fantastic

The Fantastic is a literary term that describes a quality of other literary genres, and, in some cases, is used as a genre in and of itself, although in this case it is often conflated with the Supernatural. The term was originated in the structuralist theory of critic Tzvetan Todorov in his work The Fantastic. He describes the fantastic as being the hesitation of characters and readers when presented with questions about reality.

Definition

The fantastic genre can be subtly seen in works where the reader has a sense of confusion about the work and whether or not the described phenomenon was real. Todorov states that this genre never solely encompasses a novel as the ending always drives the hesitation towards one of two decisions which he titles as the uncanny or the marvelous. The uncanny, wherein the phenomenon turns out to have a rational explanation such as in the Gothic works of Ann Radcliffe; or the marvelous, where there truly is a supernatural explanation for the phenomenon:

The fantastic requires the fulfillment of three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural or supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader's role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work -- in the case of naive reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as "poetic" interpretations.^[1]

The Fantastic can also represent dreams and wakefulness where the character or reader hesitates as to what is reality or what is a dream. Again the Fantastic is found in this hesitation - once it is decided the Fantastic ends.^[2]

Relative Genres

There is no truly typical "fantastic story", as the term generally discusses works of the horror or gothic genre. But two representative stories might be:

• Algernon Blackwood's story "The Willows", where two men traveling down the Danube River are beset by an eerie feeling of malice and several improbable setbacks in their trip; the question that pervades the story is whether they are falling prey to the wilderness and their own imaginations, or if there really is something horrific out to get them.
• Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Black Cat," where a murderer is haunted by a black cat; but is it revenge from beyond the grave, or just a cat?

A clear distinction between the Fantastic and magic realism is that the latter does not privilege either realistic or supernatural elements, nor ask the reader or characters to do so.

The Fantastic is sometimes erroneously called the Grotesque or Supernatural fiction, because both the Grotesque and the Supernatural contain fantastic elements, yet they are not the same, as the fantastic is based on an ambiguity of those elements.

Examples

In Literary Works

• many of Edgar Allan Poe's short works
• Henry James The Turn of the Screw - seen by Todorov as one of the few examples of pure Fantastic ^[3]
• Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose"
• Mikhail Bulgakov
• Algernon Blackwood's works
• Sheridan Le Fanu's works in "In a Glass Darkly"
• Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series
• E.T.A. Hoffmann's works, notably Der Sandmann, "The Golden Flower Pot", and "The Nutcracker and the King of Mice"
• Gérard de Nerval's "Aurelia"
• Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla"

In Language

In Elizabethan slang, a 'fantastic' was a fop; an "improvident young gallant" ^[4] who was obsessed with showy dress. The character Lucio in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure is described in the Dramatis Personae as a 'Fantastic'.

In popular usage, the word "fantastic" has become a casual term of approval, a synonym for "great" or "brilliant", and this has to a great extent supplanted the original meaning of the word. However, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary still lists the original meaning first, with the popular meaning listed second and described as "informal".

Footnotes

Bibliography

• Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973)
• Eric Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)
• Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)
• Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London, Methuen, 1981)
• T. E. Apter, Fantasy Literature: An Approach to Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982)
• Tobin Siebers, The Romantic Fantastic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984)
• Neil Cornwell, The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990)
• Nancy Traill, Possible Worlds of the Fantastic: The Rise of the Paranormal in Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996)
• Armitt, Lucy, Theorising the Fantastic (London: Arnold, 1996)
• David Sandner, ed., Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004)
• Riccardo Capoferro, Empirical Wonder: Historicizing the Fantastic, 1660-1760 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010)

See also

• Fantastique
• Grotesque
• Magical Realism