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HUMANITIES 225 Nancy H. Traill. Possible Worlds ofthe Fantastic: The Rise ofthe Paranormal in Literature University of Toronto Press. x, 198. $45.00 Maggie Kilgour. The Rise ofthe Gothic Novel Routledge 1995. viii, 280. $94.95 cloth, $23.95 paper Nancy Traill focuses on the literature of the -paranormal,' phenomena as yet unexplained by science which may nonetheless be part of the natural world, arguing that the transformation of the Gothic fantastic into the paranormal was the realists' answer to the intellectual changes of the latter nineteenth century, when the'fairy way of writing' was no longer credible. Much of Traill's book analyses relatively obscure texts by Dickens, Turgenev, and Maupassant, but her theory is an attempt to account for a larger-scale phenomenon, the rebirth of the Gothic in the 1890s, whose more familiar manifestations wereStevenson's DoctorJekyll and Mister Hyde, DuMaurier's Peter Ibbetson, Stoker's Dracula, and Wells's Isla:nd of Doctor Moreau. Traill views the recrudescence of Gothic as a response to the growth of science and technology, which is'probably fair enough, though none of her intellectual or social analysis is able to explain why this growth industry should have been fuelled both by exponents of science like Wells and by detractors like DuMaurier. Traill's cultural arguments rest on a 'typology of the fantastic' in which five modes of fiction are distinguished in terms of differing relationships established in the hypothetical world of the text between the 'natural' and 'supernatural' domains (which are in turn defined as 'what is physically possible' and 'what is physically impossible'). In the'disjunctive mode' the two domains are 'uncontested' and 'unambiguous,' where inhabitants of the supernatural domain are able, by virtue of their special powers, to invade and affect the natural domain. In the 'fantasy' mode, the hypothetical world of the text is entirely set in the supernatural domain, with the natural domain established only by impli~ation, or in a framing device. In the 'ambiguous' mode, the supernatural domain 'is constructed as a potentiality .... The narrator ... does not fully authenticate it.' In the 'supernatural naturalized' mode (corresponding to Todorov's category of the 'uncanny'), what appears to be the disjunctive mode is, at the end of the text, 'disauthenticated' and the events are explained as entirely in the natural domain. Finally, in the 'paranormal' mode, 'supernatural and natural are no longer mutually exclusive ... because we find that the word "supernatural" is merely a label for strange phenomena latent within the natural domain.' Something seems odd about this last definition, and possibly the problem is that those mutually exclusive categories out of which all of Traill's classification system derive - the possible and the impossible - 226 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 don't make the same sense in the hypothetical worlds offiction that they do in aUf own real world right now. No matter what we would judge to be the case in real life, we are constantlyreading texts that force us to adopt a very different stance as we assimilate ourselves to the implied authorial reader. When we read Genesis 19, the angels are just as much a part of the 'natural' domain as Lot and the other inhabitants of Sodom; indeed, they share a quickly prepared lunch with Abraham in the previous chapter. The 'natural' domain of 'Cinderella' includes fairy godmothers and pumpkins that can be transformed into coaches. Traill would probably classify both these texts as 'disjunctive,' but the disjunction does not arise as she supposes within the hypothetical world of the fiction: it is between her own actual beliefs and those of the authorial reader. But we all have known, or can imagine, actual readers who experience no such disjunction. 'Authorial reader' is a term coinedby Peter Rabinowitz in Before Reading, to distinguish between the reader constructed within the text who knows that he or she is reading a fictional text and the 'narratorial reader,' the reader constructed within the text for whom the hypothetical world of the text is real. The distinction would have helped Traill elsewhere: she classifies Gulliver's Travels as 'fantasy,' but although the narratorial reader may believe the stories about pygmies, giants, and talking horses, the authorial reader...

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