It is not only a preponderance of the latter kind of book that has made the entire fantasy field suspect within the contemporary literary establishment of the late twentieth century, segregating many worthy works of literature into the genre “ghetto,” but also a shift in fashionable literary taste, which can be traced to Victorian times when stories with their roots in folktales and oral narratives came to be associated with the lower-class and unlettered segments of society. During the Victorian era fantasy was banished to the nursery and the field of children’s literature was born—but it has never been content to stay there. Instead it popped up in “children’s books” read avidly by adults (Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, White’s The Once and Future King), in mainstream novels (Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Helprin’s A Winter’s Tale); in the popular Magic Realism of Latin-American writers (Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Allende’s Eva Luna); in the popularity of works by folklorist Joseph Campbell and poet Robert Bly.
In the 1990s, fantasy literature remains a viable, indeed popular, art form— against the bleak backdrop of a publishing industry in decline, a massive American illiteracy rate, and a culture where school-age children spend a staggering average of four hours a day watching television. Newspaper columnist Ellen Goodman recently discussed the differences between “the generation that reads and writes” and “the generation that watches and rewinds. . . . Those of us who are print people—writers and readers—are losing ground to the visual people—producers and viewers. The younger generation gets more of its information and ‘infotainment’ from television and movies. Less information. More infotainment. The franchise over reality is passing hands.”
While genre fiction, even at the best-seller level, does not have nearly the impact or reach of the average movie or television program, it nonetheless plays a vital role in keeping fiction and the love of reading alive in our present culture— particularly among younger readers. This is a responsibility we cannot easily ignore. The franchise over reality is passing hands. . . . Fantasy, a literature that goes beyond reality into the imagination—the surreal lands of myth and dream— is nonetheless at its best a literature that tells us much about the real world, and the hearts of the men and women who live in it. “Fantasy,” Ursula Le Guin has said, “is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous, and it will change you.”
The fantasy story, like the mythic stories championed by Joseph Campbell, works with symbols and metaphors that relate directly to modern life, speaking directly and unflinchingly of the hero’s quests, the Trickster’s tasks and the dark woods we each summon the courage to enter as we take the long journey from birth to death. In a time when the prevalent media fare has become increasingly formulaic, simplistic, jumping with MTV-and-advertising-style editing from image to image to image, it is all the more important for a popular literature to exist that explores the deeper complexities of the human heart, traveling more leisurely through the shadow realms of the soul. Campbell has said the artist is the myth-maker of the modern age. In a field where myth directly infuses modern story, this is a role a fantasy writer must pay attention to—even when, perhaps especially when—the writer’s stated goal is to entertain.
One of the most interesting aspects of the fantasy literature written in this country and in this decade is that much of it comes from a large group of writers who know of each other and each other’s works. Mass-market book distribution and evolving telecommunications have made this possible, as have computer networks devoted to the discussion of the field, small-press review magazines, academic conferences (like the annual International Conference on the Fantastic, in Florida), and conventions (like the annual Fourth Street Fantasy Convention, in Minneapolis) where writers, artists, publishers, and readers mingle and share their thoughts. In my capacity as an editor working with writers and illustrators across this country and in England, I am struck again and again by the passion and commitment with which these artists approach their craft. When you walk into a bookstore and find the Fantasy section where the works of these writers are segregated away from other works of fiction, the bright colors of look-alike titles and cynically commercial series jump out from the shelves (and the best-sellers lists). But if you look further, and ignore the often-lurid publishing package (over which the author, and indeed the illustrator, have little control), you will find that a fascinating contemporary fantasy literature is being formed (including a distinctively American brand), author by author, story by story, book by book.
Most recently the field has incorporated ideas explored by the Latin-American Magic Realist writers, bringing myth and folkloric motifs into modern and urban settings. At the other end of the spectrum from Urban Fantasy, the Imaginary World brand of fantasy created most memorably by Tolkien, Lewis and Eddison and then by poetic writers like Le Guin, McKillip, Beagle, Cooper, Walton and others in the seventies and early eighties, seemed to grind down to a predictable, derivative formula in the late eighties. This sparked many lively discussions among writers about what exactly makes a superlative fantasy book. Ellen Kushner, a talented prose stylist, has spoken eloquently to decry the kind of derivative works in which a young writer merely mimics his or her favorite author. “We have books based on Tolkien,” says Kushner, “and then books based on those books, and then on those books . . . like Xerox copies of a Xerox copy, getting increasingly muddy and fuzzy until the original spark is completely gone.”
The best fantasy, Kushner and others have stated, must come from the writer’s own heart, life and experience. (This is a measure that applies, I believe, to books meant as pure entertainment as well as to ones written with serious literary intent.) “A writer,” Cynthia Ozick has written “is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles’ and cousins’ books, tablets and capsules and powders . . . and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy—writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be, where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?” Fantasy, more than other forms of literature, cannot depend on novelty of plot to give it originality, based as it is on the mythic tradition of familiar tales served up anew. The themes that underlie the stories are ancient and familiar ones; what the best writers must bring to these themes to make them fresh, to make them sing again in the reader’s imagination, is their own unique voice and point of view.
Anais Nin once said (if you’ll bear with me for one more quote): “I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which to live. Fantasy is a potent way to reimage the world around us, re-envision its wonders and take us away from it so that we can return and see it anew. What new world shall we create in the future—not only in our books and our genre but, by extension, in our lives, and for the lives of the generation to come? This is a question all fantasy writers address (either consciously or unconsciously); as all writers; and all artists; and all of us who participate in the collective act of the arts as readers, viewers and audience. I hope we can keep this question in mind as we write books, publish books or support those books by our critical selection of one book over another when they sit before us on the bookstore shelves.