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Faulty Cartography.

Article Excerpt
Faulty Cartography. Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2008. 336 pp. $27.95 pbk.

Rhetorics of Fantasy is a structuralist account of generic Fantasy that works hard not to be doctrinaire or procrustean. Mendlesohn's project, which is to say disposing a mass of tens of thousands of individual texts into four boxes ("Portal-Quest Fantasy," "Immersive Fantasy," "Intrusion Fantasy" and "Limi-nal Fantasy"), does not render her tone-deaf to the particularities of specific textual production: indeed, the close attention to actual novels is one of the strengths of the book. But the purpose of the work is taxonomical, and as such it seemed to me significant that the four chapters are followed by a fifth called '"The Irregulars'" covering the works that do not fit her schema. It is game of her to concede the limits of her grid (although she suggests that such irregulars are few in number, and the texts she looks at are not very famous ones); but it speaks to one of the venerable problems of structuralist criticism. Mendlesohn is perfectly well aware of it. She begins with a "Health Warning": her book is not intended "to create rules"; "its categories are not intended to fix anything in stone"; and her categories "are constructions imposed on a literary landscape. The same landscape may be susceptible to quite a different cartography" (xxv). This is quite right; although it does not quite amount to a literary-critical Get Out of Jail Free card.

The range of Fantasy novels discussed is fairly broad, although there arc some odd omissions (nothing at all on Gene Wolfe, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler) and a good deal of attention is given to writers who probably don't merit such emphasis (Steph Swainston, K. J. Parker, Laurel K. Hamilton, Terry Brooks), especially when in the absence of such major figures. That said, Mendlesohn is scrupulous not to cherry-pick to suit her argument. Attractively this is a critical text that registers not only the books its author has read, but the conversation and emails she has exchanged with a number of colleagues. Throughout the study she practices what might be called critical courtesy; going out of her way never to appear bullying or prescriptive. This is a genuine attempt to open critical conversation.

Areview is a small part of that conversation, and it would be unfitting for me to reply in anything other than the idiom of courtesy Mendlesohn adopts in this work. That said, I read her study in a state of almost continual disagreement. I do not share her...

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