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Myths and the FantasticAuthor(s): Andras SandorSource: New
Literary History, Vol. 22, No. 2, Probings: Art, Criticism, Genre
(Spring, 1991),pp. 339-358Published by: The Johns Hopkins
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Myths and the Fantastic
Andras Sandor
I
HE SPACE left empty by the withdrawal of myths under the
onslaught of Enlightenment thought has been filled with stories,
and the stories which have so far been the closest to
myths are fantastic stories: this is the basic proposition which
I want to argue and discuss. Realistic stories, too, have been
produced in an attempt to reactivate some mythic view of the world,
as in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain or Joyce's Ulysses, but the
stories closest to being mythic are those of Frankenstein, Dracula,
Captain Nemo, Tarzan, and the like. This is curious, since myths
are "true stories" for an original audience,' whereas fantastic
stories are palpably "untrue." I am proposing, therefore, to
compare two different kinds of stories, one true, another untrue,
and do it without any intention to bridge the gap in the name of
"literature" or "art."
The distinction between true stories and untrue stories implies
classification. The further distinctions which I will introduce
here will make this implication explicit. A word about
classification, there- fore, is in order.
The classification used here is based on three considerations.
First, that every text is processed in terms of some overarching
frame; second, that all available frames need to be considered if
any one is; third, that the distinction between true stories and
untrue stories relates to a basic division among frames applied to
the texts of stories.2
As for the first consideration, the classification used here
relates to kinds of frames (not to particular frames) which people
in modern societies can be assumed to use when processing the texts
of stories. The second and third considerations belong together. If
all available frames used for telling, and listening to, stories
are considered, and I believe that all need to be, a major decision
will concern the veridical status of the story in question. True
stories are constantly tested against possible untruth, and untrue
stories can only be untrue in contrast to possible true ones.
Accordingly, this approach, focusing
New Literary History, 1991, 22: 339-358
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340 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
in the first place on the manifest level of stories, not on the
latent (and its discovery), clearly diverges from structuralist
approaches, such as Northrop Frye's or LUvi-Strauss's. Interest in
the manifest level implies that the information made available by
means of stories cannot be reduced to structural aspects, to
something nonstorical. Hegel said that "appearance is essential to
essence"; basic interest in the manifest level merely stipulates
that appearance cannot be dispensed with, since whatever is read
into it needs it for reading something into it.
There are three basic kinds of stories in general: true, untrue,
and enigmatic. A "true story" is believed to have actually
happened; it is told in reference to actual agents and their
actions/passions. Untrue stories are not believed to have actually
happened, whereas enigmatic stories are enigmatic because they are
stories, as a rule, with agents known to be actual but with actions
judged impossible as far as the world as known by experience is
concerned. The story of Jesus, for instance, is enigmatic. Belief,
as a rule, does not remove enigmas; it merely relocates them. For
the nonbeliever, the enigma will be other people's belief; for the
believer, the ways of providence.
Untrue stories are false or they are fantasies. False stories,
whether mistaken or deceitful, could be considered distinct kinds
of untrue stories, but it seems better to consider them the inverse
of true stories because they are closely related to them. Stories
cannot be called false unless they have been told with the claim of
being true and have been proved wrong. A historical novel is a
fantasy, not a false story, because it claims to be a novel and
most of its characters are bound to be fictitious. And when a true
story is found out to be a false one, it does not metamorphose into
a fantasy; it continues to be known as a false story. (Archaic
myths are not false; the very world in which they are believed to
have happened is judged phantasmagorical.)
Untrue stories, if they are not considered false, are fantasies.
The term fantasy has been used by Kathryn Hume for designating a
particular kind of untrue story or a general principle opposing
that of mimesis. I am using it here in the sense usually attached
to fiction. The reason for my choice is that fiction equally
applies to model-making, and the relationship between a model and
what it refers to is different from the relationship between an
untrue story and that to which it may be related. True stories are
about actual agents and their actions, whereas scientific models,
as a rule, are about actual but not particular events; they refer
to kinds.3 Moreover, a certain amount of fiction is necessary for
all true stories, since they need to be construed from available
evidence. "Fiction," in
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MYTHS AND THE FANTASTIC 341
other words, is a concept much broader than "fantasy." I want to
distinguish five kinds of fantasy: the realistic, the
romantic, the fantastic, the nonsensical, and the parabolic. The
distinctions result from a person's feeling or judgment
whether given nonactual agents and actions are possible as far
as the world known to him is concerned. If they are felt to be
possible, there is a subdivision according to probability.
Nonactual agents and actions which appear possible and probable
make up realistic stories; those which appear possible but (highly)
improbable make up ro- mantic stories. Realistic and romantic
stories are extremes, and have their own extremes, along the same
continuum of possibility.
Stories with nonactual agents and actions which appear
impossible, too, can be subdivided. The difference in this case is
due, not to a greater or lesser degree of impossibility, but to the
different kinds of response a story releases in the audience.
Nonsensical stories, like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, are
addressed to the intellect in the first place, whereas fantastic
stories are addressed to the feeling and the imagination. Fantastic
stories may have some non- sense at their core but the story is
developed by departing from it, usually by ignoring it, whereas
nonsensical stories never leave it; they move and meander within
it.4
Parabolic stories could be considered a fourth kind of story,
next to the true, the untrue, and the enigmatic. If lying subverts
all true stories, parabolizing subverts all stories, true or
untrue, by removing actual/particular truth from true stories and
adding general truth to untrue stories. "True" in the expression
"true story" means that "It is true that this and this actually
happened." There is, however, also "higher" truth, derived from
generalizing, and higher truth subverts the particularity of both
true stories and fantasies. Still, it is probably better to group
parabolic stories under fantasies, since this is what they are as
long as stories are divided in the first place according to
actuality, that is, whether they did or did not actually
happen.
The last comment is also intended to suggest that the typology
offered here for classificatory purposes consists of ideal types in
the Weberian fashion: they are scientific constructs produced for
helping analyze evidence rather than for taxonomically identifying
it. At the same time, I do want to claim that these constructs bear
some relationship to the nonscientific constructs which people at
large produce for sorting out information. The everyday constructs
are more or less well defined; the objects, however, to which they
are applied (in the productive as well as the reproductive
generation
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342 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
of stories as told) may require or provoke the application of
more than one construct. They very often cause lack of clarity in a
receptive audience. This is normal. Most true stories have some
mistakes and lies; and most stories, true or untrue, require more
than one kind of construal, just as their telling may be motivated
by more than one intention and scheme.
I start out with "true stories," since in my view we always take
our bearings from true stories; we constantly hear and produce
them. The telling and processing of true stories is a human need
which probably can only be removed together with the species. They
do not belong to a Marxian "society of need" which could be
overcome, and they could not be made redundant in terms of some
Nietzschean superhumanity either.
Thinking in terms of true stories means to think of myths as
distinct from mythology. The word mythology may designate, like
iconography, both a corpus, a given system of units, and the study
of their systematization. Logical systematization, however, is
opposed to the nature of myths. What characterizes the "mythic
view" of the world is that it works itself out through myths, in
the plural, not through one story or a single system of stories.
Pluralism and diversity is the very nature of myths; the emergence
of mythology effectively marks the end of myths as true
stories.5
Fantastic stories are fantasies. What is curious is why such
stories, which are furthest removed for the original audience from
being true stories, have the effect of being mythic. But this is,
after all, another way of asking why archaic myths (as well as
folktales) have received so much attention since the eighteenth
century. Our fas- cination with fantastic stories and with
(archaic) myths belong to- gether. This relationship contradicts
the view, quite widespread, that the mythic view, or myth (in the
singular), was able to integrate the world; at least it seems to
contradict it. According to Habermas, "The totalizing force of
myth, with which it orders all phenomena, as noticed on the
surface, in a network of correspondences, rela- tionships of
similarity and contrast, arises from basic concepts which
categorically combine whatever the modern understanding of the
world cannot bring together any more."' Whatever "myth" does, myths
do not totalize and have little to do with categorically coherent
concepts. And if they do bring the world together they do it in a
very peculiar way. We can only notice this, however, if we consider
them true stories and also ask what is peculiar about fantastic
stories or, to be more precise, about having fantastic stories.
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MYTHS AND THE FANTASTIC 343
II
In his book on The Fantastic,7 Tzvetan Todorov introduces the
term fantastic in a much narrower sense. He differentiates it from
the uncanny and the marvelous. Uncanny stories retain the laws of
nature: stories seemingly supernatural are given a natural/rational
explanation in the end. The marvelous, by contrast, introduces new
laws, supernatural laws of its own. For Todorov, the fantastic
hovers between the two, between actual reality and some reality
which is not actual, so the hero-as well as the implicit
reader-cannot make up his mind where he is. As soon as this
hesitation is resolved in either direction, the fantastic is left
behind (25).
Todorov differentiates the fantastic also from the allegorical
and the poetic or literary. The reader's uncertainty disappears if
he notices that the events should be understood allegorically or
self- referentially (32). The point is well taken in the context of
Todorov's scheme: self-referential poetic/literary works do not
refer to the actual world, and the reader who notices this will
lose his sense of the fantastic. He will lose it, to mention an
analogy suggested by Todorov's study, in a similar way to when he
notices that he is reading a story which is marvelous, that is,
which must be super- natural, if believed.
The trouble with Todorov's theory lies with his concepts of
nature, the natural, and the supernatural on the one hand, and with
his aestheticist concept of poetry/literature as self-referential
on the other.8
As for the first problem, Todorov does not consider that the
concept of the "supernatural" is based on the idea of a fallen
nature. The Kingdom of Heaven cannot know miracles. Consequently,
Todorov does not seem to realize that "nature" and the "natural"
are bound to be problematic when and where the idea of a fallen
nature is absent.
Now it so happens that the fantastic, as a subtype of fantasy,
began to be produced when nature became problematic because
Enlightenment thought stripped it of the supernatural and conceived
of an empirically observable reality.
This idea was problematic right from the outset. It reduced
nature to quantifiable physics (Newton), pitting against it an
identical ob- server conceived in terms of thinking and guaranteed
by a good God (Descartes), and producing a new discontinuity
between subject and object. The same idea could help blur
discontinuities as far as human beings on earth were concerned by
skeptically projecting them everywhere (Hume). This, in turn,
provoked Kant to introduce
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344 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
two fundamental discontinuities, one between pure and practical
reason, physics and morality, and another between reason and
judgment, causality and teleology. For Kant, evolutionary zoology,
history in general, and all matters of taste were accessible to
tele- ological thought only. They were, in other words, not part of
"empirically observable reality" as far as true knowledge was con-
cerned. And yet exactly these spheres of concern and reality gained
special significance when the supernatural was removed from
nature.
The authors of fantastic stories, often romantic authors, tried
to unite Kant's partitioned "nature." They believed in the
"miracles of nature," a paradoxical idea well suggested by the
title of Abrams's book on romanticism, Natural Supernaturalism.9
The nature of the paradox, however, is better suggested if the word
"supernatural" is not used. For the authors in question thought of
nature itself as capable of incomprehensible jumps. The traditional
wisdom of natura non fecit saltus-the expression has been traced
back to Fournier's Varite's historiques et littiraires (1613); the
idea was best propagated by Leibniz '--was exchanged for a new one,
nowadays overwhelm- ingly accepted, which might be called natura
fecit saltus.
In the mode of thought which holds that nature does make jumps,
all transcendence occurs in a monistically immanent world. Even the
distinction between nature and culture is paradox in such a view,
since culture, too, is nature; the nonconscious mind, too, is mind.
Immanent transcendence gives rise to a "natural superreality" at
every discontinuous jump. Superreality is integrated with reality
without surrendering the discontinuity which made its emergence
possible.
Monsters are only fantastic as long as nature is not. But if
nature is not, how are monsters possible? Moreover, if monsters are
natural, nature can be monstrous, and culture can be, too. We know
the theory of the "happy monster," the mutational ancestor of a new
species. If there are "happy monsters," the real difference runs
between monster and monster, not merely between monster and norm.
The discontinuity between monster and norm might be merely
temporal, not structural. From the vantage point of the happy
monster, the species left behind or to the side is monstrous; it
depends on the viewer which monstrosity he prefers, although he may
well prefer both. If he does, the world itself will appear as
fantastic, and our ability to produce the fantastic will appear as
closely linked with our ability to produce a mentally and experi-
entially viable world.
Fantastic stories cannot be meaningfully discussed outside this
general context in which they appeared in modern times. Self-
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MYTHS AND THE FANTASTIC 345
referential concepts of poetry/literature, or of art, therefore,
are inadequate for doing justice to the fantastic. This is the
second basic problem with Todorov's theory. The success of a
fantastic story depends on how the experience which it provokes
relates to the general experience which the audience has of nature
and the world, and the world has been a very problematic context of
experience in the period in which fantastic stories have appeared
and still appear. "Nature" does make (discontinuous) jumps, and the
per- mutations are fascinating because they are frightening, not
just playful.
III
It is helpful to pay a little more attention to
self-referentiality when discussing myths and fantastic stories
because it is one of "our" scientific concepts and a problematic
one.
Frege said that "poetry" had "meaning" (Sinn) but no referent
(Bedeutung)." He wanted to clarify the nature of the predication
"true" in an attempt to find out when it could be used. He said
that it could not be used in reference to anything bodily given or
to works of art; its sole legitimate use was in assertions (Behaup-
tungssaetze). In "poetry," he said, we have "illusory proper names"
(Scheineigennamen), not real proper names; and sentences with
illusory proper names, such as "Scylla" or "Tell," are neither true
nor false; as a result, poetry is neither true nor false (40f).
Self-referentiality is an idea based on, or relatable to,
Frege's concept of "poetry." The problem with this concept is that
Frege subsumed under it also mythic stories, myths, and he did not
tell how it could be known that a name was an illusory proper name
or a real one. Was "Athena" an illusory proper name for the
original audience of the Homeric songs? The term myth comes in
handy in answering this question. The enlightened outsider can say:
Yes, it was, but "they" did not know this. The problems with this
kind of answer have been much discussed.'2 He who knows must be an
outsider but how can an outsider really know? Moreover, how is it
possible to have an experience outside a world; how can an ex-
perience be an experience if not in terms of some world? If we
admit that "poetry" is self-referential we must exclude from poetry
all true stories, that is, stories which are known to have
referents. Myths are true stories for those who so believe them.
But are myths to be referred, therefore, to the realm of
(scientific) assertions?
Now it so happens that myths ought to be considered outside
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346 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
Frege's scheme even in terms of his own thought. Gabriel has
pointed out that Frege in fact had a treble distinction in mind:
science, pragmatic language (Gebrauchssprache), and poetry. The
difference between science and pragmatic language is twofold:
science uses words with one referent only, it is a system, whereas
pragmatic language has words with several referents; it is used,
however, in some pragmatic context which can ensure that the word
has only one referent.'3 The predication "true" is only legitimate
as far as assertions are concerned (whether scientific or
pragmatic), and the property "asserted/nonasserted" pertains to the
way in which texts are considered (Auffassung), not to the texts
themselves. Sentences of science are considered assertive,
sentences of poetry are considered nonassertive (xix). This applies
conversely as well: nonassertively considered texts are only valid
as "poetry" (xx).
Gabriel himself mentions that Frege's concept of "poetry" is
prob- lematic because "poetry" may have a truth different from the
truth of science (xx). But he does not even suggest that some works
called by Frege "poetic" in fact are "pragmatic."
If we consider this we can conclude that Frege's concept of
"poetry" needs to be dissolved or rather replaced by three basic
terms: myth, fantasy, and (lyric) poetry. For the works that Frege
had in mind could be so classified. And if we include "pragmatic
language," we can distinguish between "true story" (and its
inverse, "deceitful story"), "fantasy," and "(lyric) poetry."
Myths, to repeat, are true stories for those who so believe
them. They are asserted and so considered. The widest circumference
of the pragmatic context is the world shared by the people who
assert a given story to be true; the pragmatic context ensures,
therefore, not only that a name has a single referent on a given
occasion but also that it does have one. This holds true, it seems
to me, of all true stories, including enigmatic ones.
If we bracket lyric poetry, as nonstorical verbal works, we can
say that Frege's "poetry" should be replaced by "fantasy," and his
"pragmatic language" should be introduced to include, among others,
all true stories, whether we call some "myths" and others
"histories." Myths cannot be called, therefore,
self-referential.
But this is not all. Even fantastic fantasies are more than
self- referential.
The idea of self-referentiality was propagated, among others, by
Mukarovsky, who equated with one another the poetic and the
aesthetic and argued that the "aesthetic function" was "an omni-
present dialectical negation of the three functions of
language"
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MYTHS AND THE FANTASTIC 347
proposed by Btihler--representation, expression, appeal-and that
it was "a necessary supplement to Biihler's model."'4
Mukarovsky also argued, however, that poetic works, though self-
referential, that is, without particular referents, did have what
he called "global reference": "And it is this very reference of a
higher order, represented by the work as a whole, which enters into
a strong relationship with reality" (161). Self-referentiality, in
other words, is counterbalanced by global reference.'5 No actual
and particular referents correspond to a "poetic work" but the
actual and particular world in which it is told does correspond to
it.
In another passage Mukarovsky speaks of "global relationship"
(162) and this is a better term. Accordingly, fantasies may be said
to have no actual and particular referents but to be globally
related to some actual and particular world, the actual world of
someone's experience. A story is realistic, romantic, nonsensical,
fantastic, or parabolic in such a relationship.16
We improve on Mukarovsky's scheme if we consider also the true
stories and say that all stories are globally related to some
actual world.I" Whether or not a story is asserted to be true
matters a great deal, of course, but the global relationships which
given stories have, irrespectively of being true or untrue, are
also significant and noticeable. It is, for instance, significant
that a history, that is, a historically true story, and a realistic
fantasy share the very same type of global relationship, and that
the global relationship which a fantastic story has is closer in
type to that of a mythic story than to any other type. For myths
are believed to be true stories by a given community but their
global relationship to the actual world of the believers is quite
different from that of histories: it is not to the same kind of
world.
Histories are related to a single continuous world whereas
(archaic) myths are globally related to two worlds within, or
throughout, a single nature. This is so because myths are true
stories about deities and/or ancestors; they happened, as Eliade
likes to put it, in illo tempore.'" They happened not only in the
old days but in another time, in another world. "That world,"
however, though discontinuous with "this world," is related to it
because it had helped bring it about, and still brings it about
insofar as the two can be ritually integrated with one another.
It is presumably this power of reactivating "that world" in
"this one," a power shared by the members of a given community of
descendants, which may explain why the two worlds and their ritual
integration are not considered enigmatic by the participants.
They
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348 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
do not feel alienated from this power which they know to be
their "own," that is, of which they know themselves to be a part-in
which they actively and knowingly participate.'9
IV But next to the two basic types of true stories, myths and
histories,
there is a third type, legends. This type includes popular
legends (German Sage), as collected by the Grimm brothers, which
char- acterize it best.20 Legends differ in global reference from
both myths and histories: they are, and are known to be, enigmatic.
They are associated usually, though not necessarily,2' with some
geographic location and they are asserted to have actually happened
by people to whom the things recounted happened or who believe that
they happened in their own lifetime or one or two generations
earlier. Stories like that of Jesus or Mohammed started out as
popular legends. Recent attempts to introduce the term "myth" (in
the singular) to universal religions are, therefore, misconceived.
Popular legends, and all legends, belong to the world of enigmatic
stories, not of myths.
Popular legends are globally related to "this world" and are
(alleged to be) histories. At the same time, what happens to an
(allegedly) historical agent involves the intrusion of some agent
or agents from "another world." Such stories are enigmatic because
the two worlds intersect in them without ritual integration. The
intersecting occurs in the story itself, not in the ritual
activation.22
The agents appearing in popular legends are, at least in part,
from "that world," and they are called as a rule "supernatural."
But they are not from "beyond nature"; they may indeed be elemental
spirits, that is, explicitly natural, although they appear
surprisingly, often threateningly, hence as if discontinuously, in
"this world." What appears is "that world," some of its forces, and
"that world" was, and in some way still is, natural. What is
enigmatic is the discontinuity "within" nature. The discontinuity
of two worlds is carried by nature as two pots shaped from a single
lump of unbaked clay are carried by that clay. Carried is, of
course, a wrong term; it could also be said that the shape carries
the clay. What matters, however, is the actuality of the clay here
and there; no qualitative discontinuity divides that: the
discontinuity of the two subsequently shaped pots does not depend
on any qualitative discontinuity of the clay itself. "That world"
is not more supernatural than "this world"; nature itself is
supernatural: it is capable of discontinuous
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MYTHS AND THE FANTASTIC 349
jumps. Nature is enigmatic--for those, of course, who cannot
remove the enigma.
It is characteristic, by the way, that popular legends tell
stories about individual persons who belong to a given community
and happen to be on the road, or otherwise alone, whereas the
ritual reactivation of "that world" as a rule is communal. If
individuals, such as shamans, do the reactivation,23 they are
considered dan- gerous, and with good reason: shamans court danger,
whereas regular members of the community encounter it
inadvertently, by surprise.
Fantastic stories often resemble popular legends in regard to
the world to which they are globally related, as happens in
Frankenstein or Dracula; they may resemble myths, like most of the
stories of Ursula le Guin (for example, The Left Hand of Darkness)
or The Foundation stories by Asimov; a third kind tells of some
imaginary equivalent of a ritual integration of "that world" with
"this world," as happens in Hoffmann's Princess Brambilla or, in a
more limited way, in The Wizard of Oz.
Fantastic stories, being fantasies, cannot be enigmatic, of
course. This is why whenever they resemble popular legends in
regard to global reference, by offering stories in which two worlds
intersect, they will have the effect of myths. For a mixed world of
that kind is unlike "this world." Fantastic fantasies on the whole
resemble myths, whereas realistic fantasies resemble histories.
But fantastic stories, being fantasies, can only resemble myths
in a limited way. Myths are true stories, and for people who so
believe them, the ritual integration does occur: the two worlds in
fact are reconciled with one another. Fantastic fantasies, however,
can only suggest another world in juxtaposition to "this world."
Even if a person integrates the two during
reading/listening/viewing, the two worlds are kept apart. If they
are not, the story cannot have the effect of being fantastic.
The fantastic suggests a scar that cannot be smoothed out, a
scar that cannot heal. "That world" cannot help integrate "this
world" in the case of fantastic stories but it can make people
aware of the need for integration, and of their nonrational ability
to achieve it. Even if the scar cannot heal, in both senses of the
word, it does something quite useful: it provokes an inquietude
about the actual world, suggesting that "this world" is not really
known, stirring a person's mental powers to transcend what is
known.
Whoever feels no inquietude and trusts empirically observable
reality, the actual world as known to him, will consider fantastic
stories silly or pure amusement. But whoever cannot leave
"empir-
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350 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
ically observable reality" uncontested, however obscurely and
sub- liminally the contesting is done, will find that fantastic
stories coun- terbalance what is known by generating some
"impossible" experience.
This is a basic point. The world to which a fantastic story is
globally related is not just the world as known to a person but
also the world unknown to him. The force of such a story resides in
provoking an experience in this double relation. Fantastic stories
are not true to the actual world but what is known of the actual
world is both limited and questionable. Fantastic stories establish
a beyond against which the actual world can be noticed, and they
project a mental field in which incomprehensible and/or only sub-
liminally noticed aspects of the actual world can be suggested to
experience.
All experience is in terms of some world, and anybody's world,
however familiar, is bound to remain incomprehensible, at least in
terms of Leibniz's question: "Why is there something rather than
nothing?"24 World is a context, not a thing; it is, moreover, the
ultimate context which itself cannot be put into context as far as
experience is concerned. It is easier, therefore, to suggest it by
projecting a fantastic world, and by focusing, for instance, on
strange dreams which feel like intrusions of such a fantastic
world. Fantastic stories alone can suggest that the actual world is
fantastic. People who castigate fantastic stories for being
escapist can only do it in the name of some authority which is
considered obvious, unprob- lematic, and in no need of
legitimation. Such people are right: fantastic stories escape from
the prison of those who guard some obvious authority. But such an
authority, with its world, is itself fantastic, and this, too, can
only be convincingly suggested by fantastic fantasies, such as
Swift's Gulliver's Travels or Hoffmann's Little Zaches Called
Cinnabar.
V
It is not by chance that fantastic fantasies so frequently turn
into children's tales without losing the interest of adults who,
after all, produced them for themselves, that is, for escaping from
their own adult selves in the first place.
The (romantic) reappraisal of the child meant that children were
not just small and immature adults. The reappraisal was correlated
to that of the "people"-at first of the middle classes-who were not
just children of a wise and powerful enlightened absolutist
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MYTHS AND THE FANTASTIC 351
father, and to the discovery of the "noble savage," the
primitives as "children."
The child (in the singular) was an emotional-intellectual
complex sui generis;25 adults never lost it, they could only
repress it. Moreover, the child could be repressed also in
children. Ever since Rousseau the task was twofold: children were
to be raised so that they could freely develop the child, and
adults were to be raised (instructed) so that they could allow the
emergence of the child. This is why and how, for instance,
Hoffmann's tales were intended to be effective in a double
relation.
The regaining of the child could only be achieved by recognizing
its loss (see Hoffmann's tale, "The Strange Child"), that is, by
recognizing the impossibility of regaining paradise completely, in
other words, without awareness of its loss. This awareness
necessary for regaining the child is not the same as the awareness
necessary for the fantastic to be effective, but it is closely, or
even intimately, related to it.
For adults, the child's world is "that world," the adult's world
is "this world." So considered, modern adults find themselves in a
curious relationship to archaic adults. (Their relationship to the
adults of traditional societies, to whom they are the closest, from
whom they have been moving away, is much more difficult to
discuss.) Modern adults, too, have two worlds within, or
throughout, one nature but their two worlds clearly differ from the
two worlds of archaic adults. For archaic adults, "that world" is
the world of the ancestors; for modern adults, "that world" is the
world of the child (who according to Wordsworth is father to the
man).26
The archaic two worlds scheme is structural; this is why its
paradoxical nature does not disqualify it. Commenting on Kant's new
concept of time, Deleuze writes: "Time is no longer defined by
succession because succession concerns only things and movements
which are in time. If time itself were succession, it would need to
succeed in another time, and on to infinity.""27 This comment does
apply to the two worlds scheme as far as logic is concerned. The
descendants need the world of the ancestors but the ancestors must
have been descendants in their own time/world, and they must have
needed ancestors in turn, and so on. Logically, we have an infinite
regress. But archaic societies do not think "logically," that is,
by detaching thinking from experience in the concrete. They do not
consider that ancestors, too, must have been descendants, although
if they do they will not be disturbed by it: such a consideration
does not affect the relationship between ancestors and
descendants.
Moderns think differently. They know, for instance, of
evolution
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352 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
and cannot think of the relationship between ancestors and de-
scendants in static (or stable) terms. The curiosity is that
evolution demands (species-based) discontinuity, whereas archaic
societies con- tinuously "evolve" from animals. But moderns do have
a relation which is static (or stable) for them, that between child
and adult.
The similarity-dissimilarity between the archaic and the modern
two worlds scheme provokes two basic conclusions. First, the rela-
tionship between "that world" and "this world" is fundamentally
ambiguous for modern people. Archaic adults, too, have a rela-
tionship with the child but it remains unacknowledged. The child is
not "that world"; and adults clearly treat children differently
from ancestors. For modern adults, by contrast, the child is "that
world," the adult is "this world" but, and significantly, this is
not quite true. The more an adult allows the child to emerge, and
the more he identifies with it, the less true the division will
turn out to be. The modern "this world" has been forced to include
the child's world more and more, but this inclusion can only be
carried out by the adult (who does not abdicate). The biological,
psychological, and mental-cognitive discontinuity as well as
continuity between child and adult have only begun to be researched
recently, and the strategies and tactics to deal with them have
been subject to constant experimentation.
Second, the world of the ancestors helps integrate "this world"
of the descendants, whereas "that world" of the child ("nature")
helps break up, disqualify, or counterbalance "this world" of the
adults ("society").
Archaic societies produce a positive integration of ancestors
and descendants, "that world" and "this world," whereas modern
societies so far have only been able to integrate the child with
the adult, the child's world with the adult's world, negatively.
Child and adult may be believed to be integrated no less than
ancestors and descendants, but the integration has no positive role
for the activity of adults in their world, it only has validity as
a discontinuous process in the name of "playing." Just as children
play "Dracula," adults may integrate the world of Dracula, Bram
Stoker's novel, with their adult world. Integration does occur in
their experience but can only have a negative validity, since the
world of Dracula is discontinuous with "this world" of the
adult.
The discontinuity between child and adult (so far) has proved
irremovable in modern societies. A person can only switch, or jump,
from one to the other and back. When an adult has allowed the child
to emerge he may forget it intermittently or completely but he
achieves in either case a state of "mind and heart," the
child's,
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MYTHS AND THE FANTASTIC 353
of which he knows (at least) afterwards that it cannot be
achieved lastingly, that is, with positive validity for the adult's
"this world."
When Coleridge spoke of the "willing suspension of disbelief for
the moment, which constitutes poetic faith" he had all kinds of
"poetic" works in mind.28 In Abrams's view, "it is clear that
Coleridge also enlarged his theory to account for the reader's
attitude to realistic characters and events as well."29 Wordsworth,
too, included all kinds of "poetic" or "imaginative" works when he
wrote of early man: "The imaginative faculty was lord / Of
observations natural."30 On this view, early man and the child are
unaware of such a faculty, they believe its products actual and
real. Coleridge and Wordsworth are different; they know themselves
to be late man, modern adults. But being also "poets," they are
capable of willingly suspending their disbelief, that is, willingly
allowing the child, early man, to emerge. Their imaginative faculty
opens a (secularized) Kingdom of Heaven, a realm of eternity.
Accordingly, for their "poetic" selves, too, the issue of
possibility-impossibility does not really arise; it is all the same
whether the "imaginative faculty" produces realistic or fantastic
images. (What matters is that they cannot remain/retain the
child.)
This neutrality in regard to the possible and the impossible,
however, goes much too far; it is unacceptably excessive to
identify "imagination" with "the child," "judgment" with "the
adult." In the same way, it is unacceptable to identify early man
with the child. Early man does not observe whatever he imagines and
he is not at all without judgment. And although the child-in
children as well as in adults--may be unable to distinguish the
possible from the impossible, actual children are quite painfully
aware of the limitations of their own powers. The child may be
father to the man but children know that their fathers, and adults
in general, can do things which they themselves are unable to
do.
In addition, adults "willingly suspend disbelief" in different
ways when they read a realistic story and when they read a
fantastic one because different kinds of disbelief need to be
suspended. In reading Anna Karenina I suspend disbelief in the
actuality of those (particular) people and events without
suspending belief in the possibility of the kinds of people and
events. But in reading Dracula I must suspend disbelief also in the
kind of person to which Count Dracula belongs. Dracula's world is
"that world" for me, and if I playfully entertain that world it
will be the child's world as far as the adult is concerned.
Whether or not the child's world is always fantastic (for
adults) is difficult to say; but fantastic fantasies belong to it
as far as adults
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354 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
are concerned. The reality of fantastic stories resides in their
demand to reconcile the adult with the child. This modern
integration- which so far has been demanded rather than
achieved--is much closer to the archaic integration of two worlds
than to the integration of the individual with Divine Being beyond
"this world" offered by universal religions.
The romantic authors who discovered the child were modern
interpreters of the child of Christian thought. Their child--secu-
larized or not-was timeless, eternal; its action model was that of
the play. Freud's theory was an attempt to inject real action,
actuality, into the child, to discover its real life, and to relate
such a fate- exposed child to the adult. Freud has been criticized
for conceiving of the primitives in terms of children.31
The criticism is well taken provided we bear in mind that he
conceived of the child in terms of the adult. His theory divided
the actual human continuum, by a natural discontinuity, into two
sep- arate and yet correlated structures whose successful
integration was proposed by him to be the task.
The modern integration so far has remained a demand; but this is
why the demand which fantastic fantasies make on people has a valid
function or role. What is real for moderns is not just the adult
and the child but also their discontinuity and the demand for their
integration. The fantastic is realized in a gap which cannot close,
in a wound which cannot heal. It calls attention to the wound,
teasing with satisfaction a desire which it cannot really satisfy.
It satisfies this desire by not satisfying it.
HOWARD UNIVERSITY
NOTES
1 This is a widely accepted view. For two dissimilar authorities
see William Bascom, "The Form of Folklore: Prose Narratives," in
Sacred Narrative. Readings in the Theory of Myth (Berkeley, 1984)
and Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, tr. Willard R. Trask (New
York, 1975). 2 For "frame" see Andras Sandor, "On the Concept of
Verbal Work," in The Eighth LACUS Forum, 1981, ed. Waldemar
Gutwinsky and Grace Jolly (Columbia, S.C., 1982), p. 439; Robert de
Beaugrande, Text, Discourse, and Process: Towards a
Multidisciplinary Science of Texts (Norwood, N.J., 1980), p. 163;
and Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York, 1986), p. 265. De
Beaugrande's impressive treatment of the issue, which relies, among
others, on Minsky (Marvin Minsky, "A Framework for Rep- resenting
Knowledge," in The Psychology of Computer Vision, ed. Patrick
Winston [New York, 1975]), considers frames as "configurations of
knowledge" under the perspective of the agreement of elements "such
that access of potentially relevant elements is provided" (p. 163).
My own less ambitious treatment of the issue considers frames
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MYTHS AND THE FANTASTIC 355
in speech-actional terms: frames are used for introducing texts
(and offering re- minders throughout the text-processing). This
approach is still useful, I think, because de Beaugrande does not
confront his distinct concepts of "frame" and "text-type" with one
another. What I call frame is closer to what he discusses among the
issues of text-type: "A single text can indeed be shifted from type
to type by altering its situation of presentation . . . Although
the text remains stable, the audience's processing procedures are
placed under different controls and priorities" (p. 199). Moreover,
in my view, frames do affect the processing of texts: the verbal
sign complex is stable but the activated text, the work as it
emerges, is not. Texts can be inserted in the wrong frame(s), and
this need not be a wrong thing to do (cf. Sandor, p. 439). Mary Ann
Caws's "reading frames" are used within a text, not for framing
entire texts. See her Reading Frames in Modern Fiction (Princeton,
1985). They are indebted (p. 20) to Erving Goffmann's Frame
Analysis (Cambridge, Mass., 1974) and are relatable to Minsky's
views. Fowler dismisses the term for "genre theory." See Alastair
Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of
Genres and Modes (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. 128. Minsky says that
"those magic story- starting words arouse, in knowing listeners'
minds, great hosts of expectation-frames to help the listeners. ...
Beyond arousing all these specific expectations, 'once upon a time'
plays one more crucial role: it says that what comes after it is
fictional or, in any case, far too remote to activate much personal
concern" (The Society of Mind, p. 265). My own speech-actional
frame associated with "once upon a time" says not only "untrue
story" (Minsky's "fiction") but also, for instance, "folk-tale" (as
distinct from "popular legend" and all other kinds of
story-frames). 3 This difference is missed by Kathryn Hume, Fantasy
and Mimesis. Responses to Reality in Western Literature (New York,
1984). 4 For an example, see Gilles Deleuze's treatment of Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland in his Logique du sens (Paris, 1969). 5
Raimundo Panikkar, Myth, Faith, and Hermeneutics: Cross-Cultural
Studies (New York, 1979; pp. 39 f. and pp. 372 f.), argues against
mixing up mythos with logos in a very different context. His
phrasing, though, sometimes could be adopted here, e.g., "mythology
is the death of myth" (p. 39). Jacques Derrida, Margins of
Philosophy, tr. Alan Bates (Chicago, 1982), equating mythos with
logos, calls (Western) metaphysics "white mythology." In his own
context, "myth" and "mythology" are strictly continuous notions.
This continuity cannot be maintained if "myth" means "story." 6
Jiirgen Habermas, "Die Verschlingung von Mythos, und Aufklaerung.
Bemer- kungen zur Dialektik der Aufklaerung-nach einer neuen
Lektiire," in Mythos und Moderne. Begriff und Bild einer
Rekonstruktion, ed. Karl Heinz Bohrer (Frankfurt, 1983), p. 413; my
translation. 7 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural
Approach to a Literary Genre, tr. Richard Howard (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1975), hereafter cited in text. 8 Though criticizing Todorov,
Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in
Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (Cambridge,
1983), basically adopts his theory of the fantastic (p. 71). She
disagrees, among others, with Todorov's rejection of allegories as
fantasies (pp. 68 f). Stanislav Lem, Microworlds: Writings on
Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Franz Rottensteiner (San Diego,
1984), pp. 226 f., has voiced a similar criticism in a piece in
which he, however, rejects Todorov's entire scheme. Had Caillois
read Todorov, who argues against him (pp. 35 f.), he, too, would
have disagreed with him. For Caillois, it is a basic stipulation
that an event is noticed as certainly not belonging to the world as
known: "The fantastic is not fantastic unless it appears as an
inadmissable scandal for experience or reason" (Roger Caillois, Au
coeur du fantastique [Paris, 1966], p. 30). But Caillois not only
distinguishes the fantastic from the miraculous, he also rejects
all completely fantastic
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356 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
worlds, the fables of mythologies and the mysteries of religions
(p. 9), on account, not of their claimed reality, but of their
systematic nature. For him, "The fantastic signifies in the first
place inquietude and rupture" (p. 9). "The fantastic presupposes
the solidity of the real world but only for the sake of better
playing havoc with it" (Roger Caillois, Antologie du fantastique,
vol. I [Paris, 1966], p. 10; my translation). The rupture, in other
words, must occur for him within the story (or the painting, etc.)
not between (the world of) the story and the actual world of the
audience. 9 See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition
and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, 1973). 10 See
Georgi Schischkoff, Philosophisches Wdrterbuch (Stuttgart, 1961),
p. 396. The principle is related to those of the Great Chain of
Being and plenitude, as discussed by Lovejoy (Arthur O. Lovejoy,
The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea
[Cambridge, Mass., 1961]). As to plenitude, see Michael J. White,
Agency and Integrality. Philosophical Themes in the Ancient
Discussion of Determinism and Responsibility (Dordrecht, 1985), pp.
1 ff., who comments: "What a strong appeal the plenitude principle
still exercises in an era when it has been officially repudiated by
logicians and mathematicians" (p. 2). White argues that the
plenitude principle--"the principle that if something is possible,
then it is the case some time or other"-cannot be found before
Aristotle (pp. 5 f.). 11 Gottlob Frege, Schriften zur Logik und
Sprachphilosophie, ed. Gottfried Gabriel (Hamburg, 1978), pp. 25,
32; hereafter cited in text. 12 See R. Horton and Ruth Finnegan,
Modes of Thought: Essays on Thinking in Western and Non-Western
Societies (London, 1973); Peter Winch, "Understanding a Primitive
Society," in Religion and Understanding, ed. D. Z. Phillips
(Oxford, 1967); and Hans G. Kippenberg, "Einleitung: Zur
Kontroverse tiber das Verstehen fremden Denkens," in Magie. Die
sozialwissenschaftliche Kontroverse iiber das Verstehen fremden
Denkens, ed. Hans G. Kippenberg and Brigitte Luchesi (Frankfurt/M.,
1978). 13 Gottfried Gabriel, "Logik und Sprachphilosophie bei
Frege. Zum Verhiltnis von Gebrauchssprache, Dichtung und
Wissenschaft," in Frege, Schriften, p. xxiii, my translation;
hereafter cited in text. 14 Jan Mukarovsky, "Poetic Reference," in
Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions, ed. Ladislav Matejka
and Irwin R. Titunik (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), p. 106; hereafter
cited in text. 15 This corresponds, I think, to the "poetic truth"
which Gabriel had in mind as distinct from "scientific truth" (p.
9). 16 In principle, a story is parabolic without any regard to
global relationship, and yet in practical terms global reference
always is a factor. It entails a world scheme. 17 F. W. Galan,
Historic Structures: The Prague School Project, 1928-1946 (Austin,
1985), pp. 117, 118, has proposed this. 18 See Eliade, Myth and
Reality. 19 This is not a sheer illusion even from the point of
view of a nonbelieving outsider. It is not a simple case of
fetishism. The believer of a fetish does not know that the power
which the fetish has (i.e., is believed to have) in fact is his own
power. The believer of a community of descendants, by contrast, is
aware of something which is actually the case. His power during
ritual activation is both his own and that of the ancestors: the
two really merge, even if the outsider will give a different
explanation for how the merging is effected. 20 See Stith Thompson,
The Folktale (Berkeley, 1977). Thompson discusses the legends under
this inclusive term and distinguishes between popular legends and
saints' legends. Degh and Vazsonyi use just one term, legend, but
they clearly mean popular legends only, leaving religious legends
undiscussed. See Linda Degh and Andrew Vazsonyi, "Legend and
Belief," in Folklore Genres, ed. Dan Ben-Amos (Austin, 1976).
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MYTHS AND THE FANTASTIC 357
21 Cf. Lutz R6rich, Mdrchen und Wirklichkeit, 2nd ed.
(Stuttgart, 1964): "At any rate, localization and dating do not
suffice by themselves to keep apart the genres of tales [Mdrchen]
and legend [Sage], since there are many localized tales which are
not legends (cf. p. 204), and removal of localization will make no
legend a tale. Obviously, several characteristics must coincide in
order to draw a clear line between tale and legend. A single
characteristic will not do" (p. 12; my translation). 22 The Holy
Communion of Christians involves ritual activation; the story of
the Last Supper is a myth. Most of the stories of the New
Testament, however, are popular legends. 23 See Claude
Levi-Strauss, "The Effectiveness of Symbols," in his Structural An-
thropology, tr. Claire Jakobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New
York, 1963), pp. 186-205. 24 Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz,
Selections, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York, 1951), p. 527. 25 I am
using an expression which Ezra Pound used for suggesting the nature
of poetry. See Ezra Pound, "The Serious Artist," in Literary Essays
of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York, 1968). I have no better
way to express what the romantics' "child" was meant to be, even if
I am aware that Pound's aggressiveness in this instance consisted
in giving a due emphasis to the intellect, not to the emotions. 26
As for the child in English literature, see Abrams, Natural
Supernaturalism, pp. 379 ff., 411 ff.; and Harold Bloom, The
Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, rev. and
enlarged ed. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1971), pp. 173-82. For the child in
psychological terms, see Jean Piaget and Baerbel Inhelder, The
Psychology of the Child, tr. Helen Weaver (New York, 1969), pp. 61
ff., who discuss "symbolic play" and distinguish it from dream
symbolism in both its Freudian and Jungian varieties, saying that
"since the child is anterior to the man and was so even in
prehistoric times, it may be in the ontogenetic approach to the
formative mechanisms of the semiotic function that the solution to
the problem [of symbolism] will be found" (pp. 62-63). 27 Gilles
Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties,
tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London, 1984), p. vii. 28
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London, 1965), p.
169. 29 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and
the Critical Tradition (New York, 1958), p. 324. 30 William
Wordsworth, "The Excursion," in William Wordsworth: The Poems, ed.
John O. Hayden (New Haven, Conn., 1981), II, 140, bk. 4, 11. 707-8;
cited in Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 293. 31 Bronislaw
Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic: A Study of the Methods
of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in The Trobriand
Islands (New York, 1978). Malinowski criticized Freud for this
indirectly when he asserted that magic was not idle daydreaming,
not belief in the "omnipotence of thought," as Freud had claimed.
Freud's analogy (between the archaic, the child, and the psychotic)
could be recon- sidered, however, in terms of event theory (see
Irene Fast et al., Event Theory: A Piaget-Freud Integration
[Hillsdale, N.J., 1985]) and so applied to thinking (see Robert E.
Erard, "Concrete Thinking and the Categorical Attitude," in Event
Theory [pp. 111-34]). In terms of this theory (which is intended to
reconcile with one another Freud and Piaget) the child has no
defined object; its knowledge is interactional: it knows what it
does, and what it does happens. "Event" replaces Piaget's "action"
and Freud's primary autism at a single stroke: the child has no
defined self, self- identity, which would make "action" and
"autism" conceivable. See also Andre F. Favat, Child and Tale: The
Origins of Interest (Urbana, Ill., 1977). Favat's findings, based
on a critical acceptance of Piaget's work, are that children turn
to fairy tales
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358 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
between the ages of six and eight, at a time when their world is
changing. They regress because difficult decisions of adjustment
are forced on them: "the child must turn to the fairy tale for a
reaffirmation of his original conception of the world- a world
preserved in the tale, unchanged and unchallenged" (p. 49). Older
children turn away from fairy tales; interest returns around the
age of eighteen to twenty and then it "seems to continue throughout
adult life" (p. 56).
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Article Contentsp. [339]p. 340p. 341p. 342p. 343p. 344p. 345p.
346p. 347p. 348p. 349p. 350p. 351p. 352p. 353p. 354p. 355p. 356p.
357p. 358
Issue Table of ContentsNew Literary History, Vol. 22, No. 2,
Probings: Art, Criticism, Genre (Spring, 1991), pp. 261-503Front
Matter [pp. 280-440]Introduction to the Paratext [pp.
261-272]Pretexts and Paratexts: The Art of the Peripheral [pp.
273-279]The Figurability of the Visual: The Veronica or the
Question of the Portrait at Port-Royal [pp. 281-296]Ekphrasis and
Representation [pp. 297-316]The Intertextuality of Late Medieval
Art and Drama [pp. 317-337]Myths and the Fantastic [pp.
339-358]Discursive Form versus the Past in Literary History [pp.
359-376]Novalis, Miscellaneous Remarks: Introduction [pp.
377-381]Novalis Miscellaneous Remarks [Original Version of Pollen]
[pp. 383-406]On Defining Short Stories [pp. 407-422]The Animal
Fable among Other Medieval Literary Genres [pp. 423-439]Private
Enigmas and Critical Functions, with Particular Reference to the
Writing of Charles Bernstein [pp. 441-464]Post/Poststructuralist
Feminist Criticism: The Politics of Recuperation and Negotiation
[pp. 465-490]Books Received [pp. 495-503]Back Matter [pp.
491-494]