It is difficult, even today, to speak of Jean Lorrain
without embarrassment. Those aspects of his life and works
that appeared scandalous to his contemporaries, such as his
openness about his homosexuality, his ostentation of any and
all kinds of perversity, and his notorious bad taste, may
seem to invite rather than repel current critical interest.
1 Nevertheless, even for a position that has revalued
artifice, sentimentality, and "vice," Lorrain's writing may
prove to be unpalatable: his clamorous antisemitism, his
vociferousness as an anti-Dreyfusard, his insistent
misogyny, his approval of colonialism, and his concomitant
reveling in the worst forms of late nineteenth-century
Orientalism are almost insurmountable obstacles in the way
of a permanent revaluation of Lorrain as a "good" writer.
Why write of Lorrain at all then? Some previous attempts to
revive interest in his work sanitizes it by presenting it as
quaint: so, Philippe Jullian's biography, Jean Lorrain ou le
satiricon 1900, admirable as it is, tends to make Lorrain
seem ready for a nostalgic and neutralized mass consumption,
rather like the
art nouveau that Lorrain himself relished.
Other influential discussions of Lorrain, such as Mario
Praz's in The Romantic Agony, turn Lorrain into a
practitioner of art brut, a pathological
writer who can be
classified and contained within an established
counter-tradition. For Praz, Lorrain's oeuvre is to be
savored as symptomatology, and the disease is the man: Praz
contrasts Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray with Lorrain's
best-known novel to the advantage of the latter because it
supposedly "bears witness to a profoundly troubled and
painful state of mind" (345). Praz ...
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