A Study Of The British Fantastic Fictions In The 20^th. Century

As a literary genre, fantasy fiction describes the'impossible things' which are determined according to the modern criterion of'possibility.'The fantasy fictions of the United Kingdom in the 20th century have been a remarkable literary phenomenon. The effect of this kind of fiction is that anything that has been denied its reasonableness to exist in the real world can be easily accepted in this imaginary world. This acceptance is unconditional. The supernatural are accepted as exactly what they are. There are even communications between ordinary people and the supernatural. All these are simply textual representations of ancient mythologies and legends. For example, some fantasy fictions borrow the images from the mythologies, and some others are just rewritings of myths. However, myth and other miraculous narratives in ancient years were created by a different pattern of thoughts. It has withered away after the pattern of thoughts changed. Different from traditional myths and legends, fantasy fictions are written in a modern thought pattern. Thus, the most essential question this dissertation tries to answer is how we can understand modern fantasy fictions'efforts in reviving the traditional myths and legends.The French theorist Jean Baudillard divided the human society into two major orders. One is relevant to the SYMBOL, and the other to the SIGN. In Baudrillard's opinion, we have been ruled by the logic of the sign after the mythical period, and the order of signs has developed into the mechanism of simulation after the Renaissance. There are three stages of simulation:counterfeit, production, and simulacra. At the first stage, signs copy the reality, so literature mimics the reality. There is an ultimate reality, God, behind signs. Therefore, metaphors of God widely exist in literature at this stage. Accompanied by the disintegration of the belief in God, the second stage arrives, in which signification is generated by the signs. When the third stage begins, significations are delayed in the chain of the signifiers. The textual play of the post-modern fiction is a typical example of this stage. At this stage, literature finds it more and more difficult to take the responsibility to liberate and criticize. Literature is facing a crisis. According to the theory of Baudrillard, the ancient myth belongs to the order of SYMBOL, existing in a ritual relationship. However, the fantasy fictions emerge under the order of signs. As a result, its revival of the mythology may be taken only as an external appearance, and cannot truly revive the essence of the myth. The analysis of the specific works of the fantasy fictions in this dissertation will very well illustrate this hypothesis.The fantasy stories of W. B. Yeats as a return to the primeval oral literary creation reveal their author's intention to revolt against the modern dualistic world with his monistic worldview. However, within Baudrillard's order of signs, meaning itself is produced by signs. As far as literature is concerned, modernist literature is a revolt within modernity, and its essence is still the production of meaning. Within the literary works, there is a specific pattern through which the mechanism of signification is established. The pattern of the creation of meaning here is still the signification mechanism under the logic of the sign, in another word, the symbol, not the SYMBOL.C. S. Lewis was constantly thinking about the absolute truth of this world in this textual world. It was his belief in the Christian God that supported his thinking. What he was trying to tell people was that our existence is real and objective, because we are created by the real and objective God, and we will finally enter the eternal and absolute truth and objectivity some day. As a result, the metaphors in Lewis'fantasy fiction can be classified as the counterfeit stage in the mechanism of simulation.J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy fictions do not refer to God directly, and are not the metaphor of the Christian ideologies. He selected some structural elements from ancient mythologies and assembled them to build his texts in order to express a certain attitude to the reality. His signifiers point to certain signified in the real world metonymically. This was actually a practice of the second stage of Simulation-the generation of meaning. Tolkien was avoiding relating his texts to his religion and the reality. He just reproduced a mythology in structures and details, trying to connect his texts to the reality and the history in order to gain a position of being real in the real world. His texts tended to enfold the reality. This activity broke the referent relationship between the signs and the Holy substance and made a'hyper-reality.' Thus, he started the stage of Simulacra in the fantasy fictions. In Baudrillard's opinion, the simulacra began in the 1960's. At this time, the fantasy fictions'production came into a period of explosion. J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings was set as a model for the fantasy fictions, so the earlier styles such as W. B. Yeats' and C. S. Lewis' were no longer the major way to write a fantasy fiction. Creating a consistent secondary world became a popular creating pattern, and the production of the fantasy fictions is the production of the model itself. The texts rejected not only the signified, but also the signifier. The metaphysical reality completely collapsed. The fantasy texts were circulated in the revel of mass consumption-a typical example in the phase of the post-modernism in the Baudrillard sense. There are various manifestations of this in today's English fantasy fictions, for example, J. K. Rowling's the Harry Potter series show a paradigm of the consumption society, and Phillip Pullman's the Dark Materials trilogy is an attempt to explore the future after the metaphysical truth collapses.To sum up, the fantasy fictions'return to the mythical narratives is basically ruled by the logic of the sign. It is not a real return to the primary pattern of symbolization. Nevertheless, it does not necessarily mean that this kind of fictions do not wish to, or have the possibility to, surpass the logic of the signs. To create the supernatural and the impossible in the fictional world is itself subversive enough. It exposes the defective aspects of our real world. By doing this, this kind of writing either questions the whole system of modern value and the real world, or sets up a new value system. It is also important for us to realize that any efforts to surpass the modernity must fall within the frame of modernity. In fact, Baudrillard's theory to surpass the logic of the sign is an effort to establish a new mechanism that is different from the traditional duality. After all, there is no need to negate all the merits of modernity. What we need is to modify and do away the limitations of modernity, a practice perfectly bodying forth the most valuable source of rationalism.