the linear coherence or the calm composure of those structures rationally cultivated out of mysterious, exotic or lurid signs. There is no gram-matology of the Fantastic.4 Any account of the formal properties of these tales must fail if it refuses to recognize their fragmented and grotesquely ruptured narratives as adequate modes of rendering the Self's experience of temporality and suffering, of loss of ethical or spiritual authority and of alienation at a specific moment of political, economic or moral crisis within a culture. These nineteenth century tales do not lead one away from the world, but are rather examples of the Self's inability to think and work its way back into any recognizable moral community. In Marianne Thalmann's otherwise imaginative, even brilliant book, the Romantic or the Fantastic tale is read as nothing more than a wonderfully fabricated, but inessential, dream or nightmare each element of which can be isolated, classified and rearranged to craft a new dream or nightmare. She insists, for instance, that in the stories of Tieck both content and meaning are unimportant. 'Every one ofTieck's fairy tales', she says, 'is a model in its use of literary signs. In the last analysis the tale- is made from a bird song in which the words dance out of line, from the scarlet of a dress and the bloody red in the silver chalice, from a fare goblet and a life between a lute which is out of tune and the hieroglyphs of ancient books.' (p. 22) For her the Romantic tale, possessing no informing social or moral vision, is an architectural design whose significance lies in the fantastic arrangement of hieroglyphic, but value-free, signs and images. The romantic teller of tales is thus, like Daedalus, the secular and amoral designer of labyrinths, fabricating worlds of ornamental reveries which reflect some 'inner fantasia' (Novalis) far removed from the apprehensions of those passions, perversities and desires which simultaneously shape, and infect the Self in the modern city. Thalmann asserts that these fantastic creations are totally abstracted from the dull, grey world of everyday life where the living must perpetually wage 'contention with their time's decay' (Shelley); they are artifices designed for aesthetic pleasure from a profusion of strangely coloured objects and exotic creatures that do not exist and hence cannot moulder and die as things and beings of time. The Romantic artist is, she says, an occultist of signs, a magnificent chatter of mythic and pastoral paradises where the unrest of the city is always stilled into a prismatic order. Thus, it turns out that the Fantastic signifies nothing beyond itself. 64 April- June 1^83