Jules Laforgue
Moralità Leggendarie

"My love is white and violet mourning" wrote Jules Laforgue. After all, the anatomy of the Oedipus complex will admit some minor variation to the rule and, if it is true that each of us is unique and unrepeatable, why be more upset than necessary if a poet's subconscious desired the death of the father, but only to contemplate chastely the mother's body?

Some say that in that incandescent, sizzling and indistinct mass vulgarly called adolescence, the essential traits of our character are forged and shaped in metal, in a form, and in a very specific direction at the moment they plunge into the icy waters of certain days and catartic moments. In short, when we are wounded by certain traumas.

And, since it is well known that there are no specific causes that infallibly explode into trauma, it matters little whether these events are particularly violent or pyrotechnic. What makes all the difference is how they are experienced, the specific weight with which they reverberate in our sensitivity, which results more easily impressionable as long as it is still free from all those defenses administered by the emotional hardening of maturity.

One might say that all this is just a simplistic and schematizing boutade, one might argue that certain things are overcome, that from certain things we evolve: true, very true. The fact, however, remains that we have all had to deal with only some traumas (and not others) and that it is only some (and not others) that we have possibly overcome and from which we have possibly evolved.

In the case of Laforgue, it is soon said: one of the older brothers of a brood of eleven children, adolescence spent in the rigid discipline of a boarding school where he had been confined so as not to overcrowd the hearth at home, and a mother who died in childbirth with the twelfth - and fatal - little sparrow.

The sense of abandonment, the horror for the suffering that carnal temptations bring with them, and the rejection of libido as sealing wax sealing the man-woman relationship will be the topos of his poetic production.

One cannot deny that in Laforgue's lyrics there is more than one strand of DNA in common with those of Baudelaire, but the weariness of life of good Jules does not have that equivocal lasciviousness, that rancid and filthy epidermis that smears the pages of the king of the maudit with blood and semen. Laforgue's spleen is rather - in the words of the author himself - "eunuch and cold".

His verses hop through the woods of the province and shape the mouth into a grotesque chicken-like rictus whenever they see the sun - symbol of insatiable paternal sensuality - suffocate in its own blood at sunset in a sort of sublimation of the poet's parricidal instincts.

Finally, night arrives, and with her the moon: the mother Laforgue always wanted. Shy, pure, sterile, who since the dawn of time has shunned any contact with sordid daytime caresses. A sacred altar, an incorruptible Ideal that the poet venerates in the secret chambers of his modesty.

These premises seemed necessary to me to provide a key to reading the six stories in these "Legendary Moralities", a prose masterpiece by Jules Laforgue.

A sordid gang of anesthetists who put the patient to sleep to then steal his heart furtively, hooked usurers who lend crumbs of happiness by mortgaging human lives: "to work", "to wash", "to cook", "to produce", "to progress", "to consume"... Damn you! Damn you! Verbs that endlessly torment the existences of every present, past, and future generation: I curse you!

Well, if I had to think of a kind of declaration of intent that qualifies the common feeling of every adept of French Decadentism at the end of the '800s, it would be something of this kind.

Try reading the amazing sensory twists experienced by the protagonist of Huysmans' novel "A rebours" or the sarcastic nihilism that permeates the pages of "Contes Cruels" by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam and then tell me if I'm far from the heart of the matter.

Only that for Laforgue all this was not enough. He didn't want to just tear apart the pillars that supported the customs and practices of his contemporaneity: he wanted to touch the untouchable, change the acquired, revisit the myth.

And so among opiate exoticisms that cover the narration of events with a milky mist, among croaking philosophical tirades hopping among the swamps of existence in an evident state of drunkenness, and among dialogues imbued with frenzied fin de siècle humor that very often descends into sneering nonsense, the protagonists of these pages are characters that entered the canon of popular and literary legends. Or rather, Laforgue's urgency is rather to tell their "love stories".

In some stories, the poet maintains some faint adherence to the "philology" of myth (although distorted by the acrobatics of his pen), but, in most cases, the legend is totally overturned and bent to Laforgue's needs (particularly enjoyable are the episodes of a Hamlet who abandons his plans of revenge to pursue his dramatic ambitions and an Andromeda who sends Perseus away because she is infatuated with the sea monster).

And what are these needs? There is that little word in the title of the book - "moralities" - which refers to an edifying intention and which is linked to the bizarre relationship of Laforgue with the other sex that I mentioned at the beginning.

Every "couple" presented in the stories is blurred by an aura of chastity, sterility, and death that is the conditio sine qua non to transform a trivial love story into a legendary parable. Far from the Romantic torments, Laforgue wants to demonstrate that the only Beauty that can be pursued is that of an unresolved, asexual, unfruitful love.

But the poet often seems to distance himself and wants to maintain a certain detachment from his demons, conducting his paradox with a sharp and disenchanted irony and adopting solutions at the limit of metaliterary (with Lohengrin and Elsa, aware of being pure inventions, calling each other by the appellative of "characters").

Think of the linguistic preciousness, the syntactic double and triple bases, the pearly sketches of Flaubert's "Trois contes" centrifuged by the overflowing imagination and inexhaustible experiments of a highly gifted magician of the word. This is the Laforgue of these "Legendary Moralities".

The book was published in 1887, a few months after the poet's death at only 27 years old. And these stories, fertilized by the pen and birthed by the imagination of Laforgue, realized the Ideal of their author. They killed the father and contemplated for eternity the white marble light of the mother's tomb.

Yes, the love that emanates from these pages is definitely white and violet mourning.