Abstract
Having explored in previous chapters four essentials concepts in defining the meaning, functioning and effect of the fantastic, it is worth going back to the question posed in Chap. 2 with regards to the validity of this category in contemporary fiction. As it is shown, the contemporary fantastic assumes that reality is a product of a construct that we all participate in. However, this assumption does not mean that the conflict between the narrative and the (idea of) extratextual reality should not still be necessary for the fantastic effect to take place. Its essential objective is, after all, to question this idea. As an example of the survival of the fantastic in Postmodernity, the last section of this chapter analyses the work of several contemporary Spanish writers to propose a poetic of the postmodern fantastic.
I still daydream about my lifelong love affair with the impossible, and wonder when and if some of these impossibilities might enter the ranks of the everyday.
Michio Kaku, Physics of the Impossible
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Notes
- 1.
The protagonist in Gibson’s story, travelling across the United States in search of examples of “retro-futurist” architecture of the 30s and 40s, is assaulted by visions of machines, buildings and beings that respond to this style and which cannot be where he finds them. His friend Kihn, a specialist in paranormal phenomena, UFOs, and so on, explains the reason for his hallucinations: “If you want a classier explanation, I’d say you saw a semiotic ghost. All these contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like Fifties’ comic art. They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like the Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing. But you saw a different kind of ghost, that’s all. That plane was part of the mass unconscious, once. You picked up on that, somehow. The important thing is not to worry about” (1986: 29–30).
- 2.
- 3.
As Linda Hutcheon (1988) points out, the generalised scepticism that characterises the postmodern rhetorically translates into the device of irony, parody and play, employed to indict various basic concepts: the authority of institutions, the unity of the self, and the coherence and borders between discourses, genders, arts and disciplines. A rupture and response to the established is thus formulated.
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Roas, D. (2018). The Fantastic in Postmodernity. In: Behind the Frontiers of the Real. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73733-1_6
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