Tzvetan Todorov's "The Fantastic" has become an unavoidable cornerstone of any attempt to analyze fantastic literature. It represents a concerted effort to mark the boundaries and identify the characteristics, from a structuralist perspective, of this literary genre. It seems appropriate, then, to begin with Todorov's definition of the fantastic:

	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 sense, or a product of the imagination--and the 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 controled by 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 neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event. (25)
The basic concept that must be taken into consideration, according to Todorov, is uncertainty. The fantastic in literature evolves around a doubt in the interpretation of the nature of the events presented in the narration. The fantastic as a literary genre, then, must be approached as an epistemological problem. From this initial proposition Todorov goes on to identify the three basic conditions of the fantastic: "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.... Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as 'poetic' interpretations" (33)/ The first and third conditions are necessary in order to enter the realm of the fantastic; the second one may or may not occur. Hence the weight of the definition resides in the readers--a conclusion that must necessarily create tension with the underlying structuralist premises of the book. Todorov solves the conflict by resorting to the concept of the implicit reader in the text. Yet such a formalization of the problem does not adequately address the initial epistemological proposition, since surely the characteristics of such an implicit reader would depend on the historical determinants that framed the rest.

Thus, when considering the "Arabian Nights", Todorov claims that "supernatural events are reported without being presented as such. The implicit reader is supposed to be ignorant of the region where the events take place, and consequently he has no reason for calling them into question.... The mixture [of natural and supernatural] exists, of course, only for the modern reader; the narrator implicit in the tale situates everything on the same level (that of the 'natural')" (55-66). The "Arabian Nights" would thus fall under the category of the marvelous, a genre closely linked to the fantastic and characterized by the presentation of supernatural events without any acknowledgment of a "hesitation." But, as Todorov himself points out, such supernatural elements can be entertained as such only by a modern reader. Why, then, should it be considered a "marvelous" work? If the narrator in the tale situates everything on the natural level, should the story not be considered "mimetic" or "realistic" in the broader sense of the term? 1 "In a world which is indeed our world," says Todorov, "there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world." But what we must understand by the laws of our world? Should a story written in the Middle Ages be considered according to the concepts of nature upheld in those times or according to our current understanding of reality? Should the genre of a work change as the history of humanity modifies the idea of nature?

This apparently elusive character of the fantastic becomes for Louis Vax its basic defining trait. After rejecting the idea that nature should be taken into consideration, 2 he concludes that the fantastic cannot be apprehended through understanding or judgement but is rather percieved by the senses, like the "tragic or comic modes." "We laugh," he says, "because the comic aspects of a situation strike us /naturally/, and not because thinking shows us the superimposition of mechanical elements over live elements" (18; emphasis mine). The tautology is clear: starting from a negotiation of the natural, given its polysemous character, he ends by accepting the fantastic as a natural component of our sensibility. For Vax, then, the fantastic is an ingredient of human nature, an empirical phenomenon apprehended without mediation, while for Todorov it is, ultimately, an epistemological question, although he does not pursue the implications of such premises to their final historical conclusions.. Fantastic literature, according to Vax, encompases an aspect of the entire history of artistic production. Todorov, in contrast, in using selected texts from the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries, /implicitly/ limits the fantastic to that period.3

A consensus seems to exist in dating the origins of the Gothic tale, and of fantastic narrative in general, to 1764, with the publication of Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto."4 Sir Walter Scott, in his introduction to one of the consecutive reprints, presented one of the first analyses of this new genre: "In "The Castle of Otranto", it was his [Walpole's] object to unite the marvellous turn of incident, and imposing tone of chivalry, exhibited in the ancient romance, with that accurate exhibition of human character, and constrast the feelings and passions, which is, or ought to be, delineated in the modren novel" (6). "It was his object to draw such a picture of domestic life and manners, during the feudal times, as might actually have existed and to paint it chequered and agitated by the action of supernatural machinery, such as the superstition of the period received as matter of devout credulity. The natural parts of the narrative are so contrived, that they associate themselves with the marvellous occurrrences; and by the force of that association, render those /speciosa miracula/ striking and impressive, though our cooler reason admits their impossibility" (8). Scott acknowledges the coexistence in this "new kind of narrative," as he calls it, of two epistemological systems that belong to different historical periods: one corresponding to the "unreasonable" world of the Middle Ages, and another related to "more enlightened ages," to a society in which the principles of reason appear to shape nature. It is this coexistence, as articulated through the blending of the romance and the modern novel, that accounts for the labeling of "Otranto" as a new narrative. The fact that Walpole introduces supernatural events is not the important factor. What matters is the /association/, within the realm of artistic representation, of those "speciosa miracula" with the elements of the modern novel. The Gothic was born out of the interaction, in one space, of two opposed and irreconciliable worldviews; it came into being as the result of the reasonable framework of eighteenth-century bourgeois precepts. The Gothic was, therefore, an artistic antinomy, a paradox at the level of representation that challenged the principles of modern art and, therefore, of modern society. The fantastic was born, and from this moment its history and characteristics would be determined by the constant shifting of the diffuse boundaries between reason and unreason.5

Clearly Scott's definition implies that fantastic literature, from the perspective of the postclassical period, could not have existed before its emergence at the end of the 1700s. Scott based his arguments on a sense of historical development, of progress, since the nature of some events, although "held impossible by more enlightened ages, was yet consonant with the faith of earlier times" (10). This initial appraisal of fantastic literature has not been generally accepted by more modern critics--as the cases of Todorov and Vax illustrate. And yet it is preciselay by assuming the historical connotations of such a genre, as did Scott, that a more comprehensive study can be undertaken. From the outset, however, a distinction must be made between fantastic and fantasy, that is, between a literary genre and a human attribute. For if such a distinction were not established, the totality of artistic production would have to be considered in these pages, and an entirely different problem would be at issue. Yet the question of "fantasy and mimesis" is, to a certain extent, relevant to the study of the fantastic, at least insofar as it addresses a particular conception of reality, If the fantastic, as I argue, depends deeply on a specific concept of reality, of what is true and natural, then surely there must be a literature, prior to "Otranto", that deals with this issue, even if the referential premises rest on different values.

This is, to a point, true. Kathryn Hume proposes that "literature is the product of two impulses. There are /mimesis/, felt as the desire to imitate ...and fantasy, the desire to change givens and alter reality" (20). The basic questiono, nevertheless, is not solved by such a definition. What is to be imitated? What reality is to be changed? Any answer would have to take into account different historical and cultural worldviews: "We can also include as fantasy those stories whose marvel is considered 'real', although not in the same faashion that a chair is real. Miracles and some monsters may have been thought to exist by their original audience and even their author, but were often acknowledged to be real only in a special fashion: they only enter the lieves of the spiritually or heroically elect; they are /miracula/ or things to be marvelled at, precisely because they are not everyday occurences and cannot be controlled by just anybody who has a mind to try" (Hume, 21). Fantasy, from this perspective, would be uncommon reality, an exotic experiences--but reality nontheless. The fact it was experienced only by a select group precludes neither its existence nor its effects on society at large. The Spanish poet Gonzalo de Berceo, for instance, wrote during the thirteenth century hagiographies of local saints and recorded the miracles performed by the Virgin, creating texts that were later used as legal documents by the Monastery of San Millán in iorder to claim economic gains. The miracles of Our Lady were indeed miracula, but they fell within the realm of absolute reality.