La peur dans The City of Dreadful Night (1874) de James Thomson
The 19th century city, in real life and fiction alike, concentrated and crystallized society’s most deep-seated fears and became a favourite locale for anxiety and anguish. The City of Dreadful Night (1874) by James Thomson (1834-1882) obviously belongs to the literary tradition of the « dark city »...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2008-12-01
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| Series: | Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/cve/7986 |
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| Summary: | The 19th century city, in real life and fiction alike, concentrated and crystallized society’s most deep-seated fears and became a favourite locale for anxiety and anguish. The City of Dreadful Night (1874) by James Thomson (1834-1882) obviously belongs to the literary tradition of the « dark city » which spans the whole century, from Blake and De Quincey on. Thomson’s nameless but emblematic « city », as the definite article in the title shows, gathers many tropes already featured in previous texts—the labyrinth, darkness and gloom, the figure of the wanderer. It then forms a literary, pictorial and autobiographical palimpsest, under the aegis of Dürer’s Melencolia (1514). However, the poem conjures up a distorted and hallucinated image of London and Thomson’s atheism and pessimism—quite akin to Schopenhauer’s—make his nightmarish and crepuscular « city » stand out against the mainstream. Although its form is largely indebted to 19th century poetic codes, the mood of The City surprisingly pre-dates the 20th century sense of the tragic and the absurd. One of the epigraphs is drawn from Dante’s Inferno, but in the poem, hell has nothing to do with the punishment the damned undergo in the world beyond. It is actually the lot of the living, doomed to endless wandering, without any hope of a better hereafter. Thomson’s city, contaminated by a mysterious disease, haunted by fear, is a self-enclosed, solipsistic, meaningless world, a world without God or ideals. It offers a despairing allegory of the « hell of modernity ». And in this doomed world, the most frightening thing is not so much death as life... |
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| ISSN: | 0220-5610 2271-6149 |