Anyhere, out where: fantasy, psychosis, and writing worlds

Ursula Le Guin claimed that fantasy ‘is a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence’ (1979: 84). In 2015, I began work on a fantasy novel, A life in streets, and discovered that to write fantasy is to simultaneously exist in this world, that world, and the world of the keyboard. Consequently, the need to see and keep seeing an alternative vision of my past, present, and future realities is not without its illuminations, not without its spectres. Anchored by the work of Kathryn Hume, Rosemary Jackson, and Slavoj Žižek, this paper argues that Jackson’s paradigmatic positioning of marvellous or secondary-world fantasy as inherently non-subversive misses the mark. Moreover, her valorisation of the transgressive energies manifested by the literary fantastic seriously undervalues the transformative potential inherent to the construction of impossible, secondary worlds which, it could be said mimic something of a literary psychotic break: the articulation of an alternative reality involving a rejection of current forms of social authority and their subsequent reimagining in different developmental pathways. Significantly, such a revision of the genre, forces both reader and writer into an apprehensive position. That is, it requires that traditionally dismissive attitudes attached to criticism related to fantasy – escapism and regression, for example – be fundamentally re-examined.