Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature

The Architectural Void

Patricia Garcia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317581321
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

Arising from the philosophical conviction that our sense of space plays a direct role in our apprehension and construction of reality (both factual and fictional), this book investigates how conceptions of postmodern space have transformed the history of the impossible in literature. Deeply influenced by the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, there has been an unprecedented rise in the number of fantastic texts in which the impossible is bound to space — space not as scene of action but as impossible element performing a fantastic transgression within the storyworld. This book conceptualizes and contextualizes this postmodern, fantastic use of space that disrupts the reader's comfortable notion of space as objective reality in favor of the concept of space as socially mediated, constructed, and conventional. In an illustration of the transnational nature of this phenomenon, García analyzes a varied corpus of the Fantastic in the past four decades from different cultures and languages, merging literary analysis with classical questions of space related to the fields of philosophy, urban studies, and anthropology. Texts include authors such as Julio Cortázar (Argentina), John Barth (USA), J.G. Ballard (UK), Jacques Sternberg (Belgium), Fernando Iwasaki (Perú), Juan José Millás (Spain, ) and Éric Faye (France). This book contributes to Literary Theory and Comparative Literature in the areas of the Fantastic, narratology, and Geocriticism and informs the continuing interdisciplinary debate on how human beings make sense of space.

1 The Fantastic of Place and the Fantastic of Space

“Le normal a des limites, l’anormal n’en a pas”

(Michel de Ghelderode)

1. DEFINING THE FANTASTIC

What exactly is the Fantastic? A much-disputed term, in literary criticism as well as in popular culture, the Fantastic has acquired a number of connotations and is used both loosely and restrictively. The lack of consensus as to what it implies requires a brief outline of its diverse definitions in order to define the boundaries of this book. From the large list of studies seeking to define the Fantastic, two lines of thought can be distinguished:

Fantastic = The Supernatural

The first line of thought is promoted by a group of scholars (Rabkin 1977, 1979; Hume 1984; Cornwell 1990; Attebery 1992; Armitt 1996; Gomel 2014 and in general the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts in the US) who do not regard the Fantastic to be a specific narrative form distinct from other literary manifestations of the supernatural. Instead, in this approach, the term is often employed interchangeably with that of ‘fantasy literature’ to refer to any texts that “deviate from [that which is considered] consensus reality” (Hume 1984:21). From this perspective, fantastic literature is considered as contrasting with realistic or ‘mimetic’ literature. Their label embraces a variety of forms including fantasy, horror, the Gothic, fables, the Marvellous, science fiction, fairy tales and myths.

This approach to the Fantastic as an umbrella term for the supernatural presents various problems. First, if the presence of the supernatural is sufficient qualification for a text to belong to the Fantastic—the supernatural being a synonym in such case for the Fantastic—then the result would be a corpus so large in extent and wide in scope that the component works would bear very little in common at the level of structures, themes and effect. The Fantastic by this definition would embrace such diverse texts as The Odyssey, Hamlet, Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, Dracula or One Hundred Years of Solitude. This aspect was already remarked on by Todorov, who argued for a more precise understanding of the Fantastic in his work The Fantastic: a Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1970):

We cannot conceive a genre which would regroup all works in which the supernatural intervenes and which would thereby have to accommodate Homer as well as Shakespeare, Cervantes as well as Goethe. The supernatural does not characterise works closely enough, its extension is much too great. (1975:34)

Second, the opposition between realist/non-realist, or mimetic/non-mimetic, is not sufficient to distinguish different forms of literature. All fiction could be regarded as mimetic; this does not imply that a literary text is a faithful imitation of the factual world but rather that a literary world is never completely disengaged from our extratextual world (thus, it is never non-mimetic). Even the fantasy worlds of Lord of the Rings (J. R. Tolkien 1949) are mimetic in the sense that they derive from the factual world of the author and reader. At the same time, all literary texts could also be regarded as ‘non-mimetic’ in the sense that a literary text is always imaginary: no matter how loyal a literary world is to the extratextual referent, all—even realistic texts—are a fictional invention. In literature, there is always, as Doležel puts it, “a bidirectional exchange, [with a textual world] with ‘material’ drawn from actuality, [while] in the opposite direction, fictional constructs deeply influence our imaging and understanding of reality” (2008: prologue, x). Therefore, the mimetic/non-mimetic opposition is not an infallible tool to employ when aiming for a definition of the Fantastic. Every literary text generates a fictional world, with a basis both in factual reality and in invented elements.

Third, this umbrella definition seems to take for granted that the idea of ‘reality’ is a stable and thus context-independent entity. However, is ‘reality’ really an objective category? The very idea of ‘reality’ is a paradigm with a shifting history; so much ink has been spent exploring how ‘reality’ has changed over successive historical periods under the guise of different aesthetic, scientific, philosophical paradigms. To mention just one example, over the past few decades, research has highlighted the fact that we have shifted from the certainties of reality as being a stable and objective category toward an understanding of the concept as a negotiated social construction:

[…] a kind of collective fiction, constructed and sustained by the processes of socialisation, institutionalisation, and everyday social interaction, especially through the medium of language. […] an arbitrary convention given the appearance of permanence and validity through time and habit.

(Berger & Luckman 1967:37–40)

This point, central to postmodern thought and argued by sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann among others, is a key inspiration of this book. Any theorisation of the Fantastic forces a reflection on what is considered to be ‘real’ in a particular time period. “Presenting that which cannot be but is”, proclaims Jackson, the Fantastic “exposes a culture’s definition of that which can be: it traces the limits of its epistemological and ontological frame” (1981:23). This important consideration opens up a second angle on the Fantastic, which in turn has, for the reasons detailed below, informed the perspective endorsed here.

The Fantastic as One of the Supernatural Modes

A more focused perspective of the Fantastic enables a more precise examination of the genesis and evolution of its narrative form. As a large number of scholars of the Fantastic have reiterated (e.g., Castex 1951; Campra 2001; Roas 2001, 2011), the categories of realism and fantastic have a history. Our modern understanding of ‘real’ and ‘impossible’ began to be forged in the Enlightenment. The Impossible as an ontological (and literary) category appears in a rationalistic context where miracles and prodigies are largely eliminated as possible explanations of reality. In contrast, in the mid-eighteenth century a substantial body of literary work was produced “as a compensation of an excess of rationalism” (Caillois 1975:23). It is this sociohistorical moment that marks the genesis of the Fantastic, which initially shared roots with the Gothic English novel, for example as in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Jan Potocki’s Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse (1794–1810). In an increasingly secularised and rational society, the entry of the Fantastic into the literary sphere served to interrogate those aspects that science and reason could not answer. Using the same techniques as employed in realistic literature (e.g., realistic settings and devices to enhance the verisimilitude of the narration), the narratives of the Fantastic sought to destabilise the presuppositions of positivism (see Roas 2003:10–15). E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Fantasiestücke and Nachtstücke (1814–1816), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), Guy de Maupassant’s short stories and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) are among some of the most well-known works that played a fundamental role in the consolidation of this narrative form.

Based on this historical angle, and in contrast to the all-inclusive perspective, a more restrictive approach to the Fantastic—with specific features and a determined historical starting point—has been to the fore in Europe as well as in South America. The key role that the French critical school played in this grounding of the Fantastic is notable; with the publication of the French translation of Hoffmann’s Fantasiestücke (Fantasy Pieces) as Contes fantastiques (“Fantastic Tales”, Loeve-Veimras 1829), the term fantastique entered the French critical scene. The term later became systematised in French literary theory through its use by various scholars, who concentrated on its history (Castex 1951), themes (Vax 1960, 1965; Caillois 1975), structures (Todorov 1975) and sociocultural context (Bessière 1974). All of them have proportioned theories reclaiming the specificity of the Fantastic in relation to the supernatural—this specificity, on the other hand, has been rather ignored in English-speaking countries, one of the major examples being the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts. Vax gives the example of the multiple shapes of the revenant: is Christ’s resurrection perceived with the same astonishment and fear as a vampire?, he wonders. This distinction leads him to establish that the supernatural motif in itself is not enough to define the Fantastic: “It is not the motif which makes the Fantastic, it is the Fantastic that which develops from the motif” (Vax 1965:61).¹

One of the crucial defenders of a restrictive approach to the Fantastic was Tzvetan Todorov. His theory is based on the premise that the Fantastic is different to other modes of the supernatural: it creates a moment of hesitation on the part of the reader, a moment between the acceptance of the supernatural as possible within the fictional universe and the denial of this possibility:

The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is a victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination—and laws of the world remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality—but then this reality is controlled by forces unknown to us. The [F]antastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty.

(Todorov 1975:25)

In this respect, the Fantastic occupies a space between a realistic and a marvellous text while being neither one nor the other. The problem, as later considered by literary criticism of the Fantastic, lies in the fact that this definition of the Fantastic as a ‘moment of suspension’ is of very little use in understanding the functioning of the form: the Fantastic seems to be a genre defined by its neighbouring genres. Furthermore, while the premise of the Fantastic as hesitation is applicable to a particular type of the Fantastic that is based on an ambiguous denouement (Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, for example), it does not encompass other canonical works in which the supernatural is perceived and presented as impossible. The characters of Count Dracula and Dr. Frankenstein’s monster are neither rationalised with a logical explanation nor do they fall within a magical universe.

Todorov’s theory, however, is still applicable to one of the many forms of the Fantastic, namely the ‘ambigous Fantastic’. After Todorov’s study, a large and varied number of theoreticians of the Fantastic have provided revised theories on the Fantastic, but they all coincide in one aspect: Bessière (1974), Jackson (1981), Erdal Jordan (1998), Campra (2001), Roas (2001, 2011) or Bozzetto (2005), to name but a few, regard the Fantastic as a conflictive opposition between the natural and the supernatural: the Fantastic arises in a realistic world in which the supernatural itself is not integrated as a natural law but is instead a disruption of this realistic environment. There first needs to be a textual reality similar to ours in order for it to be transgressed by the Fantastic; only then can the supernatural be conceived as impossible. The Fantastic is thus the only literary form in which the supernatural element is presented as impossible within the text. It provokes a disruptive effect in the implied reader, forcing him or her to revise (metaphorically speaking) his assumptions on empirical reality.

Following this train of thought, the Fantastic is understood in this book to be a transgression of the realistic environment of the story. Verisimilitude is thus a premise of the Fantastic. The Fantastic is fundamentally a transgression of what Roland Barthes calls the “effect of realism” (1968). This has led some scholars to refer to this transgression as an effect (the “fantastic effect”, see Roas 2001; 2011). The fantastic text must rely on the assumption of a ‘real’ world, on what we understand as ‘reality’, codified by our laws of reason and social conventions. Several literary devices are employed to convey this impression of veracity or authenticity, one of these being the use of spatial markers in descriptions and of real spatial referents. Because it is presented as an exception within the textual reality and thus disrupts the logic that rules that storyworld, the fantastic element or event always generates a conflict. This contrasts with other literary forms in which the supernatural is an accepted part of the codes ruling the storyworld. Therefore, this approach to the Fantastic makes it possible to exclude utopic, dystopic or fantasy architecture like the Land of Oz, Narnia or Middle-Earth from its scope and many of the examples mentioned by Elana Gomel in her study on space and literatures of the supernatural (2014).

As an exception within a realistic frame, the Fantastic’s questioning of the ‘real’ operates negatively. As Campra puts it: “while for the ‘real’ an autonomy is postulated, the concept of ‘fantastic’ is uniquely defined in negative: it is that which is not” (2001:154). This coincides with Jackson’s “negative rationality”, where the Fantastic is conceptualised only “by negative terms according to the categories of realism: im-possible, un-real, name-less, form-less, un-known, in-visible” (1981:21), and with Reisz’s observation that “when confronting the fantastic events within the parameters provided by factual reality, the reader states its incompatibility” (2001:7).

2. GEOCRITICISM AND THE FANTASTIC: A METHOD

When establishing a typology of transgressions of space in the Fantastic, the method of textual analysis will need to embrace narrative space in all its complexity. Existing methodologies on space in narrative offer limited means of carrying out such a study. They tend to centre their approaches on realist literatures (e.g., Hamon 1972, Ronen 1986, Soubeyroux 1993, Pimentel 2001, Álvarez Méndez 2002 and Tally 2013). Nevertheless, they have inspired the method of text analysis I propose in this book, which is anchored on two premises:

(a) Narrative space is a sign (Álvarez Méndez 2002). No matter how faithful it is to its referent, narrative space is always fictional, created through various textual strategies and recreated by the reader when presented with it. A place, once it enters a narrative universe of a book, too becomes a sign. Space is an element of the many in a fictional structure based on four dimensions of what Álvarez Méndez calls the ‘spatial sign’: the situational (space as referent), the rhetorical (space as signifier), the semantic-actant (space as signified, with agency to influence events narrated in the plot) and the pragmatic (the space of the act of reading).

(b) The representation and function of narrative space should not be examined only at the textual level; the extratextual context also plays a fundamental role. As will be shown, the four examined transgressions of space in the Fantastic (Chapters 2 to 4) are tropes of particular recurrence and significance in the postmodern context. These can be regarded as ‘symptoms’ of this sociocultural era. It is evident, therefore, that interdisciplinary approaches are necessary for dealing with narrative spaces in general but more so with postmodern spatiality.

Returning to the idea of a socially and historically constructed ‘reality’, evolutions of the notion of ‘reality’ will materialise in the literary text as the next chapters will show. Literature can be a powerful element in revealing the fissures of the thought system (or world-view construction) that predominates in any given era (cf. Iser 1978a/b). Since it reveals the artificiality of this constructed model of reality through the irruption of the Impossible, the Fantastic is a particularly excellent means by which to examine this sociocultural construction of ‘the real’. This book will contend that different sociocultural paradigms of the real generate different textual forms. The very difference of them is at the heart of how the dimension of space functions in them. Taking into account the previous considerations, my analysis encompasses the following dimensions:

Situational Dimension: Location

The first dimension focuses on the selection, disposition and organisation of locations. This can be regarded as a sort of mapping exercise or inventory that contrasts fictional space with its extratextual referent. In the case of the Fantastic, this is the simplest level of analysis since a realistic setting is always a precondition for the fantastic transgression. Nevertheless, on some occasions, the setting will be of more relevance to the fantastic transgression than may seem the case at first sight. As shown in short stories such as “La casa” (José B. Adolph 1975) or “Dejen salir” (José Ferrer-Bermejo 1982), a location as seemingly unremarkable as an ordinary house or metro station can in fact be quite exceptional and thus significant in the history of this narrative form.

Rhetorical Dimension: Discourse

Once transferred to the page, space is always an invention, a fictional entity. The dimension of discourse focuses on devices used to recreate a three-dimensional space within the two-dimensional medium of the line. This can comprise aspects such as the inherent selectivity of narrative (Zoran 1984), which is in contrast to other arts such as sculpture, where space can be displayed from several angles simultaneously. Devices that construct space, not only through the visual but also through the other senses (the geocritical ‘polysensoriality’, Westphal 2011a:132–136), are also important, as will be best seen in the Fantastic in short stories like “Los...