| Abstract
|
:
|
My creative project, submitted in completion of my doctoral work at the University of Louisville, is a novel, Trajan's Arch, and an accompanying essay that discusses the fiction, the tradition out of which it arises, the ways it addresses the pressures and concerns I see implicit in our own cultural context, and the process of the novel's creation, which I understand primarily in terms of contemporary notions of myth, reverie and imaginal psychology. Regardless of its setting or context, of the kind of cultural tendencies to which it responds, fantasy fiction is inevitably "mythic"—it points us more readily than realism to the metaphorical nature of storytelling. An interest in the fantastic mode rejuvenates periodically as a reaction against various kinds of prevailing and stagnating literalism. All forms of literalism are a kind of death, but literalism is the preferred popular mode of thinking. One can maintain that all pre-Enlightenment literature was fantastic; though this literalism was predominantly scientific in the 18th and 19th century, even then the fantastic aligned itself against other literalisms, most strikingly the bourgeois complacency that the Realists attacked in a more "scientific" and positivist fashion while subscribing to the privileged mode of fictional discourse that fantasy critiques as well. Of course, literalism remains a predominant malady of our own times, witnessed in the fundamentalisms of Christianity, Islam, Marxism, and scientism. My preference for the fantastic has always rested on its overt defiance of the literal and of consensus reality. Fantasy predicates its larger effects on the assumption that its reader is more ready to seek and, more importantly, explore metaphorical, rather than literal, correspondences with experience. It is in the world of metaphorical correspondence, obviously, that experience deepens, because metaphor continues to reveal after the evidence of the eye has stopped. Meaning resides in story, but the working out of a story also creates meaning as it goes. The action of Trajan's Arch is an attempt to re-ensoul experience. Whether or not it succeeds, I hope the novel suggests at (and struggles with) ways in which we undertake that formidable task.
|