The Apocalypse of English Phantastes I: Introduction

Last updated on: August 21, 2008 at 4:56 am by Henry Karlson

The Apocalypse of English Phantastes I: Introduction 2008-08-21T04:56:17-05:00 Henry Karlson

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There is a natural love for story within the human psyche. There is something about a tale well told which attracts our attention. Not only do they provide a source of amusement and entertainment, stories tell us something about the world we live in, how it works, the people who live in it, the wide variety of possibilities one can find in it, and even of the kind of ideological perspectives people might have. They help move us out of ourselves, to lose ourselves, so that we can become something greater. The better the story, the more true this is; but even the most incompetent story narrated by the most naïve of narrators reveals something to the psyche, and can implant in us a change of perspective. A story does not have to be true, does not have to be an account of historical fact, in order to do this; indeed, “fiction” can tell us something which such historical narratives cannot give, because it can report about what could have been or what could be, or even what is impossible. It moves us away from the literal, fact-based perspective of empirical science and into a wider, more philosophical examination of life and the kinds of motivations which compel people to action.[1]

In pre-literate societies, stories were best rendered by old sages, who, having lived long, full lives, were capable of imparting their wisdom to younger generations; in literate societies, the story-teller can be anyone who writes. The printed page does not have to provide any specific details of the narrator for the story to be told, and therefore, the narrator can appear to be as old or as young as the reader imagines them to be. This fact requires the modern storyteller to prove their case by how well they can mix words with their imagination; they do not have the advantage (or disadvantage) of age; they have to rely upon their wits to tell their story. When such a storyteller is a master of their craft, their writings can be viewed as pieces of literature, works of art which expand the mind and ability of the reader, allowing a sense of communion with the author; this makes the reading of such stories a worthwhile leisure time activity.[2]

We bring to our reading existential questions, and our reading of literature is influenced by those questions we have before us; they become the lens by which we read and understand literature. Because of this, what we get out of a piece of literature is far less than what is possible to get out of it. When one allows a piece of literature to lead them instead of trying to lead it with their own specific questions, they find the questions they brought to it are insufficient, shallow; they fade away, they die, as the author takes the reader by the hand, and brings them into the world of his own making. The reader, at the end of the journey, will have in some fashion died to the self and been reborn. They must give up on their questions to let the text provide for them a new, greater grasp of the world at large. They must die to the self to become persons as a result of their reading. “The written questions addressed to literature, all the tortures afflicted upon it, are always transfigured, drained, forgotten by literature, within literature; having become modifications of itself, by itself, in itself, they are mortifications, that is to say, as always, ruses of life. Life negates itself in literature only so that it may survive better. So that it may be better.”[3] Then, and only then, can those initial questions be resurrected, where they will work to complement the text and the author’s desires instead of overriding them.

In writing a specific text, an author has to understand the difficulty he faces as he or she tries to engage a reader. The author has to translate their ideas to paper. The reader, then, has to translate what is on that paper, interpret it, to make any sense and meaning out of it. “The mode of being a text has something unique and incomparable about it. It presents a specific problem of translation to the understanding. Nothing is so strange, and at the same time so demanding, as the written word.”[4] The author has authority over the text, but the reader will grasp it differently, subjectively, from the author and might even find elements in it unknown to the author as they work through it and grasp its contents. The text becomes the bridge on which the author and the reader meet, and the effectiveness of the author is established by how well he or she is capable of translating their point of reference to the reader while not by tyrannical about it. The author must leave the reader open to engage the text, develop ideas from it, and transcend it. Literary criticism develops out of such skills, where a reader, who has felt some profound insight from a piece of work, would like to render their notion to others, to people like themselves who have read that work and pondered it. The critic wants to see how their views stand up to other readers, to see how a piece of literature is taken by a particular society.[5] “What belongs to the world literature has its place in the consciousness of all.”[6]

In light of what has been said, fantastic literature should hold an important place in canon of great works. It is true that there are many hacks who write within the fantasy and science fiction genres, repeating the thoughts of others, imitating them in pastiche after pastiche; this should not be used to dismiss the genres, but at most, indicate why those hacks can be ignored as one confronts the real masters of the genres.[7] Yet, academics engaging literary criticism, when they face fantastic tales, often finds themselves at wits end trying to understand why such tales find their place in the psyche of modern life; this is because positivism, so influential in the sciences, has left its mark in the field of literary criticism, making many a critic incapable of understanding that which transcends the empirical. Academics, in their literary studies, want things more concrete, because it is what they understand and have been trained to understand; as such, the whole point of literature and its ability to move us beyond ourselves has been lost to them. Of course, if one of them begins to touch upon the fantastic, they begin to find the new territory difficult, and indeed, frightening; for there is nothing to use to look back to as a tool in which to offer criticism. It is for this reason why there is an even greater need for academic professionals to address the weird tale, and not ignore it. “Fantasy, it seems to me, is a much larger thing, and a much more influential thing, than you as a group [academics, ed.] are willing to concede – the only thing in the world that is bigger than the world, and a thing that touches upon virtually every area of thought, influencing and illuminating physics and biology as well as history and sociology, testing the borders of everything in the curriculum. It is not a small and safe area of academic specialization like the Medieval Lyric, and you owe it to the rest of us to give us a clearer a clearer indication of that.”[8]

If literature is meant to provide us a ground by which we can better understand the human experience and the possibilities within that experience, the weird tale, the fantastic tale, provides a greater, more open space by which one can examine this question. Obviously there is the need for concrete explorations of the human experience as found in typical fiction, but this should not be used to ignore its complement. Fantasy is not some escapist rejection of the world, but the tool of the human spirit as it explores the boundaries of that world. “For creative Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it.”[9] Science fiction explores the possibilities which might one day confront the human psyche, and tries to deal with them before they come about, to provide a basis by which those possibilities can be dealt with so they do not cause undue concern when they are realized. “The point I’m making is that science fiction does at least tell us what some people think may happen, and let us drag those ideas out into the open where we can look at them and try to poke holes in them. Anything that does that is certainly worthy of some special attention.”[10] Indeed, as Philip K. Dick points out, the world we live is in falling apart, it is disintegrating, as it makes way for the future.[11] Science fiction, because it is capable of seeing that disintegration and the chaos to come, has a prophetic task to it. “In science fiction, a writer is not merely inclined to act out the Cassandra role; he is absolutely obliged to – unless, of course, he honestly thinks he will wake up some morning and find that the high-minded Martians have sneaked off with all our bombs and armaments, for our own good.”[12] Even fantasy can be seen as prophetic; it exists, in part, as a protest of the things as they are, of the powers that be. Fantastic literature in all of its forms contains elements of subversion. The author will “create, on the basis of the known data or plausible data, how it could all be better, or how it could all be worse. His story or novel is in a sense a protest, but not a political one; it is a protest against concrete reality in an unusual way.”[13]

Exploration of fantastic literature is a way by which we can begin to grasp the fullness of the human spirit. For it is not entrenched to the positivistic, empirical universe, but transcends it; the spirit’s hopes and dreams must be encountered and explored, and all so-called flights of fancy can represent them better than the shallow, positivistic novels academics tend to study. “Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception, of scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy it will make.”[14] By examining the development of fantastic literature by its masters, we can a greater glimpse of the human psyche, and indeed, the ideas and questions which have come and gone from its glance in modern history.[15] The focus of our research will be of those who have written within the domain of English literature, and it will be used to examine the kinds of questions which have been raised and dealt with therein. In this way we will begin to explore ideas which not only shape, but question, an important but often hidden portion of the “English society”[16] as it exists today. It is hoped that by such a study aspects of the “English soul,” so often neglected, will be put out in the open and revealed for what they are, the good and the bad.

Footnotes

[1] “The difference between a literary work of art and any other text is not so fundamental. It is true that there is a difference between the language of poetry and the language of prose, and between the language of poetic prose and that of ‘scientific’ or ‘scholarly’ prose. These differences can certainly also be considered from the point of view of literary form. But the essential difference between these various ‘languages’ obviously lies elsewhere: namely in the distinction between the claims to truth that each makes. All written works have a profound community in that language is what makes the contents meaningful,” Hans-Georg Gadamer. Truth and Method. trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2006), 155-6.
[2] C.S. Lewis confirms this point as he discusses what we get out of reading literature: “The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. Each of us by nature sees the whole world from one point of view with a perspective and a selectiveness peculiar to himself. And even when we build disinterested fantasies, they are saturated with, and limited by, our psychology. To acquiesce in this particularity on the sensuous level – in other words, not to discount perspective – would be lunacy. We should then believe that the railway line really grew narrower as it receded into the distance. But we want to escape the illusions of perspective on higher levels too. We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own,” C.S. Lewis. An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 137.
[3] Jacques Derrida, “Edmond Jabes and the Question of the Book,” pgs. 64 – 78 in Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978): 78.
[4] Hans-Georg Gadamer. Truth and Method, 156.
[5] “Literary criticism is the discussion, between equals, of works of literature, with a view to establishing common ground on which judgements of value can be based,” John Wain. Preliminary Essays (London: Macmillan & Co Ltd, 1957), 187.
[6] Hans-Georg Gadamer. Truth and Method, 154.
[7] “Literature is a function of being intellectually preserved and handed down, and therefore brings its hidden history into every age,” ibid., 154. The fact that the masters of the genres are imitated indicates something about the power of thought which is expressed in the genres themselves. Indeed, a pastiche is one of the ways in which literary themes are preserved and multiplied in society, providing a greater chance that those themes will be encountered by a given reader, even if it is in a work of secondary importance.
[8] Gene Wolfe. Castle of Days (New York: Orb, 1995), 447.
[9] J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” pgs. 109 – 161 in The Monster & the Critics and Other Essays (London: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1997): 144.
[10] Gene Wolfe. Castle of Days, 391.
[11] “Our present social continuum is disintegrating rapidly; if we don’t burst it apart, it obviously will corrode away,” Philip K. Dick, “Pessimism in Science Fiction,” pgs. 54-56 in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Vintage Books, 1995):56.
[12] ibid.,54.
[13] Philip K. Dick, “Who is an SF Writer,” pgs. 69-78 in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (New York: Vintage Books, 1995):74.
[14] J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories”: 144.
[15] There are some masters of the trade, such as H.G. Wells, who have made such an impact in academia that their writings are rarely left out of the literary canon of studies. As such, one can already examine what they have to offer, and even view the reception and criticism of their work, without need for a repeat of such analysis here. Of course, they should not be ignored because their influence is as great as it is important for fantastic fiction, but what is said of them will be cursory at best.
[16] The terms “English society” and “English soul” are being used here in relation to all who primarily speak, think, read and write in the English language instead of those residing in a specific geographic point of earth.

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