Here is something deep about all literature, whatever their formats or genres, whether opera or novels or poems or plays or whether comedy, tragedy or melodrama. All such works are either fanciful, in which case there is a fantastical story, full of implausibility and wonder and exaggerated figures, whereby an audience tries to find in that material and structure something that illuminates real life, as is the case when an Ovid myth is reread to let the reader understand that is about normal human emotions, as when Narcissus is preoccupied with himself, as any one of us can be, or else an audience or reader gets into the details of life presented so as to acquaint ourselves with real life so as to draw out archetypal figures and morals beyond the humdrum, as when “Death of a Salesman” resonates as a kind of grand tragedy worthy of the Greek tragedians. One of the other puts out its opposite, the audience or reader necessarily interpreting one as the other in order to make sense of it. That is the complexity and irony required of literature so that it can be literature. Even trivial stories such as Batman do the same thing, superheroes made human, played with to make them ordinary, Bruce Wayne turned into the Caped Crusader because of a childhood trauma when his parents are killed by criminals and so ingenious in his mastery of techniques whereby he is triumphant even if only over an underworld full of distorted criminals rather than god-like ogres and devils. Watch how the dynamics of literature work.
By and large, European literature has fanciful literature preceding realistic literature. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is about a quest to overcome danger and finds that chivalry is more important than bravery or courage. But that meaning or interpretation is gained from a fanciful tale of magical and strange events that do not achieve much verisimilitude. Why concoct the fanciful tale in the first place except as a way of placing the reader into something only tangentially real but where imaginations can wander into what seem surroundings that are somehow more vivid than are the rules that obtain in ordinary life? Similarly, “Everyman” and other morality plays are placed in archetypal situations and figures so as to work out a story of what justice would be like if it existed rather than the specious and metaphorical senses of justice that are rendered in real life by such plays as, again for example, “Death of a Salesman”? Even the greatest works of the Western canon also take their starting points with archetypal figures in that they are conceived of as types even if they have been originally created. Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” is of a lusty matron and must have been a long standing comic joke until it was elevated, in our regard, into a fully developed character with a fully developed life. Half a century before the present, Chaucerian scholarship interpreted the Chaucer stories as full of ironies, interpretations whereby scholarship revealed that what was apparently its meaning was just the opposite of what it seemed, as when “The Nun's Priest’s Tale” was not anti semitic but was theologically flawed. Interpretation reversed the apparent meaning, as did other Chaucer tales Even Shakespeare plays, so realistic in their characters, so vivid and full of their psychological tanglings, stand out first of all as each of the characters as a kind of mythological figure, each one a type, recognized since childhood, and so to be struggled with until one or another of them is rendered real or palatable rather than heavenly in nature, Hamlet an enigma who won’t fulfill his revenge for reasons that become more or less persuasive, Othello a Moor and therefore not to be trusted until the audience finds he cannot be trusted, Lear ranting about everything petty and then metaphysical and, finally, lamenting his own betrayal of his favorite daughter many years ago. The play back and forth between Shakespeerean archetypes and Shakespearean characters is a long time preoccupation with Shakespearean scholars such as Carolyn Spurgeon.
The great revolution from archetype and unworldly settings takes place in the beginning of the Eighteenth Century when Defoe can be rightly acknowledged as the invention of the novel as something very different from what were prose narrative romances also set in a far away place and atmosphere. Even if he began his journalism as recording Ripley Believe it or Not dispatches of strange things that happened, he reduces adventure stories to include characters that are doing what ordinary people would do under such extraordinary circumstances, calculating how to eke out a living in a hostile environment or also make due as a woman in the equally hostile environment in England. And even so soon as “Tom Jones'' enters the scene, it is already that heroic and fanciful stories have already been reduced to a joke on high minded things, just as had happened in “Don Quixote”.
The significance or even domination by all sorts of literature in the Nineteenth Century by realistic based poetry (as in Browning} and in novels such as Dickens and Tolstoy and Flaubert, all assuming some verisimilitude even if and maybe because of historical settings regarded as true, fully engaging a sense of what it was like back then, then it might be useful to highlight that point by observing an attempt to be fanciful but which seems to me to sound faked. What is “Norma” about other than to give a bel canto singer a chance to show her stuff? Why is it placed among the Druids excerpt to give it an unearthly and exotic context to divert the audience to a place not very well spelled out but only named for its exotic setting? The story is interpreted readily enough in to being realistic because it concerns a drama of love despite ethnic differences and because of the encroachment of Roman forces onto the exotic society, and so repeated again and again by Verdi operas about ethnic clashes during imperialistic events. The story is made ordinary by its ideological themes without filling out its exoticism, as even James Cameron tries to do in his movies. In general, the artistic process is interactive in that fanciful conceits are made realistic by pinning down archetypal characters and fantastic or at least strange settings into ordinary people and concerns while realistic people and settings are turned into archetypes, abstractions and situations that violate verisimilitude, that reading of real first and then fanciful reversed again when some Modernists such as Kafka and Joyce had the temerity to show the unreal first and awaited critics to recognize what was real “underneath”, such as the topography of Joyce’s Dublin, though it should be said that Mann was diligent in maintaining his Nineteenth Century realism so that the affairs having to do with religion in “Joseph and His Brothers”, fully informed as it was as up to the latest scholarship about how religion worked, operating in a familiar historical mode however exotic are its trappings or even its experiences. Not easy to do.
So far, the distinction between fanciful and real is a field well plowed. Now expand the idea of the fanciful to include abstraction and distortion and inventive structures while retaining the connotations of the exotic, the fantastic, or the contrived so that, as the old expression goes, a very different world is created. You can see this in recent novels such as the one not long ago reviewed by me of Ishiguro’s “When We Were Orphans”, whereby there is a reversal whereby plot, which is the spine of a novel, is supplanted by style, which is usually considered subsidiary to plot, or at least until Hemingway and Faulkner said otherwise. The Ishiguro novel, like the lobster, has its spine on the outside, as a reader follows how the narrator climbs ever so deeply into the melodrama and artifices that are presented so as to excuse whatever the narrator does, ever more deluded about his life, and so generating any number of fanciful conceits whereby to armor himself. The events that occur can be illuminating, but not as much as the unraveling of how ingenious are its rhetorical deceptions, which are fanciful as well as deluded.
For another example, the recent and well reviewed novel “Either/Or” by Elu Batuman is one of those few academic novels that are really about how a person gets an education. The heroine is a sophomore at Harvard and considers the thoughts that a literature major would encounter in her intellectual development, She hears a lecture and discussion of “Mrs. Dalloway'' whereNow, hold your hats, or to muddle your metaphors, she learns that Woolf never read Bergson, supposedly her inspiration, but the quick minded young woman sees the flaw: it doesn’t really matter if Woolf read Bergson if the idea was in the air or was independently invented. So much for intellectual history and for many of the thousands of ideas accepted or rejected in the course of an education that make a person considered well educated, as when she wonders whether to take seriously Doestoevsky’s idea that any evil is possible if there is no God. She wonders what a person would be like if the only reason to be moral was only fear of God. And that, I think, as well as she infers, that says a lot about Dostoevsky. So each intellectual perception is to be taken as a fanciful, in the sense of freely and spontaneously created insight, and aloof those collected constitute an ethereal reality to which characters and other practicalities, such as student aid, are subsumed, those facts on the ground that are circumstances of the life of the mind, which is for itself, while in Dickens, the circumstances within “Great Expectations'' are definitive even if Pip takes a while to clear up the causal chains in his life.
Architecture is another art that insists on the fanciful ever since Gilgamesh was proud for having created what were considered unusually high walls that made cities formidable and majestic and unnatural. People were elevated by what they could build and to be distinguished from African kraals which were a collection of similar modest houses perhaps with a central plaza and so like American midwestern cities which are just expanses of houses with supermarkets and other service stations and without much of the functional institutions lime museums and symphonies and universities which make up what we consider a modern metropolis. The creation of outsize buildings like skyscrapers that encompass a variety of businesses, employees and clientele passing within them enhance the sense that what is being done within is important and consequential, for otherwise there would be no reason to lease that premium space. That sense of enlargement of significance also applies to less august locations. Top officials get the corner offices that are larger than the cubicles of the everyday workers while the small rooms in the West Wing are treasured for being closer to the Oval Office. I felt more energized by being moved from a small room in a basement to a new faculty office building even though some professors tke themselves enhanced by lecturing at the same place where Michael Faraday lectured. The aura of greatness obtains.
Now expand this new sense of fanciful to objects that are hardly ever concerned as literature at all. The crossword puzzle was concocted by newspaper people in the Twenties to provide amusement for people who also heard of who committed murder and scandal. It is a fanciful concern to see how to fit words so that letters serve for mostly squares that are both horizontal and vertical. It is ingenious for people to concoct purposeless ways of those word designs and it is very pleasant to see the grid fill up. But also satisfying are the clues that reveal what words might fit in. Those are the substance rather than the framework for the puzzle. There are synonyms, pop phrases, literary and music composers, geographical names, internet lingo and so on, and so solving a puzzle means having a smattering of knowledge about a great many matters and the successful solver can feel pleased with knowing so much about so many things. Yes, solving crossword puzzles is fanciful in that it has no other purpose than its own charm but it seems a kind of intelligence test, like the ability to be a cryptographer. People I knew to be generally smart were able to solve tough crossword puzzles.But crosswords seem fanciful in the sense they are purposeless ways to pass the time by arranging to fill in words for no purpose but to “solve” the puzzle.
Now, hold your hats, and to muddle your metaphors, get rid of the net under the trapeze artists or, if you prefer, get rid of the cane whereby literature is a crutch that directs you on how to regard reality, and instead look at reality itself, in its own clarity, and see within there the relation of the fanciful to the real. Think of clothing as usages rather than as an art form. What people dress is their roles and not just their expressions. Juan Peron was said to have thought he became President when he donned his red sash. Marjorie Taylor Green an Kristen Sinema wore flamboyant gowns more appropriate to the Grammys rather than the recent State of the Union Address, though with less skin in the Grammys, but women for hundreds of years been able to be more fanciful in their dress than is available among men, they largely confined to a blue business suit,. Except for the rogue George Santos, who is often given ro sport jackets, Teddy Kennedy was said to cringe at the ever present “suits'' who accompanied him so he could fullfill the Kennedy legacy long before he had become “The Lion of the Senate” and more significant a figure than either of his two slain brothers. Clothing is fanciful, either as uniforms or plumage, because it makes people into types.
Here are two explanations of why fanciful aspects of life remain as part of everyday life even if most people think that ogres and ghosts are residues of the past except for creatures in Marvel movies. There is ever present a sense of larger than life, distorted and exaggerated creatures of great power that prevails in life, despite the realism that pervades most literature and life. One explanation is psychological and the other is sociological
The psychological explanation is to recapture the wisdom of psychoanalysis despite the ravages done to Freudian and post-Freudian theories concerning its propositions and its therapeutics. Look only at Freudian basics. There is, buried in every person’s history, images of overarching, powerful and attractive figures which loom large in our actual and present lives which still influence people even to the point of making our lives as examples of reworkings of classic tragedies because people, each one individually, captures in their tragic arc, that self same fate even if people work hard not to uncover their own secrets . People are grand, akin to tragic figures, because they struggle this way and also pathbetic in being overcome with these exigencies. So “behind” you is your mother and your father and other real and mythological figures that both motivate and explain you and very few are able to avoid or quell those stories. Parallel to tube overt and ordinary work in which we inhabit, is that other world which remains beside us and which interferes and distorts the apparent world. Whether aware of it or not, that other world brings fear and loathing and siren-like attractions. The fanciful, even as simply seen as the fright one must both engage and avoid, makes sense of the apparently real. We live with our spooks rather than reason them away.
Perhaps one of the most powerful social supports for the fanciful as part of our natures is Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy, Weber, by the way, very critical of Freud because he thought Freud to be self-indulgent. Moreover, Weber’s theory of bureaucracy was economic and legal. He defined bureaucracy as a st of offices whereby authority is delegated from one level to the next so as to make organization more efficient, as happens in a factory when an executive gives instructions to a foreman and then down the line to an assembly line worker, or accomplishes something that would not be possible without bureaucracy, as is the case exemplified by Weber himself, of railroad time tables, which can be constructed and implemented only through fanciful bureaucracies because you need the coordination of offices across time and space, people never even meeting one another, in order to make trains work. Parsons thought that there was bureaucracy in organizing the building of the pyramids, but it might have been done with some overseers lashing the slaves rather than mobilizing a variety of specialized offices who supervised one type of another.
Think just of the idea of an office itself, the phenomenon of that rather than its consequences. An office sits simultaneously with a person, ever present with your person at least at work, and so metaphorically “beside" or “above” the person, even if nor so elevated ast to be called “Mr. President” or “His Eminence”. The person is aware of his or her elevation and so is the person from whom the title of the person addresses the colleague, subordinate or superordinate. The entitled person uses the title as well as their associated powers to get the people around them to do their bidding, as when a CFO tells a CEO that finance is their own responsibility and so if you do not like the way I handle things then find me someone else to do the job oir when a foreman gives an extra break to a line worker because he is getting over an illness. Titles give people discretion and resist having rules made from much higher up about their discretion as happens when statistical experts question judgments or arrange protocols to constrain lower level initiatives.
The title is fanciful in that the person has been “enlarged” by the title as carrying an obligation to carry out the duties of his title. He cannot do otherwise than for Oedipus, as King, to overcome the plague and get to the bottom of what is going on in Thebes. (Weber, after all, was a Kantian.) Heavy wears the burden of any title, whether to act or avoid acting and responsible if you did or if you didn’t. So titles are grander than the people who are said, metaphorically, to be seated there and so are different from other roles, such as friend or girlfriend, whose obligations are largely not stipulated by company policy but crafted and recrafted by customs and general imprecations concerning morality. And yet most people are subject to some fanciful title just to get through the day.
The output of this analysis is that the structures supporting the fanciful are so strong and ubiquitous that the fanciful is likely to return as a feature of literature even though there has been a 400 year period of realism even if in Modernism excavated the fanciful as party of the archaeology of consciousness. It should also be added that the foray by Freud into the past envisioned it into the tragic sider when there might be a comic side to it, more in keeping with Ovid’s “The Art of Love” rather than “The Metamorphosis” , which is full of sad ironies rather than uplifting spirits. This process of refabulizing life may already be happening in that it is already present in so far inferior works of art which have not yet been transvaluated into major monuments of art. Perhaps Marvel movies may do that trick as has already been tried out with the batman saga where screenwriters try to delve deeply into Bruce Wayne and the Joker. Literature is very flexible. A genius can change it from being a frivolous enterprise to a serious one, whether tragic or comic.
A larger and more profound finding or speculation can be found in generalizing the fate of the fanciful beyond literature. Some secularists like Chrisropher Hitchins think that science can abolish religion which is a merely vestigial form of consciousness and whose thoughts and practices are demented and cruel. Evidence for that is the decline of religious belief in Europe and parts of North America. Religion seems to thrive only among the uneducated and the unsophisticated, the people of Africa and South America, and so a few more generations of the modern world will lead to a general acceptance of the secularist point of view, religion already caught up with the problem of how a God who is endless and ever present could have a will or a concern for the people on what Asimov called “A Pebble in the Sky”, much less to form a thought or what is inevitably a “voice” for its utterances.
But fanciful ideas, such as these, standing “behind” people so as to make them majestic and otherwise larger than life, can persist beyond theology and dogma because the fanciful is so deeply a part of everyday life. The apparatus of sanctification need not have rational roots or be recharacterized in ways that make its dispensation very different from what had before seemed its essence. For most of Christianity the emotions and thoughts mobilized were pain, punishment and obedience, while the tenor has been changed to emphasize concern and respect for individuality, kindness to all, with frequent apologies for past mistakes, without abandoning the fabulous as the bedrock of faith. New wine in old bottles, the fanciful to endure whatever its other trappings , or so this speculation goes as to the larger trajectories of history.