Is This the Real Life or Is It Just Fantasy?
By Tony Gentile
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The
Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug is currently the number one selling movie at the box office for
the month of December. For
2013 as a whole, a fantasy book turned movie, The Hunger
Games, places a #3 in sales. As movie budgets have increased, and of course
the number of explosions per minute in the average action flick too, interest
in books has declined. Even so, fans of fantasy books stand by the genre as a
way to get lost in a book for a while to leave the hustle and bustle of their
everyday lives. J.R.R Tolkien actually described this phenomenon in his essay On Fairy-Stories.
Before anyone gets the idea that the essay is about little sprite creature with
wings, Tolkien clears it up quite nicely himself; “The definition of a
fairy-story—what it is, or what it should be—does not, then, depend on any
definition or historical account of elf or fairy, but upon the nature of
Faërie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country.”
To
quickly summarize the main points in the essay that I will discuss later on,
Tolkien describes three phases that a reader experiences when reading fantasy:
recovery, escape, and consolation. Recovery is when the reader rekindles his or
her childhood imagination and is able to believe without reason what happens in
the story happens because it just does.
Escape is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, allowing the reader to
depart from the life they live and dive into the world of the novel.
Consolation is somewhat harder to describe, but in the words of Tolkien;
“…it is a
sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny
the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of
these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much
evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium,
giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant
as grief.”
These
three phenomena exist in both high and low fantasy. While reading an example of
each, The Hobbit for high fantasy and
Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere for low fantasy, I found all three
phenomena in each book but to differing degrees in each. In the case of the
Hobbit, the feeling of recovery was stronger for me because since the world is
completely different from my own, accepting that irrational things will happen
is much easier. Reaching the state of recovery in Neverwhere was rocky at first
because the world of London Below, an irrational world, was located in the same
universe as a completely rational world of London above.
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Regarding
escape, I felt the feeling more strongly in Neverwhere than the Hobbit for
pretty much the same reason as I just gave. The location of Neverwhere in a
familiar place, at least initially, made the transition much easier for me to
escape into that world. Having characters that are relatable also helps; it is
much less difficult to imagine being a humdrum Englishman who happens upon
adventure than it is to imagine being a Halfling traveling with 13 dwarves and
a magical wizard.
Concerning
consolation I had similar experiences with both book, but for different
reasons. The epic scale of adventure in the Hobbit made the ending feeling
almost like that feeling of sitting down on a comfy sofa at the end of a hard
day; it was gratifying. However, because I was able to relate more with Richard
in Neverwhere, I felt like the consolation felt more persona; perhaps also
because the scale of the book was not as enormous as in The Hobbit.
Overall,
at least with these two books, there was a pretty clear distinction between the
components of the fairy-story in high and low fantasy. For the first two
components, recovery and escape, the difference came because of the traditional
distinction of high and low fantasy; high takes place in a completely different
world while low takes place in our own world. The third component differed
because of the scale of the story, which is not something that defines whether
something is high or low. To close, I would say that for me personally, I
definitely enjoyed The Hobbit more.
I'm pleased that you enjoyed the Hobbit, particularly when it's a story with so much nostalgia and rustic sentiment at the forefront -- two things I confess don't immediately spring to mind when I think of you! The question of what the reader of "low fantasy" "recovers" as compared to the reader of high fantasy is very interesting, indeed! And I do think it's a different thing. We recover a sense that "other worlds" exist when we read high fantasy, but perhaps in low fantasy, we're being coached to see our own world as that "other world," in a way we might not have done since childhood.
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