The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale

by Dorothea E. von Mücke.
Stanford Univ. Press, Palo Alto, CA, U.S.A., 2003.
289 pp. Paper. ISBN: 0-8047-3860-2.

Reviewed by Michael Punt

mpunt@easynet.co.uk

The Seductions of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale is another contribution to the series ‘Cultural Memory in the Present’ edited by Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries and published by Stanford. As with many books in this project it pushes the envelope of convention within the established norms and protocols of academic research. This is worth pointing out because the book is simultaneously exhilarating and disappointing as restraint triumphs over adventure (a fault that I am sure is regarded as a virtue elewhere). The book’s intellectual pleasure comes from its intervention in the history of ideas by resituating the fantastic tale as an historically mutated form that gains its significance in the nineteenth century as a response to the challenge that ‘History’ has not always been with us. As such, almost from the outset, the fantastic tale remains fantastic, drifting with the tide of history against the grain of what we have been led to believe by ‘History’ were the dominant ideas. As a consequence, these tales contain traces of the ideas that can lead us to insights about nineteenth century subjectivity without recourse to psychoanalytic models of sexuality and the unconscious. Mücke argues that the fantastic tale was a crucial tool in the negotiation of the norm in the context of conflicting models of subjectivity that seemed to be on offer in the nineteenth century. Through the analysis of a number of texts this negotiation is made visible and consequently transforms our historical understanding of the occult as a discourse. The work is necessarily obtuse and difficult because, as we know history is told by the winners and, according to Todorov, the arrival of psychoanalysis made the fantastic obsolete as a means of reifying the irrational and the trail has long since gone cold.

The richness of Mücke’s synthesis of the key arguments in the Introduction is invaluable to contemporary thinkers in the art/science/technology fields concerned with transdisciplinarity. It is suggestive of the idea that discourse analysis can reveal the occult and the fantastic as a site in which the coalition of various ways of thinking about the world (as rational and irrational for example) can co-exist without social and academic censorship. As a site in which the exclusive and universal were undermined by the ubiquitous and particular, the paranormal was inadmissible as a source of knowledge in spite of its popular support. To be sure there is considerable evidence that audiences at nineteenth century public seances were in the thrall not of the medium and the paranormal, but their own mental agility that the uncensored discourse on transdimensionality liberated. The full consequences of this repression on the development of ideas in the twentieth century are only just being understood as the revisionist histories of art and science are being written.

Mücke’s contribution, however, is not here. Hers, it seems, is metadiscursive since once the introduction is over The Seductions of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale becomes a conventional work of literary criticism revisiting texts and drawing evidence from skilfully argued analysis which shows that the fantastic tale is both an exposition and symptom of the reconstruction of the nineteenth century subject. This is not simply academic figure skating but draws real insights through close and careful reading. For those for whom this kind of research is of paramount importance I am certain that Mücke has rescued a methodology that periodically falls out of favour as it is seen to be somewhat self serving. What may disappoint the history of ideas community, however, is the limited space she gives to contextualising her analysis coupled with some uncertainty about quite what is being revealed.

There is little reference to the extent of the popular enthusiasm for the fantastic tale, nor any discussion about which groups drew on them at what period in the century. This may appear to be outside the realm of literary criticism but it is not clear if the otherwise brilliant and engaging readings she makes of the texts are supposed to be the absolute meanings of the authors, subsequently drawn out by later analysis, or meanings that for some reason had to be concealed at the time. Almost certainly neither is intended but the legacy of a romanticist/romantic view of the artist as cultural conduit, voicing the desires of the less articulate, is never very far away, and in these circumstances it is difficult to know what these tales are symptoms of: the expressions of the culture, the inability of the culture to express certain ideas, or the analyst whose prior view of that culture is being confirmed in close readings of selected texts.

The brilliance of The Seductions of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale is its intellectual courage and sure footedness in contextualising the complexity of subjectivity in the nineteenth century when the many ways of knowing the world were implicated in a competition for political dominance that insisted on the exclusion of any alternatives. The recovery of the resistance to this through a forensic archaeology of ideas in art and literature is managed here with authority and style, but it disappointingly falls short of adding to our perceptions of what these acts of resistance actually meant (other than to the academic process of analysis), or how they may be valuable in the interpretation of other cultural expressions, or for the Leonardo community how the repression of one discourse affected the other. Nonetheless the book’s virtues in exposing the intellectual dynamic of the beginning of the modern age make it valuable for even for those not intimately engaged in literary study.