Édouard Dujardin

Édouard Dujardin

French writer of poetry, novels, drama and of studies of art, music and religion. As part of the publicity for Ulysses, JJ claimed that the interior monologue technique had been invented by Dujardin in his novel Les lauriers sont coupés which he had bought because Dujardin was the dedicatee of George Moore's Irish novel The Lake.

As a young man Dujardin was a well-connected Parisian dandy who lost most of his family's fortune on his early plays and other artistic schemes. While publishing poetry, drama and prose, in 1885 he founded the Revue Wagnérienne which a year later became Revue indépendante, the most important magazine of the French symbolist movement of the eighties of the nineteenth century. This journal (which first published Les lauriers sont coupés) was a hotbed of experimental art, from Wagner's music to the neo-impressionist painters and the literary work of Jules Laforgue and Stéphane Mallarmé.

It is in this radical and anti-clerical context that Dujardin met George Moore, who lived in Paris at the time. The two writers remained friends until Moore's death. With Moore, the French writer shared an interest in the early history of Christianity, on which he lectured and published in the twenties and thirties.

JJ knew of Dujardin through Moore's mention of him in The Lake and in Dana, and JJ had told Valéry Larbaud about the source of his use of the interior monologue, which Larbaud then explained in his introduction to a new edition of Les lauriers sont coupés in 1925. By that time, the old French maître was honored by JJ's insistence on his role in literary history and in 1931 he published a study of the interior monologue and its role in his own and in JJ's work. Geert Lernout