This Fantastic Life: Musings on the Edge of Literature, History, and Experience.
There is a sense of magic and wonder to the world if we only know how to look at it—whether it is a desk in a classroom or a table of statistics in a textbook. It simply requires a slight shift in perspective—a shift that enlivens and reanimates the world because we drop our normal mental filters and see things instead as outsiders. Above all, I would hope my readers and students could experience the same emotions I felt as a child when I received my first library card in Chinatown. When I began to read about other cultures, I felt doors opening on a world that was far greater than I had realized. (Lawrence Yep)
I have been bathing in fantasy my whole life, it is soul food, and it is everywhere. In the past month I have been neck deep in a literary genre called fantasy, and the more I have read about literary theories of genre and scholars of literature trying to pin down what fantasy is, the more convinced I become that theories of genre and theories of fantasy are simply mental exercises. The above quote comes from a Chinese American writer who works across genres, and I am so impressed by his short article that I am going to have to go out and find his novels. Fantasy is exactly the perspective of the outsider that allows one to find the magic in anything. C. Wright Mills, an American sociologist prominent in the middle years of the 20th century, described a way of looking at the world without the filters of one's station as the “sociological imagination.” This is a way of looking at social systems, cultures, jobs, and families from the perspective of the outsider trying to see how it all works.
I envision the world in this way, always looking for the interesting parts, wondering why people do what they do, act like they act, submit or fail to submit. Critical questioning of one's every experience, observation, and deed keeps the world fresh and interesting. Looking at life with the “eyes of a child,” if you will permit me the cliche, one may find that magic is everywhere, and that in fiction and politics it is more potent than anywhere else. Politics is magic because it is the use of language to shape the destiny and power structures of the everyday world. Fiction is magic because it is using language to permit writers and readers alike to inhabit other worlds, other bodies, other worldviews than the ones that they are born to.
I would suggest that in the long term fiction is the most powerful magic that there is. I would also suggest that this is because our cultures and societies are constructed out of myth. Everything depends on the stories a culture takes to heart and believes in. The history of a people is a myth, so is the history of a nation, or the world, or an autobiography—and all fiction is fantasy. Essentially what I am getting at here is that everything anyone tells anyone else is fiction of one degree or another, so the difference between a history text and The Lord of the Rings is a matter of degree, not of kind. Some myths have more attachment to circumstances in the everyday world than others do, but in none of them is the signifier and the signified the same thing. Northrop Frye, in trying to say that fiction could only be constructed from fiction and not from reality was a brilliant idiot. Reality is constructed from fiction, not fiction from reality.
When C.S. Lewis said that “By dipping ordinary things in fantasy, we see them more clearly.” he was correct, but not in the way that he thought. When Thoreau said that, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” he was also correct because most people don't ever learn how to take off the blinders imposed by the myths that they are living in and “dip ordinary things in fantasy.” Most of us lose the ability to see things clearly somewhere during adolescence or early adulthood simply because the social necessities of day to day life require us to abide by the mythic conventions of our time and place in the world. Nietzsche said that “we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things—metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities” (Bizzell and Herzberg, 1175). But then he allows that “that immense framework and planking of concepts [metaphors] to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect” (1178).
I would say that good fiction is above genre, is an “audacious feat of the liberated intellect” and an introduction of unworn metaphors into the scaffolding of human systems—and that unworn metaphors are necessarily fantastic in nature. Therefore, assigning a genre label to a work of fiction is either categorizing it arbitrarily for the sake of categorization, or an attempt to blunt its power by corralling the ideas contained within it in a manageable field. Now, there is some use for genre oriented study I will not deny, but by assigning genre labels to things, we are putting back on the blinders of our time, our culture, and our prejudices. As Dr. Carroll has been heard to say, there are many scholars of literature who discount “fantasy” as a genre, believing that it is not worthy of serious study. Many also say the same of “mystery,” or “horror,” or “contemporary romance,” or “science fiction,” yet none of them say this of Shakespeare's work which included examples of each sort of story—at least as they were practiced five-hundred years ago.
There seems to be a deification of the old that happens with literature, an idea that just because it was written a long time ago, and has somehow survived intact, it is better than what people are writing now. This idea is ridiculous on the face of it. What is being written now is often better than what has gone before because the new generation of writers has all of the history of fiction at their disposal to teach them their trade. Don't get me wrong, I am not disparaging Shakespeare, nor most of the canonical works (though some of them are actually quite terrible and uninteresting), nor am I suggesting that “newer is better,” there are more bad writers than good ones at any given time, but I am saying that the best of the new work that goes to the presses each year is the equal of or better than much of what has gone before, but seldom recognized as such. Furthermore, work that gets awarded the arbitrary designation of “literary” is assigned more worth than that of “genre,” or “popular” fiction, while often the work designated as “literary” is simply too stylish to appeal to a wide audience, sells very few copies and will probably not be reprinted nor survive long enough to become canonical.
Unfortunately and conversely, some of the best “genre” or “popular” fiction suffers the same fate because it is not well promoted and so does not come to the attention of a sufficient number of either academic or popular audiences. For instance, Daniel Keys Moran's Tales of the Continuing Time, is a beautifully written and philosophically deep series of books set mostly in a near future but with links to the far past and other galaxies that explores human technology, biology, parapsychology, politics and morality in an interesting way, yet I believe that they are all out of print—except perhaps The Last Dancer. And at the same time, a book like The Da Vinchi Code, becomes a huge success. I don't get it, Dan Brown's book has an interesting premise, and is well plotted, but his characters are cardboard cutouts and he could not write his way out of a paper bag—but he is rich and Moran lost in the translation from thought to reality.
So, back to the task at hand, which is to discuss fantasy and experience in a literary framework. Whoops, lost my literary framework somewhere. No, actually my literary framework is life, the universe and everything, if you don't mind my stealing a phrase from Douglass Adams. I do not see literature as a separate discipline because it is integral to my understanding of life. The written word has taught me more than any actual, physical interactions I have ever had with other people, and all the interactions I have had with other humans have been constructed out of language—even the times I have been in violent confrontations, even my job as airborne infantry soldier for the U.S. Army many years ago. They asked, “What is the spirit of the Bayonet?”
We answered, “To Kill!”
I never had to, but I would have, and not given it a thought until much later, I was bespelled by the language. Even the day to day requirements of life—cooking, cleaning, defecating, and loving are all defined by our relationship with others and hence with language. That pretty much means that everything that a human being experiences in life is ambiguous and contingent, a metaphor with no correspondence to the original thing. Except that Nietzsche overstated the case—our metaphors are the only way we can approach correspondence with the original thing, and often they are close enough that we can manipulate the physical properties of such a thing to our benefit, which is why science works. Magic works because of language, because language filters through and shapes experience into images constructed out of itself.
Language is magic, it creates the world in our minds. Magic is a fantasy. Life is constructed out of language, therefore life is fantasy.
Now I am reminded of Walker Percy's essay, “The Loss of the Creature,” wherein he discusses the “packaging of experience” that occurs in an academic setting, and on “packaged vacations” like cruises, or bus trips to the Grand Canyon. He states that a young man walking down the beach and finding a dead dogfish in the surf who then decides to cut into it with his pocketknife and becomes fascinated with its inner workings is in a much different relationship to the dogfish than is a young man who walks into a biology classroom and finds that today he is going to dissect a dogfish and learn the proper referents for all of its parts. The student in the classroom has a packaged experience, and it is properly sterilized, organized, and categorized by the language of the institution. However, the boy on the beach is experiencing the thing in itself, and any categorizing he does will of necessity be on his own terms, and there is no need for him to do so, the dogfish is just another interesting thing that he has come across and wants to know more about, while to the student in the biology class, the dogfish is a “specimen” of “a species,” which he is required to know about to achieve the goal of passing the class. In this way, the dogfish loses any meaning in and of itself and becomes meaningful only as a part of the process of becoming educated.
I am not trying to say that education is a bad thing, I enjoy school, and feel that it is important for more people to become educated so that they will be better able to function in an increasingly complex and data intensive world. However, that is not to say that an educated understanding of a thing is the best way, nor the only way—Percy says that there are three ways for the biology student to actually experience the dogfish as itself. One, he can be mentally strong enough to simply “wrest control of it from the educators and the educational package.” Or he can recover it “by ordeal” for instance if a bomb went off in the room and the student found themselves laying on the floor in the aftermath with the dogfish right in front of their face, and suddenly it is clearly not a “specimen” but a real thing, and thirdly he says that it is possible for the student can get lucky and be taken as apprentice by a “great man,” or a “genuine research man” who appreciates the thing for itself and is able to impart that feeling to others (Mind Readings, 130). Percy's point in this essay is that the categorization of experience lessens it, mutes its impact, and that by assigning a label to a thing one is attempting to control it, and, while that is a very human desire, the attempt to control experience makes it less valid, deprives it of a certain elemental force, and makes it easier to ignore.
On the other hand, the attempt to re-live experience is a noble one and can be very rewarding for those who do not flinch from their weaknesses. Patricia Hample writes that,
To write one's life is to live it twice, and the second living is both spiritual and historical, for a memoir reaches deep within the personality as it seeks its narrative form and also grasps the life-of-the-times as no political treatise can.
Our most ancient metaphor says life is a journey. Memoir is travel writing,[...]. But I cannot think of the memoirist as a tourist. This is the traveler who goes on foot, living the journey, taking on mountains, enduring deserts, marveling at the lush green places. Moving through it all faithfully, not so much a survivor with a harrowing tale to tell as a pilgrim, seeking, wondering. (190)
Nonetheless, memory is as much a fantasy as any other human endeavor, it has closer links to the day-to-day requirements of life than does fiction perhaps, but only in the context that it was written and experienced, remove the context from a memoir, and it becomes another piece of fictional history. For instance, Julius Caesar's The Gallic Wars, is an interesting read, and supposedly based on his experiences during the Roman conquest of Europe, but the countries and peoples he fought have not existed in nearly two thousand years—they are as fantastic to a modern person as would be a story that takes place on the Moon, more so because the possibility of going to the moon is much more likely than the possibility of going back in time to war with Caesar—but truthfully, going back to war with Caesar is not impossible, it is highly improbable because no one has figured out how to manipulate time in that way so far as I know, but it is possible in theory, and there are a number of very good novels based on that theory that explore the impact of twentieth century ideas and twentieth century know how on relatively primitive societies.
Now we are getting down to the heart of my argument, I am a fan of what might be considered “genre” fiction, yet I dislike the assignment of particular “genres” to works of fiction because it cheapens them. I would prefer to see all written works judged as if they were “real” or “true” stories. I would suggest that anything is possible—even poltergeists, lycanthropes and vampires, faster than light travel, alien invasions and so forth. We, as a species, have advanced far enough technologically to understand that even the most impossible legends are probably technically possible to create the circumstances of somewhere or somewhen, and while the existence of “God” or “gods” remains in doubt, it is entirely possible that there are other intelligent species out there somewhere who are far superior to us in technological ability. Furthermore, as Arthur C. Clarke pointed out in 1961, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Let us remember that in the same essay he also said that, “When an elderly and distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, when he states that something is impossible he is very probably wrong.”
The genres of “fantasy” and “science fiction” have been much maligned over the hundred years or so of their formal existence, yet both genres continue to grow wildly, and many things that were first thought of by science fiction authors are now standard parts of the world we live in—such as nuclear submarines (Jules Verne) and the Internet (Robert Heinlien). I really prefer the term speculative fiction to the more specific forms because speculation is not necessarily false, while the term fantasy gives the idea that the things under its umbrella are impossible (which I do not acknowledge as being a true statement) and even if the specific experiences in a fantasy are not “real”, the lessons that thinking them through as if they are real are no less true than the lessons that may be learned by reading and thinking through Julius Caesar's The Gallic Wars mentioned above.
For a fully realized theory of genre to work, there can be no “lesser” or “greater” genres, each piece should be measured on its own merit before being assigned a genre, and I say that the best fiction is above genre, or cross-genre anyway. Toderov's attempt to define the “fantastic” and place it on a scale between the “uncanny” and the “marvelous” was a good attempt at developing a theory of fantastic literature, and his description of the hesitation between reality and unreality as containing the essence of the fantastic agrees with Tolkien's idea of “eucatastrophe” to a certain extent, but neither of these men managed to define either “fantasy” or “the fantastic” satisfactorily. This is because neither of them gave definitions that cannot be found in multitudinous texts from a variety of genres. I have experienced the eucatastrophe when reading John D. Macdonald's, Stephen King's, and Raymond Chandler's work just as surely as I have when reading Tolkien. In fact, Stephen King's Dark Tower books are a contemporary fantasy of significant importance, even if much of his work has been schlock.
I prefer good “speculative fiction,” to other modes because the stories that can be found under these headings challenge our implicit belief systems, and ask us “what if significant parts of what you think reality is made of were different in this way?” If I had to choose a particular mode of fiction I would go with a field that could be defined as fantastic realism. In other words, not only should the tale be internally consistent, but in any area where the suppositions of the text are the same as the suppositions of the day-to-day reality that we have constructed around ourselves, the author should have done enough research to make the work believable. It annoys me when authors play fast and loose with actual things—such as guns, military tactics, forensics, and so on. If the laws of nature in a story are not the same as the one's we are accustomed to, that is fine, and it does not even have to be explicitly stated, I can pick up the new rules as I go along, but they do need to be internally consistent, and they need to be informed changes. For instance, one of the things about Stephen King's work that tends to annoy me is that he has never learned much about guns, but his characters use them all the time and take them for granted. Firearms do not change properties by being introduced to a new world, and they should never be taken for granted—they are too dangerous for that.
Now, since I mentioned King's The Dark Tower above, and have seen fit to castigate him about his characters attachment to guns, I will give a couple more examples of what I would consider to be important fantasy works of the last couple of decades. The Lord Of The Rings, which we have studied in this course, is on the list of course, it is the first example of a fully developed alternate world and essentially began and defined the genre of fantasy. There have been many critics of Tolkien's work, and most of them have a point, but he did create a internally consistent and believable world entirely from scratch, or rather from his own position in the world that we share, and he deserves the accolades that have been showered upon him.
Nonetheless, the characters in Tolkien's work are stereotyped, and so is his world, there is a clear distinction between “good” and “evil” that is generally broken down to lines of race and alliance, and the southern and eastern peoples are the bad guys, which is typical of his time and place. There have been many other fantasists since Tolkien who have followed his lead in world creation, or “sub-creation” as he would have it, and most of them adhere to his general ideas about good and evil being very different things.
However, since Tolkien wrote, there have been many others who were inspired by his secondary creation and have done some of their own. The most prominent in the genre popularly known as “fantasy” are probably Michael Morcock, Robert Jordan, and Raymond E. Feist, but there have been literally dozens of entirely new worlds created in the past seventy years, and some of them are better than others. When you include the “Sci-Fi” genre of worlds that are truly fantastic, you come across Phillip Jose Farmer, Anne Mc Affery, Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, C.J Cherryh, Lois McMaster Bjoud, (who is a fabulous and fantastic writer), David Drake, Harry Turtledove, Neal Stephenson, and S. M. Stirling (who is probably my current favorite author of speculative fiction—alternate history in this case).
So, all things are fantastic in the time before they become packaged, (both physical, lived, concrete things, and creations of the mind) or if they are observed in a context that makes them real to the viewer, or reader. Life is constructed of metaphor and fantasy, and each of us lives it every day. The trick is to Know that everything is fantastic, and to live as if anything can happen anytime. By living in that way, one is never bored, and one is always learning something new. That is a definition of wisdom I can get behind, and agrees with Confucius on the point that “the wise man is the one who is able to admit that he knows nothing. There are no borders that cannot be crossed, only ones that an individual or a society agree should not be crossed, and often it is the ones who cross previously agreed upon borders that change the world for the better—Rosa Parks, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Mark Twain, and so forth—while those that remain inside the borders are just perpetuating a system that could obviously use some improvement.
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This Fantastic Life: Musings on the Edge of Literature, History, and Experience.
There is a sense of magic and wonder to the world if we only know how to look at it—whether it is a desk in a classroom or a table of statistics in a textbook. It simply requires a slight shift in perspective—a shift that enlivens and reanimates the world because we drop our normal mental filters and see things instead as outsiders. Above all, I would hope my readers and students could experience the same emotions I felt as a child when I received my first library card in Chinatown. When I began to read about other cultures, I felt doors opening on a world that was far greater than I had realized. (Lawrence Yep)
I have been bathing in fantasy my whole life, it is soul food, and it is everywhere. In the past month I have been neck deep in a literary genre called fantasy, and the more I have read about literary theories of genre and scholars of literature trying to pin down what fantasy is, the more convinced I become that theories of genre and theories of fantasy are simply mental exercises. The above quote comes from a Chinese American writer who works across genres, and I am so impressed by his short article that I am going to have to go out and find his novels. Fantasy is exactly the perspective of the outsider that allows one to find the magic in anything. C. Wright Mills, an American sociologist prominent in the middle years of the 20th century, described a way of looking at the world without the filters of one's station as the “sociological imagination.” This is a way of looking at social systems, cultures, jobs, and families from the perspective of the outsider trying to see how it all works.
I envision the world in this way, always looking for the interesting parts, wondering why people do what they do, act like they act, submit or fail to submit. Critical questioning of one's every experience, observation, and deed keeps the world fresh and interesting. Looking at life with the “eyes of a child,” if you will permit me the cliche, one may find that magic is everywhere, and that in fiction and politics it is more potent than anywhere else. Politics is magic because it is the use of language to shape the destiny and power structures of the everyday world. Fiction is magic because it is using language to permit writers and readers alike to inhabit other worlds, other bodies, other worldviews than the ones that they are born to.
I would suggest that in the long term fiction is the most powerful magic that there is. I would also suggest that this is because our cultures and societies are constructed out of myth. Everything depends on the stories a culture takes to heart and believes in. The history of a people is a myth, so is the history of a nation, or the world, or an autobiography—and all fiction is fantasy. Essentially what I am getting at here is that everything anyone tells anyone else is fiction of one degree or another, so the difference between a history text and The Lord of the Rings is a matter of degree, not of kind. Some myths have more attachment to circumstances in the everyday world than others do, but in none of them is the signifier and the signified the same thing. Northrop Frye, in trying to say that fiction could only be constructed from fiction and not from reality was a brilliant idiot. Reality is constructed from fiction, not fiction from reality.
When C.S. Lewis said that “By dipping ordinary things in fantasy, we see them more clearly.” he was correct, but not in the way that he thought. When Thoreau said that, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” he was also correct because most people don't ever learn how to take off the blinders imposed by the myths that they are living in and “dip ordinary things in fantasy.” Most of us lose the ability to see things clearly somewhere during adolescence or early adulthood simply because the social necessities of day to day life require us to abide by the mythic conventions of our time and place in the world. Nietzsche said that “we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things—metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities” (Bizzell and Herzberg, 1175). But then he allows that “that immense framework and planking of concepts [metaphors] to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect” (1178).
I would say that good fiction is above genre, is an “audacious feat of the liberated intellect” and an introduction of unworn metaphors into the scaffolding of human systems—and that unworn metaphors are necessarily fantastic in nature. Therefore, assigning a genre label to a work of fiction is either categorizing it arbitrarily for the sake of categorization, or an attempt to blunt its power by corralling the ideas contained within it in a manageable field. Now, there is some use for genre oriented study I will not deny, but by assigning genre labels to things, we are putting back on the blinders of our time, our culture, and our prejudices. As Dr. Carroll has been heard to say, there are many scholars of literature who discount “fantasy” as a genre, believing that it is not worthy of serious study. Many also say the same of “mystery,” or “horror,” or “contemporary romance,” or “science fiction,” yet none of them say this of Shakespeare's work which included examples of each sort of story—at least as they were practiced five-hundred years ago.
There seems to be a deification of the old that happens with literature, an idea that just because it was written a long time ago, and has somehow survived intact, it is better than what people are writing now. This idea is ridiculous on the face of it. What is being written now is often better than what has gone before because the new generation of writers has all of the history of fiction at their disposal to teach them their trade. Don't get me wrong, I am not disparaging Shakespeare, nor most of the canonical works (though some of them are actually quite terrible and uninteresting), nor am I suggesting that “newer is better,” there are more bad writers than good ones at any given time, but I am saying that the best of the new work that goes to the presses each year is the equal of or better than much of what has gone before, but seldom recognized as such. Furthermore, work that gets awarded the arbitrary designation of “literary” is assigned more worth than that of “genre,” or “popular” fiction, while often the work designated as “literary” is simply too stylish to appeal to a wide audience, sells very few copies and will probably not be reprinted nor survive long enough to become canonical.
Unfortunately and conversely, some of the best “genre” or “popular” fiction suffers the same fate because it is not well promoted and so does not come to the attention of a sufficient number of either academic or popular audiences. For instance, Daniel Keys Moran's Tales of the Continuing Time, is a beautifully written and philosophically deep series of books set mostly in a near future but with links to the far past and other galaxies that explores human technology, biology, parapsychology, politics and morality in an interesting way, yet I believe that they are all out of print—except perhaps The Last Dancer. And at the same time, a book like The Da Vinchi Code, becomes a huge success. I don't get it, Dan Brown's book has an interesting premise, and is well plotted, but his characters are cardboard cutouts and he could not write his way out of a paper bag—but he is rich and Moran lost in the translation from thought to reality.
So, back to the task at hand, which is to discuss fantasy and experience in a literary framework. Whoops, lost my literary framework somewhere. No, actually my literary framework is life, the universe and everything, if you don't mind my stealing a phrase from Douglass Adams. I do not see literature as a separate discipline because it is integral to my understanding of life. The written word has taught me more than any actual, physical interactions I have ever had with other people, and all the interactions I have had with other humans have been constructed out of language—even the times I have been in violent confrontations, even my job as airborne infantry soldier for the U.S. Army many years ago. They asked, “What is the spirit of the Bayonet?”
We answered, “To Kill!”
I never had to, but I would have, and not given it a thought until much later, I was bespelled by the language. Even the day to day requirements of life—cooking, cleaning, defecating, and loving are all defined by our relationship with others and hence with language. That pretty much means that everything that a human being experiences in life is ambiguous and contingent, a metaphor with no correspondence to the original thing. Except that Nietzsche overstated the case—our metaphors are the only way we can approach correspondence with the original thing, and often they are close enough that we can manipulate the physical properties of such a thing to our benefit, which is why science works. Magic works because of language, because language filters through and shapes experience into images constructed out of itself.
Language is magic, it creates the world in our minds. Magic is a fantasy. Life is constructed out of language, therefore life is fantasy.
Now I am reminded of Walker Percy's essay, “The Loss of the Creature,” wherein he discusses the “packaging of experience” that occurs in an academic setting, and on “packaged vacations” like cruises, or bus trips to the Grand Canyon. He states that a young man walking down the beach and finding a dead dogfish in the surf who then decides to cut into it with his pocketknife and becomes fascinated with its inner workings is in a much different relationship to the dogfish than is a young man who walks into a biology classroom and finds that today he is going to dissect a dogfish and learn the proper referents for all of its parts. The student in the classroom has a packaged experience, and it is properly sterilized, organized, and categorized by the language of the institution. However, the boy on the beach is experiencing the thing in itself, and any categorizing he does will of necessity be on his own terms, and there is no need for him to do so, the dogfish is just another interesting thing that he has come across and wants to know more about, while to the student in the biology class, the dogfish is a “specimen” of “a species,” which he is required to know about to achieve the goal of passing the class. In this way, the dogfish loses any meaning in and of itself and becomes meaningful only as a part of the process of becoming educated.
I am not trying to say that education is a bad thing, I enjoy school, and feel that it is important for more people to become educated so that they will be better able to function in an increasingly complex and data intensive world. However, that is not to say that an educated understanding of a thing is the best way, nor the only way—Percy says that there are three ways for the biology student to actually experience the dogfish as itself. One, he can be mentally strong enough to simply “wrest control of it from the educators and the educational package.” Or he can recover it “by ordeal” for instance if a bomb went off in the room and the student found themselves laying on the floor in the aftermath with the dogfish right in front of their face, and suddenly it is clearly not a “specimen” but a real thing, and thirdly he says that it is possible for the student can get lucky and be taken as apprentice by a “great man,” or a “genuine research man” who appreciates the thing for itself and is able to impart that feeling to others (Mind Readings, 130). Percy's point in this essay is that the categorization of experience lessens it, mutes its impact, and that by assigning a label to a thing one is attempting to control it, and, while that is a very human desire, the attempt to control experience makes it less valid, deprives it of a certain elemental force, and makes it easier to ignore.
On the other hand, the attempt to re-live experience is a noble one and can be very rewarding for those who do not flinch from their weaknesses. Patricia Hample writes that,
To write one's life is to live it twice, and the second living is both spiritual and historical, for a memoir reaches deep within the personality as it seeks its narrative form and also grasps the life-of-the-times as no political treatise can.
Our most ancient metaphor says life is a journey. Memoir is travel writing,[...]. But I cannot think of the memoirist as a tourist. This is the traveler who goes on foot, living the journey, taking on mountains, enduring deserts, marveling at the lush green places. Moving through it all faithfully, not so much a survivor with a harrowing tale to tell as a pilgrim, seeking, wondering. (190)
Nonetheless, memory is as much a fantasy as any other human endeavor, it has closer links to the day-to-day requirements of life than does fiction perhaps, but only in the context that it was written and experienced, remove the context from a memoir, and it becomes another piece of fictional history. For instance, Julius Caesar's The Gallic Wars, is an interesting read, and supposedly based on his experiences during the Roman conquest of Europe, but the countries and peoples he fought have not existed in nearly two thousand years—they are as fantastic to a modern person as would be a story that takes place on the Moon, more so because the possibility of going to the moon is much more likely than the possibility of going back in time to war with Caesar—but truthfully, going back to war with Caesar is not impossible, it is highly improbable because no one has figured out how to manipulate time in that way so far as I know, but it is possible in theory, and there are a number of very good novels based on that theory that explore the impact of twentieth century ideas and twentieth century know how on relatively primitive societies.
Now we are getting down to the heart of my argument, I am a fan of what might be considered “genre” fiction, yet I dislike the assignment of particular “genres” to works of fiction because it cheapens them. I would prefer to see all written works judged as if they were “real” or “true” stories. I would suggest that anything is possible—even poltergeists, lycanthropes and vampires, faster than light travel, alien invasions and so forth. We, as a species, have advanced far enough technologically to understand that even the most impossible legends are probably technically possible to create the circumstances of somewhere or somewhen, and while the existence of “God” or “gods” remains in doubt, it is entirely possible that there are other intelligent species out there somewhere who are far superior to us in technological ability. Furthermore, as Arthur C. Clarke pointed out in 1961, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Let us remember that in the same essay he also said that, “When an elderly and distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, when he states that something is impossible he is very probably wrong.”
The genres of “fantasy” and “science fiction” have been much maligned over the hundred years or so of their formal existence, yet both genres continue to grow wildly, and many things that were first thought of by science fiction authors are now standard parts of the world we live in—such as nuclear submarines (Jules Verne) and the Internet (Robert Heinlien). I really prefer the term speculative fiction to the more specific forms because speculation is not necessarily false, while the term fantasy gives the idea that the things under its umbrella are impossible (which I do not acknowledge as being a true statement) and even if the specific experiences in a fantasy are not “real”, the lessons that thinking them through as if they are real are no less true than the lessons that may be learned by reading and thinking through Julius Caesar's The Gallic Wars mentioned above.
For a fully realized theory of genre to work, there can be no “lesser” or “greater” genres, each piece should be measured on its own merit before being assigned a genre, and I say that the best fiction is above genre, or cross-genre anyway. Toderov's attempt to define the “fantastic” and place it on a scale between the “uncanny” and the “marvelous” was a good attempt at developing a theory of fantastic literature, and his description of the hesitation between reality and unreality as containing the essence of the fantastic agrees with Tolkien's idea of “eucatastrophe” to a certain extent, but neither of these men managed to define either “fantasy” or “the fantastic” satisfactorily. This is because neither of them gave definitions that cannot be found in multitudinous texts from a variety of genres. I have experienced the eucatastrophe when reading John D. Macdonald's, Stephen King's, and Raymond Chandler's work just as surely as I have when reading Tolkien. In fact, Stephen King's Dark Tower books are a contemporary fantasy of significant importance, even if much of his work has been schlock.
I prefer good “speculative fiction,” to other modes because the stories that can be found under these headings challenge our implicit belief systems, and ask us “what if significant parts of what you think reality is made of were different in this way?” If I had to choose a particular mode of fiction I would go with a field that could be defined as fantastic realism. In other words, not only should the tale be internally consistent, but in any area where the suppositions of the text are the same as the suppositions of the day-to-day reality that we have constructed around ourselves, the author should have done enough research to make the work believable. It annoys me when authors play fast and loose with actual things—such as guns, military tactics, forensics, and so on. If the laws of nature in a story are not the same as the one's we are accustomed to, that is fine, and it does not even have to be explicitly stated, I can pick up the new rules as I go along, but they do need to be internally consistent, and they need to be informed changes. For instance, one of the things about Stephen King's work that tends to annoy me is that he has never learned much about guns, but his characters use them all the time and take them for granted. Firearms do not change properties by being introduced to a new world, and they should never be taken for granted—they are too dangerous for that.
Now, since I mentioned King's The Dark Tower above, and have seen fit to castigate him about his characters attachment to guns, I will give a couple more examples of what I would consider to be important fantasy works of the last couple of decades. The Lord Of The Rings, which we have studied in this course, is on the list of course, it is the first example of a fully developed alternate world and essentially began and defined the genre of fantasy. There have been many critics of Tolkien's work, and most of them have a point, but he did create a internally consistent and believable world entirely from scratch, or rather from his own position in the world that we share, and he deserves the accolades that have been showered upon him.
Nonetheless, the characters in Tolkien's work are stereotyped, and so is his world, there is a clear distinction between “good” and “evil” that is generally broken down to lines of race and alliance, and the southern and eastern peoples are the bad guys, which is typical of his time and place. There have been many other fantasists since Tolkien who have followed his lead in world creation, or “sub-creation” as he would have it, and most of them adhere to his general ideas about good and evil being very different things.
However, since Tolkien wrote, there have been many others who were inspired by his secondary creation and have done some of their own. The most prominent in the genre popularly known as “fantasy” are probably Michael Morcock, Robert Jordan, and Raymond E. Feist, but there have been literally dozens of entirely new worlds created in the past seventy years, and some of them are better than others. When you include the “Sci-Fi” genre of worlds that are truly fantastic, you come across Phillip Jose Farmer, Anne Mc Affery, Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, C.J Cherryh, Lois McMaster Bjoud, (who is a fabulous and fantastic writer), David Drake, Harry Turtledove, Neal Stephenson, and S. M. Stirling (who is probably my current favorite author of speculative fiction—alternate history in this case).
So, all things are fantastic in the time before they become packaged, (both physical, lived, concrete things, and creations of the mind) or if they are observed in a context that makes them real to the viewer, or reader. Life is constructed of metaphor and fantasy, and each of us lives it every day. The trick is to Know that everything is fantastic, and to live as if anything can happen anytime. By living in that way, one is never bored, and one is always learning something new. That is a definition of wisdom I can get behind, and agrees with Confucius on the point that “the wise man is the one who is able to admit that he knows nothing. There are no borders that cannot be crossed, only ones that an individual or a society agree should not be crossed, and often it is the ones who cross previously agreed upon borders that change the world for the better—Rosa Parks, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Mark Twain, and so forth—while those that remain inside the borders are just perpetuating a system that could obviously use some improvement.
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