with Todorov’s study is that he is not interested in textual interpretation, only in formalist criticism and the difficulty occurs because a classical discipline is used to analyse
romanticism. The wrong language is being applied.
In her book Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion (1981), Rosemary Jackson develops a cultural and psychological investigation into gothic romance and texts by Dickens, Tolkien, Kafka and Pynchon. She develops Todorov’s scheme by arguing that the fantastic
is not a genre at all, but ‘a mode, which then assumes different generic
forms’. In fact, fantasy subverts or breaks conventions by constantly reinventing
itself and by tackling taboo themes and issues. It is a dangerous and powerful
form of literature.
She argues that ‘Fantasy recombines and inverts the real, but it does
not escape it: it exists in a parasitical or symbiotic relation to the real’.
In this sense all literature has an element of both realism and fantasy, which
makes the term ‘fantastic realism’ a useful one. The symbiotic relationship
between fantasy and reality is the key to appreciating the importance of
fantasy as a mode, which interrogates the important human activities of
imagination and desire.
Jackson manages to widen the fantastic canon so as to include such notables as the Brontes, Hardy, Conrad, Flaubert and Eliot – mainstream novelists also employing non-realistic modes. Jackson argues that ‘Fantasy has not disappeared, as Todorov’s theory would claim, but it has assumed different forms’. The nature of fantasy is such that as soon as one scholar creates a definition or identifies rules, then they are bound to be subverted.
Kathryn Hume, in Fantasy and Mimesis (1984), takes the debate
further by insisting that fantasy is not a genre or even a mode. ‘It is truer
to literary practice to admit that fantasy is not a separate or indeed a
separable strain, but rather an impulse as significant as the mimetic impulse,
and to recognize that both are involved in the creation of most literature’.
She also states that ‘it is the fantastic elements which allow literature to
convey most of its varied sense of meaning’.
The dismissal of fantasy says more about the society and culture than about the
merits of individual fantasy texts and Hume goes back to classical philosophy
to uncover the origins of this suspicion towards fantasy. ‘Plato and Aristotle
between them tore a large and ragged hole in western consciousness. Ever since
their day, our critical perceptions have been marred by this blind spot, and
our views of literature curiously distorted. To both philosophers, literature
was mimetic, and they analyzed only its mimetic components’.
Hume’s thesis is a well-argued and timely call for a paradigm shift in
critical theory. Our postmodern world no longer depends on solely rational
thought, because the metanarratives have been deconstructed and science does
not provide all the answers. As Hume concludes – ‘The rediscovery of fantasy
should be a cause for optimism, and good reason to alter our critical
vocabulary’. Realism has failed to represent the whole of reality in its widest
sense and critical theory has also failed to explain the fantastic, so new
terms of reference are required.
Lucie Armitt, in Theorising the Fantastic (1996), suggests that fantasy is an
elusive and intangible paradox ‘beyond our grasp and beyond articulation, but
it continues to proffer glimpses of an enticing and forbidding unknown of which
we could otherwise only dream’. This remains an evocative definition. Armitt employs Freudian and feminist readings in her interpretation of fairy tales, gothic horror, nonsense and science fiction. Armitt demonstrates how fantasy is a powerful resource
available to every writer. ‘Now we can look at the fantastic as a form of
writing which is about opening up subversive spaces within the mainstream
rather than ghettoizing fantasy by encasing it within genres’
Structuralism, as a literary perspective, fails to enable readers to
understand a text, Armitt argues, because it is so often ‘Obsessed with
classifying’ leavi