C.-F. Ramuz's La beauté sur la terre (1927) is a novel of otherness because of its main character, Juliette, a young Cuban orphan who suddenly finds herself in a village on the shores of the Léman lake. Cultural otherness, but above all, as the novel little by little seems to express, otherness of nature: Juliette appears to many characters (and perhaps to the reader) as the embodiment of Beauty - a new Aphrodite. This paper sets itself the task of studying the textual devices by means of which such a "divine" aura is conferred on Juliette. In the first place, the system of portraits in the novel is discussed, together with the traits belonging to the main character's description; the former are then related to the text's particular narrative structure, being perceived as its effects; finally, this narrative structure is itself considered in its generic scope as one of the constitutive dimensions of a poetics of the fantastic, as C.-F. Ramuz was able to devise.
Ramuz; poetics; portrait; ocularization; focalization; genre the fantastic; otherness