Rhetorics of Fantasy

4. The Liminal Fantasy

Chapter 4 The Liminal Fantasy x Liminal fantasy as I originally conceived it, was that form of fantasy which estranges the reader from the fantastic as seen and described by the protagonist (hence the original designation of “estranged” fantasy” in the original article ). A vivid example is to be found in Joan Aiken’s “Yes, But Today is Tuesday,” a text I shall discuss in greater detail later in this chapter, but for now: there is a unicorn on the Armitage family’s lawn. When, we, the reader, mentally express surprise, the family tell us, “Yes, and it’s Tuesday, magical things only happen on Mondays.” But although there is an element of what McHale calls the “rhetoric of contrastive banality” (76), in which our amazement is reinforced by the naturalization of the fantastic, it is not the simple relationship we see in the immersive fantasy. There is dissonance: both we and the family see fantasy, but we see it in different contexts and interpret it differently. We place the absurd in different moments , but doubt because the family seems to question whether anything truly fantastical has happened at all. We could even see this as an immersive fantasy because the protagonists take it all for granted. Except that they do not. The liminal fantasy is one that relies on Wayne C. Booth’s construction of stable irony, “a reconstructing of implied authors and implied readers [that] relies on inferences about intentions . . . [that] often depend on our knowing facts from outside the poem”(Irony 133).Or it relies on “equipoise,” the term Clute suggests in his essay in Conjunctions 39 and that is essentially a more positivist construction of Todorov’s concept of hesitation (The Fantastic 25). Or it relies on both, to create a moment of doubt, sometimes in the protagonist, but also in the reader. The two elements, although related , are distinguished here for a reason. While irony is one element in the construction of equipoise—it relies, after all on a knowingness—equipoise is not intrinsic to the construction of irony.The liminal fantasy can be balanced between dichotomies or, as Bernadette Bosky suggested when we were discussing my choice of terminology, it can be truly liminal, “what it’s like to have fallen into the crack” (e-mail 10 March 2005). However, rather than being (as Bosky suggests) “anti-structural,” this fiction is striking for just how how tightly structured it is. A story like Kelly Link’s “Lull” (Conjunctions 39), for example, may spiral away from the starting point, but does so in carefully choreographed swirls. Crucial to the construction of liminal fantasy is that it is a two-way process. It depends on knowingness, or what Barthes described as a shared code: “The code is a perspective of quotations, a mirage of structures . . . so many fragments of something that has always been already read, seen, done . . . the code is the wake of that already” (20). Scott Maisano terms this “fluency” (76). Although the dialectic between reader and author is always central to the process of interpretation, in the liminal fantasy, it is central to the construction of the fantastic. Brian McHale writes, “Granted that somebody must experience epistemological hesitation, otherwise there is no fantastic effect at all in Todorov’s sense, then why not say that, in the absence of a character to do the hesitating, the reader himself or herself does it” (75). The construction of the category liminal fantasy builds on Jameson’s argument that genres are social contracts “between a writer and a specific public” (106). Consequently, one term I considered for this category was the “possible fantasy,” after the possible sword in Miéville’s The Scar (2002). In The Scar, the sword creates possibilities from which one can choose. Liminal fantasy creates possible readings. In Roz Kaveney’s phrase, it “makes readings available.” In this, it is the direct opposite of the quest fantasy, which, as I argued in chapter 1 of this book, shuts down such readings. The difficulty with this form of fantasy, however, was that it had no obvious boundaries. It seemed to come into the classic category of “I know it when I see it,” which is simply not good enough. More than any other category in this book, liminal fantasy was my category most susceptible to, and perhaps most in need of, Attebery’s argument for the fuzzy set. One possible route in was to create a network of the writers I felt...