THE APPROPRIATION HUSTLE PT. 3

I have not used the above essay-title since I completed a couple of posts on the subject of appropriation in 2017, but since my views on the subject have not changed, the title seems fully applicable here, to extend my remarks on the topic as they appear in Brian Attebery's 2013 book STORIES ABOUT STORIES.

In the last section of my Attebery review, I quoted the author's opinion of a particular White Australian author's "appropriation" of Aboriginal stories for her fantasy-novel.

As with similar endeavors in Canada, the United States, and other colonial locales, a goal of the [colonial] project... was to get rid of indigenous peoples through a combination of assimilation and genocide while APPROPRIATING [my emphasis] their songs, stories and rituals.

I won't repeat my refutation of this dubious logic, though I'll add the point that Attebery managed to conflate all those colonial persons urging for "assimilation" of marginal peoples with those who were supposed "appropriating" the sacred narratives of those people. In point of fact, the powers urging assimilation would have been totally focused on erasing all cultural differences. But when a researcher with an interest in Native American culture like Henry Schoolcraft devotes six volumes to preserving Native American culture-- research that, in turn, provided much of the content of Longfellow's HIAWATHA-- one could hardly call that erasure. It's also possible to fairly critique the characterizations Schoolcraft or Longfellow made of Native American culture without assuming some dire plot to heap opprobrium on Indians, and without assuming that the respective authors made tons of money by adapting their stories. (Longfellow did; Schoolcrafr probably did not.)

On a separate matter: Attebery was very vocal against the idea that only authors aligned with "living traditions" like that of Aboriginal worship could be deemed worthy to weave fantastic fiction out of those sacred narratives. He said nothing about other Aboriginals would approve of what the hypothetical Aboriginal author did with their sacred narratives, though Attebery dismissed the complaints of Christians who didn't always like what authors like C.S. Lewis wrought in his fictions about the "living tradition" of Christianity. Somehow I doubt Attebery would be quite so sanguine if traditional Aboriginals were upset with their religion's depiction, even by one of their own-- or even one who was ethnically related to that subgroup, but not "living the life." 

A specific example of some real-world condemnation can be found in the public criticism of fantasy-author Rebecca Roanhorse. Of her six published books, I've read both entries in the "Sixth World" series, which take place in a future where an apocalypse has more or less returned certain parts of the U.S. to their pre-Columbian status. So, given that it's a author with partial Native American ethnicity writing about Native American culture, it all must be good, right?

Not quite. According to Roanhorse, she's half-Black and half-Pueblo Indian, but her "Sixth World" fantasy is based upon Navajo religion. After Roanhorse became well-known, certain Navajo pundits claimed that a non-Navajo, even one who had lived for some years on the Arizona reservation known as "Navajo Nation," had no right to utilize Navajo narratives for fiction irrespective of formal literary quality. From Wikipedia:

Dr. Matthew Martinez, former Lieutenant Governor of Ohkay Owingeh,^[8][9] welcomed Roanhorse on her first and only visit to the community, in 2018, and spent time with her. He said, "I recognize that adoption is an emotional experience for families and communities and especially those who have been adopted out with no real connection to home....At Ohkay Owingeh, our current enrollment process privileges family lineage and not blood quantum." Agoyo explained that "anyone who descends from an Ohkay family - as Roanhorse has publicly claimed - can become a citizen. But Martinez said the author has chosen a different path."^[1] Martinez continued, "by not engaging in any form of cultural and community acknowledgement, Roanhorse has failed to establish any legitimate claim to call herself Ohkay Owingeh." He eventually concluded, "It is unethical for Roanhorse to be claiming Ohkay Owingeh and using this identity to publish Native stories."^[1]

 

 

Serendipitously, a similar example of small-minded exclusionary attitudes was brought to my attention by this CRIVENS post. It seems that a 2024 facsimile of the renowned GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #1 came out with an advisory warning reading, in part, that the story contained "negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures." But GSXM is not some 1940s cartoon making jokes about African cannibals or the like. The advisory also claims that its purpose is "spark conversation to create a more inclusive future." But how can there be a conversation, when the authors of the advisory don't even say what was wrong with "Second Genesis?" Did the story fail to depict non-White characters like Sunfire and Thunderbird as even-tempered? Or did some Marvel drone get the whim-whams from the scene in which a group of tribal Africans are shown worshiping mutant heroine Storm as a goddess, because neither they nor she know better?

Those are both possibilities. However, I'm of the opinion that the real issue was probably that all of the creative people involved were dominantly Caucasian in ethnicity. Yet the idea of having a concept like X-MEN being written so as to satisfy all ethnicities is absurd. Navajo pundits may be content to have no fiction-author base a story upon their sacred tales unless it's someone who truly came, ethnically and culturally, from the Navajo community. But how could any single writer or artist satisfy the demands of writing for all the ethnicities in this or any X-MEN story? Storm is ethnically though not culturally Black American, so I guess Rebecca Roanhorse could write her. But she couldn't write Thunderbird (even had he survived), because he's Apache. Nor could she write any hero from any other culture. And the same would apply to any other author. (And yes, I know that there are no "sacred narratives" in X-MEN, but obviously the whole "appropriation argument" extends far beyond the specific "religious fantasy" context it assumed in Attebery's screed.)

While I will admit that some pro-appropriation individuals may be motivated to preserve the integrity of their cultures, I stand by my imputation that an awful lot of talk about "appropriation" is what I called it in the title, a hustle designed to make sure some people get jobs and others don't. What did Ryan Coogler, a Black American from Oakland, know about real African cultures before he helmed a motion picture based on a made-up African nation? Wasn't he as dependent as a White writer-director would be, upon what expert researchers advised him? Even though he's credited with scripting, I feel sure that he depended on outside research as much as Longfellow depended on Schoolcraft. 

I have seen some online essays claiming that some of the worst political correctness is losing its hold on American culture. That doesn't mean an absolute return to the days when almost all comics-creators shared the ethnicity of European Jews and/or Gentiles. But it could mean a return to the idea that the quality of the work is more important than the identity of the work's creator.

PICKING ATTEBERRIES PT. 4

 For reasons I'll enlarge upon shortly, I was able to finish STORIES WITHIN STORIES, including the chapter I skipped earlier. The reason is simple: the latter chapters of the book concentrated on explicating several modern fantasies I hadn't read, and since I'd already got the overall sense of Attebery's project, I could give them all no more than a cursory once-over.

Even though I broke this review into sections for ease of posting comments, that procedure has one distinct advantage over the usual summary approach: it allows me to anticipate some of the directions in which the argument seems to be trending. In Part 3, even though I'd not seen Attebery use the word "appropriation" in the sense popularized by Roland Barthes, I recognized that this was essentially the argument Attebery was promulgating. Before that chapter, the author had mentioned the word "appropriation" once in the introduction, but in a fairly neutral manner, which MIGHT have been merely discussing the overall political climate for fantasy fiction (or, for that matter, any fiction).

So I feel some vindication when I reach Chapter 5, with the forbidding title, "Colonial Fantasy." and find Attebery discussing Australian author Patricia Wrightson. Attebery gets fairly exercised at Wrightson's hubris, as a White Australian, for having utilized Aboriginal religious concepts in her fantasy novels, and the "A" word is not far from Attebery's lips:

As with similar endeavors in Canada, the United States, and other colonial locales, a goal of the [colonial] project... was to get rid of indigenous peoples through a combination of assimilation and genocide while APPROPRIATING [my emphasis] their songs, stories and rituals.

Any comparison between (a) a fantasy-author invoking religious concepts not strictly part of the author's heritage to (b) a general process of colonial officials enforcing "assimilation and genocide" on real people is, quite clearly, a thoroughly reprehensible equation. But, for what it's worth, in the same chapter Atteberry claims (despite his earlier negative remarks on an Alan Garner book) that he has no problem with fantasists using "myths of vanished civilizations." Though earlier he criticized Campbell's monomythic interpretation of such myths, here he claims that such myth-tales "no longer belong to anyone but are legitimately part of a cultural commons." But the stories of "living traditions," like those of the Aboriginal native, are different. "They are still surrounded by rituals and obligations; they demand that the listener live by their rules."

But do they, really? When an Aboriginal native orally relates the myth-stories of his people to a group of Australian tourists, certainly the tourists are expected to listen seriously and not critique the stories. But if a modern Aboriginal fiction-writer did what Patricia Wrightson did-- creating a entirely fictional story in which the myths of his people were (presumably) depicted with the same fidelity as the oral storyteller-- what "authority," to use Atteberry's favorite word, does a purely fictional story have over listeners not of the Aborigine's tradition? 

Attebery's mistake is ironic, given that elsewhere he expressly distinguished between traditional myth-narratives and fictional stories based upon them. For instance, in Chapter 1 he states uncategorically that the most famous works of Ovid and Apuleius "function as fantasy to the degree that they are not authorized or reverent retellings of myth... they play with the material, inventing details, rearranging incidents, and inviting a response of amusement rather than awe." 

Tangentially, Attebery never mentions the financial motives for "in-tradition" authors to nullify "extra-traditional" competitors. But the motive remains present, nonetheless. I gave a real-world example of such motives in this 2017 post.

A fuller discussion of the chimera of "appropriation" must await a separate article. Therefore I'll wrap up this part of the review by stating that i the latter sections of the book Atteberry very much thumps the tub for numerous new authors of fantasy who meet his political criteria, while granting older authors either negative assessments (Zelazny, Lewis) or cursory attention (A. Merritt, Robert E. Howard). And there's nothing wrong with this priority in itself. Attebery should absolutely champion the books he likes best. But his politicized justifications for his tastes are up for counter-critique.

I said "this part of the review" because at the end of Part 3 I said that I would speak to another of Atteberry's mistakes regarding "the differing dynamics of oral culture vs. written culture." 

Though Attebery is undoubtedly aware of the tremendous difference between the two cultures, he doesn't make much of the matter. In Chapter 4 he states that "oral traditional stories are always formulaic," though he does a bit of a take-back by claiming that traditional tale-tellers can still choose "the lesser known among alternative formulaic elements." This breeds a somewhat tortured comparison to the interaction in modern stories' "formulaic elements" and "nonformulaic components." But whenever he praises deeper psychological insights in modern fantasists, as against the usually flat characterizations seen in traditional tales, Attebery plows over the question of differing venues. In dominantly oral cultures, a traditional storyteller has no motive for memorizing deep psychological insights for Sleeping Beauty or Rumpelstiltskin; they're just baggage that slows down an orally relayed story. Such fine details are only valuable to literate cultures, who inculcate the habit of reading their stories in static media, where detail can be accurately preserved.

Similarly, at the end of Chapter 2, he gives approbation to the just-discussed works of Hope Mirrlees and Charles Williams because each creates a viewpoint character who "brings to the world of myth and magic a contemporary sensibility and skepticism." This is part and parcel of Attebery's attempt to bestow upon 20th-century fantasy some of the gravitas of Modernist literature. But I definitely do not think that the fantasy genre is typified by authors' emphases of "contemporary sensibility and skepticism," even when those attitudes are rejected. Again, Attebery is entitled to prefer fantasies that signal questions of Modernist skepticism. But his analysis fails any strong test of logic.

PICKING ATTEBERRIES PT. 3

 Since I'm not sure I'll finish STORIES ABOUT STORIES, I skipped Chapter 3 and read Chapter 4, at least in part because it concerns Attebery's antagonistic relationship to Joseph Campbell.

But before getting to anything about Campbell, it occurred to me to relate Attebery's definition of myth as "any collective story that encapsulates a worldview and authorizes belief" to one of the first "mythographers" I evaluated on this blog, Eric Gould. In the work referenced here, Gould coined a term I've often used, "mythicity," but he did not share Attebery's broad valorization of any mythic tale simply because it "authorized belief."

The fact that classical and totemistic myths have to refer to some translinguistic fact-- to the Gods and Nature-- proves not that there are Gods, but that our talents for interpreting our place in the world may be distinctly limited by the nature of language.

In my own essay I registered my disagreement with Gould on that point. Nevertheless, Attebery seems to have vaulted over the epistemological question, "what authority does religious 'belief' possess, even if it expresses the collective worldview of a given tribe, nation, or ethnicity?" I would be the last to validate the Doubting Thomas  fallacy of the materialists, "If you can't dissect the risen body of Christ, that means no such body ever existed." But I think belief can be epistemologically valid insofar as its narratives reproduce epistemological patterns that are, in a sense, common to all human experience, not just to particular human groupings. For me at least, that transcendence of particular cultures trumps the "limits of language" that Eric Gould finds so disconcerting.

At base, I believe that Joseph Campbell shared this belief in such patterns, though he was, as I've said elsewhere, rather scattershot in his hermeneutics during his unquestionably distinguished career. But since Campbell and some of his fellow travelers are not validating myth based only upon whether the myth-narratives "authorize" a particular group's "belief," it's not surprising to me that Atteberry implicitly dismisses many comparativists that came into prominence in the 1960s, lumping together "Claude Levi-Strauss, Joseph Campbell, Northrop Frye, and Mircea Eliade" as proponents of "myth criticism." Attebery is initially a bit circumspect about pinning down what he doesn't like about myth criticism, though immediately after these citations he brackets the myth-critics as sharing "the assumption that all myths are psychically available to modern writers and readers." Attebery does not at first raise the Barthesian specter of "appropriation," the idea that it's wrong to pilfer cultural artifacts from cultures not one's own. The author's initial reticence may come about because he segues from talking about the cultural influence of the myth-critics (presumably in America and Western Europe, though Attebery doesn't specify) to discussing the concomitant rise of the mass-market proliferation of the fantasy genre in the same decade and thereafter. But when he turns his attention to Campbell's HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, it's clear the author has that devil Appropriation on his mind.

The problem with Campbell's monomyth as an analytical tool  is that it always works because it simplifies every story to the point where nothing but the monomyth is left. It ignores the many mythic stories that do not have questing heroes, and it leaves out the culturally defined values and symbols that make each tradition unique.

I disagree with only one part of this statement. As I may have said elsewhere on this blog, I have not read HERO in several years, and have not ever reviewed it, but I think it the least epistemologically valid of his works. If I had my way, Campbell would be much better known for his "four functions." But I must admit that Campbell's concept of an over-arching "super-myth," while fallible in many ways, had the effect of getting a lot of people to check out that particular book, including (allegedly) George Lucas. 

Yet Attebery makes the opposite mistake. When he bestows upon traditional myths a uniqueness that sets those stories apart from other cognate stories, he makes the same mistake Barthes did in MYTHOLOGIES. Long before there existed either "capitalist" or "post-industrial" cultures, so-called "traditional cultures" constantly swapped or stole story-ideas from each other. Did Norse Odin precede Germanic Wotan? No one knows, and no one should care. The same principle should apply to the intermingling of elements from disparate cultures in order to craft modern magical fantasies. We would not have a LORD OF THE RINGS if Tolkien had not synthesized many myth-traditions, not least the very disparate traditions of Celtic tales and medieval Christian religion. Alan Garner's WEIRDSTONE OF BRISINGAMEN is nowhere near the greatness of RINGS. But Garner's synthesis was a good one, and does not deserve to be downgraded because (according to Attebery) he "mixed mythologies indiscriminately," with "Nordic dwarves, Celtic elves, a Tolkienian evil force named Nastrond, and a Merlinesque wizard who guards a cave of sleeping warriors like those of the Germanic Frederick Barbarosa." It's odd that Attebery should invoke a 12th century German ruler in concert with a "Merlinesque wizard," rather than referencing the "sleeping warrior" myths about King Arthur, who's more frequently associated with Merlin.

In the end, the argument comes down not to logic but taste. Attebery clearly prefers modern fantasy authors to pick some corpus of culturally related myth-stories and to build from that corpus. But as I said, Tolkien himself did not do this, and as yet I have not seen the author critiquing the Oxford don on the same terms he uses toward both Campbell and Alan Garner. I too can think of many bad admixtures of disparate traditional stories, but that does not prove that "mix and match" is a bad strategy in itself. I also think Atteberry wants authors to stick to particular mythoi so that he can judge better if the creators do what he thinks most valuable: ringing in modern interpretive changes to traditional lore. 

If I make it through another chapter, I plan to address one of the major omissions in Attebery's schema: the differing dynamics of oral culture vs. written culture.

PICKING ATTEBERRIES PT. 2

Upon finishing the second chapter, I'm not sure how much further I'll delve into Brian Attebery's STORIES ABOUT STORIES.I thought his 1980 book on American fantasy provided a good overview of the genre. But here, the critic seems to be a little too focused on trying to bring the fantasy-genre into the sphere of literary modernism. He can make a statement like, "the principal difference between the Modernists' mythic method and that of fantasy is that the latter constructs apparently seamless narratives that put the mythic on the same diegetic plane as the modern, or at least modern sensibility." And yet, Attebery keeps coming back to the notion that the two are more strongly related by their mutual desire to re-interpret archaic myths for the purpose of modern audiences.

Certainly Attebery did a lot of homework to support his thesis. Long ago, I read the Ballantine edition of Hope Mirrlees' 1926 fantasy novel LUD-IN-THE-MIST, and retained a more or less favorable impression. But I never researched Mirrlees herself, and Attebery informed me that not only did the author run in the same circles as the esteemed literary author Virginia Woolf, both of them had a "mutual mentor, the Cambridge don and classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison." I certainly find that datum of passing interest, given Harrison's key influence upon the mythic analyses of the Cambridge Ritualists-- though my online research did not confirm Attebery's claim that Harrison was Mirrlees' "life companion." But despite the author's intelligent discussion of Mirlees' sole fantasy novel, Attebery almost seems determined to name-drop figures from respectable literature and scholarship in order to build up the repute of the fantasy genre, which was in Mirrlees' day far more socially marginal than works by people like Woolf and Harrison. 

A more key point of departure for me is Attebery's definition of myth. I certainly did not expect anything comparable to my own, or even to that of my key influence Joseph Campbell (though Campbell is given various citations throughout STORIES). But on the book's second page, Attebery provides his definition: "throughout this book, myth is used to designate any collective story that encapsulates a worldview and authorizes belief." And throughout the three sections I've read, Attebery's definition is meant to draw a line between myth, stories upon which archaic cultures center belief, and fantasy, whose virtue is, as the book's subtitle says, that of "the remaking of myth."

To maintain this distinction, Attebery frequently writes as if the archaic myths were changeless, while literary fantasies are all about ringing in changes on that changelessness. I feel sure a critic as learned as Attebery is aware that myths do change over time, even though the religions built around them may insist that the sacred narratives remain immutable over generations. 

Joseph Campbell's work supplied several examples of such cultural shifts, but I'll confine myself to one. In the chapter "Ancient India" in ORIENTAL MYTHOLOGY, Campbell describes the religion of the so-called "Aryan" tribes that invaded the Indian subcontinent circa 1500 B.C., which extolled the warrior-god Indra, celebrated for having killed the demonic dragon Vrita. However, a millennium later, the epic Mahabharata introduces the idea that Vrita was a Brahmin, and that Indra's slaying was therefore a crime, no matter Vrita's actions. Campbell interprets this change in the mythic narrative surrounding Indra as a shift in India's cultural matrix, as the former Aryan overlords were assimilated, via intermarriage, by the older tribes then denoted as "Dravidian," a congeries of peoples with very different priorities.

So for me the essence of myth is not the assertion of unchanging narratives, even though religions may claim that the narratives don't change in order to persuade the laity. In Chapter 1, Attebery asserts that we don't know to what extent Roman authors like Ovid and Apuleius really believed in the myths they depicted. But by the same token, we don't really know that the first Native American to tell a story of the trickster-god Coyote was a True Believer. Maybe he'd heard another tribal storyteller tell a myth-story about Raven, and he decided to tell a different story about Coyote for his own tribe. All sorts of motives can go into the making of all sorts of stories. The most one can say is that, as long as a given religious myth endures, someone may hold belief in its literal truth. But is that really fundamentally different from the enduring appeal of literary myths? Their adherents may never believe that the stories were true accounts of the gods, but they often give just as much devotion to all the fine points of those stories, parsing out just as many meanings as the practitioners of religious hermeneutics. And as distinctions between belief and unbelief grow hazy, we find ourselves back looking into Tolkien's "cauldron of story" for our answers, if not also to Jung's collective unconscious. And, to reiterate the conclusion I made in MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 3, the base motive to myths both religious and literary may be to propel the listener into the realms of sacred space and sacred time.

PICKING ATTEBERRIES

 My MIND OUT OF TIME series--  not precisely finished, just paused-- encouraged me to revisit some of the other books I'd reviewed here for theories of the process of imagining fantasy-narratives. My review of this 1980 Brian Attebery book shows that I didn't find in Attebery anything that made him one of my best-regarded critics. And yet, I enjoyed the 1980 book despite my disagreements. So when I noted that Attebery had several other reputable books on the fantasy-topic, I decided to check out one from 2013, STORIES ABOUT STORIES: FANTASY AND THE REMAKING OF MYTH. Given my own preoccupations, the subtitle was more than a little intriguing.

I don't know if I will devote many posts to STORIES. Today I finished the introduction and first chapter, and I was surprised that Attebery, in contrast to the 1980 book, talks a bit about his doing field studies in folklore studies. He mentions the matter only to distinguish between the experience of myth as a living practice, as sacred stories handed down through generations to embody the storyteller's culture, and the experience of myth as documented stories written down by folklorists, anthropologists or even modern literary authors.

I certainly agree with his statement distinguishing fantasy-based stories and those centered in an apparent "reality." He calls the former "metaphorical" in nature-- that is, substituting for descriptions of real experience with the depiction of the "unreal." In contrast, the latter type Attebery calls "metonymic," in that such stories create representations of persona and events that could have existed, but did not exist, in actual reality. And I've certainly made statements on this blog similar to Attebery's conclusion, "By renouncing claims to report directly on reality, fantasy requires the potential (not always realized) to generate powerful symbols."

I would say that this overstates the case somewhat, though. Though fantastic content may encourage an author's use of symbolism, certainly since the rise of isophenomenal literature, there have been any number of strongly-symbolic artworks. TITUS ANDRONICUS, generally regarded as Shakespeare's first tragedy, has nothing of "fantasy" about it, even including my category of "the uncanny" (and I will be interested to see if Attebery cites anything I would consider "non-marvelous fantasy.") But this Wiki article points out that the cycle of violence that dominates Titus's Rome could symbolize the degradation of every exalted Golden Age into profane Ages of Iron. And I feel certain that one could find any number of other symbolic analyses of TITUS online, despite its lack of overt fantasy. 

Similarly, most (though not all) fantasies require grounding in the rudiments of real life, and the fantasy-comedy of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM is certainly enhanced by Shakespeare's ability to capture the sense of how stage-performers fret and bicker backstage about who gets to play what role.

So far, I haven't found anything in STORIES that strikes me as dubious, though the intro makes a mention of "postcolonial fantasies"-- and that's NEVER a good sign.

INDUCTION JUNCTION

In DEDUCE I SAY I stressed the necessity for expanding the bounds of theoretical criticism by stepping away from the quasi-scientific inductive method, in which the critic usually has in mind some fixed notion of “the good” and then simply surveys an assortment of works that exemplify “the good” by either positive or negative example.

As with any endeavor, inductive critical works can be done well or poorly. In my short review of T.E. Apter’s FANTASY LITERATURE, I found that Apter’s criteria for her “good” in fantasy-works was too amorphous to prove useful to me, as well as being too weighted toward works of canonical literature. I’ve commented in more positive terms on Richard Wright’s COMIC BOOK NATION. I didn’t agree with Wright’s essential message: that comic books are only “good” insofar as they expoused liberal social messages for the edification of the reading public, which caused him to largely dismiss the Superman comics produced under the editorship of Mort Weisinger. But Wright’s criteria were cogent and his research solid, and so NATION is one of the best inductive studies of comic books, far superior to Harvey Kurtzman’s disappointing comics-history FROM ARRGH TO ZAP!

Somewhere between the middling example of Apter and the superior example of Wright stands Brian Attebury’s THE FANTASY TRADITION IN AMERICAN LITERATURE (1980). In contrast to Apter, Attebury’s writing-style is breezy and non-academic. I was fairly certain that I’d read the work before years ago, probably in the decade for which it was written, and indeed, several passages were still pleasantly familiar to me. And naturally, I appreciated that Attebury, unlike Apter and Tzvetan Todorov, dealt with all manner of fantasies by all manner of authors, ranging from a canonical figure like Hawthorne to more popularly oriented American fantasists like L. Frank Baum and Edgar Rice Burroughs. As an inductive study about how the idiom of fantasy evolved in America, Attebury’s study is invaluable.

However, though his criteria for “the good” in fantasy-literature is better formulated than T.E. Apter’s, Attebury’s criteria is a bit too limiting and could stand some deductive theoretical input. In his first chapter he cites his criteria for fantasy, as against genres that may use similar materials, thusly:

“Narrative poetry often approaches the fantastic, but narrative verse seems to have been all but phased out by less restricted lyric forms. Surreal fiction has the same freedom: it can flash a succession of words before the reader or suddenly drop all pretense and begin speaking discursively. Fantasy, though, needs consistency. Reader and writer are committed to maintaining the illusion for the entire course of the fiction. Tolkien refers to this commitment as “secondary belief;” E.M. Forster speaks of the reader of fantasy as being asked to ‘pay something extra,’ to accept not only the conventions of fiction but also implausibility within those conventions. Fantasy is a game of sorts, and it demands that one play whole-heartedly; accepting for the moment all rules and turns of the game. The reward for this extra payment is an occasional sense of unexpected beauty and strangeness, a quality which C.N. Manlove, among others, calls ‘wonder.’”—Attebury, TRADITION, p. 2.


As should be clear from my RULES OF ESTRANGEMENT series, I agree that it is important to immerse oneself in the rules of a fictional game, since I didn’t agree with a Grant Morrison statement that suggested that one could throw a narrative’s rules away on the slightest pretext. (Fortunately, most of Morrison’s actual comics don’t do this.) However, it’s a mistake for a reader to pay attention only to rules—to what I’ve called the “discursive” mode (a word Attebury uses for a different purpose above). What Suzanne Langer calls “presentational symbolism” is the chief means by which we experience “beauty and strangeness,” not through the rules about whether or not magic is possible in this or that world.

Attebury’s study might have benefited from some deductive emphasis like that of Suzanne Langer, for Attebury’s over-stressing of fantasyworld-rules causes him to devalue Peter Beagle’s masterful THE LAST UNICORN. Attebury, somewhat following in the footsteps of some of Ursula LeGuin’s polemic, carps at UNICORN—by my lights one of the hallmarks of “beauty and strangeness” in all American fantasy—because he says Beagle indulges in “anachronisms at the expense of the story” (p. 159). Yet one page before claiming that Beagle does not gather his fantastic phantasms “into a satisfying whole,” he comments favorably upon SF-fantasist Andre Nortion. He admits that she is not a great writer, with which I concur, but says, following the Forster dictum, that “her lack of irony and displacement often pays for itself in commitment to the story being told.” I’ve enjoyed assorted Norton books, and I can agree generally with Attebury that there’s a critical mindset that too often validates irony over all other elements of storytelling. Yet all the Norton books I’ve enjoyed don’t hold a candle to Beagle’s UNICORN, where it’s clear to me that irony is only one voice within many.

On a side-note, I enjoyed re-encountering the aforesaid Forster notion of “paying something extra.” Twice in recent essays—-both in response to online essays by one online critic in particular-—I’ve been surprised to see comics-fans speak as if their lack of response to visceral stimulations in the comics-medium—in one case to scenes of horror, in the other, to scenarios of violence-- had something to do with the limitations/execution of the medium. Relating to such visceral stimulations has never been a problem for me, and so I wonder if those who find it a problem have worked themselves out of the ability to “pay something extra” in terms of total investment in a given type of narrative. Food for future essays, perhaps.