EIN BILD ROMAN STÜCKEN A Pictorial Novel In Pieces - Captain ...

Alexandre Dumas, the author of the novel Le capitaine
Pamphile, published in 1839, was the prototypical feuilleton
writer, catering to an eager readership with witty,
ludicrous, and gripping short stories and serialized novels:
thrilling entertainment for a new grande bourgeoisie
of republicans and royalists, a coalition Louis-Philippe,
Duke of Orléans, had brought together during the threeday
revolution of July 1830 at a safe distance from the
ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Louis-Philippe,
who called himself the “Citizen King,” ruled for eighteen
years, until 1848. His successor, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte,
would have the privilege of restoring the glory
of the pre-1830 ancien régime.
In their project Captain Pamphile, the curators, Gunter
Reski and Marcus Weber, collaborating with sixty fellow
painters, have worked to translate selected sections and
parables from the novel into a sequence of images; each
artist is assigned a thematic focus but otherwise enjoys
complete creative freedom. The particular charm of this
endeavor lies in the significant parallels between the
social situation under Louis-Philippe and contemporary
developments. If colonialism was then the measure of
things, it is now the world of finance and trading that
rapidly and effectively asserts its will all over the world,
to the benefit of few and the detriment of many. The
language of cannons has been superseded by global networks
and their systems of communication, which now
determine the degree of exploitation and appropriation.
The postcolonial age substitutes money for politics and
war. Dumas read the signs of a profit-driven society with
its specific ideas and desires early on.
The social romantics and critical thinkers of Dumas’
generation—from Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac,
George Sand, Théophile Gautier, and Gustave Flaubert
to Charles Baudelaire—were of course disgusted by the
tripe Dumas produced pour la foule. Dumas tapped and
transcribed the output of other authors, bought contri-
Preface
Harald Falckenberg
butions from them, and kept writers as wage laborers
in order to keep his rapid production of stories—from
animal fables to adventure stories and novels of manners—running.
In today’s perspective, we would associate
Dumas with Appropriation and Pop art as well as
the most recent publication of materials by the founder
of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange: efforts to unmask, to play
roles, to undermine bourgeois positions while also accepting
them. At issue are speculation, illusion, fiction:
ultimately a dream factory far removed from the lofty
art of reflection and veneration. That was precisely the
work Alexandre Dumas performed. His novels Les Trois
Mousquetaires (1844) and Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (serialized
between 1844 and 1846) have been made into many
movies and reprinted innumerable times; they have
become a permanent feature of today’s entertainment
industry. The novels were usually illustrated, and so
his characters, effectively early comic-strip characters,
have over more than one hundred fifty years conquered
a firm place in our visual culture as well. What would
his scornful detractors such as Flaubert or Baudelaire,
whose œuvres are known only to a few connoisseurs,
would say today? Would they think that his stories opportunistically
exploit the aspirations of a society, or
that they unmask them? Would they describe his art as
affirmative, or as critical, or perhaps as both? There can
be no doubt—Alexandre Dumas was a Pop artist avant
la lettre.
Le capitaine Pamphile is not exactly considered his magnum
opus. It is cobbled together from odds and ends, following
the model of the boundlessly greedy profiteers,
speculators, and real as well as wannabe aristocrats of
finance. It is about anything that promises a profit. Captain
Pamphile knows what can be had and where. He
restlessly crosses the world’s oceans, travels the lands
and colonies. He does big business, sees through people,
exploits situations, and preys on animals as the precursors
and distorted images of man. He is insatiable: in
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