PLAY AND SUBVERSION: OBSERVATIONS ON THE FANTASTIC AND METAFICTIONAL MODES Dale Knickerbocker State University of New York,

Stony Brook

As the extensive bibliography on fantastic and metafictional literatures suggests, much effort has been made to define these two literary species from a variety of theoretical perspectives. [1] It would thus be difficult to justify yet another attempt to define the limits and characteristics of these two types of narrative. Nonetheless, certain similarities exist between fantasy and metafiction which merit comment: in particular, the unique relationship established between reader and text in both narrative modes. My own study of the modern Spanish peninsular novel, where these two modes frequently coexist in the same work, has led me to believe that the interaction between text and reader in both fantastic and metafictional narratives is ludic in nature.[2] By examining the workings of the ludic textual strategies present in the two modes, the ideologically subversive project which informs them becomes apparent.[3] It is posited that both metafiction and fantasy possess a subversive potential that is realized through the reader s ludic engagement with the text. The observations offered here may prove useful in the analysis of structural and thematic elements in these types of narrative which reveal and subvert the ideological nature of literary discourse itself.[4] The etymological origins of the word ludic in the latin verb ludere, to play, indicate that any examination of the ludic requires first of all a reflection on the nature of play itself. A serious discussion of this topic would itself be the subject of at least a lengthy volume. Nonetheless, even the most brief perusal of research on play is sufficient to note that play theorists seem to agree on several elements as fundamental to the act of playing. Several of these characteristics will be useful in our discussion of the literary ludic. Perhaps the first scholar to investigate the many manifestations of the phenomenon of play and its significance in culture was Johan Huizinga, late Rector of the University of Leyden, in his 1944 study Homo Ludens. This intuitive attempt at understanding play offers several valuable insights that later play theorists have confirmed and developed. Among these are the following fundamental observations: All play means something, (1) play must serve something which is not play (original emphasis), (2) play is the direct opposite of seriousness, (5) the consciousness of play being only pretend does not . . . prevent it from proceeding with utmost seriousness . . . (8) and all play has its rules (11). The French scholar Roger Caillois utilizes and refines Huizingas theories in his 1958 study Man, Play, and Games. One of his most valuable additions to Huizingas work pertains to the tension established between play and order: The game consists of a need to find or continue at once a response which is free within the limits set by the rules . . . [in many instances] the fiction, the sentiment as if replaces and performs the same function as do the rules. Rules themselves create fictions. (original emphasis, 8) Caillois concludes by defining play as an activity which is essentially: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Free: in which play is not obligatory . . . Separate: circumscribed within the limits of space and time . . . Uncertain: the course of which cannot be determined, nor the result obtained beforehand, and some latitude for innovation being left to the players initiative . . . Unproductive: creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new elements of any kind . . . Governed by rules: Under conventions that suspend ordinary laws, and for the moment establish new legislation, which alone counts; . . . Make-believe: accompanied by a special awareness of a special reality or a free unreality, as against real life. (original emphasis, 9-10)

The importance of rules to a study of ludic narrative will be discussed shortly; it is interesting to note at this point that Caillois uses the term convention as synonymous for rule. The concept of rules or conventions is crucial to our contention that the literary ludic operates under a set of conventions which is opposed to those of serious narrative. One other element that Huizinga and Caillois agree upon yet which neither develops adequately is the social nature of play. Both express an awareness of the fact that many serious adult endeavors resemble play (religious ritual, mating habits, war), sharing its conditions, structures, and even its lexicon. Nonetheless, they fail to recognize that it is through play that children become socialized or adapted to the

social roles which they will be called upon to fulfill in adult life. The ideological nature of this conditioning is now accepted as a truism. It should not then be surprising that adult forms of play, including ludic literature, reflect the underlying ideological structures of society. As Peter Hutchinson points out, the refusal to recognize play as a serious activity stems from the failure to distinguish between the activity of play and the purpose which it may serve (original emphasis, 12).[5] It is the manner in which the ludic may serve a serious, ideological purpose that is the subject of this essay. It should now be possible to offer a synthetic working definition of the ludic based on our brief survey of pertinent theory. Play is an activity that exists in direct opposition to those activities which social conventions consider serious. It is paradoxical in nature: although the player enjoys the activity as gratuitous, play always serves a serious purpose; thus it always means something. Games either participate in or reflect a process of socialization. For a state of play to exist, players must reject the rules and codes of the serious; new ones are then created by which they must abide while the game lasts. The new order agreed upon is frequently based on an as if (lets pretend) proposition. The player has the freedom to accept or reject (to participate or not) the conditions of the game. Within the games conventions, the players are given latitude to excercise their creativity; the outcome is therefore uncertain. The astute reader will already have noticed the usefulness of the above tenets in defining the literary ludic: it is necessarily opposed to serious literature or Literature. Let us define Literature as writing (in Barthess sense of the word) which takes itself seriously and is considered serious by its audience.[6] These two aspects deserve closer scrutiny. Writing which takes itself seriously is that writing which attempts to present itself as mimetic of extratextual reality and to represent that reality with a high degree of verisimilitude. Serious writing presents itself as natural, as following the conventions of the way we perceive reality in cuotidian life. Writing which is considered serious (Literature) by its audience is that writing which critics, the creators of literary convention and canon, have taken as paradigmatic of narrative art, especially in the novel: nineteenth-century realism. These conventions in turn have molded readers concepts of serious writing. Ludic narrative, then, may be partially defined as writing which opposes itself to the literary conventions of realism in form, content, or both. [7] The concept of literary conventions may be seen as analogous to the rules involved in playful and serious activities. The conventions of serious narrative are suspended in ludic narrative, which creates its own set of rules. These rules can in turn only be understood in relation to the code of conventions to which they are opposed. The reader has the freedom, as in any game, to accept or r eject the conditions which the ludic text imposes. Once the conventions of the game are accepted, an implicit pact is formed between the reader and the text, and the reader (or player) is free to excercise his/her skill in creating meaning from his/her encounter with the text. Whereas the textual strategies of realism work to conceal its fictional conventions, coaxing the reader to accept passively the narrative as natural, the ludic text makes such acceptance impossible by foregrounding its own non-mimetic nature. It may accomplish this either by creating events, places or beings which are in opposition to the conventions of extratextual reality (the mode normally employed in fantastic literature), or by utilizing a narrative form which thematically or structurally lays bare its own device in opposition to the codes of literary realism (the mode usually associated with metafiction). Of course, any combination of these strategies may be used. The ludic text is consequently characterized by the amount of hermeneutic latitude which it allows the reader; or inversely, by the amount of participation and cooperation it demands from the reader/player. It is in Barthess terms a writerly text.[8] This playful experience is simul-taneously a serious activity: the production of meaning. Although the definition of ludic writing offered above may be applied to a number of narrative modes, this essay will limit itself to discussing the two mentioned above, which arguably constitute the most representative examples available. Even the briefest survey of the critical reception of fantasy and metafiction is sufficient to demonstrate that both have been at one time or another excluded from the literary canon precisely because they are modes of narration in direct opposition to the conventions of serious realistic writing. The critical resistance to consider such modes as fantasy and science fiction, among others, as Literature is symptomatic of what academia and society in general consider serious literary activity. The rise of the metafictional or self-reflexive novel in England, France, and the United States in the 1950s and 1960s was melodramatically hailed as the literature of exhaustion and the death of the novel.[9] As we shall see, this margin-alization of fantasy and metafiction from canonic Literature is to a large extent an ideological resistance, a backlash due to the subversive nature of these literary practices. An attempt to define the fantastic should serve to illustrate the nature of its ludicity and to introduce our discussion of its subversive potential. Critics have traditionally attempted to arrive at a definition which accomo-dates a variety of themes common to the works which they consider to be paradigmatic of the fantastic. The most oft-cited example of such a definition is the following offered by C. N. Manlove: a fantasy is: a fiction evoking wonder and containing a

substantial and irreducible element of the supernatural with which the mortal characters in the story or the readers become on at least partly familiar terms (1). This definition contains two elements which are basic to almost all attempts to define the fantastic: its effect upon the reader (the readers response to it) and the relationship between what is narrated and the extratextual reality in which we live. W. R. Irwin reinforces these concepts and adds several original observations: a matter is within the range of the fantastic if it is judged, whether on the basis of knowledge or of convention, to be not only outside reality but also in knowing contravention of reality. Thus, within the concept of the fantastic is a competition for credence in which an assertive antireal plays against an established real. . . . In this effort, writer and reader knowingly enter upon a conspiracy of intellectual subversiveness, that is, upon a game. (my emphasis, 9) Irwin notes that our concept of the real is a precondition for the fantastic: the fantastic exists through its opposition to an extratextual reality. He also asserts that this concept of reality is based upon conventions. Realism aspires to the artistic representation of this conventional reality, and attempts this through the establishment of textual conventions which are a reflection of extratextual ones. The subject matter of the fantastic exists in opposition to this extratextual reality. As literature it therefore exists as antirealism, that is, its internal rules oppose those of realism.[10] Another valuable observation which Irwin contributes is that the relationship between text and reader consists of an implicit pact in which the implied reader and the implied narrator agree to the textual condition lets pretend as if . . .; any wonder created is thus produced under the terms of this pact. The readers acceptance of the narrative is thus based on the grammatical logic of a contrary to fact statement. Or as Irwin himself states, the fantastic is the narrative re sult of transforming the condition contrary to fact into fact itself (4). This reader -text relationship, as Irwin notes, is clearly ludic. As we shall see, the opposition of the textual fantastic to the extratextual possible and of the literary conventions of the fantastic to those of realism are of primary importance to the subversive nature of the fantastic mode of narrative. In what is certainly the most widely debated definition of the fantastic to date, Tzvetan Todorov posits three condi-tions which must exists for a text to be considered 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 supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character . . . the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work. 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 of these conditions he considers preconditions for the existence of the pure fantastic, the second he claims is optional. Todorov, like Louis Vax before him, asserts that the world of the characters must be a conventionally acceptable realistic world. This implies that the hesitation evoked by the possibly supernatural events narrated is brought about precisely by their presence in the otherwise realistic world of the narrative. The juxtaposition of two sets of narrative conventions in a text, in this case the mimetic and the fantastic, is by our definition one of the characteristics of ludic modes of writing. Todorov proposes that while the reader experiences the hesitation or uncertainty descri bed above, the text operates in the realm of the true fantastic. Although the concept of hesitation as the defining factor of the fantastic errs by not taking into consideration the implicit pact established between reader and text, it is nonetheless invaluable for a number of reasons. First of all, it posits a definition which takes into consideration the readers role in defining this narrative mode. Morevover, the notion suggests that a narrative may operate in the fantastic mode during part of the narration without the whole text being qualified as fantastic. It therefore becomes possible, and I argue necessary, to treat the fantastic not as a genre (with all the problematic theoretical baggage which that term carries with it) but as a mode. [11] The same claim may also be made for metafiction, for reasons which will be made clear shortly. As a result, while the characteristics defined here as fantastic or metafictional are present in the narration, that text operates within these respective modes. This distinction between mode and genre is indispensable to any literary analysis of the ludic for two reasons. First, fantastic or metafictional elements may be present in a work without the work as a whole belonging to either genre. Secondly, many modern narratives function in these two modes simultaneously; to employ the term genre would therefore be as confusing as it would be incorrect. Having briefly outlined existing definitions of the fantastic in light of our discussion of the ludic, we may now define the fantastic as that mode of narration which opposes itself to the literary conventions of realism through the representation of antifactual or impossible events, places or beings juxtaposed against

an otherwise verisimilar narrative world, thereby inviting readers to enter into an implicit pact with the text by the suspension of their disbelief. At the same time, the fantastic forces the reader into an active role: he/she must consider the relationship between what the text presents as real and the possibly supernatural, since this opposition is central to an understanding of the text. The juxtaposition of realistic and non-realistic narratives possesses the capacity to sensitize readers to the conventional nature of the former, causing them to question the underlying ideological assumptions of its mimetic strategy. This reader-text relationship, and the sensitization which it produces, are similar to those produced by the metafictional text, although these are made more explicit in the latter. Robert Alter, in his groundbreaking apologetic study Partial Magic, asserts that metafiction, though not realistic in nature, constitutes a type of writing which nonetheless dialogues with extratextual realities. He offers the following definition: A self-conscious novel, briefly, is a novel that systematically flaunts its own condition of artifice and that by doing so probes into the problematic relationship between real-seeming artifice and reality (x). Robert Scholes agrees with Alter that the explosion of the metafictional novel reflects Western mans changing ontological and epistemological perspectives, and maintains that it executes the ethical function of a fable in modern culture. Robert Spires elaborates an interesting synchronic explanation of the workings of self-reflexive literature: a metafictional mode results when the member of one world [reader, narrator, or character] violates th e world of another (15). All these observations describe important aspects of self-reflexive fiction, but perhaps the most illuminating ideas published in recent years belong to Linda Hutcheon in her excellent study Narcissistic Narrative. It is she who points out the importance of the readers role implicit in metafictional narrative: I would say that this vital link [between life and art] is reforged, on a new levelon that of the imaginative process (of storytelling), instead of on that of the product (the story told). And it is the new role of the reader that is the vehicle of this change. (3) On the one hand, he [the reader] is forced to acknowledge the artifice . . . of what he is reading; on the other, explicit demands are made upon him, as a co-creator. . . . (7) Patricia Waugh astutely suggests that metafiction must be considered in terms of its opposition to the conventions of realism: Metafictional novels tend to be constructed on the principle of a fundamental and sustained opposition: the construction of a fictional illusion . . . and the laying bare of that illusion . . . Realism, often regarded as the classic fictional mode, paradoxically functions by suppressing this dialogue. (6) The parallel between the metafictional and the fantastic as ludic modes is clear. By definition, these modes exist as such through their opposition to the conventions of serious realism. They invent their own set of anticonventions, which the reader is invited to accept. The reader/player then shares the creative burden of producing meaning from this opposition, a serious endeavor which is, paradoxically, playfully undertaken. This increased demand upon the reader is an element built into both modes, and constitutes one of their determining characteristics. By opposing themselves to the conventions of serious narrative, fantasy and metafiction call the readers attention to these conventions, exposing them as ideological constructs, inviting readers to examine more closely the relationship between language and reality. This sensitization forms the basis of these modes subversive potential, as it motivates the reader to question concepts that the realistic use of language attempts to reify or naturalize. This subversiveness constitutes the serious dialogical relationship with extratextual reality suggested above, which will now be examined more closely. Susan Suleiman, in an insightful discussion of modernity and the avant-garde, proposes that this subversive intent is the underlying meaning of ludic art: Might we say that it [the ludicity of modern art] is the overdetermined coexistence of play as mise en abyme, as an implicit organizing principle, as a metaphor for writing and living that is specific of modern texts? (original emphasis, 4).[12] This hypothesis concerning the relationship of the ludic to mans perception of his own ontological status in the twentieth century is significant, for what Suleiman suggests is that the underlying purpose and raison detre of artistic ludicity is an attempt to subvert the ideologically determined philosophical presuppositions upon which realistic art is based, and that this art in turn serve to reify: in the case of the realist novel, the chief expectations that generations of readers have internalized concern some fundamental notions in our culture . . . the principle of non-contradiction (an event cannot occur and not occur at the same time), the notions of temporal succession and causality (events follow each other and are related to each other consequentially), a belief in the solidity of the phenomenal world (a table is a table is a table), and a belief in at least a relative unity of self (a name designates a person who has certain fixed characteristics and a set of identifiable ancestors). (original emphasis, 35)

Fredric Jameson explains how the realist novel or novel of plot naturalizes these concepts: the philosophic efect of the well-made plot . . . is first and foremost to persuade us that such a logic exists: that events have their own inner meaning along with their own development . . . that human action, human life, is somehow a complete, interlocking whole, a single, formed, meaningful substance. (12) Ludic narrative does not merely reflect Western cultures loss of faith in its fundamental philosophic notions and its comfortable bourgeois myths, but in its turn may help bring about this loss of faith. Through its dialectic relationship to reality, a relationship in which the reader serves as both mediator and agent, ludic writing participates in what Barthes calls in another context a direct subversion of codesitself moreover illusory: a code cannot be destroyed, only played off (Death of the Author 144). The ludic plays off the serious because, as Robbe-Grillet observes: What is called serious, what is upheld by values (work, honor, discipline, etc.) belongs . . . to a vast code, situated and dated, . . . the serious supposes that there is something behind our gestures: a soul, a god, values, the bourgeois order . . . (qtd. in Suleiman 7) Ludic writing possesses the potential to subvert serious, ideologically determined notions such as identity, cause and effect, and bourgeois values by opposing itself to the conventions of the realistic art forms which reify them. The ludic thus subverts not only the notions themselves but the ideologies which they support. But the breaking of literary conventions itself is not enough to accomplish this subversion, as Rosemary Jackson points out in her discussion of the fantastic: The presentation of impossibility is not by itself a radical activity: texts subvert only if the reader is disturbed by their dislocated narrative form (original emphasis, 23). I would go further: the ludic text demands and counts on the complicity of the reader in its subversive project. Ludic narrative modes subvert by reminding us that they consist of nothing more than language, and that as language their relationship to the concrete realities of daily existence is conventional, and therefore ideologically determined. Nonetheless, because of their linguistic existence, these games themselves must operate within the limits that language imposes, limits of intelligibility which they stretch, challenging readers, making them aware of what is at stake in the game. It is the readers engagement in the game which makes subversion possible. This explains to a great extent many readers (and critics) discomfort with these narrative modes. What this strictly heuristic consideration of fantasy and metafiction as ludic modes suggests in terms of critical praxis is the analysis of themes and structures in ludic writing in relation to their ideological function, the way they reveal what traditional realistic narrative attempts to conceal. Ludic narratives subversive potential resides in its engagement of the reader, in the way it sensitizes the reader by the manipulation of his/her expectations. This may prove especially useful in texts where the two modes coexist. It is hoped that this essay succeeds on offering food for thought to the critic interested in pursuing investigations of literatures ideological function in culture. Works cited Alter, Robert. Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre. Berkely: U of California P, 1975. ___. The Self-Conscious Moment: Reflections on the Aftermath of Modernism. TriQuarterly 209 (1971): 209-30. Althusser, Louis. Ideology and the State. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972. 127-88. Apter, T. E. Fantasy Literature: An Approach to Reality. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. Barth, John. The Literature of Exhaustion. The Atlantic Monthly 220 (August 1967): 29-34. Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. Image, Music, Text. Ed. and trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Noonday Press, 1977. 142-48. ___. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Bessire, Irne. Le rcit fantastique: la poetique de lincertain . Paris: Larousse, 1974. Brooke-Rose, Christine. A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games. Trans. Meyer Barash. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961. Caillois, Roger. Au coeur du fantastique. Paris: Gallimard, 1965. Chanady, Amaryll B. Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomy . New York: Garland, 1985. Christensen, Inger. The Meaning of Metafiction. Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1981. Cornwell, Neil. The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism . New York: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1990.

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949. Hume, Kathryn. Fantasy and Mimesis: Reponses to Reality in Western Literature . London: Methuen, 1984. Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1980. Hutchinson, Peter. Games Authors Play. London: Methuen, 1983. Irwin, W.R. The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy . Urbana-Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1976. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen, 1981. Jameson, Frederic. Metacommentary. PMLA 86 (1971): 13-18. Kellman, Steven G. The Self-Begetting Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. Manlove, C. N. Modern Fantasy: Five Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975. Rabkin, Eric S. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976. Scholes, Robert. Fabulation and Metafiction. Urbana-Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1979. Spires, Robert. Beyond the Metafictional Mode: Directions in the Modern Spanish Novel . Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1984. Stonehill, Brian. The Self-Conscious Novel. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1988. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre . Trans. Richard Howard. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve UP, 1973. Vax, Louis. LArt et la littrature fantastiques. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1984.

[1]

In addition to the works cited in this essay, see the studies of T. E. Apter, Eric S. Rabkin, Elizabeth Hume, Irne Bessire, Christine Brooke-Rose, Roger Caillois (1965), Amaryll B. Chanady, Neil Cornwell, and Louis Vax on the fantastic; also see Inger Christensen, Steven G. Kellman and Brian Stonehill on self-reflexive literature. [2] This is the case, for example, in several of the novels of Gonzalo Torrente Ballester. This essay forms part of a study of these novels. Many other works could be offered as examples, however, for example Carmen Martn Gaites novel El cuarto de atrs. [3] Rosemary Jackson has already proposed the subversive nature of the fantastic mode. Although this essay owes much to the work of Jackson, the explanation offered here for this subversive potential is quite distinct from Jacksons, as her perspective is based on psychoanalytic theory, whereas ours utilizes above al l poststructuralist linguistic theory and Reader Response or Reception Aesthetic theory. [4] In this study, the terms ideology and ideological are used in the Althusserian sense of mans imaginary representation of his relationship to his concrete reality. This definition astutely notes that mans perception of his relationship to reality is a representation or construct. [5] Hutchinsons study constitutes the first systematic effort to apply theories of the ludic to literature. His categorization of seventeen different ludic literary mechanisms is very valuable; however, his study leaves the literary ludic all too loosely defined for any practical critical applications. [6] For Barthes, to write is . . . to reach that point where only language acts, performs . . . (Death of the Author 143). [7] This broad definition could obviously include such narrative modes as the surrealist, the parodic, and the satiric, among others. Many of these modes are appropriated by self-reflexive literature, others do not function in the same manner as ludic texts, and serve to reify traditional ideological precepts. [8] In S/Z, Barthes defines the writerly text as one whose goal is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text (4). [9] On metafiction as a terminal stage of sterility in the novel, see the articles by Robert Alter and John Barth in the list of works cited. [10] This opposition has been discussed by many theorists to support a wide variety of arguments. Our ideas concur with Eric Rabkins definition: the perspectives enforced by the ground rules of the narrative world must be diametrically contradicted . . . (8), which agrees with Todorovs first condition. Hume posits an opposition between two impulses, mimesis and fantasy, which she claims coexist in almost all literary works. See also Jacksons concept of two paraxial modes, and Amaryll Chanadys antinomies. [11] I do not use the term mode in the same sense as Rosemary Jackson. Although we both take the term from Fredric Jamesons concept of mode as the presence of common stru ctural characteristics shared by various works

from distinct periods of time, Jackson employs the term with a Freudian connotation of impulse, of the psychological need to express ones self in a certain manner. [12] The subversive artistic phenomena described by Suleiman, although characteristic of twentieth-century art forms, are certainly not limited to this period. The Quixote could arguably be considered ludic and subversive by her parameters. Critical interpretations of fantastic works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as reactions to rationalist and positivist ideologies and the technological boom of the industrial revolution also imply the subversive possiblities of the fantastic mode.