 Other Worlds: The Fantasy Genre
Book by John H. Timmerman; Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1983
Introduction
In "Birches," Robert Frost looks upon the ice-bowed branches of the pliant birch and imagines a boy swinging upon them. Trusting to his imagination and materials at hand, the boy turns momentarily from this world to the free swing of the birch bough. "It's when I'm weary of considerations," writes Frost, "And life is too much like a pathless wood," that he too finds himself longing "to get away from earth awhile." Frost immediately qualifies his longing: May no fate willfully misunderstand me And half grant what I wish and snatch me away Not to return. Earth's the right place for love....
That affirmation lies at the heart of fantasy literature; the reader longs to stand apart for a time, not to escape but to rejoin earth's "pathless wood" with a clearer sense of direction and purpose. Fantasy is essentially rejuvenative. It permits us a certain distance from pragmatic affairs and offers us a far clearer insight into them. This fact may account, in part, for the enormous appeal of fantasy literature. It does more than simply restructure a reality which we already know-it also offers a parallel reality which gives us a renewed awareness of what we already know. There is an enormous and unquenchable thirst in humankind for precisely this opportunity for pause. And, as the pace of modern life inexorably quickens, the fascination for fantasy literature quickens simultaneously.
"A child," J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote, "may well believe a report that there are ogres in the next country; many grown-up persons find it easy to believe of another country." 1 Here is the invitation fantasy extends to the reader-to recover a belief which has been beclouded by knowledge, to renew a faith which has been shattered by fact. We may know there are no ogres in the next country-we haven't seen them in our travels-yet we may well believe there are. Like other types of literature, fantasy gives us the opportunity to become lost for a time in another world so that we can discover or recover a fresh perspective in this world. Bruno Bettelheim acknowledges this in his study of fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment: "If we hope to live not just from moment to moment, but in true consciousness of our existence, then our greatest need and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in our lives. It is well known how many have lost the will to live, and have stopped trying, because such meaning has evaded them." 2
Fantasy is not a new thing under the sun, after all. Its legitimate forebears include the fairy tale, the Romance, and the fable. But man's thirst for "otherness" has sharpened in recent decades. A casual glance at booksellers' lists will disclose the phenomenal surge in sales figures for fantasy works. 3 More startling, perhaps, is the fact that these works are not only sold but read. As fantasy literature has become increasingly popular, more critical attention has been paid to it. For some years this attention was professionally coordinated by scholarly organizations such as The Popular Culture Association of America. Within the last few years several books on fantasy have been published by major presses. These books share two common traits. First, they generally focus on individual authors and individual fantasy works. Primary attention goes to certain works worthy of that attention by virtue of their aesthetic merit. This is a worthwhile and necessary endeavor, but it does little to identify the unique properties of the genre itself. There is little critical distinction, for example, between fantasy and its related genres such as science fiction. Second, but akin to the first, is the common failure to identify fantasy's place in the tradition of western literature. What features does fantasy share with all outstanding literature? Fantasy is not a sideshow at a shady comer of the main thoroughfare. Although unique, and deserving of individual identification as a genre, fantasy has a central place in the western tradition as a whole. It provides new ways of seeing a thing, and new answers to what is seen; but it deals with enduring matters. |
