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Table of Contents

The Harmony of Reality and Fantasy: TheFantastic in Irish DramaCsilla Bertha....... ........2

Bakhtin's Chronotope and the Fantastic:Gautier's "Jettatura" and "Arria Marcella"Grant Crichfield

Our I-adies of Perpetual Hell: Witches andFantastic Virgins in Margaret Atwood's Cat's EyeJulieBrown

Kincaid's LucyPatricia Harkins....

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "One Trip Abroad":A Metafantasy of the Divided SelfMarc Baldwin.... ...........69

Slaying the Dragon Within: Andre Norton'sFemale HeroesCarl B. Yoke........ ..........79

About Our Contributors...... ..........93

Manuscript Requirements........... ...................96

Ioumal of the Fantastic in the Arts. Volume 4, No. 3. Whole No. 15.Copyright 1991 by Jade Seas Publishing. All rights reserved. Printedin the United States of America.

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Cavitch, Davi d, ed,. Lifu Sndies . 2nd ed. New York St. Martin's, 1986.

Cudjoe, Selwp. "J"maica Kincaid and the Modernist Project.'Caib-bean Women Witen. Ed. Selwp Cudjoe. Wellesley, Mass.: Calalou:r,1990.2L5-32.

Davies, Carole Boyce and Elaine Savory Fido, ed. Out of the KtmblaTrenton, NJ.: Africa World Press, 1990.

DeMott, Benjamin, ed. Close Imaginings. New York St. Marfin's,1988.

Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother-Daughter Plot. Bloomington: Indianau.P.,1989.

Kincaid, Jamaica. Annie 1ohn.1985. New York Plume, 1985.

.At the Bottom of the River.1985. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1986.

Zury. New York Farrar, Straus, 1990.

Perry Donna. nAn Interview with Jamaica Kincaid." Reading BlaclgReading Feminisr. Ed. Henrylouis Gates, Jr. NewYork Meridian,1990.

Styron, William. DarlorcssWsible. NewYork: Random House, 1990.

$y'2shington, Mary Helen. nlntroductionn and nCommentary on Ja-maica Kincaid." Memory of Kin. Ed. Mary Helen Washington. 1-8;125-9.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald's nOne Trip Abroadn:A Metafantasy Of the Divided Self

Marc Baldwin

In 1930, F. Scott Fitzgerald's utterly fantastic lifestyleand marriage had reached a fevered pitch of moral andemotional self-parody. Spurred on by rampant alcohol-ism, Fitzgerald's mental and physical dissipation left himon the verge of a nervous breakdown. For his tnfe,Zelda,the consequences were clinical insanity and commitmentto a mental institution. In pushing the extremes of the richand famous beyond all the previous boundaries of mod-ernisrq Fitzgerald's created world, his version of JacquesI-acan's "Real," and some of his short fiction--specificallyone example of which I witl address in this study--beganapproaching the post-modern in their self-conscious insta-bility, their recognition of the dialogic nature of language,their competing realities and discourses, and theirmetafictional compulsion to undermine themselvesthrough contradictory impulses.

As Rosemary Jackson notes in her insightful workFan-tasy: The Literalure of Subvercion,the fantastic " character-istically attempts to compensate for a l.ack resulting fromcultural constraints" (3). Infantasy, Fitzgerald found bothan outlet from and an insight into his unreal existence.Elements of the fantastic playfully problemize all of hisnovels. In fact, Tales of the fazz Age, Fitzgerald's secondshort story collection, included a section called "fantasies,"stories he referred to as his "second manner" of writing

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(Fitzgerald, viii). Fitzgerald often expressed an interestinwriting purely fantastic novels, and would have, had thepublic been more receptive. Unfortunately, even a mas-terpiece of the fantastic such as "Diamond As Big As theRitz" had a hard time finding a publisher and was notwell-received by his readers, who wanted only more of thesame realistic tales of flappers and philanderers whichthey had come to e4pect from him. flowever, what we dohave are ten to fifteen marvelously intriguing short storiesin the fantastic mode, almost all of which have beenunjustly ignored by the critics.

One story in particular mirrors yet ultimately deflectscertain critical events in Fitzgerald's disintegrating careerand marriage. "One Trip Abroad" is a metafantasywrittenin August of 1930 as an attempt to chronicle some of thereasons for ZeLda's collapse just four months earlier. Thestory details a five year swing through Europe by onewealthy and spoiled young American couple, Nelson andNicole Kelly, who in their solipsistic search for happinessand good times manage only to displace themselves. It isa quest for a home, for the knowledge, presence, ffidrecognition of oneself and an "Other," and a conventionalstory if not fantastically twisted by a mysterious othercouple who shadow the Kellys throughout Europe, ap-pearing in their peripheral vision in their least-expectedmoments. The other couple seerns always to reflect theirown current states of mind yet although the Kellys oftenvow to approach and befriend their doubles, they neverdo. At the end, Nicole exclaims that 'They're us!" Is theother couple, then, "IJs" or "themr" "real" or "imagined"?Through the device of this dominant and problematicdoppelganger, Fitzgerald represents the tension betweenthe parts of his own radically split self, that is, of the artistand the socialite constantly competing for his time andenergy. Living a fantasy which could not be adequatelyrepresented in realism, Fitzgerald conveyed through this

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fantastic device more than he ever consciouslv knew orintended.

As in Jacques f acan's famous formulation "the uncon-scious is structured like a language," the Kellys at oncereveal their unconscious and move toward self-recogni-tionthrough the competing semiotic discourses of the eyeand the word, desire and dialogic. In fact, this story isnearly a textbookmodel of I^acan's "Imaginary" and "Sym-bolic" andtheindividual's shiftfromone to the other, froma childish image of a mythical, unified selftrood, to amature, though precariously problematic recognition ofhis nature as split betwee4 though dependent upon, bothself and other. It is at the moment of recognition of thedoppelganger as being both other and self that the dop-pelganger disappears, thus allowing the protagonists tosee themselves in a mature, new light. And it is with thathopeful, romantic conclusion that the fantasy ends, bothfor the reader and Fitzgerald.

At the outset of "One Trip Abroad" the Kellys arepositioned on the cusp between the Imaginary and theSymbolic, the place where illusions occur. Fitzgerald'sopening scene has the young, emerging couple appropri-ately isolated in a fantastic setting: in a motorbus engulfedby "air...black with locusts...on the edge of the Sahara."When the swarm dissipates, another cloud descendsaround their ears, a cloud ofwords. "And everyone talkedtogether. Everyone talked; it would have been absurd notto talk. . . ", says Fitzgerald. In this wastelandic setting filledwith human voices asserting their subject positions,Mikhail Bakhtin's principle of dialogic pertains, for heposits that dialogue

is not a means for revealing, for bringing to thesurface the already ready-made character of aperson; no, in dialogue a person not only shows

himself outwardly, but he becomes for the firsttime thatwhichhe is, not onlyforothersbutforhimself as well. To be means to communicatedialogically (Bakhtin, 47).

The young, wealthy, and vacuous Kellys, like the epis-temological landscape of the Roaring 20's which theyrepresent, find themselves in what Heidegger called thegreat'between": although theyhave tried to remain aloofand be "sufficient to each other," they begin to desire whatthey laclq the company of others. flowever, they are notyet self-assured adults able to assert with their ownvoicesa claim upon the hegemonic mass; they are still in theprocess of defining themselves dialogically. While Fitz-gerald describes thepeople around thembytheir societalpositions--"the member of the Stock Exchange," "the au-thor," "the airmaq" "the chauffeurru uthe trained nurse"--the Kellys as yet have no such public identity, no suchduality between what they are and who they are. Theyreside in r acan's Imaginary mirror state, seeing them-selves in objects and in others. Only now, as the storybegins, have theybegunto be truly exposed to whatl-acancalls the Symbolic state, ordered by the individual's en-trance into the world of words, into the language of soci-ety. In Lacan's formulation, the father's prohibitionthrusts the individual into the symbolic state. In the Kellys'case, that father is represented by an elderly couple, Mr.and Mrs. Liddell Miles, who initially take them under theirwing and then cut them loose.

Though likelyunconscious of the psychoanalytic signif-icance of his characterwation, Fitzgerald has, nonetheless,created an oppositional set of characters which are clearlydefined not by their own words and deeds but by theirauthor's discursive remarks. What results is a double helixof an author's discourse inadvertently layrng bare hismetafictional device while his created characters neatlv

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spiral back upon and mirror their creator. Representativesof society's hegemonic class, the Mileses revel in thecognizance of their radically split selves: their "aloofnesstoward the other passengers was a conscious mask, a socialattitude," yet they are 'bored with themselves," for they toohave beenfully inscribed by the language of their ideolog5r,andthus are also, aslacanwould say, subjects atthe mercyof the law that made them. To the Kellys' credit, they laterrefer to the Mileses as part of "that crowd" and "peoplewho waste your time." Yet although they recognize thatthe Mileses signiff the anti-thesis of their desire, theyagree to spend time with them. Concomitant to the exactmoment 'Vhen Nicole was conscious of a certain regretthat they had accepted," she saw the other couple, theirmirror image, the mysterious doppelganger, for the sec-ond time. She telts Nelsonthat she's "almost sure I've metthe girl somewhere before." She has-in the mirror- Ac-cordlng to l:can, the mirror image, in this case the imageof the other couple, is the image of aunified and coherentself clearly separated from the rest of the world; an imageof themselves as they aspire to be.

A parallet semiotic system is at work in the story, thatof identiffing the objects of desire through sight, the signsystem of the eye, or what I-acan calls the "scopic drive."A narcissistic fantasy, the other couple appears to theKellys to be their ideat selves: they "looked so nice" thatNicole "found her eyes drawn irresistibly toward them. " AsI-acan dramatized in his famous reading of Poe's 'The

Purloined Irtter, " characters are caught and defined by alook of desire. For example, later that same night theKeltys and the Mileses attend a performance of localdancers. At the end of their show, after "alull" to clear theroomof theunwitling anduninitiated, the dancers disrobeand dance naked. That "lull" is not unlike the very gap inwhich the Kellys find themselves, tornbetween aloofnessand society, themselves and others. And, after the "lull,"

the latent urges of the "scopic drive" are satisfied: thenaked bodies, the repressed desires, are unveiled. Thefantasy comes to life and affects the Kellys'split: Nelsonwants to stay, but Nicole 'hesitates, torn between repul-sion and the desire not to appear to be a prig. Then shesaw another young American woman get up quickly andstart for the door. Recognizing the attractive young wifefrom the other bus," she left too. Notable that at first shedidn't recognize her double, and that when she did, herrecognition was in positional terms: the woman is a 'bife

from the other bus," a subjected being like herself, at-tached to both a husband and a group. She needed to "see"someone else mirror her before she could act. Nicole,thus, split from Nelson, who stayed because he'kants tosee what it's like." In Tzvetan Todorov's view, the essenceof the fantastic can be located in its "hesitation" betweenfiction and reality. In the moment of her hesitation, Ni-cole struggles to assert her difference from and dialogicopposition to the fantasy unfolding before her eyes.Nicole's sudden "recognition," as Fitzgerald calls it, of herdouble again undermines the mimetic by foregroundingthe fantastic. As Todorov notes, this is precisely the effectof metafictional texts, to question the "existence of anirreducible opposition between real and unreal"(Todorov, 167).

That this critical episode happened in public is signifi-cant, for Deleuze and Guattari view the Unconscious notas individually generated, but as socially generated out ofcollective public experience. The Unconscious onlyknows social roles and thus realizes its desires in socialsettings. In this formulation, Nelson indulges his uncon-scious, through his " scopic drive," while Nicole, by leaving,represses her desires. As Deleuze and Guattari posit:"Fantasy is never individual: it is group fantasy" (Deleuze,30). As with the double later proving to be the vestiges oftheir imaginary self, and their creator, Fitzgerald, and his

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wifeZeldaproving themselves to be split beings in searchof the "Real," Nelson and Nicole are now "incredulouswith themselves" having set "some precedent of possiblenonagreement." The scene of the naked dancers broughtthem face to face with their imagined unity and difference,as Jacques Derrida would say. From that moment for-ward, they were cognizant of both their difference fromeach other and their difference fromthemselves and oth-ers.

In reaction, they left the tour and went off on their own,to Italy, where as Rosemary Jackson posits in writing ofdualism in fantasies, the Kellys attempted to "return to astate of undifferentiation, to a condition preceding themirror stage and its creation of dualism." Fantasies are "anattempt to re-enter the imaginary. Dualism [is a] symp-tom of this desire for the imaginary" (Jackson, 9-10). InItaly, the Kellys each attempt to learn another semioticsystem, another discourse through which to define them-selves: Nelson takes painting lessons while Nicole takessinging lessons. But they "had no direction" and "no im-mediate prospect of becoming serious." They were "notgetting anywhere." Frustrated, they " were through withbeing alone" and so went to Monte Carlo to " see peo-ple...see the chic, amusing ones," but they only foundmore disappointment. Agaiq at the exact moment whenNicole vows to seek a difference by "getting out of it allsoon...be[coming] serious and hav[ing] a baby," she seesher double, an "extremely smart" young woman whose"face was familiar" but whom she doesn't immediatelvplace. The displaced double serves as an omen of Nicole'sown impending displacement, for that same evening, shecatches Nelson kissing another woman. Aviolent and verypublic fight ensues, but in its aftermath Nelson claims thatthe kiss was "of absolutely no significance" so Nicole "accepted his explanations, not because theywere credible,but because she wanted passionately to believe them."

Now radically split by the surfacing of Nelson's re-pressed desire and the concomitant recognition of theirinevitably divided selves, the Kellys try desperately "toreturn to the simplicity they had once possessed, as if theywere trying to unwind something that had become visiblytangled." Collectively, as a couple, having now passedbeyond themirror stage andits creationof dualism,havingshattered the illusion of each other as each other's ownideal, they desire to return to the far side of the mirror, toan original unity, a powerful metaphor, as Jaclson notes,for "paradise lostby the fall into divisionwith the construc-tion of a subject" (Jackson, 89). But that evening theyagain see their doubles in a restaurant, noting that'They've changed....They're harder looking and he looksdissipated....[and] there's a hard look in her face too"(589). As the Nelsons watch, aghast, their doubles makea public scene replete with violence and screanu, muchlike the scene the Kellys had made earlier in the day. Thedevelopment so shocks them that theytrade ItalyforParis,still, however, perceiving themselves to be different fromothers, "speaking of their former acquaintances as "thatcrowd" and as "piople who waste yorriti-"." Still denyingresponsibility for their actions, still seeing others as ob-jects and themselves as distinctly different, the Kellysbelieve that they "came to know what did go and what didnot go," a delusion which leads to their objectification aseasy marks by a counterfeit Count who conned them outof $ 12,000 and all of Nicole's jewelry. "I 've lost my jewelsand I'm sick, sick! " says Nicole. She proves prophetic, fortheyboth spend the next two years inhospitals, recoveringfrom operations and illnesses. While recuperating in ahotel in Switzerland, they again see their doubles. Here,Fitzgerald juxtaposes three brief scenes in which Nelsonand Nicole individually confront their counterparts beforefacing them as a couple. In the first scene:

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Nicole found herself near the girl on the glass veranda.Under cover of reading a boolg she inspected the faceclosely. It was an inquisitive face, she saw at once, possiblycalculating; the eyes, intelligent enough, but with no peacein therq swept over people in a single quick glance asthough estimating their value. 'Terrible egoist," Nicolethought, with a certain distaste. Her estimation of herdouble is, of course, pure projection, as is Nelson's of hisdouble, whenhereports toNicole inthe second scene thathe "got a good look at his face in the mirror [of thebarl....His face is so weak and self-indulgent it's almostmean." In the story's final scene, the Kellys stand togetheron the hotel's terrace watching a "receding storm," andwondering if they "can have it all again." At that moment,"two dark forms came into the shadows nearby." In thepresence of their doubles, Nicole asks Nelson why theylost "peace and love and health, one after the other. If weknew, if there was anybody to tell us, I believe we couldtry. I'd try so hard." In an immediate flash of lightning, thetwo couples turn toward each other and the Kellys seethemselves in the others. 'They're us! They're us! Don'tyou see?" said Nicole. 'Trembling, they clung together.The clouds merged into the dark mass of mountains'looking around after a moment, Nelson and Nicole salithat they were alone together in the tranquil moonlight."At the moment of recognition of their irrevocable differ-ence from both themselves and each other, the Kellysaffect the shift to the symbolic state and the fantasticvanishes. After their long trip abroad, after the emer-gence of repressed desires, after sickening themselveswith their wastelandic lifestyle, the Kellys finally recog-nize that they too have been part of the crowd of "peoplewho waste your time."

Ultimately,Fitzgerald's symbolic fantasy is a renuncia-tion of imagined fantasy, a metafictional plea for an infu-sion of reality, a facing of facts, and a recognition of self

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and responsibility. "One Trip Abroad" ends on a hopefulnote, for the Kellys have experienced a self-revelation, arecognition that their lives had been a fantasy of desiringa presence beyond the absence. For Fitzgerald, in Augustof 1930, while his fantasy life had also ended, his realfantasy, his dominant desire, can be read in the imaginedhappy ending of a couple "alone together in the tranquilmoonlight." For Fitzgerald, it was a desire forever fated toremain unfulfilled.

References

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoyevsl<y's Poetics.

Trans. R.W. Rotsel. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973.

Bersani, I.eo.A Future forAstyanax: Character and Desire in Literature.

Boston: Little, Brown and Company,1969.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felk. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia. New York: The Viking Press, L977.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tales of thelan 4ge. NewYork: Charles Scribners,

1922.

Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion New York:

Methuen, 1981.

Rank, Otto. The Double. Trans. Harry Tucker, Jr. Chapel Hill: U of

North CarolinaP, 1971'.

Tzvetan Todorov. The Fantastic. Trans. Richard Howard. Cleveland,

Ohio: The P of Case Western Reserve University, 1973.

Slaying The Dragon Within: AndreNortonts Female Heroes

Carl B. Yoke

If I were to write a modern fairy tale with a femaleprotagonist, it might go something like this.

Once upon a time in a little town on the banks of a wideriver in the kingdom of Ohio, Rebecca (our beautiful,young central character) was forced to work as cashier ina local market because her mother insisted she pay roomand board (our heroine was imprisoned at a dead end jobby an unsympathetic mother). She worked hard underbad conditions (only two ten-minute coffee breaks a day)and dreamed that Rob Smith,last year's star quarterbackand senior class president (a prince) would ask her tomarry him (rescue her), and that they would live happilyever after.

Happily ever after, which is never explained in fairytales or Hollywood movies, means that Rebeccawill bearRob's children, keep his house, remain true to him, obeyhim, and both sacrifice for and nurture those around her.She will be happy doing these things not only becausesocietypromises her that she will be but because it expectsher to be and it educates her to love and to please.

The story above lacks the glitz and detail of a real fairytale, but itfollows the same storygrammar and it sends thesame message. It does not matter whether the female

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