Fantasy seems to be everywhere these days—in the movie theaters, on the best-seller lists, in the social phenomenon of Pottermania. Although Harry Potter has ended, and after ten years has even fallen off the New York Times best-seller list, fantasy itself has not disappeared from their ranks. A glance at the current fiction best-sellers at the time of this writing shows two works of fantasy among the top ten by Terry Brooks and Christine Feehan (number one), as well as one by a writer who made her name in fantasy and has turned her hand to science fiction with her latest book (Stephenie Meyer).

Despite its popularity, the genre of fantasy tends to be ignored by literary critics even more than science fiction is. Even when a critic purports to be doing a study of fantasy, as in Lucie Armitt's Theorising the Fantastic, the focus is on novels such as Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Doris Lessing's Briefing For a Descent Into Hell—fantastic works with status as literature. Armitt, while recognizing subversive tendencies in literary fantasy, sees contemporary genre fantasy as consolationist wish-fulfillment (60). More than ten years prior to Armitt's study, Ann Swinfen bemoaned precisely this attitude on the part of critics in her aptly named In Defence of Fantasy:

The modern fantasy novel might hardly seem to need a defence, were it not for the curiously ambivalent position it occupies in the contemporary literary scene. ... some critics and academics condemn the whole genre with a passion which seems to have its roots in emotion rather than objective critical standards (1).

Part of the problem may be in the way the individual reader or critic defines "fantasy" and "genre fantasy." John Clute and John Grant, for example, define genre fantasy as "almost always high fantasy, heroic fantasy, or sword and sorcery ... in Fantasyland" (396). We, on the other hand, would like to propose a different way of defining "genre fantasy." "Fantasy" as such is a broad trend in literature with roots in the oldest epic works, taking modern impulses from the Gothic novel, and demonstrating significant presence in modern literature in sub-genres like magic realism. "Genre fantasy," by contrast, can be seen more as a marketing category: the fantasy books on the shelves in the SFF section of bookstores, and including any number of sub-genres, all of them together still a subset of the broader category of fantasy. This would include high fantasy, heroic fantasy, and sword and sorcery, of course, but also any book with the word "Fantasy" on the spine or sold or marketed as fantasy.

Even seen in this broader way, however, "genre fantasy" still has drawn surprisingly little critical attention for all its recent publishing success. On the academic front, the books in the Greenwood Press series "Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy" have done much to improve the situation, but they remain the exception rather than the rule—and the majority of the studies concentrate on science fiction. For the most part, fantasy still suffers from critical disinterest and overgeneralization and is often viewed as a basically conservative genre, both in the sense of its conventions and its moral world view—escapist literature set in an alternative world where good and evil are well-defined and easily recognized. (1)

One reason for this may be in the well-known conservatism of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, two of the most influential writers in twentieth century fantasy. Another reason, however, stems from equating reliance on tried and true literary conventions on the part of the writer of fantasy with conservatism of readers, a facile and flawed jump in logic. To quote Jonathan McCalmont: "This is usually explained away as a result of the drive towards accessibility and immersion or escapism but, I would argue, it is also a result of the conservatism of the audience and a value in its own right." (2) The quest-type plot described so uncharitably by McCalmont elsewhere has, however, been around for thousands of years, from the epic tale of Gilgamesh to the Odyssey to the many examples in medieval romance. McCalmont acknowledges this but sweeps it aside, saying that fantasy writers dilute the monomyth.

Archetype, quest, or diluted monomyth—given the sales numbers, fantasy obviously holds a large appeal for millions readers and movie-goers these days. While single-title fantasy accounts for only about 10.48% of fiction sold (3), thirteen of the top twenty grossing films of all time are fantasy, while most of the rest are science fiction. (4) If it is not basic intellectual laziness and conservatism that is sending them—and us—flocking to fantasy, what is it?

Theories of Why We Read Fantasy

Many writers are familiar with Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces, or if not, with Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey. In his study of comparative mythology and religion, Campbell identified a common structure in the mythological adventure of the hero which he summarized in three words: "separation—initiation—return" (30). Of course, when viewed in detail, there are many more steps on this archetypal journey which has also come to be commonly referred to as the quest narrative. Creative minds as diverse as George Lucas and Margaret Atwood have consciously used a structure based on Campbell's archetype; the blockbuster Star Wars is based on it, as is the literary feminist novel Surfacing. Long after these successes, Vogler wrote his book as a kind of road map for writers, summarizing the most important points and skipping the examples from myth and religion, but emphasizing the universal appeal of this structure: "All stories consist of a few common structural elements found universally in myths, fairy tales, dreams, and movies" (3).

But if this "hackish" plot (McCalmont) of the monomyth is not only common to fantasy and is instead a universal narrative structure, it can hardly be used as an argument for the popularity of fantasy—either in a positive or a negative sense. Another characteristic of fantasy which is often cited for its appeal is nostalgia for a squeaky-clean, non-existent past: "Nostalgia ... is the dominant feeling of the fantasy genre... that spic-and-span Medieval Europe that's populated by swords and sorcerers and so forth." (5) Unfortunately, many of the works of fantasy that are selling so well these days have very little to do with medieval Europe. Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga, for example, which is now leading the New York Times bestseller list in YA series fiction, is a new-kid-in-school-vampire-love-story. Dark urban fantasy in general is one of the hottest contemporary sub-genres in fantasy. And even in George R.R. Martin's best-selling Song of Ice and Fire series, which does have settings reminiscent of medieval Europe, very little is antiseptic.

On the other hand, fantasy does often contain a sense of setting things to right—even when it is dark and gritty. This ranges from the clean, crisp nobility of Tolkien's heroes (even amid their own shifting allegiances) to the gritty faux-Medieval realism of Martin's works to the urban fantasies in the vein of Patty Briggs and Carrie Vaughn. This is a trait which it shares with mystery, where the sleuth stereotypically restores normalcy to the disrupted community of the story through resolution of the crime, but not necessarily with science fiction, which often uses other story structures than that of the hero who goes out, solves a problem, and restores a community. The "what's-going-on-here" story, for example, very common in science fiction that deals with alien worlds and societies, is more difficult than fantasy, mystery or thriller to squeeze into the "universal" narrative of the monomyth.

Rather than making a distinction based on the narrative structure or the moral world of fantasy, perhaps it makes more sense to examine the role of the protagonist in fantasy literature. A literary critic deeply indebted to Campbell's work on myth, Northrop Frye, attempted in his Anatomy of Criticism to develop an all-encompassing theory of archetypes, modes, symbols, and genres in narrative. The theory of modes is based on the "hero's power of action" (33) and is divided into myth, romance, high mimetic, low mimetic, and ironic. Many of the protagonists of fantasy fall into the mode of romance(6):

If superior in degree to other men and to his environment, the hero is the typical hero of romance, whose actions are marvelous but who is himself identified as a human being. The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power violate no rule of probability once the postulates of romance have been established (33).

Perhaps part of the appeal of fantasy can be found in this elevated role of the hero or heroine. Following Frye, the protagonist of fantasy is by his or her very nature a positive figure for us to identify with—one of us but also special.

The Relationship Between Everyday Reality and Fantasy

Fantasy is selling very well these days, in the form of books and games and movies, but it is fantasy of many different types and sub-genres, and most of the biggest sellers don't conform to the stereotype of the Tolkien knock-off. Rather than nostalgia, the appeal may be more in the unreal and the exotic and the contrast with the everyday. We have as little expectation of meeting a hauntingly handsome vampire in the high school cafeteria as Bella in Meyer's Twilight, but this kind of clash with the strange and the different can bring the primary world into sharper focus. The Harry Potter series, too, begins in our world—the real world—and takes us from there to the secondary world, in a fantasy of escape from parental control.

Fantasy brings magic into our world, and while of course very few of us actually believe in magic, the work of fantasy itself does. Fantasy has a narrative logic much post-modern literature does not have. It displays a trust in narrative and the narrated world—in much the same way most genre fiction does, be it science fiction or thriller or romance. And it displays a trust in its heroes and heroines, who are confronted with a problem and go out of their way to solve it—also the case in much genre fiction.

The single consistent difference between fantasy and all these other genres, including science fiction, is that fantasy introduces the marvelous into the narrative. Science fiction has technical marvels and secondary worlds which are also intended to induce a sense of wonder in the reader, but according to its own internal logic, the wonders should be rational and scientific. Perhaps in the present era of skepticism, the protagonist of fantasy who undertakes the hero's journey has more freedom to return bringing a message of renewal or cleansing or hope—it's fantasy, after all. We don't have to believe in it except between the covers of the book.

But when we do believe it, when the fantasy gels into something as real as the living world around the reader, then the true magic occurs. The doors open to our sensawunda and the mundane concerns of life fade like the firelight reflected on a departing hero's blade. The huge attraction of such stories in these days of miracles and wonders from the laboratory may well justify us in calling this an Age of Fantasy.

Footnotes

1. As proof that this assumption is still alive and well, see Jonathan McCalmont, "Conservative Fantasy, the son of." (http://www.sfdiplomat.net/sf_diplomat/2007/08/conservative-fa.html)
2. "The Aesthetics of Fantasy - Part One." (http://www.sfdiplomat.net/sf_diplomat/2007/02/the_aesthetics_.html)
3. For market numbers in genre, see our article in last month's IROSF, "SF and Fantasy: Siamese Twins or a Marriage of Convenience?" (http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10461)
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films
5. See Chris Ritter, "The Fantasy of Fantasy." (http://critter597.blogspot.com/2008/02/fantasy-of-fantasy.html)
6. "Romance" here of course is not referring to the contemporary genre of the love story, but rather to the kind of epic romance common in medieval literature and including among others the vast cycle of Arthurian tales.