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March 22, 2013 Leave a Comment

Muriel Spark and the Uses of Omniscience

In talking about free indirect speech in the last couple of days, I didn’t situate it within its wider historical context. Free indirect speech is a technique that was exploited, if not invented, by modernist writers such as Joyce. David Lodge observes that free indirect speech (or style) was also a feature of some of the best-known British social realist novels of the 1950s, such as Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. Lodge notes that these novels “were narrated in the first person or in free indirect style, articulating the consciousness of a single character, usually a young man, whose rather ordinary but well observed life revealed new tensions and fault-lines in postwar British society.”

Lodge makes these observations in the context of a revisiting of Muriel Spark’s very different novel from the 1950s, Memento Mori (1959). In this black comic send-up of the effects of looming death on a collection of senior citizens, Spark eschews the exploration of a single consciousness through a heavy use of free indirect speech. Rather, Spark embraces an intrusive omniscient narrator of the kind that Lodge associates with 19th-century novels. And her narrative strategy is to move rapidly in and out of the minds of her large cast of characters, a rapidity that is intensified by the brevity of the novel itself. In proceeding in this fashion, according to Lodge, Spark “violated the aesthetic rules not only of the neorealist novel, but also of the modernist novel from Henry James to Virginia Woolf.”

The plot elements of Memento Mori are also throwbacks. Lodge indicates how Spark weds her “new, speeded-up, throwaway style to a complex plot of a kind excluded from modern literary fiction–in this case involving blackmail and intrigues over wills, multiple deaths and discoveries of secret scandals, almost a parodic update of a Victorian sensation novel.”

So I’m wondering if the media here are not part of a message. That is, I’m wondering if the modernist exploitation of free indirect speech isn’t a manifestation of the greater cultural weight given to interiority at the dawn of the twentieth century. And whether in eschewing its effects in Memento Mori, in favor of an omniscient narrator and Victorian plot elements, Spark isn’t calling us back to an older cultural understanding where the individual consciousness was always under the watchful eye of a Consciousness not his own–a Consciousness always reminding the individual of Death, “the first of the Four Last Things to be ever remembered.”

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March 22, 2013 Leave a Comment

Free Indirect Speech, Part 2

“Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.”

This opening line from James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead,” is an example of free indirect speech, narration that indicates a character’s internal thoughts and feelings without the use of quotation marks or “he said, he thought” reporting. But how does this line take us inside Lily’s thoughts?

It comes down to the one word “literally.”

As Hugh Kenner points out in his little book, Joyce’s Voices, the use of “literally” in this sentence has no literal reference. Lily, that is, is not literally run off her feet. She’s simply tired from having to go back and forth all the time answering the door. But “literally” is just the kind of word that Lily would use within her own thoughts. We can imagine her muttering to herself, as she runs for the tenth time down the hallway to the door, “I’m literally run off my feet!” It’s a figure of speech, hyperbole in miniature, that Joyce captures in what seems, at first blush, like plain vanilla narration.

What is the effect of free indirect speech?

That of bringing the voices of one’s characters into the narration itself. In free indirect speech, writes James Wood, the narrative “seems to float away from the novelist and take on the properties of the character, who now seems to “own” the words. The writer is free to inflect the reported thought, to bend it around the character’s own words.”

And in so doing, the author makes his narrative voice disappear.

“It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also.”

That’s not Joyce-the-Narrator’s voice. That’s Lily’s voice again, Joyce’s narration having taken on the properties of her character.

Free indirect speech is not the only narrative technique there is, but it’s a delightful one to employ, and one we often encounter in our reading without registering it.

What books or short stories do you know that make good use of free indirect speech?

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March 20, 2013 Leave a Comment

Free Indirect Speech, Part 1

Let’s distinguish between what critic James Wood calls (1) direct or quoted speech; (2) indirect speech; and (3) free indirect speech. Here are samples of each:

Direct or Quoted Speech (from Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now)

“Of course I love you,” he said, not thinking it worth his while to kiss her. “It’s no good speaking to him here. I suppose I had better go see him in the city.”

Indirect Speech (from Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags)

For the third time since his return to London, Basil tried to put a call through to Angela Lyne. He listened to the repeated buzz, five, six, seven times, then hung up the receiver. Still away, he thought; I should have liked to show her my uniform. [emphasis added]

Free Indirect Speech (from James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead”)

Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.

Direct or quoted speech is just that: the flagging by quotation marks of the actual speech of one’s characters. The example from Trollope’s The Way We Live Now also has an element of indirect speech…

Indirect speech is the author’s narration reporting the internal thoughts of the characters. The emphasized line from the passage from Waugh’s Put Out More Flags tells what his character, Basil Seal, is thinking, as flagged by the author’s use of “he thought.” The first person “I” (“I should have liked…”) is not directly quoted; it is reported by the author within the context of “he thought.”

In free indirect speech the internal thoughts of the characters are indicated without the use either of quotation marks or mechanisms such as “he thought.”

But how? Consider the famous first line from Joyce’s “The Dead.” What is it about this line that takes us inside the thought of Lily?

Think on it–and we’ll return to this tomorrow.

* See the first chapter, “Narrating,” in James Wood, How Fiction Works (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008).

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February 22, 2013 Leave a Comment

Metaphor and the Desire to Know

As obliterating fire lights up a vast forest

along the crests of a mountain, and the flare shows far off,

so as they marched, from the magnificent bronze the gleam went

dazzling all about through the upper air to the heaven.

Homer, Iliad, Book II, lines 455-458 (translation Lattimore)

It is older even than the craft of written story: the desire to compare this to that; to illuminate the perception of one thing by juxtaposing it to some other. This is metaphor, a word derived from a Greek word which literally means “a bearing across” or a “transfer.” My father once saw in Athens a moving van with the company title painted across it: METAPHORA.

One Thing and Another

To understand how transference works in literary terms, consider the passage from Homer in my epigraph. The Achaian army is on the move. The poet wants us to clearly perceive how the dazzling gleam from their bronze armor lights up the sky, so he borrows a perception from elsewhere: a forest fire lighting up the (presumably) night sky along the crest of a mountain. In technical grammatical terms this is a simile (as the poet says “As obliterating fire….”), but we won’t fuss over that distinction. The more intriguing question is, why does the poet bother about “transferring” the image of the forest fire to the image of the marching army? We can imagine a lesser poet describing the marching army by using only the last two lines from the quoted passage:

so as they marched, from the magnificent bronze the gleam went/dazzling all about through the upper air to the heaven.

But the effect in this case would be diminished. The “transference” of the forest fire image helps make vivid the gleam from the bronze armor. It is not so much, perhaps, that the forest fire image is in itself more vivid than the image of the bronze gleam from the armor. After all, can’t we imagine a poet describing the flare of a forest fire along a mountain crest by comparing it to the gleam from the bronze armor of a marching army? At one level, it seems it is the juxtaposition, or collection, of images that vivifies the image of the marching army. The more perceptions there are, the more intense our literary delight. But not just any perceptions will do. Among the images there needs to be likeness in the midst of unlikeness. For the metaphor to work, the flare in the mountains must be like the gleam of the bronze.

The Attraction of Metaphor

In his esteemed work of literary criticism, the Poetics, the Greek philosopher Aristotle asserts that of all the modes of literary expression metaphor is the greatest. He even goes on to contend that he doesn’t think the craft of making metaphors can be taught; it is a mark of genius. Whatever we may think about that, Aristotle concludes his tribute to metaphor by saying that in making good metaphors one is “contemplating” the likenesses of things.

Here is the attraction of metaphor: we love to contemplate the likenesses of things in the midst of their unlikeness. But why? Because in perceiving likeness amidst unlikeness, we deepen our knowledge of the world.

In Homer’s metaphor, the knowledge we gain is mainly perceptual. We understand better the visual effect of the bronze armor’s gleam by comparing it to a forest fire. But the comparison of the armor’s gleam to the fire’s flare also brings with it a sense of awe. For only a vast and terrible army could produce that kind of gleam from its armor, just as only a vast and terrible forest fire could light up the night sky above a mountain.

All human beings desire to know, Aristotle says in another famous text. And we come to know reality, he continues, first of all by making comparisons through our senses, comparisons which ultimately inspire the mind to make deeper distinctions between things. To make a distinction is to discern how one thing is both like and unlike another, a discernment which helps reveal what is essential to each.

So the making of metaphor, in which we ponder likeness amidst unlikeness, is one way in which we express our desire to know; and if Aristotle is right that it is the most important mode of literary expression, then it seems that writers must attend to the making of metaphors.

Learning from The Master

Enough, however, of these minor thinkers. Let’s turn finally to a classical source: the work of the humorist P.G. Wodehouse. Evelyn Waugh, who bowed to no one in his admiration of Wodehouse’s craftsmanship, once praised Wodehouse for being able to produce two to three striking similes or metaphors per page. Such as:

The butler loomed in the doorway like a dignified cloudbank.

Here the obvious unlikeness between butler and cloudbank opens up an enormous gap. But the brilliance of the simile is found in the fact that in a certain skewed, over-the-top perception, there is a sense that a beefy butler looming quietly in a doorway is like a cloudbank. Just as a man’s dancing style can resemble a man giving alms:

“Can you dance?” said the girl.

Lancelot gave a short, amused laugh. He was a man who never let his left hip know what his right hip was doing.

Metaphor, however, whether serious or humorous, is not restricted to local description and color. It can also work for larger thematic purposes. In Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, bullfighting serves as a metaphor for grace under pressure. T.S. Eliot’s image of “waste land” serves as a metaphor for moral and spiritual decay. Metaphor is in fact the key to all imaginative writing. Indeed all thought and language, if Iris Murdoch is correct, is metaphor. “The development of consciousness in human beings,” Murdoch affirms, “is inseparably connected with the use of metaphor. Metaphors are not merely peripheral decorations or even useful models, they are fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition.”

 

* The image at the top of this post is of the 4th-century Greek philosopher Aristotle.

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February 20, 2013 Leave a Comment

In Defense of a Popular Literature

Michael Chabon’s instinct is spot on. In his essay, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights–Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” from his 2008 collection, Maps & Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, he makes the case for a literature that does not despise to be entertainment, that challenges the hegemony of “literary fiction,” that seeks to inhabit the borderlands between high art and low genres such as sci-fi, horror, and the western.

Chabon concocts a thought experiment. “Imagine that, sometime about 1950, it had been decided, collectively, informally, a little at a time, but with finality, to proscribe every kind of novel but the nurse romance from the canon of the future”:

Not merely from the critical canon, but from the store racks and library shelves as well. Nobody could be paid, published, lionized, or cherished among the gods of literature for writing any kind of fiction other than nurse romances.

Once this fanciful scenario is in place, Chabon invites us to substitute for nurse romance the “contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.” And once we do so, he predicts, we’re going to find sitting right back in our own world. For the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story wields an almost tyrannic rule over the state of literature.

And let’s not forget, Chabon observes, that the CQPMOTRS (contemporary, quotidian, etc.) has conventions just as rigorous as any popular genre. Such as: “the primacy of a unified point of view, for example; letters and their liability to being read or intercepted; the dance of adulterous partners; the buried family secret that curses generations to come; the ordinary heroism of an unsung life.”

Why, Chabon asks, should this genre trump all others?

Chabon’s critique is squarely on target, and I applaud his desire to explore the “spaces between genres” in order to produce a literature that is as entertaining as it is artful. But what he fails to explain is why the disconnection of literature from entertainment can only occur to the detriment of literature.

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.” So G.K. Chesterton famously asserts in his 1901 essay, “In Defense of Penny Dreadfuls.” Similarly to Chabon in “Trickster,” Chesterton in this essay takes on those who would sneer at popular fiction, especially fiction for boys, both because it corrupts and because it does not meet the standards of literature. Chesterton will have none of it, but he defends popular fiction for reasons that are probably very different from Chabon’s:

These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and heroic truisms on which civilization is built; for it is clear that unless civilization is built on truisms, it is not built at all.

What truisms does Chesterton have in mind? “The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared.”

Literary fiction, by contrast, both then and now, tends to eschew such truisms. “It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated,” contends Chesterton, “which is avowedly and aggressively criminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room tables.”

It is a good question whether in our day much popular fiction itself wouldn’t offend the sensibilities of a high-souled errand boy–if there are any more errand boys.

Be that as it may, Chesterton and Chabon agree that there is a sharp distinction between literature and fiction. But the truth at least implicit in Chesterton’s essay, but wholly missing from Chabon’s, is that literature and popular fiction exist along a continuum, and not just a literary continuum but a moral one as well. For this reason, when literature becomes profligate and pessimistic, divorcing itself from the entertaining truisms of popular fiction, it becomes what Chesterton calls “criminal.”

And in this light, a fiction along the borderlands of high art and popular fiction is not simply a refreshing change, a way to renew (as Chabon wants) the art of the short story. Rather, it is a way of reintroducing the truisms of civilized life–that is, the humanity–back into our literature.

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June 16, 2012 3 Comments

Dubliners and Double Writing

For admirers of the work of James Joyce today, June 16, is celebrated as Bloomsday (as the events of Joyce’s Ulysses take place on June 16, 1904). But in thinking about Joyce today I have turned not to Ulysses but to his collection of short stories, Dubliners (published in 1914). About Joyce’s technique in Dubliners Hugh Kenner observed that it consisted in a kind of “double writing”:

The technique he developed, the technique which underlies everything from the first pages of Dubliners to the end of Finnegans Wake, came out of the subject: parody: double-writing. The music-halls parodied the heroic dramas; Joyce parodied the music-halls. Journalism parodied heroic elegance: Joyce parodied journalism. He focused, that is to say, on what was actually there, and strove so to set it down that it would reveal itself as what it was, in its double nature: a distortion, but a distortion of something real. All his characters are walking clichés, because the Dubliners were… Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 11.

One example Kenner sets out is from the story, “A Little Cloud.” A young man named Thomas Chandler is dreaming about a career as a poet:

His temperament might be said to be just on the point of maturity. There were so many different moods and impressions that he wished to express in verse. He felt them within him. He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet’s soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen. He would never be popular: he saw that. He could not sway the crowd but he might appeal to a little circle of kindred minds. The English critics, perhaps, would recognize him as one of the Celtic school by reason of the melancholy tone of his poems; besides that he would put in allusions. He began to invent sentences and phrases from the notice which his book would get. “Mr. Chandler has the gift of easy and graceful verse.” … “A wistful sadness pervades these poems.” … “The Celtic note.”

“Not just the last phrases,” argues Kenner, “but every phrase that passes through Chandler’s mind, from “temperament on the point of maturity” to “the Celtic note,” is reviewers’ jargon; quotation is as close to reality as he gets” (p. 9).

But the jargon, Kenner goes on, had a meaning before the reviewers got hold of it. What Chandler thinks is a distortion, or a cliché, but even the distortion and cliché reflects something of reality, however obliquely. Chandler’s thought, says Kenner, “contains shreds of meaning still. And Chandler is no contemptible gull; he has really felt some wordless emotion stirring within him, and his melancholy is genuine, and he is seriously meditating a career” (p. 9).

The effect produced upon the reader, as Padraic Colum puts it in the Introduction to the Modern Library edition of Dubliners, is “a feeling of detachment”: “It would seem that he had decided to illustrate the life of Dublin through a series of reports, taking this and that incident and being as clear and as unconcerned in the reporting of it as a scientific historian might be” (New York: Modern Library, 1954), xi. (Colum, however, does not attribute such detachment to all the stories in Dubliners–”Eveline” and “The Dead” being among the exceptions).

But to combine Colum’s thought with Kenner’s: what Joyce reports upon so scientifically in Dubliners is talk, language, the rhetoric of a city that “acts on the promptings of idées reçues and talks in words that have for too long been respoken” (Kenner, p. 10).

Thus Kenner concludes–in an observation he attributes to T.S. Eliot*–Joyce has many “voices” but no “style” (p. 12).

* T.S. Eliot, “Lettre d’Angleterre: Le Style dans la Prose Anglaise Contemporaine,” La Nouvelle Revue Française, xix, July-December 1922, 751-6.

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June 15, 2012 1 Comment

Pretty Good Writing Advice

When in the midst of a story I need to refocus on the basic principles of narrative structure, I often (perhaps not often enough) go back to what playwright-screenwriter-director David Mamet, in his book on Hollywood, Bambi vs. Godzilla, calls “The Long Lost Secret of the Incas.” The secret consists in three magic questions. “Anyone who wants to know how to write drama must learn to apply these questions to all difficulties,” says Mamet. “It is not only unnecessary but also impossible to know the answers before setting out on the individual project in question, as there are no stock answers.”

Drama, argues Mamet, is a succession of scenes, and a successful scene must “stringently apply and stringently answer the following questions…”

Are you ready?

Here it is. The Long Lost Secret of the Incas.

  1. Who wants what from whom?
  2. What happens if they don’t get it?
  3. Why now?”

That’s it. As a writer, your yetzer ha’ra (evil inclination) will do everything in its vast power to dissaude you from asking these questions of your work. You will tell yourself the questions are irrelevant as the scene is “interesting,” “meaningful,” “revelatory of character,” “deeply felt,” and so on; all of these are synonyms for “it stinks in ice.”

Mamet’s three magic questions are the concentrated version of the famous leaked memo to the writers of his television show, The Unit, available here.

First principles, however, are not the only kind of principles. If Mamet’s three magic questions are the first principles of good storytelling, then Emma Coats’s 22 storytelling principles making their way around the Internet this week articulate some of the most relevant secondary principles. Coats is a storyboard artist at Pixar, a company that knows a thing or two about good storytelling. The following are the maxims she’s gleaned from her years working at the prestigious animation studio:

1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.

3: Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.

4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.

6: What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?

7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.

8: Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.

9: When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.

10: Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.

11: Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.

12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th–get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.

13: Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.

14: Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.

15: If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.

16: What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.

17: No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on–it’ll come back around to be useful later.

18: You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.

19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

20: Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?

21: You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool.’ What would make YOU act that way?

22: What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

Mamet’s 3 + Coats’s 22. That’s 25 basic storytelling principles that, if followed–as Mamet tells the writers of The Unit–will buy you a house in Bel Air and allow you to hire someone to live there for you.

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June 5, 2012 5 Comments

What’s Essential to Fantasy?

I have been re-reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories,” and one of the things I have wanted to take away from the essay this time around is a good, clear definition of fantasy literature. What is it that distinguishes a tale of Faerie from other kinds of tales?

Tolkien himself in the essay does not attempt to directly provide a definition: “analysis will not necessarily discover the secret of the whole.” But he does provide many of the materials and resources for such a definition. I would like to try to see if I can make good use of these in an attempt to formulate something closer to a succinct and precise definition. Here goes…

Caveat lector: as a genre, fantasy is not essentially for children. It is “a natural branch of literature.” It has sub-genres: satire, adventure, morality tale, and pure fantasy. But how to define the genre?

Fantasy (or fairy tales) take us into Faerie, “the realm or state in which fairies have their being.” And not only fairies, but dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, dragons and suchlike strange and marvelous creatures. “Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, [is] the heart of the desire for Faerie.”

So Faerie is above all a mythical place, a fully-realized Secondary World with “the inner consistency of reality.” The fairy tale opens “a door on Other Time, and if we pass through, only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe.” In taking us into a fully-realized Secondary World the fairy tale is thus distinct from the traveler’s tale or beast fable [which means I have to adjust the taxonomy given in my last post. A journey to the center of the earth is not necessarily fantasy; neither is space travel.]

Fantasy is “not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability.” Still, fantasy’s aim is a glimpse into the truth about reality, the reality of the Primary World. Fantasy aims at a recovery of sight, a “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them.” For this reason fantasy deals largely with the simple or fundamental things of nature: the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; “and the earth and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men….”

Besides recovery of sight, fantasy allows us to “escape” [see my earlier posts on fantasy and escapism] and in so doing provides consolation. It not only allows us to escape from the hardships of the progressive dream and from every kind of want, it also allows us to escape into our desires: a desire to visit the deep sea, for example, or talk to other living things. Fairy stories also often portray the Great Escape, the escape from death.

The preeminent form in which death is eluded in fantasy is the eucatastrophe. This is fantasy’s “highest function.” What it is it? A “sudden and miraculous grace.” It is the disaster that saves. In depicting eucatastrophe fantasy “does not deny the existence of dycatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”

What is marvelous about Christianity is that it tells us that what we desire in fairy tales is essentially true and obtainable. Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection is the ultimate eucatastrophe. But “the greatest does not depress the small.” The making of fantasy goes on, must go on, because it is natural to man. The Evangelium of Christianity “has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the “happy ending.”” Tolkien puts the point poetically:

Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light

through whom is splintered from a single White

to many hues, and endlessly combined

in living shapes that move from mind to mind.

Yes, fantasy goes on. “We make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made, and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.”

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May 30, 2012 2 Comments

Finding Faërie

So how does one enter the world of faërie?

This site catalogs the various ways that some famous fantasy authors have imagined the transition. I’ve added to it a bit in what follows, but the list doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive even of famous fantasy worlds. But it’s a good place to start.

You can see that I’ve distinguished two basic ways for a story to take us into faërie: by spiriting us away to another world entirely, or by taking us into a hidden dimension of our own world, whether that dimension be an obscure geographical facet of our world, or a world that exists in some way parallel to our own.

So fantasy stories either

Spirit Us Away To A Completely Other World By…

  1. dreaming (H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands; Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland)
  2. entering into a child’s imagination (J.M. Barrie’s Neverland)
  3. stepping through a wardrobe (C.S. Lewis’s Narnia)
  4. the author simply positing a world of faërie without explaining its relation to our own (J.R.R. Tolkien, Middle Earth–though Tolkien was of more than one mind on this throughout his life. Sometimes he spoke of Middle Earth as a prehistoric version of our own world.)

or

Take Us Into A Hidden Dimension Of Our Own World By…

  1. burrowing into the depths of the Earth (Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar)
  2. stumbling onto a hidden valley (James Hilton’s Shangri-La; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World)
  3. venturing into a whimsical or even magical forest (Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden; the forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
  4. coming upon strange islands (Gulliver’s World of Jonathan Swift; St. Thomas More’s Utopia)
  5. traveling through time (Lucy M. Boston’s Green Knowe)
  6. traveling through space (C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy–taking other planets to be part of our own world or cosmos)
  7. running through a wall in a train platform–among other methods (the magical world in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books)

In this light, I see my own Kingdom of Patria stories belonging in the second category, in that they take the reader into a hidden dimension of our world by introducing us to a tiny, secret kingdom nestled in the woods of northern Indiana.

Another cut at the various ways of getting into faërie is this set of distinctions by Nikki Gamble.

  1. A setting in which the primary world does not exist (e.g., Tolkien)
  2. A setting in which the secondary world is entered through a portal in the primary world (e.g. Lewis’s Narnia tales)
  3. A setting that is a distinct world-within-a-world as part of the primary world (e.g. the Harry Potter books).

Given this new set of distinctions I would say my Kingdom of Patria belongs to number 3, being a world-within-a-world as part of the primary world.

But is this right?

Because all three ways of getting into faërie distinguished by Nikki Gamble pertain to high fantasy, where a plausible, self-consistent “secondary world” is imagined. My original distinction also has to do with authors who present us with fully-realized secondary worlds.

But there’s also low fantasy, in which the setting is very decidedly our world, reimagined with some fantastical or even magical elements. Many popular middle grade children’s books are low fantasies: e.g., The Adventures of Pinocchio, The Borrowers, The Indian in the Cupboard. I would also add the two comedies of Shakespeare mentioned earlier to the genre of low fantasy.

And low fantasy, in the end, is the genre of fantasy literature to which my Patria stories belong. Patria is very decidedly in our world–there’s no portal to another world, no parallel dimension, no magic. It’s present-day Indiana through and through, but with some rather fantastical elements thrown in.

Like a kingdom founded 3,000 years ago by refugees from the Trojan War…

What’s your favorite work of fantasy?

Is it high or low?

If high, where does it fit within the categories of high fantasy discussed here?

Is there a better way of capturing the distinctions I’ve been working with?

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May 26, 2012 2 Comments

More From Tolkien on Escapism and Fantasy

In discussing the question of fantasy and escapism on Kindle Boards, someone reminded me of this passage from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories.” Most apropos:

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘Escape’ is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

All of which implies that Tolkien thought that what he calls the “progressive dream” was a kind of prison.

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