Article

Name: Cruel Tales in the Magic Lantern: Traces of Macabre Plots in the Proust’s Novel

Authors: Natalia O. Laskina

Novosibirsk State Theatre Institute, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

In the section Literary Life of the Plot

Abstract:

French decadent fiction gives in its plots an important place to the transformations of the Gothic tradition: such key texts as Barbey d’Aurevilly’s “She-Devils”, Villiers de Lisle-Adam’s “Cruel Tales”, Rachilde’s “Mr. Venus” as well as the early novels of J.-K. Huysmans created a specific, type of macabre narrative, essentially different from the romantic gothic fiction. The article shows how Proust’s poetics, consciously aimed at completing and overcoming the fin de siècle culture, uses allusions to popular themes of the decadent Gothic – danse of the dead, automatons, female captives, demonic mentorship – freed from their fantastic framework and included in a more complex context.

Proust’s strategies for citing predecessors transfer recognizable clichés from the plot to the discourse. Unlike Proust’s early prose, which did not hide the author’s dependence on his decadent teachers, the novel “In Search of Lost Time” constructs a moving system of hints scattered throughout the text, in which only flickering traces remain of the sources. The living dead, dolls and masks exist only in the speech of the narrator and some characters, but they inevitably add ambiguity and a dark shade to everyday situations and create tragicomic effects. The banal episodes of the life of the narrator and Albertine are colored by obsessive repetitions of variations of the word “violence”, and by unexpected thoughts about death. The memory of the arrival of the narrator’s friend from the front turns into a description of a superhuman body marked with signs of death, and then into an apocalyptic picture. Various characters are accompanied by references to crime, guilt, masks, fear of exposure, not motivated by the plot. The narrator himself constantly betrays his fascination with horrifying themes, and the scenes that his memory recreates like a magic lantern are often painted in macabre tones. It can also be assumed that Proust’s reworking of decadent themes allows him to create an additional level of metapoetics, hinting at sinister subtexts both in the plot of the novel and in the properties of the narrator.

Keywords: Marcel Proust, modernist novel, Gothic fiction, French decadent fiction, macabre

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