[What Came Before]

Some of the material below is of a theoretical nature, but I don't necessarily want this to be that kind of discussion.  I'm creating this topic because I'm concerned with the distinction and preservation of fantasy as a literary subgenre, and I'd like to see what other people's views are concerning the controversial status of fantasy among not only academic audiences, but popular audiences as well.  I'm sure many of us are familiar with Bakker's own personal defense of fantasy as a mode of popular literature; the mere fact that it achieves such widespread popularity must account for something.  I'm in agreement with Scott, but I want to try and expand our knowledge of fantasy as a subgenre further, so that we can better counter the criticism against it.

Popular audiences often levy rather simple yet still effective arguments against fantasy: it's unrealistic, it's illogical, it's escapist, etc.  I don't want to spend too much time on these criticisms, other than the following statements:

Why is fantasy more unrealistic than "regular" fiction?  Why is Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake realistic, but Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire is not?  What makes fantasy more unrealistic?  I would argue, off the top of my head, that it's a semiotic connection; that is, Atwood's novel has socio-linguistic and cultural ties to our own actual reality, whereas Martin's series (despite its influence from medieval tropes) is meant to be viewed as entirely separate from our reality.  Thus, we must ask not only the question of why does his reality bear such resemblance to a historical period of our own reality; but we also must ask why so many of his characters speak, and his tale is narrated in, English.  Tolkien tried to accommodate such criticisms by creating a fictional language as well as referring to what was written in English as "the common tongue" (I believe Martin does something along these lines as well).  Any mention of "English" within the novel's diegetic reality destroys its imaginative power.  Yet it's still narrated in English, thus presenting a strange illogic (i.e. a story translated from a presumably unknown language).

This claim appears to carry some weight until we begin seriously critiquing all novelistic representation.  Essentially, the criticism mentioned above only holds as long as novels such as Atwood's Oryx and Crake (or, for perhaps a better example, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian) are believed to be plausible extensions of our own, actual reality.  But we have to avoid this association; the truth is, any fiction, be it fantasy, historical, romance, modernist, etc. always only represents a form of alternative reality, or alternate history.  The worlds represented even in the most accurate and serious historical fiction can never depict anything more than an imagined version of history; an alternate reality.  Thus, why should it matter what language a story is told in?  Why can't Oryx and Crake be in French?  Why can't A Song of Ice and Fire be English?  Even better yet, why can't Blood Meridian be in Tolkien's Elvish, with its Spanish dialogue in High Valyrian (now there's a translation I'd like to see)?  Once we accept that all fictional depictions can be nothing more than entirely separate from our reality, we must accept that they can be told in any language, and adopt any cultural tropes.  After all, in an infinity of alternate realities, what isn't possible?

Now, I want to also include a brief analysis of what I believe is the source for the primarily academic criticism of modern fantasy fiction.  This criticism, I believe, has quite a history, which I will attempt to catalog below.

I trace academia's issue with fantasy back to György Lukács's discussion of Legitimism.  The Legitimists responded to what they perceived as the valueless chaos and competition of early capitalism by arguing that Europe needed to return to its pre-industrial roots.  They were authoritarians, royalists, and feudalist sympathizers; they yearned to take the rapidly emerging modern society back to their version of the valorized, idyllic, hierarchical society of knights and lords.  The form of literature that they espoused was, of course, the medieval poetic romances such as the chanson de geste.

Modern fantasy fiction has its thematic roots in the medieval romance poems.  Literary critic Fredric Jameson implicitly extends the academic criticism of fantasy when he discusses Northrop Frye's notion of romance in his book The Political Unconscious; here he writes that romance, in its original form, is essentially a "Utopian fantasy which aims at the transfiguration of the world of everyday life in such a way as to restore the conditions of some lost Eden, or to anticipate a future realm from which the old mortality and imperfections will have been effaced."  In this sense, romance, according to Jameson, offers a kind of "imaginary" resolution to real contradictory socio-economic (Jameson is, after all, a Marxist) conditions.  This is related to the popular accusation that fantasy is "escapist"; but for Jameson, the escapism of such fiction isn't the primary issue.  The issue is that, at its heart, it is ideological.

However, we need to put pressure on this association.  It is only on a thematic level that modern fantasy fiction is related to the medieval romance; there is a more important distinction and difference between them: the medieval romances were poetic; modern fantasy fiction is prose - more specifically, it uses the novel as the vehicle for the transmission of its content.

The novel is a radically modern literary form.  It achieved its popularity at the same time that many innovative and influential philosophical ideas were emerging, not the least of which were John Locke's anti-authoritarianism and David Hume's skepticism.  These new philosophical models, working in the wake of the Cartesian cogito, established a new era of human subjectivity.  The novel, as a literary form, is emblematic of this philosophical shift.  Thus, we must acknowledge that between the cosmology and literature of the Middle Ages, and the cosmology and literature of the modern era, there is an immeasurable change that takes place.

Modern fantasy fiction has to be judged on this basis: as a subgenre that deals overwhelmingly in prose (specifically the novel), it is entirely separate from its medieval predecessor apart from certain thematic similarities.  On first glance, this might seem to support the criticism that fantasy fiction is illogical: its content is anachronistic in relation to its form.  However, I believe that modern fantasy fiction must not be discarded as childish, escapist, ideological tripe (and some critics do hold this view).  Rather, it must be viewed in light of two cultural antagonisms: on one hand, its ideological fascination with medieval, or ancient, themes; on the other hand, its popularity in modern fiction, and its relation to the modern problem of representation.  Most importantly, concerning the second issue, we have to put fantasy on the same level of what is regarded as "high" literature.  If all fiction represents some alternate form of history or reality, then fantasy fiction must be contextualized within this framework: not as texts that depict impossible, escapist, or Utopian visions; but as actually possible, but radically alternate, histories.

I'm going to stop now because I could go on forever probably (I'm doing my doctorate in English literature now, so the ideas just don't stop).  Any and all responses are welcome; reactions, emotions, opinions, anything at all.  Don't feel the need to respond to anything above either; if people simply want to share why they think fantasy is a legitimate subgenre, or why they feel it is often ostracized in popular/academic circles, that's great.

Cheers!

[What Came Before]

I'm going to reread this in the morning, Soterion, and give you some actual embellished input.

Likely, I'll continue with two threads of thought.

Firstly, all readings are anachronistic by the nature of the event. One of Bakker's more recent comments on TPB highlights a common idea he has presented: "I just don’t know what a book is aside from a stack of ink and paper absent its ‘effects on the reader.’ ... Literature is different insofar as it denotes a special kind of cognitive and communicative effect that can be analysed quite independently of any genre it happens to be attached to."

That said, secondly, it leads into his choice of "narrow-casting" (his term). Fantasy, and the more encompassing genre SFF, has one of the largest cultural followings of all reading - genre or otherwise. It makes sense as a choice place to attempt changing the cultural zeitgeist.

[What Came Before]

I tend to extend that sentence to 'the neurotypical effects on the reader', ie, the average effect over a demographic (either the major demographic, or significant sub demographics).

Have to wonder if it's a redefinition of 'literature' though. On the other hand, don't really care about how a word is used, as long as it comes with a fair amount of definition.

[What Came Before]

I'm going to reread this in the morning, Soterion, and give you some actual embellished input.

Likely, I'll continue with two threads of thought.

Firstly, all readings are anachronistic by the nature of the event. One of Bakker's more recent comments on TPB highlights a common idea he has presented: "I just don’t know what a book is aside from a stack of ink and paper absent its ‘effects on the reader.’ ... Literature is different insofar as it denotes a special kind of cognitive and communicative effect that can be analysed quite independently of any genre it happens to be attached to."

That said, secondly, it leads into his choice of "narrow-casting" (his term). Fantasy, and the more encompassing genre SFF, has one of the largest cultural followings of all reading - genre or otherwise. It makes sense as a choice place to attempt changing the cultural zeitgeist.

Great Bakker reference.  There's also an incredible passage somewhere in 'The Warrior Prophet' where he basically writes that the act of reading is a form of "submission" (to the marks of another man's quill, or something along those lines).  I'll try and find it and post it, because it could certainly contribute to this discussion.

In the meantime, Bakker definitely places little importance on authorial intention, it would seem.  Even an act of submission by a reader can only be a retroactive process of semiotic projection; we perceive a text and immediately attribute a totalized, subjectified author lurking somewhere behind it.  Thus, the act of writing and the meaning of the text can be entirely to reduced to the author's original intention.  This is flawed and misguided, of course, and Bakker draws our attention to this.  The ideology (cult, even?) of the "author" is predominant in the popular reading public, but it's something worth considering and criticizing.  I think that a neuroscientific approach to textual production and reception certainly offers a more effective route to understanding literature and its impact on the audience.

How is a more scientific, or cognitive, approach to literary production related to fantasy fiction?  Is there something in the genre of the novel that opens up possibilities here; or does the import of fantasy fiction lie in its content, and in the popular reception of it as a subgenre?

[What Came Before]

Hardly "the morning," when I'd intended but here goes:

What makes fantasy more unrealistic? I would argue, off the top of my head, that it's a semiotic connection; that is, Atwood's novel has socio-linguistic and cultural ties to our own actual reality, whereas Martin's series (despite its influence from medieval tropes) is meant to be viewed as entirely separate from our reality. Thus, we must ask not only the question of why does his reality bear such resemblance to a historical period of our own reality; but we also must ask why so many of his characters speak, and his tale is narrated in, English. Tolkien tried to accommodate such criticisms by creating a fictional language as well as referring to what was written in English as "the common tongue" (I believe Martin does something along these lines as well). Any mention of "English" within the novel's diegetic reality destroys its imaginative power. Yet it's still narrated in English, thus presenting a strange illogic (i.e. a story translated from a presumably unknown language).

I think Callan summed this up nicely - the average effects over a demographic. This paragraph might be arguing that "Plausible Extension of Narrative" is somehow necessary for literary "realism" - even just sounds like another genre. This is pretty clearly one of Bakker's major schticks as far as I'm concerned. Genre's seem more a reflection of a collection of preferences rather than... whatever the fuck literary is to literati.

There's even a decent attempt at Literature in the second part of Bakker's quote: "is different insofar as it denotes a special kind of cognitive and communicative effect that can be analyzed quite independently of any genre it happens to be attached to."

So we're back to discussing effects on the reader, of individual readings, experiences, which can be maximized for cognitive and communicative effect, at least by writing within the constraint of demographic preferences...

In this sense, romance, according to Jameson, offers a kind of "imaginary" resolution to real contradictory socio-economic (Jameson is, after all, a Marxist) conditions. This is related to the popular accusation that fantasy is "escapist"; but for Jameson, the escapism of such fiction isn't the primary issue. The issue is that, at its heart, it is ideological.

Marx seems to figure that people shouldn't be writing anything that didn't relate, have an affect in change, to the actual happenings of the world. Isn't escapism then actually the issue? Unless it's useful to our current human context, does it even matter? And isn't that an ideological distinction?

Great Bakker reference. There's also an incredible passage somewhere in 'The Warrior Prophet' where he basically writes that the act of reading is a form of "submission" (to the marks of another man's quill, or something along those lines). I'll try and find it and post it, because it could certainly contribute to this discussion.

I got you... one of my favorite passages ever. I've read and used it in papers, writings, and discussions more times than I can count. Achamian is reading in the Sareotic Library...

"A book was never 'read.' Here, as elsewhere, language betrayed the true nature of the activity. To say that a book was read was to make the same mistake as the gambler who crowed about winning as though he'd taken it by force of hand or resolve. To toss the number-sticks was to seize a moment of helplessness, nothing more. But to open a book was by far the more profound gamble. To open a book was not only to seize a moment of helplessness, not only to relinquish a jealous handful of heartbeats to the unpredictable mark of another man's quill, it was to allow oneself to be written. For what was a book if not a long consecutive surrender to the movements of another's soul?" (TWP, p323)

The man has a quite the skill for metaphor.

In the case of many, many authors, I was exposed to ideas, to knowledge, that I'd likely never spontaneously have come to understand. So very much, in my life, I've been shaped and created from books. I'm giving up moments of my life and Bakker's drawing attention to that.

Is he arguing then that literature should be defined by its purpose or use? Let's say the current literary Literature is High Literature for sake of discussion. Certainly, there must be instances within the genre, the constraining institutional preferences of High Literature, which doesn't do anything, doesn't change the reader in any way? Am I making a distinction, even within that question, that effect on the reader is paramount?

This is flawed and misguided, of course, and Bakker draws our attention to this. The ideology (cult, even?) of the "author" is predominant in the popular reading public, but it's something worth considering and criticizing. I think that a neuroscientific approach to textual production and reception certainly offers a more effective route to understanding literature and its impact on the audience.

It's interesting but I think, Authorial Intent, has been the entire defense concerning the accusations of Bakker's sexism.

To give that a quote fair rundown, I followed along with the AMC/ROC, TPB, Hotlist row, and the many threads on Westeros. Though I'd never considered it, I think that some of those detractors have valid points, as much as its unfortunate that social circumstances force them to communicative tactics to disseminate information online.

Bakker is not a big fish. I wish he were but he's not. The reason I'd never considered that reading about black semen and rape monsters could turn you into a sexist is because I also grew up on popular culture. Whether you've thought about it or not, any of us living in the Western Empire (and the Internet makes that a pretty safe bet), got a prepackaged indoctrination, c. 1950's to Present.

There are worse cartoons than Bakker. It brings us back to the question of Authorial Intent. I think, ultimately, Bakker is trying to communicate something. He's also playing the odds that every "book" falls subject to readers, which as we're highlighting makes for the ultimate conundrum.

If I'd been raped in my life, depending on my level of balance with that, I'd probably want to burn Bakker's books. However, the reader makes the difference.

How is a more scientific, or cognitive, approach to literary production related to fantasy fiction? Is there something in the genre of the novel that opens up possibilities here; or does the import of fantasy fiction lie in its content, and in the popular reception of it as a subgenre?

As much as I know Bakker loves fantasy, I think, at the point of writing, he probably would have written Harlequin Romance first if he'd thought the themes could have reached more readers. Suffice it to say, SFF is popular. And that is to say, holds some real measure of socio-cultural quotient.

However, I think we are discussing how a more scientific, or cognitive, approach to literary production is related to fantasy or any fiction. In the case of algorithmic production, research will be done until enough variables of demographic preferences and the meta-narrative structures, like the Hero's Journey, are derived that they can overcome the inevitable "uncanny valley effect" of artificial writing.

Ultimately, any writing, the author's code, has to interact with the reader. And any definition of literature to this date has reflected those interactions, planting different flags in human response to mark the boundaries of effect - this is what makes the difference...

I've ranged here and I'm not sure if this is what you were after with your initial post. Just thoughts.

[What Came Before]

i repost this too much:  mieville on marxism & fantasy--

JN: What have Marxists had to say about fantasy and science fiction?
China: Probably the most influential Marxist position has been that of Darko Suvin, the theorist of SF, in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979). He's politically behind SF, seeing it as related to the progressive bourgeois project, especially in its infancy. He says that SF is characterised by 'cognitive estrangement'--it operates according to a rationalist/scientific mindset, but it involves estrangement from the here and now so that it can extrapolate creatively. Fantasy, in contrast, he used to argue was 'a genre committed to the imposition of anti-cognitive laws into the empirical environment...just another ghoulish thrill...a sub-literature of mystification. Commercial lumping of it into the same category as SF is thus a grave disservice and rampantly sociopathological phenomenon.'

He's changed his position these days, and he's more open minded about fantasy, but his original formulation is still very influential. Speaking to socialists, I still find a lot of people sceptical or dismissive of fantasy because it's got magic or ghosts or whatever in it, and because as Marxists we don't believe in them. They see something dubious in literature that pretends they're real. For me, that's a misunderstanding of what art is. I've written ghost stories--it doesn't mean for a minute I believe in ghosts. I'm writing a story that doesn't pretend to be a direct representation of the real world. Suspension of disbelief is crucial.

The only other book length Marxist work on fantasy I know is José Monleon's A Specter is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the Fantastic (1990). He sees the fantastic as a reflection of the fact that, to quote the title of one of Goya's most famous pictures, 'the sleep of reason produces monsters' (1799). I think this is a really useful starting point. Goya's picture is of a sleeping man menaced from behind by a variety of fantastic creatures. Monleon says--rightly, I think--that Goya is establishing 'a relation of cause and effect between reason and unreason'.

Capitalism's early embracing of scientific thought was progressive compared to what went before, and on that basis it projects a claim that it is the triumph of systemic rationality, and that any forces which oppose it are therefore irrational or 'anti-rational'. But we also know that capitalism throws up, absolutely inevitably, forces which can and must oppose it. It represses just about every human impulse you can mention, which are going to resurface in various forms. Most fundamentally it throws up and represses the working class, and its emancipatory political project. It pretends class conflict is inimical to it, but it's actually integral. Monleon says, 'The spectre of revolution, then, seems to be at the base of this reappearance of unreason in general, and of the fantastic in particular.' So the 'unreason' of fantasy is a kind of neurotic counterpoint to capitalism's 'rationality'. Capitalism's 'reason' produces its own monsters.

With that framework, he makes sense of the particular shape of the fantastic at different times. So Gothic fears of the ancient and pre-modern (old castles, forests, graveyards, etc) is a reflection of the fact that, at the high point of Gothic in the late 18th century, the revolts spawned by capitalism were those of a working class still often rural or newly urbanised, whose revolts (like Luddism) were directed in an unclear way against the 'modern'. Later on in the 19th century, when working class protest became more programmatic, the fantastic often located its 'monsters' in the heart of the city, or as a result of the scientific mindset (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is an excellent example).

I think the idea of 'the sleep of reason' is incredibly helpful in seeing how the fantastic is so tenacious at the heart of capitalism's rationalism. It allows you to historicise the fantastic, and within the paradigm leaves you plenty of space for more specific analyses, either of particular modes of the fantastic or of individual works. I think Monleon's book is invaluable for that.

But there are problems with Monleon: he's too one-sided in focusing on fantasy that is about the 'monstrous'. And, much more problematically, he uses a reductionist 'dominant ideology' theoretical paradigm, and judges fantasy literature on that basis. The paradigm is too simplistic, and it means his political judgement of fantasy is far too negative. He sees it as reflecting concerns but 'subsuming' them into literature, and therefore disarming the radical content--'a displacement took place that allowed dominant society to control or tame the image of unreason'. So the Gothic, for example, he sees as more or less straightforwardly 'defending' the status quo.

And after 1917, when capitalism in war and revolution turned to its own 'savage irrationalism' to defend its supposed 'rationalism', he sees the 'irrationalism' of fantasy as breaking its boundaries, generalising and being ultimately a reactionary reflection of irrationalist capitalism. It's a Lukácsian position, and it's artistically and politically philistine. He does hedge it a bit in the last chapter of his book, but it's clear that he thinks fantasy ended up being sustained by capitalist irrationalism in a direct, almost nurturing way, and sustaining it back as if it was part of a reactionary bourgeois project: 'The fantastic "reflected" very real threats; on the other hand, it created a space in which those threats could be transformed into "supernaturalism" and monstrosity, thus helping to reshape the philosophical premises that sustained the fantastic and effectively reorient the course of social evolution.' His reading of the politics of the books is way too one-sided, and he grants fantastic literature social power I don't think it has. (I wish!)

I think that fantasy's expression of the tensions thrown up by capitalism in a particularly acute way makes it much harder than Monleon suggests to read it as either 'reactionary' or 'progressive'--which can be useful shorthand but are very schematic categories. The literature's more ambivalent and complex, the relationship to irrationalism is less straightforward, and the space for the critical/subversive in the fantastic is much greater than he suggests.

people simply want to share why they think fantasy is a legitimate subgenre

a non-question for me.  can't make readers like elves and magic swords if they don't like that stuff, but legitimacy doesn't strike me as an applicable line of inquiry.  it's not like its pedophile porn.

[What Came Before]

China Miéville actually has a great article on this in the collection Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction.  The article is called "Cognition as Ideology: a Dialectic of SF Theory," and he basically elaborates on many of the points you mentioned, sologdin.  Most importantly, he identifies what Carl Freedman has called the "cognition effect" as a predominantly irrational and ideological rhetorical tool.  Many Marxist critics of the past (such as Jameson, Freedman, and Darko Suvin) have appealed to this cognition effect as what distinguishes SF from, and elevates it above, fantasy fiction.  Miéville counters this and argues that fantasy is no more ideological than SF.

Not to go into SF in depth, but it is a great argument against the tradition of privilege that SF has enjoyed over fantasy.