Misty Thule

<p>Adolphe Retté’s <em>Misty Thule</em> originally published in 1891 and here translated into English for the first time by Brian Stable-ford is one of the key documents of the Symbolist Movement and one of the most extreme illustrations of its philosophy. Deliberately breaking the usually-imposed boundaries of poetry and prose sensation and fantasy stories and chapters syntax and punctuation it can be seen at once as a collection in the tradition of Charles Baudelaire’s unfinished <em>Spleen de Paris</em> an <em>avant-garde</em> novel and a work of Surrealism <em>avant la lettre</em> reaching toward an immediacy of raw representation that attempts to gag the censor of rationalization and liberate the anarchic thrust of the unconscious as a hidden participant in the processes of perception and mental response.</p><p>Although Retté repudiated the book in later life on religious grounds <em>Misty Thule </em>remains the most remarkable work that he produced—and indeed one of the most remarkable that anyone produced under the aegis of Symbolism.</p>