Fantastique is a French term for a literary and cinematic genre and mode that is characterized by the intrusion of supernatural elements into the realistic framework of a story, accompanied by uncertainty about their existence.
[8] The French concept of fantastique in literature should therefore not be confused with the marvellous or fantasy (where the supernatural is posited and accepted from the outset), with science fiction (which is rational) or with horror, although these genres can be combined.
When Charles Nodier wants to invent a fantastique history, when Nerval recalls Cazotte as an initiator in spite of himself, they both refer without hesitation to The Golden Ass (also called Metamorphoses) by Apuleius (1st c. AD).
A Byronic figure steeped in occult knowledge and sexual perversions, Beckford allegedly wrote his novel non-stop in three days and two nights in a state of trance.
In addition to the emergence of fantastique themes (ghosts, the Devil, vampires), these novels, characterised by a more pronounced atmosphere of horror, introduced the ambiguity characteristic of the genre.
Pétrus Borel, in Champavert, Contes immoraux (1833) and especially in Madame de Putiphar (1839), was even more provocative than the English writers, particularly in his indulgence in the horrible.
Among the outstanding works of the French Gothic period are novels which, having been written with the aim of parodying the tales of Lewis and Radcliffe, have become authentic roman noir.
Similarly, Frédéric Soulié's Les mémoires du Diable which combined the roman frénétique with the passions of the Marquis de Sade.
The novel The Devil's Elixirs, which claims to be a descendant of Lewis's The Monk, often incoherently accumulates episodes of very different kinds: a love story, aesthetic or political meditations, picaresque adventures, a family epic, mystical ecstasies, etc.
Despite the fantastique component, this novel is rooted in realism: Balzac uses description to paint the sights of Paris; he brings in the psychology and social situation of his characters.
We can mention as well Falthurne (1820) by Honoré de Balzac, a novel about a virgin prophetess who knows occult secrets that date back to Ancient Mesopotamia.
La Vénus d'Ille (1837), in particular, is one of the most famous short stories in the genre: it features a pagan statue that comes to life and kills a young groom on his wedding night.
After writing fantastique texts influenced by the German Romanticism of Goethe and Hoffmann, Gérard de Nerval wrote a major work, Aurélia (1855), in a more poetic and personal style.
Other notable works at that time include: The end of the 19th century saw the rise of so-called "decadent" literature, whose favourite themes were cruelty, vice and perversity.
In the wake of works such as Joris-Karl Huysmans' À rebours [Against Nature] (1884), Là-Bas [Down There] (1891) and Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's Les Diaboliques, fantastique was no longer an end in itself, but a means of conveying a provocation, a denunciation or an aesthetic desire.
Other notable works of this category include: Victorian England produced few fantastique writers in the strict sense of the term, as the subtle ambiguities inherent in the genre found little echo in the English literary tradition.
[29] Other famous writers have penned some fantastique texts, including Robert Louis Stevenson (Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, "Markheim", "Olalla") and Rudyard Kipling.
His best-known collection is the Sketch Book (1819), which contains the tale of Rip Van Winckle, one of the first two truly original American works of fantastique, along with William Austin's Peter Rugh, the Missing (1824).
Although fantastique occupies little space in his abundant output, Francis Marion Crawford is the author of a collection of high quality in the genre, Wandering Ghosts (1891).
[34] A more controversial figure, Hanns Heinz Ewers is the author of an abundant oeuvre which, although it often veers more towards the uncanny than the fantastique, remains largely in the realm of the supernatural.
[34] In 1909, the Austrian writer and illustrator Alfred Kubin published a single fantastique novel, The Other Side, which reflects the nightmarish atmosphere of his drawings.
This novel, in which dreams and reality form an inextricable skein, is considered by Peter Assman, Kubin's main biographer, to be "an essential step in the development of European fantastique literature".
He is the author of an unbridled fantastique whose greatest success is Malpertuis (1943) and he wrote short stories steeped in the rich, mist-shrouded atmosphere of his native Flanders.
Finally, Michel de Ghelderode, in addition to his impressive theatrical work, also wrote Sortilèges (1945), a collection of fantastique short stories that is one of the masterpieces of the genre.
[39] The confidence displayed by French Society in the early 1900s was sapped by the slaughter of World War I: the Dadaist and Surrealist movements expressed a desire to break violently with the past.
In 1924, the André Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism, inspired by Freudian discoveries, challenged the realist attitude, contested the reign of logic and called for imagination and dreams to regain their rights.
Some of the major contributors of the period include: Between the wars, the fantastique catered to the masses by providing cheap entertainment in the form of feuilletons such as Le Journal des Voyages (1877–1947), Lectures Pour Tous (1898–1940) and L'Intrépide (1910–1937) and paperbacks from publishers such as Ollendorff, Méricant, Férenczi and Tallandier.
Mainstream French culture increasingly frowned upon works of imagination and preferred instead to embrace the more naturalistic and political concerns of the existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.
Significant foreign influences on French modern fantastique include Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, H. P. Lovecraft, Dino Buzzati, Julio Cortázar, Vladimir Nabokov and Richard Matheson.
In Latin America of the 21st century,[41] authors such as César Aira, Roberto Bolaño, José Baroja, Andrés Neuman, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Jorge Volpi, among others, stand out.