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From Represented to Literal Space: Fantastic Narrative and the Body in Pieces Deborah Harter “ Well, I’ve seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice, “ but a grin without a cat! Now that is a curious thing!” I N A CERTAIN SENSE all narrative reality is a problem in emer­ gence, a strategic uncovering in a strategic order of partial images. The writer may construct a world only through description in lan­ guage, and to describe a thing is already to be obliged to break it into its parts before reassembling its wholeness in the telling. Like the painter who, within his larger field of outline and color, moves from one section of his canvas to the next, recreating here his model’s nose, there her cheeks (but unlike him, since the part-by-part creation of the text must remain visible), the writer is faced with descriptive partializatio.n that makes even of the narrated realist portrait a scene made up by “ blocks” of meaning—“ une lecture cubiste” as Roland Barthes would say, where “ les sens sont des cubes, entassés, décalés, juxtaposés et cependant mordant les uns sur les autres.” 1 Nevertheless the images that typify realist narrative are impressive for their apparent wholeness. The details of the bustling city street come alive with united vitality; meandering plots contrive, in their very digres­ siveness, to insure a certain compulsive “ totality of sense.” 2 Fantastic narrative, on the other hand, is strewn with fragments. Its story line may be simpler, more focused than the one of the realist novel, but its images are often abortive. Its preference seems to be for reality in its pieces, where the human body itself is captured and contemplated through its beating hearts, its severed hands, its lost meshes of hair. While realist fic­ tion, faced with descriptive shattering, stresses the final moment of assembly, wants its images to be as complete as possible as quickly as possible, its scenes to meet the reader’s eye as if pure mimetic reflection, fantastic narrative, I would suggest, tolerates description as process. It becomes fascinated with isolated, constitutive moments, captures the stages, sometimes halting, before the picture is complete. It brings to life the “ coming-into-view” as much as the view itself, resurrects the parts V o l . XXVIII, No. 3 23 L ’E s p r i t C r é a t e u r just as much as it resurrects the whole. Like the Cheshire cat in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, appearing and disappearing for Alice one portion at a time, it delights in treating its audience to a mischievous change of pace, and to an occasional, uncanny, “ disembodied” grin. Balzac’s “ Chef-d’œuvre inconnu” illustrates precisely this phenome­ non—how the fantastic tale’s fragments and partial bodies, its “ catless grins,” may at times be the traces of the representational process itself. For while its protagonist, the old painter Frenhofer, works in spatially juxtaposed images, it is the process of his applying these that is the sub­ ject of the tale. As he looks toward some final realization that only a painter could ever dream of, his fascination with the gradual application of nuance upon nuance makes his canvas increasingly similar to a fic­ tional text. His efforts, moreover, resemble those of the narrative artist: his failures, those of his own narrator. As he works night after night fully to bring to life his “ BelleNoiseuse ,” Frenhofer must continually exclaim that his masterpiece is not yet complete, though often, “ vers le soir,” 3 it seems he has almost finished. His artist friend, Porbus, fails equally in fully rendering a love­ ly saint—her painted image being wonderful in breast and shoulder, but “ une silhouette qui n’a qu’une seule face . . . une apparence découpée, une image qui ne saurait se retourner” (392). In a similar way the nar­ rator, finally, fails in “ picturing” for us in language the precise figure of the aging artist, giving us merely a series of disparate parts: “ un front chauve, bombé, proém inent. . . un petit nez écrasé . . . une bouche rieuse et ridée . . . un menton co u rt. . . une...

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