Altered states of consciousness: the fantastic fiction of Jean Lorrain

Abstract

The fantastic is a fictional narrative genre in which occur unverifiable or irreproducible events in the referential reality. However, unlike other genres such as the marvellous or the fairy tales, we are faced with a story in which these events are perceived as supernatural in the same space-time of the text, which leads us to question the reasons why European authors from the 19^th century have invested so much of their time and efforts in their production. We adopted a social-cognitive approach according to which every narrative, textual or discursive genre is a social-cognitive response to a social-cultural contingency that, at this historical moment, is the end of a society based on vertical time (magical mentality), and its conflict with that is guided by horizontal time (scientific mentality). In general, fantastic fiction writers play with readers' confirmation bias, presenting recurring situations in everyday normality, such as altered states of consciousness and random coincidences, which are seen as manifestations of the supernatural in referential reality. Jean Lorrain (1855-1906) was a French author who, in his fantastic tales, made extensive use of altered states of consciousness, frequently  triggered by the consumption of hallucinogenic substances, to present to his readers the idea that in the heart of the Belle Époque they could open the ‘doors of perception’ and see the supernatural truth under the veil of everyday normality.