Building on Lacan and others Rosemary Jackson in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion will express the underlying truths of our fractured age of anxiety and dissolution. She’ll read in the fantastic works of literature the strange paths taken by singular individuals seeking a way out of the straight-jacket of our false symbolic order, our civilization’s global hell:
Literary fantasies from Sade onwards are driven by precisely this kind of restless dissatisfaction. They express a desire for the imaginary, for that which has not yet been caught and confined by a symbolic order, yet the self-mutilation, cruelty, horror and violence which they have to employ to re-turn to the imaginary suggests its inaccessibility. Their awareness of the problem of representing the ‘real’ draws attention to the relation of signifying practices to that order and its constitution, for with the removal of a fixed notion of ‘character’, the problem of fictional representation is…