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The modernist ideology that has dominated Western thinking during the last two
centuries or more is profoundly metaphysical. Modernism defines its ideology in
relation to an understanding of reality, for which the world and the conscious self
within it are integral, intelligible, and complete.2 Modernism separates thought from
action and art from life, in order to allow the first member in each pair to lead to the
second, and in so doing the modernist ideology defines a conception of reality
determined by the opposition to, and the marginalization of, the fantastic. For the
ideology of modernism, fantasy is the attempt to escape from reality.
The “secondary belief” that fantasy requires, according to J.R.R. Tolkien – one of
the great modernist theorists of fantasy – depends upon a primary belief, which Tolkien
did not describe but which must include belief in the extratextual reality of the world.
The good news (evangelium) that Tolkien held to be the great blessing granted by “fairy-
The modernist ideology locates the meaning (the signified) of a text within the
physical material of the text (the signifier), carefully placed there by its author, like a
message in a bottle, or better yet, a soul in a living body. The metaphysical and even
theological aspects of this metaphor have important consequences. As the analogy
suggests, the text’s meaning is far more important than the matter that “contains” it.
The author is the god of the text, and the text’s meaning derives from the author’s will
for it – that is, the author’s intention.
Yet the semiotic distinction between signifier and signified that underlies the
modernist ideology also threatens that ideology with a loss of firm connection between
the signifier and the signified. Modernism attempts to overcome this threat of logical
and linguistic non-reference through the promise of an extratextual authority: rational
or empirical Truth. These are the referents of literary realism. Realism is not the same as
reality. Realism is the representation of a reality beyond the text in a narrative. Therefore
realism involves a set of beliefs – an ideology. The modernist ideology understands and
defines narratives in terms of their relationships to reality. In fact, the distinction
between “history” and “fiction” is itself one of the products of modernist thinking,
according to Hans Robert Jauss (596-99). The modernist ideology invents both realistic
fiction and historical narrative.
However, the ideological connection between signifier and signified is not a firm
one, and this becomes apparent in the postmodern concept of “unlimited semiosis” (Eco
3).
The interpretation of the sign is not, for [Charles] Peirce, a meaning but
another sign; it is a reading, not a decodage, and this reading has, in its
turn, to be interpreted into another sign, and so on, ad infinitum (de Man
127-128).
3Nowhere is this made clearer than in Lyotard’s book; see also Serres. Also important
are Hassan and especially Olsen, Ellipse.
TODOROV
4See also Todorov, Poetics 179ff. Both Jackson and Brooke-Rose have developed fantasy
theories in relation to Todorov’s. Jackson is less cautious metaphysically than Todorov,
and what is ambiguous in his book is sometimes contradictory in hers. Brooke-Rose
seeks to supplement Todorov’s analyses in the direction of postmodern literature and
theory.
The reader who halts before this fantastical choice is not the actual, historical
reader, who stands outside of the story and is inevitably more or less aware of the
indeterminacy of the narrative phenomena. Instead, this hesitating reader is what
Wayne Booth calls the “implied reader,” who is a function of the narrative itself in an
“implied dialogue” with the “implied author.”5 The actual reader is able to merge with
the implied reader only insofar as she can suspend disbelief and accept the referential
world of the narrative as reality, for the duration of the reading. This is the fantastic
“escape,” according to Rabkin (43).
The relation between the implied reader of a narrative and any actual,
extratextual reader (and between the implied author and the actual author) is always
problematic. The actual reader is never identical to the implied reader. However,
insofar as the actual reader is unable to identify with the implied reader, there may
never be a moment of hesitation, and the actual reader may entirely miss the fantasy.
Fantasy in this limited sense is both intra- and inter-textual, but nothing else; it is not
reducible to a psychological process, nor is it historically or culturally relative.
Todorov’s views stand in contrast to those of modernist critics, for whom the
fantastic is secondary to historically and culturally governed perceptions of reality.
These would include Tolkien, W.R. Irwin, Colin Manlove, and Kathryn Hume, all of
whom draw in one way or another on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous distinction
between “fancy” (fantasy) and imagination in chapter XIII of the Biographia Literaria:
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 I consider as an echo of
the former . . . 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; and blended with, and
modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will which we express by
the word choice (167, Coleridge’s emphases).
According to Coleridge, fancy takes the (primary) reality given through one’s senses
and reason and modifies it through an act of will. A version of the same concept is
apparent in Tolkien’s claim that we produce a secondary world through an act of “sub-
5 See also Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader. Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction
from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1974), and The Act of Reading. A
Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1978).
In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without
devils, sylphides, or vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be
explained by the laws of this same familiar world. … The fantastic is that
hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature,
confronting an apparently supernatural phenomenon (25).
Whether or not the fantastic is a genre at all may be unclear, but the marvelous
and the uncanny are distinct genres, according to Todorov. The marvelous presents a
supernatural world as though it were real; marvelous stories are “realistic” about the
supernatural. The sorts of beings and events that are represented in a narrative of the
marvelous may be quite different from those in the more common types of realistic
narrative, for which the primary world is the only world that exists, but they are just as
real, within the frames of that genre. In contrast, the genre of the uncanny presents
bizarre events happening in the everyday world. However, although they are extremely
unusual, these events can be (and often are) explained in purely natural terms. Thus the
uncanny and the marvelous are completely incompatible with one another.
Nevertheless, both the uncanny and the marvelous are referential genres, because both
the uncanny and the marvelous refer to (very different) “genres” of reality. In other
words, each of these genres demands a distinct understanding of reality, within which
the union of signifier and signified can occur. Therefore both the uncanny and the
marvelous require belief, and each implies a distinctive metaphysics.
In contrast, fantasy permits only “nearly ... believing” (Todorov, Fantastic 31,
quoting the Saragossa Manuscript). Near belief is neither belief nor unbelief. The
hesitation of the reader before the fantastic results from the reader’s inability to decide
what is real. The ability of the actual reader to share the near belief of the implied reader
is a crucial measure of the actual reader’s experience of fantastic hesitation, and the
point at which literary fantasy becomes psychological fantasy. In the moment of near
belief the story is most purely fictional, and the bond between actual reader and implied
The fantastic text presents the implied reader – and often a character in the
narrative as well – with an undecidable choice between two contradictory realities, the
realities referred to by the marvelous and the uncanny. Instead of referring to a single,
consistent world, the story refers to a contradiction between worlds (genres) and to its
own unsuccessful efforts, as a story, to determine the selection between them. Thus at
the moment of hesitation between the two referential genres, the fantastic story refers
only to itself. It interrupts all reference to extratextual reality. Unlimited semiosis
becomes manifest in narrative self-referentiality.
There are important similarities between Todorov’s fantasy theory and Freud’s
theory of the uncanny. Freud was not primarily concerned with literary theory, but
complicated interplays between literature and lived experience appear throughout his
essay, “The ‘Uncanny,’” much of which is devoted to a discussion of E.T.A. Hoffman’s
story, “The Sand-Man.” Freud notes, and seems uncomfortable with, the complex
relation between the literary uncanny and the psychological uncanny:
In the Freudian uncanny, the human dwelling place, the home or house, is
turned inside-out.6 The modernist metaphysical enclosure, which provides a sense of
totality and identity, is disrupted and fractured. This disruption, however, also reveals
what Jacques Derrida calls the “family scene,” which is the “scene of writing” (Derrida
196ff.) Not unlike Jacques Lacan, Derrida reads Freud as producing a theory of writing
(“the Mystic Writing Pad”) and of the interpretation of the “writing” that is the
unconscious. Yet the unconscious is the great Freudian “family scene,” of the id and of
its sublimations. Along similar lines, Julia Kristeva calls this uncanny disruption of
identity a nondisjunction, a failure of binary opposition. The material base of language
(the semiotic) appears in and through the fragmentation of linguistic meaning (the
symbolic), for meaning is always either Heimlich or Unheimlich, properly binary and
univocal. As Todorov says, “[t]he rational schema represents the human being as a
subject entering into relations with other persons or with things that remain external to
him, and which have the status of objects. The literature of the fantastic disturbs this
abrupt separation” (Fantastic 116).
The similarity between Todorov’s theory of the fantastic and Freud’s theory of
the uncanny is heightened by Todorov’s further claim that the fantastic also stands at a
point of indecision between poetry and allegory. This uncertainty is not the same as that
between the marvelous and the uncanny. On the one hand, poetry tends in the direction
of what Kristeva calls the semiotic, the space in which language appears. Questions of
meaning or reference are less important in poetry than the pure play of language.
“[P]oetic images are not descriptive. ... they are to be read quite literally, on the level of
the verbal chain they constitute, not even on that of their reference. The poetic image is
a combination of words, not of things, and it is pointless, even harmful, to translate this
combination into sensory terms” (Todorov, Fantastic 60). 7 On the other hand, allegory
tends in the direction of what Kristeva calls the symbolic, the “monotheistic” univocity
of coherent meaning. In allegory, content or message dominates the linguistic medium.
“[A]n isolated metaphor indicates only a figurative manner of speaking; but if the
metaphor is sustained, it reveals an intention to speak of something else besides the first
object of the utterance” (Todorov, Fantastic 62-63).
Todorov claims that the fantastic is fictional, as opposed to poetic, and literal, as
opposed to allegorical. The signifier signifies, but it does not cohere to any signified. If
However, for Todorov, the fantastic remains bound to the metaphysical binarism
of real and unreal, and thus he keeps one foot on modernist ground.
RABKIN
On the face of it, Rabkin’s views are quite similar to Todorov’s. Rabkin expresses
his admiration for and general agreement with Todorov’s analyses, but with a couple of
important reservations. On the whole, Todorov considers fantasy to be what he calls an
historical genre, the incarnation of a position in the logic of narratives that emerged in
Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century and died out early in the twentieth
century. Although Rabkin also focuses primarily on works from that time period, and
within European and North American cultures, nonetheless he insists that fantasy as a
Rabkin also distinguishes between fantasy as a narrative genre and the fantastic
as a component or dimension of many different genres and individual works of
literature. This distinction is not uncommon; indeed, Irwin virtually opposes the
fantastic to the genre of fantasy. However, many theorists make no apparent distinction.
For Rabkin, the fantastic is the reversing of a narrative structure, either theme or
character, upon itself, as determined by “microcontextual variations” (Rabkin 36). These
variations are produced by “the local affect of reading at any given time” in relation to
the established ground rules of the narrative. The fantastic reversal is not the same as
the peripety of Aristotle, which remains within the fundamental ground rules
established by the narrative and its genre and which is embodied in the implied
dialogue that constitutes the story. Instead, the fantastic reverses the ground rules
themselves, and therefore it upsets the ability of the narrative to refer to a consistent
reality. The fantastic reversal is a reversal of reality – once again, fantasy subverts
ideology. Furthermore, according to Todorov, it is the supernatural that makes possible
the transgression of narrative ground rules (Fantastic 165).
A narrative’s ground rules are established within the text through the use of
language (the “grapholect”) that frames a set of perspectives (Rabkin 20; compare
Todorov, Fantastic 36-40). Within these perspectives, the fantastic is constituted not
merely by the unexpected, but by the “anti-expected” (Rabkin 10). Once again, this
reversal is independent of historical and cultural changes in the beliefs or attitudes of
readers. The fantastic reversal is made possible by the structure and the language of the
narrative itself. According to Rabkin, the fantastic operates to a greater or lesser degree
within individual texts of non-fantasy genres and also as a principle in the historical
formation of all genres. Rabkin demonstrates how the fantastic serves as a mutative
power in genre evolution. New genres arise from earlier genres through reversal of
essential ground rules; thus the fantastic serves as a principle of innovation. As readers
become accustomed to what once were new forms, their tastes become jaded, and they
demand further reversals. These changes are produced through the operation of the
fantastic.
8 See also Brooke-Rose 62ff., 342. Other scholars have also used Todorov’s distinctions
far beyond the limited range of his own study.
Fantasy as a genre is the extreme or pure state of the literary fantastic. It arises
when fantastic reversal is “exhaustively central” to a narrative (Rabkin 28) – when the
textual instances of a genre have become so highly convoluted through reversals of
ground rules, and then reversals upon those reversals, that their power to refer to
reality is undone. “[W]hen linguistic perspectives continually shift within a given text,
that is, when the ground rules of the narrative world are subjected to repeated reversal,
we have Fantasy” (78). At this extreme, fantasy becomes a genre that reverses the
structure of fantastic reversal itself. This is not a return to unreversed narrative
structure, but rather the revelation of structure as structure. The genre of fantasy
defines a literature that refers fundamentally to itself and therefore only very
ambiguously to any “other” – such as extratextual truth or reality. Once again, fantasy
is self-referential: it signifies itself.
Rabkin argues that this fantastic ambiguity cannot itself be perceived: “[r]eality is
that collection of perspectives and expectations that we learn in order to survive in the
here and now” (227). As a collection of expectations, reality is always generic. It is
always ideological. By questioning the truthfulness of every ideology – every reality –
fantasy threatens the possibility of our survival. Yet fantasy also questions the meaning
and the value of survival itself, and thus it is creative: it makes us human.
“THE METAMORPHOSIS”
Todorov’s and Rabkin’s theories of the fantastic in literature are not identical, but
they are not incompatible, either. Each view offers something that the other lacks.
In deductive logic, the use of improbable or false premises can lead to wild and
impossible conclusions, even if the argument form is valid.10 Kafka’s narrative proceeds
with a rigidity that is absolutely logical, but with one exception, a minor miscalculation,
that makes all the difference in the story – like a gun aimed ever so slightly inaccurately,
which therefore misses a distant target by a wide margin. Or rather, the bullet hits an
entirely unexpected target. The target is reality, and the miscalculation is the fantastic.
The irony of this writing cuts twice: 1) by way of comparison, like the view of one’s own
culture from a foreign country, or from another planet, and 2) by displaying the
inherent insanity of any totally coherent system or world. As the gun metaphor
suggests, fantasy is dangerous, and violent. The primary damage is the ideological
subversion described above. As Kafka says elsewhere, the fantastic story reveals the
9 Modernist theorists also disagree about Kafka’s story. Irwin describes the story as an
elaboration on the experienced impossibility of a man becoming a giant bug (81ff.).
Compare Irwin’s remarks on the end of the story (85) to those of Todorov. Nonetheless,
Irwin cites Todorov’s work with approval (55). In contrast, Hume concludes that
Neither the primitive fear of the healthy toward the maimed nor the
selfish concerns which detach the well members from the sufferer are
admirable, but honest readers will admit their inclination toward these
responses, and hence will empathize [with Gregor’s family]. ... The overall
bleak portrayal of human nature works like a subtractive image. Insofar as
we can agree, even temporarily, it is pleasant to call humanity vermin (96).
10 For example, the well-known extended syllogisms constructed by Lewis Carroll.
Rabkin does not discuss Kafka’s story in detail. However, he calls Kafka a
forerunner of the contemporary “worldwide movement toward the fantastic” (180).
Todorov, in contrast, argues at some length that “The Metamorphosis” is an exemplary
text of a new, twentieth-century literature that has superseded the historical genre of
the fantastic. What this suggests, although he does not use the term, is postmodern
metafictional literature. According to Todorov, Kafka’s story illustrates the inversion of
the fantastic (Fantastic 173).
Georges Bataille’s description of Kafka fits Gregor Samsa equally well and also
illustrates Todorov’s notion of adaptation:
[H]e bowed low before an authority who denied him, although his way of
bowing was far more violent than a shouted assertion. He bowed, and as
he bowed, he loved and died, opposing the silence of love and death to
that which could never make him yield, because the nothingness which can
never yield in spite of love and death, is sovereignly what it is (141,
Bataille’s emphasis).
However, the differences between Rabkin and Todorov here are not great.
Todorov claims that in literature such as “The Metamorphosis” the hesitation between
the uncanny and the marvelous has itself metamorphosed into paradoxical
identification of each with the other. “The supernatural is given, and yet it does not
cease to seem inadmissible to us” (Fantastic 172). As Walter Benjamin noted, one tends
to interpret Kafka either theologically (as marvelous) or psychoanalytically (as
uncanny); either Gregor has suffered the effects of a terribly cruel miracle or else he is
profoundly delusional. Benjamin holds that either of these interpretations is in error
(127), but both are necessary.11 “The Metamorphosis” is simultaneously uncanny and
marvelous, and therefore it is neither.
One central theme of “The Metamorphosis” – and nearly all of Kafka’s stories – is
the impossibility of understanding. Gregor’s family is unable to understand him, and
they incorrectly assume – with the singular exception of the charwoman – that he
cannot understand them. To this corresponds the implied reader’s inability to
understand the story – the fantastic hesitation that Todorov describes. What “The
Metamorphosis” is about is the attempt to find out what it is about. As Kafka says in a
different context, “The right perception of any matter and a misunderstanding of the
same matter do not wholly exclude each other” (The Trial 271).12 Gregor Samsa has
become a non-human parasite, and the rational modern space of Gregor’s home has
become something unspeakable, Unheimlich. As in many of Kafka’s stories, the
teleology of meaning has become, like his characters, immobilized and paralyzed.
11 See Todorov, Fantastic 83-84, 159-160, 281-282. Jackson presents a Freudian analysis of
“The Metamorphosis” (158).
12 Compare Todorov, Fantastic 32; see also Jackson 161.
Kafka’s story makes explicit and places into question the oppositions that are
fundamental to all narrative, and it reveals the unreality inherent in all language. That
which is Heimlich is revealed to be Unheimlich. “The Metamorphosis” shatters the
illusion of meaningful communication between author and reader. Yet is this not what
we must expect if fantastic reversal is itself reversed, as Rabkin says happens in the
genre of fantasy? As a postmodern fantasy, Kafka’s story exposes the material linguistic
substratum that makes that communication possible and from which the reciprocal
illusions of “author” and “reader” are created. “The Metamorphosis” displays the
incoherence and incompleteness of the written text, neither uncanny nor marvelous, yet
both uncanny and marvelous.
For Todorov, fantasy hesitates between two paradigms. For Rabkin, the fantastic
reversal becomes itself a paradigm, or better, the undoing of every paradigm. Yet both
theories describe a narrative that inevitably must break its own generic boundaries – a
non-genre, an anti-genre. Fantasy presents a puzzle for which there is no correct
solution. For postmodernism, “the genre of fantasy” becomes a misleading expression
for whatever leads the reader to the literary and literal chaos from which all narrative
proceeds and that is prior to and essential to every genre. The disagreement between
Todorov and Rabkin is therefore not about the structure of the fantastic itself, but rather
it is about the limits of that structure.
Todorov might say that this is consistent with his claim that metafictional
literature inverts the fantastic hesitation by demolishing the polarity of the uncanny and
the marvelous. I would argue that this perpetuates fantastic undecidability. It plays out
endlessly what Rabkin calls the reversal of reversal itself, with a rigor in “The
Metamorphosis” (and in many of Kafka’s stories) that is only rarely found elsewhere.13
This fantastic play or unlimited semiosis cannot be restricted to the literature of the
twentieth century, for it is an ingredient of all literature, and of all language. Fantasy
makes explicit something that is there in all writing, something inherent in the very
technology of writing, although it is commonly suppressed and ignored in the reader’s
desire to find coherent meaning – the desire for ideology.14
13 Others would include the stories of Julio Cortázar and Tommaso Landolfi – plus, of
course, those of Lewis Carroll; see Deleuze.
14 Derrida, passim. The whole oeuvre of Derrida, and of Kristeva (and of Roland Barthes,
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-----. The Trial. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. Revised and additional trans. E.M. Butler.
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-----. “Postmodern Narrative and the Limits of Fantasy.” Journal of the Fantastic in the
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