André Blavier #7: Alexandre-Vincent-Charles Berbiguier

Alexandre-Vincent-Charles Berbiguier de Terre-Neuve du Thym (1764 or 1776) was a fou littéraire who appears, among other collections of outsider writers, in Pierre-Gustave Brunet's Les Fous littéraires : essai bibliographique sur la littérature (1880) and André Blavier's Les Fous littéraires (1882; rev. 2000). He was born in Carpentras, where he died in a 'hospice', and is most noted for his triple-volume self-published work Les farfadets, ou tous les démons ne sont pas de l'autre monde (1821), all about the little devils, elves, imps, goblins, call them what you will, but they have been making Berbiguier's life a mess for many years.

Berbiguier addresses his monster work of exorcism (as he hopes) – of which I've only read a certain number of pages (the ones in Blavier: a person can, er, only have so much of a 'bad' thing) – to all the leaders of the world, that they may be conscious of the colossal problems of the farfadets, of the torments they can bring to people's lives, for which he makes no apologies for creating neologisms from the root of the common noun: the abstract noun farfadérisme, the verb farfadériser, and the adjective farfadérien.

I'm not sure if it's just a question of Blavier's examples from this huge work, but the overwhelming impression I got from the excerpts was that Berbiguier's problem is at root Freudian: fear of sex, latent homosexuality, asexuality? Who can tell, but when a shameless demoiselle says that she knows what his problem is and puts her hand on his thigh, he behaves as if it's the end of the world – she's a farfadet! He's goes home with his thigh in pain. Furthermore, farfadets make women pregnant when their man is away, wreck marriages, can even cause virgin birth, and illnesses, etc.

Well, the pioneer psychotherapist Philippe Pinel couldn't cure him, so who could? An excellent, very funny rant to be taken in short doses, and I may well return to it for more fun: the book puts Berbiguier well up the with the best of the fous littéraires. And it's available – in full – free online through Gallica.

My André Blavier/Fous littéraires posts:
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André Blavier: Les Fous littéraires #1
André Blavier #2: Alexandre Ansaldi, G. Clair/Rupin Schkoff, Camarasa
André Blavier #3: Hyacinthe Dans
André Blavier #4: Ernest de Garay, aka Karl-des-Monts
André Blavier #5: Francisque Tapon-Fougas
André Blavier #6: Jules Allix
André Blavier #7: Alexandre-Vincent-Charles Berbiguier

Raymond Queneau: Les Enfants du limon (1938)

Les Enfants du limon – Children of Clay in the translated version – is Raymond Queneau's fifth novel, which is a fictionalisation of a book considered to be unpublishable: 'Encyclopédie des sciences inexactes', on which Queneau had spent four years. The subject of the unpublished book (and the central subject of the published book) is 'fous littéraires', a term which has unfortunately often been translated as 'literary madmen', 'literary lunatics', and equally inaccurate expressions when 'outsider writers' would cover it far more politely, and far better.

Before this post runs away with itself though, perhaps a little backtracking is in order. In Les Enfants du limon Queneau – through Chambernac, but more of him later – mentions former works on fous littéraires/outsider writers which he consulted while researching his unpublished book: Charles Nodier's De quelques livres excentriques (Paris, 1835); Delepierre's Histoire littéraire des fous (London, 1860); Philomneste junior (aka G. Brunet)'s Les Fous littéraires; and Iv. [sic]Tcherpakoff (aka Auguste Ladrigue)'s Les Fous littéraires (Moscow, 1883).

Queneau restricts himself to nineteenth century fous littéraires/outsider writers: before that period misunderstandings could get in the way of definitions, and of course when he began writing the twentieth century wasn't even through its first third. But within the chosen century there are also limitations as to who should or shouldn't be placed in the category of fou littéraire/outsider writer, although the boundaries may change because this is after all a working copy (now within a novel, that is):

– by definition the person should be unknown (which of course automatically invalidates everyone if a list is published: i.e. there's a built-in paradox)

– the fou littéraire/outsider writer must have published something and so be to some extent in contact with the world outside his brain

– the published works must be saying something very strange indeed.

The question of how to establish the line between madness and plain eccentricity is also important here, but then more crucially so is the line between madness and sanity, and the reader can certainly be forgiven if he or she feels they are losing grip on reality, as indeed must have Queneau, who sifted through all these mathematical 'geniuses', messiahs without followers, idiots savants, prophets of apocalyptic doom and heavenly bliss, etc, for such a long time.

This then is a book within a book, the unpublished book within a loose story about the Limon-Chambernacs, a business family married to the impoverished aristocracy, where almost everyone is a little mad.

But it's Henri de Chambernac who is the main character, the retired schoolmaster who's now writing the book, and using the mysterious Purpulan as his secretary-cum-slave. Or is Purpulan just a facet of Chambernac's imagination, as Chambernac's passing on his book to the fictional Raymond Queneau – who makes a brief appearance at the end – is a facet of the narrator's imagination?

What are true are the names of the fous littéraires/outsider writers featured here, along with the sometimes detailed quotations from their works. But obviously what couldn't be mentioned is that the Belgian writer and bibliographer André Blavier (1922–2001) – who was near despair until he read and later met Queneau – actually succeeded in writing and publishing a huge book such as Queneau had intended to publish: Les Fous littéraires, which was published by Henri Veyrier in 1982 and revised and extended in Editions des Cendres in 2000. It is one of the oddest – and one of the most fascinating – reads anyone could ever wish for, as of course is Les Enfants du limon.

Links to my other Queneau post, my post on Blavier's book, and Queneau's grave:

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Raymond Queneau: Exercices de style
André Blavier: Les Fous littéraires
Queneau's grave, Juvisy-sur-Orge

Raymond Queneau in Juvisy-sur-Orge, Essonne

'RAYMOND QUENEAU

1903 – 1976'

Queneau lies with his parents in the small cemetery of Juvisy-sur-Orge, Essonne. Famous above all for his crazy novel Zazie dans le métro, which Louis Malle turned into an equally crazy film. He is also noted for being the co-founder of the experimental literary group Oulipo, a group particularly interested in constraints – Georges Perec's e-less La Disparition (A Void in English) being an obvious example.

Queneau's novel Les Enfants du Limon (1938) – translated as Children of Clay – was the best he could make of his work on 'fous littéraires' (roughly 'outsider writers'), but one which came like a thunderbolt to André Blavier and probably saved him from killing himself. Blavier's reference book Les Fous littéraires – a huge work of information on writers of largely self-published works so crazy that almost no publisher would touch them – is the generally acknowledged authority on this area of literature. It's unfortunate that not many people are aware of this superb labour of love.

There is now a Médiathèque Raymond-Queneau in Juvisy-sur-Orge.

Charles Nodier: Le Cimetière du Père-Lachaise #9

'CHARLES NODIER

MEMBRE

DE

L'ACADÉMIE

FRANÇAISE

ET DE

LA LÉGION D'HONNEUR

BIBLIOTHÉCAIRE

DE L'ARSENAL'

 

The Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal is part of the BNF. Charles Nodier (1780–1844) was a highly prolific writer of the period, but for me he is particularly interesting for his 1835 book Bibliographie des fous : De quelques livres excentriques: a seminal work from which Raymond Queneau, for instance, learned a great deal. More importantly, it is a precursor to the huge, essential work on outsider literature by André Blavier: Les Fous littéraires (1982; repr. with additions 2001).

Link to my earlier post on Père-Lachaise:

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Le Cimetière du Père-Lachaise / Père Lachaise Cemetery

André Blavier #6: Jules Allix

Jules Allix (1818–97) was a militant socialist and a committed feminist, but he earns a place in Blavier's Les Fous littéraires for his long article in two October 1850 issues of La Presse, which he called 'Communication universelle et instantanée de la pensée, à quelque distance que ce soit' ('Universal and instantaneous communication of thought, from any distance whatsoever'). This article gave details of the 'boussole pasilalinique sympathique ou plus communément les escargots sympathiques' ('The pasilalinic-sympathetic compass, more commonly known as 'sympathetic snails'), or as many have named it: the snail telegraph.

The discovery, made by Jacques Toussaint Benoît and Biat-Chrétien, was that snails have the ability to maintain long-distance contact with each other after having sex. They release a kind of animal magnetism, an electric fluid for which the earth acts as a kind of conductor, developing and unravelling, Allix said, like a spider's or a silkworm's thread, but which never breaks and can continue indefinitely. This 'sympathetic escargotic fluid' is completely invisible and has immediate effect.

With this revolutionary discovery in mind, Benoît and Biat-Chrétien invented a message-conveying machine, a kind of ship's compass which involved the 25 letters of the French alphabet and unfortunate snails stuck to basins. Exactly how it was supposed to work remains obscure to my unscientific mind, but then of course it didn't work anyway: Benoît (who was mentally disturbed) was just stringing his financial backer along, and disappeared when things got too hot.^* His 'colleague' Biat-Chrétien, who was supposed to be collaborating with him in America, did not in fact exist outside Benoît's imagination.

But the press made fun of the project for years: one cartoon, for instance, shows snails with quill pens at work at a post office desk.

^* Allix too was mentally disturbed, and was an inmate in Charenton on several occasions. He published Curation de l'aliénation mentale: Introduction in 1867: a link to the text is here. His brother was Léon-Émile Allix, one of Victor Hugo's doctors.

Links to my other posts on André Blavier's Les Fous littéraires are below:

My André Blavier/Fous littéraires posts:
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André Blavier: Les Fous littéraires #1
André Blavier #2: Alexandre Ansaldi, G. Clair/Rupin Schkoff, Camarasa
André Blavier #3: Hyacinthe Dans
André Blavier #4: Ernest de Garay, aka Karl-des-Monts
André Blavier #5: Francisque Tapon-Fougas
André Blavier #6: Jules Allix
André Blavier #7: Alexandre-Vincent-Charles Berbiguier

André Blavier #5: Francisque Tapon-Fougas

Francisque Tapon-Fougas (1810–93) was re-discovered in the 20th century by Raymond Queneau and André Blavier, his writing guaranteeing him a prominent place in the pantheon of fous littéraires, or outsider writers. He wrote many plays (often using the name of the Greek philosopher Thalès de Milet), and many poems (considering himself the 'Lamartine of the Auvergne'), and was convinced that he was a great writer, although none of his plays was performed. Characters in his plays (particularly writers) suffer from persecution, and Blavier speaks of Tapon-Fougas's paranoia, his synaesthetic hallucinations, his delusions of literary grandeur, and his constant changes of address as a defence strategy.

In Sur la mort d'Eugène Sue [1857] Tapon-Fougas speaks of a widespread persecution system using electricity, galvanism, and chemistry, organized by powerful men as an attack on human freedom by paralysing thinking and writing. Blavier notes a distinct evolution in Tapon-Fougas's writing between Sur la mort d'Eugène Sue and Les Antimisérables (1862), which is a huge attack on Victor Hugo. From 1862, there is no more mention of electro-galvanic batteries or Jesuitic-ammoniacal fumes – instead he concentrates on the jealous literary people who are persecuting him. Indeed, the 19th century encyclopedist Gustave Vapereau (ironically) notes that Tapon-Fougas, in Les Désespérés (1864), denounces Hugolatry and Janinocracy (after the drama critic Jules Janin) as the two plagues of the century: they have prevented his plays from being performed, prevented Tapon-Fougas from regenerating the theatre.

From 1871, Tapon-Fougas stood as candidate in all of the regional elections in his three favourite départements: Loire, Puy-de-Dôme, and Rhône – simultaneously. He was also a prolific pamphleteer, and distributed leaflets saying that the electorate had nothing to lose and perhaps a great deal to gain by electing a man who had written forty volumes of poetry and prose. His exhortations fell on deaf ears.

My André Blavier/Fous littéraires posts:
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André Blavier: Les Fous littéraires #1
André Blavier #2: Alexandre Ansaldi, G. Clair/Rupin Schkoff, Camarasa
André Blavier #3: Hyacinthe Dans
André Blavier #4: Ernest de Garay, aka Karl-des-Monts
André Blavier #5: Francisque Tapon-Fougas
André Blavier #6: Jules Allix
André Blavier #7: Alexandre-Vincent-Charles Berbiguier

André Blavier #4: Ernest de Garay, aka Karl-des-Monts

Little is known of Ernest de Garay. He wrote several books, such as Les Légendes des Pyrénées (1857), in which he concentrated on the legends of the Basque country. He was also a lawyer for the imperial court of Paris, but for political reasons for imprisoned in an insane asylum in Pau, from which he wrote his most noted work under the pseudonym of Karl-des-Monts; this is Un martyre dans une maison de fous ('A Martyr in a Madhouse'), and Blavier's excerpts from it contain Garay's definition of madness and several of his prison letters, especially to Octavie, whom he addresses in loving terms.

He rails against the director for many different things: his missing or rotten teeth, his idiotic smile, his dirty beard, his corpse-like smell, attempting to draw an accurate picture of a 'manufacturer of madness'; and he rails against the madhouse itself for being a Père Lachaise des intelligences where he sleeps on a straw bed under a horse blanket. The conditions, the awful cloaical smells, are appalling, but it is surely his graphic description of a man killed by scalding water from a boiler whose tap was negligently left on that horrifies the reader the most.

Un martyre dans une maison de fous was re-published recently.

My André Blavier/Fous littéraires posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
André Blavier: Les Fous littéraires #1
André Blavier #2: Alexandre Ansaldi, G. Clair/Rupin Schkoff, Camarasa
André Blavier #3: Hyacinthe Dans
André Blavier #4: Ernest de Garay, aka Karl-des-Monts
André Blavier #5: Francisque Tapon-Fougas
André Blavier #6: Jules Allix
André Blavier #7: Alexandre-Vincent-Charles Berbiguier

André Blavier #3: Hyacinthe Dans

From February 1924 to November 1925 the bookseller Hyacinthe Dans in Liège was in charge of the (now, as it was his) scandalous rag Nanesse, which earned him two years' imprisonment for blackmail. Before his sentence could be carried out, though, he'd fled to Paris with his girlfriend Armande Comtat, whom he forced into prostitution to prevent himself from starving.

When she declared she was leaving him, he struck her on the head with a hammer and slit her throat, then killed his own mother (although why is unclear). Terrified of receiving the death sentence in France, he fled back to Liège, where he murdered a Jesuit priest whom he had known from Saint-Gervais college: but again, the reason is unclear, although insanity is a distinct possibility. He received life imprisonment, and became editor-in-chief of Journal des prisons belges under the pseudonym Tristan Chevreuse.

Georges Simenon had been familiar with Dans from the 1920s when they were regulars at the highly disreputable café La Cagne (which, for the record, means 'herring barrel'), and had worked on Dans's magazine. Simenon perpetuated Dans's name in his partly autobiographical first-person book Les Trois Crimes de mes amis (1928).

My André Blavier/Fous littéraires posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
André Blavier: Les Fous littéraires #1
André Blavier #2: Alexandre Ansaldi, G. Clair/Rupin Schkoff, Camarasa
André Blavier #3: Hyacinthe Dans
André Blavier #4: Ernest de Garay, aka Karl-des-Monts
André Blavier #5: Francisque Tapon-Fougas
André Blavier #6: Jules Allix
André Blavier #7: Alexandre-Vincent-Charles Berbiguier

André Blavier: Les Fous littéraires (1982) #2

I mentioned André Blavier's Les Fous littéraires (1982)¹ a short time ago (see link below), and have now bought a copy. This is the first edition (pub. Henri Veyrier), which contains 924 pages with details about – and examples of the writings of – many hundreds of authors who have received no or very little recognition for their (often self-published) work.²

The Introduction contains an epigraph by Latis (or Emmanuel Peillet), one of the founder members of Oulipo, stating that brevity is a positive thing, with the exception of prefaces: the Introduction is 90 pages long. After the first heading, 'Première émission ('First Programme'), there's a footnote with an explanatory note saying that the Introduction was originally conceived as a series of radio programmes that were never broadcast, and was later copiously annotated. On the second line, a second footnote explains that the expression boule de neige (lit. 'snowball') is not used here in the Oulipian sense.³ (It's used figuratively here to refer to a growing number of questions.)

As we might imagine, the influence of Queneau is very evident, so this is no conventional introduction simply explaining the rationale behind the book, but then this probably isn't a book you would read from cover to cover in any logical way. At the moment I'm getting distracted all the time, dipping into some of the characters in this colossal work. I'll give just a few examples at the moment:

– I was aware (but didn't mention it in my first post) that Paulin Gagne – who is given 26 pages here – had written a carrot culture Marseillaise (Allons enfants de la carotte, etc), but I now notice that Alexandre Ansaldi also wrote a book called La Marseillaise nouvelle in 1971: the song is on the back cover, and the text inside calls the traditional song 'imbecilic and grotesque', and 'bombastic and violent'. When Blavier was writing he knew nothing of another song titled La Marseillaise électrique (by G. Clair and Rupin Schkoff), although it's now online: it's a 'war song' for electricians, begins Allons enfants de la batt'rie ! / Le jour de voir est arrivé !, and the rest is here.⁴

– Antoine Madrolle wrote a theology of railways.

– Camarasa wrote a Receuil ou collection de notes, de croquis, de dessins, de schémas, pour un traité historique, théorique, pratique, philosophique, philologique, poétique, sportif, acrobatique, touristique, artistique et pittoresque de la brouette ('Book or collection of notes, sketches, designs, schemes, for a historical, theoretical, practical, philosophical, philological, poetical, athletic, acrobatic, touristic, artistic, and picturesque treatise on the wheelbarrow'.) It was printed in Madrid several times between 1915 and 1925, contained 539 pages and 993 illustrations, and was dedicated to Queen Christina.

Blavier's book is really remarkable.

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¹ Interestingly, the current English Wikipedia entry for Jean-Pierre Brisset (who is included in Blavier) has a number of similarities to the current French Wikipédia entry, and translates Fou littéraire as 'outsider writer'. In my previous post, I suggested that this is a good translation of the expression, and is one I shall continue to use about Blavier's writers: I shall be adding posts about this book when I come across interesting examples.

² The second edition (pub. in 2000 Les Éditions des Cendres) has 1147 pages.

³ Boule de neige in the Oulipian sense refers to a poem which begins with a one-letter word for the first line, continues with a two-letter word for the second, then a three-letter for the third, etc. A boule de neige fondante (melting snowball) is a poem that begins with a word containing a certain number of letters in the first line, and then shrinks by a letter each following line.

⁴ Funny this undoubtedly is, although it would be a mistake to forget the gently subversive element: original words from the French national anthem –  patrie ('country') and gloire ('glory') – are changed to batt'rie ('battery') and voir ('seeing'): the song no longer glorifies the French nation, but the humble electrical workers.

My André Blavier/Fous littéraires posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
André Blavier: Les Fous littéraires #1
André Blavier #2: Alexandre Ansaldi, G. Clair/Rupin Schkoff, Camarasa
André Blavier #3: Hyacinthe Dans
André Blavier #4: Ernest de Garay, aka Karl-des-Monts
André Blavier #5: Francisque Tapon-Fougas
André Blavier #6: Jules Allix
André Blavier #7: Alexandre-Vincent-Charles Berbiguier

André Blavier: Les Fous littéraires (1982; repr. 2000) #1

It was while reading an article on Raymond Queneau that I discovered André Blavier (1922–2001), whose huge book Les Fous littéraires^* was first published in 1982; this contained 924 pages, but additions in the 2000 edition increase it to 1147 pages. The title isn't at all easy to translate: literally it means 'Literary Madmen', but that entraps us in a gender specificity that's to some extent built into Latin-derived languages, although opting for the more politically correct 'Literary Mad People' is just ugly. And then there's the problem with the word 'mad': clearly, it frequently has pejorative connotations, but Blavier didn't intend any, so I think that – on an analogy with the expression 'outsider artists' – the term 'outsider writers' is the best to use here.

Blavier was a Belgian librarian of working-class origin from Verviers, whose life was overturned – indeed saved, as he was on the verge of suicide – by reading Queneau, who in the 1930s had unsuccessfully attempted to write a book about outsider writers, adding to Nodier's list of 'génies méconnus' ('little known geniuses'). He failed to publish, though, but salvaged his researches by incorporating some of his subjects into a novel read by Blavier: Les Enfants du limon (1938) (Children of Clay). Blavier later got to know Queneau and in 1961 became Oulipo's foreign correspondent.

From Blavier's huge collection of eccentric people has emerged what can perhaps be described as a canon of outsider writers, of whom I mention just two here:

Jean-Pierre Brisset (1837–1919), who wrote, among a number of books, La Natation ou l’art de nager appris seul en moins d’une heure (1870) ('Swimming or the Art of Swimming Self-Taught in Under an Hour'). He developed the theory that humans evolved from frogs.

Paulin Gagne (1808–76) wrote L'Unitéide, ou la Femme-Messie ('Woman Messiah') (1857), which is a poem of 726 pages said to contain some of the most fantastic names and strangest words ever written. In L'Histoire des Miracles he tells of the time he sub-let his salon to spritualists who were followers of Allan Kardec. Bearing a crucifix, he went into one of their sessions:

'[...] je suis allé seul dans la salle où se faisaient les évocations infernales ; ô miracle étonnant et épouvantable ! à l'instant, un mouvement de rotation irrésistible s'est emparé de moi ; je tournais comme une toupie autour de la table satanique, que je couvris de crachats et de bave, et d'où s'échappaient les esprits démoniaques par la présence du crucifix que je tenais toujours à la main : Satan et Dieu se disputaient mon corps et mon âme !!'

(My translation: 'Alone, I went into the room, from which hellish apparitions were coming; oh, astounding and dreadful miracle: suddenly, an irresistible rotary movement took hold of me; I spun like a top around the satanic table, which I covered with spit and dribble, and from which demonic spirits were escaping because of the presence of the crucifix I was holding: Satan and God were arguing over my body and soul!!').

After this bizarre event, Gagne was taken to a maison de santé to recover for several days.

Paulin Gagne, artist unknown.

^*The expression originates from a book by Charles Nodier (1780–1844): Bibliographe de fous: de quelques livres excentriques (Paris: Techener, 1835).

My André Blavier/Fous littéraires posts:
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André Blavier: Les Fous littéraires #1
André Blavier #2: Alexandre Ansaldi, G. Clair/Rupin Schkoff, Camarasa
André Blavier #3: Hyacinthe Dans
André Blavier #4: Ernest de Garay, aka Karl-des-Monts
André Blavier #5: Francisque Tapon-Fougas
André Blavier #6: Jules Allix
André Blavier #7: Alexandre-Vincent-Charles Berbiguier