"Nonfictional narrative is always about the typical; fictional narrative is always about the atypical."-- Gene Phillips, here, just now.
Though a full reading of Todorov's THE FANTASTIC is still pending, I do credit his two principal categories of "the fantastic"-- "the Uncanny" and "the Marvelous"-- with spurring me to make further progress with my own Phenomenologial Pairing: the metaphenomenal and the isophenomenal.
Now, while I explained elsewhere the genesis of the first term, I neglected to justify the second one. But first I have to say that both of my terms were influenced by Kant's categories of the "noumenal" and the "phenomenal," with the latter comprising that aspect of reality revealed to humankind through the senses while the former was revealed through purely mental apprehension (the Greek "nous," meaning "mind," gave rise to Kant's term "noumenon").
However, within a fictional narrative, everything, no matter how "realistic" or "fantastic," is equally a product of an author's mind, whatever one wants to say about how that material got into his mind. The narrative world, Plato's "shadow of a shadow," recapitulates at the very least that experiential world that Kant calls "phenomena," the world as known through the author's own senses. Whether or not the author may *also* tap into things knowable only through pure mind (ye olde Jungian archetypes, for example) is a question for another essay, as that consideration doesn't bear on the subject of sussing out the nature of phenomena (in the generic, not the Kantian, sense of the word) within the world of narrative.
Within the sphere of fiction, there must always be what Caillois calls an "acknowledged order." Without that order, it's impossible to tell a story, at least in the accepted form of normative narrative. This order within the narrative may be termed the "isophenomenal." Greek "iso" means "equal" or "alike." Thus in my system the isophenomenal elements of a narrative are those which most approximate what the readers deem the consensual reality to which their senses attest. This neologism is necessary to distinguish this type of "phenomena" from Kant's nonliterary use of that word.
"Metaphenomenal" is not meant to be any way coeval with Kant's "noumenal" except in terms of opposition. The metaphenomenal is that which does not conform to the isophenomenal order. It may be perceived as a disruption of that order, as per Caillois' earlier-cited definition, or it may be seen as a Transcendent Truth for which consensual reality is only a veil, as per the LEFT BEHIND books I mentioned earlier, not to mention many more worthy works ranging from the METAMORPHOSIS of Apuleius to the Narnia books of C.S. Lewis. A theory of "the fantastic" that does not subsume both conceptions is constitutionally deficient, as I perceive will be the case with Todorov's book based on partial online readings.
In addition, the metaphenomenal theory can easily subsume any fantasy no matter how extravagant the mode, ranging from fantastic material explained discursively or presented as a "given." See this article on Suzanne Langer and others in that vein.
From my advance samplings it seems obvious to me that Todorov's study is skewed toward works in which the metaphenomenal is a barely explicable disruption of the isophenomenal order, with particular emphasis on horror stories. Stanislaw Lem condemns the limits of Todorov's fantasy-examples in no uncertain terms:
...Todorov's "sample," as displayed in his bibliography, is astonishing. Among its twenty-seven titles we find no Borges, no Verne, no Wells, nothing from modern fantasy, and all of SF is represented by two short stories; we get, instead, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Potocki, Balzac, Poe, Gogol, Kafka—and that is about all. In addition, there are two crime-story authors.
I suspect Todorov's emphasis on horror-story authors stems from literary elitism. In 1970, names like Poe and Hoffman were still accepted in the Land of the Literary Canon, but Wells and Verne had barely established a foothold in academia, much less modern authors of SF (including Lem himself), or any authors of fantasy except for perhaps Carroll. By the mid-to-late 70s this would change, but clearly Todorov's theory is geared to highbrow tastes only. Arguably the horror genre is privileged by Todorov not because it possesses the best or more fulfilling examples of "the fantastic," but because artists known for their more naturalistic works, such as Balzac and Dostoyevsky (also briefly mentioned in TF), dabbled in it.
I'll explore some of the consequences of Todorov's bias in Part 3, and use it in part as a springboard to discuss my conceptualiztion mentioned above: "the atypical."
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