What Fantasy is For

[tamaranth]

Warning: may contain critical theory. And photographs

Mark Bould interviewed M John ('Mike') Harrison at the BSFA / Foundation event, Signs of Life, on 13th April. It was a facsinating interview: MJH spoke at some length about the failure of fantasy to deliver the promised magic-beyond-the-portal, and about SF & fantasy tending towards a sensationalist, rather than observational, prose style.
Locus magazine's March cover face, China Miéville, is an avowed admirer of MJH, and he's gone on record in several places recently disagreeing* with Tolkien's view of fantasy as consolation. ("The idea of consolatory fantasy makes me want to puke"). Miéville makes an interesting distinction, which I'm not sure if I accept, between conservative-and-consolatory fantasy of the Tolkien school (what John Clute describes as the 'Wrongness, Thinning, Resolution' pattern of much fantasy) and the challenging subversion of the Surrealists. Should the purpose of fantasy be to justify the status quo, or to question the way things are?

I still don't know where I stand on all this. I'm not convinced that fantasy needs, let alone has, a primary purpose in that way. Seems to me there are some things to which politicisation adds nothing. Maybe I'm a thing it adds nothing to.

But there was a classic moment: China asked Mike whether he had "stopped blaming the genre for the failures of nostalgia & the failure of the fantastic to offer solutions?" And Mike responded: "Yes, I've been working through that one for the last twenty years."

Left: China (obscuring Dr Andrew M Butler)
Right: M John Harrison

It's easy to read that as a put-down - which it wasn't - but is blaming fantasy for its failure to confront real-life issues an Angry Young Author response? And is a conservative morality inherently incapable of offering constructive commentary on the real world?

* in England, we call this understatement

Comments

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

there was a comment I found in the Meditations on Middle Earth essays that suggested to me that Tolkien didn't only see it as consolation: he talked about the world-building and examination of consistency as promoting and developing logical thought. I didn't actually buy the book once I'd read Friesner, Tutrledove and de Lint's essays so I can't quote more fully but it was along the lines of reading/writing fantasy doesn't dull our thoughts, it sharpens them. Isn't LoTR as much inspiration as consolation or escapism?

LoTR as philological construction

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

I must admit I'm inclined to go along with Tom Shippey's analysis of most of Tolkein's work as an intellectual game intended to derive a consistent philological basis for the place names of Britain by giving it a single mythology, one that acted as a bridge between the mythos of Northern and Eastern Europe and that of the Celtic peoples.

And I'm not sure if the fiction of the fantastic doesn't fail to confront the "real" world. One view that I've often seen in critical thinking is that the best fantasies are a mirror to the real world. A New Worlds school novel like M. John Harrison's "The Committed Men" is much more a critique of life in the aftermath of the white heat of technology than any novel of the East Anglia school.

There's actually an argument that detective fiction is the fiction of nostalgia. Something happens to disturb the status quo. The detective arrives to root out the evil, and then removes it, restoring things to their steady state. Where at least fantasies like the LoTR leave the world changed, and often for the worse...