In four short weeks I’ve learned a lot from this weekly feature. Mostly I’ve learned how unprepared I am to team lead on such a ginormous subject as fantasy literature. Your comments and suggestions sent me scurrying back to primary sources and put me on a quest to gather unto my library all the critical volumes dedicated to fantasy literature, or at least the ones that don’t cost in triple digits.
You know what I found? There’s very little out there published specifically about fantasy. Oh, there are boatloads of “build your own world” instructional manuals and no lack of “how to write your own fantasy bestseller” books on the market. Literature as a commercial venture may be floundering, but the cottage industry in the “How to be a Writer” sector is flourishing. I found a few tributes to Tolkien and Lewis, a couple of Harry Potter appraisals (most of which appear from their Tables of Contents to be about the burgeoning Young Adult market and how it’s not Real Literature).
Collected essays by prominent writers look to be more promising, as well as back issues of Locus, SFWA Bulletin and a few other periodicals, but they’re not easy to find. Then I found a promising title: Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions by Hal Duncan.
It arrived three days ago, nicely timed with my purchase of Neil Gaiman’s new non-fiction collection A View from the Cheap Seats. Dipping into both at random places, I found a neat synchronicity as both authors considered genre, and what exactly is it? So although I promised to write this week about religion in fantasy, I found that the more I looked at it the more I found it a bigger subject than I had supposed, and worthy of more in-depth discussion, and so put it off for a week in favor of today’s questions: What is genre, anyway? How does fantasy fit genre and how does it bust it?
Genre, any agent or bookseller will tell you, is merely a label that tells people where in a shop your book should live—which section, which aisle, sometimes even which shelf. Writers soliciting agents are advised to add a couple of “comps,” short for “comparable titles” so the agent or editor knows that the writer knows where her work fits in her genre, whether that genre be Upmarket Women’s Southern Romance, or Dark Urban Adult Fantasy set in London, and it can get just that granular. That way the reader looking for some blend of Harry Potter and Regency Manners fiction doesn’t by accident grab an Alternate History Military Fantasy about freedom fighters in Central America rising up against the victorious Confederate Empire of the United States (which, come to think of it, is a pretty intriguing book idea). Or as Neil Gaiman wrote in “The Pornography of Genre, or the Genre of Pornography,”
[Genre] tells you where to look. That’s nice and easy. Just recently Teresa Nielsen Hayden told me it wasn’t actually telling you what to look at, where to go. It was telling you what aisles not to bother going down. (1, p. 42)
Is genre about exclusion or inclusion? It’s an interesting question.
Duncan’s Rhapsody also tackles genre—in fact, the entire volume is, at least from my quick skinny dips into it, built around a genre metaphor. Real literary criticism, written in a shot-from-the-hip offhand style, it offers a dizzying critique of science fiction (which is everything that is Not Realism) and its place in the canon.
Duncan envisions all of writing as a series of neighborhoods in the city of New Sodom; he hangs out in the SF Cafe, an underground bar and grill where every kind of (hmm...labels are tricky here) non-upscale realism gets a booth, or at least a seat at the bar. And SF doesn’t mean just Science Fiction, it also means Scientific Fancy, Scientific Fabrication, Scientific Fabulation, Soul Fiction (for mythographers), Spectaculist Fabrication (for epic fantasy and space opera-types), Symbolic Formulation, Strictured Fantasia, Synthetic Flux, and the umbrella term “So Fuck?” (2, pp. 1-27)
I happened to open the book at the essay, “The Booker and the Bistro de Critique,” (pp. 161-182) and was immediately smacked by déjà vu. This particular essay attempts to answer the question Why Doesn’t SF ever win the big literary prizes? and describes defensive strategies offered by the denizens of the SF Cafe, all of which end at “we’re not them, they hate us, we live in a (literary) ghetto of genre.” (This was written before Ursula le Guin won the 2014 National Book Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.)
Duncan considers what great works by the masters of science fiction should have won, and immediately runs into the same question we considered for several weeks—what is fantasy [or SF] anyway? And his writing is just too delicious not to quote at some length:
Once we scrap the crap of badly-written adventure stories, technothrillers, thought-experiments—the sensationalist or intellectualist lettuce for the genre bunnies, all too often potboiled to pabulum—just what novels do we have that deserve the Booker, what writers of the required level of literary merit that inarguably classify as SF?
The responses range from the blinkered to the blind, from the faith of those who’d argue Heinlein was as good as Hemingway to the heresy of those who’d argue William S. Burroughs was as much SF as Edgar Rice Burroughs. So the boundary debates begin.
When we say SF do we mean Science Fiction, Science Fantasy, Sci-Fi or what? Do we mean any weird-ass, experimentalist, non-mimetic mind-fuck novel which was sold as SF? If that mind-fuck novel wasn’t sold as SF but might have been, does it prove SF can cut it with the big boys if it wants to, or is it just proof that the label damns us to the literati….
And from the boundary disputes come the land-grabs, the fingers pointed to claim everything from Orwell back to Wells and beyond, through Shelley and Swift to Shakespeare. From Huxley to Homer. Casting the net so wide is understandable, right enough, when SF fans feel they’re expected to provide examples of SF with literary chops, works up to the level of the “classics from the history of literature,” an all-encompassing taxonomic level that includes everything from The Epic of Gilgamesh onwards. When you’re working on that scale, putting the David of a few decades of SF up against the Goliath of all acknowledged literary masterworks ever, well, David’s going to reach for a big-ass stone, even if he has to stretch pretty far. (pp.161-162)
Still, all this boundary-setting and ghettoizing gets us precious little; as Duncan reminds us elsewhere, the term genre comes from the Latin generis (family) (p. 51). We’re supposed to be an inclusive bunch. In the “Bistro de Critique” essay, Duncan dispenses with all the land grabs and boundary disputes and, for the purposes of discussing literary prizes, restricts SF to the past fifty years wherein SF has been a market force, and ends up acknowledging that, although the category is still quite young and has still produced good stuff, upscale SF has been baptized and renamed speculative fiction, thereby making it more acceptable to the literati. After all, Salman Rushdie would never write mere fantasy. Would he? (Of course he would, and has—no matter which SF you call it).
We’re not supposed to be walling off each other into increasingly restrictive silos, or aisles, and warning each other not to go down that particular one, because there’s nothing there we could possibly be interested in. Should we be arguing, boundary-disputing, land-grabbing, at all? On one end of the spectrum we have people who say that all fiction is fantasy because it’s all made up, and on the other we have people who say that fantasy must fit only their own strict criteria.
Or is it all just marketing, and we’re arguing over air?
I don’t think so. Tolkien had is own particular understanding of what fantasy is and, although he’s a giant in the field, his is not the only opinion. Robert Asprin wrote horribly glorious and hilarious romps that are fantasy; Mervyn Peake will break your heart, and he wrote fantasy, too. Forgotten Realms shares space with Harry Turtledove with Audrey Niffenegger, and no one’s throwing food.
Which brings me back to Gaiman, and his consideration of the “pornography of genre,” pornography because genre itself is a déclassé concept. Hired once to review a scholarly text about pornographic film, Gaiman had an epiphany about the nature of genre, when the author compared porn films to movie musicals, in that they’re art forms with a specified progression that their audiences expect.
In a musical the plot exists to allow you to get from song to song and to stop all the songs from happening at once. So with a porn film.
And furthermore and most importantly, the songs in a musical are, well, they’re not what you’re there for, as you’re there for the whole thing, story and all, but they are those things that if they were not there you as a member of the audience would feel cheated. (pp. 43-44)
Gaiman distinguishes between works that deliver the elements the audience expects and in the order it expects them, and the ones that expand on those elements, or exist despite them:
If the plot is a machine that allows you to get from set piece to set piece, and the set pieces are things without which the reader or the viewer would feel cheated, then, whatever it is, it’s genre. If the plot exists to get you from the lone cowboy riding into town to the first gunfight to the cattle rustling to the showdown, then it’s a Western. If those are simply things that happen on the way, and the plot encompasses them, can do without them, doesn’t actually care if they are in there or not, then it’s a novel set in the old West. (p. 44)
This is a vital distinction. Compare John Wayne movies with Lonesome Dove or Unforgiven (to continue the Western metaphor) and you see the difference. One group exists to deliver the genre elements, the other expands on them. Or, entering the Marvel universe, Guardians of the Galaxy versus Captain America: The Winter Soldier. One is a fun romp that sets us up for the arrival of big bad Thanatos (whose name [spoiler] translates directly from Greek, and means death) and the other is a meditation on governmental overreach and transparency. Both fit the genre, but one adds layers of meaning beyond genre.
Now, the advantage of genre as a creator is it gives you something to play to and to play against. It gives you a net and the shape of the game. Sometimes it gives you balls.
Another advantage of genre for me is that it privileges story.
Stories come in patterns that influence the stories that come after them. (p. 45)
Patterns—now I think we may be on to something. Patterns of storytelling, patterns of myth, patterns of thinking. This gets us from genre to archetype, and I’m not quite ready to go there yet. Consider it a marker, a signpost: This way there be dragons (and yes, we need to meet them).
In the great family tree of story, fantasy is a substantial branch, but one that’s slippery to define (hell, we can’t even define genre properly). Gaiman asks, regarding of the question of fantasy’s marginalization: “Do we transcend genre by doing amazing genre work or do we transcend it by stepping out of it?” (p. 47) For the record, he doesn’t give us an answer.
Gaiman speaks as a writer practicing his craft and lobbing his balls over the net that fantasy has provided him. As long as it works, he isn’t much concerned whether the Rules of Fantasy Genre (whatever they may be) are observed, because to him it’s about Story. I’ve posed more questions and offered no answers, and I’m not inclined to (mostly because I don’t have any.)
I want to end with Ursula le Guin, who got one of those Big-Ass Literary Prizes that the denizens of the SF Cafe bemoan always go to other people. Her acceptance speech for the National Book Award Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a lifetime achievement award, should be known to everyone, but especially this paragraph is important:
I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
Marxist literary criticism posits that nothing happens in a vacuum, and that currents in literature arise when readers need them. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings because no one else was writing the stuff he wanted to read; Peake did the same with Gormenghast. Le Guin is pointing to a larger issue, larger than canon or ghetto or genre: “all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction - writers of the imagination” are ascendant, and with reason. Fantasy, however you want to define it, exists today because we need it to exist. Simple as that.
1. Neil Gaiman, “The Pornography of Genre, or the Genre of Pornography,” in A View from the Cheap Seats. NY: William Morrow, 2016, pp. 39-48.
2. Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions. Maple Shade, NJ: Lethe Press, 2014