The 100 greatest
novels of all time
No. 08
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
(1782)
An epistolary novel and a handbook for seducers: foppish, French, and ferocious.
Its publication caused a scandal and it has seduced generations. As Les Liaisons Dangereuses becomes a ballet, Jason Cowley looks at its many incarnations
Jason Cowley
Saturday 16 July 2005
'I
resolved to write a book that would be quite outside the ordinary trend, which would make a sensation and echo over the world after I left it," Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos wrote of his first and only novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Published in April 1782, Les Liaisons was an immediate sensation, a succès de scandale. Yet later it would be banned in France, and denounced - despite its own insistent morality - as immoral; it would not be translated into English until the 1920s when it was celebrated by, among others, Virginia Woolf. The first major film adaptation was Roger Vadim's dismal offering of 1959, starring Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Philipe. Today, Les Liaisons continues to be translated to the stage and screen: the novel seemingly being reinterpreted for each new generation.
Born in Amiens in October 1741, Laclos was a petit-bourgeois government official who became a career army officer. He was familiar with aristocratic society but never fully part of it: he watched from the margins, observing the decadent excesses, power struggles, extreme narcissism and the stultifying hierarchies of an ancien regime that was soon to be swept away in the revolution. If his great book has a defining theme it is ennui - which, after the publication of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, would become such a preoccupation of later French writers, from Flaubert to Stendhal. The fatally destructive former lovers Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil have everything they want - intelligence, wit, wealth, power, privilege - and yet they have nothing. They are supremely bored, and they are nihilistic in their boredom: they believe in nothing except the satisfaction of their own warped and febrile appetites. "We are fully alive, and yet we experience the void," wrote the French aristocrat Mme du Deffand in a letter to Horace Walpole in the 1860s. This, if anything, would do as an epigraph to Laclos's novel.
I first encountered Les Liaisons in 1987, when I was invited by my elder sister to see Christopher's Hampton's stage version at the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End, with Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan in the leading roles. At that time, I was still an undergraduate and had very little interest in theatre, but there was a lot of noise around "Les Lays", as it was being called, and I was curious to discover what was going on. That evening, I was mesmerised by the lavish sets and the splendour of the costume drama; by the wrenching themes of duplicity and betrayal, and by the extreme eroticism of the performances, notably that of Rickman, who seemed so completely to inhabit the role of the cruel libertine Valmont that it was as if he were lost in a kind of hysteria. Here, I thought, was something comparable in emotional complexity to Othello. On returning home I began to read Laclos's epistolary novel and found myself moved and enthralled all over again.
Hampton would soon take his play to Broadway, with Rickman once more in the role of Valmont, and write the screen play for Stephen Frears' remarkable Hollywood adaptation, Dangerous Liaisons (1988), in which John Malkovich was cast as Valmont, with Glenn Close as Merteuil, his fellow aristocratic co-conspirator. Michelle Pfeiffer convinces as the austere, virtuously married and devoutly religious Madame la Présidente de Tourvel, whom Valmont seeks, for fun, to seduce and thus destroy. Later, Hampton's film version would itself be reinterpreted, the story updated to contemporary Manhattan by Roger Kumble, the writer-director of the stylish yet essentially vacuous Cruel Intentions (1999), starring Ryan Phillippe and Sarah Michelle Gellar as affluent high-school wasters.
There are admirers of Laclos, such as the novelist Michael Dibdin, who believe that any dramatic rendering of this novel is necessarily a travesty because, as Dibdin says, his "characters exist not as actors but writers". Theatre, he continues, "presents us with people in action, speaking and moving and doing, while in Laclos's novel we must follow events indirectly, at second-hand, mediated by a series of more-or-less unreliable narrators in the form of letters designed to impress, persuade, reveal and conceal - in a word, to control".
Dibdin is wrong, I think, to object to the film and stage adaptations of the novel, not least because the original is so long and digressive that its dramatic central story - the seduction, fall and death of Tourvel - is too often lost beneath layers of obfuscation and repetition. There is, too, something unsatisfactorily static about the form of the epistolary novel; it may offer the opportunity to write from multiple points of view - but what about those formal expressions of farewell?
What should be remembered as well is that Laclos's characters, especially Merteuil, may be writers but they are also actors in their own drama: they inhabit roles, they are drawn to game-playing and disguise, and their most affecting letters are more like dramatic monologues, anguished expressions of interiority.
Hampton's achievement was to excavate the bones of a wonderfully dramatic story from the larger body of the text; we watch, fascinated, as Valmont understands too late the truth of his love for Tourvel. In a moment of blinding self-revelation, he realises that, like Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich, his whole life has been wrong, a lie. And yet this most selfish of characters dies in complete self-forgetfulness: he can think, at the end, only of the plight of Tourvel and what he has done to her. Valmont, Rickman has said, "was a cruel part to play for a long time, and I don't think it was entirely healthy for me. It would take a lot to get me to do that again. Valmont is so self-destructive, yet he doesn't know it, so you have to play a lie all the time. I wasn't very pleasant to live with during that period."
As Frears was completing work on Dangerous Liaisons, so the Czech director Milos Forman was also finishing off his own film adaptation. His Valmont (1989), though largely faithful to the novel, has little of the grandeur and none of the tragedy of Hampton's version. It also has a very odd performance by Colin Firth as Valmont, whom he transforms into a kind of dreamy public schoolboy: less diabolical French libertine than a very English Mr Darcy - the man from Bridget Jones, I mean, not even the saturnine object of Elizabeth Bennet's fascination.
Forman is less concerned with Valmont's grand plan to seduce Tourvel than the complex relationship between him and Merteuil (a disconcertingly giggly Annette Bening). Merteuil has - as in the book and against the convention of the time - the ambition, independence and the desire for control of a ruthless man. She is not strictly a feminist, because she cares nothing for other women: she cares only for herself. Forman delights in the cruelties and mischief of her relationship with Valmont, and in the games they play as they set out to cheat, humiliate and destroy. He captures well some of the wit, knowingness and irony of the original novel and faithfully recreates, as does Frears, the often farcical bedroom scenes and elaborate drawing room deceptions as characters slip each other keys or letters in preparation for the midnight wanderings ahead. But through underplaying the seduction of Tourvel, the dynamic that most interested Hampton and Frears, Forman fails to move his audience, and his film expires weakly as he offers up a vision of continuity by suggesting that Valmont will live on into the next generation through his unborn child.
Part of the novel's continuing appeal is undoubtedly that its themes - lust, deceit, selfishness, revenge, jealousy, the link between sex and death - are universal: you suspect that, like Othello it would be understood nearly everywhere around the world and in whichever form it was adapted. One of the best versions I have seen is the Korean director EJ Yong's Untold Scandal which opened in London in April. Here the story is transposed to late-18th-century central Korea and to the final days of the fatigued and corrupt Chosun dynasty. Like Hampton, Yong concentrates on the grand seduction of a virtuous young woman, Lady Chung (played with fine understatement by Jeon Do-Yeon), who is a Catholic convert, and a cruel libertine's moment of belated self-recognition. The extraordinary relationship between the libertine, Lord Cho-Won (Bae Yong-Jun), and the woman whose approval he seeks above all others, the dangerous and formidably articulate Lady Cho (Lee Mi-Sook) is powerfully felt. Untold Scandal is less camp, more nakedly erotic and bleakly elegant than any other film adaptation I have seen. The closing shots - Chung walking to her death across a frozen river, the ice melting beneath her; a dying Cho-Won, blood leaking from a stab wound in his back, riding on horseback along an empty beach as he seeks an impossible reunion with the woman he has wronged - are extremely beautiful and disturbing. Yong's imperial Korea, like Laclos's pre-revolutionary France, is close to cataclysm, the decadence of the characters and their slow glide towards ruin a manifestation of wider political crisis.
What next for Laclos's novel? A new eponymous ballet, directed by Adam Cooper - who has spoken of how he was influenced by Malkovich's screen portrayal of Valmont - and Lez Brotherston, opens at Sadler's Wells in London at the end of this month. This is one of several dance interpretations of the novel being performed around the world including the West Australian Ballet Company's production in Perth. Anyone who saw Frears' film will know that there were moments when it appeared as if he were also trying to choreograph a ballet and indeed the whole of Les Liaisons is, in one sense, an elaborate dance, as characters loop and encircle each other - a dance of seduction and of death.
What is certain is that each new adaptation is a further fulfilment of the great hope of Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos, a hope that is shared by all writers of true ambition as they wager their talent against both death's certainty and forgetting: that his book will "make a sensation and echo over the world after I have left it".
No comments:
Post a Comment