by Stefan Ekman
A key element of many fantasy definitions, and one I take as a defining feature of the genre, is the presence of something impossible that is accepted—and treated—as possible by writer and reader. The different realities that the borders and boundaries keep apart are actually territories of different possibilities. What is impossible in one place is possible on the other side of the border. A fundamental function for both boundaries and borders is, in fact, not to separate but to unite; to join opposing realities. To cross from one side to the other is to rethink the world and to see the impossible as possible.
Rethinking the world is the issue underlying chapter 4. Fantasy is a genre that, in principle, allows us to rethink, reimagine, and reconsider anything. One of the central relationships that a setting can present is that between nature and culture. The guiding question for this chapter was how the nature–culture relation is portrayed in fantasy cities. In the four close readings, we encountered highly dissimilar relations between the two domains, relations possible to arrange according to a variety of principles. Looking, for instance, at how nature is or is not incorporated in the cultural domain, we find that in Minas Tirith, nature as a part of culture signals just governance. Newford uses the opposition between the natural and cultural domains as an expression of society’s flaws. In New Crobuzon, the two domains dissolve into each other as part of a general inclination against categories and toward hybridity and the grotesque. Ombria turns the natural into a liminal phenomenon that marks out the borders between the city’s cultural domains. A range such as this does not in itself reveal much about the role of the nature–culture relation in the genre, even if it is quite revealing in the respective settings. In each city, however, the relation between the domains displays a connection to a key theme or concern in the stories. This kind of topofocal reading can thus indicate an area of a work that deserves further investigation.
Chapter 5, finally, engages more immediately with the connection between setting and characters. Whereas chapter 3 considers geographical divisions found in fantasy but not in the actual world, this chapter explores how fantasy bridges divisions that are taken for granted in the actual world. Fantasy rulers may be linked more directly to their realms than we commonly consider actual-world rulers to be. The sympathy between ruler and realm is greater, and the two act as each other’s complement. A sterile king governs a barren realm, a languishing empress reigns over a fading land, and an evil lord rules a blighted and hostile country. The genre offers great variety in type and magnitude of sympathy, although the Dark Lord with his (or, occasionally, her) evil land has become a stock character in much fantasy of the portal–quest variety. Even so, each dark realm deserves careful attention, as the similarities between them are mostly superficial. Furthermore, it is a mistake to read the landscape as only a metaphor for its ruler. The direct link between ruler and realm is a fantastic element; to ignore it, or to regard it as other than “real” within the frame of the story, is to deny the impossible made possible that lies at the very core of the fantasy genre. Whatever other reading of that special connection one makes, the direct link must first and foremost be accepted for what it is. Indeed, the nature of the link—its magnitude and type—may itself be central to the construction of the plot.
My topofocal approaches center on four types of divisions of the fantasy setting, and each approach provides a partial answer to my original question. As I had expected, placing the setting in focus afforded a glimpse of what the fictional worlds contain and how they are assembled or expanded along geographical, historical, and fantastical dimensions. More surprisingly, the topofocal readings revealed much about fundamental aspects of the works, such as their underlying attitudes and central concerns. These readings turned out to be useful in clarifying the roles and nature of certain characters, and they helped demonstrate how plot, character, and setting are interwoven. The reading of any fantasy work, it became evident, would benefit from an exploration of its many environments—and clearly an understanding of some areas of the genre will profit from a focus on settings.
I say “some areas,” because even though I strove for the widest possible range in my selection of examples, I did choose works that belong near the center of the genre’s fuzzy set—as far as I can tell, they are unmistakably works of fantasy. I also picked texts that would provide the clearest possible examples of the features under discussion. It could thus be argued that other texts, texts that are less typically fantasy, may display other characteristics. A similar case can be made regarding liminal fantasy, the least represented of Farah Mendlesohn’s fantasy categories among my examples. These are valid objections; but they do not invalidate my findings, they merely underscore the need for further topofocal explorations of the genre.
One possible area for future exploration is suggested by the Cauldron of Story. In the introduction, I explained how I consider the (mostly unabashed) incorporation of material from the Cauldron to be a fourth dominant feature of modern fantasy (apart from the three features already identified by Brian Attebery). Places as well as characters and plots simmer in the pot, and they are often ladled out and added to fantasy stories. One perspicuous example in this book is the inclusion of an entire complex of related myths surrounding the Fisher King figure in Powers’s novel. Another, less obvious, example is how the landscapes of evil tend to share a number of recognizable building blocks. Places such as Faerie and the land of the dead, as well as the polder element itself, have bubbled in the Cauldron for a long time. Other settings have been added more recently: the urban blight, the “Oriental” city, the sewer systems. The most frequently used ingredients, in particular, certainly deserve more critical attention, not to find out where they come from but to see what flavors they contribute to the dish.
This book has provided only a small part of the answer to what we can learn by examining the settings of fantasy. The four approaches introduced here do not constitute the sole way of reading the genre from a topofocal point of view. Fantasy worlds differ from the actual world in innumerable ways: fantastic elements can be introduced as part of the landscape; strange environments can be inhabited or traversed; any number of categories can be rethought. Topography, hydrology, and ecology can exist under different rules. Employing a topofocal perspective does not necessarily mean using one of the approaches outlined and exemplified in the four chapters recapitulated just now. It only means finding an interesting aspect of the fantasy setting and placing it in focus.
By discussing the same work—The Lord of the Rings—in terms of maps and boundaries, as well as of the relations between nature–culture and ruler–realm, I demonstrate how analysis of a single text can benefit from all four approaches. My topofocal reading of Tolkien’s work is by no means exhaustive, but even this limited exploration of the settings of Middle-earth can clearly provide new insights about a book that has been very thoroughly analyzed over the years. As for the other texts I have used as examples, I have barely scratched their surfaces. I could instead have looked at the relation between the king and his realm in Nix’s books; the map in Miéville’s Perdido Street Station; the border between de Lint’s Newford and its Otherworld; the nature–culture relation in Brust’s Dragaera books … not to mention the construction and function of forests, rivers, mountain terrain, and other landscape types whose stories run through these works. Those topics, and many others, await future scholarship. This book outlines some paths into the vast and varied interior of Fantasyland; but a great deal remains for subsequent applications of topofocal criticism: other worlds to investigate, new landscapes to visit, more fantasy settings to explore.
Appendix A: Method for the Map Survey1
To obtain unbiased results with a known margin of error from a quantitative study, a sample should be randomly selected from the entire population, with every unit in the population having the same chance of being drawn. Hence, to sample the fantasy genre, one would compile a list of all the works of fantasy ever written and randomly
pick as many works as are necessary to obtain the desired margin of error. This is simple in theory but impossible in practice. Even if a straightforward definition existed that would determine unequivocally whether a given text belonged to the genre or not, it would be impractical to check everything ever published in English (or even everything published in English after 1858 or 1954, or any other arbitrary start date for the genre) against that definition. If one accepts Brian Attebery’s suggestion that fantasy is a fuzzy set, where genre affiliation depends on similarity to a number of core works,2 listing the works of a genre becomes impossible even in theory, as works belong to the genre to some degree.
A question that needs to be resolved when sampling a genre is what actually comprises the population. To address this question with some precision, I have borrowed terminology from the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. According to its Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, a work is “a distinct intellectual or artistic creation,” an abstract entity that is realized through one or more expressions. A manifestation is “the physical embodiment of an expression” and can exist in a number of items.3 For example, as J. R. R. Tolkien made constant revisions of the various impressions and editions of The Lord of the Rings, this work exists in a number of expressions. Each such expression is physically embodied in manifestations such as, for instance, the 2002 HarperCollins hardcover edition or the Houghton Mifflin 2004 Fiftieth Anniversary edition, each of which exists in a number of copies (items). Using these terms, we may ask whether a genre is a group of authors who write in the same vein or a collection of works that fulfill a certain set of criteria, or perhaps the totality of all expressions, manifestations, or even items that embody these works. If it is the authors, each author should appear only once in the sampling frame, and the probability for selecting Hope Mirrlees should be the same as for Terry Pratchett. That a writer who has published a single novel of genre interest would have the same impact on the genre as someone who has been writing steadily for decades seems dubious. Also, since we are investigating maps, it is reasonable to see the genre as a collection of fantasy works; the presence of maps can vary between expressions, but as a rule, if a work includes a map, a map is found in all of its expressions (although there are exceptions). I therefore decided to consider the population (the genre) to comprise all fantasy works, and to give each work in the sampling frame an equal chance of being selected for the sample.
Since listing every work in a genre is impossible, sampling the genre directly is likewise impossible. A popular method for a literary survey is to use an easily available sample. (Deirdre F. Baker, for instance, describes her sampling thus: “I did a casual survey of the maps in some of the many fantasies I have on my own bookshelves.”4) Such a convenience sample, however, is almost certainly biased in one or more ways (in Baker’s case, both by what books she has in her bookcase and by which of these she picked for her survey); there is no way of estimating the representativeness of the sample.5 The survey in chapter 2 draws its sample from a sampling frame, whose possible biases are detailed shortly. The largest database of fantasy books available to me was the inventory list of SF-Bokhandeln (Sweden’s main science-fiction and fantasy retailer), which contained titles currently or previously in stock, or ordered, at the time when the list was copied to me.6 I filtered the list for fantasy novels in English (according to the retailer’s classification, it should be noted) and edited it: each title (work) was retained only once (separate editions, for instance hardback and paperback, resulted in multiple listings for some titles in the original list). Works considered not to be fantasy according to the criteria detailed in chapter 1 were removed: Charlotte Guest’s Mabinogion (1838–49), Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (1485), and Penguin Classics of various “taproot texts” that predate the emergence of generic fantasy but that include the fantastic and are of heightened significance to the genre.7 The following categories, while of genre interest, were also removed, as they were deemed to follow rules different from those for original works of fiction for including maps and would thus bias the sample: graphic novels (e.g., Neil Gaiman’s Sandman sequence [1989–96]), obvious parodies (e.g., the Barry Trotter books [2001–2004] and Bored of the Ring [1969]), non-or semi-fiction spin-offs (e.g., Pratchett et al., The Science of Discworld [1999]), and tie-in novels (novels based on worlds originally created in other media, e.g. role-playing and computer games).
Although the list offered a reasonable sampling frame of English-language fantasy currently or recently in print, I improved its correspondence to the population through supplementation in two ways. First, obvious gaps in a number of book series were filled in (e.g., if the first and third titles in a series were listed, the second title was added to the sampling frame). Second, as they could be considered central to the genre, any fantasy novels short-listed for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards from 2000 to 2007 were added. If a short-listed work was part of a series, all the books in that series were added. For instance, for Gene Wolfe’s Soldier of Sidon (2006; World Fantasy Award winner in 2007), the previous novels of the series, Soldier of the Mist (1986) and Soldier of Arete (1989), were also included. (In fact, most of the ninety-seven short-listed works and their pre-or sequels were already on the list, and only twenty-one additions were made.) After edits and additions, the final sampling frame contained 4,292 titles. From the sampling frame, 200 titles were then randomly selected (by computer-generated random numbers) and collected (listed in appendix B).
Obtaining the exact editions in the sampling frame quickly proved too impractical—and expensive—so the sampling has been of the most readily available editions. As I take the genre to be a totality of works rather than expressions, this should not invalidate the sample. In some cases, I have been unable to get hold of copies of the books myself and have thus had to rely on others to scan or photograph the maps for me. Partially for this reason, I lack data on the distribution between high and low fantasy in the sample.
To determine the margin of error (at a confidence level of 95 percent), I used a method developed by G. H. Jowett. This method gives reliable calculations of potential errors and has the advantage of providing statistically correct margins of error regardless of sample size.8 The margin of error gives the upper and lower limits between which it is 95 percent certain that the actual value for the total population lies.
pU upper limit for margin of error
pL lower limit for margin of error
n sample size
x number of units with the quality investigated
a confidence coefficient
Appendix B: Map Sample
Note: These works were all tagged as novels although some of them are short story collections. The collections have been kept in the sample because some of them (for instance, the Conan books) actually come equipped with maps. Although the incidence of maps in collections may vary from that in novels, a work’s status as a collection does not appear to decide whether or not it contains a map, and simply being a collection was thus not deemed to be sufficient grounds for exclusion. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (www.isfdb.org) has been used to supplement information that was missing from the SF-Bokhandeln database.
Notes
1. INTRODUCTION
1. See, for instance, Michael Moorcock, Wizardry and Wild Romance (London: Victor Gollancz, 1987), ch. 2; Colin N. Manlove, “The Elusiveness of Fantasy,” The Shape of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Seventh International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, ed. Olena H. Saciuk (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 63; Robert J. Branham, “Principles of Imaginary Milieu: Argument and Idea in Fantasy Fiction,” Extrapolation 21, no. 4 (1980): 328.
2. According to Schlobin, fantastic settings “take on powers and attributes that are normally assigned to characters”; see his “The Locus Amoenus and the Fantasy Quest,” Kansas Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1984): 29; quoted in Roger C. Schlobin, “‘Rituals’ F
ootprints Ankle-Deep in Stone’: The Irrelevancy of Setting in the Fantastic,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 11, no. 2 (2000): 156. Mathews explains how fantasy geography and setting “function almost as characters and symbols,” and Clute describes how a “land” “is not a protagonist but has an analogous role”; see Richard Mathews, Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2002), 39, and John Clute, “Land,” The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, eds. John Clute and John Grant (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999). Both Mendlesohn and Rosebury observe how Tolkien’s landscape is “a participant in the adventure,” even the novel’s “hero”; see Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 35, and Brian Rosebury, Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 34. Mendlesohn makes similar points about C. S. Lewis’s Narnia (a “character in and of itself”), and in Bram Stoker’s Dracula “the landscape becomes a character […] with moods and emotions of its own” (Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 34, 129).
