One of the questions that preoccupies criticism of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels is whether they are generic fantasy. Of course, they were written and published at a time when there was no such thing–or no such thing in the sense that we mean today. That they are often referred to as a trilogy–despite numerous facts that run contrary to such a designation–implies a desire on the part of critics, reviewers, and capitalists to recuperate Peake under a generic, and therefore valorzing heading that will thus allow for further commodification. “Like Tolkien? You’ll LOVE Titus Groan! Please ignore all of the ways in which it is different… mumble… mumble… look over there! Yoink!” [Steals money, runs away.]
Archive for August, 2013
Some thoughts on magic in Peake’s Gormenghast
Posted in Here at the End of All Things, The Generic, Writing with tags fantasy, Gormenghast, Here at the End of All Things, horror, magic, mervyn peake, theory, tolkien, writing on 31 August 2013 by BenStefan Ekman on polders
Posted in Here at the End of All Things, The Generic, Writing with tags fantasy, genre, Here at the End of All Things, horror, literature, magic, tolkien, writing on 14 August 2013 by BenA polder is, simply put, a space in fantasy literature protected from the outside (think Lothlórien, for example).
Following from Clute, who writes, “Polders change only when they are being devoured from without”, Stefan Ekman argues (in Here Be Dragons):
In other words, for a polder, the internal and external realities are set up as opposing forces, and as long as the polder is successfully maintained, it does not change. The world outside does, however, and its change widens the temporal gap between the two realities. The polder becomes a maintained anachronism–that is, an anachronism opposed to the time of the surrounding world, actively if not consciously (because it begs the question: whose consciousness?). The external time is, and must be, the wrong time, since, in a polder, any time but its own is wrong. Hence a polder must not only be maintained but also defended from external influence. (100)
It is always interesting to me the way in which theoretical discussions of genre mirror debates about the legitimacy of generic fiction. For example, we might consider Literature a polder, artificially protected from the ravages of genre and history, frozen (as if by one of the three rings for eleven kings) in place and rendered incorruptible–except that Literature is presented as the world and generic fiction as something foreign to that world, which seems to me opposite how the polder tends to work (at least in Tolkien). This is the Generic at work.
evening redness 