METAPHENOMENAL MUSINGS PT. 1

 The posts in this series involve an experiment in which I respond to a CHFB thread on the subject "what is fantasy" with as little theoretical language as possible. Thus there will be assorted references in the essays to things other posters have said.

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What is fantasy? Good question.

The first elephant in the room involves content that almost everyone on Earth deems fantasy, and that's stuff that violates the rules of causation at a particular time and place. Note that I don't use the term "impossible," because there are things can be deemed impossible in one time and are proved not to be so in another. 

There's an obscure literary book, THE NARRATIVE OF REALISM AND MYTH by Gregory Lucente, in which the author makes a rough definition of both fantasy and science fiction as violations of what can happen in either time, space, or both. Any time we're dealing with "the stuff everyone calls fantasy" (and this part is just me, not Lucente), we're dealing with an author creating some "X-factor" so that the thing he's describing, the thing outside the normal causal order, can exist. A lot of these "X-factors" are very blatant about coming out of nowhere, be it "science fiction" things like Wells' "cavorite," with which the author's vessel travels to the moon, or "high fantasy" things like Tolkien's godly Valar, who bring all of Middle-Earth into being.

But there are also X-factors that are not so blatant. The OP mentions King Kong's "impossible" height. But we don't absolutely know that an erect-standing mammal could not have grown to Kong's rough height of 18 feet, the same basic height range as the four footed Indricotherium. But since we have no evidence of any mammals comparable to Kong, the King's existence also depends on an "X-factor" that violates the rules of spacial causation, the rules of what we positively know happened in our spacial continuity. The viewer of KING KONG presumes that Kong functions in much the way as does the biggest erect standing reptile, T-Rex, with whom Kong enacts the ancient rivalry of mammal vs. reptile. But since there's no evidence, Kong needs just as much of an "X-factor" as cavorite and the Valar.

There are also less blatant extrapolations that one may choose to relate to "time," though not in the same manner as Wells' time machine. In 1874, when Jules Verne wrote 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, no one had succeeded in powering submarine propulsion with an electrical battery (that breakthrough was finally accomplished, beyond all doubt, in 1897). So Verne had to use a reasonably logical "X-factor" in order to make his submarine traverse all 20,000 leagues beneath the waves-- but it was still an "X-factor," nonetheless.

Next up: the second and last elephant.