Le fantastique de Dino Buzzati: le choix d'une crise au carré

International audienceFantastic literature is essentially, so it seems, coextensive with the notion of crisis, if “crisis” is to be understood as the manifestation of a loss of balance, then of a rupture that leads to a choice. Crisis is that decisive and fruitful moment when questions emerge, hence innovations and breakthroughs, following the realization of the inadequacy of prevailing criteria. Semantically, syntactically, lexically, fantastic literature breaks from white literature and offers a kind of writing that departs from realistic or representational paradigms. The history of the fantastic goes through crises, breaks and pauses; its representatives try to promote new forms of the fantastic and are constantly in crisis and consequently critical of their own creations. Dino Buzzati illustrates this squared crisis. On the one hand, he translates in his writings a vision of existence that is both critical and fantastic, thus challenging realistic paradigms and exploding shared assumptions about reality; on the other hand, his writing is in crisis in the sense that he is aware of the limits the genre and aims at suggesting an alternative model. The purpose of this paper if to throw light on this double aspect and on the two facets of this crisis through the Fantasmi volume, extracted from Le cronache fantastiche di Dino Buzzati (2003).My perspective to read into Buzzati’s fantasy will be to follow the figure of death as a revelator of human crisis, of man’s aptitude or inaptitude to grasp the true sense of existence. The writing of his short-stories, which are intimately related to journalistic writing (since they were all originally published in journals), will be probed into in order to locate the crucial moment of choice, of separation and consequently of crisis in the writing process