Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (66 page)

Folantin, Jean:
Protagonist of HUYSMAN’s
A Rebours.
A minor office clerk, Folantin is a middle-aged, unmarried Parisian. He employs a slovenly, thieving servant—Mme. Chabanel, “an old hag, six feet tall, with moustachioed lips and obscene eyes.” In Folantin’s youth, he frequented prostitutes with disastrous consequences to his fragile health, and now the only thing left in Folantin’s life is the question of where he should eat his next evening meal. Folantin earns just enough to allow him to eat at restaurants every evening, but unfortunately, he is doomed to a series of disgusting, unpalatable meals. In an attempt to improve his life (and his meals), Folantin begins haunting various establishments throughout Paris—trying to discover a decent meal for a cheap price. . . .

France, Anatole:
(
nom de plume
of Jacques Anatole François Thibault; France; 1844-1924) Novelist, poet, and critic, France was known for his worldly sophistication, his refined sensibility in art and literature, his attitude of somewhat ironic detachment, not to say cynicism, and his graceful, witty, allusive writing.

Frémiet, Emmanuel:
(France; 1824-1910) Sculptor noted for his vigorous portraits of animals, as the text implies. His equestrian statue of Joan of Arc is a landmark in Paris.

Frémy, Edmond:
(France, 1814-1894) French chemist best known for his discovery of hydrogen fluoride and investigations of fluorine compounds. Among other compounds, Frémy investigated those of iron, tin, and lead. He also studied osmic acid, ozone, the coloring substances of leaves and flowers, and the composition of animal substances. He applied chemistry to the commercial saponification of fats, and to the technology of iron, steel, sulfuric acid, glass, and paper. He tried, but failed, to isolate the element fluorine. He also failed in attempts to make crystals of aluminium oxide, but instead found he could create rubies.

Galland, Antoine:
(France; 1646-1715) First translator of the
1001 Nights, Arabian Nights, Thousand Nights and a Night,
or
Arabian Nights’ Entertainment,
depending on the translation. It was from his translation (serially, 1704-1717) that the first translations appeared in English. All the commentators note that his edition is “expurgated,” omitting all references to eroticism or sexual activity.

Garcilaso [de la Vega]:
(1500-1536) Spanish soldier, lyrical poet, diplomat, confessed adulterer, political exile. He fought in Rhodes and North Africa, and died during an invasion of France.

“Gaspard de la Nuit”:
Prose-poems by French poet [Louis] Aloysius Bertrand (1807-1841); these writings evoke the Middle Ages with innovative images and fantastic subject matter.

Gautier, Judith:
(France; 1845-1917) Daughter of THÉOPHILE GAUTIER, she was constantly in the presence of Flaubert, GONCOURT, Baudelaire, Gustave Doré, etc., who were her father’s visitors. Her first published piece, which earned her the nickname “the Hurricane,” was a critique of Baudelaire’s translation of Poe’s “Eureka.” She became interested in Chinese literature and Eastern cultures and incorporated this Orientalism into her own works. In 1866, she married CATULLE MENDÈS, but soon divorced him, saying he was neither a faithful husband nor a good writer. She was greatly admired by many, among them VICTOR HUGO and Richard Wagner (whom she in a way “discovered” for France). The correspondence between Wagner and Gautier seems to indicate that Wagner was passionately in love, though the relationship does not appear to have been consummated; she does, however, seem to be the “muse” for
Parsifal.
A famous portrait of her exists by John Singer Sargent.

Gautier, Théophile:
(France; 1811-1872) Poet and novelist; in his early career Gautier wrote works dealing with the fantastic and the macabre, while later he stressed the perfection of form, even adopting a poetics of “art for art’s sake”; he is a forerunner of the French PARNASSIAN school (
q.v.
). In the context of Darío, he is important for his Orientalist, exotic leanings and his ideology of art and the artist.

Ghil, René:
(
nom de plume
of Henry Guibert; b. Belgium; lived in France; 1862-1925) Philosophical poet and theorist-manifesto writer of Symbolism, with important and controversial ideas about synaesthesia (he wrote the book on this topic:
Traité du verbe
) and on such ideas as “symbolism and cosmic poetry” and “mystical positivism.”

Gilead:
A mountainous region east of what is now Jordan. The word means “hill of testimony.”

Gilles de Laval, Maréchal de France and Baron de Rais (Rays, Rayx, Retz):
(France; 1404-1440) Also known as Gilles de Rais. A noted soldier, Gilles was at Orléans with Joan of Arc. He was immensely wealthy, and was a patron of music, literature, and the arts. After his military retirement, however, rumors began spreading of satanic and vicious acts perpetrated by the maréchal; when brought to ecclesiastical trial, Gilles confessed to kidnapping more than one hundred children, most boys, and to murdering them after abusing them. For these crimes, he was executed. His attacks of sadism seem to have been irresistible, making him a kind of maniac. He would even sexually abuse the dead bodies of his child victims. He has been associated popularly with “Bluebeard,” but this attribution is probably unfounded. Thomas Mann said that Gilles de Rais embodied “the religious greatness of the damned; genius as disease, disease as genius, the type of the afflicted and possessed, where saint and criminal become one.” This seems to be the Decadent (and fin-de-siècle) view of such figures as DE SADE, Gilles, RACHILDE, etc., what one might call aesthetic monsters. (For this, see also TAILHADE.) HUYSMAN’s novel Là-Bas deals with a writer, Durtal, obsessed with the legend of Gilles.

Gley, Marcel Eugène Emile:
(France; 1857-1930) Professor of physiology in the Faculty of Medicine and Biology, Collège de France, Gley is deemed responsible for
“cette science née d’hier, que les progrès de la morphologie cérébrale et ceux de la physiologie expérimentale ont seuls rendue possible, la psychologie physiologique”
(that science, born just yesterday, which progress in cerebral morphology and experimental physiology have made possible: physiological psychology). Thus Gley is responsible for great strides in “clinical psychology,” as it is called today. A street in Paris is named after him.

Gómez Carrillo, Enrique:
(
nom de plume
of Enrique Gómez Tible; Guatemala; 1873-1927) Journalist, critic, and novelist. As a reporter for the newspaper
El Imparcial,
Gómez met Darío when Darío arrived in Guatemala, and he hired Darío to write for
El Correo de la Tarde.
Later, in Madrid and Paris, Gómez met and became friends with VERLAINE, LECONTE DE LISLE, and other writers, some of whom influenced his own writings. Aside from his journalistic work, he is perhaps best known for his travel writing, which deals especially with Greece and the East. His novels were not particularly successful, and are derivative of those of PIERRE LOUŸS and Gustave Flaubert.

Goncourt, Edmond (1822-1896) and Jules (1830-1870) de:
French novelists, brothers, who often collaborated; they were early leaders of the Naturalist school, and are considered forerunners of Emile Zola and others. They researched their novels’ subjects almost obsessively, striving for perfection in the details. They were interesting to Darío not only because of their writings, but also because of their connoisseurship of art and decoration; they were amateur Orientalists, and the first to introduce Japanese art to France.

Góngora [y Argote], Luis de:
(1561-1627) Son of a Cordoban bibliophile, Luis de Góngora was raised in an educated, refined family. Leaving his formal studies due to gambling debts and problems with women, he entered religious orders, but was “too much” for his superiors, who sent him traveling throughout Spain. At court, he became chaplain to Philip III and became famous when he published ten romances and a few sonnets in two famous anthologies of the day. While in Madrid, he attacked Lope de Vega (a favorite at court) and QUEVEDO, who counterattacked. Over the long run, however, both Lope and Quevedo came to admire Góngora for the stunning perfection of his verses. Góngora was an exponent of what in his day passed for an “art for art’s sake” aesthetic, and he crafted extraordinarily elegant, refined poems.

Gould, Jay:
(American; 1836-1932) Speculator and “robber baron.” A country-store clerk and surveyor’s assistant, Gould rose to control New York City’s elevated railroads, the Western Union Telegraph Company, and half the railroad mileage in the Southwest United States. At the age of twenty-one, with savings of five thousand dollars, he became a speculator, particularly in small railroads. After some years he became a director of the Erie Railroad. Aided by James Fisk and Daniel Drew, he defeated Cornelius Vanderbilt for control of the Erie and manipulated its stocks in his own interest and that of his group, including New York political boss “Boss” Tweed. The Gould-Fisk scheme to corner gold in 1869 caused the Black Friday panic. Public protest forced the Gould group out of the Erie, ending with Gould’s expulsion in 1872. He then bought into the Union Pacific and other western railroads. He gained control of four lines that made up the Gould system. For years his name was a symbol of autocratic business practice, and he was widely hated.

Gourmont, Rémy de:
(France; 1858-1915) Essayist, novelist, playwright, philosopher, and prominent member of the Symbolist movement, influential also on English literature through T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, etc. Gourmont cofounded the important Symbolist review
Mercure de France
and published extensively, most importantly on style and aesthetics, often as applied to specific authors. Eliot called him “the perfect critic.”

Goya, Francisco de:
(Spain; 1746-1828) Painter, engraver famous for his
Caprichos
(1796-98), savagely satirical attacks on manners and customs and on abuses in the Catholic Church, and, after the Napoleonic conquest of Spain in 1808, his
Disasters of War.
As a painter, Goya was a portraitist and court painter, employing an early sort of Impressionism (so that he had a great impact on nineteenth-century French painting); as a lithographer, he made bullfighting prints and etchings. Some of his best-known work, such as
Saturn Devouring His Children,
has a ghastly, horrific quality.

Gracián [y Morales], Baltasar:
(Spain; 1601-1658) Spanish baroque moralist, philosopher, and Jesuit scholar, whose works influenced La Rochefoucauld and, later, Voltaire, NIETZSCHE, and Schopenhauer. Gracián’s first book,
The Hero,
criticized Machiavelli and defined the virtues that a great man, or leader, should possess. He was constantly criticizing the institutions of society, including the court, and thus was harshly disciplined by his order; his superiors called him choleric, ill-humored, melancholic. He published many of his works under pseudonyms, due to problems foreseen with censorship. Along with QUEVEDO he became known as an exponent of
conceptismo
(wit), an aesthetics that sought to express witty and original ideas through puns, antitheses, epigrams, twisted metaphors, conceits, and other verbal devices. In
Agudeza y arte de ingenio
(1648; freely translated,
Sharp Wit
) he defined the varieties of literary
agudeza
(ingenuity). Gracián achieved fame with the novel
El criticón,
which examined society and contemporary moral decline.

Grilo, Antonio:
(Spain; 1845-1906) Applauded at only sixteen as a promising young poet, Grilo, as he was universally known, soon made a name for himself among the nobility. One critic notes that he was “charming, worldly, a great reciter of verses, and the salons of the [Spanish] Restoration opened their doors to him in Madrid, where he poured forth the vacuity of his rhymes. A poet ‘of occasions, ’ his verse is so superficial that the monarchs who favored him with their friendship—Isabel II, Alfonso XII, María Cristina, and Alfonso XIII—knew some of his poems by heart.”

Groussac, Paul:
(b. Toulouse, France; Argentine; 1848-1929) Argentine by adoption, Groussac spent most of his life in Buenos Aires. Novelist and essayist, he was director of the National Library (before Jorge Luis Borges). While there, he founded
La Biblioteca
(The Library), a monthly journal of history, science, art, and literature, and through it and its successor
Anales de la Biblioteca
(“Annals,” no doubt following the famed French journal of almost the same name), substantially raised the level of journalism in Argentina.

Grullo, Pero:
By the fifteenth century, Pero Grullo was a popular folk character, a simpleton whose name is believed to derive from the crane (
grulla
), known for its slow movements, which were thus transferred to slowness of comprehension. The name Pero Grullo is now used for a fact or truth so obvious that even the simplest of understandings can grasp it; declaring that fact or truth is virtually fatuous.

Guyot, Yves:
(France; 1843-1928) French journalist, politician, and economist who was generally “radical”; that is, he constantly attacked power, whether it be that of the Empire or that of the Republic, and he was several times imprisoned for his writings. In addition to his writings in politics and economy, he composed two satirical novels.

Haceldama:
In Aramaic, “field of blood”; the name given by the people to the potter’s field purchased by the thirty pieces of silver earned by Judas for his betrayal of the Christ, and the place where Judas may have hanged himself.

Haggard, Rider:
(English; 1856-1926) A writer of suspenseful adventure novels set in exotic locales, usually Africa; known especially for
King Solomon’s Mines, Allan Quartermain, She
(1887), and
She’s
sequel
Ayesha
(1905). These latter two novels have a beautiful Amazonian heroine, who understandably captivated the imagination of many readers and writers.