EIRP Proceedings (Jun 2009)
La rhétorique de la peur dans la littérature fantastique
Abstract
Although fear is not a sine qua non condition of this genre, the modern speech on thefantastic mode of writing often connects this phenomenon to the idea of troubling the reader, thismode of writing being considered an unsettling hide-and-seek game with the most penetratinganguishes generated by the human mind. The success of the fantastic text is directly proportional withthe intensity of the anxiety-causing feeling, the author of the fantastic skillfully “juggling” with allnuances of fear which go from the simple shiver of anxiety up to the percussive terror. More than that,it develops an ample discursive rhetoric, synthesized in ways of expression linked either to thetechnique of excessive and hyper-realistic display of fantastic “monsters”, or to more subtle strategies,relying on the implicit and flu. While the former way of depicting fear makes the most of thedescription resources, as a recurrent procedure, following the idea of objectifying the fantastic vision,the latter one resorts to a big number of metaphors and cognitive comparisons which stand out in thenarrative text, its role being to maintain and intensify the suspense, but also to confer a verbalexistence to the fantastic event, impossible to be directly named. But when things cannot be radicallysolved, the fantastic mode of writing lies at the boundary between the two texts, creating featurescommon to both patterns by constantly alternating them. Thus, there are texts that use both strategies,their mixture implying an intelligent game of excess and restraint, equally of the explicit and implicit.
