Before we dive into Chapter 4 of Ann Swinfen’s In Defence of Fantasy, which will include a brief overview of world-building (to be fleshed out at a later date) and an unrestrained outburst about the Minnipins, one quick fact to keep in mind: In Defence of Fantasy was published in 1984. Give any academic book a year at press, a not-unrealistic estimate, and then build in the time for research and writing, and we’re looking at Swinfen developing her ideas around 1981 or ‘82. In 1982, the internet was in its infancy and the Web was the stuff of Science Fiction. I mention that just to lay down a historic marker. Because it was a different world, fantasy-wise.
Today, if you look around there are world-building toolkits free on the web. Some of them are...horrible. Some, not so horrible. You can find fantasy name generators, do-it-yourself mapmaking, “fit your epic quest into Joseph Campbell’s hero’s character arc” how to’s, and an endless array of goodies with which to decorate your fantasy world. By the way, if you write fantasy, hope to publish and don’t want some random designer turning up and demanding a cut of your meager royalty, I recommend you proceed very carefully. There are some good resources for world-building, good as in safe for writers who want to publish and/or create worlds that are truly original, and when we’re done with Swinfen I’ll write a diary that points you toward some of the better ones, at least the ones I know about.
Point is, none of this existed back in the early 1980’s, when Swinfen was writing. Which means that occasionally she gropes for vocabulary that didn’t exist then, but is shorthand now. In the 1980’s fantasy was not a publishing juggernaut, but a weird slipstream in the publishing world. Argue with me about that and I’ll refer you to the bestseller lists from 1980-1985.
tl;dr: It was a different world. We do well to practice forbearance.
So, let’s get to it! Finally, we’re in the main parts of Swinfen’s book, and it opens with a consideration of “Secondary Worlds.”
She starts by recognizing that Otherworlds are as old as literature itself: Humbaba’s Forest in Gilgamesh, the magical geography of The Odyssey, the shadow lands of Faerie as depicted by Spenser. In other words, the secondary world has been around forever:
Although modern secondary worlds share with traditional fairy-lands and enchanged forests a quality of otherness, of strangeness and wonder woven into their fabric, they also differ very widely from their literary predecessors. (1, p.75)
Where contemporary fantasies differ from traditional “otherworlds” is in the precision of their creation. The appearance of “reality,” a world that is consistent, that can be measured, that can be walked in the imagination, that can be felt and seen in the mind of the reader, that can be made “real” — that’s the hallmark of modern fantasy. A world that’s both complete and consistent; in other words, a world that adheres to Tolkien’s prescription of “inner consistency of reality.”
Moreover, Swinfen asserts, the secondary world has to have enough consonance with the primary world (our world) that readers can identify with the characters and sympathize enough to accept the perhaps arbitrary rules of the secondary world. The characters themselves have to be enough like humans that readers can accept them as real.
The inhabitants and affairs of a secondary world, like all fantasy, requires a firm basis in primary world reality. (1, p. 76)
First off, the physical nature of the world must seem logical and coherent, and the creator must abide by the rules of that physical world. The rules can be anything the writer imposes, but they can’t be violated. Which is why there are a hundred theories about the arbitrary nature of winter in G.R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire but no one calls foul—it’s built into the world and we can accept it. But a character in a novel suddenly acquiring an exotic magical skill because the latest cliff-hanging episode requires it makes readers howl (no examples here; I’m not in the business of shaming, but I’ll bet if you read much in this genre you can think of a few. They live in novels that tend to have remarkably short shelf-lives.)
Swinfen describes the worlds of Lloyd Alexander’s Prydian, Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, Lewis’ Narnia, Le Guin’s Earthsea, and Carol Kendall’s Valley of the Minnipins. Yes, really. Because a serious examination of secondary world building by writers of adult fiction requires that 2/5’s be based on children’s literature. Honestly, when I first read about the Minnipins in Swinfen I damn near threw the book into the fireplace (and I never do that). I mean, yes, I loved the Minnipins— when I was ten! And here is where I remind myself of the introduction, where I wrote that Swinfen is writing in a different world, and fantasy as a fictional form has grown in prominence, in variety and form, and much of her analysis is dated, like her assertion that most fantasies are based in Western European Bronze Age or Medieval settings… but Minnipins? grrrrr, give me strength!
Despite the shortcomings in Swinfen’s analysis, its dated quality and sometimes questionable illustrative examples, she does make salient overall points and her book does provide a decent intellectual grounding for the study of fantasy. For instance, she notes that the danger of setting a narrative in a secondary world is two-fold: 1) the writer risks alienating readers who simply can’t accept the strangeness of secondary creation, a.k.a. the “I only read realism” dodge, and 2) it’s a high-wire act, and any lapse in coherence, any detail that throws a reader out of that secondary world spoils the illusion created in fiction, the feeling of lived reality.
Provided the secondary world does induce secondary belief, [however], the advantages of the genre are obvious. The author has complete artistic freedom, within his self-constructed framework. The society and characters he depicts have no essential and given background of culture, history or belief, so that he is free to construct them as he will. For the author who wishes to start from a tabula rasa, it is the ideal form. (1, p. 76)
Much of the chapter is taken up in describing the different worlds—Prydian, Middle-Earth, Earthsea, and the others. Tolkien gets style points for elaborate consistency and deep background, Alexander for adaptation of myth from The Mabinogion, and Le Guin for the supple philosophical underpinnings and the power of plain speech in Earthsea (and this was before Le Guin returned to Earthsea to continue the story with Tenar as the viewpoint character)—before Swinfen gets around to a point she’s touched on in earlier chapters, and to which she will return again: the morality of subcreation.
This is not as preachy as it seems, and she makes a good point: if you’re a writer and you’re going to go to all the trouble to create a whole world — complete with invented history, religion, infrastructure, political system, food flora and fauna, and all the other bits and pieces that make a world work — if you’re gonna do that, you have to have a reason for doing it. It doesn’t make any sense to go through all the trouble of inventing a language if you have nothing to say in it.
The inhabitants of the worlds are faced with problems of social behaviour, and above all with spiritual and moral problems, which parallel those of the primary world. The problems tend to be more clearly posed, and to demand answers more insistently, than is normally the case in the primary world. Evil is present and manifest, and must be fought if it is not to triumph. (1, p. 91)
The struggles of the real world, the metaphoric made concrete. Swinfen notes that most fantasy doesn’t overload the aspect of the “marvellous,” because too many unicorns and magic spells “will strain the reader’s credulity just as inconsistencies in the natural law or in the structure of civilization will do.” (1, p. 93). This too is common-sense; the overtly marvelous (inspiring marvel in the same way that Milton’s awful means “full of awe” and not something you would wipe off your shoe) throws readers out of willing belief — it breaks the spell. Magic isn’t the point, it reinforces the point. It’s the nutella on a thick piece of toast.
When a writer of fantasy is in full control of his imagination, and not simply soaring off into the void, he uses these marvellous elements for specific purposes...(1, p. 93)
And here let us pause a moment in gratitude for the contemporary convention of non-gendered language that defuses the notion that the masculine pronoun is the default “normal.” Swinfen writes in a different time, Swinfen writes in a different time, Swinfen writes in a different time.
As for “specific purposes,” in her examples Swifen explains that the Minnipins, despite their kid lit designation, illustrate the power of individual choice, the inherent rightness in questioning authority, and the strength that comes when morally-conscious people “choose” their destinies. Lewis, she says, is less successful in his Narnia books because they’re so heavily overlaid with Christian allegory, but still, like Alexander’s Prydian series, are about questions of leadership and right kingship (among other things). In Lord of the Rings, evil is more powerful but
...it is morally and intellectually weaker than good. It cannot comprehend good. The good creatures, however, recognize the nature of evil and so circumvent it, through dogged, unspectacular heroism. (1, pp. 93-94)
Earthsea (and Swinfen is writing only about the first three volumes) is about a human’s growing to responsibility, acceptance of himself and the world, and the tasks of maturity — in other words, it’s about growing up and growing old, about the restoration of order and the hard work of living. Each of Swinfen’s examples provide “the setting for a tale with some underlying serious purpose” (1, pp. 95-96) In fact, she goes as far as to state that the:
...secondary world fantasy not only permits the writer to expound serious ideas, but demands some kind of overall purpose to give it coherence. The exploration of imaginative experience without the controlling strength of the given framework of the primary world, or a specific conceptual framework in a secondary world, runs the risk of degenerating into misty romanticism and sentimentality, or at least of an incoherent and episodic structure. (1, p. 97)
In other words, you have to have some grounds to identify with the characters and the book has to have something to say that justifies all the hard work both the reader and the writer invest. She cites Eddings’ The Worm Ouroboros, Keith Claire’s The Tree Wakers (more kid lit!), and Joy Chant’s Red Moon and Black Mountain as examples of fantasies that fail, or at least fail to live up to their potential, because of problems with structure or thematic resonance. Of Chant’s books, she writes
what it lacks, in fact, is an overall sense of realism, that essential element of all fantasy, which is of paramount importance in the secondary world. (1, p. 98)
Although I have quibbles with Swinfen, and some not-inconsiderable differences, here I think she’s right. The fantasies that “stick” are the ones that have heft — be it spiritual, social, moral (and really what is spiritual or social that isn’t tied up with morality?) In the end, beyond all the wonder and delight of a created world, at its heart, if a fantasy is to move us, it must speak to us, and speak of things we care about. It need not be of the all-powerful Good Vs. Evil archetype, but it must pluck chords inside us, or we won’t care about it. If we don’t care, if we don’t believe it while we’re reading, we won’t care, and the book will fail.
Next chapter, following up on the moral import of fantasy, we’ll consider “Layers of Meaning.” We’re halfway through, and the good stuff lies ahead.
Previous Installments
Reference
1. Ann Swinfen, In Defence of Fantasy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.