This collection, announces Franz Rottensteiner in his introduction, gives us none of the traditional “high” fantasy of heroic quests in imaginary lands, filled with magic and sorcery and pitting good against evil. Such fantasy, Rottensteiner argues, can provide little insight into modern society or the human mind because it is rooted in past worlds divorced from the peculiar stress and pressure of the contemporary real world.

The fantasy represented in this collection is something different. It oscillates between the real and fantastic, the ordinary and extraordinary, the plausible and implausible. It is not a mere escape from a complex and confused age. “It challenges the certainties of life” and “is, ultimately, literature of doubt, not of affirmation.” It can protest a too complacent world, question established norms, and challenge what is usually taken for granted. It can stress the irrational and unknown or unknowable realms of human life and raise unsettling questions about reason, reality, and the human psyche. By undermining fixed notions of reality, suggests Rottensteiner, this genre can probe and illuminate the real world often more effectively than realistic writing can.

Although Rottensteiner does not use the term, the genre he describes is often called “magical realism,” a term applied since the 1950’s to certain works of South American fiction, and which has increased in currency since Gabriel Garcia Marquez received the Nobel Prize for Literature. The genre has been called “a pleasant joke on ‘realism,'” and is really not so much a challenge to conventions of literary realism as to the basic assumptions of modern positivistic thought, the soil in which realism flourished. Some feel its inquiries go deep, questioning the political and metaphysical definitions of the real many of us live by. Its basic effect is aimed at unsettling our normal expectations as a means of stimulating and renewing our sense of wonder.

The 11 stories in this collection are by Dino Buzzati, Julio Gortazar, Jorge Luis Borges, Mircea Eliade, Carlos Fuentes, Italo Calvino, Use Aichinger, J.G. Ballard, Donald Barthelme, Joyce Carol Gates, and Stanislaw Lem. The subjects include a man who contemplates salamanders in an aquarium so intensely that he becomes one; a woman who is transported, as in a hectic trip across town, from the grave back to the womb; a dead giant washed ashore and gradually dismembered by souvenir hunters and enterprising dealers in by-products; a woman who gives birth to an enormous emerald; and a beautiful woman who is merely the outer casing for an insect-like killer robot. The tide story, set in 1902, tells of the cruel and purposeless destruction in the mountains of Italy of a family of rather harmless reptiles purported to be dragons. The tale is an ironically symbolic rendering of technological man’s rejection of the stuff of fairy tales.

These “tales of the playful imagination” are engaging and sometimes startling. They appeal perhaps to our childhood self, that receptiveness to the spell of even implausible narrative. However, the claim that they probe and illuminate human experience in significant ways may be overstated. On the whole, their significance lies in their manifestation of the fertility of the human imagination and the mysterious and perennial allure of storytelling.

 

[The Slaying of the Dragon: Modern Tales of the Playful Imagination; Edited by Franz Rottensteiner; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego]