The Kefahuchi Tract books are, in part, a riff on the concept of the Zone from the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic. The third book in the series is called Empty Space, and the phrase “empty space” appears early in Roadside Picnic in a description of the Zone artifact the stalkers call “empties”:
“You can stick your hand between them—maybe even your head, if the thing has unhinged you enough—nothing but empty space, thin air. And despite this, there must be something there, a force field of some sort, because so far no one’s managed to push the disks together, or pull them apart either.”
With the trilogy of Light, Nova Swing, and Empty Space, Harrison offers us the literary version of the Strugatsky brothers’ empties. “Nothing but empty space, but there must be something there, a force field of some sort”: I can’t think of a better description of this baffling, fascinating trilogy. You can’t push these books together or pull them apart to find a “meaning.” They exist as they are, a force that resists interpretation yet still produces effects.
Antoine Volodine said of one of his novels that the meaning would be found not in the book’s pages but in the dreams people will have after reading it. Harrison achieves something similar here. He does things with words, and the words do things to you when you read them, but you’re never entirely clear what is happening to you. They do, but they do not mean. The Kefahuchi Tract books are about what it feels like to read the Kefahuchi Tract books. It’s a feeling that resists translation. I can’t put my finger on it, but there must be something there…
Ann Radcliffe’s 1791 Gothic novel The Romance of the Forest is sometimes gloomy, sometimes silly, and sometimes sublime. It cycles through its moods like a piece of music: major key verses, minor key pre-choruses, soaring choruses, unexpected key changes in the bridges. Within each sequence are sudden shocks and disturbances, breaks and irruptions. Almost every development comes as a “surprize” (sic) to protagonist Adeline. She gasps, she faints, she imagines ghosts around every corner. As the plot attains velocity, this rhythm is explodes into forward motion: the comedic middle section, the peaceful journey through the Alps, the retrospective courtroom drama.
But there’s also a slower, almost seasonal, rhythm to the atmosphere of this book, particularly in the first third. One chapter, everyone is happy and their lives at the abbey are content and fulfilling. The next, a cold gloom falls over the abbey, and everyone suspects the worst of everyone else.
It is a difference in the texture of terror and dread: the thunderclap terror, the overcast sky of dread. Anticipation erupts into terror, suspense drags everyone down into dread. Each time someone imagines the abbey to be haunted, it turns out to be just the wind. Every bizarre turn of events has a logical explanation. By the same token, when Mme. de la Motte suspects her husband and Adeline to be carrying on a secret affair, the truth turns out to be far more mundane: La Motte is depressed, taking long walks on his own to ruminate on the dishonor that led him to hide out in a ruined abbey in the middle of a forest as well as the fact that he knows there’s nothing he can do to protect Adeline, whom he loves like a daughter. The roiling dread of the novel rarely boils over, but when it does, it’s in the form of another surprising revelation of human, not supernatural, cruelty.
In Radcliffe’s world, there are no ghosts or spirits walking the earth terrorizing humanity; the real monster is man, or more precisely, men: Adeline is trapped between La Motte, depressive and secretive; the Marquis, embarrassingly passionate and overbearing; and her violent, destructive father (that is, the man suspected to be her father). Then there is Theodore, whom she falls in love with only to be abandoned by until later in the book, and minor characters like the surgeon, whose foolish philosophy almost kills Theodore: “Nature is the most improper guide in the world. I always adopt a method directly contrary to what she would suggest; for what can be the use of Art, if she is only to follow Nature?” (267). At every turn, Adeline has to navigate a world of men who are evil, self-absorbed, or foolish.
Should I slow down and talk about the plot? Wikipedia can give you the plot synopsis. My least favorite part of writing about a book is summarizing the book.
I really enjoyed this one, much more than Vathek. Can you tell? The opening scenes, in which the La Mottes flee Paris by night by carriage under mysterious circumstances, are beautifully, iconically, Gothic and anxiously propulsive. The slower second chapter is heavy with atmosphere, the descriptions of the ruined abbey and the forest evocative and as dense as ancient stone and thick foliage. From there, the novel establishes a rhythm and then takes a number of sharp turns until the narrative reaches its logical, bittersweet conclusion.
The Pool (Memory of the Forest of Chambord), Théodore Rousseau 1839
As with Vathek, it is the form of the novel that most interested me as a writer. The first character we meet is La Motte, and it would be a long time before I understood that Adeline, and not he, would be the protagonist. After establishing a web of relationships during their time at the abbey, Adeline escapes, and when she meets Theodore again, the narrative briefly summarizes Theodore’s journey back to Adeline. A modern novel would likely give us parallel narratives told through alternating chapters, but the Gothic often feels more improvisational than rigorously structured. We’ll see this twisting, labyrinthine structure taken even further in The Monk and Zofloya.
I haven’t yet mentioned Radcliffe’s characters. One of the hallmarks of the Victorian novel is the way characters often double or mirror one another. This is one of the many motifs the more respectable Victorian realist novel borrowed from the Gothic tradition. La Luc’s happy family contrasts La Motte’s family in turmoil. Adeline never knows quite where she stands with La Motte, but she finds contentment with La Luc. La Motte’s mind is racked by doubt and regret. La Luc, meanwhile, a clear thinker with a clear conscience and a straightforward, common-sense philosophy.
As is often the case in Romantic literature, the external setting mimics the internal state of mind of the characters. La Motte is trapped in a labyrinth of his own mind as he wanders the gloomy, confusing, and frightful forest and its run-down abbey, full of secret passages and rooms. La Luc, meanwhile, lives a simple, happy life in an idyllic Alpine village.
What would I like to steal from Radcliffe as a writer of fantasy? The control of emotion. The emotional rhythm of the book that at turns lulls the reader, shocks the reader, takes the reader by the collar and drags them away. The form of the book and its emotional registers are all of a piece, inextricable from one another.
Roland Barthes’s essay “The Death of the Author” has the distinction of being one of the few classic pieces of literary theory known by people who wouldn’t otherwise touch literary theory. I suspect that has to do with the catchy title. Barthes was one of the pithier French theorists of the 20th century; I wonder how he would have fared on (and more importantly, what he would have said about) social media. Mythologies is after all basically a blog in book form.
I often see “The Death of the Author”—or at least the concept that the author is “dead”—in the context of how to engage with the works of authors who support harmful (exclusionary, elitist, supremacist) causes or have done awful things. It is a separate question from “Should I financially support a morally reprehensible artists?” The answer to that, for me, is “no.” Often those who disagree will say that the author is dead (metaphorically), so it’s ok to separate the art from the artist. Barthes’s argument is a little different, however. He’s not here to give us permission to like art by bad people. He’s not so much killing the author as dethroning the author.
The phrase resonates with Nietzsche’s claim that “God is dead”: it’s not that “we” have somehow “killed” God, so he doesn’t exist anymore; it’s that Christianity is no longer the sole disciplining authority in society. We have so many other masters to choose from, or we could choose to have no master at all. Now we’re “killing” the author: that is, the author is no longer the sole authority over the text. Just as the death of God frees us to make our own moral choices, the death of the author frees us to make our own interpretative choices, tracing lines of flight out of the text itself rather than searching for the “correct” meaning, the one that the author intended.
These two quotes are the crux of Barthes’s argument:
We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.
And
a text consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other…but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author…but the reader.
The author is but one thread of that tissue. We ought to refrain from centering interpretations (or “explanations”) of a text that privilege the author’s biography or statements about the text above all others. Just because the author interpreted the text one way doesn’t mean a reader can’t take something else away from it. One of the most exciting things about writing is when a reader finds a theme or interprets an ambiguous passage in a way I hadn’t considered. Just because I wrote it doesn’t mean that I am the ultimate authority, the priest and sole legitimate interpreter of a sacred text. As a writer, my job is to craft a machine that produces feelings, sensations, thoughts, connections. I may construct it to produce certain feelings and generate certain images and questions, but when a reader, who is plugged into their own personal history and cultural context, plugs into it and turns it on, as it were, it produces something entirely different for them.
When I was an English professor I would often caution students against leaning too hard on “intention,” usually derived from biographical information, in their analyses of literary texts. More often than not, appeal to intention comes into play when a student is pushing back against a symbolic reading of a text. “How do you know the author meant this to be symbolic?”
Well…we can’t know another’s intention. And anyway it’s not through knowledge of the author’s intention that we are able to make these connections. Even if the author comes out and says, “this is a symbol/metaphor/allegory for X,” why would we take their word for it? The “true” meaning could be something personal to them, or it can be some sort of dog whistle for those in the know, and they’re trying to throw us off the scent (I’m mixing my dog metaphors here). Who knows. The point is that it really doesn’t matter.
And even if they were being honest about their intentions, the nature of language is open; communication does not move in one direction from speaker to hearer, writer to reader. Communication takes place within a context, through a text, and into a particular reader, often across gulfs of space and time. Maybe that’s where I would disagree with Barthes: he takes authority away from the author and gives it to the reader. The locus of interpretative “truth” is even more complex than that. (I put “truth” in scare quotes because we’re dealing with the “truth” of a literary text and not verifiable facts about the world.)
A work of art is capable of more than whatever the artist intended it to do. The role of the critic is to ask, “what can this text do?”1 and not “what does this text mean?” Sure, we can point to Lovecraft’s biography and we can explain his work through his racism (which was not a merely “a product of his time”; he was particularly virulent even by the standards of the 1920s and 30s, and his own friends and family often challenged his views) and say case closed, this means that, Lovecraft was bad and therefore his stories are bad. The true Horror at Red Hook is that there are too many immigrants there, and because of that, it’s a bad story that we shouldn’t read.
If we stopped there, with Lovecraft’s biography, we wouldn’t have gotten Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom or any of the other great works that open up Lovecraft’s aesthetic figures and demonstrate that they’re capable of so much more than what the author may have intended for them to do, mean, or represent. That is the mark of a great work of art: it lives again and again, acquiring new affects in new contexts. It’s why the zombie never really dies in popular culture: it’s always there to signify what we need it to signify.
Whether or not you want to buy books by a living author who is using that money to make the world worse is a separate question entirely. Finding the line between “not perfect” and “truly reprehensible” is a call we all have to make on our own. It’s an easier call to make the longer the author has been dead and largely irrelevant to the wider cultural discourse on whatever said author was shitty about, but I’m rarely able to show my work on that moral calculus, and I find it similarly difficult to judge others for their own decisions.
That this is a discussion at all is a consequence of art being reduced to content consumed in a market, and in the absence of any real democracy, the market is the only place where we can express political consciousness.
A concept stolen from Bruce Baugh’s essay “How Deleuze Can Help Us Make Literature Work,” anthologized in Deleuze and Literature, Edinburgh University Press, 2000. It’s a great introductory text if you’re interested in Deleuze (& Guattari). ↩︎
“I fear I shall never be…good for anything in this world, but composing airs, building towers, forming gardens, collecting old Japan, and writing a journey to China or the moon.”
–William Beckford, 1781
Vathek and Carathis Consult the Planets, Alfred Holst Tourrier
It’s impossible to discuss Beckford’s 1786 novel Vathek without discussing Beckford himself. The weird guy and his weird book: they are inseparable. Beckford’s father, also named William Beckford, had been Lord Mayor of London and owned a plantation and three thousand slaves in Jamaica. A precocious youth, Beckford indulged in his many talents, thanks to his father’s vast wealth: collecting books and works of art, drawing, and studying music, at one point under the tutelage of none other than Mozart himself.
Beckford was bisexual, and while married to Lady Margaret Gordon, he carried on some sort of relationship with William Courtenay, who would later become the 9th Earl of Devon. (I don’t think we can even call a relationship between a 24 year old and 16 year old a “relationship.”) After the two had an explosive argument over Courtenay’s letters to another man, Beckford’s uncle published Beckford and Courtenay’s letters in the newspaper. Scandalized, Beckford exiled himself to Europe, dragging his poor wife along with him. She would die in childbirth a few years later, while Beckford would live into his 80s.
The sordid details of his life—a libertine, an expatriate, a man wealthy enough to devote himself to his passions—are inextricable from the book he wrote. Just as the horrors of slavery funded Beckford’s own lifelong pursuit of knowledge, Vathek sacrifices fifty children and burns to death hundreds of his faithful subjects in the course of his own quest for knowledge. All of Beckford’s fears and anxieties, whether about his relationship with his religious, “possessive and autocratic”1 mother or the revolutionary fervor of the masses in the years before the French Revolution, are laid bare on the page.
Fonthill Abbey, the Gothic-style country house Beckford designed. The main tower would collapse a few times and would have to be demolished completely in the 1840s.
Vathek was a hugely influential novel, leaving its mark on Lord Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Swinburne, and HP Lovecraft, among others. Stéphane Mallarmé wrote the preface to the 1876 French edition, and Jorge Luis Borges wrote an essay on Vathek in which he called its depiction of hell “the first truly atrocious Hell in literature.”
Fallen angels in Hell, John Martin
Given the book’s reputation, I was expecting the ancestor of Tanith Lee’s unsettlingly dark eroticism, a 1780s Bataille, something like black metal. What I got was more black comedy, a campy Arabian Nights fanfic in which a demon is kicked around a palace like a football and one of Vathek’s wives saves him from a tiger by throwing him over her shoulder and carrying him away. It’s humor and wry tone make Vathek more a precursor to Jack Vance than Clark Ashton Smith.
Things get increasingly weird as the story unfolds, and it’s worth reading just for the carnivalesque second half, especially those last few pages as Vathek descends into the Palace of Subterranean Fire. It’s a much more interesting book to think about than to actually read, which perhaps is why it was so inspirational to so many. Beckford put something into the world, as flawed and misshapen as it was, and others nurtured it to its potential.
What can I take from this book as a writer? What interested me the most was the form. While the narrative itself is only about 30,000 words long (the average novel is anywhere between 70,000 and 100,000 words long, with those classic fantasy doorstoppers of the 80s, 90s, and 00s stretching upwards of 250,000 words per volume), a series of footnotes add another 15,000 words to the text.
The work presents itself as an authentic Arabian tale, and the footnotes, composed mostly by Beckford’s tutor Samuel Henley, are intended to lend the story an air of academic authenticity. They define Arabic terms in detail and provide contextual information on Islam and Islamic culture (as filtered through the understanding and prejudices of a pair of 18th century Englishmen), as though this were an educational work of historical importance. But this literary device fooled few contemporary critics. They praised the story’s fidelity to its source material while recognizing that this was by no means an authentic story.
Typical for this book, the story of its composition is more interesting than the book itself. Henley went a little overboard with his footnotes, writing so many that at one point in the book’s genesis the wordcount of the footnotes outstripped that of the narrative itself, and Beckford had to dial them back. It’s as if Henley was using Beckford’s novel as a vehicle for his own interests. I could imagine a Vathek-inspired story looking like this: a story by two fictional authors that purports to be based on an older document, one writing the narrative while the other composes copious footnotes, the two authors working at cross-purposes, creating a complex and contradictory picture of reality.
The moral of the story, stated in its closing paragraphs, is that “the punishment of unrestrained passions and atrocious deeds” awaits those who would “transgress those bounds the wisdom of the Creator has prescribed to human knowledge.” This theme will come up again and again in Gothic literature, and I’ll probably talk about it more when I write about The Monk and Zofloya.
Lonsdale, Roger. “Introduction.” Vathek by William Beckford, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 8. ↩︎
Detail of Gothic Cathedral, Charles Marie Bouton, 1822
I’ve long been afflicted by a strain of Romanticism that I’ve found myself unable to shake. It has manifested as a preoccupation with equality and autonomy, a respect for nature, “an everlasting itch for things remote,” an interest in all things occult, and a thirst for the sublime. Mine is the Romanticism of the Luddite, of William Blake’s “London,” not the nationalist Romanticism of the late 19th Century that birthed the horrors of the 20th.
It’s strange to think how early in my life I began forming these political and aesthetic preferences. One of my earliest memories of reading involves Hamlet and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which were collected in volumes of literature that were part of a 1960s encyclopedia set we had on the shelf.
I don’t think six-year-old me ever got past Act I scene 1 of Hamlet, and I’m sure I understood probably less than half of what I read, but I got enough from it to form a strong mental image that has stuck with me all these years: a guardsman on a castle’s battlements, gazing out into a foggy night (does the text ever say that it’s foggy? It’s a foggy night in my memory). Another man emerges from the darkness, and they speak of an apparition, a ghost that looks just like the dead king.
Unlike Hamlet, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” had glossing in the margins summarizing the story, which made it more comprehensible to me. I was able to get the gist of that tale: an old sailor crashes a wedding, compelled to tell his story. While his ship is stuck on a windless sea, he kills an albatross. This is bad luck among sailors, so they hang it around his neck. Soon after, the ship is beset by the Flying Dutchman, a haunted hulk aboard which sail a skeleton and a creepy pale woman: Death and Nightmare Life-in-Death.
Detail of one of Gustave Dore’s illustrations for “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
My love of fantasy and horror began there, with two stories I could barely understand that nevertheless created strong images in my mind that I remember to this day. But even as I read all of the science fiction and fantasy I could get my hands on, even as I studied Romanticism and Victorian literature in school, I never went deep into Gothic literature. As much as Romanticism’s critiques and observations of early capitalism has informed my worldview, and as much as I love writers influenced by the Romantic and Gothic movements, ranging from Poe to Peake, I thought I’d go back and read some of those Gothic classics that I missed and see what I can take from them.
The Victorian Gothic, whether realist post-Gothic like Charlotte Bronte’s Villette or The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, more explicitly supernatural works like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Dracula, speaks to the spectrality of life under capitalism, to the anxieties surrounding the slipperiness of identity as people once tied to a plot of land became an unmoored industrial working class. I’m interested in seeing how (and if) these themes play out in the earliest Gothic novels, written as they were in the early days of the Industrial Revolution and both before and after the French Revolution.
Most of my favorite fantasy novels have traces of the Gothic in their DNA, some more than others: Gormenghast (more simply a 20th Century Gothic novel than a fantasy novel), The Book of the New Sun, The Lord of the Rings, Tales from the Flat Earth, The Locked Tomb series; even Dune, with its mysterious nuns, gloomy ancient castles, secret and convoluted lineages, and scheming aristocrats is a Gothic novel deep in its bones. My favorite sf film, Alien, is Gothic in space, with an old space ship and an alien playing the role of the old castle and ghost, the corporation replacing the church as the corrupt and hypocritical institution of authority.
Even if you see little direct influence of the Gothic in fantasy, the lineage is there, from chivalric romances and One Thousand and One Nights to Gothic and Romantic art and literature to Edgar Allan Poe to ghost stories and weird fiction to the separation of science fiction, fantasy, and horror into distinct genres. While fantasy is its own thing, you can find in the Gothic the source of many themes, aesthetics, and narrative norms found in the fantasy genre.
Both Gothic and Romantic literature were interested in the sublime: an expansive, excessive feeling that overwhelms understanding and emotion. The best example of the literary sublime, for me, is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Mont Blanc.” Imagine living before photographs and never seeing a picture of the massive snowy peaks of the Alps. Now imagine hiking up a hill and being met with this scene:
A view of Mont Blanc
How overwhelmed would you be? How overcome by awe, by the beauty of nature and the vastness of the world would you be? Would you be paralyzed by your own cosmic insignificance, or enraptured by the divine in nature and your connection to it, or both at the same time? That’s the sublime. That confusing, overwhelming feeling is what Shelley captures in “Mont Blanc.”
The everlasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom— Now lending splendour, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings Of waters—with a sound but half its own, Such as a feeble brook will oft assume, In the wild woods, among the mountains lone, Where waterfalls around it leap for ever, Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.
While the Romantic tended to focus on the latter feeling—the divine in nature—the Gothic located the overwhelming awe of the sublime in a derangement of the senses, probing the limits of rationality and stirring emotions through suspense, shock, and terror. We can imagine the Romantic giving birth to fantasy (by way of Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels) and the Gothic evolving into horror and the weird, but elements of the Gothic and the Romantic mix more freely in these genres.
Ultimately, my goal with this project is to locate the origins of fantasy in the Gothic and think about how these centuries-old books can help us conceptualize and write fantasy (and horror and weird fiction) today.
Detail of Inundated Ruins of a Monastery, Karl Blechen, c. 1824. Full artwork here.
The Gothic novels I’ll be reading over the next month or so are:
Vathek by William Beckford (1768)
The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliffe (1791)
The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis (1796)
Zofloya by Charlotte Dacre (1806)
A more comprehensive study would begin with Otranto and end with Melmoth, from the first Gothic novel to the novel considered the last of the first wave of the Gothic, but I want to read a few different kinds of Gothic novels that I haven’t already read. Every week or so I’ll be back with a critique or review or just some thoughts about each book.
The world of a novel is built from words. An author who writes fantasy in a way that seems as though they are striving to have no style at all—I’ve heard it described as windowpane, transparent, or novelization style—is failing to impart the feeling or experience of the setting, the sense of being in that world, whether it be the unique physical or psychological or sociological or mythic landscape of the world. It’s not worldbuilding that imparts that feeling, but “the worldbuilding effect,” as M. John Harrison put it. Ursula K. Le Guin called it “the authentic Elfland accent.”
“Good prose” is a frequent topic of conversation on fantasy forums. “I’m looking for a fantasy novel with good prose.” “How important is good prose to you?” “I don’t care about prose.” “Good prose” is often equated, by those who prefer “transparent style,” with “purple prose,” which is by definition bad prose. But what they often mean is lyrical, flowery, baroque, maximalist styles, or something that sounds like Shakespeare, Spenser, Lord Dunsany.
“The authentic Elfland accent” isn’t any of these writers’ styles. That is, it doesn’t have to be any of these. It is simply the style appropriate to the story being told. When a fantasy reader rejects a book for having “bad prose,” it’s often because an author is writing a Wikipedia entry on the world that exists in their mind rather than bringing that world to life through language. This isn’t what “show, don’t tell” means, but it should be.
Why does, say, The Winged Histories have “good prose”? It gives voice to the kinds of characters whose voices are often ignored in both history and fantasy. The book is about a different way to relate to wars and kingdoms and heroes than is typically represented in fantasy. It’s about the thoughts and feelings and perspectives of people normally on the sidelines. Its themes would be much weaker if it were written in standard sf/f style of tight third-person limited narration. It’s “good prose” not just because it’s lyrical and expressive and beautiful and evocative; it’s good prose because the style and form of the novel supports the kind of story being told.
“Good prose” makes places and the characters who live there come alive. Gormenghast/Steerpike is not Hayholt/Simon, and Hayholt/Simon is not Winterfell/Bran, because of the different styles Peake, Williams, and Martin deploy in writing about those places and their inhabitants. It’s all the same on the surface, “boy crawls around big castle and sees things he shouldn’t,” but the three writers’ different styles highlight different themes and give each one a different sense of place.
“Art reveals the forces that animate the world,” as someone, I can’t remember who, put it. Not the facts of the world (or a world), but the forces, the flows, the affects. Worldbuilding isn’t a timeline of 10000 years of a setting’s history, or a map with lots of place names on it, or long explanations about how these plants are different, or in any of the “facts” of a fictional world. It is in the texture of the prose, in characters who seem like logical outgrowths of their societies, who have ways of speaking to one another and relating to one another and thinking about their lives that set them apart from those of our own world. Worldbuilding is how it feels to be in that world. In doing so, a writer reveals not only something about a fictional world, but something about our own world, as well. To make those sensations sensible, as it were, writers have to attend to the ways word choice, syntax, rhythm, and mood help them build not the facts of their worlds, but the sense of them.
In discussions of prose or style or anachronisms in works of fantasy, someone will inevitably claim that you should think about what you’re reading as translated fiction, because obviously the people in this fantasy world don’t speak English. Tolkien approached his work this way. So did Gene Wolfe in The Book of the New Sun. But does claiming that an author’s use of contemporary language is an act of translation allow us to avoid the question of style completely? I don’t think so.
Even if we think about fantasy in general as a work in translation, shouldn’t the “translator”/author make an attempt to preserve the texture of the “original work”? Modern American readers will be most familiar with the mile as a unit of distance, but league, mile, and kilometer all suggest very different relationships to measurement and standards. The word you choose will suggest something about the setting. Using units of the international system implies that there is indeed something like our international system of measurements in this world, which in turn suggests that modern nations exist, and these nations and their bureaucratic institutions need standardized measurements for some reason, such as scientific inquiry. Having characters measure length in meters would also suggest that the characters using them have access to standardized measurement tools.
When we encounter “modern” dialogue in our fantasy novels—which we assume to be taking place in “the past,” or at least “a past,” or in a culture that is progressively “behind” ours, all terms fraught with their own issues I’m going to bracket here—we might say “that’s how the author chose to translate it.” That statement in itself is nonsensical because the novel is not actually a work in translation. It might be posing as one, in which case questions of translation are valid. But most works of fantasy do not explicitly introduce this “work in translation” metafiction.
Even if we decide to approach fantasy as translation, the way we communicate is a product of a particular social, historical, environmental, and linguistic context. I want to understand the context of the world I’m reading about. I want the author to render their “translation” in a way that lets me understand and experience the environment of these characters. I want to know how they relate to each other, how they relate to society, how they understand social status, formality and informality, what they consider sacred and profane, all of it.
This dialogue doesn’t have to be full of archaisms. The narrative voice doesn’t have to evoke “the past.” It just has to be true to the story being written. Kai Ashante Wilson’s use of AAVE in The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, for instance, works well in that novella via contrast with both the high-Vancian rhetoric that flavors the setting and the dialogue of other characters, such as that one pretentious European-coded merchant whose name escapes me at the moment. It’s done with intention, playing on reader prejudices concerning “low” and “high” (or “nonstandard” and “standard”) dialects. It’s thematic and intentional. The writing is of a different caliber, producing different effects, to the fantasy novels striving for epic scope and a sense of wonder yet rendered in a bland linguistic monochrome.
Fantasy shows us a world that is not our own so that we may reflect in new ways upon the world we live in. What is fantastic, wondrous, otherworldly, and sublime in fantasy is a product not of the concepts themselves (magic, monsters, and what have you) but of the way the concepts are rendered. Language itself is a spell. The “work in translation” argument fails to grasp what makes fantasy fantastic.
I subscribe to 404 Media because they’re one of the few outlets doing tech journalism that isn’t just uncritically parroting the ridiculous claims of big tech CEOs, but this story about recent discovery of human-created underwater structures near an island off the coast of Brittany has got me thinking about the game of telephone that is Celtic mythology, particularly regarding the Breton legend of the sunken city of Ys. The neolithic and bronze age Celtic cultures of the European Atlantic coast, stretching from Ireland to Spain, were oral cultures. As such, they never preserved their own history in their own words, so we’re left only with their archaeological remains on the one hand, and on the other, the stories written down by the Romans, who produced propaganda about uncivilized barbarians in need of Roman rule, and the Medieval Catholic Church, who appropriated Celtic myth and folklore to teach Christian morality and exalt the victory of Christianity over paganism.
Location of the Isle of Sein, off the coast of Brittany, France
Reading Celtic mythology and folklore as recounted by Medieval Christians offers a tantalizing glimpse into a lost world. For me, the pleasures of these stories, whether Irish, Welsh, or Breton mythology, whether Arthuriana or the Mabinogion, lies in attempting to reconstruct the Celtic values overwritten by Christian ones.
One of my favorite Celtic legends is the legend of the city of Ys. The Dictionary of Imaginary Places by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi summarizes the legend thus:
YS, the ruins of a city in the Bay of Douarnenez, Finistère, France, near the town of Plomarch. Towards the end of the fourth century AD, Ys was protected from the sea by a strong dam, the gates of which were hidden; only the king possessed the key to these gates. The king’s daughter was tempted by a mysterious stranger. To please him, she stole the key from her father’s chamber; the gates were opened and the city was drowned. To this very day, travellers can hear the bells of the churches of Ys sounding the hours, deep in the shadowed bay.
It may turn out that the place isn’t so imaginary, after all. The aforementioned discovery points to a historical origin of the legend. That’s not to say that these stones are the ruins of Ys itself, or that the city sank for the reasons outlined in the legend, but that the motif of the sunken city in Celtic mythology has historical origins.
I’ve been trying to write a story set in Ys for years, on and off. We can’t really know what the “original” version of the story is, before Chrsitian interpolation, and I can’t purport to write a version that is faithful to the original Celtic story, if an “original” even exists, but I can try to “re-paganize” or “de-Christianize” it by cutting away the dualistic morality and the demonization of women. My story in Flame Tree’s Morgana anthology (that’s marketing, folks) follows a similar trajectory with respect to the figure of Morgan Le Fay, whose role in Arthurian legend Medieval Christian writers often couldn’t quite work out.
Arnold Böcklin, Die Toteninsel (The Island of the Dead), 1880
Dahud, the king’s daughter in the Ys myth, is a similar figure to Morgan. Françoise Le Roux and Christian-Joseph Guyonvarc’h connect the two in La Légende de la ville d’Is, arguing that the legend of Ys “is also the legend of Dahud or Morgane, the daughter of the sea.”
While the legend’s motifs, such as the woman of the Otheworld, originate in Celtic mythology, it makes sense to me that this story, and other Celtic tales of sunken cities, such as the Cornish legend of Lyonesse and the Welsh legend of Cantre’r Gwaelod as told in The Black Book of Carmarthen, would have their origin in historical fact.
It wouldn’t be the first time science vindicates myth. One need look no further than Humboldt Bay near Eureka, California. The indigenous Wiyot people have a legend about its creation: one day, the earth opened up and swallowed the land, flooding the area and destroying a tribe in the process.
For a long time it seemed absurd that a body of water the size of Humboldt Bay could appear overnight. But it turns out that the story encodes a historical event: the 1700 Cascadia Earthquake, a magnitude 8.7 earthquake that rocked the Pacific Northwest and created a tsunami that reached all the way to Japan.
Humboldt Bay
It’s not unreasonable to think that Celtic stories of sunken cities are no different, recording historical events dating as far back as the end of the ice age, when sea levels were far lower and the southern part of the North Sea was a stretch of lush tundra now known as Doggerland. The European coastline as we know it today didn’t take shape until about 7000 years ago. How many settlements were lost to rising sea levels?
While these settlements, and the structures discovered off the coast of Brittany, were likely nothing more than villages of hunter-gatherers who crafted stone tools and erected megaliths, the paucity of factual knowledge leaves the door open to romantic notions of lost civilizations. These gaps in the historical record are what get my imagination going for some reason, whether it’s the Tocharians of the Tarim Basin in western China, or the Atlantic Bronze Age, or the Native American abandoned city of Cahokia, or the Garamantes of the Sahara.
Anyway I need to finish one of my Ys stories before someone else realizes what an excellent platform it would be to tell the story of the current civilizational collapse that we’re currently living through…
I originally read this book and wrote this review shortly after it was released a year ago, but I never got around to posting it. Now that the book has been nominated for a Nebula and a Hugo for best novella, I thought it’d be a good time to revisit it.
The university and its contradictions has been a theme of a few major works of sff recently. On the one hand, the university is a place of growth and learning. It’s a place where revolutionary new ideas for the betterment of humanity can be incubated and inculcated. It’s a place where young people growing into adulthood can find their place in the world and develop new ways of living together. It’s a place where you have access to a broad range of knowledge that will make you a better, more complete person who can make better, more compassionate and informed decisions for yourself and others in a democratic society. At least, that’s what I’d like to believe, as someone from a working-class background who used to teach at such an institution.
In reality, the university has never been this utopian monastic community existing outside of a society’s dominant values and structures. It is and has always been an instrument of power. See, for instance, Columbia University’s capitulations to fascism then and now. Today’s university is a real estate scheme, an investment fund, a corporate R&D lab supported by debt. It never was about personal or social growth. It’s always been a place where hegemony is reproduced, a place where the next generation of aristocrats is interpolated into their class, and more recently where future white-collar workers are trained in middle-class mores, a place where the society of control tightens its technological grip over us all. Students and teachers interested in doing so can still find personal enlightenment and political engagement in such an environment, but that’s not ultimately what it’s for.
This dichotomy of the university has played out in a number of recent sff novels that critique the university’s complicity in empire, the way it sucks up promising young people from the periphery and grinds them into the technocratic administrators of the values of the core. These novels look to open up the possibility of resistance to assimilation and subjugation, of actually using the master’s tools to dismantle his house.
It’s a theme dear to me from my own experience in academia, yet I find most of these books deeply unsatisfying. Either the themes weren’t adequately dramatized, the dullness of the writing itself detracted from the power of the themes, or the message was far too lacking in nuance or ambiguity to give readers anything to think about, grapple with, or take into their lives after they turned the last page of the book. Great concepts, lacking in execution, either because these writers didn’t trust their audiences or didn’t trust themselves.
Sofia Samatar’s new novella, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, is yet another sortie into this discussion of the role of the university in empire and the place of the other within it, explored through the points of view of both the student and the professor. The character known as “the boy” shows a talent for art and is taken out of slavery and put into the university to assuage the guilt of liberal administrators and create a “model minority,” which only perpetuates a bootstraps ideology (if he can work hard and overcome slavery, so can you!). The professor, known only as “the woman,” isn’t satisfied with these well-intentioned but ultimately meaningless (at best) or harmful (at worst) gestures and has to decide whether her emancipatory goals can even be accomplished from within the institution of the university.
It’s almost a cliché to say this about a great novella, but Samatar does more with 100 pages than most do with 500. The characters are economically but precisely drawn; while presented as archetypes—the boy, the woman, the jaded elder, the humble elder, the prophet—each character still sparkles with an inner life, little portraits that capture an essence in a glance.
Samatar’s style is the most noticeable aspect of any of her work. It does a lot of the heavy lifting of creating an immersive setting, the way all good sff prose should. There’s very little in the way of exposition or what would be traditionally called “worldbuilding.” After wrecking the climate, humanity has abandoned Earth for a fleet of ships that mine asteroids. This society is extremely, brutally, unequal.
She draws that society through the people who comprise it. These are people with conflicting loyalties, people who say one thing and do another, people who don’t see the effects of their actions. They’re people, not good, not bad, trying to work within and around a system built on human suffering, often failing to see beyond their own points of view. The novella’s psychedelic climax provides little in the way of answers, but it has stuck with me for months. There is a web, a net, sparks between bodies; chains are no longer restraints but the links between us, that bind us to each other and remind us of our shared humanity and the strength in solidarity.
For Augustine of Hippo, religio meant a re-binding or re-connection: re + legare. Religio denotes personal and social obligations: the chain that binds us together and links us to that which came before.
It’s hard to think about revolution without using spiritual language. Deleuze & Guattari talk about the numinous and the divine in their discussion of the Body without Organs in Anti-Oedipus. That’s because a revolutionary consciousness is not an individualized consciousness, not a river but a sea, a chain that ties us together rather than keeps us bound to a master.
My favorite book as a kid was The Rand McNally Illustrated Atlas of the World. That book sparked a lifelong love of geography, and in my fantasy writing, the way geology, geography, climate, and ecology affect culture are the bases of worldbuilding. But I’m reluctant to include a map in my own work, even if readers are expecting it, even if not having one will put off readers.
My main issue is that fantasy maps make the world too knowable, too small, even when they only depict just one country or one continent of a larger world. They’re always too empty, too cursory, too constrained by the need to fit onto a 6” x 9” page (or across two pages) in black and white. They are often presented as an objective representation of the shape of a land and rarely impart anything that I can read like a literary text, as part of the text of the novel. They rarely say anything about the people or culture who produced the map or their reasons for doing so or what use such a map would have in-world. When they do, it’s often just an excuse to make a bad map. Most of the time, the maps in fantasy novels are just bad maps.
Fantasy maps often seem like an afterthought, another piece of packaging designed to tell the reader, “you’re reading a fantasy novel.” Sometimes it’s a shorthand for telling us what kind of fantasy novel you’re reading: this place is roughly Europe-shaped, this character is from the part that corresponds to France, while this other character is from the part that corresponds to Spain.
Perdido Street Station is one of my favorite fantasy novels and remains a wildly inventive one even 25 years after its publication, but the map at the front doesn’t have much to say beyond “this place is roughly London-shaped, so think about a really weird London as you read.” The fact that it’s a map of a city with railroads and not a continent with mountain ranges and forests does, I guess, tell us something about what kind of book to expect, but just the first chapter of the book does a better job of that than a pretty boring and mostly empty map.
Its sequel, The Scar, has no map at all. It would have been a worse book had it included one. The constant deluge of weird place names, bizarre creatures, and weird geography in the first 100 pages or so does a better job of establishing the world as a vast, dangerous, and unknown place than any map ever could. In the case of fantasy geography, a thousand words are worth far more than a picture.
So to me, there’s little value in a fantasy map beyond packaging. The cover art says “this is a fantasy novel,” the map at the front says “you’ve just opened a fantasy novel,” the pages of glossary and dramatis personae say “this is a very big fantasy novel,” the “1000 years ago” prologue says “this is a quite big and epic fantasy novel indeed.” If you don’t find any of that stuff, you might end up wondering what kind of fantasy novel this is anyway, or if it is even a fantasy novel at all.
I like maps that do something interesting with the convention, like the one in The Spear Cuts Through Water, which does everything I’m complaining that fantasy maps don’t do. Take a look at it and read what the author has to say about it here. You can read the map in the way you’d read a work of art, it says something about the culture that created it and our own relationship to maps, and it’s not just an attempt to represent the shape of the land. It doesn’t literalize the metaphor that a fantasy novel presents.
History is full of interestingly inaccurate maps for fantasy cartographers to consider. There’s the T-O map, a world map resembling the letter T inside of an O.
This map doesn’t attempt to accurately represent the shape of the continents. It’s meant to be read symbolically. Top is East; Asia is the landmass on top, Europe on the left, Africa on the right. Not very useful for navigation, but it certainly says something about the culture that created it: a perfectly round world divided neatly into three parts, a trinity of continents, with the Holy Land at the center, the perfect Creator reflected in His perfect creation.
Here’s a particularly fanciful T-O map from the mid-15th century, featuring Noah’s Ark on top of Mt. Ararat:
I love the Qing Dynasty-era maps like this one that serves of a record of the Kangxi Emperor’s tour through newly conquered lands:
That’s a detail of a much larger scroll. You can view the whole thing here. From The Met’s description of the piece:
Although Wang based his design on maps and woodblock prints — he never visited the mountain — he also connected specific sites with imaginary landscape passages inspired by classical precedents and employed a traditional “blue-and-green” palette to underscore the emperor’s beneficent rule.
These images lie somewhere between map and landscape painting. They are a representation of the land controlled by the Emperor and at the same time they serve to legitimize his rule. This is how I would like to see fantasy writers think about their maps, if their publishers insist they include one.
There is a tension in fantasy between absolutes and ambiguity, meaning and openness, strangeness and familiarity, mystery and revelation: the mystery of magic, the revelation of the magic system. Fantasy is a literature of mystery and the sublime, and the fantastic is killed when ambiguity is contorted into an intelligibility that leads us to believe that the representation is the thing. Whenever I read a fantasy novel that doesn’t have a map—The Etched City, for instance—I find myself asking, “what would knowing what the land is shaped like add to this experience?” The answer is always nothing.
