Fantastic literature, the sublime, and iconclasm

The problem of "insecurity" as an effect of typically fantastic reading has not yet found a satisfying solution despite the everlasting debates concerning the genre. Though Freud in his study on the "uncanny" (das Unheimliche) did already reveal the particular strategy of the author of fantastic literature, which tends at first to seduce its reader by an apparently unlimited realism, in order to plunge him afterwards into an unlimited perplexity. Experts continue to ascertain the paradox of the fantastic project (its "ambiguity" or constituent "mixture") and do not discuss the aesthetic objective of such an apparently hybrid formula. The present study, however, refers to the exceptional virtues - first of all "nouveaute" and "modernite" - attributed to the fantastic literature by its first French disciples such as Nodier and Nerval, and from there continues on to discuss the sense of modernity as such. The definition suggested by Jean-Francois Lyotard who rediscovers Kant's transcendental idealism, induces us to set up a relation between the fantastic and Kant's aestheticism of the sublime. In the light of these principles - trouble, conflict between sensibility and reason, crisis of what is representable, search of the absolute beyond the visible - the fantastic will find its original dignity again as an "essential" expression (Nodier) of modern consciousness. Regarding its so-called structural "mixite" the analysis of the story "Bruges-la-Morte" (Georges Rodenbach) reveals - on the contrary - an inner cohesion and the novelty of a poetics of the narrative which integrates the particular tension between the "icone" and the "idea".