![]() Following this title across languages and literatures, through the intertextual trope of the beau ténébreux, through the romantic despair and the battle against melancholy, the foreign shows itself not as a veil to be lifted but as a materiality in the darkness. ![]() Representative of the novel as a whole, the title “battling le ténébreux” is obscure but brilliant the language switch destabilises and enriches. I present the rich and strange in-between space that the text and its characters inhabit as the source of its wonder, that threshold of the legible. His background as a writer-translator imbues the text with a foreignness so that it sits between French and German traditions, and his characters, unable or not-wanting to fit in or understand their world, depict their otherness with foreign and otherworldly art. ![]() Alexandre Vialatte’s Battling le ténébreux occupies a strange space between worlds and between languages. ![]()
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