Arthur Dreyfus

Arthur Dreyfus's "La troisième main" (POL, 2023) tells the life story of young Paul Marchand in the form of a "journal en désordre," a story shaped by the First World War and a grotesque medical transgression. The first half of the novel sketches a childhood in Besançon, the continuity of which shatters with the death of his father and the progressive neglect of his mother. When Paul is severely wounded, he awakens not in a hospital, but in the basement of the androgynously styled Camille Gottschalk, who performs bizarre transplants on humans and animals. From Paul's stomach grows a "third hand" belonging to the German Hans—a living, alien arm that ensures his survival and simultaneously transforms him into a monster. The text interweaves war, bodily horror, and the search for identity, leaving open the question of whether its protagonist is a victim, perpetrator, or accomplice in his own survival. The article reads Dreyfus's novel in two ways: as an uncanny parable about alienation and as a grotesque, burlesque body fantasy. In one reading, Gottschalk's laboratory is a place of scientific horror, the third hand an uncanny foreign body that undermines autonomy and identity. In the other, the same scenario appears as a dazzling, libertine spectacle in which a Candide-like narrator staggers through an anatomical cabinet of curiosities, where gender boundaries, morality, and body shapes are gleefully transgressed. Oscillating between horror and excess, the monstrous becomes the stage for survival—and the "third hand" a symbol for the ambiguity between alienation and belonging, revulsion and pleasure.