Rewriting 'Les Mystères de Paris'

The 'Mystères Urbains' and the Palimpsest

Amy Wigelsworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134862986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Idiomas

Key works of popular fiction are often rewritten to capitalize on their success. But what are the implications of this rewriting process? Such is the question addressed by this detailed study of several rewritings of Eugène Sue's Mystères de Paris (1842-43), produced in the latter half of the nineteenth century, in response to the phenomenal success of Sue's archetypal urban mystery. Pursuing a compelling analogy between city and text, and exploring the resonance of the palimpsest trope to both, Amy Wigelsworth argues that the mystères urbains are exemplary rewritings, which shed new light on contemporary reading and writing practices, and emerge as early avatars of a genre still widely consumed and enjoyed in the 21st century.

PART I
❖
Introduction

On 27 August 2009, I saw a dramatization of Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris, performed in the Bois de Boulogne’s Théâtre de Verdure du Jardin Shakespeare.¹ This performance was to spark something of a fascination for me, with Sue’s text in general and with the multiple transformations inspired by it in particular. The significance accorded to the venue for the play, performed, according to the programme, ‘sous le ciel de Paris, en plein air, au milieu du Bois de Boulogne’, drew my attention to the complex, multivalent status of the city in Sue’s novel.² Not only did the city constitute the subject matter of the text, it also provided a contextual frame of reference, defining the terms for the text’s production and reception. I found myself intrigued by this overlapping of text and context, as well as by the idea that a text which was over 150 years old, and supposedly one of the earliest and best-known examples of ‘throwaway’ fiction, could be enjoying a new life in a twenty-first-century context. I was keen to interrogate the processes of hypertextual transformation that had allowed the text to endure in this way.

Although this personal experience was a key inspiration for the research underpinning this book, the dramatization to which I refer is arguably part of a much more general revival of interest in the mystères urbains trend initiated by Sue’s novel. At the vanguard of this revival in recent years has been Camilo Castelo Branco’s Mistérios de Lisboa (1854), which, as Mystères de Lisbonne, has enjoyed tremendous success in France, as a 2010 film directed by Raoul Ruiz, which received the Prix Louis-Delluc in the same year, and which was also broadcast as a six-part television serial on Arte in May 2011.³ The term mystères evidently remains something of a keyword in the French cultural imaginary, redolent of Sue’s founding novel, and of the urban mystery craze inaugurated by it, and thus a clear signal to the reader as to the type of narrative on offer.

While acknowledging the persistence of Sue’s urban mystery archetype right through to the present day, any meaningful evaluation of the ‘destin hypertextuel’ of this text would, of course, need to trace the phenomenon right back to its roots.⁴ As Dominique Kalifa asserts in his study of the intersections between crime and culture in nineteenth-century France, Sue’s novel was central to a system of repetition and recycling of both narratives and images which was endemic in the latter half of the nineteenth century, in fact so much so that rewriting Sue’s text became something of an unconscious reflex among authors:

Au cœur de ce système rayonnent Les Mystères de Paris, texte mythique et fondateur qui constitue une sorte de matrice illimitée, sans cesse réactivée. Non seulement les rééditions se succèdent, sans que le roman connaisse jamais de purgatoire: quatorze éditions du vivant de Sue, qui meurt en 1857, dix-neuf rééditions de cette date à 1914, souvent dans des collections à grand tirage (Rouff, Fayard), sans compter les périodiques départementaux qui le resservent fréquemment, les adaptations théâtrales, les chansons, etc. Mais le roman suscite aussi une multitude d’imitations, d’avatars, de plagiats […], de parodies […] ou de séries parallèles […]. Au-delà même, son esthétique et son imaginaire commandent à tel point la sensibilité feuilletonesque du siècle qu’il était sans doute difficile pour les auteurs de ne pas réécrire sans relâche Les Mystères de Paris. (Kalifa 2005: 40–41)⁵

[At the heart of this system radiated Les Mystères de Paris, a mythical, founding text which formed a kind of unlimited matrix, subject to continual reactivation. It was not only reissued in a seemingly inexhaustible succession of new editions: fourteen during the lifetime of its author, who died in 1857, and nineteen from then until 1914, often in collections with large print runs (Rouff, Fayard), without counting the frequent republications in regional periodicals, the theatre adaptations, and the songs, etc. But the novel also sparked a host of imitations, avatars, plagiarisms […], parodies […] or parallel series […]. Its reach extended even beyond these products, in that the aesthetic and the imaginary of the novel controlled the serial-oriented sensibility of the century to such an extent that it was no doubt difficult for authors not to relentlessly rewrite Les Mystères de Paris]

Kalifa’s compelling image of Les Mystères de Paris as ‘une sorte de matrice illimitée, sans cesse réactivée’ is at the heart of the questions I seek to address in this study, namely:

— What were the implications of the constant rewriting of Les Mystères de Paris? Can we identify meaningful interactions between the mystères and other genres or groups of texts? Does the continual rewriting inevitably engender a degree of self-consciousness in the texts? If so, how does this manifest itself and what are its implications?

— In a period of tremendous literary production, and in particular an abundance of both melodramatic mysteries and fiction about the city, what was the specificity of the mystères urbains? If we take the assumption of textual/contextual overlap (the city as both subject matter and publication context) as a starting point, can we pin down this dialogue between city and text in some way? For example, what do the texts have to tell us about communities of readers and about processes of reading and writing in the city?

— Does the mystères phenomenon invite us to reconsider binary oppositions of ‘literary’ versus ‘popular’ (or ‘paraliterary’) texts in some way, and if so, how?

Corpus Choice and Previous Research

My corpus draws on Matthieu Letourneux’s 2007 article, which examines the various mystères urbains set in Paris. Letourneux identifies two sub-groups, according to the title of the text:

L’association des ‘mystères’ et d’une ville (de Londres, de Marseille, de Milan, de Naples, de Moscou, de Madrid, de New York, du monde, etc.) permettant de tirer parti de la notoriété du modèle initial, et au contraire, l’association de Paris et d’un terme renvoyant à la dimension romanesque du récit ([L]es Drames de Paris, Les Peaux-Rouges de Paris, Les Nuits de Paris, Les Bas-fonds de Paris, etc.). (Letourneux 2007: 147–48)

[The association of the term ‘mysteries’ with the name of a city (of London, of Marseilles, of Milan, of Naples, of Moscow, of Madrid, of New York, of the world, etc.) allowing [a writer] to take advantage of the renown of the original model and, on the contrary, the association of Paris with a term referring to the fictional dimension of the story (The Dramas of Paris, The redskins of Paris, The Nights of Paris, the slums of Paris, etc.)]

I drew up an initial list of texts based on a literature survey (summarized below), which I then supplemented by a search carried out on the Bibliothèque nationale de France website using the term mystères (a strategy which, needless to say, returned only items from the first category identified by Letourneux) and the date range 1789–1914. A number of additional texts, such as Lermina’s ‘Mystère-ville’, analysed in Chapter 6, and the parodic rewritings examined in Chapter 9, emerged as relevant as my readings and investigations continued. The resulting corpus should therefore be seen as a broad representative sample, and certainly not an attempt to establish immutable generic boundaries; others would be quite right to point to a wider penumbra of works surrounding the selection I have made, and would be entirely justified in making any number and combination of these the object of their own investigations.⁶

Delineating the parameters of any corpus involves, inevitably, a series of subjective, if not arbitrary, decisions, and the attacks to which such decisions are subject may be all the more virulent when dealing with popular texts, whose credentials as a group, or genre, have not been confirmed in advance by canonical research. Such criticisms can be anticipated, if not avoided altogether. The somewhat nebulous, inchoate nature of such a corpus is, one might argue, a source of interest in itself.

I have also attempted to head off criticism by identifying a meaningful date range for the corpus, although it is important to acknowledge the dangers inherent in placing undue emphasis on the originary role of Sue’s text. Indeed, Les Mystères de Paris had its own precursors, such as Restif de la Bretonne’s Nuits de Paris and Louis Sébastien Mercier’s tableau de Paris (Bretonne & Mercier 1990), to take just a couple of examples, just as the transformations inspired by Les Mystères de Paris often acquired the dual status of both hypertexts, based on Sue’s novel, and hypotexts, inspiring a new generation of transformations in their turn.⁷ Choosing an end date for my corpus was, similarly, not without its challenges. The decision to use Lermina’s ‘Mystère-ville’ (1904–05) as my final text (in terms of chronology) was a means of ensuring that both my corpus and its historical timeframe were manageable. The date also reflects the fact that, as Letourneux (2007: 160) remarks, the mystères tended to adopt new settings and new preoccupations going into the twentieth century.

A number of pieces of research on the mystères urbains deserve a mention here, in order to demonstrate that my study draws on an existing body of work, but is nonetheless original, in terms of both corpus and methodology. In a thesis entitled ‘Capital Tales: The Urban Mysteries of Eugène Sue and G. W. M. Reynolds’, Sara James (2000a) documents and interrogates comparisons of Sue’s Mystères de Paris and Reynolds’s Mysteries of London, examining the authors’ lives, representations of Paris and London, and characterization. Kimberly R. Gladman’s thesis, ‘Upper Tens and Lower Millions: City Mysteries Fiction and Class in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’ (2001), adopts a similar, cross-cultural approach. After considering Les Mystères de Paris, city mysteries in other countries, and translation issues surrounding the American edition of Sue’s work, Gladman moves on to a detailed examination of city mysteries fiction in the United States, concentrating on issues of class, race, and gender. In her thesis ‘Reading the Seen: Mystery and Visual Fetishism in Nineteenth-Century Popular Narrative’ (2004), Sara Hackenberg examines a corpus comprising French and English (both British and American) texts. Hackenberg’s emphasis is on what she terms ‘visual fetishism’. The tension between apparently stable visual clues which in actual fact engender deception and uncertainty is personified by the ‘master observer’ and the ‘master of disguise’ and the act of seeing becomes a game providing a coping mechanism for technology and urbanization. One of the most recent publications on the urban mystery phenomenon, Stephen Knight’s The Mysteries of the Cities: Urban Crime Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (2012), is similarly international in approach. Knight analyses Sue’s Mystères de Paris and Féval’s Mystères de Londres alongside Reynolds’s Mysteries of London, Lippard’s The Quaker City (on Philadelphia), Edward Zane Carroll Judson’s Mysteries and Miseries of New York, and Donald Cameron’s Mysteries of Melbourne Life.

But recent research also reflects a growing interest in a wide range of French- language mystères urbains other than those of Sue. Articles by Matthieu Letourneux (2007 and 2009) are based on a French corpus, as is Nicolas Gauthier’s thesis on repetition and cliché in the mystères, ‘La Ville criminelle dans les grands cycles romanesques de 1840 à 1860: stratégies narratives et clichés’ (2011). The scale and significance of the mystères urbains phenomenon has also been acknowledged in works with a broader historical focus, such as Dominique Kalifa’s recent Les Basfonds: histoire d’un imaginaire (2013: 67–68, 133–34, and 176–77).

Interest among the francophone academic community is clearly in the ascendant, with perhaps the most significant project to date recently spearheaded by the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3. The three-year programme (2011–14),⁸ headed by Marie-Ève Thérenty, involved the establishment of a database of urban mysteries and the digitization of a number of texts, as well as a series of conferences and publications, all with a constant emphasis on the international and the interdisciplinary.⁹

Some Methodological Considerations

A desire to play down the difference...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Contexts
• Part III: The Mystères Transposed
• Part IV: Feuilleton, Performance, and Parody
• Part V: Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index