For the next little while, we’re going through Ann Swinfen’s In Defence of Fantasy (1), taking it chapter by chapter, as promised. This week, we start with the introductory chapter, “Fantasy and the Marvellous.” I’m going to take this opener somewhat backward, because it’s the best way to introduce some concepts that may or may not be familiar; in fact, they may raise echoes of long forgotten (or in my case, repressed) introductory philosophy classes, or they may be part of your daily life. You’ll recognize that part when we get there. Yay, theory!
When I started writing this series, it was with the idea of widening the discussion about fantasy literature to talk about developments in the genre, introduce new writers, trace trends and in general share an appreciation for what is (at least in my opinion) the most adaptable, innovative, and potentially profound kind of novel being written today. We started with J.R.R. Tolkien’s seminal essay, “On Fairy-Stories,” which may be worth a quick review of parts one, two, and three, because Swinfen starts here, too. Although, as she writes, Tolkien did not invent the fantasy novel, “Tolkien made fantasy ‘respectable,’ (1, p.1). Despite respectability, though, she notes that “British and American writers with a serious purpose...too often have been obliged in the first instance to publish as children’s writers, only later...becoming accepted by an adult readership” (1, pp. 1-2). Which was certainly true as late as the 1980’s and tends to be a common experience even today, although it’s no longer called children’s literature, but YA. What was shoved into the nursery three centuries ago with all the old furniture has not yet been readmitted to the parlor.
The Basics
Swinfen agrees that in general the rise of fantasy as a popular literary genre has its ground in a rejection of modern realism, as I outlined last time but, at least in this essay, she doesn’t go any farther than simply asserting that it happened. The reason why it happened is implied in the characteristics she identifies in the fantasy genre, and may well be fodder for later discussion.
She doesn’t attempt to define a “school of modern fantasy,” (good thing, since the genre encompasses such a wide breadth of styles I don’t think it’d be possible) but she does identify some similar characteristics and concerns, which is why she structures the book In Defence of Fantasy thematically, rather than focusing on individual authors, as most critical studies do, and she limits the time period from 1945 to 1980. First up, she defines two characteristics of fantasy: morality and purpose:
It becomes clear that fantasies published during the period are frequently imbued with a profound moral purpose and, even when set in a different historical period or, more interestingly, in a complete otherworld, display a concern for contemporary problems and offer a critique of contemporary society (1, p. 2).
This shouldn’t be surprising. Although fantasy novels stand apart from everyday reality, their relationship is enmeshed with it. After all, readers live in the world, participate in the world, and their entertainment often serves, not as relief from the world, but as enhancement and explanation of it. A fancy way of saying that, in order to be relevant to a reader, a book needs to have some kind of application or interface with the reader’s lived reality. The morality angle, though, that’s a different animal, and an interesting one. Swinfen asserts that fantasy requires a moral universe, setting it apart from realism, which often doesn’t.
And modern fantasy is different from its predecessors, even its direct forebears from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “It might be argued,” she writes, “that modern fantasy writers are simply the heirs of a long-standing literary tradition,” except that, while
modern fantasy employs structures, motifs and marvellous elements derived from its predecessors in myth, legend, fable, folk-tale, and romance...it cannot employ such elements in the same way as these predecessors did. In a world governed by materialism and scientific rationalism, fantasy sets out to explore the immaterial and irrational. Moreover...the modern writer of fantasy cannot start from a widely accepted basis of belief (1, p. 2).
In other words, Swinfen says, you could argue it’s just one long tradition, but you’d be wrong.
Our world is one governed by “materialism,” not in the sense of being materialistic, but in the sense of believing in what we can touch and taste. “Reason” not because we’re inherently reasonable, but we are the inheritors of the Age of Reason. The subject of fantasy — the stuff fantasy concerns itself with — can’t be reached by appeals to Reason; it must come from somewhere other than reason and rationality. (This is the implied critique of postmodern realistic fiction I was referring to before.) Also, we no longer live in a world whose literature reflects a homogeneous culture; our points of reference have shifted. We acknowledge different gods, different myths; we’re shaped by different cultures. Fairies and spirits no longer inhabit our meadows and byres, and we’re not willing to accept that either Robin Goodfellow or that mearcstappa Grendel may be real.
Both the rejection of reason as the only fount of meaning and the inability to draw from a common native tradition mark modern fantasy, in Swinfen’s reading. This doesn’t mean that modern fantasy doesn’t borrow from earlier tradition—it does, heavily. But the borrowings themselves are not sufficient to make modern fantasy a successful art form.
So what does? Here’s where Swinfen looks to Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories” to supply the answer: Subcreation, the drawing of a secondary reality, one that is so complete and so internally consistent that it pulls the reader in to a collaborative act of imagination (1, pp. 3-4). Tolkien, according to Swinfen, did more than make fantasy respectable; in “On Fairy-Stories,” he laid the philosophical foundations for the genre itself.
According to Tolkien, Subcreation is necessary for successful fantasy, but it isn’t sufficient by itself. Instead, fantasy contains both “the Sub-creative Art in itself and a quality of strangeness and wonder” (4, p. 47). Swinfen distills Tolkien’s extended definition of “quality of strangeness and wonder” as “[T]he marvellous element which lies at the heart of all fantasy [and] is composed of what can never exist in the world of empirical experience” (1, p. 5). The marvelous can “intrude” upon reality, as indeed it does in magical realism. Another avenue for the marvelous is to have the reader carried into Fäerie through a wardrobe or a knock on the head or a portal, etc., and then returned to the real world. While the “spirited away” motif was once the main way to get to Fäerie from here, it is no longer. Most fantasies, especially contemporary ones, are set entirely in alternate worlds. The constant, though, is the quality of what “marvellous” means. The “marvellous” is marvellous primarily because, by definition, it can’t exist in the world where we live.
Therefore: Subcreation and a sense of the “marvellous” — these define fantasy in Swinfen’s terms. (I would also add morality as a largely-assumed and not-much-discussed sub-requirement.)
So far, so good, huh? Yay, theory!
The Three Faces of Fantasy
Following Tolkien, Swinfen identifies three faces, or attitudes, inherent in fantasy. In brief, and drawing from “On Fairy-Stories,” they are:
1. “the Mystical toward the Supernatural”: not much discussed in Tolkien, but extremely important. For an example, see Dante’s Divine Comedy. Also, arguably, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and the Bene Gesserit in Dune. More about this below, after the philosophy section, and examples will come crowding into your mind.
2. “the Magical toward Nature”: where Tolkien focused his efforts in Middle Earth. This is also the garden where most mainstream fantasists toil. Here realism is heightened and refreshed; we’re returned to our own lives with the veil of custom and routine removed.
3. “the Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man”: which Tolkien doesn’t discuss, but where Swinfen puts beast fables, utopias, dystopias, and satiric works like Gulliver’s Travels. In this category, fantasy doesn’t refresh but criticizes the human condition.
Three faces of fantasy, each with its own purpose. The first, to reconcile human nature and a view of the cosmos; the second, exploring alternate realities for what they mean to humanity; the third, direct commentary on human nature in all its sordid awfulness and glory.
Now the Philosophy (Important but not Essential Section)
In Defence of Fantasy has a preface. Of course it does. All critical books have prefaces. It’s the short bit at the front where the author tells you what she set out to do and how she did it. Swinfen’s is unusually short:
O imaginativa che ne rube
talvolta sì di fuor, ch'om non s'accorge
perché dintorno suonin mille tube,
chi move te, se 'l senso non ti porge?
Moveti lume che nel ciel s'informa,
per sé o per voler che giù lo scorge.
Dante, Purgatorio, 17: 13-18
Yes, that’s the whole of it. Interestingly, she doesn’t translate the quotation. That’s our job. This preface, which serves as a commentary and a guide for the entire work, is worth taking a moment to pick apart. In many ways, it’s the key to understanding Swinfen (and Tolkien, whom Swinfen riffs on).
First the translation. Remembering that any translation is an approximation of the original. I’ve checked a bunch and this one comes closest in tone and spirit. From Allen Mandelbaum:
O fantasy, you that at times would snatch / us so from outward things—we notice nothing / although a thousand trumpets sound around us— / who moves you when the senses do not spur you? / A light that finds its form in Heaven moves you— / directly or led downward by God’s will (3, p. 146).
Very rarely does Dante pause from narrating his journey to address the reader or expand on an idea. This poetic aside from Purgatorio occurs, as Dante scholars have noted, in the exact middle of the Commedia. It’s literally the turning point, where Dante lifts his eyes up. He turns toward heaven and the poem becomes a story of religious conversion. This is the point where Dante asserts that “the imagination can be a gift of sacred creation that may have little to do with our current reality.” According to Robert Hollander, (quoted in the Dartmouth Dante Lab but you’ll have to search for it. Frames can be handy for reading but they’re hell on references), Dante sees the imagination—the ability to be transfixed, so transfixed that one loses track of everything going on in the world—as a “power of the soul” that isn’t resident in the soul but is directed by the Divine.
On these equivalent powers of the soul, the phantasia or imaginatio, see St. Thomas [Aquinas] (ST I.lxxviii.4): “the phantasy or imagination is like a treasure house of images received by the senses” (cited by Sally Mussetter, “Fantasy,” in Richard Lansing, ed., Dante Encyclopedia [New York: Garland, 2000]). Thus both 'imagination' and 'phantasy' have a far different meaning in the works of Dante than in anything written after the Romantic era, where the imagination, given its 'esemplastic power' in the unforgettable phrase of Coleridge, rather than merely receiving them, produces images.
I know this is in the weeds, but the distinction becomes important in the discussion of fantasy and the argument between Tolkien and Coleridge about the nature of reality. Plainly put, Dante goes beyond St. Thomas (and Plato!) who assert that imagination reflects reality, as this world of forms reflects an ideal reality that is elsewhere.
Dante sees imagination, the ability to be so transfixed by (reading about) things not present as something that comes from outside the self. If you’ve ever been so into a book that being interrupted is like having a spell broken; if reading has ever taken you into a far country and so absorbed you that you’ve been physically present but mentally Elsewhere, and putting the book down is like coming back to your body; you know what Dante is talking about when he writes of a thousand blowing trumpets being nothing.
That ensorcellement is a function of the imagination. It comes from outside the self. In Dante, it comes of divine inspiration, and it’s an early use of the term fantasy to mean an aspect of the imagination. In Coleridge, this aspect of the imagination comes from inside. It’s part of the poet-as-creator-of-reality, as opposed to being an interpreter. This is important, because Tolkien takes Coleridge on directly in “On Fairy-Stories.”
Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria, defines two kinds of imagination. The first is primary, which is common to everyone, and is the mental action that turns sensation into perception. Your eyes collect images, your ears collect sounds, your brain processes them into things meaningful and important. The second type of imagination is conscious; you will it into being. The secondary imagination can be trained. The genesis of art is the artist’s trained, focused, and willed, imagination; Coleridge sees the artist as Creator. The artists who followed his tradition birthed the concept of Artist as God.
Swinfen thinks that Tolkien took the term “secondary” referring to imagination from Coleridge, but redefined it.
Tolkien’s sub-creative art which creates secondary worlds is also capable of affording glimpses of joy and eternal truth. Coleridge did not feel that imagination could grasp truths which were beyond the scope of reason (1, p. 9).
Tolkien’s disagreement with Coleridge hearkens back to Dante (hence, the preface), who was arguing with Aristotle. In Poetics Aristotle argues that art starts in mimesis, in copying and arranging and rearranging reality to create art. Dante changes the genesis of inspiration from reality to something outside reality (Dante credits heaven). Coleridge argues against Dante and the neo-Platonists by asserting the supremacy of the artist’s imagination as the source of artistry. To Coleridge, the ability to imagine unreal worlds is a function of assembling things known in the real world and unmooring them from context to recombine them and make something new. To Coleridge, “fancy,” or fantasy, is secondary to reality and reason.
Tolkien disagrees. In “On Fairy-Stories” he declares that fantasy, the ability to create secondary and imaginary worlds, partners reason. It’s not subservient. It doesn’t subvert reason, but enhances it. This is the meat of the “Fantasy” section of “On Fairy-Stories,” (3, pp. 46-55), and Swinfen’s argument turns on it (1, pp. 7-9). Fantasy is reason’s equal, its partner. It doesn’t draw from reality, but stands apart, and serves a different purpose.
Okay, Enough Philosophy. Now Why It Matters
It all comes down to the much overused Tolkien term eucatastrophe.
The third aspect [actually it’s the first aspect above, but Swinfen flips the order in the course of discussion] of fantasy, as the vehicle of mystery, Tolkien feels is the most difficult to achieve, although when successful it produces stories of ‘power and beauty’...And indeed the mystical nature of fantasy is the source of what Tolkien shrewdly detects as one of the most outstanding qualities of serious fantasy or traditional fairy-tale, the eucatastrophe….This ‘glimpse of joy, and heart’s desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through’… this is the essential quality which distinguishes fantasy from the realist novel…. (1, p. 7)
Eucatastrophe has become something of a deus-ex-machina term; it’s become almost a trope in itself. But most of what’s called eucatastrophic is to fantasy as Taco Bell is to Mexican cuisine. A real one is a rare thing. It’s not a happy ending—a happy ending is a happy ending. Eucatastrophe is more; it’s the grace at the end that sends Frodo to Valinor, that frees Ged to wander Gont in the autumn, that reunites Anomander Rake with Mother Dark. There are other examples, I know, but not all that many. Eucatastrophe follows, I think, a character’s utterly unselfish sacrifice, a sacrifice that atones for faults and crimes not of the character’s making.
Because eucatastrophe forces us as readers to take a long overview of a world, because it rebalances the cosmic scales, it must turn on a moral universe. Not a religious one, or not necessarily a religious one. For Tolkien, Middle Earth is both religious and mythic (and I suspect that our own Jeffersonian Democrat has Thoughts about that). Le Guin’s Earthsea and Hainish universes (actually all her universes, to my knowledge) are deeply morally and ethically centered. Most fantasy universes are.
Except the ones that aren’t. This is an aside from Swinfen’s book and an elaboration of a thought I started last time, about the rise of fantasy as an answer to the nihilism implied in modern realistic fiction. Both Tolkien and Swinfen imply the need for a centering morality to imbue the individual life with value and worth. That morality allows for eucastastrophe to come in from the outside, a beam of light, a note of grace, of transcendence. It’s an answer to despair. Which is one reason why I don’t personally cotton to grim and realistic fantasy of the George R.R. Martin variety. The lack of an ethical frame and organizing principle is so close to realism that it renders fantasy an affectation. Does its popularity mean that fantasy is playing out as an art form, that it’s losing its animating impulse?
I don’t know. End of thought, and end of this side note.
So, we made it through chapter one, and the toughest sledding. The rest of the book is based on this foundation, and for the sake of discussion, let’s just say we agree with Swinfen in her basic definitions of fantasy as requiring both a moral component and an oblique relationship with contemporary life; the three faces of fantasy, and the form’s reach for transcendence, which Tolkien called eucatastrophic.
Next week is easier. We’ll talk about talking animals. So we got all the way through the heavy stuff. Yay theory!
References
1. Ann Swinfen, In Defence of Fantasy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.
2. Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, trans. Allen Mandelbaum. NY: Bantam, QPB edition, 1982.
3. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Tree and Leaf, rpt. in The Tolkien Reader. NY: Ballantine, 1966, pp. 3-82.
