Fantastic Realities
To fuse any anti-realistic narration within a hazy notion arbitrarily named “the fantastic"
- or optionally “fantasy” - is obviously counter-productive, for it does not allow us to interpret
specific narrative occurrences in their own right, but rather forces us to receive and understand
Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland in the same manner as we do Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror.
There is such a thing as a fantastic narration, perfectly distinguishable from its immediate
neighbors, and exemplified by an identifiable corpus, notwithstanding the usual intersections
we may encounter from time to time between different narrative modes.4 To put it succinctly,
since this essay is about Richard Matheson and The Twilight Zone and not about defining
narrative modes,5 the fantastic is the product of the clash between two theoretically antithetical
and mutually exclusive semiotic codes, that of reality and that of the supernatural; the fantastic
occurs when the unexplainable - and not simply the unexplained - appears amidst a highly
identifiable reality, which, due to its mundane and unremarkable characteristics could be
construed as “hyper-reality,” and which becomes one of the terms of the narrative conflict. As
shown by previous research (Ferreras Savoye, 1995, 2003, 2014) the characters and the
situations of fantastic narrations tend to be highly common, when not decidedly uninteresting,
hence without any inherent narrative authority; only the irruption of the supernatural element
will justify the attention of the receptor as well as the existence of the narration itself. The
fantastic is the only Occidental narrative mode6 the structure of which relies upon the binary
opposition between a collectively accepted notion of reality and one or several elements that
defy it, and whose syntagmatic progression feeds upon the epistemological conflict it creates
by suggesting the possibility of the impossible. Whereas the marvelous in all its forms, from
mythologies to fairy tales to modern fantasy - from Perseus to the Sleeping Beauty to Flash
Gordon and Conan - implies the existence of a different reality, subjected to its own laws, the
4 The term “mode” appears to be more precise than “genre," which refers to at least three different parameters:
format (novel/short story), narrative mode (realism/marvelous) and narrative category (detective novels/romance
novels).
5 For a more precise structural definition of the modern fantastic mode as well as of its historical and cultural
evolution, please see Ferreras Savoye, 2014.
6 The modem fantastic is born out of the one-dimensional perception of reality that takes hold of European and
Anglo-American consciousness after the Enlightenment and throughout the Industrial revolution, and hence
corresponds to very specific historical and geographical contexts; to apply the sam e parameters of analysis to
other continents’ literary and narrative productions would be openly disregarding the very circumstances that
prompted its inception and favored its evolution to this day, for, contrary to the affirmation Todorov m ade in his
venerable Introduction £ la littGrature fantastique, the fantastic does not disappear at the beginning of the 20th
Century (174-175), nor has it been replaced by Freudian psychoanalysis (168-169).
48