Apparition Narratives and the Style of the Fantastic

This paper argues that the empirically-oriented style of realism also informs what we now call “the fantastic.” Genres such as science fiction, fantasy, and the Gothic are based on the representation of a seemingly “realistic” world whose ontology is complicated by the presence of non-empirical phenomena. These phenomena are rendered through a detailed style that is analogous to that mobilized by purportedly realistic narratives, serving, therefore, a dual purpose: it builds up an apparently natural setting that foils the super- or the non-natural, and it lends an air of credibility to entities and events that empirical culture generally tends to reject. Realism and the fantastic have, in other words, a common stylistic matrix: along with the emergence of empiricism in the early modern age went the definition of new, pervasive protocols of representation that were used to describe both the “real” and the “unreal”, the “realistic” and the “unrealistic”. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, literary codes separated out from factual codes, and the relationship between realism and the fantastic became self-consciously oppositional. The style − and ideology − of the novel were utilized and at the same time problematized by supernatural fiction, which questioned its ability to provide a reliable representation of reality. Later, the critique of realism enacted by modernism and post-modernism undermined the opposition between the novel and the fantastic, encouraging the non-realistic use of realistic styles typical of much twentieth-century fiction.