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the text in her creation of her own textual space makes it an attractive genre for the
expression of this gender-based anxiety. Here there is a suggestion of difference
within general theories of postmodern angst. It is possible to distinguish between the
postmodernist tendency of the fantastic to question the control of the narrator 104 and
the more deeply ingrained female mistrust ofwhat her Imaginary itselfproduces.
Pierre Machery's comment that 'the recognition of the area ofshadow in or
around the work is the initial moment of criticism'l'" (my italics) seems particularly
pertinent to the literary notion of the fantastic. The heightened emphasis on the
interpretative function triggered by the large area of shadow into which many
fantastic texts descend, underlines, and at the same time, often frustrates, the reader's
role as critic and interpreter of literature. In one sense this could be interpreted a re­
valuation of the work of art itself. To this effect I feel that much fantastic narrative
belongs to that category of work described by Sontag as being created as 'a flight
from interpretation' .106 It functions to return the reader's attention upon the
indivisibility of meaning from the text itself. As Lichtenberg's knife and Kafka's
Odradek suggest: perhaps those literary signifiers that remain with us are the most
fantastic ones.
The hermeneutic process foregrounded by the fantastic can also be read in the
light of Ragland-Sullivan's words on a Lacanian poetics which would 'claim that the
purpose of reading and writing literary texts is to evoke a shadow meaning network
whose structures, messages and effects control our lives, but whose truths are
evasive.,107 This double function of the fantastic to focus the reader on the literary
text, only to bring himlher back to interrogate his/her relationship to reality is further
heightened by the use of transtextuality and self-reflexivity. For women writers I
intend to show how it serves the double function ofretreat from their reading position
as oversignified objects and tentative steps towards tracing the shadow of a reality
always beyond their reach.
(eds), p.239.
Marina Polacco emphasizes the close links between non-realist modes of
104 See Deborah Harter, 'If [...] the literary text might be thought of as a recording of the "mastery and
control" of its image content - of the sedimentary of its images and their transformation from the
Imaginary into the Symbolic - fantastic narrative would seem to mark the misdirection ofthis process. I
(£.69)
I 5 Pierre Macherey, A Theory ofLiterary Production, trans. by Geoffrey Paul (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1978, first pub!. 1966), p.82.
106 Eponymous essay in Against Interpretation, written in 1964 (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 10.
107 cit. by Schwenger, p.35.
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