THE UNBEARABLE FULLNESS OF EMPTINESS

I've recently finished David Sandner's FANTASTIC LITERATURE: A CRITICAL READER (2004), which is a collection of essays and book-excerpts dealing with the concept of fantasy in literature, whether in the form of archaic romances, fairy tales or the particular modern genre known as "fantasy." It's an excellent collection, ranging from critics who are well known for their theories on the subject (Samuel Coleridge, Northrop Frye, Eric Rabkin) to those whose writings touch on the subject more indirectly (Mikhail Bakhtin, Fredric Jameson). But for me the best insight into the ambivalent heart of fantasy appears in the lead essay by Sandner, who says that the genre depends upon "the tension between its potential fullness and its surprising emptiness."

Having established that theme statement, he describes how two fantasy-creators-- Lewis Carroll and J.R.R. Tolkien-- both began their most significant works from contemplating single sentences that led both authors to create the respective worlds of Wonderland and Middle-Earth. I won't recapitulate Sandner's argument here, but in essence he demonstrates that dichotomy between the "empty" and "the full."

For Carroll, Sandner says, "fantasy is an empty set" that shows the implicit emptiness behind all of our arbitrary assignments of meaning, as in the scene where Alice asks Humpty Dumpty if a name must mean something, and is told, in essence, that his name does but that hers does not.

Tolkien, though, chooses to fill the void rather than empty it further. "While Carroll offered nothing to hold, and makes one dizzy with the emptiness of language, Tolkien also offers nothing in the language itself: but he hints that, read aright, it will awaken a meaning... that lies beyond the language, too full for mere words and their proscribed meanings."

Sandner then, views the genre/mode of fantasy as directly comparable to the emptiness/fullness of human language, which is natural enough, inasmuch as fantasies are made from language, even the "picture language" common to both archaic mythology and comic books.



But do these categories of emptiness and fullness describe actual qualities of language? Or are they, rather, processes, comparable to those described by medieval alchemists--"Solve" (breaking down) and "coagula" (building up)? I tend to favor the process theory.



This line of thought also brings me to consider another set of differences: between the meaning given the term *mythicity* by the critic who first used it, Eric Gould, and my own use of the term. I quoted this phrase from his book, MYTHICAL INTENTIONS IN MODERN LITERATURE, back in this essay:

"We live within a world where symbolic meanings may help-- do help-- yet are never fully able to bridge the ontological gap."

I recognized the logic behind that statement, but it still strikes me as special pleading, as if symbolic meanings are necessarily untrue because they do not, say, lead one into a universe of pure being, be it one like Wonderland or like Middle-Earth.

It seems demonstrable to me that language is always in a continuous process of "breaking down" and "building up," much like the concepts of "War" and "Love" in Empedocles. Thus Carroll's "empty set" take upon fantasy is simply his apprehension of its potentiality in the "breaking down" of seemingly fixed concepts, while Tolkien's "full set" take shows an awareness of how language, and any structure created by language, also has the propensity to "build up" associations and connections of all kinds.

And of course if one looks one can find both tendencies in the works of both authors, as I'm sure Sandner knew. I think Sandner's correct in seeing that both authors tended to dwell on one tendency more than the other, and it may be that much of what any reader favors tends more toward one tendency than the other-- be it the Beatles vs. the Stones or (to name a personal preference) the Hernandez Brothers vs. Daniel Clowes.