Millais's Ferdinand Lured by Ariel (1849-1850), in which the painter combines with such
abrasive clumsiness the world of fairy and the world of physical materiality, beautifully embodies
Victorian fantasy. In the first place, it reminds us that a realistic style, at least in England, can be
infused by a literary motive that appears totally out of keeping with realism. Secondly, it reminds
us that fantasy and realistic styles remain joined as long as they exist. Both, for instance, rely upon
accurate, verifiable representations of physical existing objects that in turn employ pictorial
technologies of description (perspective, tonality, color, portrayal of textures, and so on). One
may or may not need evil to have good, or ugliness to have beauty. One certainly needs realism to
have fantasy.

Fantasy is parasitic on realism; or, to state this point less pejoratively, one cannot have fantasy
without realism. Realism precedes fantasy and provides its point of departure. As William
Whewell, the Victorian philosopher, pointed out, "Reality requires things," and to this we may add
that realism requires the description of things. Realism depends upon a peculiar view of the world
that implies only things exist. Realism, in other words, is a style that embodies philosophic
materialism, the belief that only physical materiality exists and that spiritual or philosophical ideas,
such as soul, self, and life, all reduce, inevitably, to matter.

Of course, no style has ever been completely realist, in large part because all artistic and literary
works function by means of languages or forms--sets or schemata of symbolic forms that in turn
convey certain statements about physical reality. Furthermore, since all representational art is not
the thing itself but some statement about the thing, it inevitably exists at a remove, for it exists in
the condition of language. Since languages that make statements about something must inevitably
choose which aspects of the thing to discuss, describe, or re-present, they are always abstract, for
something must be left out. One way of stating this inevitable abstraction is that all works in
realistic styles--there are, by definition, no realistic works--partake of fantasy. All works in
(supposedly) realistic styles are pervaded by the ideology or ideologies that control what is
chosen as representative of the real.

Realistic art, therefore, does not present what is there any more than does fantastic art.
Nonetheless, we all have to work to perceive the ideologically determined aspects of work in a
realistic style, but those in a fantastic one stick out. Why do they thrust themselves upon us? First
of all, because, as numerous students of fantasy have pointed out, works in that style directly
confront our expectations about reality--one expects, for example, that one cannot fly, that trees
do not have faces, and that magic does not exist.

If artists from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century worked so long to create convincing
portrayals of a real world, why would fantasy artists be so perverse as to go out of their ways to
create a nonreal one? What would they get out of it? Well, one answers, several things, the most
obvious of which is that they gain the ability to confront the positivistic conception of physical
materiality that characterizes nineteenth-century and later thought. In fact, an important part of the
urge for fantasy derives from this feeling that fact isn't all there is and certainly isn't all there should
be in art. Fantasy thus uses certain facts to show that fact isn't all there is.