Genre Conventions: What is fantasy?

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

It's just that Epic can't be separated from morality without it losing meaning. Like I said, I'm probably missing something important.

No denying that, but I think Celebrim is specifically qualifying the fantasy of morality as having a lower goal and occupying a smaller subset of narrative morality than an epic would.

 

[Wild Gazebo]

No...just phantasy...I'm not sure why. Lol.

 

[John Morrow]

I very much agree. Did you see the stuff earlier on Library of Congress definitions and the split between character driven and world-oriented novels in the 19th century?

I skimmed over some of that. I guess I should go back and take a look then...

 

[Wild Gazebo]

Hmmm, I could see it being more precise...but narrower? I'm not sure I can see that. (Perhaps, that's what you meant...sorry.) edit

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Hmmm, I could see it being more precise...but narrower? I'm not sure I can see that. (Perhaps, that's what you meant...sorry.) edit

yeah, let me see if I can clarify. By the time you reach the level of moral narrative necessary to construct an epic a conflict between good and evil can only be a subset of what's going on.

Lord of the Rings can really have concrete extrapolations of good and evil duking it out, though I'm not really certain that's what's going on there but let's accept it and move on, but even in Milton, the most fantastic epic, the fight between good and evil is only one part of the creation story of Hell and the fall of man. Evil has to be personified and explored in a way that Fantasy doesn't really have to do.

And in the Divine Comedy good and evil aren't really fighting they're just different point on a continuum where good has definitively won and is trying to structure evil into the new order.

In both cases it's the structuring that's important, in the Lord of the Rings there's still a lot of structuring going on but it's not the action is a far more important focus of the narrative.

It's like the difference between novels and Mennippean satires. Novels are narrower in the sense that they are more constructed and have a more focused scope, but I'm not arguing that Moby Dick is anything less than sprawling just that it's not got the invested breadth that Gulliver's Travels has to have.

 

[Wild Gazebo]

I think you've successfully defined the difference between a novel and an Epic. Direct (physical) conflict is never manditory in a moral tale.

Edit: I think we can safely say that Moby Dick was more interested in Man while Gulliver's Travels was more interested in Morality. It is just a margin that would be hard to equate to a genre...and difficult to explain to people who focus on imagery.

 

[Desdichado]

This becomes a major crux in any argument you make discerning the validity of morality being an integral part of phantasy…that, and the importance of morality in all fiction.

Don't you mean phiction?

 

[Wild Gazebo]

Hey! Quit pokin' fun at my wordage! I don't make fun of the way you people spell 'colour'! All of these poor, poor, 'u's put out of work at such a young age. Damn economy!

 

[Desdichado]

All of these poor, poor, 'u's put out of work at such a young age. Damn economy!

They seem to have landed a pretty lucrative gig in chat-speak, so I think they'll do OK...

 

[Wild Gazebo]

Good point. I'm just happy they're working.