Grotesque and sublime
The clown, among all the artists of the spectacle, has certain mimes, is said to be related to the plus de la marionnette. In all cases, this is the character that the Helquin donnaient au clown and à l'acrobate. Ils les mecanisaient. Les clowns n'avaient pas de conscience, c'étaient des machines déchaînées, quelque chose en eux de profond, d'inconnu, de sauvage les menait. Les clowns, in our senses, is the grace inversée. […] Alastair était celui qui poussait toujours les spectacles vers l'excès et la démesure. Ça n'allait jamais assez vite pour lui. On the piste, it's déchaînait. These movements are not fluid, like certain élégants acrobats. C'étaient des mouvements brutaux, saccadés, sans suite, comme ceux d'un pantin secoué par des impulses électriques. Même moi qui connaissais les numéros, qui l'avais regardé travailler, à le voir, je ne pouvais pas me retenir d'éclater de rire, tant il savait transformer son corps en machine prise de Folie.
Of all the artists in the entertainment industry, perhaps with the exception of some mimes, the clown is the closest thing to a marionette. In any case, that's what the Helquins gave to both the clown and the acrobat. They mechanized them. The clowns had no consciousness; they were unleashed machines, driven by something deep, unknown, and wild within them. Clowns are, in a way, the inverse of grace. […] Alastair was the one who always pushed the shows to excess and extravagance. Nothing was ever fast enough for him. He ran riot in the ring. His movements weren't fluid like those of some elegant acrobats. They were brutal, jerky, incoherent movements, like a marionette being shaken by electrical impulses. Even I, who knew the acts and had watched him perform, couldn't contain myself and had to laugh out loud at the sight, so perfectly did he transform his body into a machine driven by madness.
The aesthetics of the mechanization of the body are typical of the Helquin clowns. Thalia and Charles describe Alastair/Punch's movements as "brutal, jerky, uncontrolled, like a marionette shaken by electrical impulses" ("brutaux, saccadés, sans suite, comme ceux d'un pantin secoué par des impulsions électriques"). Punch's performance is a deliberate reversal of grace and brings the clown closer to the marionette, which acts without its own (moral) consciousness.
Pierre Jourdes La marchande d'oublies (Gallimard, 2025) is a novel that intertwines the worlds of clowns, jugglers, and early psychiatric modernism in a decadent style. Jourde employs a nested, unreliable narrative form to depict the emergence of the modern subject within the tension between madness, art, and social masquerade. His work stands in a striking intertextual relationship to Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs (1869) – not as a mere homage, but as a reflection on the continued existence of Hugo's grotesque-humanistic myth in the age of modern psychiatry. Jourde sets his action in the world of showmen and clowns of the late 19th century, in the "foires" and "baraques aux monstres." These places function as precursors of the modern stage, as spaces of ambivalence between pleasure and horror. Even Hugo's circus world – Ursus's traveling stage – was a counter-world to society, a refuge of humanity. In Jourde's work, however, it has become a laboratory of madness. The Helquin clown family embodies the self-dissolution of the subject in the spectacle.
Les Helquin tombent du plafond, au beau milieu d'une table d'hôte, à l'heure du déjeuner. Vous voyez l'effarement des voyageurs. Ici, il ya un de ces coups de Folie qui traversent les pantomimes, ces coups de Folie épidémiques dont on rit si fort, avec de sourdes inquiétudes pour sa propre raison. Les Helquin prepares the plats, the bouteilles, and meets the juggler with a fury croissant, which ends up being convivial, entraînés, enragés, les imitent, de façon que la scène se appointments in a démence générale. N'est-ce pas le souffle qui passe parfois sur les foules et les détraque? L'humanité finit souvent par juggler ainsi with les soupières et les saladiers. On the other hand, there is nothing left on the bike. This is the same as Helquin's games. Ce qu'ils mettent dans all, c'est une perfection d'exécution incroyable. The scenes are set à la seconde. It fits like the tourbillons, with the claquements of souffles that combine the tic-tac with the mechanical exercises of the exercises. Ils ont la finesse et la force. This is what the characters are like. Sous le masque enfariné de Pierrot, ils détaillent l'idée avec des jeux de physionomie d'un esprit délicieux ; Puis, brusquement, a coup de vent assemblage passer, et les voilà lancés dans a férocité Saxonne qui nous surprend un peu. Ils bondissent, ils s'assomment, ils sont à la fois aux quatre coins de la scène ; et ce sont des bouteilles volées avec une habileté qui est la poésie du larcin, des gifles qui s'égarent, des innocents qu'on bâtonne et des coupables qui vident les verres des braves gens, une négation absolue de toute justice, une absolution du crime par l'adresse. Telle est leur originalité, un mélange de cruauté et de gaieté, with a fleur de fantaisie poétique.
The Helquins fall from the ceiling onto a guest table in the middle of lunch. The travelers' dismay is palpable. Here we have one of those moments of madness that permeate pantomime, those epidemic moments of lunacy that elicit such loud laughter that one feels a dull unease about one's own sanity. The Helquins grab the plates and bottles and begin juggling with increasing fury, so wildly that the guests are gradually swept up in it, becoming enraged and imitating them, so that the scene culminates in general frenzy. Isn't it the breath that sometimes sweeps over crowds and drives them mad? Humanity often juggles soup bowls and salad bowls in this way. You are seized by a fit of laughter and wonder if you won't wake up in a hut in Bicêtre. That is the joy of the Helquins. What they put into everything is an incredible perfection in execution. Their scenes are timed down to the second. They dart past like whirlwinds, their bellows clapping like the ticking of their exercise mechanism. They possess finesse and power. That is what distinguishes them. Beneath the flour-dusted mask of Pierrot, they illustrate the idea with a delightful play of facial expressions; then suddenly a gust of wind seems to blow, and they plunge into a Saxon wildness that takes us somewhat by surprise. They leap, they knock each other down, they are simultaneously at all four corners of the stage; and there are bottles stolen with a skill that is the poetry of theft, there are slaps that miss their mark, there are innocents who are struck, and guilty people who empty the glasses of the good, it is an absolute negation of all justice, an absolution of crime through skill. That is their originality, a mixture of cruelty and gaiety, with a touch of poetic imagination.
The clowns provoke an “epidemic folie” and lead the audience to the brink of madness (“On est pris par le fou rire, on ne sait si l'on ne se réveillera pas dans un cabanon de Bicêtre”). This serves to shatter the fragile surface of bourgeois reality. Despite the absolute chaos (“démence générale”), the performance is one of perfection and precision, reflecting the core principle of Helquin's artistry: “l'accord parfait de l'ordre et du chaos.” The stage becomes the site where the unconscious violence and absurdity of human existence—the cruelty and fantaisie poétique – find their absolution.
La marchande d'oublies It tells a story of memory, madness, and the grotesque, intertwining the world of fairs and clowns with the emerging psychiatry of the 19th century. In a framing narrative, Thalia, daughter of a notorious family of showmen, recounts the story of her lover Charles Louvel, a former "alienist," who encounters the monstrously neglected Alastair on a train journey – Thalia's long-lost brother, a clownish titan poised between man and beast.
The voyageur portait a pelisse comme on n'en voit nulle part, an espèce de rapiéçage de peaux brunes, noirâtres, fauves quii arrivait jusqu'aux chevilles et lui donnait l'air d'un animal composite, an espèce d'ours mêlé de loup et de sanglier. Celui qui avait fabriqué this chimère vestimentaire avait dû apparier le lapin et le renard, le chat et le blaireau. La chose était mitée, raccommodée, râpée par places, noircie, tachée, on se demandait si elle n'abritait pas des colonies d'insectes, des lichens, des parasites, c'était une sorte de créature dont celui qu'elle enveloppait n'était peut-être que le servant. Bizarrement, certain pièces, au découpage bizarre, en lanière, en étoile, en demi-lune, étaient dépourvues de poil, c'était de la peau nue, devenue grisâtre, et on se demandait sur quel animal elle avait pu être prélevée. The col anthracite montait jusqu'aux oreilles, and a chapeau de maquignon à larges bords enveloppait d'ombre the visage. Le all suintant, dégouttant, comme si la chose venait d'émerger des profondeurs d'un lac, et en se déplaçant elle avait laissé derrière elle une traînée liquide.
The traveler wore a coat unlike any other, a patchwork of brown, blackish, and yellowish-brown furs that reached his ankles and made him look like a hybrid creature, a kind of bear mixed with wolf and wild boar. Whoever had made this garment must have combined rabbit and fox, cat and badger. The thing was moth-eaten, patched, worn in places, blackened, and stained; one wondered if it didn't harbor colonies of insects, lichens, and parasites. It was a creature whose servant, perhaps, was the one it enveloped. Strangely, some sections, with bizarre cuts in stripes, stars, or crescents, were devoid of fur, revealing bare skin that had turned grayish, and one wondered what animal it might have come from. The charcoal collar reached his ears, and a wide-brimmed hat cast a shadow over his face. The whole thing was dripping and oozing, as if it had just surfaced from the depths of a lake and left a liquid trail as it moved.
This passage, with the appearance of Alastair, the "shadow" in the train compartment, immediately establishes the uncanny and grotesque nature of his existence. His fur coat is not clothing, but a "chimera," composed of various animal hides, making him appear like a composite creature. The uncanny effect arises from the mingling of human and animal and the ambivalence of whether the wearer is the master or the "servant" of this revolting thing. The garment is a living symbol of decay and morbidity; it is damp, dripping, and exudes a "disturbing haze." Since Alastair later identifies with the "marchande d'oublies," this grotesque costume acts as the physical manifestation of the angel of decay and the unconscious, who fills Charles with fear and fascination and infects bourgeois reality.
In the claustrophobic atmosphere of the compartment, Alastair unfolds the story of his amnesia, his childhood in the cruel world of the Helquin clowns, and his encounter with the mysterious "marchande d'oublies," an angelic figure of forgetfulness whose sweet communion wafers promise both salvation and death. What begins as a tale of madness becomes a metaphysical incantation: the 19th century appears as a circus of decay, in which spectacle replaces morality, medicine regresses into superstition, and the boundary between stage and madhouse, between art and illness, between love and incest becomes indistinguishable. Jourde creates a magnificent panorama of the Dance of Death, in which memory and language themselves are seduced into silence by the "marchande d'oublies."
From the end of the matinée, the ciel s'était couvert. At the end of the day, the tour is available in an obscurity that the night is still alive. C'était le début du printemps, et les orages se succédaient. Charles decided to part with a little advance, for the tent to d'éviter la pluie, and to peine three heures and demie qu'il refermait la grille du jardin et traversait la petite place déserte. Tout Saint-Genest is barricaded chez soi.
On the route of the station, there is no cross person, there is an attelage, there is a pieton, there is also a bridge with two bees. The masses of nuages violacés s'accumulaient in packets bourgeonnants, en nodosités palpitantes, comme si le ciel crevé allait déverser ses entrailles. Et la campagne puait le gibier qu'on vient d'éviscérer: les tas de fumier monumentaux puaient, qui faisaient penser à des constructions d'une civilization disparue, des temples de matière vivante, des Babel de merde. Les moutons that are serraient craintivement sous les hêtres en packages de suint et de laine puaient. Les bouses de vache qui se bousculaient au long de la route comme des méduses noirâtres, éveillées de leur sommeil stercoraire par les deflagrations des éclairs, puaient passionnément, puaient de toutes leurs forces comme pour prendre leur revanche de pauvres choses assignées à la honte et au dégout. Ah, Murmurait Charles, on comprend, devant ces petites tranches d'apocalypse rurale, que les anciens aient cherché à lire des signs dans les météores, à interpreter l'avenir dans les entrailles, à décipherer l'état du ciel et ses incompréhensibles manifestations comme un langage. The response is very simple: the dieux se soulagent sur nous, ils jouissent de nous couvrir de leurs excréments, ils éclatent de rire, des rires forced homériques, à chaque coup réussi.
Late in the morning, the sky had clouded over. As the hours passed, it grew so dark that it seemed as if night had fallen. It was spring, and there had been a series of thunderstorms. Charles had decided to leave a little earlier to avoid the rain, and it was barely half past three when he closed the garden gate and crossed the small, deserted square. All of Saint-Genest had barricaded themselves indoors.
On his way to the train station, he had encountered no one—no horse-drawn cart, no pedestrian, not even a shepherd with his animals. Massive violet clouds piled up into seething formations, pulsating nodules, as if the torn-open sky were pouring out its very core. And the landscape reeked of freshly gutted game: the monumental dung heaps stank, reminiscent of structures from a vanished civilization, temples of living matter, Babels of excrement. The sheep, huddled fearfully beneath the beech trees, stank in their clumps of sweat and wool. The cowpats, crowding along the road like black jellyfish, awakened from their steroid slumber by the explosions of lightning, stank passionately, stank with all their might, as if seeking revenge for their wretched existence, which had brought them shame and disgust. Ah, whispered Charles, seeing these little glimpses into the rural apocalypse, one understands why the ancients tried to read signs in meteors, to interpret the future in entrails, to decipher the state of the heavens and their incomprehensible manifestations like a language. But the answer can be quite simple: the gods are relieving themselves on us, they enjoy covering us with their excrement, they burst into laughter, inevitably Homeric laughter, with every successful blow.
This excerpt demonstrates the grotesque through the exaggeration of the ugly and the ordinary to cosmic absurdity. The rural landscape of Saint-Genest is transformed under an apocalyptic sky into a place of metaphysical disgust. Gigantic dung heaps become "temples of living matter" and "Towers of Babylonian shit" ("Babel de merde"), while the emanations of animal excrement are presented as a passionate act of nature's revenge. Charles, the doctor and rationalist, initially attempts to decipher this scene but ultimately recognizes that the only logical interpretation is divine profanation: the gods are laughing at humanity. This links Charles's intellectual inclination to read the world as a book laden with symbols with the nihilistic and cynical aesthetic of the grotesque that Alastair/Punch will later embody.
At 656 pages, this novel is regarded by critics as a demonstration of literary power, described as a "breathtaking novel" and a work of "impressive scale and virtuosity." The aesthetic developed by Jourde is described as "brilliantly dark" ("brillamment lugubre"). TéléramaThe novel skillfully blends the macabre with a touch of poetry. Its visual and emotional impact is so powerful that it evokes precise cinematic comparisons. The thematic violence is reminiscent of David Lynch's work. Elephant Man (1980), while the mixture of macabre and poetry is reminiscent of Tim Burton's Big Fish (2003) recalls. These parallels confirm the phantasmagorical character of the narrative (“Fantasmagories et amours fin de siècle”, Libération) and anchor the work in an artistic tradition that celebrates and questions marginal figures, thereby directly appealing to the "unconscious of the reader".
The first narrator, the physician Charles Louvel, is a former "alienist"—a representative of that early psychiatry which confines people to categories of the pathological. The doctor, who seeks to understand madness, himself becomes possessed in Jourde's text. The encounter with Alastair, the vanished clown brother, becomes an initiation into the abyss of human consciousness—just as Gwynplaine in Hugo's work becomes a mirror reflecting an entire social pathology.
The amphithéâtre is based on the students and some of the spectators, who are interested in this discipline as a young person and in a wide development that appeals to psychiatry. On all the clowns, the finale is one of the genres of the spectacle: violent, aggressive, which is also used in battle, plus a joke that cannot be compared with the cause, and the explications are always déployées sur un Ton professorial par les mandarins barbus ne faisaient qu'ajouter le prestige de la science à un mystère qui aurait aussi bien pu se jouer sur des tréteaux du Moyen Âge. Baillarguer appelait « clownism » the agitation convulsive des hysteriques pendant la crisis, part qu'elle rappelait, selon lui, les movements saccadés des clowns, leurs gestes qui se déclenchaient brutalement, leurs chorégraphies d'automates survoltés qui donnaient l'impression de corps soumis à des secousses galvaniques.
The lecture hall was packed with students and even spectators, who were increasingly interested in this relatively young and rapidly developing discipline called psychiatry. People went there as if to a clown show, for ultimately it was a similar kind of spectacle: the violent, aggressive strangeness that unfolded was all the more striking because its cause was not truly understood, and the convoluted explanations delivered in professorial tones by the bearded mandarins only served to lend prestige to a mystery that might as well have been played out on the stages of the Middle Ages. Baillarguer termed the convulsive agitation of the hysterics during the crisis “clowning” because, in his opinion, it resembled the jerky movements of clowns, their abrupt gestures, their choreography of frenzied automata that gave the impression of bodies subjected to galvanic shocks.
Here, a direct parallel is drawn between the circus stage and the amphitheater of psychiatry: The medical lectures and experiments (especially the galvanization of hysterics) are themselves described as "même genre de spectacle" like the clowns' performances. The hysterics are portrayed as automatons and Possessed perceived, whose "agitation convulsive" is called "clownism." The psychiatrist Charles falls under the spell of Thalia's lethargy – her phenomenon —and realizes that by buying and exhibiting her in his hotel, he is only imitating what he claimed to be saving her from: the voyeuristic exploitation of spectacle. The stage is thus wherever human suffering or deviance is put on display, be it in the Fair or in the Science.
The novel's title refers to the "marchande d'oublies," the small street vendor who hawks her sweet waffles ("oublies"). This figure appears to Alastair at the fair—as a vision of pure innocence, but also as a symbol of a perverted Eucharist. She sells "oblation"—offerings—to a world that has transformed the sacred into commodities.
The motif of forgetting has several layers: Psychologically, because Alastair's memory loss after his accident is the birth of his new self. Metaphysically, since forgetting is the condition of survival—and at the same time the form of damnation. Culturally, because the "marchande d'oublies" represents bourgeois society, which consumes the suffering and monstrosity that constitute its pleasure without recognizing them.
Here, Jourde encounters Hugo's ethics of compassion in a paradoxical way: Where Victor Hugo in The Man Who Laughs While demanding that society remember the “lost” faces, Jourde shows that the 19th century was a machine of forgetting – a modern-day carnival booth where monstrosity becomes an attraction. The Man Who Laughs The disfigurement of the face is a symbol of social injustice: the individual as a victim of a system that is itself monstrous. In Jourde's work, the grotesque becomes existential. The clown is no longer a victim of society, but rather the embodiment of its inner turmoil.
The description of Alastair—half animal, half human, wrapped in a stinking fur—evokes the grotesque as a form of the ontological. His language is a cacophony of voices, a “cacophonie de voix”: the subject is no longer one, but a chorus of madness, memory, and quotation. While Hugo’s Gwynplaine still retains a moral purity in his disfigurement, Alastair in Jourde’s novel is the product of decomposition: a fragmented consciousness that is simultaneously victim and perpetrator.
Jourde radicalizes Hugo's romantic principle of the "union of the grotesque and the sublime": laughter is no longer understood as a tragic mask of truth, but as the language of dissolution itself. Like Hugo's circus world, Jourde's showman's universe is a mirror of social mechanisms. But while for Hugo the circus is a place of humanistic truth, for Jourde it becomes a stage for pathology. The clowns perform their neuroses like tricks; the audience consumes them with the same greed with which it ignores the "oubliés" (forgotten) of society.
"The Man Who Laughs," a forgotten masterpiece of silent film by Paul Leni, starring Conrad Veidt as a showman whose features are distorted into a perpetual grin. See Jens Hinrichsen. Filmdienst.de.
Storytelling as a disease
The doctor Louvel, who witnesses this world, stands between science and fascination. In him is reflected the ambivalence of the modern gaze: the desire to understand the abnormal and the compulsion to exhibit it. In this sense, Jourde's novel is also a parable about the gaze of modern literature itself—about writing as a psychiatric act. Hugo's world is determined by the ananke—the fatalism of fate that compels humanity to suffer. Jourde transforms this tragedy into a psychodynamic: instead of the ancient power of fate, we find the unconscious, which manifests itself in visions, voices, and repetitions.
Je vois the patient à nouveau sur la table d'opération, couvert d'un drap fendu à l'emplacement de l'abdomen, comme des lèvres bordées de rouge between lesquelles les deux opérateurs tirent d'interminables tuyauteries molles couleur mortadelle, des organes en forme de besace, d'aubergine, de cornemuse, un cœur énorme, palpitant, dont les soubresauts envoient un jus carmin au visage des chirurgiens, c'est un gâchis, un carnage, la piste et les personnages sont couverts de liquides, de débris spongieux, à présent les chirurgiens sortent du ventre de leur victime des chapelets de saucisses, un réveille-matin, un jambonneau, un lapin, le public dégueule de rire, le patient se réveille, ses yeux s'écarquillent au spectacle de ses entrailles que l'on vide, ses cheveux à nouveau s'horripilent d'un coup, sa bouche se deforme dans un cri qui ne sort pas.
I see the patient lying on the operating table again, covered with a sheet cut open at the abdomen like red-rimmed lips, between which the two surgeons are inserting endless soft, mortadella-colored tubes, organs shaped like pouches, eggplants, bagpipes, and a huge one that throbs and whose spasms squirt a crimson fluid onto the surgeons' faces. It is chaos, carnage; the stage and the characters are covered in fluids and spongy remains. Now the surgeons are pulling strings of sausages, an alarm clock, a pork knuckle, and a rabbit from their victim's abdomen. The audience vomits with laughter. The patient wakes up, his eyes widening at the sight of his entrails being emptied, his hair standing on end again, his mouth twisting into a scream that never comes out.
This glimpse into the performances of the Helquin clowns is a prime example of the aesthetics of the grotesque and the macabre in the novel. It is a parody of surgery and the scientific dissection of the body as practiced in 19th-century psychiatry and anatomy. The grotesque lies in the mixture of realistic carnage ("gâchis, un carnage," crimson fluids) and absurd objects (alarm bell, ham, strings of sausages) pulled from the patient's body. The uncanny manifests itself in the dehumanizing violence (the patient is transformed into a frog-like test subject) and in the portrayal of suffering as the ultimate entertainment. For Alastair (Punch), this kind of violence is a necessary means of escaping the "flatness of reality" and presenting chaos in harmony with order, which constitutes the core of Helquin art.
The return of brother Alastair is a classic motif of Romantic doubling: the doppelgänger, the shadow of the repressed self. But unlike Hugo, where Dea and Ursus embody a transcendent purity, there is no redemption in Jourde. Laughter has definitively passed into the realm of decay. In the description of the rotting body, the stinking pelican, the "apocalypse of the carrion," the Romantic idea of sublimation is reversed: the grotesque is no longer elevated, but rather draws everything into the earthly and decaying. Jourde's aesthetics of disgust is a counter-poetics to Hugo's idealism.
Jourde's novel is also a reflection on storytelling itself. The story is conveyed through Thalia's voice, which recounts Charles's account, who in turn quotes Alastair's voice. This cascade of voices, memories, and projections creates an unreliability reminiscent of postmodern techniques, while simultaneously referencing the Romantic tradition of "folie lucide."
The act of narration becomes symptomatic of the delusion: the attempt to name the trauma leads to the unstoppable reproduction of the unspeakable. Just as Hugo's Gwynplaine cannot be taken seriously because his face is smiling, so too in La marchande d'oublies Every speech is devalued by its own fictionality.
The doctor who wants to tell a story gets lost in the story of the clown – like the writer who can never separate his subject from himself.
Ton corps conserve les rondeurs de l'enfance, il est lisse, sans aspérités, rien ne rompt la blancheur parfaite de ta peau, ni veine, ni poil, tes bras ont le potelé de ceux d'un de ces putti qui accompagnent les déesses sur les tableaux mythologiques. Ce corps ne donne rien au monde et ne lui demande rien, il se suffit à lui-même, il repose dans sa propre perfection inconsciente d'elle-même, et quand tes yeux noirs se posent sur moi, grands ouverts, j'ai l'impression qu'on me regarde depuis un autre monde, un monde plein, homogeneous and parfaitement clos. C'est à cause de cela that ce regard me bouleverse, il vient de l'inaccessible, par lui la pureté absolute me considère, il se pose sur moi et sur le monde sans intention, sans demande, sans desir, il se contente, sur tout ce qu'il touche, d'affirmer ta pure presence. Et par moments, c'est presque insoutenable, je ne sais plus quoi faire, je voudrais te serrer, te serrer tellement fort que tu entrerais en moi, te mêlerais à moi, mais je ne peux que sentir mon impuissance, alors mon envie de tendresse se mue en désir de violence, je Voudrais te déchirer, lacérer ce corps parfait et l'ouvrir pour qu'il me livre enfin son impénétrable intériorité. Mais je me contente de te serrer document contre moi.
Your body has retained the curves of your childhood; it is smooth, without imperfections. Nothing disturbs the perfect whiteness of your skin—not a vein, not a hair. Your arms are as plump as those of the cherubs who accompany the goddesses in mythological paintings. This body gives nothing to the world and demands nothing from it; it is self-sufficient, resting in its own, self-conscious perfection. And when your black eyes are fixed on me, wide open, I have the impression that someone from another world is looking at me, a world that is fulfilled, homogeneous, and perfectly self-contained. That is why this gaze shakes me; it comes from the unattainable, through it absolute purity contemplates me. It rests upon me and upon the world without intention, without demand, without desire. It is content simply to affirm your pure presence on everything it touches. And sometimes it's almost unbearable, I don't know what to do anymore, I want to hug you, hug you so tightly that you penetrate me, merge with me, but I can only feel my powerlessness, and so my longing for tenderness transforms into a longing for violence, I want to tear you apart, rip this perfect body apart and open it up so that it finally reveals its impenetrable interior to me. But I content myself with gently pressing you to me.
Charles' fictionalized narrative about eleven-year-old Alice (Thalia) defines absolute purity as a state of unconscious, self-sufficient perfection. Thalia's body is compared to mythological putti and possesses a "parfaite blancheur" (perfect whiteness). This purity is "inconsciente d'elle-même" (conscious of herself) and demands nothing of the observer except her pure existence ("ta présence pure"). Paradoxically, this unattainable ideal awakens a violent desire in Charles: because he cannot possess this absolute purity, his "envie de tenderness" (desire for tenderness) transforms into the wish to tear apart the perfect body and thus reveal its "impénétrable intériorité" (impossible interior). This illuminates Charles's central dilemma: he seeks in Thalia redemption from the ego and from corrupted realism, yet contact with the absolute inevitably leads to frustration and destructive desire, since purity, by definition, excludes possession.
A young girl repose on the beach, wearing a simple white tunic. These long hairs are roux, which are talented on the fabric bleue and cover the skin of the bras, the font paraître plus pale encore son visage si extraordinairement blanc qu'il a l'air d'avoir été moulé dans la cire. On the croirait morte. Sans doute pour ne pas avoir à la supposer vivante. Oui, il faut l'avouer, à la honte de la human nature, il ya quelque chose d'insupportable à la croire vivante. Non, cela ne concerne pas seulement Punch, pas seulement Punch et son esprit tordu, deformé comme un morceau de métal qu'on a repassé dans les flammes, all ici, Punch le sait, éprouvent le même sentiment. The beauty is an apocalypse. Elle nous révèle notre désastre intimate et nos odeurs de pied. Elle incendie tout sur son passage.
A young girl lies on the stage, dressed in a simple white tunic. Her long red hair, spreading across the blue fabric and covering her upper arms, makes her face, so exceptionally white it seems sculpted from wax, appear even paler. One might think she is dead. Undoubtedly, to avoid having to assume that she is alive. Yes, one must admit, to the shame of human nature, that it is unbearable to believe that she is alive. No, this isn't just about Punch, not just Punch and his twisted mind, warped like a piece of metal heated in the flames; everyone here, Punch knows, feels the same way. Beauty is an apocalypse. It reveals our innermost disasters and the smell of our feet. It sets fire to everything in its path.
This scene presents Thalia as the "belle endormie" within the monstrous exhibition, a central motif of the uncanny. Her beauty and absolute passivity, bordering on death, make her an unbearable spectacle. The figure of the sleeper embodies a paradoxical state: utterly vulnerable yet inaccessible. Punch/Alastair interprets this beauty as an "apocalypse" that reveals the intimate catastrophe and the "foot odor" (vulgarity) of the viewers. This moment is crucial to Punch's obsession, as he perceives this untouched presence as the most intimate, yet also the most alien, thing in his life and considers it the object of his search for the absolute in disfigurement.
Hugo's female characters are angels of purity (Dea), while Jourde's are reflections of desire and decay. Thalia, the sister, is both an object of desire and a symbol of forbidden knowledge; the "marchande d'oublies" embodies childlike innocence corrupted in the act of selling.
Jourde thus takes Hugo's motif of the blind Dea – who only "sees" the inner self – into a perverse dialectic: Here, the woman is no longer the blind truth, but the unconscious temptation of forgetting.
The exhaustion of humanism
This revu nos spectacles, with the précisions de detail que peut-être une mémoire qui serait poursuivie sans rupture n'aurait pas preservees. Au début, nous avions repris le canevas d'Arlequin, a pantomime from the troupe du theater royal de Covent Garden; […] C'était bien sûr une histoire d'amours contrariées, mais le canevas n'était qu'un pretexte à une distribution de gifles et de coups de pied. You want your master's pantaloon to be in a small size, the clown's maladroit will sciait en deux. On le condamnait à la guillotine. The guillotine, pour les Anglais, qui pendent leurs condamnés, c'est le comble de l'horreur exotic. Nous avions soigné la représentation, et notre guillotine faisait illusion. Deux bourreaux en frac black menaient Clown à la guillotine, content à grand-peine ses soubresauts de terreur. Ils le liaient sur la planche. Clown passes the face in the lunette face au public et clac, the lame tombait in the cataracts of singing, the big face peinte roulait sur le plancher, just devant le trou du souffleur, comme pour mieux l'entendre. Et l'on voyait bien le tronçon du cou, rouge vif, avec le rond blanc de la vertèbre.
I watched our performances again, with details that an uninterrupted memory might not have preserved. At the beginning, we had adopted the framework of Arlequin, a pantomime by the Royal Theatre company in Covent Garden; […] It was, of course, a story of unrequited love, but the plot was merely a pretext for a series of slaps and kicks. The clumsy clown, wanting to free his master Pantalon, who was locked in a chest, sawed him in two. He was sentenced to the guillotine. The guillotine is, for the English, who hang their condemned, the epitome of exotic horror. We had prepared the scene carefully, and our guillotine looked deceptively real. Two executioners in black tailcoats led the clown to the guillotine and held him back with difficulty; he was trembling with fear. They tied him to the board. The clown stuck his head into the opening facing the audience, and clack, the switchblade fell in a stream of blood. His large, painted head rolled across the floor to the prompter's hole, as if trying to hear better. The bright red section of his neck with the white circle of the whorl was clearly visible.
This detailed report on pantomime Harlequin It reveals the violent and bloodthirsty theatricality of the Helquin, who turn the horror of execution into a farce. The macabre element is not hidden but meticulously staged ("notre guillotine faisait illusion," "cataractes de sang"). The circus stage here serves as a release valve for the performers' obsessions and nightmares; Alastair explains that many of their pieces originate from their "cauchemars." The stage serves to enact the reality of cruelty and death, which is absent in banal existence, and through the absurdity and gratuitous violence to reveal the true essence of existence.
Comparing the two novels reveals a historical shift: In Hugo's work (1869), the grotesque unveils moral truth. The deformed figure is a call for justice. In Jourde's, the grotesque no longer possesses a moral dimension, but rather an aesthetic-pathological one. The world itself has become a farce; the doctor, the clown, and the reader are complicit in an endless game of quotation, trauma, and decay. Jourde shows what remains of Hugo's vision when faith in salvation and progress has shattered: a universe of spectacle in which forgetting has become a business.
Like Hugo, Jourde employs an exuberant, figurative language that oscillates between naturalism and symbolism. The long, meandering sentences, the synesthetic experiences of stench, color, and sound, create an atmosphere of overstimulation. But this rhetoric does not serve—as it does Hugo's—moral elevation, but rather the self-destruction of discourse. Language itself becomes diseased; it proliferates like the skin of a monster.
La marchande d'oublies is essentially a post-romantic commentary on The Man Who LaughsWhere Hugo's work sought to renew belief in the moral power of suffering, Jourde shows that modernity can only reproduce this belief as a grotesque memory.
Both novels revolve around the same image: the disfigured, laughing face. But in Hugo's work, it signifies accusation; in Jourde's, contagion. Laughter is no longer a sign of suppressed truth, but rather the collapse of meaning.
The “marchande d’oublies” cries out “Oublies! Oublies!” – an imperative of forgetting that erases the last vestige of memory and conscience. Where Hugo’s humanism is still imbued with pathos, Jourde responds with an aesthetic of weariness: a pantomime of decay that stages the end of romantic morality as a circus act.
What is appealing about Pierre Jourdes La marchande d'oublies What is remarkable is how the novel combines the spirit of the 19th century—its obsession with madness, spectacle, memory, and science—with the literary forms of modernism. Jourde achieves a rare synthesis of historical narrative and metaphysical reflection: he writes in the style of the period, but with the knowledge of the 21st century. The book is not only atmospherically overwhelming—with its dark fairground scenes, baroque imagery, and circulating voices and figures—but also intellectually provocative: it shows how the birth of modern identity emerges from distortion, shame, and spectacle.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
