Black Gate

Part 1 of a 2-part series

And whether or not Tolkien’s works will stand the test of time is not within our lot to know, so that the Tolkien enthusiast’s need to defend Tolkien’s title of “author of the century,” as a result of the recent Waterstone’s poll of 25,000 readers in Great Britain in 1997, may be unnecessary and even gratuitous. A work like The Hobbit that has already been translated into thirty languages or one like The Lord of the Rings, into more than twenty, has already demonstrated the virtues of both accessibility and elasticity, if not endurance. An author who has sold fifty million copies of his works requires no justification of literary merit.

Jane Chance, Tolkien’s Art: A Mythology for England

Is The Lord of the Rings literature? The answer depends on who you ask. As I see it, four camps exist, each with a different take on the question.

Camp 1, Devoted Tolkien fans. Ask one of these folks and you’re likely to hear, “A Elbereth Gilthoniel! Of course. Need this question even be asked?” For members of Camp 1 the evidence is plain, the case long made for Tolkien’s literary greatness—even if they don’t always offer clear and/or compelling supporting evidence.

Camp 2, Ardent Tolkien haters. An answer by a member of Camp 2 is typically something along the lines of [Sarcasm mode on] “Tolkien’s books had literary merit?” [/Sarcasm mode off] No awful children’s story about Elves and Hobbits and Dark Lords could possibly qualify as literature. At least The Sword of Shannara wasn’t boring.

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Before continuing the series of posts on Romanticism that I talked about last week, I’d like to write about a couple of subjects I’ve had on my mind for a while. First up is Q.D. Leavis, and her book Fiction and the Reading Public.

In or slightly before 1932, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote a letter to literary ciritc Queenie Dorothy Leavis. Leavis was preparing her PhD thesis, a book that would be an overview of the development of the bestseller and the publishing industry; as part of her preparation, she sent a questionnaire to sixty writers of various kinds, asking them about various aspects of fiction and publishing. Burroughs returned his questionnaire with a letter, which Leavis reproduced at one point in her book:

In submitting to you, in accordance with your courteous letter, my answers to your questionnaire, I wish you to know that I am fully aware of the attitude of many scholars and self-imagined literati toward that particular brand of deathless literature of which I am guilty.

From past experience it is only natural that I should assume that you may, in some degree at least, share their views. It would seem rather remarkable to me if you did not.

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I’ve been thinking over the past few days about last week’s post on William Blake and fantasy. I’ve come to realise that post is actually just the start of a much larger project.

I mentioned last week that I agreed with John Clute’s argument that the mid-eighteenth century was the era when fantastika — sf, fantasy, and horror — came into being. I’ll go further. I think the era that followed, the Romantic era of English literature, represented the dawn of fantasy as we know it; and that the major writers of that time pioneered approaches to fantasy, and elements of fantasy fiction, that are still in use today. I’ve realised now that I want to write about this general subject: Romanticism as the start of modern fantasy. But the more I thought about it, the more different connections I found between fantasy and Romanticism. So many, in fact, that I’ve also realised that there’s no way I can cover them all in one post.

I therefore intend to explore those connections in a series of upcoming essays. It’ll be an irregular series, I expect, interspersed with posts about more contemporary elements of fantasy as well. I anticipate it being wide-ranging. There are a lot of different aspects to Romanticism, and it’s a topic and a time that’s endlessly fascinating to me.

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Perhaps my favourite fantasy writing is arguably not fantasy at all. The epics and prophecies of William Blake certainly read like fantasy to many people, I think, albeit fantasy in a distinctive, unfamiliar form. But is the word appropriate? Blake himself was a visionary — he literally saw visions — and may well have believed that some at least of his writing was literally true. Does the definition of fantasy reside in the writer, or the reader? And how would Blake himself want his writing to be viewed?

Farah Mendlesohn, in her book Rhetorics of Fantasy, argued that the term ‘fantasy’ did not necessarily apply to the works of Latin American magic realist writers. As I understand her, she argues that the cultures of these writers are distinct from the culture that produced ‘fantasy fiction,’ and that the writers therefore stand in a different relationship of belief to the fiction. Magic realist texts “are not meant to act as genre text. Instead, the world from which the text was written is the primary world. It only becomes fantastical because we Anglo-American readers are outsiders. … Magic realism … is written with the sense of fading belief. If we are looking for some form of it, we need the literature of a similar culture, one in which the presence of other powers is a real and vibrant thing, even if it must exist alongside scientific rationalism.”

I don’t know whether what Mendlesohn describes is necessarily a cultural outlook, or whether it can be a personal one. She acknowledges it can apply to writing from the American South. But take John Crowley’s novel quartet The Solitudes, which seems like a North American piece of magic realism and which very carefully builds in explanations for its metaphysical elements — Crowley suggests that the world remakes itself on occasion, with different rules and a rewritten history each time; magic might have worked once, the books say, but when the world last changed, not only did magic stop working, but history itself was changed so that in fact magic now never has worked. Does one need to concern oneself with Crowley’s own philosophical positions before determining whether his writing is fantasy? (In fact, it’s a more complicated question than that; briefly, the characters are half-aware that they’re characters in a story, and the text itself unfolds aware of its nature as a text. Whether this makes it more fantastic or less is an interesting point, but not what I want to talk about here.)

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Fantasy fiction is very often set either in the European Middle Ages, or in lands that are intentionally highly reminiscent of the Middle Ages in terms of technology and social structure. It is true that the use of European medieval settings is less common now than it has been, and also true that there have always been counter-examples. But it seems that much fantasy still relies on the European Middle Ages to define itself, one way or another. Sadly, one often has a sense that these backgrounds are not wholly thought-through; not realised as completely as they might be. The setting in a lot of fantasy, particularly I think in commercial fantasy fiction, seems to be a very generic Middle Ages in which medieval stereotypes mix with unexamined modern assumptions.

(Historian and fantasy writer Kari Sperring had an excellent blog post not long ago in the course of which she decried ‘theme park’ fantasy; fantasy set in a world which has the trappings of medievalism but which lives on stereotypes about the past. Fiction that does not approach the Middle Ages as a distinctive culture — or, more properly, set of cultures — but rather as a way of reflecting some culture of the present day, with a few period trappings.)

In fact it’s a mistake to talk of ‘the Middle Ages’ as a single thing; between the sack of Rome and the advent of the Renaissance was a full thousand years, and different areas of Europe experienced those times very differently. It is wrong to imagine the Middle Ages as stagnant or unchanging or uniform. Technology changed, the arts changed, the understanding of the world changed. There were multiple Middle Ages, which varied with time and place; good fiction, I feel, understands this. Which is to say that good fiction, for the most part, understands the historical material it’s working with, and draws inspiration from the specifics of its background. History is an attempt at a record of human affairs, which means that it lends itself to drama and intensely human stories.

All of which brings me around to Judith Tarr’s 1989 novel Ars Magica, the story of a wizard a thousand years ago who became Pope.

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