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First of all, my sincere apologies for missing last Friday's blog. I was away for a funeral and, contrary to my expectations, all the attendant family obligations were such that I didn't have the time to seek out a wi-fi hot spot. I do regret that.
Today I'm putting the finishing touches on "A Dizzy Celebration of Being Somewhere Wonderful: Reading Rhetorics of Fantasy in the Real World." This is my sort-of-review/sort-of-celebration of Farah Mendlesohn's book-length study of the storytelling strategies that apply to different modes of fantasy.
One of the extremely rare dry stretches of my essay, describes these basic modes:
So I am a better writer today than I was yesterday. And I hope the same is true for you as well.
And as always . . .
. . . but a couple of days late, I've added a new post to Poem du Jour. This one is on Adam Zagajewski's "Try to Praise the Mutilated World." That is one great poem. You should look it up.
The portal fantasy is one where the protagonist steps out of his or her usually quiet world and into the fantastic. Mendlesohn, for reasons which will be later explained, conflates this with the quest fantasy, and sometimes calls it the portal-quest fantasy. The immersive fantasy starts out in a coherent fantasy world and stays there. In the intrusion fantasy, the fantastic breaks into (I paraphrase Nabokov here) what we laughingly call the “real” world. And the liminal fantasy is one which never breaks through into the fantastic and yet which nevertheless feels inescapably fantastic.Sounds boring, dunnit? But it's not. If you're capable of reading criticism for pleasure (and not everybody is), Farah's book is vastly entertaining. But, more importantly for those of us who are working writers, it's immensely useful as well. Just yesterday I read a fantasy story by one of my friends and, though the prose was good and the world-creation was inventive and original, it just didn't work. A few weeks ago, I would have shrugged and forgotten it. But after reading Rhetorics of Fantasy I could see that its problem was that it was an immersive fantasy written in the manner of a portal fantasy. It never had a chance. But if the author had only known what I know now, the story could have been reworked and made to fly.
So I am a better writer today than I was yesterday. And I hope the same is true for you as well.
And as always . . .
. . . but a couple of days late, I've added a new post to Poem du Jour. This one is on Adam Zagajewski's "Try to Praise the Mutilated World." That is one great poem. You should look it up.
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> Today I'm putting the finishing touches on "A Dizzy Celebration of Being Somewhere Wonderful: Reading Rhetorics of Fantasy in the Real World."
ReplyDeleteWhere will this essay appear? Both it and the book under review sound like they'd suit me well.
> If you're capable of reading criticism for pleasure
I'm capable of reading criticism of criticism for pleasure - thus your essay. I'm not sure how many levels meta I can go before the air gets too rarified, but two should be safe enough.
> And the liminal fantasy is one which never breaks through into the fantastic and yet which nevertheless feels inescapably fantastic.
The only thing that I can place in this category would be Gene Wolfe's _Devil in a Forest_. What else would suit?
Steve
Sorry for not mentioning that, Steve. The essay was commissioned for The New York Review of Science Fiction.
ReplyDeleteSome of the works Farah considers liminal are the first two Gormenghast Books, M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart, and Megan Lindholm's Wizard of the Pigeons. Also Hope Mirrlees's Lud-in-the-Mist and John Crowley's Little, Big. These last two do break into the fantastic at the end but reveal surprisingly little of it, other than that it exists.
Wolfe's book is a great example the form and, not coincidentally, not one of his more popular works.
Michael
I'm definitely looking forward to reading this book, as soon as I can get my hands on a copy. But to bring this back to the original purpose of this blog, is "The Dragons of Babel" a portal-quest fantasy or an immersion fantasy? It's immersive in that it stays entirely within a coherent fantasy world, but it does take the main character out of his usually quiet world into the fantastic. Or does the fact that Will was already in a fantastic world trump any portal-questiness of the novel?
ReplyDelete(I disagree about Little, Big -- I think the fantastic is there throughout, what with the changeling and Barbarossa and all that.)
Yes, LITTLE, BIG is definitely the debatable choice. But, as I wrote a couple of times in the essay, "I oversimplify wildly." The forms are defined by their relationship to the fantastic, the rhetoric used in the text and how the story relates to the created world.
ReplyDeleteAs a still oversimplified example, in a portal fantasy everything that is told the protagonist about the nature of the world is true, and so he or she cannot question it in any meaningful way. THE LORD OF THE RINGS is the Ur-text in this regard. Whereas in an immersive fantasy, the world is actively questioned by the protagonist.
So by Farah's system, there's no doubt that THE DRAGONS OF BABEL is an immersive fantasy. Though it indeed has formal aspects of the portal fantasy and even the intrusion fantasy, in that Will's in a quiet and unquestioned little world before the dragon slams into his life.
Michael
p.s. It occurs to me that WIll's "quiet and unquestioned little world" is childhood. Does that mean that all portal fantasies are really about the passage into adulthood?
They are certainly disproportionately either bildungsroman, or (in some of the older ones) conversion narratives.
ReplyDeleteFarah
Hi, Farah! Knowing you'll have to wait some months to see the essay, I'm extremely tempted to make up outrageous quotations from it ("Mendlesohn appears to be saying that Terry Brooks is a better writer than J. R. R. Tolkien.") But I shall restrain myself.
ReplyDelete> Knowing you'll have to wait some months to see the essay
ReplyDeleteOh good - your previous posting finally tipped me over the edge, and made me ask for a birthday subscription the New York Review of SF - a thought I'd been toying with for ages. Looks like I might get to see the essay after all.
NYRSF can be an excellent time-waster, all right.
ReplyDeleteMichael