Deborah Bridle | Université Nice Sophia Antipolis (original) (raw)
Published Papers by Deborah Bridle
Arthur Machen: Critical Essays, 2021
My article proposes to analyse a series of short stories written by Arthur Machen in 1894 and 189... more My article proposes to analyse a series of short stories written by Arthur Machen in 1894 and 1895. Those stories can all be categorised under the “crime fiction” or “detective fiction” label, as their main protagonist is the amateur detective Dyson, who is confronted to various weird phenomena which will lead the hero down the paths of occultism and magic. As a result, Machen both borrows from the rules of 19th-century detective fiction as inaugurated by Poe and his famous Dupin, and at the same time distances himself from the genre mainly through the supernatural and occult elements that work at the core of the plots. Rational thinking clashes with the existence of paranormal phenomena and strongly jeopardises usual techniques of ratiocination. Indeed, as occultism is the vehicle for many of the crimes investigated by the detective, Dyson will have no choice but to dabble with the dark discipline in order to understand and try to solve the mysteries at play. Consequently, will the supernatural thwart the investigation or will it give special insight to the detective? Keeping in mind that occultism concerns that which is hidden (from the Latin occulere: to conceal), how can it work alongside the task of detection, whose goal is precisely to reveal and to explain the workings of mystery?
As well as analysing the presence of occultism in the diegesis of the stories – both in the crimes perpetrated and in the investigative techniques developed by Dyson – my article will also seek to establish how occultism can be seen as a deliberate tool for the writer. Indeed, on the extra-textual level itself, the narratives also work as occult works in which Machen uses fragmentary viewpoints and a multi-layered narration in combination with horror and magic, always playing with the readers by giving them a partial description of events, particularly in the tour de force The Three Impostors. Occultism thus works as a literal motif and a metatextual symbol in all those stories, ultimately leading to the failure of the detective.
Corpus under study: “The Inmost Light” (1894), “The Shining Pyramid” (1895), “The Red Hand” (1895), and The Three Impostors (1895) (which includes “Prologue”, “Adventure of the Gold Tiberius”, “The Encounter of the Pavement”, “Novel of the Dark Valley”, “Adventure of the Missing Brother”, “Novel of the Black Seal”, “Incident of the Private Bar”, “The Decorative Imagination”, “Novel of the Iron Maid”, “The Recluse of Bayswater”, “Novel of the White Powder”, “Strange Occurrence in Clerkenwell”, “History of the Young Man with Spectacles”, and “Adventure of the Deserted Residence”).
Vastarien, 2020
Ligotti's short stories are the constant re-enactment of the same fundamental tragedy: that of hu... more Ligotti's short stories are the constant re-enactment of the same fundamental tragedy: that of human existence. The overwhelming presence of human simulacra in the form of mannequins, puppets and masks expresses the author's will to highlight human insignificance. But when Ligotti's characters end up desiring to become those puppets, the curse of humanity (having been born) turns to a cynical joke. The author cleverly turns objects of nightmare into objects of desire, thus giving another dimension to existential horror. Similarly, some of Ligotti's short stories feature humanised objects, representing another way for the author to deny man's superiority.
My paper offers to explore the strategy of desire in the context of Ligotti's horror writing: how is desire always related to an escape from the human condition? How can objectification, and the loss of humanity that stems from it, be part of conscious desire? To what extent is this desire satisfied?
This interpretation of desire can also be associated to Ligotti's own literary quest: the author’s deep desire to repeatedly explore the tragedy of humanity. The short story form offers Ligotti the ideal medium for this never-ending need to express his ontological perspective. But does the repetition offered by the short format entail a recurrent fulfilment of desire or a necessary frustration?
Journal of the Short Story in English, 2019
This paper seeks to establish the links between geography and history, time and space, fiction an... more This paper seeks to establish the links between geography and history, time and space, fiction and reality, in H. P. Lovecraft’s so-called “New England stories”, with particular focus on the role played by the fictional towns anchored in the reality of New England.
Through an analysis of text and biographical data, the author aims at demonstrating how horror as an aesthetic and a philosophical concept developed into a locus inherently linked to a deep sense of place in Lovecraft’s oeuvre and personal beliefs. By (re)constructing New England as an alternate reality, Lovecraft used this new space as an anchor of fixity and as a metaphorical threshold to the cosmic void.
Vastarien, 2019
This is a translation of my paper entitled “Visions du corps gothique dans les nouvelles de Thoma... more This is a translation of my paper entitled “Visions du corps gothique dans les nouvelles de Thomas Ligotti”. It was written after my participation to a conference organised at the Université de Bordeaux Montaigne in 2015 in tribute to two French scholars, Maurice Lévy and Jacques Goimard.
My focus is on Lévy's definition of the Gothic body as I seek to demonstrate how it can be applied to the array of bodies found in Ligotti's fiction.
The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction, 2019
Fragmentation is a key theme in the oeuvre of American horror writer Thomas Ligotti. The collecti... more Fragmentation is a key theme in the oeuvre of American horror writer Thomas Ligotti. The collection In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land (1997) is no exception. Its four short stories are set in an unnamed “town near the northern border” characterised by its weird inhabitants and the weirder still phenomena that occur there. From dreams of dismemberment to strange disembodied voices calling on from parallel dimensions, through grotesque and horrific parades displaying objects and body parts, the four plots all convey a sense of fragmentation and loss of the self. The stories themselves are unrelated but unified by a common location which, although bringing a thematic unity, is also a vehicle for fragmentation (both structural and thematic), as it appears very quickly that the town itself is what brings about the horror and the otherworldliness.
My paper not only focuses on those thematic and structural manifestations of fragmentation but also analyses the fragmentary nature of the work itself through its multimodal nature. Indeed, the collection is a multimedia collaboration with music band Current 93: it was released as a limited-edition publication of 2000 copies featuring the book and a CD. David Tibet, frontman of the British band, composed four tracks to accompany the reading of Ligotti’s stories. The stories themselves are dedicated to David Tibet and Ligotti’s stories all feature sound as a key component of their diegesis and their atmosphere. The first of Ligotti and Tibet’s collaborations, In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land can only be apprehended at its best as a collage of words and sounds, as a soundscape of dream and horror that reaches its full potential when the two media work together. My paper indeed tries to demonstrate how the two artistic productions work as parallel but at the same time dissonant fragments, whether it be on a compositional or on a metaphysical level.
Fragmentation therefore emerges as a mechanics of harmony where disparate elements eventually work together to create a cohesive work linking the craft, thought and vision of two artists.
Noël dans la littérature de langue anglaise, Dec 2018
In his short story “The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise”, Thomas Ligotti chooses Christmas as backdr... more In his short story “The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise”, Thomas Ligotti chooses Christmas as backdrop and fundamental element of the plot, which belongs to the horror and fantastic genres. The paper seeks to demonstrate how Christmas is first used as a metaphorical symbol then triggering agent of the nightmare. The narrator of the story is trapped in the yearly celebrations orchestrated by his aunt Elise. The paper particularly focuses on the motif of imprisonment associated with images of repetition in order to illustrate how Ligotti subverts the Christmas ideal and its usual values in a short story which drops its narrator in a terrifying existential abyss.
Dans sa nouvelle “The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise”, Thomas Ligotti utilise les fêtes de Noël comme toile de fond et élément fondamental de l’intrigue, bâtie sur le mode du fantastique horrifique. L’article cherche à montrer comment Noël devient symbole métaphorique, d’abord, puis agent déclencheur, ensuite, du cauchemar. Le narrateur de la nouvelle est pris au piège des célébrations annuelles orchestrées par sa tante Elise. C’est sur ce motif de l’enfermement associé à celui de la répétition que l’article insiste particulièrement afin d’illustrer la subversion du modèle de Noël et de ses valeurs opérée par Ligotti dans cette nouvelle qui plonge son narrateur dans un vide existentiel terrifiant.
Haunting in Short Fiction, Dec 2018
The purpose of this article is to understand the concepts of haunting and spectrality in their la... more The purpose of this article is to understand the concepts of haunting and spectrality in their larger sense and to use them as keys to decipher Arthur Machen’s short stories. By understanding haunting as the manifestation of a repetition, I seek to demonstrate how diegetic as well as extratextual repetitions can be seen as haunting processes for the characters as well as the readers. Through a close reading of the narrative techniques used by Machen and of the use of the supernatural in conjunction with the short story form, I aim to show how Machen’s stories can be considered as haunting and haunted bodies, the text itself becoming the ghost.
Le jardin et ses mythes aux Etats-Unis et en Grande-Bretagne, 2017
In the short story “Les Fleurs” taken from American author Thomas Ligotti’s first collection of s... more In the short story “Les Fleurs” taken from American author Thomas Ligotti’s first collection of stories (Songs of a Dead Dreamer, 1989), the narrator, who is a member of an occult society with mysterious motives, is trying to share his passion for botany with a young woman. Little by little, the reader discovers the existence of a garden as primal and ancestral as the Garden of Eden, first through the disturbed mind of the narrator, and later in a space that seems halfway between reality and imagination.
Ligotti’s style is here in keeping with its usual ambiguity and semi-obscurity and only gives the reader a fragmented vision: why is the myth of the Garden of Eden subverted and reversed? How does this subversion operate? To what extent can it be said that a new myth of the original garden is created?
This paper tackles those questions by unravelling the complex tangle of hints that Ligotti leaves for the reader to discover. It analyses the occurrence of references to the biblical myth in the text, the role of new Adam that the narrator takes on and his quest for a new Eve, and the hybridisation of the original myth with pagan traits (like the sacrificial theme and the presence of occultism).
Our purpose is to show how and why rewriting and claiming the myth of the Garden of Eden and its codes allows Ligotti to leave his singular and masterful mark in the field of horror literature.
Faunus, 2016
This paper focuses on the influence that the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn had on Arthur Mach... more This paper focuses on the influence that the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn had on Arthur Machen, one of its members, when he wrote the novel The Hill of Dreams.
In the novel, the young hero Lucian Taylor experiences a weird encounter, both mystical and pagan, sensual and terrifying, with a primal being in the ruins of a Roman fort in the vicinity of his Welsh village. The story then describes how Lucian deserts the real world to find shelter in the imaginary vision of an ancient city whose perfection casts him further and further out of a narrow-minded and bourgeois society that he loathes. After leaving for London in order to accomplish himself as a writer, Lucian shuts himself away from the world through his visions, halfway between a mystical fantasy and the dreadful image of the city’s society.
The novel is nourished by an occult imagery pertaining to the Golden Dawn and paints the portrait of the artist who carries the memory of the absolute that he desperately tries to retrieve and to express, and who therefore has no choice but to become a dissident in a materialistic, obscene and vulgar society.
Le refus, esthétique, littérature, société, musique, Jun 2012
This article explores the works of Lewis Carroll through the lens of Clément Rosset’s concept of ... more This article explores the works of Lewis Carroll through the lens of Clément Rosset’s concept of the real and the illusion. Rosset’s essay Le Réel et son Double guided my analysis of Carroll’s novels and enabled me to establish a link between the philosopher’s theory of denial of the real by the deluded subject and the writer’s creation of a nonsensical dream world.
Following the structure of the three chapters of Rosset’s essay, I seek to ascertain how, by evading the oppression of the real and its unavoidable implications – namely age, loneliness and death – Carroll refuses to conform and to subject himself to inevitability, and at the same time seems to be fully aware of his attempt, thus questioning the validity of the process of refusal.
GRAAT On - Line issue #10, Jul 2011
Loxias, Sep 2011
This article analyses the concept of experience and of coming of age, which is central to any fai... more This article analyses the concept of experience and of coming of age, which is central to any fairy tale, in George MacDonald’s two tales: The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie. The adventures of the two main characters and their evolution allow us to see this concept of coming of age as the gaining of experience – a sexual experience on the one hand, and a spiritual experience on the other – and to read the two tales as the expression of the author’s humanist and Christian beliefs.
Unpublished papers / papers pending publication by Deborah Bridle
Paper given for the 42nd ICFA on Climate Change and the Anthropocene. The two short stories “P... more Paper given for the 42nd ICFA on Climate Change and the Anthropocene.
The two short stories “Polynia” and “Covehithe” were published in China Miéville’s 2015 collection Three Moments of an Explosion. In the first story, icebergs inexplicably materialise in the London sky while the second story imagines the return of collapsed oil rigs, emerging from the depths of the oceans like so many awoken Cthulhus.
My paper proposes to explore how Miéville tackles the issue of climate change in the framework of the Weird. The “radical alterity” that the Weird conjures up (Tony Venezia) and the ensuing defamiliarisation of reality allow Miéville to question our response to an overwhelming and alien – albeit human-induced – phenomenon. In that respect, the total absence of explanation – one of the staples of many stories in the collection – reinforces the reader’s and the characters’ cognitive estrangement from a formerly known and reassuring reality. The effects of climate change are taken to an extreme that does not fall into the realm of plausibility (flying icebergs and zombie oil rigs), and yet, the various characters have no choice but to accept the unacceptable.
My paper aims at analysing what Miéville’s preference – the almost undefinable sensation of the Weird over a more classic and overdetermined science-fictional depiction – means for our possible comprehension of climate change and our potential role in this changing world. The format of the short story itself also reveals a refusal to delve into long explanations and details, and to focus instead on a “unity of effect” consistent with the Weird as a sensation, “a moment, a suggestion, a tease, an intervention, an attitude, and above all, an argument” (China Miéville).
Presented at the conference « Folk Horror in the 21st Century » at Falmouth University, September... more Presented at the conference « Folk Horror in the 21st Century » at Falmouth University, September 5 and 6 2019: https://wordpress.lehigh.edu/folkhorror2019/
L’auteur américain Thomas Ligotti n’a jamais dissimulé son admiration pour les maîtres du fantast... more L’auteur américain Thomas Ligotti n’a jamais dissimulé son admiration pour les maîtres du fantastique et de l’horreur, incluant bien sûr Lovecraft, dont il reconnaît volontiers l’influence capitale sur son œuvre et sa volonté d’écrire (« In August of 1970, I suffered the first attack of what would become a lifelong anxiety-panic disorder. Not too long after that I discovered the works of H. P. Lovecraft. I found that the meaningless and menacing universe described in Lovecraft’s stories corresponded very closely to the place I was living at that time, and ever since for that matter. […] A few years later, when I took an interest in writing fiction, there was never a question that I would write anything else other than horror stories » ).
Mon article se propose d’explorer, au travers d’un certain nombre de nouvelles de Ligotti sélectionnées selon leurs traits résolument « lovecraftiens » mais également au travers de ses textes de non-fiction, la filiation émergeant dans le travail des deux auteurs. L’héritage lovecraftien y est analysé par le biais d’une lecture thématique (éléments constitutifs communs tels que protagonistes, décor, ou encore points de développement de l’intrigue), philosophique (grâce à une analyse de la pensée ontologique et métaphysique chez les deux auteurs et leurs liens avec les courants de la philosophie pessimiste), mais également poétique (les deux auteurs ayant engagé une réflexion sur l’écriture de l’horreur et ses caractéristiques fondamentales).
Bien que n’ayant jamais contribué au Cthulhu Mythos, Ligotti peut néanmoins être considéré comme un auteur lovecraftien à part entière. Entre clins d’œil et références pleinement assumés, et une angoisse existentielle qui hante chaque page, les nouvelles de Ligotti se dessinent comme un prolongement et un dépassement de l’œuvre du père de Providence.
Henry Dumas’s untimely death in 1968 interrupted a work that will remain forever steeped in the s... more Henry Dumas’s untimely death in 1968 interrupted a work that will remain forever steeped in the social and political battles that African Americans had to fight.
His work offers a constellation of cultural and mystical references with powerful imagery and symbolism seeking to describe the Black Experience in a contemporary world but also in the larger spectrum of History. He weaves stories that try to pass on a cultural inheritance where Christian and African mythologies are mingled. His affiliation to the Black Arts Movement marks his involvement with political activism while his kinship with Sun Ra draws the picture of an author whose art was primarily concerned with the exploration of the black identity in a larger reality than our own. Dumas’s art follows a dynamics of concentration on the self and of universal expansion.
My paper focuses on the short stories that involve the supernatural, allowing me to analyse how the realm of fantasy offers an alternate cosmology. In this new cosmology, magic has different functions, from the defence of the powerless to the conjuring of ancestral forces, but all seem to point towards the duty of commemoration. Memory haunts the stories like a spectre, one that urges its black characters and black readers to remember a history that ties in with the Middle Passage but also with Ancient Egypt.
The characteristic open-endedness of Dumas’s stories underlines the interpretative role of the reader, therefore highlighting the active dimension inseparable from the act of memory. His work on language also shows how he invests words with a mission, the mission to give a past and a history to the language of black people.
Papers by Deborah Bridle
Arthur Machen: Critical Essays, 2021
My article proposes to analyse a series of short stories written by Arthur Machen in 1894 and 189... more My article proposes to analyse a series of short stories written by Arthur Machen in 1894 and 1895. Those stories can all be categorised under the “crime fiction” or “detective fiction” label, as their main protagonist is the amateur detective Dyson, who is confronted to various weird phenomena which will lead the hero down the paths of occultism and magic. As a result, Machen both borrows from the rules of 19th-century detective fiction as inaugurated by Poe and his famous Dupin, and at the same time distances himself from the genre mainly through the supernatural and occult elements that work at the core of the plots. Rational thinking clashes with the existence of paranormal phenomena and strongly jeopardises usual techniques of ratiocination. Indeed, as occultism is the vehicle for many of the crimes investigated by the detective, Dyson will have no choice but to dabble with the dark discipline in order to understand and try to solve the mysteries at play. Consequently, will the supernatural thwart the investigation or will it give special insight to the detective? Keeping in mind that occultism concerns that which is hidden (from the Latin occulere: to conceal), how can it work alongside the task of detection, whose goal is precisely to reveal and to explain the workings of mystery?
As well as analysing the presence of occultism in the diegesis of the stories – both in the crimes perpetrated and in the investigative techniques developed by Dyson – my article will also seek to establish how occultism can be seen as a deliberate tool for the writer. Indeed, on the extra-textual level itself, the narratives also work as occult works in which Machen uses fragmentary viewpoints and a multi-layered narration in combination with horror and magic, always playing with the readers by giving them a partial description of events, particularly in the tour de force The Three Impostors. Occultism thus works as a literal motif and a metatextual symbol in all those stories, ultimately leading to the failure of the detective.
Corpus under study: “The Inmost Light” (1894), “The Shining Pyramid” (1895), “The Red Hand” (1895), and The Three Impostors (1895) (which includes “Prologue”, “Adventure of the Gold Tiberius”, “The Encounter of the Pavement”, “Novel of the Dark Valley”, “Adventure of the Missing Brother”, “Novel of the Black Seal”, “Incident of the Private Bar”, “The Decorative Imagination”, “Novel of the Iron Maid”, “The Recluse of Bayswater”, “Novel of the White Powder”, “Strange Occurrence in Clerkenwell”, “History of the Young Man with Spectacles”, and “Adventure of the Deserted Residence”).
Vastarien, 2020
Ligotti's short stories are the constant re-enactment of the same fundamental tragedy: that of hu... more Ligotti's short stories are the constant re-enactment of the same fundamental tragedy: that of human existence. The overwhelming presence of human simulacra in the form of mannequins, puppets and masks expresses the author's will to highlight human insignificance. But when Ligotti's characters end up desiring to become those puppets, the curse of humanity (having been born) turns to a cynical joke. The author cleverly turns objects of nightmare into objects of desire, thus giving another dimension to existential horror. Similarly, some of Ligotti's short stories feature humanised objects, representing another way for the author to deny man's superiority.
My paper offers to explore the strategy of desire in the context of Ligotti's horror writing: how is desire always related to an escape from the human condition? How can objectification, and the loss of humanity that stems from it, be part of conscious desire? To what extent is this desire satisfied?
This interpretation of desire can also be associated to Ligotti's own literary quest: the author’s deep desire to repeatedly explore the tragedy of humanity. The short story form offers Ligotti the ideal medium for this never-ending need to express his ontological perspective. But does the repetition offered by the short format entail a recurrent fulfilment of desire or a necessary frustration?
Journal of the Short Story in English, 2019
This paper seeks to establish the links between geography and history, time and space, fiction an... more This paper seeks to establish the links between geography and history, time and space, fiction and reality, in H. P. Lovecraft’s so-called “New England stories”, with particular focus on the role played by the fictional towns anchored in the reality of New England.
Through an analysis of text and biographical data, the author aims at demonstrating how horror as an aesthetic and a philosophical concept developed into a locus inherently linked to a deep sense of place in Lovecraft’s oeuvre and personal beliefs. By (re)constructing New England as an alternate reality, Lovecraft used this new space as an anchor of fixity and as a metaphorical threshold to the cosmic void.
Vastarien, 2019
This is a translation of my paper entitled “Visions du corps gothique dans les nouvelles de Thoma... more This is a translation of my paper entitled “Visions du corps gothique dans les nouvelles de Thomas Ligotti”. It was written after my participation to a conference organised at the Université de Bordeaux Montaigne in 2015 in tribute to two French scholars, Maurice Lévy and Jacques Goimard.
My focus is on Lévy's definition of the Gothic body as I seek to demonstrate how it can be applied to the array of bodies found in Ligotti's fiction.
The Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction, 2019
Fragmentation is a key theme in the oeuvre of American horror writer Thomas Ligotti. The collecti... more Fragmentation is a key theme in the oeuvre of American horror writer Thomas Ligotti. The collection In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land (1997) is no exception. Its four short stories are set in an unnamed “town near the northern border” characterised by its weird inhabitants and the weirder still phenomena that occur there. From dreams of dismemberment to strange disembodied voices calling on from parallel dimensions, through grotesque and horrific parades displaying objects and body parts, the four plots all convey a sense of fragmentation and loss of the self. The stories themselves are unrelated but unified by a common location which, although bringing a thematic unity, is also a vehicle for fragmentation (both structural and thematic), as it appears very quickly that the town itself is what brings about the horror and the otherworldliness.
My paper not only focuses on those thematic and structural manifestations of fragmentation but also analyses the fragmentary nature of the work itself through its multimodal nature. Indeed, the collection is a multimedia collaboration with music band Current 93: it was released as a limited-edition publication of 2000 copies featuring the book and a CD. David Tibet, frontman of the British band, composed four tracks to accompany the reading of Ligotti’s stories. The stories themselves are dedicated to David Tibet and Ligotti’s stories all feature sound as a key component of their diegesis and their atmosphere. The first of Ligotti and Tibet’s collaborations, In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land can only be apprehended at its best as a collage of words and sounds, as a soundscape of dream and horror that reaches its full potential when the two media work together. My paper indeed tries to demonstrate how the two artistic productions work as parallel but at the same time dissonant fragments, whether it be on a compositional or on a metaphysical level.
Fragmentation therefore emerges as a mechanics of harmony where disparate elements eventually work together to create a cohesive work linking the craft, thought and vision of two artists.
Noël dans la littérature de langue anglaise, Dec 2018
In his short story “The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise”, Thomas Ligotti chooses Christmas as backdr... more In his short story “The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise”, Thomas Ligotti chooses Christmas as backdrop and fundamental element of the plot, which belongs to the horror and fantastic genres. The paper seeks to demonstrate how Christmas is first used as a metaphorical symbol then triggering agent of the nightmare. The narrator of the story is trapped in the yearly celebrations orchestrated by his aunt Elise. The paper particularly focuses on the motif of imprisonment associated with images of repetition in order to illustrate how Ligotti subverts the Christmas ideal and its usual values in a short story which drops its narrator in a terrifying existential abyss.
Dans sa nouvelle “The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise”, Thomas Ligotti utilise les fêtes de Noël comme toile de fond et élément fondamental de l’intrigue, bâtie sur le mode du fantastique horrifique. L’article cherche à montrer comment Noël devient symbole métaphorique, d’abord, puis agent déclencheur, ensuite, du cauchemar. Le narrateur de la nouvelle est pris au piège des célébrations annuelles orchestrées par sa tante Elise. C’est sur ce motif de l’enfermement associé à celui de la répétition que l’article insiste particulièrement afin d’illustrer la subversion du modèle de Noël et de ses valeurs opérée par Ligotti dans cette nouvelle qui plonge son narrateur dans un vide existentiel terrifiant.
Haunting in Short Fiction, Dec 2018
The purpose of this article is to understand the concepts of haunting and spectrality in their la... more The purpose of this article is to understand the concepts of haunting and spectrality in their larger sense and to use them as keys to decipher Arthur Machen’s short stories. By understanding haunting as the manifestation of a repetition, I seek to demonstrate how diegetic as well as extratextual repetitions can be seen as haunting processes for the characters as well as the readers. Through a close reading of the narrative techniques used by Machen and of the use of the supernatural in conjunction with the short story form, I aim to show how Machen’s stories can be considered as haunting and haunted bodies, the text itself becoming the ghost.
Le jardin et ses mythes aux Etats-Unis et en Grande-Bretagne, 2017
In the short story “Les Fleurs” taken from American author Thomas Ligotti’s first collection of s... more In the short story “Les Fleurs” taken from American author Thomas Ligotti’s first collection of stories (Songs of a Dead Dreamer, 1989), the narrator, who is a member of an occult society with mysterious motives, is trying to share his passion for botany with a young woman. Little by little, the reader discovers the existence of a garden as primal and ancestral as the Garden of Eden, first through the disturbed mind of the narrator, and later in a space that seems halfway between reality and imagination.
Ligotti’s style is here in keeping with its usual ambiguity and semi-obscurity and only gives the reader a fragmented vision: why is the myth of the Garden of Eden subverted and reversed? How does this subversion operate? To what extent can it be said that a new myth of the original garden is created?
This paper tackles those questions by unravelling the complex tangle of hints that Ligotti leaves for the reader to discover. It analyses the occurrence of references to the biblical myth in the text, the role of new Adam that the narrator takes on and his quest for a new Eve, and the hybridisation of the original myth with pagan traits (like the sacrificial theme and the presence of occultism).
Our purpose is to show how and why rewriting and claiming the myth of the Garden of Eden and its codes allows Ligotti to leave his singular and masterful mark in the field of horror literature.
Faunus, 2016
This paper focuses on the influence that the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn had on Arthur Mach... more This paper focuses on the influence that the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn had on Arthur Machen, one of its members, when he wrote the novel The Hill of Dreams.
In the novel, the young hero Lucian Taylor experiences a weird encounter, both mystical and pagan, sensual and terrifying, with a primal being in the ruins of a Roman fort in the vicinity of his Welsh village. The story then describes how Lucian deserts the real world to find shelter in the imaginary vision of an ancient city whose perfection casts him further and further out of a narrow-minded and bourgeois society that he loathes. After leaving for London in order to accomplish himself as a writer, Lucian shuts himself away from the world through his visions, halfway between a mystical fantasy and the dreadful image of the city’s society.
The novel is nourished by an occult imagery pertaining to the Golden Dawn and paints the portrait of the artist who carries the memory of the absolute that he desperately tries to retrieve and to express, and who therefore has no choice but to become a dissident in a materialistic, obscene and vulgar society.
Le refus, esthétique, littérature, société, musique, Jun 2012
This article explores the works of Lewis Carroll through the lens of Clément Rosset’s concept of ... more This article explores the works of Lewis Carroll through the lens of Clément Rosset’s concept of the real and the illusion. Rosset’s essay Le Réel et son Double guided my analysis of Carroll’s novels and enabled me to establish a link between the philosopher’s theory of denial of the real by the deluded subject and the writer’s creation of a nonsensical dream world.
Following the structure of the three chapters of Rosset’s essay, I seek to ascertain how, by evading the oppression of the real and its unavoidable implications – namely age, loneliness and death – Carroll refuses to conform and to subject himself to inevitability, and at the same time seems to be fully aware of his attempt, thus questioning the validity of the process of refusal.
GRAAT On - Line issue #10, Jul 2011
Loxias, Sep 2011
This article analyses the concept of experience and of coming of age, which is central to any fai... more This article analyses the concept of experience and of coming of age, which is central to any fairy tale, in George MacDonald’s two tales: The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie. The adventures of the two main characters and their evolution allow us to see this concept of coming of age as the gaining of experience – a sexual experience on the one hand, and a spiritual experience on the other – and to read the two tales as the expression of the author’s humanist and Christian beliefs.
Paper given for the 42nd ICFA on Climate Change and the Anthropocene. The two short stories “P... more Paper given for the 42nd ICFA on Climate Change and the Anthropocene.
The two short stories “Polynia” and “Covehithe” were published in China Miéville’s 2015 collection Three Moments of an Explosion. In the first story, icebergs inexplicably materialise in the London sky while the second story imagines the return of collapsed oil rigs, emerging from the depths of the oceans like so many awoken Cthulhus.
My paper proposes to explore how Miéville tackles the issue of climate change in the framework of the Weird. The “radical alterity” that the Weird conjures up (Tony Venezia) and the ensuing defamiliarisation of reality allow Miéville to question our response to an overwhelming and alien – albeit human-induced – phenomenon. In that respect, the total absence of explanation – one of the staples of many stories in the collection – reinforces the reader’s and the characters’ cognitive estrangement from a formerly known and reassuring reality. The effects of climate change are taken to an extreme that does not fall into the realm of plausibility (flying icebergs and zombie oil rigs), and yet, the various characters have no choice but to accept the unacceptable.
My paper aims at analysing what Miéville’s preference – the almost undefinable sensation of the Weird over a more classic and overdetermined science-fictional depiction – means for our possible comprehension of climate change and our potential role in this changing world. The format of the short story itself also reveals a refusal to delve into long explanations and details, and to focus instead on a “unity of effect” consistent with the Weird as a sensation, “a moment, a suggestion, a tease, an intervention, an attitude, and above all, an argument” (China Miéville).
Presented at the conference « Folk Horror in the 21st Century » at Falmouth University, September... more Presented at the conference « Folk Horror in the 21st Century » at Falmouth University, September 5 and 6 2019: https://wordpress.lehigh.edu/folkhorror2019/
L’auteur américain Thomas Ligotti n’a jamais dissimulé son admiration pour les maîtres du fantast... more L’auteur américain Thomas Ligotti n’a jamais dissimulé son admiration pour les maîtres du fantastique et de l’horreur, incluant bien sûr Lovecraft, dont il reconnaît volontiers l’influence capitale sur son œuvre et sa volonté d’écrire (« In August of 1970, I suffered the first attack of what would become a lifelong anxiety-panic disorder. Not too long after that I discovered the works of H. P. Lovecraft. I found that the meaningless and menacing universe described in Lovecraft’s stories corresponded very closely to the place I was living at that time, and ever since for that matter. […] A few years later, when I took an interest in writing fiction, there was never a question that I would write anything else other than horror stories » ).
Mon article se propose d’explorer, au travers d’un certain nombre de nouvelles de Ligotti sélectionnées selon leurs traits résolument « lovecraftiens » mais également au travers de ses textes de non-fiction, la filiation émergeant dans le travail des deux auteurs. L’héritage lovecraftien y est analysé par le biais d’une lecture thématique (éléments constitutifs communs tels que protagonistes, décor, ou encore points de développement de l’intrigue), philosophique (grâce à une analyse de la pensée ontologique et métaphysique chez les deux auteurs et leurs liens avec les courants de la philosophie pessimiste), mais également poétique (les deux auteurs ayant engagé une réflexion sur l’écriture de l’horreur et ses caractéristiques fondamentales).
Bien que n’ayant jamais contribué au Cthulhu Mythos, Ligotti peut néanmoins être considéré comme un auteur lovecraftien à part entière. Entre clins d’œil et références pleinement assumés, et une angoisse existentielle qui hante chaque page, les nouvelles de Ligotti se dessinent comme un prolongement et un dépassement de l’œuvre du père de Providence.
Henry Dumas’s untimely death in 1968 interrupted a work that will remain forever steeped in the s... more Henry Dumas’s untimely death in 1968 interrupted a work that will remain forever steeped in the social and political battles that African Americans had to fight.
His work offers a constellation of cultural and mystical references with powerful imagery and symbolism seeking to describe the Black Experience in a contemporary world but also in the larger spectrum of History. He weaves stories that try to pass on a cultural inheritance where Christian and African mythologies are mingled. His affiliation to the Black Arts Movement marks his involvement with political activism while his kinship with Sun Ra draws the picture of an author whose art was primarily concerned with the exploration of the black identity in a larger reality than our own. Dumas’s art follows a dynamics of concentration on the self and of universal expansion.
My paper focuses on the short stories that involve the supernatural, allowing me to analyse how the realm of fantasy offers an alternate cosmology. In this new cosmology, magic has different functions, from the defence of the powerless to the conjuring of ancestral forces, but all seem to point towards the duty of commemoration. Memory haunts the stories like a spectre, one that urges its black characters and black readers to remember a history that ties in with the Middle Passage but also with Ancient Egypt.
The characteristic open-endedness of Dumas’s stories underlines the interpretative role of the reader, therefore highlighting the active dimension inseparable from the act of memory. His work on language also shows how he invests words with a mission, the mission to give a past and a history to the language of black people.
In the short story “Les Fleurs” taken from American author Thomas Ligotti’s first collection of s... more In the short story “Les Fleurs” taken from American author Thomas Ligotti’s first collection of stories (Songs of a Dead Dreamer, 1989), the narrator, who is a member of an occult society with mysterious motives, is trying to share his passion for botany with a young woman. Little by little, the reader discovers the existence of a garden as primal and ancestral as the Garden of Eden, first through the disturbed mind of the narrator, and later in a space that seems halfway between reality and imagination. Ligotti’s style is here in keeping with its usual ambiguity and semi-obscurity and only gives the reader a fragmented vision: why is the myth of the Garden of Eden subverted and reversed? How does this subversion operate? To what extent can it be said that a new myth of the original garden is created? This paper tackles those questions by unravelling the complex tangle of hints that Ligotti leaves for the reader to discover. It analyses the occurrence of references to the biblical myth in the text, the role of new Adam that the narrator takes on and his quest for a new Eve, and the hybridisation of the original myth with pagan traits (like the sacrificial theme and the presence of occultism). Our purpose is to show how and why rewriting and claiming the myth of the Garden of Eden and its codes allows Ligotti to leave his singular and masterful mark in the field of horror literature.
This is a translation of my paper entitled “Visions du corps gothique dans les nouvelles de Thoma... more This is a translation of my paper entitled “Visions du corps gothique dans les nouvelles de Thomas Ligotti”. It was written after my participation to a conference organised at the Université de Bordeaux Montaigne in 2015 in tribute to two French scholars, Maurice Lévy and Jacques Goimard. My focus is on Lévy's definition of the Gothic body as I seek to demonstrate how it can be applied to the array of bodies found in Ligotti's fiction.
This article analyses the concept of experience and of coming of age, which is central to any fai... more This article analyses the concept of experience and of coming of age, which is central to any fairy tale, in George MacDonald’s two tales: The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie. The adventures of the two main characters and their evolution allow us to see this concept of coming of age as the gaining of experience – a sexual experience on the one hand, and a spiritual experience on the other – and to read the two tales as the expression of the author’s humanist and Christian beliefs.
My article proposes to analyse a series of short stories written by Arthur Machen in 1894 and 189... more My article proposes to analyse a series of short stories written by Arthur Machen in 1894 and 1895. Those stories can all be categorised under the “crime fiction” or “detective fiction” label, as their main protagonist is the amateur detective Dyson, who is confronted to various weird phenomena which will lead the hero down the paths of occultism and magic. As a result, Machen both borrows from the rules of 19th-century detective fiction as inaugurated by Poe and his famous Dupin, and at the same time distances himself from the genre mainly through the supernatural and occult elements that work at the core of the plots. Rational thinking clashes with the existence of paranormal phenomena and strongly jeopardises usual techniques of ratiocination. Indeed, as occultism is the vehicle for many of the crimes investigated by the detective, Dyson will have no choice but to dabble with the dark discipline in order to understand and try to solve the mysteries at play. Consequently, will the supernatural thwart the investigation or will it give special insight to the detective? Keeping in mind that occultism concerns that which is hidden (from the Latin occulere: to conceal), how can it work alongside the task of detection, whose goal is precisely to reveal and to explain the workings of mystery? As well as analysing the presence of occultism in the diegesis of the stories – both in the crimes perpetrated and in the investigative techniques developed by Dyson – my article will also seek to establish how occultism can be seen as a deliberate tool for the writer. Indeed, on the extra-textual level itself, the narratives also work as occult works in which Machen uses fragmentary viewpoints and a multi-layered narration in combination with horror and magic, always playing with the readers by giving them a partial description of events, particularly in the tour de force The Three Impostors. Occultism thus works as a literal motif and a metatextual symbol in all those stories, ultimately leading to the failure of the detective. Corpus under study: “The Inmost Light” (1894), “The Shining Pyramid” (1895), “The Red Hand” (1895), and The Three Impostors (1895) (which includes “Prologue”, “Adventure of the Gold Tiberius”, “The Encounter of the Pavement”, “Novel of the Dark Valley”, “Adventure of the Missing Brother”, “Novel of the Black Seal”, “Incident of the Private Bar”, “The Decorative Imagination”, “Novel of the Iron Maid”, “The Recluse of Bayswater”, “Novel of the White Powder”, “Strange Occurrence in Clerkenwell”, “History of the Young Man with Spectacles”, and “Adventure of the Deserted Residence”).
This paper focuses on the influence that the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn had on Arthur Mach... more This paper focuses on the influence that the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn had on Arthur Machen, one of its members, when he wrote the novel The Hill of Dreams. In the novel, the young hero Lucian Taylor experiences a weird encounter, both mystical and pagan, sensual and terrifying, with a primal being in the ruins of a Roman fort in the vicinity of his Welsh village. The story then describes how Lucian deserts the real world to find shelter in the imaginary vision of an ancient city whose perfection casts him further and further out of a narrow-minded and bourgeois society that he loathes. After leaving for London in order to accomplish himself as a writer, Lucian shuts himself away from the world through his visions, halfway between a mystical fantasy and the dreadful image of the city’s society. The novel is nourished by an occult imagery pertaining to the Golden Dawn and paints the portrait of the artist who carries the memory of the absolute that he desperately tries to retrieve and to express, and who therefore has no choice but to become a dissident in a materialistic, obscene and vulgar society.
In his short story “The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise”, Thomas Ligotti chooses Christmas as backdr... more In his short story “The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise”, Thomas Ligotti chooses Christmas as backdrop and fundamental element of the plot, which belongs to the horror and fantastic genres. The paper seeks to demonstrate how Christmas is first used as a metaphorical symbol then triggering agent of the nightmare. The narrator of the story is trapped in the yearly celebrations orchestrated by his aunt Elise. The paper particularly focuses on the motif of imprisonment associated with images of repetition in order to illustrate how Ligotti subverts the Christmas ideal and its usual values in a short story which drops its narrator in a terrifying existential abyss. Dans sa nouvelle “The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise”, Thomas Ligotti utilise les fêtes de Noël comme toile de fond et élément fondamental de l’intrigue, bâtie sur le mode du fantastique horrifique. L’article cherche à montrer comment Noël devient symbole métaphorique, d’abord, puis agent déclencheur, ensuite, du cauchemar. Le narrateur de la nouvelle est pris au piège des célébrations annuelles orchestrées par sa tante Elise. C’est sur ce motif de l’enfermement associé à celui de la répétition que l’article insiste particulièrement afin d’illustrer la subversion du modèle de Noël et de ses valeurs opérée par Ligotti dans cette nouvelle qui plonge son narrateur dans un vide existentiel terrifiant.
Ligotti's short stories are the constant re-enactment of the same fundamental tragedy: th... more Ligotti's short stories are the constant re-enactment of the same fundamental tragedy: that of human existence. The overwhelming presence of human simulacra in the form of mannequins, puppets and masks expresses the author's will to highlight human insignificance. But when Ligotti's characters end up desiring to become those puppets, the curse of humanity (having been born) turns to a cynical joke. The author cleverly turns objects of nightmare into objects of desire, thus giving another dimension to existential horror. Similarly, some of Ligotti's short stories feature humanised objects, representing another way for the author to deny man's superiority. My paper offers to explore the strategy of desire in the context of Ligotti's horror writing: how is desire always related to an escape from the human condition? How can objectification, and the loss of humanity that stems from it, be part of conscious desire? To what extent is this desire satisfied? This interpretation of desire can also be associated to Ligotti's own literary quest: the author’s deep desire to repeatedly explore the tragedy of humanity. The short story form offers Ligotti the ideal medium for this never-ending need to express his ontological perspective. But does the repetition offered by the short format entail a recurrent fulfilment of desire or a necessary frustration?
Journal of the Short Story in English. Les Cahiers de la nouvelle, 2018
Cet article emploie les concepts de la hantise et de la spectralite dans le cadre d’une analyse d... more Cet article emploie les concepts de la hantise et de la spectralite dans le cadre d’une analyse des nouvelles de l’auteur gallois Arthur Machen. Si l’on entend la hantise comme la manifestation d’une repetition, il est alors possible de voir les repetitions a la fois diegetiques et extratextuelles comme des processus qui hantent les personnages tout comme les lecteurs. En observant de pres les techniques narratives mises en place par Machen ainsi que les manifestations du surnaturel en relation avec la forme de la nouvelle, on souhaite ici demontrer comment les nouvelles de Machen peuvent etre considerees comme des agents de la hantise mais egalement comme des entites hantees dans lesquelles le texte lui-meme devient fantome.
Journal of the Short Story in English. Les Cahiers de la nouvelle, 2018
Cet article s’attache a mettre en lumiere les liens existant entre geographie et histoire, temps ... more Cet article s’attache a mettre en lumiere les liens existant entre geographie et histoire, temps et espace, fiction et realite dans les nouvelles de Lovecraft appartenant au cycle dedie a la Nouvelle-Angleterre, particulierement au travers du role joue par les villes fictives ancrees dans la realite de cette region. En analysant a la fois le texte fictionnel et des donnees biographiques, cette etude souhaite montrer comment l’horreur en tant que concept esthetique et philosophique a evolue dans l’œuvre et la pensee de Lovecraft vers un locus intrinsequement lie a une profonde conscience de l’espace. En (re)construisant la Nouvelle-Angleterre comme une realite alternative, Lovecraft a employe ce nouvel espace comme une ancre de stabilite et un seuil metaphorique vers le vide cosmique.