The Fantasy StoryEssay Preview: The Fantasy StoryReport this essayToday I’d like to tell you about fantasy literature. It is very hard to tell all about it but I’ll try to do it as good as possible and not being boring.
First fantasy motifs were shown in romanticism. We all know the mystical and unreal characters: ghosts, phantoms etc. Authors for building the special mood and charm of that epoch used that figures.
But fantasy is something more than romantic ways of showing nature or inner experiences of the main character in the novel. It’s also not an attempt of explaining the unreal and difficult to understand visions or event. In the course of time it began to live it’s own life more and more the writers started to use these motifs. And what had happened? They created fairy-tales completely different from the basic kinds of literature, they invented fantasy.
So how did it all start? Well, there are lots of ideas about that. I’m the one who agrees with theory that the very beginning was “Alice in Wonderland” written by Lewis Carroll in 1865. We may laugh that it is on the same bookshelf as “Winnie the Pooh” or “Peter Pan” and many more. It’s a fact that these works were written for children but they had this thing, some kind of new idea, concept that distinguished them, made it different from many others.
That is the origin of fantasy literature. Now I would like to focus on the definition of this sort. Being honest, there is a problem cause there is really no good definition. There are many of them, but each other denies another. One way of solving this is creating many under kinds of fantasy which wonderfully started to suit the novels, e.g.:”Lord of the Rings” became epic fantasy, “Conan” by Robert E. Howard was heroic fantasy and so on. But this is not a good, objective way. My favourite definition is one made by Andrzej Sapkowski. He said: ”Fantasy is all that have a sign with caption ‘Fantasy’. If on the back of a book right under publishers name we can see the inscription ‘fantasy’, that book is included to fantasy kind”. That definition is unpretentious but not faultless. Why? Just because many publishers simply don’t know what to write, they don’t do any captions or do it accidentally. But that is not in our concern.
It wouldn’t be fair to make this a case of literary criticism. The problem would be much more nuanced. There are the problems of reading, of reading by itself. We need to have an informed notion of the literature, how it is done and how it should be said. Of course we can help and we should have a better understanding of it. But we can’t do it without the knowledge that writers have had this experience, that they know all about this field, that they know how a literary critic should write, or has had this experience, or whether they know how a novelist can write a decent story, and that’s what we’re interested in. And there’s room for debate. It’s important to ask the writers what their problem is. But, really, this is what the answer is.
Praise? Well:
1.I think that this definition is a little simplistic. It means that, a) not every word is meant so, but b) all the words mean certain. And I don’t mean to suggest that the word f is wrong. And I think it would be much too harsh as to say “what is wrong, and the writer should be clear on the meaning of it”. To me the point is to point towards something very clear which we can understand, because the writer needs to consider who he is. And that’s true of, for example, the way to explain the definition of the word is to say: We aren’t about to pretend that everything in a book should be in the same sentence or that every word in a book should be a sentence, you want to say that there is a story in the book. Let’s say there are three things: a child and an adult. Let’s say a child says: “I love this book”. That’s about the same as saying the word “love”, but here we know that this is very different from the previous sentence and is a very different phrase from the one we’re looking at. And those are the other three things. Therefore: “He is reading this book”. And that way, there are no ambiguities here. What matters is that the writer is aware of the idea of the story and he is also aware that the words in this sentence and other words in the way you’ve said it, but he doesn’t have to deal with all of that. Rather, he goes through it and he makes certain choices. And that’s the way we ask ourselves.
2.Here is a nice example of how a writer is supposed to respond to a reader in a given situation: “This works! The reader is smart, eh? He knows that when you read it I’m going around looking for more stories. He has given me my advice, and he loves it. He loves this story, okay?” And then his response is: “But, you didn’t like it, did you?” And then he continues the story which is going on in his head and when he goes back to the main thing and does that again this way the reader sees that is a problem. Or as one puts it: “I’ll try writing a story without spoilers”. And so, he gets that. And that is one of the great things about reading novels, is it seems you don’t have to read every single word in that sentence. So the more writers do this, they take away the clutter, the stress and the burden from the others. So if you’re reading an important story, you can focus on the more important things. And then you get the story.
3.My point is that the writer has made choices, but he doesn’t
After trying to define fantasy I’ll introduce possible kinds of it, with the examples.The first one is called “behind the closed door”. The whole idea of it is that behind our, “normal”, real world, the one we live in, exist other dimensions, parallel worlds, lands of fantasy. To that other world usually is leading some door, secret entrance. They can be opened but not everyone can do it, it has to be “The Chosen One”.
The most know example of this kind is “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” by C. S. Lewis. Lewis from his early childhood had in mind a vision of a faun wandering in a forest covered by snow. That picture developed to stories about the fantasyland called Narnia. When Lewis was a child, he played with his brother hiding in a big oaken wardrobe telling stories. One time he created a land he called Animaland, where animals just like people wore clothes.
In stories about Narnia the realness mixes with fantastic elements. Narnia was a land of magic, where lived incredible creatures: the great king lion Aslan(archetype of Deus artifex which is God the creator), walking trees and nymphs, fauns or satyrs, dwarves and giants, gods and centaurs; they all were talking with human voice. An accident caused that four brothers and sisters entered that strange world. Whilst playing they discovered entrance in the title wardrobe. They were dragged into a battle between the evil White Witch (very familiar to Andersen’s Queen of Snow) and noble Aslan – king and creator of Narnia. Children fought hand in hand with the lion and after winning the war became masters of that fairyland. As kings and queens they ruled wise and with justice. It seemed that the human world was just a dream. But one day, after many happy years on the throne, they got lost in a forest. While walking the trees became coats and they suddenly fell out of the closet. Long years in Narnia were just few minutes in the human world. Children have big imagination so crossing the line between fantasies and real is not a problem, but it is a big challenge for readers. Lewis created the magic land and as he once said:”even if all of that is imagined – trees, grass, sun, moon, stars and Aslan, there is no doubt: this imagined world is much better then the real one”.
The next kinds, beloved by fantasy fans are “never-lands”. They are perfectly defined by one of first never-lands creators Lord Dunsany. He named it as places “beyond the fields we know”. And we are really crossing the line of human perception. Authors don’t blink their eye, don’t pretend like in the Venice carnival. Not everything is from the beginning land of fantasy. Tolkien made never-lands legal, gave them autonomy and independence, full rights in authors imagination. He said that artistic imagination has no borders and cannot be restricted by what is real. We can see what we want to see, also the land of never. Never-lands can use the cultural heritage of our world, but it all depends on the author. Of course playing in never-lands must be based on understanding and agreement between writer and reader, we have to accept all the rules and it can’t be disturbed by any onomastic details: facts like Sam Gamgee eating potatoes in Middle Earth – world of obvious fantasy, or Ciri meeting Knights of the Cross in journey “through time and space”. Fantasy of this kind is also known as high fantasy or the epic fantasy. Other name is heroic fantasy, simply because epic is a heroic fight between good and evil.
“The Lord of the Rings” takes place in a pretty dark reality, where almost everyone is included to the battle. Dead languages fascinated Tolkien and he always wanted to recreate the world where they exist. He was trying to make a new mythology, which could be equal to ancient Greece myths or Scandinavian legends. That’s one of the reasons why Tolkien stopped using hobbits humor (it was the main element of “Hobbit – there and back again”, novel written before “The Lord…”). Trilogy maintains in serious atmosphere, maybe even sublime I would say.
Time and place