“We Are All Geeks Now”: Fantasy as a Mode of Social Practice in Disenchanted Modernity

Abstract

As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality by Michael Saler Oxford University Press, 2012. 283 pages. While reading Michael Saler's As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality, I found myself repeatedly returning to the cover of this intelligent and generative cultural history of fantasy. Designed by Christopher Tobias and illustrated by George O'Connor, the cover depicts two famous men--or, rather, two famous characters. Occupying the bottom third of the cover of As If these men are the detective Sherlock Holmes and the wizard Gandalf the Grey. Both are smoking pipes. Holmes walks towards the spine of the book in search of a clue, magnifying glass in hand. Gandalf holds his wooden staff, making his way to the edge of the right side of the cover as he contemplates the fate of Middle Earth. A monster rises behind them. A hybrid of a kraken and a vampire, it looks like it slithered out from between copies of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Bram Stoker's Dracula that were jammed together on a musty bookshelf somewhere. The cover is a less garish version of some of the far gaudier artwork that adorned the covers of magazines such as Super Science Stories in the 1940s (Saler 93). In fact, it evokes scenes depicted on books from the fantasy publisher Ballantine Books, not Oxford University Press, Saler's publisher. Tobias and O'Connor, in other words, have gotten the cover of As If just right. They aim to be neither cool nor sleek. They choose much more appropriately to risk a cheesy nerdiness appropriate to Saler's subject matter: fantasy. For many, fantasy is irresponsibly escapist, a subgenre of fiction stereotypically associated with pathetic geeks somehow convinced that places like Middle Earth and people like Gandalf are real. Saler productively corrects this view of fantasy in As If, arguing in the end that we are all geeks (3). As the presence of both Gandalf and Sherlock on the cover of As If communicates, however, Saler does not restrict fantasy to the specific genre of fantasy. That genre is popularly devoted to magical lands where witches and wizards have startling powers; social life is structured by feudal politics; and races of elves, dwarves, men, and the like (or, rather, the definitively unlike) are kept strictly segregated. Not that this kind of focus would be unproductive. It's been clear to scholars for at least forty years now that mass-cultural genres belong to a sphere of aesthetic experience charged with real social and historical meanings, with an essay such as Fredric Jameson's Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture influentially tuning us into those meanings with a Marxist model in the 1970s. One might even say that the now robust tradition of scholarly work on mass-cultural genres, from popular nineteenth-century literature (e.g., Jane Tompkins's Sensational Designs and Michael Denning's Mechanic Accents) to women's culture (e.g., Mary Ann Doane's The Desire to Desire and Lauren Berlant's The Female Complaint), stands behind and enables Saler's book, which rightly takes for granted how that tradition has already done the important work of legitimating the popular as an object of study with powerful analyses from myriad perspectives. That tradition effectively allows Saler to cover an expansive world of fantastic materials without belaboring the question of whether the Bronte sisters' juvenilia, New Romances such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and H. Rider Haggard's She, the science fiction magazines of Hugo Gernsback, the detective stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, and the novels of J. R. R. Tolkien constitute an archive proper for the professoriate. What Saler must legitimate, however, is why such an extensive range of materials can be arrayed together in the same book as objects of study with some common basis. What, in short, allows Gandalf and Sherlock to share the cover of As If Saler can draw persuasively on wizards and detectives alike because he contends that they both instantiate a specifically modern form of enchantment (159). …