Comedy and Parody in the work of Pierre Louys

One strange aspect of the work of Belgian-French author Pierre Louys was his tendency to indulge in parody. He parodied major French writers, such as Victor Hugo and Jules Verne, but he also- more surprisingly- continually parodied himself.

One of Louys’ first works was a translation of the Roman poet Lucian’s Dialogues of Courtesans (1892), a text which indicates Louys’ constant interest in erotic matters, as well as his skills as a classical scholar. He later parodied this work in his Douze Douzains de Dialogues (or Twelve Dozen Dialogues), a collection of outrageously exaggerated exchanges between lovers based around various perversions and fetishes.

Louys’ major novel, Les Aventures du Roi Pausole (1901), imagined a pagan kingdom in south-west France which constituted a kind of social and moral utopia for the author. Louys subsequently savagely parodied his own ideals in another novel (which was never finished), L’Histoire du Roi Gonzalve et des douze princesses (The History of King Gonzalve and the twelve princesses), an account that starts in fairy tale form with ‘Once upon a time’ and rapidly descends into a wicked distortion of everything he had held up as admirable in Roi Pausole. His L’Ile aux dames (The Island of Women) is a parody partly of Pausole but mainly of Jules Verne’s book The Mysterious Island. The island invented by Louys is another utopia, a version of the classical world of sexual diversity and equality found in Bilitis and Aphrodite but brought into the modern world- and (naturally) taken to excess.

I have written before about his poetry collection, Pybrac. Its non-serious and mocking nature is once again revealed when you appreciate that the title is derived from sixteenth-century chancellor poet Guy du Faur, Seigneur de Pibrac, whose moralising quatrains were common reading for French youngsters until the nineteenth century. Louys attacked the prim worthiness of du Faur by savagely inverting everything he stood for: each of the three hundred plus quatrains in the book start with “I don’t like to see,” followed by a description of some over the top sexual scene. On the face of it, he plays the Puritan condemning impurity, lust and vice, but in his detailed pictures of what it is that he doesn’t like, Louys of course achieves the opposite effect- he conjures it explicitly for the reader and leads us to suspect that he actually is rather obsessed with and excited by what he purports to condemn.

Lastly, Louys wrote La femme et le pantin (Woman and Puppet) in 1898- in itself, it was a parody of Prosper Merimee’s Carmen. He then parodied La femme et le pantin‘s theme of a calculating woman manipulating and exploiting a man in his later novella Trois filles de leur mere (Three Daughters of their Mother). This- like Roi Gonzalve– goes to extremes, tasting the boundaries of taste with its utterly over the top scenarios and outrageous exaggeration. I would also argue that Trois filles is a parody of the work of the Marquis de Sade, the great French innovator in over-the-top pornographic fantasy. De Sade is already so extreme in his fevered orgies and (of course) sadism that the only route to mockery is through hyperbole. Louys achieved this, at the same time reversing the male exploitation of women seen in One Hundred Days of Sodom and simultaneously ridiculing the helpless innocence displayed by the heroine in Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791). By so doing, he exposed the the chauvinism and misogyny that runs through de Sade’s work.

As several academic authorities have underlined, Trois filles is not to be mistaken for mere coarse pornography, though. As in all his works, Louys works into his text literary references, so that we understand that he is consciously parodying and deforming existing authors and genres. In Trois filles, for example, he cites Roman writers, Renaissance French poets and the theologian Erasmus- as well as contemporary writers. John Phillips, a scholar of French literature, has described how Louys made an important contribution to the inventiveness of French erotic literature, making creating something that was obscene and yet, as a result of his humour, unerotic. He exaggerated the conventions of the genre until they were extreme- and, as a result, unreal and even ridiculous. Phillips put it rather neatly: whereas porn aims for physical pleasure, Louys sought “textual pleasure,” through excess achieving a skilful manipulation of a literary form (Forbidden Fictions, 1999, c.3).

It has been common for the artists illustrating Louys’ works to mirror visually his writing style. Just as the text is exaggerated to the point of preposterousness, so the book plates can be extravagant and excessive to the point of caricature. Some illustrators have gone for artistic and elegant images (for example, Georges Barbier’s art nouveau colour plates in the 1922 edition of Chansons de Bilitis), but others, notably Edouard Chimot and Georges Pichard, in illustrating editions of Trois filles in 1950 and 1983 respectively, went for a style verging on the cartoonish.

This was especially true of Pichard (1920-2002), who illustrated a series of graphic books from the mid-1950s onwards. Born in Paris, he was educated at the École des Arts Appliques, and after World War II worked as illustrator in advertising before publishing his first cartoon strip in La Semaine de Suzette in 1956, featuring a ‘girl next-door’ character called Miss Mimi.

In the early ’60s, Pichard met screenwriter Jacques Lob, with whom he collaborated on two superhero parodies, Ténébrax and Submerman. After a few years, though, Pichard left the family-friendly comics entirely, so that by the late 1960s, his work was increasingly testing moral boundaries, with (as Wikipedia puts it) a “style of shaping his female heroines into tall, well-endowed women with excessive eyeliner make-up to create a gothic appearance.” Having collaborated with Danie Dubos on the more daring ‘Lolly-strip’ which was serialised in Le Rire in 1966, Pichard and Lob began work within the adult genre of comics with the strip ‘Blanche Épiphanie’ in V Magazine in 1968. This marked a distinct change in Pichard’s style: the heroine Blanche is a pure orphan (rather like de Sade’s Justine), as naive as she is physically desirable, who finds herself the target of men’s lust and inevitably finds herself stripped naked and stunned. Blanche Epiphanie caused a scandal when it was published in France-Soir . Thereafter Pichard continued to push moral boundaries when he collaborated with Georges Wolinski to create a yet more controversial series featuring the eponymous character ‘Paulette,’ which began serial publication in Charlie Mensuel in 1970. Le Monde has described how the artist “became an undisputed master of adult comics with his buxom, falsely naive heroines, who are always forced into risqué situations.”

Pichard’s early work from the late 1940s and ‘50s featured busty young women, but his draughtsmanship was simple, even cartoonish.  By the time of his version of Ulysses in 1968, his characteristic strong lines and the dark, full-lipped, heavy-lidded and large breasted female figure has emerged and is well established by Caroline (1975), along with elements of bondage, sexual torture and various other perverse practices.  The influence of US cartoonist Robert Crumb is plain in the development of Pichard’s work; the American stressed that he drew comix- that is, X-rated comics- and the French artist’s mature style is definitively situated in this genre whilst his women, both in their physique and their strong personas, bear a close resemblance to those drawn by Crumb.

In 1977 Pichard’s book Marie-Gabrielle de Saint-Eutrope, with its explicit focus on BDSM and strange tortures (reminiscent of the gothic fantasies of Carlo), led to many popular bookshops ceasing to stock his work. Nonetheless, having become something of a specialist in erotic art, into the 1980s Pichard continued to illustrate free adaptions of classic erotic stories such as Sader-Masoch’s ‘Red Countess’ (1985), ‘The Lotus Flower’ by Jin Ping Mei (1987), Les Exploits d’un jeune Don Juan by Guillaume Apollinaire (1991), The Kama-Sutra by Vatsyayana (1991), La Religieuse by Denis Diderot (1992), Germinal by Émile Zola (1992), Prosper Merimee’s Carmen (1995) and, of course, Trois filles. His Marie-Gabrielle in the Orient is modern Orientalist exploitation.

The artist’s version of the Odyssey, transformed “the bewitching Circe into a super-sexy vamp,” according to Le Monde. Summarising his career, the paper’s obituary said that “Drawing women with generous shapes with a pen, highlighted by black and white enhanced by screens, Georges Pichard wanted to be the heir of the libertines of the Age of Enlightenment. Dandy, dressed to the nines, convinced feminist, he was one of the precursors of eroticism in comics and one of the main French counter-culture cartoonists of the 1960s and 1970s.”

Pichard’s illustrations are rendered in black and white in a cartoonish manner, often highly stylised and unrealistic. The men are often either ruggedly handsome or aged and grotesque. The women have exaggerated breasts and nipples, full lips, abundant lashes and freckles and very dark eyes. This kind of cartoon approach to Louys plainly makes sense to some publishers, hence the edition of Roi Gonzalve which appeared in 1990, illustrated by Dutch graphic artist Kris de Roover. His pictures are bright, bold and colourful in comic book manner. The virtue of these pairings of caricature-like images with the French author’s texts is to remind us that what Louys wrote was frequently not to be taken seriously: he was burlesquing and sending up books that he often regarded as pompous and boring- or he was simply lampooning himself for the fun of it. Accordingly, Pichard’s series of illustrations for Louys Trois filles de leur mere (1983) are very consciously drawn with stark, strong lines in a highly explicit style that confronts the graphic nature of the book head on: Pichard’s reading of the text seems to been to find it grotesque and pitiable- hence the almost haunted look he gave to some of the characters. In this respect, it’s interesting to contrast his artistic response to that of Louis Berthomme Saint-Andre, whose light, lyrical lines and watercolour washes tend towards a happier, more homely sense of the family, or Edouard Chimot‘s lively and brightly coloured illustrations, which help to emphasise the excitement and pleasure of the family Louys described. These radically contrasted illustrative strategies underline my argument that the contribution of the artist to illustrated books can have a major impact upon the reader’s interaction with the text itself.

Pichard’s later style and subject matter must unavoidably have been shaped by the Sexual Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The emergence of the ‘permissive’ society, bringing with it a greater tolerance not just of sex, but of varied sexualities, must have given him the confidence to explore what was graphically acceptable with publishers and the buying public. He came to work on Trois Filles de leur mère at the end of this more liberal and radical era, but his response to the text sits clearly within its values. Louys may have written the book six decades earlier, but the issues he portrayed had become elements of serious contemporary debate and Pichard must hve approached it in full knowledge of what it symbolised.

Pichard’s personal reaction to Trois filles was, I believe, to consider it to be a disturbing account of family abuse and filial enslavement, combined with a depiction of the brutalising effects of prostitution; this seems to have been adopted from the student narrator of the story, who expresses shock and revulsion at various points in the other characters’ narratives. Pichard’s illustrations were, accordingly, shaped by his understanding of Louys’ message. The artist’s illustrations are stark and monochrome, a choice that emphasises the harshness of their reading of the narrative. The romanticising- even cheerful- element that Chimot’s artwork introduced, is entirely absent. This is compounded by the fact that Pichard treated the text in the manner of a comic strip, with multiple plates, rather than the five to ten that might be more usual. This multiplicity of images only serves to hammer home the grimness and strained helplessness of the story he portrayed.

For more information, see my bibliography for Pierre Louys.