University of Iowa

Iowa Research Online

Theses and Dissertations

Summer 2018

Believing in books: twenty-first century fantasy and the re-

enchantment of literary value
Kelly Budruweit
University of Iowa

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Copyright © 2018 Kelly Budruweit

This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6378

Recommended Citation
Budruweit, Kelly. "Believing in books: twenty-first century fantasy and the re-enchantment of literary value."
PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2018.
https://doi.org/10.17077/etd.37roxone

Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd

BELIEVING IN BOOKS: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY FANTASY
AND THE RE-ENCHANTMENT OF LITERARY VALUE

by

Kelly Budruweit

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in English in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa

August 2018

Thesis Supervisors: Professor Claire Fox

Professor Brooks Landon
 Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa

CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL

____________________________

PH.D. THESIS

_________________

This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of

Kelly Budruweit

has been approved by the Examining Committee for

the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy degree
in English at the August 2018 graduation.

Thesis Committee: ____________________________________________

Claire Fox, Thesis Supervisor

____________________________________________
Brooks Landon, Thesis Supervisor

____________________________________________
Lori Branch

____________________________________________
Corey Creekmur

____________________________________________
Loren Glass
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am very grateful to all of the people who have helped me to work on this project.

Thanks to my committee, for all of your patience and encouragement throughout this

process, and especially to my co-directors, Claire Fox and Brooks Landon. Without Claire Fox, I

might never have had the encouragement to pursue the topics that best reflect my interests, and

the process would not have been nearly so much fun. Without Brooks, I would not have been

nearly so prepared to present the material in a coherent form, nor for the questions that might

arise. Thank you both for you enthusiasm and willingness to talk about these topics.

Thanks also to my family, especially to my mother, Joan Budruweit, and to my older

sister, Sarah Moeller. My mother has encouraged and inspired me throughout my life, with a

spirit of curiosity and generosity of perspective that I am still trying to emulate. And my sister

has inspired me to be assertive in stating what I find valuable, as well reconnecting me with the

type of reading that can be shared in and outside of the academy.

And a final, but no less important, thank you to my fellow graduate students here at the

University of Iowa, for making graduate school not only bearable, but also a surprisingly

precious experience.

ii
 ABSTRACT

This dissertation considers why fantasy has been so slow to be valued in literary circles,

how those conditions are changing, and the implications of these changes for the broader topic of

literary value. What makes literature worthy of study? It has become commonplace to observe,

on the one hand, the increasing significance and ubiquity of cultural productions, and on the

other hand, the waning significance of the humanities in higher education. Literary study, in

particular, has seemed to be in danger of losing the basis for its justification. Over the last several

decades, critique has become one of the most popular means of justifying the study of literature,

as a practice of awakening resistance to ideological forces. And yet, literature has much more to

offer besides critique, such as the affirmative values of communication, integration, and well-

being. This dissertation seeks to enhance the relevance of literary study by outlining ongoing

revisions to literary value through interpretations of contemporary fantasy.

Previously, under modernism, literary value was defined as autonomy from the

marketplace. However, following the rise of postmodernism, this ontological definition of

literary value became questionable, legible only as a cultural construction. Critique functions as a

means of preserving the movement towards, if not the content of, ideals of autonomy. The

method of critique locates value in the insights of the critic or the author who demystifies,

debunks, or otherwise criticizes social and cultural structures. To the extent that literary value

has become identified with the aims of critique, these practices of negation offer an apparent

certainty that glosses over the fact that constructions of value continue to require acts of faith

from both readers and authors. Recent shifts in literary value point towards the inclusion of

affirmative practices of construction, in addition to negative practices of deconstruction. Taking

iii
up these trends, this dissertation interprets how recent fantasies work to reconstruct the grounds

for faith in literary value.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, especially, fantasists have begun to experiment

with new ways of combining the values of critique with the values of affirmation. A postcritical

approach to fantasy re-opens avenues in academic valuing for discussing the positive, embodied

elements of literary value—particularly the value of escaping into a different world in order to

understand, and to cope with, one’s own world better. As a form of genre fiction involving the

mode of enchantment, fantasy has long been devalued along gendered lines, criticized for its

supposed positioning of readers as passively manipulated. Part One, “Recovering Enchantment,”

considers how fantasists have built on the growing recognition of the role of genre as a mode of

communication; through enchanted reading, both authors and readers engage in relatively

passive acts of absorption, which can be constructed to be more nourishing than other acts of

consumption. Building on the substance of enchantment, Part Two, “Integrating the Values of

Critique and Affirmation,” interprets how recent fantasies overcome the theoretical divergence

that associates critique with literary autonomy and affirmation with popular manipulations,

moving towards solutions for re-enchanting literary value. The methodology emphasizes the

contributions of individual texts in the context of emerging and established uses of fantastic

genres. Because reading fantasy involves an encoded act of faith, this literature is particularly

suited for investigating new directions in literary value, and for producing literary artifacts that

both recall and progress the inquiry into what it might mean to ‘believe in books.’

iv
 PUBLIC ABSTRACT

This dissertation begins with the question of why fantasy has been so slow to be valued in

literary circles, how those conditions are changing, and the implications of these changes for the

broader topic of literary value. What makes literature worthy of study? It has become

commonplace to observe, on the one hand, the increasing significance and ubiquity of cultural

productions, and on the other hand, the waning significance of the humanities in higher

education. Literary study, in particular, has seemed to be in danger of losing the basis for its

justification. Over the last several decades, critique has become one of the most popular means

of justifying the study of literature, as a practice of awakening resistance to ideological forces.

And yet, literature has much more to offer besides critique, such as the affirmative values of

communication, integration, and well-being. This dissertation seeks to enhance the relevance of

literary study by outlining ongoing revisions to literary value through interpretations of

contemporary fantasy. Because reading fantasy involves an encoded act of faith, this literature is

particularly suited for investigating new directions in literary value, and for producing literary

artifacts that both recall and progress the inquiry into what it might mean to ‘believe in books.’

v
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface: Confronting the Norms of Literary Value……………………………………………...vii

Introduction: Recasting the Spell of Literary Value………………………………………………1

PART ONE: THE RECOVERY OF ENCHANTMENT………………………………………..37

Chapter One – Enchanted Companions:

Fantasies that Reconstruct the Wonder of Reading……………………………………………...38

Chapter Two – Recovering Belief in Literature through Magical Realist Enchantment

in the Novels of Joanne Harris, Aimee Bender, and Junot Díaz………………………………....85

PART TWO: INTEGRATING THE VALUES OF CRITIQUE AND AFFIRMATION……...133

Chapter Three – Postmodern Fairy Tales: Reconstructed Attachments to Narrative

Tradition in Naomi Novik’s Uprooted and Catherynne M. Valente’s Six-Gun Snow White…..134

Chapter Four – ‘Reason’s Dream’: Recovering Fantasy through the Monstrous

in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station……………………………………………………..183

Conclusion: The Persistence of Magic in N.K. Jemisin’s Radical Fantasy…………………….231

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………….248

vi
 PREFACE: CONFRONTING THE NORMS OF LITERARY VALUE

In March of 2012, I attended a conference held by the International Conference of the Fantastic

in the Arts on the theme of “The Monstrous Fantastic.” The special guests included China

Miéville, Kelly Link, and Jeffrey Cohen. Having prepared a presentation about the Twilight saga,

I perked up every time Stephenie Meyer, Twilight, or sparkly vampires were mentioned, and I

soon noticed a pattern of deep-seated ambivalence. Contrary to my expectations, it appeared that

the series was not worthy of attention from scholars of the fantastic. There were a few panels, in

addition to mine, that did offer serious interpretations, but for the most part Twilight surfaced as

a counter-reference, more than once taken as a bad joke in order to reassure the audience that the

present discussion would not sink to the level of these banal, hyper-romanticized vampires. In

particular, one speaker introduced her presentation with a specific request that the audience

should not bring up Stephenie Meyer. I should have respected her visible disgust, but in my

naïve curiosity, I couldn’t help asking about Twilight after the panel had ended. “I really enjoyed

your presentation,” I said, “And I know that you said you would prefer not to discuss it, but I had

a question about Twilight…” I wasn’t able to finish the sentence because the woman had already

turned away.

I do regret having intruded on an established personal boundary, but I also remain very

curious about what made Twilight so deeply offensive. In hindsight, it is rather ironic that

Twilight should have been the object of disgust, in the midst of so many arguments that

investigated the subversive politics of Julia Kristeva’s abject. In The Powers of Horror, Kristeva

offers a psychoanalytic theory of the process of abjection, the repulsion by and rejection of the

gross or disgusting. The most famous example of the abject is the skin that forms when milk has

been sitting out too long. The abject is associated with the maternal, a source of nourishment that

vii
has become sickened and sickening. In scholarly discourses about the monstrous, the abject

evokes ambivalent celebrations—ambivalence about the process of rejection, which is so often

sexed, classed, and raced; and celebration of the abject as the erosion or transgression of

normative categories. By this logic, to be disgusted by Twilight should imply that there might be

something valuable about the series, insofar as it reveals the limits of normativity. The problem

is that Twilight actually reinforces normative structures, particularly the normative structures of

gender and sexuality. However, the series does reveal the limits of another set of normative

structures: The structures of literary value.

In an article revising my presentation, I attempted to explain what was so awful about

Twilight (“Utopia”). The series is not just conservative; rather, it capitalizes on the Gothic

subculture of vampire fans, transforming the valued material of subversive resistance into a

glamorous mask for assimilation. A survey of Gothic scholarship since the 1980s reveals the

tendency to value monsters to the extent that they are subversive. Critics like Richard Davenport-

Hines, Mark Edmundson, J. Halberstam, and Barbara Creed focused on the performative

subversion of the Gothic/monstrous as a site of marginalized and threatening alterity. Driven by

the desire to understand Twilight’s abjection from literary value, I synthesized these arguments

into a certainty based on the negative ground of critique, and I described the series as draining

the subversive potential of the Gothic, replacing amorphous threats with highly stabilized figures

for consumerist desire.

To the extent that the literary value of Twilight can be reduced to its politics, my

argument may be true. I now think, however, that I was overcompensating for an uncertainty

embedded in literary value after postmodernism, using ideological analysis as an abstract form of

certainty to replace the contingencies of value. For those who have read and enjoyed Twilight,

viii
my interpretation will probably seem annoyingly hostile. And worse, from the perspective of

enjoyment, it is largely invalid. There have been surveys revealing that, for many women, the

series is feminist, in the sense of being a positive representation of female desire.1 In order to

make a seemingly objective statement about value, it would be necessary to assume that the

series is regressive in spite of the embodied meanings and values ascribed to it by these readers,

and in my own experience of reading the novels. I no longer feel certain enough to make this

claim.

Considering Janice Radway’s arguments in Reading the Romance (1984), the issue lies in

a switching of codes between phenomenological and ideological interpretive practices. Radway’s

study is split between first-hand accounts of women who love romance novels and an ideological

analysis of the texts themselves. The two perspectives are incommensurable. There is no grand

theory that will overcome the contingencies of these separate forms of value. If anything, the

critical and the uncritical modes of reading have become even more rigorously separated in the

academy since Radway’s study. In performing a scholarly reading of Twilight, the best that I

could manage was to forget the phenomenological pleasure of reading, replacing it with a critical

lens that would be valued in the academy, given that the object of my study was not.

Fantasy literature here intervenes with possible revisions to discourses of postmodern

literary value. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, especially, fantasists have begun to

experiment with new ways of combining the values of critique with the values of affirmation.

This dissertation examines literary value in relation to fantasy, the literature of enchantment, in

order to consider what it might mean to ‘believe in books.’

1
See, for example, Behm-Morawitz, et. al.
ix
 INTRODUCTION: RECASTING THE SPELL OF LITERARY VALUE

“Magic,” Richard announced slowly, flushed, “is the tools. Of the Maker […] There’s no other

way of looking at it. We are dealing with a scenario where there is a Person who built the house,

and then He left […] And when He left, He left his tools lying around in the garage. Then we

found them, and we picked them up, and we started making guesses about how they work. And

we’re learning to use them. And that’s magic.

~Lev Grossman, The Magicians

In Lev Grossman’s The Magicians (2009), recent graduates from a college of magic are left with

the more difficult task of deciding what to do with magic. The series departs from the premise

that magic, and even a Narnia-like place called Fillory, are both real—and neither of them makes

the real world any better. In the above-quoted discussion, Richard, a self-avowed Christian

magician, offers the theory that magic is a tool with a specific purpose, one prescribed by God,

and it is up to magicians to discover that purpose. The other magicians react very negatively to

this suggestion, culminating with one of them, Eliot, becoming very angry. Eliot asks, “Is this a

moral God? […] Because that is just stupid […] No one gets punished for anything. We do

whatever we want, and that’s all we do, and nobody stops us, and nobody cares” (234-5). Here

Eliot conjures a vision of a nihilistic universe, one that doesn’t even include the existentialist

version of meaning in spite of meaninglessness. Richard simply responds, “If He left us His

tools, He left them for a reason” (235). At this point, someone changes the subject, but the

question of the purpose of magic remains throughout all three books of the series.

Beyond the theological implications of the novels, this discussion also reflects the

axiological situation of postmodern literary value. Like magic, literature is a tool whose purpose

is difficult to determine. Under the modernist system of value, literature is precisely a tool

without a purpose, valuable for its own sake and therefore autonomous from the base material

1
ends of commercialism. Under postmodernism, in the absence of what Jean-François Lyotard

would refer to as a legitimating metanarrative, the objective basis for literary value has dissolved.

Meanwhile, Lyotard notes, the question “Is it true?” has been replaced with the question “Of

what use is it?” Lyotard’s identification of the “mercantilization of knowledge” has been

particularly devastating for literary critics, for whom the value of literature has so long depended,

precisely, on uselessness or non-commodification. As with the young magicians of Grossman’s

novel, literary critics tend to persist in defining their object of study as a tool without a purpose.

Literary value has been disenchanted, and yet critics continue to study the object of literature,

like magicians who study magic but don’t believe in it.

The absence of a consensus about postmodern literary value has not prevented critics

from arguing for their preferred texts on the basis of politics and/or aesthetics. In response to

theories of contingency and revisions of the canon, literary critics have developed the

professional language of theory, which John Guillory identifies as a techno-bureaucratic form of

labor requiring the rhetorical performance of mastery (254). The mercantilization of knowledge

is an important factor within this framework. The awareness of the intractable advance of

consumer culture has led to a situation in which critique seems to be the only viable form of

intellectual response for maintaining the notion, if not the content, of literary value as autonomy.

The method of critique places value in the insights of the critic or the author who

demystifies, debunks, or otherwise criticizes social and cultural structures. Critique may or may

not be combined with other literary methods, such as formalism, historicism, and cultural

studies. In its more extreme forms, critique generates a position of impunity. If literature cannot

be a purely useless tool, critics might nonetheless insist that they refuse to be fooled by its

seductions. Recent trends in postmodern literature and in postcritical literary theory have sought

2
to balance critique with the revival of a more trusting approach to narrative. Taking up these

trends, this dissertation interprets how recent fantasies work to reconstruct the grounds for faith

in literary value.

Even though the methods of this dissertation do not take the form of critique, the

postcritical is very much informed by feminist theory. In particular, the mood of suspicion tends

to be gendered in the sense of reaching towards intellectual mastery. In the broader context of the

academy, commentators have begun to worry over the ‘feminization’ of higher education and the

conflation of academic culture and ‘therapy culture’ (Burke and Crozier 52). I have grown tired

of arguments that seem to depend on a necessarily suspicious stance towards affirmative values

like communication, integration, and well-being. In addition to supporting some of these values

through fantasy, the primary texts in my archive highlight a shifting relationship between authors

and readers that might be described as ethical in terms of social feminism, since it is based not on

mastery and competition but rather on a shared dialogue, recognizing the vulnerability of both

readers and of writers, while at the same time working not to manipulate or impose violence.1 In

my view, these values are feminist, but not necessarily feminine. I have thus chosen texts that

make room for affirmations in relation to genres as a mode of communicating and constructing

values. Via postcritical readings of each of these texts within the network of discourses about

genre, the dissertation traces how the series of values associated with the genre of fantasy help to

recast the spell of literary value. Through analyses of contemporary fantasy, I hope to broaden

the terms of what can be considered valuable in academic circles, recovering some of those

1
My description of feminist social ethics derives primarily from the work of Judith
Butler, particularly in Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (2004) and Frames
of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), where she argues for a shared precariousness as the
foundation of ethics.
3
purportedly ‘naïve’ or ‘manipulated’ modes of engagement that had previously been excluded by

“the gendered relics of modernism.”2

Beyond Critique: The Pragmatic Turn in Literary Value

The phrase “gendered relics of modernism” refers to the manner in which the ongoing divide

between high and mass culture continues to occur along the lines of gender. Although the

difference between modernism and postmodernism remains a subject of debate in itself, I am

relying on Andreas Huyssen’s (1986) prescient description of postmodernism as a loosening of

the attachment to the modernist (anti-commercial) aesthetic. In “Mass Culture as Woman,”

Huyssen describes how modernists like Gustave Flaubert formulated mass culture as feminine,

associated with the passive and deluded reading of Emma Bovary. That chapter ends on a

hopeful note, highlighting the potential within postmodernism to break down these divides;

however, as Mark McGurl has pointed out, both the gender and high/low binaries remain

operative within systems of postmodern literary value (2009: 42).

Forty years have passed since Huyssen’s statements, and the most intransigent aspect of

postmodern value for literary critics continues to be the relation between literary and economic

value. The best-known theory of postmodern value derives from Fredric Jameson, who defines

postmodern culture as an empty pastiche, evacuated of the substance of meaning. While critics

like Jameson and David Harvey have descried the flexible permeation of capitalism throughout

culture, others like Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek have begun to lament the apocalyptic

ending to art as such. In particular, Jameson’s arguments about the interdependence of high and

mass culture tend to resolve in the identification, not of literary works, but of ‘expressions of late

2
I am grateful to Prof. Kathleen Diffley for inventing this turn of phrase to describe the
literary-critical phenomenon being traced in this project.
4
capitalist culture.’ Because of the disenchantment with literary value, critics have tended to refer

to value in negative terms, as the deconstruction and negation of meaning.

This ‘deconstructive negation’ is an oversimplification that does not contain the variety

of postmodern constructions. It refers, not to postmodernism itself, but rather to a generalized

notion identifying postmodernism with the mood of negation.3 In any case, the lack of consensus

in regard to literary value has created a vacuum that has, in part, been filled by the substance of

critique. There have been two major trends responding to the excesses of critique: theories of the

postcritical and theories of the reconstructive. In postcritical theory, feminists have been

particularly attuned to these issues, insofar as critique maintains the implicit values of heroic

mastery, shoring up the position of the critic as heroic resister of the status quo. Within theories

of postmodernism, both authors and critics have expressed the shifting of concern away from

deconstruction and towards reconstruction. More broadly, the postcritical and reconstructive are

means of describing what might be called the ‘pragmatic turn’ in literary criticism.

Postcritical theory is a partially formed response to the problems raised by

deconstruction. These debates were initiated primarily by Bruno Latour’s essay published in

2004, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” As of January, 2018, Google Scholar documents

that the essay has been cited nearly 3,000 times. In spite of this very considerable interest, the

sources that cite the article are not necessarily in dialogue with one another, with topics ranging

from narrative medicine, to disability studies, to ecocriticism. This divergence is understandable

given the breadth of Latour’s argument, which considers the rhetorical difficulties created by the

philosophical preference for uncertainty. According to Latour, because critique works to debunk,

3
In practice, the term ‘postmodernism’ can function as a literary period, a cultural
condition, or both, and as Brian McHale notes, there are multiple postmodernisms instead of one
single version that encompasses these shifts.
5
the response to other, false ‘debunkings,’ such as denials of climate change, becomes impossible.

Thus, Latour calls for something that moves beyond critique, capable of affirming a more

“rigorous realism” (231-2), as well as generating and caring for fragile constructions (246). Rita

Felski (2008, 2015) has formulated the most influential literary-critical response to Latour’s

concerns. Felski describes the excesses of critique, following Paul Ricoeur, as the ‘hermeneutics

of suspicion,’ and she calls for ‘postcritical’ alternatives. In a similar vein, Eve Sedgwick had

earlier (1997) designated the ‘paranoid’ reading position. For both critics, the process of literary

analysis has produced a repetitive formula for creating meaning by following the demands of the

mood of suspicion or paranoia. As Sedgwick notes, the paranoid stance assumes that the object

being encountered is necessarily dubious, potentially damaging to the reading subject, if not to

culture as a whole. By contrast, she offers the reparative stance, based on the creative revision of

the object into a source of nourishment. The postcritical, meanwhile, is not a negation of critique,

but rather the recognition of other, more affirmative, modes of reading alongside critique.

The shift of emphasis towards the affirmative has also been occurring within postmodern

literature. I. Huber (2014) proposes the term “reconstructive” to identify these recent

developments. In response to tenuous debates about the end of postmodernism, Huber specifies

the narrower but still “pervasive” sense “that there has been a significant shift” in literature

published since the 1990s, involving the “attempt to transcend institutionalised ideas of what

postmodernist fiction is, means and does” (2-3). Rhetorical separations from postmodernism rely

on a wariness (or weariness) of “its incessantly oppositional stance” (3). Huber also describes a

series of philosophical shifts, from the modernist “either/or,” to the postmodern “both/and,” to

the present “yes, but…” or “in spite of…” These conjunctions serve as shorthand for attitudes

towards binary thinking, language, and meaning. The deconstruction of binaries may lead to

6
infinite regressions, in which “both/and” are true. Thus, the “in spite of” moves towards

constructing meanings while acknowledging their provisional status. In other words, “After and

because of deconstruction” comes the impulse “to reconstruct” (6-7). More broadly, I would add

that reconstruction must involve, at some point, the choice to affirm rather than to negate, and so

this development within postmodernism corresponds with appeals for the postcritical.

Another feature that reconstructive postmodernism shares with the postcritical is

pragmatism, or more specifically, an approach that emphasizes the pragmatic successes of

communication. Felski’s alternatives to critique, or her ‘modes of engagement,’ derive from a

consideration of how literature communicates with readers.4 Huber also describes a pragmatic

shift in reconstructive postmodern texts that “reclaim fiction as a form of communication that

actually manages to convey meaning, however unstable and compromised it may be” (15). Thus,

both the postcritical and the reconstructive emphasize the ways that fiction conveys meanings to

readers, in the affirmative sense of building meanings instead of debunking them.

In spite of these similarities, the discourses of the postcritical and the reconstructive have

developed separately. In Robert Meyer-Lee’s terms, the theoretical divide between recent trends

in the postmodern and postcritical derives from their different approaches to literary value.

Critics of postmodernism tend to remain within what Meyer-Lee calls the “ontological” and

“genealogical” veins of thought about literary value. The former concerns the question of what

literature is, and is often tied to formalism/aestheticism. The latter concerns how the notion of

value came to be, tracing the history of the concept and its relation to economics. Often both

perspectives occur in the same study, and co-constitute one another, but both are “normative”

4
In Uses of Literature, Felski analyzes four modes of engagement: identification,
enchantment, knowledge, and shock. Each of these modes describes an experience
communicated through reading.
7
(338), and both “eliminate” any the practices of valuing occurring outside of the academy (339).

By contrast, Meyer-Lee describes Felski as employing a “pragmatic” approach to literary value,

which involves the “repositioning of value as an activity prior to a quality” (340). The pragmatic

approach creates more space for contingent acts of evaluation not determined by the gendered

norms of academy.

Even though theories of postmodernism have recently emphasized pragmatic

communication within literature, the approach of these theorists is not, in itself, necessarily

pragmatic. For example, both I. Huber and Nicoline Timmer (2010) describe (re)constructive

trends as resulting from the innovations of almost exclusively male authors. Apart from a brief

description of female authors in the middle of the conclusion, Huber’s archive focuses on male

authors Mark Danielewski, Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Chabon, and David Mitchell.

Likewise, Timmer’s main literary sources include David Foster Wallace, Mark Danielewski, and

Dave Eggers. From a genealogical perspective, these trends have indeed begun with David Foster

Wallace. The “New Sincerity” movement departed from Foster Wallace’s speculations, in 1993,

that irony may no longer be a viable means of maintaining the value of literature in relation to

the manipulations of television and the image. Noting that televisual irony leads to a ‘tyrannical’

brand of cynicism, Foster Wallace speculates, “The next literary ‘rebels’ in this country might

well emerge as some weird bunch of ‘antirebels,’ born oglers who dare to back away from ironic

watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old

untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction” (192-3). The

call for sincerity does correspond with developments in literature since the 1990s, as well as in

8
theories of the postcritical.5 However, it is painfully ironic that male authors should be credited

with generating the insight that, as Timmer claims, literature needs to be revitalized through

shared feelings that underpin the ‘structural need for a we’ (354). 6

While there may be some validity in genealogical accounts of postmodern literary value,

they maintain a strong divide between professional readers ‘in the know’ and ordinary readers

prone to manipulation. These approaches are also gendered in the sense of reinforcing the

privileged intellectual responses of (primarily male) geniuses. By contrast, Felski’s postcritical

theory is influenced by her familiarity with feminist reading practices. Critics such as Janice

Radway and Barbara Herrnstein Smith have opened this line of inquiry by emphasizing the

divides between intellectual statements of literary meaning and the contingent realities of

ordinary readers. That divide is perhaps nowhere as clear as it is in Radway’s Reading the

Romance (1984), in the different modes of analysis applied to women’s experiences of reading

versus the ideological interpretation of anti-feminism in romances. From the perspective of the

female readers of the study, these romances were ameliorative, a nourishing escape from the

daily demands of their roles as wives and mothers. In terms of ideological analysis, however, the

romances are little more than rape fantasies. Herrnstein Smith’s The Contingencies of Value

(1988) clarifies these incommensurable positions by noting that value is performative, created in

5
For example, Michael Chabon appeals to a pragmatic view of communication when he
argues in the essay “Trickster in a Suit of Lights” (2008), that entertainment does not necessarily
imply manipulation or pandering so much as an exchange constructed with the pleasures of the
reader in mind. Another influential authors who takes up these issues is Jonathan Franzen, who
has debated with Ben Marcus whether literary value derives from a relationship between authors
and readers (Franzen) or from the autonomy of the author (Marcus).
6
Elsewhere, the “structural need for a we” has been thoroughly developed by Judith
Butler in her engagement with Levinasian ethics in Precarious Life (2004).
9
the moment it is designated (52), calling for an awareness of “contingent goodness” (159) for

certain groups under certain conditions.

Felski’s Uses of Literature even further blurs the lines between ordinary/experiential and

theoretical/literary valuations.7 This divide rests on the difference between utilitarian and

aesthetic principles. From a literary-professional perspective, utilitarianism implies a type of

value associated with the marketplace, instead of with the literary or the aesthetic, which

continues to be defined by the modernist ideal of autonomy. The type of value which Felski

describes had already been outlined, years before, in Janice Radway’s study (1997) of the Book-

of-the-Month Club. Radway characterizes the club (and middlebrow culture) as providing a

definition of ‘culture’ in competition with professional literary criticism (84), in which reading

should provide a mixture of intellection and immersion (72, 114). Moreover, as Radway notes,

middlebrow reading practices are utilitarian. Books are taken up for specific informational and

emotional ends. In Felski’s modes of engagement, literary value can include both the utilitarian

and the blend of intellection and immersion. As the title, “Uses of Literature,” implies, reading is

an activity with multiple uses, depending on the context. In fact, political readings might be

defined as one of these ‘uses.’ In other words, instead of being defined through the modernist

ideals of autonomy and uselessness, the value of literature includes multiple uses, without a

meta-theory to determine the use that is ultimately most ‘valuable.’

Aca-Fandom and the Changing Shifting Status of Genre Fiction

One of the foundational ideas of this dissertation is that fantasy literature deals even more

explicitly with these theoretical issues of literary value. Before getting into the specific dynamics

7
In a similar vein, critics like Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best have begun to argue for
forms of reading that might be called ‘just reading’ or ‘surface reading.’
10
of fantasy as a genre, however, it is important to note the changing status of genre fiction more

broadly. The conventional wisdom in the academy has long tended to associate the literary with

autonomous innovation, whereas genre fiction relies on commercial formulas. However, this has

increasingly changed as the pragmatic turn tends to emphasize fiction as a mode of

communication, which means that genres are simply one form of communicating with readers.

Because the readership of genre fiction occurs through the form of fandom, its value is

not quite as predetermined by the norms of the academy. For some, genre fiction presents an

opportunity to get in touch with practices of reading that are both outside of the academy and not

determined by the marketplace. For example, media scholar Henry Jenkins has noted the

ongoing increase of consumer participation in culture (2006: 3), beginning with his studies of

television (1992) and including science fiction fandom (1995). Jenkins (2006) contextualizes fan

culture within the populist and Marxist traditions of highlighting access to the means of

production.8 According to Jenkins, “Like the older folk culture of quilting bees and barn dances,

this new vernacular culture encourages broad participation, grassroots creativity, and a bartering

or gift economy” (132). The comparison with folk culture is somewhat apt, in the sense that

fandom has increasingly been recognized as an important cultural fuel.

Fandom arises not from (or not only from) the market, but rather from the attachments of

individuals. Both science fiction and fantasy developed as commercial enterprises that gave rise

to communities interested in the literature for its own sake. Whereas Jenkins focuses, in the

tradition of media scholarship, on the degree to which culture enables the autonomous and the

8
Jenkins is both hopeful and cautious about the influence of fan culture. On the one hand,
it is a sign that culture remains healthy, more connected with the needs and desires of people. On
the other hand, it is also limited by varying degrees of influence in the sphere of dissemination.
Although everyone is a participant, not everyone is in a position to disseminate.
11
active, the other side of fandom is that it begins as consumerism, with the purportedly passive. In

terms of literary value, the recognition of fandom offers a reconnection with the moment of

immersion, a state that is passive but not necessarily manipulated. In other words, immersion can

turn into engagement under the right conditions, and consumerism, when it is not alienated, may

be described as nourishment. Moreover, immersion is not just about accessibility or relatability

for literary neophytes. “Aca-fans” are scholars who also identify as fans.9 Part of the impetus for

the “aca-fan” movement is the desire to begin scholarly discussions from a position of

attachment. As with Felski’s postcritical theory, aca-fandom blurs the divides between scholarly

and ‘ordinary’ readers, as well as enabling discussions of positive attachments to reading, or

reading as love.

Fandom studies and aca-fandom are part of a broader shift in attitudes towards genre

fiction. In Contemporary Drift, Theodore Martin notes that “one of the distinguishing aspects of

twenty-first century culture is art’s transformed relationship to genre” (7). As Martin explains,

scholars, authors, and filmmakers “have become increasingly interested in working within the

constraints of popular genres,” and he cites the work of Colson Whitehead, Ben Marcus, Michael

Chabon, China Miéville, Kelly Reichardt, and Takashi Miike (8) According to Martin, their

works are “not superficial pastiches but earnest attempts to contribute to the history of a given

genre” (8). Each of these authors has worked with genre fiction in an undeniably literary manner,

but also from a position of sincere engagement.

In regard to the more specific area of fantastic genres (science fiction, fantasy, and

horror), Gary K. Wolfe has attributed the late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century

9
Jenkins is one of the primary voices initiating discussions of “aca-fans.” Since 2006, he
has maintained an online blog entitled “Confessions of an Aca-fan,” which includes discussions
about participatory culture, as well as genre fiction and fandom. See also Cristofari and Guitton.
12
“renascence of the fantastic” to “the emergence of a generation of writers…whose ambitions lay

in what we might call recombinant genre fiction: stories that effectively deconstruct and

reconstitute genre materials and techniques together with materials and techniques from an

eclectic variety of literary traditions, even including the traditions of domestic realism” (13).

Wolfe coins the term “post-genre fantastic” (17) in order to describe these movements both with

and against genre conventions. Moreover, he stresses that this is a healthy development for

genres as literary tools, as the genres do not disappear, but rather dissipate into the atmosphere,

becoming more ubiquitous while nonetheless maintaining their remembered shapes. In

particular, Wolfe finds that the “twenty-first century stories” of authors like M. Rickert,

Elizabeth Hand, Theodora Goss, Kelly Link, and Jeffrey Ford do not “transcend” their genres,

but rather tend to “incorporate genre materials among a complex of other narrative resources,

often producing fiction that seems to defy any sort of traditional genre reading protocols” (163).

Whether more broadly or in the specific area of the fantastic, genre has become, not a constraint,

but rather a resource for communication. I am interested in how fantasy, in particular, constructs

the terms of literary communication.

Postmodernism and the Legitimation of Fantasy

In many ways, the ideas of this dissertation are not new. I am building on the theories of critics

who have noted the potential within postmodernism for getting in touch with the invigorating

values of fantasy. As with postmodernism, what has changed in fantasy literature is not so much

the overall state of affairs, as it is the intensity and emphasis of these affairs. Whereas early

theories continued to draw sharp lines between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction, postcritical and

reconstructive theories enable a broader recognition of the values of fantasy. And in turn, the

valuing of fantasy demonstrates the extent of these shifts in literary value.

13
 Since early theories of postmodernism, critics have noted a special relationship between

the postmodern and the fantastic. In 1967, Robert Scholes coined the term “fabulators” to refer to

those contemporary authors who were turning away from the realist tradition, in favor of

romance and of story. Scholes’s argument is very similar to my own, emphasizing the restoration

of the “magical experience” of reading (6), as well as the bolstering of “imaginative well-being”

(30) and the “renewed vigor” of finding joy in storytelling (31). In 1980, John Barth built a

similar early definition of postmodern fiction as the “literature of replenishment” after the

“literature of exhaustion,” and this definition depends, precisely, on the creative reconstruction

of narrative pleasure, via a new synthesis of the premodern and the modern. Barth gives the

examples of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (1965) and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred

Years of Solitude (1967), which are both pleasurably engaging and philosophically sophisticated.

Given the similarity between these descriptions and the postcritical, as well as the reconstructive,

the current shifts in literary value might be better understood as a return to an earlier version of

postmodernism. However, neither Scholes nor Barth deals with genre fiction, as both remain

within the unquestionably literary tradition.

The valuing of fantasy encountered a set-back in Tzvetan Todorov’s 1971 study of The

Fantastic, which instantiated a bounded approach to the definition of the literary fantastic.

Todorov’s fantastic is less a genre than a space between genres, characterized by a textually

embedded hesitation between natural (uncanny) and supernatural (marvelous) explanations for

events. To accept a marvelous explanation, in particular, is to venture into the realms of fairy

tale, fantasy, and some versions of magical realism. Todorov also defines the fantastic as

historically bounded, ending with Franz Kafka and the “new fantastic.” Kafka remains a very

important figure for any theorization of literary alternatives to realism, emblematic of the shift

14
from the fantastic, as defined by Tzvetan Todorov, towards the postmodern fantastic, as defined

by Brian McHale. Using Julio Cortázar’s “Axolotl” as an example, McHale notes that what, for

Todorov, was a hesitation between realist and supernatural explanations for events becomes, in

the postmodernist fantastic, a hesitation “between the representation of a world and the anti-

representational foregrounding of language” (83). In other words, the postmodern fantastic

absorbs epistemological hesitations about the nature of the world into ontological hesitation

about the relationship between multiple worlds.

The problem here is not so much the identification of the literary fantastic with deep

ontological skepticism; rather, it is the extent to which such definitions tend to exclude fantasy as

genre. For years following Todorov, the marvelous (or fantasy) could be written off as non-

literary. For example, in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981), Rosemary Jackson

employs psychoanalytic and post-structural theories to extend Todorov’s definition, to the degree

that when she says “fantasy,” she means “the fantastic.” Jackson defines literary fantasy as

necessarily occurring between the poles of the uncanny and the marvelous. 10 She interprets the

realist/uncanny as a “bourgeois category” (26), while romance/the marvelous positions readers as

passive recipients of transcendent meaning (81). Thus, in her chapter dealing with Lewis Carroll,

George MacDonald, and J.R.R. Tolkien, Jackson claims that their works are only fantasies to the

extent that they refuse the meaningful transcendence of the marvelous. To call a fantasy valuable

only to the extent that it refuses the marvelous is a bit like valuing a giraffe for the shortness of

its neck.

10
In her much more recent work, I. Huber employs the same method. Her “reconstructive
fantasies” are more properly associated with Todorov’s fantastic hesitation, in this case between
the marvelous and the mimetic.
15
 In “The Critics, the Monsters, and the Fantasists,” Ursula Le Guin responds to the

question of why, even after Harry Potter, fantasy has yet to be valued for itself by most literary

critics. In addition to the preference for realism, Le Guin notes that literary critics tend to make

judgments about fantasy without being very familiar with its archives. She describes her

weariness with arguments against fantasy as escapist, especially from critics unfamiliar with

Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories,” and she remarks, “Unfortunately, most of them have read Todorov

instead” (84-5). Le Guin describes the “mantra” against fantasy as “primitive escapist simplistic

– in a word, childish,” and she concludes, “I have been asking for thirty years why most critics

are afraid of dragons while most children, and many adults, are not. It is a question that really, by

now, deserves some answer other than the repetition of mantras” (85). I do not claim to have a

full answer to this question, but postcritical theory offers some clues as to why fantasy remains

dubious in terms of literary value, as well as to how this status quo is changing. For those literary

critics who do focus directly on the genre of fantasy, its value has long been evident. For

example, in Strategies of Fantasy (1992) Brian Attebery argues that fantasy vitally enacts the

values of postmodernism: By embedding metafictional awareness into the frame of stories that

depart from reality, fantasy encourages more intimate investments in playful games of

signification (xii). And yet, for the majority of literary critics, the hermeneutics of suspicion have

cast an unflattering light on the apparent credulousness of fantasy.

A Provisional Definition of (the Values of) Fantasy

The most important attribute of fantasy, what makes the genre most appropriate for discussing

shifts in literary value, is the very same attribute that has been least often recognized as valuable.

Fantasy tends to be affirmative. It is hopeful, wistful, prone to idealized images and dreams.

Fantasy stories are often both prettier and more exciting than everyday reality, allowing readers

16
to imagine themselves as dragonriders and green-eyed sorceresses. The primary mode of reading

fantasy is an act of faith, albeit the temporary faith of suspended disbelief. In other words,

readers of fantasy are prepared to accept the constructions of the text in order to embark on the

emotional journey of experiencing another world, often through adventures or romances that

have happy endings. This primary attitude of passive acceptance does not, of course, describe the

entire process of reading, much less of interpreting, fantasy literature. Readers can perform the

trusting, temporary relinquishing of control, supported by the generic expectation that the world

into which they escape will be emotionally rewarding, but they can also come out of this ‘spell’

at any time, whenever something is surprising or interesting enough to examine on a critical

level. It is my contention that fantasy has been undervalued for its apparent naiveté, which is in

fact more often a studied naiveté, or, as Attebery terms it, “the deliberate imitation of a naïve

storytelling stance” (1992: 53).

Looking at these values in fantasy texts enables the awareness of postcritical shifts in

literary value. The ultimate point that Felski makes, and the one that I would like to underline

again here, is that suspicious readings are as naïve as any other reading practice; that is, naiveté

cannot be infinitely deferred. At some point, an act of faith is necessary in order to make a

positive statement about the value of a given text. Thus, in addition to the postcritical and the

reconstructive, my perspective is informed by the postsecular, or the theoretical recognition of

the ongoing role of belief in (post)modernity, and the contingency of the narrative of

secularization as the disenchantment of the world. 11 As with the postcritical and critique, the

postsecular does not ignore the influence of disenchantment; however, disenchantment is not

11
In A Secular Age (2007), Charles Taylor explains that what has changed in modernity
is not the fact of belief, but rather the conditions of belief, which has increasingly become a
matter of choice.
17
presumed to be the only means of understanding socio-intellectual history. While the faith in

resistance or negation is understandable, the suspicious over-investment in demystification has

become a form of policing the boundary between the literary and the non-literary, to the extent

that positive affects and values have become difficult to express in literary criticism. For

example, a value such as empathy is immediately suspect; indeed, critics often feel an obligation

to interrogate empathy in order to forestall the potential reduction of alterity. And yet, as

important as it is to avoid the illusions of empathy as an easy solution or response to the pain of

others, empathy is in woefully short supply. Because it involves faith in narrative constructions,

fantasy can invite the consideration of what is worth believing in, and of how to apply the

dreamy, intuitive aspects of human epistemology.

In addition to being credulous, Fantasy literature often tends to be comforting, and this

comfort has also caused it to be overlooked in the field of literary value. I do not believe that

literature should necessarily be comforting any more than it should be discomforting, and much

less that there is a ‘correct’ emotional response to literature. In literary criticism, the comforting

aspects of literature have tended to be excluded or denigrated based on their supposed automatic

commercialization and/or political conservatism. Marxist critics, in particular, tend to avoid any

correspondence between literature and ‘affirmative culture.’12 Literature, for these critics, is a

tool for creating disturbance and for representing the fundamental alienation of existence under

capitalism. On a broader level, comfort presents the difficulty of being, precisely, non-critical,

and it is also associated with childishness.

12
E.g., Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (1990). Such arguments tend to derive
from Herbert Marcuse’s “The Affirmative Character of Culture” (1968).
18
 In this dissertation, I am drawing on an implicit definition of fantasy as generating

comforting structures of meaning by imagining escape. Colloquially, fantasies offer ‘happy

endings.’ This definition is not essential; rather, it is based on perceptions of how fantasy

functions as an actant in Bruno Latour’s terms. The functioning of fantasy has been most

profoundly influenced by Tolkien’s novels and perspectives. According to Tolkien’s definition

of “fairy-stories,” the happiness of endings creates a consolation-effect. A happy ending is not a

requirement for a work to be considered fantasy, but it is an expectation of many readers, and

whether or not an author supports the structure of fantasy proposed by Tolkien, the encoding and

interpretation of ‘fantasy’ cannot avoid referring either directly or indirectly to the notion that

fantasy should offer consolation.

The essay “On Fairy-Stories” is a classic, often-quoted definition of fantasy. Perhaps one

of the first things to remember about fairy-stories is that Tolkien makes them dependent on

“Faërie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country” (16). Although the latter

parts of Tolkien’s definition tend to stress the consoling aspects of fairy-stories, his definition of

Faërie is primarily about strangeness and desire, an intensely other world that overwhelms “the

conceiving mind” with “imagined wonder” (19). Unsurprisingly given this shutting-down of the

critical faculties, critics have been suspicious of wonder, and of the closely related mode of

reading that Rita Felski calls “enchantment.” Enchantment has been questionable insofar as it is

a passive state, and for suspicious critics, as well as those who prefer to think of reading as more

of a cognitive than an emotional exercise, the surrender to wonder can only lead to manipulation

and a necessarily childish reading stance.

For Tolkien, the apparent childishness of fantasy is actually an advantage. His famous

statement, “If fairy-story as a kind is worth reading at all it is worthy to be written for and read

19
by adults,” is followed by an assertion that the offerings of fairy-stories, including “Fantasy,

Escape, Consolation” are “all things of which children have, as a rule, less need than older

people. Most of them are nowadays very commonly considered to be bad for anybody” (43). In

defending escape, Tolkien makes another often-quoted reference to the prisoner who cannot be

blamed for seeking a way out, or for “talk[ing] about other topics than jailers” (54). More

importantly, Tolkien points out that escape tends to be conflated with “Desertion” (54), when in

fact the desires indulged in escape are accompanied by things like “Disgust, Anger,

Condemnation, and Revolt” (54). In other words, for Tolkien, escape implies a critique, or even

an admirable “treachery” (54). Part of the reason that cultural critics have tended to view escape

as necessarily conservative lies, not so much in escape itself, but rather in the prescription that

fantasy should also offer “consolation.”

And, so finally, we arrive at the perhaps most degraded aspect of fantasy: “the

Consolation of the Happy Ending” (60). Happy endings, of course, do not always (or only)

appear in fantasy literature. Nonetheless, the happy ending seems to correspond with the biggest

drawback of fantasy—the excess of idealization that causes readers to live in naïve dreams rather

than confronting reality. Tolkien begins by explaining that consolation “is the opposite of

Tragedy,” and since there is no word for that, he chooses to call it “Eucatastrophe” (60). This is

“the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous

‘turn’” (60). Tolkien gives examples of moments of resurrection and the reversals leading to

happy marriages. When done successfully, the eucastastrophe will “not deny the existence of

dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure,” and indeed depends on it, turning sorrow into “a fleeting

glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief” (60). Tolkien’s Consolation

is not so much a “happy ending” as a religious experience. It is fleeting, and it is not just a part of

20
the structure of the story. Rather, “the sudden ‘turn’” creates “a piercing glimpse of joy, and

heart’s desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of the

story, and lets a gleam come through” (61). The conclusion to the lecture is very clear about the

religious connections of this moment, as deriving from “the underlying reality or truth…a far-off

gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world” (62). Whether or not the author/reader has a

religious commitment, the characterization of consolation as a religious experience is a reminder

that it is an experience, rather than an attempt to manipulate readers into accepting a status quo.13

The enlivening experience of consolation can be turned to multiple ethical or political ends.

Within genre communities, there have been a wealth of responses to Tolkien, including many

reactions against his apparent conservatism. In 1970, Michael Moorcock famously critiqued

Tolkien’s “Wagnerish Hitlerism,” and his aristocratic nostalgia for feudalism (1-2). In 2016,

Derek Lee challenged the prevalence of this view, arguing for Tolkien’s version of fantasy, not

as a willfully naïve retreat from modern problems, but rather as a source of renewal for

confronting issues of capitalism.

In order not to confuse fantasy with Tolkien’s fairy-stories, however, it is important to

consider a broader definition. In Fantasy and Mimesis (1984), Kathryn Hume defines fantasy at

the expansive level of “an impulse as significant as the mimetic impulse,” ubiquitous throughout

literature (xii). Because she defines the function of literature as “significant as a meaning-giving

experience” (27, emphasis original), Hume explains the re-emergence of fantasy as necessary for

13
In “The Encounter with Fantasy,” Gary K. Wolfe explains that the shape of imagined
ideals will vary depending on the “ideational structure” supporting the fantasy, such as the
Christianity of C.S. Lewis versus the secularism of Phillip Pullman. Moreover, he notes that the
ideational structures of readers do not need to coincide with those of a given fantasy; what
matters is that the “unity” of ideational and affective structures should generate “a core of what
might be called belief” that “enables genuine emotions to be aroused from impossible
circumstances” (77).
21
providing meaning in the (post)modern world. By representing meaningful myths, fantasy

responds to the lost sense of a shared foundational myth, and the concomitant loss of faith in the

significance of human individuals. Hume’s consideration of fantasy as a meaning-searching

device enables a broader view of literary postmodernism, in its multiple responses to “the void”

(49) of meaning. Hume’s fantasy thus includes both the affirmative and the negative aspects of

postmodern literature; i.e., postmodernism as skepticism towards the possibility of meaning, as

well as postmodernism as reconstructed meanings. Furthermore, the comforting aspects of

fantasy are here viewed not as naïve, but rather as potentially necessary and ameliorative. Thus,

in Hume’s terms, fantasy revives the possible comfort of meaning.

Fantasy and Literary Value in Lev Grossman’s The Magicians

Lev Grossman’s The Magicians offers a good starting point for these discussions, as the

narrative techniques work both with and against the above definitions of the values of fantasy.

The primary conflict of the series derives from the angst of holding onto a childlike belief in

magic as a better reality, set alongside the need to discover what magic is for. Having grown up

reading fantasy, Quentin is set apart by his romantic hopes for living in an idealized world. Over

the course of three novels, Quentin undergoes a series of rude awakenings. First, only a third of

the way through the first book, Quentin graduates from college, leaving behind the protective

bubble of extended childhood, as well as departing from Harry-Potter-like expectations. After a

few listless months, enjoying the privileges of an easy magical lifestyle coupled with the

boredom of directionless-ness, Quentin discovers the actual existence of another fantasy, and he

enters the Narnia-like world of Fillory and Further. In the rest of the series, Quentin and his

friends save Fillory more than once. Quentin is crowned and then deposed, exiled from and then

returning to Fillory. Meanwhile, Quentin’s high school friend, Julia, embarks on a separate

22
journey. Having been turned down from Brakebills College, Julia becomes obsessed with

learning magic on her own. She joins the other ‘hedge-witches’ exiled from magical colleges,

and she eventually finds a group of elite intellectual magicians seeking to extend their power by

contacting the gods. This turns out to be a mistake, calling the attention of the gods to the fact

that humans have been able to access magic. Quentin and Julia eventually work together to save

both magic and Fillory from the gods who are trying to close the loophole that allowed magic to

exist in the first place.

Grossman here registers both the allure and the dangers of fantasy literature as a

commercial genre about alternate realities shaped by desire. For instance, when Quentin first

encounters Fillory, his initial awe is soon overtaken by shock at experiencing firsthand the

violence he had only read about. As in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Fillory includes

talking animals who can act as warriors. The cuteness and remoteness of these animals, however,

is soon belied by the reality of bloodshed. On the way to retrieve a crown, the magicians are

attacked by a four-foot-tall rabbit and a seven-foot ferret, and Quentin experiences his first battle

as if he had walked into a violent cartoon:

Quentin could see the creatures coming the whole way, two of them, running flat out

across the wet grass for at least a minute, like they were out doing early-morning wind

sprints. It was almost funny. They weren’t human, and they didn’t seem to belong to the

same species as each other either, but they were both cute […] This odd couple came

charging at them across the green grass silently, no battle cry, no sound track, in the still

early-morning air. At first it looked like they might be running to greet them, but Bunny

had short, stubby swords in both its front paws, held out steady in front of him as he ran,

and Ferret was hefting a quarterstaff. (320-1)

23
This scene juxtaposes cartoon images with a grim reality, and the cuteness of the animals with

their intended violence. Instead of rushing to embrace their roles as heroes, Quentin and his

friends are confused and repulsed:

This was it: they had come to the end of what was conceivable. Something was about to

give […] Quentin realized there wasn’t going to be any parley or rock-paper-scissors.

This was going to be about stabbing […] He wasn’t ready for this. This wasn’t magic.

This was the opposite of magic. The world was ripping open […] Someone was throwing

up in the grass. It had never once even occurred to him to try to help. He wasn’t ready for

this. This wasn’t what he’d come here for. (321)

Here Quentin mentally protests the incongruities between the reality of violence and the ideal

world he had imagined. As if this really were a cartoon, he acts once again as a spectator, but this

time because he is too shocked to move. Violence is “the opposite of magic” because it is a

painful shock rather than an enchanting wonder. By extension, the novel suggests that readers of

fantasy are liable to ignore the reality of violence, and they are ill-prepared for reality by

choosing to live in ideal worlds. Escape becomes denial when it is divorced from harsher

realities, and those harsher realities come back with a jarring vengeance. It is almost as if

Quentin were being punished for his desire to live in Fillory.

The above scene demonstrates a meta-textual awareness of the commercial status of

fantasy literature. Although there are no direct references here to the marketplace, the cartoonish

violence invokes popular culture as a fantasy-mask for real, disavowed violence, marking the

internalized awareness of the Frankfurt School critique of mass culture. In their famous essay,

Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer describe entertainment as “the prolongation of work

under late capitalism. It is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labor process so

24
that they can cope with it again” (52). Cartoons, moreover, are a reflection of the violence of

capitalism, featuring protagonists who “receive their beatings so that the spectators can accustom

themselves to theirs” (53). By bringing cartoonish violence into fantasy literature, Grossman

demystifies fantasy’s imbrication with the consumerist denial of violence. And yet, the reasons

for watching cartoons are not quite the same as the reasons for reading fantasies. It is the clash

between the fantasy-reader expectations of honorable battles and the cartoonish reality that

makes this scene so jarring, exposing the childishness of wishful thinking.

Of course, the absorption of Marxist critique is only part of the story that The Magicians

tells about fantasy literature. Alongside the skepticism towards wishful thinking, the novels hold

up the interpretative frames of belief and hope for the future. Magic is connected to both wishful

thinking and to this utopian dimension that makes life bearable for the characters. Magic is about

the longing for belief, and how beliefs can come from longing. For instance, the narrator explains

Julia’s perspective that

the very promise of magic…was to deliver unto her a world greater than the one into

which she had been born. The moment when you walk into a room, and the guy playing

pool has a pair of red leather wings sticking out of his back, and the chick smoking on the

balcony has eyes of liquid golden fire—at that moment you think you’ll never be sad or

bored or lonely again. (Magician King 235)

On the surface, these statements are another poignant reminder of the dangers of wishful

thinking. And yet, since both Julia and Quentin struggle with very real depression, the inflated

hopefulness of their approach to magic cannot simply be written off as misguided. In the

simplest terms, magic is a reason for them to go on living. Even if magic and fantasy are about

wishful thinking, and even if those rosy thoughts grossly misrepresent reality, sometimes the

25
hopefulness is necessary in order to find the strength to go on living in a depressed reality. In

fact, Quentin perseveres in his faith in Fillory and in magic, even after he learns that Christopher

Plover, the author of his beloved series, was also a child molester, and that ‘the Beast’ he and his

friends are fighting is actually the adult version of the traumatized boy whom Plover repeatedly

raped. Likewise, Julia goes on striving for a connection with a local French goddess, ‘Our Lady

Underground,’ even after the initial invocation reveals that she has been fooled by Reynard the

Fox, a trickster god who kills most of Julia’s friends and then rapes Julia herself.

The fashionable argument in the current literary-critical climate would be to state that the

violence is more real than the belief in magic. The hermeneutics of suspicion privilege wariness

to the extent that it is easier to argue that hopefulness is an illusion, and more, a dangerous

illusion that does not do justice to the violence of reality. And this argument is true, to an extent.

The pain of the other is unknowable, and to suggest an easy transcendence of that pain would

misrepresent the other’s experience as well as perhaps leading to complacency regarding issues

of sexual violence. On the other hand, the text makes an equally stirring claim for the value of

enchantment, in addition to demystification. Like magic, literary value here functions on the

level of belief.

The affirmation of the role of belief also underpins the differences between my

interpretation of postmodern literary value and the preference for uncertainty, which can

productively be described as “the machismo of half-hearted belief.”14 In other words, the

‘both/and’ impulse of postmodernism is to affirm two or more incommensurable truths at once,

some of which are mutually exclusive. Critics like John McClure point to typical examples of

postmodern literature, such as Thomas Pynchon and Toni Morrison, in order to highlight their

14
I am grateful to Professor Lori Branch for coining this phrase.
26
facility in navigating a middle ground between religiosity and secularism, with one foot in belief

and the other in skepticism (4). Of course, belief and skepticism are not mutually exclusive as

existential states, but it is impossible to affirm them both equally. Writers like McClure

approximate certainty by affirming only uncertainty, and the result is a continuation of the

preference for mistrust over faith. On the other hand, as Amy Hungerford explains in

Postmodern Belief, the “inescapable fact of pluralism” (xiii) does not necessarily require giving

up on faith in literary value. For Hungerford that faith has continued in the form of a “belief in

meaninglessness,” preserving the fact of belief without a specific content (xiv). The benefit of

referencing the framework of belief is the recognition of those forms of literary value which are

ameliorative for readers, the forms that build structures and tighten certain axiological

frameworks. Postmodern literature need not recur exclusively to a knowing irony about its own

futility in the face of the ideological forces of culture. Nor does the affirmation of a structure of

identity or belief necessarily amount to naiveté and regression.

Moreover, religion is not the only point of reference for these discussions. Transcendence

and belief occur in other contexts, as well, including the myriad political uses of literature, such

as feminism, Marxism, postcolonialism, anti-racism, and queer studies, especially when these

frameworks are employed in the service of creating a better future. Because these frameworks,

however, have simultaneously been employed in cultural studies as a means of understanding, as

well as changing, the status quo, there has been a tendency among critics to defer hope, resting

on the explanatory grounds of class, gender, empire, nation, sexuality, and race while resisting

any leap of faith until the last possible moment. As a result, literary critics from all corners of

theory have begun to note with alarm the tendency to affirm only the negative aspects of culture

and the difficulty of practicing criticism as a form of appreciation. My point is not to question the

27
value of critique in itself, but rather to highlight the other forms of postmodern value that it has

overshadowed. Another way of describing postmodern literary value is thus to say that it is

inescapably instrumental, and critique is only one of the ends to which it can be used.

The question of belief also brings up a point of necessary clarification about my

methodology. Although I employ some of the methods of close reading, I am also employing

reparative methods that are not necessarily objective. In other words, my interpretations tend to

locate meanings that are ameliorative, rather than seeking to state objectively what the meaning

of a text is or should be. My method differs, for instance, from what Heather Love suggests

might be the “close, but not deep” form of literary analysis. According to Love, in order to leave

behind investments in “humanist values” (372) while maintaining a commitment to close

reading, “interpretation” should be replaced with “description,” which can still be “rich” and

varied, but which avoids “adding anything ‘extra’” (377). In other words, the aim of description

is empirical, seeking something like an objective point of view insofar as it does not impose any

‘deeper’ meaning(s) on the text. While the project of description is admirable, it may be

impossible to achieve descriptions that are untouched by the beliefs, preferences, and biases of

the reader. As Stanley Fish notes, acts of description and acts of interpretation are inextricable

from one another (93-4). In recognizing the role of belief, I am also recognizing that my

interpretations are contingent. They are reparative in the sense of emphasizing aspects of the text

that might be enlivening or ameliorative, but they are not authoritative in the sense of being

objective. Even so, I do try to avoid ‘imposing’ meanings that do not seem to follow from the

texts and their contexts.

This long digression about postmodernity and belief enables an interpretation of The

Magicians as beginning to point towards changes in prevailing assumptions about literary value.

28
In its knowing reversals of the quest fantasy, the series does not quite enact a postcritical

perspective, instead bringing to the surface the inconsistencies of fantasy-constructions. Part of

the pleasure of reading the series may derive from these repeated reversals of naïve expectations

and in the incongruous juxtapositions of fantasy and reality. At the same time, however, the

series recognizes fantasy as a source of perhaps necessary wishful thinking, demonstrating that

hope is not just an easy, sentimental Band-Aid for the more-real violence in the world. “Magic”

in the series could be read as a master signifier for human potential, both intellectual and

imaginative, and belief in magic turns out to be very similar to belief in literary value. In the

series, magic is not exactly a tool without a purpose, but rather a tool without a predetermined

purpose. One possibility is that magic is “for fixing things.” Quentin eventually learns that his

‘discipline’ or specialization is “Repair of small objects,” which “was a bit of an anticlimax. You

couldn’t call it sexy, exactly. Not breaking new ground, so much” (III, 24). Extending the

allegory of magic as literary value, this suggests a more humble approach, akin to ‘weak theory,’

through which literature might be used to make local interventions or improvements. The

Magicians thus offers an important touchstone for navigating the ongoing evaluative shift from

modernist ideals of autonomy towards postmodern tensions between forms of usefulness.

Belief may be a particularly difficult topic for literary critics because it involves a

surrendering of oneself to a fixed set of ideas, something that critics often work studiously to

avoid. The extreme version of skepticism resists any consideration of surrender as a loss of

autonomy. Critical thinking may involve being active and ‘thinking for oneself,’ but there is no

escape from the influence of outside forces. Moreover, these forces are not just negative in the

sense of being ideological, imposed from above by a questionable power-structure. From another

perspective, they are just part of being human, i.e., being wrapped up in axiological tangles,

29
doing one’s best to navigate what seems to be the most worthy of belief. To make the point

clearer about passivity being neither good nor bad in itself, Quentin becomes a god, but only

briefly. When Fillory is nearly gone, Quentin takes on the power of its gods (two rams, Ember

and Umber) and he rebuilds the world as he sees fit. Quentin realizes that he “was no longer

Fillory’s reader; he had become its author” (III, 382). Once the world is recreated, however,

Quentin relinquishes the power, realizing that “it didn’t belong to him” (384). And it is this act of

giving which is, in its way, even more powerful than any grand show of active creation. Here is

the beginning-as-gift, which is perhaps the real source of value.

A Word on Genre Terms, the Organization of Chapters, and Believing in Books

In addition to the genre of fantasy, this dissertation will consider several contiguous literary

genres. The most distinctive trend within the contemporary fantastic, as many critics have noted,

is the tendency towards hybridization, or the free play with multiple genre forms, in an

increasingly literary context. Multiple terms have been suggested to describe these trends, such

as the Interstitial and the Weird. Each of these terms has developed as a means of blurring the

divides between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction.15

The “Interstitial” is defined primarily by its lack of easy definability. The notion of the

Interstitial developed from collaborative projects and conversations between novelists Ellen

Kushner, Terri Windling, and Delia Sherman, as well as with the literary critic Heinz Insu Fenkl.

The Interstitial Arts Foundation was established in 2004, with a mission statement “to give all

border-crossing artists and art scholars a forum and a focus for their efforts. Rather than creating

15
The ‘Slipstream’ is another common term for fiction that does not fit neatly as either
‘genre’ or ‘literary.’ However, this term developed in strong identification with the project of
legitimating science fiction (Frelik 37), rather than fantasy.
30
a new genre with new borders, we support the free movement of artists across the borders of

their choice” (“About”). Part of the impetus for the Interstitial Arts Foundation was the desire to

counteract the pigeon-holing of genres, in this case primarily of fantasy. However, the movement

extends beyond fantasy and even the fantastic genres, as the crossing of borders includes literary

genres as well as visual and aural media.

If the strength of the Interstitial derives from its broad resistance to categorization, that

lack of definability can make the term difficult for critics to apply. Thus, in A Short History of

Fantasy (2009) Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James prefer the term “New Weird” as a

descriptor for recent trends in fantasy fiction (196). The New Weird shares with Slipstream and

the Interstitial in the project of increasing the visibility of the literary potential of fantastic genre

fiction. However, it developed more specifically as a blend of fantasy, science fiction, and

(Lovecraftian) horror, with online discussions in 2003 sparked by the work of China Miéville

and similar fantasy writers. More recently, the term “New Weird” has been replaced with the

broader term “Weird” in Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and

Dark Stories (2012). The editors here refer to a longer tradition of non-realistic writing,

including both pulp and experimental techniques (xx). The lineage of the New Weird will be

examined in more detail in the final chapter of this dissertation, which considers the influence of

China Miéville, particularly in reconciling fantasy and Marxism.

Critics have yet to reach a consensus about which of these terms is the most appropriate

for designating recent trends in fantastic literature, and my purpose here is not to settle on a term.

To the contrary, I would like to recognize the unsettled nature of these terms. At the same time, I

am focusing on fantasy as a genre whose values critics have long had difficulty in recognizing.

Because both of these terms (Interstitial and Weird) are imbricated in the process of legitimating

31
fantasy, they often appear in discussions of contemporary literary fantasies. In addition to these

more recent designations, the chapters will also consider the overlapping, contested grounds

between fantasy and other, more venerable literary genres, such as fairy tales, the gothic, and

magical realism. Rather than following these genres historically, however, the dissertation is

divided into two parts, based on the thematic and theoretical interventions of texts. Part One,

“The Recovery of Enchantment,” includes two chapters that consider the mode of enchantment,

with particular emphasis on how it creates more nourishing relationships between readers and

authors. Part Two, “Integrating the Values of Critique and Affirmation,” interprets how recent

fantasies overcome the theoretical divergence that associates critique with literary autonomy and

affirmation with popular manipulations, moving towards solutions for re-enchanting literary

value.

The first chapter focuses on texts that perform postcritical modes of reading that I am

advocating here. In Jo Walton’s Among Others and Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria, the

protagonists are also readers. The shared concerns of the protagonists with readers creates a more

intimate connection, as readers are able to identify on multiple levels, and this connection

diverges from other forms of metafiction that tend to create more distance by emphasizing the

boundedness of the fictional world. In addition to connecting with readers, these novels offer

theories of reading that reconstruct the foundation of trust between authors and readers, as both

are recognized to be in the somewhat passive stance of receptiveness to imagined worlds, before

moving towards the construction of active interpretations that become writing. In other words,

these novels move beyond the poststructural insight that the author is dead, and they use

enchantment in order to reconstruct an imagined, trusting relationship among readers.

32
 The second chapter extends the insights of the first chapter about the shifting

relationships between authors and readers. In this case, however, the chapter focuses on magical

realism and fantasy as genres that utilize the mode of enchantment in order to establish a more

nourishing connection with readers. Returning to Barthes’s notion of the death of the author,

both readers and writers have been recognized as engaging in acts of production; however, the

texts in this chapter highlight the ways that authors and readers are also engaged in acts of

consumption. The use of genre is different here because magical realism has become

questionable in discourses of literary value, as too ‘consumable.’ The chapter thus describes how

literary-critical definitions of magical realism tend to avoid the naiveté associated with

enchantment, ascribing naïve beliefs and consumerist habits to women, to children, and to non-

Westerners. The literary texts in the chapter demonstrate the limits of these attitudes, utilizing

enchantment to distinguish nourishment from alienated forms of consuming. In particular, Aimee

Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of

Oscar Wao are literary texts that reflect the shifting status of genre, towards becoming a

nourishing mode of communication. Although they continue to define their literariness as non-

generic, these texts engage with the enchantments of fantasy and of magical realism in order to

revitalize the belief in literature.

The dissertation here shifts to Part Two, which considers how fantasies integrate the

values of enchantment into constructions of literary value that overcome the divergences

between the critical and the uncritical. The third chapter begins with the divergence in literary-

critical discourses between ‘literary’ and ‘fantasy’ uses of fairy tales. The difference between

‘literary’ and ‘genre’ uses of fairy tales depends on the extent to which fairy-tale narrative

structures tend to be affirmed, particularly in the sense of creating nourishing meanings through

33
happy endings. As with magical realism, the happy endings of fairy tales have been associated

with naïve consumerism and with manipulations of readers, while postmodern fairy tales tend to

be defined as literary to the extent that they resist these manipulations. The primary texts in this

chapter demonstrate the range of approaches to fairy tales within fantasy, from the more

affirmative to the more critical. Naomi Novik’s Uprooted emphasizes the building of

connections to more nourishing roots; moreover, the relationship between the author and reader

here, deriving from fan fiction, is one of shared pleasure in innovative repetitions. By contrast,

Catherynne M. Valente’s Six-Gun Snow White takes up the more skeptical approach to fairy

tales, investing in the original poetry of the author while nonetheless affirming a potential

commitment to a happy ending. Thus, these fantasies include both affirmative and skeptical

approaches to narratives, but they also expand the range of postmodern fairy tales, utilizing the

narrative structures of fantasy in order to communicate with readers about the process of

becoming enchanted with better stories.

The divergence between the affirmative and skeptical approaches to narrative leads into

the subject of the last chapter. In Perdido Street Station, China Miéville uses fantasy to revitalize

the monstrous, in an attempt to resolve the clash between avant-garde resistance and popular

immersion. In other words, monsters for Miéville become the locus of a non-instrumental literary

value that includes the values of critique as well as the values of pleasure/immersion. Miéville

also defends the genre of fantasy as valuable for the project of wresting the dreams of monsters

(and therefore constructions of the human) out of the confines of a capitalist totality. These

interventions in fantasy, moreover, have led to new literary constructions in the tradition of the

Weird, which combines the values of enchantment with the values of estrangement. However,

since Miéville invests in the monstrous negations of totality, he also tends to prefer estrangement

34
to enchantment, and particularly to the consolations of fantasy in the tradition of J.R.R. Tolkien.

The chapter thus includes stories from Kelly Link and K.J. Bishop. These stories also invest in

monsters but are less exclusive about the affirmative aspects of desire. Whereas Miéville solves

the problem of the commodification of monsters by constructing a non-instrumental literary

value of radical strangeness, Link and Bishop do not overreact against the potential of

consolation in what Ursula Le Guin describes as ‘the green country of fantasy.’ Thus, even as

they distinguish their forms of literary value from the flat vacuity of commodification, these texts

leave room for the positive constructions of desire that tend to be excluded based on gendered

assumptions about manipulation. The monsters of Link and Bishop are very different from the

angels of Twilight; however, they are not completely negative reactions against the possibility of

the desires of romance.

The arc of the dissertation thus moves from revisions to relationships between readers

and authors in the postcritical and towards constructed re-enchantments with literary value. The

Weird texts of the final chapter reconstruct non-instrumental literary value by highlighting both

the estranging and the enchanting aspects of the construction of belief in fantasy. The conclusion

returns to the positive values of enchantment in order to consider how this integration might be

achieved even more thoroughly in the direction of enchantment. N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth

series is a radical fantasy that is nonetheless very affirmative. The series revitalizes and refocuses

the epic fantasy tradition to affirm the role of enchantment in creating both art and justice.

I am not religious, but I do have faith. For me, ‘believing in books’ means that I have

faith in human connections and in non-human connections, in the potential strength of inter-

relationality and in the potential construction of a non-zero-sum game to replace the fearful,

scarcity-driven game of global capitalism. I am also not a politician, nor even much of an

35
activist, and I don’t know how that better system could or should be built. However, I think that

nourishing connections play a very important role, and for that reason, I believe in literature, and

in art more generally, as a means of recognizing and, potentially, of healing, the effects of

alienation. Although some of their constructions of the content of literary value may differ from

mine, the fantasists in this dissertation make room for affirmations of the literary as a non-

alienated relation between readers and authors.

36
PART ONE: THE RECOVERY OF ENCHANTMENT

37
 CHAPTER ONE – ENCHANTED COMPANIONS: FANTASIES THAT
RECONSTRUCT THE WONDER OF READING

People tell you to write what you know, but I’ve found that writing what you know is much

harder than making it up. It’s easier to research a historical period than your own life, and it’s

much easier to deal with things that have a little less emotional weight and where you have a little

more detachment…So this is why you’ll find there’s no such place as the Welsh valleys, no coal

under them, and no red buses running up and down them; there never was such a year as 1979, no

such age as fifteen, and no such planet as Earth. The fairies are real, though.

~Jo Walton, Among Others

In the “Acknowledgements” to her novel Among Others, Jo Walton advises readers that the

imaginative elements of the ensuing story are more real than the elements that might have been

drawn from her own life. The fifteen-year-old protagonist, Mori, is a young girl very much like

Walton herself. She grows up in a small Welsh town, which she leaves for a disappointing

English boarding school; also, she has a physical disability, and she loves reading fantasy and

science fiction. And yet, the book is entirely different from Walton’s life, in the sense that Mori

doesn’t only read about fairies, but she also sees them and speaks to them, and she can perform a

subtle kind of magic. On the surface, the author’s warning that fairies are more real than the

mundane details appears to be a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the delusions of mimetic

representation and the inevitable constructed-ness of stories ‘based on real life.’ In this sense,

Walton must not literally mean that the fairies are real, but only that they are no more fictional

than the other aspects of the story. But what if she does mean that the fairies are real?

On one level, the fairies within this narrative might indeed exist in the reader’s world,

since they are only visible to those humans who already expect to see them. But on a more

interesting level, the fairies truly are more real than the red buses, the age fifteen, and the year

1979. There is nothing to indicate that Walton has actually met fairies herself, but these figments

38
of imagination may, in some ways, hold more validity than any apparently objective description

of a particular moment in time. The novel does not quite define the fairies, but over the course of

the story, Mori comes to recognize that they are shaped by the worlds of fiction and of

imagination. To the extent that they draw on this collective imagination, the fairies are indeed

more real than the experience of any single person.

Fantasies, by virtue of their genre, tend to begin by asking for the suspension of disbelief.

However, Walton’s mini-contract with the reader illustrates that there is more involved than

simply letting go of skepticism. By stating that the fairies are real, Walton involves readers in the

co-construction of belief, which turns out to be built on previous shared constructions. More than

the suspension of disbelief, the story asks for an active acceptance that pushes at the boundaries

of the real. The fairies are more real in the same way that stories are more real than an

individual’s collection of daily impressions and events. Even though the fairies are not literally

real, their new role here shifts the reader’s sense of what is possible. Thus, stories and imagined

worlds can structure understandings of daily life.

Postmodern literary theory, especially up to the turn of the twenty-first century, has long

been concerned with this power of stories to structure our understandings of the ‘real’ world. As

Paul Ricoeur has pointed out, the fear of the manipulation by stories has led to a hermeneutics of

suspicion. More recently, literary critics have begun to recognize the benefits of shifting this

stance of suspicion, away from the fear of manipulation and towards more trusting encounters

with stories. In terms of reading, this shift also requires a re-evaluation of concepts like passivity,

immersion, absorption, and more generally of the role of naiveté. However, the trusting stance

towards stories has been even further and better developed within the genre of fantasy, beginning

as it does with the need to co-construct belief in an imaginary world. In this chapter, I will

39
examine two recent fantasies that take up the question of reading as enchantment, in order to

establish more trusting, intimate, and beneficial relationships with stories. Like Walton’s Among

Others (2011), Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria (2013) features a protagonist who is, first

and foremost, a reader. What emerges, in both cases, is a revised form of metafiction, enabling

readers to reflect along with the protagonist on the benefits and dangers of being enchanted by

stories. Enchantment, for these fantasies, does not always imply manipulation; however, when

readers become enchanted, it is crucial to consider who is casting the spell, and for what

purposes. In other words, these fantasists build relationships with readers, developing their

implied identities as enchanters worthy of trust.

The framework for this chapter is particularly indebted to the perspectives developed in

three critical texts. In the area of fantasy, Brian Attebery’s 1992 study offers the basis for

considering the genre as a revised form of metafiction. Attebery points out that fantasy, in its

“blatancy of untruth,” embeds the metafictional impulses of postmodernism. In fantasy, it is not

necessary to point out the unreality of stories that begin, either literally or figuratively, with the

phrase, “once upon a time.” And that embedded awareness of being in a storyworld enables

fantasy to be “self-referential without being self-destructive, artificial without being arch” (53).

Since Attebery sums up the “course of twentieth-century literature…as the gradual spread of

irony into every phase of storytelling” (127), then the acceptance required by readers of fantasy

places the genre in a position to revitalize the investment in “narration” as “a potentially

meaningful form of discourse” (53). By embedding the metafictional impulse, fantasies do not

need to stress their own status as stories, and so they can lead to more nuanced reflections about

the relationship between stories and real life.

40
 The strong pragmatic bent in this turn to fantasy is shared more generally by the concerns

of what I. Huber (2014) calls the “reconstructive” in her study of “literature after

postmodernism.” According to Huber the reconstructive turn depends on a shift of focus, away

from questions of ontology, and towards more “ethical and pragmatic ones concerned with the

motives, effects and conditions of fictive communication” (40). In Walton and Samatar’s texts,

the metafictional is embedded in terms of the constructed belief in an imaginary world, but also

in the focus on protagonists who are readers. This shared ground between the protagonists and

the concerns of the readers generates a dialogue within each of these texts about what it can

mean to be caught up in or enchanted by stories, and it draws readers closer in describing the

experience of living with stories as companions.

The notion of stories as companions derives from the third major influence on this

chapter. In Letting Stories Breathe (2010) Arthur W. Frank employs “socio-narratology” in order

to consider the quality of companionship between humans and stories. Instead of attempting to

be objective, Frank’s perspective is pragmatic in the sense of shifting between appreciation for

and wariness of stories. He notes, “Stories make life good, but they also make life dangerous.

They bring people together, and they keep them apart” (2). In Attebery’s view, fantasy enables

the process of being caught up in stories, and this is a vital component of literary value that has

tended to be overlooked. But it is not the only component. As Frank notes, “A good story—a

story that people become caught up in because it holds them in suspense—is not necessarily a

good story, in the sense of encouraging goodness among those who tell and retell it. Stories can

be the most engaging companions but still make life dangerous because they engage so

thoroughly” (145). As with reconstructive postmodernism, Frank emphasizes both the pragmatic

and the ethical dimensions of narrative. According to Frank, stories are good companions when

41
they not only engage, but also encourage dialogic reflection. Companionship with stories

involves an exchange that includes both the engaging (uncritical) and reflective (critical) aspects

of reading, both the passive and the active, as dialogues involve both listening and speaking.

All of these theories pale in comparison to the embedded theories of reading in the novels

that make up the subject of the present chapter. As fantasies, the texts invoke the enchanted state

of being caught up in stories. However, in identifying their protagonists as readers, the texts also

enable reflection on how stories become good or bad companions. According to Frank, the best

way to determine the value of a story is whether or not it invites reframing through other stories.

To be reframed is to prevent getting too caught up in a single, monological point of view (153).

Because both Walton and Samatar are representing their protagonists as readers, these characters

are in the process of bringing in stories, and more stories, in order to understand themselves and

the world. Moreover, the relationship between author and reader shifts from one of mastery

towards one of dialogue, recognizing that the active stance of writing begins with the passive

stance of being caught up in stories.

The resituated value of passivity involves gender, one of the primary issues underlying

this dissertation. Texts written by female authors tend to be the most fruitful in exploring the

aspects of fantasy that reflect the current and potential shifts in literary value. The passivity of

immersion emerges here not so much as an initial stage of reading to be overcome, but rather as

an aspect of reading and learning that needs to be preserved in order to maintain dialogic

relationships with texts and the world. The trajectory from the uncritical to the critical is here

questioned as a single stage in a process that needs to be revised with each new encounter. In

Walton and Samatar’s novels, stories work somewhat like relationships between people—they

are manipulative or ameliorative depending on the extent to which both parties are interested in

42
and able to create dialogues. The energy of critique, insofar as it aligns with the avoidance of

manipulation, can sometimes miss the potential for more sincere encounters. By focusing on

protagonists who love reading, these novels depart from the desire to share the love of reading,

getting in touch with aspects of reading that have previously been excluded from definitions of

the ‘literary.’ These aspects include consolation, escape, emotional connection, and simply the

wonder of enchantment. And yet, as much as these texts revel in the pleasures of reading, they

are also serious about understanding how it can be misleading or harmful. Rather than ignoring

the negative aspects of reading, the choice within these novels to proceed from a more intimate

dialogue, and from love, means that the negative aspects are all the more painful.

Among Others: Translating Enchanted Reading into Writing Life

Among Others is a fantasy novel, and it is a novel about reading fantasy and science fiction. The

form departs from the traditional fantasy structure because it begins after the end of the quest and

magical battle. Mori has just defeated her evil witch mother. In the process, her twin sister (also

called Mori or Mor) has died, and Mori herself has been left with a shattered pelvis and leg

injuries that mean constant pain. Most of the novel takes the form of Mori’s diary entries

beginning at age fifteen, covering the four months between September 1979 and February 1980.

After her magical battle Mori has run away to live in a Children’s Home, been sent to live with

her previously absent father and aunts, and then been sent off again to an English boarding

school. Reading is the only solace that Mori can find, a respite from physical pain and from the

boarding school itself. As such, the diary takes the form of a reading journal, interspersed with

people and events. With the help of books and a burgeoning sf fandom, as well as through her

own ruminations, Mori manages to overcome her trauma and loneliness, choosing to live as a

43
part of the world. In other words, through reading, Mori gathers the strength to choose how to

write her own story.

Because the form is so important in diverging from other fantasy narratives, the

beginning of the novel rewards a close examination. Although most of the text follows

chronological diary entries, the first few pages set up the structure of the narrative as well as the

demonstrating how magic functions. These pages begin with what appears to be another diary

entry, dated in May 1975, when Mori and her twin sister are ten years old. Approaching the

Phurnacite factory known to them as “Mordor,” the twins perform a magical act prescribed by

the fairies. Even at this age, they have serious doubts as to the efficacy of throwing flowers into a

sulfurous lake: “Never had what we were doing seemed more childish and stupid than standing

in the centre of that desolation by that dead pool holding a pair of crushed pimpernels the fairies

had told us would kill the factory” (15). Thus, magic is introduced as both mysterious and

weighted with the expectations of reading fantasy. Like the twins, most readers are likely

familiar with The Lord of the Rings, or familiar enough with fantasy to feel, along with the twins,

the conflict between the mundane world and expectations associated with words like ‘magic’ and

‘fairies.’

The results of this magical working also appear to be anti-climactic. Mori’s sister

expected the factory “to fall and become a hallowed place…Well, either that or huorns,” while

Mori herself expected that “the flowers would dissolve and ripples would spread out and then it

would crumble to ruin and the trees and ivy come swarming over it while we watched and the

pool would become real water and a bird would come and drink from it and then the fairies

would be there and thank us and take it for a palace” (15). Clearly, these expectations derive

from reading fantasy. In particular, the “huorns” are a reference to the army of trees in The Two

44
Towers, and the overall picture that Mori paints is reminiscent generally of a dramatic

eucatastrophe at the end of a fantasy or fairy tale. Instead, “Nothing whatsoever happened” (15),

at least nothing the twins could see. A headline in the newspaper on the following morning

announces the closing of the factory. The contrast between expectations about magic and the less

dramatic functioning of ‘real’ magic lays out the primary source of conflict in the novel, i.e., the

question of how stories inform ‘real’ life, and what it means to write one’s own story. As Walton

has acknowledged, this story is close to her own life experiences, having grown up in Wales

about the same time, reading many of the same books. Her mother also had psychological issues,

and she went to a boarding school that she hated. Thus, Mori’s position, and her ambition to be a

writer, is very similar to Walton’s.

Jo Walton has become a very prolific writer of science fiction and fantasy, with thirteen

novels published since the year 2000. Her work also includes short stories, poetry, roleplaying

game supplements, and a collection of nonfiction essays about reading, What Makes This Book

So Great (2014). The latter collection developed out of Walton’s online activities, blogging as

well as reviewing books on the well-known fantasy publishing site, Tor.com. The importance of

fandom for Walton is further underscored by the subject of her forthcoming nonfiction title, An

Informal History of the Hugos: 1953-2000. For Walton, the Hugo Award holds special meaning,

and she reacted with more excitement than to other awards. She explains, “I was thrilled when I

won the Nebula, but it was ‘SFWA [Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America] gave me

their award, that’s so cool!’ whereas with the Hugo it was ‘Fandom gave me OUR award, wow,

wow, wow!’” (Tate) In addition to the Hugo and Nebula, Among Others won the British Fantasy

Award for Best Novel, and it was nominated for the World Fantasy Award. At the time, the

novel was one of only eleven novels ever to have been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and

45
World Fantasy awards. Since then, five other novels have achieved that same recognition.16 In

the thirty two years of possible overlap, this is still a relatively small number, implying an appeal

to fans as well as to other producers.

The novel underscores the importance of reading and of fandom on multiple levels. The

book is dedicated to “all the libraries in the world, and the librarians who sit there day after day

lending books to people” (6). Mori echoes this sentiment in her own voice, “Interlibrary loans

are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization. Libraries really are wonderful. They’re

better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries

just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts” (59). This description

invokes reading as an end in itself, outside of market interests. And Mori makes heavy use of

interlibrary loan. According to a list developed by a reader and posted online, there are 154

different books that are mentioned in this novel, either directly through Mori’s readings or

through references (“Books”).

Although Mori’s situation is specific, recovering from injuries and losses of a fantasy

battle, the escape to books will be familiar to many readers. Books are not a substitute for life,

but rather what makes life bearable for Mori. Early on, she notes, “I have books, new books, and

I can bear anything as long as there are books” (25). Later, she expresses gratitude for books as a

means of (necessary) escape:

16
Other joint nominees for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards include John
Crowley’s Little, Big (1981), Gene Wolfe’s The Claw of the Conciliator (1981) and The Sword
of the Lictor (1982); R.A. MacAvoy’s Tea with the Black Dragon (1983); Emma Bull’s Bone
Dance (1991); James K. Morrow’s Towing Jehovah (1994); Neil Gaiman’s American Gods
(2000); China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000) and The City & The City (2009); N.K.
Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (2010), The Fifth Season (2015) and The Obelisk
Gate (2016); Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor (2014); Naomi Novik’s Uprooted
(2015); and Charlie Jane Anders’s All the Birds in the Sky (2016).
46
 There are some awful things in the world, it’s true, but there are also some great books.

When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a

bench on a day that isn’t all that warm and they could sit reading it and totally forget

where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside

their own head. I’d like to write like Delany or Heinlein or Le Guin” (52).

Here, Mori appears to be discussing the value of escape, that form of reading that is so often

excluded from definitions of literary value. Escape is also, however, the inspiration for Mori to

become a writer. She wants to create something that will pass on the experience of being

transported, of being outside time. And the word “escape” does not encompass what is also an

aesthetic experience in itself.

Even though Mori is reading science fiction, the escape she is discussing here is more

reminiscent of the terms associated with fantasy. In describing The Lord of the Rings, in

particular, Mori notes,

The thing about Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it’s perfect. It’s this whole

world, this whole process of immersion, this journey. It’s not, I’m pretty sure, actually

true, but that makes it more amazing, that someone could make it all up. Reading it

changes everything….Reading it is like being there. It’s like finding a magic spring in a

desert. It has everything…It is an oasis for the soul. Even now I can always retreat into

Middle Earth and be happy. (103)

Tolkien used the terms “escape” and “consolation” to describe these experiences in fairy stories.

For Mori, the operative term may be “oasis.” After the dryness of reality, there is a sense of

gaining nourishment (in this case water when thirsty). The combination of desire with physical

need encompasses a view of literature that continues to be excluded or peripheral. In academic

47
circles, this sort of pleasure is excluded due to associations with untrained or “just” reading.17

Arguments against this type of reading proceed from the need to distinguish the professional

from the ordinary reader.

For professionals, reading tends to be understood as a reflection of ideological and

sociological concerns, and to be caught up in a story risks the loss of perspective, as well as the

distance that distinguishes the critic-as-master. In their most insidious form, these arguments

proceed in the name of political critique. By implying that the function of literature is to critique,

academics can exclude experiences of immersion, and especially of consolation. One of the best

examples of these discourses may be Leo Bersani’s The Culture of Redemption, which argues

that consolation and politics are diametrically opposed. In other words, to be consoled or

‘compensated’ is to drain politics of its animating force, i.e., dissatisfaction with the present.

These arguments are gendered in the sense that they are fearful of manipulation by texts, holding

onto the need to assert the dominance of the critic over the text. Abstract political theories can

provide a kind of collective fortress for critics, an armor against being manipulated. Meanwhile,

admissions of love become increasingly difficult, and easily dismissed as sentimental. How easy

it would be to take apart Mori’s phrase here, describing Tolkien as “an oasis for the soul.” But

who would want to? Mori is not entirely caught up in the novel in this reflection. She refers to

her father’s (Daniel’s) criticism that the book does not engage with the experience of lust, and

she offers the counterexample of Wormtongue. Certainly, the statement that the book “has

everything” is an exaggeration, but the sense of plenitude that Mori feels may be more important

than the question of whether her statements are literally true.

17
A term that is being recovered by Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best.
48
 Far from being trivial, the emotional compensation of reading becomes a very serious

issue, literally life-saving. On Halloween, Mori returns to her home in Wales, where she is given

another mission by the fairies. This time, she has to gather oak leaves to help ghosts in their

crossing into death, or a next place. One of these ghosts is her twin sister, who attempts to get

Mori to follow her into death, so that they can be together. Mori nearly gives in to this invitation

of suicide. In terms of one version of the story, it could make sense to the extent that joining a

twin sister is a means of restoring wholeness. The only thing that stops Mori from choosing to

kill herself is a reminder from one of the fairies, who says merely “Half way.” Mori realizes

he didn’t mean I was half dead without her or that she was halfway through or any of

that, he meant that I was halfway through Babel 17, and if I went on I would never find

out how it came out. There may be stranger reasons for being alive. There are books.

There’s Auntie Teg and Grampar. There’s Sam, and Gill. There’s interlibrary loan. There

are books you can fall into and pull up over your head. There’s the distant hope of a

karass sometime in the future. (89)

Books and people: these are Mori’s reasons for continuing to live. The simple pleasure of finding

out what happens at the end of a novel, and the hope that things will get better in the sense of no

longer being alone. In reviews, this novel has been most-often described as a “love letter to SF

fandom,” and it is through fandom that Mori finds a “karass,” or a spiritual community.18

For the most part, Walton’s portrayal of an avid reader has resonated with other readers,

both within and without of the sf/f community. As Elizabeth Bear has noted, “It’s a story of

alienation that many geeks can identify with,” and it is about reading “not as a critic pursuing an

18
The phrase “love letter to SF fandom” appears in reviews from David Barnett and
Elizabeth Hand, and it has been quoted by others. The term “karass” derives from Kurt
Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.
49
agenda but as a bright, engaged reader awakening to the possibilities of literature and the world.”

There is thus an immediate connection between the type of reading the Mori performs and the

type of reading performed by fans who are reading for pleasure. At the same time, the embrace

of Walton’s novel has not been universal, even within the sf/f community. The most common

critique has been that Walton focuses too much on the activity of reading, which is itself very

passive, and that this focus distracts from or overshadows the course of the narrative-as-story.

For instance, Philip Marchand complains that, “despite the novel’s good vs. evil narrative theme,

there is no sense of tension building between warring parties, no distractions of plot. Morwenna

does little more than read, and like her fairies, hang out and watch what’s happening.” And

Elizabeth Hand describes a similar issue: “Too often Walton preaches to the literary fangirl

choir,” and this overshadows the “delicate, lovely handling of the magical elements.” Although

Hand is not referring to the plot as such, the “magical elements” are involved with the plot of the

story as a whole.

Paul Kincaid offers the best description of the perceived incongruity between the

accounts of reading and the movement of the plot. He claims that, because Mori “learns nothing

significant,” the intertexts are arbitrarily chosen, with the sole purpose of inspiring “nostalgia,”

and their inclusion is “unsatisfactory in any reading of the novel as novel.” In other words,

Kincaid views the books within the book as mere distractions from more significant issues. He

concludes by advising readers: “Forget the flattering but essentially meaningless discussion of

various sf novels of the period, that is pablum for the genre masses; read this book for the

treatment of magic, read it for the way it can be either realist or fantasy as you choose to read it.

That is what makes this novel one of the best books of the year.” The tone is a bit dismissive for

someone who identifies himself as a member of the genre community. Kincaid’s terms recall

50
those of Fredric Jameson, using “nostalgia” as a marker of lesser cultural value, and the term

“pablum” implies that reading for such ends is childish and unintellectual. Nonetheless, Kincaid

raises some very important questions about the relationship between different elements of the

novel. Although Mori’s life as a reader appears somewhat separate from her interactions with

magic, I would argue that her reading- and story-lives are in fact related, and in a manner that is

crucial for understanding the novel as a whole, in its engagement with the interplay between

passivity and activity, as well as the relationship between reading and living.

The means through which the novel examines this relationship has to do with the

particular form of metafiction that can be found in fantasy. As Brian Attebery notes (1992), this

type of metafiction is not an ironic reflection on the distance between the text and the world.

Rather, it is a sincere examination of how the two might be related. In particular, because they

involve techniques derived both from literary realism and from fairy tales, fantasies examine the

relationship between two types of characters, i.e., the realistic character whose actions are not

predetermined by the demands of the story, and the fairy/folk tale character who is, precisely, a

function of the story. Attebery uses the terms actors and actants to refer to these different types

of “character as imitated person and character as story function” (73). According to Attebery,

fantasy enables a “dialogue between actor and actant,” so that readers can use the stories to

discover patterns as well as to understand themselves and others (86). Among Others explores

this function of fantasy. Mori begins as an actant, in the sense that she is a part of a fantasy

narrative. She and her sister are good heroes fighting an evil witch. For most of the novel,

however, Mori is also an actor, in the sense that she is giving a realistic account of a specific

period of her life, without an imposed narrative structure. Mori’s biggest problem is that she does

not know how to control whether she will remain in the role of an actant who is good. In other

51
words, she is afraid of turning into her mother. Through reading and thinking about magic, Mori

develops a philosophy that will enable her to choose the role that she plays as an actant. In other

words, through reading, Mori is developing the tools to write the story of her own life.

While readers may be passively identifying with Mori and indulging in the “nostalgia” of

a shared love for reading, they are also invited to consider how that passive position might best

be translated into action. This interplay between passivity and activity is what makes the text

both emotionally and intellectually resonant. Unlike in some other metafictional texts, Mori’s

apparent passivity as a reader is not only a source of manipulation, but also of solace as well as

food for reflection. Thus, the movement between indulging in a nostalgic love of reading and the

ruminations on magic is crucial for establishing a more trusting and egalitarian relationship

between the implied author and implied readers. Mori’s observations about novels are not so

much meant to impress the reader as they are meant as reminders of the feeling of revelation in

the act of reading. And these gestures towards the reader, in combination with the journalistic

accounts of Mori’s thoughts, raise both the character and the novel itself to the level of a

companion. In her role as an actor, Mori’s journal is candid and straightforward, enabling readers

to gain a sense of acquaintance. Even though the journal is, by definition, a monologic form, the

shared experience of being caught up in stories enables an imaginary dialogue about how and

when it is best to be caught up. In allowing more room for the passive stance of reading, the

novel adds layers of reflection in which the activities of reading, writing, and magic become

partially interchangeable. Mori enjoys reading, but she is much more ambivalent about magic,

which has real effects on other human beings. In the remainder of this interpretation, I will

consider how writing is like magic, and then I will describe the terms of the dialogue that the

novel poses about the morality of doing magic (or telling an enchanting story).

52
 Mori examines the morality of magic through her engagement with books, and with two

books in particular. In addition to The Lord of the Rings, and the fantasy structure of ‘saving the

world’ by defeating her mother, the other important text is Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of

Heaven. Magic in the novel does not quite work as it does in The Lord of the Rings. As children,

Mori and her sister brought their expectations from Tolkien to their understanding of magic and

fairies. Instead, she comes to realize that the fairies are not quite as her expectations had led her

to believe. In simply describing them, and in thinking through their relations to books, Mori

realizes the extent to which the fairies are still mysterious, and perhaps not even fairies at all. She

explains, “I’ve always noticed how much more fairies are like plants than anything else” (38).

They are organic, sometimes beautiful, and sometimes ugly. Furthermore,

Fairies don’t go much for names. The ones we knew at home we gave names, and they

answered to them or not. They seemed to think they were funny. They don’t name places

either. They don’t even call themselves fairies, that was us. They’re not big on nouns at

all, come to think, and the way they talk […] “Go! Danger! Find!” Fairies don’t exactly

talk like other people. It doesn’t matter how much you want them to be Galadriel, they’re

never going to make that kind of speech. (38-9)

Mori had previously translated the fairy speech into the rhetoric of The Lord of the Rings, but she

eventually realizes that this is not necessarily what fairies are. The novel does not settle on a

definition that would demystify the fairies, but Mori speculates that fairies might be “a sentient

manifestation of the magical interconnectedness of the world” (205). Towards the end of the

novel, Mori attempts to stop thinking of them as “fairies” at all. One of the most interesting

theories occurs when Mori expresses her opinion that Tolkien “saw” the fairies, “and dreamed

them into the elves he wanted. I think they are his dwindled remnant” (286). What emerges here

53
is a paradox: Tolkien saw the fairies, and he used them to create elves, while at the same time he

created them by writing about them. This suggests that fairies exist in the interstices between

desire and reality. Since Mori realizes that Tolkien’s stories are insufficient for understanding

fairies and magic, she is left to find other stories, and eventually to write her own.

The stories that help Mori to better understand magic are primarily drawn from science

fiction. Through reading science fiction, she revises her perception of magic and her early life:

It wasn’t that we didn’t know history…It just didn’t connect to the landscape. And it was

the landscape that formed us, that made us who we were as we grew in it, that affected

everything. We thought we were living in a fantasy landscape when actually we were

living in a science fictional one. In ignorance, we played our way through what the elves

and giants had left us, taking the fairies’ possession for ownership. I named the

dramroads after places in The Lord of the Rings when I should have recognised that they

were from The Chrysalids. It’s amazing how large the things are that it’s possible to

overlook. (34)

In interviews, Walton has explained that this shift from a fantasy to a science fictional

understanding of the landscape was part of the impetus for the novel, stemming from a blogpost

in which she recounted “growing up in South Wales and seeing it as a fantasy landscape when in

fact it was a post-apocalyptic one” (TS Tate). Thus, Mori’s reading of science fiction enables her

to revise her previous understanding, towards one that is more accurate. And beyond accuracy,

the science fictional engagement with magic shifts the weight of story, making it lighter. In other

54
words, by using the experimental and observational skills associated with science fiction, Mori is

able to consider—and to change—her relationship with magic.19

In beginning to revise her understanding of magic, Mori applies her reading of The Lathe

of Heaven.

[Magic] doesn’t happen the way it does in books. It makes those chains of coincidence.

That’s what it is. It’s like if you snapped your fingers and produced a rose but it was

because someone on an aeroplane had dropped a rose at just the right time for it to land in

your hand. There was a real person and a real aeroplane and a real rose, but that doesn’t

mean the reason you have the rose in your hand isn’t because you did the magic…That’s

where I always went wrong with it. I wanted it to work in a magical way. I expected it to

work like it did in the books. If it’s like books at all, it’s more like The Lathe of Heaven

than anything. We thought the Phurnacite would crumble to ruins before our eyes, when

in fact the decisions to close it were taken in London weeks before, except they wouldn’t

have been if we hadn’t dropped those flowers. It’s harder to get a grip on than if it did

work the way it does in stories. And it’s much easier to dismiss, you can dismiss all of it

if you have a sceptical turn of mind because there always is a sensible explanation. It

always works through things in the real world, and it’s always deniable. (40)

19
A related question might be: If Mori is living in a science fictional landscape, then is
the present novel also a work of science fiction? I think that it could be, insofar as the magic is
explained and approached intellectually. However, the novel is definitely fantasy to the extent
that the magic is irreducibly real within the bounds of the story. As much as the functioning of
magic is explored, it is certainly never explained away. Walton expressed surprise at the number
of readers who wondered whether Mori might be delusional (Pearl). Such interpretations may
result from the protocols, derived from Todorov, of reading the literary fantastic as the
hestitation between the uncanny and the marvelous. For this novel, however, such ontological
skepticism is beside the point. It is much more interesting to ask what magic does and how it
works rather than whether it is ‘real’ within the story.
55
In The Lord of the Rings, the divide between those who use magic for good and for evil remains

clear throughout, as the effects are immediate and dramatic. Moreover, in other fantasies, magic

tends to work based on recognizable systems. Here, magic is much more subtle and difficult to

grasp. The blurred line between magic and reality creates an issue for Mori. If magic doesn’t

work like it does in the fairy stories, then her relationship to it is also much less straightforward.

The reference to The Lathe of Heaven marks the increased understanding of magic as

existing in a space of desires and dreams that can shape reality. That text involves the story of a

man (George Orr) whose dreams become reality, and it tells of how he has to preserve this power

from being used by a well-meaning but imposing psychoanalyst. The Lathe of Heaven is driven

by the question of how and when manipulations of others might be justified. In spite of his

passivity, which the text implies deserves more credit than is usually given, George eventually

has to make the decision to act in order to prevent more damaging manipulations of others. In

thinking about this text, Mori learns to negotiate between her roles as actant and actor. Le Guin’s

novel provides a schema for Mori to decide how and when (if ever) to use magic. Since these

ruminations about magic are also about reading and writing, insofar as these activities are akin to

the enchantment of being caught up in stories, the more fundamental question that emerges here

is how to live well with stories.

Mori’s deepest worry is that she will become like her mother—that she will become, in

terms of actants, the evil character in the story. In order to avoid this, she has to work out a

different relationship with magic. Generally, Mori feels that it is okay to do magic for protection,

but not to impose her will on others. However, she is lonely enough to decide to do some magic

for herself, in order to find her ‘karass’ or spiritual community. On the following day, Mori is

invited to join the science fiction book club at the library, and she worries that she has

56
manipulated others without their knowledge. As Mori cannot tell whether they like her for

herself or because she did magic, the issue becomes even more acute when she begins dating one

of the boys from the book club. She worries, “I didn’t think this through enough. I was thinking

about a karass in too abstract a way, I didn’t think enough about the people, about manipulating

them. I didn’t even know them, and I was doing it. Is this how she started? My mother, Liz?”

(141). In order to distinguish herself from her mother, Mori resolves only to use magic when

necessary: “I don’t want to be evil, I really don’t. The worst of anything she could do to me

would be to make me like her. That’s why I ran away…I hereby solemnly swear to renounce the

doing of magic for my own benefit, or for anything but protection against harm” (161). This

resolution works, to an extent, but it requires a lot of interpretation about how and when to act.

Mori is poised between playing a role in someone else’s story and learning to write her

own story. She fears that her life might have been determined by someone else:

What if everything I do, everything I say, everything I write, absolutely everything about

me (and Mor as well) was dictated by some magic somebody else will do in the

future…But if it was somebody in the future where she won and was Dark Queen Liz,

and they did a magic to make us oppose her to make their world better. Well, I suppose I

don’t mind that too much, though I don’t like the thought of being a puppet any more

than making other people puppets (149).

The dilemma of magic, then, is that it turns people into characters, manipulated by the story

being told. Mori recognizes that the story manipulating her might have been an improvement, but

she is still uncomfortable with the fact of being manipulated. The novel raises the stakes of

storytelling by connecting it with magic. Arthur Frank’s question of what makes a good story

here relates directly to the question of the impact that stories might have on others’ lives.

57
Although the novel revels in the worlds of books and their possibilities, the power of stories, like

the power of magic, is very dangerous.

Mori directly confronts this danger at the end of the novel, armed with the other stories

that she has encountered. In a sense, this is a choice between living within stories and living

alongside them. Mori is prepared for this moment by her development through reading and

thinking about magic:

I thought, sitting there, that everything is magic. Using things connects them to you,

being in the world connects you to the world, the sun streams down magic and people

and animals and plants grow from sunlight and the world turns and everything is magic.

Fairies are more in the magic than in the world, and people are more in the world than in

the magic. Maybe fairies, the ones that aren’t lost dead people, are concentrations,

personifications, of the magic? And God? God is in everything, moving through

everything, is the pattern that everything makes, moving. That’s why messing with magic

so often becomes evil, because it’s going against that pattern. (294)

What is fascinating here is the combination of the passive and the active. Mori’s reflections

enable her to see that there is a pattern, but it is not, and should not, be within her control, or the

control of a single person. In terms of literary value, if stories are patterns, then these reflections

hardly makes anything simpler. The stories may be reflections of the pattern that Mori perceives,

or they may be interventions and alterations. What makes a good story, in the sense of not only

being engaging but also encouraging goodness, becomes dependent on broader patterns.

When the fairies (again) ask Mori to kill herself, they are operating under the demands of

one kind of story. And it might have been beautiful, in its own way. Mori thinks, “If I was a fairy

I could see the pattern of the magic all the time. There would be no more pain, no more tears. I

58
would understand magic. I’d be with Mor, I’d be Mor, we’d be one person, joined” (296). Such

an ending might have been both tragic and transcendent. However, Mori chooses instead to

manipulate the pattern herself. As she takes it upon herself to perform her own magic, Mori takes

up the pattern, and she chooses to send her sister into death:

I didn’t have an oak leaf, and we weren’t near the door to death, but I was fire and she

was fire and I had the pattern and I loved her… and, though she was flame she smiled her

real smile, the smile she used to smile on Christmas morning when Gramma was alive

and we would wake up to see the balloons hanging in the hall that meant Father

Christmas had been and there were stockings waiting to be opened. I opened a space

between the flame and where death fell in the pattern, and I hurled her through it, knife

and all, and then I closed it up again and sank down, dampened the flame until I was in

my own shape again (297).

This is the moment when Mori transitions from a reader to a writer, and it involves both using

and giving up power. It is a combination of acceptance and willpower. And what is perhaps more

beautiful than a transcendent ending with Mori as a fairy is her return to ordinariness. She says,

I’ll live, and read, and have friends, a karass, people to talk to. I’ll grow and change and

be myself. I’ll belong to libraries wherever I go. Maybe eventually I’ll belong to libraries

on other planets…Eventually I’ll come to death, and die, and I’ll go on through death to

new life, or heaven, or whatever unknowable thing is supposed to happen to people when

they die. I’ll die and rot and return my cells to life, in the pattern, whatever planet I

happen to be on at the time. That’s what life is, and how I intend to live it. Gate of Ivrel

turns out to be really brill. (301-2)

59
In looking at the values of reading and writing, what shifts here is the relationship between the

active and the passive. Mori becomes the hero of her own story, sure. And then she becomes the

hero of another story, as life continues to change in ways she can’t imagine. The last line of the

novel introduces another book because, in order to continue as a writer, Mori also has to continue

as a reader. This trajectory differs from previous constructions of thought and of writing. In

general, the presumption has been that the uncritical is a preface for becoming actively critical.

Readers may be entranced by stories, but then they mature enough to be active in interpreting

and writing their own. Here, the critical and the uncritical are combined. Mori begins from an

uncritical position, as a character in a story. Then she reflects, and she becomes a character in

another story. Fantasy provides the inspiration to continue to be enchanted by the world, even as

it breaks apart in the loss of one world and the birth of another.

In terms of postmodern metafiction, there is also a reversal here, in the direction of

reconstruction. Instead of pointing out the disparity between fiction and the world, and the

unknowability of the world, Mori begins to reconstruct a world. The magic that the twins

expected in the opening of the novel finally happens. Magic becomes, again, immediate and

transformative, in the final confrontation between Mori and her mother. Liz attempts to use

books against Mori, tearing out the pages of The Lord of the Rings, and throwing each of them at

her daughter to create the illusion of “a burning spear” (299). In response, Mori invokes the

strength that she has gained from other stories, “I drew the illusion monsters towards me and

gave them a push towards her. They changed and became dragons and huge alien turtles and

people in spacesuits and a boy and girl in armour with drawn swords, making a barrier between

us, protecting me, rushing down through the dusk towards her” (299). This strategy works for

60
protection, but in order to end the fight, Mori has to do more than create illusions. And so she

creates her own eucatastrophe:

I stopped and reached out to the pattern of the world. [The pages] were paper. Paper was

wood, so easy to make into a spear, but what did wood really want to be? One came so

close I could feel the wind of it passing, and I knew, and laughed. It was what Mor had

said here, so long before. It wasn’t even difficult. The spear that was a page became a

tree. So did the others, the ones she had already thrown and which were stuck in the

ground. For a moment they stood there, roots in the earth, branches reaching, oak and ash

and thorn, beech and rowan and fir, huge beautiful mature trees in full leaf. Then they

began to move downhill, Burnham Wood coming to Dunsinane. “Huorns will help,” I

said, and there were tears in my eyes. If you love books enough, books will love you

back. They weren’t illusion. They were trees. Trees are what paper was, and wants to be.

I could just about see her through them. She was raving and screaming something at me.

The pages were turning to trees as soon as she tore them, and sooner. The book, which

was in her hands, became a huge mass of ivy and bramble, spreading everywhere. The

whole desolation where the Phurnacite had been was a forest, with the ruins of the factory

at the heart of it. There were fairies in among the trees. Of course there were. An owl

swooped down over the dark pool. “Sometimes it takes a little longer than you think,” I

said. (300)

Readers are unlikely to anticipate that their own books will turn into trees. But in a sense, Mori is

restoring life to the books; they are becoming agents and resources for rebuilding. And instead of

emphasizing the gap between fiction and reality, there are multiple levels here on which fiction

becomes reality. The books become real and alive in the sense of paper turning into living trees.

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And the eucatastrophe of the forest growing up around the blighted factory landscape, which the

twins imagined previously, actually happens. So the stories live through Mori. In Frank’s terms,

the stories have become companions, agents capable of returning love. Instead of emphasizing

the naiveté of getting caught up in stories, or being manipulated by stories, this novel imagines a

reciprocal relationship through which books become companions, acting on and for people.

A Stranger in Olondria: The Birth of Language through Dialogue

The recovery of passivity and of trust in Among Others demonstrates the influence of a

‘feminized’ perspective on literary value. These concepts are not feminine in themselves, of

course, but women who write fantasies tend to be less influenced by the tacit preference for

mastery. From this perspective, the value of autonomy does not disappear, but it does not

exclude forms of passivity such as immersion and enchantment. In a more trusting relation with

books, the fear of manipulation becomes less important. Sofia Samatar’s novel shares many of

the same concerns as Walton’s. A Stranger in Olondria is subtitled “Being the Complete

Memoirs of the Mystic, Jevick of Tyom.” Once again, the first-person narrator offers a memoir

focused on the enchantment of reading. However, questions about reading, writing, and ethics

become much more complex, as Jevick becomes caught up in a power struggle for the control of

stories. Jevick’s own transition from reader to writer is overshadowed by a larger conflict

between oral and written cultures, and so the ethical questions of the written word extend beyond

himself, as he recognizes how language and stories are also tools of aggressive imperialism. As

in Among Others, Jevick creates a dialogue with books and with the reader, and he goes so far as

to create a new language; however, these dialogues are much more circumspect due to the

awareness of the colonial politics of language.

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 Sofia Samatar grew up negotiating between cultures. Born in Indiana to a mother of

Swiss-German ancestry, Samatar attended a Mennonite high school and college. Her father,

meanwhile, was Somali and Muslim. The sense of being between cultures and traditions has also

marked Samatar’s writing and teaching lives. As a writer, Samatar combines interests in fantasy,

poetry, and language. She attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison,

where she studied Swahili and later, Arabic, receiving a PhD in African Languages and

Literature, with a dissertation focusing on speculative world building in the work of Tayeb Salih,

Ibrahim al-Koni, Ben Okri, and Bessie Head. While working toward the doctorate, Samatar also

began the process of publishing her first novel, A Stranger in Olondria. At the same time (2011-

12), she started publishing poetry, short fiction, and book reviews in genre magazines like

Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, and Apex, and in 2013 she became the editor of poetry and non-

fiction for the magazine Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts. Samatar is thus active within

genre circles, as well as academia.

Samatar’s work has, for the most part, been embraced by the genre community. Her first

novel won the 2014 World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel, as well

as the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and

the Crawford Award for a debut fantasy novel. While there is still quite a bit of tension in the

genre community over issues of diversity,20 the main difficulty that Samatar faced in terms of

20
In discussing the state of diversity in sf/f, Samatar refers to Samuel Delaney’s
statements that race would not be an issue “as long as there’s only one or two of us, but once
there starts to be a critical mass of people of color in this field, we’re going to start to see push-
back” (Bady et al). This push-back has been visible in the Sad and Rabid Puppies’ bloc voting
aimed at de-politicizing the selections at the Hugo awards. These efforts have, for the most part,
failed. Bloc voting has ended while diversity continues to increase through the efforts of writers
of color, such as organizing anthologies aimed at broader representation in sf/f. For instance, one
of Samatar’s stories was published in the anthology Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the
Margins of History (2014).
63
publishing was in finding people who would risk putting out a ‘literary fantasy.’ Samatar tried

unsuccessfully for five years to get an agent, but no one wanted to take a chance on a book that

was “too literary for a fantasy novel, and too fantastical for a mainstream literary novel” (Cole).

Instead, Samatar herself approached Gavin Grant at the sf/f convention, WisCon. He offered to

read a few chapters, and soon the novel would be published by Small Beer Press, run

independently by Grant and Kelly Link. Samatar notes her appreciation of the “flavor” of Small

Beer Press (McCarry), which is much more amenable to authors working in between literary and

genre fiction. In working with the Interstitial Arts Foundation, Samatar has also come to view the

‘Interstitial’ in terms of breaking down divides between genre and literary fiction. The Interstitial

resists final categorization because it exists between categories, including media (print, music),

broader literary genres (poetry, fiction, non-fiction) and fictional genres (science fiction, fantasy,

horror, mainstream or ‘literary’). Samatar notes that “the interstitial is utterly relational,” but it is

also comparable to movements such as the “Weird.” Both movements “attempt to carve out a

space for work that takes fantasy, science fiction, and horror seriously, that isn’t trying to use

genre fiction in an ironic way…but that also has a special, often oppositional relationship to

genre fiction’s rules.” (Cole) More broadly, then, Samatar’s work is part of the phenomenon that

Gary Wolfe calls “postgenre,” of authors utilizing genre as a resource instead of a constraint.

In existing between literary and genre fiction, Samatar’s approach to writing implies a re-

evaluation of fantasy. In a sense, for Samatar, fantasy is the beauty and strangeness of poetic

language: “Reading [Mervyn Peake] at the age of 13, I understood that fantasy, the place I was

looking for, is not to be found in dragons, ghosts, or magic wands. It resides in language. Fantasy

is death by owls. It’s mourning through gesture. It’s music, incantation in half-light. An inverted

heart” (“13 Words”). This is a very strong paradigm shift in relation to fantasy, away from the

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terms of consumerism. Fantasy here is not an easily marketable experience of escape to a better

world. Rather, the idealizations of fantasy are wrapped up in the potential of language to

heighten experience through estrangement, wonder, and beauty.

The main conflict of Olondria thus appropriately revolves around language, and

particularly written versus oral traditions. Samatar developed this concern during three years

spent teaching high school English in Yambio, South Sudan. As the education switched from

Arabic to English, Samatar felt excited at first to be able to provide this service. However, she

notes, “the longer I stayed there, I just started to question it…What was I really doing? Why was

this so much better than Arabic? What's happening to this primarily oral culture?…And so I

wrote this book, and it's a lot about…these conflicts between oral and written ways of knowing”

(Bady et al). Although the novel recognizes the violence of suppressing oral cultures, the

violence occurs on both sides, as a result of the fact of dichotomy. Instead of taking a side, the

novel seeks to open up a dialogue; according to Samatar, “as much as the book addresses the

tension between the oral and the written, it also performs a sort of joyful melding of the two. It

expresses a longing for a world in which that would be possible” (McCarry). Moving past

dichotomies is part of the process of deconstruction, but there does not seem to be much

consensus about the process of reconstruction. For Samatar, fantasy is a necessary genre in order

to imagine this ‘joyful melding.’

On the one hand, fantasy is a means of getting in touch with the past, drawing on folk

tales, fairy tales, and myths. As Brian Attebery notes (2014), fantasies reframe myths so that they

can be carried forward in the present. At the same time, the apparent lack of literary status in

fantasy can actually become a resource, to the extent that the category of fantasy does not impose

the same literary expectations that weigh down categories like “African” or “world” literature.

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Samatar has thought about “African literature as the literature that becomes nothing,” and in her

dissertation, she found that terms like “oral tradition” frame texts in “a way that MAKES

EVERYTHING NOTHING AGAIN,” given the assumed inequality between the oral and the

written. Samatar concludes, “Curiously it’s making these elements ‘something’ (oral tradition)

that actually makes them nothing, while embracing them as nothing (fantasy, made-up) might be

a way to see them as something…” (Bady et al., emphasis original) In other words, fantasy is a

means of constructing worlds that are recognized from the beginning as constructed, as artificial

rather than authentic. Samatar thus suggests that fantasy provides better access to some African

literature as literature by emphasizing the freedom of the imagination to construct worlds.

Of course, fantasy is not exactly ‘nothing.’ The genre has its own history and constraints.

To the extent that fantasy has developed in the tradition of Tolkien, it also carries an Anglo-

centric bias. Tolkien was writing to get in touch with the linguistic and mythological roots of

Northern Europe, and later fantasies have often reproduced the assumed primacy of medieval

Europe. As Samatar notes,

I think my work is very much written against some of the tropes or the conventions of

epic fantasy, and one of them is this obsession with medieval Europe…but that’s how I

think about the work when I’m looking at it after it’s already written. When I’m writing,

there’s just so much pleasure in moving around, in your own made-up world…and I

don’t feel at those moments…that Tolkien is…this bad father who’s leaning over my

shoulder…I feel like he’s more of a…companion…I feel the similarities of our projects

and I just feel happy. (Murad)

The word “companion” recalls Arthur Frank’s approach to stories. Unlike some deconstructive

metafiction, Samatar is writing from a place of intimacy with and love for stories, and for that

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reason, her work is not reducible to a rhetorical argument or to a struggle for control. Thus, a

postcritical perspective is helpful in understanding how Samatar represents a shift in the field of

literary value. The difference in Samatar’s approach lies in her beginning from a point of

attachment, in a mode of enchantment, rather than in a mode of suspicion.

Samatar thus emphasizes the aspects of epic fantasy that she finds constructive, rather

than damaging. As she explains, “At the time I was creating a world for myself, my own place.

And I also wanted to explore the potential of epic fantasy by focusing on the things I love about

the genre: the sense of history, of movement through space, and of cultures in contact and

conflict. I wanted to write the book I wanted” (Clarke). The shift in perspective here is not just

about a world with characters that look like Samatar. It is also about negotiating between conflict

and contact. Samatar asks, “What if we would start thinking of epic fantasy as a genre of contact,

but not conquest? The genre is sort of built around conflict, and that's why we don't see it being

done very often. Conflict is such a part of the genre that you have to address it before shifting to

contact” (McCarry). Thus, Samatar is not so much negating the structure of epic fantasy as she is

shifting the focus away from ‘conflict’ towards the more affirmative project of ‘contact.’

The emphasis on contact is the difference between this form of writing and previous

versions of deconstruction. As Cheryl Morgan notes in her review of the novel, “Somewhere,

Michael Moorock is grinning happily because, young people, we did the whole deconstruction of

the Good v Evil structure of epic fantasy decades ago. It is nice to see it getting done again, and

in such a very different way.” Morgan does not quite explain the difference to which she refers,

but in my view, that difference lies in what I. Huber terms the ‘reconstructive.’ As Huber notes,

reconstructive texts embed a pragmatic approach towards fiction as a mode of communication.

Samatar’s very concise description of the novel emphasizes this communicative role. She

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explains that the book is “about travel, reading, writing, literature and the idea that literature

gives us contact with the dead” (Winter). If it is a truism of deconstruction that the author is

dead, then Samatar’s novel investigates the next step. Knowing that the author is dead, to what

extent does the author emerge as a ghost? Rather than focusing on the fact of unknowability,

Samatar considers the possibilities for contact that persist.

A Stranger in Olondria draws together these questions of writing, reading, and contact in

epic fantasy. The main character, Jevick, is not on a ‘quest’; instead, he is a reader who visits

another culture. In Samatar’s secondary world, Jevick comes from the periphery of an empire.

He is the son of a pepper merchant from the Tea Islands, in a culture that has not developed a

written language. When his father passes away, Jevick is excited at the prospect of visiting the

place that he has learned about through reading with an Olondrian tutor. While on the ship to

Olondria, Jevick meets Jissavet, a young girl suffering from a fatal illness, also from the Tea

Islands, and Jevick engages with her in a brief conversation about the immortalizing potential of

writing. Soon, Jevick’s enjoyment of Olondria is interrupted by the arrival of the ghost of

Jissavet. In a sense, he is haunted by his homeland, and Jissavet eventually communicates her

wish that Jevick should write the story of her life, so that she can become immortal, like the

people in books. However, in the meantime, Jevick is caught up in a religious conflict. For the

Olondrians, ghosts are known as “angels,” and those who can speak to them are consultants

within the religion of the goddess Avalei. That religion is under siege from those who worship

the ‘Stone,’ and because the current monarch supports the cult of the Priest of the Stone, seeing

an angel is considered a form of dangerous delusion.

The conflict between these two religions coalesces into a choice between oral and written

cultures. For those who worship the Stone, words are sacred, proceeding directly from god, and

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these devotees of reading are morally stringent in contrast to what they view as the loose

debauchery of the goddess worshippers. Jevick is arrested and then escapes from the Priest of the

Stone, but he eventually finds that he has been used as a pawn by the Priest of Avalei to

manufacture a war. In the meantime, he also finally decides to listen to the ghost of Jissavet, and

in the process of writing her story, Jevick falls in love with her. Jevick is thus translating an oral

history into written form, and so he is poised between the interests of the oral and the written. In

the process, he uses Olondrian to create a written form of Kideti, his native language, and he

takes ‘Jissavet’s alphabet’ back to the island to become a mystic and a teacher. Thus, the story

moves between the broader, epic conflict of war and the narrower, personal engagement of

Jevick with the ghost and with language. Jissavet’s story is a form of contact in the process of

writing, but after her body is released through burning, all that remains is a trace of what was a

more real contact. In other words, as Samatar notes, books are “more ghostly, in their own way”

than an actual ghost (McCarry).

Unlike most fantasy heroes, and many protagonists, Jevick is rather passive. Things

happen to him, rather than because of him, for the most part. He travels to Olondria because his

father has died, and he is taking the role set out for him as a pepper merchant. Once there, Jevick

does explore through reading and, more or less, partying. He is very much like a college student,

in a new environment and taking it all in. Moreover, the plot finds Jevick, rather than the other

way around, when the ghost of Jissavet appears. From this point on, Jevick becomes a pawn to

be manipulated in the struggle between the Priest of the Stone and the Priest of Avalei. Some

readers have complained that Jevick is a ‘flat and uninteresting’ character (Diversiverse), but his

role as a student can also make him a stand-in for the actual reader, bringing the reader in closer.

Perhaps one of the best descriptions of the novel comes from Geoff Ryman, who speculates that

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it might be called “heartfelt metafiction.”21 This phrase captures the sincerity of the novel’s

attachment to books and to reading, an attachment that is all the more sincere for being fraught

with concerns about how books can lead to misconceptions and to violence. Through Jevick, the

novel explores the passion of reading, as well as its limits.

Although Jevick eventually transitions from a naïve student to a knowledgeable ‘mystic,’

the novel suggests that there is something valuable in his passivity and even in his naiveté. As

Samatar notes, “As much as the book critiques the arrogance of students, it also celebrates their

openness, their curiosity, their readiness to learn. In a way it's a call for all of us to be students,

but good ones: to stay open, to remember we don't know it all” (Osman). Once again, the value

of passivity emerges here, and not only as a precondition for beginning to learn, but as worthy of

being maintained in order to continue to learn. Like Mori, Jevick is a character with whom

readers can identify in the shared passion for books. And because he is a student, the dynamic of

mastery between authors and readers is replaced with something that feels more like a dialogue

between equals.

That dialogue begins with Jevick recalling his first encounter with written language. At

first, Jevick describes words as magical, a true form of sorcery. He recalls the first moment of

recognition that words carry sound, when he realized “with a shock that I was in the presence of

sorcery; that the signs…could speak, like the single-stringed Tyomish harp, which can mimic the

human voice and is called ‘the sister of the wind’” (18). The sense of words as magical

invocations of ‘the human voice’ will eventually be qualified and revised. Nonetheless, Jevick’s

21
Here I am expanding on what this provocative phrase could mean. In the interview
where he coins the term “heartfelt metafiction,” Ryman gives an example of the power of books
in the novel, and Samatar cautions that the “victory of books” remains uncertain. However, I
think ‘heartfelt’ can refer to more than an unqualified love of reading.
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description of his enchantment with books makes a strong impression that is not reducible to the

ignorance of a student. He describes having felt himself passing

through a curtain of flame into a world which was a new way of speaking and thinking, a

new way of moving, a means of escape. Master Lunre’s massive sea chest […held] a

series of living lovers with whom he lay voluptuously, caressing the hair of each one in

turn: his books, some written by hand and some from the printing press, that unearthly

invention of the wizards of Asarma. I soon understood why, when I went in to call him

for the evening meal, my master could always be found stretched out on his pallet in the

same position: his head on his hand, his bare chest gleaming, a thin sheet over his hips,

his earrings glinting, his spirit absorbed in the mists of an open book. I, too, soon after I

read my first book […], succumbed to the magical voices that called to me from their

houses of vellum. It was a great wonder to me to come so close to these foreign spirits, to

see with the eyes and hear with the ears of those I had never known, to communicate with

the dead, to feel that I knew them intimately, and that they knew me more completely

than any person I knew in the flesh. I confess that I fell quite hopelessly in love with Tala

of Yenith, who was already an old woman when the printing press was invented. When

she heard of it, she is said to have danced in ecstasy, crying out, “They have created it!

They have created it!” until she fell down in a dead faint. Her biographer writes: “When

she rose she began her rapturous dance again, shouting, ‘they have created it!’ until her

strength was wholly exhausted. She continued like this, beyond the control of the people

of her House, who feared to subdue her with force, for seven days, whereupon she

died…” (19-20).

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Again, there are ideas here that will be revised over the course of the novel. Books do not

literally contain the voices of the dead, not quite. Nonetheless, the ecstatic moments of imagining

that contact generate an experience that is real in itself, enabling “a new way of speaking and

thinking, a new way of moving, a means of escape.” As much as the newness of this experience

will be tempered with further understanding, these initial moments generate an attachment to

reading that endures throughout the novel. Likewise, readers who identify with the experience of

loving books are drawn into recalling the inspiration for their reading. The poetic language, in

phrases such as passing through “a curtain of flame,” and “his spirit absorbed in the mists of an

open book,” re-establishes contact with the initial wonder of reading. Moreover, that wonder is

repeated in the moment of being absorbed in the description of Jevick’s absorption. In other

words, the wonder is not something that is left behind completely, as reading continues to

generate new experiences.

Jevick soon has to revise his initial enthusiasm for the sorcery of written language, for

two reasons. First, as he is drawn into the conflict between the Priest of the Stone and the Priest

of Avalei, he sees that both oral and written cultures can be manipulated to favor the voices of

the privileged. Second, on a personal level, Jevick forms a relationship with the ghost who is

haunting him, and he finds that she is not really present in her story. Jevick does not lose his love

of reading, but he comes to see the pain it can cause, as well as the promises it does not quite

keep.

The first challenge to the wonders of reading comes when Jevick is arrested and sent to

the Priest of the Stone. There, he learns how the faith in reading can be twisted towards

exclusion. Within this text-based religion, claims of seeing a ghost (or angel) are dangerous

delusions. The Priest tells Jevick, “I will not have my people duped. I will have them clean, and

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honest, and able to read the Vanathul. Words are sublime, and in books, we may commune with

the dead. Beyond this there is nothing true, no voices we can hear” (92). This perspective negates

Jevick’s experience of seeing a ghost as impossible, as well as militating against the popular oral

culture of the lower classes. Jevick personally experiences this contradiction while being kept in

a mental health facility, where the daughter of the Priest of the Stone, Tialon, seeks to ‘cure’ him

of his delusions through reading. In considering a passage from the (recently written) religious

text, Jewels from a Stone, Jevick recounts Tialon’s explanation: “The chapter on reading was one

of the first they had written down. She told me her father had groaned when he understood it,

curled on the floor, as if in labor with the beauty of the blessing” (97). The description of ecstasy

is very similar to Jevick’s raptures over his first encounter with reading, compared in the above

quotation to the ecstatic reaction of Tala of Yenith upon hearing of the creation of the printing

press; however, there is a crucial difference.

Whereas Jevick interprets reading in terms of personal encounters, the religion of the

Stone depends on a faith in the written as magically superior to the oral. Tialon thinks that

“written words possess order, much more so than the words we speak,” and so she believes that

the act of reading will be curative for Jevick’s ‘disordered’ mind. The first attempt to invoke the

order in words turns out to be rather comical. Tialon reads about Ferelanyi, a female military

commander who suffers the loss of a favorite concubine: “Ferelanyi was never the same after

Drunwe died that spring, although she still had forty-six concubines to console her, which is why

we soldiers say, if something in life has lost its savor, ‘it is just like the forty-six concubines of

the general,’” and the narrator Jevick comments, “Naturally, the treatment was a failure” (98).

Jevick brings out the sense of the ridiculous in the contrast between the supposed order and

cleanliness of words and the subject matter of this passage. There is also some pain in these

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miscommunications, as Tialon becomes frustrated when the ‘treatments’ do not seem to work.

Jevick reports, “Once a tear dropped from her eye and landed on one of my cuts. It stung” (101).

The irony in this case is less comical than it is painful. The insistence on the function of reading

as a cure leads to pain instead of healing. Jevick’s physical discomfort here is also only a small

part of the damage caused by the religion of the Stone. With the support of the imperial military,

the Priest of the Stone has ordered attacks on worshippers of the goddess, including children

learning about her.

The violence of the interpretations of the Priest of the Stone might have led to a

preference in the novel for oral culture and the apparent moral license associated with

worshipping the goddess Avalei. However, Jevick feels similarly alienated and manipulated by

Auram, the Priest of Avalei who insists that Jevick should serve in the role of ‘avneanyi,’ or one

who talks to angels. While Jevick is exhausted from a ritual to establish communication with the

ghost, Auram touches his forehead, speaking reverently to him as an ‘avneanyi.’ Meanwhile,

Jevick notes, “His fingernail snagged my skin as he traced a circle on my brow with his index

finger” (122). As with the small pain of Tialon’s stinging tears, this slight physical discomfort

hints at the violence embedded in a monological point of view. Auram turns out to be a fanatic,

vampire-like character, in the process of manufacturing a war in the name of Avalei. Nor does

fighting for Avalei necessarily correspond with fighting for the lower classes who believe in her.

Herein lie the deconstructive aspects of the novel. Instead of a struggle between good and

evil, there is simply a struggle for power. Both sides will leave the lower classes voiceless, in one

way or another. When Jevick finds that he has been a pawn used by Auram in order to

manufacture a war, the latter explains the conflict in terms of a ‘choice’: “Cold parchment or

living flesh?” Jevick responds that this is “no choice. No choice one should have to make” (278).

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In other words, the power struggle has overshadowed the possibility of choice, so that both sides

react against each other with the goal of winning control. Jevick predicts, “Your prince will be a

tyrant. He will not hesitate to burn libraries or palaces or radhui. He will set Olondria aflame”

(280). Whereas the Priest of the Stone forbids the worship of angels and the goddess, denying the

oral culture practiced by the lower classes, the Priest of Avalei will find it necessary to keep

those classes illiterate. In both cases, the access to stories is restricted, and the voices of the

lower classes are disregarded.

While the deconstruction proceeds on the level of world politics, Jevick comes into this

conflict having worked with the ghost towards a form of reconstruction. In dialogue with

Jissavet, Jevick has created a written Kideti language using Olondrian letters. This is a language,

like any, that is not free of conflict, but it is also based on contact. The story of the birth of a

language becomes a story about giving a voice and a social presence to one who does not have

either. Jissavet is one of the voiceless, on several levels. Her family is poor, referred to in the

islands as “hotun,” or those “without jut” (214). The jut is a figurine that stands in for the soul,

and so those who don’t have one are not quite present or counted by the world. In addition to her

poverty, Jissavet suffers from kyitna, a fatal illness that causes the hair to turn bright red, which

used to be dealt with by burning “the families… together with all of their livestock and land,”

and which currently leads to exile (38). At first, when Jevick learns that Jissavet wants him to

write her story, so that she can become ‘immortal,’ he finds himself repulsed by the idea,

thinking, “Write her a book, set her words down in Olondrian characters! This ghost, this

interloper, speaking only Kideti! ‘No,’ I said aloud, gritting my teeth. I would not do it. I would

not mingle the horror of death with what I most loved” (124). Here, Jevick is guided by the

privilege of literacy, and he is jealously possessive about what and who should belong in written

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language. Jevick may be driven by assumptions about class, and low status as corruption, but

mostly he is afraid of Jissavet and of death.

It is only later, when Jevick is facing the real possibility of starving to death, that he turns

to Jissavet for help, in exchange for writing her story. In the process of writing, Jevick falls in

love with his ‘angel,’ and this ghostly connection turns out to be more real than anything

preserved within a book. Jevick recounts,

I felt myself disintegrating, fading, turning to smoke, becoming pure thought, pure

energy, like her. I wanted this dissolution, sought it eagerly…closing my eyes as I

reached for her, touching marble. I could not touch her. And yet she seemed so close, the

glow of her skin against my hand, her voice in my ear a private music. I read her

anadnedet again and again. I wanted to write there too, to inscribe myself among the

Olondrian and Kideti words on the page. My own wild poetry scattered there like grain…

And it seemed to me that she had been made to answer a desire which I had carried all of

my life, without knowing it. (261)

Here, Jissavet becomes much more to Jevick than a character in a story. The story is insufficient

for the relationship, and he wants to turn it into more of a dialogue by adding his “own wild

poetry.” Soon, it becomes clear that the preservation of the story is not the same as preserving

Jissavet herself.

Jissavet’s story recounts her loneliness and anger at being an outcast. Jissavet loves her

father because he is intelligent and comes from a rich family, one with jut, and she doesn’t

understand how he could have given that up for her mother. Jissavet views her mother as a

simpleton, without real substance. After she comes down with her illness, Jissavet learns that her

real father was a ‘pirate’ who raped her mother and passed the kyitna to her as an unborn child.

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The story is thus very tragic, of a strong-willed young girl who cannot overcome the limits of her

birth. But it does not contain Jissavet herself. The first hint of this disparity comes in the

different reactions of Jissavet and of Jevick to the story. Crying, Jissavet says, “It’s a terrible

story,” and Jevick disagrees, calling it “a beautiful story. Jissavet? Can you hear me? You’ve told

it beautifully” (259). These two reactions highlight the difference between a person who has

lived a story and a person who reads. Jissavet feels only the pain of the reality, whereas Jevick

responds to the beauty of the construction.

When Jissavet asks to be released from her ghostly existence by having her body burned,

Jevick confronts the limits of books as communion with the dead. This chapter begins by

recalling one of the quotations about books that Jevick had previously inserted as a preface to the

description of his first encounter with reading: “A book,” says Vandos of Ur-Amakir, “is a

fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears”

(19). When these words reappear just before the burning of Jissavet’s body, there are no

quotation marks or citations. Here, Jevick offers an unattributed epigraph: “But preserve your

mistrust of the page, for a book is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that

has no bridge, a garden of spears” (273, emphasis original). The lack of attribution is not so

much an oversight as a recognition that Jevick has come to understand what these words mean,

through his own experience. His initial wonder in reading has been revised to include an equally

important “mistrust.” In short, books are not the same as real life or real connections, and the

book with Jissavet’s story does not compensate for the loss of Jissavet’s ghost.

Paradoxically, this is also the moment when Jevick speaks most directly to the reader,

creating a dialogue about the nature of reading. From describing his grief, Jevick transitions into

a direct address to the reader, noting,

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 [S]he had entered at last the eternal door, leaving me inconsolable in the silence. The

silence. End of all poetry, all romances. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some

intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so

light in the other, thinning toward the end. Still, you consoled yourself. You were not

quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there

were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. Oh, was it

possible to read more slowly?—No. The end approached, inexorable, at the same

measured pace. The last page, the last of the shining words! And there—the end of the

book. The hard cover which, when you turn it, gives you only this leather stamped with

old roses and shields. Then the silence comes, like the absence of sound at the end of the

world. You look up. It’s a room in an old house. Or perhaps it’s a seat in a garden, or

even a square; perhaps you’ve been reading outside and you suddenly see the carriages

going by. Life comes back, the shadows of leaves. Someone comes to ask what you will

have for dinner, or two small boys run past you, wildly shouting; or else it’s merely a

breeze blowing a curtain, the white unfurling into a room, brushing the papers on a desk.

It is the sound of the world. But to you, the reader, it is only a silence, untenanted and

desolate. This is the grief that comes when we are abandoned by the angels: silence, in

every direction, irrevocable. (274-5)

This passage, perhaps more than any other, might be described as ‘heartfelt metafiction.’ The

awareness of the difference between books and ‘real life’ comes through, but instead of being

processed as an abstract manipulation, or a misleading delusion, the end of being absorbed in a

book is processed as a real emotional loss. Even though Jevick begins the chapter by recognizing

the difference between books and the voices of the dead, the end of a book still feels like being

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“abandoned by the angels.” And when “the sound of the world” returns, it feels less real than the

imagined sounds of those voices. It is here that fantasy enables a recognition of the emotional

attachment to books. As a literature of desire, fantasy is about seeking worlds that are immersive,

which can mean escape, but also encounters with the wonder of other people and places.

Jevick’s dialogue with the reader supports the postcritical relationship with literature, in

that it is both enchanted and disenchanted with books. When ‘the sound of the world’ returns for

Jevick, it brings the conflicts of war, manufactured over the struggle for authoritative

interpretation. He is also disenchanted insofar as he knows that the voice in Jissavet’s book is not

even as real as the voice of Jissavet’s ghost. Nonetheless, through the desires of fantasy, the

immersion in other worlds does have an emotional substance. It is not entirely artificial or

manipulated. A related question that emerges in these pages is whether or not books can be

compared with jut, the figurines kept by islanders to represent their souls. Before leaving,

Jissavet claims that she knows what the book is: “It’s jut” (265). If books are not quite the same

as spirits, they might be the same as the little figurines that stand in for souls.

In more skeptical language, books are fetishized objects. Jevick offers this interpretation

when expressing his gratitude that he has not burned the books of Jissavet’s story along with her

body:

And now, how glad I am that I did not burn this stack of books, this poor vestige of her,

pathetic as a stray hair! For I am like those lovers who keep obscure and grotesque

charms, a maize-cob gnawed by the loved one, a tick scratched from her ankle. Such is

the angel’s anadnedet […] The poverty of the words does not deprive them of

significance: sometimes I think they are almost, almost enough . . . almost enough to call

her up again, real, before me, with her flashing eyes, her sumptuous, unreachable skin. So

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 the lover invents his own religion, praying over his treasure of discarded fingernails. The

anadnedet has no more power than these—perhaps less. Yet I adore it; to touch its pages

gives me joy […] Jissavet does not live within these words, she is not contained by them

[...] Still, I read. When the rain stops I can hear the sound of the pages turning, a sensuous

sound like a woman turning in bed. A whisper beneath the dropping of water from the

wet leaves of the garden hedge and the echoing clamor of the disturbed cockatoos. (297)

This passage mingles wonder and mistrust. The experience of reading is still immersive and

“sensuous,” but it is not quite the same as a real human connection. Jissavet is not in the words,

any more than the janut (plural of jut) hold actual souls. And yet, there is a faith here, as well as

mistrust, insofar as reading takes the form of prayer. And what is being prayed for? Even though

the book does not contain Jissavet, it enables Jevick to imagine a connection with her, and there

is an experience of significance through this imagined human connection. Books do not preserve

the voices of the dead, but they do contain traces.

These imagined communions are not entirely insubstantial. I would like to conclude this

interpretation of the novel by considering Jissavet’s final words, and how those words point to a

substance within the experience of imagining human connections through reading. Rather than

comparing words to echoes of human voices, the novel invokes the substance of imagined

connection as a form of light, and the light has a sound. It is similar to the connection between

Jevick and Jissavet, which he describes as the desire to become “pure energy” (261). The

interaction between light and sound also occurs in one of the early appearances of the ghost. As

Jevick notes, “She arrives in chimes. The air tolls and bellows. Now I understand that light has a

sound…Her voice metallic, a harp of light…I cannot bear her voice and presence for very long.

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Her small mouth opens and closes, a cave of light” (70). Light here invokes energy, as well as

transcendence, spirit, and voice.

This interpretation of light could lead to a different perspective on Jissavet’s final words

while alive. These words are spoken to her mother, who is carrying a lamp, and Jissavet tells her,

“Hold the light” (256). Early in the narrative, Jissavet wonders whether “last words are

always…vapid, inadequate” (242), and she thinks that her words to her mother may have been

meaningless. However, there is an abundance of possible meanings for these words. In the

context of Jissavet’s life, these words could also be a recognition of value previously denied.

Jissavet has long felt disappointed in her mother, in “the way she was so satisfied with nothing,

wanted no knowledge at all, only to sow, to dig, to have clean water, content to remain a fool

forever” (236), and when she asks her father why he ‘settled’ for such a woman, he says, “There

is peace in your mother, like light in a lamp” (222). Thus, instead of a command, perhaps

Jissavet’s final words might be interpreted as a recognition her mother’s quiet endurance.

Jissavet also has her own memory of light, in the sense of contentment. In spite of the

weight of misery in her life, she recalls some happy moments, asking,

But sometimes—wasn’t it true that you would go outside, when the sky had cleared, and

run, screaming and jumping to dash the raindrops from the leaves? Wasn’t it true that the

smell of the mud was buoyant, delightful, excessive—that the yellow light of the flats

outshone the sky? And everywhere you could hear your own voice ringing in the cold air,

and you would charge through the reeds, which sprang back, scattering moisture. And the

sea, still bubbling, angry, glowed with a heavy phosphorescence. You could play with it:

its radiance clung to the body. It’s true, I touched that radiance, but then why am I always

hungry, why am I always craving more, more light, more life? (254)

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In this sense, to ‘hold the light’ may be to remember moments of contentment, and the

experiences that make life meaningful, both in and outside of books. As the poetry of Jissavet’s

description demonstrates, words are capable of holding a part of this experience of light. Living

is the experience of being hungry, ever desirous, but writing can, to an extent, freeze a moment

of contentment.

At the end of the novel, Jevick refers to ‘light’ as a means of describing the impact of

reading. It is an animating force that he is passing to his students by introducing them to reading

and to stories. After exploring an imagined world with his students, he notes,

Then I look up: the light has changed, the children are restless with hunger, we have all

lost another afternoon of our lives, gaining nothing but an enigmatic glow: for the cup I

lift now is not merely a cup but carries on its glazed surface the shadows of sails. And

this lintel, suddenly it’s darker, as if magically aged. And the flowers of the courtyard,

exhausted with heat, hang on their stalks like handkerchiefs forgotten after a midnight

ball, like sashes lost at romantic assignations. In the same way, perhaps, I am still

influenced by the angel, subtly, hazily, as the tide responds even in the dark of the moon.

Sometimes she comes to me in dreams, and it is as if I have been permitted to enter the

huge and vanished doors of childhood. My lost rose, my distant bell! What was that

feeling of happiness, welling up unexpectedly under the sorrow? I was in the schoolroom

after a lesson; my mother was there; the room was hot and bright, the walls yellow with

light from the open doorway. I stood, shaken with joy, concentrating on the feeling as if

analyzing a new and delightful taste. It was the angel: the pure heat, the warbling doves

in the sunny garden, my mother’s golden face lit by the walls. “What is it, younger son?”

she asked me, laughing. What is it? Yes, what is it? It is the reason I walk the mountains

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 after dusk, unable to bear even my tattered shelter of dried grass, and watch the fireflies

pulsing over the forest. Oh, will she not come? Can they not call her, those roving lamps?

No: I am alone in the sultry air, in the faintly violet darkness, in the odor of damp leaves.

But I go on waiting for her. I look for her still. (298)

I do not have words for this experience, either, but I recognize it, the “enigmatic glow” that

comes after being absorbed in reading something that makes an impression, a mixture of comfort

and discomfort, of contentment and desire. In this context, the sound of light is the “joyful

melding” that Samatar wanted to invoke between written and oral cultures, but here it is also a

joining of written and lived experiences. As the literature of desire, fantasy holds this animating

force, of a bridge that is not quite crossable, and yet the act of imagining the crossing of that

bridge can inspire a keener awareness of strangeness, wonder, and beauty. Books are not quite

companions in the way that people are, nor even in the way that a ghost might be, but they are

not entirely insubstantial, either. Samatar’s delight in the creation of a fantasy points towards the

postcritical recognition of faith in something being communicated, and in something worth being

communicated. The novel re-imagines the birth of language as a dialogue, and one that is about

mystery rather than mastery.

Conclusion

Both of the novels examined in this chapter are fantasies that perform something like “heartfelt

metafiction.” They recover the value of enchantment as a passive state that can inspire the

openness required for learning and for communication. At the same time, these novels are not

‘heartfelt’ in the sense of blind acceptance of the essential goodness of books, of stories, or of

enchantment. Rather, the emotional attachment to books turns towards a recognition of their

essential limits. In order to maintain a trusting relation with books as companions, the potential

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for manipulation and delusion does need to be recognized. As with the ‘postcritical,’ the

influences of suspicion, critique, and deconstruction remain important; however, the necessity of

skepticism does not prevent the reconstruction of a dialogue with readers, based on the

connection of a shared love for imagined worlds.

The following chapters will consider the perhaps more difficult question of determining

how these postcritical values of fantasy circulate differently in relation to other genres,

particularly those that have been considered more ‘literary.’ Thus, the next chapter again takes

up the mode of enchantment, this time considering how it plays out in discursive and literary

productions of magical realism and fantasy, and particularly in relation to the tendency to

devalue fantasy affirmations as naïve.

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CHAPTER TWO – RECOVERING BELIEF IN LITERATURE THROUGH MAGICAL
REALIST ENCHANTMENT IN THE NOVELS OF JOANNE HARRIS,
AIMEE BENDER, AND JUNOT DÍAZ

The year 2000 saw the release of the film Chocolat, based on the novel by Joanne Harris. In this

film, a woman brings magic to a quiet, devout French provincial town in the form of selling

chocolates that help the villagers to get in touch with their desires. The film, like the novel

(1999), employs the common magical realist trope of the feminized enchantment of cooking. For

many critics, it is also representative of the commercialization, and therefore devaluation, of

magical realism, which seems to fall into the delusions of fantasy. The substance of enchantment

is here turned towards commercial purposes, embedding a justification of consumerism as

indulgence. From this perspective, it is difficult to distinguish between the film Chocolat and the

messages written inside the packaging of Dove chocolates that incite consumers to indulge

themselves. In this chapter, I would like to challenge the conventional wisdom that underlies

these assessments, through which enchantment becomes associated with a feminized naiveté.

While fantasy has been gradually increasing in literary value, magical realism has

become increasingly suspect. The primary texts in this chapter include two examples of the more

consciously literary fantastic, and one example of less literary magical realism. Junot Díaz’s The

Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

engage with fantastic genres in a consciously literary manner, placing themselves near the

genres, without quite being of them. Magical realism, for better or worse, does function as

another fantastic genre in many respects. My purpose is not to argue for the benefit of one genre

label over another, but rather to trace the consequences of different labels. Thus, placing Joanne

Harris’s Chocolat series within the genre of magical realism enables the consideration of what it

means when this genre becomes more consumable. More broadly, I will focus on the crossings

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of fantasy and magical realism in these texts, via the mode of enchantment, in order to describe

how enchantment serves to revitalize views of literary value as being more nourishing than other

forms of consuming.

As the previous chapter has argued, enchanted modes of reading involve a revision of the

relationship between readers and authors. In Walton and Samatar’s novels, the protagonists are

also readers who stand in for writers, so that the mode of enchantment involves a shared

passivity between the audience and the author. In other words, the postmodern death of the

author is supplanted by the opening up of narrative to a process of co-creation between readers

and writers. Following Barthes, readers have been recognized as engaging in acts of production

as well as consumption, but many authors and critics have continued to invest exclusively in

their own autonomous status as producers. This chapter takes these arguments a step further to

consider how recent uses of magical realism and fantasy work to construct the relationship

between authors and readers as a nourishing rather than a destructive form of consumerism.

Because of the history of magical realism, the recovery of enchantment here meets

further issues in terms of gender, to the extent that the fact of belief tends to have been gendered

as a loss of autonomy. Rita Felski describes enchantment as a mode of reading that is fraught

with accusations against naïve readers. The two main charges are that enchantment “deludes and

that it disables,” misfortunes to which women and the lower classes are “especially prone” (53,

74). The gendering of enchantment derives from stereotypes about passivity. To be enchanted is

to lose or to let go of the illusion of autonomy. In literary-critical discourses, the functioning of

magical realism as a genre implies a loss of literary value, with female authors being cited as

generating consumable imitations of the work of male authors.

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 Revised views of genres, of critique, and of secularism offer a means of moving beyond

gendered assumptions about enchantment in magical realism. All three of the authors in this

chapter have drawn on magical realist enchantment as a resource to express their faith in

literature to do ‘something more’ than other commodities, recurring to the enchantments of food,

cooking, and eating in order to salvage the nourishing aspects of consuming. The chapter begins

by tracing the history of the reception of magical realism, noting how the skeptical and accepting

strands within magical realism have created a particular opportunity for the postcritical, which

leads to blurry distinctions between magical realism and fantasy. After considering how the

circulation of genre labels involves gendered assumptions about the delusions of enchantment,

the chapter concludes with three in-depth readings of authors who have challenged these

assumptions, turning enchantment towards a more egalitarian and nourishing relationship

between readers and authors, who participate together in the consumption and construction of

belief in literature.

Theories of Magical Realism, Between Faith and Skepticism

Unlike fantasy, magical realism has long been recognized as ‘literary.’ Lois Parkinson Zamora

and Wendy Faris claim a “long history” of magical realism as part of an epic romance tradition

stretching back to “the Decameron, The Thousand and One Nights, Don Quixote,” which is now

re-emerging after having been “temporarily eclipsed by the mimetic constraints of nineteenth-

and twentieth-century realism” (2). This inclusive designation captures the broad appeal of the

fantastic, but it makes distinctions between magical realism and fantasy particularly difficult to

parse, as both are engaged in disrupting the hegemonic dominance of realism (3). More

historically-bounded approaches to magical realism have identified it with the Latin American

literary ‘boom’ of the 1960s and 70s, followed by a ‘post-boom’ and global expansion in the

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1980s and 1990s, and even a ‘post-post boom’ in the twenty-first century. The story of magical

realism has been told and retold by literary critics,22 so I will shift from this brief overview

towards recent revisions in theories of magical realism.

There are (at least) two identifiable strands in magical realist criticism. Terms for these

strands have proliferated, but for the sake of simplicity, I will refer to Christopher Warnes’s

identification of the “irreverent” and the “faith-based” approaches. Warnes is among the critics

who take a wider view of magical realism, describing how both of these approaches function

within the genre. As Warnes points out, “faith-based” approaches to magical realism have been

the most heavily critiqued for their apparent naïveté. The irreverent, meanwhile, corresponds to

skepticism and irony about the nature of reality. The most influential theorization of the faith-

based approach to magical realism came through the work of Alejo Carpentier, whose prologue

to The Kingdom of This World (1949) posited the term “lo real maravilloso” as the literary

expression of Latin America. This definition would later become associated with what Erik

Camayd-Freixas calls “primitivism,” or the fascination with the construction of what comes

“before” modern culture (1998: 13). However, as other critics have noted, the spiritual elements

of magical realism need not correspond to the primitive, per se; rather, they are based in reality

as experienced through a perspective including faith.

The irreverent approach to defining magical realism began with the theorizations of

Angel Flores (1955), who identifies a “cold and cerebral and often erudite storytelling” which

derives especially from Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges (111-13). This archive has initiated

debates about the relationship between magical realism and the literary fantastic. The difference

has to do with the degree of intellectualism ascribed to the awareness of these fantastic

22
See, e.g., the introduction of A Companion to Magical Realism (1-4)
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components. Magical realism, in its faith-based approach, depends on an uncritical acceptance of

the marvelous, whereas the literary fantastic foregrounds a distanced, critical-philosophical

contemplation. It is important to remember that the separation of these strands is artificial. As

Camayd-Freixas notes, magical realist texts themselves often involve both the ethnological

approaches of popular beliefs and the philosophical questions of the neo-fantastic/postmodern

fantastic (2014: 13). Thus, “the single characteristic on which critics agree is that magical

realism makes the extraordinary seem commonplace and vice versa” (14), and this characteristic

can apply both to ethnological/faith-based magical realism and to the ‘knowing’ irony of

postmodern ontological questioning.

The dichotomy of faith and reason also characterizes discussions of the differences

between magical realism and fantasy. It is particularly difficult to distinguish between magical

realism and ‘low fantasy,’ or fantasies that are set in the same world as readers. Most critics

claim that fantasy begins with a constructed departure from reality, whereas in magical realism

the fantastic emerges from the real.23 These definitions soon run into issues, in the difficult

project of distinguishing between ‘constructed’ and ‘consensus’ realities. To claim that some

readers are knowing while others are naïve is to miss how reality is constructed in both cases, a

fact of which authors of both fantasy and magical realism seem well aware.24 In general, the

proliferation of dualist descriptions (real/not real) in relation to magical realism, the fantastic,

23
Maria Bortolussi insists on fantasy’s characteristic constructions of coherent secondary
worlds; even where fantasy-worlds resemble the phenomenal world, for Bortolussi, fantasy
requires the suspension of disbelief, whereas magical realism directly locates enchantment within
phenomenal reality (358).
24
Brian Attebery (2014) solves this problem by using the broad term ‘postcolonial
fantastic’ in order to counteract ongoing assumptions that “Modern writers knowingly write
fantasy; those who live outside the circle of Modernity write (charmingly naïve) magical
realism” (171). This solution does not rely on the ‘knowingness’ of fantasy or of Western
literature, and it exposes the contingencies of distinctions between magical realism and fantasy.
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and fantasy may never lead to a satisfying solution. The ontological status of enchantment is a

matter for debate in academic circles, and it is everywhere a matter of belief.

In my view, the difference between magical realism and fantasy is thus best described as

pragmatically constructed through reception, and through extra-literary markers such as book

covers, as well as marketing and library classifications. Reader expectations follow different

codes for fantasy/science fiction and for magical realism, not least of which is the association of

the former with the popular/pleasure of escape, and the latter with the literary and the seriousness

of engaging reality.25 While the value of fantasy has been undergoing positive revisions, the

value of magical realism has increasingly been called into question. And yet, these changes are

rather cursory, confined in many cases to the surface level. In particular, the substance of

enchantment, as a positive value, remains very difficult for critics to recognize, regardless of

whether the operative term is magical realism or fantasy. Moreover, the fact of belief has been

gendered. In the following sections, I will consider how preferences for stereotypically

masculine ideals such as autonomy and rationalism have continued to function in literary

appraisals of magical realism. Finally, I will employ a postcritical perspective in order to

interpret how texts revitalize literary value through the substance of enchantment.

Postcritical Solutions to the Consumable Imitations of ‘Feminine’ Enchantment

Even before Homi Bhabha’s declaration in Nation and Narration (1990) that magical realism

“after the Latin American Boom, becomes the literary language of the emergent postcolonial

world” (7), literary critics had expressed concerns about the efficacy of the genre as a

25
As Kenneth Wishnia notes, in sf “the unexplained is explained by the framing effect of
genre classification: Weird things happen because it’s sf. In magic realism…weird things happen
naturally” (30, emphasis original).
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postcolonial discourse.26 In general, critics worry that magical realism leads to pigeon-holing in

one form or another. In an early and clear articulation of the basis for these critiques, Jean Franco

(1988) argues that the literary ‘freshness’ of magical realism, especially as promoted by

intellectuals such as Carpentier, draws fuel from the beliefs associated with women and

indigenous peoples. Brenda Cooper further elaborates the implications of this critique: “Franco’s

position suggests that magical realist writers reinforce…imperialism by peddling the exoticism

and otherness of indigenous cultures to a metropole greedy for escapism. The exotic, moreover,

is simply the flip-side of racism, which conceptualizes Third World people as weird, uncivilized

and stupid” (31). I think that this critique has merit, and it has been exacerbated by the effects of

the narrative of secularization, through which belief continues to be associated with the naiveté

of those who are less ‘rational.’

Interestingly, critiques of magical realism are very similar to dismissals of fantasy,

particularly in the multiple disavowals of “an escapist fantasy world” that drains magical realism

of its political impetus (Bowers 126-7). Because of the negative literary value of consumerism,

and its imbrication with escapism, there are very few critics who defend escape as a value. The

sliding between terms like ‘fantasy,’ ‘escape,’ and ‘delusion’ covers over the middle ground in

which fantasies and escapes are illusions that do not necessarily serve a prescribed purpose (i.e.,

26
In 1997, Alberto Moreiras wrote an article, “The End of Magical Realism,”
proclaiming the death of the genre. Moreiras traces the end of magical realism to the self-
announced suicide of José María Arguedas, in his novel El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo
(1971). For Moreiras, this indicated a failure of magical realism to overcome the violence of
colonialism, and indeed suggested that the genre irreducibly embeds a colonizing perspective.
The most succinct description of these critiques comes from Alfred López, who notes that even
postcolonial readings of magical realism offer “for a mostly Western readership…the Other-as-
travelogue” (144). Latin American authors in the 1990s formed movements such as McOndo and
the Crack generation in order to distance themselves from magical realism. In particular,
McOndo authors like Alberto Fuguet have critiqued magical realism for being charmingly naïve,
creating an exotic, consumable version of Latin America.
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supporting the fictions of capitalism). Enchantment serves an important mediating role in these

discussions. Associations of enchantment with naïve belief, with women, children, indigeneity,

and the pre-modern, continue to determine the views of literary value as based on critique.

If fantasy has continued to be associated with the lowbrow, non-intellectual realm of

reading only for the sake of escape, magical realism has meanwhile increasingly been associated

with the pseudo-literary realm of the middlebrow, of reading for ‘self-improvement.’ The code-

word for the middlebrow in contemporary literary discourses seems to be “Oprah.” The selection

of One Hundred Years of Solitude for Oprah’s book list (2004) marks the novel’s appeal to

various audiences, which critics find disturbing. Warnes refers to the description of the novel

from Oprah’s website: “through this fantastic town and its fantastic people, you will come to

appreciate the magic of your own life” (162). The statement seems crass from a literary-critical

perspective, as readers are invited to ‘use’ the novel in order to bolster their own sense of

themselves, rather than to consider its elegiac political and social implications. Similarly,

Nicholas Birns explains that, in the 1990s, “magical realism became perceived as middlebrow,

the kind of books one’s mother or aunt read, which were accepted by a polite literary opinion

whose circle of approval young writers inevitably strove to rupture” (156). In particular, Birns

refers to C.K. Stead’s critique of Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1985), especially for the

novel’s “middlebrow” and “pseudo-uplifting” ending” (154). What emerges in these portraits is a

picture of the middlebrow reader as naïve, white, female, and middleclass. Rather than

considering the implications for history and politics, these naïve readers are presumed to be

transforming the novels into fodder for self-affirmation.

In effect, the globalization of magical realism led to what Anderson Sasser calls its

“Unsavory Stage” (17). Ironically, the ‘unsavory’ aspects of magical realism derive from the

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ease with which its texts are consumed by global audiences. The most-cited avatars of this too-

easy consumption include Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel, female authors who are often

referenced as pale imitations of the substance of a monolith like Gabriel García Márquez.

Frederick Luis Aldama offers one of the most representative forms of these critiques in his brief

discussion of Allende’s The House of the Spirits and Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate.

According to Aldama, Allende’s “constant slippage into soap-operatics…deadens” political

complexity to create “a spiced-up sociohistorical moment” (23). Aldama devalues these texts for

falling into “escapist fantasy” (23) with the politically regrettable aim of “comfort[ing] readers”

(25). Here, the affirmative is taken as necessarily mainstream and regressive.27 The ‘unsavory’

aspects of magical realism overlap with criticisms of fantasy as a form of delusional wish-

fulfillment, as female authors are cited as consumable imitators of ‘authentic’ magical realism.

Langdon and Takolander respond to these critiques by critiquing, in turn, the “phallocentric

visions” undergirding the supposed ‘authenticity’ of magical realism as a political intervention

on the level of national identity (42). However, I see something else at play with the many critics

who accuse these authors of “style without substance.”28

The “substance” that has ostensibly been lost in the “unsavory” stage of magical realism

is political resistance. Instead, I would propose that enchantment is a different kind of substance,

27
Similarly, Molly Monet-Viera substitutes the term ‘spiritual fiction’ for ‘magical
realism,’ in order to mark the difference in authors (particularly Paulo Coehlo and Laura
Esquivel) whose work overlaps with globalized New Age philosophies and self-help literatures.
28
The phrase “style without substance” derives from William Rowe’s arguments about
Isabel Allende and Angela Carter; Raymond L. Williams has also dismissed Allende’s works as
“facile imitations” (qtd. Hart and Ouyang 12). And again, Helen Price argues (2005) that
Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate employs “the style rather than the substance of magical
realism” (190).
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leading to the formation of attachments and ethical collectives.29 Faris describes the “female

spirit” of magical realism as creating “alternative spaces of the imagination” that are more

relational and communal (181). Some critics are all the more suspicious due to associations

between enchantment and femininity. For instance, Cristina Ruiz Serrano finds that the ‘magic

feminism’ of Isabel Allende and Elena Garro relies on patriarchal stereotypes (865), re-

inscribing the passive and exotic “otherness” of women as naturally attuned with enchantment,

and therefore defined by patriarchy (885). While Ruiz Serrano’s concern certainly has merits,

arguments accusing female authors of naiveté should be more carefully examined, as

enchantment is neither essentially feminine nor essentially naïve.

It is here that a postcritical view intervenes to overcome assumptions that cordon off both

enchantment and naivety as belonging to those who are less ‘knowing.’ Postcritical responses to

magical realism tend to align with notions of literature as constructing an affirmative social

relationship. Wen-chin Ouyang locates the constructive aspects of both magical realism and of

fantasy in the marvelous “workings of desire in structuring the politics of longing for

community” (18).30 Eugene Arva, in studying representations of trauma in magical realism,

further describes how that expanded sense of reality inscribes “an empathy-driven

consciousness” that uses the “traumatic imagination” to construct “a receptive audience willing

to listen” (15). In other words, the constructive aspects of magical realism work to affirm a

nourishing social connection; moreover, in magical realism, that connection often has to struggle

29
As Jane Bennett notes, enchantment is not, in itself, ethical, but it may be a vital
component in the production of an ethical position, encouraging Deleuzian assemblages and
unexpected attachments (32).
30
Kim Sasser Anderson draws much the same conclusion in her description of magical
realism as being not just about subversion, but also about “the construction of representations of
belonging” (220).
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to overcome the global violence of colonialism. In terms of capitalism, these constructed

connections are important in differentiating literature from more violent and solipsistic forms of

consumption. Commodity fetishism replaces the relationships between people with the

relationships between things, working as a form of enchantment that substitutes for social

connection. Through magical realism, literary enchantment can work to restore the connection

between people, as people.

My wager is that popular magical realist authors can be read in other terms besides

making themselves cute for commercial purposes. Rather, a look at the supposed ‘imitations’ of

magical realism by female authors reveals that the situation is often much more complicated than

the questions of naïve faith versus knowing skepticism/irony would seem to imply. Women and

fantasy continue to be associated with the negative aspects of enchantment—particularly the self-

delusions of wish-fulfilment and commodification. In effect, the fact of belief has been gendered,

assigned to the intuitive territory of minds that are not yet improved by (or infected with)

intellectual skepticism. None of this is true in fact, of course; rather, it is a result of assumptions

about the mutual exclusivity of faith and reason. Joanne Harris’s Chocolat series and Aimee

Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake each demonstrate the complexity of the

interplay between faith and skepticism, as well as the difficulty of building a more nourishing

connection through literature.

The Charms and Limits of Enchantment in Joanne Harris’s Chocolat Series

If Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel have been referred to as consumable imitators of magical

realism, then Joanne Harris’s Chocolat appears to be an imitation of an imitation. (Faris 2004:

29; 147). As with Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate (1989), Harris’s novels employ the trope

of cooking as a feminized version of enchantment. The first novel, Chocolat (1999), introduces

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Vianne Rocher and her daughter Anouk, two travelers who arrive in the small provincial French

town of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes. The narration switches between the first-person perspective of

Vianne, who ‘grants wishes’ through chocolates, and the perspective of Father Reynaud, a priest

who is affronted by Vianne’s decision to open a chocolate shop at the beginning of Lent. The

novel thus pits an indulgent, feminine version of enchantment against an ascetic, patriarchal

version. It was followed by a film version (2000) starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp.

Both the novel and the film appear to be imitations of magical realism, drawing on enchantment

in order to bolster consumerism. However, a closer look at the first novel, and the two

subsequent novels in the series, reveals a much less naïve perspective than critics have assumed.

Joanne Harris has attracted very limited attention from literary critics. Apart from a few

minor celebrations of her work, most of the references to Harris occur in passing, marking her

liminal connection with magical realism and the sphere of the literary.31 The most salient issue

raised by critics is the relationship between food, enchantment, and consumerism in the novel.

Miriam López-Rodriguez aligns Harris with a straightforward feminism built on a heterodox-

spiritual indulgence that challenges ascetic, patriarchal authority (79-80). 32 This interpretation,

however, does not engage with the connections that others have drawn between chocolates and

global capitalism. Kyla Wazana Tompkins has briefly referred to critiques of the novel as

participating in a consumer capitalism that “devours” the evidence of historical inequality, in this

case through the exotic medium of chocolate (248; 257). In the film version, especially,

accusations of consumable imitations and de-politicization appear warranted. The film associates

31
Sarah Marshall-Ball, Dawn Tindle, and Ashley Wills each celebrate the magical realist
aspects of Harris’s work. Jeffrey Hull interprets Harris alongside Gloria Anzaldúa.
32
Natalia Andrievskikh offers a very similar perspective on “cooking and eating as
female empowerment” (40).
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the source of magic with cultural others, offering a back-story through which Vianne’s French

father went on a trip searching for pharmaceutical ingredients, where he met a Mexican

‘wanderer.’ The source of enchantment is thus, again, from the Americas, and once it is

transplanted into the small French town as a revitalizing force of desire, the film ends on a

triumphant note.

The role of enchantment in the novel is less straightforward. As with the film, there are

still some attachments to the fantasy of colonialism, in the sense of transporting enchantment

from the New World. Vianne describes the “intoxicating”

scents of chocolate, vanilla, heated copper and cinnamon…powerfully suggestive, the

raw and earthy tang of the Americas, the hot and resinous perfume of the rainforest. This

is how I travel now, as the Aztecs did in their sacred rituals. Mexico, Venezuela,

Colombia. The court of Montezuma. Cortez and Columbus. The food of the gods,

bubbling and frothing in ceremonial goblets. The bitter elixir of life. (64)

Here Vianne imagines entering into the myths of another culture, re-invoking colonial wonder as

a means of traveling between worlds.33 However, whereas the enchantment of the film derives

mostly from this connection to an exotic other, Vianne takes a broad perspective on religions that

recognizes the enchantment of paganism within Europe. She continues,

Perhaps this is what Reynaud senses in my little shop; a throwback to times when the

world was a wider, wilder place. Before Christ – before Adonis was born in Bethlehem or

Osiris sacrificed at Easter – the cocoa bean was revered. Magical properties were

33
The term ‘colonial wonder’ is defined by Jerónimo Arellano. Arellano stresses that not
all wonder, even in magical realism, is necessarily colonial; wonder can also be postcolonial
when it occurs in different historical moments and contexts. Vianne, however, directly re-
inscribes the wonder of colonial encounters into chocolate.
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 attributed to it. Its brew was sipped on the steps of sacrificial temples; its ecstasies were

fierce and terrible. Is this what he fears? Corruption by pleasure, the subtle

transubstantiation of the flesh into a vessel for the debauch? Not for him the orgies of the

Aztec priesthood (64-5).

From this perspective, enchantment is not only a foreign import. As Max Weber notes, the

history of Christianity, and particularly Protestantism, occurred along the lines of

disenchantment. In contrast, Vianne’s heterodox views posit an ongoing connection with the

magical.

It is also important that Vianne’s mother, in the novel, was not a Mexican ‘wanderer,’ but

rather a New Age practitioner of tarot. Vianne recalls, “All stories delighted her – Jesus and

Eotre and Ali Baba working the homespun of folklore into the bright fabric of belief again and

again. Crystal healing and astral travel, abductions by aliens and spontaneous combustions, my

mother believed them all, or pretended to believe” (113-4). The connection between stories and

belief also highlights the ongoing role of enchantment, from paganism to aliens. Vianne

remembers “listening wide-eyed to her charming apocrypha, with tales of Mithras and Baldur the

Beautiful and Osiris and Quetzalcoatl all interwoven with stories of flying chocolates and flying

carpets and the Triple Goddess and Aladdin’s crystal cave of wonders and the cave from which

Jesus rose after three days, amen, abracadabra, amen” (114). The heterodox mixture of stories

emphasizes the overlap between belief and fantasy, blurring the lines between traditions. As an

adult, Vianne’s belief is characterized by a mixture of acceptance and uncertainty. She explains,

“As an antidote I read Jung and Herman Hesse, and learned about the collective unconscious.

Divination is a means of telling ourselves what we already know. What we fear. There are no

demons but a collection of archetypes every civilization has in common” (87). The

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rationalization of enchantment as the multiple embodiments of human fears is an “antidote” for

fears and uncertainties that Vianne cannot fully explain away.

In some ways, the use of the term “magical realism” does not serve this particular novel.

In the literary marketplace, magical realism itself is a form of legitimization. However,

discussions of magical realism, when applied to this novel, might presume that the political value

relies on the inherently subversive force of a feminized enchantment. In practice, Vianne is very

unsure about the ontological status of enchantment. These uncertainties might place the novel

more directly within the tradition of the literary fantastic, as Vianne constantly hesitates over

what is happening. Fantastic events first occur in the novel when Vianne and Anouk meet

another female outsider, the older and idiosyncratic Armande Voizin. Armande recognizes

Vianne as a fellow ‘witch,’ and she confirms the presence of Anouk’s ‘imaginary’ rabbit, asking

“And the little grey friend – my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be – what is it? A cat? A

squirrel?” (41) However, a third-party confirmation does not prevent Vianne from continuing to

hesitate about whether the rabbit is ‘real.’ Vianne notes, “I sometimes tell myself I should

discourage this pretence of hers, but cannot bear to inflict such loneliness upon her” (75). The

hesitation is typical of the fantastic, but, as in many fantasies, beliefs play a pragmatic role in

determining what is real. The novel suggests that Anouk’s experience of ‘felt reality’ is so strong

that it can also be experienced by sympathetic observers.

The uncertainty about enchantment leads to a corresponding uncertainty about the

relationship between the novel and consumerism. Whereas the film version offers an uncritical

celebration of enchantment, the novel embeds skepticism through Vianne’s memories of her

mother. Vianne imagines that her mother would disapprove of her “more homely” use of magic,

for something other than gaining power; she recalls how her mother manipulated others into

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giving her free rides, noting that “the casual intrusion disturbed me. Now making chocolate is a

different matter...It is safe. Harmless. And I do not need to look into their hearts and take what I

need; these are wishes which can be granted simply, for the asking” (63) Vianne attempts to turn

stories, cooking, and enchantment towards creating nourishment, but she often fears that she

causes more harm than good. The opposition that the novel sets up between Reynaud and Vianne

becomes complicated here. Reynaud wants to control people, believing that he knows what is

best for them. He thinks of his parishioners as stupid sheep, complaining, “they fight me at every

turn, like children refusing wholesome fare in order to continue eating what sickens them” (23).

Vianne consistently thinks of Reynaud as ‘the Black Man,’ ruling through the fear of Death.

However, she comes to realize that she cannot control her impact on others solely to their

benefit. The best example is Armande, who has diabetes and enlists Vianne’s help in committing

suicide by chocolate. The film depicts this moment as Armande’s choice, underscoring the

generally favorable position towards pleasure. In the novel, however, Vianne dreams of

Reynaud’s accusation, “‘This is all your fault, you and your chocolate festival, everything was

all right until you came along and now everyone’s dying DYING DYING DYING,’” and Vianne

responds, “It isn’t me…It’s you, it’s supposed to be you, you’re the Black Man” (155). These

fears are not entirely answered in the novel. When asked directly what she believes, Vianne says,

“I believe that being happy is the only important thing.” And she thinks to herself, “Happiness.

Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive” (184). In other

words, happiness is not a simple matter, nor is enchantment. That hesitation remains throughout

the novel, which, unlike the film, ends on a note of uncertainty about whether Vianne will be

able to stay in Lansquenet.

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 The second novel in the series, The Girl with No Shadow (2008) falls more directly

within the realm of fantasy. In this story, Vianne is the one who is hiding behind a mask,

pretending to be ‘normal’ in Paris. She has given up magic, hiding in a regular chocolate shop,

and considering marriage with a man who is steady and unthreatening. The choice to give up

magic leads to a divide between Vianne and her daughter Anouk, who feels stifled and alone.

The drabness of their lives is turned around by the arrival of Zozie d’la Alba, an unscrupulous

identity thief who practices her own brand of magic, a magpie “System” that she has developed

based on what ‘works.’ Zozie is another invention, a glamour created by this person with the aim

of pretending to be the version of Vianne that Anouk remembers. The novel once again

alternates between first-person perspectives (this time including Zozie, Vianne, and Anouk). The

reader is thus aware of Zozie’s unscrupulous desire to steal money as well as secrets, and

eventually to steal Anouk. The end of the novel refers to the fairy tale of the Queen of Hearts,

who is jealous of the love between a mother and daughter and sets out to steal the latter.

Zozie’s ‘System’ is a darker version of New Age practices. Again, there is a reference to

the New World because the System is supposedly derived from an amalgam of American

indigenous beliefs. Zozie appropriates Mayan and Aztec symbols. Her story turns out to have

begun on a trip to Mexico City, where she encountered a piñata shaped like a coffin that stole

something of her substance. She finally reveals that the coffin contained “Nothing…Big fat

zip…No answers, no certainties; no payback; no truth. Just air; a single belch of foul air rushing

out of the black piñata like morning breath from a thousand year sleep… ‘The worst of all things

is nothing, Anouk. No meaning; no message; no demons; no gods. We die—and there’s nothing.

Nothing at all” (434). The twelve-year-old Anouk responds that there is “something,” and she

defeats the Queen of Hearts by taking pity on her. Zozie wonders, “Does the Pied Piper steal

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children for love? Does the Big Bad Wolf seduce Red Riding Hood out of a misguided need for

company? I’m the Eater of Hearts, you stupid child; I’m the Fear of Death; I’m the Wicked

Witch; I’m the grimmest of all fairy tales, and don’t you dare feel sorry for me—” (435); then

realizes her mistake: “I’d somehow slipped; I’d shown my true face, and the sudden intimacy of

it was unsettling, unspeakable, tearing at me like a hungry dog” (435). The novel thus falls

within the fantasy genre, not only for the open representation of magic, but also in the sense of

restored significance. Tolkien’s eucatastrophe occurs here through the moment of intimacy.

From a critical perspective, the recurrence to American indigenous beliefs as violent is as

worrying as the foundation in the previous novel, through which chocolate provided a link to an

authentic desire. However, in terms of consumerism, Zozie represents the negative version, a

violent appropriation, and the moment of eucatastrophe comes through the establishment of a

more intimate connection. Moreover, Zozie’s fear of nothingness relates to the practices of

consumption as a screen for covering the sense of meaninglessness.

So far, the first and second novels in the series both complicate the assumed connections

between feminine enchantment and naïve consumerism. Vianne is much more skeptical than

these assumptions would imply, and the second novel works to rebuild her faith on something

directly contrasted with consumerism. In the third novel, however, these issues become even

more complex, as the enchanted and skeptical positions are applied more directly to the political

situation of the veil in France. In Peaches for Father Francis (2012), Vianne returns to

Lansquenet to find a community of North African Muslims, and the novel focuses on the

misunderstandings related to the banning of the veil. The narration once again shifts between

Father Reynaud and Vianne, who both encounter a façade of progressivism that hides racism and

sexism. Unlike the first two novels, the villains of the third novel are less easy to identify.

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Everyone in Lansquenet appears to agree that the villains are Reynaud, on the one hand, and ‘the

Woman in Black,’ on the other hand, both of whom are maligned for their perceived intolerance.

The novel focuses on the difficulty of moving beyond surface-level tolerance. Vianne offers her

chocolates as a means of negotiating between cultures and trying to learn what is going on, but

this method actually fails, suggesting limits on the affirmative and communicative potential of

both food and stories.

When Vianne offers her chocolates to Inés Bencharki (the ‘Woman in Black’), she finds

herself rebuffed. Inés responds with scorn, “And you thought – what? Poor, downtrodden

Muslim woman in niqab, victimized by the kuffar? Poor, frightened widow, will welcome any

offer, however patronizing, of friendship – or of chocolate?” (3246) Inés refuses to be charmed

by Vianne, contrasting herself with those who “love the chocolate woman, who thinks that

because she once went to Tangier she understands our culture” (3246) Vianne had expected to

find common ground with Inés on several fronts. Inés has been ostracized by Lansquenet, as

Vianne had been previously. However, her claims of understanding meet a reality that is over-

determined with assumptions, including the assumption that Inés must be the one in need of help.

Eventually, Inés does reveal her story to Vianne. The apparent war between East and

West, old and young, men and women, is actually a private war between mother and son. Inés,

who had claimed to be the sister of the charming Karim Bencharki, turns out instead to be his

mother. She recalls having been raped by the son of an employer in Morocco, after which she

was cast out by the police, her family, and society generally. To avoid begging on the streets,

Inés went to stay with her brother, counting on his affection to overcome cultural stigmas.

Instead, several of her male relatives forcefully disfigured her face. As she explains, “They call it

a smiley…They take a knife and they make a cut from here to here, from there to there’ – she

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spanned the distance with index and thumb between her earlobes and the corners of her mouth.

‘So that, for the rest of your life, you always remember to keep your hayaa. So everyone who

looks at you will understand that you are a whore” (5360). The smiley turns out to be the reason

that Inés has refused to remove her veil. Moreover, she began a school teaching young girls to

wear the veil in the hope that it would prevent them from being perceived as sexually available

(particularly by her son, who beneath the charming façade is a sexual predator). The novel ends

with a confrontation between mother and son, in which the latter is attempting to set his own

daughter on fire. Inés tackles Karim, and both are lost in the river. At the end of the novel, the

community gathers for a multicultural celebration of the end of Ramadan, and there are no more

women wearing the veil. This ending is problematic on several levels. The veil becomes

inextricable from sexual violence, and the drowning of mother and son is almost a wishing-away

of that violence.

Interestingly, it is not so much naiveté that becomes problematic in this series; rather,

Harris’s critique of the veil excludes the affirmation of other perspectives. The limits of her

critique might be described as imperialist and orientalist, reproducing stereotypical assumptions

about Muslims in France. As Joan Wallach Scott argues in The Politics of the Veil, the history of

French Islamophobia is inseparable from the history of colonization in French Algeria. The

attempt to control the dressing habits of North African Muslims in France has been justified by a

long history of racism, in which the veil has become the most visible sign of irreducible

difference, as well as the backwardness of a supposedly inferior Islamic culture. According to

Scott, these stereotypes can be traced at least as far back as 1830, the beginning of the forty-year

military campaign to establish French control in Algeria (45). Colonizers saw the veil, not just as

a sign of restricted access, but also as a sign of the decadence of Islam. As such, veiled Muslim

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women “were depicted…as both temptresses and victims” (71), while the men were thought to

be controlling and over-sexed. These colonial stereotypes resurface in French anti-veil rhetorics

and in Harris’s placing of a battered Muslim woman and a male sexual predator as the cause of

both the use of the veil and the spread of cultural discord in her novelistic world.

A critical point of view might focus on Harris’s reproduction of racist and imperialist

stereotypes; however, what is perhaps even sadder is the extent to which she misses the

opportunity to construct a more radical, postcritical connection between Vianne and Muslim

women. According to Bouteldja’s 2011 study of 32 veil-wearing women, “in most cases, the

women interviewed said they adopted the full-face veil as part of a spiritual journey. Many

desired to deepen their relationship with God […] They recalled their feelings of extreme joy and

well-being on the first day of wearing a niqab/seetar” (13). Furthermore, “none of the

respondents were forced into wearing the full-face veil” (14): it was a choice largely

unsupported by the women’s families, and they were unaffiliated with any radical Muslim

groups (16). Instead of connecting the veil with a critique of Muslim anti-feminism, Harris might

have emphasized the social connection between these women’s constructed beliefs and Vianne’s.

As it is, Harris invests in a form of transnational feminist critique that overlooks common

grounds of affirmation.

Nonetheless, Harris’s critique differs sharply from assessments of literary value that

stereotypically associate femininity with naïve, consumable enchantment. Although she points

towards the possibility of enchantment as a form of intimate communication as well as the

building blocks of the social, Harris offers a more skeptical view of the inherent violence in the

formation of communities. This is the reason that Vianne continues to have such trouble settling

down; even after helping to establish a more ‘tolerant’ communal spirit in Lansquenet, the series

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ends, once again, with uncertainty as to whether Vianne will choose to stay. In Harris’s view, the

communion of shared nourishment comes at a price, through the cross-cultural violence of

forming communities.

The best evidence for this cross-cultural violence is the smiley itself, which is revealed

almost as a rebuff towards those Westerners who are put off by the inability to read women’s

facial expressions. Vianne describes the appearance of the smiley as “the face of a rag doll that

has been ripped apart, then clumsily put back together again without quite matching the broken

seams. It’s gruesome and unutterably sad; one side of the face is lifeless, as if the woman has

suffered a stroke; she tells us that this is because of the damage to the nerves” (5368). When an

unruly crowd tears off the veil, revealing Inés’s face to the community as a whole, she tells them,

“This is the face of cruelty, of bigotry and injustice. This is the face of hypocrisy, of guilt and of

intolerance. These things are not a matter of religion, race or colour” (5667). Inés refers to her

disfiguration at the hands of male relatives, but she also implicates the enforced progressive

façade in France. Inés is an uncomfortable spectacle, a reminder that women, in either culture,

are expected to wear a particular mask. The deadened nerves of the smiley suggest a

correspondence with the imperative through which women are expected always to be smiling.

Even while the series re-enacts violence by reproducing the received French skepticism about the

veil, these cross-cultural connections hint at the construction of a broader base for critique.

As a whole, the series offers a mixture of skepticism and acceptance, rather than a naïve

reinforcement of affirmative culture. According to Harris, “Stories are food of another kind, and

I think we need them just as much” (Compulsive Reader podcast). Harris’s novels represent the

difficulty of cooking and writing as nourishment, given the awareness that pleasure, charm, and

words can be deceiving. In other words, nourishment in literature cannot depend on assumptions

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about the ease of transforming otherness into sameness. The confrontations in the Chocolat

series with patriarchal authority in the form of Reynaud, with unscrupulous greed in the form of

Zozie, and with cross-cultural illusions in the form of the smiley each suggest that the building of

intimacy through language (or food) is not a simple matter of affirmation. Happy endings

sometimes do come with a cost, but that does not mean it is impossible to distinguish between

the violence of consumerism and the establishment of an authentic connection.

Aimee Bender: Revitalizing the Literary through Enchantment

Whereas Joanne Harris’s Chocolat series participates in literary value within the genres of

magical realism and fantasy, Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010)

brings elements of the fantastic into a literary novel that resists genres. Bender has attracted

attention for engaging with fairy tales.34 However, as Jack Zipes has noted, her work also

includes “elements of magical realism” (130). The difference between Bender and the literary

fairy tales of the next chapter is that her stories are inventions rather than retellings. The fantastic

elements in Bender’s fiction arise out of the everyday, in the manner of magical realism, which

can also use a fairy-tale voice. Unlike other authors of magical realism, however, Bender does

not appeal directly to existing belief systems. I would thus place Bender within the literary

fantastic, in the now more traditional definition of ‘literary’ as ‘non-generic.’ Bender’s work is

contiguous with fairy tales, fantasy, and magical realism, but not quite of those genres in the

sense of fulfilling generic expectations.

Bender’s novel offers a surprising reversal in relation to the postcritical. As has been

argued, Joanne Harris’s embedded skepticism complicates the supposed naiveté of the feminized

34
See, for example, Carney.
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enchantment. By contrast, Bender represents a form of literary enchantment that is less skeptical,

particularly in regard to the establishment of intimate connections between readers and

characters. According to Jane Bennett, the feeling of enchantment involves both “(1) a

pleasurable feeling of being charmed by the novel and as yet unprocessed encounter and (2) a

more unheimlich (uncanny) feeling of being disrupted or torn out of one’s default sensory-

psychic-intellectual disposition.” Moreover, the combined, “overall effect of enchantment is a

mood of fullness, plenitude, or liveliness, a sense of having one’s nerves or circulation or

concentration powers tuned up or recharged.” (5) In other words, considering the literary

fantastic with more emphasis on the overlap with fantasy restores the uncritical dimensions of

the sense of wonder, which may occur in tandem with its critical dimensions.

Bender has also remarked on social models of literary value. In one speech, she describes

“a peer relationship, this reader-writer thing. This is not about writer-pedestal and reader-

deferential…The whole point is to have this relationship…This invisible, beautiful relationship

between reader and writer that is intimate and moving and life-affecting and happens when…the

reader sits with a book and begins to respond to it.” Thus, the value of literature for Bender is not

so much in resistance, but rather in something like communion. Readers and writers may

experience alienation in daily life, but literature is a means for them to feel less alienated. Not

surprisingly, Bender also refers to the value of empathy underpinning the value of literature. She

concludes, “it bears repeating that no other art form gives us the interiority of a person like a

book…And this access is huge. This is why, when tested, people who read novels actually scored

higher on empathy grades than those who did not, so if you ever pick up Tolstoy or J.K.

Rowling, you are actually making yourself a better person.” (“VVFW”) These statements are

rather different from the terms in which the literary fantastic has previously been valued. The

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intimacy between authors and readers relates to genre fiction insofar as it depends on a ground of

shared expectations. Even though Bender does not directly reproduce generic structures, she is

another literary author drawing on the expectations of genre in order to revitalize the human

value of literature. In reference to fantasy and magical realism, those expectations involve the

construction of belief. Bender’s novel revives a faith in literature, not as autonomous resistance

to the market, but rather as a means of moving towards a more nourishing form of consumption,

one that involves intimate social connections.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake follows in the vein of literature that is about the

enchantments of food. In contrast to Laura Esquivel and Joanne Harris, however, the narrator

begins from the position of consumer rather than producer.35 Rose Edelstein discovers, when she

is nine years old, that she can taste the emotions of others in food, beginning with her mother’s

sadness cooked into her birthday cake. Rather than proving a useful or miraculous point of

connection, this ability more or less ruins the experience of eating, as the emotions of others are

confusing and imposing. Rose seeks to cope with this difficulty by eating processed foods. As

Rose eventually discovers ‘better’ food, the trajectory of the novel proceeds from alienation

towards the establishment of more authentic connections. And yet, the ongoing affection for the

processed creates a nuanced, less directly critical understanding of consumerism.

What Rose tastes in her first culinary encounter with the emotions of others is a kind of

alienation. She describes how “the goodness of the ingredients—the fine chocolate, the freshest

lemons—seemed like a cover over something larger and darker…None of it was a bad taste, so

much, but there was a kind of lack of wholeness to the flavors that made it taste hollow, like the

35
Bender’s novel is not the only example of this trope in contemporary culture. The
graphic novel series Chew (2009-16) by John Layman and Rob Guillory uses a similar conceit,
focusing on a detective who can receive psychic impressions from food.
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lemon and chocolate were just surrounding a hollowness” (9-10). Rose soon learns that her

mother is having an affair, and that unhappiness is generally covered over with a kind of

sweetness in her relation with her family. What makes these emotions so difficult for Rose is that

they are unprocessed. This is not so much a critique of the limits of empathy, then, as it is a

recognition that empathy can be painful and unproductive when it is not matched with an

interpretive framework of understanding. This distinction becomes clear when Rose notes her

preference for food prepared by a particular woman in the cafeteria, one who does recognize her

own emotions: “She was sad, true, but the sadness was so real and so known in it that I found the

tomato sauce and the melted cheese highly edible, even good. I would try to time it just right in

the cafeteria every lunchtime to get her food…so that before lunch was over I could eat a feeling

that was recognized” (74-5). This postcritical perspective recognizes the need for structures.

Alienation is not just a result of the imposing of a false structure, but also the lack of a direct

recognition, of more integrated structures.

Rose’s difficulty with unprocessed emotions leads her to seek refuge in processed foods.

This involves a very different relationship in the text between consumerism and nourishment.

Instead of critiquing commodity fetishism, the novel offers a grounded sense of its appeal. When

Rose is twelve, she gives an in-class presentation about Dorito’s, explaining, “What is good

about a Dorito…is that I’m not supposed to pay attention to it. As soon as I do, it tastes like

every other ordinary chip. But if I stop paying attention, it becomes the most delicious thing in

the world” (127). Whereas the unprocessed emotions of other people require a kind of labor of

understanding, Rose finds that processed foods are an escape from that emotional labor. She goes

on to describe,

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 What I taste…is what I remember from my last Dorito, plus the chemicals that are

kind of like that taste, and then my zoned-out mind that doesn’t really care what it

actually tastes like. Remembering, chemicals, zoning. It is a magical combo. All

these parts form together to make a flavor sensation trick that makes me want to

eat the whole bag and then maybe another bag…[A] Dorito asks nothing of you,

which is a great gift. It only asks that you are not there (128).

Of course, not being there is a form of alienation, but it is also a kind of rest. Clearly, Rose is

aware of the ‘trick’ of commodification, but instead of writing this off as the province of those

who are naïve, the novel suggests that these escapes are understandable.

The link between ‘processed’ forms of eating and storytelling surfaces in a conversation

between Rose and her father. The relationship between them grows over the course of the novel,

built partially on their shared habit of watching TV shows. Rose attempts to build on this

foundation by telling a story that contrasts with the simple, ‘processed’ narratives that they enjoy

together. She thus tells her father the story of a boy who couldn’t read, until one of his teachers

figured out that “he had terrible vision…and suddenly he could read, and not only that, the very

act of reading suddenly seemed to him something possible, not like the rest of the world was way

ahead of him in this impossible way.” Her father declares this “A heartwarming story” (171), but

Rose says that the story isn’t over. When the boy goes home, he sees his mother clearly for the

first time, and “he can see she’s really tired…totally exhausted, there are these dark circles under

her eyes and when she smiles it looks like one of her teeth is a little brown box. They can’t

afford the dentist…And his house? It’s a wreck […] So he steps on his glasses…He doesn’t learn

to read anymore…But he gets by. He registers as half blind and gets disability” (172). Rose’s

father does not like this darker ending, saying it is “awful” (173). It is also, however, an attempt

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at communication that goes beyond alienated forms. It is a story told out of a kind of need for

communication. The boy who sees his mother clearly is a lot like Rose, who can taste her

mother’s hidden emotions. The story expresses the desire for, and the difficulty of, seeing others

clearly. Rose and her father then proceed to watch “our favorite medical program and we

rejoiced in the saving of the woman with the heart problem, whose eyes were so large and

lovely” (174). As with the processed food, the heartwarming story and the ‘medical program’ are

a means of releasing the burden of having to pay attention and to process difficult emotions.

Instead of reproducing assumptions about the harmful effects of this processing, Rose

uses these foods and these stories as a form of nourishment that is better than nothing. The

“heartwarming” stories that Rose and her father share are recognized as distortions, but there is

something about their processing that makes them easier to handle, and even a necessary

resource for confronting the messiness and pain of reality. Even while recognizing these pre-

processed stories are inadequate, the novel makes a claim for them as potentially building a

foundation for more nourishing connections, in this case between Rose and her father, but also

between the author and the reader, as both are involved in consuming and in processing these

stories differently.

The novel thus reacts postcritically, instead of oppositionally, to the ongoing

enchantment in commodification. In the last few pages, Rose describes “a report in a magazine”

on “a small island off the coast of central California where only a handful of people lived,” and

where trees have difficulty surviving due to the balance of elements and animal life. One tree, in

particular, grew by “reaching out sideways with tangled branches,” and the islanders “found it a

symbol of survival, in how it leaned so drastically to the side. They held the summer festival

under its stretching boughs, and many weddings happened beneath its main branch, the tear-

112
filled vows strewn with messages of reaching” (291). Instead of viewing this as a pre-modern or

naïve form of faith, Rose connects it with her preference for processed food. She wonders,

Was it so different, the way I still loved to eat the food from factories and vending

machines? How once, in junior high, I’d been caught actually kneeling in front of a

vending machine, on my actual knees, in prayer position, with bowed head, breathing a

thank you into the little metallic grate that received the baggies after they fell down the

chute?... I did not know how I would get through the day without that machine at school;

I prayed those thank yous to it, and whoever stocked it, and whoever had bought it, every

night (292).

The novel is not quite arguing for commodity fetishism, but there is a recognition here of how

enchantment continues to work as a means of surviving, of making life bearable. Like the

tangled branches of the tree seeking to reach the sunlight, the path of commodity fetishism is not

taken as something to be given up or left behind, but rather something to be worked through, to

be consumed and then reformulated into constructions of better sources of nourishment.

This sympathetic understanding of commodity fetishism occurs within the overall

movement of the novel towards more authentic and nourishing connections with food, with

people, and with literature. Although Rose is able to build on the survival techniques of

processed food in order to find that more nourishing connection, her brother has an ‘ability’

which is even more of a curse. He turns into objects. Rose describes the horror of seeing him in

the process of turning into a chair: “I reached down, and when I lifted up the pant leg, there was

no cut. I don’t even know how to describe it, what I saw. There was no blood at all, and how

good it would’ve been, to see blood—to see it pouring out of his leg, and the surgery he

would’ve needed, the painkillers, the beige rug soaking through” (189). Commodity fetishism is

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not just about the belief in the capacity of consumer products to provide nourishment that isn’t

there; it is also about the replacement of the relations between people with the relations between

objects. Joseph literally becomes an object, and it is the intangibility of the injury that is the most

horrifying for Rose; an open, bleeding wound would have been easier to understand and to heal.

Rose continues, “It looked like a natural assertion of chair over him, like the chair was dispelling

him, or absorbing him, as natural as if that was the way it was with everyone” (190). Joseph

becomes alienated to the point that he can no longer interact with the world. Rose notices her

own propensity towards this emptiness when she tastes her own cooking, surprised to find “an

unknown factory…A machine-tinge I could not identify. Alongside a little-girl voice wanting to

go back, to go back to a time with less information. Go back, said the little girl. Blank, said the

factory… It was like lifting my brother’s pants and seeing the legs of the chair” (242). The

coping through processed foods is understandable, but it also leads to blankness.

Frightened by this blankness within herself, Rose goes in search of a more nourishing

connection to food. Eventually, she finds a good restaurant, a French café, where “the person

making the food was so connected with the food that I could really, for once, enjoy it” (244).

This authentic connection turns out to derive from a couple who approach food with respect and

attention. Rose says of the woman, “Somehow, in her hands, food felt recognized. Spinach

became spinach—with a good farm’s care, salt, the heat and her attention, it seemed to relax into

its leafy, broad self. Garlic seized upon its lively nature. Tomatoes tasted as substantive as beef”

(247). The nourishment of food cooked with attention is analogous to the nourishment of the

literary, as defined by careful attention to words. However, as Rose’s move from alienation to

nourishment suggests, the establishment of this connection is not a simple matter of paying

attention, but rather a more difficult prospect of having the capacity to give that attention. The

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literary requires more than a professional discipline; it also depends on the ability to confront,

and to recognize, difficult emotions.

The trope of the ‘feminine magic’ of cooking is also revised in this text. The phenomenon

of experiencing others’ emotions through food begins with Rose and her mother, bringing up

associations between nourishment and motherhood. Readers thus might assume that the source

of the empathetic connection is feminine, coming from Rose’s mother, whose character is

described as ethereal. Rose notes, “whenever I met old friends of hers, they would describe my

mother as having resembled a mermaid with legs. With a sheerness to her skin that people

wanted to shield” (86). In addition to her perceived vulnerability, Rose’s mother interprets her

world in a somewhat magical way, looking “for signs all the time. A person would be curt to her

at the supermarket and she would view it as a sign that she should be nicer to strangers. Joseph

would give her an unexpected smile and she’d retrace all her actions to see why she deserved it”

(91). These and other examples of Rose’s mother play on the expectations of the feminine as

more trusting, open, vulnerable, and responsive to outside forces. However, for all the hints that

Rose’s ability is linked to her mother, the novel avoids the essential link between femininity and

empathy. It turns out that Rose’s father is the one from whom she inherited her ability. Towards

the end of the novel, she finds out that her grandfather could smell emotions of others,

particularly their pain, and that her father suspects he can do something in hospitals, with those

who are ill (261-4). The permeability to the emotions and pain of others is thus dis-embedded

from its associations with femininity, and it is re-deployed as a framework for constructing the

literary value of empathy. As with Harris, the apparent naivete of ‘feminine’ enchantment

becomes instead a recognition of possible delusion, moving towards a construction of more

nourishing connections.

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Junot Díaz: Magical Realism, Fantasy, and the Recovery of Enchantment

In terms of the literary reception of magical realism, both Joanne Harris and Aimee Bender are

working somewhat in the margins, with relatively little comment from critics. By contrast, Junot

Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) has inspired a fast-growing, very large

body of criticism. Not even the Pulitzer Prize can explain the wealth of criticism that has sprung

up over the last decade. Díaz already had a fairly loyal audience based on the realist stories of

Drown (1996), circulating as Latin American literary fiction. Oscar Wao maintains this audience

and extends its reach by drawing on the literary capital of, first, being a novel, as well as the

popularity of magical realism, science fiction, and fantasy; moreover, the use of these genres

coincides with the trend in postmodern literary fiction of referring to the pleasures of genre-

reading. As with Bender, the novel remains within the literary fantastic, referring to genres

without directly following their conventions. Genres appear in this novel as limited hermeneutic

frameworks.36 At every fantastic turn, Yunior acknowledges the potential disbelief of readers,

and then proceeds to offer several explanations. These explanations are sometimes

marvelous/fantastic, sometimes science fictional, and sometimes uncanny/realistic. Nonetheless,

the embedded choices of what to believe create a strong link with fantasy, recalling

Mendlesohn’s characterization of the genre as defined by the co-construction of belief (xiii).

Because readers have a choice about whether to believe, there are also strong links with the

36
Some critics have coined new terms to describe Díaz’s use of genre. Ramón Saldívar
calls it both “neofantasy” and “historical fantasy” in order to mark a new turn in “the
transnational imaginary” that is “post-magical realism” and “post-postmodern” (2011: 384).
Daniel Bautista coins the term “comic book realism” to describe a new genre that “irreverently
mixes realism and popular culture” (42). However, most critics describe the novel as involved in
multiple genres, without necessarily falling within them (Miller 2011: 92, Graulund 31, Hanna
2010: 498-9; Hoberek 162; Mahler 122; Finn par. 1; Lanzendörfer 127; Sanchez-Taylor 94;
Fuchs 93, Pilar Blanco 53; Christopher González 87; Schulenberg 504-5).
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literary fantastic, defined as hesitation. Oscar Wao thus participates in the revision of literary

value through openness to enchantment as a signifying framework for critique.

The character/narrator Yunior offers a biographical narrative of Oscar and the Cabral

family. The first few pages describe fukú (the curse) and zafa (countercurse) as structuring the

effects of Dominican-American history, and particularly the legacy of the dictator Trujillo, on

the protagonists’ lives. Critics have pointed out that the curse functions similarly to postcolonial

theory, tracing the circular effects of colonialism.37 However, this literary theorization

foregrounds its own reliance on belief. Yunior ends the preface by directly addressing readers:

“It’s perfectly fine if you don’t believe in these ‘superstitions.’ In fact, it’s better than fine—it’s

perfect. Because no matter what you believe, fukú believes in you” (5). Yunior describes his

present novel as zafa, or a countercurse (7), and both Yunior and the reader are thus involved in

the co-creation of belief in the curse and its cure.

Because the curse derives from popular beliefs, there are also strong links with magical

realism as a hermeneutic framework for understanding Oscar’s life and death. The novel has a

particularly ambivalent relationship with magical realism.38 As the narrator notes, fukú, and

especially zafa, “used to be more popular in the old days, bigger, so to speak, in Macondo than in

McOndo” (7). The reference to One Hundred Years of Solitude invokes the faith-based forms of

magical realism within hybrid indigenous-European Latin American communities. However, the

reference to McOndo adds an awareness of the critiques of magical realism as literary tourism

37
This correspondence has been noted many times. For one of the most thorough
interpretations of the role of fukú as a theoretical intervention, see José David Saldívar (2011).
38
Most critics do not argue that the novel belongs in the magical realist genre. One
exception is Ignacio López-Calvo, who interprets Oscar Wao as evidence that magical realism
can “still matter,” claiming that the novel “mocks the tradition of magical realism…while
concomitantly becoming part of it” (2014: xxii).
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that pigeonholes Latin America as naïve. Yunior thus engages with magical realism on the level

of a hermeneutic framework, foregrounding his own and the readers’ hesitation over whether the

curse is ‘real.’ This has the somewhat paradoxical effect of making the curse even more

believable.

In interviews, Díaz has stressed both the importance of belief in the curse and the fact

that its breadth encompasses a trans-American narrative. Bringing readers around towards belief

in the curse is, for Díaz, a central aim of the novel. He notes, “For me…the real issue in the book

is not whether or not one can vanquish the fukú—but whether or not one can even see it.

Acknowledge its existence at a collective level” (“Díaz and Danticat” 101). The overlap between

enchantment and critical theory is thus an important strategy. It is postcritical in the sense of

recognizing the role of belief/affirmation undergirding critique. Moreover, the enchantment of

the curse takes advantage of a shared horizon of expectations about what it means to be

American. In another interview, Díaz explains that curses are “a very old, deep American

obsession. The United States…continues to be obsessed with the two sides of the coin of being

cursed or being blessed…This idea that we may be God’s chosen people, and the fear that we

may be the exact opposite,” and the novel employs the “Dominican version” of this “obsession”

(Díaz, “Blurring”). Readers are thus implicated in the curse on several levels. Through Yunior,

they are invited to construct a belief in the curse as interpretive framework for Oscar’s life, but

they are also placed in the ethical quandary of having to consider how they might already be

serving the curse or the countercurse. At the same time, readers are engaged, along with Yunior,

in the process of consuming Oscar’s life, turning it into a source of particular meaning(s).

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 Critics have remarked on Yunior, both as writer-dictator and as consumer of Oscar.39

Yunior often refers to Oscar’s many writings, as well as to his letters and to passages from his

diary, but there is no way to tell how faithfully these documents are relayed to the reader. There

is a level on which Yunior may feel competitive with Oscar as a rival author, and so the image of

Oscar’s writings being kept in Yunior’s refrigerators towards the end of the novel can be

interpreted as a means of withholding, as much as of preserving. The most often-quoted evidence

of Yunior’s complicity in imposing his own narrative on Oscar is the invocation of the

similarities between authors and dictators: “Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural

antagonists, but I think that’s too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion,

just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like.” (97)

This observation occurs in the context of the story of Jesús de Galíndez, the Columbia University

graduate student who was assassinated for writing about Trujillo. Yunior is confessing an

uncomfortable awareness that he might be engaging in a similar mode of suppression, imposing

his views in order to consume Oscar’s life and to shore up his own power. The novel thus differs

from other postmodern narratives that point out the limits of the author’s point of view. Here, the

narrator is not only recognizing his own limited epistemology; he is also confessing his own

complicity with the violence of colonialism, capitalism, and consumerism. Rather than shoring

up the position of the author as an autonomous producer, this recognition of consumerism gives

Yunior away, acknowledging his own passivity in relation to imposing his understanding, as well

as his attempts to transform that passivity into active production.

39
I am drawing especially on Monica Hanna’s interpretation of the novel as developing
“an aesthetic of artistic and cultural consumption” (2015: 90), using the metaphor of cannibalism
to describe the mixture of violence and renewal (95). Other critics have rather emphasized
Yunior’s violence, in ‘devouring’ Oscar (Gantz 134), and even his potential violence towards the
reader (Machado Sáez 174; Graulund 40).
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 Narrator and reader are thus locked in a mode of violent consumption, to the extent that

each attempts to impose a meaning on Oscar’s life. The curse may be a brilliant theorization of

the horrors of American history, but it is also part and parcel of that violent form of consuming.

The novel hints at this complicity in moments that expose how the curse and the counter-curse

are inextricable from one another. As gangsters drive Oscar to the cane fields to be murdered,

Yunior notes, “They drove past a bus stop and for a second Oscar imagined he saw his whole

family getting on a guagua, even his poor dead abuelo and his poor dead abuela, and who is

driving the bus but the Mongoose, and who is the cobrador but the Man Without a Face” (321).

The embodiment of the curse (the man with no face) and the counter-curse (the mongoose) are

here working together. Imagining the family history as a kind of bus, the hope of the counter-

curse is what drives it forward, while the curse represents the cost. This image recalls

descriptions of enchantment and myth as both inspiring and relying on tragedy (Attebery 2014:

117; Bettelheim 32). It is also a grim reminder that hopefulness can easily become fuel for more

pain.

A similar frustration occurs at the end of the novel. There are multiple chronological

endings suggested by Yunior. In “The Final Letter,” Oscar supposedly40 describes how he

managed to lose his virginity after all, and thus (for some readers) to break his own curse of

isolation. The final words of the letter (and the novel) are somewhat triumphant: “So this is what

everybody’s always talking about! Diablo! If only I’d known. The beauty! The beauty!” (335)

Many critics have pointed out the reference to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. For some,

this is a hopeful ending, for others, it is a paltry attempt to cover over the pain that has come

40
In particular, Elena Machado Sáez offers a very suspicious response to Yunior, to the
extent of suggesting that he fabricates the entire story of Ybón in order to force Oscar into
matching ideals of heterosexual masculinity (172-3).
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before.41 In my view, the shift from ‘the horror’ to ‘the beauty’ is somewhat hopeful, but mostly

disturbing. It begs the question, what is the difference between the ‘horror’ and the ‘beauty’?

Given the structure of the reference, it is impossible to think of one without the other.42 The

closeness between the horror and the beauty returns to the essence of enchantment as described

by Jane Bennett, as both disturbing and ultimately affirming. However, that sense of affirmation

remains haunted by its dependence on remembering ‘the horror’ of colonialism and human

violence.

In contrast to the violent consumption of the curse, the references to science fiction and

fantasy offer an alternative framework, recalling the particular form of consuming that is

reading. The curse is a kind of unconscious fantasy that structures American historicity;

meanwhile, science fiction and fantasy offer alternative structures for understanding colonialism.

These genres emerge as an alternative mode of consuming that is less violent, and it is possible

to imagine their becoming the decolonial narrative that the novel points toward, without being

able to produce directly. In other words, if we did have access to Oscar’s novels, perhaps they

would be decolonial, in the sense of imagining the world from a perspective not determined by

the violent framework of the curse.

41
Ramón Saldívar provides one of the best descriptions of the ending, which is all the
more painful to the degree that it is hopeful: “If it is justice we seek in love, in life, and in the
world, then justice, poetic or otherwise, is precisely what we do not get at the end of The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Given the extent of the violence described, Saldívar concludes,
“none of the novel’s three endings can even hope to account for, let alone blunt, the apocalyptic,
world destroying evil ‘that not even postmodernism can explain away.’” (2016: 384-5) Melissa
Gonzalez provides another good interpretation of the ending, involving how readers “experience
beauty as an intertextual revision of horror; there is no way out, but there is the pleasure of going
in, rereading, and revising” (292).
42
Heather Ostman generates a particularly insightful interpretation of the ending of the
novel, by pointing out that the reference to The Heart of Darkness involves the specific context
of Marlow revising Kurtz’s final words for the benefit of his fiancée. By making this reference,
Yunior may again be giving himself away for revising Oscar’s final words to the reader (124).
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 Díaz’s comments on reading and on genre fiction outline an alternative activity that is

about social connection and a more human rhythm. For instance, in “La rebeldía de leer,” Díaz

refers to “reading as antidote,” explaining, “It is impossible to compete when you’re reading,

when you’re focused on a novel or a poetry book . . . All those vices that capitalism promotes to

keep us ‘full’ in the market, art helps us lessen a bit” (qtd. Dávila 33). Genre fiction continues to

face preconceptions about its supposedly increased complicity with capitalism, in the

stereotypical notion that genre is a source of repetitive, marketable formulas. I would add that

genre places authors and readers in the position of co-consuming, as well as co-producing. As

with other arts, fantastic genres involve the recognition of shared experiences of humanity. In

“Loving Ray Bradbury,” Díaz recounts the experience of reading as a child, crying over the

story, “All Summer in a Day,” which tells of a little girl on Venus locked in a closet for the one

hour the sun comes out every seven years. He says “when I came to those ruthless final lines I

was shattered by them...I had never been moved like that by any piece of art. I had never known

what I’d been experiencing as an immigrant, never had language for it until I read that story. In a

few short pages, Bradbury gave me back to myself” (qtd Christopher González 150). The

imaginative capacity of fantastic genres thus overlaps with the felt experience of being human

and alienated.

Because fantasy works on the level of co-constructing belief, there are links to be drawn

between the mode of enchantment and the value of literature that is based on something other

than the assertion of an author’s autonomy from the market. In another interview, Díaz describes

“books as instruments and mediums of sympathies,” noting that this social connection depends

on realizing that we “share a common destiny with everyone on the planet, which is that we are

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vulnerable, which is that we are fragile, which is that we suffer, and yet, despite this, that life is

this wondrous gift.” Furthermore, Díaz refers to libraries as

a banquet…of the mind…and a banquet for the soul…[O]ne discovers, one comes up fed

by these ideas, that one coheres, that one comes to be having been nurtured by these

meats, by these fruits, by these grains, that’s not a small thing, especially for those of us

who grew up devout in the church of the book…If I have any kind of religiosity, it’s this

utopian faith I have in the book and in reading. (Hodengraber)

Returning to “Loving Ray Bradbury,” it is significant that Díaz’s faith in art begins with the

experience of being moved by genre, and the nourishment of recognizing his own suffering in

the depiction of another. The influence of genre, then, is a recognition that the writer has readers

in mind.43 Because fantasy involves the co-construction of belief, it also involves the shared

participation of authors/readers as both consuming and creating meanings. The genre references

in Oscar Wao thus invoke this shared experience of reading as an alternative mode of

consuming.

Whereas the events of Oscar’s life are directly interpreted as part of the curse or zafa, the

science fiction and fantasy references serve primarily on the level of metaphor or comparison.

Nonetheless, the moments of fantastic events in the novel do lend themselves to the possible

application of sf/f frameworks. These overlapping frameworks appear incomplete in themselves,

43
In another lecture, Díaz explains that he prefers to write for readers instead of for other
writers, as readers are far more generous with books they enjoy. He notes, “It’s profoundly
different than when you’re writing for other writers. Because when you’re writing for other
writers…you’re writing for people who…might feel competitive towards you…and who are not
making any excuses…I think it affects how much space you make for readers in your work”
(Díaz, “Intimacy”). Thus, in direct contrast to preconceived notions about genre as falling within
the less ‘literary’ and more ‘marketable’ spaces in the field of production, Díaz points out that
the space of producing for other producers is the one that actually is, in some ways, more in
thrall to the influence of individualistic competition associated with capitalism.
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and perhaps the effect of this version of the literary fantastic is to begin to compensate for the

blindspots in each framework, as much as possible. In an interview, Díaz considers the divide

between “academics” and “fanboys,” explaining, “[I]t's not as if I have a sense that one side or

the other is superior” because both “have an extremely strong blind spot and…neither proved

entirely satisfactory to me as an author or to me as a human being. I feel like I had to lay down

ten or eleven or twelve different sheets of acetate for the little hole in my eye; the blind spot

became less and less and less” (Zaurino 2007). In many ways, this description returns to the

traditional view of the ‘literary’ as defiantly non-generic, as the clash of multiple genres that

supersedes individual perspectives.

However, a postcritical perspective involves more than meta-discursive description.44 In

other words, there is a point at which each reader chooses an interpretation, in spite of the fact

that this affirmation carries the risk of distortion, highlighting some aspects of the novel and

obscuring others. Thus, I would like to focus on the moment when readers are offered the most

direct choice in the novel. This involves the cause of “the Fall” of the Cabral family, i.e., of the

persecution of Oscar’s grandfather Abelard and his family’s loss of prestige, for which Yunior

offers multiple explanations. There are two ‘uncanny’ or ‘natural’ explanations: that Trujillo

wanted to sleep with Abelard’s beautiful daughter, and Abelard refused; or that Abelard made an

imprudent joke about Trujillo, so he was turned in by his neighbors. Yunior suggests that the

story of “The Girl Trujillo wanted” is both “common” and perhaps too easy in some ways,

44
Several critics employ what I might call a postcritical view of the novel. For example,
Jeffrey González’s dissertation places the novel among “necessary fictions,” i.e., “literature that
appears to be succeeding postmodernism” (iii) and that moves away from the deconstructive
mode in a form similar to Pascal’s wager, “by believing in an end worth struggling toward” (xii).
In other terms, the excellent collection Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination refers to the
concept of “imagination” as a constructive means of “envision[ing] a radically different world, a
world structured not through dominance but through solidarity” (Hanna et. al. 9).
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“because in essence it explains it all” (244). The story neatly vilifies Trujillo while maintaining

the innocence of his subjects, who are simply defending their honor. Furthermore, the story

contains the weight of a historical perspective traceable back to the ‘brave Anacaona’ who stood

up to colonizers by refusing to marry one of them. The divide between good and evil seems a

little too simple here. The impunity of families defending the honor of women against rape

obscures the manner in which rape culture permeates to the level of the everyday.

Thus, I would prefer the third, and perhaps most tenuous, explanation for the Fall: “The

Lost Final Book of Dr. Abelard Luis Cabral” (246). Yunior describes this as a “secret history” in

which Abelard was erased because he was writing

an exposé of the supernatural roots of the Trujillo regime! A book about the Dark Powers

of the President, a book in which Abelard argued that the tales the common people told

about the president—that he was supernatural, that he was not human—may in some

ways have been true. That it was possible that Trujillo was, if not in fact, then in

principle, a creature from another world! (245)

What is fascinating about this book is that it mixes the strategies of fantasy, science fiction, and

the literary fantastic. That is, science fiction and fantasy become valid frameworks insofar as

there might exist a fantastic reality. There is the commitment to the empiricist lens of science

fiction, as well as to the constructive role of belief in fantasy. Yunior offers some evidence for

this possibility by claiming that, in spite of having Abelard tortured, Trujillo never did get his

daughter, and that none of Abelard’s books nor even a sample of his handwriting remains.

Yunior nonetheless concludes that this is “only a story, with no solid evidence, the kind of shit

only a nerd could love” (246). Thus, to choose this possibility is, in a sense, to identify as a nerd,

and it is also a recognition that a fallible “story” is the closest approximation there is to the truth.

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As with any interpretation, this one has the benefit of confirming my own perspective. It is

postcritical in the sense of affirming the role of belief, without losing a commitment to the

critical awareness of the fact that those beliefs are constructions.

More narrowly, an interpretation of the novel as fantasy even further emphasizes the

affirmative aspects of the interpretation, adding layers of significance in a world that has so often

been described as disenchanted. In Reading Junot Díaz, Christopher González refers to Tolkien’s

notion of eucatastrophe as an interpretive framework for the novel, tracing “an inherent good

arising out of what initially appears to be catastrophic outcomes,” based on “the deep structure of

hope embedded within Oscar Wao in spite of the fukú curse that dominates the narrative” (83).

González refers, for instance, to the quotation of the moment of Sauron’s defeat in The Lord of

the Rings, as evidence for Yunior’s investment in the value of hope (86). Interestingly, other

critics have used the same passage as evidence for the difference between the novel and fantasy.

The Lord of the Rings quotation occurs as a footnote to the observation that, while “Sauron’s evil

was taken by ‘a great wind’ and ‘neatly blown away,’ with no lasting consequences to our

heroes…Trujillo was too powerful, too toxic a radiation to be dispelled so easily. Even after his

death his evil lingered” (156). For some critics, this is a claim for the superiority of realism by

contrast with the delusions of fantasy.45 However, there is no reason to conflate Yunior’s

expression of this common literary-critical view with the novel’s overall position on fantasy. As

in Tolkien’s discussion of fairy-stories, this negative view of fantasy depends on the conflation

of ‘happy endings’ with false expectations.

Albert Raboteau provides a more nuanced understanding of the contribution of fantasy in

a brief analysis/letter to Díaz. Raboteau asks, “Why does fantasy literature appeal to us so

45
E.g., Lanzendörfer 139.
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deeply? Because it echoes within us lessons that we lose at peril of losing essential qualities of

our humanity—amazement, wonder, mystery, purpose, significance” (921). The reference to

“significance,” especially, implies a broader point of view regarding whether or not fantasy

should be hopeful. It recalls Kathryn Hume’s description of the literature of illusion as providing

a sense of meaningfulness, but the ‘comfort’ of meaning does not necessarily correspond with a

happy ending, per se. Raboteau further explains, “Oscar's life reflects a classic theme of this

literature, the Quest…And poignantly he succeeds at the cost of his life in an experience of self-

sacrificing love. I am amazed at those reviewers who criticized the book's ending for not quite

working. They need to improve their vision by putting on the spectacles of fantasy.” (921)

Raboteau’s ‘spectacles of fantasy,’ as with descriptions of enchantment more generally, do not

exclude tragedy, but rather include the interpretation of tragedy as a potentially hopeful source of

meaning.

On the other hand, the novel also emphasizes the limits of fantasy. These are not the

typical limits presupposed by critics who do not read fantasy, such as delusion and escape.

Rather, the issue with fantasy (and science fiction) is the unconscious reproduction of

colonialism and racism. In interviews, Díaz has identified the engagement with colonialism as a

major source of potential in fantasy and science fiction. In a lecture given for the Stanford

symposium on his work, Díaz referred to the ongoing enchantment in fantastic genre fiction,

based on Victoria Nelson’s argument in The Secret Life of Puppets that the Enlightenment

marginalized the capacity for wonder. Díaz adds that wonder has begun to express itself in “our

sub-zeitgeist—that is, in all the pop cultural crap that exists in our culture’s comics books, role

playing games, and movies.” Moreover, Díaz combined this insight with Aníbal Quijano’s

theories of coloniality as “the secret, animating force” driving “fantasy life” (qtd Decolonial 15).

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Thus, Díaz views fantasy and science fiction as very important expressions of the myths of

coloniality.46

What results is a very ambivalent relationship with fantastic genre fiction. While the

genres are fertile ground for the possible examination of coloniality, Díaz also laments that such

issues often remain unconscious. Díaz re-contextualizes his experience of finding recognition in

genre literature:

When I was growing up those were the narratives that most resonated with me and not

simply because of the ‘sense of wonder’ or because of the adolescent wish fulfillment

that many genre books truck in. It was because these were narratives that spoke directly

to what I had experienced, both personally and historically…I mean, let’s be real.

Without shit like race and racism, without our lived experience as people of color, the

metaphor that drives, say, the X-Men, would not exist! Mutants are a metaphor (among

other things) for race, and…I have no problem re-looting the metaphor of X-Men because

I know it’s my silenced experience, my erased condition that’s the secret fuel that powers

this particular fucking fantasy. So if I’m powering the ship, at a lower frequency, I’m

going to have a say in how it’s used and in what ports of call it stops” (“Díaz and

Danticat” 102).

Thus, within Oscar Wao, the references to popular culture are a means of restoring an awareness

of a power dynamic that is occluded.

46
Jerónimo Arellano applies a similar perspective to magical realism, recognizing that
views of magical realism as exoticizing tend to overlook “modern occidental culture’s own
impulses toward these forms of feeling” (xviii, emphasis original). This leads Arellano to what I
would call a postcritical perspective on magical realism, describing how the genre “channels the
aesthetic radiance of the marvelous in modern culture while at the same time probing its colonial
history to highly ambivalent, self-contradictory, and even surprising effects: a form of writing
that at times seems to move simultaneously with wonder and against wonder” (xx).
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 The question then becomes whether or not this occlusion is inherent within fantastic

genres, given the tradition of drawing on colonialism without necessarily working to create a

decolonial perspective. Farah Mendlesohn suggests that imperialism may be embedded in

traditional forms of fantasy. In particular, Mendlesohn describes the portal-quest fantasy as

reducing interpretations to “an understanding that validates the quest” (13). Moreover,

Mendlesohn explains that the portal-quest fantasy has its “taproots” in The Pilgrim’s Progress,

authorizing interpretations through the structures of predestination. The structure of

predestination returns, once again, to the framework of the curse, which is linked to an

interpretive violence insofar as it imposes morals on fantasylands, which are themselves often

connected with an ‘orientalized’ past (9). Mendlesohn suggests that, in order to be valuable now,

fantasies that continue to use the quest rhetoric tend to embed reversals and countermeasures

against this tradition.

I am less certain that the moralistic reduction of meaning must necessarily correspond

with the violence of colonialism. Oscar dreams of being “the Dominican Tolkien” (192), but he

is also aware of the racial implications in The Lord of the Rings. Yunior recalls “Oscar, keeping

me up at night…Wondering aloud, if we were orcs, wouldn’t we, at a racial level, imagine

ourselves to look like elves?” (178) There is thus a painful ambivalence in Oscar’s connection to

fantasy and science fiction. Before deciding to return to the Dominican Republic to once again

face the possibility of death, Oscar

read The Lord of the Rings for what I’m estimating the millionth time, one of his greatest

loves and greatest comforts since he’d first discovered it back when he was nine and lost

and lonely and his favorite librarian had said, Here, try this, and with one suggestion

changed his life. Got through almost the whole trilogy, but then the line ‘and out of Far

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 Harad black men like half-trolls’ and he had to stop, his head and heart hurting too much.

(307)

The sense of belonging to the alternative community of genre runs into the wall of racism within

that community. However, the problem may not be so much the reduction of meaning as the fact

that meaning is reduced in a direction that unconsciously privileges whiteness. Readers do not

have access to Oscar’s novels, so it is impossible to say for certain how he responds to this

lineage. One hint could be in the work of Octavia Butler, who deals more explicitly with racism,

imperialism, and capitalism. She does not necessarily reverse the structure of fantasy, however;

rather, her heroines offer a different perspective, constructing antiracist and anti-imperialist

morals. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao also embraces the potential construction of

meaning through genres. Rather than eschewing the naïve, ‘comforting’ meaning of fantasy, the

novel represents the difficulty of constructing a meaning that is both affirmative and resistant.

In spite of this ambivalence, the novel does construct a sense of intimacy between Yunior

and readers, as well as between Yunior and Oscar, and by extension, readers and Oscar. That

intimacy is complicated, and certainly not free of violent impulses. In spite of the ambivalence

surrounding fantastic genres, however, enchantment enables the novel to reach readers on the

level of belief. In another interview, Díaz notes,

The silence around white supremacy is like the silence around Sauron in The Lord of the

Rings, or the Voldemort name which must never be uttered in the Harry Potter novels.

And yet, here’s the rub: If a critique of white supremacy doesn’t first flow through you,

doesn’t first implicate you, then you have missed the mark; you have, in fact, almost

guaranteed its survival and reproduction. There’s this old saying: the devil’s greatest trick

is that he convinced people that he doesn’t exist. Well, white supremacy’s greatest trick is

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 that it has convinced people that if it exists at all it exists always in other people, never in

us (“Search” 394-5).

These words recall the preface from Oscar Wao, where Yunior tells the reader, “It’s perfectly

fine if you don’t believe in these ‘superstitions.’ In fact, it’s better than fine—it’s perfect.

Because no matter what you believe, fukú believes in you” (5). People say the same thing of the

devil, colloquially. Beliefs and myths are not entirely conscious, nor can they simply be argued

away. This includes the beliefs underpinning racism and imperialism. The wager of ideology

critique is that the recognition of systemic violence will lead to its dissolution. The problem with

this perspective is that the critic appears to take on a position of impunity; the one who pulls the

veil off of myths is, by definition, the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. However, Díaz’s

novel highlights the privilege underlying these academic critical positions, which sustain

themselves based on the corresponding assumption of the ignorance of the masses. The blind

among the blind may not sound much better; however, it has the benefit of reducing the assumed

distance between academic ‘knowingness’ and ordinary ‘naiveté.’ The critic/author is no longer

exclusively the active producer imposing a view on the passive reader, and fantasy enables a

working-towards the co-construction of belief.

It might seem, from the primary texts in this chapter, that the more literary texts continue

to avoid falling into genre. Magical realism has become subject to the same criticisms as fantasy,

and both genres become fodder for the more sophisticated, non-generic ‘literary’ fiction. And

yet, even if Bender and Díaz’s novels do not ‘fall into’ magical realism or fantasy, they

nonetheless demonstrate the ongoing vitality of the genres, and of genre itself as a structuring of

the engagement between authors and readers. From a postcritical perspective, genres are a means

of ‘processing’ narratives. As the readings of Harris and Bender demonstrate, moreover, the

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enchantments of fantasy and magical realism do not simply manipulate naïve, feminized readers.

By complicating assumptions about the contemporary status of belief, a postcritical and

postsecular perspective enables the awareness of the suitability of fantasy, and literatures of

enchantment, for co-constructing beliefs. Since literature can no longer be defined as inherently

valuable, this co-construction of belief is particularly important. Each of the authors examined

here demonstrates the value of enchantment for revitalizing the belief in literature.

The contiguous relationships between magical realism, fantasy, and these constructions

of literary value are similar to the divide in the next chapter, between ‘postmodern fairy tales’

and ‘fantasy.’ Bender and Díaz both rely on a definition of the literary as non-generic. Thus, they

do not fully explore the capacity of fantasy for affirming a commitment to narrative structures as

sources of meaning. The next chapter describes the fairy tale as providing a common narrative

structure for multiple forms of fantasy. As with magical realism, fairy-tale criticism includes

both affirmative and skeptical perspectives in differing combinations; however, the chapter

considers how recent fantasies benefit from genre as a mode of communication, useful for both

critiquing and for affirming narrative structures.

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PART TWO: INTEGRATING THE VALUES OF CRITIQUE AND AFFIRMATION

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 CHAPTER THREE – POSTMODERN FAIRY TALES: RECONSTRUCTED
ATTACHMENTS TO NARRATIVE TRADITIONS IN NAOMI NOVIK’S UPROOTED
AND CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE’S SIX-GUN SNOW WHITE

This chapter begins with two quotations from literary retellings of “Sleeping Beauty.” In the first

version, a grandmother (Gemma) tells and retells the story to her female grandchild, Becca.

Once, upon reaching the point when the prince “put his mouth on hers” to kiss the princess

awake, Becca “stood and climbed onto her grandmother’s lap, put her chubby little arms around

her grandmother’s neck, and kissed her right on the mouth, strawberry and peanut-butter

sandwich and all. Gemma kissed her back as if the taste didn’t matter” (177). Here, the

consolation of the happy ending is shared between generations, an exchange of loving, vital

support. The second quotation occurs within the frame of the story itself, which becomes a

nightmare labyrinth caught up in its own repetition. Here, the ‘evil’ fairy keeps the sleeping

princess company, telling her stories. The narrator explains,

The fairy recognizes that many of her stories […] have to do with suffering […],

probably because she truly is a wicked fairy, but also because she is at heart […] a

practical old thing who wants to prepare her moony charge for more than a quick kiss and

a wedding party, which means she is also a good fairy, such distinctions being somewhat

blurred in the world she comes from. (60)

The first scene comes from Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose (1992), which grafts the story of Sleeping

Beauty onto a history of surviving a death camp in World War II. The second version, also called

Briar Rose (1996), is Robert Coover’s skeptical retelling of the story that has become

ideologically dominant. These two versions may appear to be completely at odds. Whereas

“Gemma” tells the fairy tale in order to console her grandchildren and herself, Coover uses the

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form of hypertext (forty-two short ‘lexias’ or units of text that can be read in any order) to

represent the narrative trap of the story, and the outcome is anything but consoling.

“The fairy” in Coover’s story knows that Sleeping Beauty is a naïve, “moony” reader of

her own life, unwilling to break the spell herself. The stories that the fairy tells are thus

consciously frustrating and violent, returning to source materials that describe Sleeping Beauty

as awakening pregnant with twins, having been raped in her sleep. These retellings are consistent

with the seventeenth-century versions of the tale, beginning with Giambattista Basile’s Tale of

Tales (1632) as “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” and later reformulated in Charles Perrault’s “Sleeping

Beauty in the Wood” (1697). It was the Grimm Brothers’ version of “Little Brier-Rose” (1812)

that added the evil fairy and the ending of being kissed awake. Because the Disney version also

follows this less violent take on Sleeping Beauty, Coover depicts the story itself as a briar patch

that swallows men (the hero/prince) and women (the sleepers) alike. From this perspective, the

consolation of the ending is a false promise that perpetuates gender and class violence.

Yolen’s version may appear simply to repeat the false promises of romance that Coover

decries. And yet, although Gemma tells something very close to the Grimm version of the tale,

her story is also marked by shadows of violence—in this case, the irrational violence of

genocide. After Gemma’s death, Becca eventually discovers that Gemma had been put to sleep

in a ‘rose garden,’ the Nazi term for a gas chamber (107). Upon being awakened by a kiss (given

CPR), the only thing that Gemma could remember was the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty. Her

retellings of the story are thus doubly resonant, covering the incongruous, absent memories of

her past. The inclusion of violence here is thus accompanied by a very different position in

relation to enchantment. In Coover’s version, enchantment needs to be countered by the

disenchantment of recognizing violence. Women are passive readers, literally put to sleep by the

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enchantments of the culture industry. For Yolen, enchantment also works as an imperfect

container of violence, a beautiful screen for dark memories. Nonetheless, the consolation of the

story is not false, but rather a necessary strategy for survival.

My point is not to argue for the value of one of these versions over the other, but rather to

point out their different positions in the field of literary value, in relation to fantasy. Each of

these versions constructs a different relationship between the tradition of fairy-tale enchantment

and postmodern literary value. This chapter considers the shifts in postmodern literary value as

exemplified by contemporary fairy tales in three sites of discourse: In fairy-tale criticism, in

contemporary authors and literary texts, and in the reception of literary texts (awards and

reviews, both formal and informal). Each of these discourses contributes to the complex web of

fluid positions between the fairy-tale/fantasy tradition and postmodern literary value. The

skeptical/critical and affirmative/reconstructive aspects of these positions are first examined in

the context of fairy tale criticism as it has developed since the 1970s. The heart of the chapter,

however, will be the discussion of two recent novels that combine fairy tales with fantasy.

Naomi Novik’s Uprooted (2015) and Catherynne M. Valente’s Six-Gun Snow White (2013)

connect with the range of positions available in relation to the postcritical shifts in literary value,

with varying mixtures of the critical and the reconstructive. The interpretation of each author is

followed by a discussion of awards and reviews in order to consider how literary value is

actively being created, affirmed, and contested.

Fairy Tales and Fantasy: Some Brief Definitions

The difference between Coover and Yolen involves two related genres, as well as corresponding

assumptions about literary value. Coover’s version of Briar Rose has been described as a

postmodern fairy tale, whereas Yolen’s work is a fantasy re-telling of a fairy tale. The analysis of

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fairy-tale criticism and texts thus requires at least a tentative sense of the definition of fairy tales

in relation to fantasy. Although they are not inherent, there are several characteristics that make

fairy tales recognizable as a genre. Marina Warner briefly outlines these characteristics in her

Short History of the Fairy Tale. She defines fairy tales as relatively short in length,47 connected

with the past, with oral traditions, and with the ‘folk’ or people of folktales (xv-xviii). Other

features include characters and plots that “are one-dimensional, depthless, abstract, and sparse”;

a “matter-of-fact” attitude towards the supernatural, wondrous, violent, or horrific (xx); the

consolation of happy endings (xxii); and imaginary settings that are often vaguely connected

with medieval history (xxiii). In contemporary fiction, it is enough to refer to these structures and

themes in order to be labelled as ‘fairy tale.’ Although this label may or may not include the

direct reference to fantasy, the lineage of fantasy shares a common history with the fairy tale.

Warner emphasizes the point that early fantasies were thought of as fairy tales, in the vein

of Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien (4), and thus fairyland is “the home territory of

fantasy” (17). In particular, fantasy utilizes the fairy-tale mode of incorporating the wondrous

without question. According to Jessica Tiffin, fantasy differs from fairy tale insofar as the former

asks to be compared with reality (18), while the latter occurs in an isolated ‘once upon a time.’

Fantasy literature incorporates the need for explanations of and for belief in the wondrous, to

varying degrees. To the extent that the wondrous is ‘explained,’ fantasy might be said to cross

over into science fiction.48

47
This has not always been the case. As Elizabeth Harries explains, the term contes de
feés or ‘fairy tale’ was coined to refer to stories circulated primarily by aristocratic women in late
seventeenth-century France, and the tales themselves were often as long as novels (21).
48
Fairy tales and science fiction may seem to be distant cousins, if they are related at all.
As Istvan Csisery-Ronay, Jr., has noted, the apparently “antithetical genres” diverge in
“revolving around intentional-affective ‘magical thought’” and “scientific rationalism” (1).
Csisery-Ronay complicates these assumptions, demonstrating that science fiction both derives
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 The distinctive characteristics in fantasy uses of fairy tales have been historically marked

by contrasts with the values of modernism. According to Brian Attebery (2014), the fantasy

genre began in the nineteenth century with George MacDonald and William Morris (28), and it

developed alongside modernist practices of incorporating myth into literature. Importantly, the

principal difference between modernist and fantasy incorporations of myth, Attebery notes, is

that modernists resorted to myth as a reaction against traditional (nineteenth-century realist)

narrative structures, whereas fantasists incorporated myths “on the same diegetic plane as the

modern” (43). Like modernists, fantasists reacted against realism, but fantasists also sought to

preserve the narrative structures of romance and of myth (95). Thus, the history of fantasy is

wrapped up with the attachment to both myth and to narrative structures. Because fairy tales

were some of the first narratives to incorporate myths into literature,49 it isn’t surprising that the

attachment to narrative structures in fantasy often takes the form of attachment to the structures

of fairy tale, particularly in the transformative potential of happy endings.

The difference between literary postmodernism and fantasy, in relation to fairy tales,

depends partially on the attachments to myth, and partially on constructions of the audience. The

nineteenth-century revisions of fairy tales (such as the Grimm versions) redefined these

audiences as children. Likewise, fantasy developed, as Tolkien notes, as a type of literature

appropriate for both children and adults. By contrast, postmodern fairy tales developed in the

1970s in large part to recast the audience of fairy tales as adults, returning to earlier folk tales

from and returns to fairy-tale structures as a corrective for dogmas, whether religious or
scientific.
49
There are various methods for distinguishing between fairy tales, folk tales, and myths.
In general, fairy tales are the more literary (i.e., influenced by the conventions of literature),
while folk tales are more directly related to the oral storytelling practices of the ‘folk.’ Myth,
meanwhile, is a broader category for stories that, either in the past or the present, have the status
of invoking belief (Somoff 281).
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and fairy tales whose violent, sexual content had not been revised for children. These lineages

continue to influence whether a text will be labelled as ‘postmodern fairy tale’ or as ‘fantasy.’

For example, Coover’s stories delight in obscenity, in resurrecting the ‘adult’ versions of fairy

tales that were suppressed by the culture industry. Yolen’s version was published in the Tor

Fairy Tale series, edited by Terri Windling, and thus more directly connected with fantasy;

moreover, the novel was initially marketed for adults, and then reissued for young adults.50 There

are several assumptions embedded within these choices of audience for fairy tales. One issue is

the exclusion of violence, which both Yolen and Coover work to overcome. Another issue is the

role of consolation, and the attitude towards narratives of enchantment more generally, which

they each solve differently. Whereas Coover associates Sleeping Beauty with the illusions of the

culture industry, Yolen demonstrates how the story can be used to contain those horrors that are

impossible to reduce to singular meanings. By this logic, the simplicity of the story is still an

illusion, but a necessary illusion.

Fairy-Tale Criticism and Skepticism in Postmodern Literary Value

Writers like Coover have become emblematic of a particular strain of literary postmodernism,

marked by deep skepticism of determinant meanings extending to skepticism of narrative itself.

And yet, the avant-garde author wrestling to break free from the weight of tradition is only one

of many forms that literary postmodernism can take, especially when the values of ‘literary

postmodernism’ are extended to include fantasy. The divergences between Coover and Yolen,

50
The marketing for young adults resulted in “at least one book burning” in Missouri
(Baer 148). The supposed ‘obscenity’ may be re-read as a marker of the novel’s maturity. It is
not a naïve retelling of the fairy tale, but rather an artful demonstration of how Sleeping Beauty
might be used to translate the horrors of genocide into a form more easily shared and
remembered, by both children and adults.
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and the underpinning values of skepticism and affirmation, are also partially a consequence of

the literary history of fairy tales since the 1970s. As is evident from the descriptions of fairy-tale

scholars, postmodern fairy tales are often considered separately from genre fiction. In spite of the

common lineage of the two genres, what has defined postmodern fairy tales has often been the

rejection of narrative structures and traditions perceived as repressive.

During the 1970s, the fairy tale became alluring fodder for the postmodern fascination

with popular forms (Benson 2008: 4). In particular, Angela Carter’s retellings of fairy tales grew

to be very influential, to the extent that postmodern fairy tale authors have been labeled “the

Angela Carter generation” (2). As Cristina Bacchilega notes, “Whether they have read Carter or

not, writers (re)turning to the fairy tale in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century have her

fairy-tale phantasmagoria as one of their potential pre-texts” (2002: 181). Stephen Benson (2008)

designates the “fairy-tale generation” of the late twentieth century as including Margaret

Atwood, Robert Coover, A.S. Byatt, Jeanette Winterson, Salman Rushdie, John Barth, and Italo

Calvino (2). These authors utilized fairy tales as a strategy of narrative exploration and

recombination.

As with Coover, the sources for Carter’s work tend to be more ‘adult.’ In The Bloody

Chamber (1979), as well as in other original/edited collections, Carter emphasizes the sexual and

violent content of sources. While some critics have had difficulty in seeing the feminist value of

retelling stories underpinned by repressive sexual binaries (Gamble 25), Carter explains that

“sexual relations between men and women always render explicit the nature of social relations in

the society in which they take place and, if described explicitly, will form a critique of those

relations” (qtd Schanoes 2014: 89). The commitment to critique, alongside her inventive

retellings, has made Carter a leading figure in the broad genre of feminist criticism of fairy tales,

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which emerged alongside postmodern retellings in the 1970s.51 Carter also responded to a major

debate that had been developing, at the same time, in fairy tale criticism.

The terms of this debate involve the degree of skepticism associated with fairy tales, as

well as their proposed uses. In 1976, Bruno Bettelheim inaugurated the affirmative pole of fairy

tale criticism with The Uses of Enchantment (1976). Through psychoanalytic readings,

Bettelheim famously argued that fairy tales provide children with “a moral education” (5) in

which imagined dangers give a shape to unconscious material (10). A few years later, Jack Zipes

countered with a more skeptical approach in a study called Breaking the Magic Spell (1979), a

Marxist reaction against the Disney-fied commodification of fairy tales. While Bettelheim lauded

the fairy tale structure, from once upon a time to happy ending, as a useful tool for dealing with

the pressures of socialization and the transition into adulthood, Zipes pointed out the

compromised circulation of fairy tales as false structures that serve a cultural status quo.

Subsequent critics and authors place themselves somewhere between these two poles.

The apparent binary of affirmation and skepticism, however, is not as simple as it might

appear. Angela Carter’s stance on fairy tales highlights some of the nuances in these

perspectives. Carter did “take issue with the godfather of fairy-tale criticism, Bruno Bettelheim,”

and the notion that fairy tales are consoling (Gamble 22). However, in her return to older

versions of fairy tales and to folk tales, Carter also saw herself as recording “the real lives of the

anonymous poor” (qtd Gamble 22). Thus, her critical stance also involved the return to a

tradition that she felt could serve the goals of democracy. Likewise, even the most

critical/skeptical approaches to fairy tales involve elements of (re)construction.

51
Cf., Haase, for an overview of the overlapping histories of “feminist scholarship and
modern fairy-tale studies…during the early 1970s” (31).
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 A key term for describing the relationship between postmodernism and fairy tales is

ambivalence. In the introduction to Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale (2008), Stephen

Benson provides a very useful summary of the critical consensus about postmodern fairy tales.

He describes the use of metafiction by postmodern fairy-tale authors as “involving the

simultaneous granting and withdrawing of the contract of imaginative writing…[which] serves to

give a critical edge to aesthetic pleasure, and it is on this edge, between seduction and critique,

immersion and resistance, that postmodernist literature has tended to position itself” (12). I

would argue that this postmodern stance applies not only to metafiction, but also to the various

positions of texts towards narrative structures and the possibility of consolation. Because fantasy

stems from a history of embracing rather than debunking myths, these structures do tend to be

more likely to be affirmed in fantasy. Nonetheless, there is no single postmodern stance that

encompasses the multiplicity of these positions.

From a more skeptical point of view, however, the tradition of stories and of fairy tales

must be continually critiqued. Indeed, Zipes describes tradition itself as an act of cannibalism,

and he asks, “How can we know traditions, gain a sense of tradition, when they have become

elusive and are employed in the interests of groups that pretend to speak for us when they are

speaking at us and not enabling us to speak for ourselves? Why are we so intent on baking and

eating our young or beating traditions into them?” (2006: 231-2) By this logic, traditions are

cannibalistic, driven by the impulse to devour, to maintain the power of a given paradigm.

Bacchilega further advances the argument that tradition and consensus go together, claiming that

magic itself is a strategy of concealment, placing herself among critics struggling ‘to break the

spell’ (1997: 8). These accounts make it difficult to distinguish between good and bad spells.

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What is the spell to be broken, and how is that different from the spells cast by postmodern

artists?

The Return to Beauty and Postcritical Fairy-Tale Scholarship

Critique provides one answer to the question of the difference between ‘false’ and ‘good’ literary

spells. Returning to the two Briar Rose texts, Coover’s position in the field of value represents

one of the most extreme versions of the avant-garde. In short, as Benson notes, Coover especially

differs from other fairy-tale writers in his lack of “faith in narrative” (2008: 130). And yet,

critique is only one possible answer, or ingredient, in formulating the distinction between good

and bad spells. During the 1990s, when these versions of “Sleeping Beauty” were written, critics

like Elaine Scarry began to discuss the “return to beauty.” Scarry’s position will be discussed in

more detail below, but for Coover, “Beauty” is a construction, the aesthetic/sexual goal towards

which the prince strives, but whose false promises lead to reproductions of unequal social

positions.52 Coover’s Briar Rose thus reacts against the tradition of ‘beauty,’ which catches both

the prince and the sleeper in a dream-like briar patch of narrative structures.

The relationship between beauty and narrative works very differently in Yolen’s version

of Briar Rose. Both the diction and the book design emphasize beauty, with whimsical fonts and

phrases. As with Coover’s version, this beauty is incongruous with the violence contained by the

narrative. However, rather than positing violence as a consequence of beauty itself, the novel

continues to invest in both beauty and in narrative consolation. As Scarry notes in her lecture

“On Beauty and Being Just” (1998), “beauty, far from contributing to social injustice…or even

52
Elsewhere, I have developed this argument more at length to interpret the prince as a
young writer, describing himself as “he who awakens Beauty” (84). Meanwhile, Beauty or the
sleeper takes on the role of passive readers/viewers who are lulled to sleep by the false stories of
the culture industry (“Robert Coover”).
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remaining neutral to injustice as an innocent bystander, actually assists us in the work of

addressing injustice” (42). Scarry builds her argument on the correspondence between the word

“fair” as it applies to justice, and the word “fair” as it applies to beauty (62). By this logic, since

beauty tends to rely on symmetry, it can inspire the desire to recreate itself in social relations.

Moreover, this impulse towards justice is heightened, rather than diminished, by incongruity

between beautiful objects and fair relations. Because the relationship between beauty and justice

is analogical, “when one term is absent, the other becomes an active conspirator for the exile’s

return” (69). In other words, the presence of incongruity becomes an impetus to recreate the

conditions of beauty in the social world.

Yolen’s narrative highlights an extreme version of this incongruity. For example, as the

‘prince’ (Josef, actually a homosexual nobleman) describes his experience cultivating a green

house in a concentration camp, he notes,

it seemed odd to him that this place—where men were routinely castrated, where corpses

were dissected and the heads shrunk for experimental purposes, where guards made

prisoners roll naked in the snow for hours—that in this place he learned about flowers.

Later he could not smell the powerful spice of carnations or the sweet scent of lilac

without connecting it with the odor of blood (141).

The incongruity between the flowers and the violence does not play out as an argument against

beauty. Rather, it is a painful recognition of the corruption of beauty. In conditions of fairness,

beauty can and should function very differently. To return to the scene of the introduction, the

story of Sleeping Beauty creates a connection between Becca and her grandmother. Stories are

exchanged for the purposes of supporting this enlivening connection, and the fact that the beauty

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of the story does not contain the reality of horror only further emphasizes the necessity of paying

attention to beauty, as an impetus for changing the conditions of violence.

In terms of the literary value of fairy tales, Yolen’s work invokes Bettelheim in more

ways than one. As a survivor of the Holocaust, Bettelheim also had no illusions about the

possibility of ‘happily ever after,’ and yet, he still advocated that stories should be told that end

happily, in order to give children the tools to deal with pain. Both Yolen and Bettelheim,

moreover, are interested in the “uses” of fairy tales. This is a form of instrumental value that is

personal and emotional. By contrast, Coover’s literary stance implies that stories are not used by

readers, but rather the users of readers. Coover thus aligns with Zipes’s perspective on fairy tales

and myths, as stories that too often serve the illusions of power. Once again, the point here is not

to argue that one story is better than another. Both Coover and Yolen’s versions of Briar Rose

have their values. However, insofar as the latter has been associated with childishness and

fantasy, its values have been slower to gain recognition. In the twenty-first century, pragmatic

revisions of the relationship between literature and genre fiction have enabled broader

recognition of these values, which are present in the fantasies of Naomi Novik and Catherynne

Valente.

There have also been some signs of the postcritical in recent fairy-tale scholarship. Some

feminist and postcolonial critics are becoming increasingly interested in reconstructions of

subjectivity through storytelling.53 While the words ‘postcritical’ and ‘post-deconstruction’

53
For instance, Susan Sellers begins her study Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary
Fiction (2001) by distinguishing her perspective from Zipes’s skeptical attitude towards stories,
and she suggests taking on the “reading attitude” of Ricoeur’s ‘postcritical naiveté’ (35). More
recently, Sharon Rose Wilson (2008) interprets intersectional feminist fairy tales as vehicles of
“transformation” towards “wholeness” (1). Moreover, Wilson argues for revising the definition
of literary postmodernism, which has been conflated with the modes of parody and irony (2-3).
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appear in some introductions, there has yet to be a full study of the changing state of the field of

literary value in fairy tales. In Cycles of Influence, Stephen Benson offers a more dynamic

explanation of postmodern fiction, in relation to literary value. Although he doesn’t mention the

term ‘postcritical,’ Benson engages with Ricouer in order to theorize “a pragmatics of narrative

and a metaphysics of narrative” (120). The postcritical resonances of Benson’s perspective are

clear in his placing “pragmatics” alongside “metaphysics,” suggesting that, while narratives are

contingent enactments of meaning-making, the fact of that contingency does not preclude the

possibility of transcendence, albeit imagined. Benson thus allows space in postmodern fiction for

a wider variety of attitudes towards Story, particularly as sincere affirmation. As I will argue,

recent fantasy retellings of fairy tales make this affirmative space even more explicit.

The “revived enthusiasm for story” (116) that Benson discerns has long been a part of

critical accounts of retold fairy tales. While scholars like Zipes insist that the oral tradition of

storytelling has been romanticized, and that there was always a hegemonic and/or instrumental

purpose for the dissemination of fairy tales,54 most critics return to Walter Benjamin’s “The

Storyteller” as a point of reference for romanticizing the voice of the ‘folk.’55 Benjamin’s

interpretation of oral storytelling as connected to more authentic modes of production,

particularly weaving, has been picked up and expanded on by fairy-tale critics. Even with the

caveat that no stories were ever necessarily separate from normative political and social

structures, many scholars suggest that capitalism has resulted in alienation from the authentic

weaving of original stories rising from the needs and concerns of diverse populations.

54
See Zipes (2006): 15.
55
See Harries 12; Bacchilega 2002: 23; Tiffin 133.
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 What is fascinating, in this context, is that genre fiction no longer has quite such a direct

relationship to popular or mass culture. Readers of fantasy and science fiction have formed their

own communities of limited audiences, increasingly strengthening the connections between

genre and literary fiction.56 In other words, genre fiction is increasingly functioning along the

lines of Bourdieu’s descriptions of cultural capital, with smaller audiences and less economic

influence. The examination of contemporary genre fiction demonstrates the extent to which the

values of the popular and the elite have been redistributed. In order to trace this shift at further

length, I will now turn to two more recent uses of the fairy tale. Naomi Novik’s Uprooted (2015)

emphasizes continuity with traditional narratives, as well as with popular literature. Novik is

unabashed in her aims of providing entertainment, with the understanding that entertainment can

be a means of creating and sharing the meanings that are most relevant and useful in a given

subset. By contrast, Catherynne M. Valente’s Six-Gun Snow White (2013; 2015) picks up the

threads of the avant-garde skepticism towards tradition, and Valente is more ‘traditional’ in the

sense of being emblematic of high cultural literary value, informed by the literary ideals of

poetry. The novella has a smaller audience and a looser tie with the genre of fantasy. Taken

together, these two texts exhibit the range of shifting positions in relation to the (post)critical

value of fantasy retellings of fairy tales.

Naomi Novik and Fan Fiction: Revitalizing the Value of the Popular

Before becoming an author, Naomi Novik identified as a fan. She learned her craft by writing fan

fiction during college, beginning with Star Trek and eventually branching out into fifty different

56
As Bacchilega notes, however, “The reach of small-press authors, independent
filmmakers and artists as well as the cultural capital of genre fiction— with which the fairy tale
is increasingly merged— are small compared to those of the multinational corporate media
circuits” (2002: 20).
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fanfic universes (Koenig). After getting a degree in English Literature, Novik received a master’s

in computer sciences, eventually working in computer games. Both fan fiction and computer

games are clear influences on Novik’s writing. From fan fiction, she learned “to write for…my

own joy” (Herring) and “how to gauge when you’re writing something that other people are

really going to enjoy” (Mangiola). From working on computer games, she learned how to

structure longer narratives. As she explains, “It’s not enough to…write decent prose, you

have…to put the events of the narrative together in a way that’s going to be satisfying to the

reader, and that will keep the pacing moving…Working on Shadows of Undrentide, we were

creating a 30 hour game and this plot had to engage the reader for that amount of time” (White

2). One of the primary values for Novik, clearly, is pleasure in narrative.

Beyond that individual and shared entertainment, however, fan fiction also implies

revised notions of authorship and originality. Novik explains, “I don’t believe in the myth of

originality […] There is no piece of art that you make that is so unique that it stands completely

alone […] And, if it does, then I don’t think anybody could understand it or would care about it

because we are […] shaped by the world that we live in and the experiences that we take, and

that’s what […] gives us the context for understanding new things” (Kirtley and Adams). In a

lecture about fan fiction, Novik discusses these revisions to the “top-down model of authorship,”

and how “the relationship between the creator and the audience…has been changing drastically”

as media allow for more creators and more dialogues “between one and many” (Talks). As is

commonly noted in regard to fan fiction, the lines between author- and readership become

blurred, recognizing the passive aspects of creating and the active components of reading. Thus,

entertainment grows away from manipulations of the culture industry, moving closer to the

idealized sources of popular value, in the hands of the people.

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 In 2007, Novik worked with fan writers to establish the Organization for Transformative

Works (OTW), providing a more stable site for the access, community, and preservation of fan

fiction online. The organization also provides legal resources. Because intellectual property laws

do not distinguish between fan fiction and copyright infringement, fanfic authors are treated as if

they were pirating and re-selling complete works. Novik explains, “There’s a lot of confusion, a

lot of misunderstanding about what fan creators typically want. Our organization is very

specifically trying to protect noncommercial fan creators who basically are creating out of love

in a community to share with one another, to share the things that excite them” (Simon). In

addition to authors who feel that their originality or resources are somehow being leeched away,

the OTW insulates fan fiction from commercialism. In fact, the instigation for creating the

organization derived from Novik’s anger about companies “trying to…profit off of the content

being created by fan fiction writers….who just share it freely in a sort of gift economy… [and]

who are almost all women, many of them young women.” Novik channeled her anger into a

manifesto to start a preservation archive and then worked with seven other women to get the

OTW incorporated as a non-profit organization. In 2015, the site received an average of 15 to 16

million hits a day, with over 400,000 registered users. (Fox and Rotella)

In the “gift economy” of fan fiction, entertainment takes on resonances very different

from those associated with the culture industry. According to Novik, “in fan fiction, the desire to

make art is married to the desire to please an audience of whom you consider yourself a member

and to whom you’re intimately connected.” Returning for a moment to Benjamin’s “The

Storyteller,” the online weaving of narratives may appear to have overcome, or at least insulated

itself, from the alienation of capitalist production. This utopian space enables Novik to feel

connected to a tradition that is about giving and receiving sustenance through stories in intimate

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exchange. Fan fiction also creates more space for pleasure, joy, play, and even happy endings.

As Novik explains,

in the fan fiction community you cannot sell works. Your only sort of reward is the

feedback of other readers and the stories that they then write for you…and being a part of

that…particular literary tradition teaches you…to actively want your readers to be

happy…and I don’t mean happy in a…Disney way, where, yes, everything has to have a

happy ending, and everything has to be sunshine and roses, and nobody ever has a

problem, which is boring. That does not actually make a reader happy. I mean like

satisfied, like satisfied by a good meal…and that’s one of my own desires as a writer…to

try to please myself, and to try to please the reader, as opposed to…showing off how

clever I am. I am never thinking when I write, “Is this going to make me look smart? Is

this going to make me look interesting?”...And what I care about is, “Am I having a good

time?” And I want the reader to have a good time, and that’s…my main driving force as a

writer. (Fox and Rotella)

Words like “satisfaction” and “happy” can here be interpreted outside the context of

consumerism. They are no longer about deluding readers into accepting a status quo that is

unsatisfying, but rather about the search for nourishing meanings that can be exchanged freely.

Of course, the utopian space of fan fiction is not completely insulated from the fields of

economic production. Indeed, those works that inspire fan fiction are generally the most

commercially successful; moreover, fan fiction does not have, or even aspire to have, the same

literary value as original works. Novik compares fan fiction to learning guitar by playing Simon

and Garfunkel (qtd Grossman “Boy”). In order to accrue literary status, a writer still has to

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receive the consecrations of publishers and critics. Still, the apprenticeship of fan fiction

generates a notion of gift economy with the potential to revise categories of literary value.

Novik’s connection to fan fiction inspires a stronger recognition of the attachment to the

pleasures of narrative. These pleasures involve well-developed, linear plots, including happy

endings, as well as idealized dreams of what the world could be. Interestingly, in response to the

question of why her work is “resonating with readers,” Novik answered simply that it is a

“hopeful universe. I sort of don’t like the banality of a universe that’s kind of despairing”

(Amazon). “Banality” is a very loaded term in relation to literary value, historically applied to

women’s fictions (especially romances with happy endings). From Novik’s perspective,

however, there is nothing essentially more profound about reproducing a “despairing” version of

reality. I would add that banality lies not in a particular attitude, whether optimistic or

pessimistic, but rather in the lack of attention given to messy details, the organic stuff of life that

does not fit any preconceived paradigm.

Uprooted and the Descendant Fairy Tale

In interviews, Novik explains that Uprooted is primarily based on a story inspired by her

memories of her mother reading Polish fairy tales. Her “favorites” were the ones with female

heroines going out to have their own adventures (Kirtley and Adams). In particular, the novel

developed from Novik’s memory of hearing “Agnieszka Piece of the Sky,” about a girl who

battles a wizard in order to save “the wood near her home” (Herring). Thus, rather than a

feminist revision of a fairy tale, Novik views her story as a “descendant” tale, connected with her

grandmother, her mother, and her daughter. She explains, “I believe in books having roots deeper

than what you see. This book succeeds because it does have roots” (Schwartz). Novik’s parents

are immigrants who came to the U.S. from Eastern Europe before she was born. Her

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grandmother was executed for her role in the Polish resistance during World War II, and her

mother defected from Communist Poland and was separated from her family for many years

(Koenig). The Polish fairy tales that Novik’s mother shared were “her way of staying connected

to her past and to her home” (Fox and Rotella). The novel is thus specifically a “descendant”

tale, rather than a revision or a re-telling, in the sense of emphasizing continuity with the

traditions of the past.

Uprooted is the story of a seventeen-year-old girl living in Polnya, a fairy-tale version of

Poland. In Agnieszka’s village, the “Dragon” takes a new girl every ten years to live in his tower.

None of the villagers know what he does with them. After ten years, each woman is freed, but

rather than go back home, she inevitably chooses to leave. The “Dragon” turns out to be a wizard

who acts like a feudal lord to the nearby villages, and when he learns that Agnieszka has magic,

he is forced to train her. Agnieszka ends up working with Sarkan (Slovak for ‘dragon’) in trying

to protect the villages from “the Wood.” The Wood is ‘corrupted,’ populated by monstrous

creatures and spreading its corruption further by planting ‘heart trees’ that grow with human

beings trapped inside them.

When the Wood takes her best friend Kasia, Agnieszka manages to save her by tapping

into a more organic form of magic associated with Baba Jaga, the Slavic fairy tale crone.

Agnieszka and Sarkan’s success in this endeavor leads them to attempt the saving of the queen of

Polnya, who had been lost to the Wood years before. The queen is only partially saved, however;

the corruption of the Wood remains secretly within her, and she works to engineer a war between

Polnya and neighboring Rosya. In desperation, Sarkan and Agnieszka manage to turn the

queen’s assault of the tower back into an assault on the Wood itself. At the heart of the Wood,

they learn the history of the Wood’s making. When early settlers came to the area, they found

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people who could become trees. The humans betrayed these fairy people, and in sadness, the

latter all decided to become trees forever, except one. The Fairy Queen refused to change into a

tree, instead choosing to animate the forest in an assault against the humans who had killed her

sister. Agnieszka manages to reverse this process, finally clearing the ‘corruption’ and

reclaiming healthy roots.

This is a novel about roots in more ways than one. In the first place, as Novik explains,

roots involve “caring about your community.” What is interesting, however, is that Novik is

departing here from the typical “hero’s journey, where what you do is you sort of slough off your

childhood home, shed skin, and go forth into the larger world…And that feels like it’s become,

to some extent, the only story that gets told. And that’s just not the only story to be told”

(Mangiola). Instead, Agnieszka fights to hold onto her roots, “in a way that doesn’t diminish her

self or give up her power” (Novik, “Interview”). The fight for roots is interesting, particularly in

the context of globalized modernity, which so often requires the dis-embedding of the subject

from close ties. In terms of literary value, of course, “roots” are very much like the narrative

tradition of fairy tales.

In spite of her traditionalism, Novik’s descendant tale nonetheless takes a feminist

perspective. This is most notable in the figure of Baba Jaga (alternative spelling: Baba Yaga),

who is invoked as a precursor (or even previous incarnation) of Agnieszka throughout the novel.

As John Ellis-Etchison notes, Baba Yaga is traditionally understood as a “monstrous witch,” but

there is also evidence that she is “the archetypal crone, a figure that embodies wisdom and

personal fulfillment, as well as the ability to dislocate power away from patriarchal institutions”

(76). Zipes explains the demonizing of Baba Yaga in the context of “misogynist cultural

processes that have transformed goddesses into witches and fairies” (2012: 59). As “an

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amalgamation of various pagan deities that underwent gradual transformation in the Greco-

Roman period and early Middle Ages” (70), Baba Yaga is associated with virginity, fertility,

death, and ‘mother nature.’ More importantly, Zipes describes Baba Yaga as a “parthenogenetic

mother” (62), reproducing without sex, and so her demonization is tied to the suppression of

female creativity. By invoking the positive aspects of Baba Yaga, Novik is reclaiming a version

of feminine creativity that has long been associated with the wanton productions of popular and

mass culture. The term “tradition” is thus deceptive here. Novik’s fidelity is to an oral tradition

that was previously suppressed.57

Interpretation of Uprooted: Healing the Corruption in the Roots of Narrative Tradition

In Uprooted, roots are both menacing and nourishing. If, so far, magic has been taken as a stand-

in for literary value and/or the process of writing, then the purpose of magic here is about finding

and supporting a nourishing connection to narrative roots. Novik mingles the Slavic fairy tales of

Baba Yaga and Agnieszka with the German tales of Rapunzel, Beauty and the Beast, and

Sleeping Beauty. Rather than following these plots directly, however, or even reversing them,

this novel makes a claim towards reaching a deeper version of the stories, particularly drawing

on the elements that are both inspiring and nourishing. These techniques are not entirely new. As

noted above, Angela Carter also sought to revive more ameliorative tales, in the sense of being

democratic, and many fairy-tale critics refer to the popular in a democratic sense, as a source

more in touch with the needs of the people. However, as a fantasist, Novik heightens the

57
Zipes notes throughout his work that the fairy tale “tradition” is patriarchal as a result
of male-dominated practices of literary dissemination. For example, he explains, “our notion of
female protagonists in fairy tales has been greatly informed by male collectors and writers who
often domesticated the heroines and made them more passive than they actually were” (2012:
95).
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connections between these more democratic roots and the emotional benefits of consolation, as

emphasized by Bettelheim, for fairy tales, and by Tolkien, for fantasy. Novik brings the fairy

tales to life by combining mimetic details with the fantasy and romance genres. The arc of the

narrative involves the healing of the corruption in the roots that tie the villagers to their home.

Instead of focusing on counteracting the violence of tradition, Uprooted simply connects with a

version of tradition that is driven by nourishment rather than corruption.

The metafictional strategies are much more understated, as is typical of fantasy. In fact,

the narrative does not spend much time being aware of itself as ‘story.’ Instead, the narrator often

contrasts her experiences with the more fabulous versions told by traveling singers. The novel

begins, “Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our

valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through” (3). The first sentence does a

lot in terms of placing the narrative in relation to fantasy and myth. There is a truth-claim for this

narrative over the other ‘stories’ being told, and this truth-claim later extends to Baba Jaga, the

closest fairy-tale referent for the narrator. Agnieszka is the spiritual descendant of Baba Jaga, the

first witch in generations with the capacity to work her spells. And like Baba Jaga, Agnieszka is

also immediately misrepresented in the oral circulation of stories. The narrator explains, “All the

songs streaming out of Polnya were wrong about me in different and alarming ways, and I

suspected that the bards weren’t bringing the most outrageous ones to our side of the valley at

all. A man had been booed out of Olshanka tavern…for trying to sing one where I’d turned into a

wolf-beast and eaten up the king” (428). Here Agnieszka’s story is conflated with the myth of

King Lycan, and more general myths of werewolves. This is another form of the demonization

attached to witches. The narrator here recognizes that stories are ‘fabulous’; aware that even oral

traditions were never ‘true.’ However, instead of lingering on the consciousness of untruth, the

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novel moves forward to tell the story that feels the truest. Although it is not postmodern in the

typical sense of being hyper-aware of its fictionality, then, Uprooted makes a move coincident

with reconstructive shifts in postmodernism, moving from the logic of and/and (all stories are

equally true/false) to the logic of yes, but (all stories are questionable, but this story…)

The approach to story here might also be described as postcritical. Rather than reacting

against these ‘false’ stories about herself, Agnieszka embraces them as a source of authority,

allowing herself to be feared. As she travels with a basket of fruit used to cleanse the remaining

corruption, sometimes freeing villagers from heart-trees, Agnieszka notes, “I don’t think they

would have listened to me if it hadn’t been for my ragged flapping clothes, my hair in snarls and

blackened with soot, and my feet bare in the road: I couldn’t easily have been anything but a

witch” (431). Recalling the demonized descriptions of Baba Jaga, Zipes notes that “the witch

was likened to an ugly hag. Baba Yaga…has ghastly features—drooping breasts, a hideous long

nose, and sharp iron teeth. In particular, she thrives on Russian blood and is cannibalistic” (2012:

62). For Zipes, this demonization results from misogynistic revisions to pagan goddesses. The

deconstructionist response is to call attention to the limiting binaries of patriarchal violence, the

misrepresentations of the magic mirror.58 Rather than lingering on these distortions, however,

Novik develops her own mirror.

In this mirror, Agnieszka inherits the unkempt aspects of Baba Jaga. The emphasis on

Agnieszka’s clumsiness is a common trope in fantasy literature. In most cases, however, the

heroine overcomes her awkwardness to become a graceful princess, queen, warrior, etc. It is thus

interesting that Agnieszka becomes a witch, and that she embraces that image, or at least parts of

58
Gilbert and Gubar employ this metaphor for patriarchy in The Madwoman in the Attic,
and Bacchilega makes the most of it in her reading of postmodern feminist fairy tales (1997).
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it. Instead, clumsiness and untidiness become markers of Agnieszka’s imbrication with the wild

parts of nature. As Kasia explains, this is a sign of what makes her friend powerful: “Even the

way your clothes were always such a mess—you couldn’t get so dirty if you tried, and I knew

you weren’t trying, you were never trying. I saw a branch reach out and snag your skirt once,

really just reach out” (65). These affirmations of a more natural or simpler awkwardness are not

always unchallenged, however; in fact, they are, at first, the main source of conflict between

Sarkan and Agnieszka. The Dragon is a man with aristocratic, feline grace. In taking a new girl

every ten years in order to loosen the hold of the Wood, Sarkan also re-educates them with fine

clothes and manners. Early on, the Dragon forces Agnieszka to perform a spell that will put her

in a fancy, elaborate dress, leaving her “looking like a doll for some princess to play with” (36).

Thus, the version of the witch that Novik affirms privileges other qualities besides physical

appearance. Eventually, Agnieszka creates a simpler ‘degraded’ version of the spell for the fancy

dress, making clothes in which she feels comfortable. She refuses to change herself, even to

become more ‘beautiful’ and ‘high class,’ preferring the simple and, ultimately, the close-to-

home.

This bid for simplicity also characterizes Agnieszka’s practice of magic, which is

contrasted with the more ‘scholarly’ version practiced by Sarkan. In another typical move within

fantasy, the practice of magic is tied to a scholarly elite. Whereas Sarkan memorizes the

language of the spells and tries to repeat them perfectly, Agnieszka makes them up as she goes,

depending on what is appropriate or needed. This organic approach enables Agnieszka to follow

in Baba Jaga’s footsteps, with “a few words, a few gestures, a few bits of herbs and things. No

particular piece mattered; there was no strict order to the incantations. I did see why her spells

were unteachable, because I couldn’t even remember what I did when I cast them…but for me

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they were an inexpressible relief after all the stiff, overcomplicated spells he’d set me” (92).

Agnieszka practices a more enlivening form of magic, at least for her, a simpler form that does

not require static knowledge so much as responsiveness. She also ends up adding an element of

co-creation, as the spell to cast out the corruption, “the Summoning,” requires a collaborative

effort. Sarkan speaks the words of the spell, and Agnieszka embellishes by singing rhythmic

phrases that occur to her in the moment (139). The Summoning brings truth to the surface, and it

is interesting that this is a shared endeavor, rather than something accomplished alone.

Agnieszka muses, “truth didn’t mean anything without someone to share it with; you could shout

truth into the air forever, and spend your life doing it, if someone didn’t come and listen” (316).

Returning to discourses of literary value, the spell to invoke truth includes both analysis and

synthesis, awareness of precedent and responsiveness to the moment. Moreover, in the process of

reading, truth is not something imposed on readers, nor imposed by readers. It is co-created in

the event of reading.

Following the metaphor of roots as narrative tradition, attachments to story can be both

healthy and unhealthy, nourishing and harmful. The source of the corruption turns out to be a

betrayal of the wood-people. The Wood Queen first became enraged when humans seeking

power decided to imprison her and to destroy the forest, cutting down her fellow people. The

Wood Queen’s sister explains this to Agnieszka in terms of the humans having “learned the

wrong things,” and rather than become like them, the wood-people choose to become trees, more

rooted (414). The Wood Queen, upon seeing her people attacked, chooses to fight, repairing the

damaged trees by imprisoning humans within them. The “wrong things” are greed and hatred,

and the misery of the trapped humans adds to the corruption of the Wood. As the image of

Agnieszka travelling the woods to heal the corruption demonstrates, it requires active work not

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to remember the wrong things. In terms of literary tradition, Uprooted does not advocate the

forgetting of violence, but it does attempt to shift the use of tradition into a nourishing version of

rootedness, asking readers to co-create a version of truth that understands and does not reinforce

the corruptions of power. The above interpretation suggests that Uprooted might be a major

source of revision in the field of literary value; however, that contribution cannot be proven on

the basis of interpretative analysis of the primary text alone. I will thus turn to the critical

reception of the novel in order to begin to understand to what extent these revisions might be

taking hold or likely to take hold in the future.

The Reception of Uprooted and the Limits of Praising the Popular

Novik’s Uprooted straddles the line between literary and commercial success. The novel won the

Nebula, Locus, and British Fantasy Society Awards for Best Novel, and it was shortlisted for the

World Fantasy and Hugo Awards. At the same time, the novel has earned commercial value of a

potential film adaptation by a major studio.59 Moreover, descriptions by publishers and critics

tend to align Uprooted with mainstream versions of fairy tales. For instance, Random House’s

2014 sampler describes the novel as “Beauty and the Beast meets Frozen” (Herring), and other

publishers have compared the success of Uprooted to the television series, Once upon a Time

(Norton). In general, the reception of the novel demonstrates the potentials and limits of

changing assumptions about the relationship between the popular and the commercial.

Uprooted received overwhelmingly positive reviews, recognizing the main sources of

value in the series.60 In particular, Genevieve Valentine of the New York Times connects the

59
According to the author biography, “Uprooted earned near universal praise from critics
and was quickly optioned for a feature film by Warner Bros” (“Naomi Novik”).
60
Novik has not yet drawn much attention from literary critics. Her work has so far been
interpreted within the context of her value as a writer of ‘popular fiction.’ For example, Timothy
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novel with the “messier story” with “no easy map” in contrast to “bright, forthright tales.” The

appeal to messiness/difficulty is interesting, considering that Novik’s story is still very bright.

The point is that it is not too bright, i.e., not a false promise of happiness. Valentine also

mentions both Angela Carter and Tanith Lee, placing Novik in the context of writers both within

and without fantastic genre literature. Likewise, Emily May, a user on Goodreads, explains that

this novel is “a rare beast” combining elements of “those well-drawn, vivid books that have great

world-building” with elements of “those books that are delicious chocolate-ice-cream-with-

sprinkles pieces of entertainment that drag you in and just provide so much enjoyment.” In other

words, Uprooted is valuable in both ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ terms. Other periodicals tend to

emphasize the ‘enchanting’ and ‘absorbing’ aspects of Uprooted, utilizing various puns to

describe how the novel ‘casts a spell’ on readers (Levin, Zipp, El-Mohtar, Higgins). In these

positive reviews, enchantment is a result of both literary craft and the techniques of popular

writing.

Although most of the reviews are appreciative, there are several negative reviews that

stand out all the more, as ‘honest’ assessments. Two reviews, in particular, occupy very

conspicuous positions in the online reception of the novel. Anna Faktorovich is the editor-in-

chief of the Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and her acerbic review is typical of the perspective

that she solicits from other reviewers about popular fiction. As a college professor and literary

critic, Faktorovich intervenes as an arbiter of literary value. In a different arena, on the

GoodReads website connected to Amazon.com, the first review that appears about Uprooted is

and Pam Scheurer employ the common strategy of ‘explaining the popularity’ of Novik’s long-
running Temeraire series (2006-2016). The article locates the source of popular resonance in the
absorption of postmodern techniques of irony, particularly in self-recognition through “the alien
Other” who is, in this case, a dragon (583).
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also overwhelmingly negative, posted by a user named “Khanh the Grinch.”61 In the discussion

below, these reviews work to represent the common criticisms of Uprooted, which tend to focus

on the novel’s use or abuse of popular formulas. In particular, reviewers utilized knowledge of

young adult, romance, and other popular formulas in order to give negative assessments.

Critics labelling the novel as young adult presume that it is ‘juvenile,’ appropriate for

“teen readers” (Higgins) who have not yet cultivated better tastes. According to Faktorovich,

“the blurbs…mention the words fairytale, stressing that it is intended for young adult readers”

(75-6), and the novel is entertaining enough “to surprise and engage the intellect of these

younger readers, so it’s better that they read it versus nothing at all” (76). Faktorovich here

repeats a common assumption in outsider descriptions of fantasy. According to this view, the

genre, like the fairy tale, is necessarily geared towards a less mature audience, and perhaps useful

as a sort of gateway drug to inspire younger people to read. Once they have refined their habits,

however, these younger readers will naturally prefer more ‘mature’ texts.

While Faktorovich proves that assumptions about the relatively low value of fantasy

remain operative, the more interesting critiques of the novel involve the use of popular formulas

and modes, such as identification. Identification is a reading technique that tends to be associated

with ‘ordinary’ forms of reading, as opposed to academic readings. The problem of identification

arises, generally, in relation to Agnieszka as a stereotypical heroine. ‘Khanh the Grinch’ notes

that she is “every bit of a Speshul Snowflake Mary Sue.” ‘Mary Sue’ is a common term for

heroines who invite identification from readers, coming from fan fiction. ‘Speshul Snowflake’ is

the Grinch’s version of a term described on TVTropes.org, to refer to any protagonist who also

61
This review is clearly not typical, as the novel received an average of 4.11 stars out of
5 with over 95,000 total ratings (as of March 2018). The choice to put ‘the Grinch’ first on the
default setting of the GoodReads website is clearly an effort to spark further responses.
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invites identification with seeming ordinariness, only to turn out to be extraordinary. Khanh the

Grinch interprets Agnieszka as a “flat” character, one who is not developed enough to be

original. These formulas serve multiple purposes. Reviewers demonstrate their knowledge of

popular culture while nonetheless critiquing specific examples for lack of originality. The

language of ‘flat’ characters also establishes knowledge of formalist literary standards. In my

view, these assessments are based on another assumption about literary value that is undergoing

revision. In Uses of Literature, Rita Felski highlights identification as a mode of reading with the

potential to break down divides between ‘ordinary’ and ‘scholarly’ reading practices.

On the other hand, the mode of identification leads to other, less easily dismissed, issues

with Uprooted. Several reviewers have interpreted the novel as “a pornographic masochistic

fantasy” (Faktorovich 76). Or, in the more colloquial terms supplied by ‘Khanh the Grinch,’ the

Dragon “is an asshole of the Fever sort, the kind I deem Jericho-Fucking-Barrons, a term used

to describe an asshole who is an asshole only for the sake of being an asshole.” The references to

‘Fever’ and ‘Jericho’ invoke romance-novel heroes who share some of these characteristics

(particularly the hero from Shadowfever, a paranormal erotic romance). Many other readers share

this sense of a potentially abusive relationship between Agnieszka and Sarkan, as the latter’s

typical mode of interaction is aristocratic irritation, communicating in insults.

Part of the difficulty here may stem from the fact that the setting is semi-historical. Novik

explains that the attitudes toward rape in the novel were meant to be typical of feudal lords. She

wanted to acknowledge the cultural beliefs that made it “a matter of course” that lords should be

able to use “property” however they want, while still demonstrating that consent matters (Fox

and Rotella). In this context, Agnieszka and Sarkan might be interpreted as overcoming negative

cultural attitudes; however, the responses of readers are understandable, given the vague

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historicism of the fairy-tale narrative mode, alongside the reading mode of identification. My

interpretation of the novel takes a consciously affirmative stance, highlighting the nourishing

aspects of the revisions to Baba Yaga; however, a deconstructive approach might also be applied,

pointing out the continued reliance on gendered binaries between Agnieszka and Sarkan.

Although I prefer an ameliorative approach, these skeptical views also seem valid; moreover,

they are a potentially encouraging development, occurring both in scholarly and ordinary circles

and thus marking the dissemination of critique as a reading strategy.

A lot of interesting conversations might arise from examining the shifting relationships

between readers and ‘popular’ texts. I would only stress that assumptions about commercialism

and readerly passivity or immaturity also need to be more carefully examined. And this is a

difficult issue. Even in the positive reviews, there is an element of commercialism. Beyond the

potentially self-serving review processes of the publishing world, the online community of

reviewers relies on a marketable popularity. For instance, following her glowing review on

Goodreads, Emily May explains that she first reviewed this novel on netgalley.com, a website

that distributes free copies of novels to “readers of influence.” To become a ‘reader of influence,’

an individual needs to demonstrate a following on review websites. Far from the ‘gift economy’

of fan fiction, the world of reviews involves the investment of free labor on the part of readers

whose reactions can be used as marketing material. Like Novik, Emily May is writing primarily

for her own sense of what is valuable, pleasurable, and nourishing as a reader, but these personal

values may be harnessed by others as commercial value.

Even though none of the reviews point directly towards commercialism as an issue with

the novel, the language of commercialism runs throughout these discourses of value. The

comparisons with ‘popular’ narratives imply that the novel is reproducing marketable formulas

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that some readers find beneficial, and that others find harmful/repressive. In any case, I would

add that the potential, or even the realization, of commercial value does not negate the reality of

the aesthetic gift economy into which writers and readers imagine themselves. In general, these

reviews imply that there is still work to be done in terms of disentangling fantasy literature from

assumptions about the popular/commercial.

Catherynne M. Valente and Mythpunk: Resisting Tradition

Catherynne M. Valente has a very different relationship to the fantasy genre from Naomi Novik.

In terms of training, Valente comes from the other end of the field of literary value: poetry.

Valente explains that she thought of herself solely as a poet in the beginning of her writing career

(Alexander). Whereas fan fiction is not even given the status of general fiction, poetry has long

set the standards for high art in literature. Even in fiction, Valente’s use of language is very

poetic, blurring the lines between poetry and prose; in interviews, she has expressed her desire

that “fiction and poetry should mate and have wild-eyed babies” (Goodwin). The association

with poetry places Valente in the more-valued margins of genre fiction, closer to the ‘literary.’

In addition to prose/poetry, Valente is interested in blending other forms of art. Her first

prose-entry into fairy tales, In the Night Garden (2006), was later set to music by S.J. Tucker,

and Valente has performed by alternating readings from her stories with songs. Tucker also

released an album, Solace & Sorrow (2007), with songs using some original lyrics and some

passages from Valente. The blending of media and genres is a result of Valente’s association

with the Interstitial Arts movement, blurring the lines between genres in order to increase their

circulation as ‘literary.’ Valente describes herself as among these authors on “the frontier” of

fantasy that is becoming increasingly ‘complicated’ (Goodwin).

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 Whereas the reception of Novik’s work has been firmly positioned within genre

(understood as repetitive forms), Valente’s work is thus defined as crossing genres. Also, in

strong contrast to Novik’s defense of repetition as a common strategy in storytelling, Valente

follows the more typically-valued approach of pursuing originality. She explains that, “if one

isn't doing something different than the other volumes on the shelf, then there isn't much point in

doing anything. That’s what the whole ‘find your voice’ adage is all about” (Goodwin). In this

sense, then, Valente is somewhat more traditional, at least insofar as the literary has been

historically constructed as ‘original’ or ‘new,’ in contrast to the repetitions of genre fiction. Even

on the margins of genre, however, Valente nonetheless continues to define herself as a fantasy

writer. She explains, “Fantasy is my heart and my love. It's a huge playground, the biggest genre

there is, and it contains possibly all of the genres. And I just want to play in that garden for the

rest of my life” (“Catherynne” 2008). Within this broader definition, Valente remains connected

to the avant-garde strain of literary value. She emphasizes that her “work is deeply feminist and

in conversation with both the bad and the good in the genre” (Fergus), suggesting that she has an

ambivalent relationship with some of the forms of fantasy.

In general, Valente describes her approach to stories as “mythpunk.” This term began as

an entry in Valente’s livejournal. It has since grown to describe literature approaching

“mythology and folklore with…anxiety. Not necessarily trusting the original sources; making it

our own... [with] some level of anger. If you were satisfied with the way these stories were being

told; if they spoke to you in any kind of meaningful way, then there would be no reason to retell

them” (Kirtley and Adams). Here again is the skeptical vein of approaching myth, in the manner

of Zipes and Coover. Like Angela Carter, Valente is drawn to “feminine archetypes that previous

generations have found threatening or dangerous: crones, oracles, madwomen, Amazons, virgins

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who aren't helpless, bad mothers. I love to give the vagina dentata voice. It so rarely gets to

speak for itself” (“FAQ”). As with many feminist writers of fairy tales, Valente revitalizes the

voices of myth in order to draw out their internal inconsistencies. Her fairy tales have been

described as pastiche rather than retellings (Vanderhooft), and she further places herself “as a

postmodern fabulist” (Buckell), invoking the lineage of Robert Scholes’s first generation of

postmodern authors. Because of the attention given to genre-blending and to critique, Valente’s

work is more typical of the sort of writing usually associated with deconstructive

postmodernism.

Valente, however, is not completely critical of myth, nor of stories, per se. For Valente,

fairy tales have been, and continue to be, tools that can “[e]xplain the awful to the young.

Explain the awful to the old. Explain the awful to myself. After all, once you know you’re in a

fairy tale, you know how to get out, how to survive, how to stand tall and even dance at the end

of it all” (Valente, “Go”). This is something more akin to Bettelheim than Zipes, viewing fairy

tales as instruments for understanding oneself and the world, and even for making life bearable.62

Although she strives for “[e]motional honesty” in her characters (Valente, “Writing”), Valente

also writes from a space of identification with female characters and issues. In an interview with

Terri Windling, Valente identifies Snow White as her favorite fairy tale: “Being a black-haired

girl who had a wicked stepmother in her youth, it always seemed to speak to me specifically.

And it seemed to say that black-haired girls could survive, even huntsmen, even dwarfs, even

62
There is an interesting story about Valente’s first poetry collection, Music of a Proto-
Suicide. A woman working for a suicide hotline approached Valente at a book signing, telling
her about a caller who started reading from this collection, and how that reading “got her
through.” Valente comments, “I have never been so proud...as I was in that moment, that the
poetry written in the dark of night could evolve into something that guided another woman
through her own black hours. That is the best possible destiny of literature” (Goodwin).
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death…That sad little idea of how a woman falls into temptation has been at the core of a lot of

my understandings of fairy tales, which are so often about children seeking love.” Because

Valente is writing with fairy tales and fantasy, identification remains an important factor.

Whereas an author like Coover recasts Sleeping Beauty as hopelessly stuck in her passivity,

Valente adds a layer of understanding for this position.

Valente is also similar to Novik in her invocation of a more intimate relationship between

authors and audiences. Her writing was enabled by online communities through blogging.

Valente also turned to her readers for support by promising to extend one of the stories from The

Orphan’s Tales, a labyrinthine collection in the manner of The Thousand and One Nights. In this

way, she serialized the young adult novel, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of

Her Own Making (2011). However, whereas for Novik the communal basis relies on shared

fandoms in popular culture, Valente uses the internet to connect with the “speculative poetry

community.” She describes this community in terms of “family” (Kirtley and Adams). It is

intimate in the sense of closeness, but also, I would add, in the sense of being more consciously

limited. In terms of literary value, smaller audiences are not always a bad thing. Indeed, as Pierre

Bourdieu explains, cultural capital, especially in the high or elite versions, requires a limited set

of producers who are writing, not for the general public, but rather for other producers. In this

version of the gift economy, moreover, there is a much higher degree of autonomy accorded to

Valente as an original author.

Because she is a fantasy writer, Valente feels the need to add a caveat for the sake of

those expecting her work to be “easy.” She explains, “I would certainly warn the uninitiated that

my books are different and, some might say, difficult; however, it's mostly a matter of syncing

up your reading rhythm to the writing, which is not as hard as all that” (Goodwin). Elsewhere,

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Valente emphasizes that she does not intend “to be deliberately obscure–on the contrary, I am

still learning, and have been as clear as I could be at the time, while adhering to what I believe is

necessary in books: beauty, even in darkness, honesty, and bravery. I try for these things.

Sometimes I touch them, sometimes I fail. So it goes, as the man said” (“FAQ”). Whereas Novik

is suspended between popular versions of fairy tales and more literary fantasy, Valente is

suspended between high art, the literary mainstream, and genre fiction.

Interpretation of Six-Gun Snow White: Reversals and Extensions of Myth

Six-Gun Snow White was originally published in 2013, then again with illustrations in 2016. The

novella combines the fairy tale with the western, in a parody of both forms. Snow White’s father

is a mining baron, dealing in silver, gold, and jewels, who has forced a Crow woman to marry

him. Thus, the name “Snow White” is ironic, an insult bestowed by the evil stepmother, Mrs. H.,

to remind the protagonist that she is not white. Through a magic mirror, Snow White watches

Mrs. H. become pregnant and give birth to a boy who remains stuck inside the mirror. Sensing

that Mrs. H. will not allow her to stay around much longer, Snow White escapes. She takes her

gun (“Rose Red”) and her horse (“Charming”), and sets out from California to Crow Nation.

Finding herself turned away by tribe members who fear that one white person will bring more,

Snow White instead joins a group of female outcasts (the seven dwarfs) who are living in

unclaimed territory. Meanwhile, Mrs. H. uses the deer’s heart brought by the hunter in lieu of

Snow White’s real heart to bring her son out of the mirror, and the son turns out to be half-deer

instead of human. When Mrs. H. shows up on her doorstep, Snow White consciously decides to

eat a poisoned apple, in effect ‘committing suicide.’ The ending suggests multiple versions in

which Snow White does not wake up, and one in which she does wake up a hundred years later.

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In this version, Snow White becomes an astro-scientist who discovers a new pulsar in the

heavens.

Valente’s skeptical approach to narrative tradition takes the recognizable postmodern

forms of irony and pastiche. The combination of fairy tale and western heightens the

melodramatic and overwrought elements of both genres. Towards the end of the novella, the

narrator explains, “What happens to the West happens to Snow White, which is to say they both

turn into jokes. They both get told so often, they become pantomime. And then worse” (143).

This is an indictment of the reduction of meaning in the mythic foundations of US culture.

Worse than jokes, these stories have reinforced violence, suppressing women and indigenous

peoples.

Valente thus enacts a series of basic reversals. First, the name is an act of cruelty on the

part of the stepmother. Snow White explains, “She named me a thing I could aspire to but never

become, the one thing I was not and could never be” (34). Because the narrator does not even

remember having another name, this is all she and readers know to call her, and thus every

repetition of Snow White brings the conscious re-enactment of racial and colonial violence.

Other major reversals include the frustrated expectation of waking up with a kiss. Once again,

the narrator brings out the violence in dominant narratives: “In the storybooks, if you woke a girl

up with a kiss, she belonged to you. It was like a brand on a cow’s rump. A kiss round and black

and permanent-like on the skin, telling the whole world who owned her. The idea of that big

burning kiss made him hard enough to drill rubies” (79). This describes the thought processes of

a man who is planning to rape Snow White. Though all he manages to get is a fist-fight, the

romantic kiss is here connected with erotic violence, objectification, and commodification. Snow

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White becomes an animal (cow) and property to be owned (branded). Further, Snow White

becomes a ruby, highlighting the commodification of her personhood.

Still other reversals include the seven dwarfs (a group of outcast, strong women) and

Deer Boy (Mrs. H.’s half-deer son). The latter radically revises the stereotype of the handsome

prince. Deer Boy’s quest for Snow White is not about love, but rather about a need to become

whole. He wants to take her heart so that he can become human. There are a lot of strange

connections between Deer Boy and Snow White. The narrator explains his thought-process: “She

is a half-breed. She is like him” (123). As a half-breed, Deer Boy’s vulnerability is underscored

by his inability to fit into the human world. In addition to physical appearance, “He also spoke

backward from other folk on this side of the mirror, which upset just about everyone” (113).

Deer Boy’s speech comes off as foreign, and he is also objectified, eventually making money by

giving ‘peep shows,’ flashing his deer legs as a curiosity. Finally, when it comes to the crucial

moment, Deer Boy’s kiss does not wake Snow White (146). In attempting the more drastic act of

cutting out his own heart to give to her, Deer Boy does not cut deep enough, lacking the courage

and fortitude (149). In terms of identity, the mirror images of Deer Boy and Snow White

function as an indictment of the gendered ideologies that make men and women into half-people.

Both Snow White and Westerns hold up mirrors of identity that foreshorten the potential of men

and women to be full people, trapped in the binary logic of the masculine/feminine.

Given Valente’s interest in the tropes of the vagina dentata, the Evil Queen is another

very important figure for revision. Whereas Novik dismisses the misogynist fears of Baba Jaga

in order to claim descent from a powerful woman, Valente places the stepmother in the cycle of

patriarchal persecution. Mrs. H. is a Puritan ‘witch,’ and her notions of gender and of magic are

framed by views of women and the earth as naturally evil. The mirror shows Snow White that

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Mrs. H. has also suffered abuse as a young woman, to the extent that she chooses to make a deal

with ‘the earth,’ which would be interpreted by others as the devil. Snow White witnesses as

Mrs. H. runs out, naked: “She cried and she screamed and she grabbed at the mud, smearing it all

over her and scratching herself bloody. Get me out, she said into the earth. Get me out” (47). The

earth responds, “This is what it means to be a woman in the world. Obey until a man gives you

permission to die and keep on obeying after. The tasks you’re handed make less sense than a

rooster in a Sunday hat, but if God wanted us to have a say, he’d have made us men” (47). As

there is no ‘way out’ of a woman’s body, the earth offers “a bargain with pain. Make your black

deals in the black wood and decide what you’ll trade for power. For the opposite of weakness,

which is not strength but hardness. I am a trap, but so is everything. Pick your price. I am a

huckster with a hand in your pocket. I am freedom and I will eat your heart” (48). Whereas the

growing trend in popular culture is to ‘brighten’ the darkness of villains, this novella preserves

the evilness of the stepmother, implying that it is a consequence of the demonization of women,

who are not allowed to be powerful and vulnerable at the same time. They have to trade their

weakness, their hearts, for power.

This understanding of the Evil Queen underscores her constructed identity. The attention

to constructed-ness has long been a key factor in postmodern literature, and Valente reinforces

the point that identity cannot be as easily altered as fairy-tale wishes have suggested. Snow

White, in particular, is constructed by her father and Mrs. H, neither of whom is capable of

genuine love. The father treats Snow White like a commodified object. He gives her a ruby for

her gun whenever she manages to please him, and he has her dress up, alternately, like a lady, a

Crow woman, or a man, just to enjoy looking at her. Snow White describes herself as shaped by

her father into a mechanical doll: “Pull the lever in her heart and she dispenses love, pose her

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arms and legs and she exhibits grace—then put her away in her cabinet again” (11). The trope of

women as mechanized is one area in which the novella overlaps with the themes of science

fiction, highlighting the connection between Valente’s ‘mythpunk’ and feminist cyberpunk, as

exemplified in Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.” The technique of genre-blending enables

Valente to examine the effects of abusive love that are often left unexplained in fairy tales.

Snow White’s parents also dehumanize her as a half-Crow woman. Mrs. H. tells her

flatly, “You are not entirely ugly, but no one would mistake you for a human being. That skin

will never come clean. And that hair! Black as coal, and those lips, as red as the hearts your

savage mother no doubt ate with relish. That’s all right. All women have a taste for hearts. But

you will discover that I am a gentle soul” (32). Mrs. H. proves her “gentle” qualities by forcing

Snow White to bathe in ice-cold milk, at one point pushing her head down, saying “What’s

inside you needs cleaning. Swallow it down and you’ll come out pure” (52). Mrs. H. constructs

humanity as civilized, pure, and white, ironically enforcing this construction through brute

violence. As a result of these conditions, Snow White understands love to be a violent form of

consuming: “When I fed the pigs and two of them got to scrapping over an old soft onion, I

thought: That’s love. Love is eating. Love is a snarling pig snout and long tusks…Love is what

grown folk do to each other because the law frowns on killing. I said I loved her back…and

when I said it, I thought of kissing her and also of shooting her through the eye” (39). As with

the roots of Polnya’s Wood, this is how love becomes corrupted. However, whereas Agniezska is

able to overcome that corruption, Snow White, the story suggests, may remain stuck within

social and narrative constructions.

As with identity and genre, Valente’s approach to narrative tradition is typical of

deconstructive postmodernism. The novella is both metafictional and skeptical of narratives that

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have become traps. This is hard to miss, especially as the story approaches the moment when

Snow White is ‘tricked’ by the queen. One of the female outlaws, Old Ephraim, directly warns

Snow White to avoid letting herself get wrapped up in a ‘story.’ Old Ephraim explains, “life is

stupid. It just pulls the same shit over and over. Sometimes you think you can make it come out

different, but you can’t. You’re in a story and the body writing it is an asshole. You had to know

that, given the action. The story you’re in tells you like firing a gun” (116). Story is here defined

as the violence of constructed identities. This is also part of the feminist insight, from Teresa de

Lauretis, that narrative tends to be sadistic, taking pleasure in the inevitable pain of characters.

And yet, it is interesting that Old Ephraim should describe “the body writing” as “an asshole,” as

Valente may also be calling herself an asshole. From this critical-feminist perspective, all

storytellers are assholes in the sense of reproducing violence, and the best that can be done is to

be aware of it, to be slightly less of an asshole.

In the skepticism towards stories and authors, Valente aligns herself with the legend of

Coyote, ‘the Trickster.’ The novella begins with the epigraph: “Coyote had a plan which he

knew he could carry out because of his great power. He took his heart and cut it in half. He put

one half right at the tip of his nose and the other half at the end of his tail.” This is attributed to

an Apache folktale, and Coyote appears as a kind of guiding figure in Snow White’s dreams. He

explains that what happens to her “looks like a choice but it isn’t” (111). The narrator later

explains Coyote’s motivation for cutting his heart in half: “He did this so no one could catch him

at his mischief. The two halves of his heart would fly off in separate directions, each doing

whatever it pleased, and if anyone said to one half of his heart: You have done a wicked thing!

the other half would say: What the hell are you talking about? I was over here the whole time!”

(150) There can hardly be a better description of the role of the author in constructing a story.

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Authors, Valente implies, are tricksters who rig the game in advance, offering readers apparent

choices aren’t real. And when they are caught in their tricks, they can always embellish the

narrative to make a case for their innocence. The heart cut in half recalls the ambivalent position

of postmodern literary value. In this view, fairy tales are enchantments written by hearts that are

half-sincere, half-doubting.

The novella thus rejects fairy-tale narratives as casting spells of delusion over readers.

Old Ephraim voices the avant-garde desire to get “free of story” (117); however, her warnings

are not enough. When Mrs. H. does appear, Snow White is unable to resist the bonds of warped

love into which she has been educated. The narrator directly addresses the reader in this moment,

with the assumption that the reader will be questioning why Snow White answers to story when

she knows that she shouldn’t: “You can’t ask why she did it…The plumb truth is you would too,

if everything impossible stood out there saying you could be loved so perfect, the past would go

up like a firecracker and shatter across the dark” (132). Once again, Valente excavates the

perversity of the fairy-tale wish that results in masochism. The promises of fairy tales can be

destructive, offering salvation as a cover to deliver more pain. When Snow White does finally

take a bite of the apple, however, she has no illusions about the results: “She bites into it and

never looks away from Mrs. H, from the crevice of her, and this is a suicide we’re watching, full

faith and knowledge” (140). This Snow White is anything but naïve or ignorant. Nonetheless,

she remains trapped by Story, by the story that she has been told about herself and about love. As

Coyote says, “It looks like a choice, but it isn’t.”

Of course, Snow White’s ‘suicide’ is not the end of the story. If it were, then Valente’s

approach might suggest that narratives are hopeless traps. Instead, she picks up on the project

begun by Coover, offering the reader choices, and she goes further by making some of those

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choices more hopeful. Valente addresses the reader to offer the choice between multiple versions

of the ending: “Come on. Pick one. Pick a path and hit the briars” (150). Deer Boy fails to rescue

Snow White, and that might be the ending. But for readers unsatisfied with this, Valente

suggests: “Maybe someday Snow White’s cells get scraped and stored for some researcher to

kiss alive in a decade, a century, when they get around to it. When they have time” (149). And if

this is still unsatisfying, she offers one other alternative, somewhat-happy ending to close the

narrative, imagining that Snow White “wakes up because there was flooding all over town that

spring, and the current washed that house clean off its stones” (151). The accidental contingency

and lack of explanation do not give this version much plausibility, but that is beside the point. In

this version, “Snow White gets a doctorate in physics, though it takes her about fifteen years,”

and as an astro-physicist, she discovers a new star (153). This ending does not pretend to be as

believable or satisfying as the traditional happy ending; nonetheless, by offering a more

contingent happy ending, Valente supports the reconstructionist trends of postmodern literary

value, into the ‘yes, but…’ The ending suggests that, yes, fairy tales and Westerns are part of

violent narrative traditions that are misogynist, racist, and imperialist. But, nonetheless, the art of

storytelling continues to affirm structures in spite of the acknowledgement that those structures

are burdened by a heavy weight of past violence. In spite of everything, Six-Gun Snow White

suggests that the desires for beauty, for love, and for freedom are still worth telling stories about.

The Reception of Valente: Revising the Elite

Valente’s position in the field of value has been recognized by awards, critics, and readers. She

first garnered notice in the scene of genre fiction with In the Night Garden (2006), which won

the James Tiptree, Jr. award. Valente was thus placed by her first major recognition alongside

sf/f authors who productively explore issues of gender and sexuality. Valente’s other best-known

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work is the series beginning with The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her

Own Making (2011), which won the Andre Norton (2011) and Locus (2012) awards for young

adult literature. In commenting on the “overnight popularity” of the YA series, Valente

explained that it “spoke to grown-ups about the state of being a kid, and that's pretty much gold,

as far as intense fandom goes” (“Catherynne” 2017). As her self-positioning demonstrates,

however, Valente is less interested in achieving widespread popularity, preferring the limited

communities of elite cultural producers. Six-Gun Snow White underlines that position, achieving

a smaller audience but higher praise. The novella was nominated for both the Nebula (2013) and

Hugo (2014) Awards. Though she has yet to win one of these more general assertions of status in

the sf/f genres, Valente’s repeated nominations are a sign that she is positioning herself towards

further recognition.

Most of the reviews of Six-Gun Snow White are positive. In general, reviewers cite the

innovative quality of the writing (“Six-Gun”).63 On GoodReads, users identify themselves with

the limited target audience of high culture, often utilizing terms associated with postmodernism

and theory. For instance, Carol notes that this “isn't a ‘fairy tale retelling’ as much as a

'reformulation,' a genre-mash-up, a deconstruction and reconstruction of tales with modern

considerations of gender and race.” In addition to terms associated with postmodernism, some

readers actively distinguish between Valente’s work and less ‘valuable’ parodies. Algernon

begins a review by observing “the popularity of spoof novels, mashing together Jane Austen and

zombies or Abraham Lincoln with vampires. I am not much tempted to give them a try, having

63
Similarly, literary critics have tended to focus on Valente’s experimental craft, as well
as her critical revisions. For instance, Veronica Schanoes (2015) describes the experimental
digital techniques of Valente’s The Ice Puzzle in a manner similar to Coover’s work, but in this
case multiplying female identities, and she links this multiplicity with the intimate relationality
of interactions between readers and authors in Valente’s crowdfunded projects.
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low expectations from the lack of originality and from the low-brow/cheap type of humor. The

reason I mentioned them is that I want to stress that Catherynne Valente doesn't belong in this

category.” Instead, Algernon claims that Valente “has found a niche as an author from re-

examining classic fairytales and myths from a modern and usually revisionist / feminist

perspective, but she does it with flawless style and her fantasies are closer to drama than to

parody.” These reviews employ many of the same terms from my interpretation: deconstruction,

reconstruction, feminist revisions, fairy tales, and fantasy. In particular, Algernon’s distinction

between “fantasies…closer to drama” versus the “low-brow humor” of other mash-ups brings

discourses of value to the surface. These remarks connect with the growing sense among literary

critics that postmodern value has been ‘co-opted’ by popular culture. And as David Foster

Wallace suggests, when irony is appropriated in this way, literature may need to respond by a

turn towards sincerity.

It is important to contrast these statements with the reception of Novik’s work. These two

receptions recall the divergence, in the introduction to this dissertation, between Felski’s work on

the postcritical and Huber’s work on reconstructive postmodernism. In the former case, there is

more blending of the modes of reading across lines of literary value, between the ‘ordinary’ and

the ‘academic,’ in modes of enchantment and of identification. However, readers of Novik feel

called upon to supply the critical elements that seem to be absent from the text. In the case of

Valente (and Huber) the reconstructive or revisionary elements occur within texts already

recognized as valuable. Because her work is associated with the avant-garde, with poetry, and

with mixed genres, the reviews of Valente place her unquestioningly within a ‘literary’ rather

than a ‘popular’ register. Thus, sincerity and reconstruction are techniques interpreted here as

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‘original,’ contributing to the progressive tradition of literature by departing from previous

innovations.

While readers versed in the codes of high postmodern literary value appreciate both the

irony and the sincerity of Valente’s novella, the ideal of postmodern knowingness can generate

trouble for other readers. In particular, one user, Debbie Reese, has posted both on GoodReads

and on the website for American Indians in Children’s Literature, under the heading “Absolutely

disgusted by Catherynne M. Valente’s SIX-GUN SNOW WHITE.” According to Reese, the

novella is “gratuitously vile. As a Native woman, it is very hard to read it in light of my

knowledge of the violence inflicted on Native girls and women—today.” Reese’s negative

reaction is so strong, she explains, that “I will not sully my blog with actual quotes from the

book.” Instead, she lists her points of discontent. First, “Valente uses animal-like depictions to

describe the main character's genitals…Such descriptions dehumanize us”; second, the bathing in

milk “echoes the intents of the boarding schools established in the 1800s,” who sought to “‘kill

the Indian/save the man,’” drowning Indians in white culture; and finally, “Valente shows the

main character and her mother…being lusted after, abused, beaten, and violated by white men.

This is especially troubling, given the violence and lack of investigation of that violence that we

see in the US and Canada.” In all of these cases, Reese sees the reinforcement, instead of the

indictment, of racist and colonial violence.

One might say that Reese conflates the violence enacted by the author with the violence

spoken by particular characters. For instance, the comparison of Snow White’s genitals to

animals is a reference to comments made by white men working in the ruby mines (77). The

conflation of character and author on the part of Reese, however, is understandable, especially

given the manner in which Valente also conflates forms of violence. Such responses demonstrate

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the difficulties of writing about marginalized groups to which the author does not belong. As

Brian Attebery (2014) notes, in terms of fantasy, writing about the myths of other cultures opens

up authors to the potential of reinforcing colonialism, especially when those works are based on

unexamined assumption of equivalence between all traditions (119). Six-Gun Snow White does

not rely on an equivalence between all traditions, exactly. Valente is aiming for what Attebery

calls “situated fantasy,” a postmodern position that overlaps with the postcolonial, as well as

incorporating “all kinds of ‘post-ness” (185). I would emphasize that the “situated” aspect is

more difficult to achieve than then incorporation of ‘post-ness.’ When “all kinds of ‘post-ness’”

are brought together in a general mood of against-ness, it becomes difficult to distinguish

between the specifics of different critiques.

Six-Gun Snow White repeatedly makes connections between patriarchal, racial, colonial,

and capitalist violence. To take one early example: “The terrible covetous heart of Mr. H

immediately conceived a starvation for the girl not lesser in might than his thirst for sapphires or

gold” (4). This language conflates multiple forms of violence that come together in the

dehumanization of Snow White’s mother, Gun That Sings. In general, the mash-up brings fairy

tales and westerns together, in order to bring out the resonance between their forms of violence.

What is lost, however, is attentiveness to the differences between these discourses. In other

words, all marginalized positions are not equivalent, any more than all myths can be channeled

into a single monomyth.

In practice, Valente is hoping to call attention to exactly the issues that trouble readers

like Debbie Reese. In an interview with ‘The Angry Black Woman,’ Valente observes the

difficulty of choosing “to write and speak for a culture not your own. That’s often quite

dangerous territory, and many just play it safe.” Valente and her interlocutor agree that it is a risk

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worth taking because “easy fiction is boring.” That is, Valente feels an obligation to take on

difficult issues rather than to ignore them, as ‘easy fiction’ does. Within the limited audience of

savvy readers who understand what it means to be “post- everything,” it is possible to see that

the text intends to counteract, rather than to re-inscribe, violence. Nonetheless, the negative

reactions of readers like Debbie Reese cannot be discounted. Whether or not the text is

ultimately ‘racist’ or ‘imperialist’ is not something that can be proven. Its meaning is determined

in the act of reading, and so for this reader, the text is violent. Thus, one consequence of the

‘knowing’ postmodern attitude is the presumption to speak to marginalized groups with claims

of knowing more than they do about their own marginalization.64

In my view, these difficulties stem from the issues involved in texts meant to ‘awaken’

the reader to the chains of ideology. I had a similar, or at least analogous, experience to Reese in

my reading of Robert Coover’s Briar Rose. The novel speaks to women about the condition of

being lulled to sleep by false stories. And yet, although the purpose is to support an awakening to

these false structures, the depiction of Briar Rose as a moony dreamer feels imposed from above.

The author here takes on the position of the one-who-knows, descrying the naiveté of female

readers. Likewise, Valente’s depiction of a half-Crow Snow White may feel distant and imposed

from above. In both cases, the authors unveil the mechanisms of ideology, but there is a lingering

discomfort given their own positions of privilege in relation to those ideologies. True to the spirit

of demystification, however, these authors seem to be aware of their ambivalent positions in

64
In the world of publishing, these sorts of controversies have led to the hiring of
“sensitivity readers.” As Katy Waldman explains, “sensitivity readers are members of a minority
group tasked specifically with examining manuscripts for hurtful, inaccurate, or inappropriate
depictions of that group.” Thus, sensitivity readers satisfy a form of “social conscience” as well
as the “market incentive” of circumventing the increasing vulnerability of authors to online
criticisms.
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imposing narrative violence. As Old Ephraim notes, “You’re in a story and the body writing it is

an asshole” (116). Thus, Valente does recognize her own position of privilege, and the potential

for re-inscribing violence. As a result of this skeptical approach to narrative, then, violence may

be inevitable.

In my view, these issues make it all the more important that the narrative should end with

an appeal to a different future, one not necessarily trapped in the narrative briar patch. While

Novik attempts to set down more nourishing roots in narrative traditions, Valente suspends her

skepticism in order to imagine a transformative option. Even though this ending is contingent,

the last words of the novella constitute a mini-poem imagining this future: “Snow White

discovers a new pulsar out in the Horsehead Nebula. She listens to it through machines that

reflect her face./ Thump, thump, thump./ Talking mirrors on every wall./ Thump, thump, thump./

Snow White’s pulsar shakes the night sky like iron shoes dancing” (152). The images in these

lines resonate with the fairy-tale images of the story, but as Snow White becomes the explorer,

she overcomes the containment of the mirrors…or does she? Another interpretation might

emphasize the paradoxical contractedness of the mirrors in this last scene, in relation to the

broader imagined ‘wilderness’ of the stars, as well as the paradoxical image of the stars as ‘iron

shoes dancing.’

Both Novik and Valente employ fantasy as a mode of communication with readers about

the process of becoming enchanted with better stories. The terms of these ‘better stories,’

however, remain open in regard to the attitude towards fairy-tale structures, as either consoling

or restricting. While Novik imagines a protagonist who is able to heal corruption in the roots of

narrative tradition, Valente’s protagonist may remain trapped within the briar patch of

constricting narratives, and within the mirrors of representation. The next chapter will turn away

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from the positive structures of fairy tales in order to consider the potential reflections of a very

different kind of mirror. The negative de-formations of the monstrous may generate a more

integrated fantasy-solution to the problem of merging critical and affirmative modes of reading.

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 CHAPTER FOUR – ‘REASON’S DREAM’: RECOVERING FANTASY THROUGH
THE MONSTROUS IN CHINA MIÉVILLE’S PERDIDO STREET STATION

The thing unfolded. The sense was of a blossoming. An expansion after being enclosed, like a

man or a woman standing and spreading their arms wide after huddling foetally, but multiplied

and made vast. As if the thing’s indistinct limbs could bend a thousand times, so that it unhinged

like a paper sculpture, standing and spreading arms or legs or tentacles or tails that opened and

opened. The thing that had huddled like a dog stood and opened itself, and it was nearly the size

of a man […] He could not see its shape. Only its dark, glistening skin and hands that clutched

like a child’s. Cold shadows. Eyes that were not eyes. Organic folds and jags and twists like rats’

tails that shuddered and twitched as if newly dead. And those finger-long shards of colourless

bone that shone white and parted and dripped were teeth […] Four rustling concertinas of dark

matter flickered outwards on the creature’s back, and outwards again and again, slotting into

position, fanning and expanding in vast folds of thick mottled flesh, expanding to an impossible

size: an explosion of organic patterns, a flag unfurling, clenched fists opening. The thing made its

body thin and spread those colossal wings, massive flat folds of stiff skin that seemed to fill the

hall. They were irregular, chaotic in shape, random fluid whorls; but mirrorperfect left and right,

like spilt ink or paint patterns on folded paper […] The colours were midnight, sepulchral, black-

blue, black-brown, black-red. And […] the shadow-shapes moved like amoeba in a magnifying

lens or oil on water, the patterns left and right still matching, moving in time.

~China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

Given the proliferation of idealized and commodified Gothic figures, critics have expressed

concern over what has happened to the truly scary monsters. What might be lost when monsters

become indistinguishable from beautiful celebrities? The above description from China

Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000) offers one of the best answers to that question. In the

novel, this is the first full description of the slake-moth, the most elusive and terrifying species of

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monster in a book filled with monsters. The style of the passage recalls H.P. Lovecraft’s

descriptions of Cthulhu, the moment of confrontation with an impossible physical fact that defies

categorization. The language dances around ‘the thing’ or ‘the creature,’ whose features hover on

the edge of being indescribable, with ‘eyes that are not eyes,’ and other features compared to the

shapes of humans, to newborns, to the newly dead, and to amoebae. And yet, the narrator does

nonetheless manage to describe a moth with Rorschach-like wings, mirrored perfectly in one

another, in spite of the chaos. Recalling the narrative from the preface of this dissertation,

beautified monsters can be described as flat, boring, and normative in comparison to the radical,

alien terror that they might otherwise inspire. Instead of pushing at the limits of categorization,

Twilight’s monsters reinforce categories. In short, when monsters become celebrities, they may

lose all the glory of their capacity to push at the limits of human perception.

In the terms from the previous chapter, monsters (the terrifying ones at least) have the

opposite effect of fairy-tale happy endings. And yet, the radical negation of monsters, just like

fairy tales, depends on the florescent embroidering of imaginative prose that is only sustainable

through fantasy, which involves a primary attitude of uncritical belief, at least insofar as the

events of the narrative go. Whereas fairy tale structures tend to inspire dichotomous affirmative

and skeptical approaches, however, the discourse of the monstrous brings together the uncritical

emotions of fear and excitement and the potential for critique. To the extent that fantasy can also

be called a literature of desire, the desire for the monstrous is one manner of reconciling the

apparently incommensurable discourses of uncritical and critical pleasures in reading. This

chapter will focus on Miéville’s Perdido Street Station as an intervention in the defense of

fantasy, via the combination of the pleasures of reading fantastic ‘genre’ literature with the

critical and non-instrumental literary values of the monstrous.

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 And yet, again returning to the narrative of the preface, the combination of the critical

with the uncritical in a single framework may be dangerous, leading to a totalizing construction

of literary value that excludes some local, phenomenological forms of valuing. In spite of his

influential role in revitalizing the value of fantasy literature, Miéville’s constructions of value

reproduce some gendered assumptions deriving from the abstract, intellectual framework of

Marxist dialectics. When combined with the preference for negation, that framework can

overwrite more contingent forms of value, particularly excluding the more affirmative values of

romance structures, such as love and consolation. For that reason, this chapter also includes two

examples of ‘brighter’ versions of the monstrous, with clearer ties to the affirmative registers of

enchantment.

The chapter thus tells a circuitous story of Miéville’s interventions in the value of fantasy

through the monstrous. This story begins by outlining the perceived flattening of the monstrous

(and of literary value) in response to postmodern/late-capitalist integrations of aesthetics and

commodities. The chapter then proceeds to describe Miéville’s solution for these issues, in his

construction of the non-instrumental, abcanny value of the monstrous. This construction,

however, is qualified by referring to a more affirmative, local, and contingent construction of

monstrous literary value in Kelly Link’s “The New Boyfriend” (2014). The chapter then returns

to Miéville’s story by describing how he challenges assumptions about the manipulations of

fantasy, combining the estrangement of fantasy and science fiction into the genre of the ‘New

Weird,’ which has given way to a broader ‘Weird’ tradition. The argument here steps back from

Miéville’s restorative interventions to consider the ongoing ambivalence in Miéville’s

relationship to fantasy, particularly in regard to J.R.R. Tolkien and consolation. Finally, the

chapter concludes by considering similar defenses of fantasy that are less wary of consolation,

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referring to K.J. Bishop’s “The Gleeful Horse” (2010) as an example of Weird fantasy that

emphasizes continuity with the positive values of enchantment. While Miéville’s constructions

of a non-instrumental value for the monstrous are very inspiring, other examples serve to

highlight the gendered forms of value that his framework tends to exclude.

Bridging the Divide between Scholarly and Lay Readers: China Miéville as ‘Aca-Fan’

China Miéville’s creative life has overlapped with his scholarly and political lives. He received a

BA in social anthropology from Cambridge, spent a year as a Harvard Fellow, and then earned a

PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics in 2001. His first novel,

King Rat, was published in 1998, and he completed Perdido Street Station while working on his

PhD. In addition to these scholarly commitments, Miéville became involved in politics from a

young age. In 2001, he ran for parliament as the Socialist Alliance Candidate, and he has also

served as an editor of the journal Historical Materialism, best known for his role as Special

Editor on a 2002 issue about Marxism and fantasy. (Gordon, “Reveling” 456) In spite of the

prevailing attitude among Marxist critics about the conservatism of fantasy, Miéville explains

simply that he always “loved [fantasy], I enjoyed loving it, and I could see no contradiction at all

in loving it and being a Marxist” (Bould, “Appropriate”). Miéville’s multiple roles, as scholar,

activist, and fan have all influenced his fiction and his interventions in literary value.65

In addition to King Rat and the trilogy of Bas-Lag novels beginning with Perdido Street

Station, Miéville has written five stand-alone novels, as well as three novellas and three short

story collections. He has also worked on writing for comic book series like Hellblazer and

Justice League. His novels tend to mix fantasy with other popular genres. The Bas-Lag series

65
For a very thorough literary biography, see Edwards and Venezia’s “Unintroduction”
from China Miéville: Critical Essays.
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begins with a monster story, then a sea adventure (The Scar) and finally a western (Iron

Council). The particular blend of fantasy, science fiction, and horror gave birth to the term ‘New

Weird’ in 2003, and Miéville thus places his writing in the canon of Weird fiction. The Bas-Lag

novels created a stronger following for Miéville, both in terms of fans and in terms of acclaim,

winning two Arthur C. Clarke Awards (2001; 2005), two British Fantasy Awards (2001; 2003),

and a Locus Award (2003), among other nominations for fantastic literature. His prolific

influence in fiction and criticism has led one reviewer to caution that Miéville’s “bountiful

charismatic authority” means that he “is creating both the fiction and the stance from which that

fiction is then to be judged” (Williams 97). Much of this charismatic authority may derive from

the melding together of the scholar and the aficionado. Miéville has been “identified as

belonging to a group of Anglo-American writers” who are also “fanboy creators” (Edwards and

Venezia 7). Thus, Miéville’s work appeals especially to “aca-fans,” creating a space for

passionate attachments within the detached realms of the academy.

Miéville’s attachment is not just to fantastic genre fiction; more particularly, he is

attached to the New Wave writers, such as Michael Moorcock, M. John Harrison, and J.G.

Ballard in Britain, as well as Harlan Ellison in the United States (Bould, “Appropriate”). This

attachment to the avant-garde within fantastic fiction brings together uncritical passion with a

critical perspective. Thus, Miéville’s work is definitely postmodern in the trend of mixing high

and low cultures, and in response to the ongoing question of whether the pulp and the avant-

garde can “coexist fruitfully,” Miéville repeatedly describes the proposed combination of the

entertaining, immersive, and uncritical with the serious, detached, and critical as letting him

“have my geek cake and eat it too” (“With One Bound”; Naimon). The paradoxical nature of

indulging passions while remaining critically aware suggests that these tensions are not fully

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resolved, but the attempt to resolve them has elicited very warm responses from aca-fans, who

appreciate the ability to employ both fannish and academic codes in reading (Palmer 237; Birns

200-1; Malcolm-Clarke 338; Burges).66 The particular strategy of legitimation in Miéville’s work

is not reductively didactic; it bridges the divide between ‘critical’ and ‘ordinary’ reading by

remaining committed to both pleasure and to critique.67 That bridging, as I will argue, depends

on a love of monsters, for both their uncritical and their critical virtues.

The Consumerist Flattening of the Monstrous…and the Weird Re-inflation

In his textbook on the Gothic, Fred Botting describes monsters as both created by, and generative

of, the norms that construct human identity as white, male, and middle class. Insofar as the

monstrous also depends on an “excess” of meaning that goes beyond language and norms,

monsters have the capacity to demonstrate the fragility of human identity. (9) In linguistic terms,

monsters highlight the ability of language to construct negatively through both metaphor and

through metonymy. They are radically different from, and yet continuous with, the human.

However, according to Botting, these capacities of monstrosity are in the process of being

dissipated and exhausted, as postmodern and post-millenial monsters have been ‘flattened’

through commodification. In Gothic Romanced (2008), Botting notes that sympathetic monsters

66
In fact, Carl Freedman was inspired enough to conclude his monograph on Miéville
(2015) with a new statement about literary value, returning to Horace’s Ars Poetica in order to
argue that Miéville captures the dialectical “pleasure of learning” (133).
67
That bridge did work quite so well in Iron Council, which Miéville explains “had the
most profoundly contradictory response,” divided between enthusiastic critics and disappointed
fans (Anders 55). Matthew Sangster, analyzing the responses on GoodReads, explains that the
disappointment stems from the expectations of reading trilogies. While readers might already
have expected innovations on the level of content, they were put off by the experiments in form
and language. Sangster further notes that experimental techniques are valued more by academic
readers assessing “cultural value” than by GoodReads patrons assessing based on whether they
“like” the book or not (190).
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have become a means of ‘flattening’ distinctions: “Difference, eagerly sought out, is quickly

assimilated” (15). In terms of vampires, the most iconic example is Joss Whedon’s television

series Buffy the Vampire Slayer [1997-2003] (156). In Botting’s view, when viewers recognize

themselves in the vampire, the negative construction of human identity occurs only through

metonymy, not metaphor. In other words, the appearance of difference is a veil for more of the

same, as a result of the commodification of humans, of art, and of monsters.68

Botting’s flattened monstrous indicates broader shifts occurring in the value of art under

postmodernism. Postmodernism presents a daunting challenge for Marxist theories of art, and for

any theory, insofar as artistic value continues to be defined as separation from the marketplace.

As an expression of late capitalism, postmodernism in the vein of Jean Baudrillard can only

reflect itself in infinitely regressing mirrors. Slavoj Žižek, in his stylish prose, extends these

theories to observe how the sublime object of art has become shit; due to the growing recognition

of artistic value as an empty frame supported by ideological structures, any shit may be

interpreted as art, so long as it is framed correctly (28-9). Žižek’s description of the

commodification of art and the aestheticization of commodities leads to a situation in which art

and commodities become increasingly indistinguishable from one another (35). Miéville’s novel

begins with a gamble waged over monsters: Even if monsters seem to have become nothing

more than commodities, it may be possible to recover a sense of the truly monstrous.

68
See also, Botting, The Limits of Horror, 53; 61; and “Post-Millenial Monsters:
Monstrosity-No-More” (2013). For other critics, the flattening of the monstrous is not
necessarily considered a loss, but instead a result of the transformations of ‘post-humanity.’ For
example, Mark McGurl interprets the “flatness” of monsters as an intriguing innovation in the
history of the novel, which has begun to turn to the apparently flat characters of allegory as a
means of representing broader historical, material, and non-explicable “ultimate realit[ies]”
structuring human consciousness (2010: 14).
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 In the phrase, ‘truly monstrous,’ I am referring, on a simple level, to monsters that are

genuinely scary. In previous celebrations, the truly monstrous functions as something like

Jacques Derrida’s notion of the ‘dangerous supplement.’ In Monster Theory: Reading Culture,

Jeffrey Cohen applies the “dangerous supplement” in order to explain how monsters challenge

binary categorization, replacing “bifurcating ‘either/or’ syllogistic logic with a kind of reasoning

closer to ‘and/or’” (7). The and/or describes the deconstructive revision of logic, but later critics

like Botting worry that deconstruction has been short-circuited, or perhaps rewired, by the

(ir)rational logic of capitalism. The co-optation of the deconstructive potential of the monstrous

leads Botting to declare that there are no real monsters anymore.

In Of Grammatology (1976), Derrida utilizes Rousseau’s concept of the “supplement” to

describe terms that are necessary for the pure or natural functioning of other terms. Most

famously, the word supplements the thing and writing supplements speech. The logic of “and/or”

derives from the fact that the supplement is both an addition and a replacement (145). Writing

supplements by providing a figure for the presence of speech, but the act of substituting speech

for writing betrays “the mark of emptiness” (144). The monstrous might be a supplement for the

human, which explains the many references among theorists to ‘needing’ the monstrous in order

to constitute the human. Furthermore, monsters are a particular kind of supplement, the

“dangerous supplement,” insofar as they appear to enact “a simple substitution” through negation

(148). The dangerous supplement functions as a destructive force, one that feeds off of the

energy of presence rather than supporting it (151). Whereas writing can supplement as an

illusory solidification of natural presence in speech, the dangerous supplement of the monstrous

de-natures, and appears to de-solidify, presence, creating its own competing logic of creation

through destruction. Thus, the paradox of monstrosity is that it is both a necessary supplement to

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the human and a ‘catastrophe’ (147) that destroys the human. Hence the particular facility of the

monstrous as a tool of deconstruction, a dangerous supplement overturning binaries. In a sense,

the monstrous enacts the deconstructive move of exposing the fragility of ‘natural’ categories or

hierarchies.

In terms of the commodification of the monstrous, both the logics of either/or and the

deeper logics of and/or are replaced by a logic of both/and. In other words, all meanings are

relative and contingent, and in the capitalist machine, the emptiness of monstrosity can be

flaunted as a kind of veneer over the leveling of differences into one vast, sad field of sameness.

Miéville’s weird monsters return to, and supersede, the logic of and/or, entertaining the notion

that monsters are real, materially present, at the same time that they are constructed through

discursive logic. It is this primary movement of believing in, or being overwhelmed by, ‘real’

monsters that makes the commitment to the genre of fantasy so important for this achievement.

The first step to creating ‘really’ scary monsters is that they must be different from what

has already been absorbed by culture, but they also must be a deep consequence of cultural logic.

In terms of newness, Miéville recurs to the notion of the Weird, and the iconic tentacle in the

tradition of H.P. Lovecraft. In an essay on M.R. James, Miéville emphasizes the multiple

features of Weird monsters. They are:

indescribable and formless as well as being and/or although they are and/or in so far as

they are described with an excess of specificity, an accursed share of impossible somatic

precision; and their constituent bodyparts are disproportionately insectile/cephalopodic,

without mythic resonance. The spread of the tentacle – a limb-type with no Gothic or

traditional precedents (in ‘Western’ aesthetics) – from a situation of near total absence in

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 Euro-American teratoculture up to the nineteenth century, to one of being the default

monstrous appendage of today, signals the epochal shift to a Weird culture” (105).

In the context of my argument from the previous chapter, the emphasis on the break with

tradition, as well as with folklore and mythology, might be understood as a departure from

fantasy. Insofar as fantasy necessarily overlaps with the genre of fairy tales, or even with

Tolkien’s ‘fairy-stories,’ this is a departure. It is also important to note, however, that Miéville is

referring to Lovecraft and other Weird writers as generating another tradition, to which he

retrospectively attributes his own work. As I will argue in a later section, this tradition is, in

many ways, inextricable from and supported by fantasy. More importantly for the present

discussion, the repeated use of the conjunctions “and/or” indicates that Miéville is speaking of

monsters as supplements, in this case to the human capacity to categorize, or even to perceive.

Further, they are dangerous supplements because their constitutional formlessness both incites

and defeats the endeavor to catalogue them. And yet, even the multiple logics of substitution,

addition, and negation are not quite enough to capture Weird monsters. At the same time that

they may be a consequence/negation of rational logic and descriptions, they are materially

present, “indescribable and formless…although they are…described with an excess of

specificity.” This “in spite of” logic recalls what Huber refers to as the reconstructive, or the turn

responding to the deconstructive logic of ‘and/and,’ with ‘yes, but…’ acknowledging that,

although multiple versions of truth exist incommensurably, it is nonetheless possible to affirm

something like transcendence or the ‘numinous.’ For Miéville, the numinous resides in the

material presence of monsters, their existence in spite of categories.

Miéville coins the term “abcanny” to describe this non-reducible aspect of Weird

monstrosity. The lecture “On Monsters” differentiates the abcanny as a third term in opposition

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to both canny and uncanny (382). Whereas the canny describes what is known, and the uncanny

refers to what is known but forgotten and uncomfortably remembered (the return of the

repressed), the abcanny is “evasive of meaning” (381), a “beyond-meaning-ness. These monsters

mean, while they meta un-mean” (382). In other words, the abcanny refers to a material reality

that is radically unknown and unknowable. Returning to the schematic functions of the

dangerous supplement, the abcanny revitalizes the movements of addition, substitution, and

negation; however, it goes further because none of these movements can contain it. Elsewhere,

Miéville explains, “The Weird’s unprecedented forms, and its insistence on a chaotic, amoral,

anthropoperipheral universe, stresses the implacable alterity of its aesthetic and concerns. The

Weird is irreducible. A Weird tentacle does not ‘mean’ the Phallus; inevitably we will mean with

it, of course, but fundamentally it does not ‘mean’ at all” (“M.R. James” 112). Whereas uncanny

monsters become caught up in, and endlessly recycled through, language, the abcanny posits a

space outside of language and human understanding.

Because the Weird abcanny is linked with what Miéville calls the ‘bad numinous,’ it also

serves to revitalize literary value, positing and bracketing off an unknowable negativity that will

later be used to combine belief and critique. Miéville explains that the prefix “ab-“ is “in homage

to my beloved” William Hope Hodgson, who used the term to describe “exactly those

nonhuman, monstrous figures” (“On Monsters” 381). In his writings on the Weird, Miéville

often quotes from Hodgson’s story “The Baumoff Explosive” (1919), describing a German

soldier not as evil, but as searching for “absolute goodness,” and “entered instead by what

Hodgson, in one of the absolutely key phrases in Weird fiction, has his narrator suppose is ‘some

Christ-apeing monster of the Void.’” This monster, according to Miéville, “is the purest and

most affecting humanist expression of…awed horror,” because it is impossible to say whether it

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is “Christ itself.” (“Weird Fiction” 514). Thus, the ‘bad-numinous’ of the abcanny draws force

from the nihilistic; it is transcendental insofar as it exists beyond human categories, but it is also

material, embedded in the physical presence of monsters.

If Miéville were simply to present stories about encounters with Weird monsters,

repeating the works of Lovecraft and of Hodgson in contemporary settings, he would not be

intervening so directly in the literary value of fantastic genres. The combination of the material

and the numinous places the abcanny monster in a position to mediate between the concerns of

science fiction and fantasy. Before getting into the details of these interventions, I would like to

offer a brief interpretation of Miéville’s monsters in Perdido Street Station, in order to

understand how they function as a revitalized locus of non-instrumental literary value. With the

abcanny monstrous as a basis, I will then turn to a consideration of how this new value both

derives from and revises the values of fantasy.

Monsters for Monsters’ Sake: Renewing Literary Value through De-familiarized Vampires

As an author, a critic, and an activist, China Miéville’s work is driven by two overriding

concerns: A commitment to fantastic genre fiction and a commitment to Marxist radical politics.

Even though he repeatedly emphasizes that literature is not a substitute for activism, he explains

that his worldview emerges from his politics: “The reason I find it hard to express this is because

it may sound like I'm talking about art for art's sake, or about stripping politics out of writing,

which is emphatically not what I'm trying to say…but reading and writing, even politically, is

not the same thing and cannot be a replacement or substitute for collective activism” (Bould,

“Appropriate”). In other words, Miéville’s commitment to fantastic genres is informed by, but

not reducible to, his commitment to politics. What emerges is a form of literary value that is

related to the modernist ideals of art for its own sake, but is also engaged with socio-political

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realities. Moreover, especially in Perdido Street Station, it is the monsters that emerge as a locus

for the revitalization of political art in late capitalism.

Monsters are related to Miéville’s project of recovering the ‘fantastic impulse,’ or the

ability to imagine the impossible (Gordon, “Reveling” 367). In an early interview (Newsinger),

Miéville reveals that his understanding of the fantastic is heavily influenced by José Monleón’s A

Specter Is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the Fantastic (1990). In contrast to

the many critics who have valued the fantastic as the underside or counter to bourgeois realism,

Monleón argues that, by monster-izing the lower classes and bringing proletariat ‘unreason’ into

discourse, the bourgeoisie managed to tame the specter of revolution. Miéville also credits

Monleón with highlighting the provocative image of Goya’s painting, titled “The sleep of reason

produces monsters” (1799) That phrase becomes resonant for Miéville, whose embrace of

monsters is, in a sense, a political move, wresting the dreams of reason out of the confines of a

capitalist totality.69 The commodified form of monsters, their ability to inspire excitement, is

recovered in Perdido Street Station through the positioning of the abcanny slake-moths, who

exist at the sublime limits of the human imagination.

Perdido Street Station introduces the secondary world of Bas-Lag, as well as the trilogy’s

main focal point, the city of New Crobuzon. The sprawling city is the first of the many monsters

that populate the novel. Inspired by London and New Orleans, as well as steampunk and urban

69
Miéville here departs from Monleón and from other influential theories of monsters as
veiling, reproducing, and “defending the status quo.” Similarly, in “The Dialectic of Fear”
(1983), Franco Moretti describes monsters as metaphorical expressions of “a bad dream” (90),
and he points to the literary dialectic of fear as a means both of confronting and of reproducing
normative desires, from the rationalist exorcising of the proletariat in Frankenstein’s monster to
the economic/social justifications of the Victorian bourgeois class in Dracula. Miéville laments
that such “one-sided” accounts end with “fantasy…being sustained by capitalist irrationalism in
a direct, almost nurturing way” (Newsinger).
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fantasy, the city is a slimy, carnivorous mixture of the organic and the mechanical. The

mechanical aspects are typical of an industrial age, with some advancements made possible by

the practice of ‘thaumaturgy’ or magical sciences. The primary distinguishing features of New

Crobuzon include the central train depot, ‘Perdido Street Station,’ as well as a set of huge rib-

bones from an unknown, ancient creature, towering over the central plaza. Already, the setting

includes multiple generic markers (fantasy’s magic and alternative worlds; science fiction’s

technology; horror’s monsters), but this novel especially focuses on the monsters. The most

notable achievement of the magical-scientific advancements are the ‘Remade,’ individuals

melded grotesquely with machine or animal parts as punishment for crimes, or occasionally in

order to provide a labor/task force.

The city and the Remade are only two among a dizzying number of monsters in Perdido

Street Station. First, the city is populated by many races. Humans are still taken as the norm, but

there are also the cactacae (cactus-people), the khepri (bug-people), the vodyanoi (frog-people),

and the garuda (bird-people), among others. Vampirs/oupirs are mentioned as yet another race,

and zombies also gain a brief mention as the consciously created armies of other nations. The

sewers of New Crobuzon are populated by rats “the size of pigs” (419), as well as cannibalistic

former-humans (420). The Illuminati-esque handlingers, intimately connected to the covert

power structures of the city, are yet another race, made up of disembodied hands that attach

themselves to people and to animals (441-2). The Mayor of New Crobuzon is also humorously

revealed to be in contact with demons/Hellkin (331), as well as with yet another race, the

Weavers. The latter are giant spiders who live partially in and partially out of the material plane,

speaking in quasi-poetic jargon, and whose sole concern is maintaining the aesthetic integrity of

the ‘world-web’ (334-5). In direct contrast to the Weavers, the Construct Council later emerges

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as the accidental artificial intelligence of a network of machines, with a grotesque human body

for a mouthpiece, a man whose head has been cut in half, the brain replaced by a cord linked to

the assembly of machine-parts forming the giant body of the Council (450-60). In addition to

these classes of monsters, there are individuals who have been made monstrous, or have made

themselves into monsters, such as Mr. Motley, a criminal boss who has chosen to have himself

Remade into a riot of transitional parts, impossible to categorize, including several mouths, eyes,

and other seemingly-random limbs. Finally, and most importantly for the plot of the novel, there

are the slake-moths, giant dream-sucking moths who threaten to destroy all other sentient races

in the city.

The sheer number and variety of the monsters expresses the ‘geek’ enthusiasm for

cataloging, but the commodification of monstrosity is also a subject that troubles the novel, and

to that end, it distinguishes between ‘true’ and ‘false’ monsters. Thus, not all of these monsters

are created equally. They are all monstrous in the sense of having elements of the grotesque, but

their monstrosity can also be a matter of perspective (especially for the other sentient races of

Bas-Lag, who do not view themselves as monstrous at all). For the truly abcanny monstrous, the

plot sets up the slake-moths in a role similar to Dracula. The novel begins with a garuda,

Yagharek, whose wings have been cut off as punishment for an unknown crime. In search of a

means to restore his ability to fly, Yagharek hires a scientist, Isaac Der Grimnelbulin. Isaac’s

unorthodox research into unified energy fields may provide Yagharek with the means to fly

again on his own. Isaac is also involved in a covert, mixed-race relationship with Lin, an artist

who has left behind the khepri community. While Isaac is beginning to work on the problem of

flight, Lin is contracted to work for Mr. Motley, one of the most powerful crime bosses in the

city, creating a sculpture of his incongruous mass of many eyes and mouths. Both projects are

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interrupted by the entry of the slake-moths, creatures with Rorschach-like wings, hypnotizing

and rendering victims helpless before sucking out their subconscious material.

Isaac unwittingly causes the release of five slake-moths, who begin to terrorize the city.

The distilled dreams that the moths produce for their young had previously been manufactured

into ‘dreamshit,’ a hallucinogenic drug that appears to allow individuals to share the dreams of

others. As the freed moths prey on more dreams, they excrete a substance that heightens the

dream-states of people all over the city, and the nightmare-atmosphere makes sleep impossible.

Isaac and Yagharek team up, along with Derkan, a reporter/art critic, and Lemuel, a criminal

middle-man, forming a group of comrades seeking to defeat the moths. As in Dracula, this small

group is eventually successful, but the moment of triumph is counterbalanced by the revelation

that Yagharek’s crime has been rape, and Isaac decides not to restore his friend’s wings. Thus,

the defeat of the monsters does not resolve the social and cultural problems raised by the novel.

The slake-moths do, however, resolve a problem in the realm of literary value, in

restoring the substance of the flattened capitalist monstrous. In order to generate this abcanny

revival, Miéville creates a new vampire. Critics have long observed the facility of vampires for

representing capitalism, beginning with Marx’s famous metaphor of capital as a vampire. The

familiar vampire in the Dracula tradition, however, is ambivalent in relation to capitalism.

Dracula himself is an aristocrat, a revenant of the violent past defeated by the purer morality of a

rising bourgeois class. In contrast, Miéville’s vampires cannot be assimilated as a story for

capitalism’s self-justification. They are not metaphors for an older form of barbarous feudalism,

but rather for the barbarities of contemporary capitalism.

The slake-moths also relate to the capitalist production of culture. Probably the most

terrifying aspect of the moths is the fact that they cannot be viewed directly. To look directly at

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the moths is to be rendered helpless, mesmerized by the colorful patterns of their wings. The

moths are thus comparable to the society of the spectacle, in which viewers are de-sensitized in

the process of watching, giving up the capacity to dream for themselves. In an early, brilliant

interpretation of the slake-moths as ‘capitalist monsters,’ Steven Shaviro describes them as “an

expression, or better an exudation, of the self-valorising movements of capital,” in the process of

transforming “human mental creativity…into a tangible commodity” (287). The product

manufactured from the slake-moths, “dreamshit,” might be taken as a metaphor for the escapist

products of commercial culture.70 However, as abcanny expressions of radical alterity, the moths

are not entirely reducible to capitalism. That connection to radical alterity is a necessary

ingredient for truly scary monsters. In contrast to the attractive epigones of Dracula, these de-

familiarized vampires cannot be assimilated into the collapsed discourses of self/other. However,

in order to reach that radical alterity, it is necessary first to represent an epistemological totality.

For Miéville, this totality is Marxist and dialectical. Refraction must be preceded by reflection.

The moths reflect a late capitalist totality of aesthetic perception in order to refract the fragments

of the radically other, ‘bad numinous’ outside of capitalism.

The novel expresses the necessity for refraction through the use of mirrors required for

hunting the slake-moths. People walk somewhat ludicrously backwards, with mirrors attached to

helmets, because only a mirror can neutralize the hypnotic power of the moths’ wings. Insofar as

that terrifying power might be, not just capitalism, but also what is outside of the world as known

70
Critics have pointed out the connection between dreamshit and the culture industry
(Kendrick 18), as well as between dream-consumption and ‘escapist’ fantasies (Miller 2010: 48).
However, as Claire Fox has suggested in conversations about this topic, these critics may be
overstating the assumptions that the drug-induced dreams are entirely deluded: since the
fragments of dreams contained in the drug come from previous victims of the slake-moths, these
experiences of dreaming are also communal.
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through capitalism, then the mirrors are a force of domestication, momentarily taming alterity

through representation. Here Miéville both departs from and revitalizes the social realist

tradition. If the mirror of representation is domesticating, then it is not enough to strive for an

accurate representation of the negative effects of capitalism. The capitalist totality needs to be

reflected, and then reflected again (refracted), in order to reach the substance of radical alterity.

The hypnotic effects of the slake-moths work similarly. As the wormy Vermishank (the chair of

Isaac’s department who has been capitalizing off the slake-moths) explains, “seeing them

reflected negates the effect, even though it is formally an identical sight, as their wings are

already mirrored in each other. But, and this is very interesting, reflect it again—look at them

through two mirrors, I mean, like a periscope—and they can hypnotize you again” (374). The

primary realist move of accurately representing the world of late capitalism might only produce a

house of mirrors, infinitely regressing into more and more of the same, remaining within the

capitalist system. By contrast, the refracted realism of fantasy can restore the force of the

sublime, by reflecting the totality of the world as known through capitalism. The form of the

double-reflection appears capitalist, as a result of the available epistemological tools, but it also

carries something of the outside, in the very act of reflecting on the reflection.

The move of double reflection utilizes the aesthetics of the fantastic to solve the issue of

the flattening of difference in contemporary literary discourses. In addition to revitalizing artistic

value, the fantastic double-reflection breathes new life into the force of critique. Instead of the

infinite regress of deconstructive moves that posit but never quite overcome the systems that they

critique, the double-reflection posits both the system and the outside-of-the-system, in order to

make the latter available as a vital, if never fully knowable, force. The moths thus radically

negate “self-reflexive thought,” through which, as Vermishank explains, “the instincts and needs

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and desires and intuitions are folded in on themselves and we reflect on our thoughts and then

reflect on the reflection, endlessly…Our thoughts ferment like the purest liquor. That is what the

slake-moths drink…the fine wine of sapience and sentience itself, the subconscious” (375).

Returning to Derrida’s dangerous supplement, these monsters exist at the limits of the human;

they are adding to the understanding of the category of the human (especially as it has evolved

under capitalism), as well as threatening to take over that space through substitution and

negation. Because they are abcanny, however, they are also radically outside of epistemological

systems. Whereas human rational reflection works in the structure of infinite regress, reflections

on reflections, the slake moths add an element of radical alterity, and the gambit of the novel is

that, by reflecting on the abcanny, representation can be refracted to recover the force of the

unknowable. The quality of literary value, to an extent, can be said to reside in the radical alterity

of the slake-moths, in their non-reducibility to the epistemological systems through which they

are only partially knowable.

In contradistinction to the truly monstrous slake-moths, the novel also represents and

expounds upon the false monsters produced by capitalism. In particular, the monstrosity of the

Remade is a consequence of deforming properties of capitalist production. In his research into

flight and garudas, Isaac attends the “Weird Circus” of a local fair, which advertises an exhibit of

a real garuda (rare in the city apart from a small, self-contained community). Instead of an

authentic garuda, he and Derkhan are confronted by a sad man who has been Remade to appear

like a garuda, speaking through a human mouth beneath a mechanical beak, “reading from a

script that would have disgraced the lowest playhouse” (91). Isaac struggles to explain his

response: “I wouldn’t be half so depressed if it’d just been a scam, someone in a costume,

something like that. It’s the . . . fucking indignity of it that really sticks in the craw . . .” (93) In

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other words, the horror of capitalist art may be that humans become the material for producing

aesthetic commodities. Derkhan offers more detail, explaining how her roles as an art critic and

as a political journalist have sickeningly overlapped in the Remade:

Remaking’s creativity gone bad. Gone rotten. Gone rancid. I remember you once asked

me if it was hard to balance writing about art and writing for RR…It’s the same thing,

Isaac. Art’s something you choose to make . . . it’s a bringing together of . . . of

everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri,

whatever. More of a person. Even with Remaking a germ of that survives…I don’t want

to live in a city where Remaking is the highest art. (94)

Derkhan’s articulation of the purpose of art here is both simple and poignant. It is a humanist

justification that has been more or less out of favor since the advent of literary theory and the

imperative of recognizing the normativity of ‘human’ as a category. Nonetheless, the revival of

something like humanism is all the more necessary given the effects of capitalism on art, through

which the tradition of expressive creativity has become buried, or even deformed, by the more

powerful transformation of the human into the monstrous-as-commodity. Derkhan’s statements

further recall Miéville’s “Theses on Monsters,” a series of assertions about monsters that

concludes, “The saw that We Have Seen the Real Monsters and They Are Us is neither

revelation, nor clever, nor interesting, nor true. It is a betrayal of the monstrous, and of

humanity.” Thus the abcanny, in its mixture of materiality and radical negation, is necessary for

the recovery of a creativity not determined by capitalism.

The false monster-izing of capitalism infecting aesthetic production, by this logic, has

also circumscribed the possibilities of postmodern ‘art.’ Mr. Motley is another false monster, and

his views on aesthetics reflect the illusion of celebrating false monstrosity for its own sake. In

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expounding on his commission for the sculpture contracted from Isaac’s girlfriend, Motley

explains, “This is what makes the world, Ms. Lin. I believe this to be the fundamental dynamic.

Transition. The point where one thing becomes another. It is what makes you, the city, the world,

what they are. And that is the theme I’m interested in. The zone where the disparate become part

of the whole. The hybrid zone” (41). In celebrating hybridity, Motley takes the logic of

Remaking to its extremes. The absorption of the postmodernist techniques of deconstruction has

at times led to very similar theories about contemporary art, that what is valuable is the ‘hybrid

zone.’71 Through Motley, the novel suggests that hybridity and formlessness are not self-evident

causes for celebration. In terms of politics, Motley’s ability to refuse the integration of a

recognizable identity is in fact a privilege, a fashionable meaninglessness that enables deliberate

mystifications. Instead of subverting hierarchies, this self-created hybrid monster avoids the

responsibility of communicating, upholding the distinction of its own savvy flights into ‘high

aesthetics.’

The deliberate mystification of this version of art corresponds with Miéville’s views on

the limits of postmodernism. According to Miéville, postmodern theory tends to be too idealistic,

in the sense of being caught up in ideas rather than focusing on material realities. He notes that

the “postmodern fascination with hybridity and miscegenation too often blurs into a fetishistic

and sometimes quite self-indulgent celebration of marginality for its own sake” (Gordon

“Reveling” 364). When this occurs, postmodern ideals can lose their political applications. In the

novel, Motley is a ruthless criminal, profiting from corruption and misery. Thus, Motley’s views

71
As Carl Freedman explains, relying on Fredric Jameson’s seminal description of
postmodern art as pastiche, or the circulation of empty forms, Motley takes postmodern capitalist
logic to its extreme. Motley has Remade himself into a commodity, made up of commodities,
things stuck together and next to each other without logical organization, seemingly haphazardly
and thus “resistant to being understood in any intellectually totalizing way” (2015: 38).
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of art demonstrate the emptiness of celebrating the ‘hybrid zone’ for its own sake, and without

any sense of the broader picture of social and material imbrications. Miéville also finds

postmodernism to be limiting in a commitment to Marxism, which for him provides “a unified

perspective” for making sense of social injustice (360). That unified perspective is crucial in

order to avoid the sort of “cultural relativism” that might generate “terrible capitulations to

inequity” (364). In this view, postmodernism encourages these oversights insofar as its “dislike

of grand narratives” can generate a both/and perspective that runs “a real risk of minimizing

exploitative and/or oppressive cultural practices, or rendering them immune to critique” (371).

Cross-cultural injustices become invisible when there is too much emphasis on the local and the

incommensurability of embedded positions.

It is important to recognize, however, that Miéville does not disavow everything

associated with postmodernism, much less with hybridity. In fact, he argues that his dialectical

totalities are equally invested in “blurred interstices, gray areas, hard cases” (364). The

difference lies in the extent to which these differences are located within a unifying perspective

that enables cross-cultural critiques. The need for a grounding of critique recalls descriptions of

the postcritical as a pragmatic investment in restoring the ability to construct arguments, and

even in terms of the role of affirmation. Miéville wants to be able to affirm a metanarrative that

he finds deeply convincing. His dissatisfaction with postmodernism thus refers particularly to

how the philosophy has been constructed by theorists like Lyotard and Baudrillard. In the latter,

Miéville decries a “vacuous nihilism” (Conspiracy 19). Similarly, Motley shores up his own

privilege by transforming himself into an amalgam of contingent positions that do not resolve

into a coherent point of view.

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 Motley is connected to a stereotypical and limited version of postmodernism, one that

bases its value on celebrating feelings of disgust, reveling in the grotesque to support a

fashionably oppositional, marginal stance. The slake-moths, by contrast, are both grotesque and

sublime, reaching towards an overwhelming totality. There is a kind of awful beauty in their

reflection of both consumerist and aesthetic desires, in the multi-colored wings that take the

‘slaking’ of desire to a deadly extreme. In order to inspire sublime awe, these monsters both

reflect and negate the totality of aesthetic perception under capitalism. And the reflection of that

totality is crucial, in order to distinguish the moths’ radical alterity from relativist celebrations of

any form of hybridity or marginality. In other words, the reflection of an epistemological

capitalist totality enables Miéville to posit, through the material presence of the slake-moths, the

affirmative grounds for a Marxist critique of cross-cultural oppression.

And yet, the totalizing framework leading to these abcanny monsters is still only a single

construction, albeit a rather convincing one. Because Miéville takes the reaction against

sympathetic monsters to such an extreme, his framework tends to overwrite the potentials of

more local, positive attachments of love and of desire. Thus, the following section considers a

story from Kelly Link, in which monsters become sympathetic vessels of positive attachments,

although no less strange and off-putting. Instead of positing a substance of radical alterity, Link’s

monsters demonstrate that the discourse of the uncanny is not necessarily flattened by

commodification. Her short story reconstructs the literary as an instrumental, local form of value

in spite of the influence of capitalism.

Another Alternative to Commodified Monsters: Kelly Link’s Restored Uncanny

Kelly Link’s work is not always classified as ‘Weird,’ since she is not as directly engaged with

the radical strangeness of monstrous tentacles in the tradition of Lovecraft. As with Miéville,

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Link has played a very influential role in discussions of contemporary fantasy and literary value.

In 2000, she and her husband Gavin Grant founded Small Beer Press, an independent publisher

invested in literary fantasy, whose quirky titles have been emblematic of recent shifts in the

genres of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Her short stories have in themselves also been

taken as emblematic of the new generation of fantasy writers.72 The salient feature, for the

present discussion, is the inclusion of fantasy elements that are not questioned within the reality

of the textual world. In “The New Boyfriend,” these fantasy elements enable Link to create a

space for re-introducing the human structure of the uncanny. Whereas Miéville stresses the

radical difference and unknowability of monsters, Link picks up on the brighter, more

sympathetic forms of monstrosity that circulate through Twilight and other teen paranormal

romances. Instead of necessarily associating brightness or positive attachments with

commodified manipulation, however, Link’s story revitalizes the uncanny through the messiness

of human desires, which are not fully contained or co-opted by commercialization.

As in Perdido Street Station, Link here incorporates commodified monsters on the level

of the narrative world; indeed, the sole difference between this story-world and our own is the

fad for ‘Boyfriends’ among teenage girls. Boyfriends are automatons, large dolls that come in

Werewolf, Vampire, and Ghost varieties. Link’s story is related to teen romance, but it is mostly

about the love and jealousy between teenaged girls. Immy, the narrator, is unable to help being

jealous of her friend Ainslie, who seems to get everything she wants. To Immy’s chagrin, Ainslie

even manages to get a Ghost Boyfriend (whom she names ‘Mint’) for her birthday, in spite of the

72
For example, Link serves as one of the main examples that Gary K. Wolfe uses to
characterize “Twenty-First Century Stories” by a generation of writers working with fantastic
genres in recombinant strains that are postmodern and “self-aware,” but that also “achieve a kind
of emotional and aesthetic coherence…that is rare in contemporary fiction” (168).
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fact that these commodities are no longer available from sellers. Immy secretly personalizes the

Ghost Boyfriend, adding locks of blonde and black hair, originally meant as a present for Ainslie

and a symbol of their friendship, inside a compartment beneath Mint’s synthetic tongue. The

placement of the real hair inside the fake ghost creates a genuine haunting. At first, Immy

believes that this newly enhanced Mint is in love with her. The romance, it turns out, is really

between Mint and himself, as the hair belonged to a pair of lovers. In order to preserve their

union, the female lover attempts to strangle Immy, who barely manages to save herself by

extracting the hair from the doll’s mouth.

The story thus distinguishes between real and fake monsters. The flattened, commodified

monstrous becomes comical in the Boyfriends, whose canned answers are programmed to be

‘educational.’ For instance, the Vampire Boyfriends are characterized by

endless hovering and the endless brooding and all the endless talk about how delicious

you are and eternity, and they like you to read poetry at them, the really old-fashioned

rhyming kind, even. It’s supposed to be educational, okay? Like the way Werewolf

Boyfriends go on and on about the environment and also are always trying to get you to

go running with them. (368)

By making monster boyfriends into literal commodities, and by describing Immy’s cynical

reactions, Link offers a complex and accurate picture of the emotions of teenage girls. Immy

invests her desires in Mint, driven by the hope of creating something more ‘real’ in comparison

to her ‘fake’ life. Looking at herself and her friends, Immy thinks, “Let’s all get fake drunk and

have fake fun with Ainslie and her fake Boyfriends. Because she’s fairly sure all of this is fake,

this whole night, the way she finds herself acting…And if it’s not fake, if it’s all real, this fun,

these friends, this life, then that’s even worse, isn’t it?” (365) This passage demonstrates

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teenagers’ keen sense of bullshit, combined with the lack of clarity about what to expect from

reality. Instead of finding a real relationship, Immy meets a real monster, and real monsters, like

the ghosts that inhabit Mint, are more likely to strangle than to kiss.

In this process, Immy finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish between real and fake

love. At first, Immy applies her notions of love to her relations with Mint. She feels that they are

“making each other more real the longer they look at each other, and isn’t that what love should

be? Isn’t that what love should do?” (379) The adjective ‘real’ here corresponds with a kind of

positive recognition in the eyes of another person. In her idealistic expectations of romantic

fulfillment, Immy is also willing to make sacrifices for Mint, ironically loving him in spite of his

fakeness: “If he were a real boy, he could come along, too, for all the other, real stuff. But he

isn’t, and he can’t, and that’s okay. She’ll take what she can get and be happy about it, because

love isn’t about convenience and frozen yogurt and real life. That isn’t what love is about” (389).

Unfortunately, ‘convenience and frozen yogurt and real life’ are, in many ways, exactly what

love is about.

Herein lies the danger of commodification, in the hyperreal idealization of love. The

Boyfriends are designed to be hyperrealistic, with slightly bigger heads and eyes to “make you

feel good when you look at them, like how you’re supposed to feel when you look at a baby”

(395). That positive recognition, for Immy, carries the weight of other emotions, particularly her

complicated loving and resentful feelings towards her best friend. It isn’t just that the Boyfriends

trick people into loving them, but also that love itself may be a sort of conscious trick. As

Immy’s father explains, “if it’s all a trick, it’s the best trick I know. Your mom and I love you.

You love us. You and Ainslie love each other” (386). Thus, love and commodification also

become difficult to distinguish from one another. What is the difference between one trick and

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another? And yet, the story stretches the limits of idealized, hyperreal love, in order to generate a

different shock of recognition. Instead of being kissed, Immy is nearly strangled.

In “The New Boyfriend,” monstrous commodities are haunted by human desire. The

triangulated desire of a girl for her best friend returns through the uncanny resemblance of dead

lovers. The complicated emotions of love, jealousy, and hatred pass through a flattened

commodity to return with vital force. Like Twilight, Link’s story falls within what Catherine

Spooner describes as the ‘happy Gothic,’ or more celebratory forms of romantic and comic

monsters, but she ironizes those forms in order to restore the uncanny current to the monstrous.

By reflecting on commodified forms of monstrosity, both Link and Miéville are able to restore

something of the depth of structure in the monstrous. Instead of a loss of the human through

commodification, these texts demonstrate how the human might return by means of the capacity

of fantasy to imagine truly scary monsters.

In terms of literary value, however, “The New Boyfriend” is less concerned with

restoring a pure distinction between the instrumental and the non-instrumental. Link does not

imagine a totality, or a space outside of capitalism. Instead, she offers contingent, embodied

positions within capitalism, pointing out how commodified forms influence the funneling of

human desires, as well as the fact that the messiness of human desire cannot be fully contained.

In spite of abstract theories about the flattening influences of commodification, desire here

returns as an embodied force, ironically channeled into disembodied ghosts. Link’s story thus

offers a postcritical solution to the problem of the monstrous, without necessarily reviving a

normative structure of literary value, in contrast to the non-instrumental value of Miéville’s

abcanny monsters. In the following sections, I will examine how Miéville revises the values of

fantasy and science fiction in order to synthesize a new genre and a new value, separate from

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what he views as the tainted commercial values of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, in the

estrangement of the Weird.

Combining the Values of Science Fiction and Fantasy

Perdido Street Station exemplifies a transitional moment in fantastic literary value. In A Short

History of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn describes this moment, just after the turn of the twentieth-

first century, when the lines between science fiction and fantasy became very blurry, as

evidenced by the shortlisting of both Perdido Street Station and Mary Gentle’s Ash for the 2001

Arthur C. Clarke Award. Thus, “two novels most readers felt to be fantasy were shortlisted” for a

science fiction award (185); moreover, the award did go to Miéville’s novel, which also won the

British Fantasy Award for the same year, as well as being nominated for the Hugo, Nebula,

World Fantasy, and British Science Fiction awards. The recognition of Perdido Street as both

fantasy and science fiction is an indicator of the spreading influence of the ‘British SF Boom,’ or

the increasing visibility and number of genre-blurring fantastic literary texts in Britain around the

turn of the twenty-first century. As Istvan Csciscery-Ronay, Jr., explains, Boom authors, such as

“M. John Harrison, Jeff Noon, China Miéville, Philip Pullman, Michael Marshall Smith,” share

an ability “to be read unambiguously as sf while they can also be read unambiguously as

fantasy” (qtd. Bould, “Situating” 394). Although fantasy and science fiction had been blended

before, and even relatively often, the acclaim for Perdido Street Station and similarly blended

texts involves more direct revisions to the continued denigration of fantasy in Suvinian criteria of

science fiction.73

73
Further evidence of this shift can be found in the revision to the description of Science
Fiction Studies #87. The journal previously solicited “articles and book reviews on all forms of
science fiction, including utopian fiction, but not, except for purposes of comparison and
contrast, mythological or supernatural fantasy,” but the excluding final clause was dropped in
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 Even before Darko Suvin’s (1979) definition of science fiction as the literature of

cognitive estrangement, the divide between fantasy and science fiction involved a hierarchical

division. As Mark Bould explains, this line began to be drawn most clearly in the US pulp

tradition beginning with Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories. In 1926, Gernsback coined the term

‘scientifiction’ (Luckhurst 194), spurring the increasing definition of ‘hard sf’ as concerned with

empirical science (Bould, “Situating” 405). The science of hard sf became the counterpoint to the

magic of fantasy, giving birth to “two crippled (and self-crippling) offspring” in the “distinct

commodity-identities” of sf and fantasy (Bould, “Situating” 407). Thus, from Bould’s

perspective, the blending of science fiction and fantasy returns to the literary potential of genres

that have been commodified.

This process, however, has been much different for science fiction than for fantasy. The

constructions of sf/f genres interact with constructions of gender. Science fiction remains more

closely associated with masculinity, the concerns of the intellectual, while fantasy is more

closely tied to femininity and to emotional comfort, the non-intellectual or non-cognitive. These

associations may be, in part, a result of the genres’ commodification; in any case, the association

of science fiction with intellectualism has, not surprisingly, led to science fiction becoming more

readily legitimated in the academy. Istvan Csicsery Ronay, Jr., offers a reminder that the “sense

of wonder” is a quality of both fantasy and science fiction in its pulp roots, and he explains that

this quality has received less scholarly attention because “the sense of wonder resists critical

2002 (Bould, “Situating” 394). Similarly, as Andrew Milner notes, “The World Science Fiction
Society, which for decades made its annual Hugo Awards on near-Suvinian criteria (despite
fantasy long being eligible), broke new ground when it awarded its 2001 prize for the best novel
to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000), followed by several film and
television awards to fantasy between 2002 and 2007, including The Lord of the Rings, an episode
of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Pan’s Labyrinth (202).
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commentary” (71). Of course, the fact of that resistance does not preclude scholarly attempts to

understand and to describe wonder, so the question remains why fantasy should have been so

long considered less valuable.

In this regard, the histories of science fiction, fantasy, and horror all overlap, with roots in

the romance tradition. Romance, understood in its older form of fantastical stories, has long been

considered less valuable. As Catherine Spooner explains, Gothic and romance were

“indistinguishable in the late eighteenth century, when the term romance had not yet acquired its

specific connotations of courtship, signaling rather an anti-realist aesthetic” (23). According to

Luke R.J. Maynard, the romantic tradition became questionable even as it was absorbed into

Gothic fiction. Maynard notes that early assessments of the Gothic exhibit the preference for the

‘probable’ and a corresponding dismissal of the ‘improbable’ (8-9). In Tzvetan Todorov’s terms,

the distinction lies between the uncanny and the marvellous, which Maynard recasts as an earlier

“Gothic Schism” between Ann Radcliffe’s supernatural-explained and Matthew Lewis’s

marvellous-unexplained. As a consequence of the preference for the former, “Popular literature

has not since been able to completely ‘live down’ the notion that stories of the supernatural are in

some way inherently juvenile” (Maynard 11). In other words, fantasy continues to be devalued

for its supposed lack of fidelity to empirical reality.

Marxist critics, especially, tend to adhere to the negative views of fantasy inherited from

Suvin.74 Suvin’s cognitive estrangement refers to the conceptual organization of alternative

74
In Archaeologies of the Future (2005), Jameson brings together his work on science
fiction, in a perspective that reinforces Suvin’s preference for the altered historicism of science
fiction over ahistorical, idealistic fantasy. That these preconceptions were still dominant among
Marxist critics in 2009 is ironically evidenced by the title of the volume in which Miéville argues
most stridently for the equal value of fantasy relative to science fiction. As Miéville notes, the
term “fantasy” was dropped from the title, Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, and he
attributes this exclusion to the continuing “ideological hold” of Suvin’s definition (232).
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realities in fiction. The strangeness of these other-worlds combines the Russian formalist concept

of ostranenie with Bertolt Brecht’s ‘estrangement-effect.’ For Suvin, science fiction readers

confront a ‘novum,’ which is a device that spurs cognitive re-conceptions of the world, alongside

an awareness of alienation. In marking out the benefits of science fiction, Suvin also famously

excludes (and excoriates) fantasy. Whereas the alternative worlds of science fiction are

‘cognitively organized,’ the estrangements of fantasy occur though “the imposition of anti-

cognitive laws.” Suvin writes fantasy off as “a sub-literature of mystification,” and he sees the

blurring of the lines between fantasy and sf as “rampantly sociopathological” (9). In short, Suvin

viewed science fiction as the literature of the future and fantasy as ideologically backwards.75

China Miéville has directly intervened in the project of recovering the value of fantasy

literature, contesting the “ideological hold” of Suvin’s defining assumptions that fantasy is

manipulative, whereas science fiction is not (232). Instead, Miéville describes both genres as

ideological constructions, emphasizing that science fictional cognition is also an effect of

narrative persuasion. The ideology of cognition further depends on a romanticized, bureaucratic

version of scientific progress. Meanwhile, fantasy, no better or worse, simply employs a different

ideology, the ideology of Story expressed through “the logic of narrative” (242-3). The

association of fantasy with ‘narrative logic’ supports the overall argument here that the value of

fantasy depends on a sincere approach to narrative. At the same time, the commitment to

representing the “alienation from reality” requires locating the value of fantastic literature in “the

fundamental alterity-as-estrangement shared across the field” (244). Thus, both cognitive rigor

75
In 2000, Suvin re-examined the genres and revised his earlier statements to consider
fantasy as worthy of analysis, but he continues to prefer science fiction, seeing the value of
fantasy as rare and occurring against the grain of the genre. Likewise, Fredric Jameson’s essay
“Radical Fantasy” (2002) recognizes the value of some fantasy, but Jameson continues to stress
that fantasies only rarely achieve the utopian historical potential of science fiction.
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(sf) and narrative desire (fantasy) are, in Miéville’s view, imperfect formal techniques for

representing the value of estrangement. Through Weird fiction, Miéville seeks a dialectical

combination of science fiction and fantasy, giving birth to an integrated weirdness that is both

human and monstrous.

The Dialectical Birth of a Genre: Science Fiction + Fantasy = Weird

In Perdido Street Station, the defeat of the slake-moths requires a dialectical integration of

science fiction and fantasy, creating the genre that would soon be called the ‘New Weird.’ In

seeking a solution to Yagharek’s problem of flight, Isaac builds a machine which taps into ‘crisis

energy.’ As Isaac explains, “The transition from one state to another’s affected by taking

something—a social group, a piece of wood, a hex—to a place where its interactions with other

forces make its own energy pull against its current state…it’s in the nature of things to enter

crisis, as part of what they are. Things turn themselves inside out by virtue of being things” (169-

70). He gives the example of the “potential energy” in a piece of wood that is held above the

ground, ready to fall. Crisis theory would posit that the gravity of the earth is interacting with an

already-available crisis-energy in the wood to pull it out of its static position. As Carl Freedman

notes, crisis energy is dialectical (2015: 41). Perdido Street Station applies that dialectical

potential energy to revitalize the static aspects of the science fiction and fantasy genres.

In order to defeat the slake-moths, Isaac uses his crisis machine to create ‘bait,’

transmitting a signal that mimics the model of human consciousness. He hooks one input of the

machine to a man (an old man involuntarily sacrificed for the greater good, and a built-in tragic

edge to the triumph over the monsters). Then he attaches two other inputs, one to a Weaver, and

one to the Construct Council. The Weavers, again, are giant spiders who speak in a quasi-poetic

jargon, and whose only concern is maintaining the aesthetic integrity of the ‘world web.’

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Because, for the Weavers, “dreams and consciousness were one” (630), they are able to stand in

for the subconscious aspect of human consciousness. The Construct Council, a viral

consciousness born of repetitive mechanical codes, “thought with chill exactitude. Concepts

were reduced to a multiplicity of on-off switches, a soulless solipsism that processed information

without the complication of arcane desires or passion” (630). As such, the Construct Council

stands in for the rational aspects of human consciousness. The crisis machine thus takes a human

brain (input x) and compares it with the Weaver (input y) and the Construct Council (input z). As

a result, two equations are true simultaneously. To the extent that human consciousness can be

reduced to an irrational subconscious plus a rational consciousness, x = y + z. However, “the

data-flows under analysis were not just the sum of their constituent parts. y and z were unified,

bounded wholes. And most crucially, so was x…It was integral to the form of each that they

were totalities” (633). Thus, human consciousness cannot be reduced to the equation of

“rationalism plus dreams,” and so the machine also calculates that x ≠ y + z. The crisis energy, in

the contradiction of these two equations, amplifies the signal of simulated consciousness,

attracting the moths. When the slake-moths feed on this signal, their bodies explode.

The simulation of human consciousness is more than a trap for slake-moths. If the

purpose of art is to augment what it means to be human, the simulated dialectical model, human

= dreams plus reason, is also the content aimed for in artistic representations. However, insofar

as this model can never represent the bounded totality of consciousness, whose “layers” of

dreams and reason “are dependent on each other,” art must also strive to represent the fact that

human ≠ dream plus reason. The factors x and y, dreams and reason, are also potentially

interpretable as fantasy and science fiction. While fantasy privileges the fulfillment of dreams (or

narrative desire), science fiction prefers rational logic. Because dreams and reason are not

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isolatable from one another, however, neither model is sufficient in itself for representing human

consciousness. Thus, Miéville implies that the dialectical relation of science fiction and fantasy

might be a vehicle for creating a nearer-representation of human consciousness. What emerges

is, paradoxically, readable as fantasy, as science fiction, and as Weird fiction. The crisis energy

generated by this process is similar to the force of radical estrangement, distilled from both sf

and fantasy. In other words, Miéville’s model of consciousness becomes a model of fantastic

fiction, in which science fiction and fantasy are synthesized into a new genre, the ‘New Weird.’76

New Weird, New Genre, New Canon: Revising the Values of Fantasy in the Weird

The Weird has become one of the most fruitful recent topics in studies of fantastic fiction. As

with other legitimating strategies, such as the Slipstream and Interstitial Arts movements, the

Weird blurs the lines between fantastic genres themselves, as well as the line between the

fantastic and literary genres. However, whereas both Slipstream and Interstitial Arts are

dependent on hybridization, the Weird has the advantage of relying on its own separate canon of

fiction. China Miéville’s fiction and criticism have both been instrumental in bolstering this

movement.

Weird fiction existed prior to Miéville’s interventions, most notably outlined in the work

of S.T. Joshi. In fact, Joshi has been extremely prolific, editing or writing over two hundred

books, including both literary criticism and fiction.77 Joshi’s study The Weird Tale (1990)

identifies Lovecraft as the primary figurehead of a type of fiction mainly produced between 1880

and 1940. In “Establishing the Canon of Weird Fiction” (2003), Joshi refers to himself as a “true

76
Mark Bould makes a similar, though brief, argument, comparing Miéville’s model of
consciousness to Brian Attebery’s description of ‘science fantasy.’ Bould explains that Miéville
creates something new by giving both sf and fantasy equal weight (“Situating” 408).
77
See 200 Books by S.T. Joshi.
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elitist,” refusing to be taken in by the presumed divides between high and low culture, as well as

the growing ‘populist’ assumption that value derives from popular appeal. Instead, the ‘true

elitist’ “seeks only the best and has intolerance only for mediocrity,” wherever it is found (335).

Joshi argues that Weird fiction needs to be valued for its own literary merit.

Contemporary authors, especially China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer, have responded

to Joshi’s call, reviving the value of Lovecraftian fiction through the New Weird. The

publication of Perdido Street Station was an important transitional moment, leading to

discussions of how to classify the work of Miéville and similar writers who were blending

science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Most critics attribute the coining of the term ‘New Weird’ to

M. John Harrison, who initiated a discussion in April, 2003, asking about ‘New Weird’ on the

website for The Third Alternative magazine.78 In 2008, Jeff and Ann VanderMeer published an

anthology titled The New Weird, which includes a partial reproduction of that original

conversation. In the discussion, Harrison explains that he first heard the term “in conversation

with China Miéville his self” (318, sic). The wry admiration of Harrison’s tone demonstrates the

importance of Miéville’s influence in creating this term, but he hardly created it alone. The

interlocutors of that first discussion include several authors and a few critics, such as Steph

Swainston, Justina Robertson, and Jonathan Strahan.79 The conversation develops through a few

78
Published from 1994 to 2005, The Third Alternative magazine was another influence
leading to the birth of the New Weird. According to sf-encyclopedia.com, the “title neatly
established that the magazine was not publishing straightforward sf, fantasy or horror, but a third
alternative, stories of the mind, of the psychological and human condition,” and the magazine
“helped develop and establish the New Weird in Britain.”
79
Miéville did not participate in this discussion, but he did respond by publishing a short
piece in the same magazine a few months later, entitled “Long Live the New Weird.” He has also
intervened in the process of canonization by publishing multiple online lists (2002; 2012) of
recommended Weird fiction, and, in addition to critical work on monsters, Miéville contributed a
chapter, “Weird Fiction,” to the The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2009).
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attempts at definition, before turning to a debate about the benefits of labels themselves.

Eventually, those skeptical of labels come around at the urging of Harrrison, who explains, “The

struggle to name is the struggle to own” (326). Harrison views the New Weird as a strategy for

“speaking outwards” (331), from the community of genre writing to the broader literary

community. The New Weird thus consciously revises fantastic literary value.

In its more narrowly defined form, the New Weird appears to have been short-lived. The

VanderMeers offer the most-cited definition of New Weird, as

a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place

found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as

the jumping off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science

fiction and fantasy. New Weird has a visceral, in-the-moment quality that often uses

elements of surreal or transgressive horror for its tone, style, and effects (xvi).

In addition to VanderMeer and Miéville, the authors most often mentioned in association with

the New Weird include K.J. Bishop and Steph Swainston. According to Miéville, the New Weird

has already “had its moment” (Noys and Murphy 202), which was inextricable from the political

optimism of the Seattle strikes against the World Trade Organization (203). The bounded-ness of

this statement, however, has been overcome by the retrospective creation of a ‘Weird Canon’

that begins in 1880 and extends into the present. The political and formal specificity of the New

Weird has thus shifted to rejoin the broader category of Weird fiction, solidified in another

anthology: The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (2012).80

80
For a supplementary discussion of these developments, see Jeffrey Weinstock’s “The
New Weird” in New Directions in Popular Fiction (2016). Weinstock identifies and expands
upon the same pivotal moments (the 2003 discussion and the 2008/2012 anthologies).
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 The editors’ introduction follows the historical trajectory of the Weird, beginning with

the exemplary case of “The Lovecraft Circle,” and then expanding internationally across the

twentieth century. In the present, “The Weird has…fragmented” through authors who

“demonstrate an intimate knowledge of both the Kafka and Lovecraft strands of weird fiction”

(xx). These two “strands,” along with frequent references to surrealism, highlight the influences

of different positions in the Weird, from the avant-garde to pulp fiction. This trajectory overlaps

with the Slipstream movement in forming a literary fantastic. Indeed, Michael Moorcock’s

description of “the weird story,” as “precisely designed to disturb” (xiii) recalls explanations of

the Slipstream as literature that makes readers ‘feel very strange.’ The main difference is that the

lineage of Slipstream derives from the science fictional, intellectual value of cognitive

estrangement. Weird fiction, by contrast, emphasizes the palpable, pulpable influences of the

gothic/horror and fantasy.

Both fantasy and the gothic are associated with myths, superstitions, and the unknowable,

in counterpoint to science fiction’s emphasis on the knowable. The credulous element of fantasy

is preserved, to a certain extent, in the Weird, as evidenced by the phrase “surrender to the

weird.” The “surrender to the weird” is also what distinguishes Weird fiction from metafictional

literary postmodernism. As Miéville notes, “this is fiction that trusts the reader, and therefore,

surrenders to the Weird. It is not postmodern and fourth-wall-breaking, peering out of the

artefact to wink at the reader” (“Long Live” 3). The VanderMeers revise this slightly: “The

‘surrender’ (or ‘belief’) of the writer can take many forms, some of them even involving the use

of postmodern techniques that do not undermine the surface reality of the text (2008: xvi).

Slipstream, by contrast, often does ‘undermine the surface reality of the text.’ This dichotomy

between primary naivety and primary skepticism is a consequence of the inclusion of fantasy’s

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unknowable myths as valuable, in counterpoint to the science fictional valuing of the

knowable/cognitive.

Miéville describes the belief in monsters, at the level of narrative, as a “radical naivety

and radical forgetting of the fact that this is a work of fiction,” which “pulls the readers in,” so

that they experience estrangement, rather than having it built into the frame of the narrative, as

with the “empty irony” of postmodern metafiction (Shapiro 66, emphasis original). Through a

discussion with Stephen Shapiro, the terms “critical naivety” and “critical intuition” are also

suggested as the desired responses to “an internally coherent world” which encourages initial

belief and then awe before radical estrangement (67-8). The point is that readers do not have to

engage in interpretative critique in order to enjoy the fictional world. The slake-moths are

metaphors for the monster-izing function of capitalism, but they are also just cool monsters. In

theory, Miéville suggests that this technique, encouraging immersive reading, might have an

even stronger effect on readers than beginning with the distanced irony of postmodern

metafiction. In order to create a ‘critical’ fantasy, however, the uncritical aspects of fantasy need

to be counterbalanced in other ways. As we have seen, Miéville relocates the critical impulse in

the totalizing reflections of monsters, but he also embeds critique by reacting against the fantasy

tradition as established by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Not Another Fairy Tale: Critical Fantasy’s Ambivalence towards ‘Story’ and the

Intractable Hermeneutics of Monstrous Alienation

While embracing the sense of wonder and an internally coherent secondary world, Miéville’s

fantasy rejects much of what has been associated with the fantasy tradition. In particular,

Miéville is famous for his acid remark that Tolkien “is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature”

220
(Doctorow).81 Miéville qualifies his position by citing Tolkien as a good influence, insofar as he

invented “an impossible world which believes in itself” (“With One Bound”). He also credits

Tolkien with some truly scary monsters (“There and Back”), but other than that, Tolkien’s legacy

is toxic, as far as Miéville is concerned. Among the charges levelled at Tolkien-esque fantasy are

that it is reactionary, clichéd, escapist, condescendingly consoling, and attached to a hierarchical

status-quo. Interestingly, these critiques assume a shorthand form in descriptions of Weird fiction

as, precisely, not like a fairy tale (Anders 59; “Long Live” 3). This phrase implies a particular

definition of a ‘fairy tale,’ along the lines of Tolkien’s comforting fairy-stories, and for Miéville,

it is the comforting/consoling aspects of fantasy that are most regressive.

More specifically, when Miéville states that Weird fiction is not like a fairy tale, he goes

on to say that it is not supported by any “notion of transcendental moralism” (Bould,

“Appropriate”). Transcendental moralism creates the type of story in which the good are

rewarded and the bad are punished. For Tolkien, this is expressed through the ‘Consolation of

the Happy Ending,’ or more specifically, through eucatastrophe, the ‘sudden joyous turn’ when

misfortunes are reversed, bad spells broken (60). In one of his early diatribes against Tolkien,

Miéville notes wryly, “In other words, it becomes a point of principle that his literature

mollycoddles its readers…The myth of an idyllic past is not oppositional to capitalism, but

consolation for it. Troubled by the world? Close your eyes and think of Middle Earth” (Miéville,

“Tolkien” 2002). For Miéville, to say that the function of literature is consolation is both

deluding and condescending.

81
According to an article from The Guardian entitled “Miéville: A Life in Writing,”
Miéville has lost some of his fervor for this position since he has been repeatedly asked at
conferences to “do the Tolkien thing.”
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 The consolation that Miéville is arguing against here, however, is not a quality unique to

the fantasy genre. As John Cawelti explains, moral fantasies can be found in all sorts of popular

fiction. More particularly, these descriptions accord with Kathryn Hume’s category of the

literature of illusion/escape. Pastorals fall within the literature of illusion, and so do thrillers,

romances, and genre fantasy/science fiction. One strategy for critics dealing with the literature of

illusion is to re-categorize texts as belonging, more properly, to the literature of revision. The

main difference between the two is that the literature of revision (or didactic literature) incites

readers to engage with the world, rather than to escape. Both illusion and revision, however, are

comforting, in the sense that they offer closed systems of meaning. The stories themselves might

be disturbing, but ultimately, they offer the comfort of knowing one’s place in the world. To the

extent that narratives offer closure, then, they also tend to be comforting, in the sense of

investing (or reinvesting) the world of the reader with clear meanings.82 In bearing the weight of

the comforting illusions of escape, the fantasy genre thus becomes associated with narrative

desire, or Story, per se.

In reacting against both consolation and escape, Miéville reverses the associations of

fantasy, to become both engaging of reality and disturbing of fixed meanings, in short, to become

the literature of vision. Unlike the literatures of illusion and of revision, the value of the literature

of vision has hardly ever been questioned. This is an expressive tradition that seeks, ultimately,

to enhance the reader’s understanding of the world, without dictating what that understanding

should be. It offers possible, and often conflicting, visions of the world, so that readers are left to

82
“Comforting” is a loose term here, which is more specifically applicable to intellectual
comfort, a sense of surety about the vision of the world. Closed meanings in narratives are just as
likely to be depressing as they are consoling.
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reconstruct their own versions of reality.83 Miéville accomplishes this shift, avoiding narrative

closure by manipulating the ending into an intractable moral conundrum.

Perdido Street Station reacts very strongly against escapism and the consolations of

Tolkien-esque fantasy. In writing the novel, Miéville explains that he “made a checklist of the

things Tolkien does and set out to invert them: so where his is a feudal world, mine is capitalist;

his is rural, mine is urban; his is very Manichean in its morality, mine is all about shades of grey”

(Bould, “Appropriate”). At the end of the novel, the monstrous remains an intractable,

irreducible hermeneutic force, undiminished by the defeat of the slake-moths. New Crobuzon has

been saved, but it is still a carnivorous city, and so the return of the status quo is hardly

consoling. The novel instead concludes with a moral conundrum that leads to the refusal of the

possibility of flight.

Just as Isaac is about to fulfill his promise to restore Yagharek’s wings, he receives a visit

from a female garuda, Kar’uchai. The latter explains that she has heard of the plan to reverse

Yagharek’s punishment, and she asks that Isaac should let it stand. She tells the story of how

Yagharek ‘stole her choice,’ forcing her to have sex without her consent. Kar’uchai insists that

this is not ‘rape,’ but ‘choice-theft,’ explaining “It is the only crime we have…To take the choice

of another . . . to forget their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a node in a

matrix, that actions have consequences” (692). The separate community of the garudas offers an

alternative vision of ethics that reconciles the freedom of individuals with the material fact of

83
This application of Hume can also work as a shorthand for reiterating a broad swathe
of the critical responses to Miéville’s work. Several critics have pointed out the Miéville
encourages engagement with reality (usually a capitalist-historical reality), instead of escapism
(Baker 444-50; Freedman 2015: 150-2; Burling 336), or, in a similar vein, that Miéville revises
escapism by turning it into utopianism, encompassing something like Ernst Bloch’s ‘utopian
potential’ within material reality (Edwards and Venezia 34; Freedman 2005: 246; Vint,
“Possible” 277-8; Vint, “Introduction” 198; Rankin 249).
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their being caught up in a ‘matrix’ of social relations, and it calls for mutual respect of these

concrete relationships. Abstraction, by contrast, is what capitalist culture does to individuals,

defined by their abstract natural rights, instead of their concrete social relations. Isaac muses over

this situation, considering that, if “withholding help implied negative judgement he could not

make…then helping, bestowing flight, would imply that Yagharek’s actions were acceptable.

And that, thought Isaac in cold distaste and fury, he would not do” (697). The “cold distaste and

fury” is an indicator that Isaac is unable to view this situation objectively. ‘Choice-theft’ may be

a superior interpretation of rape because it relies on material, social interdependency rather than

abstract, gendered sanctification, but it is a perspective that is out of reach for Isaac. If he were

able to see it that way, he might have chosen differently, taking into account the new concrete

relations that Yagharek has established in the city. A socially concrete hermeneutics might

recognize a new identity formed in the contingent sub-community of the vampire hunters, but

Isaac ultimately views Yagharek in abstract terms.84

The ending of the novel confirms this sense of having lost an alternative community. The

outcast Yagharek, despairing of regaining an embodied wholeness, decides to mutilate himself.

He pulls out his feathers, leaving his “face a mass of raw and ragged flesh…My eyes peer out

from bald, pink, ruined skin, blistered and sickly. Trickles of blood draw paths along my

skull…My feet are constricted again by filthy strips of rag, their monstrous shape hidden…I tried

to break my beak, but I could not” (709). Yagharek remains attached to a notion of wholeness,

one that makes anything unintegrated ‘monstrous.’ He views himself as “not a half-thing” but

84
According to Joan Gordon, this decision is a betrayal of the ‘mateship’ established
among the vampire-hunters, as well as a refusal to recognize the transformative potential of
hybridity (471). Andrew Rayment, refers to this dilemma as “the most open-wound of an
ending” (90), stressing that Isaac has no good choices, as both options force him into injustice.
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rather “a failed neither-nor…I turn and walk into my home, the city, a man” (709-10). Ironically,

Yagharek chooses self-deformation in order to mimic a shape of wholeness. In choosing the city,

Yagharek is also swallowed by the carnivorous monster that he describes in the opening pages of

the novel. Paradoxically, monstrosity here becomes a function of belonging (to New Crobuzon)

and of not belonging (to either the garuda or human communities). Yagharek, at the end of

Perdido Street Station, reveals the violence underlying the process of becoming an assimilative

monster. This version of monstrosity, as a function of social belonging, is a false monstrosity,

one that could disappear if the fragmented body were to be claimed as whole, as with the

Remade freedom-fighter, Jack Half-a-Prayer. Crucially, however, it is also a true monstrosity.

Yagharek’s self-mutilation is, from his own perspective, the claiming of a non-monstrous

identity, but to the reader, he may only appear all the more monstrous and alienated.

Perdido Street Station thus invests monstrosity with the potential to revise the value of

fantasy. As with the literature of vision, it is expressive, and it does not resolve into a single

hermeneutics. The novel salvages the ability to dream monsters, inviting readers to define their

own versions of monstrosity. The primary illusion of fantasy is here preserved in order to create

a more affecting vision. As Miéville notes, the secondary-world encouragement of suspended

disbelief makes readers “collaborators in the process of creating” (“Tolkien” 2002), and he seeks

to preserve that freedom in the endings of the narrative as much as in the beginnings. In the

interest of respecting the choices of the reader, the novel invites a sharing of the love of

monsters, while also embedding a critical attitude towards the closures of Story.

According to Miéville, storytelling is an “urge” of indeterminate intrinsic value (“With

One Bound”). He expresses irritation with “the number of writers and critics who simply proceed

as if narrative/storytelling is a self-evident good,” and he goes on to note that, while the narrative

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urge may be ‘inevitable,’ “that’s in no way an inevitable cause for celebration…What if it’s one

of the great tragedies of humankind that we’re hooked on stories, and they’re no better for us

than junk food? Or heroin?” (Tranter 432) On the other hand, he explains that “seeing narrative

as a catastrophe is just as aggrandizing as seeing it as an unconstrained human good, just

reversing the polarity” (433). Miéville tempers his enthusiasm for monsters with “an agonized

skepticism, countervailed as it is by profound desire,” and the gamble of his work is that

“skepticism makes for better, not worse, stories” (435).

Conclusion: In Defense of ‘the Green Country of Fantasy’

Skepticism may not necessarily require, however, a relinquishing of the attachment to the

comforting illusions of fantasy any more than the attachment to truly scary monsters. In

Miéville’s perspective, the idealized worlds of fantasy tend to be delusions, insofar as they offer

consolations that cast readers as immature. Thus, even while Miéville revitalizes the value of

fantasy, his framework excludes some positive and nourishing emotional attachments,

reinforcing the notion that these affirmations are necessarily manipulative. This conclusion thus

turns to Ursula K. Le Guin, who has a much longer record as a defender of fantasy, applying her

descriptions to K.J. Bishop’s “The Gleeful Horse” in order to recognize the inclusion of the

affirmative aspects of fantasy in the ongoing, contingent construction of literary value.

As with Miéville’s fantastic ‘estrangement,’ Le Guin locates the non-instrumental value

of fantasy in its movement away from an anthropocentric perspective. She offers a “non-defining

statement: realistic fiction is drawn towards anthropocentrism, fantasy away from it,” as “the

green country of fantasy…verges on and partakes of realms in which humanity is not lord and

master, is not central, is not even important” (87). However, as the phrase, “green country of

fantasy” implies, Le Guin does not react so strongly against the positive aspects of fantasy, nor

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of idealized worlds. In order to parse the differences between this perspective and Miéville’s, I

will now turn briefly to K.J. Bishop’s “The Gleeful Horse.” Originally published in 2010, this is

the final story in the VanderMeer’s recent (2012) collection of Weird fiction. As in Perdido

Street Station, Bishop translates the literature of illusion into the literature of vision, leaving the

reader with an ambiguous ending. However, unlike Miéville, Bishop emphasizes the positive

attachments of enchantment. These attachments are no less strange than the fascination for

monsters, and, like the monstrous, they pull the reader both away from and towards the human.

Bishop’s story is narrated by Molimus, a sort of giant or large man who lives under a

bridge and between worlds. Molimus begins with the rumination, “Children are cruel…So it is

nothing for them to beat a living creature – a rare, marvellous creature at that – to death. They do

so to seize the treasure inside it, but one sees the pleasure they take in this assassination of life,

even before the plunder starts” (1106). The ‘living creatures’ turn out to be piñatas who, to

Molimus, appear innocent, beautiful, and very much alive—until they are murdered. In order to

save a dying piñata, whom he names ‘the Gleeful Horse,’ Molimus visits a fairy of sorts, “the

White Ma’at, the last Ma’at” (1107). The Ma’at tells Molimus how to save the horse, by stealing

the material that makes the piñatas live. When inside the piñatas, the worthless treasures of

candy and plastic rings are real treasures, “more like stars” (1109). In order to replenish them,

Molimus has to steal the star-like fragments from children, who are, in turn, left empty (dead).

This story demonstrates the broadening of the Weird away from the narrower category of

the New Weird, to include more positive versions of fantasy-worlds. The structure of Bishop’s

two worlds, and especially the one that includes magic, is clearly recognizable as what Tolkien

refers to as ‘the realm of Faërie.’ In order to reach the Ma’at, Molimus has to walk “around the

cloister with the sun a certain number of times, then against the sun a certain number,” and

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“there appeared the dwelling…a round, rose-bosomed hut of dry-stone…facing the coming

visitor across the green court” (1107). Molimus is thus passing through a portal into the “green

country of fantasy,” as Le Guin terms it. There are elements of weirdness insofar as the White

Ma’at is not described using familiar terms like elf, fairy, or wizard. She is “a woman or a

woman-shaped thing, built in a long and heavy way, with a tall forehead like a white wall and a

knotty blue vein labouring up it. What lies on the other side is a great store of irregular,

wonderful knowledge; a cellar provisioned with all the vintages of magic” (1107). The

strangeness of this figure is nonetheless easy to accept for readers familiar with the strangeness

of Faërie. The main difference between this story and Miéville’s novel involves the application

of estrangement, expressed here as beautiful/enchanting instead of as sublime/monstrous.

Of course, those elements of ‘the green country of fantasy’ turn out to be just as

dangerous as they are comforting. Molimus also becomes a sort of monster, in contradistinction

to the monstrous children described in the first sentences. This version of the monstrous, a sort of

vampiric relationship between Faërie and children, moves this story from the literature of illusion

to the literature of vision. In a different direction, Bishop complicates Tolkien’s vision of the

Faërie realm as the locus of satisfying human desires. Instead, the fairy and the children have

warring desires here, and these desires make them monstrous. What is fascinating is the inability

to discern which is the more monstrous. The children, from Molimus’s perspective, are not only

murdering the piñatas, but also transforming their life force into worthless commodities. And

Molimus, from the children’s perspective, is a soul-stealing vampire. In both cases, there is a

reduction of the wondrous, star-like substance into the consumable substance of desire.

The skepticism towards fantasy as the logic of narrative desire thus appears here as well,

via the inability of the available stories to determine who is or is not monstrous. As the Ma’at

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tells Molimus, “You see more than most persons, true, but that’s damning with faint praise. Your

eyes have a picture of cruelty on the inside. You see that picture clearly, and because of it, see

other things unclearly” (1108). Molimus’s blindness is, of course, understandable, and the story

closes with the disturbing awareness that the reader has been identifying with a monster, one that

nonetheless seems morally justified in murdering children. The story utilizes the fantasy

elements of illusion to posit that both wonder and monsters are real, but it becomes a literature of

vision because those essences remain in-dissociable from the epistemological frame of narrative.

In other words, the monstrous may be a necessary illusion, from which there is no escape.

Crucially, however, consolation may also be a necessary illusion. The fairy-world of Molimus

and the Ma’at is strange, but it is also beautiful, filled with the enchantment of tiny piñatas that

prance around like the Gleeful Horse. Moreover, the star-like fragments of souls embed another

form of value, one that is not monstrous, but rather affirmative, in contrast to the commodities

that emerge in the non-fairy world. As with Link’s story, value here becomes relative,

contingent. Thus, the enchanting elements of the story combine estrangement with a more

positive imagined value. As with the value of the monstrous, this positive value may be

constructed as non-instrumental, a good numinous of star-like substance.

Herein lies one of the most radical aspects of these transformations of value, which is to

recover the value of escape. Even though both Miéville and Bishop resolve their endings into

ambiguous conundrums, their stories embed the possibility of escape, in reaching towards the

numinous, towards what cannot be expressed in human epistemology. Moreover, the

“estrangement” of fantasy may have a negative or a positive valence, depending on the

perspective of the narrative and of the reader. In either case, “strangeness” derives from the

imagination of something alien, something outside of the human.

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 Thus, fantasy may indeed be the literature of ‘escape’ according to Le Guin, insofar as it

is an attempt to get out of “the Mandelbrot set world” (87). Because it is a fractal, or self-similar

pattern, the Mandelbrot set repeats infinitely, in smaller and smaller reiterations of the same

(Francis), which Le Guin applies as a metaphor for anthropocentrism.85 For Le Guin, these

fractal patterns are like suburbs; they are physical maps of the self-repeating mathematical

patterns of capitalism. Because these images are strange and beautiful, however, the set has also

been interpreted as a metaphor for the extent to which humans can understand the numinous.

Colloquially referred to as ‘God’s thumb,’ the detail of the set can take the shape of tentacles.

The spaces outside the Mandelbrot set, if taken as a metaphor for what cannot be known, are

either full of meaning, or they are empty. That space can relate to the ‘green country of fantasy,’

or to the baleful, soul-sucking monsters of the void, depending on your perspective:

Fig. 1. Wolfgang Beyer. “File: Mandel

zoom 08 satellite antenna.jpg.”
Wikimedia Commons, 4 December 2006,
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
Mandel_zoom_08_satellite_antenna.jpg#
filehistory.

85
Sherryl Vint offers a similar interpretation, arguing that Miéville’s “ab-realism
multiplies our understanding of realism fractally, to include possibilities not dependent for their
shape on their particular relation to the world as described by realism” (2015: 44). Ab-realism
“enables the materialist insight that reality is shaped by contingent human choice and belief and
that we…can remake it” (51). As I am terming it here, Miéville turns a literature of illusion into a
literature of vision. Vint captures the deep inspirational potential of this transition.
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 CONCLUSION: THE PERSISTENCE OF MAGIC IN N.K. JEMISIN’S
RADICAL FANTASY

Each chapter of this dissertation has isolated particular ways that fantasy contributes to the

shifting values of literature, especially through the postcritical and the reconstructive. By

focusing on the affirmative and nourishing aspects of reading, it may seem that I am leaving

behind the hard-hitting value of critique; however, the postcritical enchantment of fantasy

actually creates more room for attachment, including attachments to political readings. These are

“uses” of literature that can be enhanced, rather than dulled, by the positive emotional

attachments of enchantment. While previous chapters have demonstrated that enchantment and

critique are not necessarily opposed, this conclusion will more directly consider a recent fantasy

series that integrates the values of critique with the values of enchantment. For Lev Grossman’s

magicians in the introduction, magic (like literature) is a tool without a predetermined purpose,

and the hero chooses to use magic in order to repair small objects. Likewise, in N.K. Jemisin’s

Broken Earth series (2015-17), magic becomes identified with the creative substance of life;

however, given the ongoing systematic exploitation of life, and of lives, both justice and art in

the series depend on the free expression of magic.

In the context of the still primarily dominant preference for critique, the most serious

indictments of fantasy claim that it is apolitical and ahistorical. Recently, however, even Fredric

Jameson has begun to recognize the value of fantasy. In his essay responding to the phenomenon

of China Miéville and the New Weird, Jameson notes that fantasy can be both historical and

political. Whereas science fiction embeds the “Utopian impulse” towards historical

transformation, Jameson recognizes that fantasy can also include “the trace of…history,” and

particularly the “historical trauma” of “the politics of imperialism and modernization” (280).
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Moreover, Jameson has since expanded this view to allow that fantasy may have something

particular to contribute to literary value:

If SF is the exploration of all the constraints thrown up by history itself – the web of

counterfinalities and anti-dialectics which human production has itself produced – then

fantasy is the other side of the coin and a celebration of human creative power and

freedom which becomes idealistic only by virtue of the omission of precisely those

material and historical constraints. Magic, then, may be read, not as some facile plot

device (which it no doubt becomes in the great bulk of mediocre fantasy production), but

rather as a figure for the enlargement of human powers and their passage to the limit,

their actualization of everything latent and virtual in the stunted human organism of the

present. (66)

Jameson goes on to rephrase this, noting that in “the most consequent fantasy never simply

deploys magic in the service of other narrative ends, but proposes a meditation on magic as such

– on its capacities and its existential properties, on a kind of figural mapping of the active and

productive subjectivity in its non-alienated state” (66). In other words, by meditating on magic,

fantasy can imagine what a non-alienated form of subjectivity might look like, and I would add,

how non-alienated creativity might feel.

At the same time, Jameson’s caveat that fantasy “becomes idealistic only by virtue of its

omission of…material and historical constraints” embeds a limit on the value of fantasy.

Because, for Jameson, one of those historical constraints is the inescapable fact of

disenchantment, he concludes with a rather dismal description of what fantasy can achieve. He

notes that fantasy

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 is condemned by its form to retrace the history of magic’s decay and fall, its

disappearance from the…disenchanted world of prose, of capitalism and modern times. It

is only at this point, when the world of magic becomes little more than nostalgia, that the

Utopian wish can reappear in all its vulnerability and fragility. In Morris and Le Guin

both there visibly reappears that mysterious bridge that leads from the historical

disintegration of fantasy to the reinvention of the Novum, from a fallen world in which

the magical powers of fantasy have become unrepresentable to a new space in which

Utopia can itself be fantasized. (71)

For Jameson, fantasy as a genre is inherently outdated, and it is only valuable to the extent that it

recognizes the inevitability of disenchantment. He supports this theory by noting the

disappearance of magic in texts such as Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series. In my view, the

assumption of a disenchanted modernity is not a necessary condition for the political and

historical imaginings of fantasy. In fact, enchantment in itself remains valuable, a reminder of

the limits of what can be known/explained. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series is historical, political,

and invested in enchantment. In fact, in addition to the historical and political arguments

embedded in the novels, enchantment becomes a crucial factor for locating the value of literature

in non-alienated creativity.

Jemisin’s Epic History: From Black Lives Matter to the Enchanted Value of Life

The Broken Earth series intertwines plot and world-building so integrally that, in order to

understand the plot, it is necessary to have a sense of this constructed world. The Stillness is a

large continent characterized by volatile geological conditions. A ‘Season’ refers to periods

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when major geological events cause devastation that makes survival difficult, such as volcanic

eruptions that lead to prolonged periods of darkness. There are usually several centuries in

between Seasons, and so the people of the Stillness refer to ‘Stonelore’ to keep them prepared for

survival. The Stillness is also loosely separated into individual ‘comms’ that recognize the

authority of Yumenes, the imperial city whose power is based mostly on suppressing and

controlling the unique skills that some humans possess. These individuals, called “orogenes,” are

able to manipulate the thermal and kinetic energy of the earth, moving the elements to create or

to prevent geological events. In Yumenes, orogenes are trained to control their skills and to serve

the interests of the empire. They are assigned ‘Guardians’ as a safety-measure, to keep their

power in check. Those orogenes who do not demonstrate proper control are either killed or

lobotomized. In addition to these present features of the Stillness, the novel-world includes a

long history, only partially remembered. This history involves another, human-like race called

“Stone Eaters.” The Stone Eaters, when they appear above ground, look and act somewhat like

stone, though they can move through the earth as easily as through air. The Stone Eaters are

particularly connected with ‘deadciv’ relics called ‘obelisks,’ or large pillars of gem-like stone

that float and move unpredictably. The history of these dead civilizations is a mystery that has

been partially forgotten and partially obscured by the current Sanze empire. As a Stone Eater,

gifted or cursed with immortality, the narrator (Hoa) offers a view of the present as well as the

distant past.

The first novel switches between third and second-person, as well as between the

focalized perspectives of three female orogenes: Essun, Syenite, and Damaya. Early on, it is

clear that the “you” of the second person is addressing Essun, a mother of two, living in a small

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comm and hiding her orogeny. Essun’s story begins with her discovery that her husband has

killed their young son for the crime of being an orogene. At the same time, a Season begins when

another orogene intentionally chooses to create a rift in the earth, right in the middle of the

capital city. Essun sets off in search of her husband and her remaining daughter. The narration

shifts to the third person to describe pieces of the stories of Syenite and Damaya. Syenite is an

Imperial Orogene working her way towards a higher administrative position. Her story begins

with a mission to clear a coastal harbor of overgrown coral, in the company of a powerful male

orogene, Alabaster, with the tacit understanding that the two of them will also produce a child for

the disposal of the Fulcrum. Finally, Damaya is a young girl whose story begins with the

moment of her orogeny being discovered, when she is assigned a Guardian (Schaffa) and taken

to study at the Fulcrum. Eventually, the reader finds that all three women are the same person, at

different points in her life. The first novel ends with Essun reconnecting with Alabaster, who

turns out to have created the “Rifting.”

The second and third novels continue to follow Essun and her daughter Nassun, while

progressively revealing more of the history of the Stillness. The third novels describes

civilization before the Seasons. Hoa is part of an engineered group of people, the tuners, who are

considered inhuman tools. These people have been crafted to work with “magic,” connecting to

the obelisks in order to supply energy. The goal of the tuners, ‘geoarcanity,’ will require tapping

into the ‘magic’ (or life-energy) of the Earth’s core, supposedly eliminating scarcity forever.

However, the Earth turns out to be a living being, angry at the prospect of enslavement, and

resolved to destroy humanity. In order to prevent this, Hoa diverts the energy onto the Moon,

which becomes detached, initiating the ongoing war between the Earth and humanity in the form

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of Seasons. In the present, Essun takes up the task of ending the Seasons by restoring the Moon

back to orbit.

These novels mix the techniques of fantasy and science fiction in order to present a world

in the distant future. There are hardly any traces of the present in the novels; already, in Hoa’s

time, our civilizations are a very distant memory. Buildings have become organic, and humans

have learned to harness the power of magic as a renewable resource. As a result of the magic and

the lack of familiar structures, the world of the Stillness feels and functions entirely like a

fantasy, while at the same time utilizing the science fictional method of extrapolation. The terms

of that extrapolation highlight the cycles of violence that remain inescapable, even when humans

have the means to sustain themselves without harm to the environment. Due to the underlying

logic of exploitation that unites systems of imperialism, slavery, and capitalism, humans are

unable to recognize the Earth as a living being, and so they attempt to enslave the planet. The

series imagines the beginning of an ending to these struggles by returning to a view of art and

society that is not based on exploitation, a competing paradigm that involves respect for all

persons as well as the relinquishing of control over life.

The epic scale of the fantasy combines this incredibly broad view of history with the

struggles of individuals. In the first novel, Hoa moves between endings, the “personal ending” of

the murder of Essun’s son and the ending “writ continentally” of the Rifting (1-2). Essun’s

personality has been shaped by the social violence that dehumanizes orogenes. She has ‘cracked’

at least twice, once to become Syenite, and then again to become Essun. In fact, she has lost her

child twice, as it was necessary for her to kill her first son in order to save him from being taken

by the Fulcrum. Essun’s story thus echoes the story of the Earth; both are in pain, angry, and

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cracked from violence, and those Riftings lead to further violence. Following Essun’s

perspective, this violence recalls the present situation of the Black Lives Matter movement. The

structures of violence against orogenes function like racism. Although the scale and

estrangement of these systems of violence extends the implications of the novels much further,

the historical moment of the Black Lives Matter movement is integral to these structures.

For example, orogenes are referred to by the denigrating term “roggas,” which functions

almost exactly as “niggers” does in the present, and the first book is dedicated to “those who

have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question” (ix). Syenite becomes

aware of her systematic dehumanization when encountering a bureaucrat who treats her not as a

person, but rather as a dangerous weapon. Angry, Syenite points out that the woman has not

shaken hands, nor offered the customary cup of ‘safe’ that usually accompanies political

meetings. The woman attempts to apologize, with the explanation that “most normal people have

never seen an orogene […] Isn’t it understandable that we might be… uncomfortable?” Incensed,

Syenite responds, “[T]hat’s a really shitty apology. ‘I’m sorry you’re so abnormal that I can’t

manage to treat you like a human being,’” and the woman blurts out, “You’re a rogga,”

surprising herself with this impolite term. These behaviors recall current discussions about

micro-aggressions, but there is nothing “micro” about them, as they are connected with a broader

system of dehumanization. The dehumanization conditions and enables the violence committed

against orogenes, who are often murdered when they are found in comms, or who are instead

‘trained’ by the Fulcrum to accept their enslavement. And there is a third, more horrific option.

Those orogenes who cannot be controlled are sent to the “nodes,” where they are lobotomized

and hooked up to a metal chair, in order to harness their orogenic instincts. Seeing a human child

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reduced to part of a machine, Syenite realizes that “the use of the slur is deliberate. A

dehumanizing word for someone who has been made into a thing” (139). The transformation of

humans into things is here revealed as a form of social planning, the devaluing of certain lives in

order to maintain the power of ‘conquerors.’

The same image of humans transformed into things occurs in Hoa’s story of Syl Anagist,

the advanced society that initiated the war with the Earth. Here, the novel further estranges racist

systems to consider how they continue in different forms across history. As with Syenite, Hoa

starts out feeling himself to be a part of a system that is worthwhile, or at least necessary. He

learns from a woman named Kelenli (one of the first orogenes) about the history that has led to

his condition. Kelenli describes how the Syl Anagist empire was built on the exploitation of a

group of people called the “Thniess,” or “Niess.” These people had the ability to use magic, and

the empire enslaved them in order to take it. Through Kelenli, Hoa comes to understand the

chronological and physical breadth of his people’s systematic degradation:

[T]here are none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure

phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims will someday do back what was done to

them—even if, in truth, their victims couldn’t care less about such pettiness and have

moved on. Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior,

but simply lucky […] Perhaps it began with whispers that white Niess irises gave them

poor eyesight and perverse inclinations, and that split Niess tongues could not speak

truth. That sort of sneering happens, cultural bullying, but things got worse. It became

easy for scholars to build reputations and careers around the notion that Niess sessapinae

were fundamentally different, somehow—more sensitive, more active, less controlled,

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 less civilized—and that this was the source of their magical peculiarity. This was what

made them not the same kind of human as everyone else. Eventually: not as human as

everyone else. Finally: not human at all. Once the Niess were gone, of course, it became

clear that the fabled Niess sessapinae did not exist. […] If the Niess were merely human,

the world built on their inhumanity would fall apart. So … they made us. […] Thus we

later creations have been given exaggerated Niess features—broad faces, small mouths,

skin nearly devoid of color, hair that laughs at fine combs, and we’re all so short.

They’ve stripped our limbic systems of neurochemicals and our lives of experience and

language and knowledge. And only now, when we have been made over in the image of

their own fear, are they satisfied. They tell themselves that in us, they’ve captured the

quintessence and power of who the Niess really were, and they congratulate themselves

on having made their old enemies useful at last. (III; Location 2641)

Here, the construction of identity becomes literal. Syl Anagist has created Hoa and his fellow

tuners to be tools that lack humanity. Incidentally, the Niess were Antarctic people who appeared

white, but the colonial logic is the same. In the logic of imperialism, the Niess are constructed as

less civilized, in order to justify their exploitation. The image of a human body reduced to a cog

in a machine here returns, as Hoa describes the “briar patch” for harnessing magic from the

bodies of the Niess and from those tuners who, like the orogenes sent to the nodes, cannot be

controlled. Hoa describes how the bodies

sprawl motionless amid the thicket of vines (lying atop the vines, twisted among them,

wrapped up in them, speared by them where the vines grow through flesh), it is

impossible not to sess the delicate threads of silver darting between the cells of this one’s

239
 hand, or dancing along the hairs of that one’s back. Some of them we can see breathing,

though the motion is so very slow. Many wear tattered rags for clothes, dry-rotted with

years; a few are naked. Their hair and nails have not grown, and their bodies have not

produced waste that we can see. Nor can they feel pain, I sense instinctively; this, at least,

is a kindness. That is because the sinklines take all the magic of life from them save the

bare trickle needed to keep them alive. Keeping them alive keeps them generating more.

(III; Location 3295)

In Syl Anagist, it is illegal to kill another human being because all lives matter, in the sense that

all produce some of the excess magic that is an energy source. The images of bodies being

harnessed for energy make it clear that, even when all lives matter, what is more important is

how they are made to matter. The overlapping logics of racism, imperialism, and capitalism are

built on the exploitation of human labor and creativity. It is a logic that is “parasitic; its hunger

for magic grows with every drop it devours,” and when it is turned to the Earth, presumed to be

“an inanimate object” that won’t mind being enslaved, eventually, “that resource will be

exhausted, too. Then everything dies” (III; Location 4195). These repeating cycles of violence

are cannibalistic, barbarities that construct barbarity in order to justify exploitation. At the same

time, the novel exposes the hypocrisy of the All Lives Matter slogan, recognizing that it is one

thing to ‘matter’ under the current system, and quite another thing to ‘matter,’ in the sense of

being treated as a person.

These novels, however, do more than reflect on the functioning of systems of violence.

They also reflect on art, and in particular, on the art of storytelling. On the surface, the value of

art seems to depend, as in modernist ideals, on its uselessness. The Niess used magic in order to

240
create art. In teaching the tuners about their history, Kelenli takes them to a museum, where they

see another engine, somewhat like the one that they will be using to harness the energy of the

earth. Hoa describes this encounter:

My first thought is that it is another plutonic engine […] Yes, there is the tall, imposing

central crystal; there is the socket from which it grows. This engine has even been

activated; much of its structure hovers, humming just a little, a few feet above the floor.

But this is the only part of the engine that makes sense to me. All around the central

crystal float longer, inward-curving structures; the whole of the design is somehow floral,

a stylized chrysanthemum. The central crystal glows a pale gold, and the supporting

crystals fade from green bases to white at the tips. Lovely, if altogether strange […] This

engine’s magics have no purpose that I can see, other than to look and sound and be

beautiful. And somehow—I shiver, understanding instinctively but resisting because this

contradicts everything I have learned from the laws of both physics and arcanity—

somehow this structure is generating more energy than it consumes. (III; Location 1887)

Upon further thought, Hoa decides that, although this engine has the same structure as the larger

one built by Syl Anagist, “What’s different here is … philosophical. Attitudinal. The Plutonic

Engine is a tool. This thing? Is … art” (III; Location 1899). The difference appears to be one of

usefulness versus uselessness. And yet, there is something about this artwork that is

incomprehensible from the perspective that Hoa has inherited. For the Niess, “Magic could not

be owned […] any more than life could be—and thus they wasted both, by building […] plutonic

engines that did nothing. They were just … pretty. Or thought-provoking, or crafted for the sheer

joy of crafting. And yet this ‘art’ ran more efficiently and powerfully than anything the

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Sylanagistine had ever managed” (III; Location 2632). Here, art challenges the divide between

the useful and the useless. From the perspective of Syl Anagist, it is ‘wasteful,’ but somehow the

process of creating for a purpose other than being harnessed generates more energy than it uses.

It isn’t that the engines are completely useless; rather, they are created without a predetermined

use in mind, nor are they reducible to a particular use. Whereas modernist theories of literary

value posit a strong divide between instrumental and non-instrumental value, here the definition

of art does not preclude usefulness. It is just that those uses are not predetermined in the act of

creation. Here, too, the substance of magic overlaps with the substance of art; magic (or

creativity) is the ‘something more’ that distinguishes art. The engine of the Niess does produce

energy that might be used, and more efficiently than any calculated harnessing of resources

could achieve.

The distinction between exploitative and artistic usefulness is further underlined by the

role of storytelling in the series. In the Stillness, individuals are divided into “use-castes,” and the

common use-castes include Leadership, Resistant, Innovator, Breeder, Orogene, and Guardian.

Each person is defined by his or her use. In addition, one of the less common use-castes is the

Lorists, travelling storytellers. Lorists have become rare, an outsider group that is often

considered illegitimate. As Hoa notes,

In truth, lorists are an even older part of life in the Stillness. Twenty-five thousand years

ago is simply when their role became distorted into near-uselessness. They’re still

around, though they’ve forgotten how much they’ve forgotten. Somehow their order, if it

can be called an order, survives despite the First through Seventh Universities

disavowing their work as apocryphal and probably inaccurate, and despite governments

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 down all the ages undermining their knowledge with propaganda […] Once lorists came

only from a race called Regwo—Westcoasters who had sallow-reddish skin and naturally

black lips, and who worshipped the preservation of history the way people in less-bitter

times worshipped gods. They used to chisel stonelore into mountainsides in tablets as

high as the sky, so that all would see and know the wisdom needed to survive. Alas: in

the Stillness, destroying mountains is as easy as an orogene toddler’s temper tantrum.

Destroying a people takes only a bit more effort. (II; Location 34)

Distinctions become somewhat difficult here. The lorists of the past told stories with the aim of

preserving “the wisdom needed to survive.” Their work was thus clearly useful, but its purpose

was not determined by an exploitative power structure. In postmodern terms, these lorists built

on a foundation that is shaky at best. They tried to relay the truth of history. Nonetheless, the

investment in that truth is worthwhile, to the extent that it is not determined by the interests of

power. Thus, in postcritical terms, there may be something like a pragmatic foundation for

history as a form of truth.

Unfortunately, that commitment to truth is obscured by the more official “Stonelore,”

which has been distorted to justify the current balance of power in the Stillness. In the first novel,

Damaya becomes acquainted with her status as less than human through one of these stories.

According to this tale, after a particularly difficult Season, “an orogene named Misalem decided

to try to kill the emperor” (88). Misalem had already killed thousands of people, as a means of

demanding to meet the emperor face-to-face. The emperor agreed to this meeting, but he brought

along Shemshena, a warrior and Innovator who understood how orogeny works. Shemshena

removed all living things from the vicinity, so that Misalem would have nothing to fuel his

243
orogeny, and triumphantly killed him (88-92). Damaya enjoys the story, until she realizes that

she has been identifying with the wrong person. While listening, Damaya saw herself as

Shemshena, but her Guardian, Schaffa, makes it clear that she is like Misalem (92). The story

justifies the roles of orogenes and Guardians. Orogenes are feared and hated for their

destructiveness, while Guardians keep everyone safe. Eventually, this story is revealed to be

partial, in both senses of the word (incomplete and biased). As Syenite later learns, the Sanze

empire was built at this time by terrorizing surrounding comms through cannibalism. Misalem’s

family had been taken and eaten, and he was seeking revenge (416-17). These types of stories are

themselves cannibalistic, in the sense of justifying the continued devouring of lives. As with the

early lorists, however, such stories are told with the aim of preserving “the wisdom needed to

survive.” Following a truism of postmodernism, all stories are constructed,87 which means that

both of these versions are dependent on the perspectives of the one doing the constructing.

However, the difference between these two stories is more than a matter of perspective. What

emerges in this form of postmodern value is the recognition that, in spite of contingency, there

are some versions of stories that hold more validity than others.

In order to make this distinction between more and less valid stories, the notions of

exploitation, cannibalism, and manipulation are turned inside out through the relationship

between Hoa and Essun. To a certain extent, this relationship also appears to be cannibalistic.

After Essun connects with the Obelisk Gate, she begins turning into stone, and Hoa begins to eat

87
In A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), Linda Hutcheon famously coined the term
“historiographic metafiction” to describe works, particularly novels, that blend metafiction with
a claim towards representing history. The effect of this blend, according to Hutcheon, is the
recognition of the similarities between writing histories and writing stories, as both history and
fiction are artificially constructed.
244
her. Oddly, this relation is mutually beneficial, nourishing Hoa but also helping Essun in the

sense of relieving the weight of stone from her body. It still appears grotesque, but Essun begins

to see it differently. She remembers that Hoa told her “that he thinks of himself as human in spite

of his strange body,” and because she has “chosen to see him as human,” this makes the act of

being eaten “something other than an act of predation […] it feels like a gift” (III; Location 392).

Essun later discovers this form of eating is also an act of reproduction. When she has turned

completely to stone, Hoa will be able to transform her into another Stone Eater (III; Location

3526). In contrast to the systematic form of cannibalism that removes the humanity/personhood

from groups of people in order to transform them into tools, Essun is being used in a way that is

mutually beneficial. This interdependency includes some degree of violence; and yet,

paradoxically, the act of eating here is also an act of giving, of creating.

These dynamics also apply to the framework of the story as a whole. Hoa is narrating the

story for Essun’s sake. After she chooses to give up the struggle with her daughter, sacrificing

herself, Essun turns completely into stone. Hoa takes that stone and transforms her into a Stone

Eater, but she will only retain some of her previous memories and personhood. Thus, the present

story is a means for Hoa to remind Essun of her past, of who she was. Hoa explains, “I have told

you this story, primed what remains of you, to retain as much as possible of who you were. Not

to force you into a particular shape, mind you. From here on, you may become whomever you

wish” (III; Location 4979). In terms of literary value, this story does not fit the modernist ideals

of autonomy. Quite the opposite, it is embedded in a relationship; moreover, the value of the

story does not derive from its uselessness, nor even from its being told for its own sake. As with

the postcritical and the reconstructive, this story is pragmatic, clearly aimed at communicating.

245
 This dissertation began with a meditation on Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, in order to

consider how magic can re-enchant literary value. Literature is not just a tool without a purpose,

but also a tool whose uses can be politically and personally ameliorative. The element of magic

here is conditioned by the fact that Hoa is telling this story as a gift for Essun. It is not about

manipulating or shaping her, but rather about granting her the freedom to choose her own shape.

Likewise, in the “Acknowledgements” following the series, Jemisin explains that she has been

telling this story as a kind of gift for the reader. She describes her experience of having lost her

mother and trying to deal with mother/daughter relationships in this book. While attempting to

complete the task of catching the moon, Essun has to confront her daughter, who is planning to

open the gate in order to turn all humans into Stone Eaters in order to save Schaffa, her adopted

parent. Mother and daughter struggle for control, until Essun realizes that she has a choice

between saving the future and saving her daughter’s life, and so she gives up, and the excess

energy turns her to stone. Seeing this, Nassun is inspired to carry out her mother’s wishes,

catching the Moon and ending the Seasons. Just as Nassun decides to carry on out her mother’s

wishes, Jemisin explains that she has been writing in order to offer her perspective to the reader,

in accordance with what her own mother would want. She notes,

I definitely haven’t been in the best place while working on this book, but I can say this

much: Where there is pain in this book, it is real pain; where there is anger, it is real

anger; where there is love, it is real love. You’ve been taking this journey with me, and

you’re always going to get the best of what I’ve got. That’s what my mother would want.

(III; Location 5017)

246
And what is being given to the reader here is a kind of magic. As with the art of the Niess, it

produces more energy than is put into it. In Jameson’s terms, the novel constructs magic as non-

alienated human creativity, but it does not suggest that the magic belongs only to the distant past,

nor necessarily to the distant future. Readers share in an exchange of that energy, doing a whole

lot more than consuming something determined by the need to manipulate them. What comes out

of such magical exchanges isn’t necessarily quantifiable, nor fully graspable, and it is this lack of

grasp-ability that is necessary for something like a non-alienated human connection. This also

means that my interpretation of the novel, and my interpretations throughout this dissertation,

have simply been one of the possible ways that this literature can be used; moreover, recovering

the link between enchantment and human creativity via these fantasies will hopefully lead to

their being used for multiple other unforeseeable purposes. As Hoa explains, “This is magic after

all, not science. There will always be parts of it that no one can fathom” (III; Location 4175).

247
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