Todorov and the Fantastic

A section from an essay I wrote about the TV series Legion:

Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of ‘the Fantastic’ sees the genre bifurcating into the ‘uncanny’ and the ‘marvelous’ according to what happens in a given story.  Crudely, the former is when something fantastic is found to be ‘unreal’ within the story, i.e. a delusion or trick, and the latter is when it is ‘real’, i.e. an actual supernatural intrusion.  By that schema, I would say that the category of the ‘uncanny’ would indeed describe the Babadook – and that’s also why I find him unsatisfactory.  He is not really there, at least not as an actual external entity.  The movie is sometimes said to have left this ambiguous but I beg to differ.  Even his nature as a metaphor is explained as a psychological phenomenon; he is a hallucinated embodiment of a fiction the main character invented to express her feelings.  The alternative is the ‘marvelous’, in which the intrusion of the supernatural is ‘real’, i.e. something impinging on the characters from outside their own psyche.

The thing is, even the ‘marvelous’ forces fantastic storytelling to fall down on one side of the other.  The ‘marvelous’ is itself a form of decision and certainty, a form of this-sidedness.  The ghost is ‘real’.  Whatever it is, it’s there.  It definitely isn’t not there.

Even if the supernatural intrusion is kept as opaque, alienating and inexplicable as possible – the entire project of the Weird, some would say – there is still no doubt that the opaque, alienating and inexplicable things are there to defy understanding.  The tendency is to play with the possibility that the narrator or characters are delusional, only to prove them otherwise.  And I’m far from rejecting this approach.  Indeed, as I say, I like horror storytelling to embrace the supernatural rather than disavow it.  But it remains a collapsing of potentials.

Of course, there is always the old gothic instability of narration lurking.  The narrator or narrative voice – be it an actual 1st person address in a novel or a privileged (and not necessarily personalised) perspective in visual media – could always be insane, or lying.  This possibility haunts the gothic.  Indeed, it often haunts the fictional narrators within the genre themselves.  They are often themselves anxious about their own reliability.

Todorov talks about the tension between possible interpretations of fantastic events in fiction; tension which lasts until the story collapses one way or another.  He uses the word ‘hesitation’ to describe the state of tension in which the reader exists until the collapse.  It’s a bit like the way Schrodinger’s cat dies or lives depending on the 50/50 chance of what a subatomic particle does.

But the crux of Schrodinger’s fable is the part of the story where the cat is both alive and dead at the same time, because we haven’t yet observed its state.  At this point, its fate is dependant upon a quantum event that could go either way, and also depends upon being observed before it ‘decides’ which way it went.  That’s the extrapolation Schrodinger makes from quantum theory; it’s his attempt to illustrate its absurdity.  Whatever the rights or wrongs of that, it’s a great story.  It caught on beyond and outside its original context, and is known by people who have never read the original, like all the biggest stories – Frankenstein, the Bible, etc.  And the thing that captivates us about it is the cat’s presence in two incompatible states simultaneously.  It is this impossibility that fascinates, and the fact that we have to try to imagine it (because, by definition, it is impossible for us to observe it without ending the state of simultaneity).  Its existence as an impossibility is dependant upon our not knowing whether or not it is happening. As a story then, it relies upon an event that is irresolvably fantastic in two senses.  Firstly, it is something that cannot be happening and yet is, making its existence undeniably real – in that we are forced to contemplate it – while also being utterly unreal.  Secondly, it is something that it is definitionally impossible for us to resolve either way.

That’s different to what Todorov called the ‘marvelous’.  In the marvelous, the cat is definitely dead because we can see its ghost – probably angry about the whole being-killed-in-a-thought-experiment thing – and we know, at least provisionally, that we’re not imagining it.  In Schrodinger’s story, the cat’s eternal indeterminacy is the point.  The point of the story is the eternal and irresolvable hesitation, to use Todorov’s word.

I think the best metaphors are like the cat, both in one state and another simultaneously.  Indeed, they are like this twice over.  Firstly, they inhabit that zone of unresolved contradiction where they are both diegetically real and diegetically unreal because the narrative hasn’t collapsed things one way or another by ‘opening the box’ yet.  Secondly, they both refer to something specific and refuse to refer to it – or have been (notionally) precluded from referring to it by something else in the narrative.

The crowning glory of this approach in the fantastic genre may be in Kubrick’s movie The Shining, which suggests non-supernatural readings only to preclude them, but unconvincingly, and makes its own metaphors both very clear and intensely evasive.  It is, ironically, the film’s very lack of any clarity on these issues that makes its such a sharp political intervention.

I’m not going to claim Legion is quite in the same class as Kubrick’s Shining – which I will happily say is the greatest movie ever made – but its approach is essentially the same.  And this is not something you see very much.  In fact, the last show I can think of that did anything like it was… Hannibal.  Which probably tells you something about my tastes.

Hannibal continually danced in the interzone between the symbolic and the literally supernatural, between expressionism and hauntology.  It always left open various supernatural possibilities without ever either foreclosing upon them or endorsing them.  Like all the best stories of this type, it posed the riddle so well that the answer stopped mattering.  It really doesn’t matter if Hannibal is literally Satan, or possessed by Satan or a demon, or a Manitou, or a Wendigo, or the ‘evil’ creator-god of the gnostics, etc, etc.  What matters is the network of implications raised by the possibility, the overlaying of one cat over another, both of them in irreconcilable quantum states.  What matters is the eternal hesitation.

Similarly, in Legion, David’s notional mental illnesses are repeatedly rejected as a cause of his behaviour, despite them making much more sense as an explanation than the version of events the narrative privileges: that he is a powerful psychic and telekinetic who is also possessed by the psyche of another such entity.  And yet the show doesn’t so much reject such ‘real’ things in favour of fantastical concepts so much as – again – collapse the distinction.  And, as Hannibal does, it collapses the distinction while keeping it intact.