"There and Back Again": Progress in the Discourse of Todorovian, Tolkienian and Mystic Fantasy Theory (Critical Essay‪)‬

THE ACT OF LITERARY CRITICISM is always an act of creative fantasy. The critic constructs an internally consistent structure from fragments of texts, observations and (inevitably) personal biases, and this construction begins with a what-if proposition. What if literary texts have political implications? Might there be a correlation between a writer's gender and the language available for that writer's expression? Could it be that language itself is indeterminate, and, if so, what impact would this have on the Western tradition of liberal humanism? The critic speculates, fabricates an imagined network of logical implications and, in the case of publication, presents this fabrication for serious consideration by a scholarly community. The following act of literary criticism is, like all such acts, a fantasy of critical discourse. To survey a history of fantasy criticism--as I shall in this paper--is to build a meta-fantasy, a fantasy of fantasies of fantasy. That fantasy has been dismissed or excluded from the canon of Western literature is a commonplace of the critical work on the genre. This sense of exclusion may be the strongest recurring theme across all forms of fantasy criticism, an otherwise highly heterogeneous field. Karen Michalson, for example, introduces her exploration of Victorian fantasy by suggesting that "certain readers will object to my subject matter as well as to my approach. Fantasy literature does not enjoy the kind of critical attention or prestige that other literary genres, like the realistic novel do" (i). Michalson then proceeds to examine the historical, "non-literary and non-aesthetic reasons" for the exclusion of fantasy from "the traditional literary canon" (i) as founded in Victorian England. Although her tone may appear unwarrantedly defensive (and perhaps it is), it resonates with my own initial ambivalence in approaching fantasy as a scholar. Although I have (and do) read what is often referred to as "genre-fantasy," this material rarely appears in a scholarly milieu (i.e., literature courses). Rather, for many, the reading of fantasy is often characterized as a guilty pleasure or indulgence, carrying an implicit stigma. (1) Whether or not such a stigma exists in any universal sense, fantasy readers, writers and critics often perceive "fantasy" as a beleaguered and disrespected form of literature, the (alleged) perpetrators of this (perceived) stigma characterizing the genre as material more appropriate for children than adults or, at best, a variety of "light" or "unserious" reading. Ursula K. Le Guin names this phenomenon the "genrefication" of fantasy, a process by which genre becomes not a neutral descriptive term, but rather a label applied only to those types of literature that are other-than-serious ("Spike" 18-19). (2)