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POSTMODERN FANTASY, IDEOLOGY,
AND THE UNCANNY
©1997 George Aichele
Postmodern narrative takes its readers to the brink of a language they
cannot read that portrays a universe they cannot understand. Just beyond
a postmodern narrative, fantasy would find its pure state, and at that
vanishing point it would completely cease to mean anything (Olsen,
“Postmodern Narrative” 101).

FANTASY AND THE POSTMODERN

The narrative functioning of the fantastic is a crucial index or symptom of the
parasitic relation between postmodernism and modernist ideology. Fantasy replaces
the
coherent space of modernist reality with a paradoxical, non-referential space – a
fragmented, multiple space, a bottomless abyss – that resists through infinite
regression
the modern human habitation. This is the space of what Sigmund Freud identified as
“the uncanny.” Fantasy is the fragmentation, the undecidability, and the chaos within
the postmodern.1 As a postmodern narrative, Franz Kafka’s story, “The
Metamorphosis,” exposes the fantastic as intrinsic to language and literature, and as
subversive of genre identity.
The modernist ideology that has dominated Western thinking during the last two
centuries or more is profoundly metaphysical. Modernism defines its ideology in
relation to an understanding of reality, for which the world and the conscious self
within it are integral, intelligible, and complete.2 Modernism separates thought from
action and art from life, in order to allow the first member in each pair to lead to the
second, and in so doing the modernist ideology defines a conception of reality
determined by the opposition to, and the marginalization of, the fantastic. For the
ideology of modernism, fantasy is the attempt to escape from reality.
The “secondary belief” that fantasy requires, according to J.R.R. Tolkien – one of the
great modernist theorists of fantasy – depends upon a primary belief, which Tolkien
did not describe but which must include belief in the extratextual reality of the world.
The good news (evangelium) that Tolkien held to be the great blessing granted by
“fairy-
1 Compare Hume 124-141. By limiting her comments to a single category of recent
literature, Hume indicates the modernism of her own position. See also Jackson 9,
164.
2 See, e.g., Blumenberg.

stories” was more important to him than the deadening technocracy of the “primary
world” of everyday reality. Nevertheless, even that good news is secondary to the
reality of the primary world.
The modernist ideology locates the meaning (the signified) of a text within the
physical material of the text (the signifier), carefully placed there by its author, like a
message in a bottle, or better yet, a soul in a living body. The metaphysical and even
theological aspects of this metaphor have important consequences. As the analogy
suggests, the text’s meaning is far more important than the matter that “contains” it.
The author is the god of the text, and the text’s meaning derives from the author’s will
for it – that is, the author’s intention.
Yet the semiotic distinction between signifier and signified that underlies the
modernist ideology also threatens that ideology with a loss of firm connection
between
the signifier and the signified. Modernism attempts to overcome this threat of logical
and linguistic non-reference through the promise of an extratextual authority: rational
or empirical Truth. These are the referents of literary realism.Realism is not the same
as
reality. Realism is the representation of a reality beyond the text in a narrative.
Therefore
realism involves a set of beliefs – an ideology. The modernist ideology understands
and
defines narratives in terms of their relationships to reality. In fact, the distinction
between “history” and “fiction” is itself one of the products of modernist thinking,
according to Hans Robert Jauss (596-99). The modernist ideology invents both
realistic fiction and historical narrative.
However, the ideological connection between signifier and signified is not a firm one,
and this becomes apparent in the postmodern concept of “unlimited semiosis” (Eco
3).
The interpretation of the sign is not, for [Charles] Peirce, a meaning but
another sign; it is a reading, not a decodage, and this reading has, in its
turn, to be interpreted into another sign, and so on, ad infinitum (de Man
127-128).
Postmodernism disrupts the modernist illusions of reference to a reality beyond the
text. The postmodern seeks to make the known unknown, not through mystification
but
through the endless rediscovery of that which is unknown, excluded, or forgotten
within the known (Lyotard 81). The postmodern exists in a non-binary, parasitic
relation
to the modern3: the postmodern is not that which comes after the modern, but rather
that which goes beyond the modern by going “through” it, penetrating and disrupting
modern reality. Therefore, just as postmodernism is not the sequel to or entirely
distinct
3 Nowhere is this made clearer than in Lyotard’s book; see also Serres. Also important
are Hassan and especially Olsen,Ellipse.
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from modernism, so postmodernism cannot escape from the ideology of the modern.
To take postmodernism seriously requires a rethinking of literary fantasy. The
priority given to the fantastic by postmodernism is a crucial point at which the
modernist ideology is inverted and deconstructed. Not only the nature of fantasy as a
literary genre, but the metaphysical and ideological significance of fantastic
narratives,must be re-conceived. By emphasizing the referential ambiguity of the
story, the
fantastic hints that there is no meaning at all contained in the story, but rather that the
reading of the story embodies the ideologies that readers bring to it. The fantastic
narrative confuses and refuses the ideological distinction between reality and fantasy,
and it places this confusion above an abyss of an infinitely receding origin, an
unlimited
semiosis: the dead Father, the absent Author, the missing Transcendental Signified.
For
postmodernism, fantasy is no longer the consequence and the symptom of a
metaphysical binarism, as it is for modernism. Instead, fantasy subverts any beliefs
we
may have about reality.
For the ideology of modernism, literary fantasy must be a peripheral genre,
clinging to the edges of “literature.” However, as postmodernism fragments and
dissolves modernism from within, eating away its “proper” substance, fantasy ceases
to
be peripheral, and it ceases also to be a distinct genre. Postmodernism destroys the
metaphysical unity and identity of the modern concept of reality, and so there can be
no
center, but only eccentricity, a plurality of non-centers.

TODOROV
Valuable steps toward a postmodern approach to literary fantasy have been
taken by Eric Rabkin and Tzvetan Todorov, among others. Todorov argues that
literary
fantasy appears as a moment of hesitation or uncertainty, in which one is unable to
determine whether a narrative phenomenon belongs to the realm of the “uncanny” or
to
the realm of the “marvelous” (Fantastic 31-33).4 This moment of hesitation – it is
always
a present moment (42) – frequently confronts a character in the fantastic story,
producing a response of amazement or uncertainty. (For example, in Kafka’s “The
Metamorphosis”: the reaction of Gregor Samsa’s family to his bodily transformation,
even after the initial shock of it has passed.) However, the moment of hesitation
always
confronts the reader of the story. “The fantastic therefore implies an integration of the
reader into the world of the characters; that world is defined by the reader’s own
4 See also Todorov,Poetics 179ff. Both Jackson and Brooke-Rose have developed
fantasy
theories in relation to Todorov’s. Jackson is less cautious metaphysically than
Todorov,
and what is ambiguous in his book is sometimes contradictory in hers. Brooke-Rose
seeks to supplement Todorov’s analyses in the direction of postmodern literature and
theory.
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ambiguous perception of the events narrated” (Todorov,Fantastic 31).
The reader who halts before this fantastical choice is not the actual, historical
reader, who stands outside of the story and is inevitably more or less aware of the
indeterminacy of the narrative phenomena. Instead, this hesitating reader is what
Wayne Booth calls the “implied reader,” who is a function of the narrative itself in an
“implied dialogue” with the “implied author.”5 The actual reader is able to merge
with
the implied reader only insofar as she can suspend disbelief and accept the referential
world of the narrative as reality, for the duration of the reading. This is the fantastic
“escape,” according to Rabkin (43).
The relation between the implied reader of a narrative and any actual,
extratextual reader (and between the implied author and the actual author) is always
problematic. The actual reader is never identical to the implied reader. However,
insofar as the actual reader is unable to identify with the implied reader, there may
never be a moment of hesitation, and the actual reader may entirely miss the fantasy.
Fantasy in this limited sense is both intra- and inter-textual, but nothing else; it is not
reducible to a psychological process, nor is it historically or culturally relative.
Todorov’s views stand in contrast to those of modernist critics, for whom the fantastic
is secondary to historically and culturally governed perceptions of reality. These
would include Tolkien, W.R. Irwin, Colin Manlove, and Kathryn Hume, all of whom
draw in one way or another on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous distinction between
“fancy” (fantasy) and imagination in chapter XIII of the Biographia Literaria:
The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of
all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal
act of creation in the infinite IAM. The secondary I consider as an echo of
the former . . . It is essentiallyvital, even as all objects (as objects) are
essentially fixed and dead.
Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with but
fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory
emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and
modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will which we express by
the wordchoice (167, Coleridge’s emphases).
According to Coleridge, fancy takes the (primary) reality given through one’s senses
and reason and modifies it through an act of will. A version of the same concept is
apparent in Tolkien’s claim that we produce a secondary world through an act of “sub-
5 See also Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader. Patterns of Communication in Prose
Fiction
from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1974), and The Act of
Reading. A
Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1978).
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creation” (49).
According to Todorov, the fantastic concerns a fundamental ambiguity of genre.
For the most part, he identifies genre with what Northrop Frye calls literary “mode”
(Todorov,Fantastic 13). Todorov distinguishes between “theoretical” and “historical”
genres, and he generally describes the fantastic as a historical genre, produced
primarily
at the end of the nineteenth century in Europe. However, at times he appears to
consider the fantastic as a theoretical genre, a structure of the logic of narratives. Thus
he is somewhat inconsistent in his use of the word “genre.” What Todorov’s analyses
suggest, however, is that the fantastic is in fact not a genre at all, but rather that the
fantastic lies in the impossibility of identifying certain stories in terms of the generic
“reality” to which they refer. In other words, the fantastic appears as a breakdown of
signification – a disruption of literary realism.
In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without
devils, sylphides, or vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be
explained by the laws of this same familiar world. … The fantastic is that
hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature,
confronting an apparently supernatural phenomenon (25).
Whether or not the fantastic is a genre at all may be unclear, but the marvelous
and the uncanny are distinct genres, according to Todorov. The marvelous presents a
supernatural world as though it were real; marvelous stories are “realistic” about the
supernatural. The sorts of beings and events that are represented in a narrative of the
marvelous may be quite different from those in the more common types of realistic
narrative, for which the primary world is the only world that exists, but they are just
as
real, within the frames of that genre. In contrast, the genre of the uncanny presents
bizarre events happening in the everyday world. However, although they are
extremely
unusual, these events can be (and often are) explained in purely natural terms. Thus
the
uncanny and the marvelous are completely incompatible
with one another.
Nevertheless, both the uncanny and the marvelous are referential genres, because both
the uncanny and the marvelous refer to (very different) “genres” of reality. In other
words, each of these genres demands a distinct understanding of reality, within which
the union of signifier and signified can occur. Therefore both the uncanny and the
marvelous require belief, and each implies a distinctive metaphysics.
In contrast, fantasy permits only “nearly ... believing” (Todorov,Fantastic 31,
quoting the Saragossa Manuscript). Near belief is neither belief nor unbelief. The
hesitation of the reader before the fantastic results from the reader’s inability to decide
what is real. The ability of the actual reader to share the near belief of the implied
reader
is a crucial measure of the actual reader’s experience of fantastic hesitation, and the
point at which literary fantasy becomes psychological fantasy. In the moment of near
belief the story is most purely fictional, and the bond between actual reader and
implied
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reader is most tenuous.
The fantastic text presents the implied reader – and often a character in the
narrative as well – with an undecidable choice between two contradictory realities, the
realities referred to by the marvelous and the uncanny. Instead of referring to a single,
consistent world, the story refers to a contradiction between worlds (genres) and to its
own unsuccessful efforts, as a story, to determine the selection between them. Thus at
the moment of hesitation between the two referential genres, the fantastic story refers
only to itself. It interrupts all reference to extratextual reality. Unlimited semiosis
becomes manifest in narrative self-referentiality.
According to Todorov, this fantastic moment cannot be sustained; the narrative cannot
maintain itself at the point of the reader’s hesitation. The fantastic moment can
survive only as long as generic indeterminacy does, but the reader cannot remain in a
state of near belief. Inter- and extratextual forces – that is, ideological forces – press
the reader to move on to a deciding of the undecidable narrative, and the story
eventually is resolved into either the uncanny or the marvelous. The fantastic is
unstable and must eventually destroy itself.
TODOROV AND FREUD
There are important similarities between Todorov’s fantasy theory and Freud’s
theory of the uncanny. Freud was not primarily concerned with literary theory, but
complicated interplays between literature and lived experience appear throughout his
essay, “The ‘Uncanny,’” much of which is devoted to a discussion of E.T.A.
Hoffman’s
story, “The Sand-Man.” Freud notes, and seems uncomfortable with, the complex
relation between the literary uncanny and the psychological uncanny:
[W]e should differentiate between the uncanny that we actually
experience and the uncanny that we merely picture or read about.
... a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in
real life ... there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in
fiction than there are in real life (247, 249).
Freud’s “uncanny” isnot Todorov’s “uncanny,” but instead it is quite similar to
Todorov’s concept of the fantastic. The Freudian uncanny (GermanUnheimlich)
concerns not only that which belongs to the home (GermanHeimlich), but also that
which is hidden away (alsoHeimlich) (Freud 222-224), such as a “family secret.” The
uncanny arises as a heterogeneity that is both intimate and secret or hidden. That
which
isHeimlich is found to be alsoUnheimlich. The Freudian uncanny appears whenever
the
familiar becomes unfamiliar and the comfortable becomes frightening (Freud 220).
The
uncanny occurs at a point where non-understanding comes to light – the failure of
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understanding is not cleared up, but its object is identified as that which is not
understood. What we thought we knew well, we find that we did not know at all. This
well describes the postmodern revelation of the “unpresentable in presentation itself”
(Lyotard 81).
In the Freudian uncanny, the human dwelling place, the home or house, is
turned inside-out.6 The modernist metaphysical enclosure, which provides a sense of
totality and identity, is disrupted and fractured. This disruption, however, also reveals
what Jacques Derrida calls the “family scene,” which is the “scene of writing”
(Derrida
196ff.) Not unlike Jacques Lacan, Derrida reads Freud as producing a theory of
writing
(“the Mystic Writing Pad”) and of the interpretation of the “writing” that is the
unconscious. Yet the unconscious is the great Freudian “family scene,” of the id and
of
its sublimations. Along similar lines, Julia Kristeva calls this uncanny disruption of
identity a nondisjunction, a failure of binary opposition. The material base of
language
(the semiotic) appears in and through the fragmentation of linguistic meaning (the
symbolic), for meaning is always eitherHeimlich orUnheimlich, properly binary and
univocal. As Todorov says, “[t]he rational schema represents the human being as a
subject entering into relations with other persons or with things that remain external to
him, and which have the status of objects. The literature of the fantastic disturbs this
abrupt separation” (Fantastic 116).
The similarity between Todorov’s theory of the fantastic and Freud’s theory of
the uncanny is heightened by Todorov’s further claim that the fantastic also stands at a
point of indecision between poetry and allegory. This uncertainty is not the same as
that
between the marvelous and the uncanny. On the one hand, poetry tends in the
direction
of what Kristeva calls the semiotic, the space in which language appears. Questions of
meaning or reference are less important in poetry than the pure play of language.
“[P]oetic images are not descriptive. ... they are to be read quite literally, on the level
of
the verbal chain they constitute, not even on that of their reference. The poetic image
is
a combination of words, not of things, and it is pointless, even harmful, to translate
this
combination into sensory terms” (Todorov,Fantastic 60).7 On the other hand, allegory
tends in the direction of what Kristeva calls the symbolic, the “monotheistic”
univocity
of coherent meaning. In allegory, content or message dominates the linguistic
medium.
“[A]n isolated metaphor indicates only a figurative manner of speaking; but if the
metaphor is sustained, it reveals an intention to speak of something else besides the
first
object of the utterance” (Todorov,Fantastic 62-63).
Todorov claims that the fantastic is fictional, as opposed to poetic, and literal, as
opposed to allegorical. The signifier signifies, but it does not cohere to any signified.
If
6 See Bachelard, chapters 1-2.
7 See also Jakobson’s concept of the poetic function of language (69ff.), to which
Todorov’s concept is closely related.
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the implied reader did not seek or expect some sort of reference or meaning, there
could
be no hesitation between the marvelous and the uncanny; therefore the fantastic must
be fictional. But if this meaning is found in some hidden or indirect reference, then
the
hesitation disappears; therefore it must be literal. Thus there is a fantastic
undecidability
at the level of reference (what the story is about) and a related undecidability at the
level of the text itself.
Poetic language is essentially non-referential, and allegorical language refers to
extratextual truth. In the undecidability between these two forms of language, fantasy
is
both anti-mimetic and anti-metaphysical. In the fantastic, the materiality of language
(the semiotic) and its power of signification (the symbolic) are at war with one
another.
The fact that the physical medium can receive at once two opposed meanings (both
the
uncanny and the marvelous) is a symptom of a fundamental incoherence in language
itself.
However, for Todorov, the fantastic remains bound to the metaphysical binarism
of real and unreal, and thus he keeps one foot on modernist ground.
[B]y the hesitation it engenders, the fantastic questions precisely the
existence of an irreducible opposition between real and unreal. But in
order to deny the opposition, we first of all acknowledge its terms; in
order to perform a sacrifice, we must know what to sacrifice. Whence the
ambiguous impression made by fantastic literature: ... by combating the
metaphysics of everyday language, it gives that language life; it must start
from language, even if only to reject it (Fantastic 167-168).
If “starting from language” means acknowledging the terms of the “irreducible
opposition between real and unreal,” then we have returned to the modernist
opposition between reality and fantasy. This modernist conception may be found also
in Todorov’s limitation of fantastic literature to a rather small number of texts
produced
during a limited time span, in which “the fantastic started from a perfectly natural
situation to reach its climax in the supernatural” (Fantastic 171).
RABKIN
On the face of it, Rabkin’s views are quite similar to Todorov’s. Rabkin expresses
his admiration for and general agreement with Todorov’s analyses, but with a couple
of
important reservations. On the whole, Todorov considers fantasy to be what he calls
an
historical genre, the incarnation of a position in the logic of narratives that emerged in
Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century and died out early in the twentieth
century. Although Rabkin also focuses primarily on works from that time period, and
within European and North American cultures, nonetheless he insists that fantasy as a
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genre cannot be defined or confined historically. He argues that works of literary
fantasy are to be found at many points in literary history – in other words, Rabkin
regards fantasy as what Todorov would call a “theoretical genre,” of which Todorov’s
and his own objects of study would be but a few instances.8
Rabkin also distinguishes between fantasy as a narrative genre and the fantastic
as a component or dimension of many different genres and individual works of
literature. This distinction is not uncommon; indeed, Irwin virtually opposes the
fantastic to the genre of fantasy. However, many theorists make no apparent
distinction.
For Rabkin, the fantastic is the reversing of a narrative structure, either theme or
character, upon itself, as determined by “microcontextual variations” (Rabkin 36).
These
variations are produced by “the local affect of reading at any given time” in relation to
the established ground rules of the narrative. The fantastic reversal is not the same as
theperipety of Aristotle, which remains within the fundamental ground rules
established by the narrative and its genre and which is embodied in the implied
dialogue that constitutes the story. Instead, the fantastic reverses the ground rules
themselves, and therefore it upsets the ability of the narrative to refer to a consistent
reality. The fantastic reversal is a reversal of reality – once again, fantasy subverts
ideology. Furthermore, according to Todorov, it is the supernatural that makes
possible
the transgression of narrative ground rules (Fantastic 165).
[T]he fantastic is important because it is wholly dependent on reality for
its existence. Admittedly, the fantastic is reality turned precisely 180°
around, but this is reality nonetheless, a fantastic narrative reality that
speaks the truth of the human heart (Rabkin 28).
A narrative’s ground rules are established within the text through the use of
language (the “grapholect”) that frames a set of perspectives (Rabkin 20; compare
Todorov,Fantastic 36-40). Within these perspectives, the fantastic is constituted not
merely by the unexpected, but by the “anti-expected” (Rabkin 10). Once again, this
reversal is independent of historical and cultural changes in the beliefs or attitudes of
readers. The fantastic reversal is made possible by the structure and the language of
the
narrative itself. According to Rabkin, the fantastic operates to a greater or lesser
degree
within individual texts of non-fantasy genres and also as a principle in the historical
formation of all genres. Rabkin demonstrates how the fantastic serves as a mutative
power in genre evolution. New genres arise from earlier genres through reversal of
essential ground rules; thus the fantastic serves as a principle of innovation. As
readers
become accustomed to what once were new forms, their tastes become jaded, and
they
demand further reversals. These changes are produced through the operation of the
fantastic.
8 See also Brooke-Rose 62ff., 342. Other scholars have also used Todorov’s
distinctions
far beyond the limited range of his own study.
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Genres develop and change throughout history, and each genre has its own life
span. However, as with biological species, the appearance of a new literary form does
not necessarily mean the end of the older one. Narratives belonging to “older” genres
continue to be written and read long after the “newer” genres have appeared. Thus
there is a tension between desire for that which isavant-garde and nostalgia for the
traditional stories.
Fantasy as a genre is the extreme or pure state of the literary fantastic. It arises
when fantastic reversal is “exhaustively central” to a narrative (Rabkin 28) – when the
textual instances of a genre have become so highly convoluted through reversals of
ground rules, and then reversals upon those reversals, that their power to refer to
reality is undone. “[W]hen linguistic perspectives continually shift within a given text,
that is, when the ground rules of the narrative world are subjected to repeated reversal,
we have Fantasy” (78). At this extreme, fantasy becomes a genre that reverses the
structure of fantastic reversal itself. This is not a return to unreversed narrative
structure, but rather the revelation of structure as structure. The genre of fantasy
defines a literature that refers fundamentally to itself and therefore only very
ambiguously to any “other” – such as extratextual truth or reality. Once again, fantasy
is self-referential: it signifies itself.
Rabkin argues that this fantastic ambiguity cannot itself be perceived: “[r]eality is
that collection of perspectives and expectations that we learn in order to survive in the
here and now” (227). As a collection of expectations, reality is always generic. It is
always ideological. By questioning the truthfulness of every ideology – every reality –
fantasy threatens the possibility of our survival. Yet fantasy also questions the
meaning
and the value of survival itself, and thus it is creative: it makes us human.
According to Rabkin, readers recognize fantastic reversal “playing on and
against our whole experience as people and readers” (41, also 25). The anti-expected
changes “the preconceptions of our armchair world” (10). He argues that the fantastic
satisfies our urge for order by giving us a sense of control, a potentially healthy
escape
from the suffering and confusion of our everyday, extratextual world. “The reality of
life is chaos; the fantasy of man is order” (213). This all sounds very modernist –
much
like Irwin or Tolkien. Yet Rabkin can also say, “A real Fantasy uses the fantastic so
essentially and so constantly that one never escapes its grip into the security of a fully
tamed world for more than a moment” (218). In “real Fantasy,” semiosis is unlimited.
“THE METAMORPHOSIS”
Todorov’s and Rabkin’s theories of the fantastic in literature are not identical, but
they are not incompatible, either. Each view offers something that the other lacks.
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Reconciliation would be near if we could free Todorov’s views from their historical
limitations, and Christine Brooke-Rose has already gone far in this direction. But it is
also true that neither Rabkin nor Todorov has developed a purely postmodern theory
of
literary fantasy, and this is evident in their differing analyses of postmodern texts such
as Kafka’s story, “The Metamorphosis.”

“The Metamorphosis” is a tale of a young salesman, Gregor Samsa, who is

mysteriously transformed overnight into a gigantic insect (ein ungeheuren
Ungeziefer): he
is no longer quite himself. Kafka presents Gregor’s situation and its consequences as
simultaneously bizarre and normal, that is, as paradoxical.9 For Rabkin, Kafka’s story
well illustrates the genre of literary fantasy. What makes “The Metamorphosis”
fantastic is not the fact that in the real world people don’t turn into big bugs, but rather
that in the fictional world of this story, anything at all can happen. The world of “The
Metamorphosis” is an anti-world. In Kafka’s narrative world the reader is never
certain
what the ground rules (the story’s premises) are; Todorov calls this the story’s “oneiric
logic” (Fantastic 173). Narrative reality itself is up for grabs. Everything happens “as
if,”
a phrase that appears at crucial points throughout “The Metamorphosis.” This gives to
the story a paranoid quality that also appears in many other of Kafka’s writings.
In deductive logic, the use of improbable or false premises can lead to wild and
impossible conclusions, even if the argument form is valid.10 Kafka’s narrative
proceeds
with a rigidity that is absolutely logical, but with one exception, a minor
miscalculation,
that makes all the difference in the story – like a gun aimed ever so slightly
inaccurately,
which therefore misses a distant target by a wide margin. Or rather, the bullet hits an
entirely unexpected target. The target is reality, and the miscalculation is the fantastic.
The irony of this writing cuts twice: 1) by way of comparison, like the view of one’s
own
culture from a foreign country, or from another planet, and 2) by displaying the
inherent insanity of any totally coherent system or world. As the gun metaphor
suggests, fantasy is dangerous, and violent. The primary damage is the ideological
subversion described above. As Kafka says elsewhere, the fantastic story reveals the
9 Modernist theorists also disagree about Kafka’s story. Irwin describes the story as an
elaboration on the experienced impossibility of a man becoming a giant bug (81ff.).
Compare Irwin’s remarks on the end of the story (85) to those of Todorov.
Nonetheless,
Irwin cites Todorov’s work with approval (55). In contrast, Hume concludes that
Neither the primitive fear of the healthy toward the maimed nor the
selfish concerns which detach the well members from the sufferer are
admirable, but honest readers will admit their inclination toward these
responses, and hence will empathize [with Gregor’s family]. ... The overall
bleak portrayal of human nature works like a subtractive image. Insofar as
we can agree, even temporarily, it is pleasant to call humanity vermin (96).
10 For example, the well-known extended syllogisms constructed by Lewis Carroll.
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universal inescapability of illusion (The Trial 276).

From the opening pages of “The Metamorphosis,” where Gregor wakes up to
discover his monstrously altered state, the reader is given no reliable cues by which
she
might judge the sequence of events that follow Gregor’s astonishing transformation.
These events include Gregor’s own reactions to his altered body, his sister’s response
to
his transformed state, his family’s increasing well-being (which begins with Gregor’s
transformation), and the episodes with the lodgers. They also include Gregor’s
strangely peaceful death and the highly uncanny (in Freud’s sense of that word)
“family
scene” with which the story closes (compare Todorov,Fantastic 171). The reader not
only does not know what to expect as the story unfolds, but she also does not know
how to interpret Gregor’s and his family’s reactions to each new turn of events. Thus
although one might feel sorry for Gregor or for his family, one cannot truly
empathize,
much less identify, with any of them; they remain foreign (Unheimlich) throughout
the
story.
Rabkin does not discuss Kafka’s story in detail. However, he calls Kafka a
forerunner of the contemporary “worldwide movement toward the fantastic” (180).
Todorov, in contrast, argues at some length that “The Metamorphosis” is an
exemplary
text of a new, twentieth-century literature that has superseded the historical genre of
the fantastic. What this suggests, although he does not use the term, is postmodern
metafictional literature. According to Todorov, Kafka’s story illustrates theinversion
of
the fantastic (Fantastic 173).
[I]t is a contrary movement [to that of the fantastic] which is described:
that ofadaptation. ... Hesitation and adaptation designate two symmetrical
and converse processes (Todorov,Fantastic 171, his emphasis; compare
Bataille 129).
Georges Bataille’s description of Kafka fits Gregor Samsa equally well and also
illustrates Todorov’s notion of adaptation:
[H]e bowed low before an authority who denied him, although his way of
bowing was far more violent than a shouted assertion. He bowed, and as
he bowed, he loved and died, opposing the silence of love and death to
that which could never make him yield, because thenothingness which can
never yield in spite of love and death, is sovereignly what it is (141,
Bataille’s emphasis).
In this new post-fantastic literature, according to Todorov, the modernist
ideology that has both made possible the two poles (the marvelous and the uncanny)
and established their separation has exploded; indeed, there are no longer two poles to
hesitate between. Gregor worries more about being late for work than he does about
his
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drastically altered body, and his sister is not horrified by his new appearance; instead
she is perplexed about what to feed him.
With Kafka, we are thus confronted with a generalized fantastic which
swallows up the entire world of the book and the reader along with it. ...
what in the first world [traditional fantasy] was an exception here becomes the
rule(Todorov, Fantastic 174, his emphases).
However, the differences between Rabkin and Todorov here are not great.
Todorov claims that in literature such as “The Metamorphosis” the hesitation between
the uncanny and the marvelous has itself metamorphosed into paradoxical
identification of each with the other. “The supernatural is given, and yet it does not
cease to seem inadmissible to us” (Fantastic 172). As Walter Benjamin noted, one
tends
to interpret Kafka either theologically (as marvelous) or psychoanalytically (as
uncanny); either Gregor has suffered the effects of a terribly cruel miracle or else he is
profoundly delusional. Benjamin holds that either of these interpretations is in error
(127), but both are necessary.11 “The Metamorphosis” issimultaneously uncanny and
marvelous, and therefore it is neither.
One central theme of “The Metamorphosis” – and nearly all of Kafka’s stories – is
the impossibility of understanding. Gregor’s family is unable to understand him, and
they incorrectly assume – with the singular exception of the charwoman – that he
cannot understand them. To this corresponds the implied reader’s inability to
understand the story – the fantastic hesitation that Todorov describes. What “The
Metamorphosis” is about is the attempt to find out what it is about. As Kafka says in a
different context, “The right perception of any matter and a misunderstanding of the
same matter do not wholly exclude each other” (The Trial 271).12 Gregor Samsa has
become a non-human parasite, and the rational modern space of Gregor’s home has
become something unspeakable,Unheimlich. As in many of Kafka’s stories, the
teleology of meaning has become, like his characters, immobilized and paralyzed.
By the end of “The Metamorphosis,” Gregor’s transformed body, now a corpse,
is swept away with the household garbage. For his family it is as though he never
existed. Kafka’s story likewise must be “eliminated” by the reader; that is, it must be
given a reading, either theological or psychoanalytic. The ideology of modernism
requires that the story yield a meaning – that it reinforce the primacy of reality, in
order
to escape from it. However, postmodern fantasy disrupts and deviates from the
teleology of escape, and the material body of the sign, like Gregor’s body, refuses the
readers’ attempts to possess the story by giving it a meaning.
11 See Todorov,Fantastic 83-84, 159-160, 281-282. Jackson presents a Freudian
analysis of
“The Metamorphosis” (158).
12 Compare Todorov,Fantastic 32; see also Jackson 161.
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CONCLUSION
Kafka’s story makes explicit and places into question the oppositions that are
fundamental to all narrative, and it reveals the unreality inherent in all language. That
which isHeimlich is revealed to beUnheimlich. “The Metamorphosis” shatters the
illusion of meaningful communication between author and reader. Yet is this not what
we must expect if fantastic reversal is itself reversed, as Rabkin says happens in the
genre of fantasy? As a postmodern fantasy, Kafka’s story exposes the material
linguistic
substratum that makes that communication possible and from which the reciprocal
illusions of “author” and “reader” are created. “The Metamorphosis” displays the
incoherence and incompleteness of the written text, neither uncanny nor marvelous,
yet
both uncanny and marvelous.
One purpose of ideologies is to contain and suppress the reversals and
hesitations of fantasy. That fantasy continues to exist and readers recognize it as such
is
due to a partial failure of ideology. However, the survival of fantasy is finally due to
the
fact that ideology itself arises as, and in reaction against, fantasy. The fantastic story
refuses and deconstructs the reader’s ideology, revealing the desire to believe that lies
beneath the reader’s need to interpret the text. Like madness, postmodern fantasy
disrupts and transgresses conventional, “sane” boundaries between things and words,
signifieds and signifiers, present reality and always-fictitious representation. For
postmodernism, fantasy and madness are one; they are both non-sense.
For Todorov, fantasy hesitates between two paradigms. For Rabkin, the fantastic
reversal becomes itself a paradigm, or better, the undoing of every paradigm. Yet both
theories describe a narrative that inevitably must break its own generic boundaries – a
non-genre, an anti-genre. Fantasy presents a puzzle for which there is no correct
solution. For postmodernism, “the genre of fantasy” becomes a misleading expression
for whatever leads the reader to the literary and literal chaos from which all narrative
proceeds and that is prior to and essential to every genre. The disagreement between
Todorov and Rabkin is therefore not about the structure of the fantastic itself, but
rather
it is about the limits of that structure.
Nevertheless, both Rabkin and Todorov remain bound to the ideology of
modernism and the consequent privileging of reality over the fantastic. Perhaps this
indicates that a purely postmodern theory of literature is impossible, for to achieve
such
would require a surpassing and demolishing of this metaphysics. “[E]very narrative
strategy suggests a metaphysical one ... To explore the limits of narrative is to explore
the limits of culture” (Olsen, “Postmodern Narrative” 108). Yet despite these
limitations, both Rabkin and Todorov point toward the place and the role of the
fantastic in the postmodern. If the fantastic can become “normal,” as in “The
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Metamorphosis,” it is because reality itself has become fantastic, as during an age of

intellectual chaos – a postmodern age (Todorov,Fantastic 173).
The impulse behind fantastic postmodern narrative’s strategy of
attempting to respond to textual limits implies our culture’s metaphysical
strategy of attempting to respond to contemporary experience. That
experience is one perceived as continually beyond belief, one of a culture
that perceives itself as undergoing physical and metaphysical erasure
(Olsen, “Postmodern Narrative” 108-109).
In “The Metamorphosis,” the modernist narratives through which we encounter
reality and in terms of which we live our lives are deconstructed and left in pieces,
and
the possibility and desirability of a fantasy that comes true, a realized utopia, is short-
circuited. The reader is not comforted by this story, which resists our ideological
attempts to de-fantasize it (see Jackson 177-179). Postmodern fantasy raises the
ideological questions of who we are and should be, but in a way that does not lead to
easy answers – a way that often leads to no answers at all.
Todorov might say that this is consistent with his claim that metafictional
literature inverts the fantastic hesitation by demolishing the polarity of the uncanny
and
the marvelous. I would argue that this perpetuates fantastic undecidability. It plays out
endlessly what Rabkin calls the reversal of reversal itself, with a rigor in “The
Metamorphosis” (and in many of Kafka’s stories) that is only rarely found
elsewhere.13
This fantastic play or unlimited semiosis cannot be restricted to the literature of the
twentieth century, for it is an ingredient of all literature, and of all language. Fantasy
makes explicit something that is there in all writing, something inherent in the very
technology of writing, although it is commonly suppressed and ignored in the reader’s
desire to find coherent meaning – the desire for ideology.14
13 Others would include the stories of Julio Cortázar and Tommaso Landolfi – plus,
of
course, those of Lewis Carroll; see Deleuze.
14 Derrida,passim. The wholeoeuvre of Derrida, and of Kristeva (and of Roland
Barthes,
whom I have not mentioned) is devoted to the ideological analysis of writing.
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