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Jean Ray (pseudonym) is a Belgian writer bilingual: he is Jean Ray when he writes in French and John Flanders when he writes in Flemish.
Biography
Jean Ray (of his true name Jean Raymond Marie de Kremer) was born on July 8th 1887, with Ghent, where it made his studies. According to the legend, which it has even widespread him via some interviews (cf the review Mystery-Magazine n°41 of June 1951), it would have engaged as sailor and would have made the round the world tour, participant in alcohol smuggling during prohibition in the United States.In 1925, it makes appear the tales of the whiskey , its first collection of news. In 1927, he is condemned for " abuse confiance". He will make two years of prison and will find himself insulated and abandoned by his family and his friends. He will then start a more or less anonymous collaboration with several newspapers and reviews. Thus it will create the pseudonym of John Flanders in 1928. It leaves prison in February 1929. In 1932 its second collection appears: the cruising of the shades which will not receive any success in spite of the great quality of the texts which composes it. One can reasonably think that this failure is the result of the mediatization around its name in 1927. Always in 1932, it will be invested in the popular series of booklet: Harry Dickson ; it did not create the series in the beginning, it was in fact - at the beginning only translator of the adventures of a " Sherlock Holmes américain" , from German towards Dutch (appearance of the name of " Harry Dickson"), then into French. With long, it ends up finding the texts of origin so poor which it obtained the agreement of its editor to rewrite the stories provided that they respect the title and cover the design of the original collections. 103 adventures will be thus entirely with its hand on the 178 published booklets.
In parallel, he will collaborate in the editions of Averbode and will publish texts intended for youth, as well in French: Presto-Films that in Dutch: Vlaamse Filmkens . This collaboration will last until the end of its vie.
Come then the years from war. It will belong to a group of writers who join to be able to publish: " The associés" authors; and there will publish its more famous novel, Malpertuis (1943), but also: circles of terror , large night the , last tales of Canterbury and the city of the inexpressible fear . It will not cease writing until its death the September 17th 1964, in its birthplace of Ghent. In the number of its collections of new is reproduced the black tales of the golf , series of black accounts on this sport produced for a sporting magazine.
With the beginning of the year 1960, Jean Ray will annotate with Henri Vernes, the creator of Bob Morane, a listing of all the adventures of Harry Dickson in order to say which were with his hand. He will make some errors, but will have an excellent memory of these (its) 30 years old adventures.
Jean Ray was also sub-editor to the weekly magazine Bravo! of 1936 to 1940 (this body was then exclusively published in Dutch). It wrote there many tales as well as the scenarios of the series Edmund Bell , put in images by the great painter expressionnist Fritz Vandenberghe. After the war, it continued to write for youth in several reviews of which the weekly magazine Petits Belgians .
Jean Ray occupies the most important place within the Belgian school of the Fantastique. Its work is characterized especially by populated stories of phantoms and creatures of beyond; the fear is the principal engine. Its writing baroque must much with the Roman Gothic English of the 18th century and with Edgar Allan Poe.
Sets of themes
An eccentric space
What Jean Ray tells, throughout its work, has this characteristic, which little to appear astonishing, to be very precisely located. One is not unaware of nothing, indeed, of the places where the events occur which are reported. The geographical locations, far from being dissimulated, on the contrary are multiplied: lanes of Hamburg, Heidelberg and Hildesheim, equivocal taverns of Bow Road, obscure alleys of Old Nicholl and old frontages of Camden Town; marsh of the Fenn, tops of Scaw Fell and thickets of Sloatershill: the city like nature are massively present. Not that they give copy of a daily and verifiable outside which, at the beginning of the account, would have as a function to reassure the reader; nor even as they help to fix, with the turning of the account, the benchmarks: hardly cities, the names of the places disappear indeed from the field of reading, replaced by others which are not less quickly lost sight of the fact:“ Isle de Dogs (…) is a vast space enclosed in the curve from the Thames in Greenwich, where are the Millet Wall Docks and their sad bordering districts but that the foreigner penetrates front in Manchester Road, that it circumvents Glengall Road beyond Chapel, and it is in the middle of a decoration very other… ” ( the City of the strange fear , Harry Dickson , p. 127).
“ It looked at the way (…) to spin straight along the hedges towards Chigwell on a side, Chipping Ungar of the other. At the bottom, on the horizon, the forest of Epping made a great task of an almost lost green of sight ” ( the Malayan Mystery , Harry Dickson , p. 127).
There is only one realistic appearance. The presence of these localizations, precise and many, only aims at constituting a species of geography of off-centring; one traverses space there only to find oneself there more:
“ It skirted West King Road to engage in Hammersmith. Suddenly, with the height of Ornamental Grounds, it made an abrupt hook to engage in a maze of narrower streets ” ( the Strange green Gleam , Harry Dickson , p. 124).
“ In the west, the horizon tinted already red salts and the last corbels flew over the plain tumultuously when (it) went finally obviously that he did not find there more in this maze of muddy paths ” ( Sneaky; Knuckle and Peg Blow , in John Flanders, Night visions , p. 85).
Improbable geography, where all the points of named space are equivalent: the streets, whatever their name, return literally to same and the plans of the landscape, whatever the distance which separates them, superimpose and confuse the close relation and the distance:
“ the horizon moved as with the liking of a succession of mirages. Where the man believed duty to see the sea, he saw the milky wall of cliff; a forest of reeds which it had located in full south had become non-existent, replaced by long dead small islands of algae ” ( Large Night the and Circles of terror , Jean Ray, p. 308).
This space marked by the equivalence of all the elements which are shown by it is thus a place of confusion: the ways are erased, the horizon is drowned in the fog, the streets so precisely named gather and the frontages appear identical. So that any localization (even accompanied by proper names which makes it apparently locatable) dissolves in the similarity and the indistinct one. In the sea or the marsh (which are the essence of natural space), in the port or the street (which are the essence of urban space), all that is given to see has as much - or also little - of presence. So that the places which are described in the accounts of Jean Ray have the characteristic to be binding to the characters like a maze and to transform the approach or the escape into return or redoubling; that which saunters can only confuse, hesitate, be lost and return all the time to the same place.
A walk of Jean-Jacques Grandsire, in Malpertuis, offers the example of it:
“ We went along the channel to green water, where the first lamps ignited barges.
We crossed some lanes which the night invaded already, and from which the doors and the windows came to be closed for the sleep to come .
- Here the street of the Trip hammer!
- It lengthened, it also sinks and deserted, moving away from the channel towards an old email with the stripped plane trees .
- It is the strange one (…), she with a sigh of anguish says, we cross the street of the Trip hammer and yet… Oh! how to say it? It is not the street of the Trip hammer! It is not however very familiar. Let us continue .
We had reached the small deadened email; the sky was clear and was pricked of étoiles'.
- We the wrong road, does she say took suddenly, where I had the head? Here the street !
It was not it. Bets realized when we had traversed it in all its dark length .
- I am not there any more, groans it, however I would go there the eyes closed. We should find it… one needs it !
By three times still it believed to have found it and each time it had to recognize that it of it was nothing.
- Oh! she deplored, one would say that we turn in a kind of magic circle! I to find itself there more! Where are we?
We had not crossed any of the two bridges and I realized however that we had been attracted towards another point of the city” ( Malpetuis , Jean Ray, p. 128-129).
It is well of mislaying that it acts there, in a space where is very equivalent and where one ends up turning in round until the moment when another center is discovered. In these undifferentiated places, indeed, any element of the universe, threatened of obliteration, can also become, for the character who discovers it in his hesitant course, the center of the world.
A shallow water can become to it sudden ( Psautier of Mainz ), or a maracageuse extent ( History of Wulck ), or a street ( the dark Lane ), or a house ( Malpertuis ). The concentration of space in this new point reveals unsuspected depths at once: what had seemed a diverting surface grows hollow in threatening abysses. The wandering of Jean-Jacques Grandsire leads to this discovery:
“ Soudain I stopped by pushing a cry choked .
- There… there…
We were in front of Malpertuis .
the house (…) drew up itself in the night, enormous and black like a mountain. Its shutters were closed like the eyelids of died and the porch had sinister depths of pit” (Malpertuis, Jean Ray, p. 129).
Even changes of prospect for the sailors for the Psautier for Mainz : they are with derived and their “ glances lost in darkness ” wanders on “ the horizon padded by the night fogs ”; suddenly they discover that “ the sea-bed (is) set ablaze by a vast bloody gleam ” which extends under the schooner; clearness slips under the skittle, water becomes transparent and, with an enormous depth, they see “ large solid masses with the unreal forms ”. ( Large Night , pp. 172 to 174)
What occurs in the dark Ruelle is hardly different, since one finds there, in the middle of a reassuring small house and perfectly identical to those who surround it, a staircase which, curiously, plunges in the wall and seems to be prolonged beyond the stone barrier. Until the day when, the wall disappearing, the staircase appears to finish on “ a pit dug at very the night ” ( Night Grand , p. 123).
As for the hunter left to research Wulck, it leaves the vague sand ways of the marshes of Fenn to only be taken by the ankles; and, after two long jolts which draw it towards the depths, it is slowly inserted “ towards the center of the ground ” ( Night Grand , p. 310).
Space, in the work of Jean Ray, is thus double. The surface, apparently familiar but quickly transformed into maze, dissimulates another world, parallel with the first and which sometimes opens to the disorientated character.
Of this different world, the accounts of the author of Malpertuis reveal traces, signs which, if one looks there closely, resemble enough those which one finds in the traditional fantastic accounts.
Figures of the indécidable
What, on the bottom of indistinctness which becomes space, comes to be detached brutally and seize the character who saw the fantastic adventure, appeared, indeed, throughout the texts of Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Maurice Renard, Herbert George Wells, Bram Stoker or Horace Walpole…It is not unimportant to note that Jean Ray knew them, had read them and sometimes commented on. One tested only too much, at the time to build the legend of the writer and in order to preserve some coherence to him, to make of him a man who had lived much and much dreamed and had consequently been satisfied to transcribe it “except preexistent text” most accurately possible. One does not have that too much repeated the evocation of the ritual of the writing such as made the author and who tends to reduce the activity of the script writer to a series of mechanical epic accomplished during a kind of fright.
On the other hand, one has, during the years and with the wire of the republications, isolated his foreword with the Book of the phantoms in which Jean Ray speaks in an explicit way, if not detailed, of fantastic works that it read and which appear to him to have to be retained: he devotes some lines to it to the Château of Otranto of Horace Walpole, with the Vieux Baron English of Clara Reeves, with the Mystères of Udolphe of Ann Radcliffe, with the Moine of Matthew Gregory Lewis or with the Château of the spectra of Hans Heinz Ewers ( the Newspaper of Ghent , 1922) or of Jean Renaud ( the Friend of the book , 1923). One forgot his allusion to Arthur Gordon Pym ( the white Student , in: the Mysteries which were never cleared up ).
One retained, in his works of fiction, only the references, many it is true, with Charles Dickens, and one left in the shade the references to Ann Radcliff, Adelbert Von Chamisso, Robert Louis Stevenson and Herbert George Wells or even with Villiers of Isle-Adam.
The tradition
Devil and death
Exits in a remote way of the black novel, one thus sees emerging from the satanic figures or personifications of death. That they appear, one or the others, with a character who saw to be erased the report/ratio of familiarity that it maintained with the daily world and which, consequently, does not know exactly any more where he (in) is, and here are which enters in a decisive way in report/ratio with what is different and terrifies it ( Last Tales of Canterbury, the black Tales of the golf, the Last Voyagers in Night Grand ). Brutal and momentary, this report/ratio can be prolonged, diversify or intensify. Behind what appears as a permanent concern takes shape a satanic pact then ( Mondschein-Dampfer , in: the Cruising of the shades ) or a complicity mortal ( the black Mirror , in: Large Night ). Even if they are there two signs of a relationship of the man with the supernatural one, who replaces the familiarity lost with the daily newspaper, the fear which they cause defines the experiment of fantastic as that of the disorder. See the devil, to see death: two terrible situations, which create confusion and pose in new terms the relationship of the subject with reality.The authors of traditional black novels had as a practice to suggest this confusion by the intervention of frantic and the invocation of the supernatural one: they thus showed the effects which this other report/ratio with reality can produce, took care not to say some more, and, in fine, erased the traces of the disorder by a peaceful return to the standard and the opposition between the life and death, the sky and the hell… Only traces of these exchanges malefic with Darkness, which they had undoubtedly caused, remained some crowned books, some treaties of nécromancie or some mysterious black books.
Books
Jean Ray took again these books at the same time as the reasons, and its very whole work is crossed of these works strange and terrible that the ones dissimulate and that others pursue, which pass with one hand to the other, do not reveal each time a small portion of their old knowledge, and outstanding like here, contrary to the black novels, one in never finished. Appears thus, for a consultation as short as terrifying - which informs all the account which surrounds it - the magic Heptaméron “ delivers prohibited and whose reading is frightening ”: “ - It is really by chance that I opened (…) magic Heptaméron (…). Maguth is mentioned there (…). Démonographes, and not of least, inter alia Stein, (…) say terrible (…). Even Heptaméron is discrete in its connection; here besides few lines that it devotes to him: “Maguth (…) angel of the air, inhabitant of fire, takes pleasure in long and sometimes alarming terrestrial stays. It appears then under a blood and bilieux body, of an intermediate size, with the horrible and terrible movements. One of the other forms private individuals is a dress color of azure”. - Ah! made Dunnkelwitz. Thus see, Mister the chaplain. He showed of a trembling finger, a strange dress with bouffettes, of an indefinite fashion, made blue coarse cloth with violent one reflections, and fixed on the devil with a nail lost of the wall ” ( Night round in Koenigstein , in: books of phantoms ).Dreaded work, discovered “by chance” - but one guesses that the chance, in such a case, is not that the mask of the repetition - this Heptaméron is not there to inform all the account; it programs it in a decisive way. It makes the demon present, describes it and makes it visible in such a way that the continuation of the history will not make any more but present it, within the disorder which it causes, as a locatable being but which cannot be described. Here thus that the satanic history, come from the terrifying Romance distances, is proposed by Jean Ray like a repetition, a redoubling of what would contain the mysterious books.
The other treaties have as a name: Form of black magic of Zacharius Zentl, Black book of Wickstead, Book of the wizards or Clavicles of Solomon … But none of them as often appears and with as much relief as the Grimoire Stein , which is described at the beginning of several accounts, city many times and considered as the origin of frightening initiations whose trace is found from one account to another.
“ Which thus is the author of this appalling memory of the reasoned magic spell (…) ? One quotes three or four obscure names (…). All that one knows, or rather, which one admits, it is that it was born at the XVIII century with Stein, Swiss small town of the canton of Appenzell. It is there that the document was later discovered, by Simon Rowledge, a descendant of enigmatic Doctor John Dee, the manufacturer of the black mirror which made the pride and the misfortune of the Walpole family, at the last centuries ” ( House for sale , in: the book of the phantoms , pp. 21-22)
This work appears also important (without him, there would be no account) and also obscure (it does not deliver any contents) but the volume which, fallen from the rays of a library “ without nothing being able to explain its fall ”, lets guess what would be the Large Night one:
“ It was a very ordinary treaty of the Grand Albert, followed of brief exposed Clavicule of Solomon and summary of work of certain Samuel Podgers on the Cabal, the nécromancie and the black magic, according to the black books of former Masters of the great Hermetic Science ” ( Large Night the , in: Large Night the , p. 32).
The books which unceasingly return while emerging, the texts in the text, are phantom books, texts ghosts which appear whereas they were believed hidden forever and forgotten. They have an essential function in the fantastic universe of Jean Ray: that to pose the supernatural order abruptly and to express a disordered state that nothing nor nobody - contrary to what does in the black Romans - will come to correct. They déconstruisent the natural order by their presence; they déconstruisent the supernatural order by their suggested contents… They are not, in fact, that enumerations, continuations of meaning which do not return to any knowledge, disordered signs which, if they are empty, are however not without effects: world cups, they cut in their turn their reader of his daily universe, insulate it and impose perplexity on the center of the account.
Renewal
In addition to it imposes the factitiousness of the universe and causes within the account a hesitation as for the direction of the adventure which occurs there, such a figure introduced an element which did not appear in the tradition of the black novel.
Cyclic time
What is most impressive, in the capacity that expresses the taxidermist is that it can really make return to the life what east does not exist any more, which cannot exist any more. While making revive giant octopuses, ptérodactyles or mummies, it erases the border which separates death from the life and imposes the presence of thealive one.In the fantastic universe of Jean Ray, all can return, all can be recomposed, exist in an intermediate state between death and the life, not be still not dead or alive… If death returns, it is that death is not an end; by affirming that the fantastic account “ makes absolute permanence a quality of the daily newspaper - from where incredible the ” (I. Bessière, the fantastic Account , Paris, Larousse 1974, p. 239).
The bottom of the marshes of Fenn survive of the creatures which one sees emerging “ the monstrous eye ” and the “ horrible claws ” ( In the marshes of Fenn , in: Tales of the whiskey , pp. 49-50); in unsoundable caves a three hundred year old hides monster, with the whiteness of snow and the flask and cold body; within cave, mummies, which one says that they are “ a latent form of the life ” being able to be recalled in determined times, “ protect a creature antédiluvienne, a kind of clamping plate monster ” ( bed of the devil, Harry Dickinson , Integral 15, pp. 257-313) whose life was prolonged; in the dark corridors of Malpertuis the Euménides and the Gorgone walk which took an human form.
These ghosts impose to the characters who discover them the perception of an eternal return (that the Circles of terror could draw): “ every night they are there, the Things… They will always return, as long as we will last and as long as this ground of misfortune will last! ” ( Lanes dark , in: Large Night the , p. 132). The only exit, in similar situation, is to reverse the signs. What survived or was recomposed must break up, in “ an appalling stench (…), atrocious a mascaret which thickens the air ” ( the Cousin Passeroux , in: the book of the phantoms , p. 166).
The vampire turns over definitively to the ground: “ the pit was open and I considered a monstrous horror: a cranium laughed hideously with stars, a scrap of silk yawned on a formless rot, between sticky ossicles burned the firebrands of a multitude of ruby, while an enormous stench assembled sepulchre ” ( God, You and Me , in: New Tales of Canterbury , p. 168).
And the mummy putrefies: “ (Its features) had been just melted suddenly, the lines disappeared from it, of the black spots ran on the cheeks which, become hollow, were not any more that holes ” ( bed of the devil , p. 309).
To liquefy or dissolve what took again consistency, it is to stop the ceaseless reappearance of what should not have been more there. But there exists, in the universe imagined by Jean Ray, a type of ghosts on whom it is impossible to have taken any: they do not have consistency - one cannot thus reduce them in ashes nor to disaggregate them - they do not have that a vague form - one cannot thus seize them.
The horrifying presence
This one gathers, in its abstraction even, all the characters of what appears monstrous: in a vague way, of vague contour, this presence is never seen but imperfectly and surreptitiously:“ It foresaw something of black, monstrous and terribly hostile, but it was so short which it could accept some sets of shades (…). It pushed a cry of terror: a misty mass was agitated in the part and rolled towards him with a ferocity which he guessed more than he did not see (…). The unnamable thing fur on him ” ( Large Night the , in Large Night the , pp. 52 and 55).
Hardly visible, hardly dicible, it is an empty form, a form which is closed again on vacuum (and, in that, the horror causes). The vacuum is not an absence of object but a presence which seems absence. Contrary to the daily world describes like the place of saturation (sites urban sheltering a many population and activates - as the lanes of London or Hildesheim - or natural sites crossed by a diversified fauna - as the marsh of Fenn) it occupies a space which can become immense and null consistency does not reveal there:
“ I dared to look at . Oh God! I hope that it is not true, because it was shorter, faster than an eye which closes . I want to believe that it was a cloud, a smoke a fog, a last scrap of darkness. Over there was inserted in the horizon which it occupied entire, a formidable mask… Two fixed eyes looked with the short-nap cloth of the moor (…) . Not, not, it two enormous was perforated glaucous on the east, in the shade of the disappearing night… It was that and anything else . ( Uhu , in Last Tales of Canterbury , pp. 137-138) (They) was let roll to the bottom of the hill, howling of terror, plunging the face in sand not to see the gigantic one and monstrous form which rose above the debris, black like Erèbe, growing with an appalling swiftness and whose face veiled the blazing sun disc the four hour old ” ( the Inn of the spectra , in Large Night the , pp. 297 and 298).
One in vain wants to be diverted, flee it, this presence horrifying, immense and vague, once expressed, remains as a permanent threat which planes on all the stories that Jean Ray tells.
In this universe marked by cyclic time and the ceaseless return of what should not have been more there, the single appearance of a misty and appalling body, a shade disproportionate and terrifying is enough to make fear its foreseeable reappearance.
A first appearance, at the time of a contact between the intercalated world and the daily world, of “ odd bubbles ” which show “ eyes, hands, claws ” ( Strange studies of Doctor Paukenschlager , in: the Tales of the whiskey , p. 169), returns surprising less but, perhaps, more threatening, the vision which one of the characters of the Lanes at the time had dark when, following “ a shade, a kind of black fog ”, it noticed “ vaporous, dark and clumsy forms, which hopped like balls of children, then disappeared ” ( the dark Lane , in: Large Night the , p. 125).
It is undoubtedly enough to only one Window to the monsters behind which the horror appeared so that all the windows make it possible to make it also visible:
“ a window in the night is a terror. I knew people who only became insane to have awaited the being of the nightmare, emerged of darkness, which would stick its mortal vis-a-vis the squares ” ( Uhu , in: Last Tales of Canterbury , p. 133).
It is undoubtedly enough to only one door which opened on a vision of terror so that all the doors become menaçantes, as that in front of which Alphonse Archipêtre stops: “ There was a large gray, suiffeux and patinated wood gate. And of this door, I be afraid ” ( the dark Lane , in: Large Night the , p. 121). It is undoubtedly enough that only one wall, suddenly, was occupied “ by a kind of milky fog from where a face emerged. But what a face! … Only the hell could have joined together, in only one vision, so much of horror, ferocity and fury ” ( Mr. Wohlmut and Franz Benschneider , in: the Book of the phantoms , p. 63), so that all the walls can be regarded as thin partitions on which come to print alarming images of the world of darkness.
In such a universe, where the division between the naturalness and the supernatural one does not have anything fixed, all that belongs to the first can be a sign of the second. And any sign is struck of uncertainty. “ I foresaw, or believed to foresee, on the rough coat of the wall, a vaguely hideous form; but, by fixing it attentively, I live that it was made of thin cracks and that it was connected only with the monsters which we distinguish in laces from the curtains; remainder, it does not disturb me ” ( the dark Lane , in: Large Night the , p. 117).
Speech wrongfully reassuring: it is along this wall that will go up, a little later, the “ vague monstrosities ” which will invade all space. By say too much of it and not enough, to multiply the signs of strange but to make some play only some, the author generalizes this uncertainty of which it made one day his watchword: “ With Jean Ray, one never knows… ”.
To tell: to say (this) that one () does not have (not) considering
The uncertainty which marks the whole of the accounts of Jean Ray strikes at the same time the reader, the narrator and the witness of the fantastic adventure: the hesitation of the first comes from this mixture of too and nothing, the silence of the narration causing the outgrowth of its questioning; the hesitation of second is due to the appearance in the center of the narration of these semantic white which are the unnamable one and the inexpressible one; the hesitation of third is caused by (pretense) the difficulty which that has which saw the strange events to perceive what occurs to him.What is there to include/understand? How to say? What did it arrive? Are thus the questions which a fantastic account at the moment raises when one came to a end.
The irresolution of the situations in which the characters confronted with strange are, the ambiguity of the facts themselves, are registered in all the work of Jean Ray. As of the first texts, the Tales of the whiskey , the monsters make their appearance: hardly visible creatures, tapies at the bottom of a pit or in mud ( Between two glasses, In the marshes of Fenn, the white Animal ), beings human whose morphology changes hideously ( the Monkey, Irish Whiskey ), presence of a vampire ( the Guard of the cemetery ), mutilations spectacular ( Josuah Gullick, the Debt of Gumpelmeyer ), presence of the other world ( a Hand ) and even, seizing evocation of the fourth dimension and the intercalated world ( Strange Studies of Doctor Pauckenschlager ).
Apart from the fact that it multiplied the possibilities that the intercalated world and the cyclic time offered to him, until it leads to design the return of the ancient divinities in Malpertuis , Jean Ray took again, throughout his work, the dozen situations which its first collection proposes. Such a re-use is noticed, for example, in the fact that the figure of the Gorgone appears in a text of 1939 (Harry Dickinson, the Resurrection of Gorgone ) under the features of Euryale Ellis then re-appears in Malpertuis , under the name of Euryale, or in the fact that the three sisters Jason (which one meets in the Street of the lost head ) are regularly present through the universe rayen, under the appearance of the sisters Cormelon ( Malpertuis ), of the ladies Pumkins ( the City of inexpressible of the evil spells ). In the fact also, that certain episodes are included in several accounts published in a few years of distance: anthropophagic monstrosity of Berliner Luft (published, in 1925, in the Friend of the book ), included in an account of Harry Dickinson of 1935 ( Proifesseur Krause ) remade surface in 1944, not without to be renamed Irish Stew ( Last Tales of Canterbury ); in the same way, the account of the Shade of forty-five midnight, published in 1939, and which offers some similarity with the revealing Heart of Edgar Allan Poe, becomes four years later an episode of Mr Doove tells stories (the City of the inexpressible fear).
The evocation of these resurgences is in the field of the literary anecdote, on the same basis, undoubtedly, as the allusion which it is allowed to make with a text of Jean Ray remained with the state of manuscript and heading With the Edges of Darkness . Written, according to Jacques Van Herp which made known them, between 1930 and 1932, these feverish layers contain the draft of what will be later certain episodes of the Night Grand , of an episode of Malpertuis, Scolopendre and beginning of the dark Lane . They contain moreover a certain number of sequences with sexual connotation (the pressures short, painful and are marked by a kind of fate) which one does not find any more the least trace in the continuation.
But the literary anecdote is used for here only indicating that two mainly similar texts can become as of the moment when they are inserted in a narrative context which is not identical.
See and to say; to see then saying
Several accounts of Jean Ray have a single narrator. Some of them - they are rare in the first volumes - do not introduce any explicit narrator; they are given like a simple fact of narration and, telling the events for what they are, or what they were, the following at a constant distance, they removes any tension between the fact of seeing the things and the fact of saying them.On the other hand this tension is felt as of the moment when a narrator intervenes. It can be the same one as that which saw the events ( the Phantom in the hold, the Hand of Goetz von Berlichingen ): it is “ the same authority, the same voice, but come later, once the appeasing, i.e. the same subject of the speech after the event and out of him ” (Jean Bellemin-Christmas, Notes on fantastic the , in: Literature, N. December 8th, th and th 1972, p. 14). It can also be someone else, a witness who speaks in the place about that which faced the event ( Last Tales of Canterbury ).
The role of such a narrator is marked, of outset, by this duplicity which one finds in all the aspects of the narration as soon as one subjects it to the analysis and also far which one goes in this way.
This narrator (this “I” which assume the account) seems an observer; he has a function of rationality and underlines by there the difference between the monstrous one which he evokes and the standard that he joined (if it is its own adventure which he reports) or of which he never deviated (if it is another adventure which he reports); but, doing that, it imposes the astonishing alliance of the reason and what this one usually denies.
It is present as a witness who states to have seen strange facts; but, “ to want to confirm a truth, (it) is locked up in uncertainty because he does not find any causality satisfactory ”.
It gives itself a reassuring function but it is discovered, that with the wire of the account, the test of that which lived the fantastic event becoming the test of that which tells what occurred, uncertainty slips into the narration itself: “ it was perhaps only one fog ”, suggests the narrator of the End of the street, before yielding, him also, with the pressure of the facts: “ but terror is in me ”. The narrator is nothing any more but one vote deformed of the hero: to say and see merge. “ Conscience which takes care and conscience which sleeps, conscience which seeks and conscience which flees ”, the hero-narrator “ learns that reality is badly defined because it does not have any method to confer or challenge an existence with what separates it from reality. The only possible attitude consists in receiving these contradictory images and these metamorphoses ” (Irene Bessière, the fantastic account, Paris Larousse, 1974, p. 170).
He pretends to be there only to receive and bring back such images; in fact, it appears well quickly that having given up any certainty it causes them as much as he transmits them:
“I know” have I says, then I prudently added: “or believe it”. I do not know anything. My imagination fishes forms in the abyssal zone of the nightmare . Goules, octopuses of ground, vampire amazing, monsters of mystery which could live in the forest of Guyana and in the Brazilian sertao? Is “Which the invisible thing which occupied the cabin of Endymion? ” request my poor reason, which beats its wings of butterfly wounded in the jail of my cranium (…) ” ( the End of the street , in: the Cruising of the shades , p. 38).
It thus causes the intervention of the reader, who wonders in his turn about the degree of reality of what it reads, and returns it, by the effect of this new duplicity, in its turn captive of the text. Charged with saying after having seen, the witness “ indicates a manner of reading the account which is not other than that of which it reads his own adventure. The image of the improbable door in it that of the reader ” (Irene Bessière, the fantastic account , Paris Larousse, 1974, p. 171).
To say and not to see
The hesitation of this reader as for the reality or to the unreality of what it bed should be in theory erased as of the moment when multiply the authorities of narration. The accounts reported by several witnesses, the manuscripts given to reading, the consulted works are there to guarantee the faithful transmission or the objective retranscription what did without: maintained remotely events strange, the reader should be secured against the fear; reassured by the attempts at explanations which are proposed to him, it should finish by “ seeing clearly there”… To tell without seeing have the disconcerting vision of what have pays, returns to an act of serene transcription as that which proposes the characters who appear with starts of Malpertuis and the Dark Lane , or in the center of the Histoire of Marshall Grove . The efforts which they seem to make to deliver a faithful report are many and explicit: “ Here, I give an abrupt brake application to this account. To tell the truth, it seems to me that (that) which took pleasure to tell the history of Marshall Grove poured in useless lengths. All that precedes takes the form of the first chapter of a biographical novel (…). Some notes appear full to me with interest (…). I transcribe them without more and gives up them with the reader ” ( Books of the phantoms , pp. 83-113)They do not register any less, them also, in the account which they make, the image of the reader: “ If it likes it to comment on them, to emphasize them at length them pages which will follow, or to leave them in place and to build a small vagueness Romance black, where I would like to see only a documen T - as terrible as it can be ” ( Books of the phantoms , pp. 83-113).
Such interventions, with their corrections, their settings in doubt and their precautions, are as many pretenses. They cause to make the reader captive of the text, of the fiction of the man who tells an adventure which was previously said to him, in other words “ which initially was a recipient, and who, to the length even of his stating, indicates which must be the ideal attitude of the reader ” (Irene Bessière, COp cit. p. 164).
The authorities of narration multiplying, the account splits up, presents more and more ruptures, silences and white in the text. The disorder and the lacks of an account like Malpertuis or Saint-Judas-of-the-night , encourage the reader, placed at the center of the play, to hopelessly try to supplement the narration and to make it linear while imposing to him if it is needed another order, which is the order of its probable.
In a fantastic account, plus the rupture of the narrative mode is large, plus the hesitation of the reader is prolonged, between a rational perception and a supernatural vision. In spite of the alleged will of elucidation of which make to proof certain narrator (“ thus, the history of Malpertuis, which could have been completed on an absolute mystery, continues and demolishes somewhat - well little, alas! - of the dark veils which enclose it jealously ” Malpertuis pp. 141 and 142), the reader wants to go from before and more…
He consequently does not neglect any the explanations which the text proposes to him. And he discovers that the accounts of Jean Ray are in fact of two kinds: the ones propose an explanation in their narrative unfolding, the others, do not reveal any. It is necessary to take care not to believe that the first species corresponds systematically to the accounts of police pace (in other words, the series of Harry Dickinson ) and the second with the accounts described as fantastic.
The explanation
One knows that it is not advisable to put, in the work of Jean Ray, strict borders between the accounts of adventure, the police stories and the tale of fantasies. It is obvious that the adventure strongly marks all that the author wrote. It is not less sure than the enigma is in the center of certain texts devoted to the fear and than the fantastic one emerges more once to the turning of an police investigation.What becomes the fantastic element which is introduced into a enigma that Harry Dickinson is brought to elucidate? The text answers of itself, because the appearances of words which indicate the strange one are most frequently accompanied by a comment which decreases the disaster effect by it. Thus, in the history of the Black Pieuvre (in Harry Dickinson ), hardly the enigmatic situation it was evaluated (“ Voilà a singularly complicated business, and which again occurs in fantastic aspects ”) that the range of the words used is attenuated (“ the incredible one, the fantastic one are often only one mask which it is enough to remove for all to know ”).
Thus the statute of the appalling scenes is evoked which, regularly, come to disturb the course of the investigation and to terrify the protagonists of them. Each sudden appearance of the monster is initially perceived by the terrible effect that it produces, and then observed with coldness and perspicacity. Initially, such an appearance is not distinguished of anything of those which the fantastic accounts of Jean Ray cause: creatures with the gigantic and flask bodies, eyes immense and greens which perforate the night, prehistoric animals… In the second time, a development takes place, a rational explanation slips, which amounts saying: “ not, I badly did not see ” - with the direction where the characters of Large Night and the Circles of terror perceive with difficulty what is shown opposite them - “ but me a faked reality was shown! ”.
The role of the rational explanation is to solve the enigma posed by the account and, consequently, to dissolve the ambiguity which brought the fantastic element. The end of the text, inevitably, is summarized in a sentence: “ it has there nothing any more ”.
This return to the standard by elimination of what disputed it appears clearly in the account entitled the strange enemy. Begun again almost completely of the History of Wulck, this text reports different and revealing. To the moment when unfortunate Weybridge is inserted in moving sands, the taxidermist reduces the terror which the appearance of one ptérodactyle to the effect of a kind of faking had caused.
“ has two steps lay a coarse cage in braided wicker, which it started to cut in parts using a fine knife of prospector . - I lose there Gannet, monologua it, and I regret it, Ca it will take me months and months to be able to draw up similar with that which Weybridge has just killed me. It started from a lugubrious burst of laughter . Wulck! Aha… stupid history, if Mister Weybridge had a little less made sport and had studied more ornithology, it did not go down in this moment towards the center from the ground. Wulck! Gannet, yes… this odd Scandinavian sailing ship which, with the liking of a scarf of fog, take monstrous forms, and nothing more! But Weybridge did not know it and he died about it! ”
The prehistoric monster which sowed fear was thus only one Gannet - and nothing more! , the hesitation which one felt as for the reality or with the unreality of this monster finds cancelled, put of pieces, cut in parts…
There was, in this version of the fantastic history, something with knowing, which the protagonist and the reader were unaware of, and who appears perfectly rational.
The effect of such an explanation is identical on accounts which are not elaborate around a police enigma: the appearance of a death does not frighten any more as of the moment when it is learned that it is about a grimé actor ( My dead friend it ); what one sees vilainement to be agitated behind the Window with the monsters does not make any more fear as soon as it is known that all that could show the horrible one there was due only to one deformation of glass.
On the other hand, in the accounts which remain under the influence of fantastic and maintain the ambiguity fundamental which is the sign, the rational explanations are only of vain attempts which launch the protagonists vis-a-vis strange and with its demonstrations. “ It is the wind ”, says Gildchrist when he sees the door opening slowly on the darkness of the empty staircase. “ That could be explained by a vision, an acute disorder of the directions ”; “ it was perhaps only one fog ”; “ this is a kind of hallucination ”, are as much in way of saying, without believing in it too much, that reason unrolls it could not be irremediable.
But the stake is elsewhere. Only can prolong the indecision of the fantastic account a supernatural explanation which would correspond so that states that which is on the point of penetrating in the haunted marsh - as the reader in the fantastic account: “ the incredible things are explained only by things even more incredible ”. ( Bed of the devil , in Harry Dickinson ; The intégrale/15 p. 289).
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