Review by Glenn Russell
Weird Fiction in France - 27 short stories by turns fantastic,
bizarre, strange, deranged, ghastly, grotesque and horrific, penned by
27 different French authors - among their number Théophile Gautier,
Gérard de Nerval, Guy de Maupassant, Jean Lorrain, Marcel Schwob,
Anatole France, Gaston Danville and Remy de Gourmont.
Scholar and literary critic Brian Stableford provides the translation,
annotation and extensive introductory essay. A reader is given a clear
overview and context for these French tales of the fantastique
mostly written during the 19th century.
So what makes a weird piece of fiction weird? Taking Brian Stableford's
Introduction as a guide, here's a few keys: rather than sticking
with humdrum, routine experience, the 27 authors in this volume recognized
the world of dreams and nightmares, imagination and madness, fantasy,
horror, hallucination and the supernatural can insert and disrupt what
generally serves as "normal reality" at any moment. The narrator
or character within a story can ask: Is this happening real or illusion,
objective or subjective? Did I really see what I think I saw or was I
only "seeing things"? And, of course, that perennial question
posed by poets, artists and writers be they Romantics, Decadents or Symbolists:
Am I sane or am I mad?
When it comes to great works of literature, generalizations can only
take us so far. Thus, as a way of sharing a more specific taste of what
a reader will encounter in this collection, I will focus on selections
from two of my favorite French authors - Jean Richepin and Gabriel de
Lautrec.
I have chosen not to focus on the two most famous stories included: Théophile
Gautier's The Amorous Revenant (sometimes entitled The Beautiful
Vampire or Clarimonde) or Guy de Maupassant's The Horla.
Ample information and reviews of these two classic tales are available
with a simple internet search.
So, here you go with two wicked doses of Weird French Fiction:
The Plague-Man by Jean Richepin
The narrator recognizes all too well his tale of adventure will not be
believed since . . . well, he has a hard time persuading himself that
the whole thing wasn't a dream.
His adventure revolves around the English artist Michael Joshua Hawk
and his “Illuminations of Horror” wherein the artist rendered
in a series of ink drawings an astonishing account, step by step, phase
by phase, of the gruesome progress of the plague in a small, rural village
in India. And Hawk has never once in his life left London!
Impossible! The narrator confronts Hawk and asks the artist why he insists
on duping his friends with such a hoax. Hawk answers that he will prove
the truth of his words. One evening he leads the narrator into a small,
dark tavern run by a Hindu and then displays his “Illuminations of
Horror” and asks the narrator to commit the details of his ink drawings
to memory.
Having studied the illustrations carefully, the narrator raises his head
and discovers a naked man seated on the floor in front of him, although
he hadn’t heard or seen him come in. The man’s thin body is
folded up and his face is seemingly reduced to two staring eyes buried
amid an avalanche of white hair. The artist pronounces the word yogi.
Immediately, eye to eye, the yogi’s gaze plunges deep, deep into
his psyche and the narrator is transfixed.
The narrator relays what he begins to clearly see – astonishingly,
an Indian village caught in the grip of plague. Here’s a snatch of
his vision: “crimson anthrax illuminating ardent embers on the back,
the shoulders, the armpits, the groin; gangrenous pustules hardening into
brown scars.”
The narrator is a man of science and reason. Was what he saw a psychic
trick or extended hallucination? “Had the yogi simply been seeing
at a distance, having made me share his vision in what occultists call
the astral mirror? Or was he even more than that? Was he the formidable
mahatma of evil that Hawk called the Plague-Man?”
Sonia's Soul by Gabriel de Lautrec
The tale's first lines: "It's impossible that I am mad. That will
become evident. If I am in my right mind, why am I locked up? I think
it's at the instigation of some demon that is pursuing me."
Why will you say that I am mad? Echos of Edgar Allan Poe, author embraced
by a vast number of French writers after the great America literary man's
work was translated by none other than Charles Baudelaire.
Let's give our narrator a name: Gaspard. Monsieur Gaspard continues to
press his case for his own sanity: since he's been provided pen and paper,
he can complete his great work: The Objective of the Subjective,
a book that will open doors for his entry into the academy, and once elected,
people of great esteem will be obliged to recognize his sanity.
We have generous helpings of Gabriel de Lautrec black humor working here.
One can only wonder at the content of Gaspard's great philosophical treatise.
Perhaps his detailing the power of the subjective mind to penetrate objective
reality will be on the level of Immanuel Kant or George Barkley. And subsequently
to be judged sane by the finest minds in the country - can there be greater
evidence of a man's sanity?
But before we become overly excited at the prospect of a phenomenal philosophic
breakthrough, Gaspard recounts the key reason why he's been locked up
in the first place: a rare accident that can happen at any time to any
human: "I drank a soul, by mistake. It was Sonia's. With mine, that
makes two, if I can count."
That's right, Gaspard! You can count. One and one makes two; Sonia's
soul and your soul makes two souls. And how, may we ask, did you go about
drinking Sonia's soul?
Gaspard blames literature. He took the words of the poets too literally
when they write of two souls coming together. "I wanted to collect
that soul on the lips, like a breath." But when poor Gaspard went
to embrace Sonia so he could kiss her on the lips, he squeezed his hands
a little too strongly around her neck.
That's life for you. As Gaspard muses, "But what does it matter?
All the regrets in the world won't change anything."
Now that Gaspard has swallowed Sonia's soul, he suspects it is hovering
in some corner of his being, "looking out from there with a flickering
gaze, like some sly and timid beast."
The more Gaspard ponders the possibilities, the more possibilities he
has to ponder. Is Sonia's soul prowling around his heart? What is it seeing
or thinking inside him? And what if it dies? What if he finds himself
with a corpse of a soul inside himself? Ah! Will it remain static or putrefy?
Maybe it would be best to set it free from the prison of his body, now,
before it inflicts damage.
I dare say no more. I urge you to treat yourself to these two weird tales
in their entirely along with the other 25 collected in Weird Fiction
of France.
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