De la merveille à l'inquiétude: Le registre du fantastique dans la fiction narrative au XVIIIe siècle (review)

There are many interesting observations and arguments in De la merveille à l'inquiétude about the conception of the fantastic in eighteenth-century French fiction. However, they get watered down in the overextensive commentaries and examples Emmanuelle Sempère furnishes her readers, which often is the case with published dissertations. I found that the organization of the book could have been better presented in the introduction, which reads as if this is a book primarily about Jacques Cazotte when in fact the scope is much larger, examining the relation of the fantastic to numerous and disparate texts, from Augustin Calmet's treaty on vampires, Cazotte's Diable Amoureux (The Devil in Love, 1772), the Encyclopédie, tales by various conteuses, to works by the Abbé Prévost and Crébillon. The interest of the book lies in the foregrounding of the multiple perspectives (theological, rationalist, parodic, etc.) regarding the fantastic that result from such an examination.

This is first and foremost a book about the function of the fantastic in eighteenth-century narrative. Sempère examines the fantastic as a "registre," which translates into "style" or "tone," rather than as a genre. And the effect the fantastic exercises over characters and readers can be expressed by "inquiétude," which can mean "anxiety," "worry," or "fear," but it also suggests the "uncanny," which in French translates as "l'inquiétante étrangeté" (literally, "worrisome" or "anxiety-provoking strangeness"). Sempère situates the fantastic within the epistemological shift away from an order founded on religious and popular beliefs to an emerging order based on secular rationalism. The fantastic, then, can be read in terms of the "return of the repressed" (i.e., of forgotten or repressed superstitions and beliefs) as well as a way of trying to deal with inassimilable or inacceptable "objects" (including characters) that cannot be incorporated into contemporary thought systems, whether orthodox Catholic or secular in nature. The register of the fantastic in the eighteenth century, Sempère contends, is not necessarily anti-Enlightenment, but rather it represents a crisis in thought.

I found the first section of the book to be the most compelling. The underlying direction of these chapters follows the work of Robert Muchembled, who has argued that one of the principal functions of witch trials in France was to reinforce Catholic orthodoxy by suppressing popular forms of religious expression that are dubbed "superstitious" by religious as well as secular elites. Henceforth emerges the notion of a "true" supernatural, issuing from Orthodox Catholicism, and a "false" supernatural attached to popular traditions. Sempère examines the work of Augustin Calmet in this light, all the while highlighting the tensions present in his treaty on vampires, which move between his desire to uphold orthodoxy and his personal fascination with narratives about vampires. In a similar manner, Sempère foregrounds the paradox of the Encyclopédistes, who attempt to combat superstition by refuting it, but who end up, by virtue of putting into published words their opposition to it, giving superstition at least a momentary existence, for fantastic phenomena are first and foremost effects of narrative. Finally, Sempère examines the ambiguity of Cazotte's Devil in Love, in which the status of Biondetta (is she a woman or the devil, real or fantasy?) provokes anxiety in the main character as well as in the reader throughout the narrative.

The second part of the book focuses on the monstrous as it manifests itself in fairy tales, gothic texts, and cabalistic texts by such authors as Madame d'Aulnoy, Madame de Murat, Crébillon, the chevalier de Mouhy, Catherine Bernard, Cazotte, and writers of oriental tales. Generally speaking, Sempère views monstrosity as a symptom of disorder within the social or biological order, as well as, again, an inquiétude regarding its status as true or false. She also discusses parodic texts within...