A QUICK APTER WRAPUP

I've done a quick read-through of Apter's FANTASY LITERATURE, enough to realize that despite some promising insights here and there, this is just an adequate but theoretically unexceptional academic work. It isn't concerned with the exploration of fantasy-fiction as a whole, but with a more limited theme. I'd state this theme as "given how much litcrit territory has been taken over by psychological studies, in what ways does fantasy-literature FAIL to conform to psychological paradigms?"

Apter does an "apt" job of showing ways in which highbrow fantasy-writers like Conrad, Hawthorne and Borges diverge from those paradigms, which are always Freudian. Unlike Todorov and Barthes, who accept Freud's paradigms as heuristically sound, Apter frequently critiques Freud-- and yet, because she mentions him on nearly every page, the book ends up seeming less like a refutation of Freud's work than a compulsive obsession with his ideas. In contrast to thinkers like Fiedler and Bataille, who use Freud up to a point but make clear where they diverge from him, Apter doesn't succeed in communicating a greater vision of the many aspects of reality to which Freud was blind. She points out that "Freud's description of symbolic relationships is adequate only for an exceedingly naive allegory," which is an accurate pronouncement. But she fails to establish a heuristic model, as Fielder and Bataille do, that takes in what real insights Freud had and relates them to other spheres of cultural knowledge. Her judgments of various highbrow fantasy-authors seem reasonably sound, but her overall book is useless for anyone attempting to frame a general theory of fantasy, and for the same reasons as the Todorov work: an exclusive concern with fantasy only as executed by highbrow authors.

She does have, in addition to the critiques of Freud, a few telling criticisms of Jung. I think she underrates his insights as far as their usefulness in exploring literary fantasy, but I will admit that what most seems to turn her off-- Jung's sometimes unfortunate tendency toward the "platitudinous"-- is a fair hit.

APTER: MORE APT THAN TODOROV

In this essay I said:

...for Todorov, once a spooky story decreed that there were no real ghosts, that story fell into the domain of the merely rational.

I later countered that opinion by asserting:

If the reader gets the frisson of horror from a “phony vampire” story, then the story is on the same affective plane as the “real vampire” story, however different their cognitive aspects.

Continuing in my survey of fantasy-criticism, I've now started T.E. Apter's 1982 work FANTASY LITERATURE, which begins promisingly by downgrading some of the psychological investigations of fantasy (both Freudian and Jungian) and declares that the purpose of fantasy in literature "must be understood not as an escape from reality but as an investigation of it." (FL, page 2)

Even more striking is another line on the same page, which almost sounds as if written to counter Todorov's all-or-nothing cognitive approach:

"The problematic fantasies in Hawthorne, Conrad, Hoffman, Kafka, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, 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."

The same principle applies to less highbrow forms of literature. Tod Browning executes both a "real vampire" story (DRACULA) and a "phony vampire" story (MARK OF THE VAMPIRE), yet the latter story does not, as I assume Todorov would maintain, fall conveniently into the domain of the rational simply because the "status" of the vampire is proven fake. The uncanny world of MARK OF THE VAMPIRE may seem a bit more "stable" than the marvelous world in which Dracula is a real threat, but both films evoke a frisson foreign to the world of, say, a thriller in which the possibility of vampires can never come into play at all.

Possible future posts on Apter as I continue her book.