Seignolle, Claude. The Nightcharmer and Other Tales. Trans. Eric Hollingsworth Deudon. College Station: Texas
A&M University Press, 1983.
With a fortunate alignment of translator and printing press, the English-speaking
world sometimes gets a rare glimpse into another literary space.
Being it is one of the easiest languages for Anglophones to read, French is
so conducive to translation, so connected to our bastard tongue, one must
wonder why more French fiction has not been adapted for American readers.
Fortunately, this collection of short fiction by Caude Seignolle has
not been passed over simply because it is written in a different language.
In his brief forward to the original edition of The Nightcharmer,
Lawrence Durrell makes the false promise that Claude Seignolle will have
a wide following in the United States, comparable to that of Ambrose Bierce.
Sadly, Seignolle has not taken root here. Maurice Level, Gaston Leroux
and Jean Ray have been more frequently anthologized than the prolific Seignolle.
Though still in print, the Deudon translation of these eight short stories
is probably his first and only appearance in English in the 20th century.
Perhaps this is because, as Deudon complains in his introduction, Seignolle's
inclination toward the Gothic tale relegates him to "a lesser category of
popular literature" in the eyes of the literate. This is not so in France,
where Poe and Lovecraft are both considered to be among the greatest American
writers. Beginning with Baudelaire's translations of Poe in the 1850's,
American horror has been held in high esteem by every generation of French
literati. Ironically, America, the nation whose literature was
born in the gothic (Brockden Brown, Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville) and
which today spawns the most horror and gothic literature of any country, has
yet to return the favor by recognizing writers like Seignolle.
This is especially saddening because Seignolle is a rarity: A respected folklorist
and ethnologist, he shows considerable skill as a storyteller and preserver
of dying traditional lore. Born in 1917, he is the one of the last survivors
of a prior chapter of literary history, but as a modernist, he shows great
talent finding new angles into the fossilized poetry of folklore. For
example, in the title story of this collection, "The Nightcharmer," M. de
la Tibaldiere, the aging zoologist, along with his sympathetic manservant,
Sylvain, invites the narrator to their rambling country house crammed with
rare specimens. De la Tibaldiere tells the narrator about the Nightcharmer,
a local legendary bird whose strange cry calls the hearer to his death
late at night, when a listener is most susceptible to suggestions.
Fascinated by his host's extensive collection, his passion for exotic animals,
and above all the Nightcharmer itself, the narrator dreams a pair of puzzling
but mythologically rich dreams. The Nightcharmer first appears in the
form of a beautiful woman with a shrill laugh that "seemed composed of three
sharp notes" like a bird call. The people in the dream try to push him
down a well, and he wakes to find himself leaning over a crenel, about to
fall from a dangerously high tower. In the next dream, mysterious birds
lead him to a swamp. He wakes to find himself waist-deep in mud that
is sucking him down like a cold, giant leech. Now awake, he sees the
Nightcharmer in the light and learns the awful truth. The reader
comes to understand that the Nightcharmer is an endangered species of folkloric
bird, threatened by the post-modern age bent on forgetting the psychological
underpinnings that gave it birth.
In the tale, Seignolle raises the question of whether folklore is fully
understood. Do even the dark creatures of the nocturnal imagination
have a beneficial purpose? He shows that appearances in folklore, as
in so many other areas of human thought, are deceiving.
Another deceptive story is "Starfish", where an actress who is an accident-victim
views her reconstructed face for the first time. Despite the promises
of the doctor, she sees herself as a horrible parody of a human being and
seeks a desperate remedy. This type of tale would be at home in the
Weird Tales of the 1920's, where biological horrors flourished. Also,
like many other Seignolle tales, it belongs to a long, distinguished
body of work the French call the "conte cruel," or the cruel tale. One
can trace its history back to Octave Mirbeau and the French Decadents, Villiers
d'Isle Adam, Jean Lorrain, and more modern horrorists including Maurice Level,
who occasionally surfaced in Weird Tales and American horror anthologies.
The cruel tale usually has a bitter climax that shows the irony of life,
the heartlessness of fate and the universe's indifference to man. In
his collection appropriated titled, Contes cruels, Villier's
"Torture by Hope" tells of a man who thinks he has escaped his torturers only
to be easily recaptured in a soul-breaking game of catch and release.
Modern man is tortured by hope from the media, chasing unobtainable romance,
wealth and power.
Another of Seignolle's cruel tales is "Dog Story," the tale of a hideously
disfigured dog who stubbornly clings to life in the foxholes of World War
II. The soldiers' attempts to free the dog of its wretched condition
only leads to more agony and supernatural horror. It also has the interesting
analogy of a army field kitchen that resembles a giant toad with the coffee
tank as its bladder. "The Healer" foreshadows Stephen King's The
Green Mile. For a fixed price, the Healer can transfer a disease
to his own body and "sleep it off." Years of healing others has taken
its toll, and he tries to be selective about what new disease he acquires,
hoping for less pain and shorter recovery times. A criminal gives him
an incurable disease that he didn't reckon on, which ultimately corrupts
his soul.
"The Last Rites" is the height of his cruel tales. The twisted blessings
of a martyred, hunchbacked young female saint, Hubertine, fall upon the poor
cuckolded Pierre in a shocking and gruesome way. Often a backdrop in
horror tales, the Church is a deceptively reassuring place, where Pierre sought
solace from his cheating young wife. He earnestly desired a devoted,
submissive woman like the 11th Century saint, who suffered more in death
than in life and whose mercy was beyond good and evil. The Outlander
is a remarkable novella about a Satanic blacksmith who forces his way
into a French village. The blacksmith has mythic connections to the
old underworld of Vulcan and consequently the Devil Himself, and in this
particular tale, his evil personality unfolds to cover the land with sorrow.
It is a remarkable take on an old theme of diabolic intrusion, and reminds
the reader that the Devil is among us still.
Besides The Outlander, the other seven tales in this slim collection
are very short. In their pages, they touch upon mythology, war, psychic
powers, medical horror, diabolism, revenants, death and eroticism. It
is a wide range of storytelling with freshness and thought-provoking turns
added to traditional set pieces. More than his skill as a storyteller
and his great breadth of subjects, Seignolle's greatest asset is his originality.
He leads the reader down seemingly predictable lanes, but his brief narratives
always end up in the strange lands where myth meets the daylight.
The most unforgivable crime of many modern writers is that they retell the
same yarn with nothing new added. Seignolle's disquieting tales change
the way his readers see his world.