Realistic fiction is relentlessly focused on human behavior and psychology. “The proper study of mankind is Man.” When fiction disobeys Pope and begins to include the Other, it begins to shade into the ghost story, the horror story, the animal story, or science fiction, or fantasy; it begins the movement outward to the not-entirely-human. Even “regional” fiction, always looked at disparagingly by the modernists, is part of this movement, sliding from human psychology into that which contains it, the landscape.
We need better definitions of terms than the ones we have. Hardy’s Egdon Heath is in itself entirely realistic, but its centrality to The Return of the Native decentralises the human characters in a way quite similar to that of fantasy and even science fiction. Melville’s white whale isn’t a real whale, he’s a beast of the imagination, like dragons or unicorns; hence Moby Dick is not an animal story, but it is a fantasy. Woolf’s Flush is an animal story, because Flush is (and actually was) a real spaniel; but of course it is also a novel about the Brownings; it is also definable as a fantasy, since the dog is a central character, and we know what he is thinking; but then we know what the dog is thinking in the hunting scene in War and Peace, too, which does not make War and Peace a fantasy… The clean, sharp definition of what realism is and what fantasy is recedes even further, along with any justification for despising genre.
I venture a non-defining statement: realistic fiction is drawn towards anthropocentrism, fantasy away from it. Although the green country of fantasy seems to be entirely the invention of human imaginations, it verges on and partakes of actual realms in which humanity is not lord and master, is not central, is not even important. In this, fantasy may come much closer to the immense overview of the exact sciences than does science fiction, which is very largely obsessed by a kind of imperialism of human knowledge and control, a colonial attitude towards the universe.
- from “The Critics, the Monsters, and the Fantasists”
Ursula Le Guin writes rad imaginative literature. She also writes rad criticism of same, collected here.
5/5 stars
Sure, the author of the Earthsea books is all kinds of biased (so am I – I love imaginative lit more than any other art form); but such bias is, more than permissible, de rigueur for the matters to which Le Guin attends in Cheek by Jowl. As C.S. Lewis wrote in “On Science Fiction”, “Let bad tragedies be censured by those who love tragedy, and bad detective stories by those who love the detective story. Then we shall learn their real faults. Otherwise we shall find epics blamed for not being novels, farces for not being high comedies, novels by James for lacking the swift action of Smollett.” Here, Le Guin rails against such folly, criticizing individual stories in the context of form and genre, and as one who not only loves fantasy but groks the craft of it.
In the short “Assumptions about Fantasy”, she picks three biggies and inverts them. “The Wilderness Within”, about the influence of early childhood reading on adult writing, the only one of these I’d encountered before, and the only one collected elsewhere (in 2004’s The Wave in the Mind
[also highly recommended]), I gladly revisited. “Re-reading Peter Rabbit” deals with returning to stories that moved us in early childhood (never read Peter Rabbit, but it’s on my to-read list now, along with Bambi, Kim and Bakhtin). “The Critics, the Monsters, and the Fantasists” again turns the tables on the modernist/realist and reductionist takes on fantasy, while exploring some common qualities of fantasy settings. The title piece, subtitled “Animals in Children’s Literature”, based on a 2004 American Library Association lecture, is the longest, divided into eight sections, roughly following a spectrum from stories in which animals are central to those in which humans are. She begins with those tales, mostly drawn from myth, in which animals are the sole protagonists, examines the paradoxes of animal speech, then what she calls animal biographies: Lassie Come-Home and The Incredible Journey (neither a full biography, “since they recount only one episode”), Red Heifer, Bambi, White Fang, Lad: A Dog, The Biography of a Grizzly, Gay-Neck, Black Beauty, Mrs. Chippy’s Last Expedition and Lost, Stolen or Strayed (of which I’ve read only White Fang, the most problematic for Le Guin). Next come “animal novels”, which “differ from the biographies in containing a fantasy element: what the animals do is a mixture of behavior proper to their species and human behavior,” and which include Kipling’s “The White Seal” (and the other episodes of The Jungle Books not concerned with Mowgli), Charlotte’s Web, Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, Redwall, The Wind in the Willows, Watership Down, and Fire Bringer (of which I’ve read all but Nimh, Redwall, and Fire Bringer [of which Le Guin commends Nimh]). Near the middle of the spectrum fall Smokey, The Black Stallion, Misty of Chincoteague and National Velvet (horses, all), Gentle Ben, Old Yeller, Julie of the Wolves, Dr Dolittle, The Jungle Books as a whole, and The Sword in the Stone. At the human end are “fables and psychic fragments” “where the animal exists mixed with or as a reflection of the human”, including Aesop’s fables, the Grimms’ Household Tales, “animal satires” Animal Farm, The Story of Ferdinand and Part IV of Gulliver’s Travels, and Philip Pullman’s best-selling trilogy. “The Young Adult in YA” deals with the rules, or lack thereof, of writing fiction for kids, of the origins of Earthsea and how kids still dig it despite, by the middle of the series, the protagonists having aged well beyond their teenage years. In “A Message about Messages”, Le Guin echoes Twain and anyone else irked by the tendency to reduce a story to a slogan: “I’m not an answering machine,” she writes. Straight up! Finally, in “Why Kids Want Fantasy” she explains what kids and dragons know that “producers of fantasy-by-the-yard” do not.
Le Guin surprised me a few times in this collection. She defends such oft-dismissed (as escapist, militaristic, misogynist, what have you) fantasies as those of Kipling and Tolkien, and takes some other giants to task: the fairy tales of Wilde and Andersen for lacking emotional honesty, only pretending to be for children, and for “disguising adult self-pity in sentimental cruelty”; Richard Adams for feigning to write of rabbits as they are, portraying them instead as he wishes to give men an excuse to be; Philip Pullman for cheating, changing the rules/essential nature of his daemons.
If you’ve not read Le Guin before, dig one of her novels before you hit up Cheek by Jowl, but by all means do hit it up.
All in all this is an excellent book to have on your reference shelf if you’re a reader, writer, a reviewer, a critic, or a teacher of children’s literature.
Review by Gayle Surrette, SFRevu 4-30-09
Or of any imaginative literature.
Happy reading and writing.