Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Only the perverse fantasy can still save us."--Goethe "Literature of the fantastic is concerned to describe desire in its excessive forms as well as in its various transformations or perversions."--Todorov "When our eye sees a monstrous deed, our soul stands still."--Fassbinder "The only thing you can do if you are trapped in a reflection is to invert the image."--Juliet Mitchell --epigraphs to Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981) by Rosemary Jackson "It is as though 'the limited nature of space', to which Kant referred in his Distinctions of Regions in Space (1768), had inserted into it an additional dimension, where 'incongruent counterparts' can co-exist and where that transformation Kant called 'a turning over of a left hand into a right hand' can be effected."--Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981) by Rosemary Jackson "I should like to combine every species [je veux réunir tous les genres]."--Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) by Marquis de Sade |
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Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981) is a literary study of fantastic literature by Rosemary Jackson. On the cover of some editions is the Tree-Man, a detail from Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.
The book wants to complete Todorov's study The Fantastic in giving attention to Freudo-Marxism: political and psychoanalytical aspects of fantastic literature.
The author builds onto and challenges Todorov's definition of the fantastic and rejects the notion of the fantastic genre as a simple vessel for wish fulfillment that transcends human reality in worlds presented as superior to our own, instead positing that the genre is inseparable from real life, particularly the social and cultural contexts within which each work of the fantastic is produced. She writes that the "unreal" elements of fantastic literature are created only in direct contrast to the boundaries set by its time period’s "cultural order", acting to illuminate the unseen limitations of said boundaries by undoing and recompiling the very structures which define society into something "strange" and "apparently new". In subverting these societal norms, Jackson claims, the fantastic represents the unspoken desire for greater societal change. Jackson criticizes Todorov's theory as being too limited in scope, examining only the literary function of the fantastic, and expands his structuralist theory to fit a more cultural study of the genre—which, incidentally, she proposes is not a genre at all, but a mode that draws upon literary elements of both realistic and supernatural fiction to create the air of uncertainty in its narratives as described by Todorov. Jackson also introduces the idea of reading the fantastic through a psychoanalytical lens, referring primarily to Freud’s theory of the unconscious, which she believes is integral to understanding the fantastic’s connection to the human psyche.
From the publisher:
- This study argues against vague interpretations of fantasy as mere escapism and seeks to define it as a distinct kind of narrative. A general theoretical section introduces recent work on fantasy, notably Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973). Dr Jackson, however, extends Todorov's ideas to include aspects of psychoanalytical theory. Seeing fantasy as primarily an expression of unconscious drives, she stresses the importance of the writings of Freud and subsequent theorists when analysing recurrent themes, such as doubling or multiplying selves, mirror images, metamorphosis and bodily disintegration. Gothic fiction, classic Victorian fantasies, the 'fantastic realism' of Dickens and Dostoevsky, tales by Mary Shelley, James Hogg, E.T.A. Hoffmann, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, R. L. Stevenson, Franz Kafka, Mervyn Peake and Thomas Pynchon are among the texts covered. Through a reading of these frequently disquieting works, Dr Jackson moves towards a definition of fantasy expressing cultural unease. These issues are discussed in relation to a wide range of fantasies with varying images of desire and disenchantment.
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