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Dissidence 151This model of intersubjective understanding, of sharedunderstanding of a text which re-presents the world, is theguarantee not only of the truth of the text but of the reader’sexistence as an autonomous and knowing subject in a world ofknowing subjects. In this way, classic realism constitutes anideological practice in addressing itself to readers as subjects,interpellating them in order that they freely accept their subjectivityand their subjection.(Belsey 1980:72, 69)The fantastic undermines the transcendental subject in realistdiscourse by creating an uncertainty about the metaphysical statusof the narrative. Often this uncertainty is provoked by using theformal conventions of realism to represent a fantastic disorder oftime, space, and character and thereby to suspend the readerbetween two discursive registers, the mimetic and the marvelous.Confronted with the fantastic, the reader experiences what TzvetanTodorov calls a “hesitation” between natural and supernaturalexplanations: “The fantastic […] lasts only as long as a certainhesitation: a hesitation common to reader and character, who mustdecide whether or not what they perceive derives from ‘reality’ asit exists in the common opinion” (Todorov 1975:41; cf. Jackson1981:26–37). The unified consciousness of realism is thus splitbetween opposing alternatives, intelligibility gives way to doubt,and the reader is released from the ideological positioning in thetext, invited to perceive that “the common opinion” of realityencodes moral values and serves political interests, thatsubjectivity is not transcendental but determinate, a site ofconfused meanings, ideological contradictions, social conflicts. Thefantastic explodes the formal conventions of realism in order toreveal their individualistic assumptions; but by introducing anepistemological confusion, a fantastic narrative can alsointerrogate the ideological positions it puts to work, expose theirconcealment of various relations of domination, and encouragethinking about social change. In the fantastic, Hélène Cixousobserves, “the subject flounders in the exploded multiplicity of itsstates, shattering the homogeneity of the ego of unawareness,spreading out in every possible direction, into every possiblecontradiction, transegoistically”; and it is this discursive strategythat distinguishes nineteenth-century writers like Hoffmann asopponents of “logocentrism, idealism, theologism, all the props of