The diversity of contemporary French narration renders the canonical
definition of le fantastique useless. Writers challenge Todorov’s definition that
the fantastic emerges as the reader hesitates between the supernatural and the
natural explanation for the unlikely event. Léa Silhol (1967), a storyteller of
mythic-poetic-fantastic style, figures among these writers. An inheritor of romantic
fantastic storytelling, Silhol delves into the mental and psychic depth of
legendary figures, mostly goddesses and fairies, to make them question their
own identity and observe humans from their perspective. Her feminine and
universal writing about the fantastic exemplifies the new-generation French
fantastic. Like the mythic tisseuse in her tales, Silhol weaves stories with a new
texture, with an imaginary étoffe. Just as the mythic and legendary weavers are
associated with water, she makes use of it to achieve her verbal alchemy, the
narrative rhetoric of which operates from three angles: mythic, structural, and
stylistic. Silhol’s transtextual writing of myths from different cultures creates
mythic résonance of the collective unconscious from linguistic différance. The
narrative structure of the tales embodies the inversion of vision in Bachelardian
alchemy of the imagination. Lastly, a scrupulous analysis of the author’s diction
that corresponds with the thematic threading of tales and their narrative structure
will illustrate her dominant style of harmonism.
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