Fantasy Cathedrals and McMansions

My post about "serial epic fantasy" a few weeks ago has gotten more (non-robot) hits than most of my recent posts, so I thought I would revisit the topic, which is, after all, a perennial one on this blog. In fact, it goes back to my second post ever, when I threw down my gauntlet before the literary world.

At the time I wrote that, I had just despaired of ever finding an agent or publisher for my gargantuan first novel, which was 150K words after trimming it down by half and seriously boring. It was about autism, autogyros, quantum mechanics, and various characters that eventually found a home in my Enoch stories. At the back of my mind, I knew that it was too inwardly focused to be readable. I ultimately relegated my autistic recluse to the void in favor of a sanguine pugilist who leaps before he looks and basically does everything I would never do.

So that post was (and is) a kind of manifesto. Manifestos are fun, especially when they're full of hyperbole and self-importance. So let's do another! I'll begin with an unapologetic catalog of my twenty favorite fantasy novels, listed in chronological order:

• Phantastes by George MacDonald (1858)
• She by H. Rider Haggard (1887)
• The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (1895)
• The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson (1908)
• The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson (1912)
• A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1912)
• Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1916)
• A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay (1920)
• The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison (1922)
• The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany (1924) 
• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft (1927)
• At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft (1931)
• Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis (1938)
• Perelandra by C. S. Lewis (1943)
• Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake (1946)
• Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake (1950)
• The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (1955)
• The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle (1968)
• Little, Big by John Crowley (1981)
• The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe (1983)
• Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock (1984)

Well, okay, that was twenty-one. To get on that list, you have to have made a permanent impression my imagination, and I have to have reread you as a guilty pleasure at least once. A list of my favorite short fiction would include pieces by George MacDonald, Robert W. Chambers, Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and C. L. Moore. I tend to gravitate toward the weird and ornate, like "The Repairer of Reputations" or "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth" or "The Tower of the Elephant" or "The Demon in the Flower."

So I think it's fair to say that I'm biased toward the what came before the Tolkien watershed. When I read what other people have to say about pre-Tolkien novels, I often get the feeling that they're viewed as ungainly precursors, as the dinosaur skeletons at the museum entrance. They're the work of primitives who didn't quite know what they were about, Giottos and Fra Angelicos to our modern Raphaels and Caravaggios. They're tolerated or even admired, but as a kind of academic curiosity that one delves into occasionally as an act of literary penance.

My preferences are quite the opposite. I do read modern fantasy. I discover hidden gems that way. They're out there, to be sure. But my first and only real love is the pre-Tolkien canon. How many times have I read A Voyage to Arcturus or Phantastes or The Worm Ouroboros? Too many to count. If I read modern fantasy, it's because I'm looking for something to satisfy the hunger whetted by these works.

But, more often than not, genre fiction cheats this desire. It's got no bite, no danger, no weirdness. It's tame. To put it in galline terms, it's caponized and clipped. It lacks the grotesque stylistic bosses, the glowing digressions, the awkward framing devices and dumb shows of the classics.

I could point to myriad ways in which the works of the pre-Tolkien canon influenced one another. But each draws far more from philosophy and science and mythology. They were part of a real literary movement rather than a genre. A literary movement is a living thing that grows according to its own inner logic and is necessarily bound in time; a genre is a dead thing, a pigeonhole in a commercial classification system depending on the presence or absence of various material elements. The difference between fantastic literature and a lot of genre fiction is the difference between a Gothic cathedral and a McMansion.

And in case I seem entirely dismissive of more recent efforts, let me emphasize that I'm not talking about everything that's out there right now. I've read things that I've liked very much. But just look at the sheer quantity of it all. The kinds of works I like can't be mass produced or made to order. They're like lightning strikes. And one thing I note about the majority of the authors I listed above is that their primary career was not fiction writing. If it had been, they would have starved.

Let me also emphasize that I'm not into nostalgia. I have no desire to try to "get back" to anything. If a true fantasy novel is to be written in our time, it must take root right here in the twenty-first century, drawing its nourishment from the world around us even if in reaction against it. There are no "good old days" to hearken back to. The world in which fantasy first flourished was a dirty and brutal place, and the master fantasists were people of their time. Even the one author most responsible for creating the modern fantasy novel, the aggressively backward-looking William Morris, was a social activist whose efforts in manufacture reform were echoed in the ultra-modern Bauhaus half a century later.

As Tolkien points out, the Escape for which fantasy is often blamed has "Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt" as its companions. True fantasy is not safe. It's revolutionary. But genre fiction can't be revolutionary. It mixes and matches the established tropes, making novel arrangements rather than creating new worlds. It might, if quite certain of its audience, cautiously advance a few progressive or conservative talking points, but it will never ever do anything that makes it unclear which tribe it's supposed to appeal to, because that is the one unforgivable sin.

It's easy enough to talk about all this on my blog, and I do often enough. The quality of my novels is debatable, but at any rate they're out there. Sometimes you just have to get up on a rooftop and shout about what you're doing and why you're doing it.

Plus, the robots were getting kind of rambunctious in my absence. Go away, robots. Dance somewhere else.

Related: A Festival of Wrap-Around Cover Art

The Day of the Orcs

"All right, all right!" said Sam. "That's quite enough. I don't want to hear no more. No welcome, no beer, no smoke, and a lot of rules and orc-talk instead. I hoped to have a rest, but I can see there's work and trouble ahead."

This is tangentially related to my last post.

I've instituted a new family tradition: every week we have a movie night. My children, who are four and six, don't watch television – we don't even get it at our house – and have practically no media exposure. So, I thought, maybe it's time to begin introducing them to a rich if vulgar vein of our artistic culture.

Last weekend's showing was The Wizard of Oz. My wife had been concerned that the witch and the flying monkeys would be too scary (they are for her!), but, no, not our kids. I guess all these years of telling them creepy fairy tales like "Hansel and Gretel" and "Jack the Giant-Killer" and "The Juniper Tree" have finally paid off.

Actually, what really bothered my son (the six-year-old) was the implication that the story was all a dream. He asked about it while I was tucking him in, and I told him I thought the movie left it up to the viewer. We decided together that it wasn't just a dream. But I was a bit put out by it too, though I confess that the movie as a whole – which I hadn't seen in a long time – greatly delighted me.

I told someone else about it, and they mentioned that they'd been taught in college (they were an educator) that this is the good kind of children's fantasy, the kind that makes it very clear what's real and what's not, so that the poor dears don't get their heads turned and start looking for Technicolor dream worlds inside tornados. The bad kind of fantasy treats the events of the tale as real events. The child never wakes up or, if they do, they discover the rainbow scepter in their bed.

The main problem I have with the "good" type of fantasy is that it's stupid. When I was a kid I hated dream-stories with a passion. Why on earth would I want to read about a silly dream of the chief pencil sharpener's assistant at Acme Widget? As an adult I feel just the same way, and I discover that my children do as well. Fiction is fiction, I suppose, but the dream machinery just drapes the story with a layer of condescension: "Ha ha! You thought this was real! But it's not." Or: "No, you idiot, things like this don't really happen. You knew that, right?"

Granted, exposing the idiocy of assertions made by child development "experts" is like shooting fish in a barrel. But this particular attitude is, I think, more than just annoying. It's nothing short of damnable. It was beaten out, hammer and tongs, in the deeps of the earth by a secret cabal of Orcs.

Yes, that's right. I said Orcs. Their numbers being too small now to plot large-scale domination, they seek to influence events from behind the scenes.

 

And what Orcs most dearly want, more than anything else in the world, is for the children of Men to become efficient slaves. They want lesser breeds of imps and goblins to lord it over. They hate anything that makes the children look out the window and dream of a better place, so naturally they heap scorn on Fantasy, calling it a form of Escape (a bad word on their lips).

To which Tolkien replies:

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which "Escape" is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. 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? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter. Just so a Party-spokesman might have labelled departure from the misery of the Führer's or any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery. In the same way these critics, to make confusion worse, and so to bring into contempt their opponents, stick their label of scorn not only on to Desertion, but on to real Escape, and what are often its companions, Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt. Not only do they confound the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter; but they would seem to prefer the acquiescence of the "quisling" to the resistance of the patriot. To such thinking you have only to say "the land you loved is doomed" to excuse any treachery, indeed to glorify it.

Now, if the Orcs can't keep children from reading fantasy, they at least want them to understand that it's just a silly dream that we put away when there's real work to be done. Hence their compromise on dream-stories.

Their approach to adults – and, I think, their more recent approach to children – requires a bit more subtlety but goes a step further. Rather than settling for making adults despise the medium – which they still do, to be sure – they aim to make its very ideals despicable in the eyes of its readers. After all, we know what Orcs think about heroes:

"There's a great fighter about, one of those bloody-handed Elves, or one of the filthy tarks."

What's a tark, you ask? For the etymology of the term, please see the Appendix to The Return of the King. However, to our excellent diversity-minded modern Orcs, Frodo son of Drogo is just as much a tark as Aragorn son of Arathorn. It's all the same to them, and they're as tired as hell of it. Enough with your Hectors, your Beowulfs, your Rolands, your Arthurs! No more Gilgameshes and Galahads and Godfreys! Grow up! Give us something different! Except, when they say, "give us," they really mean, "give the great unwashed masses," because these Orcs always know what's best for everyone else.

To accomplish their ends of making the ideals of Fantasy despicable, they create (as Saruman his pitifully derivative pits and engines) meta-stories, stories that masquerade as Fantasy but serve rather to browbeat the casual reader and insult the perspicacious or principled reader through "subversion" and "deconstruction." The condescension of the dream machinery mentioned above now comes out in the open and slaps the reader in the face.

In the end, of course, such stories are read only by critics and other writers, and the sub-genre becomes a Worm Ouroboros, devouring its own tail. The one to whom Tolkien and Lewis, or even Howard and Smith, are like fine wine, decried now as a fool who reads knaves, flees with terror before the face of such insipid, self-regarding, effete, irrelevant "literature" as the Fellowship of the Ring fled the Balrog, except in this case there's no fire to ignite his mantle of darkness, because "No Smoking" signs are hung on all the walls.

Here, then, are the three main thrusts of the Orcs' assault on Fantasy:

1. Keep people from reading Fantasy.
2. Make Fantasy seem unreal and silly.
3. Mock the ideals of Fantasy.

To which I reply with the words of the Marsh-Wiggle:

"Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world."

And so I'll keep looking for the land of the sun, though all the Orcs ever spawned oppose me. I'll keep reading (and trying to write) books that aren't afraid to tell tales straightforwardly, without the winks and nods and other cheap tricks the literati use to dress up the watery barf they call "writing." I'll keep painting pictures of flowers and insects and saints and princesses and knights without an iota of irony, commentary, or self-reference. And I'll read my children the stories I like, and guide them (for a brief time) through the beauties and terrors of the world, and protect them, until they are mature enough to fight for themselves, from the clutches of "experts" whose smiling, concerned faces hide the hearts of Orcs.

"The world is all grown strange. [...] How shall a man judge what to do in such times?"
     "As he ever has judged," said Aragorn. "Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house."

It's not the first time the Orcs have tried to take over, and it won't be the last. The proper responses are the same as ever: Escape, Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt.