Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction (Continuum Collection, Contemporary Classics of Children's Literature)

181 Pages·2005·8.94 MB·English

by  Peter Hunt

Contemporary Classics of Children's Literature
Series Editor: Morag Styles
Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction
Contemporary Classics of Children's Literature
Series Editor: Morag Styles
This exciting new series provides critical discussion of a range of
contemporary classics of children's literature. The contributors are
distinguished educationalists and academics from Britain, North
America, Australia and elsewhere, as well as some of the foremost
booksellers, literary journalists and librarians in the field. The work of
leading authors and other outstanding fictional texts for young people
(popular as well as literary) are considered on a genre or thematic basis.
The format for each book includes an in-depth introduction to the key
characteristics of the genre, where major works and great precursors
are examined, and significant issues and ideas raised by the genre are
explored. The series will provide essential reading for those working on
undergraduate and higher degrees on children's literature. It avoids
jargon and is accessible to interested readers, from parents, teachers
and other professionals, to students and specialists in the field.
Contemporary Classics of Children's Literature is a pioneering series,
the first of its kind in Britain to give serious attention to the excellent
writing being produced for children in recent years.
Also available in the series:
Kate Agnew and Geoff Fox: Children at War
Julia Eccleshare: A Guide to the Harry Potter novels
Nick Tucker and Nikki Gamble: Family Fictions
Kim Reynolds, Kevin McCarron and Geraldine Brennan: Frightening
Fiction
Contemporary Classics of Children's
Literature
ALTERNATIVE
WORLDS IN
FANTASY
FICTION
Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz
continuum
LONDON • NEW YORK
Continuum
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www.continuumbooks.com
(£) 2001 Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
First published 2001, Reprinted 2003
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-8264-4936-0 (hardback)
0-8264-7760-7 (paperback)
Typeset by YHT Ltd, London
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Creative Print and Design, Ebbw Vale
N/,
Contents
Note vi
CHAPTER 1 Introduction 1
Peter Hunt
CHAPTER 2 Ursula K. Le Guin 42
Millicent Lenz
CHAPTER 3 Terry Pratchett 86
Peter Hunt
CHAPTER 4 Philip Pullman 122
Millicent Lenz
index 170
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CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Fantasy and Alternative Worlds
Peter Hunt
'Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but
Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out
everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon
Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.'
Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)
Fantasy is the natural, the appropriate language for the recounting of the
spiritual journey and the struggle of good and evil in the soul.
Ursula K. Le Gum (1992: 64)
Fantasy is literature for teenagers
Brian Aldiss (quoted in Winoker, 1987: 39)
There's certainly prejudice in some quarters against fantasy, but this
tends to be from people who think it's all swords and dragons - which is
as silly as saying that 'Booker books' are all about foul-mouthed Scots
and lonely ladies taking tea on wet Thursdays. It seems to be suggested
that fantasy is some kind of fairy icing when, from a historical point of
view, it is the whole cake.
Terry Pratchett (Pratchett and Briggs, 1997: 467)
The paradoxes of fantasy
The first question about fantasy usually is: how seriously should we
take it?
In 1984, Ann Swinfen began her book In Defence of Fantasy by
noting that fantasy occupies 'a curiously ambivalent position ... in the
contemporary literary scene' (1); in 1988, Raymond Tallis began his In
Defence of Realism with the wry observation: 'that realism is outmoded
and the realistic novel a form that has had its day is a critical
commonplace'(1). Lucie Armitt, in 1996, took the opposite view:
if you place 'fantastic' in a literary context ... suddenly we have a
problem. Suddenly it is something dubious, embarrassing ...
2 ALTERNATIVE WORLDS IN FANTASY FICTION
Suddenly we need to justify our interest in it ... [Fantasy] ... is
that intangible source of unconscious fears and desires which
fuels our dreams, our phobias and therefore our narrative fictions
... but its presumed association with the formulaic inevitably
attracts two negative[s] ... : escapism and pulp fiction.(1)
Worse, it is associated with that still-marginalized literary form,
children's literature.
Fantasy literature is either taken seriously (and enthusiastically), or
seriously rejected. It is the root of all literature, an area of advanced
literary experimentation, and essential to our mental health; or it is
regressive, and associated with self-indulgent catharsis on the part of
the writers; or it is linked to a ritualistic, epic, dehumanized world of
predetermination and out of tune with post-romantic sensitivity: or it
symbolizes the random world of the postmodern.
Or, quite possibly, all of these, for fantasy resists, and indeed mocks,
the elaborate classification systems of academia that have grown up
around it, just as it defies the view that its huge popularity is a sad
reflection on the state of contemporary culture.
However, it is useful to take the three most common (if not the most
damning) of opinions - that fantasy is formulaic, childish, and escapist,
to see if they can be sustained - remembering that the one thing that
can rarely be said of fantasy is that it has nothing to do with reality.
The problem of genre
Of types of fiction, fantasy is where the initial impulse of the writing
and the constraints of genre clash most strongly. Personal, private,
fantasy allows us to speculate, to explore possibilities, to indulge our
private selves - to consider imaginatively things that cannot be (as
opposed to speculation on things that might be, which produces science
fiction): it would seem to offer worlds of infinite possibility, of
expansiveness, of liberation.
And yet, the forms that fantasy takes - for all the endless ingenuity
of the human imagination - are surprisingly limited. Fantasy seems to
have, like the folk tales from which it sprang, a restricted number of
recurrent motifs and elements: there are young, questing heroes, wise
controlling sages, irredeemably evil monsters, and (although, mercifully
fewer these days) damsels in distress (Propp, 1975). It might seem that
the most visible form, 'sword and sorcery' genre fantasy, is doomed to
die of repetition or parody - as in Terry Pratchett's 'Discworld' series,
or Diana Wynne Jones's The Tough Guide to Fantasyland which
mercilessly catalogues every cliche: 'Beer always foams and is invariably
INTRODUCTION: FANTASY AND ALTERNATIVE WORLDS 3
delivered in tankards' (1996: 30).
Such is the grip of formula, that it is almost as if one part of the
human psyche is frightened of the other: imagination is too dangerous
to wander unchained. (Of course, it may simply be that the very
publicness of written fantasy simplifies it: it needs to be comprehensible
to more than one person, and most private fantasies would need a good
many footnotes were they to be made public in their raw state!) And
yet, making sense of both the dark, unknown universe out there, and
the perhaps worse demons within - making both humanly manageable
- has been what storytelling and metaphor have always been about.
Ritualization, then, is neither surprising, nor exclusive to fantasy.
Original fantasy, however, as this book will demonstrate, is not hard to
find, although it may have to work harder because of its awareness of
its context.
There is, however, one area of formulaic writing that is increasingly
difficult to justify: the treatment of gender. The hero tale, still the
staple of contemporary fantasy, has been essentially a male preserve: in
fantasies from The Wind in the Willows, Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Pan, The
Hobbit, the first three 'Earthsea' Books, and countless others, women
are marginalized (Tenar) or mothers (Wendy, Kanga), or dangerous
(Toad's bargewoman). As Ursula K. Le Guin said, ironically:
'Authority is male. It's a fact. My fantasy dutifully reported the fact.
But is that all a fantasy does - report facts?' (1993: 11).
But despite all this, fantasy literature, whose wellsprings are most
visibly subversive, continually strives to overcome (or exploit) both
genrefication and the fact that commercialism finds it easier to sell the
restricted and restricting rather than the dangerously unclassifiable.
The three major authors studied in the rest of this book are writers
who have taken on what has been, in terms of genre and gender, an
often limited form, and have moved it into new areas.
Fantasy and children
The second major criticism of fantasy is that it is childish. It is not
surprising that fantasy and children's literature have been associated
with each other, because both are essentially democratic forms -
democratized by being outside the solipsistic system of high culture.
The idea of a 'canon' - a group of superior texts whose superiority is
validated by some set of privileged judges - is alien to both: and to both
'popular culture' is a rallying cry, rather than a contradiction in terms.
But there is no reason to suppose that children and fantasy have a
natural connection, even if the struggle of imagination and generic
constraints parallels the conflict between common concepts of the