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Defining Fantasy
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010 12:32 amI'm still looking for a good article about defining fantasy literature. By "good", I mean "suitable for my students, who are first-year undergraduate non-native speakers. That means nothing by people who spell "theory" with a capital "T" and talk about "otherizing the discourse of post-colonial queerness" on the one hand, and nothing too colloquial on the other. I might even drop David Brin's wonderful "We Hobbits Are A Merry Folk" from the course because his chatty style throws a curve-ball at foreign students, in the way that "throws a curve-ball" does.
This has naturally made me ponder about whether fantasy can be defined. If you look at all the different things that are called fantasy—and I mean just in the context of fantasy literature, not sexual fantasies etc.—you start to get all Wittgensteiny. In fact I might make students read part of Philosophical Investigations (as I did in my games course) just to let them know what they are letting themselves in for when they try to define things. Laurence Gagnon's definition, "any story might justifiably be called ‘a fantasy’ which gives us some explicit indication of the personality of one or more of the characters and which is also about a world that is conceivable but physically impossible," is appealing at first sight. However, there is the difficulty of saying exactly what is impossible; given what we know of physics, dragons are a far more likely possibility than faster-than-light travel. Moreover, as Gagnon admits, the term "fantasy" is here used "in a very general way such that some writings called ‘fairy-tales’, some labeled ‘science-fiction’, and, perhaps, some designated ‘dream-stories’ will fall under the concept of fantasy." In a course on fantasy fiction, I can't afford to be that general; I need something that will explain why The Lord of the Rings is definitely fantasy, The Day of the Triffids definitely isn't and Star Wars and Twilight are on the fuzzy borders with SF and horror respectively. I recently read Twilight described as "urban fantasy", which is silly considering that it takes place in a village, but does at least note that fangs do not a horror film make. Twilight could fairly be described low fantasy (i.e. a tale where fantastic elements are found in the normal world, as opposed to high fantasy, which has a world all of its own). But if that is true, then why do we not say the same of Dracula?
It could be that the distinction between fantasy and horror is of a different kind than the distinction between fantasy and science fiction. Horror is like comedy or pornography, in that it is a genre defined by the feelings it is designed to arouse, whereas fantasy, like westerns, is defined by the kind of things it describes. That is why such disparate creations as The Saw and The Omen can both be called horror films, and why when you reduce the scare quotient in a lot of so-called horror, you see that it is fantasy or SF (Of course there are people who are genuinely scared of the vampires in Twilight, but they're just wusses.) The categories of fantasy and horror overlap, not because of Wittgensteinian vagueness, but because they should. If you have an overlap between the sets of plants and animals, then you assume that the concepts "plant" and "animal" are a bit fuzzy, but there is nothing surprising about an overlap between the set of plants and the set of edible things.
Coming to the more notorious overlap between fantasy and science fiction, we therefore need to ask which kind of overlap it is: is it a plant/animal or a plant/edible overlap? Both the fantasy and science fiction genres are defined largely in terms of what they describe, and both involve describing things which we are fairly sure do not exist and have never existed. They are also the kind of things which not only do not exist but would surprise us if they were to exist. If a connoisseur of nineteenth-century fiction were to read in the Times Literary Supplement that Madame Bovary was actually a real person, he might put down his teacup and murmur "Well I never!" This is probably not how we would react if it were proved that Sauron was a real person.
Both fantasy and science fiction, then, deal with things that make us go "wow!" They are "astounding tales," and in this respect, the genres are also a little like horror, in that their definition includes the feelings they are designed to evoke. A novel set in a world which was exactly the same as ours with addition of toast that always falls with the buttered side up would fit Gagnon's definition of fantasy, but would not be fantastic; neither would it make for interesting science fiction. But is the "wow" of fantasy the same as the "wow" of science fiction? If that were the case, fantasy would be decidedly less impressive, as Ryan Somma argues in a fictitious dialogue between "fanboy" and "scientist": for every impressive fantasy creature, device or journey, science fiction has something bigger, stronger, faster or whatever. Shadowfax may carry Gandalf faster than any horse, but that's still well below the speed of light ... or even the speed of a family car. But this is not how it works: the "wow" of fantasy is subtly different from the "wow" of SF. As I said, dragons are a much more feasible proposition than faster than light travel, but dragons strike us as more magical and mysterious.
Let us imagine, then, a science fictional account of dragons (something Anne McCaffrey comes close to in the Pern books). Someone, somewhere, messes with the genes of birds to make them very big, featherless and scaly. (In other words, to make dinosaurs.) Then they work on the digestive system so that the creature produces methane which can then be ignited in its mouth. Voila, a dragon, which can then make the story interesting by escaping and laying waste to cities. We're talking something between Jurassic Park and Godzilla here.
This would make passable, if rather unoriginal science fiction, but despite the presence of dragons it definitely wouldn't be fantasy. The fact that the dragons' genesis is explained identifies it as SF, but this is not the most important point; it is a side-effect of an essential feature of science fiction, which is that it follows, or at least claims to follow, the rules of our universe. It may bend them, as with FTL travel or telepathy, but it cannot flout them. If a SF novel has spaceships travelling faster than light, it doesn't give a satisfactory explanation of how they do it; anyone who could provide one would already have a Nobel prize. They may have explanations of a kind ("tachyon drives", "wormholes" etc.) but this is just a way of saying "This is happening in our universe, according to the laws of that universe." They are most definitely not saying "Faster than light travel is physically impossible, but our hero can do it because he has a magic spaceship." That would be fantasy. What fantasy does is not to bend or even flout the rules; it says "The rules here are different." Not only are we not in Kansas any more, we aren't even in hyper-Kansas. This may be what makes the "wow" of fantasy different from the "wow" of SF. When Shadowfax gallops at the speed of a Citroen, we aren't saying "Wow, that's fast!" We're saying "Wow, a magic horse!"
If it is true that what makes fantasy is the idea of different rules, then that would explain why Star Wars sits so uncomfortably (but effectively) on the fence between fantasy and SF. It has all the trappings of space opera, but we are in no doubt that we are being told a fairy tale. When we see those words "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away ..." we don't think "Hang on, all galaxies are far away. I mean the nearest galaxy to us is Andromeda, and that's 2,500,000 light years away." What we think is "Once upon a time ..." and what we understand is "The rules are different here."
This has naturally made me ponder about whether fantasy can be defined. If you look at all the different things that are called fantasy—and I mean just in the context of fantasy literature, not sexual fantasies etc.—you start to get all Wittgensteiny. In fact I might make students read part of Philosophical Investigations (as I did in my games course) just to let them know what they are letting themselves in for when they try to define things. Laurence Gagnon's definition, "any story might justifiably be called ‘a fantasy’ which gives us some explicit indication of the personality of one or more of the characters and which is also about a world that is conceivable but physically impossible," is appealing at first sight. However, there is the difficulty of saying exactly what is impossible; given what we know of physics, dragons are a far more likely possibility than faster-than-light travel. Moreover, as Gagnon admits, the term "fantasy" is here used "in a very general way such that some writings called ‘fairy-tales’, some labeled ‘science-fiction’, and, perhaps, some designated ‘dream-stories’ will fall under the concept of fantasy." In a course on fantasy fiction, I can't afford to be that general; I need something that will explain why The Lord of the Rings is definitely fantasy, The Day of the Triffids definitely isn't and Star Wars and Twilight are on the fuzzy borders with SF and horror respectively. I recently read Twilight described as "urban fantasy", which is silly considering that it takes place in a village, but does at least note that fangs do not a horror film make. Twilight could fairly be described low fantasy (i.e. a tale where fantastic elements are found in the normal world, as opposed to high fantasy, which has a world all of its own). But if that is true, then why do we not say the same of Dracula?
It could be that the distinction between fantasy and horror is of a different kind than the distinction between fantasy and science fiction. Horror is like comedy or pornography, in that it is a genre defined by the feelings it is designed to arouse, whereas fantasy, like westerns, is defined by the kind of things it describes. That is why such disparate creations as The Saw and The Omen can both be called horror films, and why when you reduce the scare quotient in a lot of so-called horror, you see that it is fantasy or SF (Of course there are people who are genuinely scared of the vampires in Twilight, but they're just wusses.) The categories of fantasy and horror overlap, not because of Wittgensteinian vagueness, but because they should. If you have an overlap between the sets of plants and animals, then you assume that the concepts "plant" and "animal" are a bit fuzzy, but there is nothing surprising about an overlap between the set of plants and the set of edible things.
Coming to the more notorious overlap between fantasy and science fiction, we therefore need to ask which kind of overlap it is: is it a plant/animal or a plant/edible overlap? Both the fantasy and science fiction genres are defined largely in terms of what they describe, and both involve describing things which we are fairly sure do not exist and have never existed. They are also the kind of things which not only do not exist but would surprise us if they were to exist. If a connoisseur of nineteenth-century fiction were to read in the Times Literary Supplement that Madame Bovary was actually a real person, he might put down his teacup and murmur "Well I never!" This is probably not how we would react if it were proved that Sauron was a real person.
Both fantasy and science fiction, then, deal with things that make us go "wow!" They are "astounding tales," and in this respect, the genres are also a little like horror, in that their definition includes the feelings they are designed to evoke. A novel set in a world which was exactly the same as ours with addition of toast that always falls with the buttered side up would fit Gagnon's definition of fantasy, but would not be fantastic; neither would it make for interesting science fiction. But is the "wow" of fantasy the same as the "wow" of science fiction? If that were the case, fantasy would be decidedly less impressive, as Ryan Somma argues in a fictitious dialogue between "fanboy" and "scientist": for every impressive fantasy creature, device or journey, science fiction has something bigger, stronger, faster or whatever. Shadowfax may carry Gandalf faster than any horse, but that's still well below the speed of light ... or even the speed of a family car. But this is not how it works: the "wow" of fantasy is subtly different from the "wow" of SF. As I said, dragons are a much more feasible proposition than faster than light travel, but dragons strike us as more magical and mysterious.
Let us imagine, then, a science fictional account of dragons (something Anne McCaffrey comes close to in the Pern books). Someone, somewhere, messes with the genes of birds to make them very big, featherless and scaly. (In other words, to make dinosaurs.) Then they work on the digestive system so that the creature produces methane which can then be ignited in its mouth. Voila, a dragon, which can then make the story interesting by escaping and laying waste to cities. We're talking something between Jurassic Park and Godzilla here.
This would make passable, if rather unoriginal science fiction, but despite the presence of dragons it definitely wouldn't be fantasy. The fact that the dragons' genesis is explained identifies it as SF, but this is not the most important point; it is a side-effect of an essential feature of science fiction, which is that it follows, or at least claims to follow, the rules of our universe. It may bend them, as with FTL travel or telepathy, but it cannot flout them. If a SF novel has spaceships travelling faster than light, it doesn't give a satisfactory explanation of how they do it; anyone who could provide one would already have a Nobel prize. They may have explanations of a kind ("tachyon drives", "wormholes" etc.) but this is just a way of saying "This is happening in our universe, according to the laws of that universe." They are most definitely not saying "Faster than light travel is physically impossible, but our hero can do it because he has a magic spaceship." That would be fantasy. What fantasy does is not to bend or even flout the rules; it says "The rules here are different." Not only are we not in Kansas any more, we aren't even in hyper-Kansas. This may be what makes the "wow" of fantasy different from the "wow" of SF. When Shadowfax gallops at the speed of a Citroen, we aren't saying "Wow, that's fast!" We're saying "Wow, a magic horse!"
If it is true that what makes fantasy is the idea of different rules, then that would explain why Star Wars sits so uncomfortably (but effectively) on the fence between fantasy and SF. It has all the trappings of space opera, but we are in no doubt that we are being told a fairy tale. When we see those words "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away ..." we don't think "Hang on, all galaxies are far away. I mean the nearest galaxy to us is Andromeda, and that's 2,500,000 light years away." What we think is "Once upon a time ..." and what we understand is "The rules are different here."
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