On Language and Community

How meaning gets made even when we're bad making it

My friend

Lyta Gold

has a great post up about the language of fantasy, and I wanted to pick up on some of the trains of thought that she explores. She talks about the ways in which fantasy literature is often not allowed to set its own critical standards, and that this sometimes even infects fantasy writers themselves, so that dragons and faeries are not allowed to simply be dragons and faeries, with their rich webs of mythic-literary associations but must be allegorized or metaphorically transformed into something that has a place in realism. We are used to thinking of allegory and metaphor as adding greater interpretive dimensionality to a text, but I want to push back against this. Especially in the case of fantasy literature, too strong a bent toward figuration can often flatten meaning and deprive the text of artistic and intellectual depth.

One of the standard canards that Lyta cites is “the dragon is capitalism,” and this makes, I think, an excellent case study. Someone determined to make realism a criterion will want to say that a dragon is a metaphor: it must stand in for something that possesses some of a dragon’s qualities. But this is only a kind of sideways substitution, a synchronic referentiality that sees only a list of qualities and predicates identity based on a certain number of matching items. Whatever is going on here, it isn’t very serious thinking. Literary dragons have a history dating all the way back to preliterate epic poetry. Zeus fights with the serpentine Typhoeus in Hesiod’s Theogony to end the challenges to the Olympian cosmic order; the god Indra battles the great serpent Vṛtra in several hymns of the Ṛgveda to release the pent-up waters; in an ancient Anglo-Saxon charm, a serpent comes sneaking but does not kill anyone, because the god Woden takes nine glory-twigs (the marvelous Anglo-Saxon word wuldortānas) and smites the serpent into nine parts.¹ There is a history here, a reworking and refashioning of something that has accrued to much and to great a density of meaning to be totally reinvented.

What, after all, are dragons? They are large and fearsome and dangerous. They hoard things: in the Germanic tradition it is gold, and in the Indic it is water, but in both cases something that is meant to circulate and move is being locked away in stillness. Dragons are usually old, perhaps due to their literary antiquity. Though they may be intelligent, they are not human and, when they speak, they do not care about the same things that human beings do. They bring death simply by breathing, and their thick hides turn aside any normal weapon. They deal, in other words, with primal human fears and concerns: fears of invulnerable beasts, of total destruction, of starvation and deprivation, of secret knowledge lost to human history. There’s a lot to reckon with here that can’t be dealt with through simplistic metaphorical or allegorical readings precisely because there is a cultural history here that can’t readily be set aside.

This gets at another of Lyta’s points, which is that “the words—and the work—of fantasy and science fiction don’t always take place on the page.” The very presence of literary elements with long histories does a whole lot of heavy imaginative lifting, and one of the results of this is that if you’re someone who’s sensitive to that history, novels that are mediocre or even pretty bad on the sentence level can still be enjoyable and satisfying. This is one of the things that makes genre fiction of all kinds—but perhaps fantasy especially—very different from literary fiction. Literary fiction that fails on the level of its language fails as literary fiction; fantasy that fails on the level of language can still succeed as fantasy literature if it succeeds in other ways, and especially if it remains sensitive to the elemental fears, anxieties, and longings that are tightly bound up with dragons and wizards and faeries and the like. Jim Butcher’s “The Dresden Files” could never succeed as literary fiction, but Butcher knows, in particular, what dragons and faeries mean: his Fair Folk are tied to the mortal world and fascinated with it, but they have very different concerns and they think in very different terms. His dragons are ancient and inscrutable and unspeakably powerful: their appearing in their true form “would basically rip reality’s nuts off.” As prose it’s not so good; as fantasy it manages to work.

I want to get a little bit into the technical weeds here: the process by which certain words and phrases become so dense with meaning that they become load-bearing literary elements is my academic specialty, but I rarely get to talk about it. Remember that for most of human history literature isn’t written; it’s spoken and heard. Oral literature is the original literature and a lot of it is lost, but some of it—the parts that were held in the highest cultural, religious, and artistic esteem—got written down during the transition into literacy, so we do have a pretty clear idea of what its aesthetic qualities are. One of the elements that most strongly separates oral literature from written is the former’s reliance on repetition. Certain phrases, lines, or even scenes pop up over and over again. Think about hearing the story of the Three Little Pigs when you were a child: “‘Little pig, little pig, let me come in!’ / ‘Not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin!’ / ‘Then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house down!’” That dialogue gets repeated at every part of the story, and it remains basically unchanged in repeated tellings. You probably don’t even need me to set the scene; if you grew up in an Anglophone country you likely heard this story countless times and could tell it to me yourself, with the formulaic phrasing intact. Those phrases have become so central to the story that they carry virtually the entire context with them; as soon as you hear or see them, the entire story comes rushing back.

Now, “The Three Little Pigs” is a single story and can be brought to life by a couple of phrases. An epic poem like the Iliad is both much longer and much more referential: it took shape amid a much larger cultural complex of stories and poems that dealt with many of the same characters, and so the assumed knowledge background is quite steep. But the important thing to realize here is: these are characters who, in the minds of the audience, are already fleshed out and realized. So when Homer says πόδας ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς “swift-footed Achilles” what comes to mind for the audience is someone they know well, a character they have grown up hearing about, who appears in other poems and in songs and in drama. And Homer says “swift-footed Achilles” a lot, because these formulaic phrases in Homeric poetry are almost always determined not by authorial choice but by metrical necessity: if there are two and a half feet left in the line and the poet still needs to mention Achilles as the subject of the sentence, then he has to say “swift-footed Achilles” because nothing else will fit.² If you want to be a 1980s lit theory weirdo about it you could argue that from a certain perspective the text writes itself, but that’s not true: rather, the text is being composed by someone working within a highly developed poetic tradition, using the tools that the tradition makes available.

In the case of Greek epic, those tools were a huge repertoire of formulaic phrases that let the poet compose metrical lines on the spot. Their toolbox was operating on the verbal level. But there are multiple sets of tools, and mythological figures are a more abstract toolbox, but still a restricted set of tools. Ancient authors realized this too: the Roman poet Horace wrote a treatise, in metered verse, about how to write poetry, and in one section he deals with the treatment of mythic figures:

Aut famam sequere aut sibi conuenientia finge
scriptor. Honoratum si forte reponis Achillem,
impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer
iura neget sibi nata, nihil non arroget armis.
Sit Medea ferox inuictaque, flebilis Ino,
perfidus Ixion, Io uaga, tristis Orestes. (Ars P. 119–124)

“Writer, either follow tradition or make things self-contained. If you represent Achilles, let him be energetic, wrathful, unstoppable, keen; let him deny that laws were made for him; let him entrust everything to force of arms. Let Media be ferocious and unconquered, let Ino be pitiable, Ixion treacherous, Io wandering, Orestes mournful.”

Horace recognizes something important here: that mythic figures are so dense with meaning that they can’t just be remade willy-nilly. They’re characterized in particular ways; they serve particular roles in a story. They’re a lot harder to work with than new characters or side characters because the expectations are so strong, and if you just say “fuck your expectations” then why even bother using mythic characters at all? You’re using them precisely because of their weight and density: their presence suggests that what’s being treated is in some way timeless and universal. But that means you have to treat them with care and let them do their thing. I once reviewed a novel (for the sadly-defunct and sadly-erased Gawker) that purported to retell a myth and then retold it badly, with a cheap “twist” ending so gauche and insensitive that it really offended me. You can’t do that without breaking the spell.

And plenty of fantasy does do it, including (and maybe especially) fantasy that aspires to be “literary.” If an author is just slumming it in genre fiction because they’re bored and they don’t bother to understand the tradition on which they’re drawing, the result is going to be some kind of failure, although perhaps not the kind that a fawning, cowardly, and ignorant literary press will acknowledge. But there are also authors who, though not proficient at the sentence level and perhaps hampered by their own lack of imagination, nonetheless have knowledge of and respect for their own literary history: they know how the parts fit together and they’re sensitive enough to let those things do their work without ham-handed authorial assistance. That kind of sensitivity and humility is its own species of literary virtue, and I wish we had a good deal more of it.

1. The verse is worth reading because Anglo-Saxon verse is one of the literary marvels of the world and we speakers of modern English pay too little attention to it:

Ƿyrm com snican, toslat he nan
ða genam Ƿoden VIIII ƿuldortanas
sloh ða þa næddran þæt heo on VIIII tofleah
Þær geændade æppel and attor
þæt heo næfre ne ƿolde on hus bugan

A worm came sneaking, but he slew no one.
Then Woden took nine glory-twigs;
he struck the serpent so that she flew into nine parts.
Thus apple conquered venom,
that she never again would dwell in a house.

2. This was the major discovery of Milman Parry that shook Homeric studies to its foundations. Lots of people outside the small world of classical studies are still unfamiliar with this idea and go into outright denial when they hear it, mostly because it takes the models of authorial choice and individualistic genius that have infected our criticism since the Romantic period and blasts those models into atoms. As you have probably deduced by now, I think that this ignorance, widespread even among literary critics, is part of the reason that our literary establishment is so bad at talking about genre fiction.