Fantastic Metropolis

When I did finally come to understand that the official canon was intended for a public rather than a private reading experience, I realized that those classmates in my high school English classes who professed to hate reading fiction of any sort had no idea of a difference between public and private reading. Public readings were intended to produce a fairly uniform, shared text. Students might come up with their own quirky ideas about these texts, but certain interpretations were more correct than others, and many interpretations were just plain wrong. Shakespeare meant this, here, and that, there. And to master the public reading, you had to learn what those authorized meanings were. Private imagination and emotion were beside the point. People who had never known the pleasure of private reading thought reading was only about authorized meanings set in stone that had to be learned as though they were state capitals or multiplication tables.

My experience of music had taught me that knowledge of music theory and history greatly enhanced the pleasures of performing, composing, and listening to music rather than diminished them; I only discovered that this could be true for literature when feminists began moving into literary criticism and narrative theory. The exclusion of private meaning from canonical texts likely helped me to persist in the notion that reading outside of the canon was an intrinsically rebellious activity, even as I was being taught that fiction in the canon was another species entirely from all other sorts of fiction. It certainly was responsible for my later coming to view the act of reading canonical texts with the same private passion I brought to noncanonical fiction as rebellious, also.

But where, exactly, is the rebellion in reading that is both private and pleasurable?

I would argue that its roots can be glimpsed in some of the earliest experiences of childhood. Consider what happens when a small child reads Dr. Seuss books. First, the child’s imagination is engaged in defying the what is that we call reality. Green eggs? There is no such thing! But what child doesn’t love to play with the idea of green eggs and ham and with Dr. Seuss’s many silly permutations of words and phrases that slip off the tongue with joyful ease and delight? One of the lessons Dr. Seuss offers is that pronouncing an unusual grouping of words together can be not only fun (which is something most toddlers discover for themselves), but can also send one’s mind to strange and wild places, creating absurd and colorful places that can be shared with anyone else playing Dr. Seuss’s game.

Such child’s play is simply child’s play, of course, and not rebellion. But the child a little older, reading the adventures of characters who are in many ways like the reader but who live in worlds unlike the one and only world the reader knows personally–whether it is the life of Alice, or Harry Potter (or even Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey children, whose model middle-class American lives were as exotic and strange to me as Alice’s)—is drawn into vivid, psychodramatic worlds, often featuring unfamiliar rules and situations that engage the young reader in a kind of world-building likely to generate a voracious appetite for imagining other ways the world can, could, or might be. Suspension of disbelief, for such children, becomes as easy as breathing, while the status quo becomes what-is-but-need-not-necessarily-be.

For adults—particularly those who do not care to read fantastic literature—suspension of disbelief is harder to come by; these days the status quo has become carved in stone. What is, most people tend to think, is what must be. Our mainstream media constantly scrawl across every available inch of the sky Surrender, Dorothy!, while the message This is as good as it gets, baby! is dinned into our heads constantly, telling us we are fools to want anything other than what is apparently available.

Fantastic fiction allows readers to flout the superior status of what is over what might be. It teaches us not only to long for different worlds, but to play with them and think within their special frames of reference and rules. It allows us, in short, to rebel against the status quo—to permit ourselves to feel deeply and engage imaginatively with what not only does not exist, but also does not purport to represent with precision and authority what does exist. Granted, much fiction is merely escapist and makes us comfortable with rather than rebellious against the status quo. When we read escapist fiction we take a break, a time-out, and can either pretend for a time that the status quo is a good place to be or avoid thinking about it for as long as we’re immersed in the escape. But afterwards we do not feel especially refreshed, invigorated, or even satisfied, and those of us who are rebellious readers always return to the reading that fuels our resistance.

In a recent Fantastic Metropolis editorial, Jeff VanderMeer offered readers a “Shadow Cabinet” of titles that are not kept permanently in print, titles the passionate private reader is typically willing to go to some trouble to locate. I’d like to add several more titles of fantastic fiction to the Shadow Cabinet:

• Brigid Brophy, Palace without Chairs
• Rebecca Brown, The Evolution of Darkness
• Lenore Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet
• Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales
• Cecilia Holland, Floating Worlds
• Bev Jafek, “The Man Who Took a Bite out of His Wife”
• Anna Kavan, Ice
• Natalie Petesch, “The Leprosarium”
• Lynda Sexson, “Margaret of the Imperfections” and “The Incarnation of God into the Body of Florence”
• Mary Staton, From the Legend of Beal
• Wendy Walker, The Secret Service