The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art , and: Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art, and: Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy Virginia Wolf (bio) Schlobin, Roger C. , ed. The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame and Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press Ltd., 1982. Slusser, George E. Rabkin, Eric S. and Scholes, Robert , eds. Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Corbondale: Southern Illinois University press, 1983. As their titles suggest, these anthologies, like much recent criticism, address the contemporary concern with defining the fantastic genres and thereby raising critical opinion of them. The Schlobin anthology focuses on fantasy, the Slusser on science fiction, discussions of other genres being used mostly to isolate the characteristics of the one under consideration. Both books have essentially the same organization, offering about a dozen essays, the first ones highly theoretical, the later ones increasingly narrow in subject. The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art, however, succeeds much better than Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy, both because its theoretical pieces more fully define fantasy than do those of Coordinates define science fiction and because its final essays are not as narrow as those of Coordinates. They explore and compare sub-genres of fantasy rather than individual works of science fiction. The first four essay in The Aesthetics, Gary Wolfe's "The Encounter with Fantasy," C. N. Manlove's "On the Nature of Fantasy," W. R. Irwin's "From Fancy to Fantasy: Coleridge and Beyond," and Kenneth J. Zahorski and Robert H. Boyer's "The Secondary Worlds of High Fantasy," are all distillations of or actual passages from major books in the field. Wolfe, known especially for The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction, writes here also of "the impossible" as the defining characteristic of fantasy, noting that "the notion of impossibility in fantasy . . . must be more public than the schizophrenic's hallucination, yet less public than myth and religion," and concluding that ideational structure—often technological and political in science fiction, but psychological in fantasy—promotes belief but never as successfully alone as when combined with psychological affect. In his words, "deeper belief is so much a piece with the created world that the question of 'meaning' becomes a phenomenological rather than a literary one." Manlove's essay, originally part of Modern Fantasy: Five Studies, explains each term of his definition of fantasy: "A fiction evoking wonder and containing a substantial and irreducible element of supernatural or impossible worlds, brings or objects with which the mortal characters in the story or the readers become on at least partly familiar terms." The new afterword examines definitions made by Bleiler, Rabkin, Todorov, and Irwin as well as criticisms of Manlove's definition, further clarifying Manlove's understanding of the genre but also setting up a context for Irwin's discussion of fancy, rather than the imagination, as the source of fantasy. Manlove, of course, criticizes Irwin's focus on fantasy as plaything or game as too narrow. Finally, Zahorski and Boyer define high fantasy in terms of setting, classifying and examining examples in terms of their "created remote secondary worlds . . . ; created juxtoposed primary and secondary worlds with magical portals serving as gateways between them; and . . . created worlds-within-worlds." With the exception of two essays on visual fantasy art, the remaining essays, as their titles suggest, deal with various subgenres: "Ethical Fantasy for Children," "Pure and Applied Fantasy, or From Faerie to Utopia," "Aspects of Fantasy in Literary [End Page 137] Myths about Lost Civilizations," "Modern Fantasy and Medieval Romance: A Comparative Study," "Heroic Fantasy and Social Reality: ex nihilo nihil fit." George P. Landow's and Terry Reece Hackford's essays are welcome additions to the discussion of fantasy illustration, Landow exploring the relationship between verbal and visual fantasy in the choice of subject, devices of transformation, and perspective; Hackford, the specific techniques of Arthur Boyd Houghton, Henry J. Ford, John D. Batten, and Edmund Dulac in illustrating their respective versions of the Arabian Nights. While clever and entertaining, the final essay in this volume seems at first not to belong at all; but William M. Schugler, Jr.'s "Recent Developments in Spell Construction" adds some important observations about names and language...