Michel de Ghelderode (born Adémar Adolphe Louis Martens; 3 April 1898 – 1 April 1962) was an avant-garde Belgian dramatist, from Flanders, who spoke and wrote in French. His works often dealt with the extremes of human experience, from death and degradation to religious exaltation. He wrote plays and short stories, and was a noted letter writer.
Personal life
Michel de Ghelderode was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1898. Ghelderode's father, Henri-Louis Martens, was employed as a royal archivist, a line of work later to be pursued by young Ghelderode. The author's mother, née Jeanne-Marie Rans, was a former postulant for holy orders; even after bearing four children, of whom Ghelderode was the youngest. She retained evident traces of her erstwhile vocation that would strongly influence the mature Ghelderode's dramatic work: One of Mme Martens's remembered "spiritual tales," concerning a child mistakenly buried alive who remained strangely marked by death even after her rescue, inspired most of the plot and characters of Ghelderode's Mademoiselle Jaire (1934) written when the author was in his mid-thirties.
He also served in the military from 1919 – 1921, and in 1924 married Jeanne-Françoise Gérard (d. 1980).
Ghelderode became increasingly reclusive from 1930 onwards and was chronically ill with asthma during his late thirties. Frequently suffering from poor health, around the age of sixteen, while pursuing his studies at the Institut St.-Louis in Brussels, he fell gravely ill with typhus. He would retain for the rest of his life the vision of "a Lady" who materialized at his bedside to utter the words; "not now, sixty-three." Ghelderode in fact died two days short of what would have been his sixty-fourth birthday in 1962. He is buried in the Laeken Cemetery, Brussels.
Influences
Ghelderode's ideas and vision of the theatre is in remarkable accord with ideas Antonin Artaud expressed in his manifesto The Theatre and Its Double, which was originally published 1 February 1938. Both men saw theatre as having the potential to express the human unconscious with its dream-like hallucinatory images and dynamic appetites. And both Artaud and Ghelderode found inspiration in the fantastical, dream-like images and ideas found in the works of the Flemish painters Bosch and Brueghel. Ghelderode referred to Brueghel as his "père nourricier" (foster father), wrote plays closely based on Brueghel's paintings, and said of Brueghel's "Dulle Griet" that it "was not only a wonderful painting but offered a vision of the world, a philosophy." Artaud independently discusses in detail the very same painting (Brueghel's "Dulle Griet") in The Theatre and Its Double to illustrate his own ideas regarding the theatre of cruelty, as he references the "nightmares of Flemish painting".
Ghelderode, who was born in Flanders, expressed a great appreciation for Flemish folk traditions and culture, which permeates his plays and stories. Ghelderode has said, "The Fleming lives in a hallucinatory world…. But our eye remains meticulously realistic; the keen awareness of the surface and of the great mysteries beyond – there you have the Fleming since even before Brueghel. … The ridiculous outside and the wretched, sublime eternal quandary of the soul … I am not a revolutionary; I am merely writing in the tradition of my race."
Ghelderode's influences include puppet theater, Italian commedia dell'arte, the medieval world of Flanders, the Flemish painters Bosch, Bruegel, Jacob Jordaens and the Teniers, along with the Belgian artist James Ensor, painter of the macabre, and the novelist Georges Eekhoud.
A number of Ghelderode's plays are based on the paintings by Breughel. His play The Blind Men (Les Aveugles, 1933) is derived from Brueghel's The Parable of the Blind, The Magpie on the Gallows (La Pie sur le Gibet, 1935) is derived from Breughel's The Merry Way to the Gallows, and The Strange Rider (Le Cavalier Bizarre, 1920) is not based on a particular painting, but, as the preface states, it is inspired by Breugel.
Career
A prolific writer, Ghelderode wrote more than 60 plays, a hundred stories, a number of articles on art and folklore and more than 20,000 letters.