The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

worlds more homely and comprehensible.
The everyday details are integrated into
the other world, extending its range of
reference; the combination of ‘real’ and
‘supernatural’ suggests a world of greater
opportunity and fullness than one consisting
of ‘real’ elements alone. If the ‘real’
world is also depicted separately (as in
Lewis), movement between the two
worlds happens at specific points in the
text, so that any character is always in
either one world or the other. The reader
is invited to feel not bewilderment at but
respect for the order of the ‘supernatural’
world, even awe and wonder.
It is characteristic of the fantastic text
that the reader is made unsure how to
interpret and respond to the events narrated.
Critics have stated that the fantastic
cannot exist without the notion of a clear
dividing line (which the text transgresses)
between things possible according to the
laws of nature and things supernatural and
impossible: for some, what defines the
fantastic is a brutal intrusion of the mysterious
into real life. But the reader’s
bewilderment is rarely confined to this
shock effect. Are the ghosts in Henry
James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) hallucinations
created by the protagonist’s
repressed feelings, or are they external to
her in some sense – and if so, what sense?
Are we to read Kafka’s Metamorphosis
(1916) as a description of mental illness
from the inside, a metaphor for some kind
of alienation, or a literally true story (the
protagonist turns into an insect, but the
objective third-person narrative is remarkably
matter-of-fact)? Are Poe’s stories
penetrating studies of human aspirations
and limitations, or carefully contrived
games which the narrator plays to keep the
reader in suspense for as long as possible
and maximize mystification and horror?
Frequently, the bewilderment is
increased by the text’s language. The
Fantastic 83
STYLE is lucid, even crystalline, but poor
in undertones, repetitive in its creation of
ATMOSPHERE. The lucidity often resides in
an overgeneral statement of the narrator’s
or protagonist’s impressions: Poe’s reference
to ‘the thrilling and enthralling
eloquence’ of Ligeia’s ‘low musical language’
(Ligeia, 1838) leaves the reader
unsure what kind of speech and auditory
sensations to imagine, more aware of the
intensity of the narrator’s response than
its quality. In the work of Cortázar, a
lucid, matter-of-fact style conveys bizarre
and impossible meanings, the truth of
which the narrator takes for granted.
Lucidity and intensity, we may reflect, are
compatible with some forms of insanity.
The confusion usually focuses on the
narrator’s or the protagonist’s personality.
Protagonists are characteristically isolated
from interaction and discussion.
Family life, a steady career, friendship,
even common everyday activities are
either meaningless to them or highly
problematical: Anselmus in Hoffmann’s
Golden Pot (1815), using a door knocker
to gain admittance to a house, sees it turn
suddenly into a snake. The protagonists’
lack of conventionality and urge towards
ideal perfection can take different forms.
Frequently in Tieck and Hoffmann, they
hold themselves open to the unexpected,
aware of both the spiritual opportunity
and the spiritual risks of this, whereas in
The Turn of the Screw and Maupassant’s
Le Horla (1887) attempts are made to create
a stable world by leaving out worrying
aspects of the self and its environment –
repressing them, Freudians would say.
The attempt to make life manageable yet
satisfying thus becomes an attempt to
transcend human limits: Stevenson’s
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) tries to
resolve his tensions by neatly splitting
his personality. But in thus pushing
human nature beyond its normal bounds,