Four kinds of fantasy
Discussion of Farah Mendelsohn’s Rhetorics of Fantasy
Gregory Frost, Ellen Asher, Greer Gilman, Sarah Micklem, John Clute
Portal Quest – Lion, Witch, Wardrobe (fantastic reached through a transition, fantastic does not leak back into the real world)
Entry, quest, discovery. Can seem immersive, but the important part is the transition. LOTR is a a portal quest, because of the hobbits leaving the Shire.
Immersive – Most epic fantasy. Fantastic element is explicit from the start
Frost quotes M John Harrison – “The counter-trajectory of the counter-liminal…” for instance, in Howl’s Moving Castle, when the fantastical characters travel to the real world, allowing satire or other commentary on the real world
Intrusion – the fantastic bursts into the everyday world, e.g. horror, but in general without a celebration of the fantastic, and driven by the desire to return to the real world.
Ellen Asher: Can there be positive fantasy? Strange and Norrell? Mortal Love?
Liminal – Little, Big. Joe Nathan’s story “But this is Tuesday?” Opposite of the quest fantasy. Turn of the Screw. Crucial element is that what is fantastic to the protagonist is not fantastic to the reader. Purpose is to disconcert the reader.
Greer Gilman – Pattern/Ground fantasy. We don’t always know what framework we’re in.
Immersive = Like a Pre-Raphaelite painting in which every element is equally brilliant and important
Liminal = like impressionist painting? Or like a Vermeer in which the only numinous element is the light?
Clute – the most modern of these categories, rare in classical literature?
What does she mean by equipoise and irony? Todorov has fantasy defined as hesitation between the fantastical and the mundane?
The last category: Subverting the Taxonomy.
Hal Duncan’s Vellum – a liminal fantasy in the immersive mode?
Hope Mirlees, Lud-in-the-mist one generation on – magic entered the world some time ago, some still resist it.
What about most urban fantasy – LKH, etc, where the everyday world is full of fantastic elements ab initio?
Clute – applicability of structural analysis to fantasy – no point in looking for exceptions to analyses like this, the value is in the utility of the distinctions drawn. The difficulty of criticism is in finding positive value in any of the ideas of others.
E.g., the idea that portal quest fantasy is imperialist. [What does imperialist mean in this context?]
Clute: Taproot text – a text belonging to the fuzzy set of fantasy
