Are You Writing Serious Fantasy?

[Nar]

ST: What's a WsIP? I think in your Mad Hatter Denethor, you've got a sense of human foibles. Promise a new review soon.

Eol: T.H. White's Once and Future King comes to mind: anything about Lancelot and Guenivere. The tone is rueful and ironic, not grand, which is a different variety of fantasy. Is it no longer really fantasy, but an elegant, lovely and worthwhile parody of fantasy? That is the question.

Bombur:

This perhaps also explains my desire to keep the story separate from history. As I desire the laws of nature to take a different twist in the world of the story and also simultaneously believe in the laws of the social dynamics and historical dialectics in this one... this leaves me only one option... that the historical timeline of my story has no connection to that of the real world.

This may also have something to do with a yet unexplored question of WHY of the fantasy.

Perhaps the answer to your WHY of fantasy has to do with what you'd hope to find out by changing the laws of nature... something about man's nature? Or something about the world's essential nature, below history and facts, facts, facts? I've always liked the idea of speculative fantasy. As LMP would say, fantasy should have a sense of place, Arda certainly does. It's good if this sense of place is stunning and unique.

LMP... Ah, a challenge! I take up your gauntlet, sir! (I almost wrote guerdon, but my trusty grey-cloaked counselor interposed! That would be Webster's Seventh NC dictionary.) I have to read JRRT's essay carefully again. As you know, I think he was describing a particular and deep-rooted catharsis, but not the only one. I do think fantasy is defined by its effect on the reader, and the interplay of catharsis, theme and archetype generate that effect.

I think my definition of fantasy is broader than that of Tolkien in Tree and Leaf. I don't see fantasy as exclusively seeking eucatastrophe and restoration of wonder and hope; I see that as a huge continent in fantasy but not Gonwandaland; not the only continent on earth. (Favorite bumper sticker: 'Re-unite Gonwandaland!')

'Wonder' is questing, curious, open, linked to newness (I wouldn't say childlike, just newness). I would use 'Awe' to try to enlarge the meaning to something more neutral, maybe hopeful, maybe just toughminded and inquiring, maybe terrible, but always revelatory: a catharsis of the understanding rather than the dictionary's catharsis of the emotions. A release of the understanding which releases emotions. Not only and always good, but as true as we can make it.

If I can sidle crabwise into another genre-- there are two types of mysteries: 1)'Logic investigates, enacts justice against the disruptor; we are all restored' (return of the king!) and 2)'Nothing can help us; we all fall down'. The second type leaves a sense of sorrow and pity-- as long as you feel that the author's writing his/her truth and not for the effect of the dark swoon. Some 'all fall down' artists are just going for the effect, for the swoon-- I purely hate that.

Re: Eucatastrophe --I don't, and can't, if I'm true to my whole understanding, assume that revelations are always in the line of release from despair into hope, if they are rigorously worked out. They could be. I love that kind of story. But I would not say that those truths sung from the stinging edge of the void are not story, or fantasy, and I would not say there are no other truths.

Fantasy is that which strikes deep, that's what I would say. Fantasy is the original story. Fantasy is composed below the surface of the story and therefore induces a catharsis of feeling and of understanding. Fantasy fits some part of the dreaming mind like a key to a lock and unlocks... something else, something that's not mind anymore.