Black Gate

Last week, I described the neo-classical attitudes of the Age of Reason, which dominated English literature through most of the 18th century. This week I want to take a look at how and when things changed.

In 1798 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poetry that some critics have pointed to as the start of Romanticism in English literature. In fact, you can fairly easily find precursors to one aspect or another of the phenomenon called Romanticism; Blake, for example, was publishing his illuminated prophecies in 1789. But there were a number of works preceding him, as well, and I’m going to look here at some of those texts that seem to pave the way for Romanticism, particularly in the thirty years from 1760 to 1790.

Since I’m interested in Romanticism as a form of fantasy, the texts I’ll look at have to do broadly with the impulse toward fantasy and away from realism. I think the fantastic is a key characteristic of the romantic, while the classical or neo-classical emphasis of the earlier eighteenth century effectively went hand-in-hand with realism. It has to be said that there are other ways to look at Romanticism; it’s certainly true that Wordsworth in particular emphasised the importance of doing away with Enlightenment conventions, and with an outdated poetic diction, in order to focus on life as it was really lived across all social classes. Romanticism is an amorphous term. Writers of the era did not call themselves Romantic, and did not group themselves together the way we group them now. As a result, strict definitions are useless. If you look too long at the vast territory often ascribed to ‘romanticism,’ sooner or later you find significant overlap with ‘the enlightenment.’

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By way of beginning a discussion about Romanticism and fantasy, I’d like to take a quick look at where the Romantics came from. If Romanticism was a revolt against Reason, what was Reason understood to be? If Romanticism, as I feel, is essentially fantastic, is Reason opposed to fantasy? To know Romanticism is to know the Enlightenment which it was reacting against, so in this post I’ll try to describe some characteristics of the 18th-century Enlightenment in England that seem relevant to the development of fantasy. I’ll go up to about 1760, and then in my next post point out some of the counter-currents and proto-Romantic elements that were developing at the time and after.

A few broad statements to start with: The Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, started in the mid-seventeenth century, viewed by thinkers at the time as a reaction against the wars of religion that had rocked Europe up through the Thirty Years’ War (which ended in 1648). Reason was considered the fundamental human faculty, and human beings were thought to be fundamentally rational actors. Deism, particuarly prominent in England, was a religious philosophy which suggested that God had created the world and left it to develop according to its own laws, without the intervention of miracle and revelation. Free speech, freedom of thought, and humanism were natural, because rational: in a free market of ideas, reason would naturally turn to the true and shun the false. Human rights as we understand them today derive from Enlightenment virtues.

This wasn’t simply a philosophical movement. This was a change in habits of thought across Europe. The scientific method became broadly diffused and rational thinking became an ideal. Isaac Newton developed new theories of physics and optics; he and Gottfried Liebnitz simultaneously developed calculus. The Royal Society was born in the late seventeenth century, helping to systematically spur the development of science. Europeans discovered the secret of making porcelain; clockwork reached new levels of sophistication; mercury thermometers were introduced.

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Before continuing the series of posts on Romanticism that I talked about last week, I’d like to write about a couple of subjects I’ve had on my mind for a while. First up is Q.D. Leavis, and her book Fiction and the Reading Public.

In or slightly before 1932, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote a letter to literary ciritc Queenie Dorothy Leavis. Leavis was preparing her PhD thesis, a book that would be an overview of the development of the bestseller and the publishing industry; as part of her preparation, she sent a questionnaire to sixty writers of various kinds, asking them about various aspects of fiction and publishing. Burroughs returned his questionnaire with a letter, which Leavis reproduced at one point in her book:

In submitting to you, in accordance with your courteous letter, my answers to your questionnaire, I wish you to know that I am fully aware of the attitude of many scholars and self-imagined literati toward that particular brand of deathless literature of which I am guilty.

From past experience it is only natural that I should assume that you may, in some degree at least, share their views. It would seem rather remarkable to me if you did not.

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I’ve been thinking over the past few days about last week’s post on William Blake and fantasy. I’ve come to realise that post is actually just the start of a much larger project.

I mentioned last week that I agreed with John Clute’s argument that the mid-eighteenth century was the era when fantastika — sf, fantasy, and horror — came into being. I’ll go further. I think the era that followed, the Romantic era of English literature, represented the dawn of fantasy as we know it; and that the major writers of that time pioneered approaches to fantasy, and elements of fantasy fiction, that are still in use today. I’ve realised now that I want to write about this general subject: Romanticism as the start of modern fantasy. But the more I thought about it, the more different connections I found between fantasy and Romanticism. So many, in fact, that I’ve also realised that there’s no way I can cover them all in one post.

I therefore intend to explore those connections in a series of upcoming essays. It’ll be an irregular series, I expect, interspersed with posts about more contemporary elements of fantasy as well. I anticipate it being wide-ranging. There are a lot of different aspects to Romanticism, and it’s a topic and a time that’s endlessly fascinating to me.

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Perhaps my favourite fantasy writing is arguably not fantasy at all. The epics and prophecies of William Blake certainly read like fantasy to many people, I think, albeit fantasy in a distinctive, unfamiliar form. But is the word appropriate? Blake himself was a visionary — he literally saw visions — and may well have believed that some at least of his writing was literally true. Does the definition of fantasy reside in the writer, or the reader? And how would Blake himself want his writing to be viewed?

Farah Mendlesohn, in her book Rhetorics of Fantasy, argued that the term ‘fantasy’ did not necessarily apply to the works of Latin American magic realist writers. As I understand her, she argues that the cultures of these writers are distinct from the culture that produced ‘fantasy fiction,’ and that the writers therefore stand in a different relationship of belief to the fiction. Magic realist texts “are not meant to act as genre text. Instead, the world from which the text was written is the primary world. It only becomes fantastical because we Anglo-American readers are outsiders. … Magic realism … is written with the sense of fading belief. If we are looking for some form of it, we need the literature of a similar culture, one in which the presence of other powers is a real and vibrant thing, even if it must exist alongside scientific rationalism.”

I don’t know whether what Mendlesohn describes is necessarily a cultural outlook, or whether it can be a personal one. She acknowledges it can apply to writing from the American South. But take John Crowley’s novel quartet The Solitudes, which seems like a North American piece of magic realism and which very carefully builds in explanations for its metaphysical elements — Crowley suggests that the world remakes itself on occasion, with different rules and a rewritten history each time; magic might have worked once, the books say, but when the world last changed, not only did magic stop working, but history itself was changed so that in fact magic now never has worked. Does one need to concern oneself with Crowley’s own philosophical positions before determining whether his writing is fantasy? (In fact, it’s a more complicated question than that; briefly, the characters are half-aware that they’re characters in a story, and the text itself unfolds aware of its nature as a text. Whether this makes it more fantastic or less is an interesting point, but not what I want to talk about here.)

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Fantasy fiction is very often set either in the European Middle Ages, or in lands that are intentionally highly reminiscent of the Middle Ages in terms of technology and social structure. It is true that the use of European medieval settings is less common now than it has been, and also true that there have always been counter-examples. But it seems that much fantasy still relies on the European Middle Ages to define itself, one way or another. Sadly, one often has a sense that these backgrounds are not wholly thought-through; not realised as completely as they might be. The setting in a lot of fantasy, particularly I think in commercial fantasy fiction, seems to be a very generic Middle Ages in which medieval stereotypes mix with unexamined modern assumptions.

(Historian and fantasy writer Kari Sperring had an excellent blog post not long ago in the course of which she decried ‘theme park’ fantasy; fantasy set in a world which has the trappings of medievalism but which lives on stereotypes about the past. Fiction that does not approach the Middle Ages as a distinctive culture — or, more properly, set of cultures — but rather as a way of reflecting some culture of the present day, with a few period trappings.)

In fact it’s a mistake to talk of ‘the Middle Ages’ as a single thing; between the sack of Rome and the advent of the Renaissance was a full thousand years, and different areas of Europe experienced those times very differently. It is wrong to imagine the Middle Ages as stagnant or unchanging or uniform. Technology changed, the arts changed, the understanding of the world changed. There were multiple Middle Ages, which varied with time and place; good fiction, I feel, understands this. Which is to say that good fiction, for the most part, understands the historical material it’s working with, and draws inspiration from the specifics of its background. History is an attempt at a record of human affairs, which means that it lends itself to drama and intensely human stories.

All of which brings me around to Judith Tarr’s 1989 novel Ars Magica, the story of a wizard a thousand years ago who became Pope.

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