ng a text as an empty piece of data. This leaves fantasy
literature and literary theory in a dialectical tension. Armitt is paraphrasing
other critics when she writes, ‘If … fantasy is at its most subversive when
located on the margins of the canon, then surely there is much to be said for
it being likewise located on the margins of theory’.
Fantasy’s marginalisation has much to do with the Enlightenment notion
that art was separate from reason or that artistic expression is not concerned
with ‘reality’. This is a dangerous premise that belittles the power of the
symbol and of artistic imagination. Literary theory fails fantasy because
fantasy transcends reason and explicit meaning, so that scientific tools of
enquiry are inappropriate.
More explicitly, author J.G. Ballard expresses antipathy for all
literary theory. He believes ‘all schools of “English literature” should be
closed … fiction is meant to provoke, exhilarate, entertain, inform, amuse
and scandalise – not to be poked and prodded like a cadaver on an autopsy
table’. Ballard suggests that the danger of theory is that the theory becomes
more important than the text being studied: ‘the trouble with literary
criticism is that it tends to turn into a self-serving ideology, constantly
concerned to purify itself. Leavis’ notion that the novel is a moral criticism
of life being complete bunk – the imagination, thank God, transcends morality’.
The mistake made is in attempting to impose our own order upon fantasy,
thus rewriting the text. As readers, we could take the less comfortable option
of peering into the inchoate darkness to discover something far richer than our
impotent, material existence. Fantasy involves the reader, as long as they have
not lost their imaginations and the ability to dream.
Whether we call it romance, fable, the grotesque, non-realism, fabulation, metafiction, postmodernism or slipstream, fantasy is not so much a genre or a mode, but it is a protean
element: a resource or tool that exists for any writer to use to add depth,
colour, richness, imagination and a greater sense of reality to their art. We
should celebrate the existence of fantasy in our lives and in our arts.
‘Fantasy is not a lower but a higher form of art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent.’