I re-read this recently, and it's much better than I recalled (by 'better' I mean: less narrow and theoretical-doctrinaire). Here's a chunk from later in the book, that I'm currently mulling over.
‘Semantic changes of literary fantasy from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century can been explained by shifts in ideas and beliefs. A gradual displacement of residual supernaturalism and magic, an increasingly secularised mode of thought under capitalism, produces radical changes in interpretation and presentation … these shifts record a move away from orthodox demonology towards psychology, to account for difference and strangeness.My specific focus is on the big YA Fantasies that (we have enough perspective, I think, to say this) dominated the late 90s and 21st-Century noughties: Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games and to a lesser extent: Pullman, Lemony Snicket. It's striking how un-theological these books are, and to how pronounced a degree their 'magic' (or in the case of the Collins and Unfortunate Events, their fantastic elements: the battle royale set-up in the former, the Great Unknown sea monster in the latter) stands in for and externalise the psychological dynamic of our interiority.
Theology and psychology function in similar ways to explain otherness. They have become substitutes for the sacred, or, as Jameson writes, strategic secular reinventions of it … “the search for secular equivalents of this kind seems to have reached a dead end, and to be replaced by the new and characteristic indirection of modernism, which, what in Kafka to Cortázar is henceforth termed the fantastic seeks to convey the sacred, not as presence, but rather as determinate, marled absence at the heart of the secular world” [Jameson, ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan’ (1977), 145].
Fantasies express a longing for an absolute meaning, for something other than the limited “known” world. Yet whereas “faery” stories and quasi-religious tales function through nostalgia for the sacred, the modern fantastic refuses a backward looking glance. It is an inverted form of myth. It focuses on the unknown within the present. … Religious or spiritual epiphany becomes inconceivable: matter is merely matter, unredeemed, yet strangely hollowed out, insufficient in itself. Without meaning, without transcendence, modern fantasy still functions as if meaning and transcendence were to be found. It uncovers mere absence and emptiness, yet it continues its quest for an absolute.’ [157-9]
Here, for my own ease of reference, is Elizabeth Wilson's review of the book [from The Feminist Review 9 (1981), 103–105]: "Rosemary Jackson's Fantasy is both a theoretical and descriptive account of the literature of the fantastic (and as such comprehensive and scholarly) and a polemic calling for its recognition as an at least potentially subversive literature. It is the literature par excellence of the imaginary, of desire, of the unconscious, and 'it seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss'. Analysing the characteristic themes of fantasy - doubles, invisibility, disappearances, transformations - she argues that ultimately it interrogates the 'real' and asks fundamental questions about the relationship of reality to unreality, self to not-self or Other, and conscious to unconscious. It expresses a fundamental anxiety about the limits of reason and consciousness. It does not—like the science fiction of Doris Lessing and Ursula Le Guin—create 'marvellous' alternative worlds, but rather attempts to articulate or describe the nothingness we experience when forced to confront that our desire is for something impossible: for unification with the Other as experienced in infancy before we were aware of ourselves as a 'self' - for the reversal of our own cultural formation. In this respect it questions the notion of 'character' in realistic fiction, and Rosemary Jackson quotes Helene Cixous on this point: So long as we do not put aside 'character' and everything it implies in terms of illusion and complicity with classical reasoning and the appropriating economy that such reasoning supports, we will remain locked up in the treadmill of reproduction (Jackson, 1981: 84). Although, in fact, Rosemary Jackson starts from Freud's essay on 'The Uncanny', she also takes account of Helene Cixous' critique, arguing that Freud himself returns fantasy to the clear light of an unproblematic reality by imposing his own positivist outlook on it, whereas an analysis of fantasy is not exhausted by understanding it as a projection of unconscious sexual anxieties (Freud's view) but is also a rehearsal of the final encounter with death. Fantasy also moves towards a more general ideal of undifferentiation. The instinct Freud names Thanatos and which is vulgarly known as the death wish is more properly understood as the longing for nirvana, for 'entropy'—a state of stasis, as Lacan put it: 'an eternal desire for the nonrelationship of zero, where identity is meaningless' (Jackson, 1981:77). In this human quest for reversal, and the longing to experience this pre-linguistic realm the whole project of the literature of the fantastic is ultimately itself contradictory. This is because it seeks a language for the unsayable, a language of/for desire, seeking to translate the irrational into the rational and conscious; form of language and literary construction. Rosemary Jackson recognizes that the fantastic has often operated not as a literature of subversion but rather to reconcile the audience to 'reality', to the world of law and order. Nonetheless she ends by reclaiming it as a subversive literature in that it: 'aims at dissolution of an order experienced as oppressive and insufficient' (Jackson, 1981:180). She also claims that it is typically a women's mode of writing - partly because female sexuality is part of what is suppressed by the dominant order and also because: Non-realist narrative forms are increasingly important in feminist writing: no breakthrough of cultural structure seems possible until linear narrative (realism, illusionism, transparent representation) is broken or dissolved (Jackson, 1981:186n)"
ReplyDeleteWhat sea monster?
ReplyDeleteIt's an interesting & persuasive argument. I felt something had gone horribly wrong when Sirius Black started singing "God rest ye merry hippogriffs", and not only because JKR seemed to have misparsed the title. There's even a church in the seventh book, but not a wisp of religion.
The second quote gets mangled around Kafka and Cortazar, btw.
Phil: thanks. Fixed.
ReplyDeleteThe Great Unknown is a sort of mysterious sea monster, first encountered (if I recall) in the Grim Grotto. Its identity is never explained, but Olaf (for one) is terrified of what it would do to his Octopoid submarine.