Realist Fantasy in Barbey d’Aurevilly

The Poetics of Perversion and the Novel in Une Vieille Maîtresse [An Old Mistress]

Abstract

For Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly’s eschatological poetics, the evil of the world constitutes the ultimate proof of the sacred mysteries of God. Thus, when in 1851 the author declared his ambition to create “a new fantastic, sinister and courageously supernatural,” these words reveal not only a deep desire for an impactful literature but also anticipate a complex literary conception. Within it, notions of the profane and the sacred, history and fiction, novel and reality oppose and complement one another, in order to establish a possible model of what the author conceives as realist fantasy in opposition to fantastic realism. To analyse how this poetic project takes shape in the novel Une Vieille Maîtresse (1851), the present article first proposes a brief theoretical discussion of the fantastic genre’s characteristics, as well as its close relationship with rationality and verisimilitude. For this purpose, the discussion moves from Catherine Gallagher’s literary rationalism towards Tzvetan Todorov’s taxonomy. Next, drawing on the works of Jacyntho Lins Brandão and Julie Anselmini, the article examines how d’Aurevilly appropriates and reshapes verisimilitude through diegetic strategies intrinsic to the narrative process. Finally, it offers a close reading of the novel in order to highlight how such strategies are deployed to create a literary universe that effectively subverts the boundaries between history and the novel, maintaining fantastic hesitation, and materialising the supernatural while simultaneously mystifying the profane.