Anne-Sophie Donnarieix's monograph Puissances de l'ombre: the surnaturel of the contemporary Roman (Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2022) offers a nuanced analysis of the presence of the supernatural in contemporary French literature. The book pursues the ambitious goal of situating the diverse manifestations and functions of the supernatural within a literary context that is characterized, on the one hand, by a crisis of rationalism and, on the other hand, fosters phenomena of destabilization and decentering of logical premises.
Content
The project as a whole
In the introduction, Donnarieix argues that the supernatural in the contemporary novel exhibits a "singularity of forms" and should be understood as a "powerful contemporary syndrome" that has thus far remained in the shadows. The central hypothesis of the work is that of a "critical re-enchantment" (réenchantement critique), in which the allure of the marvelous merges with a sharp portrayal of our era, drawing on a disturbing fantastic. Donnarieix seeks to examine how the supernatural challenges a historical memory still haunted by the traumas of world wars, genocides, political disappointments, and failed utopias, and how it illuminates an uncertain present that demands a rethinking of humanity, community, and the planet. She emphasizes the ambivalence of this recourse to the irrational: it gives form to the collective unconscious by reviving the subterranean paths of the imagination to express the unspeakable, but also allows escape into a wondrous, amnesic or comforting realm.
Methodologically, Donnarieix first establishes a conceptual clarification of the term "supernatural." She understands it as an "intellectual construct" that does not exist a priori, but is "intrinsically bound to frameworks of thought" whose content can differ from culture to culture and century to century. For the supernatural to be perceived as such, it presupposes a certain distance from magical beliefs and is bound to a frame of reference that places reason, logic, and science at the forefront of its analytical values. The author rejects a simple synonymous equation of "supernatural" and "fictional," since the supernatural is characterized by "more pronounced effects of displacement and deviation within the field of fiction."
She selects various concepts and theories as analytical tools, including the marvelous, the fantastic, the uncanny, magical realism, and a category she herself names "surnaturel scriptural" (scriptural supernatural). In doing so, she draws on thinkers such as Tzvetan Todorov for the fantastic and its "hermeneutic indeterminacy," and Amaryll Chanady for the distinction between "resolved" (magical realism) and "unresolved" (fantastic) antinomy. However, she argues that the contemporary supernatural transcends these categories by "tolerating" or "redirecting" the antinomy between real and irrational elements. The "surnaturel scriptural" is defined as a subtle form that generates a "textual spell" through the style of language itself, inspired by the "literary enchantment" of Romanticism (Yves Vadé) and the "magical art" of Surrealism (André Breton).
The work is divided into three main parts, each dealing sequentially with the impact of the supernatural on the world, history, and humanity. The investigation is based on the works of five contemporary authors: Antoine Volodine, Sylvie Germain, Alain Fleischer, Marie NDiaye, and Christian Garcin.
In his general conclusion, Donnarieix states that the supernatural is returning to literature to overcome the difficulty of representing the present in rational, logically coherent, and realistic terms. It responds to a “form of despair”—cognitive as well as aesthetic—in the face of a world in flux, marked by secularization, the decline of political utopias, the dissolution of communities, and the redefinition of individual identity, as well as by new scientific discoveries fascinated by the indeterminate and the contingent. The contemporary supernatural is not a distinct “genre” but a “hybrid tool” that draws on inherited forms while also transforming and subverting them. It bears witness to a “global affliction” and an “interstitial epoch” that questions its foundations, and in which the supernatural derives its “considerable power of representation” precisely from its anachronism. It serves a “maximalist” ambition that brings to the fore the invisible and intangible aspects of the world and imbues the novel with a “demiurgical, nostalgic and concise” power to revive the “magic of the novel” while simultaneously mourning the myths.
Individual results
The study unfolds its findings in three main parts, each comprising several chapters and highlighting the five selected authors:
Logics of the Irrational: Expanding the Real, Derealizing Discourse (Chapters 1-3)
Sylvie Germain and the syncretic supernatural: Germain's novels utilize the supernatural to blend biblical texts, pagan legends, and Eastern European myths into a syncretic imaginary. Her work borders on magical realism, as supernatural events are harmoniously integrated into a realistic context. The author explores the absence of God and the shift of the sacred from theophany to the hierophany, where the miraculous preserves meaning in a disillusioned world.
Marie NDiaye: Spaces of Indeterminacy and Irritating Perceptions: NDiaye's novels are characterized by a "poetics of ambiguity," in which the supernatural often remains unexplained and the familiar (everyday) tips into the uncanny. She demythologizes traditional figures like witches and devils, who appear disempowered and weary in her texts, signaling a distancing from outdated spiritual regimes. Her characters display a fatalistic resignation to inexplicable events and even a sense of guilt for the anomalies. The narrative style is often unreliable, with double voices or inner monologues that undermine narrative coherence and emphasize the opacity of both the characters and the text.
Christian Garcin: Nomadic Magic and Quantum Logics: Garcin integrates shamanism and quantum physics to explore the porosity of reality. For him, shamanism is not escapist, but a celebration of the multifaceted nature of reality that transcends our senses. The supernatural often manifests in subtle, everyday details that reveal a "secret poetry of the world" which is more enchanting than unsettling. At the same time, shamanism is trivialized and demystified, often through humor, which prevents its overemphasis.
Antoine Volodine and the Bardic Real: Volodine's novels are set in a "Bardo" state, a liminal space between life and death, often described as "sub-reality," which blurs the line between reality and unreality. His work is permeated by nihilism and the failure of revolutionary utopias. The "cryptographic strategies" employed in his texts, which aim to obscure discourse and references, are a reaction to censorship and totalitarian regimes. The derealization effects of his novels are often nightmarish and parodic, circumventing or distorting historical reality.
History and its ghosts. Naming the haunting, seeking meaning (Chapters 4-5)
Sylvie Germain and the cyclicality of evil: Germain uses the supernatural to metaphorize historical violence and the "cyclicity of evil" (e.g., World War I). Her supernatural elements are mystical and serve an evident aesthetic of memory by representing collective trauma through individual incarnation (e.g., stigmatized bodies). The recourse to archetypes and the motifs of night and the scream anchors the story in a primal, mythical time.
Alain Fleischer and the post-genocidal supernatural: Fleischer uses the supernatural to explore the “unspeakable traumas” of the Shoah. His narratives are characterized by a “ghostly haunting” and a temporal “extension” that makes the era appear as a time “after the end” of the catastrophe. The supernatural serves here as an allegorical tool to represent historical traumas and to enable the “remembrance of the unrepresentable.” His “scriptural supernatural” is sustained by an “exaltation auctoriale” that unfolds magic through language itself and emphasizes the “carnality” of words.
Antoine Volodine and the phantasmagorical history: Volodine's novels are permeated by the "historical haunting" of failed revolutionary ideals and problematize historical memory. His work is a "paradoxical testimony," a "reverse memorial site" ("monument invisible") that expresses both the necessity of remembering and its impossibility. The miraculous is employed here as a "means of compensation" or "escape" from historical reality, often in the form of a "fairy tale in reverse" that addresses historical liberation on a symbolic level, but without any cathartic or didactic intent.
Humans put to the test. Destabilizing bodies, problematizing voices (Chapters 6-7):
The destabilization of the body (metamorphoses, disappearance, duplications) questions the "ontological position of man" in a posthumanist era.
Marie NDiaye and the doubling of the body: In NDiaye's work, the identity crisis often manifests itself through animal metamorphoses (e.g., dog, sow), reflecting the dissolution of social and familial bonds, the fragmentation of the subject, and the "difficulty of being oneself" in a disillusioned world. These transformations represent a "critical view of humanism," illuminating violence and totalitarian tendencies within society.
Sylvie Germain and the Disappearance of Bodies: Germans Hors champ It addresses the supernatural disappearance of a person, representing the "dissolution of human value" in a technologically hyperreal society. This disappearance becomes a "memory narrative" that rescues the forgotten from oblivion and sets a living trace against annihilation.
Antoine Volodine and the Unreliable Narrators: Volodine's phenomenon of "unreliable narrators" has two causes: firstly, the cognitive impairment of the characters, and secondly, a "manipulative tendency" on the part of the authors, who deliberately obscure references. The "dispersion of voices" through polyphony and the opacity of narrative identities is a "clandestine political strategy" against censorship, but also a "strategy of immersion" that invites the reader into a dreamlike space. This "post-exotic" literature, which often reflects the voices of the excluded and a "fantasized and lost community," is deeply permeated by shamanism as a narrative principle, in which the "we" dissolves the "I."
Christian Garcin and the polyphony of texts: Garcin uses shamanism to influence textual architecture by introducing "disjointed voices" and "simultaneity effects" that dissolve narrative coherence and elevate "hybridity" to a narratological principle. The rhizomatic structure of his works and the explicit borrowing of characters or text passages from other works (by his own or others) emphasize the porosity of fiction and the dynamic interconnectedness of the "textual world."
Alain Fleischer and the voices of the shaman: In Fleischer's work, shamanism manifests itself rather indirectly through a "magical exacerbation of the voice," especially the spoken voice. His characters are often inhabited by schizophrenic or mediumistic voices that demonize discourse and create an "aesthetics of dissolution." His "archipelago strategy"—the dispersal of literary material across various works and media—forms a sprawling game of traces that deconstructs the unity of the novel and celebrates the joy of heterogeneity.
Final assessment
According to Donnarieix, the presence of the supernatural in the contemporary novel is a profound reaction to a reality perceived as a "disenchanted world".
What does this tell us about literature? Literature transcends a purely rational and empirical approach in order to do justice to the complexity and inconsistency of the modern world. It forms a “realism of contortion” that derives its greatest representational power from derealization and makes the irrationality of the world visible. It is characterized by an “aesthetics of incoherence” and a “hybridity” that breaks down traditional genre boundaries and moves in the spaces between the marvelous, the fantastic, the unusual, and magical realism. Literature reflects a “humanistic restraint” that turns away from Promethean or Nietzschean fantasies of the Übermensch. Instead, it seeks in the archaic (animal figures, ghosts, shamans) ways to model the “disturbing mutations” of human existence and to undertake an “ethical interrogation” of human identity. The “scriptural supernatural” testifies to a continuing fascination with the creative power of language, even if it is viewed ambivalently – as solace and as a place of failure in the face of history.
What does this tell us about the present? The intensive use of the supernatural testifies to a “collective anxiety” and the “necessity” of rethinking the aesthetic means of representing the mutations of our time. It is a response to the “indelible mark of a traumatic past” and the “uncertain horizons of a frightening future.” The “global haunting” (Lionel Ruffel) is symptomatic of an interim period in which the foundations of society are being questioned. Engaging with the supernatural expresses a “discomfort” with the violence of the 20th century and the millions of dead who haunt the collective consciousness. It is an attempt to represent the unspeakable aspects of history and to keep a “tormenting memory” alive. The recourse to the irrational reveals the “crisis of rationalism” and the inadequacy of purely realistic modes of representation for describing a complex world. It is not a systemic re-enchantment in the sense of a new, ideologically burdened spirituality, but a "critical" approach that acknowledges the failure of grand explanatory models (both rational and mythical).
Overall, Anne-Sophie Donnarieix demonstrates that the supernatural in the contemporary novel is not a refuge for outdated myths, but rather a dynamic and ambivalent tool that pushes the profound anxieties and questions of our time to the limits of language, memory, and human identity. It is an expression of literature's capacity to name the incomprehensible and to open new avenues of understanding in a fractured world.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
