Hi, everyone. This is our first meeting of Fantasy Readers United. I’m your humble team leader, and I shall wield the Gavel of Authority until someone comes along and boots me off my peculiarly small and low-set throne. My qualifications? Absolutely none. Except that I suggested the series and everyone else took a step backward when the call went out for volunteers. So here we meet in a virtual space that is, for the moment, otherwise empty, which leaves me talking to myself and feeling somewhat ridiculous.
I’ve been pondering a knotty question for a while—several questions, really. Questions like What will this series accomplish? What are people expecting? Do I have any clue what I’m doing? Is ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ fantasy?
That last question is not quite as dumb as it sounds. On one hand, yes of course A Song of Ice and Fire is fantasy—after all, it’s got dragons and ice zombies, resurrections of various stripes, earth magic and fire magic and wargs—oh my! Of course it’s fantasy.
Or maybe not. A while ago Michael Pollan defined processed consumables as “edible foodlike substances” that are not food. One salient difference? Real food rots. Twinkies and Big Macs are forever.
Likewise, Martin could be writing “fantasylike history” and the wars of the Seven Kingdoms could be a retelling of the War of the Roses with a veneer of dragons and direwolves to compensate for a fuzzy timeline. Or it could be real fantasy. It’s going to depend on how we understand fantasy, and getting to that could take a while.
I don’t know if we can say that about any other literary genre. Fantasy spans a range with fairy tale on the near end and urban dark on the far. Actually, stretched to its limits, all fiction is fantasy in that all fiction imagines what has not really happened. All fiction is truth that’s entirely made up. It’s the paradox that Neil Gaiman explores in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” when Auberon says of the Titania/Bottom plot line,
“This diversion, although pleasant, is not true. Things never happened thus.”
Morpheus replies, “Oh, but it is true. Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.” [1]
Or as Puck exclaims, “This is magnificent—and it is true! It never happened; yet it is still true. What magic art is this?” [2]
What Magic Art Is This?
Of course, I’m not seriously suggesting that all fiction is fantasy. Even fiction that contains fantastic elements (anybody for a big white whale?) isn’t fantasy. But you can’t take a mainstream narrative, plunk down a dwarf or three, and voila—Fantasy! Fantasy is something different; it occupies a different mental space and it stretches reality in ways other than realistic fiction does. Ursula LeGuin calls it The Language of the Night, and in doing so loaned us the title for this series (rather, I swiped it, but let’s not get picky).
How to understand fantasy, and how to determine whether A Song of Ice and Fire is fantasy—these are questions I’ve been circling. What we need are definitions, some mutually-agreed-upon terms by which we can gauge what is and isn’t fantasy.
That’s why I wanted to start this conversation. I recently had an encounter with a respected literary agent who told me, “Fantasy is dead right now. There is a full stop on acquisitions. George Martin has sucked all the air out of the room.”
It would be easy for me to dismiss this agent’s statement as a hard truth told to discourage an unpublished writer, and at first I did that. But on reflection, the agent’s statement, delivered in tones of Absolute Truth, has inspired me to rethink my suppositions about fantasy, this powerfully popular but deeply maligned and ghettoized form, to decide whether the bottom has indeed dropped out of the genre, or whether this agent was reacting to a market in profound transition and uncertainty.
For the record, I don’t buy the agent’s assessment. I tend to think it was inspired by a dismal market. After all, debut fantasy novels come out each and every month by the boatload, and George Martin’s success, rather than driving everyone else out of the sandbox, has made the sandbox bigger and whetted readers’ appetites for more books of a certain kind, the same way that Buffy paved the way for Sookie Stackhouse and Twilight and no, I never dreamed I would put those three series in the same area code, much less the same sentence. George Martin, in addition to occupying his own substantial real estate, has made space for Scott Lynch, Glen Cook and other writers of gritty stripe and disreputable protagonists.
No, fantasy is not dead. It’s not even breathing hard.
But I keep circling back to what is it? What is fantasy?
In the Beginning
The search for beginnings took me to my hoary old bookshelves, where I hauled out my Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, my final arbiter in all things lexical. Dusting off the top and fetching my trusty magnifying glass, I sought out the entry for fantasy, which occupies two and a half columns. The definitions, stripped down, follow:
Fantasy, phantasy: 1. In scholastic psychology: Mental apprehension of an object of perception; the faculty by which this is performed. Obs.
2. A spectral apparition, phantom; an illusory appearance. Obs.
3. Delusive imagination, hallucination; the fact or habit of deluding oneself by imaginary perceptions or reminiscences. Obs.
4. Imagination; the process or the faculty of forming mental representations of things not actually present. Now usually with sense influenced by association with fantastic or phantasm: Extravagant or visionary fancy.
5. A supposition resting on no solid grounds; a whimsical or visionary notion or speculation.
6. Caprice, changeful mood; an instance of this; a caprice, whim.
7. Inclination, liking, desire. Obs.
Fantasy also appears as a verb, with 4 definitions:
1. To imagine in a visionary manner. Obs.
2. To wear the appearance of. Obs. Rare
3. To take a fancy or liking to; to be favourably inclined to; to fall in love with. Also with inf. to ‘take it into one’s head’ to do something.
4, To play fantasias, to extemporize. rare
None of this is particularly useful, as most of the definitions apply to lovers, poets and lunatics—okay, maybe it does apply, but not in literary terms. It’s obvious that the Wise Clerks of Oxenford were fans of neither fantastic literature nor imaginative thinking, just as it’s obvious that, although Tolkien worked on the Oxford English Dictionary, he never got his hands on the letter “F.”
Okay, let’s go to “Literary Devices: Definitions and Examples of Literary Terms.” We should find a precise definition there. After all, they’re authorities. Their editors define fantasy as
a form of literary genre in which a plot cannot occur in the real world. Its plot usually involves witchcraft or magic taking place on an undiscovered planet of an unknown world. Its overall theme and setting is a combination of technology, architecture, and language resembling European medieval ages. The most interesting thing about fantasies is that their plot involves witches, sorcerers, mythical and animal creatures talking like humans, which never happens in the real life.
Holy Condescension, Batman! Methinks these erudite editors are not terribly respectful.
Actually a survey of definitions from sources friendly and not reveals general guidelines that are also not terribly useful. They assert that fantasy involves the use of magic, lack of technology and non-human actors, but none of them get near to the essence of what makes fantasy a powerful and often disturbing form. It’s like defining “cake” by appraising the icing. Real fantasy draws from something other than a strong narrative, in addition to a good story; it draws from springs that flow from deep sources, wells of ambient power that defy easy characterization.
Here definitions are Not Much Use. Let’s try again, starting with fairy stories.
Why fairy stories? Because they are where fantasy as a genre first entered literature, brought in by anthropologists and infantilized for children’s consumption. Andrew Lang, the Brothers Grimm, Francis J. Child and others brought folk tales and popular ballads into mainstream culture, and well-meaning editors scrubbed them of gore and all hint of unseemly parental activities like rape, dismemberment, castration and cannibalism. Fantasy remained relegated to the nursery and vaguely disapproved of by “modern” parenting theory through most of the Twentieth Century.
Under cover, though, writers couldn’t resist—Mervin Peake and J.R.R. Tolkien kept pace with Kenneth Morris, H.P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany and George MacDonald, all of them sneaking adult fantasy into our literary diet. All the while our teachers and critics clucked their tongues and wagged their beards disapprovingly as Lewis Carroll and L. Frank Baum were leading kids through the Looking Glass and all the way to Oz.
Critical disapproval didn’t stop early fantasists (I’m defining the genre as starting roughly around the beginning of the Twentieth Century although I’m open to debate on that) from writing, nor did they stop them from setting down the first rudimentary rules by which fantasy would come to define itself.
The first law of fantasy appears to be one that holds firm today: You may construct your world by any set of laws you choose, but those laws have to be applied consistently within that world. George MacDonald writes:
To be able to live a moment in an imagined world, we must see the laws of its existence obeyed. Those broken, we fall out of it. The imagination in us, whose exercise is essential to the most temporary submission to the imagination of another, immediately, with the disappearance of Law, ceases to act. [3]
Moreover, MacDonald says, the laws of the imagined world must harmonize with the moral laws of readers. “He must not meddle with the relations of live souls. The laws of the spirit of man must hold, alike in this world and in any world he may invent.” [4]
In other words, the operational laws the protagonist lives by must consonate with readers. Our sympathies lie with Gandalf and the Fellowship, not Sauron or Saruman, because we understand and accept their sense of rightness and justice. If Gandalf were to, oh, I don’t know…maybe lay waste the Shire simply because he could and were Tolkien to write approvingly of it, Tolkien would lose us as readers. Some contemporary fantasies play with our senses of morality (I’m looking at you, Abercrombie!), while others flip the script, as Kirill Yeskov did in The Last Ring-Bearer, a retelling of The Lord of the Rings from Sauron’s perspective, while still others, like Steven Erikson in The Malazan Book of the Fallen, find sympathetic protagonists in all sides of complex and bloody battles. But the principal theorem holds: We must accept the protagonist’s sense of morality, or we will reject the story itself.
Therefore, we now have two laws, provided we all agree:
1. Whatever laws the writer uses in building the world, those laws have to be consistent. To break a law, to “Mary Sue” a character or pull a deus ex machina, breaks the illusion that the world is real.
2. The laws by which the writer constructs the world must be laws that harmonize with the readers’ own sense of morality.
This implies a moral aspect to fantasy, one with which G.K. Chesterton (yes, that G.K. Chesterton) agrees. He writes
If you really read the fairy-tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other—the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales. The whole happiness of fairyland hangs upon a thread, upon one thread. [5]
This conditional morality, its violation and the restoration of order, lies at the heart of fantasy, whether that fantasy is the death of Orpheus, the destruction of a magic ring, or the loss of dust across the worlds, what Chesterton calls “the backbone of all folklore—the idea that all happiness hangs on one thin veto; all positive joy depends on one negative... This is the profound morality of fairy-tales; which so far from being lawless, go to the root of all law.” [6]
So, a third law—an ethical core. Maybe a strange ethical core, but a core nonetheless. A sword that must be destroyed lest it be let to destroy civilization, but the sword holds dangerous forces that first have to be neutralized. An evil that consumes everyone who inquires too closely of its existence. A ruby that must be smashed for an immortal to regain his rightful place. A ring that must be thrown into a volcano or its malevolence will consume everything good. A set of mismatched lovers who must be put right before sunrise, a magician who wants to leave his exile, but can’t until his child is grown and safe.
Not much, but it’s a start.
It all seems very … very proper, very restrained, very English.
In part that’s natural. Fantasy was born out of Germanic/English folktale and raised with an Oxbridge accent. The success of non-English fantasies like The Golem and the Jinni or the Tales of the Otori, among many, testify to how far the genre has grown. Has it abandoned its roots, or in these first three laws of fantasy is there something universal that is essential to the form?
Or can we argue that the First Three Laws of Fantasy apply to all literature? Or at least the first two apply—a coherent set of rules in a coherent world, and a consonant sense of morality. After all, it’s a postmodern trope to break the first law, à la Deadpool, to wink at the reader as if to say, This is all very emotional but it’s not serious and we all know it, but it’s jarring—a dangerous rhetorical move, and one that might occasionally work in film, rarely works in novels and then only in Victorian and postmodern fiction, and I would argue doesn’t work at all in fantasy. Similarly it’s the breaking of the second law that makes me want to burn Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy (and I’m still annoyed about that. I felt betrayed by my author—and that is not a good thing.)
In weeks to come I want to consider what makes fantasy work, what makes it so moving and so resonant—in short, what makes it profound and profoundly different, eternal and ever-new. Some novels wear poorly; others retain their freshness despite decades or even centuries. Most fantasies don’t age out. The King of Elfland’s Daughter and The Worm Ouroboros read as compellingly today as they did the day they were published, and that is the norm, not the exception.
Of course, there are exceptions, and I want to look at them too. Put that part in the file of Things That Should Have Worked But Went Wrong (a.k.a. most 1970’s fantasy novels).
A Heartfelt Plea
I want your help. The field is enormous and I’ve read only a fraction of what’s out there. No one person can survey it. Want to take a piece? I’m serious. If there’s an aspect of the genre you want to write about, or a book or series you want to review, let me know and I’ll yield the Gavel of Authority.
Back to A Song of Ice and Fire
Is it fantasy? I don’t know. Part of me thinks yes—the dissolution of order and its restoration, that’s classic fantasy. And part of me, well, I wonders. Thus far Martin’s narrative has been an unsparing examination of what happens when the legitimacy of power collapses, piece by piece, somewhat like gritty American realism or German modernism, but with dragons and ice wraiths.
I don’t think we’ll know until the series is done. At least I’m not ready to throw in one way or the other, not yet. Why? It has to do with language and theme, and other Things To Come.
So Welcome! This’ll be fun. Tune in next week for a dose of Carl Gustav Jung and archetypal thinking. Or maybe it’ll be Tolkien’s run at Fairy Stories. Whichever turns up first in my bookshelf. Of course, I’d welcome suggestions….
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Print References
1. Neil Gaiman, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Dream Country: The Sandman, Vol. 3 (NY: Vertigo, DC Comics), 83. Previously published in single magazine form as The Sandman: No. 19. [Nota bene: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is the only comic that ever won the World Fantasy Award for Short Story, in 1991. Rumor holds that, right after it won, the Board of the World Fantasy Association changed eligibility rules so that no comic could ever win again, but the submissions guides for the awards are silent and everyone who knows has never said. Harlan Ellison made the assertion in his forward for Gaiman’s Season of Mists.]
2. Ibid., 75.
3. George MacDonald, “The Fantastic Imagination.” A Dish of Orts (London: Edwin Dalton, 1908), reprinted in Fantasists on Fantasy: A Collection of Critical Reflections By Eighteen Masters of the Art, Ed. by Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski (NY: Avon, 1984) 15.
4. Ibid., 16.
5. G.K. Chesterton, “Fairy Tales.” All Things Considered (NY: Sheed and Ward, 1956), reprinted in Fantasists on Fantasy: A Collection of Critical Reflections By Eighteen Masters of the Art, Ed. by Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski (NY: Avon, 1984) 28.
6. Ibid., 29.
PS: No print reference for the Oxford English Dictionary. If you don’t know how to find the OED, you shouldn’t be reading this.