James Gifford - A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism, and the Radical Fantastic

It all started in another book A prequel. After I completed a complicated archival project retracing the global correspondence networks of late modernist radical anarchist poetry groups in World War II, I found several poets had turned to popular pulp. It was a time of need in the post-war years, and poetry never pays its bills. So, after Id picked up its tab and archival traces in Personal Modernisms , I wanted my own turn to pulp for a much needed break. I wanted simplicity. I wanted recreation. I wanted to read their enervating adventures written in simple words. But it wasnt simple. It was just as radical. It was as predisposed to anarchist concerns as ever. It was just as complicated. Like in real life, I ditched the relaxation of a readers equivalent of an all-inclusive vacation and turned to the stimulation of the archive, and the resort gave way to research. It was all wrong for the deep rest I deserved. I realized that if I wanted a real break from serious reading, I needed to go further into fantasy pulp and away from the literary types who were earning a living when their radical poetics didnt pay the bills.

Thats how I eventually found myself in the basement of the Reed College Librarys Special Collections in Portland it was even a road trip: a journey, a quest. A Reedie, David Eddings, later became one of the bestselling fantasy authors of the twentieth century, and after giving my little sister a set of his books just as I was given them when they first came out, Id become curious. So when I sat there with Eddingss papers in hand, ostensibly as part of a trip meant to research the Beats, I discovered the impossible. Hed been a tenured professor of English literature before quitting the profession. Worse still, hed taught modernism! And I was holding his detailed lecture notes on modernist English and American literature. When his quest narrative gave cheeky dialogue conflicting free choice and determinism by asking why two and two make four, was he really thinking of Dostoyevskys arguments around determinism in Notes From the Underground (Eddings, Magicians 99; Dostoyevsky 337)? Well, he had lecture notes on it

Inconceivable! Political radicals and a modernist legacy amidst fantasys pseudo-medievalisms and reactionary nostalgia? Futurism would appear to be shaking hands with the anti-modern. This book, A Modernist Fantasy , is the unexpected conceiving of those three things together as an intertwined set: modernism, anarchism, and fantasy fiction taken from the 1890s until the moment when the mainstream intruded around 1978 and a change of consciousness began. Eddings came later, but he was too much a part of what started me on this journey to not be here at the end of all things.

More was at work than this curiosity of finding my childhood authorial fandom transformed. I felt there was a lesson to be learned. If modernist concerns had infiltrated Eddingss fantasy novels, he was surely not alone in this my cast of radical poets included several who turned to the genre after World War II, so it was to be expected of them, but what of those who were only ever in the mainstream? For Eddings, there were the pop cultural analyses of his works that tended strongly toward the dismissive. Farah Mendlesohn presents Eddingss conclusion to the Mallorean series as a damp squib, as the choice was unbelievably obvious (Crowning 161), yet with his lecture notes in mind, the inevitability is, quite literally, no different from the freedom to believe that 2 and 2 is four as in George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-four , which is not bad company. Its also entirely the point the choosing individual in conflict with determinism. Both Orwell and Eddings, in fact, gestured back to the same modernist source in Dostoyevsky, itself already a double gesture backward to Nikolai Chernyshevskys What Is to Be Done? . Would such assumptions follow for other earlier voices of the genre as well? In the same frame of reference, Eddings gave a prose style with what many described as minimal world building without the grit of real life. He set the rumours in motion in interviews by saying the commercial success of Tolkiens Lord of the Rings inspired his turn to the genre (Nicholls, Ring 78). His teaching notes and personal diaries revealed something very different: a world as elaborate as Tolkiens and that he wrote entirely prior to the narrative that became The Belgariad, but for Eddings it was expunged from the final product. The archives also revealed a real life with more grit than most of us could bear, and once seen, impossible to overlook in the so very clean novels. And lastly, Tolkien was included much earlier in Eddingss teaching materials as a striking contrast to British Literature materials on modernism in his classes (beside Pound, Eliot, and Joyce). So much for the story of commercial opportunism Tolkien was already there long before the widely-circulated story (and story is right) of Eddings finding Lord of the Rings in a bookshop in its 73rd printing and hence a commercial model for success (Nicholls, Ring 78). Even the distracting story of leaving his vaguely described (implicitly sessional or adjunct) teaching post in protest against administrative fiscal greed (Nicholls, Ring 77) is belied by his notes on his checklist prior to moving from Dakota back to Washington. The most important phrase in his to do list for the move is a question: whether or not to sue for alienation of marital affections. The goody-goody troubled marriages in his fiction, in this context, suddenly become impossible to ignore, even if the narrative voice never dwells on it in a way that alienates the young or fun reader. In other words, like virtually all modernist authors I know, his public statements were storytelling and heavily fictionalized at that to disguise deep-set intellectual and emotional concerns that, in retrospect, appear blindingly obvious in the otherwise (contrary to modernist authors) superficially uncomplicated prose style. Its a plainness that Hemingway shows took great effort.