Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth

STORIES ABOUT STORIES: FANTASY AND THE REMAKING OF MYTH. Brian Attebery. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 240 p. 9780199316069. $29.95; Kindle ed. $9.99. BRIAN ATTEBERY WON THE MYTHOPOEIC SCHOLARSHIP AWARD in 1994 for his study of Strategies of Fantasy, the book that introduced the now-widespread idea of defining the fantasy genre as a fuzzy set of novels that more or less resemble The Lord of the Rings. He had earlier been Mythcon Guest of Honor on the strength of his historical survey of The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature. Having spent of his intervening attention on science fiction, Attebery has returned with this third major study of fantasy literature. Its theme is fantasy and myth: focused not on the usual themes of describing the mythic sources of fantasy novels, or on the reader's experience of fantasy as a modern substitute for myth, but on the more tenuous topic of the use that fantasy makes of its mythic sources, or the practice of assimilating and retelling myth. As Attebery observes, readers crave the mythic experience. It's a delicate and elusive topic, and the book's eight chapters (plus two, somewhat tangential, interchapters) approach it from a variety of viewpoints. This is because Stories About Stories, like Strategies of Fantasy before it, is actually a collection of separate essays lightly welded together. They're presented here in roughly historical sequence, with an increasingly close focus on more recent work. One recurring theme is the place of fantasy within literature. Chapter one opens encouragingly with a discussion of myth itself as literature, positing that myths of living cultures are not static and that their tellers are modern people as influenced by their circumstances as anyone else. The following section is not entirely explicit in applying this principle to the pre-20th century history of fantasy, but it's full of fascinating observations on, for instance, Milton's contribution to Biblical myth and what would be missing if he'd written, as he'd considered, an Arthurian epic instead. Chapters two and four include robust defenses of fantasy against their dismissal and suppression by modernist critics and writers. Attebery points out that dominant literary paradigms are never the only ones in operation, and that many of the canonical modernist writers also worked in the mode of the fantastic. People conveniently forgot that Woolf also wrote fantasy (Orlando), James ghost stories, and Forster science fiction (98). In chapter two, he makes the first of many startling juxtapositions by describing what Eliot's The Waste Land would be like if it were not a densely allusive and cryptically fragmented poem but a (46), and the resulting description turns out to be of War in Heaven by Charles Williams. And for a novel of that period which does the same thing to myth in pagan rather than Christian terms, he offers Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees. Chapter four is equally startling, with its readings of pioneering contemporary urban fantasies (Sanders Anne Laubenthal's Excalibur and Diana L. Paxson's Brisingamen, both largely forgotten outside of Mythopoeic Society readership) as precursors to the now-popular paranormal romance, adding the classic characters of Ozma and Mary Poppins as recipients of displaced romantic feelings. Attebery is neither Fruedian nor reductionist, just keenly observant. The chapter concludes with a sweepingly impressive reading of Alan Garner's early novels as a gradual maturation out of the Mary Sue-style wish-fulfillment story, with a particularly robust defense of the genius of The Owl Service. Chapter three is more problematic. It offers a contrast between C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald, claiming that Lewis has assimilated and rewritten MacDonald's ideas and beliefs to fit his own agenda. Questionable as this is, it's outweighed by Attebery's peculiar readings of Lewis himself, mutely passing on Laura Miller's reading of a cognitive dissonance between Narnia and the Christianity it's supposed to express as evidence that Narnia is much less Christian, perhaps than Lewis intended, without considering that Lewis's whole purpose was to demonstrate that Christianity can be more than the boredom, subjugation, and reproach that Miller found in school (qtd. …