Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning by Peter Schwenger (review)

J:J.U 1Vl.M.J... J.ll.l:,;:) j.l.l based on a Bakhtinian dialogics, stressing provisionality, exchange, and reciprocity. Some of the most striking aspects ofHermeneuticsofPoetic Sense are the connections Valdes challenges his readers to draw, not only between different genres of cultural texts, but also between disciplines that rarely engage each other. His own experience of conversations with the French experimental physiCist Etienne Guyon is opened out into an intriguing dialogue between the two disciplines: from one perspective, the element of convergence in the concept of 'strange attractors' drawn from physics provides useful strategies for the analysis of poetry; from another, a scientist's pathbreaking research is described as 'elegant haiku in physics: Similarly, interdiSCiplinary conversations between film and literary studies stimulate comparative readings of Casablanca, the classic romance, and Frida, the Latin American biographical rendering of the life of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. In what is perhaps the most striking chapter of the book, Valdes reflects on 'Postrnodernity and the Literary Historical Process.' Critiques raised by postmodernism and poststructuralism have questioned the teleological narratives of traditional literary history and the ethical claims of earlier literary theories. Valdes responds by suggesting that literature and art play a crucial role in initiating and fostering the imaginative creation of new, previously unconsidered realities which have the ability to question the tyranny of what is: 'the power of art is the creation of reality.... It is through the intimate challenge of creating an image that does not correspond to the accepted reality of the world we live in that we question the rules: While there is a clear echo in these phrasings of traditional Neoplatonic theories of art (one thinks of Philip Sidney's 'golden world' of literature or P.B. Shelley's description of poets as 'unacknowledged legislators'), Valdes effects a Significant shift in his insistence that the alternative world-making of literature and art takes place in the lived experience of communities of readers, contesting 'unquestioned axioms about ourselves, our others, and our relation to them,' It is unfortunate that the glossary of specialized terms does not give somewhat fuller definitions; I am doubtful, for instance, whether the complicated single sentence describing 'chaos theory' would be helpful to a reader unfamiliar with the term. Nevertheless, anyone who is interested in literary theories, poetry, and narrative analyses will find insightful and provocative ideas in Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense. (PAMELA MCCALLUM) Peter Schwenger. Fantasm and Fiction: 011 Textual Envisioning Stanford University Press. xvi, 176. us $16.95 Peter Schwenger's book locates itself as part of what W.J.T. Mitchell has called the pictorial tum in philosophy and literary (and other cultural) 312 LETTERS IN CANADA 1999 studies, a shift away from the assumption that human language offers the best or only model for understanding representation. More specifically, it locates itself as part of a shift in emphasis towards a visual poetics of reading(Christopher Collins is more central than Mitchell here) to address the problem of the relations between word and image. Through readings of a wide range of texts and other artifacts by writers and artists who 'visualize the mode of visualizing: Schwenger seeks to describe the movement from written words on the page to a reader's visualizations as they are triggered by these words; or rather, the book addresses a larger movement: 'Image generates the author's text, which generates the reader's image - which generates an afterimage whose effects are unpredictable .' It is important for such a project that it provide alternatives to Lacan's insistence that language and structure mean the same thing. Schwenger's aim, in a pithy formulation, is to explore 'the agency of the image in the unconscious: to assert the importance of visuality as well as language as structuring principle. After a first chapter introduces us to the basic phenomenon he is addressing - 'Possessed by Words' offers various descriptions of the threshold or liminal state of reading - the next two engage (in a satisfyingly non-polemical manner) some basic texts and tenets of structuralistand poststructuralist theory. Especially elegant isSchwenger's reading of the dream of the botanical monograph in The Interpretation of Dreams to locate and specify...