Strategies of FantasyAuthor: Brian Attebery
Genre: Literary Criticism
Pages: 142
Final Thoughts: Interesting look at past trends and motivations of the genre, but quite outdated in many respects.
My required critical text for this term is Brian Attebery's Strategies of Fantasy. Printed in 1992, it is a kind of update on Attebery's previous work,
The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature, which was published in 1980. I had something of a rough time figuring out his main goal - he focuses on disproving criticism that places fantasy outside the bounds of "great literature" in early chapters, but later chapters turn to investigating the changing methods and functions of the fantasy narrative.
The following is my brief summary (with occasional sidebar comments) of the main points of each chapter. I began this summarizing outline for myself, because I read quickly and have never been much inclined to think in terms of literary criticism and all its theories, so I needed to straighten things out for myself. All material in quotes is lifted from the text by Attebery - quotes of his quotes are attributed to their original writer/speaker.
Chapter 1 - Fantasy as Mode, Genre, Formula
- fantasy-as-mode - vast breadth of lit. - "taking in all literary manifestations of the imagination's ability to sar above the merely possible." "...a position on the world as well as a means of portraying it."
- fantasy-as-formula - restricted in scope, recent in origin, specialized in audience/appeal; consistency, predictability
- mimetic (imitative of reality) vs. mythic/fantasy - poles on the "mode" continuum
- "The combination of such [contradictory/problematic] images into a narrative order is an attempt to achieve iconic representation, so that the narrative can... give us new insight into the phenomena it makes reference to."
- "As the rules grow more definitive, the game becomes easier for the novice, and, at the same time, more challenging for the expert, the artist who wishes to redefine the game even as she plays it."
- comic formula - begins with a problem and ends with resolution; complete tale, not ambiguous - sense of wonder
Chapter 2 - Is Fantasy Literature? Tolkien and the Theorists
- traditional evaluations of "literature" involve "the sort of style that calls attention to its own innovations after the fashion of poetry, the sort of characterization that portrays 'significant aspects of human reality' and the sort of incident that seems to occur of its own necessity, rather than according to the dictates of an overall plot."
- by these standards, much of modern fantasy is not literature - it often uses a purposefully naive voice, simple style, portrays archetype characters, and involves incidents or characters that happen/appear for the sole purpose of forwarding the plot, not for the examination of their character... fantasy is "contrived"
- one theorist proposes that fantasy is a means of attaining/expressing the forbidden, that it is a genre of desire - and its functions are to express or expel those subversive desires.
- CS Lewis gives a third function - "It stirs and troubles him [the reader] (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth." - I agree with this.
- "Fantasy's reliance on the impossible, its comic structure, and the resulting positive estrangement or wonder it can offer the reader can all be understood as resulting from a particular use of language, a technique for investigating the workings of the mind, and the adoption of an ecological treatment of humankind's place in the natural world."
- I found the second half of the chapter, which discusses Tolkien's LOTR in terms of various psychological and social theories, to be more or less an indulgence of the author's admiration for the named project, rather than describing how LOTR can be seen as representative of this type of thematic presentation in other fantasy stories
Chapter 3 - Fantasy and Postmodernism
- modernism - goal = penetrate falsehood, flout convention, recreate a more authentic self
- Tolkien, Lewis stood apart because though it wasn't taboo to use folk material, you had to use it with irony, distort it in some way, not "support" it
- postmodernism - perpetuates illusions to eventually violate them, adopts/exaggerates outmoded conventions, de-centers the individual
- returns to narrative and story, but with an awareness of their artificiality; blurs the distinctions between reality and fiction; uses contemporary allusions rather than a completely separate world
- extensive discussion of John Crowley's Little, Big. - blends the lines between contemporary culture/fantasy
Chapter 4 - Fantasy and Narrative Conventions: Story
- conventions are the terms of agreement between writer and reader
- "in constructing a story, the writer is giving in to the reader's impertinent demands to know what happened next, rather than expressing her vision of human nature" - seems very selfish to do the latter
- "Writers are making use of the fantastic to investigate the way narrative, in a two-way partnership between speaker and listener like that of language, creates the realities it seems merely to reflect."
- control of time - magic can be used to alter the flow or sequence of events, speed, duration, etc. can all be affected and produce a different effect than in realistic fiction
- "To shape a narrative, you have to phase the various incidents and so control their nature that you set up significances, correspondences, foretastes and expectations, until your finished story becomes something else again from its simple outline." - Diana Wynne Jones
- this works in fantasy because magic/religion have the force of natural law - they are not a device of the author/narrator, but a natural happening within the world
- because the expectation is of a positive resolution ("gains must, however slimly, outweigh losses") this gives a chance to change expectations of what that ending can look like - re-evaluate meaning of an event
Chapter 5 - Fantasy and Narrative Conventions: Character
- fantasy has a different conception of character than realistic fiction - focus is on archetypes, ideals of humanity rather than specific, "everyman" type characters.
- embodiments of psychological phenomena acting out their struggle toward integration in a projected landscape of the mind - but entirely at the service of the story, as a social construct
- a character is what s/he does
- fantasy blends the fairy tale and "realistic" ideas of characterization - real, recognizable people struggle to integrate on an archetypal scale
Chapter 6 - Women's Coming of Age in Fantasy
- male coming-of-age stories are very common - female themes less common, in part because of lack of documentation/respect for earthly female initiation ceremonies/traditions
- many authors begin, make writing accessible, by starting out with a male protag, then shift to female in a second volume/section
- some treatments of male COA plots are directed to question practices/beliefs behind them, and many female versions do the same - male is often about controlling power, female focus on unleashing it from long-time suppression
- challenge is to "retain the values of the female initiation - its bestowal of identity and mystery upon the initiand - without turning her characters into tribal mothers and drudges." - must begin in social realities, and must also transcend them, or else it offers little in helping reach maturity
- many fairy tales/folk tales have been forgotten, with strong independent female protags; selective editing of anthologies, passive verbs, etc.
- most portray women as having innate, intuitive knowledge of unexplainable things, and borrow knowledge of breaking away from the past from the male characters to avoid following the preordered path, which would lead them back into the group of "women and children", who are seen as essentially, developmentally the same
- talks about a few recent works that do not require male intervention to initiate plots - this is one of the ways in which the material is highly dated
Chapter 7 - Science Fantasy
- potential to point out the weaknesses of both for comic or ironic effect; can also use the strength of each to negate weakness of the other; can appeal to fans of both
- I disagree with his classification of Dragonflight as science fantasy - certainly wasn't seen that way at publication, and the series wasn't revealed to be science fantasy until 1989 with Dragonsdawn (8 books into the series), which establishes the origins of Pernese society
- has the potential to re-connect the concrete and abstract meanings of divergent words which, over the course of time, have come to have metaphorical meaning but little real significance
Chapter 8 - Recapturing the Modern World for the Imagination
- challenge is to get readers to believe that a real, normal, recognizable place could also harbor fantastic elements right under our very noses, as it were
- discussion of two books - in my mind, both are very limited because their "fantasy" could be explained as simple hallucination on the part of the protagonist, or so they seem - I haven't read them, but so the descriptions lead me to believe.
- seems to be absolutely no anticipation of what we now call urban fantasy, in which magazine editors can also be powerful witches or vampires - odd, because even when the book was printed, the beginnings were stirring - perhaps E.T. and Flight of the Navigator are more "urban science fiction", but Buffy is certainly urban fantasy, and it could be argued that the Goonies has a strong element of urban fantasy in it as well.
My overwhelming feeling as I finished the book is how incomplete it is. Granted, it comes in at under 150 pages long, and a lot has happened in the last 15 years, but this was printed only three years or so before I started reading fantasy geared toward adults rather than children's or YA material. There is a long list of authors who were already well-established at the time of publication who aren't given so much as a mention: Terry Brooks, Marion Zimmer Bradley, David Eddings, Kate Elliot, Raymond E. Feist, C.S. Friedman, Katherine Kerr, Katherine Kurtz, Mercedes Lackey, Stephen Lawhead, Anne McCaffrey (mentioned only in the context of Pern being science fantasy), Robin McKinley, Jennifer Roberson, Margaret Weis, Tad Williams, and Janny Wurts glare at me from my own shelves, wondering where they got lost. Madeline L'Engle and Brian Jaques might have been left out because their stories are geared primarily toward younger readers, but I would argue that they have been just as influential as any discussed in Attebery's work. Works like Elizabeth Moon's
Deed of Paksenarrion, ten years old at the time of publication, are not discussed even in the chapter on Women Coming of Age in Fantasy, where it would have fit in superbly.
In terms of my own writing, one of the ideas that most crystallized for me upon reading this text are those of wanting to create that sense of wonder - the pull toward something greater, beyond the human scope but still within our world, enriching it. I also like the reinforcement of the idea that in fantasy, things are allowed to be fated or destined - but the expectation that things will be fated, as such, gives me room to play with reader expectations in my novel about fate and destiny.
I also really like the idea that words that have diverged throughout history into concrete and abstract words that used to be simply aspects of the same thing can be reconnected through a narrative and return to their original, combined state. With fantasy, something that would be considered metaphoric or abstract in realistic writing can be concrete and literal within the context of my story, and that's a powerful thing.
I'm really interested in finding a more recent look at trends in the fantasy genre, especially as applied to women, because I think Attebery's treatment is significantly dated. While it does paint an interesting picture of the state of the genre in the early 90's, such a treatment can only have so much application within the context of the modern market. I feel like the branch of fantasy that has most influenced my development and my writing is largely bypassed in favor of more "literary" fantasy, if that's possible.
Book #15