Les Grandes Peurs. Vol. 1: Diable. Fléaux, etc ed. by Madeleine Bertaud

Abstract

REVIEWS Les GrandesPeurs. Vol. I: Diable. Fleaux, etc. Ed. by MADELEINE BERTAUD. (Travaux de Litterature, i6) Geneva: Droz. 2003. 476 pp. SwF I24. ISBN 2-95I8403 I-4. The twenty-four contributors tackle instances of fear from the Middle Ages to the present day, though they attach themselves almost entirely and umbilically to France. For those interested in intraprofessional skirmishes, the wet lettuce of discord, the combative editor's preface asserts the pro-humanist case against (presumably) the dehumanizers. Like the animals we are, we're ever ready to press the panic-button: even in sleep we do not switch off, reliving, anticipating, or inventing things to dread. Terrorism, self-directed or inflicted, is aboriginal. Who's afraid of the big bad wolf? Jean-Pierre Collinet tracks wolves across awide territory of literary texts. For him, this beast is tragic, for it inspires both pity and terror. The long-life demonizationis, however, beginningto give way to rehabilitation. Satan, inCorinne Cooper-Deniau's presentation, works tomatch or top God step for step: a sedulous ape and a parodic inversion. She does not ask how the arch-tempter can hope to entice souls to reside in fearsome hell, when God has enough trouble trying to interest us in heaven. Does the Devil have the best tunes? He certainly disseminates himself (succubi and incubi) by 'maculate conception'. Thus women are appointed as his main helpmates. Cooper-Deniau does allow for the human counter-attack via mockery. Marianne Closson, focusing on witch-hunts, adduces the pleasures of being terrorized, which are of course palpable in conspiracy theories. She proposes that thewhole, largely mythical, belief inwitches' sabbaths constructed a counter-church, which hospitably annexed traditional anti-Semitic motifs to its essential misogyny. She deduces that the founding motivation of such satanic myths is the recognition, disguised as disapproval, of the urge to transgress all taboos. An interesting slant on the devil question comes from a priest, Denis Donetzkeff, who patiently follows the career of the Jansenists of Port-Royal, so sure of their own rightness that they viewed the Jesuits as the incarnation of Satan. Another priest, Claude Barthe, distinguishes powerfully between the hopeful anguish of Bernanos's saints and the hopeless dread of his sinners (who are naturally more fascinating dramatically). In the nineteenth-century obsession with the spread of syphilis, Jacques Marx ana lyses how some fictions resurrected pre-scientific fears, especially of divine vengeance (the Old Testament, after all, teems with punitive plagues). Panic is the communicable disease par excellence. Gilles Ernst sympathetically studies our contemporay fears about AIDS in several novelists, though he says nothing about the quality of their writing, contenting himself with the antithesis 'Le sida detruit, le texte construit' (p. 23I). Giono's Le Hussard sur le toit, his plague-novel, so much more dynamic than Camus's, shows people literally frightening themselves to death: their perverse response to the horrors of reality. This novel is a rare example of a persuasive por trayal of collective terror, usually the preserve of the cinema or painting (the arts of simultaneity). In fantastic literature, especially of the fin de siecle, as studied by Marie-Anne Zouegh-Keime, we see a humanization of the inanimate and a dehumanization of the previously animate. Like Tacitus long ago ('omne ignotum pro magnifico'), she stresses how fear of the unknown (the unwarranted beats the justifiable) is the worst of all. Nostradamus, a best-seller after i ISeptember, has had (in Yvonne Bellenger's account) an enormous impact with the very imprecision of his prophecies. He plays on our common refusal to settle for mystery, to be patiently ignorant, and our need to seek out causes, patterns, explanations. Ronsard was one such sucker: Du Bellay a sceptic. The real devil is the demon of analogy, false connections. 500 Reviews With a handful of exceptions, this finally disappointing capharnauim or glory-hole partakes of that curse of academia: the parading of the bleeding obvious. Perhaps inevitably, we hear much more on the objects than the subject of fear, its quiddity. Fear, after all, has always kept humanity alive. What is the alternative to punctual quaking? To be so laid-back with ataraxia as to be supine...