By RICARDO IANNACE*

A foray into canonical plots, thanks to which the fantastic, close to reaching three centuries, becomes known and explored

For Nadia Battella Gotlib

“The fantastic force an apparent crust, and therefore reminiscent of the velic point; there is something that touches the shoulder to take us off balance” (Julio Cortázar).

1.

Unusual, sinister, strange and marvelous realism are terms that are close, friendly and, to some extent, congenital to the fantastic. In fact, one question that researchers in this field often ask themselves is: can the fantastic be classified as a genre, subgenre, category, medium or mode of fictional construction?

The designation construction mode is recent and receives the approval of scholars. The literary phenomenon, which finds fertile ground for its development in the short story and novel genres, is engineered from its own grammar; in other words, the poetics that builds such material highlights a concentration of ingredients and a narrative procedure sui generis. To illustrate, it is worth looking at canonical plots, thanks to which the fantastic, close to reaching three centuries, becomes known and explored.

Initially, the reference is to the short story “The Sandman”, by the German ETA Hoffmann (1776-1822), a contemporary writer of JW von Goethe. Written in 1815, the plot became known due to its aesthetic quality and because Sigmund Freud, in 1919, took it as an object of speculation to formulate the essay “Das Unheimliche”, a title that in Portuguese received these translations: “The Strange”, “The Unsettling” and “The Unfamiliar”.

Hoffmann's text contains elements that are at the root of this lineage intentionally characterized by a murky atmosphere, under the guidance of a narrator skilled in the art of impenetrability, without which the receiver might not hesitated — a verb chosen by Tzvetan Todorov to equalize this reader’s reaction. Well: in “The Sandman” resides the figuration of the double, from automaton and uncertainty regarding occurrences announced in the sphere of supernatural; a certain fixed idea is strengthened in the character and achieves the status of psychic anomaly.

Nathaniel's life is filled with unintelligible events. This protagonist, in the exchange of letters with his fiancée and her friend, her brother, senses that his story will be interpreted as a hallucination. According to him, the absurd chain of incidents that literally surrounds him cannot be understood as random events — in the same way that this ambiguous web de-automatizes and invalidates explanations of cognitive magnitude. Episodes from his childhood are jumbled up in his mind, which, in adulthood, reverberate in a stunning way.

First: the legend told by elders to children who disobey the order to go to bed. According to popular belief, an evil man, late at night, approaches children who are reluctant to sleep and throws handfuls of sand into their eyes, which, once detached from their eye sockets and bloodied, are put in a bag and taken to the moon by the evil creature, in order to serve as food for his children, whose beaks resemble those of owls.

Second: Coppelius' occasional nightly visit to Nathaniel's family; for the protagonist, the hideous-looking lawyer is nothing less than the sandman. Late at night, the sinister individual carries out alchemical experiments, locked up with the boy's father in the office — the space where the accident responsible for the death of the head of the house occurs.

Third: the appearance of the Italian Giuseppe Coppola, a surname whose spelling (note the duplication) mirrors the consonants and vowel of the other, called Coppelius. He is an optician, selling barometers and lenses.

In fact, Hoffmann's story presents a combination of surprising events. In the paragraphs preceding the epilogue, with the scene of Nathaniel's fatal fall from a tower, when it was believed that he had overcome his psychological crisis (detail: from above, he saw Coppola in the square), the boy's insane passion for the young Olímpia, daughter of Professor Spalanzani, takes place; later, the lover discovers that the girl was a wooden doll (her eyes are gouged out by the merchant Coppola — also a manufacturer of artificial artifacts — when he has a disagreement with the professor who designed the android). In short, Hoffmann's text, in its economy, eclipses the reasons for the character's exceptional fortune.

2.

It should be noted that the unusual ambiance, in itself, does not hold up as a signature of the fantastic (especially of the primeval, classical fantastic). More is needed: under a certain thick fog, the double, androgyny, necrophilia and the emergence of pathologies, in addition to moving statues, mechanical devices with human gestures or humans with mechanical movement, are in close alliance. In fact, these narratives of European origin, which came to light at the end of the 18th century and gained strength in the 19th century, disseminating among nations, began to discredit Enlightenment rationalism and Cartesianism, contradicting the doctrine of truths.

These constructs are adapted to the Romantic school. Remember that the fantastic finds a home in the Gothic spirit and works to consolidate this aesthetic perspective that branches out into the nineteenth-century movement; after all, devices such as insanity, dreamlike states, mystery, grotesqueness and death appear in the works. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), an American author to whom we owe the legacy of horror and the ghostly, stands out as an icon of this literary trend. The short story “William Wilson” symbolizes this ideology.

Published in 1839, Poe’s text deals with the phenomenon of the double in an unparalleled way. The narrator, positioned in the first person, gravely records the dishonor that weighs upon him, arising from early-onset moral vices. As soon as he is admitted to boarding school, he discovers the existence of a fellow student with the same name as him and identical appearance: “I tell you, if we had been brothers, we should have been twins (…); and be astonished as I am: after I left school, I happened to learn that my namesake was born on the 19th of January, 1813, precisely the date of my birth.” (Poe, 1996, pp. 112-3).

To a spiral of convergent data — the “same name, the same features, the same day of arrival at school” and of leaving the institution —, there is added the tense coexistence and rivalry between the William Wilsons (note, by the way, the resonance of these morphemes). The character testifies, in peremptory and interrogative rhetoric: “My walk, my voice, my customs, my gestures! Could all this be the result of mere imitation?” (Idem, p. 115). In this story, the irrefutable similarity lies in the bosom of the fantastic, in the twilight of the gothic and horror. The double pursues him, whispers to him and, in the presence of strangers, denounces the fraudulent actions of the (anti-)hero. There are references in the story to secret meetings with gambling, night dances with fancy dress, masks and drunkenness; there is a duel and murder. The being constituted as a replica, facsimile (who also has a voice that is confused with the narrator's conscience), is murdered in a large, mirrored hall.

Freud’s essay predates the narrative “William Wilson”; if the Austrian psychoanalyst had known it, he would certainly have included it in his propositions on the double. “Das Unheimliche” is an intricate reading of Nathaniel’s disturbing world. Freudian analysis reveals a cartography of shadows in Hoffmann’s writing, shedding light on the paternal image and infantile castration.

The good father (family maintainer and protector) and the bad father (Coppola, sandman) unfold, respectively, in the persona of Professor Spalanzani and the synthetic eye salesman. And the Oedipal conflict, given the unsuccessful relationship between Nathaniel and the female subject, echoes in the duet Clara (the bride) and Olímpia (the automaton). The psychoanalyst also warns that the doll toy — culturally offered to children — acts on the fantasy in a unique way, because, for those who go through a tender age, the identifying concept of animate and inanimate bodies is often expressed in a blurred way.

In “Das Unheimliche” it is recorded that a doctor named E. Jentsch had carried out an introductory study on the unsettling (which seems to work as start to Freudian reflections on the subject). Jentsch uses the phrase “intellectual uncertainty” to convey the strange feeling, but the writer Friedrich Schelling goes further: it is “[…] everything that should have remained secret, hidden, but appeared."(apud Freud, 2010, p. 337).

Freud, in turn, sums it up appropriately: “[…] this unheimlich is not really something new or alien, but something long familiar to the psyche, which only through the process of repression has become alienated from it.” (Freud, 2010, p. 360). The thinker from Vienna does not ignore the work of his friend and compatriot, the psychoanalyst, Otto Rank — Der Doppelganger (1914) [The double: A psychoanalytic study]. This is an initial research that was developed and published in book form in 1925; it is, to this day, a reference for all who scrutinize the fantastic and its surroundings.

Rank's inferences contemplate universal literati. Hans Christian Andersen, Fyodor Dostoevsky, including Hoffmann, Poe and others whose narratives glimpsed the double and the shadow, are incisively recovered. The researcher is prodigious in his references to regional communities, taboos and myths (“[…] It is a widespread custom in Austria, throughout Germany and also among the southern Slavic countries, to perform the following test on New Year’s Eve and Christmas Eve: whoever, when the light is turned on, does not cast a shadow on the wall of the room or whose shadow does not have a head, will die within a year.” [Rank, 2014, position 762] / “[…] Some people still take their sick people to the sun to attract back, with their shadow, the soul that is about to depart.” [Idem, position 800]) — that is, a mosaic studded with superstitions and obituary flashes comes to the fore in this study. Note: the summary that throughout History is stratified on the fantastic delves into several of these sources.

3.

Given the voluminous material on the nature and aspects of the fictional strand discussed here, a theoretical-critical approach is necessary; in truth, postulates become more enlightening when presented simultaneously with works to which they shed light. First, Todorov is mentioned.

Em Introduction to fantasy literature (1970), the Bulgarian historian, guided by a systematizing vision, in the style of structuralism, selects and comments on a series of narratives of unusual verve, describing them as a genre. This raises controversy: by establishing, taxonomically, countless typologies, he offers some of them a fragile conceptualization; however, it does not seem fair to ignore that, as a whole, Todorov's arguments contain plausibility. See: “'I almost believed': this is the formula that summarizes the spirit of the fantastic.” (Todorov, 1992, p. 36). And further: “The reader's hesitation is therefore the first condition of the fantastic.” (Idem, p. 37). It is declared: “there are fantastic narratives in which all fear is absent […]. Fear is often linked to the fantastic but not as a necessary condition.” (Idem, p. 41).

Among Todorov’s assessments, these are quite categorical: “There is a qualitative difference between the personal possibilities that a 168th-century author had and those of a contemporary author.” (Idem, p. 169). Because, in addition to the fact that the fiction related to James Joyce’s millennium is mostly bold in verbal experimentalism — the word flirting with itself, in turbulent, ruffled syntax —, there is the fact that psychoanalysis has replaced “(and therefore makes useless) fantasy literature. There is no need today to resort to the devil to talk about excessive sexual desire, nor to vampires to designate the attraction exerted by corpses: psychoanalysis, and the literature that, directly or indirectly, is inspired by it, deal with all of this in undisguised terms.” (Idem, p. XNUMX).

Although the intrigues “Casa Tomada” by Julio Cortázar (1914-1984) and “Funes, the Memorable” by Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) are not the subject of investigation in Todorov’s essays, they seem exemplary in terms of the “neutrality” of fear. The two prose writers, along with Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Rulfo and other Hispanic-Americans of the XNUMXth century, stand out in their respective countries as paradigmatic of the tree of literature of extraordinary scope. Sometimes, the texts display diction related to genuine fantasy, but — without exception — they ring like typical compositions of marvelous realism.

Regarding these specificities and boundaries, it is worth paying attention to Irlemar Chiampi’s statements: “The fantastic is content to fabricate false hypotheses […], without offering the reader anything other than uncertainty […].” (Chiampi, 1980, p. 56). It is understood that, in “wonderful tales (with or without fairies), there is no such thing as the impossible, nor is there any scandal of reason: carpets fly, hens lay golden eggs, horses talk, dragons kidnap princesses, princes turn into frogs and vice-versa. […] Thus, while in realistic narratives causality is explicit (that is: there is continuity between cause and effect) and in fantasy it is questioned (it appears through the falsification of explanatory hypotheses), in marvelous narratives it is simply absent.” (Idem, p. 60).

In between, “[…] the internal ('magical') causality of marvelous realism is the factor of a metonymic relationship between the data of the diegesis […]; to the helpless and terrified reader due to the escape from the sense of the fantastic, the sense is restored: faith in the transcendence of an extra-natural state, in meta-empirical laws” (Chiampi, 1980, p. 61); which is why the “characters of marvelous realism are never disconcerted by the supernatural, nor do they moralize the nature of the unusual event.” (Idem, p. 61).

In “Casa Tomada” (1946), the narrator presents himself as a middle-aged man who lives with his sister Irene; methodical, they are the only occupants of the property inherited from the family. Fate did not grant either of them the joy or the bitterness of marriage; instead, in this consanguineous union, each one begins to care for the other and to take extra care of the large house. The story is not in tune with narratives guided by fear: the uneasiness is mild, if compared to the oblique stories of the XNUMXth century (neither from the arena of verisimilarity, nor from the orbit of marvelous realism, nor even from the latitude of the pure fantasy — this plot of Cortázar’s is situated in the intermezzo).

The peaceful routine of the brothers, who are so attached to their home, is destroyed when they both start hearing rumors from inside (he, absorbed in books and the stamp collection left by his father; she, busy with kitchen chores and sewing). To protect themselves, they decide to block off the rooms, preventing access to the rooms and, by extension, communication between the rooms; with this decision, the owners are crammed into the house day after day.

Until, one night, they escape from the house: “[…] I put my arm around Irene’s waist (I think she was crying) and we went out into the street like that. Before leaving, I felt sorry for her, I closed the front door tightly and threw the key into the drain.” (Cortázar, 1971, p. 18). Paraphrasing Todorov, it would be reasonable to consider that the contemporary reader would hardly assimilate the noises mentioned in the plot as manifestations of souls from the other world, or something similar.

The strangeness that is aroused slips into far from chimerical questions. There are signs in the plot that Irene and the protagonist had lived an incestuous experience: “[…] We entered our forties with the inexpressible idea that our simple and silent marriage of siblings was the necessary end of the genealogy founded by our great-grandparents in our home.” (Cortázar, 1971, p. 11). As it spreads, the inclement acoustics burst forth as self-censorship, obsessing them.

In the literature courses that Cortázar taught, he preferred to remain silent rather than bring to light the metaphorical intentions of his writings. He reserved the last minutes of classes to interact with students who were hopeful of obtaining the passwords that would decode his work from the master. However, the Argentine author’s answers were, in these circumstances, evasive: “[…] in my case, fantastic stories were often born from dreams, especially nightmares. One of the stories most studied by critics, for which they sought endless interpretations, is a short story called ‘Casa toma’.” (Cortázar, 2018, p. 67). He reiterates: “[…] in the nightmare I was alone and in the story I became a couple of siblings who live in a house where a fantastic event occurs.” And this “story follows the nightmare exactly.” (Idem, p. 67).

“Funes, the Memorable” (1942) is a narrative that also resists an orthodox concept of fantasy and marvelous realism. The unusual is present in the description given to the title character and the setting that surrounds him. After being thrown by a horse, Ireneo Funes becomes paralyzed and remains a recluse. One day, in a shadowy wing of his house, the 19-year-old welcomes the narrator for a conversation.

If the figure of this smoker with an indigenous physiognomy carries something sinister (as are his unusual tone of voice and way of looking—there are hints of fantasy literature here), what can we say about Funes’ biological nature? It emerges on par with the instance of marvelous realism, given that the young man has an unparalleled, superhuman memory and perceptive faculty. In the act of falling, “he lost consciousness; when he recovered it, the present was almost intolerable, so rich and clear, and so were the oldest and most trivial memories.” (Borges, 2007, p. 104). In fact, his innate and, no less, exceptional predicates would have expanded incredibly. The “memories were not simple; each visual image was linked to muscular, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all dreams, all half-dreams.” (Idem, p.105).

In the dialogue between the character and the narrator on the occasion of the collection, from Funes's residence, of books in Latin that had been lent to him, we discover how much he had memorized Cicero's language in a short space of time. That night, he confides: “I alone have more memories than all men have had since the world began. [...] My memory, sir, is like a heap of rubbish.” (Idem, p. 105). In the plot, such a prodigy is never open to scientific questioning: there is, naturally, an embarkation into the disproportionate universe of the young man who stores (“In Funes’ cluttered world there were nothing but details, almost immediate.” [Idem, p. 108]). It is known, shortly after, that he dies of pulmonary congestion.

The portrait of this abnormality of ontological origin emerges from Borges's fabric. A parenthesis: taking into account the differences, the story by the author from Buenos Aires presents a situation analogous to that which Franz Kafka (1883-1924), in 1915, triggers in To metamorphose (zoomorphology — as it is allegorized in the pages of the Austro-Hungarian writer — is not questioned by the cast of the novel; in other words: the event itself of the transfiguration of the traveling salesman does not require questions). Otherwise, the anomalies of the young Ireneo Funes and Gregor Samsa would enjoy prominence in the works. Todorov and Irène Bessière have spoken out about Kafka's plot.

The critic points out: “What has become of the narrative of the supernatural in the 1992th century? Let us take the most famous text that can undoubtedly be included in this category: Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’.” In it, “the most surprising thing is precisely the lack of surprise in the face of this unheard-of event […].” (Todorov, 177, p. 178). As for the family’s behavior, “there is initially surprise but no hesitation […].” (Idem, p. 182). In short, this is “the difference between the classic fantasy tale and Kafka’s narratives: what was an exception in the first world becomes a rule here.” (Idem, XNUMX). Bessière says: To metamorphose, “the question posed is not 'What have I become?', 'What happened to me?'. It is interesting to note that the consciousness of the insect-man was not altered and that only the enigma of the event matters.” (Bessière, 2009, p. 06). That is, “the enigma matters”, not the “event” stricto sensu.

The French essayist, in “Le récit fantastique: forme mixte du cas et de la devinette” [“The fantastic story: mixed form of the case and the riddle”], introductory chapter of her book Le récit fantastique: la poétique de l'incertain (1974), finds in the intersection of two discursive genres the inspiration to support his concept of fantasy literature — he therefore takes the position of /// (report) and the he guesses (riddle). Based on the work Simple shapes (1930), by André Jolles, the author chooses two — among the many — text structures that Jolles discussed.

Consider the intelligent assertions of the Dutch linguist about this encrypted piece: “[…] the true and only purpose of the riddle is not the solution, but the resolution.” (Jolles, 1976, p. 116). It “is multivocal. The first solution hides and contains a second; nor does it reveal its deepest secret […]; ‘authentic’ riddles do not have univocal solutions […].” (Idem, p. 125). Bessière, in this guideline, links the cunning of the retelling with the sphinx syntagm. And he asserts: “[…] in the fantastic story, the impossibility of the solution results from the presence of the demonstration of all possible solutions.” (Bessière, 2009, p. 12).

4.

Regarding the fantastic that flows into the 20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre's insight is also acute. In a text about the narrative aminatedb (1942), by Maurice Blanchot, he brings it closer to Kafka's work (the comparison is not made with To metamorphose, and yes with The process e The castle). For the philosopher of existentialism, whether in French or Czech fiction, “[…] there is only one fantastic object: man.” (Sartre, 2005, p. 138).

That is: “No succubi, no ghosts, no weeping fountains […]” (Sartre, 2005, p. 139) — but the presence, in an eminently bureaucratized constellation, of a “labyrinth of corridors, doors, stairs that lead to nothing” (Idem, p. 141). Behold, the “utensils, the acts, the ends, everything is familiar to us, and we are in such an intimate relationship with them that we barely notice them; but at the very moment when we feel ourselves involved with them in a warm atmosphere of organic sympathy, they are presented to us in a cold and strange light.” (Idem, p. 145).

In Brazilian literature, components of the fantastic, in the nineteenth century, spread through plots by renowned authors (Machado de Assis and Aluísio Azevedo were some of them); in the nineteenth century, Monteiro Lobato and Cornélio Penna experimented with the formula, and, later, several others: Érico Veríssimo, Bernardo Élis, Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, Lygia Fagundes Telles. However, two writers produced, in this genealogy, plots that consolidate themselves as projects of fantastic scope: José J. Veiga and Murilo Rubião. In them, the unusual takes into account the idiosyncrasy and that human reference to which Sartre points in the novels of Maurice Blanchot and Franz Kafka.

In the prose of Murilo Rubião (1916-1991), the routine that suffocates the characters is the same one that triggers a network of absurdities: construction workers, based in a skyscraper, watch the tower grow regardless of the orders of the engineer responsible for the construction; an innocuous line, formed by anonymous individuals, expands aimlessly over the course of the hours; a wife gains excessive weight, getting fat in proportion to the extravagant requests made to her husband; and a woman becomes pregnant without consummating the sexual act, giving birth at a disorderly rate and at a frantic pace.

These and other stories are organized in the then synthetic language of the short story writer obsessed with the exercise of rewriting, mimicking, in this enunciation, such feats of exorbitant and magical altitude. The parallelism that critics draw between Rubião and Kafka when they examine the misfortunes of heroes besieged in a valley of misunderstandings, or rather, heroes whose stumbles do not lead to any solution, is not gratuitous.

Acid humor, penetrating irony and lyricism, combined with the laborious task that sparkles the editorial process of obscurity, thus emerge in the author's work. The guest. Rubião once testified: “— I have never worried about giving an ending to my stories. Using ambiguity as a fictional means, I try to fragment my stories as much as possible, to give the reader the certainty that they will continue indefinitely, in an indestructible cyclical repetition.” (Ponce, 1974, p. 4).

Therein lies one of the capital features of contemporary fantastic, as nominated by Spanish critic David Roas, when he unraveled it in the wake of what Argentine Jaime Alazraki calls neo-fantastic — that is, an aesthetic-verbal construction devoid of the intention of provoking fear (as Todorov anticipated), laureated by metaphors that demand greater proximity between the citizens of the present time and the concrete world, staggering in the macrosphere of irresolutions that envelops them.

The word in flux, with its vanishing points, its gaps and fractures, plays this game – if not, this mirror of simulacra. [I]

*Ricardo Iannace He is a professor of communication and semiotics at the Faculty of Technology of the State of São Paulo and of the Postgraduate Program in Comparative Studies of Portuguese Language Literatures at FFLCH-USP. Author, among other books, of Murilo Rubião and the architectures of the fantastic (edusp). [https://amzn.to/3sXgz77]

References

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______. “The fantastic story: a mixed form of case and riddle” [Trans. Biagio D'Ângelo and Maria Rosa Duarte de Oliveira]. Fronteiraz: Revista Digital, vol. 3, n. 3, September 2009. Available here. Accessed on: 11 Jan. 2024.

BORGES, Jorge Luis. Fictions. Translated by David Arrigucci Jr. New York: Routledge, 2007.

CESERANI, Remus. the fantastic. Trans. Nilton Cezar Tridapalli. Curitiba: Ed. UFPR, 2006.

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CORTAZAR, Julio. bestiary. Translated by Remy Gorga Filho. London: Expression and Culture Publishing House, 1971.

_____. “Of the feeling of the fantastic”. In: cronopio suitcase. Translated by David Arrigucci Jr. and João Alexandre Barbosa. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1993.

_____. Literature classes. Berkeley, 1980. Trans. Fabiana Camargo. Rio de Janeiro: Civilization Brasil, 2018.

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GAMA-KHALIL, Marisa Martins. “Fantastic — mode”. In: REIS, Carlos; ROAS, David; FURTADO, Filipe; GARCÍA, Flavio; FRANÇA, Júlio (Eds.). Digital dictionary of the fictional unusual (e-DDIF). 2nd ed.. Rio de Janeiro: Dialogarts, 2022. Accessed on: January 12, 2024.

GARCÍA, Flavio. “Unusual fiction”. In: REIS, Carlos; ROAS, David; FURTADO, Filipe; GARCÍA, Flavio; FRANÇA, Júlio (Eds.). Digital dictionary of the fictional unusual (e-DDIF). 2nd ed. Rio de Janeiro: Dialogarts, 2022. Accessed on: January 12, 2024.

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JOLLES, Andrew. Simple shapes. Legend, saga, myth, riddle, saying, case, memorable, tale, joke. Translated by Álvaro Cabral. São Paulo: Cultrix, 1976.

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POE, Edgar Allan. Extraordinary Stories by Allan Poe. Trans. Clarice Lispector. 9th ed. Rio de Janeiro: Ediouro, 1996.

PONCE, J. A. de Granville. “The fantastic Murilo Rubião”. In: RUBIÃO, Murilo. The pyrotechnician Zacarias. Sao Paulo: Attica, 1974.

RANK, Otto. The double. A Psychoanalytic Study. Trans. Erica SLF Schultz et al. Porto Alegre: Dublinense, Digital edition: 2014.

ROAS, David. The threat of the fantastic. Theoretical Approaches. Translated by Julian Fuks. New York: Routledge, 2014.

RUBIÃO, Murilo. collected tales. Sao Paulo: Attica, 1998.

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Note

[I] This text, under the title “Fantástico: breviary”, was originally published in USP Magazine, No. 140, in March 2024, in the dossier Entertainment literature – Mass culture and reflection: an overview of contemporary literary genres (Organized by Jean Pierre Chauvin).

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