it doesn't happen that often that you're at a conference
where literally everybody has a fantastic track record.
But in this case, everybody does have one.
Mine though is somewhat sketchy
and I want to outline it briefly
so that you get an idea where I am coming from.
From the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s,
my exploration of the fantastic
took me across four different quarters.
Then the journey ended rather abruptly
when I handed in my doctoral thesis on Gustaf Myrink.
Coming back to Myrink.
Myrink was the subject of my doctoral thesis
and to this date, I cannot believe that my supervisors
actually allowed me to publish this thesis
under the somewhat Byzantine title that I had chosen.
The English translation of that title goes,
Hypostasis, The Logic of Mythical Thought
in the post 1908 over of Gustaf Myrink.
Be this as it may, the title actually indicated how
and why my exploration of the fantastic had run its course.
It had to do with the realization
that in the case of Myrink,
the fantastic was just a camouflage.
Myrink, as you might know,
became one of the best known German authors
of the fantastic in the early 20th century
by virtue of his tremendously successful debut novel,
The Golem, published in 1915.
However, this acclaim was not to be repeated
for what the following novels, thank you,
the following novels of his demonstrated
with increasing intensity was that the author did in fact
have very little interest in the fantastic
as an aesthetic category.
Rather, it turned out that the effects,
tropes and motives in his novels
that most readers had interpreted as fantastic
were meant in a rather different
and decidedly more serious way.
For Myrink, despite his flamboyant
and flashy outer appearance,
was in fact a practicing believer
of a whole number of spiritual, mystic and occult teachings
which over his lifetime testified
to an ever increasing attraction to the,
well, let's say, wacky.
When I came to this conclusion,
I was 29 years old and too dogmatic to admit
that other human beings who believe
in pretty wacky ideas and systems
might nevertheless be worth engaging with
as artists or simply as human beings.
A good quarter century later,
time has come for me to pay my dues
and my tribute to what I had once been attracted to
and then frightfully discarded
as a youthful folly, the fantastic.
Myrink represents the spiritually inclined dimension
of the fantastic.
Yet, as I said, there were three other domains
that I had explored.
The first of these was sci-fi, the second fantasy,
the third that of the uncanny.
Let me name some of the major stakeholders.
For sci-fi, Philip K. Dick, Kurt Lasitz, Asimov,
Chapek, and perhaps first and foremost Stanislav Lem.
And of course, Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey.
To date, my personal count stands
at 21 full-length movie theater sittings
and I shouldn't have driven home by car
after a good deal of those either.
As far as fantasy goes,
it was mainly Tolkien's lore that got me hooked.
Thank heavens Harry Potter wasn't around in those days.
I might have fallen prey to him as well
though I somehow doubt it.
I guess I simply don't like cocky public school brats
with horn-rimmed glasses.
For me, Frodo's naive boyishness
is still more intriguing
or listening to the Cheshire cat purring
and Carol's wonderland
and then stepping into the world beyond the looking glass
or corrolling down the yellow brick road
with a bunch of delightful munchkins
somewhere over the rainbow.
Finally, the category of the uncanny.
Of course, here I can mention some more respectable names
such as Hoffman, Teak, Walpole, Poe, Beers,
or the cinematographic genius of Polanski.
What's the point of this anecdotal account,
you might ask yourself.
The point I'm trying to make is this.
If we take our experience of the phenomenon seriously,
we must admit that the fantastic
is more than an abstract category.
The word fantastic is already a noun
and an adjective at the same time.
So what, you might say,
the same goes for its terminological opposite,
the realistic.
But while this is, of course, true,
our conventional use of the two terms
shows one decisive difference.
A realistic experience is generally not interpreted
as an experience of the realistic
but as one of the real, of a concrete reality.
Whereas the fantastic experience,
sensus strictu, is always also an experience
of the fantastic.
In other words, beyond its representational content,
the fantastic is also an experience
that is characterized by the merging
of the generic and the specific of transcendence.
In short, our encounter with it
has a metaphysical dimension.
When we label something as fantastic,
we do not only categorize an object.
Rather, we specify the mode and conditions
that govern our own cognitive and emotive processing
of whatever the content at hand might be.
This insight, I guess,
is what makes Todorov's seemingly clinical approach
so compelling.
Though structuralist in methodological terms,
it was the first definition that pinpointed
the essentially transient and highly subjective nature
of the fantastic, thereby shifting the focus
from representational content to cognitive process.
What I will try to do in the following
is go one step further towards a metaphysic of the fantastic.
But before embarking on that,
let us first try and get a firmer grip
on the concept as such.
What type of concept is the fantastic?
Implicitly, I have just argued against
the perhaps most common use and understanding of it
as a genre category.
If the fantastic were a genre term,
then we should be able to apply it
in a similar way as other genre terms,
for example, Bildungsroman or a detective novel.
The reason why this doesn't work is that medium,
that genuine genre categories are historically
and culturally contextualized and more over medium specific.
Clearly, in our current use of the term fantastic,
we do not understand its applicability to be constrained
by criteria such as medium and historical cultural setting.
By the same token, to employ the term as a genre category
would also result in a confusion of categorical levels.
To state, the fantastic comprises and is realized
in many genres such as vampire stories or rom-comsoms.
To state that the fantastic is a category
that cuts across genres and at the same time
to state that it is in itself a genre
should strike one as rather, well, fantastic.
Now, if fantastic is not a genre term
that is an aesthetic category,
what other type of category might it be?
Approaching the question from the phenomenological angle,
we might be led to believe that it is indeed
an ontological category.
According to this position, the concept fantastic
belongs to the class of terms that enable us
to differentiate distinct modes and possibilities of being,
of types of worlds and existence.
The dominant paradigm of realism,
understood as an ontological qualifier,
denotes the type of world in which anything that exists
or happens can be explained by way of empirical observation
and logic reasoning.
It follows that things and events that cannot be observed
and accounted for in this manner are by definition not real.
They do not form part of the world
which realism proclaims to be the exclusively realized one.
No one will dispute the fact that the fantastic
is at loggerheads with ontological realism.
But does that already make the fantastic
an ontological category in its own right?
I don't think so.
Because realism and the fantastic
are not logically symmetrical concepts either.
From the position of realism, it is rather simple
to naturalize the fantastic.
That is, to re-describe some event or object initially
labeled as fantastic in such a way
that it will conform to the realist's ontological premise.
The easiest way to achieve this is
to bracket the fantastic with a modifier such as fiction
or hallucination.
Fiction understood as a specific type
of symbolic representation is, by definition, real.
And so are hallucinations.
They are, after all, empirical, albeit partially
pathological real world phenomena.
This ontological categorization of the form of representation,
though, has no bearing on their contents.
That some people dream up fictitious worlds populated
by non-real entities like unicorns
is, as such, just a simple real fact.
Yet the ontological status of the unicorns
is no way impinged upon by this realization.
They don't get more real and less fantastic.
Now, if realism and fantastic were concepts of the same order,
one should be able to turn this dialectic on its head
and bracket, so to speak, ontological realism
by an ontological fantastic without a negative effect
on what's inside the bracket, namely realism.
This sounds complicated, and it is indeed.
In practice, it would amount to the proposition
that a non-real unicorn can somehow
conceptualize a non-non-real entity or event.
This is only possible if we allow our unicorn to somehow forget
its own ontological limitations, something
that a meson, a beam, or a metallipsis might try to achieve.
As an aesthetic mind bender, that's, of course,
perfectly OK and enjoyable.
But in a logical test for conceptual symmetry,
a paradox like this amounts to a knockout.
Ontological realism and the fantastic
are, quite simply, two petals of fish.
If fantastic is neither a genre concept
nor an ontological concept, what else might it be?
My suggestion is it is an epistemological concept.
In other words, it is a concept by which
we indicate the conditions under which we perceive things
and events and acquire knowledge about them.
This definition sounds very familiar
to the ontological one that we just discarded.
However, its decisive difference is one of focus and of cause
and effect.
Rather than categorizing the phenomena,
the objects, we now categorize the mode
by which we process the phenomena essentially
as well as cognitively.
Conceptualize the fantastic as an epistemological
category thus pays tribute to the well-known fact
that the ontological labeling of phenomena
is never absolute but context dependent.
From Henzel of Rettl's point of view,
witches belong to the type of objects that exist,
not because of some abstract ontological criterion,
but because you take them to be perceivable.
Ontologies are secondary constructs.
And our philosophical reasoning about what
is possible in this world and what is not
is by and large an extrapolation from past experience.
In this vein, what matters about the fantastic
is not that something fantastic happens.
Indeed, we can assume that in a fantastic world,
a lot of inexplicable events will
occur without even having been noticed,
just as it happens to be the case in a realist world.
What matters is that somebody witnesses some of these events
and thereby puts into question the validity
of the realist epistemology.
The effect of this attack on the hegemony of realist
epistemology is so radical because the distinction
between the two is itself of a fundamental nature.
Whatever brand of realist epistemology
one might decide to subscribe to,
all of them share one decisive characteristic.
A realist epistemology distinguishes
between things that one can perceive and know about
and things that one cannot.
In other words, all realist epistemologies
are governed by the principle of constraint.
By contrast, the governing principle
of fantastic epistemology is exactly the obvious.
It is, by definition, unconstrained.
This does not mean that we will perceive and know everything.
It only means that on the level of principle,
there is no super rule in force that
would exclude certain types of experiences
from being made and certain types of knowledge
from being attained.
It is this tension between the principle
of epistemological non-constraint on the one hand
and the practice of a pragmatically enforced cutoff
in the process of perceiving and reasoning that
gives the fantastic its particularly dynamic
and transitory character.
As in epistemology, the fantastic makes a big promise.
Yet when it delivers on it, it avoids it,
as all promises are by necessity
voided by their fulfillment.
The promise is that of the ultimate transcendence
of human epistemic boundaries, albeit a transcendence
of a temporary nature.
In a concrete work of fantastic art,
delivery on that promise must come by way of example.
The mutations of form, time, and space
dictate that we can only encounter
a certain number of pre-selected phenomena
and not the entire universe beyond the looking glass.
Yet despite these pragmatic limitations,
we will attain a knowledge which realist epistemology would
never have allowed us to acquire in the first place.
It is this founding and the principle
of liberation from epistemological constraints
that makes the fantastic so flexible
in terms of historical context, thematic emplacement,
and medial realization.
And it is this epistemological signature
that gives the fantastic away as the secular cousin
of spiritual mysticism.
In a metaphysical perspective, the fantastic
is therefore perhaps best conceptualized
as an experiment in epistemological unconstraining.
Applying this different epistemology
might result in pleasant or an unpleasant and uplifting
or in terrifying experiences.
This is where the conventions of the various fantastic genres
and their topoy will take over.
But these are beyond the scope of our current investigation.
All that matters to us here is the question of principle.
Apart from themes and plot lines,
every genre and every medium has, of course,
its own way of engaging us in this experiment
of fantastic epistemology.
The textual realization of it has the distinct advantage
that it can effortlessly switch from fictional mimetic
representation of epistemic processes
to their essentially transfictional discursive
reflection and back.
On the other hand, visual realizations,
and particularly those in films, are extremely powerful
in immersing us in a protagonist's epistemic
situation.
However, when it comes to reflection
and discursive post-processing of these experiences,
film often has to rely on rather cumbersome narrative devices.
Take, for example, Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko,
an eclectic mix of genres, cinematographic and literary
quotes, and the classic fantastic theme
of reverse engineered causality that is visually
and experientially compelling, yet requires no less
than an entire treatise on the philosophy of time travel,
plus a talking bunny named Frank to allow at least
its protagonist to get an idea of what
is going on in his world.
Of course, the lasting appeal of Donnie Darko
is a no small part ode to the fact
that even with a talking bunny and a textbook,
plus a couple of websites and fan portals,
one cannot really make out head from tails in this tale.
Castaneda's three-volume first-person literary account
of his exposure to the Mexican Indian shaman Don Juan,
a cult book whose appearance in Germany in the early 1970s
happened to coincide with that of Tolkien's fantasy,
may be considered a counter-example.
As the subtitle states, the narrator
wants to introduce us to a coherent body of thought,
namely to the teachings of Don Juan.
Moreover, one could perhaps argue
that Don Juan is not really a fantastic tale in the first
place, as the supernatural experience of the protagonist
are drug-induced.
However, at the end of the concluding volume
of the trilogy, Castaneda's hero no longer
requires the aid of P.O.T. and other consciousness-enhancing
substances.
Completely sober and corpus mentis,
he experiences an epistemological breakthrough
that is metaphorically referred to by his teacher Don Juan
as stopping the world.
Castaneda's description of this event
demonstrates the power of the word
in invoking both the experience as such
and in enabling us to partake in the protagonist's attempts
at interpreting them.
In Don Juan and Donnie Darker, we have two distinct media,
two works of art that set out with very different ambitions,
one a fully-fledged anthropological fiction
with a mystic teaching at its core,
the other a post-modernist brick-a-bracker
of former genres, quotes, motives, allusions
to zeitgeist and youthful angst that keeps its fans
busy to the current day.
Yet in terms of the epistemology in force in these two worlds,
they prove to be mutually interchangeable.
Both are driven by an epistemology
that prizes the discovery of a potential new and otherness
of man's existence over an affirmative epistemology that
only serves the conventionalized real.
If we reject what is perceived by either of the protagonists
in his respective world as merely
improbable and unrealistic, the epistemological promise
of the fantastic is lost on us.
So let us see how it looks when we superimpose
these two realizations onto one another.
["geme
"]
Well...
Thanks.
My love, what you will find
Suddenly, I felt that my body had been struck and then it had become enveloped by something
that kindled me.
I became aware then that the sun was shining on me.
I could vaguely distinguish a distant range of mountains to the west.
The sun was almost over the horizon.
I was looking directly into it and then I saw the lines of the world.
I actually perceived the most extraordinary profusion of fluorescent white lines which
was crisscrossing everything around me.
For a moment, I thought that I was perhaps experiencing sunlight as it was being refracted
by my eyelashes.
I blinked and looked again.
The lines were constant and were superimposed on or were coming through everything in the
surroundings.
I turned around and examined an extraordinarily new world.
Thank you very much.