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Gorey-philia haunts the
collective unconscious
HUMOUR NOIR. L’illustrateur Edward Gorey est né à Chicago, a étudié à Harvard et a travaillé comme directeur artistique
chez l’éditeur Doubleday. Son premier livre paraît en 1961, et jusqu’à sa disparition en 2000 il en publiera plus de deux cents.
Longtemps vénéré par quelques érudits, son talent est aujourd’hui reconnu par le grand public, comme en témoigne le succès de nombreuses expositions consacrées à ses œuvres. Un artiste à découvrir ou redécouvrir.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
ews bulletin from the spirit world:
The specter of Edward Gorey, who
died in 2000 at the age of 75, is haunting our collective unconscious. In a sense
that’s as it should be; Gorey was born to be
posthumous. His poisonously funny little picture books – deadpan accounts of murder,
disaster and discreet depravity, narrated in
a voice that affects the world-weary tone of
British novelists like Ronald Firbank and Ivy
Compton-Burnett – established him as the
master of high-camp macabre.
N
3. A wide audience has long known Gorey’s
work from the 31-year-old animations used
to introduce the PBS series “Mystery!” (now
“Masterpiece Mystery”). The playfully perverse vignettes include a skulking villain
in a cape and a swooning ingenue.
4. Before “Mystery!” Gorey’s set for the 1977
Broadway production of “Dracula” – largescale versions of his black-and-white drawings, each melodramatically highlighted
with a single, blood-red detail – spread his
fame far beyond theatergoers.
Gothic
2. Told in verse and illustrated in a style that crosses Surrealism with the Victorian truecrime gazette, Gorey stories are
set in some unmistakably British
place, in a time that is vaguely
Victorian, Edwardian and Jazz
Age all at once. Though Gorey
was a 20th-century American, he
conjured a world of gramophones and cars that start with
cranks, of boater-hatted men in
Eton collars knocking croquet
balls across the lawn while sloeeyed vamps in cloches look on,
and sinister things sink, bubbling, into the reflecting pond.
His titles are instructive: “The Fatal Lozenge,” “The Deadly Blotter,” “The Hapless Child,” “The
Haunted Tea-Cosy.”
h
BY MARK DERY
Gorey-philia haunts the collective
unconscious
La ‘Goreyphilie’ hante notre
inconscient collectif
to haunt hanter / unconscious inconscient / poisonously funny à l’humour venimeux / deadpan pince-sans-rire / account récit / to affect
affecter, feindre / world-weary désabusé / novelist romancier / high-camp kitsch, maniéré,
affecté.
2. Victorian de l’époque victorienne, du XIXème
/ to set, set, set (se) situer / unmistakably indubitablement, ici typiquement / Edwardian de la
Belle Epoque (du règne d’Edouard VII) / all at
once en même temps / to conjure évoquer, créer,
faire naître / crank manivelle / boater canotier /
Eton collar grand col de chemise rigide qui
retombe sur le revers de la veste de l’uniforme
d’Eton (prestigieux collège de Grande-Bretagne)
à la fin du XIXème / to knock frapper / lawn
pelouse / sloe-eyed aux yeux de biche / cloche
chapeau cloche / sinister sinistre, menaçant /
to sink, sank, sunk sombrer, couler / to bubble
bouillonner, faire des bulles / pond étang, mare
/ lozenge pastille / deadly mortel / blotter buvard
/ hapless malheureux, infortuné / tea-cosy
couvre-théière.
3. PBS= Public Broadcasting Service réseau de
télévision public américain / playfully gaiement,
avec humour / to skulk rôder / to swoon s’évanouir, se pâmer.
4. set décor / large-scale à grande échelle, grand
format / drawing dessin / to highlight mettre
en lumière, en relief, souligner / blood-red rouge
sang / to spread, spread, spread propager /
fame renommée, célébrité / beyond au-delà de.
(THE EDWARD GOREY CHARITABLE TRUST VIA THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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5. devotee fervent, adepte, fan / masonic (franc)maçonnique / ring anneau, bague / to swell,
swelled, swelled or swollen enfler, gonfler, augmenter (considérablement) / to wander around
déambuler, flâner / rip-off escroquerie, arnaque,
ici plagiat, copie.
6. to owe devoir / obvious évident, manifeste,
(he) owes an obvious debt à (il) doit évidemment beaucoup à / goth gothique / novella court
roman / to gather réunir / sickbed lit de malade
/ to hang, hung, hung être suspendu.
7. voguish en vogue / nanny nounou / flock
bande, troupe, groupe / doomed condamné /
grimly funny à l’humour féroce.
8. to buoy maintenir à flot, soutenir / indie indépendant / to put, put, put back into print réimprimer / to release publier / longtime de longue
date / attendance fréquentation, nombre de
visiteurs / to climb grimper, augmenter / steadily
constamment, régulièrement / Mass. = Massachusetts / curator conservateur (musée), commissaire (exposition) / traveling (US)= travelling
(GB) itinérant / exhibition exposition /
NONSENSE
nonsense (l’)absurde / cartoon bande dessinée
/ critical de la part de la critique / wordless sans
aucun mot / matchbox-sized de la taille d’une
boîte d’allumettes / pop-up book livre animé
généralement destiné aux enfants, dont les pages
contiennent des mécanismes se développant en
volume ou mettant en mouvement certains de
leurs éléments / further davantage.
(THE EDWARD GOREY CHARITABLE TRUST VIA THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Homages and respects
5. But until the last few years true Gorey
devotees were a secret society, wearing
Gorey-philia like a Masonic ring. Now, however, their numbers have swelled. The writer
Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony
Snicket, said, “When I was first writing ‘A
Series of Unfortunate Events,’ I was wandering around everywhere saying, ‘I am a
complete rip-off of Edward Gorey,’ and everyone said, ‘Who’s that?’ Now, everyone says,
Nonsense
Gorey is typically described as an illustrator. His
books can be found in the humor and cartoon
sections of major bookstores, but books like The
Object Lesson have earned serious critical respect as works of surrealist art. His experimentations — creating books that were wordless,
books that were literally matchbox-sized, popup books, books entirely populated by inanimate objects — complicates matters still further. Gorey classified his own work as literary
nonsense, the genre made most famous by Lewis
Carroll and Edward Lear.
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‘That’s right, you are a complete rip-off of
Edward Gorey.’ ”
6. Tim Burton owes an obvious debt to Gorey,
as do Rob Reger, creator of the goth gamine
Emily the Strange, and Neil Gaiman, the author of the novella “Coraline.” Gaiman has an
original Gorey drawing of “children gathered
around a sickbed” hanging on his bedroom
wall; he wanted Gorey to illustrate “Coraline,”
he said, but he “died the day I finished it.”
7. Gorey illustrations are even becoming
voguish as tattoos. Last year the ninth-season “American Idol” finalist Siobhan Magnus had a biceps tattoo of Death playing
nanny to a flock of soon-to-be-doomed children, from “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,”
Gorey‘s grimly funny alphabet book.
8. The market for Gorey books and merchandise buoys indie publishers like Pomegranate, which brings some of Gorey’s books
back into print each year, and Fantagraphics, which is releasing a third edition of “The
Strange Case of Edward Gorey,” a portrait by
the novelist and longtime Gorey friend
Alexander Theroux. Attendance has been
climbing steadily at the Edward Gorey House
in Yarmouth Port, Mass., and curators of the
first major traveling exhibition of Gorey’s
original art, “Elegant Enigmas” – originally
shown at the Brandywine River Museum in
Chadds Ford, Pa., and now on view at the
Boston Athenaeum – have been stunned by
the enthusiasm surrounding the show.
9. “I knew Gorey had a wide following, but
I had no idea of the mania,” said David
Dearinger, an Athenaeum curator, before
the exhibition opened there in February.
News media inquiries and calls from the public had been coming in for months, he said
then, “and the show wasn’t even here yet.”
Since the opening, he said, “the response has
been phenomenal.”
Analyze this
10. Opinions differ about why Gorey –
whose name increasingly serves as shorthand
for a post-modern twist on the gothic that
crosses irony, high camp and black comedy
– is casting a longer shadow these days. Handler attributes Gorey’s growing popularity
partly to the sophisticated understatement
of his hand-cranked world, a sensibility that
stands out sharply against the exuberant vulgarity of our age of jeggings, “Bridalplasty”
and “Jackass 3D.” “That worldview – that a
well-timed scathing remark might shame an
uncouth person into acting better – seems
worthy to me,” Handler said.
11. Intriguingly, explanations for the mounting popularity of Gorey’s art rarely touch on its
air of hidden, maybe even unknowable meaning. Whatever Gorey’s work appears to be
about, it’s forever insinuating, in its poker-faced
way, that it’s really, truly about something else.
The philosopher Jacques Derrida might have
said it is this very elusiveness – the sense that
meaning can never be pinned down by language – that is Gorey’s overarching point.
12. For his part, Gorey, who rolled his eyes
at anyone looking for deep meaning in his
work, would doubtless have groaned (theatrically) at any attempt to make intellectual
sense of his posthumous popularity. As he
liked to say, “When people are finding meaning in things – beware.” ●
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Pa. = Pennsylvania / to stun stupéfier / to surround entourer.
9. wide following grand nombre d’adeptes, de
fans / mania passion / inquiry demande de renseignements / response réaction.
10. increasingly de plus en plus / shorthand raccourci, contraction, ici symbole, moyen de décrire
/ twist élément, caractéristique / to cast, cast,
cast a shadow jeter une ombre, ici to cast a longer shadow étendre son influence / understatement litote, euphémisme, ici simplicité, sobriété
/ to crank démarrer à la manivelle / to stand,
stood, stood out se distinguer / sharply nettement / jegging legging en jean / Bridalplasty
émission de téléréalité américaine dans laquelle
12 femmes sont en compétition pour gagner un
mariage de rêve et une opération de chirurgie
esthétique / Jackass 3D film humoristique réalisé
par Jeff Tremaine en 3D / worldview vision du
monde / well-timed opportun, qui arrive au bon
moment / scathing cinglant / to shame s.o. into
doing sthing obliger qn à faire qchose en lui faisant honte / uncouth grossier, frustre / worthy
digne d’intérêt, estimable.
11. to touch on effleurer, aborder / hidden caché,
secret / unknowable impossible à connaître,
insaisissable / poker-faced (au visage) impassible / elusiveness nature insaisissable, intangibilité / to pin down découvrir, définir, cerner avec
précision / overarching essentiel, primordial /
point argument, sens, intérêt.
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