SOURCE: Apter, T. E. “Introduction: Fantasy and Psychoanalysis.” In Fantasy Literature: An Approach to Reality, pp. 1-11. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1982.

[In the following essay, Apter explores the role and significance of fantasy in literature, contending that psychoanalytic theory offers a useful means of studying the unique difficulties posed by fantasy literature.]

The aim and purpose of fantasy in literature are not necessarily different from those of the most exacting realism. What is called ‘truth’ in fiction is often hypothetical: if a character has certain traits, then one is likely to find, or enlightened by finding in him, other, related traits; also, if a character has certain traits then his actions and responses are already to some extent circumscribed. Yet hypotheses in fiction, however ‘realistic’, must be imaginative as well as plausible. At each state in the work the artist is faced with choices and decisions that may not have been foreseen at a previous stage. The ‘truth’ of fiction is attributable not only to the integration of character traits, the balance of motives, the consequences of actions and the development of events, but also to the ways in which new plausibilities are spotted, and the ways in which the artist's decisions create possibilities which throw light on various characters, their motives, or their conditions. Truth in fiction is not a study of probabilities but a utilisation and discovery of both possibilities and plausibilities to make points about what is probably our world.

As practised readers of fiction we can gauge the point and legitimacy of conclusions drawn from fantastic as well as from realistic premises. For example, when Gregor Samsa wakes to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect, then his and his family's subsequent behaviour reveals a great deal about Gregor's pre-insectile state and thus justifies Kafka's use of the implausible premise. The fantastic circumstances can be viewed as an economical and effective means of revealing characters' interests and emotions which would be disguised or modified in surroundings well ordered by comfort or custom; in this way they would be seen to have the same purpose as the realist's plot.

Alternatively, though not exclusively, the fantastic tale may be read as an allegory, with the literal story seen as a hieroglyph recording a previously established truth. The fantastic occurrences, setting, or characters will not tax the reader's credulity for they will be treated as systematic representations, with the particular quality of their strangeness commenting in various ways upon the ideas represented.

These suggestive readings make fantasy respectable and manageable, but they are obviously inadequate. If fantasy is a story proceeding logically from a fantastic premise, then the bizarre expectations it arouses and its peculiar brand of reasoned confusion are ignored. If the mental acrobatics of the fantasist are treated as allegories, then their revolutionary constructions are ignored. In either case fantasy becomes inessential to the work's themes and ideas, however appropriate it may be to their presentation. My aim in this book is to discuss the methods and achievements of fantasy in the modern novel and story, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Jorge Luis Borges, and to show how and why fantasy is essential to the authors' various purposes, which must be understood not as an escape from reality but as an investigation of it. The works discussed here are different from the fairy tale, myth or saga which are either enacted in a world separated from ours spatially or temporally (in a ‘Never-never land’ or ‘Once upon a time’), or which are imaginative, emblematic histories. The respective metamorphoses of Jove and the Beast are very different from Gregor Samsa's because, however wonderful, they occur within the laws of their mythic or enchanted settings. Gregor Samsa's transformation obviously breaks natural laws: if the tale is not understood as occuring within our world it loses its point. However, at the same time that Gregor's transformation defies nature and logic, it reveals an unexpected order which indubitably belongs to our world. Recognition is puzzling not only because it is disturbing but also because of the strangely literal language fantasy employs and the difficulty in marking out that area of thought, response and perception which is thereby realistically described.

At the heart of fantasy in modern fiction is the uncertainty as to which world the tale belongs—to this one, or to a very different one? The central query is unlike Hamlet's uncertainty as to the status of the ghost—an illusion, a demon, an angel, his dead father?—and unlike, too, the query in The Turn of the Screw—are the ghosts hallucinated or are they spectres which could, in principle, be seen by others? The problematic fantasies in Hawthorne, Conrad, Hoffmann, Kafka, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Nabokov and Borges cannot be isolated within a generally stable world, nor can answers as to the status of the fantasies solve the questions they raise. Even if Gogol's madman or Dostoevsky's Golyadkin or Hoffmann's Nathanael have got things wrong, their beliefs, expectations and perceptions persist in commenting upon this world. The impact of fantasy rests upon the fact that the world presented seems to be unquestionably ours, yet at the same time, as in a dream, ordinary meanings are suspended. Everything proliferates with potential meanings and becomes a potential danger. Even when a mistake is seen to be made, the fear is not mitigated. The ideas, objects and situations remain hedged round with baffling associations. All reassurance or reprieve is illusory in face of the anxiety arising from the knowledge that the familiar can take on, and tends to take on, strange and threatening forms.

The discontinuity of image and pattern essential to fantasy defies the systematic representations of allegory. More strongly, the fantasist's terms should not be read wholly metaphorically, however allusive they may be, for the function of metaphor is to persuade the audience that one thing can be seen as another, thereby revealing new aspects of either term. The poet, or any master-metaphorist, invites us to change, even to take risks with our perceptions, but the fantasist has already passed beyond warning signs into the danger area. However figurative his language, there is no ‘vehicle’ or ‘tenor’, no means of finding the way back to original terms. Metaphor makes it possible to employ extreme and original language without being lost among strange representations. One term can be considered in the light of another without losing its identity. Or, if a term does come, by way of metaphor, either to lose its original meaning or to have its meaning extended, the initial metaphoric thrust is subdued by common usage and the new use of the term becomes another example of the strongly metaphoric tendency of language itself; it now registers rather than challenges prevailing presuppositions and associations. The fantasist's metaphors, however, combine the conflation of vehicle and tenor with strange and new associations; figurative language becomes the only means of making literal assertions, for ordinary meanings fragment, expand, splinter, either because some new, unknown order prevails, or because the former order functions haphazardly or piecemeal. Thus the fantasist must piece together a new language.

Coleridge's well-known distinction between Fancy and Imagination, in which the former capacity creates an artefact whose elements are, though assembled, distinct and unintegrated, whereas the later creates a product whose elements are mutually dependent and richly, perhaps interminably allusive, bears no reference to the qualities of fantasy, for though ‘fantasy’ is sometimes shortened to ‘fancy’ the two terms generally have a different use. Nonetheless fantasy is frequently contrasted with imagination in ways which parallel Coleridge's distinction. Fantasy is unconscious, uncontrolled, highly personal, and its products lack integration or generality or balance. Here fantasy is linked to the day dream, to easy solutions, to egoism and escapism, in contrast with the reality-testing imagination. Nor do all slights upon fantasy bear this post-Freudian stamp. Fantasy is frequently linked to mistaken or misguided beliefs and perceptions, or to specifically unrealistic characteristics. Mercutio describes his vision of Queen Mab as dreams

Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy;
Which is as thin of substance as the air,
And more inconstant than the wind,(1)

though Shakespeare's use of Mercutio's speech to register the grotesque forces within Romeo's ecstasy challenges the character's dismissal.

In the sense in which fantasy is contrasted with imagination, it may lead to non-fantastic as easily as to fantastic creations. Though it is postulated as a mental activity its mark in artistic products is artistic poverty of a special kind. The work crippled by fantasy in this sense attempts crude satisfactions of personal desires, seeking simple solutions rather than resolutions to problems; or it may reveal idiosyncratic and unpersuasive associations, or tediously harp upon personal anger, or fail to communicate its meaning. This use of ‘fantasy’ is obviously different from the characterisation of fantasy literature, though there are similarities which justify the use of the same term.

Fantasy literature employs associations which are like idiosyncratic associations. Initially their strangeness may appear to be incoherent, and thus either dead to allusion or triggering off wayward, inconclusive strings of allusion. The fragmented perception, the mingling of trivial and gargantuan meanings, the anxious and inept quest for certainty, bear the mark of egoism, not only because their emphasis is on personal fear but also because the difficulties seem to arise from some flaw within the ego. There is often the impression, too, as in the case of literature impeded by fantasy, that fantasy in literature emerges from unconscious beliefs and has as its aim the satisfaction of unconscious desires. Moreover, in its display of dream characteristics, fantasy literature is peculiarly susceptible to psychoanalytic interpretations of dreams. In bearing the mark of unconscious processes—timelessness, fragmentation, mutual contradiction, exaggeration, distortion, displacement, condensation—it tempts the critic to read such literature as an exhibition of unconscious processes. The structure of fantasy literature often leaves the impression that the work has not been executed under conscious control, for many fine fantasy tales are not ‘well wrought urns’ but ungainly forms, with proliferations and fragmentations of theme and cruelly unresolved conclusions. Frequently the vitality of the fantasist's representations arises from abrasiveness and imbalance; the impact of fantasy seems to depend upon unresolved and disguised emotions.

Psychoanalytic theory, so adept at defying absurdity, is a plausible aid to interpretation of this difficult and dubious genre. Yet the special fascination psychoanalysis holds here must be ‘placed’ in the context of a criticism of fantasy literature which distinguishes between impediment by fantasy and the achievements of fantasy. The unconscious material utilised in fantasy literature is that which is ordinarily controlled by ordinary language and presuppositions essential to normal functioning. Fantasy is the means by which such material is exposed and investigated. Only in creating new associations and expectations can language set to work in this area. The characteristics fantasy shares with unconscious processes do not necessarily indicate artistic impediment.

In the Convivio Dante defined Fantasia as the representation of the intellect's dream, and though his use of fantasy as ‘visionary imagination’ is now archaic, a link between fantasy and dream seems inescapable. Yet for Dante the dream had a respectability which the modern dream lacks. Dante's dream belonged to the intellect. Its revelatory power stemmed from the fact that it was controlled, systematic, abstract. The modern conception of dream can be viewed as a development of the Romantic dream which is product of faculties in opposition to the intellect. The Romantics's dream, too, provided enlightenment, but in a somewhat disreputable and rebellious fashion in contrast to the prevailing esteem for reason. The Romantics sought the strange and exciting within themselves and were stimulated by the assumption that dream would disclose baffling and powerful inner forces. Psychoanalysis, in regard to its emphasis on beliefs and desires inadmissable to consciousness, and on the role of the irrational in the determination of human behaviour, can be viewed as an outgrowth of the Romantic glorification of emotion and impulse, for Romantic artists valued irrational influences, however controlled their imaginations in fact were.

The psychoanalytic treatment of the dream differs in an important respect from that of the Romantics, for the means by which psychoanalysis endorses the unconscious and its fantasies are also the means by which it derides them. In insisting that dreams and products of the imagination, especially those products characterised as fantastic, have significance, that even the most bizarre and apparently nonsensical mental creations have meaning, psychoanalytic theory endorses these products; but in explicating their meaning in terms of unconscious sexual fantasies attributable variously to the artist, his characters or his audience, their point and purpose is trivialised. The fantasist's use of distortion, his defiance of logic and of time, his sensitivity to ill-defined and highly personal forces, his use of fragmenting and fusing personalities is granted meaning but deprived of its artistic purpose. Psychoanalytic interpretation tends to constrict language within the sphere of unconscious personal or human history, forcing its references back to repressed desires and discarded beliefs despite its desperate attempts to delineate human reality.

Responses to psychoanalytic interpretation are ambivalent. Fantasy now is not only respectable but fashionable. Any fantasy, from folk and fairy tales to science fiction and children's tales, is valued as an introduction to unconscious material. The ‘depth’ of the unconscious as a metaphoric placing in the psychic structure is associated with depth in the sense of profundity. Any image or tale amenable to psychoanalytic interpretation is treated as meaningful in the strong, poetic sense. With Jung's help, the possibility that fantastic ideas are as susceptible to platitude as intellectual ones is usually ignored.

However, common sense and a little experience tell us that fantasy literature varies enormously not only in quality but in purpose. In both old and modern fairy stories fantasy provides the thread of reason which can restore peace and harmony. Fantasy offers escape from reality, but the purpose and effect of the escape ranges from wish-fulfilment, excitement or sheer entertainment, to release from habitual assumptions, thus providing a vantage point from which new possibilities can be realised. In most fairy tales fantasy implements hope, opening up the possibility of resolving even the most recalcitrant defeats and fears. Tolkien, in his essay ‘On Fairy Stories’, describes the fairy tale as a means of setting free needs and desires, confirming the validity of their pursuit and fulfilment, presenting the recovery of fragmented or lost desires, and thus also offering consolation. In the modern novels and stories discussed in this book fantasy also serves as a means of escaping from habitual assumptions and expectations, but the purpose of this escape is to show how awful, how limiting and imprisoning, the human world is. Fantasy discovers and aggravates disintegraton. It is not a means of consolation and recovery but of registering losses and fears. Thus such fantasy is predominately ‘negative’ in that it does not resolve problems but rather magnifies them. To expect a more ‘positive’ or optimistic message would be to ignore the very issues which fantasy differentiates from the ordinarily bland mass of perceptions, desires and expectations.

Fantasy provides a point of vantage from which we are shown the gaps in our knowledge. Such gaps impede self-realisation because they make predictions, and the decisions which are based upon predictions, impossible. Unable to act responsibly, we feel subject to a variety of forces. The impediments to self-realisation become humiliations. The self feels responsible for its ignorance and confusion, indeed for its very irresponsibility. Ignorance and confusion may be universal, but it seems that only select characters are sensitive to them. The truly ignorant and insensitive are the proud and cruel surviviors, whereas the one who is especially aware is crippled by the truths he perceives. Even in cases in which impediments to self-realisation are external, they tend to have highly individual effects as though they were internal impediments. Thus are they closely related to the psychic disturbances whose motives and mechanisms it was Freud's purpose to expose.

It is beginning to be acknowledged, however, by critics as well as analysts, that literature cannot simply be submitted to the prestige and authority of psychoanalysis.² Previously literature was considered more or less as something to be interpreted, whereas psychoanalysis was knowledge, the master-interpreter of fictions and visions. Psychoanalysis found its predecessors in literature, and named many of its themes after literary figures (Oedipus, Narcissus); but, it was supposed, literary precursors had not systematised the themes now appropriated by psychoanalysis. Yet the systematisation of psychoanalysis not only shares obvious features with fiction in general but in particular with the logic and rhetoric of fantasy. This is not to deny psychoanalysis its own clinical sphere, but rather to suggest that its theories and interpretations should be more pliant towards literary influences, and that, with special regard to its theories of fantasy, it must look at what fantasy in the modern novel and story reveals about psychoanalytic theories and procedures, and, accordingly, modify its central notions as to the possible functions and aims of fantasy. In this book I suggest that fantasy can explore and test reality in much the same manner as psychoanalysis, and, moreover, that the least misleading approach to psychoanalysis is as to an example of fantasy literature, without ignoring the fascinating implications of psychoanalysis to individual works of fantasy. Freud's works, in particular, then become a magically rich text, rather than a body of theoretical knowledge.

However, any purely literary challenge to psychoanalytic theory must proceed with caution, well aware of its limitations. Psychoanalytic theory attempts to explain human behaviour, in particular the role of unconscious beliefs and desires in behaviour; its aim is not to explain human artefacts. Fantasy in literature, however ‘neurotic’ its content, has undergone (usually a good deal of) conscious modification; primary fantasy, which is the psychoanalyst's quarry, has been worked over by the secondary processes (i.e. thought), thereby endowing the primitive fantasy with reality-tested derivations.

Nonetheless, Freud himself vacillates from marking out the boundaries between psychoanalysis and art, to using the former as master over the latter. In ‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’ (1928) he claims that ‘before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms,’ and in his essay on Leonardo (1910) he writes that though artistic productivity is intimately connected with sublimation (that is, the transformation of sexual or destructive impulses into socially acceptable activity), the nature of artistic attainment is inaccessible to psychoanalysis. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) he acknowledges that psychoanalysis searches for the operation of exceedingly primitive tendencies; phenomena as sophisticated as art works and artistic creativeness are not its concern.³ More often than not, however, he proceeds to discuss art in complete ignorance of his modest disclaimers. In ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ (1908) and ‘Psychopathic Characters on the Stage’ (1915) the only aspect of creativity that puzzles Freud is the artist's capacity to make the expression of his egoistic and neurotic fantasies palatable to others and to distract the audience sufficiently to encourage enjoyment of ordinarily inadmissible desires.

How is it that psychoanalytic theory is so easily tempted into the artistic sphere? It is based upon psychoanalytic technique which employs free association, attention to resistance (i.e., to obstacles to free association), interpretation of dreams and interpretation of transferences. These techniques involve the subject's participation, which the psychoanalytic critic does not have. The material in art, too, is different from that upon with psychoanalytic theory is based. In the analytic session the material uncovered is subject to change in response to the analyst's interventions—interpretations, questions, efforts at clarification, affective displays—and even to adventitious events within the consulting room. The temptation to apply psychoanalytic theory to art works arises, first, from Freud's and his followers' repeated references to art works which often did uncover new material; and, secondly, it arises from aspects of Freud's theories which grant plausibility to the application of psychoanalysis outside the consulting room and independent of psychoanalytic techniques. For Freud's initial emphasis on unconscious factors in the determination of human behaviour revealed time as bound: present behaviour and associations indicated past desires, renunciations, displaced meanings, fantasies and beliefs. Thus a history could be read off from present material. In addition, certain associations and patterns, in particular the Oedipal phase and its concomitant complexes (e.g., the castration complex) and developments (e.g., the super-ego), were seen as both central and universal. Sufficient confirmation was thought to be found in clinical work to apply it to cases that could not be clinically investigated. Literary works in particular were seen to deal with desires, fears, unknown and unacknowledged motives, influences and aims, thus offering an opportunity for analysis. Moreover, artistic works were themselves the products of imagination, which has obvious links with primitive fantasy, and therefore the author's unconscious desires and aims might be gleaned from his work on similar if not identical principles to those upon which primitive fantasy is attributed in the analytic session.

Such applications of psychoanalytic theory challenge the heuristic account of the truth of psychoanalytic interpretation put forward in defence of the charge that analytic statements are unverifiable. That interpretation is ‘true’ which, when accepted by the patient, leads to the amelioration of symptoms. This account of truth rests upon the theory that the bringing forward of unconscious material to consciousness is theraputic; the experiences or fantasies upon which psychic disturbances depend are repeated in analysis, and the repetition reduces the accompanying excitation to a manageable level. It may be that repetition does not require a highly accurate description of the original material. A rough sketch, or even an analogous version, may be sufficiently suggestive. Even so, psychoanalytic interpretation is not tantamount to a drug whose adequacy is gauged only in terms of its effectiveness. Though interpretations need to be adequate rather than accurate, their adequacy depends upon their ability to aim at the truth. The effectiveness of psychoanalytic interpretation is a consequence, not the content of its truth. Therefore attributions of accuracy and validity, or the reverse, to psychoanalytic interpretations of art works, which cannot be tested by their effects upon symptoms, can be squared with psychoanalytic theory.

The mutual attraction of psychoanalysis and literary criticism is also based upon the similarity psychoanalysis has to art, a similarity which, I suggest, is far from superficial. The irreducibly figurative character of many central psychoanalytic terms—‘drive’, ‘libido’, ‘boundary’, ‘defence’—has recently been pointed out by several critics,⁴ as, previously, Freud's descriptions of unconscious processes in the dream work had been seen as apt descriptions of literary techniques.⁵ But of course Freud himself was the first and most meticulous recorder of the literary tendencies of his work. In Studies on Hysteria (1895) he says, ‘it strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science. I must console myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject is evidently responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own.’⁶ In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900-01) Freud defends his metaphorical treatment of ideas as images with the argument that accessory representations may be kept extrinsic from that which they ‘dissect’, though he admits that in the process of representing the mental apparatus within the mental apparatus, the layers of language are difficult to keep apart; and, indeed, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) he not only acknowledges the irreducibly speculative nature of psychoanalysis but also exhibits its centrally figurative language, ‘picturing’ as he does the psyche as a ‘living vesicle’ with a ‘receptive cortical layer’, the outermost surface of which consists of a ‘membrane’ which has been ‘baked through’ so that it becomes a ‘protective shield against stimuli’, necessary because the psyche is ‘a little fragment of living substance … suspended in the middle of an external world charged with the most powerful energies.’⁷ In New Introductory Lectures (1933) he admits that the layers of meaning he once thought distinguishable cannot be kept apart and that the id must be approached with analogies.⁸

The persistence with which psychoanalysis turns itself into literature is grounded in two problems. First, the nature of the enterprise—that of employing the mind to discover its own processes and mechanisms which are often deliberately elusive, disguising by screen memories and other repressive techniques the procedure and quality of its evasion—is inherently tricky, with observation subject to the same pitfalls as that which is observed. Freud explains:

Every science is based on observations and experiences arrived at through the medium of our psychical apparatus. But since our science has as its subject that apparatus itself, the analogy ends here. We make our observations through the medium of the same perceptual apparatus, precisely with the help of the breaks in the sequence of ‘psychical’ events: we fill in what is omitted by making plausible inferences and translating it into conscious material.⁹

Thus the first ‘poetic’ tendency of psychoanalysis—that of being forced to use figurative language because the material to be described is uncharted and because the seeker is identical to the object of its search—is related to the second cause of this tendency: that it is a technique for filling in gaps, for creating hypotheses, for telling plausible stories. Since the aim is to study material which refuses to make itself obvious, the best approach is to note where the observable or the obvious ceases to make sense, where known explanations cease to satisfy, where normal patterns fail to indicate appropriate expectations. The mind must try to discover that it does not easily observe its own workings. Earlier, in his 1915 paper on ‘The Unconscious’ Freud had stated the centrality of ignorance and absence in psychoanalytic theory:

The data of consciousness have a very large number of gaps in them; in healthy and in sick people psychical acts often occur which can be explained only by presupposing other acts, of which, nevertheless, consciousness affords no evidence. These not only include parapraxes and dreams in healthy people, and everything described as a psychical symptom or obsession in the sick; our most personal daily experience acquaints us with ideas that come into our head we do not know from where, and with intellectual conclusions arrived at we do not know how.¹⁰

Here psychoanalysis shows its quarry to be that of the fantasist: the aim is to catch out unexpected ignorance, thereby exposing general limitations in perception and knowledge; the limitations also reveal the strange purposes and desires of the medium of knowledge—the mind. The need to show up the gaps in a world commonly perceived as whole requires the creation of associations and patterns which utilise the representations whose strangeness is mitigated by normal inertia. The language of psychoanalysis, like the language of fantasy, is figurative but not conventionally metaphoric, since there is no means of tracing one's way back to original terms. The figurative language describes literally: only if it is so treated can its power and import be understood. But it is not scientific language; it is an attempted, even an experimental description; it provides stories to be told about mental phenomena whose very difficulty often makes them undesirable, wilfully ignored, economically discarded, requiring creative ‘translation’ to differentiate them and bring them to consciousness.¹¹

Notes

1. W. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, sc. iv, ll. 102-6.

2. Cf. Shoshana Felman, ‘To Open the Question’, Yale French Studies, 55-6 (1977).

3. All references to Sigmund Freud are from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, henceforth S.E. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), vol. 18, p. 17.

4. Cf. Harold Bloom, ‘Freud's Concepts of Defense and the Poetic Will’ and Humphrey Morris, ‘The Need to Connect: Representations of Freud's Psychical Apparatus’, in Joseph H. Smith (ed.), The Literary Freud (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). Also, Jean-Michel Rey, Parcours de Freud (Paris: Galilee 1974).

5. Cf. Kenneth Burke, ‘Freud and the Analysis of Poetry’, in The Philosophy of Literary Form, revised ed. (New York: University of California Press 1957); William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970); and Graham Hough. A Preface to ‘The Faerie Queene’ (London: Longmans, 1962).

6. S.E., Vol. 2, p. 160.

7. S.E., Vol. 18, pp. 26-7.

8. S.E., Vol. 22, p. 73.

9. S.E., Vol. 23, p. 159.

10. S.E., vol. 14, pp. 166-7.

11. For a somewhat distended discussion of the way in which material can be unconscious because it is formless rather than undesirable, see Anton Ehrenzwieg, The Hidden Order of Art (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967).