Fantasy Theory

Mark Bould
The Dreadful Credibility of Absurd Things:

A Tendency in Fantasy Theory1
In Britain it has been estimated that 10% of all

books sold are fantasy. And of that fantasy, 10%
is written by Terry Pratchett. So, do the sums:
1% of all books sold in Britain are written by
Terry Pratchett. Coo.2
Although it is unclear whether, by ‘fantasy’, Butler

intends a narrow denition (generic fantasy, i.e.,
imitation Tolkien heroic or epic fantasy and sword
’n’ sorcery) or a broad denition (the fantastic genres,
i.e., generic fantasy, sf (science ction), horror, super-
natural gothic, magic realism, etc.), such statistics
nonethless make the need for a Marxist theory – or
preferably, Marxist theories – of the fantastic self-
evident. The last twenty or thirty years have witnessed
a remarkable expansion in the study of fantastic texts
and genres. Literary studies has embraced the gothic,
fairy tales and sf, and screen studies has developed
a complex critique of horror and is now beginning
1
With profound thanks to China Miéville, Kathrina Glitre, Greg Tuck – friends,
colleagues, comrades. Thanks also to Historical Materialism’s anonymous readers, and
to José B. Monleón for translating a passage from Benito Pérez Galdós’s The Reason
of Unreason (1915) and thereby providing me with a title.
2
Butler 2001, p. 7.
Historical Materialism, volume 10:4 (51–88)

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2002
Also available online – www.brill.nl
52 Mark Bould
to come to terms with sf. However, there is a remarkable absence in all this
endeavour.
The rst major Marxist sf theorist, Darko Suvin, notoriously described
(narrowly-dened) fantasy as ‘just a subliterature of mystication’ and asserted
that the ‘[c]ommerical lumping of it into the same category as SF is thus a
grave disservice [to sf] and a rampantly socio-pathological phenomenon’.3
Whether as a consequence of this position or merely consequent to it, fantasy
and the fantastic have been relatively neglected in Marxist theory and criticism
of literature, lm and media.4 This could be taken as merely concomitant to
the critical neglect of fantasy as a distinct genre from other theoretical
perspectives, a phenomenon which stems, I suspect, from the fact that deni-
tional problems have made it easier to discuss isolated examples in critical
contexts provided by other genres than to produce a theory of fantasy per se.
Such theories have, of course, been essayed, and this article will trace the
development of the most inuential account of fantasy literature, the aws
and limitations of which are exceeded only by the extent of its inuence.
However, as I will argue, there is rather more at stake for Marxists in such
debates than just plugging a gap so as to have a full complement of appropriate
genre theories.
In 1926, Trotsky argued that ‘the attempt to declare psychoanalysis
incompatible with Marxism and simply turn one’s back on Freudianism is
too simple’;5 during the following half-century, it became increasingly apparent
that Marxists had failed to generate an adequate theory of the subject and
3
Suvin 1979, p. 9. Suvin 2000 revises this argument, although not necessarily very
extensively.
4
Other (or particular) genres of the fantastic have fared better. Robin Wood’s
Marcuse-inspired work in the 1970s on the American horror movie inuenced a
generation of horror criticism (see Bould 2002), and for nearly thirty years the journal
Science Fiction Studies (where Suvin served for many years in various editorial capacities)
has provided a valuable venue for Marxist and critical postmodernist work. Sharply-
drawn distinctions between sf, fantasy and horror have long been characteristic of sf
criticism. This has often seemed to be more a consequence of the desire to make sf
seem more important than other, ‘lesser’ genre ctions than of any particularly necessary
distinction between the genres. Such theorising typically follows the logic of commercial
categorisation which sees genre as a pigeonhole into which to place particular texts.
I am far more sympathetic to the perspective which views genre as a tendency within
a text which will almost certainly also contain other generic tendencies. Therefore, for
the purposes of this article at least, I can perceive no value in establishing rigid
distinctions between, say, fantasy and sf.
5
Trotsky 1973, p. 234.
The Dreadful Credibility of Absurd Things 53
subjectivity6 and many Marxists of various shades (Adorno, Horkheimer,

Marcuse, Fromm, Reich, Sartre, Althusser and Balibar) turned to psychoanalytic
theory to remedy this pressing deciency. More recently, Freedman’s doggedly
eloquent pursuit of his contention that both Marxism and psychoanalysis ‘are
materialisms oriented toward praxis; that is, toward theoretically informed
political or therapeutic work’7 consistently overlooks the fact that attempts
to marry together elements of these two theoretical frameworks have typically
resulted in cultural criticism that privileges the therapeutic over the political
and tends toward the privatisation of dissent.
Clearly, the pendulum has swung too far. Marxist theories of fantasy and
the fantastic offer an opportunity not only to engage with extremely popular
areas of cultural production but also to better model the subject for political
praxis, and in the closing section of this article I will address this possibility
in greater detail.
Todorov and the fantastic

The publication in 1970 of Tzvetan Todorov’s Introduction à la littérature
fantastique, translated into English soon afterwards as The Fantastic: A Structural
Approach to a Literary Genre, gave the study and criticism of fantasy a measure
of academic validation. Todorov proposed a typological spectrum of several
related varieties of texts – ‘the uncanny: the fantastic-uncanny: the marvellous-
uncanny: the marvellous’ – into which he introduced a temporal element,
arguing that for a limited duration during the reading of the text the fantastic
occupied the non-space between the two central categories.
In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without
devils, sylphides, or vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be
explained by the laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences
the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim
of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination – and laws of
the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken
place, it is an integral part of reality – but then this reality is controlled by
6
It is a telling fact that even a standard reference work like Bottomore 1991 contains
no entries for these terms.
7
Freedman 2000, p. 10.
54 Mark Bould
laws unknown to us. . . . The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty.
Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a
neighbouring genre, the uncanny or the marvellous. The fantastic is that
hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature,
confronting an apparently supernatural event. 8
In Todorov’s schema, the marvellous roughly coincides with the gothic fantasy
in which the spooky goings-on have a supernatural origin (for example, Hugh
Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1756); Buffy the Vampire Slayer (since 1997)),
and the uncanny matches the gothic fantasy in which rational, material
explanations are established for seemingly paranormal shenanigans (such as,
Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); Scooby Doo Where Are You!
(1969–70)). The moment of fantastic hesitation is exemplied, as Todorov
notes, by Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, which leaves the reader unable
to conclude from textual evidence alone whether the ghosts of the former
servants seen by the governess are supernatural manifestations or projections
of her psychosexual anxieties.
The allure and possible complexities of the relationship between the fantastic,
the uncanny and the marvellous were made evident by Project UFO (1978–9).
A rigidly and unimaginatively formulaic TV series lamentable in almost every
respect, it nonetheless ran for two series and, in ‘terms of the size of viewing
audience’, remains ‘the most successful US sf TV series ever made’.9 Each
episode, purportedly based on incidents drawn from the USAF’s Project Blue
Book, would see Air Force personnel investigate an alleged UFO sighting,
and typically establish a rational explanation for it. In such instances, the
fantastic hesitation initiated by the original UFO sighting is reduced to the
category of the uncanny by the investigation’s ndings. However, this resolution
would sometimes be undercut in the closing seconds of an episode by the
reappearance of the previously explained-away UFO. The resolution of this
reintroduced fantastic hesitation into the uncanny or the marvellous depended
utterly on whether or not the viewer regarded such alien technology as a
rational or superstitious phenomenon.
Todorov identies ‘three conditions’ that the fantastic must full:
8
Todorov 1975, p. 25.
9
Clute and Nicholls 1993, p. 964.
First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters
as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and a
supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation
may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader’s role is so to speak
entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented,
it becomes one of the the themes of the work – in the case of naive reading,
the actual reader identies himself with the character. Third, the reader must
adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as
well as ‘poetic’ interpretations. These three requirements do not have an
equal value. The rst and third actually constitute the genre; the second
may not be fullled. 10
The clumsiness of this vacillation between two or three conditions (most of

Todorov’s sample fulls all three) indicates a aw in Todorov’s model which
originates in his mistaking of structuralist methodology for scientic method.
He argues that
one of the rst characteristics of the scientic method is that it does not
require us to observe every instance of a phenomenon in order to describe
it; scientic method proceeds rather by deduction. We actually deal with a
relatively limited number of cases, from them we deduce a general hypothesis,
and we verify this hypothesis by other cases, correcting (or rejecting) it as
need be. Whatever the number of phenomena (of literary works, in this
case) studied, we are never justied in extrapolating universal laws from
them; it is not the quantity of observations, but the logical coherence of a
theory that nally matters.11
However, as Stanislaw Lem pointed out, ‘representativeness of a sample in

the natural sciences and in the arts are two quite different matters. Every
normal tiger is representative for that species of cats, but there is no such
thing as a “normal story”’.12 This perhaps accounts for the inadequacies of
Todorov’s sample, which is not only profoundly unrepresentative of fantasy13
10
Todorov 1975, p. 33.
11
Todorov 1975, p. 4.
12
Lem 1985, p. 212.
13
‘Among its twenty-seven titles we nd no Borges, no Verne, no Wells, nothing
from modern fantasy, and all of science ction is represented by two short stories; we
get, instead, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Potocki, Balzac, Poe, Gogol, Kafka – and that is about
all. In addition, there are two crime-story authors’ (Lem 1985, p. 212).
56 Mark Bould
but is also, as Lem notes, comprised of texts which have already been allowed
into the canon on other grounds.14 Despite an ambivalence for popular or
mass literature which often spills over into distaste,15 Lem maintains that a
theory of literature either embraces all works or it is no theory. A theory of

works weeded out in advance by means beyond its compass constitutes not
generalization but its contrary, that is, particularization. One cannot when
theorizing discriminate beforehand against a certain group of works – i.e.,
not bring them under the scope of analysis at all. A taxonomically oriented
theory can set up a hierarchy in its subject matter – i.e., assign nonuniform
values to the elements of the entire set under investigation – but it should
do this openly, not on the sly, and throughout its whole domain, showing
what sort of criteria it employs for making distinctions and how they perform
their tasks of evaluation.16
Perhaps because testing Todorov’s hypothesis by other cases would require

them to reject it in its entirety, subsequent critics have built upon his work
by discussing the Todorovian fantastic as if it were synonymous with fantasy
literature and by continuing to exclude non-canonical texts.17 This has signicant
consequences, not least of which is the occlusion of the processes of textual
production. By considering canonical texts, the labour involved in their
production is reduced to the familiar biographical and contextual details of
individual writers, solitary geniuses who transcend the material conditions
of their historical and material situations, and whose bodies reify the social
division of labour underpinning the ideological notion of authorship. This
14
Recently, Suvin has argued that ‘Todorov draws exclusively on possibilities present
in French ction 1650–1950 (including what can be tted into it from German Romantics,
primarily some Hoffmann) and codied in French literary criticism from Nodier on.
The validity of his categorization into uncanny versus marvellous plus oscillation
between them is therefore very small for the Anglophone and even German traditions.
It is restricted to cases where some of those writings (for example, James’s Turn of the
Screw) operate within ideological conventions similar to the French ones’ (Suvin 2000,
p. 220).
15
For example, Lem’s two most famous essays on sf are called ‘Science Fiction: A
Hopeless Case – with Exceptions’ and ‘Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the
Charlatans’ (both in Lem 1985).
16
Lem 1985, p. 232.
17
For example, although Jackson 1981 adds Lovecraft and Peake to Todorov’s
sample, she is rather more concerned to introduce the likes of Mary Shelley, Gaskell,
Dickens, Stevenson, Wilde, Cortazar, Calvino and Pynchon.
leads to the negative view of genre as constraint and, arguably, to the naïve
celebration of resistance to hegemonic incorporative strategies.
Over the last thirty years, it has become something of a commonplace that
the text is produced as the reader reads it. Todorov’s rst and third conditions
of the fantastic give the reader the dominant role in determining whether or
not a text is fantastic, and then whether it is marvellous or uncanny. However,
rather than consider actual readers, Todorov introduces the second condition
which will later permit him to replace the character and the naïve reader with
the text’s implied reader,18 a hypothetical reader who is dened purely in
terms of possessing those attitudes necessary for the text to be completely
effective – or, rather, for the critic’s analysis of the text to be effective. For
example, there is absolutely no reason why the reader of The Turn of the Screw
must comply with Todorov’s third criterion and decide between possible
explanations of the events it depicts; to do so is like forcing Schrödinger to
check up on his cat. One could equally postulate an implicit reader who
enjoys the ambiguity of co-existent but mutually exclusive possibilities, or
even one who resolves such indeterminacy by calculating ways in which
alternatives can be reconciled with each other (for example, ghosts exist but
can only be seen by someone in a heightened state of psychosexual anxiety).
Although it is a problematic proposition, Jose B. Monleón argues that, used
properly, ‘the characteristics of such an implicit reader’ should at least ‘depend
on the historical determinants that framed the text’.19 Todorov, however, is
content to deploy this critical-rhetorical device in an ahistoricising manner,
reconstructing the implied reader in the image of that required by his theory
of the fantastic.
18
This move is presaged in the passage quoted above in which Todorov fails
adequately to distinguish between ‘a world which is indeed our world’ and the world
presented in the mimetic text, despite the emphasis in the early pages of The Turn of
the Screw on the recreation of the genre world of the literary ghost story rather than
of nineteenth-Century England. Such mimetic reconstruction (of a slightly earlier
period) is the business of the framed tale, and, without the frame, the possibility of
a supernatural explanation would lack sufcient weight to balance the psychosexual
reading.
19
Monleón 1990, p. 4.
58 Mark Bould
Jackson and the fantastic

Rosemary Jackson also expresses anxiety about the ahistoricising tendencies
of Todorov’s structuralism. Her discussion of fantasy as the literature of
subversion opens with an acknowledgement of the difculties in overcoming
the genre’s typical association with the notion of escapism. Following Tolkien’s
reactionary defence of the genre, literary criticism has largely suppressed an
alternative tradition of ironic and self-reexive fantasy, emphasising instead
the ability of Tolkienesque fantasy to offer the possibility of transcending the
human condition – a formulation which might be more accurately rendered
as ignoring, mystifying and otherwise obscuring the specics of social, historical
and economic being. In particular, the secondary-world fantasy exemplied
by Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954–5) can be seen to offer the delusory
pleasure of a total and comprehensible world structured around an intense
nostalgia for ‘moral and social hierarch[ies]’.20 Quoting from The German
Ideology, Jackson calls for the rejection of such transcendentalism and advocates
a new focus on the material and social production contexts of specic fan-
tasies so as to provide a corrective to the exclusion of the social and political
from Todorov’s model of fantasy; but, as in Todorov, this project involves
ignoring the dominant contemporary variety of fantasy ction, the secondary-
world fantasy, which Jackson consigns to the ‘realm of fantasy which is more
properly dened as faery, or romance literature’.21 Her suggestion that this
is not mere prejudice against the ‘particular ideals’ of such fantasies, or a
dismissal intended ‘to recommend other texts as more “progressive” in any
easy way’,22 is undercut by the distinctions she later makes between romance,
in which ‘[o]therness is transmuted into idealism’, realism, in which it is
‘muted, made silent and invisible’, and the modern fantastic, in which it is
recognised as ‘culture’s “unseen” ’.23
Jackson argues that secondary-world fantasy and other varieties of Todorov’s
marvellous are based on the creation of alternative orders (such as, Middle-
20
Jackson 1981, p. 2. A typical narrative of Big Commercial Fantasies, such as David
Eddings Belgariad (1982–5) series, Raymond Feist’s Riftwar Saga (1982–92) or Star Wars
(Lucas, 1977) and its sequels/prequels, features a boy who rises from the ranks of
slave, servant or freeman to become a king or powerful wizard who replaces despots
without affecting the social order: the ugly duckling follows an Horatio Alger narrative
transformed, courtesy of prophecies and fate, into a fantasy of obedience.
21
Jackson 1981, p. 9.
22
Ibid.
23
Jackson 1981, p. 173.
Earth, Oz, the Star Wars universe) which are related ‘to the “real” only through
metaphorical reection’; consequently, they are incapable, for the most part,
of ‘intruding into or interrogating it’.24 Fantasy, she contends, is not concerned
with such displacements but with creating ‘“alterity”, this world re-placed
and dis-located’, a paraxial realm that is ‘neither entirely “real” . . . nor entirely
“unreal” . . . but is located somewhere indeterminately between the two’.25
This interstitial position ‘reveals reason and reality to be arbitrary, shifting
constructs and thereby scrutinizes the category of the “real”’.26 However, this
distinction between secondary-world and paraxial fantasy is a false one
produced not only by the tendency to marginalise and exclude mass and
popular literature, lm and TV but also by emphasising what is arguably a
very minor distinction in the variety of milieu a novel offers its readers:
namely, the way in which it relates to extra-textual reality. Jackson argues
that the paraxial fantasy world is disorientating because ‘its means of
establishing its “reality” are initially mimetic . . . but then move into another
mode which would seem to be marvellous . . . were it not for its initial
grounding in the “real”’.27 I would suggest that not only is this neat ordering
improbable – in most cases, the transition to a fantastic milieu is displaced
onto or pre-empted by markers of the text’s existence as a commodity; contrary
to popular belief, you can often judge a book by its cover – but also that both
paraxial and secondary-world fantasy actually present worlds discontinuous
24
Jackson 1981, p. 42. I am indebted to one of Historical Materialism’s anonymous
readers for pointing out Oz’s exceptional status inasmuch as, unlike Middle-Earth
and the Star Wars universe, L. Frank Baum’s original novel, The Wonderful Wizard of
Oz (1900) was a Populist political allegory. The slightly sceptical Brian Attebery suggests
that
the silver shoes are a little like William Jennings Bryan’s silver ticket to
prosperity, the Scarecrow is, in a sense, the troubled farmer, the Tin Woodman
can stand for the industrial laborer, the Cowardly Lion is a witty analog of
Bryan himself, the Wizard could be any ineffectual president from Grant to
McKinley, and the band of petitioners are another Coxey’s Army descending
on Washington. . . . I might propose one more analogy. Dorothy, bold,
resourceful, leading the men around her toward success, is a juvenile Mary
Lease, the Kansas rebrand who told her neighbours to raise less corn and
more hell, or an Annie Diggs, the Populist temperance reformer. Baum and
the Populists promoted an active role for women in the rural utopia.
Incidentally, the real surname of the Wizard of Oz is Diggs. (Attebery 1980,
p. 86)
25
Jackson 1981, p. 19.
26
27
60 Mark Bould
to our own in prose which is mimetic to their respective milieux. It is with

good reason then that Jackson considers ‘understanding of the subversive
function’ of paraxial fantasy to emerge ‘from structuralist rather than from
merely thematic readings of texts’,28 because this subversive function is a
product of structuralist analysis rather than an exclusive potential of paraxial
fantasy uncovered by such analysis.
Having dened psychoanalysis as ‘direct[ing] itself towards an unravelling
of [the] laws [of human society], trying to comprehend how social structures
are represented and sustained within and through us in our unconscious’,
Jackson contends that psychoanalytic theory is the key to transforming
Todorov’s model into one which can address ‘political and ideological issues’.29
This rather roundabout route proves to be problematic, not least of all in its
introduction of a second meaning of ‘fantasy’. Early on, Jackson observes that
‘fantasy characteristically attempts to compensate for a lack resulting from
cultural constraints: it is a literature of desire, which seeks that which is
experienced as absence and loss’.30 This recurrent failure to adequately distin-
guish between phantasy (in psychoanalytic terms, the source of unconscious
fears and desires) and the genre of fantasy has consequences which run
counter to her declared materialist agenda, such slippages often being achieved
by expunging the different material bases and modes of production of psychic
and literary fantasy. When Jackson does distinguish between phantasy and
fantasy, it is often to ascribe the qualities of the former to the latter: for
example, fantastic literature
suggests the basis upon which cultural order rests, for it opens up, for a
brief moment, on to disorder, on to illegality, on to that which lies outside
the law, that which is outside dominant value systems. . . . [It] traces the
unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made
invisible, covered over and made ‘absent’.31
The excluded, which Jackson presents as synonymous with the desired, can
be temporarily revealed, but the necessary use of the language of the dominant
culture inevitably re-excludes it. However, Jackson argues, this momentary
28
Jackson 1981, p. 175.
29
Jackson 1981, p. 6.
30
Jackson 1981, p. 3.
31
Jackson 1981, p. 4.
perturbation of the dominant social order ‘is a telling index of the limits of
that order’,32 and paraxial fantasy is predicated on a ‘negative relationality’ to
the ‘“bourgeois” category of the real’33 conceived as an ideological and hence
linguistic order.
But how is this violation and possible subversion of dominant norms
achieved? Jackson stresses the naïveté of trying to equate ‘fantasy with either
anarchic or revolutionary politics’.34 Instead, a swift concatenantion of quotations
from Irène Bessière, Joanna Russ, Marcel Brion and Georges Bataille is used
to link paraxial fantasy with the ‘violent “opening” of syntactic order . . .
found in Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, surrealism, Artaud’ and to suggest
that ‘fantastic works of the last two centuries are clear antecedents of modernist
texts, such as Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, with their commitment to
disintegration’.35 This passage suggests that fantasy’s subversive potential,
its ability to ‘disturb “rules” of artistic representation and literature’s reproduc-
tion of the real’36 is not, after all, its unique and dening characteristic. Rather,
Jackson, like Todorov, is engaged in the sly application of nonuniform values
in order to introduce a hierarchy consonant with a pre-existing canon.37
What is it, then, that paraxial fantasy subverts, and how? Jackson argues
that by ‘[p]resenting that which cannot be, but is, fantasy exposes a culture’s
denitions of that which can be: it traces the limits of its epistemological and
ontological frame’.38 Paraxial fantasies
attempt to undermine dominant philosophical and epistemological orders.

They subvert and interrogate nominal unities of time, space and character,
as well as questioning the possibility, or honesty, of ctional re-presentation
of those unities. . . . [A]n art of estrangement, resisting closure, opening
structures which categorize experience in the name of ‘human reality’ . . .
[it] moves towards a dismantling of the ‘real’, most particularly of the concept
32
Jackson 1981, p. 4.
33
34
35
36
37
Her contention that ‘texts subvert only if the reader is disturbed by their dislocated
narrative form’ (Jackson 1981, p. 23) seems to displace such judgements onto the
reader (who must also be considered paraxial: Jackson’s methodology requires an
implicit reader, yet she emphasises affect).
38
62 Mark Bould
of ‘character’ and its ideological assumptions, mocking and parodying a

blind faith in psychological coherence and in the value of sublimation as a
‘civilizing’ activity.39
Jackson likens the disruption of the conventions of bourgeois realism by the

intrusion of elements which disturb mimetic illusion to the interaction of the
Symbolic (the realm of language, law and custom, and of distinctions between
self/other, subject/object) and the Imaginary (all that is excluded from the
Symbolic and rational discourse).40 Fantasy, then, strips away the Symbolic
and uncovers ‘all that needs to remain hidden if the world is to be comfortably
“known”’.41 Therefore, the
most subversive fantasies are those which attempt to transform the relations
of the imaginary and the symbolic. They try to set up possibilities for radical
cultural transformation by making uid the relations between these realms,
suggesting, or projecting, the dissolution of the symbolic through violent
reversal or rejection of the process of the subject’s formation.42
Jackson’s erasure of the distinction between phantasy and fantasy – here

written large – results in, or perhaps derives from, a reconstitution of texts
as Freudian psyches which innocently and unintentionally express ‘unconscious
drives’ and are thus ‘particularly open to psychoanalytic readings’.43 This
could, of course, be interpreted as that species of élitism which often haunts
studies of popular culture, erasing the realities of textual and commodity
production and treating mass culture as a reservoir of spontaneous, naïve
and, above all, unreexive expression;44 Jackson’s exclusion of the vast majority
39
Jackson 1981, pp. 175–6.
40
I have argued elsewhere (Bould 1999b) that, following Adorno, the relationship
between the Symbolic and the Imaginary can be usefully reconstructed as that between
the ‘objective subject’ which matches and ts bourgeois existence as a whole and the
unknowable ‘real subject’ repressed by exchange-value. Fully objectied, the subject
(mis)takes the objective subject for the real subject, and the real subject is transformed
into a fantasy of transcendence.
41
42
43
Jackson 1981, p. 6. This circular logic is often reiterated in psychoanalytic approaches
to fantasy. For example, ‘all ction has its origins in phantasy and so it comes as no
surprise that psychoanalytic theory has had such an impact upon our understanding
of literary texts’ (Armitt 1996, p. 39).
44
Even Fredric Jameson seems to have fallen into this trap, describing cyberpunk
as ‘the supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism
itself’ (Jameson 1992, p. 419).
of literary fantasy in favour of paraxial fantasy would seem to conrm this.

However, there is more at stake. Jackson acknowledges that
[a]lthough nearly all literary fantasies eventually re-cover desire, neutralizing

their own impulses towards transgression, some move towards the extreme
position which will be found in Sade’s writings, and attempt to remain
‘open’, dissatised, endlessly desiring. 45
She devotes her analysis to ‘[t]hose texts which attempt that movement and
that transgressive function’ because ‘in them the fantastic is at its most
uncomprising in its interrogation of the “nature” of the “real”’.46 There are
several problems with this approach.
First, the fact that almost all fantasies neutralise this impulse suggests that
the actual impulse is not one of transgression but of a eeting entertainment
of the possibility of transgression. Rather than verify the existence of an
impulse toward transgression and examine the material conditions which
produced or curtailed it, Jackson merely privileges such an impulse while
neutralising the second half of the movement, even though it is, by her own
admission, the dominant one. Her failure to consider this impulse in full is
indicative of the limited scope of her efforts to introduce the political and
ideological into her reworking of Todorov, and suggests a rather simplistic
model of the relationship between the subject and the social order which
makes no distinction between varieties of psychic and social repression.
Second, Jackson denes literary fantasy in terms of that which it typically
is not. The exceptional characteristic she privileges as the dening characteristic
of fantasy is not merely a product of ner writing – her examples are exceptional
in two senses – but of a failure of form, whether intentional or not. However,
her equivalisation of repressions leads her to interpret genre as a constraint
to be transgressed rather than as an enabling eld of possibilities.47 Con-
sequently, she has little option but to pursue this rather perverse course of
45
Jackson 1981, p. 9.
46
Jackson 1981, p. 9.
47
This is not uncommon. For example, Lucie Armitt advocates ‘an approach that
accepts genre as a necessary evil: a problem to negotiate, a limit to surpass and a
structure to overreach’, arguing that ‘our actual interest’ in fantasy texts ‘has more to
do with the complex ways in which an individual tale simultaneously irts with while
overreaching this limiting straitjacket that we know as genre’. Seduced by the ‘irtatious
dynamic’ of ‘resistance to appropriative and author/itarian possession’, Armitt valorises
the variations in individual fantasy texts which distinguish them from each other as
64 Mark Bould
misdening fantasy by its exceptions rather than its rules, and of turning –
fallaciously – to the avant-garde as the repository of literary production
supposedly least tainted by commodity production.
Third, Jackson’s focus on the suppressed impulses of fantasy texts mirror-
ing the Freudian psyche constitutes a self-validating sleight-of-hand which
also demonstrates the imperialist project of psychoanalysis: it is not sufcient
that all people must be made to coincide with its universalised white male
European bourgeois subject, so too must all cultural products. Just as Todorov’s
structuralism causes him to reject author in favour of text and actual readers
in favour of the implicit reader, so Jackson’s psychoanalysis, by attributing
sole agency to the text, exscribes the material conditions of textual production
and reception. This is perhaps unsurprising in an argument which draws
upon Freud’s own discussions of literature (for which he carefully selected
texts to illustrate his own fantasies of the psyche and universal subjectivity)
without questioning, for example, the different modes of production of the
texts (for example, volumes of literature, folklore, science; the analyst’s accounts
of the analysand’s accounts of dreams) upon which Freudian psychoanalysis
is built. This becomes increasingly troubling as Jackson’s book proceeds
without any recognition that the texts she considers, and the work by Freud
that is intended to illuminate them, are products of similar cultures during
roughly the same period. It is unsurprising, then, that they share tropes,
images and ideas; what is surprising is that, rather than indicating the historical
and cultural contingency of Freudian theory, the appearance of these shared
elements is deemed to corroborate Freudian theory, which, thus conrmed,
can, in an astonishing piece of circular logic, then be used to analyse them.
the ‘resistance to homogeneity that makes them pleasurable for us to read’ (Armitt
1996, pp. 19–20). As Armitt’s recognition of the ‘crucial differentiation between fantasy
as genre ction and the fantastic as a far more resistant, anti-generic mode’ (Armitt
1996, p. 6) indicates, her position is made more tenuous by a failure to allow for the
complex interactions of the overlapping distinctions of formula, category, genre, cycle
and mode, causing her to mistake formula or category for genre and genre for mode,
and thus to distance herself from the mass and popular forms of fantasy. Ironically,
although she notes that Todorov’s work belongs to ‘that form of structuralism that
gives birth to the compartmentalization approach to fantasy’ (Armitt 1996, p. 6), Armitt
seems oblivious to the possibility that the ‘resistance to homogeneity’ she champions
arises from the retrospective construction of straitjacketing categories.
Monleón and the fantastic

Perhaps the greatest testimony to Jackson’s failure to introduce the political
and ideological into Todorov’s model of fantasy is the extent to which
subsequent criticism of the genre has been dominated by psychoanalytic
approaches often more concerned with using fantasy texts to explore, for
example, the structuralist and poststructuralist psychoanalytic theories of
Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva. On the positive side, this has, courtesy of
often strange alliances between academic feminism and psychoanalytic theory,
resulted in some strong feminist critiques and advocacies of the fantastic as
a site and range of possibilities for the critique of patriarchal, racist and
capitalist hegemony, as exemplied in the ction of Joanna Russ, Gwyneth
Jones and Octavia Butler. However, if one believes that ‘[i]t is not the
consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence
that determines their consciousness’,48 then any critique which ultimately
locates repression in language and opposition to repression in eruptions of
the Imaginary, and which frequently seems to posit a return to undifferenti-
ated pre-linguistic ux (Kristeva’s semiotic) as its eutopian goal, is inadequate.
As Monleón notes, ‘the exposition of the repressed is not necessarily a
subversive act, if by subversion is meant a challenge to the causes of repression,
a deance of order, an assault on dominant ideology’.49
Arguably the greatest inuence of Jackson’s Fantasy: The Literature of
Subversion derives from its misread subtitle. Monleón, like others, assumes
that she considers fantasy to be inherently subversive, and, consequently, his
Foucauldian sociohistorical corrective to her work is intended as a refutation
of an argument she does not make.50 There is, for example, no contradiction
between Jackson’s observation that during the Victorian period, the ‘horrors,
transgression and sexual “licence” [of the Gothic were] exploited by many
Victorian novelists to deter a bourgeois reading public from political revolution,
even as it provide[d] them with a temporary fullment of ungratied desire’,51
48
Marx 1987, p. 263.
49
50
Jackson does argue for the subversive potential of fantasy, but only after dening
fantasy in terms of a specic type of subversive potential. The mistake is to assume
that fantasy, as used in the title of her book, means something other than this very
narrowly dened variety (i.e., Jacksonian paraxial fantasy).
51
Jackson 1981, p. 124.
66 Mark Bould
and Monleón’s argument that fantasy was involved in ‘the defense of the
status quo and the preservation of economic order’, helping to ‘modify
hegemonic discourse in order to justify the survival of bourgeois society’.52
Indeed, Monleón’s attempt to produce ‘an ideological reading rooted in the
concrete historical circumstances from which the fantastic emerged and
evolved’53 is anticipated by Jackson’s commentary on several mid-Victorian
novels concerned with connement and the collision of bourgeois realism
and Gothic horror.54
Monleón, who persuasively argues that Goya’s famous aquatint plate
Capricho 43 in fact reads ‘The dream of reason produces monsters’, locates
the origin of fantasy in the ‘interaction’ in the Gothic ‘of two opposed and
irreconcilable worldview . . . as a result of the tensions produced by the
inclusion of medieval beliefs within the reasonable framework of eighteenth-
century bourgeois precepts’.55 Therefore, fantasy, which Monleón denes as
‘an artistic production articulating a social concern about the essence of nature
and law, on the one hand, and the threats and fears derived from such a
concern, on the other’,56 could not exist prior to the objectication of nature
and the ‘triumph of reason’,57 which he dates at around 1760.58 As soon as
‘the “Rationalists”’ who had opposed ‘the dominance of arbitrary absolutism
and feudal organization’ came to power, ‘a very different political conguration
came into being, with the end result that reason had to adjust in order to
conform to its new social role’.59 This resulted in the establishment of houses
of connement on the urban periphery in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries as ‘hospitals, workhouses, pauperhouses, and prisons assumed the
52
53
Monleón 1990, p. vii.
54
Jackson notes the apocalyptic coincidence and paralleling of feminist revolt with
Luddite violence in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) and with Chartism in Elizabeth
Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848). She also discusses Dickens’s descriptions of the Gordon
rioters as demonically-possessed Bedlamites in Barnaby Rudge (1841), of Chartists as
demons in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), of political revolution as barbarism in Hard
Times (1854), and of the French Revolution as ‘a grotesque plague of madness’ (Jackson
1981, p. 132) in A Tale of Two Cities (1859).
55
56
57
58
He also argues that fantasy ended in the 1930s, when the modernist assault on
language and epistemological certainty had rendered ‘unreason . . . indistinguishable
from reason, and . . . reality . . . as nonapprehensible’ (Monleón 1990, p. 75).
59
function not only of curing, educating, or punishing, but also of hiding’; and,
as ‘[c]riminals and madmen were thrown together with beggars and the
unemployed’, many came to see work as ‘the feature that separated those
reasonable beings who participated in the productive effort from a fth estate,
composed of the “scum” always ready to rob or riot’.60 Attempts were made
‘to eliminate the cohabitation by different classes of the same streets or
buildings’ by replacing ‘vertical distinction by oors’ with a ‘horizontal dis-
placement’ which saw the ‘laboring classes . . . pushed from the center to the
periphery, to that same edge of the city in which stood the houses of con-
nement’61 and relocated cemeteries. Thus the dream of bourgeois reason
thrust all that it did not wish to recognise (death, madness, idleness, crime,
pauperism, riots and the new working class, lumped together under the
metaphor of unreason) out onto the edges of its cities.
Traces of this frenzy of reasonable repudiations can certainly be found in
the literature of the period. Don Quixote’s niece pleads with the priest and
the barber to destroy his volumes of poetry along with the chivalric romances
which have lead to his delusions, ‘[f]or once [he] is cured of his disease of
chivalry, he might very likely read those books and take it into his head to
turn shepherd and roam about the woods and elds, singing and piping and,
even worse, turn poet, for that disease is incurable and catching, so they
say’.62 The deranging irrationality of building a reasonable and enlightened
society on expulsion and exclusion, as in More’s Utopia (1516), is laid bare in
Laputa and the land of the Houyhnhnms in Swift’s Gulliver Travels (1726), as
are its exploitative colonialist and mercantile tendencies in Neville’s The Isle
of Pines (1668) and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719).
Against the backdrop of this mass connement, which ‘symbolized
unreasonable repression as well as the repression of unreason’,63 Monleón
traces the emergence of the Gothic as ‘a sadistic unearthing and reconstruction
of unreasonable forms’ which, by exposing unreason, ‘allowed dominant
society to control or tame the image of unreason, to tailor a moralistic dress
around its presence’.64 The fantastic was thus born as ‘an expression of the
60
Monleón 1990, pp. 25–6.
61
62
Cervantes 1950, p. 61.
63
64
68 Mark Bould
problem and as a means of interfering in it’, as ‘an artistic discourse that

would measure and dene the cultural and political boundaries between
reason and unreason’65 even as the bourgeoisie was repeatedly faced with
the choice between extending principles of liberty and equality to all or
defending its class interests – a conict, Monleón notes, at the heart of Shelley’s
Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (1818). As working-class political
consciousness ourished, the connection between industrial development and
the threat it posed to bourgeois order became increasingly clear. Marx and
Engels drew on familiar fantastic tropes, ‘using dominant discourse as well
as deconstructing a cultural metaphor’,66 when they wrote of the spectre
haunting Europe, of capitalism producing its own contradictions and the
bourgeoisie its own grave-diggers.
Monleón provides two imporant correctives to Jackson. First, he collocates
fantasy and other texts of sociohistorical importance in the realm of ideology,67
giving impetus to the reconsideration of specic fantasy texts in relation to
the material circumstances pertinent to their production. For example, he
writes of the profound economic changes affecting domestic servants during
the nineteenth century as they ‘joined capitalist relations of production’ and
‘lost their status as “members of the family” to become workers inserted
within the household structure’.68 This insight transforms our understanding
of The Turn of the Screw as the hesitation identied by Todorov becomes a
signier of self-conicted, contradictory ideology which is brought into focus
by the new role of domestic servants in a class society which perpetuates
myths of equality despite its fundamental exploitative economic relationships.
Add to this Engels’s insight (from Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy)
that, having ‘done its best to universalise enmity, to transform mankind into
a horde of ravenous beasts . . . who devour one another just because each has
identical interest’, liberal economics, through the factory system and child
labour, then set about ‘the dissolution of the family’ by intruding the cash
nexus into the relationship between child and parent.69 In The Turn of the
65
66
67
Refreshingly, Monleón’s few references to Freud seem more interested in considering
his work as further examples of literary production drawing on common imagery
rather than as a privileged source of insight.
68
69
Engels 1975, pp. 423–4. Such a dissolution can be seen to underlie the relationship
Screw, human interaction is similarly dominated by economic relationships.

The world of the orphaned Miles and Flora is circumscribed by the nancial
provision of an uncle who desires to have nothing else to do with them: they
are raised by servants and Miles is educated at a boarding school. Consequently,
James’s short novel can be read as not just an expression of anxieties about
servants and other subordinated groups knowing their proper place, but also
of maintaining social hierarchy when everyone within it is reducible, if not
yet reduced, to her exchange-value.
Second, Monleón introduces an historical dimension beyond the abstracted
temporality of the reader’s experience of the text, an innovation which demands
recognition of the dynamic interrelation of texts. This is valuable, but also
gives rise to problems. For the sake of concision, rather than treating Monleón’s
book-length argument in greater detail, I will instead consider Adam Roberts’s
contention – which follows a logic similar to, if simpler than, Monleón’s –
about alien abduction fantasies. In the typical scenario, ‘white, moderately
afuent thirty-something American[s] . . . are taken suddenly from their homes
by aliens, restrained (perhaps shackled) and transported to the alien ship’
where they are ‘subjected to physically degrading and sometimes painful
treatments’ which include ‘the insertion . . . of devices into nose or ear’ and
of ‘probes into genital or rectal areas, the stimulation of the penis and the
removal of sperm, or the investigation of the womb’; the abductees are then
compelled ‘to forget, or at least to suppress, memories of the experience’.
Roberts suggests that this widespread fantasy and the credulity with which
it is often met is an example of the return of the repressed ‘on a societal level’
as the collective denial of the ‘brutal realities of the trade in slaves’ on which
‘the history and indeed the success of America’ is built bursts through the
fabric of American national mythology. He concludes that ‘mainstream America
is fantasising a science-ctionalised version of eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century slaving, and interpolating itself into the victim role’.70 Appealing as
this argument might seem, it is problematic, and there are several important
questions it fails to address: why has this repressed taken so long to return?
By what mechanism has it returned? Why is it just about race?
between the Eloi and the Morlock in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine: An Invention
(1895): the Morlocks operate the subterranean machine systems which preserve the
world of the Eloi; in exchange for this labour, the Eloi (literally) feed the Morlock.
70
Roberts 2000, pp. 133–4.
70 Mark Bould
Roberts suggests that the alien abduction narrative ourished at this

particular historical juncture because race has become ‘central to late twentieth-
century constructions of “American-ness” ’.71 This untestable hypothesis is
derived not from a detailed examination of any of the many supposedly
authentic accounts of alien abduction or from a range of overtly ctional
accounts. Instead, Roberts offers a reading of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis
trilogy – novels which rework the abduction scenario so as to explore the
politics of resistance and incorporation, and which engage with the possibilities
offered by the genre to transmute colonial history into a narrative which
makes that history resonate anew, remembering the past in order to also
estrange the present – and then rereads all alien abduction narratives through
the lter it provides. His argument is itself, then, a product of the increased
centrality of race in contemporary identity politics: he considers alien abduction
fantasies to be about race because a concern with issues of race is what he is
looking to nd in them. This is not to say that alien abduction narratives
cannot or do not work in the manner he suggests, or that issues of race are
not important, but it does require us to ask what this emphasis on race is
itself suppressing.
It is possible to suggest a range of other equally plausible hypotheses to
explain alien abduction fantasies. Two abduction narratives which have little,
if anything to do with race, are the lm Fire in the Sky (Robert Lieberman,
1993) and Whitley Strieber’s Communion: A True Story (1987): the former offers
a context of short-contract manual labour, and thus of changing gender roles,
in-crisis masculinity, and domestic third-worldisation; the latter’s prurient
sado-masochistic sexual fantasies provide, however unintentionally, a metaphor
for and eroticisation of negotiated subordination. Other explanations might
include increased social atomisation coupled to increased media focus on (if
not incidents of) abduction, sexual assault, serial killing and child abuse; the
increasing surveillance of disempowered people by unaccountable institutions
and practices; the impact of new reproductive and contraceptive technologies
and reactionary retrenchments on sex education and abortion rights; the
greater visibility of gays and lesbians in a homophobic culture. The number
of possible explanations – none of them are implausible or exclusive of the
71
Roberts 2000, p. 132. For a more compelling discussion of UFO abduction narratives
see Luckhurst 1998.
others – indicates the limitations of introducing the ideological and historical

into a theoretical framework whose tendency to promote identity politics
rather than a politics of identication so readily accommodates it to the
exercise of hegemony.
Similar problems attend Monleón’s argument in that his predisposition
toward certain discourses similarly shape and inevitably distort his conception
of the historical context in which he seeks to embed the fantastic. This is not
to say that his particular embedding is without insight or value, but, rather,
that the totalising reading he attempts to construct from it and the conclusions
he reaches are ineluctably partial and misleading.
Jerry-rigging a Marxist theory of the fantastic

The rst question that must be asked in fashioning new theories of the fantastic
is, what are the earlier theories marginalising and suppressing? Two things
are immediately apparent. The rst and perhaps lesser point is that structuralist
and psychoanalytic approaches seem incapable of admitting to the existence
of the fantasy text as commodity. Monleón and Jackson locate the culmination
of fantasy in, respectively, 1930s modernism and postmodernist literature of
the late 1960s and 1970s.72 It is surely more than coincidence that these decades
witnessed the successful establishment of modern publishing categories in
the American pulp magazines (including sf in Amazing, Astounding, etc., and
fantasy in Weird Tales and Unknown)73 and the emergence of fantasy as a
succesful category in book publishing in the 1950s and 1960s with the US
mass market edition of The Lord of the Rings and other best-selling paperbacks
like Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and Frank Herbert’s
Dune (1965), all three of which were campus hits. By establishing a fantasy
canon of already-canonical texts, Jackson is able to suppress their commodity
form and, when dealing with mass or popular literature, to selectively throw
out the baby of agency with the bathwater of intentionality. Contrary to her
72
Intriguingly, Armitt identies several instances in Lewis Carroll’s Alice novels in
which ‘linguistic free-play and textual metamorphoses’ – the semiotic excess which
Jackson treats as anticipative of modernist ction – ‘actually work to suppress the
political’ (1996, pp. 157–8).
73
See Ashley 2000 and 2001, Carter 1977 and Westfahl 1998.
72 Mark Bould
stated intentions, her approach allows, encourages even, the avoidance of

political engagement. 74
If this tendency is to be effectively countered, it is necessary to construct
a theory of the fantastic which takes account of its commodity status and
forms; as a necessary adjunct to this, it is essential that a new canon be
constructed which centres on those previously excluded or marginalised
subgenres of the fantastic – the weird tale, sword and sorcery, space opera,
heroic fantasy and secondary-world fantasy – which most clearly bear the
marks of commodication, albeit in complex ways. This is not to be taken as
a celebration of low culture at the expense of high culture but as a means of
addressing the artice of that division; ultimately, already-canonical texts
would not be excluded from debate but cast in a more telling light. Such a
canon, dynamically conceived and constantly re-forming, would help to
establish fresh ground on which to build theory and criticism that liberates
readers and writers.
The second point is that the dominant tendencies in theorising the fantastic,
which build on or take inspiration from Jackson’s work, strongly serve the
interests of capitalist hegemony. As I suggested in my introduction, the roots
of this problem can be found in the failure of the Left to generate an adequate
theory of the subject and subjectivity. A clear example of the problem posed
for Marxism by the psychoanalytic turn can be found in the emphasis on
subversion and resistance in fantasy theory and criticism over the last twenty
years (particularly in screen studies) which parallels the Left’s increasingly
common rejection of a programmatic Marxist politics of revolution in favour
of the capitulative issue-by-issue politics of negotiated subordination.
74
Consider, for example, the imagery of contagion found in vampire ction. Brian
Stableford’s Empire of Fear (1988) uses vampirism as a metaphor for AIDS, and vice
versa, in order to examine various discourses surrounding them; although problematic,
it works consciously within a genre and tradition, a possibility allowed for by Monleón.
In contrast, And the Band Played On (Spottiswoode 1993) imagines AIDS as a contagion
requiring a Van Helsing to hunt down its Dracula-like patient zero, and, in 2000,
British popular journalism decribed Romanian gypsy beggars in London in terms
familiar to anyone who has read Dracula. By fostering a view of fantasy as the eruption
of unconscious phantasy, one is able to avoid direct criticism of the authors of the
latter examples because they do not seem to demonstrate any self-reexivity (or,
therefore, agency); the wider indictment of a culture which largely did not notice or
did not care about such ideological manipulation is thus forestalled, as is the necessary
critique of the role and limited repertoire of the culture industries.
Following Althusser’s description of the ideological interpellation of the

subject,75 throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, screen studies emphasised
the discursive subjectivity produced by the text-as-apparatus-of-domination.76
Subsequently, screen studies, as part of what Bennett described as ‘the turn
to Gramsci’ in cultural studies,77 shifted its emphasis to the social subject who
encounters numerous attempts at ideological positioning and responds to
them in a variety of ways. In its most extreme forms, this tendency is deeply
over-romanticised, absurd and even offensive: for example, Fiske compares
the shopkeeper who cannot distinguish between genuine shoppers and people
who try on clothes with no intention of buying them to the US invaders who
cannot distinguish between Vietnamese non-combatants and freedom ghters.78
In screen studies, critics have often taken the relationship between a fan-
tasy TV series or lm and its audiences as their object of study, typically
focusing on the activities of ‘participatory fandom’.79 Although such studies
are reasonably successful in avoiding the excesses of Fiske, even the more
ethnographically-minded are not above projecting their analysis onto their
respondents or romanticising the activities they are studying. For example,
Bacon-Smith describes the fan as knowing ‘her enjoyment does not arise out
of passive reception but out of active engagement with her favorite genre or
medium’ and argues that participatory fandom ‘has an almost limitless supply
of ingenuity and a capacity to maintain secrecy that . . . can only be compared
to the poetry movement in Russia’ and that ‘the law they break [copyright
infringement] is only the mildest part of the subversion fomented in the
ladies’ literary group and terrorist society’.80 In such accounts, fan activity
tends to be posited as resistance to incorporation, a triumph, however
temporary, over the ideological interpellations of a capitalist, patriarchal,
white-supremacist and heteronormative apparatus.
75
Althusser 1971, pp. 160–70.
76
E.g. Mulvey 1989, pp. 14–26.
77
Bennett 1986.
78
Fiske 1989, p. 39.
79
E.g. Bacon-Smith 1992 and 2000; Jenkins 1992; Tulloch and Jenkins 1995; Clerc
1996; Penley 1997; Brooker 1999. For all its faults, most especially its lack of a notion
of affect, Barker and Brooks 1998 stands out for its avoidance of this excessively self-
selecting audience in favour of a more varied sample of subjects. See also Barker,
Arthurs and Harindranath 2001.
80
Bacon-Smith 1992, pp. 16–17, 5 and 6.
74 Mark Bould
An emphasis on the unpredictability of fan responses to a text and their

subsequent activity81 indicates the extent to which this critical tendency has
lost sight of one of its principal tenets, namely that the subject is involved in
the practice of making do with the texts and commodities that the apparatus
provides. I would suggest, therefore, that fan activity and all that it is taken
to stand for is utterly predictable in all but its nest detail, and that even the
most supercial acquaintance with Gramsci indicates that this so-called
resistance is actually primarily a form of incorporation:
the fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and
the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and
that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed – in other words,
that the leading group should make sacrices of an economic corporate
kind. But there is also no doubt that such sacrices and such a compromise
cannot touch the essential; for though hegemony is ethical-political, it must
also be economic, must necessarily be based on the decisive nucleus of
economic activity.82
On a very basic level, and as any of the accounts of participatory media

fandom, especially Star Trek fandom, demonstrate, the sacrice and compromise
made by producers who do not prosecute certain kinds of fan-based copyright
infringement (indeed they tacitly encourage them) and the role played by
organised fandom in policing infringement through establishing its acceptable
forms not only does not challenge the decisive nucleus of economic activity,
it frequently results in increased protability for the media producers and
the further penetration of the market into fan activity. It is therefore necessary
to recognise the vocabulary of subversion and resistance as merely euphemistic,
especially when applied to practices such as these, and to identify differently
articulated processes of subordination as such, however intriguing they might
seem and whatever kernel of refusal they might contain.
Furthermore, it is no surprise to note then that, like much secondary-world
fantasy, many of the shows which attract this kind of fan activity, from Star
Trek: The Next Generation (1987–94) to Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, are primarily
obedience fantasies in which characters, like their authors, are trained to
81
E.g. Pearson 2000.
82
Gramsci 1971, p. 161.
adjust themselves to an apparatus of domination (whether the neoliberal

Federation or the production practices of American series TV). Similarly, the
varieties of fan ction detailed by Bacon-Smith83 are clearly engaged in
processes of incorporating the self into the ctional world or punishing its
characters.84
In closing, I will attempt to position and connect some of the basic building
blocks of a Marxist theory of the fantastic that attempts to redress the balance
from the therapeutic towards the political. What follows is not intended to
represent anything more than a preliminary and hopefully provocative
statement, a Marxist theory of fantasy jerry-rigged from available materials.
Jerry-rigging is a form of détournement and as such constrains me to misprision
and the appropriation and abuse of terms derived from already established
discourses.
To construct a Marxist theory of fantasy, it is necessary to begin with the
notion of the subject, and, as I have indicated above, perhaps the place to
begin is by returning to Althusser. In drawing out the distinction between
‘concrete individuals’ and ‘concrete subjects’ and attempting to demonstrate
that ‘all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects’,
Althusser gives the famous example of an individual in the street being hailed
by a policeman’s ‘Hey, you there!’. He writes, ‘the practical telecommunica-
tion of hailings is such that they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or
whistle, the one hailed always recognizes that it is really him who is being
hailed’; and the hailed individual turns to face the policeman, becoming ‘[b]y
this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion . . . a subject’.85
Eagleton amusingly questions whether ‘the fact that Louis Althusser’s friends
apparently never mistook his cheery shout of greeting in the street’ can serve
‘as irrefutable evidence that the business of ideological interpellation is
83
Bacon-Smith 1992, pp. 52–3.
84
The above comments are not intended to imply that fans are the dupes of the
culture industries. To the extent to which they actually believe their activities to be
truly radical and/or subversive, they might be considered as such (although a rather
more sophisticated and sensitive concept than ‘dupe’ is required); but they are not
dupes insofar as they nd in fandom a genuine community (of felt unalienation,
utopian aspiration, escape). If anyone could be considered a dupe, it is the academic
commentator who abandons political engagement in favour of fantasising fandom as
the locus for such activity.
85
Althusser 1971, pp. 162–3.
76 Mark Bould
invariably successful’.86 However, it is worth noting not only that Althusser

is self-conscious of the shortcomings of his illustration – it introduces a
‘sequence . . . of temporal succession’ into a process that ‘in reality . . . happen[s]
without any succession. The existence of ideology and the hailing or inter-
pellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing’87 – but also
that Eagleton seems to mistake this illustration by metaphor or analogy for
an actual example of ideological interpellation. He suggests that ‘it is hard
to know what to make of [Althusser’s] insistence on the “moment” of inter-
pellation, unless this is simply a convenient ction’88 without recognising that
that is precisely what it is. Consequently, he argues that ‘Althusser’s model
is a good deal too monistic, passing over the discrepant, contradictory ways
in which subjects may be ideologically accosted – partially, wholly, or hardly
at all – by discourses which themselves form no obvious cohesive unity’.89
This is a version of the conventional argument for dismissing Althusser’s
model: namely, that it is too rigid and mechanistic and consequently cannot
produce a subject who is anything other than passive and manipulated by
discourse.
Those who make this argument tend to overlook the possibilities of the
‘always-already’ in Althusser’s ‘one last proposition: individuals are always-
already subjects’90 (Eagleton, for example, dismisses the phrase as sleight-of-hand
to avoid logical difculties with the model). If, like Althusser, we introduce
for the purposes of illustration a temporal dimension into his model, and
add to that the rather more complex notions of causation that have emerged
in complexity and chaos science,91 we can arrive at a model of the subject
who is discrepant and contradictory but nonetheless determined by ideological
interpellations. Each hailing positions the individual as a subject, but each
hailing is in tension with every other hailing’s attempt to position the individual
86
Eagleton 1991, p. 145.
87
Althusser 1971, p. 163.
88
89
90
Althusser 1971, p. 164.
91
The starting point for any consideration of complex non-linear determinism must
be Prigogine and Stengers 1985. More accessible popular accounts can be found in
Gleick 1988, Hall 1992, Lewin 1993 and Peterson 1998. A number of literary critics
have drawn on chaos and complexity theory, and this offers a way into thinking about
language, discourse and ideology. Hawkins 1995 and Kuberski 1994 are rather basic,
whereas Hayles 1990 and 1991 are exemplary.
as a subject. The subject, then, is not to be considered as a singular point, a

monadic intersection, through which all hailings pass, but as a cluster or
cloud of positions, constantly shifting and repositioning in response to each
new hailing. This fuzzier model of the subject more or less corresponds to
the ‘social subject’ who is often opposed to the ‘discursive subject’, but without
the usual mystications. With such a model of the subject in place, it becomes
possible to recover the fantastic, at least partially, from the realms of unconscious
eruption favoured by Jackson and Monleón, and to restore some notion of
agency to the authoring of fantasy without surrendering determinism or
succumbing to voluntarism.
China Miéville has linked fantasy to the capacity for imagination which
Marx argued distinguished human labour from animal behaviour:92
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of the weaver, and a bee
puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what
distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect
raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end
of every labour process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination
of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form
in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his
own . . . to which he must subordinate his will . . . during the whole operation.93
This is, of course, not to conate the categories of fantasy and labour but to
acknowledge the role of fantasy (in the sense of imagination and design) in
human labour and the element of labour (the construction in language, and
hence in reality, of structures raised in the imagination) in the production of
the fantasy text. From this perspective, the potentially most useful psycho-
analytic category one can use to link this process of imaginary and material
shaping in human labour to a more-political-than-therapeutic model of fantasy
is that of paranoia.
In his analysis of the paranoid and conspiratorial worlds of Philip K. Dick,
Freedman usefully summarises Freud’s various accounts of paranoia:
the ideational structure of paranoia is that of a ruthless hermeneutic. . . .

[T]he paranoiac has an abnormally high investment in the hermeneutic
92
Miéville 2000.
93
Marx 1996, p. 188.
78 Mark Bould
practice which he or she performs on the symptomatic actions of other

people. . . . But not only is the paranoiac an interpreter: he or she is one of
an especially systematic and ambitious type. . . . The paranoiac is not only
someone for whom every detail is meaningful – for whom nothing can be
left uninterpreted or taken for granted – but someone who holds a conception
of meaning that is both totalizing and hermeneutic. The paranoiac is the
most rigorous of metaphysicians. The typical paranoid outlook is thorough-
going, internally logical, never trivializing, and capable of explaining the
multitude of observed phenomena as aspects of a symmetrical and expressive
totality. No particular of empirical reality is so contingent or heterogeneous
that the paranoiac cannot, by a straightforward process of point-for-point
correspondence, interpret its meaning within the framework of his or her
own grand system. 94
Freud traces the origin of the paranoid system to the withdrawal of the libido
from the world, which then becomes xed on and aggrandises the ego,95 and
argues that, by constructing a delusional universe, the paranoiac is attempting
to re-direct the libido outwards, to reconnect with the world. Freedman goes
on to note Freud’s association of paranoia with philosophy, his suspicion that
the delusional paranoid system outlined in Daniel Paul Schreber ’s Memoirs
of My Nervous Illness96 might contain more truth than some are prepared to
believe, and his concession, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, that paranoid
interpretations are partially justied.97
Lacan, however, does not see paranoia as merely a disease. He considers
it, rather, to play an essential role in the development of the psyche. The new-
born has no sense of identity and experiences existence as uxes, drives and
desires with no core of self and no clearly dened borders. At the ‘mirror
stage’, the infant becomes aware for the rst time of differentiation, of the
94
95
A classic example of this can be found in Robert Lindner’s account of his treatment
of the Los Alamos physicist pseudonymously known as ‘Kirk Allen’. As a child, Allen
read a work of ction whose protagonist shared his name. Deciding that he was
actually reading his own biography, he set about assimilating much of the sf and
fantasy he read into it, creating an imaginary (or delusory) alternative universe in
which he played the role of saviour. Ironically, in following Freud’s advice not to
dispute with the paranoiac analysand, Lindner came to believe in Allen’s delusional
system.
96
Schreber 2000.
97
Freud 1991a.
division of the universe into subject (self) and object (not-self). As Freedman
notes,
The rationalizing interpretations of paranoia, elaborated into a system at

the center of which stands the ‘I’ of the paranoiac, are for Lacan paradigmatic
of human psychic development as inaugurated by the ‘mirror ’ stage of
objectifying identication, when distinctions and links are rst established
between an alienated ‘I’ and an alienating not-‘I’ . . . Lacan maintains that
the ego is structured on a paranoiac basis and that human knowledge
operates according to a paranoiac principle.98
Hendershot argues that if Lacan is correct in identifying ego-formation as a

paranoid process, then ‘taking one’s place in the Symbolic Order means living
in a paranoiac system that is culturally sanctioned’.99 However, Hendershot
is keen to intepret paranoia as a special case of trauma in which the unrep-
resentable Lacanian Real is interpreted rather than merely repeated,100 and
her most useful formulation is that ‘[p]aranoia is an attempt to make meaning
out of unarticulated trauma’.101 In analysing 1950s American culture and the
sf movies of the period, she argues that ‘the very pervasiveness of the nuclear
threat makes paranoia the ideal system for expressing fear of something that
is everywhere. Paranoiacs perceive each detail of everyday life to be part of
vast networks’.102
Following a brief account of Lacan’s attempt to historicise the Freudian
subject,103 linking ‘its emergence with such cultural products of the period of
nascent bourgeois hegemony as perspectival optics and the Cartesian cogito’,
Freedman concludes that, consequently, not only are ‘the Freudian subject
and the subject of capitalism inextricably related’ but that there is also ‘no
basis for a sharp distinction between the paranoiac and the “normal” subject
of capitalist society’.104 In what follows, my use of ‘paranoia’ (and terms de-
rived from it) is not intended to carry the negative pathological associations.
98
99
Hendershot 1999, p. 9.
100
E.g. Hendershot 1999, p. 20.
101
Henderhsot 1999, p. 119.
102
Hendershot 1999, pp. 127–8.
103
In Lacan 1977.
104
80 Mark Bould
By folding these accounts of the mechanism or processes of paranoid

thinking back into my variant of Althusser’s model of the subject and Marx’s
description of human labour quoted above, it is possible to begin to construct
a theory of the fantastic. According to Marx, human species-being and species-
life consists of conscious labour undertaken in a collective or community
framework. This labour is composed of, if not a dialectical, then certainly a
cybernetic process of imaginative construction and material construction.105
The performance of such operations on material reality can be seen as a
fundamentally paranoid act, a re-ordering of a pre-existing order so as to
make a sensible system of meaning within a traumatically and intransigently
elusive Real. This also applies in the manipulation of language and the pro-
duction of text, where the limits of physical matter are replaced by the
limitations of language, discourse, ideology and the commodity system.
If the Symbolic Order is indeed nothing more than a culturally sanctioned
paranoid system, the act of imagining can be seen as playing upon the
themes, structures, possibilities and constraints of that system with varying
degrees of complicity and dissent. The act of literary production therefore
constitutes an actualisation of such play in a material form, and regardless
of whether it is the complexly interwebbed realism of George Eliott or J.K.
Rowling’s mooncalf dystopias, the depicted milieu is a paranoid construction
compensating for the traumatic absence of a sensible Real by offering the
interconnectivity of a ruthless hermeneutic. In ctional worlds, the map is
always the territory.
In this context, paranoia can be used to describe the force which holds the
fuzzily-determined subject together, the shuttling between the vast array of
subject positions on offer, which must in some way be reconciled with each
other if the subject is ever to feel unied or whole.106 This is the role of
fantasising. This is how we construct ontologies.
105
In the above quotation from Capital, Marx errs in his insistence on a chronology
of imaginary preconstruction followed by material construction; in practice, both must
continue to feedback into the other, adjusting and readjusting what is imagined as it
comes into contact with stubborn materiality, ideology and the commodity system,
and vice versa.
106
O’Donnell relates paranoia to the knowledge produced by a community which
enables individuals to obtain ‘visible identity as historically unied subjects’ (1991,
p. 184).
Fantasy ction, in both its broad and narrow senses, draws upon this force,
this continual location and dislocation. Where fantasy differs from other forms
of ction is in the particular nature of its world-building. All ction builds
worlds which are not true to the extratexual world (itself an ideological – and,
arguably, therefore a fantastic – construct), but fantasy worlds are constructed
upon a more elaborate predicate: they are not only not true to the extratextual
world but, by denition, do not seek or pretend to be. Recognising its status,
fantasy disavows the very possibility of a territory which is not its map.
This concern with world-building, with the paranoid construction of textual
ontologies, is consistently foregrounded in fantasy and the fantastic genres.
This foregrounding is the shared characteristic which provides these texts
with the identity by which, in the words of Adorno and Horkheimer, they
are brought ‘within the sphere of administration’,107 subsumed into the capitalist
culture industry and reied in a commodity form. Upon this basic characteristic
the further rules and conventions of the fantastic genres are erected, interacting
with each other and the paranoid textual ontology, so as to produce the
various types and particular examples of fantastic text (which can, in turn,
be understood as a further process of product differentiation within the sphere
of administration).
The next stage in developing this jerry-rigged theory of the fantastic would
be to use it to interrogate and explore a range of fantastic texts. The obvious
place to start would be with the novels of Philip K. Dick, or lms like Solaris
(Andrei Tarkovksy, 1972), Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983), Dark City
(Alex Proyas, 1998) and Cube (Vincenzo Natali, 1998) – fantastic texts which
narrativise and thematise paranoia, ontology and subject formation; and it
is tempting to do so, as each of them can tell us much about the complex
relationship between ontology, ideology and the subject. However, one of the
107
Adorno and Horkheimer 1997, p. 131. The reference to Adorno and Horkheimer
is not a casual one. The model of the subject ventured above bears more than a passing
resemblance to paradigmatic Enlightenment subject they identify in Odysseus and of
which they write: ‘The strain of holding the I together adheres to the I in all stages;
and the temptation to lose it has always been there with the blind determination to
maintain it’ (p. 33). If, as Adorno and Horkheimer contend, twentieth century modernity
is the inevitable culmination of the Enlightenment project, then the fantastic texts/
ontologies produced by the paranoid and fuzzily-determined subject can be seen to
consitute a vernacular modernism (for a discussion of what a vernacular modernism
might involve, see Hansen 2000).
82 Mark Bould
implications of the above argument is that, even in its crudest forms, fantasy
is possessed of a self-awareness and self-reexivity that is not essential to
other forms of ction. A more worthwhile approach, therefore, would be to
begin with, or move very rapidly on to, initially rather less promising texts
(which have not already been accepted into the canon on other grounds),
and one of the strengths of this jerry-rigged theory of the fantastic is that it
is just as successful in explaining the operations of that most crass example
of fantastic cultural production, the spin-off novel set in the diegess of a
lm (such as, Star Wars), a TV series (for example, various Star Treks) or a
role-playing game (e.g., Warhammer). Rigorously constrained by the respective
‘writer’s bible’ containing the rules, concepts, conceits and vocabulary of the
given universe with which any contribution must conform, such novels are
profoundly paranoid: to paraphrase Freedman, they are thoroughgoing,
internally logical, never trivialising, and all phenomena are aspects of a
symmetrical and expressive totality – no detail is so contingent or heterogeneous
that it cannot be subsumed within the framework of the grand system of the
particular megatext.108
The difference between such franchise ction and most other fantastic ction
is that, for the former, the megatext is imposed from without. The best of
these works – K.W. Jeter’s Blade Runner sequels or Kim Newman’s Warhammer
and Dark Future novels 109 – often work effectively against some of these
constraints, but such sly rebellion must always be from within the externally
imposed constraints of the megatext – and these acts of creative kicking-
against-the-pricks are themselves the imposition of internal paranoia such as
characterises other fantasy ction.110
108
On the megatext, see Brooke-Rose 1981 and Broderick 1995, pp. 57–61.
109
For a discussion of Jeter 1995 and 1996 see Bould 1999a. Jeter’s third (2000) sequel
is Blade Runner 4: Eye and Talon. Under his Jack Yeovil pseudonym, Newman wrote
several novels for Games Workshop: the best of which are Drachenfels (1989) and
Genevieve Undead (1993).
110
For example, in Jeter’s spin-off Star Wars: The Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy, he is
forced to moderate and modulate the frequently cynical and despairing tone of his
original novels so as to t the requirements of a mass-market, multi-media franchise.
Similarly jettisoned is his not uncommon theme of paranoia – only to be replaced by
the paranoid constraints of mass-market ction as franchised commodity, which in
turn provide an insight into the ruthless hermeneutics of fantasy itself. Set during
events familiar from Star Wars: A New Hope (Lucas 1977) and Return of the Jedi (Marquand
1983), the narrative scope is severely restricted by its relation to these canonical texts
and, unsurprisingly, takes a centripetal form (conspiracies within conspiracies, counter-
In non-franchise fantasy ction, the paranoid grand system is imposed

primarily from within; such external imposition as it contains arises from
broader generic expectations, constraints, possibilities and the ways in which
they are enforced by the publishing industry. The difference, therefore, between
the franchise and non-franchise fantasy ction is one of degree rather than
kind. With this in mind, it is possible to conclude that the (paranoid) fantasy
text is, then, homologous to the (paranoid) subject within ideology: contrary
to Voloshinov, and in chaotically-variant measures, both architect and tenant.
Any Marxist attempt to eulogise fantasy ction as a mode as being ‘subversive’
or ‘progressive’ will be as one-sided as the alternative stern denunciation of
the form as ‘mysticatory’ or ‘reactionary’. What has been attempted here is
a schematic outline of the architectonics of literary fantasy, as constrained
and informed by the mode of subjectivity of modern capitalism, and as
modelling that mode of subjectivity in textual microcosm with a peculiarly
neurotic precision. And while it might seem a kind of pessimism or capitulation
to articially construct paranoid totality, fantasy’s paranoia is an expression
of the fact that the only possible mode of life for the modern subject is one of
everyday paranoid artice. In other words, what sets fantasy apart from much
mimetic art is a frankly self-referential consciousness (an embedded, textual
self-consciousness, whatever the consciousness of the particular author or
reader) of the impossibility of ‘real life’, or Real life. It is, paradoxically, the
conspiracies within counter-conspiracies) so as not to impinge upon or contradict the

continuity they established. Moreover, many passages take the form of lengthy
conversations between small groups of characters (or of individual characters reecting
on the possible meanings of previously described events) in sealed environments in
the depths of interstellar space – as if to be sure of not disturbing the smooth surface
of established continuity. Beyond the self-replicating narrative maze, the remorseless
hermeneutic of the franchise fantasy ction can be located in individual phrases and
their relationship to the megatext within which any particular narrative is located and
which it must not contradict: as the bounty hunter Bossk observes, ‘this Dinnid person
managed to get himself into a large-capacity vat of nerf waste’ (Jeter 1998a, p. 209),
echoing Princess Leia’s (Carrie Fisher) description of Han Solo (Harrison Ford) in The
Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner 1980) as a ‘scruffy-looking nerf-herder ’. Jeter’s
rebelliousness against these constraints takes the form of pastiching George Lucas’s
inept attempts at inventing exotic-sounding names to make his never-very-alien aliens
seem alien, and parodying his inability to imagine the size of a galaxy, his inconsis-
tencies over speeds and journey times, his clunky prose, and what Joanna Russ
described as Star Wars’ satisfaction of a need for ‘self-worth and pleasure’ through
‘sexism, racism, heterosexism, competition and macho privilege’ (1978, p. 254). Such
moments of resisting the externally imposed megatext are nonetheless driven by an
internally imposed self-consistent paranoia.
84 Mark Bould
very fantasy of fantasy as a mode that, at least potentially, gives it space for
a hard-headed critical consciousness of capitalist subjectivity. Of course, very
often – most often – it does not – the specic contents of fantastic ction are
various and defy generalisation, though there is no doubt that vast amounts
of it is nostalgic and mawkish pap. The baroque paranoia of the form, however,
embeds an austere realism.
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What are some of the debates around defining and categorizing fantasy genres?

What are some of the debates around defining and categorizing fantasy genres?

What are some of the critiques of Darko Suvin's perspective on fantasy?

What are some of the critiques of Darko Suvin's perspective on fantasy?

Mark Bould

The Dreadful Credibility of Absurd Things:

In Britain it has been estimated that 10% of all

Although it is unclear whether, by ‘fantasy’, Butler

Historical Materialism, volume 10:4 (51–88)

subjectivity6 and many Marxists of various shades (Adorno, Horkheimer,

Todorov and the fantastic

The clumsiness of this vacillation between two or three conditions (most of

However, as Stanislaw Lem pointed out, ‘representativeness of a sample in

theory of literature either embraces all works or it is no theory. A theory of

Perhaps because testing Todorov’s hypothesis by other cases would require

Jackson and the fantastic

to our own in prose which is mimetic to their respective milieux. It is with

attempt to undermine dominant philosophical and epistemological orders.

of ‘character’ and its ideological assumptions, mocking and parodying a

Jackson likens the disruption of the conventions of bourgeois realism by the

Jackson’s erasure of the distinction between phantasy and fantasy – here

of literary fantasy in favour of paraxial fantasy would seem to conrm this.

[a]lthough nearly all literary fantasies eventually re-cover desire, neutralizing

Monleón and the fantastic

problem and as a means of interfering in it’, as ‘an artistic discourse that

Screw, human interaction is similarly dominated by economic relationships.

Roberts suggests that the alien abduction narrative ourished at this

others – indicates the limitations of introducing the ideological and historical

Jerry-rigging a Marxist theory of the fantastic

stated intentions, her approach allows, encourages even, the avoidance of

Following Althusser’s description of the ideological interpellation of the

An emphasis on the unpredictability of fan responses to a text and their

On a very basic level, and as any of the accounts of participatory media

adjust themselves to an apparatus of domination (whether the neoliberal

invariably successful’.86 However, it is worth noting not only that Althusser

as a subject. The subject, then, is not to be considered as a singular point, a

the ideational structure of paranoia is that of a ruthless hermeneutic. . . .

practice which he or she performs on the symptomatic actions of other

The rationalizing interpretations of paranoia, elaborated into a system at

Hendershot argues that if Lacan is correct in identifying ego-formation as a

By folding these accounts of the mechanism or processes of paranoid

In non-franchise fantasy ction, the paranoid grand system is imposed

conspiracies within counter-conspiracies) so as not to impinge upon or contradict the

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Engels, Frederick 1975, ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’ in Collected Works

Fiske, John 1989, Understanding Popular Culture, London: Routledge.

Freud, Sigmund 1991b [1911], ‘Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account

Gleick, James 1988, Chaos: Making a New Science, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Hayles, N. Katherine 1990, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature

Jackson, Rosemary 1981, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, London: Methuen.

Jeter, K.W. 1996, Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night, London: Gollancz.

Luckhurst, Roger 1998, ‘The Science-Fictionalization of Trauma: Remarks on Narratives

Monleón, Jose B. 1990, A Specter is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the

Mulvey, Laura 1989, Visual and Other Pleasures, Basingstoke: Macmillan.

O’Donnell, Patrick 1991, ‘Engendering Paranoia in Contemporary Narrative’, Boundary

Roberts, Adam 2000, Science Fiction, London: Routledge.

of literary fantasy in favour of paraxial fantasy would seem to conrm this.

Roberts suggests that the alien abduction narrative ourished at this

In non-franchise fantasy ction, the paranoid grand system is imposed

Russ, Joanna 1978, ‘Sf and Technology as Mystication’, Science-Fiction Studies, 16