Customer Reviews

Monsieur De Phocas (Decadence from Dedalus)

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In the dark fin de siecle masterpiece entitled Monsieur de Phocas, Jean Lorrain deftly employs the resources of language so as to enact, rather than merely to tell us about, the demented protagonist's increasing loss of genuine contact with the authentic world of images and individuals around him. His life swiftly spirals out of control as he makes a hellish descent into a mad world of hallucinations and phantoms; we are quite prepared, in fact, for the moment when our "hero" commits a ghastly murder. In the background, the shades of Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde, and E. T. A. Hoffmann are gesticulating wildly.

Unlike so many (famous and infamous) works of fiction contributed by authors affiliated with the "Decadent" movement at the end of the 19th century , Jean Lorrain--also a great poet and gossip-columnist, who fought a hilarious duel with the great Marcel Proust [!]--was obviously not play-acting when he wrote this very disturbing roman noir, for he drew upon some very painful youthful experiences as well as upon some of his own drug-induced hallucinations and his brushes with what seems to have been some pretty rough Parisian trade in setting down the engrossing and at times uncanny events that befall the hero of this tale.

The language in which Lorrain has embodied his decadent vision is poetically charged to the point of preciousness and, of course, resonates with that "music of the dying fall," that "Byzantine" timbre that characterizes so much work of the period. The reader should realize, however, that some of the 20th century critics who have ridiculed the obvious chronological boners that begin to crop up toward the end of the narrative have been "had" in much the same way as a similar author of a later generation would "have" his less alert readers, viz., Vladimir Nabokov--for Lorrain has very cunningly contrived these chronological "lapses," one cannot help but suspect, so that these criticules might one day be so gorgeously hoist with their own petard--and that, let us not forget, is a bomb!

This book is an enthrallimg read. The descriptions and emotions the Duc De'Frenuese experiences are described so thouroughly, and heart-felt, that I had to take a step back and look at the world around me. For anyone into the French Decadent/Surrealist movement, this is a must read.