Reading Hoffmann: Mythmaking and Uncanniness in Jean Lorrain's Monsieur de Phocas.

Segnini, Elisa

When E.T.A. Hoffmann's tales were introduced to France in translation in 1833, they became so popular as to inspire an entire genre. Scholars generally contend that in the second part of the nineteenth century, authors associated with the fantastic shifted attention from supernatural phenomena to the inexplicable within the human mind (Wandzioch 207). The French decadent writer Jean Lorrain (1) only occasionally brings the supernatural into play in his stories; scholars have nonetheless categorized his work within the field of the fantastic, citing the troubled psychic state of his characters, the frequent sense of deja vu and the emphasis on hallucinations. (2) In what follows, I examine the significance of E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sand-Man" (1816) for Lorrain's novel Monsieur de Phocas (1901). Further, I demonstrate that the "Freudian" imagery in Lorrain's novel also derives from Hoffman's story, which was in fact the point of departure for Freud's analysis of the uncanny (1919). To draw out the narrative parallels between Freud's and Lorrain's reading of the same source, I will note how Lorrain uses "Sand-Man" imagery as a subtext for his story and discuss the common features of the two works; I will then examine the similarities between Freud's reading of "The Sand-Man" and Lorrain's elaboration of its central motifs. The analysis will shed light on Monsieur de Phocas as a bridging text between the "natural" fantastic of the early nineteenth century and the "inner" fantastic of the fin de siecle and illustrate the extent to which decadent literature engages in an inquiry on the human psyche.

In 1930, Mario Praz described the fin de siecle author Jean Lorrain as "a fumiste [ether addict] of quite deplorable taste" and "a case of 'virility complex' in a being of feminine sensibility, a hysterical, with homosexual tendencies" (338). Today, Lorrain's eccentric personality continues to influence the way in which his fiction is read. Biographers underline how Lorrain was teased and condemned for his ether addiction and sexual inclinations, the latter though he had little solidarity for other homosexual intellectuals. At the time, popular theories such as Von Krafft Ebing's defined homosexuality as a pathology. Lorrain, as Christophe Cima notes, was probably familiar with these treatises and seemed to have perfectly assimilated the homophobic discourse of his contemporaries (121). He was fascinated by "monomanie," a term that in medical discourse was soon to be replaced by "obsessional neurosis," and regularly attended Jean Charcot's lectures on hysteria at the Salpetriere school (Noir 13). Besides his familiarity with Charcot and the interest in hysteria, Lorrain shared with Freud a great appreciation for the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822). At the turn of the century, Hoffman's stories enjoyed an extraordinary popularity encouraged by Jacques Offenbach's operatic version Les Contes d'Hoffmann (1881). Both Freud and Lorrain were particularly struck by the short story "The Sand-Man," which prompted their reflections on the causes and implications of the passion for the inanimate, on the significance of bodily fragmentation, and the relation of both phenomena to uncanny feelings.

Hoffmann's story opens with an exchange of letters through which we learn of Nathaniel's obsession with the Sand-Man, a legendary figure who makes children's eyes pop out of their sockets by throwing sand in their faces. Though this correspondence we learn that as a child, Nathaniel identified the Sand-Man with the unpleasant lawyer Coppelius, his father's friend and collaborator in alchemical experiments. Nathaniel recalls how he hid in his father's studio during one of their reunions and saw blinking, eyeless faces in the fire. He was discovered by Coppelius, who threatened to gouge his eyes out and finally spared him because of his father's pleading. Here Nathaniel's memories become confused: he describes how he fell into an hallucinatory state and sensed Coppelius seizing him violently, taking his limbs apart and reassembling them. We also learn that, a year later, an alchemical explosion caused the death of Nathaniel's father and Coppelius disappeared.

In the second part of the story, Nathaniel, now a university student, recognizes Coppelius in the optician Coppola. He shares this intuition with his fiancee, Clara, but she refuses to consider seriously his childhood obsession. Irritated by Clara's rationality and by her dismissal of the Sand-Man, Nathaniel accuses her of lacking sensitivity and calls her a "lifeless automaton" (200). Later on, Coppola solicits Nathaniel at his house, showing him his lenses and glasses. Staring at the optician's wares, Nathaniel recognizes the same blinking eyes he glimpsed during his father's alchemical experiments. Nevertheless, he buys a pair of glasses and wonders at the improvement of his vision. Through these lenses, he spies on Olimpia, the daughter of the physics professor Spalanzani. Blinded by his passion, Nathaniel does not realize that Olimpia is a mechanical doll. When, about to propose, he enters her house without notice, he catches Spalanzani and the optician Coppola quarreling over the puppet--and glancing at Olimpia's face, he realizes with a shock that the eyes are missing. In the ensuing confusion, the optician Coppola flees carrying the doll. Spalanzani, distressed at the loss of his invention, screams incoherently to Nathaniel: "Coppelius--he's stolen my best automaton--at which I've worked for twenty years--staked my life upon it--the clock-work--speech--movement-- mine--your eyes--stolen your eyes" and throws at Nathaniel a pair of bloody eyes (211). Seized by a fit of madness, the student attempts to strangle Spalanzani and loses consciousness. He eventually recovers and reconciles with his old fiancee, but when the two are just about to get married and climb to the top of the town's tower to admire the city, Nathaniel looks at Clara through the glasses purchased from Coppola and loses his mind once again. He first attempts to throw his beloved over the parapet, then jumps into the void himself. The narrator informs us that Coppelius is seen among the crowd.

In his 1919 essay, Freud calls Hoffmann a "master of the uncanny" and proceeds to an analysis of "The Sand-Man" that, as scholars have pointed out, overlooks several structural and thematic elements of the original text. (3) His interpretation is well known. He rejects the idea that uncanny feelings derive from a reader's hesitation between a natural and a fantastic explanation, since in his view there is no doubt that Coppelius is the Sand-Man. He then argues that the Sand-Man represents the central motif of the story, that anxiety about the eyes is a substitute for the fear of castration, and that the Sand-Man replaces "the dreaded father at whose hands castration is expected" (231). The same logic applies to Nathaniel's experience of dismemberment. Hoffmann leaves the reader uncertain as to whether Coppelius really takes Nathaniel's limbs apart, or whether this is only the child's perception. Freud ignores the ambiguity and relates bodily fragmentation to castration anxiety: "Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist ... all of these have something particularly uncanny about them. [...] This kind of uncanniness springs from its proximity to the castration complex" (244). In a long footnote, he continues the interpretation by identifying the doll Olimpia as a dissociated complex of Nathaniel. In his view, the protagonist, unable to love a woman, reverses his "senseless obsessive love" on the inanimate object. In the same footnote, Freud claims that Coppelius acts as an evil double of Nathaniel's father, and that Spalanzani (the scientist and progenitor of Olimpia) and Coppola (the optician) reenact the dyad of the good and the bad father.

Jean Lorrain also considered E.T.A. Hoffmann a master of troubling fantasies and often drew inspiration from his work for his own fiction (Kingcaid 75, Anthony 147). In "Trio de masques," Hoffmann is "the best director of the fantastic and the unexpected," (4) and "the first deformer" (80). (5) In "Nuit de Janvier," he is a "a real master of nightmares" (327). (6) Among Hoffmann's stories, Lorrain has a particular predilection for "The Sand-Man." In "Nuit de Janvier," Coppelius is mentioned as a person one should not associate with (327), and in "Lanterne magique," he is again conjured when the narrator accuses an electrician of having killed the fantastic: "you are one of the murderers of the fantastic; you and your horrible mania of explaining, demonstrating everything. Compared to you even the scientist Coppelius, the man of the wax dolls, is almost an honest man, or at least I consider him relatively honest" (48; italics mine). (7) References to Hoffmann are also present in Monsieur de Phocas. Here, the wicked character Claudius Ethal is called "the man of the wax dolls" [l'homme aux poupee de cire], while the protagonist, the duke of Freneuse, is described as one of Hoffmann's characters: "Him, an invalid? No--a character from the tales of Hoffmann! Have you never taken the trouble to look at him carefully?" (58). (8) From the outset, "The Sand-Man" is therefore indicated as an inter-text for Lorrain's novel.

Although only twenty-eight, the Hoffmannesque Freneuse has degenerated prematurely and looks twice his age. He suffers from visions in which he sees human faces around him change into horrible masks and is fascinated by jewels and statues with void eyes. In these objects, he discerns a fleeting blue and green gaze that he associates with the Semitic goddess Astarte. He initially pursues this look in the eyes of the mime Willi Stephenson--"beaute d'echafaud" (75)--and of the dancer Ize Kranile, who is repeatedly compared to Salome. Both disappoint him, and he concludes that Astarte's look was only an illusion; however, he continues to glimpse its fleeting manifestations in the most various circumstances. One day, the duke meets the artist Ethal, who claims to be able to cure him through gradual exposure to artifacts that mirror his obsession. The therapy unveils the connection between Astarte's gaze and death, exacerbates Freneuse's fixation, and brings him close to committing a crime. His exasperation reaches a peak at an opium party during which he experiences frightening hallucinations. He is saved by Sir Thomas Welcome, a handsome millionaire who claims to have suffered from the same illness and to know how to heal it. In the last part of the novel, Freneuse hesitates between Ethal and Welcome, who appear to be mysteriously close to one another. Eventually, Ethal becomes the victim of the same murderous instinct he has incited. Freneuse kills the artist by making him swallow the poison contained in an eye-shaped jewel. Freneuse changes his name to Phocas and leaves for Asia.

As Robert Ziegler notes, Lorrain's texts "chart a never-ending journey back through the writings that inspired them" (899). In Monsieur de Phocas, scholars have identified the influence of Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray and Huysmans's A rebours (Jullian 257), as well as a vast set of quotations and intertextual references. (9) The connection to Hoffmann's "Sand-Man" is less evident from the plot and must be identified on a structural and symbolic level.

As indicated, "The Sand-Man" opens with an exchange of letters between Nathaniel, his fiancee Clara, and Clara's brother Lothar. These letters refer to an episode from Nathaniel's childhood--the encounter with the Sand-Man and the death of his father--but are written by adults who now have some distance from the events. In the second part of the story, an omniscient narrator takes over the narrative, but the reader remains unsure: is the Sand-Man responsible for driving Nathaniel to madness? Or is it all a creation of his mind? In Monsieur de Phocas, Lorrain uses a similar narrative strategy. The book begins with a preface by the journalist to whom the protagonist, after murdering Ethal, has entrusted his journal. The journalist admits to having edited the manuscript, censoring its most outrageous pages. In addition, Freneuse's narrative, like the account of a patient suffering from hysteria, is filled with gaps and partial amnesias. Given the limited perspective, we wonder whether Astarte's gaze is really the source, or only a symptom, of the protagonist's neurosis. Both Hoffmann and Lorrain's texts remain unresolved.

Reading both "The Sand-Man" and Monsieur de Phocas requires a visual imagination. In "The Sand-Man," Clara is introduced through a comparison with a painting and Spalanzani is described as a copy of the character of Cagliostro painted by Chodowiecki. In Monsieur de Phocas, Ethal finds a double in the dwarf of the Duca D'Alba depicted by Antonio Moro. In addition, Freneuse describes in detail every statue and painting in which he identifies Astarte's gaze, as well as the works of art that he observes as part of his therapy, familiarizing the reader with artists such as Gustave Moreau, Jan Toorop, James Ensor and Felicien Rops. These stylistic devices are important because they remind us that both stories revolve about a matter of perception. Furthermore, in both "The Sand-Man" and Monsieur de Phocas, the characters have symbolic names. In "The Sand-Man," Coppola and Coppelius are reminiscent of Coppo, meaning eye-socket, and Clara, as her name suggests, has a clear and rational vision (Weber 1123). In Monsieur de Phocas, Phocas is the name of a byzantine emperor (Jullian 256), while the two names of the protagonist underline his inner division (Du Plessis 71); the name change entails a shift from a feminine ending ('euse') to a masculine termination ('as') (Zinck 35).

As with Nathaniel in "The Sand-Man," in Monsieur de Phocas, the roots of Freneuse's problem date back to the earliest years of his life. Each character insists that his malaise is the consequence of an external influence, a dark force that has been haunting him since childhood, but each has difficulties determining the moment in which this persecution began and uses narrative to delve into his obsessions. Nathaniel examines his fixation with the Sand-Man first in a letter, and later in a poem. Freneuse makes therapeutic use of his journal, taking note of each manifestation of Astarte's gaze along with his own reactions and associations. "A horrible thing has crossed my path," writes Nathaniel in "The Sand-Man"; "dark forebodings of a cruel, threatening fate tower over me like a dark cloud" (185). "A veritable Demon tortures and haunts me, and this since my adolescence. Who knows? Maybe it was already in me when I was a child" (55), (10) reflects Freneuse in Monsieur de Phocas. A few pages later, the demonic possession becomes a sickness and the duke acknowledges that it has long been present in himself: "It was latent in me, like a fire smouldering beneath the ashes. I have cherished it since ... perhaps since early childhood, for it must always have been in me, although I did not know it!" (40). (11)

This obscure element affects Nathaniel and Freneuse's relationship to women. As Freud notes, the Sand-Man creates a disturbance between Nathaniel and Clara. The tension between the two reaches a peak when Nathaniel reads Clara a poem that involves gruesome eye-imagery, in which he describes the destruction of their happiness by the Sand-Man. Clara, upset by this scenario, reiterates that the Sand-Man exists only in Nathaniel's mind. It is at this moment that Nathaniel, aghast by her rationality, accuses her of lacking sensitivity, calling her a "lifeless automaton." In Monsieur de Phocas, Astarte's gaze similarly affects Freneuse's ability to love. From the outset, he connects the blue and green gaze that he detects in jewels and portraits with the difficulties of his erotic life:

Oh, that blue and green something which was revealed to me in inert depths of certain gems, and even-more in the depths of certain painted expressions--the plaintive emeralds of Barrucchini's jewellery, and the eyes of certain portraits--I had not yet defined it. I had suffered so excessively from my inability to love almost all women because none of them truly had that expression. (41) (12)

He initially hopes to find Astarte's look in the eyes of Willie and Ize, but is appalled by their manipulative behavior and willingness to sell themselves for money. After a disastrous dinner with Ize, he has a nightmare in which he finds himself in a neighborhood of ghastly prostitutes with the eyes of his ex-lovers:

They might have been huge marionettes, or tall mannequin dolls left behind in panic [...] I was alone with these simulacra of love, abandoned by the men on the doorsteps of the brothels. I had been wandering for hours without being able to find a way out of that miserable quarter, obsessed by the fixed and varnished eyes of all these automata, when I was seized by the sudden thought that all these girls were Dead [des mortes], plague-stricken and putrefied by cholera where they stood, in the solitude, beneath their carmine plaster masks [...] I was alone with the masks, with masked corpses [des cadavres masques], worse than the mask ... when, all of a sudden, I perceived that beneath the false faces of plaster and cardboard, the eyes of these Dead women were alive. (64) (13)

In his essay on the uncanny, Freud explains the link between uncanny feelings and repetition by narrating an experience of getting lost in a provincial town and ending up in a red-light district, an experience he compares to a dream. (14) In his nightmare, Lorrain's protagonist is similarly unable to find a way out of the neighborhood and is haunted by the women's use of cosmetics. After this episode, he develops a terror of masks and begins to see them everywhere, horrified by the dead soul hidden beneath them: "I am happy now, when there are only masks! Sometimes, I detect the cadavers beneath, and remember that beneath the masks there is a host of spectres" (65). (15) Since the statues in which Freneuse distinguishes the alluring green and blue look are busts with void eyes, thus themselves a form of mask, this vision turns the mask from an object of attraction into a token of fear, unveiling Astarte's double identity as a goddess of lust and death, at once "Venus" and "demon" (283). The metaphorical link between masks and busts, as objects that share a relation of resemblance, is then extended to the automaton. Freneuse explicitly refers to Hoffmann as he describes a cabaret singer as the automaton Olimpia:

I did not hear the singing of a living woman, but of some automaton pieced together from disparate odds and ends--or perhaps even worse, some dead woman hastily reconstructed from hospital remains: the macabre fantasy of some medical student, dreamed up on the benches of the lecture-hall ... and that evening began, like some tale of Hoffmann, to turn into a vision of the lunatic asylum. Oh, how that Olympia of the concert-hall has hastened the progress of my malady! (66) (16)

In the beginning of the novel, Phocas is described as an androgynous being with a waxen complexion and compared to a "Hoffmann character," an allusion to the doll Olimpia. In the journal entry on the cabaret singer, Freneuse refers once again to Hoffmann's story by placing himself in the role of his protagonist, and compares his sickness to that of Nathaniel, further elaborating on the connection between the doll Olimpia and death. Like Nathaniel, Freneuse suffers from a disorientation that prevents him from distinguishing the animate from the inanimate. While real women are for him anatomical models, "chairs a experience, pas meme a plaisir" (216), he falls prey to the void eyes of the Louvre's Venuses, in which he detects at once a sense of death and the look of Astarte: "huge Venuses of bronze, leprously calcined in places, whose eyes were fulgurant, splendidly empty, in their masks of black metal" (49). (17) Both Lorrain's and Hoffmann's protagonists attribute to artifacts human sensibility and treat women as "lifeless automatons" and "anatomical mannequins." Both reject their female companions and fall desperately in love with images.

Another important parallel between Hoffmann and Lorrain's works consists in the relations of the protagonists to a series of mentors or, to use Freud's terminology, "father-figures." Like Nathaniel, Freneuse grows up without a father and, as an adult, continues to look for father-substitutes. In his analysis of "The Sand-Man," Freud observes how Nathaniel confronts again the dyad of the good and the evil father, represented by his father and Coppelius, through his encounter with Olimpia's "good father" Spalanzani and the horrific optician Coppola. In Monsieur de Phocas, Freneuse finds a healer and mentor in the older artist Ethal, who is evocative of Hoffmann's Coppelius and Spalanzani. Like Coppelius, he is broad-shouldered with an enormous head and big hairy hands. Like Spalanzani, he looks like a character in a painting (18) and makes wax statues with a deceptive life-like appearance. Moreover, like Coppelius and Spalanzani, who attempt to recreate life in their alchemical experiments, Ethal uses his artistic talent to animate his wax statues. To do so, just like Spalanzani, who, in "The Sand-Man," needs "stolen" eyes for his automaton, Ethal seeks a model close to death to endow his work with Astarte's gaze. By introducing Freneuse to a series of portraits of cadaverous women and a terminally ill adolescent, Ethal teaches him that Astarte's gaze is located in the liminal territory between life and death.

In "The Sand-Man," Nathaniel believes he has acquired an extraordinary sight with Coppola's glasses, but this clarity of vision is only a distortion that leads him to confuse animate and inanimate, reality and fantasy. In Monsieur de Phocas, a similar manipulation of the protagonist's perception occurs under Ethal's influence. The artist, a "great deformer," leads Freneuse to recognize the masks that hide behind each human face. Freneuse believes he acquired an extraordinary lucidity (clairvoyance atroce), but these visions soon degenerate into hallucinations that aggravate his vicious instinct. In "The Sand-Man," Nathaniel, who has already demonstrated his violent temper by fighting Clara's brother and attempting to strangle Spalanzani, mistakes Clara for Olimpia as he is looking at her through Coppola's glasses and attempts to push her from the tower. In Monsieur de Phocas, Freneuse fantasizes about strangling his girlfriend Willie, is haunted by dreams of decapitation, and attempts to suffocate a young prostitute.

In "The Sand-Man," first Nathaniel's father and Coppelius, and later Spalanzani and Coppola, are rivals and allies united by a shared secret: their interest in alchemy and the legend of the Sand-Man. In Monsieur de Phocas, a similar relationship binds the artist Ethal and the millionaire Welcome, two older men who claim to be able to cure Freneuse of his illness. This bond revolves around a mysterious statue and the cult of the goddess Astarte. In the course of an opium party organized by Ethal, Freneuse--like Nathaniel when he is spying on Coppelius--falls into a semi-trance, "a chaos of brief, incoherent and bizarre hallucinations" (139), (19) and cannot distinguish fantasy from reality. In this altered state, he hallucinates an assault by innumerable bats and, enfeebled, watches the faces of two Javanese dancers separate from their bodies. Suddenly, four disembodied hands threaten his eyes with their fingernails:

I saw the singularly bloated faces of the two Javanese servants, laughing mockingly. They floated in mid-air, disembodied, like two transparent varnished bladders, whitely diademed. Percolating from their half closed eyes, as if shining through two slots, was a dead and greasy gaze. The two bladders laughed, while four hands without arms came towards my face: four soft and cadaverous hands, menacing my eyes with their sharp fingernails. (141) (20)

Like Nathaniel caught spying on the Sand-Man, Freneuse risks losing his sight. In "The Sand-Man," Nathaniel's father intervenes to save his son's eyes; in Monsieur de Phocas, it is Welcome who safeguards Freneuse's vision by waking him up from his opium nightmare and offering to lead him away from Ethal. But the episode maintains an ambiguity: like Nathaniel's father and Coppelius in "The Sand-Man," Ethal and Welcome are mysteriously close, and it is unclear which of them is holding Freneuse's hand during the hallucinations.

In both stories, the enigmatic character of these relationships is emphasized by a process of conflation. In "The Sand-Man," while Nathaniel is spying on his father and Coppelius, he observes the two figures merging: "As my father bent down over the fire how different he looked! His gentle features seemed to be drawn up by some dreadful convulsive pain into an ugly, repulsive Satanic mask. He looked like Coppelius" (188). A year later, when Nathaniel's father dies in an alchemical explosion, Nathaniel examines the corpse and finds his features "fearfully distorted" (189). As an adult, he identifies the optician Coppola with the lawyer Coppelius; their common identity is confirmed at the end of the story when Coppelius is seen at the site of Nathaniel's suicide. Similar conflations take place in Monsieur de Phocas. The novel contains a chapter, modeled after Gide's Les nourritures terrestres, in which Freneuse, eager to escape from Paris, returns to his family estate in Normandy. In this digression, the reader is introduced to Freneuse's memories and his lonely childhood. The duke, the reader discovers, grew up without a father and with little attention from a sick mother. He found a paternal substitute in Jean Destreux, a handsome farmer who treated him as if he were his own son. We also learn that the young Freneuse witnessed Jean Destreux being run over by a wagon and killed. Like Nathaniel with his father, Freneuse examined Destreux's body and caught his dying glance, which continued to haunt him in adulthood. "Comme Thomas Welcome lui ressemble!" (227), (21) Freneuse writes, becoming aware of the resemblance. While, in "The Sand-Man," Nathaniel finds his dead father's features transformed into the mask of Coppelius, in Monsieur de Phocas Freneuse recognizes the features of Jean Destreux in his new mentor Welcome. In both stories, the conflated characters (Nathaniel's father/Coppelius; Coppelius/Coppola; Ethal/Welcome; Welcome/Destreux) function as the doubles of one another and as the embodiment of the Sand-Man and the Goddess Astarte, respectively.

When Freud, in his analysis of Hoffmann's tale, claims that Coppelius is without any doubt the Sand-Man, he ignores the ambiguity of the text. After the digression into Freneuse's childhood, in which Astarte's gaze is identified in the dying expression of Jean Destreux, the reader is similarly tempted to trace the source of Freneuse's obsession to his relationship with the farmer. But to do so would mean ignoring the complexity of Lorrain's text, which continues to pile up objects metaphorically linked to the mask--on the one hand, busts and statues with void eyed and severed heads, and, on the other, life-like automatons and death-like beings--extending them into the narrative segment. (22) Every new element is initially introduced as the key to Freneuse's neurosis but then revealed as just another of Astarte's masks and supplanted by a new embodiment of her gaze.

In order to understand the economy of desire in Monsieur de Phocas, we need to turn to another work by Lorrain, entitled "Madame Pygmalion." In this story, a marquise who, unlike Freneuse, makes no mystery of her homosexuality, falls in love with a statue of Diana. She wonders whether her infatuation can be explained through the statue's resemblance to one of the women she has loved, but soon dismisses this possibility: "So it would be simple ... but no, and the marquise, bravely straddling a club chair, leaned her chin on her hands, smiling, her eyes filled with images and visions of women, although none of whom had, alas! the sleek and beautiful slenderness of Diana ("Madame Pygmalion" 17, my translation). (23) In Monsieur de Phocas, the fact that desire is directed to artifacts such as portraits and statues encourages us to look for a model, but it soon becomes clear that none of Freneuse's ex-lovers is endowed with the goddess's gaze and that such a degree of perfection can be identified only in the inanimate--or at the boundaries between life and death. (24)

After Welcome warns Freneuse of Ethal's influence, he confesses to having suffered a similar illness and to having long searched for Astarte's gaze: "The masks which haunt you took for me the specific form of a severed head. Oh, how this became an illness, a disequilibrating obsession! I saw it everywhere; on every side that rictus of decapitation was railing at me, taunting me" (152). (25) By establishing an association between Astarte's gaze, masks and decapitation, Welcome connects anxiety about the eyes and bodily fragmentation. He continues his confession, describing his encounter with the goddess's gaze during a journey to Egypt:

It was a slender figure, dressed like a donkey-driver, in a thin blue robe, with rings of gold at the ankles. It was an adolescent male, but I could not tell whether he was a prince or a [female] slave, for the attitude of the sleeper seemed both royal and servile, embodying royal confidence, servile complaisance and conscious abandon. The robe was open at the neck, exposing a flat chest, as white as ivory--but there was a gaping bloody gash across the neck: a huge scar or an open wound! (149) (26)

In Monsieur de Phocas, desire is genderless: Freneuse recognizes Astarte's gaze in women and men, in the Louvre's Venuses and in the young men painted in Moreau's Pretendents. (27) However, particular emphasis is placed on the androgynous, such as the Louvre's statue of Antinous (28) and the bust of the dying adolescent sculpted by Ethal. The figure that Welcome sees on the sphinx is similarly androgynous and ambiguously described either as a prince or as a female slave.

We have seen that, in the preface, Phocas is depicted as androgynous and compared to Hoffmann's doll Olimpia, while in the journal, Freneuse explicitly identifies with Nathaniel. By comparing his character to both Hoffmann's Olimpia and Nathaniel, Lorrain suggests that his reading of "The Sand-Man" parallels that of Freud, for whom Olimpia is a dissociated complex of the student. Freneuse's journal entry on the fear of masks is in fact followed by a chapter that begins with Paul Valery's "Narcisse parle," in which Freneuse juxtaposes the gaze of Antinous--and, by extension, of Astarte, to that of Narcissus:

The sapphire is the stone of the solitary and the celibate; the sapphire is the gaze of narcissus. [...] And the beautiful lines of Paul Valery! What calmness their sublime nostalgic melancholy brought me! Those lines substituted for my horrible sickness the plight of Narcissus; and thereby cooled that suffering and phosphorous soul which the plaintive eyes of the Antinous has lighted in my being. But sapphires no longer appease me, now that I am haunted by the masks. (67) (29)

In the essay "On Narcissism: An Introduction" (1913), Freud describes narcissism as a normal phase of development that children overcome when they learn to reverse their love on other people. Among other things, he argues that, to the contrary, when beautiful women reach sexual maturity, their narcissism is reinforced and they continue to love primarily themselves. In Freud's view, these women are particularly attractive to men because they remind them of the self-love they experienced in childhood. (30) In the essay on the uncanny, Freud uses this theory again to explain how Nathaniel's love for Olimpia is essentially narcissistic. (31)

By describing Freneuse's attraction to those who cannot return his love--first femme fatales, then a series of statues--Lorrain's novel underlines the theme of narcissism found in Hoffmann. For Freneuse, real women are uncanny, and instead statues and portraits are the objects onto which he projects his passion. In particular, Freneuse is attracted to portrayals of androgynous beings, which function as mirrors reflecting aspects of himself. In "The Sand-Man," Nathaniel declares "Only in Olimpia's love do I recognize myself" and Spalanzani, as Freud reminds us, screams that Olimpia has Nathaniel's eyes. In Monsieur de Phocas, Freneuse is captivated by masks, whose hollow faces he can potentially animate with his own gaze. In automatons, masks and wax mannequins, the two characters see primarily a reflection of themselves. (32) The same year Freud's essay on narcissism appeared, he published "The Theme of the Three Caskets" (1913), in which he emphasized the importance of myth as a source for fairy tales and literature. Freud underlined that myth, by operating through mechanisms such as displacement and condensations, functions in a manner similar to dreams. As an example, he examines how ancient mythical representations of death were replaced, through a substitution of opposites, by deities of love. This process, he argues, was gradual, so that "even the Greek Aphrodite had not wholly relinquished her connection to the underworld." He also notes that "the Great Mother-goddesses of the oriental peoples all seem to have been both creators and destroyers--both goddesses of life and fertility and goddesses of death" (299). In his essay on the uncanny, Freud uses myth to interpret Nathaniel's obsession and writes that:

A study of dreams, phantasies and myth has taught us that anxiety about one's eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated. The self-blinding of the mythical criminal, Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form of punishment of castration--the only punishment that was adequate for him by the lex talionis. (231)

One can argue that Freud makes an instrumental use of the tragedy, since he first reads it in light of his own theory then uses it to support the interpretation of a work of literature that, in his view, operates through similar mechanisms. Cima notes that decadent authors' use of myth was similarly instrumental, since they were indifferent to anachronism and read myth in light of the aesthetic and moral consideration of the Belle Epoque (330).

Monsieur de Phocas revolves around mythical references that had become standard topoi for the Decadents. Salome, who is repeatedly evoked by Freneuse, is the prototype of the femme fatale, the narcissistic woman who is indifferent to the love of men and filled with anger towards them. Julia Kristeva underlines Salome's castrating role (127), (33) while Cornille and Bernheimer point out her relationship to Medusa, a myth that remains implicit in Monsieur de Phocas but is continuously evoked through references to the gaze, snakes and severed heads (Cornille 93; Bernheimer 138). Sharing the motif of decapitation, the myths of Salome and Medusa reflect anxieties around the changing roles of women at the turn of the century. Like the story of Salome, who uses the male gaze to her advantage, Medusa's myth revolves around a look. Sometimes described as beautiful, others as horrendous, the Gorgon is beheaded by Perseus and her head is placed on Athena's shield, but her gaze maintains the power to kill, turning her victims to stone. In Monsieur de Phocas, the same ambiguity characterizes Astarte, at once maternal and threatening, a symbol of love and death. The Gorgon's head, placed on Athena's shield, continues to live through its deadly look; so too the masks, fragmented portraits and severed heads of Lorrain's novel maintain an illusion of life through Astarte's fascinating and terrifying gaze.

After reading Hoffmann's imagery of bodily fragmentation as a metaphor for the castration complex in his essay on the uncanny, Freud went on in "The Infantile Genital Organization" (1924) to argue that the child's fear of castration is reflected in the myth of the Gorgon, the Greek symbol for terror. Elaborating on Ferenczi's contention that Medusa's head represents the woman's genitals, he adds that the genitals are those of the mother, whom the child perceives as having been castrated. In the essay "Das Medusenhaupt" (1923), he develops this argument further, adding that the Goddess Athena, who wears the severed head of Medusa on her shield, symbolizes a mother-figure, the sexually unapproachable woman (296). According to Freud, the shock of seeing the mother's genitals confirms the child's fear of castration and pushes him away from women, towards solutions such as fetishism and homosexuality. (34) Does Lorrain take a similar approach, using the motif of the eye, so central to Hoffmann, to suggest that the uncanny images that express Freneuse's neurosis are linked to castration anxiety?

To answer this question, it is necessary to examine the extent to which castration imagery enters the narrative on a metaphorical and literal level. At the opium party, after watching the faces of the Javanese dancers detach from their bodies and fearing for his sight, Freneuse continues to hallucinate and, with atrocious pleasure (jouissance atroce) suffers the bites of vampire bats. With erotically charged language, he describes an experience that turns him from victim into perpetrator: "quelque chose de velu, de flasque et de froid mentrait dans la bouche quinstinctivement je mordais, et qui m'emplissait la gorge d'un giclement de sang: un gout de bete morte mempouacrait la langue, une bouille tiede me collait aux dents" (167). (35)

Cornille interprets this hallucination as an image of castration; he also contends that all neck wounds in the novel should be read as castration simulacra and notes the symbolic role of the eye-shaped jewel with which Ethal is killed, using what is originally an eye-prosthesis for a crime of passion (91). It is not necessary to call on a Freudian reading to support the associations among images of blindness, decapitation, and castration, since examples of similar symbolic substitutions are provided within the narrative itself and are supported by mythical references. The mysterious object that unites Ethal and Welcome is in fact a blind, androgynous statuette of Astarte that exhibits a skull in the place of the sexual organs:

Hieratic and demonic, her body of pure black onyx attracts and reflects the glow of candlelight. Her firm round breasts thrust forward, gleaming above the shadowed abdomen: the narrow and flat abdomen which swells out at the place where the sexual organs should be, in the form of a tiny death's-head. The mocking, menacing, triumphant death's head, symbolic of motherhood and of ancestry! Beneath her low forehead there is the blind gaze of two green eyes: two profoundly dead eyes which see nothing. (218) (36)

This idol conflates imagery of blindness and castration, and suggests that heads and genitals, in the novel, are exchangeable. Moreover, since the skull is also a symbol of death, its presence connects sexuality and deadliness, the fascination of the femme fatale (Salome) with that of the death bride (the automaton Olimpia and its incarnation). This statue has been seen by scholars as an anticipation of "the Freudian notion that the fetish originates in the male child's fear and disavowal of castration" (Ziegler 73). But who is Astarte, the Semitic goddess depicted by Gabriel Rossetti with androgynous features in Astarte Syriaca, and how does she differ from the Greek goddess Aphrodite?

As a Semitic deity, this fertility goddess represents the "Orient," broadly defined in Monsieur de Phocas as a mythical place that accommodates all the vices forbidden in European society: opium, hashish, collections of precious stones and dangerous poisons, as well as admiration for the male body and an aesthetic taste for agony. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when Lorrain wrote Monsieur de Phocas, the source for detailed information about this passionate and ruthless deity was De Dea Syria (Concerning the Syrian Goddess), attributed to Lucian of Samosata and well known in France through Eugene Talbot's translation. In it, we find several descriptions echoed in Monsieur de Phocas. Astarte's statue is decorated with "an overlay of gold and very costly gems, some of which are white, some of which the color of water" (32), (37) the colors of Astarte's gaze and of the eyes of Welcome, Jean Destreux and Freneuse. Furthermore, the statue has a lifelike gaze: "If you stand opposite and look directly at it, it looks back at you and as you move its glance follows" (32). De Dea Syria also contains descriptions of mutilations inspired by the deity. A central role is, for example, played by the legend of Combabus, who castrated himself and continued to drive women mad with unfulfilled love. The ritual of castration in honor of Astarte is described in detail:

The youth for whom these things are in store throws off his clothes, rushes to the center with a great shout and takes up a sword, which, I believe, has stood there for this purpose for many years. He grabs it and immediately castrates himself. Then he rushes through the city holding in his hand the parts he has cut off. He takes female clothing and women's adornment from whatever house he throws these parts into. This is what they do at the castration. (51)

The association with castration imagery underlines how the different embodiments of Astarte--masks, wax busts and severed heads--are simultaneously love-objects and images of death. Lorrain takes the central motifs of Hoffmann's "Sand-Man," Nathaniel's inability to distinguish the animate from the inanimate, his passionate love for Olimpia and his anxiety concerning the eyes, and uses them to recount the adventures of a new, yet surprisingly familiar character. He substitutes the folk-tale of the Sand-Man with the cult of Astarte and transfers to the deity the association with vision. Inspired by Hoffmann, Lorrain uses motifs typical of the fantastic--such as the double, the portrait and the mask--but shifts attention from the supernatural to the distorted perception of the protagonist and the neurotic nature of his hallucinations, associating uncanny imagery with the return of the repressed in a way that prefigures the Freudian approach.

I have identified several similarities between Freud's interpretation and Lorrain's version of Hoffmann's tale, but the analysis has also unveiled major differences. Both Freud and Lorrain elaborate on the protagonist's passion for the inanimate, trace it back to his inability to love and connect it to an attraction to death. Both are struck by Hoffmann's scenes of blinding and bodily fragmentation and associate them with castration imagery. However, Freud insists that uncanny feelings have nothing to do with intellectual uncertainty, while Lorrain, by locating Astarte's gaze at the boundaries between life and death, emphasizes that the uncanny belongs to this liminal territory. Moreover, Freud's underlying contention is that literature, by undoing some of the censorship imposed on the unconscious, brings insight into the human mind. Monsieur de Phocas is an inquiry into the repressed, but is confined to an examination of the pathological and has no ambition of explaining archetypes of the general psyche. (38) Lastly, Freud resorts to his own theory of the castration complex to explain Nathaniel's love for Olimpia and his obsession with the Sand-Man. In Monsieur de Phocas, the association between blinding and bodily fragmentation is made but not explained, and castration anxiety is not presented as the origin for Freneuse's neurosis, but as one of the elements that characterize it.

By illustrating the extent to which Lorrain's reading of Hoffmann parallels that of Freud, this comparative analysis has underscored Freud's use of the castration complex to account for every interpretative dead-end of Hoffmann's story, as well as highlighting the difficulty of commenting on a text like Monsieur de Phocas without resorting to psychoanalytic theory. Elaborating on Lacan and Derrida, Samuel Weber notes that: "the distinctive character of the uncanny [...] involves the recurrence and repetition of castration, which however, is itself [...] a form of repetition and not to be confused with a unique, visible event" (1123). We can recognize a similar pattern in Monsieur de Phocas, where desire comprises a fascination with death and mutilation and shifts metonymically from a simulacrum to another, always evocative of other images but never coinciding with a model. The search for Astarte's gaze leads us into a loop and back to the deceptive look of the mask, thereby contributing the story's uncanniness.

Notes

(1.) Jean Lorrain is a pseudonym for Paul Duval (1855-1906).

(2.) Among scholars who contextualize Lorrain within the field of the fantastic we can mention Thibaut d'Anthonay, Magdalena Wandzioch, Will Mc Lendon, Rober Ziegler and Amy Ransom.

(3.) Helene Cixous, Sarah Kofman, Neil Hertz and Samuel Weber have subjected both Freud's essay and his reading of E.T.A. Hoffmannn's "The Sand-Man" to deconstructive readings, demonstrating that Freud's summary already contains an interpretation, as he deliberately ignores several aspects of the story, such as the multiple perspectives, the poem written by Nathaniel, the role of Clara in the final scene. See Cixous (352-48), Hertzt (97-122), Kofman (1973: 135-81).

(4.) "Le metteur en scene par excellence du fantastique et de l'imprevu."

(5.) "Le premier des deformateurs."

(6.) "Vrai maitre du cauchemar."

(7.) My translation. "... vous etes un des assassins de la Fantaisie avec votre horrible manie d'expliquer tout, de tout prouver, et aupres de vous le savant Coppelius lui- meme, l'homme aux poupee de cire, est presque un honnete homme, au moins je l'estime relativement pour tel."

(8.) "Un malade, lui, non, un personage de conte d'Hoffmann! Vous etes-vous jamais donne la peine de bien le regarder?"

Unless otherwise indicated, English translations from Monsieur de Phocas are by Francis Amery. I will note when Amery's translation significantly alters the original.

(9.) Among the works that are part of the net of intertextuality of the novel we can mention Huysman's A Rebour, Gide's Nourritures terrestres, Rachilde's Les Hors Nature, Mirbeau's Le Jardin des Supplices, Barbey d'Aurevilly's Diaboliques and numerous verses by Musset and Baudelaire (Zinck 305-14). As Zinck underlines the importance of the fantastic inter-text: "[le duc] reste en definitive un etre de papier: pure litterature. Toute velleite de l'inscrire dans la realite d'un monde a la Charcot, de lui donner un semblant d'epaisseur, est evacuee au profit de l'assimilation au genre fantastique represente par Hoffmann" (38). "In the end Freneuse remains a paper-being: pure literature. The desire to inscribe him in the reality of Charcot's world, of giving him an appearance of thickness, is abandoned in favor of the assimilation to the fantastic genre, represented by Hoffmann" (my translation).

(10.) "[U]n Demon me torture et me hante, cela et cela depuis mon adolescence. Qui sait? Peut-etre etait-il deja en moi quand je n'etais qu'un enfant" (28).

(11.) "Il etait latent en moi, comme un feu sous des cendres; je le caressais depuis ... depuis mon enfance peut-etre, car il fut toujours en moi ... mais je ne le savais pas!" (67).

(12.) "Oh! cette chose bleue et verte qui me fut revelee dans l'eau morte de certaines gemmes et l'eau plus morte encore de certains regards peints, la dolente emeraude des joyaux de Barrucchini et de certains yeux de portraits, je ne l'avais pas definie encore, et si j'ai tant souffert de mon impuissance d'aimer aupres de toutes ces femmes, c'est qu'aucune d'elles n'avait vraiment de regard" (67).

(13.) "On eut dit de grandes marionnettes, de longues poupees mannequinees oubliees la dans la panique ... j'etais seul avec ces simulacres d'amour abandonnes par les hommes au seuil des maisons de joie et deja, depuis des heures, j'errais sans pouvoir sortir de ce quartier morne, obsede par les yeux vernisses et fixes de tous ces automates, quand une soudaine idee me venait que toutes ces filles etaient des mortes, des pestiferees ou des choleriques pourrissant la, dans la solitude, sous des masques de platre et de carmin [...] j'etais seul; avec des masques, avec des cadavres masques, pis que des masques, quand tout a coup je m'apercevais que sous ces faux visages de platre et de carton les prunelles de ces mortes vivaient" (90).

The ghastly, doll-like prostitutes of this nightmare closely resemble the women described in Lorrain's story "Lanterne magique" (1900), whose cadaverous look is explicitly compared to the doll Olimpia (51-2).

(14.) "The factor of repetition of the same thing will perhaps not appeal to everyone as a source of uncanny feeling. From what I have observed, this phenomenon does undoubtedly, subject to certain conditions and combined with certain circumstances, arouse an uncanny feeling, which, furthermore, recalls the sense of helplessness experienced in some dreamstate. As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the desert streets of a provincial town in Italy which was unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter of whose character I could not remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a time without enquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street" (Freud, "The Uncanny" 237).

(15.) "Heureux suis-je, maintenant, quand ce ne sont que des masques! Parfois, je devine le cadavre dessous, et ce sont souvent plus que des masques, puisque ce sont des spectres que je vois" (91).

(16.) "Je necoutais pas chanter une femme vivante, mais un automate aux pieces disparates et montees de bric et de broc, peut-etre pis encore, une morte hativement reconstituee avec des dechets d'hopital, quelque macabre fantaisie d'interne imagine sur le bancs de l'amphitheatre ; et cette soiree commencee comme un conte d'Hoffmann s'achevait en vision d'hopital. Oh! Cette Olympia de beuglant, comme a precipite la marche de mon mal!" (93).

Amery's translation, in this passage, differs from the original where emphasis is placed on the transition from "conte d'Hoffmann" to "vision d'hopital." Amery translates the latter to "lunatic asylum"; "morgue" would be a more accurate rendering.

(17.) "Des Grandes Venus de bronze calcine et comme lepreuses par places, dont les yeux fulguraient, splendidement vides, dans leur masque de metal noir" (77).

(18.) As indicated, in both stories characters are repeatedly compared to visual images. Spalanzani finds a double in the character of Cagliostro as painted by Chodowiecki, Ethal in the dwarf of the Duca D'Alba as depicted by Antonio Moro.

(19.) "Un chaos d'hallucination, breves, incoheerentes, bizarres" (165).

(20.) "Je voyais ricaner les faces singulierement gonflees de deux Javanaises. Elles flottaient sans corps comme deux vessies transparentes et vernies; diademes de longs vers blancs, leurs yeux mi-clos laissaient filtrer, comme par deux fentes, un regard huileux et mort. Les deux vessies riaient, tandis qu'approchees de mon visage, leurs quatre mains sans bras, quatre mains molles et exsangues menacaient mes yeux de leurs ongles aigus" (167).

(21.) "How he resembles Thomas Welcome!" (203).

(22.) The gaze between life and death is also a feature associated with the mask, especially in its specific shape of a death mask.

(23.) "Alors, ce serait tout simple ... mais non; et la marquise, enfourchant bravement une fumeuse, appuyait en souriant son menton sur ses mains, les yeux remplis d'images et de visions de femmes, mais dont aucun n'avais, helas! La svelte et superbe gracilite de la Diane" ("Madame Pygmalion" 17).

(24.) Scholars have noted the metonymic displacement that desire undergoes in the narrative: "Desire does not have an origin, does not recognize itself in a model, it is always taken towards other referents, in a substitution without end, away from the original scene" (Cornille 88, my translation). "Indeed, the narrative of Monsieur de Phocas is structured primarily as the syntagmatic enchainment of a series of substitutions or a paradigm" (Du Plessis 152).

(25.) "Les masques qui vous hallucinent seprecisaient enmoi dans une tete coupee, celametait devenu une maladie, une desequilibrante obsession; oh! J'ai souffert. J'en voyais partout; partout des rictus de decapites me raillaient, me sollicitaient" (178).

(26.) "C'etait une forme jeune et svelte, vetue, comme les aniers fellahs, d'une mince gandoura bleue, avec des anneaux d'or aux chevilles, la forme adolescente ou d'un prince ou d'une esclave, car l'attitude de ce sommeil offert etait a la fois royale et servile: royale de confiance, servile de complaisance et de savant abandon. La gandoura s'ouvrait sur une poitrine plate, d'une blancheur d'ivoire; mais au cou saignait, comme une large entaille, une cicatrice ou une plaie!" (175).

(27.) Scholars have seen in this painting the key for interpreting the novel; in particular, Bernheimer has argued that "The mythical figures that are carriers of the look, Salome and Astarte in particular, have the role of Athena in Moreau's painting: they are stand-ins for the male sadist from whom the masochistic desires self- shattering pleasure" (121).

(28.) In decadent imagery, this statue is a topos for homosexual desire.

(29.) "Le saphir, la pierre de la solitude et du celibat, le saphir, le regard de Narcisse. [...] Et le beaux vers de Paul Valery! Quel calme leur melancolie nostalgique et sublime apportait en moi! A mon horrible mal ils substituaient, ces vers, la brulure de Narcisse; et cette brulure etait encore de la fraicheur aupres de l'ame de soufre et de phosphore qu'ont allumee en mon etre les yeux dolents de l'Antinous ... Les saphirs ne m'apaisent plus depuis que je suis hante" (93)

(30.) Sarah Kofman has pointed out that Freud's argument carries a problematic implication: he maintains that healthy love is reciprocal, but by arguing that men feel attracted to women because they recognize the self-love they once experienced, he suggests that they see in these women their own double and that this love, too, is in essence, narcissistic (L'enigme de la femme 66).

(31.) Curiously, another example for secondary narcissism is for Freud the criminal as described in literature, a type to which both Nathaniel and Freneuse, with their murderous fantasies, come very close.

(32.) Praz extends this interpretation to the author's biography, noting that Astarte's eyes are blue/green, the same color as the eyes of Lorrain: "These eyes, in which 'luit et sommeille une eau si verte, l'eau morne et corrompue d'une ame inassouvie, la dolente emeraude d'une effrayante luxure,' were precisely the eyes of Jean Lorrain himself, which Normandy described thus: 'des prunelles glauques, caressantes, extenuees et comme defaillantes en une interminable agonie'" (348).

(33.) In Kristeva's view, Salome is "la femme sublime, la castratrice dont reve le male qui eprouve quelques difficultes a jouir, c'est-a-dire plutot tout le monde." (The sublime woman, the castrating woman who is the dream-object of men who encounter difficulties in reaching pleasure--that is, of everybody.)

In 1909, a few years after the publication of Lorrain's novel, the Viennese artist Julius Klinger painted a satiric portrait of Salome holding a giant, severed phallus (see Dottin Orsini 1996, 41).

(34.) Sarah Kofman notes that, according to this reasoning, all children should turn into fetishists or homosexuals: "It seems that, faced with this horror, man has only two solutions: homosexuality or fetishism" (L'enigme de la femme 100, my translation).

(35.) "Something hairy, flaccid and cold entered my mouth. Instinctively, I bit down on it, and it filled my mouth with a sudden spurt of blood: the taste of some dead animal was bitter on my tongue; a tepid gruel adhered to my teeth" (141).

(36.) "Hieratique et demoniaque, en pur onyx noir, elle attire et reflete en elle la flamme des bougies; ses seins hardis er ronds pointent dans une lueur au-dessus du ventre sombre, un ventre etroit et plat qui se renfle a la place du sexe au-dessus d'une petite tete de mort. La tete de mort ricane, symbolique, menacante, triomphante des maternites et des races! Sous son front bas, c'est l'aveugle regard des deux prunelles vertes, deux yeux d'eau morte qui ne voient pas" (241).

(37.) Translation by W. Attridge and Robert A. Oden. The numbers in parentheses refer to the different sessions.

(38.) One must not forget that the character Freneuse/Phocas belongs to the fin de siecle nobility and that his neurosis reflects contemporary theories of degeneration.

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