Kalessin: I take my share of the blame for cross-wiring this thread and the Tril & Bible thread – but I’m glad I did, since this little spur of side conversation turned out to be quite interesting (at least to me). Thanks also for your clarification of what you mean by “appropriation”.
Genre Constrictions and Definitions
I think (as I have implied in a few posts) that the fantasy genre these days has come to be defined mostly as “swords-and-sorcery”. Sure, you’ll find the odd Neil Gaiman who isn’t writing swords-and-sorcery but whose work can only be classified as “fantasy”, but by and large, fantasy consists of multi-volume sagas in the Tolkien/Dungeons and Dragons tradition. Speaking of Gaiman, it’s interesting to note that the so-called graphic novel is actually a format that accommodates a broader definition of fantasy and in which a much greater degree of innovation, both in narrative style and in themes and subject matter, is taking place.
But we really are talking about swords-and-sorcery fantasy, aren’t we? That’s what we’d like to see a new, seminal example of, right? Something that’s like Tolkien, and yet not like him. Something that’s as good and as satisfying and as pleasurable, yet different. Outside of a few Arthurian cycles, I can’t think of anyone who’s writing epic fantasy cycles that are being shelved with “Literature” because the author has a great rep or good pull with their publishers.
Side note: I’ve been waiting to see if anyone would mention Borges. I’m not terribly familiar with his work – I’ve found what I’ve read to be interesting in principle but frustratingly aimless in execution. Do you have further thoughts or recommendations on him, Kalessin?
The Harry Potter Phenomenon
I was reading an article on screenwriting recently, and happened across an interesting theory which is tangentially related to littlemanpoet’s Potter observations:
Quote:
Here's the idea [of something the author calls “Mental Real Estate”]: I name something, and you either recognize it, or you don't. Could be a person, place, or thing, like the classic twenty questions game. If you recognize the thing I tell you, that means it's taking up space in your head – tangling up a few billion neurons – residing on a chunk of mental real estate. That makes it valuable, because if the thing is taking up space in your head, chances are, it's taking up space in a good percentage of other heads across the country. And Hollywood can use that. It's the main commodity of the town – Hollywood buys, sells, and trades in mental real estate.
[...]
The Potter books have something that most other fantasies don't have, even ones that are just as inventive, well-crafted, and charming. Yes, that's right, I know the secret of the popularity of the "Harry Potter" books. There's a big chunk of mental real estate at their core. The brilliant thing that J.K. Rowling did, that no one -- amazingly -- had done before, was this: she wrote about going to school. What's the biggest part of a kid's life from about age six on?
Going to school.
How many kids go to school?
All of them.
So simple, and just sitting there, right in front of everyone.
Rowling took the single most dominant aspect of a child's life -- the most common experience we all lived through, and share -- and made it really cool.
What kid wouldn't rather ride the train to Hogwart's and study magic, than trudge off to the local elementary school for some boring lecture on grammar?
Going to school... such a simple, common, everyday activity -- and that's what they mean when they say, 'accessible' and 'something readers can relate to.'
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Now, I’m not saying (and really the author isn’t asserting) that this idea of “Mental Real Estate” is the sole reason for the success of Potter, but I think he’s onto something. Tolkien traded on the same “Mental Real Estate” in his day, starting with
The Hobbit, which offers familiar and accessible elements (Dragons, Wizards, Elves, Dwarves, magic rings, etc.; also classic mythic motifs) reworked in a new and innovative (at the time, anyway) form. I would add to the article author’s theory that not only do you need a points of accessibility like that, you also need to offer some fresh spin on them. Wizards, Elves, Dwarves, and so on take up mental real estate in all of our heads – but no one has since been able to bring a fresh treatment of them before the public.
Redefining our “Devourer of Archetypes” according to a new metaphor, maybe Tolkien has such a huge plot of Mental Real Estate staked out that there’s scarcely a scrap of unclaimed land for some ambitious, homesteading young writer to farm. Fantasy writers need to set sail for the New World and till some fresh, unclaimed earth.
Plato and Artistic Essence
Aiwendil – now I see what you’re driving at. Plato’s Ideal Forms and whatnot. Still being somewhat Plato-illiterate (I confess with shame), I thought that the Ideal Forms usually represented the essence of concrete things – i.e., an ideal cat, or an ideal table, or an ideal Pez dispenser. Leaving that aside, though, I’m tempted to muse that since the forms of various artistic mediums vary, the Platonic essence common to them all must have something to do with content. I’m going to do another cross-wiring and steal a quotation cited by littlemanpoet in the
“The Effects of Fantasy” thread:
Quote:
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I can do you no better service than quoting from Tolkien's Tree and Leaf: 'This "joy" which I have selected as the mark of the true fairy-story (or romance), or as the seal upon it, merits more consideration.... The peculiar quality of "joy" in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.'
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Is this “sudden glimpse” some component, not only of successful Fantasy, but of all “Art”? Is it also something that’s missing from the bulk of modern fantasy?
Since I’m on a quoting spree, I’ll add one more, this from sci-fi (sort of) author Neal Stephenson:
Quote:
The lesson most people are taking home from the Twentieth Century is that, in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist peacefully on the globe (or even in a neighborhood) it is necessary for people to suspend judgment in this way. Hence (I would argue) our suspicion of, and hostility towards, all authority figures in modern culture. As David Foster Wallace has explained in his essay "E Unibus Pluram," this is the fundamental message of television; it is the message that people take home, anyway, after they have steeped in our media long enough. It's not expressed in these highfalutin terms, of course. It comes through as the presumption that all authority figures--teachers, generals, cops, ministers, politicians--are hypocritical buffoons, and that hip jaded coolness is the only way to be.
The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there's no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire point of having a culture.
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Has modern fantasy been reduced to the significance of “clog dancing and macramé” by what Stephenson refers to as “this global monoculture” which Kalessin’s double-whammy implies? I think it has, and I think this is one of the big problems faced by modern fantasy writers, whose stock in trade is (or should be) underlying truths.
(BTW, this Stephenson extract is from a much longer – some seventy pages or so – essay on computer operating systems (!) which is available for download
here.)
[ April 22, 2002: Message edited by: Mister Underhill ]