Editor’s Preface

Editor’s Preface Laurence M. Porter D EFINING LITERARY GENRES is a vexed problem. The most enduring verbal modes seem to reflect emotions humans share with animals: joy (odes), anger (satire), bereavement (elegies). Culturally determined, other genres bloom and fade more rapidly, and are defined only in retrospect. The Western World awaited Tasso to define the “ three unities” of Classical Greek tragedy. Critics will nearly always see their own time as a period of decadence, or promise, or con­ fusion. After the New New Novel, what? But our twentieth-century labels of New, Modern, and Post- are not as empty as they seem: they solicit our awareness that literary movements and genres wear out. Has “ the Fantastic” now gone by? Was it the reverse side of nineteenthcentury bourgeois society, thus bound to the fate of the realist novel? Surely the canon of fantastic works in France suggests a link to Realism. Earlier works by Cazotte, Beckford, Potocki, and Nodier are slighted by most overviews save those of Todorov and Castex. The masterpiece of visionary Romanticism, Nerval’s Aurélia, likewise is passed over. The official fantastic genre centers on the male “ art story” from Gautier and Mérimée to Villiers and Maupassant. Syntheses con­ cerning the genre also omit authors from after the 1880s—Supervielle, Aymé, or Tournier. The keen recent interest in Robbe-Grillet’s Djinn as a fantastic work has not yet modified literary history. Most critics agree that the fantastic unlike other art stories preserves indeterminacy. If the latter is dispelled by an explanatory narrative frame like those in Nodier’s “ Inès de las Sierras” or the first version of “ Le Horla,” the fantastic is erased once we realize that it existed only in the imaginaire of a deranged protagonist—and in those temporarily spell­ bound by him or her. So as Castex suggested some 40 and Charles Nodier some 150 years ago, the fantastic would be an effect rather than a genre. Should we then approach it from the viewpoint of pragmatic (readerresponse ) criticism? If so the most fruitful approach might be to study the foundation of the narrator’s authority through a “ pacte fantastique” analogous to Philippe Lejeune’s “ pacte autobiographique.” But the notion of “ a willing suspension of disbelief” risks blurring the distinc­ tions between the fantastic, and fantasy, and all of fiction—distinctions VOL. XXVIII, NO. 3 5 L ’E s p r i t C r é a t e u r which Ross Chambers therefore deems unhelpful. I personally believe that a semiotic approach aimed at “ the cultural code” (see Roland Barthes’ S/Z) will prove productive, although it would have to encom­ pass our expectations for the functioning of narrative. The primary illu­ sion of the latter is the metonymic enchainment of cause and effect, medially disrupted in the fantastic by the intrusion of a new layer of causality. Drawing on extensive research in the medical humanities, Rae Beth Gordon discusses the cross-pollination between psychiatrists and imaginative writers in France from around 1820 to 1890. She shows how fictional and medical studies of dreams and madness in nineteenthcentury France deconstructed the dichotomy of “ natural” and super­ natural by revealing that the former may be as strange as the latter. The comparatist Deborah Harter asks why the fantastic tale often fore­ grounds the isolated or detached body part with fetishistic insistency (for a parallel statement regarding the realist novel see Naomi Schor, “ Fetish­ ism and Its Ironies,” forthcoming in the fall 1988 issue of NCFS). She thus calls attention to what I would metaphorically call the “ schizo­ phrenic fantastic” where fear of dismemberment reflects a feeling of helplessness and the lack of an integrated personality. Such visions would ultimately be grounded in unconscious memories of disturbances during Lacan’s “ pre-mirror stage,” during which the infant unable to control its body can experience its identity only in fragmentary ways. Dismemberment reinforces the fantastic’s prevalent motif of cognitive helplessness. Like the detective story, our genre is filled with what I would call “ metonymic debris” : hints and anticipations too partial to allow the reader or protagonist to deduce an outcome. In contrast, most overviews of the fantastic concentrate on its...