OPTION 2: A Bornsteinian Consideration of Marie Corelli s Wormwood: A Drama of Paris

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1 1 OPTION 2: A Bornsteinian Consideration of Marie Corelli s Wormwood: A Drama of Paris (1890) Marie Corelli s Wormwood (1890) contains elements associated with highbrow art, such as decadent themes and poetic prose, and popular elements, such as romantic, melodramatic plot lines. Victoria Stewart describes Corelli as a middlebrow proto-best seller novelist, associated with neither high modernism [n]or genre fiction. 1 Wormwood s popularity may be attributed to its ambiguous status between high and low. Methuen s 1921 publication of the novel establishes the text as middlebrow by reflecting this popularity, presenting it as disposable and emphasising its best seller status, whilst also including highbrow elements. Contrastingly, Blood Axis and Les Joyaux de la Princesse include text from Wormwood in their industrial music album Absinthe La Folie Verte (2002), transforming it into an obscure musical form. These representations of Wormwood reflect the contexts they were created in, because the Methuen novel emphasises the contemporary fin-de-siècle popularity of the text, while Blood Axis and Les Joyaux de la Princesse reinvent Corelli as a great decadent poet, using her text to create specialist, collectable art within the industrial music genre, borne of the digital age. In the different contexts Wormwood is transformed from popular versions into transgressive material to be appreciated by an elite. Methuen s 1921 edition of Wormwood is a generic version of a popular text geared towards a middlebrow audience. It is a 23 rd edition, reflecting the longstanding popularity of the text, because it has been republished many times since its original publication. It has been printed cheaply, on thin paper which is roughly cut (Figure 1), reflecting the disposable quality of the edition. It bears the standardised series cover (Figures 2 and 3) for Methuen s Two- 1 Stewart, Victoria, The Woman Writer in Mid-Twentieth Century Middlebrow Fiction: Conceptualizing Creativity, in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol.35:1 (October 2011), pp , p. 22.

2 2 Shilling Library: Cheap Editions of many of the most Popular Novels of the day (Figure 4), a series that included other writers typically considered middlebrow, such as H.G. Wells (Figure 5), emphasising the generic nature of the edition, not warranting its own specialised cover. This grounds the text as accessible in terms of cost and content; it is not a precious article which would mark the reader out as cultured. The inside page lists Marie Corelli s Romances (Figure 6) establishing Wormwood as a romance novel, foregrounding the popular adventure, fantasy, and sensational plots over the decadent endorsement of absinthe. While middlebrow art often contains popular elements, another characteristic is attempts at highbrow art. The second page bears an epigraph in French (Figure 7) assuming a bi/multi-lingual reader. However, it foregrounds the tragedy of the absinthe plot patriotically, labelling absintheurs as braggarts of vice which are the shame and despair of their country, rather than glamorising it like decadent poetry. The next page bears a quote from Revelation about wormwood (Figure 8), and a translation into French. The biblical reference highlights the popular, moralistic meaning, framing the text within a Christian understanding of value, and the archaic font is an excessive attempt to ground the text in historic importance. This edition of Wormwood is represented in its generic, popular form, foregrounding the popular aspects of the text which gained it its best seller status.

3 3 Figure 1: Cheap, thin paper which is not cut neatly/properly. Figure 2: Three examples of Corelli texts published as part of Methuen s Two-Shilling Library with a standardised cover: The Sorrows of Satan (1920), God s Good Man: A Simple Love Story (1922) and Thelma: A Norwegian Princess (1921).

4 4 Figure 3: Wormwood (1921) as part of Methuen s Two-Shilling Library with a standardised cover. Figure 4: Corelli in Methuen s Two-Shilling Library.

5 5 Figure 5: Corelli appearing in Methuen s Two-Shilling Novels series with other middlebrow authors, such as H. G. Wells. Figure 6: List of Marie Corelli s Romances in the front page of the book.

6 6 Figure 7: Epigraph in French. Figure 8: Quote from Revelations about wormwood, with a translation into French, in Gothic/medieval font.

7 7 Contrastingly, Absinthe - La Folie Verte uses Wormwood s highbrow elements, recreating the text within the intentionally obscure form of industrial music. Industrial music is a subcultural genre, consisting of marginal aspects, such as transgressive lyrics and white noise, making it inaccessible to the masses and creating a specialist audience. The song Symphonie verte, for example, consists entirely of white noise and synthesised organ music, with no lyrics or melody. In the age of digitisation, during an acute overall sense of modernity, as the rise of inventions such as the internet irreversibly change the way people interact with the world, industrial music uses technology to reject traditional musical conventions, setting apart an elite audience who understand its subversive significance. S. Alexander Reed explains that the main function of industrial music is affirming or suggesting identity traits [ ] to listeners [ ] like cool, misunderstood, cultured. 2 Absinthe - La Folie Verte is a collaborative project between Blood Axis and Les Joyaux de la Princesse. Justin Massa discusses Blood Axis as part of the racist skinhead subcultural movement, explaining how they use their music to push the cultural envelope, using the cultural trappings of hatred, creating experimental or noise music, existing in a marginal space in the music scene. 3 Les Joyaux De La Princesse are a little known band, whose music is usually released in small numbers, alongside physical, intricate album art itself becoming rarer in the digital age as collector's items to its intentionally elite audience. The record label which released Absinthe - La Folie Verte, Athanor, reemphasises the niche market of the album, being a small independent label mainly releasing music with dark, anti-christian themes, contrasting against Methuen s conventional Christian framework. Both bands create intentionally enigmatic 2 S. Alexander Reed, Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013), p Justin Massa, Turning Down the Sounds of HATE: Young People Stand up Against White Power Music, in Fellowship, Volume 67 (Apr 30, 2001), p 14.

8 8 music, attracting small audiences, and elevate Wormwood in their use of its text to an elitist form. Absinthe - La Folie Verte places Corelli alongside Ernest Dowson and Charles Gros (Figure 9), recreating her as a decadent poet, rather than a middlebrow romantic fiction writer. Blood Axis frequently use highbrow modernist literature in their music, contributing to their exclusionary audience attraction, assuming their listeners have knowledge of modernist literary forms; for example, they use a recording of Ezra Pound reading from his Cantos in their song The Voyage (Canto I) (1996). Their adoption of Corelli elevates her to a higher literary status as Blood Axis and Les Joyaux de la Princesse make no distinction between her and other highbrow poets. Transforming Corelli s text into lyrics brings it closer to poetry, as an oral performance, with the ability to use tempo, emphasis and sound, rather than simple narrative. The bands select sections of the novel which concentrate on decadent themes, omitting any popular elements, such as romantic, melodramatic plot lines. For example, in the song Venus & Cupid, they use text from the artist Gessonex s speech to Gaston in Chapter 12, before Gaston tastes absinthe for the first time. The adaptation of the decadent artist s speech, into a monologue accompanied by music, emphasises the highbrow artistic elements of the text. The first 70 seconds of the song consist of a man repeatedly singing the same line of opera music, overlaid by a repeated riff of tinkling bells. The monologue starts simultaneously with synthesised organ music, devoid of melody, obscuring the words so that they are barely audible. The last 100 seconds of the song consist of white noise, intermittently overlaid by accordion music. Selecting a speech performed by Wormwood s figure of the artist, presenting it independently from its original narrative function, and framing it amongst disorientating, unconventional music, shapes the text for a more obscure, exclusive audience.

9 9 Figure 9: Text from Corelli s Wormwood placed amongst decadent poetry in the liner notes of the album. The endorsement of absinthe was a suitable theme for Corelli s contemporary decadent poets, as a transgressive, anti-religion, and therefore highbrow, topic. Industrial music s similar aims make decadent pro-absinthe poetry an attractive form, and the inclusion of text from Wormwood, amongst the glamorising album artwork, reimagines popular Corelli as a highbrow decadent. The album artwork foregrounds Blood Axis and Les Joyaux de la Princesse s project as a homage to absinthe, combining various absinthe related materials, such as advertisements and anti-absinthe propaganda. This use of lowbrow art is a common

10 10 highbrow technique, creating the everyday as unique and collectable. 4 Furthermore, the use of lowbrow material which is now archival, lends a stylish, postmodern quality that elevates the album s cultural status. The intricate artwork, and unique amalgamation of historical materials, makes the physical album attractive to collectors. This aesthetic appeal is intensified as the album had limited release, making it rare. The front of the digipack (Figure 10) itself a rare, frail and therefore precious, form of CD packaging depicts a decadently dressed woman enjoying a glass of absinthe. The woman is depicted as sexually attractive, sitting in a provocative position, with her back arched and face turned upwards, in exaggerated colours with bright orange hair, and pale white skin. This image of pleasure and beauty is framed by a golden border, creating it as a piece of art and spectacle. Therefore, the physical embodiment of the music foregrounds decadent endorsement of absinthe, highlighting Wormwood s highbrow characteristics. 4 This relationship between highbrow and lowbrow, as a rejection of the middlebrow, is set up by Virginia Woolf in her writing on the middlebrow Virginia Woolf, Middlebrow, Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1966). We can assume, from Blood Axis s knowledge of other modernists, such as Ezra Pound, that they may have been aware of such critical prescription when creating their highbrow art.

11 Figure 10: The front of the digipack. Blood Axis and Les Joyaux de la Princesse take a historically popular text and recreate it for their industrial, elitist purposes.

11 11 Figure 10: The front of the digipack. Blood Axis and Les Joyaux de la Princesse take a historically popular text and recreate it for their industrial, elitist purposes. They appeal to a small audience, giving their work specialist status by elevating the highbrow characteristics of Wormwood to promote absinthe, and anti-christian messages, in contrast to Methuen s biblical reference which highlights the text s didacticism. While Methuen s 1921 edition of the text emphasises its popularity, as an accessible and disposable novel to be enjoyed by the masses, Blood Axis and Les Joyaux de la Princesse targets, and validates their audience as cool, misunderstood and cultured. Word count: 1571

12 12 I hereby certify that this submission is wholly my own work, and that all quotations from primary or secondary sources have been acknowledged. I have read the section on Plagiarism in the School Style Guide / my Stage & Degree Manual and understand that plagiarism and other unacknowledged debts will be penalised and may lead to failure in the whole examination or degree. Bibliography Blood Axis and Les Joyaux de la Princesse, Absinthe La Folie Verte (France, Athanor, 2002) Corelli, Marie, Wormwood (London: Methuen, 1921) Massa, Justin, Turning Down the Sounds of HATE: Young People Stand up Against White Power Music, in Fellowship, Volume 67 (Apr 30, 2001) Reed, S. Alexander, Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013) Stewart, Victoria, The Woman Writer in Mid-Twentieth Century Middlebrow Fiction: Conceptualizing Creativity, in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol.35:1 (October 2011), Woolf, Virginia, Middlebrow, Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1966)

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