Language

Abstract

The transgression proposed by the fantastic is not limited exclusively to its narrative and thematic concerns, but is also manifested on a linguistic level (in literature, of course): the fantastic phenomenon, which is impossible to explain, exceeds the frontiers of language, it is by definition indescribable because it is unthinkable. It may, therefore, be worth asking if there is a language with a particular form of discourse that is natural to the fantastic. The critics who have led the way in asking this question have all arrived at the same conclusion: whilst it is possible to detect various recurring rhetorical, discursive and structural devices in a significant number of narratives of the fantastic, they are not exclusive to the fantastic and are shared across literary language in general. There is no language of the fantastic in itself, but rather a way of using language that generates a fantastic effect, but without forgetting that the fantastic narrative is extremely dependent on an extratextual notion that defines it as an expression of a confirmed reality.

I arrive now at the ineffable core of my story. And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? […] Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive. Nonetheless, I’ll try to recollect what I can.

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph”