Bruges la Morte, or Bruges the Dead, a novel published in 1892 by the Belgian Symbolist
Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898; photo above), is the story of a grief-stricken widower,
Hugues Viane, who travels to the then-decaying Belgian inland port city of Bruges
(now a flourishing tourist attraction) and develops an obsession there with a
local danseuse who is, he thinks, the
spitting image of his dead wife. The narrative culminates in a deranged murder.
Sound a bit familiar, Hitchcock fans? Well, it should: Rodenbach's gloomy
little tale influenced the French crime writers Boileau and Narcejac, who wrote D'Entre Les Morts ("The Living and the Dead"), which
Hitch made into Vertigo. The novel
threw out further tendrils: Eric Wolfgang Korngold, once a famous and lionized
composer of operas and symphonies, later the "father of film music," used
it as the basis for his opera Die Tote Stadt.
And admirers of the late W. G. Sebald, among whom I count myself, will, while
leafing through Rodenbach's book, experience a frisson of familiarity at the sight of the black-and-white
photographs he interspersed throughout, a technique Sebald used to great effect
in his own novels such as Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn. (Coincidentally, he also wrote a novel called Vertigo; no relation.)
Rodenbach seems to
have been a melancholy chap at the best of times, much given to nostalgia and meditation,
as one might expect from a brooding Belgian Symbolist: They brooded a lot, and many
were Belgians. "One only truly loves what one no longer has," he said, possibly
between sips of absinthe (or, less likely, Rodenbach beer). "Truly to love one's little homeland, it is best
to go away, to exile oneself for ever, [...] and for the homeland to grow so
distant it seems to die. [...] The essence of art that is at all noble is the
DREAM, and this dream dwells only upon what is distant, absent, vanished,
unattainable."
