Boundaries

First semester last year I took a course called "Incredible Magical Realism" in which we explored literature at the border of the uncanny and marvelous. In his book, The Fantastic: a Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Tvetan Todorov outlined the "fantastic" as a hesitation between explanations, uncanny or marvelous. Uncanny events are strange, but entirely possible within the bounds of nature and technology. They are the classic "rational explanation" scenarios. A marvelous phenomenon, on the other hand, is supernatural. The rules of nature as we, the readers, understand them, are broken. A story is "fantastic" as long as it lies between the two. Movies such as The Orphanage are examples of this type of fiction.

In class we had a hard enough time sussing out the classifications of different works of fiction, trying resolve the built-in hesitation. I thought that things would be simple outside of that particular limbo, but after last class, I'm not so sure. As it turns out, the border between marvelous and uncanny is a small, relatively tidy place compared to the world outside that little slice. I have been trying to apply the marvelous-uncanny continuum to the science-fiction/fantasy debate, but now I'm realizing that it might not get me any farther. At first it seems obvious. If the driving mechanism in the plot is supernatural, we're talking about fantasy. If the phenomenon are simply uncanny, then we've got science fiction.

The problem comes from perspective. To the humans in the Lord of the Rings Universe, an Orc or ghost is a perfectly normal thing to encounter, but to us, they would be something supernatural. Likewise, the technology in Star Trek, for example, makes sense in the world of the characters, but to us, couldn't possibly happen, and yet we consider it science-fiction. Obviously the model couldn't work if in one case we measure against our own perspective, while in another, we measure against the fictional set of assumptions. Also, where would you place the Artemis Fowl universe in which fantasy and science fiction elements both abound?