The Fantastic and European Gothic: History, Literature, and the French Revolution by Matthew Gibson

Abstract

Reviews 221 la crème” (125). Gone are the recurrent rubrics like “médialecte,” “mots-chimères,” and “souvenances,” advantageously replaced by freer reflections on cultural arbiters from Germaine de Staël to George Clooney, and on cultural sites from concert halls to shooting galleries.Along the way, in a complaisant mood, Genette offers up the four prose writers he prefers:Montaigne,Chateaubriand,Stendhal,and Proust.Chateaubriand is the outlier, the unexpected one; but the narrative techniques that Genette puts on display in Épilogue, so similar to Chateaubriand’s own, may help us to understand why he is included in this small pantheon. Inevitably, granted the importance of the idea in Genette’s career, from its early stages onward, a great deal of attention is accorded to the notion of time. But here it is a highly personalized, indeed subjectivized time that is in question, and its dimensions are roughly those of a human life. Memory is of course very much at issue as well, and more especially the“fonction subrepticement fictionnalisante de la mémoire”(72).Whether we like it or not, Genette argues, we tell ourselves stories about our past; and we may eventually be persuaded to tell those stories to other people, too. It would be inaccurate to call Épilogue a memoir; nor are the terms “autobiography,” “confession,” or “testament” entirely apposite—though this text flirts overtly with each of those forms, turn and turn about. Genette does not tell us that this will be his final book; indeed he suggests that this post-scriptum may one day be followed by a post-post-scriptum. Yet the valedictory tone of Épilogue is unmistakable and far more pronounced than in any of his other writings. Last words are rarely recognized as such when they are uttered,except perhaps in a book:“[L]’avenir, on le sait, n’est à personne” (204). University of Colorado Warren Motte Gibson, Matthew. The Fantastic and European Gothic: History, Literature, and the French Revolution. Cardiff: UP of Wales, 2013. ISBN 978-0-7083-2572-8. Pp. 243.£95. This volume is a recent addition to Gothic Literary Studies, a series that encompasses both literature and film, including topics that range from Shakespeare to Stephen King.Within the present volume, only three of the authors studied are French: Charles Nodier, Théophile Gautier, and Paul Féval. However, the reason why the entire volume remains of interest to scholars of French is because the French Revolution and its aftermath stand as the watershed event which, Gibson argues, all the Fantastic or European Gothic authors of his study clearly responded to, even in fictions set during a distant, prerevolutionary past. Gibson begins by challenging the Todorovian definition of the Fantastic’s characteristic “hesitation” between rational and supernatural interpretations of strange events; he observes that many works which are commonly recognized as belonging to the Fantastic genre (such as E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tales) present episodes of the uncanny or marvelous without any such“hesitation”between alternate explanations. This semantic re-positioning is interesting and worthwhile, since it allows Gibson to focus on varying definitions of the Fantastic which were articulated by contemporary authors themselves, some of whom (Nodier, Gautier, and Walter Scott, for instance) were theorists as well as artists. In Gibson’s reading of the Fantastic, rationalism is not merely downplayed, but pointedly criticized: a stylistic choice that challenges Enlightenment belief in reason and the scientific method, while these tales’ frequent use of proleptic anticipations and anachronisms also reveal a fundamental pessimism toward historical progress. These are both effects that can be traced back to the prolonged trauma of the French Revolution, Gibson argues. Some of the works studied tend to support this thesis; for example, Gibson’s reading of Paul Féval’s pro-Monarchist use of the Gothic vampire motif is compelling. However, his claim that all works yield a unanimously counter-revolutionary or Legitimist reading is not as convincing; it relies on interpretations of “allusion, metaphor and allegory” (73) that feel strained in some places (for instance, in the heavy-handed political interpretation of Gautier’s wit and gorgeous sense of style). Finally, Gibson appears to write primarily for an audience...