The Fantastic I

I think I’ve mentioned before that the book I’m writing at the moment is on fantasy and dream in modern literature, and there seems to be quite a bit of the fantastic floating around in the book blog world at the moment, not least the Slaves of Golconda‘s latest, Bruno Schultz’s Street of Crocodiles. Now, the fantastic in literature (and by that I mean ghosts, spirits, bizarre phenomenon, acts of impossible metamorphosis, inanimate objects coming to life, etc) is often considered to indicate a story that tries to ‘escape’ or ‘transcend’ reality by constructing an alternative world. Our first response is to see the fantastic as belonging to a set of literary concerns that have nothing to do with life as we live it, or the reality of our political or cultural situation. Perhaps this is because the fantastic is often associated with the world of the child, and children are forcefully excluded from engagement in what adults consider to be most ‘real’. Well, think again; the fantastic is actually very tightly enmeshed with what is most intolerable or constricting about real life.

What the fantastic really expresses is a struggle against the limits of the world in which it was written. It often expresses the fears and anxieties that the contemporary social context inspired in its author, or else it spoke of an unbearable lack that begged for compensation; a lack of freedom, or a collapse of previously reliable forms of authority. In this way, fantasy literature is very good at showing us the basis on which the order, or rule of any society rests, for it performs, for a moment, a rampant, uncontrolled form of disorder, or misrule, a terrifying glimpse of what is most illegal, of what lies beyond the law. Whether this is the dead walking, or the drinking of human blood, or animals performing the same feats of language as human beings, fantasy shows us the scaffolding of beliefs and rules that keep us safe and in control in the reality we know. Are the dead really dead enough? To what lengths will man’s inhumanity to man go? Fantasy tests the boundaries of the known world to see whether or not they are in danger of breaking and letting unimaginable horrors in.

But the ties that bind are also those that constrict. It’s not surprising that authors like Kafka or Schultz, both of whom had traumatic childhoods, should be attracted to the fantastic. The irrational dictates of overly authoritarian parents are often translated into mad worlds where unreason rules; lack of love can lead to landscapes which remain locked in stubborn winter; the experience of extreme anger can find expression in spirits that burst into flames. Essentially these are moments when fear, anxiety or incomprehension take on a material form. It’s easy to see how terrified children, who lack the language to express what is happening to them, find their emotions taking on symbolic form in later life.

Whilst the fantastic can speak of personal torment, it also tells the tale of cultures in transition. One of the most defining periods of fantastic literature occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century in France. At that point France had been through a series of damaging and destabilizing revolutions; belief in monarchy as a form of government was destroyed, as was the peoples’ faith in a new form of Republic. The Catholic church was fast losing its power over the populace, and fathers were being challenged as heads of the family. In short, the fantastic at this point in history reflected a crisis in patriarchy; kings, heads of state, God and the father were all losing their grip on authority, and what would happen next remained unclear but threatening. As the old structures of order and control began to crumble, fantastic literature spun tales of malignant ghosts, vampiric women, statues that came to life and journeys to the centre of the earth. After all, if what had seemed set in stone now proved to be malleable and impermanent, it was possible to think that anything, just anything could happen. It’s a perfect example, I think, of how fear and possibility exist on two sides of the same coin.

What interests me particularly is that at the end of the twentieth century we began to see a real revival in the genre of the fantastic. What does this tell us about our own moment in history? What transitions are we undergoing at present and what regulations and limits are we testing? Some would say we are entering the era of the posthuman, that our old sense of humanity as perfectible and continually improving itself has been replaced with absolute investment in technology to take over as our guiding force. But I think that’s a post for another day…