“The fantastic, we have seen, lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and character, who must decide whether or not what they perceive derives from ‘reality’ as it exists in the common opinion. […] If he decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we say that the work belongs to another genre: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous.” — Tzvetan Todorov
Key Terms: Genre, Fantastic, Uncanny, Marvelous
Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (translated from the French by Richard Howard), has fundamentally changed elements of my perspective on what I shall, for the moment, rather sloppily call “fantastical fiction.” In fact, after reading this book, I find that I must begin to revise terminology that I have been blithely using for years now. So, first a brief examination of the work–then I’ll move on to the effect it’s had on me and how I can think about it in terms of my comps questions.