Rhetorics of Fantasy

5. “The Irregulars”: Subverting the Taxonomy

Chapter 5 “The Irregulars” Subverting the Taxonomy x The only real purpose of any critical study such as this is to make it possible to open up new lines of inquiry and to lay down new challenges. In the previous four chapters, I have suggested some ways in which the English-language fantasy that has been written in the past hundred years can be understood; that there are certain types of fantasy and that to be effective, they need to be written in certain ways. In this chapter I shall draw attention to a few works that appear to break my “rules,” novels that do not fit comfortably into my design. This chapter is not elective. If the first four chapters are to be regarded as descriptive rather than instructive , it must be possible to see their limits. Genre is a dialectic not a rubric, and the same should be true of genre analysis.The purpose of this chapter is to support my argument by undermining it. The first four chapters of this book have considered how different modes by which the fantastic enters the text shapes the writing of those fantasies. It is quite feasible to overlap some modes (we saw this particularly with immersive fantasies, which frequently contain intrusions) or to segue from one to another, but all of these techniques essentially accord with the rhetorical structures I have outlined. In the case of immersive fantasies that contain intrusions, we need to consider whether the location and story of the fantastic is with the construction of the world, or with the intrusion. We can argue that with a novel such as Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, it is not the world as we first meet it that we marvel at, but the intrusions that disturb this world. They are where the story is, and the chosen rhetorical strategy used to construct the fantastic is primarily that of the intrusion. Elsewhere, when the authors move a fantasy from an intrusion fantasy into a portal world (as in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone [Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone]), the style changes to accommodate the shift. However, there are some authors—a very small number— who operate differently, whose work shifts from mode to mode without necessarily taking on the characteristics of each mode. In Hal Duncan’s Vellum (2005), for example, Duncan constructs a portal fantasy in which only the reader, but not the protagonist, travels over the portals, so that while we enter world after world, we do so mostly through the eyes of the ensconced, frequently through the first person. The (deliberate) result is a dizzying disorientation with none of the expectation of eventual mastery that accompanied most of the portal fantasies. Duncan’s rhetorical structure supports the “story of unbalance” that is also one way to interpret this eschatological novel. In the following discussion, the idea that structure replicates and intensifies story will be repeated. Other authors use the rhetorical structures I have outlined to mislead us into variant readings of the text—mislead in the sense that in some cases we misread the text, while in others all variant readings are simultaneously correct. I shall begin with a set of novels that I originally placed in liminal fantasy : The Legends of the Land by Steve Cockayne. The Legends of the Land is written in three novels.The first, Wanderers and Islanders (2002), tells of Leonardo Pegasus, chief magician to the King; of Rusty Brown, a young boy in the hinterlands; of Alice, a child of the Islands; and of the renovation of a house.The second, The Iron Chain (2003), tells of Tom Slater, an abused and abandoned child who rises to become an entrepreneur, and also of Rusty’s middle years. The final book, The Seagull Drovers (2004), follows Rusty’s daughter Ashleigh, and then returns us to Leonardo Pegasus , and to the far north of the kingdom. In this book, prophecy is a dominant thread, but protagonists see themselves engaged in the more mundane tasks of fixing a computer network and overthrowing a tyrant. None of this tells the reader what the books are about. Wanderers and Islanders and its sequels may provide the answer to a question that haunted chapter 4: is it possible to write a liminal fantasy within the immersive mode? In terms of the rhetorical structures discussed in chapter 2 (immersive fantasy), The Legends of the Land is clearly an immersive fantasy in that we...