Science-Fictiony Stuff
12/9/02 00:22![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eredienCrackers Do Matter, for those Farscape fans. Write. Call.
Lila was reading Tolkien's On Fairy Stories again today, and I commented to her about it a little. I started reading Perelandra, Lewi's book, today, too. So, there's been this ongoing little brain-dialouge all the rest of the day, which always happens when I read something good, or when I think about Tolkien, his world - for if it was anyone's, it was his - and especially his magnificent essay.
The main whisper of this brain-thought is: "There's a spark there. There's something. You can feel it. And you want to, for a brief time, hold that spark, and have other people warm their hands in its light."
Except it's phrased more like a question. Or a challenge.
Which are really the same things.
And so, I read tonight this essay, Reinvigorating the Fantastic, by China Mieville. (Who, by the way, couldn't have got a cooler name had he picked it out himself.)
Now, I haven't read anything of Mievelle's yet. I'm planning on it. I tend to really like urban-novel-fantasy-surreal thingies. That is to say: I have no real qualifications for critiquing the article, other than the fact that I'm a fan and tend to read and think quite a bit. But I'm not going to let that stop me.
I do think there's a lot of cliches out there.
But complaining about them isn't going to do you any good, first off. If you don't like the whole "magic sword" bit, keep writing. And remember that someone's going to like it. Remember that for some people, that might be their introduction to other things in the genre. We don't all have the same literary tastes. Remember that this is a good thing.
I completely fail to see how Tolkien had a "deadening impact." Yes, there were people writing sf and fantasy before Tolkien and Lewis and all the rest. But Tolkien's work helped to create the mass demand for the genre. The only deadening impact it may have had was on writer's imaginations - but that's the writer's fault for listening too hard to someone else's story to want to make their own. Not Tolkien's.
Now, something I have read, numerous times, is Tolkien's "Fairy Stories" essay, which I know Mievelle is taking things from here. So I will assume you've read it. If you haven't, that, go out and get a copy of the book. Now. If you're interested enough to read this far in my journal on this topic, you ought to acquaint yourself with what one of the best Storytellers in the genre had to say about his own profession, and what is also one of the major literary touchstones in my own life.
The big problem I have is with this paragraph: "In other words, books that challenge or subvert reality, that pick at its scabs, are discouraged as a matter of policy [italics his]. Tolkien and Lewis’s vision is fantasy that doesn’t try to investigate reality and its tensions, but which tries to escape it. It does that by being structured according to moralistic and mythic logics, rather than organic, narrative logic."
*coughcough*
Excuse me.
Fairy, as Tolkien called it, and Story, as I call it, is in its essence a challenge to reality. It's a challenge to the very idea of reality, the "this is the way the world works," the "these are the Unspoken Rules that Everyone Knows," that linger in our heads. We know we've crossed into something else, whether it's a situation or a universe, when those rules are changed. It's a subversion when the rules are bent just a little, but it's a primal-scream kind of challenge when those rules are just...gone. New ones come in to take their place, perhaps - but those rules are not ours, and we know it.
It can be an escape, yes. But the best fantasy doesn't just act as an escape-hatch; there's something Different on the other side of the door.
Like those new rules, for example. Does it mean that because the tensions that the fantasy tries to investigte aren't familiar, and that the reality you're now in, the Different, puts you so far out of your Normal that people call it "escape" simply because they don't know what else to call it, but know it's not theirs? Do they give up on understanding the rules altogether, and just go along for a ride with pretty colors?
I wish I had Mievelle here now. I would talk to him. I don't understand why morals, in the right situation, can't be organic. Or why myths can't have their own kind of logic.
I think that maybe, just maybe, they do.
It's just not ours.
He does make the point that fantasy can be "...difficult, as dirty and complex and rife with social tensions..." as the 'Real World' can be. I agree with this. He points out some of my favorite authors who do that. I want to do that, and see nothing wrong with social tensions or difficulties. This, I think, is one of those things that not enough sf/fantasy writers do.
But I think he misses the point again in the last paragraph when he says that "fantasy is about the real world."
Fantasy can have tensions. And dirt, and blood, and people screaming. Fantasy can be set in the real world. (I like to read that kind of thing.) It can (and in my opnion, should) have emotions that people feel in the real world, if only to give readers something that they can understand and relate to within the shifting rules.
But it's not about the real world, unless "the real world" means "the Unspoken Rules that Everyone Knows". Fantasy is about the change in definition of "real," and how people deal with that. And that kind of thing isn't shelved under non-fiction.
Lila was reading Tolkien's On Fairy Stories again today, and I commented to her about it a little. I started reading Perelandra, Lewi's book, today, too. So, there's been this ongoing little brain-dialouge all the rest of the day, which always happens when I read something good, or when I think about Tolkien, his world - for if it was anyone's, it was his - and especially his magnificent essay.
The main whisper of this brain-thought is: "There's a spark there. There's something. You can feel it. And you want to, for a brief time, hold that spark, and have other people warm their hands in its light."
Except it's phrased more like a question. Or a challenge.
Which are really the same things.
And so, I read tonight this essay, Reinvigorating the Fantastic, by China Mieville. (Who, by the way, couldn't have got a cooler name had he picked it out himself.)
Now, I haven't read anything of Mievelle's yet. I'm planning on it. I tend to really like urban-novel-fantasy-surreal thingies. That is to say: I have no real qualifications for critiquing the article, other than the fact that I'm a fan and tend to read and think quite a bit. But I'm not going to let that stop me.
I do think there's a lot of cliches out there.
But complaining about them isn't going to do you any good, first off. If you don't like the whole "magic sword" bit, keep writing. And remember that someone's going to like it. Remember that for some people, that might be their introduction to other things in the genre. We don't all have the same literary tastes. Remember that this is a good thing.
I completely fail to see how Tolkien had a "deadening impact." Yes, there were people writing sf and fantasy before Tolkien and Lewis and all the rest. But Tolkien's work helped to create the mass demand for the genre. The only deadening impact it may have had was on writer's imaginations - but that's the writer's fault for listening too hard to someone else's story to want to make their own. Not Tolkien's.
Now, something I have read, numerous times, is Tolkien's "Fairy Stories" essay, which I know Mievelle is taking things from here. So I will assume you've read it. If you haven't, that, go out and get a copy of the book. Now. If you're interested enough to read this far in my journal on this topic, you ought to acquaint yourself with what one of the best Storytellers in the genre had to say about his own profession, and what is also one of the major literary touchstones in my own life.
The big problem I have is with this paragraph: "In other words, books that challenge or subvert reality, that pick at its scabs, are discouraged as a matter of policy [italics his]. Tolkien and Lewis’s vision is fantasy that doesn’t try to investigate reality and its tensions, but which tries to escape it. It does that by being structured according to moralistic and mythic logics, rather than organic, narrative logic."
*coughcough*
Excuse me.
Fairy, as Tolkien called it, and Story, as I call it, is in its essence a challenge to reality. It's a challenge to the very idea of reality, the "this is the way the world works," the "these are the Unspoken Rules that Everyone Knows," that linger in our heads. We know we've crossed into something else, whether it's a situation or a universe, when those rules are changed. It's a subversion when the rules are bent just a little, but it's a primal-scream kind of challenge when those rules are just...gone. New ones come in to take their place, perhaps - but those rules are not ours, and we know it.
It can be an escape, yes. But the best fantasy doesn't just act as an escape-hatch; there's something Different on the other side of the door.
Like those new rules, for example. Does it mean that because the tensions that the fantasy tries to investigte aren't familiar, and that the reality you're now in, the Different, puts you so far out of your Normal that people call it "escape" simply because they don't know what else to call it, but know it's not theirs? Do they give up on understanding the rules altogether, and just go along for a ride with pretty colors?
I wish I had Mievelle here now. I would talk to him. I don't understand why morals, in the right situation, can't be organic. Or why myths can't have their own kind of logic.
I think that maybe, just maybe, they do.
It's just not ours.
He does make the point that fantasy can be "...difficult, as dirty and complex and rife with social tensions..." as the 'Real World' can be. I agree with this. He points out some of my favorite authors who do that. I want to do that, and see nothing wrong with social tensions or difficulties. This, I think, is one of those things that not enough sf/fantasy writers do.
But I think he misses the point again in the last paragraph when he says that "fantasy is about the real world."
Fantasy can have tensions. And dirt, and blood, and people screaming. Fantasy can be set in the real world. (I like to read that kind of thing.) It can (and in my opnion, should) have emotions that people feel in the real world, if only to give readers something that they can understand and relate to within the shifting rules.
But it's not about the real world, unless "the real world" means "the Unspoken Rules that Everyone Knows". Fantasy is about the change in definition of "real," and how people deal with that. And that kind of thing isn't shelved under non-fiction.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
12/9/02 08:32 (UTC)As to this essay, I think Mieville is, in fact, letting his dislike of certain brands of Christianity run away with him, which would explain his somewhat inflammatory use of adjectives. However, he does have a point, and it is a point that is useful. I reread On Fairy Stories yesterday, so that is also fresh in my mind. Tolkien advocates the use of genuine narrative logic, mythic and realistic coherency, and all other things that make up a world in the writing of fantasy, because he believes in fantasy as 'sub-creation', the production from the human mind of a genuine secondary world. Lewis believed in that too. However, Tolkien does, in fact, state in his essay that these secondary worlds, while real and important to the human imagination, are primarily to be used imaginatively. They are to produce emotional and intellectual experiences, but they are not to produce genuine emotional and intellectual changes. This can be inferred from his description of the primary purposes of these secondary worlds as being means of reaffirming one's own likes and dislikes, one's own individuality, against the samenesses and automations of modern, mechanistic society. He does not see their purpose to be the changing and remolding of society itself. Mieville does; he is a self-professed urban revolutionary. Lewis did, which Mieville fails to notice, since Mieville mistook the vision of the world Lewis wanted to promulgate for the actual dominant views at Lewis's time. Mieville's books insist on action: either you want his secondary world to be a genuine possible emotional landscape of modernity (not any other kind of possibility-- our physical circumstances are irreconcilable with his world-- but the mindset and attitudes of the human beings in his work are certainly achievable by present-day, existing human beings) or you don't want it to be a possible landscape, in which case you need to go do something about it, right now.
Personally, I see neither difference nor quality distinction between the two kinds of fiction here delineated, as I have always followed the pagan rule of 'as within, so without'. Tolkien's work had such a great effect on my imagination, and on the imaginations of millions, that it has produced visible outward expressions of itself in my life and in many other lives (a situation Tolkien never imagined; he was both capable of having and happy with a fantastical inner life that showed not at all to the public; this was how Things Were Done at that time, and there is nothing wrong with that). Mieville's work caused me to reevaluate certain attitudes, but the changes didn't run so deeply, which means that, for me, Tolkien has been more successful on Mieville's terms than Mieville has. What matters it if the author means to say 'You must change your life' so long as the life is changed?
Lil
(no subject)
13/9/02 09:01 (UTC)And now you've broke my brain with "They are to produce emotional and intellectual experiences, but they are not to produce genuine emotional and intellectual changes." Because my first gut-impulse on reading that was, "but they're the same!" and now I have to go and re-examine that.
and then again
12/9/02 10:37 (UTC)Now, obviously, the trimmings are different, the cultures are usually widely different than they are at home, and there is a far broader range of the Physically Possible than there is here in Mundania. But nearly every time, it is possible to look at the story and see something very real, very true, and very relevant to the 'real' world. A line Neil Gaiman quoted in the intro to his recent book- "Fairy tales are true, they're more than true. Not because they tell us dragons are real, but because they tell us dragons can be defeated."
Lewis's Narnia books are straight parable, laid-on-with-a-trowel parable, as a matter of fact, and everyone recognizes this. But most- and, probably, all of the good ones- of the sf and fantasy works out there, have as real a point. If they were not relevant to the who-we-are here in the 'real' world, they would have no value. Escapism and wish fulfillment only go so far, and there is more to the genre than that.
That's my $0.02, anyway.
Re: and then again
13/9/02 08:58 (UTC)I do think that you can find truth and relevance in fairy tales, in the genre, what-have-you. Otherwise, I wouldn't be writing it, or reading it. It's more than escape, yes. Can we settle on "possible escape, but more than that, relevance and truth to the real world, but in a form that it might not usually take?"