Deconstructing Horror: Commodities in the Fiction of Jonathan Carroll and Kathe Koja

In his study The Fantastic in Literature, Eric Rabkin points out that the fantastic often depends on what he calls "structural ambiguity," that is, on the coexistence of two or more textual elements, each of which "can legitimately be taken as having either of two meanings, depending on the perspective with which one looks at that part" (218). All texts, whether they are fantastic or not, force the reader to make an initial decision as to the "proper" interpretation of one of these elements. This first interpretive choice will then channel and determine all subsequent decisions whenever another element is added until the entire text comes together as a coherent whole. This concept of the reading process implies that no element in itself carries a stable, unalterable meaning. Instead, single elements interact with each other to create contexts whose complexity increases with every new element added. Their composite meaning remains in a state of calculated ambiguity or relative indeterminacy as long as the text does not intervene by imposing some gesture of closure upon it. According to Rabkin, fantasy does not operate all that differently. However, it does require a more radical process of revising or expanding the reader's initial assumption. Fantasy operates within the same hermeneutics of reading as realist modes of discourse, yet, unlike its counterparts, it emphasizes the gaps, disruptions, and gray areas of transition that exist between the successive elements of the interpretive sequence. In other words, fantasy claims the freedom to add subsequent elements that do not necessarily reaffirm the first interpretive choice. It aims at derailing the "safe" or predictable interpretive sequence. It is, to quote Rabkin, "the consideration of fantastic reversals" (217) that characterizes the fantastic as a calculated aesthetic effect on the one hand, and as a consistent and recognizable genre on the other. Although the fantastic tends to foreground the discontinuities of reading, it is equally concerned with coherence, stability, and the reconciliation of conflicts. This intrinsic bipolarity manifests itself as a challenge to the readers' own sense of ontological stability. Thus, to assess the relative degree of the fantastic in any given text means to examine how thoroughly the text disrupts the expectations that readers have about ontological coherence and predictability, in fiction as well as the world around them. Readers want to know whether they are entering a world in which animals can speak, in which science has made time-travel possible, in which historical figures mingle freely with fictional ones, or in which the narrator can violate the suspension of disbelief at will by addressing the reader directly or stepping outside of the narrative. Once the ontological rules governing the text are established, they create a complex and, at times, heterogeneous frame of reference. It allows readers to define the nature of the world they are in until the next reversal occurs. The more ontological reversals and reformulations, the more fantastic the text. Among all efforts to define the fantastic in its most fundamental terms, Rabkin's approach is particularly useful in discussing one of its varieties, the genre of horror fiction, and its specific problems. At first glance, his definition captures what other critics in pursuit of the fantastic, most prominently among them Tzvetan Todorov, have described as the unsettling moment when the fantastic erupts into the mundane. In The Fantastic, Todorov quotes a number of critics, among them Vladimir Solovyov, M.R. James, Louis Vax, and Roger Callois, who agree that the fantastic is based on the fictional premise that two incompatible spheres--the predictable, mundane world of everyday life and the non-rational world of the fantastic--exist separately from each other. With this ontological topography as a given, fantasy is generated whenever the line of separation is being crossed in one direction or the other; Callois talks about "an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday reality;" Castex about a "brutal intrusion," and Todorov himself about the fearful or awed "hesitation" of characters and readers at the moment when they realize that the line has been crossed (26). …