Last time I laid out some basic history of the novel, (a short recap follows). The reason I went back to basics is in the service of clarity. Only by looking back at the great sweep of the novel’s development can anyone chart where we are in the tradition; we know who we are in part by defining our relationship to our literary forbears.
Writers, seasoned professionals or those of us in training, know this. We study it. But most readers don’t pay a lot of attention to the purposes — articulated or implicit — of fiction. That’s the way of things. After all, you don’t have to have studied the history, the rules, the development and the strategies of baseball in order to enjoy watching a game; it helps, but you really don’t need it if all you want to do is have fun.
This is, I think, especially true for consumers of genre fiction, including fantasy. If the story is good, you don’t care about how it came about or where it fits in the canon.
When we come to the question of “what is fantasy,” though, the long view is helpful. Which is why I’m insisting on it. When I asked a few weeks ago whether George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is fantasy, most commenters responded with “Of course it is!” Many readers think that any story plunked into a fantasy setting is by definition a fantasy. Not surprisingly, I disagree, but more about that later.
One of the basics of rhetoric is a rule of three: 1) tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em; 2) tell ‘em; 3) tell ‘em what you told ‘em. In more technical form: introduction/thesis/conclusion. So, after my “Previously On...” teaser, we’ll move to the main course, to disgracefully mix a metaphor while splitting an infinitive (the “never split an infinitive” rule is infinitely stupid, anyway, and better broken thoroughly and often).
Long Long Ago in a Diary Far Far Away….
1. Marxist literary theory: very briefly. Every development in art and culture is an effect of some cause. There has to be a reason why someone creates a work of art—art is rebuttal, commentary, apologia. There has to be a stimulus for the development, and conditions have to be right in order for that development to succeed.
2. A short and opinionated history of the novel. The novel, as we define it today in contemporary Western tradition, is an incredibly flexible prose form. It differs from previous prose narratives in its focus on psychological coherence and thematic development. It differs from short form prose and all poetry except epic in that the novel brings a great panoramic sweep and tone to its subject. There’s room to develop theme and follow it through. After you’ve followed Jean Valjean through eight volumes of tribulation, his death is one of the most moving events in literature—and you need those eight volumes to give his death the thematic resonance it deserves. Whatever the novelist’s objective, whether psychological or sociological, a successful novel focuses, through its narrative lens, on the human experience. This is true of all novels; we are endlessly interested in human experience, and I would argue that the reason we read novels is because we are obsessed with people, with what makes people tick, what makes people human, what constitutes a fully-lived life. After all, Umberto Eco said, “The person who doesn’t read lives only one life. The reader lives five thousand. Reading is immortality backwards.” Eco’s smarter than I am and, by the way, if you follow the link, the interview is delightful.
So that’s basically what makes a novel, and what makes a novel different from earlier and other narrative forms that contain elements of novels but don’t really put it all together: plot, theme, and human focus.
3. A general discussion of art literature and mainstream literary fiction, which holds up a mirror to humanity, to society and, starting in the second half of the twentieth century, to the form of the novel itself. Following the lead of literary critics, avant-garde novelists/semioticians like Eco, Calvino, Danielewski to name a few off the top of my head, turned their focus on emphasizing form and breaking conventions, reshaping narrative—but still in the service of human experience.
So that’s art literature. That’s the highbrow stuff, the stuff that’s taught in college classrooms and lovingly dissected in peer-reviewed journals.
Genre is, the academicians would have you believe, the fast food of the literary world. Genre fiction, they would say, privileges mere story over form and theme. In this post-contemporary world, I think story is going to be the next big “discovery” of literary fiction, and will infuse literature with new blood, moving the focus from a preoccupation with form and back to good story-telling. Maybe I’m only hoping it’ll happen, but it’s a good hope.
The Main Course
In 2014, Ursula Le Guin received the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a lifetime achievement award, and her acceptance speech was a tour-de-force defense of the art of the novel. Almost lost in her crie-de-coeur for imagination and artistic freedom is the first paragraph:
To the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks, from the heart. My family, my agents, my editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as my own, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice in accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who’ve been excluded from literature for so long – my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for 50 years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.
The “beautiful rewards” have gone to literary fiction, not genre fiction, no matter how excellent, how compelling, how provocative or profound. Despite a fairly recent willingness in academia to indulge popular fiction surveys like Harry Potter seminars — mostly driven by student interest — academics remain skeptical and genre fiction remains unserious, unworthy of “real” research (as one acquaintance of mine who taught a single semester of a Harry Potter seminar only to find herself under tenure review, in part because her colleagues accused her of wasting academic resources, learned to her astonishment—and that was only a couple of years ago) or any real respect, even today.
It’s important to remember that, a century ago, all fiction was considered declassé. Even Dickens was pap for the masses, and the reading of novels was a degenerate waste of time. English departments in universities were not organized, and the teaching of literature as literature didn’t start until roughly the end of the nineteenth century. Just a little more than a hundred years—that’s not a long time. A hundred fifty years ago in the US, just reading a novel could get you kicked out of school. Think about it this way: baseball has been an institution longer than the English Department has existed.
Once the literary canon was established, though, it became entrenched, and the focus was mostly on literature as art for its own sake. It’s been a sturdy and durable model that percolated through the educational system. You need not have gone to college to meet the ars gratia artis approach to literature; most of us who suffered through high school lit classes reading books that were way too old for us (Melville and Faulkner, for instance), but college English departments raised it to a high art.
One thing that the academy enforced was the mostly-artificial dividing line between “literature” and “garbage.” Few genre writers have been able to break out of what Hal Duncan calls the “ghetto of Genre,” (2) and most of them by being superb stylists.
What has all this got to do with fantasy? you may be wondering. After all, this whole series is about fantasy, so why am I nattering on about art novels and the literary canon? Ah, yes...well, it’s because of the reasons why fantasy was excluded from literature. J.R.R. Tolkien details one of the reasons in his essay “On Fairy Stories,” when he explains that
Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the ‘nursery,’ as shabby or old fashioned furniture is relegated to the playroom, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused…. (1, p. 130)
In the early Modern era, works of the pure imagination became unfashionable and, being unfashionable, were considered childish. That derisive attitude toward fantasy still exists, despite the artistry and current popularity of fantasy today. It’s important to remember that, without Tolkien, fantasy as a form would not have developed as it did, and hundreds of writers today would not be writing as they do.
Back to Marxist literary theory: things don’t happen without a cause, and the time has to be right for the thing to happen. Why did Tolkien write about Middle-Earth? Because no one was writing the kinds of books he wanted to read. So he did it. And when they were published, except for a few positive reviews, reception from the literati was … generally unenthusiastic. It took decades of readers recommending to other readers, who recommended to other readers, for the love of Middle Earth to percolate slowly through generations, all the while ignored by academics who called Tolkien a “middling philologist and dull Anglo-Saxonist who wrote a trashy fairy story.” By the 1970’s, Ursula Le Guin wrote
There is an inverse correlation between fantasy and money [insert any “serious” pursuit here]. That is a law, known to economists as Le Guin’s Law. If you want a striking example of Le Guin’s Law, just give a lift to one of those people along the roads who own nothing but a backpack, a guitar, a fine head of hair, a smile, and a thumb. Time and again, you will find that these waifs have read The Lord of the Rings — some of them can practically recite it (3, p. 43).
Fast forward to 2000, and everyone from The New Yorker to TMZ was astonished at the overwhelming response both popular and critical to Peter Jackson’s version of the Trilogy. Fussy old academics pronounced themselves perplexed and attributed the onset of hobbits and bright named swords and invented languages to the barren and infantile nature of popular culture. George Will-types agreed. But all their voices faded; the evidence was clear: The Lord of the Rings was an overnight sensation. Yeah, it took only 60+ years for the literati to catch up to what readers already knew.
Step 3: Profit! (or, conclusion)
Certainly this is a skewed telling of the tale. We’ve had forty or more years of fantasists writing in the fantasy ghetto, shuttered away from the “beautiful rewards” and the glow of critical regard, perfecting their craft, developing the form, building on certain foundations that require scrutiny, especially now that the form is growing beyond those foundations and practitioners ought to ascertain whether they’re building on firm ground or sinkhole-prone sand. Nothing so dramatic as the collapse of any literary form is predictable or even possible. What is at question is how long will fantasy endure? And a corollary: how far can you stretch the form and still call it fantasy?
Next time I want to look at those foundations. If you’ve made it this far, you’ve made it all the way to the “why should I care?”
Since we’re all being good Marxist theorists, I ask you to consider this: We know why Tolkien wrote such a startlingly original creation and devoted his imaginative life to it, the great Tree in his imagining, as he put it in “Leaf by Niggle,” the Tree of which The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion were all but separate and discrete leaves. We know why he wrote.
But why did it catch fire? Why did it endure? What conditions were there in the world that permitted the book to set seed in the imagination of its readership? Why so many devoted fans? After all, rare is the novel that remains beloved for a whole lifetime, but The Lord of the Rings has that kind of power. All the more amazing, it endured through post-Modernism, the generations of Beckett and Pynchon and Updike and Vonnegut; if fact, as time went on, it only grew larger on the literary landscape.
It’s not simply that it’s a great novel. Something was going on in that time that powered Tolkien’s longevity, his eventual critical triumph, something beyond his genius. That something enabled the rise of fantasy. I have my own ideas about what it is, but I’m interested in your ideas. Just as there was a force in the 1800’s to suppress the celebration of invention and imagination, another force in the 1900’s fostered it, and gave voice to hundreds of writers working today, in styles and forms from Naomi Novik to Susanna Clarke to Neil Gaiman to Nnedi Okorafor and beyond. What was it? Inquiring Marxists want to know.
References
1. J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories.” In J.R.R. Tolkien: The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, ed. Christopher Tolkien. NY: Penguin, 2006, 109-161.
2. Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions. Maple Shade, NJ: Lethe Press, 2014.
3. Ursula Le Guin, “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” In The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Susan Woods. NY: Putnam, 1979, 39-46.