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Books Like Bruges-la-Morte
Best books to read after Bruges-la-Morte by Rodenbach
Readers who respond to Bruges-la-Morte's Symbolist equivalence between grief and a dead city, its prose-poem structure, and Rodenbach's use of objective correlative will find the wider tradition of French and Belgian Symbolist fiction.
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Le Carillonneur
by Georges Rodenbach
Rodenbach's 1897 sequel to Bruges-la-Morte in the same setting: the bell-ringer Joris Borluut's identification with the city and its bells is the direct continuation of Hugues's identification with Bruges's grief-landscape, and reading both novels together gives the fullest portrait of Rodenbach's symbolic city.
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Pelléas et Mélisande
by Maurice Maeterlinck
Maeterlinck's 1892 Symbolist play was written in the same year as Bruges-la-Morte and is the theatrical equivalent of Rodenbach's fictional method: both works use an atmosphere of indefiniteness and repetition to evoke a spiritual state that cannot be directly described, and Debussy's opera setting of Maeterlinck (1902) is as directly indebted to Rodenbach as to Maeterlinck.
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The Well-Beloved
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's 1892 novel about a sculptor who pursues the same ideal woman through three generations is the most remarkable English contemporary parallel to Bruges-la-Morte: both works treat the obsession with a dead woman's double as a study in the psychology of the ideal, and both were published in the same year.
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Les Fleurs du mal
by Charles Baudelaire
Baudelaire's Tableaux parisiens, in which the city of Paris functions as an objective correlative for the poet's spiritual state, is the essential predecessor of Rodenbach's method: the equivalence between the city's geography and the poet's interiority that Baudelaire developed in lyric poetry is what Rodenbach extends to the novel form in Bruges-la-Morte.
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À Rebours
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
À Rebours (1884) is the essential predecessor of Bruges-la-Morte in French Decadent fiction: Des Esseintes's construction of an artificial world that correlates exactly with his psychological state is the method Rodenbach applies to the relationship between Hugues and Bruges — both novels use external objects as embodiments of internal states.
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Là-Bas
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Là-Bas (1891) was published the year before Bruges-la-Morte and shares its treatment of the supernatural as a literal presence in the modern world: where Huysmans explores Satanism in Paris, Rodenbach explores grief-as-ghost in Bruges, and both novels treat the spiritual as a material reality that the modern rationalist world denies.
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Axël
by Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
Villiers's 1890 Symbolist drama is the philosophical equivalent of Bruges-la-Morte's fictional method: both works treat an absolute ideal (the perfect beloved, the perfect love-death) as superior to any lived reality, and both choose the impossible ideal over the compromised real.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
Wilde's 1890 novel is the English equivalent of Bruges-la-Morte in its use of an art object (the portrait) as an objective correlative for a psychological state: both novels embody a psychological condition in an external object (the painting that ages as Dorian stays young; the city that grieves as Hugues stays in mourning), and both belong to the same moment of European Symbolist fiction.
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