The Fantastic Voyage

Tzvetan Todorov. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975.

This book has been on my list for at least a decade. I don’t remember where I read about it first. It’s a typical mid-20th-century scholarly effort, dense as hell but mercifully short. I’ve seen it referred to in at least a dozen books about fantasy, scifi and horror writing. Having read it, it seems to be one of those books that everyone knows, but no one’s actually read.

What this book is not about is fantasy writing in general. It concerns itself with a very specific subgenre, a subgenre so “sub” that it’s often only a subpart of any individual story.

For Todorov, the “fantastic” refers to stories (exemplified in the 19th and early 20th century, in French, German and English tales) that force the reader to “hesitate” between seeing the events of the narrative as supernatural or not. M.R. James’s ghost stories are excellent late examples of this. The hesitation is that moment of suspended decision before, in most cases, the story makes a decision one way or the other.

Todorov calls a “fantastic” story that decides that the supernatural is not real “uncanny.” Scooby-Doo tales are an excellent example of the uncanny, as they often work overtime to convince us (or at least Scooby and Shaggy) that ghosts are real before pulling the mask off of Old Man Jenkins.

The opposite decision, that the supernatural is real, is called the “marvelous.” At the time of Todorov’s writing (1970; the edition I read came five years later), this mostly involved the last of the pulp magazines, and the rise of the mass paperbacks. The Exorcist was published in 1971, beginning horror’s dominion until the mid-90s.

In modern horror stories, there is usually a period of suspended decision for the characters as they try to determine whether something supernatural is at work. However, modern horror readers rarely experience this suspended decision. Often, the book they are reading has “horror” printed on the spine and it’s only a matter of the characters catching up to what the reader already knows.

That makes Todorov’s contribution interesting, if we do not try to universalize it, to make his moment of hesitation to key to unlock all literature from comic books to the Bible. Instead, he is writing about western European literature at a very specific moment in the late Enlightenment. Readers in that time and place often had difficulty accepting the supernatural as a real part of a fictional world. They needed this hesitation, to enjoy the narrative for as long as possible, sometimes even past the end of the story. Modern readers/viewers generally find “was it or wasn’t it?” endings unsatisfying. Even thoroughly secular readers are rarely as embarrassed by fantasy as their forebears of 175 years ago were. If an author stretches the hesitation too far, readers are likely to become annoyed with the characters for their failure to see. 

But this is a structuralist book, and, alas, Todorov does try to take a universal from it. What is “structuralism”? It’s a mid-20th-century movement that took in anthropology, philosophy and literary studies. It posited that human consciousness is built out of fundamental oppositions: the raw and the cooked, the male and the female, the inside and the outside. Structuralists attempted to figure out which binaries were most important, and that is what Todorov spends four of his ten chapters on.

He divides “fantastic” literature into two groups. One concerns themes of the self and its annihilation, and the other concerns themes of the other (mostly via forbidden sex). The self and the other is a classic structuralist binary, and as such, it’s so easy to apply to anything that it ends up meaning nothing.

But again, if we restrict our view to the material Todorov actually covers, his work on the “fantastic” illuminates genre writing’s history. What about a “marvelous” story where there is no hesitation, that just dives right into a world? Todorov says that one type of such a story is science fiction. He finds its source, not in Edgar Allan Poe as is often done, but in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” Dear Reader, Gregor Samsa is a cockroach now. Deal with it. Rather than hesitating, the reader has to adapt themselves to the rules of this literary world. Secondary-world fantasy, such as Tolkien’s, is another example of the “marvelous,” a category that developed out of Todorov’s “fantastic.”

Poe himself is not treated much by Todorov, for the reason that in few of Poe’s stories does Todorov find any hesitation. What makes Poe so revolutionary is that he was demanding readers adapt to his narratives before anyone else was. He has both “uncanny” stories, such as his stories of madness, and “marvelous” stories, such as his early science fiction (e.g., “The Facts of the Case of M. Valdemar”). But Poe charges straight at the monolith of Enlightenment rationality, waving his West Point saber. The only story of his that might be called “fantastic,” in the sense of involving hesitation, is “The Fall of the House of Usher.” That could either be the working out of a poisoned supernatural destiny, or a series of startling coincidences.

So Todorov’s history of the “fantastic” contributes something startlingly original to the history of genre fiction. Being a writer of that myself, he helps me understand what I’m doing, and to do it better. Stephen King says, in Danse Macabre, I believe, that a horror writer doesn’t have to be an electrician to know when to turn the lights on and off. Not to take issue with the master, but if you want to have a light come on in a new and interesting way, you do need to be able to rewire the house without burning it down. That’s why I study genre fiction as much as I write it. Because is the unexamined writer’s life worth living?