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Souvce SuISlance, VoI. 18, No. 2, Issue 59 |1989), pp. 35-47
FuIIisIed I University of Wisconsin Press
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Fantastic
Phenomenology:
Quixote
Reconsidered
Richard Hull
FANTASY LITERATURE SUSPENDS established truth and
reality.
Yet
fantasy
theory
relies on
unquestioned
norms of
convention,
and never asks what it
means to
suspend
them.1 Theoretical definitions of
fantasy rely
on formal
distinctions-the real vs. the
unreal,
the known vs. the
impossible-
without
examining
the
premises
upon
which these antithetical notions are
based.
However,
a
proper theory
of
fantasy
must ask
just
what the
reality
is that's
being suspended.
To
develop
a
fantasy theory
that
escapes
norm, convention,
and the
self-evident,
we must turn to
something
like Husserl's
phenomenology
in
which
ready-made reality
is
suspended.
Husserl called
everyday reality
transcendental naivete
(Crisis 189), and,
in order to
escape
the conventional
thinking
it
entailed,
he
developed
an intellectual
procedure
that
parallels
fantasy's suspension
of
reality.
He called this
procedure
the
bracketing
of
the known and
accepted
world.
Heidegger explains bracketing
as the
"phenomenological suspension
of the thesis of existence"
(History
100),
and
says
it allows us to focus on
what
something
is without
having
to consider whether it exists. The brack-
eting
of a whole
sphere
of
consciousness,
or
world,
is called "reduction":
In the reduction we
disregard precisely
the
reality
of the consciousness
given
in the natural attitude in the factual human
being.
The real
experience
is
suspended
in order to arrive at the
pure
absolute
experience....
The sense of
the reduction is
precisely
to make no use of the
reality
of the
intentional;
it is
not
posited
or
experienced
as real.
(Heidegger, History
109)
This
suspension
of the real
experience precisely parallels
the
suspen-
sion of
reality
that characterizes
fantasy
literature.
Clayton
Koelb has marked a kind of literature which is indifferent to
"truth" or reference to the world. Most
texts,
including
those we read
allegorically
or
symbolically, pretend
to offer truth about
reality.
These
Koelb calls
"alethetic,"
in order to
distinguish
that small
group
of "lethetic"
writings
(from
the Greek
letheia,
"that which is
forgotten")
which
"forget"
the world we live in. Koelb
says:
SubStance N?
59, 1989 35
36 Richard Hull
The
language
of
poetry,
which
Heidegger
considers to be the best
example
of
"authentic"
language,
does not concern itself with
making representations
that are to be
compared
with "real" states of affairs.... A lethetic fiction turns
language
into a
fantasy
world such as that which we find in the
genres
of
science fiction and the "marvelous."
(35,
37)2
This
language
turned into a
fantasy
world
goes beyond
what
Heidegger
calls
"only
a
particular
and narrow
sphere
within the domain of inten-
tionality" (History
78).
Fantasy
directs attention not so much to the
things
in a
world,
as to the
realization that the world has been constituted
by
mind. In Blake's "Mar-
riage
of Heaven and
Hell,"
for
instance,
"the most terrific
shapes
of ani-
mals
sprung
from
corruption."
But the hero
plunges
into this horrible
abyss only
to find himself
"sitting
on a
pleasant
bank beside a river
by
moonlight."
When the
angel
asks how he
escaped
the
monsters,
the hero
says
"All that we saw was
owing
to
your metaphysics"
(155-57).
In refus-
ing
the
narrowing
of attention demanded
by
the
angel, refusing
to
go along
with official
metaphysics,
the hero directs attention to the constitution of
that
metaphysics by
interested
parties
in
industry
and the church. His
procedure parallels
that of
phenomenology. Heidegger says
that in order
to avoid a
narrowing
of
attention,
"to some extent I 'do not
go along
with'
the concrete
perception....
This 'not
going along
with' the thesis of the
material
world,
and of
every
transcendent world is called ...
refraining"
(History
98-99).
It
might
also be called
quixotic,
since Don
Quixote's
salient
characteristic is his not
going along
with the thesis of the material world.
Almost all
fantasy theory
does
go along
with that
thesis,
tacitly
assum-
ing
the
priority
of material
reality
over consciousness. But
Heidegger
shows that it is consciousness "which must be
presupposed,
which must
already
be there so that
something
real can manifest itself...
[Conscious-
ness]
has the
advantage
of not
needing reality" (History
105).
Husserl
questions
scientific
reality, calling
it "the
totality
of what is
taken for
granted
as
verifiable,"
and
pointing
out that cultural
conditioning
determines what is verifiable. In order to think
originally,
Husserl tries to
put
off this
conditioning by
which the world
appears
as a
"ready-made
world,"
or
"something already
constituted" (Crisis 176-77).
In
suggesting
that
philosophers
bracket the
ready-made
real,
Husserl does not discuss
the
long
tradition of such
bracketing
in
fantasy
literature,
perhaps
because
the realist
ideology
in works like Don
Quixote
has discredited
fantasy
as
childish, trivial,
and insane. But when we've become
suspicious enough
to
question
"consensus
reality"3
we
ought
to be able to
appreciate fantasy
bracketing.
36 Richard Hull
37
Husserl in effect denounces consensus
reality
as a coercive standard
for
thought. Fantasy
theorist
Roger
Schlobin calls it a
"tyranny
of ration-
ality,
which
recognizes everything, except
itself,
as unreal and
ephemeral."
(AFLA xiv)
Wolfgang
Iser
says
that what is considered
reality
in a
par-
ticular
epoch
is
imposed
as a hierarchical order which
regulates
our "ex-
perience processing" by neutralizing
and
negating
rival
thought systems:
No
literary
text relates to
contingent reality
as
such,
but to models or
concepts
of
reality,
in which
contingencies
and
complexities
are reduced to a
meaning-
ful structure. We call these structures
world-pictures
or
systems
.... each
sys-
tem has a definite structure of
regulators,
which marshal
contingent reality
into a definitive order .... each
system
must effect a
meaningful
reduction of
complexity by accentuating
some
possibilities
and
neutralizing
or
negating
others. (70-71)
In Don
Quixote
Iser's abstract
neutralizing
and
negating appear
in
concrete
instances,
as if to demonstrate that
reality
is a
convention,
that it is
only
a
particular
(and interested)
way
of
seeing things.
Scholars have been
converging
from various directions toward the
conclusion that what
fantasy suspends
is not what realists
naively
think,
but an enforced consensus.4 Foucault's
archeology
and
Berger
and Luck-
man's
sociology
of
knowledge
show how consensus about
reality
is en-
forced.
Fantasy
theorist Erik Rabkin defines "'scientific' habits of mind" as
"the idea that
paradigms
do control our view of all
phenomena"
(121).
But
as Foucault has
pointed
out,
such
paradigms
(he calls them
"archives")
are
not
neutral,
since the authorities that
police
our
reality
are endowed with
tremendous
power
of enforcement.5
By setting
aside
paradigms
that con-
trol our
view,
Don
Quixote
makes it
possible
to think about this
power.6
Don
Quixote
is a
sociology
of the real in that it "understands human
reality
as
socially
constituted" and traces "affinities between the
theorizing
personnel
and various social interests."7 The interested theorist in Don
Quixote,
who
parallels
Blake's official
angel,
is the canon who condemns
fantasy
literature for
lacking
verisimilitude:
The more truthful it
appears,
the better it is as
fiction,
and the more
probably
and
possible
it
is,
the more it
captivates
.... But no writer will achieve this who
shuns verisimilitude and imitation of
nature,
in which lie the
highest qualities
of literature. (478)
Since
Quixote's
stature
grows
under the
indignities
he suffers in the
name of this
theory,
we must consider whether the novel isn't a reaction to
such
orthodoxy,8
that
is,
whether the canon's realism isn't
being parodied.
In 1953 Richard Predmore said the reader of Don Quixote
"always
knows what the
objective reality
is,"
because Cervantes "confirms facts"
Fantastic
Phenomenology
38 Richard Hull
with variants of "his
oft-repeated phrase:
'and such was the truth"'
(55-56).
But
by
1967 Predmore is
suggesting
the
phrase may
be a
joke.
"Isn't that
what is
suggested by phrases
such as: 'And the Duchess that
day really
and
truly dispatched
one of her
pages?"'
(83)
Such
exaggerated reality-and-
truth claims are a
parody
of realism.
When Sancho wonders how the author of Part I could have
"got
wind
of" their
private thoughts
and
conversations, Quixote
exposes
the realist
convention of omniscient narration. In
Quixote's
supposition
that the nar-
rator knows
private thoughts by
means of enchantment
(543),
Cervantes
points
to a
fantasy
element at the heart of realism. In fact Cervantes seems
to mock mimetic
theory by depicting
a character to whom chivalric
fantasy
appears
truthful. As Don
Quixote demonstrates,
the
problem
with the can-
on's
theory
is not
only
that chivalric fantasies do
captivate
readers,
but
more
seriously
that
they appear
truthful.
Quixote's
madness consists in his
finding
verisimilitude where the canon does not.9 His books are con-
demned for
depicting things
that do not seem
real,
and he is condemned
because to him
they
do.
Cervantes shows that what seems true is what fits an
already-
con-
stituted
system.
When Dorotea
pretends
to be the Princess
Micomicona,
the curate
says
her act is
very
clever "in its resemblance to the books of
chivalry"
and
concludes,
"how
readily
this unfortunate
gentleman
believes
all these
lying
fictions
merely
because
they
resemble the
style
and manner
of his foolish books"
(308).
Of course realism also has its conventional
style
and manner. And
just
as chivalric
fantasy
starts to break
apart
in Cervantes
when its markers become conscious
cliches,
realism
might
break down in
our own time as we become conscious of its cliches. Such a breakdown
would throw new
light
on the
suppression
of
Quixote's
fantasy,
and on the
realistic norm so
long accepted
without
question.'0
We
might
come to
judge
it in the
light
of the
practices
which
gave
it birth.
The curate and canon exclude chivalric
fantasy
in order to
prevent
contamination of truth. The narrator of what is called the
"history"
of Don
Quixote
begins by telling
us that "we swerve not a
jot
from the truth"
(57)
and that "No
story
is bad
provided
it is truthful" (109).
But we must see
that what's mirrored in such mimesis is not the
"things
themselves,""
but
"the known of the
accepted
world,"
"consensus
reality."
As
Riley points
out,
a
"question
about the
relationship
of chivalric fiction and true
history
is embedded at the heart of the novel" (62).
People
were
realizing
that
many
historical "facts" were inventions. Cervantes's statement that
"objec-
tion can be raised
against
the truth of this
history,"
that its author is an
"Arabian
historian,"
and that "those of that nation are much inclined to
38 Richard Hull
39
lying"
(108-109),
refers to a crisis in the relation between
fantasy
and truth.
The line between them is thus
smudged
from the
beginning.'2
Realism as Coercion
In Don
Quixote
the real is constructed before our
eyes by
the exclusion
of
previously acceptable thoughts
and
peoples,
constructed
by
enforcers of
consensus for whom
fantasy
is the "other" that must be
suppressed,
con-
tained,
and controlled. Of course
Quixote
himself is contained and control-
led. But the
rejection
of
fantasy
in Don
Quixote,
accompanied
as it is
by
the
expulsion
of
Jews
and
Moriscos,
and the
burning
of books and
heretics,
is
far more than the accommodation of current realities Bakhtin calls "noveli-
zation." Manlove
points
out that our idea of
fantasy depends upon
"our
conventions" of
reality,
our
commonplace
shared
assumptions
about what
is real
("On
the Nature of
Fantasy,"
107-8);
but Don Quixote
shows how
power
is exerted to make sure the
commonplace
is
shared,
and outlines
what
happens
to
people
who refuse to share it. It is a demonstration of the
closing
of the Western mind which took
place
with the establishment of
absolutism.13 The canon
says
that "so-called books of
chivalry
are most
harmful to the commonwealth"
(477).
The barber
says they
are "schis-
matic," and,
like
schismatics,
should be burned
(322).
The canon hurls
books of chivalric
fantasy against
the wall "for
being
liars,
impostors,
and
beyond
the bounds of common
nature,
for
being
founders of new sects and
new
ways
of life"
(490).
It was the business of the
Inquisition
to force dissidents to recant. In a
parody
of the
way
we arrive at the known of the
accepted
world under
inquisitorial regimes,
Quixote
puts
his sword to the
Knight
of the Mirrors'
throat,
and forces him to
say,
"I
confess,
judge,
and consider
everything
to
be as
you
confess,
judge,
and consider it"
(625). Quixote's
deathbed confes-
sion-"I now abhor all
profane
stories of
knight-errantry"
(1045)-is
like
the
Knight
of the Mirrors' confession. And indeed his hearers were
"skep-
tical about the return of his
sanity,"
because of "the suddenness with which
he had recovered his intellect"
(1046).
This doubt about his conversion
parallels
the Old Christians' doubt about the conversion of Moriscos.
They
figured
such conversion was
insincere,
a mere
recognition
of force.
When the curate and barber treat
Quixote's
dissident
ontology
as an
illness,
they
are not
practicing
medicine but the
psychiatric suppression
of
diversity.'4
The canon tells
Quixote
his heretical books "have
brought you
to such a
pass
as to make it
necessary
to shut
you up
in a
cage
and
carry
Fantastic
Phenomenology
40 Richard Hull
you
on an
oxcart,
as
they transport
a lion or a
tiger
from town to town to
exhibit it for
money.
Come,
Don
Quixote,
take
pity
on
yourself;
come back
into the bosom of common sense"
(490-491).
When Sancho
objects
to "how
badly you
treat
my
master,"
the barber threatens to lock him
up
too. "Are
you
also,
Sancho of
your
master's
fraternity?
I swear to God I'm
beginning
to think that
you'll
have to bear him
company
in his
cage
and that
you'll
remain as enchanted as he
is,
for
you've caught
a touch of his humor and
chivalry"
(476).
Understanding
that it was out of the fear of such mistreat-
ment
(the
Inquisition
was of course
capable
of much
worse)
that realism
was born makes it seem monstrous. The "cure" is submission to the realist
ideologue.
Quixote's
final submission to realism must be seen in the con-
text of this
cage.
The threat of the
cage
is
immediately put
in the context of
suppressing
books,
as the curate
proceeds
to
give
"an account of the
inquisition
that he
had held
upon
them and to
say
which he had condemned to the fire and
those whose lives he had
spared"
(478).
The
book-burning
cure for
Quixote
is the same as the
heretic-burning
cure for
Spain.
Quixote's
niece
says,
"You
might
have cured him before
things
reached such a
state,
and
you
would have burned all those excommunicated books (he has
many,
mind
you),
for
they
all deserve to be burned as heretics"
(83).
The canon's
metaphor
for this
procedure
is racism. He
says
books of
chivalry
"deserve to be
expelled
from a Christian
republic
as a useless
race."
(478)
Earlier cordial relations with Moriscos are now unreal.
Sancho's Morisco
neighbor says,
"I was forced to leave our town in obe-
dience to the
king's
edict, which,
as
you
know,
so
severely
threatens the
people
of
my
unfortunate nation .... the edict of His
Majesty
....
produced
such fear and dread
upon
me that I almost
imagined
that the law had
already
been executed
upon
me and
my
children" (913-914).
A Moorish
girl
wants to
stay
in
Spain
with her
lover,
but the
young couple's
"modest
and radiant
happiness"
(997)
is
impossible.
"There's
nothing
to
hope
for,"
says
Ricote,
since Bernardino de
Velasco,
the official
responsible
for
expell-
ing
Moriscos,
"believes that the entire
body
of our race is tainted and
rotten"
(998).
A useless
race,
fantasy
books-whatever is different is
sup-
pressed.15
In the end
Quixote recants,
and realism seems to have won the
day.
Richard Predmore tells us that "Cervantes
begins
and ends his
masterpiece
by saying
that he wrote it to
'destroy
the
authority
and
acceptance
that the
books of
chivalry
have in the world and
among
the
people"'
(98).
But
Predmore overlooks the fact that this
purpose
is ascribed to the work in the
prologue
not
by
Cervantes but
by
a friend who "burst into the room"
(42),
40 Richard Hull
Fantastic Phenomenology 41
and in the conclusion
by
Cide
Hamete,
the
lying
Arabian
historian, a
member of the
very
race
being expelled.
Certainly
Don
Quixote
works to disable the
genre
of chivalric
fantasy.
Its
juxtaposition
of
bodily
functions
(stinking peasant
women, etc.) with
the conventions of chivalric
fantasy
makes them seem ridiculous. But what
has been less
emphasized
is that Don
Quixote
shows the realist norms of the
curate and canon (and realist narration
generally
since
Cervantes)
as a
policing
which limits narrative to censorious
orthodoxy.
Because verisi-
militude
merely
reflects
socially
constituted ideas of what is
probable,
it is
vulnerable to
police
actions of the curate and
canon,
and
may
serve totali-
tarian
regimes wittingly
or not. But
by bracketing
those
ideas, Quixote's
fantasy
offers the
possibility
of
escaping
such
complicity by directing
atten-
tion to the constitution of the world.
The
fantasy products
of
Quixote's
mind are nonrealized in the sense
that
they
are outside of the
reality
constituted
by
the curate and canon. For
Heidegger
the
phenomenon
is also nonrealized in this sense. "The term
'phenomenon'
...
says nothing
about the
being
of the
objects
under
study,
but refers
only
to the
way
in which
they
are encountered"
(History
85).16
If
realism is an
ontology,
Quixote moves in a different
ontology,
where the
real and the unreal are undifferentiated in the nonrealized. In his
example
of the
Boiling
Lake, Quixote
suspends reality-and-truth
claims in favor of
delight:17
Is there
anything
more
delightful
than to see this
very
moment before our
eyes,
as it
were,
a
great
lake of
pitch, boiling
hot,
and
swimming
and
writhing
about in
it,
a
swirling
mass of
serpents,
snakes, lizards,
and
many
other kinds
of
grisly
and
savage
creatures,
and then to hear a dismal voice from the lake
crying:
'You
knight
... show the valor of
your
dauntless heart and
plunge
into
the midst of this dark
seething
flood,
for if
you
do not do so
you
will not be
worthy
to see the
mighty
marvels.... he commends himself to God and his
lady
and casts himself into the middle of the
seething pool
.... he finds himself
amid flowered meadows whose
beauty
far exceeds the
Elysian
fields. There
the
sky
seems to him more
transparent
and the sun to shine with fresher
radiance. He sees before him a
pleasant
wooded
glade
of
green
and
leafy
trees
whose verdure
rejoices
his
eyes,
while his ears are lulled
by
the
gentle
and
spontaneous song
of
tiny, painted
birds that are amid the
interlacing
branches.
(497)
Quixote's
point,
like
Blake's,
is that beneath authoritative
reality
there
is
another,
delightful
world. It is
only
the canon's realism that makes
fantasy
monstrous.
Setting
it
aside,
as
Quixote does,
enables "us to under-
go
an
experience
... which bowls us over." The
delight
comes not so much
from the flowered meadows and fresher radiance of the
sun,
wonderful as
Fantastic
Phenomenology
41
42 Richard Hull
they may
be,
as from the
bracketing
of consensus
reality. Perhaps
more
important
is the
way
Quixote encounters these
phenomena:
he shows his
dauntless heart
by plunging
into the
ontological
dark. His
leap
from the
language
of realism to that of chivalric
fantasy changes
the world.
World-Moving Saying
Quixote's
chivalric
language
contradicts "the
very
nature of the
ground
rules,
of how we know
things,
on what basis we make
assump-
tions"
(Rabkin 37).
Since
reality
is constituted
by
these
ground
rules and
habitual
assumptions,
their
suspension
alters
reality.
Rabkin tells us that in
Alice in Wonderland
"Humpty Dumpty says
that Alice
might
be
any shape.
But that of course cannot
be,
because
regardless
of the names of
things,
and
whether or not those names have
particular
or universal
meanings,
the
shapes
of the
things
remain the same"
(112).
Rabkin's "of course" is the
very
narrowness to be set aside. We need to
go beyond
it to consider the
effect of
language
on the constitution of the real. For
help
here we turn to
Heidegger's "world-moving Saying,"
in which the word
gives being
to the
thing.
In
Being
and Time
Heidegger distinguishes
the ontic
(beings,
or
things
existing
in the
already-constituted
"our
world")
from the
ontological
(Being
in
general,
which is not restricted to
existing beings).
If we want to
understand how the world is
constituted,
we must
go beyond
"the ontical
depiction
of entities
within-the-world,"
because such mimesis is unable "to
reach the
phenomenon
of the
'world,"'
which has
"already
been
presup-
posed" (Being
and Time
92).
Thus the restriction of literature to mimesis and
verisimilitude contributes to the narrowness which obscures the world.'8
Fantasy, by
contrast,
might
occasion the
ontological by releasing
us from
the one-sided
ontic,
and
calling
attention to "worldhood."
Quixote
does not limit himself to
existing beings,
but
operates
in a
larger
world
given meaning by things
that
might
not exist. When Sancho
says,
"Your
worship
has never seen
Lady
Dulcinea,
and this
lady
does not
exist on earth but as a fantastical mistress whom
your worship
has
begot-
ten and
brought
forth in
your
mind,
and
painted
with all the
graces
and
perfections you
desired,"
the
knight
answers,
"God knows whether Dul-
cinea exists on earth or
not,
or whether she is fantastical or not. These are
not matters where verification can be carried out to the full. I neither
engendered
nor bore
my lady, though
I
contemplate
her in her ideal form"
(760).
While full verification
might degrade
her as
ugly
and
stinking
of
42 Richard Hull
Fantatic henoenolgy
4
garlic,
i.e. without
value, Quixote's
fantasy projects
an essence that can be
respected.
He insists that in her ideal form she is
beautiful, modest, and
courteous. The effect of
attaching
such
meanings
to a
peasant girl
is to
go
beyond
the narrowness of fact to a more
meaningful
world.
By
the 1950s
Heidegger
was
looking
to
language
as a
way
to
get
beyond
the one-sidedness of the technical-scientific attitude denounced in
Husserl's Crisis. "On the Nature of
Language"
(1957-58)
goes beyond
the
traditional
assumption
that
language
refers to
things
that
exist,
to
point
out
that
language
calls
up comportment
toward
something,
whether it exists or
not. He
begins
"On the Nature of
Language" by suspending
the known
and
accepted
of
positivist objectivity:
To the modem
mind,
whose ideas about
everything
are
punched
out in the die
presses
of technical-scientific
calculations,
the
object
of
knowledge
is
part
of
the method. And the method follows what is in fact the utmost
corruption
and
degeneration
of a
way.
For reflective
thinking,
on the
contrary,
the
way
be-
longs
in what we here call the
country
or
region....
where all that is is cleared
and
freed,
and all that conceals
itself,
together
attain the
open
freedom. The
freeing
and
sheltering
character of this
region
lies in the
way-making
move-
ment,
which
yields
those
ways
that
belong
to the
region.
(OWL 91)
Heidegger might
be
describing
Blake's
"pleasant
bank beside a
river,"
the
region
beneath
Quixote's
burning
lake,
or the
meaningful region
in-
habited
by
Dulcinea.
If
Quixote
sets aside Sancho's realism in order to
experience
a
region
of
meaning, Heidegger's bracketing
of consensus
reality
also aims at the
quality
of
experience.
"To the
calculating
mind .... the nearness to which
neighborhood belongs
can never be
experienced."
(OWL 102-103)
Ridding
ourselves of the
calculating
frame of mind is the
phenomenological
reduc-
tion,
but it is also what
Quixote
does when he
rejects
verification.
In
Heidegger's fantasy story
the evil is
just
this realist calculation
which would
strip
Dulcinea of
meaning:
The dominance of
space
and time as
parameters
for all
conceptualization,
production,
and accumulation ... encroaches in an
unearthly
manner
upon
the
dominion of nearness ....
everything
becomes
equal
and indifferent in conse-
quence
of the one will intent
upon
the
uniformly
calculated
availability
of the
whole earth.
(OWL 105)
Cervantes shows these
parameters,
which disallow
any conceptualiza-
tion out of
uniform,
coming
to dominance
through
the colonization of the
earth,
the
expulsion
of unwanted
races,
book
burning,
and the
designation
of dissidents as insane.
43 Fantastic
Phenomenology
44 Richard Hull
Focusing
on the "relation ...
you
live to the
language you speak"
(OWL
58),
Heidegger,
in this the
Quixote of modern
philosophy, proposes
resist-
ing
such
uniformity by "Saying"
and thus
living
in "nearness." In the
transmuted relation he
proposes,
"we enter into
something
which bowls us
over. ...
Language
... as
world-moving Saying"
(OWL 107),
in which 'The
word alone
gives being
to the
thing"
(OWL 62).
Indiana
University
Northwest
NOTES
1.
Roger
Schlobin calls
fantasy
"that
corpus
in which the
impossible
is
primary
in
its
quantity
or
centrality"
(x-xi). S. C. Fredericks tells us
fantasy
"deals with events
that violate the laws of our
universe,
yet
bear an
intelligible relationship
to the real
world, hence,
serve some
reality-function"
(cited
in
Raymond
H.
Thompson,
23). Erik
Rabkin cites a
dictionary
definition of
"fantasy":
"not real or based on
reality" (28).
W.
R. Irwin writes of "the
persuasive forming
of sustained
impossible
fictions ...
making
a narrative from the
consequences
of a
single controlling
and
generative
contrast
between the known of the
accepted
world and a
posited impossibility"
(28).
Proposing
"a
normal,
useful
irreality
function,"
Gary
Wolfe
says "fantasy
must
gain
some of its
power
from
socially
determined notions of what is
possible
and
impossible"
(6).
2. But
Koelb,
like most
fantasy theory,
insists on the
priority
of orthodox
reality.
'The lethetic text must
play against
a firm
background
of belief.... There is doubt
neither about the untruth of the material
presented
nor about the
origin
of that
untruth" (Koelb 49).
Fantasy
theorists such as Todorov and Irwin also think even
fantasy depends
on the self-evident certitudes of convention. Irwin
says
it would be "a
mistake to think of the
emphasized
demand for credence in
fantasy
as a means of
seriously
and
permanently refuting
the 'truth.'
Quite
the
opposite.
Without certitude
there can be no
fantasy"
(67).
3. This
very
useful
phrase
is used
by Kathryn
Hume
throughout
her excellent
Fantasy
and Mimesis:
Responses
to
Reality
in Western Literature (New
York:
Menthuen,
1984).
4. William
Spanos,
for
instance,
sees in
"re-presentational
discourse,
a discourse
committed to a model of structure-a master code-assumed to be natural
(primary),
permanent,
universal-and threatened-but
which,
in
fact,
is constituted
by
the dom-
inant culture and is intended to serve as a standard for
thought
....
[It is]
a
secondary,
derived,
and codified
discourse,
the fundamental
imperative
of which is the imitation
of an authoritative
measure,
a
consensually
established archive"
(Spanos
301).
5. A whole line of
critics,
stemming largely
from
Foucault,
thinks realistic fiction
is in
complicity
with the
police.
D. A.
Miller,
The Novel and the Police
(Berkeley:
University
of California
Press, 1988),
says
realism in the novel reveals "the character of
modern
power only
insofar as it 'masks' it as an
ontology
.... the novel must
always
'say'
power
as
though
it were
saying something
else .... Power is seen to coincide with
the
'reality'
that is
merely being re-presented:
a
reality
whose
authority may
be la-
mented,
but is never
finally arguable"
(57).
See also Leo
Bersani,
"The
Subject
of
44
Richard Hull
Fantasic Phnomenoogy 4
Power," Diacritics 7:3 (1977) 2-21,
Mark
Seltzer,
Henry
James
and the Art
of
Power
(Ithaca:
Cornell
University
Press,
1984) and
John Bender,
Imagining
the
Penitentiary:
Fiction and the Architecture
of
Mind in
Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University
of
Chicago
Press, 1987).
6. Husserl
might
have been
describing
the curate and canon in Don
Quixote
when
he
said,
"I understand the
one-sided, closed,
natural attitude ... as one of a certain
habitual one-sidedness" (Crisis 205),
and he
might
have been
speaking
for
Quixote
when he
said,
"We
permit
no
authority
to
deprive
us of the
right
of
recognizing
all
kinds of intuitions as
equally
valuable sources for the
justification
of
knowledge,
not
even that of 'modem
empirical
science' ... the 'Positivists' ... are not
willing, being
bound
by
their
prejudices,
to
recognize
more than one of them as
valid,
or indeed as
being present
at all"
(Ideas 86-87).
7. These are the terms in which
Berger
and Luckmann define their
sociology
of
knowledge
(189; 172; 180).
8.
Riley points
out that
especially
in the canon's
"description
of the
functioning
of
verisimilitude,
with its
emphasis
on
achieving
a
suspension
of
disbelief,"
"Don
Quixote
... laid the foundations for a
theory
of the moder novel"
(Riley
67, 65).
Though Riley says,
"it is a mistake to see Cervantes as
siding exclusively
with the
Canon"
(70),
he comes close to
doing just
that when he claims that Cervantes
"rejected
unsupported fantasy"
(68).
9. Cf. Bruce
Wardropper:
"Cervantes ... is
carrying
mimesis to its
logical
end;
he
is
trying
to make his reader
participate
in ... this form of dementia which consists in the
inability
to
distinguish
the fictional from the real"
(6).
10. Cf.
Riley:
"Cervantes criticism has
certainly
suffered from the
widespread
tendency
to
judge
all his fiction
by
the same novelistic standards.
Happily, things
are
starting
to
change
here,
and the
autonomy
of romance
(to
which
English
and Ameri-
can
literary
criticism is accustomed)
is
becoming
more
readily recognized.
So, indeed,
it should be in an
age
when science fiction and other sorts of
fantasy
have
proliferated
in all media-when the chivalric romance is reborn" (12).
What
Riley
calls novelistic
standards
here,
I would call normative realism.
11.
According
to William
Spanos,
the
purpose
of
postmodern strategy
is "to
generate
rather than
purge anxiety
and dread: to 'destructure'
(Heidegger)
Western
Man's sedimented
metaphysical presuppositions
and thus to de-center and
dislodge
his
tranquilized proper
self from the
superficial
... the
domesticated,
the
scientifically
charted,
organized
and leveled
world,
into immediate contact with 'the
things
them-
selves'"
(26-27).
12.
Pointing
to the crisis in
historiography
in Cervantes's
time,
Wardropper
concludes that Don
Quixote
"blurs the
boundary
between
history
and
story"
(11). The
problem
was that
fantasy
and
history
couldn't be
kept separate.
"Historians make
their histories read like
novels,
and novelists make their novels read like histories ....
Since the fifteenth
century
historians had been
busily engaged
in the deliberate fal-
sification of
history."
Pedre de Corral's Cronica sarracina
(ca. 1430) "started a
vogue
for
what has been called 'la historia novelesca
y
fantaseada'" (7).
13. Cf. Bruce
Wardropper,
"Don
Quixote: Story
or
History?"
Modern
Philology
63
(1965):
10-11. "Don
Quixote is,
among
other
things,
a tremendous
protest against
the
moralistic assurance of Counter-Reformation
Spain
.... in this common madness was
the evidence for a truth about man's world which the Counter-Reformation was
suppressing."
14. Realists have
always
found the label of
insanity
a useful tool for
suppressing
fantasy.
Foucault's Madness and Civilisation has shown that the
"discovery"
of
Fantastic
Phenomenology
45
46 Richard Hull
psychosis
coincides with the rise of a scientific rationalism which insisted on
empirical
reality.
Todorov observes that
fantasy
"was
considered,
in the 19th
century
in
par-
ticular,
to be the main characteristic of
insanity....
The
psychotic
... would confound the
perceived
and the
imaginary"
(121).
15.
Jonathan
Culler's defense of Paul de
Man,
"It's Time to Set the Record
Straight
About Paul de Man and His Wartime Articles for a Pro-Fascist
Newspaper,"
The Chronicle
of
Higher
Education
(August
13, 1988),
is
apropos.
"De Man's
critique
in
his later work of what he called 'the aesthetic
ideology'
now resonates
also,
in the
light
of his earlier
writings,
as a
critique
of ideas
underlying
fascism and their
deadly quest
for
unity
and the elimination of difference.... What makes Nazism the worst excess of
Western civilization is the fact that it took to an
appalling
extreme the
process
of
constituting
a
group by opposing
it to
something
else and
attempting
to exterminate
what it
falsely
defined as a
corrupting
element."
16. Predmore
points
to "the
pronounced tendency
in Cervantes's
writing
of
putting
before his characters not what
things
are but rather what
they appear
to be.
Perhaps
the most
surprising aspect
of this
tendency
is that which reveals Cervantes
renouncing
a novelist's omniscience" (76).
17.
Riley says
Quixote
"swallows
up
the
question
of
veracity
in the
(for him)
greater principle
of artistic
pleasure.
The books are read with
delight by
one and all"
(71).
18.
Heidegger
of course is not
directly
concerned with the
literary problems
of
mimesis and
verisimilitude,
but with
making
"worldhood"
intelligible.
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