MÉLUSINE MODERNE ET CONTEMPORAINE

par Cyril Bagros

The fairy Mélusine, to this day frequented by medievalists especially, too deeply impregnates our imagination for us not to greet with pleasure the 31 articles—enhanced by a solid final bibliography—that an eclectic criticism devotes to her here. Proposing to explore her appearances and avatars in literature from Jean d'Arras's novel to our days, the work opts for a chronological journey—from the Middle Ages to the 17th century, in 19th-century French literature, and finally in that of the 20th. A last chapter questions the resurgences of the myth in the world. The breadth of the overall project, as well as the diversity of approaches and texts, make the volume a bit dense. But the journey is organized, as one reads, around several fertile problematics: those already found in germ in the ambiguous character of the woman-serpent, come from the other world to marry a mortal, and condemned to flee when her husband, betraying his word, will discover the secret of her double nature.

At the junction of the here-below and the beyond, issued from the evanescent world of fables but also linked to a historical memory, she provokes several instructive and sure analyses regarding the anchoring of her incarnations in the society that produced them. Progressively humanized in medieval iconography (F. Clier-Colombani), summoned to the world of mortals to legitimize a sovereign's power through a ritual union whose trace Matthew W. Morris detects in Gaul, she is also linked, in Spanish translations of the late 15th century, to genealogical and political stakes (A. Pairet). C. Coudert shows that she constitutes the symbolic target of an antiprogressist discourse in Pierre Le Loyer's Quatre livres des spectres, in a dense article that includes, in passing, several references to the myth's links with esotericism—it is unfortunate that this approach, too punctual, was nowhere developed for itself, despite its richness. One finds, curiously, the fairy in Zola's universe (Nana), where she serves as a pretext for a social and political "infra-discourse," which her mythical nature paradoxically endorses (G. Séginger). Melusinian places are displaced and transposed, in Hugo, from real space to that of fiction (J. Boislève), while a Fontane novel, with realist vocation, makes the figure of the serpent intervene as a gateway to a beneath of images and words, elementary and imponderable (Cl. Foucart). This ambiguity of the myth, maneuvering between reverie on the other-world and historical reference, is well highlighted by an article by A. Petitjean-Lioulios, showing Combet's very ambivalent Mélusine incapable of renouncing a human world from which, however, she claims to escape, uniting with Raimondin to become mortal again while knowing that he will not know how to keep her. By being no more than of this world, the fairy, at the extreme, is weakened under the features of the salon woman, in the historical and gallant novella of the early 18th century (I. Trivisani-Moreau), and treated in a parodic mode in Goethe's La Nouvelle Mélusine (M. Mouseler). O. Penot-Lacassagne brings her closer to the Georgette of Les Dernières Nuits de Paris in a somewhat forced manner (does any affinity of an elusive woman with water and night make her a Mélusine?), but clearly defines Soupault's skeptical surrealism, which summons the marvelous only to renounce it.

A second line of analysis, superimposable on the previous one, concerns the reinvestment and feminist interpretation of the myth. Convincing, the approach is also original. M. Girard presents, in Jean Lorrain and Camille Lemonnier, a decadent Mélusine affirming her androgynous nature to claim her place as a woman within society, and the heroine still appears, in disguised forms, as the banner of a feminine revolt against masculine incomprehension, in contemporary literature by francophone women (M. Zupancic). She finally embodies, in Antonia Byatt, masculine fear before feminine power of seduction and knowledge (A. Bouloumié).

In a more anthropological perspective, most articles encounter and intersect the question of equivocal determinations attached to the figure of the hybrid: Mélusine builder and destroyer, auspicious and inauspicious. If the concern to interrogate this essential ambiguity does not go without some repetitions from one article to another, it ultimately allows interesting distinctions. Creature of venomous seduction, nocturnal and "infernal," the Melusinian woman is in Nerval a factor of loss (M. Streiff-Moretti), and J.-Cl. Valin's psychoanalytic approach wants to see in her a castrating heroine. Drawing inspiration from Gilbert Durand's Structures anthropologiques de l'imaginaire, C. Hertzfeld shows that she conjugates and conjoins, in Hellens, her contrary determinations in a coincidentia oppositorum. Mediator and guide embodying the lost kingdoms of the imaginary that must be revived in Breton's surrealism (H. Menou), she is called to redeem the epoch—by opposing to the Vichy regime a collective myth bearing hope—as well as to unify, on the level of personal myth, the beloved women (H. Béhar). A. Montandon finally describes, in Yvan Goll, a Mélusine seeker of the absolute, figure of the poet revolted against the insensitivity of the modern, rational and technical world.

A last option consists in emphasizing, in an aesthetics of reception, the "acculturation" of the myth, through the diversity of its transformations, deformations and rewritings. From the musicalization of her cry in Mendelssohn's Die Schöne Melusine, a sensitive article by Cl. Jamain retraces the erasure of the boundary between poetry and instrumentation in 19th-century opera, which liberates music from song, by emptying the latter of its meaning to restore to the former its power of expression. The fluid eroticism of the woman-serpent is signaled, in the painting of Klimt and F. Von Stuck, as the free expression of a desire repressed by the social codes of an epoch (S. Petit-Emptaz), and H. Béhar, by retracing the history of the journal Mélusine, as well as by questioning the links of this name with surrealism, shows how the latter assimilates this myth with multiple harmonics by reinvesting it positively. In a refined and desexualized form, expressing a cerebral eroticism, she is interpreted as the discursive version of Moreau's paintings in Péladan's writing (J. Krell). Ch. Pelletier finally detects a curious avatar of Mélusine in a bestseller of the sixties: Angélique et la Démone.

Overall, despite some rather long pages aiming to restore the plot of the studied work, in spite, sometimes also, of a tendency to sacrifice demonstration for the benefit of erudition, the work has the true merit of filling an important gap in the critical landscape. It moreover proposes, through the diversity of approaches and works studied, a stimulating and solidly documented ensemble.