магистрант Байджанова Г.Б.

Discourses of Fantasy in Literature

The discourses of fantasy in literature have been shaped by the difficulty of generically delineating between fantasy and its related genres of science fiction and horror, and by a concern with how to understand and validate the different narrative and formal strategies in representing ‘fantastic’ events and characters. Early criticism tended to argue that science fiction literature could be differentiated from fantasy by its emphasis on scientific realism in the representation of the fantastic. For example, the late 19^th century writer Jules Verne heavily criticised H. G. Wells’ novels as inferior fantasies without the basis of ‘sound physical principles’ in comparison to his own ‘voyages extraordinaires’, which were characterised by an emphasis on realism and detailed scientific justification. In the 1920s and 1930s Hugo Gemsback, editor of a number of magazines that were central to the growing recognition of science fiction as a distinct genre, actually set up a panel of experts to maintain the scientific accuracy of the stories published in his new magazine Science Wonder Stories [1, 68]. Kingsley Amis reiterates this emphasis on scientific realism in differentiating science fiction from the ‘anti-realistic’ [2, 31] form of fantasy.

However, the formal experimentation of the New Wave science fiction writers of the 1960s threatened such distinctions by moving away from a commitment to rational scientific discourse, frequently expressing cynicism about scientific enterprise. By introducing an exploration of the ‘softer’ social sciences and the realms of religion and magic into literary science fiction, the New Wave writers blurred the boundaries between science fiction and other literary genres, threatening the distinctiveness of the genre, and leaving Scholes and Rabkin to conclude that in the future ‘science fiction will not exist’ [3, 99]. As a consequence, analyses of the genre developed to encompass more fluid definitions of scientific discourse, which opened up debates about the history of the genre and its relationship to fantasy . For example, Darko Suvin argues that literary science fiction as a genre can be traced back to the fantastic voyages of Lucian and More [4, viii]. However, he maintains a distinction between fantasy and science fiction, by arguing that while fantasy introduces anti-cognitive laws into the empirical environment, science fiction literature represents the fantastic as ‘a realistic irreality’ [ibid.], creating cognitive estrangement by representing something that appears to be both fantastic and ‘real’ [4, 7-8].

Todorov’s (1975) seminal study of the literary fantastic is similarly concerned with understanding the function of realism in the representation of the fantastic. Todorov situates the fantastic on the frontier of two neighbouring genres, the marvellous (fairy tales, myth and so on) and the uncanny. He argues that ‘marvellous’ literature posits a supernatural explanation for the fantastic events depicted, while literature of the ‘uncanny’ represents events that, although disturbing or horrific, can be accounted for by the laws of reality. The fantastic occupies the liminal world between these two alternative responses to supernatural events, maintaining ambiguity and hesitation in the reader.

Todorov goes on to argue that as a consequence of maintaining ambiguity, the literary fantastic transgresses the structural and thematic laws that govern the representation of the real.

Whether it is in social life or in narrative, the intervention of the supernatural elements always constitutes a break in the system of pre-established rules, and in doing so finds its justification. [5,166]

These pre-established rules are based on the reader’s understanding of the real and of the literary conventions for representing the real. In creating hesitancy in the reader, the fantastic ‘questions precisely the existence of an irreducible opposition between real and unreal.’ [5, 167]. Rather than understanding the fantastic as ‘anti-cognitive’ as Suvin does, for Todorov it is the creation of hesitation between a cognitive and anti-cognitive explanation for the fantastic events represented that distinguishes the literary fantastic from related genres such as horror and science fiction [5, 172].

Extending Todorov’s structural poetics of the literary fantastic, Rosemary Jackson argues for a more inclusive model of the literary fantastic that situates the development of the fantastic in relation to the changing socio-political context of writing. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s understanding of literary modes, Jackson argues that ‘Fantasy provides a range of possibilities out of which various combinations produce different kinds of fiction in different historical situations’ [6, 7]. Thus, while Todorov’s theoretical definition of the fantastic is rigidly and restrictively formed, by constructing literary fantasy as a mode, Jackson is able to formulate a more fluid definition of the fantastic that encompasses, romance literature, or ‘the marvellous’ (including fairy tales and science fiction), ‘fantastic’ literature (including stories by Poe, Isak Dinesen, Maupassant, Gautier, Kafka, H.P. Lovecraft) and related tales of abnormal physic states, delusion, hallucination, etc. [6,7] Central to her analysis is the belief that there is no ideal model of the fantastic.

There is no abstract entity called ‘fantasy’; there is only a range of different works which have similar structural characteristics and which seem to be generated by similar unconscious desires. [...] Fantasy is not to do with inventing another non-human world: it is not transcendental. It has to do with inverting elements of this world, re-combining its constitutive features in new relations to produce something strange, unfamiliar and apparently “new”, absolutely “other” and different. [6, 7-8]

Jackson’s model of the literary fantastic therefore centres on the implications of representing the unreal. Centrally, she argues that this process involves not an escape from the real, but an engagement with and dislocation from culturally constructed perceptions of reality. This fracturing of the real disturbs both the culturally dominant notions of what is perceived as reality, and disrupts the artistic rules for the representation of the real. Jackson argues that by ‘eroding and scrutinizing the “real”’ [6, 180] the literary fantastic can be understood as a subversive literature that, ‘hollows out the “real”, revealing its absence, its “great Other”, its unspoken and its unseen’ [ibid.].

Bibliography

1. Parrinder, Patrick (ed.). 1979. Science Fiction: A Critical Guide, London: Longman.

2. Amis, Kingsley. 1961. New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction, London: Victor Gollancz.

3. Scholes, Robert; and Rabkin, Eric S. 1977. Science Fiction: History, Science, New York: Oxford University Press.

4. Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses ofScience Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, New Haven: Yale University Press.

5. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, New York: Cornell.

6. Jackson, Rosemary. 1981. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, London: Methuen.