t 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’ leaving 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,