Le paysage et l’expérience du numineux dans les récits autobiographiques de George Sand

Abstract

In 1917 Rudolf Otto proposed the word “numinous” to denote the irrational side of religious experience, experience that is an apprehension of a mysterium tremendum et fascinans. In the same way Edmund Burke or Immanuel Kant, who theorised the aesthetics of the sublime, spoke of this kind of delicious horror that man feels when faced with that which surpasses him and makes him aware of his smallness before enormity, defined by Otto as «that which is not normal, that which is disturbing». The sublime sombre of romantic landscapes and the numinous appear to be very closely-linked concepts. Moreover, George Sand always displayed religious and spiritual concerns which, whilst they may have evolved over the years, are nevertheless still successors to the theories of Pierre Leroux or Robert de Lamennais. However, one can distinguish in these texts a need for the Absolute, an impetus towards God revealed in the descriptions of landscapes. On the following pages our aim was, moving away from the writer’s novelistic production, to ponder over the Sandian landscapes as described in her travel diaries and in other autobiographical texts. We will see how the way George Sand experienced nature and the grand brings her nearer to this absolute presence which enables us to speak of experience of the numinous. A strong presence of Christian symbolism confirms the presence of a homo religiosus behind the writer. The landscapes described in this way show themselves to be sites steeped in numinous power where the narrator encounters the Wholly Other.