REVIEWS
of imagination:
In the end he found a little ballad to recite, a little gay drop of overflow from all that happiness and pain which had filled him lately. It was about a young man who goes to sleep in the forest and is taken into fairyland. The fairies love him and look after him with great concern, puzzling their little brains to make him happy. The delights of forest life were inspiredly painted, a long running out at the end of each stanza giving it something of the babbling of a spring in the woods. But the fairies never sleep and have no knowledge of sleep. Whenever their young friend, fatigued by exquisite pleasure, dozes off, they lament 'He dies, he dies!5 and strain all their energy to keep him awake. So in the end, to their deep regret, the boy dies from lack of sleep.7
This fragment would serve well as a critique of those methods of formalist or structural analysis which seek to reduce the Fantastic (or any other work of art) to a harmless fabrication without any human ground, and without any historical reason.
1 Terms used by Victor Sklovsky, 'The Mystery Novel: Dickens*Little Dorrit\ in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, (eds.) Ladislav Matejka and Krstyna Pomorska (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1971), p.220.
2 See Frederick Jameson, The Prison House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism {Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).
3 For example, Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, translated by Richard Howard (Cleveland and London: The Press of Case Western Univ., 1973).
4 There have been numerous interesting attempts to offer us one. See for example, Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, translated by Lawrence Scott (Austin and London: Univ. of Texas Press, 1968); Alan Dundes
5 Hero of Charles Robert Maturin's great tale Melmoth the Wanderer. See also, amongst other things, Keats's Lamia.
6 See EP. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London :
Merlin Press, 1978).
7 Seven Gothic Tales (1939 rpt; New York: Vintage Press, 1961), pi 387. 66 April- June 1983