Sex, Devouring, Creating: A rich multilingual anthology of world literature from 1842 to 1980 reweaves the myth of the octopod spinner, between horror for the predator and fascination for her works of art.
How, from woman, one becomes an octopod – and vice versa.
Arachnophobes beware! One would like to immediately accompany such a warning with an invitation to open this book in order to ward off its terror, a bit like Primo Levi does in his essay therapeutic backed by childhood memories, “Peur des araignées” (1981), collected in the anthology designed by Sylvie Ballestra-Puech and Evanghelia Stead. The two polyglot academics and fine translators defend comparative literature in its most stimulating form: capturing the echoes between texts and languages, illuminating and deciphering the motifs and myths that innervate world literature, all eras combined. In Arachne’s Web does not deviate from this transversal and intertextual approach which is perfectly suited to its dual object: the place as much as the figure, the canvas as much as the famous and rebellious spinner of Latin Antiquity.
Fascinating or repulsive
The spider occupies a primordial place in the fantastic bestiary, sometimes arousing fascination, sometimes repulsion. Situated “between art and terror” as Sylvie Ballestra-Puech recalls in the title of her preface, to describe the twenty-one stories included in this imposing work both in terms of its volume (more than 700 pages) and its scope, the spider has found in literature a space of predilection for its multiple misdeeds and incarnations – because it is anything but unequivocal. Its prestige, however, rests on a paradox: the (supposed) hideousness of the animal is opposed to the beauty and finesse of its habitat (doubled with a pantry) – and of its work.
Going back to the sources of myth and onomastics, uncovering its underground mutations, the two masters of this ambitious opus offer us valuable reference points: they focus on the metonymic shift that saw the canvas gradually give its name to the worker, thus making it switch from masculine to feminine – grammatically and symbolically – (preface, pp. 6-9; postface, pp. 679-681); they examine the abundant nomenclature that varies from one language to another and note the polysemy of certain terms, which the authors have been able to take advantage of, because “with Arachne we experience the intertwining of words and the traps of language,” warns Evanghelia Stead (postface, p. 683); finally, they underline the contribution of related figures. Indeed, to the myth of Arachne, recounted in one of Ovid’s most famous Metamorphoses, we must add two other older but lesser-known stories: one, taken from the Theriaca of Nicander of Colophon, shows the curse of Athena falling on Arachne and her brother Phalanx, guilty of an incestuous union, inscribed in their very names, both of which designate spider in Greek (preface, p. 6) and which William Sansom would recall in “Pansovic and the Spiders” (1943). Another source, this time Alexandrian, reveals to us the existence of Arachnos – in other words “spider” again, but with a masculine ending -, in love with the soothsayer Tiresias transformed into an old spinner with abundant hair. A constant emerges from “these three mythological stories (…): the erotic component of the story is associated with violence, transgression, animality” (id., ibid.). We could add that most of the selected fictions are structured around a triple axis: sexuality, devouring, creation. Hybridization of myths, hybridization of figures, the spider also presides over metamorphosis – physical as well as psychic.
Opting for a tight chronology, the anthology covers nearly 150 years, from 1842 (date of Jeremias Gotthlef’s “The Black Spider”) to the early 1980s, an essential period in more ways than one: it is at XIXe century that the fantastic tale takes flight, then that psychoanalysis is invented to probe the unconscious and that Freud forges the notion of Unworldly – the disturbing strangeness – which suits admirably certain spiders pinned here, finally that the first suffragists give voice and begin fights exceeding the right to vote, and that the stories of Arachne, notably in her association with the evil and/or predatory woman, multiply, diversify, and become more complex. And to note that female pens were not the last to seize the myth to revisit it in a scathing manner.
The choice of the unusual
Divided into five thematic sections that mark out the extent of its fantas(ma)tic territory, the work tracks down and describes the monster’s appearances through stories that allow us to identify a fictional typology: Devil’s Spiders, Monstrous Loves, The Family Spider, A Spider on the Ceiling, Art Spiders. In a comparative approach dear to the two editors, this selection is not limited to French or to the hexagonal borders but embraces a production extended to authors of English, German, Italian and Spanish, thus offering a varied panorama which testifies to the intertextuality presiding over the fortune of the myth; all these fables, in verse or in prose, including seven unpublished in French, are also offered in a bilingual version, sometimes in a reworked translation.
It was certainly necessary to make difficult choices, given the number of spider tales, to retain only the most emblematic but also the most unusual or the rarest, in particular several British short stories from XXe century, true gems of terror and irony, such as John Widham’s “More Spinned against…” (1953), Elizabeth Walter’s “The Spider” (1967) and Peter Valentine Timlett’s “Little Miss Buffet” (1981). Room is also made, of course, for classics such as Hanns Heins Ewers’ “The Spider” (1908), a masterpiece of the genre, whose mystery resists all analysis, no commentary being able to exhaust its meaning but rekindling reflection, or Marcel Schwob’s “Arachne” (1889), taken up two years later in Double heart. In her long notice, Evanghelia Stead returns to Schwob’s immense erudition, his devious writing, his “art of constructing a narrative” (p. 178) and, through a back-and-forth game, encourages us to reread the story and reconstruct its hidden meaning, once equipped with new tools.
The claimed scientific bias nevertheless gives the text precedence over the exegesis. Thus, in order not to spoil the pleasure of reading and not to dispel the suspense on which it often rests, the notices are judiciously placed after the works, with two exceptions; they illuminate and pull the threads of these strange and often enigmatic stories by suggesting scholarly interpretations where language, even lexicography, opens up fertile avenues of decipherment, avenues to which the insertion of images brings additional relief by reminding us that the creature has also imposed itself in iconography and that the squeaky grin of Odilon Redon’s spider, which adorns the cover, has streaked more than one of these stories.
The Fatal Embroiderer
The embroiderer and femme fatale invites herself into these pages, whether the spider takes human form or retains its original appearance. Totem animal of a ghoul woman in Lorrain (“Mr. Smith” (1903), whose title – also known by its variant “Monsieur Smith” – reiterates the gender ambiguity long associated with the figure, moreover misleading the narrator), instrument of vengeance in the pen of Silvana Occampo (“La Noce” (1959)), criminal lover (Bierbaum’s “L’Araignée” (1901) or Wyndham’s “Tel est pris…”), devouring mother whose archaic power the artist Louise Bourgeois had managed to restore in her monumental sculpture with the revealing title, “Maman” (1999) – an ambiguous homage to her weaver mother –, spawn of the devil, even a figure of destiny, which brings her closer to the Fates spinning human destinies as she weaves her web (for example in “Et Clotilde se pressa les mamelles” (1912), a poem by Enrico Pea), tarantula, sometimes simple spider, inhabits dusty attics or damp caves, accompanies sabbats, vampirizes humans, haunts nightmares and fragile psyches.
An invasive or fantasized presence, it signals the mind in the grip of delirium and madness (made even more disturbing by first-person narrations) which gave rise to this delightful expression “to have a spider on the ceiling”, illustrated by example through five texts of a construction as fluid as it is elaborate. It becomes the double or symptom of narcissistic heroes, as in Rachilde whose metaphorical “crystal spider” (1892) designates a broken mirror evoking both the animal’s web and the hero’s obsession with the specular reflection where, behind his own image, the deleterious maternal presence is drawn; as for Marcel Béalu’s “water spider” (1948), ultimately returned to the aquatic element and its first form, it draws the perjured narrator into his own monstrosity. As indicated by the last set of the volume, which, in essence, summarizes it, Art Spidersthe octopod captured in its poetic dimension is also an allegory of the imagination, a figure of the artist who, measuring himself against the gods, weaves his fable with total freedom, guided only by his creative impulse.
Omnipresent
Another observation: the spider is everywhere, taking up residence in the countryside as well as in the city, in modest inns as well as in opulent interiors, taking us from the gloomy manor to the cozy cottage, from the bourgeois 1900s residence to the London loft. In remote, windswept lands, witches and demons populate folk legends and exercise their curse across generations, repeatedly condemning the spider to the stake (in “The Crab Spider” by Erckmann-Chatrian (1860) and in “The Ash Tree” by Montague Rhodes James (1904)). Some horror and satanic stories from the 1850s, drawing on and pastiching the folk tale, with its narratives in abyss and its taste for repetitive patterns (such as Erckmann-Chatrian’s “The Invisible Eye or the Inn of the Three Hanged Men” (1857), which Hanns Heinz Ewers had in mind when he wrote “The Spider” fifty years later), reflect the arachnid figure’s propensity for metamorphosis and at the same time expose the incredible plasticity of the writing to which it gives rise.
In modern and contemporary settings, the myth is making a strong comeback and stimulating a romantic impulse that proves to what extent Arachne, whose ramifications are as numerous as her legs, is on the side of creation, whether she symbolizes it or spurs it on. Rampant with shivers, prey to an “amazed fear” (postface, p. 682), we will discover, upon reading these “Tales of Love, Madness and Death”, that the ancient fable lends itself to inexhaustible reversals and renewals that attest to its irreducible modernity.