Marcel Schwob is interesting

The Book of Monelle engages a lot with the kind of stuff i tend to complain about in surrealist and proto-surrealist texts, in terms of the idealization of an innocent woman as this sort of grand philosophical muse and symbol, but the thing is it delves so deeply into some of the thoughts around this that it ends up feeling like a metaphysics of suffering girlhood, a symbolic system where the core is that young women suffer and the rest of society dwells on their backs. and while there's plenty of feminist analysis to bring to that, it's a lot more *interesting* than most things in this dimension and a lot more generative for me to think about. according the afterword Schwob was someone who collaged a lot and reinterpreted texts and that's also very interesting to me