Reality as fabulous: fantasy as rhetorical imperative in the contemporary American novel

Abstract

Structural homologies exist among the imperatives of quantum theory, the conventions of fantasy, and the contemporary American novel through its literary tradition of Transcendental wonder. These components assume an underlying attitude of belief, an attitude of episteme, which relates knowledge to values. As two sides--the popular and the literary mainstream--of the same rhetorical imperative impulse, Tom Robbins and Robert Coover are explicit in their desires to assimilate and then disseminate the constructive and destructive assumptions of the primary intellectual climate generated from quantum theory in their use of form and in their examination of content. Through fantasy with its tenets of belief, participation, and alternative views, they find a viable construct with which to approach the aesthetic and cultural intellectual climate. The rhetoric of their metafantasies is concerned with language as an imaginative construct and as a tool of the human imagination and is bent toward the merging of an ontological age with an epistemological age. Such mergings integrate the reader as spectator/participant in the creation of a text and its meanings. The freedom of the imagination is what the rhetorical imperative of fantasy contemporaneously explores and celebrates.