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trend towards genre-mixing and genre-breakdown.III
McLoughlin argues that such a tendency is a contemporary one in what he describes
as 'negative non-dualist: postmodernist' giving as Italian examples Calvino, Benni,
Capriolo and Manfredi in which:
real and unreal do not combine to create a surreality but they cancel each other
out; the transcendent in this case is neither real nor unreal (nor a combination of
the two). By refusing to represent anything beyond itself the text calls attention
to its own artifice wherein lies the transcendent dimension that the text tries to
express. The reader is required to experience the transcendent aesthetically
rather than (as in the dualistic and positive non-dualistic forms) to know it
conceptually. Extratextual representation is replaced by intertextual reference
and the fantastic concept is reduced to the status of metaphor, which is in all
three cases, undermined; the transcendent dimension that the postmodem
fantastic tries to express can only be pointed to - even the fantastic concept is
inadequate to describe it.112
Before getting lost in a labyrinth of potentially sterile postmodern game­
playing it is worth considering the proximity ofthat double pull which is still present
in the fantastic genre, between the reader's involvement and distance, to Linda
Hutcheon's definition of the 'central paradox' of 'textually self-conscious
metafiction' :
that, while being made aware ofthe linguistic and fictive nature ofwhat is being
read, and thereby distanced from any unself-conscious identification on the
level of character or plot, readers of metafiction are at the same time made
mindful of their active role in reading, in participating in making the text
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mean.
Much of the contemporary fantastic studied in this thesis shares this emphasis on the
reader's role in connecting the text, however tentatively, to a new vision ofthe real. It
makes the space of the text one of negotiation between author, reader and the
definition of literature itself. Women writers have far more to lose and gain in this
process - their writing is not merely able to point towards an unattainable
'transcendent dimension'. For women, who have first hand experience of the
interdependence of their textual and 'real' objectification, infinitesimal shifts in
III Neil Cornwell, p.143.
112 Michael McLoughlin, in his conclusion.
113 Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metcflctional Paradox (New York: Methuen, 1984),
p.xii of Preface.
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