A Reader of Else

Rather than talk about a specific book (or using a specific book as an excuse to talk about something related), I’m going to talk about a more general topic this time – it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and something I know I’ve had multiple conversations about, so I wanted to have a chance to get my thoughts in order on it.

There have been quite a few books in the last few years that I’ve ended up reading or seeing discussed that cross between the spheres of myth and of fantasy, or are entirely about and around myth, but treated as if they are fantasy. It’s something I have a lot of thoughts about, but the primary one is this – myths, and stories using myths, are not necessarily fantasy. They can be, and some of them do choose to be*. But the existence of a mythological component in a narrative is not, by itself, at least in my opinion, a sufficient marker for a novel to be fantasy. To some extent, this forms part of a larger issue but there are only so many of my words anyone wants to read in any one stretch, so I’m going to limit myself to this one thing right now.

And it all boils down to one thing – “elements of the fantastical” and “fantasy” are not synonymous.

I mean… there are genres where absolutely we can find elements of the fantastical, but would consider themselves totally a different genre. There are genres that are edge cases that sort of overlap fantasy but sort of are their own special thing. And yes, there are ones that fall into fantasy. But fantasy as a genre is about more than just the unreal or the implausible. Otherwise we’d consider most SF to be a subset fantasy (weirdly, a view I did actually hear espoused the other day).

But I’ve heard plenty of people over the last few years go “x must be fantasy because y happens”, where y is something magical, unrealistic or implausible. And my visceral instinctive response is always just “what no”. A notable example was The Iliad. Now, for me, this is filed solidly under “myth”, “classics” and “poetry” (other genres may be available). Do fantastical things happen in the story? Absolutely. Are some of the events the sort of thing that might happen in a novel that considers itself to be fantasy? Also very much true. So what makes the difference? As ever, context. Context makes all the difference in the world. Well, context and the fact I don’t 100% subscribe to death of the author, even in an example where “the author” wasn’t a single person and even had they been, they would have died a good few thousand years ago. But mainly context.

Genre’s a construct, right? We all know that. The genre of a novel is fundamentally informed by the context in which the novel was written and published. Authors don’t exist in a bubble, and respond to the works around them and before them. They can forge a new path and end up creating something different, but even that comes with an awareness of what came before – Frankenstein may have birthed a genre, but we can’t forget its roots in the gothic romance that was abundant when it came to be, especially as, in many ways, it has a lot more in common with Dracula than it does with Foundation. This doesn’t mean Dracula is SF though, does it?

So with all that in mind… can something be “fantasy” when the whole concept of anything that might even approach that genre is a thousand years away from existence, and the novel a good few hundred? Sticking with The Iliad, it wasn’t even bloody written down for a few hundred years. It’s operating in a totally different reference frame from Rivers of London. The two are aiming to achieve two totally different objectives** – which is the second part of my context point. What was a particular text – and the texts around it, the things it drew on and interacted with, the things it was inspired by – meant to achieve? What was it meant to do to the world and its audience? A modern fantasy novel… well, that’s there for entertainment, primarily. There may be some secondary moralising, didactic or inspirational points, as well as its creation possibly being an end unto itself, but the modern novel is a medium of entertainment. Myths in general? The Iliad in particular? We-ell… there’s a bit more going on there, isn’t there? Myths are religious texts, if not in the same sense as we might consider for instance the Bible, and the Homeric epics occupied, along with Hesiod, a very particular niche in the cultural context in which they arose. There’s a quotation of Herodotus from the C5th BC where he claims that Homer and Hesiod gave the Greek gods their characteristics… and while this is only as true as anything Herodotus tells us is, at least in the literal sense, it is worth bearing in mind that those two bodies of myth were part of what the Ancient Greeks used to construct their own identity – Greeks were people who spoke Greek and worshipped the gods of Hesiod and Homer. While the rhapsode performing a section of The Odyssey may well have been a source of entertainment to the listeners, that’s not the whole of what it was for in its own time. It wasn’t just telling a fun story.

And then of course there’s the matter of belief. At some point in the way back when, these were stories people believed in. Whether that was a literal or a more figurative sort of belief doesn’t hugely matter, at least not to me. These were stories that weren’t wholly fantastical. The fact that they are to us just speaks of a different context in which we’re reading them. Because absolutely, to me, Athena isn’t rocking up invisibly behind fractious demigods and telling them to behave a bit less ridiculously when talking to the king. But to someone listening way back when? Someone who made offerings to Athena Parthenos, who prayed to her for intervention in their life? Whole different matter.

Which isn’t to say I think we ought to treat it like a treatise of literal truth, because Ancient Greek storytellers were just as sophisticated with allergory and fiction as we can be, but more that it feels inherently trivialising and almost rude to consider something “fantasy”, when originally it had such a place within the context of its birth. Myth is more than fantasy. It’s more than entertainment and a fun story to read on a rainy night. It’s more that what it is to us, because it has the weight of years and belief behind it, lending it a sort of gravity that something written, however well, in knowing creation cannot possibly manage, that something that hasn’t spent centuries being a source of identity, religious imagery and cultural unification cannot possibly manage.

Sure, not all myths are The Iliad. But it exists at the end of a spectrum, and there’s a whole long line of mythical narratives stretching on back from it before we even begin to approach what we might consider “fantasy”.

And then you get to things that aren’t “original” myth texts themselves, but use those myths to make new stories. Circe is probably the example I’ll be sticking with here, because it’s the one I was annoyed about when people suggested nominating it for a Hugo/Nebula. Because if we think just in terms of the context issue, it’s being created for entertainment, and may well be interacting with, informed by and generally related to plenty of absolutely entertainment-y books. But I read it and was absolutely certain, with the feeling you have for genre that it’s sometimes hard to explain, that this was a lit-fic novel.

Now, defining lit-fic as a genre is an absolute bitch, as I learned all over again yesterday, but it exists as a genre. It has some common themes that run through all (or most of) the books that occupy it. It tends to be more concerned with the intricate details of relationships and human experience and the mundane than most genre fic, and has more scope for interpretation in terms of finding themes and resonances with other works, more implications beyond the scope of a simple story. It tends to be more concerned with the art of the novel and the story in and of itself.

And for me, Circe absolutely ticked that box. Sure, it had elements of the fantastical going on – she’s a literal goddess doing witchy things after all – but they weren’t the point of it. It was more a novel trying to be a literary novel… that just happened to have fantastical elements involved. And that is kind of my point about elements of the fantastical – they can be used as tools in service of the novel doing something else, in this case being a literary novel about womanhood, power and finding one’s place in the world, and by being put into this service, by being sufficiently not the point of the endeavour, are rendered somewhat immaterial to what genre the whole affair ends up sitting in.

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, none of this matters in the slightest to the person reading a book in the moment, purely for fun. Genre’s a construct***. It doesn’t stop me reading enjoying a story. I don’t need to know the genre of a book to know I like it. But what we call things does matter more broadly, because it affects how we understand them, how we relate to them, and how we relate to the people who made them and the meaning they weighted within them. It will shock precisely no one to know that someone who writes a semi-regular book review blog cares about understanding where books exist within the wider literary landscape. And no one has to care – I just enjoy it. But I think by claiming a mythical story is just fantasy bereaves you of some of that legacy, and that understanding, that wonderful context, that is such a huge part of what it is. You reduce it to nothing more than a fun story, when for me at least, the draw of myth is exactly that cultural weight that defining it as fantasy strips it of.

Stories are more than the sum of their parts, and myths exist as a testament to the world not just of the imagination, but of the belief, their retelling, their integration into an identity and their role in the performance and participation in a civic and religious life in the past or present. And fantasy isn’t that. Just because they have fantastical events within them, doesn’t mean they can’t be something other, and something more.

*Obviously, all declarations of fact here are prefaced with “in my opinion”, but I cannot be bothered to hedge it every single time I type a sentence, so please take it as read.
**This is the bit where it matters that I don’t 100% go with death of the author – I do think authorial intent has some value, especially if we’re talking about “what was this text created to achieve”. I’m not saying a text is unknowable outside of this, obviously, mind.
***If nothing else, it exists as a marketing tool for selling books to the audience most likely to buy them.