Reading the Fantastic Imagination

Reading the Fantastic Imagination: The Avatars of a Literary Genre

Edited by

Dana Percec

Reading the Fantastic Imagination: The Avatars of a Literary Genre Edited by Dana Percec This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Dana Percec and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5387-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5387-3

TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword ................................................................................................. viii Introduction .............................................................................................. xv It’s a Kind of Magic Dana Percec Part I: Fantasy: Terms and Boundaries Chapter One ................................................................................................ 2 Fantasy: Beyond Failing Definitions Pia Brînzeu Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 39 Gothic Literature: A Brief Outline Francisco Javier Sánchez-Verdejo Pérez Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 57 From Fantastic Twilight to Fifty Shades Fanfiction: Not Another Cinderella Story… Codruţa Goşa Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 77 Fantasy and the Unicorn in Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn and Tracy Chevalier’s The Lady And The Unicorn Dana Percec Part II: Critical Fantasy Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 96 Dystopian Realms of the 2000s: The Road and Never Let Me Go Cristina Chevereşan Chapter Six ............................................................................................. 112 South African Speculative Fiction Luiza Caraivan

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Part III: The Fantastic Imagination on Film Chapter Seven......................................................................................... 132 Six Impossible Things Before Midnight: Gothic Fantasy in Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland Daniela Rogobete Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 156 Son, Lover and Scapegoat: The Progression of Horror in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands Adriana Răducanu Chapter Nine........................................................................................... 169 Lady and the Alien: Avatars of an Iconic Duo Gabriela Glăvan Chapter Ten ............................................................................................ 182 Subjectivity (Un)Plugged: The Matrix (1999) Eliza Claudia Filimon Part IV: Vampires and Machines Chapter Eleven ....................................................................................... 200 Out of This World: (Arch)Angels as the New Vampires? Nalini Singh’s Angels’ Blood Andreea Şerban Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 218 Steampunk: Discovering Old and New Attractions Andreea Verteş-Olteanu Part V: Fantasy and Beyond Chapter Thirteen ..................................................................................... 242 Fantasy Theme Analysis: Rhetorical Visions of Immigration in the British Press Irina Diana Mădroane

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Endnote................................................................................................... 266 Contributors ............................................................................................ 268 Index ....................................................................................................... 272

FOREWORD The purpose of this collection of essays is that of observing the very hybridity of the fantastic genre, as a typical postmodern form. The volume continues an older project originated by the editor and a large number of the contributors, to investigate the current status of several popular genres. The success of the historical novel and historical narratives was the focus of a volume published in Romanian (Percec 2011). In a second book, the same group of academics mulled over the controversy surrounding one of the most disparaged of genres, romance (Percec 2012). The scrutiny continues in this third volume, dedicated to the fantastic imagination and the plethora of themes, moods, media, and discourses deriving from it. The volume comprises five parts and thirteen chapters, researchers from Romania, Spain, and Turkey investigating the evolution of the fantastic genre from its early days, in the late 18th century, to the contemporary mixed discourses of horror, steampunk, and children’s literature, and from fan fiction to fantasy theme analysis. The contributors invite readers with an interest in fantasy, researchers and students in literary studies to re-read long forgotten stories, to discover British, American, and South-African authors and film directors, and to reflect on the versatility of the fantastic imagination. Pia Brînzeu opens the collection, with a theoretical chapter, Fantasy: Beyond Failing Definitions, which does not offer, despite the title, another definition of fantasy. First, because nobody can provide a universally valid definition of fantasy, of the fantastic, or of fantastic fiction, and second, because a single, stable definition of these concepts is not even desirable. Although scientists have developed sophisticated methods of investigation, formulating theories of high standard, they could neither offer a satisfactory definition of fantasy nor agree on the genres, supergenres, and subgenres of fantasy fiction. Most often such works as The Castle of Otranto, Frankenstein, or Dracula–to use only three of the most famous examples–are approached separately as primary works of gothic, horror, or fantastic literature. Then why do critics strive with so much difficulty to find the right definition of fantasy? And what is the use of a definition? Definitions are needed to delimit or characterize the territories scholars want to explore in their desire to answer one or several of the questions referring to what fantasy and fantasy fiction are, how

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fantasy worlds are created, when and where the action is placed, how the process of (de)familiarization takes place, and why authors write and readers consume fantasy productions. The chapter answers these questions starting from some of the most famous definitions formulated by authors of literary-critical theories and tries to highlight the major characteristics of these troublesome concepts with the help of a larger description. Francisco Javier Sánchez-Verdejo Pérez’s chapter, Gothic Literature: A Brief Outline, offers an outline of classical Gothic fiction elements. In the field of the literary studies, what seems clear at first sight results in being surprisingly difficult to be defined. This is what happens with the so-called Gothic literature, and, in particular, with its specific development in England, a country where its nature can be quite closely limited and its evolution can be tracked, even though it is not the only country that witnessed the enthusiasm of this type of writing. Nowadays, the label “Gothic genre” suggests an immediate reference: a type of literature that spins around the macabre, the mysterious, the fantastic, everything which goes beyond the logical, beyond reason. This literature developed with a lot of profusion in the 18th and 19th centuries. Among Gothic must-haves, critics include the presence of supernatural entities, ghosts, demons, and vampires hidden deep inside the thick, dark plot. A romance would help, and so would religious and mythical beliefs and several taboos. Finally, the events of the story should make the reader wish to explore whatever exists outside the material world. It is without any doubt that writing about vampires can be a lucrative business. However, argues Codruţa Goşa, in the chapter entitled From Fantastic Twilight to Fifty Shades Fan Fiction: Not Another Cinderella Story… writing about sex can be even more lucrative, as the tremendous success of E.L. James’ Fifty Shades-sexually-loaded-fan-fiction trilogy seems to show, at least when it comes to record setting in the number of copies sold or the rush of turning it into a film. And even though the source of Fifty Shades is admittedly the fantastic vampire series Twilight, it explicitly moves away from fantastic to contemporary romance. In the chapter, Codruţa Goşa proposes an analysis which has a twofold purpose. On the one hand, it aims to document the claim that the main characters in the fan fiction trilogy are implicitly as “fairy-tale” fantastic as those in the source text, in spite of the fact that they are no longer vampires or vampires in the making. On the other hand, it aims to substantiate the argument that it is sex that has contributed crucially to the huge success of the Fifty Shades fan fiction. To this end the chapter explores the strategies that Stephanie Meyer and E.L. James employed when creating their texts. Both series are analyzed comparatively and the analytical framework

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devised draws on several theories of novel construction such as genre, character, plot, conflict setting, narrative technique, and language. Dana Percec’s chapter discusses the cultural heritage of a fantastic figure, the unicorn, and illustrates its function in a comparative study of two contemporary novels employing the metaphor of the mythical creature, Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn (1963) and Tracy Chevalier’s The Lady and the Unicorn (2003). Although neither book belongs to the fantastic genre as such (the former telling a contemporary story which recycles Gothic motifs, in a decade when the second Gothic revival, occasioned, a little later, by popular literature and film industry, was not yet in place; the latter–is a historical novel, the imaginary genesis of a famous work of art), both authors start from the pretext offered by the fantastic creature. The two authors have drawn freely on various postmodern narrative techniques and the conventions of several literary genres in order to incorporate the unicorn into their story. Cristina Chevereşan’s chapter focuses on particular subgenres associated with the fantastic and the speculative–the dystopian and the post-apocalyptic–as illustrated by two highly-praised mid-2000s novels, Never Let Me Go (2005) and The Road (2006). The article presents Kazuo Ishiguro’s and Cormac McCarthy’s flirtations with science fiction as ingenious explorations of the potentially disastrous future of humankind, brought about by individual and communal recklessness, unscrupulousness, insensitivity and ambition. While Never Let Me Go investigates the ethical dilemmas of technological advancement, entering the end-of-thetwentieth-century debate on organ harvesting and human cloning, The Road warns against the unavoidable loss of values, principles and humanity in the aftermath of catastrophe. The article analyzes the persuasive rhetoric used by the two mainstream writers, who resort to the challenging inventory of alternative universes in order to expose the flaws and dysfunctionalities of our own and, thus, to articulate a creative and efficient type of social critique. Luiza Caraivan, in South African Speculative Fiction, focuses on South African science fiction starting with the film District 9 (2009) and continuing with Lauren Beukes–Zoo City (2010) and Henrietta RoseInnes’s writings. Science fiction is in its early days in South Africa, as post-Apartheid writers are continually searching for new themes and issues to replace the grand narrative of Apartheid. However, South African science fiction is strongly related to the realities of the Apartheid society, reinforcing the fact that segregation still exists in today’s South Africa. Critics consider that there seems to be a growing speculative fiction movement in South African literature. In this respect, the chapter analyses

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some definitions of this term and how South African writers have managed to adapt the everyday life into their science-fiction screenplays or novels. Two chapters are devoted to American director Tim Burton and his dark filmography, with a focus on Alice in Wonderland and Edward Scissorhands. Already a brand name in the field of black fantasy, Tim Burton has imposed his peculiar manner of combining Gothic elements and bleak perspectives with a strangely fragile sensitivity, an unexpected poetry and an overwhelming imagination. In Alice in Wonderland Tim Burton–renowned for his preference for adaptations and remakes–meets Lewis Carroll on the fantastic grounds of Wonderland. Daniela Rogobete, in Six Impossible Things before Midnight. Gothic Fantasy in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, reviews Burton’s sequel, received with conflicting reviews but acknowledged as an incontestable box office success. The chapter focuses upon the strategies Burton uses in combining elements of Victorian traditional fantasy set against the peculiarities of absurdist and nonsensical fantasy as epitomized by the canonical texts Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass and contemporary Gothic fantasy in an attempt to revisit and reread Carroll. Placed in the context of other numerous adaptations or imitations of Alice, Burton’s sequel seems to best fit Carroll’s vision of a Wonderland that provides self-knowledge, introspection, linguistic and logical thinking. It also breaks with generally accepted social and literary conventions and nourishes unbridled fantasy and at the same time intertextually alludes to contemporary filmic productions and theories in children’s literature. Another viewing of Tim Burton’s creation is offered by Adriana Răducanu’s chapter, Son, Lover, and Scapegoat: The Progression of Horror in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands. Regarded as one of the most significant followers of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990) has fuelled multiple debates among aficionados and critics of various formations, thanks to its elusive, slippery features. These are best recognized in the view of the film’s concomitant affiliations to various genres which consequently inspire different interpretations. When discussing Edward Scissorhands, critics generally register an affinity to fairy tale, science fiction, and Gothic romance. As already implied, all these affiliations are problematic and partial, since none of them actually offers exhaustive readings of the cinematic substance. Nevertheless, the avatars of orphaned son, unfortunate lover and dejected scapegoat embodied by Tim Burton’s “dark hero” can be encountered in all the three genres mentioned above, albeit in different disguises. Moreover, the feeling of “horror” which

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accompanies our witnessing the tribulations of such avatars also delineates the common, psychological contours of fairy tale, science fiction and Gothic romance. With these observations in mind, the chapter focuses on a detailed analysis of the protagonist, as well as onto its uncanny resemblance to the figure of Tim Burton, one of Hollywood’s most tormented, as well as most creative directors. Gabriela Glăvan also focuses on film in her chapter The Lady and the Alien. Avatars of an Iconic Duo. From Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking Aliens (1979) to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 1997 Alien Resurrection, the epic journey of Lt. Ellen Ripley and her encounter with the alien monster prompted a connection of great depth and complexity, one that challenges cultural representations and generates a striking dyad in the realm of modern mythologies. Taking into account the different filmic approaches to the story, specific to the three directors of the saga (Scott, Cameron and Jeunet), the chapter follows the underlying structures that turned the Alien franchise into an epitome of SF imagination. A closer investigation of the avatars of this duo is significant from more than one perspective, given the dynamics of recent SF cinema and the continuous metamorphoses of heroic archetypes in contemporary popular culture. The recent explosion in the popularity of vampire stories–from the huge success of Twilight to the ever-increasing celebrity of the Black Dagger Brotherhood collection–has turned the vampire figure into a somewhat overused yet constantly evolving and always compelling type. What Nalini Singh brings new into the equation is a link between sensual, blood-thirsty vampires and higher, celestial creatures that wield an immense amount of power, yet are susceptible to their own flaws–the (arch)angels. Singh’s universe is structured on layers and levels, all of which contain their own predators, be they angels, vampires or humans. Set against the backdrop of an enchanting, futuristic version of New York City, dominated by “Angel Tower”, Singh’s Angels’ Blood (2009) blends two science fiction subgenres (urban fantasy and paranormal romance) and represents the starting point for an unusual and captivating love-story between an immortal, Raphael, the archangel of New York, and a mortal, Elena, a vampire hunter. Therefore, in an attempt to account for the success of the series, Andreea Şerban’s chapter, Out of This World: Archangels as the New Vampires? Nalini Singh’s Angels’ Blood, aims to explore, on the one hand, the means used by the writer to convey the otherworldliness of the non-human characters (archangel vs. vampire), while on the other hand, the ways in which sexual tension is written between a human and an Other.

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In Steampunk: Discovering Old and New Attractions, Andreea VerteşOlteanu tackles a new and fashionable subgenre of fantasy. Steampunk, emerged in the 1980s as a fictional subgenre, once a cultish mix of sci-fi, steam and the Victorian era, can now be seen at play not only in fiction, but also in advertising, music, art, and fashion. The anachronistic fantastic is the recent and successful art of mixing pasts and futures together with visions of the present time. Forecasters claim the relatively new style, a blend between the romantic Victorian London and H.G. Wells and Jules Verne-themed fantasy, is set to perform a huge leap from niche to mainstream. IT and social media experts predict that steampunk will “shift from low-production, high-cost craft manufacturing to mass-production within the next two years,” according to a study published in The Independent at the beginning of January 2013, (Murphy 2013) which found that the amount of online references to steampunk increased 11 times in the period 2009-2012. Presumably, the 19th century is an excellent mirror for the modern period. Moreover, Victorians have been compared with rear-view mirrors–people tend to look forward to see what lies behind; paradoxically, it is the very opposite of what they do when studying history in order to catch a glimpse of the future. The chapter analyzes the reasons underlying the society’s need to suffuse its culture, as well as crafts, with time-travel. In a slightly different register, Irina Diana Mădroane’s chapter, Fantasy Theme Analysis: Rhetorical Visions of Immigration in the British Press, employs fantasy theme analysis, a method grounded in symbolic convergence theory and developed in rhetorical criticism. The meaning of “fantasy” within this frame is not something fictional or unreal, but “the imaginative and creative interpretation of events” (Bormann 1982, 52) in the form of narratives shared by the members of a group, a process that simultaneously shapes a symbolic reality and fosters a common consciousness for the group. She applies this method of analysis to a topical issue in the British press and public space in general: immigration to Britain from the A2 countries, with a focus on Romania. Her chapter discusses the findings from a corpus of news articles published in JanuaryMarch, 2013, in a selection of popular and serious national British newspapers, with both left-wing and right-wing intended audiences. She explores the fantasy themes and types that make up the rhetorical visions of immigration emergent from the two types of newspapers, according to their different ideological orientation. The symbolic realities of immigration and the rhetorical communities constructed around them reveal two distinct immigration dramas, with different heroes and villains (migrants, politicians, the European Union), emotions aroused (fear of or

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sympathy for immigrants), and underlying values (fairness, cultural integration or multiculturalism, or economic development).

Works cited Bormann, Ernest G. 1982. “The Symbolic Convergence Theory of Communication: Applications and implications for teachers and consultants,” in Journal of Applied Communication Research, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 50-61. Murphy, Margi. 2013. “Steampunk! Introducing Britain’s latest fashion craze”, in The Independent. Sunday, 20 January 2013. Available at http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/news/steampunkintroducing-britains-latest-fashion-craze-8458861.html. Accessed 04/20/2013. Percec, Dana (ed.) 2011. O poveste de succes. Romanul istoric astăzi. Timişoara: Eurostampa. —. (ed.) 2012. Romance. The History of a Genre. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

INTRODUCTION IT’S A KIND OF MAGIC DANA PERCEC There was a time when all literature was fantasy, writes Peter S. Beagle in the introduction to an anthology of fantastic literature (2010, 9). The fine line between fantasy and “actual” literature has begun to become thicker and thicker only in the last few decades, with the development of a number of subgenres and even sub-subgenres. In the 19th century and earlier (and even well into the 20th century), writers of Gothic tales, mysteries, and children’s literature were acknowledged as mainstream authors. While they still hold a place in the literary canon today, they are generally viewed now as classic fantasists. Dickens, Poe, and Wilkie Collins are only a few of the most obvious examples. At the same time, there are works of fiction which are central to western literature (without having ever been regarded as fantastic), in which modern fantasy authors find their most valuable sources of inspiration. While no one would call Shakespeare a genre fantasist, a play such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream contains all the ingredients of a fantasy. It is hard to pin down fantasy as a genre just as it is hard to place the genre (or related genres and subgenres) in an aesthetic hierarchy, according to mainstream highbrow standards. In their attempt to isolate the genre, many theorists have resorted to the term employed by Brian Attebery in his pioneering work on fantasy, a term borrowed from the vocabulary of mathematics, “fuzzy set” (Clute, Grant 1997, viii; Mendlesohn 2008, 183, 273; James, Mendlesohn 2012, 2-3), meaning that fantasy can be defined not by fixing boundaries–which are fluid–but by analyzing the most relevant examples. As a result, an attempt has been made to draw a morphology of fantasy, with the help of taxonomies (Mendlesohn 2008), with an ideal in mind (the so-called “full fantasy” of Clute and Grant 1997), in a search for a comprehensive–if not complete– list of characteristic themes, moods, and metaphors (James, Mendlesohn 2012). Here the efforts of fantasy theorists and critics have been directed at providing descriptive language that branches out from the traditional

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vocabulary of “mimetic” fiction theory and criticism (James, Mendlesohn 2008; Beagle 2010). Another preoccupation for fantasy theorists, an effect of reader-response criticism, has been that of answering a central question: how do we read fantasy? For Gary K. Wolfe (2011, 39) this dilemma is twofold: on the one hand, he thinks we have “unlearned”, over two hundred years of reading literature and its criticism, how to read fantasy as serious literature; on the other hand, the question implies the experience of the reader confronting a text that depicts impossible adventures, environments, or creatures. Similarly, Farah Mendlesohn (2008, xiii) argues that fantasy is a genre, or an area of literature, as she calls it, which depends “on the dialectic between author and reader.” Though this dialectic does not occur only where fantastic fiction is concerned, it is clearly conditioned by genre expectations more than other “areas” are. In experiencing fantasy, readers should position themselves well: as with a perspective puzzle, if they stand in the wrong place, they cannot take in the whole picture. The answer to this question takes us back to Coleridge’s sense of wonder. Mendlesohn defines wonder via genre expectations, arguing that reader and writer work together for the construction of a sense of wonder and of belief. (2008, xiii) In his preface to John C. Tibbets’ collection of interviews with fantasy authors and SF movie directors, Richard Holmes (2011, 10) views wonder diachronically, explaining it as a notion which evolved with knowledge and took the reader into more and more difficult areas: into the beautiful and good, as well as into the terrifying and menacing. Hence we observe the genre instability which is recognized by all theorists. But while some salute this crossing of boundaries, considering it “an exhilarating development, bringing with it a sense of breached ramparts and undiscovered terrain” (Wolfe 2011, 19) and recommending fantasy as a fresh, postmodern instance of interstitial art, which subverts genre expectations and defies literary conventions, others see this as the flaw of a fictional “area” which slips into the commercial and thus forfeits the right to be regarded as a true genre (Beagle 2010, 10). This is, in the latter theorist’s opinion (Peter S. Beagle is also known as a “classical” fantasy author), the reason why some writers identify themselves with fantasy while many others flee from such a classification. James and Mendlesohn describe the fluidity, looseness, and variety of the genre by comparing fantasy to a house: Fantasy is not a mansion but a row of terraced houses, each with a door that leads into another world. There are shared walls, and a certain level of consensus around the basic bricks, but the internal décor can differ wildly,

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and the lives lived in these terraced houses are discrete yet overheard. (James, Mendlesohn 2012, 2)

Similarly, David Sandner (2004, 5) regards fantastic fiction as a literature of fragmentation, harbouring an unresolved paradox: it is avantgarde, because it questions the limits of self and society, and at the same time escapist, refusing reality. He considers this paradox productive for the genre and likely to encourage debate about its meaning and purpose. Speaking of paradoxes, however, fantasy criticism has not reached a consensus when it comes to what Coleridge, again, called “the suspension of disbelief,” the major directive force of a literature of imagination. On the one hand, envisaging a history of fantasy, Sandner argues that the strength of this genre lies in its very skeptical nature, “skepticism appearing after primary belief in the supernatural has waned.” (2004, 6) On the other hand, Gary Wolfe explains the devaluation of fantastic literature in the last two hundred years in terms of the increasing skepticism of an age that measured everything, including literature, in terms of evolution and progress (2011, 21). The result of this devaluation was the transfer of the fantastic into modern popular genres and the diversion of reading protocols into areas conventionally deemed as “minor”–children’s literature chiefly, but also the literature of sensation and others. Nowadays, in the context of considerable talk about the blurring of boundaries between literary genres, but also between literature and other narratives and communication channels or media, the versatility of fantasy, fantastic literature, plus its “companion genres” (Mendlesohn 2008, 102) can prove a rewarding area of investigation. The definition that Clute and Grant give of fantasy, as “a self-coherent narrative” which tells impossible stories that are possible in the “otherworld’s terms” (1997, ix), covers an incredibly wide range (which is expanding as we speak) of discourses, as all aesthetic expressions tell a story, as it were: novels, fairy tales, fables, mysteries, movies, TV shows, comics, musicals, opera, songs, graphic novels, cartoons, commercials, visual presentations and visual art, etc. These discourses are claimed by just as vast a variety of subgenres, species, and trends: allegory and romance, satire and wonderland, horror and science fiction, prophecy and mashup, surrealism and magic realism, steampunk and cyberpunk, etc. Among these subgenres, so hard to pin down that some theorists advise us to call them “clusters” (Mendlesohn 2008), some that are enjoying great popularity today are urban fantasy, dark fantasy, and paranormal romance – though the list remains open.

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Fantasy is a hybrid mode, hybridity being more characteristic of this “area” of literature than of many others. It has, like many others, a specific rhetoric and iconography, and also a specific community of consumers who understand and observe the strategies of reading and writing, viewing and producing fantasy. A generally derided genre, fantasy often reveals complexity and sophistication and, though marginalized as popular, together with its criticism, has been revisited by “serious” critical responses, coming from psychoanalysis (Lacan) and also structuralism and thematic criticism (Tzvetan Todorov), and continues to be valuable material for genre analysis.

Works cited Beagle, Peter S. 2010. The Secret History of Fantasy. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications. Clute, John, John Grant. 1997. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Holmes, Richard. 2011. Preface to John C. Tibbets, The Gothic Imagination. Conversations on Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. James, Edward, Farah Mendlesohn (eds.) 2012. The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mendlesohn, Farah. 2008. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Sandner, David. 2004. Fantastic Literature. A Critical Reader. Westport: Praeger. Tibbets, John C. 2011. The Gothic Imagination. Conversations on Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wolfe, Gary K. 2011. Evaporating Genres. Essays on Fantastic Literature. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

PART I FANTASY: TERMS AND BOUNDARIES

CHAPTER ONE FANTASY: BEYOND FAILING DEFINITIONS PIA BRÎNZEU Introduction This introductory chapter is not intended to offer a valid definition of fantasy. Firstly, this is because nobody can provide a universally acceptable definition of fantasy, of the fantastic, or of fantastic fiction. Although scholars have developed sophisticated methods of investigation, often formulating theories of a high standard, they have not been able to offer a satisfactory definition of fantasy or to agree on the genres, supergenres, and subgenres of fantastic fiction. What most often happens is that the same work is approached separately as a primary work of fantastic, gothic, horror, mythic, science fiction, or cyborg literature. This is what has happened to the stories of Frankenstein, Dracula, and Tarzan, or, to give a more recent example, to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), which has been considered a science fiction, utopian/dystopian, feminist, postmodern, historical, and religious novel, depending on the issues focused upon by critics.1 The second reason for my not offering a definition of fantasy fiction in this essay stems from the belief that a stable definition of such a fluid concept is not even desirable. To live in a world of unique terms is overwhelming and intolerable, because, as Vivian Sobczack (1987, 17) observes, “[d]efinitions strive, after all, for exclusivity, for the setting of strict and precise limits which, when they become too narrow, seem glaringly and disappointingly arbitrary.” Since fantasy fiction includes novels as diverse as The Castle of Otranto, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Hobbit, and the Harry Potter series, its boundaries must remain flexible enough to embrace a great diversity of texts. Then why do critics make so many attempts to find the correct definition of fantasy? And what is the use of a definition? Scholars

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frequently enjoy the pleasure of creating, explaining, illustrating, celebrating, contesting, or annihilating definitions. Moreover, even if definitions fail, they support investigators in individualizing their field of research, explaining their point of view, and striving for high academic standards, especially when these scholars want to answer one or several of the following questions: What is fantasy fiction? Which are its main genres? When and where is the action placed? Why do authors write and readers devour fantasy productions? In the present essay, I shall try to answer these questions with the help of some well-known definitions, and, using their common denominators to highlight the major characteristics of fantasy fiction, I shall try to offer a possible insight into what fantasy really is. And this, I hope, will make any new definition superfluous.

What? 2.1. What is fantasy? This question is answered by dictionary definitions in ways that are incomplete, ambiguous, or pleonastic. Take the following examples: in the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (2002, 503), fantasy is seen as “a pleasant, exciting or unusual experience that you imagine is happening to you.” This definition excludes both frightening experiences, which are quite common, and experiences which can be imagined to be happening to other people as well. In The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (1996, 420), fantasy is defined as “an idea that is wild or not realistic; a product of the imagination.” This entry reduces fantasy to an “idea” and considers that it has to be “wild,” whatever that term is supposed to mean. The Random House Dictionary (1968, 478) is more detailed, offering a number of explanations: fantasy is a “mental image especially when grotesque” (why grotesque?), “imagination, especially when extravagant and unrestrained” (what does “extravagant and unrestrained” mean? When is “extravagant” no longer normal and “unrestrained” no longer restrained?), “an imaginative sequence, especially one in which desires are fulfilled,” “daydream,” “hallucination,” “a supposition not based on solid foundations” (does “solid” mean “realistic”?), “caprice, whim,” and “an ingenious or fanciful thought or creation” (to define “fantasy” as a “fanciful” idea is a pleonasm). The Oxford English Dictionary defines fantasy more accurately as the faculty or activity of imagining “impossible” or “improbable” things, “a fanciful mental image with no basis in reality, typically one on which persons often dwell and which reflects their conscious or unconscious wishes.”

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Putting all these definitions together, we reach the following conclusion: fantasy is a mental image or sequence of images, reflecting both conscious and unconscious wishes, satisfied or not, but not very different from daydreaming or hallucination. Based on unrealistic foundations, these mental images may be pleasant, exciting, thrilling, or grotesque. For readers and writers of literature they involve an unfettered freedom of expression beyond the limitations of what is usually known and believed. That is why the majority of scholars accept that the fantastic represents a challenging break from the reader’s established world and that, owing to its unique nature, it finds its natural expression in the realm of the imaginary. From a historical point of view, the word “fantasy” changed its meaning at the beginning of the 19th century: from being related to the Greek words “phantasia” (imagination, appearance) and “phantazein” (to make visible), as indicated also by its Latin translation “imagination,” it came to mean what the verb “to fantasize” still indicates today, i.e., to desire or think of untrue, improbable events. It is with this meaning that fantasy has become a popular topic not only in literary studies, but also in psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and social sciences. Psychoanalysts, and chiefly Sigmund Freud, see fantasy as an “auxiliary construction,” (Freud 1916/1964, 419) a field which prolongs reality as a kind of “screen-memory, representing something of more importance with which it was in some way connected.” (Freud 19091911/1988, 328) Fantasy extends reality by providing new territories necessary for the normal development of a child. Continued as daydreaming, fantasies are grouped together around certain basic childhood wishes and are experienced in a process expressed by children in their playing (Freud 1908, 205-226). Different versions of related fantasies can appear at different developmental stages, but along with the important wishes they contain they invariably include defensive components as well as superego elements. When society exerts pressure, defence mechanisms block off the individual's conscious fantasies and push them out into the subconscious. Here, unconscious fantasy, often spelled “phantasy”, is related to drives and instincts, and appears in dreams, games, and neuroses as imagined fulfilments of frustrated wishes. Being incompatible with a person’s ego, it becomes the seed of later neurotic afflictions. Freud (1915, 190–191) himself acknowledged that some of these unconscious, instinctual impulses display contradictory features. On the one hand, they are highly organized, free from self-contradiction, and can hardly be distinguished from the products of the conscious system; on the other hand, they are incapable of entering conscious life. Freud could not

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resolve this unscientific illogicality inherent in human impulses and neither could his American disciples, Jacob Arlow and Charles Brenner (1964, 4), who complain that one cannot draw a clear line of demarcation between conscious and unconscious fantasies and that, therefore, “our understanding of the role of unconscious fantasy has been hindered greatly by drawing too sharp a distinction between conscious and unconscious.” Still, psychoanalysts acknowledge that both conscious and unconscious fantasies are a constant feature of our mental life: they interact with the real data of experience. Mediated by the various functions of the ego, they have an enormous impact on workplace practices and artistic productions. As recently observed by Valerie Walkerdine (2005, 48), when a person or situation does not meet highly idealized standards, a combination of fantasies offers the perspective of a successful self-made future. A similar imaginary promise of impossible enjoyment provides a fantasy support for many consumer choices, social roles, and political projects. Even political discourse is nothing but the unreal presentation of a future “good life” or “just society” that is claimed to be able to overcome the current limitations of political systems. Freud’s ideas on fantasy and on the fantastic were and have continued to be reformulated by his disciples, above all by Melanie Klein, Carl Gustav Jung, Jaques Lacan, and Slavoj Žižek. For Klein (1975, 290), unconscious fantasies underlie not only dreams but all thoughts and activities, both creative and destructive. They modify external events, investing them with significance: “Infantile feelings and phantasies leave, as it were, their imprints on the mind, imprints that do not fade away but get stored up, remain active, and exert a continuous and powerful influence on the emotional and intellectual life of the individual.” Jung believed that the fantasies of the unconscious mind are related not only to the individual unconscious, where people store their unique life experience, but also to a collective reservoir of unconscious mental forms. They appear in people's minds as innate or inherited shapes, without having been experienced before in any way. Jung (1953/1996, 43) called these pre-existent forms “archetypes” and claimed that along with our immediate conscious and our personal unconscious there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature, identical in all individuals: “This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.” Archetypes are transcultural and transhistorical because they emerge from the collective unconscious and are common to all people in all times. They direct all fantasy activities,

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constantly resurfacing in fairy tales, myths, and fiction. Thus, there are many transhistorical, universal imaginative impulses which prompt us to create idealized worlds, in which similar desirable human qualities are embodied and valued. Jacques Lacan bases his fundamental thesis of fantasy on Freud’s theory of dreams and proclaims that in the opposition between dream and reality, fantasy is on the side of reality. Fantasy is the support that gives consistency to what we call “reality”: “fantasy is never anything more than the screen that conceals something quite primary, something determinate in the function of repetition,” (Lacan, 1994, 60) repetition being “the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle.” (53-54) But fantasy, whether in dreams or in day-dreaming, is “the support of desire” (185); in “going through the fantasy” (65) we experience how fantasy-scenarios materialize our desires. Impossibilities are replaced by imagined possibilities, and blank screens are filled with suggestive images. There is nothing “behind” fantasy, which supplies what is lacking in the various unfulfilled situations or relationships in our existence (126). Agreeing with Lacan in saying that fantasy supports reality, Slavoj Žižek (2002, 316-317) adds that the credibility of any object of identification relies on the ability of the fantasmatic narrative to provide a convincing explanation for the lack of total enjoyment: fantasy belongs rather to the “bizarre category of the objectively subjective–the way things actually, objectively seem to you even if they don’t seem that way to you.” Lacan and his followers also claim that fantasies survive only insofar as desires remain unsatisfied and that the fantasmatic narratives produced in the process of potentially possible realizations offer infinite variations at the level of content. Of utmost importance in the process is the way in which the human mind is capable of forming mental images of things not actually present. Imagination is thus related to the faculty of conceiving images, in general called “fancy” when it is reduced to mere imagemaking and to the power of giving the inner consistency of reality to ideal creations of the mind. That fancy is a mechanical process different from creative imagination was explained by S. T. Coleridge as early as 1817. His famous theory of the opposition between fancy and imagination is developed in Chapter XIII of Biographia Literaria: The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an

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echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. (Coleridge, Ch. 13)

Thus, in Coleridge’s opinion, fancy is “passive” and “mechanical”; like memory, it is based on a process of association. Imagination, on the other hand, is transformative and creative, offering the power needed for the higher arts. Its mysterious character, related to “hidden ideas and meaning” and “co-existing with the conscious will”, suggests its unconscious nature, which opposes deliberate acts. Being the result of sensory perceptions, the primary imagination is common to all people, while the secondary imagination is the superior faculty associated with artistic genius.2 2.2. What is the fantastic? The Oxford English Dictionary defines the fantastic as something that is imaginative, fanciful, remote from reality, strange, or exotic. The Random House Dictionary (1968, 478), on the other hand, defines the fantastic as something grotesque, eccentric, odd, fanciful, imaginary, irrational, conceived by unrestrained imagination. In fiction, the fantastic is seen as the dialogue between the possible and the impossible, the normal and the paranormal. Rosemary Jackson (1981, 15) comments: The fantastic exists as the inside, or underside, of realism, opposing the novel’s closed, monological forms with open dialogical structures, as if the novel had given rise to its own opposite, its unrecognizable reflection. Hence their symbiotic relationship, the axis of one being shaded by the paraxis of the other. The fantastic gives utterance to precisely those elements which are known only through their absence within a dominant “realistic” order.

Frequent confusions appear between the fantastic and its two related modes, the uncanny and the marvellous. If we compare the above-

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mentioned definition of the fantastic in The Random House Dictionary with the one given for the uncanny, considered “to have a supernatural or inexplicable basis,” to be “mysterious,” and/or “uncomfortably strange,” “beyond what is ordinary or normal,” (1968, 1428) we realize that no real distinction is being made between the two concepts. For Freud, (1919) however, the uncanny is undoubtedly related to what is frightening–to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general. ... We are tempted to conclude that what is “uncanny” is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.

Tzvetan Todorov (1975, 25) distinguishes between the marvellous, in which events are seen as supernatural, the uncanny, in which events are seen as real, and the fantastic, which is hesitation between the two states, where events cannot be defined as either marvellous or uncanny. Accordingly, in Todorov’s opinion, the fantastic is the hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature and is forced to confront an apparently supernatural event. Its forms evolve from gothic fiction onwards, moving from the marvellous, which predominates in a climate of belief in supernaturalism and magic, through the purely fantastic, in which no explanation can be found, to the uncanny, which explains all strangeness as generated by unconscious forces. Todorov’s theory has found a major opponent in Brian McHale (1996, 75-76), who claims that Todorov does not get to “the bottom of the fantastic” because the epistemological frontier of hesitation between the uncanny and the marvellous is continued by the ontological frontier created by postmodern writers between this world and the fantasy world “next door.”3 2.3. What is fantasy fiction? This is another question whose answer is problematic. Isaac Asimov (1953, 158) commented on the difficulty of giving a correct definition of science fiction, which is “an undefined term in the sense that there is no general agreed upon definition of it. To be sure, there are probably hundreds of individual definitions, but that is as bad as none at all.” Tolkien (1939) made a similar comment with regard to fairy stories: “I will not attempt to define that, nor to describe it directly. It cannot be done. Faerie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible. It has many ingredients, but analysis will not necessarily discover the secret of the whole.”

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What Asimov says about science fiction and Tolkien about fairy tales is true of fantasy fiction as well, since all these genres use fantasy activities to create imaginary worlds and characters. Definitions of fantasy fiction vary from simple explanations, such as “a story that shows a lot of imagination and is very different from real life” (Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners 2002, 503), to more detailed ones: A general term for any kind of fictional work that is not primarily devoted to realistic representation of the known world. The category includes several literary genres (e.g. dream vision, fable, fairy tale, romance, science fiction) describing imagined worlds in which magical powers and other impossibilities are accepted. Recent theorists of fantasy have attempted to distinguish more precisely between the self-contained magical realms of the marvelous, the psychological explicable delusions of the uncanny, and the inexplicable meeting of both in the fantastic. (Baldick, 2008, 125-126).

“Fantasy fiction” is also an ambiguous term because it is used in an undifferentiated way to designate a supergenre, a genre, and a subgenre. The Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus (2007, 327) defines fantasy fiction simply as “a type of imaginative fiction involving magic and adventure, especially in a setting other than the real world.” This is too wide a definition, since it would include almost all kinds of literary productions. When Kathryn Hume bases her study Fantasy and Mimesis. Responses to Reality in Western Literature (1984) on the idea that fantasy and mimesis are the two overarching modes in Western literature, she sets fantasy fiction over against realistic works. In this case fantasy is seen as a supergenre, synonymous with “speculative fiction” and “suppositional fiction,” and including such varied genres as fantasy, science fiction, romances, mythic stories, fairy tales, etc. The Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture (2006, 492) defines fantasy stories as being “about imaginary worlds which often involve magic. The characters are often searching for an object which will cause good to win over evil, and they usually fight with swords rather than modern weapons.” This definition reduces fantasy to sword-and-sorcery stories, a clearly subcategorized genre. It is not difficult to understand why one cannot give a single valid definition of fantasy fiction: on the one hand, there are too many texts which use fantastic elements to various degrees, most often intertwined with non-fantastic elements; on the other hand, since the 1970s, popular interest in fantasy literature has been increasing so rapidly and the pressure of a consumerist public has caused so many subgenres to come into

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existence every year that the variety of fantasy fiction can no longer be covered by a single definition. Moreover, the many types of practice observable in fantasy works tend to place them in more than one of such neighbouring genres as magic realism, science fiction, utopian/dystopian writing, horror, and supernatural fiction. Library, bookstore and dust jacket/blurb categories often use different genre classifications for the same book. 4 Dunja M. Mohr (2005, 38) adds still further reasons why scholars cannot agree on a single definition: there are too many contradictory terminologies; some arguments rage over what productions are, others over what they are not; genre boundaries are not agreed upon and are becoming increasingly confused as different forms converge, intersect, and ultimately implode generic distinctions; the same literary work is given a variety of labels by different critics, depending on their personal stances. Similar difficulties are encountered by scholars attempting to define fantasy in film productions. James Walters (2011, 1) complains that definitions are, on the one hand, so broad that they could include all fantasy films, and, on the other, so narrow that they exclude films which would deserve to be placed in this category. “Fantasy is a fragile, ephemeral, and volatile element in cinema,” Walters says, “prone to emerge in unexpected places as well as shaping [itself] into the dominant facet of certain fictional worlds.” Its propensity for crossing the boundaries of genre makes fantasy surface unexpectedly in works of horror, science fiction, melodrama, animation, and so on. Accordingly, the best thing to do is, in Walters’ opinion, to avoid both fantasy as a term of definition and all its possible sub-classifications. Authors of literary-critical theories have approached fantasy in two ways: by means of a maximalist, mode-based position, or via a minimalist, genre-historical understanding of the fantastic. Laura Feldt (2011, 255) explains: Fantasy theory does indeed seem suspended between claims for the ancient timelessness of fantasy and an extreme cultural specificity. The modebased theories do not consider the fantastic as tied to any one genre or historical period. It is, rather, an element which may form part of any kind of literature and be articulated in historically variable ways, and these theories may therefore be called maximalist, because they are potentially very inclusive. The historical, genre-based theories define the fantastic minimally, and see it as bound to a specific genre and to specific literaryhistorical periods, often the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.

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It seems that the sharp distinction between these two types of theories leaves no room for a common denominator for all fantasy productions, and that therefore no single definition can be valid. In spite of this impossibility, theoretical studies abound in definitions. Gary Wolfe (2004, 271) wonders why the most frequently used definition of fantasy−“a fictional narrative describing events that the reader believes to be impossible”−manages to be so popular, since it places too great an emphasis on reader response and not enough on thematic or structural characteristics. Another frequently cited definition is Colin Manlove’s (1982, 17) description of fantasy 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 or the readers become on, at least partly, familiar terms.” This definition combines the readers’ response of wonder with the readers’ and characters’ effort to become familiar with supernatural or impossible worlds, which, we may guess, contain witches, ghosts, demon lovers, monsters, clones, cyborgs, or various other kinds of alien creatures. There are other similar definitions of fantasy fiction: W. R. Irwin (1976, 4) considers fantasy “the literature of the impossible”; for Eric Rabkin (1976, 14) it is the fiction whose “polar opposite is reality,” and which violates “what the author clearly believes to be natural law.” In the opinion of Rosemary Jackson (1981, 46-47), we are talking about the fantastic when the dialogue between the possible and impossible becomes evident and when there is a dramatic encounter fraught with threat between the normal and the paranormal. Lucie Armitt (2005, 8) underlines the two primary characteristics of fantasy novels: that they deal in the unknowableness of life, and that they convey a world not necessarily known through the senses or lived experience. Even language is seen as a distinctive feature of fantasy fiction. For Renate Lachmann (2002, 10–15) the fantastic is a broad literary mode of discourse or narration that presents the impossible, the contra-factual, and the unreal in language; as a discourse on alterity, it emphasises uncertainty and uses linguistic ambiguity programmatically. All the above definitions postulate the existence of the real, the natural, the normal as a pre-established system, attacked and subverted by fantastic elements. Referred to as “reality,” “mundane life,” or the “possible,” “normal,” or “true” world, the pre-established system allows the existence of imaginary components, which always contravene reality and provoke a break in the readers’ universe. On the other hand, all fictional worlds, including mimetic ones, are imagined. They constitute a break with

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normality, even if all the incidents and characters within them are accepted as naturally incorporated into an everyday reality. But then what is fictional “reality”? We all have our own reality, subjectively determined by our senses, education, religion, and sociocultural background. Therefore, whenever artists transcribe reality, they can offer nothing but an illusion, no matter how objective they may claim to be. George Eliot’s statement in Adam Bede (1859/1980, 221) is relevant from this point of view. Whenever she wants to give “a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind,” the mirror “is doubtless defective; the outline will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint and confused.” What George Eliot is saying indirectly is that the fictional world cannot simply mirror: it imitates and recreates the real world, transforming it into an imaginary universe of its own. But here again we have to become aware of the fact that what is considered real and imaginary, possible and impossible may also vary from one time to another. The audience who first listened to Beowulf, Kathryn Hume (1984, 87) tells us, may well have believed in Grendel’s real existence. In the opinion of Hunt and Lenz (2001, 14-18), even the readers of Sidney’s Faery Queen, of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, or The Tempest, and of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels saw the fantastic as unexceptional and quite possible, while for us today the distinction between what is possible and what is impossible seems to be clearly delineated in these works. As a consequence, it becomes obvious that the difference between fantastic and mimetic novels does not lie in the existence of the break between the imagined universe and the reader’s world, since this split appears in all cases: it lies in how far narratives depart from normal assumptions and how strongly they defy social, political, and ontological conventions. This may happen in two ways: as a test of reality or as a presentation of what is impossible in real life. Mikhail Bakhtin (1984, 114) favours the former variant. Seeing the origin of the fantastic in classical Menippean satire, he claims that the fantastic has served through the centuries “not for the positive embodiment of truth, but as a mode for searching after truth, provoking it, and, most important, testing it.” Joanna Russ (1973, 52) takes the opposite position, believing that fantasy contradicts reality by making us think of what can never happen, of the forms of “negative subjunctivity:” Fantasy embodies a “negative subjunctivity”–that is, fantasy is fantasy because it contravenes the real and violates it. The actual world is constantly present in fantasy, by negation … fantasy is what could not have happened; i.e., what cannot happen, what cannot exist, the negative