"Fantastika; or, The Sacred Grove" by John Clute in Fantastika Journal, April 2017
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ludic: showing spontaneous and undirected playfulness
eruv: an area within which observant Jews can carry or push objects on the Sabbath, (which lasts from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday), without violating a Jewish law that prohibits carrying anything except within the home.
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Part 1: A Problem
[....] I proposed to use the term primarily to describe works written (very roughly) from the last decades of the eighteenth century onward: works that might be deemed therefore to have been written in a consciousness of their generic nature. I now use the term fantastika, in these two primary senses (plus a few others), in everything I write. I try to keep several loose conditions in mind.
Part Two: Practical/Poetical
1): Fantastika consists of that wide range of fictional works whose contents are understood to be fantastic.
2): Fantastika is a child of Romanticism in Europe. It soon monstrously outgrew these swaddling clothes.
3) [....] not until (roughly) the beginning of the nineteenth century that the subversive quasi-industrial creation by authors and publishers of oppositional genres began to create centripetal domains for various forms of the fantastic, forms inherently transgressive of standard understandings of how the West was won. For reasons beyond my scope here to anatomise concisely, these
incipient genres seemed from the first pragmatically prone to the breeding of interpellatory conversations, which is to say toolkits. A toolkit is a sharing of knowledge.
[....] The term fantastika designates a fictional work understood to be non-mimetic and which its creator understands is a toolkit (or megatext) to be shared.
4) [....] the nature of the sf gaze, which is a gaze driven by time.
[....] the landscape painter Robert Hubert had already created a diptych, Project for the Grande Galerie of the Louvre (1796) and Imaginary View of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre in Ruins (1796), which, for the first time in his huge oeuvre (and perhaps for the first time ever), can be taken to visualise a doubled world joined one to the other through a yet-unspoken temporal gap that cried out to be narrated.
[....] Similarly, John Martin's The Assuaging of the Waters (1840) or Solitude (1843) or The Plains of Heaven (1851-1853) may be the first works of art to hint at the curvature of the Earth.
The Assuaging of the Waters
Solitude
The Plains of Heaven
[....] The term fantastika designates a fictional work through which the planet may be seen.
5) [....] the default understanding of a tale of fantastika is literal
not metaphorical; for metaphors in fantastika can mean what they say. Fantastika is a grammar of the literal; it is not a lesson imparted to the world from without. A story told literally is a story which believes what it sees, no matter how "marvelous" the vision may seem.
6) [....] if we take the Western World between 1800 and 2017 as its focus, then fantastika is transgressive against owners.
7) [....] the world is the fourth wall of fantastika. So when we say that a sf text can be defined as story set in an arguable world, we are saying that an sf text can be defined as a story that addresses the fourth wall. Any reading of any text of fantastika that dissevers text from its worldly context throws out the bathwater and the baby. That to best understand any such text, we must recognise where it is. The author's engendering intentions, the context she wrote in and for whom, when he wrote and with what knowledge or premonition, the anthropocenic world that circumambiates each word: all should be taken into account. [My empasis - JR]
8): Fantastika is ludic, which may be another way of saying it is literal....
[....] inherent grammar – the engendering fire – of fantastika is not to be found in the thing done, or in strategic groupings of texts under various partial rubrics, but in the grammars of connection between texts
[....] it lies in the beat that marks a tensing of the limbs of story, in the gap between the repose of the already told and the alarums of something new; it might be described as a manifestation of Pathosformel, a term Aby Warburg used to describe what he conceived of as the essence of any typology of an artistic form through time: which was the edge where it all changes.
[....] The heart of a matter is when it changes. Fantastika, which is time-bound, is the lord of the dance, which moves in time. The heart of fantastika is a changing of the guard between fixations.
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Jay
12 November 2022
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