If you read fantasy (and, as the self-selected nerds we are, you likely wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t) you probably know about The Fantasy Inn. If you’re not familiar with it, you should be — come for the smart reviews, discussions, and short essays; stay for the podcasts. A little something for everyone, and rarely does it hit an off-note. My diary tonight was occasioned by a recent blog post by HuiGregg on Fantasy Inn, Why Do We Read Fantasy? It in turn was occasioned by a meatier post by the same author, Our Gateways Into Fantasy, a breakdown into who reads what and when. Both are good, albeit brief, essays. And both of them got me thinking.
Why do we read fantasy? HuiGregg’s answer is simple — it’s escapism. At least, he assumes it’s the most common answer, the answer that Tolkien wrestled with in his seminal essay, “On Fairy-Stories”:
Escape is evidently as a rule very practical , and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails….Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison walls? (1, p. 60)
Escapism gets a bad rap, especially considering that reality is so grim. But, then, reality has always been grim, even if 2020 is a banner year for The Great Suck. People have always read to escape, and escapism is not the exclusive purview of fantasy. I mean, you can escape as easily into Trollope or Dickens as N.K. Jemison or Martha Wells. HuiGregg asserts that escapism is not a primary motivation for him, anyway, but rather variety:
I’m someone who has a fierce loathing of the familiar and a deep-rooted terror of the pre-ordained….And so fantasy is my safe haven. With fantasy, there’s always something new. There’s always something different. There is something for everyone. It’s a genre with a million subgenres, infinite possibilities, and absolutely no limits….Fantasy is infinite. It can, quite literally, be anything.
It’s an interesting argument, although I don’t know if I’d quite agree. Variety is nice and the observation is compelling, but stretching the limits of what constitutes fantasy to cover anything is rather a stretch too far, although he’s right about fantasy slipping neat definitions.
When I started this series, I had rather firm ideas about fantasy: that it’s defined by its relationship to realism. I agreed with Le Guin that realism is to daydream as fantasy is to dream. I still agree with her in that — that there is a subconscious reality to fantasy that realism elides over. Which is why, when I’m feeling pedantic, I’m likely to insist that, for all the ice zombies and dragons, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is not really a fantasy, but a rehash of the War of the Roses with a few fantasy touches. It’s because the psychological reality remains unaddressed. There’s nothing at its core but politics and the exercise of raw power.
To my way to thinking, it’s not the magic elements that make the fantasy, it’s the drawing from myth and dream that does. I mean, Lev Grossman is not my favorite writer, but The Magicians has more psychological profundity. What I’m trying to articulate is not a quality you notice while reading (or even in retrospect unless you’re looking for it), but it’s what makes the story sink into your heart and live in your mind.
Of course, many people are likely to disagree. The best way I can explain the difference between fantasy and fantasy-lite is this: think about the books that stick with you, the ones that really get inside you. What makes them different from the ones you read and forget? I would submit that there’s a resonance in the core that chimes inside, and if you investigate that resonance you’ll find something you already knew deep inside, but never thought of it in quite that way, a vision of personal and psychological wholeness that far exceeds the qualities we commonly talk about in conventional terms of good and evil.
I think that’s what Le Guin was talking about in “The Child and the Shadow,” (2) that fantasy doesn’t break cleanly into white hat/black hat oppositions but are, in this kind of fantasy, entwined, dependent on each other. It’s not life or death, but both, each one making the other precious. There’s no shadow without a light, no light without darkness. Frodo and Gollum need each other; Agnieszka and Sarkan bring together two sides of magic to make a whole — two principles that combine to be, neither good nor bad, but human, flawed but well-intentioned. There are endless examples, whether wholeness is achieved by two or more characters or the struggle takes place inside the individual, as it does in Ganoes Paran or Rae Seddon. It’s not the location of the struggle, but the fact that the dichotomy is addressed and reconciled. Which is a long trip around to talking about profundity.
I’m well aware that not everyone reads like this. Next time, I want to look at what a few other readers and writers think fantasy is. I’m open to other interpretations, but after long thought and deep reflection, this is the well that keeps drawing me back. I have to think it holds for other readers, too.
References
1. J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories.” In The Tolkien Reader. (NY: Ballantine, pp. 25-73).
2. Ursula Le Guin, “The Child and the Shadow.” In The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ed. Susan Wood (NY: Putnam, pp. 57-71).
Note
Thanks to Angmar for filling in over the past few weeks and congratulations on the successful launch of Occult and Psychical Sciences on DK.