INDUCTION JUNCTION

In DEDUCE I SAY I stressed the necessity for expanding the bounds of theoretical criticism by stepping away from the quasi-scientific inductive method, in which the critic usually has in mind some fixed notion of “the good” and then simply surveys an assortment of works that exemplify “the good” by either positive or negative example.

As with any endeavor, inductive critical works can be done well or poorly. In my short review of T.E. Apter’s FANTASY LITERATURE, I found that Apter’s criteria for her “good” in fantasy-works was too amorphous to prove useful to me, as well as being too weighted toward works of canonical literature. I’ve commented in more positive terms on Richard Wright’s COMIC BOOK NATION. I didn’t agree with Wright’s essential message: that comic books are only “good” insofar as they expoused liberal social messages for the edification of the reading public, which caused him to largely dismiss the Superman comics produced under the editorship of Mort Weisinger. But Wright’s criteria were cogent and his research solid, and so NATION is one of the best inductive studies of comic books, far superior to Harvey Kurtzman’s disappointing comics-history FROM ARRGH TO ZAP!

Somewhere between the middling example of Apter and the superior example of Wright stands Brian Attebury’s THE FANTASY TRADITION IN AMERICAN LITERATURE (1980). In contrast to Apter, Attebury’s writing-style is breezy and non-academic. I was fairly certain that I’d read the work before years ago, probably in the decade for which it was written, and indeed, several passages were still pleasantly familiar to me. And naturally, I appreciated that Attebury, unlike Apter and Tzvetan Todorov, dealt with all manner of fantasies by all manner of authors, ranging from a canonical figure like Hawthorne to more popularly oriented American fantasists like L. Frank Baum and Edgar Rice Burroughs. As an inductive study about how the idiom of fantasy evolved in America, Attebury’s study is invaluable.

However, though his criteria for “the good” in fantasy-literature is better formulated than T.E. Apter’s, Attebury’s criteria is a bit too limiting and could stand some deductive theoretical input. In his first chapter he cites his criteria for fantasy, as against genres that may use similar materials, thusly:

“Narrative poetry often approaches the fantastic, but narrative verse seems to have been all but phased out by less restricted lyric forms. Surreal fiction has the same freedom: it can flash a succession of words before the reader or suddenly drop all pretense and begin speaking discursively. Fantasy, though, needs consistency. Reader and writer are committed to maintaining the illusion for the entire course of the fiction. Tolkien refers to this commitment as “secondary belief;” E.M. Forster speaks of the reader of fantasy as being asked to ‘pay something extra,’ to accept not only the conventions of fiction but also implausibility within those conventions. Fantasy is a game of sorts, and it demands that one play whole-heartedly; accepting for the moment all rules and turns of the game. The reward for this extra payment is an occasional sense of unexpected beauty and strangeness, a quality which C.N. Manlove, among others, calls ‘wonder.’”—Attebury, TRADITION, p. 2.


As should be clear from my RULES OF ESTRANGEMENT series, I agree that it is important to immerse oneself in the rules of a fictional game, since I didn’t agree with a Grant Morrison statement that suggested that one could throw a narrative’s rules away on the slightest pretext. (Fortunately, most of Morrison’s actual comics don’t do this.) However, it’s a mistake for a reader to pay attention only to rules—to what I’ve called the “discursive” mode (a word Attebury uses for a different purpose above). What Suzanne Langer calls “presentational symbolism” is the chief means by which we experience “beauty and strangeness,” not through the rules about whether or not magic is possible in this or that world.

Attebury’s study might have benefited from some deductive emphasis like that of Suzanne Langer, for Attebury’s over-stressing of fantasyworld-rules causes him to devalue Peter Beagle’s masterful THE LAST UNICORN. Attebury, somewhat following in the footsteps of some of Ursula LeGuin’s polemic, carps at UNICORN—by my lights one of the hallmarks of “beauty and strangeness” in all American fantasy—because he says Beagle indulges in “anachronisms at the expense of the story” (p. 159). Yet one page before claiming that Beagle does not gather his fantastic phantasms “into a satisfying whole,” he comments favorably upon SF-fantasist Andre Nortion. He admits that she is not a great writer, with which I concur, but says, following the Forster dictum, that “her lack of irony and displacement often pays for itself in commitment to the story being told.” I’ve enjoyed assorted Norton books, and I can agree generally with Attebury that there’s a critical mindset that too often validates irony over all other elements of storytelling. Yet all the Norton books I’ve enjoyed don’t hold a candle to Beagle’s UNICORN, where it’s clear to me that irony is only one voice within many.

On a side-note, I enjoyed re-encountering the aforesaid Forster notion of “paying something extra.” Twice in recent essays—-both in response to online essays by one online critic in particular-—I’ve been surprised to see comics-fans speak as if their lack of response to visceral stimulations in the comics-medium—in one case to scenes of horror, in the other, to scenarios of violence-- had something to do with the limitations/execution of the medium. Relating to such visceral stimulations has never been a problem for me, and so I wonder if those who find it a problem have worked themselves out of the ability to “pay something extra” in terms of total investment in a given type of narrative. Food for future essays, perhaps.