Forms of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Third International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film ed. by Jan Hokenson, Howard Pearce (review)

L ’E s p r i t C r é a t e u r Robert A . Collins & Howard D. Pearce, eds. T h e S c o p e o f t h e F a n t a s t i c — T h e o r y , T e c h n i q u e , M a j o r A u t h o r s . (“ Selected Essays from the First International Con­ ference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film” ). New York: Greenwood Press, 1985. Pp. 295. $35.00. Todorov’s Introduction à ta littérature fantastique was undeniably a path-breaking work in the 1970s. A precise definition of the genre made it possible to distinguish it from similar categories such as the uncanny and the merveilleux. In the present collection, Todorov’s (and Castex’s) thesis that uncertainty is a necessary condition for the Fantastic is generally accepted: we are in the Fantastic when we find ourselves unable to decide whether an event defying the laws of our universe is naturally explicable (i.e., uncanny) or super­ natural (i.e., marvellous). But Todorov’s historical limitation of the Fantastic to the nine­ teenth century is attacked by most of the contributors. P. Cersowsky uses the principle of uncertainty to identify as fantastic the twentieth-century authors Meyrink, Frey, and Kafka, while Butler does the same for Nathaniel West’s novel Miss Lonelyhearts. Cersowsky adds that in our century we have to consider a “ transcendental kind of the Fantastic that is fundamentally different from the solely spiritualistic type” described by Todorov (p. 25). R. A. Swartz’s “ The Fantastic in Contemporary Fiction” affirms that literary realism cannot provide us enough answers, and that we therefore invoke the Fan­ tastic to organize the chaos of the universe. Jan Hokenson finds in Todorov’s misprision of Sartre’s Aminadab the roots of his unexplained claim of a transition from the “ old” to the “ new” or “ generalized fantastic.” Using Potocki's Saragossa Manuscript, Will McLendon demonstrates that, contrary to Todorov’s claims, the fantastic is not incompatible with allegory. William G. Plank says that the only absolute definition of the Fantastic we could for­ mulate would be to accept at face value authors’ claims to be writing it (p. 81). Yarrow, H. D. Pearce and Jaen discuss the Fantastic from various epistemological viewpoints— philosophy and mysticism respectively in the latter two—while John M. Lipski identifies as a “ literature of the unknowable” one that reflects the non-uniqueness of the universe and the “ possibility for information-sinks and spontaneous deviations from all known phe­ nomena” (pp. 113, 119). The Scope o f the Fantastic offers the possibility of seeing the Fantastic in new ways beyond the somewhat dry structuralist approach of Todorov; it is presented as a current phenomenon. I question, however, the collection’s occasional assimilation of the Fantastic to science fiction: the latter is really a modern form of the marvellous. Since it seems dif­ ficult to be content with Plank’s definition mentioned above, one concludes this collection with the impression that a satisfactory definition of the modern fantastic remains to be found. D a n i e l F e r r e r a s Michigan State University Jan Hokenson & Howard Pearce, eds. F o r m s o f t h e F a n t a s t i c : S e l e c t e d E s s a y s f r o m t h e T h i r d I n t e r n a t i o n a l C o n f e r e n c e o n t h e F a n t a s t i c in L i t e r a t u r e a n d F i l m . New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. The great merit of Forms o f the Fantastic lies in its variety of subjects and critical approaches: it includes treatments of canonical authors like Spenser and La Fontaine, as well as marginal authors like C. S. Lewis and Peter S. Beagle; essays on Dr...