On Monday 29 September this blog, The City of Lost Books, celebrated its tenth birthday. This seems like the ideal time for a retrospective, partly because I’m planning to change things here in days to come.
In 2015 I set up the world’s first Masters degree in Fantasy Literature, the MLitt in Fantasy at the University of Glasgow. The idea of writing a blog for it came from my wonderful friend and colleague Evelyn Arizpe, whose MEd in Children’s Literature and Literacies (co-directed by the equally wonderful Maureen Farrell) had already been a huge success by the time I came to set up my Masters. Her advice was that a blog helped to give intellectual and social cohesion to a Masters programme, providing prospective students with a glimpse of what thinking about and studying the subject might be like at Glasgow, and offering current students a chance to read posts elaborating on ideas their teachers will have begun to sketch out in lectures and tutorials. I think she said other persuasive things about blogs and their benefits, but at this distance of time I’ve forgotten what they were, and in any case my blog turned into something rather different from what she or I might have anticipated.
The existence of The City of Lost Books, then, was the product of a pedagogic conversation or dialogue, but it quickly took itself off in a new direction, largely determined by the fact that I was teaching, writing and thinking about the topic of the blog – fantasy fiction – largely by myself for the first twelve months or so of the blog’s existence. The eccentricities of the blog were my own eccentricities, no doubt exacerbated by pressure of time – writing a post each month turned out to be time-consuming, which meant I sometimes cheated by posting stuff I’d already written and published elsewhere. I didn’t have much space in my head for philosophical reflection on the question of blogs and their function; I merely wanted to put out posts regularly, so as to identify the blog as active and wide-ranging. Ideally those posts would have some connection to the Masters in Fantasy, which was launched in the same month as The City of Lost Books; but I very quickly found myself straying into fantasy-related subjects that were barely touched on in the programme. I justified this by telling myself that the contents of the programme were not fixed, and that we encouraged our students to write on texts that interested them, not necessarily texts that were being taught in our courses. After all, there is no canon of fantasy literature (I hope and trust there never will be), and I wanted students to have the opportunity to write on what they loved, not what obsessed the programme convener (me) – a straightish white British man in his fifties. Sure enough, the contents of the programme have changed pretty radically since those early days, and trying to keep up with its changes in the blog would have been impossible, given the substantial length of the later posts and the time it takes to write each one.
When I started, I didn’t have much experience of blogs and didn’t really know how to set one up. There were three or four I read regularly, but they had nothing to do with Masters programmes, and varied widely in topic, style and presentation. I started out following the model of some of those other blogs, with short, punchy posts based on single books, many of which I’d already tested on Facebook (my friends had been very nice about them, but then of course they were my friends so that was their job). In those early days I also played with the idea of presenting the blog as the communications office of an imagined fantasy hub, based in a gigantic castle-like building staffed with mythical beings and run by witches, wizards, sorceresses, shamans, nuns, alchemists and the like. In developing this concept I drew on my enjoyment of radio, whose nature as a sound-only medium meant it could conjure up the most lavish and extravagant settings without the need to spend a penny on raw materials, architect’s fees or interior decoration (I’m thinking here of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Goon Show and many others). I’m a little sad I didn’t do more with the concept, but time was against me, and in any case the hub – known as the Glasgow Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic – now really exists, having come into being five years after The City of Lost Books began. The Centre even has a physical space of its own in the form of the Weatherwax Room in University Gardens, a tiny library stocked with SFF related magazines and books, large enough to host small meetings. Once a Fantasy Centre has a library it’s already linked to that vast edifice the Unseen University Library, along with all the other libraries that intersect in L-Space, as explained by the great Terry Pratchett; so perhaps there’s no longer any need to imagine anything so restrictive as a castle-like building staffed by mythical beings and run by scholars and practitioners of magic. Every room with books in it pays homage to Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel, or the House full of book-related statues in Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, and no mere physical edifice could match the splendour of those two structures, or indeed of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, which contains every ancient book or building within the purlieux of its uncharted walls.
I began by composing shortish posts, but as time went on, I began to enjoy the opportunity to write at any length I pleased, about what I pleased, from any angle I pleased, without being hassled by finicky editors or the conventions of publishing houses. In terms of the quality of my essays, this was of course a mixed blessing: editors can offer invaluable help in terms of making your arguments readable, accurate and relevant, though they can also show unwelcome resistance to unusual stylistic choices (such as bullet points, UK English, or what I like to think of as witticisms). I also vastly enjoyed adding a visual element to my essays in the form of images. Working out which images to add was a learning process, punctuated by accidental infringements of copyright which I paid for both metaphorically and literally by taking them down, refunding the copyright owners, and seeking an appropriate free substitute. My use of images in blog posts and my use of images in PowerPoint presentations for lectures at the University of Glasgow followed a similar trajectory. Towards the beginning I tended to use just one or two images as a way of introducing a post or lecture with a visual cue, intended to conjure up some relevant mood or atmosphere; but by the end of my lecturing career, I used PowerPoints first and foremost as a means of providing a series of exciting images for my listeners to rest their eyes on throughout the lecture – and perhaps to lose themselves in when my words became too abundant (‘too many notes’, as some patron or other may have complained to Mozart). The same principle applies to the pictures in my later posts. I’m very much a visual person, and I suspect a lot of fantasy readers share that proclivity and welcome the extra dimension visual images bring to invented worlds, from maps to book covers, illustrations, and even statues, as in Piranesi.
As I continued to work on the blog I found that my posts became more wayward, less predictable from my own point of view, let alone that of my readers. This waywardness arose partly from the fact that some of them were based on texts and ideas I was addressing in talks at other institutions, many on topics not connected to the programme, and partly from the influence of visiting speakers we entertained, first at the imaginary Fantasy Hub and later at the real-life Fantasy Centre. Among the speakers were Julie Bertagna, on whom I wrote a blog-post intended to accompany a mini-conference at which she was the keynote speaker. Some years later I wrote a substantial piece on puppetry and fantasy to tie in with an event we had organised on the subject with the help of a long-term friend of Fantasy at Glasgow, the writer-artist Terri Windling. As for my own invited talks and lectures, from the moment I started teaching the Fantasy programme I tried to make sure that all of these were fantasy-oriented, even when I was asked to speak on early modern topics (I started out as a scholar of early modern or Renaissance literature before transitioning to the worlds of the fantastic). This led me to pen a series of posts on early modern fantasy, which may one day find their way into a book on the subject. For me, fantasy may be said to have had its origins in the Reformation, when opponents on either side of the religious wars accused one another of making things up and embracing manifest impossibilities as orthodox doctrine, and many of my talks considered Protestant writers – or writers in a Protestant environment, such as Shakespeare – making use of what might be called the ‘Catholic imaginary’ as a means of constructing wild romances and inventive fictions. Meanwhile in my talks on modern fantasy – from the nineteenth century from the present – I often found myself focusing on Irish fantasy in response to the personal and professional interests of my target audiences. One of the Glasgow departments I worked with closely when setting up the programme was Celtic and Gaelic Studies, and this led me to give a talk on Irish Fantasy and the Easter Rising which later found new life as a blog post. This post led to further blog posts and further talks on the Irish fantastic, some of them building on work I had done before setting up the programme – on Flann O’Brien and C. S. Lewis, among others – while others sprang from a fresh interest in Lord Dunsany, James Stephens and Patricia Lynch, all three of whom were present at and wrote about the Easter Rising as well as writing influential fantastic fiction. My interest in Irish Fantasy, too, may one day find expression in a book. Meanwhile, I found my long-term interest in Scottish fantasy growing exponentially as I studied its Irish counterpart. After the post on Julie Bertagna I found myself writing on William Croft Dickinson, Alasdair Gray, Mollie Hunter, George Macdonald, Naomi Mitchison, W. W. Tarn, and many others. I began to think about constructing a digital Fantasy Map of Scotland, indicating the locations of influential fantasy narratives – and perhaps movies, though this might make the map too unwieldy – with links to substantial essays by many hands. Needless to say, the map has not taken shape, though I’d love to think the idea might yet come to fruition – needless to say, with dazzling bespoke images, incidental music, games, puzzles, maybe even – why not? – animations! The sky’s the limit, after all, when you’re concocting projects which may never see the light of day.
Meanwhile I had been thinking for years of writing a monograph on one of my heroes, the British writer-artist Mervyn Peake. I made sure that Peake’s Titus books made an appearance at a key moment in the Fantasy programme, towards the end of the first semester, and many of the talks I gave outside Glasgow drew on my fascination with his work, from a discussion of Peake and Piracy at the University of Edinburgh to a lecture on Peake and Islands at the British Library. Another lecture at the University of Edinburgh gave me a chance to consider another book that featured on the programme, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, as a work of fantasy. A talk at Lund University in Sweden gave me a chance to focus on a book I have loved since childhood, John Masefield’s The Midnight Folk; while a collaborative project with the University of Queensland inspired posts on the Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck and the World Fantasy Award-winning Canadian writer Helen Marshall. Invitations to speak, then – for myself and others – and projects of one sort or another provided the impetus for several posts, and often involved a change of critical direction from the paths I had been treading when teaching classes.
Then there was creative writing. From the beginning I had wanted there to be space within the Fantasy Masters for students to pursue their interest in writing fantasy as well as discussing it, since in my experience just about every fantasy reader is also a fantasy writer at some level. To coincide with the inaugural session of the Fantasy MLitt programme my friends and colleagues in Glasgow’s Creative Writing programme – especially Dr Elizabeth Reeder – set up a creative writing course available to all Masters students in the College of Arts, something that had not existed up to that time, and as I expected many of my fantasy students chose to take it. To support these and other students in their writing I organised an annual Fantasy Reading Party at the Dram! Bar on Woodlands Road, and decided to read some of my own short stories at it, afterwards placing them on the blog despite my doubts about their quality. My stories have been among the least visited of my posts, but I’m glad I put them out there, as a gesture of solidarity with those students who have had the talent and courage to pursue a career as creative writers – and more still with those students who write for the joy of it, without ever putting their work into widespread circulation.
As the last couple of paragraphs make clear, writing blog posts gave me the opportunity to understand how my interest in fantasy could be organised under different themes. I’ve mentioned early modern fantasy, Irish and Scottish fantasy, creative writing, and the writer-artist Mervyn Peake (and Mervyn Peake spawned in turn a series of posts on other fantasy writers in his lifetime, as well as on other writer-artists, such as Mary Fairclough, Alasdair Gray, David Jones, William Morris, J. R. R. Tolkien and Ursula Moray Williams, though I haven’t always had time or space to consider the relationship between their visual art and their writing). Working on Peake also made me think very hard about the rise of modern fantasy between the wars, and about fantasy in wartime, and these themes led in turn to a fascination for the fantasy fiction published in one particular year, 1939; this too may one day become a book, and a powerfully pertinent one in the light of the current rise of authoritarianism and neo-fascism around the world. Another theme that emerged over time – to my surprise – was fantasy houses, which is central to one of my posts but also crops up in many more; what a terrific book topic this would make, offering up a meditation on how our domestic spaces shape our imaginations, making us capable of creating alternative worlds even within the confines of a bedroom, a wardrobe or a cupboard under the stairs. As you can see, the experience of writing the blog has generated something approaching an imaginary library of non-existent critical works, supplemented perhaps by a non-existent short story collection, and I shall be perfectly happy if this library building remains imaginary but half visible through my posts, glimmering out of them like the lights of a ghostly mansion from the depths of a forest.
Fantasy for children remains another important theme. When I first started writing the blog I was very much aware of the unusual position occupied by fantasy fiction for children; I can think of no other genre in which children’s books have so often evolved into highly respected series of books for adults, from T. H. White’s The Once and Future King to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Chronicles of Earthsea. In a kind of homage to the Masters programme in Children’s Literature and Literacies which inspired it, I wanted my blog to be full of serious engagements with children’s fantasy literature, subjecting it to the kind of close reading too often reserved only for poetry or experimental fiction for adult readers. One day I’d love to publish yet another book full of such close readings. I’m particularly proud of the posts I’ve written on two other lifelong heroes, the poet, playwright and novelist John Masefield, which I mentioned earlier, and the trans writer, actor and dramatist Nicholas Stuart Gray. I also hugely enjoyed writing on C S Lewis (treading in the footsteps of that brilliant blogger Katherine Langrish), Mollie Hunter, Patricia Lynch and Clifford Mills. Mills is a good example of another theme that winds its way through the blog: books that have been lost from the collective memory, but which are well worth retrieving from wherever they have landed among the shadows on the forest floor. Mill’s play for children Where the Rainbow Ends was once one of the most popular theatrical events of the British Christmas calendar, with a similar place in the affections of mid-twentieth century audiences as Barrie’s Peter Pan, but it has been largely forgotten, largely because of its tendency to boost a particularly cringeworthy form of British imperialism; but I loved it as a child, and its influence on the growing minds of many generations of children – not least that of C. S. Lewis, whose The Magician’s Nephew echoes one episode in the novel version of Mills’s play – deserves to be remembered and understood. Other forgotten writers I’ve stumbled across and written on include Ruthven Todd, the Scottish surrealist poet and fantasy writer; Frances Browne, the ‘blind poetess of Donegal’ who wrote haunting fairy tales; and Elmer Rice, whose Science Fantasy novel A Voyage to Purilia conjures up a planet that operates according to the conventions of Hollywood silent movies in the 1920s. Most of these I came across in second hand bookshops entirely by chance, and writing about them seemed like a way of honouring the operations of chance in constructing our perception of literary history.
It may or may not be worth trying to publish a book about forgotten fantasies, but there’s one I’m pretty certain, now, I’ll never write: a monograph called The Fantastic History of the Twentieth Century which I mentioned a number of times in early posts. The idea of this book was that the story of the century could be told through its fantasies, showing how the fantastic fiction of each decade responded to major political events; I used the concept as the basis of a course I taught for many years at undergraduate level, and it worked very well as a structuring device, at least until the twenty-first century began to demand more urgent attention than its predecessor. But as I’ve worked on fantasy, and read other people’s work on fantasy – which has been emerging in increasing quantities since the blog got going – I’ve realised I could never write the kind of comprehensive survey I had envisaged, since this would involve reading a lot of books that don’t particularly excite me or which indeed I actively detest; I refuse to write on any book I don’t admire on some level, which is why I have never published a negative review (I won’t review a book if I think I’m going to diss it). Also, quite simply, it would involve reading a lot of books, many of them gigantic, and I’m not a fast reader. I’ve always preferred to read slowly, with attention, savouring every sentence, paragraph or chapter, and to write in such a way as to acknowledge the craft, thought and imaginative energy that has gone into the specific text I’m reading – as against the qualities it shares with other texts (though of course a comparison with other texts is essential to bring out its special qualities). I’m less concerned, too, to write on movements large or small than on the text as a symptom of such movements – some of which may never have been recognised as movements at all until they were exposed by their wavering presence in the text under consideration. I might write my fantastic history if I could choose just one or two texts as somehow speaking for each decade of the century, but that would be a very different, much more modest book than the encyclopaedic tome I once conceived. It might still be an attractive book, though, if well printed and lavishly illustrated; so I’ll add it to the non-existent library which is gradually taking shape as I consider what I’ve learned while working on The City of Lost Books.
So what are the larger things I’ve learned about fantasy as I worked?
First, I’ve found that the simplest definition of the genre – ‘the art of the impossible’ – works very well, for me, as a basis for discussion. In classes, this is the definition I’ve repeatedly returned to. For fantasy to be truly itself, the reader (or spectator, viewer, player, or whatever) must be conscious that it could never have happened; that it must at some point violate accepted laws of physics, biology, history, geography, temporality and so on – the laws that govern what Kathryn Hume has called ‘consensus reality’[1] – and that this violation must not be explained, or rather must not be deemed to be explained, in terms of science as we understand it, since such explanations make a fantastic narrative science fiction rather than fantasy. This simple explanation enables the term to embrace the full range of what I understand to be fantasy or the fantastic – that is, the various narrative strategies or techniques listed by Farah Mendlesohn in her seminal book Rhetorics of Fantasy, such as immersive fantasy (a narrative that takes place entirely in an invented world), portal fantasy (a narrative that involves a transition from our own familiar world to an invented world), intrusion fantasy (a narrative in which something impossible occurs in or invades our own familiar world), and more.[2] It encompasses everything from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which is packed with invented creatures and impossible occurrences, to Italo Calvino’s The Non-existent Knight, which contains just a few such impossibilities – the chief impossibility being the central character, who is a suit of armour without anything in it, animated only by a determination to discharge his role as one of Charlemagne’s devoted knights. The definition can encompass Karin Tidbeck’s great novel Amatka, which includes many of the conventions of science fiction (such as a world that operates according to very different principles than our own, to which people have travelled from our own world in conventional vehicles armed with advanced scientific equipment and knowledge), but which is also subject to rules wholly incompatible with those of any science, in that words alone are capable of changing the physical nature of things and people there. Or Octavia Butler’s Kindred, where the sole impossibility consists in the fact that the protagonist is suddenly transported from the present-day United States (that is, the US of the 1970s when the novel was written) to the antebellum US of the early nineteenth century, without the benefit of a time machine that works according to principles deemed to be scientific; she simply finds herself in the past, without any explanation at all. Or Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, which follows a dream logic which could be described as surreal. Even the fact that ‘impossible’ is a shifty term (the impossible of the past was not that of the present, the impossible of one culture is not that of another) does not detract from the definition’s validity; the shiftiness simply needs to be taken careful account of in our discussions.
Secondly, the rhetorical device that lies at the heart of fantasy is oxymoron, described by Rosemary Jackson as ‘a figure of speech which holds together contradictions and sustains them in an impossible unity, without progressing towards synthesis’.[3] The classic oxymoron, as practised by Francesco Petrarch in his love poems, includes phrases such as ‘icy fire’ or ‘living death’, phrases which depend for their effectiveness on the hearer holding in their mind simultaneously two incompatible concepts, which are deemed to coexist in the same object, person, event or landscape. The moment when the impossible enters a fantasy text is always described in terms of oxymoron – as when a heavy body spontaneously acquires the power of unaided flight, or when a person finds themselves immersed in water without getting wet, or when light springs from an object which is not normally a source of illumination, such as a ring or a wooden staff. I devoted a whole lecture, in the course of the Fantasy Masters, to the notion of oxymoron as it occurs in what I called the interface between realism and fantasy – the moment when the impossible first enters the world of the text, something I also discussed a little in three posts on C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. A famous oxymoron that introduces the transition from realism to fantasy occurs at the beginning of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
[S]he was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.
A rabbit with the power of speech, wearing a waistcoat and owning a watch gives us three impossibilities in quick succession, any of which could be described as an oxymoron – a contradiction in terms – in relation to the rabbit, and which are never explained in the course of Carroll’s book (that is, until the final page, when Alice’s adventures are revealed as having been a dream). I gave a number of other pleasing examples of oxymorons in fantasy in my lecture, and one day I intend to reproduce it here in full. Watch this space!
Thirdly, there is a visual form of oxymoron which features perhaps most obviously in the various fantasies of puppetry, whether in fiction, on stage or in the movies. This involves what Steve Tillis describes as a ‘kind of double vision’, whereby the same object is perceived to be at once both an inanimate thing and a living creature or person. Tillis puts it like this:
the puppet is a theatrical figure, perceived by an audience to be an object that is given design, movement, and frequently, speech, so that it fulfils the audience’s desire to imagine it as having life; by creating a double-vision of perception and imagination, the puppet pleasurably challenges the audience’s understanding of the relationship between objects and life[.][4]
Puppets, in fact, return an adult audience, or an older child, to the pleasurable early childhood game of imagining a toy to be a living, moving, articulate being, while still remaining a toy; and fantasy replicates this playful mode by animating a whole range of objects, from houses and stones to door-knockers, trees, dolls, scarecrows, paintings and rubbish, impossibly investing them with motion and sometimes voices while insisting on their continued identity as houses, stones, door-knockers, trees and so on. Oxymoron, then (‘which holds together contradictions and sustains them in an impossible unity’), can work on several levels, involving all five of the human senses – sight, hearing, touch, feeling, smell and even occasionally taste – as it conjures up impossible situations. It’s not just a verbal strategy, in other words; and this helps explain fantasy’s delight in making the transition from one expressive medium to another – from page to stage to screen, or from verbal narrative to map or illustration or game or podcast. My own interest as a commentator is largely in literary or genre fiction, with occasional forays into illustration and film, but as a consumer of fantasy I like to find it everywhere – including in architecture, which is always breaking out into unexpected forms of organic life that seem to belie its rigid, chilly surfaces.
Fourthly, I remain fascinated by Tzvetan Todorov’s notion of hesitation as lying at the heart of fantasy. Actually, Todorov claims that hesitation is the dominant mode of a genre he calls the fantastic, whose narratives keep their readers hovering in a state of uncertainty as to the explanation of certain events – are they natural or supernatural? – without resolving the matter (alternatively the matter may be resolved, but only after a prolonged period of uncertainty).[5] A fine example of Todorov’s fantastic is Henry James’s celebrated ghost story The Turn of the Screw, in which the reader can never finally be sure whether the ghosts in question were real or imagined. Fantasy embraces hesitation, too, though not often, perhaps, over whether some given event may be natural or supernatural. Alice’s curiosity as to the rabbit’s nature is never really resolved but only grows into greater curiosity as she encounters more strange beings (‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ Alice cries in the second chapter), whose explanations of their own nature and activities only elicit further questions. Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea involves an extended hesitation over the nature of the Shadow released by the young wizard Ged; what is it and how can it be defeated? (As it turns out, defeating the Shadow is not even the correct solution to its troubling presence.) The One Ring in The Lord of the Rings involves a hesitation over how to deal with a supernatural object, rather than over its nature: if the Ring supernaturally imposes its evil will on those who possess it, how can its current possessor (Frodo) retain enough independence of mind to destroy it when the time comes to do so? That hesitation is what makes Frodo reluctant to take up the Ring, makes Boromir doubt the wisdom of letting him keep it, ensures that the Ring’s maker fails to entertain the possibility that his enemies may seek to destroy it at all, and remains unresolved at the end of Frodo’s journey to Mount Doom, when he finally succumbs to the Ring’s malignant influence. It’s often assumed, even by fans, that the classic fantasy narrative involves the defeat of ‘evil’ by ‘good’ (usually embodied in a strong male hero) – the kind of story whose template is the tale of Saint George and the Dragon; but all the best fantasies I can think of involve a hesitation over the nature of the challenge that is being faced, over the nature of the person or people facing up to it, and over the question of how the second should address the first. There are plenty of fantasies, of course, which involve a more Todorovian hesitation, such as David Garnett’s novella Lady into Fox, in which a woman turns into a vixen without any rational explanation – though the narrator speculates endlessly about the reasons for her transformation; or Butler’s Kindred (what’s behind those constant journeys back and forth in time?); or many short stories by Gene Wolfe or Kelly Link. Even in these, however, the nature of the hesitation is often much shiftier than Todorov’s simple hesitation between a natural and a supernatural explanation of events. Often what remains at the end of a sophisticated fantasy is a hesitation on the part of the reader over what exactly happened and what it means. This kind of hesitation, like Todorov’s, invariably makes us return to the narrative to read it again: I can’t count the number of times I reread Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun in the course of my twenties, and I literally reread his novella Seven American Nights every year after I placed it on the reading list of an undergraduate fantasy course I taught for many years before setting up the Masters programme (I named it after my non-existent book ‘The Fantastic History of the Twentieth Century’). Under the influence of my students, I came up with a different interpretation of events almost every time I read it.
This latter kind of hesitation – the hesitation over what a fantasy narrative means – segues neatly into the fifth and final ‘larger thing’ I’ve learned about fantasy as I puzzled over it in my blog, which ran alongside my teaching for so many years. This fifth thing is that fantasy is a genre obsessed with riddles; indeed, that it understands existence itself as a kind of riddle, to be answered with as much ingenuity as it is asked. This idea stems from Adam Roberts’s book The Riddles of the Hobbit, which posits the idea of fantasy itself as a riddling mode of writing – at least, that’s how I understand Roberts’s argument. A riddle looks at one thing or situation and sees it as somehow standing for or pointing towards another, quite different thing or situation, and invites us to guess what is being indicated or pointed towards. To take the riddles of The Hobbit, for instance, thirty white horses on a red hill may stand for teeth; a box without hinges, key, or lid may stand for an egg; a set of oxymorons (alive without breath, never thirsty ever drinking) may stand for a fish; and so on. For Roberts, the rhetorical figure favoured by the riddling mode is irony, whereby ‘the relationship between the said and the meant is not straightforward’, in contrast to the simpler relationship between what’s said and what’s meant that underpins mimetic representation.[6] ‘“Irony rather than mimesis”’, he adds, ‘also happens to be a fairly neat thumbnail for separating out the textual strategies of science fiction and fantasy from “realist” works more generally conceived’. So discovering riddles (or un-dish-covering them, to invoke Lewis Carroll again) can be said to be what fantasy is all about; though Roberts also points out that the process could just as easily summarize the act of reading fiction in general, which involves trying to find a satisfactory meaning for any fictional narrative, not just narratives of the fantastic. Roberts writes very well, on the extent to which riddles can have more than one answer; the relationship between the said and the meant remains unstraightforward even after one has found a satisfying solution. Fantasy’s riddles involve oxymorons – impossibilities – to a far greater extent than realism’s do, I would suggest. And actual riddle-games, as against riddling prose, are widespread in fantasy fiction, from Patricia McKillip’s Riddlemaster trilogy to Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots, from Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle to the riddling predictions that underpin so many quests, such as the prophecy that Lyra is ‘destined to bring about the end of destiny’ in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. The translation magic of R. F. Kuang’s Babel involves etymological games which are effectively riddles with more than one answer, the unravelling of curses in Frances Hardinge’s Unraveller involves deciphering the riddles of which curses are composed, while Le Guin’s entire Earthsea sequence concerns itself with the problematic relationship between things and their ‘true names’. Understanding the world as a riddle implies that you don’t believe there is only one set of rules by which to decipher it, and indeed that the more inventively you read the cues it offers you the more adventurously – and the more freely – you will live.
Many of my posts have chosen to read fantasy texts as in some sense utopian, or as pointing towards ways to liberate ourselves from dystopian elements in the societies we inhabit. That’s a choice on my part, and I’m far from sure that the writers I have discussed would always have been comfortable with the kinds of utopias I’m inclined to embrace. I remain convinced, though, that fantasy is the ideal mode in which to explore better ways of living and being, and I suspect its willingness to unmoor itself from physical rules – and to play games with the verbal rules it necessarily exists by – are what makes it suitable for that purpose. Even the contempt with which the term ‘fantasy’ is used can be liberating. If nobody takes a genre completely seriously, including the artists who practise it, it cannot readily be trapped into speaking with authority, still less with the strident voice of authoritarianism.
Ten years is quite a time to run a substantial blog. An acute case of stress led me to retire from my job as a University Professor in 2022, but I continued to keep up the blog with pleasure and enthusiasm, doing my best to put up posts at the rate of one a month. Lately I’ve begun to find the pressure of monthly deadlines increasingly stressful, generating vivid flashbacks to the mental health issues that led to my retirement. I intend, then, to ignore these deadlines from now on; I’ll put up posts only when I feel like it. There are still a lot of posts I’d like to write, and I plan to write them as and when my mental state permits. I’d also like to give plenty of time to larger projects unconnected with the blog. This means that the present post marks a break with the practices of the past; but it also marks a utopian gesture towards the future. May that future bring a better world – indeed, many better worlds – to all my readers.
NOTES
[1] See Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature (New York and London: Methuen, 1984), p. 21.
[2] Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy (Middletown, Ct: Wesleyan University Press, 2008).
[3] Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London and New York: Routledge, 1981), p. 21.
[4] Steve Tillis, Toward an Aesthetics of the Puppet (New York etc.: Greenwood Press, 1992), p. 65.
[5] Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 25.
[6] Adam Roberts, The Riddles of The Hobbit (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 4.