The Literary Fantastic

Literary fantastic fiction is difficult to classify, and goes by many names: magical realism, slipstream, sf, the new weird, among others. Over the last few decades, literary fiction containing elements of the fantastic has gradually become more accepted by mainstream publishers and readers, as Jordan E. Rosenfeld notes.

But why are so many contemporary authors turning to the fantastic? To my mind, the fantastic allows us, members of a world that is first and foremost secular, access to realms of the sacred and profane. Like Gogol and Kafka before them, contemporary writers use the fantastic to explore and describe our alienation and our longing for something more, something meaningful, something magical. Next semester I'm going to teach a course on the subject, but to start thinking about it I present six novels I love that invoke the fantastic. It's not a stretch to say that these are all novels that I hold sacred.

Angela Carter: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (British title: The War
of Dreams)

This 1972 novel explores the war on reality conducted by its eponymous character, Dr Hoffman, who strives to release our lives from the straightjacket of reality by freeing up imagination via his “desire machines.” These machines literalize dreams and fantasies, often with disturbing results. The ambivalent protagonist, Desiderio, a bi-racial outsider to his society, is sent to defeat the doctor but ends up in love with the latter’ s daughter. Albertina herself is an agent of imaginative chaos, in part because of the love she inspires in and feels for Desiderio, in part because of her dedication to the enactment of unfettered imagination. Carter’s allegory explores the '60s love-in mentality by taking that decade’s slogans to their logical conclusion. In doing so, she asks us if we really want to live in a world where the imagination is literalized without our consent or control. The chaos that results from this literalization is full of sexual depredation, tyrannical expressions of the will-to-power, and an unconscious reversion on the part of individuals to stereotyped notions of those who don’t belong to their tribe. The book suggests that part of imagination’s appeal is its status as imaginary. Yet the longing felt by all visionaries to see their visions realized is also acknowledged here, as well as the disastrous results that such realization can have for civil liberties.

John Berger: Here Is Where We Meet: A Fiction (2005)

Narrated by a man named John Berger, this novel, though entitled “ A Fiction,” teasingly presents itself as a (fictionalized) memoir. Though the book lacks a traditional plot, Berger sets the chapters of this novel in different countries of Europe, following John on his travels around the continent. In each country he visits, John encounters an important person from his past who is now dead, and the two interact and converse. Interspersed with John’s conversations with the dead are memories of the living person John knew in his past. Frequently, the dead are quietly amused by John’ s consternation at meeting up with them; especially moving is the tenderness John feels as he talks with these people as an older person, appreciating them now that he is elderly (Berger wrote the novel in his early 70s) in a way he could not when he was younger. Interestingly, the novel feels remarkably youthful, in part because it returns to the younger John’s past, but also because of the wonderful attention paid to the physical world that is the backdrop for John’ s conversations with the dead. This quiet novel makes concrete our continued relationships with the people who are important to us, in spite of the fact that they may not be physically with us, and brims with reverence for life and for the importance of the past in our negotiation of the present.

Hilary Mantel: Fludd (2000)

Set in 1950s Midlands England, this novel is steeped in the bleak economies and deprivations of that postwar era. Its characters’ lives are regulated by small-minded town officials who enforce rigid social and religious rules to oppress those who long for a life of imaginative and social freedom. Catholic parish priest Father Anguin, whose sympathetic outlook could be a force for liberation, can’t act because he has lost his belief in god, though he still believes in the devil. As a result, he lets the Reverend Mother at a nearby convent exact a tyrannical rule over young women whose families can’t afford to support them. Sister Philomena suffers the most under the Reverend Mother’s iron hand because she is kind and generous girl and possesses a spiritual charisma that enrages the head nun. The soul-blasting tedium of life in this town is disrupted by the appearance of “Father” Robert Fludd, who seems to be the reincarnation of a 17th-century alchemist and scientist by the same name. Fludd’ s mysterious spiritual presence and powers have a transformative effect on the good hearted people of the town. The leaden souls of characters who yearn for a way out of their dull, life-deadening circumstances are changed into gold, and the spiritual freedom they achieve is accompanied by enlightened attitudes toward sexual expression, love, and social mobility. Especially surprising about this book by the recent Booker Award winner are its playful exuberance and joyful willingness to believe in miracles and their positive effect on human tolerance.

Penelope Fitzgerald: The Gate of Angels (1998)

Set in pre-World War I England, a young physicist-in-training collides with a young woman of the lower classes while the two are bicycling, much like the collision of the atoms that he studies. The wife of a Cambridge don mistakes the unconscious pair, who are strangers, for a married couple, thus Fred and Daisy wake up in bed together. Fred finds himself helplessly in love with the lower-class Daisy, while Daisy, one of the most generous and feisty female characters in the British canon, fearfully flees him, because everyone she knows has used her and manipulated her, even if they’ ve genuinely cared about her. The book’ s sophisticated analogy between atomic physics and the seemingly random trajectories of human lives hints at a deeper meaning to both, one which human consciousness is too limited to comprehend. The miracles and ghosts that fill its pages point to the transformative power of faith and love, charging the novel’ s prose with a grace that comes as near to the divine as we are likely to find in the secular realm.

Kathryn Davis: The Thin Place (2007)

In Varennes, a small town in New England, three girls find a man lying face down on a beach, apparently dead. But one of the girls, Mees Kipp, seems to possess a mysterious power that brings him back to life. The novel moves from Mees’ s consciousness (she knows she has a mysterious gift), to that of other inhabitants of the town (including non-human denizens, such as Mees’s dog, beavers, and plants). In this way, the narrative ripples through the minds and lives of this rural community in a manner that is both matter-of-fact and electrifying. The shifts in perspective can also leave the human realm far behind: Davis notes, “ If the earth is just a ball, no one place on it is any more important than another. Human time is much too thin to be discerned. The slow steady march of geologic time is punctuated with catastrophes.” Yet the thin but evocative human realm brims with it a dramatic action that runs in counterpoint to the novel’s cosmic vision. The result exalts the tiniest details: a dog savoring the smell of porcupines; a 92-year-old nursing-home-detainee, Helen Zeebrugge, who is infuriated by the stupidity of her caretakers; her son, Piet, who is sexually restless and on the prowl for his next wife. These homely details juxtaposed with the novel’ s flexible, wayward narrative turn the matter-of-fact elements of human lives and the natural world into a force as mysterious as Mees’s supernatural gift, and the result ignites a sense of wonder in the reader.

Donald Harington: The Choiring of the Trees (1991)

In 1914, Nail Chism is framed for rape and sentenced to death by electrocution. When he is about to die, he “ hears” the trees near his homestead in Stay More, Arkansas, singing to him from many miles away. Nail is bewildered by this, but also comforted; he is also mysteriously saved from dying by a malfunction in the electrical system. The Ozarks town that is the setting for most of Harington’s fiction allows him to create a vivid snapshot of rural life that is wonderfully realistic and detailed. Yet the trees’ choiring is also a fantastic element that gives Nail hope and speaks to a deeper connection between humans and the landscape in which they make their homes. This connection, moreover, is one that is supernaturally charged; in addition to the mysterious accidents that prevent Nail from being executed, the singing trees seem to act through a woman named Viridis Monday who befriends Nail. Viridis’s artistic vision (she does death-row sketches for a Little Rock newspaper, but was trained by Parisian artists) allows her to recognize Nail’s innocence and motivates her to try to help free him. The novel’s lyrical intensity is accompanied by a documentary-style record of the brutal condition of Arkansas prisons; the combination creates a stunningly hopeful testimony to human faith and imaginative power in the face of tyranny and oppression.