Aymé, Marcel - Graham Lord (essay date 1980)

Graham Lord (essay date 1980)

SOURCE: “Faerie and Fantastic Phenomena and Motifs,” in The Short Stories of Marcel Aymé, University of Western Australia Press, 1980, pp. 11–17, 20–56.

[In the following essay, Lord examines Aymé's stories that fall into the traditions of fairy tales and tales of the fantastic.]

Les fées sont agréables à
fréquenter. Les hommes
aussi.

—Marcel Aymé

It is the physical fantasies that are most commonly accepted as Aymé's trade-mark. All three pastiches of his work stress this kind of story. Commentators trying to analyse Aymé's extremely varied use of the physically unreal have had recourse to a multitude of terms to qualify it: fantaisie, merveilleux, surréel, fantastique, fabuleux, absurde, non-sens, miraculeux, féerique, science-fiction. This list makes the analysis of Aymé's unreal stories seem a...

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