Mental image, dream, fantasy, hallucination--all these are
comprised in the psychoanalytic concept of the fantasm. Perhaps
only such a multifarious concept is adequate to the range of visual
elements involved in the experience of reading fiction, or of
writing it. Soon after the birth of the novel, doctors expressed
concern that readers might be possessed by what they were reading,
haunted by textual fantasms. Contemporary writers like John
Gardner, Maurice Blanchot, and John Banville figure this possession
as a kind of textual dreaming: fiction, like dream, draws from a
fantasmal unconscious.
For the reader's images to become conscious, however, they must be
cued by a material text through framing strategies and evocative
gaps. This book analyzes the complex relationship between the
fantasmal experience and the material text, reading a wide range of
works--such as Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller,"
Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," Sorrentino's "Mulligan Stew," and
Rimbaud's "The Vowels"--that treat explicitly what is implicit in
reading.
Although the specific images of individual readers cannot be
predicted, one can speculate on the modes of these images: are they
focused or fogged, schematic or emotive, fleeting or enduring?
These are questions not only for theorists but for artists who make
textual visualization visible. Drawing on artists' books, marginal
drawings by authors, and films such as "Prospero's Books," "
Fantasm and Fiction" illuminates the process of textual
visualization.
The author develops, in addition, "A Politics of Visualization"
through analyses of the photographs of David Wojnarowicz, Derek
Jarman's film "Blue," and Nicole Brossard's novel "Picture Theory."
In this richly suggestive study, the fantasm emerges as a crucial
aspect not only of reading but of any kind of envisioning.
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