Following a recent post in which I discussed Michel Tournier's short story Le nain rouge [click here], I received an email from a reader expressing disappointment that I didn't address the tale's overt anchondroplasiaphobia and malicious stereotyping of little people as monstrous and malevolent.
That's true and is, I suppose, a legitimate concern: maybe I should have said something about how the figure of the dwarf functions within the mytho-cultural imagination and maybe challenged some of the language used by Tournier to describe Lucien Gagnero.
Having said that, it would be tricky to portray the latter in a positive or sympathetic light. Not because of his dwarfism, but because he strangles and rapes a woman; cruelly humiliates and sodomises her husband; displays a worrying desire to surround himself with children under twelve; and fantasises about being the kommandant of a Nazi concentration camp.
In brief, Lucien is a depraved and sadistic psychopath - although, that of course, is precisely the negative stereotype identified on TV Tropes [click here].
Still, isn't it preferable to inspire fear and be despised as inhuman, than to be seen merely as a pint-sized figure of fun ...?
Notes
[1] Formerly believed to be a portrait of Sebastián de Morra, a dwarf-jester at the court of Philip IV of Spain, it is now - thanks to recently discovered documentary evidence - thought to be another buffoon known as El Primo. The red robe that the figure wears reminds one of the huge crimson bathrobe that Lucien Gagnero drapes around himself and which helps trigger his metamorphosis from a little person into an imperial dwarf, full of the courage of his own monstrosity.
See: Michel Tournier, 'The Red Dwarf', in The Fetishist, trans. Barbara Wright, (Minerva, 1992), pp. 61-74.
