It’s the Economy, Stupid

Some of the more interesting conversations I end up having occur during our hellaciously long commute across the entire city of Cleveland in the evenings. I’ve usually been writing all day, and thus I, the fantasist, and my partner, the die-hard SF fan, get to squabbling about genre things fairly frequently. Thus was the case a few days ago, with “metal,” and with what Fantasy Is All About.

All this sort of feeds into the things I’ve been talking about over the last few days, as writing for someone else’s blog means never having to say “I’ll get around to posting about that eventually.”

The issue is class. Is fantasy a classist genre by definition? It concerns, more often than not, kings and princesses and the accouterments of wealth–rings and jewels and swords and what not. While dark fantasy and urban fantasy and a few other subgenres sometimes delve into the realities of the lower and middle classes, the core of the genre, the big, epic bestsellers, still revolve around kingmaking and the concerns of those wielding power or seeking it.

The issue is gaze. When I was talking about steampunk, I mentioned that the TOTAL AWESOMENESSOMG of the Victorian era depends on whether you owned the factory or worked in it. But there are precious few novels that feature a POV character who lives as most people did during the 19th century and through most of human history–in desperately poor circumstances, where power didn’t matter so much as eating. The gaze, if it falls on the underclasses at all, is so often, so painfully upper class and white, in Victoriana and the medieval milieux–despite the rich stories to be mined from the experiences of people who do not wear silk.

Old news, right? I mean, fantasy is like that, everyone knows that. (I’d argue that SF is equally obsessed with technocracy, but that’s beside the point.) Your occasional de Lint doesn’t change high fantasy–and why should it? As a genre it started with Tolkien and Lord Dunsany, white guys with plenty of pudding in their pantry, those are our roots.

Except this: I am not a lady. I will never have particular power over anything. My stomach still turns at the sight of powdered milk in the store because there was a time when I was a kid that that was all we could afford. I’ve slept in the cold because I had nowhere else to go. So why should I expend my writing and my passion to communicate the experience of the upper classes?

Why should you?

Now, I don’t want, in any of these posts, to seem as though I’m laying down any kind of rules for content. I just like to think about my assumptions. When writing The Orphan’s Tales I often tried to write fairy tales–typically concerned with royalty–from the perspective of those outside the apparatus of power. I’m not sure I did enough, but when I think about fantasy as a genre, with my die-hard SF darling at my side, I wonder what it is that makes it contemptible in the eyes of realists and often science fiction writers as well.

And the class issue makes me think it is partly because realists cannot see us as honest. (SF authors cannot see us as useful, concerned as they are with the Future of Man.) High fantasy, and like it or not those of us who do not write it still must deal with it as the great behemoth of our genre, does not appear from the outside to have anything to do with the author’s personal experience. It has everything to do with the personal experience of men like Dunsany and Tolkien, who wrote books that paralled their own lives, metamorphosed them into myth. And it looks, from an outsider’s perspective, as though we have become anemic and ashamed of our actual lives in deference to theirs.

There is a peculiar alchemy that forces personal experience through the lens of fantasy and changes it into a book. I confess I put a great deal of value on personal experience, a holdover from my days as a realist, and though obviously we ought to be making up fabulous stories of impossible things, the emotional root comes from our selves and our lives. The gaze should be our own, not the ghost-gaze of British men long gone and past concern.

Office workers need fairy tales, too. And teenage runaways, and factory workers, and bloggers, and authors. Everyone needs fairy tales, to be told their lives and experiences Matter in that mythic, universal way. Not just boys who will grow up to be kings.

13 comments on “It’s the Economy, Stupid

  1. Johanna Vainikainen-Uusitalo says:

    Hello! As I am currently translating The King of Elfland’s Daughter into Finnish, I’d like to comment on Dunsany (please forgive my clumsy English!). Unlike Tolkien and most authors, Lord Dunsany had an insider’s view of the life of the very privileged classes and I think this makes at least this book quite different. It is not an airheaded fairytale. There are lots of little sarcastic or ironic comments about how the ordinary people look at the nobility, gossip on their doings, want to live their lives, envy them and have done this through generations. And the high-born ones are not free to live their lives as they please – in fact the ordinary people are the ones who put things into motion: their parlament presents a wish to the old lord who feels he has to obey it. The low point of the story is when the ordinary people’s admiration turns into bitterness, jealousness and hate. It is not black and white; there is no pure evil at all. (Oh, I just love this book!) There are parallels to the celebrity-crazed popular culture of today… have you read Stephen Fry’s blog entry on what its’s like to be famous?

  2. Johanna–It is a lovely book, and true to Dunsany’s experience, but not to mine, or, I think, very many of us. All I’m saying is we should illuminate also our own experiences, not just theirs. And of course being upper class has its own suckages–but there are plenty of books and films to tell us that. Having never been it, how else would I know? All of life, nothing off limits. Nothing hidden. Fantasy can do that, I want to see it.

  3. Jeff VanderMeer says:

    I couldn’t agree more with this post, Cat. It’s akin to something I have been trying to express in various posts, but I think you get to the heart of it much better than I have. The thing of it is, too, that this speaks to characterization. Which is to say that when writers *don’t* think about class and these other related issues when writing both stories and characters, they lose the opportunity for more rounded characterization, more complexity generally, which speaks to the idea of fiction conveying a kind of truth. Of course, that’s a lot harder than just going with the usual stereotypes.

    JeffV

  4. Hal Duncan says:

    This is why I’ve always dug Peake *way* more than Tolkien, and why the “core of the genre”, in so far as it takes Tolkien as its model, feels largely irrelevant to me (in many respects though not all) in its obliviousness of the realities of class. It makes good psychodrama on the archetypal level (or bad wish-fulfillment, depending on how it’s written), because it’s working in a Jungian/Campbellian framework where all the character tropes — kings and queens, princes and princesses, rogues and rebels, magicians and monsters — don’t represent a historical reality never mind a contemporary one; rather they’re symbols of the psyche, ciphers for the Ego, Id, Anima/Animus, Shadow and so on. That’s why they’re accorded a degree of grandeur (noble blood, magic powers, manifest destiny, yah de yah) that distinguishes them from the mundane. That’s all well and good if all you want is a myth of individuation, but it limits the scope of such fiction to an intrinsically heroic (and thereby potentially fascistic) ideology. You might be able to crowbar in a bit of allegory, but the symbolic lexicon of this type of fantasy is so removed from reality, so bound to the notion that some individuals are just “Great”, that you have to *really* fuck it over if you want your secondary world to even begin to reflect the realities of class and power in the world around us. Not that this isn’t possible, of course.

    Anyay, that’s only true of that one type of fantasy, I’d argue — the Epic/High/Heroic stuff. And that stuff may be the core of the genre — as a broad family of work with the label “Fantasy” slapped on it for marketing reasons — but I’m not convinced it has the same… centrality in terms of fantasy as a literary mode, an aesthetic form. Or at least not any more.

    Way I see it, even if we exclude the tradition of fantasy sold as “general fiction” or as “SF” — Kafka, Borges, Bradbury, Bulgakov, the Zelazny of ROADMARKS, the Silverberg of THE BOOK OF SKULLS, Edward Whittemore, and so on — we’ve still got Peake sitting there right alongside Tolkien as our “other grandfather”, so to speak. Sure, like Lieber and Howard he was kind of left at the wayside in the boom of Tolkienism that shaped this wide-spread perception of Fantasy as a rigidly formulated commercial genre — all elves and wizards and dragons and suchlike — but I think he stands as a prime example of “What Fantasy Is All About” as a literary mode. What I mean is, if we’re questioning whether fantasy is classist by nature then we’re looking at fantasy as an aesthetic form with a variety of types, and asking if classism is intrinsic to the form, not any one type. And ten million clones of one type which *is* classist (Tolkienesque epic) aren’t, I think, evidence of classism at that deeper level if there are other types which aren’t classist at all.

    Actually, it seems to me that in the Gormenhast books Peake is tackling class head-on: addressing the impact of the modern era on the old stratified social structures of Britain; taking the Victorian/Edwardian “Big House” and scaling it up; turning it into a concrete metaphor of inter-War society as a whole, the ancient regime as a grotesque joke, a rotten dusty pile of meaningless traditions and empty rituals; showing us the rise to power of the disenfranchised classes in the form of Steerpike the guttersnipe; reflecting the brutal effects of populist movements like communism and fascism in the way he claws his way to power. There’s no idealisation of either side — no reverence for the nobility, no lionisation of the worker-as-rebel — just a dark analysis of the profound socio-political transformations of the early 20th Century, as I see it.

    Anyway, that’s my tuppence-worth. I can see the argument as regards *heroic* fantasy, and given the predominance of that type within the field it’s not surprising that we’d worry about classism being intrinsic to fantasy; but I reckon the problem is with the “heroic” rather than the “fantasy”.

  5. Transfiguring Roar says:

    Well said!

    This is something that I’ve been thinking about for some, and the reason that I have moved away from epics. My first thought on this was why aren’t we writing modern fantasies, much as the ancient Greek myths were set during (more or less) their own times ie., weapons and armour and architecture etc? Aside from the obvious holes in what I’m saying, I guess I’m talking about fantasy set in the sorts of cities we currently live in, and further, fantasy that develops as the human race develops. Is there anything like that out there?

    Of course, I’m over generalising, but that’s the gist of my thought.

  6. Jeff VanderMeer says:

    Re the sorts of cities we’re current living in, etc., Mr. Roar, I’m actually working on a short novel called “Borne” that tackles that very setting/subject.

    JV

  7. Transfiguring Roar says:

    Excellent, Jeff! I’m already looking forward to that.

    Actually, it completely slipped my mind, but your short story Secret Life (from the Select Fire Remix) begins to approach what I’m on about.

    So along the lines of what Cat Valente more than adequately wrote, fantasy that relates to own *modern* lives, both in setting and personal situation, is where I’d like to see fantasy go.

    By the way, Jeff, I read Veniss, City, and Shriek recently, and was completely blown away (sometimes your writing was just too much, like in Dradin when his mum loses the plot. I actually felt my mind ‘spreading out’ from the weirdness of the image you conjured up). Good job, man!


  8. Anyway, that’s my tuppence-worth. I can see the argument as regards *heroic* fantasy, and given the predominance of that type within the field it’s not surprising that we’d worry about classism being intrinsic to fantasy; but I reckon the problem is with the “heroic” rather than the “fantasy”.

    I have to agree with Hal here- this is a gross generalization. In fact, I wonder how relevant the argument is today? I mean, don’t we have an equal influx of Post-Buffy fiction (which has it’s own problems) that is just or sometimes even more popular than those bigly beastly epics?

    Also- I wonder how much epic/historic fantasy exists today? Other than those that are a spin off from AD&D/D&D? Most dragon laced covers I see flooding the market are based on shared worlds for Dungeons and Dragons. That is a different thing altogether- that would be like complaining about how all scifi novels are about class and society based on Star Wars spinoff novels (which are just as abundant and sell 10x more than AD&D based fantasy).

    I have this inkling fear that this is avoiding the real question: which is the perception of fantasy versus what fantasy really is. One or two bestselling authors does not a genre make. And what about relevance? What is selling well now, when it is concerned with fantasy? Being slightly scientifically inclined, I tend to demand proof to back up such a statement.


    This is something that I’ve been thinking about for some, and the reason that I have moved away from epics. My first thought on this was why aren’t we writing modern fantasies, much as the ancient Greek myths were set during (more or less) their own times ie., weapons and armour and architecture etc? Aside from the obvious holes in what I’m saying, I guess I’m talking about fantasy set in the sorts of cities we currently live in, and further, fantasy that develops as the human race develops. Is there anything like that out there?

    Actually, quite a bit. I even edited an online antho for behind the wainscot about it, with a short story from Cat in it (as well as others):

    http://behindthewainscot.com/?p=30

  9. Transfiguring Roar says:

    Cheers, Paul!

  10. I agree with the point that the issue might be more with “heroic” than with “fantasy.” I’ve also read fantasies focused on the upper classes that demonstrate very well all the warts and problems thereof. Martin, for one. (And anything else one might substitute in for Kurtz’s Deryni work that LeGuin railed against in “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie.”)

    Fantasies I’ve seen focus on the lower classes can idealize them just as much, too, wipe away as many of their stains and rough edges. I mean, the Clever Street Urchin is a pretty common trope of Fantasy — in my experience, it’s probably more common these days than the Noble Knight. (Innocent Farm Boys, too, but of course most of them turn out to be long-lost kings.)

    But still, the core point I take away from your post is very worth thinking about, namely, that we should pay attention to this and try to make a greater diversity of choices. You’ve reinforced my decision that the upcoming Victorian book should be all about the lower classes (in contrast to Midnight Never Come which, for reasons of premise, had mostly to do with gentlemen and lords. Or really gentlemen and Queens.)
    Now the real question is whether I have the enthusiasm to read through all six volumes or so of London Labour and the London Poor or whatever it’s called.

  11. WaywardSailorGirl says:

    Transfiguring Roar Says:

    Well said!

    This is something that I’ve been thinking about for some, and the reason that I have moved away from epics. My first thought on this was why aren’t we writing modern fantasies, much as the ancient Greek myths were set during (more or less) their own times ie., weapons and armour and architecture etc? Aside from the obvious holes in what I’m saying, I guess I’m talking about fantasy set in the sorts of cities we currently live in, and further, fantasy that develops as the human race develops. Is there anything like that out there?

    Of course, I’m over generalising, but that’s the gist of my thought.

    ——————————————————————————————————————–

    I think Gaiman writes this type of fantasy rather well actually. His “American Gods”, “Anansi Boys” and “Neverwhere” fall right into what I would consider to be modern fantasy.

  12. For some reason, I think, it seems to take fantasy writers (as a whole, obviously gross generalization considering whose blog this is, and who made the original post, AND half the people commenting here) a long time to recognize their own cliches.

    There were certainly authors who were writing outside of the established tradition, in a tradition other than Tolkein’s (Clive Barker leaps to mind as the most prominent example) but they were definitely outside the mainstream. New Weird seems the first time some of the cliches (such as focusing on upperclasses) were directly challenged in a mainstream way.

    Now, of course, New Weird is gathering its own set of cliches. Urban fantasy with a secondary world setting and some antiheroes anyone?

    Maybe its the act of creating a secondary world, but their limits are often very visible. In terms of what Cat is talking about, only one social class is created. Or, with regards to New Weird, only the city is created.

    Fantasy has a tradition of using “the broad canvas” and yet it never seems to use much more than a corner of it. I think that if there’s to be a new breed of epics that they need to have a much wider focus–the idea of sole hero being able to enact sweeping historical change seems pretty bankrupt to me. Heroism has a bureaucracy that isn’t being represented. Any change requires a vast number of actors, often all working at cross purposes, often not even aware of each other. If fantastic literature is going to comment on this crazy world we live in (which surely is its raison d’etre) then I really believe its got to take into account ALL of this crazy world. Focusing on one class, one anything, especially if its one of these tired cliches we’ve played out so many goddamn times limits its ability to be relevant or even meaningful.

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