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Last week, Powell’s devoted daily guest blogs to Conjunctions 52: Betwixt the Between, which features among a host of excellent tales my translation of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s short story “La Tête,†which uses a horror trope (the severed head) taken from historical fact (Dr. Beaurieux’s experiments with the guillotine) to explore themes of innocence, experience, and euthanasia.
In her post, Elizabeth Hand notes
“…the original impulse behind gothic art and literature: to evoke awe and terror at the same moment. In 21st century pop culture, that balance has tipped in favor of terror, usually deployed as gruesome cinematic violence. But great literature of the fantastic re-calibrates and celebrates that balance…â€
Her words recall a significant debate in Francophone literature, which after the Second World War saw an efflorescence in the genre of the fantastique largely forgotten today. During “the quarrel of the fantastique,†critic Roger Caillois (perhaps best known if at all in the States for “discovering†Borges) advanced in 1958 the claim that the genre’s sole function was to provoke fear; that, indeed, the genre was a “game†or “play†of fear, an exercise in pure fiction whose manipulations were aimed at eliciting a single emotion. » Read the rest of this entry «
