Lore-o-phobia

December 22nd, 2006 by Morgan J. Locke

Ursula K. Le Guin recently wrote an important essay on the place of fantasy in society. The essay is superb throughout, and you should definitely read the whole thing, but one of my favorite parts is this.

Though modernism is behind us and postmodernism may be joining it, still many critics and reviewers approach fantasy determined to keep Caliban permanently confined in the cage of Kiddie Lit. The voice of Edmund Wilson reviewing J R R Tolkien is still heard, bleating: “Oo, those awful Orcs!” There should be a word – “maturismo”, like “machismo”? – for the anxious savagery of the intellectual who thinks his adulthood has been impugned.

To conflate fantasy with immaturity is a rather sizeable error. Rational yet non-intellectual, moral yet inexplicit, symbolic not allegorical, fantasy is not primitive but primary. Many of its great texts are poetry, and its prose often approaches poetry in density of implication and imagery. The fantastic, the marvellous, the impossible rode the mainstream of literature from the epics and romances of the Middle Ages through Ariosto and Tasso and their imitators, to Rabelais and Spenser and beyond. This is not to say that everybody approved of it. Conflict with religion and with realism always loomed. In the first great European novel, imagination and realism meet head-on, and their contest is the very stuff and argument of the book. Don Quixote is driven mad by chivalric fantasies – but what is he without his madness?

I’ve long been fascinated by the aversion that some people have to forms of entertainment they deem insufficiently mature and realistic. Le Guin references other genres besides fantasy, including science fiction, though she argues that fantasy is the primary non-realist literature of choice in childhood, whereas SF and other non-literary/ non-realist/ genre fiction are adopted as readers enter adolescence. I think her point is valid, though it’s not just fantasy that triggers maturismo. I have encountered serious discomfort before, occasionally even alarm, when I tell some of my friends and acquaintances I write science fiction.

I’ve never had a lot of patience with the slannish, they – only – hate – us – because – they’re – jealous reflex some SFF readers have whenever the subject of who reads what and why comes up. There are more damn fine books in the world than any one person can read in a lifetime or even two. I’m good with whatever reading material floats people’s neurons.

Let’s make a distinction between people who may not like SF or fantasy, but could care less whether you or I read it or not, and those who seem to feel threatened by it. There is no doubt that too much fantasy seems to provoke anxiety, even revulsion, for some people, and this, I think, is at the base of maturismo. Case in point: both of my parents were quite worried with what must have seemed to them as my almost obsessive fascination with fantastic beasts, alien worlds, weird tech, and creepy shit, growing up. At one point, they even had me evaluated by a psychologist (who ran a battery of psyche tests on me and basically told them I was fine, and for them to stop worrying). (For one thing, parenthood is just scary. Is my kid going to turn out to be a psychopath? Suicidal? What’s this RPG business? Didn’t a group of D&D players end up murdering all their neighbors? And I read about a kid that choked to death on a kernel of popcorn! Christ on a dirt bike! With giant ants! We’re all going to die!)

Lore-o-phobes seem to equate a fascination with the fantastic with mental illness. I think this is revealing.

Here’s my theory. I think some people worked hard for years to get the monsters beneath their beds to go to sleep, and they’ve managed to forget about them. But secretly, they are afraid the monsters are still there. Fools like us keep reminding them. We are going to wake the bloody beasts up with all our carrying on. Shhh!

Posted in Daily Life, Fantasy, Fiction, History, Morgan, People, Pop. Culture, Science Fiction | 9 Comments »

9 Responses

1. Caroline Spector Says:
   December 23rd, 2006 at 9:57 am

   Great post, Morgan. Personally, I think *all* fiction is fantasy. And I would argue that religion and mythology were but the first attempts to make a cohesive plotline.

   Making stuff up is what humans do. We try to explain and enlighten ourselves and the more bizarre and entertaining the better.

2. Steven Gould Says:
   December 23rd, 2006 at 12:33 pm

   Here’s a quote attributed to Heinlein:

   To be matter of fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy — and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.

3. Madeleine Robins Says:
   December 23rd, 2006 at 1:19 pm

   Excellent post, Morgan.

   I just talked with my sister-in-law, whose oldest son is a fighter pilot in Iraq, and asked if he liked to read and if I could send him books. “He loves to read, but only real stuff.” By which I gather he only likes non-fiction. I am not about to argue with a 24-year-old about the real worlds of fictional landscapes (he’s up to his ears in as much reality as anyone should have to handle) but this particular locution drives me nuts. Jane Eyre is as real to me as any of my friends, and Narnia as vivid as my back yard. If all fiction is fantasy (which it must be, if it isn’t “real”) then it’s the readers of fantastic fiction who go farthest along the spectrum to the place where everything is invented except the emotional dilemmas and truths.

   Me, I find that an interesting place to hang out.

4. Doug Potter Says:
   December 23rd, 2006 at 4:08 pm

   When I went to a war zone for a year I was reading f and sf to the exclusion of everything else. Soon I was reading anything that was sent to us in the field, including a book on WW2 as fat as some of GRR Martin’s latest.
   Your post reminded me of the first time I ever deliberately prodded at the shadows under the bed by reading The Exorcist at night while sitting next to a window with the curtains back so the night could look in. It was an attempt to fully get in to the unknown horrors Blatty wrote about. I don’t know if it helped, but the read did scare me.

5. LDA Says:
   December 23rd, 2006 at 6:29 pm

   If I may go back to Caroline’s insightful point on religion and mythology. In their landmark work on how human mind shapes myth, “When They Severed Earth From Sky”, Elizabeth & Paul Barber put forth that myth arises from several principles, one related here states,

   “Because our language faculty is designed to tamp the world into coherent patterns or rules (explanations) for itself, whether or not it has the data to do so “correctly”, human narratives generally contain explanations—whether or not they truly explain the observed data.”

   [They further state that, of the product of the observer’s processing of the information, “the conscious mind may have no way of knowing which part is fact and which part is fiction”.]

   So, we’re hard wired by our language centers to rationalize. And from that well-spring we’ve gone on to willful storytelling where we know when we’re producing fiction, f or sf. Remarkable.

6. Morgan J. Locke Says:
   December 24th, 2006 at 12:16 am

   Excellent comments, all. Caroline, I think you are right, both about fiction as fantasy, and that religion and myth can be viewed as prototypes of what has become fiction. I’m with you, Mad and Steve, that fiction can be more real than reality… or perhaps we could say, it contains a kind of clarity and emotional truth that the complexities of reality make it hard for us to perceive the underlying truths. If I really wanted to do THAT subject justice, I would have to write a-whole-nother post.

   Doug, it’s interesting what you say about how living abroad affected your reading tastes. I found my reading broadened for the period I lived abroad, too. And I’m thankful for it. I would never have given Tolstoy or Henry James a second glance, otherwise. I still find my greatest pleasure is in SF and F, though, with popular science and mysteries and thrillers running a close second and third.

   And I gotta say, you have serious gonads. I would not have been able to read THE EXORCIST with the curtains open, much less past bedtime. Even DUMBO can creep me out, at the witching hour. That elephant parade scene… *shudder*

7. Bradley Denton Says:
   December 24th, 2006 at 12:38 am

   Sir Philip Sidney, in his _Defense of Poesy_, made the point that fiction writers never lie, because they never claim to be reporting fact. So fantasists are the least lie-prone people on earth — and therefore, as Morgan suggests, may tell greater truths than anyone else. (Or will at least have a better shot at it than your average preacher or memoirist.)

8. Caroline Spector Says:
   December 24th, 2006 at 11:38 am

   This reminds me of a conversation I had with one of my dotors.

   She asked me what I wrote and I said, “Fantasy and Horror, mostly.”

   She shivered and said, “Oh, I can’t read that stuff. It’s too scary.”

   I replied, “Do you watch The Operation? I think that’s terrifying.”

   “Oh no,” she said. “That’s real. It’s not scary.”

   Let’s just say, I was boggled.

9. Morgan J. Locke Says:
   December 24th, 2006 at 11:43 am

   I think my head just exploded.