SOURCE: “ Michel de Ghelderode's La Balade du Grand Macabre: The Triumph of Life,” in Before His Eyes: Essays in Honor of Stanley Kauffmann, edited by Bert Cardullo, University Press of America, 1986, pp. 51-55.

In the following essay, Piette argues that Ghelderode achieves his greatest thematic unity in La Balade du Grand Macabre.

Death is omnipresent in Michel de Ghelderode's theater, a recurrent theme that often betrays his inclination toward the gloomy and the gruesome. American audiences are probably more familiar with the dark and biting irony of Pantagleize, set, in 1929, “on the morrow of one war and the eve of another” and intended by the dramatist as “a farce to make you sad.”¹ Mademoiselle Jaïre, written in 1934, presents an even darker embodiment of that theme: the sexual frenzy of the protagonist Blandine after she rises from the dead at times verges on necrophilia and is the epitome...