Saturday, November 12, 2022

Reading notes: "The Sacred Grove" (2017) by John Clute

"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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