abstract for an unpresented paper

Children and Beasts in Hervé Guibert and Angela Carter

Guibert’s early fiction (La Mort propagande , 1977; Les Chiens, 1982; Des Aveugles, 1985) exploits childhood imaginings of animals embodying the threat of an absolute sexual aggressivity. Infantile fears of incorporation are mastered in Guibert’s eroticised sublime, through the cultivation of an infantile polymorphous perversity present both as theme and as ludic textuality. Carter, in The Bloody Chamber (1979), likewise plays upon the illicit seductions of Sadean bestiality. While animals in Carter’s stories tend to relate to the fantasmatic status of the beasts she represents, revealing the psychic motifs implicit in the fairy-tales she revisits, Guibert explores a less fixed and identifiable form of the animal, constantly in mutation, and emerging from the linguistic fabric of the texts they inhabit to virally infect the form and stability of the human narrator. I will argue that beyond the determination of the Freudian primal scene the fascination these beasts provoke derives from a schism between human and animal which is retrospectively projected as more primitive. I will make reference here to the work of Georges Bataille, whose thought functions as a condition of possibility for the work of both Carter and Guibert.