Reading: Mythopoesis, Austen
Some correspondence re the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award finalists has come up on that list. It’s great to be talking these things with other readers-but at the same time I wish the discussion had come up when I didn’t have to force my thought processes through the fog of accumulated exhaustion.
One person led off by expressing annoyance at the fact that McKinley’s Sunshine made it onto the list.
When we-that is, the Mythopoeic Society, of which I have been a member since 1967--resuscitated the MFA back in the mid eighties, those of us who resisted a complicated definition of what was appropriate and what wasn’t finally prevailed, leaving the guidelines at: in the spirit of the Inklings.. I especially liked this because it was so very broad. When you consider the variety of stuff the Inklings produced, from Williams’ supernatural thrillers to Lewis’ retelling of the Psyche myth in Til We Have Faces, that seemed to include any sort of fabulism.
I wrote back, enumerating a few reasons why I voted for Sunshine I said that we all obviously interpreted the guidelines differently, but usually we came up with a respectable list each year. Though personally I was disappointed that Tooth and Claw hadn’t made it onto the list, and that the Le Guin (which I consider yet more of the same old sermon she’s been preaching for the last twenty years, however exquisite her prose) did. Nothing new there, and it seemed to me that McKinley was trying new territory with her piece, as was Walton.
The person wrote back, saying that they thought Tooth and Claw was well-written and a very good read, but not any more mythopoeic than the McKinley.
Not mythopoeic! I didn’t write back yesterday. Migraine and so forth. I feel I need to write back today, and not let the discussion die away, because I want to find out how mythopoeic is defined for other readers who love fantasy. Yes mythopoeic translates as “myth-making” (whatever that in its turn means). I am surprised, I must admit, as I consider these two books to be excellent examples of mythopoesis-as I define it. So how do I define it? That’s where I keep getting up to check the laundry, and the crockpot chili I have to take for today’s school function. I’m too tired to think well, and will probably misstate myself, but it seems to me that the best fantasy transcends the everyday, the accepted and even invisible boundaries of our contemporary culture, that it employs imagination not just to create entertaining images and situations, but to see us as other than what we are now-as individuals, as gender, as family, as culture. This, for me, is the excitement of fantasy, and incidentally makes me impatient with the hipsters who sneer at fantasy, dismissing it all as reactionary cliché. Of course there is plenty of that, but there is plenty of that in every form, including mainstream and even experimental fiction.
Both of these novels are quite carefully crafted, the one exploring the redefinition of bonds both individual and communal when the accepted world has sustained a devastating change, the other making real, and exploring the consequences thereof, certain Victorian assumptions which even now underlie some of our behavioral patterns. Is that not mythopoesis at its very best?
My reading this week was confined to comfort reading, which in this case was Jane Austen’s Emma and I am nearly two-thirds of the way through Persuasion, the nth read for them both. This time through Emma I was marveling at Austen’s experimental writing. It always amazes me just how profound was her impact on the modern novel, in this particular novel how she succeeds in telling the story around the standard heroine and hero, confining herself to the point of view of the Rival, as well as the chorus, and how the heroine’s and hero’s fraught tale impacted everyone else’s lives. Because of course Jane Fairfax is the standard heroine: orphan, beautiful, elegant and sophisticated beyond her family connections, doomed to a horrible life through no fault of her own, falls in love with a rich, handsome scion of a noble house whose relations would never accept her. Forced to see him courting the perfect woman for his station, collapsing when about to be thrust into the misery of governessing (her rival coming by and rubbing it in with offers of medicine, country-rides in her carriage, etc, to make her suffering worse) and then spectacular and miraculous last minute rescue by the death of the one impediment to her happiness. Austen is so sly with her commentary: Jane, the perfect heroine, is really a bit of a bore in her reserved perfections; Frank Churchill, of course perfect from Miss Fairfax’s view, is a bit of a pain in the ass, to others. How I love that book.
One person led off by expressing annoyance at the fact that McKinley’s Sunshine made it onto the list.
When we-that is, the Mythopoeic Society, of which I have been a member since 1967--resuscitated the MFA back in the mid eighties, those of us who resisted a complicated definition of what was appropriate and what wasn’t finally prevailed, leaving the guidelines at: in the spirit of the Inklings.. I especially liked this because it was so very broad. When you consider the variety of stuff the Inklings produced, from Williams’ supernatural thrillers to Lewis’ retelling of the Psyche myth in Til We Have Faces, that seemed to include any sort of fabulism.
I wrote back, enumerating a few reasons why I voted for Sunshine I said that we all obviously interpreted the guidelines differently, but usually we came up with a respectable list each year. Though personally I was disappointed that Tooth and Claw hadn’t made it onto the list, and that the Le Guin (which I consider yet more of the same old sermon she’s been preaching for the last twenty years, however exquisite her prose) did. Nothing new there, and it seemed to me that McKinley was trying new territory with her piece, as was Walton.
The person wrote back, saying that they thought Tooth and Claw was well-written and a very good read, but not any more mythopoeic than the McKinley.
Not mythopoeic! I didn’t write back yesterday. Migraine and so forth. I feel I need to write back today, and not let the discussion die away, because I want to find out how mythopoeic is defined for other readers who love fantasy. Yes mythopoeic translates as “myth-making” (whatever that in its turn means). I am surprised, I must admit, as I consider these two books to be excellent examples of mythopoesis-as I define it. So how do I define it? That’s where I keep getting up to check the laundry, and the crockpot chili I have to take for today’s school function. I’m too tired to think well, and will probably misstate myself, but it seems to me that the best fantasy transcends the everyday, the accepted and even invisible boundaries of our contemporary culture, that it employs imagination not just to create entertaining images and situations, but to see us as other than what we are now-as individuals, as gender, as family, as culture. This, for me, is the excitement of fantasy, and incidentally makes me impatient with the hipsters who sneer at fantasy, dismissing it all as reactionary cliché. Of course there is plenty of that, but there is plenty of that in every form, including mainstream and even experimental fiction.
Both of these novels are quite carefully crafted, the one exploring the redefinition of bonds both individual and communal when the accepted world has sustained a devastating change, the other making real, and exploring the consequences thereof, certain Victorian assumptions which even now underlie some of our behavioral patterns. Is that not mythopoesis at its very best?
My reading this week was confined to comfort reading, which in this case was Jane Austen’s Emma and I am nearly two-thirds of the way through Persuasion, the nth read for them both. This time through Emma I was marveling at Austen’s experimental writing. It always amazes me just how profound was her impact on the modern novel, in this particular novel how she succeeds in telling the story around the standard heroine and hero, confining herself to the point of view of the Rival, as well as the chorus, and how the heroine’s and hero’s fraught tale impacted everyone else’s lives. Because of course Jane Fairfax is the standard heroine: orphan, beautiful, elegant and sophisticated beyond her family connections, doomed to a horrible life through no fault of her own, falls in love with a rich, handsome scion of a noble house whose relations would never accept her. Forced to see him courting the perfect woman for his station, collapsing when about to be thrust into the misery of governessing (her rival coming by and rubbing it in with offers of medicine, country-rides in her carriage, etc, to make her suffering worse) and then spectacular and miraculous last minute rescue by the death of the one impediment to her happiness. Austen is so sly with her commentary: Jane, the perfect heroine, is really a bit of a bore in her reserved perfections; Frank Churchill, of course perfect from Miss Fairfax’s view, is a bit of a pain in the ass, to others. How I love that book.