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Dead Mirrors: Relics and photographs inGeorges Rodenbach'sMichael Newman

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To cite this article: Michael Newman (2011): Dead Mirrors: Relics and photographs in GeorgesRodenbach's, Photographies, 4:1, 27-43

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Michael Newman

DEAD MIRRORS

Relics and photographs in Georges Rodenbach’s

Bruges-la-Morte

The use of photographs of buildings reflected in canals and of reliquaries in GeorgesRodenbach’s novel Bruges-la-Morte (1892) is discussed in relation to the fetishism involvedin the protagonist’s preservation of his dead wife’s hair, in a story that concerns his desire forher double. As indicated by the prominent motif of the mirror combined with the theme ofdeath and the role of the relic, the narrative of the novel may be interpreted as an allegory ofphotography.

For his novel Bruges-la-Morte, a sensational tale involving fetishism and murder pub-lished in French in 1892, Georges Rodenbach selected topographical photographs of theBelgian city, mostly of buildings reflected in still and stagnant canals, from a commercialfirm of photographers. What is the effect of placing reproductions of photographs in anovel, which is putatively a work of fiction? After Rodenbach, several notable writers —of which I will mention just a few — also followed this procedure in the last century.Virginia Woolf used photographs of portrait paintings and photographic portraits in hernovel Orlando (1928), giving real portraits and portraits of actual people, including herlover Vita Sackville-West, on whom the character of Orlando was based, fictional names.Published in the same year, André Breton’s Nadja, generically something between a noveland a memoir, included photographs of places visited with the woman with whom thenarrator is in love, of artworks made by her, and of the director of the asylum to whichshe is eventually confined. The novels of W.G. Sebald, which began to appear withSchwindel. Gefühle (Vertigo) in German in 1990 and The Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten)in English translation in 1992, have included photographs — sometimes taken by thewriter, sometimes found — as well as other kinds of illustration, to extend their medi-tation on history and memory. In all these cases the inclusion of photographs, supposedlythe real trace of a moment, have served to throw into question the fictional status of thenarrative. If photographic “evidence” is provided, surely the story must have some ref-erence to real people and events that took place? Yet on the other hand, how can weknow what exactly these photographs are pictures of without the extended caption ofthe narrative to fix the referent? In which case, if the narrative is a fiction, does not thereference of the photograph come unstuck from reality? Is the Bruges of Bruges-la-Mortean actual city or a place of fantasy?

Georges Rodenbach never lived in Bruges,1 and for his novel seemed to have con-ceived the place as something of a fiction from the start, more precisely, as he suggests inhis foreword, as a character, associated with states of the soul (15). Rodenbach’s inten-tion is to use the photographs to convey this active sense of the city as a cause of affective

Photographies Vol. 4, No. 1, March 2011, pp. 27–43ISSN 1754-0763 print/ISSN 1754-0771 online © 2011 Taylor & Francishttp://www.informaworld.com DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2011.553396

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28 P H O T O G R A P H I E S

FIGURE 1 From the 1931 edition of Georges Rodenbach Bruges-la-Morte, with halftone

reproductions of photographs from the suppliers J. Lévy and Co. and Neurdein Frères.

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D E A D M I R R O R S 29

FIGURE 2 From Bruges-la-Morte.

states, “so that all those who read this work may themselves feel the presence and theinfluence of the city, experience the contagiousness of the waters, and be conscious ofthe long shadows of the high towers as they fall across the text” (15). The towers throw

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30 P H O T O G R A P H I E S

shadows, which become the photographs in the book, and the waters of the canals spreadcontagion (the old association of disease with miasma), which is here associated withbeing infected by a state of the soul. Bruges is described as “dead”, in part because itsconnection with the sea has become silted up, resulting in the loss of its role as a portand metaphorically of water as flowing life, and because it has become fixated on itspast. If, as Joseph Brodsky writes, “water is the image of time” (43), this is time thathas stopped. Analogously, the photograph functions as a fixing or arrest of a moment inthe flow of time as living duration, which instantly becomes both past and unchanging,hence the appropriateness of the inclusion of photographs in a novel about a city thatis frozen in the past. These photographs — effectively souvenirs — were taken in the1880s or very beginning of the 1890s with a large-format camera at a slow exposure.This has the effect of removing any waves or choppiness in the water, turning it into aflat expanse that mirrors its surroundings. Therefore these dead, turbid mirrors echothe very photographs in which they are reproduced, as static impressions of time. Butthere is more: the analogue photograph is also a relic, linked as it is to its subject bythe causal effect of light — the kind of sign Charles Sanders Peirce called an “index”(4–10) — so the photograph is effectively a piece of its subject. Its use as part of thenovel thus parallels the mortifying role of the relic in the narrative, as we shall see.2

Doubles and substitutes

Hugh Viane, the protagonist of Bruges-la-Morte, is a widower, prematurely old andstooped, who lives only for the memory of his wife who died five years previously.

FIGURE 3 From Bruges-la-Morte.

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D E A D M I R R O R S 31

Bruges becomes “la Morte” because merged with his dead wife: “Bruges was his deadwife. His dead wife was Bruges” (22). “The shadow from the overhanging towersappeared to fall upon his soul” (22). Hugh’s being is to have the shadow of his deadwife cast on him in the form of the city of Bruges. One day, because of a holiday, his ser-vant has cleaned his drawing room early, and without his supervision. He is disquieted,because it is to this room that the memory of his wife is consigned, it is replete with hertraces, and a relic comprising the blond hair that had descended to her waist and whichhe cut off as a keepsake after her death:

The chairs on which she had reclined recalled the memory of her perfect figure; thecurtains kept undisturbed the folds which she had bestowed on them; the mirrorsretained in their depths the slumbering image of her beauty. Among the memo-rials which more vividly disinterred to Hugh the loveliness that now moldered inthe grave, were the portraits of his wife taken at different ages and scattered atvarious points throughout the chamber. But treasured above all other keepsakeswas the hair he had snatched from the clutches of the tomb, and ever since con-served with unceasing devotion. [. . .] To ensure unforgetfulness he had placedupon the now silent piano of this principal drawing room the locks which stillremained an incarnation of her [. . .]. In his dread of their defilement by the slight-est contamination and to avert all danger of their discoloration by the humid airof the town, he had his upon the idea of protecting them through the medium ofa crystal reliquary, and upon no morning did he fail to kneel in reverence at thisshrine. (19–20)

The hair-relic is built up to through a veritable frenzy of indexical traces of the dead,including the idea that the mirror in the room contains her image, which cleaning mightefface. Reassured that things are as they were, Hugh goes for a walk, during which heis confronted by the living image of his dead wife. Later he sees her again, walking thewalk of his wife, which makes the resemblance seem all the more appalling,

Deprived of all vestige of energy, he now found himself dragged irresistibly in thewake of the apparition. Hopelessly magnetized for the moment, he understood onlythat a re-incarnation of his dead wife was walking in front of him . . . (31)

He follows her, and discovers that this woman is a dancer in the opera. He sees herin a performance of Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le diable, and the chapter ends: “It wasin a fashion such as this that Doctor Faustus hungered after the magic mirror in whichthe celestial image of his beloved disclosed itself” (36). The suggestion here is that themirror, as a diabolic machine for the production of resemblances, is an anticipation ofthe camera which fixes those resemblances, such as those included in the book. This inturn meshes with the role of likeness and substitution in the narrative. Hugh thinks thewoman, whose name is Jane Scott, exactly resembles his dead wife:

In the countenance of the living woman he saw that of the dead. [. . .] The liquidradiance of the eyes that he had believed closed forever filled him with ecstasy. Thewaters were no longer stagnant — the mirror lived! (38)

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32 P H O T O G R A P H I E S

FIGURE 4 From Bruges-la-Morte.

Since a mirror produces the image of the one who looks into it, what Hugh seeswhen he sees his dead wife in the mirror of her double is himself: the mirror reproduces anarcissistic structure whereby Jane becomes nothing other than the projection of Hugh’sdesire with respect to the lost object, and thus her image bears the burden of sustainingthe integrity of his ego (Irigary 54). This Pygmalion moment produced by his desire (“itbecame his desire that she should assume the place of his dead wife”) is threatened byher artifice: “What most endangered his illusion was the theatrical garishness of Jane’sapparel.” Her failure to fulfil his projection becomes the cause of Hugh’s aggressive fury:he must destroy her for the sake of the original. His incorporation of her as similitude, asidentical to his dead wife, is threatened precisely by her masquerade (see Riviere), whichis also the very condition that makes his identification possible — he later discovers tohis horror that her hair is dyed. Her assertion of independence from him culminates inher mocking his relic, toying with the braid in his salon. He can only maintain his fantasyin one way, and the story ends with her mortification.

This idea of the desire of a man for a woman who resembles a predecessor cannotbut remind us of the plot of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), where Scottie (James Stewart)follows Madeleine (Kim Novak), who he believes to be the wife of a college friendGavin Elster, and who apparently identifies with her dead ancestor Carlotta Valdes,and then later follows a woman, Judy, who resembles Madeleine who he believes is dead(Madeleine was of course Judy impersonating Elster’s wife). Rodenbach’s novel wassomething of a best-seller, so it is quite likely that the French authors of policiers, PierreBoileau and Thomas Narcejac, who wrote the novel D’entre les morts on which Vertigowas based, would have read Bruges-la-Morte.3 The similarities between Bruges-la-Morte

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D E A D M I R R O R S 33

and Hitchcock’s film Vertigo are striking, and go beyond the resemblance of the twonovels, as they specifically concern the role of hair.

Hair has a key role in the plot of Vertigo (see Cousins). When Judy imitates Elster’swife Madeleine she has a knot or bun of blond hair in the emphatic form of a coil.This echoes the spirals in the opening credits, and alludes to the spiral as a motif ofvertigo. The opening sequence ends with Scottie suspended over a void. The experienceof vertigo involves being drawn towards something that would be fatal — rather than afear of falling; the impulse to throw oneself over is involved here. Transposed to hair,the coil of Vertigo is applied to the fetish. The fetish sucks Scottie in, with the implicationthat the destination will be a void or death (if not for him).

The dead wife’s hair in Bruges-la-Morte is a relic. On Madeleine in Vertigo, the whorlof hair becomes in effect the living-dead relic of the dead Carlotta Valdes by whom sheis supposed to be haunted. The hair thus functions like the Madeleine cake in MarcelProust’s À la recherche du temps perdu — it is a little piece of the past in the present(48–51). However, the Proustian Madeleine is eaten — introjected (in the sense ofAbraham and Torok, where the process involves expanding the ego) — whereas thefetish and the photograph are incorporated, or encrypted, taken in and preserved intact(125–38). We could say that the mortifying dimension of the fetish — which is the casein both Bruges-la-Morte and Vertigo — comes from this encrypting, which has to do notwith transformation (like the Aufhebung of the Hegelian dialectic, raising and preserving)but strictly with repetition. The photograph is a repetition of the past in the present, thedesired woman as a resemblance of a woman who is or will be dead (Jane and the deadwife of Bruges-la-Morte, Madeleine as a repetition of Carlotta and Judy as a repetition ofMadeleine in Vertigo) is a central motif in both the book and the film.

In both Bruges-la-Morte and Vertigo, the hair-fetish functions as the mediator of thedoubling or repetition of the women for the man. Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s monumen-tal study Psychopathia Sexualis, first published in German in 1886,4 includes descriptionsof hair fetishists and “hair-despoilers” (157–62), cases of men for whom seeing ortouching hair, often of extreme abundance or length, is required to cause arousal. ForKrafft-Ebing, such fetishism would be a pathological deviation from a norm of pro-creative sex. For Freud in his essay “Fetishism” (1927), the fetish is an unconsciouscompromise between an unwelcome perception — in infantile terms that the motherlacks a penis, causing an anxiety in the little boy that he will be castrated — and awish that the woman still have a penis (198–204). Christian Metz in “Photography andFetish” contrasts the time of the film, with “the timelessness of photography which iscomparable to the timelessness of the unconscious and of memory”. He writes that:

Film gives back to the dead a semblance of life, a fragile semblance but one imme-diately strengthened by the wishful thinking of the viewer. Photography, on thecontrary, by virtue of the objective suggestions of its signifier (stillness, again)maintains the memory of the dead as being dead. (84)5

For Metz, the fetish is metaphorically inciting and metonymically apotropaic: it is aphallic substitute in the place of lack, while it wards off the anxiety of castration and loss.By means of the metonymic relation, this place of lack is effectively rendered off-frame.

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34 P H O T O G R A P H I E S

Now, the off-frame is different in photography and film: in film there is the possibilitythat the off-frame may come into the frame, whereas in the photograph this will neverhappen. Metz claims, “the off-frame effect in photography results from a singular anddefinitive cutting off which figures castration and is figured by the ‘click’ of the shut-ter” (87). Whereas the photograph functions as a fetish — the object, as Metz writes,“held . . . in the pocket” — film as an activator of fetishism “endlessly mimes the primaldisplacement of the look between the seen absence and the presence nearby” (87): filmplays with terror, and continually displaces the line between the seen and the unseen.Metz refers to the psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni, who emphasizes the way in whichfetishism is characterized by a structure of disavowal that takes the form of the state-ment: “I know very well, but all the same . . . ” Fetishism thus involves a split attitudetowards the object of knowledge and belief.

Where, in relation to this structure of fetishistic repetition and the split attitudetoward the object, are the topographic photographs of Bruges-la-Morte? The photographicreproductions set into the novel function as moments of arrest — cuts — in relation tothe narrative, while at the same time re-positioning the viewer from being a reader,for whom the text offers the promise of new knowledge, to being a seer, who maybe absorbed, fascinated by or lost in the image. The reflective water seems to evoke acertain vacancy: these are photographs of buildings and of emptiness. I would suggestthat we project the emptiness into the buildings: that we somehow “know” that thebuildings are built around emptiness, that they seem vacant, abandoned, as if Bruges hadbecome a ghost town. If we know this at some level — “I know very well . . . ” — it isthe fiction that populates the photographs and fills them up with character and meaning.The emptiness of knowledge and the fullness of fiction meet in the relic. It is thereforeno coincidence that in the latter part of the book we come across two photographs not oftopographic views, but of reliquaries. A relic may be a piece of someone, and dependson credulity for its power. The reliquary is a box — which often takes the form of arichly ornamented and bejewelled building — around something stupid and formlessyet a real presence that is both a reminder of and a denial of death. If, as Roland Bartheswrites, “Death is the eidos of that Photograph” (15), the “essence” that it may be reducedto in all its variety, then as a surrogate host the image also — subject only to belief —promises resurrection. Rather than appearing as evidence for it, the reproduction of anactual photograph punctures that promise, which is perhaps why Barthes does not showthe very photograph of his mother that would fulfil the intention of his book while atthe same time creating the possibility of his detachment from her and a mourning thatmight come to some conclusion.

Photographs and mirrors

When Hugh sees the double of his dead wife, Rodenbach writes that “The waters wereno longer stagnant — the mirror lived!” (38). The mirror has produced a double of theabsent object of desire, effectively bringing her back to life, therefore both as an image,and as more than an image, where that more threatens to collapse the distance that theimage interposes.6 In effect, the desire for the double involves the refusal to accept thatthe image is merely an image, a representation and not a living reality. Mirrors — which

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D E A D M I R R O R S 35

produce a real resemblance simultaneous with the viewer — often feature in roomsdescribed by Rodenbach, frequently waiting to be broken. As I have suggested, in thenovel with its photographs, Rodenbach continually re-enacts the passage from realitythrough its mirroring to the image, which in turn becomes real, above all in the doubleas a resurrection of the lost original. This process is assisted by the city, the topographicsite for the story of the double, already being in its very reality an image, a reflection ofitself, by the photographs often doubled and inverted, so that the woman who is the dou-ble is given the reality of the original by the phantasmagoric frame of the city itself. Theimages reproduced in the early Flammarion edition of Bruges-la-Morte as “similigravures”(half-tone engravings) were of topographic photographs from a commercial supplier,Lévy et Neurdein.7 It is a technique of reproduction suitable for monochrome imagesmade of mid-tones, which has the effect of creating an image with a unified grey hazeand a juxtaposition of tonal areas. Rodenbach draws on it to create a “Symboliste” effect,a Whistlerian tonality. Thus, the city is turned into an image that is at once contingent(a photo), historic (past), and “eternal”, a work of art understood in Symbolist terms asbringing out an eternal essence in the very contingency of the photograph. Rodenbachexplicitly, in his follow-up novel to Bruges-la-Morte, The Bells of Bruges (published as LeCarillonneur in 1897), interprets this “eternal” character as deathly: that which is subjectto time dies, and that which is dead is eternal, “no less than the mummies themselves. . .” (81). Later, André Bazin was to write that “photography does not create eter-nity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption” (8).8

Rodenbach, in his novels of the fin-de-siècle, anticipates much of the photography theoryof the following century.

Almost all the city scenes are empty of people, or when there are people in them,they are standing still. In The Bells of Bruges, Rodenbach describes the emptiness of theearly morning city as suggesting to the narrator the city subject to contagion, as if it hadbeen cleared by a plague. This may be compared with the remark of Walter Benjaminon Eugène Atget in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility”, thathis photographs suggest the city as the scene of a crime: “It has justly been said that hephotographed them like scenes of crimes. A crime scene, too, is deserted; it is pho-tographed for the purpose of establishing evidence” (27).9 Perhaps two rather distinctviews of politics are implied by the difference between crime and contagion.

Absurdly, for a recent translation of Bruges-la-Morte, the original 19th century pho-tographs were replaced with ones taken recently, perhaps in the name of “relevance”, butrevealing a disturbing blindness to how the images in their specific character function inrelation to the motifs of the text.10 What it did bring out, though, is the differencebetween a long-exposure image and a faster contemporary photo, particularly when itcomes to water. In the old half-tones, the water of the canals is flat and glassy: any move-ment or ripples have been erased. Obviously these are not tidal canals as in Venice, andare described as stagnant and unmoving in the novels, but even the effect of a breeze isabsent. Of the windows of the church of Saint Walburga in Bruges, Rodenbach writesin The Bells of Bruges, “They were like stretches of water that nothing can make ripple,tremble any more” (212). This glassiness turns the canals into mirrors. So the city isreflected, doubled, in the canals which form an essential, defining part of it. In thissense, the city is already “photographed” in the canals as soon as the water stops flowing,

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36 P H O T O G R A P H I E S

becomes stagnant and dead rather than alive. The effect of turning the page from thefirst image, shown on the soft cover or over the title of chapter 1 (figure 1), whichappears to have been taken from a bridge looking towards a stone bridge beyond afork in the canal, with slightly misty buildings behind it, to the second, which is ofthe same view but now taken from a path under trees between the fork (figure 2),has the effect of moving forward as if it were toward and even into the mirror. The“dead mirror” of the canal doubles the photograph, both as process — as the indexicalcreation of the image — and as product, the mortifying still image. The images thusbecome not only reflective but also reflexive — they refer to themselves. As the canalsreflect the buildings along them, so the photographic plate serves as a mirror for whatis in front of it when the photograph is taken. And just as the canal gives off a miasmathat results in infection, so the photograph produces a contagion of mimesis and iden-tification, such that it changes from being the copy of a model to being a simulacrumthat multiplies detached from any referent. In doing this, the photographs provide akind of commentary on the text, reversing the “conventional” role of image and text,at least in relation to the tradition of topographic illustration that Rodenbach is drawingupon here.

The mediating term, I would propose, is the “relic”. Mirror and relic come togetherin the photographs, as they do in the narrative. Hugh is extremely uneasy when his maidcleans the drawing room without his supervision, because he is so concerned to preserveall the indexical signs of his dead wife, including the dust that traces them out like thedots of the half-tones, or the grain of a photograph.

Relics and resemblances

Two photographs of reliquaries appear in Bruges-la-Morte. Following the psychoanalystJacques Lacan, the art historian and critic Birgit Pelzer has argued that a relic is a littlepiece of jouissance, an enjoyment that is beyond the substitutions of desire. It is notablethat whereas the form of the relic itself is negligible — it could be just a piece of bonefrom a saint or a fragment of the true cross — the form of the reliquary that containsor “frames” it is exaggerated: it could be a miniature building, chased and encased withjewels (figure 5). This idea of the reliquary as building chimes with the idea in bothRodenbach’s Bruges books of the buildings of the town as themselves relics frozen in thepast.

The whole action of Bruges-la-Morte revolves around a relic, with which it begins andends — the long blond hair of Hugh’s dead wife, cut from her corpse and mortifyingin its turn. So the relic is not only a piece of the jouissance or enjoyment of the other, itis also an agent of death.11 Rodenbach extends this mortifying character to the city ofBruges itself.

The denouement of Bruges-la-Morte takes place during the Procession of the HolyBlood: “an annual ceremonial that commemorates the arrival in Bruges of a drop of theblood of the Saviour pierced on Calvary by the fatal lance, and since reverently preservedwithin a reliquary in the chapel that bears its name” (91). This is the Basilica of the HolyBlood.12

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D E A D M I R R O R S 37

FIGURE 5 From Bruges-la-Morte.

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38 P H O T O G R A P H I E S

The procession seems to “annihilate the present” in what seems a “miracle ofresuscitation” (referring to both Lazarus and the resurrection of the body), as if thefigures that otherwise only dwell in paintings “visualized themselves before the eyes ofthe spectator”. We could understand this as the temporality of the relic, because a relicis not a representation, but is a part of what it is a relic of, with the potential for being,like the host, a “real presence”.

The rock-crystal of the reliquary in the Basilica of the Holy Blood is copied by Hughin the glass container for his wife’s hair. By illustrating this famous reliquary in Bruges-la-Morte or one very like it (figure 5), Rodenbach strengthens the connections betweenthe photograph as such, the role of the relic in the narrative, and the materiality ofthe reproductions on the page. The paradox is that the highly contingent and index-ical photograph becomes a sign for the relic-in-general, which would include Hugh’spersonal relic. The photograph thus comes to function like the word in Rodenbach’sfriend Mallarmé’s poetic: that it signifies the absence of the thing, while at the sametime assuming, like the letters of the words on the page, its own materiality. In the fore-word to Bruges-la-Morte, Rodenbach talks of “the long shadows of the high towers as theyfall across the text” (15), which I take to be a Mallarméan gesture, which moves fromthe image, and specifically here in photographs the index, to the materiality of the page,which they share with the text.13

By placing a photograph of a reliquary towards the end of the book, Rodenbachidentifies the relic with the photograph, just as Hugh identifies his dead wife with herreproduction, Jane, who thereby becomes herself a kind of photograph. Resemblancealways implies difference, otherwise the resemblance would simply be identical withwhat it resembles, and would no longer be a resemblance. It is when she ceases to func-tion as a similitude — when she becomes disturbingly dissimilar — that Hugh murdersher with the “true” relic, his wife’s hair, the true image or vera icona, the veil that SaintVeronica gave to Christ as he carried the cross to wipe his forehead and which camemiraculously to bear the image of his face, model of the analogue photograph as imageproduced by contact rather than by human hands.14 And it is true that photos as iconsof memory are associated also with hair, as Geoffrey Batchen reminds us, photographs,probably of someone deceased, where either framed together with locks of their hair,or incorporated into bracelets or frames made of hair (65–71). However the double isrevealed as such — as a false image — when her artificiality or masquerade becomesapparent, and she has to be killed to preserve the sanctity of the true image.15 Themurder of the living woman is supposed to overcome for Hugh both her difference fromthe image of the dead original, and the distinction of the representation from the realpresence in the name not of reality but of the maintenance of the image.

The city as agent performs a reversal of the subject–object relation to the relic. ForHugh, his wife’s hair in its crystal container is a relic-object in relation to which he isthe affected or pathetic subject. However, if the city of Bruges just is his dead wife, as isstated, then it contains him — it becomes both relic and reliquary, and as we see fromthe one illustrated, reliquaries often take an architectural form. In The Bells of BrugesRodenbach writes of “Storiated architecture, façades like reliquaries . . . ” (47). Hughbecomes the relic of the relic, entombed in his dead wife. Not only is he the crypt — touse Abraham and Torok’s term to describe the structure of melancholia (130) — of his

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dead wife, whom he has incorporated psychically as an untransformed piece of her, butshe has become his crypt, through the mediation of the city he is encrypted as alreadydead into her. If the indexical traces in his salon are in effect quasi-photographs of hiswife, so we could say that the photographs in the book function as sites that are in a senseswitching stations where Hugh becomes a trace. And by a contagion that emanates fromthe mirror-effect of the canals, so does the reader/viewer.

Hugh is overwhelmed into identification with the whole people of Flanders by thevision of the bejewelled reliquary passing in the procession. However Jane shatters hisabsorption with “a shrill outbreak of laughter” (102): because of the “obduracy” (100) ofJane the spectacle of the procession collapses for Hugh into being a mere illusion. Thisimplies a criticism of Hugh’s absorption in his fantasy, to the exclusion of the other. Janefeels out of place in his apartment, resenting in particular the mirrors: “Jane felt dimlythat there subsisted a disaccord between the mirrors and her own personality, whilst theimmutable attitude of the old furniture disconcerted and irritated her” (103). Mirrorand relic come together here — the reliquary is itself a bit of old furniture, harbouringa trace of the past. Jane sees that Hugh has portraits in the room, and that they arelike her. Although it isn’t stated, we might guess that more than one is a photograph.Hugh becomes extremely angry with Jane for handling them: “To him all these objects ofhis cult were as sacred as the monstrance and the chalice are to the priest.” Formally shecomes to the “precious glass coffer” on the piano, “removed the lid, extracted the adoredhair, and shook it wildly backwards and forwards with the delight of a gamin” (104).“Hugh became livid with fury. This was blasphemy.” Hugh strangles Jane with his deadwife’s hair, and thereby fulfils the resemblance:

The two women identified themselves into a perfect unity. Resembling each otherin life, they did so to an infinitely greater degree in death. [. . .] Into the corpse ofJane was incarnated the phantom of his dead wife, though she was visible to himalone. (105–7)

As incarnation, the corpse becomes the “real presence” of the loved dead woman,but the murder of the substitute woman also accomplishes her transition from body toimage. Rodenbach thus anticipates the comparison that Maurice Blanchot will go on tomake of the image with a cadaver in “Two Versions of the Imaginary”, where, since itis as corpse that the person comes to resemble themselves, the image and corpse sharetheir essence that they are where the object becomes pure resemblance, at the heartof which is nothingness: “if the cadaver resembles to such a degree, that is because itis, at a certain moment, preeminently resemblance, and it is also nothing more. It isthe equal, equal to an absolute, overwhelming and marvelous degree. But what does itresemble? Nothing” (421). By killing Jane, Hugh at once transforms the resemblanceinto its object, and the object into nothing other than resemblance. The transformationthat takes place in the murder of the substitute woman is not of a resurrection of thedead, the re-presentation of a past presence, but rather what Blanchot calls “absence aspresence” (425). Absence is incarnated in a corpse, as the past is shown as stilled in thephotographs in Bruges-la-Morte.

Accompanied by another photograph of buildings reflected in a canal, the novel endswith the last bells: “is it over the city, is it over a tomb? — to be shedding the petals of

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40 P H O T O G R A P H I E S

FIGURE 6 From Bruges-la-Morte.

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iron flowers”. The story reveals something of what is at stake in the idea of the relic,including when it is applied as a model to the photograph — not just an indexical traceof the past, but a little piece of encrypted, mortifying jouissance. It is striking that in bothBruges-la-Morte and Vertigo the woman who is taken to be or has acted as a double orimage of a previously loved woman has to die.

Finally, we might wonder whether Georges Rodenbach’s book Bruges-la-Morte hasitself become something of a relic, since the model of the photograph — the photographas both mirror and relic, as dead mirror — which permeates it at every level and uponwhich it reflects so brilliantly, is itself becoming for us a thing of the past, the object ofan owl’s gaze.

Notes

All the illustrations are from the 1931 edition of George Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte.Paris: Flammarion.

An earlier version of this essay was delivered in the Photography Seminar at theRoyal College of Art on 3 December 2009. I would like to thank those who werepresent, and in particular Olivier Richon and Francette Pacteau for their comments.

1 Georges Rodenbach was born on 16 July 1855 in Tournai, Belgium, and died in1898 in Paris. As a youth he became friends with the poet Emile Verhaeren. He was aSymbolist poet, who supported himself as a lawyer and journalist. He published eightcollections of poetry and four novels, as well as short stories, plays and criticism. Heleft Belgium in 1888, spent the last ten years of his life in Paris as the correspondentof the Journal de Bruxelles, and became a close friend of the poet Mallarmé.

2 See Edwards for an excellent and informative discussion of the relations of textand photographs in Bruges-la-Morte. I concur in particular with his claim that thenovel is about photography (71), his consideration of the immobilazation of timein the photographs of canals (79–80), and the connection of photographs and relics(84–86). For the relation in the photograph of the index to the real, see Iversen113–29.

3 D’Entre les morts was published in French in 1954, and in an English translation byGeoffrey Sainsbury in 1956. It was reissued in 1997 as a paperback edition under thetitle Vertigo by Bloomsbury Film Classics. Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac alsowrote the novel that became Les Diaboliques (1955) by Henri-Georges Clouzot andthe treatment for Franju’s Eyes without a Face (1960).

4 A French translation by Émile Laurent and Sigismond Csape appeared in 1895 (Paris:Georges Carré).

5 For a sustained discussion of the relation between photography and film, seeCampany.

6 It could be said that the “punctum” in Barthes’ Camera Lucida, making the imagean object of fascination, connecting it to the life beyond biological life of the real,overcomes the deadness of the image as studium.

7 Some later editions add graphic illustrations.8 For an analysis of the way that the figure of the Egyptian mummy has been used to

discuss the photographic and cinematic image, see Rosen.

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9 The following remark on Atget from Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography” alsoapplies to the photographs chosen by Rodenbach for Bruges-la-Morte: “almost all ofthese pictures are empty. [ . . . ] They are not lonely, merely without mood; thecity in these pictures looks cleared out, like a dwelling that has not yet found a newtenant” (286). Of course in early photography is was impossible to convey movingsubjects without blur, which might account for why empty topographic photographswere preferable.

10 Trans. Mike Mitchell, Sawtry: Dedalus, 2009. The new photographs of Bruges areby Will Stone.

11 For the relic as a piece of enjoyment, see Pelzer 178–203. In his seminar Encore,Lacan contrasts both desire and phallic jouissance with feminine jouissance that heapproaches through the writings of mainly female mystics (76–7).

12 Constantinople was sacked by the Crusader army of Count of Flanders Baldwin IX in1204, during the Fourth Crusade. Baldwin IX probably sent the Holy Blood, lootedfrom the Byzantines, to Bruges shortly thereafter (the novel says Thierry of Alsacebrought it).

13 In “Crisis of Verse” Mallarmé writes: “I say: a flower! And, out of the oblivion wheremy voice casts every contour, insofar as it is something other than the known bloom,there arises, musically, the very idea in its mellowness; in other words, what is absentfrom every bouquet” (210). For the new role of the page in the material spacing ofwriting, see Mallarmé’s poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard” (A Throwof the Dice will Never Abolish Chance) (1897).

14 For a profound discussion of images produced by contact, see Didi-Huberman.15 For a brilliant reading of Vertigo in terms of the relation of the loss of the image and

the image of loss, emphasizing the series of images over the relation of the image tothe (lost or prohibited) object, see Cousins.

Works cited

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Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.Print.

Batchen, Geoffrey. Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance. Amsterdam: Van GoghMuseum; New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004. Print.

Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” Trans. Hugh Gray. Film Quarterly13.4 (Summer 1960): 4–9. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writingson Media. Ed. Michael Jennings et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2008. Print.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Station Hill Blanchot Reader. Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1999.Print.

Brodsky, Joseph. Watermark. London: Penguin, 1997. Print.Campany, David. Photography and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. Print.Cousins, Mark. “The Insistence of the Image: Hitchcock’s Vertigo”. In Parveen Adams ed.

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Lacan, Jacques. On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973. Encore:The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Bruce Fink.New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1998. Print.

Mallarmé, Stéphane. Divigations. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,2007. Print.

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Michael Newman is Professor of Art Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London,and Associate Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at The School of the ArtInstitute of Chicago. He is the author of the books Richard Prince: Untitled (couple) (2006)and Jeff Wall: Works and Writings (2007) as well as numerous essays on contemporary artand philosophy.D

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