The Tale of Gold and Silence

by Gustave Kahn

  The Tale of

  Gold and Silence

  by

  Gustave Kahn

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  Le Conte de l’or et du silence, here translated as The Tale of Gold and Silence, was initially published in its entirety in Paris by the Societé du Mercure de France in 1898. The first six chapters—which include the first chapter of Part Two—had previously appeared in 1896 in La Societé Nouvelle. It is not obvious why the serial version was suspended, given that it did not conclude at a “natural break,” but the likeliest explanation is that there was a pause in its improvisation. I say “improvisation” rather than “writing” because much of the book, especially these early chapters, is a patchwork that must have taken aboard a number of previously-written stories, poems and prose fragments, providing them with a narrative frame that sometimes seems cursory and is not altogether coherent.

  Gustave Kahn was born in Metz in 1859 and educated in Paris. Although he published some critical pieces while still a student his literary career was interrupted thereafter by a four-years sojourn in North Africa; although he did submit some poetry to Parisian periodicals during that interim, it was not until 1886—having returned to Paris in 1885, perhaps with a considerable body of unpublished work in hand—that he began to publish poetry prolifically, initially in the first of several periodicals whose editorial staff he joined, La Vogue. In September 1886 Jean Moréas published “Le Symbolisme”—effectively the manifesto of the rapidly-burgeoning movement—in Le Figaro, and Kahn immediately joined forces with Moréas and Paul Adam to produce a showcase for it the weekly periodical Le Symboliste. The periodical did not last long, but the movement did, and Kahn remained at its heart, promoting himself as the pioneer and champion of vers libre [free verse], which he regarded as a form uniquely well-suited to symbolist expression. He subsequently occupied editorial positions on the staff of La Revue Indépendante, La Revue Blanche and the periodical that became the chief organ of the Symbolist Movement in the 1890s, Le Mercure de France.

  Other examples were inevitably advanced to dispute the honor of being the first French writers to adopt vers libre, but the two most plausible—Kahn’s close friend Jules Laforgue, and Arthur Rimbaud—had both been published under his auspices in La Vogue, so his leading role in its promotion is indisputable. Whether or not vers libre is uniquely appropriate to symbolism is similarly debatable, but it certainly caught on with several of the leading figures in the movement, and it formed a bridge of sorts between conventional Romantic and Parnassian rhymed verse and prose-poetry, which had been proclaimed by Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Jean Des Essenites as the ideal format for the exercise of “Decadent style.”

  In the view of most critics of the 1880s and the bulk of the reading public there was no real distinction between the emergent schools of Decadence and Symbolism, and the two terms were bandied about rather indiscriminately, but the three editors of Le Symboliste did not care for the “Decadent” label, and instead of accepting it and inverting its pejorative implications, they tried to draw a distinction between their emphasis on the use of exotic language in the service of some kind of philosophical purpose and an affection for Decadent style for its own sake, as advocated by Théophile Gautier’s doctrine of l’art pour l’art. Kahn’s attempt to claim a special role for vers libre has to be seen in that context. Whether there was any real difference in the distinction remains a matter of opinion, but it had some success as a marketing ploy, and Kahn elaborated his discriminatory perspective with considerable depth in his seminal critical study Symbolistes et décadents (1902).

  Kahn was also an important art critic and, in that capacity, a leading advocate of Impressionism, partly under the guidance of his friend Charles Henry, a mathematician and physiological psychologist who had published Introduction à une esthétique scientifique [Introduction to Scientific Esthetics] in 1885. Kahn introduced Henry to the pages of Le Symboliste and used his ideas and discoveries regarding the physiology and psychology of perception to connect the literary and artistic schools. Just as the impressionism could be interpreted as an attempt to take a kind of psychological back-step, so that the artist could produce a suggestion of what the eye registered prior to the brain’s synthesis of a more coherent, knowledge-based image, so symbolism, in the theories of Moréas, Kahn and Stéphane Mallarmé could be interpreted as an attempt to suspend a part of the brain’s analytical process and tackle ideas in a more immediate form, prior to the intellectual sieve of interpretation and explanation.

  In his manifesto, Moréas declared that Symbolism was inherently opposed to “plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description,” all of which seemed to him to be overly conscious, and thus possessed of an apparent directness that was, in fact, misleading in its simplification and imposed coherency. According to Mallarmé, truth could only be approached indirectly, through the medium of symbols, because it was by nature evasive, if not unfathomable. According to Kahn, the purpose of symbolist art was to “objectify the subjective” and replace imaginative elements censored or tidied up by intellect to their true priority in the processes of perception and enquiry.

  Opponents of Symbolism routinely charged its exponents with such alleged literary sins as making up words, deliberately using archaic terminology, distorting the meanings of words and generally tending toward incoherence, but all of these strategies were seen by the school’s exponents as virtuous and necessary. Those writers who preferred the label Decadent to Symbolist committed all the same sins, for motives that were hard to distinguish if they could be distinguished at all, but tended to be more pugnacious in defense of them. The core of the collective ideology of the compound Movement was a reaction against the philosophy of Naturalism, although there was much more of an overlap between the seeming rivals than might have been expected, with writers like Huysmans and Adam moving back and forth between the two, and literary titans like Gustave Flaubert and Anatole France functioning with equal ease and mastery in both modes.

  The Symbolist opposition to vulgar naturalism drew writers naturally to topics drawn from folklore, legend and mythology, but there was nothing new in that, and the calculated primitivism of the manner in which they tried to grasp such substance extrapolated an entire Romantic tradition stretching all the way from the chivalric romances of Feudal times to the Romantic Movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, initially spearheaded in France by Charles Nodier and effortlessly extended into Decadence by Gautier. Symbolism had never been absent from such work and had very often been central to it, but the proto-psychological theories borrowed by Kahn from Charles Henry and formulated by Mallarmé did offer some potential for its transformation into a quest for a new kind of insight—a tentative precursor of the far more elaborate and determined quest undertaken by Carl Jung in his attempted analysis of “archetypal imagery.” Much Symbolist prose—and Le Conte de l’or et du silence is a cardinal example—can be construed, with the aid of hindsight, as an exercise in the further development of, and an aspirant commentary on, the archetypal images subsequently categorized and explored by Jung.

  Kahn’s first three collection of poems, Les Palais nomades [Nomad Palaces], Les Chansons d’amant [Love Songs] (1891) and Domaine de fée [Realm of Enchantment] (1895)—all reprinted in the omnibus Première poèmes [Early Poems] (1897)—were devoted to his principal concern, the development of free verse, but the bulk of his publication was in periodicals until he began to publish books on a regular basis in 1896. It was in that year that his first novel, the baroque comedy Le Roi fou [The Mad
King] appeared, although a substantial fraction of the text of Le Conte de l’or et du silence had probably been written earlier, and the fact that he published three novels in quick succession in 1898 suggests that he had probably built up a considerable backlog while struggling to get his career under way.

  Although Le Roi fou certainly qualifies as a symbolist work, its literary method is not nearly as exotic or extravagant as that of La Conte de l’or et du silence, and its humor contrast quite sharply with the latter novel’s earnest pretentiousness. Kahn’s later novels, including Les Petites âmes pressées [Hurried Little Souls] (1898), Le Cirque solaire [The Solar Circus] (1898), L’Adultère sentimental [Sentimental Adultery] (1902), L’Aube enamourée [The Enamored Dawn] (1925), Mourle (1925) and La Childerbert, roman romantique [the title refers to the nickname of a building] (1926) are markedly less exotic than Le Roi fou, and he never returned to the kind of prose endeavor that he had undertaken in Le Conte de l’or et du silence, perhaps considering the work a failure as an artistic endeavor. His poetry, however, never faltered in its symbolist method, and he continued to address the themes touched on in Le Conte de l’or et du silence in vers libre with the same urgent passion that is displayed in the most impressive passages of the novel.

  This apparent discrepancy reflects the fact that symbolism, as a literary modus operandi, is more easily adaptable to poetry than to prose, and more easily adaptable to brief “poems in prose” than to longer works. Moréas and Mallarmé restricted their symbolism almost exclusively to poetry, and although Paul Adam claimed to be writing symbolist novels in some profusion, it was not always obvious that the novels in question were much different from his earlier Naturalist endeavors. The leading novelists identified with the Decadent Movement—including Jean Lorrain, Rachilde, Catulle Mendès and Pierre Louÿs—often attracted that label as much for the deliberate perversity of their subject-matter as for their deployment of Decadent style, and it is noticeable that the prose “Bible” of the Movement, Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À rebours (1884; tr. as Against Nature and Against the Grain), is more an extended character-study of a Decadent lifestyle than a novel.

  This pattern extended as time went by. Remy de Gourmont’s novels made far less use of symbolist technique than his short fiction, and could easily be seen as exercises in psychological neo-Naturalism in the same vein as the novels of the supposed chief exemplar of that school, Paul Bourget. Gourmont was, in any case, a much more precise and analytical employer of literary symbols than the Moréas-Kahn theory advocated, as was Anatole France when working in that vein. At the opposite end of the Symbolist spectrum, the deliberate recklessness displayed by Gourmont’s sometime editorial collaborator Alfred Jarry in his own symbolist novels moved them decisively in the direction of surrealism, one of whose most important precursors Jarry became. Jules Laforgue never wrote a novel, but his short fiction moved flamboyantly in the same direction, extrapolating precedents set by Rimbaud and the satirical performance-pieces acted out in Le Chat Noir by the core members of Émile Goudeau’s Hydropathes—which Kahn testified that Laforgue enjoyed enormously.

  Within this spectrum, Le Conte de l’or et du silence occupies a location that is virtually unique. It is not only Gustave Kahn’s most overtly and most extravagant symbolist novel, but one of the most overtly extravagant symbolist novels ever attempted, and it demonstrates in no uncertain terms why such attempts were plagued with enormous difficulty. Perhaps it does not qualify as a novel at all, given that it is such a disorderly patchwork with so many variegated intrusions, but if it does not, it is very difficult to specify what it is; it is far more than a random collection of tales. Indeed, Kahn was not otherwise given to seeming randomness is compiling short story collection, carefully organizing the contents of his three major collections under the categorizing titles Contes hollandais [Dutch Tales] (1903), Contes juifs [Jewish Tales] (1926) and Vieil Orient, neuf Orient [Old Orient, New Orient] (1928). Le Conte de l’or et du silence flies in the face of this orderliness by mingling mock-parables, Old Testament fantasies and visionary fantasies, and throwing in a couple of mock-folktales and an adventure story for good measure. The frame-traversing threads connecting up these disparate elements seem rather arbitrary at times, but are sufficiently robust to insist that there really is a connecting theme binding the whole together, however eccentrically.

  Kahn’s knowledge of and attitude to literary symbolism was inevitably colored by his Jewish ancestry, and it must have seemed natural enough to him to deploy symbolist methods in re-examinations of Old Testament mythology and the supposed modifications introduced by the subsequent reinterpretation of much of that mythology by the New Testament. He was not a devout Jew, however, and was prepared to take the view that all such symbolic myths could be fruitfully placed in a much wider context, taking in Classical mythology, all manner of folklore and the tradition of French Medieval romance, and also licensing the invention of entirely new mythologies to challenge or counterbalance allegedly-unfortunate aspects of existing ones. The core of his world-view, however, remained firmly rooted in the Old Testament, and the supposed wisdom of Solomon—as handed down, in the novel, to the Mage-King Balthazar.

  There is no surprise, given its importance in the history of French literature, that Kahn should also have seized upon the Christian myth of the Wandering Jew in order to provide Balthazar with a sidekick and sounding-board. He was undoubtedly familiar, at least by reputation, with the use of the Wandering Jew in a frankly symbolic fashion in Eugène Sue’s classic feuilleton serial Le Juif errant (1844-45; tr. as The Wandering Jew), and was probably aware that Alexandre Dumas had deliberately adopted the same figure as the central character of his intended masterpiece Isaac Laquedem (1853), although Dumas abandoned the work in disgust when it fell foul of Napoléon III’s censors. He might even have been aware of Paul Féval’s ideological reply to those Radical and Republican tales, La Fille de Juif errant (1864).1 We can, however, be certain that one work with which Kahn was definitely familiar, and which undoubtedly had an influence on Le Conte de l’or et du silence, was Edgar Quinet’s epic drama Ahasvérus (1833), which uses its eponymous protagonist as an interested viewpoint with which to survey the entire history of the world, from its creation to the long aftermath of the Day of Judgment.

  Kahn is not quite as ambitious as Quinet in organizing the stage on which his action is deployed, but he attacks the same enigmas with a similar intensity, and Part Two of Le Conte de l’or et du silence employs the same Medieval frame as the third act of Quinet’s drama, with a similar bitterness of tone. The interpolation of an episode of Arthurian mythology into that part of Kahn’s narrative, which might seem odd and awkward, is probably not unconnected to the fact that Quinet’s other major exercise in mythical reinterpretation was Merlin l’Enchanteur [Merlin the Enchanter] (1860). The world-views of the two writers are markedly different in several respects, but a methodological kinship is obvious, as is an unsurprising commonalty of feeling, arising from the fact that when they take their lyrical examinations of the human condition to its furthest limit—a much further limit than any other nineteenth-century writer of extended contes philosophiques attempted to attain—they both discover a perspective that is exceedingly bleak. Kahn’s particular bleakness is, of course, solidly licensed by the Old Testament, and in the most telling passages of his main story the tone of his lamentations often seems to be echoing Ecclesiastes and Jeremiah, although the alleviation of the Song of Solomon is not entirely absent.

  In terms of parallels with English literature, the writer with whose work Le Conte de l’or et du silence has most in common is undoubtedly M. P. Shiel, who had a similar fondness for Old Testament mythology and language, and took a similar delight in the construction of exotic rhapsodic prose. Shiel, who spent a good deal of time in Paris during the 1890s and was acquainted with several of the writers involved in the Symbolist/Decadent Movement, almost certainly met Kahn, and might conceivably have taken some inspiration from his
work. Whether Kahn ever read Gabriel de Lautrec’s translation of Shiel’s The Purple Cloud is uncertain, but he was definitely acquainted with Lautrec, and surely read the most Shielian of his dream-tales, “La Terreur polaire” (tr. as “The Polar Terror”), which appeared in the Mercure de France in 1904. The parallels between Shiel’s work and Le Conte de l’or et silence are, at any rate, sufficiently striking to give this translation a particular interest to admirers of Shiel, although it will offer some delight to all English lovers of the eccentricities of Decadent style.

  This translation was made from the London Library’s copy of the first edition of the full text, published by the Societé du Mercure de France. The expectable difficulties of translating a text that does not always aim for coherency were compounded in this instance by the fact that the printed text in question is strewn with errors, to such an extent that it is difficult to believe that it was ever proof-read. (I have run a cursory check of the first part of the text against the serialized version, and identical errors occur there, suggesting that the Societé Nouvelle text was used for type-setting the early pages of the book, without any attempt being made to correct it.)

  The pattern of those errors that are not mere misprints strongly suggests that Kahn dictated the bulk of the text rather than writing it by hand and that he entrusted much of the work of punctuation and syntax to his amanuensis—or, more likely, amanuenses, given that some of the elements of the text were probably written a intervals of several years. It seems to me that Kahn’s amanuenses did not always understand what he had said—or perhaps what their own shorthand signified—and that their work was then inadequately checked by the author.

  Any attempt to “restore” a text suspected to be corrupt is bound to be presumptuous, and some of the alterations I have made in the interests of trying to assist certain passages make more sense might be mistaken, but I have done what I could to the best of my ability; I can only apologize for any passages that stubbornly retain their nonsensicality in spite of my attempts to work out what might have been meant.