Fantastic
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Fantastic is a literary term that describes a quality of other literary genres, and in some cases is used as a genre in and of itself, although in this case it is often conflated with the Supernatural. The term was originated in the structuralist theory of critic Tzvetan Todorov in his work "The Fantastic". He describes the fantastic as being a liminal state of the supernatural. A truly fantastic work is subtle in the working of the feeling, and would leave the reader with a sense of confusion about the work, and whether or not the phenomenon was real or imagined. Todorov compares this with two other ideas: The Uncanny, wherein the phenomenon turns out to have a rational explanation such as in the gothic works of Ann Radcliffe; or the Marvelous, where there truly is a supernatural explanation for the phenomenon.
There is no truly typical "fantastic story", as the term generally discusses works of the horror or gothic genre. But two representative stories might be:
- Algernon Blackwood's story "The Willows", where two men travelling down the Danube River are beset by an eery feeling of malice and several improbable setbacks in their trip; the question that pervades the story is whether they are falling prey to the wilderness and their own imaginations, or if there really is something horrific out to get them.
- Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Black Cat", where a murderer is haunted by a black cat; but is it revenge from beyond the grave, or just simply a cat?
There isn't a clear distinction between the Fantastic and Magical Realism, but the latter seems generally to include a higher proportion of non-real elements.
The Fantastic is sometimes erroneously called the Grotesque or Supernatural fiction, because both the Grotesque and the Supernatural contain fantastic elements, yet they are not the same, as the fantastic is based on an ambiguity of those elements.
Examples of writers of Fantastic literature include:
- many of Edgar Allan Poe's short works
- Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose"
- Mikhail Bulgakov
- Algernon Blackwood's works
- Sheridan Le Fanu's works in "In a Glass Darkly"
- Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series
- E.T.A. Hoffmann's works, notably Der Sandmann, "The Golden Flower Pot", and "The Nutcracker and the King of Mice"
- Gerard de Nerval's "Aurelia"
More modern and popular examples of fantastic works might include:
- Miracle on 34th Street, a film in which a man is likely to actually be Santa Claus (which would be supernatural) but that fact is never made certain.
- K-PAX, a film and a novel where a man claims to be an alien, but, again, that fact is never certain. (It is however made clear in the novel sequels to K-PAX whether or not the character is an alien.)
In Elizabethan slang, a Fantastic was a rake; an "effeminate fool" or "improvident young gallant".[citation needed] The character Lucio in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure is described in the Dramatis Personae as a Fantastic.
