ABSTRACT
Claude Louis-Combet is a former seminary student who lost his faith, became a philosophy teacher, a translator, and above all the author—to use his own words—of “fables, mythobiographies, as well as phantasmatic and oneiric narratives.” Because Louis-Combet mixes mystical and sexual themes, invokes ancient myths and transgressive primitive rituals, examines Christian values with devastating seriousness, and deploys “extreme characters,” his deeply provocative fictions have incited many French critics to call him the direct inheritor of Pierre Klossowski and Georges Bataille. Never neglecting the sacred, Louis-Combet conjures up doomed characters who have no other choice than to proceed ever further down a path of no return, a path which nonetheless promises a definitive experience of ecstatic sex, or ecstatic death, and often both. The well-documented incestuous relationship between Trakl and his sister, Margarete, of course provided a perfect topic for Louis-Combet, who borrowed his vivid title from the poet’s prose text “Revelation and Downfall.”.
