The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy 3031263960, 9783031263965

Table of contents :
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Fantasy Faction(s)
The Structure of This Book
Part I: Theory and Methodology
What Is Fantasy and Who Decides?
Self and Other
Game of the Impossible
Journeying Across the Border
Works Cited
Fantasy as Genre: On Defining the Field of Study
Resistance to Genre
Defining Fantasy: A Brief Overview
Fantasy/Fantasy/Fantastic: Contested Terms
Fantasy and Genre: Obstacles and Assumptions
Fantasy as Genre: Possible Approaches
Conclusion
Works Cited
A Biocultural Taxonomy
The Supernatural Imagination
Faith, Folklore, Fantasy
The Reading Brain and Fantasy’s Narratology
Conclusion
Works Cited
Allotopia: A World-Building Narrative
Introduction
The Concept of Allotopia: A Brief History
Eco’s Definition of Allotopia
Allotopia as a Fictional Heterocosm
The Topographical Otherness
Closing Remarks
Works Cited
A Thousand and One Book: A Cross-Cultural Approach to Serialized Fantasy
Works Cited
Crosshatch Fantasy: Unsettling Portals, Crisis Heterotopias, and Comings-of-Age
Introduction
Portal Fantasy Worlds as Heterotopias
Crises Heterotopias and Coming-of-Age
Crosshatch Fantasies: Crossing Over into the ‘Real’
Reading as Heterotopic: Contamination and Transformation
Works Cited
Hybrid Secondary Worlds: Animal Fantasy
Hybrid Secondary Worlds: Animal Fantasy
Scales of Animality
Adjusting Animal Worlds
Home of Tooth and Claw
You Can’t Go Home Again
Conclusion
Works Cited
“How Did you Go about Saving a City? She Googled it”: Urban Fantasy Cities as Communities of Citizens
Works Cited
Punk Subculture in Urban Fantasy: Life on the Border
Youthful Revolt: Punk in the 1980s
Transgressive Art, Punk, Fantasy
Punk, Folk, and Faerie
Faerie-Filtered Punk Philosophy: The Other Way to Think
Works Cited
Part II: Countries and Cultures
History and Other (Colonial) Fantasies: Indigenous Time Play in Cleverman
The Past Is Never Dead. It Is Not Even Past.
The Past Is Never Where You Think You Left It ...
What If You Came Back Now/To Our New World, the City Roaring 
He Kakano i Ruia Mai i Rangiātea
Works Cited
Chinese Danmei: Male-Male Romance, Women’s Fantasy, and the Feminization of Labor in the Digital Age
Works Cited
Between Scylla and Charybdis: A Survey of Greek Fantasy Fiction
A Lost Road
The Case Against the Fantastic
Fantasy Ascendant
The Advent of Self-publishing
Toward the Creation of a National Scene
Conclusion
Works Cited
Re-imagining Hindu Mythology in the Twenty-First Century: Amish Tripathi and Indian Fantasy Fiction in English
Amish Tripathi and Indian Fantasy Literature
Humanization of the Divine
Scientized Mythology
Conclusion
Works Cited
Wilderness as Wonderland: Jewish Fantasy from Ancient to Modern
RbbH’s Travels
A Share of the World to Come
Anti-hero, Chaos, and Fantasy
Bialik—A Modern Implementation
Works Cited
Israeli Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fantastical Chronotopes and the Modern Promised Land
The Promised Land Chronotope
Judaic Israeli SFF
Universalist Israeli SFF
Hybrid Judaic and Universalist Israeli SFF
Local and Global SFF
Works Cited
Looking for an Italian Style fantasy
A Brief Archeology of the Italian Fantastic
The Twentieth Century and the Slow Affirmation of Italian Fantasy
The Fantasy Baby Boom and the 2012 Crisis
Recent Years: The Revival of Indies and Self-publishers
Works Cited
The Little Red Gloves: Apocalyptic Fantasy and the Bodhisattva of Mercy in a Japanese Picture Book on Hiroshima
The Development and Characteristics of Modern Japanese Fantasy Literature for Adults and Children
Kannon in Miraculous Buddhist Traditions
The Little Red Gloves—Picture Book and Apocalyptic Fantasy
Conclusion
Works Cited
Latin American Fantasy as Heterogeneous Literature: Between Neomedievalism and Latin Americanism
Introduction
Down the Rift: Space-in-Between, Cultural Appropriation and Heterogeneous Literature in Latin American Tradition
Liliana Bodoc’s Saga de Los Confines: A Fantasy Approach to the Conquest of Latin America
Verónica Murguía’s Loba: Latin America through the Lens on an Imaginated Middle Ages
Conclusions
Works Cited
Cultural Appropriation of Poland’s Fantasy: The Cold War Saga o Wiedźminie Moving into American Mainstream Culture
Polish Fantasy and Folklore
Polish History and the Saga o Wiedźminie
The Trap of Translating the Saga o Wiedźminie
Disenchanting Anti-Fairy Tales
Justifiable Appropriation: The Saga o Wiedźminie Moving to Netflix
Conclusion
Works Cited
Syncretism in Russian Fantasy
The Triumph of Fantasy in Russia
A Model Case Study
Works Cited
Mystification, Religious Imagery, and Fantasy in Modern Tibetan Literature
The Development of Modern Tibetan Literature
The Fantasy of Tibet
Is Tibet a Shangri-la?
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy Edited by  Elana Gomel · Danielle Gurevitch

The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy

Elana Gomel  •  Danielle Gurevitch Editors

The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy

Editors Elana Gomel Tel Aviv University Ramat-Aviv, Israel

Danielle Gurevitch Bar-Ilan University Ramat-Gan, Israel

ISBN 978-3-031-26396-5    ISBN 978-3-031-26397-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, ­reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material ­contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: cokada/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

Part I Theory and Methodology   1  What Is Fantasy and Who Decides?  3 Elana Gomel and Danielle Gurevitch  Fantasy as Genre: On Defining the Field of Study 15 Kim Wickham A Biocultural Taxonomy 31 Thomas Kristjansen  Allotopia: A World-Building Narrative 47 Krzysztof M. Maj A Thousand and One Book: A Cross-Cultural Approach to Serialized Fantasy 61 Nardeen Dow  Crosshatch Fantasy: Unsettling Portals, Crisis Heterotopias, and Comings-of-Age 71 Rose Michael and Glen Donnar  Hybrid Secondary Worlds: Animal Fantasy 85 Cord-Christian Casper  “How Did you Go about Saving a City? She Googled it”: Urban Fantasy Cities as Communities of Citizens103 Aleksandra Łozińska

v

vi 

Contents

 Punk Subculture in Urban Fantasy: Life on the Border119 Dean-Liathine McDonald Part II Countries and Cultures 137  History and Other (Colonial) Fantasies: Indigenous Time Play in Cleverman139 Sara Spurgeon Chinese Danmei: Male-Male Romance, Women’s Fantasy, and the Feminization of Labor in the Digital Age157 Zhange Ni Between Scylla and Charybdis: A Survey of Greek Fantasy Fiction175 Dimitra Nikolaidou  Re-imagining Hindu Mythology in the Twenty-­First Century: Amish Tripathi and Indian Fantasy Fiction in English191 Deimantas Valančiūnas Wilderness as Wonderland: Jewish Fantasy from Ancient to Modern205 Ido Hevroni  Israeli Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fantastical Chronotopes and the Modern Promised Land223 Vered Weiss  Looking for an Italian Style fantasy241 Livio Gambarini and Francesco Toniolo The Little Red Gloves: Apocalyptic Fantasy and the Bodhisattva of Mercy in a Japanese Picture Book on Hiroshima257 Roni Sarig  Latin American Fantasy as Heterogeneous Literature: Between Neomedievalism and Latin Americanism271 Paula Rivera Donoso

 Contents 

vii

 Cultural Appropriation of Poland’s Fantasy: The Cold War Saga o Wiedźminie Moving into American Mainstream Culture289 Aylin Dilek Walder  Syncretism in Russian Fantasy307 Donatella Possamai Mystification, Religious Imagery, and Fantasy in Modern Tibetan Literature321 Michal Zelcer-Lavid Index337

Notes on Contributors

Cord-Christian  Casper is a post-doc at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Department of English. Studies Joseph Conrad, Anarchism, and Giorgio Agamben. Casper is co-founder of CLOSURE, an e-journal on comics studies. Glen Donnar  is a senior lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. His research primarily examines popular cultural and screen representations of men, masculinities, and terror. He has published diversely on representations of masculinity, monstrosity, and disaster in film and television; the mediation of terror in news media; and the ethics of news viewership. He is the author of Troubling Masculinities: Terror, Gender, and Monstrous Others in American Film Post-9/11 (2020). Paula Rivera Donoso  is a Chilean fantasy author and independent researcher. She holds a Master of Arts in Literature and a Diploma in Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Her research and fiction writing focus on fantasy literature. She has published the children’s fantasy novel La niña que salió en busca del mar (2013), the fantasy short story compilation El musgo en las ruinas (2018), and several short stories in different Chilean and Spanish anthologies. Nardeen  Dow  is a lecturer in the English Department at Tel Hai College, Ohalo Campus, Israel. Her research mainly focuses on fantasy literature and the cultural reception of the genre. She is equally interested in Arabic literature and has written two articles comparing Arabic and English literary works and how culture influences the reception of these texts (to be published). Her article “Homosocial or Homoerotic? A Re-reading of Gender and Sexuality in Harry Potter Through Fanfiction,” which was published in the journal Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, also deals with reader response in the form of fanfiction and examines homosocial and ­homoerotic relationships in Harry Potter by exploring fanfiction stories written by fans of the series.

ix

x 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Livio Gambarini  is a writer of historical novels for Piemme Edizioni and a fantasy author for Acheron Books (Eternal War saga, Brancalonia). Geek.com listed one of his books among the 10 most interesting contemporary non-­ English-­native fantasy novels. He teaches in the creative writing class Il Piacere della Scrittura at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan. As an authorpreneur and editorial consultant, he created “Rotte Narrative” and runs an appreciated YouTube channel about narratology. Elana  Gomel  is an associate professor at the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University. She has taught and researched at Princeton, Stanford, University of Hong Kong, and Venice International University. She is the author of five academic books and numerous articles on subjects such as narrative theory, posthumanism, science fiction, Dickens, and Victorian culture. Among her books are Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject (2003), Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature (2014), and Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism: Beyond the Golden Rule (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2014). She is working on a book project about narratology of the future and editing a collection of essays about Israeli speculative fiction and a new volume on serial killers and serial spectators for Brill. She is also an award-winning fiction writer who has published more than a hundred short stories, several novellas, and five novels. Danielle Gurevitch  is cultural anthropologist, director of the Multidisciplinary Studies in the Humanities (Liberal Arts) and Chair of the BIU Dangoor Centre (https://dangoorcentre.com/), and a visiting professor at Tulsa University. Her scientific academic work includes the history of ideas, contemporary cultural studies, and speculative and comparative literature. Her latest book, coedited with Dov Schwartz, titled Woman Are Skilled with Witchery: Witchcraft, Science and Gender in Medieval Jewish Philosophy, is about to be published in 2023. Ido Hevroni  is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Jewish Thought, and in the Core Curriculum at Shalem College, Jerusalem. His main area of research is the stories of the Talmud and Midrash. He teaches courses on Talmudic narratives, Western classic literature (from Homer to Ovid), gantasy literature (from Grimms’ Fairy Tales to The Hobbit), and depth psychology (Freud and Jung). Thomas Kristjansen  is an independent freelance scholar of fantasy and speculative fiction and holds master’s degree (2020) in English from Aarhus University. His research concerns how psychology, evolved dispositions, history, and the psychological and cultural phenomenology of religion influence the fantastical imagination. He works within an interdisciplinary paradigm to for-

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

xi

mulate a holistic and inclusive vision of what we mean we talk of fantasy and the supernatural. Aleksandra  Łozińska  is a PhD candidate at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. She is working there on a thesis on urban fantasy in various media. While this is her main research interest, she also carries out an original related project, “The Course and Consequences of the Urban Turn in Fantasy,” funded by the National Science Centre, Poland. Krzysztof M. Maj  is an assistant professor in the Department of IT and Media Studies, Faculty of Humanities, AGH University of Science and Technology; video game researcher specializing in world-building, fantasy, and SF studies; co-editor of More After More: Essays Commemorating the Five-Hundredth Anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia (2017) and several Polish books on fantasy and game studies; and author of two monographs: Allotopie: Topografia s ́wiatów fikcjonalnych (Allotopias: Towards the Topography of Fictional ́ Storyworlds) (2015) and Swiatotwórstwo w fantastyce: Od przedstawienia do zamieszkiwania (World-Building in the Fantastic: From Representation to Inhabitation) (2019). Dean-Liathine McDonald  is a PhD candidate in the REMELICE laboratory of the University of Orléans, France. His research centers on urban fantasy literature and its relationship to culture, subculture, and politics, with psychoanalysis drifting along somewhere on the peripheries. His work on early urban fantasy has recently been published in Caliban n°63: Dynamics of Collapse in Fantasy, the Fantastic and SF as well as Jangada: crítica, literature, artes. His chapter “L’alchimie de la fantasy urbaine: l’énigme du décentrement au cœur d’un genre” will be published shortly. Rose Michael  is Senior Lecturer in Writing and Publishing at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Rose Michael’s first novel, The Asking Game (2007), was a runner-up for the Vogel and received an Aurealis honorable mention. Short stories from it appeared in Island, Griffith Review, and Best Australian Stories and won a University of Melbourne prize. An early extract from her second, The Art of Navigation (2017), was shortlisted for a Conjure award. She has published speculative fiction criticism in outlets such as The Conversation, Sydney Review of Books, and Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, while her most recent creative speculative fiction appears in Meanjin. Dimitra Nikolaidou  Nikolaidou’s research examines the intersection between speculative literature, gaming, and culture. Her papers on diversity in gaming and the cultural roots of speculative narratives have been published in various academic journals and volumes. Her short stories have appeared in a variety of outlets including Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Metaphorosis, and Andromeda Spaceways, as well as in several anthologies including Nova Hellas. Zhange  Ni is an associate professor at the Department of Religion and Culture, Virginia Tech. She holds a PhD in Religion and Literature from the

xii 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

University of Chicago Divinity School. Her research is devoted to religion and genre fiction, such as fantasy and romance. She has published Religion and the Arts in The Hunger Games (2020, Brill) and is working on a book project tentatively entitled The Cult of Fiction in the Age of the Internet: Chinese Religions, Digital Capitalism, and the Fantasy Boom in Contemporary China. Donatella  Possamai  is Deputy Director of the Inter-University Center for Research on Contemporary Russia and Its Cultural Heritage (CIRRCEC), Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Padua in Italy. Specialized in contemporary studies, she has focused her research on Russian culture and literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She is the author of What Is Russian Postmodernism? (Che cos’è il postmodernismo russo?). Her latest book is titled At the Crossroads of Two Millennia. A Journey in Contemporary Russian Literature (Al crocevia dei due millenni. Viaggio nella letteratura russa contemporanea). Roni  Sarig  is researcher and Lecturer in Japanese Studies, and writer, who teaches at Bar-Ilan University and Tel Hai College, Israel. Her research deal with the memory of World War II in Japan and Israel, comparative children’s literature, society and margins in Japan, and Japanese cinema. Her published books include All the Silk Paths (novel, Hebrew), Soon the Wind Will Blow (novel, Hebrew), The Journey That Began in Impitom (children’s book, Hebrew), and translation into Hebrew of the Chinese novel by Hong Ying, Daughter of the River. Sara Spurgeon  is Professor of Literatures of the American West in the English Department at Texas Tech University, where she also works on Indigenous speculative fiction, environmental literatures, and post- and decolonial theory. She is the author of Exploding the Western: Myths of Empire on the Postmodern Frontier, co-author of Writing the Southwest, editor of the critical anthology Cormac McCarthy, and co-editor of Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre (2020). She has published on Ana Castillo, Cormac McCarthy, Martin Cruz Smith, feminist theory in the borderlands, the alt-history novel Journey to Fusang by Cherokee speculative fiction writer William Sanders and co-authored an essay on the film Brokeback Mountain. Her recent publications include an essay on Cherokee comics artist and writer David Mack, “Indians, Aliens, and Superheroes,” in Aesthetic Apprehensions: Silences and Absences in False Familiarities (2020), and the article “Transnational American Studies, Ecocritical Narratives, and Global Indigeneity: A Year of Teaching in Norway” in the Fall 2022 issue of the Journal of Transnational American Studies. Spurgeon directs the Literature, Social Justice, and Environment (LSJE) Program at Texas Tech. Francesco Toniolo  is Adjunct Professor of Film and Television Studies at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan. He also teaches game culture at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti of Milan and game writing at the Scuola Internazionale di Comics of Florence. He conducts research on video games,

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

xiii

online communities, narratology, and intersections between different forms of art and narration in media. He has published several articles and books on these topics. Deimantas Valancˇiu ˉ nas  is Associate Professor of Film and Popular Cultures of Asia at the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Vilnius University. His research interests include Indian cinema, postcolonial theory, diaspora studies, and Gothic and horror cinema and literature in Asia. He has published several journal articles on South Asian cinema and literature, and his recent publication is an edited volume South Asian Gothic: Haunted Cultures, Histories and Media (co-edited with Katarzyna Ancuta, 2021). Aylin Dilek Walder  While pursuing her PhD project “Negotiations of Alterity in Contemporary Anglophone Fantasy Fiction,” she works at the Department of English Philology at the University of Cologne, Germany. Further, she is part of the editorial team of Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies. Her research primarily focuses on the notion of alterity as well as on adaptation theory and cultural studies with particular regard to written and screened fantasy fiction. Vered Weiss  is the Serling Israeli Visiting Scholar and “The Israel Institute” Teaching Fellow at The “Michael and Elaine Serling Institute for Jewish Studies and Modern Israel” at Michigan State University. Weiss is co-editor of Tracing Topographies: Revisiting the Concentration Camps Seventy Years After the Liberation of Auschwitz (2017). Weiss is co-editing a volume about Israeli culture and post-traumatic stress disorder (Lexington) and is also collaborating with Elana Gomel on a volume about Israeli speculative fiction (Liverpool University Press). Kim  Wickham is Professor of English at Horry-Georgetown Technical College in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, USA. Her areas of research include fantasy, science fiction, contemporary novels of slavery, and pop culture. She has published in The Comparatist, the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and Response: The Journal of Popular and American Culture. Michal Zelcer-Lavid  is Director and Lecturer in the Asian Studies track at the Multidisciplinary Studies Program (Liberal Arts) at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. Her research focuses on nationalism and ethnic identity in Tibetan and Uyghur minorities, ethnic conflicts in Asia, and East-West Asia relation.

Introduction

Elana [email protected] Danielle [email protected] 1 Tel Aviv University, Ramat-Aviv, Israel 2 Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel

Fantasy Faction(s) We are members of a Facebook group called Fantasy Faction in which members exchange recommendations and discuss their favorite fantasy books. Discussions sometimes get heated but seldom descend into the feeding frenzy of Twitter. It is a large group, and exceptionally active. Judging by its members’ emotional investment in their favorite genre, fantasy is doing very well. And indeed, according to Query Tracker, fantasy is the second most-requested genre by literary agents.1 But what is fantasy? While fans groups do not require its members to provide a formal definition, they all seem to share a basic understanding of the genre. Judging by Fantasy Faction, sci-fi (SF) fantasy and book lovers, and others similar online groups, fantasy is limited to (mostly) trilogies written by (mostly) white men and women in (exclusively) English. An informal survey of the members’ discussions would generate the following pantheon of the genre’s greatest: J.R.R. Tolkien (of course), C.S. Lewis (not particularly beloved but often mentioned), J.K. Rowling, Ursula Le Guin, Terry Prachett, and recently the new gold members Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfuss, and George R.R.  Martin. This tracks quite well with the publishing data, according to which Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Lewis’ Narnia books, Martin’s Songs of Ice and Fire, and Sanderson’s various series account for the lion’s share of English-language fantasy book sales.

1

 https://writingcooperative.com/what-are-the-most-popular-literary-genres-6db5c69928cc.

xv

xvi 

Introduction

But this is changing. Just as members of Fantasy Faction increasingly come from all over the world, so does the field of fantasy grow exponentially to include books written in Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Hindu, Bengali, Icelandic, Hebrew, Arabic, and many other languages. The readers and publishers are becoming aware of the fact that there are flourishing traditions of fantasy in many countries outside the Anglo-American cultural hegemony. Translations of international fantasy and SF are steadily climbing bestsellers charts: from the Sergei Lukyanenko’s Nightwatch series (1998–2015) to Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher (2007–1018) and Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem (2008–2016). And yet there has never been a Reader dedicated specifically to international fantasy. Nor has there been any attempt to offer a critical approach to fantasy flexible enough to account for the genre’s increasingly transnational, transcultural reach, and yet specific enough to embrace its fans’ intuitive understanding of it. Our Reader attempts to fill these lacunae. First, we want to define fantasy in a more narratively precise and culturally sensitive way than has been the case hitherto, by interrogating the genre’s representation of alterity in the context of specific consensus realities. While we do not believe that any definition can encompass the entire field of fantasy, certain heuristic models are necessary. While the models offered by our contributors and ourselves are different, all converge on the necessity to separate fantasy from other forms of non-mimetic writing, and to link it to a specific cultural and historical configuration. We also want to discuss how fantasy functions in relation to culturally, linguistically, and nationally diverse audiences. And finally, we aim to survey national traditions of fantasy that have been underrepresented in academic scholarship, with particular emphasis on issues of cultural influence, cosmopolitan and transnational writing, and postcolonial entanglements. While such a survey is, by necessity, incomplete, we hope it will open the way to more studies of international fantasy. Our international contributors bring a much-needed shift of perspective in fantasy studies. By addressing fantasy with a diverse set of paradigms, such as postcolonial theory, narratology, new materialism, transnationalism, and others, they offer a fresh look at the genre. And by introducing the English-­ speaking reader to undertheorized, marginalized, or unknown fantasy traditions, they open the field of fantasy studies to new voices and new texts.

The Structure of This Book This Reader is divided into two parts. The first is Theory. Clustered here are chapters which address the issue of fantasy as negotiation: between cultures and ideologies, between identities and forms of writing, and ultimately between different consensus realities. The scholars represented in this Part are as international as our project itself. The corpuses that they invoke are equally diverse, from Egyptian serial fantasy to the New Weird; from magic realism to Young Adult (YA). But all the chapters here attempt to dislocate the familiar

 Introduction 

xvii

dichotomy of fantasy as an Anglo-American popular genre versus fantasy as a transhistorical psychological faculty. Rather, they open the field of fantasy studies to multiple approaches and multiple voices. Our own chapter “What Is Fantasy and Who Decides?” functions as a portal (to use a familiar fantasy term) into the world of fantasy studies, offering our own provisional definition of the genre in terms of its positioning within a historically, linguistically, and nationally specific consensus reality. Kim Wickham’s “Fantasy as Genre: On Defining the Object of Study” argues for a dynamic and flexible definition that reflects the cultural and national diversity of the genre and accommodates different theoretical approaches (neo-classical, Reader Response, and Cultural Studies) without imposing an ethnocentric taxonomy. Thomas Kristjansen’s “A Biocultural Taxonomy” offers an innovative approach to the genre through the lens of cognitive narratology that focuses on the interaction between literary forms and the innate structures of the human brain. Krzystof M. Maj’s “World-Building in Fantasy” addresses the complex theoretical issue of storyworlds and delves into the differences between the ontologies of science fiction and fantasy, while developing Umberto Eco’s concept of allotopia to account for these differences and to sketch a comprehensive ontological approach to the genre which draws upon the theories of Marie-Laure Ryan, Thomas Pavel and others. Nardeen Dow’s “A Thousand and One Book: A Cross-cultural Approach to Serialized Fantasy” tackles one of the most puzzling aspects of fantasy–its penchant for series, sequels, and prequels, while also introducing the reader to an unfamiliar and intriguing corpus of Egyptian serialized fantasy. The next two chapters in this Part address children’s and YA fantasy, which is such a significant factor in publishing industry that the entire genre is sometimes conflated with it. YA fantasy is often reduced to some form of the bildungsroman. Our contributors, however, depart from this model in favor of highly complex and innovative theoretical discussions. Rose Michael and Glen Donnar introduce an intriguing concept of “crosshatch” fantasy: another world that is superimposed upon consensus reality. Using Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, their chapter “Children’s Crosshatch Fantasy: Disturbing Portals” considers “crosshatch” worlds as “counter-sites” of crisis and transition. And Cord-ChristianCasper’s “Hybrid Secondary Worlds: Animal Fantasy” provocatively combines ecocriticism and storyworld theory to analyze the deliberate conflation of the fantastic fictional world and consensus reality in anthropomorphic animal fantasy. The final grouping of chapters in this part addresses the popular subgenre of urban fantasy in a way that is both theoretically sophisticated and culturally diverse. Aleksandra Lozinska’s “How Did You Go About Saving a City?” and Dean-Liathine McDonald’s “Life on the Border” discuss the popular subgenre of urban fantasy but from different theoretical perspectives. Lozinska’s chapter focuses on the difference between government and governance, and on the

xviii 

Introduction

way fantastic cities become “enclosed” storyworlds that dramatize the diversity and complexity of urban living. McDonald’s chapter delves into the punk and countercultural roots of the urban fantasy subgenre. The second part of our Reader consists of chapters that survey fantasy traditions in non-Anglo-American cultures and languages. Most of the texts and corpuses introduced are almost unknown to the academic mainstream, and yet they are profoundly interesting and important not just in their home countries but in the global arena as well. We believe that the chapters here constitute the core of our book. Not only do they open up the field of fantasy studies to new voices, but they require a serious reconsideration of the very nature of the genre. Moreover, as fantasy in translation becomes more and more popular and available in the English-language market, these texts and traditions are reshaping the entire generic field on the global scale. The chapters in this Part are arranged alphabetically, by the name of the country/cultural tradition they analyze. Of course, we do not pretend that our survey of international fantasy is in any way complete. To do so would require a book multiple times the length of the present volume. Rather we are hoping to offer a glimpse of the many faces of fantasy across the globe and to invite further explorations of its richness and diversity. An important chapter by Sara Spurgeon “History and Other (Colonial) Fantasies: Indigenous Time Play in Cleverman” discusses the issue of aboriginal fantasy. This chapter theorizes that the basic perceptions of time and space are culturally inflected, and thus, the very notion of fantasy is inextricably embedded in the consensus reality of its time and place. By showing how aboriginal reality may appear as fantastic when filtered through the prism of Western narrative conventions, the chapter is a fitting introduction to the wealth of fantasy’s cultural diversity we spotlight in the second Part of the Reader. Zhange Ni’s “Chinese Danmei: Male-Male Romance, Women’s Fantasy, and the Feminization of Labor in the Digital Age” returns to the issue of fanfiction raised in Nardeen Dow’s chapter but situates it in the uniquely Chinese subgenre of queer fantasy written and consumed primarily by women. Inaccessible and unknown to the Western reader, this subgenre is used not only to negotiate the issues of gender and sexuality but also to generate entire textual universes enmeshed in the politics of contemporary China. Its reach extends “to world-building ambition beyond telling love stories as a result of the triangular contestation and negotiation amongst grassroots creativity, capitalist capture, and state censorship.” Dimitra Nikolaidou’s “Between Scylla and Charybdis: A Survey of Greek Fantasy Fiction” opens with the paradox: while classic Greek mythology is a source of inspiration for so many Anglo-American fantasies (consider the bestselling Percy Jackson’s books), it is so not in Greece itself. In analyzing this paradox, Nikolaidu, herself a distinguished writer of fantasy, offers an illuminating overview of the recent cultural and political history of modern Greece

 Introduction 

xix

and argues that “the current state of Greek fantasy closely mirrors the country’s attempt to formulate a unique identity separate from both its antiquity and the dominant Anglo-Saxon influences, while at the same time wishing to establish itself as a member of the Western cultural canon.” The Indian subcontinent has loomed large in the Western colonial imaginary, with fantasies by Rudyard Kipling, Dan Simmons, and others reflecting the West’s fascination with, and fear of, the Indian Other. But it is reductive in the extreme to view the rich and diverse cultural, religious, and linguistic traditions of the subcontinent exclusively through the Western lens. And yet at the same time, the fraught colonial history cannot be disregarded, even as India is asserting its political centrality on the global stage. Deimantas Valanciunas’ “Re-imagining Hindu Mythology in the Twenty-First Century: Amish Tripathi and Indian Fantasy Fiction in English” shows how narrative and linguistic borrowing from the English fantasy tradition combines with Hindu mythological subject matter to create a flourishing popular genre directed at the local book market. As noted above, the politics of fantasy in Brian Atteberry’s chapter are framed by his perplexity at the observation by an Italian student that fantasy is a “reactionary” genre. Livio Gambarini’s and Francesco’s Toniolo’s “Looking for an Italian-Style Fantasy” explains the unique and fascinating history behind this perception of the genre, reminding us that all politics are local, and that the “voice of the Other,” as Atteberry puts it, does not always speak for justice and democracy. Chronicling the cultural (mis)translation of Tolkien in Italy, and the rise of Mediterranean grimdark, the two authors provide a much-needed historical context for any discussion of the ideology of the genre. Israel occupies a unique position in the global geography of fantasy. While located in the Middle East, the literary roots of Israeli literature go back to Europe and the fraught history of the Jews on this continent. However, it is also profoundly shaped by the years of military conflict and the attempts to forge a distinctive Israeli national identity. Vered Weiss’ comprehensive chapter “Israeli Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fantastical Chronotopes and the Modern Promised Land” uses narratological tools to sketch a generic and ideological map of Israeli SF fantasy (SFF). Ido Hevroni’s “Wilderness as Wonderland: Jewish Fantasy from Ancient to Modern” provides an historical background to the fantastic elements in Judaism that have been incorporated into Israeli fantasy. Japan has by now become a global speculative fiction superpower. Since there are several excellent studies of Japanese fantasy, SF, and horror, we have decided to include only a chapter that highlights less familiar aspects of Japanese fantasy. Roni Sarig’s “The Buddhist Goddess of Mercy and Apocalyptic Fantasy in Japanese Children’s Books on Hiroshima” analyzes the use of a Buddhist goddess in representations of the nuclear apocalypse. Precisely because the Atomic Age and the destruction of Hiroshima are often figured through quasi-­ Christian apocalyptic imagery, it is important to see how Buddhism may be

xx 

Introduction

used for the same purpose. Japanese religious life is notoriously syncretic, and the reflection of this syncretism in children’s fantasy provides a new lens for understanding the larger field of Japanese speculative literature. While Latin American magic realism is well known, the issue of Latin American fantasy is far more contentious. Is there a Latin American fantasy at all? Or is the consensus reality of this admittedly diverse and complicated region so different from the West that we cannot even make such a determination? In her chapter “Latin American Fantasy: Between Neomedievalism and Latinamericanism,” Paula Rivera Donoso traces the genealogy of real maravilloso and argues that the developing fantasy genre in Latin America has to be conceptualized in opposition to it as literatura heterogénea, a concept coined by Peruvian scholar Antonio Cornejo Polar to describe indigenous literature. In other words, fantasy and magic realism diverge both structurally and ideologically, as the former addresses the national self-definitions of Latin American cultures rather than their stance vis-à-vis the West. Of all European countries, it is surprisingly, Poland that has become most visible to the Anglo-American readers of fantasy and science fiction. In the field of SF, the towering figure of Stanislaw Lem, the author of Solaris, explains this visibility. But what Lem was to SF, Andrzej Sapkowski, the author of the Witcher books, has become to fantasy. Aylin Dilek Walder’s “Cultural Appropriation of Poland’s Fantasy” argues that postcolonial theory can be usefully applied to Eastern European fantasy, both with regard to its suppression under communism and with regard to its subsequent appropriation by the West. Donatella Possami’s “Syncretism in Russian Fantasy” brings to the attention of the Western reader a largely unknown corpus of extremely popular fantasy written in Russia in the transitional period during and after the collapse of the USSR, asking important questions about transculturalism, adaptation, and the influence of geopolitical upheavals on speculative fiction. Michal Zelcer Lavid opens a window to a fascinating culture that often figures in Anglocentric fantasy writing yet, paradoxically, its own literature and culture remain largely unknown. Tibet, often represented as a mythical land that time forgot, has its own complex and politically charged relationship with modernity reflected in its indigenous fantasy tradition. Lavid’s chapter focuses on the modernization and urbanization of Tibet, and discusses the complexity of modern Tibetan identity, in which traditional beliefs, myths, and religion coexist, albeit often uncomfortably, with modern values of progress, innovation, and rationalism.

PART I

Theory and Methodology

What Is Fantasy and Who Decides? Elana Gomel and Danielle Gurevitch

While there is a broad critical consensus on science fiction (SF), based on the work of Darko Suvin, Adam Roberts, and others, the very definition of fantasy seems to be a field of raucous disagreement. Andrew Rayment’s summary may be unkind, but it is accurate: “there is a number of vague pet theories as to what Fantasy is, delivered seemingly from rhetorical positions that could be unkindly characterized as doing some shoehorning of their own” (Rayment, 3). Rayment’s own solution is that the fans, not academics, know best. His definition emphasizes what readers believe fantasy to be, essentially adopting the intuitive understanding of the genre by Fantasy Faction and similar fan groups: “Fantasy is read here synchronically, it is what Fantasy is now, at this point in history, in accordance with (popular) reader-led ideas” (Rayment, 15). But what fans and what readers? As several of our contributors note, consumption of fantasy texts in non-English-speaking markets differs profoundly from the “reader-led” dynamics in the US. There are huge markets for fantasy fiction in China, India, Japan, Russia, and other countries. Indeed, the readership for Chinese erotic fantasies that Zhange Ni discusses in her article, for example, probably exceeds the combined membership of all Anglo-American fantasy lovers’ groups. Structurally and thematically, these texts have little in common with Harry Potter or even “adult” fantasy romances by Holly Black or Laini

E. Gomel (*) Tel Aviv University, Ramat-Aviv, Israel e-mail: [email protected] D. Gurevitch Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2_1

3

4 

E. GOMEL AND D. GUREVITCH

Taylor but they are seen as fantasy in their country of origin. And while Rowling and Tolkien have become popular globally, their reception in other countries differs significantly from the way the same texts are read in the US and the UK. Clearly, if we want to consider fantasy in, say, Italy, we need to refer to what specifically Italian readers and fans believe fantasy to be. And yet we need to start with some general observations. For while fantasy is different in different cultural contexts, all agree that there is such a thing as fantasy.

Self and Other Alastair Fowler in his book Kinds of Literature suggests that there are two ways of defining a genre: historical and structural. The former outlines the literary genealogy of a genre, the latter focuses on its narrative grammar.1 Since modern English-language fantasy emerged in the late nineteenth century with pseudo-medieval works of William Morris, Eddison, and Lord Dunsany, leading up to Tolkien and the “Inkings,” its historical trajectory would include the Medieval Marvelous as reimagined by the nineteenth-century rebels against Victorian realism. In our previous book “With Both Feet on the Clouds: Fantasy in Israeli Literature” on Israeli fantasy, we broadly adopted this approach, considering permutations of the marvelous throughout centuries. But interestingly, J.R.R. Tolkien himself in his “Tree and Leaf” essay, rejects a historical approach in favor of human universalism. He claims that the essence of fantasy lies in the human imagination; it is a reflection of the universal longing for salvation and escape: “Mirour de L’Omme; and it may (but not so easily) be made a vehicle of Mystery.” Fantasy, according to Tolkien, is a natural human activity, unconstrained by particularities of culture and history. It enables us to form “mental images of things not actually present” in reality, offering us “Recovery, Escape, Consolation.” Tolkien coined the influential term, practically identified with his methodology: subcreation. Subcreation, with its obvious religious connotations, is the production of images that are not found in the primary world but can be found in “the inner consistency of reality” (48). For a universalist approach, fantasy is synonymous with the human capacity of the imagination: “Fantasy literature uses poetic means to examine the limits of the possible out of a belief in a purposeful order” (Gurevitch et al., 12). After Tolkien, studies of fantasy developed in two opposite directions: inclusion and exclusion. A well-known representative of the first trend in which fantasy is everything that is not a handful of nineteenth-century realistic texts is Kathryn Hume’s influential Fantasy and Mimesis ((1984) 2014). Hume makes a striking claim that “fantasy informs the spirit of all but a small part of western literature” (3). Her slender book covers Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, 1  Confusingly Rayment critiques what he calls “diachronic” definitions, but these are not the same thing as the “historical” genres of Fowler. Rayment’s “diachronic” definitions are rather what we call “broad,” incorporating as many diverse texts as possible.

  WHAT IS FANTASY AND WHO DECIDES? 

5

Kafka, and Orwell to name but a few, alongside such popular fantasy writers as Stephen Donaldson. Hume’s justification for the breathtaking reach of her theory is that she defines fantasy as “the deliberate departure from the limits of what is usually accepted as real and normal” (xii). Of course, a question immediately arises: accepted by whom? Hume introduces the crucial concept, to which we will return later, of “consensus reality” but then avoids the political and cultural pitfalls of the issue of “consensus” by describing it as “the reality we depend on for everyday action” (xi; italics mine). The issue of who we are, and who is excluded from this supposed commonality of action and perception, remains unexamined. Another important book, also published in the 1980s, takes the opposite track, reducing the provenance of fantasy to a specific kind of writing that originates in the rebellious response to nineteenth-century realism. Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981) uses psychoanalysis and a quasi-Marxist notion of subversion to define fantasy as a literary revolt against the ideological norms of Western bourgeois society. Following such thinkers as Erich Fromm and Theodor Reich, she believes that the Freudian unconscious is where repressive social rules are established and perpetuated, forming the consensus reality of industrial capitalism: “For it is in the unconscious that social structures and “norms” are reproduced and sustained within us, and only by redirecting attention to this area can we begin to perceive the way in which the relations between the individual and society are fixed” (Jackson, 15). Fantasy is the kind of writing that subverts and dislocates these norms: In a secularized culture desire for “otherness” is not displaced toward the alternative realms of heaven or hell, but is directed toward the absent areas of this world, transforming it into something “other” than the familiar comfortable one. Instead of an alternative world, it creates “alterity”—this world replaced and dislocated. (17)

Fantasy is the opposite not of reality but of realism, which Jackson sees as codifying the social structures of repression and conformity in post-Industrial Revolution England. Thus, her main interest lies in texts which undermine realistic modalities of representation. Her examples of fantasy are works by Dostoyevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Brontë, and French surrealists. What is missing from this list, of course, is precisely the kind of literature Fantasy Faction thrives on. Jackson explicitly addresses this exclusion. In her view, works of “the marvelous” are not fantasy because they shore up the realistic consensus by presenting a clearly delineated alternative, situated in a separate fictional world. The marvelous is what Tolkien previously described as the “faery realm” in his influential and poetic essay “Tree and Leaf” mentioned earlier, where he defines it as: “the realization, independent of the conceiving mind, of imagined wonder … behind the fantasy real wills and powers exist, independent of the minds and purposes of men” (14). Imbued with Christian

6 

E. GOMEL AND D. GUREVITCH

dogma and political conservatism, the “marvelous,” in Jackson’s view, is the opposite of fantasy. Thus, from the very inception of modern fantasy studies, two diverging views sought to define the genre as either all-inclusive or exclusive to a fault: as sweepingly broad or suffocatingly narrow. And yet, they had something in common. Both Hume and Jackson described fantasy as a “Western” genre, challenging the West’s concept of reality. The “we” in Hume’s discussion meant “we, the Western people.”2 The difference between the two lay in the way West was delineated: either as encompassing the entire historical trajectory from Odyssey to Orwell or as limited to the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath. But for both critics, the “consensus reality” that fantasy undermined was the reality constructed for, and by, Western culture. And moreover, at a closer look it turns out that the “West” they focused on was, in fact, exclusively Anglocentric. Despite (or maybe because of) Hume’s bird’s-eye view, significant cultural differences between, say, English and Spanish, or English and Greek, literary traditions were overlooked. Jackson’s examples of “literature of subversion” included Dostoyevsky and Mallarme but no analysis of how the experience of serfdom in Russia or the revolution in France may have impacted the very notion of “subversion.” Subsequent studies of fantasy have largely abandoned search for definitions. Brian Attebery’s Strategies of Fantasy (1992) offers a heuristic view of the genre in terms of common tropes, which may be either thematic or narrative. In Farah Mendelsson’s Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008), the focus is on the narrative voice and other strategies which construct the interaction between the protagonist and the fictional world. In the Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, the editors explicitly declare that their goal is “to take the body of genre fantasy on a multiplicity of terms that recognizes academic, reader and commercial understandings of fantasy as equally valuable” (2). Embracing the view of Fantasy Faction that we know fantasy when we see it, theoreticians seem to argue that a generic definition is either unnecessary or undesirable. But while this retreat from the theoretical ambitions of Hume and Jackson seems to offer theoretical flexibility (not to mention a certain democratization of academic discourse), it also involves a loss of perspective. With all their flaws, “grand” theories of the previous generation, including not only Hume and Jackson but also Tzvetan Todorov and W.R.  Irwin, attempted to create a strong model which would answer persistent questions plaguing the field of fantasy studies. Some of these questions are obvious. What is the difference between fantasy and science fiction? What about the hybrid genres, such as dark fantasy? What is the pleasure of fantasy, and why does this genre elicit such a strong emotional attachment in its readers? Others are less so. Why does fantasy tend to be serialized? Is fantasy a politically conservative genre? What is the relationship between fantasy and visual media? Without having some sort of 2

 Compare with: Mabille, 13.

  WHAT IS FANTASY AND WHO DECIDES? 

7

general understanding of the nature of the genre, it is hard to see how to go about tackling these issues. And perhaps most importantly, refusing to define fantasy makes it almost impossible to move beyond the Anglocentric focus of earlier studies. For while almost everybody can agree that Tolkien and Lewis wrote fantasy, what about the Russian Sergei Lukyanenko and the Pole Andrzej Sapkowski? What about the Bengali Sukumar Ray and the Argentinian Lilian Bodoc? Are their books fantasy in the same sense as The Lord of the Rings? If yes, does it mean they play the same role in their cultures as commercial fantasy plays in the Anglo-­ American book marketplace? And if no, what are they? And since Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, Le Guin, and Martin have by now achieved global distribution, how can we track the impact of Anglo-American fantasy on other literary traditions if we lack some sort of yardstick for defining the genre? Since the goal of this Reader is precisely to offer an international overview of fantasy, we feel it is important to suggest a preliminary definition that will enable us to track the complex interactions between different cultures and histories, while also keeping our focus on a specific modality of writing. Our goal is not to delimit the field of fantasy but rather to disentangle the knot of ideology, politics, cultural history, and national identity that shapes international fantasy today.

Game of the Impossible In The Game of the Impossible (1976), W.R. Irwin defined fantasy as “a story based on and controlled by an overt violation of what is generally accepted as possibility” (4). In terms of fictional-worlds theory, we can gloss this definition as “a story based on and controlled by an overt violation of consensus reality.” The notion of consensus reality is derived from constructionism in social sciences. Epitomized by Peter L.  Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966), this trend emphasizes the unstable and historically contingent nature of the real. In fictional-world theories by Thomas Pavel, Lubomir Dolezel, and Ruth Ronen, consensus reality refers to the author’s point of departure for the creation of their “storyworld,” which may be congruent with, or totally different from, the consensus reality of their time and place. The use of consensus reality rather than “reality” in understanding fantasy eliminates the absurdity of consigning The Lord of the Rings, Beowulf, The Divine Comedy, and the Bible to the same genre. Hume’s expansion of fantasy to coincide with most, if not all, of world literature would be greatly reduced if her references to consensus reality were more consistent. However, the problem is, of course, that consensus reality is very much like a political consensus in a multi-party system: provisional, unstable, and prone to be exploded by a rebellion at any time. Consider the difficulty of the Narnia books for a non-­ Christian reader. While fawns, witches, and magical wardrobes are clearly fantastic in relation to the consensus reality of twentieth-century Britain, what are

8 

E. GOMEL AND D. GUREVITCH

we to make of the last book in which the main characters die and go to heaven? Lewis himself would see this conclusion as realistic (1966); many of his contemporary audiences would disagree. The same applies to fantasies written by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) writers, such as Orson Scott Card or Brandon Sanderson, whose baseline reality incorporates elements not shared by most of their readers. Thus, the very notion of consensus reality cannot be taken for granted, especially in relation to international fantasy, which addresses the reality constructs embedded in specific histories, often unfamiliar to the Anglo-American readers. Another way to bring history, politics, and culture into fantasy is through the concept of the horizon of expectations, which involves the reader-centered aesthetic of reception, based on the individual’s experience of reading a literary work and their subjective self-satisfaction from it. Originally introduced in the 1969 essay by Hans Robert Jauss, this concept is glossed by Cyrus Patell as networks of contextualization: “we read with certain expectations and rules in mind, which are the products of our social, cultural, historical, aesthetic, and personal contexts” (Patell 20). The notion of the horizon of expectation is similar to that of consensus reality but it allows more flexibility and emphasizes the active role of the reader in consuming and interacting with the text. This is extremely important in relation to fantasy fandom and fanfiction, a unique socio-cultural trend explored in Japan and South Korea (Anima, Manga, and K-pop). Equally important, however, is the fact the horizon of expectations shifts with traveling, much like the actual horizon. This notion corresponds directly to Bakhtin’s Chronotope theory and the understanding of how time and space are constructed in strategy narratives.3 As fantasy became more popular in the first half of the twentieth century, it merged with SF in the pulp magazines which were considered low-quality literature, read by teenagers or the immature. The infrequent critical study of fantasy published in the mid-twentieth century often starts with an apology for even considering the genre. This, however, changed in the 1960s. The Beat and Hip generation embraced Tolkien. Moreover, their openness to diversity and interest in non-Western cultures started the process of generic diffusion that characterizes the field of fantasy today. Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Samuel Delany were pioneers in incorporating elements of non-Western cultures into the storehouse of tropes that defined the genre. In being translated and/or adapted by a different culture, a fantasy text undergoes a significant transformation, acquiring new meanings and appealing to new audiences. Patell’s focus on cosmopolitanism as a conversation among cultures is useful in relation to fantasy’s ability to cross historical and national boundaries and to assimilate older and/or foreign themes, concepts, and topoi. Thus, we can offer a preliminary definition of fantasy as a literary genre that departs from the consensus reality of its time and place in textually conspicuous ways; that is, by explicitly or implicitly invoking this consensus reality through a network of  See discussion on universal Chronotopes and their interactions in Vered Weiss’ article.

3

  WHAT IS FANTASY AND WHO DECIDES? 

9

intertextual allusions that can be deciphered by the competent reader. In addition, this departure is not naturalized through a quasi-scientific discourse, thus distinguishing fantasy from science fiction (SF). While of course, this definition is as provisional as any other, it will be helpful in disentangling various strands of international fantasy as presented in this Reader. In the conclusion to his classic book The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Tzvetan Todorov somewhat surprisingly sketches a broad theory of fantasy in terms of the opposition between “themes of the self” and “themes of the Other” (Todorov 139–140). It is surprising because Todorov’s structuralist approach has been faulted for being far too narrow, limiting the fantastic to a handful of texts exhibiting a “hesitation” between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events in the text. “Self” and “Other,” however, seem to be far too broad, encompassing much of literature in general. And yet, Todorov’s conclusion is logical, insofar as no discussion of fantasy as a genre (or a cluster of genres) can escape the psychological, social, and ontological opposition between sameness and alterity, familiar and strange. But while Todorov locates alterity within the text, we would like to consider it as a function of the broad generic field of fantasy literature. In this Reader, we do not address the philosophical meaning of the alterity of the Other, as identified by Husserl, Heidegger, and the existential French philosophers, or as a phenomenon of the lived experience of a “stranger,” as in Albert Camus’ novel (1942). There are other studies that focus on these issues. Rather, we address the alterity within the fantasy canon, as the non-­Anglocentric national traditions highlighted in the Reader function as the Other of the familiar Tolkien/Lewis/Rowling mainstream. These traditions are no longer hermetically isolated from the popular mainstream (if ever they were). Chinese, Japanese, Polish, and Russian fantasies have climbed Amazon bestseller lists, and even more “exotic” texts, from Iceland, Finland, and Sweden, for example, are now becoming available to the English-speaking reader. And this is not to mention the rise of Afrofuturism, which can be considered as an irruption of cultural alterity into the mainstream.4 We want to examine what is often considered to be fantasy’s margins beyond its familiar limits, though it is arguable that in the global world, the relationship between the center and the periphery needs to reconceptualized. Chinese or Indian fantasies have as many, or more, readers than The Lord of the Rings. To paraphrase Immanuel Levinas’ definition, we are inquiring not only into the relations between the Other (l’autre) and the Same (le même), but, even more so, into the dynamics whereby the unfamiliar becomes familiar, and the unhomely (in the Freudian sense of the unheimlich) is brought home.5

4  The question of translation, both linguistic and cultural, is very important in this context; however, the limitations of space do not allow us to go into it in any detail, though it is raised in several essays, notably by Zhange Ni and Deimantas Valanciunas. 5  An observation largely discussed in Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría’s article.

10 

E. GOMEL AND D. GUREVITCH

Journeying Across the Border Crossing the border is such a common trope of fantasy that it has become all but invisible. The border is often not simply geographical but ontological, as in Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series of books, in which the characters literally journey through a series of gates separating the living from the dead. But this trope can also be seen as a self-reflexive depiction of fantasy itself; it is a genre that is constantly engaged in crossing cultural, historical, national, and linguistic borders. While this is a source of fantasy’s richness, it also creates issues of misreading, cultural appropriation, and ideological misuse. Consider how the ignorance of the historical background of non-­ Anglocentric fantasies can generate negative reactions in the English-speaking reader, brought up on the diet of Star Wars. When the Witcher series of books became popular in the West due to the Netflix TV adaptation, many reviewers were put off by the author’s unfamiliar style and even more so, by his depiction of war, politics, and gender. In the Tor.com review, the reviewer accused Witcher of “rampant sexism” and expressed bewilderment that the books were written in the 1990s: “I might have thought the books were written in the 1950s, when in fact The Last Wish was originally published in Poland in 1993.”6 The answer is, of course, that the 1950s in the US and in Poland were parts of very different histories, and that what is seen as “rampant sexism” in the US may qualify as progressive feminism in Eastern Europe. Another thorny issue in fantasy studies (and literary studies in general) is so-called cultural appropriation. Since fantasy often resurrects older and/or foreign mythical and folkloric narratives, it is transcultural by definition. Few people object to Tolkien’s use of Celtic and Norse mythologies but the situation becomes more complicated when borrowing reaches across European borders. Consider the angry reactions to the quasi-Japanese Otori series of YA fantasies written by Lian Hearn, a penname of the Australian writer Gillian Rubinstein. When asked about cultural appropriation in an interview, Rubinstein pointed out that Japanese culture itself has heavily borrowed from other cultures and traditions: I’m always encouraged by how Japanese artists and writers borrow from all over the world, so you have manga set in Victorian England or the American civil war or the realm of King Arthur. I think cultures have always taken from each other, and crossfertilised in rich and creative ways. Of course there are dangers of exploitation and misrepresentation which individuals must strive against. It’s usually a question of being aware of where the power lies.7

6  https://www.tor.com/2019/12/23/to-prepare-for-the-witcher-i-read-the-book-itdidnt-help/. 7  https://austsfsnapshot.wordpress.com/2016/08/07/2016-snapshot-gillian-rubinstein-lian-hearn/.

  WHAT IS FANTASY AND WHO DECIDES? 

11

Rubinstein suggests that cultural appropriation (as distinct from cultural cross-fertilization) is a matter of power balance. But in what sense is Australia more powerful than Japan? In the global world, establishing the power balance of conflicting consensus realities may it itself become a political gesture. And what about China? The Chinese book-market is the largest in the world, and China exerts its economic and political hegemony throughout Asia. Nevertheless, translations of Chinese science fiction and fantasy (SFF), such as the celebrated trilogy by Cixin Liu, and/or fantasies written by writers of Chinese origin, such as Ken Liu, are often viewed through the prism of ethnic/ minority studies. Can Chinese writers be seen as writers of color? Should Chinese-­inspired fantasy novels written by Europeans, such as Guy Gavriel Kay’s Under Heaven, be seen as cultural appropriation, honest homage, crossfertilization, or something else entirely? In her essay “Writers of Colour,” Nnedi Okorafor, herself a distinguished fantasy writer, grapples with this issue and suggests that appropriation is a matter of positioning the text within the larger cultural/political context. She notes that it would be “absurd” to regard Chinese writers as being “of colour” “but when their works enter the AngloAmerican market, the situation might be considered to change” (179). In other words, it is the reader’s horizon of expectations rather than the author’s cultural identity that matters. However, even this does not quite solve the problem of culturally hybrid texts, such as Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon (2012). Ahmed is an American writer of Egyptian descent who does not speak Arabic, yet his novel draws heavily upon the Quran, the history of the Middle East, and Arabic folklore. Should Ahmed’s novel be classified as an “Arabic fantasy” or an example of orientalism? Should it be read against the historical background of the triumphant rise of Islam in the Middle East, or of the Islamophobia of the post-9/11 US? Clearly, deciding what the author’s consensus reality is can be highly problematic, and yet without such decisions, fantasy texts remain open to ideological manipulation, misappropriation, and even deliberate misreading. The danger of (mis)translation and appropriation arises even when the lines crossed are ideological rather than cultural or linguistic. The politics of fantasy is yet another of those thorny issues that seems to admit of no satisfactory resolution. In his famous 1991 essay “The Politics (if Any) of Fantasy,” Brian Attebery recounts an anecdote from his experience teaching in Italy: I was giving my usual heated defense of fantasy as an art form when I was interrupted by a comment from the students. “Here in Italy,” they said, “fantasy is something that comes from the far right, and science fiction from the left.”

Taken aback by this statement, Attebery eventually came up with a political defense of fantasy that focused on its representation of the Other: When it speaks in the voice of the Other, fantasy … makes some broad political claims. It says that reality is a social construct, easily voided; that the individual

12 

E. GOMEL AND D. GUREVITCH

character is a conditional thing, subject to unnerving transformations … Perhaps the most profound political statement that fantasy can make is to let the Other become a self. When this happens, the past breaks into the present, colonies become capitals, and the natural world takes its revenge on civilization.

But the notion that the voice of the Other is always progressive is born from the sheltered experience of the American academy. The Italian student could have pointed out that the radical right is a political minority in Europe, “othered” by the center-left mainstream. Norman Spinrad’s unnerving meta-­fantasy The Iron Dream (1973) makes it clear how the topoi of fantasy can be easily appropriated by a fascist discourse. The novel is a framed by an alternative-­ history premise, in which Adolf Hitler emigrates to the US and becomes a writer. The bulk of the novel is the text of Hitler’s wildly popular Lord of the Swastika, which details the history of the Nazi Party as a typical fantasy quest, with the inhuman Dominators being a thinly veiled caricature of the Jews. The most subversive aspect of it is that without the framing, the novel could easily be read as a typical Tolkienesque fantasy and even fit into some Star Wars scheme of a rebellion against a tyrannical government. When the voice of the Other starts spouting Nazi propaganda, it may be the time to reconsider whether the genre as a whole can be said to make “broad political claims” or whether each text’s politics need to be embedded in its specific historical matrix. A similar issue arises in relation to fantasy’s use of Soviet history and culture. Recent years have witnessed the rise of what might be called Sovietpunk (by analogy with steampunk). China Miéville’s Iron Council (2004), Higgins’ Wolfhound Century (2016), and Robert Jackson Bennett’s City of Stairs (2014) are just some examples of Anglo-American fantasy trying to come to grips with the great political Other of the twentieth century. However, as with Nazism, the ideological attitudes of the texts vary depending on the author’s political stance. Miéville, a self-declared Marxist, is enchanted by the romantic imagery of the October Revolution with its “trains of history.” Higgins and Bennett evoke the grim reality of the Gulags, persecution, totalitarian repression, and the shattering death of the deified regime. And meanwhile, an entire generation of Russian and Eastern European fantasy writers invoke both the historical memory and the lived experience of the USSR in a way that may be opaque or even unintelligible to their Western counterparts. Clearly, the meanings of such texts cannot be deduced from either their point of origin or their reception alone. It can only be understood as an unstable intersection of political, cultural, and ideological struggles and negotiations. In one of her last public appearances, Susan Sontag delivered a long reflective address in 2004 on the nature of narrative, the essence of storytelling, and her contention that the key to great writing lies in the act of freedom of imagination. At one point, she states: A great writer of fiction both creates—through acts of imagination, through language that feels inevitable, through vivid forms—a new world, a world that is

  WHAT IS FANTASY AND WHO DECIDES? 

13

unique, individual; and responds to a world, the world the writer shares with other people but is unknown or mis-known by still more people, confined in their worlds: call that history, society, what you will.8

International fantasy, then, is less of a unified genre and more of a transnational field, in which these struggles and negotiations are refracted through the medium of the imagination. There is no single consensus reality which fantasy contests. Rather, we live in the fractured milieu of conflicting realities, histories, and truths, which fantasy and its readers navigate the best we can.

Works Cited Attebery, Brian. “The Politics (if Any) of Fantasy.” In Strategies of Fantasy. Indiana University Press, 1992. Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas. The Social Construction of Reality. Tridico-­ Elsemer Press, 2003; Berger-Penguin Books, 1966. Camus, Albert. l’étranger: Roman. Gallimard; Bibliothèque, 1942. Digital Copy at: Paul-Émile-Boulet de L’Université de Québec à Chicoutimi, 2010. Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Clarendon Press, 2002. Gurevitch, Danielle and Gomal, Elana (eds.) With Both Feet on the Clouds: Fantasy in Israeli Literature. Academic Studies Press, 2013. Hume, Kathryn. Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature. Talor and Francis, (1984) 2014. Irwin, W. R. The Game of the Impossible. University of Illinois, 1976. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. Routledge, 1981. James, Edward and Mendelsohn, Farah. The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2014. Jauss, Robert Hans. Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory. Newton-­ Twentieth-­Century Literary Theory, (1970) 1977. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’extériorité. Le Livre de Poche, (1961) 1991. Mabille, Pierre. Mirror of the Marvelous: The Surrealist Reimaging of Myth. Jody Gladding (trans.). Inner Traditions, 2018 [1962]. Mendelsson, Farah. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Welsleyan University Press, 2013. (2008). Okorafor, Nnedi. “Writers of Colour,” in: The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, 2012. Patell, Cyrus. Cosmopolitanism and the Literary Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Rayment, Andrew. Fantasy, Politics, Postmodernity. Brill, 2015. Sontag, Susan. At The Same Time: Essays and Speeches. Farrer, Straus, and Giroux, 2007. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Cornell University Press, 2007. Tolkien, J. R. R. Tree and Leaf. HarperCollins, 2014.

8  A lecture in honor of South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, titled: “At the same time: The Novelist and moral reasoning,” Cape Town and Johannesburg, March 2004; Sontag (2007: 210).

Fantasy as Genre: On Defining the Field of Study Kim Wickham

Over the past twenty years fantastic works have become more mainstream than ever, in large part due to the success of Peter Jackson’s cinematic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and later, The Hobbit, and both the literary and the box office success of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Countless other mainstream successes would follow: HBO’s Game of Thrones (based on George R.R. Martin’s bestselling Song of Ice and Fire series); BBC’s revival of Doctor Who; new Star Wars prequels and sequels; Young adults (YA) works like Twilight and The Hunger Games; cinematic adaptations of several of The Chronicles of Narnia books; James Cameron’s Avatar; MMORPG’s and console games like World of Warcraft, Everquest, Final Fantasy, and Skyrim; and the current massive success of the Marvel cinematic universe. The genre’s popularity has been matched in many ways by new and continued critical scholarship: academic responses to YA and children’s literature are extensive; science fiction, which has remained theoretically rigorous for decades, continues in its critical work; and comic book studies has found a strong foothold in the academy, as has game studies. Yet, despite the burgeoning and established work being done around fantastic film, games, and literature, there is comparatively little critical attention paid to the genre of Fantasy itself. Fantasy still has not achieved wide-ranging acceptance as a field of study worthy of critical attention. While Cultural Studies has largely dispelled the belief that popular literature is unworthy of study, Fantasy still faces unique challenges.

K. Wickham (*) Horry-Georgetown Technical College, Myrtle Beach, SC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2_2

15

16 

K. WICKHAM

One of these challenges, which will be discussed in this chapter, is defining the object of study. That is, what is the genre of Fantasy? What, precisely, would defining what is (and isn’t) Fantasy look like? And why is that important? While this seems a straightforward set of questions, diving into issues of genre and definition, limiting and delimiting generic spaces, and establishing Fantasy as a legitimate field of study becomes more complicated the more one begins to examine not only the history of Fantasy criticism, but also responses to genre, and the place of Fantasy within the academy. In this chapter my goal is not to come to a final definition of the genre of Fantasy. Rather, I aim to explore the discussions surrounding Fantasy as genre, with a focus on some of the unique obstacles one faces in attempting to define the genre. Finally, I make a case for the need for further robust scholarship on Fantasy and its subgenres.

Resistance to Genre One need only to begin a discussion on genre to find truth in the following statement by David Duff: “In modern literary theory, few concepts have proved more problematic and unstable than that of genre” (2000: 1). Indeed, as Ralph Cohen notes, at various times, “[g]enre has been defined in terms of meter, inner form, intrinsic form, radical of presentation, single traits, family traits, institutions, conventions, contracts, and these have been considered either as universals or as empirical historical groupings” (2017: 118). And attitudes toward genre and theories of genre also change and evolve. From a simple classificatory system to a complex interaction with socio-historical factors, theories of genre have remained a complicated area of literary studies. The simplest way to think of genre is to view it as a classificatory system, a way to neatly place texts into discrete categories. These Neoclassical approaches to genre often start with a priori categories by which we can “label” texts as “belonging” to certain genres. This approach appears straightforward and utilitarian: each text might be objectively evaluated based on certain criteria, boxes can be checked, and generic labels applied. This approach also makes claims to a “universal validity” (Bawarshi and Reiff 2010: 16), meaning that the criteria for admission into a genre transcends time periods—the categories that designate a text a novel in the eighteenth century will be the same in the twentieth. This taxonomic approach was challenged by Romantic and post-Romantic (and later Modernist) theories that encouraged a “denial of genre,” claiming that texts only achieve literary status when they have exceeded genre conventions. This idea, of genre as limiting, authoritarian, pedantic—something to rebel against—has persisted. Indeed, Duff writes: “Even where there is no mention of ‘rules’ or ‘conventions’ (its usual corollary), the term [genre] seems almost by definition to deny the autonomy of the author, deny the uniqueness of the text, deny spontaneity, originality and self-expression” (2000: 1). In some recent discussions, genre is relegated to a tool used by publishing or marketing houses in order to capitalize on a readership.

  FANTASY AS GENRE: ON DEFINING THE FIELD OF STUDY 

17

Despite this persistent popular view of genre, contemporary theoretical understanding sees genres as dynamic reflections of the societies and cultures by which they are deployed. In this view, genres become critical to meaning-­ making (Bawarshi and Reiff 2010: 3–4). Indeed, the Romantic and Modernist objection to genre as stifling or limiting seems to be replaced by ideas of genre as “signaling not prescription and exclusion but opportunity and common purpose” (Duff 2000: 2). As Anis S. Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff write: [G]enre has come to be defined less as a means of organizing kinds of texts and more as a powerful, ideologically active, and historically changing shaper of texts, meanings, and social actions. From this perspective, genres are understood as forms of cultural knowledge that conceptually frame and mediate how we understand and typically act within various situations. (2010: 4)

Genres, then, are not static categories but instead participate in dynamic relationships between text and social action (4). Therefore, we must rethink how we think about genre. It is no longer satisfactory (if it ever was) to generate lists of formal features that indicate which texts belong in which genre. While there are still issues to be found within a number of theories of genre, some of which are particularly pronounced when discussing Fantasy, genre not only can and does offer the important function of defining fields of study but also produces dynamic and productive discussions of historic and social change and the ways in which literature can and should grapple with those changes. Inclusion in, or exclusion from, a genre can often highlight biases and prejudices that would otherwise remain hidden and unevaluated.

Defining Fantasy: A Brief Overview It is not uncommon for studies of Fantasy to include a defensive declaration that Fantasy is a legitimate field of study. Lucie Armitt begins her 2005 work Fantasy Fiction: An Introduction by acknowledging, “‘Fantasy’ is a word commonly disparaged by literary and nonliterary voices alike” (2005: 1). Lori M. Campbell explicitly states that she is “dispensing with the ‘apology’ [that] usually opens any ‘academic’ study of literary fantasy” (2010: 5) acknowledging the impulse in the repudiation. Brian Attebery notes that before discussing fantasy literature, “a number of obstacles must be cleared away,” one of which is the tendency for people who don’t read fantasy to “consider themselves superior to it” (2014: 1). What these apology/defenses highlight is that the status of Fantasy within the academy is still tenuous enough and so nebulously defined that some attention must be paid to both defending the field of study and, in order to do that, defining it. As Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz note, most studies of fantasy begin (as most academic studies do) with an attempt to define the object of study, “marking out academic or conceptual territory” (2001: 9). In the case of Fantasy, they note that this can turn into “a fairly defensive exercise” (9).

18 

K. WICKHAM

This is because “fantasy” can take on so many different meanings. It is surely possible, they note, to claim that all fiction is fantasy “because fiction narrates and makes sense of things in a way that is unavailable in reality” or, in a more commonly encountered move, “one could reasonably include the category of fantasy any fanciful tale, from myths to religious parables, from the folk tale to the absurd, from nursery rhymes to nonsense” (2001: 9). Often, definitions of fantasy easily admit works not typically considered part of the genre. Defining one’s object of study is also good academic practice, so even Hunt and Lenz offer their own run-down of available definitions: W.R. Irwin defines fantasy as “the literature of the impossible” (1976: 4);1 Erik S. Rabkin defines it by what it is not, writing that fantasy’s “polar opposite is reality” (1976: 14);2 Colin Manlove foregrounds its relationship to our world and beliefs, calling it “another order of reality from that in which we exist and form our notions of possibility” (1975: 3) and “a fiction involving the supernatural or impossible” (1999: 3); Brian Attebery takes a self-referential approach, writing that fantasy is anything that violates “what the author clearly believes to be natural law” (1980: 2); LeGuin highlights the ways in which fantasy helps us to understand existence, defining it as “a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence” and goes on to offer a number of descriptive terms, writing that fantasy “is not anti-rational, but para-­ rational; not realistic, but surrealistic, superrealistic; a heightening of reality” (1979: 84, 1992: 79). To their fairly comprehensive list I would add: Tzvetan Todorov marks the fantastic as when “[i]n a world which is indeed our world, the one we know … there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world” (1973: 25); Farah Mendlesohn does not offer her own definition, but at some point must identify what rhetorical move that she can identify as “fantasy” entering the text, writing that it is “dependent on the dialectic between author and reader for the construction of a sense of wonder, that it is a fiction of consensual construction of belief” (2008: xiii); and Rosemary Jackson locates the fantastic as existing “[b]etween the marvellous and the mimetic, borrowing the extravagance of the one and the ordinariness of the other, the fantastic belongs to neither and is without their assumptions of confidence or presentations of authoritative ‘truths’” (1981: 35). It subverts unitary vision, introduces confusion and alternative, and is meant as an opposition to the “realist” novel’s support of bourgeois vision (1981: 35).3 The studies listed above include vastly different texts and further confusion arises through a conflation of genres, with studies also seeing little difference 1  More specifically, Irwin defines fantasy as “a story based on and controlled by an overt violation of what is generally accepted as possibility; it is the narrative result of transforming the condition contrary to fact into ‘fact’ itself” (1976: 4). 2  Rabkin is more specifically concerned with establishing the fantastic as the opposite of narrative reality. He writes that the fantastic occurs “when the ground rules of a narrative are forced to make a 180 reversal, when prevailing perspectives are directly contradicted” (1976: 12). 3  S.C. Fredericks outlines some of the shortcomings of many of these studies in “Problems of Fantasy” (1978).

  FANTASY AS GENRE: ON DEFINING THE FIELD OF STUDY 

19

between Fantasy and the fantastic. For example, most of these definitions of fantasy can be applied to virtually all fantastic texts. Hunt and Lenz’s assertion that “fantasy” is relative is evident nowhere more than when one attempts to find a definition for fantasy and then determine which texts fall within that definition.

Fantasy/Fantasy/Fantastic: Contested Terms As we have seen, one of the fundamental issues that arises when one attempts to speak about or delineate the genre of Fantasy is one of terminology. Whether you place the genesis of the modern genre of Fantasy in the mid-twentieth century with the publication of The Lord of the Rings or at some other date, it’s clear that “Fantasy,” the popular genre, is relatively new as far as genres go. This in and of itself should not be an issue. However, the term fantasy was already widely in use throughout literature and the academy to describe things other than this new popular genre. A.P.  Canavan writes that “Fantasy,” as a term, is used in three major ways: the mode, the genre, and the formula. This simple statement reveals a problem that has plagued Fantasy scholarship almost from its very inception: when we as academics discuss fantasy, we are almost always arguing at cross-purposes, not because we have never defined the limits of fantasy nor because our desire for taxonomy has obscured the discussion, but because we use the term fantasy to mean multiple things (2012: 1). This leads to confusion, disagreement, and, in extreme cases, a devaluation of the object of study. Works that propose to study Fantasy can include vastly different texts that one would not typically consider as Fantasy (the popular genre) but instead belong to the broader category of the fantastic. As Canavan notes, a number of theorists use “the term ‘fantasy’ interchangeably with ‘fantastic’ to refer to the supergenre or mode of ‘the fantastic,’ the grand overarching category of nonrealist or nonmimetic literature” (2012: 1–6). While this isn’t by default an issue—studying different manifestations of the fantastic in literature allows critics to place their work in context and make connections between different traditions—“fantasy is not the same as the fantastic” (Canavan 2012: 6). Neglecting to differentiate or acknowledge the ways in which the fantastic and Fantasy differ often leads to an uneasy grouping together of “fantastic” texts, like those of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe, with Fantasy texts like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. While of course one can examine texts like these together, to expect them to interact with fantastic elements in the same way, or to satisfy the same definition of fantasy, is to invite confusion and disappointment. This is why, in Rosemary Jackson’s study Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, she finds little value in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. She lists it with other fantasies that “are all of the same kind, functioning as conservative vehicles for social and instinctual repression” (1981: 155). The “fantasy” she is interested in is the tradition that runs through the Gothic to Dickens, Poe, Hawthorne, Sartre, and so on.

20 

K. WICKHAM

Tolkien’s work is fundamentally different, and it is not surprising that she finds little of value in his texts. “Fantasy” as mode is often presented in opposition to mimesis. Kathryn Hume’s definition elucidates this: [L]iterature is the product of two impulses. These are mimesis, felt as the desire to imitate, to describe events, people, situations, and objects with such verisimilitude that others can share your experience; and fantasy, the desire to change givens and alter reality—out of boredom, play, vision, longing for something lacking, or need for metaphoric images that will bypass the audience’s verbal defences. (1984: 20)

From there she reaches the definition that “Fantasy is any departure from consensus reality” and this departure does not have to be noticed by the characters, only the reader (1984: 21; 23). Hume goes on to examine different ways fantasy might operate within any variety of texts as escape, adventure, horror and ghosts, augmented worlds, mythic dimensions, didactic approaches, and so on. Of course, utilizing fantasy as mode, as described here, does not make a text part of the Fantasy genre: these approaches may appear in any fantastic work. This further highlights the difference between Fantasy as genre and fantasy as mode, even though we are using the exact same term to refer to both. It is no wonder there has been confusion. Thus we are left with fantasy as mode, or the departure from consensus reality in opposition to mimesis, the fantastic, a kind of “supergenre” that is often conflated with and identified as fantasy, and Fantasy as genre, a popular literary form that took shape in the twentieth century. And, while each term is clearly defined, confusion remains. This confusion could theoretically be resolved: Canavan suggests abandoning the use of the term fantasy to describe mode at all. He argues that “Fantasy is not the overarching mode. Fantasy is not the term to use for the discussion of the mode, the supergenre, the all-­encompassing category. Fantasy is a genre within the fantastic … Fantasy is a distinct tradition, a distinct genre, a distinct entity with all the complexity, paradoxes, exceptions, and formulas that every other genre exhibits” (2012: 6). Accordingly, we would be left with the fantastic—a term that would describe an approach to reality and encompass a number of different genres such as science fiction, horror, weird fiction, and so on—and Fantasy as one of those genres. Two related, but clearly different terms. Establishing the fantastic and mimetic as the main descriptors of approaches to literature, or “supergenres” as Canavan terms them, removes confusion concerning the genre of Fantasy. This division allows for each approach to describe various genres and subgenres.4 Unfortunately, the use of fantasy to describe 4  This division is not static or rigid. Works by, for example, indigenous authors who might depart from what Western or non-indigenous readers consider consensus reality but who consider their works to be alternate descriptions of reality (not departures from it) would offer a rich venue for further theorizing ideas of the fantastic and mimetic.

  FANTASY AS GENRE: ON DEFINING THE FIELD OF STUDY 

21

any number of works and approaches that do not belong to the genre is already in wide use in the academy. It seems unlikely that it will be abandoned or replaced without significant effort. This is why it is so important that scholars of Fantasy continue to produce robust analysis and to discuss and theorize not only Fantasy itself but also the various subgenres that make the genre so dynamic and worthy of critical study. As Fantasy becomes a more widely accepted field of study, perhaps a reclamation of the term, and the resolution of this confusion, will be possible.

Fantasy and Genre: Obstacles and Assumptions It is notable that many of the obstacles Fantasy faces are explicitly or implicitly linked to genre. Take, for example, the difficulty of securing Fantasy’s position within the academy. This is because of a persistent stereotype surrounding Fantasy literature—that it features tired, clichéd, formulaic stories that have nothing of importance to say about socio-cultural or historical issues. In an interview, China Miéville remarks that if one looks at Fantasy texts they tend to be based on feudalism lite: … Strong men protect curvaceous women. Superheroic protagonists stamp their will on history like characters in Nietzschean wetdreams, but at the same time things are determined by fate rather than social agency (qtd. in Newsinger 2000). Miéville also notes that the particular post-Tolkien stream that adheres to many of the conservatives tendencies are what people mean when they think of “Fantasy” (Newsinger 2000). And this observation is not completely inaccurate, as many early works of Fantasy tend to follow this structure that began with Tolkien but solidified in the 70s and 80s.5 But this does not accurately describe the genre of Fantasy as we know it today. This common assumption—that all Fantasy is alike—tends to pre-determine its status as genre fiction.6 But this is also a reflection of Neoclassical theories of 5  Farah Mendlesohn notes that immediately following Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Fantasy could be separated into two types: the stylists, like Peter S.  Beagle, Poul Anderson, and David Lindsay; and the adventure writers like William S.  Burroughs, Sprague De Camp, and Robert E. Howard, that followed more closely the sword and sorcery approach. She marks 1977 as the moment when a third type emerged epitomized by Brooks’ Shannara series and Stephen Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: the romance writer. She notes that from Brooks and Donaldson forward the reverie—a kind of internal monologue that the reader is privy to, but does not actually function as fragmented internal dialogue, but rather as a kind of self-­ contemplation—prophecy that forces the hero to demonstrate his fitness through some kind of display, and action that carries emotional weight push the genre in a clear direction (2008: 38–42). 6  A few critics have noted that while many devalue genre fiction because it is formulaic, “The real point often seems to be the reverse formulation, that ‘literature’ is somehow not ‘generic’” (Lennard 2007: 10). Anne Cranny-Francis makes a similar point when she writes that “all fiction (and all non-fiction) is generic, but some of it works to disguise its conventionality” (1993: 93). Literary realism naturalized conventions “so that they seemed obvious or inevitable to readers, and so became effectively invisible” (1993: 93). Literary fiction also utilizes generic conventions, they are just not as obvious and so are presented as natural.

22 

K. WICKHAM

genre. Labeling something “genre fiction” often implies that a group of texts lacks such nuance and creativity that one actually can list out criteria for the genre that all subsequent works will include. Including Fantasy in genre fiction indicates the assumption that all Fantasy texts are alike (and subsequently that we can dismiss them) a claim which is easily disproven.7 If, as an exercise, we did attempt a Neoclassical approach to Fantasy, it becomes quickly apparent that once you try to list out all of the features a genre should contain, and discard all of those it shouldn’t, you run into issues. As Paul Kincaid notes, speaking of science fiction, “the more comprehensively a definition seeks to encompass [the genre], the more unsatisfactory it seems to those of us who know the genre” (411). This is precisely the issue that arises with a classificatory, ahistorical approach. Take, for example, the straightforward proposal that Fantasy must contain magic. This seems a claim that stands on fairly strong ground. However, what do we make of Joe Abercrombie’s Shattered Sea trilogy? It contains no true magic, but the tone, style, characters, and plot development is typical of other Fantasy works. Indeed, the two blurbs on the back are from Patrick Rothfuss and George R.R. Martin clearly indicating that this trilogy is meant to be considered Fantasy.8 It would be foolish to discount this work as not belonging to the Fantasy genre simply because it does not contain magic, even though nearly all Fantasy works do. As Kincaid also notes, Neoclassical approaches often presuppose a kind of ur-text—some text that contains all the possible aspects that might belong to the genre—that also becomes an additional issue for Fantasy. If one such ur-­ text were to be identified, the most likely contender would be The Lord of the Rings. This is because it is largely regarded as the beginning of Fantasy as genre.9 It is also the text that comes to mind when someone says “Fantasy” work (though it is possible Game of Thrones has recently taken its place).10 This 7  I am not so much criticizing the existence of genre fiction, but rather the assumption that anything labeled genre fiction is unworthy of literary study. This issue is also faced by those who study other genre fictions, such as modern Romance. 8  Barnes and Noble’s online interface places the series within Science Fiction & Fantasy and further sorts it into Epic Fantasy, if the whims of marketing teams are to be taken into account— and there is no reason they should not be. 9  I agree with scholars like Tom Shippey who mark the beginning of Fantasy as a recognizable, and marketable, genre with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Shippey writes that “it is possible to say that [fantasy] would have existed, and would have developed into the genre it has become, without the lead of The Lord of the Rings. This seems, however, rather doubtful” (2000: xvii–iii). Brian Attebery calls it the “mental template” for Fantasy fiction (1992: 14). Stefan Ekman writes that “although fantasy works had been written for one or even two centuries previously, depending on how one chooses to define the genre, the publication of Tolkien’s novel marked the beginning of seeing fantasy as a genre, and its influence has shaped modern fantasy and reader expectations alike” (2013: 9). But while this text might have ushered in Fantasy as a genre, that is not the same as treating it as an ur-text. 10  The reception of Game of Thrones by non-Fantasy readers is in many ways the exception that proves the rule. When Game of Thrones came out, many viewed it as an aberration, a unique expression in the genre of Fantasy. This is because most assume that Fantasy only means Tolkien-inspired narratives. So it was surprising for many to see this kind of text existing within the Fantasy genre.

  FANTASY AS GENRE: ON DEFINING THE FIELD OF STUDY 

23

seems to place LOTR as a likely and acceptable candidate from which to extract the necessary generic criteria for Fantasy. But to take this influence on the genre and to transform that into criteria is an entirely different thing. If one were to take LOTR and from that work extract a list of criteria required of a text to be considered Fantasy, unless the criteria were incredibly broad to the point of being useless, they would necessarily exclude many of the works that are clearly accepted as Fantasy texts. Take, for example, N.K. Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy. While there is a well-developed secondary world and a form of magic, that is largely where the similarities end. Or what of an Urban Fantasy series like The Dresden Files that contains no developed secondary world? Or, of course, the example of Abercrombie’s work above? Gritty Fantasy, or works like Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James, would also cause issues. And this would only get more problematic as writers who are not white, hetero, Western men produce Fantasy works that necessarily might look different from LOTR. This approach is too rigid and does not allow for the historical evolution of a genre through time, or how a genre might respond differently to different socio-historical contexts. It locks a genre into a facile reproduction of a set of features without acknowledging the ways in which those features change, are adapted, possibly discarded, called up again in new ways, challenged, and so on. But it is also an easy and effective way of dismissing a genre based on assumptions. If a misunderstanding of what the genre of Fantasy is, both in the academy and in popular discourse, holds it back, then it seems to make sense to perhaps trust those who do read Fantasy to determine the limits of the genre. This in many ways reflects the motivation of reader response theories of genre, which sees it as a performance of the reader, not the text itself (Bawarshi and Reiff 2010: 22). In reader response, genres “function as conventionalized predictions or guesses readers make about texts” (Bawarshi and Reiff 2010: 23). Of course, this means that these readings might change depending on circumstance or who is reading. Thus readers, often critics, would determine the genre of a text, based upon their expectations and experiences with other texts. While taking a cue from the readership, particularly for a popular genre that tends to attract a widely read and passionate base, seems a reasonable solution, allowing readers to determine what works should belong in the genre can lead to a form of gatekeeping, both by the readership and by publishing houses who largely market to that readership and their tastes.

So much so that a simple Google search will return numerous articles, blogs, and posts asking if Game of Thrones is even Fantasy fiction. But those who read widely in the genre know that A Song of Ice and Fire, while undoubtedly popular and influential, was not an isolated or major intervention within the genre—the turn to Gritty Fantasy had already started. David Chandler and Doug Smith point to reactions to other media—namely horror that showed more viscera and blood and grittier television shows like The Wire, respectively—as the impetus for grittier texts, and a number of authors were working within the subgenre before, concurrently with, and of course after Martin. For more on Gritty Fantasy see Faircloth (2011) and Smith (2015).

24 

K. WICKHAM

This approach centers the preferences of the readers in a way that has the potential to stunt the genre. If publishing houses (who wish to make money) feel a work will not be understood as for an audience (that is, as part of a specific genre) they might not risk publishing it. When N.K. Jemisin first shopped around The Dreamblood Duology she was told that they wouldn’t sell. In an interview she reveals: “In a couple of cases, they [the publishing house] told me that they didn’t know what the audience for that would be. It was, maybe, ten years ago, but it was in the days when people believed that black people did not read, and that a book containing primarily black characters wouldn’t sell” (Carroll 2015). The fear being that if readers encountered a text too far outside of what their definition of Fantasy was, it would not be recognized as such and therefore did not have a marketable audience. This is even though the Dreamblood Duology has a developed secondary world and a robust magical system. This becomes particularly meaningful for authors who are not white and male. Helen Young notes that because most early successful authors were white men, the genre formed certain habits of whiteness that shape the narratives themselves (2016). This makes these narratives, which conform to habits of whiteness, more recognizable to readers as Fantasy. As E.D. Hirsch notes, a reader’s “preliminary generic conceptions” are “constitutive of everything that he subsequently understands” and remain that way until that conception is challenged (74, qtd. in Bawarshi and Reiff 2010: 23). Of course, the most extreme example of this was seen with the Sad and Rabid Puppies.11 While these groups were largely unsuccessful in their attempts to shut out “politically correct” authors from the Hugo Awards, they offer a clear example of why genre is important and a warning that reader response definitions are susceptible to prejudice. These fans defined science-fiction fantasy (SFF) in one very specific way and did not believe that works that diverged should be recognized 11  In 2013, upset about the seeming trend the Hugo Awards (Fantasy and Science Fiction’s highest honors) were taking towards more literary or “politically correct” works, disgruntled fans attempted to form a voting bloc in order to nominate more “swashbuckling” and “space adventure” novels. Many quickly discerned that their real issue was that “nominees for the Hugo awards have become substantially less white and less male” (Berlatsky 2015). The initial group that spearheaded this attempt was called the Sad Puppies, but later branched out into the Rabid Puppies who nominated similar, but not always overlapping, authors. While they often claim not to be racist or sexist, but suggest they are merely advocating for overlooked authors of Science Fiction and Fantasy that are being ignored in favor of more social justice type works, the following quote from Theodore Beale (aka Vox Day), the founder of the Rabid Puppies, in response to a speech N.K.  Jemisin gave in which she called for a reconciliation within Science Fiction and Fantasy, speaks largely for itself: “Being an educated, but ignorant half-savage, with little more understanding of what it took to build a new literature by “a bunch of beardy old middle-class middle-­ American guys” than an illiterate Igbotu tribesman has of how to build a jet engine, Jemisin clearly does not understand that her dishonest call for “reconciliation” and even more diversity within SF/F is tantamount to a call for its decline into irrelevance” (2013). In the same post he also clarifies that “it is not that I, and others, do not view her [Jemisin] as human, (although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens), it is that we simply do not view her as being fully civilized for the obvious historical reason that she is not” (2013).

  FANTASY AS GENRE: ON DEFINING THE FIELD OF STUDY 

25

as celebrated representations of the genre. These lays bare the ways in which fans can sometimes desire to maintain rigid distinctions between what they consider representative of the genre and what they consider outside of the limits of “true” SFF.

Fantasy as Genre: Possible Approaches While so far we have seen some of the issues surrounding Fantasy fiction and genre, there are productive ways to think about the relationship between a text and its genre(s). In the introduction to this chapter I made reference to new ways of thinking about genre as dynamic, socio-culturally embedded, and demonstrating the interrelatedness of texts and culture. While there are compelling arguments to dismantle concepts of genre—arguments that are reminiscent of Romantic and post-Romantic theories of genre—there are both practical and theoretical motivations to fully engage with ideas of genre. In this final section, I would like to examine some of the ways Fantasy as genre might be theorized that allows for robust and complex discussions of texts. Definitions of Fantasy that best reflect the idea that genres not only change over time but also respond to the socio-cultural context in which they are encountered or produced are those that tend to see genre as not only relational but also, in a sense, communal, borrowing from both reader response and Cultural Studies theories of genre. Perhaps the most well known is Brian Attebery’s definition of fantasy as a “fuzzy set.” He writes that fuzzy sets are categories defined not by a clear boundary or any defining characteristic but by resemblance to a single core example or group of examples (Strategies). This way of thinking about categories is similar to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblances; in both cases, the qualities of the category depend on the prototypes one chooses. One difference between these two ways of thinking about genres is that fuzzy sets involve not only resemblances but also degrees of membership. Instead of asking whether or not a story is science fiction (SF), one can say it is mostly SF, or marginally SF, or like SF in some respects. (2014: 33) While this definition is useful, as it eschews rigid categories and criteria and allows for a way to trace the relationality of texts, these fuzzy sets still require a center, and Attebery relies quite heavily on LOTR and Tolkien’s own theories of fantasy to define that center. Thus, texts that move too far from the center are no longer Fantasy, but are “mostly” or “like” Fantasy. This in many ways maintains a somewhat static view of the genre: if there is a center from which the “Fantasy-ness” of a text can be judged, then works that seek to explore the richness that the Fantasy genre has to offer will not be considered fully Fantasy if they stray too far. And placing LOTR at that center maintains a Western, white, male perspective against which texts will ultimately be measured. However, describing Fantasy as a fuzzy set gets us much closer to a more dynamic theory of Fantasy as genre, which is why it has persisted as a favored description.

26 

K. WICKHAM

Paul Kincaid’s discussion of how to define science fiction also offers a useful view of how one might approach Fantasy as genre. Kincaid, who, like Attebery, pulls from Wittgenstein’s idea “family resemblances” writes: One thing to recognize, therefore, in this web of resemblances, is that one work might bear different resemblances to many other works. And any number of those resemblances might constitute what we call science fiction. By thinking of science fiction as a network of such family resemblances, it is easier to see that science fiction is not one thing. Rather, it is any number of things—[…] whatever we may be looking for when we look for science fiction, here more overt, here more subtle—which are braided together in an endless variety of combinations…. What constitutes the warp and weft of science fiction, therefore, is endlessly subtle and intricate, made up at times of more things than we can readily identify. […] Science fiction, as I have described it, consists of a series of threads (themes, devices, approaches, ideas) that are braided together. (2003: 416–417)

What Kincaid’s explanation of family resemblances functioning as a web of interconnected threads does is eschew the implied hierarchy of central texts. Thus, one can trace resemblances back in time, not to some ur-text, but to a variety of texts that contain a thread that would come to constitute the genre, and forward in time to new works that might do something new. What focusing on family relations does that a fuzzy set does not is allow for influential texts to emerge naturally. Instead of starting with a central text, one starts with relations. And while it will likely emerge that LOTR has a thicker cluster of relations, of texts that can clearly be linked back to its influence, this is a result, not a prerequisite of the approach. Thus, as Kincaid notes, authors can react to, transgress, replicate, challenge, distort, and so on other works in the genre, but as long as the family resemblance remains they are still identified as part of the genre. This would also allow for shifts over time to occur as certain relations are reproduced more frequently than others, picked up by other authors, and expanded upon. It becomes more inductive than deductive. The idea of genre as family resemblances isn’t without its drawbacks. As John Rieder notes, while Kincaid argues that there is no origin text, the idea of family resemblances invokes the idea of a family tree, with descendants and ancestors (2010: 195). In response to this, Rieder prefers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theory of rhizomatic assemblage. He writes that it is an “antigenealogy” that “operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots …. [I]t has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills” (21; qtd. in Rieder 2010: 196). There is no pedigree, but simply connections between parts, and “the paths that connect those itineraries are not given in the ‘acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying’ structure of the genre, but rather have been and must be constructed by writers, publishers and readers out of the conjunctures they occupy and the materials at hand” (2010: 196). While I do agree that the term “family resemblances” does invoke an idea of power relations, the theory connected to

  FANTASY AS GENRE: ON DEFINING THE FIELD OF STUDY 

27

it does not necessarily reflect that—there is no reason these relations must be imagined as a family tree with inheritors and ancestors—but rhizomatic assemblages does eliminate this possible association. The threads or features that connect texts through resemblances or assemblages should not be flimsy or surface level—that is how we wind up with Terry Pratchett’s claim that “you can do all you want, but you put in one fucking dragon and they call you a fantasy writer” (Gaiman 2015). This simply returns us to a Neoclassical approach—if one checks the “dragon” box, then one is put straight into Fantasy. This is why Fantasy, and all of its subgenres, warrants continued and extended critical examination in order to render more explicit and identifiable connections between works, even if that connection is one of challenge or transformation.

Conclusion Fantasy is notoriously difficult to define. This is due to the factors of terminology and devaluation already discussed but also because, like science fiction, it can be so many things. While many still see genre as useful only for publishing companies there is still very productive work to be done regarding Fantasy and genre. In addition to further theorizing the connections between different works of Fantasy and the subgenres that give it its robust and varied avenues of expression making the genre more welcoming to an array of authors, other theories of genre would also add dimension to Fantasy studies. For example, a Cultural Studies approach would examine the fact that how readers “identify, select, value, and experience texts” is directly related to social institutions (BR 24). In response to the Sad/Rabid Puppies, the hostility often faced by writers of color or queer of women writers, the intervention of international authors into the Fantasy genre, or Kazuo Ishiguro’s surprise that his novel The Buried Giant was labeled Fantasy by some, a Cultural Studies approach would unravel the socio-cultural and historical influences behind these impulses. Defining Fantasy and marking out an area of study, complete with a reclamation of terminology, is also important for the position of Fantasy studies in the academy. While critical acceptance is not essential for a genre to flourish it does help to confer legitimacy and authority. We need to more comprehensively imagine genre not as a way to define, sort, or categorize texts, but as a way to understand them. While this does not satisfy our innate desire to classify things or offer a quick and easy litmus test to determine what is Fantasy and what is not, it does allow for a much more dynamic interaction within and between texts. Of course, this does not mean that Fantasy can be anything, but it does begin to allow for a genre that has for too long been largely dominated by and considered as catering to Western White men to demonstrate the amazing diversity that exists and can exist within its borders, fuzzy or rhizomatic though they are.

28 

K. WICKHAM

Works Cited Armitt, Lucie. 2005. Fantasy Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Continuum. Attebery, Brian. 1980. The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP. ———. 1992. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana UP. ———. 2014. Stories About Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth. New  York: Oxford UP. Bawarshi, Anis S. and Mary Jo Reiff. 2010. Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Berlatsky, Noah. 2015. “NK Jemisin: the fantasy writer upending the ‘racist and sexist statusquo’.” The Guardian 27 Jul 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/books/ 2015/jul/27/nk-jemisin-interview-fantasy-science-fiction-writing-racism-sexism Campbell, Lori M. 2010. Portals of Power: Magical Agency and Transformation. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc. Canavan, A.P. 2012. “Calling a Sword a Sword.” The New York Review of Science Fiction 54(9): 1–8. Carroll, Tobias. 2015. “They Are Living Their Own Myths: An Interview With N.K. Jemisin, Author of the Fifth Season.” Electric Literature 31 Aug 2015. https:// electricliterature.com/they-­a re-­l iving-­t heir-­o wn-­m yths-­a n-­i nterview-­w ith-­n -­ kjemisin-­author-­of-­the-­fifth-­season/ Cohen, Ralph. 2017. Genre Theory and Historical Change. Ed. John Rowlett. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Cranny-Francis, Anne. 1993. “Gender and Genre: Feminist Subversion of Genre Fiction and Its Implications for Critical Literacy.” The Powers of Literacy: A Genre Approach to Teaching Writing Ed. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis. New  York: Routledge. Duff, David. 2000. Modern Genre Theory. New York: Routledge. Ekman, Stefan. 2013. Here Be Dragons. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP. Faircloth, Kelly. 2011. “Why the turn towards gritty realism in epic fantasy? Authors sound off!’ i09.com 18 Oct 2011. https://io9.gizmodo.com/5850891/whytheturn-towards-gritty-realism-in-epic-fantasy-authors-sound-off Fredericks, S.C. 1978. “Problems of Fantasy.” Science Fiction Studies 5(1): 33–44. Gaiman, Neil. 2015. “Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘The Buried Giant’” The New York Times 25 Feb 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/books/review/kazuo-­ ishiguros-­the-­buriedgiant.html?_r=0 Hume, Kathryn. 1984. Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature. New York: Methuen. Hunt, Peter and Millicent Lenz. 2001. Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction. New York: Continuum. Irwin, W.R. 1976. The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Jackson, Rosemary. 1981. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York: Routledge. Kincaid, Paul. 2003. “On the Origins of Genre.” Extrapolation 44(4): 409–419. LeGuin, Ursula K. 1979. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. New York: Ultramarine Publishing. ———. 1992. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. 2nd edition. New York: Harper Collins.

  FANTASY AS GENRE: ON DEFINING THE FIELD OF STUDY 

29

Lennard, John. 2007. Of Modern Dragons; and Other Essays on Genre Fiction. Penrith, CA: Humanities-Ebooks LLP. Manlove, C.N. 1975. Modern Fantasy: Five Studies. New York: Cambridge UP. Mendlesohn, Farah. 2008. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP. Newsinger, John. 2000. “Fantasy and Revolution: An Interview with China Miéville.” International Socialism Journal. http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj88/ newsinger.htm Rabkin, Eric S. 1976. The Fantastic in Literature. New Jersey: Princeton UP. Rieder, John. 2010. “On Defining SF, or Not: Genre Theory, SF, and History.” Science Fiction Studies 37(2): 191–209. Shippey, T.A.. 2000. J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Smith, Doug (Idlewilder). 2015. “Painting with grey: the development and popularity of ‘grittyfantasy’” Fantasy-faction.com 18 Nov 2015. http://fantasyfaction.com/ 2015/painting-with-grey-the-development-and-popularity-of-gritty-fantasy Todorov, Tzvetan. 1973. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Case Western Reserve University. Young, Helen. 2016. Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness. New York: Routledge.

A Biocultural Taxonomy Thomas Kristjansen

If fantasy is merely a function of naturally occurring convergent mental process, we fail to account for its particular historical and cultural situation. Conversely, if fantasy is merely the sum of its social, historical, and cultural antecedents, we have no basis for accounting for how supernatural ideas interface with the mind independently of cultural pressures. There is no singular determinant, only mutually reciprocal, interacting factors. Biocultural inquiry aims to account for these multilateral processes. It provides us with better tools than ever to examine the properties of fantasy holistically and with interdisciplinary perspective. Fantasy fiction deals in impossibilities, but more importantly, it deals in agreeable impossibilities. By tapping into the deep-seated and natural processes of the supernatural and literary imagination, fantasy is a powerful space for sophisticated and ontologically captivating concept-play. Its varied and dynamic story-worlds are friendly to whatever supernatural modification and impossible notion that is both conceivable to its writer and palatable to its reader. Fantasy depends on mobilizing clusters of information and expectations outside the story itself. And crucially, fantasy presents itself as untrue by clearly telegraphing its metarepresentational position. Fantasy fiction is a powerful testament to the possibilities of human imagination. It is also a seeming paradox. Why are we so enthusiastically willing to invest time, energy, and mental attention into story-worlds that “not only did not happen but could not have happened” (Attebery, Stories About Stories 4)? To enjoy a fantasy tale is to provisionally tolerate a whole cluster of unreal concepts and ideas for the sake of the story.

T. Kristjansen (*) Aarhus, Denmark © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2_3

31

32 

T. KRISTJANSEN

My aim in this chapter is to situate these questions within the wider framework of biocultural criticism and inquiry. Biocultural theory is mindful of what we can broadly term “human universals” or “human nature.” By this, we mean the “genetically mediated characteristics typical of the human species” (Carroll, Reading Human Nature 4). Included in the universal package of characteristics is a wide suite of cognitive machinery, emotional mechanisms, behavioral dispositions, and sundry clusters of inherited traits and proclivities common to all Homo sapiens (Boyd 19–30; Carroll, Reading Human Nature 13–18; Carroll, Literary Darwinism 103–128; Pinker). These species-typical properties include, among others: basic social cognition; basic understanding understand of causal relationship; the ability to recognize behavior as goal-based and intentional; the mental process that allow us to hypothesize about counterfactual scenarios. These interrelated capacities form the background from which cultural activity, including art, rises—activity that in turn affects how innate and salient structures of the brain are expressed and stimulated (Clasen; Boyd; Dissanayake; Dutton; Gottschall, Literature; Gottschall, Storytelling Animal; Richerson and Boyd). Humans are not caught in a tug-of-war between natural impulses and culturally learned behavior (Asma and Gabriel; Keller; Richerson and Boyd), but are rather “simultaneously biological and cultural creatures” (Geertz 306). Recognizing that “human culture and behavior grow out of human biology” (Gottschall, “Tree of Knowledge” 255) opens new avenues of interdisciplinary synthesis with the disciplines of cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, and adjacent domains. Variety is a feature of the human species (as it is a feature of all species), and no individual manifestation of the human experience is more or less “natural” than others. The existence of human universals in no way discounts individuation. Individual humans can (and do) display tremendous variance both enabled and constrained by their inherited species-typical traits. In understanding of literature, this a crucial principle. After all, authors do not show universal adherence to set norms; indeed they “are sometimes sympathetic to species-­ typical norms, and sometimes alienated from them, and they are sometimes sympathetic and sometimes hostile to their own cultural orders” (Carroll, Literary Darwinism 131). The same logic is true of readers, whose “beliefs, feelings, and values often conflict with those of the author” (Carroll, Literary Darwinism 132). These differences can be meaningfully identified and distinguished only against a common backdrop of shared mental faculties that precede, constrain, and yet also allow considerable variety. Fantasy, like all stories, must interface with the processes of the reading mind. I argue that fantasy leverages this human ability to great effect through the systemic use of reference, inference, and allusion, and that these narrative tools are employed vis-à-vis an extensive and dynamic set of sources outside the story’s presented universe. Fantasy is uniquely capable of playing with the concepts it imports—modifying them, reconfiguring them, truncating or expanding them. Because its creative space denies literal truth, fantasy can make use of

  A BIOCULTURAL TAXONOMY 

33

impactful and dramatic supernaturalisms, and can put them in any conceivable thematic situation. All these factors, I argue, contribute to making fantasy fiction a particular versatile and stimulating environment for creative expression. Unlike genres such as comedy, horror, and romance, fantasy fiction is not defined by its emotional content. It can be dark, it can be light-hearted, it can be surreal, it can be gritty—all by projecting our expectations into heightened, dramatic, and symbolic story-worlds. Fantasy is nothing if not varied. It is flexible, and its concepts hybridize easily with a wide variety of narrative and emotional goals that stimulate and reward the reader’s imagination into a palette that can engage with virtually any cultural, emotional, or dramatic theme.

The Supernatural Imagination The capacity for imagining the supernatural is not a singular module of the mind, but rather grows from the interplay between various related domains. Imagination happens in the context of a “nested hierarchy of cognitive processes” (Boyd 133). These processes guide and constrain how we conceive of supernatural ideas. Religion invariably involves an appeal to the supernatural imagination and its products (Atran; Atran and Norenzayan; Boyer, Religion Explained; Norenzayan et al.; Geertz). Human mental architecture, the fundamental framework that all religious concepts must negotiate, has constrains and dispositions that inform what concepts are and are not amenable and captivating. A convergence of naturally evolved properties make supernatural ideas (and by extension religious ideas) conceivable. There, in this sense, nothing aberrate or “unnatural” about religious thinking. The same faculties that allow for everyday practical cognition and mental efforts also “enables us to pray to gods, make offerings to goddesses, cast out demons, and be scared of ghosts” (Slone 47). It is tempting to think of the variety and fluidity of religious concepts as being random, arbitrary, and chaotic. Not so; religion is no free-for-all “where anything goes, where any strange belief could appear and get transmitted from generation to generation” (Boyer, Religion Explained 29). Beneath their immense variety, religious and supernatural concepts do play with our intuitions and expectations, but they do so in systemic ways. Supernatural characteristics aside, they still largely conform to mundane expectations of behavior and traits (Atran; Boyer, Religion Explained; Boyer, Naturalness). In part, this is because the human brain is very adept at economizing the ways it acquires new information. In very simplified terms, this means we can efficiently generate meaningful intuitions about a new concept based on its category-­ membership (Gilead et al.). By taking these cognitive shortcuts and avoiding spending energy on construe concepts bottom-up, our brains economize the acquisition of novel concepts, and can instead rely on vast nested networks of tacit on-the-spot inferences and expectations (Atran; Boyd; Boyer, Naturalness; Boyer, Explained; Boyer, Minds; Slone). Cognitive scientists additionally

34 

T. KRISTJANSEN

identify a cluster of other processes in the mind that generate spontaneous inferences about the world. In the cognitive model, these intuitive processes are called folkmechanics (concerning object relations and physical movement), folkbiology (concerning biological entities), and folkpsychology (concerning agency and goal-directed behaviors) (Atran; Atran and Norenzayan; Boyer, Religion Explained; Hirschfield and Gelman). Their inferences are not always accurate, but, like ontological categories, they allow for a more efficient expenditure of mental effort in everyday activities. Aside from allowing us to quickly generate inferences the present, we can easily apply these expectations to imagined and hypothetical scenarios. This is very much an “adaptive habit, since it might help one prepare and predict dangerous or beneficial features of the habitat” (Asma, Evolution of Imagination 115). Because we have rich mental structures that continually generate spontaneous predictions, we are remarkably adept at “continuously, automatically, and unconsciously generating expectations that meaningfully inform—constrain—perception and action at every turn” (Dietrich and Haider 902). Conjecture and imagination rely on a bedrock of effortless intuition (Atran; Asma, Evolution; Boyd; Dutton; Turner, Ideas). By adding more information, concepts can be modified virtually endlessly to elaborate on the core or to create new subtypes. We can imagine variants that modify the core concept without violating it. Large, small, differently colored, and so on are common modifiers. So far, so good. But what about, for instance, a boar that talks? Or turns invisible? Or is immortal? What happens if we imagine a boar with supernatural qualities? “Supernatural” is more than merely “extraordinary.” Supernatural concepts are counterintuitive, which means that they do not fully conform to the standard pattern of inferences we make about their category membership (Atran; Asma, Monsters; J.  Barrett; Boyer, Religion Explained; Clasen; Slone). The concept possesses at least one trait that violates its ontological class. A talking boar has traits that violate what we tacitly expect a member of the BOAR category to be like. The same would for a zombie (since the dead should not move), or shapeshifting monsters (entities should not change their ontological category), and so on. Remarkably, these concepts provide rich and attention-­ demanding fodder, creating new avenues of inference. A talking boar presumably still gets hungry, still lives in the woods, and still has tusks—in other words, even after accounting for its ability to talk, our inferences follow lines that are “remarkably predictable, ordinary, and mundane” (Atran). Most of our intuitive inferences about a counterintuitive concept are kept intact, “except the ones explicitly barred by the counterintuitive element” (Boyer, Religion Explained 73). If we imagine a boar only talk but also think, we would quite tacitly assume it is capable of the standard palette of mental states. Even a single counterintuitive trait can therefore introduce a vast array of new inferences relating to that trait (Atrain; Boyer, Religion Explained; Boyer, Minds Make Societies; Clasen).

  A BIOCULTURAL TAXONOMY 

35

Efficient and memorable supernaturalisms start from a base of being minimally counterintuitive, that is, the introduction of  a single, but particularly captivating, modification to the core concept (J. Barrett, Why; Banerjee et al.; Slone). A salient example is the ghost, or person-spirit. It is fundamentally construed as an entity in the PERSON category, but with the modification “immaterial body.” It is a simple modification, but rich in inferential potential. A counterintuitive concept that is based on a minimal deviation can, through cultural accumulation and transmission, more easily acquire additional counterintuitive traits (Atran; Atran and Norenzayan; J.  Barrett; Boyer, Religion Explained; Boyer, Naturalness). Whether we are hunting in the wilds, speaking to our friends, or leisurely reading a book, we are constantly engaged in keeping track of the whereabouts of other entities. Our brains want to know who around us has agency, and what motivates them to act. We are prone to imagine the movement of agents where they may be none, to assume the presence of an agent not only where they actually are, but where they could be. In evolutionary terms, this is the safest bet, as it is far less expensive to register some false positives than it is missing a threatening agent entirely. The chance of survival is drastically increased if the brain by default considers that the rustle in those bushes might be a predator lying in wait, even if it turns out to just be the wind. This preference for agency-­ detection is reflected in the vast catalogue of supernatural agents across cultures. Supernatural concepts overwhelmingly revolve around agent-based entities rather than static and inanimate units (J.  Barrett; Boyer, Explained; Clasen 46; Guthrie; Haidt; Slone). Because supernatural agents possess intent and motivation, we imagine we can deal with them on these terms. Though they originally evolved to keep track of intra-human sociality, “social mental tools have no difficulty reasoning about gods, even when the gods are not seen” (J. Barrett 46). We generally imagine that interaction with supernatural forces is possible on the same folkpsychological principles that inform our intuitions about human interaction. Prayer and sacrifice are both examples of interactions that are fundamentally imply a social relationship to the supernatural subject (J. Barrett; Sørensen). Supernatural agents need not be particularly intelligent. Mythology, folklore, and fairy tales are full of creatures with supernatural ability that nevertheless “are rather easily fooled” (Boyer, Religion Explained 8). Effective supernatural concepts, aside from being ontologically compelling, deal with human concerns in emotionally powerful ways. Concepts with counterintuitive traits that are at best trivial or that carry little to no inferential potential do not thrive as well culturally as those that appeal to perennial dispositions of the evolved mind. Nowhere is this more evident than in religion, whose counterintuitive concepts are intimately involved with life, death, survival, love, fortune, social organization, danger, and other powerful issues inherent in the human condition (Atran; Asma and Gabriel; Atran and Norenzayan; D.  Barrett; Boyer, Religion Explained; Dissanayake; Greene). Supernatural agents are themed around relevance, or potential relevance, to

36 

T. KRISTJANSEN

human affairs. In mythology and religion, supernatural agents of malevolent disposition far outnumber wholly benevolent ones (Atran and Norenzayan 719). Even the mystics of Christianity, a religion organized around the concept of all-pervading benign God, could not resisting conjuring highly fanciful catalogues of evil demons and monsters (Asma, Monsters; Davies). Even if religious behavior can have anxiety-relieving functions, the counterintuitive and supernatural worlds of religion are anything but sanctuaries. The supernatural may offer comforting ideas, but it also revels in heightening and super-charging the salient pressure points of the human experience (Asma, Monsters; Asma and Gabriel 293–299; Boyer, Religion Explained 19–23; D. Barrett; Slone). Psychologist Deirdre Barrett coined the term “supernormal stimuli” to describe input that targets human dispositions through exaggerating and upsizing the original subject(s) of the disposition(s), and can thereby “exert a stronger pull than the real thing” (D. Barrett). The attention-arresting, inference-rich nature of an effective supernatural concept makes them well-suited to provide such appeals to innate tendencies. Imaginative culture is rife with hunter-beasts like dragons and griffin that exaggerate the typical traits of dangerous predators (Asma, Monsters; Clasen), representations of benevolent deities often suggest heightened and superlative caregiver and/or parental ability (Atran and Norenzayan), and negotiations with invisible spirits overwhelmingly revolve around influencing material and social conditions in the pursuit of safety and emotional fulfillment (Atran; Sørensen). Humans “have active minds that are continuously engaged in the construction of novel thoughts and in the transformation of culturally transmitted ideas” (Slone 121), and as a result, the supernatural imagination produces a steady stream of concepts and interpretations that may or not conform to culturally mandated ideas of theological correctness. Much to the chagrin of religious proselytizers and inquisitor watchdogs, the unconscious and fluid processes of the imagination are not particularly concerned with obeying theological precepts (J. Barrett; Boyer, Minds; Slone). Such reasoned concerns are largely the provenance of literate religious specialists, and many societies have religion but “neither theologians nor specialized interpreters of texts” (Boyer, Religion Explained 89). The omnipresence of local and personalized interpretations, cultural flourishes, and syncretic practices show just how much religion can and do deviate from institutionally sanctioned belief (Green; Thomas; Ziolkowski). This hints at another facet of supernatural concepts: they are story friendly. Gods, monsters, and spirits, with their attention-grabbing, inference-rich counterintuitive traits, are powerful narrative devices. Archeological uncovering of art from as far back as the Paleolithic era suggests a fascination with supernatural ideas (Asma and Gabriel 271–282; Boyd 113–118; Guthrie), and one of the oldest extant pieces of narrative literature overall, The Epic of Gilgamesh from c. 1600–1200 BC, shows a story-world rife with gods, monsters, and journeys to the underworld. Religious narratives invariably involve engaging with the counterintuitive concepts of its theology (Feldt; Geertz).

  A BIOCULTURAL TAXONOMY 

37

The worlds of the supernatural are not just conceptually compelling. They are dramatic, dangerous, and profoundly amenable to another natural outgrowth of human mental architecture: storytelling.

Faith, Folklore, Fantasy The ubiquity of stories and narrative expression in human life grows from the functional and originally adaptational interconnected dispositions of the human brain. Like with so many aspects of human psychology, storytelling is not a single module. A convergence of cognitive and emotional functions of the human mind that allow not only individual stories, but stories as a fundamental format of human expression (Carroll, Literary Darwinism; Clasen 55–57; Boyd; Gottschall, Literature; Gottschall, Storytelling Animal; Herman; Hogan). Stories rely on our capacity to meaningfully organize and interpret information about agents and their actions and motivations in dramatic spatial, temporal, and causal relationships (Boyd; Herman; Stockwell; Turner, Mind). This ability employs the mental tools originally evolved for human sociality; tools that allows us to monitor the social world around us, pay attention to social information (essentially gossip), and account for the intent behind other’s actions. These information units tend to be structured narratively as well (Boyd; Dutton; Herman 73–99). The brain projects the basic consistent expectations generated by folkpsychology, folkmechanics, and folkbiology to construe story-worlds, and employ on a language-independent grammar of sequential and dramatic cause-and-effect in organizing story content. The source and context of a story has profoundly impact on how we process it. In essence, this is because we employ the mental tools of social tracking, not just to organize the contents of a story, but to track the source and intent behind the story as a unit (Carroll, Darwinism; Geertz, “Narrative”; Gottschall, Storytelling Animal; Zunshine). The ability to “not only make and understand representations, but also to understand them as representations” (Boyd 129) is a crucial part of our truth-evaluation mechanisms. Lisa Zunshine calls this level of representation and attribution “metarepresentation,” “our tendency to keep track of the sources of our representations” (Zunshine 47). It allows us to distinguish between different types of stories, and to adjudicate ambiguities and frictions by considering the context of the source, its motivations, and its intent in presenting the story. Our evolved social machinery extends beyond the content of a story, and is also applied to construe the storyteller as a social agent with all that entails. This kind of source-tracking is exactly what allows us to understand Homeric poetry in the context of Ancient Greece, to read the Rig-­ Veda fully aware that is a text considered genuinely sacred in Hinduism, or read a novel well-knowing it is an invention of the attributed author. It is also part of what makes us sensitive to deception and falsehoods, as we tend to react very negatively if a story’s truth-value and “tag” is later revealed to be different than we were led to believe (Atran; Herman; Turner, Mind; Zunshine).

38 

T. KRISTJANSEN

Consequently, stories with very similar conceptual and emotional content can have very different metarepresentational positions. For fantasy fiction, this a pertinent issue. After all, despite the genre’s name, there is nothing unique about its use of fantastical elements. As discussed earlier, the supernatural imagination informed human art, religion, and literature long before Conan became king by his own hand in Aquilonia or Frodo set out for Mount Doom. The connections between fantasy fiction and its cultural antecedents are well-­ documented (Attebery, Stories; Mendlesohn; Mendlesohn & James; Wolfe) and are well worth considering and they make a good starting point for considering both similarities and distinctions between fantasy and other modes of supernatural narrative. The fantastic is very present in stories from the past, even if we sometimes lack the historical and archeological evidence to make definite statements about the intent and context of the source. I want to highlight two important points about what these types of archaic fantastica. Firstly, that the majority of such literature is of religious characters, though not necessarily in the sense of presenting codified theology or sacred text precepts, and thus necessarily must interface with the reader’s own religious beliefs. Secondly, that when texts do present material that appears as clear invention of the author, genuinely held religious beliefs and concepts still organize and inform these inventions. While we see incidental supernaturalisms presented as authorial invention, seldom do we see stories presenting worlds centrally structured entirely around openly fictional premises. In the course of Western literary history since Late Antiquity, varieties of the Christian religion were intellectually dominant. In a cultural ecology where the intelligentsia and literary elites were overwhelming unsecular, entertaining supernatural ideas contrary to official dogma carried connotations of heresy and/or heathenry. Even religious projects that sought a more conciliatory approach with folk belief and practices, such as the urgings for practical missionary and pastoral work of Pope Gregory I in the late 500’s AD, were ultimately aimed at imposing theologically compliant beliefs (Demacopoulos 73–78). Such a cultural environment was unsurprisingly infertile to anything more than fairly unorganized and unstructured supernaturalisms at a largely folk-level (Green, Ziolkowski), but did not remain statically so. Western intellectuals and cultural authorities were moving from “an animistic universe to a mechanistic one” (Thomas). This reevaluation of the fantastic would bit by bit carve out a literary niche where it was both possible and permissible to engage with the imagined supernatural without serious consideration of religious commitment; what Mendlesohn and James call “a playful approach to the fantastic.” While realistic fiction became the intellectually dominant literary style (William; Watts), the fantastical and supernatural still exerted its pull on the imagination. One example is the Romantic revisiting and reconstruction of legend and mythology, most often with nationalistic undertones (Attebery, Stories; Leppälahti; Mendlesohn and James; Wolfe; Ziolkowski 23–29). Their work would come to influence later genres profoundly. The Gothic writers

  A BIOCULTURAL TAXONOMY 

39

would similarly impact the development of fantastical fiction. Whereas the Romantics tended toward important, interpreting, and reconfiguring the supernatural concepts they “rediscovered” from previous bodies of stories, the Gothic writers were more open to outright invention. Gothic fiction tapped into the potential affects of fear that could be targeted with supernatural elements (Clasen 43–51). The worlds of Gothic stories are, by and large, realistic settings garbed in historical or geographic exoticism where uncanny intrusions lurk and occasionally invade the protagonists’ lives in dramatic, highly emotive ways (Punter; Roberts; Wolfe). While Gothic fiction could be supernatural, it did not need to be; variants on the Gothic aesthetic could as well emphasize mood and tone rather than supernatural intrusions. The Gothic writers were quite happy to allude to folkloric origin and implicate their work in grander, quasi-mythic contexts, but their domain was ultimately fiction, not anthropology, and they added to the growing body of antecedents and sources that constitute the background for fantasy’s emergence. Two examples of proto-fantasy that emerged from the shadow of the Gothic were Lord Dunsany’s The Gods of Pegana (1905) and E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros (1922). Their central creative conceit is the portrayal not just of supernatural intrusions into the real world, but the depiction of complex, practically self-contained counterfactual universes with significant supernatural principles. American pulp authors like Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and H.P.  Lovecraft worked with similar premises in their fantastical stories, adding the sensibilities of Weird fiction and cosmic horror to the fantasy catalogue (Joshi; Mendlesohn and James; Parsons). It would be J.R.R. Tolkien’s seminal The Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954–55) that became the lingua franca of fantasy literature, and writers have since approached it as a template to follow - or as a pattern to challenge (Attebery, Stories; Mendlesohn and James; Risden; Shippey, Author; Shippey, Road).

The Reading Brain and Fantasy’s Narratology The vexing thing about fantasy fiction is that many of its characteristic traits are not unique to it. Fantasy involves the supernatural; so do myth and religious narrative. Fantasy involves counterfactuals; very well, so does all fiction. Fantasy involves imagined story-worlds; so does science fiction. Context outside the story itself is needed to identify fantasy, as its ontological and emotional content can be indistinguishable from other narrative forms without proper positioning. Provisionally, I argue for that we can define fantasy fiction as stories that (a) make effective appeal to the naturally occurring, species-typical processes of imagining the supernatural and the counterfactual; (b) are structured around counterfactual premises that address human emotional themes by means of supernatural concepts; and (c) are strongly informed by, but not constrained by, a culturally situated set of reference points from preceding bodies of literature and historical material.

40 

T. KRISTJANSEN

Since Tolkien’s epic was published, the genre has been a stable part of the modern landscape  of fiction. And fantasy is very much that: fiction. Tolkien himself was keenly aware that he was treading theologically problematic ground with his work. His Catholicism colors Middle-Earth, but he was adamant about not blurring the line between fantasy and religion, an artistic and theological sin that he believed would undermine the entire premise of fantasy fiction (Attebery, Stories; Risden; Shippey, Author; Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories”). The cultural ecology in which fantasy fiction is read may involve any number of narrative devices for the sake of “immersion,” but ultimately fantasy fiction telegraphs its own fictiveness clearly and unambiguously. Fantasy stories, like literary fiction in general, are couched in markers so that “the decision about its overall truth-value has been made for us” (Zunshine 71). This somewhat banal feature is the foremost strategy of presentation by which fantasy decisively and explicitly “denies direct application to the world of experience and faith” (Attebery, Stories). Fantasy, in short, openly denies its own literal truth-­ value even more so than realistic fiction. Literary meaning is invariably “always meaning for some specific person, from some specific point of view” (Carroll, Darwinism 131). An author provides narrative content, prompts, and cues in the text, and they are latent until they interface with the evolved mental faculties and personal particulars of a reader (Carroll, Human; Gottschall, Storytelling Animal; Herman; Stockwell). Context, cultural positioning, and source-tagging helps the reading mind adjudicate and interpret the text. All stories, fantastical or not, rely on the reader to fill in blanks and to mobilize expectations about implicit elements. The imagination deploys the same essential mechanics for generating reflexive intuitions about counterfactuals as it does for reality (Boyd; Carroll, Darwinism; Stockwell), tacitly construing “the world of a fiction and of a counterfactual as beings closest possible to the reality we know” (Ryan 406). This is called the principle of “minimal departure,” meaning fundamentally that the brain imagines fictional content by assuming it is minimally different from equivalent real-life concepts (Mikkonen; Ryan). The findings of cognitive science indicate that the brain does indeed imagine fictional entities this way (Herman; Stockwell). For stories and texts, this means there is no need for endless regression and conceptual explanations. A story can include rivers, mountains, and forests, and we can as, readers, assume that they conform to our expectations about concepts unless otherwise noted. Fantasy continually leverages this type of “outside the story” information while relying on readers to meaningfully apply the majority of their basic expectations. Works like Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series (1999–2011), Ian Irvine’s Three Worlds Cycle (1998–2020), and N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015–2017) are rife with intricate and richly imagined supernaturalisms, but people still get hungry, gravity still exerts its pull, and fire is still warm. Our basic expectations of the mechanisms of psychology and the physical world are confirmed, not abandoned, in fantasy fiction.

  A BIOCULTURAL TAXONOMY 

41

The same economy of information and intuitions is applies with specific concepts. If a story is set in Renaissance Italy, the reading mind can (a) meaningfully mobilize whatever knowledge it has of that era, and (b) reasonably assume the story-world correlates to this information. This again saves significant mental effort from both storyteller and reader. The author can dramatically and efficiently frame a story as, say, “Venice, 1540 AD” without the need for a regressing text that explains what Venice is, what AD means, and so on (Boyd 129–131; Herman; Hogan; Mikkonen; Zunshine). Only modest cueing of the reader is needed. Fantasy uses both general/intuitive information and specific/referential information. Furthermore, fantasy stories often make use of allusion, often as an efficient shortcut to cultural themes and motifs. In K.J. Parker’s Colours in the Steel (1998), the members of a nomadic steppe culture are named after Mongolian phonetic conventions; in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (1996–present), the city-state of Braavos evokes medieval Venice in aesthetics and names; Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age is dense with names and cultural concepts lifted straight from ancient history; and so on. Allusions telegraph quickly mobilized sets of extratextual connotations and sensibilities to the reader. In part, this is helped by the genre use of a “shared fantasy pool” (Leppälahti 183), and to the conceptual content of millennia’s worth of fantastical stories from myth to modern fantasy (Attebery, Stories; Clute and Grant; James). The sheer resilience of wizards, dragons, griffins, and other archetypical fantasy motifs suggest that these ideas have strong resonance with the supernatural imagination and with a place in cultural ecologies that aid their spread. Additionally, this pool has many components that started out as serious religious concepts. The Roman and Greek pantheons, Christian esoteric demonology, alchemy, and so on all started in the realm of serious belief. While fantasy authors tend to avoid making their own serious religious beliefs explicit, “it is difficult to find any body of mythology that has not been used in fantasy” (Attebery, Stories). Concepts imported from myth and history are vetted insofar that they once did indeed exert a demand of serious commitment. The canons of Western antiquity and mythologized medievalism has been the historically dominant template, but fantasy stories can orient themselves toward other points of historical, mythological, and cultural reference points (Attebery, Stories). Saladin Ahmed patterning the world in his 2012 novel Throne of the Crescent Moon on medieval Arabia, Fonda Lee using post-colonial city-states of East Asia as her strongest point of allusion in Jade City (2017), and China Miéville’s Bas-Lag novels importing imagery and themes of industrial society are but a few examples. Novel supernaturalisms are patterned around the same logic as established ones. Invented monsters capitalize on the deep-seated fear and responses to monstrosity as the beasts of legend and myth (Asma, Monsters; Clasen). Our idea of magic, essentially the practice of manipulating supernatural forces through proscribed actions, is organized around intuitive principles of

42 

T. KRISTJANSEN

causality, relationships, and goal-based behaviors (Sørensen), and the portrayal of magic in fantasy fiction reflect these proclivities. In some cases, they are rationalized and systematized to create codified “magic system,” such as in Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy (2006–2008). Much as in religion, supernaturalisms of the author’s invention tend not more than merely unusual or trivial; they tend to be dramatic and rich in inferential potential. Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni books (1970–2014) oncern the titular Deryni, who are functionally human but with the additional traits of telepathy and improved empathy—a potent ingredient to add to story’s themes of stately intrigue and courtly drama. While traditional post-Tolkien fantasies of world-saving quests constitute a substantial subgenre (Attebery, Strategies; Mendlesohn and James; Senior), many fantasy stories diverge from this relatively conventional narrative structure. Terry Pratchett’s voluminous Discworld series (1983–2015) is rife with satirical humor, Glen Cook’s dark fantasy saga The Black Company (1984–present) is a bleak and grim war-is-hell narrative, Kai Ashante Wilson’s A Taste of Honey (2016) is a queer-themed existential romance, and so on. Fantasy fiction hybridizes with other aesthetics and story formats remarkably well. The heroic quest-fantasy template, though dominant for a time, is not ubiquitous. Tacitly expected story structures can be modified, truncated, and defied as part of a story’s expression (Gottschall, Storytelling Animal; Hogan; Turner, Mind). Fantasy thus allows for a vast and flexible creative space. Cognitive scientist and literary scholar Mark Turner sees the mental processes of modifying, blending, and reapplying existing concepts as one of the cornerstones of human creativity and imagination (Turner, Mind; Turner, Ideas). Fantasy excels at this, and it invites the reader to participate. It can make explicit the modification and reconfiguration of concepts from any conceivable source, and it allows for the dramatic interrogation of hypothetical concepts vis-à-vis the supernatural. Unlike science fiction, which is generally supported by various degrees of scientific vocabulary, fantasy fundamentally appeals to a much more ancient logic of the mind. Ultimately, fantasy’s only constraints are those of its readers’ minds. And fortunately for the genre, our evolved dispositions repurpose themselves easily enough to make imagining impossible worlds of magic and drama not only effortless, but enjoyable.

Conclusion The current state of knowledge still has many questions unexamined through the lens of biocultural research. What can we say about the role of the supernatural in genres like horror, science fiction, or magical realism? How do different subgenres of fantasy engage with different clusters of reference points? What ways can we empirically test which supernatural concepts are most amenable to fantasy readers? Much is still unknown, but never have we had better tools for these questions. The application of the brain sciences is uniquely suited to account for fantasy’s place in human imaginative life, not only as it

  A BIOCULTURAL TAXONOMY 

43

relates to other processes, but how its emergent and particular properties arise. On the appeal of meaningfully unifying natural science and humanistic reason, E.O. Wilson wrote enthusiastically of “the prospect of intellectual adventure and, given even modest success, the value of understanding the human condition with a higher degree of certainty.” I share his optimism on this. Though understanding may arrive only incrementally, that is still infinitely preferable to it not arriving at all.

Works Cited Ahmed, Saladin. Throne of the Crescent Moon. DAW Books, 2012. Apuleius. The Golden Ass or Metamorphoses. C. 175 CE. Translated by E. J. Kennedy. Penguin Books, 1998. Asma, Stephen T. On Monsters: A Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. Oxford University Press, 2009. Asma, Stephen T. The Evolution of Imagination. University of Chicago Press, 2017. Asma, Stephen T., and Rami Gabriel. The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition. Harvard University Press, 2019. Atran, Scott. In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Oxford University Press, 2005. Atran, Scott, and Ara Norenzayan. “Religion’s Evolutionary Landscape: Counterintuition, Commitment, Compassion, Communion.” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 27, no. 6, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.  713–730, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X04000172. Attebery, Brian. Strategies of Fantasy. Indiana University Press, 1992. Attebery, Brian. Stories About Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth. Oxford University Press, 2014. Barrett, Deirdre. Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose. Kindle ed., W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. Barrett, Justin L. Why Would Anyone Believe in God? AltaMira Press, 2004. Bellah, Robert. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009. Boyer, Pascal. The Naturalness of Religious Ideas. University of California Press, 1994. Boyer, Pascal. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. Basic Books, 2001. Boyer, Pascal. Minds Make Societies. Yale University, 2018. Carroll, Joseph. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature. Routledge, 2004. Carroll, Joseph. Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice. SUNY Press, 2011. Clasen, Mathias. Why Horror Seduces. Oxford University Press, 2017. Clute, John, and John Grant. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Cook, Glen. The Black Company series. Tor, 1984–present. Davies, Owen. Grimoires: A History of Magic Books. Oxford University Press, 2010. Demacopoulos, George E. Gregory the Great: Ascetic, Pastor, and First Man of Rome. University of Notre Dame Press, 2015.

44 

T. KRISTJANSEN

Dietrich, Arne, and Hilde Haider. “Human Creativity, Evolutionary Algorithms, and Predictive Representations: The Mechanics of Thought Trials.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 22, no. 4, Springer US, 2015, pp.  897–915, https://doi. org/10.3758/s13423-­014-­0743-­x. Dissanayake, Ellen. Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes from and Why. University of Washington Press, 1995. Dunsany, Edward Plunkett. The Gods of Pegana. 3. Edition, Elkin Mathews, 1905. Dutton, Dennis. The Art Instinct. Oxford University Press, 2009. Eddison, E.R. The Worm Ouroboros, 1922, collected in The Complete Zimiamvia, Kindle ed., HarperCollins, 2014. Erikson, Steven. The Malazan Book of the Fallen main series. Tor, 1999–2011. Feldt, Laura. “Fantastic Re-Collection: Cultural vs. Autobiographical Memory in the Exodus Narrative.” Religion, Narrative, Cognition and Culture, edited by Armin Geertz and Jeppe Sinding Jensen, Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2011, pp. 191–208. Gamer, Michael. Romanticism and the Gothic Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation. Cambridge University Press, 2000. Geertz, Armin W. “Brain, Body and Culture: A Biocultural Theory of Religion.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, vol. 22, no. 4, BRILL, 2010, pp. 304–321, https://doi.org/10.1163/157006810X531094. Gilead, Michael, et al. “Above and Beyond the Concrete: The Diverse Representational Substrates of the Predictive Brain.” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 43, 2019, p. 121, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X19002000. Gottschall, Jonathan. Literature, Science, and a New Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Gottschall, Jonathan. The Storytelling Animal. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Gottschall, Jonathan. “The Tree of Knowledge and Darwinian Literary Study.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 27, no. 2, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003, pp. 255–268, https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2003.0047. Green, Richard Firth. Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Greene, Joshua. Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. Atlantic Books, 2013. Guthrie, R. Dale. The Nature of Paleolithic Art. University of Chicago Press, 2005. Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Penguin Books, 2012. Herman, David. Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind. MIT Press, 2013. Hirschfeld, Lawrence A., and Susan A. Gelman. Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. Cambridge University Press, 1994. Hogan, Patrick Colm. The Mind and its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Irvine, Ian. Three Worlds Cycle series. Penguin, 1988–2020. James, Edward. “Epics in Three Parts.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 29, no. 1, 2018, pp. 7–17. Jemisin, N.K. Broken Earth series. Orbit, 2015–2017. Joshi, S. T. The Weird Tale. Wildside Press, 1990. Keller, Evelyn Fox. The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture. Duke University Press, 2010. Kurtz, Katherine. Deryni series. Ballantine/Ace, 1970–2014.

  A BIOCULTURAL TAXONOMY 

45

Le Guin, Ursula K. A Wizard of Earthsea. 1968. Earthsea: The First Four Books Reissue Edition, Puffin, 2016. Lee, Fonda. Jade City. Orbit, 2017. Leppälahti, Merja. “From Folklore to Fantasy: The Living Dead, Metamorphoses, and Other Strange Things.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 29, no. 2, The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, 2019, pp. 179–200. Martin, George R.R. A Song of Ice and Fire series. Bantam Spectra, 1996–present. Mendlesohn, Farah. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Mendlesohn, Farah, and Edward James. A Short History of Fantasy. Kindle ed., Middlesex University Press, 2009. Mikkonen, Kai. “‘There Is No Such Thing as Pure Fiction’: Impossible Worlds and the Principle of Minimal Departure Reconsidered.” Journal of Literary Semantics, vol. 40, no. 2, Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 2011, pp. 111–131, https://doi. org/10.1515/jlse.2011.007. Norenzayan, Ara, et al. “The Cultural Evolution of Prosocial Religions.” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 39, 2016, p. e1, https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0140525X14001356. Parker, K.J. Colours in the Steel. Orbit, 1998. Parsons, Deke. J.R.R.  Tolkien, Robert E.  Howard and the Birth of Modern Fantasy. McFarland & Company Inc. Publishers, 2015. Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Penguin Books, 2002. Pratchett, Terry. Discworld series. Random House, 1983–2015. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Vol. 1, The Gothic Tradition. Longman, 1996. Richerson, Peter J., and Robert Boyd. Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. University of Chicago Press, 2005. Risden, E.  L. Tolkien’s Intellectual Universe. McFarland & Company Inc. Publishers, 2015. Roberts, Adam. “Gothic and Horror Fiction.” Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, edited by Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 21–35. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Fiction, Non-Factuals, and the Principle of Minimal Departure.” Poetics (Amsterdam), vol. 9, no. 4, Elsevier B.V, 1980, pp. 403–422, https://doi. org/10.1016/0304-­422X(80)90030-­3. Sanderson, Brandon. Mistborn trilogy. Tor, 2006–2008. Senior, W.  A. “Quest Fantasies.” The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 190–199 Shippey, Tom. The Road to Middle-Earth, Revised and Expanded 2003 Edition. HarperCollins, 1982/2003. Shippey, Tom. J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. HarperCollins, 2000. Slone, Jason D. Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t. Oxford University Press, 2004. Sørensen, Jesper. A Cognitive Theory of Magic. AltaMira Press, 2007. Stockwell, Peter. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction, Second Edition. Routledge, 2019. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. Kindle ed., Weidenfeld & Norton, 1971. Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-Stories.” 1947. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Kindle ed., HarperCollins, 1983.

46 

T. KRISTJANSEN

Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Oxford University Press, 1996. Turner, Mark. The Origin of Ideas: Blending, Creativity & The Human Spark. Oxford University Press, 2012. van Elk, Michiel, et  al. “Priming of Supernatural Agent Concepts and Agency Detection.” Religion, Brain & Behavior, vol. 6, no. 1, Routledge, 2016, pp. 4–33, https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2014.933444. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Bodley Head Paperback Edition, The Bodley Head, 1957. Williams, Ioan. The Idea of the Novel in Europe, 1600–1800. Macmillan, 1978. Wilson, David Sloan. Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. University of Chicago Press, 2002. Wilson, E. O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Kindle ed., Vintage Books, 1998. Wilson, Kai Ashante. A Taste of Honey. Tor, 2015. Wolfe, Gary K. “From Dryden to Dunsany.” Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, edited by Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 7–20. Wright, Robert. The Evolution of God: The Origin of Our Beliefs. Kindle ed., Hacette Digital, 2009. Ziolkowski, Jan M. Fairy Tales from before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies. University of Michigan Press, 2009. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Ohio State University Press, 2006.

Allotopia: A World-Building Narrative Krzysztof M. Maj

Introduction In this chapter I propose to redefine the notion of allotopia—first introduced to narrative theory by Umberto Eco in the essay I mondi della fantascienza as a part of a larger classification of fantastic worlds—for the purposes of world-­ building and fantasy studies. Understanding allotopia, etymologically, as “an alien world” or “another world,” Eco argues it to be a narrative pivoted around the creation of a world “structurally different [strutturalmente diverso]” (Eco, Sugli specchi e altri saggi 174), a concept reverberating in an increasingly acknowledged claim that contemporary “storytelling has become the art of world building” (Jenkins 114). What remains challenging, however, is the way writers, designers, and world-builders alike can achieve this level of “structural difference” while simultaneously adhering to a wide variety of other important features of fantastic storytelling such as cognitive estrangement, willing suspension of disbelief, or immersion. This essay is meant to provide a new narratological framework for understanding such ways of allotopian world-building, with particular emphasis on its key aspect of otherness that distinguishes the allotopia from other types of worlds, such as utopia, dystopia, heterotopia, atopia, or metatopia.

K. M. Maj (*) Department of IT and Media Studies, Faculty of Humanities, AGH w Krakowie (AGH University of Science and Technology), Kraków, Poland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2_4

47

48 

K. M. MAJ

The Concept of Allotopia: A Brief History Historically, “allotopy” has been used predominantly within Liège’s structural linguistic school and so-called Groupe μ to denote semiological contradictions such as “a black snow,” or “night is day” (Dubois).1 These usages already produce some degree of inspiration for the world-building theory. Paraphrasing John R. R. Tolkien from his famous treaty On Fairy Stories, one could easily imagine (or say) “a black snow,” but in order to design a secondary world around it, wherein this black snow “will be credible and commanding Secondary Belief” (Tolkien 49)—that would require not word-building, but world-­ building expertise. What makes the snow black? Is it an optical illusion? Or maybe a biological or physical phenomenon? Answering such questions is tantamount to constructing another reality along with a certain set of universal laws governing its nature. Fantasy worlds seem to have always been conceived in such a way. Dragons, vampires, or Sith lords are “allotopian” lexemes and for obvious reasons. In reality, there are no fire-breathing snakes with wings, shapeshifting, caped immortals feeding on human blood, or force-sensitive dark knights producing lightings from their hands. But, on the other hand, we can easily find proper designates for snakes, winged creatures, blood-sucking insects, medieval knights, or natural occurrence of lightings. This process was termed in scholastic philosophy as the creation of chimeric entities (ens chimæricum), which, according to William of Ockham, could at the very least compose “a world of impossibilia in the same way that there is a world of beings” (Ockham, Ockham’s Theory of Terms: Part II of the Summa logicae 123)— remaining, however, in reality, only a part of negative propositions. At the same time, these entities are constituted as compounds of individual existents; “If anything is an chimaera, it is composed of goat and cow” (Ockham, Ockham’s Theory of Terms: Part I of the Summa logicae 108), argues Ockham. Chimera, much like any other chimeric entity, however, can neither really exist as a substantial whole, nor be a part of affirmative ontological propositions—just like allotopian “black snow,” or, as in Tolkien’s example from the quoted essay, “a green sun” (Tolkien 49). In the book Lector in fabula. La cooperazione interpretativa nei testi narrativi, Umberto Eco extrapolates such allotopian contradictoriness even further, showing the causal relation between formation of words denoting fictional entities and fictional world-building.2 As reads one of the memorable passages: These [fictional—KMM] worlds are not constructed, they are simply named. You can assume very well that there can be a world wherein seventeen is not a prime number, and so you can also say that there can be a world inhabited by green stone-eaters (verdoni mangiasassi). But to build these two worlds one must, in 1  These contradictions are also known as “breaks in isotopy” that can, under specific criteria, “produce a polyisotopy which is a necessary condition for the poeticity of the text” (Martin 38). 2  Mark J.  P. Wolf in Building Imaginary Worlds observes, quite similarly to Eco, that “most subcreated worlds find their origins in words” (Wolf 227).

  ALLOTOPIA: A WORLD-BUILDING NARRATIVE 

49

the first case, provide the rules under which seventeen can be divided, with some result, by a number that is not itself, and, in the other case, describe the individuals named green stone-eaters by attributing properties to them. For instance, that they lived in the seventeenth century, were green, and dwelled the underground to eat all the stones that Father Kircher had dropped into volcanic craters to learn whether they would emerge at the antipodes or be arrested by the gravity force at the centre of the Mundus Subterraneus. As can be seen, in both cases individuals were constructed by combining their—no matter how unprecedented—properties registerable in the matrix of reference W0. Such is the question debated in the history of philosophy: can one conceive of a golden mountain or, as was pondered by Horace, is it possible to imagine a human being with an equine neck. Why not? It is all about combining new things from those already known. (Eco, Lector in fabula: la cooperazione interpretativa nei testi narrativi 86)3

It seems, then, that allotopian world-building is deeply rooted in semiological allotopy. Arising from a seemingly contradictory and illogical otherness (the existence of “green stone-eaters”), it creates the otherworld—an allotopia, a place different in its properties from the one we know. This notion happens to be a common denominator for philosophical usages of the term. One of the earliest of the latter can be traced back to Wilhelm Füger’s text on allohistory, i.e., a counterfactual or alternate history narrative (Rosenfeld 398–99), wherein he identifies allotopias with figmenta pura—pure figments of imagination (Füger 352). This “otherworldly” trait of allotopia echoes in more contemporary readings as well. Filipe Santos, for instance, prefers allotopia over heterotopia in his interpretation of Foucault’s famous essay Des espaces autres. Hétérotopies, arguing that as “derived from the Greek ἄλλος, implying differentiation […], it is better than the simple variation suggested by ἕτερος” (Santos 39). Also Jeroen Stevens and Bruno De Meulder—having quite overenthusiastically claimed the authorship of the term introduced by Jacques Dubois half a century before—envision an allotopia as a “place that insurgently accumulates different, at first sight incongruent, worlds […] that counterfigure the «regular» and the «norm»” (Stevens and Meulder 12, 15). As can be seen, therefore, all of these readings display the need for a concept broader than heterotopia

3  Translation from: “Tali mondi non sono costruiti, essi sono semplicemente nominati. Si può dire benissimo che esiste un mondo in cui 17 non è un numero primo, così come si può dire che esiste un mondo dove esistono i verdoni mangiasassi. Ma per costruire questi due mondi bisogna, nel primo caso, fornire le regole in base alle quali 17 possa essere diviso, con qualche risultato, per un numero che non sia se stesso, e nell’altro descrivere degli individui nominati come verdoni mangiasassi attribuendo loro delle proprietà: per esempio lessere vissuti nel Seicento, lessere stati verdi, l’aver risieduto sotto terra per mangiare tutti i sassi che padre Kircher lasciava cadere nei crateri dei vulcani per vedere se fuoriuscissero agli antipodi o si arrestassero gravitando al centro del Mundus Subterraneus. Come si vede, in tal caso si costruirebbero individui combinando sia pure in modo inedito proprietà che sono registrabili in una matrice W, di riferimento. Che è poi la questione, dibattuta nella storia della filosofia, se possa essere concepita una montagna doro, o quella dibattuta da Orazio se possa essere immaginato un essere umano con la cervice equina. Perché no? Si tratta di combinare cose nuove partendo dal già noto.”

50 

K. M. MAJ

and less philosophically burdened than, for instance, utopia or uchronia—but, nonetheless, particularly useful for discussing the issue of otherness.

Eco’s Definition of Allotopia The concept of allotopia was first introduced to narrative theory in 1985 by Umberto Eco in the text I mondi della fantascienza, along with a concise typology of imaginary worlds—or, as Marie-Laure Ryan would term them, “world-centered narrative systems” (M.-L. Ryan 383): Utopia, wherein a possible world co-exists with its real counterpart, however remains inaccessible in normal circumstances; Uchronia, wherein a possible world is an answer to a question “what would have happened if, what happened, had happened otherwise?”; Metatopia and metachronia, wherein a possible world represents the future of its real counterpart and, even though structurally different, remains plausible and probable precisely due to the fact that all the changes it may undergo are the extension of the tendencies observable in the real world; and—most interestingly for the purposes of our analysis—allotopia, opening the entire typology and defined, consequently, as the most general type of possible world. According to Eco: Allotopia presumes that our world is really different from the one we know by allowing the occurrence of things normally unheard of (i.e. animal speaks, warlocks and fairies exist). Allotopia, therefore, constructs an alternate world and implies that it is even more real than the real one, to the point of convincing the reader that allotopian world is the only one true. A typical allotopia allows the once imagined world to dissolve any connections with the reality, with the obvious exception of allegorical tropes. (Eco, Sugli specchi e altri saggi 174)4

If the above definition were to be cross-referenced with those already functioning in poetics, allotopia would share its traits with a fairy-tale (“animal speaks, warlocks and fairies exist”), Tolkienian high fantasy (“alternate world […] even more real than the real one”), utopian and dystopian fiction (“allows the […] world to dissolve any connections with the reality”), or just any kind of world-building fantastic fiction (“with the obvious exception of allegorical tropes”). Consequently, this means allotopia could be easily confused with even these types of world-centered narratives Eco decided to discern, such as, for instance, utopia or metatopia. It remains also unclear, where Eco draws the line between the narrative, storyworld, and possible world which remain 4  Translation from: “Può immaginare che il nostro mondo sia realmente diverso da quello che è, e cioè che vi accadano cose che di solito non vi accadono (che gli animali parlino, che esistano I maghi o le fate): essa costruisce cioè un mondo alternativo e assume che esso sia più reale di quello reale, a tal punto che tra le aspirazioni del narratore vi è quella che il lettore si convinca che il mondo fantastico è l’unico veramente reale. Anzi, tipico dell’allotopia è che, una volta immaginato il mondo alternativo, non ci interessano più I suoi rapporti col. mondo reale, se non in termini di significazione allegorica.”

  ALLOTOPIA: A WORLD-BUILDING NARRATIVE 

51

distinct phenomena in narrative theory. The last problem of the definition is also the most interesting one. What makes an imaginary, fantastic, allotopian otherworld more real to the point of surpassing the easily perceivable realness of the world that we dwell in? All in all, those unfamiliar with basic conventions of fantastic storytelling—with various means of defamiliarization and cognitive estrangement atop—could find it troublesome to perceive a higher degree of realism in a world where “animal speaks, warlocks and fairies exist.” This paradox calls, therefore, for a closer examination. The reasons for the paradoxical nature of allotopian reality may be twofold. The first one was diagnosed by a well-known postmodern novel theorist, Linda Hutcheon, as the so-called realist imperialism. According to Hutcheon, this imperialism was the result of narrowing the concept of realism to a limited time period and the literary genre with “the implied positing of the referent of fiction as real” and “the underlying assertion […] that if something «really happened,» or could be made to seem to, it was therefore its own justification and verification” (Hutcheon, “Metafictional Implications for Novelistic Reference” 4). This strive for authenticity is particularly visible not only in narratives marketed as “based on true stories” or “true accounts”—as if it were to justify them automatically as truly factual—but in realist fiction in general, favored by critics for its mimetic values. Of course, this discursive practice is not only limited to literature. For instance, a video game which does not create any imaginary setting but imitates the real one, in order to provide a compelling framework for a political commentary on our contemporaneous reality, is often labeled as a “serious game” (Michael and Chen). This may imply that all the other games set in imaginary worlds, disregarding their interpretative capacity, are, by extension, trivial or “non-serious” at best. Realist imperialism could be understood, consequently, as a “dispositif” of power-knowledge (Foucault 194–95) exercised upon fiction that defies referring to the reality we know in favor of establishing its own frame of reference. The second reason for a doubtful approach toward the notion of an imaginary allotopia more real than the real world and its mimetic representations can be traced back to the classical rhetorical argument about eikós (εἰκός— “probable, likely, reasonable”) and pithanon (πιθανον—“plausible, persuasive”). This useful distinction was, however, lost due to Marcus Cicero’s synonymous treatment of verisimile and credibile (Allen 47). Earlier on, at the time of the New Academy, the approach toward the plausible and the probable displayed a higher degree of subtlety. Most prominently, following Carneades of Carnea’s concept of pithanê phantasia, Sextus Empiricus proceeded with the discussion of “impressions that appears [mine emphasis, KMM] true” (Palmer 361)—but not necessarily must be based on any true accounts. A pithanê phantasia could be, then, defined as a believable fantasy not representing any kind of pre-existing reality but creating a new one, with second-ordered means of justification and verification that produce a sense of internal coherence. Consequently, instead of pursuing the objective verisimilitudity of eikós, pithanê phantasia allows for projecting intersubjective credibility or believability of

52 

K. M. MAJ

pithanon, thus shifting the perception of truth from the relation of correspondence to the relation of coherence (White 40). If so, can allotopia truly be a world more real than the real one? In the quoted essay On Fairy Stories Tolkien claims that once entering a fantastic world the reader finds a specific kind of truth that “accords with the laws of that world” (Tolkien 37). Hutcheon, in her reading of these words, points at the well-known representational paradox: that however fantastic the newly imagined world may be, “the medium is the language of this world, the use of which might be said to limit the novelist’s ability to evoke in the reader the figures of his imagination” (Hutcheon, Narcissistic narrative: the metafictional paradox 92). At the same time, however, “No one demands that Tolkien’s Middle Earth be a counter to our empirical world, just that it be a coherent heterocosm [emphasis mine, KMM]” (Hutcheon, Narcissistic narrative: the metafictional paradox 92). In other words, to represent the imaginary world, one does not need to create a realist representation of the actual world so as to confront the real with the fantastic. Rather, the realism that contributes to the believability of allotopia is rooted in the language itself and in the representational practices it allows for. Consequently, creating allotopian worlds with the means of realist representation subverts readers’ expectations—as it employs well-known entities to create an entity yet unbeknownst (ens chimæricum) that remains, nonetheless, integral and credible in its depiction. Yet again, therefore, the truth of correspondence is substituted by the truth of coherence— pointing at the importance of internal consistency in the ways of constructing realist allotopian worlds.

Allotopia as a Fictional Heterocosm According to Hutcheon, a heterocosm is a living narrative space much rather than an ontologically predefined world—a space than is created not only top-­ down, through the act of writing, but also bottom-up, through the act of reading. As she elucidates in one of her texts: The fictive referents gradually accumulate during the act of reading, thereby constructing a “heterocosm”—another cosmos, a second ordered referential system [emphasis mine, KMM]. This fictional universe is obviously not an object of perception, but an effect to be experienced by the readers, in the sense that it is something created by them and in them. (Hutcheon, “Metafictional Implications for Novelistic Reference” 5)

In A Theory of Adaptation Hutcheon elaborates further on the term, explaining that a heterocosm may be also understood literally as: […] an “other world” [emphasis mine, KMM] or cosmos, complete, of course, with the stuff of a story—settings, characters, events, and situations. To be more precise, it is the “res extensa”—to use Descartes’ terminology—of that world, its

  ALLOTOPIA: A WORLD-BUILDING NARRATIVE 

53

material, physical dimension, which is transposed and then experienced through multisensorial interactivity […]. This heterocosm possesses what theorists call “truth-of-coherence” […] just as do narrated and performed worlds, but this world also has a particular kind of “truth-of-correspondence”—not to any “real world” but to the universe of a particular adapted text. (Hutcheon, A theory of adaptation 14)

This take on fictional heterocosm is particularly inspiring as it re-introduces the relation of correspondence—but on a higher degree. Much like one can easily see correspondences between a given realist narrative and the real world it narrates, one can also, argues Hutcheon, spot analogous correspondences between a given allotopian narrative and the allotopian world it narrates. This could be a way out of the dilemma associated with “the realist demand for extratextual reference” (Hutcheon, “Metafictional Implications for Novelistic Reference” 2) which is obviously not a desirable construal of the properly designed allotopia. Both in Eco’s and Hutcheon’s approach to the fantastic poetics any allegorical or referential anchoring is excluded—and no wonder: fantastic narratives are, predominantly, about building imaginary worlds (Wolf 29–33; Schanoes 236; Butler 145–146) and this is why they should be interpreted as world-centered (rather than character-centered, or plot-centered) narrative systems (M.-L.  Ryan 383). It does not mean, however, that the demand for “extratextual reference”—whatever that could mean after Derridian “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (Derrida 35)—should remain unfulfilled. Worlds, both actual and possible, in order to be perceived as worlds, need to display a number of characteristic features that can be called, after Martin Heidegger, Die Weltlichkeit der Welt, i.e., “the worldness of world” which translates into the “transcendental horizon of our experience” (Jameson 98). This idea has been independently researched in transmedial narratology by Lisbeth Klastrup and Susana Tosca who proposed to define worldness as “a shared idea of the world” and “a mental image” that is informed by three major dimensions: (1) mythos (along with the founding, creational mythology and a history of the world), (2) topos (the setting of the world both in time, and space, i.e., the chronotope in Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms5), and (3) ethos (global world’s ethic or individual moral courses of conduct) (Klastrup and Tosca 297). These dimensions can prove to be particularly useful for fantasy, science fiction, and world-building studies that still need to address the ways a fantastic narrative correlates with what is referred to as the world’s lore. More importantly, Klastrup and Tosca’s notion of worldness aligns with Hutcheon’s view on the heterocosm. The gradual accumulation of references well corresponds with how the worldness—as a number of “distinguishing and recognizable features” of the world—originates “from the first version, or instantiation, of 5  Bakhtin has famously proposed to associate the chronotope, understood as a “time space,” with the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” and “a formally constitutive category of literature” (Bachtin 84).

54 

K. M. MAJ

the world but can be elaborated and changed over time” (Klastrup and Tosca 297). It seems, then, that one should focus on expanding all the narrative content that contributes to growth of the intersubjective experience of worldness in order to battle the ramifications of realist imperialism and create an allotopia that would “dissolve any connections with the reality” (Eco, Sugli specchi e altri saggi 174), one should focus on expanding all the narrative content that contributes to growth of the intersubjective experience of worldness. Michał Kłosiński in his interpretation of allotopian representation from the book Hermeneutyka gier wideo [Hermeneutics of Video Games] decided to choose a slightly different approach. Instead of fighting the realist imperialism and its discursive dispositives, he reached for hermeneutic understanding of Verwandlung or alloeosis (ἀλλοίωσις) in order to establish a space of “true mimesis” within the borders of allotopian world (Kłosiński 162–64). Kłosiński relies here heavily on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s distinction between transformation and alteration (alloeosis). As we read in Truth and Method, what is transformed, ceases to exist in its previous substance and is “suddenly and as a whole something else,” whereas “what is altered also remains the same and is maintained,” thereby being only “an accident of substance” (Gadamer 110–11). “A green sun” or “a black snow” clearly introduces alteration (alloeosis) rather than propose transformation—they do not change the substance of their real-­ world equivalents but, instead, produce an otherworld that alienates us from the one we know. This convinces all the more that Eco, in the first definition of allotopia, consciously uses the phrase il mondo alternativo, an alternative world, thus emphasizing the aspect of alteration and alternativity. Kłosiński’s reading of Alloeosis allows also, quite interestingly, to re-evaluate Darko Suvin’s concept of cognitive estrangement which was—just as our construal of allotopia— formulated as a mean of distinguishing science fiction poetics from its realist equivalents. Even though the basis for cognitive estrangement, a formalist notion of ostranenie—introduced famously by Victor Shklovsky—was unfortunately translated into English as defamiliarization, Suvin accentuated that he was more invested into Bertolt Brecht’s concept of Verfremdungseffekt, “militating directly against social and cognitive alienation” (Suvin 374). Does it mean, however, that alteration is tantamount to alienation? Maybe alloeosis could allow for mitigating the negative effects of alienation, for instance throughout creating allotopian worlds which, on the one hand, preserve the properties and phenomena of the known world (such as greenness, stones, eating, blackness, or snow) and, on the other hand, alter them in order to fit allotopian frame of reference (“green stone-eaters,” “black snow”).

The Topographical Otherness The majority of approaches to the otherness focus on its individual or personalistic attribution, whether that would be the Big Other in Lacanian psychoanalysis or the Other in Levinas’ phenomenology. There is, however, one lesser known philosophical tradition that seems to be more fitted for the purposes of world-building and allotopian studies, which is so-called topography of the

  ALLOTOPIA: A WORLD-BUILDING NARRATIVE 

55

other (Topographie des Fremden) formulated by a German phenomenologist, Bernhard Waldenfels. Instead of focusing on substantial differences between the oneness and the otherness—that are encapsulated in words such as strange, insolitum, étrange, or ξένον—Waldenfels relativizes the perception of the other to a spatial relationship. The otherness, as he argues, is produced when we juxtapose the exterior with the interior (externum, extraneum, étranger, stranger, foreigner) or the own with the other understood in possessive terms (αλλότριον, alienum, alien, ajeno) (Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Alien 71–72). Both interpretations of otherness well align with the heretofore discussed construal of allotopia which, without a doubt, is a phenomenon external to our internal, empirical affairs, and, at the same time, defines a world belonging to the other (αλλότριον), to, say, an imaginary society of “allotopians” who treat it as their own. This well shows the relativeness of Waldenfels’s approach. Allotopia is other only from the perspective of our own world, but from allotopian perspective it seems, quite conversely, that it is our world which is other and alien. This means we can support two distinct paradigms of realism as well as reaffirm Eco’s paradoxical rendition of allotopia as the world even “more real that the real one” but, nonetheless, “structurally different” (Eco, Sugli specchi e altri saggi 174). The main advantage of such “xenotopographical” understanding of the otherness is that it utilizes concepts describing a world model prototypical for fantastic storytelling (Maj). Having been indebted in late Husserial phenomenology and, particularly, in his late idea of Lebenswelt divided into the home-­ world (Heimwelt) and the alien-world (Fremdwelt), Waldenfels proceeds with addressing the relationship between the two as well as cognitive processes that accompany the act of encountering and understanding the otherness. The xenologist terms the latter an “originary substitution,” a substitution, therefore, that “is not characterised by an attempt to occupy the Other’s place by myself, but rather by the fact that I start from the Other’s place” (Waldenfels, “In place of the Other” 156). This subtle demeanor helps in avoiding what is particularly dangerous in fantastic world-building or fantasy and science fiction studies alike, that is a colonial attitude, when one worldview is imposed upon the other, subsequently threatening it with subjugation, appropriation, or imperialism.6 As argues Waldenfels, when approaching the otherness—notwithstanding our primary point of reference—one has to speak “in place of the other” and, thereby, avoid an “asymmetry of call and response” (Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Alien 37) that accompanies logocentric, ethnocentric, or egocentric narratives.7 Such interpretation in many ways may influence the way the fantastic may be perceived. Instead of inferring the quality of the fantastic 6  Such is, I would argue, the main downside of once immensely popular portal-quest world-­ building model when the own (empirical, real world) is not only juxtaposed with the other (counterempirical, imaginary world), but also, usually, shown as a primary cognitive domain. 7  This is meant to be governed by the so-called figure of The Third, an intermediary position that helps in negotiating and mediating the contact between the ownness and the otherness (Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Alien 80–83).

56 

K. M. MAJ

from the difference between two orders, paradigms, or worlds, one can acknowledge it as αλλότριον, i.e., empirical to the other much like our world is empirical to us. “Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes.” wrote Neil Gaiman in American Gods (Gaiman 253). This is precisely the challenge that is inextricably associated with constructing a believable allotopia, one that escapes the asymmetric relationship of the empirical (real, own, familiar)—which for readers, viewers, or gamers will always remain a point of cognitive departure—and counterempirical (fantastic, other, unfamiliar) in favor of immersing in the otherworld. Here, contrary to a great many theories of immersion developed in media studies (Heim; Grau; Calleja), the process would rather be tantamount to absorption in the other reality and willing abandonment of any realist imperialism that impedes the suspension of disbelief or, as Maurice Merlau-Ponty would say, a monopoly of reason (monopole de 1’être) (Merleau-Ponty 215). Mark J. P. Wolf claims that there are two levels of such absorption in imaginary worlds: In one sense, the user’s attention and imagination is absorbed or “pulled into” the world; one willingly opens a book, watches a screen, interacts with a game world, and so forth. At the same time, however, the user also “absorbs” the imaginary world as well, bringing it into mind, learning or recalling its places, characters, events, and so on, constructing the world within the imagination the same way that that memory brings forth people, events, and objects when their names are mentioned. (Wolf 49)

A world capable of absorbing the visitor in its otherness—without challenging his sense of ownness—could be justly called the allotopia. Achieving such level of world-building mastery is, by no means, a difficult endeavor; and perhaps this is why higher levels of immersion are usually associated with a kind of desensitization. Marie-Laure Ryan calls it entrancement, while Gordon Calleja goes even further by associating it with incorporation, i.e., “the absorption of a virtual environment into consciousness, yielding a sense of habitation” (Calleja 169). It is the latter term—inhabitation—that seems particularly interesting from xenotopographical perspective. By inhabiting worlds, we grow accustomed to them, we familiarize them, and domesticize them—but we also challenge their aboriginal inhabitants with our presence. Meanwhile, according to Waldenfels, the alien is what “seeks us out in our own home (heimsuchen) by disturbing, enticing, or terrifying us, by surpassing our expectations and eluding our grasp” (Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Alien 3). We are, therefore, other and exotic to allotopians inasmuch as they are other and exotic to us (ἐξωτικός means literally “foreign, coming from the outside”)—and the same applies to the worlds we respectively originate from. And yet, the metaphor of inhabitation and domestication—disregarding their colonial connotations—perseveres in studies of fictional worlds. In Heterocosmica, Lubomír Doležel claims that during the act of reception one

  ALLOTOPIA: A WORLD-BUILDING NARRATIVE 

57

“must background the knowledge of their actual domicile and become cognitive resident of the fictional world they visit through the act of reading” (Doležel 181). Likewise, David Herman in the entry on storyworld from Routledge Encyclopaedia of Narrative Theory concurs that we tend to “imaginatively (emotionally, viscerally) inhabit a world in which things matter, agitate, exalt, repulse, provide grounds for laughter and grief” (Herman 570). But how to seek home in the fantastic world without occupying it in the process? After all, since the release of classical essay by Sigmund Freud, fantasies have been long associated with das Unheimliche (Bloom 240): i.e. the uncanny homelessness which “casts us out of the «homely» i.e. the customary, familiar, secure” and “prevents us from making ourselves at home”, as Martin Heidegger would say (Heidegger 127). Waldenfels is skeptical toward such a bipolar view and criticizes both “clinging to the common, familiar, homey” as well as “fleeing into the extraordinary, exotic, excessive” (Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Alien 67). The solution seems to be found somewhere in between, in the acceptance of the alienness of alien-­world inasmuch as in the acceptance of the homeness of the home-world. It is then, perhaps, in the momentous act of transportation to the world yet unbeknownst to us—that so frequently accompanies immersive styles of reception across many media—that one can find the equilibrium of “the mediating third” (Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Alien 74), a traveler between cultures, societies, and worlds.

Closing Remarks In a 1627 poem Nymphidia. The Court of Fairy, Michael Drayton writes: This palace standeth in the air, By necromancy placed there, That it no tempests needs to fear, Which way soe’er it blow it; […] The windows of the eyes of cats, And for the roof, instead of slats, Is covered with the skins of bats, With moonshine that are gilded. (Drayton 291–292)

Having read those last quoted verses from an allotopian perspective— respecting the strategy of originary substitution and avoiding the colonizing gaze of the monopole de 1’être—one may ponder on two characteristic words: instead of. Why Oberon’s palace should be covered with whatever else than skins of bats given its magical origins and entourage? Maybe in this allotopian world it is not customary to cut the wood from forests for construction purposes or maybe it is viewed as despicable and offensive, much like in entish and elven communities from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings? And—however despicably and offensively it may sound from our ethical perspective—maybe

58 

K. M. MAJ

harvesting roof thatching from bat’s skins is considered more justified? We may never know—but this does not mean that we should know anything else on beforehand, that we should remain prejudiced against such notion or presume it unacceptable basing only on the knowledge derived from our world and not negotiating with the other, xenotopographical field of reference. Being immersed in allotopia means, therefore, abstaining from judgmental, rationalized gaze in favor of accepting the otherness and alienness “of things normally unheard of” (Eco, Sugli specchi e altri saggi 174). Xenological reconceptualization of allotopia makes it easier to realize its unique potential. Building upon Eco’s notion of the allotopian world as “more real than the real one, to the point of convincing the reader that [it] is the only one true” (Eco, Sugli specchi e altri saggi 174) and Waldenfels’ idea of “originary substitution” and resisting the easy temptation to “occupy the Other’s place” (Waldenfels, “In place of the Other” 156), one can perceive a new advantage in the immersive style of reception. Immersion, mainly, does not need to be associated only with digital media and their telematic capacity, nor does it need technological environments to occur. It may invite a momentary inhabitation that, as Marie-Laure Ryan phrased it, disarms the other of its otherness “by representing it and building «realities» as worlds to inhabit” (Marie-­ Laure Ryan 35). Furthermore, allotopia invites utterly different approach to fantastic narratives, pointing at: their world-centeredness, worldness, inner consistency, and ability to produce second-ordered referential systems; the emphasis on believability and credibility (pithane phantasie) over rationalistic verisimilitudinousness associated with the realist imperialism; different representational strategies founded on the principle of alteration, alloeosis (ἀλλοίωσις), aimed at achieving true mimesis; finally, the importance of xenotopography understood as a depiction of the other and the otherness deprived of colonizing, rationalistic, and unbalanced attitude that favors one’s home-world over the other’s alien-world. These four qualities strike as particularly important in post-postmodern, networked society wherein many works of art become parts of coherent, transmedial universes and, thereby, contribute to the expansion of imaginary realities rather than to the one we already know. Quite conversely, by opening the recipients to the problems of the otherness and ways of negotiating it, they provide us with what Douglas Barbour once called an escape that brings us home (Barbour).

  ALLOTOPIA: A WORLD-BUILDING NARRATIVE 

59

Works Cited Allen, James. “Aristotle on the value of “probability,” persuasiveness, and verisimilitude in rhetorical argument.” Probabilities, Hypotheticals, and Counterfactuals in Ancient Greek Thought, edited by Victoria Wohl, Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 47–64. Bachtin, Michail Michajlovič. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, University of Texas Press, 1981. Barbour, Douglas. “Fionavar Tapestry Review.” The Malahat Review, vol. 1987, no. 79, Bloom, Harold. “Clinamen: Towards a Theory of Fantasy.” Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader, edited by David Sandner, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004, pp. 236–54. Butler, Andrew M. “Postmodernism and science fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 137–48. Calleja, Gordon. In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation, The MIT Press, 2011. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination, University of Chicago Press, 1981. Doležel, Lubomír. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Parallax. Drayton, Michael. “Nymphidia. The Court of Fairy.” A Sixteenth Century Anthology, edited by Arthur Symons, Blackie & Son, 1905, pp. 290–316. Dubois, Jacques. Rhétorique de la poésie: lecture lineaire, lecture tabulaire, Editions Complexe, 1977. Eco, Umberto. Sugli specchi e altri saggi: Il segno, la rappresentazione, l’illusione, l’immagine. 1st ed., Bompiani, 1995. ———. Lector in fabula: la cooperazione interpretativa nei testi narrativi, Bompiani, 2010. Foucault, Michel. Power/knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (1972–1977), Pantheon Books, 1980. Füger, Wilhelm. “Streifzüge durch Allotopia. Zur Topographie eines Fiktionalen Gestalrungraums.” Anglia—Zeitschrift für englische Philologie, no. 102, 1984, pp. 349–91. https://doi.org/10.1515/angl.1984.1984.102.349. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd ed., Continuum, 2006. Gaiman, Neil. American Gods: A Novel. 1st Perennial ed., Harper Perennial, 2003. Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. First MIT Press paperback edition., The MIT Press, 2004. Heidegger, Martin. An Introduction to Metaphysics, Yale University Press, 1959. Heim, Michael. Virtual Realism, Oxford University Press, 1998. Herman, David. “Storyworld.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman et al., Routledge, 2008, pp. 569–70. Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic narrative: the metafictional paradox, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980, worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/oclc/1033434621. ———. “Metafictional Implications for Novelistic Reference.” On Referring in Literature, edited by Anna Whiteside and Michael Issacharoff, Indiana University Press, 1987, pp. 1–13. ———. A theory of adaptation, Routledge, 2006, worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/ oclc/219248146. Jameson, Fredric. The political unconscious: narrative as a socially symbolic act, Routledge, 2002, worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/oclc/612061271.

60 

K. M. MAJ

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New  York University Press, 2006. Klastrup, Lisbeth, and Susana Tosca. “Game of Thrones: Transmedial Worlds, Fandom, and Social Gaming.” Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, edited by Jan-Noël Thon and Marie-Laure Ryan, University of Nebraska Press, 2014, pp. 295–314. Kłosiński, Michał. Hermeneutyka gier wideo: Interpretacja, immersja, utopia, Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2018. Lupa Obscura. Maj, Krzysztof M. “From Two-Worldliness to Allotopia: Towards Philosophico-Literary Approach to World-Building Narratives.” Dialectics of Space and Place across Virtual and Corporeal Topographies, edited by June Jordaan et al., Brill, 2019. Martin, Richard. “Semiotics in Belgium.” The Semiotic Sphere, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok et al., Plenum Press, 1986, pp. 19–45. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Signes, Gallimard, 1960. Michael, David, and Sande Chen. Serious Games: Games that Educate, Train, and Inform, Course Technology, 2011. Ockham, William. Ockham’s Theory of Terms: Part I of the Summa logicae: trans. by Michael Joseph Loux, University of Notre Dame Press, 1974. ———. Ockham’s Theory of Terms: Part II of the Summa logicae: trans. by A.J. Freddoso and H. Schuurman, St. Aug.ine’s Press, 1998. Palmer, John A. “Skeptical Investigation.” Ancient Philosophy, vol. 20, no. 2, 2000, pp. 351–75. https://doi.org/10.5840/ancientphil200020234. Rosenfeld, Gavriel David. The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism, Cambridge University Press, 2011. Ryan, M.-L. “Transmedial Storytelling and Transfictionality.” Poetics Today, vol. 34, no. 3, 2013, pp. 361–88. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-­2325250. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as virtual reality: Immersion and interactivity in literature and electronic media, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2001. Parallax. Santos, Filipe Delfim. “Boarding Schools as ‘Special Places’ or Allotopias.” Education and the Boarding School Novel: The Work of José Régio, edited by Filipe Delfim Santos, SensePublishers, 2017, pp. 31–53. Schanoes, Veronica. “Historical fantasy.” The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, Cambridge University Press, 2012. Stevens, Jeroen, and Bruno de Meulder. “On Allotopia: The Spatial Accumulation of Difference in Bixiga (São Paulo, Brazil).” Space and Culture, vol. 5, 2018, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331218760772. Suvin, Darko. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” College English, vol. 34, no. 3, 1972, p. 372. https://doi.org/10.2307/375141. Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel. Tree and Leaf, Allen & Unwin, 1968. Waldenfels, Bernhard. “In place of the Other.” Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 44, no. 2, 2011a, pp. 151–64. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-­011-­9180-­y. ———. Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts, Northwestern University Press, 2011b. Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Wolf, Mark J.  P. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, Routledge, 2013.

A Thousand and One Book: A Cross-Cultural Approach to Serialized Fantasy Nardeen Dow

Fantasy, it may be argued, exists in one form or another in almost all cultures, represented through a wide range of languages and literary heritages—Western, Middle Eastern, Asian, and so on. Yet, scholars’ examinations of the genre often neglect an essential feature of its construction, which has, in turn, also extended to other societies. I suggest here that a publication format is a crucial part of the understanding of a genre, and I specifically argue that serialization is a dominant feature of fantasy literature which contributes greatly to its reception, popularity, and the interaction between the text and its anticipated audience, whether locally or globally. Likewise, this serialization has been adopted by numerous cultures, showing that the impact of Anglo-American texts on various literary traditions is noticeable and of great significance. Examples of the implementation of this specific generic dominant in different literary traditions include Sergei Lukyanenko’s Night Watch and its successive volumes, Christelle Dabos’ Miroir series, the newly popularized translated Polish series The Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski, in addition to other Polish fantasy works such as Kłamca by Jakub Ćwiek, the German Das Geheimnis von Askir seven-­ book series, Finnish series The Red Abbey Chronicles by writer Maria Turtschaninoff, the Spanish Saga of the Borderlands by Liliana Bodoc, along with The Jade Trilogy, a Japanese series by Noriko Ogiwara, and the Arab author Islam Edris’ trilogy. Evidently, serialization as a structural feature of the fantasy genre has transcended Anglo-American texts and spread to various regions. Consequently, it is necessary to provide a new, more inclusive,

N. Dow (*) English Department, Tel Hai College, Tel Hai, Israel e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2_5

61

62 

N. DOW

taxonomy which will enable readers and critics alike to approach fantasy not only across timelines but also across cultures. This chapter intends to offer a new taxonomy by which we can categorize fantasy as a literary genre by examining its application in Arabic fantasy specifically. There is an ongoing discussion between author, reader, and critic about the definitions of a genre, and different writers adhere to these shifting generic limitations by attempting to either align with or undermine the generic standards in their fiction. Yet, a genre is more fluid than static, and often its boundaries are negotiated based on the audience’s expectations of the genre itself. Generally, literary works are categorized into genres depending on various stylistic and thematic norms to guide a specific audience and guarantee the work is being read by its intended readers. Consequently, one could make the claim that, from its inception, a text has a predetermined audience, and therefore, as Daniel Chandler argues, in “An Introduction to Genre Theory,” genres are socially constructed and the role of a reader in producing a literary text should not be overlooked by writers and editors.1 One definition of a genre can thus focus on the expectations of readers or audiences of it. For instance, a science fiction novel can be determined as such by whether its intended audience deems it as a science fiction text. Yet, it is crucial to point out that a genre requires an examination from various perspectives to account more accurately for the texts included within its parameters. Otherwise, it is limited and non-­ inclusive, as this method of standard classification is biased, and there are debatable limitations in each generic medium, and various scholars seem to offer explanations that do not completely align with one coherent definition. I approach fantasy literature from both a generic and cultural perspective to make the claim that fantasy has a specific generic feature that has been overlooked in previous research. I claim that a new classification of fantasy should account for both content and form as the structure of modern fantasy has been adopted by other cultures as well. This cultural modification of the genre is particularly significant and will be studied in this chapter through its adaptation in Arabic fantasy. While the thematic of fantasy have been given a more expansive scope for definition and research, its form has not received much scholarly attention. Take, for example, Farah Mendlesohn’s famous work, Rhetorics of Fantasy, in which she offers a new classification of fantasy literature by focusing on its content and divides it into four categories: portal quest, immersive, intrusion, and liminal. This division is connected to the hero’s relationship to the fantastic world. For instance, Portal quest refers to a fantasy world that is accessed through a portal by the hero/heroine (e.g., The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), “the portal fantasy allows and relies upon both protagonist and reader gaining experience” (xix). Immersive fantasy, as the name suggests, immerses its readers from the start and is closest to science fiction. The reader immediately enters the fantastical realm and gains insights into this world as 1

 Chandler, Daniel in “An Introduction to Genre Theory.”

  A THOUSAND AND ONE BOOK: A CROSS-CULTURAL APPROACH TO SERIALIZED… 

63

they progress in the reading process. Intrusion fantasy is abrupt—both for the protagonist and for the reader. Liminal fantasy is when the fantastic becomes “temptation framed by the door” (xxiii); it is on the edge of intrusion. Another major work is Mark A. Fabrizi’s edited book, Fantasy Literature: Challenging Genres, in which numerous scholars discuss philosophy, gender, education, and social justice as they pertain to fantasy. Other works include The Myth of Persephone in Girls' Fantasy Literature by Holly Blackford, in which scholars examine representations of the female figure in fantasy works (and the mythic story of Persephone); Wizards, Aliens, and Starships: Physics and Math in Fantasy and Science Fiction by Charles Adler, which focuses on the portrayal and use of physics and math in both science fiction and fantasy; and The Fantastic in Literature by Eric S. Rabkin, which offers an explanation of what the fantastic is by examining its role in detective fiction, fairy tales, science fiction, and religious texts. These are only a few of many works which examine thematic elements in fantasy. Yet, an in-depth understanding of modern fantasy also requires a study of its construction in varying cultures. Indeed, the structure of any given literary work is closely tied to its content and, often, is part of what gives the text meaning. The structure of a work often, if not always, frames the reader’s understanding of the text. Therefore, when we divide narratives into genres, we take into consideration its format as well as its subject matter. Here, it is no different. Modern fantasy has clearly adopted a specific structure which has been applied in numerous cultures and across timelines. Roman Jakobson’s definition of the dominant as the “the focusing component of a work of art” may be used in this context to argue that a dominant feature of modern fantasy is its publication as a serialized format. This can be seen in the increasing number of fantasy novels which were and are still being released serially across the world. Starting with The Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter, The Witcher to Kłamca, Night Watch, Miroir, and countless other examples. Indeed, even when a text is published as a stand-alone book, often its adaptations into film are serialized. Take, for example, The Hobbit, which was adapted into three 2-hour movies, or Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which has already been adapted into two movies, with its third installment in progress. Seriality, not only as it pertains to fantasy, has traversed time and place. Indeed, it has left its mark in a wide array of media, be it publications or, in more recent times, serials as they relate to the television and the internet. Mark Turner, a scholar on seriality, argues that the term itself is suggestive of “a range of complex genres, forms, and economic processes” and explains that in its most basic definition, the serial is “any publication that is published by design at regular intervals, of whatever periodicity.” (17).2 Similarly, in “Serialization and Victorian Literature,” Susan David Bernstein and Julia McCord Chavez claim that seriality “is a transcendent form, moving across not only print 2  Turner, MW 2014, “The Unruliness of Serials in the Nineteenth Century (and the Digital Age).” in R Allen & T van den Berg (eds), Serialization in Popular Culture. London: Routledge.

64 

N. DOW

formats and their temporal cycles of distribution (daily or weekly installments in periodicals, monthly part-issue numbers, volumes), but also historical time and place.”3 Indeed, the concept of serialization has been around for quite a long time, with examples that can be found all the way back to Pilgrim’s Progress in 1678. One can also argue that the origins of serialization can be traced to publication of Arabian Nights (1706) which incorporates some of the traits that are regarded as inseparable from this particular format, namely repetition and suspense.4 At the time, however, the text was viewed as “common property,” which meant it could be expanded upon by someone other than the original author (Chavez). Even today, in popular culture, serialization continues to be prominent in the literary sphere—specifically in children’s literature and fantasy. The continued role of serialization is clear in newly digital forms of writing as well—such as Fanfiction, Manga, and comics. Yet, despite being around for a long time, Sean O’Sullivan believes seriality can be a challenging term to define as it “invite[s] synthetic approaches that privilege a taxonomical impulse at the potentially significant cost of local properties and effects” (50). A serial may be defined as “a continuing narrative distributed in installments over time,” but it is a broad definition that does not take into account other works, such as comics, blogs, and TV series. However, O’Sullivan makes use of the term “segmentivity,” which he borrows from Brian McHale and Rachel Blau DuPlessis in order to explain how seriality functions. McHale’s “segmentivity” describes how poetry functions as a narrative from, focusing on how poetry creates meaning by negotiating the gaps in the text, such as line break and stanza break. He believes that segmentivity provides meaning to the formation of poetic narratives. O’Sullivan adopts this term and believes that segmentivity is “critical to all serial forms.” He asserts the following: [T]he juxtaposition of distinct installments is constitutive to serial meaning-­ making, just as the juxtaposition of segments of language is constitutive to the designs of poetry. Segments by necessity imply gaps—and gaps of information within a narrative, and the gap-filling that an audience must provide, have long preoccupied narratological examinations of fictional texts. […] But the distributed, structural gaps that define serials—the time gaps between the publication of installments, the diegetic gaps (and overlaps) that often occur between one episode and another—have received comparatively less scrutiny. (50–51)5 3  Chavez, Susan David Bernstein and Julia McCord. “Serialization and Victorian Literature.” October 2017. Oxford Research Encyclopedia. 4  The Arabian Nights contain the sequential structure of the serial format. The narrator, Scheherazade, relies on elements and techniques that keep her listener/reader interested. Scheherazade uses repetition, suspense, and is able to remain alive only due to the anticipation of the Sultan, to whom she is telling the stories. In 1720s, publisher George Parker decided to serialize these stories in 445 installments. 5  Sean O’Sullivan. “Broken on Purpose: Poetry, Serial Television, and the Season.” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, vol. 2, 2010, pp. 59–77. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/ storyworlds.2.1.59. Accessed 9 May 2021.

  A THOUSAND AND ONE BOOK: A CROSS-CULTURAL APPROACH TO SERIALIZED… 

65

Fantasy, I believe, makes use of these gaps within its narrative by taking the readers themselves on the same journey as the characters. The structural disparities in fantasy promote the narrative and become integral to its creation of meaning, thus making its publication as a serialized form a necessary feature to deliver meaning. I take into account that there are some fantasy novels without prequels and sequels, and that works in other genres may be serialized (e.g., detective fiction). However, modern fantasy makes serialization a requirement for the obtainment of meaning. This is evident from the way it has been published since the 1940s. Beginning with the publication of Tolkien’s The Hobbit in 1937 and the following Lord of the Rings series in 1954, fantasy has not only become a central genre in popular culture, but its audiences also already expect a structural format to come hand-in-hand with the anticipated plot. Seriality’s connection with fantasy has seen an immense rise in recent years, and many authors of fantasy publish their works serially, such as Brandon Sanderson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Christopher Paolini, Philip Pullman, and Neil Gaiman, among others. Indeed, a quick examination of the lists of fantasy books on Goodreads, for example, clearly shows that most fantasy works are serialized. This is not only relevant in Anglo-American texts, but transculturally as well. For instance, the newly popularized Polish Series, The Witcher, which currently contains eight installments. What specifically sets fantasy literature apart from the many other forms of serial narratives currently circulating, some of which (like detective fiction and science fiction) also share the quest form? While seriality functions in similar ways in various genres and mediums, fantasy utilizes it by incorporating its structure with its content. As an ontological genre, fantasy appeals to its audience by employing a new and unique setting. Indeed, readers derive pleasure from fantasy by exploring the fictional world. Thus, the world-building of fantasy along with its cyclical journey creates a “horizontal” seriality which allows the reader to engage more intensely with the text. Therefore, to answer “why fantasy” more directly, it is because fantasy—thematically and structurally—expresses a different form of narrative desire: the desire for the text not to end. Additionally, I believe that this desire for the text not to end is transcultural and has influenced how fantasy is published globally. Another scholar of the serial, Frank Kelleter, also discusses this desire in his edited book Media of Serial narrative, where other scholars also survey seriality across different mediums, including cinema, comics, and narratives (but not across cultures). In his article, “Five Ways of Looking at Popular Seriality,” Kelleter offers a theory of “popular seriality” and writes that the “will to formal closure probably derives, like art itself, from existential needs” and that happy endings are not crucial to “aesthetic experience.” At the same time, and while “every conclusion holds a promise of serendipitous coherence,” the postponement of the end creates “the promise of perpetual renewal.” He asserts that in serial works, “each puzzle calls for a solution, [and] each solution calls for another puzzle” (8–9). He calls these “the impulses of storytelling” and claims that the tension and suspense increase again after a narrative has come to an

66 

N. DOW

end. Serial storytelling, Kelleter argues, can be considered as a “fast narrative,” where, as commodities, “their prime interest is not only to attract but to durably reattract as many readers or viewers as possible by regularly exchanging recent innovations with new offerings and quickly updating past manifestations with future-bound variations” (13–14). He further explains that, generally, serial narratives can be seen as an ongoing process as the publication of the serial relies heavily on the idea of “continuing for as long as possible” regardless of the fact that there is no “real infinity.” At the same time, he believes that the closure of a text presents a problem as, in its essence, its success depends on “being able to continue, not coming to an end” (17). This is the desire that fantasy promotes by using a serialized format. For instance, the Harry Potter series generated seven installments and, as Kelleter points out, “a multitude of competing series about young wizards and sorcerers, complete with engaged audiences and countless media transpositions in movie adaptations, games, and so on” (20). Even in the Arab world, fantasy has clearly been influenced by this publication format, and while the genre, in its more modernized sense, is still in its early stages, it has been a part of Arabic literature’s heritage since the publication of One Thousand and One Nights, which not only follows the genre’s theme premises but also its structure. By looking at ancient Arabic narratives, we can see that many include elements of fantasy: myths, legends, and other stories like travel literature (the trip of Ibn Fadlan, and El-Tawahum by Al-Mohasibi where he describes a journey from earth to the sky after death). Examining old literary works in Arabic literature indicates that it incorporated many elements of what we know as fantasy today. Such example is A Thousand and One Nights, where Scheherazade, the protagonist, wants to save herself from King Shahryar, who, because of a marital betrayal, persists in revenge by killing his wives one night after marrying them. Scheherazade, however, uses our attraction to storytelling and our need for closure to stop him by telling him these stories serially to keep him interested until he finally falls in love with her. This presents the dependency of readers on the text to end but also to go on, endlessly. While longing for a closure, the reader still wants to experience the unfamiliar world that fantasy (or other forms of the fantastic such as myth) provides. The Arab literary world has evidently become more influenced by Anglo-­ American culture due to our access to the internet (social media platforms, conferences, etc.). This has, in turn, affected how Arab authors view fantasy in a modern setting. Indeed, one of the newly released fantasy series by writer Islam Edris, which was published by the Kuwaiti Platinum Publishing House in the years 2012–2014, has clearly been influenced by texts such as Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones. The series currently includes three books—The Legend of Return, The Legend of the Priest, and The Legend of Departure—and there is a promised fourth installment in progress. The story of the novel revolves around the eternal struggle between good and evil. Inspired by Anglo-­ American narratives, Islam Edris builds an entire world inhabited by multiple

  A THOUSAND AND ONE BOOK: A CROSS-CULTURAL APPROACH TO SERIALIZED… 

67

peoples spread around a huge geographical area, from kingdoms and empires to cities and villages. Edris’ work has undoubtedly been shaped, to some extent, by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and other major fantasy works in his construction of the plot, his world-building, and his emphasis on the prophecy and inclusion of numerous inhabitants in his fictional world. This may be considered as one of the first modern fantasy books published in the Arab world, and interestingly it is not only influenced by the characteristics of fantasy thematically but also structurally. The book was published in a serialized format starting in 2012, and Edris is currently working on the fourth installment, entitled The Legend of the Black Power. The books can be seen as a combination of Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings as it is influenced by both styles. Edris’ world-building is intricate and detailed, despite being a considerably new genre in the Arab world. The setting of the narrative is a secondary world—an island called Ethera, where three kinds of creatures live in peace (humans,  Morizors, and the Wandering Knights). The Wandering Knights are mysterious magical people who had a historical relationship with humans, which ended several generations ago. The Morizors are another group who are similar to the Wandering Knights; both love and serve nature by harnessing their magical powers, which stem from the earth itself. The Nazeels are ugly and barbaric people who had previously attacked humans after the latter tried to wipe them out of existence. In addition to these groups, there are other strange creatures that have a role in the next war, including magical horses, dragons, and other mysterious creatures. A sea, within which mermaids and pirates, and giants roam, divides the main island, Ethera, and another island called Micora, where dwarves live. The first book begins with rumors of the imminent attack of the Nazeels on human settlements. These rumors travel fast to the court of kings in the capitals of kingdoms and empires, and everyone hears of the impending attack and speculates about the fate of mankind in the next war. However, the Nazeels— creatures similar to ogres—fail in the attempt because of the union between the Wandering Knights and the men. The book further shows the interactions between the three people who live in Ethera. Similar to Game of Thrones, the book does not revolve around a hero figure; instead, readers are presented with various figures as main characters. On occasions, one of the main characters dies, and the reader starts to follow the story of another. This style continues throughout the series. The second book is entitled Legend of the Priest and it is around 240 pages— in contrast to the first book which is around 450. This installment mainly consists of fillers to the first book and introductions of various characters. The Priest is the moving power of the Nazeels, urging them to attack humans. Nothing stands in the way of the Nazeels, who are taking revenge on the men and the knights who stood in the way of their previous attempts to conquer. These battles cause the destruction of human cities and the slaughter of their inhabitants and their fighters. However, the knights have a different plan that adheres to an ancient prophecy. The prophecy predicts that this desperate war

68 

N. DOW

will not be victorious except by the forces of evil, and that the knights must return to their ancient land where a hero will appear who will lead them to victory in the future. The third book is entitled Legend of Departure and is around 320 pages. Here, the readers are introduced more in-depth to the Black Pries and the Nazeels, among others, and to the essence of the war between the various groups. The Moziro, the dwarfs, and the mermaids get involved in the war as well, and each of these groups has an agenda. The focus of the third book is Micora, the dwarf Island. The book also ends with several battles, all of which result in the defeat of humans, and it seems that there is no hope to confront the forces of the Black Priest who also uses giants, dwarves, the Morizors, the Knights, and traitors among the human race. Edris implements the thematic features of Anglo-American fantasy by incorporating a secondary world, a quest plot, and other fantastical elements. He also adopts the structure of modern fantasy. By serializing his work, he is appropriating what global audiences consider as modern fantasy. Readers’ horizon of expectations, to use Jauss’ term, includes within its parameters the structure of the genre. If we were to examine the Facebook group “Fantasy Faction,” cited in the introduction to this book, in which readers discuss the genre at length, modern fantasy is thought of as “trilogies.” This understanding of the genre indicates that the content of fantasy is intertwined with, and even bound to, its form, to the extent that they become inseparable. Therefore, despite being transformed and adapted to a specific culture, the format in which modern fantasy is published remains the same. Likewise influenced by world fantasy, and by Edris’ work, is another acclaimed Arab fantasy writer, Osamah M. Al Muslim, a Saudi writer and novelist, who began his writing career in 2015. Despite not being the first Arab author to write fantasy narratives and notwithstanding writing his books after Edris, his novels are more popular and some of them were even nominated to be adapted into movies due to their cinematic style. Before the publication of his first novel, he faced many difficulties and controversies, including finding a publishing house and later decided to publish his first novel entitled Fear in 2015 at his own expense, which became popular and sold around 150,000 copies. This, in turn, contributed to the publication of nearly ten novels in three years. Al Muslim continued his career writing mysterious fantasy, and then in the same year he published the novel Arabistan Orchards. In this novel, he explores the pre-Islamic era, and while first intending to write three parts, he eventually wrote five. The series begins with the book Arabistan Orchards, published in 2015; the second part, Demons Coven, published in 2016; followed by the third sequel in the same year, entitled Winds Abandoned. Then he published Al-Arjaa or The Limping Woman in 2018, and the fifth part, The Hybrid Witch, in 2020, which begins by linking all the previous installments. Additionally, an expected part six, entitled The Lion's Den, was to be released in mid-2020. The final three parts of the series were called Al-Arjaa Trilogy. The Arabistan Orchards series takes place in the pre-Islamic days. The story is about a revenge

  A THOUSAND AND ONE BOOK: A CROSS-CULTURAL APPROACH TO SERIALIZED… 

69

between a Persian woman called Afsar and an Arab woman called Daajaa, who recruit a group of witches to start a war between them. Additionally, Al Muslim published another fantasy series entitled The Seven Seas of which five issues have been released since 2017 until now. The books have topped the best-seller list in most of the Arab Gulf states. The series revolves around the princess of the Seven Seas, who tries to rule in any way possible.6 These two writers may be paving the way for more fantasy books in the Arab world. Indeed, in an interview by Adab News, Manar Ibrahim states that Al Muslim “presented a literary genre that is still rare in the Arabic library, namely, the fantasy novel”7and asks him why he chose to write this type of literature, to which he responded as follows: I love fantasy and I started by reading through the series A Thousand and One Nights, and this is how I fell in love with fantasy; by reading Arabic fantasy, and when I searched for a novel similar to A Thousand and One Nights I found nothing, and so I started to write this kind of literature to satisfy a need or desire that I have. […] I wanted to add to our Arabic library, and I published Arabistan Orchards, focusing on an Arabic setting—in Egypt, Ancient Persia, Iraq. The Arab world includes enough civilization to present a wonderful Arabic fantasy […].8

While clearly influenced by an Arab setting in the subject matter, Al Muslim is equally affected by the structure of Anglo-American fantasy works. By publishing his works serially, he is contributing to the way modern fantasy is perceived not only locally but also worldwide. If fantasy as a genre can be separated from its structure, then fantasy would have been adopted by writers thematically—and perhaps on few occasions, structurally as well. Yet, the many examples here show that the form of fantasy has also been embraced transculturally. Indeed, a modern fantasy text is already expected by readers, publishers, and writers to adhere to a serialized format. Thus, I believe that the form of fantasy is not only integral to the understanding of the genre, but that it is necessary for the formation of meaning. The seriality of fantasy is, therefore, a method through which we understand the texts themselves and consequently a preliminary definition of fantasy must include within its scope a reference to seriality as a dominant feature.

Works Cited Abed, Mohammad. “The Literature of Osama Al Muslim; Sci-Fi and Historical Fantasy.” TheAsaiN, 3 Jan. 2019. Web. https://web.archive.org/web/20200720062903/ http://ar.theasian.asia/archives/34135  https://web.archive.org/web/20200720062903/http://ar.theasian.asia/archives/34135  https://web.archive.org/web/20200720074440/http://adab-news.com/2020/01/27/ ‫ني‬-‫األدب‬-‫مع‬-‫ممتع‬-‫حوار‬-‫في‬-‫ال ُمسلم‬-‫أسامة‬/ 8  Ibid. 6 7

70 

N. DOW

Adler, Charles L. Wizards, Aliens, and Starships: Physics and Math in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Print. Blackford, Holly Virginia. The Myth of Persephone in Girls' Fantasy Literature. New York: Routledge, 2012. Print. Chandler, Daniel. “An Introduction to Genre Theory.” The Media and Communications Studies Site, 1997, p. 1–15. Retrieved from http://faculty.washington.edu/farkas/ HCDE510-­Fall2012/Chandler_genre_theoryDFAnn.pdf Chavez, Susan David Bernstein and Julia McCord. “Serialization and Victorian Literature.” October 2017. Oxford Research Encyclopedia. Fabrizi, Mark A. Fantasy Literature: Challenging Genres. Rotterdam; Boston: Sense Publishers, 2016. Print. Ibrahim, Manar. “Osama Al Muslim in an Interesting Interview with ‘Al-Adab News’.” Al-Adab News, 27 Jan. 2020. Web. https://web.archive.org/web/2020072007 4440/http://adab-­news.com/2020/01/27/ ‫ني‬-‫األدب‬-‫مع‬-‫ممتع‬-‫حوار‬-‫في‬-‫ال ُمسلم‬-‫أسامة‬/ Kelleter, Frank. Media of Serial Narrative. The Ohio State University Press, 2019. Mendelson, Farah. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Print. O'Sullivan, Sean. “Six Elements of Serial Narrative.” Narrative, Volume 27, Number 1, January 2019, pp. 49–64. ———. “Broken on Purpose: Poetry, Serial Television, and the Season.” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, vol. 2, 2010, pp. 59–77. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/storyworlds.2.1.59. Accessed 9 May 2021. Rabkin, Eric S. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton University Press, 2015. Print. Turner, Mark W. “Seriality, Miscellaneity, and Compression in Nineteenth-Century Print.” Victorian studies 62.2 (2020): 283–294. Web. ———. “The Unruliness of Serials in the Nineteenth Century (and the Digital Age).” in R Allen & T van den Berg (eds), Serialization in Popular Culture. London: Routledge, n.d.

Crosshatch Fantasy: Unsettling Portals, Crisis Heterotopias, and Comings-of-Age Rose Michael and Glen Donnar

I suspect that the book which takes you into a world apart must also trouble you, at least a little. And the troubling stays with you, like the grit in the oyster, and afterwards you are changed. —Susan Cooper (1996)

Introduction Characters in ‘portal’ fantasy are typically transported into another, distinctly ‘other,’ fantastic world via a physical or metaphorical door or gateway. ‘In genre fantasy,’ according to the Encyclopedia of Fantasy (Clute and Grant 1997), ‘portals are generally passages from here to there’; and in Dark, Weird, or ‘crosshatch’ fiction they ‘are more often seen as passages from the other world into this one.’ A defining characteristic of classic portal fantasy is that characters usually enter this fantasy world unwittingly, at least initially. Sometimes passage is achieved by an object, which pulls protagonists out of one world and into another via a powerful, magnetic magic. In Harry Potter (JK Rowling 1997–2007), for example, enchanted everyday objects, ‘Portkeys,’ transmit anyone who touches them to a prearranged location, in the same way that the rings in The Magician’s Nephew (CS Lewis 1955) transport the titular Digory and his new friend Polly to the fantasy world of Narnia and the ‘dead’ city of Charn. This passage is not always straightforward, and the child

R. Michael (*) • G. Donnar School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2_6

71

72 

R. MICHAEL AND G. DONNAR

protagonists soon discover that the rings do not offer direct passage to utopia but instead take them to a ‘Wood between the Worlds’ (31): a forest filled with shallow pools that only become portals when the ‘right’ ring is worn.1 Regardless of how or where children arrive, in portal fantasy these ‘other worlds,’ whether utopian or dystopian, typically remain distinct from the protagonist’s ‘real’ world: the ‘first’ world that readers encounter. This continues even once the ‘new’ worlds become familiar. Although they may be revisited, and the experiences the characters have transformative, ‘over there’ never crosses back into the original ‘here,’ to the point that the child adventurers struggle to describe, even recall, this formative experience. Forever afterward Digory remembered Narnia as if it was a long-ago meal: ‘It was a rich place: as rich as plum cake’ (32).2 By books’ end, returning to the ‘real’ world is against their wishes: Narnia is, after all, a utopia of talking animals and mythical beasts. So completely returned are the protagonists that they doubt their own experiences. At the end of The Last Battle (Lewis 1956) the Christ-like lion king Aslan calls up ‘the queerest and most ridiculous thing you can imagine’ (174): ‘a rough wooden door and, round it, the framework of the doorway: nothing else, no walls, no roof.’ The portal stands alone, but through the cracks in the door the children see the ‘old’ Narnia they have left behind being un-made. Eventually ‘High King’ Peter ‘leaned out into the darkness and pulled the Door to’ (197). The world ‘over there’ is, apparently, gone forever. But for those on the ‘right’ side, the ‘in’ side—the characters Aslan has judged as worthy—the ‘true’ Narnia persists. This elect few includes the reader, since we are repeatedly told throughout the series that ‘[o]nce a king and queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia.’ Despite shutting the door, the end is actually ‘but a beginning’ and the story ‘goes on for ever’ (228). For the reader, too, the fantasy world will persist, remembered fondly, if faintly, like Digory’s long-­ ago Christmas pudding. Published over a decade later, The Dark is Rising series (Susan Cooper 1965–1977) and Elidor (Alan Garner 1965) set themselves against Lewis’s overtly Christian saga in many ways. Although Garner met both Lewis and JRR Tolkien at Oxford—and is erroneously often assumed to write in the same fantastic tradition—he wrote to his publisher, ‘[H]aving finished Elidor, I noticed it was THE anti-Narnian fantasy’ (Howe 2011).3 More than this, this chapter 1  The ‘portal’ rings, then, work more like Harry Potter’s ‘Floo Powder,’ which turns the flues of regular fireplaces into a network of magical g(r)ateways—and requires careful attention to ensure travelers reach their intended destinations. 2  In Lewis’s heavily symbolic Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956), the ‘kings and queens’ always find themselves children again when they are ‘sent back’ to ‘their’ world, which more closely resembles our ‘reality’ than the ‘high fantasy’ world of Narnia. 3  Garner clarified that this was not intentional. Lewis and Tolkien, in turn, are often seen as continuing the tradition of the ‘Golden Age’ of British children’s literature (think Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame: talking animals and rather idyllic ‘other’ worlds), which ended abruptly with World War I.

  CROSSHATCH FANTASY: UNSETTLING PORTALS, CRISIS HETEROTOPIAS… 

73

posits that Garner and Cooper transform ‘portal’ fantasy into more disturbing ‘crosshatch’ fantasy, in which worlds ‘simultaneously inhabit the same territory’ (Clute and Grant 1997) and ‘over there’ bleeds back into characters’ ‘real’ worlds.4 In each of these books, physical doors function powerfully as a way into—and out of—a fantasy world. The ‘door’ first opened by the youngest Pevensie child, Lucy, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950),5 is not merely closed but permanently locked by brother Peter at the end of Narnia (the world and the series). But doors in The Dark is Rising and Elidor cannot keep their ‘other’ worlds out. ‘Over there’—initially accessible only via a clearly marked portal—unsettlingly bleeds back into ‘here.’ This ‘crossing over’ is the defining characteristic of the category, in which fantastic worlds are overlaid and the very idea of a portal as a fixed site is challenged. In this process characters—and readers too—come of age and into their power, initially ‘out of sight’ but only until ‘over there’ transforms the real.

Portal Fantasy Worlds as Heterotopias The ‘other’ worlds of crosshatch fantasies are charged examples of Michel Foucault’s heterotopic spaces: heterotopias (1967/1984). A concept only ever briefly sketched, heterotopias have attracted interest in recent scholarship on American cinema (Donnar 2015) and Japanese fiction (Dodd 2020). According to Foucault, a heterotopia describes places that are ‘perfectly other’: permissible, in-between spaces. In contrast to utopias and dystopias, heterotopias are places ‘that are somehow “different”: disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory and transforming’ (Johnson and Browning 2017: 1). They can be separate from, parallel to, or enclosed within the ‘real’ world of everyday spaces. And they can be simultaneously physical and psychological, such as the moment you see your reflection in the mirror. Heterotopic spaces have additional layers of meanings or relationships to other places than immediately meet the eye; they are both connected to and separate from the everyday, such as tourist destinations and red-light districts. Although lying in relation with other ‘real’ spaces, heterotopias destabilize, contest, invert, and even invent the set of relations they seem to reflect. As much as mirrors, the fantastical ‘other’ worlds on the other side of portals in ‘portal’ and ‘crosshatch’ fantasy, and their relation to the ‘real’ worlds of child protagonists and reader alike, can productively be understood as heterotopias: ‘worlds within worlds, mirroring and yet upsetting what is outside’ (Johnson and Browning 2017: 1). 4  We do not use the term ‘young-adult’ (YA) to describe books that were written well before that term was in general circulation, are read far more broadly, and whose authors rarely if ever identified as writing specifically for that market. 5  Neither of the ‘origin’ stories that ‘start’ these series were actually written first and would today be called ‘prequels’: The Magician’s Nephew was the second-last book Lewis wrote, while The Dark is Rising was Cooper’s second—written ten years after Over Sea Under Stone. There are fascinating similarities between the two first-published adventures, both of which concern a group of siblings sent away and a mysterious uncle.

74 

R. MICHAEL AND G. DONNAR

The Dark is Rising  (1973)—the first book in Cooper’s series—is the story of Will Stanton, a young English ‘everyboy’ tasked with a quest to save the world and hold back the ‘Dark,’ by completing the ‘circle’ of Light. On the eve of his eleventh birthday, on ‘Midwinter’s Day,’ Will learns that he is the seventh son of a seventh son. Midwinter’s Day—a day already made strange by a fall of longed-for but uncommon snow—ends with Will facing two great carved wooden doors: ‘standing alone and tall on the white slope, leading to nowhere’ (22). These doors ‘told him nothing.’ The wood is so polished with age it could be stone. The signs carved into them are incomprehensible. There are no handles; Will ‘pushed’ against the doors: to let himself in, or out? Heterotopias are ‘outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality’ (Foucault 1986: 25). Likewise, on the other side of these ‘closed doors towering before him’ (25), Will discovers an unimaginable ‘space’ outside time where, and when, he will begin his moral and psychological maturation. When the great doors swing shut behind Will, ‘and the light and the day and the world changed so that he forgot utterly what they had been’ (25), the door closes on the ‘real’ world he has known and the boy he has been. That ‘real’ world is already being rewritten: ‘[T]he world he had inhabited since he was born seemed to whirl and break and come down again in a pattern that was not the same as before’ (26). Eventually Will returns through ‘the same strange gates’ (39), pitched back into a ‘real’ world and familial relationships that, outwardly, have not changed. He, however, is transformed—though not-yet-­ completely—by his newfound knowledge of, and from, the ‘other’ world heterotopia. The perception of an unchanged reality, so deeply held in classical ‘portal’ fantasy, quickly proves false in ‘crosshatch’ fiction. Heterotopias such as museums also arrange, or overlay, multiple times in a single space, representing a ‘break’ from the normal flow of time. This is equally true of portals, as Will’s mysterious mentor Merriman explains: ‘The doors are our great gateway into time’ (40). Coming back (and coming to), Will realizes that he is in the grounds of Greythorne Manor, the ‘great house’ in his village. He has, presumably, been there—and not ‘there’—all along. When he later returns to the ‘great hall’ that has ‘no real windows,’ he recognizes it as both the ‘real,’ modern-day manor and the ‘original’ from centuries earlier. Indeed, he learns that the estate has not only been owned by Miss Greythorne’s family for centuries, but by Miss Greythorne herself: like Will, she is also an ‘Old One.’ In straddling two times, in simultaneously inhabiting the same place twice-over, they are, Will notes, ‘not in real time; at least, we are in past time, and even that we seem to be able to stretch as we wish’ (81). The doors are a portal into a liminal no-place Will first enters to learn his ‘true’ lineage as an Old One, complete with magical powers. On his next visit, he learns the history of magic (and, relatedly, of England), before finally being reborn, through the same symbolic passage, as the last of this line. Once he comes into his power, he can better ‘see’ this doubling of time and place, of the ‘great house’ of now and the ‘great hall’ of then—reinforced in the use of line breaks and ellipses:

  CROSSHATCH FANTASY: UNSETTLING PORTALS, CRISIS HETEROTOPIAS… 

75

he saw… … he saw, not the genial muddle of collected villagers in a tall, panelled modern room, lit by electric standard lamps, but the great candle-shadowed stone hall, with its tapestry hangings and high vaulted roof, that he had seen once before, a world ago.’ And later, again: he saw … … and he saw, when he raised his eyes, that he was back in the manor of Miss Greythorne’s time. (154–155)

Crises Heterotopias and Coming-of-Age The heterotopic fantasy world is where Will can come of age, making the transition from eleven-year-old boy into an Old One. Foucault describes ‘crisis heterotopias’ as spaces for individuals in a state of crisis or transition in relation to their society, lived environment, and own bodies (Foucault 1986: 24). Beyond portal fantasy’s straightforward affiliation with the coming-of-age experience, the crisis heterotopias of crosshatch fantasy are spaces—at once physical and psychological—in which some transition or turning point occurs; characters’ comings-of-age (must) take place out of sight from the ‘real’ world. Cooper makes it clear that Will actively seeks the knowledge he enters into. He does not simply wake to a tomorrow ‘beyond his imagining’ (17), where a quest is thrust upon him, but consciously chooses to enter the ‘no-where’ time of adolescence and young-adult awakening. The great hall is not the only heterotopic space that Will—and the reader—enters. When he next visits the Manor, on Christmas Eve, Will becomes an expert simply by reading (we wish!) in a scene that fantasy convention disparagingly refer to as an ‘info dump’ or ‘magical explanation.’ This time he is transported out of time by music as much as Merriman’s magic. It is no coincidence that he is ‘trying to make his voice so exactly match James’s that the two of them together sounded like one boy’ (66), singing an ancient, still-sung carol. And then: ‘There before him rose the great doors, the great carved doors that he had first seen on a snow-mounded Chiltern hillside.’ Will separates himself from his family and walks ‘into the light, into a different time and a different Christmas’ (67). The Book of Gramarye, with its knowing play on grammar and spelling speaking to the power of reading as knowledge, contains all the magic Will will ever need.6 In reading it he ‘enters into’ the book, ready to complete his (magical) transformation. He must read it ‘out of sight’ also of the other Old Ones and Merriman—who pointedly leaves him alone to read it. Will has never been ‘the same’ as other children: his family frequently remarks that there is something odd, something old, about him: ‘“Will,” Gwen said at length, “is rather an old eleven.” “Ageless, almost,” Robin said’ (11). When Will closes the last page, 6  There are obvious parallels here not only with bibles—and the Book of Incantations Lucy Pevensie encounters in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Lewis 1952)—but also the book in which the reader encounters The Book of Gramarye, The Dark is Rising.

76 

R. MICHAEL AND G. DONNAR

‘He was not the same Will Stanton. … Now and forever, he knew, he inhabited a different time-scale’ (92). In the crisis heterotopia formed in the reading of the Book of Gramarye, he comes into his true self—coming of age as an Old One. Heterotopias are spaces where transformations and desires can, supposedly, be enacted at a safe distance, benefitting from a sense of displacement from the everyday. In portal fantasies, even before the protagonists enter the ‘other’ fantasy world, they are generally removed from their everyday—whether having been sent away from war, or to attend boarding school, and so on. This allows them to come of age, into their own young adulthood, away from home and some way out of sight. Indeed, The Dark is Rising is the only book in Cooper’s series which doesn’t take place away from the main characters’ generally urban childhood homes. The other books’ protagonists have been sent away on holiday or to convalesce (much like the reader, perhaps) to outlier regions of the United Kingdom—such as Cornwall and Wales—where Celts retreated and their lore and languages are still spoken about and spoken. Their ‘first’ world is thus already heterotopic, before the portal that brings transformation and coming-of-age. Even before Will enters the portal, his ‘reality’ is already, variously, heterotopic. Will’s family home and village is removed from that of most contemporary British and all international readers: a semi-rural quasi-idyllic England, replete with Old Ways and old-timers. In its romantic, pastoral setting The Dark is Rising is physically, geographically, close to the country of English, and older, folk tales.7 This setting permits a heterotopia arranged across multiple times (present and past) and spaces (real and mythical). Heterotopias are also ‘counter-site[s] … [where] all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’ (Foucault 1986: 25). The fantastical nature of British children’s fiction is much noted, arguably inspired by the prevalence of historic ruins and persistence of powerful cultural icons like the Grail and Sword in the Stone—the ‘Arthurian echoes’ Cooper says on her author page that she was surprised to recognize in her first manuscript. There is also an even older tradition of fairy worlds that children are whisked away to, or changelings called up from. Every green mound across the Isles has the story of a door, each hill is whispered to be hollow and home to the wee or ‘Good’ folk (who are so-called not because they are thus, but so as not to offend them). It is these mythical, fantasy worlds that constitute the heterotopias of British ‘portal’ and ‘crosshatch’ fantasy. The Midwinter’s Day of Will’s coming of age is similarly heterotopic. Generally understood as the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year has long-standing significance in many cultures as marking the symbolic death and rebirth of the sun. Ancient Briton was no exception and ‘Yule’ customs—continuing into the Christmas tradition of the Yule log that Will lights with his 7  Cooper remarked, after the books’ writing, that the series was infused with her own homesickness (Cooper 2021).

  CROSSHATCH FANTASY: UNSETTLING PORTALS, CRISIS HETEROTOPIAS… 

77

family—were a pagan ritual/ceremony designed to banish, and endure, the long darkness of the Northern Hemisphere winter. This story is famously told and retold in British children’s fantasy; in heterotopic fantasy worlds that stage is the eternal (seasonal) battle between Good and Evil, Light and Dark, drawn from quite specifically British history: Arthurian legends and English folktales.8 This particular ‘strange-familiar’ (16) Midwinter’s Day is even further ‘out of’ time for Will (and the reader) after he returns to his ‘real’ world. Coming into his power as an Old One, Will awakens the Dark, personified by the uncannily foreign Black Rider. When Will first encounters The Rider, he ‘mistakes’ his accent as signaling his Dark foe is from another place, before his new ‘Old’ knowledge recognizes it as (also) a voice from another time. Cooper here powerfully blurs two moments in Britain’s history: post-World War II (WWII) British readers would not fail to note the Germanic associations, before realizing, with Will, that this has happened many times: and the Rider associated with earlier invasions.

Crosshatch Fantasies: Crossing Over into the ‘Real’ In Elidor, four siblings stumble through a portal into, this time, a dying world. There they receive an ill-defined quest they must complete to heal the threatened kingdom of Elidor.9 Their adventure begins when the Watson children enter an unfamiliar area of Manchester, perhaps sent away for the day so as not to hinder their family’s move to their new ‘country’ home (it is only on the city’s outskirts). On a whim, literally a spin of a wheel—the street map was ‘a tall machine of squares and wheels and lighted panels’ (7)—takes them into ‘slum clearances,’ past ‘empty and broken’ houses (10) bombed in the war and marked for demolition and replacement: It was not one or two houses that were empty, but row after row and street after street. Grass grew in the cobbles everywhere, and in the cracks of the pavement. Doors hung awry. Nearly all the windows were boarded up, or jagged with glass. Only at a few were there any curtains, and these twitched as the children approached. But they saw nobody. (10)

The children pass through this broken terrain before Roland, the youngest and—as is so often the way in portal fantasy—Elidor’s main protagonist, follows his siblings into the abandoned church and discovers the portal on the other side of a heavy iron-handled door. As with the uncanny hour of Will’s 8  The reader learns later in Cooper’s series that Merriman—‘Merriman Lyon,’ who belongs ‘nowhere and everywhere’ (74) and is called ‘Merry Lyon’ in Over Sea, Under Stone—is Merlin. Elidor, also, is ruled not by a Christian God but an older figure of misrule. 9  The book is the follow-up to Garner’s better-known The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), where the ‘real’ tales of Alderley Edge (a village in England where Garner grew up) threaten to overtake his artful (re)telling. As with Lewis’s The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and Cooper’s Over Sea Under Stone: the first books written in those series are more mystery than fantasy.

78 

R. MICHAEL AND G. DONNAR

awakening into a snow-filled Midwinter’s Day, this fantastical heterotopia lies at a double remove: ‘Wasteland and boundaries: places that are neither one thing nor the other, neither here nor there—these are the gates of Elidor’ (50–51). This heterotopia, portal to a dying land, lies in a liminal space where the physical and psychological scars and ruins of WWII mark the country. Much as they arrange multiple times, heterotopias also overlay multiple spaces in a single place. As Knight observes, a heterotopia such as the botanical garden ‘is capable of juxtaposing numerous seemingly incompatible spaces in one place’ (Knight 2017: 143). When the children enter the portal via a condemned church within the ‘slum clearance,’ they arrive in the world of Elidor: ‘It is not easy to cross from your world into this,’ says Malebron, a time-­ traveling character like Merriman (though more minstrel than mage) who instructs the children on the lore of the fantasy world they have unwittingly entered, ‘but there are places where they touch. The church, and the castle. They were battered by war, and now all the land around quakes with destruction. They have been shaken loose in their worlds’ (50–51). Elidor is profoundly ‘other’ to Narnia: not merely as a dying dystopia, but also because it refuses to stay in place, or be un-made, no matter how much Roland’s rational, older brother Nicholas wishes. In Elidor the children’s ‘real’ world is pervaded by the ‘other’ place, similarly ‘shaken loose.’ The portals the children—and Will—enter do not close; there is no Narnian ‘golden key’ to lock out what has been witnessed ‘over there’: ‘it existed in both places at once—the real church, and the echo of itself’ (50). It is hoped that the heterotopic and ‘home’ spaces will remain rigidly separated; the latter unaffected, uncontaminated. However, Foucault contends that heterotopias ‘presuppose a system of opening and closing [or exclusion] that both isolates them and makes them penetrable’ (1986: 26). A heterotopia is a space disturbingly open to other sites and other selves. This disturbance can be transformative: either positive or negative. As Merriman observes, those with power can travel through the portals ‘in any direction we may choose’ (40). Yet while Will and Roland are relieved to return ‘home’ after encountering their fantastical heterotopias, they are disturbed to learn they have not returned alone. The dark forces that Roland draws across are aptly described as ‘shadows,’ which refuse to remain separate on their side of the door—and stretch over into the light. This disruptive, two-way openness of the portals destabilizes both the integrity of the ‘real’ world and the coherence of the child subject. The heterotopias on the other side of the portal-door both disturb and construct ‘real’ spaces—and so destabilize and question ‘real’ selves, in large part because of an ambivalent capacity to reveal and distort, reflect and refract, display and veil. Nicholas, like Digory, comes to doubt whether their heterotopic experiences were ‘real’ or imagined.10 Nicholas, however, wants to forget: ‘Why is it so important for you to think Elidor isn’t real?’ asks Roland (147–48). 10  Or, indeed, as a long-ago holiday, as Elidor is remembered in a scene edited out of Garner’s original script, The Song of Roland (1962): ‘For a while the children talked about Elidor, but with time it grew remote, a private memory for each of them, and as unconnected with their real life as their annual holiday by the sea’ (Howe 2011).

  CROSSHATCH FANTASY: UNSETTLING PORTALS, CRISIS HETEROTOPIAS… 

79

Once entered, the heterotopia cannot be held safely distant from everyday reality: ‘You may have finished with Elidor,’ David sides with Roland against Nicholas’s skepticism, ‘but Elidor’s not finished with us.’ When the children flee the dying land—escaping an encroaching darkness, their own fears manifest, which nearly overwhelms them—they are each given a Treasure to protect: a spear, sword, cauldron, and stone. Each talisman is transformed into an everyday object once they return to their ‘original’ reality: ‘In his hand Roland held a length of iron railing; Nicholas a keystone from the church. David had two splintered laths nailed together for a sword; and Helen an old, cracked cup, with a beaded pattern moulded on the rim’ (59). To anyone else, these objects look like the worthless detritus of slum areas condemned to demolition. Artifacts originating from or connected to the heterotopia are only readable to those who have come from there. The children can still ‘feel’ the true nature of the Treasures. ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right,’ David agrees with Roland. ‘The real sword and these two bits of wood have the same kind of “swordness” about them. That’s not changed’ (156). So too, however, can the evil shadows who would destroy Elidor and later slip through the portal Roland opens, seeking the Treasures Malebron has charged the children to protect. In a similar sense, the elemental ‘signs’ that Will is tasked to seek appear to be mere Christmas decorations, horseshoes, and belt buckles to those in his ‘real’ world, but signal their magic in becoming intermittently white-hot or ice-cold to the touch when warning of the presence of the Dark. Much like objects from the heterotopia, the protagonist’s profound change and newfound maturity is neither recognized nor understood by those who have not experienced the heterotopic space or wish to deny it. Roland’s attempts to warn his older siblings are persistently dismissed and Will finally wonders ‘how you explained to an elder brother that an eleven-year-old was no longer quite an eleven-year-old, but a creature subtly different from the human race, fighting for its survival. … You didn’t, of course’ (174). Not only is the child’s experience not acknowledged when they return, but the heterotopic space itself can only be understood by those who reside there—and those who elect to enter. Anyone can enter a red-light district or prison, but only a select few will understand how to ‘read’ it, or what objects and relations within signify. When Roland returns to the ‘slum clearances’ at book’s end—in an attempt to find the unicorn Findhorn and fulfill the children’s quest to save Elidor—the previously condemned, ‘dead’ space is alive to Roland’s eyes: ‘The streets were so quiet. His footsteps echoed on the cobbles. The ruins hemmed him in. Doors and windows stared at him: abandoned furniture crouched among the rubble. A tin can rattled down a pile of bricks in the shadow of a building’ (172–173). In crosshatch fiction the fantasy world beyond the portal unsettlingly seeps through—even after, or when, the door is supposedly shut. As Roland learns

80 

R. MICHAEL AND G. DONNAR

too late: ‘It’s my fault. I made it. I made it. […] I must unmake it’ (122–124). It even seeps through in other places, challenging the notion that passage is possible only at designated sites (such as fairy rings or hollow hills in common mythology) or times (such as All Hallow’s Eve, when the door to the ‘otherworld’ supposedly opens). Not only do the characters return changed, with Signs and Treasures ‘shaken loose,’ but the ‘other’ world follows and threatens the ‘original’ world and home. On the other side of the portal he has opened Roland can see sentries from Elidor. They are both ‘over there’ and ‘here.’ Outside his front door. ‘They had found it. They knew it was a way through. They would come when they were ready’ (122–24). ‘He heard the familiar footsteps on the porch, and a hand pushed the letterbox open: the knob was turned; the door moved against the lock: scuffle: and silence.’ In both The Dark is Rising and Elidor, the dark forces initially manifest everyday technological disturbances—such as TV channels turning to static and radios going in and out of tune. The unsettling crossing over or mixing of worlds is not immediately recognized, only when it can no longer be ignored or denied.

Reading as Heterotopic: Contamination and Transformation There are multiple portals in Elidor; as for Will, fully entering the ‘other’ world is a two-step process. After entering Elidor, Roland must ‘make’ the portal-­ door in his mind. Malebron tells him that he can find it in a manner that recalls how Merriman describes the power of the Old Ones to Will: ‘Make the door appear: think it: force it with your mind’ (41). The boy must make the portal ‘real.’ Or, rather, make a real door fantastic. There is no story, no coming of age, and no saving a dying world if he cannot. Roland’s portal-door is as detailed and concrete as Will’s: ‘Think of the feel of it. The sound of it. A door. The door. The only door. It must come. Make it come.’ Roland thought of the door at the new house. He saw the blisters in the paint, and the brass flap with ‘Letters’ outlined in dry metal polish.… His eyes were so tightly closed that he began to see coloured lights floating behind his lids, and they were all shaped like the porch entrance. There was no need to think of it now—he could see nothing else but these miniature, drifting arches: and behind them all, unmoving, the true porch, square-cut, solid.

Provocatively, the (unsettling) transformative potential of crosshatch fantasy is equally true of the act of (re)reading. Much has been written about how non-­ realist genres are escapist, transporting characters—and readers—to other worlds in which they have untapped powers; powers limited only by the child character’s inexperience or self-doubt. Less is written about how these

  CROSSHATCH FANTASY: UNSETTLING PORTALS, CRISIS HETEROTOPIAS… 

81

‘returning’ worlds reflect (on) the coming-of-age experience.11 In both Elidor and The Dark is Rising the protagonist comes of age by learning what they can do with their mind—what only they (and the reader) can do. Where Will learns by reading, Roland learns by doing: with ‘tightly closed’ eyes he can, eventually, see ‘nothing else’ (42). Roland’s heterotopia is mirrored for the reader who, simultaneously, in their own space also realizes the power of their own imagination. As Malebron continues: ‘The power you know fleetingly in your world is here as real as swords’ (41). The reader too must ‘think it: force it’— magic the ‘other world.’ Like the fantasy worlds within them, fantasy books function as enchanted everyday objects and contained ‘portals’: originally shut, open for the duration of the adventure, and finally closed. Shelved, quietly waiting to be opened again. Or so it seems, for the worlds and ‘portal’ the reader enters—and the encounters and knowledge they garner within—cannot be contained. The fantastic storyworlds ‘cross over’; they seep back into the reader’s ‘real’ world, changing (sometimes barely perceptibly) the world they had left. As the ‘other’ world functions for crosshatch fantasy characters, so too the act of reading produces a perfectly other heterotopic space, which compensates for the (young) reader’s ‘messy, ill constructed, and jumbled’ reality (Foucault 1986: 27). In the process, upon entering the ‘portal’ of the fantasy, the reader too is transformed, and similarly comes of age and into their own power ‘out of sight.’ As with the characters, the reader’s ‘reality’ is permeated by ‘shadows’ from the other side of the portal, via the crosshatch fantasy text itself. For ever and ever, we say when we are young, or in our prayers. Twice, we say it. Old One, do we not? For ever and ever … so that a thing may be for ever, a life or a love or a quest, and yet begin again, and be for ever just as before. And any ending that may seem to come is not truly an ending, but an illusion. For Time does not die, Time has neither beginning nor end, and so nothing can end or die that has once had a place in Time. (190)

Rose memorized the above passage—from the last book in Cooper’s series Silver on the Tree (1977)—in which Merriman inducts Will into his birthright, copying it out into her diary. The passage perfectly conveyed what she felt as a teenager: coming into old/new knowledge. The incantatory language—as well as the philosophical concept of a moment in time being also a moment out of time and a moment for all time—spoke to her growing feeling of becoming connected forward and backward in time. She glimpsed her own ‘oldness’ emerging, alongside an awareness of her specific cultural ‘backstory’ as an English immigrant. As with the characters, her change was not recognized by those around her who had not entered the ‘portal.’ British portal fantasies particularly resonated for her, ‘waking’ into teenagerhood in a ‘perfectly other’ 11  In contrast to the rather tired argument that SFF is a genre for readers who fail (or refuse) to grow up or move on—presumably to realist fiction (Michael 2018)—it is interesting to note how often characters grow through an engagement with the fantastical, rather than its refusal or denial.

82 

R. MICHAEL AND G. DONNAR

antipodean world. A heterotopia of time more than space, it was no coincidence that it mirrored her move toward stories about children transforming into something ‘other’ and older, at once outside of time and finally ‘in’ time. Australian readers, like Glen, also connected with these British portal fantasies, of course. This passage and, indeed, this series, functioned as a sign among Rose’s young antipodean peers. Although far removed from their British setting, a heterotopia of space more than time, each book facilitated their individual comings-of-age. They did not read Cooper’s series together (they had read them already), but they recognized kindred ‘Old Ones’ who knew their Book of Gramarye. They quoted the passage to communicate a knowledge and transformation that they could not put into their own words. The Dark is Rising was a portal they passed through to come into their own power, returning to a ‘real’ world that was just as before and forever different—because they were changed. Entering the heterotopic portal of crosshatch fantasy ‘for ever and ever’ changed the ‘real’ world: The air shivered and quaked, the outlines of trees and earth and sky trembled, blurred, and all things visible seemed to swim and intermingle. […] Like a place seen through a shimmering haze of heat, the trembling world began to resolve itself into outlines of visible things. […] They seemed not quite real, not quite firm; they had a ghostly quality as if they might disappear when touched. (206)

For readers outside Britain, and especially in its former colonies, this heterotopic space is redoubled in the blurring of ‘real’ (the readers’ own) and ‘other’ (British) worlds. In its unruly mixing of British spaces and times, British crosshatch fantasy paradoxically offers the colonial reader a heterotopia in which to throw off the yoke of Empire. Foucault passionately advocated for a society with many heterotopias, not only as spaces in which difference is affirmed but also as a means of escape: disturbing, contesting, and inverting the dominance, in the case of fantasy, of Britain’s cultural imagination. For the reader crosshatch fantasy provides productive contaminations and transformations: the opportunity to come into power ‘out of sight’—and to do so, again, each time we re-enter that world.

Works Cited Clute, John, and Grant, John. 1997. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New  York: St Martin’s Press. Cooper, Susan. 1965. Over Sea, Under Stone. New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books. Cooper, Susan. 1973. The Dark is Rising. New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books. Cooper, Susan. 1977. Silver on the Tree. New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books. Cooper, Susan. 1996. Dreams and Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children. New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books. Cooper, Susan. 2021. The Lost Land of Susan Cooper: About Susan. http://www. thelostland.com/about/interview.html. Accessed 4 August 2021.

  CROSSHATCH FANTASY: UNSETTLING PORTALS, CRISIS HETEROTOPIAS… 

83

Dodd, Stephen. 2020. The Pleasure of Dark Places: Heterotopia in Mishima Yukio’s Inochi Urimasu (Life for Sale). Japan Forum. https://doi.org/10.1080/0955580 3.2020.1791229 Donnar, Glen. 2015. Monstrous Men and Bathroom Mirrors: The Bathroom as Revelatory Space in American Cinema. In Spaces of the Cinematic Home: Behind the Screen Door, eds Eleanor Andrews, Stella Hockenhull, and Fran Pheasant-Kelly. London: Routledge: 180–193. Foucault, Michel. 1986. Of Other Spaces. Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16(1): 22–27. Garner, Alan. 1960. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: A Tale of Alderley. Glasgow: William Collins, Sons. Garner, Alan. 1965. Elidor. Glasgow: William Collins, Sons. Howe, Roger. 2011. The Song of Roland: Alan Garner’s Elidor, http://www.suttonelms.org.uk/elidor.html. Accessed 9 August 2021. Johnson, Peter, and Browning, Karen. 2017. 50 Years On: The Heterotopian Mirror of Enchantment, Self-reflection and Disruption. Heterotopian Studies. Knight, Kelvin T. 2017. Placeless Places: Resolving the Paradox of Foucault’s Heterotopia. Textual Practice 31(1): 141–158. https://doi.org/10.108 0/0950236X.2016.1156151. Lewis, CS. 1950. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. New York: HarperCollins. Lewis, CS. 1952. The Dawn Treader. New York: HarperCollins. Lewis, CS. 1955. The Magician’s Nephew. New York: HarperCollins. Lewis, CS. 1956. The Last Battle. New York: HarperCollins. Michael, Rose. 2018. Why Speculate? TEXT Journal 51: 1–5. Rowling, JK. 1997–2007. Harry Potter. London: Bloomsbury.

Hybrid Secondary Worlds: Animal Fantasy Cord-Christian Casper

Hybrid Secondary Worlds: Animal Fantasy In fantastic fiction, ‘animal’ is an uncertain category. As readers encounter animal characters that talk, wear clothes, become heroes or villains, go on quests, and return home, they are constantly beset by limit cases. Is Toad in The Wind in the Willows (1908) still an animal, despite the surfeit of human-like traits? Does the restrained anthropomorphism of Watership Down (1978) maintain real-world characteristics of rabbits? How do the human traces at the limit of the mole epic Duncton Wood (1980) inflect worldbuilding? The limits of animality are far from certain in the scenarios proposed in and by these fantastic narratives. However, such boundary work—where do animals begin, where does animality end—is unobtrusive. The fantastic mode (Attebery 2) primes readers to accept the degree of anthropomorphism presented to them. In other words, we adjust our model of the fictional world to include a range of hybrid figures, just as we expand it to include deviations from our ‘actual-world encyclopedia’ (Doležel 181) in other varieties of fantasy. In this chapter, I trace how fantasy fosters immersion in the world of its animal beings—yet also calls into question the status of its unstable, hybrid characters. As a result, it will not only become clear that animal fantasy (henceforth, A.F.) makes unique use of the fantasy-specific construction of ‘worlds.’ What is more, I argue that this subgenre can bring to the fore the strategic instability of worldbuilding more generally. The example of A.F. shows that the uncertainties, gaps, and inconsistencies

C.-C. Casper (*) Department of English, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, München, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2_7

85

86 

C.-C. CASPER

of secondary worlds are not a drawback, but rather a unique formal possibility of fantastic modes and genres. What separates Animal Fantasy from alternative nonhuman narratives, I contend, is its concern with secondary worlds. Here, I am particularly concerned with a tradition of novels that center nonhuman animals rather than featuring them as helpers of the human protagonist. In works of this kind, A.F. elaborates the nonhuman experience to such an extent that it encompasses a ‘secondary world’ set apart from the primary world outside of its bounds. In Maria Nikolajeva’s terms, “[w]hat may be more rightfully called animal fantasy features talking intelligent animals living within realms of their own without any contact with the humans” (56). This ‘realm of their own’ ensures that we are not simply confronted with a literary equivalent of what it might be like to be an animal in actual-world environments. There is a surplus to the world of fantasy animals: the clothes they wear, the houses that they inhabit, the thoughts that they articulate—all these are features that would not ordinarily be attributed to a rat, a mole, or a rabbit. A.F. grants sufficient consistency to a world in which a car-driving toad or a heroic mouse can make an appearance without causing ontological breakdown—sufficient, that is, for the reader to “transport themselves in imagination into the worlds described by the text, pretending that they are real through an act of make-believe” (Ryan, “Fact” 75). Selective anthropomorphisms are literalized through that prompt to make-believe, allowing us to work out consistent scenarios at the boundary of the human and the nonhuman. This transfer of the nonhuman animal into a realm of its own complicates the question ‘what is an animal’ from the outset. A.F. constitutively denies a hard-and-fast notion of animality. Instead, the genre draws and re-draws the line separating the human and the nonhuman. Anthropomorphism itself plays an ambivalent role in this process. On the one hand, tales about speaking animals may appear like a subordination of nonhuman experience to a human scheme. However, A.F. does not presume to capture animal experience with any accuracy in the first place. Instead, the genre draws our attention to the specific characteristics that a given narrative transports from the primary to the secondary world. In the course of this exchange between “discourse domains” (Herman 202), humanity and animality become points on a spectrum. There is no human, just as there is no animal—all that remains are more-or-less animalized or humanized characters and worlds. This chapter argues that Animal Fantasy revolves around the possibility of bringing this exchange to a close. The narratives in this genre seek to halt the production of quasi-animals and almost-humans. Within the storyworld, this notion of a fixed degree of anthropomorphism becomes coextensive with the notion of a ‘home.’ The fantastic animal protagonists seek a place in which the drift and renegotiation of characteristics would finally cease, and in which the secondary world could settle into a clearly demarcated, naturalized shape. Such a home, however, remains elusive, so that A.F. cannot but stage uneasy conjunctions of human and nonhuman traits over and over again. Accordingly, it

  HYBRID SECONDARY WORLDS: ANIMAL FANTASY 

87

is my contention that A.F. invites the construction of a secondary world, yet also refuses to settle its anthropomorphic scheme once and for all. This instability is a unique resource of the fantastic mode: it allows this set of narratives to indicate that “[b]eyond the edge of the so-called human, beyond it but by no means on a single opposing side, rather than ‘The Animal’ or ‘Animal Life’ there is already a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living” (Derrida 31). The innocuous speaking critters of A.F. demonstrate that ‘the animal’ is a ‘heterogeneous multiplicity’ of this kind, one that refuses the neat separation of a purified animal category. As a result, the genre presents us with hybrid characters who never quite reach the ‘home’ to which they aspire.

Scales of Animality The very first sentence of Wind in the Willows already makes it difficult to answer our question whether we are dealing with animals in these texts. “The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home” (7). A description of this type gestures toward a scale from the literal to the figurative. Although we might initially picture an animal preparing its burrow, the addition of ‘spring’ points to cultural models of domesticity. This leaves us with two options: either we assume that the narrator is easing us into a metaphorical mode in which the animal’s activities are presented as if they were household tasks, thereby remaining on the level of narrative transmission. Or else—cued by the paratextual material and the accompanying illustrations— the reader begins the process of worldbuilding. This requires them to imaginatively relocate into a domestic scene in which the duties of a mole include dusting and polishing rather than digging. Thus suspended between metaphor and diegetic reality, this innocuous sentence blurs the boundaries between story and discourse. If the relationship between the human source and the animal target domain attains any degree of consistency, the description elicits worldbuilding; there is also, however, a lingering possibility that we are provided with a figurative illustration of what goes on in a mole burrow. As the mole hovers between “ladders and steps and chairs” (ibid.), on the one hand, and conventionally mole-like behavior, on the other hand (“working busily with his little paws,” 8), any hard-and-fast distinction between human and animal becomes tenuous. This confusion only intensifies in a later chapter in which Mole returns home after a lengthy visit to the riverbank. During this homecoming, Mole’s dwelling—initially a guarantor of human-like objects— exerts its ‘pull.’ The animal’s homing instinct is described in terms of a non-­ rational enchantment which is, nevertheless, firmly anchored to an explicitly animal sensorium: We others, who have long lost the more subtle of the physical senses, have not even proper terms to express an animal’s inter-communications with his surroundings, living or otherwise, and have only the word ‘smell,’ for instance, to include the whole range of delicate thrills which murmur in the nose of the ­animal

88 

C.-C. CASPER

night and day, summoning, warning, inciting, repelling. It was one of these mysterious fairy calls from out of the void that suddenly reached Mole in the darkness. (75)

Here it is the solid home, the space of all-too human middle-class ‘spring cleaning,’ that elicits a ‘fairy call.’ Enchanted domesticity offers a particularly unstable version of the celebration of the non-rational that is so characteristic of fantasy (Martin 22). For the reader, at least, it is difficult to contain the distinction between the magical/instinctive attraction of home and the mundane/logocentric world that ‘we others’ inhabit. After all, the narrative voice is at pains to specify that the animal perceives the world as a maelstrom of synaesthetic thrills “night and day”—and so, presumably, throughout the rest of the novel. Do ‘we others,’ then, generally lack the ability to comprehend the mole’s world? Is the implication that the entire narrative presentation of the novel supplants an originary animal experience with “proper terms” in order to render the animal experience palatable to the human reader? If we accept this replacement, the world of the animals loses its stability altogether: their speech and appearance, motivations and rationale become subject to an anthropomorphic suspicion. Specifically, whenever the novel emphasizes the gap separating ‘us’ from ‘an animal’s inter-communications,’ the narrative appears as an extended translation of a constitutively unspeakable nonhuman world. However far readers go down this route, speculation on the ‘real’ animal behind the anthropomorphic conceit opens up a rift between ‘proper terms’ and the improper animal Umwelt. Or rather, the very characteristics we may have initially assigned to the animal and the human, respectively, lose their differentiating power, giving rise instead to hybrid beings that are subject to disorienting shifts. These negotiations show that A.F. undermines the assumption that fantasy generally requires an “internally consistent secondary world” (Miéville, “Fantasy” n. pag.). After all, the interest in Mole’s mundane actions stems from precisely such oscillation between types of animal beings and the attendant shifts of the projected environment. The decision between competing options—human or mole—cannot be settled once and for all. Instead, the process of switching back-and-forth between these incompatible perspectives emerges as the determining feature of A.F. The hybrid figure of the Mole cannot be located on either side of the distinction, but emerges precisely once we switch from one version to the other. In each case, alternative readings have to be relegated to the outside: we can see the Mole as a human or as a subterranean mammal intermittently humanized by the narrator, but would be hard-put to maintain both versions at the same time. Whichever interpretative track is chosen, a surplus remains—a perennial potential for humanization or animalization. By enabling such a flexible constitution of the storyworld, A.F. elicits both practices designated by “the word ‘modern’” (Latour 10): “The first set of practices, by ‘translation,’ creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and

  HYBRID SECONDARY WORLDS: ANIMAL FANTASY 

89

culture. The second, by ‘purification,’ creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other” (ibid., 10–11). The reader may well feel compelled to perform acts of purification themselves in order to neatly distinguish human and nonhuman worlds—or at least to derive a secondary world which departs from the “actual world, center of our system of reality” (Ryan, Possible Worlds vii) in a predictable manner. However, such distinctions are subject to perpetual change. For all its fantastic deviation from a mundane world, the rule-governed ‘sub-­ creation’ (Tolkien 59) of A.F. remains striated by an unruly excess of conventionally ‘human’ or ‘animal’ traits. The proliferating hybrid figures of A.F. refuse narrative domestication. The alternation between purification and hybridity serves to subdivide the variants of Anthropomorphic Fantasy. According to John Grant, “[P]ure A.F. is a tale which features sentient animals who almost certainly talk to one another and to other animal species, though not to humans” (31). By contrast, the “beast fable features animal protagonists whose behavior and nature can be compared with that of humans” (96). In light of the superimposed worlds of Mole, however, we should consider multistable status of animals itself the defining characteristic of A.F. The genre hinges on the switch between generic expectations of ‘animal fantasy’ on the one hand and ‘beast fable’ (Grant 96) on the other hand. In setting up its unstable, half-built worlds, A.F. exploits the fact that “fictional worlds are incomplete” (Doležel 22). “Incompleteness is established by a relatively simple test: only some conceivable statements about fictional entities are decidable, while some are not” (ibid.). Eric Hayot describes this feature of literary worlds as the “‘price of apples’ problem: what is the price of apples in the London of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist?” (146). Analogously, we could describe the animal status in Willows as a ‘burrow problem’: does Mole inhabit a hole in the ground? There are works of in which such questions can be decided with a degree of certainty. Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge series features extensive illustrations specifying the layout of a mouse mansion carved into a tree. Richard Adams’ Watership Down (clearly ‘A.F.’ in John Grant’s terms cited above) remains quite close to actual-world knowledge of wild rabbits, locating its speaking, mythmaking, warring animals in recognizable environments. In Willows, however, the nature of the Mole’s home (and the ontological makeup of the storyworld containing it) remains uncertain. Or rather, we receive a superabundance of answers which cancel each other out. This hesitation is a crucial resource in A.F. Whereas other variants of fantasy flaunt the alleged depth of their worlds, the animal-centered subgenre tends to exploit the gaps and inconsistencies of its fictional realms. From one moment to the next, a hole in the ground can become the house of a clerk-like mole, only to switch back to a burrow merely described in human terms.

90 

C.-C. CASPER

Adjusting Animal Worlds A.F., then, requires constant adjustments of our model of the narrated world. Readers are called upon to renegotiate the question ‘what can an animal think, do, and say in this world?’ These shifts can be mapped with Marie-Laure Ryan’s principle of minimal departure, which states that “we project upon these worlds everything we know about reality, and we will make only the adjustments dictated by the text” (51). A shift in the distribution of human and nonhuman characteristics appears as a crucial prompt for such a departure from the actual-­ world model. Ryan, for one, demonstrates the principle with an example of children’s A.F. In her account, a reader encountering the sentence “Babar the King of the elephants went to a restaurant” in Jean de Brunhoff’s children’s series Babar draws the pragmatic inference that “‘Babar was hungry, and he went to the restaurant to eat.’ To come to this conclusion, we must assume that in the anthropomorphic world of Babar, where elephants have kings and are able to talk, they are attracted to restaurants for the same reasons that we are” (52). However, while these world-creating shifts on the part of the reader are plausible, the sense of a ‘we’—as a source domain for anthropomorphic target domains—is remarkably unstable in A.F.  Rather than a departure from an actual-world model to an adjusted model in which animals take on human traits, the genre requires different degrees of animal-specific adjustments. In Willows, for instance, readers have to implement ever more rapid adjustments of their anthropomorphic models in order to make sense of ‘Toad.’ At first, this hybrid character is introduced as an entity which the reader can safely construe along the lines of the other main characters. Like Badger, Rat, or Mole, his species name doubles as his proper name, making him ‘a toad’ as well as ‘Toad.’ He is another in a series of beings “identified as types of human males of a certain class and era” (Cosslett 175). For all of the minute shifts, readers do glean a formula for the distribution of human and nonhuman traits. However, once the erstwhile amphibian gets addicted to reckless driving, he morphs into new shapes. Not only does he drive cars with human occupants, undergoing a shift in size as a result. What is more, once he has run afoul of the law and ends up in a dungeon, he appears as a typical animal from the point of view of the jailer’s daughter, who pleads on his behalf: “She was particularly fond of animals, and, beside her canary, whose cage hung on a nail in the massive wall of the keep day by day […], she kept several piebald mice and a restless, revolving squirrel” (123). ‘Toad’ is stripped of his anthropomorphic traits in his iteration as a pet. For a brief instance, he is ‘a toad,’ an expendable captive being among others. Subsequently, readers have to update their inferences about the world yet again. After all, although the novel proceeds to restore a distinction between ordinary caged pets and the incarcerated anthropomorphic Toad, only the latter can be sprung from jail by dressing up as a washerwoman in a farcical escape sequence, with the flimsiest of disguises allowing Toad to pass as human. In another jarring shift, the operator of a barge that carries Toad to freedom ultimately throws him into the water with the following

  HYBRID SECONDARY WORLDS: ANIMAL FANTASY 

91

exclamation: “Well, I never! A horrid, nasty, crawly Toad! And in my nice clean barge, too! Now that is a thing I will not have” (167). As a result of this invective, the worldbuilding of A.F. appears to stall. Reduced to an animalistic kernel, the animal is dislodged from the dynamic enchantment of anthropomorphism. At this point, the narrative self-referentially entertains the possibility of its own end by uncovering a disenchanted mundane world beneath the anthropomorphic veneer. This threat of disenchantment always hovers over the animal worlds, reminding readers that its characters can be divested of their speech, clothes, and individuality at the drop of a hat. Moments of high tension, consequently, hinge on the very possibility of maintaining a fantastic secondary world at all. This threat is just barely kept at bay as Toad returns to the Riverbank. He escapes from disenchantment as much as the diegetic conundrum by reversing the removal of anthropomorphic potential and reinstating the flexible boundary work between the human and the beastly. As he becomes subject to shifting identifications, it is not only Toad who changes—the entire storyworld and the type of entities it allows for are turned on its axis. Notably, time and again, Toad ‘finds himself’ in situations he has not consciously planned. While he inspects a car, for instance, he loses control: “Next moment, hardly knowing how it came about, he found he had hold of the handle and was turning it. As the familiar sound broke forth, the old passion seized on Toad and completely mastered him, body and soul” (104). We can, firstly, read this passage in strictly anthropomorphic terms, with Toad standing in for a particular type of human individual. Proceeding from this initial humanization, we can scour his characterization for clues about how he came to be such an irresponsible ‘man.’ We can also, however, relocate a zoomorphic kernel in Toad’s uncontrolled behavior. According to Greg Garrard, zoomorphism involves a description of “humans in animal terms” (154), up to and including a “depressingly deterministic” (161) account in which animal drives take over and dictate behavior with little leeway for individual agency. The push and pull between zoo- and anthropomorphism does not end with the uncertain status of Toad as a ‘man,’ however. After all, we can also cast doubt on the very notion that the instinctual should be relegated to the animal in the first place; after all, as Richie Nimmo asks, “when we ‘introspect’ do we not face a complex maelstrom of fleeting sensations, fragmentary impressions, half-­ formed thoughts and contradictory emotions on which we impose meaning […]?” (24). From this angle, it is far from certain what, exactly, we are reading into animals when we render them human in the first place. Once we conceive of human characteristics as no less alien than animal natures, Toad’s desires can appear as a representation of human consciousness as much as a brief foray into animal cognition triggered by a distinctly human artifact. Anthropomorphism and zoomorphism, then, emerge as entangled strategies. Each category only ever establishes a fleeting form, relegating alternative distributions of humanity and animality to its outside—a reservoir of possible hybrid beings that lays the groundwork for future shifts.

92 

C.-C. CASPER

The speed of change associated with the amphibian protagonist fractures the storyworld into sub-worlds that require mutually incompatible pragmatic inferences. It also draws attention to the process of ascription that yields animal and human traits alike. When it comes to Toad, we encounter a flexible process of defining animality against humanity—and vice versa. In the process, the anthropomorphic animal as a character is replaced with a series of shifting hybrids, each of which requires a specific mode of “‘Seeing-as’ or aspect seeing” (Kellenberger 101): seeing the Toad as a toad and washerwoman, seeing the animal as human, seeing the human as animal. The reader has to decompose the storyworld of A.F. into ‘animal becomings’ (Deleuze/Guattari 14), the development of which forms a meta-plot that co-develops alongside the explicit narrative events. A.F. might seem like a counter-intuitive starting point for any attempt to go beyond “narrative’s tendency to foreground human protagonists, psychological causality, and human-scale temporality and spatiality” (Caracciolo 173). After all, at first glance Grahame’s house-dwelling, picnic-­ organizing, car-driving characters appear to be presented from such a staunchly anthropocentric perspective that a restrictive world begins to take shape: empathy is reserved for beings that resemble educated male humans, some superficial animal guises notwithstanding. However, the increasing speed of anthropomorphic shifts in Willows also leads us in the opposite direction: the characters in these stories are ‘polymorphous’ (cf. Schiesari), requiring ever-­ new distinctions not only between the human and the animal but also within each of these broad categories (cf. Borgards 2). As a result, anthropomorphism loses its presumption of stability—readers are made to feel progressively uncertain of what, precisely, these animals are supposed to look, feel, and be like.

Home of Tooth and Claw Amid its genre-defining anthropomorphic shifts, A.F. stages the desire to end the perpetual metamorphoses of hybrid beings. The concept of ‘home’ particularly comes with the promise of a respite from the unstable to the constant permutation of traits. Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way! Why, it must be quite close by him at that moment, his old home that he had hurriedly forsaken and never sought again, that day when he first found the river. (Wind in the Willows, 75)

For Mole, this emphatic sense of ‘home’ promises an end of instability. The ‘caressing appeal’ of a cherished place equals the promise of a return to nature, a sense of immediate belonging in a sphere no longer riven by the paradoxes of anthropomorphism. The home appears as a stable locale in which characters are exempt from adjustments of their worlds on the human-nonhuman continuum. Crucially, however, the quest for such a place is far more pronounced than

  HYBRID SECONDARY WORLDS: ANIMAL FANTASY 

93

the actual arrival. After all, intermittent stability of the human-animal shifts—a momentary anthropomorphic accord—can only be defined against its obverse. In other words, there is no home without a strange outside in which the hybrids face the prospect of being dismantled, or rather decomposed into their component parts. As twee and picturesque as talking animals can seem in the British strand of A.F., a sense of the potential withdrawal of human likeness remains an abiding possibility. As longs as its narratives orient themselves toward a sense of home, A.F. holds out the possibility that its hybrid figures might be stabilized. Notably, William Horwood’s Duncton Wood largely revolves around a community of moles rediscovering their own buried culture, writing, and religion. The novel establishes an initial baseline of anthropomorphic animals displaying, yet also commenting on and debating, actual-world mole behavior. They can only do so with members of their own species, so that, in John Grant’s terms, we appear to find ourselves in paradigmatic A.F.  This restrained anthropomorphism imbues fighting, mating, and burrow-building with intentionality while also emphasizing the ingrained, instinctual nature of parts of such knowledge. Gradually, however, the protagonists (literally) unearth a cultural archive, thus reviving the written traditions and religious beliefs of an idealized past. The narrative charts a shift from almost metaphorical anthropomorphism to a fully-­ fledged secondary world. If we take into account Mark Wolf’s contention that since “secondariness is a matter of degree, it may be more useful to arrange fictional worlds along a spectrum of attachment to, or reliance on, the Primary World (as we know it) and its defaults” (27), Duncton Woods progressively pivots toward a pole of increased ‘secondariness.’ How is this tilt toward fantastic worldbuilding accomplished? Initially, we might still assume that a human narrator is translating the mole-world into terms we can understand—that, in other words, the story is presented as if moles could speak, plan, or wax nostalgic. On this first reading, we are never entirely certain what the moles are like in the presumed storyworld: do they actually speak or are we to assume an interceding narrative voice transforming the nonhuman world into quasi-human form? The latter becomes especially likely whenever a mole encounters other animals: “He saw a lot of life—birds, a couple of voles, several squirrels, a possible fox—but no mole” (66). Whereas in Watership Down cross-species communication between hares, mice, and seagulls is possible, here the boundary remains absolute: ‘no mole’ also means ‘no interlocutor,’ nobody whose sensorium and communicative capabilities can be rendered as speech by the model of selective anthropomorphism. Such a lingering suspicion of a gap between the fictional world and its narrative mediation is reduced as characters recall a religious system centered around a holy Stone: “In the many moleyears since, he had only ever thought of the Stone as a distant thing, for the sense of grace that flowed into him then was overshadowed by the fighting and living, and the mating, that was the reality of Duncton in his time” (288). Here, the mole protagonist bemoans the disenchantment of nature. Alison Stone describes this phenomenon in the terms of Adorno and

94 

C.-C. CASPER

Horkheimer: “[W]e have come to see natural things as (1) lacking a meaning, a reference beyond themselves, which they were formerly seen to possess and (2) fully intelligible and predictable, not at all mysterious. To ‘re-enchant’ nature, conversely, would be to find in it a meaning that cannot be fully understood” (232). Duncton Wood traces a process of precisely such re-enchantment by staging a rediscovery of what is taken to be the true reality of the animal protagonists. We encounter a paradoxical effect of worldbuilding here: the more elaborate the secondary world, the less anthropomorphic do the moles appear. As they gain culture, religion, and competing ideologies—conventionally human characteristics—they are also associated with unfamiliar modes of expression that depart from any conventional ascriptions of a human ‘type.’ Instead of a mole-world exhausting itself in variations of ‘fighting and living and mating,’ the restoration of mole culture ensures that the animals are granted a genuine departure from human allegory—they enter a world of their own. The emerging secondary storyworld guarantees that the animals do not coincide with the narrator’s translation of their concerns into human terms. In other words, as anthropomorphism gains consistency, the ensuing “reality effect” (Barthes) makes the animals appear less (rather than more) human. The autonomous realm removes the moles from our “actual-world encyclopedia,” which “readers have to be ready to modify, supplement” (Doležel 181). As readers gain expertise about the elaborate mole culture, they are discouraged from mapping the fictional world onto the human world. Instead, they “background the knowledge of their domicile and become cognitive residents of the fictional world they visit through the act of reading” (ibid.). Readers do so at the same time as the animal characters vastly extend their sense of ‘what it is like’ to be a mole. The denizens of A.F. realms, then, perform a diegetic version of worldbuilding themselves; becoming a ‘cognitive resident’ is a strategy of immersion, yet also describes a parallel process of re-enchantment in the narrated world. Duncton Wood shows the potential of the A.F. world to become a fully-­ fledged secondary world, a process in the course of which the “protagonist goes from mundane life—in which the fantastic, if she is aware of it, is very distant and unknown (or at least unavailable to the protagonist)—into direct contact with the fantastic” (as Mendlesohn describes ‘portal-quest fantasy,’ xix–xx). As a result, the narrative can no longer be interpreted as a translation of actual-world ethology into a human-like story. Instead of encountering moles ‘as if’ they spoke, the novel dramatizes the rediscovery of an “invented world that the author has created, one that is fundamentally different from the primary world in some way” (Taylor 9). John Clute has identified an initial ‘sense of wrongness’ as a generic trait of fantasy. A.F. connects such ‘wrongness’ to any impoverished version of animal being that does not grant nonhumans a perspective, let alone a realm, of their own. Talking moles they may be, but the “small desiccating hint that the world has lost its wholeness” (Clute, n. pag.) doubles as a hint that the animals have lost their capacity to disengage themselves from the reductive account of animal behavior mediated by the

  HYBRID SECONDARY WORLDS: ANIMAL FANTASY 

95

narrator. If, as John Grant puts it, “animal fantasy has an inherent bent towards the real world” while beast fable “hovers at the threshold of full fantasy, and sometimes crosses over” (Grant 97), Duncton Wood shows the capacity of A.F. to move from the former to the latter: from the actual world to a markedly secondary one, from humanized animals to zoomorphic quasi-humans, and from an animal-specific lifeworld to the transmission of cultural memory. Brian Jacques’ Redwall series—epic fantasy with anthropomorphic animal protagonists—demonstrates this constitutive flux of the world of A.F. The first novel still features some scant allusions to human habitation, such as a horse and cart which seem to maintain an ‘actual-world’ scale relative to the talking animals. As these remnants of a world-for-humans are expunged, however, degrees of anthropomorphism vary within a secondary world. Slight variations of human likeness play out within the safety of an enchanted anthropomorphic accord. The main location of the narrative, Redwall Abbey, serves as a bounded space within which animal identities can be negotiated without endangering an established baseline of anthropomorphism. Within the abbey, instinctive knowledge serves as the equivalent to a ‘final motivation’ “which is present when the course of events in the narrative world is determined by a concept such as fate or providence” (Jannidis 43). Accordingly, as the protagonist assumes the narrative role of a hero of epic mouse history, intuitive certainty equals destiny: “Instinctively Matthias knew this was a good defense and a formidable deterrent” (48). The home allows for heroic traits to be transferred without thereby destabilizing the hybrid identity of the animals. When one mouse asks an elder where the latter’s knowledge comes from, the old mouse counters with a question of his own: “How do the bee folk know there is pollen in a flower?” (68). This is the anthropomorphic accord in a nutshell: the mouse can partake in the immediacy of animal knowledge without thereby relinquishing its human likeness. Fantasy is predisposed toward such shifts as the genre trope of the ‘chosen one’ is smoothly transformed into a natural state of affairs—an instinctive feature of the Umwelt in which the nonhumans are immersed. The semantic space of the home in which mice become figures of epic fantasy is encapsulated by a prayer of self-domestication declaimed before a communal feast: “Fur and whisker, tooth and claw/All who enter by our door/[…] Silver fish whose life we take/Only for a meal to make” (22). Just like the rediscovered cultural prehistory in Duncton Wood, the home and the beings it includes provide temporary stabilization of the constant anthropomorphic drift that characterizes A.F.

You Can’t Go Home Again The abbey in Redwall brings us to the flipside of the desire for an animal accord. We have seen that ‘home’ is associated with an interruption of the anthropomorphic instability that permanently re-organizes the degree of human characteristics ascribed to individual characters or entire species. On the level of the plot, however, this arrested animal development is hard-won: any

96 

C.-C. CASPER

determination of a peaceful home is wrested away from forces of destabilization. In Redwall, the animal protagonist can only ever determine a domestic haven against an unruly environment. Specifically, the abbey is attacked by dehumanized rats who, as opposed to the inclusion of any ‘tooth and claw’ in the abbey’s prayer, are decidedly ‘red in tooth and claw’ (Tennyson 996). These antagonists are not only a literal threat in the narrated world, but endanger the anthropomorphic stability of the animals’ home. Some animals, in other words, are more animal than others, and the desire to protect home and hearth against them doubles as a means of stabilizing the tenuous anthropomorphic accord. This dependence on a disavowed beastly Other shows that while the home guarantees a predictable distribution of traits, it is narratable only at the expense of introducing an ‘evil’ species. Creatures outside of the bounds of acceptable anthropomorphism come to be determined by the “dehumanizing animal imagery” that Young has identified as a central feature of fantasy’s construction of enemies (95). In A.F. this antagonism is a direct consequence of human/animal liminality. The genre requires an outside so that, conversely, negotiations of the status of hybrid beings can proceed on the inside of the home. Any anthropomorphic accord depends on a mass of beasts that is precluded from repositioning itself on a scale from abject animality to domestic hybridity. The differentiation between the creatures’ domestic identity and a threateningly multiform outside is particularly stark in the spatial structure of The Wind in the Willows. With elliptical reluctance, our protagonist, Rat, explains the dangers of the Wild Wood: “‘Well, of course—there—are others,’ explained the Rat in a hesitating sort of way. ‘Weasels—and stoats—and foxes—and so on. They’re all right in a way—I’m very good friends with them—pass the time of day when we meet, and all that—but they break out sometimes, there’s no denying it, and then—well, you can’t really trust them, and that’s the fact” (14). First off, an allegorical reading looms large here. The Wild Wood threatens the privileges granted by the riverbank, containing as it does all those excluded from its sphere of leisure. However, in addition to the class struggle, the entire scheme of anthropomorphism is endangered. Descriptions of animal dwellings as manor houses or poets’ cottages appear less stable when they are confronted with a restive surplus population on the cusp of ‘breaking out.’ The riverbank animals can indulge in a range of human-like activities on the condition that animality as such remains outside of its borders. Confronted with an underclass described in animalistic terms, the anthropomorphic accord is revealed as exclusive and tenuous. Its maintenance depends on an undifferentiated mass of beings out of bounds, classes of entities not granted the status of individuated characters. The revolutionary potential of this unequal distribution of anthropomorphic privileges is poignantly worked out by Jan Needle’s Wild Wood (1981), a critical rewriting of Wind in the Willows from the perspective of the very beings that Grahame’s world excludes. While the ferrets, stoats, and weasels in the original novel ‘break out’ for reasons that the riverbank animals are incapable

  HYBRID SECONDARY WORLDS: ANIMAL FANTASY 

97

of understanding, Needle empathetically describes destitute living conditions and competing revolutionary models that aim to improve the weasels’ lot. If, that is to say, their condition can be changed in the first place. For all their unsettling of the categories ‘human’ and ‘animal,’ after all, the hybrids of A.F. cannot but incarnate ideologies of the natural. Time and again, the genre returns to the notion that their animal nature consigns these characters to an unchangeable set of characteristics. The anthropomorphic accord of the Riverbank home tends to naturalize ‘animal’ traits. Once the hybrid characters have acquired a measure of stability (defined against the bestial, working-class outside), the natural world can be invoked to assign a sense of necessity to the precarious balance of the animal home. Throughout, The Wild Wood skewers such “naturalization of social differences and economic systems, the presentation of inequalities and hierarchies as natural orders” (Sturgeon 12). In Needle’s critical counter-narrative, the distinction between home and outside appears as an arrangement which, far from essentially true, redounds to the benefit of a class of anthropomorphic animals who claim exclusive access to human (and by extension humane) living conditions. The class-based critique of Needle’s critters indicts a system that assigns and withdraws animal traits. In Giorgio Agamben’s terms, ‘homo sapiens’ “is neither a clearly defined species nor a substance; it is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recognition of the human” (2003, 26). The Wild Wood explores the implications of this ‘machine,’ which allows for a limited recognition of humanity in the faces of charismatic main characters. This recognition as ‘human,’ however, comes with an ever-present threat of misrecognition, as a result of which humanity is withdrawn—and animality returns as bare life not subject to ethical concerns. As one would-be revolutionary puts it, “So we have a ferret, a weasel, and a stoat. But what do we call them? We call them Baxter, Radcliffe, Boddington” (pos. 443). There are, as another character adds, “so many of us, if you know what I mean. I mean, Mr. Toad, now. He hasn’t got a name, has he? Well, if he has I’ve never heard it. Just plain Mr. Toad” (pos. 443). Thus, while Toad, Rat, or Mole can stand in for a species and a class by sheer dint of their name, the Wild Wood populace can only do so as a collective. They are not, in other words, enabled to “include all Ratness, Moleness, and so forth, in their own singular selves, standing out from the more ordinary multitudes of other animals like Platonic forms” (Gaarden 43). Whichever individual characteristics they possess is extinguished by their classification as Wild Wood animals, as the ‘others’ haltingly sketched by Grahame’s Rat. Anthropomorphization, in this sense of a metonymical incarnation of a species, is an exclusive property. While Toad can be ‘more than an animal,’ the Wild Wood multitude, in Giorgio Agamben’s terms, “is precisely neither man nor beast,” dwelling “paradoxically within both while belonging to neither” (1998, 105). Needle’s novel recoups this as a revolutionary position, which, while co-­ opted and ultimately unsuccessful, at least allows for a distinct class identity to contest species essentialism.

98 

C.-C. CASPER

The rebellion in The Wild Wood negotiates the boundaries of the nonhuman life imagined by A.F. Needle’s novel exploits an unruly potential that is already part of the threatening outside in Grahame’s novel. In The Wind in the Willows, the anthropomorphic status of the Wild Wood set remains unsayable, a blank hidden in the ellipsis. When Mole ventures into the wood, semantic excess turns into horror: “Then the faces began. It was over his shoulder, and indistinctly, that he first thought he saw a face: a little evil wedge-shaped face, looking out at him from a hole. When he turned and confronted it, the thing had vanished” (43). Mole’s sojourn into the Wild Wood’s heart of darkness is a far cry from the description as a ‘friendly’ underclass by means of which Rat attempts to affix the weasels to the riverbank home. The unsettling point at which the faces ‘began’ appears as the zero degree of the very process of anthropomorphism underlying A.F. more generally; the staring faces are an “empty mediality” (Kornbluth 120) underlying the friendly animal faces we encounter in the privileged space of idyllic cohabitation. After all, we might say that the construction of faces always already ‘begins’ throughout the novel as the narrator seeks human likeness in animals and individual nonhuman animals are singled out for the human reader’s imaginary identification. Once the readerly strategy of ‘finding faces,’ however, is transferred into the storyworld, it no longer guarantees the stability of recognizably human-like expression. Instead, the visages threaten to expose their status as ‘things,’ utterly resistant to any recognition or mutuality. As Claire Parkinson describes such a sense of alienation: “[i]f the return of the gaze and the face are coextensive, what does it mean to almost have a face, and in what ways does this shape the dynamics of our encounters with other animals?” (46). Reminding us that our main characters, likewise, depend on the ascription of human features to be recognized as having a face, the gaze from the Wild Wood calls into question the barely consistent storyworld guaranteed by intermittent anthropomorphic accords. The enchanted home of the Riverbank may function by singling out compelling bearers of humanity, but the weasels indicate that this idyll, with all its associations of pantheistic unity and childhood innocence, is a manufactured zone of imaginative domestication. The Mole encounters a sphere in which horror of Nature expresses itself as failing anthropomorphism, as a “wedge-shaped” hitch in the production of animal likeness. What lurks at the borders of the home, then, is not only a diegetic threat in the form of a rebellious multitude (Wild Wood), a fascist overlord (Duncton), or a conquering rat (Redwall). Rather, outside of the sphere of sanctioned anthropomorphism, readers face the breakdown of hybrid characters around which A.F. revolves. At the boundaries of the fantastic space, we encounter the weird: “that which does not belong. The weird brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the ‘homely’ (even as its negation)” (Fisher 10–11). By including misrecognitions and dis-identifications, the genre shows that we can recreate nonhuman nature in our image—up to a point. Questioning both the reader’s imaginative relocation into the storyworld and the sense of ‘home’ achieved by the protagonist,

  HYBRID SECONDARY WORLDS: ANIMAL FANTASY 

99

this fantastic mode turns against its core conceit: that of an enchanted nature in which nonhuman animals share our concerns. Already destabilized by the unruly woodland faces, this enchanted sense of home, finally, reaches its limit in confrontation with the god Pan in Wind in the Willows. A hybrid being himself, this divine incarnation of nature cannot be reconciled with the ‘homely’ anthropomorphic figures with which we have become familiar. The elusive god elicits contradictory emotions in the Rat: “Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid” (116). The staccato speech recalls the previous description of the Wild Wood denizens: the anthropomorphic being encounters the boundary of what the character can understand and what A.F. can render in human-like terms. As China Miéville puts it, Pan’s irruption into the anthropomorphic accord presents “the picturesque with its viewpoint moved a hair to one side or the other so what the constructed view obscures is just visible again. The picturesque itself made abject” (“Skewing,” n. pag.). By presenting this outer limit of anthropomorphism, A.F. gestures beyond itself, to nonhuman beings outside of fantasies of human control. If the genre already destabilizes what it is like to be human or animal, Pan marks the spot where animals can no longer be subject to human priorities at all. At the margins of its homely territories, A.F. gestures to the limits of humanizing animals.

Conclusion “Humans are like ‘animals,’ but ‘animals’ are not ‘animals,’ as we are beginning to see” (Morton 41). Timothy Morton’s rejoinder also applies to the hybrid beings of A.F.: we cannot know what kind of entity these hybrids represent. I have shown that A.F. dislodges us from a straightforward distinction of the human and the animal. This variety of fantasy presents anthropomorphism as ever-renewed boundary work in which the separation of the human and the animal has to be redrawn time and again—and, on occasion, cannot be maintained at all. What results within the storyworld is an elegiac mode of fantasy in which the determination of a realm of enchantment—of Arcadian unity with the natural world—goes hand in hand with disenchantment. After all, the moment they begin to speak, the animals of A.F. double as a trace of a lost world not subject to human rationality. This constitutive loss connects A.F. with fantasy more generally: “By the time we reach them, those green fields are always in decline. The spell never lasts” (Grossman, n. pag.). A.F. indicates the tenuousness of any anthropomorphic accord temporarily fixing the relationship of human and nonhuman traits. Consequently, the genre revolves around the search for a way out: it expands the animal environment into a secondary world or indicates the weird nature outside of the strictures of anthropomorphism. These narratives contain shifts between human and animal traits—but only in the set-apart places deemed ‘home.’ Within such delineated animal domesticity, hybrid formations of the human and the animal can gain momentary consistency. Any such anthropomorphic accord, however, is only ever temporary. A.F. perpetually redefines the boundary of the human and the nonhuman— until the distinctions break down.

100 

C.-C. CASPER

Works Cited Adams, Richard. Watership Down. Puffin Books, 1974. Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford Univ. Press, 2004. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford Univ. Press, 2010. Attebery, Brian. Strategies of Fantasy. Indiana University Press, 1992. Barklem, Jill. The Complete Brambly Hedge. HarperCollins, 2011. Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect.” The Rustle of Language, University of California Press, 1989, pp. 141–49. Borgards, Roland. “Einleitung: Cultural Animal Studies.” Tiere: Kulturwissenschaftliches Handbuch, edited by Roland Borgards, J.B. Metzler, 2015, pp. 1–7. Caracciolo, Marco. “Notes for an Econarratological Theory of Character.” Frontiers of Narrative Studies, vol. 4, 2018, pp. 172–189. Clute, John. “Fantastika in the World Storm.” Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm, edited by John Clute, Beccon, 2011, pp. 19–31. Cosslett, Tess. Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914. Taylor and Francis, 2006. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 11. print. Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2005. Derrida, Jacques. Animal That Therefore I Am. Fordham University Press, 2008. Doležel, Lubomír. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998. Parallax Re-Visions of Culture and Society. Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater, 2016. Gaarden, Bonnie. “The Inner Family of the Wind in the Willows.” Children's Literature, vol. 22, no. 1, 1994, pp. 43–56. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. Routledge, 2010. Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. Penguin, 1994. Grant, John. “Animal Fantasy.” The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, edited by John Clute, Orbit, 1997, p. 31. Grossman, Lev. The Death of a Civil Servant. Believer Magazine. 1 Jan. 2010, believermag.com/the-death-of-a-civil-servant/. Accessed 7 Aug. 2022. Hayot, Eric. “On Literary Worlds.” Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 2, 2011, pp. 129–61. Herman, David. Narratology Beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life. Oxford University Press, 2018. Horwood, William. Duncton Wood. 2nd ed. Hamlyn, 1981. Jacques, Brian. Redwall. Red Fox, 2006. Tales of Redwall bk. 1. Jannidis, Fotis. “Narratology and the Narrative.” What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, edited by Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, Walter de Gruyter, 2008, pp. 35–55. Kellenberger, James. “’Seeing-as’ in Religion: Discovery and Community.” Religious Studies, vol. 38, 2002, pp. 101–08. Kornbluth, Anna. The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space. University of Chicago Press, 2019. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard Univ. Press, 1991. Martin, Philip. A Guide to Fantasy Literature: Thoughts on Stories of Wonder & Enchantment. Crickhollow, 2009. Mendlesohn, Farah. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Wesleyan University Press, 2008.

  HYBRID SECONDARY WORLDS: ANIMAL FANTASY 

101

Miéville, China. “Fantasy and Revolution: An Interview with China Miéville.” International Socialism Journal, vol. 88, 2000, pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/ isj88/newsinger.htm. Accessed 7 Aug. 2022. Miéville, China. Skewing the Picture. Rejectamentalist Manifesto. 7 Aug. 2021, chinamieville.net/post/173542023303/skewing-­the-­picture. Accessed 7 Aug. 2022. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Harvard Univ. Press, 2012. Needle, Jan. The Wild Wood. Golden Duck, 2014. Nikolajeva, Maria. “The Development of Children's Fantasy.” The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012, pp. 50–62. Nimmo, Richie. “From over the Horizon: Animal Alterity and Liminal Intimacy Beyond the Anthropomorphic Embrace.” Otherness: Essays and Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2016. Parkinson, Claire. Animals, Anthropomorphism and Mediated Encounters. Routledge, 2021. Probyn-Rapsey, Fiona, and Jay Johnston, editors. Animal Death. Sydney University Press, 2013. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Possible Worlds: Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Indiana Univ. Press, 1991. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Fact, Fiction, and Media.” Narrative Factuality, edited by Monika Fludernik and Marie-Laure Ryan, De Gruyter 2019, pp. 75–95. Schiesari, Juliana. Polymorphous Domesticities: Pets, Bodies, and Desire in Four Modern Writers. Univ. of California Press, 2012. Stone, Alison. “Adorno and the Disenchantment of Nature.” Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol. 32, no. 2, 2006, pp. 231–53. Taylor, Audrey Isabel. Patricia McKillip and the Art of Fantasy World-Building. McFarland, 2017. Tennyson, Alfred. “In Memoriam A. H. H.” The Norton Anthology of Poetry, edited by Margaret W. Ferguson et al., 5 ed., Norton, 2005, p. 996. Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy Stories.” Tolkien: On Fairy Stories, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson, HarperCollins, 2008, pp. 27–85. Willmott, Glenn. “The Animalized Character and Style.” Animal Comics: Multispecies Storyworlds in Graphic Narratives, edited by David Herman, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, pp. 53–76. Wolf, Mark J.P. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. Taylor and Francis, 2012. Young, Helen. Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2016.

“How Did you Go about Saving a City? She Googled it”: Urban Fantasy Cities as Communities of Citizens Aleksandra Łozińska

The fact that cities are of prominence as sites of diversity is a well-recognized one. Given their key importance for the phenomenon, it is understandable then that urban fantasy inevitably touches upon the complexity of the contemporary societal landscape. Scholars have discussed various ways in which it does so: Stefan Ekman describes its predilection towards representing various social groups, including those underprivileged (Ekman 2016); Kimberley McMahon-­ Coleman, Roslyn Weaver and Helen Young show a wide range of the ways in which fantastic beings are used to (more or less intentionally) code minorities, both in a manner critical towards the actual world’s biased views on them and the one perpetuating it (McMahon-Coleman and Weaver 2012; Young 2016b); and numerous other researchers studied gender dynamics within the trend (McLennon  2014; Deffenbacher  2014; Anyiwo & Hobson  2019). Those works show urban fantasy’s capability for engaging with topics concerning several axes of difference (class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality etc.). There is, however, also a less identified aspect of the portrayal of urban plurality within the

The article was written as part of the research project No. 2020/37/N/HS2/01961 financed by the National Science Centre, Poland. A. Łozińska (*) Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2_8

103

104 

A. ŁOZIŃSKA

mode—one that I aim to explore in this chapter.1 I argue that urban fantasy’s structural features encourage not only portrayals of the situations of separate social groups, but also a specific way of presenting urban communities as a whole: as political entities, shaped by many actors with various and often contradictory interests, among which the official governments are rather rarely the most powerful or (at least from the narrative point of view) relevant ones. Consequently, the cities are seen here as inherently heterogenous sites of conflict and negotiation: between the powers wanting to profit from them, their inhabitants (those groups  can, of course, overlap, and both are divided into multiple factions), but also aspects of metropolises themselves, since the latter are often given strong identities and various degrees of agency. Urban fantasy—a broad phenomenon existing in a recognizable form for, as most of the scholars agree (Ekman 2016, 453), over thirty years—is, of course, not a monolith. It has also understandably changed over time, and the importance of acknowledging that evolution while considering its particular aspects has been emphasized (McLennon  2014). Nevertheless, some major tropes regarding the construction of social and political spheres relevant for this chapter have been prominent in the sub-genre throughout its history in similar forms, and so I believe that a synchronic analysis should not be a misuse in this case. Likewise, the actual cities in relation to which I will be considering the fantastic ones are very diverse, but still neither individual differences between them, nor the way they changed since the establishment of their modern form are not as fundamental as to prevent establishing any common characteristic (especially given their globalized nature). I will further elaborate on those shared qualities below, but a short outline of the difference between cities of the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries and those from the previous eras can be offered by Ewa Rewers’ notion of defining the former as “post-polis”: transnational, with boundaries blurred in the broader metropolitan areas, posing difficulties with establishing who has the right to them (Rewers 2005, 5).2 Another common aspect of those, linked to Rewers’ concept, is being affected by issues such as “the crisis of participation, urban democracy and rights or the crisis of belongingness and cultural identification of their residents” (Nieszczerzewska & Skórzyńska 2020, VIII). Finally, Krzysztof Nawratek points out an ongoing crisis of the city as a political idea (Nawratek 2008, 26–35), which I perceive as particularly important for this analysis. I believe that the way urban fantasy protagonists relate to the places they inhabit as well as the portrayal of the latter’s social and political organization can be seen as a kind of response to those issues. I do not imply it to be a deliberate one: defining authors’ intentions is a fallacy, but it would be equally ill-­founded to assume that all of their reflections and objectives are alike (and, 1  For the discussion of urban fantasy as a mode see the terminology of John Clute (Clute & Langford 2012). 2  Understood as a combination of rights “to self-determination and an adequate standard of living” (Mathivet 2010, 23).

  “HOW DID YOU GO ABOUT SAVING A CITY? SHE GOOGLED IT”: URBAN FANTASY… 

105

additionally, fit my interpretation of their work). Instead, the fact that similar tropes are present in many texts created from different standpoints seems to all the more incline that the predilection towards portraying particular types of relationships with the city stems from urban fantasy’s very structure. There are two recurring tendencies that I believe can legitimize that claim, which I will therefore subsequently analyze: the organization of fantastic societies within the storyworlds and repeated motifs of crime solving and/or fighting for the fate of the metropolis. The first one is particularly important in the urban fantasies with settings closely modeled after the actual world’s cities (most often contemporary ones). That is because in the works where the storyworld is allotopian, the society is generally not divided by the knowledge about the fantastic or a lack of such.3 In the other type of urban fantasies, however, the storyworld is typically fragmented into more or less separate domains, only some of which are supernatural.4 Those can be hidden or, although less often, disclosed, if the fantastic society revealed itself to the general public. In both cases they are usually regulated by rules different from the outside world’s. This might be a consequence of the domain being located in “the city’s fantastic double” (Tiffin 2008, 34) accessible through some kind of portal, like Ekaterina Sedia’s city below Moscow (Sedia 2007), China Miéville’s UnLondon (Miéville 2007) or Aneta Jadowska’s Thorn, counterpart of Toruń (Jadowska  2012). But, even when “the topography of the actual city is largely preserved but it is overlaid with a secret world of magic and danger” (Gomel 2017, 73), the latter will still most often have its own rules and institutions. Fantastic domains might differ from the mundane ones in their very construction: the aliveness of certain elements (e.g. statues—Fletcher 2007), the functioning of space and time—possibility of entering different planes of existence (Griffin 2013b) or teleportation (Jacka 2012), materialization of alternative fates of the city (Lindholm 2002, 81) or its surplus time (Gaiman 2016, 254)—and many more. Such creations can be seen as mirroring contemporary metropolises’ complexity and fluidity (Gomel 2014, 175), whose consequence is the fact that, as Rewers claims, members of urban crowd seem to live in different universes (Rewers 2005, 6). Thus, Roger Luckhurst offers a pessimistic interpretation of urban fantasies (especially the ones using gothic tropes): “So etiolated is any idea of a metropolitan public sphere that we have turned instead to the private experiences of hidden routes, secret knowledges, flittering spectres, the ghosts of […] past” (Luckhurst 2002, 541). Yet, such diagnosis of post-polis’ divisiveness does not need to be final: I am inclined to agree with Nawratek, who states that it is not enough to conclude that residents live in 3  “Allotopian” here refers to the storyworld created as “a new reality, which is no more a Secondary World subsequent to a Primary One, but an otherworld even »more real than the real world«” (Maj 2016, 155). See also K.M. Maj’s chapter in this volume. 4  Domains being parts of the fictional world which “differ in terms of, for instance, contradictory value systems, knowledge, or natural or social laws” (Ekman 2013, 10).

106 

A. ŁOZIŃSKA

subjective cities—to cause positive change, one needs to ask what it is that is common to them (Nawratek 2008, 110). I believe urban fantasy to take, even if indirectly, a stand on that issue. To discuss that, however, it is first necessary to examine other aspects of cities’ creation within it. The second difference in how magical and mundane domains function is the rules that fantastic societies impose on themselves. It is common for them, regardless of whether they are hiding or not, to have their own internal hierarchies. Although urban fantasy is often (and not without a cause) perceived as a response to the medievalist part of the genre, still, as Helen Young notes, “the medieval haunts modernity in UF texts across the media spectrum” (Young 2016a, 1). One of its common forms is the feudal-like stratification of particular groups. Faery courts are present in urban fantasies from Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks (Bull, 2001)  and Charles de Lint’s Jack, the Giant Killer (de Lint, 1995b), through Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files and Michał Studniarek’s Herbata z kwiatem paproci [The Tea with a Fern Flower] (Studniarek 2004), to Holly Black’s Valiant (Black, 2006). Vampires form blood-tied families, often characterized by “a strong patriarchal organisation” (Piatti-Farnell 2014, 139), werewolves are divided into alphas and their subordinates, and all of them have not only their own customs, but also laws and ways of enforcing them; even when there is an official law division dedicated to the supernatural citizens, like the I.S. in Kim Harrison’s The Hollows (Harrison, 2008)  or BUR in Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate  (Carriger, 2010), the hierarchies still regulate their relations, and power struggles abound. Aristocracies of magic users (Raduchowska  2011) or genii locorum (Aaronovitch  2011), instances like Miéville’s eponymous King Rat (Miéville 2011a) or Kate Griffin’s Bag Lady and Beggar King (Griffin  2009), deities worshipped by obscure cults (Miéville  2011b; Griffin  2013a), and incarnations of mythical beings (Kisiel 2014) can exist and influence the city.5 Another variant of imagining fantastic societies as subordinate to their own sets of rules and hierarchies is portraying some cliques as operating similarly to criminal groups, or simply as them. Those might belong to the most significant forces in a given place: that happens e.g. with Harrison’s or Jadowska’s vampires and weres. Non-magical mobsters can also be important: an example is Dresden Files’ “Gentleman” Johnny Marcone, who is seen as a marshaling agent even by the police, preferring his influence over the “anarchy in the underworld” (Butcher 2000, 55). Finally, organizations associating or controlling magic users appear (Butcher 2000; Raduchowska 2012; Jacka 2012), adding to the list of more or less secret powers shaping sub-genre’s cities and fighting for dominion over them. Alongside all those many instances, however, rarely any official governments appear. Some of urban fantasy’s metropolises, like Miéville’s New Crobuzon (Miéville 2008b), have known, authoritarian rulers; Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork’s Patrician is a recurring character in 5  Although in the case of King Rat questioning of the very legitimacy of king’s power is one of the main points, in the end rats still form a separate society within London.

  “HOW DID YOU GO ABOUT SAVING A CITY? SHE GOOGLED IT”: URBAN FANTASY… 

107

the Discworld series, Parasol Protectorate’s heroine works directly for queen Victoria (however, Carriger’s werewolves “had always strived to keep pack protocol separate” from serving the crown [Carriger 2010, 212–213]), and The Hollow’s Trent Kalamack is a councilperson—although his real power comes more from his illegal activities. Those are, nevertheless, only exceptions; and, as already indicated in the last two examples, even when government representatives do appear, their power might be rivaled by other authorities—or quite openly portrayed as inadequate. In Esther Friesner’s New York by Knight city’s mayor is mentioned, but only to resign when faced with a dragon terrorizing the place, and a bigger role is played by the US president who tries to defeat the creature—however, unlike magic-associated protagonists, he fails miserably (Friesner 1987). In Paul Crilley’s Poison City politicians do appear, but are entirely corrupted, and the people must be protected not only independently, but despite them (Crilley 2016). Dzielnica Cudów [District of Wonders], part of Jadowska’s fantastic counterpart of Warsaw, has its Pillars—immortal residents essential for preserving the quarter’s existence—to whom belong the owners of a local brothel and cabaret, but not council members, police officers or judges (Jadowska 2016, 96). In Griffin’s Matthew Swift series eponymous character himself becomes the mayor (Griffin 2010), but a Midnight one—a superior of only the magical community of London. Swift is also extremely reluctant to take the position and later to follow the rules imposed on him (although he does fulfill his obligations). That attitude towards authorities is also quite popular in other urban fantasy texts: Butcher’s, Harrison’s, Jacka’s, Jadowska’s and Raduchowska’s protagonists enter various conflicts with the institutions they supposed to comply with and are often presented somehow as rogue professionals, which further distances them from the official powers. Thus, cities (and societies) in urban fantasy are largely shaped by governance (“a process increasingly dominated by other actors than the state and its institutions” [Peters & Pierre  2006, 209]), not governments—even when those can be present in the background (regardless of whether it is possible to reject such instances in the actual world—Nawratek  2008, 187–188; Peters Pierre 2006). A notable exception is the recurring presence of characters working with or for the police forces, part of a trope of “[t]he investigator, detective, monster-­ hunter or supernatural problem-solver” (Ekman 2016, 459) so widespread in urban fantasy, it belongs to the mode’s distinctive traits. Their involvement might take different forms: from the reluctance towards legal procedures (in the case of, i.e., Butcher’s Dresden or Laurell K.  Hamilton’s Anita Blake [Hamilton 2009]) to feeling comfortable within sanctioned structures and even aiming for broadening them (see Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant or Pratchett’s Vimes). Still, even when those detectives unquestionably belong to the governmental power structure (that is, when they are not private eyes, rebellious consultants etc.), they are not at the top of it and very rarely (I already listed the examples) take orders directly from those who are. They operate on a level of day-to-day crime solving, and when they take part in the

108 

A. ŁOZIŃSKA

broader struggles for the city’s fate, they do so against agents from the catalogue of unofficial forces listed above (for example, Grant works against The Faceless Man: a rogue magic practitioner and organized crime boss). Dominion over the place is thus decided through an ongoing fight, not elections allowing one instance to shape the metropolis. Such proliferation of independent groups of interests can reflect not only the actual world’s conflicts over the right to post-polis (Rewers 2005, 6)—especially given that private activity in the cities is not an exclusive domain of the latter (Body-Gendrot et al. 2016)—but also the fact that those ceased being unified, political entities. Urban studies’ scholars note how during the nineteenth century the municipal public sphere stopped to be a domain of politics (Sennett 1996, 538), and how the metropolises are no longer able to effectively govern themselves (Nawratek 2012, 13; Pobłocki 2013, 14). Significant roles in determining their fate belong now to outside agents (Nawratek 2008, 26; Harvey 2012, 15–16, 23–24), and money is the deciding factor not only on the power over them (Nawratek 2019, 18), but also on the accessibility of urban life for their inhabitants (Harvey 2012, 14). Nevertheless, in my opinion there is also another way urban fantasy relates to those issues. It not only represents them, but also offers visions (however not literal ones) of remedying them, that are based on finding the aforementioned common ground to the urban residents, which Nawratek points out as necessary to causing positive change. The first of those visions consists in emphasizing individual agency. As Kacper Pobłocki claims, in contemporary cities so many residents are deprived of any influence on the places they inhabit, that having some sort of duty towards them becomes a kind of privilege. This chance for influence, though, should not be separated from responsibility, as it is in the case of many powerful city agents today (Pobłocki 2013, 34). Such responsibility “so far is being put on us from the above”, “but is also a right” (Pobłocki 2013, 35). The roles of many urban fantasy protagonists can be seen precisely in that light. There are two very common types of story arcs in the mode, which can—and quite frequently do—intertwine: a fight for the city’s fate (necessity to “save” it from some danger) and solving crimes (that mostly occurs when protagonists are working as some sort of private or police detectives). The first one is partially an incarnation of the fight between good and evil popular in fantasy in general, although combined with the elements of manifold narrative conventions (McLennon 2014; Ekman 2016, 53; Hobson & Anyiwo 2019, 1). The stake, however, is disparate: the city replaces the whole world. It does happen that the danger can affect a broader area, that the protagonists travel to help somewhere else (Hamilton  2010; Aaronovitch  2015), are representing their city outside of it (Pratchett 2000), and even that they work to aid (or at least think they do) a different metropolis than the one they are in right now (Miéville 2008c). Still, in some of those cases the center of their efforts is also the city, and more popular yet is restricting what is at stake to it (with a variant of acknowledging events’ wider reach, but focusing only on the one place in the center of them [Miéville 2011b]). The characters themselves also often act

  “HOW DID YOU GO ABOUT SAVING A CITY? SHE GOOGLED IT”: URBAN FANTASY… 

109

as protectors of specifically the city (which here can be understood as a community residing in a given place, an independent entity, or anything in between) they live in, whether it is their official function or their personal sentiment. This might also apply to the scenarios where instead of an all-encompassing danger there is a less powerful villain committing the crimes under investigation in a particular place (as it mostly happens in the long-running detective series). Therefore, regardless of the scale of the events demanding their intervention, the protagonists are actively involved in and feeling responsible for more than just their own lives. They possess various degrees of agency over the city and are able to shape its fate according to what they perceive as a right, championing their own vision (although often shared with others) from among the many of how their communities should function. They are the privileged actors— and, as Pobłocki wants, they are also not free from responsibility. It is wort noting, however, that not everyone takes part in this kind of fight for the city “inscribed in the space” (Matysek-Imielińska 2018,  414). Most often at least some of the many actors involved in it are a mystery for the majority of the inhabitants (who do not know e.g. how much their city is dependent on goddess-like rivers [Aaronovitch 2011]), which also further stresses the elusiveness of powers shaping contemporary metropolises. Although the protagonists do have the agency, others still are excluded from the processes of self-governance. Consequently, while stressing the possibility of individual influence and, if not encouraging, then at least presenting involvement in community’s life and fighting for what one believes in as an important value, urban fantasy does not present ready visions of ideal cities where every inhabitant takes active part in making relevant decisions so much as of urbanity as an area of continuous struggle.6 There “fluid, dynamic, rhythmical and reflexive […] experiencing entails constant action and active critique” (Rewers 2005, 7), and effective participation requires either causing conflicts or acknowledging their inevitability in the public sphere and consciously navigating them (Miessen 2011; Nawratek 2008, 193; Nawratek 2012, 177; Sennett 1996, 25), consisting in “means of acting »without mandate«” (Miessen 2011,  236) and invitation, “forcing oneself into existing power relations” (Miessen 2011, 14) or „»plugging« into the […] structures of power, economy, culture” (Nawratek 2008, 94). Still, the genre tends to focus on those involved in the life of their communities. The responsibility inscribed in such involvement is also often strongly emphasized. In many urban fantasy texts the cost of helping others is significant: the heroes are routinely put in danger through their actions, often finding themselves on the verge of death; they lose their pre-fantastic lives (Gaiman 2016), friends (Miéville 2011a) or homes (de Lint 1995b); they are perpetually tired and have trouble finding time for their personal affairs 6  Even when Miéville creates such a community, it becomes an always possible, but not yet realized utopia (in the form of a train frozen in time, inspiring others, but not able to reach the oppressive New Crobuzon [Miéville 2008a]). Creating literal city-states, like Ankh-Morpork, also does not mean they are governed in an egalitarian way.

110 

A. ŁOZIŃSKA

(Hamilton 2009; Butcher 2000; Harrison 2008). Frequently they are at least initially pulled in the quest for city’s safety against or without their will (e.g. Bull  2001; de Lint 1995b; Raduchowska 2011; Griffin  2013b), if that duty falls on them by accident or if, like more traditional fantasy heroes (Wolf 2018), they are somehow predestined to the role of saviors. Still, they never reject fulfilling the obligation, and that responsibility can be voluntarily taken as well.7 Sometimes it is because the protagonists feel responsible for the threat to the city, like in Perdido Street Station, where Dan der Grimnebulin’s actions unintentionally led to the release of dangerous moths (although the main reasons for the whole situation were government’s illegal operations and civil servants’ corruption), in Steven R. Boyett’s Prodigy, the main hero of which must defeat a murderous entity created by his anger (Boyett 1996), or in Marta Kisiel’s Nomen omen, where one of the characters accidentally resurrects a serial killer. Finally, however, there are also those who act simply because they feel an obligation to do good (Pratchett  2001; de Lint  1995a; Butcher  2000; Miéville 2007; Aaronovitch 2011; Jadowska 2012).8 The rescuers most often either come from within the communities they help or become a part of them in the process. The colonial overtones not uncommon in other types of fantasy, where “the savior is often a newcomer or even a stranger to the place being saved (and many will often leave once their work is done)” (Wolf 2018, 51), can be present: a vivid example is de Lints’ Jack of Kinrowan, where the Seelie Court is incapable of overcoming their problems and only human Jacky can help them (de Lint 1995b), while fiana sidhe need a mortal to lead their ritual of rade (de Lint 1995a, 302).9 Still, even in those cases the outsiders do not leave (or at least not permanently) after accomplishing their mission. Gaiman’s Neverwhere’s Richard discovers the world of London Below just in time to help save it from a guardian turned oppressor, but eventually chooses to spend his life there. Un Lun Dun’s Deeba after protecting the eponymous city against dangerous Smog comes back to the London she arrived from, but, having made friends in the fantastic metropolis and become attached to it, intends to return from time to time. Herbata z kwiatem paproci’s protagonist is aware of the fact that after helping fantastic beings once (in the cyberpunk Warsaw) he will never permanently part ways with them; and heroines of Nomen Omen and Raduchowska’s Szamanka od umarlaków [Shaman of the dead] both move to Wrocław at the beginning of the plot but stay there, involved in city’s supernatural life. I would also argue that even in the works using the narrative construction of portal-quest fantasy as described by Farah Mendlesohn an imperialist component (“only the hero is capable of change; fantasyland is orientalized into the »unchanging past«” 7  Or those motives might occur combined: Felix Castor from Mike Carey’s series works as an exorcist because of his ability to see the dead, but he chooses to also help ghosts (Carey 2008). 8  Although those from the previous section do make a choice as well: they could reject remedying the consequences of their actions. 9  The reasons for which are not really laid out: “[…] a mortal leads us best? Don’t ask me why, but that’s the way it is” (de Lint 1995a, 313).

  “HOW DID YOU GO ABOUT SAVING A CITY? SHE GOOGLED IT”: URBAN FANTASY… 

111

[Mendlesohn 2008, 9]) does not necessarily need to be present, since urban fantasy has a tendency towards depicting supernatural societies as evolving (a motif of their adaptation to the modern times is popular) and cities as palimpsests constantly being overwritten—ergo, updated. Finally, the protagonists themselves are very often localized. One strategy of making them so is connecting the change they undergo to the places of action. Said change might manifest as personality development, e.g. when the quest of saving the city results in discovering one’s heroism and gaining confidence. In my opinion, however, the link to the place is most visible through bodily change. Examples include the radical transformation of King Rat’s hero, whose animal genes are activated by discovering the fantastic side of London, or Griffin’s Magicals Anonymous series, where the protagonist after gaining similar knowledge starts to be able to become invisible and walk through walls— although the motif is perhaps most expressive when the bodies of all the inhabitants are metaphorically subordinate to the creation of a specific metropolis (Gomel  2017). Moreover, urban fantasy has the capacity to take giving agency to the locality even further, through empowering the cities themselves. As Nawratek states, part of the crisis of a city as a political idea is the fact that it can function as an area of political processes, but not their participant (Nawratek 2008, 26). In urban fantasy, however, cities often become characters on their own (Hobson & Anyiwo 2019, 1) and active forces, whether as a unified entity (like Crilley’s Durban, having a personified soul) or by anthropomorphizing of some of their aspects, examples of which I mentioned earlier. This kind of empowerment leads in turn to the next characteristic aspect of urban fantasy’s metropolises’ creation: their strong identities. Another dimension of localizing the characters is presenting them as typical members of a particular community, which is relevant not so much for stressing the particularity of a given place as for the general message about who has the power to alter the world around them. Urban fantasy protagonists are quite often shown as embodiments of the figures of mediocrity, recruited from ordinary residents. That challenges the idea that only the few are responsible for and able to alter the fate of the place they live in—and, like the motif of bodily connection, reinforces the notion that change in fantastic cities comes from within. Urban fantasy often conveys the message that one does not need to be “special” in terms of social position, power, resources etc. to have an impact on the society they are—or become—a part of. De Lint’s Jacky is able to help Seelie Court because she is human, but not a particularly gifted one: she leads an ordinary life she is not really satisfied with. Gaiman’s Richard is an average office worker being stifled by his fiancée; Magical Anonymous’ Sharon sees her life as a failure, and one of her major occupations is reading self-help books, and Un Lun Dun’s Deeba is specifically constructed as “the Unchosen One” in a plot meant to challenge the trope of a prophesied savior. It is not an absolute rule, but even when genre’s protagonists do have some special powers (for example, Sharon learns she is a shaman), those tend to at least be combined with some degree of mediocrity in their lives, keeping them close to an average

112 

A. ŁOZIŃSKA

person. What seems to be crucial to their fitting rescuer roles is the very fact that they are willing to enter them, taking responsibility for their communities and connecting with others within them (similarly, genre’s detectives are not anointed into their professions—they just choose them). Moreover, majority of protagonist’s efforts results in success—although that applies to the immediate issues of fantastic dangers or particular crimes, not necessarily broader structural problems that are being mentioned, but I will return to that topic later on—and in some works, especially the stand-alone ones, after all the hardships endured their own life turns out to be better because of the involvement in the common cause (Bull  2001; de Lint  1995b; Pratchett  2001; Gaiman  2016; Miéville 2007; Kisiel 2014). There is, however, also a darker model of involvement in urban fantasy, present in the works in which the heroes are active in relation to the space they inhabit not because they choose so, but because they are forced to. I am referring here particularly to a strong motif of supernatural beings’ territoriality. Vampires and werewolves in the sub-genre very often divide the land among their clans, ruling it with their own authorities independent from the official ones (even in the storyworlds where their existence is undisclosed and they are subject to the common law). As a result, members of a family or a pack cannot freely travel to the territories not belonging to them and have to ask respectively a master of a city (or their analogue, since the terminology differs) or a local alpha for a permission to do so, and if they do not, they might run into trouble. Similar rules can also apply to other beings: in The Hollows pixie and fairy families possess gardens, which they guard from other members of those races, and if they want to enter strangers’ territory, they need to wear customary signs of not having hostile intentions; and in Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant series it is problematic for anthropomorphized rivers to come into another river’s region. Those relations indicate the need for constant vigilance (occasionally not dependent on the territory: Hamilton’s Anita Blake or Jadowska’s Nikita [Jadowska 2016] are habitually armed, always fearing for their safety), literal fight for one’s space and guarding it against intruders. Metropolis then becomes a kind of wilderness—as well as, e.g., in the anarchic Bordertown divided into gang territories (Windling & Arnold 1996)—regulated by the survival of the fittest rule (Harrison directly points into that direction with The Hollows titles, transfiguring those from the Western genre [McLennon 2014]). A fight over the right to the place becomes then a necessity—but it is nevertheless present. Nawratek writes about the two sides of involvement with one’s city: “a local, egoistic interest in defending a certain territory” (Nawratek 2012, 21) and an “intimate tenderness people build between themselves and a place” (Nawratek 2012, 21–22), which can be an extension of the former. The motifs in urban fantasy I described can, I argue, be seen as an illustration of those two attitudes, expressing sentiments from the possessiveness towards the place to the readiness to defend it for the sake of not only oneself, but other residents as well. Those do not have to be mutually exclusive: the fact that in the

  “HOW DID YOU GO ABOUT SAVING A CITY? SHE GOOGLED IT”: URBAN FANTASY… 

113

storyworlds of Dresden Files or Anita Blake series there are groups of interest fighting over the land they perceive as their subject coexists with the protagonists not having such ambitions, but instead deeply caring for the safety of their fellow citizens. Such models of intense involvement result in creating characters who are, indeed—as some urban theorists postulate in the actual world— connected to their cities not just as consumers, but with their whole lives (Nawratek  2008,  198–199), engaged in collaboration for reasons different than the private gain (Miessen 2011,  99–100), often undertaking “socially useful work performed outside the market economy and the logic of profit” (Matysek-Imielińska 2018, 249). Said work might be done individually (especially when it consists of solving crimes) or require cooperation of many community members (Miéville 2007; Sedia  2007; Miéville  2011b; Griffin  2013b)—and the second option is close to the teamwork seen as a basis of an active, empowered city (Matysek-Imielińska 2018, 76). At the same time, however, as I mentioned earlier the area of protagonists’ activity is often shifted from the problems touching actual world’s cities towards the fantastic sphere. The former can be present in the storyworlds: besides the issues already listed, like corporate power over metropolises and economic and social exclusion, urban fantasy touches upon gentrification (Studniarek 2004) or the flaws of the municipal architecture (Aaronovitch 2014). But, while those are criticized, there are virtually no propositions on how to solve them (except, of course, what one can deduce: that if available flats are described as to small, they need to be built more spacious, if people in the crisis of homelessness are left on their own, they should somehow be helped, etc.). An exception is crime, generally punished by the end of each book in the series (besides the doings of organized crime bosses playing broader roles in the storyworlds, like I described above). The threats present in the narrative model of protecting the city from an all-encompassing danger tend, nevertheless, to be of imaginative nature. Illustrative here is a fragment from Griffin’s Stray Souls: How did you go about saving a city? She googled it. It seemed as good a place to start as any. Recycle more, build less, bicycle more, drive less, build skyscrapers, build terraces, preserve historical housing, demolish unused stock, more parks, fewer car parks, more car parks, fewer bins—the answers seemed numerous and diverse, and not one of them seemed to deal with what she had in mind. (Griffin 2013b, 111)

There are few aspects here requiring a commentary. The googling as a beginning of fulfilling a city-saving mission is both a sign of a (humorous) translation of quest motif into contemporary times and of heroine’s status as an ordinary citizen: she does not have any experience in this kind of work, nor is she especially equipped for it (at least not at this point)—still, she does not shun from the responsibility it entails. While praising such attitude, Griffin

114 

A. ŁOZIŃSKA

intentionally listing so many ideas on helping actual cities seems to be aware the “saving” she describes—defeating a wendigo—is not an answer to their problems. However, said wendigo also operates as an embodiment of corporate greed, literally stealing crucial city instances from the rest of the inhabitants, and his prosperity is linked specifically to the lack of personal responsibility of his subordinates (Griffin 2013b,  310). The conclusions from that thread can, I think, apply to many other urban fantasy works as well. On one hand, the phenomenon offers an imaginative tale about a—in spite of all—simpler way of remedying cities’ problems than the multiple and not necessarily convergent real-life ideas.10 Such a fantasy also harmonizes with the lack of governments in the storyworlds—they are one of the factors that do not need to be considered when a supernatural threat becomes the metropolis’ main problem. It is not to say that I believe urban fantasy should be proposing solutions to the issues which, as I have repeatedly stressed, are very complicated (and do not need to be a primary concern of writers)—rather, I am trying to assess which actions do and which do not lay in its nature. I already described some of the former—and a particularly important one among them (that I already mentioned) is, I think, giving the textual cities strong and distinct identities. The lack of such (not to be mistaken with artificial branding used as means of commodifying them  [Matysek-Imielińska 2018, 11]) is a part of the actual cities’ crisis diagnosed by the theoreticians. At the same time, cities as areas more confined than, e.g., states can potentially become collective entities more easily (Nawratek 2008, 197), and some inhabitants of the biggest metropolises already feel more like the citizens of them than of the countries they lie in (Rewers 2005,  15). Presenting cities as the main stake in urban fantasy can then be seen partially as a consequence of the second phenomenon, and partially as making use of the first one—for example, in order to make the area one can take responsibility for concrete, and therefore less overwhelming and daunting than the whole global world. A common identity for all residents of such (typically) diverse places might also help to bridge social divisions between them, which e.g. Kisiel uses in practice, making her long-lived characters value common identity of Breslau’s (German name of currently Polish Wrocław) inhabitants over nationalistic divisions. Finally, such strong identification can work as a way of remedying urban identities’ crisis mentioned before—and here, I believe, urban fantasy does have a potential agency. I am inclined to agree with Nawratek’s statement that a change in the city’s symbolic space is a key element of re-rooting the residents in it (Nawratek 2008, 115). Through creating narratives “about a real city” (Clute & Langford  2012), (not always, but often) drawing from its history and topography and writing about the tensions that shape it, but also showing the imaginative potential laying in it, urban fantasy offers its audience a chance 10  Which are, additionally, marked with a history of past reformative projects which left the cities still in need of renewal (Rewers 2005, 269–271; Matysek-Imielińska 2018, 45).

  “HOW DID YOU GO ABOUT SAVING A CITY? SHE GOOGLED IT”: URBAN FANTASY… 

115

for such a change. Of course, not all of its works refer directly to actual places, but even the allotopian ones tend to portray protagonists whose fate is intertwined with that of their cities (somehow like in the pre-modern optics [Sennett 1996, 575]), deeply engaged in their functioning end emotionally connected to them. The latter seems to be an attitude most valued by the mode, which’s very structure—presenting characters with tasks requiring involvement in local life, emphasizing the role of various bottom-up agents over official governments—tends to work towards facilitating it. Urban fantasy’s metropolises are complex entities and subjects of constant conflict between various groups of interest, and ideas of helping them become better places to live are often fantastical—but nevertheless a notion of reclaiming them for the inhabitants seems to underline their creations.

Works Cited Aaronovitch, Ben. Rivers of London. Gollancz, 2011. Aaronovitch, Ben. Broken Homes. Gollancz, 2014. Aaronovitch, Ben. Foxglove Summer. Gollancz, 2015. Anyiwo U.  Melissa, and Amanda Jo Hobson, editors. Gender Warriors. Reading Contemporary Urban Fantasy, Brill, 2019. Black, Holly. Valiant. A Modern Tale of Faerie. Simon & Schuster, 2006. Body-Gendrot, Sophie, Jacques Carré and Romain Garbaye. “Introduction”. A City of One’s Own: Blurring the Boundaries Between Private and Public, edited by Sophie Body-Gendrot, Jacques Carré and Romain Garbaye, Routledge, 2016, pp. 1–12. Boyett Steven R. “Prodigy”. Bordertown, edited by Terri Windling and Mark Alan, TOR, 1996. Bull, Emma. War for the Oaks. TOR, 2001. Butcher, Jim. Storm Front. Roc Books, 2000. Carey, Mike. The Devil You Know. Grand Central Publishing, 2008. Carriger, Gail. Blameless. Orbit, 2010. Clute, John, David Langford. “Urban Fantasy”. Encyclopedia of Fantasy, edited by John Clute and John Grant, 2012 http://sf-­encyclopedia.uk/fe.php?nm=urban_fantasy. Accessed 20 Jan. 2022. Crilley, Paul. Poison City. Hachette UK, 2016. Deffenbacher, Kristina. “Rape Myths’ Twilight and Women’s Paranormal Revenge in Romantic and Urban Fantasy Fiction”. The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 47, no. 5, 2014, pp. 923–936. de Lint, Charles. “Drink Down the Moon”. ———, Jack of Kinrowan. TOR, 1995a. de Lint, Charles. “Jack, the Giant Killer”. ———, Jack of Kinrowan. TOR, 1995b. Ekman, Stefan. Here Be Dragons. Exploring Fantasy Maps and Settings. Wesleyan University Press, 2013. Ekman, Stefan. “Urban Fantasy: A Literature of the Unseen”. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 97, no. 3, 2016, pp. 452–469. Fletcher, Charlie. Stoneheart. Little, Brown and Company, 2007. Friesner, Esther New York by Knight. Headline, 1987. Gaiman, Neil. Neverwhere. William Morrow, 2016.

116 

A. ŁOZIŃSKA

Gomel, Elana. Narrative Space and Time. Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014. Gomel, Elana. “Cannibal Cities: Monstrous Urban Bodies in Contemporary Fantasy”. REDISCO—Revista Eletrônica de Estudos Do Discurso e Do Corpo, vol. 11, no. 1, 2017, pp.  62–77. https://doi.org/10.22481/redisco.v11i1.2475. Accessed 20 Jan. 2022. Griffin, Kate. A Madness of Angels. Orbit, 2009. Griffin, Kate. The Midnight Mayor. Orbit, 2010. Griffin, Kate. Glass God. Orbit, 2013a. Griffin, Kate. Stray Souls. Orbit, 2013b. Hamilton, Laurell K. Guilty Pleasures. Headline, 2009. Hamilton, Laurell K. Bloody Bones. Hachette UK, 2010. Harrison, Kim. Dead Witch Walking. Eos, 2008. Harvey, David. Rebel Cities. From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. Verso, 2012. Hobson, Amanda Jo, U.  Melissa Anyiwo. “Introduction. What Is Urban Fantasy?”. Gender Warriors. Reading Contemporary Urban Fantasy, edited by U.  Melissa Anyiwo and Amanda Jo Hobson, Brill, 2019. Jacka, Benedict. Fated. Orbit, 2012. Jadowska, Aneta. Złodziej dusz. Fabryka Słów, 2012. Jadowska, Aneta. Dziewczyna z Dzielnicy Cudów. SQN, 2016. Kisiel, Marta. Nomen omen. Uroboros, 2014. Lindholm M. Wizard of the Pigeons. Voyager, 2002. Luckhurst, Roger. “The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the “Spectral Turn””. Textual Practice, 2002, vol. 16, no. 3, pp.  527–46, https://doi. org/10.1080/09502360210163336. Accessed 20 Jan. 2022. Maj, Krzysztof M. “From Two-Worldliness to Allotopia: Towards Philosophico-Literary Approach to World-Building Narratives”. Dialectics of Space and Place across Virtual and Corporeal Topographies, edited by June Jordaan, Carl Haddrell and Christine Alegria, Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2016, pp. 151–164. Mathivet, Charlotte. “The Right to the City: Keys to Understanding the Proposal for “Another City Is Possible””. Cities for All. Proposals and Experiences towards the Right to the City, edited by Ana Sugranyes and Charlotte Mathivet., Habitat International Coalition, 2010. Matysek-Imielińska, Magdalena. Miasto w działaniu. Warszawska Spółdzielnia Mieszkaniowa  - dobro wspólne w epoce nowoczesnej. Fundacja Nowej Kultury Bęc Zmiana, 2018. McLennon, Leigh. “Defining Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance: Crossing Boundaries of Genre, Media, Self and Other in New Supernatural Worlds”. Refractory. A Journal of Entertainment Media, 2014, https://web.archive.org/ web/20200229161804/http://refractory.unimelb.edu.au/2014/06/26/uf-­ mclennon/. Accessed 20 Jan. 2022. McMahon-Coleman, Kimberly and Roslyn Weaver. Werewolves and Other Shapeshifters in Popular Culture: A Thematic Analysis of Recent Depictions. McFarland & Company, 2012. Mendlesohn, Farah. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Miessen, Markus. The Nightmare of Participation. Sternberg Press, 2011. Miéville, China. Un Lun Dun. Ballantine Books, 2007. Miéville, China. Iron Council. Pan Books, 2008a.

  “HOW DID YOU GO ABOUT SAVING A CITY? SHE GOOGLED IT”: URBAN FANTASY… 

117

Miéville, China. Perdido Street Station. Pan Books, 2008b. Miéville, China. The Scar. Pan Books, 2008c. Miéville, China. King Rat. Pan Books, 2011a. Miéville, China. Kraken, 2011b. Nawratek, Krzysztof. Miasto jako idea polityczna. Korporacja Ha!art, 2008. Nawratek, Krzysztof. Holes in the Whole. Introduction to the Urban Revolutions. Zero Books, 2012. Nawratek, Krzysztof. Total Urban Mobilisation: Ernst Jünger and the Post-Capitalist City. Palgrave Pivot, 2019. Nieszczerzewska, Małgorzata and Agata Skórzyńska. „Co po kryzysach? Kulturowe artykulacje przyszłości miast”. Przegla ̨d Kulturoznawczy, vol. 4, no. 46, 2020, pp. VII–IX, https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.20.031.12835. Accessed 20 Jan. 2022. Peters, B. Guy and Jon Pierre. “Governance, Government and the State”. The State. Theories and Issues, edited by Colin Hay, Michael Lister and David Marsh, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 209–222. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. The Vampire in Contemporary Popular Literature, Routledge, 2014. Pobłocki, Kacper. „Prawo do odpowiedzialności”. Marcue Miessen, Koszmar partycypacji. Translated by Michał Choptiany, Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2013. Pratchett, Terry. The Fifth Elephant. Harper, 2000. Pratchett, Terry. Guards! Guards!. HarperTorch, 2001. Raduchowska, Martyna. Szamanka od umarlaków. Fabryka Słów, 2011. Rewers, Ewa. Post-polis. Wstęp do filozofii ponowoczesnego miasta, Universitas, 2005. Sedia, Ekaterina. The Secret History of Moscow. Prime, 2007. Sennett, Richard. Flesh and Stone. The Body and the City in Western Civilization. W. W. Norton & Company, 1996. Studniarek, Michał. Herbata z kwiatem paproci. Runa, 2004. Tiffin, Jessica. “Outside/Inside Fantastic London”. English Academy Review vol. 25, no. 2, 2008, pp. 32–41, https://doi.org/10.1080/10131750802348384. Windling, Terri and Mark Allan Arnold, editors. Bordertown, TOR, 1996. Wolf, Mark J. P. “Saviors”. The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, Routledge, 2018, pp. 51–55. Young, Helen. “Medievalism in Urban Fantasy”. 2016a, https://Www.Academia. Edu/35306370/Medievalism_in_Urban_Fantasy. Accessed 20 Jan. 2022. Young, Helen. “Relocating Roots: Urban Fantasy”. ———, Race and Popular Fantasy Literature. Habits of Whiteness. Routledge, 2016b, pp. 140–166.

Punk Subculture in Urban Fantasy: Life on the Border Dean-Liathine McDonald

And see ye not that bonny road, That winds about the fernie brae? That is the road to fair Elfland, Where you and I this night must gae.

The sight of that bonny road to Elfland described by the Queen of Faerie in this traditional ballad was enough to entice True Thomas away from his home on the Scottish border and into Faerie. Although we cannot be sure of what this thirteenth-century prophet may have expected to see there,1 it was undoubtedly not the wave of mohawk-touting punks that would eventually follow in his footsteps. This punk movement roared onto the international scene toward the end of the 1970s, led by pioneering musicians like the Sex Pistols, and tore open a cultural space for social misfits within cities worldwide. The liminal space they occupied simultaneously refused and belonged to the mainstream, growing into a musical subculture that would change the face of the West, through artistic expression and new technologies that gave creative control back to the individual. A group of North American writers at the time, many of whom were guided by editor and writer Terri Windling, would quickly hone in on this new cultural space, finding the inspiration that helped to 1  According to Briggs (1976), Thomas of Ercildoune, the bard and prophet, lived in Scotland in the late Middle Ages (394).

D.-L. McDonald (*) REMELICE Laboratory, University of Orléans, Orleans, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2_9

119

120 

D.-L. MCDONALD

popularize the genre now commonly referred to as “Urban Fantasy” (UF).2 Arguably the paragon of liminality in contemporary fiction, like punk, it straddles a cultural line, a place that is always between, one part within, one part without, mixing magic, myth, and music with the modern metropolis. The genre is perhaps currently best known for fringe protagonists, such as wizard investigators and tough-as-nails, monster-slaying heroines. Yet, in the 1980s, the quasi-­ubiquitous punk and post-punk presence allowed early UF to find such fringe characters in the real world by focusing instead on a different Other: the creative, the musician, the artist. UF is a difficult topic to study. Liquid in form, it resists categorization within a single parent genre. This aspect caused much of its initial academic attention to focus on either issues of naming or attempts to define taxonomic and generic boundaries that by its very nature it refuses to respect. Instead, its genre-­ splicing and genre-hybridizing qualities allow UF to mold itself to each new story, pulling from other popular genres as is necessary, be they romance, detective fiction, horror, and so on. This idiosyncratic complexity has been described by both McLennon (2014) and Ekman (2016) as a marker of the genre, thus avoiding the potential confusion of “generic tunnel-vision,” while highlighting the transversal, even transmediatic,3 quality of UF. A comprehensive definition, however, remains elusive. To illustrate this, Irvine (2012) argues that the term “Urban Fantasy” is “now diffused in a fog of contradiction […] and marketing noise” (200); Clute and Langford (1997) added an addendum to the online version of their original definition, superseded as it was by common use; even McLennon (2014) places UF on a “genre spectrum” with paranormal romance. Still, as Ekman (2016) shows in his aggregate analysis of UF studies, when it comes to the nebulous genre, scholars do agree on one thing: magic exists.4 It permeates the fabric of the city,5 accessible to those urbanites in the know, who often find themselves on the fringe as a result. In recent years, the “definition wars and boundary disputes” that Attebery (1991, 11) famously describes appear to have taken a secondary role as scholars accept the above ideas and bow to popular consensus on naming,6 thereby allowing analysis to shift from taxonomy to interpretation. So, why bring magic to the city? Before considering this, it is necessary to understand the city in question. Stories featuring magic in a contemporary setting have been part of human 2  For a detailed explanation as to the use of the word “genre” and not “subgenre” when referring to UF, see Ekman (2016). 3  In McLennon’s (2014) article “Defining Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance,” she convincingly argues that UF is at least partially defined by its refusal to be contained by a given medium, flowing from the printed page (though this is not always the initial medium) into televised series, film, web content, and so on, all of which provide multiple paths of entry into the UF world/text. 4  That is to say magic, the supernatural, mythic creatures, and so on. 5  As well as settings in which the somewhat inescapable influence of the city plays an important role. 6  Other worthy contenders being Attebery’s (1991, 129) “Indigenous Fantasy” and de Lint and Windling’s “Mythic Fiction,” to name but a few.

  PUNK SUBCULTURE IN URBAN FANTASY: LIFE ON THE BORDER 

121

culture since Mesopotamian myth met with clay tablet. Indeed, to paraphrase Irvine (2012), were a city with magical elements the only criteria necessary to qualify a text as UF, then the Epic of Gilgamesh could be shelved alongside works by such writers as Charles de Lint or Jim Butcher (202). Most studies, however, place the beginnings of UF somewhere in the twentieth century, though general consensus specifies the mid to late 1980s (Ekman 2016, 453). Although, there are probably earlier examples, Ekman suggests Fritz Leiber’s (1941) short story “Smoke Ghost” as “a perfectly valid candidate for a progenitor of [UF]” (454). Thorne Smith’s (1931) The Night Life of the Gods could also fit that description. Whatever the earliest example may be, the genre itself rose to popularity in the 1980s with the help of Charles de Lint, Emma Bull, and perhaps most instrumentally, Terri Windling. Their fictional representations of contemporary culture, of course, brings our focus to a very particular notion of “city” as setting: that of North America in the 1980s.7 More specifically, these writers drew their inspiration not only from the mainstream cultural quotidian, but also from its raucous, musical subculture. Charles de Lint may have started the trend with his 1984 novel Moonheart, but it was his then-editor Terri Windling who nurtured it. In her blog Myth & Moor, Windling (2012) describes how both writers shared similar backgrounds, de Lint ran away from home at a young age and experienced some of the darker elements of the Canadian city streets—and its subculture—until music, fiction, and his soon-to-be wife helped him better navigate his life. Nevertheless, this period would serve as a fundamental source of inspiration in his writing: “he is particularly interested in the role of the Outsider: figures that dwell in the shadows of the city and at the margins of our culture: street kids, artists, gypsies, travelers, tricksters, con men, shape-shifters” (Windling 2012). Likewise, after being asked to create an anthology for the young adult market by New American Library (NAL), Windling chose to “confront the demons of [her] youth—the Bad Old Days of life on the streets,” and place it in a setting based on “the streets of Manhattan [where] punk and folk music were in abundance,” thus creating her punk-inspired, shared-world city on the border to Faerie: Bordertown (Windling 2003). Though the series would later shift to the adult fantasy line at Tor, it was initially intended to be a guide through the “sheer anguish of that hard passage from adolescence to adulthood” (Windling 2011, 5).8 In order to do this, Windling centered these stories around “outcasts, homeless kids, and other teens making their own way in the world” (7), inviting non-traditional fantasists (de Lint and Snyder), as well as writers who were also musicians (Bull, Shetterly, de Lint, Kushner, and Boyett), to write tales set

7  For further information on UF stories set in London, and their link to Gothic Literature and Dickens, see Ekman’s (2018) article “London Urban Fantasy: Places with History” and ElberAviram’s (2021) monograph Fairy Tales of London: British Urban Fantasy, 1840 to the Present. 8  Italics in original.

122 

D.-L. MCDONALD

in Bordertown, albeit evoked by their own cities (7). Many of these writers would go on to publish their own UF novels.9 Yet, Windling’s thematic influence remains present. The relationship to alterity is a primary narrative theme in the genre, and indeed remains pervasive in later works by writers such as Mercedes Lackey, Neil Gaiman, and so on. It seems that those who do not, or cannot, conform to the contemporary manifestation of “mainstream” find a home, beyond the normative societal veil, in the hidden world represented in the UF text. McLennon (2014) notes that the UF narrative “increasingly explores the possibilities and difficulties of thriving in iterations of contemporary, global, monstrous and post-human worlds,” and therefore acts as a reflection of contemporary culture through its destabilization of boundaries. In essence, UF allows the reader to traverse these boundaries and meet with the social, sometimes monstrous, Other in an environment full of what Ekman (2016) refers to as “the less savoury aspects of modern/ urban life” (466). Here, as in Bordertown, one finds the homeless, prostitutes, criminals, the addicted (466); but also, the sexual Other, both non-­stereotypical representations of women and members of the LGBT community (McLennon 2014); as well as ethnic and religious minorities (Young 2016, 144–145). This blatant preoccupation with the sort of the social outsider prompted Ekman (2016) to refer to UF as a “literature of the ‘Unseen’” (463). With the above studies in mind, it appears that UF seeks to shine a light on the sociocultural anxieties of the time, representing the tension between a mainstream Self and the various epochal Others. In the UF of the 1980s, punk embodied much of the above, symbolizing a subcultural Other. Punk’s influence on UF has, however, been largely overlooked. Ekman (2016, 459), Young (2016, 142), and Mendlesohn (2008, 148) have all pointed out the proclivity toward musicians as protagonists in the genre, but only Irvine (2012) briefly mentions the punk presence as “an emblem of alienation,” describing its use in early UF as a consolatory type of “powerful wish-­ fulfilment fantasy” for the above Other (206). Though partly true, his perspective disregards both authorial intent and the cultural importance of a movement made up of much more than its, admittedly key, musical element. As recent studies show,10 punk influenced the attitude of a generation regarding not only creative endeavor (music, art, literature, etc.), but also politics and the economy. On top of this, many of the previously mentioned early urban fantasists were connected to this musical scene and its street culture in some way, which gave their narratives a realistic frame of reference. In order to better understand this connection, it is first necessary to paint a clearer picture of the nebulous movement that was punk.

9  Bull and Shetterly would publish their own stand-alone novels set in Bordertown. Bull would go on to writer her 1987 novel War for the Oaks, often cited as one of the first UF novels. 10  See Worley (2017), McLeod (2019), Sabin (1999), and Moore (2010).

  PUNK SUBCULTURE IN URBAN FANTASY: LIFE ON THE BORDER 

123

Youthful Revolt: Punk in the 1980s Punk crashed onto the world stage at the tail end of the 1970s, tearing open a new cultural space that immediately splintered into a plethora of post-punk interpretations. Indeed, though the contrary has often been argued, punk never died. As Sabin (1999) notes, it simply changed forms from punk to post-­ punk, glam-punk, folk-punk, grunge, pop-punk, emo, scene, and so on (4). It offered a space for all who through volition, naïveté, misfortune, nature, or artistic drive would find themselves on the fringe of conservative society. Of course, the tremors punk caused were more than mere reverberations of madcap melodies, they would be felt throughout cultures world-wide as the philosophy and aesthetic of punk seeped into the mainstream. There is a debate as to whether the movement began in New  York or London, with valid arguments on both sides, rendered unclear by a constant dialogue between both versions. Many areas remain to be studied; mirroring UF, punk has only recently begun to receive adequate academic attention, in part due to the confusion caused by its anti-academic nature and its aversion to delimitation. What is clear, however, is that the economic and sociopolitical climate in both nations created a perfect storm for punk to emerge. At the end of the 1970s, the political pendulum plunged to the right. In England, voters felt let down by the left, and thus turned to Thatcher in search of stability and security. Many of the nation’s youth, however, took another path, turning their backs on mainstream politics and rejecting the status quo. Worley (2017) points out how the lack of employment available after graduation, coupled with recession and a period of Cold War–induced fear caused the boredom and social unrest that would lead to the British punk movement (38). For them, the economic boom that Thatcherism brought was of little succor, resulting in social changes that added fuel to an already raging fire. Across the pond, similar symptoms spread. America was in crisis. In the decades following the 1960s, Jones (1995) sees massive shifts in social demographics and deindustrialization that brought “decay, pollution and social disintegration” to the American city (576). This resulted in many teenagers feeling displaced as urban decline, homelessness, drug addiction, and violent crime ravished areas like New York (577). Mirroring events in Britain, the majority turned to conservatives and Reaganomics to fix the issues, and though this would greatly improve the economy, it removed much of the social aid that made artistic endeavor possible in the New York underground art scene, such as cheap rent and welfare benefits, and so on. With work more available in the US, unemployment and the bohemian lifestyle began to diminish, leading to backlash from teenagers who feared conventionalism: for punks, as O’Hara (1999) has it, “the most hated thing in the world was a willing conformist” (27).

124 

D.-L. MCDONALD

Transgressive Art, Punk, Fantasy Non-conformity, thy name is punk. In Britain, this deviation was often considered as political critique, Worley (2017), however, believes that punk “confronted, challenged and gave vent to a disaffection that was resonant but politically ambiguous” (33). Indeed, it was a movement of ubiquitous protest, but also one of distinctly bohemian sensibilities, with some youths taking advantage of unemployment to read, play music and be artistic (97). Culturally, across the pond, something similar was happening. In America, however, punk had a touch more pizazz. New York had long been a haven for the social Other. In fact, since the early 1960s the art scene that spread out from southern Manhattan to Greenwich Village, Soho and East Village, created a unique cultural space for musicians, writers, visual artists—and the atypical acolytes with whom one associates such activity (McLeod 2019, 1). Their presence at the time rendered New  York, especially Greenwich Village, a progressist hub where the social outsider might find a sense of community, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation (13). This was facilitated by the cheap rent, deindustrialization, and “white flight to the suburbs” that had caused a rise in inner-city poverty and crime all while allowing individuals to sustain themselves through artistic creation (1). From Andy Warhol to Patti Smith and Richard Hell, artists and poets of all kinds found their way to New York, hypnotized by its siren call. While the art they produced was subcultural in nature, it mirrored a national post-war upsurge in the cultural provision of science, literature, and the arts that Jones (1995) claims made the US “the envy of the world” (595). The Beat poets would take advantage of this period to plant the subcultural seeds that sprouted the sexual revolution of the 1960s before growing into the Pistol’s punk poplar. New York’s underground art movement took inspiration from the aforementioned artists, evolving into the odd mixture of mimeograph-­ facilitated, non-compromising authenticity with a street theater aesthetic, that would inspire poets and others involved in Off-off-Broadway—a low-budget theater experience that intentionally broke down the barrier between the performers and the audience. McLeod (2019) describes how these DIY venues provided much of the activity that would later come to be associated with the punk movement (7). Indeed, the latter would inspire Patti Smith to shift from poetry writing to musical performances, leading others to do the same. Richard Hell (born Meyers) recalls seeing one of Smith’s “electrifying rock-and-roll-­ level poetry” performances at the gay disco Le Jardin (237), prompting him to create a band with Tom Verlaine (238). It was Hell’s, then-idiosyncratic, torn T-shirts and spikey hair style that enamored countercultural fashionista Vivienne Westwood’s business partner, Malcolm McLaren (313). Influenced by the New York scene, he would go on to manage the Sex Pistols helping them rise to stardom decked out in his partner’s clothing line, known for its shock factor. In fact, much of what we now come to associate with punk is due to McLaren’s influence. He saw in the Sex Pistols an opportunity to go beyond simple

  PUNK SUBCULTURE IN URBAN FANTASY: LIFE ON THE BORDER 

125

musical production and, to paraphrase Worley (2017), filter their rhetorical populism and cultural innovation through his art school pretensions, thus capturing the epochal mood of decline, unrest, “and social dislocation that pervaded the media and political discourse of the time” (7). It is this very mixture of punk aesthetics and punk as social commentary that would become an integral part of the subculture (8), it is also exactly what lent weight to the underground culture of music and art coming out of New York at the end of the 1970s, fueled by artists such as Debbie Harry,11 the Ramones, Talking Heads and others who played at the club known as CBGB’s. Many of the latter artists would go on to have successful careers, bringing punk elements into the mainstream throughout the 1980s. A complete history of America’s underground art scene and its influence on punk is beyond the scope of this chapter, suffice it to say that punk’s musical and subcultural roots run deep. They also run wide. Culturally, punk was much more than a musical movement, it was a mood that would impact a multitude of media and become the emblem of a generation, a subcultural zeitgeist.12 Worley (2017) sees punk as a catalyst that opened up a cultural space for those who found themselves in “opposition to perceived sociocultural norms,” provoking people to question the status quo (46–47). Quoting Conflict, he goes on to claim that while it is difficult to pin punk down to just one thing, in its essence it “is about making your own rules and doing your own thing” (47). It was, to put it another way, an anti-establishment movement that focused on individual expression, speaking for those who were not represented in the mainstream by breaking down barriers and refusing relatively outdated rules. In many ways, the term “punk” is insufficient, Osgerby (1999) describes it as “a contrived and superficial category, [that] blurs across a diversity of genres and sub-genres, often obscuring more than it reveals” (156). Indeed, though punk primarily targeted contemporary political establishments and music corporations, even the publishing industry would be affected. Battles are waged with weapons, but cultural wars won with words. At least according to anti-war activist poets, such as Andrei Codrescu, who used mimeograph, the almost instantaneous form of printing, to help subcultural communities form, inform, and refuse to conform, much like the internet nowadays, all while maintaining that intimate “touch of the flesh and ink on hands” (McLeod 2019, 52). The spirit of independent publishing allowed the art coteries to thrive, fostering the “symbiotic relationship between local indie media and downtown scenes” that became the bedrock of the punk and post-­ punk movements (308). With the success of Punk in New York and Sniffin’ Glue in London, fanzines (a style of self-made, often low-budget,  More commonly known for her stage persona: Blondie.  Of course, “zeitgeist” refers to the spirit of the age in its totality. In the 1980s, however, as there was such cleavage between the mainstream and subcultural groups who felt displaced in the society they had inherited, it seems appropriate to qualify this counter-spirit of the age with the above adjective. 11 12

126 

D.-L. MCDONALD

mimeographed magazine), exploded in popularity, sharing poetry, stories, music, political views and guides to grassroots activism (O’Hara 1999, 67). Successors to the latter magazines would become so popular that they were eventually sold by mail-order and on local news-stands (69). When one examines the glut of punk fanzines, Osgerby’s above statement certainly seems accurate. The following quote from Mike Gunderloy, editor of Maximum Rock N Roll, illustrates this (62): My own breakdown of major zine types would go like this (not in any particular order), art (including comics, mail art, collage stuff), conservative-­ Constitutionalist, ecological-environmental, film (mostly horror-sleaze-gore), poetry, religion (pagan-subgenius Discordian-ceremonial magic), anarchist-­ leftist, music, science fiction-fantasy, mainstream literary, UFO-Fortean-psychic-­ odd science-cranks-peace-anti-war-socially conscious, gay-lesbian-bisexual.

This omnium-gatherum of punk interest provides a snapshot of the attitudes and do-it-yourself ideals that influenced the youth culture of the 1980s: punk seemed to stretch into all possible areas, providing a brazen authenticity to bold creative pioneers, taking them by the hand and helping them populate the cultural space beyond the border to which they had before been bound. It was this transformative quality that would bring magic to the city. The high-wizards of post-Tolkienian fantasy literature had decreed that magic was a matter for Middle-earth or Midkemia, not Minneapolis. Or so it seemed in the early 1980s. Informed by her time as an editor at Ace publishing, Windling (2012) describes how writers of magical fiction were restricted by marketing rules of such agencies that saw little benefit to breaking with the formulae of secondary world fantasy, dominated as it was by the lucrative “Tolkienesque epic fantasy and Howardian swords-&-sorcery.” That is until Charles de Lint decided to pull from his difficult teenage experiences, his rich reading background and a love of Celtic music to inspire the stories he wrote when not working at record stores or performing live. What was originally a hobby grew into a desire to write full-time after being published in the Canadian small press—a movement that mirrored the small press in the US (Parker 2012). Windling helped de Lint to publish his first novels, including Moonheart (1984): a story that punkishly refused convention and broke, what she (2012) calls, “unspoken (but distinct) genre rules” in the market at the time, by bringing magic to the city. Windling, however, made it punk. Taking the genre under her wing, Windling brought the aforementioned group of writers together to contribute to her shared-world anthology and strongly influenced the future of UF. Windling (2011) saw the city, Bordertown, as “rooted in the gritty, punky, vibrant, violent, flamboyant New York city of the eighties,” but adds that the involved writers melded elements from other cities like LA, Minneapolis, Seattle, Ottawa, Dublin, and so on (7). It appears as though it were all cities mixed together: “Borderland can apparently be found by heading for the ruins of just about any large twentieth-century city”

  PUNK SUBCULTURE IN URBAN FANTASY: LIFE ON THE BORDER 

127

(Windling 1991, 8). Her intention was to tell tales relevant to contemporary readers in a “pre-Harry Potter era, when young adult fantasy was still thin on the ground, and [she] felt there was a crying need for mythic rites-of-passage tales for modern teens” (Windling 2011, 5). To do this, she mixed a narrative potion of punk, elves, and a dangerous city setting freed from technology in which they could run amok (5), inspiring a generation of writers and inadvertently bringing UF to the mainstream. Still, the question remains: to what degree is punk present in UF?

Punk, Folk, and Faerie Music has been at the center of human culture since prehistory. As is evidenced by one of the oldest instruments on record being a 40,000-year-old bone flute (Wilford 2009), and the use by the oldest continuous civilization, the Aboriginal tribes, of song as an auditive map to navigate the routes to their sacred sites, in symbiosis with nature (Fuller et al., 2014). Of course, this musical relationship with nature, ours or the world around us, is still a fundamental part of music today, though it is arguably most resonant in folk music. The latter often dealing with nature, society, and our place within them both. Perhaps this would explain why, as Irvine (2012) points out, early UF narrative is so saturated with music. Punk’s search for authenticity and the displacement within society, described above, touched the hearts of a generation. Yet, the type of punk in Windling’s anthology seems to resonate more with nature than the angst-­ ridden melodies of New Wave. Of course, punk’s progenitors are plenty. Indeed, the innovative and liberating qualities that one might associate with the movement and its later derivations were heavily influenced by movements that came before. Some argued that punk was a reaction to Rock ‘n’ Roll, aiming either to end the latter or, as Keir (2001) sees it, to fulfill its “traditional investment in differentiation and authenticity, distinguishing itself from the mainstream” (138)—though this mentality flows from an older tradition still. Folk, the music of the people, was its source. Although now “folk” calls to mind traditional “Celtic” music—a fact which David (2010) considers a bi-­ product of its “authentic sound of the past unpolluted by artifice” (16)—, in post-war America, the word described what is known now as country music (Kier 2001, 121). It began as an antithesis to “Mass society,” which it believed to be causing “a loss of community, tradition and meaning in the lives of ordinary people” (120). Fear of the shapeless, subsumptive “Mass society” that was industrial capitalism, caused folk culture to emerge and voice a rejection of the “soulless” media at the time (120–121). It was a musical movement that placed authenticity above all else, preferring “acoustic instruments, orally transmitted songs and vernacular modes of performance” (121). Concerned with social change and leftist ideologies, elements of folk culture were soon taken up by the intellectuals and the urbanites of the 1960s, when, under the influence of artists like Bob Dylan, it began to influence rock (121–122). The parallels with

128 

D.-L. MCDONALD

punk are clear: if rock, as Keir (2001) claims, was more a reaction to the industrial mainstream rather than the natural evolution of musical crossover (126–127), punk was the contemporary subcultural equivalent—although its reclamation of authenticity, both of the individual and of the group, was much noisier than its predecessor. Punk was a missile strike to the status quo: it hit, it fragmented, it transformed its surroundings, manifesting as the myriad of musical genres, called “post-punk.” Worley (2017) describes the latter as a nebulous “cultural force,” a tension that hung between destruction and creation; those drawn to it had to “pick through the debris left in the Sex Pistols’ wake to find their own means of expression (26–27). In that wake, groups such as the Pogues, the Violent Femmes, and hardcore group Hüsker Dü, as well as solo artists, like London-­ born poet, Patrik Fitzgerald, would create the subgenre folk-punk. These artists blended punk’s aggressive sound with traditional instruments, folk songs with hardcore beats, and punk lyrics with tin whistles. Stretching across boundaries of genre, it seems that, like UF, folk-punk existed in that liminal space between authentic folk and commercial rock, between rural forest and urban road. The poet writes with the pen of metaphor and dream. Poetry facilitates memorization through its rhyming structure allowing myths, fables, and fairy tales to be passed down through the generations, which in turn give us, to paraphrase Bettelheim (1976), fantastical representations of deeply hidden, abstract psychological processes (7). It is the inky artistry of semantics. Speaking of mythic fiction (UF), Windling (2015) writes: “Casting spells with language and telling tales of transformation are, after all, the very point of this alchemical genre in which elements of poetry, prose, myth, fairy tale, and dream are carefully combined, turning lead, and straw, and language, and life itself into pure gold.” Clearly, the Pied Piper call of poetry that flowed through punk artists, like Patti Smith, and brought Richard Meyers to New  York in the 1960s resounds loudly in UF.  Written by her community of melody and narrative structure, the short stories set in Windling’s Bordertown capture this resonance faithfully. Their folk-punk ballads tell tales of the human experience, but also those of the elfin, of nature and of the magic therein. Music is magic; magic is emotion manifested; emotion is poetry. Such is the lore of Borderland. Many of the songs in the series rely on folk-punk melodies mixed with traditional, poetic stories in the form of song, such as that of Thomas the Rhymer at the start of this chapter. The first anthology, however, begins with the story Prodigy (Boyett 1986), which lays the foundation for the series, although remaining clearly distinguished from it. Boyett’s protagonist, an angsty youth, Scooter, navigates his new life in a city that only six years ago was turned upside-down by the return of magic (9). No longer a famous rage-­ fueled rock star, he lives a bohemian lifestyle of lounging and guitar-playing. Often, he goes to the hill at the boundary of the city surrounded by the magical forest, as it is there that his music can tap into the latent, environmental magic and manifest in color and shape around him (9–10). He is overheard

  PUNK SUBCULTURE IN URBAN FANTASY: LIFE ON THE BORDER 

129

there by an elf whose father quickly finds Scooter and ominously warns him “what you make belongs to you” (47). Of course, the message does not become clear until Scooter’s girlfriend disappears, leaving him for not bearing his share of responsibility in their relationship; he tries to locate her, but finds only the end of a whiskey bottle (64). Overwhelmed, he borrows an old battery pack that would power his amp, takes his electric guitar to the hill and pumps his rage and heart-ache out into the night; this time, however, instead of the habitual light show, it produces an all-devouring humanoid storm cloud, the emptiness in his heart given form (70–71). The creation immediately sets out to hunt the only person who once filled that very void, his girlfriend, Roxanne. Taking responsibility for his actions, Scooter enters the enchanted forest to seek the elves’ aid and realizes that he must protect his girlfriend with the monster’s counterpoint, a musical expression of harmony and love, played on an acoustic guitar (108–110). The narrative acting as a potent metaphor: music has the power to manifest the melody of the soul, its emotional state, and give it agency in the world—be it for better or for worse. Scooter’s wordless, musical creations have no form. One, created by “his hunger, his rage, his pain, his need,” is simply described as “a smoky tendril” (70–71), the other, expressing his love, materializes as an explosive detonation of, literally, blinding light (110). The reader understands these creations as a testimony to the power of emotive music—Rock, Punk, or acoustic Folk. Both folk and punk are concerned with the lives and values of the individual, and not an artificial, mediatic representation. Though folk may romanticize the individual, while Punk channels his or her frustrations, both genres are concerned with authenticity. David (2010) sees non-mainstream or “alternative” musical genres, such as punk or world music, as a means to create a shared identity with a group and differentiate oneself from an imagined Other (26–27): the mainstream or dominant culture. With this in mind, the choice of folk-­ punk as the music of UF becomes clear. The frustration of living in contemporary, mainstream society flows from the pages of early UF, especially in Windling’s (1986) anthology where runaways and rejects who find no solace in their homelives come to experience magic and adventure on the border with Elfland. Punk melodies voice their frustrations, using electric instruments, rough and gritty distortions on the guitar, and so on, to create a metallic noise that “takes the sound of the urban environment and uses them to scream out” (David 2010, 123). The punkish quality of the singing voice connotes an impure world “where clean emotions can be expressed” in a world “that is worn and dirty” (123). This darker element is juxtaposed with the nature-­ infused lyrics and musical instruments of folk. Nature is then given a magical quality, despite the urban setting, through the eruption of, mostly Celtic, Faerie creatures in UF, who subvert the typical folk-punk lyrics and bring the romantic authenticity of the bard to each verse. David (2010) considers that folk “Celtic” music maintains this authenticity through its traditional sound “unspoiled by urban and technological contamination,” despite the use of more modern instruments (16). He claims that people associate this music

130 

D.-L. MCDONALD

with nostalgia for the past traditions in such a way that the sounds become “literally tied in with the very mists of the ancient lands and peoples we associate with them” (16–17). The alchemical mixture of punkish outburst, distorted guitar, céilí fervor, and folk yearning that is folk-punk might seem like an odd mix, but, like so many misfits, it finds a home in the early works of UF. Yet, the above representation is a little too harmonious for punk. The folk-­ punk music of UF seems at odds with the musical outcries of Johnny Rotten and his ilk. The love of music, the drive for authenticity, the grit of doing-it-­ yourself in spite of the mainstream, and living through one’s music is all there, but it seems that much of punk’s rage has been replaced with the magic and mythology of the folk tale. Though wrapped in the punk aesthetic, these stories appear to critique part of its tenets through either omission or folky subversion, as evidenced by the aforementioned story Prodigy making a monster of punk melodies (Boyett 1986). While the punk passion is present, it is coupled with a reverence of nature that, when transformed by fay magic, comes across as more numinous than nihilistic. Could it be that the UF writers were critical of the punk philosophy?

Faerie-Filtered Punk Philosophy: The Other Way to Think Contrary to the western image of the Greek wise man lost in Socratic quandary absently twirling his fingers through his silver beard, worldly reflexion was very much a pastime for the youth of the 1970s and 1980s. At an age where emotions are perhaps their most turbulent, decades before the mind-numbing distraction of social networks, teenagers looked around at the society they would inherit and turned to pondering the existential question: why am I here? O’Hara (1999) imagines the mainstream society at the time as a ridiculous, atomistic, and alienated lifestyle from which many had begun to wake up, consequently finding themselves “othered” (22–23). It was in this climate that the Sex Pistols’ arrival would channel the above sentiment, rendering it confrontational, oppositional, and aggressive (Worley 2017, 4). Many arguably sought to self-actualize through the punk scene, finding resonance with its thirst for authenticity and its resistance to cultural hegemony (9). Thus, discourse tended to center around critical theory, specifically Marxism and feminism (9), the reinvention of the music industry, anarchism, fascism, and anti-racism (10); the latter, sometimes contradictory, viewpoints found a place to be expressed within punk making it, as Worley (2017) puts it: “a cultural process of critical engagement rather than a specific musical or sartorial style” (11). Of course, punk’s inclusion of such varied heterodoxy did not necessarily make it any easier to find one’s way. In order for her shared-world mecca to serve as both guide and escape for teenagers, Windling had to shine a light on some of the dangers that lay in waiting along the road. Nihilism was one such danger. Pulling primarily from

  PUNK SUBCULTURE IN URBAN FANTASY: LIFE ON THE BORDER 

131

philosophies that paralleled existentialism (Worley 2017, 133), and with well-­ known slogans like the Sex Pistols’ “No Future for you” (1977), Orange Juice’s “Rip it up and start again” (1983), and “London’s burning” by the Clash (1977), it is no surprise that punk garnered a reputation in the media for being nihilistic. Worley (2017) captures the mood perfectly when he states that “punk gave vent to frustrations of both socioeconomic and existential origin” (7), and that its members used violence in their lyrics to present a society “rife with social tensions exacerbated by limited opportunities and the repressive forces of the state” (91). Of course, many punks would turn this violence into a passionate push for positive progress; as exemplified by the political activism of Crass (163), Tom Robinson’s fight for LGBT acceptance (199–200), and the feminist ideals called for by a host of female punk groups such as The Raincoats (187–188), all of which are echoed in early works of UF. Still, there is a ying to every yang, and the darker aspects of punk come under harsh critique by early UF writers. Modern society is incompatible with magic. In Windling’s world, the once bustling cities that held the promise of progress, culture, and career have been transformed into Bordertown: the land on the border with Elfland where neither magic nor technology functions reliably. There, teenage runaways from the magic-free “World” squat in squalor while violent gangs, some riding spell-­ powered motorbikes, stalk the streets. For the newly arrived, one’s prospects appear bleak. Yet, despite the emptiness of the city, reminiscent of New York and London during suburban flight and deindustrialization (Jones 1995, 575), Windling’s characters are distinctly wholesome. In the first three anthologies of stories set in this punky shared-world, most of the characters escape to Bordertown in order to find meaning in their life or make a new one. The protagonists’ story only ends when they have found a sense of place, a group they can call family, often among a chosen few who share an artistic connection to poetry, visual art, or music. Many of the characters appear broken or hate something within themselves, and learn to accept this part within by being accepted without, thus putting an end to self-destructive behavior. Indeed, the sense of family that helps to heal the emotional wounds of the characters seems to be the “true” magic of each story. Painted in contrast to a blackened canvas of urban ruin, this empathic sense of kinship leaves the reader with the impression that any place becomes magical when there is community, art, and love. Nihilism solves nothing. Windling shines a light on the existential dangers that confronted the youth culture at the time, giving them enough narrative substance to expose their flaws. Punk’s antipathy toward government, religion, and capitalism was palpable. In Johnny Rotten’s view, they were illusory, nothing but the “hypocrisy, monotony, consistency” of the system against which punk rebelled (Worley 2017, 133–134). This idea is given symbolic form in Bordertown, through the return of magical truth that appropriated the city and stripped away the illusion. Although UF texts present the harsh realities that Worley (2017) claims animated punk’s negative drive that led some to drug-use, suicide, or mental illness (137), they also appropriated its more

132 

D.-L. MCDONALD

positive aspects, such as its “impetus for agency” (137). Instead of simply creating a nihilistic antagonist, writers of early UF reveal the potential for nihilism within us all, both societally and individually.13 Each story informs the reader that he or she has the strength to face that inner-void and choose to fill it with creation rather than destruction, and, in Windling’s words, “to fully live wherever it is we find ourselves” (Windling 2014). Clearly, there is some ambivalence toward punk in these stories. On one hand, the nihilistic outlook and (often self-destructive) violence that comprise the lyrical content of punk is critiqued and even subverted. On the other, by demonstrating the purpose found in creative endeavor, UF writers amplified and lauded elements of punk culture, such as its philosophy of authenticity, the idea that family can be chosen, and that non-conformity is best expressed when, as Worley (2017) put it, punks “form a band, write a fanzine, dress up, go out and do-it-yourself” (137–138). Do-it-yourself meant that people should create their own rules and do their own thing. Hidden within this pervasive idea is the radical message of personal responsibility that some critics claim was the driving force of the punk subculture.14 While this idea is certainly debatable, it is the primacy of authenticity and passion, embracing one’s Otherness and walking the road less taken by mainstream society, that is arguably the movement’s most ubiquitous element. Although to be true to oneself is not an easy task, it requires first facing who one is deep down; it means accepting oneself and escaping the ancient forest of one’s unconscious. Windling (1999) points out how fairy stories and mythologies often show the protagonist disappearing into the forest for a time, only to come out again with newfound gifts, be they magical or material. Merlin gains the power of foresight, magic, and animal communication, the early UF protagonist’s transformation, however, tends to be more psychological than magical, more a rite of passage. Indeed, they must turn their backs on the lives they once knew, undergo hardship, and face themselves. Of course, risks abound and survival is by no means a foregone conclusion, but the safe traversal of “the forest, the spirit world, or the land of death often marks, in traditional tales, a time of new beginnings.” Bettelheim (1976) claims that the forest of such tales represents “the dark, near-impenetrable world of our unconscious” (94), and that the protagonist’s losing himself in it reveals the loss of framework and structure in his past life; he must now navigate this wilderness and develop his personality in order to mature (94). For the 1980s punk, the failures of mainstream society and the feeling of cultural displacement projected them into this forest, with community and a sense of place waiting for them on the other side, once they had matured and self-actualized though music, art, love, and

13  This is perhaps more obvious in de Lint’s work, where the idea is often given metaphoric and symbolic substance. 14  For more information on punk’s relationship to DIY and personal responsibility, see O’Hara (1999) and Moore (2010).

  PUNK SUBCULTURE IN URBAN FANTASY: LIFE ON THE BORDER 

133

storytelling. It was through this passage that Windling hoped her stories would be a guide. Urban Fantasy has become a cultural object throughout the world. It has grown and evolved over the last 40 years, splitting into different categories, such as Mythic Fiction, Paranormal Romance, and Noir Fantasy, to borrow Beagle and Lansdale’s categories (2011), now with a dash of steampunk, and even secondary world UF by authors like China Miéville. No longer confined to the printed page, UF series abound on television and on streaming services, offering mature magical narratives set in a version of contemporary society. Yet, it was Terri Windling who has arguably had the greatest impact on the genre. Pulling from her love of folklore and mythology, as an editor and a writer, she brought magic to the streets of 1980s America and straddled the border with Faerie, in an effort to provide a place for those who felt Othered by the swiftly changing mainstream. Though the road to Bordertown was not easy, but rather fraught with the dangers of the enchanted forest and metropolitan jungle, of authenticity and nihilism, of creativity and chaos, of subculture and the “Mass society.” Guiding the reader back and forth along these borders, Windling (2011) sought to highlight the “real-world magics that can save us when the world goes dark: like friendship and community, like making art and telling our stories” (5). The misfits, the atypical, the social Other have remained an integral part of UF, through fringe, often magical, sometimes monstrous, protagonists, many of whom continue Windling’s legacy and guide the reader on a new, gritty, and decidedly urban journey to find a sense of place, living life on the border.

Works Cited Attebery, Brian. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. Beagle, Peter S., and Joe R. Lansdale, eds. The Urban Fantasy Anthology. California: Tachyon Publications, 2011. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage Books, 1976. Boyett, Stephen R. “Prodigy.” In Borderland, 9–113. New York: Signet, 1986. Briggs, Katharine. An Encyclopedia of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976. Bull, Emma. War for the Oaks. New York: Ace, 1987. Clute, John, and David Langford. “Urban Fantasy.” In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, edited by John Clute and John Grant. London: Orbit, 1997. http://sf-­encyclopedia. uk/fe.php?nm=urban_fantasy. David, Machin. Analysing Popular Music: Image, Sound, Text. London: Sage, 2010. Ekman, Stefan. “London Urban Fantasy: Places with History.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 29, no. 3 (2018): 380–401. Ekman, Stefan. “Urban Fantasy: A Literature of the Unseen.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 27, no. 3 (2016): 452–69.

134 

D.-L. MCDONALD

Elber-Aviram, Hadas. Fairy Tales of London: British Urban Fantasy 1840 to the Present. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Irvine, Clive C. “Urban Fantasy.” In The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, 200–213. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Jones, Maldwyn A. The Limits of Liberty: American History 1607-1992. Second. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Keir, Keightley. “Reconsidering Rock.” In The Cambridge Companion to Pop & Rock, 109–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Leiber, Fritz. “Smoke Ghost.” In Night’s Black Agents: The Classic Fantasy of Fritz Leiber. New York: Berkeley Publishing Corporation, 1941. Lint, Charles de. Moonheart. Orb 1994. New York: Ace, 1984. McLennon, Leigh. “Defining Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance: Crossing Boundaries of Genre, Media, Self and Other in New Supernatural Worlds.” Edited by Angelea Ndalianis. Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media 23, 2014. https://refractory-­journal.com/uf-­mclennon/. McLeod, Kembrew. The Downtown Pop Underground: New York City and The Literary Punks, Renegade Artists, DIY Filmmakers, Mad Playwrights, and Rock ‘N’ Roll Glitter Queens Who Revolutionized Culture. New York: Abrams Press, 2019. Mendlesohn, Farah. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Moore, Ryan. Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture and Social Crisis. New York & London: New York University Press, 2010. O’Hara, Craig. The Philosophy of Punk: More than Noise! Second. London, Edinburgh & San Francisco: AK Press, 1999. Orange Juice. Rip It Up. Vinyl. London: Polydor, 1983. Osgerby, Bill. “‘Chewing out a Rhythm on My Bubble-Gum’ The Teenage Aesthetic and Genealogies of American Punk’. In Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk, edited by Roger Sabin, 154–69. London & New York: Routledge, 1999. Parker, George L. “Small Presses.” In The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada, 3 December 2012. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/smallpresses. Robert S.  Fuller, Michelle Trudgett, Ray P.  Norris, and Micheal G.  Anderson. “Star Maps and Travelling to Ceremonies—the Euahlayi People and Their Use of the Night Sky.” Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage 17, no. 2 (2014): 141–48. Sabin, Roger, ed. Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk. London & New York: Routledge, 1999. Smith, Thorne. The Night Life of the Gods. New York: Ballantine Books, 1931. The Clash. London’s Burning. Vinyl. London: CBS, 1977. The Sex Pistols. God Save the Queen. Vinyl Single LP. London: Virgin, 1977. Wilford, John Noble. “Flutes Offer Clues to Stone-Age Music.” The New York Times, 24 June 2009, sec. Science. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/science/25 flute.html. Windling, Terri. “About the Creation of BORDERLAND.” Archive. Endicott Studio (blog), 2003. https://web.archive.org/web/20030414073700/http://www. endicott-­studio.com/borderland2.html. Windling, Terri. “Charles de Lint: A Life of Stories.” Myth & Moor (blog), 2012. https://www.terriwindling.com/mythic-­arts/charles-­de-­lint.html.

  PUNK SUBCULTURE IN URBAN FANTASY: LIFE ON THE BORDER 

135

Windling, Terri. Introduction to Welcome to Bordertown: New Stories and Poems of the Borderlands, edited by Holly Black and Ellen Kushner, 4-8. New  York: Random House, 2011. Windling, Terri, ed. Life on the Border. New York: Tor, 1991. Windling, Terri. “On the Magic of Cities.” Myth & Moor (blog), 23 October 2014. https://www.terriwindling.com/blog/2014/10/urban-­walking.html. Windling, Terri. “The Dark of the Woods: Rites of Passage Tales.” Realms of Fantasy, 1999. The Journal of Mythic Arts. https://www.endicottstudio.typepad.com/articleslist/the-­dark-­of-­the-­woods-­rites-­of-­passage-­tales-­by-­terri-­windling.html. Windling, Terri. “The Magic of Words.” Myth & Moor (blog), 18 March 2015. https://www.terriwindling.com/blog/2015/03/the-magic-of-words.html. Windling, Terri, and Mark Alan Arnold, eds. Borderland. New York: Signet, 1986. Worley, Matthew. No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Young, Helen. Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness. New  York: Routledge, 2016.

PART II

Countries and Cultures

History and Other (Colonial) Fantasies: Indigenous Time Play in Cleverman Sara Spurgeon

In December 2019, Australian nbn Environment Minister Sussan Ley was being interviewed about her government’s lax response to the catastrophic wildfires then ravaging millions of acres, engulfing entire towns, pushing dozens of species to the brink of extinction, and which, by the end of the following month, would kill an estimated one billion animals, including nearly a third of all koalas in Australia. In light of her government’s continuing denial of climate change, the interviewer wondered whether the Environment Minister felt Australia should be taking more concrete steps to fight global warming, which scientists argue is contributing to Australia’s increasingly long and ever more destructive wildfire seasons. Minister Ley attempted to steer the conversation to the problem of feral house cats, but when the interviewer pressed her query, the Minister blurted, “Look, it’s certainly the case that 200 years of human settlement in this relatively young continent is catching up with us” (Ley). There are actually two Freudian slips embedded in this comment, and both illustrate the depth of the fantasies shaping settler colonialism in Australia, as well as their strange relationship with history and time. An Environment Minister was unable to address climate change because her Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, and his party believe global warming to be a vast conspiratorial fantasy. But this delusion itself rests on, and is deeply entangled with, the much older fantasy Minister Ley expressed as though it were simply mundane historical fact; the belief that Australia had no human inhabitants until the arrival of

S. Spurgeon (*) Department of English, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2_10

139

140 

S. SPURGEON

European settlers 200 years ago—a belief she certainly understands on a rational level to be untrue, and yet one which so powerfully shapes the way she and other white Australians think about themselves and their claims to the continent that she literally cannot unthink it. To disbelieve the fantasy of an Aboriginal-free Australia would be to disbelieve the fantasy of settler colonialism’s legitimate possession of Aboriginal land. This is magical thinking deployed as powerful public fantasy, not a fantasy functioning as mere entertainment, but as an important weapon in the ongoing battle to legitimize settler colonization of Australian land and Australian time—past, present, and future. This contest for land, waged as a battle over history and time, is at the heart of the Australian television series Cleverman, variously labeled fantasy, science fiction, or the “Aboriginal Superhero show.” The series counters the settler colonial historical fantasy with its own version of history and time based in an Aboriginal epistemology. Certainly, this Aboriginal version is in the guise of an entertaining superhero show; nonetheless, like the “young continent” fantasy, it is also a weapon deployed in a struggle over Australian history as well as Australia’s present and future. Created by Ryan Griffen (Gamilaraay) and directed by Wayne Blaire (Batjala Mununjali Wakkawakka) and Leah Purcell (Goa Gungurri Wakka Wakka), Cleverman is a joint production of ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) and Sundance TV.  Season 1 aired in 2016 on ABC in Australia, BBC 3 across the UK, and on Sundance TV before being picked up by Netflix and made available for streaming in 2017. Set in the near-future, the series commences approximately six months after an ancient species of humans from Aboriginal lore known as the Hairypeople walk out of the outback and reveal their existence to the rest of the world. Although a second season has been released, this chapter focuses on the ways Season 1 sets up the series’ engagement with history and other colonial fantasies. Cleverman enters this battle wielding what I term “indigenous time play.” Drawing from Michael Schrage’s concept of serious play, I define indigenous time play as a fanciful but deliberate deployment of various versions of history and ideas about time through storytelling anchored in an indigenous epistemology. Indigenous time play here functions as an important node within what Grace Dillon (Anishinaabe) calls “native slipstream,” that is, writing that isn’t simply toying with standard science fiction tropes such as time travel or alternative histories, but which “models a cultural experience of reality” that Dillon says “allows authors to recover the Native space of the past, to bring it to the attention of contemporary readers, and to build better futures” (4). In Cleverman, an Aboriginal version of indigenous time play explodes the space of the past, flinging history like shrapnel into the present as the series insists upon the non-erasure of indigeneity and the concomitant disruption of settler colonial claims to Australian land.

  HISTORY AND OTHER (COLONIAL) FANTASIES: INDIGENOUS TIME PLAY… 

141

The Past Is Never Dead. It Is Not Even Past.1 Cleverman’s indigenous time play ricochets between dueling historical fantasies; the Aboriginal version imagining two distinct species of people in Australia for tens of thousands of years, and the settler colonial version imagining there were no humans at all until the 1800s. Similarly, indigenous time play in the series is two-pronged. One prong reaches backward to bring Aboriginal history (both factual and fantastical) into direct confrontation with the settler colonial fantasy of the “young continent.” The second prong posits, more subversively, that not only do Aboriginal peoples possess the Australian past, but they also own the future, in contrast to the mainstream assumption common in white-­ authored speculative fiction that the future belongs to white men wielding white technologies on behalf of white cultures. In this battle of the fantastical, the Hairypeople act as a doubling of Aboriginal history, presence, and claims to the land. While most non-­Aboriginal viewers likely assume the Hairypeople are entirely fictional—just quaintly fantastical figures from Aboriginal folklore—the line between history and fantasy is often more porous than we expect. For example, most archeological evidence indicates that “the initial colonisers of Australia were Homo sapiens sapiens” who arrived on the continent approximately 60,000 years ago (Smith and Burke, 26). However, the skeletal evidence also suggests fairly extreme dimorphism, that is, two physically distinct types of humans have been uncovered, termed “gracile” and “robust” (Lahr, 29). The differences between the two groups are extreme enough that archeologists continue to debate whether there were actually two entirely different human populations which coexisted in ancient Australia. That the memory of such coexistence could have persisted into our contemporary world would have been considered the stuff of fantasy until 2003, when Mike Norwood and his team uncovered the remains of Homo floriensis in a cave in Indonesia while searching for evidence of the earliest migrants to Australia. Nicknamed “hobbits” in popular media due to their short stature and large, flat feet, Homo floriensis were a species of archaic humans that inhabited the Indonesian island of Flores at the same time as modern humans. Their existence, while dismissed by Europeans as quaint indigenous folklore before Norwood’s discovery, was long known to local islanders who called them “Ebu Gogo” (Grandmothers who ate everything). They were described in stories as short, hairy humans with large feet and flat foreheads who lived in caves on the island, but who disappeared before the arrival of Europeans. It is not my intention here to argue that the Hairypeople are, like the Ebu Gogo, a now-vanished species of humans who once inhabited Australia as Aboriginal stories contend. It is my intention, however, to disrupt the fantasy that Euro-western epistemology has provided an unimpeachable version of the past in which we can clearly distinguish between (European) fact and 1

 Faulkner, William.

142 

S. SPURGEON

(Aboriginal) fantasy. For the purposes of this chapter, I treat the Hairypeople as fictional elements of a speculative fiction/fantasy series, albeit one created by Aboriginal people and respectful of Aboriginal traditions in its efforts at decolonization. The Hairypeople, drawn from descriptions in multiple Aboriginal stories, act as a doubling of Aboriginal history, presence, and claims to the land. In the world of the series, they have, as their name suggests, more body hair than humans, but they also possess greater than human strength, and much longer lifespans than humans, although their spoken languages and clan organizations reflect those of various Aboriginal clans in our real world. Cleverman’s utilization of time as a decolonizing tool is characteristic of what Laura Marks calls intercultural cinema, which, she explains, “moves backward and forward in time, inventing histories and memories in order to posit an alternative to the overwhelming erasures, silences, and lies of official histories” (15). This temporal movement is a response to indigenous artists confronting “public and personal amnesia” regarding the actual histories of their own communities. These artists, Marks continues, “must first dismantle the official record” before beginning the process of “making history reveal what it was not able to say” (24-25). If we understand Cleverman as a form of intercultural cinema, we should not be surprised that in many ways the series’ portrayal of Australian history, the first prong of its indigenous time play, is far more factually accurate than the settler colonial version put forward by Minister Ley, even as the series plays with historical time in conjunction with the fantastic. Viewers see the most obvious challenge to the young continent fantasy at the beginning of every episode. The opening credit intertitles, combining the factual and the fantastic, consist of white type on a black screen: The Aboriginal people of Australia are the longest surviving culture on earth with over 60,000 years of stories known as The Dreaming. The Dreaming is the spiritual realm that binds the past, present, and future together. It is inhabited by incredible creatures and spirits. At the head of this realm is the Cleverman, a powerful man who is the conduit between The Dreaming and the real world. (“Opening credits,” Cleverman, Season 1)

The Cleverman, an amalgamation here of beliefs about this figure from the traditions of multiple clans, possesses powers that allow him to communicate with the spirit world and ancestors, to battle mythical creatures and other humans on both the physical and supernatural planes, and, in what likely generates the “Aboriginal Superhero” talk, is able to heal himself from almost any wound, making him, as long as he holds the mantle of Cleverman, virtually immortal. Felicity Ford claims that through this playful blending of history and imagination, [T]he fantastical elements of the Hairies and the magical abilities of the Cleverman disrupt colonial temporality and, by collapsing real and imagined worlds, present

  HISTORY AND OTHER (COLONIAL) FANTASIES: INDIGENOUS TIME PLAY… 

143

a contemporary Australia still haunted by a history of genocide, government control and systemic abuse of Indigenous communities. Here, the fantastic offers a subversive space in which to engage with Indigenous narratives and challenge the dominance of a white Australian history. (28)

The rebuke of the settler colonial fantasy of a continent uninhabited until the nineteenth century is obvious in the intertitles’ reminder of the 60,000 years of Aboriginal history and stories. What may be less obvious is the indigenous time play contained in the term “The Dreaming.” Many readers are likely more familiar with the term “Dreamtime”; however, at the Australian premiere of Cleverman, series creator Ryan Griffen “made an important distinction between ‘Dreamtime’ and ‘Dreaming’, stressing that the former was bound to the past whereas the latter suggested something happening now, something still becoming” (Ford, 27). This nomenclature and explanation are echoed by various Aboriginal characters in the series, indicating from the first episodes the importance of Aboriginal understandings of time, even as that epistemology is playfully shaped into a pop-culture superhero story steeped in history and pointing toward the future. Bliss Cua Lim offers a useful concept for thinking about the ways in which speculative fiction genres can play with time and history, developing a concept she calls “immiscible times.” Immiscible refers to things that refuse to dissolve into something else, maintaining their own integrity. Water and oil are immiscible. Lim argues that when applied to history, immiscible times are “Traces of untranslatable temporal otherness in the fantastic” (12). Immiscible times, those versions of history that refuse to dissolve into something else, collapse the perceived distance between past and present, like oil visibly floating on the surface of water, allowing the tension between them to be investigated in more meaningful ways. While Lim explores how immiscible times function within speculative genres openly classified as such, Cleverman’s indigenous time play reveals settler colonial versions of history to also be openly fantastical. As Minister Ley made clear, settler colonialism has a rich fantasy life regarding the past, imagining not only that it can be made to dissolve or disappear, but that it is represented primarily by primitive, long dead natives—people literally out of, or displaced in, time— while imagining the present and future to be embodied by white, Eurocentric, cosmopolitan modernity. This fantasy requires that indigenous peoples in the present must somehow be made to vanish, as Patrick Wolfe has famously argued is the role of the native in settler colonialism. Thus, settler colonial narratives of history frequently attempt first to confine Aboriginal peoples to the past, and then, like Minister Ley, to erase them from it. However, another way of removing indigenous people and achieving the dream of an Aboriginal-free Australia is to deny Aboriginal people are, in fact, people, as Minister Ley did in collapsing the categories of human and European. Cleverman draws attention to this dehumanizing move. It presents both Aboriginal peoples and the newly emerged Hairypeople as oppressed and

144 

S. SPURGEON

exploited by the Australian government, but as the series commences, viewers learn the Hairypeople have been officially classified as “subhumans,” an important step in the government’s end goal of making the “Hairies” and whatever land claims they may represent, vanish. All Hairypeople have been imprisoned in a walled ghetto in Sydney known as the Zone, where much of Season 1 is set. The Containment Authority (CA), a militarized state security force, is responsible for keeping the Hairypeople trapped in the Zone. This enforced containment utilizes the fantastical to point at both history and daily life in the real world. As Ford points out, the storyline involving the Hairypeople’s confinement to the Zone and CA prisons has strong parallels with current debates and protests concerning Australia’s asylum-­seeker policies and offshore detention centres. Furthermore, the abuse suffered by the Hairies in prison … parallels the overrepresentation of Indigenous Australians in prison and brings to mind the video footage of incidents that occurred in 2014 at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre that was broadcast on 25 July 2016 by Four Corners. (28-29)2

In other words, settler colonialism in our real world as well as the world of the series is deeply invested in containing Aboriginal people both temporally and spatially, and indigenous resistance to such containment is often met with violence. The response of white Australian characters in Cleverman to instances of indigenous present-ness suggests how powerfully disturbing it is when indigenous people refuse to be confined, either in physical prisons or in the temporal prison of the past. This violence is graphically enacted in the series in a way that uses the realm of the fantastic to pointedly comment on mundane reality, thus allowing us to examine the tension between the real and the fantastic in meaningful ways. We can see this in a scene that opens with an establishing shot of contemporary Sydney at night. The lighted windows of office towers loom behind a group of young white men on a sidewalk, laughing loudly and shoving each other before boarding a city bus. As they troop noisily down the bus’s center aisle, a sign near the door is visible behind their heads: HARBOURING A HAIRY IS AN OFFENSE.  DON’T RISK IT (S1E1, 00:54). A young Aboriginal woman, Lena (Miranda Tapsell [Larrakia]), seated near the back of the bus with an open book in her lap, glances up at the men apprehensively. They leer, one giving a long wolf-whistle while another grins and tells his mates, “Watch and learn, boys.” This man approaches Lena down the long center aisle. He drops into an empty seat across from her, reaches out, and yanks her headphones off her head. “Good book?” he sneers. She doesn’t answer, keeping her gaze on 2  For more on the torture of Aboriginal youth at the Don Dale Detention Centre, see the ABC investigative report https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-25/four-corners-evidence-ofkids-tear-gas-in-don-dale-prison/7656128

  HISTORY AND OTHER (COLONIAL) FANTASIES: INDIGENOUS TIME PLAY… 

145

her lap. With a sudden, violent lunge, he grabs the book from her hand and holds it behind him. She looks up, her expression stony, and finally speaks. “Can I have my book back?” “Not until you talk to me,” he retorts, the medium close-up on his face and slightly low camera angle underscoring the menace in his tone. “Please,” she replies quietly. He holds the book out to her, across the aisle, but refuses to let go when she tries to take it. She is unexpectedly strong, however, and rips it away from him. His three mates rush down the aisle to join him in looming over her. “You’re tough for a little chick!” “Oooh, show us the muscles!” “You can handle the four us! Come on.” A medium close-up shows her expression turning grim as the men crowd around, laughing (S1E1, 01:35). The young woman has been immediately marked out as inappropriate, out of time and place, her ordinariness in reading a book and riding a bus are an affront to the young men’s fantasies about where/when she ought to be. An Aboriginal woman not in the outback, not confined to the historical past, represents a refusal to dissolve or disappear. The scene deepens the sense of immiscibility, however, in the revelation that occurs next. In an insert shot, we see a close-up of the young woman’s left arm as she deliberately extends it toward the men. She slowly pulls up her long sleeve, revealing her bare forearm, her smooth brown skin covered with tawny hair. In a reverse shot, we see her main tormentor’s face contort with fear as one of his mates exclaims, “She’s a Hairy!” (S1E1, 01:49). “You shouldn’t be outside the Zone, you filthy rug,” another growls, pushing in close to her face. The young woman responds with a powerful slap, her sharp nails slashing two bloody lines across his cheek. The men stumble back up the aisle, shouting “Stop the bus!” “Call the Containment Authority!” as a woman near the driver screams, “There’s a Hairy on the bus!” Lena stands up slowly, and one of the men turns back, a low-angle shot showing him striding menacingly toward her as he snarls, “You’re not going anywhere.” With more-than-human speed and force, she shoves him in the chest, sending him flying down the aisle while the camera, centered between the rows of seats, is framed by converging lines of floor-to-ceiling metal poles on each side of the aisle, evoking prison bars (S1E1, 02:16). Lena performs indigenous time play in this scene in several ways. She emphasizes the symbolic meaning of the Hairypeople as a doubling of Aboriginal presence in the series. She is 60,000 years of history powerfully and physically reified, and her easy comfort in performing supposedly white European modernity—speaking fluent, unmarked English, riding the bus, reading a book—overtly disrupts the settler colonial desire to confine different groups of people in different temporal spaces. And finally, her superhuman indigeneity is presented as a fierce, physical assault on the settler colonial fantasy that rests on the belief that she, like all indigenous peoples, “shouldn’t be outside the Zone.”

146 

S. SPURGEON

The Past Is Never Where You Think You Left It ...3 Although Cleverman clearly has many fantasy elements, in a generic sense it also functions as what Dillon terms Indigenous Futurism, a form of indigenous speculative fiction that “weds sf (science fiction) theory and Native intellectualism, Indigenous scientific literacy, and western techno-cultural science, scientific possibilities enmeshed with Skin thinking” (2-3). Indigenous Futurism in the series intertwines three subgenres of speculative fiction. The first two are fairly obvious; fantasy in the form of the Hairypeople and the superpowers of the Cleverman, and science fiction as embodied by the “western techno-­ cultural science” of the series’ main villain Jerrod Slade and the government surveillance state, which are opposed by the indigenous scientific literacy wielded by the Cleverman. The third, less obvious, narrative form present in the series, and closely tied to its deployment of indigenous time play and the battle for the future, is the sub-genre of speculative fiction known as alternative history, stories in which one or more historical events occur differently than they did in our real world, thus engendering a different future beyond that altered point in time. Catherine Gallagher writes about alternative histories as a form of resistance, examining what she calls their “undoing impulse … the kernel of which is an attempt to change the present by subtracting a past crucial event and thereby sending history off in an alternative direction” diverging from our own reality from the point at which the altered event, the Y-shaped split in the timeline, occurs (11). Alternative histories frequently revolve around such questions as what the world might look like if Alexander the Great had not died young, if the Confederacy hadn’t lost the US Civil War, or if the Nazis hadn’t been defeated by the Allies. Indigenous examples of alt histories often speculate about what the world might look like if the parameters of settler colonialism had been different. Ysleta del Sur Pueblo author Martin Cruz Smith (most widely known for his series of Arkady Renko novels that began in 1981 with his bestselling thriller Gorky Park) wrote an alternative history, The Indians Won (1970), in which the coalition of native nations that defeated Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn do not disband, as history tells us, but instead are able to gain access to arms and munitions, thus allowing them to halt further Euro-­ America settlement and establish a sovereign Indian Nation in the Great Plains of North America4. Cherokee speculative fiction writer William Sanders wrote several alt histories, including the novel Journey to Fusang (1988), which imagines that, rather than turning back at the borders of what is now Austria in 1241 (a decision that still perplexes historians), the Mongols continue their march across the continent, resulting in an economically devastated Europe and a North America in which the primary colonizing powers are the Chinese  Porter, Katherine Anne.  See Spurgeon’s “’The bomb was like the Indians’: Trickster Mimetics and Native Sovereignty in Martin Cruz Smith’s The Indians Won.” American Quarterly. 66.4 (December 2014): 999-1020. 3 4

  HISTORY AND OTHER (COLONIAL) FANTASIES: INDIGENOUS TIME PLAY… 

147

and Moors, also, interestingly, opposed by a native coalition that seeks to establish a sovereign, pan-tribal Indian nation5. Such deliberate interferences in the course of history, Gallagher argues, can “indicate a significant expansion of our sense of plausible chronologies, and … this enlarged sense of temporal possibility correlates with a newly activist, even interventionist, relation to our collective past” (11-12). Cleverman presents a kind of reversed, indigenized alternative history, with Season 1 opening six months in the future, after what is known as “Emergence Day,” when the Hairypeople, previously believed (at least by white Australians) to be imaginary figures from quaint Aboriginal folktales, reveal themselves to the rest of the world. The Hairypeople’s Emergence Day seems to mark the Y-shaped split in the narrative timeline, the point from which the reality of the series diverges from our own, making the series appear to be a kind of fantasy futurism rather than an alternate history. In fact, it is both at once. As Minister Ley’s comment makes clear, the details of what Gallagher calls “our collective past” are precisely what is under contention in both Cleverman and our real world. Cleverman’s indigenous time play deploys indigenized alt history as a means of decolonizing the future through decolonizing, or perhaps recolonizing, the past. It does so via the Y-shaped split and where, precisely, the split is located in time. Because, of course, the Hairypeople did not come into existence the moment they walked into contemporary Sydney on Emergence Day, any more than the continent of Australia popped into being the day Willem Janszoon sailed up to what is now called Cape York Peninsula. Like the Aboriginal people who watched Janszoon and his boat, the Hairypeople were there all along. The first prong of the series’ time play—the Y-shaped split that sets the world off on an unexpected trajectory into the future—is not Emergence Day, it is the Hairypeople’s historical reality in the world of the series prior to their public revelation of themselves. Like the historical reality of Aboriginal people in our own world or the Ebu Gogo on Flores Island, their always/ already there-ness points to an immiscible past that exists in spite of, not because of, European awareness of it. Rather than subtracting a crucial event from history in order to reshape the future, Cleverman adds aboriginality back into it, both in the historical form of the Aboriginal peoples whose 60,000 years of history is referenced in the opening intertitles and through the fantastical presence of the Hairypeople who, like the series’ Aboriginal characters, have been there all along. This form of indigenous time play, locating the split in time that engenders the alternate reality of the series in the depths of a past that not only predates white Australians but also comically destabilizes their version of history, helps viewers understand why settler colonialism must invent fairytales like that of an empty “young continent” in order to legitimate its dubious claims to land. 5  See Spurgeon’s “Indianizing the Western: Semiotic Tricksterism in William Sanders’ Journey to Fusang.” Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre. Eds. Kerry Fine, Rebecca Lush, Michael Johnson, and Sara Spurgeon. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2020.

148 

S. SPURGEON

Instead, Cleverman presents an ancient Australia doubly filled with peoples, nullifying twice over the British assertion that Australia was terra nullius. The scene of Lena on the bus collapses the distance settler colonialism wants to perceive between a past supposedly empty of people, and a present fondly imagined to be possessed by white Europeans. It does so by reifying figures from the stories of Aboriginal peoples, which, as the opening intertitles remind us, stretch back in an unbroken line for 60,000—not 200—years. The overall narrative structure of Cleverman works in a similar fashion, constantly weaving together actual events from Australian history into its contemporary fantasy future setting, never allowing these events to be dissolved away into settler colonial fantasies of the past. Ford argues that “Cleverman does not directly reference these events, but instead evokes them through imagery that is bound to the fantastical elements of the superhero genre. This coupling of fantasy and real-life events speaks to the role of storytelling and the way in which history is continually remade in the present” (23). Emergence Day, the most potently symbolic of these events, may seem to be the most fantastical to non-Australian viewers, but it references quite directly the actual historical emergence in October 1984 of the Tjapaltjarri clan, a group of Pintupi-speaking people, previously unknown to non-Aboriginal Australians, who maintained their traditional lifeways by hiding for decades in the remote Gibson Desert near what is now the Western Australia-Northern Territories border. The Tjapaltjarri’s years of secrecy followed by their decision to make contact with the small Aboriginal community of Kiwirrkura, was a major news event covered by Australian media for months afterward6. In evoking this historical emergence through the similar emergence of the legendary Hairypeople, the series uses an instance of real-world immiscible times to remind contemporary viewers of why the Tjapaltjarri stayed in hiding for so long. The emergence of the Hairypeople, like the historical emergence of the Tjapaltjarri, acts as the spectacular, embodied return of the living Aboriginal past. Further, their fate in the series—to be imprisoned as sub-human threats to white Australians—brings the two prongs of the series’ indigenous time play into contact with each other.

What If You Came Back Now/To Our New World, the City Roaring 7 While the first prong of indigenous time play in Cleverman reaches back 60,000 years, the second springs forward, pointing to the present and the future. This second prong moves in a generational sense, on the level of human time, reminding viewers that the last 60,000 years in Australia did not involve merely abstract history but the lives of individual people and their families whose 6   For more on the Tjapaltjarri clan’s emergence, see https://www.bbc.com/news/ magazine-30500591 7  Noonuccal, Oodgeroo.

  HISTORY AND OTHER (COLONIAL) FANTASIES: INDIGENOUS TIME PLAY… 

149

members bear the weight of that history today. Time rhythmically expands and collapses around and between the series’ older and younger Aboriginal characters, highlighting their evolving relationships with their own history, with white Australians, and with the Hairypeople as living representatives of ancient, and possibly competing, claims to land. The continuous attempts by the settler colonial government to achieve an Aboriginal-free Australia through overt and covert racism entwined with economic policies that produce poverty is a repeated trope across both seasons of Cleverman. These attempts are manifested in part via offers of assimilation and social acceptance by whites that are held out as a racial bribe to Aboriginal peoples as a means of discouraging them from making common cause with the Hairypeople even as their own communities are being decimated by the ongoing effects of colonialism. The destruction these policies visit on successive generations of Aboriginal peoples is explored through the dual storylines of the two Gumbaynggirr half-­ brothers at the center of the series. They are reimagined figures from a traditional aboriginal tale that exists in various versions across multiple clans. The two half-brothers are building very different lives in contemporary Sydney— one embracing his Aboriginal heritage while the other tries to escape it. Waruu West (Rob Collins [Tiwi]), the older brother, is handsome, articulate, well-­ educated, and has dedicated himself to a life of activism and community organizing. He lives with his wife Nerida (Jada Alberts [Larrakia, Bardi, Wadaman, Yanua]) and teenage daughter Alinta (Tamala Shelton [Boroondara]) in a shabby apartment block in the Zone. Although he could afford a more upscale house elsewhere in Sydney, he feels an address in the Zone where he grew up keeps him in touch with his people and offers political street cred. A high-­ profile figure even outside the Zone, Waruu West makes the rounds of talk shows and TV interviews, speaking out in defense of both the Aboriginal and Hairypeople inhabitants of the Zone. He is politically savvy, understands the modern media soundbite, and spends much of his time in Season 1 trying to organize the various, often hostile, factions in the Zone. His younger half-brother Koen West (Hunter Djalai Yumunu Page-Lochard [Nunukul/Munaldjali]) lives outside the Zone in a flat above the struggling nightclub he is barely able to keep from bankruptcy. He gets extra cash by taking money from Hairypeople trying to flee the Zone, smuggling them to an apartment safe house in Sydney, then turning them in to the Containment Authority to collect a reward. When his white friend and employee, Blair (Ryan Corr), expresses discomfort over the fact that Hairypeople caught outside the Zone wind up in Containment Authority prisons from which they never seem to emerge, Koen dismisses his concerns, opining that at least they get three square meals a day. After Koen and Blair smuggle a Hairypeople family, consisting of a mother, father, and three children, out of the Zone and into the apartment they use as a fake safe house, Blair remarks uneasily, “You didn’t tell me there’d be kids” (S1E1, 12:08). “They’re probably older than both of us combined,” Koen shrugs as he dials the Containment Authority Hotline from his van outside the apartment block.

150 

S. SPURGEON

S1E1 appears to situate Waruu as the “good” brother and obvious heir to the current Cleverman, the brothers’ elderly Uncle Jimmy (Jack Charles [Bunurong/Wiradjuri]), but E2 complicates this by introducing tensions around Aboriginal identity, authenticity, and blood, similar to the tensions involving language, tradition, and blood quantums in North American indigenous communities. It is a tension that feels very personal to Griffin, who explains, My son’s mother and I are both light-skinned Aboriginal people who strongly embrace our Aboriginality. Why does the color of our skin matter to this story? Because growing up, I constantly had to fight for my Aboriginality. I was presented with casual racism on a regular basis. … Whenever I would tell people that I was Aboriginal, they questioned it immediately: “What percentage are you?” or, “Yeah, but you’re one of the good ones.” Others would flat out deny my claim of my heritage until they saw my father, and then those questions were laid to rest. But for my son, he won’t get that opportunity; people will look at me, and still ask him the same questions. (Interview, The Guardian)

Griffen’s vision of aboriginal identity, in other words, is not tightly bound to blood or skin color, but to a genuine embrace of Aboriginal culture and traditions, as well as a belief that those traditions can and should be, like The Dreaming, an ongoing concern, changing and evolving as time passes. The passage of time and the physical manifestation of these changes is embodied in the legacies, both good and bad, that each generation in the series bequeaths to the next. Cleverman presents the troubling power of this legacy in a family history combining the tensions Griffin addresses with a reimagined version of the traditional story involving the two brothers. This is in itself, of course, an example of traditions undergoing change and evolution, as Kristin Dowell points out, “Indigenous stories do not automatically or seamlessly transition from story to screen—this is an active process full of choices made at every stage of preproduction, production, and postproduction that involves negotiating the interface of digital technology, filmic conventions, indigenous knowledge, and cultural poetics of storytelling” [emphasis in original] (167). While Dowell references indigenous stories in aboriginal Canadian cinema, Griffen confirms her argument, stating, Aboriginal protocols are complex to navigate and informed much of our process. We could sit in the writers’ room and come up with something amazing that hit all the genre beats to make a great hour of television, but if it crossed the line of what we can say and do around Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal stories, then we had to revise our thinking. These are protocols put in place by Aboriginal elders who passed the stories over to me for the show … The elders were trying to achieve something very special that would help to keep our culture growing. (Ford, 31)

  HISTORY AND OTHER (COLONIAL) FANTASIES: INDIGENOUS TIME PLAY… 

151

The trope of growth and evolution of culture and stories across generations is initiated in a pivotal scene illustrating the ways immiscible threads of the past permeate, sometimes violently, the present and future. The scene is constructed as a flashback sequence shot in a palette drained of the intense colors employed in other scenes. On a meager square of scrubby grass outside a rundown apartment block in the ghetto now called the Zone, a series of grainy, handheld shots depict a young Koen, possibly twelve years old, being pinned to the ground and beaten by the larger, teenage Waruu, who sneers down at his younger half-brother, “Koen, your mom was a white whore! You coconut” (S1E2, 10:14). In addition to fleshing out the brothers’ backstory (their Aboriginal father had an affair with a white woman who was Koen’s mother), the scene sets up the outlines of the traditional story introduced later in which a grandfather must decide which of his two grandsons to pass his knowledge and power on to, the sun or the moon. He chooses the sun. This makes the moon angry, and he becomes jealous of his brother, the sun. Passing on indigenous knowledge and power to a younger generation in a world in which Aboriginal identity is constantly under threat is especially fraught and perilous. As S1 opens, Koen clearly accepts the settler colonial notion that Aboriginal traditions are tied to a past he finds irrelevant to his life in contemporary Sydney. To accept those traditions, he feels, is to accept a version of himself as imprisoned, static, and impotent. The pressure to dissolve aboriginality through assimilation plays out in the series as an ongoing assault on indigenous identity, particularly as its definition is made and remade over time. The assault causes schisms between and within Aboriginal clans, families, and generations stretching backward and forward in time, a movement the series depicts both narratively and visually. This movement between times, an intrinsic part of the indigenous time play in the series, is visually reified in the scene in which the West brothers’ troubled Uncle Jimmy arranges for Koen, not Waruu, to take his place as Cleverman. Uncle Jimmy, who struggles with alcohol addiction, has a fraught relationship with the series’ main villain, Jerrod Slade. Uncle Jimmy has accepted monetary payments from Slade, who presents himself as a white ally interested in learning from a “real Cleverman” about Aboriginal traditions he wants to help preserve. Although Uncle Jimmy is not aware of Slade’s secret ownership of the private contracting firm that runs the Containment Authority, its prisons, or the labs that use Hairypeople prisoners in medical experiments, he begins to suspect Slade has more sinister motives, prompting him to decide the time has come to anoint a new Cleverman. In this third act scene, increasingly fast and jarring crosscuts rhythmically evoke the experiences of Aboriginal Australians moving back and forth between generations and between white-dominated and Aboriginal cultural spaces. This movement, both between time and between epistemologies, is visually represented on screen via crosscutting. Such movement is, according to Marks, another characteristic of intercultural cinema which attempts to “represent the experience of living between two or more cultural regimes of knowledge” (1).

152 

S. SPURGEON

In the series, these cultural regimes meet, then part, then come together again, beginning when Uncle Jimmy leaves Slade in disgust and goes to Koen’s bar. Here he gives his nephew a polished wooden club called a nulla nulla, traditionally used for hunting or fighting. Koen accepts the sacred object reluctantly, making clear he is uninterested in what he considers the empty trappings of dead traditions, but Jimmy tells him sternly, “This is not a game. Time you decided which tribe you belong to” (S1E1, 23:46). The first in an escalating series of crosscuts then shows Uncle Jimmy, in a wide-angle shot, standing alone on a deserted beach later that evening. Across the dark, rippling waters of Sydney harbor, the sun sets behind the cranes and high-rises of the city’s waterfront. Electric lights lay trails of white and orange across the choppy water, pointing toward the empty beach where a backlit Uncle Jimmy drags old boards and driftwood into a pile. When he dumps gasoline on the boards and lights them, the crackling, wind-whipped flames are dwarfed by the city on the other side of the bay, but nevertheless their orange glow outshines the distant electric lights. As the sound of a non-diegetic digeridoo slowly builds, Jimmy stands in front of the fire and begins chanting quietly in Gumbaynggirr, “Come on. It’s all right. Come on. Complete the circle. Come on” (S1E1, 31:01). This visually balanced juxtaposition of empty beach and crowded city is interrupted by an abrupt crosscut to a blurred, low-angle close-up of Koen’s face, loud diegetic dance music thumping as a rack shot slowly pulls Koen’s face into focus out of the dark background of the noisy nightclub, suggesting his distance, physical and emotional, from Uncle Jimmy, even as the color palette visually connects the two men. The blackness of the crowded, hectic nightclub is pierced, like the dark waters of Sydney harbor, by harsh artificial lights, bright white underlighting coming from fancy LEDs embedded in the surface of the bar Koen stands behind. An insert shot shows Koen’s hand in extreme close-up grasping a bottle of Grenadine, slowly pouring the blood-red syrup into a glass of orange juice illuminated by the bar’s underlighting, making it glow eerily as the crimson liquid swirls through the lurid orange Tequila Sunrise Koen mixes for a customer. Another abrupt crosscut returns viewers to a shot of the night sky, as the camera slowly pans down to Uncle Jimmy who stands on the silent, windy beach where the only sounds are the rhythmic waves and the crackling of the fire. We see his face in close-up, patiently scanning the sky above Sydney, a contrast to the jittery nervousness of Koen and the constant, frenetic movement and noise of his nightclub. In a reverse angle shot across the harbor, what appears to be a small, flaming meteorite is seen emerging, like Koen’s face, from the darkness of the night sky. It streaks over Sydney before splashing violently in the black water, its orange light abruptly extinguished. Jimmy smiles broadly in another close-up, the wind whipping the orange flames of the fire and his frizzy white hair, backlit like a halo around his head. He unzips his jacket, exposing his bare chest, and stands smiling, waiting calmly as an unseen creature, growling off camera, emerges from the water and rushes toward him.

  HISTORY AND OTHER (COLONIAL) FANTASIES: INDIGENOUS TIME PLAY… 

153

The next crosscut takes viewers to a medium close-up of Koen and Ash (Stef Dawson), a young white woman who works in the nightclub and is Blair’s girlfriend. Ash sits on a counter in the storage room at the back of the bar and a panting Koen is having sex with her before he suddenly staggers away and sprawls on the concrete floor. A brief, high angle insert shot of his unconscious face show a strange red swelling on his left eyelid. When Ash and Blair, who rushes in after hearing Ash’s cries for help, assist Koen to his feet, he wipes blood away from his left eye but assures them he is fine. Back on the beach, a motionless camera at ground level focuses on Uncle Jimmy who lies on his back in the sand, his ribcage violently torn apart, the fire scattered and dying behind him, flickeringly illuminating his frizzy white hair and a strange blue glow that flares then fades from his half-open left eye (S1E1, 34:48). Viewers understand that something involving the legacy of Aboriginal tradition possessed by Uncle Jimmy has passed to Koen, and that its passage across generations was precipitated by the violent, sacrificial death of the older man. This is not the traditional way in which a new Cleverman is initiated. Eventually, viewers learn that Uncle Jimmy has called a creature known as a Namorrodor, a being that only turns up “when things are out of balance” (S1E1, 35:44). Returning things to a balance, it is implied, will be a bloody business requiring enormous sacrifice. The full extent of the trauma and violence attached to this passage of tradition and power from one generation to the next under the complicating regime of settler colonialism is made clear in a scene later in the episode when Waruu has figured out that it was Koen who betrayed the Hairypeople family to the Containment Authority, whose agents shot and killed the youngest daughter during the arrest. Waruu goes to Koen’s bar, accompanied by his lieutenant/enforcer, a tall, powerful Hairy punningly named Harry. Waruu accuses Koen of betraying the Hairypeople family and when Koen flips him off, Harry grabs Koen’s upraised middle finger and tears it from his hand, dropping the bleeding digit disdainfully as Koen sinks to the floor, moaning and clutching his injured hand. After Waruu and Harry leave, Koen snatches up his severed finger and thrusts it into the bar towel he wraps around his mutilated hand, but minutes later, when he unwraps his hand and rinses the blood away in the sink, the finger has reattached itself, the wound closed and perfectly healed. Koen’s left eye flares into a blue glow that dies away but leaves his iris, previously dark brown, now a startling blue. Koen’s brown Aboriginal face with one electric-blue eye is used as the promotional image for the series, and it is also the symbol of his new status as the inheritor of the mantle of Cleverman, visually signifying the supernatural powers he now possesses. Much of Waruu’s resentment of Koen (in addition to his not unreasonable distrust of his brother’s lifestyle and moral choices) is bound up in his belief that Koen’s mixed racial heritage means he is not Aboriginal enough to inherit or defend important Aboriginal traditions. And yet for Waruu, the 60,000-year-old traditions he obsesses over are not a tie to an immiscible past that should be carried into the present or used to shape an Aboriginal future, but rather a means of obtaining personal political power and

154 

S. SPURGEON

commanding fear and respect from those he purports to serve. It is a club (reified in the nulla nulla he fiercely covets) he would like to use to beat others into obedience, but which he is willing to sacrifice or destroy to preserve his own position of influence. Waruu cannot see beyond the present moment or understand, as Koen eventually does, the more than metaphoric or symbolic connection between past and future that the Dreaming and the Cleverman must unite. Season 1 of Cleverman ends with the CA crushing an uprising of Hairypeople and humans in the Zone led by Koen, who appears to die in a hail of bullets, emphasizing the violence settler colonialism is willing to undertake in order to vanish indigenous peoples. This seems to suggest settler colonial fantasies have succeeded in containing Aboriginal and Hairypeople both temporally and spatially, as survivors of the massacre are loaded into CA vans to be transported to secret prisons. Season 2, however, opens with Koen’s bullet-ridden body transforming into a falcon and flying out of Jerrod Slade’s laboratory. Privately, Slade has come to believe that in the face of catastrophic challenges like global climate change, it is indigenous peoples who have proven themselves able to adapt to the world around them by surviving even the apocalypse of colonialism who will ultimately inherit the future. The cultural sterility of white Australians, Slade suggests, is literally written in their DNA. To prevent the calamitous future vanishing of white people, he carries out secret medical experiments, first on Aboriginal people and then on imprisoned Hairypeople. His goal is to extract their vitality, their adaptability—their indigeneity—to produce a serum to inject into himself and other white Australians. The assault of settler colonialism has been reimagined within this speculative fiction of Cleverman as a literal battle for future possession of the continent and the continuing survivance of Aboriginal peoples. Can 60,000 years of history and stories be removed from indigenous bodies, made miscible—forcibly dissolved—and then absorbed by white Australians, successfully realizing the settler colonial fantasy of an Aboriginal-free Australia?

He Kakano i Ruia Mai i Rangiatea ̄ 8 Four weeks after the Australian Environment Minister’s inadvertently revealing interview, Alexis Wright (Waanyi) wrote a more prosaic sort of rebuttal than the fantastical one offered by Cleverman to the settler colonial fantasy of a young, empty continent only recently touched by human hands. Like Cleverman, however, Wright’s response utilizes indigenous time play to disrupt settler colonialism’s fanciful temporalities and fictional history. She points out that in the face of the catastrophic wildfires, Australia’s government has the option of drawing on 60,000 years of time-tested, highly effective “Indigenous techniques that lessen the damage that fires cause” (Wright). Aboriginal people 8  Sullivan, Robert. His poem “Waka 65” opens with this phrase, taken from the proverb “E kore au e ngaro he  kakano i  ruia mai i  Rangiātea” (I shall never be  lost, the  seed which was  sown from Rangiātea).

  HISTORY AND OTHER (COLONIAL) FANTASIES: INDIGENOUS TIME PLAY… 

155

have urged the Australian government at least since the devastating 2009 Black Saturday Fires to consider these techniques, she reminds readers, developed by “our ancestors [who] have adapted to changing climatic conditions here for millenniums.” Wright spoke with Mrrandoo Yanner, a Gangalidda leader who directs the Jigija Indigenous Fire Training Program. Mr. Yanner, Wright says pointedly, is “a man made for these times,” who reminds her “of the strength of our ancient country.” As Australia staggers under the failure of settler colonial science and epistemology to safely and effectively manage the land it seized, Wright reports, Yanner explained to her that “the way forward is back. ‘If we can understand, learn from and imagine our place through the … stories of our ancestors, then we will have true knowledge on how to live, adapt and survive in Australia, just as our ancestors did’” (Wright).

Works Cited Dillon, Grace L., ed. Walking the clouds: An anthology of indigenous science fiction. University of Arizona Press, 2012. Dowell, Kristin. Sovereign Screens: Aboriginal Media on the Canadian West Coast. University of Nebraska Press (reprint edition), 2017. Faulkner, William. Requiem for a Nun, 1951. Ford, Felicity. “Screen dreaming in ‘Cleverman’: Reimagining indigenous identities” [online]. Screen Education, No. 85, June 2017: 26-35. Gallagher, Catherine. “Undoing.” Newman, Karen, Jay Clayton, and Marianne Hirsch, eds. Time and the Literary. Psychology Press, 2002. 11-30. Griffen, Ryan, creator. Cleverman. ABC (Australia) and Sundance TV, 2016-2017. Griffen, Ryan. Interview https://www.theguardian.com/tv-­and-­radio/2016/ may/27/i-­c reated-­c leverman-­f or-­m y-­s on-­b ecause-­w e-­n eed-­m ore-­a boriginal-­ superheroes Lahr, M. and Richard Wright. “The Question of Robusticity and the Relationship between Cranial Size and Shape in Homo sapiens.” Journal of Human Evolution. Vol. 31, issue 2, August 1996 : 157-191. Ley, Sussan. Interviewed on (https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/am/ govt-­is-­working-­to-­address-­threats-­to-­native-­species:-­ley/11828480). Lim, Bliss Cua. Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique. Duke University Press, 2009. Marks, Laura. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Duke University Press, 2000. Noonuccal, Oodgeroo. “Understand Old One,” from My People: A Kath Walker Collection. Milton: Jacaranda Press, 1970. 68-69. Norwood, Mike, Thomas Sutikna, Richard Roberts. “Flores Find: Lost World of the Little People.” National Geographic, April 2005: 16-27. Porter, Katherine Anne. Part II “High Sea,” in Ship of Fools. Little, Brown and Company, 1945. 146. Schrage, Michael. Serious Play: How the World’s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate. Harvard Business Review Press, 1999.

156 

S. SPURGEON

Smith, C. & Burke, H. “An Introduction to Indigenous Australia.” Digging It Up Down Under. World Archaeological Congress Cultural Heritage Manual Series. Springer: NY. 2007. Sullivan, Robert. “Waka 65.” Star Waka. Auckland: Auckland UP, 1999. 74. “The Day the Pintupi Nine Entered the Modern World,” BBC News Magazine, 23 December 2014 (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-­30500591) Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of genocide research 8.4 (2006): 387-409. Wright, Alexis. “Want to Stop Australia’s Fires? Listen to Aboriginal People.” New York Times, January 15, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/15/opinion/ australia-­fires-­aboriginal-­people.html (accessed April 3, 2020).

Chinese Danmei: Male-Male Romance, Women’s Fantasy, and the Feminization of Labor in the Digital Age Zhange Ni

Danmei 耽美 (literally, addicted to beauty)1 is a new popular genre that emerged in China around the turn of the twenty-first century (Feng 2009). It is assumed that the Danmei fiction, which features romantic (and often, sexual) relationships between male characters, is produced and consumed primarily by women using electronic devices and digital media. This unique genre requires critical attention as it embodies the entanglement of two popular genres— romance and fantasy—in the age of digital capitalism. It is worth noting at the outset that the term fantasy refers to not only a popular genre devoted to the fabrication of magical otherworld(s)2 but also a mental faculty that forms images of non-present things (Tolkien 2008). This psychic process generates 1  A compound borrowed from Japan, danmei, pronounced tanbi in Japanese, is one of the several alternative labels for “boys love” (hereafter bl) in Japan, originally a type of manga. Although Chinese writers and readers have been using bl and danmei interchangeably, I opt for the latter to stress both danmei’s involvement in the transnational circulation of male-male romance and its Chinese characteristics. 2  It is scholarly consensus that fantasy as a literary mode emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century (James and Mendlesohn 2012), but fantasy was not used as a commercial label designating a popular genre until the late 1960s and early 1970s (Williamson 2015).

Z. Ni (*) Department of Religion and Culture, Virginia Tech, Blaksburg, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2_11

157

158 

Z. NI

cultural products (de Lauretis 1999) and provides a mechanism for the staging of desire and the making of the human subject (Laplanche and Pontalis 1968). This explains why romance is often described as women’s fantasies (Modelski 2008). In danmei romance, by fantasizing male-male relationships deviating from social reality, Chinese women have gone beyond constructing their own sexual subjectivities to reflect upon the gendered experiences of digital labor. Although fantasy as a popular genre was marginalized due to its close association with the denigrated magic or superstition, it started to go mainstream in the late twentieth century, when capitalism shifted from an industrial mode to digitalization, understood as the permeation of digital technologies, the restructuring of capital and labor, and the valorization of capital through the capture of life experiences not limited to the bounded time and space of work (Fumagalli and Morini 2011). A new main source of production and accumulation is immaterial labor. Performed by material non/human bodies to generate knowledge and experiences, immaterial labor is cognitive and affective—symbolic-analytic tasks on the one hand and caring labor that produces subjectivities and communities on the other (Lazzarato 1996; Hardt 1999). An internet-based genre, danmei as fantastic romance or romantic fantasy is produced by the immaterial labor of women-dominated communities and in its diegetic space thematizes the cognitive and affective aspects of immaterial labor. More specifically, danmei stories project women’s labor experiences—including but not limited to sex and other activities in the space of social reproduction—onto male characters to capture the so-called feminization of labor, the reorganizing of labor in general using women’s experiences as a model. In what follows, I track the generic histories of romance and fantasy in twentieth-­century China up to the rise of internet literature and then introduce danmei’s two predecessors, Japanese bl and American slash, both male-male romance of fantastic leanings. I offer in the second section a discussion of digital capitalism, the cultural logic of fantasy’s ascent at the present moment, and danmei as a window onto the feminized model of immaterial labor and its ambiguous relationship to capital. In the third and last section, I analyze how two danmei novels, Yiyu’s 亦域 Huangliang 黄粱 (Golden Millet, 2004–5, hereafter GM) and Moxiang Tongxiu’s 墨香铜臭 Renzha fanpai zijiu xitong 人 渣反派自救系统 (Scumbag System, 2014, hereafter SS),3 creatively respond to the changes in the extratextual world. Both romance and fantasy, although deeply rooted in premodern antecedents, are distinctly modern Western phenomena linked to an array of developments in the age of industrialization (Radway 2009; Mendleson and James 2012). In the modern Chinese language, the counterpart of romance fiction is 3  The first novel is available online at http://www.quanben.io/n/huangliang/list.html. The second novel has been translated into English and published by Seven Seas in December 2021 and is available on Amazon https://www.amazon.fr/Scum-Villains-Self-Saving-System-Englishebook/dp/B09JRX3MJX.

 CHINESE DANMEI: MALE-MALE ROMANCE, WOMEN’S FANTASY… 

159

yanqing xiaoshuo 言情小说 (fiction that speaks of love). The term appeared in the 1910s, if not earlier, and was used to designate sentimental love stories.4 The Chinese translation of the term fantasy as a generic and commercial label appeared as late as the 1990s. In Chinese, fantasy is translated as qihuan 奇幻 (the marvelous and the fantastic), which parallels xuanhuan 玄幻 (the mysterious and the fantastic).5 The two neologisms have been applied to the two branches of Chinese fantasy emerging in the twenty-first century, with qihuan designating Western-style fantasy novels written in the Chinese language, and xuanhuan, fantasy novels drawing on the magical ideas and practices of Chinese traditions. Chinese fantasy writing appeared much earlier, however. In the 1920s and '30s, wuxia xiaoshuo 武侠小说 (fiction of martial arts and knightserrant) emerged, with wuxia often followed by shenguai 神怪 (spirits and anomalies), which marked the fantastic nature of this genre (Fan 1999; Hamm 2019). Both yanqing and wuxia writers were lumped into the disparaging category of yuanyang hudie pai 鸳鸯蝴蝶派 (Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School) by cultural elites committed to modernizing Chinese literature (Link 1981). While mandarin ducks and butterflies were symbols of paired lovers in traditional literature, the expression expanded radically in the early 1920s to include a variety of allegedly old-style fiction meant for “escapist” entertainment. Yanqing stories, if they properly channeled the love between the individuals into the non-trivial project of nation-building, were deemed acceptable and eventually subsumed into revolutionary literature (Liu 2003; Lee 2006). Wuxia novels and their film adaptations, on the other hand, were banned by the modernizing states for promoting the unwanted superstition (Goossaert and Palmer 2011: 50–63; Hamm 2019: 136–149). In 1949, the Communist Party founded the People’s Republic of China on the mainland, where the government promoted socialist realism, valuing literature as a tool for the education of the masses while banning popular fiction as a commercialized form of entertainment. Yanqing and wuxia disappeared on the mainland but continued to flourish in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and throughout the Chinese diaspora. In the 1980s, mainland China started pursuing economic and political liberalization and reopened itself to the world. Yanqing and wuxia novels were imported, or, more precisely, largely pirated, from overseas. When novels of love and magic stormed the Chinese market, giving rise to a fledgling pirating and renting industry, the real game-changer took the stage, the internet. Decades of suppression of popular novels, the lack of a 4  In the early years of the twentieth century, xieqing 写情—writing about love, proposed by Wu Jianren 吴趼人(1866–1910)—and yanqing—speaking of love, used by Yun Tieqiao 恽铁樵 (1878–1935) to designate love stories published in popular journals—were both generic markers for novels of sentiment. 5  Qihuan was coined in 1992 by Zhu Xueheng 朱学恒, a Taiwanese writer who introduced Western fantasy novels in Ruanti shijie 软体世界 (Software World), a PC game magazine. Xuanhuan, a very similar term, was coined in 1988 by Huang Yi 黄易 (1952–2017), a wuxia writer based in Hong Kong who strove to bring back the supernatural.

160 

Z. NI

print-based network of presses, bookstores, and other institutions, and the new opportunities offered by the internet all contributed to the boom of internet-­ based genre fiction. In the late 1990s, a new form of piracy was to scan yanqing and wuxia books and put digitized versions online. Fiction-sharing websites mushroomed, some of which later purchased copyrights for pirated books (Xue 2018: 28; Chu 2019: 111–12). Next, discussion bulletins were created on those sharing sites, a space for enthusiastic readers to discuss digitized novels. When the young generation became tired of reading the limited number of available popular novels, they began to write new stories and upload them, create new genres, and bring about Chinese internet literature, defined as “Chinese-language writing…written especially for publication in an interactive online context and meant to be read on-screen” (Hockx 2015: 4). In its early years—the late 1990s and early 2000s—Chinese internet literature was a decentralized network of creative commons where amateur writers made their works freely available to a vast readership. Among attempts to commercialize internet-based writing and reading, the pay-per-read model invented in 2002–3 proved to be successful (Chu 2019: 115–118). Literary websites adopting this model, such as Qidian 起点, signed contracts with popular writers and charge the readers an access fee for each chapter of serialized novels. The revenue thus generated is split between the website, which has become a literary platform, and the writers, contracted workers not unlike Uber drivers. Readers of internet literature are digital laborers too. They pour their free labor onto these specialized platforms, interacting with writers to participate in the creative processes, discuss and promote their favorite novels using social media, and form fan communities for various online and offline activities. Currently, internet literature is one of the most vibrant creative industries controlled by media capital and monitored by the state, although non-­ commercial writing/reading has persisted. According to the 2020 report on the developments of internet literature released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China had 467 million readers of internet literature and 8.9 million contracted writers with the Yuewen group alone, the country’s largest online publishing corporation. The 2019 report estimated the total number of writers, including those contracted with smaller companies or not contracted, to be around 17.55 million.6 While popular fiction is favored by capital that has gathered under the rubric of digital media, the old discourse to stigmatize romance and fantasy is still adopted by the Chinese state, which deploys state-­ controlled media and other ideological apparatuses to promote realist literature and regularly launches “Internet Purifying” campaigns to lock or delete improper (mainly pornographic) materials at major platforms such as Qidian 6  Starting in 2016, China released a yearly governmental report on internet literature. The latest three are the 2018 report: http://culture.people.com.cn/n1/2019/0810/c429145-31287235. html; 2019 report: http://www.chinawriter.com.cn/n1/2020/0220/c404027-31595926.html; and 2020 report: https://new.qq.com/omn/20210327/20210327A0C3BE00.html.

 CHINESE DANMEI: MALE-MALE ROMANCE, WOMEN’S FANTASY… 

161

and Jinjiang 晋江. The former claims to be the world’s largest literary platform and is known for its huge amount of fantasy novels. The latter is the world’s largest woman-centered literary portal specializing in romance, the digital equivalence of Harlequin Mills & Boon. Qidian and Jinjiang originated as fiction-sharing sites for wuxia and yanqing fans respectively. The gendered divide between women’s romance and manly fantasy was replicated in the digital age, with Jinjiang and Qidian, like many other sites, catering separately to female and male readers. However, underneath the surface of gender/genre division is the intra-action of what has always been entangled. Internet-based romance at and beyond Jinjiang has exploded into a conglomerate of new subgenres, many fantastic (Feng 2013, Xue 2018). To accommodate women enthusiastically refashioning fantasy subgenres originally meant for men, Qidian has split into the male channel and the female channel, the latter now an independent site. Located at the intersection of romance and fantasy is danmei, love and adventure stories of male characters imagined by and for women. In the early 1990s, Japanese bl manga was pirated into mainland China via Taiwan.7 Young women began to write male-male love stories in the late 1990s, mostly fanfiction derived from Japanese manga and anime. When American movies and TV shows became popular in the early years of the twenty-first century, the tradition of slash writing also extended into China. It is to be emphasized that original male-male romance fiction not dependent on a pre-existing “canon” flourished as well. Beyond China, back in the 1970s, bl and slash emerged almost simultaneously in Japan and America. A branch of shôjo (young girls) manga, bl was produced by women artists and later expanded to include other media forms, all for consumption by a female audience (Levi et al. 2010; McLelland 2015). Slash is a type of fanfiction written by and for female fans of cultic TV shows such as Star Trek. These women transformed the homo-social attachment in the source texts into the homosexual passion between male heroes (Lamb and Veith 1986). It has been argued that women artists in Japan depicted beautiful boys as the displaced selves of adolescent girl readers who sought to escape, if not to change, the gender and sexual norms of mainstream texts and the real-­ life world (Welker 2006). The parallel story in America is that female fans of cultic TV shows articulated their yearning for opportunities of self-­development and ideal relationships beyond sexism, patriarchy, and heternormativity by rewriting male characters as radical equals adopting unfixed, non-binary gender roles while exploring the universe beyond everyday reality (Jenkins 1992; Salmon and Symons 2001). Male-male romance awaits the exploration of fantasy scholars. Bl manga is blatantly fantastic, “generally set beyond Japan, in the borrowed psychic space of a romanticized Europe of the past, thus visually and narratively transporting 7  For the spread of Japanese bl into Taiwan, see Martin 2012. However, research still needs to be done on how bl further journeyed from Taiwan into mainland China.

162 

Z. NI

shôjo readers to a world they can only fantasize about inhabiting” (Welker 2006: 842).8 On the other side of the planet, slash is a hybrid genre of romance, pornography, and sci-fi/fantasy (Penley 1992). More interestingly, it has been argued that the homoeroticism of slash fiction is not imposed onto the media sources but a subtext of fantasy that celebrates adventure beyond everyday reality and is intrinsically incompatible with heterosexual relationships in the domestic realm (Jones 2002). Both bl and slash tell fantastic love stories, whether we interpret fantasy as a psychic process or a popular genre. Following their lead, danmei is no exception. Bl, slash, and danmei, all portraying male-male romance, constitute a woman-centered space where writers and readers experiment with alternative masculinities to construct female sexual subjects. Male characters in these stories are more fantastic than real, serving as the alter egos and ideal lovers for women rather than passively reflecting men, male bodies, and masculinities in the real world. They embody the so-called hybrid masculinities, fictional constructs simultaneously deviating from and aligned with the normative, hegemonic forms of masculinity (Allen 2019). Male-male romance by and for women often abounds in sexually explicit details, standing in contrast to traditional pornography targeting a male audience or heterosexual romance in which female characters are merely sexual objects or are asexual. Sexual relations between male protagonists are meant to stage the fantasy of women writers and readers, who are interpellated as sexual subjects and then form female communities (Ziv 2015; Neville 2018; Russ 1985). Influenced by its forerunners, Chinese danmei is a field for women’s sexual fantasies. However, born in a digital environment, danmei is irreducible to sexual fantasies. It is where women reappropriate the literary tradition of popular fantasy and, more significantly, perform and discuss immaterial labor in the age of digital capitalism. Digital capitalism is a new phase of capitalism that came into being in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.9 The domination of information and communication technologies, especially the internet, has rendered social life into an invisible, diffused factory. In this social factory, work is no longer just a circumscribed part of life but a comprehensive action; human experience in toto is subsumed into the production and accumulation of capital, one that covers not just labor processes but life processes (Gill and Pratt 2008; Vercellone 2007). What digital capitalism exploits is physical as well as immaterial labor. Entire sets of infrastructures have been built to capture and capitalize on human cognitive and affective capacities (Fumagalli et al. 2019; Karppi et al. 2016). Against this background, creativity, the imagination of something not given, has dethroned reason as the new driving engine of capitalism (Agustín et al.

 Bl has already been studied as fantasy. See Omoto 2015; Madill 2016.  For an introduction to this new kind of capitalism and the new economy in the digital era, see Huws 2019: 2–3. 8 9

 CHINESE DANMEI: MALE-MALE ROMANCE, WOMEN’S FANTASY… 

163

2015). It is this age of creativity that witnesses the global ascent of fantasy, of which Chinese internet literature is an integral aspect. On the one hand, the immaterial products generated by cognitive labor are represented by intellectual properties such as patents, trademarks, procedures, algorithms, and, most relevant to this study, popular novels. Striving for creativity, cognitive labor integrates expertise, synthesis, and intuition to “find solutions to complex problems when analytical, deductive and causal logic are not sufficient…, when predications relying upon statistical probabilities about the state of the world have failed” (Boutang 2015: 237). Tapping into collective human intelligence, cognitive labor is inseparable from linguistic and communicative activities and depends on a space, a network of interactions and cooperation, such as the internet (Fumagalli 2015). On the other hand, affective labor brings into being collective subjects through human contact and interaction. Capable of arousing desires, activating subjects, and mobilizing crowds, affect is a source of economic effect beyond rationality and provides a foundation for cognitive-creative labor (Karppi et al. 2016). Once perceived as associated with women at home and thus nonproductive, affective labor is now recognized as “not only directly productive of capital but at the very pinnacle of the hierarchy of laboring forms” (Hardt 1999: 90). In contemporary China, the cognitive labor of numerous writers and readers using the internet has congealed into internet-based popular novels. They are not just intellectual properties but also emotional commodities, intangible commodity-experiences co-manufactured by the producer and the consumer (Illouz 2017). Although mass-marketed, popular novels crystalize each writer’s personal experiences and aspirations. The reader does not purchase a commodity outside of herself, since the novel turns her into an object upon which it acts and becomes complete only when her unique experience is generated, only when the commodity is infused with her emotions. In short, these novels encapsulate the affective labor of writers and readers as well. I emphasize the structural homology between the rise of immaterial labor, cognitive and affective, and the changed status of fantasy on a global scale. Fantasy is a creative genre that keeps churning out worlds and subjects that do not bother to stay loyal to consensus reality. Why these deviations? It has been argued that fantasy is an articulation of our longing for wonders and marvels in an allegedly disenchanted world (Saler 2012). Vivian Sobchack specifies re-­ enchantment as the revival of magical thinking—free association that bridges the gaps between the mental and the material to satisfy desires—by the perversion of digital technology and consumer electronics (2014). Although she still takes fantasy as an escape into some imaginary past, I assert that fantasy is an active engagement with the digital present. It is a site of immaterial labor, where the magic of imagination, sustained by the labor of love, concurrently valorizes and opposes digital capital. Fantasy not only transgresses the boundaries set up by human rationality to build magical otherworlds but also prioritizes affects, experiences, and subjectivities peripheral to, or outside of, the dominant value systems (Jackson 2008).

164 

Z. NI

Furthermore, fantasy has always been predicated upon collective endeavors. Although attributed to individual authors, fantasy has been described as modern attempts to rewrite and repurpose pre-existing myths, collective stories of distinct peoples (Attebery 2014). Entering the era of new media, fantasy is particularly favored by “transmedia storytelling,” a new mode of narrative that builds complex fictional worlds beyond single texts, genres, and media platforms (Jenkins 2008). As a result, we may want to use roleplaying game systems (RPGs) as a new heuristic to approach fantasy, which are games governed by established formal conventions that invite and govern the participation—or, immaterial labor—of multiple production teams and numerous fan communities (Vu 2017). Dan Hassler-Forest identifies fantastic transmedia world-building as a tug-­ of-­war between the complex, coherent storyworlds controlled by media corporations and fan culture’s radically heterogeneous appropriation of the so-called canons. He sees this internal contradiction as an expression of the intrinsic ambiguity of immaterial labor, or the tension between the global expansion of capital and resistance at the grassroots level (Hassler-Forest 2016). I emphasize that the cultural logic of fantasy is not just magical thinking in an abstract sense but the enchantment of capitalism and its supporting mechanisms, which are not as rational as they seem to be (Moeran and de Waal Malefyt 2018). I add that magic may also play a disruptive function. Premodern and non-Western ideas and practices may harbor alternative relations to the material world and threaten to expose and oppose the magic of capitalism (Styers 2004). The magic that defines fantasy is both the magic of digital capitalism that turns nonnormative subjects and their life-worlds into the raw materials of profitmaking and the alternative cosmologies, epistemologies, and embodied practices serving as a reservoir of resources for resistance. I read the efforts at world-building in fantasy novels as corresponding to the performance of cognitive labor, while love stories in romance fiction are stories of affective labor. A new explanation for the even more intensified entanglement of fantasy and romance in the digital age is that creativity, the new Holy Grail, is powered by the interaction of human individuals and collectivities who are physical, cerebral, and emotional at the same time. Creativity is eagerly sought after by businesses and governments as a magical key to commercial success and economic growth. It also disguises the more intense exploitation of human capacities and experiences. New workers, “people who would once have been viewed as bizarre mavericks operating at the bohemian fringe,” are recruited and placed “at the very heart of the process of innovation and economic growth” (Florida 2012: 7). One case in point is that fantasy, and romance, fans are no longer bizarre mavericks but representative immaterial laborers. Although fantasy boasts of male and female fans, the gender of the post-­ industrial mode of production or immaterial labor has been recognized as female. The so-called feminization of labor cannot be reduced to the quantitative expansion of a pool of female workers. Christina Morini looks at women’s reproductive labor in the domestic sphere and highlights that the qualitative

 CHINESE DANMEI: MALE-MALE ROMANCE, WOMEN’S FANTASY… 

165

characteristics historically present there, such as precarity, mobility, fragmentation, and the lack of proper compensation, have become a general paradigm irrespective of gender (2007). Researching the “passionate work” of female workers in creative industries, Angela McRobbie points out that the promises of self-discovery and self-fulfillment in low-pay or no-pay work are meant to negate the threat of material and psychological insecurity and to reinscribe ideals of normative femininity within the framework of paid work. She further argues that creativity is an instrument of labor reform impacting men and women (2016) Since work and home are no longer two neatly separated spheres, Kathi Weeks reminds us that social reproduction is no longer limited to the household model but should be “understood as the production of the forms of social cooperation on which accumulation depends” (2011: 29). What is implied is that women’s work does not neatly fall into either side of the work-home binary. Creative forms of life may or may not be readily transformable into new forms of work to be harnessed by capital. Most interestingly, Kylie Jarrett compares the consumer labor performed on digital platforms—a type of creative labor outside the individual artist model—and domestic labor. Both types are affective and share the same contradictory relationship to capital, “outside, and often antagonistic to, capitalist modes of accumulation, even while they remain necessary to that system” (2015: 3). They are unpaid or underpaid but productive, helping capitalists to reduce the costs of reproducing and renewing the laboring body and subject. However, both are irreducible “to their function as inputs into the fiscal calculations of capitalism,” as they remain replete with use values “important to the mental and emotional health of individuals and to group cohesion at a family, community, class, or societal level” (2015: 3). It is time to return to Chinese internet literature, a field of immaterial labor—or feminization of labor, to be more precise. First of all, the consumption of popular fiction used to be relegated to the sphere of social reproduction. Literary platforms are still spaces of social reproduction, where writers and readers gather for not just the re-creation of their labor force but also the formation of social cooperation on which production and accumulation are dependent. That is to say, writers and readers are “digital housewives,” an intentionally provocative concept coined by Jarrett to refer to users of digital media, male and female, who perform reproductive labor that used to be associated with women in the domestic sphere. Second, the labor of these digital housewives fits in with the model of feminization described by Morini—that is, low-paid and highly flexible. According to the 2019 report, the average working time per day for contracted writers was five hours; their average income per month was 5133.7 RMB (about 750 USD). Among these writers, 44.6% made less than 2000 RMB per month (about 300 USD); only 4.1% made 20,000 RMB (and above) (3000 USD). On the top tier (4.1%), a very small number of people (around thousands in the entire country) had the privilege to sell their novels as intellectual properties to media corporations. We also know that over 60% of the contracted writers are

166 

Z. NI

part-time writers; however, non-commercial writers and readers as free laborers were not covered in those statistics. Third, women’s labor is worthy of critical attention. The 2018 report gave the gender ratio of contracted writers as 56.6% male versus 43.4% female, while the latest two reports did not provide a ratio. We have no data as to the exact gender ratio of all writers and readers, if we do not limit our attention to commercial platforms. The open secret is that women are paid less than men by these platforms, and that women writers tend to remain anonymous or choose to stay outside the marketplace. This passionate labor of love has been given for free by many women writers as well as women readers, who are fans chasing stories across media platforms and participating in various fan activities. Internet-based and woman-centered, danmei, in terms of its production, consumption, and diegetic storyworlds, is where the feminization of immaterial labor in the field of internet literature is most immediately discernible. Danmei fans practice cognitive-affective labor to imagine otherworlds centered upon issues of gender and sexuality and enact alternative subjects and relationships not present in the real-life world. Danmei is thoroughly ambiguous because it is both in and outside the commercial model. Despite the anti-­ pornography campaigns waged by the state, danmei has developed from internet-­based novels into transmedia projects. Danmei novels, purged of sexually explicit content, have been adapted into anime, radio drama, and TV dramas, bringing to some authors, now copyright owners, huge amounts of income and launching the career of young stars who play those fantastic men in love. These newly crowned celebrities are then invited by big corporations to endorse their brands, promoting these commodities to danmei fans, who wrestle with state censorship to bring their queer readings to bear upon de-­ sexualized media content and contribute their free labor to media capital as the productive consumers of danmei novels, TV series, and other commodities.10 However, the majority of danmei writers have made little profit. One reason is that a considerable portion of danmei writing is fanfiction, which is hard to commercialize, as the source text is protected by copyright. Moreover, many danmei writers/readers consider their writing/reading a labor of love rather than labor for money and intentionally resist commercialization. Jinjiang refused to adopt the pay-per-read model and did not give in until 2008. As the most high-profile romance site, heterosexual as well as homoerotic, Jinjiang implements strict censorship under the pressure of the state, which heavy-­ handedly monitors Qidian fantasy as well. Discontented writers and readers have no choice but to migrate to quasi “underground” sites to pursue what they value: aesthetic autonomy, self-expression, and community building. It is 10  When danmei novels were adapted into TV series, production teams had to change homoerotic relationships into stories of “socialist brotherhood.” However, fans subverted state censorship by practicing queer readings. See Hu and Wang 2020; Ng and Li 2020. More research needs to be done to illuminate the role played by media corporations and the value production process extending beyond TV adaptations; see Zhou and Bai 2021.

 CHINESE DANMEI: MALE-MALE ROMANCE, WOMEN’S FANTASY… 

167

also to be mentioned that, since pornography is illegal while homosexuality is a tabooed subject in offline and online publications, danmei writers in the marketplace, to avoid trouble (that is, their work being criminalized), have been practicing self-censorship and/or have provided a very limited number of copies for sale if they resort to self-publication.11 In the above-described environment, danmei novels are not just produced by immaterial labor but tell stories of the feminization of labor in their fictional worlds. GM and SS were selected for textual analysis. The two novels belong to the two stages of Chinese internet literature, the pre-2008 Jinjiang as a creative common and the post-2008 Jinjiang as part of creative industry. Serialized on Jinjiang from 2004 to 2005 for free by an anonymous writer under the penname Yiyu, GM generated heated discussion on gender roles and women’s status among danmei fans. The author seems to be a career woman, if we can trust the personal information she shared with her readers. During the serialization of the novel, she frequently referenced her busy schedule at work to explain why she was not able to write at the speed desired by enthusiastic readers. She might even have experiences working outside of China proper, since her main characters are all overseas Chinese. Her penname is an interesting wordplay. While yu means territory, realm, or world, the Chinese character yi 亦 (still the same) is a homonym of yi 异 (the other). The message of Yiyu could be interpreted as “the otherworld is still the same.” This author does not conceal her ambition to engage social reality by building otherworlds. The penname of SS’s author needs to be explained as well. Moxiang Tongxiu (fragrance of ink and stench of money) is the penname of Yuan Yimei 袁依楣, who serialized her first novel SS at Jinjiang in 2014, when she was in her early twenties. After this novel became a commercial success online, she self-published it offline to make more money but ended up breaking the Chinese law that set a limit for profit made from printed materials without a legitimate register number issued by the government. But it is impossible for danmei writers to acquire such numbers in the first place. According to rumors in circulation, SS was reported by angry parents whose children had purchased this pornographic novel. Yuan was then arrested and sentenced to a three-year imprisonment for illegal business operation. In 2019, her second novel, Modao zushi 魔道祖师 (Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, 2015–16), was adapted into a TV series entitled Chenqing ling 陈情令 (The Untamed), which turned out to be a national and even global media sensation. Most poignantly, it is not unlikely that Yuan was arrested right before the show’s premiere. Both GM and SS build complicated otherworlds. The structure of GM is particularly noteworthy. The first half of the novel follows the sexual adventures of a young man who mysteriously wakes up in the middle of the Sahara Desert and is rescued by two tourists, a brother and a sister from a Chinese 11  For scholarship on censorship and criminalization that followed the commodification of danmei, see Yang and Xu 2016; Bai 2021. For the danmei practitioners’ paradoxical relationship to state censorship, see Tian 2020.

168 

Z. NI

entrepreneurial family based in America. They name him Shi Yi 施毅 (homonymous with 失忆, memory loss), as he has lost all his memories. Shi Yi is in a romantic/sexual relationship with them both and helps them to manage their family business. However, his lost memories rush back when the woman is giving birth to their child. What he recalls is the story told in the second half of the novel. The real name of Shi Yi is Lu Ruoming 卢若铭, who grows up in Malaysia and is thrown into an alternative world by a plane crash. This otherworld resembles premodern China but recognizes three genders: women, male men, and female men. Due to a curse caused by female infanticide that used to be rampant, very few females have been born. The human species would have gone extinct had another miracle not occurred. Half of the male population were manufactured—through medication, surgery, and daily disciplines—into female men who conduct women’s reproductive labor: sex, reproduction, child-rearing, various chores, and interpersonal care within and beyond the household. Lu, a cisgender man from our world, is labeled female and forced to go through the entire feminization process. At the end of part two, Lu has no choice but to embrace his new identity and can only dream of returning to his (and our) world. The story in part one is merely his dream. Hence the novel is entitled Golden Millet, a loaded trope for dream or illusion in Chinese literature. The first half of the novel is typical romance/pornography. It is a pornotopia, to borrow the term coined by Steven Marcus, who reads British eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pornography and observes that these novels posited a utopian non-place and non-time where sexual fulfillment is the ultimate goal (1966). However, the second half of the novel is porn-dystopia, where sex is portrayed as the first and foremost type of labor female men must perform to please male men and one disciplinary technology among many others to make docile bodies. Lu is fucked into a female man. He is captured and possessed by the aristocratic Nan 南 (homonymous with 男 male) brothers, who gang rape him almost on a daily basis, force him to drink magic potions, and have doctors operate on him to give him reproductive organs. To Lu’s horror, he becomes pregnant and gives birth to two “daughters,” female boys. A privileged man from our world, Lu seizes every opportunity to escape. It is pregnancy followed by child-rearing that crush his masculinity. Bewildered by a constructed “mother” nature, s/he becomes reluctant to leave the babies. When they cry in hunger, milk flows out of Lu’s penis, which is no longer the symbol of male potency but a substitute for a woman’s nipple. Lu hates the Nan brothers, male supremacists and sexual predators. Toward the end of the novel, one of the brothers is killed in war and the other seizes the throne and announces himself the new emperor. The middle-aged Lu is made the empress and accepts her position in this nuclear family, reconciles with her rapist-husband, and strives to raise her daughters as the next generation of female men granted a bit more freedom. The ending is intentionally contrived, mocking the ideal of romantic love and heteronormative family,

 CHINESE DANMEI: MALE-MALE ROMANCE, WOMEN’S FANTASY… 

169

which seems rosy only after the brutal process of feminization—to which the second half of the novel is devoted—is wiped out. Existing scholarship on male-male romance celebrates it as a utopian space where women experiment with hybrid masculinities and explore their own sexuality. I argue that what is projected onto these fantastic male characters is more than women’s desire for love and sex. The first half of GM is pornotopian indeed; however, the making of the dystopian otherworld in the second half is even more interesting. This porn-dystopia encapsulates Chinese women’s anxieties in the early twenty-first century over the prospect of being forced out of job markets and into the domestic sphere to work as housewives. During the socialist period, Chinese women were portrayed as equal partners to men and expected to seek fulltime employment outside the home. However, a sharp decline in urban women’s labor force participation has been observed since the early 1990s, as China shifted from socialism to neoliberalism (Hare 2016). One consequence of privatization, deregulation, and erosion of the welfare system and social safety net is that more and more women could never go back to work after marriage, especially after child-birth. Lu’s struggle to no avail is the shared nightmare of the author and her readers. His “manly” freedom and his wasted flair for business stand for these women’s yearning for an active engagement with the world beyond any “essentialist” roles or realms. It is also undeniable that new job opportunities have been created in the digital age, such as writing novels online, but these are feminized, precarious jobs. Another interpretation for the feminization of Lu is the imposition of a feminized model of labor onto men and women. The precariat is a woman or a female man, a proletariat deprived of his male privileges. SS, the novel that landed its author in prison, is another feminization-of-­ labor story. Its world-building project is no less sophisticated than that of GM. The protagonist of SS is again a young man from our world. An avid reader of Qidian fantasy novels, the protagonist finds himself trapped in his favorite novel, A Demon’s Journey to Immortality (hereafter Journey), or, more specifically, in the body of Shen Qingqiu 沈清秋, the novel’s arch-villain who is to be vanquished by the hero Luo Binghe 洛冰河. Journey is a xiuzhen 修真 (immortality cultivation) novel, a popular xuanhuan subgenre that fuses the alchemical cultivation in the Daoist tradition with the stage-by-stage adventure in video games to tell exciting stories about the self-enterprising neoliberal individual (Ni 2020). The otherworld the protagonist travels into is not just a xiuzhen novel but one that takes the format of an RPG. He must play this game to change the plotline, or rewrite this novel, so that the villain can escape his tragic end. Inside the novel/game, the protagonist interacts with “the system,” a floating screen where instructions and explanations are given. The background of this interface resembles the front page of Qidian, because the novel within the novel is modeled after the numerous xiuzhen novels serialized there. In these magical tales, the hero is invariably an ordinary young man, an underdog at the beginning, who achieves immortality by practicing Daoist alchemy, subduing

170 

Z. NI

monsters, and triumphing over competitors. The hero of Journey is a good-for-­ nothing trainee at a cultivation school, who is constantly abused by his evil master, Shen. After Shen discovers that Luo is half human, half demon, he ruthlessly throws the boy off a cliff, not to protect the world against this potential threat but because he is jealous of the boy’s hidden superpower. The entire novel, focused on Luo’s rigorous self-cultivation and eventual revenge against Shen, is a quasi-Oedipus story in which the disciple is destined to destroy his master and win all the female characters whom they both desire as sexual objects. The protagonist of SS enjoys reading this Qidian fantasy because he identifies with Luo, a winner who takes all. However, the avatar assigned to him is Shen the villain. The task of the new Shen performed by the reader/ player is to save himself by transforming the antagonist master-disciple relationship into a loving bond. The old Shen is a self-centered hypocrite who sacrifices other people to advance his own interests. To reverse this image, the new Shen has no choice but to act as a caretaker inside the cultivation school. He extends help to his peers, offers protection and guidance to their disciples, and pampers Luo in particular with love and care, who becomes attached to him. According to Janice Radway, women read romance to connect themselves to a mother figure and her characteristic care. This mother figure can be identified even in the male lover of a heterosexual romance (Radway 2009). The new Shen is no longer a father figure to be replaced by the hero but a motherly lover for Luo. They are no longer the competitive individuals in Qidian fantasy but homosexual lovers in Jinjiang romance. In the end, since the generic conventions of a male adventure story have been twisted into those of male-male romance, the interface of the system changes from the background of Qidian to that of Jinjiang, accordingly. The change introduced above is brought about by the consumptive labor of the protagonist as a reader/player, which is also the reproductive labor freely offered by the new Shen. SS is a parody of xiuzhen fantasy, a fantasy in which the neoliberal individual is caught up in a Hobbesian war of everyman against everyman. The protagonist of SS is a digital housewife, a user interacting with the system and a caretaker beyond the household. His consumptive labor and reproductive labor, although seemingly unproductive in the industrial paradigm, produce the positive externalities of both exchange and use values. That is to say, our fun-seeking online activities are a new source of primitive accumulation and are not without a radical potential to build intimate and social relationships that exceed capitalist capture. Compared with Lu’s feminization experience, the feminization of Shen is more redemptive than repressive. While female characters in xiuzhen fantasy are sexual objects the hero fights for, in SS they lose interest in Luo and are instead obsessed with the romantic relationship between Luo and Shen. Women become sexual subjects and share among themselves self-created erotic stories and artwork. At a metafictional level, they mirror danmei fans outside the novel. However, what is missing in this pornotopia are the crushing pressures of commercialization and state censorship.

 CHINESE DANMEI: MALE-MALE ROMANCE, WOMEN’S FANTASY… 

171

What is to come in the extratextual world? I urge us to stay open-eyed and open-minded. To conclude, I reiterate that these two novels are created by the cognitive and affective labor of the danmei community. Writers and readers collectively practice world-building and subject-formation to enact reality as a series of unstable and indeterminate worlds and protagonists as feminized immaterial laborers. These male-male romance novels are women’s fantasy with queer possibility. If we take queerness as a nonnormative way of life beyond a way of having sex (Somerville 2020), an outcome of writing/reading practices that reconfigure subjects and worlds, I believe queerness is a goal danmei novels have been striving toward, whether these strivings are successful or not. What is nonnormative is women’s refusal to be defined by reproduction, rejection of the success myth of the self-cultivating masculine individuals, and refiguration of these individuals into feminized immaterial laborers.

Works Cited Allan, J. (2019), Men, Masculinities, and Popular Romance, New York: Routledge. Attebery, B. (2014), Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth, New York: Oxford UP. Agustín, Ó. G. et  al., eds. (2015), Creative Capitalism, Multitudinous Creativity: Radicalities and Alterities, Lanham: Lexington Books. Bai, M. (2021), “Regulation of Pornography and Criminalization of BL Readers and Authors in Contemporary China (2010–2019),” Cultural Studies, DOI: https:// doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.1912805. Boutang, Y.  M. (2015), “The Pollination of Creativity: For a Basic Income in the Creative Capitalism of Network Societies,” in Creative Capitalism, Multitudinous Creativity, 235–247. Chu, H.  J. (2019), Shuoshu ren yu meng gongchang: jishu, falv yu wangluo wenxue shengchan (Storytellers and Dream Factories: Technology, Law and the Production of Internet Literature), Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe. de Lauretis, T. (1999), “Popular Culture, Public and Private Fantasies: Femininity and Fetishism in David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly,” Signs 24.2: 303–334. Fan, B. Q. (1999), Zhongguo jinxiandai tongsu wenxueshi (History of Popular Literature in Modern China) vol. 1, 2, Nanjing: Jiangsu jiaoyu chubanshe. Feng, J. (2009), “Addicted to Beauty: Consuming and Producing Web-Based Chinese ‘Danmei’ Fiction at Jinjiang,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, no. 2 (Fall): 1–41. Feng, J. (2013), Romancing the Internet: Producing and Consuming Chinese Web Romance, Leiden: Brill. Florida, R. (2012), The Rise of the Creative Class—Revisited, New York: Basic Books. Fumagalli, A. et  al., eds. (2019), Cognitive Capitalism, Welfare and Labour: The Commonfare Hypothesis, Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge. Fumagalli, A. (2015), “Cognitive, Relational (Creative) Labor and the Precarious Movement for ‘Commonfare,’” in Creative Capitalism, Multitudinous Creativity: 3–24.

172 

Z. NI

Fumagalli, A. and C.  Morini (2011), “Life Put to Work: Towards a Theory of Life-­ Value,” Ephemera, 10 (3–4): 234–252. Gill, R. and A. Pratt (2008), “In the Social Factory?,” Theory, Culture and Society 25 (7–8): 1–30. Goossaert, V. and D.  A. Palmer (2011), The Religious Question in Modern China, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Hamm, J. C. (2019), The Unworthy Scholar from Pingjiang: Republican-Era Martial Arts Fiction, New York: Columbia University Press. Hare, D. (2016), “What Accounts for the Decline in Labor Force Participation Among Married Women in Urban China, 1991–2011?,” China Economic Review 38: 251–266. Hardt, M. (1999), “Affective Labor,” Boundary 2 26 (2): 89–100. Hassler-Forest, D. (2016), Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics: Transmedia World-­ building beyond Capitalism, London; New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Hockx, M. (2015), Internet Literature in China, New York: Columbia UP. Hu, T. and C. Y. Wang (2020), “Who is the Counterpublic? Bromance-as-Masquerade in Chinese Online Drama—SCI Mystery,” Television & New Media: 1527476420937262. Huws, U. (2019), Labor in Contemporary Capitalism? What Next? London: Palgrave Macmillan. Illouz, E. ed. (2017), Emotions as Commodities: Capitalism, Consumption and Authenticity, Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge. Jackson, R. (2008), Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, London: Routledge. James, E. and F.  Mendlesohn, eds. (2012), The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Jarrett, K. (2015), Feminism, Labour and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife, Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge. Jenkins, H. (2008), Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, H. (1992), Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, New York: Routledge. Jones, S. G. (2002), “The Sex Lives of Cult Television Characters,” Screen 43.1: 79–90. Karppi, T. et  al. (2016), Affective Capitalism. Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 16.4. Lamb, P.  F. and D.  Veith. (1986), “Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines,” in D.  Palumbo, (ed.), Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature, Westport, CT: Greenwood; 236–55. Laplanche, J. and J.  B. Pontalis (1968), “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 49.1: 1–18. Lazzarato, M. (1996), “Immaterial Labor,” in P. Virno and M. Hardt (eds.), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 133–147. Lee, H. (2006), Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–1950, Stanford UP. Levi, A. et al., eds. (2010), Boys' Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-­ Cultural Fandom of the Genre, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company. Link, Eugene Perry (1981), Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities, University of California Press.

 CHINESE DANMEI: MALE-MALE ROMANCE, WOMEN’S FANTASY… 

173

Liu, J. (2003), Revolution Plus Love: Literary History, Women's Bodies, and Thematic Repetition in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Madill, A. L. (2016), “Even Better than the Real Thing: Fantasy and Phantasy in Boys’ Love Manga,” in J. Roberts, and E. MacCallum-Stewart (eds.), Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Popular Fantasy: Beyond Boy Wizards and Kick-ass Chicks, Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 68–84. Marcus, S. (1966), The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-­ nineteenth-­century England, New York: Basic Books. Martin, F. (2012), “Girls Who Love Boys’ Love: Japanese Homoerotic Manga as Trans-­ national Taiwan Culture,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 13.3: 365–383. McLelland, M. J. et al., eds. (2015), Boys' Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. McRobbie, A. (2016), Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries, Cambridge: Polity. Mendlesohn, F. and E.  James (2012), A Short History of Fantasy, Chicago: Libri Publishing. Modleski, Tania. Loving with a vengeance: Mass produced fantasies for women. Routledge, 2008. Moeran, B. and T. de Waal Malefyt, eds. (2018), Magical Capitalism: Enchantment, Spells, and Occult Practices in Contemporary Economies, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Morini, C. (2007), “The Feminization of Labour in Cognitive Capitalism,” Feminist Review, 87.1: 40–59. Neville, L. (2018), Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: Women and Gay Male Pornography and Erotica, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Ni, Z. (2020), “Xiuzhen (Immortality Cultivation) Fantasy: Science, Religion, and the Novels of Magic/Superstition in Contemporary China,” Religions, 11(1), 25. Ng, E. and X. Li (2020), “A Queer ‘Socialist Brotherhood’: The Guardian Web Series, Boys’ Love Fandom, and the Chinese State,” Feminist Media Studies 20.4: 479–495. Omoto, R. (2015), “Politics of Utopia: Fantasy, Pornography, and Boys Love,” in Boys Love Manga and Beyond: 141–152. Penley, C. (1992), “Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture,” in L.  Grossberg, C.  Nelson, and P.  A. Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies, New  York: Routledge: 479–500. Radway, J. A. (2009), Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Russ, J. (1985), “Pornography by Women for Women, With Love,” in Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts: Feminist Essays, Trumansburg, N.  Y.: Crossing Press: 79–99. Saler, M. (2012), As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality, New York: Oxford UP. Salmon, C. and D. Symons (2001), Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fiction, Evolution and Female Sexuality, New Haven: Yale UP, 2001. Sobchack, V. (2014), “Sci-Why? On the Decline of a Film Genre in an Age of Wizardry,” Science Fiction Studies, 41.2: 284–300. Somerville, S. B., ed. (2020), The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

174 

Z. NI

Styers, R. (2004), Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World, New York: Oxford University Press. Tian, Xi. (2020), “More than Conformity or Resistance: Chinese ‘Boys’ Love’ Fandom in the Age of Internet Censorship,” The Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies 1: 189–213. Tolkien, J., V. Flieger, and D. Anderson (2008), Tolkien on Fairy-stories (Expanded edition with commentary and notes), London: HarperCollins. Vercellone, C. (2007), “From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism,” Historical Materialism 15.1: 13–36. Vu, R. (2017), “Fantasy After Representation: D&D, Game of Thrones, and Postmodern World-Building,” Extrapolation 58.2–3: 273–301. Weeks, K. (2011), The Problem with Work. Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, Durham, NC: Duke UP. Welker, J. (2006), “Beautiful, Borrowed, and Bent: ‘Boys’ Love’ As Girls’ Love in Shôjo Manga,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 31.3: 841–870. Williamson, J. (2015), The Evolution of Modern Fantasy: From Antiquarianism to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Xue, J. (2018), Zhifen diguo—wangluo yanqing xiaoshuo yu nvxing huayu zhengzhi (Women’s Empire: Internet Romance and the Politics of Female Discourse), Peking University Ph.D. diss. Yang, L. and Y. Xu (2016), “The Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name: The Fate of Chinese Danmei Communities in the 2014 Anti-porn Campaign,” in M. McLelland (ed.), The End of Cool Japan: Ethical, Legal, and Cultural Challenges to Japanese Popular Culture, London: Routledge: 163–183. Zhou, Y. and M.  Bai (2021), “The Value Co-creation Mechanism of Celebrity Endorsement: Netnography of Multiple Fan Communities,” Foreign Economics & Management 43.1: 3–22. Ziv, A. (2015), Explicit Utopias: Rewriting the Sexual in Women's Pornography, New York: SUNY Press.

Between Scylla and Charybdis: A Survey of Greek Fantasy Fiction Dimitra Nikolaidou

A survey of the Greek fantasy tradition constitutes an encounter with multiple paradoxes. Homer’s Odyssey is often referenced as one of the first works of epic fantasy, while the corpus of Greek mythology has long provided inspiration to fantasy authors worldwide. In addition, fantastical elements have always abounded in Greek folklore and oral narratives. These illustrious beginnings might have been expected to contribute to the early development of a unique fantasy tradition. However, this did not prove to be the case. Instead, the cultural landscape of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greece proved to be, for the most part, inimical to the genre. Due to a multiplicity of factors, until the second half of the twentieth-century Greek works of the fantastic were few and far between. Additionally, the international fantasy canon did not become accessible in Greece until the very end of the twentieth century. Surprisingly, it was the economic crisis of 2010 that allowed for and eventually encouraged the establishment of a strong, transnational speculative literary scene. Presenting us with a final paradox, while still strongly influenced by the hegemonic presence of the Anglo-Saxon fantasy canon, this scene is currently producing many decolonized works of fiction which often meet with international acclaim. These paradoxes are rooted in the turbulent history of the country, which greatly influenced the perception and reception of the fantasy genre in Greece. For this reason, this chapter’s aim is twofold. First, it attempts to chart the evolution of fantasy in Greece through a historical and cultural lens. Following that, it builds on the findings in order to examine the current fantasy scene which formed in Greece in the first two decades of the twenty-first century,

D. Nikolaidou (*) Thessaloniki, Greece © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2_12

175

176 

D. NIKOLAIDOU

utilizing ethnographic research. The conclusion of this overview strengthens the claim that fantasy, while often dismissed as escapist fiction, is in fact strongly tied to real-world concerns, processes, and cultural shifts, a fact which, in the case of Greece, resulted in a strongly political modern fantasy scene.

A Lost Road The history of fantasy in Greece is better understood when separated in three distinct periods. During the first period, which begins in 1830 with the establishment of the Hellenic Republic, the fantasy genre is near-absent from the literary landscape; the few exceptions consist of short stories and children’s literature. The second period, beginning with the publication of Tolkien’s The Hobbit in 1978, essentially introduces the genre in Greece and, along with multiple other factors, results in the marginalization of Greek fantastical elements and the production of heavily colonized works of Greek fantasy. The third period is triggered by the financial crisis in 2010, and culminates in the development of a vibrant fantasy scene. To fully understand these shifts, it is best to begin by focusing on the shape of fantasy before Tolkien’s translations. In particular, it would be important to discover why, despite the abundance of fantastic elements encountered across various types of Greek narratives since antiquity, fantasy remained marginalized in Greece until the late twentieth century. The work of anthologist and translator Makis Panorios partly illuminates this question. His six-volume collection titled simply Το Ελληνικό Φανταστικό Διήγημα (The Greek Fantastic Short Story), whose first volume was published in 1987, attempts to collect the majority, if not the entirety of fantastical1 works written in Greek in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The labor that went into the making of this anthology is as illuminating as the content of the stories it includes. As stated in an interview in Mystery magazine,2 Panorios had to collect these stories from a variety of sources such as anthologies, magazines, newspapers, and so on since, until the publication of his anthologies, there had been no platform, medium, or work dedicated exclusively to the Greek fantastic. Rather, authors renowned for their work in other genres would occasionally pen stories which included fantastic elements. Such authors include literary luminaries such as the National Poet Dionysios Solomos as well as Constantine Karyotakis, Andreas Karkavitsas, Fotis Kontoglou, Ioannis Polylas, C. P. Cavafy, and Alexandros Papadiamantis. An overview of these short stories suggests that the authors did draw inspiration from folklore, legend, myth, and the oral traditions. While this is to be expected, it also meant that their fantastical short stories blend seamlessly with their many body of work, and were never 1  Panorios’ anthologies contain fantasy, horror, and science fiction stories. As will be shown in this chapter, the term Φανταστικό is used similarly to the term Speculative fiction in that it encompasses separate genres of the fantastic. 2  Dimitra Nikolaidou, “Η Νύχτα του Μάκη Πανώριου,” Mystery, issue 102, p. 8-13

  BETWEEN SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS: A SURVEY OF GREEK FANTASY FICTION 

177

categorized as fantasy or counted as the beginnings of a Greek fantasy tradition. David Connolly, who edited The Dedalus Book of Greek Fantasy makes a similar observation: for a long time, the most well-known specimens of Greek fantasy literature belong to authors not otherwise known as fantasy authors (kindle edition). Additionally, there was never any attempt to anthologize these stories previous to Panorios’ anthology; the genre was essentially marginalized. These observations beget a question. As Panorios notes in his Prologue, in Greece, mythology, folklore, oral tradition, medieval romances, epic poems and even historical narratives have since antiquity overflowed with fantastical elements. In addition, all the classical elements of fantasy such as quests, otherworldly entities, magical beasts, secondary worlds, magic, and heroes are ever present not only in Greek mythology but also in folk songs, local legends, medieval romances, and even philosophy. These elements were encountered across the Hellenistic world and remained a continuous part of Greek tradition even as different regions of the country were occupied by various foreign powers. It would be expected then, that a distinct Greek fantasy tradition was bound to spring from a culture in which the fantastic has always featured so prominently. However, this was not the case, for a multiplicity of reasons examined below. Both in his Prologue and in his Mystery interview, Panorios places the blame on the Fall of Constantinople and the four-century-long occupation of Greece by the Ottoman Empire. During that time, literary production was almost exclusively the domain of the Greek Orthodox Church and thus, the fantastic elements of folklore and legend were expunged from most written narratives of that era. To strengthen his argument, Panorios presents the example of Crete which, until its occupation in 1669, produced important works of epic poetry which did contain fantastical elements, Erotokritos being the most well-known example. However, Greek independence did not bring along the Renaissance of the fantastic in literature for a variety of reasons. To begin with, in the last 50 years before the liberation of Greece, foreign literary production was introduced in the occupied territories. These works were focused on Greece as perceived by foreigners; an imaginary, idealized ancient world that bore little relation to current reality or even the country’s actual antiquity. Local literary production in these times focused almost exclusively on the cause of liberation, and on the subject of romantic love. Thus, cultural colonization, combined with the urgency of the war of independence, further marginalized the fantastic. Folk songs, still preserved today, were the only outlet continuing the tradition of the fantastic. Panorios further notes that, following the liberation of Greece and the establishment of an independent Greek state in 1830, literature focused exclusively on the crafting of Greek identity. At the same time, since all educated Greeks had studied abroad in various European states, and given that the influence of Ottoman and European occupiers was still prominent, literary production tended to imitate foreign movements with a focus on Romanticism. In the

178 

D. NIKOLAIDOU

decades that followed, Greek literature, still in search of a Greek identity, mainly focuses on naturalism,3 in an attempt to chronicle and comment on rural and urban realities, while simultaneously continuing to imitate foreign movements and literary trends. However, the fantastic, both local and imported, remains excluded from these attempts. To quote Panorios directly, “Greek authors might be acquainted with Poe, Hoffman, Vern, Welles, yet they copy Fournier, Maupassant, Giono, Balzac, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky. The fantastic is considered paraliterature and, if occasionally encountered, it is as an element of folk tradition […]; just another part of naturalism” (16). Connolly similarly notes that “[f]antasy literature during this period is marginalized and relegated to the realm of non-serious literature” (Kindle edition). This view of speculative fiction as a distraction from serious and pressing issues, would not only continue to dominate the cultural and publishing landscape for decades, but it would culminate into open enmity and disdain due to the unique cultural and political circumstances in Greece following World War II (WWII).

The Case Against the Fantastic The hostile post-war attitude toward speculative fiction is comprehensively presented in Domna Pastourmatzi’s survey titled Bibliography of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror: 1960-1993. Pastourmatzi attempts to chart publications of translated speculative fiction in Greece, an attempt she aptly describes as an “odyssey” (2); her research, rich in qualitative and quantitative data, yields very interesting observations. In terms of speculative fiction, the first genre to appear in Greece was science fiction, first translated in Greek in the 1960s.4 Fantasy did not appear until much later: a few short stories were included in various speculative5 fiction anthologies in the 1970s, but for a very long time, the genre was viewed simply as an addendum to science fiction. In the 1970s, interest in science fiction bloomed, and the publication of The Hobbit in 1978 finally brought attention to the fantasy genre itself. However, even then few venues insisted in an absolute distinction between the subgenres of the fantastic; for a long time these genres were often viewed as indistinguishable. For this exact reason, a short review of science fiction’s reception as offered by Domna Pastourmatzi adds rather than distracts from the discussion on fantasy. Pastourmatzi discovered that in the sixties only 12 texts of science fiction were published in Greece, while the number increased dramatically in the seventies, particularly after 1976 when around 100 novels and 230 short stories became available to the public. However, increased interest did not denote increased acceptance; instead, from the very beginning the genre was met with 3  Naturalism in Greece takes the form of ηθογραφία, a movement focused on describing, and occasionally prescribing, contemporary mores and modes of living. 4  The exception was Jules Verne, who was considered a children’s author. 5  The term speculative fiction was not of course widely used at that time. Instead, publishing houses used the term “fantastic” (φανταστικό) to denote the inclusion of fantasy, science fiction, and horror included in their anthologies.

  BETWEEN SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS: A SURVEY OF GREEK FANTASY FICTION 

179

open disdain. Following an interview with the publisher Odysseas Hatzopoulos of Kaktos publications, Pastourmatzi writes the following. I discovered that being a pioneer publisher in the field has its price. [Hatzopoulos] dared to launch a series of science fiction novels in the mid-­ seventies only to suffer the scorn of the publishing establishment. His house was stigmatized as incapable of engaging in serious literary production and he had to fight for the reputation of his business. The negative reaction drove him to focus on a series of classic Greek authors translated into modern Greek. This fierce reaction toward Kaktos’ ventures sums up Greek attitudes toward speculative fiction from WWII until the early nineties. Pastourmatzi noted the disdain toward the genre which was summarily dismissed as “paraliterature” or paraphilology, particularly by those she names as elite gatekeepers of the belle-­ lettres (13). She also points out that this attitude led to a dearth of critical analysis: academic analysis was non-existent, while references in magazines and newspapers were limited to short retrospectives, translated interviews, author bios and information on new publications. Indeed, one of the most generous views published at that time belongs to Petros Martinides, who in his book Συνηγορία της Παραλογοτεχνίας (In Defense of Paraliterature, 1982) includes the genre among pocket romances, comic books, and Westerns without attributing to it any further value. Finally, Pastourmatzi notes that none of these critiques offers any solid argument against the fantastic, save the aphoristic characterization of the genre as “a capitalist artifice characterized by mass production, sloppiness and lack of mental stimulation” (15). Of course, these arguments were not unique to Greece. Indeed, speculative fiction has been faced worldwide with similar accusations since its inception. Still, both the ferocity of the attacks and the fact that they were espoused well into the twenty-first century merits further discussion. I posit that the unique political and cultural circumstances in Greece not only made these critiques more absolute, but also greatly delayed critical acceptance of the genre. In particular, I suggest that the political divide between left and right as well as the strong anti-American sentiment prevalent after WWII contributed to the negative reception of speculative fiction, including of course the genre of fantasy. To begin with, the sociopolitical situation in Greece following its establishment as an independent state in 1830 remained unstable for decades. As a result, political sentiments were continuously tense and public discourse was dominated by conflict. Following the Allied Victory in 1945, the Yalta conference and the Truman Doctrine, Greece entered the Western Sphere of influence. However, pro-communist sentiments were particularly strong and widespread, leading to the Greek Civil War which lasted until 1949. Conflicts did not subside, culminating in the military coup of 1967 which established a junta lasting until 1974, and lead into the invasion of Cyprus. Even when the junta was deposed, the situation did not completely stabilize until the early eighties. These turbulent decades gave rise to a strong anti-American sentiment which influenced reactions to the US cultural hegemony and thus to any cultural products seen as distinctly American. Zinovia Lialiouti notes that Greece,

180 

D. NIKOLAIDOU

seen as symbolic to the West and the US in particularly, was subjected to a process of Americanization which consequently gave rise to competing trends. The Greek post-Civil War state adopted anti-communism as its official ideology and anti-Americanism rose to challenge the official ideology (42). Resistance to the hegemonical American culture then was seen as a deeply political act, during a period when politics permeated all aspects of life. Additionally, Lialiouti establishes that anti-American attitudes were not limited to the Left. America in post-war Greece, regardless of ideological preference, was synonymous with moral decline, brutal force, cultural inferiority and the negative aspects of modernity. Although the Left had a leading role in this discourse, orchestrating a moral panic underpinned by cultural conservatism, these stereotypes were particularly powerful in the public sphere (45-6). This sentiment proved to be particularly harmful were it concerned speculative fiction, which was seen as embodying the least desirable traits of US culture as well as its political aims. I suggest that in terms of reception of the fantastic, this situation constituted a continuation of previous trends. As in the War of Independence so in the post-war period, the search for Greek identity in a heavily colonized cultural landscape was considered vital; art and literature needed to contribute to this quest. Consequently, the negative perception of the fantastic as a distraction was strengthened, especially since, unlike the relatively positive attitudes toward “foreign powers” which prevailed during the 1821 War of Independence, the US was now perceived as actively attempting to distract Greeks from political and ideological pursuits in order to further control them. In this polarizing climate, neither the genres “proletarian” origins nor their potential for sociopolitical transgression was recognized. The pioneering editor Christos Lazos summarized the reception of speculative fiction in an article at the literary magazine Diavazo by saying that “certain circles”6 decided that the fantastic is a vehicle for the dissemination of American subculture, and their disdain influenced the general public (24). Under this lens, both the disdain directed at Odysseas Hatzopoulos for publishing genre fiction and his subsequent reaction, to start publishing the Greek classics in order to restore his reputation, are more clearly understood. It is equally interesting, and rather supportive of this argument, to note that the first speculative authors to be published in Greece were not American but Russian (K. Volkov), French (Pierre Benoit), British (James Hilton), and Polish (Stanislaw Lem). This inimical landscape however did not stifle interest in speculative fiction. Supporters of the genre persisted in their pursuit and, once the climate

6  Lazos vagueness is to be expected given the political implications of any discussion concerning speculative fiction. As seen elsewhere in this chapter, Panorios and Pastourmatzi also mention the concept of cultural gatekeepers and their detrimental effect they had on the dissemination of speculative fiction. While these references may seem unclear, they also highlight how widespread negative attitudes towards speculative fiction were at that time.

  BETWEEN SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS: A SURVEY OF GREEK FANTASY FICTION 

181

stabilized, worked at establishing a national scene that would eventually produce the beginnings of a fantasy tradition.

Fantasy Ascendant Despite the deeply hostile environment, Pastourmatzi’s near-exhaustive research suggests not only that speculative fiction was increasingly being published in Greece during the sixties and seventies, but also that small dedicated communities were formed around it. After 1976 (and following the 1974 reestablishment of democracy) sales of translated genre fiction increased exponentially, though Greek short stories of the fantastic remained few and far between. However, this would soon change with the publication of The Hobbit in 1978 and, two years later, The Lord of the Rings: the translation of Tolkien’s work essentially introduced fantasy in Greece, triggering the beginning of a new period as it concerned the genre. I posit that fantasy was met with fewer obstacles than science fiction for a variety of reasons. To begin with, the combination of the abovementioned factors –increased sales, the easing of political tensions and the successful translation of Tolkien’s work– meant attacks against speculative fiction lessened in intensity. In addition, fantasy was often considered children’s literature and thus drew less critical attention; moreover, its pseudomedieval themes and tropes did invite immediate connections with US culture. Finally, many of the publishing houses that took the risk of publishing fantasy were also publishing new age books and the occasional ancient conspiracy text; it’s likely that their publishing activities were seen as beneath the notice of the critics. However, one of the most important factors in the dissemination of fantasy as a genre was the publication of the Ωρορα (Aurora) series of paperbacks. In 1986, the Aurora publishing house began anthologizing translated speculative fiction short stories centered on specific themes (a particular author, genre, character archetype or even an artifact such as magic swords); it also published several novels. A few Greek authors were also included in their anthologies. Their books were mainly sold at kiosks, which are particularly numerous in Greece, thus reaching a wide segment of the population. The introduction of these pulp “pocket books” essentially popularized fantasy, mirroring the process which popularized fantasy in the West in the first half of the twentieth century. Additionally, Aurora provided a platform for three Greek pioneers of the fantasy genre: George Balanos, Thomas Mastakouris, and Thanasis Vembos. These three anthologists, authors, and translators are also responsible for many of the early works of modern Greek speculative fiction, which were inserted in Aurora’s anthologies. Mastakouris in particular focused on heroic fantasy, while Balanos and Vembos mostly wrote horror and science fiction. Aurora’s success showcased the public’s appetite for fantasy, paving the way for other houses to include fantasy anthologies and classic fantasy novels in their line of production and encouraging Greek authors to write fantasy for the first time. Notably, in his Prologue for the second volume, written in 1993,

182 

D. NIKOLAIDOU

Panorios writes that the new generation of authors is writing fantasy, science fiction and horror “consciously” instead of interjecting fantastic elements in their stories. Interestingly, his third anthology volume (1994) includes women writers for the first time. These years were also marked by certain events signifying the gradual establishment of a fantasy scene in Greece, namely the establishment of the dedicated publishing houses Αίολος, the establishment of the “Άγνωστη Καντάθ” (Unknown Kadath) bookshop and publishing house in Thessaloniki, and the “Solaris” bookshop in Athens, both of which specialized in speculative fiction. Both venues, which became well known for carrying English-language books, became gathering spots for fans of the genre. Along with gaming shops such as Kaissa, Kadath, and Solaris allowed for an actual subculture of the fantastic to develop and grow. While this shift was positive in terms of the acceptance and dissemination of fantasy, it also had some negative consequences. During the sixties and seventies, Greek publishing houses and fanzines did not focus exclusively on Anglo-­ Saxon speculative fiction, for the reasons established in the previous section. However, in the eighties and nineties this changed and, as the Greek public attempted to “catch up” with decades of fantasy fiction, translations of Anglo-­ Saxon fantasy became the norm. Given that many new readers were discovering fantasy through the Aurora paperbacks, Greek perception of the genre was essentially shaped to the point of being dominated by the Western fantasy canon. Inevitably, the first wave of Greek fantasy authors identified the genre with its Western manifestations instead of perceiving it as a genre that can draw inspiration from different myths, legends, and oral traditions. This is evident in the few Greek short stories published this period; interestingly, some of them completely eschew the use of Greek names and place their stories in imaginary worlds inspired by Anglo-Saxon fantasy or in existing European landscapes. This was in part to be expected, since Greek literary tradition had actively distanced itself from fantasy, causing the genre to be perceived as an exclusively foreign affair. Another cultural factor that might have influenced Greek fantasy authors toward adopting exclusively Anglo-Saxon fantasy tropes and narratives is that, following the fall of the nationalistic, ultraconservative junta, and following its EU integration, Greece was striving to distance itself from its past, its oral traditions and its rural narratives, since those had been previously appropriated by the junta to support its oppressive rhetoric. Inspiration from antiquity was, for the same reasons, outright connected with fascist leanings7. As a result, the narratives from which fantasy authors in any country usually draw inspiration were, in the case of Greece, evoking disdain, while Western fantasy narratives symbolized instead a break both from the ideological divide of the Civil War with its rejection of Western speculative fiction and from the junta’s regressive culture. This particular cultural conflict would shape the work of Greek fantasy authors for decades. 7  Some authors and clubs indeed used speculative fiction as a vehicle for nationalistic ideology; those were usually isolated by the rest of the community.

  BETWEEN SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS: A SURVEY OF GREEK FANTASY FICTION 

183

The gradual but continuous increase in fantasy’s popularity resulted into the gradual acceptance of the genre which, in the beginning of the twenty-first century, mirrored a worldwide evolution. The commercial and critical success of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy (2001-2003), which introduced the genre in general to the mainstream, the advent of gaming and MMORPGs which further popularized fantasy8 and of course the advent of the internet, were crucial factors in this shift. Other factors particular to Greece include the launch of the 9 magazine, edited by Angelos Mastorakis, and the formation of three institutions which promoted fantasy. 9, which included comics, reviews, and short stories by Greek and foreign authors, was a weekly supplement of the major newspaper Ελευθεροτυπία; as such it both reached a large segment of the public and bestowed legitimacy upon the genre. As the first mainstream platform for speculative fiction authors it also launched a public discourse concerning the reevaluation of speculative art and culture. Interestingly, 9 did not focus exclusively on English-language fiction or comics, translating instead authors and comic makers from diverse parts of the world, further defending speculative works from the standard critiques of cultural colonization as well as familiarizing the Greek public with international fantasy. The publishing landscape was also shifting. Small, dedicated publishing houses like Συμπαντικές Διαδρομές made their appearance, while another series of pulp paperbacks, Terra Nova by Archetypo Publications, further introduced the fantasy canon in Greece. At that time, two major clubs which are still active today came into being: ALEF, The Athens Club of Science Fiction, and the Greek Tolkien Society “The Prancing Pony.” Both clubs would eventually become crucial factors in the dissemination of fantasy texts as well as in the development of a Greek fantasy tradition. In 2003, the website sff.gr (also active today) was launched, offering for the first time in Greece an online workshop for genre writers who wanted to get feedback, network, and discuss the publishing landscape. Most major Greek fantasy authors, if not all, have been a part of one or more of these three establishments. The prominence of ALEF once more showcases the close ties between science fiction and fantasy in Greece. ALEF was established in 1998, and the following year it established a writer’s workshop which initially focused on science fiction (as did most of its activities). However, very soon the decision was made to include fantasy works in its workshops and events, given that many ALEF authors worked in both genres. ALEF’s help was also crucial in the establishment of the Greek Tolkien Society: Karagiorgi notes that finding “hospitable” venues and becoming known to the public was possible due to their cooperation. The combined activities of ALEF, the Greek Tolkien Society and sff.gr showcased that by 2010, (a) the Greek public was acquainted with speculative fiction and (b) there was a cadre of Greek fantasy authors producing quality 8  To quote from an interview I conducted with Kaethi Karagiorgi of the Greek Tolkien Society, “As the years went by more and more people began to accept the fantastic. The definitive factor, I think, was cinema and gaming.”

184 

D. NIKOLAIDOU

work. However, major publishing houses were still reluctant to invest in Greek fantasy. Still, a few important Greek fantasy novels and short story collections were published in the first decade of the twentieth century. Vasso Christou’s Λαξευτές trilogy, Antony Paschos’ Πέρα από τη Γη των Θεών, Efthymia Despotaki’s Μέσα από το Γυαλί, Yiannis Pliotas’ To Βασίλειο της Αράχνης, the anthology Αντίθετο Ημισφαίριο (edited by Alexander Myroforides), Konstantinos Missios’ O Λέκγουελ και οι Ξεχασμένοι Θεοί, and, quite importantly, Lefteris Keramidas’ Κοράκι σε Άλικο Φόντο were among the most important titles. It is notable that Keramidas’ and Pliotas’ novels were published by major, mainstream publishing houses. It is also notable that only Keramidas and Despotaki were drawing inspiration from Greek myth, history, and legend. The rest of the authors utilize non-­Greek, mostly Tolkienesque names, landscapes, and myths instead, continuing the writing trends of the previous decades. While it would not be advisable to draw conclusions from such a small sample, this trend was also visible in sff.gr, ALEF’s literary workshops and the few pulp collections that included a couple of Greek authors in their selection. Apart from the reasons mentioned in the previous section, it is possible that the publishing houses themselves considered fantasy reminiscent of Tolkien and Moorcock to be more marketable than attempts at Greek inspired fantasy. The reception of Keramidas’ book, which is considered as the bestselling work of Greek fantasy, was indicative of the fact that public perception of fantasy was still anchored in its Anglo-Saxon form: while the author’s attempt to produce original Greek fantasy clearly resonated with the public, press coverage repeatedly focused on comparisons with Anglo-­Saxon fantasy. However, the economic crisis would soon reshape both the perception and the reception of the genre. Within a decade, Greek fantasy would quickly move through a transformational process, reconnecting with the Greek fantastic tradition as well as engaging with the international fantasy scene.

The Advent of Self-publishing The third period in Greek fantasy was triggered by the economic crisis of 2010, which essentially forced Greek publishing houses to embrace self-publishing as well as vanity publishing. Thus, publishers’ long entrenched resistance to the fantasy genre finally gave way since the criterion for choosing a book was no longer its supposed quality or its perceived marketability. Therefore, the publication of Greek fantasy titles increased exponentially, reflecting for the first time actual public interest in the genre. Unfortunately, given the nature of self-­ publishing, these works were not necessarily representative of Greek fantasy’s potential, especially when accounting for the fact that professional authors resisted self-publishing and thus were not represented in the market. The beginnings of modern Greek fantasy tradition then, where less than illustrious. During this period, the overall low quality of the titles further reinforced perception of fantasy as paraliterature though the political implications were largely absent. Still, it is rather notable that Ioanna Bourazopoulou’s critically

  BETWEEN SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS: A SURVEY OF GREEK FANTASY FICTION 

185

acclaimed fantasy novel The Valley of Mud was paradoxically never categorized as fantasy not because it lacked the relevant qualities, but because of its positive critical reception and openly political themes.9 However, some general conclusions can still be drawn from that period. The majority of these self-published titles, remain heavily colonized by Anglo-Saxon fantasy tropes. Urban fantasy is being published along heroic fantasy and sword and sorcery for the first time, usually situated in non-Greek cities and utilizing creatures of foreign myths. Also interestingly, and in accordance with international trends, for the first time authors seem to be drawing inspiration from role-playing games such as World of Darkness and Dungeons & Dragons. Unfortunately, in the case of Greece, even when role-playing games (digital or tabletop) include elements of Greek myth and legend, they draw these elements from pulp narratives and not directly from myth10; thus, in much of Greek fantasy fiction of that period, supposedly Greek elements appear through a foreign lens. Moreover, while fantasy internationally was evolving in its handling of social issues, Greek fantasy was still dominated by problematic pulp sensibilities in terms of race and gender. To add one more detrimental factor, the small market and the proliferation of self-publishing signified a lack of financial incentive for improvement. One positive development though was the exponential increase of women writers. Interestingly, the works of authors Kiara Kalountzi, Efthimia Despotaki, and Eirini Manta (which were not self-­ published) are among the few that eschew the usual tropes in favor of Greek fantasy elements. To summarize, Greek authors were not in contact with those developments in the fantasy genre which encouraged the development of national fantasy scenes elsewhere, while the surrounding culture provided them neither with stimulation nor with financial incentives. Despite its problems however, the proliferation of Greek fantasy finally allowed for the establishment of a national scene; it strengthened the subcultures associated with speculative fiction, and encouraged publishing houses and sponsors to invest in fantasy related events. The most important such festival was Φantasticon, which took place in 2014. Unlike most similar events, which focused on comics, Φantasticon focused on speculative fiction with a clear emphasis on fantasy. It acted as a catalyst for many of the developments in the fantasy genre, including increased cooperation between fantasy-related groups, increased press coverage, and the popularization of writing workshops on speculative fiction. Φantasticon proved to be a turning point for Greek fantasy, which, for a multiplicity of reasons examined below through an ethnographic frame of reference, was about to morph into a transnational scene with a deeply Greek identity.

9  Other speculative authors who were critically acclaimed and thus never considered as speculative fiction authors are Zyrana Zatelli and Chloe Koutsoumpeli. 10  Peterson 84.

186 

D. NIKOLAIDOU

Toward the Creation of a National Scene In his seminal work Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai has delved into the ways globalization ensures that mass culture becomes a process of merging and negotiation in which imagination has become collective. Because of electronic media, self-imaging becomes an “everyday social project” (5); the fast flow of mediated images across the world creates “diasporic public spheres, phenomena that confound theories that depend on the continued salience of the nation-state as the key arbiter of important social changes” (5). This exact process took place in Greece in terms of fantasy: rather paradoxically, encountering the international fantasy scene finally allowed for the rediscovering of the diachronic Greek fantastic and the crafting of a national scene. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, following wider cultural shifts, fantasy was facing increasing demands to evolve beyond both the Anglo-Saxon model and its problematic pulp elements. Greek fantasy was also involved in this process of conflict and negotiation, which in part took place online. One factor that contributed to this was the success of Greek authors writing in English.11In particular, during this period Natalia Theodoridou, Eugenia Triantafyllou, Christine Lucas, Elena Castroianni, and George Kotronis saw their short stories published in international “pro” magazines12. Theodoridou’s 2018 World Fantasy Award for her story “The Birding: A Fairy Tale,” drew attention to the possibilities inherent in rediscovering the fantastic elements of traditional Greek narratives, which had previously been rejected as regressive. Given that publication abroad offered authors financial compensation and critical recognition which they lacked in Greece, a disproportional number turned their eye on the international market, becoming quickly acquainted with current developments in fantasy in the process. The activities of three particular establishments also aided this shift: ALEF, The Tales of the Wyrd13 creative writing workshop, and the short-lived Άρπη publishing house. ALEF’s demanding workshops produced several high-quality anthologies, one of which Αθήνα 2525 was the first Greek speculative fiction to be published abroad (as Nova Hellas) in three languages. Tales of the Wyrd, a writing workshop focused solely on speculative fiction, undertook translations of Greek works into English thus further facilitating authors’ turn toward international markets. Another important development was the appearance of the fantasy imprint Άρπη, which under the direction of Lefteris Keramidas and Efthymia Despotaki focused on Greek authors who drew inspiration from Greek narratives of the fantastic. Despotaki and Keramidas’ popularity, ALEF and Tales facilitation of international aspirations, access to a diverse body of fantasy through the internet and through new translations, and the successes of Greek authors, 11  It should be noted that international success has traditionally been perceived as a measure of worth in Greece, often legitimizing previously marginalized cultural endeavors. 12  Interestingly, apart from Christine Lucas, these authors lived abroad at the time of their first publications. 13  Tales of the Wyrd is composed of authors Victor Pseftakis and Dimitra Nikolaidou.

  BETWEEN SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS: A SURVEY OF GREEK FANTASY FICTION 

187

finally shifted the focus from Greek imitations of fantasy’s pulp period to the search for authentic Greek fantasy. At the same time, the discourse on issues of diversity and representation had reached Greece, removing yet another obstacle for Greek authors who wanted to be published abroad yet were not familiar until then with the increased demand for inclusive, socially responsible fantasy. The fact that authors such as Theodoridou, Castroianni, and Triantafyllou were vocal about social issues, as well as the fact that their work utilized Greek themes, assisted in the further evolution of Greek fantasy, an evolution away from imitations of foreign fantasy tropes yet in alignment with a discourse on inclusivity which originated outside Greece. This brings us to the Greek fantasy tradition’s final paradox: with foreign markets providing an incentivizing publishing platform, Greek fantasy authors finally began drawing from their own, briefly forgotten tradition of the fantastic, revitalizing the Greek publishing landscape in the process, since the increased quality of their work (along, of course, with the increased popularity of fantasy worldwide) persuaded traditional publishers to invest in local authors.14 By 2021, the list of notable fantasy authors in Greece is almost identical with the list of Greek authors publishing their work abroad. Apart from Triantafyllou, Theodoridou, Castroianni, Keramidas, and the prolific Lucas, names include Antony Paschos, who has published his fantasy both in literary and in genre magazines, Ioanna Bourazopoulou, George Nikolopoulos, Victor Pseftakis, Atalanti Evripidou, Angeliki Radou, and Dimitra Nikolaidou. A few authors, like Avra Margariti, publish exclusively abroad. Successful authors publishing exclusively in Greek include Efthymia Despotaki, Vasso Christou, Natasha Pavlitsevits, Chrysostomos Tsaprailis, and Stelios Anatolitis. Anatolitis and Tsaprailis in particular achieved the dissemination of fantasy beyond its usual audience: Antolitis fame as a standup comedian introduced his urban fantasy series to the wider public, while Tsaprailis retelling of the folk traditions of Thessaly was acclaimed in literary circles. It is notable that, unlike Bourazopoulou and Zatelli in previous decades, these authors’ mainstream success did not exclude them from the speculative scene/canon, suggesting that the divide is not as persistent as it used to be. Even though the shift is recent, some common threads can be observed in the work of these authors, allowing for several observations on modern Greek fantasy. Examined collectively, these authors’ body of work reveals an increased focus on social issues, especially queer representation and immigration. Additionally, Greek fantasy authors draw inspiration from the entirety of the country’s history, including the previously taboo issue of the Civil War. Most importantly, a rediscovery of Greek oral traditions, especially folk songs and legends, can also be observed. It is notable that though Greek authors 14  Two examples that showcase the shift are the 2021 anthologies Φως στις Ρωγμές and Ίσως edited respectively by Tales of the Wyrd and ALEF. Unlike previous anthologies, the stories focus on uniquely Greek narratives drawing inspiration from myth, tradition, Greek cinema, and even mythology.

188 

D. NIKOLAIDOU

previously rejected these narratives in an attempt to reject regressive ideologies, they now reclaim them instead, highlighting their turbulent historic background while simultaneously shifting the focus on previously marginalized protagonists and on female heroines. Interestingly, Greek mythology is featured mostly in retellings that purposefully upend classical narratives, essentially deconstructing the heroic and patriarchic pattern inherent in ancient myths. It is equally notable that fantasy authors are often working with lesser-known oral traditions that have been marginalized by mainstream literary genres which, in search of a unified Greek identity, and influenced by foreign literature and its perception of Greece, often focused exclusively on Attica’s myths and traditions. Finally, the proliferation of these themes has not resulted in the exclusion of sword and sorcery or epic fantasy since the particular subgenre continues to attract the attention of authors and readers. Most importantly though, it is currently clear that Greek fantasy authors have transcended the limitations of theme, style, and ideology previously imposed upon them due to sociopolitical factors. Though perseverance appears to be a common underlying theme (perhaps fittingly given the country’s history), the fantasy scene in Greece currently produces truly diverse works of fiction.

Conclusion As often stated by scholars of fantasy fiction, authors utilize the genre to engage with current sociopolitical and cultural issues. In Greece, for a short period of time, refusal to engage with modern realities constituted a cultural statement in itself. Soon, as the political and social turbulence subsided, Greek fantasy quickly overcame multiple challenges and moved into the establishment of a transnational scene. Current fantasy authors are rediscovering, utilizing, challenging, and deconstructing the country’s fantastical narratives, and in doing so they engage simultaneously with the international discourse on social issues and the country’s own unique conditions. Even though the acceptance, discovery, and evolution of Greek fantasy had to happen through its engagement with international markets (an observation that can be made for many genres of Greek literature save perhaps poetry) the process resulted in the induction of fantasy into the country’s literary canon, offering authors yet another tool with which to negotiate social challenges. The rediscovery of the fantastical elements which abound in Greek narratives, as well as the unique viewpoint of Greek authors who write at the crossroads of East and West, can potentially contribute significantly to the international fantasy canon.

Works Cited Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Print.

  BETWEEN SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS: A SURVEY OF GREEK FANTASY FICTION 

189

Connolly, David (Ed.). The Dedalus Book of Greek Fantasy. Langford Lodge: Dedalus, 2004. Kindle edition. Lialiouti, Zinovia. “Greek Cold War Anti-Americanism in Perspective, 1947-1989.” Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 13:1, 40-55. Print. Πανώριος, Μάκης. Το Ελληνικό Φανταστικό Διήγημα, Τόμος Α. Αθήνα: Αίολος, 1993a. Πανώριος, Μάκης. Το Ελληνικό Φανταστικό Διήγημα, Τόμος Β. Αθήνα: Αίολος, 1993b. Πανώριος, Μάκης. Το Ελληνικό Φανταστικό Διήγημα, Τόμος Γ. Αθήνα: Αίολος, 1993c. Pastourmatzi, Domna. Bibliography of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror: 1960-1993. Athens: Alien, 1993. Print. Peterson, Jon. Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures from Chess to Role-Playing Games. San Diego: Unreason Press, 2012. Print.

Re-imagining Hindu Mythology in the Twenty-­First Century: Amish Tripathi and Indian Fantasy Fiction in English Deimantas Valančiūnas

The decade after economic liberalization in India (1991) has brought significant changes in country’s social and cultural life. It was especially evident in the rapidly growing middle classes and their developed new tastes in lifestyle, leisure, and entertainment and more opportunities and enthusiasms for consumption (Dwyer 2014, 236). The predominant form of Indian popular culture—cinema (or its global aspect in the form of Bollywood)—was supplemented with other forms of leisure and home entertainment, one of them— popular literature in English. Differently than English writing by Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and other Indian and diasporic writers, often seen as catering for either Western readership (Huggan 2001) or the postcolonial elite of India, this popular fiction in English is predominantly aimed for the domestic market. The rise of literature in English also saw the development and popularization of new genres, such as rom-com and chick-lit, but also Indian fantasy literature (represented by authors such as Amish Tripathi, Ashwin Sanghi, Shatrujeet Nath, Jagmohan Bhanver, and Samhita Arni, to name but a few). Even though Indian fantasy literature in English draws its inspiration from general Heroic/Epic fantasy in narrative construction and in publication trend of serialization, its content is uniquely Indian. E. Dawson Varughese (2017) titled it “Bharati” fantasy, because the narratives of the majority of Indian fantasy literature rely heavily on Indian mythology

D. Valančiūnas (*) Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2_13

191

192 

D. VALANČIŪNAS

and usually interpret and even rewrite various Hindu scriptures (Puranas, but also epic literature [Mahabharata and Ramayana]). One of the most important figures in the genre is Amish Tripathi, a banker-turned-bestselling author, whose fantasy fiction has explored and interpreted different sources of classical Hindu mythology (e.g., Shiva Purana in the Shiva Trilogy [2010–2013] and Ramayana in Ram Chandra Series [2015–2019] as well as Indian historical figures [The Legend of Suheldev: The King Who Saved India, 2020]). While interpretation of mythological / religious narratives in different arts and visual culture in India is not a new trend (e.g., these tendencies can be seen in oil paintings of the nineteenth century artist Raja Ravi Varma, the mythological genre of Indian popular cinema of the early twentieth century, or Amar Chitra Katha comic books of the late 1980s). Indian fantasy literature in contemporary India may be seen as continuing this engagement with mythology, but now catering to a new, globally oriented Indian readership and interprets Hindu mythology in accordance to its sensibilities. Therefore, by taking the Shiva Trilogy by Amish Tripathi (and concentrating mostly on the first installment—The Immortals of Meluha) as a case point, this chapter proposes to investigate the emergence of Indian fantasy fiction not only as a developing new form of “visual and aesthetic regimes of Hindu devotionality” (Sharma 2019, 159), but also in a broader context of socio-cultural transformations and political climate of contemporary India.

Amish Tripathi and Indian Fantasy Literature To say that Indian genre literature is an invention of the twenty-first century would be, of course, wrong, and there were numerous interactions and experiments way before. Some of the first experiments with genre literature in India were already present as early as the nineteenth century and were, in part, encouraged by the colonial experience. For example, the first attempt at historical fantasy was already made in 1835, with the publication of a short story “A Journal of Forty Eight Hours of the Year 1945” by K.C. Dutt in English (Khair 2008), while some of the earliest examples of sci-fi was a story “Niruddesher Kahini” (“Story of a Disappearance”) by Jagadish Chandra Bose, published in Bangla language in 1896 (Banerjee 2020). The experiments with writing in the Gothic style, or the narratives involving the supernatural, ghosts, and so on could be found in the end of the nineteenth century too, in the writings of Rabindranath Tagore in his short fiction written in Bengali (Bhattacharyya 2021) or in Urdu writing of Imtiaz Hijab Ali in the first half of the twentieth century (Jha 2021). These instances showcase the unique literary “contact zone” (Pratt 2008) where certain vernacular political and cultural sensibilities were discussed through the previously unexplored literary genres. Since the economic liberalization in India in 1991, the experiments in sci-fi and fantasy genres have increased and some of the first novels exploring Hindu mythology in different and fantastical environments were produced in the works of Ashok Banker (book series based on the Ramayana) and Sumit Basu

  RE-IMAGINING HINDU MYTHOLOGY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: AMISH… 

193

(The Gameworld Trilogy) in the early 2000s. Even though these were innovative and creative attempts to experiment with the genre, it may be argued that these novels never reached the mainstream reader which was still not particularly defined. It was only when the popular literature in English has gained the right of its own, and this newly emergent trend was propelled by the bestselling author Chetan Bhagat, who has been “widely celebrated in the Indian popular press for opening up a world of books to an upwardly mobile Indian youth faced with the many hopes and frustrations that accompany the prospect of growing national wealth” (Basu 2017, 167–168). What Manisha Basu refers here is the already aptly visible urban middle class which started to form the market for English-language literature. It is in this context that Amish Tripathi entered Indian literary scene with his first novel (and the first installment of the Shiva Trilogy), The Immortals of Meluha in 2010, instantly becoming a market phenomenon and one of the highest book sellers in India (Varughese 2017, 10). Together, Tripathi has become the author most often associated with this particular commercial genre of Indian mythological / fantasy literature, earning him the title of “Indian Tolkien” in the media (Pandey 2017) and whose literary, thematic and narrative strategy trends made a visible impact on other Indian writers, who successfully continue exploring the terrain of mythological fantasy in India today. The Shiva Trilogy traces and re-imagines the story of Shiva, one of the most prominent gods in Hinduism. The Immortals of Meluha, the first book in the trilogy, is set in the year of 1900 BC and concentrates on Shiva, leader of the Guna tribe who lives in the remote desert of Mount Kailash under harsh conditions and constant attacks from the neighboring tribes. Shiva is visited by the messengers from Meluha empire and is invited to resettle there. After some considerations Shiva agrees and travels to Meluha, where he is astonished by the achievements of this super civilization. After drinking some mysterious medicine called Somras, Shiva’s throat turns blue. After this Shiva is revealed to be the Neelkanth—the blue-necked hero, whose arrival is predicted in ancient prophesies. Shiva is convinced to fight the Chandravanshi clan and the tribe of disfigured people, the Nagas, who are treated as evil by the people of Meluha (who belong to the opposite—Suryavanshi clan). Reluctant at first, Shiva finally accepts his role as a leader. Throughout the course of the three novels, the power relations and perspectives shift, Shiva is drawn into a web of intrigues, however he is able to locate the source of evil and finishes it, transforming from a simple tribesman to a divine warrior and god in the process. This narrative strategy presented in the Shiva Trilogy requires a reconfiguration of the entire mythological Shiva-related literary corpus as well as popular/ oral knowledge. Therefore, in Amish Tripathi’s reworking of the Shiva mythology, many other figures related to Shiva (Daksha, Sati, Kartik, Ganesha, Kali), places (mount Kailash) and events (churning of the Ocean) are cast and interpreted in a new light. While as mentioned above the experimentations with Hindu mythology in literature has been done in the past, it may be argued that it was Amish Tripathi who has made it mainstream, creating a unique variation

194 

D. VALANČIŪNAS

in the global fantasy literature. It is apparent that Tripathi’s writing is a certain cross-over of different aspects of fantasy literature. On the one hand, it falls under the category of a traditional “quest fantasy” (Senior 2012), where the hero (usually an average person at the beginning) embarks on a journey, passes through a series of adventurous encounters and dangers, gradually changing himself and acquiring the knowledge needed to defeat the evil. This traditional fantasy mode is, however, reworked by Amish Tripathi through the thick layer of Hindu mythology, and, therefore, could fall under the rubric of “mythology-­ inspired fiction” (Varughese 2019). Additionally, this particular narrative strategy (or style) can be seen as a “fantasy of religion,” to use the term by Graham Sleight, or a “a text that depicts or makes use of commonly understood religious tropes, but which recasts them in the context of additional fantastic narrative elements” (Sleight 2012, 248). This definition is very helpful in understanding the particularly intricate aspect of Amish Tripathi’s novels, because the author himself considers his writing not as a mere interpretation of mythological narratives, but as a certain type of revelation, as seen in the Acknowledgments of The Immortals of Meluha: “(…) I believe that this story is a blessing to me from Lord Shiva. Humbled by this experience, I find myself a different man today, less cynical and more accepting of different world views. Hence, most importantly, I would like to bow to Lord Shiva, for blessing me so abundantly, far beyond what I deserve” (Tripathi 2010, xiv). Therefore, it also exposes some intimate relationship between fiction and devotionality. And finally, the writing of Tripathi can also be treated as a form of speculative historical fiction, because even though some of the places are fictional, the Trilogy firmly utilizes Indian geography and treats depicted events as an alternative form of Indian history. Even though Amish Tripathi’s phenomenal success has produced a range of inspired literature, it should be noted that Indian fantasy literature is definitely multifaceted and multi-vocal, and has been showcasing both narrative and stylistic diversity. And even though most of the novels in this mythology-inspired fantasy genre interprets or rewrites classical mythological narratives, they tend to do so in different ways. E. Dawson Varughese has singled out several narrative patterns emerging from this corpus of literature: (1) narratives that are faithful in retelling the original mythological narratives with minimal changes; (2) narratives that are recognizable by the original mythological narratives but where stories, plots, and characters are presented anew; (3) narratives which re-imagine original mythological sources through contemporary subgenres and/or locations; and (4) narratives that take only characters or some aspects of the plot of the original mythological source, developing and re-imagining it further (Varughese 2019, 146). Amish Tripathi’s fantasy fiction generally and his Shiva Trilogy in particular belongs to the second pattern discussed by Varughese and Tripathi interprets some of the most important narratives of Indian mythology, most notably stories associated with god Shiva, but also Ramayana, Mahabharata, and other sources. What is significant about the mythology inspired fantasy of Tripathi, is the humanization and

  RE-IMAGINING HINDU MYTHOLOGY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: AMISH… 

195

personalization of god Shiva (as well as other gods and goddesses of Hindu mythology) and scientization of related places and events in Shiva’s mythology. These narrative decisions require a closer inspection, especially if situating them in the perspective of the socio-political climate of India.

Humanization of the Divine One of the most striking aspects of Amish Tripathi’s Shiva Trilogy is his attempt to present the god Shiva as a common man, who transforms into the divinity through the course of his heroic deeds and journeys. This particular approach to the divine through the process of humanization is not entirely new and has been done in several different ways in Indian culture in the past. It can be argued, however, that such attempts to rework mythological narratives and religious representations were always tied to different configurations of historical and socio-cultural transformations. One of the first attempts to humanize gods and goddesses in the modern artistic environment was amateur painter’s Raja Ravi Varma’s (1848–1906) paintings. Ravi Varma created an innovative painting style, where he used European techniques of oil painting and realist perspectives in interpretation of mythological narratives springing from classical Sanskrit drama, the epics and the Puranas. In his paintings Varma usually presented divine characters, gods and goddesses, in naturalistic settings, captured in motion, in this way not only adding a realistic perspective on them, but making gods and goddesses seem domesticated and humanized. After establishing the Ravi Varma Fine Art Lithographic Press in 1894, Varma’s prints have spread across the country in countless copies. Varma’s selected narratives from the epics and classical Sanskrit plays communicated to the spectator about the rich and timeless Indian cultural heritage which was made real and alive and, most importantly, modern through the realist techniques of oil painting. Because of this reason Varma’s paintings and lithographs can be seen as instrumental in the India’s anti-­ colonial struggle of the nineteenth century. Ravi Varma was celebrated by Indian nationalists and elite, but also, as Kejri Jain suggests, his “prints made available multiple ways of performing Indianness to a wide audience, which did not need to be literate, wealthy or male to participate in a nationalist arena” (Jain 2012, 199). Another notable example I want to draw attention to is the phenomenal success of a low budget mythological film Jai Santoshi Maa (1975) which became a super hit much to the surprise for both the industry and the critics. Triumphing together with two other films of the same year, Deewaar and Sholay, both lead by the Indian film star Amitabh Bachchan and belonging to the popular format of the Bombay cinema, Jai Santoshi Maa was contrary—a mythological film with little known actors about a little popular goddess Santoshi and her assistance to her devotee Satyawati. The film has become a religious phenomenon, which completely reinvented the goddess and made her extremely popular. The immense success of the film draws our attention to

196 

D. VALANČIŪNAS

several key aspects of the film which might have resulted in this overwhelming appreciation by the public. As Pllip Lutgendorf has suggested in his extensive study of the film, even though ritualistic worship or philosophical discourses about gods and goddesses may “emphasize their ‘otherness’ to the human— their being eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing, etc.—the praising of deities through stories about their ‘acts’ (charitra) or ‘play’ (lila) stresses their human-­ like qualities” (Lutgendorf 2002, 27). And so in the film gods and goddesses appear to be expressing human traits and emotions—jealousy, passion, but also merit and compassion, highly appealing to the diverse (but mostly female) audience which could easily relate to the mythological, yet humanized figures in the film. Jai Santoshi Maa is not a singular instance, however, and South Indian film industry has developed a certain sub-genre, which can be labeled as “Goddess films,” and which follows a similar narrative pattern in variations. By bringing the goddesses to the contemporary world to assist their (usually female) devotees, these films through the cinematographic means encourage modern spectators “to experience the goddess as living flesh rather than stone” (Ram 2009, 56). These examples showcase not only the continuous interpretation and adaptation of religious/mythological figures in connection to the ever changing religious experience in India, but also their relationship to the socio-­ cultural and political changes in India. Amish Tripathi’s attempts to interpret and reinvent the epic and mythological narratives continues this engagement of contemporary arts with the classical Hindu mythology. However, the innovation that Tripathi brings into the representation of Hindu mythology is that he in his Shiva Trilogy has worked on a reverse matrix and presents the readers with Shiva as a person who, in a process of self-discovering and fulfilling his duties becomes mahadev—“the great god.” In fact, it is not only Shiva, but also other Hindu gods and goddesses (Sati, Kali, Ganesha and others) that are reinvented as (extraordinary, but) humans. And so in The Immortals of Meluha Shiva is constructed as a barbarian, his youthful body defined by expressive musculature and marked with numerous scars, indicating mastery in the battles. His attitude toward life and values, however, establishes him as a leader, who would do anything for his tribe and the people he cares about. Despite living in the remote desert of the mount Kailash, Shiva is sophisticated and easily understands complex issues of science, war techniques and medicine. The novels also highlight his human-like qualities by emphasizing his youthful joyfulness, as Shiva is often cracking jokes and enjoys the joint of marijuana with his friend Bhadra. At the same time, he is sensitive, romantic, sexually active, but directs his energy only toward the love of his first sight—Sati. Moreover, as particularly visible in the first installment of the Shiva Trilogy, Shiva constantly feels reluctant when he is approached by the other characters of the novel as god or mahadev, and is often seen as embarrassed by this reverence, which strengthens reader’s impression of his humanness rather than godliness. Despite the fact that Shiva in Amish Tripathi’s fiction is reconstructed as a completely new and individual character, it is also important that several traits,

  RE-IMAGINING HINDU MYTHOLOGY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: AMISH… 

197

particularly associated with Shiva’s religious iconography, are presented early in the novel in order to reaffirm the reader’s knowledge of the god. Namely, in the novels Shiva is presented as exceptionally good dancer, and when in The Immortals of Meluha he meets Sati during her dance practice lessons, he acknowledges some technical mistakes she makes and provides her with guidance by first of all striking a Nataraja pose and then performing an awe-­inspiring dance. According to Alain Daniélou, “as a manifestation of primordial rhythmic energy, Shiva is the ‘Lord of the dance’ (Nata-raja) and the cosmic universe is his theatre” (Daniélou 1992, 199), and so in Hindu iconography, the image of Shiva Nataraja is a very identifiable motif. It is easy no notice that the portrayal of Shiva as a protagonist of the novels is constructed in a manner already familiar to Indian audiences accustomed to the format of Indian popular cinema. As many Indian popular films are hero-­ centric, they too put a lot of emphasis on their male protagonists. While contemporary Bollywood films emphasize the muscular and ageless bodies of their male characters, together the male protagonist of the films would be showcasing a variety of different traits and values, such as charm, charisma, sophistication, and emotionality, “creating a new image of today’s Indian as simultaneously Indian and global” (Dwyer 2014, 74). This deliberate construction of Shiva, as a similar character to a filmic hero, can also be seen through the choice of language in the Tripathi’s novels, which is very simple, bordering sometimes on colloquialisms. It is first of all noticeable in the speech of Shiva. In the novels Shiva uses various colloquialisms to indicate his emotional responses to certain events and circumstances, and so Shiva may express his embarrassment with himself after saying inappropriate suggestions to his future-to-be wife Sati with “Shit! What am I saying!” (Tripathi 2010, 43) and by expressing his anger or astonishment with “bloody hell” or “Dammit!” Therefore, Shiva’s speech littered with colloquialisms reminds the vocabulary and expression of the Indian urban youth. The idea that the language of the characters mirrors Tripathi’s readership may be also extended further by the words Tripathi chooses to describe certain places and events in the novels. Therefore, when Gunas arrive in Srinagar, the city in Meluha, they are being led to the “Foreigner’s Office” where they are introduced to Chitraangadh, the “Orientation executive.” In a similar way, characters venture into “restaurants” or talk about “police” or, several times, encounter “terrorists” and “terrorist attacks”—all of the above-­ mentioned names seemingly more appropriate for the contemporary context, rather than for the ancient India of 1900 BC. It is also apparent that Amish Tripathi does not take for granted that the reader of his fiction already knows all the intricacies of Hindu religious and ritualistic terminology, and thus even though he uses a lot of original terms of Sanskrit origin (be it practices, names, or titles), he almost exclusively explains them in immediate follow-up commentary, marking the Sanskrit word in italics and giving the explanation in the same style. At the same time, the novels also include a glossary at the end, explaining some of the key terminology (e.g., words, such as “Namaste,” “karma,” “Holi,” etc.).

198 

D. VALANČIŪNAS

It may be argued, that by employing the common colloquial English language and expressions of the middle-class urban Indians of the twenty-first century, Amish Tripathi connects the ancient with the modern as unbreakable continuum, bringing the ancient past to a proximity to the metropolitan present. At the same time, the historicization of Indian mythology and humanization of the gods and goddesses could also in part be aimed at these young metropolitan readers of neoliberal India, to showcase that Hindu mythology is not something related to the past, but as something historically grounded and, moreover, relevant to the present. It has been noted that Indian economic liberalization was also tied to the growth of Hindu nationalism in India. As Aravind Rajagopal suggests, the previous stagnant “Hindu rate of growth” (the term coined by economist Raj Krishna) has created certain associations between the sluggish economy, India, and the term “Hindu.” Rajagopal writes that “‘Hindu’ here was metonymic of India—ancient and out-of-date, too vast to be successfully influenced by mere mortals, and possessing in this intractability its own peculiar distinction. Yet the overriding feature of this distinctiveness was failure—its seeming incapacity to answer the needs of changing times” (Rajagopal 2001, 35). However, after the liberalization and with the growth of Hindu nationalism and the rise of the BJP party, the perception of Hinduism has started to change, as it has been celebrated and promoted as inseparable part of Indian identity. These political shifts have become visible in many spheres of Indian public life, including popular cinema. As, for example, Sheena Malhotra and Tavishi Alagh argue in their discussion of a highly popular Bollywood film Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), “Hinduism, then, is able to articulate itself in more popularly acceptable terms, being marketed as a hip, young religion, fluid in its different manifestations” (Malhotra and Alagh 2004, 23). Therefore, on the one hand, Tripathi’s novels may seem to be aimed at the global audience, not familiar with Indian cultural expressions. On the other hand, this is also could be seen as a helping aid for the global Indians (both the Indian urban middle class and the diaspora), who may already be not very well versed in the complex Hindu mythology or it’s intricate terminology, or who may belong to different religious groups. In one way or the other, Amish Tripathi’s writing can be seen as yet another way to re-inscribe Hindu mythology in its new and modern form into the public life of India.

Scientized Mythology In Shiva Trilogy, one can encounter many instances where Amish Tripathi evokes science. Science is employed in some of the most crucial instances of the novels to rework, and, therefore, to rationalize certain aspects of narratives of popular myths. One of the key objects in The Immortals of Meluha is the medicine drink of Somras, which provides the Meluhians with the longevity and good health. The name of Somras is similar to that of soma—a divine drink found in the Vedas and associated with amrita, the elixir of immortality. In the

  RE-IMAGINING HINDU MYTHOLOGY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: AMISH… 

199

Hindu mythology, one of the most fundamental and central myths is the “Samudra Manthana”—“Churning of the Ocean.” Myth has many versions, but the most popular are found in the Mahabharata and the Vishnu Purana, where gods (devas) and antigods (asuras) agree to churn the milk ocean in order to produce the divine drink of immortality—amrita. Amish Tripathi in The Immortals of Meluha takes on the same myth, but reforms it to strip it of mythological connotations. First of all, the Somras drink is presented not as a product of divine effort, but as an “invention,” as Daksha explains to Shiva: “Somras was invented many thousands of years ago by one of the greatest Indian scientists that ever lived. His name was Lord Brahma” (Tripathi 2010, 61). Therefore, not only the drink is a product of scientific experiment, but its invention is attributed to Brahma—the god creator in the major pantheon of Hinduism, reaffirming once again the stance that some of the most important gods in Hindu mythology were (extraordinary) human beings. When in The Immortals of Meluha Shiva decides to visit mount Mandar—the place where Somras is produced, Tripathi continues in the novel to rearrange the myth through the scientific approach. This is most evident when Brahaspati, the chief scientist of Somras production, explains the complex process of Somras making: “We have giant churning machines in a massive cavern at the base of this mountain. The Saraswati waters are led in here through a complex system of canals. The water is collected in an enormous pool in the cavern which we affectionately call Sagar” (Tripathi 2010, 89). Therefore, the production of Somras in the novel still has key elements of the churning of the ocean myth (e.g., the pool is called Sagar, which means “an ocean,” mount Mandar is also taken from the myth, where it is used as a handle to churn the ocean), but this myth is rationalized in the novel as a kind of sophisticated system of scientific achievement. Moreover, Shiva’s neck becomes blue when he drinks the Somras, which also happens in the churning of the ocean myth, where during the churning a lethal poison halahala is produced and god Shiva drinks it up. In the myth, it is Shiva’s consort Parvati, who places her hand on Shiva’s throat in order to prevent poison from spreading further into his body, resulting in his throat becoming blue due to the effect of the poison (Ranganathan 2018, 84). Not only the empire of Meluha is constructed as a supercivilization of technological advancement, but Amish Tripathi uses modern words to describe certain inventions. For example, Tripathi uses the word “drone” to evoke the disembodied voice of mantra chanting: “the drone of Brahmin scientists reciting Sanskrit shlokas at the bottom of the mountain floated up to create an ethereal atmosphere of pathos” (Tripathi 2010, 250). While in the second installment of the Shiva Trilogy, The Secret of the Nagas Tripathi attempts to rationalize and explain the process of communication by thoughts between Shiva and Vasudevs (the divine messengers of Vishnu, serving as Pandits in different temples). Here, the divine telepathy is simply explained as “radio waves” with temples serving as “transmitters” (Tripathi 2011). The novels also employ the concept of Brahmastra—a weapon of mass destruction, and Pashupatiastra— the weapon of intact precision, becoming the references to modern weaponry.

200 

D. VALANČIŪNAS

All of these examples in Amish Tripathi’s writing may be considered as another attempt by the author to create a certain justification to the Indian mythology, not only making it understandable to contemporary reader, but also creating an uninterrupted link between the mythological past and a very advanced present. This tendency, however, could also be read in the light of recent political developments in India and in the context of Hindu nationalism. As Banu Subramaniam has explained, “at the heart of this contemporary form of Hindu nationalism, Hindutva or ‘Hinduness,’ is the imagination of a great and grand Hindu past where science, technology, and philosophy thrived” (Subramaniam 2019, 7). And so even though certain instances of the scientization of mythology has been seen for many years in various discourses in India, the scientization of different narratives of the past have increased since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took the post in 2014. Narendra Modi himself made the famous speech at the Mumbai’s hospital claiming that plastic surgery and reproductive genetics have been a long-time invention of India, recorded in the mythological sources (Rahman 2014). Therefore, in recent times the science and religion have been mobilized together to reclaim, in a way, the lost greatness of an ancient India (Subramaniam 2019, 8). What is important to note, however, is that particular trends relocating scientific in the mythological may not always be confined to any of the concrete political ideologies. As Meera Nanda suggests, “it is not considered particularly right-wing or left-­ wing, as elements of it can be found among people and parties of all political persuasions” (Nanda 2016, 5). Therefore, it may be argued that the tendencies of scientization in Amish Tripathi’s novels function as a reflection of the kind of postcolonial re-vitalization and celebration of the ancient Indian past in recent popular political discourses. The scientization of mythology is not the only aspect of Tripathi’s novels which may tie his works to the recent political developments in India, as his novels also exhibit very pronounced traits of militarism and patriotism. The Shiva Trilogy, as, in fact, many examples of heroic fantasy, relies heavily on battles, fight scenes and military campaigns. And even though the narrative revolves around the empire of Meluha, located in the territories of the river Indus, the word India is used quite frequently in the novels in different contexts. For example, Nandi describes Meluha as “the richest and most powerful empire in India” (Tripathi 2010, 73). Acknowledging the fact that in the Indian subcontinent there may be other empires too, the narrative of The Immortals of Meluha also insists on the conceptualization of India as a unified whole, for example, when Brahaspati comments to Shiva: “You are meant for bigger things. You are important to the future of India” (Tripathi 2010, 123). Therefore, India in the novels is not the territory of the Indian subcontinent of the 1900 BC, but rather functions as an equivalent for contemporary India, as a nation-state. This could also be seen in the light of recent political developments in India, where the discourses of Hindu nationalism showcase tendencies to revision the past and to “Indianize” it, especially by equating history to mythology (Jaffrelot 2021, 171). This understanding of the India of the past,

  RE-IMAGINING HINDU MYTHOLOGY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: AMISH… 

201

as India of the present resonate with the notions of patriotism and militarism. In The Immortals of Meluha, Shiva asks to be blessed by a blind old man with the words “Bless me, sir, so that I find the strength to fight for a man as patriotic as you” (Tripathi 2010, 122). And when Drapaku, a warrior from the vikarma (or the untouchable) class proclaims to Shiva that there are many men in his class ready to “die for Meluha,” Shiva replies that “I don’t want you to die for Meluha, brave Drapaku. […] I would like it if you killed for Meluha” (Tripathi 2010, 324). Even though the power positions shift in the later novels of the Trilogy, the notions of heroism and patriotism remain very visibly connected to Shiva and other divine characters (Kartik, Ganesha, Kali, Sati), whose muscular and trained bodies are employed in their attempts to fight, kill, and even die for the motherland. Therefore, even though Amish Tripathi has said in many of his interviews that he does not believes in either left-wing or right-wing ideologies (Benu 2017), and some of the ideas in his novels can be interpreted as liberal (e.g., his empowering portrayal of female characters, or raising up the issue of unfair status of untouchability in the example of vikarma people), his writing still, arguably, remains tied to mainstream nationalistic tendencies of India. It can also be seen through his indirect references to certain events and places of contemporary India which have unresolved or controversial status. One of the contemporary references in The Immortals of Meluha is the reference to the Ramjanmabhoomi temple in Ayodhya—the temple which marks the birth place of god Rama. When Shiva is about to move to Ayodhya in novel, Sati exclaims: “But I don’t know if these people would have kept his temple unharmed. They may have destroyed it in their hatred” (Tripathi 2010, 293). This may be interpreted as a reference to the Babri mosque of the city of Ayodhya, which was built by the emperor Babur in the sixteenth century after allegedly destroying the previous structure of Ram’s temple. The expressed concern by Sati in the novel subtly reverberates the discourses surrounding the site in contemporary India—the archeological debates on the possibility of the historical Ram temple, the demolition of the Babri mosque by Hindu fundamentalists in 1992 and the ongoing works of rebuilding the temple under Narendra Modi’s government. And even though in The Immortals of Meluha the characters learn that the temple is intact and not harmed, not only does the novel dedicate an ample paragraph describing the beauty and exclusivity of the temple, but, it in a way, it also provides the reader with a certain reassurance about the Ram temple’s existence, this way legitimating, albeit indirectly, the ongoing process of rebuilding Ram temple in Ayodhya—the campaign Amish Tripathi has been vocal and supportive about (Tripathi 2019).

Conclusion When discussing India’s fascination with “speculative fiction,” Philip Lutgendorf contends that contrary to the Western audiences, for whom classical mythology appeared to be dead, “mythology never died in South Asia; on

202 

D. VALANČIŪNAS

the contrary, it remained alive, kicking, and ready to be reinterpreted to suit contemporary needs” (Lutgendorf 2021, 366). Therefore, the development of mythology-inspired narratives in the twenty-first century as English-language fantasy fiction may be seen as another attempt to revision the Hindu mythology, this time—for global India. Amish Tripathi’s fiction discussed in this chapter showcase how narratives of classical Hindu mythology may be reworked and reinterpreted to suit the understanding and taste of the urban middle class populations in India and Indian diaspora. In the Shiva Trilogy, Shiva, one of the major gods in Hinduism, is envisioned as a common human, who becomes a god by fighting the evil and defeating it. It is also important to stress that it is not only Shiva, but the rest of the characters from Hindu mythology in the novels are presented in the same way—as extraordinary, but human. This requires a careful reinvention of Shiva-related mythology, and so Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, who is generally known from the classical mythology to be the son of Shiva and Parvati, his second wife, is presented in the novels as the first child of Sati, whom she believes is dead, but actually is alive, but hidden from her by Daksha, her father, because of some bodily mutations he has been born with, and therefore considered abnormal. The same line is kept in constructing the goddess Kali, who appears to be Sati’s twin sister, also driven away from the family due to her deformed body. One of the most important reworking in the novels is, however, the character of Sati. She is represented in the novels not only as a caring wife and mother of Shiva’s child, not only a skilled dancer, but also as a warrior. Sati, the first wife of Shiva in classical mythology, immolates herself on a sacred fire as a response to her father’s, king Daksha’s, insult to Shiva. In the Shiva Trilogy, however, Sati dies in the battle with Egyptian assassins. All of these instances showcase the flexibility of mythological narratives who delve on the familiar, but are reworked through various thematic patterns and are given different interpretations, which may also be dependent on the socio-political contexts which produce and disseminate these very same narratives. Therefore, if earlier genre fiction in the vernacular Indian languages have been a popular entertainment for the masses, usually produced as cheaply printed books of detective and ghost stories, littering the stalls of the busy railway stations, the mythology-inspired fantasy fiction in English sits proudly displayed in the major book stores and airport lounges all across India, indicating the new status this genre holds and the new reading public which consumes it.

Works Cited Banerjee, Suparno. Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity. University of Wales Press, 2020. Basu, Manisha. The Rhetoric of Hindu India. Language and Urban Nationalism. Cambridge University Press, 2017. Benu, Parvathi. “The Amish Tripathi Interview: I Don’t Believe in Left-wing and Right-wing Ideologies, I’m Just Proud of Indian Culture!” Edexlive, 29th March,

  RE-IMAGINING HINDU MYTHOLOGY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: AMISH… 

203

https://www.edexlive.com/live-­story/2017/mar/29/xyz-­amish-­ 2017. tripathi-­266.html. Bhattacharyya, Prasanta. “Search and Subterfuge: The Haunting of the Bengali Bhadralok in Tagore’s ‘The Hungry Stones.’” South Asian Gothic. Haunted Cultures, Histories and Media, edited by Katarzyna Ancuta and Deimantas Valančiūnas, University of Wales Press, 2021, pp. 65–79. Daniélou, Alain. Gods of Love and Ecstasy: The Traditions of Shiva and Dionysus. Inner Traditions, 1992. Dwyer, Rachel. Bollywood’s India: Hindi Cinema as a Guide to Contemporary India. Reaktion Books, 2014. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. Routledge, 2001. Jaffrelot, Christophe. Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy. Princeton University Press, 2021. Jain, Kejri. “Mass-Reproduction and the Art of the Bazaar.” Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture, edited by Vasudha Dalmia and Rashmi Sadana, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 184–205. Jha, Shweta Sachdeva, 2021. “Tracing Terror and the Uncanny in the Gothic Urdu Fiction of Hijab Imtiaz Ali.” South Asian Gothic. Haunted Cultures, Histories and Media, edited by Katarzyna Ancuta and Deimantas Valančiūnas, University of Wales Press, 2021, pp. 81–96. Khair, Tabish. “Indian Pulp Fiction in English: A Preliminary Overview from Dutt to Dé.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 43, no. 3, Sept. 2008, pp. 59–74. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989408095238. Lutgendorf, Philip. “A ‘Made to Satisfaction Goddess’. Jai Santoshi Maa Revisited. Part Two.” Manushi, 131, July–August, 2002, pp. 24–37. Lutgendorf, Philip, “A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away. The Mahābhārata as Dystopian Future.” Many Mahābha ̄ratas, edited by Nell Shapiro Hawley and Sohini Pillai. State University of New York Press, 2021, pp. 361–384. Malhotra, Sheena and Tavishi Alagh “Dreaming the Nation: Domestic Dramas in Hindi Films Post-1990.” South Asian Popular Culture, 2:1, 2004, pp. 19–37. https://doi. org/10.1080/1474668042000210492. Nanda, Meera. Science in Saffron: Skeptical Essays on History of Science. Three Essays Collective, 2016. Pandey, Geeta. “Amish Tripathi: ‘India’s Tolkien’ of Hindu Mythology.” BBC, 16 June, 2017. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-­asia-­india-­40284980. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge, 2008. Rahman, Maseeh. “Indian Prime Minister Claims Genetic Science Existed in Ancient Times.” The Guardian. October 28, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2014/oct/28/indian-­prime-­minister-­genetic-­science-­existed-­ancient-­times. Rajagopal, Arvind. Politics after Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public. Cambridge University Press, 2001. Ram, Kalpana. “Bringing the Amman into Presence in Tamil Cinema. Cinema Spectatorship as Sensuous Apprehension.” Tamil Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India’s Other Film Industry, edited by Selvaraj Velayutham, Routledge, 2009, pp. 44–58. Ranganathan, Shyam. Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation. Routledge, 2018.

204 

D. VALANČIŪNAS

Senior, W.  A. “Quest Fantasies.” The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 190–199. Sharma, Chinmay. “Expanding World of Indian English Fiction. The Mahabharata retold in Krishna Udayasankar’s The Aryavarta Chronicles and Amruta Patil’s Adi Parva.” Indian Genre Fiction. Pasts and Future Histories, edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity, Routledge, 2019, pp. 159–174. Sleight, Graham. “Fantasies of History and Religion.” The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 248–256. Subramaniam, Banu. Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism. University of Washington Press, 2019. Tripathi, Amish. The Immortals of Meluha. Westland, 2010. Tripathi, Amish. The Secret of the Nagas. Westland, 2011. Tripathi, Amish. “Ramjanmabhoomi: Let the Temple be the Foundation of Ram Rajya.” Observer Research Foundation, November 21, 2019. Varughese, E. Dawson. “Post-millennial ‘Mythology-Inspired Fiction’ in English. The Market, the Genre, and the (Global) Reader.” Indian Genre Fiction. Pasts and Future Histories, edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani and Anwesha Maity, Routledge, 2019, pp. 141–158. Varughese, E.  Dawson. Genre Fiction of New India. Post-millennial Receptions of “Weird” Narratives. Routledge, 2017.

Wilderness as Wonderland: Jewish Fantasy from Ancient to Modern Ido Hevroni

Why is there no Jewish Narnia? Because, says Michael Weingrad, fantasy in its essence is foreign to the Jewish tradition: To put it crudely, if Christianity is a fantasy religion, then Judaism is a science fiction religion. If the former is individualistic, magical, and salvationist, the latter is collective, technical, and this-worldly. Judaism’s divine drama is connected with a specific people in a specific place within a specific history. Its halakhic core is not, I think, convincingly represented in fantasy allegory. In its rabbinic elaboration, even the messianic idea is shorn of its mythic and apocalyptic potential. Whereas fantasy grows naturally out of Christian soil, Judaism’s more adamant separation from myth and magic render classic elements of the fantasy genre undeveloped or suspect in the Jewish imaginative tradition. (Weingrad 2010)

Weingrad raises several important arguments, but the picture that he presents is partial. Indeed, modern Jewish fantasy literature is rare, and while it is true that the Judaism’s mainstream is usually identified as rational-realistic, at the same time there are Jewish streams, such as mysticism and Hassidism, that created rich fantasy, and contemporary fantasy writers that were influenced by them.1 Even if the tradition of Jewish fantasy is a desert, it still offers a fair share 1  For a review of Jewish folklore, see: Yassif 2009. For contemporary fantasy based on Kabbalistic sources, see for example: Kluger and Rybalka 2001; Doren 2008.

I. Hevroni (*) Department of Philosophy and Jewish Thought, and the Core Curriculum, Shalem College, Jerusalem, Israel e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2_14

205

206 

I. HEVRONI

of oases, in which the contemporary writer can find rich sources of inspiration for his work. Yet these esoteric streams are not alone in offering fertile soil for modern fantasy, as it can even be found in what is considered the source of its realistic-rational predisposition: The Babylonian Talmud, the fundamental book of all of Judaism’s streams. What has created the contemporary shortage in Jewish fantasy is not the fact that it does not exist, but rather that it has been repressed for generations. To use a fantastic metaphor, Jewish fantasy is still living in the cupboard under the stairs, waiting for the owl. The chapter will propose a more complex view of Jewish fantasy via analysis of a case study: a compilation of fantastic stories of the sage Rabbah bar bar Hana’s (hereafter RbbH) journeys through sea and wilderness (b. Bava Batra 73b–74a), which served as inspiration for the poem “Dead of the Wilderness” (1902), written by the Zionist movement’s national poet, Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934). “Fantasy” as a genre is admittedly a modern distinction, but, as Weingrad argues, it feeds off of the world of pre-modern literature. Furthermore, the Talmudic stories analyzed here are not far from modern fantasy, in that they consciously describe an alternative reality that is not subject to the laws of nature known to their audience.2 The proposed textual analysis for the stories of RbbH’s wilderness journeys will lead to theoretical distinctions regarding fantasy’s potential contribution to culture. In light of these distinctions, I will then present Bialik’s poem, which is based, like many other of his works, on Talmudic fantasy. The Babylonian Talmud is a thoroughly redacted comprehensive collection of legal and normative discussions, homilies (drashot), and narratives (realistic and fantastic) that were compiled in the religious Jewish academies (yeshivot) of the lands of Israel and Babylonia during the first centuries AD and were passed on orally as distinct traditions. Since its redaction around the sixth–seventh centuries, it was accepted as Judaism’s foundational and obligatory book. However, its different parts were not awarded equal status. The Jewish tradition divided its contents into two main genres: “halakha” and “aggadah.” Halakha, the religious law, dictates all walks of the Jewish woman and man’s life: from monetary and marital law to laws regarding the Sabbath, prayer, and blessings. The aggadah, the accepted definition being “everything that is not halakha,” was viewed at most as an assortment of good advice and at worst as comic respite from the serious halakhic discussions. It is important to note that the halakha-aggadah hierarchy does not come from the Talmud itself, but was created by its inheritors, who were influenced by the Muslim rationalistic tradition (Elbaum 2000, 13–64). Nearly every page of the Talmud contains both genres, and the reader of the text cannot always discern when the halakhic section ends and the “narrative” section begins (Frenkel 1996, 769; Wimpfheimer 2011, 9–13). Even the “aggadic” section itself poses a challenge for the reader searching for its relevance: it includes realistic descriptions, theological discussions, medical advices, and fantastic 2

 See the discussion in Gurevitch 2013, 11–25.

  WILDERNESS AS WONDERLAND: JEWISH FANTASY FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN 

207

stories. Some of the narratives are not only unrelated to the halakhic discourse, but even contradict its conclusions, thus adding to the complexity of the text. Today as well, it is customary in many yeshivot to skip the narrative sections, as the main effort is directed toward legal discussions. The narratives serve more in a “folkloric” manner: they are recounted to children and serve as fertile ground for public speeches that seek to attract the audience’s heart. Nonetheless, in the world of academic research, and even in some yeshivot, there is noticeable growth of a new approach, which involves reading a large Talmudic unit of discussion (sugya) according to how it was originally redacted, on all of its genres, which leads to a different understanding of some of the accepted traditions. The more realistic the narrative is, the easier it is, of course, to be integrated.3 But what about the Talmud’s fantastic narratives? What could be the relevance of texts that deal with things that contradict realistic knowledge? The chapter addresses this question by reading a compilation of fantastic Talmudic stories, which not just the Jewish tradition treated as hyperbole, but also modern researchers.4 The strangeness of these stories posed a challenge for Jewish commentators over the generations. Some appreciated these stories as the best example of the entire Talmudic aggadot’s dubious nature, others tended to see them as true testimonies; but the majority tended to interpret them as allegories.5

RbbH’s Travels The stories of RbbH are brought as first-person, eye-witnessed testimony. The first half introduces mythological creatures that he had seen on his journeys. The first tale describes a newborn ram, the size of Mount Tabor, whose droppings dam the Jordan River. The second tale describes a frog the size of a fortress that was swallowed by a crocodile, which in turn was swallowed by a giant bird, who, upon finishing its meal, rests on a tree that can bear its weight. In the following stories, he describes giant fish that he had met in his travels at sea: a dead fish that had swept up onto a beach and destroyed sixty cities, but whose flesh and bones were used to build sixty new cities and sustain their inhabitants; a giant fish with sand accumulated on his back, upon which vegetation grew— RbbH and his friends thought it was an island and lit a bonfire on its back, and as the fish heated up, it flipped over in order to cool itself in the water, but the travelers were saved thanks to a nearby ship; a fish so large that it takes three days to sail from one fin to another. In the final sea story, RbbH describes a giant bird standing in the water, whose head reaches the sky. RbbH thinks that 3  For example, I recently showed how in a discussion on the status of women, reading the narrative sections along with the halakhic ones leads to the identification of a more positive view than the one that arises from reading the halakhic sections alone. See: Hevroni 2020. 4  For research on the stories of RbbH, see: Ben Amos 1976; Kiperwasser 2008; Grossmark 2010; Stein 2012, 58–83; Kiperwasser and Shapira 2012, 2014, 2015; Frim 2017. 5  See a review at: Foyst 2002.

208 

I. HEVRONI

the water is shallow and wants to enter it in order to cool off, but a divine voice warns him that the water is especially dangerous at that spot. In his travels, the hero of the journeys does not interact with these creatures and exclusively provides descriptive information, without identification or categorization, and without passing judgment. The redactors supplemented some of the stories with additional testimonies that bear witness to the truth of his descriptions. In the final two stories, the testimonies also identify the creatures that RbbH had described by relying on two of the Talmud’s accepted sources of authority: general knowledge and the interpretation of biblical verses. The giant fish is identified as “sea gildana” based on the fact that it has two fins; the giant bird is identified as “ziz saday” mentioned in Psalms 50. Following the sequence of the descriptions of mythological creatures, there appears a new sequence of descriptions of RbbH’s journeys in the wilderness: And RbbH said: Once I was traveling in the wilderness and I saw these geese whose wings were falling out because they were so fat, and streams of oil flowed from them. I said to them: “Do we have a share of you in the world to come?” One raised a wing, and one raised a leg. When I came before Rabbi Elazar, he said to me: “Israel will eventually be held accountable for them.” And RbbH said: Once I was traveling in the wilderness and there was a certain Arab with us who used to smell the dust and say: “This is the road to a certain place and that is the road to another place.” We gave him dust; he said: “You’re eight parasangs away from water.” We gave him [dust] again; he said “Three parasangs away.” We switched the dust, but we could not deceive him. He [=the Arab] said to us: “Come and I will show you the dead of the wilderness.” I went and saw them lying down as if they were intoxicated and had fallen asleep. And one of them was lying on his back with his knee bent, and the Arab entered under it while riding the camel and holding a spear in his hand, and he did not touch him. I cut and took one thread of azure from [the tassels of one of] them, and the camel could not walk. The Arab said: “Perhaps you took something from them? Return it, as we know that one who takes something from them cannot walk.” I returned it to them, and we went. When I came [back] to the Yeshiva, they said to me: “Every Abba is a donkey; every bar bar Ḥ ana—a braggart!” Did [you take] these threads and joints [in order to determine] whether [the halakha is according to the opinion] of Beit Shammai or Beit Hillel? You should have counted them and [then] come and tell us!” He said to us: “Come and I will show you Mount Sinai.” I went and saw that scorpions were surrounding it and they were standing like Lybian donkeys. A [divine] voice came out and said: “Woe is me that I took an oath; and now that I took the oath, who will nullify it for me?” When I came [back] to the Yeshiva, they said to me: “Every Abba is a donkey; every bar bar Ḥ ana—a braggart!” You should have said: “Your oath is nullified, your oath is nullified!” However, I thought that it could have been [God’s] oath concerning the generation of the flood. The rabbis [would argue that if that were so,] why say: “Woe is me?”

  WILDERNESS AS WONDERLAND: JEWISH FANTASY FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN 

209

He said to us: Come and I will show you the chasm of Korah. He showed us a crevice out of which smoke was emerging. He brought a tuft of wool, soaked it in water, wrapped it around his spear, and inserted it there, and it was charred. He said to me: “Listen, what do you hear from here?” And I heard that they were saying: “Moses is true, and his teachings are true, and we are liars.” He said to me: “Every thirty days Gehenna mixes them like meat in a pot, and they say: ‘Moses is true, and his teachings are true, and we are liars.’” He said to us: “Come and I will show you the place where heaven rests upon the earth.” I [went there and] saw that window and put my basket in it. By the time I had finished praying, the celestial sphere had rotated and I couldn’t find it. I said to him: “Are there—God forbid—thieves here?” He said to me: “Wait until the same time tomorrow when the celestial sphere will return to its place and take it.” (b. Bava Batra 73b–74a)

Like the stories of the journeys at sea, the wilderness stories also begin with a chance encounter with fantastic creatures. This time, however, for the first time in his journeys, RbbH interacts with these creatures and asks them a question: “[D]o we have a share of you in the world to come?” After receiving an answer from the poor creatures, he describes his meeting with the Arab, a miraculous guide-figure that will direct him from here onward in the wilderness and until the end of the world. The three sites to which the guide takes him commemorate events from the story of the biblical exodus from Egypt. At the first station, RbbH encounters the dead of the wilderness: the decedents from Egypt who were condemned to death on the way to the Land of Israel as a result of the Sin of the Twelve Spies (Numbers 13–14). The dead are gigantic and look as if they are alive. Their presence affects their surroundings in a fantastic manner: when RbbH takes a thread from the tassels of one of them, he and his guide cannot move from their place. The second station is Mount Sinai, the place of God’s revelation to the nation (Exodus 19–20). RbbH also experiences a revelation here, but instead of a divine command, he hears an expression of regret. At the third station he hears the sons of Korah, who were swallowed by the earth as punishment for their subversion of Moses’ status as a leader sent by God (Numbers 16). At the final station RbbH visits the spot where “heaven rests upon the earth.” In these stories as well, RbbH does not offer interpretative insight into what he had witnessed, and he does not seem to have achieved anything, perhaps even the opposite. Instead of returning with a treasure like the protagonists of common journey stories, he leaves behind a part of his possessions: his basket, which remains in the window of the celestial sphere.

A Share of the World to Come RbbH’s journeys at sea include motifs and plots that are familiar from other literatures of the same time and place; the stories of the huge ram, the crocodile, the giant bird and the strong tree, the fish that is mistaken for an island,

210 

I. HEVRONI

the enormous fish, and the Ziz, all have parallels in, among others, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Zoroastrian mythology, and the stories of Sinbad (Kiperwasser and Shapira 2012, 2014, 2015; Frim 2017; Wazana 2004; Shveka 2006). This led some researchers to view the Talmudic renditions as conscious cultural responses, and even parodies, of neighboring non-Jewish cultures (Frim 2017, 2–5). I think, as do additional researchers, that amid the non-Jewish and Jewish society of the Talmudic period, these stories were considered factual. Behemoth, Leviathan, and Ziz—even if they originated in non-Jewish mythology—are in the period of the Talmud an accepted and familiar part of the rabbinic world (Fishbane 2005, 96–249; Idel 2004; Frim 2017). It is reasonable to assume that in the eyes of the original audience, these stories belonged to the pool of general knowledge and were known more widely by heart than by the reading of any specific literature. Contrary to these familiar sea stories, RbbH’s wilderness stories do not appear in any other source. Although some of them recall motifs that exist in other stories, their appliance to the biblical context is unique. The narrative’s sequence seems to indicate that the ultimate goal of the compilation is to present these later stories to the audience. In other words, contrary to those who treat them as hyperbole, I think that the sea stories are meant to cause the opposite reaction: to strengthen the storyteller’s credibility. The first half, the “reliable” sea stories, was meant to lay the basis for the fantastic second half, the wilderness stories. The former’s credibility stems from the fact that it supplies information that is familiar from other sources. Having established its credibility in the eyes of the reader, the text moves on to the unfamiliar section. The creatures that RbbH describes in the first half are central figures in the stories describing the mythological struggle between cosmos and chaos. The representatives of order (gods or heroes) struggle against the monstrous representatives of chaos, defeat them, and thus establish their cultural superiority over anything that does not belong to their orderly world. A homily that appears after the RbbH stories also describe similar events, which occurred in the past, during Creation: At the time when God sought to create the world, He said to the minister of the sea [=Rahab]: Open your mouth and swallow all the waters of the world. [The minister of the sea] said to Him: “Master of the universe, it is enough that I will stay within my own waters.” God immediately kicked him and killed him; as it is written: “He stirs up the sea with his power, and by his skill he strikes down Rahab” (Job 26:12). (b. Bava Batra 74b)

Another homily shows that the battle that characterized the beginning of the creation will also take place in the future, in the time preceding the redemption: In the future, Gabriel will chase Leviathan, as it is written: “Can you catch leviathan with a fishhook?” (Job 40:25). And were God not assisting him, he would not defeat it, as it is written: “Only his maker can approach him with his sword.” (Job 40:19) (b. Bava Batra 74b–75a)

  WILDERNESS AS WONDERLAND: JEWISH FANTASY FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN 

211

Just like the gods and heroes of the neighboring cultures, these homilies present the Jewish God as one who is constantly struggling against chaotic monsters and overcoming them. The comparison of the RbbH chronicles to the Jewish and foreign mythological stories that deal with the same creatures highlights the fact that, contrary to the other heroes, RbbH does not struggle against the fearsome creatures that he encounters. While the biblical God, the foreign gods, and the heroes of other cultures’ journey stories establish the superiority of the representatives of order, RbbH presents himself as an anti-hero, who is not interested in imposing his order on the fantastic worlds he visits. The RbbH’s compilation includes not only his descriptions but also other rabbis’ responses to them. A comparison of his actions to these responses contributes to this conclusion regarding his conduct. While the other rabbis seek, as is their custom in the Talmud, to find in the descriptions of the fantastic realms information that possesses scientific, religious, or halakhic value, RbbH does not propose interpretation based on biblical verses, nor even explanation based on “scientific” knowledge. The stories are told in an innocent tone and indicate, supposedly, a lack of understanding. Like Alice in Wonderland, RbbH appears to be someone who is unintentionally caught up in a realm whose rules he fails to understand. At sea, he erroneously mistakes the resting whale for land, and errs in the assumption that the water in which the giant bird stands is shallow. Despite the cultural distance between heroes battling monsters and rabbis studying in a yeshiva, there is a common characteristic in both approaches. The hero that sets out on journeys and defeats monsters is, as mentioned, a typical model of the imposing of the powers of order over chaos. This is also the case with the rabbis: they admittedly do not arm themselves with sword and spear, but they use homilies to grant meaning and order to the disorderly aspects of reality (Kugel 1986; Fraenkel 2001, 198–219). As opposed to the heroes of both cultures, RbbH presents a different type of hero: he does not set out on a journey in order to defeat threatening monsters, nor to obtain treasures; he does not wish to exterminate evil, solve halakhic problems, enrich scientific knowledge, or hasten the redemption. He presents himself merely as a witness, without taking a stance. His stories do not offer organizing principles, a worldview of good and evil, light and darkness, order and disorder. He touches on the mythical, but does not act in a mythical manner; he does not change the world. So, what is he looking for? On the rhetorical side, it seems that his “mistakes” were meant to strengthen his credibility, because they present him as an innocent person who is not aware of the value of his testimonies. The redactors increase RbbH’s credibility by backing up his stories with the testimonies of additional rabbis. But the innocence is merely rhetorical. The question addressed to the geese indicates the existence of a conscious destination. After establishing RbbH’s credibility with the sea stories, the text then presents his wilderness stories. His opening question, “Do we have a share of you in the world to come?,” provides a key to identifying his goal, as it creates

212 

I. HEVRONI

another connection between his stories and the homilies that appear afterward, that not only deal with God’s victory over the monsters, but also with what will be done to them after their death: God created leviathan male and female. … He castrated the male and killed the female, and preserved it for the world to come. … God will make a feast for the righteous from the flesh of leviathan. (b. Bava Batra 74b)

The victory over the rebellious creatures does not end with their extermination, but with them being eaten: the female Leviathan and Behemoth were killed at the beginning of time, and they await, preserved, for the meal of the world to come; the males admittedly remained alive, but they will be slaughtered in the final battle and served fresh. The description of the creatures of chaos being eaten by the righteous suggests a more complex conclusion to the struggle between cosmos and chaos. The dichotomic view that the world is divided into good and evil usually requires the latter’s elimination and extermination as a necessary foundation for a perfect world. However, unlike this view, this homily (and other rabbinic sources) offers an incorporation, at least partially, of the creatures of darkness into the world of light. Behemoth, Leviathan, and Ziz are dangerous in this world, but their flesh nourishes the righteous in the world to come. With proper treatment, the impure becomes pure, the forbidden—permissible, and the evil—good. The first wilderness story grants the journey a purpose. The exact meaning of the dialogue with the geese is quite vague, but its subject is clear: RbbH explores the wilderness in search of elements that are worthy of a share in the world to come. From here on he will be led by the Arab, the supernatural guide. The fact that the guide appears immediately subsequent to the story in which RbbH poses his question indicates that this represents another level of the development of the protagonist’s journey. RbbH first active reaction “invites” the guide to lead him down the path that will enable him to find an answer. The meaning of the meeting with Korah’s dead is clear in light of the reading offered above concerning the place of the rebellious creatures in the feast of the righteous. The allies of Korah are caught up in infinite regret, repentance, and absolution of their sins, while they await their share in the world to come. In light of this, the meeting with the dead of the wilderness can be understood as having a similar purpose. Contrary to what is expected, RbbH does not find a heap of bones, but rather sleeping giants protected by supernatural powers. His colleagues assume that he wished to bring the tassel as a piece of evidence in order to solve a halakhic dispute regarding the correct tying of the strands and are upset that he does not provide them with an answer. But the story itself does not reveal RbbH’s true motives. It is reasonable to assume that he needed the tassel as proof of the wondrous encounter, which otherwise would have been met with skepticism. But the tassels serve another purpose as well: in the biblical text, the commandment to wear the tassels

  WILDERNESS AS WONDERLAND: JEWISH FANTASY FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN 

213

appears right after the story of the Sin of the Spies, and thus can be viewed as the cure for the mistake that led to the sin (Milgrom 1982). Hence, RbbH’s evidence of the tassels that adorn the edges of the dead Israelite’s clothes serves not only as proof of the encounter itself but also as decisive proof of their remorse over the Sin of the Spies and of their loyalty to Moses’ teachings—and therefore also for their share in the world to come.

Anti-hero, Chaos, and Fantasy RbbH, we now know, has an agenda. But why does he promote it so passively? In order to propose an explanation, we will be aided by Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story. The book operates within the regular confines of the genre of the hero’s journey, but adds another dimension. The plot begins with Bastian, a boy orphaned of his mother, neglected by his father, and socially spurned, holed up in an attic and reading an adventure story. The book that he is reading—The Neverending Story—progresses within the accepted rules of the genre: there is a princess that needs to be saved, and a hero (Atreyu) who sets out in order to find a cure for her disease. In the end, however, Atreyu hits a glass ceiling. He needs the assistance of the boy from the realistic human world in order to save the princess. Here there is a surprising twist—the reader of the book, the spurned boy, the anti-hero, who up until this point passively followed the literary hero’s journey, enters into the story’s plot and saves the princess. However, he does not do this as a slayer of dragons, but rather as someone who merely gives her a new name. After she is saved, the princess takes her leave of him and wishes him to find his own path. He is then carried away into a fabricated, heroic journey throughout the fantastic realm—he reinvents himself as a classic hero and wishes to rule the kingdom, but fails to do so. Eventually he will understand that his place is in the real world and will find his way back to it. When he returns to reality, he is still a chubby, ungainly boy, and the only difference is that in light of his knowledge of the fantastic story, he begins to conduct himself differently in the real world. And this is what the stories of RbbH do. RbbH does not return from his journey with the head of a dragon or a treasure trove of pearls, but with fantastic stories that enable a change in the view of reality. The cultural significance of bringing fantastic knowledge to society can be explained using Mary Douglas’ theory of the relation between order and disorder that lays at the foundation of human culture. As opposed to the simplistic view that in order to maintain order one must struggle to drive disorder out of society, she shows that many societies believe that disorder has a place and contributes to the world order: Granted that disorder spoils pattern, it also provides the material of pattern. Order implies restriction; from all possible materials, a limited selection has been made and from all possible relations a limited set has been used. So disorder by

214 

I. HEVRONI

implication is unlimited, no pattern has been realized in it, but its potential for patterning is indefinite. This is why, though we seek to create order, we do not simply condemn disorder. We recognize that it is destructive to existing patterns; also that it has potentiality. It symbolizes both danger and power. (Douglas 1996, 95–96)

Order, by definition, is always constrained. Society chooses and sanctifies a specific set of ideas and values out of an infinite realm of possibilities. The values that do not enter the set are expelled to the realm of chaos.6 This is why disorder and chaos are not just the negation of order, but also a source of alternative energy. Douglas describes the custom of certain societies, during times of trouble and the disruption of order, to send “inferior” members to the realms of chaos outside of its borders in order to find a cure. The emissaries are the insane, the ill, the people in-between, who in normal times exist at the seam between the cultural and social cosmos and the chaos from which it guards itself. The assumption is that in the realms of disorder, materials will be found from which a new order can be constructed, which will remedy the current distress: In these beliefs there is a double play on inarticulateness. First there is a venture into the disordered regions of the mind. Second there is the venture beyond the confines of society. The man who comes back from these inaccessible regions brings with him a power not available to those who have stayed in the control of themselves and of society. (Douglas 1996, 95–96)

Marie-Louise von Franz describes the necessity of the process of entering into the disordered realms of the mind, which appears in many fantastic stories that deal with the (mostly female) powers that were banished out of the boundaries of the culture and forgotten: This motif of the forgotten god or goddess, more frequently the goddess, is an archetypal one. … What does this mean psychologically? It is obvious that gods represent archetypal contents in the unconscious, or collective complexes—normal complexes which everybody has, not pathological complexes. … They are different dynamic factors in the psyche which belong to the normal structure of man and which are generally personified in gods. … If a god or goddess has been neglected, it means that a specific natural psychological way of behaving has been omitted. It has either intentionally or stupidly been left out of consideration …. If a god is forgotten, it means that some aspects of collective consciousness are so much in the foreground that others are ignored to a great extent. … But ignored organs of the psyche behave in the same way as ignored organs of the body. … If we ignore certain vital nuclei in the psyche, they will cause an illness in the system. Just as stomach trouble can result in complete destruction of health, so can one complex that does not function properly disorganize the whole. Then there is a neurosis, or worse, and one has to find out what has been ignored and is now “cursing” the whole personality. (Von Franz 1988, 24–26) 6

 For a thorough elaboration on this, see: Neumann 1969.

  WILDERNESS AS WONDERLAND: JEWISH FANTASY FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN 

215

It seems that RbbH’s active search yet passive conduct in the fantastic realms indicates a similar approach. RbbH seeks to bring the abandoned aspects of his culture to the fore, not in order to create cosmic changes, but to provide a foundation for the building of a more inclusive social order. He does not seek to diminish or eradicate the chaotic realms, like the heroes that defeat the monsters, but rather to enrich the orderly realms. Despite the sharp responses of the rabbis, the Talmud’s editors—the heirs of those same rabbis—chose to preserve his stories. Their choice expanded the reservoir of cultural opportunities available for the use of future generations. In this sense, the incorporation of the fantastic aggadot into the Talmud keeps in line with the spirit of the redaction of the entire composition. The definitive characteristic of the Talmud is the presentation of contrasting opinions, usually without deciding between them. The Halakhic tradition eventually decided one way or another, but the rejected traditions are, until this day, studied with the same seriousness as those that were accepted. This can be viewed as a textual version of the social and psychological model described by Douglas and Von Franz: The Talmudic redaction simultaneously preserves both order and disorder, and the preservation of the latter enables its recurring use at times when the boundaries of order are breached and new resources are required. In this sense, RbbH’s journeys were meant to expand the supply of disorder available for usage by the heirs of the Talmudic tradition. If we generalize from the case of the RbbH stories to the fundamental question of the combination of aggadah and halakha in the Talmud, we may view fantastic aggadah as a literary reservoir of disorder, which is always in the vicinity of order and thus prevents the latter from stagnating. The halakha, the law, by nature, dictates the proper order; the aggadah provides the disorder, the subversiveness necessary for maintaining a dynamic culture.

Bialik—A Modern Implementation The realms of imagination that were rejected by the Jewish tradition suffered a knockout blow in the modern era. The Zionist movement, which sought to redeem the Jewish people, not only rejected Talmudic halakha, but also its aggadah. During thousands of years in exile, the Jewish tradition cultivated a dream to return to the land of Israel but adopted a passive stance with regard to its realization. Over time an approach developed whereby any attempt to actively return to the land of Israel constitutes a rebellion against God’s will: God exiled the Jews from their land as punishment for their sins, and therefore He will only return them after satisfyingly administering their punishment. Most of the Zionist movement’s leaders were raised within the Jewish tradition but rebelled against it, as part of the process of renewal that they believed in. Within the movement itself, an argument erupted regarding the nature of the necessary national renewal: redemption of the body, or redemption of the mind? Proponents of the first opinion sought to concentrate the movement’s efforts on the building of a national home, usually accompanied by a partial or

216 

I. HEVRONI

complete rejection of the religious Jewish tradition in favor of modern, non-­ Jewish materialistic doctrines, the most prominent of them being socialism. Proponents of the second opinion put the emphasis on Jewish cultural renewal, even if not in a religious manner. The first party eventually prevailed: the kibbutz movement, and not the scholars and poets, founded the state of Israel. In the culture rooted in the “religion of labor,” no room was left for the imagination. Hayim Nahman Bialik belonged to the party that sought to place the main emphasis on Jewish cultural renewal. The poem “The Dead of the Wilderness” was published in 1902, and the motto that appears underneath the title is the sentence that the Arab says to RbbH, “Come and I will show you the dead of the wilderness.” Bialik takes the place of the guide and invites his readers to view his version of the realm of Jewish fantasy. The poem opens with an extensive description of the “dead” Israelites: they are strewn by their tents in the hot sun, appear to be sleeping, but also as being ready to go into battle—half alive, half carved into stone. Despite the large degree of vitality that they radiate, they have been utterly motionless for centuries. However, after hundreds of years of fossilization, a change occurs. The entire wilderness awakens with a storm and seeks to rebel against God. The dead stone-people accede to the terrible wilderness and join the rebellion: And in that instant— Wakes the terrible power that slumbered in chains, Suddenly stirs and arises the old generation of heroes, Mighty in battle: their eyes are like lightning, like blades are their faces. Then flies the hand to the sword. Sixty myriads of voices—a thunder of heroes—awaken, Crash through the tempest and tear asunder the rage of the desert. Round them is wildness and blindness: And they cry “We are the mighty!” The last generation of slaves and the first generation of free men! Alone our hand in its strength Tore from the pride of our shoulders the yoke of bondage. We lifted our heads to the heavens, and behold their broadness was narrow in the pride of our eyes, So we turned to the desert, and said to the Wilderness: “mother!” Yea, on the tops of the crags, in the thickness of clouds, With the eagles of heaven we drank from her fountains of freedom— And who is lord of us? Even now, though the God of Vengeance has shut the desert upon us, A song of strength and revolt has reached us, and we rise. To arms! To arms! Form ranks! Forward! Forward into the heavens and the wrath thereof. Behold us! We will ascend With the tempest! (Bialik 1926, 35–36)

  WILDERNESS AS WONDERLAND: JEWISH FANTASY FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN 

217

Bialik’s heroes rewrite the biblical story: it was not God who had redeemed them from Egypt with a series of spectacular miracles, but rather their own strength that had single-handedly lifted the yolk of slavery. The poem should be read against the background of RbbH’s stories, but also against the background of the biblical description. The story of the Sin of the Spies did not end with the punishment of wandering and death in the wilderness that was decreed upon the entire generation that experienced the Exodus from Egypt. The morning after receiving the bitter tidings, the people forcibly attempted to enter the Land of Israel against God’s will: And they rose up early in the morning, and gat them up into the top of the mountain, saying, Lo, we be here, and will go up unto the place which the LORD hath promised: for we have sinned. And Moses said, Wherefore now do ye transgress the commandment of the LORD? but it shall not prosper. Go not up, for the LORD is not among you; that ye be not smitten before your enemies. For the Amalekites and the Canaanites are there before you, and ye shall fall by the sword: because ye are turned away from the LORD, therefore the LORD will not be with you. But they presumed to go up unto the hill top: nevertheless the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and Moses, departed not out of the camp. Then the Amalekites came down, and the Canaanites which dwelt in that hill, and smote them, and discomfited them, even unto Hormah. (Numbers 14:40–45)

In a sharp pendulum swing, the Israelites shift from a refusal to enter the land, to a strong aspiration to do just so. They leave the ark of the covenant behind, set out for battle, and are slaughtered. Similarly, Bialik’s heroes also go against God’s will and leave behind the holy Jewish texts: Though the Lord has withdrawn His hand from us, And the Ark stands moveless in its place, Still we will ascend—alone! Even under the eye of His Wrath, daring the lightning of His countenance, We will carry with storm the citadels of the hills, And face to face in combat encounter the armed foe! Listen! The storm, too, calls unto us—“Courage and daring!” To arms! To arms! Let the hills be shattered and the mountains blasted into dust, Or let our lifeless bodies be heaped in countless cairns. Forward! On to the hills!” (Bialik 1926, 36)

In RbbH’s stories, Bialik finds material that enables him to formulate a complex view of the Zionist act. As opposed to the Jewish Orthodoxy, which treated Zionism as a foreign element, his poem includes the Zionist act as being a part of Jewish tradition: the format of the rebellion against God and the forced attempt to ascend to the Land of Israel already appear in the biblical story. In this sense, he grants the Zionist story an interpretation that its

218 

I. HEVRONI

supporters can also identify with. The Zionist movement sought to break away from the exilic tradition that began with the Talmud, but many of its members admired the biblical heroes who dwell on their own land, work it, and fight over it.7 Bialik struck a chord in the heart of his generation. The poem aroused great interest in the Jewish world and even became a part of the Zionist movement’s “holy texts.”8 Parts of “The Dead of the Wilderness” were inserted into the Kibbutz Movement’s Passover Haggadah—the text that accompanies the secular celebration of freedom, which replaced the religious celebration of thanks for the divine redemption. However, whoever added it to the new Jewish “canon” missed its full meaning. Bialik sings a song of praise for the courageous Zionists, but at the same time severely criticizes them. What did Bialik think would be the fate of a powerful and heroic generation that attempts to return to the land while severing itself from its heritage? Passed is the tempest. The desert is silent and pure is the silence. … Still in the sand are the sixty myriads of heroes aslumber. Darkened their faces, for death has brought them to peace with their maker. No man knoweth the place of their slumber. (Bialik 1926, 36–37)

Bialik woke the dead of the wilderness with his pen’s kiss, but not in order to revive them to health and prosperity. He expresses his view on two levels: on the level of narrative, he reburies the dead of the wilderness who attempt to enter the land while abandoning their tradition. On the level of meta-narrative, the use of the Talmud as a key to understanding the present is in and of itself a stand regarding the relevance of the diasporic heritage. The Talmudic discussion about the dead of the wilderness’ entitlement to the world to come is what enables him to view Zionism as part of Jewish tradition. The biblical story paints the rebellion and the forced entry attempt in negative colors, and without the stories of RbbH, their existence as a relevant option despite their negative connotation would not have been possible. Though Bialik supported the Zionist enterprise, he believed that political Zionism that was disconnected from spiritual Zionism would have no future. If RbbH’s dead of the wilderness threatened to disrupt the order of the Jewish academy, now the tables have turned. The people of the Zionist Movement resented their learned ancestors and rejected the Talmudic tradition. The cosmos of one became the chaos of the other: while diasporic Judaism rejected the model of masculine virility and encouraged the fostering of the “feminine” scholar, the first Zionists rejected scholarship in favor of manual 7  The popular phrase is “From the Tanakh [the Hebrew Bible] to the Palmach [pre-­independence Israeli fighting force].” See: Simon 2002, 21–44. 8  For the extent of the influence, interest, and interpretations that the poem aroused, see: Luz 1988.

  WILDERNESS AS WONDERLAND: JEWISH FANTASY FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN 

219

labor and physical might. The strange, fantastic Talmudic story granted Bialik the basis for formulating a complex realistic stance, which on one hand recognizes the relevance of the dead of the wilderness (=Zionism) to the nation’s redemption, but on the other hand, makes clear that it should not be done by pushing aside the diasporic tradition. Bialik enthused his generation with the splendor of ancient biblical times, infused its arteries with mythological vitality, but also issued a warning: a generation that enters the land while abandoning its heritage is destined to be buried in sand. The poem “The Dead of the Wilderness” is only a part of Bialik’s rich fantasy oeuvre. Besides poems and articles, he dedicated much work to aggadah. Along with a colleague, he assembled an anthology of the entire body of Mishnaic and Talmudic aggadot translated into modern Hebrew (Sefer Ha’Aggadah) and also wrote original, mostly fantastic aggadot, which were assembled in the book Vayehi HaYom.9 Bialik’s aggadot mainly draw their inspiration from rabbinic literature, but were also influenced by Jewish and non-Jewish folktales and from modern literatures.10 One of the central aggadot, of which he wrote two versions, is a variation on the theme of the princess locked up in a tower.11 In this aggadah, as in his other ones, the princess’ redeemer is not a warrior and conqueror but rather a virtuous scholar, who achieves his goal due to his resourcefulness and knowledge of tradition, without resorting to violence. RbbH perhaps was not just a source of information for Bialik, but even served as the role model of his anti-heroic Jewish hero. The examples of RbbH and Bialik show to what extent the picture that Weingrad paints is lacking. Jewish tradition is not just a rationalist-realist, but has many fantastic foundations. Whether locked up in a cupboard under the stairs or imprisoned in a tower, Jewish fantasy exists and is waiting for a heroine or a hero to expose it under the light of day.

Works Cited Ben Amos, Dan, “Talmudic Tall Tales,” in: Linda Dégh, Henry Glassie and Felix Oinas, eds. Folklore Today: A Festschrift for Richard M.  Dorson (Bloomington: Indiana Semiotic Sciences, 1976), pp. 25-43. Bialik, Chaim Nachman, Selected Poems. Trans. by Maurice Samuel (NY: The New Palestine, 1926). Doren, Erez Moshe, The Warriors of Transcendence (Jerusalem: Moznaim, 2008). Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London and NY: Routledge, 1996). Elbaum, Jacob, Medieval Perspectives on Aggadah and Midrash (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2000).

 First published in 1933.  For Bialik’s aggadot and their connection to traditional sources, see: Shamir 2012. 11  For the ancient sources of this aggadah, and the new elements inserted by Bialik, see: Elstein 2004. 9

10

220 

I. HEVRONI

Elstein, Yoav, “The Theme of ‘The King’s Daughter Locked-Up in a Tower’: The Unfolding of the Versions from Midrash Tanhuma to Bialik’s ‘Legend of the Three and the Four’”, in: Yoav Elstein, Avidov Lipsker and Rella Kushelevsky (Eds.), Encyclopedia of the Jewish Story 1 (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press,2004), pp. 70-104. Fishbane, Michael, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Von Franz, Marie-Louise, The Feminine in Fairy Tales (Dallas, Texas: Spring Publications, 1988). Frim, Daniel J., “Those Who Descend upon the Sea Told Me …: Myth and Tall Tale in Baba Batra 73a–74b.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 107: 1 (2017), pp. 1-37. Foyst, Yehuda, “Interpretation of the Tales of RbbH Throughout the Generations: Between Reality and Allegory”, Shma’atin 147-148 (2002), pp. 124-136. Frenkel, Yonah, Midrash and Hagadah (Tel Aviv: The Open University of Israel, 1996). Fraenkel, Jonah, The Aggadic Narrative: Harmony of Form and Content (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Haneuchad, 2001). Grossmark, Tziona, Travel Narratives in Rabbinic Literature (NY: The Edwin Meiien Press, 2010). Gurevitch, Danielle, “What is Fantasy?” in: Danielle Gurevitch, Elana Gomel, and Rani Graff, With Both Feet on the Ground: Fantasy in Israeli Literature (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013), pp. 11-25. Hevroni, Ido, “Yalta—The Third Rib: Redaction and Meaning in Bavli Berakhot, Chapter 7,” Hebrew Union College Annual 91 (2020), pp. 1-52. Idel, Moshe “Leviathan and Its Consort: From Talmudic to Kabbalistic Myth” in: Ithamar Gruenwald and Moshe Idel (eds.), Myth in Judaism: History, Thought, Literature (Jerusalem: the Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2004), pp. 145-188. Kiperwasser, Reuven, “Masa‘ot shel Rabbah bar bar Hanah,” Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Folklore 20 (2008), pp. 215–41. Kiperwasser, Reuven, and Dan D.  Y. Shapira, “Irano-Talmudica II: Leviathan, Behemoth and the ‘Domestication’ of Iranian Mythological Creatures in Eschatological Narratives of the Babylonian Talmud,” in Shoshannat Yaakov: Jewish and Iranian Studies in Honor of Yaakov Elman, ed. S. Secunda and S. Fine (Leiden, 2012), pp. 203–35. Kiperwasser, Reuven, and Dan D.  Y. Shapira, “Irano-Talmudica IV: Encounters between Iranian Myth and Rabbinic Mythmakers in the Babylonian Talmud,” in Encounters by the Rivers of Babylon: Scholarly Conversations between Jews, Iranians, and Babylonians in Antiquity, ed. U. Gabbay and S. Secunda (Tu¨ bingen, 2014), pp. 285–304. Kiperwasser, Reuven, and Dan D. Y. Shapira, “Irano-Talmudica III: Giant Mythological Creatures in Transition from the Avesta to the Babylonian Talmud,” in Orality and Textuality in the Iranian World: Patterns of Interaction across the Centuries, ed. J. Rubanovich (Leiden, 2015), pp. 65–92. Kluger, Daniel, and Alexander Rybalka, A Millennium on Loan (Moscow: Armada-­ Press, 2001) Kugel, James L., “Two Introductions to Midrash”, in: Geoffrey H.  Hartman and Sanford Budick (Eds.), Midrash and Literature (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 77-101.

  WILDERNESS AS WONDERLAND: JEWISH FANTASY FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN 

221

Luz, Zvi (Ed.), On “The Dead of the Wilderness”: Essays on Bialik’s Poem (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1988). Milgrom, Jacob, “Tassels,” Beit Mikra: Journal for the Study of the Bible and Its World 28 (1982), pp. 14-22. Neumann, Erich, Depth Psychology and a New Ethics (Hodder and Stoughton Ltd. and the C. G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, 1969). Shamir, Ziva, The fusion of New Ideas and Ancient Myths: A Study of Bialik’s Adapted Legends (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Haneuchad, 2012). Shveka, Avi, “Anzu, Ziz, and the Locust,” Shnaton: An Annual for Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies 16 (2006), pp. 143-155. Simon, Uriel, Seek Peace and Pursue it (Tel Aviv: Yedioth Ahronoth Books, 2002). Stein, Dina, Textual Mirrors: Reflexivity, Midrash, and the Rabbinic Self (Philadelphia, 2012), pp. 58–83. Wazana, Nili, “Anzu and Ziz: Traces of a Mythological Bird in the Ancient Near East, the Bible and Rabbinical Traditions,” Shnaton: An Annual for Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies 14 (2004), pp. 91-161. Weingrad, Michael, “Why There Is No Jewish Narnia?,” Jewish Review of Books (Spring 2010): https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/290/why-­there-­is-­no-­ jewish-­narnia/ Wimpfheimer, Barry Scott, Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011). Yassif, Eli, The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

Israeli Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fantastical Chronotopes and the Modern Promised Land Vered Weiss

For Fantasy and Science Fiction to work as literary genres, the implied reader and author need to first agree on what is real and what is fantasy.1 To borrow Sklovsky’s famous example, in order to make the stone stony again, we have to first agree there is a stone, and also that the stone was initially stony. The complications of this seemingly simple requirement within the Israeli context are twofold: first, like for all readers, twentieth- and twenty-first-century ground-­ breaking quantum physics theories’ confirmation renders perception and representation of reality complicated2; and second, the notion of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people entails ideas about “The Promised Land,” which is a concept that seems to be taken straight out of the realms of Fantasy. Concepts of time/space in Israeli Science Fiction and Fantasy (SFF) are thus inherently unstable and constantly reconfigured, negotiated, and contested.3 The literary time/space, or the chronotope, is the focal point of the narrative, as it “unites the narrative inscriptions of time, space and character or

1  As Danielle Gurevitch notes, “Fantasy literature uses poetic means to examine the limits of the possible.” (Gurevitch, “What is Fantasy?,” 11). 2  See Gomel, Narrative Space and Time, 1–39. 3  See Spiegel, “Things Made Strange,” 369–384; Gomel and Karti Shemtov, “Limbotopia: The ‘New Present’ and the Literary Imagination,” 60–71; and Gomel, “Territorial Histories.”

V. Weiss (*) Michael and Elaine Serling Institute for Jewish Studies and Modern Israel and The Center for Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University, Lansing, MI, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2_15

223

224 

V. WEISS

agent.”4 In his initial formulation of the chronotope as “intrinsic ­connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature,”5 Bakhtin notes that chronotopes are significant for plot development and generic distinctions.6 The most central and ubiquitous aspect of SFF chronotopes is the unique concepts of time and space. SFF alternative worlds either tamper with or undermine contemporary perceptions of realistic time and space. As Elana Gomel suggests, “SF is concerned with the projection and elaboration of alternative fictional worlds, whose ontological features are radically different from the world of consensus reality.”7 Like SF, Fantasy tampers with realistic time/space and is articulated as “that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.”8 Both genres invite readers to explore and reexperience alternative time/space, and unlocking the texts’ chronotopes is key to readers’ enjoyment. Yet Israeli time/space is already ambiguous, as the nation state’s establishment is based upon a conflation of primordial Judaic myths and modern Zionist narratives, and its current borders are constantly contended and reconfigured. In correlation, Israeli SFF chronotopes are nuanced. Certain productive classifications of Israeli SFF allow a more refined consideration of regional literature. Keren Omry offers a productive division of Israeli SFF into five categories: Social SF; Space Travel and encounters with Alien species; Time-travel and Alternate Histories; Hard SF (under which she includes Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Bodies, and Future Technologies); and Fantasy.9 Following this initial categorization, exploring the way chronotopes that are unique to Israeli SFF interact with correlating universal chronotopes both distills a definition of Israeli SFF and draws conjectures regarding a reconsideration of definitions of both genres more broadly. The following analysis outlines two main subgenres in twenty-first-century Israeli SFF: Judaic Israeli SFF and Universalist Israeli SFF.  The former engages with Judaic traditions and formative Jewish and Israeli locations and historical events, and the latter refrains from engaging with either. Texts that merge Universalist and Judaic Israeli concepts, tropes, and events offer a third Hybrid Israeli SFF subgenre. These generic subgenre reflect twenty-first-century Israeli identities’ tensions between local particular  Gomel “Time Enough for the World,” 22.  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 84. 6  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 250–1. For further discussion of the significance of chronotope for generic formation see, for example, Bemong and Borghart, “Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope,” 1–17; and Keunen, “Bakhtin, Genre Formation, and the Cognitive Turn.” 7  Elana Gomel “Time Enough for the World,” 11. 8  Todorov, The Fantastic, 25. For a distinction between Fantasy and the Marvelous, see Gurevitch “Fantastic Literature at the Beginning of the Third Millennium.” The following analysis explores SF and Fantasy, but note there is further work to be done regarding the Marvelous, Weird, and New Weird. For further discussion of Weird and New Weird, see, for example, VanderMeer and VanderMeer, The New Weird, x–xv; and Robertson None of This Is Normal, 2018. 9  Omry, “Israeli SF 101,” 9. 4 5

  ISRAELI FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION: FANTASTICAL CHRONOTOPES… 

225

Israeli concerns and transnational issues shared by Israelis and readers worldwide.10 The Israeli SFF scene is teeming, and already a decade ago the list of SFF books provided in With Both Feet on the Clouds: Fantasy in Israeli Culture, the seminal book on Israeli SFF, was long and varied. It included formative authors such as Amos Kenan, Orly Castel-Bloom, and Etgar Keret, as well as emerging voices such as Shimon Adaf and Nir Baram.11 The twenty-first century has seen an expansion of Israeli SFF on platforms such as Hayo-Yihye magazine (Once Upon a Future Speculative Fiction Anthology; ‫)היֹ ה יהיה‬, the online journal Bli Panica (‫בלי פאניקה‬, No Panic), and the Icon and Utopia festivals, many of which are supported by The Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy.12 Focusing on twenty-first-century Israeli SFF that was written in Hebrew and published in Israel, and not Jewish or Israeli SFF more broadly,13 this chapter undermines certain generic rubrics to explore children’s literature, young adult literature, and adult literature. However, this chapter does not attempt to be comprehensive—there are scores of excellent Israeli SFF texts; rather, it highlights central trends in Israeli SFF.

The Promised Land Chronotope The notion of “The Promised Land” is simultaneously known and familiar and inherently incomprehensible. It is conceptually both a real place that one must reach and that one has to attain to achieve prosperity, and it is also a nebulous idea of the promise of prosperity. “The Promised Land” can be understood as the area that God had promised Abraham in Genesis, 15:18–21, which entails two complications: neither the spatial nor the conceptual notions are clear. The initial narrative provides a problematic spatial reference to the location of “The 10  For an analysis of transculturalism in twenty-first-century Israeli literature, see Harris, “Israeli Literature in the 21st Century the Transcultural Generation,” 1–14. 11  Earlier Israeli SFF includes Orly Castel-Bloom, Where I Am (1990), Human Parts (2002), Doly City (2007); Etgar Keret, Missing Kissenger (1994), Suddenly a Knock on the Door (2010); Nir Baram, The Dream Remaker (Keter, 2005), and many more. Note that Keret and Bram might be more accurately aligned within Magical Realism. While some of Keret’s short stories, such as “Gaza Blues” or “The Son of the Head of the Mossad,” are anchored in a specific Israeli context of the regional conflict, others such as “Super Glue” and “Pipes” explore universalist issues such as individualism and relationships. Whereas the settings in the former two stories are specifically realistic Israel or Gaza, the latter are non-specific and can be anywhere any time. 12  Bli Panika was founded in 2000 and offers original and translated Fantasy and Science Fiction as well as reviews and critical essays, and Hayo-Yihye was founded by The Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy in 2009. For further detail, see https://www.sf-f.org.il/en/; http://www. blipanika.co.il; and https://futures.utopiafest.org.il/en/. 13  There is a vast body of work that might be categorized as Jewish SFF, as well as Israeli SFF written in other languages or outside Israel. For example, works by Daniel Kluger, Elana Gomel, and Lavie Tidhar, which are written in English or Russian, would work productively within the following categorization, with some of Gomel’s texts, such as The Cryptids and The Hungry Ones (2019), aligned with “Universalist Israeli SFF,” and Tidhar’s Central Station (2016) and Unholy Land (2018) fitting the definition of “Judaic Israeli SFF.”

226 

V. WEISS

Promised Land,” establishing eastern and western borders along the Egyptian river—presumably the Nile—and the Euphrates, but no northern and southern borders. The text offers a revised outline of the borders in Book of Numbers (34), yet the initial spatial problems highlight the conceptual ambiguity as well as the ethical and moral dilemmas. The land is promised even though there are people living there, and the promise thus requires a violent expulsion or genocide of the local inhabitants. Much of the biblical narrative is anchored in the Promised Land chronotope, as every plotline and every character are propelled by the need and requirement to reach the Promised Land. Yet even when the Israelites reach the Promised Land, and even after they conquer the land, the narrative outlines a continual strive toward another realm of promise, another level of piety that might bring them closer to divinity. Drawing upon the distinction between “place” and “Place,” the former being the physical home and childhood landscape, and the latter the idea of the “Land,” with its symbolic meaning represented in cultural artifacts,14 Zali Gurevitch notes that the divine voice in the biblical narrative “intervenes in the natural course of earthly wandering from place to place and plucks it out of its ordinary meaning. To reach (and attain) his Place, Abraham must leave his place […] the notion of place is thereby radically altered.”15 The Promised Land is both a place and a concept, an actual space, and a fantasy.16 The problematic aspects of the Promised Land haunt modern Israel and Israeli identities, as modern socio-political realities seem to replicate mythical ethical dilemmas of the biblical narrative’s Promised Land chronotope in Israeli realities. There are a couple aspects of modern Jewish Israeli culture that are significant to the discussion of Israeli SFF. Initially, one must be aware of the role of Zionism in Israeli culture, on the one hand, and the paramount role of literature in the articulation of Zionism, on the other hand. Zionism is not only a political movement but also a cultural movement intricately intertwined with the “Hebrew revival.”17 The poetry and prose produced by cultural Zionists envisioned the land and language as part of a continual Judaic tradition that was reimagined into modernity. The literary and cultural aspects of the movement cannot be understated, and as Gil Hochberg notes, the inception of Zionism is based upon a fantasy, specifically “Zionist Utopianism.”18 Zionist utopias seek to “leap boldly into the future,”19 even as they outline a return of the Jewish nation to its ancestral land.20 Indeed, as Omry notes, “the very founding of the nation can be  Aran and Gurevitch, “Al Hamakom,” 25.  Gurevitch, “The Double Side of Israel,” 211. 16  For further analysis of the Promised Land in Hebrew literature and Israeli culture, see, for example, Ben-Ari and Bilu, Grasping Land, 1997; Gertz, Myths in Israeli Culture, 2000; and Schwartz, Do You Know the Land Where the Lemon Blooms, 2007. 17  For further discussion of Hebrew and Zionism, see, for example, Domb, Identity and Modern Israeli Literature, 2006; and Zerubavel, 1995. 18  Hochberg, “Dystopias in the Kingdom of Israel,” 20. 19  Gorni, “Utopian Elements in Zionist Thought,” 20. 20  Hochberg, “Dystopias in the Kingdom of Israel,” 20. 14 15

  ISRAELI FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION: FANTASTICAL CHRONOTOPES… 

227

attributed to utopian visions set out by at least two key literary texts: Altneuland by Theodor Herzl (1902) and before this, the lesser known A Journey to the Land of Israel in the Year 800 to the Sixth Thousand by Elhanan Leib Levinsky (1892) said by some to be the first fiction novel written in modern Hebrew.” 21 Both texts outline a return to the Promised Land. One of the fascinating aspects of twenty-first-century Israeli SFF is the conflation of modern Zionist ethos and the biblical myth of the Promised Land. Whether explicitly or implicitly, and even when it is a gaping lack, the constant call beckoning to return to the Promised Land echoes in Israeli SFF. Israeli SFF operates in a continual conversation with what Elana Gomel and Vered Karti Shemtov termed a “limbotopian” genre, which “accesses and critiques collective narratives of history and, in doing so, attempts to go beyond outworn ideological forms and conventions.”22 As Gomel notes, “[T]he chronotope of Israeli SFF is located in the space of history.”23 Specifically, this is the Promised Land chronotope. In Judaic Israeli SFF the Promised Land chronotope dictates that both the plot and the character development are anchored in Jewish and Israeli culture and are driven by either a need to return to the Promised Land or an attempt to escape the need to return. Conversely, Universalist Israeli SFF plot and characters have no connection to Jewish or Israeli spaces, and plot and character operate in a chronotope of SFF that is not tethered to a specific place which readers might identify in Israel. The Hybrid Judaic Universalist Israeli SFF engages with the Promised Land chronotope in a noncommitted manner, allowing productive forays in and out of its constraints.

Judaic Israeli SFF There are many texts that fit Judaic Israeli SFF generic definition.24 To illustrate the main attributes of the Promised Land chronotope in Judaic Israeli SFF, as well as the diversity within this category, this section explores writers whose work is productively tethered to the Promised Land chronotope. A trailblazer in Israeli Fantasy, Hagar Yanai has written several books, including co-editing with Danielle Gurevitch the comprehensive exploration of modern Israeli SFF, With Both Feet on the Clouds: Fantasy in Israeli Culture.25 One  Omry, “Israeli SF 101,” 9.  Gomel and Karti Shemtov, “Limbotopia,” 70. 23  Gomel, “Territorial,” 8. 24  For example, Herzl Amar [Herzl Said] by Yoav Avni (2011) and Tel-Aviv by Yair Hasdiel (2012) that tamper with the notion of the Promised Land by exploring alternative Jewish Israeli realities and histories. See Omry, “Israeli SF 101,” 10–11. 25  Yanai was born and raised in Kibbutz Barkai, in the northern part of central Israel, and holds a B.A. in Creative Writing and Screenwriting from Camera Obscura School of Art, and an M.A. in Literature from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. For Yanai’s full list of publications, see Yanai at the Israeli National Library website: http://merhav.nli.org.il/primo-explore/search?query=creator,contains,‫הגר‬,% 20‫&ינא י‬vid=NLI&lang=iw_IL . In addition to several other novels, Yanai has also recently written another non-fiction book The Universe Beyond the Horizon (2020, ‫)לאופק מעבר היקום‬. 21 22

228 

V. WEISS

of Yanai’s important contributions to Israeli Fantasy is The Leviathan Trilogy, which is composed of The Leviathan of Babylon (‫הלווייתן מבבל‬, 2006), The Water Between the Worlds (‫המים שבין העולמות‬, 2008), and The Journey to the Heart of the Abyss (‫המסע אל לב התהום‬, 2017).26 The protagonists of the trilogy, sister and brother, Ella and Yonatan, meander between contemporary Israel and the ancient Babylonian empire, where they battle the dark and mysterious forces that lurk in the abbeys. The siblings encounter demons and forge relationships with some of the local inhabitants. Readers of The Leviathan Trilogy are transported to a fantastical rendition of ancient Babylonia, which is replete with magic and is subjugated by the Satraps, who are powerful magicians and merciless rulers.27 The specific choice of the Babylonian era as the time/space in which the protagonists battle the dark forces is significant because Babylonia functions as a synecdoche for the Babylonian exile and its paramount impact upon Jewish tradition, and as a metaphor for the yearning for the Promised Land. This historical event engraved notions of nostalgic yearning to the Promised Land,28 whose influence resonates in contemporary Israeli culture.29 Reflecting a Judaic tradition of yearning to return home, Yanai’s characters are nostalgic for a home that no longer exists, and perhaps only ever existed as an ideal. In Yanai’s trilogy the Babylonian empire is likewise both a place and a state of mind.30 The cure for the depression caused by the abyss that appears to threaten the empire, which is a metaphor for loss of identity, promises “a life of milk and honey.”31 The biblical allusion suggests the books outline the Promised Land as an idea of opulence and serenity. Yet the trilogy ends with the kids magically relocating their mother from modern Israel to ancient Babylon and establishing their home there. The dichotomous representation of home versus Babylon is subverted as Yanai suggests that home is where one establishes social connections and creates identities. Yanai’s fantasy Babylon allows modern Israelis to continue yearning for “The Promised Land” even while modern Israel exists in a parallel time/space. Yanai’s trilogy is steeped in Judaic tradition and the Promised Land chronotope. For example, the second book, The Water Between the Worlds, commences with an epitaph from Jeremiah 40:4: “Come with me to Babylon, if you like, and I will look after you; but if you do not want to, then don’t come. Look, the whole country lies before you; go wherever you please.” This utterance is 26  The Leviathan of Babylon and The Water Between the Worlds won the Geffen Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy. While Yanai does not explicitly refer to the Leviathan trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, readers of Fantasy might enjoy the allusion. 27  The Hebrew word is Achashdarpan (‫)אחשדרפן‬, which were the governors of provinces in ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean empires. 28  For further analysis of the significance of the Babylonian exile upon Judaism, see, for example, Barton, “Influence of the Babylonian Exile on the Religion of Israel,” 369–378; and Gray, “Introduction,” 1–33. 29  For further analysis of Israel and the Babylonian exile, see, for example, Shohat, “Rupture and Return Zionist Discourse and The Study of Arab Jews,” 49–74; and Levy, “Reorienting Hebrew Literary History,” 127–172. 30  The Leviathan of Babylon, 268. 31  Ibid., 192. The phrase alludes to Exodus 3:8; and Numbers 14:8.

  ISRAELI FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION: FANTASTICAL CHRONOTOPES… 

229

told by a Babylonian commander to Jeremiah the prophet, and the text emphasizes that exile is the Israelites’ punishment because they sinned. The reader is later reminded of Jeremiah’s prophecy to accept their fate and accept the Babylonian king as a divine agent. Both the biblical narrative and Yanai’s text outline a yearning for the Promised Land as they engage with questions regarding free will and fate. While the trilogy seems to end with the kids in the Babylonian exile, it also ends with a variation on domestic bliss, with the kids’ mother knitting sweaters for Pazuzu, the demon’s offspring. Yanai utilizes the Babylonian exile as signifier of the yearning for home in the broad historical religious national level to explore the personal and even intimate notion of a nostalgia to one’s childhood innocence. For Yanai the Babylonian exile is a metaphor for the exile from childhood, which is an ever-enduring unattainable Promised Land. The time/space of Yanai’s novels offers an exciting ride across ancient Near Eastern realms, allowing the readers to recognize some of the staples of a desert terrain even while the action is set in a fantastical magical world. The novels are written in spoken Hebrew of twenty-first-century Israel, yet their cultural world is immersed in Babylonian traditions. To this cultural combination Yanai adds a playful conversation with twenty-first-century technological, archeological, and medical knowledge, creating a Judaic Israeli journey across time and space. Whereas Yanai weaves her novels as a mixture of ancient cultural concepts and deities and twenty-first-century linguistic traditions, Shimon Adaf’s fantastical worlds invite readers to experience a linguistic transportation as well as the spatial and temporal dislocation. Indeed, one of the most intriguing aspects of Adaf’s work is his unique language.32 The combination of ancient Judaic linguistic traditions and cutting-edge twenty-first-century tech terminology presents the readers with Judaic Israeli SFF. Adaf’s significant contribution to Judaic Israeli Fantasy is best illustrated in the first and last books of the “Judaic Rose Trilogy” (‫)ורד יהודה‬: Nuntia (‫כפור‬, 2010) and Undercities (‫ערים של מטה‬, 2012).33 The novels build upon Judaic traditions and Israeli cultural references to create a nuanced, ­multilayered conflation of history, culture, and fantasy.34 Both character construction and plot development are anchored in Judaic traditions and Israeli culture, and invite the readers to a journey that unfolds some of the intricacies of Judaic and modern Israeli identities. Nuntia is set in a futuristic Tel Aviv in which ancient Judaic traditions are interleaved with innovative technology. The setting of the novel includes references to Tel Aviv streets and locations, yet the city is a dystopian  On Adaf’s unique language, see Lemberger, “Contacts and Discontinuities,” 329–354.  Mox Nox (‫)נוקס מוקס‬, 2011, the second book in the trilogy, is not selected for this analysis because it focuses more on metafictional questions and does not offer the same attention on spatiality relevant to this article. Some of Adaf’s work include Icarus’ Monologue (‫)המונולוג של איקרוס‬, 1997; Aviva-No (‫לא‬-‫)אביבה‬, 2009; and Sunburnt Faces (‫)הלב הקבור‬, 2008. 34  Dorit Lemberger, notes Nuntia, offers “interwoven narratives from different periods, creating a tri-cultural, tri-temporal perspective” (“Contacts and Discontinuities,” 336). 32 33

230 

V. WEISS

space to which Jews come from all over the world, “[B]uild a city, give it a name from the past, a charged name, engulfed in mystery, immersed in grandeur. Not the fourth or fifth return of Zion. A second coming to Tel Aviv.”35 In a few short sentences Adaf converges realistic past and fantastical future, as well as Jewish mysticism with Zionism. The inhabitants of Adaf’s Tel Aviv are survivors of a global catastrophe, who are oppressed by a strict orthodox Jewish religious regime that follows dictums that resemble the Second Temple era, and prohibits relationships between Jews and non-Jews as well as between humans and machine-enhanced humans. Undercities takes the readers to Berlin, Tel Aviv, and Sderot, where Adaf grew up, to explore Jewish Israeli identities upon the backdrop of Kabala and mysticism and the question of Judaism in the context of space and time. The novel follows two plotlines that merge as the protagonists’ journey leads them to uncover the meanings of the mysterious Judaic Rose, which is both a linguistic symbol and a gate between worlds, and is thus a brilliant literary embodiment of the heart of Jewish Israeli identities as the manifestation of spirituality and spatiality. The spatial metaphors in Undercities are so ingrained in the Promised Land chronotope that even the names of several characters are significant places in Judaic mystical tradition. The three siblings in one of the plotlines are called Tveria (Tiberias), Acko  (Acre), and Zafed. Tiberias and Zafed are considered holy cities and are linked with Rabbi Akiva and his disciples, which is significant for the trilogy’s plot line that outlines an alternative subversive Jewish sect that rejected Akiva’s path. Acko is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible in the context of wars of the Israelites and the local peoples. In Undercities, whereas Tveria explores her humanity and its connection to mysticism through poetry, her brother Acko tries to understand the significance of human existence by creating a computer language that will create poetry. Their baby brother, Zafed, who was born with some form of neurodiversity, dies at the age of three without acquiring linguistic abilities. Tveria and Acko travel from Israel across the world, to Europe and the USA, only to realize the prominence and power of the pull of the Promised Land. Adaf’s novels suggest that the core of Jewish identities, and inevitably Jewish Israeli identities as well, is the paradoxical connection to the Promised Land. On the one hand, Judaism commands Jews to inhabit the Promised Land and, on the other hand, they must always yearn and pray for it, never really inhabiting a land that exists only as fantasy. Thus, the Promised Land already becomes a place and a fantasy. In this sense Judaic Israeli SFF is the epitome genre that encapsulates Jewish Israeli identities as a fundamentally contradictory tension between fantasy and reality, utopia and dystopia. Validating my reading of Adaf’s work as Judaic Israeli SFF, Gil Hochberg argues that Nuntia belongs specifically within a realm of “inherently and exclusively Jewish dystopias [that] exclusively focus on Jews, Jewish history, the

 Adaf, Nuntia, 128. (Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.)

35

  ISRAELI FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION: FANTASTICAL CHRONOTOPES… 

231

Jewish future, the Jewish state, and Jewish textual sources.”36 Hochberg notes Nuntia’s “circular temporality” which is “described in premodern Hebrew and directly alluding to historical events (specifically the destruction of the First and Second Temples).”37 Hochberg connects Adaf’s “circular temporality” to Zionist literature drawing attention to the lack of engagement with the Palestinian question in Adaf’s work.38 While the Palestinian question seems to have been predetermined in Adaf’s texts, they nonetheless offer scathing social critique heralded at the cultural and social polarization and divisions within twenty-first-century Israel. Another twenty-first-century SFF writer whose work draws readers’ attention to contemporary Israeli socio-political concerns is Ilan Sheinfeld.39 In A Tale of A Ring (‫מעשה בטבעת‬, 2007) Sheinfeld explores sexual exploitation, social norms, and religiosity. The novel is an alternative fictional exploration of a real horror that entails a human trafficking mafia called Zwi Migdal, which operated in Buenos Aires from the late nineteenth century to the late 1920s.40 The narrative is set upon the spatial axes of Siedlce, which is a town in Eastern Poland, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Israel. The novel unfolds the narratives of women who were exploited and depicts the horrors of prostitution. Yet to the real historical facts and setting, Sheinfeld adds the presence of black magic, demon possession, and a magic ring. The conclusion of the novel suggests that only once the women arrive in Israel along with their story can they break the evil spell and be redeemed. The novel offers a revisit of the narrative of the Promised Land that involves rape and exploitation. Like A Tale of A Ring, When the Dead Return (2012 ,‫ )כשהמתים חזרו‬explores twenty-first-century Jewish Israeli identities by casting a broad spatial and temporal net upon a fantastic chronotope. The spatial journey leads readers from Eastern Europe, via South America to Israel, with a constant undercurrent that anchors the narrative in linguistic and cultural Judaic traditions. Sheinfeld examines messianic notions, which are some of the most influential and problematic fantasy narratives in Judaic tradition, within a context of the twentyfirst-century Jewish Israeli identities crisis.41 The characters in When the Dead Return yearn to return to the Promised Land, because “the redemption of  Hochberg, “Dystopias in the Kingdom of Israel,” 20.  Ibid. 38  Ibid., 25. 39  Sheinfeld addresses social concerns in his children’s literature as well. For example, in There is no Such a Bird, Kortsipa (‫קורציפה‬, Shurfa Press, 1999) Sheinfeld explores notions of social acceptability and self-image, and in A Kingdom Named Collision (‫קוליסה‬, Shurfa Press, 2007) Sheinfeld depicts the reckoning of a world that had for years been sending its rubbish to space. 40  For further exploration of Zwi Migdal human trafficking, see, for example, Glickman, The Jewish White Slave Trade and the Untold Story of Raquel Liberman, 2000; and Solomon, “Reconsidering Anti-Semitism and White Slavery in Contemporary Historical Fiction about Argentina,” 307–327. 41  For further discussion of messianism in Hebrew literature and Israeli culture, see, for example, Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism, 1996; and Idel, “Messianic Scholars,” 22–53. 36 37

232 

V. WEISS

Israel and the birth of the messiah are linked with the end of exile.”42 The novel outlines a messianic zombie apocalypse, as the dead return to the Promised Land to find a torn and divided Israel. Both When the Dead Return and A Tale of A Ring are anchored in Judaic traditions, including, or even primarily, the continual processes of exile and return to the Promised Land that are at the heart of Judaism. In both novels Sheinfeld’s Hebrew is reminiscent of traditional Jewish folk tales such as Mendele Mocher Sphorin or S.Y. Agnon, and both novels also offer a path for contemporary Jewish Israelis to connect with Judaic traditions. Sheinfeld, Adaf, and Yanai’s texts utilize the Promised Land chronotope to explore contemporary Jewish Israeli identities and social concerns, and their texts resonate predominantly with Jewish Israeli readership.

Universalist Israeli SFF In contrast to Judaic Israeli SFF texts, which form a conversation primarily with Jewish Israeli readership, Universalist Israeli SFF opens a conversation with global readers. Universalist Israeli SFF does not refer to Judaic traditions or Israeli spaces. Quite the contrary, Universalist Israeli SFF refers either to distinctly fantastical worlds or to real places that are anywhere but Israel.43 The absence of the Promised Land chronotope or indeed any Jewish Israeli cultural and spatial references in texts written in Hebrew by Jewish Israeli writers makes the lack noticeable. Following these patterns of Universalist Israeli SFF is Eshkar Erblich-­ Brifman’s Winter Blue series (2008–2004 ,‫בלו‬-‫)ווינטר‬. The series unfolds the adventures of Winter Blue, the fairy child, and her friends. The books are set along the tensions between the human world and Magic-land, yet the human world bears no resemblance to recognizably Israeli places. The realistic features include Universalist aspects of childhood, such as attending school, and might appeal to children all over the world.44 There are numerous examples of Universalist Israeli SFF texts, many of which appeared in Hayo-Yihye and Bli Panika and were nominated for or won The Geffen Award.45 A recent example of Universalist Israeli SFF published in Hayo-Yihye is “The Harbinger” (Ha’mevaser, ‫ )המבשר‬by Yael Furman.46 Furman has published many SFF short stories, as well as two novels that will be  Sheinfeld, When the Dead Return, 94.  Some Universalist Israeli SFF may also be aligned with the Marvelous, as they are stories that explore “the existence of two parallel worlds that never meet. While events in the ‘natural world’ can be explained logically, the ‘other world’ is filled with supernatural phenomena manifested in miracles, sorcery, magic, and witchcraft.” (Gurevitch “Fantastic Literature at the Beginning of the Third Millennium.”) 44  The first book has been translated to English and the second is forthcoming. 45  The Geffen Award is an annual literary award given by the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy. See the Geffen Award winners list: http://geffen.sf-f.org.il/?page_id=79 46  Furman, “The Harbinger,” 229–243. 42 43

  ISRAELI FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION: FANTASTICAL CHRONOTOPES… 

233

discussed below in the Hybrid Judaic Universalist SFF section.47 While many of Furman’s texts are set in Israel and consider Israeli social concerns, many others are set in fantastical realms and explore universal philosophical and ethical questions.48 “The Harbinger” is set in a fantastical world terrorized by the dark tyrannical ruler, King Karadak, who feeds upon the population. The king has a system to lure young men who think they are destined to vanquish the dragon and save the realm. They are summoned by myths that the harbinger plants in their communities, and when they follow what they think is a calling to fulfill their destiny as saviors, they meet their death as they battle the dragon. Following the predictable death of yet another naïve knight, enters a young knight with a striking high voice, like a woman’s, who convinces the harbinger to change sides, and together they defeat the evil ruler and free themselves and the kingdom. The majority of the action takes place in a wooded area that oversees the magical palace, which is the façade that lures the gullible men who attempt to fight the monster and free the realm. There is no mention of Israeli locations or any Judaic traditions, and the readers are invited to consider universal issues regarding gender roles and social norms. Another example of Universalist Israeli SFF that was published in the same issue of Hayo-Yihye is “A Birthday Experience From Another World” by Lili Dai.49 The story is set in a futuristic world in which each person can purchase a dead person with whom they get to spend their birthday. While some choose to spend their birthdays with grandparents, the protagonist prefers to commission a dead celebrity to entertain her each year on her birthday. The short story follows the unnamed narrator’s reviews for the years 2056–2060 of her purchases of dead celebrities from the “next world.” The first one she describes is Danny Kaye, who is charming, talented, and attentive, and receives a raving review. The following year she purchases Fred Astaire, who turns out to be a disappointment, then, to compensate the dissatisfied customer, “they” from the next world offer a “two-for-one combo” but the protagonist is not pleased with her Laurel and Hardy deal, which was charming, but she felt like she is intruding upon their perfect duo.50 Her utter disappointment with David Bowie the following year leads her to try Danny Kaye again, only this time he disappoints, not at all like his charming self, and as she wonders what happens “there” she declares “they” lost a customer. The story ends with her conclusion of her customer experience as “disgraceful.”51 The short story is a

47  For a comprehensive list of Furman’s publications, see her website: http://www.yaelfurman.co.il. 48  See, for example, “The Troll Hunter” (‫ )צייד הטרולים‬No Panic 2006 http://www.blipanika. co.il/?p=1132; “Gertrud Cooked Porridge” (‫ )גרטרוד בישלה דיסה‬No Panic, 2009 http://www.blipanika.co.il/?p=1610; and “Chikoko” (ֹ‫ )צִ ’יקֹוקו‬Hayo-Yihye 12 (2016) https://www.sf-f.org.il/ archives/1830. 49  Hayo-Yihye 12 (2020): 33–37. 50  Dai, “A Birthday Experience from Another World,” 36. 51  Ibid., 37.

234 

V. WEISS

humorous exploration of Universalist questions regarding death, and there is nothing that connects the narrative to Israel or Judaic traditions. One of Israel’s prolific SFF writers, Keren Landsman, recently offered a short story titled “Stitches and Claws” (‫תפרים וטפרים‬, 2020) in which Landsman explores same-sex relationships set in a futuristic world in which female technicians and multi-gendered priests worship technology and oil gods. Hebrew is a heavily gendered language and Landsman refers to technicians using the feminine form, thus ensuring her readers are fully aware from the onset to the gender issue. The plot of the story entails a visit to the city of Ucolo, also referred to as “the nidle,” “hell,” or “stench,” in which Shahar, the technician, is required to descend to the city to obtain oil from one of the temples of worship. Shahar recalls she once heard one of the aeronauts with whom she travels through space that they called it hell because it was a hot spot in the middle of a frozen land. Shahar descends to perform her task, and due to an accident in the temple, she and the priestess with whom she has had previous romantic encounters are “compelled” to take a long leave of absence, which they are both delighted to take.

Hybrid Judaic and Universalist Israeli SFF While some Israeli SFF texts emphasize Judaic aspects and others attempt to offer an escapist non-Israeli world, many Israeli SFF texts operate in a hybrid form that pulls upon Universalist SFF tropes while maintaining certain links to Jewish traditions and Israeli identities and settings. The global issues these texts explore range from genetic engineering and climate change to social discrimination and inclusivity, yet they all share a Jewish Israeli layer that pertains specifically to the area of the “Promised Land.” For example, whereas in “Stitches and Claws” Keren Landsman did not focus on any specifically Judaic notions or refer to Israeli locations, in The Heart of the Circle (‫לב המעגל‬, 2018) Landsman employs an interesting variant of Hybrid Judaic and Universalist Israeli SFF that weaves very delicate threads of specific Israeli locations and social concerns into otherwise very Universalist narratives. Both “Stitches and Claws” and The Heart of the Circle explore gender issues while focusing on class- or cast-based marginalization and discrimination. The plot of The Heart of the Circle is set in Israel, many of the places are easily recognizable as set in Tel Aviv, and the reference to the Rabin assassination anchors the narrative in Israeli culture. The novel explores a society in which people with magical abilities are not only marginalized, but are segregated in a manner reminiscent of Apartheid in South Africa or the Jim Crow era in the USA. The narrative follows Reed, the empath, or moody in slang, whose abilities include manipulating other people’s feelings. The plot includes the heroic prevention of an extremist group’s plan for a revolution, which occurs upon the backdrop of a passionate love affair between Reed and Lee.

  ISRAELI FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION: FANTASTICAL CHRONOTOPES… 

235

Landsman’s depiction of their romance offers an intriguing perspective of same-sex relationship, as in addition to them both being men, they are both empaths. The novel undermines the prejudices regarding relationships between people of the same gender through the metaphor of a relationship between people with the same powers. An intriguing novel that productively utilizes the hybridity of Judaic and Universalist Israeli SFF is Assaf Gavron’s Hydromania (2008). Set in a couple of decades from now, the novel offers a dystopian depiction of the remnants of Israel after it has been depleted of most of its territories and water sources. The spatial reduction is the result of the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, who have gained access to advanced weapons and consequently reduced Israel to Caesarea and Tiberias, as well as a few other towns and villages in the area. The water shortage, which is part of a global water shortage crisis, is then exacerbated when the Palestinians attack and conquer Tiberias, thus cutting off the Israelis’ main water source. While the novel is set specifically in Israel, referring to Israeli cities and terrain and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it explores the specificity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within a global perspective. The local clashes over space and resources are presented as part of worldwide battles, which are driven by global corporations that manipulate local governments and populations to maximize profit. The plot follows an Israeli woman whose husband mysteriously disappeared following a secretive meeting with dubious clients and mafia-like corporate representatives regarding his innovative water collection and purification device. As the mystery is resolved, the readers join the protagonist, Mia, for nine months as she carries her husband’s child and invention from seed to fruition. After she finds out she is pregnant, Mia joins her brother’s family in Harod, a village that used to be Ein Harod. The minimized Harod functions as a spatial metaphor for the depleted Israel in the novel, as the history of Ein Harod underscores the history of the real Israel, especially with regard to Zionist settlement and water resources. Ein Harod was one of the main Kibbutzim established in the early 1920s and is named after the nearby spring.52 The fountain is called in Arabic Ain Jalut, or the Spring of Goliath, and in Hebrew Ein Harod. The name Harod is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible in the context of the Israelites’ battle against Midian, as Gideon selects his warriors based on whether they lap the water directly from the spring or kneel down to drink.53 The name is also a literary allusion to Amos Kenan’s dystopian novel The Way to Ein Harod (1984), which follows the protagonist, Rafi, in his journey from Tel Aviv to Ein Harod after a coup has left Israel under military regime. Whereas Kenan depicts a world in which the Israeli forces demolished many kibbutzim and exiled most of the local Arab population, Gavron portrays the opposite narrative in which the Palestinians have seized the majority of the 52  Following ideological disputes in the 1950s the kibbutz split into Ein Harod Union (Ihud) and Ein Harod United (Meuhad). 53  Book of Judges 7:6.

236 

V. WEISS

area and the Israelis are refugees.54 Hydromania thus subverts several narratives regarding Israel, including and particularly the idea that the spaces and places of the land are “promised.” On the one hand the novel is in conversation with Judaic Israeli traditions, including modern Hebrew literary explorations of utopia and dystopia, and, on the other hand, Hydromania can be located among “cli-fi” trends that consider climate changes and global concerns.55 Another example of texts that explore social concerns which are not particularly Jewish Israeli are Yael Furman’s YA novels The Glasshouse Children (Yaldei Ha’zchuchit, ‫ילדי בית הזכוכית‬, 2011) and World Fragments (Kirei Olam, ‫קרעי עולם‬, 2017). Both World Fragments and The Glasshouse Children are tagged as young adult literature and explore adolescent anxieties alongside environmental and ethical concerns. The texts are set in Israel but explore universalist issues, and the characters and plot do not revolve round Judaic notions or the Promised Land. The Glasshouse Children is set in a futuristic Israel in which genetic engineering exposes social issues such as marginalization and discrimination. The narrative follows Shaked, a young girl, whose family lives in an apartment building shared by humans and merfolk. Shaked knows merfolk language, which is sign language, so she can communicate with her best friend, Kaila, who is a mermaid. The friends face various challenges when Shaked’s classmates mock Kaila’s nudity, and when social activists pass a law that prohibits the confinement of merfolk. While at first Shaked fears for her friend out in the wild, eventually she realizes freedom is paramount. World Fragments is set in a fairly realistic contemporary Israel, yet the plot follows two kids, Gil and Liron, who are sucked into a VR game that Gil had created. Gil and Liron find themselves trapped in the game, caught in the midst of a battle between two powerful sorcerers, Kinsa and Black Starin, and have to complete the game to return home. The spatial shift from the Israeli reality to the virtual world allows the book to merge the plot and character development into the narrative time/space. The book outlines a narrative of a return home, yet is not anchored specifically in the Promised Land chronotope. Rather, it explores broad ideas about faith and religiosity, friendship and social expectations. Like Furman’s The Glasshouse Children, “Twins” (‫ תאומים‬2006) by Ilan Eshkoli explores questions regarding genetic engineering by positioning transnational questions in a local Israeli setting. The short story follows the bizarre occurrence of a seven-month-old baby replicating herself. As the father, Oded, tries to figure out a way to resolve the issue, he reaches out to an old acquaintance from his army service, Yirmi. Yirmi puts him in touch with Pomerantz, who has an unclear army background and forceful militarized presence. 54  The two novels also invert the narrative point of view as Kenan’s novel follows a male protagonist who leaves without knowing where his wife and children are or even if they are alive, and Gavron’s novel follows a wife who does not know what happened to her husband. 55  For further examination of “cli-fi,” see, for example, Goodbody and Johns-Putra, Cli-Fi, 2008; and Tuhus-Dubrow “Cli-Fi: Birth of a Genre,” 58–61.

  ISRAELI FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION: FANTASTICAL CHRONOTOPES… 

237

When Oded refuses to let Pomerantz experiment on the babies, his wife asks whether he thinks Pomerantz is some kind of Mengele. The invocation of Josef Mengele, who had experimented on people during the Holocaust, brings the already horrifying story to the brink of the unthinkable horror of Jewish history.56 The replication of the babies in the story explores questions regarding genetic engineering, as well as quantum physics theories, specifically the paradox of quantum superposition, which has been illustrated in the hypothetical thought experiment of Schrödinger’s cat. While the story positions these universal queries in a recognizably Jewish Israeli environment that includes the shadow of the Holocaust and military involvement, neither plot nor character development is linked with notions of the Promised Land. The final example of a text that explores transnational SFF questions regarding cloning in an Israeli setting is Avivit Mishmari’s The Matilda Days (2018). The novella is set in a futuristic Israel in which Neanderthals have been cloned, yet after some years of public interest and debate regarding their legal status, the public loses interest as the Neanderthals fail to present Homo sapiens with answers to the latter’s quest for meaning.57 The text follows Dr. Dafna Darwish, an Israeli paleontologist with an expertise in Neanderthals, as she tries to hold on to Matilda, one of the last surviving cloned Neanderthals. The “Global Faculty for Neanderthal Research” that had branches in Singapore, Sydney, Rehovot, Lion, and Boston is reduced due to lack of interest.58 Rehovot functions as a metonym for the Weitzmann Institute of Science where it is located, but the plot of the novel commences in Tel Gezer and follows the Israeli team to Abu Kabir and Jaffa. Tel Gezer is one of the most archeologically rich areas in Israel, reaching from as far back as the Neolithic era. Gezer is mentioned several times in the Hebrew Bible in relation to various wars of the Israelites with the local populations, as well as in the Book of Maccabees.59 The plot meanders between Gezer and Abu Kabir, and Mishmari refers to several famous landmarks in the Abu Kabir area such as the Sabil Abu Nabbut and the Saint Peter Church. While the specific setting connects these queries to Jewish history and mythology, the ethical questions regarding cloning are universal.

Local and Global SFF The generic subdivision between Judaic Israeli SFF, Universalist Israeli SFF, and Hybrid Judaic Universalist Israeli SFF highlights the distinctions between the three subgenres, as well as the overarching unifying elements. Whereas Judaic Israeli SFF texts use the Promised Land chronotope to engage with Jewish and Israeli culture as the main focal point of the plot and character  Eshkoli “Twins,” 2006.  The recent discovery of humanoid fossils in Israel renders this novella timely. See Jones, “Mysterious skull fossils expand human family tree — but questions remain,” 2021. 58  Mishmari, The Matilda Days, 9. 59  Book of Joshua10:33, 17:3, 21:21; Book of Samuel II 5:25; Book of Kings II 9:15; Book of MaccabeesI 13:54. 56 57

238 

V. WEISS

development, Universalist Israeli SFF reject such associations. Hybrid Judaic Universalist Israeli SFF engages with the Promised Land chronotope in a sporadic manner, situating local Jewish and Israeli concerns within global issues, and vice versa. The three kinds of Israeli SFF adhere to transcultural SFF generic ontological conventions, forging a fundamental unifying bridge between Israeli and global readers.

Works Cited Adaf, Shimon. Nuntia (‫)כפור‬. Tel Aviv: Z’mora Bitan, 2010. Adaf, Shimo. Undercities (‫)ערים של מטה‬. Tel Aviv: Z’mora Bitan, 2012. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. University of Texas Press, 1984. Barton, George A. “Influence of the Babylonian Exile on the Religion of Israel.” The Biblical World Vol. 37 No. 6 (1911): 369-378. Bemong, Nele and Pieter Borghart. “Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives.” Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives. Gent, Academia Press, 2010. Ben-Ari, Eyal and Yoram Bilu. Grasping Land: Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse and Experience. New York: State University of New York Press, 1997. Dai, Lili. “A Birthday Experience From Another World.” Hayo-Yihye 12 (2020): 33-37. Domb, Risa. Identity and Modern Israeli Literature. Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006. Erblich-Brifman, Eshkar. Winter Blue series (‫בלו‬-‫)ווינטר‬. Rishon Lezion: Yediot Sfarim, 2004-2008. Eshkoli, Ilan. “Twins” (‫)תאומים‬. Bli Panika, 13 February, 2006. http://www.blipanika. co.il/?p=1042 (accessed 2 April 2021). Furman, Yael. The Glasshouse Children (‫)ילדי בית הזכוכית‬. Ben Shemen: Modan, 2011. Furman, Yael. World Fragments (‫)קרעי עולם‬. Ben Shemen: Modan, 2017. Furman, Yael. “The Harbinger” (‫)המבשר‬. Hayo-Yihye (Once Upon a Future: Speculative Fiction Anthology; 229-243 :)2020( 12 )‫יהיה היֹ ה‬. Gavron, Assaf. Hydromania. Or-Yehuda: Kinneret Zmora-Bitan, 2008. Gertz, Nurith. Myths in Israeli Culture: Captives of a Dream. Portland Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000. Glickman, Nora. The Jewish White Slave Trade and the Untold Story of Raquel Liberman. New York; London: Garland Publishing, 2000. Gomel “Time Enough for the World.” Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination. New York and London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010. Gomel. Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature. New York and London: Routledge, 2014. Gomel. “Territorial Histories: Lavie Tidhar, Transcultural Spaces, and Israeli Fantastika.” Lingua Cosmica 2 edited by Sean Guynes (forthcoming). Gomel, Elana and Vered Karti Shemtov. “Limbotopia: The “New Present” and the Literary Imagination.” Comparative Literature Vol. 70 No. 1 (2018): 60-71. Goodbody, Axel and Adeline Johns-Putra. Cli-Fi: A Companion. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008. Gorni, Yosef. “Utopian Elements in Zionist Thought.” Studies in Zionism Vol. 5 No. 1, (1984) 19-27. Gray, Alyssa M. “Introduction.” A Talmud in Exile: The Influence of Yerushalmi Avodah Zarah on the Formation of Bavli. Rhode Island: Brown Judaic Studies, 2020.

  ISRAELI FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION: FANTASTICAL CHRONOTOPES… 

239

Gurevitch, Danielle. “What is Fantasy?” With Both Feet on the Clouds: Fantasy in Israeli Culture. Edited by Elana Gomel and Danielle Gurevitch. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013a. Gurevitch, Danielle. “Fantastic Literature at the Beginning of the Third Millennium: Terror, Religion, and the Hogwarts Syndrome.” Journal of Popular Film and Television Vol.17 No. 1 (2013b). https://ojs.latrobe.edu.au/ojs/index.php/tlg/ article/view/386. Gurevitch, Zali. “The Double Side of Israel.” Grasping Land: Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse and Experience 203-216. New York: State University of New York Press, 1997. Gurevitch, Zali, and Gideon Aran. “Al ha-makom: anthropologya yisraelit.” Alpayim 4 (1993): 9–44. Harris, Rachel S. “Israeli Literature in the 21st Century the Transcultural Generation: An Introduction.” Shofar Vol. 33 No. 4 (2015): 1-14. Hochberg, Gil. “Dystopias in the Kingdom of Israel: Prophetic Narratives of Destruction in Recent Hebrew Literature.” Comparative Literature Vol. 72 No. 1 (2020): 19-31. Idel, Moshe. “Messianic Scholars: On Early Israeli Scholarship, Politics and Messianism.” Modern Judaism Vol. 32 No. 1 (2012): 22-53. Jones, Nicola. “Mysterious skull fossils expand human family tree  — but questions remain.” Nature 25 June 2021. https://www.nature.com/articles/ d41586-­021-­01738-­w. Keret, Etgar and Samir El-youssef. Gaza Blues. London: David Paul, 2004. Keunen, Bart. “Bakhtin, Genre Formation, and the Cognitive Turn: Chronotopes as Memory Schemata.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture Vol. 2 No. 2 (2000). https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol2/iss2/. Landsman, Keren. The Heart of the Circle (‫)לב המעגל‬. London: Angry Robot Press, 2018. Landsman, Keren. “Stitches and Claws.” (‫)תפרים וטפרים‬. Hayo-Yihye (Once Upon a Future: Speculative Fiction Anthology; 9-33 :)2020( 12 )‫יהיה היֹ ה‬. Lemberger, Dorit. “Contacts and Discontinuities: Changing Aspects in Shimon Adaf's Work.” Hebrew Studies 55 (2014): 329-354. Levy, Lital. “Reorienting Hebrew Literary History: The View from the East.” Prooftexts Vol. 29 No. 2 (2009): 127-172. Mishmari, Avivit. The Matilda Days. Israel: Petel, 2018. Omry, Keren. “Israeli SF 101.” SFRA Review 306 (201): 8-11. Ravitzky, Aviezer. Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism. University of Chicago Press, 1996. Robertson, Benjamin J. None of This Is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Sheinfeld, Ilan. A Tale of A Ring (‫)מעשה בטבעת‬. Ben Shemen: Keter, 2007. Sheinfeld, Ilan. When the Dead Return (‫)כשהמתים חזרו‬. Or-Yehuda: Kinneret ZmoraBitan, 2012. Schwartz, Yigal. Do You Know the Land Where the Lemon Blooms. Tel Aviv: Zmora-­ Bitan, 2007. Shohat, Ella. “Rupture and Return Zionist Discourse and The Study of Arab Jews.” Social Text Vol. 21 No. 2 (2003): 49-74. Solomon, Claire. “Reconsidering Anti-Semitism and White Slavery in Contemporary Historical Fiction about Argentina.” Comparative Literature Vol. 63 No. 3 (2011): 307-327.

240 

V. WEISS

Spiegel, Simon. “Things Made Strange: On the Concept of Estrangement in Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies Vol. 35 (2008): 369-384. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Cornell University Press, 1975. Tuhus-Dubrow, Rebecca. “Cli-Fi: Birth of a Genre.” Dissent Vol. 60 No. 3 (2013): 58-61. VanderMeer, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. “Introduction.” The New Weird. Tachyon Publications, 2008. Yanai, Hagar. The Leviathan of Babylon (‫)הלווייתן מבבל‬. Jerusalem: Keter, 2006. Yanai, Hagar. The Water Between the Worlds (‫)המים שבין העולמות‬. Jerusalem: Keter, 2008. Yanai, Hagar. Into The Abyss (‫)המסע אל לב התהום‬. Ben Semen: Modan and Ocean Publishing, 2017. Zerubavel, Yael. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Looking for an Italian Style fantasy Livio Gambarini and Francesco Toniolo

The present chapter traces the history of Italian fantasy. The chapter begins with an overview of the Italian classics that can be considered precursors of fantasy, or an inspiration for the genre. We continue with the complex editorial history of foreign fantasy in Italy, with the translation of The Lord of the Rings as a specific example. Then, the first examples of Italian fantasy are presented, followed by the boom that occurred at the beginning of 2000. Finally, we come to the decline of the first wave of interest from the leading publishing houses, which has nevertheless produced what is perhaps the most distinct outcome of Italian fantasy, characterized by very specialized small publishers, Mediterranean settings and authors who, in many cases, had formed a few years before on a group of ‘‘rebellious’’ bloggers.

A Brief Archeology of the Italian Fantastic In Italy, there is a substantial distinction, especially among intellectuals and in school manuals, between literary fiction and popular literature. The first one is promoted and valued; thus, stories that fit into the “marvelous” (according to Todorov’s definition) and belong to this category, especially those written in the past, have a better chance of entering academic discourse. The marvelous elements of these works are often a metaphor for contemporaneity or introspection.

L. Gambarini (*) Piemme Edizioni, Milan, Italy F. Toniolo Film and Television Studies, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2_16

241

242 

L. GAMBARINI AND F. TONIOLO

Products labeled as “fantasy”, on the other hand, are regarded as popular literature and remain generally excluded from the intellectual discourse. As we will underline in paragraph 2, The Lord of the Rings itself struggled to be accepted in certain Italian circles. Moreover, today, Italian fantasy is still largely ignored or underestimated by the academy. In short, the fantasy genre has struggled for a long time to establish itself in Italy. Some reasons are contingent and linked to specific events of the twentieth century. Others, however, have more ancient roots. Therefore, it is helpful to start with a brief archeology of Italian fiction that somehow anticipated fantasy, also explaining why this kind of literature almost disappeared in some ages. In the Middle Ages, at the birth of romance literature, there was already an established distrust of fairy tales. The adverse judgment of Saint Paul, who speaks of “aniles fabulas” in the First Epistle to Timothy, is followed by many theologians, and there is a system of religious doctrines very averse to this kind of stories (Petrini). Where fantastic elements appear, they are deeply imbued with religiosity, as happens in Dante’s Divina Commedia. Dante Alighieri’s journey to the three realms of the afterlife is, among Italian writers, one of the best known and most influential fantastic narratives of all times. Matthews cites the Divina Commedia among the “medieval texts of great importance for fantasy internationally” (14). The Commedia, and in particular the first cantica Inferno, is recognized and valued in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (Clute and Grant), which indicates it among the fundamental texts for the birth of the genre. Alongside it, in the Encyclopedia, there are several other works by Italian writers: Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, Luigi Pulci’s Morgante, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Gian Francesco Straparola’s Piacevoli notti, and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata. Dante Alighieri directly inspired many fantasy novels, but Commedia’s impact is even more significant if we consider mediated influences. Tolkien himself, who has had a considerable effect on a large number of fantasy productions, must have been familiar with the work of Dante Alighieri (Cilli, “Tolkien e l’Italia” and “Tolkien’s Library”). The echoes of Dante’s Commedia, in particular, are present in numerous media products (Pugh and Weisl 12-29; Rossignoli): for example, through the monsters he places in Hell (Canova, Jewiss). These reappear in several RPGs (Role Playing Games). At least some of the names of Dungeons & Dragons also seem to derive directly from the Commedia. There may also be Dante’s influences on the construction of fantasy videogame settings (Rogers). That said, talking of a direct impact on the spatiality of fantasy novels is more complicated. Ekman, for example, mentions very little Dante Alighieri in his study of the settings and maps of fantasy, and he does so in a pretty generic way. ven more than Dante, the chivalry poems appear, under various aspects, as examples of proto-fantasy. Between Humanism and the Renaissance, the desire for the marvelous is rekindled in Italy, and works such as the Morgante by Pulci, the Orlando Innamorato by Matteo Maria Boiardo and the Orlando Furioso by Ariosto are produced. These are texts that, for

  LOOKING FOR AN ITALIAN STYLE FANTASY 

243

different reasons, have more than one analogy with the contemporary definition of fantasy. The Furioso, in particular, contains a large number of fantastic beasts and wizards, as well as duels and battles, alongside adventurous journeys to unknown lands, in search of powerful artifacts. Indeed, comparisons between Furioso and contemporary fantasy emerged on several occasions (e.g., Arnaudo). C.S. Lewis himself compared The Lord of the Rings to Ariosto’s Furioso and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, also declaring the supremacy of his friend Tolkien over the other two authors (Lewis 990). Similarly, Boiardo’s nostalgia for the age of chivalry, which emerges in Orlando Innamorato, is very close to the nostalgia that characterizes a large number of fantasy stories. Nevertheless, Torquato Tasso, when he composes his Gerusalemme Liberata, was already in a radically different context. The Renaissance was at its sunset, and the age was profoundly uncertain, for which Tasso “was himself amid the perilous current and thus participated, from time to time, in all the impulses and hopes, but also in the uncertainties and sentimental confusions that characterized that epoch of rupture” (Caretti 90). The uncertainty that typifies the age of the Counter-Reformation also marks a renewed distrust of fantastic stories. Moving forward in time, the disinterest remains, although the reasons that animate it change. Italian romanticism, for example, sees the prevalence of patriotism, which generates novels and poems linked to reality and historical events. Later, Verism is affirmed, as a movement close to French Naturalism, with writers such as Giovanni Verga, Luigi Capuana, and Matilde Serao. As soon as we move outside a particular canon model, the interest of the academy and anthologies is considerably reduced, even toward nineteenth-century authors of fantastic texts: It is not easy to find any trace of the fantastic Italian popular in literature manuals. At best, it’s possible to meet the usual examples of the late nineteenth century […]. Mainly, fiction coming from the Scapigliatura (Igino Ugo Tarchetti, the brothers Arrigo and Camillo Boito) or originating from the darkest anxieties of naturalism (this is the case of Luigi Capuana). […] As regards the early twentieth century(school rarely goes beyond that), what is the nature of the Italian fantastic? From most of the anthologies and non-fiction essays dedicated to the subject, only one, precise portrait seems to emerge: a surreal, ironic, rational style of fantastic […] a fantastic who has now dismissed the nineteenth-century paraphernalia, or who uses it with aware and alluring detachment, no longer caring about what had been the fulcrum of the “traditional” fantastic (Foni 3-4). Among the literary exponents of the nineteenth century, there are Iginio Ugo Tarchetti and other members of the Milanese Scapigliatura, with their fantastic tales. There are also the occasional intrusions into the fantastic by authors such as Luigi Capuana, mainly known as an exponent of Verismo. Even these texts hardly appear in anthologies. Then, in the twentieth century, the intellectual and symbolic fantastic triumphed. One of the few exceptions is Le avventure di Pinocchio. Storia di un burattino by Carlo Lorenzini is better

244 

L. GAMBARINI AND F. TONIOLO

known by his pseudonym Carlo Collodi. The story of the puppet Pinocchio, depending on how fantasy is defined, could be one of the first and best known Italian examples of fantasy for children (Myers). It could also be understood as a coming-of-age fairy tale that teaches young readers the moral message of obeying parents and avoiding bad company. At the same time, it aims to transmit a system of values to Italians, recently freed from foreign powers, from a postcolonial perspective (Govender). Another very popular Italian writer who, in some way, comes close to the stylistic features of fantasy is Emilio Salgari, author of a vast number of novels, many of which are dedicated to pirates and corsairs. Although the events of his stories are set in the real world, Salgari uses distant and, therefore, unknown places to evoke the same sense of wonder that fantasy writers try to arouse. Obviously, his works cannot be included in the genre, but they still deserve mention in the present analysis, because they influenced many fantasy writers who would come after him (Leoni). Similarly, Pinocchio has inspired a large number of authors of children’s books. È rilevante? With a few nineteenth-century exceptions, Italy arrives at the twentieth century without having developed its own fantastic current. Even when it is born, it will be far from the spirit of novels like The Lord of the Rings. It is helpful to start from the Italian first approach to this novel, to understand the twentieth-­ century mood of the Italian editorial production.

The Twentieth Century and the Slow Affirmation of Italian Fantasy The editorial history of The Lord of the Rings in Italy is particularly emblematic to underline the fantasy genre’s difficulty in establishing itself in this country. A comprehensive reconstruction on the subject was carried out by Oronzo Cilli (“Tolkien and Italy”). Here we will limit ourselves to retracing some of the main stages of the process. On at least two occasions, in 1954 and then in 1962, Mondadori (one of the leading Italian publishing houses) considered Tolkien’s work for a possible publication. In both cases, however, the opinions were negative. In 1962, Elio Vittorini and Vittorio Sereni, two Italian intellectuals and writers who worked for the publisher, expressed themselves negatively about a translation of The Lord of the Rings. It is helpful to quote at least a part of Vittorini’s judgment: Attempt to build a fantastic world on themes drawn from Nordic mythologies (A bit like Shakespeare in some of his works, for example: ‘‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’’). Indeed, a renovation rather than a construction. The success of this attempt would require the strength of a true genius (which Tolkien proves himself not to be) and the ratification of topicality (i.e., that the novel implied a metaphor of some facet of current events), but this does not happen at all (quoted in Cilli, “Tolkien and Italy” 99).

  LOOKING FOR AN ITALIAN STYLE FANTASY 

245

His judgment is exceptionally negative. The critique about the lack of a connection with actuality is fascinating. For Vittorini, The Lord of the Rings should have been the metaphor of some topical issue to acquire value. Even before reaching Italy, the book seemed destined to find itself at the center of a political debate, in which numerous people would have accepted or criticized it as a support for different political ideas. In a follow-up to his judgment, Vittorini considered the possibility of publishing only the first book to see how much it would sell, but then it was decided not to proceed. The novel was published in 1967 by Astrolabio, in an edition consisting of a few copies, which today are very rare. The translation had been entrusted to Vittoria Alliata di Villafranca, who was 15 years old at the time. Three years later, in 1970, the novel was republished by Rusconi: it was this edition that started garnering a growing success among the Italian readerships. However, the success among readers has not undermined the prejudice toward this work and the whole genre. The novel achieved great success especially among right-wing young people, that led many left-wing intellectuals to oppose or ignore it. This editorial situation triggered, on both sides, a political use of Tolkien’s works (Orecchia; de Turris; Cilli “Tolkien and Italy”). This forced politicization of Tolkien, carried out by both sides, has further slowed down the diffusion of fantasy in Italy. In essence, we have to wait for Peter Jackson’s film trilogy to witness, as the following paragraph will showcase, an effective editorial opening toward fantasy and an expansion of literary criticism on Tolkien. However, the political question has not ended, and it re-emerged in 2019-2020 with a new translation of the work, made by Ottavio Fatica. This new translation immediately produced appreciations (e.g., Binelli and, albeit with doubts about a couple of toponyms, Picone) and criticisms or at least doubts (e.g., Savelli; Bonelli) on Fatica’s choices, but any actual analysis turned out to be—again—corrupted by political agendas. On the one hand is the accusation of an intent to produce a ‘politically correct’ version of Tolkien and on the other hand, the intention to label those who criticize the new translation as “fascists”. In equal measure, two accusations that disregard the text itself, which is used instrumentally. Maybe, the most agreeable position is the one of Paolo Pizzimento. He recognizes the different limits of the translation of Alliata di Villafranca—which, moreover, was first revised by Quirino Principe and then by the Italian Tolkienian Society—but also underlines the stretches on the text by Ottavio Fatica, made to distance as much as possible his translation from the previous one. Leaving aside the sterile political rhetoric, he says that neither of the two translations is perfect. Still, they can “integrate each other and offer a valid contribution to the understanding of the original text, that they show us from different points of view” (Pizzimento 156). The peculiar political events related to Tolkien’s reception in Italy are not, however, the only reason for the delay in the affirmation of fantasy and the generalized distrust of the genre in the country.

246 

L. GAMBARINI AND F. TONIOLO

In the twentieth century, the Italian fantastic emerges, no more limited to its sporadic previous appearances. It is an intellectual fantastic, used as a mirror of interiority or as a parody and a vehicle for social criticism (Zangrandi; Caltagirone and Maxia; Cavalli). These texts—often short stories—are still far from fantasy. An author such as Italo Calvino is much closer to Giacomo Leopardi’s Operette Morali than to Tolkien: “Above all the others, it is in our century that fantastic literature, having lost all its romantic nebulosity, affirms itself as a lucid construction of the mind and an Italian fantastic can be born. This happens precisely when Italian literature recognizes itself, above all, in the legacy of Leopardi: a disenchanted, bitter, ironic clarity of sight” (Calvino 227-228). This type of fantastic story is celebrated by the academy, by the literary canon and by school manuals. Again, with mixed fortunes. Italo Calvino is omnipresent, while several other authors appear sporadically, despite their relevance to the genre: Dino Buzzati, Anna Maria Ortese, Giorgio Manganelli, and so on. Even the most popular foreign authors, in academia and anthologies, are closer to Julio Cortázar than Tolkien or Lovecraft. Therefore, they take as models the authors who, again, create fantastic stories that openly clash with gothic atmospheres and fantasy (Zangrandi 46-50). Therefore, Italy in the twentieth century saw the strong preponderance of an erudite and intellectual fantastic. The nineteenth-century antecedents were marginalized mainly, and the names that attracted some attention (such as Collodi and Salgari) have long been – or still are – relegated to the discourse on popular fiction. Meanwhile, the import of foreign fantasy had also slowed down significantly. With this situation, we reach the threshold of the 1980s, in which finally the first signs of a proper Italian fantasy appear. This was also due to the success that both The Lord of the Rings and Sword & Sorcery novels achieved, so that more and more of similar material is translated. It is precisely on the front of heroic fantasy / Sword & Sorcery that one of the first genuinely Italian fantasy productions happens to be The Cycle of the Amazons by Gianluigi Zuddas. Amazon, the first novel in the series, was published in 1978 and had the warriors Goccia di Fiamma and Ombra di Lancia as protagonists. Like the Hyborian Age of Robert E. Howard’s books, Zuddas’ novels are set in a distant past, in the Mediterranean basin of 10,000 years ago. His works remained a case of relative and somewhat isolated success, although some exciting experiments were attempted. One of these were the two books Le spade di Ausonia and I guerrieri di Ausonia, both printed by Akropolis in 1982. These two volumes were an attempt to lay the foundations for an Italian heroic fantasy. Each volume contained three short novels. The authors involved were, in addition to the aforementioned Zuddas, Adolfo Morganti, Adalberto Cersosimo, Alex Voglino, Luigi de Pascalis and Benedetto Pizzorno. This one and other projects had no particular following; nevertheless, they represented a vital predecessor for more recent similar attempts, such as the Eroica anthology (Iascy and

  LOOKING FOR AN ITALIAN STYLE FANTASY 

247

La Manno), published in 2016 to relaunch the Italian Sword & Sorcery. Zuddas’ works, with their Mediterranean location, also showed a first case of what is called the new Mediterranean heroic fantasy (La Manno). From 2010 onward, a fair number of Italian authors have produced fantasy stories, more or less belonging to the “heroic” label, in which the Mediterranean and the territories bordering it are strongly present (see below). Going back to the 1980s, while the political debate on Tolkien continues (Cilli, “Tolkien and Italy”) and translations of foreign fantasy novels grow in number, some sporadic examples of Italian fantasy continue to emerge. In 1984 they were published Odla il cantastorie by the aforementioned Benedetto Pizzorno and Storie dell’epoca Mu by Mariangela Cerrino, followed in 1985 by Nel segno della luna bianca by Lino Aldani and Daniela Piegai. It looks more like a sowing period than a harvesting one. More and more publishers, including Mondadori, are translating foreign fantasy. In the meantime, the crossroads between fiction and role-playing games, both fundamental for constructing the following fantasy imaginary, start to appear. In 1985, Editrice Giochi brought the basic set of Dungeons & Dragons to Italy, which would have been followed by numerous other editions, alongside further role-playing games. In the meantime, the publishing house E. Elle, of Trieste acquired the rights to many English, US and French series of interactive books, published in a series entitled “Librogame” (Longo and Spina 52-54). Before E.  Elle, it was already being published, in 1982, Avventure nell’Isola, the translation of Sugarcane Island (Packard), followed by other editorial experiments, but it is with the “Librogame” series that these products experienced a short but intense moment of affirmation. In 1987, the first Italian interactive stories were also published: In cerca di fortuna (Angiolino) and Il Presidente del Consiglio sei… tu! (G&L). A quick mention of another crucial element of the imagination that was gradually spreading in Italy needs to be done: that is, Japanese cartoons. From the late 1970s, and for a long time, Italian television networks broadcast an extensive and differentiated number of Japanese products (Pellitteri), linked to science fiction imaginaries (the various super robots) and fantasy. The indicator of their success among the Italian public also emerges from the reactions of numerous journalists and intellectuals, who repeatedly criticize Japanese products (Pellitteri). In the 1990s, Italian literary fantasy continued its slow affirmation. In 1992, the novel I cieli dimenticati was published. It is the first volume of a historical fantasy trilogy by Mariangela Cerrino, linked to the Etruscans. Moreover, in 1994, in particular, Nicholas Eymerich, Inquisitore, written by Valerio Evangelisti, was published. It probably was the first Italian fantasy product to enjoy some success abroad. In addition to giving life to a series of novels, it has also led to the birth of some cross-media operations, such as the video game Nicolas Eymerich, Inquisitore: The Plague (TiconBlu), characterized by the presence of medieval Latin dubbing.

248 

L. GAMBARINI AND F. TONIOLO

The Fantasy Baby Boom and the 2012 Crisis The early 2000s, thanks to the enormous success of the movies Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and The Fellowship of the Ring, trigger a chain of publishing events of great importance for the history of Italian fantasy. In 2002, Christopher Paolini publishes Eragon, whose Italian translation is a commercial success that takes the operators of the sector by surprise: it is the first time that a conspicuous success with the public smiles on an author who, although American, has a name that sounds Italian (Manco and Vaccaro). In 2004, Nihal della Terra del Vento arrived in bookshops. It is the first volume of Cronache del Mondo Emerso, by the 22-year-old Licia Troisi. The novel tells the story of a teenage half-elf called to become a heroine and a Dragon Knight, who together counter the threat of the cruel Tyrant and his servants. The cover artist, Paolo Barbieri, would soon become one of the most popular illustrators in Italy (Laurenti). The advertising system of the operation is impressive, the narrative is lively, casual, and in line with the commercial needs of the Young Adult audience. However, the work immediately arouses perplexity in the speculative fiction community. Silvio Sosio, manager of Fantascienza. com, writes: Mondadori has spent its editorial power by focusing on a very young novice girl, Licia Troisi. […] We await the results of the sales of the Cronache del Mondo Emerso with curiosity and even a little concern. We are worried because a terrible fear grips us: that, in the end, a book of this kind can sell much more than a quality book, thus meeting the expectations of Segrate’s building managers [the headquarters of Mondadori are located in this city]. Because advertising still has its effect, whatever the product. Because we suspect (while hoping with all our heart that we are wrong) that to sell so many copies, the fact of writing something that resembles a thousand other books does not matter so much, when most people have not read those thousand books; because out of tune details and naive writing go unnoticed, or perhaps they are even more congenial to a general public not used to reading (Sosio). The novels of the young Troisi prove to be an overwhelming success. For the first time, an Italian fantasy book reaches the honors of the national news, and—even more particularly—the books are written by a very young person. The operation is soon imitated by other major Italian publishers, who play downward with the age of the authors in the trend that is ironically called “fantasy baby boom” (Lenti). The definition is not used in reference to the generation of baby boomers, but it indicates the sudden appearance of many very young authors. In the range of possible varieties in the fantasy genre, described by Brian Attebery as a gradient between the two opposite extremes of free literary reverie (fantasy mode), and stereotypical escapism with recognizable motifs and predictable progress (fantasy formula), the works of the editorial companies in this period focus decisively on this latter approach. With debuts defined by Manco and Vaccaro as “premature and not adequately prepared”, in 2008 the editors “Einaudi, Newton Compton and Dalai throw off the

  LOOKING FOR AN ITALIAN STYLE FANTASY 

249

seventeen-year-old Chiara Strazzulla (Gli eroi del crepuscolo), Federico Ghirardi (Bryan di Boscoquieto) and Thomas Mazzantini (Garmir. L’eclissiomante)” (Manco and Vaccaro). In cultural journalism, these “Tolkien’s grandchildren” (Taglietti) are mostly greeted with a generic, condescending favor, which only rarely goes into the merits of the books. Little used to fantasy, traditional journalism tends to treat it more as a strange juvenile phenomenon than as a literary current with coherence and qualitative standards. This situation generates a grassroots reaction. A part of the fantasy community begins to voice a loud discontent with increasing bitterness on the internet. Reviews, articles, and comments target the works of the “fantasy baby boom”, their authors, the publishing houses that printed them, and the cultural operators themselves, who have lost their role as critics and quality warrantors. This critical fringe consolidates in 2007 around a group of independent bloggers, including the historical popularizer Gabriele Campagnano (aka Zweilawyer), the narratology expert Marco Carrara (aka Duca di Baionette), and Chiara “Gamberetta” (from the Fantasy Gamberi blog). These were the prominent names, the most cited and discussed on the internet. Alongside them, other blogs also occasionally dealt with the topic, such as Tapirullanza and Tenger’s Fortezza nascosta. And the list could go on with Wereharesburrow (no longer available), Draghi d’ottone e nani con la scopa (no longer available), Knight & Princess. Massacri Fantasy (available, but their articles about specific books are no longer accessible) and many others. The critical movement was quite broad and differentiated, although, as already mentioned, the two leading exponents were the blogs of Marco Carrara and Chiara “Gamberetta”, followed by “Zweilawyer”. Numerous fantasy writers who would make their debut in the following years had trained on their articles. Articles characterized by meticulous in-depth analysis, combined with judgments formulated with a decidedly accusatory tone, were rare to find elsewhere. As a practical example, here is an excerpt from an article by Fantasy Gamberi: Troisi writes without knowing what she is talking about. Not only that, but she does not even have any doubts. Let me immediately give an example: “After the initial difficulties, however, Nihal became familiar with that unusual weapon. Strength was not essential to use it and, overcoming the frustration of missed targets, began to give her great satisfaction. She discovered that she had an excellent aim, a gift that few others shared in her group, and she got used to shooting even in movement”. (Gamberetta) Here, what Troisi defines as an “unusual weapon” are bow and arrows. Strength is essential for using a bow! But let us suppose she does not know that. Is it possible that she has never heard the many legends related to the difficulty of drawing bows? Ulysses and his bow that none of the suitors could use? (Gamberetta). In addition to sarcastic and sometimes ferocious analysis, these blogs also post punctual insights into medieval history, creative writing and hoplology (Carrara), urging for a more serious and rigorous approach to

250 

L. GAMBARINI AND F. TONIOLO

the writing process, one built on study and documentation. In recent years, Marco Carrara has inspired numerous writers with his blog, and nowadays he presents himself as a teacher of fiction, known for his extreme severity. In the wave of standard fantasy for young adults produced by this “baby boom” period, however, there are also authors with a more defined personality, who question the stereotype of the secondary world with Nordic and medieval motifs consolidated by the standardization of Tolkien tropes, parodied by Diana Wynne Jones in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. History, legends, and names linked to Mediterranean area begin to appear in Zeferina by Riccardo Coltri and in Geshwa Olers e il viaggio nel Masso Verde by Fabrizio Valenza. There are also linguistic and stylistic contaminations in Giovanni de Feo’s fantasy and Francesco Barbi’s picaresque adventures. The change of setting is manifested even more clearly in the field of urban fantasy: Luca Tarenzi (with the novels Le due lune and Quando il diavolo ti accarezza), Chiara Palazzolo, Francesco Falconi, and above all Francesco Dimitri with Pan, elect metropolis and suburbs from Italian cities as a setting for their weird and dark fantasy novels. L’Eretico, the first volume of the Trilogia di Magdeburg by Alan D. Altieri (pseudonym of Sergio Altieri), already acclaimed for his previous action thrillers, was published in 2005. Here, Altieri writes a gothic fantasy set during the Thirty Years War. Hyperversum by Cecilia Randall (pseudonym of Cecilia Randazzo), published in 2006 and partly set in medieval Flanders, is another historical fantasy of this era. The use of English pseudonyms by various Italian fantasy authors (as well as the adoption of the heteronym of Lara Manni by the journalist and radio host Loredana Lipperini for the publication of Esbat in 2009), could be seen as a symptom of the readers’ anglophilia, as well as of the persistence of the prejudices of the Italian cultural environment toward fantastic fiction, not lessened (and perhaps even strengthened) by the literary case of Licia Troisi. At the beginning of the second decade of the 2000s, the Italian fantasy market enters a phase of contraction that becomes particularly manifest after 2012, the “annus horribilis” of publishers (Bovino). From 2012, the sales figures show drastic drops of many authors in the sector, including the most highly regarded. The large Italian publishers are entering a historical phase of significant acquisitions and reorganization, culminating in 2016 with the merger between Mondadori and Rizzoli, two of the largest publishing groups in the country. The experiments of the previous period are interrupted. Mondadori and others will continue to publish, albeit with smaller editions, the novels of Licia Troisi and other authors of formulaic fantasy. However, in choosing new authors, they prefer celebrities, such as the YouTubers Guglielmo Scilla aka Willwoosh (L’inganno della morte), Adrian Rednic aka Caleel (La caduta dello Zentir) and the famous comics scriptwriter Roberto Recchioni (YA—La battaglia di Campocarne). There are still isolated attempts to ennoble fantasy in cultural circles. Mainstream author Vanni Santoni tries to apply postmodern registers and

  LOOKING FOR AN ITALIAN STYLE FANTASY 

251

themes to the fantasy trilogy Terra Ignota, which receives some attention from the press but is tepidly received by fans of the genre (Mondadori). The sales crisis makes the fantasy genre as a whole an afterthought. Numerous midlist authors lose their editorial interlocutors and are forced to fall back on self-publishing or the indie sector (see below). Italian fantasy thus enters a phase of recession, which however contains the seeds of a subsequent rebirth.

Recent Years: The Revival of Indies and Self-publishers Italian fantasy struggles to find a place in high-end catalogs. The official press and bookstores largely stopped following the phenomenon. It is in this context that fantasy seeks its spaces elsewhere. The new points of reference for lovers of the sector become the events related to nerd culture, such as Cartoomics, Romics, and Lucca Comics & Games. Facebook groups take the place of the comments sections of forums and webzines, while experts meet at the panels of exhibitions like Delos Days and Stranimondi in Milan (owned by Delos Books). Between 2010 and 2020, several new independent publishers are born. With varying degrees of craftsmanship, they specialize in Italian fantastic fiction to fill the void left by the big publishers and provide an alternative to vanity presses. Among the most interesting indie catalogs are those of Dark Zone Edizioni (with authors such as Francesca Pace, Rob Himmel, and Alessio del Debbio), Watson Edizioni (Alessandro Forlani, Angelo Berti, and Carlo Deffenu) and Plesio Editore with authors like Federico Galdi and Roberto Gerilli. Of the latter, we remember Questo non è un romanzo fantasy, an urban fantasy set during Lucca Comics & Games, which makes fun of the recent history of the literary genre by choosing as the protagonist a fictional author of the “baby boom”, crushed by bloggers and unable to find a new home to the characters of its story. Continuing with the list, Gainsworth Publishing stands out for the high material care of its printed volumes, and Edizioni Hypnos has a rich catalog of weird genre, in which Ivo Torello’s sensual historical fantasies stand out. In the tumultuous sector of the indie market, among all the new publishing players, Roberto Risso (Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Clemson) considers Acheron Books particularly remarkable: Publisher specializing in Italian fantastic fiction, able to offer to the readers, a niche but in constant growth, works by expert and committed writers (…). Livio Gambarini, Christian Sartirana, Giuseppe Menconi, Luigi Musolino, and many others are just the vanguard of a group of new, interesting young talents. The Vaporteppa series curated by Marco Carrara, a character as exuberant and picturesque for marketing as serious and rigorous in editing and creating stories, is noteworthy. The remarkable fact of the works belonging to this meritorious avant-garde is that the medium-size or small publisher becomes a literary and authorial training school for talents. Thanks to young people who are intelligent and generationally attentive to the Anglo-American market and its mechanics, the results were not long in coming (Risso, III).

252 

L. GAMBARINI AND F. TONIOLO

To the names mentioned by Risso, it is possible to add others, such as Sara Simoni, Titania Blesh, and Mala Spina. Acheron Books publishes fantasy novels in Italian settings: ranging from the Sardinia of the bronze age of SRDN (Andrea Atzori) to the macabre Venice of Guiscardi senza Gloria (Mauro Longo) and the delicious monsters cooked in Chianti in Italian Way of Cooking (Marco Cardone). The promotion of the Italian historical, cultural and landscape heritage is combined with attention to the needs of the public, which is no longer composed of readers only, but also of fans of manga, video games and RPGs. In the soil of this cross-media product, two Italian fantasy settings emerge in 2020 and 2021, respectively, for the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons: Brancalonia and Inferno. The first is comic and deliberately coarse, while the second is inspired by the First Cantica of Dante’s Commedia. The two campaigns are launched on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, where they collect over 600,000 euros. It is crucial to remember projects like these because they intercepted a large group of Italian readers while coming from a small publisher. These initiatives showcase the existence of a market for Italian fantasy: a market that can be conquered by those who want to identify the tastes and needs of the readers, after the big publishers have abandoned the genre. The growth is not about small publishers only: with the growing popularity of Amazon, there has been an impetus for self-publishing. Italian self-­publishers can achieve visibility that would otherwise be unthinkable, provided that the authors themselves know how to implement “intelligent editorial strategies […], and this is an exciting innovation” (Risso). Among those who succeed, we point out Gabriele Campagnano, long-time popularizer and already a prominent member, like Marco Carrara, of the group of bloggers who criticized the “fantasy baby boom”. Campagnano, drawing inspiration from Altieri’s novels and Kentaro Miura’s Berserk, wrote the dark fantasy Zodd, Alba di Sangue. Another relevant mention is for the duo Luca Mazza and Jack Sensolini, who also have a strong literary personality. They gathered a large audience through the label Ignoranza Eroica (heroic ignorance), whose style can be described as “an Italian fantastic that is politically incorrect, hypertrophic, sneering… a Grand Guignol” (Saccoccia). More and more experimenters are coming to self-publishing after (or alongside) an experience in more traditional publishing. This is the case of Alessandro Forlani (Arabrab di Anubi), of the herald of Mediterranean fantasy Andrea Gualchierotti and of Davide Cencini, whose fantasy saga Darkwing embodies the complexity of possible publishing paths in this era, as it ranges among different publishers (Ute Libri, Plesio, Astro) and various media: comics, novels, gamebooks and illustrated books (Cencini, “Career”). The greater fluidity and flexibility of the current publishing market, combined with a progressive increase in the narratological awareness of the new voices, help to paint the portrait of a very vital genre. It is difficult to predict

  LOOKING FOR AN ITALIAN STYLE FANTASY 

253

what the near future will reserve, but certainly, the increase in political and social themes in fantasy is destined to increase. The sex of angels has already become a recurring trope for the introduction of LGBTQIA + themes in Aislinn’s Angelize and in Valerio La Martire’s Saga dei Nephilim, while the female condition is at the center of the story Il volo notturno delle lingue mozzate by Beatrice Salvioni, winner for the Jury of the “Beyond the Veil of the Real” competition organized in 2021 by the Calvino Prize, one of the major Italian literary awards. It is helpful to remember this last example, because perhaps it is the sign of what could be a progressive opening of Italian cultural circles toward literary fantasy. Regardless of the expectations about the future, however, the situation of contemporary Italian fantasy is quite clear. Many authors mix fantasy with an Italian or Mediterranean setting. Several small but very specialized publishing houses focused on a verticalized offer, aimed at specific niches of readers. Alongside it there is self-publishing, which has generated content with a good circulation. And much is yet to come.

Works Cited Aislinn. Angelize. Fabbri, 2013. Aldani, Lino, and Piegai, Daniela. Nel segno della luna bianca. Nord, 1985. Altieri, Alan D. L’Eretico. Corbaccio, 2005. Angiolino, Andrea. In cerca di fortuna. Ripostes, 1987. Arnaudo, Marco. “L’Orlando furioso e il fantasy moderno.” Il dialogo creativo: studi per Lina Bolzoni, edited by Maria Pia Ellero et al., Maria Pacini Fazzi Editore, 2017, pp. 265-277. Attebery, Brian. Strategies of fantasy. Indiana University Press, 1992. Atzori, Andrea. ŠRDN dal Bronzo e dalla Tenebra. Acheron Books, 2017. Barbi, Francesco. L’acchiapparatti. Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2010. Binelli, Andrea. “Appunti su alcuni profili tematici nelle traduzioni italiane di Tolkien”, I Quaderni di Arda, 2019, https://iquadernidiarda.it/andrea-­binelli-­appunti-­su-­ alcuni-­profili-­tematici-­nelle-­traduzioni-­italiane-­di-­tolkien/. Bonelli, Costanza. “Tra Autore e Lettore: Breve viaggio nel magico mondo della traduzione.” Barlumi di cose più alte, più profonde o più oscure della sua superficie. L’opera di Tolkien dalla critica accademica al legandarium, edited by Giuseppe Scattolini, L’Arco e la Corte, 2021, pp. 265-277. Bovino, Luca. D’Aie! Com’è andato davvero l’anno da record dell’editoria. LeggIndipendente, 03/08/2021. https://leggindipendente.com/daie-­come­andato-­davvero-­lanno-­da-­record-­per-­leditoria/ Calvino, Italo. Mondo scritto e mondo non scritto. Mondadori, 2002. Caltagirone, Giovanna, and Maxia, Sandro (edited by). «Italia magica». Letteratura fantastica e surreale dell’Ottocento e del Novecento, AM&D Edizioni, 2008. Campagnano, Gabriele. Zodd, alba di sangue. Necrosword, 2018. Canova, Leonardo. “Old monsters and new masters: i mostri dell’Inferno dantesco nella cultura pop contemporanea.” Vecchi maestri e nuovi mostri. Tendenze e prospettive della narrativa horror all’inizio del nuovo millennio, edited by Marco Malvestio and Valentina Sturli, Mimesis, 2019, pp. 173-188. Cardone, Marco. Italian Way of Cooking. Acheron Books, 2015.

254 

L. GAMBARINI AND F. TONIOLO

Caretti, Lanfranco. Ariosto e Tasso. Einaudi, 2001. Carrara, Marco. Le armature: test di penetrazione e conclusioni. Steam Fantasy, 02/23/2008. https://www.steamfantasy.it/blog/2008/02/23/le-­armature-­test­di-­penetrazione-­e-­conclusioni/ Cavalli, Annamaria. Oltre la soglia. Fantastico, sogno e femminile nella letteratura italiana. Unicopli, 2002. Cencini, Davide. Darkwing 3: La Freccia d’Oro. Youcanprint, 2016. Cencini, Davide. “Career”. Davidecencini, https://davidecencini.weebly.com/ about.html Cerrino, Mariangela. Storie dell’epoca Mu. Mondadori, 1984. Cerrino, Mariangela. I cieli dimenticati. Longanesi, 1992. Cilli, Oronzo. Tolkien e l’Italia. Il Cerchio, 2016. Cilli, Oronzo. Tolkien’s Library: An Annotated Checklist. Luna Press, 2019. Clute, John, and Grant, John. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. Orbit Books, 1997. Coltri, Riccardo. Zeferina. Fantasy dal Regno d’Italia. Asengard, 2010. Dal Lago, Alessandro. Eroi e mostri. Il fantasy come macchina mitologica. Il Mulino, 2017. de Turris, Gianfranco. “Il caso Tolkien.” La compagnia, l’anello, il potere. J.R.R. Tolkien creatore di mondi. Nuova edizione, Aa.Vv., Il Cerchio, 2008, pp. 9-38. Dimitri, Francesco. Pan. Marsilio, 2008. Ekman, Stefan. Here Be Dragons. Exploring Fantasy Maps and Settings. Wesleyan University Press, 2013. Evangelisti, Valerio. Nicholas Eymerich, Inquisitore. Mondadori, 1994. Foni, Fabrizio. Alla fiera dei mostri: racconti pulp, orrori e arcane fantasticherie nelle riviste italiane, 1899-1932. Tunué, 2007. Forlani, Alessandro. Arabrab di Anubi. Watson, 2017. G & L. Il Presidente del Consiglio sei… tu!. Mondadori, 1987. Gamberetta, Chiara. Recensioni romanzo: Nihal della Terra del Vento. Fantasy gamberi, 01/16/2008. http://fantasy.gamberi.org/2008/01/16/recensioni-romanzonihal-della-terra-del-vento/ Govender, Kamalini. “Pinocchio and the Uncanny Quest for Subaltern Spaces in Italian Children’s Literature, Italian Studies in Southern Africa, vol. 31, n. 1, 2018, pp. 60-87. Iascy, Alessandro, and La Manno, Francesco (edited by). Eroica – antologia Sword & Sorcery. Watson edizioni, 2016. Jewiss, Virginia. “Monstrous Movements and Metaphors in Dante’s Divine Comedy.” Monsters in the Italian Literary Imagination, edited by Keala Jane Jewell, Wayne State University Press, 2001, pp. 179-190. Jones, Diana Wynne. The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. Penguin Group, 1996. La Manno, Francesco. “La via italiana all’heroic fantasy.” Italian Sword & Sorcery, edited by Annarita Guarnieri, Associazione Culturale Italian Sword & Sorcery, 2018, Kindle Edition (position 1588-2792). La Martire, Valerio. Nephilim: Guerra in Purgatorio. Curcio, 2014. Laurenti, Lorena. “Paolo Barbieri”. Disegnamo.com, 11/26/2018 https://www.disegnamo.com/paolo-­barbieri/ Lenti, Marina. “Guerra termonucleare in salsa fantasy”. Fantasy Magazine, 07/08/2008, https://www.fantasymagazine.it/9152/guerra-­t ermonucleareglobale-­i n­salsa-­fantasy. Leoni, Giulio. “Le presenze (palesi o occulte) di elementi salgariani negli scrittori italiani di genere.” Riletture salgariane, Metauro, 2013, pp. 261-264.

  LOOKING FOR AN ITALIAN STYLE FANTASY 

255

Lewis, Clive Stapes. Collected Letters Volume II. Books, Broadcasts and War 1931-1949. HarperCollins, 2004. Longo, Mauro, and Spina, Mala. Scrivi la tua avventura! Dalle storie a bivi ai librogame. Amazon Italia, 2019. Manco, Emanuele, and Vaccaro, Andrea. “Fantasy e urban fantasy nel nuovo millennio.” Guida ai narratori italiani del fantastico, edited by Walter Catalano, Gian Filippo Pizzo, Andrea Vaccaro, Odoya, 2018, p. 318-321. Matthews, Richard. Fantasy. The Liberation of Imagination. Routledge, 2002. Mondadori. “Terra ignota. Risveglio.” Goodreads, 24/09/2013 https://www. goodreads.com/book/show/18502148-­terra-­ignota Myers, Lindsay. Making the Italians: Poetics and Politics of Italian Children’s Fantasy. Peter Lang, 2011. Orecchia, Antonio Maria. “’I Cacciatori di Frodo’. Tolkien tra destra e sinistra nella stampa italiana.” La filosofia del Signore degli Anelli, edited by Claudio Bonvecchio, Mimesis, 2008, pp. 153-179. Packard, Edward. Avventure nell’Isola. Translated by Daniela Camboni, Nuove Edizioni Romane, 1982. Paolini, Christopher. Eragon. Fabbri Editori, 2004. Pellitteri, Marco. Mazinga nostalgia. storia, valori e linguaggi della Goldrake-generation dal 1978 al nuovo secolo. Tunué, 2018. Petrini, Mario. La fiaba di magia nella letteratura italiana. Del Bianco, 1983. Picone, Marco. “Il nome della mappa. Traduzioni cartografiche del mondo di Tolkien”, I quaderni di Arda, vol. 2, 2021, pp. 111-124. Pizzimento, Paolo. “Tolkien: mostri e traduttori. Performatività delle traduzioni de Il Signore degli Anelli”, Mantichora, vol. 10, 2020, pp. 145-157. Pizzorno, Benedetto. Odla il cantastorie. Fanucci, 1984. Pugh, Tison, and Weisl, Angela Jane. Medievalism: Making the Past in the Present. Routledge, 2013. Randall, Cecilia. Hyperversum. Giunti, 2006. Recchioni, Roberto. YA – La battaglia di Campocarne. Mondadori, 2015. Rednic, Adrian. La caduta dello Zentir. Fanucci, 2018. Risso, Roberto. “Il marketing dei nuovi talenti”, L’indice dei libri del mese, Anno XXXVIII, maggio 2021, N. 5, p III. Rogers, Scott. “Hell, Hyboria, and Disneyland: The Origins and Inspirations of Themed Video Game Level Design.” Level Design. Processes and Experiences, edited by Christopher W. Totten, Crc Press, 2017, pp. 101-120. Rossignoli, Claudia. “Playing the Afterlife: Dante’s Otherworlds in the Gaming Age”, Games and Culture, vol. 15, n. 7, 2019, pp. 825-849. Saccoccia, Cristiano. “Letture fantastiche e dove trovarle. Viaggio nell’editoria indipendente”, N3rdcore, 05/28/2021 https://n3rdcore.it/letture-­fantastiche-­dove­trovarle-­viaggio-­editoria-­indipendente/ Santoni, Vanni. Terra Ignota. Mondadori, 2013. Santoni, Vanni. “Inferno: un crowdfunding dantesco da quattrocentomila euro”. L’indiscreto, 26/04/2021. https://www.indiscreto.org/inferno-­un-­crowdfunding­dantesco-­da-­quattrocentomila-­euro/ Savelli, Marcantonio. “Translating Tolkien. The thin line between translation and misrepresentation. An Italian case-study”, Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 11, n. 1, 2020, pp. 1-15.

256 

L. GAMBARINI AND F. TONIOLO

Salvioni, Beatrice. “Il Volo notturno delle lingue mozzate.” L’indice dei libri del mese, XXXVIII, 2021, N. 5, p IV. Scilla, Guglielmo. L’inganno della morte. Kowalski, 2013. Sosio, Silvio. “Fantasy. Boom a tutti i costi”. Fantascienza.com, 04/20/2004, https:// www.fantascienza.com/6670/fantasy-boom-a-tutti-i-costi Strazzulla, Chiara. Gli eroi del crepuscolo. Einaudi, 2008. Taglietti, Cristina. “I nipotini (italiani) di Tolkien”. Corriere.it spettacoli, 06/06/2008, https://www.corriere.it/spettacoli/08_giugno_06/nipoti_italiani_tolkien_4cb18b 8a-­3389-­11dd-­9532-­00144f02aabc.shtml Tarenzi, Luca. Le due Lune. Alacràn, 2009. Tarenzi, Luca. Quando il diavolo ti accarezza. Salani, 2011. Troisi, Licia. Nihal della Terra del Vento. Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 2004. Valenza, Fabrizio. Geshwa Olers e il viaggio nel Masso Verde. Edizioni l’Età dell’Acquario, 2008. Zangrandi, Silvia. Cose dell’altro mondo. Percorsi nella letteratura fantastica italiana del Novecento. Archetipolibri, 2016. Zuddas, Gianluigi. Amazon. Casa Editrice La Tribuna, 1978.

The Little Red Gloves: Apocalyptic Fantasy and the Bodhisattva of Mercy in a Japanese Picture Book on Hiroshima Roni Sarig

Have the little red gloves gone up to the sky and become stars? Lots of stars started to shine in the sky. Nachan’s voice echoed in the starry night sky: ‘Oh no! A scarier day than today is yet to come.’ (Nishino)

The Japanese children’s book The Little Red Gloves (Nishino 1991 [1983]), the subject of this chapter, is a combination of three genres: Japanese picture books about Hiroshima with a message of conciliation, peace, and the fight against atomic weapons; modern Japanese fantasy literature; and pre-modern Buddhist miraculous traditions that are associated with the Bodhisattva Kannon, the goddess of mercy. The book belongs to the genre of picture books in Japan that tell the story of Hiroshima and the atomic bomb, but unlike other picture books in this genre, it is written as a modern dark apocalyptic fantasy. The Bodhisattva Kannon appears only twice in the story—at the beginning and near the end—and she seems to be a marginal figure in it; however she and the connection between the beginning of the story and the end through her appearance are important for the story’s message and for the combination of fantasy in it. The chapter discusses the fantastic aspects in the book and the figure of the Bodhisattva Kannon as part of them, and analyzes their significance and the use

R. Sarig (*) Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel Tel Hai College, Tel Hai, Israel © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2_17

257

258 

R. SARIG

the author makes of them to augment the message of the story: a prayer for peace and the fight against atomic weapons. I argue that the author uses fantasy as an effective tool to emphasize the story’s central message, which is an outcry against forgetting the victims of Hiroshima and against the production, distribution, and use of atomic weapons around the world. Extending the fantasy by connecting the figure of the goddess Kannon to the traditional Buddhist stories intensifies another aspect of the story’s message: forgiveness and conciliation and praying for a world without atomic weapons. The theme of fantasy also emphasizes justice and injustice, good and bad, the power of evil and the power of good, and the disparities between them. Furthermore, I argue that choosing the fantasy genre in itself undermines the silence, oblivion, and non-struggle. The prayer for mercy, as it manifests in Kannon’s figure, is not a prayer to accept reality as is, and certainly not to ignore it, but rather a demand to fight to change it. This book can be viewed as the continuation of modern Japanese fantasy literature, which began with the Meiji era (1868–1912) and the modernization of Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century, literature by writers such as Natsume Sōseki and others. To establish a historical and thematic framework for analyzing the fantastical and miraculous in The Little Red Gloves, the chapter will first review Japanese modern fantasy literature and then the Buddhist traditions about the goddess Kannon.

The Development and Characteristics of Modern Japanese Fantasy Literature for Adults and Children In her pioneering study of modern fantasy literature in Japan, Suzan Napier (2005) argues that this literature began in the stories of one of the greatest Japanese authors of the twentieth century, Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916). According to Napier, Sōseki creates a surreal world, “which Freud or Jung would certainly have recognized in terms of its suffocating representation of […] modern anxieties as crises of identity and free-floating guilt, expressed through archetypal imagery” (2). Sōseki’s work uses universal images of fantasy, but it is also unique to Japanese culture. The confluence of universal archetypes and cultural specificity is similar to the magic realism of the Latin American authors. Similar to them, Sōseki and other Japanese fantasy writers have written works that appeal to a non-Japanese audience but also employed unique Japanese elements to raise issues that are specific to modern Japan. Through the use of fantasy, Sōseki discusses the dark elements of his time, the Meiji era, which was perceived as a historical and social success story, and criticizes the modern world, which he perceives as a world of “speed, progress, and technology at the cost of humanity and tradition” (53). In children’s literature, the inception of this genre is even earlier, in the nineteenth century, which started with the translation of Western children’s

  THE LITTLE RED GLOVES: APOCALYPTIC FANTASY… 

259

literature in Japan. This became the foundation of modern Japanese literature for children and its values, including fantasy literature, mainly fairy tales like those of Hans Christian Andersen and others. Modern Japanese fairy tales soon followed toward the end of the nineteenth century (Wakabayashi 238–240). In the twentieth century, Kenji Miyazawa’s work, specifically his story Night of the Milky Way Railway (Ginga Tetsudō no Yoru) from 1934, is considered the first significant work of fantasy literature in Japan, beyond fairy tales. Miyazawa had a huge impact on the Japanese fantasy literature that came after him (Stephens 400–401). After Japan recovered from the Second World War, the country was considered a sweeping success both inside and outside Japanese society. It was described as the phoenix who rose from the ashes of defeat and destruction (Napier 2). Against this perception of Japan, the post-war Japanese fantasy writers who wrote for children highlighted the “fundamental absurdities and impossibilities of living in the modern world” (ibid., 53). The post-war Japanese children’s literature was generally affected by and derived from Western, and mainly American, children’s literature (Choi 85). In the 1950s and 1960s, children’s authors in Japan were greatly influenced by Western fantasy literature, and their works set the foundation for children’s fantasy literature as a genre in Japan, which continued in subsequent decades (Stephens 401). Japanese fantasy literature for both adults and children express complex relationships with realism. For the most part, this literature contradicts realistic representation and often tries to subvert it. In general, fantasy represents uncertainty: unlike realism, the message of fantasy literature is that the world cannot be understood, in contrast to the traditional definition of fantasy as making wishes come true. An elaboration of the definition of fantasy, as Rosemary Jackson argues, is that it is “a literature of desire which seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss. […] The fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made ‘absent’” (qtd. in Napier 5–8). Napier argues that as a result, Japanese fantasy literature should be understood as subversive. Furthermore, fantasy, by nature, addresses reality in its contrast to it (8). Napier, the first to study Japanese fantasy literature, leans on Kathryn Hume’s broad definition of fantasy and subsequently defines fantasy as “any conscious departure from consensus reality” (9). Writing in this genre guarantees to the writers that the work will be accepted differently than realistic literature. The choice of Japanese writers to write fantasy literature (gensō bungaku), like Latin American writers, is a subversive choice because it strives to present the world in a non-Western way. This representation opposes the assumption of materialistic and scientific Western modernism: that reality is built-in, predictable, and controllable. However, the fantastic in modern Japanese literature undermines modernization more than it does Westernism, since Japan was a partner in modernism in the history of the twentieth century, like the West. Therefore, Japanese fantasy is a sort of mirror image of the myth of the success of Japanese modernism: of never-ending progress, financial marvel, and social

260 

R. SARIG

harmony. However, Japanese literature in general studied the various aspects of Japanese modernization positive and negative, but fantasy literature, argues Napier, did this in a more precise and in-depth manner (Napier 11–13). Japanese fantasy deals with similar issues to Western fantasy and treats them in similar fashions. The differences between these literatures are mainly in the degree to which they deal with certain issues compared to others with regard to modernism. Certain motifs are emphasized in this literature more than in Western literature, such as the description of rural pastoralism as fantastic versus the Japanese city as realistic, or the modern perception of the Self versus Other, which is a central theme in Japanese fantasy literature (Napier 221–2). The nihilistic style is also not unique to Japanese fantasy but is prominent in it. As Napier says: “From the turn of the century to the present, the [Japanese] fantastic visions […] are far more likely [than the Western] to be disturbing, even horrific, than they are to be soothing” (224). One of the developments in post-war Japanese fantasy literature is pushing boundaries and an increasing infiltration of the fantastic into the real world. In contrast to the pre-war literature, where there was a separation between fantasy and reality, and where the fantastic was a safe and secure world separate from reality, in contemporary Japanese literature, the fantastic invades the real world rather than being separate from it. All contemporary Japanese fantasy, from pure literature to popular manga, undermines the central myth of modern Japan as a stable hierarchical society where everyone knows his place and the authorities know what is best for the individual. The reality presented in contemporary Japanese fantasy is a depressing reality that oppresses the individual (Napier 222–3). These characteristics of Japanese fantasy manifest in The Little Red Gloves as we will see later.

Kannon in Miraculous Buddhist Traditions In The Little Red Gloves, the goddess Kannon appears only at the beginning and end of the book; however she frames the story and enhances its message. The traditional-cultural-religious connotations of this figure, who is still so popular in Japan, are important in understanding its significance in the book and will therefore be presented in the Buddhist tradition from here on in. The Bodhisattva Kannon is a central sacred figure in Asian Buddhism in general, and in numerous sects of Japanese Buddhism as well as in folklore. The Buddhist tradition, embodied in The Little Red Gloves with her appearance, appears to contradict the perception of fantasy as a secular genre that of “the age of skepticism” and “secularization” and the issues associated with it. However, Laura Feldt argues that fantasy belonging to the age of reason does not contradict traditional and religious beliefs, and there isn’t always a separation between the characteristics of modern fantasy and traditional beliefs: “(a)mbiguity, indeterminacy, and uncertainty and other fictionalizing traits may be important elements in traditional religious narratives” (Feldt 553). Beyond that, Kannon’s appearance in the story, which is connected to the traditional aspects of this deity, is not religious but rather stems from the cultural tradition. Kannon appears in the story to reinforce

  THE LITTLE RED GLOVES: APOCALYPTIC FANTASY… 

261

the story’s contemporary-­political-­humanistic message. Her connection to this message is not Religious-Buddhist but rather as a figure who represents a fundamental aspect in Japanese culture, even today. More than any other Buddhist figure, Kannon is the divine embodiment of grace and mercy, and her worship is common throughout Asia in all tiers of society (Eichenbaum 1). The goddess’s name means “the one who listens to the cries of the world” (Reis-Habito 13) or “regarder of the cries of the world” (Reeves 371), a name that implies the goddess’s role as a savior. In one of her early descriptions, in the Lotus Sutra, she is described as having powers to save people from disasters, like fire or floods. If someone gets trapped in a fire and calls her name, the Bodhisattva’s divine power and authority will protect that person from the fire, and if a person gets swept away in a flood and calls her name, he’ll immediately reach shallow ground (Paul 256; Nelson 154). In other canonical works, the goddess is described as “a light to the blind … shade in the heat, a stream for the thirsty, a bestower of fearlessness in fear, a remedy in sickness, a father and a mother for the suffering beings, a guide to Nirvāna for the beings in hell” (Tay 156). Her image gradually evolved into one of a universal savior (MacWilliams 40). In the later folklore and in the fantastic stories about her, she saves people from all sorts of disasters using her miraculous powers and infinite compassion (Gump 145). Kannon originates in the Indian deity Avalokiteśvara, one of Buddha Amida’s followers, who was described as a young Indian prince (Eichenbaum 1). Later this image evolved from a male to a female deity. In China the bodhisattva gradually became a goddess named Guanyin, and she also reached Japan in this form. As a female deity she was described in the Buddhist literature and art as having numerous heads, representing the steps on the path to enlightenment, or as having a thousand arms, extending them to all beings in the world out of compassion, in order to help them reach enlightenment. In the Pure Land sect, her job was to accompany the souls of the dead to the heaven on the outskirts of the West, and she did this “using four of her many arms for ‘pacifying’ and ‘destroying’ the chaos of war, ‘attracting’ wandering souls to her guidance and benevolence, and ‘increasing’ the faith of the spirit in order for it to reach the Pure Land” (Nelson 153). According to one of the early representations of Kannon in art, she is holding a lotus flower, a symbol of Buddhism. With the development of the Zen Buddhism branch, her image once again evolved and underwent a process of abstraction. In Zen drawings she is sometimes described as a girl or a woman in a white cape close to a water source (Eichenbaum 1–3; Tay 151–152; Paul 249). In later periods, Kannon became a protectress not only to the believers of the various branches of Buddhism but also of the children in hell. During the Ming Dynasty in China (1368–1644) this was one of her roles and after the Christian missionaries arrived in China during this period, her role as a protectress of all the children became central. In religious statues and drawings from the period, Kannon appears as a mother holding an infant in her arms, similar to the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus, but in contrast to Mary, Kannon’s baby

262 

R. SARIG

is not hers, but is a symbolic representation of all the children she protects as a compassionate mother (Eichenbaum 64). In one of the Buddhist sutras, there is a story of Kannon as a young girl before she became a goddess. According to the story, Kannon’s mother’s love and compassion toward her are what influenced her to become a Bodhisattva who saves others, and in her adulthood, she becomes the mother of all beings in need of a maternal figure (Paul 253, 256). Another important characteristic in Kannon’s figure is her ability to transform herself, from a goddess to a woman, and back to a Bodhisattva, in order to help, save, and guide the believers to heaven on the outskirts of the West (Eichenbaum 2).1 In one of the most famous legends about Kannon, which originated in China during the Song Dynasty (960–1279) and continued in numerous versions in Japan, Kannon was born as Princess Miao-Shan, who refused to be married as an adult and chose to become a nun against her father’s wishes. In his rage, her father set fire to the monastery where she lived, and she died among the flames. After her death she was sent to hell in order to experience the suffering of the beings there, and then she returned to the world of the living and saved her father from death by giving him her eyes and arms. After this act, she is embodied as the goddess Kannon of a thousand eyes and a thousand arms (Reis-Habito 63). In one version of the story, Kannon is depicted as someone who even as a girl exhibited tenderness and compassion toward suffering people and animals, and another version says that as her monastery was going up in flames, she became a white bird and flew outside and “beyond the gold and crimson gates of heaven” and was thus saved from death (Blofeld 72–80, quote on page 79). In another version of the legend, Kannon herself describes her manifestation in different forms: “[c]entury after century, I have appeared among men, sometimes as now […] with a celestial body composed of light, sometimes as a human being, and more than once as a noble horse” (Blofeld 75). The various versions of this legend emphasize the immense suffering that the goddess must bear so that she can become a goddess who is compassionate toward others. The suffering is capable of purifying the soul until it becomes compassion itself. Kannon’s ability to transform and appear in various forms to help all beings, which stems from the actual power of compassion as described in the sutras, is as deep as the ocean (MacWilliams 39). Beyond this legend, Kannon is described in the Buddhist literature as one appearing in diverse miraculous forms, such as in a dream or by floating or flying (MacWilliams 60). The statues of the goddess are also considered her living icons, as was common with regard to statues of Buddhist deities, particularly in Japan. From the second half of the Heian period (the eleventh century) living icons of Kannon were popular in Japan. These statues were perceived as a living presence of the goddess: “[I]n some mysterious manner the deity is incarnated in the icon itself […] the deity and its image are often interchangeable” (MacWilliams 36). 1  Kannon does this as her role in the Pure Land sect, as a Bodhisattva who accompanies the souls of the dead to the heaven created by Amida Buddha.

  THE LITTLE RED GLOVES: APOCALYPTIC FANTASY… 

263

Kannon, therefore, evolves in the Buddhist tradition as a Bodhisattva of compassion with miraculous powers that enable her to rescue people from disasters and save them. She is a sort of compassionate mother who protects the children, and she transforms in miraculous ways to save children and adults out of the power of compassion. In her evolution she endures tremendous suffering from which she emerges as a Bodhisattva full of compassion for all beings in the world. As we will see later, in The Little Red Gloves she appears as the image of the story’s dead protagonist, and gives her some of these miraculous powers.

The Little Red Gloves—Picture Book and Apocalyptic Fantasy The Japanese picture book The Little Red Gloves, written by Ayako Nishino in 1983, belongs to the genre of children’s picture books about Hiroshima that were written from the end of the Second World War, until the 1980s and 1990s. These books tell young children about the atomic bomb on Hiroshima mostly through the story’s protagonist, an innocent boy or girl who were injured by the bomb (Sarig 2005). This book’s protagonist is also a girl, Nachan, who dies in the atomic blast. However, unlike other books, the girl’s story is told mostly after her death, and it is written in the fantasy genre, unlike the realism of other picture books. In The Little Red Gloves we meet Nachan shortly before her death, and most of the plot takes place many years after the destruction of Hiroshima, with the figure of the dead girl leading it. The story is about two childhood friends, Toshi-chan and Nachan, and starts in Hiroshima: “[A] small girl sits on a stone bench in the park and knits. The girl’s name is Nachan. She’s eight years old. She moved to Hiroshima a short while ago from a small village not far from Lake Hamana” (Nishino, no page numbers). Nachan remembers her childhood friend Toshi-chan, who she was forced to say goodbye to. Before they were separated, the girls’ neighbor gave each of them a small purse with gold embroidery, with a charm in the image of the goddess Kannon. This is the Bodhisattva Kannon’s first appearance in the story, and she will return only near the end of it. And now, Nachan knits little red gloves for her friend so that she will be warm in the winter. At that moment, the atomic bomb falls on Hiroshima and the world becomes hell: “The body of Nachan, who was sitting on the stone bench, burned and became a small shadow” (Nishino, no page numbers). From that moment the story fast forwards to several years in the future: Much time passed. […] Flowers started to bloom also next to the stone bench in the park. […] And more time passed. Children played in the park. And all that time, Nachan, who became a shadow, whispered: “I’m here,” but no one noticed her […].2

2

 This last sentence is repeated several times as a motif in the first part of the story.

264 

R. SARIG

From here on in, the deceased Nachan floats through the world, which has changed after her death, while she remains a dead girl in this world, invisible to the living. Now she has powers that humans do not, and she leaves Hiroshima and returns to her childhood village near the lake. There she sits among the tree branches, until Toshi-chan arrives with her son. Her childhood friend has grown up and became a mother. Toshi-chan finds a little red glove under the tree, looks up, and sees Nachan with the second glove, and they show each other the charms of the goddess Kannon, which they both kept. At first, only Toshi-chan can see Nachan, but after her son puts on the red glove, he can see the girl as well. After the encounter between the past and present, and between the dead girl and the living mother and her son, Nachan takes the living mother and child on a journey to an apocalyptic future: the three sail together in a boat on the lake when suddenly the blue sky shakes and the water in the lake is overtaken by waves that shake them about. In the sudden storm that ensues, Nachan looks up at the sky and with trepidation announces future destruction: “This day will return.” “What do you mean by ‘this day’?” Toshi-chan asks. “I mean the day I became a shadow.”

At that moment, the mother and her son have a terrifying vision: the boat starts moving by itself, the evening fog blankets everything, and out of the fog a terrible world begins to materialize, a red light covers everything, and birds, flowers, children, and adults die a tortuous death. In response to the horrifying apocalyptic world, Nachan says sadly to her friend: “Toshi-chan, it’ll be a day like this. A day that is even worse than that day in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb fell and we all died. This day is drawing nearer.” Then the fog lifts, Nachan disappears, and the lake goes back to how it was before. Stars start shining in the sky, and out of the night sky the dead girl’s voice echoes in prayer or pleading to humans: “[A] day more frightening than that day will come. Please understand. Make it end. Please, please, please, please.”3 After the apocalyptic vision at the lake and before the end, the story moves forward to the next day. The boy is looking for Nachan in the field of flowers where he played the day before. Suddenly he hears a voice that calls him quietly: “I’m here,” and he discovers a small statue of the goddess Kannon among the flowers. The illustration on this page shows Nachan as the goddess Kannon, with a serene face and hands clasped. Then Kannon transforms back into Nachan, and the text ends with the following sentences: Out of nowhere, sounds like a song were heard, echoing in the sky, on the ground and over the lake. So that a day like that will never return, 3

 The text becomes smaller and smaller with these pleading words.

  THE LITTLE RED GLOVES: APOCALYPTIC FANTASY… 

265

So that no one will become a shadow again, So that the soft bright light will never disappear, So that the greenish wind will always blow.

In their books about fantasy children’s literature, Levy and Mendlesohn argue that “Dark Fantasy has no generic form, and it covers a wide range of the horrific.” What children’s fantasy books have in common is “a sense of abiding fear, and a belief that the fantastic is lurking very close” (Levy 189). According to Levy and Mendlesohn, the post-war children’s fantasy literature was not written as escapist literature but rather in order to encourage the generation that grew up after the war to take responsibility for their world. Thus, the protagonist in the stories of Suzan Cooper, The Dark is Rising, says in the final book of the series: “[n]ow especially since man has the strength to destroy his own world, it is the responsibility of man to keep it alive, in all its beauty and marvelous joy” (Cooper 267 in Levy 112). Napier argues that “dystopian literature is ‘message fiction,’ and the message is one of alarm and warning.” According to her, “critical dystopias,” a term coined by Constance Penley, refers to works that “critique contemporary life by exaggerating certain elements already existing within the modern world. Rather than departing from consensus reality by offering alternatives, these fantasies drill into the real, transmogrifying it into a grotesque version of itself” (Napier 181). Based on these claims, it is possible to see that the dark apocalyptic fantasy in The Little Red Gloves creates a horrific and terrifying future world of destruction that is even worse than Hiroshima; however, this apocalypse is not removed from the real world but rather is a part of it. The deceased girl, the goddess Kannon, and the terrible vision are all revealed in this world, and they appear as an outcry against the atomic bomb, to convey a clear message against atomic weapons, and for the hope that children won’t grow up in this world. Moreover, both parts of the story—the beginning in the realistic description of the atomic bomb that falls from the sky on Hiroshima, and the transition thereafter to fantasy—tie the realistic and the fantastic and thus emphasize the disastrous proportions of the atomic bomb, which cannot be perceived in realistic terms but rather are experienced as a dark and terrible fantasy; but what is experienced as a fantasy is actually a reality that is darker than any fantasy or fiction. As we saw above in Napier’s study of Japanese fantasy literature, the fantastic in modernity invades and subverts reality and the myth that it presents of stability and security. Fantasy subverts this myth and warns against the dangers of modernism, Japanese society, and the individual’s sense of safety. Fantasy also makes the silenced voices heard, and in the book—the voice of the deceased girl who was left behind. Also, the appearance of the goddess Kannon at the beginning and end of the story—first as a charm that symbolizes the girls’ friendship and is meant to protect them, and at the end as resembling the girl Nachan’s spirit—links the two parts of the story: the realistic and the fantastic. Kannon is a merciful deity but also an outcry against the suffering of children and against the use of the atomic bomb; however her figure expresses a prayer for

266 

R. SARIG

conciliation and peace. Kannon’s appearance in the story further complexifies the message of fantasy due to its ties to the traditional figure. Kannon’s first appearance as a charm for the girls at the beginning of the story is a promise that is not kept. The goddess of mercy who protects children in her traditional roles should have protected and saved Nachan, but in the reality of Hiroshima, her divine powers were not enough to save children from the hell of an atomic bomb. The Bodhisattva with the miraculous powers lost her divine strength, and she is incapable of saving Nachan and unable to prevent her death or her suffering. At the beginning of the story, it seems that she is also incapable of protecting the girl’s memory after her death. Only when the childhood friends—the living and the dead—are reunited and show each other the charms of Kannon that they kept is the goddess’s role as protectress of the memory of the dead revealed. Kannon’s compassion remains intact, and she uses this power to protect the memory of the dead girl (Sarig 2017). The goddess’s second appearance, at the end of the story, is in her merger with Nachan. Kannon appears as a statue in the field of flowers in the girl’s image, similar to the Buddhist tradition where she transforms in order to save the beings from their suffering. But in the children’s book she does this in another role: the girl is the goddess who returns to her image as a girl and they are embodied as one figure, divine and childlike as one. This merger creates a double meaning: first this insinuates that at the end of Nachan’s journey of suffering and torment—with her death and thereafter when she becomes a shadow, erased from the world of the living, forgotten from memory and abandoned by the living people—her spirit is purified and she is illuminated, just as Kannon in the Buddhist tradition experienced immense suffering to the point of purification and became a Bodhisattva. Nachan achieved peace and became a manifestation of Kannon, in other words, the epitome of mercy. Second, the merger of the girl with the goddess enhances the story’s main message of no more Hiroshimas. The prayer that is associated in tradition with religious adherence becomes a secular prayer for the entire world in the book when Nachan turns into Kannon, with her cries and pleas in the boat in the apocalyptic fantasy world that was revealed to her, to her friend Toshi-chan, and to Toshi-chan’s son. Kannon-Nachan represents pain and a call to fight together with compassion and conciliation. It seems that these two faces of the goddess-child contradict each other; yet Kannon in the story, who could not save children from their suffering in Hiroshima, must still save children in the future from another Hiroshima. In this role, Kannon-Nachan embarks on a battle to prevent the suffering and death of children—and adults—from atomic weapons, so that the suffering of the past does not recur, and warns against forgetting the victims. She does this by proposing conciliation and peace instead of death and destruction. This is Kannon in her image in modern fantasy but also in the Buddhist tradition, where the goddess’s essence can be understood as a manifestation of every person’s illuminated or compassionate spirit: “[Kannon is] the appearance of the illuminated nature inside us […] to have mercy means to be Kannon.

  THE LITTLE RED GLOVES: APOCALYPTIC FANTASY… 

267

Without mercy […] there would not be a single Buddha in the world” (Tay 157); Kannon “is nothing but our true nature, lack of selfishness and full of compassion” (Reis-Habito 68). According to this Buddhist interpretation, The Little Red Gloves offers a message of conciliation but also of individual responsibility; after all, if Kannon expresses human ability as compassion, every person must use this ability not to harm another person, but to enact his illuminated and merciful nature. Another significant aspect that connects Kannon to fantasy in the story is the connection to nature. As we saw, in Japanese fantasy the disparity between the city—the “realistic”—and nature or the pastoralism of the village, represented by the fantastic, is highlighted. In the children’s book the relationship between the city and nature is complex: the realistic—the city of Hiroshima is destroyed and becomes a place of death and suffering, and over time as the city recovers—people forget the dead. Nachan leaves the city and returns to the lake and the village where she grew up, and only there she is seen again, by her childhood friend. Nature is a place of connection, beauty, compassion, and hearing silenced voices, where the three—Nachan, Toshi-chan, and her son—play in the field, create a bouquet from the wildflowers, and place them at the foot of the statue of Jizō, another important Bodhisattva whose role is to protect children. But later, that nature becomes a horrific apocalyptic scene with people suffering and dying, and it disappears and ceases to exist. This motif characterizes Japanese dystopias where nature is almost completely absent, in contrast to its importance as a utopian refuge in most twentieth-century Japanese literature. In Japanese dystopia, nature is pushed aside by looming and oppressive technology (Napier 182, 221), and may become “grotesque and threatening” (54). However, the story does not end there: after the apocalyptic vision, the stars resume twinkling in the sky, and serenity returns to the lake. In the children’s book, nature returns to being a sort of protector against the dystopian world, similar to the testimonies of Hiroshima survivors. In her testimony, one of the Hiroshima survivors described nature as caring, unlike the indifference of humans toward her. In her testimony, she recounted that a doctor didn’t want to save her mother because he thought she would have died regardless. The same woman attested, similar to the description of the stars in the sky in The Little Red Gloves, that “I felt that only shining stars in the sky understood our sorrow and cared for us” (Ide 526). The perspective that nature is a partner in human concern and a savior, and even as supernatural is connected to Buddhism in Japan, which perceives all things and phenomena in the world as interdependent and interconnected by causation and connection. In the Buddhist perception, human lives are connected to the entire universe (Ide 527). In the story, the boy meets Kannon-Nachan in the field of flowers the next day, and nature’s beauty is restored. The revelation of the goddess is far from Hiroshima and from the destruction, in the world of fantasy, disconnected from the corruption of the world. This is similar to the Buddhist tradition where some of the worship of Kannon is in isolation from society, away in the mountains,

268 

R. SARIG

disconnected from the corruption of the establishment (MacWilliams 42). Kannon in the book is part of nature, of the world; in this ending of the story in the field of flowers there is hope for a good future, where nature conquers destruction.

Conclusion The children’s book The Little Red Gloves tells the story of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima through a dark apocalyptic fantasy. The story is told from the perspective of the dead girl Nachan, who warns against a future that is even more terrible than the destruction of Hiroshima and the suffering and death caused by the atomic bomb, a human creation. The central message of the book is a fight against nuclear proliferation in the world and against forgetting the victims of Hiroshima, and for world peace. Both the use of the fantasy genre and the miraculous appearance of the Buddhist goddess Kannon in the story augment this message by using this genre due to its inherent possibilities, and the connection to the goddess in Buddhist tradition. Nachan, the heroine of the story, witnesses the suffering of Hiroshima and as a deceased witness she also prophesizes the destruction that may befall the future in an atomic world. The choice of fantasy enables the writer to break through the boundaries of history and to place the dead girl’s outcry in the center. It also makes it possible to transition between opposing spheres and worlds—from the city to the village and nature, from the realistic to the fantastic and back to reality in the present. In the book, the fantastic is not separate from the realistic, but rather is a horrific mirror image of it in time, which meshes with the realistic. In fact, not only does the fantastic invade the realistic, but the realistic can also be understood as invading the fantastic in a back-and-forth motion, because the horrific past of Hiroshima becomes a fantastic vision in the story’s present. Through fantasy, the dead girl’s existence is made possible and thus also emphasizes the fight against forgetting her and the other victims of the atomic bomb. Nachan in the story does not disappear when she dies due to humans’ choice to destroy her in an instant and turn her into a shadow, and she does not disappear even over time when people put their past behind them and continue to live their lives by ignoring the suffering of the victims. She returns through fantasy and cries out against forgetting the victims and the dangers of nuclear weapons. Fantasy makes it possible to create a horrific apocalyptic world as a warning to the technological modern world that continues to arm itself with nuclear bombs. As is evident, the choice of the fantasy genre is subversive, as this genre served Japanese writers in the twentieth century as undermining the negative tenets of modernization. Fantasy for children also puts into focus the terrible and the horrible, which occur in the book in the fantastic apocalyptic vision in a terrifyingly visual way, in contrast to innocence and goodness, represented by the innocent girl who dies, her adult friend who never forgot her, and the hope for a world without wars.

  THE LITTLE RED GLOVES: APOCALYPTIC FANTASY… 

269

The appearance of the Bodhisattva Kannon in the story enhances its message. In modern reality, Kannon has lost her miraculous powers to save and rescue children and adults from suffering and death; but she is left as a figure that represents the powers of compassion and mercy—not the divine but the humane. When she merges with the figure of the girl, Kannon is not a Bodhisattva in the popular traditional sense, but the essence of mercy, which stems from the humanity of people and from their ability, responsibility, and moral obligation to fight reality and to change it. Therefore, in Ayako Nishino’s choice of the fantasy genre and the appearance of the Bodhisattva of mercy Kannon in The Little Red Gloves, the religious aspect enhances the secular message, the traditional aspect enhances the contemporary message, the divine aspect enhances the human message, and the fantastic aspect enhances the realistic message—to prevent another Hiroshima from ever happening again.

Works Cited Blofeld, John. Bodhisattva of Compassion: The Mystical Tradition of Kuan Yin. Boston, Shambhala, 2009 (1977). Choi, Hyoseak. Losing the War, Winning the Pooh: Ishii Momoko and the Construction of Contemporary Children’s Literature in Postwar Japan. Thesis, University of Toronto, 2017. Cooper, Suzan. Silver on the Tree. New York, McElderry, 1977. Eichenbaum Karetzky, Patricia. Guanyin, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004. Feldt, Laura. “Contemporary Fantasy Fiction and Representations of Religion: Playing with Reality, Myth and Magic in His Dark Materials and Harry Potter.” Religion, vol. 46, no. 4, 2016, pp. 550–574. Gump, Steven E. “Mythologies and Miracles: The Saikoku Kannon Peregrinogenesis.” Southeast Review of Asian Studies, vol. 27, 2005, pp. 141–158. Ide, Kanako. “Rethinking the Concept of Sustainability: Hiroshima as a Subject of Peace Education.” Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 49, no. 5, 2017, pp. 521–530. Levy, Michael, and Farah Mendlesohn. Children’s Fantasy Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2016. MacWilliams, Mark. “Living Icons:” Reizō” Myths of the Saikoku Kannon Pilgrimage.” Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 59, no. 1, 2004, pp. 35–82. Napier, Suzan J. The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity. London and New York, Routledge, 2005 (1996). Nelson, John. “From Battlefield to Atomic Bomb to the Pure Land of Paradise: Employing the Bodhisattva of Compassion to Calm Japan’s Spirits of the Dead”. Journal of Contemporary Religion, vol. 17, no. 2, 2002, pp. 149–164. Nishino, Ayako. Chı ̄sana Akai Tebukuro [The Little Red Gloves], illustrations by Toshiaki Watanabe, Hikuma no Shuppan, Shizuoka-ken, 1991 (1983). Reeves, Gene, translator. The Lotus Sutra. Boston, Wisdom Publications, 2008. Reis-Habito, Maria. “The Bodhisattva Guanyin and the Virgin Mary”. Buddhist-­ Christian Studies, vol. 13, 1993, pp. 61–69. Sarig, Roni. “The Past We Were Told, the Truth We Were Told—Narratives in Japanese Children’s Literature of the Atom Bombs and Israeli Children’s Literature of the

270 

R. SARIG

Jewish Holocaust—A Comparative Study”, Unpublished dissertation, Nagoya University, Nagoya, 2005. Sarig, Roni. “KsheGizo bacha: Elohuiyot Buddhistiyot besifrut yeladim yapanit al Hiroshima” [“When Jizo Cried: Buddhist Deities in Japanese Children’s Literature About Hiroshima”]. Dapim lemekhkar besifrut [Literature research pages], vol. 20, 2017, pp. 254–277. Stephens, John., editor. The Routledge Companion to International Children’s Literature. Routledge, 2017. Tay, C.N. “Kuan-Yin: The Cult of Half Asia”. History of Religions, vol. 16, no. 2, 1976, pp. 147–177. Wakabayashi, Judy. “Foreign Bones, Japanese Flesh: Translations and the Emergence of Modern Children’s Literature in Japan.” Japanese Language and Literature, vol. 42, no. 1, April 2008, pp. 227–255.

Latin American Fantasy as Heterogeneous Literature: Between Neomedievalism and Latin Americanism Paula Rivera Donoso

Introduction The definition of imaginative literature’s possible genre is, arguably, one of the most perplexing research topics in non-mimetic fiction scholar study. However, this topic acquires a whole new level of complexity when dealing with cultural implications. In other words, in the same way that there is not a universal, essentialist way of conceiving and analysing literature, the conceptualization of non-mimetic subgenres could be distinctly shaped according to the place where they are written, read, and studied. As Mena (1975) states, European traditions like the Spanish Baroque or French Surrealism, for example, transformed themselves when they arrived at Latin America; they became unique expressions, instead of mere recreations of the original models (400). An important Latin American landmark in this sense is Alejo Carpentier’s novel El reino de este mundo [The Kingdom of this World] (1949) whose prologue introduces the concept of real maravilloso [the real marvellous], an aesthetic that the author associated exclusively to Latin America’s particular cultural milieu. Indeed, in his manifesto, he states that Latin Americans should reinforce the marvellous elements that are already harmonically entwined in their conception of “reality”, as they are bound to endure beyond the artificial conjuring of the European marvellous. Carpentier (1993) states: “Because of

P. Rivera Donoso (*) Osorno, Chile e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2_18

271

272 

P. RIVERA DONOSO

the virginity of its landscape, because of its formation, because of its ontology, because of the Faustian presence of the Indian and of the Black, because of the Revelation its recent discovery constituted, because of the fertile racial mixtures it favored, the Americas are far from having used up their wealth of mythologies” (31). It is possible to state that the original real maravilloso derived later in the now well-known concept of magical realism, a similar brand tailored for exportation. Latin American critics appropriated the concept to describe a remarkably diverse corpus, written by local authors since 1925, with emphasis on the Latin American Boom (1960-1970).1 Some of these writers, however, were also associated with fantastic literature, in the Todorovian sense of the fantastique (1971), which was conceptually confusing. Nevertheless, as Mena discusses, an element shared by these critical approaches is the idea that, whether as real maravilloso or as the Latin American fantastique, this type of fiction challenges the Eurocentric conception of reality. In this sense, it develops as a way to assert the worldview of a whole continent. It can be proposed that magical realism’s local branch pretends to represent a vivid vision of Latin American countries, from the perspective of each country’s own worldview. But this is neither a homogeneous nor a univocal vision. It is imbued with the miscegenation and syncretic aspects that are inherent to the continent’s history. In this regard, it becomes relevant to reassume the ideological vision that Brazilian scholar Irlemar Chiampi (1983) describes for the trajectory of marvellous realism, as it could, as well, be applied to this Latin American expression of magical realism: its literary properties would reflect the notion of Latin American culture through the union of heterogeneous elements, a synthesis that nullifies contradictions, and the fusion of different races and cultures (166). These properties could be summarized, on the one hand, as diverse narrative techniques that give prominence to the novel genre, as the disintegration of logical causality, a polysemic characterization, a wider range of focalizations, and narrative discourse’s self-awareness, among others (23). On the other hand, it can be identified as rescuing different marvellous elements form indigenous mythologies from the continent (219). According to Chiampi, magical realism was introduced mainly between 1940 and 1955 as a complex fictional renovation phenomenon (21). Until then, mimetical fiction had dominated the Latin American cultural field. Chiampi states that this new trend’s spreading inspired critics to conceive it as sign of realism’s crisis from the 19,020 and 1939 decades, expressed in canonical works like La vorágine (1924), from José Eustasio Rivera, or Doña Bárbara (1929), from Rómulo Gallegos. Nevertheless, magical realism continued to grow through the decades. In fact, Sieber (2021) states that it keeps on being a relevant literature from the XXI Century, and that other metropolitan cultures had since written from its aesthetic territories (169). Despite this, Sieber proposes that Latin American magical realism still has a distinctive identity, as “Latin Americans come to magical realism from an entirely different cultural 1  See among other authors like Juan José Arreola, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Máquez, Juan Carlos Onetti, Julio Cortázar, Elena Garro, María Luisa Bombal, or Jorge Luis Borges.

  LATIN AMERICAN FANTASY AS HETEROGENEOUS LITERATURE… 

273

milieu than that of Europe and North America, never having experienced the cultural relativism of mass production and the events leading up to postmodernism in the West” (173). However, fantasy literature, particularly in the trace of mythopoetic fiction, seemed not to have a place in this context (something that, if true, continues to this day). The European imaginary does not seem suitable for a continent that still struggles with its own mestizo identity. As such, the only Latin American non-mimetic fiction that receives local and foreign critical attention is the one that places the imaginative elements tied to an explicit representation of the Latin Primary World. Mythopoetic and/or Secondary World fantasy literature is scarcely written in Latin America, and its widely unknown even for Latin American readers.2 To many Spanish-speaking critics and scholars, in fact, Latin American fantasy seems to exist mainly as commercial young adult fiction, closer to transmedial and audio-visual narratives like videogames, anime, and films. Nonetheless, recent Latin American fantasy has shown new and complex ways of expression that synthetize the core ethic and aesthetic values with the European and Latin American cultural traditions. In that sense, I propose that Latin American fantasy could be read as literatura heterogénea (1978) [heterogeneous literature], a concept coined by Peruvian scholar Antonio Cornejo Polar to study indigenous literature. Just as this literature, Latin American fantasy usually strives to narrate from the interstice of two worlds: the cultural identity of its own continent and the artistic influence from Europe. This tension has been largely discussed by Latin American intellectuals in the field of mimetic literature. I am interested in transferring this discussion to fantasy, a quite peripheral and deprecated literature in Latin America, in hope of shedding a new light on these ideas and genre-thinking itself. My stance is that, as a heterogeneous literature, Latin American fantasy is blooming, mainly, through two paths: neomedievalism and Latin Americanism. Through neomedievalism, it deals critically with the Medieval-European ethos of pre and post Tolkien fantasy, and opens its ideological constrains to give voices to the downtrodden, in dialogue with Latin America’s problems. Through Latin Americanism, it reclaims the continent’s indigenous legacy in opposition to the implicit cultural rule of the Medieval-Europe imaginary, using traditional fantasy codes to subvert them through the presence of non-­ teleological structures, the Spanish language’s distinctive rhythmic patterns, and polyphonic narratives. To characterize both paths, I will analyse two novels that, respectively, express them: Loba (2013), by Mexican author Verónica Murguía (neomedievalism), and Los días del Venado (2000), by Argentinian author Liliana Bodoc (Latin Americanism). In doing so, I will state that the problematic fissure/rift of the heterogeneous nature of Latin American fantasy literature should be conceived as a rich set of aesthetic possibilities and that

 In this context, I use the concept “mythopoetic” as “Conscious artistic fabrication of myths or myth-systems, sometimes regarded as an attempt to ‘remythologize’ experience as a reaction to perceived dehumanizing forces” (Wolfe 76). 2

274 

P. RIVERA DONOSO

these traits should be considered in further studies about the genre itself, beyond the hegemonic Anglocentric scope.

Down the Rift: Space-in-Between, Cultural Appropriation and Heterogeneous Literature in Latin American Tradition The tensions between Latin American and European literature, as it can be imagined, derive from an even more complex and bigger matter that has not been solved in centuries: the traumatic encounter between Latin American and Europe as two different cultural systems that overlap in constant friction: Europe, order, and hegemony, stands against the rebel and subordinated colony, striving to find a voice of its own. It is here, in this space, where the fissure opens down. This interstice has been addressed by the Brazilian critic Silviano Santiago (2001) as entre-lugar [space in-between]. Deprived from its original cultural roots through a systematic process of colonization/civilization, what is left to Latin America are the ruins of its own tradition and imposed Western models: America is transformed into a copy, a simulacrum that desires to be increasingly like the original, even though its originality cannot be found in the copy of the original model, but rather in an origin that was completely erased by the conquerors. Through the constant destruction of original traces, together with the forgetting of the origin, the phenomenon of duplication establishes itself as the only valid rule of civilization (Santiago 29). In this context, the tendency of a Latin American author to mimic European literary traditions is understandable. However, as previously stated, it seems impossible to just aseptically emulate the source—there are always remains of autochthonal identity that, consciously or not, find their way through the Latin American author’s recreation, and end up transforming the source into something unique. Indeed, Santiago proposes that this complex mixture of autochthonal and European elements, incarnated in the mestizo identity as opposed to “unity and purity” ideals, provides a rich tradition on its own: “Latin America establishes its place on the map of Western civilization by actively and destructively diverting the European norm and resignifying preestablished and immutable elements that were exported to the New World by the Europeans” (30). Addressing this discussion specifically regarding Latin American fantasy literature, it is evident that its main source is J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. This work functions as a paradigmatic landmark to the epic fantasy subgenre. This is true even in the Western context, as Attebery (1992) states in his definition of fantasy literature as a “fuzzy set”, defined in its centre by Tolkien’s famous oeuvre. However, the fantasy tradition is not only defined by this work. It is also permeated by a complex system of Western mythos (myths, fairy-tales,

  LATIN AMERICAN FANTASY AS HETEROGENEOUS LITERATURE… 

275

legends, languages, and even historical periods) that Tolkien creatively transformed in his novels. This situation could explain the fact that fantasy literature, especially in its epic-medievalistic form, could be perceived by local critics and scholars to be alien or exogenous to Latin America’s own mythos. As Chilean scholar Bernardo Subercaseaux (1998)  explains, “El desfase se produciría porque ciertas corrientes de pensamiento o artísticas que surgen en Europa de condiciones históricas específicas y concretas, empiezan a existir en América Latina sin que las circunstancias y hechos que las generaron originalmente logren todavía una presencia o una fuerza suficiente” (127).3 However, it could be proposed that this gap it is not a handicap itself, but a special richness for literature as a global art—and, of course, to world fantasy literature in particular. This optimistic view is shared with Subercaseaux, as he defines his conceptions about cultural appropriation as a productive model, that adapts and transform the foreign elements with a different codification, and into something that, in its hybrid nature, it is also our own (130). This thought seems in dialogue with Cornejo Polar’s concept of heterogeneous literature. In the case of the twofold sociocultural status of some Latin American literature, where there are two societies and cultures confronted, Cornejo Polar (1989) defines its heterogeneity by “the duplicity or plurality of the sociocultural signs of their productive process. Generally, this process contains at least one dissonant element, one element whose lack of connection to the others necessarily creates a zone of ambiguity and conflict” (16). In that sense, Cornejo Polar returns to Noé Jitrik’s (1975) distinction of fractured unity of ‘the world presented’ and ‘the mode of representation’ (17), particularly in the study of indigenous literature that tries to recreate an autochthonal or already mixed world with Western forms. As this critical route shows, these three key concepts of in-between place, cultural appropriation and heterogeneous literature could be interesting theoretical tools if applied to fantasy literature written in Latin America, in Spanish, by Latin American authors. Consequently, I propose that this type of fiction usually travels two main paths nowadays. On the one hand, a path where the story tries to convey an autochthonal (fictional, non-mimetic) world, inspired by explicit Latin America references, through the Western form of heroic or epic fantasy. On the other, a path where, apparently, both the world presented and its representation seem Western, but where the creative appropriation allows different subtle aesthetic negotiations that get to express Latin American ethos anyways, in a more implicit form. I identify these paths, respectively, with the Latin Americanism and neomedievalism fiction trends. In the next

3  “The gap would occur because certain artistic and intellectual currents that grow in Europe, from specific and concrete historical conditions, begin to exist in Latin American, but without the facts and circumstances that originated them having enough presence or strength”. Translation is mine.

276 

P. RIVERA DONOSO

section I will discuss these concepts and the way how they express their heterogeneity through two awarded Latin American fantasy novels.

Liliana Bodoc’s Saga de Los Confines: A Fantasy Approach to the Conquest of Latin America Published in the first half of the 2000s, Liliana Bodoc’s Saga de los Confines [Saga of the Borderlands]4 became a landmark in Latin America fantasy. Bodoc’s story was read and criticized as proper literature, especially in the Children and Young Adult scholarly circles, because of what it offered: an explicitly local epic setting, which inspired political readings against escapism and internalized colonization accusations, together with a sophisticated prose that departed from the fact-paced best seller prose that was associated to commercial fantasy fiction. Saga de los Confines tells the story of diverse fictional indigenous communities, living in the Fertile Lands, in their union against the invaders, sideresios, from the Ancient Lands. The conflict narrates, through a mythopoetic frame, the arrival of European conquerors to America, introducing different variations to the historical narrative. This fantasy trilogy can be read as a modern epic that tries to use imagination as a source to assert Latin American lost voices, as opposed to the main fictional work that address the European colonization of America, written by Spanish poet Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga: La Araucana (1569). Even when Bodoc herself stated that her story was a local response to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, in confrontation with his supposedly Western traits, her aesthetic proposal could also be read as homologous to Tolkien’s. Indeed, her motivations resemble the South African-born English author’s idea of a “mythology for the British Isles”. At the same time, however, they recognize the importance of the local imagination and its applicability. As Bodoc remarks during her interview with García (2003): “No puedo, y mucho menos deseo negar que la Saga de los Confines es un imaginario que tiene puesto sus pies en las civilizaciones precolombinas y en la Conquista de América. Pero también deseo aclarar que no hay referencialidad unívoca ni directa. […] En todo caso, la Saga de los Confines pretende ser un relato épico que eleve el rango protagónico a los pueblos en lucha por la libertad y hermandados con toda la creación. El referente de la Conquista resume todas las conquistas y todos los avasallamientos […]” (11).5 4  Composed by a trilogy of novels (Los días del Venado, 2000; Los días de la Sombra, 2002; Los días del Fuego, 2004) and a short story compilation (Oficio de búhos, 2012). The first novel was published in English as The Days of the Deer (2013), by Atlantic Books. The name of the series was translated as Saga of the Borderlands, suggesting that at least the trilogy was going to be translated as well. But the book’s reception in English-speaking circles was scarce, and thus only the first novel made its way into the Anglosphere. In this paper, I quote the original Spanish source, but in addition present the English translation as well. 5  “I cannot, and I even less I would not wish to deny that the Saga de los Confines offers an imaginary grounded in the pre-hispanic civilizations and in the Conquest of America. But I would also

  LATIN AMERICAN FANTASY AS HETEROGENEOUS LITERATURE… 

277

However, this motivation tends to be read as fully allegorical by Latin American scholars, and even as a positive rejection of Tolkien’s work as the canonical core of modern fantasy fiction. This is the case of Susana Sagrillo (2014) and her take on the Saga. She proposes that Bodoc’s aim for her work was “[l]a recuperación de la dignidad hispanoamericana, la que fue perdida en el transcurso de la historia por el avance de una ideología occidental y centroeuropea que oscureció y borró, mediante la violencia, cualquier manifestación cultural” (180).6 But this insistence in allegorical reading seems, in time, sterile for me. I think that the Saga’s richness emerges, precisely, from its conflicted epic fantasy fiction nature and the heterogeneity that comes with this form. I would even propose that the allegorical reduction serves as an unconscious hegemonic Western expectation, as it would rigidly codify the possibility of Latin American fantasy delimited in a mere revindication manifesto. Presented as a fantasy retelling of the Conquest, Saga de los Confines tells how the different autochthonal communities of the continent of Tierras Fértiles [Fertile Lands] must join to face the invasion from the sideresios, from the continent of the Tierras Antiguas [Ancient Lands]. Los días del Venado, as the first book, presents its collective protagonist, a family from the husihuilke tribe (resembling the mapuche folk), and their first struggles in the organization of the Alliance of the Deer and their battle against the sideresios. Even beyond Bodoc’s words for her own work, the text itself shows that it is debatable that it can be reduced to an allegory, as I have proposed previously in my essay “Trascendiendo el imaginario latinoamericano: la fantasía en la Saga de los Confines de Liliana Bodoc” (Rivera, 2016). The sideresios do not resemble at all Spanish conquerors, as they also have their own magicians. The story also focuses on another autochthonal community from the Tierras Antiguas, the nuberas, who also suffer the sideresios onslaught. There is even an archetypical antagonist that incarnates primal evil, called Misáianes. This type of constitutive elements, in my reading, weakens the allegorical vision of a story sustained in an “us (Latin American) versus them (Europeans)” narrative frame. Both the Deer Alliance and the nuberas fight against the same primal evil (that is not even human), and yet, in the alliance itself, there is room for personal evil, as expressed in Molitzmós, a treacherous character in the novel (Rivera 136-137). These ideas stress the complexity of the Saga’s heterogeneous qualities that emerge from its paradoxical compositive nature. Indeed, this a story that tries to tell the Conquest, a historical episode, through the transformative lens of fantasy. And it does, indeed, revendicate Latin America’s cultural legacy. At the same time, however, it does not constrain itself to what like to clarify that there is neither univocal nor direct referentiality […]. Anyway, the Saga de los Confines pretends to be an epic tale that raises indigenous people, in fight for freedom and in communion with all creation, to the main story’s role and focus. The Conquest reference summarizes all the conquests and all subjugations suffered hence […]”. Translation is mine. 6  “The restoration of Hispano American dignity, that was lost in History because of the progression of an Occidental and Centre-European ideology that tarnished and erased, through violence, any cultural expression”. Translation is mine.

278 

P. RIVERA DONOSO

could be identified as “local colour” or value. It uses very recognizable epic fantasy topics: the archetypical character’s construction and development (the warrior, the magician, the crone, among others), or the existence of a primordial form of evil. On the other hand, the way in which the story is told is through Spanish, the language of the colonizer, not through the words and lenses of one of the continent’s native languages. In addition, the Saga’s structure follows the topical Western structural pattern of the epic fantasy contemporary novel. This structure was divided by Clute and Grant (1997) in the following segments: thinning, wrongness, recognition, and healing. The Saga’s own structure concurs with these segments. In Los días del Venado, first, the main character’s perception of their world is affected by a concatenation of bad omens shared by the family members. This was previously suggested in the story’s prologue with the birth of Misáianes (thinning). Second, this omen incarnates in the possible threat of the sideresios’ arrival, as announced in the council that gathers different communities from the Tierras Fértiles (wrongness). Third, the enemy is identified as such, and all the main characters assume, in their own ways, their roles in the confrontation (recognition). Fourth, an important battle is won against the enemy, and hope arises despite individual character losses (healing). But the Saga also offers different traits, less common in stereotypical epic fantasy: a whole family as protagonist, diverse growth paths for every member that transcend the male hero’s journey, as well as occasional narrative digressions that recreate the idea that there is someone else (Nakín, a meta narrator character) telling this story, for its further remembrance. From the point of view of language and style, even if the story is written in Spanish, it allows itself to by stylistically playful by taking advantage of Latin American Spanish’s particular cadence and poetic diction. In that sense, two important stylistic resources in the story are metaphors and epithets. Both serve two main functions: to reinforce the quality of a quotidian element in a more meaningful way, and to describe foreign elements that are not known to the protagonists and, thus, do not have specific words to name them. Example of the first function is the epithet devolvedor de vida (“life-­ restoring bread”), associated with the crone Vieja Kush’s bread, a simple hand-­ made food that recalls peaceful days. The event when this expression is uttered is quite symbolic, as it shows when Dulkancellin, a young warrior and Vieja Kush’s grandson, recalls important things of his culture before commanding an important assault against the sideresios. Bodoc (2008) narrates that: “Los hombres miraron a Dulkancellin, esperando un respuesta. Durante un instante, el husihuilke se sintió brutalmente solo. Buscó en su memoria el bosque de Los Confines. Buscó el pan de Vieja Kush, devolvedor de vida. Y más que nunca jefe de sus guerreros, dio la primera orden” (278).7 Here, then, the original plain meaning of bread as a life giver, in the sense of basic food, is transformed. 7  “All the men stared at Dulkancellin, waiting for his reply. For a moment, the Husihuilke felt brutally alone. In his mind’s eye, he saw the forest at the Ends of the Earth. He saw Old Mother Kush and her life-restoring bread. Then, more than ever the leader of his warriors, he gave the first

  LATIN AMERICAN FANTASY AS HETEROGENEOUS LITERATURE… 

279

It stands for nourishment but is also the root of the beloved and threatened land, and all the things in it that he loves and that it must be protected. Examples of the second function are the recurrent metaphors of animal con cabellera (“maned animal”: here, a horse) and polvo gris (“grey powder”: here, gunpowder). These constructions name the unknown, brought by the foreign invader as weapons: (i) the strong equine that provides an armed mount and, (ii) firearms, deadlier that traditional weapons. This mirrors the true historical indigenous communities’ perplexity in the face of the conquerors’ possessions, now displaced and recreated through poetic resources, and in Spanish. In Bodoc’s story, these metaphors also have narrative purposes. For instance, polvo gris is used in the first novel as a token of the invaders, and introduces the grim attraction that two characters (the traitor Molitzmós and the ill-fated Kume) develop in relation to it, also foreshadowing their downfall: Durante la estadía en la Casa de las Estrellas los guerreros fueron aleccionados sobre las armas de los sideresios. […] Vieron y olieron el polvo gris que las alimentaba. Kume se había interesado más que ningún otro en el conocimiento de las armas enemigas, llegando a manifestar una admiración que molestó a sus hermanos. Molitzmós era el único que compartía el sentimiento y que, además, se abocó a aprender sobre ellas sin que el rencor lo turbara (Bodoc 295).8 In conclusion, Bodoc’s fantasy story offers an interesting take on heterogeneous fiction: it achieves a vivid recreation of Latin America’s pre-hispanic world. At the same time, it transcends it, by using the language and the narrative resources of the metropolis. This highlights the subversive potential of fantasy. Imagination can turn the colonizers’ power towards (not necessarily against) them.

Verónica Murguía’s Loba: Latin America through the Lens on an Imaginated Middle Ages Loba was granted the Spanish Young Adult fiction Gran Angular award in 2013. It was the first time that the Gran Angular was given to an author whose world depicted an epic fantasy novel set in a secondary world influenced by a medieval imaginary. The novels tell the story of three youngsters as they become involved in a conflict that entwines political struggles and the awakening of two magical creatures, Tengri the dragon and the nameless Unicorn. These characters are Soledad, a proud and lonely warrior princess; Cuervo, a stern and maimed magician; and Ámbar, a peasant girl very fond of old imaginative tales. Following mainly Soledad and Cuervo’s growth into adulthood order”. Translation by Nick Caistor and Lucia Caistor Arendar. The Days of the Deer (Bodoc, 2013), English version of Los días del Venado. 8  “While they had been staying in the House of the Stars, the warriors had been taught about the Sideresians’ weapons. […] They saw and smelt the grey powder feeding them. More than anyone else, Kume had shown a great interest. His admiration was so great his brother warriors were disturbed; Molitzmós was the only other one who shared this feeling, and who devoted himself to studying them without resentment”. Translation by Nick Caistor and Lucia Caistor Arendar.

280 

P. RIVERA DONOSO

from loss and difficult choices, this epic fantasy story also explores the Other ones’ concerns: outlanders, slaves, commoners, and other usual peripheral characters in this genre. This context spurs interesting questions regarding Loba’s value as a Latin American fantasy work; mainly, the following one: if Bodoc’s Saga de los Confines showed a locally inspired secondary world that interwove the colonizer and colonized traditions, how could the Latin American ethos express itself through a “purely” medieval secondary world story? To answer such a question, it is necessary to explain what creative possibilities the Middle Ages imaginary offers to fantasy authors. This effort starts by defining neomedievalism and its relationship with metropolitan epic fantasy. The term neomedievalism was first coined by Umberto Eco in his essay “Dreaming of the Middle Ages” (1973), in a characterization of different popular culture works that reimagined the Middle Ages to their own playful purposes, distancing themselves from a more historically rigorous approach. Medievalism itself (an artistic trend originated in the XIX Century), also proposed its own derivations, but they were still inspired by the Victorian present knowledge of the Middle Ages themselves. Neomedievalism, in contrast, stems from the already filtered constructions of the former. It is thus twice removed from historical evidence. This double distance, however, should not be conceive as a degradation. On the contrary, the appraisal of this complex framework may involve the understanding of the sociocultural transformation of its sources. As Young (2015) explains, Exploring neomedievalisms does not show what the past was like; rather such studies illuminate what can be imagined not only about it, but through it, in the present moment. Neomedievalisms are bounded, in part, by the many widely shared assumptions about the Middle Ages, and this needs to be taken into consideration whether or not one shares in these beliefs (2). It is possible to think, then, in multiple imaginary constructs of Middle Ages: these may or may not resemble their historical counterparts. What creative possibilities could this offer from fantasy literature perspective remains to be seen. As Amy S. Kaufman (2010) proposes, neomedievalism’s playful and anachronic world view seems to speak not from a certain historical past, but from our own present and future predictions; its different medieval distortions are not mistakes, but deliberate creative choices (4-6). However, Kaufman also notes that neomedievalism, despite these rich options, tends to homogenize itself in a stock pool of ideological elections: If neomedievalism wants to erase the unknowable, erase distance, then it must also erase difference. Its rejection of history, its spirit of integrating past and present, often cause all of the Middle Ages to be absorbed completely into a Western notion of the medieval: knights, European castles, court ladies, Christian spirituality (8). In this regard, neomedievalism’s links with fantasy literature are exposed. As Attebery points out, this relation comes from fantasy’s own European tradition, with narrative forms that have been constantly associated with (neo)medieval constructs, even when some of them predate these constructs or even

  LATIN AMERICAN FANTASY AS HETEROGENEOUS LITERATURE… 

281

come after them. The sustained popularity of medieval (imaginary, as opposed to “historical”) fantasy has reinforced these characteristics, mainly in the most formulaic metropolitan brand of epic fantasy. I will now analyse how Murguía’s Loba manages to use a (neo) medieval framework that, without renouncing to itself can, also, reflect the inner consistence (to use a term employed by Tolkien to speak about fantasy in general) of Latin American reality. It could be commented that, superficially, the world presented in Loba and its mode or representation coincide: a neomedieval setting story written in Spanish, a European language. However, the world presented has diverse qualities that transcend the usual hegemonic focuses, and that could be interpreted as Latin American inquiries. For instance, the social role of the downtrodden (women, peasants, foreigners), the problems of systematic violence as a hegemonic way of life, and a heavily ingrained sexism. This could be read, precisely, as the aesthetic possibilities that neomedievalism and the space in-between concept can offer. If neomedievalism does not address the historical European Middle Ages, it is possible then to generate a particular neomedievalist imaginary that could express Latin American ethos in a creative way. If Latin American authors cannot fully disguise their identity through the emulation of European works, then, even in the most non-mimetic and cultural distant setting, Latin America’s voice will end finding its own distinctive phrasing. My analysis centres on symbolic reading of two narrative elements from the imaginary world of Loba: the outcome of Soledad and Ámbar. In first place, Loba tells the story of Soledad’s coming of age as a warrior princess. The character development resembles J.R.R. Tolkien’s Éowyn, as they both are presented as young women interested in masculine codified roles, mainly the path of the sword, as in the shield maiden archetype. But Soledad does not disguise herself as a man as Éowyn does to go to battle, in the disguise of the male warrior Dernhelm, because she is characterized as a soft virago. She learns how to wield a sword as a woman, and, as such, she is rejected by men as much as she is by women. The former is exemplified by Queen Jara, Soledad’s stepmother, when she tries to tame her into womanhood for political purposes. As Murguía (2013) writes: “Soledad, si te embellecieras, si fueras más dócil, tal vez Tagaste podría establecer una alianza ventajosa para tu padre. Eso es lo que el rey Lobo necesita: dinero, hombres, tierras. No una hija que se comporta como un hombre y que, a pesar de los halcones y los perros, seguirá siendo mujer”.9 (105). The latter is exemplified by a soldier’s conversation that Soledad overhears, in which she is devalued: “¿Qué importa que monte bien? Es una mujer, fea como un diablo. Buenos jinetes hay donde sea; mujeres feas, también. Pero como esta, pocas. Y

9  “Soledad, if you would embellish yourself, if you were more docile, maybe Tagaste could establish a profitable alliance for your father. That is what the Lobo king needs: money, men, land. Not a daughter who behaves like a man and that, in spite of her hawks and dogs, will remain as a woman.” Translation is mine.

282 

P. RIVERA DONOSO

lo feo no se le quita sobre el caballo. Además, seguramente es virgen y morirá virgen. A pesar de la dote.10” (163). At the beginning of the story, she seems in the interstice of both worlds/ in the tension between the two opposite worlds masculine and feminine; earthly powers and magic forces; roughness and tenderness, without properly fitting in either of them. Soledad has determined to become a warrior to please her father, the king of Moriana, who expects his offspring to be male, and so she idealizes war and ruthlessness to get close to him (19). This topic can be traced back to medieval romances, like the French “Silence” (XIII Century, attributed to Heldris de Cornuälle) or the Spanish “Romance of the Warrior Woman” (XV Century, anonymous). However, Soledad’s character and outcomes differ from these sources. Unlike Silence, Soledad is not raised as a male; unlike the warrior woman, she does not go to war just because there is no other option, nor she goes back to feminine-coded actions once the battle is over. At the beginning of the novel, Soledad likes weapons, battles, and male codified actions because they appeal more to her personality, very distant from female customs. However, at the same time, she is also recognizable by different, quieter traits: she is a silent, timid young woman and is very fond of animals, whom she sees as her best friends. At this point, it could be tempting to frame this character development trough gender lenses, as a metropolitan reading would expect. In fact, much of Soledad’s problem matches with what Tolmie (2006) identifies as a continuum of violent motifs associated with neomedieval fantasy heroines, mainly gender based oppression. Tolmie states that these are “aspects of a symbolic system that acts out the dispossession of women in order to highlight feminine resistance to that dispossession” (5). However, I would like to explore a symbolic reading that could link Soledad’s lonely growth to the problem of appreciating, critiquing, and writing fantasy fiction in Latin America. From this perspective. The character can be read as a fictional representation of Latin America, as a literary “compound”, struggles in the face of Europe’s implicit and explicit expectations. The European tradition could expect that the Latin America tradition gets to learn how to write “proper” neomedieval fantasy, following the same path that the former has traced as hegemonic. On the other hand, it could also expect that the Latin American tradition gets to defy its paths, but only by presenting very autochthonal fantasy, that matches European preconceptions. But Latin American fantasy, at least in Loba’s way, is like Soledad: it has its spirit divided in two constructs. In this case, the young woman’s identity-and-belonging conflict could be read as a representation of Latin American neomedieval fantasy’s dependence to Western models. However, Soledad’s growing path leads her to realize that she cannot fulfil expectations, neither the world’s nor her own—and that she 10  “What does it matter if she is good rider? She is a woman, ugly as a devil. There are good riders everywhere; ugly women, too. But like this, there are few. And ugliness does not remove itself in a horse. Besides, she is probably a virgin, and she will die like one. Even despite her dowry.” Translation is mine.

  LATIN AMERICAN FANTASY AS HETEROGENEOUS LITERATURE… 

283

should not do it. She gets to despise war’s cruelty and murder, and renounces to kill other humans. But she does not renounce to the sword, as she needs it to confront a dragon, a global menace. In the same sense, she falls in love and learns to open her heart to the ones that care for her. But she does not renounce her destiny as a Unicorn-bound maiden. She abandons her lover and her kingdom, transcending all mundane ties. By her bounding to the Unicorn, she even gets to know the secret of life (506). In this sense, it can be proposed that her path transcends topical gender views. By the end of story, she does not conciliate her existence by feminism or by a more complex identity development—she outbounds herself from the social world and enters, symbolically, a world of legend. In summary, Soledad discovers a new path for herself, that spurs in part from known worlds, but that are shaped ultimately in a unique way. This could be true to neomedieval Latin American fantasy, as well. Like Soledad, it should strive to find its own aesthetic route, finding the balance between the appreciation of tradition and the understanding of its limitations, shortcomings, and distances. Only by this, I propose, neomedieval Latin American fantasy could offer something unique or interesting to the already established traditions, such as neomedievalism itself or even Latin American imaginative fiction trends. In Loba, one of its highlights is its pacificist scope. This is something rare in mainstream mimetic contemporary Latin American works, that tend to glorify or justify the continent’s real violence context in its fiction. As read by Mexican authors Oscar Luviano and Alberto Chimal (both in 2013), Loba presents a hopeful vision that strives for peace in spite of (or in the face of) violence. I suggest that this is achieved, mainly, through the narration’s attention to peripheral quotidian details that a larger fantasy epic could easily overlook for sake of a greater “good.” By rescuing these details, the novel shows the reader small beauties that could be lost forever. That is the case, for instance, of Soledad’s discovery of a former enemy singing: Una mañana lo escuchó cantar y tuvo que ocultarse de la vista de los otros para llorar, sacudida de pies a cabeza por el regocijo. Esa canción era gracias a ella. Esa garganta que cantaba una brusca canción de amor era gracias a ella. Atalai seguía vivo porque no había podido matarlo, y su vida la alegraba (Murguía 301).11 Secondly, following the same train of thought, traditional metropolitan epic fantasy tends to focus on magnificent characters (aristocrats, prodigies, chosen ones, among other portents). This is partly true in Loba, as Soledad has all these traits. However, the novel opens itself to give voice to peripheral characters too from (precisely) socially precarious backgrounds. As it can be read early on in the chapter “En un confín de Moriana” [In Moriana’s Frontier] (36-43).

11  “One morning she heard him singing and had to hide from the sight of others to be able cry, overwhelmed by joy. This song was because of her. This throat that was singing a sharp love song was because of her. Atalai was still alive because she could not kill him, and his life gladdened her”. Translation is mine.

284 

P. RIVERA DONOSO

That is case of Ámbar and her grandmother Liaza. Ámbar is one of the three main characters and the only one that is just a peasant with no special traits. But it could be proposed that she embodies the role of an imagination sympathizer, a person who yearns to see dragons even if they could cause problems in the world (39). As such, she is nurtured from a young age by Liaza through old tales, and grows keen on exploring the world. However, her filiation is not understood in her free but poor community, Peña Verde, as it is not only perceived as dangerous, but foreign to the urgent local concerns. Moriana has undermined Peña Verde for decades, taking away their harvest and their young men to force them into battle, and abusing their young women. In this context, Liaza’s main concern is Ámbar’s safety, and mainly from Moriana’s mundane menace: killing, slaving, and raping. The fears from the peasantry are not the same as the ones from royalty, or even from the magical communities. The Other danger that worries royals, the presence of the tungro’s community, for example, is scarcely addressed by Liaza. She even suggests that the Moriana folk are more fearful that tungros, because only the Moriana folk have been inhuman to themselves (42). Then, there is Tengri, a dragon. By virtue of its awakening, Ámbar’s ancient and magical knowledge, inherited from her grandmother, suddenly becomes convenient to everyone, and links her destiny to Soledad and the fallen magician Cuervo. It is remarkable that Ámbar is the only protagonist that is connected to Tengri from a personal perspective. Soledad’s connection to Tengri derives from her status of the chosen one. However, she must choose her own alliance as well, choosing her allegiance between another magical creature besides Tengri, the wild and mysterious Unicorn featured in the tale. Cuervo’s connection to Tengri derives from the fact that he awakened the magical beast and tried in vain to use him as a living weapon against Moriana. This failure leaves him physically and spiritually wounded. Ámbar’s connection, instead, grows from her love of dragons from her childhood stories. Following Tengri’s death by the end of the novel, Ámbar remains sad (437). It is not Soledad’s sadness (which feels to her like the sadness derived from killing a lover). Ámbar’s grief seems closer to the nostalgic mourning of the fantasy lover, that sees the world diminished from its marvels at the end of a fantasy story: —[El cielo] Está vacío de su habitante. Hablar de los pájaros es como decir que las hormigas ocupan esta casa. Que. las ollas son las dueñas. El dragón pensaba, hablaba. No me preguntes por qué, pues no sabría decírtelo, pero lo amé desde que lo vi. Al encontrar el colmillo sentí que se abría una puerta que ahora se cierra. Era un cometa viviente, una llama que respiraba. Ahora hay menos magia en nuestra vida. El mundo es un lugar más triste sin él. —Hija, ¿qué locuras dices? El dragón era malo.

  LATIN AMERICAN FANTASY AS HETEROGENEOUS LITERATURE… 

285

—También los hombres son malos, madre. Y él no era solamente malo. Era una estrella viva. Todos en el mundo somos más pobres sin él —respondió la muchacha (437).12 In this passage, Ámbar resembles some of Liaza’s world visions, but with her own turn: the marvellous world of magical tales has its own perils, but the human world is even more perilous, and, for worse, is deprived of fantasy’s intrinsic beauties, treasures of the imagination. This statement is even more valuable considering that Ámbar actually never went to her own proper adventure, like other European imaginative protagonists as Bastian from Michael Ende’s The Neverending’s Story (1979), for example. Almost all she learns and loves from fantasy comes from her own marginal position as a sympathizer. It can be assumed that such a voice could be symbolically read as an atypical idiosyncratic take to fantasy literature from Latin America. Ámbar is not a heroine in a traditional sense—she is mainly a dreamer and a peasant. Topical metropolitan fantasy usually presents characters like this as the main protagonists or heroes, proposing development paths that carry them form a humble state to an accomplished one. As Ionoaia (2020) proposes for fantasy main characters (based on Campbell, Raglan, von Franz, and others) they could be read as heroes-in-progress, as they need to practice, gain experience, and instruct themselves, physically and psychologically, before being suitable for confronting their nemesis and achieving that heroic status (22). The fact that Ámbar is not “fated” to participate of the major, world-changing events of her world, calls attention to the potential status of fantasy written in Latin America as a “silenced center” (Spivak 25) of post-colonial, even subaltern implications. If the monomythical tradition is read as a symbol of the male-dominated mythological space whose archetypes, symbols are at the core of “Western” fantasy, the question of the Other can be raised as a by-product of such reading. The fact that Spivak (1988) is able to interweave gender, class and what has been traditionally referred to as “race” in the figure of the subaltern is perhaps most significant. As a peasant, dragon-enamoured young woman, Ámbar is the ultimate subaltern in Murguía’s world. Yet, she can speak. By mourning the dragon’s passing, she unveils (in Foucault’s sense of making visible the invisible) the relentless reality of change in a way that harkens back to Samwise Gamgee’s longing for the passing of the elves but from the point of view of the decentred participant. Sam journeys to become a hero. Ámbar contemplates and this is not to be seen as a failure. Contemplation can only be perceived as such if judged according to the monomythical standards of male strength and prowess 12  “[The sky] is hollow. To talk about birds is like to say that ants live in this house. Or that pots are the owners. But the dragon thought, talked. Do not ask me why, because I would not know how to tell you, but I loved him since I saw him. When I found the fang, I felt that a door was opened, and that door now closes. He was a living comet, a breathing flame. Now there is less magic in our life. The world is a sadder place without him. —Girl, what nonsense are you talking? The dragon was bad. —The men are bad too, mother. And he was not only bad. He was a living star. Everyone in the world is poorer without them —replied the young woman”. Translation is mine.

286 

P. RIVERA DONOSO

that the worse representation of the traditional hero-story have popularized. As a subaltern who finds freedom of speech in yearning, Ámbar reaffirms her position as a decentred centre. This reaffirmation may not turn her into the centre of the narrative (as one might say, the journey to Mordor turns Sam into a warrior), but does something else entirely by proposing that the mythology of the silenced has only began to be uttered. The result is that both the silence of women and their distance from the world dominated by men—and this can be linked to Soledad’s choice of the Unicorn—is nothing but a primordial space, the mythological “void” often alluded by myth, from which new mythologies unfold. Ámbar’s decentred position gives her the gift of seeing the unseen and for this she is perhaps misunderstood. Distance, after all, is another form of foresight. Latin-American writers, who have merely started to articulate their poetics (both Bodoc and Murguía’s cases are peripheral within the context of the continent) may find themselves in a similar situation. So far, they have been used to witness the development of fantasy literature (led by Western writers, scholars, universities, and audiences) from a decentred position. The continent’s tendency towards social realism and its exotic, magical variant has indeed marginalized writers of the imaginative whose only hope is to look from afar and take what they can or move how they can within these spaces in between. The need to conform to industrial standards and the adherence to popularized “modes” of fantasy can indeed be read as Peña Verde’s struggle with Moriana. As an undermine community, they cannot properly stand inf front of the powerful colonial centre. The question is, should they? Must the subaltern reveal its secrets to the master? Rosemary Jackson (1981) once described fantasy as a literature of desire. Ámbar’s desire of the dead dragon is a strong centripetal force that may well drive the underdeveloped tradition of the continent towards a space beyond the in-betweens. This movement may imply a departure of the European model, though a conscious reappropriation of the model, aware of gender, class, ethnicity, struggling in-development economies and unstable political regimes, may suffice for a “first-wave” of politically aware fantasists beyond the mere binomial tensions of, for example, Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973) or mere attempts to decolonialize by opposition. Soledad’s mercy towards her spared enemy might suggest yet another pathway. The ultimate call of the subaltern may be a call for freedom but also a call for peace.

Conclusions In this article, I questioned whether Latin American fantasy can be read as heterogeneous literature, as its conception and development seem inevitably tied to the tension between the continent’s own cultural mestizo milieu and the strong external influence of the hegemonic Western world. However, as my corpus analysis depicts, this space-in-between can be read as a valuable and unique possibility for fantasy literature. If the local type of fiction is found

  LATIN AMERICAN FANTASY AS HETEROGENEOUS LITERATURE… 

287

appealing due to its imaginative and redemptive potential, therefore no fantasy enthusiast, be it casual or scholar, should overlook the fantasy stories written in a beaten continent where imagination and redemption are not just “nice words” to present, but a cultural hopeful necessity. I argue that Latin American fantasy can (and maybe should) use the hegemonic possibilities of the Westerns to tell its perils, until it makes them their own through aesthetic transformation. In a more radical vision, this could even lead to what Silviano Santiago (2001) proposed: “Thus it is best for her/him [the author] to learn first the language of the metropolis in order to then combat it more effectively” (33). However, my personal stance regarding fantasy is less combative and more dialogical. As I have suggested, there is not a single aesthetic path for Latin American fantasy. Neither there are paths that could be read as more inherent to the continent than others, or more critical. Local Latin Americanist fantasy works will never be totally rid of Western influences, and local neomedievalist fantasy works will never be separated from its own struggles and context of production. Why should they? The rift, thein between-space is their greater gift, not only to fantasy literature as a fictional genre itself, but also to all those who build their lives and themselves standing in the mountain-high shoulders of the imagination. In the same atypical way as I used Latin American theory as a theoretical framework to fantasy literature, I propose that local and foreign aesthetic possibilities for Latin American fantasy should be transformed through critical and conscientious amalgamation, until they get to shape a unique mestiza fantasy voice. A voice that, like magic, ignites in a peasant child’s hand and has the power to change the whole world, if allowed to grow in fertile lands.

Works Cited Attebery, Brian. Strategies of Fantasy. Indiana University Press, 1992. Bodoc, Liliana. Los días del Venado. La Saga de los Confines I. Norma, 2008 [2000]. Bodoc, Liliana. The Days of the Deer. The Saga of the Borderlands I. Atlantic Books, 2013. Translated by Nick Caistor and Lucia Caistor Arendar. Carpentier, Alejo. “Prologue to The Kingdom of this World (1949)”. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 26.47 (1993): pp. 28–32. Translated by Alfred Mac Adam. Chiampi, Irlemar. El realismo maravilloso. Forma e ideología en la novela hispanoamericana. Monte Ávila Editores, 1983. Translated by Agustín Martínez and Márgara Rusotto. Cornejo Polar, Antonio. “Indigenist and Heterogeneous Literatures: Their Dual Sociocultural Status.” Latin American Perspectives 16.2 (1989): pp.  12-28. Translated by Susan Casal-Sánchez. García, Sashenka. “La Saga de los Confines. Entrevista a Liliana Bodoc.” Barataria. Revista Latinoamericana de Literatura Infantil y Juvenil, vol. 1, no. 1, June-­ December 2003, pp. 8–11. Ionoaia, Eliana. The Hero Paradigm in Fantasy Novels. Bucharest University Press, 2020. Kaufman, Amy S. “Medieval Unmoored.” Studies in Medievalism 19 (2010): pp. 1–11. Edited by Karl Fugelso.

288 

P. RIVERA DONOSO

Mena, Lucila. “Hacia una formulación teórica del realismo mágico.” Bulletin Hispanique 77.3 (1975): pp. 395–407. Murguía, Verónica. Loba. Ediciones SM, 2013. Rivera, Paula. “Trascendiendo el imaginario latinoamericano: la fantasía en la Saga de los Confines de Liliana Bodoc.” Literatura para infancia, adolescencia y juventud. Reflexiones desde los estudios literarios, edited by Claudia Andrade et  al, Ediciones Universitarias, 2016, pp. 129–145. Sagrillo, Susana. La otra voz en La Saga de los Confines. Un estudio sobre la trilogía de Liliana Bodoc. Ediciones Biblioteca Digital Universidad de Cuyo, 2014. Santiago, Silviano. “Latin American Discourse: The Space In-Between.” The Space-­ Between. Essays on Latin American Culture, edited by Ana Lúcia Gazzola, Duke University Press, 2001, pp. 25–38. Sieber, Sharon. “Magical Realism.” The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 167–179. Spivak, Chakravorty Gayatr. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 24–28. Subercaseaux, Bernardo. “La apropiación cultural en el pensamiento y la cultura de América Latina.” Estudios Públicos, no. 30, 1988, pp. 125–135. Tolmie, Jane. “Medievalism and the Fantasy Heroine.” Journal of Gender Studies 15.2 (2006): pp. 145–158. Young, Helen. “Introduction: Multiple Middle Ages.” The Middle Ages in Popular Culture. Medievalism and Genre, edited by Helen Young, Cambria Press, 2015, pp. 1–10.

Cultural Appropriation of Poland’s Fantasy: The Cold War Saga o Wiedz m ́ inie Moving into American Mainstream Culture Aylin Dilek Walder

Globalization is a phenomenon that not only affects every aspect of contemporary social life but also heightens the power of the Westernized hemisphere to world which signifies the power of the West to form reality.1 With enhanced medialization and vast information channels, the production of cultural goods such as literature has been altered causing them to move easily between cultures—whether in the physical form of a translated book, as digital translations in the shape of TV shows and games, or as a musical on Broadway. At a first glance, the increase of cultural networks reflects rather well on the effects of globalization. With regard to the ideological and political properties of written as well as screened literature, however, aspects of identity formation, neocolonialism, and cultural appropriation appear on the scene complicating the evaluation of globalization’s effects. As any cultural product is influenced by its spatial as well as temporal placing and thus marked with a particular ideology, the spatial movement of cultural products, enabled by globalization, can lead to the cultural products losing their initial meaning. When this migration to a

1  Terms such as West or Other are capitalized to emphasize their constructiveness as they are of imaginary character and defined by those with the power to world. For further reading, see Yeǧenoǧlu (1998).

A. D. Walder (*) Department of English Philology, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2_19

289

290 

A. D. WALDER

new context happens without acknowledgment, an unjustifiable cultural appropriation can take place. In general, cultural appropriation refers to the procedure of an outsider taking something from someone else’s culture2; and in the case of the outsider being from the dominant West and the insider coming from a minority culture, neocolonial tendencies permeate this process. These can then undermine a product’s identity-affirming properties for the minority culture, especially when its incorporation into the dominant culture remains unacknowledged. Thus, it becomes worthwhile to investigate how these socio-structural characteristics of globalization influence a cultural product that is already placed on the margins of the dominant discourse: fantasy fiction only slowly frees itself from the prejudice of being an escapist literature, and the fantastic narratives contemporarily examined are most often than not from an Anglophone, Western background and accompanied by assumptions based on Tolkienian tradition. These elaborations then lead to the objective of this study, namely, the examination of the Polish fantasy Saga o Wiedz m ́ inie (1990–1999) created by the Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski and its translation to Netflix (2019, 2021), known as a platform creating American mainstream products. In this paper, I challenge Netflix narrative adaptation of a cultural good taken from a marginalized country. While doing so, I further examine how Andrzej Sapkowski’s narrative can be positioned in relation to the Western fantasy discourse that often reduces fantasy narratives as only following the specific fantasy formula established by Tolkien. After an introduction to Polish fantasy tradition, including a brief review of contemporary Polish literature’s popularity, the universe of Saga o Wiedźminie is examined in its unique particularity that expresses an interesting alternative to the familiar Tolkienian tradition. In doing so, this chapter inducts in translation and adaptation studies, aiming to present, compare, and challenge the English novels as well as the Netflix version regarding their deviation from the source text Saga o Wiedz m ́ inie. The understandings will enable to conclude with justifiability of the cultural appropriation of Sapkowski’s story by Netflix.

Polish Fantasy and Folklore To highlight the differences between the Tolkienian tradition of high fantasy and the fantastic literature that originates from those countries most often ignored by the dominant discourse, one has to point to the cultural tradition of fantastic stories existing in non-Anglophone countries that predate the entering of Tolkien into the respective discourse—in this case, Poland. While a definition of fantasy is not this study’s objective, its roots can be found in those 2  For this chapter, culture is defined as the sum of what connects people and binds them together as a group on a small scale or as a nation on a larger scale. Aspects of a national culture are among others basic values, core beliefs, customs, and language, while aspects of the culture of a smaller circle of people can include the first but are not limited to them (cf. Young 2005).

  CULTURAL APPROPRIATION OF POLAND’S FANTASY: THE COLD WAR… 

291

early stories of folklore and myth that provided the cultural foundation for national, ethnical, social, and cultural identity-formations (cf. Nikolajeva 2003); folklore reflects shared values and believes of one community and can serve as an instrument to understand the heritage of unfamiliar cultures and to recognize the diversity of the same. Here, folklore can be used as an argument for the long tradition of the fantastic in Poland and its distinction from Anglophone traditions. The cultural traditions of Poland date thereby back to the early Middle Ages when Polish folklore began to emerge as part of peasant culture, ethnically Polish but with origin in Slavic languages (cf. Krawczyk-­ Wasilewska 2007). The establishment of Polish nationality and culture, its origin, and close ties to Slavic culture just as Poland’s occupation by various nations and its own influence on other cultures then explain the commonalities between Polish folklore and those myths originating from other Slavic regions as well as its similarities to Celtic, Germanic, and Baltic folk.3 As Clute and Grant point out in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), historically, Polish fantasy began with the era of Romanticism in Europe and was marked by a focus on Polish folklore. While the emergence of the fantasy novel in Poland is tied to Romanticism, the fantastic in the form of mythology and folklore was already established in the territory of present-day Poland as early as the early Middle Ages. Following the rigid definition of fantasy as being solely based on the Arthurian archetype as done by most critics reduces Polish fantasy traditions and excludes the fantastic tendencies of folklore and myths preceding Romanticism. Insofar as superstitious, ‘religious and magical’ (Krawczyk-Wasilewska 2007, 63) belief systems were invariably dominant until the end of the nineteenth century, it is not surprising that many of those beliefs—inspired by folklore—entered Poland’s fantastic narratives in the form of tropes and images from Slavic mythology. With the January Uprising (1863), then, a more realistic tone can be noted in Polish fantasy producing narratives such as Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Ogniem i Mieczem (1884), whose novel only appears to be realistic on the surface as it contains a story of impossible strong and wise humans participating in various quests. These fantasy stories, touched by realism, were then followed by authors like Zofia Kossak-Szcczucka who published Krzyzowcy (1935) during Poland’s time of independence; in the novel, the exotic Muslim Other’s civilization and progress is perceived as magical by the Polish crusaders. The end of World War II then led to a time during which Polish fantasy was absent; the long tradition of Polish folklore, already recording a slow decline at the beginning of the century, and fantasy authors slid into obscurity. Further, the post-war changes of Polish borders—the loss of land in the East and incorporation of Northern and Western territories—led to

3  Insofar as Poland’s history can be regarded as common knowledge, no particular references are made. For further readings on Polish history and culture, Davis’ Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland’s Present (2001) or Lukowski and Zawadzki’s A Concise History of Poland (2006) can be recommended.

292 

A. D. WALDER

a significant exchange between cultures accompanied by an integration of previously foreign folklore into Poland’s cultural heritage. As folklore serves as a reference point for national identities, the time of socialism (1952–1989) in Poland established a procedure of documenting and preserving existing folklore in order to establish a consistent national identity and style for a country marked by its diversity in ethnicities and cultures (cf. Krawczyk-Wasilewska 2007). With Polish fantasy’s slow resurrection, the previously mentioned novel Krzyzowcy (1935) was taken up again by Ziemkiewicz in his series Skarby Stolinów (1990) trying to establish a ‘Slavic archetype’ (Clute and Grant 1997, 772) and followed by Nienacki’s trilogy (1990) incorporating Slavic mythology and religious tropes. While the fantastic narratives by the aforementioned writers prove that Polish fantasy did not come to a halt, their success in the country was vanishingly small. The tendency of Polish fantasy’s meager popularity then changed with Andrzej Sapkowski (b. 1948). As continuations of his first story ‘Wiedźmin’ published in December 1986, the Saga o Wiedźminie nowadays contains five novels and various short stories that tell of the events happening around Geralt who belongs to a moribund species of humans that were subjected to mutations and magical elixirs from a young age that enable them to fight monsters and do magic.4 The genre of Polish fantasy contemporarily experiences an incredible rise due to the popularity of these narratives and their development into a franchise that captures audiences from all around the world. Here, the admiration for Sapkowski’s Saga o Wiedźminie in Poland is of particular interest insofar, as its popularity is closely linked to the assumed Slavic character of wiedz m ́ in [witcher] Geralt.5 The series evokes national pride in Polish people as Sapkowski’s combination of various aspects of Polish folklore and past mirrors the multifaceted historical background of the country (cf. Gawronski  and Bajorek 2020). Regarding Clute and Grant’s (1997) proposition that fantasy literature in contemporary Poland is only a reproduction of the formula invented in the Anglophone sphere, meaning Tolkien’s structure of high fantasy, the following examination of Sapkowski’s saga shows that Poland’s cultural heritage, history, and contemporary fiction provide enough evidence for a Polish fantasy tradition that can be differentiated from the Tolkienian tradition.

4  Andrzej Sapkowski’s Saga o Wiedźminie includes Ogniem i Mieczem (2002 [1884]), Miecz Przeznaczenia (2015 [1992]), Ostatnie Zyczeni (2008 [1993]), Krew Elfów (2009 [1994]), Czas Pogardy (2013 [1995]), Chrzest Ognia (2014 [1996]), Wieża Jaskółki (2016 [1997]), Pani Jeziora (2017 [1999]). 5  The English terminology and novels’ titles are only used in the first instance. Following, only the Polish terminology is deployed to acknowledge the saga’s background as well as to not resort to false semiotic signs.

  CULTURAL APPROPRIATION OF POLAND’S FANTASY: THE COLD WAR… 

293

Polish History and the Saga o Wiedz m ́ inie While attempts of copying Tolkien’s formula exist in Poland, the simplified ‘good vs. evil’ theme of high fantasy proves to be not a suitable structure for Polish fantasy reflecting the country’s cultural heritage and historical past.6 Before turning to the elaborations on the intertextual references in the Saga o Wiedźminie which reflect Poland’s cultural heritage and mark the saga as Eastern European, one has to point to some parallels between Polish history and the situation on the Continent, the world the story is set in. Like Poland’s particular folk culture, Polish history is marked by various occupations and armed conflicts so that Polish history differs from the spatial-temporal placing of Tolkien’s productions and leads to fantasy narratives with other focuses and ideological messages. During the novels Blood of Elves [Krew Elfów] (2009 [1994]) and The Tower of Swallows [Wieża Jaskółki] (2016 [1997]), the reader learns that the first beings living on the Continent were dwarves and gnomes. Then, elves arrived and fought these two species for inhabitable land and power. It is only after the Conjunction of Spheres—a mysterious event that aligned parallel universes— those humans were able to reach the Continent and waged war against all nonhumans. As many have rightly pointed out before, the Saga o Wiedźminie is not about skin color but about the hostility existing between species; it is a story that focuses on the destruction of a country caused by oppression and constant battle. Just like the Continent is the scene of several wars, Poland endured many occupations, annexations, migrations, as well as losses of ethnically Polish grounds. Until the end of the tenth century, various groups— including Huns, Germanic Franks, and Kievan Rus’—had migrated to the territory between east Germany and inner Russia; in the mid-thirteenth century, Mongols came to Poland and following different more instances of foreign occupation, the most recent historical event relatable to the saga is found in the twentieth century: after regaining its sovereignty in 1918, less than 30 years later, Poland was already occupied again by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Army. Hence, the plot mirrors Poland’s long struggle with and its partition constrained by forces of foreign countries that started even before Poland was officially formed in 966. Further, the practice of pushing defeated and marginalized groups to the margins of societies, only leaving them with the option of living in so-called ghettos, can be found in both Poland’s real history and the history of the saga. With the humans winning over the nonhumans of the Continent, these sentient beings were forced to the margins of society, living in the ghettos of the

6  As an example for Polish fantasy incorporating Tolkien’s formula, one can point to the previously mentioned series by Ziemkiewicz (1990) which was torn apart by Polish critics precisely because of its similarity to Tolkien’s works.

294 

A. D. WALDER

cities built on their ancestors’ ruins.7 While most of the nonhumans adapted to the situation, a group called Scoia’tael formed: a guerrilla-like squad of dwarves, gnomes, and elves who fight the human oppression and the consequent threat of extinction the elves face. Similar to the sentient nonhumans in the Saga o Wiedz m ́ inie were forced to live in ghettos, Polish Jews who previously lived peacefully in a country known for its religious tolerance, hosting one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe, were confined to ghettos and death camps by Nazi Germany. Then, it might be assumed that the resistance of the Scoia’tael was inspired by actual events of non-textual history inasmuch as both oppressed groups—the nonhumans of the Continent and the Jewish Polish people dominated by Nazis—fought their oppressors: the Scoia’tael by attacking the human armies on the road, the Poles by organizing, for instance, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943) or the Warsaw Uprising (1944). However, while the Scoia’tael began only fighting humans who took their land, they soon turn on those fellow nonhumans whom they proclaim as traitors to their species due to their too close contact to humans. As the Scoia’tael start to kill their own people who are just afraid of a revolt’s backlash, the plot exposes a division of the world into good and evil as a wild-goose chase. Realized through the Scoia’tael’s misdeeds, Andrzej Sapkowski presents the events in his saga in a shade of gray which is also often pointed out by various characters such as the dwarf Yarpen Zigrin in Krew Elfów (2009 [1994]). While one may understand the need of the nonhumans to fight back to regain the possibility to live a decent life, their cause becomes questionable the moment they turn on those who did not mean any harm. Insofar as the Scoia’tael do not realize that hunting those so-called traitors is unjust, the story points to the tendency of regarding the choices one makes as reasonable while deeming similar actions done to oneself by others as unjust. Sapkowski highlights through the guerrilla group that no one is exempt from losing their moral compass and that one may start with good intentions but can soon display the gruesome behavior of the Other previously deemed as unjust and inhuman. Further, the Scoia’tael’s double standard becomes even more apparent when considering that even the elves were only second on the Continent: after arriving there, the elves pushed the dwarves and gnomes to the margins of society displaying a similar behavior as the humans. While an outsider may not see the references to Polish history, it is inevitable to highlight the non-Western character of the narrative that sets it apart from other works that follow Tolkien’s formula. Further, this provides an argument for a growing Polish fantasy tradition that reflects on Poland’s historical past.

7  In Baptism of Fire [Chrzest Ognia] (2014 [1996], 123–126), Geralt talks with two dwarves about their lives in these ghettos. Similar scenes can be found in the ‘Four Marks’ and ‘Rare Species’ (The Witcher (2019)).

  CULTURAL APPROPRIATION OF POLAND’S FANTASY: THE COLD WAR… 

295

The Trap of Translating the Saga o Wiedz m ́ inie With the dominant language on the bookselling market and in the academic sphere being English, many authors from non-Westernized or Second World countries who write in a language that is not part of the dominant discourse are neglected in those spheres that are able to shape the contemporary current of opinion through the means of cultural production and academic research. Further, the normal direction cultural products take is from the English market of Westernized countries down to those commonly regarded as smaller countries, and while Poland includes almost 40 million citizens—its language also spoken abroad—Poland’s closeness to the East and its past of Communism led to a stereotypical representation as a smaller country placed on the periphery of the dominant cultures in the West (cf. Drewniak 2020). The global success of the Saga o Wiedźminie is hence an exception on several levels that faced various challenges on its way to the streaming platform Netflix; one of which is the twofold translation of Sapkowski’s story. First, the Polish series had to be translated to English—a process that can easily lead to a loss of the narrative’s cultural background when ‘culture-bound items’ (Mucha 2020, 63) are translated in a way that their meaning is changed. Second, the literary narrative had to be translated into a narrative adaptable for the screen. In addition to a possible loss of cultural aspects due to linguistic differences, changes and reductions of the plot for the screen can further result in an omission of items carrying significant cultural as well as social value for the source culture. Here, the particular choices of the translators determine the gap between the social, cultural, and ideological propositions beneath the surface of the source and target culture’s narrative (cf. Gawronski and Bajorek 2020). In general, the translation of the fantasy genre can be a forgiving task insofar as the audience is accustomed to imaginary words whose meaning remains closed to them at first. By diving into the fantastic world, the audience discerns the invented terminology and adopts it to their own vocabulary. This leads to an easier incorporation of foreign elements as the target audience will not shy away from reading or watching narratives that present them with the unfamiliar. However, the imaginary character of the fantasy genre poses the challenge for the translator to present the target audience with the same coherent universe that the source audience discovered (cf. Mucha 2020). The Saga o Wiedźminie is hence a particular challenge for a translator as its universe is basically a combination of mythologies, intertextual references, as well as references to the non-textual world taken from various nations existing next to invented names and places bearing no similarity to the worlds of the audiences. Besides meeting Slavic monsters like the rusalka or stryga with a long tradition in Polish legends and various matches in other Slavic nations’ folklore, the reader further stumbles over creatures like kikimoras, whose name’s origin is related to the old Finnish term kikke mörkö, just as upon a djinn, a figure predating Islam and the origin of the genie myth in the Middle

296 

A. D. WALDER

East (cf. Mironova 2019; Aveela 2019). While most names of characters and places were easily adopted to the English version, some terms—in particular, those referring to mythological creatures of Central and Eastern Europe—were replaced by expression more familiar to the target audience with the result that some images invoked in the audience when reading the novels changed. For instance, the Polish term upiór originally refers to a creature that, like a vampire, comes back to life after its human form died, and appears in Sapkowski’s story in situations suiting this mythology (cf. Baranowski 1981 qtd. in Mucha 2020, 66). For the translation, three different terms were chosen: specter, ghost, and kobold. While the upiór is presented as highly dangerous, its replacements do not convey the threat Sapkowski evoked with his choice of a vampire-like monster: a ghost cannot harm a human in the way a vampire can, a specter is a rather neutral creature, and the term kobold already has its Polish equivalent, the chobold (Gieysztor 2006 qtd. in Mucha 2020, 66). However, as the replacements for the Slavic term rusalka highlight, the translator did not always walk into the same trap but chose words of the target culture that can still evoke the same images as in the source culture; in a situation in which the Polish reader meets the rusalka, the English reader stumbles upon a nymph. Since the English audience probably does not know what a rusalka is, the change of image is justifiable insofar as the scene does not focus on the mythological background per se but on the beauty of the creature; an image easier evoked in the English reader by the term nymph (cf. Mucha 2020). Whether the choice of words is done in a manner suitable for the story or not, the change of terminology leads to a change of the East European cultural context surrounding the creatures and replaces them with creatures of a more Westernized background. A foreign reader is hence excluded from learning about Slavic and Eastern mythology while the Saga o Wiedźminie is in danger of losing its Slavic and Polish character which initially set it apart from the stories that came before and led to its global success. This can be seen in relation to the aforementioned differentiation of the narrative from Tolkienian fantasy tradition insofar as when the translations and screen adaptations lose the multi-­ cultural character Sapkowski initially gave his narrative, the story of wiedz m ́ in Geralt is reduced to one of many instead of being an exceptional cultural product. While here only two examples for translated ‘culture-bound items’ (Mucha 2020, 63) are outlined, the following approach to the Netflix adaptation shows that the translation of foreign fantasy to the screen leaves more room open to restrain from changes of terminology as the images supporting the story provide a visual context to unfamiliar terms. Introducing the notion of translation to this adaptation study is based on the semiotic process underlying the translation from one language to another that can be easily applied to the adaption from written language to the visuals of the screen: while a traditional translation choses the signs of the target’s language system that are most appropriate for the signs used in the source’s system, the translation from book to screen involves the selection of the most important signs in the book and their translation to a visual counterpart-sign

  CULTURAL APPROPRIATION OF POLAND’S FANTASY: THE COLD WAR… 

297

(cf. Gawronski  and Bajorek 2020). With regard to the language chosen in Netflix’s The Witcher (2019), the screen writers and producers orientated themselves more closely at the original terminology of the books and thus foregrounded the Slavic heritage of the narrative in a better way than the English translations could; this is mainly because those words, the American mainstream audience is unfamiliar with, were given a visual background so that the need to substitute a foreign term like stryga or kikimora with an English term is non-existent. The medium of the screen thereby allowed for circumventing the trap of false translations since those unfamiliar with the Slavic mythology do not need to look it up to understand a text, where it is not replaced by a different English sign, but can rely on the imaginary the show provides them with as the experience of the screened saga is shaped by both the narrative as such and ‘the overall audio-visual experience’ (Gawronski and Bajorek 2020, 3).

Disenchanting Anti-Fairy Tales Like the incorporation of mythological figures from a multitude of cultures, Sapkowski assembles legends and fairy tales in his narrative whereby he twists the fairy tales into anti-fairy tales.8 In contrast to the Tolkienian tradition of a happy end, which proved to be unsuitable for Poland, the Saga o Wiedźminie presents to the reader darker versions of the original fairy tales so that their underlying message is inverted. This then leads to more realistic tales instead of the happy end embedded in the source fairy tales. For his motif of anti-fairy tales, Sapkowski relies especially on those stories already known globally and existing in most countries and cultures in one form or another, such as the French story Beauty and the Beast by Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve (2017 [1740]) or the German Grimm brothers’ collected fairy tale of Snow White (2019 [1812]). The plot of Beauty and the Beast is introduced in the Saga o Wiedźminie through Nivellen, a cursed man condemned to live in the body of a furry monster. Since Nivellen suspects that he can end his misery by making a girl fall in love with him, he hands money to some random girls who in turn are obliged to spend their time in his company. However, it is Vereena—a vampire-like, very handsome bruxa—who lifts his curse when she avows her love to Nivellen before she dies. When Geralt meets the two (cf. Ostatnie Zyczeni (2008 [1993]); ‘A Grain of Truth’, The Witcher (2021)), he initially decides to let the ‘monsters’ be as they live peacefully together and do not harm anyone; nevertheless, when Vereena cannot stop herself and attacks Geralt, the wiedz m ́ in is forced to act against his wish and kills her. First, the change from fairy tale to anti-fairy tale enables a closer examination of the conception of monsters. Similar to the original tale, the beast eventually is proven not to be an actual ‘monster’: while in Beauty and the Beast (2017 [1740]) the animal-like man 8  For further reading on anti-fairy tales, see McAra and Calvin’s Anti-Fairy Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment (2011).

298 

A. D. WALDER

who indeed acts monstrous in the beginning turns out to be a handsome and sensitive prince, Nivellen as the animal-like man of the anti-fairy tale does not show any bestial behavior at all which is contrasted by the demeanor of Vereena. Through her failure to control herself, Sapkowski forces the reader to question the concept of monsters as not something one can detect by looking at an individual but rather as something performative. The beauty—in the original narrative embedded with feminine characteristics—is here twisted into a bestial woman. Thus, Sapkowski’s version becomes a cautious tale to not judge the Other simply by looks. Second, the notion of ‘there is no limit to love’ that colors the original story of the beauty able to see past the monstrous form and to fall in love with the beast is twisted into a rather pessimistic version that marks the beast as only lovable for another beast. Regarding this twisted version of Beauty and the Beast (2017 [1740]), it might be assumed that Andrzej Sapkowski also drew inspiration from his own country legends. The recurring thread of monsters not being bestial corresponds to the depiction of monsters in one of Adam Mickiewicz’s ballads from his series Ballady i Romanse (n.d.): here, a young man decides to cross a bridge of which many people have warned him as it is supposedly haunted by evil creatures. He then comes across a female ghost called Maryla, and as he refrains from running away, but instead stays put and expresses his amazement, the ghost transforms into a human girl and explains she was cursed by a revenging rejected lover, only left with the possibility of turning back into a girl when someone would express some affection for her ghostly form. Just like Nivellen, the girl was cursed by someone seeking revenge—a behavior that rather marks the curser as the monster than the individual ending up with a non-human outlook. In this context, Michalska (2020) points out that the tropes embedded in Mickiewicz’s ballads are universal for the poetry of Romanticism so that the similarities between Sapkowski’s plot and Mickiewicz’s ballads are beneficial in two ways: first, it binds the narrative more closely to Polish heritage and allows the native reader to rediscover some part of their cultural past; second, the foreign reader is not left in disorientation, unable to encounter the intertextuality of the Saga o Wiedźminie, but can still relate the tropes to their own cultural tradition. Another example of Sapkowski’s intertextual play is the incorporation of a more horrific version of the classic Snow White (2019 [1812]) in the form of Renfri (Ostatnie Zyczeni (2008 [1993]); ‘The End’s Beginning’, The Witcher (2019)). While Geralt is on the search for new assignments to earn money, he meets a woman called Renfri who has a group of seven gnomes—instead of seven dwarves—rallied around her with whose help she robs merchants traveling between cities. At one point, she tells him her story: similar to the girl in the original, Renfri’s stepmother not only tried to kill Renfri with a poisoned apple but also employed a hunter to kill her after her initial plan failed. The fairy tale becomes gruesomely twisted when the reader learns that the hunter did not show mercy like in the original classic version, but instead robbed and raped Renfri who then killed the huntsman to save herself. Her life

  CULTURAL APPROPRIATION OF POLAND’S FANTASY: THE COLD WAR… 

299

characterized by hostility and a constant threat of death changed Renfri from a delicate princess to a tough woman experienced in fighting and killing. Just like Sapkowski altered the story of Beauty and the Beast (2017 [1740]) so that it loses its nativity, he creates a tale that may follow the structure of Snow White but denies his readers the comfort of the traditional happy ending. Further, this anti-fairy tale highlights how an individual’s experience and background shapes their present behavior. Renfri was not born a monster but rather molded into one by the actions of others. Once again Sapkowski points to the various layers of an individual deemed monstrous—an awareness his main character Geralt shares. Renfri’s story ends when she attacks Geralt, leaving him with no other choice but to kill her; however, he does so with reluctance as he is aware of why she turned into a bloodthirsty woman. Sapkowski’s version of Snow White is thereby only one instance in which his protagonist Geralt faces his constant dilemma: as Geralt is a paid monster-slayer, he often finds himself confronted with the hesitation whether to slay or rather show a monster mercy; his decision is thereby complicated insofar as he does not always see the creatures as monsters but rather as victims of human domination (cf. ‘The End’s Beginning’ and ‘Four Marks’, The Witcher (2019)). Then, one can point to another anti-fairy tale that is found in the novels as well as the show: the twisted version of Sleeping Beauty (2001) in the form of princess Adda who turned into a stryga as she was falsely buried after being assumed to be still born (cf. Wiedźmin, 1992 [1990]). While the description of the situation is slightly changed in ‘Betrayer Moon’ (The Witcher (2019)), the girl inside the stryga is still presented as the product of an incestuous sexual union as well as she is saved by Geralt—both aspects follow the thread found in the Saga o Wiedźminie. After putting his dead daughter to sleep in a casket, so to speak, Adda’s father does not recognize his daughter in the form of the stryga, and he commissions Geralt to hunt the monster that haunts his subjects. When Geralt opposes the task he was paid to do and changes Adda back into her human form by biting her neck in self-defense, Sapkowski substitutes the prince’s awakening kiss with a bite that reminds more of the vampire’s sexual penetration in the form of the change-bringing bite than the tenderness of a lover. Even though this side story focusing on Adda does not directly appear to be an anti-fairy tale like the ones mentioned earlier as most parts of the original story are changed too much, the plot still serves as a reminder of monsters not always being monsters: it is the respective circumstance of a creature that determines whether it is truly a monster or deserves one’s mercy. The intertextual references in the Saga o Wiedz m ́ inie are deployed in a way that disenchants the reader and forces ‘them to start questioning known themes’ (Michalska 2020, 42) and to think about the hierarchal order of non-­ textual life. While one has to point to Tolkien’s influence on the fantasy genre in general, it is imperative to highlight the extension of Tolkien’s formula in the universe Sapkowski created as the latter departs from the rigid structure of high fantasy by turning fairy tales into anti-fairy tales that give his story a more realistic tone: by rendering a naive belief in the simple notion of good versus evil

300 

A. D. WALDER

impossible, Sapkowski points to the shades of gray humans are confronted with in the non-textual world as well as he creates a universe in contrast to the nativity of Tolkienian high fantasy. Insofar as not all Western readers are familiar with the various intertextual references to Slavic culture, the classification of the Saga o Wiedźminie as classic fantasy fiction that is guided by Tolkien’s formula is intelligible (cf. Michalska 2020). However, a universal claim of the saga following Tolkienian tradition leads to a reduction of Sapkowski’s creation of a fantastic world that is built on the cultural traditions of a great number of nations. Inasmuch as these stories are kept in the show, The Witcher (2019, 2021) provides its audience with a narrative that follows the source text’s approach of disenchanting the reader through the incorporation of anti-fairy tales as well as it highlights the same shades of gray, countering the nativity of believing in the possibility of a rigid differentiation between good and evil. Due to the incorporation of the anti-fairy tales in the Netflix adaptation, the producers were further able to keep the notion of Geralt’s character intact as the audience can follow him in his decision-making of whom to kill and whom to let live. Hereby, a story is created to which not only Poles can relate but to which also contemporary readers can built a connection insofar as it points to the same grayness opened by the challenges of globalization and the question of righteousness in the face of warfare.

Justifiable Appropriation: The Saga o Wiedz m ́ inie Moving to Netflix An important aspect of the Saga o Wiedz m ́ inie’s way to international success is its transmedia character that enabled a symbiotic relation between the different media adaptations, meaning that each release added to the public attention of the other versions.9 Before Andrzej Sapkowski’s saga reached international recognition, however, several adaptations came before as the adaptation of the Saga o Wiedźminie to screen proved to be more difficult than expected.10 After a history of failed attempts scrutinized by critics, the Netflix adaptation elevated the screen version to a new level that was finally praised by critics and Poles alike. Similar to approaching a screen adaptation as a translation of the story of one medium to another, one can regard adaptations as a kind of reappearance of the plot in another discoursive field providing the narrative with a novel spatial-temporal placing (cf. Stam and Raengo 2004). Insofar as many 9  The term transmedia refers to the establishment of a relationship between products of various media that relate to each other in terms of commerce, narrative, and reception: the products are branded as complementation to one fantastic universe, the narrative thread and characters are the same or at least resemble each other, the audience acknowledges the relation (cf. Jenkins 2006). 10  The most prominent example of earlier adaptations are the game series launched by CD Project RED in 2007 which then forced the pace of the novels’ translation to English as the global success of the games led to a rise in demand. Further, the final success of a comic version was achieved by Dark House Comic who published The Witcher: House of Glass (2014), The Witcher: Fox Children (2015), and The Witcher: Curse of Crows (2016).

  CULTURAL APPROPRIATION OF POLAND’S FANTASY: THE COLD WAR… 

301

adaptation studies reduce their findings to an examination of the same’s faithfulness to the source, notions of translation and reappearance broaden the possibilities of investigating the narratives in their new environment. However, since this study considers the aspect of cultural appropriation, there is no getting around an assessment of the adaptation’s faithfulness to the source text as done above. Considering the difference in medium and hence necessitative difference in narrating style, deviations from the source narrative are not to be assessed as wrong or disadvantageously for the story at the outset. It is rather the consideration of whether the core of the story was altered or not and, in the case of a cultural product moving from a minority culture to American mainstream culture, whether the novel product can be deemed an appropriation of another culture’s heritage (cf. Young 2005). Cultural appropriation is a heterogeneous notion that can appear in various forms which all share the same feature of a cultural outsider claiming something from the insiders’ culture. Regarding the study at hand, content appropriation is the form to be considered and refers to the situation when an outsider uses a cultural product of another, the insider’s culture, for an own cultural production. Following Young’s elaborations (2005) on whether appropriation can be done in a moral way, here, representation offense and consent offense have to be considered as a criterion for the justifiability of appropriation by Netflix. First, consent offense is caused by the failure of asking for permission to use the foreign product, and even if one has asked for permission, an unacknowledgment of the appropriation can still lead to a violation of the insiders’ rights. Regarding this offense, one has first to point to the legal regulations underlying adaptations of literature, such as copyright, that make a consent offense highly unlikely. Just like a Polish illustrator was involved in the comic production and a Polish company released the games, the Netflix adaptation had a renown Polish figure as executive producer: with Thomas Bagiński, Netflix committed the co-author of the games’ trailers to the production of a multi-seasoned project. Then, with setting the premier at Warsaw and producing a documentary about the production that also involved Sapkowski himself, Netflix constructed the marketing of The Witcher (2019) around its Polish background. These aspects can be seen as Netflix’s acknowledgment of the narrative’s background due to which consent offense on the basis of a missed acknowledgment of the product being of Polish origin becomes invalid. Further, many Poles feel a national pride toward Sapkowski’s creation that raised it to the status of a flagship for cultural productions in Poland evidenced by situations like Barak Obama’s visit to Poland in 2011: when the former President of America met Poland’s then prime minister, the latter gave Obama one of Sapkowski’s novels as a present (cf. Drewniak 2020). Insofar as the author had to sell his copyright to Netflix and Poles evidently take pride in the success of the saga, an argument for consent offense becomes rather unreasonable. As pointed out above, representation offense is the second marker for unjustifiable appropriation to be considered for the purpose of my argument. This offense occurs when an outsider produces a product that contains

302 

A. D. WALDER

misrepresentations of another culture; this happens, for instance, when the outsider is a member of the Western discourse and produces a representation of a minority culture that strengthens the stereotypes existing in the West about its Other. However, the representation of another culture does not necessarily lead to representation offense as it is the case when the image of the minority culture is correctly created so that the insiders accept the outsider’s product. As Sapkowski’s saga is a fantastic story without any direct representations of Poles, representation offense could only occur in terms of a misrepresentation of Polish values and attitudes incorporated in the novels. While differences between the written Saga o Wiedźminie and the screened The Witcher (2019, 2021) are inevitable due to the varying style of narration, focusing on the wrong semiotic signs can alter the story extensively on its journey to the other medium. Here, the producers of The Witcher walked a fine line between altering the narrative only enough so that those unfamiliar with the novels can follow its plot nonetheless and including those parts in the show that keep the spirit of Andrzej Sapkowski’s saga alive. While the screened adaptation does not rigidly follow the narrative structure just as it is not a close redisplay of the game series, Netflix achieved ‘a hybrid solution’ (Garwonski 2020, 5) that orients itself at Sapkowski’s prototype as well as the imaginary found in the games leading to the satisfaction of both fandoms. Further, Netflix created an original kind of fantasy series that follows three different threads and incorporates many side stories from the novels; these are then presented in a rather non-chronological order that renders the series a not-so-easy-watch like many other Netflix’s productions. One example for the change of thread that is the detailed introduction to the sorceress Yenefer: contrary to her background story’s slow explication in the course of all novels, the Netflix show already introduces the character to its audience in vast detail in the first season (The Witcher, 2019). This can be related to the circumstance that those viewers not familiar with the novel would otherwise be lost in the show. As the Netflix production only changed the order of the side plots and dialogues so that characters were properly introduced and the narrative fit the medium of the screen, the changes are rendered justifiable. Then, the omission of the author’s stylized choice of words and exceptionally well-written dialogues in favor of shorter versions more suitable to the medium of screen cannot only be condoned by the faithfulness to Polish mythological terminology but also by further similarities detectable in The Witcher (2019, 2021) that preserved the Saga o Wiedźminie’s character. Here, one can point to the aforementioned anti-fairy tales: the Renfri-version of Snow White (2019 [1812]), the similarity to Adam Mickiewicz’s ballads (n.d.), Geralt’s encounter with Vereena as the anti-fairy tale to Beauty and the Beast (2017 [1858]) as well as the story of princess Adda as a new version of Sleeping Beauty (2001). Like the preservation of the Slavic character and intertextuality of its source text that reflects Polish national identity as ‘determined by collective memory of conflicts between generations of Poles and their neighbors’ (Lastawski qtd. in Michalska 2020, 54), the

  CULTURAL APPROPRIATION OF POLAND’S FANTASY: THE COLD WAR… 

303

references to Polish history in the form of the Scoia’tael and the hostility between the species are translated to The Witcher (2019, 2021). Hence, the Netflix adaptation achieved to incorporate the ‘distinctive feature of Polish fantastic worlds’ (Drewniak 2020, 221), meaning the morally gray and horrific aspects found in the Saga o Wiedz m ́ inie, as well as to do justice to the saga’s original cultural context, both of which can be seen in relation to the advantage of screen adaptations—the possibility to narrate on a visual level. As those tropes that reflect Polish attitudes and cultural heritage as well as those important for the intertextual character of the novels were integrated into The Witcher (2019, 2021), the appropriation of the Polish story is improbably to cause any representation offense in Poles as the insiders of their culture.

Conclusion Inasmuch as the Saga o Wiedz m ́ inie is composed of various references to Polish culture, history as well as to its Slavic heritage and reflects ‘Polish national self-­ perceptions, preoccupations, and attitudes’ (Drewniak 2020, 212), it is hardly surprising that Polish people take pride in Sapkowski’s work and the global fame it has reached. One aspect that helped the Saga o Wiedźminie to its success is the mingling of different cultural products since it not only reflects the vast cultural influences on Polish folklore but also enables Western audiences to access the story’s intertextuality by providing them with references to familiar tropes; however, this mixture of Western and Eastern culture also led to claims of Sapkowski following in Tolkien’s footsteps—an idea that can only be countered by those knowing Eastern history and able to point to the Slavic images found in the saga. Since the translations to the English novels and to the American screen differ in the targeted medium, the morality of the translations varies as well: while the English novel mistranslates some foreign terms by choosing inappropriate semiotic signs, the producers of The Witcher (2019, 2021) could avoid these mistakes. As the novels’ translations tend to deviate from the source, parts of the Slavic mythology incorporated into the Saga o Wiedźminie lose their particularity and a Western reader is neglected a truthful representation of Eastern European folklore. The screen version of Sapkowski’s story, however, was able to incorporate the original words directly as the foreign audience is provided with suitable imaginary providing context to unfamiliar words. The close inspections of the diverse folklore incorporated in the novels and the contexts in which cultural appropriation is justifiable then led to reasonable evidence that enabled the argumentation in favor of Netflix’s translation of the Saga o Wiedźminie to the screen. Besides, as the Slavic aspects of the saga were kept rather intact, an emphasis on the difference between the Tolkienian tradition and Andrzej Sapkowski’s universe due to the variation of the used folklore was established. While the incorporation of Polish folklore can be seen as an attempt of reestablishing national Polish identity through the means of its cultural heritage, the discourse on the story’s Slavic character remains only understandable for those familiar with the vast history of Polish

304 

A. D. WALDER

and Slavic regions as well as the tradition of incorporating Eastern and Slavic mythology into Polish fantasy (cf. Gawronski and Bajorek 2020). Concluding, the global popularity of the Saga o Wiedz m ́ inie established Poland and its culture as an autonomous deliverer of high-quality products from Central Europe countering the stereotypical dismissal of Poland as only a small country in the East. The imagery of migration and warfare spoke to the Poles in the past and mirrors contemporary questions of migration politics in the EU or the fear of the Other in post-9/11 America—the sociopolitical aspects of the saga are as relevant today as they were at the time of Sapkowski’s debut.

Works Cited Aveela, Ronesa. A Study of Household Spirits of Eastern Europe. Bendideia Publishing, 2019. Clute, John; Grant, John. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. Palgrave Macmillan, 1997. Davis, Norman. Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland’s Present. Oxford University Press, 2001. de Villeneuve, Gabrielle-Suzanne. Beauty and the Beast. Planché, J.R., translator. Pook Press, 2017 [1858]. Drewniak, Paulina. ‘Literary Translation and Digital Culture: The Transmedial Breakthrough of Poland’s “The Witcher”’. Translating the Literature of Small European Nations. Rajendra Chitins et al., editor. Liverpool University Press, 2020. Gawronski, Slawomir; Bajorek, Kinga. ‘A Real Witcher—Slavic or Universal; from a Book, a Game or a Tv Series? In The Circle of Multimedia Adaptations of a Fantasy Series of Novels “The Witcher” by A. Sapkowski”. Arts 9(102), 2020. Grimm, Jacob; Grimm, Wilhelm. Snow White: The Original Brothers Grimm Fairytale. Rachel Louise Lawrence, translator. Self Published, 2019 [1812]. Grimm, Jacob; Grimm, Wilhelm. Sleeping Beauty: A Grimm’s Fairy Tale. Floris Books, 2001. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press, 2006. Kossak-Szcczucka, Zofia. Angels in the Dust: A Novel of the First Crusade [Krzyzowcy]. Nabu Press, 2011 [1935]. Krawczyk-Wasilewska, Violetta. ‘Polish Folklore’. Poland. History, Culture and Society. Selected readings. Eleonora Bielawska-Batorowicz, editor. Łódź, 2007. Lukowski, J., & Zawadzki, H. A Concise History of Poland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. McAra, Catriona; Calvin, David. Anti-Fairy Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment. Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2011. Michalska, Anna. Otherness and Intertextuality in The Witcher: The Duality of Experiencing Andrzej Sapkowski’s Universe. Utrecht University Repository, 2020. Mickiewicz, Adam. Balladen und Romanzen [Ballady i Romanse]. Philipp Reclam jun., print. Mironova, Polina. ‘The issue of translation of Slavic mythological creatures: Names in “The Witcher” cycle by A.  Sapkowski.’ Slavic World. Commonality and Diversity, 267–70, 2019.

  CULTURAL APPROPRIATION OF POLAND’S FANTASY: THE COLD WAR… 

305

Mucha, Aleksandra. ‘Translating Polish Fantasy—Translational challenges and problems concerning culture-rooted elements’. Między Oryginałem a Przekładem, 22(28): 55–71, 2020. Nienacki, Zbigniew. Dagome ludex. vol. 1 & 2: 1989, vol. 3: 1990. Nikolajeva, Maria. ‘Fairy Tale and Fantasy: From Archaic to Postmodern.’ Marvels & Tales, 17(1): 138–156, 2003. Sapkowski, Andrzej. The Witcher [Wiedźmin]. Published in Ostatnie życzenie, 1992 [1990]. Sapkowski, Andrzej. Sword of Destiny [Miecz Przeznaczenia]. Gollancz, 2015 [1992]. Sapkowski, Andrzej. The Last Wish [Ostatnie Zyczeni]. Gollancz, 2008 [1993]. Sapkowski, Andrzej. Blood of Elves [Krew Elfów]. Gollancz, 2009 [1994]. Sapkowski, Andrzej. Time of Contempt [Czas Pogardy]. Gollancz, 2013 [1995]. Sapkowski, Andrzej. Baptism of Fire [Chrzest Ognia]. Gollancz, 2014 [1996]. Sapkowski, Andrzej. The Tower of Swallows [Wieża Jaskółki]. Gollancz, 2016 [1997]. Sapkowski, Andrzej. Lady of the Lake [Pani Jeziora]. Gollancz, 2017 [1999]. Sienkiewicz, Henryk. With Fire and Sword [Ogniem i Mieczem]. Fredonia Books, 2002 [1884]. Stam, Robert; Raengo, Alessandra. A Companion to Literature and Film. Blackwell Publishing, 2004. The Witcher, created by Andrzej Sapkowski and Lauren S.  Hissrich, Poland/US: Netflix, 2019. The Witcher, created by Andrzej Sapkowski and Lauren S.  Hissrich, Poland/US: Netflix, 2021. Tobin, Paul. The Witcher: House of Glass [Wiedźmin: Dom ze szkła]. Joe Querio, illustrator. Dark Horse Comics, 2014. Tobin, Paul. The Witcher: Fox Children [Wiedźmin: Dzieci lisicy]. Joe Querio, illustrator. Dark Horse Comics, 2015. Tobin, Paul. The Witcher: Curse of Crows [Wiedźmin: Kla ̨twa kruków]. Piotr Kowalski, illustrator. Dark Horse Comics, 2016. Yeǧenoǧlu, Meyda. Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism. Cambridge University Press, 1998. Young, James O. ‘Profound Offense and Cultural Appropriation’. The Journal of Aesthetic and Art Criticism 65(2): 135–146, 2005. Ziemkiewicz, Rafal. Skarby Stolinów [trans. Stolin’s Treasures], KAW, 1990.

Syncretism in Russian Fantasy Donatella Possamai

The Triumph of Fantasy in Russia The Federal Agency for Press and Mass Media (Federal’noe agenstvo po pečati i massovym kommunikacijam) publishes the results of the surveys on the book market carried out by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (Vserossijskij centr izučenija obščestvennogo mnenija) every year; for the year 2019, the genres linked to the literature of the fantastic are placed stably at 21% in the general reading preferences of Russians. The popular website selling e-books, LitRes, also has fe ̇ntezi (fantasy) and fantastika (fantastic literature) placed respectively at 32% and at 10% on the popularity index, that is to say in second and third place, beaten only by romance novels (Cf. Grigor’ev, 60–64).1 It is interesting to note how, in the second ranking, fantasy occupies a separate position from fantastika; but what is the relationship which exists between them? To try and free the field from possible terminological misunderstandings, in this chapter we shall utilize the term fantastic literature2 in its wider sense, also because «it is unlikely that a final answer to the question of the essence of 1  All of the annual reports, which naturally refer to the previous year, can be downloaded at the following page: http://www.unkniga.ru/analitika/bookrinok.html 2  For the articulations of the fantastical in literature we refer to the two critical essays by Tzvetan Todorov and by Remo Ceserani. Regarding Russia see Elena Kovtun (1999).

D. Possamai (*) Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Letterari (DiSLL), University of Padua, Padua, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2_20

307

308 

D. POSSAMAI

fantastic literature and the limits of “fantastic literature” will ever be given» (Kovtun 2007, 20).3 The only distinction within the field used by us shall be that between fantasy and science fiction (nauc ̌naja fantastika) which appears to be different articulations, or, in other terms, subgenres of fantastic literature. This implicit distinction is in fact now generally accepted by Russian scholars: Into this area [of fantastic literature] fit the works built upon a fantastic premise. This premise, as a rule, either implies a fundamental explicableness and logical motivation for its presence in the text (the rational fantastic literature, that is, in current terminology, science fiction), or, no less fundamentally, it refuses it, immediately inviting the reader into a “wondrous” model of reality” (fantasy). (Kovtun 2008, 71)4

Kirill Korolev outlines this same structure perhaps even more clearly: Jointly, fantasy and science fiction make up the fantastic literature movement in the field of mass literature and at this point, within this movement, the structure of the themed oppositions is formed (conventionally retrospective fantasy and conventionally progressive science fiction); basically, fantastic literature is literature of the extraordinary, of the impossible at the contemporary level of society’s development. (Korolev, 22)5

This distinction also has quite clearly defined inner chronological confines. If until a few decades ago the territory of the Russian fantastika coincided, in fact, with science fiction, now it is no longer so, quite the contrary: the presence of fantasy within contemporary fantastic literature has become clearly prevalent, as we have seen from the charts reported above. The Soviet era, in fact, was marked by the triumph of science fiction and by the refusal of fantasy: “Thanks to the efforts of official critics, in the mind of the readers of the socialist block, fantasy was associated with the low-quality popular literature of the decadent West” (Kovtun 2007, 330)6 and therefore condemned; as a 3  «окончательный ответ на вопрос о сущности фантастики и границах понятия “фантастическая литература” едва ли когда-нибудь будет дан». Unless otherwise indicated, all of the translations are by the author of this paper. 4  «В эту область входят произведения, строящиеся на основе фантастической посылки. Последняя, как правило, либо претендует на принципиальную объяснимость и логическую мотивацию своего присутствия в тексте (рациональная, в общепринятой терминологии «научная» фантастика), либо не менее принципиально отказывается от таковой, сразу приглашая читателя в “чудесную” модель бытия (fantasy)». 5  «Совместно фэнтези и научная фантастика составляют направление фантастики в поле массовой литературы, и уже внутри этого направления формируется структура тематических оппозиций (условно-ретроспективная фэнтези и условно-прогрессистская НФ); собственно же фантастика есть литература о небывалом / невозможном для современного уровня развития общества». 6  «Благодаря усилиям официальной критики fantasy в сознании читателей из стран социалистического блока ассоциировалась с “бульварной”, низкокачественной литературой “загнивающего Запада”».

  SYNCRETISM IN RUSSIAN FANTASY 

309

consequence, it was scarcely accessible by the public. It is certainly not therefore a coincidence that in Russia fantasy exploded roughly twenty-five years ago, in the second half of the ’90s: from 1991 the official disappearance of the Soviet Union and of its institutions had caused a series of radical changes also in the cultural landscape, unsettling the entire social and artistic life and upsetting also the old rules of the world of state publishing. Another era had begun, that of the savage ’90s (lichie 90-e variously translated also as bold, fiery, crazy) an era in which everything had suddenly become possible, but also an era of fear, bewilderment, in which clear criteria for the organization of civil, cultural, and also individual life no longer existed. Everyday life was subject to pressing spurts in all sectors, requiring, generally, continuous efforts of adaptation to the frantic changes of the surrounding world. The new Constitution of the Russian Federation of 1993 saw enshrined, among the political rights of the citizen, freedom of speech and of press; the new private publishing houses could therefore publish anything, but they found themselves having to deal with the free market. Compared to the old Soviet world, books now had to be sold and therefore had to meet the public’s taste, a new public, with different needs and requirements, in constant evolution, regarding the publishing market. As is typical of all eras of transition, the feeling of disorientation, instability, and nostalgia pushed the reading public to try to reconstruct safe horizons, to make of literature a reassuring tool, able to reconstruct sure coordinates, ending up therefore by attributing to it, willingly or not, a compensatory, therapeutic function; in other words, literature performs a problem-solving function with respect to the collision of epistemological, religious, and cultural systems.7 Therefore, in Russian Federation, those literary products in which the escapist value, more or less evident, set in motion the mechanisms necessary to fill the identity deficit afflicting a large part of society were favored (Cf. Possamai 2018, 9–15 and passim). In this completely new social scenario fantasy became a perfect piece of the puzzle. In the West, the phenomenon had started long before: after the success of the trilogy of The Lord of the Rings by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien in the second half of the ’50s, fantasy experienced a constant increase in popularity among readers; as we shall see, Russian society recovered the time lost quite quickly, manifesting once again the great ability of its cultural system to assimilate and re-elaborate foreign models, a feature which has characterized its internal dynamic over the centuries. Let us return to fantasy: the founding and indispensable element which is recurrent in all the different articulations of fantasy is the presence of an unavoidable fantastical premise (or, better said, magical). This structural premise, devoid therefore of a rational explanation (which is instead typical of science fiction), once accepted by the reader, makes any wondrous event or character plausible:

7

 On the “therapeutic” role of literature and its function of problem solving see Calabrese, 3–47.

310 

D. POSSAMAI

NF/SF [nauc ̌naja fantastika/science fiction] and fantasy differ significantly from each other. NF/SF claims a rational, at least pseudo-scientific explanation for any fantastic incursion into the familiar empirical world, whereas fantasy […] presents a totally nonempirical world, all the fantastic element of which have to be accepted and taken for granted by the reader to begin with. (Lovell, Menzel, 125)

Fantasy is therefore a sort of fantastic literature based on a premise of a plot of an unreal nature. The underlying assumption does not find, in fact, any “logical” motivation in the text and presupposes the existence and the acceptance of facts and phenomena which, differently from science fiction, do not lend themselves to futuristic explanations. As Darko Suvin put it: Science fiction has always been created through the author’s fascination with unknown possibilities; inextinguishable curiosity has supplied the foundation of the genre. But unlike fantasy, in SF the amazing aspects of the story had to lie within the bounds of what was possible according to the standards of knowledge current in the author’s world. (Suvin, 11, italics mine)

So, if in science fiction we are dealing with “a new, hypothetical but cognitively possible framework of intelligent life” (Suvin, 12), in fantasy there can be any sort of fantastical hypotheses to explain the strangeness of settings and of characters. In this alternative world everything is possible: gods, demons, good and evil sorcerers, witches, talking animals and objects, mythological and legendary creatures, ghosts, vampires, shapeshifters and any other type of creatures, anthropomorphic or not. The narrative acquires plausibility, intended as internal structural cohesion, thanks to the acceptance of this preliminary condition. These micro and/or macro fictional worlds must therefore suggest a sensation of authenticity that is born only indirectly in the reader, that is to say through the perception that the protagonists have of these worlds. For the characters in fantasy, the world represented is real and the laws which govern it determine their actions. By virtue of what has been said, if compared to science fiction, fantasy often pays much higher attention to the inner world of the characters; it is not by chance that Maria Nikolajeva speaks of «an externalization of the protagonist’s inner world» (Nikolajeva, 138–156) which is probably due to «the question of faith and of the “suspension of disbelief”» (Nikolajeva, 152)8 that acceptance of the wondrous without which fantasy could not exist. Furthermore, while science fiction tends to project itself toward the future, classical fantasy often finds its natural setting in a mythological or mythologized past, which can also become contaminated with the present, as we shall see. In Russia, still today, the debate around fantasy is very lively and mainly revolves around two principal questions: is fantasy a genre?9 When is an 8  Expression, that in quotation marks, that Maria Nikolaeva modifies from Samuel Taylor Coleridge adapting it to another context. 9  For a careful examination of the definitions attributed to fantasy see Jakovenko, 140–167, https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/zhanrovye-osobennosti-fentezi-na-osnove-analiza-slovarnyh-­ definitsiy-­fentezi-i-nauchnoy-fantastiki/viewer

  SYNCRETISM IN RUSSIAN FANTASY 

311

authentic Russian fantasy born? We shall not deal with the first question here because it involves the status of fantasy in general10; we shall note only en passant the definition of “genre” attributed to it in the Dictionary of the Contemporary Reader (Slovar’ sovremennogo c ̌itatelja) by the influential publishing group Ėksmo: Fantasy is a fantastic genre which uses mythological and folkloristic motifs in the narration in addition to fairy-tale themes. Given that the fantasy genre was formed under the influence of British authors, mainly that of J.R.R. Tolkien, the fantasy worlds are aesthetically close to the chivalric middle ages, but are at the same time inhabited by imaginary creatures and heroes with supernatural powers. Currently a great number of fantasy novels based on Scandinavian, Slavic and other mythologies can be found.11

Natalija Kupina, Marija Litovskaja, and Natalija Nikolina also speak of genre, tracing the birth of Russian fantasy back to the early twentieth century with authors such as Fëdor Sologub, Valerij Brjusov, and Aleksandr Grin (Kupina, Litovskaja, Nikolina, 224), while other critics push its origins much further back, even arriving at the first third of the nineteenth century with the appearance of fantastical elements in the works of Nikolaj Gogol’, Antonij Pogorelskij, Aleksandr Bestužev-Marlinskij, Vladimir Odoevskij, and others. The Literary Encyclopedia of Terms and Concepts (Literaturnaja e ̇nciklopedija terminov i ponjatij) devotes an entire entry to fantasy. The contributor, despite managing to find illustrious Russian predecessors of the genre such as Michail Bulgakov and the brothers Arkadij and Boris Strugackie, must admit nevertheless that «only at the end of the XX century does it become possible to speak of the creation of a national fantasy» (Gopman, 1163).12 It is no coincidence, in fact, that the term has only recently taken on a stable form in Cyrillic script; until recent times one could find countless variations in its transcription and still today the gender varies from the feminine to the neuter, as is also the case in the Italian language, which sometimes presents it as a masculine noun. In the first phase following the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the literature of translation (perevodnaja literatura) poured into the internal market en masse, and the «boom of translated fantastic literature opened up Russian culture to a new trend (more precisely, to anticipate slightly, a new cultural genre):

 In addition to what has already been mentioned see Choruženko, 392–397.  «Фэнтези—фантастический жанр, который использует мифологические и фольклорные, а также сказочные мотивы в повествовании. В связи с тем, что жанр фэнтези формировался под влиянием британских авторов, в первую очередь, под влиянием Дж. Р. Р. Толкина, миры фэнтези эстетически близки рыцарскому Средневековью, но при этом населены вымышленными существами и героями, обладающими сверхъестественными силами. В настоящее время можно встретить большое количество фэнтези-романов, основанных на скандинавской, славянской и других мифологиях», italics mine, https://eksmo.ru/slovar/ fentezi/ 12  «Лишь в конце 20 в. стало возможным говорить о формировании отечественной фэнтези». 10 11

312 

D. POSSAMAI

fantasy» (Korolev, 9).13 Under the pressure of foreign literature, «the writers [Russian] of fantastic literature lost competitiveness for some years. The market simply crushed them. The abundance of translated fantastic literature, absolutely forbidden in the Soviet context and absolutely allowed in the Post-Soviet context, made the ground crumble from beneath their feet» (Volodichin).14 Quite soon though a solid autochthonous production also established itself: «Science fiction and foreign fantasy dominated the Russian book market until the mid ’90s and then the landscape changed almost instantly. Immediately, some publishers who had correctly guessed the developing trends and the market potential of their “own” mass literature, started publishing collections of works created by national authors» (Korolev, 9).15 An emblematic case that testifies the process of assimilation, appropriation, and transformation of foreign models and of the subsequent passage to a fully autochthonous production is that of the popular writer Nik Perumov, whose work has passed through different stages: from the translatio, through the imitatio and the aemulatio, to arrive at the inventio in a broad sense. In 1993 he made his debut with the first two novels—Elven Blade (El’fijskij klinok) and Black Lance (Č ërnoe kop’ë)—of the Ring of Darkness cycle (Kol’co t’my) to which was added in 1995 the third and last novel, The Adamant of Henna (Adamant Chenny). The cycle has a hobbit as its main character and is set in Middle-earth, made famous by Tolkien’s novels,16 of which it stands as a sort of sequel, as stated explicitly in the trilogy’s subtitle: free continuation of the Lord of the Rings.17 As soon as he gained notoriety, Perumov moved on to the creation of autonomous fantastical worlds with the cycle Hjorward Chronicles (Letopisi Ch’ёrvarda), and no longer made use of direct “loans.” It has been precisely thanks to the re-elaboration in a local key that Russian fantasy has gained enormous popularity. It is a phenomenon which, in the light of the studies of Roland Robertson and Zygmunt Bauman, we could define as glocalization: 13  «…бум переводной фантастики открыл для русской культуры новое направление (точнее, забегая немного вперед, новый культурный жанр)—фэнтези». 14  «Фантасты на несколько лет теряют конкурентоспособность. Рынок их просто давит. Обилие переводной фантастической литературы, абсолютно запрещенной в советских условиях и абсолютно разрешенной в условиях постсоветских, выбивает у них почву из-под ног», https://znamlit.ru/publication.php?id=2826 15  «Зарубежные фантастика и фэнтези господствовали на российском книжном рынке примерно до середины 1990-х гг.—а затем картина почти мгновенно изменилась. Сразу несколько издательств, верно оценив тенденции развития и рыночный потенциал “своей” массовой литературы, приступили к выпуску книжных серий, составленных из произведений отечественных авторов». This datum is also confirmed by the statistical analyses carried out by Jeremy Dwyer on the annual bestsellers charts drawn up by the Knižnoe Obozrenie magazine from 1994 to 1998; in only four  years the percentage of foreign authors fell from 69.1 to 29.7. Dwyer, 306. 16  For the Nik Perumov cycle and, more in general, for the influence of Tolkien on Russian fantasy, see Kokhanovskaïa, Nazarenko, 84. 17  Cf. Stroeva, https://magazines.gorky.media/nlo/2005/1/fentezi-2004-m-2004-fentezi-­ ­2005-m-2004.html

  SYNCRETISM IN RUSSIAN FANTASY 

313

Integration and fragmentation, globalization and territorialization are mutually complementary processes; more precisely still, two sides of the same process […] It is for this reason that—following Roland Robertson’s suggestions—it is advisable to speak of glocalization rather than globalization […] The intimate connection between the ostensibly world-wide availability of cultural tokens and increasingly diversified, territorial uses made of them has turned into one of the staple topics of the present-day social-scientific study and discourse. By common agreement among the analysts of contemporary scene, “globalization” does not mean cultural unification; the mass production of “cultural material” does not lead to the emergence of anything like “global culture”. The global scene needs to be seen rather as a matrix of possibilities, from which highly varied selections and combinations can be, and are, made; through the selection and combination from the global yarn of cultural tokens, separate and distinct identities are woven… (Bauman, 42–43)

Grafted on the fertile Russian soil, long open to the appropriation and reworking of western literary models, the tradition of fantasy has first and foremost given rise to the so-called Slavic fantasy (Lovell, Menzel, 123 and following). We shall mention here, among the countless possible examples, only the very famous hexalogy Volkodav (Wolfhound, 1995–2014) by Marija Semenova, set in an alternative world which brings to mind the Rus’ of Kiev. The reasons for the success of Slavic fantasy are to be found, by no coincidence, in the continuous harking back to the «Slavic meta-subject» (slavjanskij metasjužet, in Kirill Korolev’s fitting definition). The Slavic meta-subject is to be intended as the constant reference to a common cultural and ideological context, dominated by the interest in ancient Slavic and pre-Christian history, mythology and folklore, characterized by the attempts to establish a continuity between contemporary and ancient Russian cultures, thus isolating the autochthonous culture from other cultural traditions until the refusal of the latter, and highlighting at the same time the supremacy of the former. In concrete terms, Slavic fantasy has as its object the fantastical narration of a common heroic past (much more Russian than Slavic, in reality) built upon the reworking of the myths of the byliny18—the popular epic narrative Russian poems—and of other elements of the folklore; the first function of this operation, like it or not, is that of stabilizing the sense of national identity, creating a direct channel of communication between the glorious and joyous time that was, with a present not equally as happy and surreptitiously projecting the harmony of then onto the chaos of today: If a nation is understood as an imaginary community, built in the framework of a “shared” common culture, then nationalism is a process of self-identification of the members of said community—a process which requires a long time for the 18  In this regard, the tetralogy created by Konstantin Pleščakov in 1998–2006 titled Annals of the Bogatyri (Bogatyrskie Chroniki), which proposes again to the reader, in a fantasy theme, all the heroic deeds of the great heroes of the byliny, the bogatyri Svjatogor, Dobrynja Nikitič, Il’ja Muromec and Aleša Popovič, deserves to be mentioned.

314 

D. POSSAMAI

identification of the self with that same community, a process which reveals, divulges and glorifies the advantages of belonging to that community and ­determines the cultural, symbolic confines of the “ours” and of the “theirs” for the purpose of a subsequent differentiation of values from the latter. (Korolev, 52)19

It is therefore evident that in the historical situation in which the country found itself in the mid-’90s, the fictional worlds of Slavic fantasy represented— and continue to represent—a safe landing place for that ship (national, imperial? always and anyway individual) constantly at the mercy of the waves. In other terms, a tool to bury the Post-Soviet trauma and bring back to life a past greatness. Similar to fantasy in general (see Gogoleva, 85–89) other movements and subgenres have subsequently proliferated, also internally to Russian fantasy, with different denominations; Kirill Korolev is right when he states that «the ambiguity of that which is meant by “fantasy” has led some researchers to abandon the attempt to define fantasy in general and to concentrate on analysing the “particulars”, that is the intra-genre directions that it seemed possible to identify and group together—generally, according to a thematic principle» (Korolev, 324).20 The opacity of the term “fantasy,” the difficulty of defining it once and for all has led therefore to coining or adopting a series of sub-­ definitions, from mystic thriller (mistic ̌eskij triller) to space opera (kosmoopera) to urban fantasy (gorodskoe fe ̇ntezi) and many, many others.21

A Model Case Study At this point it can be useful to analyze a text which has more than once been attributed to urban fantasy. The World of Watches (Dozory) series by Sergej Luk’janenko (1968–) started in 199822 and officially the original author’s cycle—a hexalogy—ended in 2014 with the publication in Russia of Sixth Watch (Šestoj Dozor); in reality, by 2018 on the net there were rumors (and by 2019 19  «Если нация понимается как воображаемое сообщество, конструируемое в рамках общей, “разделяемой” (shared) культуры, тогда национализм представляет собой процесс самоидентификации членов этого сообщества  – протяженный по времени процесс отождествления себя с данным сообществом, выявления, популяризации и всемерной глорификации преимуществ принадлежности к данному сообществу, определения культурных, символических границ “своего” и “чужого” для последующей ценностной дифференциации от последнего». Korolev reconstructs the history of the Slavic meta-subject from the times of Catherine the Great. 20  «Неопределенность означаемого для термина “фэнтези” побудила ряд исследователей отказаться от попыток дать определение фэнтези в целом и сосредоточиться на анализе “частностей”, то есть внутрижанровых направлений, которые представлялось возможным выделить и сгруппировать – как правило, по сюжетно-тематическому принципу». 21  For a careful reconstruction of the ramifications of fantastika in the 90s, see Kaplan (2001) https://magazines.gorky.media/novyi_mi/2001/9/zaglyanem-za-stenku.html and also the subsequent Kaplan (2005, 125–142). 22  Precisely the previous year Nik Perumov and Sergej Luk’janenko had written together Not the Time for Dragons (Не время для драконов); called an example of technofantasy, the novel had a certain success.

  SYNCRETISM IN RUSSIAN FANTASY 

315

also the prologue and the whole first chapter) of a further book in the saga with the working title The Eternal Watch (Vec ̌nye Dozory). In the best ­tradition of serial literature, for over twenty years the universe of the Watch has in any case continued to expand thanks to the contribution of volumes and short stories outsourced to other authors, taking the count to almost thirty titles.23 Briefly the plot of the series World of Watches. On Earth, since time immemorial, humans and the Others—vampires, magicians, witches, and shapeshifters—equipped to different degrees with Powers, which allow them to penetrate the different levels of the Twilight, alternative to our everyday reality, have coexisted. The Others are divided into two opposing factions which apparently correspond to the eternally contrasting polarities of Good and Evil (Light and Dark); the custodians of this eternal struggle are the Night Watch for the forces of good and the Day Watch for the forces of evil. The constant balance between the fighting parties is set out by a thousand-year-old treaty whose keepers are enlisted in the Inquisition. The series narrates the different attempts, now by one side, now by the other, to prevail: the equilibrium, dynamic and not static, is necessary for the survival of the whole of humanity. This is, in brief, the narrative axis around which the events of the main character, Anton Gorodeckij, Night Watchman, revolve. The stories narrated range widely in subject, with forays into different popular subgenres, from psychological thrillers, to romance novels, to Sword and sorcery. All of this is masterfully combined in a horror cocktail whose ingredients include irony, a taste for metaphor and allegory with frequent incursions into metaphysics. The latter feature is particularly evident in Last Watch (Poslednij Dozor), published in Italian by Mondadori in 2008 and originally published in 2006, in which the three main characters—an Inquisitor, a sorceress, and a vampire—conspire to resurrect the people dear to the three conspirators. Those who are familiar with Russian culture cannot but hear the strong echoes of the cosmist philosophy of Nikolaj Fëdorov expounded in the work titled The Philosophy of the Common Task (Filosofija obšc ̌ego dela), published posthumously by two of his disciples from 1906 to 1913. The “common task” to pursue, as the only possibility of reaching happiness on Earth, is reunification with the fathers and all those who have disappeared; this would come about through their resurrection, made possible by scientific progress. At the basis of Luk’janenko’s success there is surely a great ability in the use of fusion on more than one level: «A strong mix of psychoanalytical practices and ethical imperatives is the normal “setting” of the books of Sergej Luk’janenko. A happy choice of “proportions” has contributed greatly to his impetuous literary career» (Volodichin).24 The hybridization and the 23  From the official website of Sergej Luk’janenko, cf.: http://lukianenko.ru/cyclebooks_ rus/#gsc.tab=0 24  «Крепкая смесь из психоаналитических практик и этических императивов—нормальный “фон” в книгах Сергея Лукьяненко. Удачно подобранные “пропорции” немало способствовали его стремительной литературной карьере», https://znamlit.ru/publication.php?id=2826

316 

D. POSSAMAI

contamination of the works of Luk’janenko are characteristics detected also by Birgit Menzel, who indulges in the temptation of allowing them to rise to become distinctive elements of a subgenre: Since the 1960s, another subgenre, “urban fantasy” or “dark fantasy”, has become very popular. Its novels are based on the juxtaposition of fantasy world and contemporary reality, and often mix elements of fantasy thriller, horror and science fiction. Vampires, werewolves, fairies and other fantasy characters are moving back and forth between their fantasy world and today’s modern urban world. The most successful authors of this ‘urban fantasy’ include Neil Gaiman, Robert Zelasny, and in Russia recently Sergei Luk’janenko. (Lovell, Menzel, 123)

One of the main reasons for the extraordinary success of the series of the Watch is due precisely to its undefined genre, to this skillful (and cunning) remodulation of fantasy following the beat of the most diverse genres, in addition to the simultaneous use of more literary formulas, according to John Cawelty’s definition (Cawelty, 5–37). The malleability of the narrative material of the Watch has favored its transformation into videogames and film; the film Night Watch (Noc ̌noj Dozor) came out in Russia in June 2004 and Day Watch (Dnevnoj Dozor) in January 2006, both directed by Timur Bekmambetov; the scripts of the two films, on whose creation Luk’janenko himself also worked, are significantly distant from the original works and have not been taken into consideration here. The power of the transmedia has in turn caused a leap in sales and the translation of the book into various languages, almost all following the first film; except for a translation of Night Watch which came out in Polish in 2003 and one in Lithuanian in 2004, all the others (English, German, French, Czech, Estonian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, and Italian) are subsequent to the release of the film. The popular website Laboratorija Fantastiki, from which we have taken these data, does not, however, mention the Italian translation, added by us, leading one to assume a wider circulation in further languages.25 There are also other elements, of a different nature, which have contributed in a decisive manner to making the series so attractive to the general public: the setting, which, albeit combining the human dimension and the supernatural one, is, as already stated, a contemporary one with Russia and Moscow as its main backgrounds. This allows for constant references to a reality familiar to the reader, reinforcing at the same time the possibility and the plausibility of the other world which, subtended to everyday life, could easily be accessible to everybody. The series, furthermore, plays out in its entirety as a sort of Bildungsroman. The arc of the main character, Anton Gorodeckij, follows classical lines: as a young and normal human he discovers he is an Other and is initiated, he encounters the friendship of the other Light Watch and the love of Svetlana, he  https://fantlab.ru/work1255

25

  SYNCRETISM IN RUSSIAN FANTASY 

317

comes up against the hard reality of the two worlds and throughout myriad experiences finds himself and his role in life. We shall note in passing that Sergej Luk’janenko, prior to dedicating himself exclusively to writing, was a psychiatrist by profession; this is evident where the author’s propensity to introspective character descriptions comes from, fundamental in the fantasy framework as was said above. And here intervenes another captivating effect of the Watch: Gorodeckij, who begins his career as a medium-low level mage (fourth on a scale of seven), will manage to climb the rigid hierarchy of the Others until the highest degree, that of Grand mage. As in the Bildungsroman we see the encounter and clash between an inner law and the outer circumstances depicted. Gorodeckij understands, along the road, that good is not absolute just as evil is not absolute and that often light and dark and all the oppositional series that derive therefrom, so typical of Russian culture, coexist inextricably in reality, because they are merely part of a single monistic principle. This vision of the world of the Watch is supported by the author himself: The fact is that in the cycle of the Watch there are no oppositions, and probably this is what makes it interesting. The dichotomy between good and evil exists only in the thoughts of Gorodeckij when he is young, in the very first book. Going forward he understands more and more that not all the children of the light are really so and that the same is also true for the children of the dark… (Balueva)26

The traditional Manichean vision of the genre, typical for example of works such as The Lord of the Rings, therefore falters, bringing about, also in this case, an effect of higher credibility and allure. The fundamental characteristic of the series of the Watch is of having initiated a new path toward the recovery of utopic-dystopic representations. Utopia, although denied in the classic terms of the projection of a possible model of an ideal society, acquires the characteristics of a universal, and at the same time individual, right to dream, limiting oneself to the hic et nunc, to the recovery and to the reconstruction of a reassuring image of oneself and of the world and of a stable identity, peculiarities, these, typical of many works of fantasy and that have decreed their enormous success in Russia. The implicit pact with the reader suggests therefore that the protagonist of the fantasy maintains a solid identity profile for the purpose of keeping alive the game of identification and of the projection of the self. Maybe also for this reason, besides the obvious implications of a commercial nature, after the protagonist Anton Gorodeckij had lost his supernatural capacities in the Sixth Watch, last “official” episode, Luk’janenko felt the need to reopen the plot: 26  «В том-то и дело, что в “Дозорах” противостояния нет, чем они и интересны, наверное. Дихотомия добра и зла там существует разве что в мыслях юного Городецкого, в самой первой книге. А чем дальше, тем сильнее он понимает, что не все Светлые светлы и не все Темные темны…», https://www.kp.ru/daily/26195.5/3082526/

318 

D. POSSAMAI

And then The Sixth Watch, in which I have decided with joy to finish the story. Let the Others remain, the Watch fight, but Anton Gorodeckij... then my hand trembled, I could not bring myself to kill him […]. I made him return a man. And after having finished writing the book, suddenly I understood that I had acted much more cruelly […]. How could he live after having lost all his powers? After having lost all the world in which he had lived and fought for twenty years? This is a tragedy… But every tragedy is a good excuse for a book. (Luk’janenko)27

And for continuing a dream. For the moment, though, on the official website of Luk’janenko and on the LitRes page dedicated to it, still only the foreword and the first chapter of the seventh book by the provisional title Eternal Watch are available…28 Maybe the writer really intends to close the cycle? In the interview given to the popular newspaper Izvestija almost four years ago now Luk’janenko was ambiguous in this regard: «Recently an unexpected twist came to mind, which, in my opinion, really concludes everything. I am not saying that Anton Gorodeckij will die, but this will surely be the ending. I will close the “watch” theme forever» (Kornackij).29 Who knows…

Works Cited Balueva, Anna, Sergej Luk’janenko: Dozory—eto ̇ špionskie romany o dvuch specslužbach, in Komsomol’skaja Pravda, 16 February 2014. Bauman, Zygmunt, On Glocalization: or Globalization for some, Localization for some Others, “Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology,” 1998, 54.1. Calabrese, Stefano, www.literature.global. Il romanzo dopo il postmoderno, Einaudi, Torino 2005. Cawelti John G., Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1976. Ceserani, Remo, Il fantastico, Il Mulino, Bologna 1996. Choruženko, Tat’jana, Žanrovaja model’ fe ̇ntezi: vozmožnyj podchod k probleme, in Paradigmy perechodnosti i obrazy fantastic ̌eskogo mira v chudožestvennom prostranstve XIX–XXI vv., Izdatel’stvo Nižegorodskogo universiteta, Nižnij Novgorod 2019.

27  «А потом Шестой Дозор—где я злорадно решил всё-таки закончить историю. Пусть остаются Иные, пусть воюют Дозоры—а вот Антон Городецкий … тут моя рука дрогнула, убить его я не смог […] Сделал человеком. А дописав книгу, вдруг понял, что поступил куда более жестоко […] Ну как может он жить, лишившись всех сил? Потеряв весь тот мир, в котором жил и сражался двадцать лет? Это же трагедия … Но любая трагедия—это повод для книги», https://vk.com/@izdatelstvoast-vechnyi-dozor 28   Respectively on the pages http://lukianenko.ru/works_rus/371.html#gsc.tab=0 and https://www.litres.ru/sergey-lukyanenko/vechnyy-dozor/chitat-onlayn/ 29  «Недавно придумал неожиданный поворот, который, как мне кажется, действительно всё завершает. Я не говорю, что Антон Городецкий умрет, но это точно будет финал. Я закрою тему с “дозорами” навсегда», Kornackij, https://iz.ru/825757/nikolai-kornatckii/ ia-zakroiu-temu-s-dozorami-navsegda

  SYNCRETISM IN RUSSIAN FANTASY 

319

Dwyer, Jeremy, The Knižnoe Obozrenie Bestsellers Lists, Russian Reading Habits, and the Development of Russian Literary Culture, 1994–1998, in The Russian Review, 2007, 66, 2. Gogoleva, Sajara, Drugie miry: tradicii i tipologija žanra fentezi, ̇ in Nauka i obrazovanija, 2006, 3. Gopman, Vladimir, Fe ̇ntezi, in Nikoljukin Aleksandr (ed. by), Literaturnaja e ̇nciklopedija terminov i ponjatij, NPK «Intelvak», Moskva 2003. Grigor’ev, Vladimir, (ed. by) Knižnyj rynok. Sostojanie, tendencii i perspektivy razvitija. Otraslevoj doklad, Federal’noe agenstvo po pečati i massovym kommunikacijam, Moskva 2020. Jakovenko, Ol’ga, Žanrovye osobennosti fentesy ̇ (na osnove analiza slovarnych definicij fe ̇ntesy i nauc ̌noj fantastiki), in Vestnik Irkutskogo gosudarstvennogo lingvistic ̌eskogo universiteta, 2008, 2. Kaplan, Vitalij, Topografija sovremennoj russkoj fantastiki, (in particular the paragraph Žanrovye raznovidnosti), in Timina Svetlana (ed. by), Sovremennaja russkaja literatura, Academia, Moskva—Sankt Peterburg 2005. Kaplan, Vitalij, Zagljanem za stenku. Topografija sovremennoj russkoj fantastiki, in Novyj Mir, 2001, 9. Kokhanovskaïa, Tatiana and Nazarenko Mikhaïl, La fantasy épique, in Littératures postsoviétiques de l’imaginaire, La revue russe, 2014, 43. Kornackij, Nikolaj, Ja zakroju temu “dozorov” navsegda, in Izvestija, 12 January 2019. Korolev, Kirill, Poiski nacional’noj identic ̌nosti v sovetskoj i postsovetskoj massovoj kul’ture, Nestor-Istorija, Sankt-Peterburg 2020. Kovtun, Elena, Chudožestvennyj vymisel v literature XX veka, Vysšaja Škola, Moskva 2008. Kovtun, Elena, “Fantastika kak ob”ekt naučnogo issledovanija: problemy i perspektivy otečestvennogo fantastovedenija, in Russkaja fantastika na perekrest’e ėpoch i kul’tur. Materialy Meždunarodnoj naučnoj konferencii: 21–23 marta 2006 g., Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, Moskva 2007. Kovtun, Elena, Poe ̇tika neobyc ̌ajnogo: Chudožestvennye miry fantastiki, volšebnoj skazki, utopii, pritc ̌i i mifa (Na materiale evropejskoj literatury pervoj poloviny XX veka), Izdatel’stvo MGU, Moskva 1999. Kupina, Natalija, Litovskaja, Marija and Nikolina, Natalija, Massovaja literatura segodnja, Flinta-Nauka, Moskva 2010. Lovell, Stephen and Menzel, Birgit (ed. by), Reading for Entertainment in Contemporary Russia: Post-soviet popular literature in historical perspective, Otto Sagner, München 2005. Luk’janenko, Sergej, Večnyj, Dozor, in Knigi. Izdatel’stvo AST, 3 June 2019. Nikolajeva, Maria, Fairy Tale and Fantasy: From Archaic to Postmodern, in Marvels & Tales, XVII, 2003. Possamai, Donatella, Al crocevia dei due millenni. Viaggio nella letteratura russa contemporanea, Esedra editrice, Padova 2018. Stroeva, Ksenija, Fentesy-2004. ̇ M., 2004. Fentesy-2005. ̇ M., 2004, in NLO, 2005, 1. Suvin, Darko, Preface, in Other Worlds, Other Seas (ed. by Darko Suvin), Berkley Medallion Books, New York 1970. Todorov, Tzvetan, La letteratura fantastica, Garzanti, Milano 1991. Volodichin, Dmitrij, Mesto vstrec ̌i… Fantastika i literatura osnovnogo potoka: konvergencija? in Znamja, 2005, 12.

Mystification, Religious Imagery, and Fantasy in Modern Tibetan Literature Michal Zelcer-Lavid

Tibet is synonymous with mysticism and fantasy. The Lost Kingdom in the Himalayas has stimulated the imaginations of explorers, academics, travelers, and spiritualists and has been evoked in various artistic and literary works over the years. As Tsering Shakya has observed, “Tibet has become a source of adventure and mystery in a world where there is little magic and mystery. Everything about Tibet is esoteric and beyond ‘ordinariness’” (“Tibet” 20).1 Even the complex political reality gripping the country in recent decades does not detract from the “exotic” appeal of Tibet. The current situation in Tibet, an autonomous region of China, has its roots in the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) when the Chinese government introduced new policies in Tibet to promote economic reform. However, Tibet’s ensuing economic growth during the 1990s led to tension between Chinese immigrants and the local Tibetan population, which intensified at the beginning of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, Tibet enjoyed improvements in infrastructure, enhanced tourism, and local economic growth. On the other hand, it experienced the Sinicization of the culture, language, and daily life (Iredale, Bilik, and Su 162). Even with these changes, compared to China, with its rapid and intense modernization, Tibet continued to represent an 1

 On Tibet’s myth in the west see Lopez 36–43.

M. Zelcer-Lavid (*) Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2_21

321

322 

M. ZELCER-LAVID

imaginary space. Given, in a region of increasing materialism, Tibet remained a source of dreams and fantasy. At the same time, Tibetans and Chinese alike were searching for the “authenticity” and “roots” of their past in the midst of such turbulent changes. The literature of Tibet of these years reflected this complex reality. Written in the Chinese language mainly by Tibetan authors who had been raised and educated outside Tibet, these works express the myths and stereotypes about Tibet that the writers had absorbed from the Chinese culture for the most part. Thus, this new Tibetan literature was preoccupied with primitivism, mysticism, and sexuality, among other things, because these were the demands of the Chinese readers and publishers who aspired to read about the “other” and the “different” as an alternative to their prosaic everyday reality.2 The artistic value of this literature was enhanced by its integration of stereotypes about Tibet into a contemporary narrative. Its emphasis on the modernization and urbanization of Tibet, sometimes in an extreme manner, as a background for the plots, created a stark contrast with the mysticism and exoticism of the Tibetan characters and protagonists. This literature reflects the complexity of modern Tibetan identity, in which traditional beliefs, myths, and religion coexist, albeit often uncomfortably, with modern values of progress, innovation, and rationalism (Erhard 135–137). This chapter focuses on the mythologizing of Tibet as a spiritual ideal. Tibetan authors, mostly educated in China and speaking Chinese exclusively, were nonetheless ethnically Tibetan. Their writing naturally incorporated Tibetan Buddhist myths and their representations into Chinese culture; their works abound with what can be perceived as exotic, primitive, sensory descriptions of Tibet. As Huggan observes, “while exoticism describes the systematic assimilation of cultural difference, ascribing familiar meanings and associations to unfamiliar things, it also denotes an expanded, if inevitably distorted, comprehension of diversity which effectively limits assimilation […] Exoticism describes a political as much as an aesthetic practice. But this politics is often concealed, hidden beneath layers of mystification” (14). Tibetan fantasy literature, written mainly in Chinese, is more popular among Chinese than the literature written in the Tibetan language,3 which, while aimed at the local population, plays a central political role in the representation of Tibetans in China. However, as Huggan explained, the usage of myths and legends in fantasy literature creates, in a way, a fictitious encounter between the

 See Maconi 172–201; Schiaffini-Vedani.  The Tibetan language, dated back to the seventh to ninth centuries, is a group of languages spoken mainly in China, Nepal, Bhutan, India, and Pakistan, with a written system of Indic origin. Tibetan was the official and common language in Tibet until the arrival of the Chinese communists in 1950. “As part of China’s political policies, the Tibetan language was repressed in favor of Chinese, with the Chinese regime presenting Tibetan as a backward language of no value in the modern world” (Zelcer-Lavid 571). The outcome of this policy was the decline of the Tibetan language in favor of the Chinese language (Tournadre 2). 2 3

  MYSTIFICATION, RELIGIOUS IMAGERY, AND FANTASY IN MODERN TIBETAN… 

323

reader and the Tibetan culture. The fantastic elements preserve Tibet as an imagined and out-of-reach space in which the real and unreal reside together. Many of the best-known Tibetan authors of contemporary fantasy literature were born in China proper and found their way to the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, in the 1980s, driven by curiosity, a thirst for adventure, and a strong urge to experience the unfamiliar (Yue 76). Starting in the early 1990s, the city became an attractive destination for avant-garde creators (Schiaffini-Vedani “The Language” 81), offering an alternative to China’s materialistic lifestyle and constant drive for money. Among these are two outstanding authors, Tashi Dawa (1959–) and Sebo (1956–), who both command broad readership in China. Yet, for many in Tibet, they are perceived as “inauthentic” because they do not write in the Tibetan language, and their works appeal to Chinese rather than to local Tibetan readers. This disconnect between Tibet and those writing fantasy literature about it inevitably returns us to the question of what makes a work one of modern Tibetan literature. What are its characteristics? How is it characterized? Is it the author’s ethnicity, language, or content of the literary work? Modern Tibetan authors writing in the native language claimed ownership not only of their own work but of “Tibetanism” in general. “Thus, the Tibetan ethnic origins of authors writing in Chinese became secondary to the ability to write in Tibetan” (Zelcer-Lavid 572). Still, this dispute over authenticity remains, differentiating between Tibetan literature written by Tibetan authors and literature from Tibet, which emphasizes Tibet as a theme, regardless of the author’s origin. Another controversy arising in modern Tibetan literature revolves around the place of religion. Tibetans consider religion as a reflection of traditional past culture; some, mostly urban intellectuals, blame tradition and religion for weakening Tibet and leading it to its current troubled state (Bhum 5). Throughout the 1980s, these intellectuals feared that the religious system’s inflexibility could prevent the creation of a renewed Tibetan national identity based on progress and economic stability rather than religious awe. However, rapid economic development and political processes that risk sweeping away traditional Tibetan heritage have resulted in pressures throughout Tibetan society to preserve and protect the country’s religion and tradition. For this reason, many Tibetans are critical of the mystic depiction of Tibet in modern fantasy literature and the misrepresentations of Tibetan Buddhism, considering such depictions simplistic and misrepresentative of their rich traditions (Zelcer-­ Lavid 572–573; Shakya “The Waterfall” 35–38). This further alienates them from this literature written in a “foreign” language. Starting in the seventeenth century, the Dalai Lama was Tibet’s religious and political leader. The traditional link between governance and religion deeply affected Tibetan culture, which was essentially Buddhist in nature. But this began changing after Tibet was annexed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1951 and then defined as the Tibet Autonomous Region since 1965. This autonomy, however, was limited, referring only to the cultural sphere, permitting Tibetan leadership to uphold the Tibetan way of life in accordance

324 

M. ZELCER-LAVID

with their culture and language, and even then, only if Tibetans did not contradict the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) official policy. With the imposition of Communist doctrine in Tibet, Tibetans were unable to practice their religion until the reforms began in 1978. Given the religious nature of Tibet’s government until the PRC took control as well as the particularly rigid political limitations during Mao Zedong’s rule (1949–1976), any allusions to or discussions of Tibetan religion began appearing in modern Tibetan literature only during the current era of reforms. In the absence of freedom of expression in the PRC, literature has served as an indirect tool for implicitly expressing views and spreading ideas related to sensitive issues, such as Tibetan religion and its place in current society (albeit to a limited extent that does not cross the CCP official line). Throughout Chinese history, literature has not been religious, but served as a moral, political, and social compass (Link 104–105), its role to convey intellectual, didactic, and value-based messages aimed at shaping readers’ worldviews. This role was reinforced following the rise of Communism, as the CCP used literature as a tool for changing national social awareness and implementing political indoctrination (Hung 181–191). Cultural creation and consumption became less restrictive following Mao’s rule and the start of a period of liberalization, including the introduction of a free market economy. Nonetheless, the Chinese government, well aware of the political power literature can wield, continued supervising all cultural discourse by controlling all Chinese media outlets (internet, TV, radio, journalism, and publications). As with other areas of life and culture, literature today, even in a “reformed” PRC, remains under governmental supervision, although much attenuated in manner and scope compared to what prevailed under Mao. These shifts strongly influenced modern Tibetan literature, which began developing only in the 1980s and which reflected the complexity of Tibetan religious issues, many of them expressed in the emerging genre of fantasy literature.

The Development of Modern Tibetan Literature Modern literature is a relatively new phenomenon in Tibet. Tibet’s ancient literature shows little, if any, evidence of either Chinese or western influence. Tibetan local literature was essentially religious, dealing with Buddhist texts and philosophy and influenced by Sanskrit texts. Compared to the abundance of Buddhist literature, Tibetan historical chronicles and folktales were limited (Shakya “The Waterfall” 28), with the first modern Tibetan novel published in the eighteenth century.4 However, after this first book, there are hardly any novels or short stories to be found for the next 200  years. As noted above, numerous researchers claim that modern Tibetan literature began to develop only in the 1980s (ibid. 29; Kapstein ix). 4  The novel The Legend of the Prince Who Was Unlike Himself (Tibetan: Gzhon nu zla med kyi gtam rgyud) was written by Dokhar Tsering Wanggyel (1689–1763).

  MYSTIFICATION, RELIGIOUS IMAGERY, AND FANTASY IN MODERN TIBETAN… 

325

During the 1980s and 1990s, modern Tibetan literature echoed modern and secular life. It was written by intellectuals and aimed at the small local elite, as the majority of Tibetans remained illiterate.5 Even monks and nuns, chiefly in central Tibet, possessed only the most basic rudiments of reading and writing skills, since religious education focused on memorization and oral recitation of religious texts (Zelcer-Lavid 574). The methods of religious education, primarily taking place in the monasteries and meant only for monks, along with Tibet’s geographical isolation and the Buddhist regime’s policy of seclusion until the 1950s, prevented a public education system and modern literature from developing (ibid. 574–575). As a result, modernity and secular concepts entered Tibet only after 1951 via the Chinese Communist education system. This system, based on repetition and memorization, was devoid of discussion, interpretation, or critical review. Students learned how to read and write but were not permitted to interpret texts or express opinions counter to the official party line. Thus, throughout Mao’s reign, not only was very little Tibetan literature produced, but what did emerge was political in nature, written to support party policy (Moon 19). Religion during this period was viewed as a vestige of feudalism, which was used historically by the Tibetan nobility to dominate their serfs. Until 1951, 80% of Tibet’s population was desperately poor and totally uneducated, either still yoked in serfdom or nomads (Grunfeld 8–14). The traditional local culture, steeped in religion, provided the population with no means to withstand the atheist Communist regime, making it difficult for the population to preserve its identity during this time. The post-Mao reforms and liberations in the 1980s included reviving religious institutions in Tibet. The increased interest in regional minorities and the arrival of the New Age movement in China in the 1990s increased the value of Tibetan culture among the Chinese and precipitated a simultaneous change among Tibetans toward their own religion (Lai 52–55). The more modern Tibet became, absorbing influences from China and the world, the more pressing preserving and accentuating unique, authentic Tibetan ethnic characteristics became. Many people began delving into their roots in search of identity, while others were attracted to mysticism and fantasy, seeking escapism from daily life in alternative universes (Zhang 116–117; Baranovitch 81). Tibetan literature, which started flourishing in the 1980s, reflected a search for modern Tibetan identity. Most authors supported adopting a modern identity, a new concept in Tibet identified with progress. Authors adopting this approach were, from the outset, more open to modernization and innovation.6 Those who promoted a return to religious tradition were mostly part of the religious elite that had begun reestablishing its status. Their fear of the influence of secular culture on Tibetan youth derived primarily from China’s interest in strengthening a modern Tibetan identity by supporting the already 5   Tibet’s illiteracy is the highest in China, at 35.2% in 2018; see National Bureau of Statistics (2019). 6  A prominent example is the author Dhondup Gyal. For others see Shakya “The Waterfall” 36.

326 

M. ZELCER-LAVID

emergent secular culture while continuing to weaken traditional religion (Shakya “The Dragon” 420). The conflict between supporters and opponents of tradition was reflected in the Tibetan literature of that time, along with the flourishing of new literary genres, such as magic realism, fantasy, and avant-­ garde literature.

The Fantasy of Tibet A classy Land Rover back from Lhasa roared up and stopped. Two young lamas in monastic robes and sun hats scrambled out, waved to the driver, and started climbing up the path. One wearing earphones babbled a song in tune with his pocket radio. (Sebo “The Circular” 212)

This extract from Sebo’s 1991 story, “The Circular Day” (Chinese: Yuanxing rizi), published in Chinese in 1991 in an anthology of the same name reflects the striking clash of modernity and traditionalism in the Tibet of the 1990s expressed in the emerging modern Tibetan writing. Tibet’s capital Lhasa, as described by Sebo, is modern, thriving, cosmopolitan, and bustling with Western tourists, Chinese, youngsters, monks, motorbikes, and beggars in a sensory riot. The story follows a materialistic young Tibetan woman whose mother promises to buy her a fashionable gym outfit. The mother dashes from store to store trying to keep her promise but ends up empty handed; all the outfits have been sold. The story describes a relatively banal reality, although at the time new to Tibet, of a parent trying to keep up with her child’s demands in the context of consumer capitalism with its constantly changing fashions. The end of the story, however, is anything but banal. As the day draws to a close, and the mother is still unable to find what her daughter wants, she sees an old beggar woman dressed in the sought-after apparel. The author describes the contrast between the bright red top and the woman’s shrunken, wrinkled body. Surprised, the mother approaches the beggar and puts the money intended for the purchase into the overturned hat placed in front of the woman. The story thus brings to life the pursuit of materialism and exposes the blindness it causes, ending with the object of desire being found on the old woman. By wearing it as clothing rather than as a fashion statement, she erases any meaning attached to the clothing. The mother, who had reached a point of despair in her search for the particular item, acknowledges the item’s triviality and redirects her money to a more humane purpose. Giving to beggars and pilgrims is part of Tibetan tradition: this transforms the mother’s action into a victory for tradition over consumerism. It is a victory that, in retrospect, is perfectly suited to Tibet’s spiritual capital. This story belongs to the fantasy genre in the sense that, as in magical realism, behind the ostensible plot lies a deeper message about Tibet—a combination of reality and fantasy, the natural and the supernatural. This story could also fall under the category of what Marxist philosopher Lukács calls “critical realism” used by the author to

  MYSTIFICATION, RELIGIOUS IMAGERY, AND FANTASY IN MODERN TIBETAN… 

327

highlight the tense relationship between individual and society (Shakya “Language” xviii). Tibet described in the story as an alternative space, sometimes fantastical, where economic reality merges with spiritual realization. Simultaneously, “The Circular Day” offers a cynical description of traditional Tibetans encompassing lamas, pilgrims and beggars, and explicit sexuality, such as a detailed depiction of a rural man sitting next to his wife on the street while publicly stroking her breasts as she gazes indifferently around, continuing to chew her gum. Eroticism is expressed in the plot by repeated sexual references to the girl by passers-by (including a monk who, after examining her body when she asks to come with him, decides that she is too young), a naked woman in a dim shop that is implied to be a brothel, and other descriptions of extroverted sexuality that can be considered dystopian to some degree. The story emphasizes the avant-garde style pervasive of that era in China, evident in works by Chinese authors in Tibet, such as Ma Jian and Ma Yuan. Also alluded to is the idea of traditional Tibetan compassion for all living creatures in a country where monks beg for food daily in order to experience detachment from the material and compassion for the poor. The father of the girl, the story’s protagonist, is none other than a lama from a local shrine, and the withered beggar woman is presented in neither a spiritual nor a human light as she sips from a bottle of cheap liquor. Critically reading the story reveals the common stereotypes about Tibetans cloaked in new robes. Tibetans are presented as primitives, infantile, and animalistic, thus reinforcing the common perception in China whereby Tibetans need the cultured modern Chinese to assist them. Such stereotypes are part of the rhetoric used to justify the Chinese regime’s rule in Tibet.7 Sebo is among those Tibetan authors who “discovered” and re-adopted their ethnic origin in order to highlight their uniqueness in China’s literary world. His father was Chinese, and his mother, Tibetan. Yet he himself is unfamiliar with the Tibetan language and culture. Following his parents’ divorce, he grew up with his father in China’s Sichuan and Hunan provinces (Batt 163). Arriving in Tibet in the 1980s, he assumed the sobriquet “Sebo,” a free translation of his Chinese name, Xu Mingliang, into Tibetan. But despite his efforts to adopt a Tibetan identity, he notes that he never felt a sense of belonging to Tibet: “I never felt I belonged to that place, I never felt I was like the Tibetan people around me; I only felt I belonged to the intellectual circle of my friends (Schiaffini-Vedani ‘The Language’ 148).” As a Tibetan author writing in Chinese, he felt obligated to write about the lives of Tibetans, but since he was not deeply familiar with Tibetan culture, he began to weave Buddhist motifs into his works, infusing them with a sense of the exotic and the mystical. Sebo, educated in China, assimilated the representations of Tibet common in China, but by using them he actually points a critical finger at Chinese society, for which the story is intended. The focus on sexuality and consumerism by the narrative’s protagonists and the plot’s urban background emphasize 7

 For minorities representation and stereotypes in China, see Gladney.

328 

M. ZELCER-LAVID

both the absurd pursuit of money and objects and the alternative space Tibet offers. The story begins from the daughter’s perspective: her wanderings through the streets of Lhasa lead to encounters with various archetypes. As she jots down poetry and snippets in her notebook, she offers the reader a view of the city and its residents. The teen girl represents Lhasa itself, as the author perceives it: There’s a furry, blond guy from America, a photographer. All day long, he takes so many pictures of me there’s no space in my room to hang them all. I know he wants to attract me. There are so, so many guys all trying to attract me, American, Germans, Italians. They all Take my picture. (Sebo “The Circular” 211)8

The poem emphasizes the teen’s external image. Western tourists photograph her as a way of “courting” her to obtain something, hinted at as sexual favors. Lhasa itself is considered a desired destination by westerners, its sensuous image as Shangri-La enhancing its charm. Westerners try to capture the city through the camera lens, perpetuating their attraction to the city’s exotic attractions. Ultimately, however, they do not succeed in corrupting the young woman or the city, as evidenced by the story’s ending and the mother’s act of generosity in expressing kindness and compassion. This ending highlights the difference between Tibet and the rest of China and joins in the criticism leveled at Chinese society that rather than encouraging individualism (manifested in the mother’s action in the novel) it actually promotes, if not glorifies, following the rules, thereby falling victim, among other things, to changing fads and fashions. In the broadest sense, Sebo turns a universal narrative of the fruitlessness of materialistic pursuits into one of alienating urban modernity infused with traces of Tibetan folklore. The story’s name relates to the circular route of Barkhor Street in the heart of ancient Lhasa. A further reference is to the cycles of life experienced by the figures peopling that street, magnified by a description of sunrise and sunset which is present throughout the plot. Other than the young teen who has no idea who her father is, the reader meets pilgrims, a hunchback, a cripple, a crazy woman, and an old beggar woman. The beggar is the one wearing the object the young woman wants: the red tracksuit with its low neckline: She’d pulled down her sheepskin robe. Beneath it she wore a tracksuit. Its overlarge v-neck exposed two triangular mounds of shrunken, shriveled skin that were her breasts. Dried, cracked, glittering scales shone among the wrinkles like metal in a desert, golden in the rays of the setting sun. (Sebo “The Circular” 215) 8

 This is the original poem’s construction.

  MYSTIFICATION, RELIGIOUS IMAGERY, AND FANTASY IN MODERN TIBETAN… 

329

This detail in the plot can be interpreted as criticism of the pursuit of consumer goods and the fickle temporary nature of fashion, but it also presents a new perception of Tibet. Sebo shows how, despite the ancient religious Tibetan traditions, modernization is indeed taking place, as the mother frantically searches for the modern clothing. However, it does not yet fit Tibet’s changing society, with the garment found—remarkably—only on an old beggar woman who doesn’t even realize what it is. Together, these women represent Tibet’s complexity with Westerners drawn to its exotic, enticing elements, while the Chinese view them as ancient, irrelevant remnants of the past.

Is Tibet a Shangri-la? Tashi Dawa’s (1959–)9 “Tibet: A Soul in Bondage” (Chinese: Xizang: Jihad zai pisheng jieshang de hun) is a further expression of the modern genre that integrates the exotic and mystic with realism. Tashi Dawa writes in a magic realist style. Like Sebo, Tashi Dawa is of mixed origin and lived most of his life in the Tibetan parts of Sichuan. In the 1980s, he discovered Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, who influenced his style and works (Angben 59). Many Latin American authors, chief among them in this regard Gabriel Garcia Márquez, use the magic realist style to express political protest, integrating realist motifs with mystical motifs unique to their cultures (Parkinson Zamora and Faris 3–5). Most of these authors were educated in Europe and adopted this writing style in order to critique the social order upon returning to their homelands. Foreign influences and backgrounds allowed these authors to observe their own culture in a different light and their perceptions then manifested in their works. Much like these authors, Tashi Dawa was also educated outside Tibet, but unlike them, he does not delve into the issues of burning interest to Tibetans. This may be explained by his distance from Tibetan culture growing up in the PRC and his lack of knowledge of the Tibetan language. Tashi Dawa even claimed that Tibetan was well suited to religious texts but lacked sufficient variety to make it suited to modern literature and therefore was not sophisticated enough to express the concepts in his stories (Schiaffini-Vedani “The Language” 90). Counterbalancing the criticism leveled at Tashi Dawa for emulating the Latin American magic realism style, Schiaffini-Vedani claimed that the source of Dawa’s inspiration derives from both the Tibetan traditions, and beliefs, and his secular education; together, these helped him see the magical in Tibetan culture (ibid. 151). The author himself states that his stories: “are comparable to ancient Tibetan chronicles, which contain both factual history and mythical narrative” (Batt 264). In addition to the artistic value, magic realism is important for its representation of Tibet. Integrating fiction and reality, magic realism allows Tashi Dawa to successfully represent both Tibet and Tibetans in an 9

 Tashi Dawa is the nom de plume used by Zhang Niansheng.

330 

M. ZELCER-LAVID

extreme fashion that exposes and clarifies their stereotypical nature so familiar to the reader; basic words take on different meanings in light of the mystical and fictional motifs used. Written in 1984, “Tibet: A Soul Knotted on a Leather Thong” describes a Tibet 16 years in the future. The story won first place in the China Short Story competition of 1986, garnering Tashi Dawa much esteem. It was translated into English and French and can be found in all the author’s anthologies. Taking place in the year 2000, the story depicts the author meeting a dying lama whose soul will not reincarnate following his death. The lama describes a cosmic battle, apparently taken from an ancient Buddhist prophecy: a war between devils and the Shangri-La warriors. The latter come from a mythical place, a kind of paradise which no person can locate, but on his deathbed, the lama details two figures making their way toward him. The author identifies the characters: they reference his own work. In 1984, Dawa began writing a story about these two figures making their way somewhere, but he was forced to put it aside because he had no idea where they were headed. The story is replete with descriptions of a reviving Tibet which the protagonists meet on their way to this unknown location, as does the author who begins and ends the story in the first person. The narrative’s focus is the place of tradition in a rapidly modernizing Tibet. The lama at the story’s start dies and no one is found to inherit the role. Thus, a long Buddhist tradition of reincarnation comes to a halt. The lama’s death signifies the end of Tibet’s religious era and the transition to modernity. The author’s two fictional characters are brought back to life and set out from his earlier shelved story; they represent traditional Tibet. The man and woman reach the region of Kham, where they represent the old generation according to the common stereotypes the Chinese hold about Tibetan primitiveness and ignorance. The woman, having joined the man in order to escape from a future of hard labor where she lived, fills the traditional role of preparing food and drink for the man. Her character is likened to that of an animal or, more precisely, a dog. She wears a leather strap much like a dog’s collar, on which she marks the journey’s days in scratches. The leather strap provides the story with its title and links the woman to her home and her past. When she explains to the man that she is marking each day’s passing since leaving her home, he answers with contempt, saying he has had no home since his birth (Tashi Dawa 110). In this way he is perhaps alluding to the loss of his homeland. Throughout the plot, the woman, like a work animal, lugs the cooking equipment on her back and is not allowed to leave by the man even when she tires of his attitude. In one part of the story, the woman reaches a small town and, like a stray dog, is stoned by children. Despite being injured, she does not react, her character remaining passive and obedient. This stereotypical figure provides the foreign or exotic element, through which are presented motifs perceived as Tibetan for Chinese readers. Further on, Tashi Dawa tries, unsuccessfully, to challenge the stereotypes and lead the figures through a transformation in order for them to modernize.

  MYSTIFICATION, RELIGIOUS IMAGERY, AND FANTASY IN MODERN TIBETAN… 

331

The encounters between tradition and modernity, and between religion and secularity, weave the fabric of the story’s plot. Despite Tashi Dawa’s attempts at describing Tibet’s technological advances in the year 2000, his imagination is limited to the reality familiar to him in the 1980s. Tradition is predominantly identified with the primitive, for example: the encounter takes place in a village reached by the protagonists, where residents include a shepherd and an accountant: “If you don’t have anything to eat you can have dinner with us. I’ve got firewood to boil tea.” “Damn, did you just walk out of the Middle Ages? Are you one of those extraterrestrials?” “I come from a place far away. I’ve walked…” She held up the thong again. “How many days did you count?” “Let me see…eighty-five days.” “I walked eighty-five days? That’s not right. Just now you said ninety-two. You’re tricking me,” Chung started to giggle. “Oh, tsk, tsk! Buddhas and bodhisattvas,” he shut his eyes and murmured, “you’re driving me crazy.” “Do you want to have supper here with me? I still have some dried meat.” “Girl, let me take you to a place where young people have fun. There’s music, beer, disco music. Throw away that rotten tree branch in your hand. (Ibid. 114)

Tashi Dawa employs the accepted Tibetan stereotype on the way minorities are presented in China. But, in fact, the extreme way in which these stereotypes are drawn and their integration into the futuristic story empties them of all meaning, as they are perceived as fictitious representations that do not correspond with reality. This extreme vision, coupled with the duo’s fate in the future, can be viewed as a protest against accelerated modernization and loss of simplicity, and the novel attempts to take a critical stance against Tibetan tradition while simultaneously reinforcing the perception of Tibet as a fantastical destination where the future and past coexist. The climax of the plot is the arrival of the couple in a nameless village, X. Following a drought, the seer had prophesied that a couple would arrive that morning from the east, bringing rain with them. The couple was therefore received by the locals with great fanfare and transported on a lavishly outfitted tractor into the village square. After noticing the woman’s face, the townsfolk decide she is the embodiment of the goddess of compassion. For the first time in her life, she is showered with attention and gifts. The man, by contrast, is left alone. He goes off to provoke an argument for the purpose of getting killed and ending his suffering. At the beginning of the story, the man, known as Tabei, steals money and gives it to a local shrine. Despite claims of religiosity, his attitude toward the woman lacks compassion, treating her like a beast of burden. While the village locals wonder at her beauty, he feels disgusted by her

332 

M. ZELCER-LAVID

ugliness. Despite his many sins, he seeks a place that will provide him with religious salvation without needing to change his ways. The paradise Tabei seeks is a myth that the author chooses to identify with Communism. He recalled: In 1964, they started the people’s communes. Everybody talked about the communist road, but nobody then could say just what communism was … some kind of heaven. But where? They asked people who came from western Tibet—‘Not there’. Asked people from Ngari—“Not there.” People from the Qinghai border hadn’t seen it. The only place left nobody’s ever been was Kelong Mountain. A few people in the village sold their belongings, said they were taking the road to communism … set off across Kelong Mountain, and never came back. After that not a single villager headed up that way, no matter how hard things got. (Ibid. 118)

Communism, according to this quote, or more precisely, Communist propaganda, is a myth that never materialized in these parts of Tibet. Communism did not improve Tibetans’ lives, nor did the promised paradise ever appear. A further criticism is leveled at those who set out seeking the path to Communism and paying with their lives. Since these views are spoken by an ancient Tibetan man, they can be understood in China as ignorance rather than separatism. The unachievable Communist utopia is identified in the story with the Buddhist myth of “paradise on earth” sought by the protagonist. The Tibetan myth of a paradise hidden in the Himalayas is called Shambala. The myth was picked up by a British author, James Hilton, in his 1933 novel, Lost Horizon. It describes a hidden valley in the Himalayas, known as Shangri-La, a concept identified with isolated, exotic locations. The story’s message is that belief in paradise led to ruin. The protagonists discover that no such Communist paradise exists, nor is there a Buddhist paradise, and the suffering of their journey was in vain. Exiled Tibetan researcher Pema Bhum presents similar claims to those of Tashi Dawa. Bhum notes how Tibetan intellectuals active in the 1980s sought a new doctrine, feeling that Buddhism had disappointed them by leading to Tibet’s weakened status, which in turn enabled the Communist doctrine to be forcibly imposed on them through the political party and the military. The intellectuals’ objective is to “liberate” themselves from these doctrines (Bhum 3–4). In “Tibet: A Soul Knotted on a Leather Thong,” the protagonists arrive in a village where the locals have adopted modernization. To the female protagonist, they appear “as happy as gods.” The local residents show pride in their new agricultural technologies, digital wristwatches, Walkmans, and yellow tractors, one of which accidentally runs over Tabei and injures him as he makes his way to the mountains in search of paradise and redemption. At the end of the story, Tashi Dawa meets these protagonists. He turns himself into a literary figure, emphasizing his role as the Creator. On his journey from the world of

  MYSTIFICATION, RELIGIOUS IMAGERY, AND FANTASY IN MODERN TIBETAN… 

333

reality to that of fantasy where the story takes place, he passes by an abandoned field where an epic war had occurred, and he imagines the act of re-creation in which a man and a woman would be the new Adam and Eve. These new figures are meant to replace the stereotypical characters of the story with new, modern representations. While trying to save the injured male protagonist, Tashi Dawa encounters the female protagonist who treats his wounds. The couple enter into a dialogue with him and are freed of his authority when they express independent desires. The author tortures himself over having created the characters: Letting Chung and Tabei walk out of that manila envelope had been an irreparable mistake. Why to this day have I been unable to portray the image of the “new man,” the “new woman”? Now that I’ve created these characters, their every action has become an unalterable fact. (Tashi Dawa 123)

Tashi Dawa is unable to create new characters. Perhaps his failure derives from not being able to alter his perception relative to Tibetans. Or perhaps he is not interested in really creating a “new man” and “new woman” because he does not really want Tibetan culture to change. The first option presumes that Tibetan society is too primitive at that stage (the 1980s) to undergo any change. By contrast, the second possibility is that the author may not want Tibetan tradition to lose its spiritual uniqueness and therefore chooses to perpetuate it through mystical and exotic representations. At the end of the story the author, changed into yet another protagonist in the plot, attempts to persuade Tabei to realize the delusion of searching for utopia, since utopia does not exist. The traditional sound of chimes heard shattering the fantastical space in which they find themselves restores them to the global reality. The American voice, which Tabei erroneously thinks is the voice of the god, declares that the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics is now officially opened, stressing the perception that America is “paradise on earth.” “Tibet: A Soul Knotted on a Leather Thong” contains similar messages to those appearing in Sebo’s “The Circular Day.” Alongside criticism of the consumerist lifestyle and the pursuit of objects and brand names, Tashi Dawa emphasizes the United States’ rising status as a model worthy of emulation for many in China. Unlike Sebo in “The Circular Day,” Tashi Dawa does not offer an alternative to this state of mind, and the way he presents his protagonists makes it harder for the reader to identify with them. Magic realism makes Tashi Dawa’s protagonists alien rather than realistic images. Both Tashi Dawa and Sebo present bold, new writing that merges religion and secularism, reality and fantasy, old and new. For this reason, these two authors chose to present their protagonists in an extreme form, their unique methods establishing their status as authors.

334 

M. ZELCER-LAVID

Conclusion Tibet’s mystification as a desirable spiritual destination is common among many of Tashi Dawa’s works and a central motif in his writing. The modern literature produced by Tashi Dawa, Sebo, and others is directed at Chinese readership and integrated into the “searching for roots” trend that dominated China in the 1980s. Minorities symbolized the “authenticity” and “rootedness” sought after by Chinese intellectuals as interest in minorities grew in Chinese society (Baranovitch 81). “Discovering” and “adopting” the Tibetan identity is one stage in the process of seeking that authenticity and an alternative to the accelerated pace of life during the period of reforms in the PRC. Tibetan literature in Chinese is more popular than that in the Tibetan language and plays a central role in representing Tibetans in China. These modern Tibetan authors were, in most cases, educated outside Tibet, and some lacked fluency in both the Tibetan language and Tibetan history and culture.10 Nonetheless, this fantasy genre of literature is important for the way it represents Tibet to Chinese readers and its ability to shape Tibet’s and Tibetans’ perception in the broader context of the PRC. Authors are aware of their power as representatives of the Tibetan minority and choose to emphasize their ethnic origins. In the 1980s, Tibet was still a relatively isolated location and very different, geographically and culturally, from the rest of China. The sense of alienation was accompanied by a good deal of curiosity directed toward Tibetan culture, and many stories were written around the convergence of old and new. The increasing popularity in China of regions dedicated to minorities, Tibet among them, enabled authors writing in Chinese to stand out by using the fantasy genre which merged ethnic motifs with mysticism. This is how these literary works present the “other” and the different to the Chinese reader. In contrast, because Tibetan literature in Chinese did not reflect the burning issues in Tibet, nor the daily lives of Tibetans, it became irrelevant for Tibetans. The main reason for this situation is that Tibetan readership is of a limited scope and did not show interest in Tashi Dawa’s and Sebo’s work due to the way these authors perceive Tibetan culture. Explaining the phenomenon is Dondrup Wangbum (1995–): “Actually, the ‘mystery’ of Tibet is the ‘mystery’ of Tibetan culture, and this mystery stems from ignorance. Once it is understood, it is no longer mysterious. A Tibetan never thinks of himself or his life as a mystery” (Schiaffini-Vedani “The ‘Condor’” 218).11 Their occupation with the realm where tradition meets modernization, using the Chinese language in Tibetan literature derives, to a great degree, from the authors’ personal experiences on arriving in Tibet. The artistic value of such literature is increasingly strengthened with the integration of stereotypes relating to Tibet, 10  Sebo testifies to the fact that he and other authors, such as Tashi Dawa, who grew up outside Tibet, still do not understand Tibetan culture despite having spent 20  years in Tibet (Sebo “Yaoyuan” 78). 11  The author is also known by his Chinese name, Danzhu Angben.

  MYSTIFICATION, RELIGIOUS IMAGERY, AND FANTASY IN MODERN TIBETAN… 

335

sometimes in an extreme form, as the background to the literary plots, constituting a contrast to the mystical and exotic elements in the represented images.

Works Cited Angben, Danzhu. 1991. “Tashi Dawa and His Work.” Chinese Literature 3: 58–62. Baranovitch, Nimrod. 2003. China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender and Politics, 1978–1997. Berkeley: University of California Press. Batt, Herbert J. (ed.). 2001. Tales of Tibet. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Pub. Bhum, Pema. 1995. “The Heart-Beat of New Generation: A Discussion of the New Poetry.” Lungta, special issue on Modern Tibetan Literature 12: 2–6. Dawa, Tashi. 2001. “Tibet: A Soul Knotted on a Leather Thong.” In Tales of Tibet. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Pub. 105–126. Erhard, Franz Xaver. 2007. “Magical Realism and Tibetan Literature.” In Proceedings of the Tenth Seminar of the IATS 2003, Vol. 6. Leiden: Brill. 135–137. Gladney, Dru C. 1994. “Representing Nationality in China: Refiguring Majority/ Minority Identities.” The Journal of Asian Studies 53(1): 92–123. Grunfeld, Tom A. 1996. The Making of Modern Tibet, Revised Edition. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. Huggan, Graham. 2002. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. Abingdon: Routledge. Hung, Changtai. 1994. War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press. Iredale, Robin, Bilik, Naran and Su, Wang. 2001. Contemporary Minority Migration, Education, and Ethnicity in China. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Kapstein, Matthew T. 2008. “Foreword.” In Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change. Durham: Duke University Press, vii–vix. Lai, Hongyi Harry. 2003. “The Religious Revival of China.” Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies 18: 52–55. Link, Perry. 2000. The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Lopez, Donald S., Jr. 1994. “New Age Orientalism: The Case of Tibet.” Tricycle: The Buddhist Review 3(3): 36–43. Maconi, Lara. 2008. “One Nation, Two Discourses: Tibetan New Era Literature and the Language Debate.” In Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 172–201. Moon, Adrian A. 1991. “Modern Tibetan Fiction, Part 1.” Tibetan Review 26(10): 19–25. National Bureau of Statistics. 2019. China Statistical Yearbook 2018. Beijing: China Statistic Press. Parkinson Zamora, Lois and Faris, Wendy B. 1995. “Introduction: Daiquiri birds and Flaubertian parrot(ie)s.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1–14. Schiaffini-Vedani, Patricia. 2002. Tashi Dawa: Magical Realism and Contested Identity in Modern Tibet, PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania. Schiaffini-Vedani, Patricia. 2004. “The Language Divide: Identity and Literary Choices in Modern Tibet.” Journal of International Affairs 57(2): 81–98.

336 

M. ZELCER-LAVID

Schiaffini-Vedani, Patricia. 2008. “The ‘Condor’ Flies Over Tibet: Zhaxi Dawa and the Significance of Tibetan Magical Realism.” In Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change. Durham: Duke University Press, 202–224. Sebo. 2001. “The Circular Day.” In Tales of Tibet. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Pub., 205–216. Sebo. 2006. “Yaoyuan de jiyi” [Reflections from a Far]. Xizang wenxue [Tibetan Literature] 1: 77–82. Shakya, Tsering. 1991. “Tibet and the Occident: The Myth of Shangri-La.” Lungta: 20–23. Shakya, Tsering. 1999. The Dragon in the Land of Snows, A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947. New York: Penguin Compass. Shakya, Tsering. 2000. “The Waterfall and Fragrant Flowers: The Development of Tibetan Literature Since 1950.” Manöa: Song of the Snow Lion 12(2): 28–40. Shakya, Tsering. 2001 “Language, Literature, and Representation in Tibet.” In Tales of Tibet. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Pub, xi-xxiii. Tournadre, Nicolas. 2003. “The Dynamics of Tibetan-Chinese Bilingualism.” China Perspectives 45(1). Yue, Gang. 2004. “Echoes from the Himalayas: The Quest of Ma Lihua, Chinese Intellectual in Tibet.” Journal of Contemporary China 13(38): 69–88. Zelcer-Lavid, Michal. 2018. “Modern Education and Literary Traditions: A Comparative View on the Development of Modern Uyghur and Tibetan Literature.” Central Asian Survey 37(4): 563–581. Zhang, Xudong. 1997. Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-­ Garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press.

Index1

A Allotopia, 47–58 Anthropocentrism, 92 Apocalypse, xix, 154, 232, 265 Attebery, Brian, 17, 18, 22n9, 25, 26, 31, 38–42, 85, 120, 120n6, 164, 248, 274, 280 Australia, 11, 139–144, 147–149, 154, 155, 175–188 B Biocultural approach, 31, 32, 42 Buddhism, xix, 261, 267 C Childhood, 76, 98, 226, 229, 232, 263, 264, 266, 267, 284 Chronotope, xix, 8, 8n3, 53, 53n5, 223–238 Cities, xvii, xviii, 67, 71, 77, 103–115, 119–123, 120n5, 126–128, 131, 144, 148–154, 185, 197, 201, 207, 230, 234, 235, 242, 248, 250, 260, 267, 268, 294, 298, 323 Cleverman, xviii, 139–155

Cognitive narratology, xvii Cold War, the, 289–304 Colonialism, 139, 140, 143, 144, 146–149, 153, 154 Comics, 15, 64, 65, 126, 179, 183, 185, 192, 206, 252, 300n10, 301 Coming-of-age, 75–77, 80, 81, 244, 281 Consensus reality, xvi–xviii, xx, 5–8, 11, 13, 20, 20n4, 163, 224, 259, 265 Cooper, Susan, 72–77, 73n5, 76n7, 77n8, 77n9, 81, 82, 265 Cultural appropriation, xx, 10, 11, 275, 289–304 D Danmei, xviii, 157–171 Diachronic, 4n1, 186 Dystopia, 47, 73, 78, 230, 231, 236, 265, 267 F Faerie, 76, 80, 88, 112, 119, 121, 127–130, 132, 133, 232 Fairy tale, 35, 50, 63, 128, 147, 242, 244, 259, 274, 297–299, 311

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Gomel, D. Gurevitch (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26397-2

337

338 

INDEX

Fantastic, the, xvii–xix, 7, 9, 15, 18–21, 18n2, 20n4, 38, 47, 50–53, 55–58, 62, 63, 66, 71–73, 80, 81, 85–87, 89, 91, 93, 94, 98, 99, 103–107, 110–113, 142–144, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164, 166, 169, 175–182, 176n1, 183n8, 184, 186, 187, 194, 206, 207, 209–211, 213–215, 219, 231, 241–244, 246, 250–252, 257, 259–261, 265, 267–269, 272, 290–292, 295, 300, 300n9, 302, 303, 307, 308, 310–312, 323 Fantasy aboriginal, xviii, 142 animal, xvii, 85–99 apocalyptic, xix, 257–269 Arabic, 11, 62, 69 children’s, xx, 77, 259, 265 Chinese, xvi, 9, 158, 159 definition of, 3, 8, 19, 24, 25, 69, 259, 274, 290, 291 Greek, xviii, xix hybrid, xvii, 6, 85–99 Indian, xix, 9, 191–202 Israeli, xix, 4, 223–238 Italian, 241, 242, 244–248, 250–253 Japanese, xvi, xix, 9, 257–260, 265, 267 Jewish, 205–219 Latin American, xx, 273, 274, 276, 277, 280, 282, 283, 286, 287 Polish, xvi, 9, 61, 290–294, 293n6 portal, xvii, 62, 71–82 Russian, xvi, xx, 9, 307–318 urban, xvii, xviii, 23, 103–115, 119–133, 185, 187, 250, 251, 314, 316 Fictionality, xvii, 5–7, 38, 40, 48, 52–54, 56, 57, 64, 65, 67, 85, 89, 93, 94, 121, 141, 142, 154, 162, 164, 167, 194, 224, 231, 251, 260, 272, 275, 276, 282, 287, 310, 314, 330 Folklore, 11, 35, 37–39, 133, 141, 175–177, 260, 261, 290–292, 295, 303, 313

G Gaiman, Neil, 27, 56, 65, 105, 109, 110, 112, 122 Gender, xviii, 10, 63, 103, 124, 161, 164–168, 185, 233–235, 282, 283, 285, 286, 311 Genre, theory of, 62 Globalization, 186, 289, 290, 300, 313 Gothic, 19, 38, 39, 192, 246, 250 Grahame, Kenneth, 92, 96–98 Greece, xviii, 175–183, 178n3, 185–188, 186n11 H Harry Potter, xv, 3, 15, 66, 71, 72n1 Heterogeneity, 275–277 Heterotopia, xvii, 47, 49, 71–82 Hinduism, 37, 193, 198, 199, 202 Hiroshima, xix, 257–269 History, representation of, 195 Homer, 175 Hume, Kathryn, 4–7, 20, 259 Hybridity, 89, 96, 235 I Israel, xix, 206, 208, 209, 215–217, 218n7, 223, 225–237, 225n11, 225n13, 227n25, 228n29, 237n57 Italy, xix, 4, 241–253 J Jackson, Rosemary, 5, 6, 18, 19, 163, 259, 286 Japan, xix, 3, 8, 11, 157n1, 161, 258–262, 267 Jews, history of, xix, 12, 231 L Latin America, xx, 271–287 Le Guin, Ursula, xv, 7, 8, 18, 42, 65 Lewis, C.S., xv, 7–9, 71, 72, 72n2, 72n3, 73n5, 77n9, 243 Luk’yanenko, Sergei, 314–318, 314n22

 INDEX 

M Magic, xvi, xx, 22, 23, 41, 42, 71, 74, 75, 79, 81, 105, 106, 108, 120, 120n4, 126, 128–133, 158, 159, 163, 164, 168, 177, 181, 205, 228, 231, 232n43, 258, 282, 285n12, 287, 292, 321 Manga, 8, 10, 64, 157n1, 161, 252, 260 Marxism, 130 Mendelsson, Farah, 6 Middle Ages, the, 119n1, 242, 280 Mieville, China, 12, 21, 41, 88, 99, 105, 106, 108–110, 109n6, 112, 113, 133 Mimesis, 20, 54, 58 Modernism, 259, 260, 265 Monsters, 34, 36, 41, 107, 120, 129, 130, 170, 211, 212, 215, 233, 242, 252, 292, 295–299 Mysticism, 205, 230, 321, 322, 325 Mythology, xviii, 10, 35, 36, 38, 41, 53, 80, 130, 132, 133, 175, 177, 187n14, 188, 191–202, 210, 237, 244, 272, 276, 286, 291, 292, 295–297, 303, 304, 311, 313 N Narrative, xviii, xix, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 18n1, 18n2, 22n10, 24, 33, 36–40, 42, 85–89, 91–95, 99, 104, 108, 110, 113, 114, 122, 127–129, 131, 133, 143, 146–148, 164, 175–177, 182, 185, 186, 187n14, 188, 191–196, 198, 200, 202, 206, 207, 207n3, 210, 218, 223–227, 229, 229n34, 231, 234–236, 236n54, 242, 248, 260, 272, 273, 276–281, 286, 290–298, 300–302, 300n9, 310, 313, 315, 316, 322 Neomedievalism, xx, 271–287 P Pavel, Thomas, xvii, 7 Poland, xx, 10, 289–304 Punk, xviii, 119–133

339

Q Queer romance, 42, 171 Queer theory, 27 R Reader response, xvii, 23–25 Realism, xvi, xx, 4, 5, 21n6, 42, 51, 52, 55, 159, 258, 259, 263, 272, 286, 291 Reality, xviii, 4–8, 11–13, 18, 18n2, 20, 20n4, 40, 48, 50, 51, 56, 58, 72n2, 74, 76, 79, 81, 87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 105n3, 131, 140, 144, 146, 147, 158, 161, 162, 167, 171, 177, 178, 188, 206, 211, 213, 223, 226, 227n24, 230, 236, 243, 258–260, 265, 266, 268, 269, 271, 272, 281, 285, 289, 308, 313–317, 321, 322 Religion, xx, 33, 35, 36, 38, 40, 42, 93, 94, 126, 131, 194, 198, 200, 205, 216, 322–325 Romance, 3, 21n5, 22n7, 33, 42, 120, 157–171, 177, 179, 235, 242, 282, 307, 315 Russia, xx, 3, 6, 293, 307–314, 316, 317 S Sapkowski, Andrzej, xvi, xx, 7, 61, 290, 292, 294–304 Science fiction (SF), xvi, xvii, xix, xx, 3, 6, 8, 9, 15, 20, 22, 24n11, 25–27, 39, 42, 53–55, 62, 63, 65, 140, 146, 176n1, 178, 178n5, 179, 181–183, 205, 223–238, 224n8, 247, 308–310, 312, 316 Secondary world, 23, 24, 48, 67, 68, 85–99, 105n3, 126, 133, 177, 250, 273, 279, 280 Seriality, 63–65, 69 Storytelling, 12, 37, 47, 55, 65, 66, 133, 140, 148, 164

340 

INDEX

Storyworlds, xvii, xviii, 7, 31, 33, 36, 37, 39, 41, 50, 57, 81, 86, 88, 89, 91–94, 98, 99, 105, 105n3, 112–114, 164, 166 Supernatural, 9, 18, 31, 33–39, 41, 42, 105–107, 110–112, 114, 120n4, 142, 153, 159n5, 192, 212, 224, 232n43, 267, 311, 316, 317 Synchronic, 104 Syncretism, xx, 307–318

250, 274–277, 281, 290, 292–294, 293n6, 299, 300, 303, 309, 311, 312 Tripathi, Amish, 191–202

T Talmud, the, 206–208, 210, 211, 215, 218 Taxonomy, xvii, 19, 31–43, 62, 120 Time, representation of, 187 Todorov, Tzvetan, 6, 9, 18, 241, 307n2 Tolkien, J.R.R., xv, xix, 4, 5, 7–10, 15, 19–21, 21n5, 22n9, 25, 39, 40, 48, 52, 57, 65, 67, 72, 72n3, 89, 157, 176, 181, 184, 242, 244–247, 249,

V Video games, 51, 169, 247, 252

U Uchronia, 50 Utopia, 47, 50, 72, 73, 109n6, 225, 226, 230, 236, 317

W Wonder, sense of, 18, 244 Wonderland, 205–219 World-building, xviii, 47–58, 65, 67, 85, 87, 91, 93, 94, 164, 169, 171