THE READING RHEUM: THE TEMPEST (1611)

 I only "reviewed" one other Shakespeare play in THE TOILS OF TROILUS, but THE TEMPEST is without a doubt a more important, both as Shakespeare's last important play and a last flowering of the fantasy-genre before the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, as I discussed in this essay:   

Following the Renaissance, the literary lights rejected, particularly by embracing the naturalistic novel, all or most of those "improbable and marvelous" elements that culminated in the late 1500s with Spenser's FAERIE QUEENE. Wikipedia pegs the beginnings of the Enlightenment with Descartes, but I prefer 1603, the publication-year of the first book of DON QUIXOTE, which essentially ended the chivalric romance for the next two centuries.

I don't retract this analysis, but the world of European theater may not have nearly as much of a cutoff in terms of metaphenomenal works as the chivalric romance did. Certainly Shakespeare seemed to go his own way and was generally popular even if many currents in European lit were leaning towards more naturalistic/isophenomenal concepts. Before 1600, WS's most important metaphenomenal work was A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, while after 1600 we see such classics with fantastic content as HAMLET, KING LEAR (perhaps arguable), MACBETH and finally TEMPEST. Still, after Shakespeare, other authors of the 1600s are not very imaginatively impressive until we reach Milton's PARADISE LOST in 1667, when the Renaissance is over and the Enlightenment is in full bloom.

My strongest take-away from this reading of TEMPEST is that though I'm perpetually amazed by the four mythopoeic characters of the play-- Prospero, Miranda, Ariel and Caliban-- all of the other characters, including the indispensable groom-figure Ferdinand, are thoroughly unimaginative. Since WS was notable for infusing even very minor characters with strong moments of humanity, the paucity of wit in the drunk clowns Trinculo and Stephano is amazing. I can't help considering that WS was so deeply invested in the four characters of his "magical island" that he simply couldn't spare any attention for the quotidian types. And there's a special irony in this, since the theme of TEMPEST is all about leaving behind the worlds of magic-- even good magic-- in order to rejoin the domain of ordinary mortals. 

More to come...          

PRELUDE TO THE GREAT SUBLIMITY SHIFT

“We all live in the sublime. Where else can we live? That is the only place of life.”

― Maurice Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble 

I'll be writing more about the impending "shift" in some of my literary categories in the next post. This post provides a history of the concept of "the sublime," supplementing much of what I've already written here about the concept's appearance in the works of such 18th-century critics as Burke and Kant.

I confess that, though I've read more about the sublime than many people, for overall history I'm as dependent on online sources as anyone. But as a first-time experiment, I decided to consult not just the dominant source Wikipedia, but also Grokipedia, Elon Musk's AI-generated competition for the allegedly over-liberal online encyclopedia. What I found has nothing to do with the political sympathies of either encyclopedia's compilers, whether direct (Wikipedia) or indirect (the programmers behind the Grokipedia AI). The Grokipedia entry is much stronger than the competing entry on the elaboration of the sublimity concept, and cognate concepts, in ancient Greece. But it then cites, as did other sources I relied upon in past, Edmund Burke's 1757 writings as the first important post-Renaissance meditations on the sublimity concept. The Wikipedia entry says little about the Classic Greek developments but includes more data about the 17th and 18th centuries. Since I'm more interested in the post-Renaissance developments, from now on I'll build on Wiki's historical observations, like this one.

In Britain, the development of the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic quality in nature distinct from beauty was brought into prominence in the 18th century in the writings of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury and John Dennis. These authors expressed an appreciation of the fearful and irregular forms of external nature, and Joseph Addison's synthesis of concepts of the sublime in his The Spectator, and later the Pleasures of the Imagination. All three Englishmen had, within the span of several years, made the journey across the Alps and commented in their writings of the horrors and harmony of the experience, expressing a contrast of aesthetic qualities.^[3]

I find it fascinating that the three authors cited in the passage cited the Longinian idea of "the sublime" in relation to their sightseeing tours of the Alps. The article discusses, as I will not, some of the differences in their interpretations of their separate experiences, and I will take Wiki at its word since I've read nothing of Addison, Dennis, or Ashley-Cooper (the last of whom-- fun fact-- got a shout-out in the teleseries LOST). I suspect that all three invoked the sublime in reaction to some anterior observation about the concept, possibly from one of those persons who translated Longinus into English in either the late 17th or early 18th century. Is it possible that all three authors journeyed to the Alps with the advance suspicion that the Alpine sights would give them the elevated experience Longinus wrote about? Impossible to know, but it has been said (by sources I forget) that pre-Renaissance Europeans of sufficient means simply did not mess about in the mountains for any such gratifications.

So Longinus was one of many Classical authors, including Aristotle, whose original works became available to Europeans, for the first time in centuries, during the Renaissance. The first distinct era of the post-Renaissance is usually dubbed "The Age of Enlightenment," and I observed here that it was particularly marked by an embrace of heavily rationalized philosophy and literature.

Following the Renaissance, the literary lights rejected, particularly by embracing the naturalistic novel, all or most of those "improbable and marvelous" elements that culminated in the late 1500s with Spenser's FAERIE QUEENE. Wikipedia pegs the beginnings of the Enlightenment with Descartes, but I prefer 1603, the publication-year of the first book of DON QUIXOTE, which essentially ended the chivalric romance for the next two centuries.  

In an essay I've not placed on The Archive, I similarly observed that critics of the period began using Aristotle's term "mimesis" (imitation) to connote the reproduction of observed reality with absolute fidelity-- though that was not the way Aristotle had used the term. 

So the Age of Enlightenment began, at least in part, by an act of rejecting fantasy. But since human beings as a whole are as much attracted to the limitless as to the limited, fantasy literature came back in a relatively short time. The 1600s concluded with the rise of the literary fairy tale, closely followed by the recording of popular oral folktales. The first European translation of the ARABIAN NIGHTS appeared in 1704, and despite the concurrent rise of naturalistic literature, European literature began a perhaps illicit love affair with genies and elephant-stealing birds. The late 1700s birthed both the first Gothic novel (1765) and the first important magical-era fantasy novel (1785's VATHEK) of the post-Renaissance period. For good measure, the year 1785 also hosts the last pure manifestation of the pre-Renaissance genre of "the fantastic travelers' tales," embodied by Raspe's BARON MUNCHAUSEN. These works and others laid the groundwork for the various works in the Gothic and Romantic movements throughout the 19th century, not least Walter Scott's sadly neglected LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL, the first important post-Renaissance fantasy in the combative mode. I am not saying that any contemporary readers of any of these works necessarily called them "sublime." But I am saying that even as various European countries got themselves engaged to the rational, they kept getting drawn back to the charms of the non-rational, which some called "the sublime" while others would come to call it "the sense of wonder." In this essay I endorsed an equivalence of the two affective terms, summed up adeptly by this passage.

The affinities of science fiction and Gothic literature also reveal a common quest for those varieties of pleasing terror induced by awe-inspiring events or settings that Edmund Burke and other eighteenth-century critics call the sublime. A looming problem for writers in the nineteenth century was how to achieve sublimity without recourse to the supernatural. ... The supernatural marvels that had been a staple of epic and lesser forms from Homeric times would no longer do as the best sources of sublimity. ... writers sought new forms that could better accommodate the impact of science.-- Paul K. Alkon, SCIENCE FICTION BEFORE 1900.

                          

MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 4

 In my essay MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 3 I made this statement:

Thus I am saying that magical fantasy stories recapitulate the sense of a space and time far from our own profane world, where all wonders spring from the loins of magic. This world can be entirely divorced from our own, as with Middle-Earth, or it may also be a very abstracted version of some distant historical era, like the unspecified Arabian setting of ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. The world may display an author's scrupulous intent to center all the fictional events within a specific historical period, as Marion Zimmer Bradley does in THE MISTS OF AVALON, or it may utilize a hodgepodge of historical eras, like the teleseries XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS. The fidelity to history is only important to a given author's creative priorities, and often the religious sources of magical fantasy stories may also be a hodgepodge of material from different historical periods, as is said to be the case with both the Arthurian corpus and the Thousand and One Nights. 

In this essay I established that, although I specified that the category of fantasy stories I call "magical fantasy stories" are not intrinsically better than other metaphenomenal fictions, they are better with respect to one literary goal. That goal consists of transporting the readers of our various post-industrial cultures back into worlds where magic is the primary instrumentality through which the denizens of said worlds understand existence. I explicated this idea with the formulations of Mircea Eliade, with some caveats that I didn't think Eliade was always very clear about his distinctions between "the sacred" and "the profane." Having lodged that complaint, I thought I ought to try to be equally clear about how "far" magical fantasy stories can get from our profane world.

The answer is that they can never escape the shadow of the profane entirely, at least partly because they're being written by authors who have lived in profane worlds. But more than that, there's often a "domain of impurity" within the fantasy-worlds that calls the magical domain into question.

For instance, few fantasy-tales take place at the real "beginning times," when God has (or the gods have) just made the world. One of the few exceptions that comes to mind is C.L. Moore's 1940 short story "Fruit of Knowledge," which relates the story of the Garden of Eden from the POV of Adam's first wife Lilith. But it's far more frequent for the magical-fantasy author to set his stories in a world where humankind has acquired some level of advancement short of what we call "the industrial age." And as soon as humankind attains such a level, a certain amount of life's profane nature assumes its own domain within even worlds where magic rules.

The simplest form of profanity is one in which everyone in the world is aware that magic exists or has existed, but individuals believe that for various reasons that the power of magic cannot affect them. Clark Ashton Smith often created characters living in utterly magical worlds who nevertheless had some blindness on that matter. In the masterful "Voyage of King Euvoran," the monarch witnesses a mage challenge his power, and then foolishly pursues the wizard for vengeance, leading to his undoing. In many ways, such stories parallel the dynamics of the modern-day supernatural story, in which, say, unbelievers trespass on a mummy's tomb and suffer a magical revenge.

Sometimes magical fantasy narratives include characters who are either of a materialistic bent or take actions that have the effect of post-industrial materialism. THE BEAR AND THE NIGHTINGALE, set in medieval Russia, depicts a village of people who are overtly Christians but who still covertly observe the old pagan ways of propitiating the spirits of houses and forests. A fanatical Christian monk enters the village and belabors the citizens until they put aside their pagan practices-- which brings about a major conflict for the heroine to cope with.

There also may be an inbuilt sense that the world of magical phenomena is doomed to be superseded by a profane one. Every "fall of Camelot" story implies that ordinary history will take over once the wonders of Arthurian Britain are no more. Patently, J.R.R. Tolkien followed the same pattern at the end of LORD OF THE RINGS, by implying that "The Time of Men" will succeed the era in which Men mingle with Elves, Dwarves and Hobbits. 

A. Merritt's SHIP OF ISHTAR provides a variation on the above theme. Modern archeologist John Kenton, despite knowing that Babylon has long been superseded by more mundane historical cultures, plunges into a cosmos where the Babylonian gods still exist-- though they rule a very limited cynosure, limited to one island and the titular Ship of Ishtar. The author never explains how this sub-cosmos comes into being, but one may fairly assume the deities created the world, probably so that they could continue to enjoy mortal worship.

All of the forces that countervail against the total efficacy of magic and the sacred within a "secondary universe" can be viewed as "agents of the profane," and thus of the author's awareness that he or she exists in a time when magic has been diminished if not extirpated. Because all such authors have themselves have lived in cultures where magic and the sacred are continually called into question, that may be a prime reason as to why most magical fantasies take place in worlds with a medieval, but pre-industrial, level of advancement. A qualified exception may be made for stories patterned after rural folktales. PINOCCHIO probably takes place in post-industrial times, based on a very tiny number of internal references. But the novel remains steadfastly in a rural, small-town universe, never letting the reader see any phenomenon that suggests the heavy industry that existed in the 19th century. Further, the author reinforces the sense of a folktale universe by showing humanoid animals who can talk and wear clothes, as well as numinous entities not strictly allied with any established religion.

 

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. 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.

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.

MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 3

 At the end of MIND 2.5 I wrote:

But for now it's more important to move on to the matter of why the presence of the magic-accepting society is as important to the category as the magic itself-- as I shall convey in Part 3.

I started this essay-series with the question, "is there something that sets the genre we usually call 'fantasy' from all other genres with metaphenomenal content?" I established that I believed that the dominant colloquial usage of "fantasy" concerned a particular subgroup of metaphenomenal narratives I have now dubbed "magical fantasy stories." From this category I have excluded narratives which are complicated by the presence of competing forms of wonder-rationale (as discussed in Part 2.5), OR by the absence of the proper kind of magic-welcoming society. I also mentioned that my desire to set aside the unique appeal of "magical fantasy stories" due to my own personal response to the fantasy-genre. I do not automatically assume that my response is characteristic of all fantasy-readers. But I also do not automatically assume that there is no relevance even if no other person has ever made the correlation I will now make.

I have reviewed, in three linked essays, one of the earliest breakthrough works of religious historian Mircea Eliade, 1957's THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE. My second essay provides the most detailed look at what Eliade sought to say in that book, though I should stress that he wrote only of religion, and not, as I do, of literature and folklore.

The first chapter, "Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred," explores many of the ways that religious people around the world have sought to endow specific objects or locales-- trees, stones, temples, or entire cities-- with a sacred quality that transcends the everyday interactions of the profane world. Given the chapter's concern with space, it's logical enough that Eliade leads off with a quote from Exodus: "put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground." Eliade cites numerous other cultures-- Vedic Indian, Algonquin, Australian aborgine, Roman, Egyptian-- in order to support his claim: that "homo religiosus" shows a supervening tendency to formulate spaces in which the sacred can enter to banish the profane, which Eliade defines, albeit only briefly, as all those contingent factors involving "man's vital functions (food, sex, work and so on."

Now on this blog I've repeatedly discussed both the similarities and differences between the dynamics of religion and the dynamics of art. And I've always concluded that the differences are less significant than the similarities. The sense of constricting, "profane" ordinariness that religion banishes for the believer can also be banished by the "shadows of imagination" that audiences enjoy through art. The stories I deem "magical fantasies"are not any better or worse than any other stories in terms of potential ability to dispel dull care. But because magical fantasies create the feeling of a world imbued with magic, the worlds in those fantasies come closest to duplicating the dynamic Eliade describes:

...the desire to live in a pure and holy cosmos, as it was in the beginning, when it came fresh from the Creator's hands.

But such a cosmos is not defined only by space, but also by time. So quite logically, Eliade follows up his chapter on "sacred space" with one entitled "Sacred Time and Myths." Profane time, Eliade says, is "ordinary temporal duration, in which acts without religious meaning have their setting." In contrast, sacred time "represents the re-actualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past."

Now, I have not implied that magical fantasy stories, which belong to literature rather than religion, share religion's purpose of recapitulating the sacred stories of any particular culture-- though some stories do draw upon such established stories. Kelly Cipera, the essayist cited in Part 2.5, mentions that the Arthurian myths, which are not technically religious narratives, have their appeal in what *I* consider depicting events outside the scope of "profane time."

We recognize all of the ingredients of high fantasy is stories such as Le Morte d’Arthur, or the story of Arthur, Camelot and the search for the Holy Grail, a legend of Welsh origin. It is a hero’s tale — Arthur, who has no control over whether or not he can pull a sword from a stone or not, does, and suddenly kingship is thrust upon him. Matters beyond him and magic turn his life, which would have been otherwise dull and ordinary, into the stuff of legend.

Thus I am saying that magical fantasy stories recapitulate the sense of a space and time far from our own profane world, where all wonders spring from the loins of magic. This world can be entirely divorced from our own, as with Middle-Earth, or it may also be a very abstracted version of some distant historical era, like the unspecified Arabian setting of ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. The world may display an author's scrupulous intent to center all the fictional events within a specific historical period, as Marion Zimmer Bradley does in THE MISTS OF AVALON, or it may utilize a hodgepodge of historical eras, like the teleseries XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS. The fidelity to history is only important according to the creative priorities of any given author, and often the religious sources of magical fantasy stories may also be a hodgepodge of material from different historical periods, as is said to be the case with both the Arthurian corpus and the Thousand and One Nights. 

And that, for now, is my conclusion as to the special appeal of what I term "magical fantasy stories." I imagine that in future weeks I might be able to write as much as I have over these two days on all of the stories that don't convey this Eliadean sense of sacred exoticism.

ADDENDA: I will note that what Eliade calls a "pure and holy cosmos" often includes, in many religious cosmologies, all sorts of significant transgressive actions-- Odin slaying Ymir to make the world out of the giant's bones, or Adam and Eve being expelled from Paradise. So the nature of religious purity and holiness does require some meditation to account for the significance of transgressive actions in molding a cosmos.

MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 2.5

Before proceeding to the conclusions suggested at the end of Part 2, I'll make some generalizations as to some types of narratives that belong in my category of "magical fantasy stories," always with the caveat that I may make additions or alterations in future.

While as I've said "fantasy" by itself has often been a rubric that can cover everything from Tolkien to Roger Rabbit, the great reputation of Tolkien has resulted in the popularization of the term "high fantasy" for the more Tolkienian forms of fantasy. Wikipedia cites this definition: 

High fantasy, or epic fantasy, is a subgenre of fantasy^[1] defined by the epic nature of its setting or by the epic stature of its characters, themes, or plot.^[2] High fantasy is set in an alternative, fictional ("secondary") world, rather than the "real" or "primary" world.^[2] This secondary world is usually internally consistent, but its rules differ from those of the primary world. By contrast, low fantasy is characterized by being set on Earth, the primary or real world, or a rational and familiar fictional world with the inclusion of magical elements.^[3][4][5][6]

The careless writing of this essay implies agreement between all the sources cited, but this is not the case. The first source, a 2011 article on the site Fandomania, not only does not use the high/low distinction-- attributed, with whatever accuracy, to a Brian Stableford book-- but cites two forms of high fantasy that the maybe-Stableford definition would term "low fantasies."

The settings for these quests are generally in one of three varieties: a world separate unto our world, one where our world for all intents and purposes doesn’t even exist; a secondary world that is reached from our world through a portal; or, lastly, a secondary world within our own world. Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings and Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series are examples of the first variety. They both exist in a completely developed secondary world that is not Earth — Earth doesn’t even exist in their minds. The Chronicles of Narnia is a classic example of a portal into another world variety and the Harry Potter series is a contemporary example of the “world within a world” type of high fantasy.

I'm glad, though, that the uncredited Wiki-writer linked to the Fandomania essay, because Cipera's broader definition is better than the very artificial high/low distinction. Cipera clearly feels that all three forms of fantasy can be associated because they are all drawing on the same wellsprings of myth and folktale to tell similar stories of high romance and adventure. 

So, all three of Cipera's categories would make it into my category of "magical fantasy stories." However, as Part 2 specified, my wider category also includes a folktale like ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. This story includes an element of magic and does not use the competing rationales of either "science" or "just because" to justify the story's wonders. But it also qualifies as a "magical fantasy story" because it takes place in a pre-industrial society that considers magic more important than any other rationale.

In a separate essay I plan to address various examples of stories-- whether from literature or folktales-- that don't fall into my category because they meet only one of the two criteria cited, or explain their wonders with two or even three co-existing rationales. I've already cited one such exception in POPEYE MEETS ALI BABA, which is the latter type of "hybrid story," mixing "magic" with "just because." But for now it's more important to move on to the matter of why the presence of the magic-accepting society is as important to the category as the magic itself-- as I shall convey in Part 3.

MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 2

Here's the statement I made at the end of Part 1:

...despite the strong association of the colloquial use of the term "fantasy" and the "magic rationale," I think there's a more fundamental appeal to "magical fantasy" than the use of said rationale...

One reason I eliminated "the magic rationale" as the main attraction is that some extremely popular "magical fantasies" make only very minor usages of magic.

Case in point: the ARABIAN NIGHTS folktale of "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves." In the standardized version of the story-- which is the one most often adapted for modern narratives-- poor woodcutter Ali Baba witnesses a gang of thieves using a magical cave to conceal their ill-gotten treasures. The cave-door, which opens or closes in obedience to certain magic words, is the only magical item in the story. Everything else in the narrative, however improbable or melodramatic, would be deemed isophenomenal, governed by naturalistic laws. We don't know if the "open sesame" cave is the result of active or passive magic-- though I tend to favor the former, that some individual placed a spell on the cave-mouth to act as cave-mouths don't usually operate. But there's a sense of a regular magical procedure involved in the treasure-cave's makeup. The cave doesn't open "just because," say, it's funny for the purpose of a gag, a la my earlier example of ROGER RABBIT. That nonsense-rationale would imply the cave might open some times and not others.

The appeal of magical fantasies, whether they use a lot of magic or very little, inheres more in the fact that they reproduce a society that is fully or mostly "pre-industrial," in which it's possible for the characters to invest in magic because there is no competing rationale of "science." That does not mean that there is no science as such in the world, such as (say) the engineering principles needed for Ancient Egypt to build the pyramids. But in an archaic world, science simply is not as IMPORTANT as magic.

So, I'm admitting that "magical fantasies" have a vital appeal because they invest in the magic-rationale and not the other two rationales-- but there's also a greater, supervening appeal in that the contemporary reader/audience is transported back to a time when science had less influence than magic. And I'll look at some possible reasons for that appeal in Part 3.

Parenthetically, Ali Baba got the "just because" treatment in 1937's POPEYE MEETS ALI BABA, and in that cartoon short it's clear that gags like "Abu Hassan got 'em anymore" overshadow any investment in even the minor magic of the "open sesame" cave.

 

 

MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 1

I see from Google that others have used the reverse-pun in my title before this. Still, I suspect the connotations of my pun are a little different from anyone else's.

In UP WITH FANTASY, DOWN WITH HORROR, I suggested that one could regard "fantasy" and "horror"-- categories which usually appear in that famous marketing troika, "fantasy, horror and science fiction"-- as two "super-genres," at least in terms of how they organize what I've called sympathetic and antipathetic affects. Having said all that, I'm going in a different direction now, Now I'm asking the unmusical question, "is there something that sets the genre we usually call 'fantasy' from all other genres with metaphenomenal content?"

Before going further, I'd note another specification I made here regarding the three rationales all or most authors use to justify the metaphenomena in their stories:

(1) The rationale of science.

(2) The rationale of magic.

(3) The rationale of "just because."

These rationales become important partly to sorting out some of the problems with the standard colloquial usage of "fantasy." At least where prose fiction is concerned, the "magic rationale" is the one most often connoted with works called "fantasy," because so much of the genre's development in the U.S. was influenced by Tolkien. But colloquially "fantasy" can also take in "just because" works like WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT. And though "science fiction" as such is usually considered as something of an "opposite number" to fantasy, even within the "Big Tent" of SF one sees certain works labeled "science fantasy."

On a related note, I talked a little bit about the history of my personal response to the "magical fantasy" genre in this Rip Jagger's Dojo comment:

I did not get converted to Tolkien first, but to Lin Carter, at least as editor. I got a half dozen fantasy paperbacks at a college book sale, and they included at least one CONAN, a Ballantine called DISCOVERIES IN FANTASY, and the Lancer collection of JIREL OF JOIRY. My memory is that I saw new depths in those fantasies for adults that I hadn't seen in things directed more at kids, like Oz and Peter Pan. I continued to read voluminously in both fantasy and SF for the rest of my life, but something about seeing a new potential in a genre at just the right age makes me prefer the fantasy genre in an affective sense.

Now, I ask myself, to what extent was my liking for "magical fantasies" associated with the appearance of the magic-rationale?

I think that the concept of magic has definite appeal. Magic usually takes two forms in fiction: one active, one passive. The active form involves some entity-- typically a mortal sorcerer, a god, or a demon-- using magical procedures to influence some aspect of the universe. The passive form takes the form of depicting the existence of entities that are thought to be intrinsically magical, but are not brought into being by anything but the intrinsic rules of a fantasy-universe. One finds both forms in LORD OF THE RINGS, in that characters like Gandalf and Sauron utilize specific procedures to influence their world, while whole categories of entities, such as dwarfs or trolls, are passively magical in nature even though they utilize no magical procedures. 

However, despite the strong association of the colloquial use of the term "fantasy" and the "magic rationale," I think there's a more fundamental appeal to "magical fantasy" than the use of said rationale-- which I'll discuss in the next section.

WEIRDIES AND WORLDIES

 I introduced the term "weirdies" in this essay as a description for a subset of characters in the comics-medium, and I justified the term in part with a reference to a label DC Comics had used in the late 1990s: "the Weirdoverse." But the proximate source of the term was a chapter in Brian Aldiss' 1973 history of science fiction, BILLION YEAR SPREE (revised in 1986 as TRILLION YEAR SPREE). 

Aldiss' "spree," while very readable, was typical of most science fiction histories. The author had no general theory of all metaphenomenal forms of literature, and in that respect he probably knew his audience well, as being almost exclusively interested only in the genre of science fiction. Most science-fiction histories are blithely uninterested even in SF's two best-known rivals for metaphenomenal popularity: "horror" and "fantasy," and Aldiss's SPREE conformed to this paradigm for the most part. But though I have not read any edition of SPREE for over twenty years, I remember well one chapter in which Aldiss more or less accounted for the less reputable (to SF fans) forms of the metaphenomenal, and that chapter was entitled, "ERB and the Weirdies."

"ERB," of course, was Edgar Rice Burroughs, who, in addition to creating a certain ape-man, was renowned for a host of otherworldly adventures that most purists would not deem "science fiction." I'm not certain, but the portmanteau "science fantasy" may have been devised, if not strictly for Burroughs, then for everything that didn't satisfy the supposed rigor of mainstream science fiction. As for "The Weirdies," I believe this category took in all the horror and fantasy authors who were popular during the heyday of American pulps, with special reference to the "Big Three" of WEIRD TALES: H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. Aldiss's analysis of all four authors struck me as generally condescending, even when he admitted having enjoyed this or that particular "weirdie" work.

I interpret the proponents of mainstream science fiction as having a superiority complex toward horror and fantasy via my interlinked concepts of freedom and restraint. With much the same logic used by elitists who boost naturalistic canonical literature above all other forms, fans of mainstream SF consider their favored genre to possess "cognitive restraint," the propensity to take boundless fantasies and make them reflect "real" issues in society or culture. Horror and fantasy are not incapable of such restraint, but the overall perception of both genres aligns with my concept of "affective freedom." The grotesques of Lovecraft and the arabesques of Smith are seen as stemming mostly from an appeal to affects/emotions, and to purists, that gives those genres less intellectual rigor.

Now, as a result of reviewing the JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK story-line, I began thinking more about what qualities made certain comics-characters seem like "weirdies." The Wiki article alleges that most of the Weirdoverse characters were aligned with the "mystery/occult" genres. This may be true of three of the four: NIGHT FORCE, SCARE TACTICS, and THE BOOK OF FATE (i.e, one of various titles about the sorcerer-superhero Doctor Fate). Yet, the fourth title under this rubric was CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, and even a quick look at online copies of this 1997 series indicated that it was not steeped in the tropes of horror or fantasy.

I don't think "weirdies" are purely allied to the supernatural in itself, and the 2018 incarnation of JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK bears this out, in that two of the members are productions of "mad science" like Detective Chimp and the Man-Bat. By the same token, those characters with opposing connotations-- what I now term "worldies"-- can also include any number of characters with supernatural associations, like Thor and Wonder Woman. (The Amazon Princess gets her occult mojo ramped up for her membership in the 2018 JLD.)

"Worldies," as I conceive them, may possess all manner of supernormal powers, but they seem to be tied to a commonplace representation of "the world," in much the same way that prose SF stories take place in logically consistent worlds with one or more "wonders" in them. "Weirdies," though, exist BETWEEN the commonplace world and another, twilight realm wherein nothing is logical or consistent. I relate Aldiss' use of "weirdies" to the origins of the word "weird," taken from an Old English word meaning "fate," which connotes an illogical order superimposed over mundane existence. I may devote some future posts on OUROBOROS DREAMS to some of the more interesting forms that the "weirdies" take in the comics medium.

UP WITH FANTASY, DOWN WITH HORROR

 In WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, Schopenhauer distinguishes between "intuitive" and "abstract" representations: humans share "intuitive representations" with other animals, in that they are based in the body's "percepts."  But humans alone have the power to conceive "abstract representations," for humans alone can base representations in "concepts."-- HERO VS. VILLAIN, MONSTER VS. VICTIM PART 3 (2012).

So in my previous essay I extended my terms of "grotesque and arabesque" to two "super-genres," horror and fantasy. I call them "super-genres" because both subsume so many subgenres that it's difficult to claim that any single genre embraces works as far apart as Poe's HOUSE OF USHER and the Chichester-Johnson JIHAD (for horror) or Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS and Clark Ashton Smith's "Zothique" stories (for fantasy). I think it's plain enough as to which super-genre is aligned with the grotesque and which is aligned with the arabesque.

It's more challenging, though, to place these super-genres-- which extend their influence far beyond their manifestations in popular fiction-- in the Schopenhaurean categories of authorial will. I've attempted to rename, for my literary project, Schopenhauer's names for his two types of representation, "intuitive" and "abstract," but I'm not going to reference any of my revisions in this essay. I want to get at a very narrow aspect of how audience expectations form patterns within authorial will.

I referenced that aspect-- or two manifestations of that aspect-- in the 2012 HUXLEY, JUNG AND STRANGENESS, where I summarized Thomas Huxley's distinctions between what he termed "upward transcendence" and "downward transcendence." 

UPWARD TRANSCENDENCE-- a state of mind that Huxley doesn't adequate define, though he associates it with "theophanies" and the veneration of a " liberating and transfiguring Spirit."


 DOWNWARD TRANSCENDENCE-- a state of mind in which the transcendence "is invariably downward into the less than human, the lower than personal."  Huxley's three main venues toward this form of transcendence are "drugs, elementary sexuality and herd-intoxication," though he mentions some others as well.

It also should not be difficult to guess which super-genre I'm likely to align with downward transcendence, and which with the upward species. Although the "intuitive representations" that human beings share with lower animals are not inherently "lower" by themselves, they become "lower" in contrast with "abstract representations," which generally suggest principles that supervene the world of base animal existence. Such principles may be metaphysical, as in religion, or empirical, as in science, but both systems depend on abstractions in order to promote the philosophies of their adherents. I may never have reason to further use terminological terms for the two forms of literary transcendence, but for convenience I'll name them after two Greek religious terms: "chthonic" for "earthbound," and "ouranian" for "heaven-bound." 

So what are the "audience expectations" I referenced above? With respect to the super-genres, horror is expected to give audiences "the worst case scenario," and fantasy is expected to give audiences "the best case scenario." There are naturally exceptions, and I named two of them above. 

HOUSE OF USHER is in every way a grim, grotesque look at familial relations, and thus represents the "mainstream" of horror fiction. In contrast, the narrative of JIHAD somewhat transcends many of the gruesome activities of both Cenobites and Nightbreed, and offers to the audience-- if not to the characters-- a metaphysical rapprochement between their respective worlds.

 LORD OF THE RINGS offers a panoramic vision of human courage against overwhelming odds, and of redemption even in the face of near-total degradation (i.e., Gollum, Frodo's "shadow-self.") Thus Tolkien's book represents the mainstream of the fantasy super-genre. In contrast, though Smith's "Zothique" stories take place in an apocalyptic fantasy-verse full of colorful arabesques, many of them have downbeat or diffident endings worthy of Smith's idol Poe. Yet none of these exceptions disprove the rule, the rule being that audiences look to fantasy for the feeling of positive life-affirmation, while they look to horror to feel as though they have met the negativity of all life-denying forces, and still survived. 

I may develop these points further, but that's a decent stopping-place for now.

ANOTHER EINSTEIN INTERSECTION

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.-- Albert Einstein.

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.-- Albert Einstein.

I encountered these two quotations in Graham Joyce's excellent novel SOME KIND OF FAIRY TALE. Both quotations appear on the Net, which does not necessarily mean that Einstein said those precise words, given the many ways in which celebrity figures are frequently misquoted.

But if one could prove definitively that Albert Einstein, a genius in the realm of the physical sciences expressed these unbounded sentiments in favor of unrestrained fantasy-- what would that mean?

My guess is that Einstein felt that fantasy enlarged the scope of his ability to imagine new patterns, and then to test them as to whether or not those "shadows of imagination" represented anything in the perceived patterns of consensual reality. If this was the case, then one might accuse Einstein of advocating fantasy for utilitarian purposes, as Peter Washington said of Calvino in this quote:

By presenting possible worlds, [the writer] can remind us that there are alternative orders of reality.-- Peter Washington, 1993 introduction to Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER, Everyman's Library.

But of course Einstein didn't make any definitive statement as to the utility of fantasy. All he says is that fairy tales are good for intelligence, and that the gift for fantasy has meant more to him than his lauded capacity for "abstract, positive thinking," which I compare to Cassirer's concept of "discursive thinking." 

Purely for motives of self-flattery, I'd like to think that he had some intuition along the lines of my own: that the capacity for fantasy, for representing what may not be real, goes hand in hand with the capacity for testing reality, for representing what seems to be real. 

But as I said-- no one really knows.

STRENGTH TO ENGAGEMENT

In STRENGTH TO DREAM, THE SEQUEL, I summed up some previous arguments thusly:

I applied some of my observations to King's comments in his 1981 book DANSE MACABRE, concluding that what he and Coleridge called "disbelief" was more like "disengagement." 

Having made that fine point, though, I didn't follow through on the question of whether Stephen King's extrapolations from Coleridge re: the "muscular" nature of disbelief might apply equally to disengagement. Once more, just to keep track of what Coleridge originally said:

It was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. 

Again I note that Coleridge does not define what he means by "suspension," though he certainly doesn't use any of King's muscular metaphors. If anything, when he speaks of "transferring from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth" in order to overcome some state of "disbelief," it sounds more like he's saying that he the author has to "charm" the disbeliever into putting aside his disbelief in favor of "poetic faith." It's not impossible that, since he's comparing his "endeavors" to those of his partner-in-poesy Wordsworth in a general way, Samuel T. may be covertly implying that Wordsworth's more grounded ruminations aren't capable of delving into "our inward nature," that they are only capable of giving "the charm of novelty to the things of every day."

Though both Coleridge and Stephen King were somewhat at odds with literary trends toward naturalism in their respective times, the kind of literature that Coleridge above calls "romantic" had made a modest comeback, and this is at least part of the reason that later critics lumped Coleridge, Wordsworth, and others into the category called "Romantic poets." In contrast, both during King's youth and his writing career, the general consensus in American literary culture was that Naturalism had essentially won the battle against Romanticism. This culture might admit to the existence of a handful of post-Renaissance literary works worthy of being called "good literature." But most "romantic" works, particularly those that involved metaphenomenal fantasy-content, were considered trash, and they generally appeared in such trashy media as pulp magazines, comic books, and kiddie television. (Fantasy-films arguably gained a greater stature than fantasy-works in other media during Stephen King's youth, but the possible reasons for this would comprise a separate essay.)

King's statements in DANSE MACABRE and the essay "Why I Chose Batman" show that he was fully invested in fantasy-fandom, though he, like many fans, formed his own non-academic criteria for what was good and what was bad. Yet I suggest that he was always conscious of the scorn of majority culture for many if not all of the fantasy-stories he favored. I also suggest that King didn't really have much of a rebuttal to naturalism except the idea that one's imagination might possess something like "muscles" that fantasy-fans regularly exercised while realism-fans did not. It's a stimulating idea but does not really speak to a deeper issue. It's true that realism-fans may dislike metaphenomenal fiction because they think it important that all fiction should emulate "the things of every day." But I've pointed out that most fantasy-fans don't literally "believe" that the fantastic content in their favored stories is real. Rather, they choose to engage with such content for reasons of aesthetic taste, not cognitive assessment. 

I think that when Coleridge speaks of how "suspension of disbelief" can foster "poetic faith" by way of the aforementioned "inward truth," he's a lot closer to stating that the human psyche draws equally upon both "inward truth" and what might as well be called "outward truth." In the second part of 2022's THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS, I related these categories to the Greek ideas of "the limitless and the limited."

I've already stated my own allegiance, but not without having noted that myth and literature are all about propounding "half-truths," responsive to both the truths we encounter through physical experience and truths we encounter through abstract contemplation.

Since both categories have relevance to the human condition as a whole, it is not so much that "realism-fans" disbelieve in fantasy-content as they do not engage with it as strongly as they do with realism-content, and the reverse formula would apply to "fantasy-fans." And of course there are those who can engage strongly with works in either category. Though I have a fascination with the complicated dynamics of how fantasy-content is expressed, I appreciate the rigor of a well-conceived "realism-work."

My theory of aesthetic engagement also speaks to reader-preference in terms of the two major categories of the uncanny and the marvelous. Possibly for the last time, here's King's statement as to why he "chose" Batman over Superman.

I remember the ads for the first SUPERMAN movie...the ones that said YOU'LL BELIEVE A MAN CAN FLY. Well, I didn't... But when Batman swung down into the Joker's hideout on a rope or stopped the Penguin from dropping Robin into a bucket of boiling hog-fat with a well-thrown Batarang, I believed. These were not likely things, I freely grant you that, but they were possible things.

I don't really credit that Young Stephen King liked these uncanny Bat-feats simply because they were more believable, and in part I dismiss this recollection because King had almost certainly allowed himself to "believe" in marvelous phenomena no more extraordinary than Superman in many other fantasy-works mentioned in DANSE MACABRE. I think the dynamic of the uncanny engaged him more than that did the dynamic of the marvelous, possibly because the former seemed to have a greater supply of what I've called "rigor." And given that King also WROTE quite a few stories with marvelous content-- some of which, rather improbably, tried to compete with the secondary-world mastery of J.R.R. Tolkien-- I think he could engage with the marvelous whenever he pleased, irrespective of his "belief" systems.

ADDENDUM: I may as well note that the reason I've gone so long about the use of the word "disbelief" is that I don't think anyone who knows what fiction is comes to it with the idea of "believing" in it, since the essence of fiction is that it is not factually true. One can accept a lot of fictional propositions and reject others, but always in the context of what I once called "relative meta-beliefs." Engagement or its lack, however, is crucial for anyone's appreciation of fictional narrative-- and it's anyone's guess whether I'll leave things at that pass for the near future.