THE READING RHEUM: ZOTHIQUE (1970)

 In contrast to my rather so-so experience in reading the Clark Ashton Smith collection XICCARPH, ZOTHIQUE, another of the Lin Carter paperback editions from Ballantine Books, re-acquainted me with all the reasons I liked Smith's wry, mordant stories. Zothique-- possibly named for the Greek idea of the "Sothic Year," sometimes associated with cycles of world annihilation-- is Earth in its final days. But Zothique, unlike most if not all previous future-Earths in fiction, became dominated by ancient magicks, as described in the opening lines of "The Dark Eidolon:"

On Zothique, the last continent on Earth, the sun no longer shone with the whiteness of its prime, but was dim and tarnished as if with a vapor of blood. New stars without number had declared themselves in the heavens, and the shadows of the infinite had fallen closer. And out of the shadows, the older gods had returned to the gods forgotten since Hyperborea, since Mu and Poseidonis, bearing other names but the same attributes. And the elder demons had also returned, battening on the fumes of evil sacrifice, and fostering again the primordial sorceries...

It's a world in which Smith establishes a loose continuity between a few dozen exotic domains and their equally exotic deities, though in a sense none of the stories are literally tied together, even to the extent of the Cthulhu mythos. Oddly, editor Carter arranged the seventeen Zothique stories into what he considered their historical order. I can't claim that I don't pursue intellectual chimera just as elusive, but since there really isn't a "history" as such in Zothique-- which resembles the world of the Arabian Nights seen through the charnel lens of Edgar Allan Poe-- I didn't see the point. Personally, I might have preferred to see the stories-- all written in the early thirties-- to have been ordered according to their time of writing, though I concede that this could have been difficult, given that the author was something of a hermit.

Not all of the seventeen stories in the Ballantine collection meet my criteria for high-mythicity fiction, but as I've done in many other reviews, I'll go down the list, judging each with the symbols "G" (good), "F" (fair), and "P" (poor). 

XEETHRA (G)-- The titular character is a simple goatherd who wanders into a mountain cavern and finds himself in a long-vanished realm. Hungry, he helps himself to some nearby fruit, after which he beholds two huge dark guardians, though they do nothing to impede him. He then begins to have dreams of a separate existence, wherein he was Amero, king of the ancient realm. Xeethra's mind becomes so divided between his two incarnations that he returns to the cavern-world. There he meets the lord of the domain, the demon lord Thasaidon, who offers to restore Xeethra to his earlier glory, but only if the goatherd can keep true to that incarnation. It turns out to be a "grass always greener" situation, but it's interesting that Xeethra's unhappy fate arises from tasting a sort of "forbidden fruit."

NECROMANY IN NAAT (F)-- Prince Yadar goes hither and yon seeking his lost love Dalili. He finds her on the isle of Naat, which is dominated by two necromancers with a small army of zombies. Sadly, Dalili died before coming to Naat, and the sorcerers have made her one of their undead followers. Things don't turn out all that well for Yadar either, but better than they do for the necromancers.

THE EMPIRE OF THE NECROMANCERS (P)-- This tale follows yet two other necromancers who create their own private kingdom of dead people. This one loses points given the presence of a zombie guy who turns on his masters, just because the story needs him to do so.

THE MASTER OF THE CRABS (P)-- A sorcerer and his apprentice go seeking treasure on an island inhabited only by crabs. But another sorcerer seeks the same wealth, and he knows how to turn the local fauna against the other seekers. Not much of anyone to root for.

THE DEATH OF ILALOTHA (F)-- King Thulos, though married to his reigning queen, becomes obsessed with the idea that his dead lover Ilalotha may cheat the Reaper thanks to her skills in witchcraft. He braves the tomb to find out. Things do not go well.

THE WEAVER IN THE VAULT (P)-- This tale suffers from a big buildup and an arbitrary resolution. A king sends three warriors to a dead city to bring back an ancient mummy for purposes of divination. Of course, things end badly for all three men, but Smith earns point in that the titular "weaver" isn't some stock vampire or zombie. However, the alien-seeming creature doesn't lend itself to context of any kind, and so seems rather contrived.

THE WITCHCRAFT OF ULUA (G)-- Smith was at his best when he wasn't so focused on delivering a "gotcha" to the horror fans. Young Amalzain plans to accept a position in a corrupt kingdom full of degenerates, particularly the witch queen Ulua. He visits his anchorite uncle Sabmon, who wants him of the perils and gives him a protective amulet. Sure enough, Ulua attempts to seduce the innocent youth, and when he rejects her, he's haunted day and night by specters of rotting corpses. Amalzain finally flees and escapes back to the protection of his uncle, who shows him the fate he missed, as the entire kingdom is dragged down to the hell of Thasaidon. 

THE CHARNEL GOD (G)-- Poe would have loved this one. While Phariom and his bride Eliath pass through a city dominated by worshippers of the death god Mordiggian, Eliath succumbs to a cataleptic fit that makes her look dead. The priests of Mordiggian ignore the young man's protests and claim the woman to be buried in their sacred tombs. Phariom must brave the sepulchers of the god to prevent his bride from being buried alive. But as it happens, there are worse blasphemies transpiring that night, as a necromancer plans to steal the corpse of a woman he slew, the better to raise her from the dead for his pleasure. Will the worshippers, or even the death god himself, consume both the licit and illicit transgressors?

THE DARK EIDOLON (G)-- The evil king Zotulla commits many nasty acts, but he doesn't even remember driving his chariot over the body of a beggar-boy, Narthos. But Narthos becomes obsessed with gaining revenge for his injuries, and for years he studies sorcery. Years later, under the name Namirrha, the magician shows up in the city where Zotulla still reigns. Slowly Namirrha weaves spells to confuse and disconcert the ruler, like a cat toying with a mouse. But there's a new wrinkle when Namirrha's patron god Thasaidon warns the magician to leave Zotulla alone, since the king provides the demon with lots of evil deeds. Not surprisingly, Namirrha still visits an appropriate equine doom upon the king, but gods are not defied, and the dish of revenge never tastes good cooked by demon-fire.

MORTHYLLA (G)-- In the midst of courtly degeneracy, discontented youth Valzain can't get any satisfaction. But someone at court tells him that there's a lamia who hangs out at the local necropolis, and Valzain is willing to risk death to allay boredom. The lamia Morthylla welcome the young blade, and they make love. He begins to wonder, though, why she spares him her fangs. This leads to a sad story of disillusionment and death, but at least Valzain receives a mild surcease of sorrow in the afterlife.

THE BLACK ABBOT OF PUTHUUM (F)-- Two young warriors are charged with making a trek to a foreign land in order to guide a beautiful woman to her wedding with their king. Hostile creatures force the little band to seek shelter in a temple run by a Black man named Ujuk, even though the warriors think he's got a yen either to hump the young (implicitly White) girl, or to devour her. Smith playing to the worst elements of the pulp magazine audience? Not precisely, because in the catacombs beneath the temple, the two stalwarts meet the spirit of the real Abbot of Puthuum. Formerly a living Black man, the late Abbot belonged to an ascetic cult, but he strayed from his path, had sex with a succubus, and so spawned the only half-human Ujuk. After the two heroes slay the false abbot, they jointly decide that they don't want to waste the young bride on some decrepit king and decide only one of them should take her as the prize. The young woman's response provides one of the few humorous denouements in a Smith story.

THE TOMB-SPAWN (P)-- Two jewel merchants give ear to the story of an ancient kingdom whose king commanded a fell spirit, Nioth Korghai, who may still guard the king's tomb. The two begin their journey back home, but on the way, they're harried by a beast-like people. Unlike the various treasure-hunters in other stories, the innocents end up in a certain tomb, guarded by the very spirit they just learned of. This is easily the weakest story, though Smith does name-check the sorcerer Namirrha from DARK EIDOLON just for an inside reference.

THE LAST HIEROGLYPH (F)-- Nushain the astrologer seeks to avoid the fate decreed for him by the stars. Only the inventive nature of the doom redeems this so-so story.

THE ISLAND OF THE TORTURERS (G)-- I realize this story is basically just one of many "the biter bit" stories, but it's easily the most memorable one in the collection. A virulent plague, the Silver Death, decimates all the people ruled by King Fulbra. He survives the loss of all his people thanks to a magic ring which suspends the effects of the plague with which he too is infected, even keeping him from spreading it to others. He sets sail for a kingdom where he hopes to spend his days in peace, secluded so as to minimize contact with others. But a storm casts the unfortunate king upon the shores of Uccastrog, the island home of a people devoted to coming up with skillful tortures. Fulbra endures the torments of the vile natives without resorting to his one ace in the hole because a woman tells him she plans to help him escape. Then she betrays him, and there's no reason for Fulbra to withhold his hand-- or rather, his ring-- and the doom of the torturers is eminently satisfying.

THE GARDEN OF ADOMPHA (F)-- This too is a "biter bit" tale, but not nearly as interesting as TORTURERS. King Adopha maintains a fantastic garden, and how it grows is with the bodies of his pawns and enemies. The king owes his success to his court wizard Dwerulas, but the rash royal decides the magician's power might threaten him, and so murders Dwerulas. So this time, instead a worm turning the garden, the garden turns the worm.

THE VOYAGE OF KING EUVORAN (G)-- One of the best takes last place. Like most of the idiot monarchs in Zothique, Euvoran fills his days tormenting the subjects who fall under his scrutiny. His rulership is symbolized by his fabulously bejeweled crown, and much of his pride in his kingship is tied up is this hereditary possession. Then a stranger, either a magician or a god, decides to mess with Euvoran's peace of mind. In full sight of the court, the stranger brings to life a stuffed bird, and all watch as the bird flies off with the monarch's crown. Since Euvoran doesn't have the sense to know when he's out of his depth, he launches an expedition to find the bird's nest and recover the crown. Numerous events, both tragic and comic, eliminate all of Euvoran's retainers. Finally, in a great tour de force, the hapless monarch is taken prisoner by a race of intelligent birds, who are naturally offended when he mentions having stuffed one of their kindred. Despite Euvoran's massive stupidity and his indifference to the suffering of others, he's actually spared any of the ghastly dooms Smith metes out to the guilty and innocent alike, though, to say the least, he ends up in comically reduced circumstances.

MYTHCOMICS: "I'M GOING TO STEAL IT" (TOURNAMENT OF THE SIX REALMS, 2021?)

Of the various English titles attributed to the Japanese manga ROKUDOU TOUSOU-KI, I think "Tournament of the Six Realms" most sums up the appeal of this shonen feature. I've seen the title "Battle of the Six Realms" more frequently online. But because TOURNAMENT was cut off by its original publisher at only sixteen episodes, there's no way to know if the main character was intended to engage in any activity beyond trying to win a fighting-tournament in his future-civilization. I saw one Reddit claim that the mangaka may have completed a few more chapters of TOURNAMENT around 2022, so I'll randomly assign the opening chapters with the date of 2021. Only the first two chapters meet my criteria as a myth-comic.

After author Serina Oda describes how future humanity fled a poisoned atmosphere and built a great city beneath the earth, we meet main character En, busy grubbing through garbage as he listens to public broadcasts, far above his head, about the impending Tournament. En's not quite alone, though. A somewhat older man named Sam, but calling himself "Sensei," shows up and remonstrates with the young fellow for blowing off school. En asserts that he's been exploring the city's underground trash heaps in search of "body modification" tech, which he can sell on the open market. 

Though En loosely fantasizes about participating in the Tournament, he knows that he has no means to pay for the body modifications necessary for such high-level battles. Moreover, just as he scavenges amid discarded refuse and the dead bodies of unsuccessful combatants, local tough guys try to scavenge the fruits of his labors. One of the thieves even has some modification-tech in his body, though one presumes it's a low-level implant. The thug threatens En, but a weird fluctuation in the electrical system distracts the crooks, so that En escapes. Unbeknownst to the vagabond, a separate individual observes the unusual phenomenon.

A little later, En collapses from exhaustion in the midst of an upper-level crowd, and no one helps him but one stranger, whom readers should recognize from the earlier scene. The stranger doesn't introduce himself, but the two talk a bit, and En mentions, without any particular emphasis, that people told En he was born "from the corpse of a modified woman," implicitly someone who lost a battle in the Tournament and was consigned to the underground trash heap. The stranger turns the topic to the goal of competition in the Tournament, and seems to encourage the youth to enter, despite the fact that En can't afford any modifications. Then the stranger runs off.

Moments later, En runs into his only friend, the sensei Sam. En tells Sam how much the older man's friendship has meant to him. But to En's dismay, Sam sells him out. The sensei reveals that he was only waiting until En reached the age of 15, which was the ideal age on which to experiment on him.

However, En's extreme panic triggers something in his body, even though he's never technically undergone any modifications. En's unexplained power wrecks the lab and frees him from his bonds. However, Sam's assistants have modifications that give them arms like praying mantises. En fights them, unleashing a lightning attack and defeating the assistants.

Then Sam reveals that he too can manifest his inner mantis, and as the two of them fight, En runs low on power. Then there's a major concussion, apparently not from En or Sam, and the mysterious stranger shows up, demonstrating his own modification. And suddenly En puts all the pieces together. The stranger is none other than the current Tournament-champion, the famous Miroku, and he has saved En just to see "what you are capable of in the Tournament." And thanks to this quixotic support, En resolves to make the trash heap of his birth "the center of the world."

In the ensuing battle, Sam is defeated, and Miroku prepares to kill him. But En interferes. He argues that, despite the evil scientist's motives, Sam's false solicitude really helped En get through his torturous existence. So he spares Sam's life-- though En nevertheless punishes his bad friend by punching him out. Then, as a crowning touch, Miroku reveals that his main reason for following En around was that he'd observed the youth's peculiar powers, and so wondered if he Miroku might simply steal whatever tech En possessed. En concludes the two part story by telling his friendly enemy that he plans to steal Miroku's title as champion of the Tournament of the Six Realms.

The subsequent fourteen chapters do not reveal the source of En's powers, though the setup implies that somehow he acquired them from the body of his deceased mother. Some chapters broadly imply, though, that Miroku was more than just an exploiter like Sam. It's strongly implied that Miroku cleaves to the trope of the Sportsman Who Most Wants a Rival. The oldest use of the trope known to me is Richard Connell's 1924 short story "The Hounds of Zaroff," which became the basis of the 1932 MOST DANGEROUS GAME and countless imitations. Yet I harbor the unprovable opinion that  Japanese pop culture may have embraced the trope far beyond the respective cultures of Europe or America.

The other fourteen stories are very good, though the symbolism is not elaborate enough for me to label any of them mythcomics. I hope Serina Oda gets the opportunity to continue En;s exploits. But even if he (or she?) does not, En remains one of the more impressive examples of the "hero of low estate aiming for the stars." 

THE APPROPRIATION HUSTLE PT. 3

I have not used the above essay-title since I completed a couple of posts on the subject of appropriation in 2017, but since my views on the subject have not changed, the title seems fully applicable here, to extend my remarks on the topic as they appear in Brian Attebery's 2013 book STORIES ABOUT STORIES.

In the last section of my Attebery review, I quoted the author's opinion of a particular White Australian author's "appropriation" of Aboriginal stories for her fantasy-novel.

As with similar endeavors in Canada, the United States, and other colonial locales, a goal of the [colonial] project... was to get rid of indigenous peoples through a combination of assimilation and genocide while APPROPRIATING [my emphasis] their songs, stories and rituals.

I won't repeat my refutation of this dubious logic, though I'll add the point that Attebery managed to conflate all those colonial persons urging for "assimilation" of marginal peoples with those who were supposed "appropriating" the sacred narratives of those people. In point of fact, the powers urging assimilation would have been totally focused on erasing all cultural differences. But when a researcher with an interest in Native American culture like Henry Schoolcraft devotes six volumes to preserving Native American culture-- research that, in turn, provided much of the content of Longfellow's HIAWATHA-- one could hardly call that erasure. It's also possible to fairly critique the characterizations Schoolcraft or Longfellow made of Native American culture without assuming some dire plot to heap opprobrium on Indians, and without assuming that the respective authors made tons of money by adapting their stories. (Longfellow did; Schoolcrafr probably did not.)

On a separate matter: Attebery was very vocal against the idea that only authors aligned with "living traditions" like that of Aboriginal worship could be deemed worthy to weave fantastic fiction out of those sacred narratives. He said nothing about other Aboriginals would approve of what the hypothetical Aboriginal author did with their sacred narratives, though Attebery dismissed the complaints of Christians who didn't always like what authors like C.S. Lewis wrought in his fictions about the "living tradition" of Christianity. Somehow I doubt Attebery would be quite so sanguine if traditional Aboriginals were upset with their religion's depiction, even by one of their own-- or even one who was ethnically related to that subgroup, but not "living the life." 

A specific example of some real-world condemnation can be found in the public criticism of fantasy-author Rebecca Roanhorse. Of her six published books, I've read both entries in the "Sixth World" series, which take place in a future where an apocalypse has more or less returned certain parts of the U.S. to their pre-Columbian status. So, given that it's a author with partial Native American ethnicity writing about Native American culture, it all must be good, right?

Not quite. According to Roanhorse, she's half-Black and half-Pueblo Indian, but her "Sixth World" fantasy is based upon Navajo religion. After Roanhorse became well-known, certain Navajo pundits claimed that a non-Navajo, even one who had lived for some years on the Arizona reservation known as "Navajo Nation," had no right to utilize Navajo narratives for fiction irrespective of formal literary quality. From Wikipedia:

Dr. Matthew Martinez, former Lieutenant Governor of Ohkay Owingeh,^[8][9] welcomed Roanhorse on her first and only visit to the community, in 2018, and spent time with her. He said, "I recognize that adoption is an emotional experience for families and communities and especially those who have been adopted out with no real connection to home....At Ohkay Owingeh, our current enrollment process privileges family lineage and not blood quantum." Agoyo explained that "anyone who descends from an Ohkay family - as Roanhorse has publicly claimed - can become a citizen. But Martinez said the author has chosen a different path."^[1] Martinez continued, "by not engaging in any form of cultural and community acknowledgement, Roanhorse has failed to establish any legitimate claim to call herself Ohkay Owingeh." He eventually concluded, "It is unethical for Roanhorse to be claiming Ohkay Owingeh and using this identity to publish Native stories."^[1]

 

 

Serendipitously, a similar example of small-minded exclusionary attitudes was brought to my attention by this CRIVENS post. It seems that a 2024 facsimile of the renowned GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #1 came out with an advisory warning reading, in part, that the story contained "negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures." But GSXM is not some 1940s cartoon making jokes about African cannibals or the like. The advisory also claims that its purpose is "spark conversation to create a more inclusive future." But how can there be a conversation, when the authors of the advisory don't even say what was wrong with "Second Genesis?" Did the story fail to depict non-White characters like Sunfire and Thunderbird as even-tempered? Or did some Marvel drone get the whim-whams from the scene in which a group of tribal Africans are shown worshiping mutant heroine Storm as a goddess, because neither they nor she know better?

Those are both possibilities. However, I'm of the opinion that the real issue was probably that all of the creative people involved were dominantly Caucasian in ethnicity. Yet the idea of having a concept like X-MEN being written so as to satisfy all ethnicities is absurd. Navajo pundits may be content to have no fiction-author base a story upon their sacred tales unless it's someone who truly came, ethnically and culturally, from the Navajo community. But how could any single writer or artist satisfy the demands of writing for all the ethnicities in this or any X-MEN story? Storm is ethnically though not culturally Black American, so I guess Rebecca Roanhorse could write her. But she couldn't write Thunderbird (even had he survived), because he's Apache. Nor could she write any hero from any other culture. And the same would apply to any other author. (And yes, I know that there are no "sacred narratives" in X-MEN, but obviously the whole "appropriation argument" extends far beyond the specific "religious fantasy" context it assumed in Attebery's screed.)

While I will admit that some pro-appropriation individuals may be motivated to preserve the integrity of their cultures, I stand by my imputation that an awful lot of talk about "appropriation" is what I called it in the title, a hustle designed to make sure some people get jobs and others don't. What did Ryan Coogler, a Black American from Oakland, know about real African cultures before he helmed a motion picture based on a made-up African nation? Wasn't he as dependent as a White writer-director would be, upon what expert researchers advised him? Even though he's credited with scripting, I feel sure that he depended on outside research as much as Longfellow depended on Schoolcraft. 

I have seen some online essays claiming that some of the worst political correctness is losing its hold on American culture. That doesn't mean an absolute return to the days when almost all comics-creators shared the ethnicity of European Jews and/or Gentiles. But it could mean a return to the idea that the quality of the work is more important than the identity of the work's creator.

PICKING ATTEBERRIES PT. 4

 For reasons I'll enlarge upon shortly, I was able to finish STORIES WITHIN STORIES, including the chapter I skipped earlier. The reason is simple: the latter chapters of the book concentrated on explicating several modern fantasies I hadn't read, and since I'd already got the overall sense of Attebery's project, I could give them all no more than a cursory once-over.

Even though I broke this review into sections for ease of posting comments, that procedure has one distinct advantage over the usual summary approach: it allows me to anticipate some of the directions in which the argument seems to be trending. In Part 3, even though I'd not seen Attebery use the word "appropriation" in the sense popularized by Roland Barthes, I recognized that this was essentially the argument Attebery was promulgating. Before that chapter, the author had mentioned the word "appropriation" once in the introduction, but in a fairly neutral manner, which MIGHT have been merely discussing the overall political climate for fantasy fiction (or, for that matter, any fiction).

So I feel some vindication when I reach Chapter 5, with the forbidding title, "Colonial Fantasy." and find Attebery discussing Australian author Patricia Wrightson. Attebery gets fairly exercised at Wrightson's hubris, as a White Australian, for having utilized Aboriginal religious concepts in her fantasy novels, and the "A" word is not far from Attebery's lips:

As with similar endeavors in Canada, the United States, and other colonial locales, a goal of the [colonial] project... was to get rid of indigenous peoples through a combination of assimilation and genocide while APPROPRIATING [my emphasis] their songs, stories and rituals.

Any comparison between (a) a fantasy-author invoking religious concepts not strictly part of the author's heritage to (b) a general process of colonial officials enforcing "assimilation and genocide" on real people is, quite clearly, a thoroughly reprehensible equation. But, for what it's worth, in the same chapter Atteberry claims (despite his earlier negative remarks on an Alan Garner book) that he has no problem with fantasists using "myths of vanished civilizations." Though earlier he criticized Campbell's monomythic interpretation of such myths, here he claims that such myth-tales "no longer belong to anyone but are legitimately part of a cultural commons." But the stories of "living traditions," like those of the Aboriginal native, are different. "They are still surrounded by rituals and obligations; they demand that the listener live by their rules."

But do they, really? When an Aboriginal native orally relates the myth-stories of his people to a group of Australian tourists, certainly the tourists are expected to listen seriously and not critique the stories. But if a modern Aboriginal fiction-writer did what Patricia Wrightson did-- creating a entirely fictional story in which the myths of his people were (presumably) depicted with the same fidelity as the oral storyteller-- what "authority," to use Atteberry's favorite word, does a purely fictional story have over listeners not of the Aborigine's tradition? 

Attebery's mistake is ironic, given that elsewhere he expressly distinguished between traditional myth-narratives and fictional stories based upon them. For instance, in Chapter 1 he states uncategorically that the most famous works of Ovid and Apuleius "function as fantasy to the degree that they are not authorized or reverent retellings of myth... they play with the material, inventing details, rearranging incidents, and inviting a response of amusement rather than awe." 

Tangentially, Attebery never mentions the financial motives for "in-tradition" authors to nullify "extra-traditional" competitors. But the motive remains present, nonetheless. I gave a real-world example of such motives in this 2017 post.

A fuller discussion of the chimera of "appropriation" must await a separate article. Therefore I'll wrap up this part of the review by stating that i the latter sections of the book Atteberry very much thumps the tub for numerous new authors of fantasy who meet his political criteria, while granting older authors either negative assessments (Zelazny, Lewis) or cursory attention (A. Merritt, Robert E. Howard). And there's nothing wrong with this priority in itself. Attebery should absolutely champion the books he likes best. But his politicized justifications for his tastes are up for counter-critique.

I said "this part of the review" because at the end of Part 3 I said that I would speak to another of Atteberry's mistakes regarding "the differing dynamics of oral culture vs. written culture." 

Though Attebery is undoubtedly aware of the tremendous difference between the two cultures, he doesn't make much of the matter. In Chapter 4 he states that "oral traditional stories are always formulaic," though he does a bit of a take-back by claiming that traditional tale-tellers can still choose "the lesser known among alternative formulaic elements." This breeds a somewhat tortured comparison to the interaction in modern stories' "formulaic elements" and "nonformulaic components." But whenever he praises deeper psychological insights in modern fantasists, as against the usually flat characterizations seen in traditional tales, Attebery plows over the question of differing venues. In dominantly oral cultures, a traditional storyteller has no motive for memorizing deep psychological insights for Sleeping Beauty or Rumpelstiltskin; they're just baggage that slows down an orally relayed story. Such fine details are only valuable to literate cultures, who inculcate the habit of reading their stories in static media, where detail can be accurately preserved.

Similarly, at the end of Chapter 2, he gives approbation to the just-discussed works of Hope Mirrlees and Charles Williams because each creates a viewpoint character who "brings to the world of myth and magic a contemporary sensibility and skepticism." This is part and parcel of Attebery's attempt to bestow upon 20th-century fantasy some of the gravitas of Modernist literature. But I definitely do not think that the fantasy genre is typified by authors' emphases of "contemporary sensibility and skepticism," even when those attitudes are rejected. Again, Attebery is entitled to prefer fantasies that signal questions of Modernist skepticism. But his analysis fails any strong test of logic.

PICKING ATTEBERRIES PT. 3

 Since I'm not sure I'll finish STORIES ABOUT STORIES, I skipped Chapter 3 and read Chapter 4, at least in part because it concerns Attebery's antagonistic relationship to Joseph Campbell.

But before getting to anything about Campbell, it occurred to me to relate Attebery's definition of myth as "any collective story that encapsulates a worldview and authorizes belief" to one of the first "mythographers" I evaluated on this blog, Eric Gould. In the work referenced here, Gould coined a term I've often used, "mythicity," but he did not share Attebery's broad valorization of any mythic tale simply because it "authorized belief."

The fact that classical and totemistic myths have to refer to some translinguistic fact-- to the Gods and Nature-- proves not that there are Gods, but that our talents for interpreting our place in the world may be distinctly limited by the nature of language.

In my own essay I registered my disagreement with Gould on that point. Nevertheless, Attebery seems to have vaulted over the epistemological question, "what authority does religious 'belief' possess, even if it expresses the collective worldview of a given tribe, nation, or ethnicity?" I would be the last to validate the Doubting Thomas  fallacy of the materialists, "If you can't dissect the risen body of Christ, that means no such body ever existed." But I think belief can be epistemologically valid insofar as its narratives reproduce epistemological patterns that are, in a sense, common to all human experience, not just to particular human groupings. For me at least, that transcendence of particular cultures trumps the "limits of language" that Eric Gould finds so disconcerting.

At base, I believe that Joseph Campbell shared this belief in such patterns, though he was, as I've said elsewhere, rather scattershot in his hermeneutics during his unquestionably distinguished career. But since Campbell and some of his fellow travelers are not validating myth based only upon whether the myth-narratives "authorize" a particular group's "belief," it's not surprising to me that Atteberry implicitly dismisses many comparativists that came into prominence in the 1960s, lumping together "Claude Levi-Strauss, Joseph Campbell, Northrop Frye, and Mircea Eliade" as proponents of "myth criticism." Attebery is initially a bit circumspect about pinning down what he doesn't like about myth criticism, though immediately after these citations he brackets the myth-critics as sharing "the assumption that all myths are psychically available to modern writers and readers." Attebery does not at first raise the Barthesian specter of "appropriation," the idea that it's wrong to pilfer cultural artifacts from cultures not one's own. The author's initial reticence may come about because he segues from talking about the cultural influence of the myth-critics (presumably in America and Western Europe, though Attebery doesn't specify) to discussing the concomitant rise of the mass-market proliferation of the fantasy genre in the same decade and thereafter. But when he turns his attention to Campbell's HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, it's clear the author has that devil Appropriation on his mind.

The problem with Campbell's monomyth as an analytical tool  is that it always works because it simplifies every story to the point where nothing but the monomyth is left. It ignores the many mythic stories that do not have questing heroes, and it leaves out the culturally defined values and symbols that make each tradition unique.

I disagree with only one part of this statement. As I may have said elsewhere on this blog, I have not read HERO in several years, and have not ever reviewed it, but I think it the least epistemologically valid of his works. If I had my way, Campbell would be much better known for his "four functions." But I must admit that Campbell's concept of an over-arching "super-myth," while fallible in many ways, had the effect of getting a lot of people to check out that particular book, including (allegedly) George Lucas. 

Yet Attebery makes the opposite mistake. When he bestows upon traditional myths a uniqueness that sets those stories apart from other cognate stories, he makes the same mistake Barthes did in MYTHOLOGIES. Long before there existed either "capitalist" or "post-industrial" cultures, so-called "traditional cultures" constantly swapped or stole story-ideas from each other. Did Norse Odin precede Germanic Wotan? No one knows, and no one should care. The same principle should apply to the intermingling of elements from disparate cultures in order to craft modern magical fantasies. We would not have a LORD OF THE RINGS if Tolkien had not synthesized many myth-traditions, not least the very disparate traditions of Celtic tales and medieval Christian religion. Alan Garner's WEIRDSTONE OF BRISINGAMEN is nowhere near the greatness of RINGS. But Garner's synthesis was a good one, and does not deserve to be downgraded because (according to Attebery) he "mixed mythologies indiscriminately," with "Nordic dwarves, Celtic elves, a Tolkienian evil force named Nastrond, and a Merlinesque wizard who guards a cave of sleeping warriors like those of the Germanic Frederick Barbarosa." It's odd that Attebery should invoke a 12th century German ruler in concert with a "Merlinesque wizard," rather than referencing the "sleeping warrior" myths about King Arthur, who's more frequently associated with Merlin.

In the end, the argument comes down not to logic but taste. Attebery clearly prefers modern fantasy authors to pick some corpus of culturally related myth-stories and to build from that corpus. But as I said, Tolkien himself did not do this, and as yet I have not seen the author critiquing the Oxford don on the same terms he uses toward both Campbell and Alan Garner. I too can think of many bad admixtures of disparate traditional stories, but that does not prove that "mix and match" is a bad strategy in itself. I also think Atteberry wants authors to stick to particular mythoi so that he can judge better if the creators do what he thinks most valuable: ringing in modern interpretive changes to traditional lore. 

If I make it through another chapter, I plan to address one of the major omissions in Attebery's schema: the differing dynamics of oral culture vs. written culture.

PICKING ATTEBERRIES PT. 2

Upon finishing the second chapter, I'm not sure how much further I'll delve into Brian Attebery's STORIES ABOUT STORIES.I thought his 1980 book on American fantasy provided a good overview of the genre. But here, the critic seems to be a little too focused on trying to bring the fantasy-genre into the sphere of literary modernism. He can make a statement like, "the principal difference between the Modernists' mythic method and that of fantasy is that the latter constructs apparently seamless narratives that put the mythic on the same diegetic plane as the modern, or at least modern sensibility." And yet, Attebery keeps coming back to the notion that the two are more strongly related by their mutual desire to re-interpret archaic myths for the purpose of modern audiences.

Certainly Attebery did a lot of homework to support his thesis. Long ago, I read the Ballantine edition of Hope Mirrlees' 1926 fantasy novel LUD-IN-THE-MIST, and retained a more or less favorable impression. But I never researched Mirrlees herself, and Attebery informed me that not only did the author run in the same circles as the esteemed literary author Virginia Woolf, both of them had a "mutual mentor, the Cambridge don and classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison." I certainly find that datum of passing interest, given Harrison's key influence upon the mythic analyses of the Cambridge Ritualists-- though my online research did not confirm Attebery's claim that Harrison was Mirrlees' "life companion." But despite the author's intelligent discussion of Mirlees' sole fantasy novel, Attebery almost seems determined to name-drop figures from respectable literature and scholarship in order to build up the repute of the fantasy genre, which was in Mirrlees' day far more socially marginal than works by people like Woolf and Harrison. 

A more key point of departure for me is Attebery's definition of myth. I certainly did not expect anything comparable to my own, or even to that of my key influence Joseph Campbell (though Campbell is given various citations throughout STORIES). But on the book's second page, Attebery provides his definition: "throughout this book, myth is used to designate any collective story that encapsulates a worldview and authorizes belief." And throughout the three sections I've read, Attebery's definition is meant to draw a line between myth, stories upon which archaic cultures center belief, and fantasy, whose virtue is, as the book's subtitle says, that of "the remaking of myth."

To maintain this distinction, Attebery frequently writes as if the archaic myths were changeless, while literary fantasies are all about ringing in changes on that changelessness. I feel sure a critic as learned as Attebery is aware that myths do change over time, even though the religions built around them may insist that the sacred narratives remain immutable over generations. 

Joseph Campbell's work supplied several examples of such cultural shifts, but I'll confine myself to one. In the chapter "Ancient India" in ORIENTAL MYTHOLOGY, Campbell describes the religion of the so-called "Aryan" tribes that invaded the Indian subcontinent circa 1500 B.C., which extolled the warrior-god Indra, celebrated for having killed the demonic dragon Vrita. However, a millennium later, the epic Mahabharata introduces the idea that Vrita was a Brahmin, and that Indra's slaying was therefore a crime, no matter Vrita's actions. Campbell interprets this change in the mythic narrative surrounding Indra as a shift in India's cultural matrix, as the former Aryan overlords were assimilated, via intermarriage, by the older tribes then denoted as "Dravidian," a congeries of peoples with very different priorities.

So for me the essence of myth is not the assertion of unchanging narratives, even though religions may claim that the narratives don't change in order to persuade the laity. In Chapter 1, Attebery asserts that we don't know to what extent Roman authors like Ovid and Apuleius really believed in the myths they depicted. But by the same token, we don't really know that the first Native American to tell a story of the trickster-god Coyote was a True Believer. Maybe he'd heard another tribal storyteller tell a myth-story about Raven, and he decided to tell a different story about Coyote for his own tribe. All sorts of motives can go into the making of all sorts of stories. The most one can say is that, as long as a given religious myth endures, someone may hold belief in its literal truth. But is that really fundamentally different from the enduring appeal of literary myths? Their adherents may never believe that the stories were true accounts of the gods, but they often give just as much devotion to all the fine points of those stories, parsing out just as many meanings as the practitioners of religious hermeneutics. And as distinctions between belief and unbelief grow hazy, we find ourselves back looking into Tolkien's "cauldron of story" for our answers, if not also to Jung's collective unconscious. And, to reiterate the conclusion I made in MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 3, the base motive to myths both religious and literary may be to propel the listener into the realms of sacred space and sacred time.

SELLING THE SUPERHERO WOMEN

 

I started to respond to Tom Brevoort's post on Marvel's 1977 reprint collection THE SUPERHERO WOMEN, and to its attendant comments on that blog. But I decided I would do so here first, and reprint my remarks there afterward. 

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First, I agree with Tom that the selection from SPIDER-MAN #62 doesn't really make the character of Medusa look all that great. Of course, there was no inherent sexism in this guest-starring story, because Stan Lee had written other Spidey stories in which male guest-stars like Quicksilver or The Iceman acted stupidly in order to make the story work. A better selection would have been Medusa's solo story from MARVEL SUPER HEROES, published around the same time as the Spidey story, which in turn may've been designed to get casual readers interested in the long-locked lass.

The RED SONJA story is an okay selection, and the FANTASTIC FOUR entry is well chosen. This story depicted Sue Storm gaining her force field powers, thus responding, after roughly three years, to fans' complaints about her lack of overall power. 

I have the impression that the MS MARVEL selection arose from the company's ongoing agenda to protect the "Marvel" name in any character. Certainly that agenda underlay the creation of the "Marvel Captain Marvel" in the first place, and since a CBR article mentions that the company was taking pitches for various "Ms. Marvel" concepts as early as 1972-- two years after UNCANNY X-MEN and Marvel Girl were off the stands-- that applied to the final, approved version as well. (I couldn't locate an online recapitulation of the story that Jean Grey herself was considered as a possible "Ms. Marvel.")

The selection of the two-part THOR story featuring Hela was a strange one. Since she wasn't purely villainous, she wasn't all that consequential to THOR in particular or to Marvel as a whole. Why not the first Enchantress story, since she was at least important to the universe, and since the tale was a good stand-alone? Maybe Stan just wanted to spotlight some of his post-Kirby work with the God of Thunder, which work was actually pretty good. I'm not surprised there was no Sif-centric story, because I can't think of any at all up to 1977.

A better choice IMO would have been issues X-MEN #62-63. Granted, Marvel Girl was usually a pretty weak sister for most of the feature's run, but this was one of the few times, if not the only time, she was allowed to shine and save the day. And until re-reading the issue, I'd forgot that it included Magneto hitting on Jean Grey big-time, in the old "reign at my side" context. So, Mags, checking out the Young Talent? Sort of like that story where Magneto has the mentally enslaved Scarlet Witch do a hootchie-koo dance for him, years before she was retconned into his pride and joy.

The "Femizons" story was meh, and I suppose the CAT and SHANNA stories were attempts by Stan to repeat his "Well, we tried" defense. The Black Widow story from SPIDER-MAN is another story where the guest star acts stupidly to make the story work, but it holds some historical interest for debuting the bitchin' catsuit-costume. 

That leaves only the Wasp's debut story in the ANT-MAN feature from 1963, which is IMO the best story in the collection. Though Stan's only credited with the plot for "The Creature from Kosmos," I'd theorize that he gave scripter Ernie Hart a pretty thorough breakdown of the whole story, since Stan was after all doing his best to build his then-small universe. For an early Silver Age adventure, it's pretty layered. Ant-Man starts having existential doubts about who will carry on for him while simultaneously grieving for his lost wife Maria. When he considers the possibility of a partner, 1963 readers might have expected (if not for the cover and splash page) the introduction of a kid sidekick-- "Pismire, the Ant Wonder!" Instead Henry Pym gets a meet-cute with Jan Van Dyne, a young woman who slightly resembles Maria, and thought balloons establish that both are instantly attracted to one another. Despite Pym's defensive reaction to the effect that Jan is just "a child," I think it's obvious that she's close to 20, and probably a bit older, given that there's no question of her inheriting the Van Dyne fortune when her pop gets killed. None of that Magneto-type trolling for Old Henry!

I also don't think there's a good argument for Jan, before or after she becomes The Wasp, being an "airhead." Her determination to avenge her dad is what leads Pym to play "Batman" to her "Robin," and to give her the chance not just for vengeance, but to take up the life of a superhero. But she accepts the duty partly because she knows that he's attracted to her, and not as a kid. So all of her subsequent expressions of stereotypical femininity-- drooling over other men, or her frequent references to shopping-- are part of her plan to stay close to Henry and keep reminding him that she's a woman, not a sidekick. And of course, she may actually LIKE shopping. I have it on good authority that some women really do!

MYTHCOMICS: "THE CURSE OF THE SUPERBOY MUMMY" (SUPERBOY #123, 1965)

By 1965, many of the Mort Weisinger-edited comics of the SUPERMAN line had gone beyond the fustiness of their Golden Age precursors. If one goes beyond my specific connotations of "mythicity," and speaks only of how each of the titles nurtured its own mythology, then both of the SUPERMAN books, the SUPERGIRL backup, LOIS LANE and JIMMY OLSEN all showed unprecedented inventiveness in creating new characters and concepts, or in causing old ones to interact. (I'm leaving the LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES feature outside these considerations because it sported a very different conceptual format.) But of the features set in the 20th century, SUPERBOY was the least distinguished in sheer creativity. 

I've only read bits and pieces of the late forties/early fifties SUPERBOY, I've found them extremely jejune compared to the SUPERMAN scripts of the same period, even allowing for SUPERBOY's simpler, kid-focused plots. Only one event in the feature's late Golden Age era is still remembered by fans today, the creation of Lana Lang, which as I argued here began as a recapitulation of Lois Lane's character. Then two more "myth-events" followed in the first five years of the Silver Age. First came the introduction of Krypto in 1955. Then in 1960 came one of the feature's few mythic stories, "How Luthor Met Superboy," which debuted the appealing idea that Luthor and Superboy grew up together in Smallville long before they became implacable foes in adulthood. The "retcon" of Luthor was followed other tales which borrowed from the SUPERMAN comic books (or, in one case, from the SUPERMAN comic strip), so that the Boy of Steel began meeting Phantom Zone villains and the like. But even by 1965, his writers showed little sign of evolving any new myth-material original to Superboy's universe-- again, not counting the Legion.

I suspect that the premise of "The Curse of the Superboy Mummy" might have begun from an idea for an arresting cover image-- Lana Lang and Superboy finding archaic doppelgangers of themselves in an Egyptian tomb. Given that idea, writer Leo Dorfman and artist Curt Swan then probably had to "work backward" to find some way to justify the image. But this time Dorfman rooted his makework story in one of the key myths of the Superman cosmos-- the War Between Men and Women.

The three-way relationship of heroic Superboy, admiring Lana Lang, and apparently-timid Clark Kent had of course been borrowed from the SUPERMAN comics, but a few interesting divergences arose. For one thing, Lana became at some point the daughter of an esteemed archaeologist, so she could sometimes be tied to arcane or unusual discoveries. 

Now, the cover does not specify the nature of the "curse," but the opening caption does, implying that somehow Lana's presence is going to bring doom to the hero-- even though she doesn't show any of her more annoying traits here or in the issue's other two stories. Nevertheless, when Dorfman takes us back to 3,000 B.C. in Egypt, the writer changes the Smallville setup-- "young girl only thinks the guy she knows is weak"-- to a literal reality. Seth, weakling son of royal magician Ahton, is humiliated when the taunting Neferti demonstrates that even she's stronger than he is. Doting father that Ahton is, he goes for the quick fix, asking Isis for help.

Isis shows Ahton the futuristic feats of Superboy-- proving that even archaic gods are big fans of the Kryptonian franchise-- and Ahton learns how to duplicate Superboy's powers with a magic potion. There is of course no internal reason for Ahton or Seth to duplicate the Superboy costume too, except to make the cover-image work out. But I give Dorfman extra points for coming up with a rationale for the insignia, since the Egyptians didn't have the European letter "S."

During Seth's short super-career, his major accomplishment is really to blow off Neferti when she tries womanly wiles to attract his attention. But Neferti shares the snoopiness of her later doppelganger, so she not only learns Seth's true identity, she even sees images of Superboy and Lana in Ahton's magic oracle-shield.

Then, just as the nosiness of Lois and Lana sometimes put their romantic idol in one kind of peril or another, Neferti has a "Deianeira moment," where she trusts in an unscrupulous adviser to give her a love-charm. The jade scarab she wears to attract Seth kills him, and her as well, when she tries to rescue him from the sea. (The story has an unusual amount of death for a mid-sixties SUPERBOY tale.) 

This half of the story is the most resonant for its use of a trope one might call, "Hero Killed by Woman's Egotism." Astute readers are expected to notice that Lana appropriates the very jade scarab that killed Seth, and so there's no great mystery to those readers when modern-day Superboy begins experiencing non-romantic heartaches when he gets near Lana. The Big Reveal of the next three pages is pretty routine and not worth recapitulating here; those interested in the denouement may read it here. The only mythic element of the modern-day section of the narrative is that, even though Lana isn't intentionally endangering Superboy, the hero's dimestore self-analysis is never actually invalidated. According to the way Lana normatively functions in the SUPERBOY canon, she does at least endanger the hero's peace of mind with her frequent identity-hunting. And if one chooses to amplify the potential feelings of these purely fictional characters, Lana also could incur a lot of resentment by her frequent complaints about Clark Kent's meekness-- though to my knowledge she never went so far as to embarrass Clark in a contest of strength/skill. So if Superboy does harbor secret resentments of his potential girlfriend, it's not because he's swayed by any ancient superstition. He just resents nosy, nagging women.

THE READING RHEUM: PINOCCHIO (1883)

I can't prove it, but even though Carlo Collodi's PINOCCHIO rates as one of the most often-translated fantasies in the world, I suspect that not that many people in the U.S. have read it. I base this only on my long hours of bookstore-hauntings. Granted, I rarely if ever checked the children's fantasy sections, but I hardly ever saw used copies, even though it's a public domain work and anyone can issue a redaction. But I just don't think Americans, usually raised on the Disney version, are as likely to check out Collodi's prose original, in contrast to the many people who do read Lewis Carroll or L. Frank Baum.

To be sure, even though Carroll and Baum's works are often episodic, Collodi's tops them in that regard. Installments of the puppet boy's adventures originally appeared in newspapers, and Wiki asserts that Collodi kept the story going due to popular demand. so I don't know how that affected the unabridged version I read. But though it would be fun to see a film adaptation that reproduced all of Collodi's inventive sequences, I can well understand why Disney and other adapters chose a more linear approach.

I had already read commentary to the effect that prose-Pinocchio was much more mischievous than the Disney version, causing much more grief to his creator Gepetto. He has a lot of vices that child-readers could certainly recognize in themselves or in peers: he's lazy, selfish, and picky about what he eats. Yet in the book the idea that Pinocchio can become a real boy if he mends his ways isn't introduced until over two-thirds of the book is done. The positive effect of removing this "carrot" is that Pinocchio's misdeeds are more like those of ordinary kids, who don't undergo any physical transformations simply for doing the right thing.

Another major difference is that no supernatural entity brings Pinocchio to life; Gepetto simply happens to construct a boy-puppet out of wood that's already sentient when he carves it. There's no explanation as to why the wood was sentient, it's just a given-- and early in the book, Pinocchio meets other sentient puppets who immediately recognize Pinocchio, though none of them have ever physically met. Back in my 2017 review of a Neil Gaiman SWAMP THING story, I joked that Pinocchio could have been one of Gaiman's "puppet elementals." Yet I didn't guess that other puppets in the Collodi work were just alive as Pinocchio is, thanks to some unspecified fairy-tale magic. By the way, the names of two puppets, Harlequin and Punchinello, are the only conspicuous story-elements that provide any historical context to Collodi's timeless-seeming Italian setting. Since Harlequin was the later-conceived of the two, PINOCCHIO must take place any time after the 16th century. It may have been intended to take place in Collodi's own time-frame, though Collodi never depicts anything that suggests the rise of 19th-century technology.

Gepetto is the only character who's pretty much the same as he is in Disney; a lovable schmuck. He does end up inside a huge sea-monster, albeit a Giant Shark rather than a whale, and Pinocchio's rescue of his father from the beast's belly isn't crucial to his salvation as in Disney. This Pinocchio kills his advice-giving cricket, but the unnamed bug seems to be able to come back to life when he pleases. The Fox and the Cat start off as con artists, but Collodi's schemers are more murderous. They don the masks of robbers seeking to rip off the puppet-boy's money, and the only reason they don't slay their victim is because they hang him by the neck, which isn't enough to kill a puppet. Candlewick, the boy who lures Pinocchio to Playland, not only remains permanently donkey-ified, he dies after Pinocchio returns to normal. The puppet-master "Fire-Eater" is nothing like the tyrannical Stromboli, and the macabre Green Fisherman has only been adapted to film three times.

But the most fascinating original is the one on whom Disney based the Blue Fairy. In Disney she's a distant, celestial character who brings Pinocchio to life and only appears in his life a couple of times thereafter. In Collodi, she's generally called something along the lines of "the Blue-Haired Fairy," which for convenience I''ll abbreviate to "BHF." BHF is not in Pinocchio's life at the onset, but once she makes his acquaintance-- almost certainly not by coincidence-- she more or less dogs his heels, watching him with maternal omniscience as the puppet continually strays from the path.

Pinocchio first encounters one incarnation of BHF when he's fleeing the masked robbers. He sees a strange house and begs sanctuary. A blue-haired child comes to the door but won't admit him, claiming she's expecting to perish soon. After the robbers leave Pinocchio strung up, BHF finally takes action and has her minions succor him, though her initial reluctance to act begs the notion that she wants him to suffer and learn from the experience. The next time Pinocchio disobeys her, and then returns to the house, he finds a grave that claims the BHF child "died of sorrow on being deserted by her little brother Pinocchio." Of course this is just a ruse to instill guilt in the bad puppet's soul. The next time the BHF appears, she's a blue-haired adult, and she volunteers to become Pinocchio's mother in the absence of his father. Whereas Gepetto never successfully disciplines the puppet, the BHF is a true "punishing mother." However, she renders punishment only in an indirect fashion, to make Pinocchio's humiliations the direct result of his transgressions. It may not be coincidence that Pinocchio finally earns his boyhood not from rescuing Gepetto or keeping the old man healthy, but from showing charity to BHF, after one of her servants falsely tells the puppet that BHF is sick and dying. 

Despite the novel's loosely contemporary setting and its episodic structure, Collodi's PINOCCHIO deserves to be better known for its insights into human psychology-- not just of the "child" variety -- and for its freewheeling creativity.

PICKING ATTEBERRIES

 My MIND OUT OF TIME series--  not precisely finished, just paused-- encouraged me to revisit some of the other books I'd reviewed here for theories of the process of imagining fantasy-narratives. My review of this 1980 Brian Attebery book shows that I didn't find in Attebery anything that made him one of my best-regarded critics. And yet, I enjoyed the 1980 book despite my disagreements. So when I noted that Attebery had several other reputable books on the fantasy-topic, I decided to check out one from 2013, STORIES ABOUT STORIES: FANTASY AND THE REMAKING OF MYTH. Given my own preoccupations, the subtitle was more than a little intriguing.

I don't know if I will devote many posts to STORIES. Today I finished the introduction and first chapter, and I was surprised that Attebery, in contrast to the 1980 book, talks a bit about his doing field studies in folklore studies. He mentions the matter only to distinguish between the experience of myth as a living practice, as sacred stories handed down through generations to embody the storyteller's culture, and the experience of myth as documented stories written down by folklorists, anthropologists or even modern literary authors.

I certainly agree with his statement distinguishing fantasy-based stories and those centered in an apparent "reality." He calls the former "metaphorical" in nature-- that is, substituting for descriptions of real experience with the depiction of the "unreal." In contrast, the latter type Attebery calls "metonymic," in that such stories create representations of persona and events that could have existed, but did not exist, in actual reality. And I've certainly made statements on this blog similar to Attebery's conclusion, "By renouncing claims to report directly on reality, fantasy requires the potential (not always realized) to generate powerful symbols."

I would say that this overstates the case somewhat, though. Though fantastic content may encourage an author's use of symbolism, certainly since the rise of isophenomenal literature, there have been any number of strongly-symbolic artworks. TITUS ANDRONICUS, generally regarded as Shakespeare's first tragedy, has nothing of "fantasy" about it, even including my category of "the uncanny" (and I will be interested to see if Attebery cites anything I would consider "non-marvelous fantasy.") But this Wiki article points out that the cycle of violence that dominates Titus's Rome could symbolize the degradation of every exalted Golden Age into profane Ages of Iron. And I feel certain that one could find any number of other symbolic analyses of TITUS online, despite its lack of overt fantasy. 

Similarly, most (though not all) fantasies require grounding in the rudiments of real life, and the fantasy-comedy of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM is certainly enhanced by Shakespeare's ability to capture the sense of how stage-performers fret and bicker backstage about who gets to play what role.

So far, I haven't found anything in STORIES that strikes me as dubious, though the intro makes a mention of "postcolonial fantasies"-- and that's NEVER a good sign.

FINESSING FANTASY

I don't always elaborate on changes to my subject tags, but in this case, I want to record my line of thought for future use.

I noticed that two of my tags-- "fantasy" and "fantasy stories"-- seemed a little redundant, and in fact I had over the years sometimes applied them inconsistently. So, in line with the recent determinations I made in the MIND OUT OF TIME series, I changed anything that referred to particular stories of magical fantasy to "magical fantasy stories," while creating new categories for stories that didn't meet the magical fantasy criteria. For instance, Lewis Carroll's tales are now "nonsense fantasy stories," while THE SATANIC VERSES is "supernatural comedy." The rubric "supernatural" is one I plan to use for any with fantasy-content that's not either science fiction, nonsense, or some metaphenomenal hybrid and is set in more or less contemporary times. 

As a further example, the LEPRECHAUN horror-series would be mostly "supernatural drama" since it involves an archaic leprechaun killing off people in modern times-- though I guess LEPRECHAUN 4 IN SPACE is a hybrid between SF and supernatural drama.

The tag "fantasy (literary term)" deserves more explication. There is not a standard use of the term "fantasy" in academic literary criticism, but one particular critic does use it as I do: Kathleen Hume in her 1984 book FANTASY AND MIMESIS. She uses "fantasy" as a blanket term for everything in literature that deviates from commonplace, mimetic descriptions of the world, even deviations that might be classed as minor bits of nonsense. (For instance, she includes an incident where two characters in Voltaire's CANDIDE, seen to die explicit deaths "on stage," come back to life for no good reason.) My own category for the totality of all fantastic imaginings is "the metaphenomenal," while "the isophenomenal" describes everything that adheres to the principle of mimesis. But henceforth I'll also use "fantasy" to indicate the mental process by which authors create deviations from realism. This process, regardless of the rationalization used, thus engenders a principle opposite to that of mimesis, as in Hume: a principle which authors use to describe anything that goes beyond the bounds of realism.