Impossibility Fiction? IF only …

Abstract

The University of Central England on 3 July 1993 held a one-day conference based upon a category termed ‘impossibility fiction’. Before the call for papers for this conference materialised I had not come across the phrase. Nevertheless, I found myself looking at the various categories of writing included on the blurb and attempted to find a common denominator which would account for them all (see Appendix). This was in preference to immediately hunting down its meaning in academic journals and scholarly articles. It was partly an exercise in attempting to retain the I-Thou instead of seeking out the I-It of mastery. I thought this might be done by refusing to let the category be reduced to the definition provided by the blurb: ‘any fictional narratives that deal ostensibly with alternative worlds, or which foreground imagination, fantasy, desire, unreality or the unexplained’. The term intrigued me so much I wanted to know it in a way that, for the time being, evaded this discursive net, a net I presumed it had already been caught up in. Might it be possible to use and manipulate the phrase in a way that illustrates the l-Thou? In particular, might ‘impossibility fiction’ be construed so as to demonstrate the ineffable experience of Art/Literature - the gap between the reading experience and the knowledge of that experience? Rather than proceeding therefore with the discussion in a specifically logical and theoretical way, what follows is the attempt to delineate an ‘impossibility fiction’ that lives up to the aura of intrigue it invokesand suggests.