Abstract
Fantasy is not absolutely the connotative association of something that is deviated from the reality. It is the negation of reality and not the opposite. It stands between the phase of reality and the phase of unreality. Fantasy is used with the purpose of bringing the reality that lays hidden under the veil of unreality. Vonnegut has used two fantastical elements that state the formula of survival: Natural Selection and Ghost narrator. Vonnegut uses the concept of Natural Selection which stands as a foil to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution to bring out the reality that the world ought to be. His Narrator stands as a pinnacle of fantasy as he has called a ghost to narrate a story that will happen a million years later.
Fantasy as a Literary Mode
Fantasy is the most seductive subject both in literature and in others. Fantasy cannot be explained like any other terms in literature. Its connotative association with imagination and desire, indeed, has really made it a difficult area to explain and interpret. The word “Fantastic” is derived from Latin “phantasticus” which refers to all imaginary activities. Given such a scope, it has proved difficult to develop an adequate definition of fantasy as a literary kind. As a critical term, fantasy has been applied rather indiscriminately to any literature which does not give priority to realistic representation: myths, legends, folks and fairy tales. According to M. H. Abrams, fantasy literature is “deliberately designed by the author to leave the reader in a state of uncertainty whether the events are to be explained by reference to natural causes or to super natural causes” (237). The definition given by Abrams is very apt as it helps to explain the actual cause for the undefinable nature of fantasy. The fantasy in literature traces something which is very much unseen and unsaid in any work when it is read apparently. Fantasy literature, generally, refuses to observe the unities of time, place and action. The characters slide away from the chronological move of the story and the story fails to give a definite demarcation between animate and inanimate object.
Fantasy is unfit for denotative definition but it is generally associated with something that seems to be unreal. It is always claimed that the literature of fantasy transcends reality, escapes the human condition and constructs the alternate world. But this connotative meaning of fantasy in association with unreality and alternative world should be discarded because the world of fantasy is neither unreal nor a secondary world which is alternate to the real world of human beings. Thus, “fantasy is not to do with inventing another non-human world: it is not transcendental. It has to do with inverting elements of this world, re-combining its constitutive features in new relations to produce something strange, unfamiliar and apparently ‘new’, absolutely ‘other’ and different” (Jackson 8).
The ultimate aim and purpose of fantasy and realism are not very much different in literature. The realistic fiction is written to give the effect that it represents life and the social world as it seems to the common reader, evoking a feeling that its characters might exist. Fantasy literature also achieves the same end by representing ordinary events and details together with fantastic and dream like elements. “The fantastic circumstances can be viewed as an economical and effective means of revealing characters’ interests and emotions which would be disguised or modified in surroundings well ordered by comfort or customs” (Apter 1).
Fantasy in literature is used by the author for various purposes, which must be understood not as an escape from reality but as an investigation of it. The fantasy that is used in modern and postmodern fiction is entirely different from the fairy tale, myth or saga. The fairy tales, myth and sagas are enacted in a world separated from the mundane world spatially and temporally. But in the postmodern fictions, the fantasy is applied to the practical materialistic world without giving a feeling of transcending the mundane world.
The Paraxial Region of Fantasy
Rosemary Jackson, in her book entitled Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, in an attempt to explain fantasy in terms of reality explains it by using a technical term employed in optics, “paraxis”. “A paraxial region is an area in which light rays seem to unite at a point after refraction. In this area, object and image seem to collide, but in fact neither object nor reconstituted image genuinely resides there: nothing does” (Jackson 19). Thus she takes the paraxial area to represent the region of the fantastic whose imaginary world is neither entirely ‘real’ (object), nor entirely ‘unreal’ (image). But it is located somewhere between the two.
Todorov, a structuralist, offers an account of the genre of the ‘fantastic’ (le fantastique) which describes it as “bounded by the neighbouring genres of the uncanny (l’estrange) and the marvelous (le merveilleux) but never straying into either region, however much it may be drawn in one direction or the other, and indeed however much it may embody the tension that such a state creates” (Hawkes 81).
From the definitions of Rosemary Jackson and Todorov, it is very evident that fantasy is not the opposite of reality but it can be called a negation to reality: not the exact opposite of reality at the same time it cannot be equated with reality. The exact opposite of ‘real’ is ‘unreal’ not ‘fantasy’. Therefore, fantasy has nothing to do with unreality.
Fantasy and Vonnegut’s Galapagos
The world of fantasy is not an unreal world but is just an inversion of the real world in which humans live. The mundane world is inverted as a world of fantasy for a specific purpose. But the purpose of using fantasy differs from writer to writer. Similarly, Vonnegut has also used fantasy with the purpose of bringing certain facts to the readers. He intensifies the reality in his novels and makes it fantastic to show the readers the reality that ought to be. Fantasy is also a means through which he reveals his humanistic vision.
According to Rosemary Jackson, fantasy can operate in two ways in expressing desire: it can manifest or show desire, or it can expel desire when the desire is a disturbing element which threatens cultural order and continuity. Vonnegut is a writer who belongs to the second type. By harping on fantasy, he tries to expel the desire for materialism and technology which destroys the ‘real’ of the reality.
Vonnegut uses scientific arena in Galapagos which was asserted by Allen in the following manner: “Galapagos reflects Vonnegut’s knowledge of the work of scientists like Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould and often reads like a text book in evolutionary biology.” He also further adds that “excepting its supernatural narrator, it clearly belongs at scientific, realistic pole of science fiction” (Allen, Understanding 149).
Galapagos is a wry account of the fate of the human beings told from a million years in the future by a ghost. The evolution of humanity is predicted for the next million years. It is also predicted in the novel that the species will be limited to the Galapagos Islands alone and that they evolve into creatures with flippers and fur. “If my predictions in the book are wrong, I will return all the money” says Vonnegut playfully (Berryman 188).
The Alternative World and Natural Selection
Rosemary Jackson has claimed that the fantastic world is not a world completely away from the realistic world but is merely an inversion of the real world. Thus, the world of fantasy is an alternate world to the real world with only a few changes. Vonnegut, with the help of the scientific knowledge, attempts to create an alternate reality in his fiction: a possible world of humane happiness that depends on a different moral order.
Vonnegut is tired of wars. In an interview with Allen, Vonnegut explains that “having seen where we’re headed, I don’t want to go that way anymore” (Allen, Conversation 292). Therefore, drawing on his trip to Galapagos Islands with his photographer wife Jill Krementz, Vonnegut takes as his model for human happiness the life of the seals he sees playing joyfully and peacefully. He had made the world of seals as an alternate world of human beings by transforming the human beings into seal-like creatures with a stream-lined head, fur and flippers.
In order to bring an equivalent harmony of humanity with the rest of the world, Vonnegut seeks the aid from the law of natural selection. The Natural Selection has made few changes: It has turned the dreadful hands of human beings which often use grenades, guns and weapons to flippers; the natural selection has also made those ‘big’ heads of human beings which resulted in discovery of destructive machines into stream-lined heads which provide no space for the brains that cause destruction. “We see that the law of natural selection may be responsible for better teeth, but the average life span has decreased to thirty years. Nobody starves and the problems connected with aging are unimaginable. But its killer whales and sharks that keep the population manageable” (Broer 155).
The Ghost Narrator: Leon Trotsky Trout
Apart from the alternative world of human beings created by Vonnegut, the other commonly accepted fantastic element in the novel is the narrator ghost Leon Trotsky Trout. Leon Trout was the son of Kilgore Trout, an eccentric writer of science fiction who is very familiar with the reader of Vonnegut. Leon is a Vietnam War veteran and deserter from the United States Marines who was granted political asylum in Sweden. He relates, “I became a welder in a shipyard in Malmo. I was painlessly decapitated one day by a falling sheet of steel while working inside the hull of Bahia de Darwin” (G 177).
Leon did not go crazy simply for a while. With the return of the emotions repressed since childhood also came the reawakened consciousness of guilt. To escape the horrors of the present, Leon took refuge in Sweden, but he could not leave behind his past — with its accumulated guilt. Unable to cope rationally with his tortured history, he took refuge in his imagination. Acting as a ghost at the service of the Natural Order, he denied his corporeal existence and created a story that envisioned a species to which not only familial life and human affection but also the common ills of twentieth-century society were unknown.
Through Leon’s narrative, Vonnegut advocates the futility of war. The paranoid headless narrator is traumatized by the Vietnam War like the author’s other war-scarred heroes. “The painful complexity of human identity, emotional volatility, and the anguish of choice have ceased to be. In fact, no one thinks at all anymore, and everyone is same” (Broer 156).
The Father-Son Relationship
The bitter relationship between father and son is also projected through Leon Trout. His parents had diametrically opposed temperaments and attitudes towards life. Leon’s naive belief that his father was a great writer led him to become co-conspirator in driving his mother away forever. When he was only sixteen he realized that Kilgore Trout was a disgusting failure writer. With that rejection of his father, Leon also left home, to embark on a fruitless quest to find his mother.
Leon is not just the only character in Vonnegut’s novel to hate his father. Paul Proteus in Player Piano also hates his father just like Leon. In the novels following Breakfast of Champions, especially Slapstick and Deadeye Dick, the destructive father-son relationship becomes still more ominous — the moribund father infecting the protagonist with his own disillusionment and cynicism. Vonnegut successfully brings this realistic social issue through his fantastic character Leon Trout.
Conclusion
Throughout the novel, Vonnegut uses his fantasy to bring out the realistic social issues of twentieth century like the horrors of war, the survivor’s guilt, the ecological issues, the super industrialization and the technological development. Through the introduction of a fantastic character, Leon Trout and by transforming the real world into an alternate world, he attains the pinnacle of success in portraying the reality through fantasy.
Works Cited
- Abrams, M. H., and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Handbook of Literary Terms. Australia: Cengage, 2009.
- Allen, William Rodney, and Paul Smith. “An Interview with Kurt Vonnegut.” Conversation with Kurt Vonnegut. Ed. William Rodney Allen. London: University Press of Mississippi, 1988.
- Allen, William Rodney. Understanding Kurt Vonnegut. South Carolina: University of South Carolina, 1991.
- Apter, T. E. Fantasy Literature: An Approach to Reality. London: Macmillan, 1982.
- Berryman, Charles. “Vonnegut and Evolution: Galapagos.” Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut. Ed. Robert Merrill. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co, 1990.
- Broer, Lawrence R. Sanity Plea Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut. London: U. M. I Research Press, 1991.
- Davis, Todd F. “Apocalyptic Grumbling: Postmodern Righteousness in the Late Novels.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. 254 Vols. Detroit: Gale Cengage Learning, 2008.
- Hawkes, Terence. Structuralism and Semiotics. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2003.
- Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Routledge, 2001.
- Todorov, Tzevetan. “The Structural Analysis of Literature: The Tale of Henry James.” Contemporary Criticism: An Anthology. Ed. V. S. Sethuraman. Chennai: Macmillan, 1989.
- Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. New York: Bantam Books, 1971.
- Vonnegut, Kurt. Galapagos. London: Flamingo, 1985.