Rodenbach, Georges (1855-98). ‘C'est très beau et très Poe, cela’, said Mallarmé of Le Règne du silence (1891), in whose poems Rodenbach expressed in melodious, intimist, and melancholy tones the mysterious analogies between poet and world which made him one of the leading figures of Belgian Symbolism. In 1881 he co-founded La Jeune Belgique, in which he helped to open Belgian literature to the influences of the French Decadents and Symbolists. He achieved greatest success with his novel Bruges-la-morte (1892), in which he brought together the theme of love for the deceased spouse with descriptions of the city's canals, rains, and mists and their links to the subconscious. Bachelard described the novel as an illustration of the ‘Ophelia complex’, and this ‘ophélisation d'une ville entière’ made Bruges one of the privileged sites of fin-de-siècle sensibility.
[James Kearns]
