Fantasy as Epanalepsis: ‘An Anticipation of Retrospection’

Abstract

This article begins by discussing the rhetorical turn of the first sentence in M. T. Anderson's Thirsty. That first sentence reads: 'In the spring, there are vampires in the wind' (1997 p. 11). Do not these words sound similar to the subtitle of Tolkien's The Hobbit: 'There and Back Again'? I mean, doesn't the shape of the sentence that begins Thirsty remind us of the meaning of Tolkien's subtitle? The sentence begins with a prepositional phrase and ends with a prepositional phrase; in other words, it begins, with a phrase blowing in the wind and ends with the return of that wind; it begins, goes there, and then comes back, so to speak. When winter passes, a spring wind is sure to follow. If we are of a psychoanalytic cast of mind, we might say that rhetorically, the sentence enacts a return - the return of the repressed - but it does so slyly; it disguises the return of the repressed because we always have to disguise repressed content when it insists on emerging from the unconscious. Those pesky vampires insist on returning time and again; this time they come in with the wind - a sort of undead Chinook. My argument, then, is that fantasy rhetorically enacts the journey of return. When we begin a fantasy, we anticipate a return; we read retrospectively. Fantasy can deliver a productive nostalgia, a looking backward in order to look forward, fantasy opens a space for invention, and what returns in fantasy is both the repressed itself and the mechanism of repression.