What Fantasy is For
Tuesday, April 30th, 2002 03:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranthWarning: 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
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
