The other day somebody — in fact, an extremely eminent and excellent fantasy writer whose name I’m dying to drop but won’t (but in effect I just did anyway) — asked me for my favorite quote about fantasy. This request plunged me down a rabbit-hole of Googling and rereading and trying to remember something, anything really, that I read about fantasy in college.
‘But why,’ (some ask), ‘why, if you have a serious comment to make on the real cheap zithromax life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own?’ Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality…And man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?
That’s what I came up with. Tell me: what did I miss?
I would probably end up choosing something from said extremely eminent and excellent fantasy writer, because he’s really good for these. If we’re talking about the same person.
The Ursula K Le Guin quote makes me think of a W. H. Auden poem about how the dragons and monsters didn’t disappear — they just became invisible and thus more dangerous.
@Jaimie not him! different one.
@Alyssa Oh my god, that poem is incredible. I’ve never seen it before. I can’t believe Auden wrote a poem with kobolds in it.
The Murdoch quote is real; it comes from an interview with Rachel Billington in the Times (London), 25 April 1983. The article was called “Crusading in a Fantasy World”. Terrific interview….
I was going to chime in with the G.K. Chesterton quote, but Seanachie beat me to it.
I’m not sure that you “missed” anything. These three quotes contain a book or two’s worth of truth. Thanks for sharing them.
All three are excellent quotes.
When I gave a Career Day talk at my former high school, and started with an explanation of how I chose biology as a career, I quoted that.
Goddammit all these quotes about dragons. I have to share this Rilke quote that I adore, even though he’s not explicitly talking about fantasy. He’s talking about embracing possibility, mystery; so it’s practically the same thing. Context.
George RR Martin’s “On Fantasy” would probably top my list.
It’s an elegant counterpoint to the Iris Murdoch one in your OP, isn’t it? Both suggest that fantasy literature can transcend itself and become actual, transformative, part of a quest for / escape to the real.
Michael Moorcock has written some of the best popular criticism of fantasy … as you probably know, so I won’t bang on about it.
I think that one’s either from, or from the era of his well-known anti-Tolkien polemic, ‘Epic Pooh’.
In one of his Perelandra books, don’t remember which one, Lewis has a single line about the relationship of fantasy to everything else that, I think, puts his writing and so much other similar writing in a needed context.