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A review by btcarolus
Rhetorics of Fantasy by Farah Mendlesohn
2.0
I was extraordinarily disappointed with this book. Mendlesohn's earlier treatment of Diana Wynne Jones, in which she employs her categories, was groundbreaking and illuminating. It also fully convinced me that her taxonomy was correct, at least as an interpretive suprastructure. Unfortunately, Rhetorics of Fantasy falls far short of her previous book.
There are several problems with the book, the biggest being that the central taxonomical project is inherently flawed (and yes, I read the "health note"), but it is also plagued by bad writing and bad argumentation marked by sloppy thinking.
The central problem is that Mendlesohn is trying to make an argument for rhetorical technique derived from her classification system. However this system, as she herself admits (see the "Health Note"), is an arbitrary one that is impossible to apply to the vast majority of fantasy books due to their adeptness at swimming between the boundaries. As she admits throughout, Mendlesohn had trouble deciding how to categorize even the books she examines within each chapter, sometimes moving them to a different chapter, or mentioning that a book would easily fit into another category, then bracketing any discussion of this fact. In each chapter she has to argue that the other categories could indeed be present within the current category she is treating.
Ironically, this entire problem could have been avoided had she approached the problem from the other direction. Rather than seeing fantasy as inherently divided into categories which are then reified by rhetoric (doubly ironically, a position I don't think Mendlesohn actually holds), she should have argued that specific rhetorical strategies create fantasies that can be categorized across her taxonomy. Rather than creating a taxonomy of fantasy, she needed to create a taxonomy of rhetoric. The benefit of this is would have been that that she could group rhetorical strategies together, rather than texts together. This would obviate the need to continually point out that one text can be seen as occupying multiple categories at once. Instead, one author employs rhetoric in multiple ways within one text, weaving, for example, immersive and intrusive rhetorics together to create a polyvalent whole.
This is further compounded by the fact that the categorizations that she does make are not themselves argued for. In every chapter she selects books that she considers representative of the type of fantasy she is investigating. However, she makes no attempt to explain or justify any of her choices, no matter how controversial or off the wall they seem. This is especially problematic when she includes books which would not widely be considered fantasy, or which in fact aren't fantasy at all (Pilgrim's Progress), without making more than token efforts to justify these inclusions. These range from books whose inclusion seems bizarre but acceptable (Holes) to books whose inclusion literally flies in the face of the critical tradition (Pilgrim's Progress or the short story "The Pit and the Pendulum").
There are two essential problems with this. One more pretentious issue is that it raises questions about her own engagement with the broader world of literary criticism (there are serious problems with her treatment of the Gothic, the dream vision/allegory tradition, etc.). Is Mendlesohn trying to engage with critics while still writing an accessible book about fantasy? If she is she did not do her homework, so to speak.
The other problem is that there is so much slippage between genres, traditions, etc. that what Mendlesohn defines as fantasy or within the fantastic tradition is totally called into question. She spends close to twenty pages on Gothic literature, much of it on the less fantastic edges of the gothic, only to declare Fairy Tale part of Fancy and therefore not relevant. She of course moves on without explaining this bizarre decision, leaving a gaping hole in her discussion of Intrusion Fantasy. But this is to be expected, and is only more indicative of her sloppy writing and arguing.
I was also really bothered by Mendlesohn's poor argumentation throughout the book. She constantly makes pronouncements which she does not or cannot defend, introduces important points without thinking through their implications for her broader argument, and even makes points that are so facile they offend the reader. At the same time, because she is so flippant with the points she makes, she packs so much into each chapter that it is impossible to follow the major argumentative thread. This turns all of her chapters into loosely organized musings that sometimes feel like a slog.
Just to follow two related points along these lines: One of Mendlesohn's observations about Portal/Quest fantasy is that the category is given to imperialist readings. In her work on Diana Wynne Jones this was a brilliant insight, and lead her to a brilliant critique of Jones's Dark Lord of Derkholm and me to a breakthrough in understanding the paradoxically great yet racist Damar books by Robin McKinley. In Rhetorics, however, Mendlesohn does not work out this insight. Instead, early on, she asserts that "This kind of Fantasy is essentially imperialist," and then goes on to analyze most of the books in the Portal-Quest chapter without even the slightest nod to her insight. This becomes extremely distressing when we reach the core of her chapter, where she analyzes The Lord of the Rings a book widely considered by critics to be strongly and notably anti-imperialist. Yet The Lord of the Rings, she informs us, created the framework of the Portal-Quest as we now know it. It "codified much of how the quest fantasy deals with landscape, with character, with the isolation of the protagonists into the club-story narrative and with reader positioning." She does nothing to either argue against other critics who see LotR as anti-imperialist, or to explain how the book is in fact anti-imperialist in contradiction to her previous assertion. In fact, the latter discussion would have supported her overall argument and her overall treatment of LotR as a portal-quest fantasy, so it is distressing to me that she didn't follow that path. It is one of many that she ignores.
The other point, Mendlesohn asserts in her Intrusive fantasy chapter that those seduced by the fantastic (even to their deaths) are in fact like rapists, trotting out "the old rape justification of "it made me do it! It seduced me! It was asking for it!" She quotes Nalo Hopkinson (who originated that quote) as support for her assertions, and then continues to return to Hopkinson everytime she makes this argument. Unfortunately, I think she and Hopkinson are deeply mis-appropriating narratives of rape to make this point, at a level that feels almost dangerous to me. Viewed in either direction, they are essentially victim blaming. In Mythago Wood, the book she relies on most to make this point, those (men) seduced by the fantastic are indeed seduced and ultimately killed by the wood. If we carry on the violence against women analogy, they are more like battered women, seduced by an abuser. If we keep strictly with the rape analogy, then she is calling the men who are legitimately seduced by the wood rapists. In other words, the rapist's excuse is true, and the object of rape was in fact a seductress. This is not a path that should be tread down with anything other than a great deal of clarifying and supporting argumentation, but Mendlesohn delivers none, a serious failing and highly indicative of her sloppy, surface level argumentation throughout.
I will skip a critique of her writing in general, suffice it to say that she is verbose where concision would be better and that her paragraphs are poorly structured. There were also dozens of grammatical and proofreading errors, to the point that I was noticing one every other page. I normally would not point out the one or two understandable grammar errors in a book, however these were so commonplace, and really so unacceptable in an academic work, that they seem almost indicative of the carelessness that went into the book.
All of this said, I still suggest that serious readers of fantasy literature read this book, especially those interested in the critical perspective. It is frustrating, but Mendlesohn's observations about fantasy, albeit obfuscated by her incompetence here, are truly groundbreaking.
There are several problems with the book, the biggest being that the central taxonomical project is inherently flawed (and yes, I read the "health note"), but it is also plagued by bad writing and bad argumentation marked by sloppy thinking.
The central problem is that Mendlesohn is trying to make an argument for rhetorical technique derived from her classification system. However this system, as she herself admits (see the "Health Note"), is an arbitrary one that is impossible to apply to the vast majority of fantasy books due to their adeptness at swimming between the boundaries. As she admits throughout, Mendlesohn had trouble deciding how to categorize even the books she examines within each chapter, sometimes moving them to a different chapter, or mentioning that a book would easily fit into another category, then bracketing any discussion of this fact. In each chapter she has to argue that the other categories could indeed be present within the current category she is treating.
Ironically, this entire problem could have been avoided had she approached the problem from the other direction. Rather than seeing fantasy as inherently divided into categories which are then reified by rhetoric (doubly ironically, a position I don't think Mendlesohn actually holds), she should have argued that specific rhetorical strategies create fantasies that can be categorized across her taxonomy. Rather than creating a taxonomy of fantasy, she needed to create a taxonomy of rhetoric. The benefit of this is would have been that that she could group rhetorical strategies together, rather than texts together. This would obviate the need to continually point out that one text can be seen as occupying multiple categories at once. Instead, one author employs rhetoric in multiple ways within one text, weaving, for example, immersive and intrusive rhetorics together to create a polyvalent whole.
This is further compounded by the fact that the categorizations that she does make are not themselves argued for. In every chapter she selects books that she considers representative of the type of fantasy she is investigating. However, she makes no attempt to explain or justify any of her choices, no matter how controversial or off the wall they seem. This is especially problematic when she includes books which would not widely be considered fantasy, or which in fact aren't fantasy at all (Pilgrim's Progress), without making more than token efforts to justify these inclusions. These range from books whose inclusion seems bizarre but acceptable (Holes) to books whose inclusion literally flies in the face of the critical tradition (Pilgrim's Progress or the short story "The Pit and the Pendulum").
There are two essential problems with this. One more pretentious issue is that it raises questions about her own engagement with the broader world of literary criticism (there are serious problems with her treatment of the Gothic, the dream vision/allegory tradition, etc.). Is Mendlesohn trying to engage with critics while still writing an accessible book about fantasy? If she is she did not do her homework, so to speak.
The other problem is that there is so much slippage between genres, traditions, etc. that what Mendlesohn defines as fantasy or within the fantastic tradition is totally called into question. She spends close to twenty pages on Gothic literature, much of it on the less fantastic edges of the gothic, only to declare Fairy Tale part of Fancy and therefore not relevant. She of course moves on without explaining this bizarre decision, leaving a gaping hole in her discussion of Intrusion Fantasy. But this is to be expected, and is only more indicative of her sloppy writing and arguing.
I was also really bothered by Mendlesohn's poor argumentation throughout the book. She constantly makes pronouncements which she does not or cannot defend, introduces important points without thinking through their implications for her broader argument, and even makes points that are so facile they offend the reader. At the same time, because she is so flippant with the points she makes, she packs so much into each chapter that it is impossible to follow the major argumentative thread. This turns all of her chapters into loosely organized musings that sometimes feel like a slog.
Just to follow two related points along these lines: One of Mendlesohn's observations about Portal/Quest fantasy is that the category is given to imperialist readings. In her work on Diana Wynne Jones this was a brilliant insight, and lead her to a brilliant critique of Jones's Dark Lord of Derkholm and me to a breakthrough in understanding the paradoxically great yet racist Damar books by Robin McKinley. In Rhetorics, however, Mendlesohn does not work out this insight. Instead, early on, she asserts that "This kind of Fantasy is essentially imperialist," and then goes on to analyze most of the books in the Portal-Quest chapter without even the slightest nod to her insight. This becomes extremely distressing when we reach the core of her chapter, where she analyzes The Lord of the Rings a book widely considered by critics to be strongly and notably anti-imperialist. Yet The Lord of the Rings, she informs us, created the framework of the Portal-Quest as we now know it. It "codified much of how the quest fantasy deals with landscape, with character, with the isolation of the protagonists into the club-story narrative and with reader positioning." She does nothing to either argue against other critics who see LotR as anti-imperialist, or to explain how the book is in fact anti-imperialist in contradiction to her previous assertion. In fact, the latter discussion would have supported her overall argument and her overall treatment of LotR as a portal-quest fantasy, so it is distressing to me that she didn't follow that path. It is one of many that she ignores.
The other point, Mendlesohn asserts in her Intrusive fantasy chapter that those seduced by the fantastic (even to their deaths) are in fact like rapists, trotting out "the old rape justification of "it made me do it! It seduced me! It was asking for it!" She quotes Nalo Hopkinson (who originated that quote) as support for her assertions, and then continues to return to Hopkinson everytime she makes this argument. Unfortunately, I think she and Hopkinson are deeply mis-appropriating narratives of rape to make this point, at a level that feels almost dangerous to me. Viewed in either direction, they are essentially victim blaming. In Mythago Wood, the book she relies on most to make this point, those (men) seduced by the fantastic are indeed seduced and ultimately killed by the wood. If we carry on the violence against women analogy, they are more like battered women, seduced by an abuser. If we keep strictly with the rape analogy, then she is calling the men who are legitimately seduced by the wood rapists. In other words, the rapist's excuse is true, and the object of rape was in fact a seductress. This is not a path that should be tread down with anything other than a great deal of clarifying and supporting argumentation, but Mendlesohn delivers none, a serious failing and highly indicative of her sloppy, surface level argumentation throughout.
I will skip a critique of her writing in general, suffice it to say that she is verbose where concision would be better and that her paragraphs are poorly structured. There were also dozens of grammatical and proofreading errors, to the point that I was noticing one every other page. I normally would not point out the one or two understandable grammar errors in a book, however these were so commonplace, and really so unacceptable in an academic work, that they seem almost indicative of the carelessness that went into the book.
All of this said, I still suggest that serious readers of fantasy literature read this book, especially those interested in the critical perspective. It is frustrating, but Mendlesohn's observations about fantasy, albeit obfuscated by her incompetence here, are truly groundbreaking.