fantasy: building the new canon
by uzwi
Barbaric Document has YouTube of Polly Harvey’s Who Will Love Me Now ?, a mix of raw yearning, total self-awareness & Angela Carter-like manipulation of folk imagery which should have gone straight on to the fantasy list.
Apropos of that list–
One or two people have emailed me to point out that it is eccentric. Many of the recommendations on it are “not true fantasy” (ie, they weren’t written in the US after 1970). Some “aren’t fantasy at all”. Some aren’t even books. While several have done well, others are barely known.
I’m sorry you feel like that. Actually, I’ve begun to feel that it wasn’t eccentric enough. By concentrating on items made specifically to be art or entertainment objects, it missed an opportunity. So here’s a modest proposal.
The car industry offers fantasies of success, escape &, especially, competence (ninety percent of drivers rate themselves in the top ten percent of driving ability). The cosmetic & fashion industries offer the fantasy of perfectibility. The sports industry sells a fantasy of activity to people who rarely leave their cars or their sofas unless it’s to go to bed. From the iconography of Nationalism to the publicly managed death of a Reality TV star, cultural psychodramas have always been fantasies–some orchestrated, some spontaneous, most a mixture of both. All these elements are interlocked. You don’t have to be a theorist to recognise that. You only have to have lived in the 20th & 21st Centuries.
The world is constructed. It is imaginary from the off. Inside that imagined space, we act out off-the-rack fictions. Take a bus, sign a form, buy a product, catch up on your friends, catch up on the latest panic: each time we move we model the visions of politicians, journalists, lobbyists, standards agencies, architects, fashion houses, hypermarket shelf-planners. Each satisfactory performance brings fantasy rewards. Life flatpacks into a mobile phone. A bottle of shampoo contains a brief orgasm.
So my list is deficient in that it doesn’t include some of the truly great fantasies. Coca Cola’s appropriation and redesign of “Father Christmas” in 1931. Bernie Eccleston’s “Formula One” (see fantasies of competence, above). L’Oreal’s brilliant narcissistic fantasy, “You’re worth it!”, in which the full experience of the flattered self is stuffed into an astonishingly small word-count. (It would take the best–ie, highest-earning–fantasy writer in the world, JK Rowling herself, a minimum of 200,000 words to shift a fraction of the product to a fraction of the customers reached by that short phrase.)
These texts are more successful than fantasy novels. Their penetration of the global market is deeper. Yet we don’t find them, or the people who wrote them, on any list of great fantasies. They don’t win awards. The literary snobbery of the fantasy publishing industry excludes them. Compared to brand campaigns, political slogans & media psychodramas, fantasy novels speak to a minority. They are the indulgence of an elite, maintained in the face of the tastes of ordinary people, who don’t read but who just want to find some direct connection to their dreams–through a household purchase, an opportunity to vote, a day at a theme park–which allows them a moment of escape from the dreariness of daily existence. Is that wrong ? Was The Life & Death of Jade Goody any less of a fulfilling fantasy experience than The Lord of the Rings ? Only an elitist would say so.
Lewis Hamilton would be my pick for the World Fantasy Award this year. A well crafted YA fiction, it’s packed full of thrills & spills: the story of how one talented boy’s aspirational dream turns into a nightmare and then back into a dream and then back into a nightmare again and then back into a dream again and then… It lacks the feelgood appeal of Obama! But I think, in the end, it’s more original. After all, Hamilton didn’t steal his shoutline from Bob the Builder, a UK TV series for very young children.
the m john harrison blog 
I wonder, do Ponzi schemes come under this category? The Russian MMM scam was the first thing I thought of when reading this. The gigantic ad campaign included a kind of soap opera following the ups and downs (mostly ups) of a ‘typical’ investor in the scheme. I suppose the Madoff scandal makes it all look like small beans now, but it ties in nicely to the volatile nature of reality in the last days of the Soviet Union. Victor Pelevin has mined all this extremely well – I’d urge people to read A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia if I could only get the hang of describing it.
How about the fantasy that the genre of “realism” is closer to the world and further from the dream than the genre of “fantasy”.
Or the fantasy peddled by Simon Cowell that when we laugh at the freaks on Britain’s Got Talent we’re not doing it out of fear.
To be fair to Tolkien, he also from recollection spoke of a great Escape, there being nothing wrong in his view with escapism since we were indeed in the clutches of the mundane, and escapism called to something in our natures that was truer that the lies and delusions of this world; C.S. Lewis also spoke of what the imagination was, only he appeared to use it to make the ordinary and the necessary simply more palatable. I have always seen these two faculties, fantasy and imagination, as opposites, not comrades in arms.
Drfidelious, I think Ponzi schemes are one of the purest styles of this genre. One of the founding styles.
Vegclothing & Orfanum, how well you know me… But here I was trying to fry some other fish. I think the key to this admittedly complex bit of positioning lies in the phrase “a modest proposal”.
This reminds me strongly of my education growing up in the USA, where the history of my country was sanitized as if it were a Grimm’s Fairy Tale being told to a slow nervous child with all the brutalities and savage misdeeds edited out, leaving a bland and intentionally boring fantasy that said: Look only to the future young man, there is nothing to be learned from the past.
“Look only to the future young man, there is nothing to be learned from the past.”
Except that war, rape, and slaughter are OK and even heroic as long as they’re taking place against someone you don’t like (such as the ‘racist’ South for example), and that anyway, history began in the 1960s.
But personally I read the blog entry as a sarcastic response to fans of generic fantasy with some complex overtones. I personally think the problem isn’t fantasy itself but bad fantasy. On the other hand, cattle is cattle is cattle…
I’m surprised that in the midst of some excellent points about the commercialization of certain escapist/fantasy themes, you left out the biggest one of them all: the reduction of certain religious beliefs to catchphrase marketing terms such as the laying-of-hands minister striking the sick’s foreheads with his/her palm heels and saying “Be healed!” or the confessionals followed by “You’re now forgiven.” Very powerful stuff, that, especially when wielded by those televangelists who have stripped religious faith of virtually all its complexities, leaving only a marketed faith™© that convinces so many to put their fantasies of redemption and self-justification in the hands of a trained marketeer. After all, isn’t that what lies at the heart of so many of those self-help/improvement books?
fundamentally agree – just didn’t want to go on for too long. Yes, the point for me is following on I think from what you are saying is – what distinguishes ‘good’ fantasy from ‘bad’ fantasy, or whether we should admit there can be no judgements here, and learn to live with the complexities of exerting the fantastical imagination (to conflate my own dichotomy) on the prefabricated illusoriness that we are born into. Why do we find, if we are in favour of fantasy, that we find the Samsara of the world distasteful, that we want to mock it and disrupt it with our own constructions? Are some fantasies more equal than others? You seem to indicate not, therefore the ringfenced literary elite should start to allow the awarding of trophies to those who, we mortals unsuspecting, were actually speaking in fantasy, so that they can be uncloaked for the deceivers they are.
But if all is deception, the world and our own minds, Samsara and koan, nonsense alike, what’s the compass, what’s the territory, what is being traversed? Would science be undermined if we considered deeply that both sherbert and polystyrene are just effervescences? I doubt it, since we look at the quality and purpose of their different effects.
So, is that we’d want to create different effects from the ones that cradle us, deriding them? Is our play just a means of pointing to the play-acting of others?
To borrow from one of Silverberg’s novellas, I reckon at least with fantastical literature as such there’s the intent to create a ‘sufficient reality’, that although a simulacrum has interior, solipsistic and authentic, self-redeeming power; the rest of the world is a black magic operative fiction, false and treacherous, no matter how much it is presented organic and natural.
There is still an air of elitism around this, just not of a traditional type, not formed by the ordinary rules, a different community of irregular letters.
PS – as an ordinary person (mother and father once factory workers both), I would hate to think that I’d been left to roam a sheep because someone else thought shepherding a bit too high-falutin’ a notion. Enlightenment might lead you to understand you always had been aware but you kind of have to go through that process first – if you were born with a plastic spoon in your mouth, wanting silver might at least bring with it connotations of werewolf slaying as well as those of unwarranted social position…
Great post Mike. I’m liking the Swift reference. I think what interests me is what one might consider constitutes writing in or for this helpfully expanded sphere. I mean hard (but not remotely pleasant) to imagine the salivation of Max Clifford when he realises that Jade is actually DYING of CANCER and that he has THAT to work with; make shape, ‘sense’ and capital of. And clear that Clifford, Cowell et al – wranglers of humans trapped in an odd mix of banality, either none or some questionable talent and always tragedy, sculptors of life-in-and-through-media – are proponents of an art form that involves the capitalisation of human experience and emotion as they are lived, farming raw material out into the media space in structures that it can understand, playing it, tweaking it, watching it roll out and watching the cash roll back in. This process is not new as such – it is myth making as u say – but the much talked about shift from the older narratives in which people with a certain (if anyhow debatable) talent or skill or extraordinary/unique experience are revealed as merely human (movie stars or astronauts for example) to the newer narratives in which the players are already ordinary [sic] and the central drama is just watching them getting stuffed into the machinery of fame like so many salon-tanned birds into a jet engine (Jade and every other contestant in every other reality show) is a marked one. Strange sense of all these humans as collaborative works – a set of formerly real lives sphered around with press and PR people, agents and advisors and stylists, mixed and remixed by a constant set of attempts to anticipate, spin and shape the direction of the coverage (time for your sex tape now Mr Harrison, then some ‘leaks’, ‘paparazzi shots’, ‘intimate’ ‘confessions’ and ‘exclusive’ ‘interviews’) nonetheless arrayed around an actual human being with actual desires, fuckups, potentialities, whims and always taking place in the unpredictable accident-factory that is the world. That – the combination of these things over time and dispersed in the space of the media – is for sure a grotesque kind of fantasy writing now. In the background/runup to it you have everything from Barnum and the pseudo-events of early advertising, to the performance artists (with life as art) and the Situationists (with their resistance to but supreme analysis of the spectacle), and Warhol of course who must watch all this with a dark mix of boredom and glee. But the real difference there is that Warhol pretty much wrote himself.. and Jade is to some miserable extent written by Clifford and others. That’s the truly different thing. We are stuck with this kind of writing tho so there’s no use lamenting it overmuch, it’s certainly not disappearing in a hurry since the appetites are proven and the opportunities for easy cash are well known. But (seriously) I think we can get a bit pissed off that these guys are all telling so much the same story every time… the tabloids make even the front tables at Waterstones look varied which is quite an achievement. Perhaps vat-grown wanna-be celebs-to-be with genetically engineered tragic flaws and illnesses in waiting, along with web-cast linkups and twitter feeds direct from their cortexes would be the way to go. (Gibson was there already, pretty much). In the meantime – following the logic of your expansion of the Fantasy category – I think the Nebula Awards will be interesting this year as final installment of the long running ‘Global Warming’ saga goes head to head with the cyberthriller ‘Storm Botnet’ and the plodding over hyped ‘H1N1’.
The triple decker fat fantasy is good for reading on the beach, the dying fat celebrity is good for reading about on the double decker to work. Horses for courses. Please wear a hard hat in the works area. No hat = no job.
And besides: we’re busy out here with the beatification of Ballard of the Autobahn. Admittedly it’s a smaller franchise but piggybacked on the last few years sanctification of Saint Curtis of Manchester it should provide fascinating reading for our eco-yurt holiday in the Algarve this summer.
“I personally think the problem isn’t fantasy itself but bad fantasy. On the other hand, cattle are cattle are cattle…”
Fixed. To make it grammatically correct and more immediately offensive.
PS. Eco-yurt holidays remind me of ancient times when cows were said to fart so industriously that the Romans were able to grow grapes in Britain. I think the big saga of the near future will be Globowarmthinkery fanatics vs. the impending glacial period.
Agreed. Along similar lines, I have long contended that the most important genre of contemporary Anglo-American narrative writing is the self-help book (whether dieting, pseudo-psychology, or management-aimed), which both in form and spirit resembles science fiction’s characteristic “fix-up novels.” (While I would rather believe that the most important genre was The Weekly World News’s zany cover stories, I’m afraid I don’t.) Back when I was struggling to write fiction, I dutifully attempted one myself, but found it too difficult.
(As further examples of its centrality, pop religion, pop occultism, and pop conspiracy theory also re-brand the craft of conceptually-linked reader-aggrandizing anecdotage. And of course, long before I began expounding “my” theory of contemporary literary history, it had found practical confirmation in the career of L. Ron Hubbard.)
You’re obviously using the wrong shampoo. Tesco’s Deluxe Coconut Thick & Curly has been giving me multiple orgasms for years.
(Of course it could simply be a girl-boy thing.)
I’ve been eating it for years, Lara, and it still hasn’t had that effect. What’s going on?
This should be up for a Hugo:
http://www.nowpublic.com/style/ben-southall-winner-australias-best-job-world-contest
It licks and cuddles all those trad disaster tropes that English sf readers used to adore like kittens with catnip: as your very own Crusoe (minus that awkward Friday, who’s now doubtless sweeping up after wide boys on the Isle of Dogs five nights a week) you could be the only person in the world, but you’re on the beach, the sun’s shining. and you needn’t think about where to live or what to eat – it’s an eight year-old’s paradise. You’re playing alone in the back garden, but mum and dad are about *really,* in case Something Happens, so you can forget about everything except this wonderful bit of pretend.
Bonus point #1: you’re part of that lovely fiction, where we indulge our every whim and still “save the planet.” Bonus point # 2: it’s Australia, our Ray Davis Shrangri-La, Neighbours-land where everyone is up-and-laughing in a fascinating selection of pastel polo shirts, with no real problems about money, mortality, or existential dread – bonzer, mate. Extra Special Bonus Point: it’s Son of Jade, just an ordinary bloke plucked from millions, now having a cavort in front of millions with the sun-drenched little denizens of the deep, Attenborough-stylee. Fair makes you wanna be right there in the snorkel mask with him, no?
Mind you, it’s easy to get the formula wrong:
“Imagine bringing the whole family to an island in Maine for a working vacation as lighthouse keepers.”
Yes. Just imagine that …
http://www.howtobuyaprivateisland.com/private-island-caretakers.htm
Too many comments to handle here & still be a working writer, so a scattered handful of replies.
Hi Orfanum, you wrote–
Something like that, yes. Something political in the broadest sense. I always thought that fantasy writers, given their trade, were best-placed to identify & counter these manipulative fantasies, disentangle them from the decent dreams of people, & offer satire, understanding, & some kind of alternative. In fact that does happen, but not in generic fantasy. More often than not we leave it to mainstream literary writers to do what should be–at least part of–our job.
& of course, everyone–writers, readers, people generally–is leaving it to the new elite class of manipulators & ideologists (who, as an enabling mechanism, have helped us sell ourselves the idea that we are in charge of the fictions now; see Tim Etchells’ comment).
Matrixless. Am I so transparent ?
Larry, I guess religion is one the great founding tropes of this whole genre.
Hi Tim, glad you liked it. Definitely time for an analysis of the evolution of the contemporary genre; also some discussion of how the contemporary subgenres support one another. Clifford is a good place to start. I agree that H1N1 (aka Pandemic!) probably won’t make it this year. But maybe next year with Swineflu Too ? One of the aspects that interests me most is the level of unwrittenness of some of this, the point where urban myth, advertising, design of the built environment, etc etc, come together coincidentally to make a fiction to which you simply can’t assign an author. Cliffordless effects (which might then be sucked into narratives of Clifford’s or of NuLabour’s or whatever; or turn up in a novel like The Broken World or something of Jack Womack’s).
Lara: steady on there, Tesco’s Thick & Curly sounds, well, almost edible. & why are you the only woman in these comments ?
[…] l’idea che “Perché io valgo” (l’Oreal) sia un testo fantasy superiore – se non […]
Hi, Mike.
I would have chosen “Earth died screaming”.
Best
Arturo
Good choice, Arturo.