Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth

The Future of Fantasy Criticism. Brian Attebery. Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 240 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-931607-6. $29.95 pbk.Reviewed by Benjamin J. RobertsonBrian Attebery's Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth is an important book about fantasy. Nonetheless, I hope that it does not define a program for fantasy criticism going forward to the detriment of other approaches and concerns. To be sure, Attebery solidifies his position as one the most important scholars of fantasy literature, a position he earned with his first two books, The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin (1980) and especially Strategies of Fantasy (1992). Stories about Stories takes a broader view and makes a stronger claim for its significance than either of the previous books. Attebery calls for and models an approach focused on the particular interactions of various mythic traditions in fantasy texts, that is, the ways in which fantasy texts tell stories about stories by reframing traditional (often oral) narratives in contemporary contexts with surprising results. His method remains problematic, however.Prior to Stories about Stories, Attebery's lasting contribution to fantasy criticism and scholarship, aside from the fact that he is one of the main reasons there is such a field at all in its present form, had been his conceptualization of the "fuzzy set" as a means to understand genre. As described in Strategies of Fantasy, the fuzzy set (in the context of fantasy or sf or some other genre) is defined by, first, a center composed of a few texts which inarguably belong to the set (e.g., Tolkien, Lewis, and Le Guin), and second, by texts that enjoy greater or lesser degrees of "family resemblance" with those central ones. This concept allows critics to be less concerned with developing and maintaining firm borders between fantasy and related genres (especially, at the time, sf). Two recent studies of fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008) and Stefan Ekman's Here Be Dragons: Exploring Fantasy Maps and Settings (2013), take the fuzzy set as a starting point even as they add to or modify the concept.In Stories about Stories, Attebery underscores the logic of the fuzzy set while acknowledging its limitations: "I still like this way of cutting through the Gordion knot of genre classification, but it does not account for all the historical and social dimensions of genre" (33). With regard to fantasy, fuzzy sets do not account for the manner in which fantasy texts and authors draw upon and recontextualize myth. Attebery writes: "I do not want to merely claim that one can find myth in fantasy, though that is certainly the case. Rather, I am looking at the way writers use fantasy to reframe myth: to construct new ways of looking at traditional stories and beliefs" (2-3). He continues by arguing that "instead of spending so much time simply identifying a particular Celtic myth in a work of modern fantasy," critics and scholars "should look at how the fantasist appropriates from, engages with, travesties, and reconstitutes the myth. The modern reuse will never be the same as the original performance" (3). In short, Stories about Stories concerns itself with not only the various traditions upon which fantasy draws, but also the nature of this drawing upon. As worthy a goal as the first task remains, the latter is far more important. Attebery makes this point clear in later chapters.The book's early chapters focus on proto- and early fantasists such as Hope Mirrlees, Charles Williams, George MacDonald, and C. S. Lewis. Attebery calls attention to interesting relationships between fantasy and high modernism as well as the manner in which fantasy adopted and reframed Christian mythology for a secular world. His argument hinges on a discussion of colonial fantasy in Chapter 5. Critics, he contends, should not take the remaking of myth as a neutral act; any scholarship that would content itself with merely pointing out that text A draws upon myth B runs the risk of assuming such neutrality. …