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Today, I'll be speaking with Catherine Butler, who is reader in English at Cardiff University,

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has written extensively on fantasy literature, perhaps most notably with her monograph

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for British fantasists in 2006, and has also written six

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fantasy novels herself.

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Thank you for joining me. Nice to be here. So my first question

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to you is quite a general one. Hopefully I'll take a stunner.

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So some interesting roots. This is this. This

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talk is this part of a series of groups around the title Fancy Literature.

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Do you think there is such a thing at all? And if so, how would you define it and what would be its main

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characteristics? Well, I'm fairly sure there is such a thing.

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I think probably most literature historically has been fantasy literature.

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How we might define it is a trickier question on the whole. That's what I'd

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rather leave to the lexicographers. I quite like the approach that brought Atterberry

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took of defining fantasy in terms of its being a so-called in fuzzy

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set this kind of logical idea of where things at the centre of the set are

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clear cut. Everybody pretty much would agree that the Lord of the Rings is a fantasy work,

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but around the edges where it gets fuzzier and

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there are borders between fantasy and science fiction, between fantasy and realism, between fantasy

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and magical realism. Various other genres. And there are certain texts that we might

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want to argue the toss. But I think if we get het up on those hard

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cases, we'll make some very bad law. If I had to choose amongst

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the many definitions of fantasy that have been offered, probably my favourite

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concise one is Catherine Hume's idea, and I'm probably slightly misquoting

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her. I hear that your fantasy is that which

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differs from consensus reality. So in

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the phrase consensus reality and particularly the word consensus is the key one

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here, I think because it suggests that what constitutes fantasy literature

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is partly a function of what people tend to think constitutes

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the real, which of course does vary over time and between cultures.

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And I think, yes, fantasy in that sense is a kind of moving target.

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I think it also reminds us that phrase consensus, reality,

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that reality is also up

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for negotiation, that when people contrasts fantasy

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with the real the real that they're talking about is often in very large part a kind

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of social reality made up with things like

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promises, a point as promotions, status and

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market value, those kinds of concepts which are in a sense

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just as fantastic as anything else. They are produced by the performative power of words rather

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than having any foundation in physics. I think that actually as

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human beings, we spend a lot of our lives in this problematic for sure, where imagination

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and physics have rival claims and fantasy literature. For me, it's interesting

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because it takes that dispute, if you like, as its

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subject matter. But I think it's implicit in almost all literature and

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great. Thank you. If I might sort of

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ask a question on the back of that sort of trying to address the main

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characteristics in SCAG quotes of fantasy literature. Yeah. If

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it's even possible to tease out main characteristics, because I'm sure there will always be

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counterexamples where those main characteristics are not present. And yet we would still call the work

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fun to almost certain to take you back to Tolkien. He was,

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of course, hung up on this idea of fairy diaries.

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So over the over over the. And do you think that he was tapping

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into something at the core of fantasy and his notion of

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a fairy, the fairy worlds? Is this something? Is this a useful concept

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decades down the line to to engage with? I'm not sure it's a useful word.

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But then, of course, it's always a bad idea to call fairies fairies if you don't like it.

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I think it does acknowledge something which in the

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world of the fantasy that we call realism, we are likely to want to

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leave unacknowledged, which is that we are largely imaginative beings. We spend

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a good portion of our lives in the thrall. Subconsciously, a third of our lives

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as we're spending asleep. Hmm. Almost as though our waking hours were spending in daydreams.

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A lot of our motivations are based on imagination.

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And what we might call fantasy in a negative way as well is in a positive.

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So if we think about fairy as something which has

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power over our perceptions of reality, a kind of glamour to the good fairy word,

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I think it's something which absolutely is what needs to be written about.

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I'm not sure if that's what Tolkien had in mind by the word.

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Of course, he also in positive of fairy

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stories that he was writing, that he was defending that word. Of course, he also talks about that special

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kind of consciousness, which we call sub creation. Yes.

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Which has tended to be linked for understandable reasons, considering what his

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own fictions were like with the idea of fairy, with the idea of the fantastic

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and specifically with the idea of secondary worlds. But I think actually,

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if you go back and read that, well, originally a lecture, they try and say, yeah,

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you'll see that what Tolkien is talking about is actually that special conscious state

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of half hypnotic consciousness, which is called entering into a story. That story does not

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need to be what we would necessarily call a fantasy in the literary

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short sentence. If you read and are absorbed by Pride and Prejudice,

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if you fall in love with Mr. Darcy or if you cry over

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the death of a favourite character, then in a sense you are being sucked into

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a sub creation or submitting your consciousness and your imagination to

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a belt on some mercy, if I can say in that in the form of an author and that

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that is a real power, we might call that fairy, we might call it something else. But I think

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perhaps we're talking about the same thing. Yeah, certainly. I mean, in that same

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lecture [INAUDIBLE] essay, Tolkien talks about what uses or

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just some the willing suspension of disbelief. And so I think it's the same thing, a sort of argues against that

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up until the point and sort of suggests that a good fantasy

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ships should be able to ditch the world will end up. But, yes, I totally agree that it

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should be an involuntary involuntary thing. And as soon as you become conscious of the fact that you're suspending disbelief,

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the magic of that experience is is lost or diminished somehow. Of course,

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he's quite right about that. And I suspect that Coleridge would have agreed with me

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if if Tolkien had been able to pull him up on it. Yes. Yes. The suspension of disbelief

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brought more than the willingness, which is the key factor. But

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I think talking with actually saying something quite important, there is something which, you know,

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in a way goes against the grain of

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English criticism as a kind of academic subject where we've wanted on the whole to

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sit, as it were, in charge of all our faculties in some kind of

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evaluative or analytical judgement on a piece of literature

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and say you have either describe it or evaluate it.

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And in order to do that, it requires a certain objective

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detachment from it. But the literary experience

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at its best, I think, and certainly at its most involving, requires

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a kind of submission. Now, whether that submission is wholly voluntary, wholly

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involuntary and involuntary or somewhere in between.

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I think that varies. But the fact that it does gets submitted

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to some extent is important. And without it, we wouldn't have any kind of effective

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relationship with stories or their characters or their places.

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Great to taking Tolkien as a

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as a as a starting point for my next question and moving away from sort of the theoretical

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concerns of fancy literature.

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There is the term Oxford School trying to

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study this a a term a label that you've engaged with.

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Well, I haven't I haven't actually engaged with that phrase. I think that's very much

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Maria. Yes. Phrase. But I've said a. Faced with the

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phenomenon, the phenomenon, precisely because I think you're alluding, of course, to four British fantasists

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where I took as my subjects

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Ireland, Ghana and Penelope Lively, but also to the people in

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the so-called Oxford schools. Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper. Yeah.

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And part of the lens through which I was looking at them was the fact that they were all

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at Oxford as undergraduates in the first

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half of the 1950s. Only two of my four were studying English.

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Lively was studying history and Ghana classics. Although

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he often did attend English lectures. Yeah.

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So, yes, the Oxford School is a it's a complicated

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a multipart question, I think. There are some way I suppose I

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better start with a couple of caveats, I think. Go ahead. If we want to talk about the Oxford School,

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we have to be aware that as when we make any kind

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of label like that, there's a possibility of

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cutting out of the account other very important aspects of these writer's

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lives. So in the case of Diana and Jones, for example,

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the influence acknowledged and I think pretty obvious of Inês

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bit on her writing. Well, yes, but it's not an Oxford person

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and therefore won't appear in accounts of the Oxford school, but certainly at least

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as much of an influence on Diana in Jones Jones's C.S. Lewis, I should say.

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But that is to say that they were both influences. But let's not forget that Nesbit was there, too,

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similarly with Susan Cooper. I think if you sit down and read The Dark is Rising

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alongside John Masefield Box of Delights, you'll see that there's a very

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strong and direct connexion there. But again, that doesn't seem to fit.

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If that meant that it's not that she doesn't belong in the Oxford

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school, but that her membership of it shouldn't be allowed to

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cut those other influences and aspects of her writing out of account. So there's that.

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The word school also perhaps suggests that there's a kind of

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conscious association of these people, that they were, as it were, working together

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when I was writing my book, Higher Jocularly. I think that would be

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the right word, these circumstances suggested. Was there a junior inklings club where these brightest

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got together and read each other early draughts of the way it's done if Bingham.

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Well, the fact is there wasn't there when they were at Oxford. None of these writers

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really knew each other or certainly not at all well. And

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so but having said all that, I think there are quite a lot of things for the idea of the

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Oxford school. One of them is Oxford itself.

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I think Philip Pullman has written quite eloquently on Oxford as a place.

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Absolutely. And when you think about the characteristics of so-called Oxford

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school fantasy, you know, Oxford physically embodies quite

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a lot of them with its history, obviously also its traditions,

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its secrets, its hidden panels, as it were, its rituals,

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its shibboleths. And when you remember that these writers are coming here

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at the age of 18, most of them not having been to public

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school, Liam, these are mostly grammar school people coming to Oxford, right. For the first time at 18,

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a very impressionable age, having been told no doubt that by going to Oxford, they

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are entering an intellectual and possibly social elite,

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which, of course, is kind of true in Britain. Well, then

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it is not it wouldn't be terribly surprising if that would be an element of their thinking.

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And if we look at. Those kinds of ideas as they

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play themselves out in fantasy wide. Lo and behold, they are there. So I think Oxford

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as a place is important. Another aspect, which, of course,

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Maria talks about in her book as well is C.S. Lewis and

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J. Are talking the kind of founder members of the Oxford school.

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And yet certainly both as

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the the manufacturers and sponsors of the Oxford English curriculum,

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with its heavily mediaevalist emphasis and as examples of fantasy

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writers themselves, they were hugely influential. And I think

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that has been acknowledged by by

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most of the writers in the Oxford school. And to some extent,

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if perhaps not so much by Garner and Lively gonna perhaps as

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OK, on contrary, kind of denied influence.

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Then I think perhaps at least as important as that, though, has been the way in which

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Lewis and Tolkien have created both a market, you

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know, kind of literary market for fantasy, which later writers were then able to

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exploit. Certainly in the case of Alan Garner, when the son was

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encouraged to try to publish the bridge of bringing him in because it was riding on the

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back of this kind of Tolkien mania. Well, I. Collins Billy Collins,

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who had rejected the Lord of the Rings and before he received the

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weird set up with Inkerman and having realised that he'd thrown away our Pearl,

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Richard and all his tribe when he saw something else with with us and Dwarf's

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sorry to wharfs. He was in there.

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He snapped it off. And certainly other people, including C.S. Lewis, when he read

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the wisdom of his Inkerman, was immediately I'm reminded of talking and he was

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not the full blast. Obviously. God

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himself suggested that the resemblance was because they shared common sources.

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Bathing in their belts and so.

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That argument rages. I'm not going I'm not going to get involved in it.

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So that was the question of creating a market that also very much connectivity, a context

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of perception. So Lewis being the first example of that.

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But when people look at these books, they are they will be primed, as it

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were, to see Oxford, Lewis and Tolkien in Connexions.

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And so I think this is a kind of circle, but we're still

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patients according to taste, by which the Oxford school, its

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its age has become the club sharper and clearer. And as it were, self confirming.

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Great. Thank you for that answer. I wondered if we might just

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say a bit more about Alan Garner as a sort of possible outlier

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in the idea of the Oxford School as somebody who read classics briefly

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before terminating his studies. And as somebody who has denied this

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this influence from from Tolkien or any association with a so-called

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Oxford school. But it is interesting that he does riff on some of

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the same traditions as Tolkien. The way it's done at presentments is steeped in Norse

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mythology. Yeah. And the our service is

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very much saturated in mediaeval Welsh

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literature. It is the mythological. And so he draws on the

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mob orgasm quite explicitly. And yet

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his writing is very local. It's very rooted in plagues and in very particular places

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in the British Isles. Yes. And in fact, the whole service is itself an outlier within

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Gardiners one. And because all the rest of his work is basically set around

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old age where he grew up. Yeah. And Cheshire. Yeah.

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And I wonder if this is a threat, perhaps that that runs through at least some of the writings of some

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of the members of the Oxford school and their associates. Tolkien,

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I think, was very sensitive to place. Absolutely. You know, we start in these small

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and the in the homely of the shire before expanding out into the wider world. Gone are

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clearly interested in place. And as you say, most of his writing is situated in the region of elderly age.

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Sudoku. From the dark is rising. She's situating

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the events of that novel in a particular part of England. You know, the path one that was familiar to

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do. Do you think that this is perhaps one of the ways in which the later

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Oxford fantasy writers did something perhaps a bit different with

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the mediaeval source material that they may have been drawing on at times? Well,

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I think they were mostly very interested in place anyway, whether

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they were doing it through literary mediaeval models. But I think a lot of the right, all

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of the writers pretty much that we've mentioned so far

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have a say. I wouldn't call this so much.

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Specifically, Oxford school characteristic, although it's certainly very much there in the Oxford school.

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But if I did that, it's a British fantasy

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kind of trope, I think, to use place.

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It's historical, it's archaeological, it's folkloric sometimes

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even it's palaeontological aspects. And to try

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to find resonances, to dig down, to stratify to

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excavate those places. And I think there's a large section

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of British fantasy writing, including pretty much all the Oxford school, but not

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confined to it. Which is as important

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to coin a phrase. You know, it's very palimpsest. Yes. I think that's the way

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the nice word. I think that's that's that's very much the way that

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a lot of British fans, not all of it, but a lot of British fantasy works. It looks for places

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in there, different aspects. And if you could say it's backward looking or you say it looks

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down into the ground. And of course, if you're an archaeologist, those two things are

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the same as you dig down. You go back in time. And in a way,

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this is a distinction on the whole between

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British fantasy writing and that of, say, America,

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where, of course, there is a lot of history, but a lot of it is

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off limits for writers of European descent because

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for reasons of a very understandable sensitivity. So

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when they write fantasy, they have to make it from different kinds of materials.

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So they might use some imported European elements

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or they might try to make it out of contemporary elements.

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So something like that, all I think is doing both of those things. Mm hmm.

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I'm not an expert on American fantasy, however, so I probably shouldn't go too far down that line.

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But there's perhaps a tangible difference between what for, for example,

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American policy writers are doing, as opposed to what British fantasy writers

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have at least done historically because of the different

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space that they occupy that they live in. And there is a different cultural

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context that they are being considered. Absolutely. And as

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I say, it doesn't apply to all British fantasy. But I think there's a lot of fantasy writers, some

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associated with Oxford, some no doubt influenced by Oxford, people like Rolling, for

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example. There's a couple of Oxford writers we haven't mentioned, such as

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Jill Peyton Walsh and Penelope Farmer, both

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fantasy writers who were suntans a couple of years after Diana

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when Chance was there. Overlapping a little bit. OK.

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So, yeah, that they're they're writers who are, I think in many cases, not in all their

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work, but in many cases looking at the kind of archaeological aspects of Britain in the broadest

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sense and finding magic there. And I think it was Humphry Carpenter

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who characterised perhaps slightly caricatured

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fantasy from. At any rate, the 60s and 70s is having a kind of recognisable pattern where,

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you know, often children will discover some artefact or some

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secret of some hidden place within a place which opens up

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its pop. It's historical or more likely magical or mythological past

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to them. And then understanding that they will come to understand themselves.

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And in a way, you could say all of this is even reprising the kind of experience which

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was first set out in a book like Puck of PWCS, held by Richard Kipling, where

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its exposure to the mythological parts of England, which is then

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consciously forgotten but worked, remains at a subconscious

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level that really grounds the child protagonist in

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a sense of themselves as English, in this particular case,

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very specific. So I think in that sense, and of course, many Maria

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in her book is quite rightly connecting this to its

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imperialistic and nostalgic elements.

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I think in this sense, you could say that that that strain of fantasy writing from Kipling

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on and in in a different direction coming from C.S. Lewis and J. RL Tolkien

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had a very long tail. Perhaps we're not past it yet.

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I wouldn't want entirely to repudiate everything that's in that aspect of fantasy writing,

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but obviously there are many very problematic aspects to it. Yeah, of course.

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I mean, I'd rather you of picked up on the

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response of children to fantasy literature and fantasy literature, which

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is perhaps intentionally got them in mind

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talking. And Lewis grappled with this distinction between children's

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literature and adults literature and specifically in the context of a fantasy.

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Would you say that there is a clear divide between the two? Well,

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there ought to be a divide. If people try to to enforce it,

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I don't really know what that divide would be.

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And it's not just a matter of fantasy literature. On the whole, I'm rather puzzled by

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the attempt to put a very clear or hard border between childhood and

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adulthood in general. And even

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Philip Paul Menocal, subversive as he is with regard to Lewis and

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Tolkien and and top antipathetic as it is to them in many ways, in a

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sense, with his conceit of the idea of the demons settling puts a very

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hard distinction between what is to be a child and what it is to be an adult. Whereas my

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experience is that the border, if there is

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one at all, is a good deal more messy than that. But it's a very

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gradual process, one which also includes a lot of regressions

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and that we're talking about a graduated spectrum, if anything at all, rather

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than a border. So

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I wonder, though, if whose benefit is this border perceived as being

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consistent or important or necessary to be enforced?

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I've often thought that there are two contrary but equally deeply

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rooted ideas about childhood, current and Western society.

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One is what we might call the poor line school. You know,

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once once you grow up, you put away childish things. And this figures

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childhood as developmental as something which is preparatory

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for adulthood, adulthood often being identified with so-called real life.

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And in that sense, childhood and things connected to

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childhood, including, of course, children's literature, are necessarily seen as

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inferior or at any rate, half formed. Mm hmm. But of course, that codes

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coexists with a very different and the contrary model, which we might

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call the Rousso in school, whereby children in becoming

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adults. Losing as much as if not more than they're gaining. That's

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children have some kind of insight or some kind of perception, some

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kind of understanding even that adults do not have. And

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that in gaining knowledge or gaining sophistication and having the engaging,

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gaining social understanding, they're losing something more important, some connexion with nature

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or something more spiritual, depending on what inflexion you want to

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have. So children themselves, of course,

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are subject to both of these pressures. And anybody who has anything to do with

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children, including children's rights, is sort of pulled in these two directions as well.

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I'm in my office at work. I have a New Yorker cartoon

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which shows some parents being shown around the nursery. And the

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teacher in charge of the nursery is saying she looks down at these three or four year old children.

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We try to teach them that the world can be a dangerous

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and unwelcoming place at times and that they must be very careful

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to be safe. But at the same time, we're trying not we're trying to preserve the lovely

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innocence. It's tricky. And I think these kinds of

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contradictory demands that we make on children,

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the fact that they're contradictory should make us suspicious in the first place, I guess. Why do we have

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these two very different ideas about children and why are we so insistent that they must

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both be right? And what is it? How does this manifest in things that we

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say to children or that we give to children in the form of literature about, you know, what how they should

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be thinking of themselves and their futures? So in order

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to answer your question, I don't put any hard distinction between

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children's fantasy and adult fantasy. Of course, there are some things that

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children probably wouldn't find very interesting or easily, easily

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understood. But adults can learn about and have experienced

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and probably if you did a fantasy about the menopause, it wouldn't set a lot

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to children, for example. But beyond that,

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I don't really see any particular problem with letting everybody find their own level

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and find what they like. I'm to sort of

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conclude on this point. This is something that Pohlman Hos has written about

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outside of his his own fantasy novels. I

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wonder whether you think that the settling

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of demons in his dark materials is itself a critique

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of a society which has this paradoxical

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relationship towards children. He said that children should be encouraged

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to read just about anything that that might appeal to them, whether

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it's specifically intended for them or not. Well, I quite agree with him about that.

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I think in Pullman's case, and I may be doing him an injustice here, but

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if we put it in the terms I was a minute ago and his sympathy is, I think, very

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much with the kind of developmental side. So, you know, for him, the so-called fall

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is actually area better. Felix Khilafah, isn't it? It is. Then.

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So, yes. And Pullman's case, it is often recommended.

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The essay on the Marionette Theatre, which tries to explain how

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we must, as a boy, lose childish innocence in order to

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return to something like it through the back door, Asian, as it were at the end. In order to get

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there, you must pass through experience, including sexual experience,

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of course. So he's definitely critiquing, I should say, the kind of

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he had an idea of children being holy or whatever, what

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you want to apply. I slightly

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part company with him in the sense that the way in which he critiques it

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is to some extent simply to invert it. So rather than saying your childhood

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is good and adulthood is a kind of degeneracy, we're saying that childhood

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is inadequate and adulthood becomes a kind of perfection. And

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I don't think you need to invert it in order to critique it. I think you can

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abolish. I think that's quite a nice note

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for us to finish on, I think that we're we're out of time. Katherine Butler, thank you

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very much for your time. And you're very thoughtful responses. It's been a great pleasure.

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Thank you.