THE AVATAR IN PANAMA - Theses - Flinders University

1.2 Fantastic Psychoanalysis and the Doppelganger The Avatar in Panamaconstant overturning and questioning of previous shared assumptions,traditions, and customs and postmodernism has done the same. 21Fantasy and the FantasticThe Oxford Dictionary’s entry for fantastic reads “existing onlyin the imagination, fabulous, unreal; perversely or irrationallyimagined”. 22 Nevertheless, fantastic literature has traditionally beenunderstood through its relation to realism and critics’ definitions havereflected its paradoxical association with reality. The fantastic cannotexist independently without the real and a major study which is basedon this premise is that of Irène Bessière, Le récit fantastique: lapoétique de l’incertain. 23 Eric S Rabkin proposes that although thedictionary defines the genre as “not real or based on reality, it isimportant precisely because it is wholly dependent on reality for itsexistence. It is reality turned 180° around”. 24 Claude Puzin understandsthe fantastic as ambiguous when applied to literature that has beencreated by (real) imagination: it means “that which does not exist inreality and whose content is outside the possible of the real […] anybizarre, extraordinary event”. 25 More recent French critics in the field,Roger Caillois, Pierre-Georges Castex, and Louis Vax, have notcontradicted these definitions. Someone who did question thisclassification however was Bulgarian critic Tzvetan Todorov whosuggested instead of looking to “extra-literary categories to ‘accountfor’” the fantastic, an analysis of the texts themselves would lead to atheoretical definition rather than a philosophical or psychologicalexplanation of the genre. A general anxiety and unease seemed to be agiven in terms of the effects of the fantastic upon the reader andconsequently Todorov was interested in how this sensation wasproduced. 26.Todorov's definition of the fantastic has the experiencer of theextraordinary event as either “the victim of an illusion of the senses, aproduct of the imagination-- and laws of the world then remain whatthey are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part21 Elliott, Subject to Ourselves 7.22 OED, 916.23 Irène Bessière, Le récit fantastique: la poétique de l’incertain (Paris: Larousse,1974).24 Eric S Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton U P,1976) 41.25 Claude Puzin, Le Fantastique (Ligugé: Éditions Fernand Nathan, 1984) 3.26 Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen,1981) 26.42