The Purpose of Fantasy

Back to 1981

The purpose of Fantasy never struck me as much of a question until I read Charles Platt’s “The Curse of the Hobbit” from Heavy Metal, September 1981. In this piece Platt rails against the new popularity of Fantasy fiction following the success of books like The Lord of the Rings. He begins by saying escapist fantastic literature is okay. Then:

But the last fifteen years have seen the rise of a new form that debases escapist adventure fiction to a lower level than ever before. It reduces characterization to a puerile simplicity, is written and plotted with little skill or finesse, and cuts off all redeeming realistic references to real life, real people, real problems, or real emotions.

Fifteen years previous is 1966 when The Lord of the Rings exploded on college campuses and a little while later Robert E. Howard would be reborn anew in purple-edged paperbacks. Platt points out correctly that fifteen years ago Fantasy was not a separate publishing category. He also felt that “…the sheer dumbness of that escape indicate a catastrophic decline of audiences to cope with the real world.”

The Enemies of Sense

Before Platt goes on he clears the horror fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King, the Science Fiction of H. G. Wells and Fritz Leiber from any crimes. The enemy he points out are:

– the sword-wielding, lantern-jawed thug, nostrils flaring with witless blood lust as he slices up slavering demons of darkness;

– the alabaster-fleshed, leather-clad teen queen cowering from a leering lizard-thing that crawls from its lair to rake her bulging tits with its slime-stained talons;

– and winsome dragons, lovable gnomes, lost princesses, wise old wizards, communities of rabbits, philosophical chickens….

He goes on to lament primitive backgrounds, the lack of technology and simple characters and talking beasts, lack of plausibility, archaic speech or diction and books with maps. He then launches into an explanation of how the old Science Fiction fan had “The Dream”, the idea that this fiction would one day become reality. He specifically slams Frank Frazetta, Richard Adams, The Lord of the Rings, Dune and Anne MacCaffrey’s Pern novels (all bestsellers).

The Purpose

This wrong-minded tirade brought that question firmly into my head: what is the purpose of Fantasy? Platt seems to have missed the point altogether. He wants it to be a didactic fiction like some forms of Science Fiction. He calls it down for being a complete separation from reality. (Well, duh! to use an expression from this time period). Fantasy fiction, whether Sword & Sorcery or the wonderful world of the rabbits of Watership Down, a quest novel like a legion of LOTR clones, none of these was written to teach you a specific lesson, to discuss the price of gas, or politics in the Middle East. People read this stuff to get away from all that crap that Platt seems to want.

So what exactly is the purpose of Fantasy then? If Platt is right then I am one of “…the adults who seem to want to believe in fairy tales, and who want not just escapist adventure but to be totally cut off from anything remotely real or remotely disturbing.” In other words, an idiot. To that I laugh. I can read SF of any breed, though I admit I prefer the ones he probably hates. My mental ability to appreciate many genres (Mystery, Horror, Westerns, etc.) is not impaired by my love of Fantasy. There are good Fantasy books just as there are good SF books. And conversely, bad in both genres. Each has its own aesthetic, its own history, its own purpose.

Tolkien and His Tale

Again I say Platt has missed the point. Let’s take J. R. R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings as an example. (This seems fair when the title targets hobbits.) Old John Ronald was a veteran of World War I. He wanted to write about the war but not in a direct way. He could have written a book like My Years in the War, but this would have been mere journalism. It might draw a picture about how awful it was and how many of his friends never came back. But again, merely reporting facts. Tolkien wanted to say something far more profound about the experience and the loss. To do this he uses Fantasy as a foil. Fantasy fiction is a style of storytelling that works with mythic images and sub-text. (Not allegory, for Tolkien hated that.)

Critics Know Better

Diana Waggoner explains it thus in The Hills of Faraway (1978, making it a book Platt could have read earlier…):

The answer is that fantasy, as a literary genre, is not primarily about the material it uses—the symbols and dream-stuff, myths and images, which are the flesh and blood on its skeleton of rationality. Fantasy deals with mythopoeic archetypes of great antiquity and power—enchanters, princesses, quests, dark towers, hidden cities, haunted forests, walled gardens—as well as with myths of less age but no less force like the Old West, the atomic bomb, or the power of telepathy. But use of these symbols and images is not confined to fantasy, nor does it make a work a fantasy. What is important is the treatment of this mythopoeic material. Fantasy places the material in a fictional framework within which it is treated as empirical data, the common stuff of ordinary reality. A fantasy world is a secondary reality whose metaphysical premises are different from those of the real world, but whose inhabitants are men and women like ourselves, who live in their reality just as we do in ours.

The Real Purpose

The purpose of Fantasy then is to enchant. Not to explain with nuts and bolts and molecules. It requires a child-like quality (not to be confused with childish) that Mr. Platt has lost somehow. I can only feel sorry for an obviously intelligent man who can’t appreciate the sheer magic of Watership Down or the larger scope and power of J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy. Sure, not every book is a masterpiece. He points to the Gor novels of John Norman. They have their fans but nobody is calling them the cherished classics of the genre. (That is the equivalent of me saying Science Fiction is all crap because of Perry Rhodan and ignoring Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness.)

Here is the ultimate irony of all this. Consider the magazine it appeared in. Heavy Metal, a publication that featured more than few “alabaster-fleshed, leather-clad teen queen cowering from a leering lizard-thing” on its covers, selling a mix of SF, Fantasy and sex to an audience that must have laughed their arses off while they read this spiel. (The cover for that issue was the classic Chris Achilleos image used for the Heavy Metal movie.) The editor was no longer Ted White who left in 1980. Ted bought all those “sword-wielding, lantern-jawed thugs” for Fantastic until 1978. One of the new editors, Leonard Mogel, had taken over for Ted and published the famous and controversial Achilleos cover with (and without) the nipples.

A Look Back in Anger?

My final takeaway is to consider this editorial within the context of September 1981. Charles Platt was a 36-year old SF writer then, with seven novels under his belt, stories in critically awarded places like Damon Knight’s Orbit series. He must have been reading the publishing industry ‘writing on the wall’. Fantasy trilogies were about to become the big fish in the fantastic literature pond. For most a hundred years SF sold better than Fantasy. He had been born into an age that wasn’t interested in SF mid-listers. Readers wanted more books like The Lord of the Rings, and publishers like Ian Ballantine and Judy Lynn-Del Rey were more than willing to push The Sword of Shannara on these LOTR-hungry customers.

Conclusion

So in a way, “The Curse of the Hobbit” makes me sad, not angry. It is a snapshot in time that many have forgotten. The likes of Charles Platt, men and women who had worked hard on their SF craft, realizing the tide had turned and it was all for naught. A similar paradigm shift occurred back in 1977 when Star Wars broke box office records. Some, those going in another direction, must have dropped what they were doing, realizing everything had suddenly changed.

*N. B. Charles Platt went on to write six more novels and become the editor of Interzone in 1995. I am not sure what his current opinion is on the purpose of Fantasy…