Fantasy

The Liberation of Imagination

Richard Mathews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781136785542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Using a broad definition of fantasy to include myth, folklore, legend and fairy tale, this survey of the genre will entice as well as inform any student interested in the mysterious, mystical or magical. Beloved authors like J. R. R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, William Morris and Robert E. Howard are examined closely.

Chapter 1

FROM ANTIQUITY TO INFINITY: THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN FANTASY

F antasy enables us to enter worlds of infinite possibility. The maps and contours of fantasy are circumscribed only by imagination itself. The breathtaking sweep of its scope can be awesome and even frightening, but this powerful, vivid mode of human consciousness has been part of artistic expression from the earliest known oral and written texts right up to the present day. In fact, the literary genre of modern fantasy is characterized by a narrative frame that unites timeless mythic patterns with contemporary individual experiences. Its stories at their hearts are about the relationship between the individual and the infinite.

Although it is difficult to define literary fantasy precisely, most critics agree it is a type of fiction that evokes wonder, mystery, or magic—a sense of possibility beyond the ordinary, material, rationally predictable world in which we live. As a literary genre, modern fantasy is clearly related to the magical stories of myth, legend, fairy tale, and folklore from all over the world. There are also elements of fantasy in even the most realistic literature, just as daydream and imagination hover at the edges of our waking minds. Fantasy as a distinct literary genre, however, may best be thought of as a fiction that elicits wonder through elements of the supernatural or impossible. It consciously breaks free from mundane reality.

Because fantasy is so pervasive in the early literature of every culture—from Egypt, Babylonia, China, India, and Persia to Greece, Rome, and the West—and is inseparable from the greatest tales and legends of antiquity, which are filled with transformations, marvels, and supernatural events, one critic has observed that “fantasy forms the mainstream of Western literature until the Renaissance.”¹ But the literary paths of realism and fantasy began to diverge in the 1600s as new systems of learning from the Renaissance brought about a rejection of superstition in favor of science and reason. Until the scientific method began to tame and frame the world, the human imagination had had free rein to explain mundane reality by referring to supernatural forces. Trees might be transformed human spirits and the sun pulled by a chariot across the sky. The great resources of human reason gradually reduced the number of acceptable explanations, however, leaving less room for unrestrained belief and imagination.

By the nineteenth century, history began to be conceived as falling into three broad developmental periods: ancient, medieval, and modern. The medieval period was viewed as the “Dark Ages,” and as scientific reasoning took root even the great ancient civilizations were increasingly regarded as primitive, superstitious, and unenlightened. Despite a few stunning celebrations of fantasy in the Renaissance, including Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the trend toward a literature purified by reason and reality was unmistakable.

In The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt brilliantly describes the changes that helped shape realistic fiction and documents its full emergence as a genre in the eighteenth century. Fantasy as a modern literary category all its own took shape through a dialectic with this new literature of realism. The insightful and influential modern authors who crafted fantasy as an alternative literary form seem intuitively to have understood that they could create a complex and appealing counterpoint to popular fiction about ordinary life by imbuing their writing with ancient human impulses toward myth and romance. Thus fantasy as a genre emerged in the shape of novels and short stories, the two most significant modern structures for contemporary fiction.

These modes of realistic fiction first rose to popularity during the eighteenth century through books by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, and Frances Burney, then flowered into the great age of literary realism in the nineteenth century in the writing of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and others. The widespread interest in and market for stories of real life with ordinary, believable characters grew and flourished concurrently with the increasing dominance of the scientific method, the expansion of the industrial revolution, and the unfolding of related historical developments, including changes in printing and publishing technologies, increasing literacy, and a rising middle class. The emergence of realism as the mainstream focus for the literary imagination created a clear dialectical pole against which the fantasy genre could counterthrust as a specialized mode of fiction. In fact, fantasy especially utilized the novel—the most ambitious and popular vehicle for realism—as its primary literary vehicle as well.

Unlike realistic fiction, fantasy does not require logic—technological, chemical, or alien—to explain the startling actions or twists of character and plot recorded on its pages; such events may be explained by magic or not explained at all. The presence of these magical or impossible elements in a fictional form (a novel or short story), in which realism and logical causality are expected, creates a tension between form and content in which the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief” can be exercised in surprising ways. Fantasy’s fundamental departure from realism creates what influential literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov calls “hesitation” in the reader, whose instincts for credibility are stretched through narrative events beyond realistic explanation. Other critics, such as Harold Bloom, have argued convincingly that the best fantasy involves no hesitation but a sense of being caught up in and swept away by the “agonistic encounter of deep, strong reading.”² In either case, the fantasy writer’s freedom to depart from realism involves an obligation to coherence and to the establishment of a relationship with the reader’s experience, perhaps best expressed in Robert Scholes’s description of “fabulation” as “fiction that offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know, yet returns to confront that known world in some cognitive way.”³

Fantasy is dosely allied to other variations of the realistic novel, including gothic horror, science fiction, utopian fiction, and satire, and one way to clarify a generic identity for fantasy is to consider it in relationship to these. Significantly, each of these kindred genres more directly depends on and utilizes the conventions and contexts of realism, whereas fantasy consistently incorporates a radical departure from the real. The gothic tale of terror, the first significant generic rebellion against the realistic novel, developed a clear identity of its own, playing fear and dark terror against the light of reason. A series of startling books in exotic settings, from Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765) to the works of such writers as William Beckford, Ann Radcliffe, M. G. (“Monk”) Lewis, and Charles Maturin, contained unexplained horrors, bleeding statues, and walking portraits. French and German authors also used supernatural elements to develop a wider range of expression than is possible in the realistic novel. Broadly speaking, these works were part of the romantic movement and include such milestones as Jacques Cazotte’s Le diable amoureux (The Devil in Love, 1772), Ludwig Tieck’s three-volume collection Phantasus (1812–1817), the early-nineteenth-century German tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, and the works of Friedrich de la Motte Fouque (most significantly Undine, 1811) and Wilhelm Meinhold (whose Sidonia the Sorceress, 1847–1848, was a great favorite of the Pre-Raphaelites and one of the books William Morris chose to publish at his Kelmscott Press). Yet despite frightening intrusions from the supernatural, these authors maintain their hold on familiar, material reality, evoking terror precisely because of this realistic grounding.

Science fiction is similarly anchored in the actual. It depicts events in a rational universe in which occurrences are subject to reasonable scientific explanation and causality, however futuristic, alien, or inventive the science. Orson Scott Card, a contemporary author who writes both fantasy and science fiction, explains the difference in simple, practical terms: “If the story is set in a universe that follows the same rules as ours, it’s science fiction. If it’s set in a universe that doesn’t follow our rules, it’s fantasy.”⁴ The presence of magic in fantasy is probably the most common departure from the “rules” of science fiction that help distinguish it from fantasy, but as Eric Rabkin rightly points out, fantasy and science fiction are most appropriately viewed as two ends of a spectrum, with blurred boundaries in the middle.⁵ Within similar spectrum models we should also locate the shifts from fantasy to supernatural and horror fiction, fantasy to utopian or satirical writing, fantasy to realism. Utopian fiction may be distinguished from fantasy by the fact that it usually sticks closer to the realistic “rules,” for the ideal society must be seen in relationship to the realistic present, and most utopias imply there is a way to change our present, real society into a more ideal society by means other than magic. Yet fantasy often includes utopian or dystopian elements, as might be expected given the philosophical and moral concerns also characteristic of the genre, so there are areas where these modes of writing overlap and coalesce, as in the numerous fantasy variations on the Arthurian utopia of Camelot or in such novels as Anatole France’s The White Stone, Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar, and James Hilton’s Lost Horizon.

Like science fiction and utopian writing, satire bears a similarly close relationship to fantasy, but it, too, is nearer to the real world than to pure fantasy. Satire aims to correct defects in the real world by holding them up for ridicule. Through laughter and logic satire seeks to amend or improve identifiable behaviors in real life lived by realistic rules. To the extent that the satirist fully creates an alternative impossible world, as Swift does in Gulliver’s Travels, for example, satire may depart into fantasy, but usually the departure is tinged with the awareness of exaggeration and unbelievability, and the literary focus or thematic purpose turns us away from the fantastic toward the real. Despite these fundamental differences, the literary spectrum that includes gothic novels, science fiction, utopias, and satires forms a supportive continuum for fantasy. These allied modes, fed like fantasy from many ancient sources in myth and folklore, continue to contribute much to the evolution of the genre. There are no pure genres, and fantasy is no exception.

Foundations of Fantasy in the Ancient World

Nearly all of the surviving literature of the ancient world, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to The Odyssey, is rooted in fantasy, though at the time each work was composed much of it was believed by those who heard or read it to be true. In eras when matters of superstition and magic were popularly accepted as fact, much of what we see today as nonrealistic elements in literature did not necessarily seem impossible or imaginary. Nonetheless, it is clear that even the earliest fantastical prose fiction was constructed by its authors as fiction rather than as history. Although those who heard or read the texts may have believed them to be literally true, the artists who created them clearly placed significance on nonliteral metaphoric or mythic purposes. The aim of these early works seems to have been a desire equally to stimulate, educate, and entertain. In some cases there was also a desire to influence, impress, and control.

The oldest known examples of ancient fiction—texts we would now call fantasy—are magical tales from Egypt recorded on papyrus that has been dated about 2000 B.C.E. The earliest (ca. 2000–1900 B.C.E.), “The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor,”⁶ is the story of a young man sailing on the Red Sea who is shipwrecked on a phantom island. There he meets the genie, or guarding spirit, of the place, a 50-foot snake with a 3-foot beard and a body overlaid with gold. Finally he escapes without harm, as the creature has assured him he will, and the island vanishes from sight. This oldest fantasy text contains archetypal narrative elements of the genre: an uninitiated hero on a sea journey is thrown off course by a storm, encounters an enchanted island, confronts a monster, and survives, wiser for the experience.⁷

One aspect of this and other ancient Egyptian fantasy texts that establishes them as fiction is that each tale is imaginatively presented within a larger narrative frame. The “Shipwrecked Sailor,” told to entertain a superior officer during a tedious voyage, is a clear precursor, in both narrative frame and specific subject, of the cycle of Sinbad tales in The Arabian Nights. It is an episode also analogous to Odysseus’s arrival at the Phaeacians’ island in The Odyssey. And the marvelous monster is the clear prototype of the greatest fantasy monster of all time—the dragon, sometimes called the “wurm.”

The narrative frame for three tales from the somewhat later transcribed Westcar Papyrus casts the storytelling back in time, as if the tales were being told about 2680 B.C.E., to Khufu (Cheops), builder of the Great Pyramid at Giza (Gizeh), across the Nile from Cairo.⁸ Actually, the stories might well have been told at one time in his court. The first one is about a magician whose wife has been seduced. The magician reasserts his honor and power by making an enchanted wax crocodile that comes to life to kill his wife’s lover. In “The Boating Party” a magician parts the waters of a lake in order to recover a malachite pendant in the shape of a fish that has been lost by a maiden of the court. In “The Magician Djedi,” a magician exhibits his power to decapitate animals and later to restore them to life by cutting off and then rejoining the heads of a goose, a duck, and an ox. These stories, which were no doubt written down long after they were actually composed, seem to date from the third century B.C.E., a period from which no full texts have yet been recovered. But they make it clear that from the earliest literary history human beings have been involved in the creation and preservation of texts portraying archetypal patterns of deep mortal concern: the first tale draws connections between art and magic and links these with the most basic human problems in love relationships, including jealousy, honor, and justice. The second tale is an archetypal story about human control over nature. The third involves control of life and death. In each there appears a mixture of reality and magic, and each treats finite relationships with forces of the infinite.

Even more important in terms of influence and mythic scope is the great Babylonian text of about the same period (ca. 2000 B.C.E.) known as The Epic of Gilgamesh. The narrative establishes many motifs and archetypes, which recur in the Bible and in the Greek epics. The legendary King Gilgamesh is linked to an unlikely companion in the person of a wild man, Enkidu. Together they face a series of startling adventures, including one with Humbaba, a fire-breathing monster. A character named Utnapishtim is a prototype of Noah in the Bible, and the epic, perhaps best known for its account of a great flood similar to Noah’s, predates the Old Testament.⁹ After Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh quests for immortality, but a serpent robs him of the herb that promises eternal life, and Gilgamesh returns home to die. The wandering hero/king, the unlikely companion, the combination of king and savage, the elemental adventures (Gilgamesh faces challenges of earth, air, fire, and water), the conquest of a fire-breathing monster, and Gilgamesh’s thwarted search for immortality—even his downfall through the agency of a serpent—are archetypes repeated so frequently in fantasy that they have become defining characteristics of the genre.

The ancient Egyptians attributed the gift of writing to the god Thoth, who was said to have bestowed it on humankind, so this link to the infinite or transcendent is mythically present in various accounts of the very act or gift of writing. In fact, hieroglyph, the term that combines the Greek words heiros (holy) and gluphein (to carve or engrave) to refer to the characters of Egyptian writing, means “writing of the gods.” The Egyptian and Babylonian magical tales, although not primarily religious documents, exhibit awareness of the holiness inherent in the nature of language itself. An emphasis on the transcendent and creative power of words remains an integral characteristic of fantasy today. The self-reflexiveness so often claimed as modernist or postmodernist is in fact an ancient trope and ...