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.