Well, I expect you to be basically the antithesis of everything I stand for and love in this world, Joe, so it's not surprising.

I could throw out a few names such as Lord Dunsany, Mervyn Peake, John Myers Myers and even throw in a reference to Virginia Woolf's Orlando... but if you don't like fantasy, then the Gormenghast trilogy or Dunsany's short stories might just seem like a waste of time.

Now the Gormenghast trilogy -- there's fantasy with some literary merit, and a real artist's vision behind it. It's a bit frustrating in the sense that it's not so much a narrative as it is a giant, grotesque painting, but Peake is writer everyone should check out. He's so jarringly original I didn't even think to associate him with the fantasy genre per se. I think Titus Groan is a Jan Svankmajer or maybe a Quay Bros. movie waiting to be made.

K

I can dig what you're saying about Peake, but I can also think of a lot of fantasy novels I think have at least some real literary merit.

That's why it bothers me to see people basically dismiss the whole genre as trash with elves and crap (and even some of the books with elves and crap have literary merit, such as Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword).

There's a lot more to the fantasy genre than mediocre trilogies that seem like the writer just kept good notes during a fun Dungeons and Dragons campaign, changed enough stuff to keep from getting sued and then turned the notes into a book.

Yeah, you have to sort through a lot of stories about obscure farmboys turning out to be the only one who can save the day in a manner appallingly similar to Luke Skywalker and stories about unhappy quasi-feminist princesses who kick ass once they're given a chance... but once you get past the stuff you're more likely to find at Borders, there are a lot of great books out there lurking just below the radar of the general public.

Robert Holdstock's first two or three Mythago Woods books, just for example. They're great stuff about Freudian psychology, deconstruction of mythology and what you should do when a living, breathing representation of Robin Hood conjured from your subconscious keeps making feeble efforts to kill you.

The books revolve around a forest in England where time flows in different ways depending on where you are and that is bigger once you're inside than it seems like before you enter it. In the forest, some unexplainable phenomenon creates living versions of every fictional character ever used in a story (yeah, it's a little like that one Star Trek episode, but it's a more compelling idea than I'm making it sound like), but you don't always get what you expected so... you have to deal with things like being captured by Jason and the Argonauts after they became slave traders...

Or the really fun "A Night in the Lonesome October" by Roger Zelazny, which features stuff like Jack the Ripper's loyal talking dog sidekick (the protagonist) and a witch's cat going to all the places mentioned in Lovecraft's "The Dream Quest of Untold Kadath" over the span of one wild and crazy chapter.

I just read Bloom's Potter essay. I noticed that not far from the place where he picks at Rowlings for using cliches, he refers to the sorcerous breed, those who send their sons and daughters to Hogwarts, as "addicted to magic." I've only read the first two Potter books, but this strikes me as a misrepresentation. There were a range of sorcerer-types who were both bad and good, but I don't believe any of them were addicted to anything. Rowlings' idea of her sorcerer-people may not be the best evocation of the theme of "special people amongst us," as evoked by everyone from Van Vogt and Henderson to Lee & Kirby, but that's all it is: the non-Muggles have potential for magic, period.

But then I'm not surprised to see Bloom evoking metaphors of drug addiction in order to fight his rearguard action against the perils of pop fiction.

One thing a canon-oriented critic like Bloom cannot comprehend is that not all of what he terms "rubbish" gets rubbed out by time. In fact, sometimes it remains popular enough to edge its way into the official literary canon, or at least to establish a 'separate but equal' canon of its own, as with works like DRACULA and LORD OF THE RINGS. Some of this popularity may accrue from adaptations in other media, particularly the cinema, but hey, there've been a few times that the movies have boosted the readership of canonical novels too. I remember working at a library in the mid-70's, when TV aired a new adaptation of EAST OF EDEN; we couldn't keep the book on the shelves.

I don't know if POTTER is going to make it to either canon: I found the two I read enjoyable but I wouldn't put either on my short list of best fantasies ever. But as far as I can see Bloom's just using the book as an excuse to beat up on cultural trends he doesn't like.

Re: the "dumbing-down" effect of the NEW YORK TIMES-- wonder if he notes the same effect in that periodical's reviews of modern comics, as well.

Gene, is Harry Potter as deserving of canonization as Dracula or Lord of the Rings? That's a ridiculous claim, so I fail to see what point you're making. Simply because a few popular works are great long-lasting ones doesn't mean shit regarding the vast majority of such works.

I think Bloom is quite capable of comprehending your point, Gene; whether he agrees with it or not is something else entirely. But why resort to personal attacks against Bloom, ridiculing his intellectual capacity, just because you don't agree with his views?

There's a lot that might technically fall under the term "fantasy" simply because it takes place in a made-up world, like Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast or Jim Woodring's Frank. Then there's work that bends the rules of reality a little, like Kafka. And I think it's already been pretty well established that certain science fiction works, like Frankenstein, 1984, or Brave New World, have earned their place in the real literary canon, not just some "canon of their own"... what does that mean, anyway?

I think all this only goes to show that we need better terms. In particular, we need to better denote the genre we almost always mean when we say "fantasy" or "science fiction"-- that "farmboy saves the universe" genre that's always the same whether it involves swords or rayguns. We've probably lost a lot of great work that could have been done if good authors hadn't been worried they would be associated with that kind of juvenilia.

I've read two Harry Potters and found them cute but not much else. I remember one pretty gripping scene at the end of the first when Voldemort manifests himself in a gruesome way, but then again the villains are always the most exciting part of this kind of thing. In general, it seems to be a product of the same kind of strategy that Disney and Pixar have been using: come up with an adventure that the kids will take 100% seriously but fill it with wry humor & topical satire for the adults and you've got an across-the-board hit. I agree with A.S. Byatt who said that there's none of the wildness or sense of exploration that you get with the best children's fantasy.

My personal definition of fantasy is flexible enough to include some of the metafiction I've read and a lot of other stuff, but yeah... Where does Kafka fit?

The Metamorphosis is more like horror, but it's not scary so much as quietly outraged. I've read science fiction stories from the Fifties that are far scarier than The Metamorphosis... so it is horror, magical realism, fantasy, something else?

What do we call The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges? I'm tempted to think of it as fantasy... but then, I've read plenty of fantasy books that weren't following the far-too-prevalent "farmboy saves..." pattern.

There is plenty of fantasy with more ambition than just rehashing the plot of Star Wars, but any time I've ever found myself having this sort of conversation, people usually want to come up with reasons why most of the good stuff doesn't really count.

I agree. We need better terms. It's too easy to dismiss, say, Freedom and Necessity by Steven Brust and Emma Bull... which is basically a historical romance featuring a bunch of British socialists and social reformers who now get their theories discussed in sanitized ways in Sociology 101 classes, but who lived dangerous, controversial lives back in the nineteenth century--but it also implies that at least two of the characters have working magic powers.

Freedom and Necessity is a great fantasy book by two writers who have written some great stuff on their own, but most people would think it doesn't really count just because there aren't any eccentric old wizards or annoyingly cute hobbits in the book.

Jeez, Charles, didn't I just say I didn't know whether or not it would gain entry into the Lesser Canon? As I said, I've only read the first two books, so I'm not an expert on things Potterian. But I think Bloom's rationale for disincluding the series is faulty. Most of his criticism is directed at the POTTER books for being badly-written, right? But technically-polished writing is not necessarily a requirement for Great Junk Fiction: if it were, Stoker's DRACULA could never make it in. There are some fine suspenseful moments in the novel, some of which are so good they're practically embedded in our pop-cultural consciousness, but there are also a lot of draggy sequences and poor characterization that are, on the whole, inferior to Rowlings.

I don't mind if Bloom knocks the Potter books for substantive reasons; they probably get too much unequivocally-good press. But I repeat, I don't think he recognizes the qualities that made the series successful, and instead uses Rowlings as his whipping-girl.

I don't think I commented on Bloom's intellectual capacity: what I found fault with was more of a matter of taste (pointless though it is to argue on such matters). He likes works that are weighty enough to enter his canon of great works, and doesn't think much of those that are beyond the pale. That's his privilege, and it's mine to disagree with his preconceptions.

FWIW, I did enjoy THE WESTERN CANON, even though in that, as in the Potter article, he "p-shaws" the whole idea of cultural criticism of things like "Batman comics." I think the canon-obsessed critic may sometimes say things worth reading, but I get antsy when I feel like the guy's trying to drown out anyone with differing views.