Hell E-Book

Henri Barbusse

• Herausgeber: Gothic World Literature Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 220

Beschreibung

A young man, tired of life and love, indifferent to the people and world around him, takes up a room in a Parisienne boarding house. Noises from the adjoining room draw his attention to a hole in the wall, and he observes its occupants through it. He becomes obsessed with the individual episodes of human life that play out before his eyes; love, adultery, incest, childbirth, death, thievery and betrayal. Through his voyeurism, the unnamed narrator becomes an omniscient godlike character, observing the room's inhabitants in their most private and naked moments. The hole becomes a window to the very soul of humanity and the human condition. But as with Prometheus, his godlike powers come at a cost.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title PageIntroductionIntroduction to the 1918 edition Chapter IChapter IIChapter IIIChapter IVChapter VChapter VIChapter VIIChapter VIIIChapter IXChapter XChapter XIChapter XIIChapter XIIIChapter XIVChapter XVChapter XVIChapter XVII Copyright

HELL or “THE INFERNO”

BY HENRI BARBUSSE AUTHOR of “UNDER FIRE”

TRANSLATED FROM THE 100th FRENCH EDITION WITH AN INTRODUCTION By EDWARD J. O’BRIEN

RESET WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOSHUA ANDREW

GOTHIC WORLD LITERATURE EDITIONS EDINBURGH 2021

INTRODUCTION

by Joshua Andrew

Henri Barbusse was born on the 17th of May in Asnières-sur-Seine, to a long line of protestant farmers. In his youth he was sent to Geneva to be trained as a pastor, however, during his studies, he lost his faith and returned to his family a left-wing atheist. Yet he continued to be influenced by Protestantism throughout his life, with a mixture of Kantian philosophy, and vehemently opposed “absolutism, irrationalism and Catholicism”.

In 1908, at the age of 35, Henri Barbusse published his second novel, L’Enfer (translated in 1918 by Edward J. O’Brien as The Inferno). However, it would be Le Feu (Under Fire), published in 1916, after, and based on, his service in ‘The Great War’, that would gain him worldwide celebrity and recognition as a writer. For this reason, L’Enfer, despite being an excellent philosophical meditation on the human condition, is often overlooked and not as widely known as his later works.

His early works focussed on realism, existentialism, pessimism and the suffering of mankind, which all had a large part to play in L’Enfer. As a young writer he was deeply involved and interested in social issues, and would go on to found the World Committee Against War and 10 Fascism in 1932. In 1914, he signed up to fight in the First World War, where he fought in the trenches for 17 months, until he was removed from active service due to his age, exhaustion, dysentery and damage to his lungs. After which, he became a pacifist and opposed imperialism and militarism. From 1919 onwards, he became a staunch supporter of Bolshevism, and in 1923 he became the first French writer to join the French Communist Party, inspiring a wave of French intellectuals to do the same.

He spent the rest of his life fighting against tyranny and fascism, and upholding human rights, liberty and peace. He was involved in numerous socially conscious committees and organisations that spanned across the world, founding the Clarté (Clarity) movement and magazine, named for one of his books. Henri Barbusse died on the 30th of August 1935 of pneumonia in Moscow, 500,000 Parisians attended his funeral, and he was buried at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

The novel format allows Barbusse to explore, and deal with, philosophical ideas in a manner that engages the reader and takes them with him on his meditative wanderings. The story follows a young provincial man who comes to Paris to work in a bank, and takes up a room in a boarding house. He has grown indifferent to the world and its people. On his first night, he discovers a hole in the wall, through which he can see and hear the goings on in the next room. He witnesses the entire spectrum of humanity and quickly becomes obsessed with the lives and stories of the people he observes, gradually realising this is a means of better understanding 11 the human condition. The young man seeks to understand what lurks beneath the masks people wear; who they are in their most private and intimate moments. The narrator becomes obsessive and spends so much time observing the goings on he becomes blind, sore and unable to move. At the end of the story his own life becomes a living hell, and he despairs when he realises that he can no longer live the life he dreamed of, and never again bear witness to anything. The hole in the wall gave him godlike powers, to see people for who they truly were, but much like Prometheus his godlike powers came at a terrible price.

Suffering plays a major role in Barbusse’s novel, from Amy’s outpourings of misery to her lover, to the narrator’s own pain in not being able to realise his hopes and dreams due to his decrepit state at the end of the story.

In the scenes with the couple having an affair, the narrator realises Amy is deeply unhappy and is using the affair to escape her misery. But her lover tells her one cannot escape misery, and that happiness can only exist with its counterpart, stating: “It is an error to believe that we can be happy in perfect calm and clearness, as abstract as a formula. We are made too much out of shadow and some form of suffering. If everything that hurts us were to be removed, what would remain?”

Barbusse’s tragic tale does, however, have an overall optimistic element to it. Just as we benefited from Prometheus’s sacrifice, so too must we learn from that of the nameless narrator. He has left himself blind and crippled so that we may learn something from his 12 journey. His book hints at a better future, despite the suffering of mankind. “Happiness needs unhappiness. Joy goes hand in hand with sorrow. It is thanks to the shadow that we exist. We must not dream of an absurd abstraction. We must guard the bond that links us to blood and earth. ‘Just as I am!’ Remember that. We are a great mixture.” The Young man, observes the whole of humanity, and discovers that true infinity lies within each of us. He discovers that though the world around us has no meaning, it is in each of us that lies the meaning we seek and indeed the opportunity for greatness

Barbusse was deeply influenced by Kantian Ethics, believing that, through rationality and the categorical imperative (essentially do unto others…), we could create a fairer and more just society. He believed that by taking the best parts of the religious framework one could create a modern religion/morality in which all strive to be the best they can be, akin to Nietzsche’s Übermensch. Barbusse was however deeply critical of religion, and particularly the absolutism found within Catholicism, demonstrated clearly in his scene with the priest and the dying man.

In order to create this new, fairer, more morale world, we would have to sever ties with what ails the current one, and dispense with notions such as patriotism, which will ever continue to “maintain war and exhaust the world”, yet he acknowledges that we, as people, cling to what we know, and are deeply fearful of change. This all too human struggle is best represented in the discussion between the two doctors, which shows us Barbusse’s views on the matter, and is indeed a 13 foreshadowing of Barbusse’s future with the French Communist Party. They talk of a need for progress and people’s clinging on to, and refusal to dismiss, notions of the past. The older Doctor demonstrates the irrationality and hypocrisy inherent to the human mind, despite acknowledging that change/progress must take place, we as humans fear and hate change, we refuse to take the plunge, fearing a change of state.

The omniscient powers, the hole in the wall gives the narrator, allow him to see through the characters he observes, coming upon truths of which they themselves are not aware. A great example of this is the affair between Amy and her nameless poet. He sees that despite the declarations of their love to one another, they do not truly love each other. When they embrace, instead of witnessing joy and happiness, as he expected, he saw in them sadness and pain, as though it were a “heart-rending farewell” rather than a passionate meeting of lovers. He sees that what Amy seeks from her lover is not his love nor his embrace but the opportunity to escape and forget her miserable existence for a brief moment, and her lover desires only her body. Barbusse writes: “Their desires were not the same. They seemed united, but they dwelt far apart. They did not talk the same language. When they spoke of the same things. They scarcely understood each other, and to my eyes, from the very first, their union appeared to be broken more than if they had never known each other.”

Throughout the story the narrator witnesses the entire spectrum of humanity, he witnesses birth and death, love and betrayal, and suffering and happiness. We, 14 the readers, like Barbusse’s nameless narrator, are voyeurs; flies on the wall. Yet we leave unscathed and can benefit from the lessons he learnt.

“Humanity is the desire for novelty founded upon the fear ofdeath”

Henri Barbusse, Hell

“Happiness needs unhappiness. Joy goes hand in hand with sorrow. It is thanks to the shadow that we exist. We must not dream of an absurd abstraction. We must guard the bond that links us to blood and earth. ‘Just as I am!’ Remember that. We are a great mixture.”

Henri Barbusse, Hell

INTRODUCTIONto the 1918 edition

By Edward J O’Brien

In introducing M. Barbusse’s most important book to a public already familiar with “Under Fire,” it seems well to point out the relation of the author’s philosophy to his own time, and the kinship of his art to that of certain other contemporary French and English novelists.

“L’Enfer” has been more widely read and discussed in France than any other realistic study since the days of Zola. The French sales of the volume, in 1917 alone, exceeded a hundred thousand copies, a popularity all the more remarkable from the fact that its appeal is based as much on its philosophical substance as on the story which it tells.

Although M. Barbusse is one of the most distinguished contemporary French writers of short stories, he has found in the novel form the most fitting literary medium for the expression of his philosophy, and it is to realism rather than romanticism that he turns for the exposition of his special imaginative point of view. And yet this statement seems to need some qualification. 18In his introduction to “Pointed Roofs,” by Dorothy Richardson, Mr. J.D. Beresford points out that a new objective literary method is becoming general in which the writer’s strict detachment from his objective subject matter is united to a tendency, impersonal, to be sure, to immerse himself in the life surrounding his characters. Miss May Sinclair points out that writers are beginning to take the complete plunge for the first time, and instances as examples, not only the novels of Dorothy Richardson, but those of James Joyce.

Now it is perfectly true that Miss Richardson and Mr. Joyce have introduced this method into English fiction, and that Mr. Frank Swinnerton has carried the method a step further in another direction, but before these writers there was a precedent in France for this method, of which perhaps the two chief exemplars were Jules Romains and Henri Barbusse. Although the two writers have little else in common, both are intensely conscious of the tremendous, if imponderable, impact of elemental and universal forces upon personality, of the profound modifications which natural and social environment unconsciously impress upon the individual life, and of the continual interaction of forces by which the course of life is changed more fundamentally than by less imperceptible influences. Both M. Romains and M. Barbusse perceive, as the fundamental factor influencing human life, the contraction and expansion of physical and spiritual relationship, the inevitable ebb and flow perceived by the poet who pointed out that we cannot touch a flower without troubling of a star.

M. Romains has found his literary medium in what 19 he calls unanimism. While M. Barbusse would not claim to belong to the same school, and in fact would appear on the surface to be at the opposite pole of life in his philosophy, we shall find that his detachment, founded, though it is, upon solitude, takes essentially the same account of outside forces as the philosophy of M. Romains.

He perceives that each man is an island of illimitable forces apart from his fellows, passionately eager to live his own life to the last degree of self-fulfilment, but continually thwarted by nature and by other men and women, until death interposes and sets the seal of oblivion upon all that he has dreamed and sought.

And he has set himself the task of disengaging, as far as possible, the purpose and hope of human life, of endeavouring to discover what promise exists for the future and how this promise can be related to the present, of marking the relationship between eternity and time, and discovering, through the tragedies of birth, love, marriage, illness and death, the ultimate possibility of human development and fulfilment.

“The Inferno” is therefore a tragic book. But I think that the attentive reader will find that the destructive criticism of M. Barbusse, in so far as it is possible for him to agree with it, only clears away the dead undergrowth which obscures the author’s passionate hope and belief in the future.

Although the action of this story is spiritual as well as physical, and occupies less than a month of time, it is focussed intensely upon reality. Everything that the author permits us to see and understand is seen through a 20 single point of life—a hole pierced in the wall between two rooms of a grey Paris boarding house. The time is most often twilight, with its romantic penumbra, darkening into the obscurity of night by imperceptible degrees.

M. Barbusse has conceived the idea of making a man perceive the whole spiritual tragedy of life through a cranny in the wall, and there is a fine symbolism in this, as if he were vouchsafing us the opportunity to perceive eternal things through the tiny crack which is all that is revealed to us of infinity, so that the gates of Horn, darkened by our human blindness, scarcely swing open before they close again.

The hero of this story has been dazzled by the flaming ramparts of the world, so that eternity is only revealed to him in fiery glimpses that shrivel him, and he is left in the dark void of time, clinging to a dream which already begins to fail him.

And the significant thing about this book is that the final revelation comes to him through the human voices of those who have suffered much, because they have loved much, after his own daring intellectual flights have failed him.

So this man who has confronted the greatest realities of life, enabled to view them with the same objective detachment with which God sees them, though without the divine knowledge which transmutes their darkness, comes to learn that we carry all heaven and hell within ourselves, and with a relentless insight, almost Lucretian in its desperate intensity, he cries: “We are divinely alone, the heavens have fallen on our heads.” And he adds: 21 “Here they will pass again, day after day, year after year, all the prisoners of rooms will pass in their kind of eternity. In the twilight when everything fades, they will sit down near the light, in the room full of haloes; they will drag themselves to the window’s void. Their mouths will join and they will grow tender. They will exchange a first or a last useless glance. They will open their arms, they will caress each other. They will love life and be afraid to disappear….

“I have heard the annunciation of whatever finer things are to come. Through me has passed, without staying me in my course, the Word which does not lie, and which said over again, will satisfy.”

Truly a great and pitiless book, but there is a cleansing wind running through it, which sweeps away life’s illusions, and leaves a new hope for the future in our hearts.

EDWARD J. O’BRIEN. BASS RIVER, MASS., July, 10, 1918.

CHAPTER I

The landlady, Madame Lemercier, left me alone in my room, after a short speech impressing upon me all the material and moral advantages of the Lemercier boarding-house.

I stopped in front of the glass, in the middle of the room in which I was going to live for a while. I looked round the room and then at myself.

The room was grey and had a dusty smell. I saw two chairs, one of which held my valise, two narrow-backed armchairs with smeary upholstery, a table with a piece of green felt set into the top, and an oriental carpet with an arabesque pattern that fairly leaped to the eye.

This particular room I had never seen before, but, oh, how familiar it all was—that bed of imitation mahogany, that frigid toilet table, that inevitable arrangement of the furniture, that emptiness within those four walls.

The room was worn with use, as if an infinite number of people had occupied it. The carpet was frayed from the door to the window—a path trodden by a host of feet from day to day. The moulding, which I could reach with my hands, was out of line and cracked, and the marble mantelpiece had lost its sharp edges. 24 Human contact wears things out with disheartening slowness.

Things tarnish, too. Little by little, the ceiling had darkened like a stormy sky. The places on the whitish woodwork and the pink wallpaper that had been touched oftenest had become smudgy—the edge of the door, the paint around the lock of the closet and the wall alongside the window where one pulls the curtain cords. A whole world of human beings had passed here like smoke, leaving nothing white but the window.

And I? I am a man like every other man, just as that evening was like every other evening.

. . . . .

I had been travelling since morning. Hurry, formalities, baggage, the train, the whiff of different towns.

I fell into one of the armchairs. Everything became quieter and more peaceful.

My coming from the country to stay in Paris for good marked an epoch in my life. I had found a situation here in a bank. My days were to change. It was because of this change that I got away from my usual thoughts and turned to thoughts of myself.

I was thirty years old. I had lost my father and mother eighteen or twenty years before, so long ago that the event was now insignificant. I was unmarried. I had no children and shall have none. There are moments when this troubles me, when I reflect that with me a line will end which has lasted since the beginning of humanity.

Was I happy? Yes, I had nothing to mourn or regret, 25 I had no complicated desires. Therefore, I was happy. I remembered that since my childhood I had had spiritual illuminations, mystical emotions, a morbid fondness for shutting myself up face to face with my past. I had attributed exceptional importance to myself and had come to think that I was more than other people. But this had gradually become submerged in the positive nothingness of every day.

. . . . .

There I was now in that room.

I leaned forward in my armchair to be nearer the glass, and I examined myself carefully.

Rather short, with an air of reserve (although there are times when I let myself go); quite correctly dressed; nothing to criticise and nothing striking about my appearance.

I looked close at my eyes. They are green, though, oddly enough, people usually take them for black.

I believed in many things in a confused sort of way, above all, in the existence of God, if not in the dogmas of religion. However, I thought, these last had advantages for poor people and for women, who have less intellect than men.

As for philosophical discussions, I thought they are absolutely useless. You cannot demonstrate or verify anything. What was truth, anyway?

I had a sense of good and evil. I would not have committed an indelicacy, even if certain of impunity. I would not have permitted myself the slightest overstatement.

If everyone were like me, all would be well. 26

. . . . .

It was already late. I was not going to do anything. I remained seated there, at the end of the day, opposite the looking-glass. In the setting of the room that the twilight began to invade, I saw the outline of my forehead, the oval of my face, and, under my blinking eyelids, the gaze by which I enter into myself as into a tomb.

My tiredness, the gloominess (I heard rain outside), the darkness that intensified my solitude and made me look larger, and then something else, I knew not what, made me sad. It bored me to be sad. I shook myself. What was the matter? Nothing. Only myself.

I have not always been alone in life as I was that evening. Love for me had taken on the form and the being of my little Josette. We had met long before, in the rear of the millinery shop in which she worked at Tours. She had smiled at me with singular persistence, and I caught her head in my hands, kissed her on the lips—and found out suddenly that I loved her.

I no longer recall the strange bliss we felt when, we first embraced. It is true, there are moments when I still desire her as madly as the first time. This is so especially when she is away. When she is with me, there are moments when she repels me.

We discovered each other in the holidays. The days when we shall see each other again before we die—we could count them—if we dared.

To die! The idea of death is decidedly the most important of all ideas. I should die some day. Had I ever thought of it? I reflected. No, I had never thought of it. I could not. You can no more look destiny in the face than you can look at the sun, and yet destiny is grey. 27

And night came, as every night will come, until the last one, which will be too vast.

But all at once I jumped up and stood on my feet, reeling, my heart throbbing like the fluttering of wings.

What was it? In the street a horn resounded, playing a hunting song. Apparently some groom of a rich family, standing near the bar of a tavern, with cheeks puffed out, mouth squeezed tight, and an air of ferocity, astonishing and silencing his audience.

But the thing that so stirred me was not the mere blowing of a horn in the city streets. I had been brought up in the country, and as a child I used to hear that blast far in the distance, along the road to the woods and the castle. The same air, the same thing exactly. How could the two be so precisely alike?

And involuntarily my hand wavered to my heart.

Formerly—to-day—my life—my heart—myself! I thought of all this suddenly, for no reason, as if I had gone mad.

. . . . .

My past—what had I ever made of myself? Nothing, and I was already on the decline. Ah, because the refrain recalled the past, it seemed to me as if it were all over with me, and I had not lived. And I had a longing for a sort of lost paradise.

But of what avail to pray or rebel? I felt I had nothing more to expect from life. Thenceforth, I should be neither happy nor unhappy. I could not rise from the dead. I would grow old quietly, as quiet as I was that day in the room where so many people had left their traces, and yet no one had left his own traces. 28

This room—anywhere you turn, you find this room. It is the universal room. You think it is closed. No, it is open to the four winds of heaven. It is lost amid a host of similar rooms, like the light in the sky, like one day amid the host of all other days, like my “I” amid a host of other I’s.

I, I! I saw nothing more now than the pallor of my face, with deep orbits, buried in the twilight, and my mouth filled with a silence which gently but surely stifles and destroys.

I raised myself on my elbow as on a clipped wing. I wished that something partaking of the infinite would happen to me.

I had no genius, no mission to fulfil, no great heart to bestow. I had nothing and I deserved nothing. But all the same I desired some sort of reward.

Love. I dreamed of a unique, an unheard-of idyll with a woman far from the one with whom I had hitherto lost all my time, a woman whose features I did not see, but whose shadow I imagined beside my own as we walked along the road together.

Something infinite, something new! A journey, an extraordinary journey into which to throw myself headlong and bring variety into my life. Luxurious, bustling departures surrounded by solicitous inferiors, a lazy leaning back in railway trains that thunder along through wild landscapes and past cities rising up and growing as if blown by the wind.

Steamers, masts, orders given in barbarous tongues, landings on golden quays, then strange, exotic faces in the sunlight, puzzlingly alike, and monuments, familiar from 29 pictures, which, in my tourist’s pride, seem to have come close to me.

My brain was empty, my heart arid. I had never found anything, not even a friend. I was a poor man stranded for a day in a boarding-house room where everybody comes and everybody goes. And yet I longed for glory! For glory bound to me like a miraculous wound that I should feel and everybody would talk about. I longed for a following of which I should be the leader, my name acclaimed under the heavens like a new clarion call.

But I felt my grandeur slip away. My childish imagination played in vain with those boundless fancies. There was nothing more for me to expect from life. There was only I, who, stripped by the night, rose upward like a cry.