BULETINUL

Universitii Petrol Gaze din Ploieti

Vol. LXII
No. 1/2010
107-114 Seria Filologie


The Fantastic or the Uncanny Fantasy
Marius-Virgil Florea
Doctoral student, The Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest
E-mail: virgil_fl@yahoo.com
Abstract
Our debate is upon the meaning of the notions of fantasy and the fantastic. Scholars sometimes use both
terms as synonyms, but on other occasions in order to distinguish between genres or types of discourse
depending on the context or, on their purpose. The consequence is a wide range of definitions and notions
that sometimes become useless or hard to understand. After explaining this confusion, we would like to
investigate several approaches of the genre, mode or discourse of fantasy. The aim is to find an
appropriate theoretical approach, for the variety of texts and contexts in which we may speak about
fantasy.
Keywords: fantasy, fantastic, uncanny
Contexts and Notions
The history of the different approaches concerning fantasy and the fantastic has known
many interesting moments as the notions and the way they were understood changed several
times. David Sandner calls his collection of literary theories The Fantastic even though it
contains both works upon the fantastic and upon fantasy, being aware of course of the similarity
between them. In terms of history, Stephen Prickett in The Evolution of a Word treats the matter
of meaning concerning the term fantasy, showing that in the Middle Ages it was used
corresponding to its Greek etymology as something invented or hallucinatory. It was with its
first uses that the term had been also associated to its humbler sibling of fancy. Mingling their
meanings one referred to something wholly invented, as in Chaucer, cited by Prickett who used
the term fantasy together with mental image as something that does not exist [6, 173]. The
term had an ironic use most of the times, meaning something that did not exist, no matter if it
was about something good or evil. Towards the end of the 18
th
century the belief in ghosts and
fairy decreasing, the term dealt more with something like delusion and the nonsense of madmen
or of children [6, 173]. A surprising change came in the first half of the nineteenth century when
together with romanticism fantasy had the great chance to gain revenge. In the discourse of
Coleridge fantasy was seen as the distinction between imagination and fancy. It was in fact,
from the year 1797, when, in a letter to Thomas Pool, Coleridge spoke about the importance of
fantasy and fairy tales in building ones personality [6, 38]. Those unrealistic images, instead of
being dangerous, were the chances for the future adult, to love The Great and The Hole as
opposed to the little world of other people. In a later stage (1817) Coleridge also makes an
important distinction between primary and secondary imagination, giving this term a very
108 Marius-Virgil Florea

powerful meaning that tried to relate humans power of the will with Gods creation. Fantasy
gains this time a more specific but also generic place, being separated from fancy but situated
behind imagination, the noblest function of the Will. Returning to Pricketts historical
presentation, the term fantasy was used by Thomas Carlyle (1831) apparently instead of
Coleridges imagination, calling it the organ of the Godlike. Prickett considers it anyway more
like confusion because Carlyle couldnt really have a similar context to Coleridges in which to
use the word. The real sense of Carlyles, according to Prickett, couldnt have been more than
something like arbitrary and subjective, having lost the sense of the Divine world of Platos pure
Ideas as in Coleridges concepts. Not much time before that, in 1828, Hoffmanns tales had
been translated into French, and highly appreciated by J .J . Ampere who compared them to
Walter Scotts work. As a reaction, in Revue de Paris of the same year, Scott considered that
fantasys main characteristics were the unbelievable and the absurd. So practically, Carlyle had
written about fantasy in an already formed opinion about it as a minor and unserious genre. So,
fantasy once again remained rehabilitated but not to the full, defined but not completely.
From fairy tales to the gothic novels the term made a career. It was not until 1970 that
Todorovs work was translated in English, and the critics had nothing else to prefer instead. But
even after that, English studies continued to use the same term, sometimes as a synonym of
fantastic, other times as signifying something different.
As for the contexts of the fantastic, Valrie Tritter explained the important moment in
1828, when Love-Veimars translated Hoffmanns stories in French, and the arbitrariness of his
decision in naming them contes fantastiques[9, 4]. At first, it appears that the word was used
only in its adjectival form as in the cited phrase, in order to be made famous as a noun with
Charles Nodiers Du fantastique en littrature in 1830, [9, 4], in which together with his high
appreciation of romanticism considered that the fantastic was the last key to inspiration in spite
of all the reductions of literatures power of referentiality imposed by the growing of the
civilization. The next year Gerard de Nerval writes an essay called Fantastique, with a rather
vague definition [3, 13], but the most mentioned as the first serious critic, George Pierre Castex
gave a social point of view to the genre in Le Conte fantastiques en France de Nodier
Maupassant (1951). Denis Mellier [5, 11] also mentions Louis Boussoulas (1952), Roger
Caillois (1965) and Louis Vax (1965) as the critics that imposed and defined the basics of this
concept. Finally, after Tzvetan Todorovs Introduction la littrature fantastique, (1970), the
term became fully autonomous, as the notion for a whole genre of literature.
Genre, mode or discourse
In no connection to, or apart from the oscillation for the right notion, we might classify
the different approaches in three main streams. Fantasy (or the fantastic) have been considered
and treated as a genre mostly in the French tradition as a mode, or as a different discourse in
comparison to the main stream of the mimetic discourse of literature.
In spite of the title we begin with the wider approach of the fantastic as a mode in relation
to J oseph Addisons article The Pleasures of Imagination in The Spectator (1712), [6, 13] who
named the fairy way of writing all that had connection to the supernatural. This had opened a
long debate upon how largely should fantasy be defined. But there wasnt a precise grasp of that
kind of theory yet, and the other types of approach already made a competition. Anna Laetitia
Aikin (later Barbauld) in On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Pleasure, (1773), [6, 30-36],
considered the matter through the concept of pleasure. And even if her aim was not all fantasy
but more like its terrifying horror stories stream, the principle used could state for the whole
writing of the supernatural. She opened this way another field of research that will be brought to
its best by Freud later on, that of psychological approach, seen from the point of the reaction of
the reader. Besides, she opened a moral concern which was dealt with by Coleridge or later by
Dickens: the issue was whether untrue and fairy way of writing could be considered
The Fantastic or the Uncanny Fantasy 109

dangerous because of the lack of concern or its defying reality. That explains Coleridges
defense of fantasy from his letter to Thomas Pool where he spoke about the benefits of his
childhood readings of the fairy tale. His ideas that the fairy way of writing was a noble access to
mans opening towards The Great and The Whole derived from Edmund Burke philosophical
theory of the sublime in A Philosophical Enquiry of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1759), where the delightful stillness [Addison On the Sublime,142 in 6, 8] of the soul was to
be gained by peeping at things that fed our imagination with an idea of the infinite. It was the
paradox by which our imagination needed to be fed with something that overwhelmed it, that
made this value possible. The connection to the sublime was acknowledged or at least brought
about by Addison before Burke, but also by Walter Scott, Ann Radcliff, Tzvetan Todorov,
Harold Bloom and J ohn Clute [6, 10] after that. The matter that one literary form should need a
philosophical defense ground is in itself interesting as we shall point out further on. Returning to
the several approaches, it is obvious that talking about fantasy scholars would imply the wide
variety of text and that way not getting to a unique answer whether they talked about a mode or
a genre. If Richard Hurd in his Letters (1762), [6, 24-29] defended the gothic novel in the name
of fantasy, and also Anna Laetitia Aikin [6, 30-36] gave her example of terrifying atmosphere,
talking also about that, others, such as Coleridge or later on Dickens would imply fairy by
talking about fantasy. Nevertheless the English theory saw no obstacle in giving various names
to different subgenres in order to distinguish them: fairy tales, gothic fantasy, weird stories,
sword-and-sorcery, horror stories and so on. This shows in fact another way of conceiving
terms in general, whose most important role is rather descriptive and interchangeable. And
maybe that wasnt after all such a bad idea, as the main problem had to be the object of
literature in itself instead of this nominal one. After the todorovian distinction, in 1975, Colin
Manlove wrote about the substantial and irreducible element of the supernatural as a defining
feature of fantasy, being very inclusive by that, but continued in stating that this supernatural
should always become at least familiar in relation to the one who experienced it, including this
way only the fairy tale and the modern fairy. [6, 157] It is just a proof that the vague way of
defining continued [2, 18; 45].
The French school however opposed a more specific and technical use. The first theorists,
like Nodier for example, related the genre to Hoffmanns work that was by then (1828)
translated in French. G. P. Castex observed the social implication and also explanation of the
way in which the fantastic literature used to break all conventions about world and reality [7,
11]. Again, Roger Caillois placed the fantastic somewhere between the fairy tale and science
fiction, getting to the valuable idea that such classifications depend on the way literature is
perceived [7, 12-13], and Louis Vax, another important theorist from the period before Todorov,
treated the matter from the point of view of a crisis in the perception of reality and consequently
in the perception of the self [5, 12]. It was the perfect background for Todorovs approach who
did nothing more than to clarify the terms trying to reach to some eternal value of his
distinction, using the concept of hesitation. The problem was that, just like his predecessors
Todorov spoke only about the 19
th
century literature and therefore his classifications were only
for a historical genre. This misunderstanding that Todorov didnt clarify has been the beginning
of endless discussions about structural or historical approaches.
Another way of talking about both fantasy and the fantastic was from the point of view of
discourse. Formalist theoretician Andrzej Zgorzelski (1967) considered that:
The breach of internal literary laws; fantasy appears when the internal laws of the
fictional world are breached, as indicated by reactions of characters in the story [6, 272-
273].
Eric Rabkin, in The Fantastic and Fantasy (1976), [6, 168-171], seeing that the central
concept in defining fantasy, the impossible was a very questionable and changeable idea, and
that, inside the world of fiction it is its rules of coherence and reality that make us feel in a
normal or awkward place. The conclusion was that:
110 Marius-Virgil Florea

One of the key distinguishing marks of the fantastic is that the perspectives enforced by the
ground rules of the narrative world must be diametrically contradicted. The reconfiguration
of meanings must make an exact flip-flop, an opposition from up to down, from +to - . [6,
170]
It was a very important step towards the revival of the idea of fairy way of writing
which was the fantastic seen as a mode. The problem with those theories was that they had the
tendency to put the matter of the content behind, in favor of that of the discourse. Anyway this
matter opened the field of another kind of approach in which fantasy was seen as a matter of
discourse more than one of content. This double way of seeing the problem led to Rosemary
J acksons conception of the fantastic as a mode, where the two streams were put back together.
However Fredric J ameson in Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Use of Genre Criticism
(1981) [6, 181] showed that there is always a certain relativity among the pretended scientific
approaches such as structuralism and semiotics, because of their historical bounding. Even
though he sometimes goes rather too far, one fact is there correctly shown: What really matters
is not the perfection of the method but its effects on the research. In order to bring a certain
incomplete closure we briefly present Gary Wolfes collection of definitions that together make
an interesting picture both by their synonymy and by their differences, [6, 272-273]: For E.M.
Forster (1972), fantasy means fiction that implies the supernatural, but need not express it.,
whereas for Herbert Read (1928) it is The product of Fancy in Coleridges sense,
characterized by objectivity and apparent arbitrariness best exemplified by the fairy tale.
Speaking of the fairy tale the well known writer of the modern one J . R. R. Tolkien (1947)
considered fantasy as: The most nearly pure form of art, characterized by arresting
strangeness and freedom from the domination of observed fact; in other words, Sub-
Creation combined with strangeness and wonder. Another definition, not far from this idea is
that of Reginald Eretnor (1953): Imaginative fiction in which no logical attempt is made, or
needed, to justify the impossible content of the story. Both definitions witness the matter of
escapism rendered by the genre, although Tolkiens idea is mostly about a belief. Continuing
the idea of representing the impossible, Robert A.Heinlein (1957) considered fantasy: A story
that is imaginary and-not-possible., and Rudolph B. Schmerl (1960), as:
The deliberate presentation of improbabilities through anyone of four methods the use of
unverifiable time, place, characters, or devices to a typical reader within a culture whose
level of sophistication will enable that reader to recognize the improbabilities [6, 272-273].
The concept of impossibility mingles with the readers approach as in Donald A.
Wollheim (1971): Pure fantasy is that branch of fantasy [in the whole of which Wollheim also
includes science fiction and weird fiction] which, dealing with subjects recognizable as
nonexistent and entirely imaginary, is rendered plausible by the readers desire to accept it
during the period of reading. Impossibility is sometimes related to man and his world as Ursula
K. Le Guin (1973) sees it: An alternative technique for apprehending and coping with
existence, characterized by a para rational heightening of reality and (in Freudian terms)
primary process thinking, as opposed to reason. As well, J ane Mobley (1974) shows that we
deal with:
A non-rational form ... which arises from a world viewed essentially magical in its
orientation. As a fiction, it requires the readers entering an Other World and following a
hero whose adventures take place in a reality far removed from the mundane reality of the
readers waking experience. This world is informed by Magic, and the reader must be
willing to accept Magic as the central force without demanding or expecting mundane
explanations [6, 272-273].
This being only a half of Wolfes list, we may draw the conclusion that in the most part
what we encounter is vague definitions with rather abstract and unverifiable terms. Others
which are more specific like the last two, have a higher risk to fall into mistake. For instance, if
we consider the world of magic as one of fantasy (although its obvious that not all fantasy is
The Fantastic or the Uncanny Fantasy 111

like that), that doesnt mean we speak about the non-rational. Any fictional world has its
internal laws among which there is a perfect coherence. George Macdonald wrote about this in
1890 [The Fantastic imagination, in 6, 64-69]:
The natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them in the way of
presentiment any more than in the way of use; but they themselves may suggest laws of
other kinds, and many may, if he pleases, invent a world of his own, with its own laws; for
there is that in him which delights in calling up new forms which is the nearest, perhaps,
he can come to creation. When such forms are new embodiments of old truths, we call them
products of the Imagination; when they are mere inventions, however lovely I should call
them the work of the Fancy: in either case Law has been diligently at work [6, 65].

It is of course still a matter of terminology but Macdonalds point is obvious. The famous
fantasy writer C. N. Manlove described fantasy in 1975 as:
A fiction evoking wonder and containing a substantial and irreducible element of
supernatural or impossible worlds, beings or objects with which the mortal characters in the
story of the readers become on at least partly familiar terms [6, 272-273].
In this he practically concentrated the essence of fantasy in the supernatural, another term
that can be defined differently in certain contexts. W. R. Irwin (1976) gave a definition closer to
Roger Caillois: A story based on and controlled by an overt violation of what is generally
accepted as possibility; it is the narrative result of transforming the condition contrary to fact
into fact itself. The reason why Wolfe gave all these examples (and more), was to place
himself into a whole other paradigm of discussion and speak about fantasy from a more generic
point of view, that by which we may also judge the main stream of literary forms and genres.
His theory presented in another excerpt shown by Sandner transforms this first debate into a
rather senseless little quarrel.
An interesting theory
Gary Wolfe in his work The Encounter with Fantasy, (1982), [6, 222-235] started by
pointing out that almost every theory upon the issue of fantasy and the fantastic would always
turn to the problem of representing the impossible, the non-rational etc. After showing that the
concept of what may or may be not rendered as possible is just a convention and is therefore
rather questionable he chose not to completely reject it but to point out that another thing
becomes important. Because it doesnt matter so much whether an element is considered
possible or not but the most important is the context on which it is shown. If the context in
which we judge the matter of possibility is very narrow we might come to the delirium of a
schizophrenic. If the context is too wide we come to the discourse of fairy or that of science
fiction or the religious imagery. Thats why Wolfes conclusion is that:
The notion of impossibility in fantasy, then, must lie somewhere toward the middle of this
scale; it must be more public than the schizophrenics hallucination, yet less public than
myth and religion [6, 224].
But the main issue comes not only to that but to the problem of signification. There are
two types of signification that Wolfe talks about. One of them is the dogma, as the set of rules
by which we conceive our world, the other is the emotional signification that must sustain the
convention between the author and his reader:
an agreement that whatever impossibilities we encounter will be made significant to us, but
will retain enough of their idiosyncratic nature that we still recognize them to be impossible
[6, 224].
So the main problem that is encountered by the reader and that also needs the master
creation of the author is not how to represent the impossible but how to create meaning from it.
112 Marius-Virgil Florea

Significance becomes more important than representation itself, as in any other mimetic
creation. The reader may become really interested only when he is drawn by that. Wolfe shows
that the problem of possibility, seen as a cognition matter, does not always have a primary role
in fantasy. In fact, it is more with the science fiction that the author tries to make impossibilities
seem possible through a logical and coherent set of laws. On the opposite side, fantasy is built in
such a way that the readers attention is not oriented mainly upon impossibilities but upon
significance. In the same way he explains the difference between fantasy and the sword-and-
sorcery type, which is often taken as the first. From his point of view, Wolfe has all the reasons
to consider this type of fantastic closer to science fiction than to fantasy. Because, even though
we dont encounter the outer space, the same different set of rules exists, coherent in itself and
significant mostly as it may be manipulated and controlled. As returning to fantasy, Wolfe made
this finest observation that the most important fact is not the horrifying thing or the way in
which the impossible is conceived, but the strategy that keeps the reader close even after the
hesitation stopped. His conclusion is that: fantasy manages to sustain our interest in impossible
worlds simply by making these worlds emotionally meaning to us [6, 229]. By that he doesnt
dismiss the opposite cognitive element, stating that the reader must be kept in a perfect
equilibrium of the two. And it becomes obvious after seeing things like that, why we become
skeptical whenever we have to classify that kind of works made only for the pure (but rather
low) emotion, such as some works of the gothic or of the horror stories. The problem as Wolfe
shows it is not that they use the same arsenal of the supernatural but that the emotion we
expect from them is poor and foreseeable.
Speaking also about the accusation of escapism Wolfe goes further and states that since in
fantasy we may talk about equilibrium between emotional and cognitive significance, we may
also come to the idea of belief. Careful not to be misunderstood he also clarifies this as having
nothing to do with didactic or allegorical fantasy but with something entirely different similar to
what Tolkien called secondary belief. This way even if we accept that the reader might get a
sense of freedom through the disruptions and breakings of the common law, they are after that
or almost simultaneously captive to belief. And since this kind of belief arises from both
cognition and emotion, it is not necessary for us to share the authors philosophies or beliefs
that are external to the work for us to accept and believe in their embodiment in the
narrative[6, 231]. This way caption is temporary and any theory or philosophical suggestion
may be suspended after the lecture.
How can one simplify and not be reductive
After Freuds essay upon The Uncanny with the subtle distinction between heimlich and
unheimlich, which proved the origin of our most horrifying images and explained them through
Hoffmanns Sandman, almost any critical approach had to mention the psychoanalytical point
of view. Sometimes they even went further, as fantasy became also the literature of narcissistic
overestimation of the self and of the promethean desire [Harold Bloom in 6, 236-254] or the
expression of the hidden desires [R. J ackson in 6, 272]. Obviously, if we get their ideas out of
their contexts any irony becomes possible. But that is not the issue here at all. Psychoanalysis
surely sees and finds out great things about the most inner reasons for our actions including
literature. We might even agree that it explains many intricate elements from the plot and from
the imagery as well. But the problem of really describing fantasy still remains unsolved. The
question was not about the treatment so the answer shouldnt be a diagnostic. We find more
appropriate instead, Wolfe and Daniel Melliers suggestion [5, 15] that also fits Matei
Clinescus semiotic approach, [1, 8], that is the point of view of a crisis. All three, in their
different ways consider the main characteristic of fantasy as a crisis similar also to Louis Vaxs
theory. This crisis appears in both the readers and the fictional world of significance or code,
by the encounter of two different signifying codes that usually undermine each other [1, 8]. The
The Fantastic or the Uncanny Fantasy 113

reader is at least put into doubt by showing him an example of lack of coherence. This example
may of course stand only in terms of language, or narrative solutions but it also may be brought
by the content and the plot itself. Other things such as the readers hesitation, escapism or
unheimlich memories exist of course but more as a result of the crisis. And as for the opposition
to the Reason or the Real, that is another effect that can be discussed only culturally. But the
intricate way of fantasy shouldnt and cant stop here. Because we may see the moment of crisis
as nothing more than what it is, just one moment that leads to another. Any crisis passes
immediately to another stage of equilibrium. Of course we talk about a different equilibrium
than the one before the crisis. But this is not the most important debate. What counts is that, as
Wolfe showed, we are made, cognitively and emotionally to deal, in term of crisis, with our
world even if by that we mean our world of preconceptions. This entire adventure in which we
get to an underworld territory by the lack of coherence and then, through a complex mechanism
of involving ourselves, we get to the surface once again is the main issue of fantasy.
A Crisis of Reality or Fantasy Read Backwards
The connection between fantasy and postmodernism was brought into the spotlight by
Neil Cornwell, a theoretician from Bristol University, who showed that fantasy (or the fantastic)
has become closer to the main stream literature in the past few years:
From a position of lurking around the Gothic and baroque margins of minor works and
genres in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the literary fantastic in its broader sense,
cross-fertilizing and evolving new forms, has marched steadily towards the mainstream of
literature [4, 211].
The fantasy way of writing became more eligible for writers, instead of the classical
mimetic discourse. This doesnt mean that we should see postmodernism as a contemporary
form of fantasy. There are specific motifs and themes for this current that has only coincidental
similarities to the features of fantasy, such as the playful imagery and the textual worlds. But
this only shows that we see the older genre of fantasy in a different way now. Lance Olsen
(1987) began this discussion with describing our perception of reality in terms of possibility
stating that:
Our preconceptions of what constitutes the impossible are assaulted every day. In other
words, postmodern art faces the problem of responding to a situation that is, literally
fantastic. No wonder, then, that fantasy becomes the vehicle for the postmodern
consciousness. The fantastic becomes the realism our culture understands [7, 284].
By turning upside down the cultural paradigm, perception seems totally changed. And the
question that would derive from here is whether the old mimetic type of discourse should be
conceived as the postmodern fantastic.
Taking into account these few examples of the variety of contexts and approaches in
which fantasy had no choice but to reshape and redefine, we therefore draw a conclusion. All
these texts are so related to each of their contexts, to the extend that one could never consider
any of them to be the right one. The modal approach forces a separation to the mimetic
discourse and therefore can be contradicted by several works of the 19
th
century; the generic one
often exaggerates with its attention paid to frontiers and essence; the French discourse is
sometimes much too exclusive when reduces le fantastique to the literary works of the 19
th

century, while the English one becomes very inclusive and many times uses undefined terms
such as the substantial and irreducible element of supernatural or impossible worlds; finally
the postmodernist approach tends to change fantasys real aims and shift to its deconstruction,
sometimes transforming the effects and rank them as primary causes. The reason why we chose
Wolfes theory as an interesting one was that he situated his theory in a wider context of
literature in general and spoke more of the values but of the particularities of fantasy. He
114 Marius-Virgil Florea

showed this way, what we generally need from literature shaping this request for the fantastic
world.
Bibliography
1. *** Antologia nuvelei fantastice, Bucharest: Univers, 1970.
2. Bozzetto, Roger, Hufti er, Arnaud, Les Frontires du Fantastique. Approches de
limpensable en littrature, Camelia Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, 2004.
3. Cap- Bun, Marina, ntre absurd i fantastic: incursiuni n apele mirajului, Bucharest: Paralela
45, 2001.
4. Cornwel l , Neil The literary fantastic: from gothic to postmodernism, London and New York:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990.
5. Mel l i er, Denis La littrature fantastique, Paris: Seuil, 2000.
6. Sandner, David Fantastic literature: a critical reader, London: Praeger, Westport
Conneticut, 2004.
7. Stei nmetz, J ean-Luc, La littrature fantastique, Paris: Presses Universitaire de France,
2008.
8. T odorov, Tzvetan Introduction la littrature fantas que, Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1970. ti
9. T ri tter, Valrie, Le fantastique, Paris: Ellipses, 2001.
Fantasticul sau the Uncanny Fantasy
Rezumat
Articolul exploreaz problema noiunilor prin care este denumit fantasticul alturi de cea a modurilor n
care acesta este perceput. n funcie de anumite contexte, abordrile privesc genul, modalitatea sau
discursul fantasticului. Dincolo de astfel de subtiliti problema rmne i astzi nerezolvat, pentru c
eterogenitatea indiciilor oferite de critici este nc prea mare. Propunem n acest articol deschiderea
unei noi discuii, n cutarea unei perspective potrivite. Am utilizat n acest sens contextul mai larg oferit
de Gary Wolfe, n care atenia se concentreaz mai mult asupra profunzimii unei opere literare dect
asupra particularitilor legate de fantastic.




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