Today, I'll be speaking with Catherine Butler, who is reader in English at Cardiff University,
has written extensively on fantasy literature, perhaps most notably with her monograph
for British fantasists in 2006, and has also written six
fantasy novels herself.
Thank you for joining me. Nice to be here. So my first question
to you is quite a general one. Hopefully I'll take a stunner.
So some interesting roots. This is this. This
talk is this part of a series of groups around the title Fancy Literature.
Do you think there is such a thing at all? And if so, how would you define it and what would be its main
characteristics? Well, I'm fairly sure there is such a thing.
I think probably most literature historically has been fantasy literature.
How we might define it is a trickier question on the whole. That's what I'd
rather leave to the lexicographers. I quite like the approach that brought Atterberry
took of defining fantasy in terms of its being a so-called in fuzzy
set this kind of logical idea of where things at the centre of the set are
clear cut. Everybody pretty much would agree that the Lord of the Rings is a fantasy work,
but around the edges where it gets fuzzier and
there are borders between fantasy and science fiction, between fantasy and realism, between fantasy
and magical realism. Various other genres. And there are certain texts that we might
want to argue the toss. But I think if we get het up on those hard
cases, we'll make some very bad law. If I had to choose amongst
the many definitions of fantasy that have been offered, probably my favourite
concise one is Catherine Hume's idea, and I'm probably slightly misquoting
her. I hear that your fantasy is that which
differs from consensus reality. So in
the phrase consensus reality and particularly the word consensus is the key one
here, I think because it suggests that what constitutes fantasy literature
is partly a function of what people tend to think constitutes
the real, which of course does vary over time and between cultures.
And I think, yes, fantasy in that sense is a kind of moving target.
I think it also reminds us that phrase consensus, reality,
that reality is also up
for negotiation, that when people contrasts fantasy
with the real the real that they're talking about is often in very large part a kind
of social reality made up with things like
promises, a point as promotions, status and
market value, those kinds of concepts which are in a sense
just as fantastic as anything else. They are produced by the performative power of words rather
than having any foundation in physics. I think that actually as
human beings, we spend a lot of our lives in this problematic for sure, where imagination
and physics have rival claims and fantasy literature. For me, it's interesting
because it takes that dispute, if you like, as its
subject matter. But I think it's implicit in almost all literature and
great. Thank you. If I might sort of
ask a question on the back of that sort of trying to address the main
characteristics in SCAG quotes of fantasy literature. Yeah. If
it's even possible to tease out main characteristics, because I'm sure there will always be
counterexamples where those main characteristics are not present. And yet we would still call the work
fun to almost certain to take you back to Tolkien. He was,
of course, hung up on this idea of fairy diaries.
So over the over over the. And do you think that he was tapping
into something at the core of fantasy and his notion of
a fairy, the fairy worlds? Is this something? Is this a useful concept
decades down the line to to engage with? I'm not sure it's a useful word.
But then, of course, it's always a bad idea to call fairies fairies if you don't like it.
I think it does acknowledge something which in the
world of the fantasy that we call realism, we are likely to want to
leave unacknowledged, which is that we are largely imaginative beings. We spend
a good portion of our lives in the thrall. Subconsciously, a third of our lives
as we're spending asleep. Hmm. Almost as though our waking hours were spending in daydreams.
A lot of our motivations are based on imagination.
And what we might call fantasy in a negative way as well is in a positive.
So if we think about fairy as something which has
power over our perceptions of reality, a kind of glamour to the good fairy word,
I think it's something which absolutely is what needs to be written about.
I'm not sure if that's what Tolkien had in mind by the word.
Of course, he also in positive of fairy
stories that he was writing, that he was defending that word. Of course, he also talks about that special
kind of consciousness, which we call sub creation. Yes.
Which has tended to be linked for understandable reasons, considering what his
own fictions were like with the idea of fairy, with the idea of the fantastic
and specifically with the idea of secondary worlds. But I think actually,
if you go back and read that, well, originally a lecture, they try and say, yeah,
you'll see that what Tolkien is talking about is actually that special conscious state
of half hypnotic consciousness, which is called entering into a story. That story does not
need to be what we would necessarily call a fantasy in the literary
short sentence. If you read and are absorbed by Pride and Prejudice,
if you fall in love with Mr. Darcy or if you cry over
the death of a favourite character, then in a sense you are being sucked into
a sub creation or submitting your consciousness and your imagination to
a belt on some mercy, if I can say in that in the form of an author and that
that is a real power, we might call that fairy, we might call it something else. But I think
perhaps we're talking about the same thing. Yeah, certainly. I mean, in that same
lecture [INAUDIBLE] essay, Tolkien talks about what uses or
just some the willing suspension of disbelief. And so I think it's the same thing, a sort of argues against that
up until the point and sort of suggests that a good fantasy
ships should be able to ditch the world will end up. But, yes, I totally agree that it
should be an involuntary involuntary thing. And as soon as you become conscious of the fact that you're suspending disbelief,
the magic of that experience is is lost or diminished somehow. Of course,
he's quite right about that. And I suspect that Coleridge would have agreed with me
if if Tolkien had been able to pull him up on it. Yes. Yes. The suspension of disbelief
brought more than the willingness, which is the key factor. But
I think talking with actually saying something quite important, there is something which, you know,
in a way goes against the grain of
English criticism as a kind of academic subject where we've wanted on the whole to
sit, as it were, in charge of all our faculties in some kind of
evaluative or analytical judgement on a piece of literature
and say you have either describe it or evaluate it.
And in order to do that, it requires a certain objective
detachment from it. But the literary experience
at its best, I think, and certainly at its most involving, requires
a kind of submission. Now, whether that submission is wholly voluntary, wholly
involuntary and involuntary or somewhere in between.
I think that varies. But the fact that it does gets submitted
to some extent is important. And without it, we wouldn't have any kind of effective
relationship with stories or their characters or their places.
Great to taking Tolkien as a
as a as a starting point for my next question and moving away from sort of the theoretical
concerns of fancy literature.
There is the term Oxford School trying to
study this a a term a label that you've engaged with.
Well, I haven't I haven't actually engaged with that phrase. I think that's very much
Maria. Yes. Phrase. But I've said a. Faced with the
phenomenon, the phenomenon, precisely because I think you're alluding, of course, to four British fantasists
where I took as my subjects
Ireland, Ghana and Penelope Lively, but also to the people in
the so-called Oxford schools. Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper. Yeah.
And part of the lens through which I was looking at them was the fact that they were all
at Oxford as undergraduates in the first
half of the 1950s. Only two of my four were studying English.
Lively was studying history and Ghana classics. Although
he often did attend English lectures. Yeah.
So, yes, the Oxford School is a it's a complicated
a multipart question, I think. There are some way I suppose I
better start with a couple of caveats, I think. Go ahead. If we want to talk about the Oxford School,
we have to be aware that as when we make any kind
of label like that, there's a possibility of
cutting out of the account other very important aspects of these writer's
lives. So in the case of Diana and Jones, for example,
the influence acknowledged and I think pretty obvious of Inês
bit on her writing. Well, yes, but it's not an Oxford person
and therefore won't appear in accounts of the Oxford school, but certainly at least
as much of an influence on Diana in Jones Jones's C.S. Lewis, I should say.
But that is to say that they were both influences. But let's not forget that Nesbit was there, too,
similarly with Susan Cooper. I think if you sit down and read The Dark is Rising
alongside John Masefield Box of Delights, you'll see that there's a very
strong and direct connexion there. But again, that doesn't seem to fit.
If that meant that it's not that she doesn't belong in the Oxford
school, but that her membership of it shouldn't be allowed to
cut those other influences and aspects of her writing out of account. So there's that.
The word school also perhaps suggests that there's a kind of
conscious association of these people, that they were, as it were, working together
when I was writing my book, Higher Jocularly. I think that would be
the right word, these circumstances suggested. Was there a junior inklings club where these brightest
got together and read each other early draughts of the way it's done if Bingham.
Well, the fact is there wasn't there when they were at Oxford. None of these writers
really knew each other or certainly not at all well. And
so but having said all that, I think there are quite a lot of things for the idea of the
Oxford school. One of them is Oxford itself.
I think Philip Pullman has written quite eloquently on Oxford as a place.
Absolutely. And when you think about the characteristics of so-called Oxford
school fantasy, you know, Oxford physically embodies quite
a lot of them with its history, obviously also its traditions,
its secrets, its hidden panels, as it were, its rituals,
its shibboleths. And when you remember that these writers are coming here
at the age of 18, most of them not having been to public
school, Liam, these are mostly grammar school people coming to Oxford, right. For the first time at 18,
a very impressionable age, having been told no doubt that by going to Oxford, they
are entering an intellectual and possibly social elite,
which, of course, is kind of true in Britain. Well, then
it is not it wouldn't be terribly surprising if that would be an element of their thinking.
And if we look at. Those kinds of ideas as they
play themselves out in fantasy wide. Lo and behold, they are there. So I think Oxford
as a place is important. Another aspect, which, of course,
Maria talks about in her book as well is C.S. Lewis and
J. Are talking the kind of founder members of the Oxford school.
And yet certainly both as
the the manufacturers and sponsors of the Oxford English curriculum,
with its heavily mediaevalist emphasis and as examples of fantasy
writers themselves, they were hugely influential. And I think
that has been acknowledged by by
most of the writers in the Oxford school. And to some extent,
if perhaps not so much by Garner and Lively gonna perhaps as
OK, on contrary, kind of denied influence.
Then I think perhaps at least as important as that, though, has been the way in which
Lewis and Tolkien have created both a market, you
know, kind of literary market for fantasy, which later writers were then able to
exploit. Certainly in the case of Alan Garner, when the son was
encouraged to try to publish the bridge of bringing him in because it was riding on the
back of this kind of Tolkien mania. Well, I. Collins Billy Collins,
who had rejected the Lord of the Rings and before he received the
weird set up with Inkerman and having realised that he'd thrown away our Pearl,
Richard and all his tribe when he saw something else with with us and Dwarf's
sorry to wharfs. He was in there.
He snapped it off. And certainly other people, including C.S. Lewis, when he read
the wisdom of his Inkerman, was immediately I'm reminded of talking and he was
not the full blast. Obviously. God
himself suggested that the resemblance was because they shared common sources.
Bathing in their belts and so.
That argument rages. I'm not going I'm not going to get involved in it.
So that was the question of creating a market that also very much connectivity, a context
of perception. So Lewis being the first example of that.
But when people look at these books, they are they will be primed, as it
were, to see Oxford, Lewis and Tolkien in Connexions.
And so I think this is a kind of circle, but we're still
patients according to taste, by which the Oxford school, its
its age has become the club sharper and clearer. And as it were, self confirming.
Great. Thank you for that answer. I wondered if we might just
say a bit more about Alan Garner as a sort of possible outlier
in the idea of the Oxford School as somebody who read classics briefly
before terminating his studies. And as somebody who has denied this
this influence from from Tolkien or any association with a so-called
Oxford school. But it is interesting that he does riff on some of
the same traditions as Tolkien. The way it's done at presentments is steeped in Norse
mythology. Yeah. And the our service is
very much saturated in mediaeval Welsh
literature. It is the mythological. And so he draws on the
mob orgasm quite explicitly. And yet
his writing is very local. It's very rooted in plagues and in very particular places
in the British Isles. Yes. And in fact, the whole service is itself an outlier within
Gardiners one. And because all the rest of his work is basically set around
old age where he grew up. Yeah. And Cheshire. Yeah.
And I wonder if this is a threat, perhaps that that runs through at least some of the writings of some
of the members of the Oxford school and their associates. Tolkien,
I think, was very sensitive to place. Absolutely. You know, we start in these small
and the in the homely of the shire before expanding out into the wider world. Gone are
clearly interested in place. And as you say, most of his writing is situated in the region of elderly age.
Sudoku. From the dark is rising. She's situating
the events of that novel in a particular part of England. You know, the path one that was familiar to
do. Do you think that this is perhaps one of the ways in which the later
Oxford fantasy writers did something perhaps a bit different with
the mediaeval source material that they may have been drawing on at times? Well,
I think they were mostly very interested in place anyway, whether
they were doing it through literary mediaeval models. But I think a lot of the right, all
of the writers pretty much that we've mentioned so far
have a say. I wouldn't call this so much.
Specifically, Oxford school characteristic, although it's certainly very much there in the Oxford school.
But if I did that, it's a British fantasy
kind of trope, I think, to use place.
It's historical, it's archaeological, it's folkloric sometimes
even it's palaeontological aspects. And to try
to find resonances, to dig down, to stratify to
excavate those places. And I think there's a large section
of British fantasy writing, including pretty much all the Oxford school, but not
confined to it. Which is as important
to coin a phrase. You know, it's very palimpsest. Yes. I think that's the way
the nice word. I think that's that's that's very much the way that
a lot of British fans, not all of it, but a lot of British fantasy works. It looks for places
in there, different aspects. And if you could say it's backward looking or you say it looks
down into the ground. And of course, if you're an archaeologist, those two things are
the same as you dig down. You go back in time. And in a way,
this is a distinction on the whole between
British fantasy writing and that of, say, America,
where, of course, there is a lot of history, but a lot of it is
off limits for writers of European descent because
for reasons of a very understandable sensitivity. So
when they write fantasy, they have to make it from different kinds of materials.
So they might use some imported European elements
or they might try to make it out of contemporary elements.
So something like that, all I think is doing both of those things. Mm hmm.
I'm not an expert on American fantasy, however, so I probably shouldn't go too far down that line.
But there's perhaps a tangible difference between what for, for example,
American policy writers are doing, as opposed to what British fantasy writers
have at least done historically because of the different
space that they occupy that they live in. And there is a different cultural
context that they are being considered. Absolutely. And as
I say, it doesn't apply to all British fantasy. But I think there's a lot of fantasy writers, some
associated with Oxford, some no doubt influenced by Oxford, people like Rolling, for
example. There's a couple of Oxford writers we haven't mentioned, such as
Jill Peyton Walsh and Penelope Farmer, both
fantasy writers who were suntans a couple of years after Diana
when Chance was there. Overlapping a little bit. OK.
So, yeah, that they're they're writers who are, I think in many cases, not in all their
work, but in many cases looking at the kind of archaeological aspects of Britain in the broadest
sense and finding magic there. And I think it was Humphry Carpenter
who characterised perhaps slightly caricatured
fantasy from. At any rate, the 60s and 70s is having a kind of recognisable pattern where,
you know, often children will discover some artefact or some
secret of some hidden place within a place which opens up
its pop. It's historical or more likely magical or mythological past
to them. And then understanding that they will come to understand themselves.
And in a way, you could say all of this is even reprising the kind of experience which
was first set out in a book like Puck of PWCS, held by Richard Kipling, where
its exposure to the mythological parts of England, which is then
consciously forgotten but worked, remains at a subconscious
level that really grounds the child protagonist in
a sense of themselves as English, in this particular case,
very specific. So I think in that sense, and of course, many Maria
in her book is quite rightly connecting this to its
imperialistic and nostalgic elements.
I think in this sense, you could say that that that strain of fantasy writing from Kipling
on and in in a different direction coming from C.S. Lewis and J. RL Tolkien
had a very long tail. Perhaps we're not past it yet.
I wouldn't want entirely to repudiate everything that's in that aspect of fantasy writing,
but obviously there are many very problematic aspects to it. Yeah, of course.
I mean, I'd rather you of picked up on the
response of children to fantasy literature and fantasy literature, which
is perhaps intentionally got them in mind
talking. And Lewis grappled with this distinction between children's
literature and adults literature and specifically in the context of a fantasy.
Would you say that there is a clear divide between the two? Well,
there ought to be a divide. If people try to to enforce it,
I don't really know what that divide would be.
And it's not just a matter of fantasy literature. On the whole, I'm rather puzzled by
the attempt to put a very clear or hard border between childhood and
adulthood in general. And even
Philip Paul Menocal, subversive as he is with regard to Lewis and
Tolkien and and top antipathetic as it is to them in many ways, in a
sense, with his conceit of the idea of the demons settling puts a very
hard distinction between what is to be a child and what it is to be an adult. Whereas my
experience is that the border, if there is
one at all, is a good deal more messy than that. But it's a very
gradual process, one which also includes a lot of regressions
and that we're talking about a graduated spectrum, if anything at all, rather
than a border. So
I wonder, though, if whose benefit is this border perceived as being
consistent or important or necessary to be enforced?
I've often thought that there are two contrary but equally deeply
rooted ideas about childhood, current and Western society.
One is what we might call the poor line school. You know,
once once you grow up, you put away childish things. And this figures
childhood as developmental as something which is preparatory
for adulthood, adulthood often being identified with so-called real life.
And in that sense, childhood and things connected to
childhood, including, of course, children's literature, are necessarily seen as
inferior or at any rate, half formed. Mm hmm. But of course, that codes
coexists with a very different and the contrary model, which we might
call the Rousso in school, whereby children in becoming
adults. Losing as much as if not more than they're gaining. That's
children have some kind of insight or some kind of perception, some
kind of understanding even that adults do not have. And
that in gaining knowledge or gaining sophistication and having the engaging,
gaining social understanding, they're losing something more important, some connexion with nature
or something more spiritual, depending on what inflexion you want to
have. So children themselves, of course,
are subject to both of these pressures. And anybody who has anything to do with
children, including children's rights, is sort of pulled in these two directions as well.
I'm in my office at work. I have a New Yorker cartoon
which shows some parents being shown around the nursery. And the
teacher in charge of the nursery is saying she looks down at these three or four year old children.
We try to teach them that the world can be a dangerous
and unwelcoming place at times and that they must be very careful
to be safe. But at the same time, we're trying not we're trying to preserve the lovely
innocence. It's tricky. And I think these kinds of
contradictory demands that we make on children,
the fact that they're contradictory should make us suspicious in the first place, I guess. Why do we have
these two very different ideas about children and why are we so insistent that they must
both be right? And what is it? How does this manifest in things that we
say to children or that we give to children in the form of literature about, you know, what how they should
be thinking of themselves and their futures? So in order
to answer your question, I don't put any hard distinction between
children's fantasy and adult fantasy. Of course, there are some things that
children probably wouldn't find very interesting or easily, easily
understood. But adults can learn about and have experienced
and probably if you did a fantasy about the menopause, it wouldn't set a lot
to children, for example. But beyond that,
I don't really see any particular problem with letting everybody find their own level
and find what they like. I'm to sort of
conclude on this point. This is something that Pohlman Hos has written about
outside of his his own fantasy novels. I
wonder whether you think that the settling
of demons in his dark materials is itself a critique
of a society which has this paradoxical
relationship towards children. He said that children should be encouraged
to read just about anything that that might appeal to them, whether
it's specifically intended for them or not. Well, I quite agree with him about that.
I think in Pullman's case, and I may be doing him an injustice here, but
if we put it in the terms I was a minute ago and his sympathy is, I think, very
much with the kind of developmental side. So, you know, for him, the so-called fall
is actually area better. Felix Khilafah, isn't it? It is. Then.
So, yes. And Pullman's case, it is often recommended.
The essay on the Marionette Theatre, which tries to explain how
we must, as a boy, lose childish innocence in order to
return to something like it through the back door, Asian, as it were at the end. In order to get
there, you must pass through experience, including sexual experience,
of course. So he's definitely critiquing, I should say, the kind of
he had an idea of children being holy or whatever, what
you want to apply. I slightly
part company with him in the sense that the way in which he critiques it
is to some extent simply to invert it. So rather than saying your childhood
is good and adulthood is a kind of degeneracy, we're saying that childhood
is inadequate and adulthood becomes a kind of perfection. And
I don't think you need to invert it in order to critique it. I think you can
abolish. I think that's quite a nice note
for us to finish on, I think that we're we're out of time. Katherine Butler, thank you
very much for your time. And you're very thoughtful responses. It's been a great pleasure.
Thank you.