DE L’EXPÉRIENCE DE L’ENFERMEMENT À LA DÉGRADATION DU SIGNE RELIGIEUX : UNE PROBLÉMATIQUE ROMANESQUE BELGE DE LA TRANSMISSION
FROM THE EXPERIENCE OF CONFINEMENT TO THE DEGRADATION OF THE RELIGIOUS SIGN: A BELGIAN NOVELISTIC INQUIRY INTO TRANSMISSION

Summary/Abstract: Beginning in the interwar period, the Belgian cultural milieu sought to reassert a national literature, one that certain literary journal founders – such as Robert Merget –envisioned as entirely severed from stylistic and ideological affiliations with French literature. In contrast, other journals like Le Disque Vert championed the benefits of transnational literary exchange. Under the direction of Franz Hellens, Le Disque Vert promoted a poetics of the uncanny, more resonant with the disquieting atmosphere that shaped both the writer’s and the reader’s postwar experience. This paper argues that, in the wake of World War I, literary discourse could no longer rely on prewar semiotic frameworks to represent reality. The authorial function thus evolved toward alerting the reader to fissures within inherited symbolic orders, particularly those derived from religious ceremonial codes. By tracing the development of the uncanny in Belgian literature – from Hellens’ formulations to its reconfigurations in the dark fantastic of Jean Ray, the dystopian parable of Jacqueline Harpman, and the post-apocalyptic narratives of Adamek – this study demonstrates how a progressive recontextualization of religious semiotics emerges within confined narrative spaces. These shifts attest to a broader transformation in the symbolic economy of Belgian letters, reflecting a semiotic slippage that foregrounds the instability of meaning in a post-traumatic literary landscape.

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