Abstracts
p. 383-392
Texte intégral
1The Verne ’Oscillation’ or Fantastic Space (A Conversation) – Jean DELABROY
Inscribed in the positivist and rationalist project that Hetzel implemented in the Magazin d’education et de récréation, the Vernian novel seems, at first sight, to exclude the fantastic perspective. Nevertheless, Verne was a reader of Poe and Hoffmann, and his knowledge of the fantastic haunts these novels of modernity. The fantastic hollows out this novel of triumphant knowledge with a nostalgic and critical dimension. At the heart of the rational adventure, the repressed of the heroic ages – mysterious or frightening figures, the ones that positivist knowledge has not succeeded in exhausting – returns. From the journey to the center of the earth to the voyage to the moon, the fantastic space in Verne suspends progress, which the nineteenth century believed to have been set definitively into motion.
2What Must be Read in a Vampire Story : Richard Matheson’s I am Legend – Luc RUIZ
Richard Matheson’s I am Legend is usually considered to be a brilliant stylistic exercise: in it, vampirism is « recuperated » by science fiction at the same time that the characteristics appropriate to the human and the vampire are reversed. Nevertheless, Matheson’s novel seems, above all, to be a dialogue with Dracula, a book with which it plays by reversing the topic with a scientific explanation that does not at all possess the seriousness that would have been expected. The inscription of Dracula serves as a signpost in a text that makes a particularly good use of rewriting and reference, thus forming a network in such a way that this novel can best be approached, not so much in terms of the fantastic or science fiction, but, instead, as fable and legend.
3The Fantastic Narrative : A Manner of Neologism that Calls for a Common Reading – Jean BESSIÈRE
In reference to Borges’ The Aleph, the paradox of the fantastic letter is considered under the double sign of the neologism and the common reading. By these two notations, it is indicated that the fantastic text presents itself as a kind of singularity – it would be a radically distinct text – and as a manner of symbolic impasse, since this singularity and this distinction are, in fact, constituted by the play of several forms of life. The fantastic narrative would play hyperbolically with the transition between these forms of life and would draw its effect of estrangement from the hermeneutic game that is indissociable from this transition. These propositions not only allow all of the contemporary theses on the fantastic narrative – which are dualistic – to be reconsidered, but also suggest that they be challenged.
4The Detective Novel as Jurifiction – Claude AMEY
The detective novel is one of the forms into which the classical novel has been transformed. It brings a solution to the crisis of the novel, and does so according to a mode of rigid structuration that recalls the story or the premodern narrative. It can be reduced, at the narrative level, to a canonical, functional and actantial structure, without causing its signification to disappear, but, quite to the contrary, by saturating its meaning It is a narrative, then, that creates meaning at the moment of its structure. Moreover, it is a fictional transformation of other texts, among which is the philosophy of right (Hegel), an approach that, in essence, reduces crime and its complexity to a violation of the law, and makes the enigma of life slide onto the terrain of policing and of a juridical – i.e., factual – truth.
5James Ellroy’s White Jazz: A Postmodern Roman Noir – Christophe DUFOSSÉ
With White Jazz, James Ellroy completes his series of romans noirs by trying to explode a genre of which he had been the provisional reanimator. This attempt at deconstructing the novelistic hard-boiled style seems to be linked to a postmodern axis that, in large part, overflows the strict frame of paraliterature. By reinscribing Ellroy in the tradition of the noir thriller, but also in the context of an America that is fascinated by extremes, this study proposes to examine White Jazz in a double perspective: the possible closure that this work inscribes in the roman noir, while positing the hypothesis that it opens up this genre, which is a priori serious, to parody.
6The Enigmatic Contemporaneity of the Detective Narrative – Denis MELLIER
The contemporary novel never stops borrowing from the forms and the imaginary of detective fiction. The principle of this encounter is the strangeness of such fiction, which remains well beyond the solution of its mystery. What is enigmatic about detective fiction is the presence within it of a questioning that works on the constraining form of this narrative. Moreover, questions that concern contemporary literature arise, questions of chaos and the aleatory, of the opening up of a crisis for simple meaning, and of self-reflexive obsession. Is this a discovery of novelistic modernity in a worn-out form, or, instead, a metafictional deployment of properties that, from the beginning, have been contained in the form and the imaginary of detective fiction?
7(A Conversation) – Jerome CHARYN
In the name of a reflection on language, Jerome Charyn, in this conversation about his novels, refuses to differentiate between his detective stories and his other books. Drawing examples especially from Hammett, but also from John Hawkes and William Gass, Jerome Charyn evokes what all literature – and thus the detective novel as well – seeks to grasp, since language plays with the very constraints that it is given. A literature without a past, the detective novel is described as an open and democratic form, which, like the cinematic image, creates its own language.
8Alexandre Dumas Between History and Adventure – Elements for a Poetics of the Cloak-and-Sword Romance – Sarah MOMBERT
A definition of the genre of the « cloak and sword romance » inevitably involves the paradox that history and adventure, although imposing opposite constraints upon the novelistic narrative, can be combined to produce works such as the three novels in Alexandre Dumas’ musketeer cycle. By forming a part of the historical novel, the cloak-and-sword romance is, in effect, obliged to make a special use of realia: time, place, and event converge in the reader’s recognition of the narrative’s frame. Adventure, on the contrary, introduces surprise into the narrative, and the entire art of the cloak-and-sword romancer consists in making the best use of the places of freedom that history accords him in order to introduce into his work the breath of the imaginary.
9Dramaxes : Elements for a Grammar of Popular Epics – Colas DUFLO
Dramaxes are units of simple meaning. They can be logical and ideological axioms, cliches, or even typical characters. The interactions of dramaxes create the perpetual movement of « popular » novels – novels that we will, from now on, call dramaxicals.
« Dramaxes » cannot, with any rigor, be spoken of in the singular, but must, instead, be referred to in the plural. A unit of simple meaning begins to be a dramax only when it is integrated into a network of dramaxes, which forms a drama. There are only a few dramaxes.
The theory of dramaxes is an attempt to contribute to the study of the « popular novel’s » structure and tremendous productivity.
10The/A Modest Cosmology of the Popular Novel – Cyrille LE GRAND
How is the question of the world inscribed in paraliterature? Three corpora are envisioned here: the classic popular novels (from Mystères de Paris to Fantômas), Jules Verne’s « educational novels », and the first novels of « anticipation ». The world that, in the first corpus, is only a decoration and, in the second, only a scholastic pretext, becomes, in the last, a figuration of the multiple. These three corpuses are the place of a dehiscence of Fiction and Fabulation.
11A Bad Encounter: Misery or the Devouring of the Reader – Sophie RABAU
In Stephen King’s novel, Misery, a novelist meets one of his most faithful readers. Why does this meeting lead to the death of the reader, and not to a euphoric encounter between the one who knows how to tell, and the one who asks only to hear a story? The first component of the explanation, the madness of the reader, who can be placed in a literary tradition of characters who are mad readers, involves an assimilation of reading to devouring. Above all, the meeting between the author and this mad reader abolishes textual mediation and leads to a literalization of images. Thus, an opposition between solitary novelistic writing and the desire for an oral narration in presentia takes shape in King’s novel.
12Arsène Lupin and Others – Daniel COUÉGNAS
The novellas and detective novels published in the magazine Je Sais Tout between 1905 and 1914 were inspired, for the most part, by literary models and themes in vogue at this period: sporting narratives, fashionable and psychologizing, they also tried to conform to the more popular imperatives of the detective novel incarnated by the works of Conan Doyle. But only – or almost only – Maurice Leblanc and Arsäne Lupin succeeded in passing into posterity. Perfectly « intertwined » with the Belle Epoque, they knew how to give life to a fashionable detective novel whose distance, self-irony, and playful writing participate in a certain literary modernity.
13On the Literary Primitivism of Robert Ervin Howard – David BENSOUSSAN
The fascinating Robert E. Howard! The short and tormented life of an accursed writer (he committed suicide in 1936 at the age of thirty); an abundant work that leapt incisively from a wild and inspired pen. Known as the father of a genre that is in vogue today – the heroic fantasy – he hardly gains by being judged by the standards of his followers; moreover, he is radically distinguished from them by the intensity and the peculiarly « primitive » purity of both his fantasmatic vision and his poetics. His work is to be rediscovered, but it can be appreciated correctly only when put back into its literary, historical, and psychic context, and studied both for its lines of internal coherence, and for the remarkable success of a style that, by its instinctive virtuosity, knew how to recover the primitive and infallible springs of epic art in all the splendor of its powerful and sincere simplicity.
14The Adventure as Ethical Experience: The Super-Heroes of American Comic Books – Jean-Paul GABILLIET
The super-heroes of American comic books fill essential functions of cultural identification for their readers. They repeat the narrative of transcendence in a playful form that is acceptable in the secularized everyday life of Modernity. The concept of the super-hero seems to be the product of a syncretism between the Christian cultural tradition and capitalist ideology, both of which consider the body to be the privileged place for the manifestation of the supernatural. However, the representation of a superhuman body used for positive ethical ends helps to sublimate the « schizophrenic » experience of Modernity, at the heart of which the individual seeks vainly and sometimes futilely to transcend the everyday in a permanent fashion.
15The Romance of Chivalrous Adventure (in the Middle Ages) – Pascale CHIRON
What does the medieval Arthurian romance have in common with The Count of Monte Cristo? Both belong to a vast category of the literary field called the « romance of adventure ». Adventure is certainly what happens to the hero, and it is also what happens to the romance.
More than an episode in the life of a knight, the adventure demonstrates a specific relation of the individual to the group, and of the personal quest to that of the collective values that the hero is supposed to incarnate. This search for an equilibrium, tinted with nostalgia, sets the romance in motion. If Lancelot’s horse continues to wander by chance (even as the knight is immobilized in an amorous dream) the romance has the ability to pursue its thread, involving the reader in a forest of meaning, where his/her destiny meets that of the hero of the adventures.
16Lesuire and the Adventure Novel – Jean GILLET
By means of a novel that had a certain success, and which displayed its intention, in 1782, of writing adventures in the French fashion, this article attempts to pinpoint the place and meaning of adventure, which is thus put in the forefront.
L’Aventurier français seeks, first of all, to oppose itself to the English novels: the critique of Robinson Crusoe is attached to Defoe’s lack of realism. Lesuire opposes to it, however, not an attempt to be lifelike, but, on the contrary, a narrative that underlines its own lack of realism by oscillating between the burlesque and the oneiric.
This attempt to explore the different registers of the adventure novel suffers from an instability of tone; it moves from « French mirth », which combines ribaldry with broad comedy, to outbursts of Rousseauesque sensibility, and goes, as well, from a legislative and almost colonialist utopia to the most conventional burlesque effects. All of these moods create an impression of great incoherence.
The most constant scheme is that of the hero’s search for identity: in effect, the structure of a familial novel organizes the entire text. In contrast to the inconsistency of the various events in the hero’s life, his reconquest of his identity and social place serves as a constant, and is the only true adventure in these scattered events.
17The True and the False: Complementary Bipolarity in Cao Xueqin’s The Dream of the Red Chamber – Yinde ZHANG
Deeply impregnated by Buddhist and Taoist thought, The Dream of the Red Chamber makes the illusion and vacuousness of human existence perceptible by signifying them through the interpenetration of the worlds of dream and reality. By relying on the classical Chinese novel of the eighteenth century, the article tries to show that the fantastic, particularly in its acceptance of the supernatural, participates in the play of overlapping and complementarity. Drawn from the general principle of the alternation of Yin and Yang, and by no means presented as a transgression of knowledge or rationality, it adheres to the problematic of the interaction of the empty and the full, and the true and the false, by revealing to us a novelistic discourse that corresponds to the Chinese philosophical and cosmological vision.
18Adventure by Metaphors in Two Novels by Joseph Conrad – Nathalie MARTINIÈRE
The analogical processes (metaphors and comparisons) used by Conrad for his spatial descriptions in Typhoon and The Secret Agent testify to the particular status of Adventure in his novels. Description is only possible because of the metamorphoses undergone by space: the liquefaction of the city in The Secret Agent, and the petrification of the sea in Typhoon. It is constantly necessary to superimpose metaphors and comparisons upon the inexpressible narrated adventure. The action overflows the diegetic space, which is too narrow, while new guide marks take over, marks that are the guarantees of novelistic coherence. Thanks to these figures, Adventure remains a fantasy that, by attempting to end up in another place, always escapes being carried out. The diegetic space becomes a palimpsest, and the figure of the voyage turns into an infinite wandering. This vain quest resonates finally as an echo of the most intimate choices of the writer, who opts for the English language, as if the adventure narrative, like the sea story, consists in a displacement, and thus in the construction of new guide marks in a foreign language as in metaphoric space.
19About Stephen King : The Fantastic, Literature, and Cinema – Irene BESSIÈRE
The fantastic cinema offers in itself a paradoxical image : while the fantastic is usually understood as the terrain of uncertainty, the cinematic image achieves the explicit. Hence, the cinematic adaptation can never constitute a simple transposition. The passage from verbal to visual representation has, as its conseqence, a loss of the textual discontinuity that the cinematic narrative cannot restore; at the same time, this passage implies a gain, for a power of truth-telling extends to the image. From these constraints, we read cinematic adaptations that conform to the fantastic project as the ones that do not fall into an excess of representation, but which, in the image of the literary narrative, maintain its power of suggestion.
In this perspective, two of the best adaptations of Stephen King’s texts will be examined more specifically: David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
20H. P. Lovecraft : The Fantastic and Writing – Gilles MÉNÉGALDO
Most of Lovecraft’s narratives develop a coherent imaginary universe, a « modern mythology ». In opposition to the techniques of objectivation that are integrated into a problematic of scientific investigation or journalistic inquiry, strategies of interference reintroduce the fantastic. Discourse seeks to express the unthinkable and the unfigurable by an excess of representation, or, on the contrary, by a « rhetoric of the undecidable ».
If the pseudo-mythic reference gives depth and consistency to the fictional universe, the writing maintains an opacity that, in certain respects, is also characteristic of myth, and assures its polysemy. The work thus attracts attention to the precariousness of rationalist discourse, and permits the appearance of fissures that menace the cohesion of the subject and the coherence of meaning. Where myth explains and shapes, the paradoxical union of myth and the fantastic signals the gap that remains between our ordered representations of the world and the chaotic complexity of the « real ».
21Joan Perucho’s The Owl, or Devastating Irony – Jean-Pierre JARDIN
This narrative of a vampire hunt on Catalonian soil in the midst of the Carlist war uses, in parodic fashion, the discourse of various novelistic and popular film genres: the cloak and sword romance, the adventure narrative in the manner of Jules Verne, the Hollywood love story, and the post-Stockerian fantastic romance. The work’s ironic dimension – the inaudible song comparable only to the melody of the shy aurea picada – renews the treatment of a theme that certain authors elsewhere have used and abused, and reminds us that it was on Spanish ground, more than three centuries ago, that the great destroyer of fashionable ideas and genres – Don Quixote de la Mancha – was born.
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