The CONTE FANTASTIQUE as Poetic Fiction : Critical

Orbis Litterarum (1972), XXV II, 237-253
The C O N T E F A N T A S T IQ U E as Poetic Fiction :
Critical Definitions Then and N o w
Louisa Jones, University of Washington
Recent years have witnessed a renewal of interest in the nineteenth century
minor genre, the conte fantastique. In spite of a good deal of traditional
scholarship in this field, Tzetvan Todorov entitled a recent book on the
subject Introduction å la littérature fantastique (Paris: Seuil, 1970). In France,
new reviews have been founded, primary and secondary sources re-edited,
clubs and associations formed.
The fantastique, however, developed as part of nineteenth century mimetic
narrative, itself now somewhat unfashionable. Modern critics recognize this
association. Such divergent writers as Todorov, Castex (Le Conte fantastique
en France de Nodier å nos jours, Paris: Corti, 1950), Kayser (The Grotesque
in Art and Literature, McGraw Hill, 1966) and Louis Vax (La Séduction de
l’étrange, Paris: PUF, 1965; L ’Art et la littérature fantastique, Paris: PUF,
1970) all point out that fantasy must create a convincing illusion in a narra­
tive framework. Fantasy, defined as “une intrusion brutale du mystére dans
le cadre de la vie réelle”, (Castex, p. 8) needs a linear change of equilibrium:
beginning, middle, end. The supernatal is event, not State. Hence they conclude that the fantastic and poetry are mutually exclusive.1 The fantastique,
moreover, complements rather than opposes realism in fiction, since vraisemblance, paradoxically, is a major organizing principle of both: although
fantasy runs counter to the realist’s scientific, objective bias, it strives to
present the impossible as probable - furthermore, as having actually taken
place.
1. Marcel Schneider (La Littérature Fantastique en France, Fayard, 1964) and Roger Caillois
Images Images.. . Essai sur le role et les pouvoirs de l’imagination, Corti, 1966) are exceptions to this group precisely because they want a definition which will link the conte
fantastique with modern poetic fiction, but I think they prove the case precisely by definition
rather than by examination.
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In the nineteenth century, however, the fantastique was linked with poetry.
The fantasy-reality duality was one of many conventional nineteenth century
oppositions: objective-subjective, adult-child, work-play, matter-spirit, belief
in progress-nostalgia for an innocent past, and, particularly, science-art.2
Many writers of the time viewed fantasy as the irruption of poetry into the
material- and materialistic-world, the extra-ordinary illuminating the everyday. Nodier and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam show typical contempt for what they
consider their mediocre, middle-class culture: fantasy is the escape of the
superior man. Nodier concludes an artiele praising Hoffman with the following advice to his public: “Brisez, brisez cette chaine honteuse du monde intellectuel dont vous vous obstiniez å garotter la pensée du poéte!” (“Du Fantas­
tique en littérature”, Revue de Paris, November 1830). Whereas Renan, in
L’Avenir de la science, insisted: “Le monde véritable que la science nous
révéle est de beaucoup supérieur au monde fantastique créé parl’imagination”
(Paris: 1850, ch. V), Huysmans, in A Rebours, suggests to the man of talent
stifled by his society “un élancement vers le fantastique et vers le réve”.
Thus were the battle lines drawn.
For many writers of the fantastique, the poet was still the Romantic seer
in touch with the Absolute. An artiele by Philaréte Chasles in Le Journal des
Débats (May 20, 1830) suggests that Hoffman’s artist-heroes need not even
sully themselves with material creation to reach genius: “L’oeuvre de Partiste
reste gravée dans l’intelligence qui la crée . . . ce dernier ne peut transmettre
å nos yeux qu’une image affaiblie, une contre-épreuve påle de sa pensée
originale”. Here is already the preoccupation of Mallarmé and Valéry for
whom material existence, even artistic, is imperfect. In 1926, Reverdy still
expresses a concept of poetry reminiscent of the fantastique: “Le lyrisme qui
va vers l’inconnu, vers la profondeur, participe naturellement du mystére”,
and “le poéte est dans une position difficile et souvent périlleuse, å l’intersection de deux plans au tranchant cruellement acéré, celui du réve et celui
de la réalité” (Le Gant de crin, Paris: Plon, 1926, pp. 40 and 15).
Is the fantastique then essentially narrative, poetic or hybrid? Must we
see in these contradictions a discrepancy between nineteenth and twentieth
century opinion on the genre? If so, how do we explain its interest to today’s
formalist critic? We must go deeper into definition.
2. Some of these dualities and their inherent contradictions are discussed in Jaques Ehrmann's
artiele “Homo Ludens Revisited”, Yale French Studies 41, 1970, 31-57.
The Conte Fantastique as Poetic Fiction
239
Fiction today discredits the mimetic illusion. At the same time, many
modern discussions of poetry stress its non-representative nature: “Quand le
poéte a inventé l’aurore aux doigts de rose, il n’a pas tué l’aurore, il ne la
pas imitée ni embellie non plus . . .” (Reverdy, Art poétique, Paris: Gallimard, 1968, p. 511). Gérard Genette concurs: “La littéralité du langage
apparåit aujourd’hui comme l’étoffe méme de la poésie . . . En poésie mo­
derne le mot est irremplagable parce que littéral, en poésie classique il n’est
parce que figuré” (Figures, Paris: Seuil, 1966, p. 206). Riffaterre claims that
imagery was never directly imitative of reality. How, he asks, are we to
understand a poem about the ocean which we have never seen? The convincing qualities of a poem’s rhetoric depend not on its successful copy of
experience but on its skillful use of the following potential present in the
linguistic code: a set of associations and connotations shared by all speakers
of the same language, which may be more or less richly combined. He
proposes a new critical approach:
Inversant sa démarche traditionnelle, qui va de la chose représentée å la repré­
sentation, [l’analyse critique] montrera comment la représentation crée la chose
représentée, comme elle la rend vraisemblable, c’est-å-dire reconnaissable et satisfaisante å la lecture. Elle montrera que le lecteur n’a pas besoin de se référer å
son expérience du réel (laquelle peut étre inadéquate), parce qu’il lui suffit pour
comprendre et pour voir de se référer au code linguistique (dont il a une ex­
périence adéquate par définition, sans quoi il ne serait pas lecteur).
(“Le Poéme comme représentation'’, Poétique, 4 (1970) p. 404).
Just as Riffaterre re-evaluates nineteenth century poetry, recent studies
on vraisemblance propose a similar approach to traditional fiction (see Com­
munications, no. 11). The fantastique is a good illustration; although few
readers have experienced ghosts, the success of the genre has always depended on its ability to convince. Its rhetoric, like that of Hugo’s poetry,
must stand or fall according to its success in combining familiar associations.
It should be stressed that the reality violated by the fantastique is conventional and popular, not scientific. For example, it was commonly agreed
in seventeenth century France that moon travel was impossible. It is still a
commonplace that one person cannot be in two places at the same moment.
These assumptions are part of a shared system of beliefs about reality, one
that is inherent in our linguistic forms, not one that reflects the latest findings
of our physicists. But there are also conventional types for the impossible:
the existence of ghosts, time travel, etc. It is one paradox of the fantastique
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that its vraisemblance depends on the reader’s familiarity with, but not his
direet experienee of, the phenomena deseribed. A complieity between reader
and author is necessary to the genre.
If “mimesis” means a convincing blend of conventional with original as­
sociations inherent in the linguistic code, it can no longer be used as a
criterion to distinguish fiction from poetry. It is not surprising, then, to find
a major theorist of the New Novel, Jean Ricardou, approaching fiction as
a continuous pattern of metaphor and, moreover, naming this poetic principle
of continuity (which for him replaces those other conventions, linear time
and causality) “le fantastique de récriture” (Pour un nouveau roman, Paris:
Seuil, 1967, p. 136). In this light, how may the traditional conte fantastique
be deseribed as poetic?
I will take up in turn several approaches to the problem of the fantastique
as poetry, weighing the arguments for and against, and beginning with a
nineteenth century evaluation.
Privileged States of Consciousness
For nineteenth century writers, the poetry of the fantastique was frequently revealed in special, rarified states of consciousness. Balzac’s “Les
Deux Réves” illustrates the prophetic nature of dreams. Gautier describes
hallucinations induced dy drugs in “La Pipe d’Opium” and “Le Club des
haschhischins”. Freud points out that, before his work, dreams were considered either revelations of the spiritual world or senseless results of material
circumstance (digestion, for example); they could not be both material and
meaningful. Dreams, then, according to the first interpretation, were a legitimate subject for the fantastique3 whereas drug-induced revelations, being
results of physical change, were suspect. In faet they occur far less frequently in the stories.
Madness, on the other hand, is an obviously appealing vehicle for the expression of higher, irrational and misunderstood vision, especially since here
the fantastique renews the ancient tradition of the inspired fool. The poet­
seer, like the madman, like the child, is naive and unrealistic in the eyes of
an uncomprehending world. Nodier’s heroes in “Une Heure ou la raison”
and “La Fée aux miettes” both end up in an asylum, but in both cases
3. There is naturally a long tradition relating dreams and fantasy. Kayser points out that one
of the earliest, still very restricted, uses of the word “grotesque” was to describe the Renaissance genre “sogni di pittore”.
The Conte Fantastique as Poetic Fiction
241
their supposedly mad world seems truer than, or at least preferable to, the
“real” one. The doctors who treat them, positivists naturally, are dangerous
obsessives. Nodier, moreover, links fantasy with nostalgia for the Golden age
- rediscovery of the primitive merveilleux. All these attitudes will of course
be further developed by Rimbaud and the Surrealists.
The major objection to this linking of fantasy and poetry is that subject
matter does not make a poem. Any doctor’s case history, by this definition,
is poetry if it contains reports of dreams or hallucinations. Madmen are the
characters, not the authors, of these stories. Nerval, who can write conventional contes fantastiques of some charm (such as “La Main de Gloire”,
“Le Monstre Vert”) reaches poetry only when he extends the irrational
beyond subject matter to the very texture of the narrative (this being, natu­
rally, only one aspect of the poetic quality). If we compare Maupassant, who
describes a kind of possession very like madness in “Le Horla”, we find
that he carefully provides an objective, well-documented, material explanation to supplement the psychological one. Even in the first person narrative
he retains two separate levels of reality - objective and subjective, material
and spiritual - which Nerval blends into one poetic vision. From this point
of view, then, the contes fantastiques simply express fashionable attitudes
towards poetry from without.
Ambiguity
When we examine the rhetoric of this genre, however, we find that the
conventions of the contes fantastiques encourage ambiguities in narrative
technique; some of these are comparable to the use of polysemy and the
rejection of logical opposites central to the understanding and practice of
poetry from Baudelaire onwards.
The most obvious ambiguity involves the interpretation of events. Todorov
even defines the genre on this basis: as long as the reader floats between
rational and irrational explanations for the action, he is experiencing the
fantastic. Most contes play on perception in this way: in Villiers de l’IsleAdam’s “Véra”, it is unclear until the dénouement whether the dead wife
has really returned from the grave or if her loving husband simply imagined
it. Julien Green’s Le Voyageur sur la terre similarly makes perception
ambiguous, but here the confusion is never resolved. We never know if the
hero’s companion is a “real” character or not. Thus Green raises the ques­
tion: what is “real”? Such fiction challenges the subjective-objective duality
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and prepares the way for such deliberately unreliable narration as Céline’s
in Voyage au bout de la nuit: is Robinson the narrator’s alter ego or a
separate character? or both? The narrator stresses his hallucinatory percep­
tion which results from drugs, fever, fatigue and hunger. The double - part of
the Romantic heritage and a familiar motif in fantasy - extends the ambiguity
from situation to personality (Stevenson’s “Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde”,
Gautier’s “Le Chevalier Double” or “La Morte Amoureuse”, “Poe’s “Wil­
liam Wilson”). Another basic tenet of fiction - character as a unified set of
traits - becomes unreliable. Thus the fantastique prefigures Proust, Queneau,
Beckett. Northrop Frye describes this development in his brief survey of
ghosts throughout history:
In a true myth there can obviously be no consistent distinction between ghosts
and living beings. In romance we have real human beings, and consequently
ghosts are in a separate category, but in a romance a ghost as a rule is merely
one more character: he causes little surprise because his appearance is no more
marvellous than many other events. In high mimetic, where we are within the
order of a nature, a ghost is relatively easy to introduce because the plane of
experience is above our own, but when he appears he is an awful and mysterious
being from what is perceptibly another world. In low mimetic, ghosts have been,
ever since Defoe, almost entirely confined to a separate category of “ghost
stories”. In ordinary low mimetic fiction they are inadmissible, “in complaisance
to the scepticism of a reader”, as Fielding puts it, a scepticism which extends
only to low mimetic conventions . . . In some forms of ironic fiction, such as
the later works of Henry James, the ghost begins to come back as a fragment
of a disintegrating personality.
(Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton, 1967, p. 50).
Monsters, common to the contes fantastiques, are animal-human blends,
usually expressing the ominous instincts of human nature (for example, in
werewolfs stories). In fantasy, even objects may be animated, as the statue
in Mérimée’s “La Vénus d’Ille”, more logical distinctions are thus suspended.
If such stories continue the Romantic tendency to ascribe subjective states of
soul to the external world, the emotion projected here is usually fear, sometimes tinged with desire (cf. Vax, La Séduction de 1’étrange). They foreshadow the alienation of man from environment, and more particularly the
tendency to view objects independently of their utilitarian function. Objects
here are masters, not slaves (as the furniture in Maupassant’s “Qui sait?”).
They may, in another variant, express the nightmare of man as slave of the
object-machine, or man in love with an automaton or wax doll (Hoffman’s
“Der Sandmann”, Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s
“L ’Eve future”).
The Conte Fantastique as Poetic Fiction
243
Animism in fantasy, as Todorov points out, may replace causality: magic
replaces logic, and the rational explanations of realist eonvention are avoided.
Where logic works, and sometimes it works quite rigorously, its premise will
be irrational: that the dead live, that the inanimate is alive, that imagination
has special powers over the material world. In Balzac’s “Le Requisitionnaire”, a mother envisions her son’s execution miles away, an experience
which causes her own death. Such irrational mixtures of inner and outer
reality have more recently been described as characteristic of the primitive
mind (by Lévi-Strauss, among others) and of children’s thought (by Piaget).
Fantasy also challenges the linear concept of time. Ghost stories, besides
denying the life-death distinction, often make the past irrupt into the present.
Sometimes hallucinations reveal the future (as in Mérimée’s “La Vision de
Charles X I ”), or dreams permit the past to rejoin the present (as in Gautier’s
“Arria Marcella”, where the hero falls in love with a girl who died at
Pompeii). Such a treatment of time anticipates Freud’s condensation principle
in dreams, or Proust’s spatial concept of memory. It again represents a
rejection of the positivist’s rationally ordered world.
A final important ambiguity suspends the significantIsignifié distinction.
Fantasy has always expressed the magic of words - in curses, spells, and
incantations and in the sacred nature of the act of naming. The simple
uttering of a word may cause its referent to appear, to change, even to die.
What Freud and Breton describe in dreams - play on language which links
one episode to the next - happens frequently in the fantastique. Even those
writers who link fantasy and mimesis recognize this paradox. Vax points out:
“Les personnages, qui ne sont plus soumis aux lois de la nature matérielle,
le sont å celle de l’analogie: leur destin est inscrit dans les lignes de la main,
dans les astres et dans le mare de café” (p. 33). Todorov goes further: “Le
surnaturel commence å partir du moment ou l’on glisse des mots aux choses
que ces mots sont censés désigner. Les métamorphoses forment done å leur
tour une transgression de la séparation entre matiére et esprit. . (p. 119).
The distinction between mimetic and literal uses of language, which was
supposed to separate fiction from poetry, again appears too simple: the
fantastique combines both.
The fantastique challenges many logical categories: objective-subjective,
animal-human, living-dead, animate-inanimate, time-space, word-referent.
By so doing, it attacks the rhetoric of realism insofar as the realistic use
of narrative depends greatly on these dualities. The fantastique here fore-
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shadows - even if the shadow is a pale one - the new vision of poetry introduced by Baudelaire and Mallarmé, the resolution of seeming opposites
through form and the ideal of the universal analogy. Valéry echoes this later
when he describes poetry as “runivers de relations réciproques, analogue å
l’univers de sons . . . dans laquelle la résonance remporte sur la causalité”
(Oeuvres, Paris: Pléiade, 1960, I pp. 1501-2). Octavio Paz continues the
tradition:
L ’identification des contraires va å l’encontre des fondements méme de notre
pensée. L ’image ne peut done aspirer å la vérité . . . L ’image transmue l’homme
et le transforme å son tour en image, c’est-å-dire en espace ou les contraires se
jouent. Et Phomme, exilé des sa naissance, se réconcilie avec lui-méme lorsqu’il
se fait image, lorsqu’il devient autre. La poésie est métamorphose.
(.L’Arc et la Lyre, tr. Roger Munier, Paris:
Gallimard, 1965, pp. 129 and 147).
Metamorphosis is change from one State to another - in a sense, then,
narrative. But poetic metamorphosis is both in and outside of time. In
metamorphosis poetry and fantasy may meet.
Atmosphere and Connotation: The Fantasy of Language
Atmosphere is an essential ingredient of the fantastique. To build up suspense, the author carefully chooses descriptive terms for their mutually echoing connotations; he thus estabishes a pattern of associations. In “Le Horla”,
soon after the hero begins to feel himself possessed, he makes a visit to
Mont Saint Michel. His first view of the town elicits
. . . un cri d’étonnement. Une baine démesurée s’étendait devant moi, å perte de
vue, entre deux cotes écartées se perdant au loin dans les brumes; . . . le soleil
venait de disparaitre, et sur l’horizon encore flamboyant se dessinait le profil
de ce fantastique rocher qui porte sur son sommet un fantastique m onum ent. . .
j ’atteignis l’énorme bloc de pierre qui porte la petite cité dominée par la grande
église. . .
(Oeuvres complétes, Paris: Conard, 1908-29, v. 9).
All the details of the passage, including some not cited, stress the limitless
immensity of nature: “démesurée . . . å perte de vue, se perdant au loin dans
les brumes”, “énorme bloc de pierre”. The city is small, in comparison, and
dominated by the monument. The disappearing sun has left ominous flames
and shadows; the very word “fantastique”, twice repeated, a qualitative ad-
The Conte Fantastique as Poetic Fiction
245
jective, links the speaker’s emotions (“un eri d’étonnement”) with his visual
perceptions. But only the rock and the monument deserve this term: the
town - ordinary human life - occupies little space in this threatening environment. It is perched on top of the rock, its existence precarious.
This passage does not accompany a major narrative development. Even
here, however, no detail is arbitrary; each contributes to the emotional
climate of fear and menace. All contes fantastiques contain such passages,
the ones directly preceding the action being usually the most violent. Vigny,
in “La Mort du Loup”, strives for similar effect:
Les nuages couraient sur la lune enflammée
Comme sur l’incendie on voir fuir la fumée,
Et les bois étaient noir jusqu’å l’horizon .. .
Et les chénes d’en bas, contre les roes penchés,
Sur leurs coudes semblaient endormis et couchés .. .
(Oeuvres complétes, Paris: Gallimard, 1950, Vol. 1, p. 146).
Each word and image suggests the ominous, with a striking contrast between
dark and light similar to Maupassant’s; nature is alive and potentially threat­
ening. Vigny’s description will become ironie, when his preference for nature
as the victim of man emerges; then symbolic, as the whole situation is explicitly given its more universal application.
Though these further complexities are usually lacking in the contes fan­
tastiques, atmosphere frequently depends on metaphor. To ascribe human even monstrous - qualities to trees, buildings, etc. is to make implicit comparisons, blending feeling and perception as in the pathetic fallacy. Yet, the
metaphors which describe trees as threatening monsters, while contributing
to the growing pattern of repeated connotations similar to Ricardou’s “fan­
tastique de l’écriture”, can only be effectively a menace if read mimetically:
not “trees are like monsters” but “trees are monsters, capable of narrative
action such as crushing the hero to death”. In another context, such as
Hugo’s “Ce que dit la Bouche d’Ombre”, a specter may be iinpressive, and
not frightening, because we read him symbolically from the start, never
literally. The fantastic metaphor must be read both as if it were mimetic and
as impossible in mimetic terms: here again the fantastique prefers paradox
to logic.
The Tradition of the Grotesque
The irrational aspect of nineteenth century fantasy can be placed in a larger
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historical context. The “other world” for a still Christian society may be
heaven or hell, and both types of supernaturai occur in the fantastique
(Balzac s Séraphita is a good example of heavenly intervention into the real
world). When tne mimetic moves towards irony (to use Frye’s terminology),
when the ideal of order, beauty, and virtue gives way to an esthetic of local
form, the picturesque, even the ugly and the grotesque, then the diabolical
wins out over the divine. The fantastique is rooted in the medieval vision of
the diabolical: whereas, in Christian mythology, the marvellous was associated with divinity, love, beauty, the good, the opposite qualities - dis­
proportion, ugliness, monstrous animal—human hybrids, guilt, fear and pain belonged to hell. Later on, in a culture that continued to link order of the
mind to the preservation of a stable society and a balanced ideal of beauty,
fantasy went underground.4 Sometimes it was simply not “serious” as with
the grotesques and caprices of painting; sometimes it expressed forbidden
eroticism; sometimes it took the form of satire, which is always a liberating
urge against too much restricting order. The critique of intellectual as well
as of political systems is familiar in satire. Even the discontinuities of satirical
narrative - as in Rabelais’ magnificent and vital fragmentation - expressed
this rejection of system. Narrative order was associated with logical continuity.
The Romantic writers of course challenged the association of beauty with
moral and social order. The reception of Hoffman’s tales in France nicely
illustrates the new attitude (as related in Castex, pp. 46-55). Walter Scott,
himself widely read in France at the time, reviewed Hoffman’s stories,
relegating them to a “genre inférieur. . . ou l’imagination s’abandonne å
toute 1irrégularité de ses caprices . . . ses caractéres les plus marqués sont
1 invraisemblance et l’absurdité” (“Du merveilleux dans le roman”, Revue de
Paris, 1829). The critic of the Globe, however, “s’indigne que l’on prétende
assigner des limites å 1imagination et proclame en adversaire résolu des
normes classiques: ‘Les mots de merveilleux et de régulier s’excluent’ ”
(Castex, p. 51). Castex sees Scott’s reaction as professional jealousy, but
surely it reflects the esthetics of contemporary English literature: Scott is
observing the distinction between fancy - dangerous disorder of the mind and imagination - the mind inventing harmony and beauty. For the French,
4. Kayser remarks that French seventeenth century criticism defined the difference between
French and Spanish art by finding in the latter “heated and excessive fantasy” (p. 17).
The Conte Fantastique as Poetic Fiction
247
on the other hand, Hoffman naturally fit into the new, revolutionary esthetic
of the grotesque elaborated by Hugo in his preface to Cromwell. The critic
of the Globe was mistaken - historically - in his use of the word “merveilleux” (as André Breton would be later in the famous passage of the Manifestoes)', but we have here already the two basic orientations of the fantas­
tique: liberty (for those who want an escape from social order or from
positivism) and absurdity for those who, like Maupassant, regard disorder
with fear). The Romantics naturally associated Creative disorder with the
diabolical, a tradition continued by Baudelaire, Rimbaud and the Surrealists.
The contes fantastiques are obviously structured around this opposition of
system and destruction, although the elements that intervene suddenly into
an ordered world may not always be explieitly diabolical. The rejection of
order and convention discussed in the last two sections takes part of its
meaning from this historical perspective. It explains, furthermore, why the
emotions so often associated with this genre are fear and pleasure: the devil
is both fearful and attractive, his extra-ordinary powers being part of his
seduction. Todorov examines the temptation aspect of the fantastique in his
chapter “Les Thémes du tu”, where he presents fantasy as a dangerous,
forbidden freedom.
The treatment of animals also reflects the diabolical. They are never
purely animal, and, for that reason, innocent: on the contrary, there is always
something of a higher nature degraded expressed in the blend of animal and
human characteristics. The common motif of vampires perpetuates the
medieval archetype of the destructive, diabolical female, she whose antithesis is the virgin goddess. Mérimée’s “Lokis” is a striking example of
animal fantasy: a woman attacked by a bear gives birth to a monstrous son
who will murder his human bride on their wedding night. Animality may be
more indirect, as in Erckmann and Chatrian’s “La Montre du doyen”, where
the murderer is constantly described as feline. In all these cases, the animal
theme echoes the Christian view of man’s dual animal-angel nature, emphasizing the devil’s half.
The two major types of hero in the fantastique illustrate two approaches to
the diabolical. The first is the man of science, the detective, the scholar, who
attempts, in essence, to cast out the devils that are disrupting order and
reason. In this sort of story there is frequently a rational explanation for
the events at the end. The second sort af hero, however, is the victim himself.
Here we are already well into ironie fiction, according to Frye:
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If inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of
looking down on a sence of bondage, frustration or absurdity, the hero belongs
to the iionic mode. Thjs is still true when the reader feels that he is or might be
in the same situation, as the situation is being judged by the norms of a greater
freedom.
(Anatomy, p. 34).
Helpless passivity in the face of overpowering forces, usually destructive
or at least dangerous, is one of the hallmarks of the fantastique; it will similarly characterize the heroes of Michaux, of Pinget, of Beckett. At this point,
one may ask if the particular situation should be read as a metaphor of the
human condition. Later writers impose such a reading by stressing of the
rational and the discontinuous. Thus they destroy the particular level of
reference so that only the universal application remains.
Conclusion
The fantastique is poetic, firstly, by early nineteenth century norms; here
poetry does not exclude anecdote, mimesis, or linear progressions similar
to those of the novel, and subject matter, or context, carries more weight
than it does today. It is poetic, secondly, by modern standards to the extent
that it suggests the metaphorical potential, in fiction, of both vocabulary and
situation; thus it reflects the late nineteenth century attitude which no
longer sees prosody as the principal criterion for poetry, and looks for
poetic qualities in prose. As for the novel, once the mimetic concept of fiction
loses ground, narrative becomes simply one type of patterning, not more
real” than metaphor. The fantastique is modern insofar as it helps make the
mimetic illusion self-conscious. It further foreshadows the ironic-diabolical
esthetic which will characterize so much of the “absurd” in later literature.
This combination of elements explains, I believe, the interest of the fan­
tastique for the modern critic and self-conscious author such as Ricardou.
Yet we must still ask: what are the limitations of this genre? Although sug­
gestive, why does it seem so much less innovative than the concurrently
developing prose poem? How far does it go in its attack on mimesis, or in
its emphasis on metaphor?
The first major weakness of the fantastique is its highly conventional
nature. It is a popular genre, not because it richly exploits the symbolism of
its folklore but because of its conventional facility. Its flights into the be-
The Conte Fantastique as Poetic Fiction
249
yond, unlike those of the symbolists, must always be rooted in the easily
accessible. Although stressing the uncommon, the extraordinary, they must
be convincing according to some criterion of vraisemblance acceptable to a
wide public.
It is often said that these stories depend on their accumulation of concrete,
realistic detail to gain plausibility for the fantasies they depict. These details
are convincing, however, because of their conventional familiarity rather
than their verisimilitude. Yves Bonnefoy describes this phenomenon in nine­
teenth century realistic painting, which presents
. . . une idée de l’object conventionelle et impersonnelle qui implique que “faire
vrai” c’est se placer sous les yeux des plus quelconques des autres hommes et
chercher leur assentiment.
(Rome 1630, Flammarion 1971, p. 128).
What seems to be an emphasis on the particular and the concrete is really a
simplification, an abstraction, a stereotype - albeit stereotype of the bizarre
and unique. Conventional motifs, situations, and characters which recur from
author to author make for a good deal of predictability. For the reader, the
fantasy is carefully controlled experiment, a risk highly calculated, and the
result is pleasurable because safe. There will be no serious mystification on
the part of the narrator. Rather the mystery from some already familiar
principle, such as the existence of ghosts. The enigma will be at least partially
solved in one of several possible conventional patterns. Most important, the
story will almost certainly end with a return to the everyday world from
which is started. It is like a roller coaster ride: you are confident it will end
safely. The dreamer awakens at dawn (Nodie’s “Smarra”, Mérimée’s “Djoumåne”). The other world may leave behind some tangible evidence (the
coffee pot shards in Gautier’s “La Cafetiere”, the key in Villiers de l’Isle
Adam’s “Véra”), but again this technique is so common that it is almost
expected.
The second major limitation of this genre is total subordination of all
elements to narrative. The particular situation - even if stereotyped, not truly
concrete or original - takes precedence over the metaphorical, more universal
reading of plot. What happens then to the poetic elements desecribed above?
The connotative networks on which atmosphere depends have as their chief
and only raison d’étre the creation of suspense: fear as to what will happen
next. Only metaphorical associations related to the furthering of the action
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are allowed and these, thus limited, again fall into conventional families. We
mentioned, in Erckmann and Chatrian’s “La Montre du Doyen”, the murderer’s feline characteristics. They are in faet causal in this story: the man
murders gratuitously because he is cat-like. Fantasy and metaphor are inseparable, but it is always the narrative side of the image that is developed.
In the stories about distorted time, there is rarely any play on the time of
narration. One need only compare Borges, who, even though he frequently
uses the conventions of the fantastique, extends its range to his own rhetoric,
telling a story within a story in such a way that fiction and reality are inseparable. In “The Garden of the Forked Paths” (Labyrinths, New Directions, 1964), the “garden” is a real plant garden, a labyrinth, a novel which
is a labyrinth, and the story we are reading; the “paths” are sometimes
spatial, sometimes temporal. Borges’ stories must be reread. But with the
traditional conte fantastique, as in the detective story, once the enigma is
resolved, the linear development completed, there is no need to begin again.
The brevity of these stories, unlike that of the poémes en prose, is necessary
only to permit the twist at the end which Poe deseribed as a necessary effect
in good narrative. These stories are models of contes bien faits.
Ambiguity is also essentially narrative in this genre. Todorov distinguishes
two kinds of ambiguity in his reading of Aurelia: in the first we ask, “Is the
man mad?” This is a limited, narrative question, relating to a particular
character and circumstance. In the second, we ask, “What does madness
mean?” This becomes a play between language and reference which enriches
the text, allowing several levels of reading. It may be poetic.
The fantastique needs the security of the logical framework it would
question. Gautier emphasized this in 1836 in La Clironique de Paris: “II faut
dans la fantasie la plus folie un appareil de raison, un pretexte quelconque,
un plan, des caractéres et une conduite.” Many authors create distance
through retrospective narration, or even through a series of narrators, none
of whom have experienced the supernatural firsthand. Maupassant, in “Le
Horla”, needs the pretext of a diary to reveal his hero’s growing obsession,
even though it is extremely unlikely that a man would take notes while
fleeing a burning building. Such detachment allows the author to maintain
society’s moral classifications: madness is deviant and undesirable.
Many denouements dissipate the mystery with a rational, if farfetched,
explanation (Nodier’s “Ines de la Sierra”, for example). And although the
reader is allowed to enjoy his forbidden - or mistaken - moment, some
The Conte Fantastique as Poetic Fiction
251
writers will seriously warn him against the consequences of over-indulgence an orderly, bourgeois piece of advice. Gautier’s “Onuphrius”, for example,
describes a young man too impressed by his readings of Hoffman. He begins
to see the fantastic everywhere and, of course, goes mad. In “La Morte
amoureuse” Gautier warns against erotic fantasy, as does Cazotte in Le
Diable amoureux. Almost all of these authors display a disturbing ambivalence towards their subject matter.
Such an emphasis on plot, such limits set on reader involvement, damage
the metaphorical reading in other ways. How far can the reader identify with
the hero as victim? There may be two types of dangerous situation: in the
first, man is surpassed by something he cannot grasp, but which is still a
system - ominous, but ordered. In the second, man is simply facing arbitrary
chance. Both types may be combined, if there is a system which benefits a
natural order but has no place for man, who arbitrarily finds himself caught
up in it. The contes fantastiques most typically present the first, least modern,
situation, which has the advantage (so considered then) of being more per­
sonal: the hero has been chosen as the individual victim of some elaborately
constructed machine, such selection seeming far more fearful than chance
disaster. A murder has far more story-power tlian a car accident if “story”
must involve a carefully and logically developed plot. The fantastique is
again particularized, and the hero’s plight cannot then so easily be read as
a metaphor of the human condition. The reader is once more safe, since he
is another individual, one who has no reason to believe himself so selected by
destiny. He can identify only when it pleases him.
The devil is really not so threatening with these conventions limiting his
power. Lautréamont, writing in the same Romantic-diabolical tradition, but
with greater originality and no desire to please his reader, achieves far greater
intensity. Convention is after all a kind of social order, accepted and expressed in the fantastique through the complicity of narrator and reader.
This desire for complicity with the reader, part of the realist rhetoric,
contrasts sharply with the elitism of Malarmé and the Symbolists and with
the mystification of the Surrealists. This last approach, however, may be
seen as a projection of the enigma of fantasy into the very texture of the
work.
A similar caution may be observed in much Romantic poetry. The point
of departure for revery is still often anecdotal, and imagery is frequently
introduced by “comme si”, “on eut dit”, or “on croirait”. Riffaterre, com-
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menting on this tendency in Hugo, points out that the poet suggests halluci­
nation rather than true synesthesia when combining auditory and visual connotations; he goes on to say:
L ’hallucination est efficace poétiquement, mais du point de vue de la mimésis
littéraire, c’est encore une excuse, un aveu de la nécessité d’une référence å un
contexte rationnel (note 28, p. 407).
It is highly ironic that the authors of the fantastique, many of whom wrote
to affirm the superior reality of the inner life over the external, material
world, should have produced a literature of such overwhelming exteriority.
The artist’s confrontation with the arbitrary, particular nature of the world,
a world he desires to depict not symbolically but through direct perception
of its material, concrete, qualities, has since the Renaissance, always carried
these great risks: the artist will remain outside, the confrontation will not take
place, and no meaning will emerge. The fantastique starts with the premise
that fruitful convergence is impossible, that physical and spiritual are inevitably separate, and then seeks security in a pre-organized form which
simply accumulates conventional detail. It follows naturally that Castex, in
his survey of his genre, not only finds Nerval and Lautréamont difficult to
classify but also Balzac, the great critic of man’s passionate ambition to
transcend matter, who preferred the concreteness of the novel to philosophy,
but for whom materialism was by in no sense a reduction. In fantasies like
Séraphita or La Peau de Chagrin, he could combine the abstract allegory of
Lamartine’s La Chute d’un ange with the concrete quality of living narrative
simply because, for him, symbolism and materialism were not mutually exclusive. Their union did not seem intellectual or inaccessible. It was a real
fusion of spirit and matter, a manifestation of spirit in matter for which art
provided the lieu de recontre.5 The typical conte fantastique, although it
questions logical distinctions, presents its hybrids as sources of conflict
(ghosts and monsters are usually this) rather than as successful resolutions,
as juxtapositions rather than as fusions. Its very vocabulary, “extra-ordinary”, “super-natural”, implies separation, even if the desire for union exists.
The fantastique is a surface genre. Its extreme exteriority brings about a
far greater reduction of the inner life to the material than in the roman
5. Balzac has many qualities that Bonnefoy, in Rom 1630, ascribes to the Baroque and, more
particularly, to Bernini.
The Conte Fantastique as Poetic Fiction
253
réaliste. Yet, even here, we may find a modern descendant in the novels of
Robbe-Grillet. Whereas one line of experimentation in the novel leads
towards the subordination of narrative to metaphor (Beckett, Simon, Le
Clézio, etc.), Robbe-Grillet insists that the artist must indeed remain on the
outside of the objects and phenomena he describes, that meaningful confrontation is indeed impossible. Surface is for him a new realism, the only honest
one. For the old continuities of narrative logic he substitutes patterns of asso­
ciations which might also be compared to those of the fantastique. His taste
for the arbitrary but intricately organized design (familiar also in Queneau)
might be compared with the carefully constructed plots of fantasy that depend on an absurd premise. The modern writer, naturally, shows far greater
originality; he avoids the security of easy conventions; he exploits the tra­
ditional complicity with the reader as a source of endless mystification. Only
the future can tell how a fiction so self-consciously exterior will grow.