Annotated Bibliography of Texts on Fantasy
Note: These are notes I wrote for my own benefit while working on my honours. As Todorov, Rabkin and Jackson wrote the seminal texts on fantasy and the fantastic I included extended descriptions of each chapter of their work. The texts by Cornwell, Armitt and Donald extend those arguments. The others are more specific, but I highly recommend Ziolkowski's book.
Note: These are notes I wrote for my own benefit while working on my honours. As Todorov, Rabkin and Jackson wrote the seminal texts on fantasy and the fantastic I included extended descriptions of each chapter of their work. The texts by Cornwell, Armitt and Donald extend those arguments. The others are more specific, but I highly recommend Ziolkowski's book.
Overview
Ziolkowski, in Disenchanted Images: A Literary Iconology, traces the gradual fading of belief in the magical properties of animated statues, haunted portraits and magic mirrors, and argues that these magical images have been separated from their original magical traditions and reworked. Ziolkowski sees this process, which he calls “disenchantment,” as having passed through four stages. First, in the Middle Ages supernatural elements were accepted. Second, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rationalism and common sense indicated that the supernatural was an impossibility, while a philosophical romanticism thought that natural matter could be animated. Third, at the end of the Romantic period, there was an ambiguity around the supernatural: an impulse to provide rational explanations coupled with a refusal to deny the possibility of the supernatural. Fourth, in the twentieth century, magic was “internalized and transferred from the image into the mind of the observer” (76) becoming merely the wishful dreams of narrators. For Ziolkowski, magical images now exist in the form of “pure fantasy, horror fiction, and travesty” (65), a conclusion shared by other theorists of the fantastic, such as Todorov and Jackson, who are specifically interested in post-Romantic secular texts.
Certainly, people are now mostly aware of magic as a literary figure in fantasy films and novels. Indeed, the genres of “high fantasy,” sword-and-sorcery “heroic” fantasy, literary fantasy, and sometimes even horror, are often understood as being recognisable by the presence of magic and/or magicians. Ursula Le Guin's “Changing Kingdoms: A Talk For the Fourteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Marx 17-21, 1993,” offers “a list of icons or motifs or commonplaces of twentieth-century fantasy ” which includes:
Magic : a gift and/or skill which may be learned. Magic enables the user to perform acts not in accordance with natural law as described by science, though the techniques of magic obey certain laws of magic. ( Trajectories of the Fantastic 4)
However, while it is an accepted convention that “magic is possible in the world of fantasy and the exact nature of this ambient magic strongly influences the narrative” ( Encyclopaedia of Fantasy and Science Fiction 616), there is usually no assertion that magic exists in the world beyond the narrative. As David Pringle argues in The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction , fantasy concerns itself with “impossible things—magical, supernatural, arbitrary, wish-fulfilling events or places or entities” providing us with “impossible wonders” (11). This assumes “the standard psychological (non-literary) application of the term ‘fantasy'” (Cornwell 32) as a manifestation of an individual's (denied and/or repressed) desire. This application is “represented in narrative sequences as day-dream, pipe dreams, nightmares, reveries, musing—down to wishful thinking, dreads or mere musings” (32). While fantasy may express a desire for cultural change, it does not describe how this change can come about, expecting, instead, that its impractical assertions of will and desire will be immediately gratified by some “magical” transformation.
By contrast, many science fiction writers and theorists, such as Pringle, argue that science fiction tends to be “rational,” and to explain or argue the basis of a changed world. Unlike fantasy, it dramatises the need to reason through the possibilities of a situation and then pragmatically assert one's will and desire in accordance with realistic objectives and expectations.
However, in journals like Extrapolation and Science Fiction Studies , “science fiction” (or SF), “fantasy,” and/or the “fantastic,” are discussed side by side. Many contemporary theorists of “fantasy” and the “fantastic” tend to define fantasy as a “trans-generic literary quality” (31) or mode opposed to, or at least different from, “mimeticism.” Neil Cornwell, for example, argues that most theorists of “fantasy” and the “fantastic” agree in the assumption that “reality” is a linguistic construct, with foundations in human perception and fear, and that fantasy reveals or exposes the exclusions and taboos of that “reality” and the limits of the dominant cultural order (26-27). Certainly, when they refuse to conform to the dominant ideology of scientific rationality or conventions of “realism,” fantasies can protest and compensate for lack resulting from very “real” cultural constraints and can have “a subversive influence for social change” ( Jackson 27).
Yet fantasies “can, in [their] pure escapist form, also serve as a conservative or repressive force” (27), “expelling their desire and frequently displacing it into religious longing and nostalgia” (9). According to Jackson, fantasies like those of W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien have a “nostalgic, humanist vision” which looks back “to a lost moral and social hierarchy, which their fantasies attempt to recapture and revivify” (2). This lost past is often figured as a form of European feudalism, some early stage of market capitalism, or some pastoral Golden Age. Fantasy, so defined, has much in common with Jameson's notion of ideology, in that ideology is not only historically and linguistically specific, it also has a utopian element which is recast nostalgically and/or conservatively. Science fiction texts, such as Star Trek, are fantasies (are ideological) because their stereotypical “outer [social] space” is articulated in/by the same cultural codes or “reality” as the stereotypical “inner [psychic] space” of fantasy. Though science fiction texts project their fantasies in the future, they tend to extrapolate from the present social order and/or hark back to some ideal past.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic. A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Cleveland, USA: The Press of Western Reserve University, 1973.
Todorov tries to identify fantasy as a genre according to structuralist principles, and his argument indicates some correlations between theories of the fantastic, magic and primitive thinking (and provides many departure points for other theorists in this bibliography).
In “Literary Genres,” Todorov argues that “every literary study must participate in a double movement: from the particular work to literature generally (or genre)” (7) and vice versa. He spends some time considering Northrop Frye's five six points put forward in Anatomy of Criticism , his principal concern being that literature is a closed system that does not refer to anything but itself. He then deconstructs Frye's classification of genre according to “the modes of fiction”, regarding the relationship between hero and reader; verisimilitude; comedy and tragedy; archetypes (romance, irony, comedy and tragedy; drama, lyric poetry and prose; intellectual and personal, introvert and extrovert. Focusing on “the modes of fiction”, Northrop comes up with five genres, which Todorov calls “historical genres”; Todorov on the other hand enumerates thirteen logically possible genres, or permutations, based on the divisions or oppositions according to which Northrop constructs genres, and Todorov considers these logically possible permutations as “theoretical genres”. For Todorov these divisions or oppositions are fairly arbitrary, and often borrowed from philosophy, psychology, social ethics. They consequently lead outside of literature, which suggests the need to foreground the divisions according to which we construct, or demarcate literary genres, or we may end up moving outside of our legitimate authority from which we are basing our arguments. Todorov notes that some theoriests consider structuralism as articulating structures or divisions at the ontological level, others argue it articulates them at the level of concepts, or mental constructs; Frye, he argues, moves towards the former. For Todorov, to seek the structures on the level of observable images is to refuse all certain knowledge, but the mental abstract or structure is static according to its own logical definitions. Texts may or may not conform or deviate according to that structure, so that what is being discussed is probability: will an indeterminate text meet the criteria of a particular genre? He concludes by offering three theories about genre: first , every theory of genre is based on a hypothesis concerning the nature of literary work (verbal, syntactic and semantic categories, these terms correlate with “point of view”; “composition”; and “theme”); second , we must choose upon what level to locate literary structures (Todorov chooses an abstract manifestations, mental constructs); third , the concept of genre must be qualified according to theoretical genre, historical genre and the consequent distinction between elementary and complex genres. Todorov thus argues we must oscillate between phenomena (individual texts) and abstract theory (genres), and keep that our categories may take us outside of literature, indicating that literature says what other systems of meaning can say, thus devaluing literature as saying something that something else does or can not say.
In “Definition of the Fantastic,” Todorov argues, first , that the fantastic involves a hesitation on the readers part between a natural and a supernatural explanation. Second , the fantastic requires that the reader identify with a character, or narrator, and that we share the hesitation with that character. Third , the reader of the fantastic must not be able to explain away supernatural events as allegorical or poetic, that is, cannot dismiss events as being analogous to “ideas,” or as verbal play, for there would be no hesitation regarding the status of the events. He then considers other definitions: the presence of the supernatural; reader's reactions, for example fear and perplexity, terror, wonder, surprise and so one; the fantastic as an analogue to the author's “unconscious”; as an opposition to reality or naturalism. He offers two varieties of the fantastic by reference to Hoffman and Nerval, focusing on ambiguity and style: the illusory, when we are uncertain as to how to explain events that we perceived, and the character with which we identify is uncertain as to whether he is mad or not; and the imaginary, when are not even sure if the events have happened, because we know the character is mad but do not know if his madness might be a form of higher reason.
In “The Uncanny and the Marvellous,” Todorov pursues the distinction between the “fantastic” and other genres. When texts have a rational explanation for the “fantastic” event, they belong to the genre of the “uncanny”: accident, coincidence, dreams, tricks and prearranged apparitions, sensory illusions, madness (resolvable into real/imaginary and real/illusory) erode the sense of ambiguity. In its pure state, the uncanny invokes a certain response (incredible, extraordinary, shocking, singular, disturbing or unexpected, and characteristic of horror); its sentiments originate in certain themes linked to ancient taboos, and Todorov takes recourse to Freud to define its primal source. The difference between the ghost and detective story, in their uncanny state, is on the emphasis on reaction (to the ghost) or solution (of the crime); Todorov gives the example of one of John Dickson Carr's texts in which “the entire supernatural atmosphere had been created by the murderer in order to confuse the case, to avert suspicion” (51). When the text accepts the supernatural, a text is in the realm of the “marvellous”, one common form of which is the fairy tale, though there are other forms: the hyperbolic, exotic, instrumental and the scientific marvellous. (In Todorov's own terms, it is difficult to justify the scientific marvellous as being any different from uncanny.)
In “Poetry and Allegory” he explores his third criterion for the definition of the fantastic - that it lies between “reality” and “literature” and must not be read as allegory or poetry. The most relevant point is on page 60 where, in differentiating what we would call semiosis and mimesis, he implies - but does not specify or pursue - that the fantastic could exist in the structural ambiguity of the text, that is, at the level of the signifer; Sanchez takes this issue up in “Inside the Fishbowl,” without reference to this part of Todorov's text
In “Discourse of the Fantastic,” Todorov considers the “syntactical level” of the fantastic; that is, he considers how structural unity is achieved (and consequently made ambiguous) at the level of: the utterance, whereby the fantastic “originates” rhetorical figures, that is, the supernatural only exists in words: “the supernatural thereby becomes a symbol of language, just as the figures of rhetoric do, and the figure is, as we have seen, the purest form of literality”); the speech act, focusing on the narrator, or “I”, as facilitating identification but bringing into being the question of false testimony or limited perspective, doubt and authentication; third, the syntactical, focusing on the dependence of the fantastic on temporality; “[i]f we know the end of a fantastic narrative before we begin it, its whole functioning is distorted, for the reader can no longer follow the process of identification step by step”; in other words, the fantastic depends on the accumulation of effects so that a particular kind of surprise and effect facilitates the experience of hesitation).
In “Themes of the Fantastic: Introduction,” Todorov considers the “semantic” or “thematic” level of fantastic texts, that is, those “uncanny events” which, though they do not define the fantastic, are necessary for it to exist. Todorov argues that they have three functions: to produce a particular effect (“fear, or horror, or simply curiosity - which the other genres or literary forms cannot provoke”); maintaining suspense, and a particularly dense organisation of plot; it describes a fantastic universe, where the description and what is described are the same, for the universe does not exist beyond the text. Privileging what we would call semiotics over mimeticism, he considers classificatory schemes for the themes of the fantastic to determine whether they are limited or limitless in number; he argues that the fantastic events explore “limits”, between “the purport of the supernatural and its perception” and where “the supernatural provokes such anxiety, such horror, that we scarcely manage to distinguish what constitutes it (necessitating a line between stress on the object itself and the reaction to the object). In terms of the role of ideology, he considers a third, more ambiguous position in which: “perception constitutes a screen rather than removes one” (105). One revealing quote I focus on is his decision to “leave aside the implications concerning ‘primitive mentality' and concern ourselves only with what touches upon literary analysis” (97), for it is precisely his structurally approach and lack of commitment to psychology and cultural context that Jackson criticises, and is interesting in the study of “magic” as Tambiah theorises it.
In “Themes of the Self” Todorov considers “the fragility of the limit between matter and mind” which engenders “a special causality, pan-determinism; multiplication of the personality; collapse of the limit between subject and object; and the transformation of time and space; these “fundamental themes” correlate to descriptions of psychotic or infant states (and, I would clarify, are related to attempts to describe “mystical” or “paranormal” forms of thinking in terms of the modes of causality identifiable at early psychological stages, see Alcock's Parapsychology: Science or Magic? : A Psychological Perspective ). The stress here is on “perception-consciousness”, and relationship to the senses, especially “themes of vision,” which Todorov relates to mirrors, glass and other reflective surfaces (see Lacan) where clear reason is distorted by the duplicity of the mirror, implying a true and false (indirect, distorted, subverted) perception (which we can parallel with theories of true and false ideology). The term “visionary” implies this “fruitful ambiguity” between occult vision (sight of the non-visible) and a loss of vision in the physical world (blindness of the visible); themes of the self involve man observing and making sense of the world.
The “Themes of the Other” are, for Todorov, organised around sexual desire. The fantastic describes desire “in its excessive forms as well as its various transformations . . . or perversions”; here corpses, vampirism and other cruel, violent and socially unacceptable forms of sadism or masochism are linked to the theme of love, but involve the socially impossible , while other forms of desire deal with the physically impossible . The “themes of the other” then are related to man and his desire, that is, man and his unconscious (or, even, themes of discourse). “Man no longer remains an isolated observer, he enters into a dynamic relation with other men,” thus themes of the other involve man acting in the world.
In “Themes of the Fantastic: Conclusion” Todorov argues there is an incompatibility between the two themes; a distinction between a scientific, objective structure (genre) and a interpretative, subjective meaning (poetics); structure has to do with literature in general, the other to do with particular work; not merely a distinction between form and content because forms can have an interpretative content assigned to them (iamb implying gayness). He is not interested in assigning particular images with particular meanings, for example the devil with sex, he merely signifies a co-presence, recognising polysemy. The analogy between the child's understanding of self (as represented by adults, eg Piaget) and moves towards a recognition of the subjects accession or acquisition of language, shift from an absence of distinction between mind and matter, subject and object, from pre-intellectual concepts of causality, space and time to the adult's conception: ability to narrate and anticipate actions by verbal representation as opposed to an eternal present of childhood or primitive states. For him, childhood desire lacks an external desire because it is autoerotic; in drug, mystical states the object is the whole world, being panerotic; between the two is “normal” desire. The third analogy of themes of the self is psychosis, or schizophrenia, a private or anti-language which cuts oneself from others; thus links together psychotic, drugged, infant and primitive and the mystic. For Freud the distinction between neurotic (conflict between ego and id) and psychotic (conflict between ego and reality), themes of the self are psychotic, themes of the other are neurotic; themes of the self are based on a break in the limits between the psychic and the physical; perception and desire seem to coincide (see Maitre); themes of the other involve repression, hence the unconscious. Hence perception-consciousness is opposed to unconscious impulses. He is not interested in translating meaning (fixing a meaning, strict correlation between idea and meaning) rather linking together meanings, the mechanism of language, its internal function. Literature should not simply be a symptom of an author, we should focus on the text: we don't need psychological and biographical information about the author for the distinction between individual and collective unconscious is not relevant if the two mingle. He finds an analogy between social structures and two networks of themes, an opposition between religion and magic (self and other):
while religion tends towards metaphysics and is absorbed in the creation of ideal images, magic through a thousand fissures, emerges from the mystical life from which it draws its forces to mingle with profane life and desert it. It tends to the concrete even as religion tends towards the abstract ( ).
Mystical meditation is a-verbal, whereas magic cannot do without language. Hence there is an opposition between vision and discourse: themes of self cover the possibility of breaking down the limit between literal and figurative meaning; themes of the other are formed out of the relation established between two interlocutors during the discourse. For Todorov the self is present in the other, but not the converse. This is, I would note, not in accordance with present psychoanalytic theory. Todorov's division between self and other is thus bogus; we would now recognise both themes as related, and that the fantastic invites a dissolution of “self” and “other”, as Rosemary Jackson mentions in Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion (52).
In “Literature and the Fantastic” Todorov says that rather than focusing on the “internal” aspects of the fantastic, he will place it in context. First he considers the social function of the supernatural: its recourse to the supernatural to avoid legal repercussions when dealing with taboo or socially unacceptable topics; psychoanalysis, however, has for Todorov taken over this role, and we can deal directly with subversive desire, rather than through veiled types. Psychoanalysis has replaced and thereby made useless the literature of the fantastic. Themes of the fantastic literature are now the themes of psychological investigations. Psychoanalysis also recognises pandeterminism, at least in man's psychic activity. In a consideration of the literary function of the supernatural: pragmatic: disturbs, alarms, or keeps the reader in suspense; semantic: constitutes its own manifestation, it is an autodesignation; syntactic function is that it enters into the development of the narrative: the supernatural is a break of the stability of the narrative, instigates a new order, breaks the fixed laws which immobilise narrative. Both social and literary function of the supernatural then coincide with a transgression of the law.
We can argue that Todorov is unable to engage in psychoanalytic explanations of the fantastic because for him psychoanalyses supersedes the genre of the fantastic. With its appearance the fantastic no longer says what nothing else can: psychoanalysis can express sexual and other taboos. However this conclusion is problematised when we consider the ongoing influence of the fantastic, the juxtaposition of the fantastic and psychoanalysis, and the way they work with/influence one another through mutual critique (see Pynchon's use of psychoanalysis in The Crying of Lot 49 ). Also, psychoanalysis is insufficient to describe the experience of existentialism: the fantastic dramatises what psychoanalysis says . In Todorov's terms, while it may “say” the same thing in terms of ideas, or content, it “speaks” to a reader in a different way - which his discussion of the “effects” on the genre otherwise makes obvious.
Todorov concludes his analysis by considering what form the fantastic has taken in the contemporary, arguing that in texts such as Kafka's Metamorphosis the supernatural is accepted, so that there is no hesitation. We are exposed to a supernatural event, and gradually recognise its “naturalness” in the narrative world - the reader undergoes an “adaptation” from being stunned by the fantastic moment to being indifferent to it. Indeed for Todorov the “fantastic object is here no longer some supernatural event, but the average, normal man; the fantastic is the rule, not the exception; we are “confronted with a generalised fantastic which swallows up the world of the book and the reader along with it.” In other words, the world is now fantastic rather than certain events, because we have lost faith in the real as an empirically accessible object and question the real/unreal distinction at an ontological level. (This is an argument we can see taken up in Csisery-Ronay's article.)
Rabkin, Eric S. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1976.
Rabkin's project is to consider the fantastic as an “affect” consequent upon certain psychological principles. In “The Fantastic and Fantasy,” the section most relevant to my project, he argues that the experience of the fantastic involves a transgression of the “ground rules” of a narrative, a 180 o turn in a narrative. 90 o or 120 o turnabouts, “participate in the complex of feelings of surprise, shock, delight, fear, and so on that marks the fantastic, but are not themselves truly fantastic; they are flavoured by the fantastic” (12). The fantastic involves the “dis-expected” (which he relates to the seemingly irrelevant) more than the “un-expected” (which he relates to the truly irrelevant). There are three classes of signals here: character, narrator and “implied author,” all of which necessitate reference to the “ground rules” of the narrative, which requires the participation of the reader (we can relate these to Todorov's theory of identification with a narrator) who recognises the texts' “grapholects” (the texts signification of a cultural or historical set of conventions to which it refers). Rabkin proceeds to define Fantasy by reference to fairy tales and Tolkein's theory of the Faerie, or a “Magic” World of Enchantment, arguing that Fantasy as a genre is totally saturated with the fantastic, so that it becomes invisible. While there is a 180 o turn between the “real” world and the world of Fantasy, there is no structural contradiction contained in the text itself. Fantasy, especially the fairy tale element, involves paired opposites, not reversal. We could rephrase this argument by saying that any “opposition” in the fantastic does not involve a polarisation of any two elements as two halves of an organic binary, but turns established oppositions upside down or creates new oppositions against those oppositions which, temporarily at least, deny the organicism characteristic of binary oppositions in Fantasy genre. The problem with Rabkin's argument here is that he does not account for contradictions in texts which we might describe as significant in terms of ideology, not the fantastic; that is, he assumes that the “ground rules” in each text are internally consistent - except when the fantastic breaks them.
In “The Fantastic and Escape” Rabkin argues that escapist literature is psychologically useful. “We make believe because we want to believe; to accept belief, to suspend belief” (43), perhaps because we are bored. We participate in the fantastic; we do not evade responsibility. Seriousness is not necessarily better than escape, and escape is not an indiscriminate rejection of order. “Escape literature, according to the conventional wisdom, means that no higher purpose than amusement” (44); and “[t]he theme of a work may seem trivial, its characters uninteresting, its conflicts irrelevant, but if it offers escape it is in that regard structurally akin to some of the world's great literature” (44-5). Rabkin uses the example of David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus , in which the reader makes the “voyage” to Arcturus and across the land of Tormance not merely to overcome boredom, but to overcome the main character's specific brand of moral boredom. Tormance is a fantastic environment, “a map of the underside of man's mind, the hidden world where a morality worn smooth by the repetition of an ordered life retains yet its crags and sharp edges” (48). Rabkin also uses the example of Poe's “The Black Cat”, arguing that “[a]lthough in the extratextual world guilt often goes unpunished, in this escape literature, we know from the very first fantastic portraiture that guilt will be punished. This is an ordered world, a world that despite its horror gives us faith” (53), so that escape leads us to the “truth of the human heart” (54). Rabkin also uses Vladimir Propp's study of the morphology of the fairy tale, which sees all fairy tales as identical in form, offering a form of order, “an escape from our own . . . but through a diametric, fantastic reversal, so that the narrative world actually explores the underside of our conscious world, The world of escape is a controlled world, controlled not by the arch-fiend within us, but by the conventions of the fantastic genre itself” (57). A world apparently offering escape from our own really speaks directly to us. In detective fiction he identifies a shift from a problem , for example the problem of evil, to the puzzle , the puzzle of evil. The sufficiently skilled detective can always bring the world to a moral attention. (We can argue here that there is an opposition between the post-modern sublime - dramatically dealing with a problem in which there are no underlying moral codes to guide us - and pre-modern sublime in which there is an assumed correspondence between certain images in the world we see and an underlying, omnipresent morality in the “occult” world; the modern sublime is here a variation of the pre-modern, but with a focus on the distortion of the images through which we determine the correspondences). Rabkin also offers the example of Chesterton's Father Brown series in which there is an overt moral aspect to the escapism. Chesterton wants the escape world of the detective narrative to become our actual world. If the escape world is based on a fantastic reversal then that escape need not be a descent into triviality but message of psychological consolation, continuing diametric reversal of the ground rules within a narrative world. Pornographic forms of escapism here may reveal much about the writer or reader, but do not give a new perspective on the mental constraints from which they seek escape. In short, if we know the world to which a reader escapes, then we know the world from which he comes (a statement analogous to utopias as being heuristic devices, not blueprints, where we are in the present more than where things will go in the future).
“The Fantastic and Perspective” Rabkin uses the fantastic to study the diametric opposition of what it is escaping from. “The study of the fantastic provides new tools for the analysis of worldview” (74). We find cultural taboos by considering social transgressions. Couple of examples, focuses on high Victorian culture and three escapists along the lines of: i) William Morris, who critiques a notion of history; ii) George Macdonald who criticises religion; iii) C.L.Dodgson (Lewis Carrol), who critiques notions of science. He synthesises the three notions of history, religion and science through Samuel Butler's Erewond. “Although the tale proceeds with the kennings (rock-wall for mountain) and twisted syntax of a presumably magic time, . . . is oppressed by a not-at-all magical problem” “Hyperborean myth” (91), “We can divide concepts of time into three gross types mythic time, aveum - angel time, history [linear-progressive, repetitive cycle, or a progressive spiral]” (92-3). He talks of the cult of the child, and how “homo sapiens is perhaps more strongly geared than any other species to accept outgroup behaviour from its young” (97). The Victorians, conflating several passages from the bible, saw children as “innocently wise” and “the notion that a person might regain child-like innocence, a notion approved by scripture, was a consoling thought” (101)
“The Fantastic and Genre Criticism” he foregrounds that genre can be defined variously, and the choice of method reflects the perspective of the reader. “The wide range of works which we have already seen fit to call, in one degree or another, fantastic, is large, much too large to constitute a single genre” (117). Some genres are entirely fantastic, others can be related by degrees of its use; he wants a consideration of the fantastic to complement the normal study of genres. Science fiction exists when “a work belongs to the genre of science fiction if its narrative world is at least somewhat different from our own and if that difference is apparent against a background of an organised body of knowledge” (120). He argues that the body of knowledge is not necessarily physics or chemistry but may be anthropology, history, economic determinism, scientific evolution and so forth. “What is important to the definition of science fiction is not the appurtenances of ray guns and lab coats but the scientific habits of mind, the idea that paradigms do control our view of all phenomena, that within these paradigms all normal problems can be solved, and that normal occurrences must either be explained or initiate the search for a better (usually more inclusive) paradigm” (121). In this sense science fiction is fantastic, as he argues in relation to Theodore Sturgeone's More than Human , Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood End . He imagines a continuum of the fantastic that arranges all works within the genre of science fiction according to their degree of the use of the fantastic. In doing so he tends to quantify the fantastic. He suggests cross-generic comparisons (and seems to equate the fantastic with popularity at several points, but doesn't address the contradictions). For Rabkin, Dystopia as part of utopia, and in his classification scheme his demarcations are: author's approval or disapproval, extrapolation or reversal, and whether or not it “recall[s] an organised body of knowledge” or is “an unstructured collection of contemporary perspectives” (144). Satire is inherently fantastic, and depends on narrative worlds reversing perspectives of the world outside the narrative; its style tends towards irony “stating the reverse of the truth as though it were clear truth” (146). Rabkin's diagram shows three overlapping genres to construct a “super-genre” that contains works along a limited segment of the continuum of the fantastic. He implies Todorov's distinction between theoretical and historical genres, but does not address this, implying that all theoretical genres should exist historically. He argues we can compare two segments in his “super-genre” to construct hypothesis, for example that in science fiction “man is ultimately beyond his control” and that, in satire “men are always responsible for their actions” (149).
In “Fantastic and Literary History” Rabkin argues how a change of perspective can lead to new languages. He talks here about the shift from rejection to acceptance of mechanical metaphors in the Victorian era, and goes so far as to say that “stylistic developments are the paragraphs of literary history, changes in the use of the fantastic are the chapters” (153). He talks of the growing self-reflexiveness in detective fiction. After WWI, justice was further de-emphasised and the literary formulaic play-qualities of the puzzle were strengthened “As the conventions of the genre become better known to the reader new works in a genre must become more and more fantastic to create the same effect” (164), hence the alignmnent of the fantastic with the thriller and the supernatural. There is a shift towards puzzles being still solved and the solutions resulting in the distribution of injustice. His discussion of Borges “Garden of Forking Paths,” Alaine Robbe-Grillet's “The Erasers,” moves into a discussion of the New Novel:
our literary history is much more complex than an ordered series of reflexes to cultural needs. Genres in part serve cultural needs by providing escape from prevailing perspectives and in part create new needs by inventing new escapes to oppose those that have worn out. The intra-literary history of genres and extra-literary history of readers together generate new genres and modify the perspectives held in the world by readers: this dialectic process, with its concentration on the fantastic complements normal literary history, which traditionally makes literature a reflex of historical moments (181).
He thus considers the artistic literary movement of Gothicism. The term “Gothic” was inverted from its meaning of barbarous and medieval, to meaning a term of praise in the Enlightenment, thence to meano a ghastly, ghostly supernatural element. Here, “from the roots of Shakespeare and the oriental tale, together with the rise of antiquarian interest and sentiment, English literature begat mainstream Gothicism; mainstream Gothicism, by becoming more fantastic, begat naturalised Gothicism; those two genres, by becoming more fantastic, begat satirised Gothicism; and these three genres, by yet another fantastic reversal, begat romanticised Gothicism” (187). For Rabkin, the development of genres has to do, then, with the way works use the fantastic.
In “Scope of the Fantastic” Rabkin argues that the fantastic is a basic mode of human knowing and that we can find parallels in non-narrative materials. He begins by discussing medieval poetry and gothic prose, then moves to the non-verbal example of architecture. Gothic architecture involved a need to “escape the metrical strictures of classical architecture and prescriptive architectural criticism” (195). He then discusses Middle Age gothic's three stages, and how religious movements privileged the moderation of the middle stage. “Ultimately, of course, through years of mutual association, the normative and the fantastic become reconciled; gothic is naturalised and Palladianism becomes less severe” (195). Using the example of Morris again, he argues the stress was on feeling rather than defining. “The fantastic worlds of gothic fiction were paralleled by the world of gothic poetry, gothic architecture, gothic landscape and gothic theology, and gothic painting” (202). “In every field of art, and in theology, and poetics too, we can see the need to break existing molds. This need expresses itself through the fantastic, thereby creating new possibilities and ultimately changing the molds. It is little wonder that we see an intimate relation among the uses of the fantastic in diverse media” (203). His argument appears to be teleological, but he doesn't place this teleology in its context, and does not explicate the telos . For him, “[i]t seems clear that at some crucial moments, artists must choose ‘between custom or innovation' . . a whole new way of seeing . . . the emergence of a new genre . . . a reversal of the world of conventions that had preceeded it” (207). He then correlates games, formulas and fictions that create fantastic worlds by offering diametric alternatives to a perceived reality. “The reality of life is chaos; the fantasy of man is order” (213). Art, for Rabkin, asserts wholeness out of life's chaos, and perspective involves keying out irrelevancies, or contradiction, to gain as sense of wholeness. In art, we assume there is wholeness in the conventions of a text. All art is therefore minimally fantastic, it “offers us a safe controlled world in which caution is unnecessary and where we can afford to suspend disbelief” (215). Self-reflexion is fundamental to human perception. Then curiously argues that “the uncanny is, of course, always fantastic” (222). He almost says that the uncanny and fantastic effects in art are commensurate, self-reflection, depth, mirrors of the self. He quotes from Freud's Totem and Taboo, regarding the decreasing omnipotence of thought towards a scientific attitude arguing that the fantastic is fundamental to a fundamental sector of our psychic lives (225-6). There is, here, a dark side to the fantastic as well as a light side: our deepest fears and shames can meet our greatest aspirations and finest hopes. He puts his theory of perspective and perception on the same level as Kuhn's “paradigm,” and argues “we make revolutionary scientific process only by fantastically reversing” paradigms (227). Fantasy is opposed to reality in the sans that on the one hand we have the universe, which is beyond words, and our perspective realities, our paradigms, that undergo change and are not bound by reality, whereby, “Man travels in fantastic worlds” (227).
In his conclusion, everything is seen as fantastic, and the term loses meaning and explanatory force; he seems to imply “reversals” are the explanation for all social change, or at least the major component. Kuhn's theories, and those of later theorists of discourse, are more likely to stress the many determinants of historical contexts which can lead to reversal, rather than abstracting the idea of the reversal itself and its manifestation to the choice of individual artists between convention and innovation. Most importantly, Rabkin tends to take his authority from things beyond literature, dismissing theorists like Todorov (he has a small footnote on Todorov on page 118) rather than debating with them.
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion . London and New York: Methuen, 1986.
Jackson's text advances on the theories of Todorov and Rabkin by arguing that the fantastic is not a genre, but a mode. The earlier part of her text summarises and criticises theories the fantastic up to Todorov and Rabkin, succinctly and intelligently; in the second half it tends towards tautology. Also, while she seems to be aware of the problems in the use of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, she does not elaborate these problems sufficiently. Most significantly, she too readily equates “ideology” with the “unconscious”. (If the fantastic is the underside of reason, and ideology is unconscious, it would logically follow that the fantastic was the ideology of the Enlightenment.)
In her introductory chapter, Jackson says that Fantasy has always been related to the imagination as being free from social and physical restraints. The tendencies were towards transcendentalism criticism, with popular fantasy considered as conservative, looking for a nostalgic past. However, when we locate it historically and culturally, she argues it is often subersive, utopian. Fantasy attempts to protest against, to compensate for, lack resulting from cultural constraints : even if it does not transform culture, it is a utopian act because of its oppositional nature, a site of resistence. It shows the unseen of culture, the ‘unreal' versus the ‘real', the ‘impossible' and ‘never happening', and is always culture specific. Jackson divides faery romance and moral allegory and so on from the ‘fantastic' noting that many fantasies repress or defuse the unconscious impulse while gaining power from it: “[t]heir original impulse may be similar but they move from it, expelling their desire and frequently displacing it into religious longing and nostalgia” (9). Jackson argues here that literary fantasies express unconscious drives, but that fantastic is, in a political sense, the most liberating form because it remains open, dissatisfied, endlessly desiring (9) I would note here that since I deal with the ideological ambivalence underlying signif.cations of magic, I deal with both “groups” of texts fairly equally - fantasy in its conservative as well as subversive forms - to foreground the way a tension between the nostalgic and utopian in single texts creates a “fantastic” hesitation on the part of the reader at an emotional level.
In the fist part of Chapter 2, “The Fantastic as Mode” “The Imagination in Exile” she notes that the term “fantasy” is protean and often applied to the non-realist text, the non-mimetic, a generalised “other”. This otherness is not necessarily anarchic or revolutionary, but can disturb, or create a sense of uneasiness or doubt over the “real”. Bakhtin, in his analysis of the fantastic, talked of Menippean literature, which, through its misrule, its conversations with the dead in the underworld and so on, permitted ultimate questions about social order. He linked it to the carnival, which brought together that which usually couldn't be connected, though Jackson notes that modern fantasy isn't communal like the menippea or carnival. It mixes together social forms - characteristic of the capitalist break of organic unity - producing plurality but not synthesis. Nonetheless, fantasy is not only escapist, but expresses social forms. Jackson relates this to the way fantasy gains new meanings in a post-Romantic, secularised context as a compensation for lost faith - even if only as a negative religion. As she notes in her introduction, “[f]rom about 1800 onwards, those fantasies produced in a capitalist, industrialised economy express some of the debilitating psychological effects of inhabiting materialistic culture” (4). I think it is interesting to consider what kind of tensions are inherent in that sentence as opposed to a liberal or Protestant perspective on materialisation. I would point out here the point that, in a secularised culture, religious-transcendental closure on meaning is no longer accessible and we acknowledge that meaning is mediated through or by man. There is a problem here for to say that the shift towards the psychological explanations for the fantastic means that there is only the imagination of man, that “there are no phantams, no succubi, no weeping fountains” (18) means we can mistakenly privilege the idealism of man, denying the fact there there is a real world (whether or not its objects are accessible).
In “The Real Under Scrutiny” Jackson argues that otherness, or the fantastic, is not located outside the real. Using the optical metaphor of paraxis, Jackson argues it is suspended between the real and unreal: it is relational to the real and rational, not irrational but anti-rational. It makes reason confront all that it traditionally refuses to encounter, thus showing it and the “real” to be arbitrary and shifting, open to alternatives. Contradictions surface, as evident in the oxymoronic tropes and themes like invisibility, impossibility, transformation, defiant illusion. It is consequently politically charged by nature, a negative rationality (24). I would point out that the unconscious of reason does not have a topological position, but is structurally opposition, “founded upon contradictions” (21).
In “The Marvellous, Mimetic and Fantastic” Jackson summarises and adds to Todorov's theory of the fantastic. Fantasy is usually defined as unreal, non-mimetic, but the fantastic in its pure form must create doubt about the real: it must be real enough to be unsettling, and not to fantastic to be unreal (27). Consequently, anxiety is part of its form as well as its content, and there is often an inbuilt skepticism to the story's contents. Fantasy, with its multiple viewpoints, its complex narratives, problematises vision and language: we find it hard to trust the seeing eye and the recording, speaking “I”. Jackson's is a shift from recognises fears from marvellous (religious) to the (fantastic) uncanny “in which strangeness is generated by unconscious forces” The questioning or problematisation of vision and language is brought up by translating the fanmtastic in cinema we've got camer's I which conflates objective documentary recording with the subjective vision through the narrator's : cinematic process is then fantastic. For example, in horror movies, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, sometime we do not know if it is merely just us looking through the camera, or if we are looking through the eyes of the monster, criminal-murderer, or another character: we sense the possible process of another consciousness, another intent (and the realisation is what action this consciousness will make us look upon). Tension or whether or not our eyes are our own, the narrator's, a characters etc. Problematises vision as knowledge.
The purely fantastic exists, then, between the super-real and the uncanny, strange because of the deceiving mind (32). Pure marvellous (some science fiction and romance); fantastic marvellous (eventually supernatural); fantastic uncanny (strangeness has a subjective origin). The fantastic (pure) is between the fantastic marvellous and the fantastic uncanny. But it is a mode which assumes different generic forms, and is found between: the marvellous - authoritative, confident, omniscient narrators, a passive relation to a completed history, implying evident truths; the mimetic - makes the implicit claim of equivalence between the represented fictional world and the “real” world outside the text; the fantastic - asserts realsm but presents the unreal - borrows the extravagence of the marvellous and the ordinariness of the mimetic. It is related to surrealism, but surrealism is marvellous, it usually has faith in a unified truth.
For Jackson, Todorov fails to consider the social and political implications of literary forms, his attention is confined to the effects of the text and the means of its operation. He doesn't relate text to cultural formations, focusing on poetics, not politics. For Jackson, the fantastic is not a literary genre seen diamagratically according to its relationshop to the marvellous and uncanny, she sees it as literary mode which manifests itself between the marvellous and mimetic. The mode assumes different generic forms, fantasy general, opposition to realism ( ).
In “Non-Signification” she argues that fantasy is the most “literary” kind of writing because it foregrounds its own signification: signs are capable of multiple interpretations, and truth vanishes as an effect of language. Bellemin-Noel's critique of Todorov suggests that this lack of meaningful signification characterises fantasy. A rhetoric of the unsayable, of the sublime, of the insufficiency of language, is present that harks back to the modernist gap between signification and meaning, with constant references to the unnameable “it”, “they”, “thing” etc, as Lovecraft makes obvious. There is a consequent tendency towards empty signifiers (or “absent paradigms” in Marc Angenot's terms), that is, words that do not have any referent (“jabberwock,” and so on), which Jackson terms non-signification, a recognition of the pre- or non-conceptual. When this function is naturalised by symbols, allegory etc it loses the power of this function. It is metanymic more than metaphoric, because things don't resemble other things they actually metamorphosise into them. For Lacan, metonymy bypasses social censure, obstacles etc. Usually, however, generic forms (romance, symbolic, allegory) hide the truly disturbing nature of non-signification (in some instances relagating it to politcally innocent child-like or feminine play).
In “Topography, Themes and Myths” she shows how the content of fantasies often mime their forms. Utopian literature creates secondary worlds rather than disrupt the present one. Fantasy creates or shows lack. In visible worlds the in-visible, un-seen, is unreal. But the collapse of perspective, surface, space ands time etc exposes the individual to the sublime. Fantasy here attempts to see things as the spaces between things (48), with attendant themes of invisibility, transformation, and good vs evil (49), making taboo desires explicit. It strives for a unity through disunity, annihilating difference through excessive transgression of differences.
Jackson forgrounds the centrality of language in structuring differnece. The naming of otherness is important to showing the limits of religious and political beliefs, cultural limits. Ex-nomination of the non-normal/normative as ‘evil' etc. Often externalises the evil/good to exorcise it. Difference is punishishable, and, as Jameson argues, difference precedes naming something as “evil”. The fantastic is ex-nominated as diabloic, demonic, an implied supernatural evil, motive “out there”. A shift from external to internal “others”, the self as self and other. Shift from human nature (solopsism) to the shifting processes of ideology, self and culture. Goethes demon shows an absence of meaning beneath culture, a negative version of the desire for unifity. Otherness is all that threatens to dissolve the world.
Corresponding to Todorov's two themes of fantasy, though articulating it far better, Jackson argues that fear is directed towards the self or the other in fantastic texts: in the former case, as in Frankenstein, the evil comes from within (and is then externalised); in the latter case, as in Dracula, the evil comes from beyond the self. Both themes push for a state of undifferentiation from the self/other, but the other is harder to contain than the self, so fantasies often try to replace cultural life with a total, absolute otherness.
Jackson reiterates Todorov's themes of self (vision, consciousness, perception) themes of the other (unconscious, desire, transgressions of). But “ one of the central thrusts of the fantastic is the attempt to erase this distinction itself, to resist separation and difference” p52. The I/not-I is not adequate as two separate themes since the fantastic deals with the collapse of the two: to divide the genre according to those two themes is miss the hesitation between I/not-I which Todorov sets up. They are subsumed by a common theme between the two in fantastic.
Evil is self-generated because language exists in the self-other process and “evil” is a linguistic term. Jackson here recognises that external forces, whether they can be identified or not, effect us, though of course to talk of us-them is arbitrary (52). Howevr the distinction between the demonic as being generated by the self or as being imposed from outside, is not explored in the sense that “just because we are paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you”. Identification of cause-effect chains is arbitrary, macroscopic locii in perception, but action still occurs, and there are relatively autonomous cause-effect chains which we can predict practically, if not in the last instance, in our field.
In Chapter 3, “Psychoanalytic Perspectives,” Jackson argues that ideology is “profoundly unconscious” ( ). Fantasy tries to find a language desire so we need to theorise desire to understand fantasy, and relate fantasy's effects to the cultural construction of desire and ideological issues. (See Dowling's introduction to Jameson's The Political Unconscious .)
Jackson notes that the “uncanny” is defined variably as “disturbing vacuous area . . . When the divine image is lost faith in” (Heidegger). From the not quite safe to trust to the “dangerous, unsafe” (64). For Freud what is frightening is the effect of projecting unconscious desires and feards into the environment and on to other people and things. Hidden anxieties in the subject are played out, old and long familiar returns. There are two definitions here: i) at home - and its negation “not at home”; ii) what is obscured, hidden - and its negation, uncovering what is hidden and transforming the familiar into the unfamiliar. The personal repressed appears in other, protected from the self. “Demon” as reification of sense of horror in self, reification of fear. But Cixous advanced on Freud's reading of Hoffman, argues that there is a relation between fantsy and the real linking theme and form, both dissolve closed structures (68). The uncanny empties the canny, a sense of death. Animistic -> religious/love objects -> scientific/reality principle. So the uncanny is regression to animistic belief systems. The vicarious experience is conservative, while the act is not, literature as sublimation. For Foucault, “the literature of transgression occurpies the place where the sacred used to play, where transgression takes limit to the edge of its being” (79). Against existential emptiness, Edgar Allen Poe “peculiarly full and empty” “dynamic and static” (80).
Metamorphosis has shifted from being involved in will and divine intercession to being without meaning and “progressively without the will or desire of the subject” (81), a shift from metamorphosis as being “utopian dreams of superhuman or magical transformations of the subject” to a fantastic sense of the slipping of the object into the subject without redemption, perverse imagary/horror/monstrosity, desintegrated, multiplicity of subject. Changes are, in short, without teleology. Entropy and metamorphosis relate to desire for undifferentiation. Jackson extends this in “Disintegrated Bodies” by discussing bourgeois realism and the stable character as “an ideological concept” (83), with reference to Cixous', “The Character of ‘Character'”. The whole self is here threatened by psychiatry and technology (cyborgs, synthetic limbs, cutting and pasting in visual medias). In this we find the “[c]oncept of character and its ideological assumptions mocking and parodying a blind faith in psychological coherence and in the value of sublimation in a civilising activity” (178) because fantasy tends “to give graphic depictions of subjects in process, suggesting possibilities of innumerable other selves, of different histories, different bodies” (178). This helps to “dissolve or shatter the boundary line between the imaginary and symbolic” ( ) and highlights the difficulty of entering into the symbolic.
The rest of Jackson's text involves explication of the above theories through a great variety of texts, in the sections: “Gothic Tales and Novels,” “Fantastic Realism,” “Victorian Fantasies,” and “From Kafka's Metamorphosis to Pynchon's Entropy”. Her “Afterword: the ‘Unseen' of Culture” summarises the ideas in a general sense, with fantasy constructed generally as the conscience of the Enlightenment and the underside of reason.
Cornwell, Neil. The Literary Fantastic : From Gothic to Postmodernism
Cornwell traces theories of the fantastic from before and through Todorov to Christine Brooke-Rose, Rosemary Jackson, T.E. Apter, T.E. Little, Tobin Sieber, Kathryn Hume, Iurii Mann, Amaryll Chanady and others. He concludes that their common ground lies in assumptions that “reality” is a linguistic construct, with foundations in “human perception and fear” and that the recognition of this is the “bedrock of fantasy,” the content of which reveals or exposes the exclusions and taboos of that “reality” and the limits of the dominant cultural order. Fantasies “make up for a society's prohibitions by allowing vicarious fulfilment,” and while the fantastic has a “subversive influence for social change . . . it can, in its pure escapist form, also serve as a conservative or repressive force” (27). Cornwell argues that much apparent conflict between theorists comes from the lack of discrimination definition of “Fantasy,” and “the fantastic”(28), and proceeds to untangle some of the epistemological confusion, defining “Fantasy” as an impulse or mode, “a trans-generic literary quality ever present to some degree” (31) as well as, in a limited sense, a reference to a kind of everyday “wishful thinking” - and in modern literature it is also linked to metafiction - and for some theorists even refers to the state of contemporary culture as “The age of fantasy” (34). The “fantastic” is defined as a genre, extending Todorov's terms, with Non-Fiction, Faction, Realism, Uncanny Realism and the Fantastic-Uncanny on the left of the Pure Fantastic, and the Fantastic Marvellous, the Marvellous (what if?, fairy story or romance/fantasy) and “Mythology, etc” on its right. Fiction, mimesis, fantasy, satire, parody and the absurd and so on are cross-generic concepts here, and may be present across the spectrum. Significant points suggested in the first section are the connection between gothic and the sublime (47), and paranoia and the fantastic (53), and the magical influences in romanticism/gothicism (57).
From this general theorisation, he goes on to consider in detail the evolution of the literary fantastic through nineteenth and twentieth century texts, tracing all the standard fantastic texts, as well as some not previously addressed in this context. I am most concerned with the first section of “The Twentieth Century,” which shows the relations between the fantastic and postmodernist fiction (and, incidentally, various other forms such as the absurd and surrealism, offering), referring to the “pormanteau novel,” John McHale's “postmodernist fantastic,” Mikhail Bakhtin's “carnivalisation” and “Menippean satire,” Linda Hutchean's “historiographic metafiction,” Carlos Fuentes' “potential novel,” Catherine Belsey's “interrogative text” (154-55) and others. To characterise the “portmanteau novel he offers a list of the chronotope, irony, parody, intertextuality and metafiction, arguing that these “baggy monsters” contain elements of the fantastic: “their own monster, within their baggage” (159).
In the “Import of the fantastic” I stress his critique of psychoanalysis - arguments that it can produce closure, and (this being an argument taken from Kristeva and Brooke-Rose) that modern literature has “in a sense . . . taken over from psychoanalysis and become ‘its strangest rival' in a potentially dangerous ‘exploration of the limits of meaning'” (213). His conclusions regarding the sublime, possible worlds, the state of fantasy/fantastic in a society of the spectacle and so on are as equally relevant. He concludes with a postscript on the Rushdie affair, stressing the profanity of novels in Islam as rivalling the reality established by the Creator, the insufficiency of violence in the expression of beliefs and thought, and the necessity of fiction to express repressed or alternative notions, or the imagination in general, without threat of violent repression through the closure of fundamentalist or other extreme and intolerant readings and reactions. An important implication here is how literature can have very real, very violent effects, and so cannot be dismissed, for the position of modern literature has been demarginalised and “[e]ven literary criticism is no longer the frivolous fringe activity it was once thought to be” (229).
Armitt, Lucie. Theorising the Fantastic . Great Britain: Arnold, 1996.
Armitt's text is the most up-to-date discussion of the fantastic, however her contribution is limited to a critique of the obsession of definitions of fantasy, a discussion of the distinction between “phantasy” (loosely, the unconscious process or impulse) and “fantasy” (the self-conscious artistic product as individual work and/or genre), with an emphasis on notions of “play,” and considers the relationship between fantasy and the body, placing Baudrillard's similucrum and Donna Haraway's cyborg in the context of the “fantastic”. She elaborates these three ideas through criticisms of Lessing's Briefing For a Descent into Hell , Bank's The Bridge , Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper , Carroll's Alice stories, and Carter's The Passion of New Eve . Through these texts she explores the familiar notions of the unconscious, the fetishised other, maternal identification, narcissicm, the carnival, the child, utopia and so on.
Ironically, Armitt's criticism of obsession of definitions in the fantasy-fantastic is a criticism of definitions in the debate of fantasy-fantastic, and we could extend this by criticising the obsession (including Armitt's) with the “fantastic” in the debate of Cultural Studies in general. This issue gains significance because while there are some useful sections in this text that extend the debate of the “fantastic,” Armitt's main concern is with repositioning Haraway in that debate, and while I agree this is important, she can be seen as merely annexing Haraway and cultural theory under the term the “fantastic” and worsening the mish-mash of terminology, with “similucra,” “cyborg,” “grotesque” suddenly interchangeable with a dozen others in the vat of the “fantastic”.
Armitt's distinction between phantasy and fantasy is one that engages more directly with previous theorists of the fantastic, and it is surprising the issue has not been taken up by many theorists before, for example by Neil Cornwell in his discussion of the confusion in definitions of “fantasy”. My only reservation is that Armitt does not state directly how seductive it is to try and find a border between biological phantasy and cultural fantasy (especially with both opposed to the genre of fantasy, that is with dreams fantasy, not phantasy) and to deny the fact that (in the Lacanian terms she uses) territorialisation of desire occurs the instant after birth through how/where infants are/are not handled, and so on, and biology (the distinction between biology and culture) is itself a cultural construct (there is a parallel in Judith Butler's Gender Trouble , where the presence of “sex” in language means that culture already masks cultural gender difference with assumptions of biological sexual differentiation).
I would suggest here that, while at times her discrimination between terms is quite subtle, at other times this subtlety is muffled by convoluted or presumptious expression (as with her final conclusions on the uncanny), and the occasional careless/clumsy reinscription of contradictions/obfuscations in the discourses with which she is working (for example, in the first chapter, she supports Freud and Lacan, ignoring the fact that the latter is a largely incompatible re-reading of the former, and that such juxtaposition needs to be qualified). This latter problem is especially dangerous because it is specifically this tendency to carelessly synthesise theorists and make terms interchangeable that has led Cultural Studies to becoming such a “fabulous world” of its own.
Donald, James Ed. Fantasy and the Cinema . London : British Film Institute, 1989.
I have annotated four essays of this collection and the introductions to each section, which offer a useful narrative of the way theories of film and the fantastic have developed, and frame the way the essays fit into this narrative.
In the “General Introduction,” Donald outlines the collections approach as not being polarised around the traditional concerns of fantasy and the cinema as “mass produced daydrems, as vehicles of either a coercive or potentially liberating wish-fulfilment, or fantasy as a genre (including science fiction, horror and swords-and-sorcery). It is focused on tge broader issues: “Why do film images and narratives take the form they do? What is the nature of the audience's investment in them? What is the social function of these products of the dream factory? Is wish-fulfillment all there is to fantasy and the fantastic?” (4). He relates these questions to the debate about “realism” (the Screen project which exposed ideological mechanisms of classicial realist films, identifying and promoting politically “progressive” films) and the shift in fantasy which tried to move away from some of the problems of realism. These problems included the contradiction in ideology as a timeless unconscious “but also [subject to] . . . historically specific requirements of the social relations of production” (5); and a conflict between theories of ideology and psychoanalysis - the one confidently explaining the social construction of individuals and inquiring into how art can effect revolutionary change, the other confidently explaining the role of art in revolutionary - displacing subjectivity - and inquiring as to the relationships of individuals to social formations. The “turn to fantasy” acknowledges both approaches, denying assumptions of fantasy as wish-filfillment and symptomology of repression and stressing the dynamic relatonships between the psychic and social.
The introduction to “The Cinefantastic” outlines Todorov's theories of the fantastic, and Mark Nash's extension of Todorov's theories in his analysis of Vampyr and notes that more recent theorists have resisted the limiting formal definition of the fantastic and approached it “as a mode (Harold Bloom, Rosemary Jackson) or as an element in writing withgin a variety of genres (Christine Brooke-Rose, Kathryn Hume)” (18) moving to issues of history and ideology. Many theorists tend to equate psychoanalytical explanations and ideology, but Donald suggests that Roger Dadoun's article “stresses the difficulty of making direct links between the social and the psychic” and that the articles in the first section “begin to explain . . . the scandalous and resilient appeal of a cinema of fantasy and terror” (20).
Roger Dadoun, in “Fetishism and the Horror Film” uses Freud's article on fetishism as its starting point, but is concerned with Freud's shift from individual sexual practice and collective usage, and how it may operate in the socio-cultural field in the horror film as a fetish function that is “well situated by language, which designates by the same term ‘fetishism' a libidinal organisation described by psychoanalysis, elementary religious forms or practices defined more or less in anthropology and the orthodox Marxist insistence on the fact that, in certain societies, things are not seen as the product of work and of socio-economic relations” (39). The fetish is a memorial to a time before which it was realised that the mother lacked a penis, a means of denying the threat of castration, an absence which relates to a whole network of anxieties about “castration, abandonment, fusion, disintegration”; in its organising capacity, the fetish is a constructed thing, like a collage, organising anxieties its combination of emphasis on variations on the phallus, sexuality and ritual. Dadoun compares the presence of the fetish to the “spectacle” and a suspension of disbelief, and offers a conceptualisation of the fetishistic figure of the horror film which sees the “archaic mother as omnipresent totality” displaced by the “phallus as sexualised object” with the archaic mother reduced to an occulted mother, understood in terms of lack. The
omnipresent mother is occulted or concealed, transformed into absence. But just as the mother's omnipresence and all-powerfulness vanish into thin air, into the gaping hole . . . . opened up by the recognition that she lacks, does not have, a phallus, so the fetish- memorial is built on nothing, since the phallus as a total obejct is not supplied with libidinal energy of a living, creative sort, but with emptieness, irreality, non-being (43).
Dadoun relates this to King Kong, which illustrates - by contrasting the earlier scene of sacrifice to King Kong by the “primitive blacks” with the scene of King Kong's display and escape in New York - “the restoration of fetishist values in capitalist society” (45). Dadoun notes how the former's scene signifies “darkness and misery” while the latter is a “bright, luxurious and carefree atmoersphere” (however he should at this point persisted with the comparison between the fetish as framed, sacred, irreplaceable object and the exhibited, packaged, obscenely visible and exchangeable fetish which is, in fact, merely a fetish for the fetish of money - a secondary denial of the phallus, in Dadoun's terms). Dadoun here notes that the cinema becomes fetishised, taking over from the economy when it fails (as it did in the Depression); this involves a fetishisation of actors, directors, and characters, which “assume such gigantic proportions that, like primitive fetishes or capitalist gold, they absorb the human agents” (46) (with the “‘devaluation' of cinematographic fetishes” - the recognition of them as cliches, for example - tending towards a revalorisation of the actor's work, as evident with Peter Cushing).
This archaic mother, though absent in many horror movies, is nonetheless present in an “archaic” sense,
as the massive, diffuse, irrefutable action or pressure of a very archaic maternal imago . . . [an absence] read in a series of enclosures and expulsions, in a movement whereby spaces, one inside the other, become progressibely smaller and more confining, leading us finally to the purest, most original sign of archaic motherhood, a pinch of earth ” (52)
Hence characters find themselves abandoned, isolated, enveloped in not just anxiety-inducing spaces but situations, with a “threatening absence of living beings” suddenly broken by appearences, “an emtiness full of fantasmatic activity and meaning” (53) (a notion relevant to ideas of magic in fantasy and science fiction - the sudden appearance, the focus on the concealment). The figure of Dracula hides in the archaic mother, whose malignant, manipulative forces spells bad luck for the hero, however there is “a still more archaic mother, a mother-thing situated beyond good and evil, beyond all organised forms and all events. This is a totalising and oceanic mother, a ‘shadowy and deep unity'” (53).
The explicit presence of Dracula-as-fetish, who seems an “erect phallus” with fangs, claws, “piercing eyes” forming a “remarkably condensed expression of the fetishistic link between sexuality and castration” (55). His presence involves a willing suspension of disbelief (there is a female phallus, yet there isn't) which Dadoun argues explains a duality between his appearance and disappearance: we see him yet he has no reflection, no noise; he seems dead and buried, yet stays alive; he looks weak, yet governs great forces; at day he is nothing, at night he is strong, and so on. “He moves from what he does not have to what he can be , if only in illusion” (57). By sucking blood, by acting on the world, he tries to fill his emptiness some, however others
when confronted with the vampire, reveal the process of fetishisation which is at work in them. Struggling against the vampire's evil spells, the Scientist (in Kiss of the Vampire, The Devil Rides Out, etc.) look in the book-fetish, in some Lovecraftian Necronomikon, for set recipes, little packages of knowledge - so many cabbalistic formulae to accompany the ritual handling of fetishistic objects. The delusions of the main protagonists are hardly more impressive than this reification of knowledge . . . Is it possible to get rid of one's fantasms so easily . . . ? (57).
Dadoun then considers the two instruments which “neutralise” the vampire, the stake and cross, “when reality truimphs over appearences: the true phallus (the vertical penis-stake) truimphs over the false one (Dracula lying horizontal in the coffin, the maternal receptacle). From the fact that the campire's whole being resided in his heart, we now gather that all the rest, his whole body, was only a disguise, a mask . . . [leaving the hero standing over the ashes] with the feeling of terror overcome, of a nightmare dispelled” (58). The cross “is not so much a symbol of Christianity as something that brings abvout a regression to a magic stage. It takes it place alongside all the parahernalia of fetishism: the stake, garlic, amulets of all kinds” (58).
Dadoun notes in confusion that there is room for the subject to play with institutional attempts to manipulate him/her, feeding “the process of alienation . . . [yet also providing] catharsis ” (59).
Barbara Creed's “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection” follows a similar path to Dadoun, relating the “monstrous-feminine,” the image of the phallic woman common to all human societies, to Kristeva's theory of abjection, as well as situating in relation to the horror film and the maternal figure. Abjection, which deals with transgression of boundaries (between self-(m)other) and the mother-child relationship, whereby the mother is a site of conflicting desires through socialisation, and becomes abject in the process of the subject differentiating him/herself. Kristeva distinguishes between “maternal authority” in which there is no sense of shame , and “paternal authority,” in which there is; the horror film's excess of blood, gore, excremental and menstrual fluids points to the boundary between maternal authority and the law of the father. The pre-Oedipal mother is repressed, and religious and other social forms try to purify, or deny it, with the horror film “a form of modern defilement rite” (72). Creed critiques the fact that Kristeva's analysis can be read as prescription, not description, and does not address the gendered subjectivity of abjection.
Creed proceeds to analyse the way Ridley Scott's Alien constructs the monstrous-feminine in scenarious of primal scene, death and birth, and in many guises “as the treacherous mother, the oral sadistic mother, the mother as primoridial abyss; and she is there in the film's images of blood, of the all-devouring vagina, the toothed vagina, the vagina as Pandora's box; and finally she is there in the chameoleon figure of the alien, the monster as fetish-object of and for the mother” (73) as well as archaic, reproductive/generative mother through the presentation of clean technological births and terrible organic births.
Tracing images of the primal horde and the difficulties of representing pre-Oedipal origins, Creed shows how Freud, Lacan and Kristeva mystify the mother, and how the archaic mother as a generative source of life (present as a positive force in many cultures) is reconstructed negatively: the genitals and womb are uncanny sources of fear fascination (given the overlap between generative mother and the “sublime,” it is a pity Creed does not consider the question of the relationship of the uncanny to the sublime). It is here difficult “to separate out completely the figure of the archaic mother . . . from other aspects of the maternal figure - the maternal authority of Kristeva's semiotic, the mother of Lacan's imaginary, the phallic woman, the castrated woman” (80), indeed the monstrosity of the feminine sometimes depends on the merging of these aspects. However the archaic mother is present in horror films, first, as a negative force, a void, because the womb “cannot be constructed as a ‘lack' in relation to the penis. The womb is not the site of castration anxiety. Rather, the womb signifies ‘fullness' or ‘emptiness' but always it is its own point of reference” (81): thus the archaic mother allows for a notion of the feminine not dependant upon the masculine. Second, as death, desintegration of the subject, desire for non-differentiation, of regressing back to pre-Oedipal, imaginary stages, with the subject continually threatened with isolation, unnameable terrors, monsters. The closure of horror deals with this anxiety by naming and destroying the monster, however the oral-sadistic monster is ambiguous: “it both repels and attracts” (83) (and I again note the parallel with the sublime).
Creed foregrounds the difference between the male fetish-object, the phallic woman or phallus-fetish, and the female fetish-object, the child, and how the womb is a greater threat than that of the mother's phallus; the womb has the ability to produce more children, to double or multiply the phallus. However, in Alien and many other texts, the archaic mother is relegated to non-human, and the human female is recuperated as a safe, desirable body. Most importantly,
the feminine is not per se a monstrous sign; rather is constructed as such within a patriarchal discourse which reveals a great deal about male desires and fears but tells us nothing about feminine desire in relation to the horrific” (87).
Two important critiques need to be made of Creed's article. First, a similar critique to the one she levels at Kristeva: her unqualified dedication to Freudian terms can be prescriptive, not descriptive, and she does not consider the various slippages and multiple spaces by which a reader of Aliens might deal with anxiety in a completely different way. She constructs a normalised subject, and does not consider alternatives. Second, and perhaps more importantly, while Creed differentiates between the pre-Oedipal archaic mother and the patriarchal construction of the maternal or feminine figure, there is a parallel between the archaic mother and sublime which begs the question of why Creed does not consider the role of androgynous or hermaphroditic figures which are more apt in referring to the sublime, or any generative force. To call a pre-Oedipal generative force an “archaic mother” is to make the same mistake as eco-feminists such as Erica Sjoo, projecting human gender onto a genderless cosmos, and merely inverting Oedipal categories, not refuting them. To privilege the archaic mother and “goddesses” is subversive, but not necessarily progressive or utopian in a feminist politics which holds equality dear. What we should say, instead, is that the figures of the archaic mother (as ambivalent), the phallic woman (as dangerous), and the patriarchal mother (as sanctuary, receptacle) are all useful in theorising problems of origins from the perspective of gendered humans, but are insufficient in the last instance, because in any contemporary theory of representation we recognise that we cannot project our local, relative epistemes upon the world and have any confidence that we are representing any ontological object.
In the introduction for “The Mise en Scene of Desire” Donald distinguishes between pyschologism and psychoanalysis, the latter of which does not assume there is any moment of clarity whereby we see the real world, and investigates only “psychic truths,” the “Unconscious wishes, and the fantasies they engender [which] are as immutabl a force in our lives as any matrerial circumstance” (136). He then mentions Lyon and Cowie, who both critique earlier theories, which were concerned merely to show how the spectator was strictly positioned by film, by stressing the “shifting subject positions . . . [and] multiple points of identification for the spectator” (137). This relates to Jean Laplanche's and J.-B. Pontalis' writings on fantasy as mise en scene of desire: here fantasy cannot be seen as mere wish-fulfillment, “what is evident in fantasies is not just the wish, but the setting out of the wish in a way that always also incorporates the prohibitions, censoring, and defences that surround the wish. ‘Fantasy never articulates desire alone. And even more complexly, it may express conflicting desire and the law in a single ensemblement'” (140). (I would stress that this understanding parallels Fredric Jameson's notion of ideology as both utopian and nostalgic - as is implied at the beginning of the general introduction.) Fantasy here shows desire not merely as an “upsurging of the drives”; “desire comes to exist as sexual only through its articulation in fantasy” (140) because “fantasy is not the object of desire but its setting . . . the subject does not pursue the object or its sign: he appears caught up himself in the sequence of images” (140-1). “The mobility of character positions withjin the narration and the multiple points of identification for the spectator in fantasy are so organised as to perpetuate the setting out of desire” (142) and consequently there “is no arrival at a point of origin either in ‘the world' or ‘the subject'. The subject emerges in the negotiation of this realm of representations - a symbolic order whose form, function and authority are at least partially organised and reproduced through the operation of the original fantasies” (144). Donald's main argument here is that “forms of mass-circulation fantasy scenarios . . . help to construct our psychic reality in ways that bear the imprint of our Oedipal structues.
I agree that the quotation by Laura Mulvey, while speaking of “the area of contact between the unconscious and its manifestation in collective fantasy: roughly speaking, popular culture and its representations” (144) is significant. But one can argue that there is still some slippage inheritated from an implied difference of “phantasy” and “fantasy” that is not addressed: that is, could be clarified that “phantasies” are merely “fantasies” which do not conform to any artistic form but that legislated by the economics of the psyche, but that the psyche is already structured by both culturally inherited “fantasies” and the laws against/with which those fantasies were formed, and that the economics of the psyche produce our “phantasies” because of the persistence of those laws. To say “fantasies” “bear the imprint of Oedipal structures” implies recapitulation, which necessitates something being recapitulated: at what point can we say an infant's archaic “phantasies” pre-exist “fantasies” and are subject only to the cultural laws where produce the “fantasies” which will, as the subject is acculturated, sublimate these initial “phantasies”? This question could be seen as important to the identification of revolutionary (moments in) texts because it foregrounds pre -Oedipal forms. The question, following Lacan, might be, then, how can we identify “fantasies” that bear the imprint of our earlier “phantasies” and consequently have the potential to offer fresh alternative “fantasies”? Also, repressed pre-Oedipal “phantasies” are sublimated in “mass-circulation fantasy scenarios” and could be seen as offering some of the utopian aspects of ideology to counterpart the nostalgic “fantasies”.
Constance Penley's “Time Travel, Primal Scene and the Critical Dystopia” argues that while “Our love affair with apocolypse and Armageddon, according to Jameson, results from the atrophy of the utopian imagination, in other words, our cultural incapacity to imagine the future” the Terminator is not merely “trashy infatuation” with the future. Rather, it can be called a “critical dystopia” because it suggests causes rather than merely reveals symptoms, suggesting that
[t]he true atrophy of the utopian imagination is this: we can imagine the future but we cannot conceive the kind of collective political strategies necessary to change or ensure that future (198).
Penley argues that, in Terminator, technology itself is not the cause of the dystopian world's formation, rather it is the decisions we have made and will make about technology; also, Terminator does not create a simple opposition between us/them, man/machine, for hybridity crosses the text through the figure of the cyborg, Kyle's technological savvy and so on.
Penley then relates the time's stress on the appeal of the time loop paradox to the notion of the primal scene to ask: “what would it be like to go back in time and give birth to oneself . . . [or] be one's own mother and father?” The pleasure of the time travel story is “similar to the primal scene fantasy in wich one can be both observer or one of the participants” (202). Penley stresses that shift in recent film theory to acknowledge the complexity of a identification in film:
An important emphasis has been placed on the subject's ability to assume, successively, all the available positions in the fantasmatic scenario. Extending this idea to film has shown that spectatorial identification is more complex than has hitherto been understood because it shifts constantly in the course of the film's narrative, while crossing the lines of biological sex; in other words, unconscious identification with the characters or the scenario is not necessarily dependant upon gender (202).
Another point is that a “fantasy is not ‘just a fantasy' but a story for the subject” (203): it does not merely fulfil wishes, it restructures our past, displacing, sublimating, externalising, moving or repressing elements to give us pleasure (though Penley might have discussed this in more detail, showing that this pleasure comes not only in repressing undesirable parts of one's past, but through harmonising information, making connections which give significance to events, constructing a totality of self). Consequently, characters are often coded in contradictory ways: Kyle is represented as both father and son in the text, as is Martin Pauley in The Searchers , “depending upon the unconscious and ideological demands the narrative at any give moment” (203).
I would also point to Penley's reference to Freud's argument that the realm of fantasy is like a “reservation” or “nature reserve” (for it relates to feminist arguments on the construction of nature, children and women as beyond the reality of production, as a political):
[e]verything, including what is useless and even what is noxious, can grow and proliferate there as it pleases. The mental realm of fantasy is just such a reservation withdrawn from the reality principle” (203).
Penley argues that while these primal scene fantasies draw the reader into an ambivalent incestuosness it simultaneously denies, in a Freudian reading its function as art also leads the spectator back to the social, to the technological future.
Penley argues that this question of origin leads to questions of sexual difference, and that the difference between men and women is being increasingly displaced onto the difference between humans and aliens (usually by coding aliens as female, or associating them with some “maternal” instinct as in Alien ), with science fiction trying to “dissipate that fear of the same, to ensure that there is difference” (205). (Stephen Neale criticises this idea to some extent in his essay “Issues of Difference: Alien and Blade Runner ” in the same volume).
Penley concludes by comparing Terminator to Le Jatee , a movie in which there is a “temporal impossibility of being in the same place as both adult and child” and which suggests that “a compulsion to repeat, and the regression that implies, leads to the annihilation of the subject” (208). Indeed “the fantasy of time travel is no more nor less than the compulsion to repeat that manifdest itself in the primal scene fantasy” (208) and suggests “all film viewing is infantile sexual investigation” (209).
(I would parenthetically note that time travel paradoxes assume there is a mimetic relationship between our linguistic-discursive field and the laws of physics: that is, the pronoun“I” is suddenly capable of being displaced through time and space the same way it can be displaced through a sentence.)
In the introduction to the section on “Carnival” Donald discusses how there has been a shift in cultural theory since the 70's that has shown there is “greater complexity [in texts] than the ideology model sometimes allowed. They reveal the depth and pervasiveness of the ambivalence of films narrastives, and the mobility and fragmentation of the fantasmatic dynamics both within these narratives and also in spectator's investment in them” (226). Laura Mulvey's reflections on her own work foreground this shift, which recognises a problem with a binary between mainstream and avant-garde given it is incapable of moving beyond opposition and negation, inverting the binary rather than offering new forms. The new approach neither merely resists mainstream texts nor searches for progressive texts, opting instead for experimentation, for narratives that dramatise difference and dialogue. This conflicting dialogue appeals to Bakhtin's notion of the “carnival” and implies an “aspiration to community, a community whose form and direction cannot be determined in advance but only in the process of dialogue” (230). While “carnivalesque canon” and “postmodern perspective” are contradictions in terms (and the “carnival” does not in itself suggest new formulas for the avant-garde) Donald considers three trajectories which can, nonetheless, be identified with the “carnival”: first, the “magic realism” which Jameson opposes to la mode retro (the fetishised representations of the past that have evolved in commodified society to compensate for the loss of History); second, theories of the avant-garde that touch on the sublime (in Lyotard's sense) and the “fantastic”; and, third, films from the “Elusive Sign” exhibition (of which I am unfamiliar). Donald ends by arguing that while this promotion of keeping open the possibility for change, “not, as in pluralism, heterogeneity as an end, but a heterogeneity of ends” (231) and that while this approach, like the carnival, involves only a “temporary and licensed disrupton of categeories and hierarchies” (231) but “at least this new modesty signals an awareness of the limits of cinema, and a refusal of the the lazy, self-deluding substitution of film-making or theorising (or carnival, or culture) for politics” (231).
Unfortunately, as Donald has already implied through his recounting of how critiques of how ideology functions can create social change, everything is political. This last statement needs some serious unpacking to know what “politics” Donald is referring to, for it implies a large amount of cultural and theoretical history. To begin with, in “a society of the spectacle” movements like Surrealism and the Situationists International hoped that momentary irruptions or disruptions (of, basically, desire) would create political change. One of the things that became evident, however, is that the carnival and its analogues often mocked itself because it was being packaged and exploited through commodification and had to be framed very carefully to escape being transformed into the kind of spectacle it is opposed to. Since it seemed desire had been co-opted by massive social formations (capitalism and patriarchy), that macropolitics was a self-sustaining form that absorbed all transgressional power (as Baudrillard maintains), there could be no way of mobilising (or indeed legitimating) a macropolitical revolution because transgressive desire was utilised by the “System”, some theorists moved towards micropolitics. That is, change had to be gradual in the sense of “grass roots” politics (or the slogan “Think global, act local”) - which for the later Foucault included “technologies of the self,” for de Certeau the use of “tactics” against the “strategies” deployed by social formations, and, for Lyotard, exposing the differend , because totalising discourses were shown to be insufficient in judging or legislating order in society, which was constituted of many different discursive positions, each with its own sense of order and justice. Later theorists, such as Best and Kellner, argue that these kinds of movements were in some senses reactionary, and that the theories of Foucault should be combined with the theories of Baudrillard if an adequate theorisation of the complexity of contemporary Western culture is to be achieved. As Tom Moylon argues in his reading of Woman on the Edge of Time, the political fight must be fought on different fronts: micropolitical, ideological and semiotic.
James Donald, in “The Fantastic, The Sublime and the Popular; Or, What's at Stake in Vampire Films?” concerns himself with the “apparently paradoxical overlap between . . . ‘lowness' [of the horror film] and what seems to be its contrary, the sublime - a concept [that has] reappear[ed] centre stage in the aesthetics and politics of postmodernism” (233). He asks three questions, about first, the relation of the fantastic and uncanny to film theory and popular culture, and second, to the popular; third he considers the monstrous in politics, a liberal politician like Thatcher, for example, who projects a monster, a “magical, pervasive power to a conspiratorial centre of evil” to construct an imaginary community, whereby “what we are dealing with . . . is a history of popular fears - fears that are not only given expression in horror films, but which also drive this [Thatcher's/liberal] paranoid political style” (235)
He argues the approach to find the theoretical meaning of monsters (classes, repressed elements of the psyche, etc) whereby what is “evil” is defined consequent upon it being seen as “Other, alien, different, strange, unclean and unfamiliar” (Jameson, quoted 237) tries to define the Other as threat, and ignores the Other as essential to the formation of identity. Donald relates this to Todorov's “uncanny” (which, I note, he superficially equates with the fantastic, though one is an effect, another a genre), in which there is more uncertainty, hesitancy with identity. Donald hopes to link Todorov's formal approach with the historical approach of Morreti and Woods.
He consequently traces the idea of the “sublime” from Burke through Kant, the gothic and melodrama. The melodrama, like the sublime, and certain forms of realism, has an
aspiration to get beyond surfaces. It attempts to reveal the underlying drama of what Peter Brooks calls ‘the “moral occult”, the domain of operative spiritual values which is both indicated within and masked by the surface of reality'. As in the Gothic novel, the unreality, the excess and the irrationality are functional: they enable us to conceive the unpresentable (241-2).
However in most realist texts the sublime figures as an unwanted intrusion of irrationality into the rational world. Donald has the heading “A Modern Sublime” and proceeds to discuss notions of the “sublime” through Kristeva, Foucault and Lyotard. (This seems to be a slippage, for he calls Kristeva's sublime “modernist” in its distaste for the way popular cinema exploits the sublime (243), but he foregrounded earlier that he was concerned with the “postmodern sublime”; one would assume the “modern sublime” refers to Kantian or certain religious, for example Christian, notions of the sublime.) Kristeva turns the sublime/beautiful distinction into the semiotic and symbolic; Foucault turns it into the Same and Other, the discursive rationality and non-discursive forms of “madness, sexuality, death and the diabolical” (243); Lyotard distinguishes between nostalgia and novatio.
For Lyotard, any attempt to claim consensus or identity, for example a projection of community, constitutes totalisation, an imposed totality, indeed even a kind of terrorism (he might have given the example of the Fundamentalist assumption that there is one Word, and all other words are “evil” and must be punished). The problem is thus not identity but authority, for Lyotard, the problem of having to make decisions in the absence of universals, to demand a community without declaring what form the community should take. “The sublime thus comes to indicate a tensions between the joy of having a feeling of the totality and the inseparable sorrow of not being able to present an object equal to the Idea of that totality” (245).
Donald then relates this to the popular, which can, in political rhetoric, refer to a Thatcherite imposition of a universal identity, or to a heterogeneous social formation best characterised by Bakhtin's carnival. One suggestion he considers is that of the surrealists, of kitsch lovers, “that bad taste should take its place alongside the fantastic, the uncanny and the sublime in a carnival of resistence to the hegemony of the beautiful?” (247). Unfortunately, he does not unpack this rather loaded sentence, and remove the discrepencies between his correspondence between the positive terms “fantastic,” “uncanny,” “sublime,” and “carnival”.
He concludes by stressing that the focus is on those who try to speak for “we” the people, and those who do not name the people, who are “concerned less with the people as an archaic myth of origins than with a pragmatics of the popular as an endless, disorderly dialogue” (248), a politics which takes heterogeneity and fragmentation seriously, not as comic facts. The sublime thus indicates the “materiality and limits of representation, and to their inevitable inadequecy to the idea of totality” (249), the inability of political closure and the aspiration for a community that never is. I would note here that this notion of a utopian community that never is, is the definition of utopia as a “no-place,” and that feminists like Helene Cixous, and post-colonialists, take up the same - or a similar - ideas, in regards to the kind of misrepresentation that occurs when we try to speak for someone; we can also critique the unqualified notion that ideology forms a totality, for each ideological act is merely a parole in the shifting background, or langue, of any network of ideological systems.
Bloom, Harold. Bridges to Fantasy. Slusser, George. E, Eric S. Rabkin and Robert Scholes, Eds. Carbondale, USA: Southern Illinois UP, 1982.
In terms of theories of the fantastic, this collection of essays is, in places, dated and tautological. Some try to define fantasy en masse according to a single critereon (usually as escapist and politically nullified, and in opposition to science fiction); others recuperate fantasy and the fantastic on their own terms (recognising certain of their aspects as politically active). This collection (only two essays have been excluded in my annotation) thus foregrounds the conflicts or contradictions inherent in debates about the genres of fantasy and science fiction; it also indicates the frequent repetition, reformulation, continuities, especially in the use of neologisms.
Harold Bloom, in “Clinamen: Towards a Theory of Fantasy” uses Gnostic and Freudian categories to define literary fantasy as a “belated version of romance”, in which romance comes at a time when romance is repressed - and relegated to the past. His general argument, using David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus , is that “fantasy . . . promises an absolute freedom from belatedness, from the anxieties of literary influence and origination, yet this promise is shadowed always by a psychic over-determination in the form itself of fantasy, that puts the stance of freedom into severe question.” That is, fantasy seems to promise aesthetic freedom by virtue of privileging of the pleasure principle, yet still seems to labour under the reality principle because the tradition of fantasy and its related symbolic formations impose allegorical and other conventional forms. Bloom finds an analogy to this ambivalence between fantasy as “free” or “overdetermined” in the figure of the Sublime, which invokes terror and of of annihilation at the Promethean forces of the universe as well as narcissistic freedom as the limitless possibilities of the self. The coupling of the aggressivity of Prometheanism and the self-consciousness of Narcissism means that the heroic quest is here turned upon the self; the “fire” that the Promethean-self steals is a fire that is within oneself. Bloom argues that this is the clinamen, or “ironic swerve,” which initiates fantasy, asserting that while the mode apears to negate the reality principle, it is contaminated by it.
Larry McCaffery, in “Form, Formula, and Fantasy: Generative Structures in Contemporary Fiction,” tries to consider a “generative” rather than “relative” theory for fantasy; that is, rather than focusing on fantasy as opposed to the real, he considers an impulse of fantasy which assumes that reality is a fictional construct, or at least one among numerous possible realities, all equally valid in their meaningful contexts. His premise begins with an analogy to Jorge Luis Borge's “Library of Babel,” which holds all possible permutations for any text in the world, and signifies, metaphorically, the universe as being made up of a “near-infinite number of elements which combine to create ‘shapes' that mankind (sic) attempts to decipher” (22). He argues that, through the fiction of certain writers, such as Calvino, and through the theory of contemporary structuralists, the traditional mimetic role of texts which assumed a singular, universal reality in accordance with humanist values, has been critiqued, giving way to a semiotic understanding of the representational nature of texts as constructing realities through selection and stuctural arrangement of a finite number of elements.
McCaffrery argues that this has led to self-reflective metafiction, or “fabulation”, as well as a re-valuation of texts which make no pretense to “present” reality, which and also older, mythical forms. However, while many writers, “such as Barth, Coover, Hawkes, Pynchon, Delaney, Zelanzy, and Calvino” utilise older forms, there is a tension between “the mythic framework's tendency to organise and rigidify its elements into teleological wholes and the ambiguous, fragmented nature of contemporary experience, which refuses to yield to formulas and patterns”. Such writers, consequently, rework mythical material, and show the inadequacy of older forms of meanings in making sense of the present; they are interested in showing the generative potential of meaning, the new perspectives which enable us to generate a new “reality” more appropriate to our immediate experience. McCaffery distinguises here between “fantasy,” which functions relationally - presenting nonfact as fact, in opposition to a “reality” - and the “fantastic,” which is the more anti-real. The “fantastic” does not oppose any one single sense of “reality,” it defies the notion of reality altogether, arguing that what we consider reality is mere convention. It is interested, then, in mapping “possible alternatives”; however, in conclusion, he prefers the terms “open-ended” and “closed” rather the “fantastic” and “fantasy,” given the kind of “impoverishing” generalisation it entals.
My primary concern with this essay is that it relates the production of meaning to an original, finite body of elements. Though McCaffery never states it, he implied that Borge's “Library of Babel” can only ever be a metaphor because while the finite system of elements out of which any statement is made is not singular, nor located in one place at one time: each “finite system,” or discourse, is associated with a particular lived context, and can be interpreted in innumerable ways. This privilaging of the “generative” counters Baudrillard's theory of the Code as singular, closed system of signifiers that refers only to itself.
Marta E. Sanchez, in “A View from Inside the Fishbowl: Julio Cortozar's ‘Axolotl',” counters Todorov's argument that the twentieth century has produced no fantastic literature by suggesting that Todorov's conclusion was limited to Europe, England and the United States, and by arguing, through an analysis of Cortozar's text, that the fantastic has undergone a transformation. While “Axolotl” meets Todorov's formal criteria of the fantastic, regarding uncertainty in the closure, there is a shift in Cortozer's text from a hesitation about “ what has happened ” to “ who speaks ”; also, there is a shift from a “linear and irreversible direction” of the narrative to a “nonlinear and reversible pattern” that may “be expressed in terms of an opposition between metonymic and metaphoric or diachronic and synchronic . . . invert[ing] the typical structure of the nineteenth century fantastic text. For Todorov the fantastic was the “bad conscious,” or the repressed underside, of positivistic modern science and used a “magical and supernatural mode” to undermine notions of mimeticism; the “objects” in the fantastic were presented according to the rules of mimeticism, and so seemed to indicated instability in the real world. Cortozar, on the other hand, uses “linguistic experimentation,” and ambiguity lies in the use of “personal pronouns and binary oppositions” (43). Sanchez's conclusion is that, in contemporary texts, the instability which is characteristic of the fantastic lies not in the world but in the signification of language.
Arlen J. Hansen, in “The Meeting of Parallel Lines: Science, Fiction, and Science Fiction” applies Thomas Kuhn's theories of revolutions in scientific paradigms to the genre of science fiction. For Hansen, the myth of the scientist is “based on our image of the nineteenth century naturalist [who] works inductively. He ‘does research' and ‘collects data,' and then his experimental discoveries are marshalled into an overriding theory that accounts for his fieldwork or laboratory experiements” (55). Referring to Clerk Clerk Maxwell, Werner Heisenberg, Einstein, and other scientists, Hanson argues that this is not only misleading but invalid, and that fantasy, or fiction, plays a significant role in the development of scientific theories and science fiction. This undermines the genre's claims to objectivity through an appeal to the “science” in its title. Hanson briefly outlines the shift from “classical” to “quantum” science (without using those terms), by reference to three dominant models by which scientists made sense of certain systems: the closed structure (characteristic of a Newtonian, deterministic universe), the loop structure (characterised by computer programming) and the open-ended structure (charactistic of a universe which operates on the principle of probability and indeterminacy). He concludes by considering that another structure may become necessary to make sense of data in the future, for example the “sine curve or the helix,” and foregrounding the temporary nature of scientific theory and how the irrational, often considered as fantasy, or non-scientific, is in fact part of the history of science itself.
David Clayton's “On Realistic and Fantastic Discourse” tries to find a new way of defining the field by finding a definition between Todorov's formal, structuralist method (which he considers too narrow) and Rabkin's schematic method (which he considers too broad). He consequently defines fantasy in two ways: “a purely formal way, as a component of literary discourse” and “as an investment of literary by unconscious desire” (60). In the first, formal sense, he considers the relationship between the “neumatic” (a more useful term, for Clayton, than “realism” or “cognition”) to fantasy, which he renames the “fantastmatic”. Clayton considers three relationships between the two: one of “violation” (characteristic of horror), of the “fantasmatic transform[ing] itself into a similucrum of the noematic” (characteristic of allegory), and of the “neometic approach[ing] the fantasmatic without becoming flagrantly unreal” (characteristic of the grotesque). In the second, psychoanalytic sense, he argues that fantasy, rather than being oneiric (pre-linguistic) and merely violating “the order of speech,” is actually formulated within language, hence the term “fantasmatic discourse”. He offers Freud's theory of jokes and Greimas' theories on “the interchangeability of semantic units of unequal magnitude” to argue that expansion and condensation, while figures of language, are metonymic of fantastic processes. Clayton then goes on to reread Viktor Shklovsky's theory of deviance to “interpret deviation as the sign of the fantasmatic” (70) by referring to the Frankfurt schools argument that the Enlightenment's (neomatic) tendency to rationalise and objectify had its foundation in fear and the irrational, and that the fantasmatic “limits its continuing expansion, and by means of deviation momentarily crosses its frontiers” (71).
He concludes, giving Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Kafka's “Metamorphoses” as examples, by disputing Todorov's assertion that the fantastic is no longer produced because psychoanalysis has replaced fantasy and that the twentieth century no longer accepts the division between reality and fantasy upon which the fantastic depended. Todorov here offerred two alternatives for the artist of the nineteenth-century: to criticise positivistic rationality “and return to an age of supernatural phenomena or to assume the burden of discovering . . . reality within himself” (76). Clayton is more optomistic, stressing “historical perspective,” whereby a sense of reality and fantasy have merely shifted, not become redundant, and that each texts' fantastic-fantasmatic elements must be seen in relationship to the noumatic elements in the discourses in which the text's meaning is produced.
G.R.Thompson contributes “The Apparition of This World: Transcendentalism and the American ‘Ghost' Story” . In asking why American writers, unlike their British counterparts, wrote few straight ghost stories, he discusses the movement of Transcendentalism, specifically through Emerson and Whitman. This movement saw an ambiguity played out in the relationship between the physical and spiritual realm, or nature and god (and, by extension, individual souls). The increased tendency to play out the “drama of perception” in the mind, that is, to privilege the idealistic mind (higher Reason, understanding and imagination) as the category around which ontological anxiety manifested itself, was countered by psychological explanations such as “misperception, hallucination, insanity” (102), that is, sub- or un-conscious distortions which problematise the relationship between subject (mind, spirit) and object (body, nature). Here, for Thompson, American writers such as Hawthorne, Poe and Irving do not represent ghosts as literal forces of an “other” occult or supernatural, spiritual realm, “or even finally from the depths of the mind,” but rather as figures of a solopsistic anxiety that the world itself, because of the underlying ambiguities, “is itself a vision of an all-encompassing, luminescently opaque ghost ” (107). (See Csisery-Ronay's article.)
Robert A. Collins addresses the difficulty of defining the fantastic in “Fantasy and ‘Forestructures': The Effect of Philosophical Climate Upon Perceptions of the Fantastic”. He acknowledges popular conceptions of the fantasy genre, Todorov's “rigidly structuralist” definition of the fantastic according to its supernatural elements, and Rabkin's “flexible” definition of the fantastic as 180 o turn of perception, then proceeds to identify two major shifts in “philosophical climates” using Heiddeger's phenomenological theories to privilege the relationship between perception and pre-existing forestructures which condition our perceptions of the real. Collins first shift is from a theological paradigm to a scientific paradigm, a shift which initially saw science as fantastic, and is evident through the Copernican revolution to the Industrial Revolution in the writings of philosophers, poets and authors. Collins here opposes Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and James' “Great Good Place,” and considers the responses of writers contemporaneous to this shift.
The second shift identifies the “philosophical climates” in which Todorov's and Rabkin's theories were formulated, Todorov's notion of the real being dominated by “the nineteenth-centuries preoccupations with the natural-supernatural conflict” and Rabkin's by a recognition of greater instability in the “real-fantastic polarity” in contemporary life. Collins attempts to complement and correct Rabkin's argument by detailing contemporary “[m]etaphysical assumptions” (which we might identify today as a shift between modernism and postmodernism). For Collins, contemporary fiction which is often considered fantastic because of the way it seems to break with the real is not always fantastic because it is predicated on the understanding of the world as being fantastic; using Ionesco's plays as an example, Collins argues what is commonly considered to be fantastic is in fact attempting to express a reality it conceives as absurd. He links this observation to existential despair, using Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy to argue that, in understanding the complexity of definitions of the “fantastic”, we must accept that contemporary existential despair (consequent upon the alienation produced by scientific objectification of objects as meaningless in themselves in terms of human value) “may well be temperamental” and may “one day seem as quiant as a medieval armillary” (120-1).
Unfortunately, Collins talks of a “moment” or “shift” of “philosophical climates” then gives examples of a movement from a theological to a scientific paradigm which spans several hundred years. His examples here indicate that the “shifts” are ongoing tensions between discourses (most extant, with the tensions continuing), not as historical facts confined to specific periods; perhaps partly as a consequence, he does not recognise the differing positions within science in the same way Hanson does. His focus on phenomenology is useful inasmuch as Heidegger's terms are more loaded with perception in terms of personal experience as opposed to some abstract process. However, Collins ignores the arguments of the linguistic structure of perception which logically conclude discussions of relativity for McCaffery or Sanchez and provide for a more sophistocated recognition of the process of perception;
George R. Guffey's contribution is “The Unconscious, Fantasy, and Science Fiction: Transformations in Bradbury's Martian Chronicles and Lem's Solaris ”. Quoting a few science fiction writers, Guffey demarcates two forms of the creative process: one that involves conscious and rational planning, another that involves unconscious and intuitive free-association. He considers the imagery of the the unconscious in the “ocean” or “night,” in which ideas “float,” or how, when self-consciousness becomes too powerful, become “frozen solid”; he consequently uses Jung's categories of “directed thinking” and “fantasy thinking” and of the “personal” and “collective unconsciousness”. On this basis he considers how the influence of the unconscious is common to both The Martian Chronicles and Solaris as they relate to metamorphosis. He traces metamorphosis through daydreams (which are most commonly wish-fulfillment in which we turn into a figure of our desire) and Greek mythology, then gives several examples of metamorphosis in Martian Chronicles and Solaris. He considers the former book's style given that metaphor and simile are “by their very nature transformational” (155), and argues that Bradbury's “mechanophobia” probably led him to “unconsciously generate . . . biomorphic figures of speech” in which machines are made organic, or at least humanised. He concludes the essay by offering examples of transformation across fantasy texts, and suggesting that representations of the unconscious may be an element of all fantasy texts. While the notion of representations of the unconscious is an interesting shift from discussions of the unconscious per se is useful, Guffey's argument has not dated well. He accepts Freud's and Jung's theories en masse (eliding over differences between the two, neglecting to define archetype in relation to his use of unconscious figures, and ignoring possible tensions between figures of the collective unconscious which may be inherited or developed independantly according to common experiences. He also does not specify the obvious question, why there might be a relationship between figures of the unconscious and fantasy; this kind of question would be useful if addressed to the discussion of the kind of representations of the unconscious which might differentiate the “fantastic” in Todorov's formal sense from “fantasy” in the generic sense.
In “Confronting the Alien: Fantasy and Antifantasy in Science Fiction Film and Literature” Jack P. Rawlins is interested in explaining why science fiction films are not science fiction, but fantasy, a position which overlaps with popular conceptions of the difference between fantasy and science fiction. Using the way Invasion of the Body Snathers , and “Who Goes There?” and a few others texts suggest we should deal with an alien, or monster, Rawlins suggets there are two modes which identify with fantasy and science fiction: fantasy “honors the emotive side of the self . . . the nighttime perspective,” and characters in their texts must recognise that the alien, or the monstrous circumstances in which they find themselves, cannot be solved except by recourse to dream-like or symbolic responses which are traditionally associated with emotion or irrationality; the alien is here an expression of our inner selves (fantasy as “allegory”). Science fiction, on the other hand, “exercise[s] . . . the daytime powers of the intellect” (162), and characters must recognise that the alien, or monstrous circumstance, is an objective, external, scientific fact that needs to be explained away, and we must not let it tempt us to respond emotively and find symbolism (science fiction as “realism”). Rawlins thus suggests that science fiction is antifantasy, that mainstream film lies somewhere between these two tendencies to treat objects in fiction as symbols or as objects in themselves. While, using Close Encounters of the Third Kind as his ideal, he recognises that fantasy requires a specific kind of reader, he uses Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 as an example of how allegory can be reduced to scientific explanations (something that appears allegorical is in fact literal, but we are not evolved enough to understand the objects in themselves). He concludes by arguing that film is emotive, communicating to the “‘instinctual child'” (173), while reading is more analytical, and consequently most supposed science fiction films end up losing their analytical, science fiction elements and are reduced to fantasy. Rawlins position is problematic in terms of contemporary theories of the fantastic, to say the least; he does not recognise the common determinants in fantasy and science fiction, nor his political motivation for recuperating science fiction at the expense of fantasy; most importantly he does not recognise that the science he is discussing (the industrialised, patriarchal form of empirical reasoning linked to capitalist Progress) is only one forms of science or rationality, and that this kind of science is stereotyped in both fantasy and science fiction. A much more subtle theorisation is required to identify more analytical, less stereotyped kind of texts across fantasy and science fiction, yet Rawlins position is interesting in that it tries, through academic discourse, to recuperate popular conceptions of fantasy and science fiction.
Finally, in “The Search for Fantasy: From Primitive Man to Pornography,” Gary Kern traces some characteristics of fantasy from “primitive” mythology to pornography through Aesop, Plato, Aristophanes, Wells, Hoffman, Gogol, Dostoevesky, Belyi, Zamyatin, Khlebnikov and Lem. His main characteristic is that fantasy is born “through the possibility of giving experience a literary form,” of imposing a narrative structure which distorts experience as it is formerly understood. It may manifest itself in various (combinations of) forms: “moral tales . . . ideal dialogues . . . satires” (192); it may delight in its own inventions, or speculate about human limits, technology and philosophy; it may destroy logic and the world's reason, it may become an inward-turning escape from reality; it may re-create myth, demonstrating “its generative power,” and may suggest new types of creation. However, the major conclusion Kern draws is that while there was once a sense of progress through history, that is an “extension” of fantasy, “a reproduction of the same form, the same idea, only with new materials,” at present there is such re-use of the same forms and ideas that the genre is standardised and what popular films and texts are largely what he calls “ dead fantasy ”. Kern cannot find “any striking new idea, any challenging new form, any flash of fantasy to startle my mind and propel it into a future of exciting possibilities. Perhaps the future itself is closed, and fantasy has been reduced to a pastime.” His model for the degradation of the genre of fantasy is pornography, which meets Todorov's formal requirements because “too much unreality makes it ludicrous, too much reality makes it pathetic” (194). Kern's comment that fantasy may be “a pastime” compares strangely with William Morris' and other utopian writers' view that once a utopia is achieved fantasy will become dead, because there will be no more dramas to be played out. His focus on selection and his pessimism (which is dealt with in more detail in McCaffery's essay) also harks at Baudrillard's, yet he comes close to recognising optomism through the “open-ended structure” which subverts the “omniscient author” as a staple of contemporary fiction and is evident in the relativism of Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and Gogel and in the texts of Borges, Ionescu and Gombrowicz.
Zanger, Jules and Robert G. Wolf. “The Disenchantment of Magic.” Forms of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Third International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film. Eds. Hokenson, Jan and Howard Pearce. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.
This article discusses what it identifies as a shift in representations of magic and the role of magic in fantasy literature. The shift is from a position characteristic of British writing - which sees magic as the evil obstacle to the hero, or, if good, as subordinate to the agency of the hero, or ineffective - to one characteristic of American writing - which sees heroes reconciled with magic, beating evil magical forces on the same magical terms.
In the first tradition, Zanger and Wolf trace the image of the evil magician to the “willful deception” of Adam and Eve by the serpent, whereby magic is ultimately illusory, and an attempt to “trick the Christian into betraying his faith” (32). Magic, through figures such as Archimago, involves willful acts of asserting power and producing chaos and dissolution, a contrast to saintly acts which are prayerful supplications and try to restore an Edenic state. With magicians like Faust, magic's impiety loses sway to the notion of magic as forbidden knowledge. Zanger and Wolf relate this to the emergence of science and industrialisation, which, while granting great power, led to great social unrest, and magicians in fiction were analogous to technologists, and were motivated by human greed, ambition and desire for power. This tradition includes Coppelius and Sauron, where the evil magician's order is a reflection of an iniquitous and wasteful social system based on an individual's misuse of resources for his own satisfaction. On the other hand, good magicians in the British tradition are aides or advisors to the heroes - Merlin, Gandalf, Cadellin Silver Brow, Schmendrick and the Wizard of Oz - insufficient in themselves to combat the evil magicians. Zanger and Wolf conclude that the emphasis is on human rather than magical agency, pitting individual human courage against wild preternatural forces which alleviate anxiety over the contemporary plight to see social and technological forces as dwarfing the human.
In the second tradition, heroes master magical forces, through study, or because of familial inheritance - as evident in the magicians Norman Saylor, Ged, Morgan, Kelson, Jack and so on. Also, magic becomes seen as a science - as having empirically verifiable results - and consequently not a violation of natural law but an extension of it. Magic and science compete as two viable forms of gnosis, and though magic sometimes truimphs over science, generally science is seen as superceding magic. This theoretical branch ends with scientists who disguise superior technology as magic.
Zanger and Wolf relate this shift to three cultural causes. First, the fact that the American writers came from a science fiction tradition - where the hero is a scientist whose heroism lies in his ability to solve problems rationally and the audience valorises science, or appreciates it as a spectacle; second, to the post-World War II tendency to identify technological research in laboratories to find more effective weapons with the research of the magician. The figure of Einstein, Oppenheimer and Werner von Braun are here three figures which have magical analogues. Third, there was a shift in the writing community itself, from a traditional humanist culture that felt threatened by new scientific-technological-industrail forces, to a humanities which has capitulated to this scientific-technological wing.
Schuyler, William. “The Ethical Status of Magic.” Forms of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Third International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film. Eds. Hokenson, Jan and Howard Pearce. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.
Schuyler addresses the argument about the ethical status of magic, that is, to consider it good or evil. He does so by considering magic according to three theories of ethics - act-centred, consequence-centred and motive-centred (which all “have their weakness . . . [and] can be combined with either or both of the others” (25). To begin with, tracing the traditional way magic is constructed, he argues that magic is considered evil because, first, it is opposed to God's natural law, or will (that is, as an appropriation of God's supernatural powers by individuals), second, using it diminishes our humanity, and, third, “good motives and good consequences cannot outweigh the bad consequences and the risks” (26). He then critiques this position on three fronts.
On the first front, Schuyler introduces the distinction between laws we must obey (physical laws like gravity), and laws we can choose to obey (moral laws); morality lies, then, only through acts of will. He then has a vague reference to a case that what is good is independant of God in Christian theology, and seems to be saying that that God's natural law incorporates both physical laws and the moral code, and that ethics inheres not in these physical laws or the moral code per se , but in the actual process of choice by willing human beings. Consequently, we cannot denounce magic on an ethical basis because ethics does not emanate from God.
This account is misleading, for while morality as Schyler refers to it does not emanate from God, within such a framework it is nonetheless judged by that God's standards. If we do not conform to the moral code, we commit a normal social transgression; if we do not conform to natural laws, we commit a magical or supernatural transgression. In ethics, transgressions of laws or codes which are considered good are evil acts, and tolerance does not necessarily imply pluralism. The assumption often invoked is that the individual need not punish wrong-doers, for if they do not recognise their own bad choices and atone God will punish them because we are all subject to the same laws (an assumption not entirely consistent with original Christian dogma, yet evident in the history of Christian institutions). The idea I think Schuyler is trying to appeal to here is the notion that morality cannot be subject to the same standards of judgement as other fields of knowledge, such as physics, in which consensus is based simply upon observation of facts. Even if we know all the causes that led to an ethical choice, and all the possible effects of our choice, we do not eliminate the existential dilemma of having to make a choice: we still have an ethical dilemma which is hotly contested. Schulyer does not make this clear. To argue that magic is moral or immoral according to Christian dogma is to speak for Christianity from a position that is not Christian, or at least to imply that he is making the argument from a Christian viewpoint, which is not the case. Instead, he might have said that there are systems of meaning (religious and secular) which, unlike Christianity, do not construct natural law in such a way that necessitates magic be seen as an immoral transgression of it.
On the second front, Schuyler says we can argue that “the notion of natural law properly construed does not allow a distinction between natural and supernatural” (26), usually with the assumption that magic is morally neutral. On the one hand, we can argue that magic and science are commensurate, that magic can be subsumed under recogniseably scientific laws or forms. On the other hand, we can argue that magic and science are different, but coexist - that is, they both function in the world, but work according to different laws. In the example he provides, a story by Randell Garret, Schuyler argues that magical knowledge is ethically neutral: while destructive magic may have more potentially evil uses, and curative magic more potentially good uses, the ethics of magic is still, in principle, subject to use.
Third, using Roger Zelazny's “Amber” series as his example, if the natural state of affairs is chaos, and there is no natural law, then not only the ethical status of magic, but ethics in general is questionable. We cannot be certain if magic is good or evil because character's motives are egotistical and hedonistic. Magic seems to be judged according to its consequences, but not (presumably because there is no standard but an individual's laws or whims from which to judge it) utilitarian.
Schuyler argues magic can be seen in different ways according to different theories of natural law, but that no view of magic is tied to an ethical theory; in opposing traditional stereotypes of magic as evil or good I think he does live up to his presumption to have shown the complexity of the topic, however his argument is, especially in his first counter-argument, flawed, and demands more rigorous attention.
Ziolkowski, Theodore. Disenchanted Images: A Literary Iconology . Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1977.
Ziolkowski's text traces the themes, symbols and motifs of animated statues, haunted portraits and magic mirrors through a vast range of texts with fantastic elements; his broad coverage complements Todorov's limited treatment of texts, giving his exclusive definition of the fantastic, and the structure imposed on certain motifs gives his discussion a coherence which is sometimes absent in theorisations of the fantastic which are by virtue of the topic very much eclectic in their choice of examples. His focus on individual examples is useful for a consideration of contrasts between magical images and corresponding images in theorisations of fantasy, science fiction and the fantastic.
In his “Introduction,” Ziolkowski clarifies his definitions of image, theme, symbol and motif, and notes that the three “images” he has chosen to focus on are linked by a “magico-religious context” - from “efforts of primitive man to gain paower over his environment by means of image magic” to “intimite associations between images of the human body and the soul”. His discussion moves towards the way these images have become “disenchanted,” transformed in a secular context.
In “Image as Theme: Venus and the Ring,” after noting the primitive and religious origins of beliefs in animated statues, he traces versions of a text by William of Malmsbury which revolved around an image of Venus being animated by a wedding ring placed upon her finger, and the consequent havoc she wreaks on the man, who had been betrothed to another. This magic can proceed not merely from “the person to the image, but also from the image back to the person. This belief provides the theoretical basis for image-charms, a form of magic that goes back to paleolithic times” (24). The image of the statue of Venus represents pagan forces that predate Christian civilisation, and narratives progressively demonise the pagan Venus, though that figure can be seen positively or negatively, depending upon the author and historical context; Venus, and pagan eroticism or values, can liberate or revitatlise a “bland and effete society” (75), or represent “a dangerous intrudsion into the order of the nineteenth-century society, a threat to order and civilisation” (75). Its disenchantment involves four stages: in the Middle Ages its supernatural element was accepted; in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centures rationalism and common sense indicated animated statues were an impossibility, while a philosophical romanticism thought natural matter could be animated; at the end of the romantic period, there was an ambiguity around the supernatural, an impulse to provide rational explanations coupled with a refusal to explicitly deny the possibility of the supernatural; fourth, a stage where all magic is internalized and transferred from the image into the mind of the observer,” (76) becoming merely the “wishful dreams” of narrators. For Ziolkowski, such “magical” images exist in the twentieth century in the form of “pure fantasy, horror fiction, and travesty” (65).
Some relevant points for me concern how the fascination with automata in Romanticism “is almost always related to the ffear produced by the confusion of reality and illusion, a typically romantic phobia. / Romanticism was based on the philosophical belief that mind and matter are fundamentally identical . . . inanimate matter could be brought to life since it is seoparated from the animayte only by degree, not by any ingerent qualities. Such discoveries of the age as galvanism, mesmerism and animal magnnetism seemed to provide scientific evidence of this phenomenon . . . [T]he intellectual climate was such that the animation of a statue not only was theoretically possible; it also provided the public imaginartion with an ideal image for its central belief in the unity of all matter” (35-6). Also, “Heine elaborated an idea . . . that after the trumph of Christianity the deities did not simply vanish; instead, they went into aexile (an idea that appealed to Heine, the political exile), assuming the shape of animals (e.g., in Egypt) or retresting in the statues that represent them. The statues therefor represent a state of sleep, not a stony death” (45). “The Greek deities still reside in their ancient temples, but as a result of Christ's victory they have lost all their power. They are no more than poor devils who must hide, by day, among the owls and toads I nthe ruins of their former splendour. At night they rise up in enticing shapres in thew hope of seducing some innocent wanderer or bold fellow” (48).
In “Image as Motif: The Haunted Portrait” pursues the ways certain fictions play on the belief that images of people are not merely embody but are their souls, and, “if the portrait is the receptacle of the soul, then the soul or spirit of the deceased might well continue to animate the portrait long after the original body has died” (80). He spends some time considering the parodies of this theme, arguing that parody necessitates that the audience has a widespread familiarity with the subject (ie, genres or motifs) being parodied, and that “the phenomenon of rationalization must also be interepreted” (93). A striking quote which examplifies the magical aspect is taken from “Dr Heidegger's Experiment”:
The greatest curiosity of the study remains to be mentioned; it was ponderous folio volume, bound in black leather, with massive silver clasps. There were no lketters on the back, and nobody could tell the title of the book. But it was well known to be a book of magic; and once, when a chambermaid had lifted it, merely to brush away the dust, the skeleton has rattled in its closet, the picture of the young lady had stepped one foot upon the floor, and several ghastly faces had peeped forth from the mirror; while the brazen head of Hippocrates frowned, and said—“Forbear!” (quoted in Ziolkowski, 93)
Three themes are the portrait that magically “ages”; the Gothic portrait that communicates with the living; and the portrait that has absorbed the soul of the living model, which have their analogue in three manifestations of the haunted mirror. First, the genius loci , when a portrait is tied to a specific place, “representing the usually malevolent brooding presence of the house or family” (96) though “in classic cases, the portrait as genius loci is concerned more with the house than with the family” (110). A useful quote regards a tale in which:
[T]he narrator finally determines that the house is indeed haunted by the brain or consciousness of an eighteenth century character—someone like Caglistro—who had set up in a hiddon chamber various pieces of magical-electrical equipment that extended the impulses of the fiendish will. The wizard himself is represented in the secret room by his portrait (99).
With the figura , “a portrait painted in the past foreshadows present or future events” (95). The portrait here functions as a kind of prophecy, and “the psychological relationship between the portrait and the heroine matters” (110) in terms of disenchantment. The anima , lastly and, most relevant, is present when “a portrait painted in the fictional present stands in a magical relationship to its model” (95). A major theme here is the preference for Art over Life, “for the portrait over the original” and the “serious, indeed, often mortal, consequences” (87). The “egocentricity of the artist, who pursues his work at the expense of human life,” how “the artist's ruthless exploitation of his human subject gradually drains the life out of her and bestows it upon his creation” is Poe's form (124). In other cases, the artist is often seen as bearing “a huge moral responsibility since he is constantly subject to corruption by the forces of evil, which subvert his art” and “there exists the danger that even ‘good' art can have an insidious effect” (117). Ziolkowski relates the focus on the anima to the increasing “demand for more effective mechanical means of visual reproduction” (119), such as the daguerreotype. An important figure, for my project, is that of Hawthorn's Artist, “an exotic, demonic, Faustian magician, who is in touch with occult powers” (121). Hawthorne “attributes supreme owers of creation to the artist, who is capable by his very virtousity of bringing evil into the world” (122). In this, the artist is “entangled in the mysterious relationshgip that emerges between the model and its pictorial anima” (132). The most significant quote involves how such works
reveal a reverence for art that is virtually religious: hence the well-night magical power of the portraint in each case despite its secularization and disenchantment; it is the image of the aesthetic religion. But precisely because the image has been secularized, because it is clearly the product of a human creator, all these authors are keenly aware of thegreat moral responsibility incumbent upon the artist . . . For better or worse, for good or evil, it is the creation and responsibility of the painter, who thus enters the story with his huge burdon of consciousness and conscience. ( )
Two poles form in modern representations of the anima, characterised by love of a portrait for the sake of its model, and love of the model for the sake of her (usually) portrait. Another useful quote refers to The Shape of Illusion by William E. Barret:
[W]e are dealing with a writer who consciously chooses to relocate the motif of hainted portraits in the religious tradition in which it originated—with a writer, moreover, whose chosen genre is “fantasy fiction,” which operates on the borderline between realatity and the preternatural. As the background for the story that deals with magic paintings and sorcerer-artists the author has chosen a small town in Germany, which still preserves a medieval-mystical atmosphere, where such occurrences are not inconceivable (146).
The disenchanted painting becomes “an image onto which men project their feelings of guilt” (148).
In the most significant section of his text, “Image as Symbol: The Magic Mirror”, Ziolkowski begins by considering three familiar metaphors. First, a Platonic mirror of art, with art seen negatively as an imitation of an imitation. Art as imitation is also seen in a positive perspective, most significantly in relation to Marxism - “Georg Lukacs adduces the mirror hundreds of times as the symbol of an aty that reflects a reality xisting independant of our consciousness” (151), and recall the Mirror of Production ). Second we can find a Christian mirror of the soul that reflects God, of Holy Scripture as a mirror that reflects the truth of God, and, negatively, of man's mind as a mirror that reflect the illusory world of the senses (154). A secular version of this developed with the growth of texts considering the “mirror” as mimetically equivalent to truth. Third, we find the romantic metaphor of the soul as the mirror of one's fellow people, and of oneself. He then briefly associates the rise of the “image” of the mirror to Narcissus, that is, the growing self-consciousness (and conscience) with the mirror exposing horrors of the self, and breaking of the mirror as symbolic of hate or annihilation of the self. These, however, are non-magical mirrors.
The spiritual properties of mirrors are associated with the theory of the material origin of the soul; reflections or shadows of the self are seen seen as the soul, and those without either have no soul, and, in Christian mythology, this explains why the devil desires to steal souls and shadows. Also, the mirror represents access to a spiritual realm, beyond death, which results in omnipotence, and explanation of magical powers such as temporal and spatial clairvoyance. This is an explanation for many superstitions regarding mirrors. For Ziolkowski's classification, the relationship of characters to mirrors is of importance, and he focuses on catoptromancy, or divination by mirrors, the phenomena of doubling, and of the inverted or “other” world.
Regarding catoptromancy , he notes that “every competent sorcerer” was expected to be able to make a magic mirror, and “every important ruler was suppposed to have [one]”; from this he argues that “[t]he dream of efficient technological intelligence-gathering antedates modern secret services by many centuries” (163). One interesting text he relates of relevance to me is of
the legend of the master artisan, whose skill in constructing wondrous artifacts was so great that he was often considered a sorcerer. Among other things, he had fashioned of metal such subtle mirrors that even invisible spirits could be seen in them as visible figures . . . The master built his finest mirror in awe of the glory of God. But, gradually, as more and more people came to admire his work, he devoted himself increasingly to the mirror and neglected his other duties. Finally, becoming rich and proud, he lost sight of God and immersed himself in sinful passion (quoted in Ziolkowski, 164).
This both relates artisanship with sorcery and awe at the divine, and also relates the shift from religion to religion to individual power. “The magic mirror . . . though originally meant to reflect the glory of God, was corrupted to gratify the illlusory world of appearances and, ultimately, to reflect nothing but the vanity of the master himself” (164).
He then relates three historical/cultural factors that influenced the notion of the double. First, Fichte's philosophy on the Ego and the non-Ego, or external world, projected by it, which denied the existence of any reality apart from the Absolute Self. Second, the myths of animal magnetism, or mesmerism, which indicated that people could be linked, or at least that identity could be confused, through “magnetic” powers. Third, the interest in psychology, in the unconscious and the conscious. Rational explanations of doppelganger's as look-alikes became improbable leading to the literary revauluation on the convention of magic as an explanation in the text. What then arose was the tendency for people to consider apparently supernatural apparations as reflections of the self, especally a reflection of one's conscience, and for mirrors to signify delusions of identity, paranoia, schizophrenia, or, at its most vulgar, merely madness in general. Ziolkowski points out that when the image of the mirror does no more than reinforce a sense of psychological delusion, or functions structurally to enable some other prominant supernatural action to occur, it remains a motif; it only becomes a symbol when it becomes central to the story itself. In any case, the example of Franz Werfel suggests that duality, represented in the usual understanding of a reflection in a mirror, and a sense of disassociation from the self,“does not encompass the varied aspects of human consciousness” by presenting multiple mirrors, so that the double is “refracted into multiples ” (209). Likewise, for Hermann Hesse, the “magic mirror” is “a powerful symbol for the multiple aspects of the human personality” (213).
The backward world, or simply “other” world, is the third image Ziolkowski explores. He notes that the end of Werfel's play sees the “magic mirror, which at first reflcts the illusory world of everyday reality, finally becomes a transparent window opening out onto an ideal world, the spiritual kinddom of eternal reality” (216), but that in other texts the world need not be simply ideal, but of a different order, the realm of the underworld, or Death, the timeless realm of poetry.
In “The Implications of Iconology” Ziolkowski locates his study (of “phenomena that seemingly violate the laws of nature as they are understood at a given time in history” (227)) in the category of works the the supernatural in literature, yet differentiates it from the work of others. He argues that his historical approach on the four stages of disenchantment offers a different way of considering the “marvellous,” “fantastic” and “uncanny”: first, images of magic bear their ancient magical asosciations “accepted as conventions of fiction” (230); second, there is a shift to use narratives to play with the tenstion between rational and supernatural explanation; third, the spernatural is totally explained by rational means, usually in terms of internalized psychology. These three catagories are not “synchronic ‘genres' or modes but reactions to the supernatural that can best be understood in a diachronic sequence,” though they “do not disappear when a new stage [of reaction to the supernatural] prevails” (233). While many genres co-exist, they “emerged in a fixed sequence that reflects the history of culture and ideas” (233) - a notion which, I would point out, is significant to discussions of the spectacle and the sublime: while we are immersed in an interconnected field of significations, it is necessary at a critical level to consider the historical context of elements which constitute(d) spectacular or sublime moments.
Zuilkowski argues, considering the persistence of belief in the supernatural in the face of reason, that “[i]t was not mere credulity or ignorance of superstition that prompted perfectly intelligent people of earlier times to accept supernatural phenomena. They were often encouraged by sorcerers and priests who, for reasons of their own, used trickery to create the illusion that the statue could move, that the portrait could weep, that the mirror could reveal hidden truths” (236) and those who later wrote of the supernatural often located their tales in these “credulous” times. Ziolkowski argues that in an effort to explain persistent beliefs, Enlightenment thinkers like Kant “arrived at the inconclusive opinion that the ultimate solution to problems of the supernatural is not accessible within the limits of human reason and that the matter in any case is not worthy of serious consideration” (238) though others were less tolerant. He concludes that belief in the supernatural was prevalent during the Age of Reason, that “faith in the supernatural must be undermined before the sensation of the fantastic can emerge, and that “once the supernatural was liberated by rationalism, its literary usefulness become evident. It not only enable indirect expression of repressed aspects of a culture (for example sexuality in Victorianism) but enabled an expression of the numinous in a skeptical age; indeed once exhausted through parody and rationalisation, these images are sometimes placed again in their religious context. He gives some explanation for revival of the supernatural, and from this retrospectively organises his discussion of magic images according to a shift from a “threat to the individual from the outside” to a threat to the individual from within.” He relates this to a political contex: in the first case, unpredictable forms of authority and crumbling order create the sense of a threat from without, and when political circumstances relax, minimising a sense of external oppresion, the threat could be located within the individual. This had its analogue in the shift in psychological theories which first posited the unconscious as external, but, as they became more sophistocated, showed that the unconscious was better explained in terms of “manifestations of the individual psyche; it was not necessary to resort to external forces” (247); and this can explain shifts from a desire to explore other worlds to a desire to explore inner worlds.
Ziolkowski argues that the fantastic is characteristically found in literature, in narrative fiction, because the ambivalence of the fantastic occurs in the mind and loses much of its effect when given a visual status; that the first person narrator can undermine the sense of the fantastic; and the tendency towards short fiction existed because the fantastic focuses on a moment of crisis, an intensity of experience, and for supernatural element to cause such a moment of crisis the text has to embody reason and order - Ziolkowski implies that short fiction, at least in the French tradition, had a convention of order and rationality. Finally, for Ziolkowski the source of magical images is not some collective unconscious, but a literary tradition
Maitre, Doreen. Literature and Possible Worlds. Pembridge Press: Trowbridge, Wiltshire, England, 1983.
Maitre discusses the ways in which we construct possible-not-actual-worlds (pnaws). For modal logicians, the actual world is just one possible world amid infinite pnaws, which can be divided into those which could be actual because they follow our physical laws, and those which could not be actual because they are at variance with known physical laws. For Maitre, the positing of non-actual states of affairs for pnaws allows us to comprehend the actual world, and can lead us to change our perception of the possible in the actual world. Pnaws thus function as metaphors, creating new meanings by filtering the secondary subject (the “real” world) through the principal subject (the pnaw). But Maitre’s main focus is four different classifications of pnaws: i) pnaws inclusive of historical events and details which enable us to find authenticity outside of the text, so that there is a tension of cause and effects in the real world; ii) imaginary affairs represented that could be actual, an often utopian which shows the limits of “psychological tendances”; iii) texts that oscillate between could-be-actual worlds and could-never-be-actual worlds, making us wonder whose perception is wrong; iv) works which deal straight away with states of affairs which could never be actual. Overall, she offers a model for the projective nature of fiction, and the metaphorical nature of perception in general.
Mendelson, Edward. “Gravity’s Encyclopedia.” Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Ed. George Levine and David Leverenz: Little, Brown, 1976, (139-59).
Mendelson identifies the genre of encyclopaedic narrative, which signifies, metonymically, “the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets its knowledge” (162). He sees Gravity’s Rainbow as being, like Moby Dick and Ulysses, a compendium of Western culture, an accumulation of the living and dead material of/by which it is constituted. Science, religion, philosophy and literature are juxtaposed, both synthesising and parodying the knowledge they traditionally offer. Mendelson shows Pynchon’s indebtedness to Weber, especially regarding the notion of charisma, and argues that while, as an encyclopaedic representation of a cultural totality, Gravity’s Rainbow “recalls origins and foresees endings”, it also “insists on the continuing responsibility of those who live in the present”. Mendelson here argues that language is not separate from the world, but has real (political and other) effects, and that the other-worldly transcendence desired for by many of the characters is underlined by a desire to communicate, or “connect”, with others in the totality of the real world.
Plater, William M. The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.
Plater’s text is broken up into considerations of several basic themes, for example tourism, death-transfigured, and paranoia, but he argues that Pynchon’s texts do not carry such “discrete categories”. Rather, he sees it as accumulating meaning through “repetition and recapitulation”. But Plater’s underlines these various categories with the argument that Pynchon’s posits a duality between land as it exists in/by itself, and the landscapes we see in it. Through exploring the ways in which language, the self and the world can be perceived as “closed systems” subject to entropy, Plater sees paranoia is a means of imposing ones “dreams and fantasies” on others to impose a narrative of the self as a “closed system”. However, chance collisions with other “closed systems” operate to undermine this system, and this - as well as the possibility of “open systems” - counteracts entropy. Plater argues that Gravity’s Rainbow, unlike Pynchon’s other texts (which locate paranoia in the main characters) brings paranoia into the text itself, making the characters, narrators and readers alike all involved in a paranoid mode of organising the proliferation of fictional and factual details. Through his references to Wittgenstein, he shows that paranoia’s fanciful landscapes and chains of cause and effect do not occur in a vacuum, but amidst a totality of cultural “facts”.
Sanders, Scott. “Pynchon’s Paranoid History.” Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Ed. George Levine and David Leverenz: Little, Brown, 1976, (139-59).
Sanders argues that paranoia is the secular form which Puritanism has taken now that “God has been discredited”. He opposes a religious mode of seeing God as “the original conspiracy theory” (as governing the cosmos according to a Plan which can be divined) with a mode of seeing demonic forces (such as industrialists, or secret agents) as controlling and manipulating life. He consequently locates secular paranoia in a social context of post-WWII modes of social organisation. We are, he argues, surrounded by seemingly malevolent agencies - corporations, capitalist powers &c - too vast for us to apprehend, and project our anxieties over the effects of these anonymous forces on our lives back onto these agencies, imagining connections between them, and a specific, malevolent intent. Sanders relates this to Gravity’s Rainbow by arguing that while the Plan (the conspiracy) is “central”, Pynchon’s characters are “at the edge”, and their reality bounces between the uncertainties of chance and hidden powers “systematically hidden” from them.
Siegel, Mark Richard. Pynchon. Creative Paranoia in Gravity’s Rainbow. Port Washington, N.Y.:Kennikat, 1978.
Siegel argues that any critical analysis of Gravity’s Rainbow is in itself a kind of paranoid activity: one may be looking for an underlying order which does not exist. He devotes chapters to points of view, characterisation, cultural metaphors and narrative structure, and argues that each area functions to provide ambiguity. For example, Pynchon’s narrative perspective shifts continuously, making it difficult to stabilise a sense of reality. In conclusion, Siegel argues that Pynchons’ juxtaposition of mutually exclusive scientific and metaphoric metaphors from mathematics, literature, technology, social science and religion, creates a fundamental ambiguity.
Swanson, David W., Bohnert, Philip J. and Smith, Jackson A. The Paranoid. Little Brown and Co.: USA, 1990.
This clinical text foregrounds the multiplicity of meanings that the term “paranoid” can mean, and argues that “paranoia” is neither a symptom nor a disease, but a syndrome. It lists and describes seven characteristics which generally typify this syndrome: projective thinking, hostility, suspiciousness, centrality, delusions, fear and loss of autonomy, and grandiosity. It also gives a broad overview of the history of the term, from Plato and Hippocrates to Vogel, Kraeplin, Bleuler, Freud, ending with the official classification in the American Psychiatric Associations Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Its position is one of aiding the clinical therapist to best identify and treat the paranoid patient, arguing that the terms and categories of paranoia are not representative of objective forms, but “facilitate communication and clarify [between therapists], even if in an imperfect manner, the nature of the patients being investigated.” It consequently discusses the aetiology of clinical paranoia from biological, evolutionary and sociological perspectives, including, in the last category, the ways “paranoia” can influence, or is influenced by, the family, citizenship, politics, the law, religion and industry.
Kuhn, Annette. “Introduction: Cultural Theory and Science Fiction Cinema.” Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Science Fiction Cinema . London: Verso, 1990.
Kuhn traces the development of genre criticism in relation to the increasing significance of science fiction in cultural theory since the 1970's. She considers how the spectacular excess of film and its celebratation or glorification of its technological content, whereby “the technology of cinematic illusion displays the state of its own art” making science fiction “the most cinematic of genres”. She also considers some of the generic transformations of science fiction, largely revolving around preservation of humanism and the male ego, and how these relate to larger social processes, including other genres. She concludes by recognising the (cultural) use and (economic) exchange value of science fiction, and the different theoretical approaches that have been taken to analyse it: reflection, ideology, repression, spectators, intertexts.
Russ, Joanna. “The Subjunctivity of Science Fiction.” Extrapolations. Vol 15, No. 1. Dec 1973.
Russ focuses on the relationships between four modes of subjunctivity and four genres; reportage says “this happened,” naturalistic fiction says this “could have happened,” fantasy says this “could not have happened,” and science fiction this “has not happened”. After considering three definitions of science fiction (predictive, allegorical, and utopian/satirical), Russ tries to identify science fiction's “unique” status by placing it between fantasy and naturalistic fiction, that is, as neither possible nor impossible. She suggests that science fiction always keeps a sense of the actual world, or a familiar “model of reality” - a conception of physical and psychological laws as we understand them - but at the same time reworks this “model” by extrapolation. It consequently makes what is thought to be known seem absurd - or, in Russ's terms, it uses the devices of satire, but not for satirical effects, rather to defamiliarise the familiar. Fantasy, on the other hand, is framed by the familiar, and does not dislocate the reader's categories of “real” and the “possible” in the same way. While Russ' delineation between formal subjunctive categories is useful, the subjunctivity she identifies with science fiction is not exclusive to science fiction; fantasy also has a subversive, or satirical, aspect, and much science fiction is as conservative as the Fantasy Russ theorises. Generally, the closer fantasy and science fiction approximate generic typologies, the less transgressive they become.
Pringle, David, Ed. The Ultimate Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction. Sydney: The Book Company International, Pty. Ltd., 1966.
This encyclopaedia lists and reviews a comprehensive number of science fiction movies, television series, books, writers, characters and magazines. Pringle's predilections only occasionally intrude in the summaries of the films and texts, but while its listings are comprehensive and well known texts are described in some detail, many entries are so short that at times the text functions more as a reference book of titles and occasional trivia than an encyclopaedia. Also, Pringle's rates the movies according to four stars, excluding half stars; his ratings are, consequently, unsubtle and function mostly as a vehicle for his own tastes. Pringle's introduction offers some definitions of science fiction and a brief history of the genre's development, tracing back some of the individuals and events which inspired it. Pringle outlines the major themes that run through science fiction in all its manifestations by foregrounding its use of various “templates” (space operas, planetary romances, future cities, disasters, alternative histories and prehistorical romances and so on) and “motifs” (alien life, artificial intelligence, cosmic collisions and so on). Pringle thus foregrounds the complexity of science fiction of a genre, however his assumption that science fiction is opposed to fantasy and that this is “an important distinction” is problematic. Given the recognition by many contemporary theorists of science fiction and fantasy, this kind of statement is merely indicates a reactionary attempt to retain fantasy as the ex-nominated category to which theorists once (and sometimes still do) relegate science fiction, and in doing so assert the political validity of science fiction as a genre.
