“Introduction: The Form of the Content of the Form”
\nBrian Attebery<\/p>\n
History is a tale we tell ourselves about the past, but there is no past, not here, not now. There is only the present, including the odd fragments from the wreck of the past that have washed ashore around us. We look these over, we read the words inscribed on some of the pieces, we guess at the gaps, and we construct a story. And then we do it all over again, for the present in which the tale was told is now itself part of the past and has to be wrapped into the narrative.<\/p>\n
Fans of Hayden White will recognize two thirds of my title. His pioneering work of metahistory, The Content of the Form<\/em>, invited historians to look at the way they typically present their findings, as narratives. Taking his cue from Karl Marx\u2019s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon<\/em>, in which Marx claimed that history repeats itself, but the second time around turns tragedy into farce, White asked who chooses these modes of tragedy and farce. Is it history, revealing its true shape, or is it the historian who must have a story to tell and can only do so in the forms provided by culture? In either case, forms are not empty vessels. They already hold something, before any facts are poured in: a sketch of a plot, a handful of character roles such as \u201chero\u201d and \u201cantagonist,\u201d a desired outcome, a logic of cause and effect. Such contents are meaningful. They sort information into clusters and make certain facts stand out and others recede into the background. They tell us what an ending is, and where to look for new beginnings.<\/p>\n I find White\u2019s insight provocative and penetrating. My historian friends are not always so impressed, but I\u2019m not sure whether that\u2019s because they think it is obvious or because they don\u2019t like to examine their own thought processes too closely. The one thing I wish White paid more attention to is the idea of story itself. Where do we learn the narrative structures into which we fit historical events? Is every history both recit<\/em> and conte<\/em>: story and story-telling? Does narrative on a large scale\u2014the story of a tribe or a nation\u2014really work the same way as personal narrative, or do terms like tragedy<\/em> and farce<\/em> lead us into seeing a similarity where none exists? And why those two forms? Why not tell history in the form of a bildungsroman or a detective novel\u2014or fantasy?<\/p>\n There are, of course, many historical fantasies: fictions in which impossible events are interwoven with real persons, places, and movements. Tim Powers constructs especially deft fantastic interpolations into history, inserting real lamias and belles dames sans merci<\/em> into the lives of the Romantic poets and turning casino builder Bugsy Siegel into the Fisher King. Other writers write plausible histories of nonexistent places: Guy Gavriel Kay\u2019s Tigana, history: John W. Campbell coined the term to describe Robert A. Heinlein\u2019s self-consistent timelines, and other outstanding examples include Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s Hainish novels, James Blish\u2019s Cities in Flight quartet, Suzy McKee Charnas\u2019s Holdfast Chronicles, Frank Herbert\u2019s Dune series, and Cordwainer Smith\u2019s stories of the Instumentality of Mankind. Besides future history there is alternative history. Kim Stanley Robinson\u2019s The Years of Rice and Salt<\/em> (2002), for instance, investigates the historical processes we think we understand by imagining them starting from different premises: Europe dead of the plague, Islam filling the historical niche occupied by Christianity, colonial empires launched from China and India. Some works of sf and more than a few fantasies examine the writing of history itself. Among the latter are Diana Wynne Jones\u2019s The Crown of Dalemark<\/em> (1993), John Crowley\u2019s \u00c6gypt<\/em>, aka The Solitudes<\/em> (1987), and Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman\u2019s The Fall of the Kings<\/em> (2002). But none of these quite dare to write history\u2014real world history\u2014as fantasy. What would that entail, and what might the exercise tell us about the past and our relation to it?<\/p>\n One kind of history almost seems to require a touch of the fantastic, and that is the history of human consciousness. Most people in most times have thought of themselves as living in a world that included both material reality and supernatural forces. Daily life was rife with ghosts and monsters; gods and demons shaped grander destinies. To write about those people only in terms of economic conflict and political maneuvering is to miss a large part of their reality. Jeanne Larsen, Nalo Hopkinson, Nega Mezlekia, and others have taken up the challenge of writing history with the myths and legends left in: their work might be called magical realism, but I think fantastic history comes closer to the mark.<\/p>\n What got me thinking about this question is reading Geoff Ryman\u2019s The King\u2019s Last Song<\/em>, which feels a lot like a fantasy and yet quite clearly is not. Ryman makes up much of what he tells us about twelfth-century Cambodia, Hope Mirrlees\u2019s Lud-in-the-Mist, and of course J. R. R. Tolkien\u2019s Middle-earth. A lot of science fiction incorporates what has come to be called future but he fesses up to his inventions in an extensive afterword. Historians do the same. There is no magic in the novel. No gods swoop down to aid his characters; no prophecy predicts their rise and fall; wisdom is imparted by sages rather than mages\u2014and by bitter experience. Perhaps the fantasy affect comes from the unfamiliarity of the scenery and culture: Khmer names and battles on elephant-back may remind western readers of the exotic nomenclature and weird warfare of a Lord Dunsany or a Jack Vance. Another push toward the fantastic is the unimaginably improbable horror of Cambodia\u2019s more recent history, which forms the second strand of the novel\u2019s twofold plot. However, I think the element that really made it feel fantastic is the link between past and present. King Jayavarman\u2019s time touches on the present in the form of an archaeological discovery: a narrative inscribed on pages of gold. Contemporary characters get caught up in the struggle for possession of the golden leaves. Issues current in the 1100s are still being fought over in the twenty-first century. The story of the past changes lives and ideas in the present. Strangest of all, minds touch across centuries. That\u2019s just history. We forget how magical it is, until someone like Ryman reminds us.<\/p>\n The essays in this issue of JFA<\/em> all have to do with history and the fantastic. Kathryn Walls shows how C. S. Lewis\u2019s cozy and timeless fantasies of Narnia might have been influenced by historical events such as the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Heather Snell finds reflections of the historical experience of a number of colonized groups\u2014Native Americans, post-Diasporic Africans, and the deaf\u2014in an sf story by Carole McDonnell. Umberto Rossi\u2019s reading of J. G. Ballard\u2019s novelette \u201cThe Ultimate City\u201d is historical in two senses: it examines Ballard\u2019s use of the literary past, including both his rejection of its iconic figures and his readmission of Shakespeare into his own personal canon, and it illuminates the disruptive and anachronistic narrative form that Ballard uses to make a kind of sense out of twentieth-century history. T. S. Miller similarly looks at one writer\u2019s use of another, which is to say, at fantastic storytelling as a form of historical recreation. In this case, history includes something that never really existed: Frankenstein\u2019s creature, which has haunted our dreams, embodied our ambitions, and shaped debates about science and humanity for a couple of centuries. Miller conducts a sort of archeological dig through Brad Bird\u2019s 1999 animated film The Iron Giant<\/em>; Ted Hughes\u2019s novel, from 1968, on which the film was loosely based; James Whale\u2019s 1931 film; and Mary Shelley\u2019s 1818 novel, which set the whole thing in motion. And, closest to my theme, in our lead article, Margaret Rose writes about steampunk, the hot new retro form that somehow turns the Victorian era into a future past. Rose suggests that steampunk puts meticulously researched historical details into \u201cflamboyantly wrong imagined pasts, in order to explore the ways in which the conventional historical sensibility sometimes gets it wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n Works Cited<\/p>\n Ryman, Geoff. The King\u2019s Last Song, or, Kraing Meas<\/em>. 2006. Afterword. Easthampton: Small Beer-Harper, 2008. Print.<\/p>\n White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation<\/em>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. Print.<\/p>\n “Extraordinary Pasts: Steampunk as a Mode of Historical Representation” “When Curiosity Gets the Better of Us: The Atomic Bomb in The Magician’s Nephew<\/em>” “The Postcolonial Fantastic as New Ground of Invention: Reading Carole McDonnell\u2019s ‘Lingua Franca'” “Shakespearian Reincarnations: An Intertextual Reading of J. G. Ballard\u2019s ‘The Ultimate City'” “Frankenstein<\/em> without Frankenstein: The Iron Giant<\/em> and the Absent Creator” “Dark Enlightenment: On John Clute\u2019s Darkening Garden” Francesca Billiani and Gigliola Sulis\u2019s The Italian Gothic and Fantastic: Encounters and Rewritings of Narrative Traditions<\/em> Jules Verne\u2019s The Kip Brothers<\/em> and The Mysterious Island<\/em> D. Harlan Wilson\u2019s Technologized Desire: Selfhood and the Body in Postcapitalist Science Fiction<\/em> Sean Redmond\u2019s Studying Blade Runner<\/em> Heather L. Duda\u2019s The Monster Hunter in Modern Popular Culture<\/em> David Whitley\u2019s The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation<\/em> John Paul Riquelme\u2019s Gothic and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity<\/em> Andrew Gordon\u2019s Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg<\/em> J. P. Telotte\u2019s The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader<\/em> Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox\u2019s New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction<\/em> Editor’s Introduction “Introduction: The Form of the Content of the Form” Brian Attebery History is a tale we tell ourselves about the past, but there is no past, not here, not now. There is only the present, including the odd fragments from the wreck of the past that have washed ashore around us. We look […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":223,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-fullwidth.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-245","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":333,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/245\/revisions\/333"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Articles<\/h3>\n
\nMargaret Rose<\/p>\n
\nKathryn Walls<\/p>\n
\nHeather Snell<\/p>\n
\nUmberto Rossi<\/p>\n
\nT. S. Miller<\/p>\nReview Essay<\/h3>\n
\nLeon Marvell<\/p>\nReviews<\/h3>\n
\nRev. by Felice Italo Beneduce<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Janice M. Bogstad<\/p>\n
\nRev. by A. K. Drees<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Kevin M. Flanagan<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Lynda Haas<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Jim Holte<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Markus Oppolzer<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Jen Schneider<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Melissa Colleen Stevenson<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Roslyn Weaver<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"