Monstrosity and the Fantastic: The Threats and Promises of Monsters in Tommaso Landolfi’s Fiction

Irene Bulla

Abstract My chapter investigates the relationship between monstrosity and the fantastic, considered here as a literary mode with a well-defined historical and literary breeding ground and a more or less identifiable set of formal and thematic features. Far from being interchangeable with fantasy literature, the fantastic, which is born around the beginning of the nineteenth century and flourishes over the following decades, survives into the twentieth century in more fluid and composite ways. After a brief foray into the features of so-called traditional fantastic, I shift the focus to Italian twentieth-century fantastic and the monsters it produces, with special attention to the creatures born among the pages of Tommaso Landolfi. Their paradoxical nature, both alluring and terrifying, stands out especially when we consider them in the context of the broader relationship between monstrosity and the fantastic.

Key Words: Fantastic literature, Italian literature, monstrosity, monster theory, Tzvetan Todorov, Tommaso Landolfi. ***** The origin of the critical discussion of fantastic literature could be traced to the famous 1919 essay by Sigmund Freud, Das Unheimliche, where he discusses the notion of the uncanny from both a psychoanalytical and an aesthetic point of view.1 The essay delves into the network of motifs that resonate through E.T.A. Hoffman’s short story Der Sandmann, one of the foundational works of the fantastic genre, but extends the analysis to all the main sources of the uncanny (which are, incidentally, the most common devices for the activation of the fantastic space in literature): the Doppelgänger, the recurrence of the same (déjà vu), wishes or presentiments coming true, magic and witchcraft, death (dead bodies, ghosts and spirits), live burial, dismembered limbs. Freud’s study opens with an in-depth analysis of the semantic nuances of the word unheimlich. As the opposite of heimlich, which denotes something familiar, intimate, belonging to the home, the word unheimlich typically refers to something that is unfamiliar or unknown. Yet, something heimlich is also ‘concealed,’ ‘kept from sight, so that others do not get to know about it’: therefore unknown.2 As a result, the meanings of heimlich and unheimlich end up overlapping completely, exposing both the ambiguous nature of the uncanny experience and the apparently contradictory conditions for its activation. In fact, Freud’s conclusion is that the uncanny arises when something once known (and then forgotten) resurfaces in 144 Monstrosity and the Fantastic ______consciousness: namely, when a particular event brings with it the return of a repressed ideational content, such as the castration complex, or a surmounted primitive belief, such as the belief that inanimate objects possess a life of their own (animism). For instance, a story about a lost limb with a life of its own (Le Pied de Momie by Gautier) or about blinding (such as Hoffmann’s Sandmann) brings up the fear of castration, which the subject has overcome (repressed) in order to submit to the reality principle. Similarly, stories in which wishes can change reality (The Monkey’s Paw by W. W. Jacobs) or statues come to life (La Vénus d’Ille by Mérimée) are unsettling because they remind us of a surmounted cultural code, a magical way of thinking that scientific rationality has superseded. Freud’s declared interest is in the aesthetic conditions required for the arising of the uncanny. Uncanny situations are always so when they present themselves in reality (although some of the above-mentioned situations or events are not likely to take place), yet this is not always the case for a literary or fictional setting. Not all literary works featuring the return of the repressed are uncanny: for instance, some of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories feature inanimate objects coming to life, and yet they do not instil any feeling of uneasiness in the reader. Freud’s hypothesis is that the basic condition a work of fiction needs to satisfy in order to give rise to uncanny feelings is verisimilitude, intended as the highest possible adherence to reality. The story, in other words, disguises itself as a piece of realistic fiction, only to overthrow the reader’s expectations by introducing an extraordinary element: ‘[the author] deceives us into thinking that he is giving us the sober truth, and then after all oversteps the bounds of possibility.’3 The uncanny arises when the reader experiences a conflict of judgment (Urteilsstreit) between what s/he thinks is possible (and therefore conforming to the reality principle) and the remnants of suppressed beliefs that the story frames as worthy of trust, thereby pitting against each other two cultural codes with completely different rules and principles. Through this theoretical articulation, Freud lends a more subtle meaning to the Jentschian notion of ‘intellectual uncertainty’ and raises the stakes of the psychological conflict activated by the uncanny. To be sure, the regurgitation of an old or superseded content or model of thought apparently digested by a system, throws a sinister light on the balance achieved through that digestion. The tight system of empirical rationalism cannot afford even one intrusion by magical and pre-rational thought, on pain of collapsing. With these findings, Freud inadvertently laid the foundations for future theorists of fantastic literature. While not every piece of fantastic fiction is necessarily uncanny, the notion of an insoluble contrast between the natural world and some sort of supernatural realm is established by some critics as a basic condition for every fantastic text. Only, the activation of such oppositional categories (rational/irrational, possible/impossible) is articulated in such a way that the stability of these oppositions, instead of being confirmed, is put into question.4 French theorists of the fantastic in the 1950s and ‘60s, such as Pierre-George Castex5 and Louis Vax,6 elaborate on the notion