Essential reads in literary fantasy
I know that there’s been a good many attempts to quantify a “canon” of fantastic literature, but why should we let that stop us now? When I say “quality” fantasy literature, what comes to mind, and why? Let’s say you give me five good examples. After a while, I’ll wade in and give you mine.
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Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
LOTR by J.R.R. Tolkien
Master and Marguerita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
1984 by George Orwell
Thanks for making me think about this.
Asimov’s Foundation
Ringworld by Larry Niven
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Eon by Greg Bear
Neuromancer by William Gibson
I could name many more, but I think it’d be good to let others do that
. I don’t want to hog it all 
.
I live in New Orleans, so my criteria here is ‘if the city tries to sink again, what am I going to grab as I swim away.’
Viriconium – M. John Harrison
City of Saints and Madmen – Jeff Vandemeer
The Etched City – K J Bishop
Impossible Stories – Zoran Zivkovic
The Books of the New Sun – Gene Wolfe
(BUT… what if the definition of fantasy is broadened?
Then I would have to work out
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Entering Fire- Rikki Ducornet
Texaco – Patrick Chamoiseau
Arc D’X – Steve Erikson
Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino )
Here’s some of the books I hold in highest regard:
The Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula Le Guin
The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Dying Earth by Jack Vance (OR The Lyonesse Trilogy)
Baudolino by Umberto Eco
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
I realise my list is biased towards male writers, but this is an imbalance I am currently trying to redress – something made a lot easier by blogs like yours and Jeff’s, I might add!
Perdido Street Station – China Mieville
The Etched City – K.J. Bishop
Leviathan 4 – edited by Forrest Aguirre
Viriconium – M. John Harrison
Gormenghast Triology – Mervyn Peake
This is pretty much the list of fiction that made me realize fantasy wasn’t Tolkein-lite. It’s because of them that I’m able to write.
Tales of the Dying Earth – Jack Vance
Ill Met In Lankhmar – Fritz Leiber
The Gormenghast Novels – Mervyn Peake
The Book of the New Sun – Gene Wolfe
The collected books of Discworld – Terry Pratchett
Lord of the Rings – J R R Tolkien (Duh.)
Why?
For me the definition of big-ell Literary Fantasy comes to this: while solidly-written Fantasy has the capacity to *move* me, Literary Fantasy has the capacity to *change* me.
It’s really not about conventions, or world-building, or even the tendency of some literary works to require a thesaurus be kept close at hand (Gene Wolfe. New Sun. Oh! the words!) Instead, by one means or another these books, these authors, have stuffed my head with Big Ideas. Through their words and their worlds they have changed my perspective, and fundamentally altered how I look at my *own* world.
Discworld?! Mmhmm… especially Discworld.
Most of the commenters seem to be neglecting an interesting little factoid about literature:
Prior to the Age of Reason, almost all literature was “of the fantastic”. Fairies ran wild in Shakespeare, and Spenser. Religious writing handle literal interpretations of their texts as fantastickally as any magical realist or surrealist. Visions and poems and romances and all sorts of serious tales were full of magic, surrealism, and wonder.
Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, for instance, was arguably the bestselling book of the time before printing presses, and involves a dialogue with the goddess Fortuna, personified and in the flesh.
The question in my mind is not “Is this part of the Canon?” but “When the heck did we get kicked out of the Canon?”.
It wasn’t in the Age of Reason. We had Jonathen Swift among many others. It wasn’t in the nineteenth century. We had Frank L Baum and Mark Twain among many others. When exactly did literature of the fantastic become a joke to the Canon-Makers?
Was it Tolkein that got us kicked out of the club? Was it the backlash against comic books? Was it the bleak and dreary outlook of the nucleur age scaring the bejeezus out of everyone?
When did we lose our place at the big kids’ table? And, how come it has taken us so long to crawl back to it?
I am going to give a newer example instead of an old one:
‘Thunderer’ by Felix Gilman – (though you do have to wade stalwartly through the first 40 pages, then it is brilliant)
I think on this and maybe add more later…
I lost the end to my rather long comment, and I’m still trying to get this final bit to post…
Depending on how far back you want to reach – either before the mysterious backlash against the art form or the period after we got dropped by the adults’ table and sent to the kids table – you have different answers.
Going back through history and looking for five books?
Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathen Swift
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Paradise Lost by John Milton
But, there are so many to choose from, that this five feels like a disaster.
If you mean including only the last 85 years or so, and the literature movement that rose out of pulp serials? Is that the question you’re asking?
Mr. McDermott,
I appreciate your comments.
No time period was defined in my original query, so you’re free to choose throughout the entire panoply of fantastic literature from “The Epic of Gilgamesh” to “The Alchemy of Stone.” As long as you consider it an “essential read” and the titles are the first five books you consider as quality fantasy literature, I think you’re in the clear.
I’ve also pondered fantasy’s expulsion from the Eden of Proper Literature, and have wondered at times if it might be a possible consequence of Puritanism or maybe industrialization. Perhaps rather than looking for one defining moment, we should instead seek to understand this as the end result of gradual and subtle processes throughout the last few hundred years.
By the way: the Initial post was worded intentionally vague to foster conversation. Seems to be working! Carry on!
Conernng Mr McDermott’s comments about the time frame of fantastic literature. First, Mr. McDermott, I thought Last Dragon was excellent. I don’t lend out a lot of books (because I am jealous of their treatment…some kind of misplaced booklust) but as soon as I finished it I had to pass it along.. right now I think it is spending the summer in Belize).
This has been a question popping up all over blogs recently (OF Blog of the Fallen recently posted a poll concerning ‘when’ fantasy literature should be dated back to).
The notion, I think, neglects issues of intention, orientation, and meaning as the time frame expands beyond recent centuries and beyond certain geographical boundaries. Gilgamesh, Paradise Lost, The Dvine Comedy, all seem to orient themselves differently than later, ‘modern’ fantastic literature. Certainly, it is easy for many to dismiss the religious, ontological and epistemic meanings in such writings as only fantastical, as a disease of language (as the grandfather of religious studies, F. Max Mueller defined myth) but this too me seems unfair. The Lord of the Rings and the Consolation of Philosophy differ along the same lines: Tolkien wrote for intellectual gratification, and he is read for entertainment (by most), while The Consolation, Beowulf, etc, yes may have indeed been entertainments, popular, and the like, but that does not negate their inherently religious, mythological quality, which places them in, I thnk, a category distinct from fantastic literature.
The goal of the author, when one can be identified, needs to be considered. What was Swift doing when he wrote Gulliver’s Travels? Was he writing an adventure, a fantasy, or a political satire? Certainly, the borders between these categories are permeable, but I think a diservice is done when we wrangle writers and books into an order that fits our sense of how the world should be shaped instead of letting the writer and the work reshape our world.
Post-Tolkien, too, have not authors, faced with the convention of genre, in the Anglo-American world, actively chosen to write a fantasy novel as opposed to a science fiction novel, a horror novel, or one that would be mainstream? Genres are often (and rightful) bemoaned, but their impact on how authors and readers conceptually place what they are writing or reading should not be devalued.
Just five?
It’s difficult for me to choose because I have to put them into context (is it for new readers? not-so-famous but talented authors?). Also interesting to note is how people will tend to cite novels more often than short story collections/anthologies (although some of your commenters have cited them).
Here’s my five although if you ask me tomorrow, the list might change:
Jeffrey Ford – Empire of Ice Cream (collection)
Kelly Link – Magic for Beginners (Collection)
George R. R. Martin – Song of Ice and Fire series (well, at least what’s been put out so far)
Roger Zelazny – Chronicles of Amber (well, just the first five books) although Lord of Light also comes close.
Joe Hill – 20th Century Ghosts (collection)
I’ll add a few that I doubt would be on many radars here, but perhaps they ought to be:
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo
Angélica Gorodischer, Kalpa Imperial
Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps
Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph
Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
Taking SFF and not just Fantasy:
The Scar – China Mieville
Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler
A Game of Thrones – George R. R. Martin
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
I really kind of want to put Elizabeth Bear’s Promethean Age novels, if taken as a collection, on the list, but I’m just not sure about that. Ask me again in five years.
Not sure I have a fifth right now, and I’m struggling with my inclusion of the George Martin.
I’m surprised we’ve gotten this far without anyone mentioning John Crowley. I expected LITTLE BIG to be the first book named!
I find this exercise to be an impossible one. Five is far too small a number. But if given that number merely as a start, I’d probably start here:
Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Le Morte D’Arthur by Thomas Mallory
Possession by A.S. Byatt
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
Ficciones by Jorge Juis Borges
The Stories of Ray Bradbury
The Stories of Harlan Ellison
The Collected Sandman, Neil Gaiman
Replay, Ken Grimwood
Flat Earth Cycle, Tanith Lee
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
The First Amber Quintet, Roger Zelazny
Please note that I majored in English, not math.
Mine have been covered, several times over, although I’d like to toss in HG Wells and Jules Verne, especially 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.
I’d probably have to start my list with heavy-hitters from the twentieth century (and my bookshelf) like Kafka, Borges, García Márquez, and Calvino. One of the more important questions for a project like this is whether you want to draw a firm line between “literary fantasy” and “science/speculative fiction.” I think there’s good reason to keep those canons somewhat separate…
Tim, thanks for your kind words about my book, and thanks for passing it along! Remember: the nicest thing you can do for any media artist is to hand the media to someone else. It pleases me greatly that you passed the book on to friends.
I wonder, like Matt, if it wasn’t the rise of industrialization. I actually suspect that the harsh reality of the first World War exploded the art world, in every way. Dadaism rose from the ashes of World War I, as did countless other movements that attempted to rebuild concepts of reality out of the wreckage that the war had wrought. Still, the Surrealists continued to do magical things, and the Spanish-speaking world never lost its sense of the wondrous. I also wonder if it wasn’t the rising influence of psychoanalyses categorizing and science-ing the subconscious. Instead of facing a void of unknown things, we had a language to discuss and control the numinous realm of our heads.
That said, and back on topic, let’s go ahead and remove the religious works from the list. They are polemic texts attempting to teach reality veiled by the language of a cultural religious reality. No Roman do la Rose, either. No l’Morte de Arthur, and their ilk, either, for most Arthurian romances and their like were justified, culturally, by their attempts to teach religion through heroics.
Fantasy attempts to build in the realm of the imagination, while much of religious writing of the past tried to describe what was accepted at the time as real and apply this reality to life.
This kicks out Homer, too, and Gilgamesh. They were stories of – culturally – “real” events.
For literature of pure fancy and imagination, where unReality is a major part of the equation, I once again point to Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathen Swift. I point to The Tempest, by Shakespeare.
Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, I think, deserves a spot here, for the Wizard of Oz that started as a silver polemic and ended as the dream world of little (and not so little) girl’s everywhere. Mark Twain wrote some amazing fantasies, but as he is most known for his comedic realistic fictions, I’ll keep him off the list.
In the Middle English Literature, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales had moments of the fantastic, indeed, that were designed not to educate, but to illuminate character and entertain with artistry. Let’s go with this one.
Now, I want one book from the rising tide out of pulp magazines. This period of fiction will be foundational to the future of the form, and ignoring that won’t be good for any canon. What one book represents the art form, at its highest quality, since Amazing Stories went to the printing press?
Just one? I can’t do it. I tried, and I can’t do it.
Here’s my list, then, and like any of this nature it will be horribly wrong:
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
The Tempest by Shakespeare
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathen Swift
Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
*Some book of the literary tradition of the pulps* by *someone*
Thoughts?
I absolutely agree about the role of industrialization, but I think that aspects should be combined with Euro-American imperialism and the trend towards rational/secularist forms of knowledge as being generally accepted as the bounds of concensus reality. Thomas Disch wrote and excellent essay on Poe’s role in science fiction in his The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, but he forgets to locate Poe in his context: the new, growing, anonymous mess of the American City in the 1840’s. The urban industrial center was considered such a weird, dangerous place, by residents and by rural patricians, that reams and reams of paper were wasted in attempts to warn their children of its danger. And all the cruelities unleashed by Poe’s characters – they are forms of violence done by strangers against strangers. Personal, familial relationships were thought to be breaking down, no one could be trusted: the city was dark, strange, fantastic in all the wrong ways.
Combine with the spread of imperialism since the 15th century and the rise of Enlightenment rationalism from the late 17th- 19th centuries, there could be said to form a conceptual space for Europeans and Americans where many of the ‘nonrational’ things in life become fair game not just for academic study, but for popular and literary play. One of the numerous results of colonialism, for both colonized and colonizer, is the massive influx of new ideas, images, colors, smells, experiences (of linguistic sounds, foods, sex, a variety of new ways to die) that have, necessarily, to be incorporated in the existing, and maleable, cultural contexts of all parties involved. Realities are re-evaluated, cultural norms undermined, and new definitions of the imaginary take shape. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the Enlightenment corresponds to a drastic rise in European colonial expansion. Subsumed under the rubric of rationality, suddenly a wide range of human experiences and expressions become fantastical instead of mundane.
The fantastic, too, needs to be identified by an outsider (either a geographic interloper, or even just a social one, who has not been initiated into different practices of reality [shamans, yogii, cultural historians, sopranos] ). Do I mean the fantastic is historically a symptom of misunderstanding, of a lack of knowledge?? I don’t know… maybe…
I think it is telling that both Swift and Shakespeare make use of the images of colonial experience, and those images are what stands out, to us, as being most fantastical. Baum and Chaucer too, anchor their narratives the European practice of travel that prefigures the colonial projects – pilgrimage – where a select group of individuals come together as a temporary community to complete a goal. For Chaucer and Baum, the events along the way to the final goal, either the recitation of personal narratives of characters, or the exploration of the wonderfully odd lands of Oz, help to reify the bonds of that community and also place a barrier between that group and the space they pass through: the narrative creates a distinct us and a distinct them/not us/ other. It is the later that strikes there reader as fantastic.
But I get uppity sometimes, and I do consider Swift and Shakespeare and Baum and Chaucer to be writers of the fantastic…but maybe that means I consider writers of the fantastic to be colonial/ post colonial writers… hey wait, I think I DO… I know that is what drew me to Vandermeer’s City of Saints and Madmen… what he does with Grey Caps and their relation to the later population (who thought they were extinct, but can never escape the ghosts of Grey Cap’s real presence nor the legacy of the human’s own actions in inhabiting Ambergris) strikes me as a wonderful meditation on the history of human movements in the real world.
tim
And I have no idea what to add from the pulp tradition… I am sorry lacking in that area… perhaps something by Lovecraft? is he pulp?
I suspect it has less to do with industrialization (which came to a head in the 19th century) and more to do with the onset of consumerism. This lines up a little more neatly with the dearth of the fantastic after the World Wars.
As for a great fantasist of the 20th century… Borges is my number one guy. If the imagination in his work isn’t enough to rank with some of the classics listed above… well, I’ll be in the parking lot after five to discuss the issue further, R. E. Howard style.
Hah!
Having fun, Matt?
Absolutely!!!!
And, hey, the fun hasn’t even begun yet!
I’ve got, plans, sir. Big plans.
Guys, if you’re looking for something from the pulp era, I would strongly suggest Robert E. Howard, or maybe Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Mars” books.
LOTR – Tolkien
The Golden Ass – Apuleius
The Oresteia – Aeschylus
Malpertuis – Jean Ray
Von Bek (Tale of the Eternal Champion) – Michael Moorcock
ok. the last was a bit of a cheat. These are books that are my personal pantheon of great ‘literary fantasy’. I am mostly affected by Art in a personal way, so it’s difficult to ‘recommend’ to others. Throw in Lovecraft, Petrus Borel, Blackwood, Zelazny and Ellison and I’ve covered most of my literary ground. Don’s ask about graphic novels.
1) The Wild Ass’s Skin: Balzac
2) The Mandarin: Aca de Quieros
3) The Nose: Gogol
4) Tales of Hoffmann
5) The Saragossa Manuscript
I meant Eca de Quieros, and Hoffman…someday I’ll learn t’spell.
Hyperion!! I knew there was another one I wanted to mention / add to my list.
My thoughts align pretty closely with Matthew Dyer’s, above. Fantasy became disconnected with the Canon when it became its own marketing category. That’s when fantasy became the end, rather than a means to the end. I think JM McDermott’s correct in referring to this as a pre-pulp and post-pulp phenomenon; we’ve gotten some great stories out of this consumerism-inspired turn in fantasy’s evolution; correspondingly, we’ve acquired some severe handicaps, of which we’re all well aware.
But because I grew up in the post-pulp era, and because I am more an excitable fanboy than a literary historian, I will draw all five of my titles from the more recent years. (I will cheat and include a couple of series.) And anyway, this list is in keeping with Matt’s original directive, which asks what comes first to mind when thinking of quality fantasy literature. Reflexively, I first think of the modern era.
1. The Prince of Nothing trilogy, by R. Scott Bakker. Highly underrated, I think.
2. Arc d’X, by Steve Erikson.
3. The Aegypt books, by John Crowley
4. Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
5. Earthsea, by Ursula K. LeGuin
Brendan: it’s Eça de Queiroz, not with a c but ç, spelled “éss” and with no relation to spanish wantings (quieros)…
lol
but glad to see a countryman refered here
Let me suggest something to the discussion of the canon, like main influences or something:
I think surrealism brought visualized fantasy to the attention of the general public and to new heights of perception. People began to see examples of imaginative and speculative thinking really fly, and that has to bear on writing someway, especially since they worked with every information media, actively tackling the mass markets…
Also, their intelectual uses of imagination came to be seen as academically respectable creative efforts in ways that had not been happening before.
Both seem important indirect contributions to literary fantasy, not often refered, conditioning or influencing many of the the later fantasy important works of the 20th century some good people have mentioned here.
Would you agree? I’m still not entirely sure about this. Besides, these would be like “outside influences”.
Yeah, well I really am bad at remembering spellings. I knew for the accented “c” but don’t seem to have that on my Swiss German keyboard…
Anyhow, one of my very favourite writers.
Or are you saying if you dont have that it is better to spell Éssa?
I suppose that it’s time I waded in here. I feel that Tim covers most of my own thoughts on fantasy rather well as a product of multiple influences – economic, social and religious – so instead of trying to dive too deeply into theory (not my strongest area anyway), I’d like instead to provide both my agreement and a list of five works that challenged my ideas of what fantasy was and its powers as a transformative medium.
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“Stranger Things Happen” by Kelly Link
“City of Saints & Madmen” by Jeff VanderMeer
“Ficciones” by Jorges Luis Borges
“The Bloody Chamber” by Angela Carter
As for my favorite modern literary fantasist, that would be Tim Powers. I haven’t seen his work mentioned here yet. His work explores the possibilities of fantasy without becoming entrenched in medieval genre cliche.
His latest, Three Days to Never, is a great example of the potential for literary fantasy. I highly recommend it.
Brendan: every solution unsatisfactory
but glad you like it
Matt:
To get back on track, my choices for a canon would be on the line of:
Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carrol
The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges
Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter
also anything by Poe or even Lovecraft would be advisable I think, but I really can’t decide for a particular work for any of them.
For me, it seems self-evident that fantasy is the oldest art form. As soon as humans began thinking they began dreaming, imagining. Three thousand years ago little boys and little girls tossed in their beds at night, dreaming of unimaginable terrors. This hasn’t changed. It never will. Only now the terrors are lurking just outside the solar system instead of beyond the dale.
I never have been able to understand all the contempt for fantasy by mainstream literati. Yes, there’s a ton of crap published in the name of fantasy. But the same is true of “literature.” The same professors who denounce fantasy are the ones who require their students to read these:
The Iliad and the Odyssey
Beowulf
The Faerie Queen
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (and The Tempest)
Le Morte d’Arthur
Um…maybe I’m not getting something here. Fantasy is fantasy is fantasy.
Reading through all of these posts, I am wondering if fantasy is not the ‘main branch’ of literature and that what we think of (or what is shelved) as fiction/literature is not the bastard child, but one that has some how managed to get the intellectual credit. I mean, Cervantes, Rabelais, and all the other late-medieval/ early modern writers who are credited with foundational steps toward the shaping of the novel as a mode of writing were all creating fantastic literature. It seems like ‘mainstream’ lit doesn’t show up until the 17th or 18th century, about the same time that the sciences start to fracture.
And I am jealous about the Latin American traditions being much more capable of blurring lines, not just between genres, but also between fiction and reality. The permeability of boundaries opens so many more creative possibilities that are often derrided in the English tradition.
I have to agree with one of the side posts to this thred over on Estatic Days, which refuses to recognize a boundary between fantasy and literature, that the difference between Tolstoy and Peake is not so great. Neither one is ‘more real’ than the other, both being works of the imagination. Certainly, not every book ever written is great literature, but that does not mean they need to be devided by some conceptual line.
Am I going back on my colonial lit rant? I don’t know. Different day, less coffee. But I still think that for modern literature, the fact of colonization has played a central role, and in a lot of ways makes works by someone like Rushdie more real than, say, Jack Kerouac or Henry Miller (whom I both enjoy too, so I don’t mean to put them down here, just to suggest a very different concept of reality than that represented in Rushdie, or Garcia Marquez, or Borges).
You can and should return to your colonial litrant, Tim. The encounter between different, opposing cultures was only more pronounced prior to industrialization and the communication and transportation technologies that have altered civilization.
Much of Middle English Lit, and prior, and subsequent, was an experience of encountering an “other”, and dealing with that in one way or another.
In many ways, any book with a Trickster figure – Tom Sawyer, Brer Rabbit, etc – is a fantasy story. Any tall tale. Any comic fable where a character encounters or behaves in a way instinctively “other” than the prescribed mode of life of their society.
“One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” might as well be a fantasy novel. The experience of a mental hospital is a fantasy to most folks, and rife with the same dynamics that you bring up, Tim, with your concern about post-colonial studies.
In these two cases, society is subverted. With the Tricksters, society is spun around from the inside out. In the psycho-ward example, society is subverted by entering a space beyond society, in the Outlands, and Otherrealms. That what is so often found in such cases is a microcosm of the society left behind is immaterial, for that microcosm is generally a grotesque shape that resembles the worst traits more than the better ones, skewed into a fantasy.
I suggest that in regards to Central and South American and Caribbean fictions we are careful not to express our own colonialization instincts on the texts, and be careful not to categorize in a way that may be damaging to the texts. I do not know whethe 100 Years of Solitude qualifies as a fantasy novel or a surrealist Faulknerian fable like a hyper-complex Animal Farm. I do know that Marquez is almost universally called a Magical Realist when much of his writing has no magic whatsoever. He writes “The General in His Labyrinth” and he is a magical realist, still? “Of Love and Other Demons” has but one small moment of anything magical that is explainable by chemistry and the natural ways bodies decay. Yet, he is still carrying this label.
I wonder if 100 Years of Solitude is a fantasy novel only because we are not culturally prepared to interpret it.
Thoughts?
Here’s the main difference between modern fantasy and those earlier efforts. They aren’t, in the context of their contemporary audiences, necessarily all that fantastic. The line between metaphor and reality wasn’t delineated by the scientific method. The logic of dreams was just as valid as the logic perceived in everyday life.
Talking philosophy with a god wasn’t that fantastic. It was a conceivable possibility. Even as a metaphor, it’s fairly straight forward.
Modern fantasy is a conscious decision to use the imagination in contradiction to reality. It lose its literal-ness and becomes more metaphor. The rise of secondary world fiction in the 20th century is symptomatic of this. It isn’t trying to explain the world we live in by telling tales about the heroes of our past. It’s trying to comment on the scientific and rational society we live in using metaphors and fragments of our own past explanations of reality.
I think there is a distinct break between classic fantasies like the Iliad and Beowulf and modern fantasies such as Tolkien’s LotR or Moorcock’s Eternal Champion mythos. Melnibone has a metaphorical relationship with postwar London and the new world created by the fall of colonial powers that isn’t present in a work like Paradise Lost.
I think a modern critical reading can be made of Milton, examining Paradise Lost in light of the modern world, but I’m not so sure that the work shares a literary tradition aside from a common, postmodern critical perspective such a reading would create.
“in the psycho-ward example, society is subverted by entering a space beyond society, in the Outlands, and Otherrealms.”
I worked in psych facilities for years, and have also dealt with my own illness, but have never been hospitalized. If you want to classify any sort of literature as fantastic based on the experience of being outside mainstream society then we’re going to have a lot of books on that shelf, from Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” to Charles Bukowski’s “Ham on Rye.”
Right. If we’re serious about defining something as “literary fantasy,” there must be stronger criteria than a highly subjective piece of fiction. The human condition is always concerned with the other and an individual’s relationship with society.
There’s got to be something else that “fantastic” means besides “fictional from a non-objective point of view.”
I agree, Matt, and I hope I don’t offend with the first choice that caught my eye on the shelves of the library I’m at right now.
That’s why I brought it up, as well. Archetypes of fantasy and archetypal situations seep into the rest of literature.
I don’t have a better term for it, so I’m going to use “Civilizing”.
There exists a civilizing element in literature when encountering other places, outside of the norm, and other characters. The art of scribing them down is a power act that wraps the other into the control of an authorial voice. This is a magic act. This is a fantasy. Whether you are talking of how Mark Twain gently altered American society with his comic trickster novels (and a brilliant fantasy: let’s not forget “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”!), and the authors of the sixties also exerted power over unknown places in the mind, by pushing the boundaries of society.
That theme is common to literature, whether one character or group inside a society subverts the whole, or whether one character or group is pushed to the edge and beyond.
When we encounter these Other characters and Other places inside the pages of a book, we experience them in a controlled space.
Tim, with his post-colonial readings, ought to shudder when he heard me choose the term “civilizing”.
Anyway, I mention it just to urge caution when approached Marquez as a fantasist, and even, to some extent, Borges. When does a metaphor cross the line into fantasy? What is the line between surrealism and magical realism? Better scholars than I have crashed on the rocks of this difficult shore.
Offense? Not at all!
Can sometimes this civilizing element you’re referring to can become an act of appropriation and subsequent absorption too? The transformation of the fantastic to the banal?
In response to McDermott’s excellent point I’m unsure what I could possibly add. Speaking more from the paces academia has put me through rather than a great depth of knowledge on the history of fantasy’s acceptance by the literati, I would hazard a guess that fantasy’s current poo-pooing by canon elitists has more to do with stereotypes regarding the fantasy genre than the actual beast. In my experience, the genre is viewed as pure escapism with little artistic merit by many well-read profs who should know better. This no doubt gets into consumer culture as has already been discussed, particularly in the pulp and post-pulp eras. Or maybe it is fantasists tendency to stick together and emphasize the solidarity of the genre, thereby allowing many diverse talents and styles to be lumped into one easily dismissable grouping?
Hearing academics dismiss Tolkien as “warmed-up medievalism” while championing works I found far more mundane in both in style and historical literary context turned me off a bit from some individuals, but in all fairness to the Keepers of the Canon I’ve met many who think the world of not just Borges and Calvino but also the New Weird and the Old. I suspect we will see a shift in the canon as a new guard comes in, a move towards accepting literature regardless of genre–or so I hope. Like most fans of the fantastic, I presume, I am quick to consider excellent, intelligent fiction of any stripe to be literature regardless of its placement in book stores or its author’s personal definition of which genre they work in.
My list of mostly 20th century texts would go something like this:
The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount, by Italo Calvino
Because: Much as I love his less linear works, some of which have already been mentioned in earlier posts, there is a beauty and sharpness to these perfectly paired novellas. I prefer the latter to the former, at least on my last read through, but both demonstrate a master’s attention to detail and trope, and through his sheer skill as an artist what should be the blandest, most obvious symbolism is absolutely profound.
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, by Angela Carter
Because: Perhaps better known for her short fiction, carter exemplifies the difficulty in assigning genres to particular works or authors. The question of whether this novel is horror, fantasy, dark fantasy, science fiction, Literature (with a capital L), erotica, satire, or some amalgamation of them all is rather a moot one, I feel, given that the experimental and fearless novel gets the brain juices coursing around at frightening speeds.
Baudolino, by Umberto Eco
Because: Eco’s unofficial definition of the term neo-medievalism, coined by the author in his “Travels in Hyperreality.” I love this for many of the same reasons as the above Calvino works, and fans of both non-fantastic historical fiction and those who regularly look beyond the mundane can appreciate this finely nuanced text. Eco has the impressive ability to reward the reader familiar with the history at hand and simultaneously educate–in a completely unobtrusive fashion– the reader who knows little of the era.
Hyperboria, by Clark Ashton Smith
Because: Smith was the first author I discovered who poured even more detail and personality into his landscapes than his characters, the quintessential example of a writer focusing on lush world-building at the expense of all else. Some readers hate him for this and his poetic prose, but I adore it. Incidentally, Smith reputedly quit writing fantasy because he felt the genre was becoming just that, and too commercial to boot.
And, to doff my hat at McDermott’s excellent point,
Candide, by Voltaire
Because: There was a time when the most respected academics in the world counted fantastic tropes among the most accessible and useful in the stack. A quick and joyous read, and a clever reminder that books can stimulate the mind regardless of how serious their style or how realistic their plot.
I’ve “photographed” this page and comments to Zotero, so I can refer back to it at leisure. As always- so many books, so little time. There are definitely some I haven’t read and now have to add to those two GIANT piles next to my bed. Thanks (I think).
Matt, I think that is definitely what happened to the artists of the cultural revolution in the 1960’s.
Though John Lennon and his peers were “musicians” – technically speaking – they were also by necessity performers of lyric poetry.
The world changed. The Other was brought into the mainstream. It is – I hope – a regenerative act.
Uh, hey…
What the hell was I talking about this for? I’m going to have to read like forty comments just to remember why I brought this up! Somebody else pick this up for me. Tim, where’d you go?
Hm. The lack of “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley on everyone’s lists disturbs me.
Speaking of disturbing, I’m going to upend the list entirely. We’ve listed plays that are often performed and interpreted on stage instead of read aloud. Why not list out 5 texts of fantasy that might actually survive the death of the printed word in semi-literate culture, and enter the fantasy canon of the future?
“The Wall” by Pink Floyd
“Guernica” by Pablo Picasso
“Faust” by Charles Guonoud
“Princess Mononoke” by Hayao Miyazaki
“Carnival” celebrated by donning masks and getting hammered in many places in the world.
I completely agree with Mr. McDermott’s notion of the civilizing nature of writing. This is what has puzzled me the most about Ian McDonald’s most recent works and the amount of praise they have been getting. While it is gratifing to see someone attempt to work out places of the globe that are usually ignored by English language writers, his Brasyl and River of Gods seem to be primarily acts of appropriation. They owe a great deal to the ground staked out by the Orientalists, and for some odd reason I found myself reading Edward Said’s critique of that tradition and McDonald almost at the same time… and I did shudder a bit
It was a shock, too, after reading and loving E. M. Forster’s novels – which do such an excellent job in suggest ways to decolonize the mind, or at least to note where the borders of worldviews collide and fall apart – that 1) he wrote a short story that is now widely considered to be science fiction and 2) he was a bugger of an imperialist. Funny how that word has changed so much, gone from being a symbol of ideas of progress to the dirty word I meant to use it as.
And thank you about the point concerning Garcia Marquez. I guess it is something like a miscommunication, or a lack of conceptual framework. Working through the book, having the book work on you, instead of following a pre-packaged way to interpret it, is like confronting (or really is confronting) another way of being in the world. I never really liked the idea of magical realism, it seemed like a polite way to dismiss something that was undeniably brilliant but somehow considered untasteful… “spirits chained to trees, technology as magic? that obviously has nothing to do with serious literature…’
Like the film version of Beowulf: Part of what makes the poem so wonderful is the collision of different realities that it represents. It can be so alien at times, stand in stark relief to what we now hold as important, that it can challenge us about our values and visions. I think the film was unfair by the poem by collapsing it into some Oedipal/Freudian morality play. All the knots and power valences and misunderstandings vanish… though I guess in a film, those would be pretty hard to deal with.
But speaking of being careful about categories when discussing other cultures, what about our own past? George Orwell has for a long time (always?) been considered a writer of some science fiction novels. That was the received notion that I had the first time I read Animal Farm and 1984, but is this only replicating the same problems that confront the readers of Borges and Garcia Marquez? And what exactly was Lord Dunsany up to? In other words, through reinterpretations, the building of literary traditions, can we sort of colonize the past?
I was thinking about Shelley… wondering about gothic literature, romanticism, (hey, I just got something… probably missed the bandwagon by a decade or two, but after Neuromancer by Gibson was published, and before cyperpunk became the label he and like writers had to contend with, they were called neuromantics. I wonder how self consciously they wanted to mimic ‘new romantics’? which Gibson was especially … )
anway, Shelley, yeah, absolutely important…. but are the film versions of Frankenstein more important culturally than the book? (Thomas Disch seemed to think it was not read widely when first avaliable, and then remained mostly a lit course text).
non literate literary fantasy… 5… and then back to work for me!
Mr. McDermott, you picked some really excellent ones (Floyd, P. Mononoke,…)
In order not to replecate those,
The Seventh Seal – Bergman
Pan’s Labyrinth – Del Toro
(any album) by Tom Waits… Black Rider, Real Gone, Bone Machine
if you can, check out some art by Alan Magee…. a Maine artist, amazing!
The Arrival – Shaun Tan
how did I make a smiley face? I didn’t mean to…
The line between metaphor and reality wasn’t delineated by the scientific method. The logic of dreams was just as valid as the logic perceived in everyday life.
I’d disagree on that. I think there’s a potential hard-edged definition for the “fantastic” as a form of the strange, and one that *doesn’t* require a post-Enlightenment notion of the “laws of reality”. Even without that rationalist sense of a rationable world that works in terms of physical laws (the “laws of reality”) you do still have a sense of “laws of nature”, a sense of nomological possibility and impossibility.
The notion of miasma that’s central to Greek tragedy rests on a sense of wrongness, of a breach in the order of things — the laws of Man, Nature and God; it’s the strangeness of the *abject*. The *absurd* and the *profane* in comedy rest on a sense of a similar type of breaching of the “laws of nature”, I’d argue. These narratives are actually driven by the disrupting effect of the strangeness. As is the tall tale, where strangeness takes the form of the *exotic*. And the fantastic is just a particular flavour of exotica.
What all these flavours of strangeness boil down to is, I’d say, changes in the subjunctivity level of a text (from “could have happened” to “could not have happened”) and/or modality (”should/should not have happened”). With a post-Enlightenment sensibility we tear that idea of possibility/impossibilty apart into different levels — temporal (technical/historical) and metaphysical impossibilities that map to the different types of conceit used in the fantastic genres (SF’s hypotheticals, Alt-History’s counterfactuals and the metaphysical conceits of Fantasy.) We don’t need that scientific worldview however to have an informal sense of the “laws of nature” and things which contradict them.
That our sense of nomological impossibility (events which contradict the “laws of nature”) is *not* dependant on a scientific worldview is, I think, evidenced by the projection of these events into alterior elsewheres, the fabulous remote realms of myths and traveller’s tales. Where we’ve developed a view of the world as mapped and measured, all corners of it according with the laws of nature, before the development of that view it was possible to imagine that the laws of nature might be quite different elsewhere. The crucial point is, I think, that the location of strange events in places outwith the native domain of the author — beyond the limits of the known world — indicates an awareness of the distinction. There’s a here-and-now where the laws of nature apply; if you want to see the exotic you have to go beyond that mundane realm. We’ve mapped the here-and-now so extensively we can’t just posit such elsewheres, so we have to invent the elsewhens of the future, parallel worlds or alterior realities (i.e. secondary worlds).
I mean, I think it’s interesting, for example, that in Gilgamesh, apart from Ishtar (who can be understood as her human avatar, the city-state’s queen/priestess), the strangeness encountered through the narrative is largely met with in dreams (this is how Shamash communicates for example) or out in the distant realms of the exotic, the great beyond. Humbaba in the Cedar Forest is small fry, but look at Gilgamesh’s journey to Utnapishtim; this is basically treated as being a journey to “beyond the sunrise”.
Anyhoo, that’s my two cents worth.
Hmm. Those smiley’s are meant to be m-dashes, btw, but what the hey.
“The crucial point is, I think, that the location of strange events in places outwith the native domain of the author — beyond the limits of the known world — indicates an awareness of the distinction. There’s a here-and-now where the laws of nature apply; if you want to see the exotic you have to go beyond that mundane realm. We’ve mapped the here-and-now so extensively we can’t just posit such elsewheres, so we have to invent the elsewhens of the future, parallel worlds or alterior realities (i.e. secondary worlds).”
what I meant to do was quote that (see above) and then write: Exactly! Much better said then I my attempts, but I agree with those two cents of yours.
That’s a very interesting point. I think my point could be clarified by saying that the logic of dreams and the logic of reality didn’t have the clearly delineated borders that they do post-Enlightenment. After the Enlightenment, is miasma possible? The idea of nomological impossibility seems changed–you can break the laws of nature, and suffer the horrible consequences as nature rights itself, but you cannot break the laws of reality without drifting in to the strange.
I think part of my original point is that the logic of dreams and the logic of nature weren’t so easily separated pre-Enlightenment. I’ve tried to come up with something cogent, but have failed so far.
I think the transition of the elsewhere to an elsewhen may have something to do with it though. There’s not enough room in our reality for the strange, and that transition seems important when trying to define modern literary fantasy.
I think there is something too, about how people thought about dreams. Where were those images and experiences coming from? Were they produced by the individual, or were they the result of, again, something outside, something other? Divine touch, devilish intervention, bad food… Even after Freud, even today, when dream logic takes on an ontological primacy, it is usually because the dream is attributed to something/one exterior to the self. In a sense, then, is this not a permutation of Mr. Duncan’s idea of the perceived strangeness of elsewhere? Only this time instead of a geographic, physical distance, it is the product of a sense of Otherness impinged directly on the human?
I think part of the issue my be not where they come from, but how we treat them once they arrive. The experience of dreams takes a backseat to the experience of reality, and is subject to reality, in many modern interpretations.
What happens when the otherness of the self’s unconscious makes every experience strange? This is the purview of postmodern literature. What is it about fantasy that makes it different?
This is a fascinating conversation; even though we’re futilely drawing lines in the sand, we’re spending such a nice afternoon at the intellectual beach. (Watch out for octopi.)
Wow! Great day at the beach! But I think I’ll stay in the shallows. There have been some wonderful choices for the cannon. The only one I would add that hasn’t been mentioned is Watership Down, one of my favorite books when I read it in my teens.
Mary, that’s an excellent suggestion. I love “Watership Down,” and read it only about five years ago.
I have to second that – Watership Down!
“The Course Of The Heart” By M. John Harrison
“The City Of Saints & Madmen” by Jeff Vandermeer
“Children’s Hospital” by Chris Adrian
“Magic For Beginners” By Kelly Link
all the Flat Earth Chronicles by Tanith Lee
I’d like to Include Shriek, but it’s so dependent on “..City..” I also wanted to throw “Fortress of Solitude” by Lethem on there, but I feel it’s mostly a “main stream” novel anyway. Close Calls were “Kalpa Imperial” by Angelica Gorodishcer , the Holdfast Chronicles by Suzy McKee Charnas, “The Etched City” by K. J Bishop
I’ve not read anything of Charnas’ except for “The Vampire Tapestry,” which I rather enjoyed. How does the rest of her work hold up?
[...] less fantasy than sf, but because fantasy seems more a much more diffuse category. Terry points to this discussion about “essential reads in literary fantasy”, which may provoke some thoughts, although [...]
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So I’m the first to mention Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter? Really? Because — despite some problems — that is where I would start. Not just revolutionary fantasy, but anti-fantasy as well, with sci-fi limbs and an avant-garde heart. (Also in this vein, believe it or not: Ursula K. LeGuin’s Always Coming Home.)
I think Julio Cortazar’s 62: A Model Kit and Cronopios y Famas both fit the suit here, despite being too damned slippery to categorize.
And there is really no denying the brilliance and wonder of most of the books on this list.
I very much enjoyed those Charnas books, Mr. Staggs. It was one of the first SF novels that made me realize speculative fiction could transcend genre. Technically I guess it’s “post-apocalyptic”, but it doesn’t really play with those rotes. It deals a lot with gender roles, and it’s more than a little “feminist”. The series is very thought provoking, and more than a little dark.
Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold
The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant and Other Stories: And Other Stories by Jeffrey Ford
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susan Clarke
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Maybe my definition of “fantasy” is more widespread than others :p
Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer
The Percolated Stars by Rhys Hughes
The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake
The Passion of New Eve, Nights at the Carnival and Burning Your Boats by Angela Carter
The Passion and Sexing the Cherry by Jeneatte Winterson
There are more, including Beloved by Toni Morrison, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie and The Master and Margarita, but I’ve listed the above as the first five to come to mind.
Adam
xxx
Dhalgren, Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand and others bt Samuel Delaney
Fine Prey by Scott Westerfield
Works by Ursula LeGuin, Patricia McKillip, Charles DeLint, Roger Zelazne.
These works arouse questions on a deep level in me- questions that I didn’t know how to ask. There’s something Zen about them.
They don’t satisfy me, rather they make me hungry. They make me wonder.
The language pleases me like a sunset, or anexcellent picture.