Based on Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy : The Literature of
Subversion (1981)
Human nature, especially changeable, unstable
as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds
itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds,
until it rends everything asunder, the wall, the
bonds and its very self…
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Fantasy is…….
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______ / Fantasy
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Is fantasy an escape from reality?
Is it the flight of imagination?
Is it the realm where desire is free to express
itself?
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‘appear to be free from many of the
conventions and restraints of more realistic
texts’
they have refused to observe the unities of
time, space and character
they move beyond three dimensionality and
the rigid distinctions between animate and
inanimate objects, self and Other, life and
death.
Literature of the fantastic has been claimed as
‘transcending’ reality, escaping the human
condition and constructing superior alternate,
‘secondary’ worlds.
 Dominant readings of the literature of fantasy
see it as trying to fulfill a desire for a ‘better’
more complete, unified reality.
 It provides vicarious gratification. (vicarious
means ‘experienced in the imagination through
the feelings or actions of another person:
"vicarious pleasure".)
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This transcendentalist approach is part of a
nostalgic, humanistic vision evident in the
romance fictions of C.S Lewis , J.R.R. Tolkein
etc.
All of them look back to a lost moral and
social hierarchy which their fantasies attempt
to recapture and revivify.
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“Fantasy is escapist, and that
is its glory. If a soldier is
imprisoned by the enemy,
don't we consider it his duty to
escape?. . .If we value the
freedom of mind and soul, if
we're partisans of liberty, then
it's our plain duty to escape,
and to take as many people
with us as we can!”
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Source:
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/26219fantasy-is-escapist-and-that-is-its-glory-if-a
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The Literary fantasy is produced in relation to
the authors’ historical, social, economic,
political and sexual determinants.
The literary fantastic is never ‘free’.
The literary fantastic texts protest against
and are generated from the particular
constraints of the culture.
They attempt to compensate for a lack.
This literature of desire seeks that which is
experienced as absence and loss.
Fanstasy can express desire in two ways:
 it can tell of, manifest or show desire
(expression in the sense of portrayal,
representation, manifestation, linguistic
utterance, mention, description)
 or it can expel desire, when this desire is a
disturbing element which threatens cultural
order and continuity (expression in the sense
of pressing out, squeezing, expulsion, getting
rid of something by force).
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Fantastic literature seeks to express/expel the
desire that is outside the dominant value
systems.
It traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture:
that has been silenced, made invisible
covered over and made absent.
The recurrent features of a fantastic narrative therefore
will be movements from the manifestation of desire to
the expulsion of desire.
 The fantastic narrative tells of the impossible attempt to
realize desire, to make visible the invisible and to
discover absence.
 It tells its narrative by using the language of the dominant
order and accepting its norms and through it tries to
unearth its dark side. It tries to open up for a brief
moment, onto disorder, onto illegality, onto that which
lies outside the law, that which is outside the dominant
value system. It is therefore a telling marker of the limits
or boundaries of the dominant order.
 It introduces the ‘unreal’ and sets it against the category
of the ‘real’ – a category which the fantastic interrogates
by its difference. Real/unreal.
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If in fantasy the absence, the unsaid, the
unexpressed desire is expressed and
manifested and excesses of it are expelled,
what do you think happens in the Gothic
genre, which is an off shoot of Fantasy?