V A R I A T I O N S ON F A N T A S Y

The problem of poetic narrative, considered as somehow distinct from narrative poetry in the modern period, has given rise to much discussion and may attempts at definition. Such pieces, varying in length from a paragraph to the several pages of the conventional short story, or even, as some would consider, usurping the role of longer forms such as the novel, appear to retain the defining characteristics of narrative: progres- sion from one equilibrium to another through time, continuity of cha- racterization, use of a narrator, and set up in the reader the expectation of narrative techniques with which he is already familiar; yet somehow the narrative remains secondary to a far more pervasive poetic unity. Moreover, the poetic effect seems to be related to the disappointment of at least some of these narrative expectations and involves a breakdown in narrative logic, various forms of discontinuity on the level of the story which make it unspecific and destroy its status as the description of unique events. I would like to suggest that the poetic effect in such works depends in the destruction of conventionally separate and rational cate- gories of thought and the creation of a new fusion which is neither logical nor narrative. A metaphor is thus not just a rhetorical device which shows similarities in two terms which nonetheless remain distinct, it is a means of blending the two terms and denying their separateness. (For discussions of this view of poetry, see the work of Robert Champigny and Jean Cohen.) I would further like to suggest that many modem au- thors deliberately set up the conventions of earlier fiction, particularly those of fantasy, in order to undercut them for poetic effect, and to illu- strate this I will analyze one example of fantasy from Maupassant, with variations by Pieyre de Mandiargues, Michaux and Supervielle. I will use the English word "fantasy" precisely because it seems to cover both the ,,fantastique" and the ,,fantaisiste" which French distinguishes, and which ! would like to present as closely related.

Discussions of fantasy are liable to the same problems as those about reality, in or out of literature, and a few definitions at the outset are per- haps advisable. As used here, fantasy will refer to a view of the world somehow at odds with a conventional view of reality. For example, most people share a common-sense view of gravity, and expect that a ball thrown into the air will come down if its trajectory is not interrupted. A story about a ball thrown into the air which never lands might be la- beled fantasy, as it goes against our conventional experience of the world. The physicist's view is not really relevant here, as it may often be far diffe- rent from the conventional one, for example in discussions of time. Many of the authors who write what is generally considered fantasy stress the conventional as its opposite pole, as will be illustrated. And of course the aspects of fantasy which themselves become conventional,

L. Jones - Variations on Fantasy 3

the ghost for example, must be taken into consideration, all of which allows a great deal of scope for plays between the expected and the unexpected, the undeniably normal and the abnormal, which may provoke anything from amusement to fear in the unwary reader.

A well-known story of Maupassant's, ,,Le Horla" l, will afford a basis for comparison with later authors. There is a first-person narrator who is also the central character, and who records a short period of his life in a diary, From the first entry, which expresses love of life and of his Normandy home, he suddenly finds himself suffering the effects of a strange illness, indeterminately emotional or physical. A trip to Merit- Saint-Michel refreshes and seems to cure him, and at the same time shows the reader his great interest in the supernatural, the world of the invisible, through a conversation with a Breton monk. On his return, however, he finds himself even more upset than before, his sleep distur, bed by the impression of a being which sucks away his energy each night. He notices also that during the night the water placed near his bed dis- appears, and he alternates between belief in a supernatural being and fear that he himself is a mad sleepwalker. Throughout the story this ambivalence is very marked - is the evil within him or without? and the narrator reflects this by combining a very strong scientific bias with a tendency to let his imagination run away with him. The emotional effect on him and the reader is thus fear of a double nature.

He conducts an experiment which would seem to prove that he is not the one who drinks the water, and then, in panic, he flees to Paris. Again he is completely relaxed, his old self, and blames his own sensi- tivities: ,,Certes, la solitude est dangereuse pour les intelligences qui travaillent". (35). While in Parrs, however, he witnesses an experiment with hypnosis which suggests to him that science, which he firmly be- lieves in, is only on the threshold of discovering new modes of being, previously considered supernatural. Troubled by this, he returns, finds himself once again possessed, this time to the point of feeling his will subordinated to that of some other being. He can think of nothing else, he reads scientific treatises on what man knows of invisible creatures, and finally, in the Revue du M o n d e Scientif ique, he reads of a kind of plague in Brazil which resembles in detail his own sickness.

,,les habitants 6perdus quittent leurs maisons, drsertent leurs villages, abandonnent leurs cultures, se disent poursuivis, possrdrs, gouvernrs, comme un brtail humain par des 6tres invisibles bien que tangibles, des sortes de vampires qui se nourissent do leur vie pendant leur sommeil, et qui boivent en outre de l'eau et du lair sans parattre toucher /t aucun autre aliment." (37-38)

He remembers an event which he had described in the first entry of the diary, the passage up the Seine of a ship from Brazil past his property, and concludes that one of these creatures saw and joined him on that day. He seems to attain a kind of communication with the creature, and learns that it is called the Horla. The entries become more and more frenetic

4 L. Jones - Variations on Fantasy

as he schemes to free himself from this power. Eventually he tries to kill the Horla by burning his house down. As he watches the conflagra- tion, his servants are killed, since he neglected to give any warn ing- a clear indication that this obsession has unbalanced his mind. It occurs to him that just as this invisible being obeys different laws of material substance and perception than those which obtain for men, so may they also be invulnerable to accidents which would prove fatal to man, and the last sentence of the journal concludes:

, , n o n . . . n o n . . . sans auetm doute, sans aueun doute . . . il n'est pas mort . . . Alors.. . alors.. , il va done faUoir que je me rue, molt" (47)

This story illustrates the conventions of the fantastic in several ways. First of all, there is a clear separation between the normal world of narrator and character (here the same) and the intruding abnormal element, a distinction inherent even in the vocabulary usually used to describe this type of fiction, which contrasts the ordinary and the extra- ordinary, the natural and the supernatural. The time progression of the narrative is organized around the recognition of this intrusion and its consequences. However, equally important, even the extraordinary is explained and accounted for with some semblance of rationality. There is a carefully developed cause and effect sequence which is very explicit: The reader is aware that these beings come from Brazil, how one of them reached the narrator's estate, and how this caused the eventual burning of his house. Scientific documentation is given for this. Moreover, the scientific view of the world is not questioned: the invisible beings are explainable in terms of an extension of scientific theory beyond its pre- sent limits, or beyond the limits of human perception, but it is assumed that if science were able to extend its perceptions, the logic of its deduc- tions would hold as well as ever.

The structure of the plot, then, depends on an intrusion of the extra- ordinary into the ordinary, which creates a mystery: in this case the enig- ma turns on whether the disruption is in fact external to the narrator, i.e., objectively verifiable, or due to a disturbance of his own psyche. The progression in the story depends on the gathering of evidence for one interpretation rather than the other, and at the , ,drnouement", a cause- and-effect structure has been established so that the reader knows there is an external event; thus the enigma is resolved and explained. There is an ironic twist in this story - the alternative explanation also turns out to be true: the narrator does go mad, though this is the result rather than the cause of the original disturbances. This irony is made possible here by Maupassant's use of the first-person narrative.

The contrast between the ordinary and the extraordinary brings up the problem of complicity: in order for the author to make his story acceptable, he must somehow gain the complicity of the reader with respect to the extraordinary or the fantastic.

L. Jones - Var ia t ions on Fan tasy 5

Here the narrator-hero has a basic ambivalence which both appeases the reader's skepticism, and leads him gradually to accept the super- natural. He has both an absolute faith in science, a skepticism before the inexplicable, and yet a tendency to be intrigued by the fantastic and a ready imagination of his own. The former allows the reader to accept the supernatural explanation: after all, if such a man with the authority of science behind him discovers evidence which forces him to accept the existence of invisible beings, how can the reader object? The tight logical structure of the plot contributes to this effect as well. On the other hand, the narrator 's own vivid imagination prepares us to accept his eventual madness, but only as a result of a confrontation which goes beyond normal experience. Remarks such as the following illustrate the double function of this type of hero, who gains the reader's complicity insofar as the latter identifies with his reactions, and who manages both to appease his skepticism and lead him beyond the world of "normal" experience:

,,Au lieu de eonelure par ees simples roots: 'Je ne comprends pas paree que la cause m'rehappe,' nous imaginons aussit6t des myst&es effrayants et des puissances surna- turelles." (20)

Eventually the elusive cause turns out to be, in fact, supernatural. The description of settings in the story is likewise important as a

complicity-gaining technique. The extensive use of detail is well known in stories of the supernatural, as illustrated in the following remark of M~rim~e:

,,On sait la reeette d'tm ben conte fantastique: commencez par des portraits bion arr&rs de personnages bizarres, mais possibles, et donnez ~t leurs traits la rralit6 la plus minutieuse. Du bizarre au merveiUeux, la transition est insensible, et le lecteur se trou- vera en plein fantastique avant qu'il ne se soit apergu que le monde r~el est loin derriere lui". 2

The description here is relatively simple and brief, not strikingly unusu- al, yet it lends itself to the gradual transition to the bizarre. Rouen, for example, is described as

,,la vaste ville aux toits bleus, sous le peuple pointu des cloehers gothiques. Ils sent imaombrables, fr~les ou larges dominrs par la fl~che de fonte de la cathrdrale..." (7-8)

The choice of detail is not especially disturbing, yet the mention of ,,clochers gothiques" and the idea of domination begin the gradual build-up of associations and foreshadowing usually known as atmosphere. The much more accentuated gothic tone of the visit to Mont-Saint-Mi- ehel is important as a reflection both of atmosphere and of the character of the hero, who chose such a vacation spot, and reacted to it in such a way. Thus the detail of the descriptions serves an indirectly narrative function in the progression into fantasy, as well as the directly narrative one of contributing to the causal progression: Rouen is important be-

6 L. J o n e s - Variations on Fantasy

cause it is a seaport through which a ship for Brazil may pass up the Seine bringing an invisible guest, and so on. Maupassant's story thus has many features typical of ,,contes fantastiques" but at the same time, he uses them in a way suggestive of their poetic potential.

It is typical of the fantastic that certain categories of being, accepted as normal, are no longer rigidly kept separate; thus a ghost represents a lack of the normal distinction between life and death, as well as that between past and present. This is one of the aspects by which fantasy lends itself to poetry, and this is illustrated in this story by the ambiguity which exists between subjective states of mind and the external, so-called objec- tive world of events. As mentioned before, the central enigma of the story depends on this ambiguity, is cleared up at the end rather than being a normal condition of existence. But until the ,,d~nouement", this distinc- tion is not clear at all, and this ambiguity suggests lack of distinction between objective and subjective which is of great importance in the other writers to be discussed. Moreover, it leads to conclusions rich in poetic suggestion; for example, insofar as it is not clear if the narrator is victim of himself or of some external power, he cannot decide between the use of the third person, , ,on" in this case, and the subjective ,,je".

,,Je deviens fou. On a encore bu toute ma carafe cette nuit: ou plut6t je l'ai bue! Mais, est-ee moi? Est-ce moi? Qui? Oh! Mon Dieu! Je deviens fou!" (18)

The tenuous relationship between self and other will of course be exploited poetically by Rimbaud. This ambiguity is extended also into the concern for the unity of the self, since the "other" here may be a second self, a sleeping, irrational, Mr. Hyde figure, the double character being almost as conventional as the ghost. This type of confusion leads to the lack of continuity in character, the tendency to metamorphosis and unstable identity which marks the other authors used as illustrations here, and since that kind of continuity is essential to narrative, the pre- dominant narrative organization breaks down. Similarly with the des- cription of setting: there is a change from setting, objectively described, which nonetheless reflects affective states, i.e. atmosphere, to setting which is determined by, and determines and is inseparable from states of mind. This also is foreshadowed by Maupassant's character in a passage which is both a statement of the author's own technique of the fantastic and of an objective-subjective dependency (later rejected in this story, since the illness was not just the effect of imagination):

,,D6cidement, tout d6pend des lieux et des milieux. Croirr au surnatural dans 1'110 do la Grenouill~rr serait le comble de la relic.., mais au sommet du mont Saint-Michel? mais dans les Indes? Nous subissons effroyablement l'influence de ce qui nous ontoure". (28)

Finally, although there is nothing inherently illogical in the rhetorical situation as set up by Maupassant - the narrator's notations in the diary -

L. Jones - Varia t ions on Fan tasy 7

the author has not explained some aspects which seem rather improbable, especially at the end, during the house-burning scene, when it seems highly unlikely that the hero would be sitting writing down such extreme reactions. Nothing is said about the circumstances under which the diary was found and presented to the reader. One of the devices used to gain complicity is traditionally a logical framework for the telling of the story. If there is an objective third-person narrator, he may state his relationship to the central characters and explain how he comes to know the story. But this technique also has the effect of reinforcing the contrast between the normal, rational world and the abnormal developments which disturb it, and is often parodied by later authors in a way which undermines its rational coherence, and the view of the world that it reflects.

Another example might have shown distortions in narrative time, where- as Maupassant's is the traditional rational sequence, chronologically presented. Ghost stories, for example, involve an overlapping of two levels of time, even more striking in the case of a double character, one possessed by another from an earlier era. But such distortions are all sorted out and put in their place, explained in some way, by the end, and this kind of suppressing of normal time distinctions only leads to an undermining of narrative structure when the rational cause and effect sequence is abandoned.

The enigma-resolution plot involving two levels of reality, and the play between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the banal and the bizarre, has led to many interesting variations. Julien Greene's ,,Voyageur sur la Terre" is a kind of double story in which two explanations are offered for the hero's sudden death, one rational if heavily psycholo- gically oriented, the other depending on a kind of religious mysticism. The author provides careful objective documentation which nonetheless cannot point to one alternative rather than the other, so that the central theme of the story is in fact the perception of this double reality. Paul Devaulx's stories are almost always constructed around an enigma, in which the familiar conventions of setting and characterization lead the reader to expect a resolution which never comes, the ambiguity becoming the point of the story. Andr6 Dhrtel's stories present the enigma, the exceptional hero finally solves it, yet the logic of the solution depends strongly on the close relationship between the psyche and the external world, this ambiguity always remaining.

The automatic writings of the surrealists provide interesting material for comparison (Breton, Prret for example) insofar as their underlying principles are precisely this lack of distinction between the objective and the subjective, and a redefinition of the relationship between the ordinary and the extraordinary. The natural and the supernatural are no longer distinct but mingled, so that the surprising is no longer primarily on the level of plot, here nonexistent, but within the framework of each

8 L. Jones - Variations on Fantasy

sentence. It is no longer a question of an ordinary situation into which the unusual intrudes; rather, each sentence may provide an incongruous mixture of the extremely banal, the clich6, the stock response, and its surprising and often humorous distortion. The carefully developed con- tinuity of Maupassant is in sharp contrast with the constant shock tech- niques and discontinuity of the automatic writings, the whole concept of mystery in the everyday being redefined. Characters also are continu- ous in name only, if that, and metamorphosis and monsters are themsel- ves so commonplace that they no longer have much meaning.

The author-reader relationship is quite different here, and often quite explicitly hostile. P6ret, for example, uses the conventions of narrative as a basis for parodying and making fun of the reader's expectations. And of course the surrealists' rejection of common distinctions, temporal- spatial, external-internal, life-death, normal-abnormal, literature-life, is as well known as their rejection of the logical framework of perception. These techniques represent another and strikingly different version of the ordinary-extraordinary contrast, where in fact the opposites are merged. The two levels in Maupassant become one on the level of narrative struc- ture, but are constantly exploited, consciously or unconsciously, on the level of sentence structure, where the incongruity provides the expression of both ,,humour noir", and the ,,hasard objectif". Many of these tech- niques will also appear in the authors still to be examined.

Two post-surrealists, Pieyre de Mandiargues and Michaux, seem to represent two distinct trends in poetic fiction which might be called the exotic and the universal. Mandiargues will be illustrated by a selection from Le Musde Noir called ,,Le Passage Pommeraye" 3. This story is, again, related by a first-person narrator who is for most of the time the only character in the story. He is walking in Nantes towards the evening of a July 14, a situation very explicitly given. Most of the population seems involved in the celebrations, and in the desserted streets he comes upon the Passage Pommeraye, an obscure lane of exotic little shops which he decides to explore. His natural imaginative tendencies delight in the experience, which he feels with greater and greater intensity and describes with a wealth of detail until the moment when he realizes he is not alone. A girl is watching him. She pronounces a single, ominous name: ,,Echni- da", and sufficiently intrigues him so that he follows her out of the passage into another obscure back street. At this point he gives several indications of a feeling of compulsion, a will stronger than his own which directs him against his misgivings. The girl seems afraid and apprehensive too, but leads him into a small house and upstairs, where he discovers a table covered with bloodstains and various unidentifiable surgical instruments, presided over by a monstrous animal half cat and half pig. Another monster emerges from the back of the room, and indicates to the hero that this table is prepared for him. Only a single reference to her scaly arm suggests that this is Echnida, the mythical woman-serpent, mother

L. Jones - Var ia t ions on Fan tasy 9

of so many famous monsters. At this point there is a sudden break, and an "editor's note" informs the reader that he has been reading a manus- cript, which the editor received from a carnival man with a menagerie of monsters, one of which was the ,,c616bre homme-ca~man", author and hero of our tale, who was found dying the day after a national festival. Thus there is an explanation by which the time sequence and order of events can be reconstructed in retrospect, and what the reader now ac- cepts as a manuscript is accounted for.

However, if this story seems at first view a fairly traditional example of the fantastic, on further consideration there are some disturbing nuances. In the plot structure, most obvious perhaps is the effect of discontinuity obtained by placing the surprising editor's note after the manuscript rather than before. As the reader first gets into the story, there is no deafly defined enigma as with Maupassant, beyond wondering what is going to happen. The suspense is not really built up until the appearance of the woman, and especially during the last paragraphs where a cruel fate seems certain, but at whose hands, for what reason, in exactly what form? In a story which is rich in very detailed descriptions of the smallest actions, these crucial questions of the causality of the intrigue remain unanswered. The editor's note does not explain them, and a narrative that appears tightly constructed simply through the use of a device which conventionally acts as a hole-filler is in fact highly ambiguous. Moreover, the editor's note is essentially a mockery of editors' notes, and tantalizes the reader with more mysteries rather than clarifying the already existing ones. The editor, for example, assumes that the reader already is familiar with story and characters:

,,Ce manuscrit, r6dig6 par le c~l~bre homme-caiman et trouv~ dans ses bagages peu de temps apr~s sa mor t . . , nous fur eommuniqu6 par un ancien capitaine.., il avait recueilli l'homme-caiman, nous confia-t-il, en un r6cit trop fantasque pour que nous puissions jurer de ravoir parfaitement entendu..."

And further along: ,,Tant de gens ont pu examiner l 'homme-caiman que nous n'entreprendrons pas de d6crire encore sa difformit6". (66) The horror is greater when left to the reader's imagination, and the author makes fun of the reader for this. Mandiargues, in fact, seems to go to the trouble of making explicit the rhetorical situation only to mock. Even his final sentence contains a detail so superfluously macabre that it seems a parody of the whole idea of fantasy. He describes the monster's efforts to write his story:

,,noircir des feuilles de papier d'emballage, en crispant sa pauvre petite main palm6e sur un stylographe r6clame d'une maison de pompes fun~bres". (66)

There is no ,,d6nouement" - the ,,n~euds" remain as ambiguous as ever.

Another important point concerning the plot progression involves

10 L. Jones - Varia t ions on Fan ta sy

a kind of poetic causality reminiscent of the surrealists' ,,hasard objec- tif". As mentioned above, the hero's desire to follow the girl is attributed to the intense experience he has just undergone in walking through the Passage Pommeraye, and the seemingly mystical power she has over him goes beyond eroticism to become a kind of communion of his spirit and the external world. This is directly expressed in his feeling that he already knows her:

,,Je m'effor~ai de poursuivre le lien qui m'attachait obscurrment au prrsent phrno- m~ne, de remonter plus haut, de surprendre ce qu'il pouvait y avoir ~t l'origine de co sentiment indrniable de ,,drj~ vu" et mrme d',,enfin retrouvr" qui m'avait saisi d~s le premier abord.. ." (59)

Artistic associations are all he can find at first, but he concludes:

,,Cependant je savais bien que mon 6motion venait d'ailleurs, d'autres milieux; de rrgions et de circonstances maintenant oublires, mais qui avaient eu pour moi une beaucoup plus considrrable importance, et que je me sentais sur le point de redrcou- vrir. Dans la m~me seconde, il me semblait que cette proximit6 de ce que je drsirais tant ffit redoutable, et que j'rtais sur le bord d'un abtme." (60).

Here the rejection of time distinctions is closely associated with a sug- gestion of spiritual reincarnation, or sharing of the common human unconscious, so that it is not simply the objective narration of a trip through time, as for H. G. Wells, but an experience in which the dis- tinction between the perceiving consciousness and the world is lost. This represents on another level an attack on narrative time (to be taken even further in Michaux and Supervielle) especially since the girl appears immediately after the hero takes stock of his experiences so far by asso- ciating them with a sense of timelessness and a rejection of reason:

,,Je n'avais plus aucune notion du temps 6coul6 depuis que j'rtais entr6 darts le Passage Pommeraye... je me rappelais parfaitement la succession de ces rencontres, mais le sentiment de temps n'y intervenait pas davantage que darts une hallucination qui m'efit ainsi promen6 en un monde aussi extravagant, et off les extravangances se fussent drroulres avec autant de naturel qu'en celui-ci; car rien non plus ne choquait ma raison, si toutefois c'rtait bien encore la raison qui gouvernait mort ~tre". (58)

This very central passage is both a statement of literary technique, the subordination of narrative to the poetic vision, and of the main theme of the story, the naturalness of the irrational and exotic.

This last point raises the problem of description. None of the details, which are in great abundance, contribute to a narrative resolution, except insofar as they create a state of mind in the hero which predisposes him to follow the girl, and in the reader to gain his complicity for the monsters to follow. The atmosphere-creating function clearly predomina- tes, and of the fifteen pages of the total story, the first eight are entirely a description of the street, before the girl's appearance. This is clearly related to the fact that almost all of the story is simply a description of the narrator's perceptions, until the end - even more so than with Mau-

L. Jones - Variations on Fantasy 11

passant 's story. When the girl appears, there is a certain amount of di- rect foreshadowing of disaster, which accompanies the hero's transition from observer to victim, as in the following:

,,Nous reparttmes en suivant le quai de la Fosse. Insolite, au beau milieu de la ville, tm train passa lourdement sur le quai derriere los grilles qui le bordent et que nous long, ions elIe et moi. C'rtait un lent train de bestiaux et tout prrs de nos t&es, de toutes los petites lucarnes des wagons, partaient los mugissements des boeufs emmenrs ~t rabattoir; horribles ~t entendre dans le ferraillement des roues sur los rails, apr~ le silence du passage et de la tit6 somnolente". (68)

This passage is typical of Mandiargue's style and use of detail in several ways, and especially in his perception of the strange, the ,,insolite" in the everyday. Why should the train be especially unusual? Partly because of the state of mind of the observer, who communicates this surprise by the sentence structure. A train in the middle of the city, if unexpected, is a typically surrealistic example of incongruity, yet when we realize that it is beside a quai, it becomes commonplace. The precision of the des- cription is reminiscent again of Mrr imre ' s ideas on the realism of the fantastic. The reader knows exactly where the train and the people are with respect to each other, and how close. This kind of precision seems almost hallucinatory in retrospect, when the reader learns the circumstan- ces of the writing. Again it is indicative of the state of mind of the narrator, who says himself as the story progresses:

,,il me semblait que ma volont~ ffit abolie, et que rues facultrs d'observation s'en trouvassent augmentres proportiormellement". (61)

Yet, at all times his powers of observation and recall are overwhelm- ing and even when he enters the chamber of horrors, he is able to make the following observations:

,,Trois grandes fen~tres 6taient ouvertes ~t deux battants sur le port de Nantes, il 6tait ~t peu prb.s huit heures du soir, le soleil descendait derriere le pont transbor- dour . . ."

He has not yet seen the operating table, and before he does he remarks:

,,Je reprenais lentement mes sons, comme au sortir de quelque ivresse ou d'un 6va- nouissement prolongS, et m'appliquais/~ bien examiner ce que m'entourait dans le vaste local arrien. . ." (65)

The degree of exactitude he uses even while claiming that his mind is wandering is both an indication of character and a technique to make the fantastic real, but more than those it is the expression of a central theme in the story, the perception of fantasy in the banal and everyday. The plot itself, until the introduction of the monsters, is surely of the utmost banality: a man walks is a deserted street, picks up a girl and fol- lows her home. The associations of horror and eroticism which contribute to making this banal episode exotic are again reminiscent of the surrealists

12 L. Jones - Variat ions on Fan tasy

and are clear in the description of the girl's voluptuous and menacing mouth when she first appears:

,,la ligne de ee nez un peu aquilin, un peu busqu6 vers le bas sur des narines erensdes largement et en m~me temps d'une si fine texture que je pensais ~t un ivoire eonvulsif; surtout le dessin merveilleux de cette bouche renflSe, arrogante, entrouverte, voluptu- euse, et de ees l~vres minces et prorrninentes, autour d'une double bard~re de dents qui me blessaient comme des paroles offensives". (59)

Much of the detail also exploits a contrast between typically modern banality and the exotic. The shops which appear so strange often contain fairly commonplace products, and the technique of providing the "inso- lite" first and the banal pseudo-explanation after is fully exploited here as well. The narrator notices a sign, ,,Touristes, ne passez pas ~t Nantes sans voir l'&alage d'Hidalgo de P a r i s . . . " He begins the next paragraph thus:

,,Comment ne pas obrir ~t cette double et mystdrieuse injonetion, qu'une grande main rouge, qui apparaIt route seule, l'index lev6, darts rombre de la voOte, fait plus impr- rative? La main est l'enseigne d'un gantier dent la ndgoee s'intitule assez eurieusement ,,Au Puits" . . . " (54)

Again, the quantity and precision of detail (,,qui apparait toute seule") contribute to the surprise effect which is undercut immediately. Hidalgo's window is later described:

,,la devanture est un bazar eapricieux olh se m~lent des articles de parfumerie et des instruments de chirurgie dentaire avec les objets les plus disparates que ron ait jamais pu rrunir au service de la publicitr".

The description of the shop continually mixes the bizarre and the commonplace, including a page-long list of the names of various types of firecrackers.

The principal effect of all the techniques discussed so far seems to be a destruction, through parody and discontinuity, of the apparently traditional narrative framework which first seems to hold the story together, and to integrate these elements into another unity, that of the themes of the story. The plot becomes simply another example of the bizarre and fantastic reality teeming within the narrow limits of everyday perception, and the central figure's authority in this case resides not on his familiarity with science combined with his tendencies towards imagination, but entirely on his ability to perceive and experience this aspect of the everyday. The chief technique here is the description in great detail of highly unique circumstances, the unusual and the exotic, but these no longer intrude into the everyday world, they are the everyday world. Yet, at the same time, the hero remains a victim of a reality more powerful than himself, and this passive acceptance of destiny is the one element that all our examples have in common, a necessary ingredient to any exploitation of fantasy. The world is unknowable,

L. Jones - Variat ions on Fantasy 13

uncontrollable, and perhaps hostile, full of the unexpected, the mon- strous and the ever-changing, and unwelcome metamorphosis.

Michaux's predicament is basically the same, though his poetic tech- niques are directly opposed. The examples given are very short, and are taken from Une Vie de Chien 4. The very briefness of the pieces in an indication of the discontinuity of the narrative. The following selection, ,,Crier", quoted in its entirety, will illustrate some of the most important points to be made:

,,Le panaris est une souffrance atroee. Mais ee qui me faisait souffrir le plus, c'6tait que je ne pouvais crier. Car j'6tais ~t l'h6tel. La nuit venait de tomber et ma chambre 6tait prise entre deux autres o/~ l'on dormait".

,,Alors, je me mis ~t sortir de mort crane des grosses caisses, des cuivres, et un instru- ment qui r6sonnait plus que des orgues. Et profitant de la force prodigieuse que me dormait la fi~vre, j'en fis un orchestre assourdissant. Tout tremblait de vibrations."

,,Alors, enfin assur6 que dans ce tumulte ma voix ne serait pas entendue, je me mis hurler, ~t hurler pendant des heures, et parvins ~ me soulager peu ~t peu". (228)

This text is in striking contrast with Mandiargue's by its lack of precise detail, its lack of a specific situation in time and space. Who is the speaker? What hotel? What night? Who are the people sleeping in the adjoining rooms? What does the ,,d6cor" look like? None of these details is given, nor is the tumult described except in abstract terms. What is the instrument ,,qui r6sonnait plus que des orgues"? Why is it described only by the comparison and not directly? Michaux's lack of precision is part of the lack of development of the narrative situatio n and keeps it from being related to a specific person, time and place, thus making it more universal. However, there is a narrative progression which can be analyzed.

After the first statement - a general affirmation in the present tense, as yet unrelated to any narrative element - there is a kind of in m e d i a s res

beginning. A character, identified only as ,,je", describes his suffering, using the imperfect tense. This reaction may be attributed to the ,,pana- ris", (cause and effect established by association). Other circumstances of the event are given, followed by two new paragraphs, each of which is clearly marked for temporal progression by the opening word ,,alors". The narrative continues by the use of the past definite. ,,Alors" also sug- gests a logical sequence: because of his situation in the hotel, the hero is obliged to act in a certain way; because he successfully does this, he is able to howl, and as a result, he finds relief.

Thus even within the three paragraphs, there is a tight narrative frame- work. However, there are some elements which, combined with the ab- stract nature of the very brief descriptions, break up the continuity of the narrative, and reflect a fantastic distortion of the conventional world. Firstly comes the surprising reflection of the opening sentence, in which something trivial and rather banal, a very minor injury, is declared to be

14 L. Jones - Varia t ions on Fan ta sy

source of great suffering. Although this was medically possible of the time of writing, it is sufficient to introduce an atmosphere of the unusual. The second sentence assumes a logical link with some preceding remark which does not exist, and thus is disorienting in another way. The in- formation in the following sentences does nothing to clear up the ambi- guity. The second paragraph makes another statement about the physical possibilities of Michaux's world which involves assumptions unfamiliar and surprising to the reader: that one can remove from one's head a great variety of musical instruments many times larger than their contai- ner. Here there is a relationship between the world of mental objects and physical objects that can only be interpreted as metaphorical, yet this passage is not simply a poetic description of an act whose literal meaning is obvious, rather it is an integral part of the narrative structure - metaphor become metamorphosis, a poetic image continued through time and having narrative consequences. As such, it is another technique for representing the lack of any boundary between the objective and the subjective, physical and mental objects are interchangeable, both for the hero and the poet who takes his metaphors literally and makes them the basis of a fantasy. This example shows what I consider to be one of the major links between poetic narrative and fantasy, the latter being very frequently a continuation through time of a metaphor taken literally. Moreover, when cause and effect are based on such metaphorical pre- mises about the world, the result is a logic of fantasy. Although the meta- phor here becomes narrative, yet there is a second stage. It comes as a shock in the context heretofore established, and its ultimate effect is thus to distract from the narrative continuity. Thus it provides another clue to that other dimension of meaning: the poetic, which unifies the broken fragments of the narrative.

Other contradictions occur of various sorts: again the idea that whit- low causes violent fever is not borne out by normal experience, the rea- der's knowledge of the world. And there is an internal one, in the rea- soning by which the hero, in order to avoid making a noise which would disturb his neighbors by howling, makes a still greater noise to cover that which results from his pain. The logical structure of the narrative is thus undermined for the benefit of the thematic unity - the story itself becomes a metaphor in which sickness expresses emotional and meta- physical anguish. The narrative situation which is always specific can by these techniques be generalized and becomes any man's isolation and alienation from others to whom his suffering cannot be revealed or com- municated.

This narrative use of metaphor is typical of Michaux. ,,Mes Propri6t~s" describes the hero's attempts to build on quicksand, and the narrative gradually reveals that the very concrete physical details refer rather to the mental universe of his uncertain identity. Another very brief excerpt is even more typical of the persecution fantasy:

L. Jones - Var ia t ions on Fan tasy 15

Un Homme Perdu ,,En sortant, je m'6garai. I1 fut tout de suite trop tard pour rcculor. Je me trouvais au

milieu d'une plaino. Et partout circulaicnt do grandes roues. Lcur taille 6tait bion cent fois la mienno. Et d'antrcs 6talent plus grandos encore. Pour moi, sans prcsqur los regarder, je chuchotais ~t leur approche, doucemont, commc ~ moi-m6me: , ,Roue, no m'6crase pas . . . Rouc, je t'cn supplic, ne m'~crase pas . . . Rouo, de grace, ne m'~crase pas." Elles arrivaiont arrachant un vent puissant et repartaient. Je titubais dopuis des mois ainsi: ,,Roue, no m'~crase pas . . . Roue, cette fois-ci, encore, no m'~craso pas." Et personne n'intorvicnt! Et rien ne pout arr~tcr ca! Je resterai l~t jusqu'~ ma mort." (218-19)

The shift from the implicit third person of the title to the first person narrative, the transition from past definite to present to future, the lack of narrative detail - where the character comes from, where he wanted to go before getting lost, etc., the lack of explanation of his plight, the repetition of the victim's plea, all are techniques which reinforce the poetic intensity of the irrational image. In this passage, narrative time gives way to a sense of eternal, perpetual nightmare. Again, as with Maupas- sant and Mandiargues, the hero is essentially a victim of forces which are beyond his control and his understanding.

The repetitions and apparently emotional rather than rational organi- zation of the usually brief sentences is again in contrast with Mandiargues' careful spacing of exotic detail in long, convoluted, often precious sen- tences, yet Michaux's techniques also lead to the discontinuity of the unexpected, as illustrated above. His tone, derived primarily from simple familiar language, will sometimes prove incongruous as well, through the use of pseudo-scientific terminology and pretentious parodies of academic logic. Moreover this striking discontinuity in such short passa- ges defines his relationship with his reader - rather than trying to gain the reader's complicity, he simply allows the shocks to fall where they may. He often presents his metaphors in the most direct form of a general statement of truth about the world, and assumes as normal conditions which will surprise the reader.

The contrast between Mandiargues and Michaux and the techniques illustrated here can be found in many developments of modern fiction, and even elsewhere. Robbe-Grillet frequently contrasts vague narrative situations and distortions of narrative time with an obsessive concern for detail, as well as parodies of the exotic juxtaposed with the extremely banal and conventional, but without distortions of physical reality which would earn his writings the name of fantasy. Natalie Sarrautv also ex- ploits the conventional nature of her situations, whereas Butor can rather be linked with the precious concern for artistic detail and specific situa- tions in time and space that mark Mandiargucs. The theatre of the ab- surd is well known for its surprising and ,,insolite" distortions of the banal and the conventional, from the cliches of language to its plot situations, and at its best it also subordinates narrative to poetry in the manner described here.

As a final example, Supervielle provides a kind of synthesis of the

16 L . . lones - V a r i a t i o n s o n F a n t a s y

authors considered thus far. One of his most representative stories is called , ,L'Enfant de la Haute Mer" 5. This is narrated in the third person, as are all of his tales, and opens with a series of questions about the ex- istence of a phantom village on the high seas, whose only inhabitant is a little girl. There is a long description of her daily activities which under- lines her loneliness (twelve of the story's eighteen pages are thus occupied). A single unique event constitutes the story's plot; whereas normally the village disappears at the approach of a ship, on one occasion this norm is broken:

,,un autre jour il y cut comme une distraction du destin, une f~lure dans sa volontr. Un vrai petit cargo tout fumant.. , passa darts la rue marine du village sans qua les maisons dispaxussent sous les tots ni qua la fillette ffit prise de sommail". (21)

The child tries to take advantage of this event by calling for help, but to no avail. Her hopes disappointed, she now tries to die, but is unable to effect even this change in her existence. The story finishes by an ex- planation (on the part of the narrator) of the little gift's situation: her father, hearing of her death while at sea, thought of her so intensely that he recreated her and her village for eternity on the very spot. As is obvious from this final note of the narrator, there is a definite causality established, but only in the last paragraph. Again, a fantastic premise - that strong grief can be externalized, subjectivity becoming concrete objectivity - leads to a kind of logic of fantasy. Moreover, the supposedly objective narrator who provides a kind of editor's note, like Mandiargues, is entirely inconsistent in his objectivity. As the story opens, he claims to know no more than the reader, and states:

,,Nous dirons les choses au fur at ~t mesuro quo nous les verrons et qua nous saurons. Et ca qui doit rester obscur le sara malgn~ nous". (10)

There is no explanation for his knowledge of a situation which cannot be perceived by anyone in the little gift's world, or for his concluding discovery o f its cause. This is again a kind of mockery of logical narrative, just as the careful causal explanation is fantasy rather than science.

The complicity problem is not posed in the same way here. The narrator gains the reader's indulgence by claiming to share his ignorance at the beginning, but then he accepts certain possibilities in this world as normal which must remain fantastic in the reader's world. This is like Michaux's assumptions about the physical world, sometimes stated like principles of physics, sometimes implicit in the causal relationships established.

The treatment of time also essentially undermines the narrative con- ventions. The little gift's plight forbids any kind of progression in time, and her situation is eternally established, so that there is only the hope of a narrative shift from one equilibrium to another, a hope which is not realized. Almost all of the "act ion" in the story consists of repetitive

L . J o n e s - V a r i a t i o n s o n F a n t a s y 17

rituals by which the girl fills up her days, movements which are typical and cyclical and produce no change. The only unique event, as mentioned above, occupies a very brief space in the story and leads to no change, no real , ,dtnouement". It is, moreover, introduced as if it were to be just another in the series of typical actions, nothing special, by the phrase ,,un autre jour". This undercutting of action is evident even in the style of Supervielle's descriptions, which often avoid finite verbs entirely (the historical infinitive is one of his favorite constructions) or restate actions in a static nominative form, as in the quotation below where the sound of the siren and the belltower remain separate:

,,Le cargo fit entendre sa sir~ne, mais cette voix ne se m~la pas ~t celle du elocher. Chactme gardait son indtpendance". (21)

The fantasy elements of the story are contrasted with much that is conventional. The constant incongruity in the description rests on the contrast between a very typical little girl's banal and normal daily acti- vities in a village, and her exceptional solitude in the middle of the ocean.

,,Ou bien elle ~crivait une lettre o~t elle donnait des nouvelles de sa petite ville et d'elle-m~me. Cela ne s'adressait h personne et eUe n'embrassait personne en la termi- nant et sur l'enveloppe il n'y avait pas de hem".

Supervielle's language is simple, often familiar, and although in other stories he often indulges in incongruities of tone, here the discrepancy is rather one of situation. The little girl is herself a paradox reuniting the attitudes of both Michaux and Mandiargues: she is unique, solitarily so, the only one of her kind and thus highly exotic, yet she is so conven- tionally the typical village child that she cannot be considered a true character in her own right, but a universal abstraction, like Michaux's hero. Supervielle's extended description and undermining of narrative techniques are more reminiscent of Mandiargues, but the nature of the description remains familiar and conventional, often humorously so, as with Michaux. This is true even in the stories borrowed from Greek myths, where the Minotaur, for example, unique of his kind, complains in modern slang about his inability to get along with people - he is uni- versalized in the child that other children won't play with, and the exotic details of his monstrous physique are only important insofar as they give him the emotional reactions of an outcast. This little girl also represents the figure of the outcast, at a still greater degree of abstraction. Super- vieUe calls her ,,un 8tre infiniment dtshtr i t t" . The fantasy of her situation, the discontinuity of the narrative thus reveal the central theme of lone- liness, the plight of the outcast, whose suffering is expressed metaphori- cally by her physical situation. She is another in the series of helpless heroes, who are destined to be passive in the face of a strong, incompre- hensible destiny.

Many other varations could be discussed, and the techniques analyzed

18 L. 1ones - Variations on Fantasy

in these examples recur elsewhere, The parody of traditional narrative is a commonplace of modern fiction, but it is this tendency combined with the extension of metaphor into narrative time and sequence which creates the kind of fantasy described here. This is in turn poetic when the conventional distinctions - the separate terms of the metaphor - become blended at the expense of the narrative framework. The logical distinction-making process appears an inadequate translation of the world'~ complexities.

Common to the writers discussed here and to many other is, moreover, an ambivalence in the face of this loss of distinctions, this formlessness to which they give form. Marcel Aym6 sees it as a desirable return to the wonder of childhood. SupervieUe also, in other stories, describes a primitive or childlike cosmic unity of all opposites, a source of hope and fraternity, precisely what the little girl is missing. For others, such as Michaux, the formlessness of this world which is also himself is a source of anguish and struggle. Each of these writers has his own unique Way of dealing with this problem and his view of reality has profound effects on his literary forms.

University o f Washington. LOUISA JONES.

Notes

1. Guy De Maupassant. Le Horla. (Albin Michel, 1965). 2. As quoted by R. C. Dale, The Poetics of Prosper Mdrimde (Mouton, 1966) 94-5. 3. A. Pieyre de Mandiargues. Le Musde Noir. (Union Grnrrale des Edition, Collec-

tion 10-18, 1963) 52-66. 4. Michaux, ,,Line Vie de Chien". Histoires fantastiques d'aujourd'hui Ed. Marcel

Schneider (Paris, Casterman 1965) 209-234. 5. Jdes Supervielle. L'Enfant de la Haute Met (GaUimard, 1931).