The fantastic is a very paradoxical mode, as it becomes clear in its critical history
of often contradictory attempts at defining it, and we've seen some of them at this conference,
I'm sure.
The 18th century in England is in many ways a paradoxical age, and it is out of these
paradoxes, aparias and contradictions that the modern fantastic comes into being.
Fantastic literature often appears or flourishes in times of change and disorder because of
its flexible propensities of dealing with chaos.
It can be used to create order in the face of chaos in one way by showing a secondary
world where order rules, as for example in fairy tales where an emphasis on hierarchies,
categories, numbers and formulae reinforces a sense of extreme order.
In another way, the fantastic can present order and support a given system by showing
the intrusion of disorder into the world and then the removal of this disorder.
But the fantastic can also put its emphasis on the threat of chaos and the disruption
of a system, exposing the vulnerability and fragility of a given social order, and it
is in this role that it has been called the literature of subversion by Rosemary Jackson.
Both functions of the fantastic, stabilizing and destabilizing, are needed and appreciated
in times of change.
The 18th century in England is a time of massive change in all conceivable ways, politically,
socially, economically, epistemologically and theologically.
It is the beginning of a modern rational worldview, of modern structures in society
and economy and towards the end of the century, of a modern notion of the individual self
based on an essential core identity.
Many established certainties are shifting before a new order is slowly established.
All of these changes leave the individual in a state of profound disorientation.
With retrospective simplification, it seems that the individual in the 18th century is
caught in a limbo regarding its terms of reference, while both power and moral responsibility
are gradually being shifted from the divine or spiritual realm to the realm of the individual.
Fantastic literature of the time explores the state of in-betweenness and is itself
in a state of in-betweenness.
A sense of the fantastic is something marked and distinct, is newly conceived of in the
18th century because of the epistemological change in the 17th and 18th centuries towards
the rational, scientifically based worldview that the fantastic deviates from.
So the rise of realism in literature and the notion that literature should quote exhibit
life in its true state as Samuel Johnson famously put it, the fantastic is relegated to a marginalized
position in the literary field.
But of course one has to keep in mind that the distinction between what exactly is and
what isn't fantastic or supernatural is still far from clear in the 18th century as the
ongoing social and academic debates about phenomena like vampires and ghosts similar
to these narratives prove.
In the meantime fantastic texts continue to be read and written and a variety of influences
bring new elements and new genres into the realm of fantastic literature, for example
fantastic and real accounts of travels in exotic countries, the fairy tale fashion coming
to England from France and the fashion for oriental tales since Galand's Arabian Nights
Entertainment.
At the end of the century some of the new orders appear more stable and reliable than
before which is comforting to some and revolting to others and this revolt manifests itself
in the writings of romantic authors against the dictates of reason.
The fantastic here acquires a new urgency and fundamental importance.
But in this paper I want to focus on the state of the fantastic in between before romanticism
and before new order is in place.
In particular I want to look at some examples of comic fantasy which bring a playful and
irreverent approach to the social and the generic state of in betweenness that I have
described.
These texts explore the systems of reference within which identity is constructed and play
with the individual factors thereby exposing the constructedness and arbitrariness.
At the same time they disrupt and destabilize the aesthetic order and fictional structures
on which several genres are based and this again emphasizes the artificiality and instability
of meaning making and cultural productions.
Okay, my first example is probably the most famous work of fantastic literature in the
18th century, Jonathan Swift's Galavas Travels from 1726.
The text satirically plays with at least three genres, travel literature, utopia and
satire itself.
It belongs to a time of abundant satirical production and one might say it's satirical
warfare between different political parties and media.
Satire is linked to fantastic literature in its transgression of boundaries and satires
of the time often use fantastic elements but they rarely create fully blown fantastic worlds
as they appear in Galavas Travels.
These worlds in Galavas Travels are peculiar and interesting in themselves and the way
they satirically mirror many aspects of English society but I want to focus on Galava himself
as a narrator and protagonist.
He begins his travels as an individual who is firmly placed within a system that defines
him and assigns him roles as an Englishman, as a member of the middling ranks, as a doctor
and as a husband.
As his travels and adventures progress his attitude towards these roles changes and his
whole framework of identity and social norms is shattered until in the end his ideal of
perfect humanity is associated with horses and he can no longer stand the smell of other
human beings not even his own family.
This destabilization starts with the external element of size and body.
This is probably the best known part of Galavas Travels.
In his well-known travels to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, Galava changes perspective from
a giant amongst little men to a dwarf amongst giants.
With this change in size comes a shift in power and power of judgment.
Galava feels superior to the Lilliputians in morality and understanding, looking down
upon quote, the most scandalous corruptions into which these people are fallen by the
degenerate nature of man, unquote, and ridiculing their petty quarrels and factions at court.
Of course here the satirist is already satirized because the petty quarrels strongly resemble
such quarrels in England.
Far from realizing these similarities, Galava is very proud of the achievements of his native
country.
This pride receives a blow when he is put into the role of the powerless little man
in Brobdingnag in the second book.
Here social status drops from the counselor and warrior of kings to the slave and plaything
of a common man.
So here the element of class becomes relative.
Now he finds himself subject to the giant's judgment of his country, which the king, after
all Galava's praise of England, calls quote, the most pernicious race of odious little
vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth, end quote.
In these adventures, Galava's sense of identity and national pride is maintained.
In the fourth book, however, his point of view undergoes a much more fundamental shattering
when he's confronted with the opposition between the Hohenhams, a race of intelligent, rational,
and morally impeccable horses, and the Yahus, a degenerate form of the human species whose
physical ugliness and neglect mirrors their moral depravity and egotistical, aggressive,
narrow-mindedness.
To Galava, they appear as deformed, ugly monsters, and he only slowly realizes that he and the
English people are much closer to this race, both in body and in mind and social behavior,
than to the horses, whom he reveres and idealizes.
The idea of the other, the satirize, the monster, is suddenly mapped onto the self, formally
representing the norm and the morally superior position.
Galava becomes an object of distaste and hatred for himself, and he becomes the object of
satire but for very different reasons.
It is his reaction to the value system of the horses and to the human features of the
Yahus that make him a ridiculous figure, not his actual genetic similarity to the
monsters.
He violently turns his back on the English system of norms and adopts the Hohenham system
as an ideal which, to the human reader, in fact seems very inhuman and marked by an extremely
harsh and rigid moral code that lacks any kind of feeling, sympathy, or emotional bonds
between people.
Particularly the fact that there are no family ties between parents and children, that parents
willingly and dispassionately give one child to another family if there are unequal numbers
which might threaten the balance of the system, in fact might seem like a monstrous practice
to a human being.
But not so for Galava, who cherishes the supreme rule of rationality and reason that is at
the basis of the society.
He discards the notion of family ties and affection as values in themselves and is disgusted
by his wife and children when he returns to England.
So Galava, as the homodigetic narrator, changes the genre and leaves his position as observing
traveller and in some cases a satirical observer behind to progress into the realm of utopia.
For this step he becomes the major object of satire.
Because of this shift, Galava's travels can be seen as a meta-sattire, where the relativity
and instability of the position of the satirical norm is demonstrated.
The boundary between subject and object breaks down as the subject gives up his perspective
and becomes the other himself.
But it becomes apparent after Galava's return to England that this identification of self
and other cannot be sustained and he uses his new ideal to elevate himself by association
with the horses and to look down upon his fellow human beings as the other.
So the fundamental instability and constructedness of the relationship between rational self
and his biased monster is exposed in the chain of displacement and replacement of self,
self-other and ideal norm, and Galava's way towards isolation and misanthropy.
It becomes clear that as soon as the structure of a position between self and monster is
in place, it starts crumbling again, as realization dawns that the gap between them is not as
wide as one would like it to be.
And there's one more element to add, I've now, I would have had a summary of this in
the PowerPoint, mentioned a couple of factors like class, national identity, things like
that that are destabilized.
And another one that is only implicitly destabilized is that of providence, it doesn't even really
appear in Galava's travels, but it is remarkable that it is left out.
Because this metaphysical or divine point of reference, such as God or providence that
plays an important role, for example, in Robinson Crusoe, if you know that, John Mullen claims
that Swift's whole novel is based on this absence of any divine regulating power and
calls it an experiment in godlessness that shows the pitfalls and dangers of the modern
world that is just beginning.
And for me, it is a very interesting point for the theory and history of fantastic literature
that Galava's travels as one of the few fantastic works of a period dominated by the rise of
realism leaves out the most comprehensive and powerful fantasy of all, that of metaphysical
power, which is very much present in the so-called realistic works of the time.
My next example, I will only deal rather shortly with this, is Horace Walpole's The Castle
of Otranto from 1764.
And this is his most famous work, and he's hailed for this as the founding father of
gothic fiction.
But yeah, as I said, I only want to touch briefly on this work and show how it plays
with the conventions of romance.
The Castle of Otranto shows the individual is situated within a shattered, dysfunctional,
and contradictory system of reference points and power structures.
The traditional co-ordinates of the system that normally defines and situates the individual
are all potentially there.
Providence or divine will is here, very present.
He expressed by supernatural importance, class-related power structures and rights to property, references
to a moral code, family ties and patriarchal authority, and passion or love as dynamic
force that can unsettle existing structures.
But in the course of the narrative, all of these co-ordinates become destabilized.
I can't go into the complex plot and character constellation here, and some of you may be
familiar with the novel.
But it's remarkable how moral frames of reference, roles of the characters and character constellations
are constantly shifting in this text.
For example, the young heroine Isabella can be seen as a signifier that is constantly
deferred.
First she is to marry Conrad, the son of Manfred, the owner of Otranto.
When Conrad dies, Manfred, his father, wants her to marry him, despite the fact that he
already has a wife.
Then she falls in love with Theodore, who turns out to be the rightful heir of Otranto,
and she marries him in the end, but Theodore only marries her as the second best replacement
of Manfred's daughter, Matilda, who is dead, accidentally killed by her father, who confused
her with Isabella.
Now, this is very complicated, but you see the constant shifting.
This is what I'm going for.
These kinds of shifts are, of course, not new in romance.
But what is interesting in this novel is the instability of the moral code and the
fact that not even the supernatural elements represent a coherent and stable framework
of moral demands that is external to the conflicts of the individuals.
Instead they mirror their conflicts and heighten them by sending confusing and contradictory
signals.
For example, when Manfred's grandfather usurped Otranto by killing its rightful owner, said
Nicholas, this is the divine power, a saint, showed himself open to a deal and deferred
revenge and justice to a later generation for the nice gift of a church.
This instability is a major difference to forms of the Gothic novel that follow in its
heyday of the 1790s, where the demands and structures of moral behavior and the authority
of providence and divine justice are much more stable and clear-cut.
But I want to stay with Horace Walpole and talk about his less well-known collection
of stories called Hieroglyphic Tales, which he didn't make accessible to the public during
his lifetime, probably knowing that it would have proved too disruptive and shocking for
contemporary society.
These tales reveal an irreverent comic fantasy that completely detaches itself from moral
purposes and allows the free-floating play of absurdities.
All kinds of stabilities and categories are undermined here, particularly that of narrative
authority.
This is already established in the paratecs.
The preface satirically replays and exaggerates the conventions of fictional editors in the
18th century, and the editor asserts that considering, quote, considering the gravity
of the matter, the solidity of the reasoning, and the deep learning contained in the ensuing
sheets, it is necessary to make some apology for producing this work in so trifling an
age where nothing will go down but temporary politics, personal satire, and idle romances.
So he's showing his narrative as something very serious, very refined, very learned.
And as a contrast to this in the postscript, the stories are presented as deliberate retaliation
of fantasy in a literary culture that is severely lacking in the field of imaginative writing.
Here the stories are called, quote, an attempt to vary the stale and beaten class of stories
and novels, which the works of invention are almost always devoid of imagination.
This is a critique of 18th century realism in a way.
So the contrast between preface and postscript and their playful destabilization of truth
and fancy is in tune with the stories themselves, which expose and satirize the constructedness
of cultural meaning, moral truth, and social roles.
And the hieroglyphic tales, all of its artificial genre conventions of the fairy tale for projecting
order, are exposed as artificial and arbitrary.
I talked about the fairy tale and its order establishing at the beginning.
Due to the limited time, I can only show this in a few examples.
In all of the stories, social hierarchies and power structures are deconstructed in
various ways.
Regal succession is almost always questioned by legal disputes.
So for example, in the story The King and His Three Daughters, it begins with the following
quote, there was formerly a king who had three daughters.
That is, he would have had three if he had had one more.
But somehow or other, the eldest never was born.
She was extremely handsome, had a great deal of wit, and spoke French imperfection as all
the authors of that age affirm.
And yet, none of them pretends that she ever existed.
It is very certain that the two other princesses were far from beauties.
The second had a strong Yorkshire dialect, and the youngest had bad teeth and but one
leg, which occasioned her dancing very ill.
So this is the beginning of the story, you see the typical fairy tale elements.
And you see how the text plays with authentication and truth.
It also plays with the ways in which fairy tales usually ascribe identity and situate
characters in the fictional world.
Each of the princesses is marked by a very strong attribute, and these attributes here
are exaggerated to the extreme of the very existence of the princess that is lacking.
What follows is a satire on legal dispute and political factions, as the question of
which princess should inherit the throne is disputed.
The situation becomes precarious when a young prince enters the scene, who is in his turn
marked by three attributes or flaws, namely that he is dead, speaks only Egyptian and
has three legs.
He falls in love with the eldest daughter, but the match is deferred when it is discovered
that they are, quote, related within the forbidden degrees, a woman that never was, and a man
that had been, being deemed first cousins in the eye of the canon law, unquote.
The ensuing religious dispute is solved when the second daughter, supported by the city
people, marries a common dry soldier and takes over the power and the kingdom.
In this tale, the emphasis lies on the power of discourse and the discursive construction
of identity.
The non-existent eldest daughter exists because her father, the king, claims her to be his
favorite.
She cannot marry the dead man, not for the obvious physical reasons, but because of legal
and clerical quarrels, and the new queen in the end takes over by creating her own truth.
So, quote, this resolution was so sudden and so universal that all parties approved
or were forced to seem to approve it.
The old king died the next day, as the courtier said, for joy.
The prince of Khubini was buried in spite of his appeal to the law of nations.
This is the dead prince.
And the young princess went distracted and was shut up in a madhouse, calling out day
and night for a husband with three legs.
Truth and power are closely related here, and in combination with the madhouse as a
place to relegate the unwanted, abnormal, and potentially threatening, these proceedings
show a very Foucauldian state of the kingdom.
The performativity and discursiveness of truth and identity appear even more pronounced in
the first story of the collection, a new Arabian night's entertainment.
A young woman from a different country is captured and brought to the giant emperor
of Kukuruku in order to be his wife.
He marries a new wife every day, who is supposed to tell him stories through the night to
distract him from his insomnia.
The intertextual play with an Arabian night's entertainment is obvious here.
But the motive of constant deferral that is at the core of the original is pushed to extremes
in Walpole's parody.
The emperor is called a giant by his subjects, but when the captive meets him, it becomes
clear that he's only a relative giant, just a sculliver in a way, who is given this epithet
because his predecessors were smaller and because his courtiers want to flatter him.
Flattery and euphemism are what the general system of preference and hierarchy at this
court are based on.
The emperor's newly captured wife is similarly fond of dissimulation and faked identity.
She introduces herself as a princess, but admits that she only calls herself that because
of an ambition to be the heroine of a novel, for which she must be either a princess or
a shepherdess.
When she starts the task of entertaining the emperor and starts going into her country's
and family's history, it becomes clear that her ancestors likewise faked their names and
identities and that there is no straightforward history of her country.
All there is is a series of quarrels and disputes about power and religion and about
who has the prerogative to say what is true and thus determine history.
The confusing details of these quarrels annoy and bore the emperor so much that he finally
falls asleep, allowing his wife to suffocate him with a pillow.
So these are just some examples from the stories, but the relativity of knowledge, truth and
identity and the power of discourse and our core themes in all of them.
I was going to talk about William Beckford's Birkbeck, I don't know if you're familiar
with that, because it satirizes first of all the oriental tale and also the gothic novel,
and so it again destabilizes genre conventions, but also destabilizes ideas of power and of
truth and truth production, but I will come to my conclusion now.
In this paper I've touched upon some of the genre traditions which use fantastic elements
and which are in turn used and transformed in fantastic literature, satire, utopia, travel
literature, romance, the fairy tale and the oriental tale that would have been perfect.
I've put my focus on a time of transition for the fantastic mode in which both the genres
that feed into it and its points of reference in society are changing, and I've chosen some
examples of comic fantasy to show how it plays with the conventions of these genres and with
social meaning-making strategies in general, with particular focus on social roles and
identity markers.
I think that works like these open up these genres, test and expose their boundaries and
make them more flexible for future use, and it's particularly the playful comic fantasies
that have this liberating effect and shed the limiting pressures of moralizing and the
simple binary oppositions connected with it, and this particular streak of the fantastic
goes on and develops further with authors like Lewis Carroll in the 19th century and
Terry Pratchett in contemporary fantasy, both of whom presenting contrast to the serious
and moralizing types of fantasy of their times.
Thank you very much.