Stephen Donner
Dr. R. Brittenham
English E303
Close Reading Six
March 14, 2006
For Tzvetan Todorov, in “Literature and the Fantastic,” (The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 1975,) within stories which concern perceived or “real” supernatural occurrences, the fantastic holds its place temporally speaking between the uncanny, which is an explanation of otherwise seemingly inexplicable phenomenon in a story based on “known facts to a previous experience,” and the marvelous, which must remain an “unknown phenomenon, never seen as yet, still to come” (42). As a wonderful example, in Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem “Mariana,” his prose is positioned precisely in the fantastic of which Todorov speaks.
The form and content work together to create tension, because they force us to remain in Mariana’s “present.” The first eight lines of each stanza describe the physical setting in very dilapidated, Gothic terms, but are capped off by four lines of Mariana lamenting, in the present tense, the absence of presumably her lover: “I am aweary, aweary / I would that I were dead!” What’s important is that this pattern repeats itself even until the very end, creating a very dramatic, intended effect: the reader—like the character—is stuck in a sort of temporal vortex, never knowing beyond pure speculation what, indeed—if anything!—happened to Mariana.
Since the narrator never reveals what happened to her, we might wonder, too, if she is already herself supernatural (a ghost). Perhaps her wish to be dead, read in such a context, could suggest that although she’s dead in the terms of our natural, scientific laws, her spirit lives on, left again in my “temporal vortex” to experience, over and over, the pangs of expectant agony.