Thomas on Warpcast

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Thomas pfp

@aviationdoctor.eth

Réalisme fantastique? The most important genre you've never heard of? A Christmas thread 🧵

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Thomas pfp

@aviationdoctor.eth

Let me introduce you to an obscure countercultural movement from the 1960s that I deem both underrated and perenially relevant. It originated from France under the name "réalisme fantastique" and is recondite enough that its French Wikipedia article does not have an English equivalent (though I'm thinking of creating one). 2/17

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@aviationdoctor.eth

In fact, I struggle to even offer an adequate translation of "réalisme fantastique". The first part seems obvious enough; in the arts, realism spawned in the 1840s with a goal to represent subjects truthfully, devoid of any speculative or supernatural elements, as a reaction against the idealization and dramatization of the then-prevalent romanticism movement. 3/17

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@aviationdoctor.eth

"Fantastique", on the other hand, has no equivalent in the English lexicon. It pertains to the subtle intrusion of supernatural elements into reality, but also, and very importantly, to the uncertainty that surrounds them. 4/17

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@aviationdoctor.eth

Unlike the "merveilleux" or fantasy genre, which shares a latin root with "miraculous" and assumes a deeply magical world in which realistic normality may still exist, the "fantastique" genre plays on the blurred lines between natural and supernatural, the possible and the impossible, and the logical and the illogical. 5/17

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@aviationdoctor.eth

An example of quintessential "fantastique" in popular culture is the TV show The X-Files; at least those episodes where there is enough plausible deniability for Scully to explain away the uncanny phenomena observed by Mulder. Like the viewer or reader, the protagonists of the fantastique genre *must* be reluctant to accept the supernatural qualities of what they are witnessing, because their implications are world-shattering and insanity-inducing. 6/17

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@aviationdoctor.eth

Literary examples of the fantastique genre include HP Lovecraft, Jorge Luis Borges, and Edgar Allan Poe, whose well-grounded characters experience abnormality in subtle and inconclusive ways, as well as a growing sense of cognitive dissonance when they hopelessly try to preserve rationality using Occam's Razor. 7/17

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@aviationdoctor.eth

"Réalisme fantastique", however, belongs with neither the réaliste nor fantastique genres, and instead occupies an idiosyncratic no man's land between them. It is also not exactly science fiction, which is rationally speculative but not supernatural, nor is it fantasy, which uncritically takes for granted a supernatural world. 8/17

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@aviationdoctor.eth

So what is réalisme fantastique, really? It started off with a nonfiction book published in 1960 by two journalists (Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels) under the name "Le Matin des Magiciens" (released four years later in English under the title The Morning of the Magicians). The goals of the book were to challenge mainstream views on paranormal topics such as alchemy, ancient spacefaring civilizations, cryptozoology, occultism, and ufology; and to exercise the readers' critical thinking abilities. 9/17 PDF of the book in English: https://shorturl.at/fRbHN

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@aviationdoctor.eth

In their book, Bergier and Pauwels wrote (translation from French is my own): "Fantastique" is generally defined as a violation of natural laws, as the intrusion of the impossible [into reality]. For us, this is not at all what fantastique is. It is a manifestation of natural laws, a byproduct of perceiving reality directly, and not filtered through the veil of intellectual laziness, habits, prejudices, and conformism. 10/17

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@aviationdoctor.eth

The co-authors of the book were heavily inspired by an American writer named Charles Fort who, for years, had obsessively documented testimonies of uncanny phenomena such as cryptid sightings, UFO encounters, anomalous objects falling from the sky, etc. culminating in the publication of his Book of the Damned in 1919. 11/17 PDF of the book: https://shorturl.at/Yxm6f

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@aviationdoctor.eth

"Le Matin des Magiciens" was a massive success (more than a million copies sold in France alone). It spawned a popular magazine, Planète, that for ten years covered topics such as epistemology, futurology, fantastique fiction, etc. Modern descendants from that magazine include Omni in the UK and Wired in the US. It also set the stage for multiple conferences dedicated to fringe research, scientific skepticism, zeteticism, etc. 12/17

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@aviationdoctor.eth

The book made an impression on me when I was a teen. As a grown-up, I don't accept pseudosciences at face value, and consider myself a skeptic of the Carl Sagan, James Randi, and Richard Dawkins tradition. I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories or New Age woo. Nevertheless, I consider the book, and the cultural movement that it launched, a useful lens for thinking about the world not in black and white, but in shades of gray that shimmer as you try to capture them neatly. 13/17

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@aviationdoctor.eth

To me, réalisme fantastique serves to remind us about the fragile boundary between reality and allegory, reason and qualia, facts and fiction, the universe and its simulation, knowledge and perception, etc. It reminds us that this boundary is a diffuse twilight zone where our eyes play tricks on us, for we are not our eyes, and they are not us. It reminds us that reality is nothing more than whatever ersatz we are allowed and able to perceive through our senses, and then describe to others through our imperfect language and memories. We strive for an objective reality in a world that is anything but. 14/17

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@aviationdoctor.eth

Like the prisoners in Plato's cave, we are stuck in our own skulls while animated shadows dance on our retinas; we should never be so gullible nor principled to accept nor reject anything at face value. There are plenty of unresolved questions that lurk at this blurry edge of natural science and metaphysics, such as the nature of consciousness, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the anthropic principle, the simulation argument, the directionality of time, the relationship between mathematics and what they describe, the existence of free will, the role of the observer in quantum experiments, the fabric of reality beyond our four dimensions, the computational universe hypothesis, the afterlife, the incompleteness of objective truths, the limits to knowledge, etc. 15/17

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