Entre desir et entropie: Fragilite de l'ecriture fantastique chez Maupassant et Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
Description
The topic I explore in my dissertation is directly related to the recent surge of interest, demonstrated by numerous critics, for aesthetic production traditionally considered as peripheral. Such is the case, in literature, for texts which deal primarily with fantasy. Over the last two decades, fantastic literature has motivated a vastly varied critical response and has subsequently encountered an equally wide range of definitions. My methodological approach is essentially interdisciplinary, confronting several perspectives that inspire and inform my work, such as narratological studies, psychoanalytical readings poststructuralist literary theory and postmodern research on science a literature In order to illustrate my topic, I take a close look at the fantastic tales' written by Guy de Maupassant and Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, two major authors in this category. Their work corresponds exactly to the well-known definition of the fantastic as a genre, provided by Tzvetan Todorov in his seminal Introduction a la litterature fantastique This work elaborates on the Todorovian notion of the ambiguity of the fantastic. By examining the ways in which ambiguity operates at the structural level I attempt to demonstrate Maupassant and Villiers' intuitive awareness of the problematic status of fantastic narration. The tension resulting from such awareness has led both authors to produce highly complex and self-reflexive narrative patterns. I closely examine the way each author represents ambiguity through investigation into the interrelated concepts of desire (as described by Freud) and entropy (as defined by chaos theory). These, in my view, function as poles of attraction between which the fantastic narrative structure oscillates. I interrogate the role they play in testing the limits of the text's structural space Relying on the historical coincidence between nineteenth-century fantastic literature, the discovery of the unconscious by Freud and the conceptualization of entropy by Clausius in the second law of thermodynamics, I establish intimate connections between the routinely compartmentalized fields of literature, psychoanalysis and science. My work investigates the way in which the uncanny functions as the element of the fantastic structural logic which exposes the text's uncertainty about its own status. I then attempt to uncover the 'entropic' properties of the fantastic narrative by studying the devices used by fantastic writers to suggest disorder in an otherwise tightly ordered narrative. The most striking of these devices is the systematic recourse to what I call 'chaotic figures' which function as agents of ambiguity both at the thematic and structural levels The purpose of this work is to demonstrate that the fragility of narrative organization, structurally suggested in the fantastic texts of the late nineteenth century, anticipates the chaotic narrative patterns of postmodern metafiction. This task, to my knowledge, has never been attempted before