Fantasy Beyond the "TV Mind"

In which an essay and a podcast (and Tolkien) coalesce to describe something I've been trying to articulate for quite some time

If I haven’t already recommended the episode of Manifesto about Tolkien’s essay, “On Fairy-Stories,” then I am recommending it now. And if you’ve never read Tolkien’s essay, please stop reading this piece and go read his RIGHT NOW.

(Done? Welcome back.)

The Manifesto episode touches on something Tolkien wrote about in his letters and that I myself have long been thinking about as a reader and writer of fantasy. It’s the way in which fantasy, perhaps more than other genres (but this point is debatable and not the main point anyway), is more a literary genre than a theatrical or cinematic genre.

But, wait, you may be thinking, what about all the amazing fantasy films of the last twenty-plus years?

Well, I like them. Anyone who knows me knows I love the Lord of the Rings movies, and many other fantasy movies and TV shows besides, so it’s not like I’m dogging on fantasy films. I think Tolkien is wrong in some respects (or, at least, overstates his case) when he says theater and cinema can’t “do” fantasy. (And even the Manifesto guys and their guest admit that animated cinema manages to be fantasy, contra Tolkien.)

But there is something I’ve noticed and wondered about when it comes to fantasy and cinema and it’s not whether a show like Game of Thrones is able to be “fantasy.” What I’ve been wondering instead is whether fantasy literature itself is able to be “fantasy.” Or, to put it more clearly, have all the fantasy novels turned into written TV shows?

This isn’t something totally new, nor is it a phenomenon exclusive to fantasy literature, but fantasy literature in particular really exemplifies the way in which aping the storytelling mode of cinema reduces what fantasy literature can be, reducing the very elements that make it fantasy.

What do I mean by this? Well, think of the last recent-ish fantasy novel you’ve read. I’m thinking of a couple of really excellent novels that I loved. Now imagine them as movies.

For one of the books, I can almost imagine the movie or TV show playing out on screen but for one major roadblock: my shifting perception of certain characters’ physical appearance throughout the story. This is not insignificant, and probably makes it hard for the book to ever be adapted without losing this essential aspect.

But the other book, as excellent as it was, could definitely become a movie or show, because everything was sensory. It played like a movie in my head.

This is generally thought to be a good thing, but what if we’re seriously underplaying what fantasy literature can BE if we stick only to the sensory, to the concrete. A fantasy that deals with the inner life of a character, with their feelings and the ineffable subjectivity of their experiences, with the “unseen” and “unseeable”: this kind of fantasy doesn’t translate to cinema.

Fantasy literature uses words as its medium, language as the means for its magic. Words, being symbols, are not the same as our five senses, and a fantasy that is literature is therefore a fantasy that is primarily one of language, not sight, sound, or otherwise. The pun, the ambiguous meaning of a word or phrase, the metaphor — most primarily the metaphor — cannot easily transfer to the screen.

I’m thinking of another book I’ve been reading — Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan — and I’m marveling at the language. At the descriptive passages and metaphors that abound. It’s one thing to “see” Swelter on the screen in all his hideous girth, but such visuals do not capture the real Swelter, do not convey the phantasmagorical nature of his character. None of the characters can really be rendered on screen without losing almost everything that makes the novel interesting (note my qualifier: “almost;” for it IS possible to visualize the grotesqueness of Gormenghast, and do a very entertaining job of it too; I’m not saying nothing about Titus Groan can be rendered as cinema, just that a lot of what makes it great — what makes it FANTASY — is lost).

What exactly is fantastical about Titus Groan anyway? Perhaps it’s fantasy simply by being set in (I think?) a secondary world. Or perhaps it’s some of the strange quirks of this world, like the way the Dwellers seem to descend into old age suddenly and much too quickly compared to normal human development. Maybe one could argue that it’s not “fantasy” at all.

But it’s certainly not realistic fiction. And it’s not science fiction. Gothic, perhaps, but then, Gothic is adjacent to fantasy anyway.

But whatever Titus Groan is, it’s not easily translatable to cinema, and that is its power. That is its genius, in a sense. It can be nothing other than what it is, and what it is is almost impossible to adequately describe.

Lincoln Michel’s essay is about literature in general, but I think what that essay hits upon is even doubly-so true for fantasy. Cinema is the dominant medium of our age, and as McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message.” We learn stories from the stories we see play out on screens, and then is it any wonder that the stories we write become “TV shows in our minds.”

What this means for fantasy is that language becomes secondary to the image, even when we’re writing with words. Michel’s suggestions to writers for ways to avoid “TV brain” are good, generally, but I’d like to consider them in light of fantasy literature.

Fantasy literature, being fantasy, is not always dealing with what is, but also with a hidden world, a world in which magic is real and the normal rules of nature might not apply: a world that cannot be “seen” but can be felt, that can be conjured through the spell of language.

I can describe a tree with yellow trunk and purple leaves, and this is obviously fantasy, and a filmmaker can then render such trees either through practical effects of CGI, but if that’s all my fantasy is — the yellow trunk and the purple leaves — then I’m delivering a somewhat paltry version of “fantasy” for my readers.

Michel’s point about prose’s ability to manipulate time is important in the fantasy context because fantasy has even more leeway to move through eons or slow down to expand a moment. Not only can these be used as stylistic or experimental aspects (as they often are in literary fiction), but they can become utterly central to the story itself when writing fantasy.

I mused several newsletters ago about writing a story from the perspective of a “dungeon” (in the classic Dungeons and Dragons sense). What would happen if we experienced the passage of time from the perspective of the dungeon? What if we watched as walls moldered and crumbled, as monsters moved through the corridors, fought and died, scavenged for treasure, and ages upon ages of adventurers swept through the cobwebbed hallways of the dank underground? It’s not about any kind of cinematic story but about the experience of time and decay and the ways in which one sentence, a couple of lines, can convey a thousand years.

Which also ties into Michel’s other point about the interiority of literature. Fantasy is fantasy not just in the way we build our secondary worlds but in the subjective way the reader experiences them.

Back to my purple-leaved tree. The history of such trees, the meaning of them, the feelings of the tree itself, and the interior life of the inhabitants who know these trees: all of these can come into play when I’m writing literature. Yes, cinema can deliver speeches and voice-overs, but these aren’t always the best devices in visual storytelling, and even moreso, these voices are external to us, the viewers. What literature can do is get us inside the heads of the characters, and even the world itself. And this subjective experience is where the fantastical elements can emerge even when the situation is not fantastical.

I think back to Titus Groan, to the way Fuschia’s attic sanctuary is described, or the way darkness and night are described, or the way Keda’s wanderings are described. None of these moments would mean much on the screen. We’d see the attic, we’d see the darkness, we’d see the worn and weary Keda wandering.

To see those moments — and only to see them — is to miss the entirety of the novel. It’s to miss the subjectivity of these moments. The fantasy is what happens inside our heads as we read. It’s not simply a “picture” but an entire feeling, a sensibility and mood, and even more than that: it’s something ineffable that we can’t quite reduce to an “image.” It’s the language itself. The metaphors. What is figurative is by its very nature not literal. The screen literalizes. Language, on the other hand, is metaphor.

I think Tolkien is a bit too hard on Drama and Film as being insufficient for fantasy (“In human art Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature”)¹; puppetry, animation, and the kinds of both digital and practical effects that go into stagecraft and cinema can create wonderful effects that push us into something resembling what Tolkien calls “arresting strangeness.”

But his larger point, about how fantasy is primarily a thing that happens in the imagination, is well-taken when we consider that today’s best-selling fantasy novels often find their way to movie and TV adaptations, and that when these stories make the leap to cinema, they often lose something in the translation.

It’s a commonplace to say, “The book was better,” but what most people often mean is that the movie had to cut too many scenes out of the book, perhaps their favorite scenes or story lines.

But what I think really happens is the movie can’t capture the interior experience of reading the book. We’ll often say, “That’s not how I pictured it,” when we see a movie adaptation, as if the movie would be so much better if only it had cast someone closer to our mind’s eye, or if only the art director could see directly into our imagination.

But even if the movie were picture-perfect in casting and art design and screenplay, it would still be “different” from the book because watching a film is a different aesthetic experience from reading a book or hearing someone tell a story. This is obvious stuff, yeah, but cinema’s totalizing effect on the way we think of “story” is such that even once we start writing literature, we are writing with one eye towards the movies. Not in a “I hope this gets adapted” kind of way (though, maybe), but in the way we conceive of the stories as stories.

Stories have “scenes.” This is the language of the stage play. But now we think of our own writing in terms of scenes; we construct our narratives using the formulae of stage and screen.

For fantasy literature, in which setting is so important, and the magic of Faerie is central, the imposition of cinema’s aesthetic not only crystalizes certain images as THE images of the fantasy world, but it also reduces fantasy to something we primarily SEE. Even the most dream-like of films can’t capture what it’s really like to dream.

And even the most impressive art direction, special effects, practical effects, costumes, and performances can’t capture what’s happening in our heads as we read a fantasy story. All stories lose something in this translation, but because fantasy deals with magic, the thing that’s lost isn’t just a certain “look” but the thing itself. The magic becomes all too “real.”

Which brings me back to Titus Groan. On some level, I want to see what a visual artist would do with characters like Nanny Slag or Swelter or Prunesquallor, with the castle itself, but on another level, I want these creatures and places to live only in my imagination. The magic is there, not anywhere external.

The language of the novel is what gives me aesthetic pleasure; it’s fantastical not only because it’s set in a secondary world but because the language itself mutates my imagination, giving me an experience of “arresting strangeness” that even the best images can never achieve.

I don’t think all of fantasy fiction being written today is written in “movie-style,” but I do think we are conditioned — by whom, I don’t know, probably just ourselves since we’re so awash in movies — to write so that audiences can “see” the “scene,” like roving camera-eyes on set in our story worlds. Novels like Titus Groan show another way of storytelling. Older fantasy, like George MacDonald’s Phantastes, like the works of Tolkien himself, show that way too.

It’s a way that puts language and narrative above image, of interiority and imagination above exterior simulation.

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Blog Posts of Interest

I got the first two Lone Wolf Roleplaying Adventure books for Christmas and shared them with my son. I also decided to start running a Dolmenwood solo adventure. I’m hoping to give some gaming reports here on Substack.

I also wrote a tortured update on where I’m at with the second Merlin’s Last Magic book, Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess.

And I decided that America’s great fantasy text isn’t a novel but the entire corpus of Grateful Dead songs.

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That’s it for now. As always, thank you for reading!

And if you are looking for Arthurian fantasy, consider my novel, The Thirteen Treasures of Britain, or if you want a dash of nostalgic coming-of-age, 1990s-style, there’s Avalon Summer and its companion fantasy, Gates to Illvelion. Or you can check out my short stories HERE.

Remember, if you enjoyed this post but can’t afford a monthly subscription, you can always buy me a coffee.

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1. from “On Fairy-Stories”