29 February

Fantasy as Antifantasy: 1 Transformation of Fantasy and Irony

　The genre called fantasy, which constitutes a subcategory that has the characteristic of “describing events that are not generally considered to be possible”, in the literary activity of “describing fictional events,” is a paradoxical thing in itself, no less than the precarious concept “fiction,” and it was a parameter that could cause great interference to both coordinate system called “fiction,” and another coordinate system called “reality.” Moreover, in recent years, the concept of “metafiction,” designating the “fictional existence beyond fiction,” has been introduced, and as a result of its interaction with conventional fantasy literature, postmodern fantasy works that are ascertained to have a higher degree of deviation from the realist world picture, are being generated one after another.
It is not surprising that the factor of irony must be noted as an opportunity for the activation of space-time in metafiction as a variation of fantasy. The fact that the literary expression of fantasy was introduced as one of the manifestations of the desire for a religious substitute or universal religion in the midst of the collapse of the traditional view of the universe, can be pointed out with various concrete examples. The case of George McDonald’s creative motivation was typically one of these. The literary expression of fantasy was sought as an alternative to traditional Christian beliefs that could no longer be trusted in literally, that is, as a means of constructing a psychological metaphysics that could provide a modern world formula, fully supported by scientific and rational intelligence. In the case of the German Romantics, irony was introduced as an effective means of dialectical endeavor to overcome the conflict between the desire to “believe” in the existence of eternal and unchanging principles and values, and the hopeless realization that no conventional teaching or knowledge could be “believed” literally anymore. The spirit of irony contains a dynamic mechanism that creates a new space-time while incorporating the opposite operating factor of nihilism, which denies and destroys the world of one’s own thoughts by subverting the very act of “believing” inherent in the thought process. It is unintentionally equivalent to the contemporary awareness of the problem that Attebery counted as another definition of fantasy. The result of the description of thought attempted in this way was the substance of the fairy tale (Maerchen) created by the writers of the German Romantics. There is a subtle mental attitude in which the two poles of faith and disbelief are seamlessly united. Sometimes faith came to the surface, and sometimes disbelief came to the surface, as the result of fluctuations and oscillations. Typical examples of the former may be Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Novalis, while examples of the latter may be Clemens Brentano and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Belief in the unnameable unknown has often been called by the name of Romanticism, but it is often forgotten that disbelief in what has been inherited and the ingenious expression of immanent disbelief in what is now being spoken of itself, is also another face of Romanticism. (note)

note:
This mechanism of German Romantic irony is noted by G. R. Thompson, in Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales, the University of Wisconsin Press, (1973.) Thompson discusses in detail the relationship between irony and “transcendentalism,” which later came to be adopted by Jackson and others in order to derisively call Tolkien’s theory of the creation of fantasy literature, in a subtle relationship between Poe and the German Romantics.

In this study, I would like to highlight such a nihilistic aspect as a method of presenting the world of the fictional work, and survey the ironic mechanism that is actively introduced in fantasy.