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114 pages

English

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"You, my love, will be poor, so as to be more like all other women. In order for us to live together I shall work all day and so be your servant. You will work affectionately for us both in this room - and in my absence there will be nothing beside you but the pure, simple presence of your sewing machine. You will practice patience which is as long as life - and maternity, which is as heavy as the world." The Inferno, otherwise translated as Hell, is the controversial novel by Henri Barbusse. A lone young man spies through a hole in the wall of his hotel room. Through it he witnesses all possible events of life, such as marriage, death, lesbianism, adultery and incest. The story was condemned on its English release as gross voyeurism, but can also be read as the education of one isolated individual in the tragedy of life.

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Publié par	The Floating Press
Date de parution	01 juin 2009
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781775415572
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0164€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

THE INFERNO
* * *
HENRI BARBUSSE
Translated by
EDWARD J. O'BRIEN

*

The Inferno From a 1918 edition.
ISBN 978-1-775415-57-2
© 2009 THE FLOATING PRESS.
While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike.
Visit www.thefloatingpress.com
Contents
*
Introduction Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI Chapter VII Chapter VIII Chapter IX Chapter X Chapter XI Chapter XII Chapter XIII Chapter XIV Chapter XV Chapter XVI Chapter XVII
Introduction
*
In introducing M. Barbusse's most important book to a public alreadyfamiliar with "Under Fire," it seems well to point out the relation ofthe author's philosophy to his own time, and the kinship of his art tothat of certain other contemporary French and English novelists.
"L'Enfer" has been more widely read and discussed in France than anyother realistic study since the days of Zola. The French sales of thevolume, in 1917 alone, exceeded a hundred thousand copies, a popularityall the more remarkable from the fact that its appeal is based as muchon its philosophical substance as on the story which it tells.
Although M. Barbusse is one of the most distinguished contemporaryFrench writers of short stories, he has found in the novel form themost fitting literary medium for the expression of his philosophy, andit is to realism rather than romanticism that he turns for theexposition of his special imaginative point of view. And yet thisstatement seems to need some qualification. In his introduction to"Pointed Roofs," by Dorothy Richardson, Mr. J.D. Beresford points outthat a new objective literary method is becoming general in which thewriter's strict detachment from his objective subject matter is unitedto a tendency, impersonal, to be sure, to immerse himself in the lifesurrounding his characters. Miss May Sinclair points out that writersare beginning to take the complete plunge for the first time, andinstances as examples, not only the novels of Dorothy Richardson, butthose of James Joyce.
Now it is perfectly true that Miss Richardson and Mr. Joyce haveintroduced this method into English fiction, and that Mr. FrankSwinnerton has carried the method a step further in another direction,but before these writers there was a precedent in France for thismethod, of which perhaps the two chief exemplars were Jules Romains andHenri Barbusse. Although the two writers have little else in common,both are intensely conscious of the tremendous, if imponderable, impactof elemental and universal forces upon personality, of the profoundmodifications which natural and social environment unconsciouslyimpress upon the individual life, and of the continual interaction offorces by which the course of life is changed more fundamentally thanby less imperceptible influences. Both M. Romains and M. Barbusseperceive, as the fundamental factor influencing human life, thecontraction and expansion of physical and spiritual relationship, theinevitable ebb and flow perceived by the poet who pointed out that wecannot touch a flower without troubling of a star.
M. Romains has found his literary medium in what he calls unanimism.While M. Barbusse would not claim to belong to the same school, and infact would appear on the surface to be at the opposite pole of life inhis philosophy, we shall find that his detachment, founded, though itis, upon solitude, takes essentially the same account of outside forcesas the philosophy of M. Romains.
He perceives that each man is an island of illimitable forces apartfrom his fellows, passionately eager to live his own life to the lastdegree of self-fulfilment, but continually thwarted by nature and byother men and women, until death interposes and sets the seal ofoblivion upon all that he has dreamed and sought.
And he has set himself the task of disengaging, as far as possible, thepurpose and hope of human life, of endeavouring to discover whatpromise exists for the future and how this promise can be related tothe present, of marking the relationship between eternity and time, anddiscovering, through the tragedies of birth, love, marriage, illnessand death, the ultimate possibility of human development andfulfilment.
"The Inferno" is therefore a tragic book. But I think that theattentive reader will find that the destructive criticism of M.Barbusse, in so far as it is possible for him to agree with it, onlyclears away the dead undergrowth which obscures the author's passionatehope and belief in the future.
Although the action of this story is spiritual as well as physical, andoccupies less than a month of time, it is focussed intensely uponreality. Everything that the author permits us to see and understandis seen through a single point of life—a hole pierced in the wallbetween two rooms of a grey Paris boarding house. The time is mostoften twilight, with its romantic penumbra, darkening into theobscurity of night by imperceptible degrees.
M. Barbusse has conceived the idea of making a man perceive the wholespiritual tragedy of life through a cranny in the wall, and there is afine symbolism in this, as if he were vouchsafing us the opportunity toperceive eternal things through the tiny crack which is all that isrevealed to us of infinity, so that the gates of Horn, darkened by ourhuman blindness, scarcely swing open before they close again.
The hero of this story has been dazzled by the flaming ramparts of theworld, so that eternity is only revealed to him in fiery glimpses thatshrivel him, and he is left in the dark void of time, clinging to adream which already begins to fail him.
And the significant thing about this book is that the final revelationcomes to him through the human voices of those who have suffered much,because they have loved much, after his own daring intellectual flightshave failed him.
So this man who has confronted the greatest realities of life, enabledto view them with the same objective detachment with which God seesthem, though without the divine knowledge which transmutes theirdarkness, comes to learn that we carry all heaven and hell withinourselves, and with a relentless insight, almost Lucretian in itsdesperate intensity, he cries: "We are divinely alone, the heavenshave fallen on our heads." And he adds: "Here they will pass again,day after day, year after year, all the prisoners of rooms will pass intheir kind of eternity. In the twilight when everything fades, theywill sit down near the light, in the room full of haloes; they willdrag themselves to the window's void. Their mouths will join and theywill grow tender. They will exchange a first or a last useless glance.They will open their arms, they will caress each other. They will lovelife 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 whichdoes not lie, and which said over again, will satisfy."
Truly a great and pitiless book, but there is a cleansing wind runningthrough it, which sweeps away life's illusions, and leaves a new hopefor 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 shortspeech impressing upon me all the material and moral advantages of theLemercier boarding-house.
I stopped in front of the glass, in the middle of the room in which Iwas going to live for a while. I looked round the room and then atmyself.
The room was grey and had a dusty smell. I saw two chairs, one ofwhich held my valise, two narrow-backed armchairs with smearyupholstery, a table with a piece of green felt set into the top, and anoriental carpet with an arabesque pattern that fairly leaped to theeye.
This particular room I had never seen before, but, oh, how familiar itall was—that bed of imitation mahogany, that frigid toilet table, thatinevitable arrangement of the furniture, that emptiness within thosefour walls.
The room was worn with use, as if an infinite number of people hadoccupied it. The carpet was frayed from the door to the window—a pathtrodden by a host of feet from day to day. The moulding, which I couldreach with my hands, was out of line and cracked, and the marblemantelpiece had lost its sharp edges. Human contact wears things outwith disheartening slowness.
Things tarnish, too. Little by little, the ceiling had darkened like astormy sky. The places on the whitish woodwork and the pink wallpaperthat had been touched oftenest had become smudgy—the edge of the door,the paint around the lock of the closet and the wall alongside thewindow where one pulls the curtain cords. A whole world of humanbeings had passed here like smoke, leaving nothing white but thewindow.
And I? I am a man like every other man, just as that evening was likeevery other evening.
*
I had been travelling since morning. Hurry, formalities, baggage, thetrain, the whiff of different towns.
I fell into one of the armchairs. Everything became quieter and morepeaceful.
My coming from the country to stay in Paris for good marked an epoch inmy life. I had found a situation here in a bank. My days were tochange. It was because of this change that I got away from my usualthoughts and turned to thoughts of myself.
I was thirty years old. I had lost my father and mother eighteen ortwenty years before, so long ago that the event was now insignificant.I was unmarried. I had no children and shall have none. There aremoments when this troubles me, when I reflect that with me a line willend which has las