Method in Madness: Control Mechanisms in the French Fantastic (review)

A new monograph devoted to the relatively little-studied genre or mode of the conte fantastique is a welcome addition to titles in French studies and, given its place within Rodopi's exciting Chiasma series, dedicated to 'urgent critical assessments focussed on joinings and criss-crossings', promises much. The elegantly simple overall thesis of Fortin's work is that contes fantastiques dramatize the failure of a series of defence mechanisms (fetishization, projection, intellectualization, mechanization, compulsion), designed to control or to displace psychical anxiety. These control mechanisms fail, according to Fortin, because in the fantastic mode, the repressed content is no longer hidden by a fetish object or deflected by a piece of intellectual sophistry, but becomes 'real': the fantastic 'consists in transforming psychical dangers into real ones' (p. 133). The 'joining' at stake here, then, is the meeting between psychoanalytic theory and literary generic criticism. However, little 'criss-crossing' is involved in Fortin's straightforward application of psychoanalytic concepts to fantastic narrative and characterization. Indeed, this theoretical framework is an appropriate, if rather obvious one, given that Freud's essay on The Uncanny proceeds from a reading of Hoffmann's fantastic. What is more, the readings of texts pursued here vary in effectiveness. In a section on Maupassant's 'La Chevelure', for example, Fortin argues that the fantastic works to unmask the defence mechanism of fetishism by putting the woman that is feared in place of the lock of hair designed to mask her reality. Yet, significantly, the fetish as Freud conceptualizes it is not constructed to counter the fear of woman a whole, but rather the fear of woman as a hole, that is, of her 'castrated' genitalia. The focus on the whole woman, then, already entails a coy deflection from what the fetishist dreads. In this case, as in others, the sometimes ingenious attempts to theorize how the fantastic unmasks defence mechanisms simply does not quite work at the level of textual specificity.

Similarly, the reasons given for the chosen corpus are rather unsatisfactory. Arguing for the inclusion of a little-known story by George Sand, or of contes that are only tenuously fantastiques, such as Mérimée's 'Carmen', and for the exclusion of other more widely discussed tales such as Maupassant's celebrated 'Le Horla', Fortin simply states 'this study makes use of those texts which best serve its purpose' (p. 17). This blatant selection of material on the basis that it happens to fit the argument is somewhat problematic. While in the introduction, Fortin justifies this selectiveness by claiming that her aim is not to 'redefine the literary genre of the fantastique'(p. 17), in the conclusion, she risks contradicting herself by asserting that her method of reading these texts 'contributes to the theory of the fantastic itself' as well as 'elucidating the individual texts' (p. 133). This claim may be slightly too bold, since excluded texts that are central to the fantastic (such as 'Le Horla' in which the object of terror never is defined or unmasked, or Nodier's classic 'Smarra' whose narrative simply moves between several levels of nightmare reality) would not conform to the proposed model. Indeed, the study is paradoxically at its strongest when analysing the individual eccentricities of a given text, rather than trying to make the neat overarching theory fit the genre as a whole. The analysis of George Sand's portrayal of non-gender-specific anxieties of individuation in 'La Reine Coax', for example, offers insights into textual features that, while wholly atypical of the predominantly male-authored fantastic genre, are nevertheless illuminating and fascinating, in and of themselves.