Fantastic, The. Fantasy, taken broadly to mean a more-or-less light-hearted play with the impossible and the imaginary, is of course a permanent element in French literature. It can be traced, for instance, in the supernatural aspects of folk-tale, pastoral, and opera, in the imaginary voyages of Rabelais,
In spite of the charge that ‘les Français n'ont pas la tête fantastique’ (Louis Vax), a characteristic strain of fantastic writing can be traced in French literature from the giddy devilries of Cazotte's Le Diable amoureux (1772), through the supernatural tales of Romanticism, and on to the erotic phantasmagoria of Surrealism, and even, it may be argued, the suave enigmas of a nouveau romancier like Robbe-Grillet. According to the Structuralist criteria of Tzvetan Todorov, the effect of the literary Fantastic is to implicate the reader in the hesitation experienced within the narrative by characters unable to decide if certain events are real or unreal. A tale such as Mérimée's La Vénus d'Ille (1837) perfectly fits this model in so far as its narrator, for all his scholarly self-importance, cannot finally resolve whether or not he has witnessed the murder of a young man by a statue come to life. A story like Maupassant's Le Horlà (1886-7), with its diary format, offers a complementary demonstration in inviting the reader to enter the mind of a man in the grip of hallucinations.
French practitioners of this international genre tend to owe less to the horror-inducing strategies of English Gothic than to the milder thrills of Les Mille et une Nuits or the uncanny fantasies of E. T. A. Hoffmann; so that Romantics like Gautier, with his yarn about a glamorous vampire, ‘La Morte amoureuse’ (1836), or Surrealists like Mandiargues, with his story on a similar theme, ‘Le Passage Pommeraye’ (1946), might be thought to offer rather more wit and baroque decoration than is compatible with the wholehearted escalation of disquiet and panic. Even so, the persuasive insights into the psychotic sensibility of Nerval's semi-autobiographical Aurélia (1855), the macabre imaginings of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Contes cruels (1883), and the unfettered and morbid frenzies of Lautréamont's Chants de Maldoror (1868-9) are evidence that the French can hold their own against foreign ‘shockers’ like Poe or Gustav Meyrink. The history of the genre of the Fantastic is one of evolving self-consciousness and narrative subtlety, and, while in the 1940s francophones like Marcel Brion and Jean Ray could still exploit classic formulae, supremacy was to shift to South America and the urbane ironies of Jorge Luis Borges, whose masterly fictions, translated by Roger Caillois, were a major revelation of the 1950s.
[Roger Cardinal]
Bibliography
- P.-G. Castex, Le Conte fantastique en France: de Nodier à Maupassant (1951)
- R. Caillois, Anthologie du fantastique, 2 vols. (1966)
- T. Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (1970)
