Fear and Fantasy in a Global World Textxet Studies in Comparative Literature
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Fear and Fantasy in a Global World Textxet Studies in Comparative Literature Series Editors C.C. Barfoot Theo D’haen VOLUME 81 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/tscl Fear and Fantasy in a Global World Edited by Susana Araújo Marta Pacheco Pinto Sandra Bettencourt LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: Corrida / Running, 1983. Tinta acrílica sobre papel montado em tela / Acrylic on paper mounted on canvas, 239 × 202 cm. Col. / Coll. Paula Rego, em comodato na / under loan for use Fundação Paula Rego – Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, Cascais. Library of Congress Control Number: 2015948136 issn 0927-5754 isbn 978-90-04-30603-5 (paperback) isbn 978-90-04-30604-2 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS Acknowledgments Susana Araújo, Marta Pacheco Pinto, and Sandra Bettencourt Introduction 1 Part 1: Local Fears, Global Anxieties Christopher Bollas The Transmissive Self and Transmissive Objects in the Age of Globalization 15 James Rushing Daniel Dreamlandic Fantasy: Consumerism and Control in Bragi Ólafsson’s The Pets 35 David Vichnar “Territories of Risk” within “Tropological Space”: From Zero to 2666, and Back 55 Edith Beltrán Mexico’s Fearscapes: Where Fantasy Personas Engage in Citizenship 75 Part 2: The Limits of Knowledge: Fantasy and Identity Formation Martijn Boven The Site of Initiative. Towards a Hermeneutic Framework for Analysing the Imagination of Future Threats 101 Christin Grunert Conflict with the Perception of Time as Fertile Ground for Collective Insecurity: The Frightening Reality of Scientific Facts and their Transformation in Literary Fiction 123 Gero Guttzeit Fearful Fantasy: Figurations of the Oedipus Myth in Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010) 143 Marija Sruk Laugh Away the Fear! The Satisfaction of Comical Fantasy in the Holocaust Film Comedies of the Late 1990s 163 Alexandra Hills Viennese Fantasies, Austrian Histories: Space, Fantasy and Fascism in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter 185 Part 3: Boundaries and Performance: Language, Memory and Fantasy Harriet Hulme A Politics of Form: Fantasy and Storytelling as Modes of Resistance in the Work of Atxaga and Kundera 213 Ana Filipa Prata Memory and Fantasy in Antoine Volodine’s Minor Angels 239 Hande Gurses The Fantasy of the Archive: An Analysis of Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence 259 João Pedro da Costa The Digital Meta-Dissemination of Fear in Music Videos. A Transdisciplinary Textual Analysis of Two Case Studies: Esben and the Witch’s Marching Song and M.I.A.’s Born Free 279 Part 4: Uncanny Representations of the Self and the Other Ortwin de Graef Shaft which Ran: Chinese Whispers with Auerbach, Buck, Woolf and De Quincey 303 Brecht de Groote The Phantom in the Mirror: Duplication, Spectrality, and the Romantic Fear of Fantasy in Wordsworth, Coleridge and De Quincey 323 Margarita García Candeira Habitability and Spectres in the House of Language: Approaching (Post)Modernity in Las flores del frío, by Luis García Montero 351 Daniela Di Pasquale War on Fear: Reinterpreting Dante’s View of the “Infidel” 373 Notes on Contributors 397 Index 405 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The editors would like to thank the members of the Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies for the ongoing and stimulating venture which is the Hermes Doctoral Summer Seminar and Symposium: The University of Aarhus (Denmark), University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Charles University (Czech Republic), University College London (UK), Justus-Liebig-University Giessen (Germany), University of Helsinki (Finland), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), University of Lisbon (Portugal), Stanford University (USA), University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain), and University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA). The editors also wish to thank the research Centre for Comparative Studies of the University of Lisbon (CEC) for institutional and financial support. We are thankful to Helena Buescu, who supported this project since the beginning, and to the current Director of CEC, Manuela Ribeiro Sanches, for her continuing support. Special thanks are due to Francisco Serra Lopes for his revision to the volume’s Introduction and to Everton Machado for his comments. This work follows the scientific goals of Project CILM (reference PTDC/CLE- LLI/110694/2009). Thanks are also due to Masja Horn from Rodopi for her precious collaboration, as well as Textxet’s series editors, Theo D’haen and Cedric Barfoot, for their editorial support. Last but not least, the editors will always be grateful to the painter Paula Rego and to her museum Casa das Histórias: Rego’s fearless art work and bold approach to fantasy have been major sources of inspiration to the conception and editing of this volume. INTRODUCTION SUSANA ARAÚJO, MARTA PACHECO PINTO, AND SANDRA BETTENCOURT At a time when the mass media insists on bombarding us with news about natural, political and economic disasters, from flu pandemics to terrorist threats, thus acting as “weapons of massive communication”,1 words, ideas and images associated with such “crises” and “catastrophes” shape to a great extent collective memory and current imagination. However, the way concepts such as “crisis” and “catastrophe” depend upon and depart from fear and fantasy still needs in-depth analysis and further discussion. Fear and Fantasy in a Global World seeks to stir the debate on the processes and meanings of, as well as on the relations between, fear and fantasy in the globalized world. Collective fears and fantasies will be analysed here from a number of cross-disciplinary perspectives. Such diversity is promoted by the epistemological underpinnings of comparative literature, particularly in terms of the wide range of textual corpora this field is able to embrace as well as in terms of the critical and theoretical paradigms it is capable of bringing together. The volume explores the multiple ways in which culture, theory and the arts (literature and visual representations in particular) absorb, rework or challenge many of our collective fears, fantasies and anxieties in late global capitalism. In various ways and from different disciplinary angles, the essays respond to and scrutinize key questions related to the imaginaries of fear and fantasy, as well as their relations to trauma, crisis, anxiety, and representations of both the conscious and the unconscious. Despite their origins in psychoanalytic theory – namely in the work of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, among others – “fear” and 1 Paul Virilio, City of Panic, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005, 32. 2 Fear and Fantasy in a Global World “fantasy” have become pivotal terms in cultural and literary studies, and, as the essays show, they have recently seized the attention of theorists in a number of academic fields, such as literature, philosophy and politics. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud highlights the distinction between fear and anxiety through the tertium comparationis of danger.2 While he believed anxiety to be a state of expectation and preparation for a danger or threat which could be unknown (that is, have no object or an object not yet grasped), fear implied more specific and determinate objects. Anxiety and fear therefore elicit defensive reactions. In this light, fantasy is also devised or brought forth as a defensive architecture that morphs yet is percolated by Wirklichkeit – reality perceived as surrounding and external, in contrast to Realität, the psychic principle. For Freud, fantasy (Phantasie) was mainly a defence mechanism, a construction that allows one to deal with reality. Phantasizing was thus thought of as a means to sidestep certain elements of reality somehow ancillary to the pleasure principle. In turn, daydreaming was considered a resourceful mental elaboration stemming from the unconscious: “These day-dreams are cathected with a large amount of interest; they are carefully cherished by the subject and usually concealed with a great deal of sensitivity ... such phantasies may be unconscious just as well as conscious.”3 For Freud these play a central role both in everyday life as well as in art: The energetic and successful man is one who succeeds by his efforts in turning his wishful phantasies into reality. Where this fails, as a result of the resistances of the external world and of the subject’s own weakness, he begins to turn away from reality and withdraws into his more satisfying world of phantasy, the content of which is transformed into symptoms should he fall ill. In certain favorable circumstances, it still remains possible for him to find another path leading from these phantasies to reality, instead of becoming permanently estranged from it by regressing to infancy. If a person who is at loggerheads with reality possesses an artistic gift (a thing that is still a psychological mystery to us), he can transform his 2 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), trans. James Strachey, New York: W.W. Norton, 1961. 3 Sigmund Freud, On Psychopatholgy, ed. Angela Richards, London: Penguin, Penguin Freud Library Penguin, 1988, 88. Introduction 3 phantasies into artistic creations instead of into symptoms. In this matter, he can escape the doom of neurosis and by this roundabout path regain his contact with reality.4 Fantasy, it should be noted at this point, also became a central issue with the development of the Kleinian group within the British Psycho- Analytical Society.