The Temporalities of Agony

In 1893, painter Maurice Denis collaborated with his friend, the novelist André Gide, for the illustrations of Le Voyage d'Urien. This short novel narrates the story of a symbolic and fantasised journey, which leads Urien and his fellow travelers to land on an island struck by the plague. With the lithograph on page 48, representing four plague-stricken individuals, I argue that Denis transposed his theories on the decorative, formulated in his "Définition du Néo-Traditionnisme" in 1890. I contend in this essay that through this lithograph Denis synchronizes multiple temporal levels by representing the same figure four times. On the level of the subject, the agony of the plague-stricken relates to a private time distinct from society’s public time. Moreover, the sequencing of the disease into four stages partakes in the journey towards absolution. Regarding the composition of the work, the decorative elements belong to their own temporality which is integrated on the spatiality of the page and recalls a so-called “archaic” and “primitive” time.