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Are readers able to reconcile imagination and the real? Western critics usually vacillate between discarding the marvelous as fancy mimesis and welcoming it within an allegorical economy of the possible. In stylistics, allegory designates a kind of metaphor which alludes to meanings that lie outside the narrative, but not outside language. On the other hand, the logical notion of the possible attempts to appropriate "the real," dispense with what is called its "factuality," and make it fit the language of logic. In other words, language defies contingent reality because it allows us to describe it, as well as marvelous realms, in coherent statements. Such statements are apt to configure semantical "possible worlds." Contemporary critics such as Eco, Pavel and Dole_el adapted the concept of possible-world semantics to the needs of the postmodern literary criticism. Contemporary semiotics reckoned with integrative (or even holistic) theories and proposed the notion of "fictional worlds," that, unlike the Carnapian possible worlds," does not hinder the spheres of invention and the concrete. According to Traill, fictional worlds are authenticated through narrative and epistemic policies, and depend entirely on the existential rank of the natural and supernatural regions. Nancy Traill's book on the fantastic discusses the axiological status of this wide-ranging phenomenon. Historically, the term was ignored until the eighteenth century, with few illustrious exceptions. For Boileau, the marvelous counteracted the mimetic impositions of the classical doctrine of Naturnachamung. The metaphysics of Leibniz introduced a new term, "the possible world," that was to be granted, in our century, the power to reconcile the imaginary with the real.
After the Romantics rediscovered the ghosts at the Opera, the nineteenth-century realist writers spiced their taste for explanation with splashes of the occult, the strange, and the marvelous. Dickens, Turgenev, and Maupassant frequented mediumistic seances, and witnessed public levitations in a cultural climate that raised the spirits of the dead against Darwin's heresy. Although the realist writers applied a healthy skepticism to occult events, things such as pianos playing by themselves, and pieces of furniture moving without being touched, unbalanced again the traditional ratio between experience and inspiration. Yet, the apparent rejection of the supernatural generated a counter-reaction: it enriched the real with the aura of the paranormal, and it framed what traditionally had been called "the unexplainable," as "the not yet explained." As the "fairy way" of marvelous writing did not appeal to realists' representations, "the paranormal mode became the fantastic" (34). At this juncture, Traill's approach explicitly turns against Tzvetan Todorov's theory of the fantastic as an ideal genre. According to Traill, Todorov inaugurated a theoretical trend that plays the fantastic against reality. Todorov connected the fantastic to the readers' hesitation between mutually exclusive answers to the event that triggers the plot. He writes that the fantastic is an "evanescent genre," merely sustained by the writer's programmatic ambiguity. Instead, Traill submits that the fantastic is a universal aesthetic category, whose universality allows it to cut across genres and currents: ballads, statues, plays, and symphonies may be imbued with the fantastic, as the fantastic can also surface in various general aesthetic trends and currents, from Romanticism to Surrealism.
Traill agrees with Todorov that the presence of the supernatural cannot label a genre as such; the fact that Hamlet speaks to his father's ghost cannot rank the Shakespearean play as fantastic. Still, the intrusion of the supernatural in works like Hamlet needs more open horizons, and Traill points at Eco's, Pavel's and Dole_el's theories on fictional worlds as such sky-openers. 'Possible-worlds' semantics can account for the unbearable specter, that, however has its function limited to that of activating the plot. Traill founds a new economy of the supernatural, which becomes the physically impossible. She grounds her definition of the fantastic in the basic antagonism between the physically possible and impossible. Fighting with the inertia of her own dialectics, the author does not forget to add that "the fantastic does not transcend history," thereby it is mediated by modes. Such modes are ascribed to extra-literary conjectures like the social structure of imagination or taste. The domains of possibility, writes Traill, map the fictional world according to the theory of sets. Through inclusion, exclusion, appurtenance, or mutual interaction between the natural and supernatural, Traill attempts to answer the Hamletian dilemma in epistemological terms.
Traill's major endeavor lies in the definition of the paranormal mode, where the supernatural and the natural are no longer opposed. Although never made explicit, her assumption implies a political stake: a recovery of the cultural twilight-zones for and within this new interpretative framework. In other words, science-fiction books may soon shelve themselves in the University of Toronto Robarts Library; once the criterion of genre is abolished, fancies like alien abduction, once relegated to "the physically impossible," will be common-sensically tolerated. Isn't this the very process through which a work of anticipation is fulfilled beyond its allegorical ends? At any rate, if one assumes that the fantastic is a universal aesthetic category, one can only guess that Traill's fantastic finds its praxis in ritual - music, dance, or invocations. Further inferences are possible: ideological discourses themselves may convey Aesopian or Hamletian messages, depending on their relation with the fantastic modes. The intellectual riddle between to be and not to be possible is from now on to be played with, not with respect to the real, but to the assigned universe of possibility. Traill's book helps literary theory abandon traditional iconoclasms, by no longer classifying, and thus confining works of imagination to no-no places, but by reintegrating them within the realm of a human experience that is conceived in a more flexible way.
Andrei Zlatescu
University of Western Ontario