Avoiding the rehashed themes/plots/mechanics of Fantasy

I think it is true of early fantasy for sure. And still true of a lot of epic fantasy, though not all of it. I’m curious, though, as to whether there is a definition of fantasy literature as a whole that doesn’t encompass mythology.

 

That is an interesting question. I doubt it could be boiled down to something as brief as a paragraph though, more like an article. Fantasy has grown vast, and extends in many different directions now. It's become amorphous and indefinite, as so many things seem to do in the arts.

 

Honestly, I tend to think of fantasy in the broadest sense possible. Fantasy is just literature with supernatural elements.

 

I don't even think the supernatural elements are required. Certainly, there are works regarded as 'fantasy' and shelved in that section of the bookstore that don't have any.

 

In that case, fantasy is just literature that is... fantastical!

 

True. Perhaps an easy definition of the genre is no longer possible at this point. I tend to think of it as literature that takes place in other than the real world as it actually exists--but that is very broad and encompasses works of horror and SF.

 

Heh. I like that.

 

I thought that was the definition. Stories set in worlds in which there are one or more fantastical elements. Something that couldn't be or have been in our world (as we understand things). As opposed to science fiction - stories set in worlds that could be in our world (as we understand things).

 

I don't think so. There are fantasy works by writers like KJ Parker and Guy Gavriel Kay, for example, that could have been set in our world but are not. In the case of Kay, some of the works are even based on historical events in our world but they're not set in our world. Some people call it 'historical fantasy,' more recently.

 

Reading about those two it seems that it is publishers that are labeling them as fantasy, presumably for marketing purposes. KJ Parker has expressed a preference for historical fiction and Guy Gavriel Kay dislikes the push to call his work fantasy or historical fantasy.

 

Kay doesn't use 'historical fantasy,' from what I've seen, but talks about his works slipping back and forth between 'historical fiction and fantasy.' Parker has called his work "sort-of fantasy" because it's written about people and places that never existed. There's no way you could call any of the works in question 'historical fiction.' If the setting is meant to be a secondary world that never existed, that's enough for it to be fantasy, imo.

 

mythology was very real and vital to someone at some point. The intent of the author is important to me.

I believe fantasy must have been intended as fictional. That rules out myth and religious stories, but Beowulf could be argued to have been a fantasy. I suppose fairy tales are fantasy as well.

 

As I understand it fairy tales and folk tales are essentially the same thing as myth, except that they weren't actually religious stories (as myth was). They encoded the deepest wisdom of a people in symbolic form, same as myth did. In a sense that's also what Aesop's fables were (fabulous tales, written by a fabulist), but he certainly knew he was writing stories to be told to children. I'm not sure that's true for fairy tales and folk tales. Also, Aesop's fables were simple morality tales designed to teach good behavior. That's not what fairy tales and folk tales were.

 

Good point, yeah. There's a deeper cultural level that all of these originally oral stories reach that fantasy intended as such does not.

 

I'm trying to think of a way to formulate what they actually were. I'm far from an expert, but from my reading they seem to often be cautionary tales about listening to the small quiet voice of the unconscious, replete with warnings about what happens if you don't. The voice comes from strange unexpected sources, like a tiny man made of iron or a raven or a dwarf who lives underground, or a frog from the bottom of a well. All perfect symbols for the voice of the unconscious. The people who scoff at these strange (often crippled or deformed) helpers suffer the consequences, but the ones who do listen are richly rewarded.

Of course the unconscious, though nobody knew what it was at the time or where it was coming from, was much more well-regarded in pre-literate and pre-scientific times, before materialism took over.

 

There can be a lot of symbolism in those stories. "The Girl Without Hands" comes to my mind, such a strange story. I wonder if you wouldn't do a blog post on it; I think it might be up your alley.

 

I'll look into it for sure, thanks for the heads up. I did recently read a story about a man with tiny pure white hands, I believe it was in the book The Weird. Very strange stuff.

 

Just gonna drop this here real quick and let it go so as not to hijack the thread any farther.

The Calumniated Wife: Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 706—The Maiden Without Hands

When interested in a fairy tale or folk tale, look it up along with the terms Aarne Thompson Uther or ATU type.

The classification system stops at physical acts like incest and mutilation, but of course those probably point to deeper psychological meanings. These tales can be analyzed like dreams. Many of them probably originated as dreams.

Here are a couple of fascinating resources:

• Aarne–Thompson classification system @ Pop Culture Wiki
• US IB English-Grimms' Tales for Young and Old: The Complete Stories: Folklore Studies Indexes

And now, back to your regularly-scheduled programming...

 

For 'fresh' Fantasy, you could try reading some of the old masters. I have just recently discovered Jack Vance as an author, and I can't seem to get enough of his books now.

What they all have in common is they are extraordinarily well-written. He never lets the detailing of his fantasy worlds (and they are VERY detailed indeed) obscure his characters. He never lets the fact that some of his characters do magic interfere with them being individuals ...nearly always living in some kind of grey moral state. He is funny too, when appropriate. Sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. He writes excellent female characters, who often drive the story without turning into macho wannabe men (in most cases anyway ...I can think of one exception.)

Cugel the Clever is a hoot from start to finish. (The Eyes of the Overworld, followed by Cugel's Saga which are included in the full version of Tales of the Dying Earth.) The Lyonesse Trilogy is a masterpiece—maybe slightly more standard than his other fantasies, but it never lets go till the end. Rhialto the Marvellous is also wonderful to read—he's a slightly more principled (and a bit smarter) character than Cugel, but they have a few things in common. I am now in the middle of Demon Princes, which is partly sci-fi but mostly Fantasy. And superb. I can't get enough of Jack Vance at the moment ...and I was getting VERY tired of so many Fantasy tropes.

 

I am more annoyed by the simplification tropes than anything else, both in fantasy and science fiction.

When an author doesn't want to give a damn about politics in their world and pulls the "X Empire" from their shoe plastering it with Roman references without actually having read a single line on Roman History proper. Same with Kings & Medieval times. A personal peeve of mine is when people directly lift the modern (post-1660) British nobility directly into a wholly medieval system and pretend it "just works" with no explanation whatsoever.

 

I've read that the big difference between a cliche and a trope is about execution, and I think that's about right.

Is the story built around the trope? Is it appropriate for the genre or story structure? Does it appear at the right time in the story?

I'd much rather read a well-written story around a trope I don't like than a terrible story about a trope I enjoy.

 

Several years ago, I wrote an unfinished Fantasy genre that maintained more of a grey area. I got good reactions from my writing group. It still had good vs evil elements to it, but not with my Elves and Orcs. And my humans were just being humans. At first, my writing group didn't look interested when I told them the summary. They really liked my story when they read it.

 

magic systems. And no attention paid to political systems; just because there’s a king doesn’t mean he isn’t operating within a particular institutional environment. I’ll be honest, eight times out of ten I simply prefer historical fiction. There’s a certain romance that I always look for in fantasy, but never manage to find.

 

Have you read a variety of fantasy authors?

 

I just skimmed this page, particularly the discussion between me and @Friedrich Kugelschreiber about the differences between fairy tales and stories (not quite how we stated it).

Fairy tales are not like regular stories because they're archetypal. They're about types rather than individuals. Even if an individual has a name in a fairy tale, they represent a type. The names are often strange, like 'Horsehair went to wash himself in the creek as he did every morning... '

In fact, let me see if I can find that really cool little thing about tales (which include fairy tales) that Angela Carter wrote in the afterward to her book Fireworks.

Here we go:

AFTERWORD

I STARTED TO write short pieces when I was living in a room too small to write a novel in. So the size of my room modified what I did inside it and it was the same with the pieces themselves. The limited trajectory of the short narrative concentrates its meaning. Sign and sense can fuse to an extent impossible to achieve among the multiplying ambiguities of an extended narrative. I found that, though the play of surfaces never ceased to fascinate me, I was not so much exploring them as making abstractions from them. I was writing, therefore, tales.

Though it took me a long time to realize why I liked them, I’d always been fond of Poe, and Hoffman – Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious – mirrors; the externalized self; forsaken castles; haunted forests; forbidden sexual objects. Formally, the tale differs from the short story in that it makes few pretences at the imitation of life. The tale does not log everyday experience, as the short story does; it interprets everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience, and therefore the tale cannot betray its readers into a false knowledge of everyday experience.

The Gothic tradition in which Poe writes grandly ignores the value systems of our institutions; it deals entirely with the profane. Its great themes are incest and cannibalism. Character and events are exaggerated beyond reality, to become symbols, ideas, passions. Its style will tend to be ornate, unnatural and thus operate against the perennial human desire to believe the word as fact. Its only humour is black humour. It retains a singular moral function – that of provoking unease.

The tale has relations with sub-literary forms of pornography, ballad and dream, and it has not been dealt with kindly by literati. And is it any wonder? Let us keep the unconscious in a suitcase, as Père Ubu did with his conscience, and flush it down the lavatory when it gets too troublesome.

So I worked on tales. I was living in Japan; I came back to England in 1972. I found myself in a new country. It was like waking up, it was a rude awakening. We live in Gothic times. Now, to understand and to interpret is the main thing; but my method of investigation is changing.
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And keep in mind that fairy tales are far more compressed than the much more sprawling tales of Poe or Hoffman. Those exist somewhere between the far more 'typical' (or archetypal) fairy tales and short stories as we're familiar with them today, dealing with individuals in something approximating ordinary day-to-day life like the life we're familiar with.

In fact it just occurred to me—I'd say the difference (between fairy tale and short story) is much like the difference between dream and story.