“Fantasy” became firmly established as the label for a popular commercial genre of adult fiction in the 1970s. As with the two other popular genres whose contents were also nonmimetic—horror fiction and science fiction (sf)—the creation of the label involved the invention of a generic history: a myth of creation and organization, complete with legendary heroes. Fantasy’s two rival genre labels—both of which represent subgenres of the broader field—tend to base their claims to modern relevance on myths of relatively recent creation; the mythical past of horror fiction situates the origins of the definable genre in the gothic novels of the late 18th century, while the mythical past of sf places the development of its recognizable literary method in the 19th century.
Some definers of genre fantasy have adopted a similar course; while admitting that genre fantasy takes its definitive themes and images from myth, legend, and folklore—raw materials older than literature itself—
they nevertheless insist that “fantasy literature” is something relatively new that needs to be distinguished from the literature of earlier eras despite the many elements they have in common. The reasons for this are complex, but it is primarily an attempt to avoid stigmatization; the desire to distinguish from “folktales” and “children’s fantasy” a “fantasy literature”
fit for the consumption of modern adults is natural enough, although attempts to implement it in this way generate further complications.
The strategy that represents “fantasy literature” as something relatively new is summarized and reinforced by John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997, coedited with John Grant), which is the closest thing to a definitive text the genre currently has. The argument alleges that we should not speak of “fantasy literature” as having existed before the Age of Enlightenment, because “fantasy literature” is an essentially contradictory notion, formed in dialectical opposition to the notion of “realistic (or
xlii • INTRODUCTION
naturalistic) literature.” Before the Enlightenment, there was allegedly no such manifest opposition, because the realistic and fantastic elements of literature coexisted harmoniously, free of any apparent tension or enmity.
“The fantastic,” in this view, could not qualify as a genre, because it was not significantly separate or distinct from other raw materials of story making.
Critics employing this argument sometimes find it convenient to separate “fantasy” and “the fantastic” in a contemporary context as well as a historical one, because it helps them to identify contemporary literary forms that they wish to save from the pejorative connotations routinely attached to the notion of “fantasy,” or at least to give diplomatic recognition to the fact that many writers and other critics wish to make such saving moves. Thus, Brian Attebery begins his study of Strategies of Fantasy (1992)—which is one of the leading contenders in an ongoing struggle to present a coherent theory of the genre—by contrasting “fantasy as genre”
(which he sees as an essentially modern phenomenon) with both “fantasy as formula” (an essentially commercial phenomenon) and the much more generalized “fantasy as mode”—which, he asserts, still extends into “the vast, unformed realm of the fantastic.”
The Clute/Attebery strategy must, however, be contrasted with the strategy, adopted in showcase anthologies, by which Lin Carter sought to describe and identify the genre of “adult fantasy” in the 1970s, a strategy that was tacitly adopted by such reference books as Neil Barron’s guide to Fantasy Literature (1990). These texts and others like them extend the history of modern fantasy literature all the way back to Homer, in a more or less unbroken evolutionary chain.
This dictionary will, inevitably, have to document both these strategies and the terminologies spun off therefrom, but it will also have to choose between them in order to permit its own organization. Readers of the chronology will already have noted that it favors the Carter/Barron strategy; it does so on the grounds that the Clute/Attebery strategy creates more confusion than it dispels.
Any attempt to introduce a crucial category distinction between a noun and its adjectival form is probably doomed to founder on the rock of linguistic necessity, but the attempted differentiation of “fantasy” from “the fantastic” is further compromised by other special meanings that critics have attached to the term “fantastic”—particularly those derived from French deployments of fantastique. Even if this were not the case, the improvisation of a historical divide between modern fantasy literature and
INTRODUCTION • xliii
earlier manifestations of the materials that it recycles and transfigures is a brutal artifice. To claim that there was no manifest opposition between the real and the imaginary before the 18th century is to imply far too much; it is true that the Enlightenment refined ideas about the definition and determination of “reality,” but it is certainly not true that previous storytellers were unaware of any contrast or tension between the naturalistic and supernatural elements of their stories.
Critics who do not accept the distinction between “fantasy” and “the fantastic” take it for granted that the history of “fantasy literature” should begin with the origins of writing. A strong case can be made for this assertion by considering the formation of the reputation of the first significant author of fantasy literature thus defined, Homer. Homer is probably a fantasy himself, a legendary hero invented by the preservers of the Iliad and the Odyssey; what is important about those two works, however, is precisely the fact that their preservers thought it necessary to invent an individual author for them, irrespective of whether they actually had one.
Whether he existed or not, the idea of Homer was so powerful that no less than seven Greek cities claimed the privilege of being his birthplace. According to those who sang his praises, he was unlike all those who had gone before him, in being no mere transmitter of independent stories but a literary genius— the literary genius, in an era and culture that had as yet produced no other.
The myth of Homer illustrates the fact that writing immediately called into being the notion of the writer. Homer was an originator, not in the sense that he was the inventor of the characters and events he wrote about, let alone their metaphysical context, but in the senses that he was a transfigurer first and a recycler second, and that his transfiguration enjoyed a special status. Homer the narrator does not represent himself in this way; when he calls upon the unnamed Muse, it is not for inventive inspiration but for the gift of memory so that he might correctly remember the lines he must sing. Those who formulated his myth, however, also suggested that he was blind, subtly implying that he did not know his own nature. To those who fabricated his legend, Homer was an orderer and formulator in his own right; he was also an archetypal model for others to imitate, the very definition of a literateur.
There is no doubt that Homer was a fantasist, in every sense of the word.
Whether or not he or his inventors believed in the real existence of the gods they intruded into his canonical accounts of the fall of Troy or of the monsters encountered by Odysseus, they knew perfectly well that there
xliv • INTRODUCTION
was a difference between the supernatural aspects of the stories and the naturalistic ones. They understood such concepts as symbolism and
metaphor, because they knew—how could they possibly not?—that the
mind can produce images as well as reproduce them, imagine things that have no actual existence as well as things that do. They knew, even though they had as yet no history, that the mythical past was indeed mythical.
They knew, even though they had as yet no naturalistic fiction with which to contrast them, that the Iliad and the Odyssey were works of fantasy literature.
The most important thing to understand about the nature of fantasy—
in its literary forms as in its psychological ones—in the view adopted by this dictionary is that its definition has nothing at all to do with belief. To believe in miracles—or magic, ghosts, or fairies�
��is not to transfer such entities from the category of Chaucerian fantasye into that of reality; they still remain outside the range of ordinary events and actions, and beyond the scope of everyday causes and effects. Belief does not affect the boundary between the natural and the supernatural, nor does the slight fuzziness of that boundary confuse the pattern of discrimination unduly.
Chaucerian fantasyes that people believe in are still strange and bizarre, and recognizably so; once this is admitted, it is easy to see that the reach of Chaucerian fantasye extends far beyond the limits of literature, into scholarly writing and social action. It is necessary to understand, if the pattern of fantasy literature’s evolution is to be properly understood, that there are scholarly fantasies and lifestyle fantasies as well as literary fantasies.
The extent to which storytellers prior to the 18th century may or may not have believed in magic, divination, fairies, witches, ghosts, legendary heroes, or mythical gods is not a significant factor in the decision as to whether to classify stories about such ideas and individuals as fantasy.
Prior to the 18th century, supernatural elements were much more likely to be mingled with naturalistic ones in works of literature, but that does not mean that meaningful distinctions could not then be made as to which were which, and as to what narrative functions the supernatural elements were supposed to perform. It is for these reasons that the descriptions contained in this dictionary will accept that fantasy literature is as old as literature itself and that its elements of fantasy are much older. This assumption should assist the task of explaining how the components of modern fantasy literature evolved and why they have come into the various configurations evident within and without the commercial genre.
INTRODUCTION • xlv
THE THEORY OF FANTASY LITERATURE
The pioneer of modern aesthetic philosophy, Alexander Baumgarten
(1714–62), argued that the creation of a literary work is a process of “secondary creation” analogous to the primary process by which the world was made. He also argued that the best kind of secondary creation is rigorously mimetic, restricted to the faithful and artful reproduction of the world of primary creation, and that any attempt to create “heterocosmically” is necessarily inferior.
It was natural that Baumgarten should believe this, because he was a follower of Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), whose assertion that God’s creation had produced the best of all possible worlds had not yet been shamed by the mockery of Voltaire’s Candide. It is not so obvious why other literary creators and critics—especially those who were later to side with Voltaire in regard to the merits of Leibnizian optimism—should have agreed with Baumgarten, but the majority was on his side in 1760 and remained there for the next two centuries and more.
Baumgarten’s view contrasts sharply with the contemporary opinion of Edmund Burke, whose Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) argues that the imagination requires exercise just as the body requires physical exercise if the mind is to develop in a healthy manner, capable of sustaining and benefiting from the full range of the emotions. Although Burke’s ideas paved the way for the development of Romanticism and excused gothic indulgence in terror and horror, it was Baumgarten’s view that had the greater support—with the result that anyone seeking to celebrate “heterocosmic” creativity had to begin by defending it, building defensive walls capable of withstanding an ideative siege. The assertiveness of Burke’s championship of imaginative ambition was rarely replicated, let alone carried forward; since the publication of the Philosophical Enquiry, discussion of fantasy literature has been almost entirely a matter of resistance to disdain rather than the celebration of innovation.
Baumgarten’s Aesthetika was published—not entirely coincidentally—
when the novel was making great strides toward its establishment as the dominant form of literary endeavor. Although it was still reckoned less meritorious than poetry throughout the 19th century, the novel’s potential seemed as great as its popularity, and the techniques of narrative realism that novelists developed to facilitate their work came to seem wondrously powerful. The invention of printing had standardized the shapes of whole
xlvi • INTRODUCTION
words, thus opening up the potential for people to read “by eye” rather than “by ear”—which is to say, to absorb the meaning of a word or phrase directly rather than by translating it into a set of phonemes. Poetry is essentially geared to reading by ear, making use as it does of such devices as rhyme, scansion, and alliteration; all poetry is, in effect, designed to be read “aloud,” even if the words are only sounded within the privacy of the reader’s mind. Prose, on the other hand, can be read without figuratively moving one’s lips; a page of prose can be scanned, and its meaning taken up, far more economically than a page of verse.
The possibility of reading by eye rather than by ear facilitated the development of the devices of narrative realism: the prose writer’s ability to draw the reader “into” a story, so that it becomes something more like a lived experience than an observed artifact. Inevitably, the education of readers in this kind of surrogate experience—and the education of writers in the skills of its production—initially concentrated on simulation and mimesis. The first task and first test of the techniques of novel writing were bound to be that of facilitating the reader’s illusion that the world within the texts was the world, because that was the only way that the reader could feel entirely at home there, as fully immersed as was possible.
It was, however, realized almost immediately that the techniques facilitating this immersion, and the conviction they carried, could be used satirically. Jonathan Swift’s account of Lemuel Gulliver’s travels mimicked the form of novelistic traveler’s tales that had already taken full advantage of the power of incidental detail, a seemingly candid first-person narrative voice and the seemingly accurate mapping of time and space within the story, but it used such devices teasingly and flippantly. As soon as the novel form had been invented, the potential was there for the creation of
“immersive fantasies”—but the business of educating readers to experience exotic worlds within texts with the same degree of conviction, and the same sense of “being at home,” as could be obtained from naturalistic narratives was never going to be easy. The history of fantasy literature is, to a large extent, the history of that educative process; the recent emergence of a commercial genre of fantasy is the proof of its success. In the interim, however, it was inevitable that a defensive frame of mind would continue to dominate writing about fantasy literature.
Theorists who prefer to think of fantasy literature as a contradictory product of the Enlightenment inevitably seek its origins in the Romantic movement, which became the Enlightenment’s loyal opposition. Some
members of that movement did indeed make great strides in the rehabili-
INTRODUCTION • xlvii
tation of traditional fantasy materials and the adoption into contemporary literature of real and imitation folktales, and it was their justifications for so doing that laid the apologetic foundations of modern fantasy theory. Because they were couched so defensively, however, the ideas the Romantics formulated showed no conspicuous evolution for a long time. The 18th-century opinions of Johann Musäus, Madame d’Aulnoy, Charles Perrault, Antoine Galland, Voltaire, Nathan Drake, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge regarding the utility and potential of literary fantasy were not much extended by the 19th-century and early 20th-century theorists who came after them, whose English representatives included Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Machen, and G. K. Chesterton. Even critics who refused to consider fantasy literature as a subdivision of children’s literature were forced to begin their work by arguing long and fiercely against opponents who insisted that it was.
The definers of modern “adult fantasy” had to start from that position; the fundamental document of modern fantasy theory originated in 1938 as a lecture, then en
titled “On Fairy Tales,” given by J. R. R. Tolkien, who in it asserted his conviction that fairy tales—and the whole literary field of which they had become archetypal—were far too useful in psychological terms to be considered unfit for adults. The essay “On Fairy-stories” that Tolkien developed from his lecture proposed that fantasies modeled on fairy stories performed three fundamental and vital psychological functions: recovery, escape, and consolation.
The first of these three terms, in Tolkien’s usage, proposes that reality cannot be clearly seen or fully appreciated without an imaginative sidestep that extracts the observer from imprisonment therein and that standpoints located in imaginary worlds allow readers to recover a proper sense of perspective. The second proposes that the pejorative connotations frequently attached to the notion of “escapism” are unwarranted and that temporary escapes from the burden of maintaining one’s public image and conduct are entirely healthy, by no means symptomatic of cowardice or laziness; well-constructed fantasies, Tolkien suggests, provide ideal places of refuge for the stressed imagination. The third proposes that there is valuable moral rearmament to be obtained from the climactic “eucatastrophes” that typically set things right in fantasy stories.
It is partly because Tolkien practiced what he preached in his essay that the modern commercial genre of fantasy came into being when it did and in the format that became typical of it. Tolkien was its Homer, The Lord of the Rings its Iliad and Odyssey. When the genre’s most conspicuous advocate in
xlviii • INTRODUCTION
the commercial publishing arena, Lin Carter, attempted to describe and de-limit the field, he called his first book on the subject Tolkien: A Look behind The Lord of the Rings (1969); Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy (1973) was a sequel and extrapolation.
The territory thus claimed and staked out was swiftly colonized by academic writers; such surveys as Colin Manlove’s Modern Fantasy (1975), Eric S. Rabkin’s The Fantastic in Literature (1976), Roger C. Schlobin’s The Literature of Fantasy (1979), and Marshall B. Tymn, Kenneth J. Zahorski, and Robert H. Boyer’s Fantasy Literature (1979) supplemented Carter’s mapping, with appropriate supportive arguments, while such texts as L. Sprague de Camp’s Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers (1976), Marion Lochhead’s The Renaissance of Wonder in Children’s Literature (1977), Roger Sale’s Fairy Tales and After (1978), Diana Waggoner’s The Hills of Faraway: A Guide to Fantasy (1978), and Stephen Prickett’s Victorian Fantasy (1979) retraced and reemphasized the genre’s connections with earlier forms of popular fiction. Within a decade, the commercial genre was up and running and its history (mythical as well as actual) had been thoroughly mapped out, summarized in a five-volume Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature (1983), compiled by Keith Neilson on behalf of Frank Magill’s Salem Press. It was then that theoreticians began the serious work of contesting and refining definitions, and trying to figure out where the potential limits of the genre might and ought to lie.
The A to Z of Fantasy Literature Page 5
