Calliope

This is, as the slightly-younger-than-I-am-millennials put it, my trap card. I spent a few years of grad school somewhat obsessively reading and thinking about fiction. I don't mean I read and thought about works of fiction, though I was of course always doing that as well. I mean I was thinking about the nature of fiction itself, its ontology I suppose, and its etiology.

I remember, before I got into theory, one day, I was talking to two other creative writing students, before I got into the literature phd obviously, and I said I "believed in stories," and they acted like I was a fool. I can't understand why, to this day -- if one doesn't believe in stories, why does one try to write them? There are easier ways to fail to make money.

Anyway, the thing is, and you know I'm a genre critic -- this is sort of why -- all fiction is fantasy.

This is, of course, a trick. But it's also true, which is why the trick works.

See, "fantasy" in Anglophone literary writing typically means "a mode of fiction in which either the setting is not the zero world or a setting that appears to be the zero world until impossible or fantastic events occur." That's very quick and dirty.

This is still a trick. Because in Anglophone speculative fiction fan circles, as I think Orson Scott Card¹ put it, fantasy is when someone travels faster than the speed of light by rubbing a talisman -- as opposed to science fiction, which is when someone travels faster than the speed of light by pressing a button. I'm not sure I still agree with that, but let's be honest: a lot of the time, when people say "fantasy" they mean "there's a dragon on the cover."

My point is that "fantasy" is polyvalent, and in fact I would argue it's overdetermined: like Hester Prynne's A, the word "fantasy" means too many things at once. And given how several of the meanings overlap, it can often be difficult to know from context which meaning is being drawn on. But -- and this is drawn entirely from Derrida -- if a native or fluent speaker of a language uses a word with multiple meanings, and those meanings are sufficiently common, then no matter what, the speaker means all those meanings.

My favorite example from grad school is that you can say someone who is too weak to do something is "impotent" but you are also, necessarily saying they can't fuck. The word means both things, and you can't argue that it stops meaning the latter just because you're not writing a sex scene (or a conversation with a medical professional I guess).

So fantasy always means everything from "stuff I dreamt up when I was bored" to "a marketing term meant to get you to buy a book based on the cover and where it's shelved in a store."

But, and the point I'm making really, is that, as above, fantasy means "that which does not appear to be in the zero world."² Let me curate a list of novels that do not happen in the zero world:

• Pride and Prejudice
• The Great Gatsby
• Herzog

You get the point. Mr. Darcy did not exist. Mr. Darcy never existed. He is a fantasy of Jane Austen's. He is not real.

Now. You know I'm a practicing magician. So, for my final trick: yes he is.

Maybe you haven't read that book, or seen the movies. Let me use another example. Superman's real. He exists. Or, that is to say, he has an existence. You know who Superman is. You know a bunch of stuff about Superman. You know his hair style, where he grew up, his job, his girlfriend's name, one, at least, of his addresses. But he's invented. How can he also be real?

Well, because "real" is, let's say, fraught.

I'll put it another way: my partner is not on cohost. They are ontologically real, scientifically measurable, materially locatable. But you know nothing about them. Well, most of you don't. To you, Superman's "index of reality" is higher than my partner's.

I call this the Hogfather argument, if you're curious.

So the thing about fiction is, it's a place that both is and is not real. It is hypothetical. It exists in a kind of uncollapsed phase state in the mind -- or, as Georges Poulet put it, it's a kind of "other I," another thing coexisting within the thing that's you. Except, since it's also external, it exists in many people at once. Fiction does a distractingly good job of appearing "real." Thousands mourned and wore black arm bands when Sherlock Holmes died.

What this leads to is the niggling thought that fiction is a hologram, a thing that is, for the moment, as present as memory. Superman will exist until -- let's be optimistic about the staying power of our friend in tights -- every single human being ceases to exist.

The "there" does not exist, until it does. And then it stops again.

In a very similar way to "real" things you forget about and then remember.

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1. yes, I know, but I read this in a bookstore once and it stuck with me for over a decade. I mean it, I didn't buy the damned book.

2. you might wonder why I don't just say "that which isn't real" or at least "that which doesn't pretend to be real."³ Let's consider something: if I write a novel in which no one performs magic, no one rides a dragon, the protagonist goes to work at a Starbucks, but also at night they pray to Odin and Odin answers, is that fantasy? Your immediate answer is going to depend on your personal beliefs and ontology. However, people do pray to Odin, here in the actual zero world, and they do hear him answer. And this, by the way, is a whole ethical kettle of fish. Editors of speculative fiction collections have complained on social media that they get people writing entirely mimetic (mimesis: mimicking, in this case the real world) fiction but also the characters have religious beliefs, and for some reason a lot of the time it's indigenous religious beliefs. You can imagine how troubling that is, I'm sure.

3. For reference, the term "zero world" is from the work of Darko Suvin.