Reclaiming the Modern World for the Imagination: Guest of Honor Speech at the 19Th Annual Mythopoeic Conference

Volume 15 Number 2 Article 4 Winter 12-15-1988 Reclaiming the Modern World for the Imagination: Guest of Honor Speech at the 19th Annual Mythopoeic Conference Brian Attebery Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore Part of the Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons Recommended Citation Attebery, Brian (1988) "Reclaiming the Modern World for the Imagination: Guest of Honor Speech at the 19th Annual Mythopoeic Conference," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Vol. 15 : No. 2 , Article 4. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol15/iss2/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Mythopoeic Society at SWOSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature by an authorized editor of SWOSU Digital Commons. An ADA compliant document is available upon request. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To join the Mythopoeic Society go to: http://www.mythsoc.org/join.htm Mythcon 51: A VIRTUAL “HALFLING” MYTHCON July 31 - August 1, 2021 (Saturday and Sunday) http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-51.htm Mythcon 52: The Mythic, the Fantastic, and the Alien Albuquerque, New Mexico; July 29 - August 1, 2022 http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-52.htm Abstract Guest of Honor speech, Mythcon 19. Defines indigenous fantasy—fantasy in a contemporary, “real-world” setting—and illustrates its techniques as demonstrated in Wizard of the Pigeons and Little, Big. Additional Keywords Crowley, John. Little, Big; Fantasy, indigenous—Definition; antasyF , indigenous—Technique; Lindholm, Megan. Wizard of the Pigeons This article is available in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol15/iss2/4 Page 24 MYTHLORE 56: Winter 1988 fiectaiming the Modem fo r the Imagination Quest o f Monor Speech at the 19 th Annual Mythopoeic Conference ‘Brian Atte6ery ince I am here as the official representative of academe, edges in too close for comfort, and veers of f again on a new Slet me begin by apologizing for the way literary tangent, shooting off streamers of stolen fire. scholars have largely ignored fantasy. That is why a few of us have tried to deal with fantasy. Most of us, unfortunately, seem to be comfortable only It's tricky. Those parabolic orbits are hard to follow. You with narratives that keep a consistent relationship with the have to keep changing lenses to keep the story in focus. world of experience. You might think of these stories as But it is worth it when a new light appears in the sky - planets with nice circular orbits around the real world. Comet Tolkien, Comet Le Guin - especially when it comes They have just enough narrative momentum to avoid fall from a direction you haven't anticipated. ing into the center - collapsing into pure history or autobiography. On the other hand, they never get any far What we have had in the last few years in American ther from the source, either. The pull of reality brings them fantasy is a comet swarm: a group of original fantasies that back, around and around. If they are not equivalent to the pose particularly interesting questions about the space be world of sensation and preconception and memory that tween fiction and reality. Fantasies like R. A. MacAvo/s we call real, the separation is so uniform that it can almost Tea with the Black Dragon, Orson Scott C ard's Seventh Son, be ignored, as if the story were reality. W hat this means to or Nancy Willard's Things Invisible to See challenge our no literary scholarship is that a lot of attention gets paid to im tions about the ways literature can transform experience agery, character drawing, and point of view, which have and about the limitations of fantasy as a genre. to do with correspondences between the real and the fic tional, and not much attention to anything else. Ordinary fiction, the kind that literary scholars notice, attempts to generate, as a primary response, recognition. If But you don't learn about celestial mechanics by look it succeeds, we feel we have been given an authentic ing only at the predictable orbits. You need to look at the glimpse into the human condition. Fantasy, though, is eccentric ones as well. A good fantasy is a comet, which directed primarily toward a kind of reponse we call swings into view from who-kncws-what regions of space, wonder. Wonder is connected with seeing things not so MYTHLORE 56: Winter 1988 Page 25 much as they are but as they might be or ought to be. The conceal or bridge the built-in conceptual gap. The gap it unknown can generate wonder; so can the familiar seen in self reflects our different ways of knowing and respond a new light. ing to the world, the magical and scientific dimensions of thought and language. It also reflects the less evident gulf The ability of fantasy to generate wonder is closely tied between story and history, our two ways of organizing to both setting and story line. The setting is traditionally an time and placing ourselves within it. enclosed Other World of magical beings and miraculous events: Narnia or Middle-earth. The story follows the fairy The most rigorously realistic fiction emulates history in tale model: whatever happens along the way, the ending all its muddle and sprawl. Its mode of discourse is essen will come out right. We sometimes call this coming out tially reportorial, for history ultimately derives from the right a happy ending, for short, but readers of the great eyewitness account. W e make use of that discourse every fantasies know it is much more ambiguous and less trivial day in conversation, telling what we saw, what we did, than that. what someone said to us. W e usually make an attempt to arrange our account in chronological order, with the logi The setting makes the ending possible. A magical cal sequence of cause and effect providing the connections world cannot be confused with real life, and so the story is between events: "Then he got noisy again, so I hit him with entitled to reach the most satisfying, rather than the most the lamp." probable, conclusion. Frodo will reach Mount Doom and destroy the Ring. The conclusion, in turn, validates our So long as one sticks to the rules - tell what happened response to the imagined world, our astonished delight at or reasonably might have happened, describe what one ents and elves and mallom trees. A different ending might saw or might have seen, keep events more or less in order have reinforced experiences in Saruman's tower or and causes evident - one can incorporate any incident or Shelob's lair; it might have generated irony or horror, but emotion, adopt any perspective or style. This kind of not wonder. reporting is so adaptable and seems so natural that we tend to forget that it is not the only form of discourse available, But the recent fantasies I mentioned earlier, and others even in conversation. There are also, for instance, tall tales by Megan Lindholm, Charles de Lint, Sherri Tepper, Diana and jokes, neither of which is arranged according to the Paxon, Peter Beagle, and John Crowley, paradoxically at rules of historical discourse. Fantasy shares with these tempt to reattach the wonder-generating mechanisms of other oral genres a certain contrived or constructed fantasy to realistic-seeming settings and situations. quality. Its characters are chosen and its incidents ar ranged to fit a predetermined pattern, which allows for the At this point I need a name for this group of fantasies, achievement of a particular effect: laughter in the case of so I don't have to keep listing authors or titles. I might call the joke, the refreshment of vision called wonder in the them magic realism, since they parallel some of the tech case of the fantasy. niques of a painter like Renee Magritte. I might name them after earlier writers who seemed to be working toward similar combinations of the impossible and the mundane: Defining serious literature only in terms of the dis F. Anstey or Edith Nesbit or Charles Williams. But I think course of reporting, as critics have done for the past cen we have essentially a new phenomenon that deserves a tury, ignores the human need to cast the events of one's new name, and I am going to suggest the name indigenous life in story form, rather than exclusively in reference to fantasy. That is to say, this is fantasy that is, like an in history. Stories have heroes, whereas histories only have digenous species, adapted to and reflective of its native en actors. Stories have beginnings and end, and an internal vironment. dynamic that moves them toward a particular goal. The form of a stoiy is its chief meaning, whereas the meaning What characterizes indigenous fantasy is its avoidance of history must be inferred through application to external of the characteristic other-worldly frame. Rather than values. taking place in Tolkien's Middle-earth or any such fairyland, indigenous fantasy calls its setting Ann Arbor Other World fantasy more or less bypasses history by or Seattle. This choice involves making two simultaneous inventing a setting in which every object, incident, or and imcompatible assertions: first, that the story takes motivation may be assumed to be in service to a preor place in the ordinary world accessible to our senses, and, dained and comprehensible narrative pattern.

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