The Magician’s Box of Tricks: Fantômas, Popular Literature, and the Spectacular Imagination
Résumé
Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, in order to abide by the terms of the contract with their publisher, which required a monthly output of novels in the Fantômas series, used what they called “the tricks cupboard,” a huge folder, filled with newspaper articles, about extraordinary murders, accidents, and eccentric faits divers. The literary representations of the lurid crimes of the Parisian Belle Époque arch-criminal were always echoing authentic events, directly inspired by the discourse built around them by the press, but in a deformed and exaggerated fashion. As a showman and a magician of crime, Fantômas can be seen as a metaphor of the two authors’ conception of popular literature. Fiction became pure sensation, a series of performances with show-business spectacle as the main aesthetic referent. The character is, thus, symptomatic of the new ways in which popular fiction was produced and consumed at the beginning of the twentieth century: associated with a new kind of print media, carried by a new culture of entertainment and leisure, fiction gave up all pretense to depict the world or to offer a moralized discourse like in the nineteenth century. The reader’s pleasure was the same as the one offered in a magician’s show: knowing the artifice behind fiction, the reader was drawn to simply admire the tricks, the absurdity, the horrific plots that the author-magician unveiled. This new way to define fiction is the origin of some of the practices of modern French popular culture.