Books

The Occult Essence of Louys

REVIEWED BY CHARLES LONBERGER

In shifting through a facsimile of selections by Pierre Louys, published in London by Greening and Co., Ltd. in 1908, we discovered that the Louys most known by the reading public through his influential Le Femme et le Pantin, is a misrepresentation, for his oeuvre, as made clear by his accumulated writings, was obsessed with the Occult, with overtones of the Satanic, which, in true Symbolist fashion, is depicted as a feminine force.

Not to say that Louys was strictly Symbolist, but the influence of that movement upon him is pronounced. His “A New Pleasure,” for instance, depicts a bored bourgeoisie roused from his reverie by an Egyptian Goddess raised from the dead by a spell. Rather than be frightened by his visitor, the bourgeoisie instead attempts to corrupt her with a vice (cigarettes). Further, his “Hill of Housel” is a fantasy on Wagner’s Tannhauser; its conclusion suggests the author has been consumed by a Hell commanded by a Venus of cloven hoofs and horns.

While his Leda memorably conveys bestial congress, what is most significant about it is the Paganism of its setting. The most developed of the selections we read, Immortal Love, taken from his best-selling Aphrodite, is a compendium of pagan Goddesses, associating Jewesses with witchcraft. One might even see his famous creation, Concha Perez, in this light, the darkness of her appearance suggesting the presence of the Demonic, which might account for the spell, virgin or no, that she casts on men.

Louys’ writings are laced with a strong eroticism, from the rape of Leda by the Swan to the reference to female pubic hair in Immortal Love. He frequently cloaks the nudity of his characters with a veiled gauze and, most notably, spends a lot of attention on the auction of primarily female slaves, and their ambiguous feelings about their slavery, as in The Artist Triumphant.

The heady mix of eroticism and symbolism that permeates his work, finds its visual equivalent in the Belgian draughtsman, Felician Rops, almost an exact contemporary of the Frenchman. 

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