The Fantastic in France and Russia in the Nineteenth Century: In Pursuit of Hesitation (review)

The juxtaposition of eight stories by seven French and Russian nineteenth-century authors and their analysis in terms of Tzvetan Todorov's Introduction à la littérature fantastique might be neatly justified by Todorov's role in disseminating Russian literary theory (particularly that of Mikhail Bakhtin) in Western Europe and in applying the legacy of Russian formalism to French structuralism. In fact, other than to note the common influence of the eighteenth-century Gothic and the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann (pp. 8-9), Claire Whitehead's resolutely narratological reading of the fantastic eschews any such attempt to link the two literary traditions, whether historically, contextually or in terms of the personalities involved (Prosper Mérimée, for instance, made several translations from the Russian, including one of Aleksandr Pushkin's Queen of Spades, a text discussed here). Rather, Whitehead prefers the practice of close and attentive reading, 'focused at a point of maximal proximity to the text' (p. 155), and argues that 'the revelation of similarities between the devices used to create uncertainty in the two languages proves that fundamental generic features exist at a deeper, more trans-linguistic level than has previously been acknowledged' (p. 9). Although her convictions set her apart from much contemporary scholarship, where the turn from literary theory towards cultural history has challenged traditions of close reading and commentary, they nonetheless yield impressive results and demonstrate the continued vitality and validity of self-consciously ahistorical modes of interpretation (even Whitehead's brief recourse to the work of Hans Robert Jauss or Wolfgang Iser does not pick up on the subtle historisization of phenomenology and hermeneutics that was such a feature of the Constance school). Whitehead writes felicitously, draws on secondary criticism lightly yet authoritatively, and employs narratological terminology with exemplary clarity. Moreover, her decision to refer to 'the reader' as 'she' throughout appropriately foregrounds the specificity of her own interpretations, and perhaps challenges the universalizing tendencies of certain types of formalist criticism (notwithstanding her belief that 'the reactions ascribed to the reader in this book [are] largely universal', p. 11). In four main chapters, Whitehead explores the implications of Todorov's theory of the fantastic in two texts (one French, the other Russian), yet in each case suggesting crucial ways in which Todorov's ideas might be reassessed in the light of her chosen case studies. In particular, the assumption that heterodiegetic narration and madness are fundamentally inimical to the fantastic genre is demonstrated to be false. Whitehead's greatest departure from Todorov is, however, her insistence that the fantastic is not threatened 'if reader hesitation is directed at the discourse' itself (p. 158). If we are perhaps less interested today in the fantastic and supernatural (or rather, our taste for such genres has been transposed onto, say, magic realism or science fiction), then postmodern anxiety, whether about the stability of language and representation, or about our ability to read and interpret statements correctly, itself becomes a marker of our own hesitation, and hence of our own fantastic world.