6.07 In Defense of Fantasy

Geekdom and Down-the-Nose POV

My guess is that one of the reasons so many look down on fantasy as a genre for reading is that we associate it with our childhood make-believe.

Isn’t this what our elementary teachers and Disney and Dr. Seuss and Nickelodeon and comic books and daydreams all had us do? Make things up? We’d make up stories in school about princesses and magic spells and sea monsters and 237-year-old ambidextrous clone gnome necromancers with a penchant for shoplifting. Maybe that was just me.

We told our stories, colored our pictures with Crayola, sometimes read them to our too-forgiving parents’ ears.  And then, we grew up. We set it all aside–that is, if we wanted to avoid the label of nerd or geek in middle school and high school. 

Some of us refused. I mean, we refused to “grow up,” and we continued to live in imagination. A few went on to discover other kinds of stories: horror, science fiction, thrillers, even romance. All of them fantasies in their way. And still others moved on to serious fiction. 

Not me, though. I mean, yes, I went on to read a ton of horror and science fiction and thrillers: H. P. Lovecraft and Clive Barker, Larry Niven and Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy, Harlan Ellison and more Harlan Ellison. Was I a nerd? A geek? 

Well, I did read a lot of fantasy: Bradley and Zelazny, Tolkien and Lewis, Donaldson and Card. And in 1980 I wore buttons to various wargame conventions that said, “Lord of Chaos,” “Frodo Lives,” and “D&D Sucks.” Don’t get me wrong, by the way, I didn’t hate wargames or role-play games. I just hated the dull rules-jockeying hack-and-slash of Dungeons and Dragons. I was a much more discriminating role-player, preferring games like Chivalry & Sorcery, Empire of the Petal Throne, The Call of Cthulhu, and The Morrow Project. (And if any of you listening have ever heard of The Morrow Project, let me know so we can be friends for life.)

Yes, we fantasy readers tend to wear our inevitable geekdom with pride. Or, at least we did. That all seemed to change at the end of 2001 when—the US reeling from a geopolitically-reshaping terrorist attack—there suddenly appeared two films that also changed the socio-economic imaginative landscape: Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone and The Fellowship of the Ring, the first films in a still-growing series of fantasies. Let’s put a pin in this unexpected alignment and come back to it.

Now it was okay not to grow up. Okay, it was slightly better than “not okay.” And afterwards, up to now–and for reasons we will discuss, probably for a long while still–fantasy stories of all kind are in a sort of electroplated Golden Age. It seems every major cable and streaming service is vying for our attention with some kind of major blockbuster series that could classify as fantasy. Stranger Things and Discovery of Witches, Vampire Diaries and Game of Thrones, Lost and  Fringe, Castle Rock and His Dark Materials, Winx and  Arcane, The Witcher and  Good Omens. (Hey there, were you waiting to see if I was going to name your favorite just then? You know what that makes you, don’t you?) There are dozens more.  And, as we might expect, books of fantasy have risen alongside them with a whole lot of cross-over. We can barely see a popular fantasy book written now where its “TV or movie potential” isn’t consciously considered. 

We’re geeks still, but we’re more and more wealthy geeks.

But rich or not, why do so many readers still pooh-pooh fantasy? Why is it still largely seen as a lower form of writing and reading? It could be partly what we talked about last time, an issue of genre and formula-writing. There’s a lot of good fantasy out there, but popularity and geekdom (and here I’m thinking about uber-fans who all want to write it) also means that there is a whole huge lot of crappy fantasy out there. It’s an easy genre to write poorly in. Heck, I think my fifth grade “clone gnome shoplifter” series still has real potential compared to some of the stuff we see. 

“You see, young readers and fantasy fans, serious writing and reading is about literature, about solid writing and powerful themes, complex ideas and reflective nuance. In short, literature is an art form, and fantasy, science fiction, and these other genre-writings? They’re escapist! Homeric phallocentric adventure. They’re done with the equivalent of elementary school crayons, it’s not relevant except for brief indulgences and the rare exceptions which emerge and this, underscore the point: they’re exceptions.”

In other words, because genre-writing (from mysteries to westerns to steampunk) so markedly and frequently follow formulaic guidelines and has obvious and clumsy tropes, we discriminate: we set it aside rather than risk wasting our time. True, there is a lot of talk and community around the popularity of YA fantasy writers (especially romantasy writers) like Rebecca Yarros and Sarah Maas, but let’s not pretend they will ever see a Pulitzer, Nobel, or Booker Prize. (Buzz). 

Ah, wait just a minute! Didn’t Lois Lowry’s The Giver win a Pulitzer? And what about McCarthy’s The Road? And the Nobel: Kazuo Ishiguro has won it, but isn’t Never Let Me Go hugely popular for YA readers? And what about Lord of the Flies, a book I taught successfully and frequently to 14-year-olds. William Golding has a Nobel Prize for Literature. Oh, and that Booker Prize? Many titles nominated and awarded lie in the realm of the fantastic: Clarke’s Piranesi and Stuart’s Shuggie Bain were both nominated for the Booker in 2020 and 2021, and in 2022 The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida won it.

So one of two things is true, listener (who is not you directly but someone else listening who obviously has an irrational bias against fantasy books): either great books are some endangered species that will be lost forever (a thesis held, by the way, by authors like Milan Kundera), or two, fantasy as a genre is doing something we may not fully appreciate, yet.

So the question that remains for you is only, Are you a … 

Geek or Future Geek?

Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and today I’m here to tell you–Fantasy? You know you’re soaking in it.

Un-Trashing Mass Culture

[Excerpt from 1970s Palmolive commercial.]

Back across the 1970s, Madge the manicurist found dozens of women who weirdly, inexplicably, without warning, unfailingly, spontaneously, thoroughly, unconsciously, would stick their fingers in dishes of thick green liquid until she revealed to them that it was Palmolive dishwashing liquid. It confused me then and it confuses me now. Until today.

Today, I want you to treat this entire episode like a Palmolive ad. I’ll play Madge (who was actually actress Jan Miner), and she surprised women in this way–or rather, women continued to dump their hands into this unnaturally-hued goo–for, not kidding, 26 years. From 1966-1992. Since I started to become a conscious walking entity to the end of graduate school. 

So I’ll play Madge and you will play all the finger-soaking women. Okay? Good.

Fortunately, it won’t be just you and me in a room together watching those fingers soak, either. Ursula will be with us–Ursula K. Le Guin, of course, she of the “Omelas” and “Vaster Than Empires” and Earthsea and lots of other stuff fame–and writer Lin Carter, most widely known for his pulp science fiction and posthumous collaborations with Robert E. Howard, H P Lovecraft, and Lord Dunsany. I’m bringing Carter in because last year I read his backgrounder, Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings, a fairly unenlightening and self-aggrandizing book, but in it he put together one of the most complete histories of fantasy as a genre I have seen.

It’s worth saying that Le Guin spent most of her career writing what we might describe as fantasy but what many now describe as “speculative fiction,” a broader category of genre which includes fantasy, science fiction, and just about anything else that bends reality in the interest of asking “What if?” What’s interesting about the term “speculative fiction” today, though it was coined by science fiction writer Robert Heinlein way back in the 1950s, is that it’s a more slippery and therefore elegant term: it doesn’t carry the prejudicial baggage of fantasy or sf. People are less likely to discriminate against it. Ah, Margaret Atwood! That wonderful speculative fiction writer!  See what I mean? Atwood is “cool.”

Anyway, while writing her novels, Le Guin also spent a fair amount of time in letters, talks, interviews, and essays defending fantasy which she argues has a “profound literary value.” 

To start, Le Guin has real trouble with the idea that “literary fiction” and “genre fiction” are separated categories of any kind. She also understands this binary opposition we set up by creating the categories. She wrote plainly in a blog post of her website, “We must have a more intelligent discussion of what literature is.” To escape the problem, she proposes a new definition: “Literature is the extant body of written art” (and by extant with the “a” she means ‘what exists,’ everything we have that is written art). She clarifies it more plainly: “All novels belong to it.” 

I should point out here, that she does say written art; that is, she means this in contrast to most writing that our teachers make us do after elementary school, writing that is for a social or career-building function: resumes, “how to” essays, research papers, journalism, and formal letters. The written art she says we should accept as literature has a different purpose that is not entirely pragmatic. We’ll get back to that.

As we talked about last week, Le Guin makes it clear that the intelligent discussion of what makes a book good or bad can’t be about its subject. There are good books and bad books about dogs and about aliens. And it can’t be about genre. There are good romance books and worse ones, good realism fiction and worse. Whatever is left–perhaps how it is written and what it accomplishes?–is what makes for good book talk. True, Le Guin pointed most of her attacks at the publishing industry itself–a number of big companies that work hard to define our reading and can get aggressive over making money from anything. But at least we, readers at large, can decide on our own what to believe. In another essay, she says, “If fiction is how it says what it says, then useful criticism is what shows you how fiction says what it says.”

And if you’ve heard me before on this topic of good and bad writing, literary canonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More and art, I’ve often been suspicious of the arbitrary lines we draw in this regard. What makes for fine reading or guilty pleasure, reflective catalyst or disgraceful trash, is sometimes difficult to determine. And when we get books that push our comfort or taste.  . . .  The Catcher in the Rye, The DaVinci Code, The Color Purple, Lolita, The Satanic Verses, 1984, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, have all been lauded and reviled, though those that have read them do not disagree about their content. And too few of those protesting talk about that ‘how,’ anyway, caught up in the surface subjects alone.

And as for this guilty pleasure thing, who says the pleasure must be guilty? Why can’t pleasure be pleasure? I’m not going to argue that two of my favorite horror films, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist and John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, are at all equal on a scale of quality; but I can say with little apology that I enjoy them both for very different reasons, even though they are both about the devil and possession in the horror genre. The same is true of fantasy quest novels like Stephen King’s Gunslinger series and Rick Riorden’s Percy Jackson series–two very different approaches with two hugely unequal levels of message, quality, and ambition. But I like them both. And I’m not going to argue that Civil War films like 1993’s Gettysburg (a four-hour blockbuster) and 1956’s Love Me Tender starring Elvis Presley are at all equal in quality, but . . . no, I can’t say that. I just can’t stand Love Me Tender, and nothing’s going to change that.

Truths of Fantasy

We don’t have to accept Le Guin’s definition that all non-practical writing, written art, is literature. But what she’s doing in writing is practicing that very thing, writing in order to explode our old prejudices, to get us thinking differently, even uncomfortably, about how we see and think about the world. She does this in the same manner as a Salinger or Rushdie, a Walker or a Nabokov, an Orwell or Chbosky. It’s the kind of practice that makes us ask, “If we understand the writing part, what is she saying about the ‘art’ part? 

And we’ll recall as well that Le Guin warns us of the Treason of the Artist. For her, important writing, accomplished writing, is about forwarding, even confronting readers with truth in story, with rejecting simplistic untruths and writing voyeurism. Story considers richly, perhaps challenges us–a formal engagement in the spaces we inhabit. An escape, perhaps, but not escapist. Artistic treason is about setting aside this duty, writing without beauty and truth, with little accomplished except that we have spent a few hours together across the pages for a diversion. 

A diversion. A diversion from what? That is what Le Guin would have us examine. For Le Guin, the artist has power and language and must therefore avail herself of purpose and responsibility. The artist is a member of community; the artist has a responsibility to community. 

But careful: she isn’t asking a writer or book to lecture or admonish, to praise or critique. Le Guin is blunt about this: “No matter how humble the spirit it’s offered in, a sermon is an act of aggression.” 

First and foremost, the story owes itself story, has a responsibility to story. Story can offer revelation, insight, reflection. She writes, “Art reveals something beyond the message.” She says of the truths of her story, “I don’t put them there. I find them in the story as I work.” Others, she understands, may find different ones. 

Now here’s an interesting sort of contradiction. Fantasy as a genre seems the farthest thing from the truth of the world; how can we as artists of fantasy somehow be responsible to both story and truth? And ah, this is where our formalists might remind us: the story is not the meaning of the work but a vehicle for its meaning; it is in the how, how the story is built, where we find questions to consider. Le Guin tells us that fantasy serves as “precise and profound metaphors” for understanding human nature, morality, and the societies we’ve built. 

Let’s think about that for a moment. Now I am quite certain that many many fantasy writers would say that their novels aren’t metaphors, but this goes back to what Le Guin said: we don’t put the ideas into the story; we find them there, we authors and readers. So asking those fantasy writers what I will find in their stories is kind of silly. More, those writers are probably correct in their denials that their fantasy novels are not intentional allegories. An allegory where every aspect of the scene represents some part of our own culture: the dragon is Nazism descending upon the Castle which represents the ancient ideologies of humanity as Platonically virtuous, whereas the king is a worldly ballast for the President pro tempore of the Senate. They’re right, just stop now.

No, Le Guin says fantasy serves as metaphors, a far more complex relationship for us to explore. Nothing as simple as Star Wars light side and dark side of the Force, obvious obvious obvious metaphor for good and evil. So obvious that several characters spell it out in case we don’t get it. Nothing as simple as good triumphs over evil if the Chosen One succeeds–hard to make that into an allegory, in any event, but as metaphor, I think it could be problematic. If I see myself as the Chosen One, am I fated to step into my conflicts and cry “Victory!”? If I do not see myself as a metaphor for Chosen One, am I excused from participating until he comes along?

Le Guin is looking more deeply, of course. She may treat the human unconscious, human repression, language, the realm of nature and our relationship to it (um, “Vaster Than Empires”), efficiency and intuition, compassion, or any number of topics. And in these ways, good fantasy (like all good literature) really isn’t escapism but a journey or exploration to articulate our truths in unique ways, to understand them better. Those explorations can be highly personal, of course, too. Fantasy can help us process emotion as metaphor, reconsider moral dilemmas, all in safe imaginative spaces. Paradoxically, fantasy and science fiction create a distance from reality that allows us closer examinations of the truth. 

And you can hear me talking about the Hideous Bargain and the Suffering Child motif here, yes? I want to get more into this concept in our next episode.

History of the Fantastic

But there’s something else I promised we’d get to. All I’ve accomplished so far today is explain more about the effects on your soaking fingers, what that Palmolive does. What I have not done yet is show you where your hand is soaking. This is the point where the silly woman gasps as Madge points out over and over again for 26 absurd years that it’s happening right there at the table. If the first lady didn’t get it, you’d think her 20-something daughter would have when she sits down!

But that’s the problem. We don’t learn too quickly. Generation after generation, we imagine that we understand something the previous one did not. We presume that the long-dead folks of history never thought as deeply and struggled as profoundly as we do. Hmm.

Let’s see how far back the genre of fantasy goes, and then we can decide whether the children of history understood.

Start with the concept of the “epic,” which comes from the Greek epos, “a speech, tale, or song.” How far back can you go to think of the earliest of epics we still have? Would that be Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey? Those are pretty old, maybe 2700 years or so, back to about 750 BCE. And if you remember much about them, it may be the monsters, gods, and magics: the Cyclops, Circe’s witchcraft, Apollo and Ares rampaging across the battlefields, Athena magicking Odysseus to disguise his homecoming. Pretty fantastic tales, and it’s pretty safe to say that across the ages, listeners did not believe them as journalism; they listened to tales of fantasy, learning truths about the roles of guest and host, of honor and pride, of grief, of fidelity and loyalty, perhaps arguing at length about what the real flaw in Achilles actually was.

But heck, let’s go back 1500 or so years before that, to 2000 BCE or earlier, to the ancient Mesopotamian poem of Gilgamesh. Heroes who are 40 feet tall or more, monsters the size of mountains, curses that work, monsters in the form of scorpion men and the Bull of Heaven, quests to dark underworlds in search of immortality. And we reflect: not about the plot with stone people or the Council of Elders, but about excess and machismo, the role of human between the realms of nature and gods, the immortality in authorship, the differing notions of love and sex, of friendship.

Epic songs and tales had their day, but as civilizations shifted and grew and became more complex, the epic began to devolve, to shrink in size. The Romans tried, but their epics with the exception of Virgil’s Aeneid (which is similar to Homer) and maybe Petrarch’s later, odd, unfinished work Africa. After that, our epics became hero stories, the Chanson de Geste (Songs of Deeds). We have, for instance, the Song of Roland and elsewhere, Beowulf. Now Beowulf is built upon monster hunts (Grendel, Grendel’s more terrible mom, a dragon), and the more reserved Song of Roland has magic swords, epic-sized battles out of proportion of all history, Moslem villains that would impress Darth Vader for wickedness, and angels making visits. 

Other tales of the time and following, the medieval romances, would reduce all the gods and religious aspects of epics but keep their effects. For gods we now had wizards who controlled magic. The source of wonder was shifted. We might see various versions of the King Arthur legend as standing in the middle of this shift: is it a story of strife with local pagan custom and Christian redemption? Or is it a story of battling wizards and human infidelities?

Now I’m moving fairly quickly through the classic historical fantasies you know so we can pause at a few you may not. Here, perhaps around 1200 CE we have the beginning of the Amadis of Gaula books. And so many sequels and imitations!  

Basically, a secret love of a king of the fantasy realm of Gaula makes a secret baby, Amadis, who is abandoned and raised by a Scottish knight. He has all kinds of adventures while he is hunted by a mad wizard, protected by a strange prophet priestess, embarks on a long quest for love that includes a decade or so of madness from anguish, hunts monsters across Europe and Asia, and all the while is the most handsome and virtuous Christian man anyone could ever ask for. And that’s just the first book.

The first print version in the early 1500s by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo spawned about a dozen more sequels in Spanish, only a few by Montalvo (who didn’t write the original in any event), more versions still in French, German, Italian, and Portuguese, and probably half a dozen operas and a film made in the 1960s. The cool thing about this series isn’t just that there were many authors each adopting the story to larger and larger adventures, each more absurd and ridiculous than the last, and isn’t that the story is a favorite of another character of fantasy life, Don Quixote. (We must admit, by the way, Quixote’s fantasy is almost entirely psychological– but it’s still the part we read for.)  No, the best part of all of the Amadis of Gaula books (and sequels about his kids–the guy had to die sometime–) the best part is that we have a fantasy space of giants and magic carpets and monsters and necromancers and all across a half-true European map; the other part of it all is the fantasy world-building. Each writer with few exceptions accepted the previous books and built upon them, adding and adding to the fantastic world across history and now millions have read or at least know about. 

Yes, the genre of fantasy just produced its first example of series fiction.

Now I just mentioned a moment ago that Don Quixote loved Amadis of Gaula, but now I want to reverse myself some: not that the character didn’t love the books, but that Cervantes’s novel isn’t exactly a fantasy. We need to appreciate that the main character Quixote lives an interior fantasy life, but the work is a satire of Amadis of Gaula and works like it. Cervantes is basically taking a canonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More shot to all of these medieval fantasies and romances. He hates them and in so doing cements a new movement for realism that will overshadow fantasy. Look at what he does to some of fantasy’s finest tropes: the noble quest is a series of absurd adventures with windmills and hats made of pots. The damsel in distress is a common peasant. And the faithful squire Sancho Panza is constantly challenging and questioning the delusional hero. 

Ah, the war between “serious” fiction and genre fantasy has begun, and we can see it in 1605 in the novel of our favorite musical of all time.  (The Man of La Mancha is your favorite, right?) 

But it wasn’t just Cervantes who attacked fantasy. By this time, it seemed everyone could write and borrow and re-adapt and change and add to and strike out and convert every fantasy story to any other. It wasn’t just that the wider spread publishing of books brought a certain elitism to serious fiction and verse, but it brought about a new phenomenon of cheap imitators, pseudo-writers, and outright hacks. Persian genies began appearing everywhere along with Merlin tales and Prester John legends, Charlemagne and Alexander the Great stories, just about anything that might sell. And to top it all off, famously Edmund Spenser writes the massive poem The Fairy Queen, which basically borrows everything from the Bible to the Iliad to medieval romances, bits from various scenes in Amadis of Gaula, the Book of Revelations, a partridge in a pear tree, and a few glittering vampires. He must have been thinking, I guess, that his greatness would depend not on the quality of the writing, but on how much stuff he could stuff. But hey, he invented a new kind of poetic stanza, so there’s that. 

But never fear, fantasy lovers! The genre did not die (even though the Victorians with their Novels of Manners would focus on people and social customs and try to stomp out every remnant of imagination they could find and substitute a gasp of indignation instead of a spell and a miscommunication instead of a curse. What fun was that?). No, it didn’t die, because we still had writers of spirit and faith in wonder to save us. Folks like Sir Walter Scott who gave us more modern fantasies. Now, if you’re someone out there putting your nose in the air to Rob Roy, Kenilworth, and the Lady of the Lake, I’ll have you know I still have three different film versions of Ivanhoe on DVD. (Cold, dead hands.)

More seriously, Scott did exactly what Le Guin says good fantasists should. When we read his stuff, we might imagine that Scott was writing of his day, the stories of the year 1200 or so. Nonsense, of course, since Scott was writing in the early 1800s. He took characters of legend, of chivalric honors and pastoral ideals and had them interact with more historical actions and themes. Here’s history, Scott would show us, if it had the kind of people that should be on the scene. I will dare to say that I agree with Lin Carter who said that Scott offered us a hybrid genre of history and romantic fantasy. 

And by then, when we hit the later 1800s we meet William Morris and his novel The Well at the World’s End, 1896. We could probably spend several episodes on just this work. Morris created a wholly invented world and a story that is simply put, the first heroic fantasy novel. Morris is seen by many as the father of modern fantasy for the work. H. G Wells loved the work, and C. S. Lewis wrote that “It is an image of the truth.” (Ah, Le Guin, you strike again!) But for fun trivia, the story has a King Gandolf along with a fast white horse named Silverfax. JRR, you dog!

At the same time we have Lord Dunsany who did a number of trippy little psychedelic fantasy tales and legends drawing somewhat from Icelandic tales and more obscure medieval romances. I’ve read his The Gods of Pegana, and I have to say, don’t go in looking for a coherent story, but world-building? Yes. Atmosphere? It’s all atmosphere, strongly enough that writers like H. P. Lovecraft adopted the Dunsany mood in his own mythic fantasy creations.

And from there, JRR Tolkien is just around the corner in the 1930s, isn’t he? Tolkien has done so much in defining fantasy across the last 100 years that we can scarce say a word without opening up three episodes of talk. He synthesized so many of the traditions we spoke of, drew from sources like the Eddas and Beowulf, set an enormously high bar in world-building, complete with full invented languages, and created an epic meant in part to offer England a mythology that could be entirely its own. 

The genre, its tropes, its world-building requirements, its serializations, its characterizations… so much of it comes from Tolkien’s work as a professor studying and using these traditions. And, unlike Spenser, Tolkien didn’t stuff his stuff with stuff. As thick as his worlds and histories are, they are richer in story and coherence, in a singular creation that holds together on its own and echoes over and over again with Le Guin’s call: metaphors for truths we need. 

You might be able to tell that I’m a fan (Frodo Lives!), but I am holding back–oh, am I holding back here–so that we can move on with our history. But huge moment: everything about the genre is formed and almost completely cemented in the bedrock of our history right there. All the writing that follows so far is very nearly variations on Tolkien theme and structure.

None of this is meant to denigrate later writers but to exonerate them and enjoy what they have since accomplished: they have built upon the tradition of modern and ancient history, varied it, offered us new reflections and metaphor from it.

C. S. Lewis is there, too, literally alongside Tolkien as friend and reader/collaborator and fellow writer of Narnia and so many other works. But unlike Tolkien, Lewis’s goals were different. He was wrestling with Christianity and questions of faith and evil; important questions, of course, but more focused and directive than Tolkien’s open form stories.

Nevertheless, reading “On Fairy Stories” by Tolkien is an essential for anyone wanting to get into the writing of fantasy; C. S. Lewis’s essays are also wonderful, and Le Guin’s essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie.” All of these diagram what makes the genre work, something we’ll explore a little more next week.

Now I could talk about more writers, but those living today likely know most and fantasy writing is hugely available to any. Yes, there is a lot of schlock out there, a lot of stuff amateurishly written that is little more than another enormous round of Amadis of Gaula-style rip-offs, but hundreds of others who are worth the time, many I have yet to discover. 

We could spend some time with all of the subgenre and hybrid genres of fantasy–the fantastic, the marvelous, the uncanny, high fantasy, urban fantasy, dark fantasy, sword & sorcery, comic fantasy, mythic fantasy, romantasy, fantasy of manners, portal fantasy, grimdark, superhero fantasy, weird fiction, and the like. But the more we narrow in on these, the more they will shift again in coming weeks. And all of that is good talk for geeks and nerds.

So I want to make one more stop at two writers who you may not expect, but they also have had a massive influence on fantasy as a genre from the 1970s onward. That’s Gary Gygax and Dane Arneson, the original writers of Dungeons and Dragons, the role play game. These guys did invent some new worlds and all, but they did something else bigger still. Until 2001’s movies of Potter and Tolkien, I would argue that no other force has worked as much to popularize the genre. Even if you are not a gamer, even if you’ve never played these games, other writers have, and D&D has largely codified the fantasy tropes responsible for the last 50 years of fiction and film: Gygax and Arneson analyzed and synthesized the traditions (leaning heavily on Tolkien), and other writers follow and vary the tropes and traditions.. 

You’re Soaking In It

Other writers follow and vary the tropes and traditions. Fantasy hasn’t influenced other fantasy writers alone; it’s influenced other writers. Period. Once we recognize the tropes and the reasons for them, the underlying motivations like those Le Guin speaks to: a writer’s art and its duty to story and truth, fantasy as metaphor for these truths–once we understand this, look what opens up:

The entire realm of magical realism, a kind of hybrid genre that isn’t working to heal the breach between fantasy and realistic fiction necessarily but to exploit each for its own purposes. We have works like Beloved by Toni Morrison, where the supernatural is a direct manifestation of historical trauma, just as many fantasy spirits and monsters operate.

What do Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s stories and novels do but explore questions of time, of solitude, of history, of cruelty, through sudden and unexpected magical events: a woman folding laundry suddenly ascends to heaven; a man is followed by a cloud of butterflies; an angel crash-lands in a slum courtyard.  

Another Booker prize winner, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is based on an entirely fantastic premise. By its end, the novel asks we readers to choose what to believe.

Last year I read Mohsin Hamid’s marvelous Exit West, which is a brutal and desperate story of refugees attempting to flee a civil war. Inexplicably, a single fantasy element is added: there are magical doors that transport people instantly across the planet. Now with immigration suddenly and literally on everyone’s doorstep, how do the human and political questions transform?

Just about every book ever by Haruki Murakami. Talking cats and rains of fish, the Sheepman and strange encounters at Denny’s restaurants.

George Saunders’s Booker prize winner Lincoln in the Bardo, which takes place in a state of limbo, told through ghosts. It’s a novel that explores grief. 

Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is a literary thriller book of dark academe (itself a subgenre of fantasy), but the central event around the murder is a Dionysan rite that may or may not have supernatural consequences. 

Works by Isabel Allende, Neil Gaiman, Susanna Clarke, Cormac McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro, and dozens of others. If you are a reader and you are listening to this podcast, you have absolutely read something of the fantasy genre as an adult and enjoyed it. It has spoken to you in ways a traditional novel cannot. You–we–are soaking in it.

The Fantasy Formal 

Fantasy as a formalist critic is easy to spot, like most genre works. The genre operates by fairly specific if not always written rules. 

For instance, some characteristics of the genre of fantasy as a structure is to construct unique worlds for the story to operate, have consistent rules for that world (like its magic, its language, its sense of time, etc.), and to choose from several narrative structures, like the episodic quest story. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are each quests built upon scenes and episodes which each link the characters across the timeline. George R. R. Martin does the same but he interweaves point of view chapters in more complex ways. 

In terms of genre, fantasy has particular conventions that it shares. Often we understand magic to be real, or at least alternative realities. Moral stakes of good and evil are often delineated fairly clearly and with high stakes, but fantasy is best when it subverts or alters these conventions some. High fantasy with its traditional fantasy races and clear magic rules is different from urban fantasy which is grittier and with race variants and/or new versions the characters encounter in magic. 

We’ve already discussed a number of fantasy tropes like chosen ones and dragon hoarders and evil overlords and the like. But fantasy uses these tropes for its work in defamiliarization, in creating new opportunities in meaning not from formula but the variation of formula. Consider, for instance, the entire Superman film franchise and all the different roles we build for Superman to forward different kinds of stories. 

Fantasies are in books, films, graphic novels, video games, tabletop role play. . . where isn’t it? 

The only thing we have not fully figured out quite yet is not where it is–but why it is suddenly so pervasive, so powerful, so popular. We’ve touched upon Le Guin’s concerns a little, and I want to pursue those next week at greater length, which will lead us right up to her “Omelas” short story. 

Le Guin had a number of personal concerns that she forwards through her works: colonization, oppression, the roles of gender, our complacency to suffering—all philosophical goals, on the order of Dostoevsky or James. But I asked before, and I will ask now with a little more information in front of us, if these earlier writers already posed these questions in essays and classic novels, what could a little fantasy short story possibly add to the discussion? 

Well, we’ve already had a taste in the short story “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,” which not only explored some of the philosophical questions posed by the Andrew Marvell poem, but takes on other issues, like the impotency of language to capture the thinking of a sentient planet; she is compelled to write in words that which cannot be written. And in her approach, we have her line “Silence and wind in leaves.” Perhaps, too, the silence of Marvell’s mistress finds its power in that very non-patriarchal silence, a language of silence. 

So Le Guin knows what she is up to. And, like the best writers, she has selected a form and genre best suited to her own goals. 

But for us, that means reading fantasy for what it is; we must not be passive readers. Le Guin tells us: 

“Listening is an act of community, which takes space, time, and silence.

“Reading is a means of listening.

“Reading is not as passive as hearing or viewing. It’s an act; you do it. You read at your own pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling, shouting rush of the media. . . . Reading a story, you may be told something, but you’re not being sold anything. And though you’re usually alone when you read, you are in communion with another active mind. You aren’t being brainwashed or co-opted or used; you’ve joined in an act of the imagination.”

Next week, we look more carefully at what’s on her mind. 

Now, find your way to some magic. Go read something.

Outro

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Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

Bibliography

Carter, Lin. Tolkien: A Look Behind “The Lord of the Rings.” Ballantine Books, 1978.

Fekete, John. “Circumnavigating Ursula Le Guin: Literary Criticism and Approaches to Landing.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 1981, pp. 91–98. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4239387.

Le Guin, Ursula K. Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story. First Mariner Books edition, Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015.

Le Guin, Ursula K. Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books. 1st ed, HarperCollins Publishers, 2019.

Le Guin, Ursula K., and David Naimon. Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing. First US edition, Tin House Books, 2018.