Offensive literally as in the opposite of defensive, the assertion/claim to be counterargued. Not offensive as in insulting.

K

Oh well, any comic book discussion that flirts with Plato, Shakespeare, Milton, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Joyce, Proust, Dreiser, Jane Austen, Sartre, Kafka, Hitchcock, Visconti, Chaucer, Robbe-Grillet, Tolkein, 'Groundhog Day,' 'The Heart of Darkness,' Lynch, ...ahem... Mathew Barney, and... Cough! Cough! Hack! Cough! ...Harry Potter... can't be all bad.

Did anybody mention Mark Twain? He wrote some good fantasies-- 'The Mysterious Stranger,' 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court?'

And let me drag in one other guy--

Well, this thread seems to have dribbled itself out and lost its energy. But, hey, I tried.

I never said that self-made losers like Pekar should just hang it up and jump out a window or something. That's simply what I would do if I were Pekar and had his life. Life should never be an end to itself and some lives, like Pekar's miserable existence, are simply not worth living and should be ended as quickly as possible. This is mentioned somewhere in Sun Tzu. One simply needs the courage and decisiveness to do it. Again, that's just me and what I would do in Pekar's situation. I'm quite happy with my life.

Anyway, to close things out, this thread could have done a bit better if Zabel had had some more effective counter-arguments to Madget, Reece, and myself. I could think of any number of good arguments Zabel could have put up against us. He could, for instance, have used the old Marxian argument in support of realism, one advocated by Georg Lukacs, and say that fantasy and surrealism are escapist and bourgeois--instances of "false consciousness", in other words. But that's a bit played out, to say the least.

Another good defense of realism is an offshoot of the Marxian defense I just described. According to this argument, surrealism is artsy obcurantism, comprehensible only to a small elite of the initiated, and fails to challenge the societal status quo. Realism, on the other hand, is readily comprehensible to anyone and has a more populist appeal and, since it invariably depicts contemporary life as meaningless and decrepit, is implicitly a critique of contemporary society.

I could name a couple more, but they're all basically different versions of these two, and, to tell the truth, about as equally vapid.

Please don't switch sides, Adam-- I don't want an arrogant bore like yourself on my side.

On Pekar: I find Adam's interpretation to be off the mark. Pekar's stories tend to be a way of grappling with the quotidian aspects of his life, but I don't sense much self-loathing in them. However, I do agree that the stories are pretty boring, but enjoy listening/reading Pekar discuss other topics (or his comics themselves), even if I don't tend to agree with him.



I don't think the discussion is unreasonable to have, but do think you've not given a good reasonable defense to the counter-claims that've been made. For example, I countered your democracy analogy already by pointing out that (1) democracy's superiority depends on privileging certain factors over others, e.g. individualism and (2) unlike finding good fantasies, one would be hard-pressed to find dictatorships which could be considered benevolent, therefore (3) unlike fantasy, one can safely say that dictatorships in general suck.

Oh, for crying out loud Joe, lighten up. I'm just fucking with you a bit. Truce.

Generally, I like the little-man-in-an-incomprehensible-world genre. I'm a huge fan of Gogol's "The Overcoat", which single-handedly invented it and, of course, Melville's "Bartleby The Scrivener". Another good author of this type, who I encourage people to discover, if only because I'm doing my doctorate on him, is the early 20th century Swiss writer Robert Walser. There are some here who may have heard his name before--the Kray Brothers film INSTITUTE BENJIMENTA was based on the Walser novel of the same name. Before he ended up in an insane asylum--unjustly!--he wrote just the most touching and bizarre bunch of stories this side of Kafka. Actually, Kafka was a huge fan of Walser.

But Pekar has never struck me as a very good writer and he seems to have taken this "embrace your own victimhood" shtick about as far it can go. I was also a bit unnerved by the Pekar I saw in the movie. Really creepy. The sort of guy you don't want to sit next to on the subway. But I have to give it to him for having written his way out of an utterly wretched existence. I'm just not a fan.

Argh, damn quote function didn't capture the first part of Joe's response. Anyone know why it sometimes quotes everything (within limits) and sometimes only the last little bit?

Anyway, Joe sed to me: "You make a good argument for a means by which fantasy can express an abstract idea, but since you yourself illustrate how a realistic story like HOD can do the same, I haven't anything to add."

I think you've misunderstood me, Joe, if you think I said that HOD expressed its abstract notions in the same way as did an outright fantasy like LORD OF THE RINGS. A fantastic story and a realistic story will both have conceptual underpinnings of some sort but the realistic one cannot express its concepts in "the same" way as the fantastic one, because the former is committed to depicting only what is realistically credible. This is the other side of the coin to your conviction that a fantasy cannot express things of the real world as well as a realistic narrative: I would say that any story that excludes the fantastic as "real" (and I'm not altogether sure that includes HEART OF DARKNESS, though it's close enough) can never let its imagination fly to the same extents that a fantasy can. Joe, you've said several times that you think a realistic story can be depicted with imaginative skill, and I've no quarrel with that, but within the confines of a realistic narrative imagination is always hemmed in by the necessity to imitate reality. In a realistic narrative the imagination is in the position of the king's valet: the king must be dressed and the valet must try to make him look good, if he wants to keep his head. In a fantastic narrative, however, their roles are reversed. In LOTR the imagination lords it over everything, and all the realistic touches that so many readers admire-- the invented languages, the precise geography-- would mean nothing in a realistic context, because neither the languages nor the geography are actually real, or ever were.

I stated back on 8-19 that fantasy and realism were "distinct in characteristics but equal in value," and I'll say it again because while I might never find a fantasy that can give me the precise bracing effect of Zola's GERMINAL, I also don't think pure realism, even at its most imaginative, can ever yield the fever dreams of a Poe.

I don't remember just what Charles said about wanting to see reality reflected through the fantasies he likes, but if that's what he said, it's not the same thing this fantasy-lover (meaning me) looks for in fantasy. Sure, it's fun to pore over a Poe tale like MORELLA and try to figure out if it expresses Oedipal patterns of psychology, or contemporaneous societal feelings toward women. But MORELLA, though situated in the "real world," is able to pull off aesthetic effects that GERMINAL cannot. MORELLA can do so because it depicts a world that may exist only in our imaginations, or that may exist in some form beneath the percepts of our consensual reality: a world where magic works.

Or, to put it another way, Alan Moore's PROMETHEA has garnered a lot of praise for being able to take all the heady, interrelated myth-concepts of the Tarot and to expound upon them in an intelligent fashion. I submit that few if any realistic narratives could do that particular job of concept-explication as well as PROMETHEA does, for the central reason that it's damn difficult to expound on said concepts within a context where the concepts are just ideas, without any reality outside men's minds.

To sum up:

Purely-realistic stories are best for showing the uncompromising rigors of reality as we know it.

Purely-fantastic stories are best for showing the innumnerable transformations reality can undergo through the prism of the imagination.

Well, the juice has just about evaporated from this thread (mixed metaphor, I know), so responding to an old comment is probably like being "the last living cell in a dead body," but here goes anyway. (Ten points for anyone who can name the quote, by the way.) I've been distracted by a lot of stuff lately but wanted to respond to Adam F.'s thoughts for some time, and keep in mind that I do so without attempting to prove that he's 'wrong.' He is wrong for ME, but obviously, not for himself.

I agree with Adam F.'s statement that the purpose of fantasy is to make us see old things in a new way (Tolkien related it to his notion of 'secondary creation,' FWIW). But I wouldn't center that sense of newness on the super-literary notion of defamiliarization/"making strange," which applies so well to Kafka and Gogol but not most generic fantastic fiction. I see defamiliarization as simply a back-door literary approach to the less literary notion of what SF fans long ago termed "the sense of wonder." Yes, with works like "The Nose" or "Metamorphosis" you may see the familiar things around you in a new light of sorts, but for me personally I have no internal conviction that Kafka's cockroach or Gogol's ambulatory nose have any reality in themselves; to me they're merely literary devices that an author uses to make a point; i.e., allegories.

In contrast, when I read Tolkien or even (since sword and sorcery has been so much invoked here) Robert E. Howard, I have far more of a sense that their fantastic constructs are part of the worlds they exist in. These constructs can, and often do, have symbolic meanings, but the symbolism is more organic and less rigorously planned out. For instance, Tolkien had a spider-phobia as a child, and that phobia surely went into his devising of monstrous arachnids like Shelob and Ungoliant. Is this sort of fantasy as consciously personalized as Gogol's runaway nose? No, but it is still personal, and to anyone who shares Tolkien's anti-spider sentiments to any degree, a scene like the slaying of Shelob in LOTR has a resonance that cannot be put down to mere stereotype.

In short, while I like defamiliarization fantasies well enough, I don't like the implication that they are central to the fantasy experience. In a related manner you, Adam, object to blurring distinctions between folklore and mass-produced modern fantasies. I can accept keeping an awareness of the distinctions but I object to the notion (first propounded, I think, by the Frankfurt School) that there is some uncrossable gulf between the two. Both folklore and pop-cultural fantasies have that primarily-visceral appeal I mentioned before, and their symbolic values are often unintentional, yet not without their own profundity. Who can say that the sense of wonder conjured by Aladdin's sojourn in the treasure-cave, when heard by some long-vanished Arab listener in the 13th century, was of some different order than the sense of wonder of a 1940's American kid reading about Billy Batson venturing into the underground hall of Shazam in the CAPMARVEL origin-tale? The answer is of course, that no one can say they are categorically different. There would certainly be differences in the outlooks of each audience-member, but their visceral reaction, I maintain, would be so nearly the same as to be indistinguishable.

Lastly, while I don't debate your right to prefer more polished authors than Tolkien, my own preference is more toward 'content' than 'style.' I can think of a lot of authors of junk whose work, when examined through certain intellectual lenses, is symbolically richer than that of authors who can write well but don't have the signal ability to fantasize creatively. I confess I haven't read most of the modern literary authors you, Adam, mention, but I have read a few, such as Denis Johnson, whom I consider to be writers who write beautifully but may actually say less than a good Captain Marvel or Conan story.

But then, I'm with Leslie Fiedler, who once wrote that "mythopoetic power [is] independent of formal excellence," so maybe that tells you where I'm coming from...

Well, Gene, if I didn't feel there was some value to pure fantasy, I wouldn't be posting here. I mean we ARE on a comics message board. For months I tried convincing those assholes over at TCJ.com that even the most superficial-seeming fantasy could be aesthetically superior to work that traffics in tried-and-true devices such as "thematic richness" and "psychological depth", that Moore, depite his use of superheroes and fantasy, is infinitely superior to Spiegelman. Nothing doing. Most people simply can't relinquish the notion that "depth" and realism equals better. This is largely a result of what we were taught in High School, where it was jammed into our heads that a writer should "write what he knows" (i.e. realism)and that real literature and film consists of a patient layering of themes and symbols. It's only when you get to college and discover writers like Borges and Barthelme and that psychology and the notion of "depth" are simply passing fads, that you realize how utterly limited such notions are.

As I said before I really haven't read much modern fantasy, in the swords-and-sorcery sense of the word. Tolkien's trilogy, the first DUNE book, that's pretty much it. As far as modern science-fiction goes, I've mainly read J.G. Ballard, Lem, and some Bradbury. Generally, I think cinema has been more successful with the genre than literature. Tarkovsky's SOLARIS is among my top 5 favorite films. STAR WARS is another favorite.

In my earlier post I commented that writers of pure fantasy simply reproduce the tics and manerisms of realism, but on a different planet, as it were: mimetic prose, descriptive layering, psychological "depth", and all the rest. In this sense, I think your idea that "defamiliarization" is simply a more uppity version of fantasy's sense of "wonder" might be unfounded.

Let's just take a recent example. In Ben Marcus's NOTABLE AMERICAN WOMEN, spoken language literally transforms, destroys, and even kills people. The reader is immediately reminded of a simliar device used in the DUNE books--"the weirding way" I think it was called. Marcus, however is making a different point than Herbert. Modern linguistics has suggested that language doesn't react to the world, it creates the world--its PROactive, not REactive.(*) So, in NAW, the sister character undergoes an intensive regimen of re-naming by her sadistic parents--"Jane", "Lucy", even "Jesus"--which result in extreme physical changes in her body. Finally, when she is named "Tina", she dies of it. Apparently, the name "Tina" is quite deadly. Watch out for it. All of this is presented with Marcus's characteristic irony and wit, but it's serious business. He's showing the degree to which our names transform and determine our identity, defamiliarizing, in other words, the most familiar element of our lives, the thing that's with us from birth to death: our names. So Marcus's use of the device is very different from Herbert's, to say the least.

(*)This idea is kind of difficult to grasp, but the critic Stanley Fish once very cleverly illustrated the idea with the following anecdote: A batter lets a pitch pass over the plate. The umpire hesitates before calling it a ball or a strike. The batter turns to him, "So, which is it, a ball or a strike?". Umpire: "Kid, it's not anything until I call it." The umpire was making the same point that Critical Theorists like Fish and linguists like Austin have made, that our language creates the world.

I'm one of those TCJ.com a-holes, and I've read this thread with considerable interest. I grew up on fantasy and SF, then discovered that Nabokov's Lolita was far more imaginative than Terry Brooks's Shannara stuff. Anyway,:

I think one of Alan Moore's strong points is the way he incorporates psychology, richly developed themes, etc. into his work. Moore understands the virtues of realistic and fantastic literature, and is skilled at deploying and blending them. Saying he's better than Speigleman strikes me a similar to saying Robert Towne is superior to Jean-Luc Godard; does it have to be a horse race?

I'm reading Titus Groan: Book One of the Gormenghast Trilogy, and it's exhibit A in any defense of Fantasy Lit as Real Lit. The author, Mervyn Peake, was raised in China among diplomats and royalty. As an adult he lived and worked in England. The imaginary setting of his story finds the common denominator between Chinese and English tradition, and their common unhealthy emphasis on doing things by tradition. This is one advantage of fantasy; by being able to blend elements of various real cultures, it's able to find the common ground between different cultures in unique ways.

P.S. I'm also an athiest, and that doesn't compel me to prefer realistic lit. It frees me to drink deep of the myths and lore of all cultures without being wieghed down by the responsibility of believing in any of them.