Présence et signification des seuils dans Le jardin malade de Michel de Ghelderode
Presence and Significance of Thresholds in Michel de Ghelderode’s Le jardin malade

Summary/Abstract: Any literary space represents the passage through a threshold beyond which the reader discovers a different universe. Fantastic literature tries to stage a double passage, towards a mimetic, habitual universe, in a first stage, and in a second phase, towards a world whose paradigm and rules are difficult for the reader to accept. The passage to this new space-time is made by thresholds, thanks to the thresholds which conceal and enclose the supernatural thing/ presence/ space. In this article, we will try to analyze how the notion of threshold works in a story whose theme is linked to space, which one could interpret, at first, as fantastic. The way in which the hero relates to this space, which reflects his inner states, acquires a special meaning in the story of the Belgian writer. Being also the narrator of the events, he recounts in a diary his strange and inexplicable attraction for an old abandoned house, which he contemplates every day in his solitary walks. For reasons that are still obscure, but very powerful, this building exerts on him, since childhood, an attraction that becomes irresistible. The hero considers that he has the mission to discover the secrets of the house and its past, seen as dark, disturbing, and which somehow represents the past of the entire neighborhood. By becoming the owner of these places and settling there, the narrator experiences a miraculous incursion into the imagination relating to the house and the garden, about the past of which discovers several myths. The hero will thus experience delusional states of mind, on the border of madness, or will experience anxieties coming from a tragic, painful collective mind, which until then remained buried under the house and its garden. Like all the other characters in the Sortilèges collection, the narrator of Le jardin malade acts in a bizarre way: he is ready to sacrifice himself, struggling with this malevolent, deformed space, so that pacification may be restored and bad memories disappear forever. We can observe how each writer gives birth to a distinct, original imaginary space, in the story of the Belgian writer, this one pretending to lead the reader towards a fantastic, irrational universe which will show itself as false, will dissolve in the strange, so that in the end the normal world regains all its rights.

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