Truesdale’s Domestication of Genre

Since the column Dave Truesdale writes for F&SF only appears online I find myself reading the July installment six months late (they ought to create an RSS feed).  He discusses the Paraspheres anthology, which attempts to step beyond the genre boundaries of science fiction and literary fiction in order to appeal to both.

In his euphemism-free critique (”. . . narcolepsy inducing . . . pretentious; boring; trivial; pseudo-intellectual . . .”) he raises a definition for science fiction that I find very useful, even if I cannot wholly accept it any more than I can the myriad other definitions.

The idea, taken from James Gunn, is that science fiction has traditionally sought the “domestication of the strange.” But with the New Wave and subsequent pressures to gain respectability by conforming to the narrow parameters of quality endorsed by mainstream “literary” literature, science fiction has instead pursued the “estrangement of the domestic.”

This perfectly describes slipstream and the various other trends of surrealistic speculative fiction, modes too often, but not invariably, devoted to literary high jinks in lieu of storytelling. Truesdale argues convincingly that this is a dead end both artistically and commercially, and also points out it’s been done before.

Through all of this I’m delightedly nodding. Truesdale pulls no punches, and I agree: such writing is fine as an exercise, but leave it in your notebook. It can have no higher purpose than priming the pump for actual storytelling.

But something nags at me. This dichotomy, the domestication of the strange vs. the estrangement of the domestic, works well for science fiction but breaks down when fantasy is considered.

Certainly the domestication of the strange is fundamental to fantasy. Permeating the genre’s strata are stories of humans sojourning in fairy, or fairies sojourning in our world. While the former is commonplace, the later is also central to many classics, from Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter, to Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn and Patricia McKillip’s The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.

Yet even in these encounters between the mundane and the fantastic there is less domestication than is typical in science fiction. Instead the sense of wonder is intractably associated with fantasy, and it might instead be argued that estrangement of the domestic is the genre’s central concern.

Tolkien, in his 1938 essay “On Fairy-Stories,” explains that contemplation of the fantastic makes reality fresh and new. He calls this “recovery,” saying creative fantasy “may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds. The gems all turn into flowers or flames, and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they were you.”

But just as fantasy is more a sojourn amidst the strange than it is the domestication of the strange, so also it is less the estrangement of the domestic, which renders the everyday inscrutable, than it is Tolkien’s recovery, which enables us once again to truly see the everyday.

In fact, Tolkien regarded this recovery as the antidote to what the estrangement of the domestic too often leads to: “there may be a danger of boredom or of anxiety to be original, and that may lead to a distaste for fine drawing, delicate pattern, and ‘pretty’ colours, or else to mere manipulation and over-elaboration of old material, clever and heartless. But the true road of escape from such weariness is not to be found in the wilfully awkward, clumsy, or misshapen, not in making all things dark or unremittingly violent; nor in the mixing of colours on through subtlety to drabness, and the fantastical complication of shapes to the point of silliness and on towards delirium.”

This warning sounds much like Truesdale’s criticisms of surrealistic trends in science fiction, though I fear fantasy is even more susceptible to this fashion. Yet while the estrangement of the domestic makes ready use of fantasy’s toolbox, it is no more likely to be mistaken as belonging to mainstream fantasy than it is science fiction. It is not sword and sorcery. It is not high or Tolkienian. It is not urban fantasy, or fairy story, or alternate history, etc.

As Truesdale quotes Algis Budrys, the appearance of this affectation “is immediately recognized by the top editors as ‘literary’–that is, visibly concerned with technique . . . with ‘writing,’ if you will, as distinguished from ’storytelling.’” I would amend that a typical reader is no slower to recognize this style. And though there is some benefit in the reminder that genre boundaries are ephemeral, imprecise, and often unhelpful, neither are they entirely illusory, and in trying to transcend them, and not in the service of story but for the principle of the thing, a story will deservedly find itself left alone in limbo, not a trailblazer but an oddity.