While the title of this essay/rant doesn’t pose a question, there is a mystery it wishes to explore and this is: Why the attraction? Why this abiding fascination with the fantastic? When the authors of literary fiction sigh with ennui within their too-familiar kitchens, their dreary work-places, and their predictably alienating urban settings, whither they? When literary genre-crossing becomes all the rage—whither these authors?
Why, to the deep dark woods where the fantasy authors play.
When a crisis of genre identity afflicts, whither the critics? To fantasy they turn. Why the attraction? Is it the woods—lovely, dark, and deep?
And when I write “fantasy” here I wish to be clear that I am not using it as reference to any one particular genre. Rather, I am referencing the deep well-spring of the fantastic which feeds a multiplicity of genres and sub-genres, and which in point of fact lies open to any author to draw upon. I make no claims to any genre definition other than the one particular guiding metaphor that I wish to explore here.
Very broadly, when literary critics and theorists turn to pinning down the differences between literary fiction and genre fiction, they often cite the usual suspects: plot convention and predictability (you know what you’re getting). They also claim they will not base their comparison on the quality of the prose (since you mustn’t compare apples to oranges), and yet then they promptly go on to do precisely that.
Admittedly, fantasy generally is not the home of economy of prose, nor pure elegance—though many authors operating within it can achieve such beauty—rather, fantasy is about wilderness. The tangled unknown. The potentially ominous and certainly threatening wild woods that is, of course, the imagination.
In the wilds nothing is neat. By definition you do not know what may lie beyond the next turn. Dare you risk becoming lost? Where lies the familiar and comforting moment of character self-realization now? Which way to the epiphany? What you thought you saw or heard just then—can you be certain of psychological realism here? Dare you enter the wild trackless woods where the fantasy writers play?
Many searching for something beyond the tired and the familiar do. Cross-genre pollination, some call it. I call it daring to set a toe into the frightening wilds.
I began this rant determined not to name names, nor drag out the usual perpetrators, however, I feel that I must—if only to confound those readers who, even now, are saying to themselves: Well! He hasn’t mentioned so-and-so. . . . And so comes the litany of Michael Chabon with his Jewish enclave in Alaska, Colson Whitehead’s zombie apocalypse, Jonathan Lethem, et al., Karen Russell and her vampires, and Aimee Bender’s imaginings. It is also true that many of the above authors yet remain acceptable topics within literary criticism; perhaps because while they wandered a touch further into the woods to steal a few magic mushrooms, they certainly didn’t linger.
The question is, then, why the appeal? Why come to fantasy?
One reason may lie in an assigned weakness that is in fact a strength. Like a sister genre (or sister non-genre, as I will argue) fantasy and so-called “historical fiction” share a certain type of definition—or lack thereof. Some critics and literary theorists assign all fiction that is “not contemporary” into a bottomless bag that they name historical fiction. Following this logic, writers are apparently only allowed to portray their contemporary moment or risk being dumped into a shameful genre ghetto—or more importantly—tossed over the walls of so-called “literary” writing. Yet just what defines contemporary? This particular year? This particular month? This particular day? More recently, however, many critics do now reluctantly acknowledge that there may be some merit to such “historical” authors as Pat Barker and Hilary Mantel. And yet, imagine their spluttering rage in the face of authors who actually go ahead and write whatever they damn-well please without any consideration of their precious genre definitions, such as Jim Shepard.
The die-hard defenders of the boundaries of literary fiction (and very vigilant they are), have built very tall and well-defined walls around their claimed territory. They patrol them with sharp pens and equally sharp disapproval. However, should one of them happen to raise their gaze to the forest at large, they would discover that all they have succeeded in doing is confining themselves to a very tiny, very strangled, meadow. And that surrounding them, extending beyond sight in all directions, stretch the tangled woods of possibility: the near infinity of all-that-could-be. The far off future; the distant past; unguessed possibilities of human social organization; utopias and dystopias; and, yes, even talking animals (George Orwell would approve).
So possessive of their small choked-off and rather inbred meadow are these critics that when a literature emerged from another tradition, one which did not share English-language tradition’s biases, blinders and lacunae, and thus one that partook of the fantastic, an entirely new category had to be invented to explain away how this could be possible. And so was “magic realism” born. And so were those pesky iconoclasts—supposedly—put in their place.
It would seem that to some literary critics an expansive freedom of literary techniques is acceptable only so long as that author hails from a differing tradition. Just as, in colonial times, other cultures were the purview of anthropology—but certainly not that of the metropole.
Why then this continuing attraction of fantasy, its forms and its tropes? It might be that here one finds the deepest roots of all literature. Here, lost or hidden somewhere within the darkest grove or frond-choked pool, lie direct living fibrous connections with the first legends and stories put to scroll or stone—the very beginnings of what Western scholars name “history” itself. Here heroes battled monsters, gods walked among men and women, and an ancient king searched for immortality.
My claim then, is that it is here within the trackless wilds of fantasy that one can find anything. Here lie an infinity of ways to portray things. If, in fiction, one pressure is to bring the new to something old . . . then you can find just that in the woods.
And here, if you go looking with open eyes and an open creative spirit, you will always be surprised by what you discover.