4 research outputs found
“Une impression posthume des sensations d’autrefois”: Games of Nostalgia and Mysticism in Joséphin Péladan's La Décadence latine
No full textPour le psychanalyste Donald Winnicott, le jeu constitue une « valeur positive de l’illusion » qui, pour l’adulte, ainsi que pour l’enfant, permet d’accéder à la réalité de façon graduelle et supportable. Bien que connu plutôt pour son concept de l’objet transitionnel chez les enfants, Winnicott revendique pourtant le rôle essentiel des phénomènes transitionnels à toutes les étapes de la vie, à tout le moins celui de la création artistique. Cet article vise à mettre en jeu la psychologie de Winnicott, surtout de son livre Jeu et réalité (1971) et La Décadence latine (1884 & seq.) de Joséphin Péladan, œuvre méconnue et insuffisamment étudiée de la littérature décadente. S’appropriant un regard nostalgique sur l’histoire, Péladan la transforme en fantaisie contre-culturelle qui constitue un acte de résistance au présent. Il se crée une alternative à l’histoire, une « expérience illusoire » qui, moitié jeu, moitié reformulation de la réalité, lui fournit une façon de contourner la déchéance morale. Or, Péladan oppose à ses peurs de la fin de la latinité une nouvelle trajectoire historique de son innovation propre afin de réécrire le monde à rebours.For the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, playing constitutes a “positive value of illusion” which, for the adult as well as the child, allows access to reality in a way that is gradual and bearable. Although better known for his concept of the transitional object for children, Winnicott makes the claim for an essential role played by transitional phenomena at all stages of life, particularly in artistic creation. This article seeks to read together the psychology of Winnicott, especially Playing and Reality (1971) and Joséphin Péladan’s La Décadence latine (1884 & seq.), a little-known and poorly studied work of decadent literature. Through his use of a nostalgic gaze on history, Péladan transforms it into a counter-cultural fantasy, an act of resistance to the present. He creates for himself an alternative to history which acts as an “illusory experience” – a half game, half remaking of reality – allowing him to overcome the moral decadence that he laments. Thus, Péladan opposes his new arc of history to the fears he has about the end of the Latin race, effectively rewriting the world à rebours
The Devil’s Marriage: Folk Horror and the <i>Merveilleux Louisianais</i>
No full textAt the beginning of his Creole opus The Grandissimes, George Washington Cable refers to Louisiana as “A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay”. This anti-pastoral view of Louisiana as an ecosystem of horrific nature and the very human melancholy it breeds is one that has persisted in popular American culture to the present day. However, the literature of Louisiana itself is marked by its creativity in blending elements of folktales, fairy tales, and local color. This paper proposes to examine the transhuman, or the transcendence of the natural by means of supernatural transformation, in folk horror tales of Louisiana. As the locus where the fairy tale meets the burgeoning Southern Gothic, these tales revolve around a reworking of what Vladimir Propp refers to as transfiguration, the physical and metaphysical alteration of the human into something beyond the human. The focus of this paper will be on three recurring figures in Louisiana folk horror: yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil. Drawing upon works including Alcée Fortier’s collection of Creole folktales Louisiana Folktales (1895), Dr. Alfred Mercier’s “1878”, and various newspaper tales of voodoo ceremonies from the ante- and post-bellum periods, this article brings together theorizations about the fairy tale from Vladimir Propp and Jack Zipes and historiological approaches to the Southern Gothic genre to demonstrate that Louisiana, in its multilingual literary traditions, serves as a nexus where both genres blend uncannily together to create tales that are both geographically specific and yet exist outside of the historical time of non-fantastic fiction. Each of these figures, yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil, challenges the expectations of what limits the human. Thus, this paper seeks to examine what will be termed the “Louisiana gothic”, a particular blend of fairy-tale timelessness, local color, and the transfiguration of the human. Ultimately, the Louisiana gothic, as expressed in French, English, and Creole, tends toward a view of society in decay, mobilizing these elements of horror and of fairy tales to comment on a society that, after the revolution in Saint-Domingue, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Civil War, was seen as falling into inevitable decline. This commentary on societal decay, expressed through elements of folk horror, sets apart Louisiana gothic as a distinct subgenre that challenges conventions about the structures and functions of the fairy tale
Rag Time: Decadent Textiles in the Louisiana Gothic of the Fin de Siècle
No full textLafcadio Hearn’s fascination with the ‘dead bride’ of the American South, beginning upon his arrival in Louisiana in 1877, was predicated upon a notion of Louisiana as a locus of cultural and literary production that had been among the richest in America for decades. If we continue Hearn’s metaphor of the dead bride, her wedding gown is undoubtedly a rich one, embroidered and bedight with baroque finery. By the time of Hearn’s arrival in the late 1870s, Louisiana was adorned with numerous literary journals and a wealth of works written in multiple languages. As Catherine Savage Brosman suggests:
Thus, crisscrossed for three centuries by competing ethnic, civic, and cultural lines of force, and unique, as the only former French colony in what is now the United States, Louisiana gave rise, unsurprisingly, to a unique cultural patrimony, or what has been termed the state’s ‘perverse complexity’.[i]
Although the invocation of perversity brings with it a host of complex associations, one that has been underexplored, both in American literature and in literature of the South more specifically, is that of decadence. In Fears and Fascinations (2005), Thomas F. Haddox makes a case for viewing works in the tradition of the Southern Gothic, and their antecedent works, through the lens of decadence – far from being a uniquely European phenomenon, he suggests, decadence is to be found in the American South, in ‘the spectacle of a South haunted by defeat, by the ghosts of racial atrocities, and by a fantasy of past cultural glory […]. If failure is indeed beautiful to a decadent, then the ruined, faux-aristocratic South becomes a splendid backdrop’.[ii] Rather than seeing Louisiana literature as a regional curiosity, I propose we cease to enshroud ourselves in a parochial view of what constitutes major and minor literatures.
[i] Catherine Savage Brosman, Louisiana Creole Literature: A Historical Study (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), p. 12.
[ii] Thomas F. Haddox, Fears and Fascinations: Representing Catholicism in the American South (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 86
‘The matrix of all problems’: Stephen King’s marriage of fundamentalism and the monstrous-feminine as social critique
No full textThe place of women in society has long been decried by their place in religion – at least according to horror novelist Stephen King. Indeed, the release of first novel Carrie (1974) was the beginnings of an avid interest in both religion and gender stereotyping, the latter of which the author has been accused of utilising for horrific effect. Yet, this unison of themes is more complex than this. Certainly, these thematic concerns become the means with which King interrogates religious extremism and the conditions which cultivate such devotion; the novel succeeded in exposing the cataclysmic aftermath of a childhood so governed and restricted by militant Puritanism as to metamorphose Carrie White from a wholesome, all-American teen into an ardent evangelist responsible for a town massacre and the murder of her mother. However, utilisation of the fundamentalist agenda within this novel and later releases becomes the means with which King critiques both the archaic notions of the sin of femininity upheld within Christianity, and crucially, how and why such conceptions still pervade modern-day culture. In particular, King turns ‘his women’ monstrous because of their adherence to roles placed upon them by the conservative – even oppressive – conception of gender found within fundamentalist discourse; monstrous when they succeed in following such ideals – and monstrous when they do not – King also suggests that the origins and perpetuation of the image of the monstrous-feminine are far more sewn into the fabric of US society than its citizens would care to admit. This study will thus focus upon the methods of control found within fundamentalist ideology and how they presume to demarcate boundaries which dictate appropriate behaviour for women. Analyses of the monstrous-feminine within later novels will also demonstrate King’s motivation for marrying religion and the woman-as-horror scenario, and will be highlighted as not simply a mechanism within King’s oft-used toolbox of terror, but as the mechanism with which he turns the spotlight on both fundamentalism - and an avidly patriarchal society still struggling to maintain a hold over women
