“Poetic Fiction” has always worked to stir wonder at what lies beyond our grasp, conjuring the illusion of another world—whether by casting the poem into distant ages or propelling its action to the earth’s remotest corners. Analysis, by contrast, requires no such invention. Operating as it does within the realm of deliberate unreality—isolating what in life remains fused—it generates its own wellspring of illusion. Hence some writers embrace fiction whilst others renounce it: most Classicists and Romantics choose the former path; certain Classicists, some Romantics, and all Naturalists take the latter. One might indeed gauge the human and aesthetic truth of these three schools by observing how liberally they employ fiction, or how rigorously they refuse it.
Great modern writers—Balzac, M. Barbey d’Aurevilly—appear to spurn pure Fiction, though not from any inability to wield it. Rather, they recognise that this simple retreat through time and space offers too blunt an illusion, one the steam engine has rendered obsolete. This explains why Romantic theatre has become poetically intolerable: its gestures towards beautiful Deception collapse, geographically at least, beneath the weight of travellers’ accounts. Temporal distance might still enchant us, but history has devoured time as ruthlessly as the railway devoured space. The great Flaubert, in Salammbô—still a marvel of prose—expended prodigious genius stripping illusion of its temporal remoteness, documenting and particularising historical detail until the ancient world stood solid before us. Today, tellingly enough, this method has descended to M. Sardou.
As for Balzac, the visible, contemporary world itself became his Fiction. This visionary perceived familiar demons stirring in modern souls, agitated by passions both petty and vast. M. Barbey d’Aurevilly, meanwhile, births his heroes within his own soul and lives their fictive existence himself—a man dwelling beyond the world even as he moves through it.
Beyond the world—not simply beyond familiar dates and places, but beyond the world itself: here lies fiction’s fundamental law.
Beyond the world, yet never beyond humanity or nature. A soul, a flower, a body: these belong to eternity. The poet may take his own moment as starting point (though he need not), and there is peculiar pleasure in watching a beautiful vision transcend the very hour that birthed it. A historical detail, woven into the fabric of such a vision, can strike us with strange force—as though the poet were gently mocking the grand pretensions of nations. The vision itself, slipping free of its own constraints, may even wear the mask of everyday reality, provided it knows the way home130.
The poet prefers to work through pure invention—creatures as fantastical as mythological chimeras, as strange as the enchantments of fairy tales—to give his thought symbolic form.
In the present case, how better to symbolise the soul’s liberation from itself and from society—its soaring return to humanity’s original splendour—than through angel’s wings, beating their rhythm through the indefinite towards the infinite?
Yet to establish this being’s exceptional nature required his birth amongst men ashamed of their offspring: for to the wingless and earthbound, a winged child of man must appear monstrous, his presence both stupefying and shameful. Thus the angel must enter humanity as a monster—the product of teratogeny, scarcely more unnatural than a child born without arms. This monstrous child, his family’s disgrace, will mature in shadow, feared, scorned, imprisoned in a cell that preserves the family name.
Here is fiction pared to its essence, yet sufficient—with the promised satisfaction of watching the monster claim his angelic birthright.
As a saint amongst libertines, a poet in the commercial quarter, any Exception amongst the ordinary, this soaring being becomes an object of hatred to all who encounter him—save the singular soul of the woman destined to produce this exquisite aberration of nature. Since the husband’s authority (he who never forgave the miracle and nearly throttled the fabulous infant) forbids the mother from seeing her child, mysterious correspondences flow between them, transporting her unknowingly into an extraordinary realm whilst preserving the angel’s human feelings—correspondences that animate nature around them both, binding the maternal soul so tightly to her angelic child that she will perish the instant his wings unfold.
Yet a Poet might never discover his genius without some great catastrophe—these wings would never spread if the persecuting household, growing accustomed despite themselves, allowed their hatred to wane. Imagine, then, an “ordinary” child maturing as the angel’s younger brother. The horrific being is concealed from this child above all others—a child naturally talkative, certainly impressionable, raised as future consolation to abhor the extraordinary. Neither this education nor the mystery he immediately senses proves barren: education instils the desired unshakeable convictions, whilst mystery sharpens curiosity and cultivates intelligence. Thus the atmosphere surrounding the angel breeds genius, though evil men transform this genius into a sublime expression of their own baseness. The child matures: he uncovers the secret; he beholds the angel. What the Angel speaks and what the man replies forms the book’s core. This dialogue should kill the man; instead, he loses his reason, temporarily, and his madness, still shot through with terror, demands the removal of its cause: they unlock the angel’s prison, and the angel soars away, singing…
Now imagine this tale recounted by the Angel’s own brother to a Poet in a Landscape that listens and speaks—and the Poem’s Fiction stands complete.
Léon Hennique Novel 