The astonishing rapidity with which the idea of the new genre asserted itself, in both the marketplace and the academy, seemed akin to a dam burst. When John Clute planned his Encyclopedia of Fantasy in the mid-1990s, he envisaged it as a smaller and more tightly focused volume than the recently updated The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction; it ended up as a sprawling leviathan almost twice as large as originally intended. The immense difficulty Clute and Grant had in setting boundaries to the project and in discovering an adequate descriptive terminology for comparative and taxonomic purposes provides a graphic illustration of the manner in which the historical and critical writings of the 1970s had created more problems than they had solved. The Encyclopedia writers’ heroic attempts to solve the problems in question complicated the situation even farther, as well as clarifying some of the essential issues.
It would have been possible, in constructing this dictionary, simply to reproduce and attempt to use the terminology coined and deployed in the Clute/Grant Encyclopedia, but that would imply the existence of a consensus that has not yet been solidified and acceptance of several other
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judgments that are as manifestly dubious as the judgment that it makes sense to draw a clear distinction between “fantasy” and “the fantastic.” For this reason, many of the terms used in the Encyclopedia, although defined here, are left unused in discussion of authors and their works, while other terms that now seem more useful have been drafted from other sources. It would be foolishly optimistic to hope that this volume can possibly provide the last set of words on the subject, but it is worth insisting that progress is being made and that this dictionary will ideally be part of it.
READING FANTASY LITERATURE
Many writers, readers, and critics still express a preference as strong as Baumgarten’s for naturalistic novels, not on the grounds that the experienced world is the best of all possible worlds, but on the grounds that it is, after all, the one in which we are condemned to exist, about the transactions and possibilities whose we need to be as fully aware as possible. The illusion that the characters in novels might be actual people cultivates the further illusion that by standing in their shoes—thus getting to know them far more intimately and completely than it is possible to know any actual person—readers are actually enhancing their understanding of the world of experience, in a way that identification with characters involved in strange and bizarre encounters and adventures never could.
There may be some truth in the first stage of this argument, although it is probably dangerous to assume that the people who actually surround us can be understood as if they were literary characters. There is, however, none in the second; there is not the slightest reason why we cannot learn just as much from hypothetical encounters and adventures of various improbable and impossible kinds as from thoroughly mundane ones.
Even so, most fantasy novels begin naturalistically, adopting the pretense that the worlds they contain are simulations of some aspect of the reader’s experienced world, albeit one that is carefully distanced geographically, and perhaps historically. In the most discreet variety of fantasy literature, a singular element of fantasy is introduced into this seemingly mimetic context so that its disturbing effect can be observed and measured.
This kind of exercise is what Farah Mendlesohn calls an “intrusive fantasy.” The modus operandi is convenient in several ways; most importantly, it allows readers to orientate themselves quickly and easily within
l • INTRODUCTION
the text. It is easier for author and reader to establish and maintain comfortable communication if they are working from a set of common assumptions, and it is useful to both if the reader can be snugly accommodated within the text before strange and bizarre things start to happen.
In traditional intrusive fantasies, the intrusions usually arise as relics of the mythical past, and the tacit assumption that such relics might exist serves as a reminder that the present state of worldly affairs is assumed by traditional fantasy to be the result of a long process of erosion that has removed supernatural and magical aspects from contemporary normality. In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, Clute calls this process “thinning,” and he finds an acute consciousness of it very widely distributed in modern fantasy.
This representation of the primary world as a product of long-term magical erosion contrasts sharply with the representation of the primary world as the product of progress, one in which a wealth of knowledge and technological apparatus has been accumulated. This is the principal reason why science fiction and fantasy seem to many observers to be contradictory categories, despite the fact that the stories they tell are often formulated in exactly the same way; the intrusive fantasies of sf draw their intrusions from the present rather than the past, as irruptions from alien worlds or as new discoveries made by inventive scientists. This makes traditional intrusive fantasies seem rather old-fashioned to the modern eye, and it is a significant factor in the evolutionary process that has made other fundamental categories of fantasy more fashionable.
The most obvious alternative to the narrative pattern in which our world is disturbed by a fantastic intrusion is the pattern in which the reader is led away from the mimetic world-within-the-text into a “secondary” world, either by undertaking a journey into terra incognita or by passing through some kind of portal, akin to the Gates of Ivory and Horn that were once alleged to admit sleepers into the world of dreams. This kind of fantasy is often known as “portal fantasy”; under that label, it makes up a second major category of Mendlesohn’s classification of fantasy stories. The third principal category of that classification, which Mendlesohn calls “immersive fantasies,” consists of novels that adopt the much more difficult task of substituting an entire fantasy world for the simulacrum of the real world that readers usually expect to discover when they embark upon the task of immersing themselves in a novel.
This is, in a sense, the ultimate challenge for the writer, the reader, and the techniques of narrative realism: to allow the reader to move directly
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into a wholehearted heterocosmic creation, without warning or guidance, and to establish facilities that will enable the reader to feel quite at home there in spite of its strangeness. This seems, and is, a difficult thing to accomplish—and yet, if we forget novels for a moment and return to an earlier phase of literary evolution, there was a time when almost all fantasy fiction was “immersive” in Mendlesohn’s sense, although it did not seek to immerse the reader in the fashion typical of novels. Oral narratives and recorded stories that resemble folktales in the manner of their narration are necessarily represented as having taken place “once upon a time,” in milieux that are unlike the experienced world in various fundamental ways.
There is, in consequence, a sense in which the evolution of modern fantasy literature toward a renaissance of “immersive fantasy”—which is to say, the evolution of the fantasy novel—has been a process of recovery: accommodating the magical and mythical materials of folklore to the novel form. This was not a simple process, and its complications need to be appreciated if the history and nature of fantasy literature are to be understood. It is important to observe that the process does not end with recovery. Once accommodated within the novel form, the materials of folkloristic fantasy became far more flexible and imaginatively powerful than they had ever been in their “natural habitat”; this flexibility and power has already changed the nature of fantasy literature dramatically, and it will determine its future prospects.
The literary art of designing mimetic simulacra is dependent on the fact that a text, unlike a painting, which can be seen as a whole, is the product of a linear string of information. The words making up a literary text build an image gradually in the minds and memories of its readers.
The literary image has to be assembled in such a way that readers can be eased into its details and complexities, while being provided with sufficient narrative momentum to m
otivate them to follow the informative thread to its terminus.
This process of assembly is greatly assisted in mimetic fiction by the reader’s awareness that the partial picture offered by the informational string can be filled out—however vaguely—from stocks of knowledge relating to the actual world. As soon as it is indicated to the reader that the world within the text is a secondary world rather than a simulacrum of the primary one, however, the utility of those preexistent stocks becomes uncertain and problematic. The burden of informing the reader about the nature, population, and history of a secondary world is likely to be considerable, unless shortcuts can be devised. The notion of “once upon a time” is one such shortcut.
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The assumption that there was a mythical past beyond the reach of
memory, when magic worked, miracles occurred, supernatural beings coexisted and interacted with humankind, and animals had the power of speech, forms the basis for a second store of “knowledge” that coexists with the ones people build up concerning the actual world. One of the reasons why it seems to belong to childhood is that people generally master this alternative stock of knowledge more rapidly than they can master stocks of knowledge about the actual world, because it is as simple as it is fanciful. It is also limited and relatively changeless—unlike the actual world, which is so complicated and subject to such sweeping changes that stocks of knowledge relating to it are often obsolete as soon as they are formed.
As Michel Butor has pointed out, this is the main reason why folktales and their clones are uniquely useful as stories told to children by adults.
Because a child’s experience of the primary world differs so drastically from an adult’s, it is difficult for parents and their offspring to draw upon common stocks of knowledge in constructing simulacra of that world; the simplified secondary world of folktales is much easier to grasp, and it provides common ground in which adults can meet with children almost as equals, each knowing the same things about the world within the story—
especially if the story seems to have an existence of its own independent of any particular teller or hearer.
Since the advent of the novel, writers have developed a complex armory of transferable narrative techniques, by means of which literary mimesis can be cultivated—most obviously, the development of the “third person limited” viewpoint. This device is uniquely conducive to the facilitation of a reader’s intimate identification with the viewpoint character—a degree of intimacy impossible in any medium other than text read “by eye.” Readers are not passive participants in the process of mimetic simulation; the most sophisticated among them have become experts in picking up the cues that writers distribute within their texts, just as writers have become experts in crafting and placing those cues. As literary history has unfolded, therefore, mature readers have become increasingly sensitive to the cultivation of resemblance; as the skills of mimetic reading have been honed and mimetic writing has become more demanding of those skills, many skilled readers have become specialists in that kind of collaboration. To them, the devices of folktales—the assumptions wrapped up in the phrase
“once upon a time”—seem implicitly primitive, no matter how ingenious they may be in serving their own purposes.
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Given that observers of literary history have to be highly skilled readers, it is only natural that they consider the triumphant advances of novelistic technique to be literature’s principal progressive component. From this standpoint, heterocosmic modifications may be easily seen as flaws.
Although the main trend in painting during the last two centuries has been opposite in its direction—moving away from the cultivation of accurate resemblance toward impressionism, expressionism, abstraction, and surrealism—there have been relatively few literary critics who have been prepared to tolerate, let alone laud, the artistry of heterocosmic secondary creation. It has seemed to many observers that there is a fundamental contradiction and incompatibility between the novelistic devices of narrative realism and the pretense of “once upon a time.”
Heterocosmic creators, understandably, tend to see things differently. They do not see the nonmimetic elements of their work as flaws; on the contrary, they consider that it is the heterocosmic aspects of their creativity that demonstrate the ingenuity and originality of their work. No matter how defiantly they take this stance, though, heterocosmic creators must acknowledge that the problems involved in accommodating readers comfortably within their fictitious worlds are far more awkward than the problems faced by creators of literary simulacra, and that this awkwardness may easily infect the fictional worlds themselves. From the viewpoint of heterocosmic creators, the assumptions bundled up in the “once upon a time” device are as inconveniently limiting as the constraints of rigorous mimesis; they represent something to be escaped, challenged, or transfigured—but that requires sacrificing the utility of the device and discovering other ways by which readers might be quickly and comfortably accommodated within secondary worlds.
A heterocosmic creator cannot organize the informational thread of a text in the same way as can the creator of simulacra. The reader’s attention must be drawn to similarities and differences between the world within the text and the primary world. The heterocosmic creator must not only work hard to establish the relevance of some aspects of the readers’ preexistent stocks of knowledge into the text, but must work at least as hard to ensure that certain other aspects are definitively excluded. The heterocosmic creator must separate into two distinct parts the readers’ ready-made understanding of the way a world might work and must then compensate for the part ruled irrelevant by supplying a new understanding to take its place. Even in its sim-plest variants, this process requires considerable skill and versatility on the part of the writer; it also requires considerable skill and versatility—as well as an uncommon generosity—on the part of the reader.
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The skills that writers and readers must bring to the navigation of complex heterocosmic constructions are different in kind, as well as degree, from those required in the navigation of mimetic texts. Instead of requiring to be persuaded that the heterocosmic construction is as perfect a simulacrum of the primary world as can reasonably be contrived, readers of nonmimetic fiction require to be persuaded that a world within a text is plausible and interesting in spite of its marked differences from the primary world: differences that might pertain, as a set, uniquely to the world within a particular text. This kind of reading requires not only special skills but a special kind of willingness to be persuaded. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it “the willing suspension of disbelief,” while J. R. R. Tolkien preferred to represent it as a kind of “secondary belief” uniquely appropriate to secondary worlds—but Tolkien also called it “enchantment,” and some other theorists have gone even farther than that in representing it as an altered state of consciousness.
As with the skills involved in reading mimetic fiction, there has been a gradual evolution during the last two centuries in the skills required in reading heterocosmic constructions. Many individual readers have extended both ranges of skills, and a few have doubtless achieved equal expertise in both; they are not, after all, mutually exclusive opposites.
The construction of both mimetic and heterocosmic creations has to proceed from the same common ground: the writer’s and reader’s shared understanding of the primary world. The differences between them are matters of replication on the one hand and variation on the other—but variation can occur in different ways and at different rates; it may involve supplementation, reduction, transfiguration, hybridization,
chimerization, and the careful management of ambiguity, or any admixture thereof.
These variations are relatively easy to manage in intrusive fantasies; the stocks of knowledge that the writer and reader share can be mobilized in their entirety and modified in an orderly linear fashion. The predominance of horror stories and
farcical comedies within this category is a corollary of the nature of intrusive fantasy. As Mendlesohn observes, a supernatural intrusion is bound to function within a simulacrum of the primary world as a “bringer of chaos”: it is disturbing by definition, and disturbance has two typical forms, generating either anxiety or humor, or some combination of the two. The close relationship between horror and comedy is, of course, very evident in the evolution of the horror fiction genre, as well as the evolution of “black comedy.”
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Intrusive fantasy also has the advantage of a seemingly “natural” story arc. The solution to the problem posed by a bringer of chaos is self-evident: order must be restored. The seeming naturalness of this story arc is, however, dependent on the assumption that “normality” is a privileged state, whose recovery is imperative. In a mimetic text, this seems to be a viable contention, because the simulacrum of the primary world not only reflects but supports the prescriptive definition of social order; it relies upon the “common sense” of that order to engage and consummate its fundamental marriage of minds. In a heterocosmic construction, that foundation becomes uncertain and negotiable. An intrusive fantasy must, by definition, begin its story in a simulacrum of the primary world, but the moment the intrusive element appears, the possibility emerges that the simulacrum might be permanently transformed into something else. Indeed, it is arguable that from the moment the intrusive element appears, the simulacrum has already been transformed—and that normality cannot possibly be restored to it, because the possibility of further intrusions can no longer be ruled out. The history of intrusive fantasy clearly exhibits a growing awareness of this argument and its consequences.
The A to Z of Fantasy Literature Page 6