 not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with a special
content of it, namely the archetype of the self’. Archetypes help us to create
symbols to express our deepest fears and emotions. Through these archetypes
fantasy forces us to confront those parts of our life that are inexplicable and
deeply personal. These stories have become an important part of our
understanding of self and society.
Medieval romantic poetry, such as the legend of St. Brendan from the tenth century and
the chivalric poems of the sixteenth century, like Palmerin of England, follow
these mythical patterns. Whilst the heroic epic represents tribal warfare, the
romance is concerned with quest and the mystery of the supernatural, employing
visionary themes, metaphysical imagery and baroque language. Since then fantasy
has been developed by literary movements and forms such as Gothic Romance,
Decadence, surrealism, horror, sf and postmodernism. These texts testify that
fears, hopes and dreams are best expressed through fantasy. Some of the
greatest novels written today are fantastic literature without much of the
general public or academic world realising.
In literary theory, the fantastic is usually discussed as a contrast to the seemingly preferred realistic or mimetic literature. Tzvetan Todorov in his ground-breaking study, The Fantastic (1975), gives a structuralist analysis of stories by Edgar Allan Poe and E.T.A.
Hoffman. In summary he concludes: ‘the fantastic is based essentially on the
hesitation of the reader’ referring to a tension that exists between what is
real and not real and the purest example he offers of fantastic uncertainty is
Henry James’ ambiguous narrative The Turn of the Screw.
Todorov naively suggests that ‘psychoanalysis has replaced (and thereby has made useless) the literature of the fantastic’ as if people no longer rely on supernatural explanations (the
marvellous) because science gives us rational answers (the uncanny). This is
only because his definition of fantastic literature is so limited. The problem 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 ‘i