2 Horizontal vertigo and psychasthenia: border figures of the fantastic Patricia García Introduction The boundary, border or frontier is a dominant feature of how we understand ourselves in space: self and other, here and there, belonging and not-belonging are structured and arise through the awareness and affirmation of a border that very often has a material presence and geopolitical, cultural and existential implications. In narrative worlds, boundaries are also key in constructing articulated spatial frames that generate an impression of realism. However, what happens when these boundaries fail to fulfil this articulating func- tion? Fictions of the fantastic offer interesting aesthetic responses to this question. The chapter starts by approaching the fantastic as a spatial form, outlining its fixation with borders. It then engages with two versions of the same spatial transgression found across several cultural texts from the second half of the twentieth century. These aesthetic phenomena, which I approach as ‘border figures’ following Johan Schimanski (2016), invite us to reflect on the sociopolitical and existential implications of the destabilisation of our sense of (normal, natural, logical) boundaries articulating human spatiality. The first one, horizontal vertigo, portrays the absence of the border that marks the end of a physical space. I trace the itinerary of this concept across disciplines and cultural contexts, from its metaphorical use to refer to the Argentine pampas to its presence in postmodern urbanism. In the literary domain, I focus on J.G. Ballard’s literary representation of this border figure as criticism of the expansion of the built environment in tourist areas. The second border figure, which I call spatial psychasthenia, concerns the fusion of the body with its surrounding material space. My analysis builds on Roger Caillois’s explanation of this term in reference to some animal species Patricia García - 9781526146274 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 02/04/2021 10:02:26AM by johan.schimanski@ilos.uio.no via Johan Schimanski