MAGICAL REALISM AND THE FANTASTIC: Resolved versus
Unresolved Antinomy
Amaryll Beatrice Chanady
The fairy tale belongs to the mode of the marvelous,
where nothing surprises the characters, since magic is the
norm. In the fantastic, on the other hand, the world view
coincides with our own and is threatened by an event that
doesn't fit into the logical code expressed by the rest of
the text. The fantastic can be confused with the uncanny,
where the protagonist is terrified of sinister sounds and
shapes, but eventually discovers they have a rational
explanation (such as in the "Sandman," by E.T.A. Hoffmann) or
the scenario where, in the end, we discover that it was
"all a dream." Another type of "pseudo-fantastic" is science-fiction,
where the apparently fantastic can be explained by science and
technology.
The fantastic forces us to accept two distinct levels
of reality in one narrative (our everyday, rational, world
and the inexplicable according to our logic). It is similar
in this way to the popular legend where the supernatural is
presented as essentially different from the natural. They
are thus bi-dimensional, whereas the fairy tale is
unidimensional. However, unlike the fantastic, the legend
does not question the supernatural on the grounds of reason
and logic -- it may well find it terrifying, but not because
it violates our logic. In the fantastic, however, the
supernatural is seen as problematic because it cannot be
integrated within the implicit ideological code conveyed by
the text. Thus we have antinomy (the simultaneous presence
of two conflicting codes in the text). Since neither can be
explained in the presence of the other, the apparently
supernatural remains inexplicable. The introduction of a
single inexplicable event does not produce a sustained
antinomy; each code must be developed to the point where it
must be accepted. Thus the ambiguity of the fantastic is
not in the nature of the object or event, but in the nature
of a world ruled (and maintained) by certain norms that are
destroyed by something we cannot accept. One of the most
important devices for ensuring the reader's participation is
authorial reticence, which makes the inexplicable even more
disturbing and mysterious. The reader gets only enough
information to create suspense, leaving the rest to his
imagination. (Garland, New York, 1985)
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THE FANTASTIC IN LITERATURE
Eric S. Rabkin
Though Alice (of Alice in Wonderland) was
astonished at talking plants, we moderns (in a science-fiction
mode) can see such phenomena as unexpected but orderly --
proving that talking plants are not inherently fantastic;
they become so only when seen from a certain perspective (such as
Alice's, whose expectations were those of a normal, 19th century child).
Thus the fantastic does more than extend experience; the
fantastic contradicts perspectives -- it is Alice's
astonishment that signals the fantastic.
By virtue of this
direct contradiction of perspectives (what Rabkin calls a diametric reconfiguration), we can distinguish the
fantastic from other non-normal occurrences: the unexpected
and the irrelevant. Unexpected, literally, means
not-expected. When a hitherto unmentioned character wanders
into a story (Stephen Blackpool into Hard Times), his
entrance is not-expected, but many be quite ordinary (since
it is in keeping with the ground rules previously
legitimized -- a story about industry may well need a
worker). This has little to do with the fantastic. The
dis-expected is closer, representing those elements which
the text had diverted one from thinking about but which, it
later turns out, are in perfect keeping with the ground
rules of the narrative. Jokes depend on the dis-expected (e.g. the chorus-girl says to her elderly admirer, "Sir, I must tell you my hand belongs to another." "My dear," he replies, "I never aspired that high."). It is the anti-expected (e.g. the
dead, or a plant, speak) that we are calling
the fantastic and is that which, as discussed above,
contradicts perspectives. Thus the anti-expected is wholly
dependent on reality for its existence (even if it is, in a
sense, reality turned around 180 degrees).
Besides the three mentioned above, we still have one
other kind of non-normal occurrence in a narrative: the
irrelevant. Irrelevant occurrences violate a basic ground
rule of all art: every element of a work of art tends toward
the organic impact of that work of art. If this rule were
reversible, we might well have a new source of the
fantastic. However it is not. We must distinguish between
the apparently irrelevant and the truly irrelevant. The
apparently irrelevant functions cooperatively within the
organic whole of the narrative (e.g. the witty non-sequitur)
and is thus not irrelevant at all. The truly irrelevant
tends to be excluded not only from art but from all
experience (e.g. it is often untranslatable, for where there
is no frame of reference, man apprehends almost nothing).
As gestalt teaches us, there is no narrative world or
physical world without a set of ground rules by which to
perceive it.
One might look for a fantasy among fairy tales, but
their use of the world of enchantment negates the
possibility of their being true fantasy. Within the world
of enchantment, everything happens according to rules: "[The
fairy tale hero] doesn't ponder over the mysterious forces or where his
helpers have come from; everything he experiences seems
natural to him..." (Max Lüthi). The ground rules are not
ever-changing and reversed (as in Alice in Wonderland) and
thus it isn't true fantasy. (University Press, Princeton, 1976)
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AMINADAB (or The Fantastic Considered as a Language)
Jean-Paul Sartre
What must the nature of the fantastic be in our time if
it leads a French writer (Maurice Blanchot, author of the novel
Aminadab) to find himself, upon adopting fantasy as his
mode of expression, on the same terrain as a writer of
Central Europe (Franz Kafka)?
So long as it was thought possible to escape the
conditions of human existence through asceticism, mysticism,
metaphysical disciplines or the practice of poetry, fantasy
was called upon to fulfill a very definite function. It
manifested our human power to transcend the human. The
object thus created referred only to itself. It did not aim
at portraying anything, but only at existing. Though
certain writers did borrow the language of fantasy for the
expression of certain philosophical and moral ideas in the
guise of entertaining stories, they readily admitted that
they had diverted this mode of expression from its usual
purposes and that they had created an "illusionist" fantasy.
For Kafka, also, a transcendental reality existed, but
it was beyond our reach and served only to give us a sharper
feeling of man's abandonment in the realm of the human.
Blanchot in Aminadab rejects all transcendence and thus
the fantasy of the postwar disillusionment resigns itself
to transcribing the human condition. At the same time the
genre was pursuing its own evolution and getting rid of
fairies, genies and goblins as useless and outworn
conventions. For Blanchot there is only one fantastic
object, man. And not the man of religion or spiritualism,
but natural man, man as he is given.
If the fantastic is now limited to expressing the human
world, is it not going to be bound by new conditions? When a person
deals with the human world (Sartre's example is a cafe), he or she is
confronted with various implements, utensils, and machines. These
implements, by definition, are supposed to do something. In the
case of a pair of scissors, this something is to cut and trim various
types of material, and when one picks up a pair of scissors to cut a
piece of paper in half, the scissors represents a means to an end.
The means functions as matter, and form -- mental order-- is
represented by the end.
To describe the world topsy-turvy we will have to show ends crushed by
their own means -- where objects reveal their own instrumentality, but
with an indiscipline and disorderly power, a kind of coarse
independence that suddenly snatches their end from us just when we
think we have it fast. For example, the scissors, instead of cutting
the paper in half, changes into a stone as soon as the protagonist
tries it. Frustrated, she decides to wrap the stone in the paper
instead, but as soon as she tries to do so the paper turns into a pair
of scissors, and so on.
If the reader, while reading a story of this kind, thinks that it
is all a practical joke played on the protagonist, or that the
protagonist is suffering from some form of psychosis, then we have
lost the game. But if he has the impression that these absurd
manifestations appear as normal behavior, then he will find
himself plunged all at once into the heart of the fantastic
-- the fantastic, then, is the revolt of the means against the
ends. Absurdity, on the other hand, is the complete absence
of ends -- it is an object of clear and distinct thought and
belongs to the right-side-up-world, as the actual limit of
human powers. In the eccentric and hallucinating world we
are trying to describe the absurd would be an oasis, a
respite, and thus there is no place for it. I cannot stop
there for an instant; each means refers me constantly to the
phantom end by which it is haunted, and each end sends me
back to the phantom means through which I might bring about
its realization. I am unable to think at all, except in
terms of slippery and iridescent notions that disintegrate
as I behold them.
...The atmosphere in such works is so stifling because
of the exclusion of "impassive Nature." The protagonist
never gets a glimpse of forests, plains, and hills. How
restful it would be if they could come within sight of a
mound of earth or a useless piece of matter! But if they
did, the fantastic would immediately vanish; the law of this
genre condemns it to encounter instruments only. Also
excluded is the isolated person -- the hero must be
surrounded with men who are instruments. The reader,
referred from the implement to the man, as from means to
end, discovers that man is, in turn, only a means. As a
result, the universe of the fantastic seems like a
bureaucracy. (From: Literary Essays by John-Paul Sartre,
Philosophical Library, New York, 1958)
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AFTER KAFKA: The Influence of Kafka's Fiction
Shimon Sandbank
To Walter Benjamin, Kafka's parables have "a similar
relationship to doctrine as the Aggada (sections of the
Talmud and Midrash with stories, folklore, maxims) does
to the Halakhah (concerned with religious laws and
regulations). They are not parables, and yet they don't
want to be taken at their face value; they lend themselves
to quotations, and can be told for purposes of
clarification. But do we have the doctrine which Kafka's
parables interpret and which K.'s postures and the
gestures of his [Kafka's] animals clarify? It does not exist; all we
can say is that here and there we have an allusion to it.
Kafka might have said these are relics transmitting the
doctrine, although we could regard them just as well as
precursors preparing the doctrine." If, in Kafka, movement
and gesture were presented as semantically self-sufficient,
or, obversely, their symbolic meaning determinable, there
would be nothing new about this way of writing. What makes
it entirely new is that it always points to a truth beyond
itself but never commits itself to the truth to which it
points. His stories present themselves as interpretations,
point to a text beyond them, but are deprived of the
doctrine they represent. They are so many pointers to an
unknown meaning.
To relate this to some prevalent distinctions (Rimmon:
The Concept of Ambiguity), there is a threefold gap at the
center of Kafka's stories: at the level of events as they
appear in the text (what the Russian formalists call the
sjuzet), at the level of the events in their original
"natural" order, before they were artistically shaped into
the text (fabula) and, most important, at the level of
theme. A temporary gap at the level of sjuzet is finally
filled in, after many arrests and retardation. But the
filling proves illusory and the gap is reasserted and
finalized. It now turns out to be at the level of the
fabula itself, a permanent gap. The absurd nature of the
gap makes the reader want to treat the story as symbolic,
makes him want to translate it into another mode. Various
clues scattered about even seem to suggest this is possible,
but it proves fruitless. And yet he is not a purely
self-reflexive writer, as Kafka's work is guided by an
undeniable metaphysical impulse. The themes it evokes --
and evades -- may be psychological or political no less than
metaphysical, its very resistance to a reduction to any one
of them is a measure of its holistic, metaphysical drive.
Were it not for the fact that the doctrine Kafka was after
was the total meaning of existence, the total truth of
ontology rather than the partial truths of psychology,
ethics or politics, he could have had a doctrine, not only
its "relics." The fact that his stories resist thematic
extrapolation is inseparable from the fact that they are
metaphysical and concerned with the world as a totality.
Even Kafka's successors are unable, or unwilling, to write the
radically skeptical type of fiction that is his great contribution
to literature. They cannot, or will not, bear too much unknowing,
the withdrawal from all theme, the renunciation of all reason. They
end with some comfort, however paradoxical: Camus' absurd, Borges's
illusionistic mysticism, etc. (The University of Georgia Press,
Athens, 1989)
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