One of the side-effects of revising a novel is that it makes you think structurally. As in, back to first principles, following through-lines and character arcs and things like that. So rather than look at any individual books for a while, since I’ve been reading a lot of science fiction and history, I’d like to go back to Fantasy as a Topic. I’ve also been reading theory recently, which hasn’t helped a bit with revisions but does tend to blow the cobwebs out of the brain.
Did you know that cob is the Old English word for spider? And Old English is the form of the language that was spoken in England before 1066 — Shakespeare is most definitely not Old English but is Early Modern — actually OE as a recognizable language diverged from proto-Germanic early on, around the 7th century (splitting the difference between which authority says what date) and simplifying its forms into a dominant Wessex/Mercian dialect by the 11th century and yes, you’re right, I’m inviting PHScott to chime in, and also I’m advertising The History of English Podcast by Kevin Stroud, who is not a professional medievalist or linguist, but a lawyer who likes language history and does a fine job of it. The podcast has been going for a while, and it’s really well-done and you would certainly enjoy it. I blew out my phone’s data limit because downloading 126 episodes (and Stroud is all the way up to the 14th century now) is not an option, so my gardening entertainment is now largely confined to Crooked Media and musings about cobs, their webs, and the best way to clear them from the mind. Hence, theory.
Really, this won’t be painful. It’s a wide overview of what makes the genre tick, what drives it, what makes it relevant, and we’re going to start easy, but with people you might not expect, people like Coleridge and Shelley, Plato and Chesterton. For the next few weeks I want to outline Ann Swinfen’s In Defence of Fantasy: A Study of the Genre in English and American Literature since 1945. Published in 1984, her examples are a bit dated but her thesis is relevant. (Note: The Indiebound pub date is October for a reissue and the price is terrifying, but you should be able to pick it up much cheaper if you look around.) I’ll follow that up with Hal Duncan’s Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions, which is more up-to-date and expands the toolbox considerably. By the end, we should have….
Well, what we’ll have is new ways of looking at texts, not just fantasy, not just genre, but all texts. Literary theory has value outside the halls of academe: it gives readers new ways of looking at stories, new perspectives, new ways of thinking about what stories mean, how they move us, why they move us. Theory gives us ways to ask questions, and questions are always a lot more interesting than answers.
That’ll be the agenda for a while.
The first question I want to ask is why fantasy became popular when it did. I have Ideas, so I’ll start. This is not a lecture, but a conversation (or it will be, if I can stay awake long enough. If I can’t, carry on.)
Marxist theory insists that things don’t happen by accident, but as responses to historical, social, and cultural pressures. Every effect has a cause — actually a web of causes. So, the popularity of fantasy as a genre raises interesting questions, and the answers are necessarily personal for each reader. Fantasy had been simmering along quietly in a twee sub-genre with MacDonald and Eddison; it had enjoyed an Indiana Jones-like run of popularity with Haggard and Burroughs and Every Boy’s Adventure. But for the most part, Serious People sniffed at the whole fantasy thing as an outlet for the juvenile mind.
Then Tolkien published a strange book in three parts. Serious People sniffed more (many are still sniffing) but fantasy began to filter into the mainstream — into bookstores, into libraries, into homes. Lewis hailed from Narnia and from Space; Anne McCaffrey found a cache of dragons; Katherine Kurtz, David Eddings, Ursula Le Guin all went to work, and fantasy started to grow.
What was it that made this particular garden so fertile? Not only that writers wanted to work in the form, but readers wanted to read it. Readers gobbled it up and begged for more.
Something made that happen. Something made this the time for this particular note to sound.
I have a theory that makes sense to me personally. I suspect, as you read this, you have one, too — something that drew you in and colored your imagination, and filled an emotional fissure that you might not even have realized existed.
For me, it came down to two things: morality and eucatastrophe*.
I read Tolkien, like most of us I suspect, first when I was really too young to realize all that was going on. The scene in the dell at Weathertop scared the bejeezus out of me and haunted my nightmares for years. I reread LOTR once every year. But like all kids, in school I learned how to stay quiet about elven alphabets and Bilbo’s verses. English class meant American Lit, and American Lit meant Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, et al. What does the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock symbolize? Why are the hills compared to elephants? What does the light in August mean? What is the symbol? What is the theme? Why is it almost always “man’s inhumanity to man”? Updike and Rabbit, Lewis and Babbit — it all felt random and dusty and worn, the world’s edges rubbed away to expose an empty skeleton beneath. Modernism was an assemblage of the rejected shards of earlier ages, Pound paring away Eliot to his essence, a bricolage of borrowed meanings and empty suits.
In my successive readings of Tolkien, I saw something else — a world where, yes, terrible things happened, but beneath the randomness of events there was a sense of cohesion, a unity, even a sense of morality — not in a superficial way of thinking but a profound organization that, in all its variety, all its multiplicity, was comprehensible.
I was drawn to fantasy because it revived my imagination. It didn’t wear me out; it didn’t make me jaded or cynical, as I saw so many of my friends growing jaded and cynical way too early and in far too unearned ways.
This is a very personal start to a theoretical exercise, isn’t it? Not entirely. In “Fairy Tales,” G. K. Chesterton writes
[B]ecause the world of the fairy-tales is a brighter and more varied world than ours, they [poets] have fancied it less moral; really, it is brighter and more varied because it is more moral...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. (1, pp. 27-28)
Leaving aside the admittedly-dated vocabulary, Chesterton says the same thing Frodo says: “When things are in danger: someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them” (2, p. 309). Nothing is free, or as Tattersail would say, “Always an even exchange.”
I remember becoming conscious of this essential difference between fantasy and mainstream fiction the first time I read John Fowles’ Daniel Martin and worried whether Fowles would be brave enough to give the novel a happy ending. That was what contemporary fiction had become to me — where a happy ending, and I’m not talking about a superficial pasted-on ending like ending #1 in The French Lieutenant’s Woman is superficial, nor the mean and cynical (post-Modern) #3 ending, but the earned resolution of the #2 ending — is an act of bravery. Daniel Martin gets a touch of eucatastrophe, which demonstrates that eucatastrophe isn’t peculiar to fantasy, but when it’s employed in mainstream fiction, it’s downright revolutionary. But it’s in fantasy that eucatastrophe shines.
And that’s where we’ll start next week, with Ann Swinfen.
*Eucatastrophe: defined by Tolkien in “On Fairy Stories” as
The sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale)…. is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. (3, p. 68)
References
1. G. K. Chesterton, “Fairy Tales.” In Fantasists on Fantasy: A Collection of Critical Reflections By Eighteen Masters of the Art, Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski, eds. NY: Avon, 1984, pp. 26-30.
2. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King. NY: Houghton-Mifflin, 1988.
3. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories.” In Tree and Leaf, part of The Tolkien Reader. NY: Ballantine, 1966, pp. 3-73.