"The Fantastic" by Tzvetan Todorov - Chapter Summary

Todorov, Tzvetan. "Chapter 2: The Fantastic." The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. 24-57. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975. Print.

The fantastic is a genre that exists while in the work of literature there is uncertainty as to whether an event is caused by natural or supernatural sources. Once the reader has chosen one explanation or another the work transitions into the fantastic’s sister genres: “the uncanny (supernatural)” or “the marvelous (hard to believe but governed by rules of reality)”. The fantastic is characteristic of a situation, normally involving characters in the “real world”, where there is a simple realistic explanation for what is happening, but this explanation conflicts with the protagonist’s feeling that the supernatural explanation is the correct one.

Many times in the genre, the sense of uncertainty builds up over time. Supernatural events are juxtaposed with natural emotions, or natural behavior until the protagonist’s judgment is severely impaired as to the nature of the events, and his own sanity (but he is never entirely certain he is mad). Reason abandons and returns to the protagonist, keeping him in limbo about this.

“The fantastic requires the fulfillment of three conditions. 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 or supernatural explanation of the events described. {hesitation} Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader's role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work -- in the case of naive reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the character.{hesitation of both reader and character} Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as "poetic" interpretations.”{a decision must be made, and it cannot be dismissed as an above-the-work symbolic}

Many times the fantastic genre will relate the character’s struggle with the interpretation of the events outright, encouraging the reader to identify with the character. 

Tzvetan Todorov