In The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov’s said of the fantastic event in literature, “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 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.” He goes on to explain that it’s only when you can’t quite make a choice between the two, when you’re genuinely uncertain, that you truly have that fragile form: the fantastic.
Rachel Ingalls is an elegant master of producing this kind of fragility in fiction. Her quirky, spare 1982 novella Mrs. Caliban brought the fantastic into an otherwise ordinary domestic novel reminiscent of Revolutionary Road. The fantastic took the form of an erotic sea monster. However, her novella Binstead’s Safari, first published in 1983 and now reissued by New Directions, works precisely in reverse, bringing the domestic to the fantastic.
Like Mrs. Caliban, Millie in Rachel Ingalls’s Binstead’s Safari is a lonely, nondescript housewife stuck in a marriage with an adulterer. She is neglected and cheated on by Stan, a boorish folklorist who has decided to leave New England in order to study a lion cult in Africa (which country in Africa, you may be asking — there are references to the Masai of Kenya and Swahili, but the East Africa in Binstead’s Safari seems intended to function as a somewhat nebulous, surprisingly anti-colonialist dream space).
Stan is small and resentful, convinced of his own importance. A Swiss colleague has told Stan a story about an East African lion cult in which there exists a man with supernatural powers in battle, medicine and love: he can turn himself into a lion. Because he is so brave, the lions gave him the power “to make himself one of them.” Stan decides to go to Africa to study the shape shifter, hoping to develop his “theory about mythic character and its relation to the society that gives rise to it.”
Millie asks to go along. Initially Stan demurs; it would be too expensive. But when her aunt dies and leaves her an inheritance, Millie can pay her own way. As their marriage continues its irreconcilable breakdown, they stop in London. Both are “already weighed down by an emotion that made for even greater lassitude — a kind of inertia, intermittently broken by irritable indecisiveness. In the army they call it combat fatigue.” The emotional violence within the marriage is echoed through several references to literal and metaphoric war.
While Millie hopes the trip will become a second honeymoon, Stan abandons her in rainy London so he can chum it up with his colleague and have a foursome. Millie wanders alone, and it’s in her movement, her wandering, her lonely, leisurely pace that psychological empowerment occurs. She takes tea, attends an afternoon music concert, and goes shopping. She looks in a window and thinks, “My God, I look like somebody’s mother,” and so she reinvents herself with a haircut and clothes in a whirl of consumerist feminism. Over the course of their stay in London, she comes alive and reflects on her circumstances.
In Africa, Stan’s open contempt for Millie only continues apace, even as she starts to assert herself. Her confidence triggers in him episodes of existential dread. In an interesting and slightly confounding twist, once Millie openly confronts Stan about his efforts to make her crack up, Ingalls allows us to spend less time inside her point of view. Instead we learn more about the inner workings of Stan. And although the novel critiques Stan and his Western colonialist male vantage on the world, the keys to how the novel is to be read are more readily found in his academic thoughts than Millie’s empowered ones. He’s just not quite aware enough to figure out how these thoughts apply to him.
When Millie meets a professional hunter named Henry Lewis, the novel’s dream logic heats up, turns weirder. Beneath her window, Henry coughs to alert her to his presence — his cough becomes a camp motif yet is strangely believable. Stan comes to see Millie as regal, lion-like: “He still felt thrown off balance by the sight of her sitting in the strange, throne-like piece of furniture, with a crowd of people paying court together.”
But Binstead’s Safari is not about lions or their position as kings. Rather, it employs its fantastic lion imagery to reveal the wild darkness of humans, to uncover the horrifying ways in which humans turn on each other. Men against women. The colonial imagination against the indigenous one. Late in the novella, Stan thinks, “Biologists talk about the aggressive instincts of animals, but people themselves take the cake every time … They stand out among the earth’s population as members of the one species whose hatreds and fears are mostly directed against itself. You’d think they would have died out a long time ago.” While Stan’s observations are handed to the reader almost too easily, how these thoughts work alongside the plot necessitates a reader’s serious attention, and that’s where Ingalls’s artistry lies.
Her characters’ interior thoughts are reinforced by memorable events. When a child and his nursemaid are killed on safari, humans of various cultural backgrounds are mesmerized and take pictures, more awed than disturbed. Remarking on things found in the digestive tracts of killed game, a hunter says, “dolls, cameras, plastic washing-up bowls. Incredible. That’s civilization for you.”
Binstead’s Safari is a strange masterpiece in which the suspenseful and potentially horrifying are balanced by campy comedy. In Ingalls’s fiction, we returned to the essential unknowability of the fantastic. Yet for all its puzzle-ness, the novella resists encapsulation, resists being named and pinned down. As a particularly intricate and rich cipher, the novella is better experienced than described. Is it a contemporary fable about feminism and anti-colonialism, or an elaborate joint hallucination of a couple whose marriage is falling apart? The fragile beauty of the truly fantastic in literature is such that it disintegrates if you try to break it down with too violent a logic.
[Published by New Directions, February 26, 2019. 224 pages, $15.95 paperback]