13 After Midnight

By Jaime Martinez Tolentino

WITH AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SHORT STORY OF THE FANTASTIC

Nobel Prize for Literature nominee Jaime Martinez Tolentino presents 13 stories of the fantastic to read after midnight, and also sets out to explore the differences between the various kinds of such stories—the uncanny, the supernatural, the marvelous, the fantastic, magical realism, etc.

The stories contained in 13 AFTER MIDNIGHT all belong to what is, arguably, the most misunderstood literary genre, or modality: the Fantastic—and fantastic they are, in all sense of the word!

In his book, [Martínez Tolentino] toys with the ambiguities of what we commonly call reality. But, before allowing us to enter those bewildering worlds, he leads us through a vast antechamber in which, with the patience of a tour guide, he explains the world of the short story of the fantastic [...] That antechamber, takes the form of an Introduction to the Short Story of the Fantastic as a literary genre, and with that essay, Jaime has achieved one of the clearest and most systematic definitions of the short story of the fantastic that we have ever read.
—Professor Rafael Andreu Wolmar, of the Inter-American University of Puerto Rico

• Language: English
• Publisher: ReAnimus Press
• Release date: Apr 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311789174

Jaime Martinez Tolentino

Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, JAIME MARTÍNEZ-TOLENTINO is the author of 14 books, and the editor of 6 others, some of them in Spanish, some in French and some in English. Those books, published in Puerto Rico, the USA, Germany, Spain and Australia, include literary and historical essays, reference works, collections of short stories, plays, a memoir and the historical Spanish-language novel Taíno, recently published by Spain's Ediciones Áltera. Moreover, he is the author of more than 40 publications in newspapers and journals from Puerto Rico, the USA, Spain, Venezuela, Mexico, Peru, Italy, Colombia, Canada and the Internet. He has received literary awards in Portugal, Puerto Rico, the United States and Canada, and his work has been the subject of large portions of three published works as well as a whole book.

Book preview

13 AFTER MIDNIGHT

Short Stories of the Fantastic – With an Introduction to the Genre

by

JAIME MARTíNEZ TOLENTINO

Produced by ReAnimus Press

© 2016 by Jaime Martínez Tolentino. All rights reserved.

http://ReAnimus.com/authors/tolentino

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~~~

To my good friend

Rafael Abréu Volmar.

~~~

Table of Contents

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SHORT STORY OF THE FANTASTIC

THE RING

THE VOICE INSIDE THE CONCH SHELL

THE ISLAND ACROSS THE RIVER

THE NIGHT WATCH

THE AMULET

NIGHTFALL

AN OLD FRIEND FROM LONG AGO

LETTERS FROM LAURA

IN THE EYE OF THE STORM

A HAUNTING

THE MAGIC HARMONICA

THE FOOL-PROOF PLAN

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

—William Shakespeare - Hamlet – Act 1, scene 5

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SHORT STORY OF THE FANTASTIC

The stories contained in 13 After Midnight all belong to what is, arguably, the most misunderstood literary genre, or modality: the Fantastic. I have been interested in this genre for just about my whole writing career. That is why, I begin this book with an Introduction to the Short Story of the Fantastic, which is to say, a definition of what the fantastic is and what it isn’t.

Before continuing, I shall clarify a certain point:  my use of the term genre in this essay.  When considering works of the fantastic, I shall refer to them as belonging to the genre of the fantastic. I do this because, in its 5th edition (2002), The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines a literary genre as a style or category of written works characterized by a particular form or purpose, and, as we shall see in this essay, the fantastic has a very clear-cut form in its properties, and a specific purpose: to leave the reader in doubt at the end of a narration.  Therefore, it obviously qualifies as a literary genre.  With that out of the way, I shall proceed to the definition of the genre of the fantastic.

Modernly, the adjective fantastic is quite often used to denote the great quality of something.  That is not how I shall use the term in this essay.

In its traditional sense, the adjective fantastic refers to objects and actions related to fantasy and imagination, but most of all, to that which is imaginary and unlikely—in fact, so far removed from reality that it is improbable.  If we consider the term in that sense, then we would have to conclude that literature of the fantastic has always existed. First orally, and later in written form, there has always existed a literature in which animals and inanimate objects communicate with human beings, in which all sorts of monsters exist, in which the dead return to life, and in which strange events, totally foreign to everyday reality, take place.

However, with the advent of The Enlightenment in the 18 th century, there arose a new critical spirit based on reason and observation which condemned all things considered illogical, superstitious or of little practical value, and that rejection seriously affected the up-to-then existing literature of the fantastic, with its stories of flying carpets, genies enclosed in magic lamps, magic spells, imaginary lands, remote both in time and space, and ghosts, all of which then became objects of censure and ridicule.  Moreover, the critical spirit of the Enlightenment led to spectacular achievements in technology and the experimental sciences, and those achievements led, in many cases, to a blind faith in science which, many believed, would thereafter unravel all the mysteries of the universe.

At the beginning of the 19 th century, Romanticism reacted against that eminently practical, scientific and rational world vision by creating literary works which emphasized the emotional over the rational, which replaced the ugliness of the here-and-now with the charm of the exotic, and which reintroduced the notion that Nature possesses mysteries unknowable to humans.  That was, to a large extent, what Ann Radcliffe and her British followers did when they created the Gothic novel, set in medieval surroundings where torture, ghosts and unexplainable events were all presented in order to provoke fear; that was what Sir Walter Scott, for example, did when he wrote about a legendary past; that was what Goethe intended when he wrote his play Faust , particularly part I, which was published in 1808; and that was, clearly, the purpose of  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Mary Shelley) when she wrote her anti-scientific novel Frankenstein (1818).

Later on, in Europe during the 19 th century, the excesses of Romanticism led to a reaction against it which was largely responsible for the birth of two other literary movements: Realism and Naturalism. However, the insistence of those two movements on portraying everyday reality, in turn, led to a reaction against them. Thus, in that same 19 th century, there was a reaction on the part of European writers intent upon returning mystery to literature, and that reaction led to the creation of works such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula , to a greater development of the Gothic novel, to the creation of a futuristic, utopian literature, to a decadentist movement in France responsible for works such as Joris-Karl Huysman’s Là-bas , and to the birth of what is modernly known as science fiction. It could even be argued that the 20 th century, mostly Latin American, phenomenon of Magical Realism had its origins, partially, in that 19 th century reaction against the tenets and qualities of Realism and Naturalism.

Still, even at the beginning of the 19 th century, the European authors of fantastic and imagination-based prose had come to realize that their potential readers were much more sophisticated than ever, and that, as Walter Scott himself observed, contemporary readers were no longer satisfied with the fables that had delighted their ancestors, and that both the genies that once freely roamed through oriental tales [as well as] the magic wands of fairies, had lost their old prestige (Scott, pp. 313-314). Moreover, those same authors realized that, first as a consequence of the influence of The Age of  Enlightenment, and later, of the budding Positivism, their readers were more attached to the here-and-now than ever, and that they demanded a literature of the fantastic with which they could better identify.

Therefore, if those European authors of fantastic and imagination-based prose were to retain their readers and their popularity, they would have to find ways of lending the imaginary universes that they created the appearance of reality, while still allowing their prospective readers to feel that they were penetrating strange and unknown worlds, even if only briefly.

Eventually, those beginning-of-the-19 th century authors of fantastic and imagination-based tales, as well as many others who would came after them, notably the German author E. T. A. Hoffmann, hit upon a formula capable of distancing their tales from those in which the merely terror filled and supernatural intervened gratuitously, while firmly anchoring their stories in the known world, focusing on the human element and the individual’s internal experiences, yet still retaining the supernatural element which constituted their main attraction.  That formula is the basis of the modern literature of the fantastic in its European and North American versions. It was also, probably, the starting point for Latin America’s Magical Realism, which in time, deviated from the fantastic significantly, while retaining some of its basic tenets. Toward the conclusion of the present Introduction, I shall comment on Magical Realism versus the Fantastic.

I would also like to inform the reader that plays of the fantastic exist, just as do novels of the fantastic, movies of the fantastic and TV series of the fantastic.  Examples of modern plays of the fantastic are Constance Grenelle Wilcox’s 1920 work Told in a Chinese Garden: And Four Other Fantastic Plays for Out-Doors or in-Doors , and Percival Wilde’s 1924 The Inn Of Discontent And Other Fantastic Plays ; examples of modern novels belonging to this genre are Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union ; David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas ; and Daniel Manus Pinkwater’s year 2000 4 Fantastic Novels ); modern movies of the fantastic include the 2004 movie Secret Window , based upon a novella by Stephen King and included in his book Four Past Midnight ; and modern TV series of the fantastic include Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone TV series, and the Canadian/American cult science fiction television series The X-Files, created by screenwriter Chris Carter. Nevertheless, in the present introduction, I shall focus, mainly, on short stories and novellas (short novels) of the fantastic since it is in those genres that the fantastic mode has most flourished.  That is not to say that in this essay I won’t consider plays, novels, films and TV series of the fantastic.

 Some of the most well-known classic novellas of the fantastic are the late 19 th century-early 20 th century Anglo-American writer Henry James’ 1898 The Turn of the Screw , and the mid-19 th century French writer Honoré de Balzac’s 1831 The Wild Ass’s Skin .  Some of the best-known classic short stories of the fantastic are the 19 th -century American writer Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 The Tell-Tale Heart and his The Black Cat of that same year.

In my opinion, and in that of most of the specialists in the matter, the best definition of the short story of the fantastic is that set forth by the Bulgarian literary critic Tzvetan Todorov, most recently in his 1975 book The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre .  Todorov’s definition reads as follows:

In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without devils, sylphides, or vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world.  The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination—and [the] laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of  reality—but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us. [...] The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event. (Todorov, The Fantastic , p. 25)

In his definition, Todorov employs the term the uncanny to refer to what is natural, but strange, and the term the marvelous to refer to what we would usually call the supernatural.  In other words, in his definition, the natural is opposed to the supernatural. Furthermore, for Todorov, in a tale of the fantastic, both types of explanations of a strange event (the natural and the supernatural) must be possible . However, as can be read above toward the end of our quote, for Todorov, the fantastic can only exist while both explanations of a strange event continue to be viable .  As he states, The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty.

Todorov’s definition is by no means original, since it had been gestating since the very moment in the 19 th century when Jean-Jacques Ampère coined the term of the fantastic to refer to the short stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann. However, Todorov was one of the first critics to bring world wide attention to the genre of the fantastic, particularly in his Introduction à la littérature fantastique , published in Paris, in 1970, by Aux Editions du Seuil. Moreover, it has been Todorov who has best studied each of the traits of that type of tale, and who has formulated the best definition of the genre.  For those reasons, in the present essay, I shall analyze each element of his definition in order to reach a better understanding of the limits and the main traits of that literary genre.

The part of Todorov’s definition which reads In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without devils, sylphides, or vampires, offers us the first trait of the genre:   that the text make it clear that the story takes place in the real, experienced and palpable world. That means that tales situated in legendary or imaginary lands such as the continent of Atlantis, the Inferno, or the lost kingdom of Camelot, do not fit into the fantastic, and neither do most science fiction tales (which are often mistakenly classified as fantastic) because these are often situated in the future or in unknown worlds where the characters face forces unknown to modern humans and make use of instruments that our science and technology have not invented.

Banned from the fantastic genre are also gothic tales (which are often also mistakenly classified as fantastic), populated by devils, ghosts and vampires, and most oriental tales and children’s fables, set in worlds where fairies, gnomes and leprechauns exist, and where mountainsides open up when certain magical words are uttered. Henry James’ statement regarding ghost stories also applies to the literature of the fantastic. In his November 9, 1865 literary review of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1865 novel Aurora Floyd , a review originally published in The Nation I (November 9, 1865), James declared that A good ghost-story, to be half as terrible as a good murder-story, must be connected at a hundred points with the common objects of life (See Henry James: Literary Criticism, Vol. 1 : Essays, English and American Writers . Des Moines, IA: Library of America; 1st Edition, 1984, P. 742).

Todorov points out the second defining trait of the fantastic when he states that in such tales there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world. Suddenly, a character can see into the future, some other character feels unexplainably drawn to someone, an object or a place, all of a character’s wishes come true, or a certain protagonist receives warnings or messages of events to come. No matter how it may manifest itself, in a story of the fantastic something inexplicable occurs, something which seems to go against all the laws of our daily and familiar world.

Three other contemporary French literary theorists perceive the invasion of the familiar world by apparently unexplainable forces as one of the defining traits of the genre of the fantastic.  For Pierre-Georges Castex, in  his 1951 text Le Conte fantastique en France , p. 8, the fantastic [...] is characterized [...] by a brutal intrusion of mystery into the context of real life (See Todorov, The Fantastic , p. 26); for Louis Vax, in his 1960 volume L’Art et la Littérature Fantastiques , p. 5, The fantastic narrative generally describes men like ourselves, inhabiting the real world, suddenly confronted by the inexplicable (See Todorov, The Fantastic , p. 26); and for Roger Caillois, in his 1965 work Au Coeur du fantastique , p. 161), The fantastic is always a break in the acknowledged order, an interference of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday legality (See Todorov, The Fantastic , p. 26).  Thus, all three critics agree that the great effect of the tale of the fantastic is to surpass the limits of everyday experience by introducing a foreign and disturbing element into the known familiar world.

The third defining characteristic of the short story of the fantastic, and perhaps the most important one of all, is the doubt that must necessarily be associated with the strange, seemingly unexplainable, event. Todorov’s words to the effect that The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination—and [the] laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality—but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us mean that in order to classify a story as belonging to the fantastic genre, the text must force the reader, or a character with whom the reader can identify, to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the strange event. If, at the end of the story, there is no doubt whatsoever remaining in the reader’s mind, and the reader concludes that the strange event is obviously supernatural in nature, then that reader is reading a short story of the supernatural, what some critics call the marvelous, and he or she can readily accept the appearance of ghosts, devils and vampires. On the other hand, if, at the end of the story, there is no doubt whatsoever in the reader’s mind, and that reader concludes that the strange event is obviously natural in nature, then the reader is reading a tale belonging to a different genre, what some critics have called the uncanny. However, in neither case does the tale being read classify as a tale of the fantastic because the reader has opted for a single explanation of the strange events.

In short stories and novels of terror such as Dracula , for example, the strange events presented are obviously supernatural in nature, while in many detective novels, for example, those events are attributable to natural causes.  Therefore, neither type of work, forms part of the fantastic because the element of doubt at the end of the story is missing.  For a tale to form part of the fantastic, at the end of the story, both types of explanation must continue to exist: the natural and the supernatural.

During the 19 th century, a Russian literary critic had already commented on the element of doubt and the need for two possible types of explanations as characteristics of fantastic literature. Todorov points out that in his preface to Alexis Tolstoy’s The Vampire , the Russian philosopher and critic Vladimir Solovyov had declared that In the genuine fantastic, there is always the external and formal possibility of a simple explanation of phenomena, but at the same time this explanation is completely stripped of internal probability (See Todorov, The Fantastic , pp. 25-26).  Later on, the British author and himself specialist in ghost stories, Montague Rhodes James, echoed that opinion (reprinted in Jack C. and Barbara H. Wolf, eds. Ghosts, Castles, And Victims . Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1974, p. 6) when, he declared that It is sometimes necessary to keep a loophole for a natural explanation, but I might add that this hole should be small enough to be unusable (See Todorov, The Fantastic , p. 26).

But can a story exist in which the doubt as to the nature of a strange event persists throughout the whole tale?  In The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre , Todorov believes it can. As he states in that work it would be wrong to claim that the fantastic can exist only in part of the work, for [there] are certain texts which sustain their ambiguity to the very end, i.e., even beyond the narrative itself (See Todorov, The Fantastic , p. 43). For my part, I also believe that stories with an open end can and do exist, and that, therefore, stories of the fantastic in which the true nature of the extraordinary event remains forever doubtful, can certainly exist.

Perhaps a good example of a lingering doubt at the end of a narration can be found in the short story The Lady or the Tiger? by the American writer Frank Richard Stockton (1834-1902) which ends when the condemned man is about to open one of two doors behind which await, either a beautiful damsel with whom he may get married, or a ferocious man-eating tiger which will surely devour him if he opens the wrong door. At the end of the story, the man stands before the two doors, he looks up into the stands where the beautiful princess responsible for his trial-by-tiger sits next to her father, the king, the princess makes a barely visible sign, and the man knows which door to open.

But which door does he open?  Did the princess make a sign that will allow the condemned man to open the door leading to the beautiful damsel, thus throwing her lover into the arms of another woman?  Or did the princess point to the door hiding the tiger, feeling that if she can’t have her man, no one else will?  Yet another possibility is that the condemned man will not trust the princess’ sign and will open the door which she did not indicate. We never know which door the condemned man opens because the story ends when the condemned man knew what he had to do. Therefore, the choice between the lady or the tiger will forever remain a mystery, and both results—that the man will die in the jaws of the tiger, or that he will survive to wed a beautiful damsel who was not the princess—will, also forever, continue to be possible.

Nevertheless, the hesitation concerning the nature of the strange event is not the only doubt possible in a tale of the fantastic, since both the main protagonist and/or the reader are often forced to wonder, as Todorov points out, if that strange event is "an illusion of the