A Subjunctive Geography
by Fred Lerner
Over
the centuries writers have used the blank spots on the globe as
settings for narratives of events that lay well outside the experience
of their audience. (There’s a reason that unbelievable accounts are
dismissed as “outlandish”.) But as the supply of unmapped lands has
diminished, writers have had to move their settings to alien planets or
dimensions, or to terrestrial locations that both they and their
readers acknowledge to be imaginary.
At the 2016 World Fantasy Convention there was a panel called “Fantasy without Magic”. Its description read:
Is this a subgenre? Gormenghast, Islandia, Ambergris are all imaginary
places, quite apart from known history and geography, fantasy-lands but
without anything supernatural going on. When the magic is in the place
instead, how do we read and explore those works?
I had
asked to be on this panel, and was appointed its moderator. As things
worked out, I was unable to attend the convention, but that hasn’t
stopped me from thinking about the relationship between geography and
the fantastic.
As is often the case when I think about the nature of speculative
fiction, I turned to Samuel R. Delany. In his groundbreaking essay
“About Five Thousand One Hundred and Seventy Five Words”, Delany uses
the “level of subjunctivity” to differentiate among naturalistic
fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and reportage. Reportage (“this
happened”) is irrelevant to the present discussion. Naturalistic
fiction describes events that “could have happened”, science fiction
describes events that “have not happened”, and fantasy describes what
“could not have happened”. In an endnote to this essay Delany observes
that “naturalistic fictions are parallel-world stories in which the
divergence from the real is too slight for historical verification”.
Does Delany’s essay adequately cover the taxonomy of speculative
fiction? To my mind the “fantasy without magic” of the WFC panel is
closely related to several other types of fiction that inhabit our
literary universe. The “secret history” story could be described in
Delanyesque terms as describing events that could have happened without
our knowledge. The “alternate history” subgenre describes events that
might have happened had some aspect of our consensus history occurred
differently. (Delany does allow that a story such as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle falls into the SF subcategory of “events that have not happened in the past”.)
*
A significant number, perhaps a majority, of fantasy stories are set in
an alternative version of our own world. Its geography may be
significantly different from ours, its flora and fauna divergent from
the species of Linnaean taxonomy, but the basic principles of
astronomy, geology, and biology are all identical with those of our
native planet, and its gravity, atmosphere, and climate are
unremarkable and unremarked upon. Even George R.R. Martin’s A Song of
Ice and Fire seems to fit into this category, though indications are
that the climate of Westeros will become very remarkable indeed in the
forthcoming sixth volume, The Winds of Winter.
The three places named in the WFC panel description are meant to be
understood as sited on Earth. They exist on a world whose basic
conditions are all identical with those of our native planet; and they
all have some degree of interaction with the world that we know. If the
reader is so minded, he can play the game of finding some spot on the
globe in which this interaction can be imagined to take place. One gets
the impression of Gormenghast Castle existing in some remote corner of
Europe. The Karain continent whose southern tip Islandia occupies is
either a distorted Africa or someplace in the Indian Ocean. I don’t
remember Ambergris well enough to place it on a map, but to me it feels
like it belongs in some Caribbean venue.
The invention of imaginary places to be tucked into some otherwise
unused part of the world is not limited to genre fiction. Neither The Prisoner of Zenda nor The Mouse That Roared is usually acknowledged as fantasy. But why is this? Is the “divergence from the real” in Titus Groan or Islandia more pronounced than in The Prisoner of Zenda or The Mouse That Roared?
Does the faux-Mitteleuropa of the latter two resemble the Europe that
we think we know too closely for us to read them as fantasy? But if
that’s the case, what about Avram Davidson’s Limekiller,
set in an imagined country called British Hidalgo that the careless
reader might easily mistake for Belize (the former British Honduras)?
The few elements of the fantastic that I recall from that book seem
more like extrapolations from Caribbean folklore than seriously
intended encounters with the supernatural. The same might be said for The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy, Davidson’s venture into Mitteleuropa. A map
on the Avram Davidson Society’s website shows its setting, the Triune
Monarchy of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania, squeezed between Hungary,
Serbia, and Rumania – and just one country over from Ruritania. (The
Balkan Peninsula has been described as an area that “produces more
history than can be consumed locally”. Davidson seems to suggest that
the same is true of its geography.)
Writing in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy,
Gregory Feeley uses the phrase “exotic sense of place” in describing
the work of Avram Davidson. I think that this captures the appeal of
the non-fantastic fantasies of Peake and Wright and Vandermeer to those
of us whose reading tastes are not unduly restricted by an overwhelming
affection for the everyday world. “Fantasy without magic”, like secret
history and alternate history, offers readers something akin to the
“cognitive estrangement” that Darko Suvin posits as the distinguishing
feature of science fiction. It seems to me that “fantasy without magic”
is really no such thing, for it is infused with the magic that enables
a gifted storyteller to make an imaginary place real enough to
supersede the world in which the reader has lived since birth.
*
A slightly different version of this essay originally appeared in Lofgeornost #125, November 2016. |