Fantasy cannot "engage with our social world"

Cafe Society
1

So, I was reading through an FT link on Harry Potter 5 as you do, when I came across the following ending paragraphs:

"If the Potter phenomenon makes more people read, takes people into bookshops, helps other writers to sell more, and generally adds to the richness of life - that is wonderful. But let us not confuse things. Let us not lose sight of the fact that the proper concerns of serious grown-up literature are broader and deeper. The fantasy genre can do many things. It can entertain, and assuage, and comfort, and fascinate and allow us to soar away from our realities : all that is important, and good and never to be downplayed.

It cannot, however, engage with our social world - that is what it is escaping. It cannot tackle the full complexities of real relationships within that social world. It can be skitti sh with stereotypes, but since it depends on them so heavily it cannot question them with any subtlety or seriousness. And for those reasons, it cannot teach us much. It can address, if not actually fulfil, the dream therapist’s “collective hunger for an image of renewal and hope”, yes - but what kind of renewal, what kind of hope is this, if it consists of magic and otherworldly elements that by their nature are impossible in our world?

A child’s mind can be fully absorbed by the impossible, because childhood is that protected time of exploring and learning. To an adult whose mind is satisfied by the impossible, I am tempted to say: grow up.

[Mods: Is than an acceptable amount to quote? For everyone else, its an extremely long article and I’d reccomend reading the whole thing if you’re a HP fan.]

To which I say - huh? How can a literary editor have such a blatant bias and dare to print it? It says something of her snobbish-ness. (Okay, backing down now, or this’ll go into Pit territory).

Apart from the fact that I would question “it cannot, however, engage with our social world” even with Potter, due to the rather neat racism metaphors in Chamber of Secrets, I would be willing to accept that this author may not see that as counting as it is not the most complex thing ever. Perhaps I am being unfair but one rather gets the impression that she has not read anything other than HP and Lord of the Rings.

Perhaps therefore I should excuse her comment. Certainlly a lot of fantasy is nothing more than pure cliched plot, with little theme to back it up. But one could say the same - IMO to a greater extent - about the thriller genre, romance, war, well actually, pretty much any of them. However, there are counter examples: I personally would put forward Buffy as something that delved into more deep subjects than 90% of other television, and still managed to include demons. My knowledge of the subject is not great, but I’m sure you could extend that.

Adding in sci fi as is arguably nothing more than a type of fantasy anyway, she seems to be deriding… let me see… 1984, anything by Wells, half of Shakespeare, Brave New World, Dickens (can’t have ghosts, can we?), etc. etc. etc. My mind has gone a blank towards English literature, but I am fairly sure it would be very easy to extend that.

So, does anyone agree with her? Does adding in the non real in any form always destroy the relevance towards the real world? This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered this sort of perception - is it shared by the majority of the literary world?

I’m really having difficultly seeing this women’s POV, and so I would be grateful if anyone could back up her side of the argument.

2

I partially agree. Fantasy can engage with the real world, however it usually doesn’t. It usually treats its subjects simplistically and lacks the nuance for a truly literary work. The Matrix perfectly illustrates this. When a fantastical or science-fiction work does intelligently approach issues of greater importance, it is no longer a part of the genre - for instance Brand New World. Fantasy, on the whole, is lazy writing that concerns itself more with the silly intricacies of the world it creates than theme or characterisation. When it concerns itself with more important things, it is no longer fantasy.

3

But surely that’s cheating. The rule “if it’s good, it can’t be <genre>” is foolish, as it will automatically exclude any counter-example. Brave New World fits any reasonable definition of science fiction - why toss it from that category because it’s good?

4

The best Classic Fantasy is a historically familiar setting, a rollicking adventure tale, a romance, and a thoughtful premise examined from a unique agle, all rolled into one.

That means it is ripe for deeper and more involving stories, not just simple hack and slash pulp tales (which are far and away the minority these days in fantasy).

5

After Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2001, a friend of mine - who is an award-winning sf writer and and full Professor of English at a major university - said to me after the award ceremony: “Jesus. Harry Fucking Potter.”

Whenever a book earns unprecedented sales, commentators always come out of the woodwork to disparage the taste of the buying public. It happened with Gone with the Wind, with Peyton Place, with Jaws, with the James Bond books, and it has been happening a lot with Tolkien. These critiques go unnoticed by said buying public, of course, but are given a certain amount of credence by literary figures because there is a grain of underlying truth. All the above named books are inferior examples of literature. There are better historical novels than Gone with the Wind, better spy books than James Bond.

And certainly better fantasy books than either Harry Potter or Tolkien.

I’m pretty sure than Jan Dailey hasn’t read them. (He or she doesn’t mention any contemporary authors or any adult ones.) Hardly anybody outside of the field would recognize their names. That’s because they don’t write classic fantasy, don’t have medieval settings, don’t include wizards or dwarfs or magic rings. They are set in the present, and confront present day issues, and even have some social comment. Look at John Crowley or Lisa Goldstein or Sean Stewart, just to pull three off the top of my head. Or look at the recent “New Wave Fabulists” issue (#39) of the literary magazine Conjunctions, which had 18 first-rate stories by genre authors that would twirl Jan Dailey’s head right off his or her body.

And these books and writers are also good. It is a horrible and ridiculous thing to define good completely out of genre, making the failure of genre a self-fulfilling prophecy. gex gex, you should be ashamed of yourself. “Transcends the genre” is one of those code phrases that means you can stop reading a review immediately, because it is an absolute indicator that the person using it has no real acquaintance with the genre being condemned.

People believe in brand names. Harry Potter is a brand name. No other children’s book or fantasy novel will get an 8.5 million first printing again. If any of the authors I mentioned got 1% of that they would be quite happy. But they exist. Search them out. Read beyond the bestsellers list. Find your own favorites in addition to or instead of the ones I mentioned. Just don’t confuse a Brand Name with Goodness or with Badness.

And then whenever you come across an article that condemns a whole genre, you can be smug in your assurance that you know a whole lot more than the twit doing the writing.

6

I agree with Papermache Prince. Fantasy approved of by mainstream critics tends to be redefined as something other than fantasy: generally “magical realism”.

7

[QUOTEIt cannot, however, engage with our social world - that is what it is escaping.[/QUOTE]

There are a couple of Ursula K. Le Guin essays which deal with the purpose of fantasy/sf as a literary genre. I’ll see if I can remember the titles. Anyway, I think her premise in the particular essay I’m recalling is that fantasy/sf is an excellent genre through which to explore our basic assumptions about what it means to be human, and also to follow specific cultural ideas to their logical ending. Or to find out what happens if you reverse them entirely. Although it’s not not fantasy, I’m particularly thinking of her book The Left Hand Of Darkness, in which she explore what humanity would be like if gender was mutable rather than fixed. It wsa written in the late 60’s, when traditional gender roles were being heavily questioned. It seems to me a book which does “engage our social world” , even if its setting isn’t realistic.

The word which sticks out of that quote, to me, is “escape” it seems that since all fantasy is being tagged “escapist”, it therefore can’t have any redeeming social commentating to do. If it did, it wouldn’t be fantasy, because all fantasy is by its nature “escapist”. Humph. That’s a bit circular.

Off the top of my head, the fantasy novels being damned include Beowulf, The Odyssey, Pilgrim’s Progress, Erewhon, Frankenstein, Dracula, Gulliver’s Travel’s, Faust, Utopia… plus all the ones mentioned above. That’s quite a bit to condescendingly discard, isn’t it?

I’ve also got Tolkien’s quote about the people who fear others escaping being jailers stuck in my head. Pardon me if none of this makes any sense.

8

Fantasy most certainly can engage with the real world, and even make intriguing points that have direct bearing with life. The critic (as many do) has only a limited knowledge of fantasy and thinks it’s only one very narrow type of fiction.

I dare her to read Ken Grimwood’s Replay and not say it has a real-life message. Samuel R. Delany’s **Flight from Neveryon ** is about the AIDS epidemic. Jane Yolen’s White Jenna, among other things, is a funny condemnation of academic thinking.

9

I made a previous reply which got lost in the ether. Anyway, the gist of it is, I can’t believe people are still so snobby about fantasy. But snobs anywhere are obnoxious - and literary and/or scholarly ones especially so.

and by the way, I also like that quote of dear Prof. Tolkien’s that someone above alluded to. Unfortunately, I can’t remember it exactly either.

10

Ah, great. Another lengthy disertation on fantasy by someone who’s only experience with it is following the latest Harry Potter book’s progress on the NYT Best Seller list. Instead of familiarizing herself with the genre, she looks at the most popular book currently on the market and draws all her conclusions from that, instead of seeking out the fantasy novels that have truly complex themes. Because, like all genres in all artforms, the most popular works are never the best works, they are merely the most accesible works.

Or, worse, she makes the same mistake Gex Gex makes, and seperates genre novels that are true works of literature out of their genre. Usually, such critics cannot accept that a genuinely great author could ever utilize the tools of a pulp genre like fantasy honestly, and so assume that fantastic elements must be used ironically. Feh. This is why, when asked, I always claim my favorite fantasy author to be Salman Rushdie. Let’s face it, the only functional difference between the characters of Midnight’s Children and the X-Men is a lack of spandex, but Rushdie is “real literature” while X-Men are “escapist trash.” Not to this reader. A rose by any other name still smells just the same.

11

How about these?

“The people who hate escapism the most are jailers.”

“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?”

12

This is just confusing “realism” with “subtlety.” There’s absolutely no necessary link between the two. Sometimes reality is brutally simple; and a sufficiently talented person (say, a Gabriel Garcia Marquez or an Italo Calvino) can make the utterly fantastic also extremely nuanced.

Mind you, the author’s way of thinking–realism is the only appropriate mode for serious fiction–was all the rage in the first third of the 20th century. But since writers spent the second two thirds of the 20th century rejecting and disproving this point of view, it’s a bit surprising to see it still being mooted.

(Miller’s quite right about Midnight’s Children; the Children are clearly a reference to good old comic superheroes, as well as, if I remember correctly, the Hindu pantheon.)

13

Now be fair the difference in quality between Harry Potter and Tolkien (I’d be impressed to find a better fantasy writer than him) is great deal.

[QUOTE]
I’m pretty sure than Jan Dailey hasn’t read them. (He or she doesn’t mention any contemporary authors or any adult ones.) Hardly anybody outside of the field would recognize their names. That’s because they don’t write classic fantasy, don’t have medieval settings, don’t include wizards or dwarfs or magic rings.

[QUOTE]

Now I admit that fantasy could be a be a better genre if the writers used that type of setting less.

Under this type of logic there would be no need to ever read Beowulf, or Journey to the West because they don’t have present day settings. I also would think that any reasonable and open mind writer or liter critic would agree that a story dose not need present day setting to reflect on the human condition as it is today.

14

Now be fair the difference in quality between Harry Potter and Tolkien (I’d be impressed to find a better fantasy writer than him) is great deal.

Now I admit that fantasy could be a be a better genre if the writers used that type of setting less.

Under this type of logic there would be no need to ever read Beowulf, or Journey to the West because they don’t have present day settings. I also would think that any reasonable and open mind writer or liter critic would agree that a story dose not need present day setting to reflect on the human condition as it is today.

15

There is a great difference in quality between Tolkien and Harry Potter. My statement is still perfectly true. Most good fantasy writers can write Tolkien under the table.

I was responding to Daniel’s statement that:

I took “our social world” to mean our present day world. It’s quite true that books need not have a present-day setting to resonate with today’s problems. However, many of today’s better fantasy novels are set in our world (or as close to it as Harry Potter is) and not in the faux-pastoral faux-Tolkien world of the Tolkien imitators. (I will agree to stipulate that Tolkien imitators are even worse writers than he was.)

16

Good call mentioning Le Guin. I love her stuff.

This poster has his own catagory for fantasy involving elves, dwarves, and magic rings. Call it Tolkeinish fantasy, swords and sorcery, or whatever. It’s a subset, a specialty: one goes into it knowing pretty much what to expect, and appreciates it, or not, based on the variations or twists on old ideas involved.

Fantasy in the broad sense of the word is another question. Swords and sorcery is fun to read, for me, but ultimately it’s the product of an author unwilling or unable to create his own setting. True fantasy is something different, a broader catagory.

17

Meh. Change “True Fantasy” to something less snobbish sounding. Maybe broad fantasy, as opposed to swords and sorcery.

18

I’d say not “when it concerns itself with more important things it is no longer fantasy,” but rather, “when it concerns itself with more importanat things, it is no longercalled fanstasy”. Or science fiction, or mystery, or whatever genre. In other words, if it’s a really good book or short story, its “promoted” out of its genre. This snobbish attitude – “if it’s good or serious, it can’t be science fiction or fantasy” – has long annoyed me.

19

Bear in mind that it beat out George R.R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords. I had a pretty similar reaction when I head about it myself.

20

What arrogant rubbish. By this logic, any quasi-realistic fantasy (e.g., modern world setting with some fantasy elements thrown in; urban fantasy; historical fiction; perhaps your so-called “true fantasy;” etc.) is the “product of an author unwilling or unable to create his own setting.” Please. Fantasy isn’t fantasy unless an author invents everything him/herself? Then nothing is fantasy. I can respect your opinion that swords-and-sorcery doesn’t do much for you personally, but that in no way justifies the following remark.

Someone mentioned George R. R. Martin, an excellent counter-argument: Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire world is good old swords-and-sorcery, yet the plot could be easily transplanted to a gritty modern urban setting with few if any alterations. He writes in such a way that you can at times forget that there are no such things as magic or dragons, because the cohesion and liveliness of his world is just so damn convincing. It is realistic in the sense that it is consonant with its own reality. Does his story suffer for being set in a patchwork world composed of classic fantasy elements? Not a bit. I actually got into Martin hoping for some rollicking clichéd swords-and-sorcery, and was pleasantly disabused.