[20] Studies in the Fantastic The Fragmentation and Recovery of Zdzisław Beksiński Joseph Rex Young Abstract: This article uses literary theory to propose an explanation for the range of responses to the art of Zdzisław Beksiński, whose work tends to provoke either hyperbolic disgust or intense awe. Beksiński’s decision never to title his paintings necessitates ekphra- sis, the translation of visual images into prose, which in the case of Beksiński’s images breaks down due to the impossibility of describing his fgures in plain speech. An ekphrasis of these images thus pushes the viewer into the second stage of Thomas Weiskel’s three-stage model of Romantic transcendence—deprived of the ability to speak and searching for a way to recover it. Neither of Weiskel’s codifed approaches to this crisis—the metaphorical or the metonymical—are efective solutions to this problem, marooning viewers in Weiskel’s second stage with no chance of reaching the third stage, where they would be reconciled with the contents of their world. The viewer of a Beksiński painting must therefore contend with what David Sandner calls an “open” response to the sublime, accept- ing the sublime as an ongoing feature of their world. One of Sand- ner’s codifed open responses, fragmentation, precisely describes the response of those who regard Beksiński’s art as fearsome or disgust- ing, forcing the viewer into an encounter with something they dis- like. The other, dispossession, closely describes the sense of transcen- dent power other viewers ascribe to these images. The process of Sandnerian dispossession with regard to Beksiński’s paintings is elu- cidated by comparing it to a similar process in neo-Romantic theory, J. R. R. Tolkien’s concept of Recovery, the highlighting of the natural and human via their contrast with purpose-built manifestations of the supernatural and inhuman. Various of Beksiński’s paintings yield to such analysis, as studies of humanitas celebrated in contrast to preternatural inhumanity. The key to the power of these images is their ability to show the viewer something of themselves. Painter Zdzisław Beksiński seldom attended exhibitions of his art. Refusing to discuss his work in any detail, Beksiński sometimes