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Approaches


 Literature of the Fantastic has been approached in any number of ways, each of them having something valuable to contribute to the understanding of what literature of the Fantastic is, how we might read it, and what it has to say. I will concentrate on four different approaches, and then ask you to: (a) see if this applies to particular works of Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror; and (b) what are its strengths and weaknesses as a critical approach?

(i)Psychological and Psychoanalytical Approaches.
 This type of criticism may take a number of forms. The most basic, and common, is to read Fantastic literature as a means of understanding (diagnosing?) the psychic or psychological makeup of the writer or artist? The writings of Edgar Allen Poe and R.L. Stevenson have been approached in this way, and their writings used as forms of psychological and biographical evidence.
 An alternative psychological approach, which we will consider in relation to various texts on this course, is to read the texts 'psychologically', that is, for what they reveal about the individual and collective self, behaviour, desire, relations between the conscious and unconscious self, and the inherent stability (or otherwise) of the personality. As Freud recognised, Horror fiction provides us with fertile material for psychological exploration, indicating the operation of forces such as 'repression', 'sublimation', and drives such as the Death Wish (Thanatos). Fantasy and Horror, it could be argued, are premised on a human interest in, and need for, exploration of the boundaries between sanity and insanity, normality and monstrousness, the familiar and the extraordinary.
 A third, but related, psychological approach involves focusing on the pleasures of reading such works of Horror and Fantasy. Are those pleasures based on the vicarious exploration of things which are 'other' to ourselves?

(ii)Literary-Cultural Approaches

 One very important critical approach to the study of these kinds of literature involves focusing on the various types of Fantastic fiction (genre-criticism) and tracing how they develop and suggesting reasons why they take particular forms at particular times (literary historical approaches).
 The definition of what constitutes or defines Fantastic writing is, as you might expect, fraught with difficulty. Consider the following list and see what the following have in common: the Romance, the Epic, Horror, Science Fiction, the Fable, the fantasy, the nightmare, the ghost story, etc. Are there any here which do not belong? What is it about each of these which makes them uniquely special, that allows us to define them and give them a name? Why might this be a useful thing for us to want to do?
 There have been attempts to produce general abstract 'models' of what constitutes literature of the fantastic, and allows us to be able to know that is what we are reading. Perhaps the most significant of these is Tzvetan Todorov, in his study of 'The Fantastic', in which he concludes:
The fantastic requires the fulfillment of three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and supernatural exploration of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader's role is entrusted to a character... the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text; he will reject allegorical as well as 'poetic' interpretations.

How adequate, if at all, do you consider this formulation? How well does it apply to particular examples? Can you think of a better definition? One alternative might be to argue that Fantastic literature in general is characterised as literature which is purposively not "realistic", in other words, it is 'other to' conventional plausible or empirical types of writing. Will this do?

 From the point of view of literary historical approaches it is certainly valuable to chart the development of modern Fantastic writing through the pattern of influences and changes in literary fashion. We might take our starting point from the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth century, The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho, to Frankenstein, and onwards to the works of Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe, Stevenson, to Dracula and the ghost stories of M.R. James, through Edwardian fantasies like Peter Pan, and into the emergence of modern Science Fiction, Fantasy and Romance. What might this tell us about the nature of Fantastic writing? How would it help?

 Moving from this, we might then proceed to consider the cultural and social factors which have governed these patterns of development. Would it be true that this rich body of fantasy literature was produced as an alternative or antidote to conventional 'realism' in the nineteenth century, to supply alternative and more imaginative views of this or other worlds? Was literature of the fantastic a response to the emergence of an industrial culture in the nineteenth century, an acknowledgement of psychic repression, the desire for alternatives to a predominantly secular view of the world, an irruption of libidinal rebellion?

(iii)Spiritual perspectives.
 Maurice Levy writes that "the fantastic is a compensation that man provides for himself, at the level of imagination, for what he has lost at the level of faith". Fantastic literature has been associated, by critics such as Georges Bataille, with the need to affirm some sense of a religious or transcendental vision, offering us 'other' possibilities and alternatives to a secular view of the world. Can literature which portrays ghosts, demons, poltergeists and pixies really be seen as offering us an alternative vision of the world, exploiting the gaps between what we 'know' and what we do not 'know', indicating the limits of a secular and rational world view? This could be seen as a positive thing, i.e., that fantastic literature offers us timely reminders of the limitations of the Western secular view of the world. The negative view would be that fantastic literature is simply conservative, based on a hankering after "departed gods" and discredited faiths. How much of your response to these issues is governed by what you believe, and the basis upon which your beliefs are based?

(iv)Marxist and sociological approaches.
 Marxist criticism might note the coincidental emergence of modern Fantastic literature with the rise of a modern, rational and ordered industrial society, either as a radical questioning of contemporary society, or to offer a mystifying vision of material social and historical relationships. A Marxist critic might take a novel such as Dracula and see that it is primarily about a degenerate aristocracy which sucks the blood from decent and predominantly middle class citizens - this is an interpretation we will explore when we come to the novel. Alternatively, in Wells' The Time Machine, it is highly appropriate to read the novel, in its portrayal of the Morlocks and the Eloi, as "really about" relations between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Texts can be approached, from this perspective, as dealing with and dramatising, at whatever allegorical level, contemporary social and historical events and situations. David Punter's study, The Literature of Terror, whilst not explicitly Marxist, retains a generally Marxist flavour.
 Marxist criticism would also have a great deal to say about the popularity of, and readership, for Fantastic literature, in that it provides alternative forms of social opiates (displaced religion), or a means of articulating utopian possibilities for society. What would you say to this approach?

(v)Other critical approaches.
 These might include Structuralist approaches (which would focus on the ways in which a particular text, or group of texts) contain symbolic oppositions between 'normality'/'abnormality'; 'the natural' and 'the cultural'; 'sane'/'rational', etc.), or reader response criticism (what do readers actually do, cognitively and effectively, when they read such texts?), or gender-based approaches (which focus on the ways in which texts portray men and women or dramatise the differences between 'male' and 'female'). Do these critical approaches have anything valuable to say about literature of the fantastic?

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