Rhetorics of Fantasy - Farah Mendlesohn

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Mendlesohn Heidi Robbins Gary Westfahl Cheryl Morgan Veronica Schanoes Shana Worthen Stephanie Moss Brian Stableford

      And special thanks to William Senior of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and to David Hartwell, Kathryn Kramer, and Kevin J. Mahoney; and to the Wiscon Committee, who have all published my thoughts-in-progress as they have developed and to Suzanna Tamminemn at Wesleyan University Press.

      My gratitude also to Mike Houghton and James Bloom for keeping me fit enough to write; LiveJournal friends for encouragement in the final days; the staff of the British Library who cheered me with their recognition; and all the hotel staff in various hotels in Dublin who supplied me with tea, positive support, and a power socket when I couldn’t find anywhere else to work.

      Parts of this book have been published previously:

      “Towards a Taxonomy of Fantasy.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 13, no. 2 (2002): 173–187.

      “Conjunctions 39 and Liminal Fantasy.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 15, no. 3 (2005): 228–239.

      An application of the ideas expressed in this book can be found in my Diana Wynne Jones: Children’s Literature and the Fantastic Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2005).

      This book is not about defining fantasy. The debate over definition is now long-standing, and a consensus has emerged, accepting as a viable “fuzzy set,” a range of critical definitions of fantasy. It is now rare to find scholars who choose among Kathryn Hume, W. R. Irwin, Rosemary Jackson, or Tzvetan Todorov: it is much more likely they will pick and choose among these and other “definers” of the field according to the area of fantasy fiction, or the ideological filter, in which they are interested.

      I want to reach out for an understanding of the construction of the genre; specifically, I wish to consider its language and rhetoric, in order to provide critical tools for further analysis. During the research for this book I became aware that while there are many single author or single text studies in genre fantasy criticism, there is relatively little comparative criticism beyond the study of metaphorical and thematic elements. There is almost nothing dealing with the language of the fantastic that goes beyond aesthetic preference.1 My contention is that if we do not have a critical tool that allows us to collate texts in any yielding way (note that I do not insist on “meaningful”), we cannot engage in the comparative research that illuminates a genre.

      I believe that the fantastic is an area of literature that is heavily dependent on the dialectic between author and reader for the construction of a sense of wonder, that it is a fiction of consensual construction of belief. This expectation is historical, subject to historical change, and is not unique to fantasy. Wayne C. Booth has written that “for experienced readers a sonnet begun calls for a sonnet concluded; an elegy begun in blank verse calls for an elegy completed in blank verse” (Fiction 12). This dialectic is conditioned by the very real genre expectations circling around certain identifiable rhetorical techniques that I will be describing. Intrinsic to my argument is that a fantasy succeeds when the literary techniques employed are most appropriate to the reader expectations of that category of fantasy. Understanding the broad brushstrokes of plot or the decoration of device is less fundamental to comprehending the genre; all of these may be tweaked or subverted while still remaining firmly within the reader’s expectation of the text.

      I came to this project as a science fiction critic, and that perspective has shaped the way I understand the structures and rhetorics of fantasy. Crucially, it led me to focus on an issue that both W. R. Irwin and Brian Attebery (Attebery, Fantasy Tradition) have raised: the way in which a text becomes fantasy or, alternatively, the way the fantastic enters the text and the reader’s relationship to this.2

      In science fiction, how the reader is brought into the speculative world influences the ways in which that world can be described. The incredible invention story rapidly gives way to the completed future, because the incredible invention permits only one level of emotional response, that of ritualized amazement or ritualized horror. In contrast, as Robert A. Heinlein argued and practiced, the completed future—the enclosed world or pocket universe—permits the author to elicit increasingly complex responses but demands much more sophisticated narrative techniques. But the question remains, what is the precise reader relationship to these futures? There is a clear difference between the imaginary society, which we enter riding on the shoulder of the otherworldly visitor (a construct most common to utopian fiction),3 and the society we encounter as a hidden observer for whom no allowances are made: the first demands—and usually offers—explanations; the second requires the reader to unpack the intertext. The consequences of these reader relationships for science fiction have been explored by John Clute, Samuel R. Delany, John Huntington, Edward James, and Brian Stableford, among others. My approach therefore is not new. I am building on work already done, but work that has primarily been done for science fiction. My intention is to turn the same critical gaze on fantasy, to take up Roger Schlobin’s challenge, implicit in his claim that the “key to the fantastic is how its universes work, which is sometimes where they are, but is always why and how they are” (“Rituals” 161). Attebery argues that most fantasy writers create clearly defined frames: “Narrative devices that establish a relationship between the fantasy world and our own while at the same time separating the two” (Strategies 66)—which is of course what my book is about: how these strategies work and their impact.

      In this book I argue that there are essentially four categories within the fantastic: the portal-quest, the immersive, the intrusive, and the liminal. These categories are determined by the means by which the fantastic enters the narrated world. In the portal-quest we are invited through into the fantastic; in the intrusion fantasy, the fantastic enters the fictional world; in the liminal fantasy, the magic hovers in the corner of our eye; while in the immersive fantasy we are allowed no escape. Each category has as profound an influence on the rhetorical structures of the fantastic as does its taproot text or genre. Each category is a mode susceptible to the quadripartite template or grammar—wrongness, thinning, recognition, and healing/return—that John Clute suggests in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy (338–339).4 Each mode places its emphasis on a different note within this four-note bar; within the mode, consistencies exist in the use of these templates that demonstrate coherence in the categories.

      The construction of these groups strongly suggests a taxonomy and it would be disingenuous of me to attempt to fudge this issue. Taxonomy, however needs to be understood as a tool, not as an end in itself, and it needs to be understood in the modern context that taxonomical practices are increasingly polysemic and multiplex, generated by acknowledged questions and capable of existence alongside other configurations. It is not my intention here to argue that there is only one possible taxonomic understanding of the genre. The purpose of the book is not to offer a classification per se but to consider the genre in ways that open up new questions. It is a tool kit, not a color chart.

      If the taxonomy I suggest is to succeed as a critical tool kit, it must work across the more commercial definitions of fantasy, as well as the categories of children’s and adults’ fantasy, dark fantasy, and light and comic fantasy. It must help to explain some of the more anomalous texts: those that find their genre coat of the wrong cut or color, rough to the touch or tight around the sleeves. In essence, my contention is that the failure to grasp the stylistic needs of a particular category of fantasy may undermine the effectiveness of an otherwise interesting idea. Eleanor Cameron wrote that fantasy is “a very special category of literature that compares with fiction as a sonnet compares with poetry. Either you have a sonnet if you have written your poem in a certain way, or you don’t if you haven’t” (165). To use my own terms, which are outlined below, an immersive fantasy told with the voice of portal fantasy will feel leaden; a liminal

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