The Fantastic in Literature (review)

My best instincts tell me that this book isn't even worth talking about. It should be dismissable without any consideration of what it's trying to say, simply because it's so miserably written. Rabkin's prose reads like a parody of bad criticism. He drops the names of all the intellectual gurus of the decade, like Barthes and Borges and Merlau-Ponty and Whorf and McLuhan and Gombrich. He indulges in jargon of his own invention, like "grapholect" and "super-genre." And he writes sentences like "The fantastic has a place in any narrative genre, but that genre to which the fantastic is exhaustively central is the class of narrative we call fantasy" (which means, I think, that fantasies have more fantasy in them than other works of fiction).

Nevertheless, buried in all this junk is a theory of fantasy. Rabkin thinks that fantasy works on reversals; it establishes ground rules, and then upsets them.

That sounds good; the trouble is that it applies to all good writing, in which, it seems to me, a writer transforms and redefines the conventions of a type of fiction by remaking them in his own individual way. So Rabkin really isn't writing about fantasy at all. In fact, he finally says that "all art, all mental wholes, are, to some extent at least, fantastic." True, perhaps, and it certainly justifies his inclusion of discussions of mystery novels, pornography, satirical allegory and Gothic art in a book about fantasy. But it doesn't explain why Rabkin spends so little time talking about what the rest of us call fantasy —like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, which he says isn't fantasy at all.

The greatest silliness of this silly book is Rabkin's assumption that anything that can be talked about in high-sounding jargon is worthwhile art —that the business of criticism is not to make informed judgements, but to find a place for everything and its dog in intricate structure of one's own invention. Rabkin speaks disdainfully of "the old prescription criticism," but I'll do some anyway: The Fantastic in Literature is an awful mental whole.