Jean Ray (1887 - 1964)
Related: Belgium - fantastique
Biography
Jean Ray, pseudomym of Jean Raymond Marie de Kremer, is a Belgian French language writer of the fantastique. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Ray [Oct 2005]Malpertuis
poster for Malpertuis (1971), film adaptation by Harry Kümel
image sourced here. [Mar 2005]
Malpertuis (1943) est le premier roman fantastique de l'écrivain belge Jean Ray, publié en 1943. Le ton est onirique et le suspense, inquiétant. Le fantastique repose sur les grands mythes grecs et l'abolition de l'espace et du temps.
Le vieux Cassave, qui se sent proche de la mort, contraint une quinzaine de personnes à vivre ensemble dans une vieille maison flamande, Malpertuis. Jean-Jacques Grandsire, le jeune héros « candide », vit parmi ces êtres étranges et se trouve, à la fin de la première partie, seul face à Euryale dont le regard pétrifie. Dans la suite, Jean-Jacques essaie de dénouer l'énigme de Malpertuis mais les scènes terribles auxquelles il assiste, l'ombre des maléfices et le souffle du sacré vont perturber gravement sa santé.
Construit sur un enchâssement de manuscrits, le roman multiplie les voix narratives. --http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malpertuis [Mar 2005]
See also: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0067386 [Mar 2005]
Malpertuis, A Pagan and Catholic and Gothic and Carnivalesque and Modernist and Surrealist Tragedy
The term “grotesque” originates in Italy during the early Renaissance, when decorative motifs representing a then unknown Roman aesthetic were uncovered during the excavation of some old bathing grottos. Plants, animals, people, monsters and gods all woven together in long slender ribbons of illustration on the walls; these grotesques were pictorial where arabesques were abstract, and seemed to trace an open-ended sequence of transformations through a play of interlacing forms. The term swiftly developed all sorts of applications as European art became more diverse, and, by the time it was applied to works of literature, it had come to mean especially fanciful, even weirdly imaginative. The grotesque was still the underworld, and it referred to that art most saturated with imaginary things, and the most wildly imagined things. The grotesque was associated with the seemingly incessant European carnivals, in which all established order would be inverted, opposites like ugliness and beauty, life and death, comedy and tragedy, would be brought so close together as to be crushed nearly into each other. --Michael Cisco via http://www.themodernword.com/columns/cisco_005.html [Mar 2005]