LiteratureandFantasy

Literature and Fantasy Speculative fiction may be a big tent but real literature when considering the same topics is not If a story has science fiction attributes there is little chance it will be accepted into the canon Virtually anything future oriented or technological is automatically shuttled into genre becoming science fiction by default There is very little literature which is science fiction Margaret Atwood s A Handmaid s Tale some Vonnegut and not a whole lot more Real literature is somewhat kinder to fantasy A hybrid fantasy story can make quite acceptable literature Literature generally uses three main types of fantastic construction The first might be called speculative storytelling There are often no overt fantasy elements in such a story but the very premise itself will be fantastical Often verging on being a schematic mythology this form is characterized by the use of symbolism and extended metaphor Here is an example A woman is born to a man who wants only a son So he simply goes on as if she was male raising her as a boy and believing fully in her maleness In time enjoying her enhanced place in society she adopts the role fully What might be only a specific case of transvestism can become a metaphor for the role of gender or the place of women in male dominated society or for the nature of identity itself Something fairly normal or at least conceivable can become the vehicle of fantastic speculation The story cited The Sand Child by Tahar Ben Jelloun will be reviewed in our upcoming Desert Themes issue so stay tuned A second area of fantasy in literature is the fabulation The key mark of the fabulation is a subversion of acknowledged reality for the express benefit of the story being told It is important that the reader recognize the unreality of the tale to appreciate the points of the narrative This is a very widely used convention in literature by countless authors William Burroughs comes immediately to mind as does Katherine Dunn in the incredibly creepy Geek Love Most importantly it is a convention used with a nod and wink to the reader and in this strays a bit from what could be called a pure fantasy Where speculative storytelling uses covert fantasy in the realm of overt reality the fabulation turns this inside out hiding the reality within a construct of fantasy A third avenue involves fantastic elements emerging into a conventional setting There is a lot of this in Kafka and especially in the genre of magical realism Mostly Latin American or Central European magical realism s three M s are mystery miracle and magic Some explanations of magical realism s genesis are first the mysteries of alien culture observed by the European invaders of the New World the acceptance of mystery as an integral part of pagan religion The second is the structural system of belief in miracle which underpins the Catholic faith the miraculous happening in literary narrative echoing the history of acceptance of miraculous happening in life Third is the collision of the modern world with remnant traditional belief systems often magical which offer a resonant symbolism and structure The typical magical realism story involves singular fantastic eruptions into everyday existence aberrations of reality which hold within them spiritual truths It is half way fantasy not forcing the reader to make a full suspension of disbelief using fantasy only as an element in the story What literature is most comfortable with is an emergent fantasy as in magical realism Kafka Burroughs and recently in the excellent work of Jonathan Carroll It has an analog in horror fiction which uses the intrusion of the occult into mundane life Literature will use the speculative device but is leary of full speculative investigation At the sharp end use of fantasy in real literature is not about a full speculative suspension of disbelief That is left to science fiction and fantasy which it ghetto ises as genre The stink of it is that these two step children are not fully literary that they are somehow less Unfortunate but that s just the way thi