Lights on the Horizon, Part 2

Part 2

These different kinds of lights, metaphorical and natural, phosphorescent gleams, biolumiscent flickering, slippery and shiny illusions, figures of speech and figures of thought, some become metaphors for how the mind works.  Are these illustrations no more than comic book style symbols, like the lightbulb that appears above the head of a character when she gets an idea, or they deeper and more meaningful insights into the various explanations of the workings of the imagination itself?

The next section is based on longer discussions of George Sand’s experience of orblutes in her autobiographical and other writings.  I there give further examples contemporary to Sand and other enriching explanations of this phenomenon.

George Sand and the Ignis Fatuus

In her autobiography Histoire de ma vie George Sand recounted one of the first examples in her life when she experienced the imagination at work.  As a young child she—still known by her birth name Aurore Dupin[1]—travelled with her mother to Spain where her father had been stationed during the Napoleonic Peninsula Wars.  Playing on the roof an old palace in Madrid where they lived, the little girl saw a myriad of sparkles, lights reflecting off different features of the building.  These painfully blinding gleams—and she wonders in her book of reminiscences, as an adult recalling this event, how she did not actually lose her sight—were not merely playful sparkles that fascinated her; they caused her to see images she knew were not real, hallucinatory phenomena.  That is, there was something between what common sense perceived through the naked eye and the completely inner illusions of dreams and memories in her mind.  These secondary visions caused by brilliant reflections of sunlight were created in processes she would later learn to call her imagination.[2] 

A ma droite, tout un côté de la place était occupé par une église d’une architecture massive, du moins elle se retrace ainsi à ma mémoire, et surmontée d’une croix plantée dans un globe doré.  Cette croix et ce globe étincelant au coucher du soleil, se détachant sur un ciel plus bleu que je ne l’avais jamais vu, sont un spectacle que je n’oublierai jamais, et que je contemplais jusqu'à ce que j’eusse dans les yeux ces boules rouges et bleues…[3]

On my right, along the side of the place was filled by a church with a massive architecture, at least it is thus traced into my memory, and surmounted by a cross planted in a golden globe.  This cross and globe sparkling in the setting sun detached itself from the bluest sky I have ever seen, made a spectacle I will never forget, and that I contemplated until I had these red and blue bubbles in my eyes...[4]           

At first, Aurore enjoys the phenomenon itself as a kind of magical game she can play by herself; but then the mature George Sand considers the absence of an appropriate modern term and the lack of a scientific explanation for its occurrence as part of the education she was acquiring as a person preparing to be the writer of fiction was to be become, an author sensitive to psychological activities in the sensoria and in the inquiring mind.

Then, after describing this optical illusion of her infancy, George Sand turns her attention to the absence of a word for this phenomenon in modern French.  The only term that seems appropriate occurs in her own local dialect (Berrichon) derived through Old French and ultimately from medieval Latin.[5] 

…que par un excellent mot dérivé du latin, nous appelons, dans notre langue du Berry, les orblutes.  Ce mot devrait passer dans la langue moderne.  Il doit avoir été français, quoique je ne l’aie trouvé dans aucun auteur.  Il n’a point d’équivalent, et il exprime parfaitement un phénomène que tout le monde connait et qui ne s’exprime que par des périphrases inexactes.[6]

…which we call, by an excellent word derived from Latin, in our dialect of Berry, orblutes. This word could pass into our modern language.  It could have been French, although I have never found it in any author.  It has no equivalent, and yet it expressed perfectly a phenomenon that everyone knows and which can only be expressed by inexact periphrasis.

It is not a matter, very Romantic in its origins, that if a person or a language does not have a specific word for some experience or object, then such a phenomenon has not been recorded before, as though each language were a hermetically-sealed historical code of reality for its speakers; but rather that cultural filters have been at work to suppress older expressions and images or the experiences themselves have been denied for ideological reasons.  In the search for their “roots” in peasant culture and archaic rituals, many nineteenth-century poets began to search for the pristine knowledge of the “race” in folklore and anthropology by collecting fairy tales, interviewing rural peasants, and delving into their own dreams and hallucinations.  Children, women, country people and “savages” in unfamiliar places were classified along with hysterics, madmen and poets as sources of this vital information that would make boruegois readers able to escape into nostalgia and become more human, it was thought.

Thus George Sand continues with her childish recall of the orblutes when she first saw them in Spain:

Ces orblutes m’amusaient beaucoup, et je ne pouvais pas m’en expliquer la cause toute naturelle.  Je pensais plaisir à voir flotter devant mes yeux ces brûlantes couleurs qui s’attachaient a tous les objets, et qui persistaient lorsque je fermais les yeux,  Quand l’orblute est bien complète, elle vous représente exactement la forme de l’objet qui l’a causée ; c’est une sorte de mirage.  Je voyais donc le globe et la croix du feu se dessiner partout ou se portaient mes regards, et je m’étonne d’avoir tant répété impunément  ce jeu assez dangereux pour les yeux d’un enfant. [7]

These orblutes gave me a great deal of pleasure, and I could not explain their natural cause.  I thought it enjoyable to watch these burning colours that were attached to all the objects float before my eyes, and which continued when I shut my eyes.  When an orblute is finished, it represents to you exactly the form of the object that created it; it is like a mirage.  I could thus see the globe and the cross of fire making pictures of themselves everywhere and carried them in my perceptions, and I am astonished to have repeated this dangerous game so often without harm to my infant eyes.[8]

Sand at this point adds a “scientific” footnote to her text suggesting a slight orthographical change to allow the word to enter into standard modern French.

Pour que le mot fût bon, il faudrait changer une lettre et dire orbluces.[9]

To make the word acceptable, one need only change a single letter and say orbluces.

A modern French editor of the Histoire de ma vie points towards two further novels in which Sand employs the word orblute in the sense first found in her childhood memories.

George Sand emploie ce mot dans La Petite Fadette et Les Maîtres sonneurs, dans un sens assez proche de l’expression populaire « berlue ».[10]

George Sand uses this word in Little Fadette [1851] and The Master Pipers [1853] in a sense very close to the popular expression “burlue”.

The use of the term orblutes in George Sand’s other pastoral novel Les Mâtres sonneurs[11] is even less developed and appears in the text with neither the author herself nor the modern editors offering any gloss. The narrator of the thirty two evening conversations constituting the book finds himself in the middle of the forest, some distance from his own native area where woodcutters and hemp collectors live, among muleteers and more unsavoury types make their livings.  He is there with his female cousin Brulette, and one evening at a celebration, the young woman is insulted by one of the roughnecks, a giant by the name of Malzac, who has approached her too familiarly.  Instead of Tiennet defending her honour, the local host Huriel literally takes up the holly cudgel in her defence, the one-on-one combat according to the rules of that part of the forest.  The fight occurs in near darkness with only two wind-blown torches providing light and it is almost impossible for the narrator to see who is knocked down after a crushing thud is heard.

Lequel était-ce?  Je ne voyais plus, j’avais des orblutes dans les yeux ; mais j’entendis la voix  de Thérence qui disait : —Dieu soit béni, mon frère a gagné ![12]

Which one was it ?  I could no longer see, as I had some orblutes in my eyes; but I heard to the voice of Thérence say:—Bless  the Lord, my brother has won!

In this fictional scene, orblutes represent at least two kinds of blurring of the speaker’s vision during the fight: first, physically, the darkness, the swaying flames of the torches, and the sweat in front of his eyes create the small particles of light; second, in a more psychological sense, anger, fear and confusion at the nature of the combat generate an hallucinatory experience embodied in the appearance of spots or specks.

The term orblutes is also to be found in some of Sand’s accounts of her own studies of folk customs and beliefs which she, like many other European Romantic writers, collected and discussed as the bedrock features of each nation’s racial identity.  While she knows, on the one hand, that the customs and beliefs associated with orblutes has no scientific basis and is more or less pure superstition—relics of an archaic mentality and mythical ways of thinking (what would later be termed la pensée sauvage, primitive thought, she also argues that these narratives, traditions and modes of intellection, though forgotten or rejected by modern Europeans, nevertheless contain within them spiritual truths and insights that will serve to re-humanize the growing bourgeois cities and the technological society that no longer satisfies the poetic imagination.

Other European artists and fiction writers in the course of the nineteenth century attempted to discover in similar phenomena an area and a way of creating an alternative to the common sense perceptions shown by enhanced mechanical technologies (photography and x-rays, for example) and theories of science to be limited, distorting and often altogether false (Darwinian evolution, cellular biology, germs as the cause of disease, for example) and the dynamic, hallucinating and diseased individual mind revealed by psychoanalysis and the collective, traumatized and primitive group mind opened to discussion by anthropology.  Moreover, whereas modern painters, sculptors, composers and other artists (e.e., Impressionists) sought to break away from the structures of academic codes of beauty and classical form by turning their attention to the role of atmosphere, light and distance on what can be seen and reproduced or utilizing advances in chemistry and physics to find new practical methods of using colour and texture, novelists and dramatists

---

 NOTES

[1] Fuller annotations appear in my studies of Alfred Dreyfus In his own Time and Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus in the Phantasmagoria.

[2] Within the same few pages where Sand recalls this experience of the orblutes, she also speaks of how she first came to recognize echoes, thus suggesting an intimate relationship between sound and sight for aesthetic purposes.

[3] George Sand, Histoire de ma vie, ed., Brigitte Diaz (Paris : Le Livre de Poche, 2004) pp. 163-164.

[4] All translations my own unless otherwise indicated.

[5] See L. Vincent, La Langue et le style rustiques du George Sand dans les romans champêtres (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1916). 

[6] Sand, Histoire de ma vie, p.  164. If the derivation is from orbluces, it can yield on the one hand  orb (globe) + lux (light), i.e., globes of light, or as in the Old French orb, from orbum = bereft, something like blind, obscure or dark and so: bright  blinding light.  Cp. Kenneth Urwin, ed., A Short Old French Dictionary for Students (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963) p. 67.

[7] Sand, Histoire de ma vie, p. 164.

[8] Thelma Jurgau edited a group translation of the book for SUNY Press in 1991; they choose to leave orblutes in its original form, but translates mirage by “after-image”. 

[9] Sand, Histoire de ma vie, p. 164, note *.

[10] Diaz in Sand, Histoire de ma vie, p. 164, n.1.

[11] Vincent points out that this is the novel whose language is most distant from modern French (La langue et les style rustique, p. 15).  He sees this novel as “l’apogée des ses essays rustiques.  C’est dans ce roman qu’elle s’éloigne le plus de sa manière d’écrire habituelle…elle la cherche des sites de style plus encore que dans les romans précédents » (Vincent, p. 39). ; « the highpoint of her rustic excercises.  It is in this novel that she distances herself most from her normal way of writing...she seeks out such sites here more than her former novels.”   It is not just a matter of occasional local words or idioms but much more of capturing the syntax and rhythm of speech.  Sand travelled through the regions close to Nohant and spoke with local folk, sensitive to the nuances between the speakers in one village and another (Vincent, p. 21).  Though she did not conduct scientific surveys of the various versions of the patois and indeed often played with the lexicon and grammar she listened to, she was almost unique among nineteenth-century French novelists in taking seriously the sensibility and culture of the country people she engaged with.  Balzac and Flaubert, for example, used dialect as part of the background for local colour and still treated the folk as comic characters (Vincent, pp. 35 ff.).

[12] George Sand, Les Mâtures Sonneurs, p. 200.  In this modern edition, the events occur in the fifteenth evening conversation.  An earlier edition published in1857 by Librarie Nouvelle in Paris places this whole episode into the fourteenth evening (p. 159).