Fantasy, Politics, Postmodernity

272 Pages·2014·2.049 MB·English

by  Andrew Rayment

Fantasy, Politics, Postmodernity
Postmodern Studies 52
Series
edited by
Theo D’haen
and
Hans Bertens
Fantasy, Politics, Postmodernity
Pratchett, Pullman, Miéville and Stories of the Eye

Andrew Rayment
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014
Cover image: Unexpected Passion, original artwork copyrighted by Sabina
D’Antonio.
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3858-5
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1100-0
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2014
Printed in The Netherlands
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART I – THE POLITICS OF (IN)SIGHT
INTRODUCTION
Fantasy Sight: ‘Real Being’ 9
ONE Metaphor and Domain Maps: Parallax Sight 23
TWO From Mind to Real: Ontological Sight 53
THREE Theory, Fantastic Beings, Space: ‘Purificational’ Sight 83
FOUR Seeing Visions: Experimental Sight 111
FIVE Dwarfs, Hermaphrodites, Lovers: Fantastic Sex 141
PART II – THE POLITICS OF BLINDNESS
SIX A Plague of Punctum: Postmodern Excess 173
Punctum 1: Words 176
Punctum 2: Narratives 186
Punctum 3: Images 212
Punctum 4: Theory 232
CONCLUSION
“What It Seems It Is...” (Is a World of Seeming) 243
Bibliography 255
Index 269
PART I
THE POLITICS OF (IN)SIGHT
INTRODUCTION
FANTASY SIGHT: ʻREAL BEINGʼ

A number of twenty-first century British Fantasy writers are avowedly
political. The texts of Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman and China
Miéville not only boldly and openly engage with grand
socio-politico-religious issues, but also with more subtle and easily
missed plays of micro-power. They take issue with the overt power
wielded by corrupt and corrupting authorities, and, as such, may be
regarded as having topical importance in their reflection of and
engagement with what Juergensmeyer calls the “crisis of confidence
in public institutions that is characteristic of post-modern societies in
the post-Cold War world”,1 but also with the covert workings of
power established through consent. In particular, they seek to uncover
the means by which (constructed) world-views may be agents of
repression, and, as such, may be regarded as having wider importance
as part of the (left-wing) school of thought that seeks to unveil the
operations of ideology. These twenty-first century British Fantasy
writers demand, in short, to be read as dissenting, but this is a reading
which raises a number of interesting questions:

1. What exactly does it mean to be ʻdissentingʼ in the Fantasy
genre? How can a Fantasy text avoid dismissal as mere
escapism? Can a Fantasy text, if politically aware, be truly
radical? What, indeed, can ʻradicalʼ mean in the context of this
genre?
2. How can a text in the Fantasy genre engage with the political?
What means do texts in this genre have at their disposal to
effectively engage with political questions? What is in the
ʻFantasy armouryʼ, as it were?

To even begin to answer these questions, a definition of ʻFantasyʼ
literature is required.

1 Mark Jeurgensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious
Violence, Berkeley, 2003, 209
10 Fantasy, Politics, Postmodernity

A good starting point for providing such a definition would appear to
be critical works that carry the word ʻFantasyʼ in their title. Some
fairly recent examples of such works include Rosemary Jacksonʼs
Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981), T.E. Apterʼs Fantasy
Literature: An Approach to Reality (1982), John Clute and John
Grantʼs The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), Richard Mathewsʼ
Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination (2002) and Lucie Armittʼs
Fantasy Fiction: An Introduction (2005). So what is ʻFantasyʼ
according to the experts?
The first point of note is that all of the texts above seem
resoundingly to agree that the ‘popular’ notion of what constitutes a
ʻFantasyʼ text is far too limiting. Armitt could, perhaps, be thought of
as a kind of spokesperson here in her claim that any attempt to
shoehorn a text into a binding yet artificial category is a “travesty” of
compartmentalisation, a “death wish” of division and subdivision.2
All of the critics mentioned above, in fact, in line with Armittʼs
hostility to a limited genre of ʻFantasyʼ, essentially take the view that
any text which has elements that would usually be considered outside
the bounds of ‘normal’ experience, in other words, any text with
fantastic elements, can fall under the category of ʻFantasyʼ. Yet,
beyond this seeming mantra, there is no agreement whatsoever
between these critics, with a wild disparity of definitions on offer.
There is no agreement over whether ʻFantasyʼ is a genre, mode
or stance. There is no agreement over an exact timescale for ʻFantasyʼ
texts. There is no agreement over the texts that can be considered as
being part of the ʻFantasyʼ genre. What there is is a number of vague
pet theories as to what Fantasy is, delivered seemingly from rhetorical
positions that could be unkindly characterised as doing some
shoehorning of their own: According to Jackson, ʻFantasyʼ is ʻthe
literature of subversionʼ, to Apter, it is ʻan approach to realityʼ, to
Clute and Grant it is the ʻclassic fuzzy setʼ, to Mathews it is ʻthe
liberation of the imaginationʼ, while to Armitt, it is ʻthe literature of
the ever-extending horizonʼ.
What is to be done with this paradoxical disavowal of any
possible definition of ʻFantasyʼ and simultaneous didactic assertion of
what ʻFantasyʼ really is? How is a position to be decided upon?

2 Lucie Armitt, Fantasy Fiction: An Introduction (Continuum Studies in Literary
Genre), New York and London, 2005, 195
Fantasy Sight: ‘Real Being’ 11

Three objections can be made with regard to the definitions of
ʻFantasyʼ expounded by the theorists above: Firstly, that their
approach is diachronic; secondly, that their approach is misleading (or
possibly even disingenuous) and, thirdly, that they are (largely)
scornful of the popular notion of ʻFantasyʼ. Let me deal with each in
turn.
Possibly the greatest problem is that all of the above theorists
take a diachronic approach. This results in the huge variety of texts
that are described as being within the ʻFantasyʼ genre in their work.
Jackson, indeed, devotes time to such diverse works as The One
Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom and Jane Eyre, Apter ranges from
The Scarlett Letter to Lolita, Clute and Grant cover just about every
text ever written in English that is not specifically Realist, from
Hamlet to It, Mathews finds space for a chronology of ʻFantasyʼ that
includes Mary Poppins and The Satanic Verses and Armitt occupies
herself with Animal Farm and The Time Machine. Jackson perhaps
sums up a view that would be shared by all five when she claims, “It
seems appropriate that such a protean form has so successfully
resisted generic classification”.3
However, such an indiscriminate view of what comprises
ʻFantasyʼ literature cannot be accepted on the grounds that any
categorisation whose extension is so great, to paraphrase Tzvetan
Todorov,4 is essentially an anti-categorisation, a rejection of a usable
and meaningful notion of genre. And nor can such trite and virtually
meaningless notions as ʻFantasy as the literature of subversionʼ
(Jackson), ʻFantasy as the liberation of the imaginationʼ (Mathews) or
ʻFantasy as the literature of the ever-extending horizonʼ (Armitt) be
accepted: They are simply too vague to be useful and give rise to some
of the absurd collations mentioned above, which could unkindly be
described as seeming category errors.
The second objection is that, in all of the above five theoretical
texts, there is, first of all, analysis of texts that would most definitely
not be considered ʻFantasyʼ by the popular reader and, moreover, in
some cases, active rejection of texts that would sit absolutely squarely
in the popular definition of ʻFantasyʼ literature. Hence, as seen above,
The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom (Jackson), The Scarlet

3 Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, London and New York,
1981, 13
4 See Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
(Cornell Paperbacks) (trs Richard Howard and Robert Scoles), New York, 1973, 34