Microworlds

such thing as a “normal story.” The “normalization” of tigers is effected by natural selection, so the taxonomist need not (indeed should not) evaluate these cats critically. But a student of literature who is in like fashion axiologically neutral is a blind man confronting a rainbow, for, whereas there do not exist any good organisms as distinguished from bad ones, there do exist good and worthless books. And in the event, Todorov’s “sample,” as displayed in his bibliography, is astonishing. Among its twenty-seven titles we find no Borges, no Verne, no Wells, nothing from modern fantasy, and all of science fiction is represented by two short stories; we get, instead, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Potocki, Balzac, Poe, Gogol, Kafka — and that is about all. In addition, there are two crime-story authors.

Todorov declares, further, that he will pass over problems of aesthetics altogether in silence, since these are beyond the present reach of his method.

Thirdly, he debates the relationship of the Species and its Specimen. In nature, he says, the occurrence of a mutation does not modify the species: knowing the species tiger, we can deduce from it the properties of each individual tiger. The feedback effect of mutations upon the species is so slow that it can be ignored. In art it is different: here every new work alters the species as it existed heretofore, and is a work of art just insofar as it departs from a specific model. Works which do not satisfy this condition belong to popular or mass literature, such as detective stories, slushy love stories, science fiction, etc. Agreeing thus far with Todorov, I see what is in store for his method as a result of this state of affairs: the more inferior and paradigmatically petrified the texts which it undertakes to anatomize, the more readily it will reveal structures. Todorov, not surprisingly, omits to draw this conclusion.

Further, he discusses the question of whether one should investigate genres that have arisen historically or those that are theoretically possible. The latter strike me as coming to the same thing as a history of mankind a priori, but since it is easier to formulate a foolish idea concisely than it is to refute it concisely, I will let this pass. I will however remark here that there is a difference between taxonomy in nature and in culture which structuralism overlooks. The naturalist’s acts of classification, say of insects or of vertebrates, evoke no reaction on the part of that which is classified. A futurologist might say that Linnaean taxonomy is not subject to the Oedipus effect (Oedipus got into trouble by reacting to a diagnosis of his fate). On the other hand, the literary scholar’s acts of classification are feedback-linked to that which is classified, i.e., the Oedipus effect manifests itself in literature. Not straightforwardly, to be sure. It is not the case that writers, upon reading a new theory of genres, run straight to their studios to refute it by means of their next books. The linkage is more roundabout. Sclerosis of paradigms, as a stiffening of intergeneric barriers, arouses authors to a reaction that expresses itself, among other ways, in the hybridization of genres and the attack on traditional norms. Theoreticians’ labors are a catalyst that accelerates this process, since their generalizations make it easier for writers to grasp the entire space of creative activity, with its inherent limitations. Thus the student of genres who establishes their boundaries causes writers to rebel against them — he produces a feedback loop by the very act of classification. To describe limitations on creativity thus amounts to drawing up a self-defeating prognosis. What could be more tempting than to write what theory prohibits?

The constriction of the imagination that is inherent in a dogmatic mentality, such as is represented by the structuralist, manifests itself in the belief that what he has found to be barriers to creativity can never be transgressed by anyone. Perhaps there exist intransgressible structures of creativity, but structuralism has not come within reach of any such. Rather, what it proclaims to us as bounds of creativity is really quite an antique piece of furniture — to wit, the bed of Procrustes, as we shall show.

Coming to matters of substance, Todorov first of all demolishes past attempts at defining the fantastic. After crossing off the efforts of Northrop Frye, he lights into Roger Caillois, who had the bad luck to write that a “touchstone of the fantastic” is “the impression of irreducible strangeness” (p. 35). According to Caillois, jeers Todorov, a work’s genre depends on the sang-froid of its reader: if he is frightened, then we have to do with the (uncanny) fantastic, but if he keeps his presence of mind, then the work must needs be reclassified from the standpoint of the theory of genres. We will speak in the proper place of how the scoffer has here left his own method exposed to attack.

Todorov distinguishes three aspects of the literary work: the verbal, the syntactic, and the semantic, making no secret of the fact that these were formerly known as style, composition, and theme. But their invariants have traditionally and mistakenly been sought “on the surface” of texts; Todorov declares that he will look for structures on a deep level, as abstract relations. Northrop Frye, suggests Todorov, might say that the forest and the sea form a manifestation of an elementary structure. Not so — these two phenomena manifest an abstract structure of the type of the relation between statics and dynamics. Here we first come upon the fruits of spurious methodological sophistication, that congenital trait of structuralism, for it is plain to see what our author is seeking: oppositions which come to light on a level of high abstraction. Now, this one is wide of the mark, because statics is not opposed to dynamics but is a special case of it, namely, a limiting case. This is a small matter, but a weighty problem lies behind it, since it is in the same way that Todorov constructs his integral structure for fantastic literature. This, by the structuralist’s decree, consists of a one-dimensional axis, along which are situated subgenres that are mutually exclusive in a logical sense. This is portrayed by Todorov’s diagram: “uncanny : fantastic-uncanny : fantastic-marvelous : marvelous” (p. 44).

What is the “fantastic”? It is, Todorov explains, the hesitation of a being who knows only natural laws in the face of the supernatural. In other words, the fantastic character of a text resides in a transient and volatile state during the reading of it, one of indecision as to whether the narrative belongs to a natural or a supernatural order of things.

The “pure” uncanny amazes, shocks, terrifies, but does not give rise to indecision (of the kind we would call ontological). This is the place of the horror story, which presents occurrences that are frightful, extraordinary, but nevertheless rationally possible. This genre extends off the diagram to the left, merging into “ordinary” literature — as a transitional link, our theoretician mentions Dostoevsky.

The fantastic-uncanny already gives occasion to the vacillations that evoke the sense of the fantastic. This is a tale the events in which are, as its reader at first supposes, brought about by the intervention of the Supernatural. Its epilogue, however, furnishes a surprising rational explanation. (Here belongs, for example, the Manuscrit trouve a Saragosse.)

The “fantastic-marvelous” work is just the other way around — it supplies in the end explanations of an extramundane, irrational order, as in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Vera, inasmuch as the conclusion of this story forces one to acknowledge that the dead woman really rose from the grave.

And finally the “pure” marvelous, which again does not give rise to any vacillations between mutually exclusive types of ontic systems, has all of four subdivisions: (a) the “hyperbolic marvelous,” stemming from narrative extravagance, as in the voyages of Sinbad, where he speaks of serpents capable of swallowing elephants;

(b) the “exotic marvelous”: here, too, Sinbad serves Todorov’s purpose, when he says that the Roc had legs like oak trees — this is not a zoological absurdity, since to long-ago readers such an avian form may have seemed “possible” (c) the “instrumental marvelous” — the instruments are fabulous objects such as the lamp or the ring of Aladdin; and (d) the “scientific marvelous,” i.e., science fiction. Of this last subdivision, he says: “These narratives, starting from irrational premises, link the ‘facts’ they contain in a perfectly logical manner” (pp. 56-57). And: “The initial data are supernatural: robots, extraterrestrial beings, the whole interplanetary context” (p. 172). And: “Here the supernatural is explained in a rational manner, but according to laws that contemporary science does not acknowledge” (p. 56).

The scientific bibliography of the theory of “robots” forms a thick volume; there exists a world-renowned organization of astrophysicists (CETI) concerned with searching for signals emitted by Todorov’s “supernatural beings,” i.e., by extraterrestrial creatures; for our theoretician even the “interplanetary background” possesses supernatural properties. Let us, however, regard all these qualifications as slips of the pen. We may as well do so, since Todorov’s theory would be fine if it contained only such defects.

As we know, Todorov calls the fantastic a transitional boundary state on an axis whose opposite extremes signify the rational system of nature and the irrational order of marvels. For a work to manifest its fantastic character, it must be read literally, from the standpoint of naive realism, thus neither poetically nor allegorically. These two categories, according to Todorov, exclude one another with logical necessity, hence fantastic poetry or