Fantasy – The Literature of Subversion

1. Fantasy – The Literature of Subversion Based on Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy : The Literature of Subversion (1981)

2. Franz Kafka Human nature, especially changeable, unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it rends everything asunder, the wall, the bonds and its very self…

3. What is Fantasy? • Fantasy is……. • ______ / Fantasy

4. Is Fantasy freedom? • Is fantasy an escape from reality? • Is it the flight of imagination? • Is it the realm where desire is free to express itself?

5. Literary fantasies • ‘appear to be free from many of the conventions and restraints of more realistic texts’ • they have refused to observe the unities of time, space and character • they move beyond three dimensionality and the rigid distinctions between animate and inanimate objects, self and Other, life and death.

6. Traditional theoretical approaches to Fantastic Literature. • Literature of the fantastic has been claimed as ‘transcending’ reality, escaping the human condition and constructing superior alternate, ‘secondary’ worlds. • Dominant readings of the literature of fantasy see it as trying to fulfill a desire for a ‘better’ more complete, unified reality. • It provides vicarious gratification. (vicarious means ‘experienced in the imagination through the feelings or actions of another person: "vicarious pleasure".)

7. The Transcendentalist Approach • This transcendentalist approach is part of a nostalgic, humanistic vision evident in the romance fictions of C.S Lewis , J.R.R. Tolkein etc. • All of them look back to a lost moral and social hierarchy which their fantasies attempt to recapture and revivify.

8. Fantasy – JRR Tolkein • “Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!” • Source: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/26219-fantasy-is-escapist-and-that-is-its-glory-if-a

9. Post-structuralist Viewpoint -Rosemary Jackson’s approach • The Literary fantasy is produced in relation to the authors’ historical, social, economic, political and sexual determinants. • The literary fantastic is never ‘free’. • The literary fantastic texts protestagainst and are generated from the particular constraints of the culture. • They attempt to compensate for a lack. • This literature of desire seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss.

10. Fantasy – expressing Desire Fanstasy can express desire in two ways: • it can tell of, manifest or show desire (expression in the sense of portrayal, representation, manifestation, linguistic utterance, mention, description) • or it can expeldesire, when this desire is a disturbing element which threatens cultural order and continuity (expression in the sense of pressing out, squeezing, expulsion, getting rid of something by force).

11. Fantasy – The limits of cultural order • Fantastic literature seeks to express/expel the desire that is outside the dominant value systems. • It traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that has been silenced, made invisible covered over and made absent.

12. Summary – The Fantastic narrative • The recurrent features of a fantastic narrative therefore will be movements from the manifestation of desire to the expulsion of desire. • The fantastic narrative tells of the impossible attempt to realize desire, to make visible the invisible and to discover absence. • It tells its narrative by using the language of the dominant order and accepting its norms and through it tries to unearth its dark side. It tries to open up for a brief moment, onto disorder, onto illegality, onto that which lies outside the law, that which is outside the dominant value system. It is therefore a telling marker of the limits or boundaries of the dominant order. • It introduces the ‘unreal’ and sets it against the category of the ‘real’ – a category which the fantastic interrogates by its difference. Real/unreal.

13. The Gothic as Fantastic Literature • If in fantasy the absence, the unsaid, the unexpressed desire is expressed and manifested and excesses of it are expelled, what do you think happens in the Gothic genre, which is an off shoot of Fantasy?