Okay, but please stop assuming I secretly agree with you on some level.

Part of the value I find in fantasy is that by creating distance, I think about my own life in different ways than I would if all I ever read was stuff like Emma.

It's like the 5-year mission of Star Trek... seeking out new worlds of imagination and insight that I wouldn't get from "The Natural" even though it's a hell of a story.

I think limiting your options and sticking to only what one deems realistic is another one of those artificial choices you like to talk about.

The only thing that makes me find A inferior is that I usually don't find A entertaining in prose. It has nothing to do with the literary potential of realism and everything to do with what I think is fun.

Another TV example: I would rather watch Farscape than Boomtown. Boomtown is a great cop show with some great characters... but I get a lot more out of John Crichton's wacky misadventures in outer space than I get out of seeing the shady D.A. on Boomtown try to do the right thing.

Boomtown isn't particularly realistic, but it's set in a modern setting and the cop stuff is generally plausible, so that should make it better, right?

Well, not for me. I've gotten far more insights about how I should live my life and be a better person out of Ben Browder arguing with muppets than I've ever gotten out of Boomtown. Boomtown is a popcorn movie every Friday--a good popcorn movie, but ultimately the multiple-perspective story telling is more interesting than anything they actually do or talk about.

Farscape, on the other hand, has caused me to examine my personal philosophy in a lot of useful ways and there are episodes of Farscape that I found cathartic and inspiring.

Boomtown... I kind of like Donnie Wahlberg and the funny fat guy... but it's just a way to kill an hour if I'm home on Friday night. I haven't gotten anything out of it that forced me to take a hard look at my life of quiet desperation or anything.

So, if usefulness is a criteria for the worth of fiction, Farscape kicks Boomtown's ass all over the place as far as I'm concerned.

And it helps that I have a weird crush on Claudia Black.

But anyway... I've got work to do.

Huh? What are you referring to?



Hmmm... I don't recall writing anything about artificial choices. What are you talking about?

Joe, actually what you called it was "false selectivity." Sorry for the semantic error, there.

And I took this

to mean that even if we disagree with your theory, we're really agreeing with it because we must appreciate realism more or less how you do without admitting it.

I ain't admitting nothin'. I would come closer to saying A=B than I ever would to saying A is inherently better just because the character's name is Fred instead of Dumbledore or whatever.

And I've seen fantasy with unicorns and all that crap that strived very hard to have at least some content that was true to life, so I don't buy your definition of fantasy at all. The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick, for example, or just about anything by Charles de Lint, or Rebecca Ore or J. Gregory Keyes, or T.H. White even.

Dumas-- The passage where I used the phrase 'false selectivity' was merely stating that if someone wants to say that A = B, i.e. that fantasy and realism cannot be distinguished from one another, then they have to be able to convince fantasy fans like yourself of the fact. I apologize if I seemed to be dragging you into a dispute in which you'd expressed no opinion.

So to rephrase it, if one assumes that A = B, one must be able to persuade a fantasy fan of the proposition. If you can't convince a fantasy fan that A = B, then it's not reasonable for you to try to persuade a fan of realism.

As for the other discussion, I didn't intend to try to project my views onto other parties in the discussion. The point I was trying to make is that the idea about rational and irrational as represented by different kinds of fiction presupposes that one accepts the validity of realism as well as fantasy.

Joe, I've only given these latest posts a very quick read; I'll go through them in a little more detail when I have a bit more time. But I wanted clear something up:

You're right about the problems regarding "fantasy" -- there are several ways it's being used in this discussion that have gotten sort of mangled together, and you're right to call attention to that. Of course, the confusion results from the fact that delineating what constitutes "fantasy" as a general artistic pursuit is very tricky. The boundaries are not very clear. To tidy up, maybe we could go with this rough definition of fantasy in terms of a literary product: fiction that takes place in a world other than our own, or a version of our world which does not approximate anything we concretely know to have existed. This means post-apocalyptic science-fiction stories, or stories occurring on an Earth populated with fantasy creatures such as fairies or goblins, would qualify. A story like Hamlet or Macbeth, in which supernatural and spiritual occurences inform the action would not -- not because ghosts are qualifiably real, but because they are a minor facet of the story and because some people do actually believe in ghosts, portents, etc.

There are probably problems to be found even with this rough definition (where to put Dante?) but it should help keep things a little clearer. I do feel the relationship between abstract creative "invention" (fantasy as in, general fantasies of the imagination, dreams, the visionary principle, etc.) and fantasy as in "a fantasy story" -- is significant, but, in my last post especially, I think I blurred it together too heavily.

As for Dumas, there should be no burden on my part to convince him of anything; he has stated he decidedly prefers B to A, because B is simply more fun. I say both A and B can yield substantial fruit. If you want me to tell him A can be just as good as B, I'll be happy to do so. Hey, Dumas -- A can be just as good as B. B isn't automatically better. (I don't think he disagrees, but, there.)

I think Dumas introduces an important and so far relatively untouched facet of the discussion, though -- entertainment value and it's relationship to the emission and extraction of what we've been calling "knowledge and wisdom." There is a tendency to put "mere entertainment" (escapism) in a bin for dismissal and "serious art" in another, on a pedestal, as if they were entirely distinctive things with no relationship to one another. It leads to a kind of implied sentiment that if something is too highly entertaining, that in and of itself countermands potential claims to serious artistic merit -- and I don't see why it should. What qualifies as entertainment? I enjoyed The Death of Ivan Ilyich the other night -- immensely. So, it's entertainment to me, isn't it? I guess; but it's odd to think of such a grim, serious, moving tale as "entertainment." Does entertainment evoke only happy feelings perhaps, leaving the reader's fundamental convictions about existence relatively unchallenged? Is art only really "art" if it disturbs and unsettles? I don't know, but it's probably all relevant to the discussion at hand. Just some issues that might be worth a further look. Again though, even if we were to agree that a work has to unsettle or disturb or challenge us to achieve real artistic merit, it becomes its own criteria, and one that I think is rather independent of whether or not the content in and of itself is realistic or fantasy-based.

That's all I have time for right now. I'll give your last reply a more careful read and possibly a more detailed response as time permits. Finally found a job, albeit it a crappy one, so my appearances here might be less frequent than usual.

K

PS - edited to straighten out my As & Bs

Check out this article .

I haven't read the whole thing, but I like this excerpt from David Brin's intro:

As for the literary elite, postmodernists despise science fiction because of the word "science," while their older colleagues -- steeped in Aristotle's "Poetics" -- find anathema the underlying assumption behind most high-quality SF: the bold assertion that there are no "eternal human verities." Things change, and change can be fascinating. Moreover, our children might outgrow us! They may become better, or learn from our mistakes and not repeat them. And if they don't learn, that could be a riveting tragedy far exceeding Aristotle's cramped and myopic definition. "On the Beach," "Soylent Green" and "1984" plumbed frightening depths. "Brave New World," "The Screwfly Solution" and "Fahrenheit 451" posed worrying questions. In contrast, "Oedipus Rex" is about as interesting as watching a hooked fish thrash futilely at the end of a line. You just want to put the poor doomed King of Thebes out of his misery -- and find a way to punish his tormentors.

Oh, and much of the Lovecraft I've read threw Randolph Carter or some other human brave and/or foolish enough to mess with things beyond ordinary mortal comprehension into strange dreamworlds where cats can fly to the moon unaided and there are all kinds of bizarre phenomena and ancient Elder Gods who find the people of Earth completely insignificant. He wrote a lot of stories about strange lizard men who left behind vaguely Egyptian-looking ruins and things of that sort that had very little to do with the real world at all.

One of his weirder stories had a Zarathustra-like prophet go up to a mountain to gain forbidden knowlege and the guy went crazy after seeing some of the less important Elder Gods. All we ever really learn about the prophet-type guy is that he came from some prehistoric culture Lovecraft concocted. There are no geographic or cultural clues to help us figure out when exactly this guy saw Nylarhotep of the Outer Darkness (or whatever the god's name was exactly). He very well could have been around at the same time as Robert E. Howard's Aesir and Vanir tribes.

Sure, Lovecraft set stories in Arkham and had scenarios that used monsters in a (then) contemporary setting... but he also wrote stories about aliens and lost cities and parallel dimensions and other science fiction sorts of things.

So, the Lovecraft I've personally read is generally far less realistic than, say, The Death of Ivan Illyitch... which I personally found incredibly boring, but I am glad madget enjoyed it.

Also, I object to the inclusion of detective stories as fantasy. I don't consider "The Big Sleep" or Agatha Christie's short stories to be the same thing at all.

By the way, thanks for the support madget. I appreciate it.

You mean all the B you'll ever need, don't you? Or am I confusing my Bs with my As? C how much these variables help, Joe?

K

Madget-- 'A' is the story about the unhappy marriage, 'B' is the story about the magician and the barbarian, and 'C' is the attainment of value that transcends entertainment. And personally I'd much rather type 'A = B' than have to type 'The story about the unhappy marriage is equivalent to the story about the magician and the barbarian.'

Regarding entertainment value-- I have enormous respect for fine entertainment, and I think the finest entertainment always has about it some desire to enlighten the audience about profound thoughts. Furthermore, I agree with you that profound ideas are inherently entertaining to read about.

But for many people, the Three Stooges are also entertaining. And, not meaning to put the guys down, but I don't think there's very much profundity going on there.

I don't know whether A or B has an edge in the entertainment department. One advantage B certainly has is the unlimited ability to invent new and different forms of wish-fulfillment. But the wish-fulfillment of realism might in many cases be more potent, because it's more credible. For instance, it's fun to imagine you're Superman, but pretending you're The Godfather might be more vivid.

Anyway, there's a lot more to entertainment than wish-fulfillment. The most entertaining film I've seen this year is Bend It Like Beckham (a realistic story, btw); I didn't particularly relate to the idea of wanting to be a soccer champion; but I related with the characers very well, and wanted them to succeed and be happy-- that's what entertained me about the film.