With the establishment of Louis-Philippe's Bourgeois Monarchy in1830, Romantic artists developed a sense of themselves as a class, often outsiders to the main fabric of bourgeois society, and their writings reflected this awareness of the artist as an outsider in society. In reaction to the overt capital accumulation, the crass materialism, the self-interest, and the spiritual philistinism of the times, the Romantics sought a counterculture of oblivion, a self-induced artistic euphoria, a dropping out of reality. Reenter the fantastic. It was in this milieu, where the debris of the past met the disenchantment of the present, that the conte fantastique had a renaissance. The debris of the past was the anarchy and horrors unleashed by years of revolution, the Terror, and Napoleonic wars. The literary critic Amy J. Ransom has characterized the Romantic Generation of 1830 as both scarred by historical traumas and unable to reclaim what might have been their pre-Revolutionary birthright. In her view, the Romantic mal du siècle was a longing for a past that could never be recaptured. Meanwhile, the monster of Gothic literature (and its feminine equivalent in the fantastic) embodied the malevolent specter of revolutionary anarchy. 1 A whimsical fragment entitled “Cauchemar d'un Mangeur” (Nightmare of an Eater) published in Le Gastronome on May 22, 1831, and attributed variously to Gérard de Nerval and Théophile Gautier, said that “One no longer believes in stories of revenants, and one is indeed wrong. Epochs of crisis and revolution are ordinarily the ones in which these gentlemen choose to recast in doubt the simplest ideas of rationalism and philosophic skepticism.”* There was a profound connection between the unthinkable, but only too real, and the fantastic. In 1830 Charles Nodier had articulated a similar link in his theory of the fantastic in literature. 2 But as early as 1819, implicitly aligning Romanticism and the frenetic genre, he had implicated political upheaval: The imagination is so enamored of story that it prefers an illusion that terrifies to an agreeable but natural verity. This last resort of the human heart, fatigued by ordinary sentiments, is what one calls the Romantic genre, strange poetry, but very well suited to the moral state of society, to the needs of blasé generations that desire sensations at any price and do not think them too expensive even at the price of the happiness of future generations. ... [The ideal] of the Romantic poets is in our miseries. This is not a defect of art; it is a necessary effect of the progress of our social perfection. One knows where we are in politics, and in poetry, we are in nightmare and vampires. † Tastes made blasé by the violence and political conflagrations of the time marked the literary climate in which young writers needed to survive. Economic considerations, like the growing market-driven system of literary production and the proliferation of newspapers and journals, gave further impetus to the frenetic genre. As shown in Parts One and Two of this study, few writers were immune to the violence, atrocities, and upside-down world of the genre—not Nodier, Jules Janin, or Honoré de Balzac, not the lesser-known authors or the bohemian artists of the Petit Cénacle .* Victor Hugo had provided philosophical cachet with his theory of the grotesque (although he would later admonish the young school to “reform,” not “deform” literary style). 3 Indeed, in the Romantic's book, the grotesque was to the ugly as the sublime was to the beautiful: both inspired awe, and the two counterpoised could create a sensation of almost unbearable tension. 4 In spite of its clichés and commonplaces, great writers used the frenetic impulse to achieve their own sensibilities and to match their own purposes. Such was the case with Théophile Gautier, who, in an early tale, “Onuphrius,” took the frenetic parody of the divine and trumped it with a parody of the frenetic. † “Onuphrius” first appeared in La France Littéraire in August 1832, then in Le Cabinet de Lecture in October of the same year, and finally in the first edition of Gautier's Les Jeunes-France, Romans Goguenards ( Jeunes-France , Fictions and Mockeries) in 1833. 5 Shifting its venue of publication and undergoing revisions in the process, the work signals Gautier's double consciousness as an author who aspired to a place inside the literary establishment and as a member of the frenetic circle of comrades (the Petit Cénacle ), hence an outsider by definition. This tension reveals itself in the opposing predilections of the story: on one hand, an acute sense of Romantic fervor and poetic exile, on the other, a witty tone that encompasses pastiche and self-satire. From Nodier, Gautier imported nightmare, somnambulism, malady, and madness (see Part One). From Balzac he drew a physiological type—the self-consuming artist whose fantastic vision surmounted the ordinary world. From Jules Janin, he borrowed the conceit of the grave robbed, the corpse unburied and dissected in a laboratory (see Part Two). But Gautier's dark introspections were often mitigated by witty self-insight. Indeed, scholars have perceived the painter-poet Onuphrius as a burlesque self-portrait of the author. 6 In one episode of the story, Onuphrius dreams that, immobilized and deprived of any way of signaling his existence, he is sealed in a coffin and buried, even while his feelings and sensations continue unabated. He passes the time composing verse—“La Vie dans la Mort” (Life in Death), a poem that Gautier would publish in Le Cabinet de Lecture a few weeks after “Onuphrius” appeared in that journal, and that later became the first part of La Comédie de la Mort , published in 1838. 7 In this poem the poet's super-susceptible imagination leads him to imagine a dialogue between a maggot and a dead woman: the maggot comes to consummate the “solemn mystery” of nuptial rites with the deceased one—the bride, who resists with a “fierce modesty.”* In French, the word for maggot, ver , is a homonym with the word for verse, vers . Maggots devouring the dead woman's body pose a metaphor for melancholic images devouring the poet's mind as he suffers a symbiotic act of graveyard creation. The recursive link between the poem and the novella heightens the sense of autobiography, as if the poem were meant as a key to the identity of the protagonist in a roman à clef . But “Onuphrius” goes beyond self-portrait to social commentary as Gautier satirizes the obsessed Romantic as a type: “I don't need to tell you, Onuphrius was a Jeune-France and a Romantic madman.” † The central character's studied out-of-vogue wardrobe, designed to evoke earlier centuries, and his scorn for anything bourgeois recall the artists of the Petit Cénacle as Gautier would describe them much later in his Histoire du Romantisme . ‡ Indeed, the very title Jeunes-France evokes this younger contingent of authors and artists (Fig. 1).* One is tempted to read into Onuphrius an uncanny resemblance to Gérard de Nerval, Gautier's friend from childhood: “Our writings were sisters, as our hearts were brothers.”* Nerval's fantastic inner world, his profound reveries (Gautier compares him to a somnambulist standing on the edge of a roof, whom one would not wish to startle), even his unpredictable zigzags and sudden suspensions in space evoke the artist-dreamer disoriented in the real world of Gautier's novella. And Onuphrius' madness and death seem strangely prescient of Nerval's struggles with insanity and his eventual suicide. † FIGURE 1 An engraving after Gavarni satirizing the artist as a type, which appeared in Le Diable à Paris: Paris et les Parisiens (J. Hetzel, 1845–46). Gautier's character, Onuphrius, was a literary precursor of such caricatures. “The devil in Paris" was like a fly on the wall, a voyeur of private life, who offered consumers a bird's-eye view of Paris and Parisians. By courtesy of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. As if he were of a double mind, the embodiment of contradictory tendencies, Gautier champions the Romantic mental set, chimerical and excrescent, even while commenting upon it with witty, ironic detachment. The subtitle of the tale, “The Fantastic Vexations of an Admirer of Hoffmann,” ‡ seems to refer ambiguously to the chagrins of its author as well as its protagonist. Steeped in mystical, cabalistic, demonic literature, Onuphrius is a prophet of the invisible and adverse: He made, in the middle of the real world buzzing around him, a world of ecstasy and vision that was given to few to enter. Of the most common and matter-of-fact detail, by his habit of searching for the supernatural aspect, he knew how to make something fantastic and unexpected spring out. § Diabolical jinx, Venetian mirrors, glimpses of Satan's talon—all signatures of a malfeasant deity unimagined by other characters—give the paradox of the fantastic: is this a minutely observed descent into madness or a chronicle of Satan's ever more daring assaults? What starts out as an obsession develops into “a state of nearly perpetual hallucination,” in which the artist cannot distinguish between dream and reality. Yet, Gautier's wit undermines the bizarre and gruesome images of the frenetic genre. When a double jumps out of the Venetian mirror and trepans Onuphrius' skull, he watches ideas and characters fly pell-mell from his head and promenade around his studio, “without troubling themselves the least, chatting, laughing, debating, as if they were in their homes.”* Earlier in the narrative, during the horrific dream sequence, I experienced a horrible fear because I understood they were going to dissect me; my soul, which until then had not abandoned my body, no longer hesitated to leave me: at the first cut of the scalpel it [ mon âme , feminine] altogether disengaged itself from its fetters. It would rather suffer all the inconvenience of an intelligence dispossessed of its means of physical manifestation than to share these dreadful tortures with my body [ mon corps , masculine]. ... Not wishing to witness the dismemberment of its dear envelope, my soul hastened to make its exit. † As the protagonist embodies (or disembodies) horrific violations of the human body, Gautier mocks the sadistic gratifications of the frenetic genre. The author's narration of the soul's ethereal lightness—at one point only the tips of the protagonist's toes touch the earth—makes one think of dancing sylphs, ‡ until the dreamer qualifies the bodily sensation as like that of an amputee's phantom limb. But it is this very liaison between gruesome physical torment and poetic ecstasy that is the theme of my study of the fantastic discourse in literature and dance. Nor is the alienated artist the only target of Gautier's satire. Bourgeois spectators, the least informed of whom are the most opinionated, are also the butt of the joke (Fig. 2). What is one to make of Satan's full-blown appearance as a dandy who transforms the poet's verse into insipid pablum before them? Moreover, the positivist denouement is deceptive; science is rendered relative as a fantastic discourse in its own right: For having too much observed his life through the microscope—because he nearly always took his fantastic in ordinary events—what happened to him was what happens to those people who perceive, with the aid of the microscope, worms in the soundest foods, serpents in the most limpid liquids. They no longer dare to eat; the most natural thing, magnified by his imagination, seemed to him monstrous.*FIGURE 2 A design by Gavarni satirizing the bourgeois, from Le Diable à Paris: Paris et les Parisiens . The caption translates, “Do not speak to him of artists.” The antipathy between the bourgeois and the artist was a recurrent theme during the Bourgeois Monarchy. By courtesy of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. Gautier cites a Doctor Esquirol, reproducing what is purportedly his statistical chart on the causes of madness.* The last category is “unknown cause” ( cause inconnue ), and that is where the storyteller places his protagonist, thus parodying the classification scheme in itself. 8 The theme of folie (madness) is so pervasive in the fantastic/frenetic discourse (from Alvaro to Inès, from Jeannie to the Public Prosecutor), that a medical reading of its causes and effects here as elsewhere would be literal and prosaic. Indeed, Gautier's ironic tone deliberately rebuts a logical explanation or mechanistic interpretation. As elsewhere in the fantastic literature, positivism is singled out for particular critique (see Parts One and Two). This is an important point to keep in mind vis-à-vis the ballet fantastique . Fantastic narratives are far too subjective to warrant positivist analysis. Whether one considers James' obsession in La Sylphide or Giselle's madness in Giselle , one must search for meanings in the specific discourses to which the ballets gesture and refer. † Here is where Felicia McCarren's analysis of Giselle's madness as a reflection of men's fears of syphilis and the symptoms it produces breaks down. 9 Contexts must be carefully chosen based upon relevance and proximity. Moreover, contexts do not exist independently of human conception; indeed, their meanings are formulated and mediated by meaningful structures or symbols. For the fantastic author from Nodier to Gautier, madness was a double-edged sword integrally interwoven with the imagination. When one considers Gautier's thorough investment in Romanticism in general, and the fantastic genre in particular, it becomes clear that to treat Giselle's dance of madness as symptom, rather than symbol full of nuances and tone colors, is to ignore one of the most pertinent of contexts—Gautier's narratives in which madness plays a thematic part. Gautier's synopsis of Giselle for the 1845 volume Les Beautés de l'Opéra offers a unique form of evidence, since it gave the librettist the opportunity to retell the story after having seen the ballet performed many times. He describes Giselle's madness in tender terms: “In women, reason is in the heart; wounded heart, affected head. Giselle becomes mad, not that she lets her hair hang and strikes her forehead in the manner of melodramatic heroines; it is a gentle madness, tender and charming like her.” When Berthe relates her premonition of the Wilis' fate to her daughter, Gautier reads Giselle's thoughts: “to dance after her death, that is certainly dreadful! Is it thus such a great pleasure to remain there between six boards and two slats, immobile, completely straight.” This was, after all, the author of La Comédie de la Mort writing. Giselle's only defect is that she yields herself utterly to the dance (Fig. 3). Like Onuphrius, who is a victim of his own imagination, Giselle is the artist whose suspension of reality undoes her in the end. In Gautier's words she is “mad about dance, she dreams of nothing but that, she dreams only of balls under the foliage, interminable waltzes and waltzers who never tire.”* To Gautier the loss of dance—a synecdoche for art—is the only thing to be regretted: FIGURE 3 Pierre Joseph Challamel depicts Carlotta Grisi as Giselle ascending saint- or martyrlike above the horizon (Act II, Giselle ). Giselle's index finger points to her temple even as she is liberated from earthly bonds by ethereal feet, suggesting links between madness, dance, death, and resurrection. From Album de l'Opéra: Principales scènes et décorations les plus remarquables des meilleurs ouvrages représentés sur la scène de l'Académie Royale de Musique (Paris: Challamel, 1845). By courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Giselle lived in a “fantastic land of pirouettes and jetés battus,” just as Gautier lived in a fantastic world of words. Undoubtedly for the poet, Carlotta Grisi partook of Giselle's character with her simple expression of emotion and “the pleasure that she experience[d] dancing.” As for the Wilis, they represented “all those who lived, all those who died for and by the dance.”* To understand Gautier's attraction to the fantastic, one must consider first the depth of his immersion. In the first volume of his two-volume edition of Gautier's fantastic work, Michel Crouzet includes ten short stories (some of them not so short): “La Cafetière” (The Coffee Pot, 1831), “Onuphrius” (1832), “Omphale” (1834), “La Morte Amoureuse” (The Dead Woman in Love, 1836), “La Pipe d'Opium” (The Opium Pipe, 1838), “Le Chevalier Double” (The Double Chevalier, 1840), “Le Pied de Momie” (The Mummy's Foot, 1840), “Deux Acteurs pour un Rôle” (Two Actors for One Role, 1841), “Le Club des Hachichins” (The Club of Hashish Eaters, 1846), and “Arria Marcella” (1852); volume two includes the novels Avatar (1856), Jettatura (1856), and Spirite (1865). Clearly, the fantastic genre was a source of inspiration for Gautier, one to which he returned throughout his literary life. Moreover, in spite of its ostensible parody of the fantastic artist, “Onuphrius” was too reflectively etched, too intimately drawn, to be considered merely a mockery of a type rather than a broader critique of the absurdities and miseries of the human condition. Like Nodier, Honoré de Balzac, Prosper Merimée, and others, Gautier found in the fantastic a genre conducive to the expression of the dark undercurrents of the past, poetic yearnings, and antiestablishment attitudes. But his fantastic sensibility was unique in that it moved into an entirely new medium—the dance. True, the ballet had already been pervaded by the fantastic, specifically in the Ballet of the Nuns and La Sylphide . But Gautier, whose broad immersion in the arts crossed categories of the visual arts, literature, theatre, and the dance, would become the greatest proponent of the fantastic in ballet. In his roles as ballet critic and ballet librettist, he apprehended the plastic, poetic potential of the medium of dance and its intrinsic beauty: l'art pour l'art , art for art's sake. Moreover, he understood the potential of the fantastic, ultimate encounter with the irrational, player of paradox at the expense of easy denouements, for establishing the primacy of the medium in ballet. Pierre-Jules-Théophile Gautier was born on August 30, 1811, in Tarbes, a cultural crossroads of the Pyrénées. In 1814 his family moved to Paris, where his father held a government post. At the Collège Charlemagne, where Théophile studied the humanities from 1822 to 1829, he met his lifelong friend Gérard de Nerval. His ambition to become a painter brought him to the studio in the rue Saint-Antoine of the artist Louis-Édouard Rioult, a student of David, and here he came into contact with a fervent circle of young Romantic fine artists. In 1829 Nerval introduced him to Victor Hugo and he discovered the master's book of poems Les Orientales , which strongly influenced his decision to become a man of letters instead. Gautier's first collection of poems was published in 1830, the same year that he was a flamboyant participant in the riot over Hernani . In 1832 he began to frequent the Petit Cénacle , whose young avant-garde writers and fine artists took Romanticism to its countercultural extreme, practicing the frenetic genre, subscribing to Art as a cult, and challenging dominant notions about realism, positivism, material progress, and social utility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]