Romanian Review 1983/2-3 [antikvár]

Emerging from, and Leading to, Reality Understanding a phenomenon largely depends on understanding the interest it arouses at a^arious moments in time. Such a moment — as far as the fantastic in art is concerned — is that of the present. Indeed, during the last two decades more works on this subject have been written than during the last couplc of ccnturies or so. Artists, men of letters, and scholars in different countries have displayed a passionate and vivid interest in this aesthetic category. They went so far as to establish in 1955 an International Institute for the study of The Fantastic in Art. In Romania the interest we are speaking about has been reflected in essays and references to the fantastic in the works of authors belonging to the younger or middle-aged generation. But the question itself is, fundamentally, why this sudden interest in the fantastic in art? Since the question has obvious historical nuances we shall not, for the moment, try to find a global explanation or to provide general reasons for the use of the fantastic throughout the ages, focusing, in exchange, on more restricted explanations for its frequent use today. We are aware that such restrictions prevent a global explanation for the interest in the fantastic as a periodical phenomenon, independent of historical events. We shall use this broader approach at the end of the study. For the moment, therefore, we discuss only a special kind of the fantastic as attached to a special mentality of our times. May we be allowed therefore to start in a rather roundabout way. It is known that, in every culture, stark necessity, immediate utility, is the promoter of all values. It gradually establishes a forma mentis of the respective culture, projecting its configuration for onto the most "immaterial" planes. In these terms, we may say that our age has an extractive character, as it were. After all, although the term might sound too aggressively material to some, we are not the first to use an "industrial" metaphor for things of the spirit. For some decades now geological terminology as used in industry has been also circulated in what Camil Petrescu used to call the noosphere. Strata, substrata, sediments (subconscious of course), threads (of inspiration, of course), resources (artistic), sounding, drilling, underground water are terms making up such a forma mentis liorn out of the basic "extractive" compulsion of our times. Far from being arbitrary, they point to the vertical exploration characterizing both industry and the humanities in our century. There is no real gap between the two levels since they cohere in the unity of the same "style of the age". Practically the whole material surface of present-day civilization is a texture obtained through the