What I'm claiming is that it's transparent that fantasy is indeed not about good and evil, and if you'd remember your earlier claim instead of now changing it to be "about defining heroism" we'd be able to have a more cogent discussion about it.
I don't see how that has shifted my claim at all. The heroic narrative is one of the several ways that cultures define good and evil. You answer the question, "What is best in life?", "How can I be good?", or "What is good?" with - "Live by this example."
Howard, for example, is very patently not about good and evil. In taking the fact that Howard romanticized barbarians and their "free" way of life in the Conan and Kull (and other) stories, and trying to cast that as Howard's definition of "good" and "evil" you've migrated into territory that I find thoroughly unconvincing.
Ok.
When you define what it means to be about "good vs. evil" instead of using a standard definition, such as any speaker of the English language familiar with the words "good," "vs." and "evil" would use, then of course you find evidence to support your definition.
But I'm using the terms as any speaker of the English language would. However, that doesn't resolve the question of what in particular is 'good'. Different speakers of English can know what is meant by 'good', but when asked to provide examples point to very different things.
Most (or at least an awful lot of it) fantasy is not, however, about good vs. evil in the conventional sense of good vs. evil. Sword & Sorcery in particular is defined as a subgenre that ignores the issue entirely. Only High Fantasy often but not obligatorily tends to concern itself with the nature of good and evil by definition.
I find that highly unconvincing and completely without substantiation. I certainly find no evidence that S&S is defined as fantasy that ignores the question of good and evil.
In ethics, one learns that there are different ways of establishing ethical codes. You might provide a heroic narrative. You might provide an axiom. You might provide a legal code. You might tell parables. You might provide some combination of these things. A story set out to explore the nature of good and evil would approach the question in different wayss depending on how its animating ethical system approached the establishment of ethical truth. An author whose underlying ethical system established truth by logic and rhetoric would create a different sort of story than one whose underlying ethical system established defined good and evil by narrative examples. The former work would likely seem 'high', would likely have soliquoys on the nature of good and evil appearing in the text, would likely to have some formal symobology, and would likely involve conflict of cosmological significance. The latter would likely seem 'low', would involve conflict of personal significance, would avoid overt moralizing - much less characters engaging in scholarly theological debate, and would tend to lack a rigorously maintained table of symbols.
But the Oddysey is no less a tale of moral virtue than The Lord of the Rings despite the big differences in the work and the sort of thing the authors won't to extol as virtuous.
But the idea that fantasy is defined by the question of good vs. evil, and it's obligatory to the genre, and as near as I can tell the only definitive characteristic you offer up gets us to the place where you have to admit Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment as fantasy...
To a certain extent, I think any work of fiction has some small element of fantasy in it although that may not be the central genera in the mix. In as much as all fiction is an imaginative, speculative invention involving characters who are not real and the question of what is good and what is evil is somewhat inescapable in any narrative, then yes, almost everything could involve some small amount of fantasy. But to be primarily interested in the question, "What is good and what is evil?" was not the only definitive characteristic I offered up. I further said that it had a particular approach to this question, and to the extent it relies on this approach we recognize it as fantasy. That approach is take abstract concepts and embody them in some tangible form.
Yes, I agree that does make fantasy broader than we might first think, in that for example, if we see in a book like 'Les Miserables' that Javier is in fact an embodiment of the concept of Law or Legalism (in opposition to Jean Valjean who is at least in part playing the role of Grace), then we see that this book without dragons or spells is in no small part a fantasy. Then, seeing it thus, we might pay more attention to the books mysticism and see the fantastic, superhuman, and supernatural in it. That isn't to say that fantasy is all that 'Les Miserables' is about - its a big ambitious work, but it certainly has that as one of its components.
It's also worth noting that when overtly fantastic elements are added to a story, but the exploration of good and evil is not particularly central, we have a tendency to shelve the story differently than we would faery tales, Tolkien's high fantasy, or Burrough's heroic moralizing. We don't immediately grab 'Hamlet' as fantasy or Letham's 'Fortress of Solitude' and tend to have the suspicion that despite the use of the fantastical that there is something else going on here of more importance. The same tends to be true of someone like Robert Silverburg, who is pretty obviously writting science fiction, even if we can't explain why particularly in the face of the fact that much of what is happening can only be explained with 'magic'.
yet can't admit Howard's Conan corpus without some real special pleading about how you can cram a good vs. evil interpretation into stories that fundamentally are very obviously not about good and evil.
I make no special pleading at all. If you think 'heroism' requires special pleading to be related to the concept of good and evil, then there is certainly no pleading I want to do special or otherwise.
This doesn't have anything to do with admiring Homer and Virgil vs. being a devout Christian, and your (and Corjay's) insistence that just because Moorcock or Burroughs weren't actually religious means that they weren't completely products of a culture who's values were heavily influenced by that religion is absurd. I'm not claiming that either of them "fully accepts the tenants of that theology" and you should know that very well. You're arguing a strawmen; attacking a position I never claimed as my own.
I'm not sure I know what your position is on this matter. You seem to be saying that noone raised in a Christian culture can consciously or unconsciously reject its values and is somehow foredestined to hold the values of that culture. The idea that you couldn't hold an un-Christian standard of what was good and what was evil because you were raised in a culture heavily influenced by those standards strikes me as ridiculous. So ridiculous, I see no point in arguing that with you.
At the same time, holding up ancient standards of good and evil and claiming that either of them actually mimic the values of that culture is equally absurd.
Why? Plenty of people, some of them who hang out here, claim to hold pagan moral values? What's so wierd about claiming that certain fantasy authors foreshadowed that, especially when what you are arguing is really that they couldn't have chosen one ancient standard of good and evil over another ancient standard of good and evil. Why not? Lack of familiarity? Like none of us have ever read Homer or Virgil? Are thier works no longer studied?
John Carter mimics values that were current in Edgar Rice Burroughs own time and culture, not values 2,500 years older.
Burroughs tends to be a deeply subversive writer. He doesn't wholly reject his own societies standards, any more than he wholly embarasses pre-Christian Greek ones, but he is deeply critical of them in numerous ways and John Carter has alot more in common with pagan heroism than Christian heroism.
My claim is simply that you can't extricate the values of ERB's society from the religion that largely brought them to that society, even if ERB was not religious.
Err... so? I can extricate ERB's values from ERB's society, and that seems the more important point.
ERB wrote romanticized adventure melodramas, not morality tales anyway.
You are just flat out wrong.
He didn't discuss the nature of good and evil; his characters were cardboard thin.
The two are somehow incompatible?
John Carter was the idealized Dudley Do-right dashing hero, his villains tended to be moustache-twirling Snidely Whiplashes.
Err... what was that about these not being morality tales?
Plus, the Barsoom stories are not even necessarily fantasy. Given the scientific understanding of the time, they were more accurately called science fiction, and they are directly ancestral to space opera.
Scientific understanding has painfully little to do with science fiction. Only the genera of 'hard sci-fi' has a really direct connection with scientific understanding. In pretty much everything else, you are perfectly free to use sufficiently advanced super-science however improbable in much the same way you use magic. In some cases, you can use outright magic, you just label it according to the conventions of the genera 'psionics' or 'telepathy' or some such. And even in 'hard sci-fi' certain things are 'allowed' to be handwaved by convention, most obviously FTL travel is often hand-waved away as an easy problem to overcome (relative to other technological advancement) rather than being a violation of known natural laws which by any conceievable method of our current understading requires an unfathomly powerful energy source.
The biggest flaw in your argument as I see it is that you claim that any fantasy story in which the protagonist actually exhibits any character traits is indicative of "a discussion of good vs. evil." Rather than refute your argument that Conan doesn't exhibit non-modern character traits which Howard clearly idolized and romanticized, I'd rather see how you explain how El Borak or Steve Costican doesn't do exactly the same thing, and explain how according to your definition those aren't fantasy as well then. Or to go even further afield, how your typical Louis L'Amour novel and James Bond aren't therefore fantasies because they hold out strong characters with traits that the author clearly considers good and contrasts them to the villains and are therefore also stories of "good vs. evil."
Yes, that's the biggest flaw I see in my argument as well. The problem isn't that the definition doesn't encompass all of fantasy, it is that it ends up not drawing a particularly neat line around the things we normally think of as fantasy and excluding things we don't. I think that there is probably some additional element I'm missing that draws the line tighter, and some existing definitions in the field hold what I think are clues; however, rather than going off into what those could be I think it more interesting for the moment to note that any idolized and romanticized genera featuring characters with such exceptional attributes and skills that they stretch the limits of credulity does seem to bear a close resemblence to fantasy. I'm not therefore particularly interested in arguing that Louis L'Amour isn't writing 'Cowboy Fantasies' and Ian Fleming isn't writing 'Spy Fantasies' or even that your typical bodice ripper isn't to a large extent a 'Romance Fantasy'. There is I think a powerful streak of unreality to such works, and a very strong element where the authors are setting up heroic examples. The only way that they differ from things which we typically think of as 'fantasy' is that there is (usually) nothing which strikes us as absolutely impossible. But, as the characters within get more and more superhuman in thier heroism, even that line is blurred. For example, as 'Louis L'Amour' type stories move toward the 'Man with No Name' stories for which Clint Eastwood is famous, we move further into the fantasy genera to the point that eventually - with things like 'High Plains Drifter' we've stumbled off right into it.
