Todorov’s definition of the fantastic

“J’en vins presque à croire”: voilà la formule qui résume l’esprit du fantastique. La foi absolue comme l’incrédulité totale nous mènerait en dehors du fantastique; c’est l’hésitation qui lui donne vie.

[Todorov1970], p. 35.

In the introduction of a lecture on the Metamorphosis, Nabokov starts with sev-eral remarks on the methodology of literary analysis.⁸ One of the first things to do, Nabokov emphasises, is to define the genre of the text, which is to guide the interpretation of the text. The Metamorphosis is a fantastic story, Nabokov argues.

The term “fantastic” has become a technical term of literary analysis denoting a specific genre, thanks to the work of Tzvetan Todorov. In 1970, Todorov published a famous essay entitledIntroduction à la littérature fantastique, translated into English three years later under the title The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre(translated by Richard Howard in Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press). The logic of literary genres is notoriously difficult to systematise. Todorov’s proposal is to tackle the definition of the fantastic by contrasting it with other close literary genres like the marvelous or some science-fiction. He then tries to put forward positive features of the fantastic.

8Nabokov’s lectures are transcribed and published in [Nabokov1980].

In the following, I will define the “T-fantastic” (T for Todorov), which is my interpretation of Todorov’s definition.⁹ I am not sure how Todorov himself would welcome my definition of the T-fantastic: I will say a word about it later.

A story isT-fantastic when something “uncanny”, apparently super-natural hap-pens in a world in which the “laws of reality” as we ordinarily experience them remain intact otherwise.¹⁰ So the T-fantastic is to be sharply distinguished with the marvelous, or the oneiric, in which the “laws of reality” are explicitly altered. For instance, talking animals, magical creatures or metamorphoses of any kind are very common fictional events in fairy tales, and this shows that the fictional events do not occur in a world nomologically similar to ours. Maybe some “laws of reality” remain unchanged in some marvelous stories, for example the law of gravitation. Indeed, objects and people regularly fall in fairy tales. But there is a very clear sense in which the worlds to be imagined in appreciating marvelous stories are nomologically different from the world of everyday experience: extraordinary, magical things also happen in fairy tales.

The same holds for some science-fiction stories in which the reader is explicitly required to imagine that some “laws of reality” are altered. For instance, in some science-fiction stories, one can be teleported away, or travel back in time, or plug one’s consciousness into a computer and “live” forever. These are explicitly going against both ordinary experience and current scientific results.¹¹

This is not what happens with the T-fantastic. The typical T-fantastic story presents a world which could very well be our world for all we know, were it not for this one phenomenon which is blatantly at odds with everyday experience. For instance, in La Vénus d’Ille, a short story by Prosper Mérimée, an ancient bronze statue appears to have closed its hand by itself: a character put a ring on its finger at some point in the story, and later on the statue’s hand is closed on the ring.

9Todorov’s definition, though central to the subject, is not the last word when it comes to defining the genre fantastic in the field of literary studies. I will not discuss all the available definitions and their subtle differences. For other interesting definitions, see for instance [Caillois 1965], [Brooke-Rose1983], [Malrieu and Vercier1992], [Mellier2000].

10Caillois uses the term “inadmissible” to express the same idea in [Caillois1965]:

Tout le fantastique est rupture de l’ordre connu, irruption de l’inadmissible au seuil de l’inaltérable légalité quotidienne.

My translation:

The fantastic is essentially a violation of the known order, an irruption of the inadmissible into the unalterable everyday legality.

11Some “optimistic” minds would rather say “ahead” instead of “against”...

CHAPTER 9. DEBATES OVER DISAGREEMENTS

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Consequently, the characters in the story are deeply puzzled by this fact, and the narrator of the story doubts that this is what actually happened. He considers several rational explanations without coming to any convincing conclusion. Given the puzzlement of the fictional characters, a supernatural explanation as in a fairy tale is not straightforwardly available. Besides, such appeal to magic would simply ruin the whole point of the short story. Indeed, the point of the T-fantastic as a genre is that the reader is naturally trying to look for a rational explanation underlying the uncanny fictional event. By definition, the conventions of the genre trigger rational thinking on the part of the reader, by challenging it. This challenge to rational thinking implies a feeling of hesitation about what is true in the fiction, such hesitation usually develops into a feeling of unease, which is characteristic of the T-fantastic.

Todorov and the T-fantastic

I have to say that Todorov is less explicit than I in distinguishing the uncanny fictional event being part of the fictional world and what the reader actually imagines when they read. I put most of the weight of my definition in the reader’s stance towards the text, trying to hold fixed the idea that the world of the fiction and the real world differ little in their nomological structure.

Todorov, on the other hand, takes a narratological point of view and he insists that the fictional world depends, in some relevant sense, on what the reader actually imagines. So that the distinction between what is a fictional event and what is in the reader’s imagination flickers. In my definition the felt hesitation on the part of the reader is aconsequence of the way the fictional world is presented to the reader as being. Todorov, on the other hand, suggests that the felt hesitation isdefinitional of the genre.

It is worth reading Todorov on this:

Here is the core of the fantastic. In a world which is indeed ours, the one we know, without devils, sylphs, nor vampire, there happens a singular event which cannot be explained following the laws of this familiar world. Those who perceive the event must opt for either of these two possible solutions: either it is an illusion of the sense, a product of the imagination and the laws of reality remain what they are; or the event actually occurred, it is part and parcel of reality, but then this reality follows laws unknown to us. Either the devil is an illusion, an imaginary being; or it actually exists, as any other living being: with this little reserve that one rarely encounters it.

The fantastic fills the time of this doubt; once either of the answer is selected, one leaves the fantastic and enters a neighbour genre, the strange or the marvelous. The fantastic is the felt hesitation of a being who knows no other laws than the natural laws, when faced with an apparently supernatural event.¹²

In order not to be committed to any definite interpretation of this complex and subtle definition, I introduced my definition of theT-fantastic. Though, I think I am quite faithful to the Todorov’s spirit, if not to it’s letter.