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Dr. Mario Vrbancic, Associate Professor University of Zadar E-mal: mavrbanci@unizd.hr
THEORISING THE FANTASTIC LITERATURE
Abstract: In this article I analyse the fantastic and the problem of representation. Usually, the fantastic refers to any literature without representational aspiration, that is, to non-realistic literature: myths, legends, folk and fairy tales, utopian allegories, dream visions, surrealist texts, science fiction, horror stories, literary fantasies and so on. I trace the fantastic by pointing towards a Lacanian three orders (the imaginary, the symbolic, the real). I argue that rather than abjection the fantastic is injunction; rather than exclusion it is inclusion, rather than transgression it is overwhelming identification. In short I trace the fantastic in Lacanian concept of jouissance, in the symbolic, in the real as primordial object of a terrible jouissance - in other words the fantastic is in the everyday.
Keywords: fantastic literature, Todorov, Lacan, Levinas, Jackson.
Usually, the fantastic refers to any literature with- in the pool of images, in order to experience 'I' as
out representational aspiration, that is, to non-realistic literature: myths, legends, folk and fairy tales, utopian allegories, dream visions, surrealist texts, science fiction, horror stories, literary fantasies and so on. In Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion [1, 13], Rosemary Jackson emphasises the visual, optical dimension of fantasy, which is very close to the concept of the visual in Lacanian psychoanalysis. As Jackson points out the word fantastic derives from Greek phantazein — to make visible i.e. to imagine and from the Latin — phantasticus, 'visionary', 'unreal'. The spectral imagery outlines the topography of the modern fantastic: mirrors, glasses, reflections, portraits, eyes which see things myopically or distortedly, doubles — all of which mirror some uncanny otherworldly nether lands, forever inaccessible yet constantly intruding into our world.
Such a visual, optical dimension of the fantastic correlates with Lacan's concept of the emergence of the subject during the period he names the 'mirror stage' — the alienation of the subject in the imaginary. Indeed, the unconscious swarming with images is usually associated with fantasy and the fantastic. In order to separate itself from this pleasant swimming
something different from the world of objects, 'I' must go through the mirror stage. The mirror stage depicts the period when a child is captivated by its own image in the mirror, before developing the faculty of language, recognises itself as a unity, as a single, unified and exterior 'I'. The mirror encounter of the child and its image serves a catalytic function which initiates a development of the ego and a sense of self-awareness; in other words this play with an image structures the relation of the child to its body and to others, in the form of an identification. But for Lacan this identification is imaginary, it is always built on an illusion. The subject mis-identifies the spectral 'Other' that gazes from the mirror as the object of desire. This narcissistic misrecognition involves a denial of the fragmentation of the child's body, conceals the lack that inflects the subject's own coming into being, the lack which the subject will try to overcome by entering the symbolic.
If the imaginary is usually associated with the fantastic, then the second order, that of the symbolic, can be viewed as realism, a realist narrative that 'mirrors the reality'. In that context realist literature, as any notion of realism, 'believes' in the relation between
mirror and its reflection, between the signifier and signified. Lacan argues, in opposition to theories in which a unity between signified and signifiers is stressed, that signifiers and signified are not united. He gives priority to the signifier over the production of the signified. Signifiers are not representations as argued by realist representationalism, in producing the meanings of the signified, they produce the signified itself. In this context, then, the signified does not have a meaning outside of language, it is lost as a real point of reference [2]. The symbolic is something that we usually perceive of as 'reality'; it includes language, law, social rituals, science, customs ... in short, it is the world of words, of representations. In the symbolic, the subject becomes a subject in language and accepts the laws of language. 'The symbolic provides a form into which the subject is inserted at the level of his being. It's on this basis that the subject recognises himself as being this or that' [3, 20]. But the world of words (signifiers) fails to represent the subject and in that way the subject becomes an effect of the word, of the signifier. This asymmetric relation indicates the problem of presentation. As Ernesto Laclau and Lilian Zac put it:
Every signifier fails to represent the subject and leaves a residue: something fails to be reflected in the mirror-world of reflections. There is an essential asymmetry, between projection and introjection, for although the image is brought in, it remains outside; the inside 'starts' outside. In other words, not everything is reflected in the image-mirror, and what remains on the other side is the impossible, the primarily repressed. This asymmetry points to the faults that install uncertainty and trigger identifications. The moment of failure marks the emergence of the subject of lack through the fissures of the discursive chain [4, 32].
In short, the Lacanian subject is in its inception a kind of fantasy construction; it is split, a double, a doppelganger, it is a lack that constantly demands the closure of an identity. Yet all of these demands of the
subject (different identifications) do not guarantee a stable identity; 'I' is always threatened by something that eludes the armour of identity, by something in me that is both not me and more than me, something that cannot be represented by signifiers, but at the same time is at the base of each representation. And for Lacan that is the 'real'.
Of all three orders (the imaginary, the symbolic, the real), the real is most related to the fantastic, that is in the context of optical imagery: portraits, eyes, mirrors, doubles, all these reflections gaze from the unrepresentable. For Lacan the real is a phase of the subject before or 'after' being written and overwritten with signifiers, or it is an impediment, an inherent obstacle in signification. In Lacan's psychoanalysis the real is not a stabile term, but constantly shifts. Lacan illustrates this phase of the subject before the body is broken by a symbolic order with Hieronymus Bosch's paintings — the nightmare of a fragmented or dismembered body of a child caught up in the lure of spatial identification. That body is buried in a realm with no boundaries, of polymorphous perversity, as one unbroken erogenous zone undulating and billowing through the unconscious dream-like landscape, similar to Bakhtin's grotesque body, the gigantic body that can fill the earth and stars with its juices, unconscious of any privileged zones, but overflowing with pleasure at every pore. So too, the Lacanian real is without zones, without highs and lows, gaps or cracks, its fabric is woven everywhere, its smooth, seamless surface may slide over a child's body as over the whole universe.
How can one reach the real? There are attempts, like Bosch's hellish vision, or Bakhtin's grotesque body, but there is no way to express this pre-linguistic realm in the symbolic since it is always filtered by the word. The real is not just something that precedes language, it cannot be grasped by temporal terms: before, now, later; its traces are always here, we may say, it is something that has not yet been symbolised, it resists symbolisation and yet is created by the symbolic; something that cannot be signified and yet is
shining through the very impossibility of a signifier. To explain this presence of the real as something that is not representable, but is still part of each representation as its internal limiter, Zizek states:
The Real is the fullness of the inert presence, positivity; nothing is lacking in the Real — that is, the lack is introduced only by the symbolisa-tion; it is a signifier which introduces a void, an absence in the Real. But at the same time the Real is in itself a hole, a gap, an opening in the middle of the symbolic order — it is the lack around which the symbolic order is structured. The real as a starting point, as a basis, is a positive fullness without lack, as a product, a leftover of symbolisation, it is, in contrast, the void, the emptiness created, encircled by the symbolic structure. We might also approach the same pair of opposites from the perspective of negativity: the Real is something that cannot be negated, a positive inert datum which is insensitive to negation, cannot be caught in the dialectics of negativity; but we must add at once that it is so because the Real itself, in its positivity, is nothing but an embodiment of a certain void, lack, radical negativity. It cannot be negated because it is already in itself in its positivity, nothing but an embodiment of a pure negativity, emptiness [5, 170].
For Lacan the Thing, something that is unrepresentable, is mostly related to this third category, that is to the real. It is also related to objet a as the point where the symbolic fails to represent the real. The signifier, the word, the symbolic, offers to the subject stable representation, but this representation is not capable of representing the 'unity' of the subject. With an entering into the symbolic the subject sacrifices something, it sacrifices an immediate access to the real, it becomes alienated and this 'alienation constitutes the subject as such'. This lack of the subject is productive since the subject continuously tries to fill it, to close it with different identifications, but there is no identification in the symbolic, in the social that can restore the real. The real is lost forever, sacrificed
or castrated when the subject enters the symbolic but nevertheless it is exactly this loss of fullness that forces the subject to try to find it in the symbolic. In Lacan, this lack of the real is the lack of a pre-symbolic, real enjoyment, a lack of jouissance. The sacrifice of jouissance, of the primordial Thing, causes desire for it and in that context the primordial Thing becomes posited as an external object, the 'first outside', which remains desirable but still impossible. This first apprehension of reality through the desiring of the impossible Thing forever obscures intersubjectivity. The uncanny, strange object, the Thing in the sphere of our intimacy which Freud calls Nebenmensch, a neighbour, designates both separation and identity. Lacan portrays the uncanny side of the Neighbour as something unchangeable in the first Other, something indefinable and yet always the same — the Thing — initially an isolated element around which all pleasures and pains circulate. Despite its intimacy and the subject's total dependence on it, the Thing is by its vary nature, something uncanny, strange. This first outside, the Thing, decentres subject by insertion into the symbolic order. Despite its irresistible attraction, the Thing unfolds as an object of desirable fullness only in its absence. Prior to its loss the Thing is completely unrecognisable, impossible to signify, a meaningless, brute presence. Only entry into the symbolic develops the urge to symbolise what has been lost, all our acts of signification, culture, all 'progress' in science will never be adequate to represent the unrepresentable object, the impossible nonobject of desire.
The Thing often lurks in the impossible place; it is in our nightmares, frozen timeless nightmares of the 'alien' or Frankenstein's creature, yet at the same time it marks the emergence of self-consciousness, our entry into the symbolic. But, as Lacan states, the Thing may be also be found in mundane surroundings, like an ordinary object that has become horrifying and frightening due to its displacement. It can appear in the most unexpected places, it can intensify the dystopic smell of objects, that can, for instance, only be connected by some conspiracy or
erupt from the surface. The dystopic vision harbours the Thing in quite unexpected places, or rather, the Thing always appears in unexpected places. It can occur even in the midst of comedy, in the midst of laughter. In one of his seminars, Das Ding, Lacan suggests that the third of Marx brothers, the dumb Marx Harpo, may be the Thing [5, 55]. The mute Marx brother's face mirrors our absolute hesitation: we do not know whether he presents a funny genius or a total idiot, childish innocence or complete perversity. This undecidability makes him monstrous. The face with its everlasting smile thrusts everything before us into the abyss by suspending signification. Zizek[5] notices that this absolute undecidability — the very impossibility of signifying the enigmatic dumbness of Harpo's face — makes Harpo a monstrous Thing, an Other qua Thing, not an intersubjective partner, but a thoroughly inhuman partner. With this face from which emanates absolute innocence or monstrosity, we are very close to the fantastic.
Fantastic literature constantly strives to express this inexpressible point. For example, Edgar Allan Poe attempts to reach the unreachable as an impossible space of contradictions: 'full and empty', 'dynamic and static'; it 'resembles death... it resembles the ultimate life'. In his essay 'Mesmeric Revelation' he refers to organic, rudimentary creatures which enjoy the ultimate life — immortality — at death, or metamorphosis. His desire is for 'that which was not. that which had no form. that which had no thought; in Eureka it is 'where everything is swallowed up, where 'Space and Duration are one... neither Past nor Future .all being Now' [6]. All these 'impossibilities' with the collapse of time and space, indicate the inexpressible real, the dark, disintegrated body, or the empty body of pleasure. This is the end of literature itself, and this silent timeless space of the first light of the universe is what the fantastic wants to articulate. But how to represent the unrepresentable? Jackson argues that Bulwer Lytton, for instance, in 'A Strange Story' shows that the object of fear can have no adequate representation:
'It' is something without a name, without a form; 'it' is something unnameable, it is as negating 'the something without which men could never found cities, frame laws, bind together, beautify, exalt the elements of this world'; this pure negativity 'It was a Darkness shaping itself out of the air in very undefined outline' ... its dimensions seemed gigantic [6, 112].
Jackson comments that Lytton's work hunts down 'the presence of the Nameless', the unutterable Horror, 'that DARK THING, whatever it might be' [6]. This shapeless, nameless, formless Dark Thing, ranging from horrific emptiness to absolute fullness, strives to articulate a zero point, a point of origin — the real. The fantastic literature constantly deals with the real, and consequently the Dark Thing is always fantastic. Unlike realist literature, the fantastic does not explore the mirrored reality, but the very possibility of mirroring, this shimmering glint of light of the very beginning; light as knowledge, light not as object but the Gnostic intimacy with life itself.
The Dark Thing is not only the unrepresentable darkness, but it also stands at the edge of whiteness: it can spiral into alternative reality, or into the narrative of the origin of reality. The fantastic narrative correlates with Lacan's creation story which attributes to the Thing a generative force of constant naming, the signification of the unrepresentable that in spite of its impossibility of designating the mysterious signified, enables the process of signification itself. While it enables language and any other system of presentation, the Thing could be only encircled through the process of the metaphoric repetition of this original loss. Therefore, repression of the Thing forms the phantasmic kernel, a core of the subject's self-identity, or, better, it initiates a process of identification. The Thing is the unrepresentable, the inaccessible traumatic element concealed by fantasy, enveloped by elusive, unconscious libidinal economy. On the one side fantasy has a stabilising dimension, 'the dream of the state without disturbances out of reach of human depravity'. On the other side, fantasy's destabilising
dimension creates images that 'irritate us'. In other words, the obverse of the harmonious community always produces some disconnected piles of fragments that try to conceal the lack in reality itself, to 'fill' the central void [7, 24]. Through fantasy we learn how to desire the absolute Other of the subject that can only be found as something missed, as an absence, sometimes uncanny, sometimes sublime or terrifying. Hence theorising about the Thing opens up fundamental questions about the relation between fantasy and reality.
The fantastic and the problem of representation
It seems that the fantastic has been more related to dark than light, which testifies to the problem of representation, and moreover to the uncanny proximity to the real. If we follow our hypothesis that the fantastic mode deals with the real qua Thing, then the problem of representation takes a central place. Indeed, the fantastic is produced, or the effect of the impossibility of representation of its object of narration, the Thing. Though it may be associated with or evoked by different monstrous forms, the Thing mostly concerns the problem of representation, namely, the impossibility of its representation. Various descriptions of monsters testify to this impossibility where the word, the image or any signifier fails. For example, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the creature is without a name, it cannot be represented by a signifier [8], and this failure of the signifier to adequately present the Thing is intensified by emotional responses to abortive attempts to define a gruesome being: 'monster', 'wretch', 'daemon', 'demonical corpse', 'creature', 'hideous guest', 'fiend', 'Begone, vile insect' or even 'a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived' [9]. Similarly, Bram Stoker's Dracula describes the vampire sometimes as the thing; there was something, 'the Thing', wriggling in Lucy's body. Both Frankenstein and Dracula have some uncanny extra thing, something ordinary and yet out of the ordinary. This surplus is emphasised by the narrative circulating around 'the Thing', by characters narrating and documenting their horror in confrontation with the unknown. By weaving together
different testimonies we can reach 'this unknown': in Frankenstein from testimonies by a scientist and in Dracula from testimonies by lawyers, doctors and so on. As if so strong an intrusion of the lethal unknown into Victorian society requires reliable witnesses that can confirm or renounce the Thing. However, the description of the monster in a nightmare, somehow, can never be completed; despite many details and the very proximity to 'the dead matter' ('this', 'beside') the signified is punctuated with something that holds nothing. Insecurity induces almost imperceptible yet unbearable shivers of anxiety caused by the oscillation between something and nothing; in this chiaroscuro we are confronted by something that the signifier cannot designate — the Thing! It is something uncanny, inexpressible, unrepresentable yet present and oppressively near; something that puts the nonhuman at the very core of the human, or rather, paradoxically, something that is more human than the human. Like bites of the undead, introducing some uncanny, strange thing into the body of those who have been bitten, for instance, Lucy, in Stoker's Dracula:
Van Helsing opened his missal and began to read ... Arthur placed the point over the heart, and as I looked I could see its glint in the white flash. Then he struck with all his might. The thing in the coffin writhed: and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips ... poor Arthur never faltered. There in the coffin lay no longer the foul thing that we had so created and grown to hate ... but Lucy as we had seen her in life, with her face of unequalled sweetness and purity. [10] Rather than some failure in the description of monsters, 'the Thing' testifies to the impossibility of the signifier penetrating into the mute, inaccessible world of things: the Thing in the coffin which resembles Lucy, who though dead is more alive than she has ever been and yet stays somehow outside the symbolic, outside language, like some undefined empty shell. This horrific empty shell, the Kantian things-in-themselves, forever inaccessible to us, be-
yond our experience, may be translated as into the very obstacle within language.
The fantastic dwelling in the problem of presentation arises from insecurity, from a gap between the signifier and signified (Lacan). Unlike fantasy, the fantastic tends to narrate this very gap. Jackson addresses this dimension of the fantastic by playing with Beckett's observation in Molly — 'There could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names' [1, 38]. Accordingly, on one hand, there is a representation of 'nameless things' in the nineteenth century tales of fantasy and horror from MacDonald's Lilith and Phantastes, Bulwer Lytton's Zanoni and Strange Story, Maupassant's Horla and He to Poe's stories, and on the other, there are classical monsters, like Dracula or Frankenstein.
According to Jackson, in fantastic literature words are empty signs, without meaning. In the fantastic the signifier is not secured by the weight of the signified, but it seems to float free. The fantastic pushes towards an area of non-signification. It does this either by attempting to articulate 'the unnameable, the nameless things' of horror fiction, attempting to visualise the unseen, or by establishing a disjunction of word and meaning through a play upon 'thinglesss names'. In both cases, the gap between signifier and signified dramatizes the impossibility of arriving at a definitive meaning, or absolute 'reality'. By hollowing out the sign of meaning, the fantastic anticipates the semi-otic excess of modernist texts: from Carroll, through Kafka, to modern writers such as J. L. Borges.
Hence, apart from sublime horror in confrontation with the monsters of the Enlightenment, the fantastic dwells in language. This disjunction between word and meaning resembles Lacan's interpretation of language: meaning comes from the signifier and not vice versa. As I have already mentioned, beings like Frankenstein's Creature and Dracula suffer because they cannot be adequately represented by the signifier: they are on the edge, they can constantly be represented in new attempts and consequently vanish. But, according to Lacan,
the metonymic sliding of signifiers is not indefinite, it is stopped by points de caption (nodal points), particular signifiers that halt the movement of signification, fixing the meaning of the whole chain by linking signifiers to signifiers. However, points de caption, although they produce stability and fullness, cannot make an entirely stable meaning. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe use the Lacanian notion of points de caption (nodal points) as privileged signifiers that fix the meaning of a signifying process to analyse the social (the symbolic). They argue that the social does not exist as a given object, but is always a process, always incompleteness, a fissure. All societies and identities are constructed within specific discursive formations and they are results of articulatory practices. The practice of articulation consists of different discursive attempts to fix the meaning of the social. These partial fixations of the social Laclau and Mouffe calls 'nodal points' [11]. In that context the fantastic questions points de caption, by narrating events that cannot be integrated into the language, that is the fantastic is a literature of radical indecision.
The fantastic (Tzvetan Todorov)
The fantastic embodies the problem of the representation of the Thing, which lies in the gap between signifier and signified, between the mirror and its reflection, a sign and its meaning. Instead of filling this gap, there is the possibility that the mode of narrative hinges on this very gap. It was Tzvetan Todorov who first defined the fantastic as a genre in its own right. In my view Todorov's groundbreaking study The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre delineates both the contour of the fantastic as a genre and the possibilities of accessing the Thing. Namely, fantasy as allegory, myth or poetry, according to Todorov, does not belong to the fantastic genre since it does not capture the tension between the prevailing construction of reality and its subversion. Fantasy is weightless, seemingly in some outer space of pure escapism, whereas the fantastic is in constant tension, or rather it explodes 'reality', it is a site of hesitancy.
In order to illustrate this site of hesitancy, Todorov analyses the dilemma ofAlvaro, the main character of Cazotte's tale Le Diable Amoureux (which according to him is the first fantastic story). Todorov's strategy of defining the fantastic as a site of hesitancy begins with the description of the torments ofAlvaro, a young monk, about whether he slept with a beautiful girl Bi-ondetta, and succumbed to the sin of flesh or whether the event was fancy. Alvaro hesitates about whether his relation with Biondetta was dream or reality, whether she was a devil or a beautiful female. For Todorov this indecision leads to the very core of the fantastic, and the person, like Alvaro, must opt for two possible solutions: either he is the victim of illusion or the event really has taken place. However, the fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. The fantastic only occupies the duration of this process and the minute we decide upon a single cause for the event we leave the fantastic for a neighbouring genre, the uncanny or the marvellous, i.e., the uncanny, the pure fantastic that may evolve into the horror of the 'it thinks', the Thing that thinks, or may be sensitised by the symbolic in the genre of science fiction.
In a number of ways the fantastic functions as a borderline phenomenon. Todorov's reading of the fantastic opens up the textual borders to intervention from the reader (subject). The fantastic in this sense becomes a site of hesitancy, of uncertainty and disquieting ambivalence. Because the fantastic comes to the point of interaction between two conflicting worlds/zones/modes, the resulting narrative is always to a greater or lesser extent on the edge between the two. Most significant of all is the manner in which this uncertainty is perpetuated: it is in the structure itself. And this leads to the end of the fantastic, because Todorov designates the moment when the state of exception becomes the rule, the possibility of diminishing a site of hesitancy. It happens with Kafka and according to Todorov the fantastic genre finishes with Kafka.
Unlike previous famous accounts of metamorphosis occurring through magic, supernaturalism, or
potions, Gregor Samsa's change into a giant beetle in Kafka's Metamorphosis is without 'cause' or 'explanation' [12]. There are no quasi-scientific experiments and alchemy potions, the metamorphosis just happens; it precedes the start of the tale, and then triggers a cold, detached description of events. What is the most surprising is that Gregor Samsa's metamorphosis is accommodated within the family house, and ... no one wonders, no one is shocked. What is most surprising is the absence of surprise, and the end of surprise in the face of an uncanny supernatural event designates, according to Todorov, the end of the fantastic genre. But these succinct indications of hesitation are drowned in the general movement of the narrative in which the most surprising thing is precisely the absence of surprise with regard to the unheard-of event that has befallen Gregor Samsa... Words have gained an autonomy which things have lost [13, 168].
But this point of vanishing, of silence and absence may signal a new transformation of the fantastic. Jackson [1, 158] comments that it is a consequence of a long inward journey, namely internalisation of myth and supernatural. She claims that the fantastic is a discourse of telling of absolute othernnes that has been gradually stripped of magic, myth and has been measured by secular, scientific thought over the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Accordingly, the fantastic enters the sphere of psychology, theology, the lunatic asylum and finally politics. This gradual displacement of a residual supernaturalism and magic, Jackson illustrates by the 'fate' of the demonic: the transition from demonology towards psychology, from Radical Evil to the inner human Evil doing. This transition is evident in numerous literary fantasies from The Castle of Otranto to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
The absolute otherness, the Evil force, becomes a case for a psychiatrist, or sociologist and other sciences: it requires an explanation, a rational integration into the discourse. For example, in the novel Master and Margarita written by Mikhail Bulgakov, those
who have encountered the Evil force, end up in a psychiatric ward; it is a new illness that may produce different totalitarian regimes. However, this tendency to totally explain the Evil force, does not end the fantastic. Frederic Jameson [14] suggests that the science of Evil and transgression does not abolish the uncanny strangeness but merely redirects the fantastic from the late nineteenth century onwards. In modernism from Kafka to Cortázar what is henceforth termed the 'fantastic' seeks to convey the uncanny otherness not as a presence, but rather as a marked absence in the secular world. Thus the modern fantastic is an inverted form of myth, a myth without myth, an unknown in the known, emptiness inside a seemingly full reality. The modern fantastic, writes Jameson presents an object world forever suspended on the point of meaning, forever disposed to receive a revelation, whether of Evil or of grace. That is the skeletal, grey world of Kafka, which is for Todorov the end of the fantastic.
An absence of astonishment and wonderment in confrontation with the supernatural, the demise of a site of hesitation, the modernist marking of absence — everything revolves around a Kafkaesque universum. But what if Kafka, instead of the end, signals a new beginning of the fantastic? What then is this new beginning? What if the absence of the uncanny is the most uncanny?
A new model of the fantastic
Jackson criticises Todorov for his focusing on the structural effects of the text, or in other words, for a one-sided elaboration of hesitation. A site of hesitation, insecurity, undecidability presupposes anxiety, unconscious, and desire; in other words, it implies psychoanalysis. The structure of hesitation requires psychoanalytic treatment. Because of that, Jackson stresses the fantastic in relation to the unconscious. Jackson outlines the fantastic as literature of desire, a constant effort in finding the language of desire; desire and transgression, abject, taboos, and mostly the uncanny. The uncanny is the central term in defining the fantastic.
In his famous essay The Uncanny, Freud orchestrates a number of examples that echo Todorov's thematic enumeration of the fantastic (Freud's uncanny arises from the tension between familiar and unfamiliar). There is an overlap of meanings of the word 'uncanny' through different languages and the German word unheimlich inspires lengthy linguistic discussion. The word heimlich means belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, intimate, though at the same time what is familiar may be tucked away, hidden, concealed, secret, 'kept from sight', withheld from the other, and in that case the heimlich becomes unheimlich: threatening, fearful, occult, uncomfortable, uneasy, gloomy, dismal, ghastly and so on. Unheimlich is the name for everything that ought to have remained ... secret and hidden but has come to light' [15, 201]. Furthermore Freud enumerates a number of instances of the uncanny: fear of cold corpses, being buried alive, anxiety because of signs that we cannot decipher; the repetition of the same thing combined with certain circumstances: being caught in the midst and returning again and again to one and the same spot, fear of doubles (even Freud was terrified when he caught his reflection in the mirror in the train carriage). All these and other instances evoke fear and anxiety; fear of ancient times that seeps into reality.
Modernism extends the uncanny to the ontologi-cal level: rather than just trepidation of the subject, the uncanny can be the world, a nihilistic world without God whose absence creates unbearable emptiness. Fantasy, according to Jackson, constantly tends to the DARK THING, to dissolution of the world, of organic matter, of unconstrained life, to disintegration of characters, to what Freud defined in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as the death drive, or what in thermodynamics is called entropy [16, 162-195]. The uncanny repulsion of repetition or of the return of the same is envisaged in the pornography of Marquis de Sade: the assemblage of bodies, of machines of pleasures, the collapse of difference and borders between bodies, between organic and inorganic in order to gain eternal pleasure. Consequently, Jackson states that
Sade is the founder of modern fantasy. Sade's writing can be seen as an extreme point, towards which other modern fantasies move and against which they can be located [1, 76]. Its body machines are designed to gain the impossible self-identity in jouissance. With its dimension of dissolution, the disintegration of bodies, Jackson claims that the fantastic is a longing for that which does not yet exist, or which has not been allowed to exist. Jackson outlines the fantastic in the tension between the symbolic and the imaginary, and, like many others, finally designates the fantastic in the imaginary as a pool of undifferentiated selves as the most subversive fantasies. .inhabited by an infinite number of selves preceding socialization, before the ego is produced within a social frame. These selves allow an infinite, unnameable potential to emerge, one which a fixed sense of character excludes in advance... the most subversive fantasies are those which attempt to transform the relations of the imaginary and the symbolic...[1, 91]. On the other hand the marked absence does reveal to us some shades of vanishing presence, which suggests that the fantastic resides in the tension between the symbolic and the real.
If the fantastic is really a 'literature of subversion' then the most subversive subversion is in the sudden eruption of the real- that Dark Thing. With its exploration of self-identity in the blissful state of jouissance, the fantastic questions the roots of reality, a zero point of creation, something that is unsayable, inexpressible, the uncanny, sublime, not only the fullness of undifferentiated images, of surrealistic collages, but as pure nothingness, negativity — the real. In other words, the fantastic pushes to the limits, and these limits may be the limits of reason as well. This signals a new route, an approach to the fantastic from a different angle. A site of hesitation in which the most uncanny is the very absence of the uncanny reveals something new about structure: the fact that the exception has become the rule. Hence, the whole structure (often presumed as reality) can become uncanny. According to Giorgio Agamben,
the exception as rule founds political philosophy after Auschwitz [17]. He claims that this is a new phase of totalitarian power over naked life, and the concentration camp becomes the paradigm of politics in the twentieth century. The possibility of the uncanny world, of some horror creeping into a structure, into the symbolic, radically relocates the fantastic: not as a marked absence in the secular world but as a horrible fullness. It is Zizek who analyses this uncanny threat of the real invading structure (the symbolic) in our contemporary world, often characterised as postmodernism. Following Zizek, I argue that the uncanny threat is reflected in the unexpected fullness of the fantastic. However, this threat is related to the 'return' of the problem of Evil, the devil. The devil not only as transgression, pleasure of the flesh, but the uncanny figure that could be elevated into the Divine domain of the Good, and even confuse those two domains.
By portraying some evil characters, like Don Juan, Mephistopheles, or the Sadean laboratory of pleasure, the fantastic narratives point towards a Radical Evil. Jacques-Alain Miller notices that the forerunner of the new kind of disinterested Evil, or pleasurable Evil, devoid of divine fears and repentance, is staged in eighteenth century literature in a number of devilish characters 'who dupe people and pursue evil for the sake of evil' [18, 220]. These evil seducers (Don Juan, Mephistopheles etc) pursue evil not for the sake of money, or any earthly pleasures, but for the sake of Evil, pure Evil, or radical Evil.
Lacanian psychoanalysis reveals this diabolical Evil in a quite unusual connection between a disinterested ethical attitude, that of Immanuel Kant and uncontrolled indulgence in pleasurable violence, that of Marquis de Sade. Like the fantastic exploration of limits through the supernatural, improbable and different transgression, Kant designates the limit of reason, knowledge and morality. If Sade maps out the limits of pleasure, Kant dwells on the limits of knowledge. In his text Kant with Sade Lacan analyses this odd couple [19, 55-76]. Why is Sade the truth
of Kant, asks Zizek in his interpretation of Lacan's Kant with Sade. The main surprise is that, according to Lacan, it was none other than the philosopher of transcendental ideas, of lofty areas of metaphysical limits, who was the first to outline the dimension of what Freud later designated as 'beyond the pleasure principle'. Kant's transcendental a priori, or the very impossibility of the subject's experience of things-in-themselves in phenomenal, temporal-spatial frame, corresponds to the very impossibility of experiencing the Supreme Good, which is also unrepresentable, forever out of consciousness. The Kantian moral maxim 'act only on the maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law' seeks to establish a will that will fit into his metaphysical edifice, an a priori will like a priori knowledge, which will be pure will, not smeared by emotions, interests, or any pathological deviation, without object, devoid of any content. What is most astonishing in this establishing of pure Will, or Good, says Zizek, is that the pure, detached form at the end of the journey encounters or creates some ghastly, unreal object. This pure form, however, emerges with the suppression of the previous contents which correlates to the Freudian notion of 'primordially repressed' — representation. Zizek points out that in Kant this repressed content is the Supreme Good, and the Law. The form of the Law unfolds precisely in the place of this missing representation: paradoxically, the very form fills out its void, the form of moral Law holds the place of the missing content. This invisible reminder in the void, this presence of the form assumes a ghastly, spectral object. This is where the true link between Kant and Sade lies, says Zizek: in Lacan's naming of the 'wiping out' of all pathological stains or a 'symbolic castration'. In this context, the psychoanalytical undertone of the Law shows how this renunciation 'confuses' Supreme Good and primordial loss. This loss designates a strange, uncanny economy: the myth of castration outlines the promise of jouissance, the promise of something in exchange for this radical renunciation.
But Lacan stresses that this economy of exchange of something for nothing underlines the very precarious status of the symbolic, or our view of reality, disturbed by the impossibility of incorporating the Thing into the symbolic. By pointing out this radical loss, Zizek reveals its ontological function, that is this carving out of the symbolic, this uncountable, pure radical loss uncannily underlines the instability of objects, the precarious position of any structure. Through this castration Zizek depicts a bizarre topography that creates any fantastic narrative (which we have already seen in the fantastic as non-meaning): This loss has an 'ontological' function: the renunciation of the incestuous object changes the status, the mode of being, of all objects which appear in its place — they are all present against the background of a radical absence opened up by the 'wiping out' of the incestuous Supreme Good... In the terms of [language] castration introduces the distinction between an element and its (empty) place, more precisely: the primacy of the place over the element, it ensures that every positive element occupies a place which is not 'consubstantial' to it, that it fills out a void which is not 'its own' [20, 231].
Thus in this precarious instability between the element and its place, word and flesh, we have come to the very core of the fantastic narrative. The modern fantastic, from the monsters of the Enlightenment, the Gothic novel and so on 'show' this insecurity, this instability of representation. 'It is through 'the limited nature of space', to which Kant referred in his Distinctions of Regions in Space (1768), had inserted into it an additional dimension, where incongruent counterparts can co-exist and where that transformation which Kant called a turning over of a left hand into a right hand' can be effected. This additional space is frequently narrowed down into a place, or enclosure, where the fantastic has become the norm' [1, 46]. This enclosure Zizek explores as a space of desire... We can find references to that in Todorov as well when he states that there is the fantastic element
in the narrative that creates the fantastic. Or in other words, there is always some gap, some leak in reality, reality that has never been complete.
Sade is the truth of Kant, explains Zizek, because this blind pursuit of pure form, like diabolical characters of eighteenth-century literature, produces of itself a new, unheard-of kind of object. This new object, the most fantastic object, outside of the spatial and temporal dimension of Kant's philosophical edifice, is the most fantastic object. That object is without taste, without smell, without temporal and spatial dimension, an impossible object that Lacan displays in his imaginary museum as objetpetit a, the object-cause of desire. This object grows out of the very ambiguity of desire, like the ancient mystic that denies any earthly passion and interests, unaware that this denial can produce even greater pleasure, that is, pleasure in its denial — jouissance. This object is not what is desired but it sets desire in motion, and because desire is metonymical, it fuels its motion from object to object. This objet petit a, that has sometimes been translated into English as 'object a' Lacan considered to be his most important formulation.
In that case the fantastic is inseparable from ideology, as Zizek taught us. The fantastic then lies in the knot of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real, where the position of the symbolic designates what is included and what is excluded in that which
we consider reality, that is founded on a scientific paradigm. While Jackson defines the fantastic in the tension between the symbolic and the imaginary, and Todorov dwells in hesitation as the pure fantastic (the uncanny) in the symbolic, I argue that there is the shift towards the tension between the symbolic and the real, that is, in its very indecision the fantastic strives to express the objet petit a. In short, the real in the structure designates a new kind of fantastic, the horror of being transferred to the structure, objectified, an alienation without end and beginning, wearing some semi-dead body that watches the immanent boredom of the corporate week. As Emmanuel Levinas says, this horror originates not so much in the fear of death or the monster, as in being stripped of subjectivity, depersonalized; horror turns the subjectivity of the subject inside out, the impossibility of death, the living dead, zombie. Consequently, unlike Todorov and Jackson, I trace the fantastic by pointing towards a new direction. Rather than abjection it is injunction; rather than exclusion it is inclusion, rather than transgression it is overwhelming identification. In short I trace the fantastic in the Thing — in jouissance in the symbolic, in the Thing as primordial object of a terrible jouissance — in other words the fantastic is in the everyday.
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