For the last few weeks I (well, we, driven by my contrarian nature) have been pursuing a certain analysis of fantasy literature. Although we’ve quibbled here and there, I think we can pretty safely say that the general rule holds that the best fantasy novels are the ones that draw deep from myth’s springs, simmer in Tolkien’s cauldron of story, [and are served up with generous helping of psychology]. This last bit is more contentiously debated, and it’s a debate well worth having.
I don’t believe in accidents, especially ones that rise from the deep currents of literary history. If you take a long enough view, you can trace cause and effect in the popularization of any form of writing. In English poetry, for instance, Romanticism is a rebellion against the rationalism of the Eighteenth Century. Victorian poets attempted to synthesize the two poles of pure feeling and thought. Their style devolved into the (largely forgotten) Sentimentalist school that shattered on the experience of World War I and the abrupt cultural changes brought about by the war. Pope to Wordsworth and Keats to Tennyson to Owen. And from Owen to Eliot and Pound (Pound who weighs ever heavier as the decades pass) and from them to Gunn and Hughes. Established form/Rebellion against form /Synthesis of opposing forms/Established form/Rebellion....and the cycle repeats. This is only one example among many, taken as a “for instance” and viewed superficially over three centuries, but the causal relationships are clear, unmistakable.
Cause and effect. Likewise, it’s no accident, I contend, that Fantasy comes to Literature as a corrective to sterile and pale, self-limited and over-ripe realism. Arriving between Psychology and Mythography, the genre of fantasy has flourished. Between 1) Joseph Campbell and his great analysis of myth and religion, those towering markers of culture and belief, and 2) Freud and Jung and their research into the unconscious, exorcising the dragons and demogorgons from our personal anxiety closets, Fantasy found fertile ground. The little-regarded and easily-dismissed “nursery literature” of the Nineteenth Century with its sanitized lessons in the triumph of good over evil gave way to re-evaluations of the fairy tales themselves, the rediscovery of their violent, bloody and transgressive origins. At the same time, psychology recognized in the myths and fairy tales expressions of the unconscious writ in our cultural DNA.
And along came fantasy, drawing from the same material.
In the last few weeks I’ve advanced Ursula Le Guin’s theory of fantasy as that literature best suited to address the individual’s spiritual/psychological journey in life, every person’s quest to do more than merely exist, but to live meaningfully. The language of the archetype is natural in fantasy, and a natural fit. Realism is to daydream as fantasy is to dream.
This is an interpretation of the genre that makes sense to me; it accounts for the power and the vitality that fantasy (not all, but the good stuff) possesses.
Ah, the good stuff—now there’s a loaded term! And, while there’s been precious little agreement about what’s good and what isn’t, if you will indulge me, I’m going to sketch out my distinctions:
A big slice of the fantasy market is pure play, a sandbox where the writer makes the world and everything in it. It requires no hewing to history or the laws of physics, needs no research, and is sheer fun. A huge chunk of fantasy is play—pure and simple. It’s Every Boy’s Adventure; it’s Chick-Lit with an SCA twist. It’s Dinosaur Erotica (yes, really). It’s Sookie Stackhouse and Bella Swan and Vicky Nelson. It’s Elric and Conan and Tarzan, Lestat and Filius Viae.
All of this (well, except for Twilight and Taken by the T-Rex ) is a pleasant way to spend a summer afternoon. But it’s fluff. Nothing is profound; it won’t keep you awake at night, it won’t stalk your daylight thoughts, it won’t haunt your dreams. It’s not The Good Stuff.
And it isn’t The Good Stuff because it doesn’t leverage the power and potential of the unconscious. It doesn’t speak to what makes us human. None of it challenges our compassion or enlarges our spirit.
What I’m suggesting is a distinction between fantasy as entertainment and fantasy as literature. A distinction with a difference, one being a subset of the other. Any book is a failure if it fails to entertain, so that’s the minimal requirement. If a book can enlighten as well as entertain, if it can stir your interest as well as teach you something important about yourself and/or the world, then it’s literature. It can and should be taken seriously. It becomes part of the canon (and, for all disputation to the contrary, fantasy and its first cousin, science fiction, are not yet full initiates in the canon of Serious Literature. If they were, there would be no marketing distinction between fantasy and magic realism).
By saying that fantasy is for children (which some of it is) and dismissing it as commercial and formulaic (which some of it is), critics feel justified in ignoring it all. Yet looking at such writers as Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez, Philip K. Dick, Salman Rushdie, José Saramago, it is possible to believe that our narrative fiction has for years been going, slowly and vaguely and massively, not in the wash and slap of fad and fashion but as a deep current, in one direction—towards rejoining the “ocean of story,” fantasy.
Fantasy is, after all, the oldest kind of narrative fiction, and the most universal. (1, pp. 42-43)
Le Guin’s reading of the literature is a major force in criticism and, although there are other readings of fantasy by other critics, I don’t think there is another writer in the field today who speaks with the same, or even similar, force and persuasion.
But I’m looking, and that search takes time—time that, currently, I need in greater quantity.
Therefore, I’m calling a change of pace, from the theoretical to the particular. In other words, it’s time for some book reviews.
And I need help. For one thing, the past three months have shown me in excruciating detail that there’s a lot more out there to be read than I’ve had the chance to read. So give me a hand, please. Pick a book that’s dear to you (or as many as you like) and call dibs. Personally I’d prefer books that are recent over the ones you remember from college and high school, although the choice of what you want to write about is entirely your own. I’m just saying there are a lot of great writers working now who would benefit from the exposure and who deserve wider circulation. And if you’re familiar with the intersection of gaming and fiction it’d be great to get your perspective. Gaming is something I’ve stayed far away from—I know my own nature, and if I ever started gaming I’d never do anything else.
For myself I need a break from criticism. I’m two-thirds of the way through the first-draft of a novel that’s in serious danger of tipping over if I don’t get back to it. For me, criticism and fiction don’t share space comfortably in my skull. One tends to elbow its way to the fore and soak up all my attention, leaving the other to grumble in my sleep. Criticism has been loudest lately, and fiction’s grumbling is starting to fade in volume, which worries me.
Next week I’ll start with a review of Erika Johansen’s Queen of the Tearling. That gives you all two weeks to get on it.
Peregrine Kate has laid claim to Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle.
Quarkstomper is doing some of George MacDonald’s early novels.
Angmar is reviewing MacDonald’s Lilith.
Neil Gaiman, in writing about fantasy, reminds us all that fantasy is important, not because it teaches us that dragons are real (we already know that) but that dragons are real and can be slain.
So come on, help me slay a dragon! It's rewarding and fun. I promise.
Previous Installments
Notes:
1. Ursula Le Guin, “Things Not Actually Present,” in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. Boston: Shambhala, 2004, pp. 38-45.