Pierre Loti's novel Pêcheur d'Islande (1886), one of the great publishing successes of late nineteenth-century French literature (1) as well as one of its most esteemed examples, (2) became the object of an impressive number of illustrated editions, primarily in France, of course, but also in translation abroad. Several factors contributed to this. To begin with, the novel's great popularity assured publishers that there would be a market for more expensive illustrated editions. In addition, the suitability of the story for young adolescents made it eligible for the beautiful, large-format illustrated treatment then in vogue as special holiday gifts for children, of which the most famous examples are Hetzel's editions of Jules Verne, as well as for the more modest illustrated volumes that it has long been customary to give to children as an enticement to read. The particularly visual nature of Loti's narrative-the author had begun his publishing career as an illustrator for the big Parisian illustrated papers and often spoke of scenes in his novels as "tableaux"-also played a part, facilitating and even calling out for a visual artist's contribution. (3)
Like any other transfer of a work from one medium to another, illustrating a literary text is not just a matter of reproduction, it is a form of interpretation. [big cheese here] In choosing certain scenes to depict, the illustrator gives them prominence. In order to flesh out his illustrations, she also provides details of his own based on her interpretation of what is already in the text. Illustrations therefore shape how we see a text as a function of how the illustrator saw and interpreted it. At the same time, however, because illustrations accompany the text, they do not altogether replace it as, for example, a film adaptation does. Rather, they function in tandem with the original work.
In the case of Pêcheur d'Islande, this became a particularly complex affair. The story is apparently simple. It recounts, at least on the surface, the tale of Gaud Mével, a young Breton woman who meets a handsome fisherman, Yann Gaos, falls in love with him, and then spends two years wondering why, after initially seeming very interested, he subsequently does everything he can to avoid her. The work tells another love story as well, however, not in so readily apparent a fashion, but equally as clearly for those who have caught Loti's hints about how to decode his texts: it recounts the tale of Yann's love for another fisherman, Sylvestre Moan. (4)
That this second love story was well encoded is demonstrated not only by the novel's popularity with the general heterosexual public, but also by the fact that, a century ago when American textbook publishers regularly produced edited texts of great foreign literature for high school and college foreign language students, Pêcheur d'Islande was subject to no less than eight such presentations. (5) Still, some readers, especially French readers, who knew Loti's previous work would have had reason to suspect the existence of and search for something beneath the heterosexual surface. Mon Frère Yves (1883), Loti's previous novel, had been fairly clearly homoerotic. That and certain aspects of Loti's public behavior led to persistent rumors about his non-standard sexuality in the French popular press for the rest of his life. (6) Even if, like most of its readers, illustrators might have missed the homosexual subtext of Pêcheur d'Islande on their own, therefore, they had extratextual clues to alert them to its possible existence.
Once they saw this subtext, these illustrators had to decide whether to include, ignore, or even suppress it in their own work. If they opted for the first alternative, they also had to figure out how they would depict homosexuality in a book aimed at a general reading public. The novel's French, American, Swedish, British, and German illustrators each undertook this in a different way, some of which say a great deal about illustrations' potential relationship with their text.
Pêcheur d'Islande begins with a scene that could be-and probably has been-the opening of a gay male porn video. Down in the cramped cabin of a fishing vessel isolated in the North Atlantic far from sexually-censorious Western civilization, five tall, broad-shouldered, muscular fishermen sit tightly packed around a table, drinking. One of their number, Sylvestre Moan, who, though only seventeen, 'était déjà un homme, pour la taille et la force, . . . s'ennuyait, à cause d'un autre appelé . . . Yann, qui ne venait pas. En effet, où était-il donc ce Yann; toujours à l'ouvrage là-haut? Pourquoi ne descendait-il pas prendre un peu de sa part de la fête?' (I:1). (7)
Ten of the fifteen French illustrators chose to present this first scene, eight of them at this point, and all ten seem to have used it to signal whether they were going to deal with the novel's homoerotic subtext or avoid it. The first of them, Pierre Jazet, working for the 235 select individuals who had subscribed to buy the special limited illustrated printing of the regular version of the novel that Calmann-Lévy had been publishing since 1886, chose to capture the scene a few moments later, once that awaited sixth man, Yann Gaos, has joined the others (figure 1). Captain Guermeur has just joked about what the young women back in Paimpol must think when they see him, twenty-seven, huge, muscular, but not yet married. Yann scoffs at the idea that they might question his masculinity. The last time he was with a woman, he boasts, she fell for him so hard that when he left her after three weeks she gave him a gold watch. "Et, pour la leur faire voir, il la jetait sur la table comme un méprisable joujou," making it clear that for him she held no interest at all.
Jazet's choice of this particular moment--Yann's declaration of his disdain for a female lover and (heterosexual) marriage is general--to feature at the head of the first page of the text is already telling. In addition, however, as his Yann tosses the woman's gold watch disdainfully down, he has his arm around Sylvestre's shoulders, something not in the novel-a particularly striking example of how an illustrator 'provides details of his own based on her interpretation of what is already in the text.' As the non-homoerotic illustrations of this scene to which we will turn shortly emphasize by contrast, Jazet's positioning of Yann and Sylvestre on the other side of the table from the rest of the crew, distant from them but not from each other, further suggests that they are, for this artist, a couple. Nor, given all this, can it be coincidence that directly behind them is the only bed visible in this illustration, though Loti's text mentions three. Jazet's initial illustration demonstrates very clearly, therefore, the first of the illustrator's three options when encountering a subtext: she or he can focus on and even add to that element of the work in order to make the covert less hidden, to confirm its perception in another's mind.
So great was the success of Pêcheur d'Islande from its very first appearance that after seven years and about 150 editions, Calmann-Lévy decided to bring out not one but three entirely new versions. (8) One, designed to replace the general mass-market version that had been in use since 1886, had no illustrations and was never subject to an illustrated printing like the Jazet. (9) A second was part of a set of Loti's complete works that Calmann-Lévy undertook in 1893, no doubt to cash in on the author's ever-growing popularity and recent advance in prestige-in 1891, at the exceptionally early age of 41, he had been elected to the French Academy. (10) The set was no doubt aimed at the wealthy who could afford such things. In the illustrated printing of this version, Pêcheur d'Islande has only three drawings, by G. Bourgain, of which the opening scene is one (figure 2). There are only five fishermen-Yann has not yet joined them. More importantly, they are all sitting equidistant from each other with space between them, though Loti's text says that they are "très près les uns des autres, faute d'espace" (I:1). There is no homoeroticism in this picture where it would have been both so easy and so indicative, as the Jazet shows, so it comes as no surprise that there is none in Bourgain's other two illustrations either.
The third version of Pêcheur d'Islande that Calmann-Lévy brought out in 1893 is the best-known of the fifteen French illustrated versions and the most intriguing on this issue. By the 1890s, middle-class French society had developed a tradition of giving children lavishly illustrated editions of suitable French literary classics as Christmas and New Year's gifts. Publishers who had the rights to such titles would commission distinguished artists to prepare many often full-page drawings for each episode in the text. Because Pêcheur d'Islande was a perfect candidate for this, being both very popular and suitable, with just a few changes, for young readers, Calmann-Lévy hired the much-admired artist Edmond Rudaux to create such a version, even paying for him to spend time in Paimpol, where most of the work is set, so that his drawings would be true to the reality that inspired the story. (11) Because Rudaux was an esteemed artist in his own right and because Pêcheur d'Islande was popular with adult readers, Calmann-Lévy also brought out a parallel and more expensive limited version of 650 copies on fine papers that retained the original text, so Rudaux knew he would have a dual audience.
Which of them he had in mind when he set about visually supplementing Pêcheur d'Islande cannot be determined-most likely both-but it is very clear that Rudaux imagined part of at least one of them to be males interested in other males. Over and over again throughout his more than one hundred illustrations he seems to be winking at such readers, doing his part to point out the homoeroticism in the story, just as Jazet had done with his first drawing. His presentation of the opening scene is, taken in isolation, fairly anodyne in this respect, though he does give real prominence to the beds and his fishermen are a lot more physically intimate than Bourgain's (figure 3). Some might also be struck by the heavy chains in the background, which have no source in the text.
But what makes this illustration homoerotic is its context. The first drawing in Rudaux's version, on the title page where no one could miss it, is a line-up of the novel's four main characters, Sylvestre, Yann, Gaud, and Sylvestre's grandmother, Yvonne Moan (figure 4). Here for all to see is the tall, broad-shouldered Yann looking not at Gaud but very directly at Sylvestre and with an expression that certainly suggests he is thinking about something interesting. Then, at the end of the first chapter, we see the cabin boy and the captain smoking their pipes with another sailor looking on (figure 5). The cabin boy stands between the captain's spread legs-cabin boys often ended up serving as surrogate women on ships such as these-and the other sailor's gaze is directed either at the cabin boy's backside or the captain's crotch. Having located it between these two highly homoerotic drawings, Rudaux could be less obvious than Jazet with his depiction of the opening scene. (12)
Jean-Gabriel Daragnès (1922) did only nine illustrations for the Banderolle version of the novel and chose to pass on this scene altogether. It is therefore not surprising that none of his etchings is homoerotic and that he did not choose scenes with homoerotic underpinnings for his efforts. For the Lafitte version of the following year (1923), part of a set devoted to Loti's novels that was aimed at a large market by a publisher that specialized in colorful illustrated editions of literary classics, Lucien Simon, again a very distinguished artist, contributed the depiction of this scene (the rest of the illustrations are by Gumery). There are six men in his illustration, so Yann has joined the others, and they are certainly physically close, but they do not look at each other, so it is no surprise that in the later very limited 1934 version for which Simon would do all the illustrations, homoeroticism is not an issue. In that version, printed privately for 150 well-heeled subscribers, Simon for the novel's first scene shows only Yann descending into the cabin. There is no contact with the others, and no homoerotic development of what is essentially a crotch shot.
Similar to Simon in the Lafitte version, H. Barthélemy, who included the opening scene among the many he illustrated for the Beaux Livres version (1926), depicted his fishermen as not looking at each other. They are standing, unlike in the text, and as far away from each other as the frame will allow. This initial drawing seems to be proclaiming 'No funny stuff going on here'-indeed, the expressions are dour, although the text says that 'la joie de vivre éclairait leurs figures'-and, though this version has many drawings, the potentially homoerotic scenes are either avoided or rendered in an unerotic fashion.
The same is also true of the Cyral version illustrated by Daniel-Girard that appeared two years later. Again, these men do not touch, there is no joy on their faces, and there is no homoeroticism in this version. (13) The Hachette version illustrated by Dethomas, which came out that same year and which has only eleven illustrations, avoids this scene altogether and, not surprisingly, homoeroticism in general, as does Hachette's next version of the novel, the Faivre, which appeared in 1930. (14)
Mathurin Méheut, a very distinguished Breton painter, was chosen by Calmann-Lévy to do the Pêcheur d'Islande in the sixteen volume set of illustrated Loti works that they published from 1936-38. His many renderings are certainly works of art in their own right and this is one of the most sought-after of the illustrated versions of the novel. By making the cabin very spacious, despite Loti's text, thereby giving the men room to keep apart from each other, and by basically removing the beds from view, Méheut also removed the homoeroticism (figure 6). (15) As if to remove it even further, someone, either Méheut or the book's designer, placed this illustration half-way through the novel rather than in the first chapter. The only illustration actually in the first chapter, at the top of its first page, is a simple depiction of a lamp and a statue of the Virgin, with no men in sight.
Henry Cheffer's beautiful rendering of the opening scene, Jacques Poirier's spacious depiction, and Alain Coz's somber vision follow in the vein of the Daniel-Girard. In each case, there is no homoeroticism and the men are not smiling.
Turning to the American illustrators, Richard L. Marwede (1933), perhaps because he was illustrating one of those eight American school editions, avoided any suggestiveness here-and, again, any joy. Frederick T. Chapman, however, who illustrated a 1946 Knopf trade version of the novel, is a very different story (figure 7). In his depiction of the opening scene the fisherman are smiling, they are looking at each other--some, like the one on the left and the one with the pipe facing the viewer, with very knowing expressions--and, not surprisingly, the reader is treated to the first of a remarkable number of butt-shots in form-hugging pants. We will, not surprisingly, have reason to come back to Chapman's illustrations later.
Last but definitely not of least interest on this subject is the Classics Illustrated comic version of Pêcheur d'Islande published in 1963. (16) Like most comic books, especially those published several decades ago, Classics Illustrated were aimed at boys, so, not surprisingly, Gaud's unrequited love is downplayed and the scenes with the fishermen get prominence, just as the title, Saga of the North, emphasizes the sea adventure aspect of the story. That in itself is not homoerotic. But this version of Loti's novel most certainly is, at least in some of its illustrations. (17) In its depiction of the novel's first scene the fishermen are, half of them, actually in bed, with skin showing, muscular pectorals outlined by tight t-shirts, and smiles on their faces. If there is no more than that here, there is enough that certain adolescents males would have known that they had found another comic book that would allow them to indulge their not childish fantasies. Nor would the rest of this version have disappointed them, as we shall see.
The next scene treated by illustrators that offered homoerotic potential occurs at the end of Part I, again aboard the Marie, when Yann and Sylvestre, each having received a letter from home, sit together on the deck reading them: 'assis tous deux à l'écart, dans un coin du pont, les bras enlacés et se tenant par les épaules, ils lisaient très lentement, comme pour se mieux pénétrer des choses du pays qui leur étaient dites' (I:6; my emphasis). The potential for homoeroticism is much more obvious here, which may explain why most of the artists who avoided it when it was optional in the first scene simply chose not to deal with this episode.
Rudaux, however, did (figure 8). His Yann holds the much smaller Sylvestre close beside him, a smile on his face. (18) The bowsprit sticking up long and straight as if protruding directly from his body would not seem to require a lot of commentary given its angle; it certainly suggests the state of mind and body that produced the smile on Yann's face. The deck planks reinforce its rigidly straight lines and draw attention to it because they run parallel with it.
But here, for the first time, the homoerotic scene is observed by other men, in this case the two fishermen near the bow, both of whom are frowning. It is hard not to see them as a representation of society, and particularly male society, always looking on, watching every time two men get together to see if they are up to something. Rudaux drawings like this suggest a gay paranoia, the fear of a closeted man worried that someone might catch him in flagrante and condemn him for being gay, or even see him with another man and suspect him of such. (19) (This element is absent from Loti's text.)
Gumery's beautiful depiction of the same scene (figure 9) shows, by its differences, just how homoerotic Rudaux's drawing is. By changing to a higher perspective, Gumery makes Yann and Sylvestre smaller and less the focus of our attention-the mist-shrouded ship in the center of the frame is far more intriguing. Soft, wavy lines everywhere remove phallic suggestion-the stiff mast against which the two of them lean is softened by the remarkably fluid sail attached to it, as another sail in the left background undercuts by its curves any rigidity in that part of the ship. If one looks carefully one can see Yann's arm around Sylvestre's shoulders again, but the hand seems so small as not to be constraining-could it really be Yann's?-and there is a lot more space between the two of them than Rudaux allowed. (Again, as in some of the illustrations for the first scene, space undermines homoeroticism.) Their legs are clearly separate, whereas in the Rudaux they are so entwined that it is hard to determine which are whose. Like most of Gumery's other contributions to the Lafitte version, this is a beautiful illustration but also a de-eroticizing one.
Daniel-Girard and Faivre did not go to so much trouble. In both cases they simply chose a perspective that allowed them not to show Yann's arm. In each case, he could have it around Sylvestre, but because of the angle we cannot tell. If the Daniel-Girard is not homoerotic in itself, however, it becomes so because of its placement. All of the illustrations in the Cyral version are at the heads of the chapters in which the scene that they depict figures, with this one exception. The designer put this one illustration not at the head of a chapter, but rather in the middle of one. Nor is it in Part I, Chapter 6, where this scene occurs, but rather in the middle of Part I, Chapter 5, which deals with Gaud's despair at Yann's indifference to her. In fact, the illustration is placed very specifically in the middle of the paragraph that says of Gaud: 'ses épaules et sa poitrine, sa forme admirable . . . allait sans doute être perdue pour tous, se dessécher sans être jamais vue, puisque ce Yann ne la voulait pas pour lui' (I:5). It is very hard to believe that the designer made this one exception by chance. Rather, he or she seems to have moved the illustration to this location in order to offer a commentary on why Yann was not showing any interest in Gaud, thereby demonstrating another way in which illustrations can be used to shape the reader's interpretation of a text.
Chapman, not surprisingly given his first illustration, does show the holding (figure 10). Now Sylvestre has his arm around Yann, but not, it bears noting, around his friend's shoulders as in Loti's text; rather, he holds him as any lover would hold a partner, around the waist. Again, note the butt-shot perspective that Chapman favored and the other fisherman, also positioned with his backside offered to our gaze, seated on the in this context phallic stay. (The difference between this illustration and Figure 8, between having one sailor, seated on a potentially phallic stay, showing no interest in Yann and Sylvestre's intimacy, and Rudaux's two frowning sailors looking at the couple askanse, is certainly striking.)
Even though drawn for adolescent males who are constantly on the lookout for signs of homosexuality as they come to terms with their own sexual impulses, the Classics Illustrated is equally direct here (figure 11). Yann, his well-developed pectorals outlined by his tight-fitting sweater and with as masculine a chin and torso as any gay-male-in-the-making could ever desire, has his arm softly around Sylvestre's shoulders. There is more space between them than Rudaux or Chapman allowed and Sylvestre's crossed legs protect his sexual region, though not to the extent one sees in the Gumery. The curve of the thick rope coming off the coil in the foreground echos that of the gunwale behind the younger fisherman, however, both emphasizing that of Yann's arm and thereby calling attention to it.
This is the only potentially homoerotic episode that Yngve Berg chose to illustrate for the Limited Editions' version of the novel (1931). We can see someone's arm around someone's torso, but, unlike in the Rudaux or the Classics Illustrated, no facial expressions or erect bowsprit. Not surprisingly, Berg elsewhere repeatedly chose to focus on heteroerotic episodes (Gaud undressing to go to bed, the prostitutes in India, etc.).
The next relevant scene is in the first chapter of Part II and occurs during that de rigueur moment in all stories dealing with the sea: the great storm. At its height, Yann and Sylvestre are on deck, trying to keep the Marie headed into the waves so it will not capsize. 'Yann et Sylvestre étaient à la barre, attachés par la ceinture. Ils chantaient encore la chanson de Jean-François de Nantes [a highly misogynic sea shanty]; grisés de mouvement et de vitesse, ils chantaient à pleine voix, riant de ne plus s'entendre au milieu de tout ce déchaînement de bruits, s'amusant à tourner la tête pour chanter contre le vent et perdre haleine' (II:1). Once again a comparison of the Bourgain and the Rudaux, done the same year for the same publisher, is instructive. Bourgain leaves plenty of room between the two men (figure 12). The boom does not align with either of them and is held in place by ropes that reproduce and reinforce the angles at which the two lean away from each other. There is no hint of homoeroticism here; if anything, just the opposite.
In the Rudaux (figure 13), on the other hand and not surprisingly by now, Yann and Sylvestre are butt-to-butt and the boom aligns with the angle of Yann's waist and hips, connected to ropes that repeat the angles of his thighs and therefore draw attention to his crotch. If that makes the boom, here far more rugged than the very neatly stowed one in the Bourgain, a large manifestation of Yann's phallus, it should come as no surprise that the raised spot of Yann's pants over his right knee does not in any way resemble a kneecap but rather suggests a particularly impressive erection-understandable, given that Sylvestre's backside is pressed hard against his. As with Bourgain's and Rudaux's illustrations of the novel's first scene (figures 2 and 3), these two depictions are too dramatically in opposition on the issue of homoeroticism to permit an assumption of chance. Bourgain seems to be not simply illustrating (i.e., giving his interpretation of) Loti's text, but also working to undo the homoerotic interpretation proposed by Rudaux.
Gumery, on the other hand, in another beautiful watercolor does his best to make us not see the two men at all. The storm-wracked ship holds our attention here as did the mist-shrouded one in the previous Gumery (figure 9), and Yann and Sylvestre are lost down in the front like refugees from a Claude Lorrain landscape. The boom that juts into the lower right corner of the frame could be phallic to those in the mood, but it does not connect by parallel angle with either of the two men, who are not touching. In fact, the one on the right looks like he is trying to back away from the one on the left.
The Méheut (figure 14), on yet another hand, would seem to be too obvious to be the result of chance. The tiller comes out of the one fisherman's crotch at just the angle a gay reader would expect of the relevant body part. The boom above it reinforces this already-obvious element by its parallel angle. Again the two men are side by side, so the erection comes as no surprise. It is worth noting, however, that the two have very worried and not at all happy expressions on their faces, contrary to Loti's text; it is also impossible to determine who is who. Méheut does not remove the homoeroticism here, but no one seems to be deriving any pleasure from it.
The same is true of the Durand (figure 15), which sets up the scene in the same way as the Meheut. The tiller is once again, and equally as clearly, a representation of a very erect phallus protruding from one of the fishermen's crotches at the expected angle. The two men have space between them this time, however-the one in the background, despite the text, does not appear to be tied to the tiller-and the one holding the phallus seems for all the world to be masturbating it, a solitary pastime. There is no togetherness here and no one is smiling.
In the Coz the two fishermen are too far apart and too intent on their work-they are not looking at each other--to be thinking about sex. Chapman remembers that the two are supposed to be joyously singing, but because he evidently did not know what the tiller of a nineteenth-century goélette looked like (the French word 'barre' means both tiller and helm, and Guy Endore, the author of the translation used by Knopf, mistakenly chose helm), he missed an opportunity for storm-tossed intimacy. In the Classics Illustrated version of the scene, we cannot see the two men through the seaspray.
In the next relevant scene contrast once again brings out the homoeroticism of Rudaux's work. When he sails for Vietnam and the French war there as part of his military service, Sylvestre, being a topman, (20) spends his time in the crow's nest: 'Il vivait dans sa mâture, perché comme un oiseau, évitant ces soldats entassés sur le pont, cette cohue d'en bas' (II:9). Cheffer's beautiful illustration (figure 16) does a magnificent job of evoking Sylvestre's isolation and longing for Brittany-the gaze in the direction from which the ship is coming. Rudaux (figure 17) inserts yet another observer not found in Loti's text, this one positioned so as to stare right into Sylvestre's crotch. (He resembles the fisherman who stares at Captain Guermeur's crotch at the end of the opening chapter [figure 5].) Nothing softens all the straight lines that run parallel with Sylvestre's torso and the thick, powerful mast against which he leans and which therefore becomes associated with him. With all of these parallel straight lines reinforcing Sylvestre's rigidity and solidity, it is no wonder the other sailor is staring at his crotch. Notice, in comparison, how the ropes running in various directions in the Cheffer as well as the soft sail hanging in graceful curves from the yard remove any suggestion of phallic rigidity there.
Sylvestre reading another letter, this time on a cruiser off the Vietnamese coast (II:13), provides an opportunity for yet another interesting contrast. Daniel-Girard's Sylvestre looks as non-erotic as one could imagine even seen by himself, but his Classics Illustrated counterpart (figure 18), the most traditionally masculine and mature of the renderings of the character, makes him look like a six year old. The comic book representation offers, in addition to the heavy chain passing close to a shaded and therefore mysterious crotch as if a metaphorical representation of the unseen, the sailor in the left background who stares at the very ruggedly handsome Sylvestre with a strangely frowning expression. Is he a descendant of Rudaux's prying male observers (figure 8), or an interested party like the other sailor in Rudaux's crow's nest (figure 17)? There is definitely an interest of some sort here.
At the exact center of the novel, III:9, the twenty-eighth of its fifty-five chapters, Loti, with a sense of balance and design worthy of his training as a visual artist, put the scene that is the center of the work's homosexual subtext. Yann, fishing in the North Atlantic, has received a letter telling him of Sylvestre's death in Vietnam. At first he cannot deal with the news and goes to sleep, placing the letter beneath his sweater against his heart. The next morning, however, he climbs up on deck, stares at the sky and, gazing at a strange cloud formation, imagines that he sees Sylvestre, arms outstretched as if hoping before leaving this earth for one final, full embrace from Yann. The passage is an astounding stylistic tour de force, painting a late-Monet sky while theorizing about the function of Impressionist art for memory and self-understanding in a way that clearly foreshadows Proust. (21) For the first time in his adult life, Yann cries.
Rudaux accords that difficult expression of grief all the noble seriousness one would expect. Even at such a moment, however, another man looks on, as if wondering why Yann should be so emotional. For Rudaux's gay man there is no escape from society's prying, homophobic eyes.
Daragnès, who had avoided the potentially homoerotic scenes up to this point, grants Yann his expression of grief with equal, if differently expressed, dignity, though for whatever reason he shows Yann reading the letter on deck. Simon who, like Daragnès, had avoided all the potentially homoerotic moments in the novel, also allows Yann to grieve, but changes the positioning of the cloud-Sylvestre (figure 19): the apparition no longer reaches out to the grieving fisherman and so loses its homoeroticism. (22) Cheffer, by turning Yann's face away, deprives him and us of his grief, though the illustration is, as always, very beautiful. Poirier allows him a very deep sorrow.
Illustrations of verbal creations are, of necessity, interpretations. When the verbal art has a covert subtext, however, the visual artist becomes involved in more than just interpretation. She now has to decide whether to deal with that subtext in his renderings, sometimes, as with Jazet's first illustration (figure 1), to the extent of adding to the author's narrative in order to do so, or to ignore it, or even, as we have seen with Simon (figure 19), to alter and suppress it. Given the wide and very diverse reading public for Pêcheur d'Islande, it is interesting to speculate about whom Jazet, Rudaux, Chapman, and the Classics Illustrated artist might have imagined to be among their audiences, their own 'unknown friends,' to use the term Loti employed throughout his work to refer to the readers whom he imagined catching the things that he had hidden in his texts. One might argue, however beautiful the art in some of the other sets of illustrations may be, that by engaging in the same subtext encoding that Loti had undertaken in his writing, the Pêcheur d'Islande visualizations of those four artists are the truest to the spirit of the novel.
French versions:
1886 Paris: Calmann-Lévy. 9 illustrations by Pierre Jazet.
1893. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. 128 illustrations by Edmond Rudaux.
1893. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. (Oeuvres complètes de Pierre Loti III: 309-550) 3 illustrations by G. Bourgain.
1922. Paris: Editions de la Banderole. 9 illustrations by Jean-Gabriel Daragnès.
1923. Paris: Pierre Lafitte. (Romans complets illustrés de Pierre Loti, with Madame Chrysanthème. 126-252) 1 illustration by Lucien Simon, 28 by A. Gumery.
1926. Paris: A. et G. Mornay. (Les Beaux livres 25) 136 illustrations by H. Barthélemy.
1928. Paris: Henri Cyral. (Collection française 19) 64 illustrations by Daniel-Girard.
1928. Paris: Hachette. (Les Grands écrivains) 11 illustrations by Dethomas.
1930. Paris: Hachette. 21 illustrations by Henri Faivre.
1934. Paris: Aux dépens d'un amateur (Ch. Miguet). 50 illustrations by Lucien Simon.
1936. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. 29 illustrations by Mathurin Méheut.
1945. Paris: L'Edition d'art H. Piazza.103 illustrations by Henry Cheffer.
1967. Paris: Hachette. (Bibliothèque verte 10) 13 illustrations by Paul Durand.
1974. Paris: Hachette. (Idéale bibliothèque) 38 illustrations by Jacques Poirier.
1998. Saint Malo: L'ancre de Marine. 25 illustrations by Alain Coz.
American versions:
1931. An Iceland Fisherman. Trans. Guy Endore. Stockholm: P. A. Novstedt and Söner. (Limited Editions Club) 20 lithographs by Yngve Berg.
1933. Pêcheur d'Islande. Ed. Colman Dudley Frank. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company. 15 illustrations by Richard L. Marwede.
1946. An Iceland Fisherman. Trans. Guy Endore. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 28 illustrations by Frederick T. Chapman.
1957. An Iceland Fisherman. Trans. Guy Endore. Alhambra, CA: C. F. Braun. [?] illustrations by Joe Mugnaini.
British version:
1963. Saga of the North. Writer unknown. London: Thorpe and Porter Ltd. (Classics Illustrated 162) Illustrator unknown.
German version:
n.d. Islandfisher. Trans. Carmen Sylva. Leipzig: Alfred Kröner. 6 illustrations by an unnamed illustrator.
1914. Islandfischer. Trans. not named. Weimar: Gustav Kiepenheuer. 12 illustrations by Helene Vrieslander.
Figure 1. Jazet's illustration of the opening scene (page 3).
Figure 2. Bourgain's illustration of the opening scene (opposite page 320).
Figure 3. Rudaux's illustration of the opening scene (page 3).
Figure 4. Rudaux's title-page illustration.
Figure 5. Rudaux's end illustration for Part I, Chapter 1.
Figure 6. Mathurin Méheut's illustration of the opening scene (opposite page 144).
Figure 7. Chapman's illustration of the opening scene (page 5).
Figure 8. Rudaux's depiction of Yann and Sylvestre reading their letters (opposite page 62).
Figure 9. Gumery's depiction of Yann and Sylvestre reading their letters (opposite page 141).
Figure 10. Chapman's depiction of Yann and Sylvestre reading their letters (page 64).
Figure 11. Classics Illustrated depiction of Yann and Sylvestre reading their letters (page 7).
Figure 12. Bourgain's depiction of Yann and Sylvestre during the storm at sea (opposite page 369).
Figure 13. Rudaux's depiction of Yann and Sylvestre during the storm at sea (opposite page 74).
Figure 14. Méheut's depiction of Yann and Sylvestre during the storm at sea (opposite page 66).
Figure 15. Durand's depiction of Yann and Sylvestre during the storm at sea (page 55).
Figure 16. Cheffer's depiction of Sylvestre in the crow's nest (page 105).
Figure 17. Rudaux's depiction of Sylvestre in the crow's nest (page 110).
Figure 18. The Classics Illustrated depiction of Sylvestre reading Yvonne's letter (page 13).
Figure 19. Simon's depiction of Yann's hallucination of Sylvestre (page 129).
1. By 1924, 38 years after its first publication, Calmann-Lévy, Loti's publisher, had brought out 445 regular editions of Pêcheur d'Islande in addition to the illustrated ones we will discuss here (N. Serban, Pierre Loti: Sa vie et son oeuvre [Paris: Les Presses françaises, 1924] 340).
2. The French Academy awarded the novel its Vitet prize (Raymonde Lefèvre, La Vie inquiète de Pierre Loti [Paris: Société française d'éditions littéraires et techniques, 1934] 92).
3. On Loti as an illustrator, see: C. Wesley Bird, Pierre Loti, correspondant et dessinateur 1872-1889 (Paris: P. André, 1948), Claude Farrère., Cent dessins de Pierre Loti (Tours: Arrault, 1948).
4. On how Loti encoded a gay subtext in Pêcheur d'Islande and most of his other novels, see Richard M. Berrong, In Love with a Handsome Sailor: The Novels of Pierre Loti and the Emergence of Gay Male Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).
5. For a list of them, see Berrong 239-40 n. 11.
6. The depiction of Loti as homosexual in various satyrical Parisian publications of his era is discussed in two entries in the recent Dictionnaire de l'homophobie, ed. Louis-Georges Tin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003), Patrick Cardon's 'Caricature' (78-79) and Tin's 'Littérature' (265). Edmond de Goncourt, in his famous and often malicious diary, repeatedly declared that Loti was sexually interested in men (Journal, ed. Robert Ricatte [Paris: Fasquelle, 1956] 3:1230, 4:227, etc.).
7. I cite Loti's text using the method standard among Loti scholars: by Part and Chapter number. The chapters are very short and there are many editions of the novel, both in the original French and in many other languages, so referring to page numbers in any specific edition would be useless for most readers of this essay.
8. The French use of the word 'edition' needs explanation here. They traditionally referred to each new printing of a novel as a new edition, even though nothing was changed and the same plates were used. These first 150 or so editions of Pêcheur d'Islande all used the plates created for the first edition, which had 319 pages. None of what I refer to as the three new 'versions' of 1893 used these plates, which seem to have been discarded at this point.
9. This version had 344 pages and seems to have been used into the 1940s.
10. Calmann-Lévy brought out the first volumes in this set quickly, several a year, putting two or three works in a volume, but then slowed down and finally gave up on it after the tenth volume, which covered Loti's output through 1905. There was both an illustrated and a non-illustrated printing of this set, the illustrations-there are only a few per volume-all being hors texte.
11. The changes in the text to make it appropriate for late nineteenth-century middle-class French children consisted mostly of deleting references to prostitutes and the last few lines describing Gaud and Yann as they start their wedding night (IV:7). On Rudaux, see: Léon Thévenin, Edmund Rudaux peintre et illustrateur (Paris: Meunier, 1903). There was an exhibition devoted to Rudaux, his stay in Paimpol, and his illustrations for this version of the novel at Paimpol's Musée de la mer, 23 April-17 September 2000.
12. Loti did something similar in Pêcheur d'Islande. He sometimes paralleled a scene involving Gaud and Yann in that novel with one involving the character Loti and the sailor Yves Kermadec in Mon Frère Yves, his preceding novel, letting the parallel with the male-male scene attribute homoeroticism to an apparently heterorotic scene in the second novel. On this, see Berrong Ch. 6.
13. One of the interesting things about the Daniel-Girard version is that, wherever possible, the artist chose not to show the main characters' faces. Given that characters' faces are one aspect of a novel that each reader will imagine very much in her or his own way, I find this very astute.
14. The Faivre version, more expurgated than the Rudaux, was also intended for young readers.
15. Méheut had already illustrated Mon Frère Yves, what is probably the most obviously homoerotic of Loti's novels, eight years before (Paris: Mornay, 1928). Although there are many illustrations in that version and many scenes in the novel that have fairly obvious homoerotic content, not one of the artist's renderings suggests homoeroticism.
16. This is one of the titles published after the operations were moved to England by the son of the founder. The English-language version was published under the title Saga of the North, with no mention of either Loti or Pêcheur d'Islande. There is also no indication of the illustrator or the writer, but the text does not come from any of the seven English translations published up to 1963. The German-language edition does have "Pierre Loti" on the cover under the title, which is very dramatic: The Rage of the Sea. Again, however, there is no mention of Pêcheur d'Islande, the illustrator, or the writer.
Unlike the work of the other illustrators I examine here, the drawings for the Classics Illustrated version do not, of course, accompany Loti's text, nor is there any reason to believe that they were intended for an audience familiar with Pêcheur d'Islande. On the other hand, several of them make it clear that the unnamed illustrator knew Loti's work: they depict elements of the novel not in the comic book text. Therefore, they are still illustrations of the novel and still offer an illustrator's interpretation of that work, though they would not have participated in the reader's interpretation of Loti's text.
17. Given the focus of this paper, I will not get into how the comic book's text interprets Loti's. For an example of how that can be done, see: Michael C. Berthold, 'Color me Ishmael: Illustrated versions of Moby-Dick', Word and Image 9, 1 (January-March 1993): 1-8.
18. Rudaux always makes Sylvestre small, though Loti's text remarks on his height as well as his strength several times (I:1, etc.). I find this particularly interesting given that this version was created for younger (male) readers (an audience similar to that of Classics Illustrated). One is tempted to imagine that Rudaux 'scaled down' Sylvestre to give his young readers someone with whom to identify, an entry-point into the story.
19. In his History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), Michel Foucault argued that nineteenth-century European medicine and law set about detailing signs of homosexuality in order to make society as a whole aware of them and thus men very careful not to exhibit them.
20. The French word, gabier, does not have the sexual connotations of the English term.
21. Loti was one of the adolescent Proust's two favorite prose writers. Cf. William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) 140.
22. It is interesting to note that in the first version of this drawing, Sylvestre does not appear at all.