BULETINUL Vol. LXII 107-114 Seria Filologie Universităţii Petrol – Gaze din Ploieşti No. 1/2010

The Fantastic or the Uncanny Fantasy

Marius-Virgil Florea

Doctoral student, The Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

Our debate is upon the meaning of the notions of fantasy and the fantastic. Scholars sometimes use both terms as synonyms, but on other occasions in order to distinguish between genres or types of discourse depending on the context or, on their purpose. The consequence is a wide range of definitions and notions that sometimes become useless or hard to understand. After explaining this confusion, we would like to investigate several approaches of the genre, mode or discourse of fantasy. The aim is to find an appropriate theoretical approach, for the variety of texts and contexts in which we may speak about fantasy.

Keywords: fantasy, fantastic, uncanny

Contexts and Notions

The history of the different approaches concerning fantasy and the fantastic has known many interesting moments as the notions and the way they were understood changed several times. David Sandner calls his collection of literary theories The Fantastic even though it contains both works upon the fantastic and upon fantasy, being aware of course of the similarity between them. In terms of history, Stephen Prickett in The Evolution of a Word treats the matter of meaning concerning the term fantasy, showing that in the Middle Ages it was used corresponding to its Greek etymology as something invented or hallucinatory. It was with its first uses that the term had been also associated to its humbler sibling of fancy. Mingling their meanings one referred to something wholly invented, as in Chaucer, cited by Prickett who used the term fantasy together with “mental image” as “something that does not exist” [6, 173]. The term had an ironic use most of the times, meaning something that did not exist, no matter if it was about something good or evil. Towards the end of the 18th century the belief in ghosts and fairy decreasing, the term dealt more with something like delusion and the nonsense of madmen or of children [6, 173]. A surprising change came in the first half of the nineteenth century when together with romanticism fantasy had the great chance to gain revenge. In the discourse of Coleridge fantasy was seen as the distinction between imagination and fancy. It was in fact, from the year 1797, when, in a letter to Thomas Pool, Coleridge spoke about the importance of fantasy and fairy tales in building one’s personality [6, 38]. Those unrealistic images, instead of being dangerous, were the chances for the future adult, to love “The Great” and “The Hole” as opposed to the “little world” of other people. In a later stage (1817) Coleridge also makes an important distinction between primary and secondary imagination, giving this term a very 108 Marius-Virgil Florea powerful meaning that tried to relate human’s power of the will with God’s creation. Fantasy gains this time a more specific but also generic place, being separated from fancy but situated behind “imagination”, the noblest function of the Will. Returning to Prickett’s historical presentation, the term fantasy was used by Thomas Carlyle (1831) apparently instead of Coleridge’s imagination, calling it the organ of the Godlike. Prickett considers it anyway more like confusion because Carlyle couldn’t really have a similar context to Coleridge’s in which to use the word. The real sense of Carlyle’s, according to Prickett, couldn’t have been more than something like arbitrary and subjective, having lost the sense of the Divine world of Plato’s pure Ideas as in Coleridge’s concepts. Not much time before that, in 1828, Hoffmann’s tales had been translated into French, and highly appreciated by J.J. Ampere who compared them to Walter Scotts’ work. As a reaction, in Revue de Paris of the same year, Scott considered that fantasy’s main characteristics were the unbelievable and the absurd. So practically, Carlyle had written about fantasy in an already formed opinion about it as a minor and unserious genre. So, fantasy once again remained rehabilitated but not to the full, defined but not completely. From fairy tales to the gothic novels the term made a career. It was not until 1970 that Todorov’s work was translated in English, and the critics had nothing else to prefer instead. But even after that, English studies continued to use the same term, sometimes as a synonym of fantastic, other times as signifying something different. As for the contexts of the fantastic, Valérie Tritter explained the important moment in 1828, when Loève-Veimars translated Hoffmann’s stories in French, and the arbitrariness of his decision in naming them “contes fantastiques”[9, 4]. At first, it appears that the word was used only in its adjectival form as in the cited phrase, in order to be made famous as a noun with Charles Nodier’s Du fantastique en littérature in 1830, [9, 4], in which together with his high appreciation of romanticism considered that the fantastic was the last key to inspiration in spite of all the reductions of literature’s power of referentiality imposed by the growing of the civilization. The next year Gerard de Nerval writes an essay called “Fantastique”, with a rather vague definition [3, 13], but the most mentioned as the first serious critic, George Pierre Castex gave a social point of view to the genre in Le Conte fantastiques en France de Nodier à Maupassant (1951). Denis Mellier [5, 11] also mentions Louis Boussoulas (1952), Roger Caillois (1965) and Louis Vax (1965) as the critics that imposed and defined the basics of this concept. Finally, after Tzvetan Todorov’s Introduction à la littérature fantastique, (1970), the term became fully autonomous, as the notion for a whole genre of literature.

Genre, mode or discourse

In no connection to, or apart from the oscillation for the right notion, we might classify the different approaches in three main streams. Fantasy (or the fantastic) have been considered and treated as a genre – mostly in the French tradition – as a mode, or as a different discourse in comparison to the main stream of the mimetic discourse of literature. In spite of the title we begin with the wider approach of the fantastic as a mode in relation to Joseph Addison’s article “The Pleasures of Imagination” in The Spectator (1712), [6, 13] who named “the fairy way of writing” all that had connection to the supernatural. This had opened a long debate upon how largely should fantasy be defined. But there wasn’t a precise grasp of that kind of theory yet, and the other types of approach already made a competition. Anna Laetitia Aikin (later Barbauld) in On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Pleasure, (1773), [6, 30-36], considered the matter through the concept of pleasure. And even if her aim was not all fantasy but more like its terrifying horror stories stream, the principle used could state for the whole writing of the supernatural. She opened this way another field of research that will be brought to its best by Freud later on, that of psychological approach, seen from the point of the reaction of the reader. Besides, she opened a moral concern which was dealt with by Coleridge or later by Dickens: the issue was whether untrue and “fairy way of writing” could be considered The Fantastic or the Uncanny Fantasy 109 dangerous because of the lack of concern or its defying reality. That explains Coleridge’s defense of fantasy from his letter to Thomas Pool where he spoke about the benefits of his childhood readings of the fairy tale. His ideas that the fairy way of writing was a noble access to man’s opening towards The Great and The Whole derived from Edmund Burke philosophical theory of the sublime in A Philosophical Enquiry of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1759), where the “delightful stillness” [Addison On the Sublime,142 in 6, 8] of the soul was to be gained by peeping at things that fed our imagination with an idea of the infinite. It was the paradox by which our imagination needed to be fed with something that overwhelmed it, that made this value possible. The connection to the sublime was acknowledged or at least brought about by Addison before Burke, but also by Walter Scott, Ann Radcliff, Tzvetan Todorov, Harold Bloom and John Clute [6, 10] after that. The matter that one literary form should need a philosophical defense ground is in itself interesting as we shall point out further on. Returning to the several approaches, it is obvious that talking about fantasy scholars would imply the wide variety of text and that way not getting to a unique answer whether they talked about a mode or a genre. If Richard Hurd in his Letters (1762), [6, 24-29] defended the gothic novel in the name of fantasy, and also Anna Laetitia Aikin [6, 30-36] gave her example of terrifying atmosphere, talking also about that, others, such as Coleridge or later on Dickens would imply fairy by talking about fantasy. Nevertheless the English theory saw no obstacle in giving various names to different subgenres in order to distinguish them: fairy tales, gothic fantasy, weird stories, sword-and-sorcery, horror stories and so on. This shows in fact another way of conceiving terms in general, whose most important role is rather descriptive and interchangeable. And maybe that wasn’t after all such a bad idea, as the main problem had to be the object of literature in itself instead of this nominal one. After the todorovian distinction, in 1975, Colin Manlove wrote about the substantial and irreducible element of the supernatural as a defining feature of fantasy, being very inclusive by that, but continued in stating that this supernatural should always become at least familiar in relation to the one who experienced it, including this way only the fairy tale and the modern fairy. [6, 157] It is just a proof that the vague way of defining continued [2, 18; 45]. The French school however opposed a more specific and technical use. The first theorists, like Nodier for example, related the genre to Hoffmann’s work that was by then (1828) translated in French. G. P. Castex observed the social implication and also explanation of the way in which the fantastic literature used to break all conventions about world and reality [7, 11]. Again, Roger Caillois placed the fantastic somewhere between the fairy tale and science fiction, getting to the valuable idea that such classifications depend on the way literature is perceived [7, 12-13], and Louis Vax, another important theorist from the period before Todorov, treated the matter from the point of view of a crisis in the perception of reality and consequently in the perception of the self [5, 12]. It was the perfect background for Todorov’s approach who did nothing more than to clarify the terms trying to reach to some eternal value of his distinction, using the concept of hesitation. The problem was that, just like his predecessors Todorov spoke only about the 19th century literature and therefore his classifications were only for a historical genre. This misunderstanding that Todorov didn’t clarify has been the beginning of endless discussions about structural or historical approaches. Another way of talking about both fantasy and the fantastic was from the point of view of discourse. Formalist theoretician Andrzej Zgorzelski (1967) considered that: ‹‹The breach of internal literary laws››; fantasy appears when ‹‹the internal laws of the fictional world are breached››, as indicated by reactions of characters in the story [6, 272- 273]. Eric Rabkin, in The Fantastic and Fantasy (1976), [6, 168-171], seeing that the central concept in defining fantasy, “the impossible” was a very questionable and changeable idea, and that, inside the world of fiction it is its rules of coherence and reality that make us feel in a normal or awkward place. The conclusion was that: 110 Marius-Virgil Florea

One of the key distinguishing marks of the fantastic is that the perspectives enforced by the ground rules of the narrative world must be diametrically contradicted. The reconfiguration of meanings must make an exact flip-flop, an opposition from up to down, from + to - . [6, 170] It was a very important step towards the revival of the idea of “fairy way of writing” which was the fantastic seen as a mode. The problem with those theories was that they had the tendency to put the matter of the content behind, in favor of that of the discourse. Anyway this matter opened the field of another kind of approach in which fantasy was seen as a matter of discourse more than one of content. This double way of seeing the problem led to Rosemary Jackson’s conception of the fantastic as a mode, where the two streams were put back together. However Fredric Jameson in Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Use of Genre Criticism (1981) [6, 181] showed that there is always a certain relativity among the pretended scientific approaches such as structuralism and semiotics, because of their historical bounding. Even though he sometimes goes rather too far, one fact is there correctly shown: What really matters is not the perfection of the method but its effects on the research. In order to bring a certain incomplete closure we briefly present Gary Wolfe’s collection of definitions that together make an interesting picture both by their synonymy and by their differences, [6, 272-273]: For E.M. Forster (1972), fantasy means fiction that “implies the supernatural, but need not express it.”, whereas for Herbert Read (1928) it is “The product of Fancy” in Coleridge’s sense, characterized by „objectivity and apparent arbitrariness” best exemplified by the fairy tale. Speaking of the fairy tale the well known writer of the modern one J. R. R. Tolkien (1947) considered fantasy as: “The most nearly pure form” of art, characterized by ”arresting strangeness” and “freedom from the domination of observed “fact”; in other words, Sub- Creation combined with “strangeness and wonder”. Another definition, not far from this idea is that of Reginald Eretnor (1953): “Imaginative fiction in which no logical attempt is made, or needed, to justify the “impossible” content of the story.” Both definitions witness the matter of “escapism” rendered by the genre, although Tolkien’s idea is mostly about a belief. Continuing the idea of representing the impossible, Robert A.Heinlein (1957) considered fantasy: A story that is “imaginary – and-not-possible.”, and Rudolph B. Schmerl (1960), as: The deliberate presentation of improbabilities through anyone of four methods – the use of unverifiable time, place, characters, or devices – to a typical reader within a culture whose level of sophistication will enable that reader to recognize the improbabilities [6, 272-273]. The concept of impossibility mingles with the reader’s approach as in Donald A. Wollheim (1971): “Pure fantasy is that branch of fantasy [in the whole of which Wollheim also includes science fiction and weird fiction] which, dealing with subjects recognizable as nonexistent and entirely imaginary, is rendered plausible by the reader’s desire to accept it during the period of reading.” Impossibility is sometimes related to man and his world as Ursula K. Le Guin (1973) sees it: ”An alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence”, characterized by a “para rational” “heightening of reality” and (in Freudian terms) primary process thinking, as opposed to reason. As well, Jane Mobley (1974) shows that we deal with: A non-rational form ... which arises from a world viewed essentially magical in its orientation. As a fiction, it requires the readers entering an Other World and following a hero whose adventures take place in a reality far removed from the mundane reality of the reader’s waking experience. This world is informed by Magic, and the reader must be willing to accept Magic as the central force without demanding or expecting mundane explanations [6, 272-273]. This being only a half of Wolfe’s list, we may draw the conclusion that in the most part what we encounter is vague definitions with rather abstract and unverifiable terms. Others which are more specific like the last two, have a higher risk to fall into mistake. For instance, if we consider the world of magic as one of fantasy (although it’s obvious that not all fantasy is The Fantastic or the Uncanny Fantasy 111 like that), that doesn’t mean we speak about the non-rational. Any fictional world has its internal laws among which there is a perfect coherence. George Macdonald wrote about this in 1890 [The Fantastic imagination, in 6, 64-69]: The natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them in the way of presentiment any more than in the way of use; but they themselves may suggest laws of other kinds, and many may, if he pleases, invent a world of his own, with its own laws; for there is that in him which delights in calling up new forms – which is the nearest, perhaps, he can come to creation. When such forms are new embodiments of old truths, we call them products of the Imagination; when they are mere inventions, however lovely I should call them the work of the Fancy: in either case Law has been diligently at work [6, 65].

It is of course still a matter of terminology but Macdonald’s point is obvious. The famous fantasy writer C. N. Manlove described fantasy in 1975 as: A fiction evoking wonder and containing a substantial and irreducible element of supernatural or impossible worlds, beings or objects with which the mortal characters in the story of the readers become on at least partly familiar terms [6, 272-273]. In this he practically concentrated the essence of fantasy in the supernatural, another term that can be defined differently in certain contexts. W. R. Irwin (1976) gave a definition closer to Roger Caillois: “A story based on and controlled by an overt violation of what is generally accepted as possibility; it is the narrative result of transforming the condition contrary to fact into „fact” itself.” The reason why Wolfe gave all these examples (and more), was to place himself into a whole other paradigm of discussion and speak about fantasy from a more generic point of view, that by which we may also judge the main stream of literary forms and genres. His theory presented in another excerpt shown by Sandner transforms this first debate into a rather senseless little quarrel.

An interesting theory

Gary Wolfe in his work The Encounter with Fantasy, (1982), [6, 222-235] started by pointing out that almost every theory upon the issue of fantasy and the fantastic would always turn to the problem of representing the impossible, the non-rational etc. After showing that the concept of what may or may be not rendered as possible is just a convention and is therefore rather questionable he chose not to completely reject it but to point out that another thing becomes important. Because it doesn’t matter so much whether an element is considered possible or not but the most important is the context on which it is shown. If the context in which we judge the matter of possibility is very narrow we might come to the delirium of a schizophrenic. If the context is too wide we come to the discourse of fairy or that of science fiction or the religious imagery. That’s why Wolfe’s conclusion is that: The notion of impossibility in fantasy, then, must lie somewhere toward the middle of this scale; it must be more public than the schizophrenic’s hallucination, yet less public than myth and religion [6, 224]. But the main issue comes not only to that but to the problem of signification. There are two types of signification that Wolfe talks about. One of them is the dogma, as the set of rules by which we conceive our world, the other is the emotional signification that must sustain the convention between the author and his reader: an agreement that whatever impossibilities we encounter will be made significant to us, but will retain enough of their idiosyncratic nature that we still recognize them to be impossible [6, 224]. So the main problem that is encountered by the reader and that also needs the master creation of the author is not how to represent the impossible but how to create meaning from it. 112 Marius-Virgil Florea

Significance becomes more important than representation itself, as in any other mimetic creation. The reader may become really interested only when he is drawn by that. Wolfe shows that the problem of possibility, seen as a cognition matter, does not always have a primary role in fantasy. In fact, it is more with the science fiction that the author tries to make impossibilities seem possible through a logical and coherent set of laws. On the opposite side, fantasy is built in such a way that the reader’s attention is not oriented mainly upon impossibilities but upon significance. In the same way he explains the difference between fantasy and the sword-and- sorcery type, which is often taken as the first. From his point of view, Wolfe has all the reasons to consider this type of fantastic closer to science fiction than to fantasy. Because, even though we don’t encounter the outer space, the same different set of rules exists, coherent in itself and significant mostly as it may be manipulated and controlled. As returning to fantasy, Wolfe made this finest observation that the most important fact is not the “horrifying thing” or the way in which the impossible is conceived, but the strategy that keeps the reader close even after the hesitation stopped. His conclusion is that: “fantasy manages to sustain our interest in impossible worlds simply by making these worlds emotionally meaning to us” [6, 229]. By that he doesn’t dismiss the opposite “cognitive” element, stating that the reader must be kept in a perfect equilibrium of the two. And it becomes obvious after seeing things like that, why we become skeptical whenever we have to classify that kind of works made only for the pure (but rather low) emotion, such as some works of the gothic or of the horror stories. The problem – as Wolfe shows it – is not that they use the same arsenal of the supernatural but that the emotion we expect from them is poor and foreseeable. Speaking also about the accusation of escapism Wolfe goes further and states that since in fantasy we may talk about equilibrium between emotional and cognitive significance, we may also come to the idea of belief. Careful not to be misunderstood he also clarifies this as having nothing to do with didactic or allegorical fantasy but with something entirely different similar to what Tolkien called “secondary belief”. This way even if we accept that the reader might get a sense of freedom through the disruptions and breakings of the common law, they are after that or almost simultaneously captive to belief. And since this kind of belief arises from both cognition and emotion, “it is not necessary for us to share the author’s philosophies or beliefs that are external to the work for us to accept and „believe in” their embodiment in the narrative”[6, 231]. This way caption is temporary and any theory or philosophical suggestion may be suspended after the lecture.

How can one simplify and not be reductive

After Freud’s essay upon The Uncanny with the subtle distinction between heimlich and unheimlich, which proved the origin of our most horrifying images and explained them through Hoffmann’s Sandman, almost any critical approach had to mention the psychoanalytical point of view. Sometimes they even went further, as fantasy became also the literature of narcissistic overestimation of the self and of the promethean desire [Harold Bloom in 6, 236-254] or the expression of the hidden desires [R. Jackson in 6, 272]. Obviously, if we get their ideas out of their contexts any irony becomes possible. But that is not the issue here at all. Psychoanalysis surely sees and finds out great things about the most inner reasons for our actions including literature. We might even agree that it explains many intricate elements from the plot and from the imagery as well. But the problem of really describing fantasy still remains unsolved. The question was not about the treatment so the answer shouldn’t be a diagnostic. We find more appropriate instead, Wolfe and Daniel Mellier’s suggestion [5, 15] that also fits Matei Călinescu’s semiotic approach, [1, 8], that is the point of view of a crisis. All three, in their different ways consider the main characteristic of fantasy as a crisis similar also to Louis Vax’s theory. This crisis appears in both the reader’s and the fictional world of significance or code, by the encounter of two different signifying codes that usually undermine each other [1, 8]. The The Fantastic or the Uncanny Fantasy 113 reader is at least put into doubt by showing him an example of lack of coherence. This example may of course stand only in terms of language, or narrative solutions but it also may be brought by the content and the plot itself. Other things such as the reader’s hesitation, escapism or unheimlich memories exist of course but more as a result of the crisis. And as for the opposition to the Reason or the Real, that is another effect that can be discussed only culturally. But the intricate way of fantasy shouldn’t and can’t stop here. Because we may see the moment of crisis as nothing more than what it is, just one moment that leads to another. Any crisis passes immediately to another stage of equilibrium. Of course we talk about a different equilibrium than the one before the crisis. But this is not the most important debate. What counts is that, as Wolfe showed, we are made, cognitively and emotionally to deal, in term of crisis, with our world – even if by that we mean our world of preconceptions. This entire adventure in which we get to an underworld territory by the lack of coherence and then, through a complex mechanism of involving ourselves, we get to the surface once again is the main issue of fantasy.

A Crisis of Reality or Fantasy Read Backwards

The connection between fantasy and postmodernism was brought into the spotlight by Neil Cornwell, a theoretician from Bristol University, who showed that fantasy (or the fantastic) has become closer to the main stream literature in the past few years: From a position of lurking around the Gothic and baroque margins of ”minor” works and genres in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the literary fantastic in its broader sense, cross-fertilizing and evolving new forms, has marched steadily towards the mainstream of literature [4, 211]. The fantasy way of writing became more eligible for writers, instead of the classical mimetic discourse. This doesn’t mean that we should see postmodernism as a contemporary form of fantasy. There are specific motifs and themes for this current that has only coincidental similarities to the features of fantasy, such as the playful imagery and the textual worlds. But this only shows that we see the older genre of fantasy in a different way now. Lance Olsen (1987) began this discussion with describing our perception of reality in terms of possibility stating that: Our preconceptions of what constitutes the impossible are assaulted every day. In other words, postmodern art faces the problem of responding to a situation that is, literally fantastic. No wonder, then, that fantasy becomes the vehicle for the postmodern consciousness. The fantastic becomes the realism our culture understands [7, 284]. By turning upside down the cultural paradigm, perception seems totally changed. And the question that would derive from here is whether the old mimetic type of discourse should be conceived as the postmodern fantastic. Taking into account these few examples of the variety of contexts and approaches in which fantasy had no choice but to reshape and redefine, we therefore draw a conclusion. All these texts are so related to each of their contexts, to the extend that one could never consider any of them to be the right one. The modal approach forces a separation to the mimetic discourse and therefore can be contradicted by several works of the 19th century; the generic one often exaggerates with its attention paid to frontiers and essence; the French discourse is sometimes much too exclusive when reduces le fantastique to the literary works of the 19th century, while the English one becomes very inclusive and many times uses undefined terms such as the “substantial and irreducible element of supernatural or impossible worlds”; finally the “postmodernist” approach tends to change fantasy’s real aims and shift to its deconstruction, sometimes transforming the effects and rank them as primary causes. The reason why we chose Wolfe’s theory as an interesting one was that he situated his theory in a wider context of literature in general and spoke more of the values but of the particularities of fantasy. He 114 Marius-Virgil Florea showed this way, what we generally need from literature shaping this request for the fantastic world.

Bibliography

1. *** Antologia nuvelei fantastice, Bucharest: Univers, 1970. 2. B o z z e t t o , Roger, Huftier, Arnaud, Les Frontières du Fantastique. Approches de l’impensable en littérature, Camelia Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, 2004. 3. Cap-Bun, Marina, Între absurd şi fantastic: incursiuni în apele mirajului, Bucharest: Paralela 45, 2001. 4. Cornwell, Neil The literary fantastic: from gothic to postmodernism, London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990. 5. Mellier, Denis La littérature fantastique, Paris: Seuil, 2000. 6. Sandner, David Fantastic literature: a critical reader, London: Praeger, Westport Conneticut, 2004. 7. Steinmetz, Jean-Luc, La littérature fantastique, Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 2008. 8. Todorov, Tzvetan Introduction à la littérature fantasti que, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970. 9. Tritter, Valérie, Le fantastique, Paris: Ellipses, 2001.

Fantasticul sau the Uncanny Fantasy

Rezumat

Articolul exploreazǎ problema noţiunilor prin care este denumit fantasticul alături de cea a modurilor în care acesta este perceput. În funcţie de anumite contexte, abordările privesc genul, modalitatea sau discursul fantasticului. Dincolo de astfel de subtilităţi problema rămâne şi astăzi nerezolvată, pentru că eterogenitatea indiciilor oferite de critici este încă prea mare. Propunem în acest articol deschiderea unei noi discuţii, în căutarea unei perspective potrivite. Am utilizat în acest sens contextul mai larg oferit de Gary Wolfe, în care atenţia se concentrează mai mult asupra profunzimii unei opere literare decât asupra particularităţilor legate de fantastic.

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