diamond

The common disdain for the Fantasist is the unreality of the thing. What is the use of swimming a lie?, the critic asks. Beware lest you drown. And perhaps there is more truth here than I dare admit. 

Yet, people respond to Story for the truth of the thing, not the lie. Even in the works of fancy and imagination, there is resonance or there is failure. If the tune the Fantasist rings does not attune to our crystal of reality, we cast the thing out. We move on to the next song hoping for a chord, a note, something that sets our mind ringing with the truth of it. 

The Fantasist is one who can strip reality away, recast it a lie, and by way of deceit, reveal quiet riversongs of truth. The Fantasist is a brilliant liar that leaves their listener liberated from lies. They dig at the Veil with sharp whispers of what is not, to help consider what then is. They fear not the mystery but pursue it like a hungry hound.

Or they should.

What intrigues me is the seeming trend of post-moral fantasy (grimdark for one) to fear the mystery. Everything has a system and a boundary. We need clear definitions and final resolutions. The fear of the unknown has overcome the genre, the light of exploration has been extinguished. There has become a reality where there should be none. We do not seek adventure, we seek a cushion on which to sleep.

“ ‘I am always hearing. . . the sound of a far off song. I do not exactly know where it is, or what it means; and I don't hear much of it, only the odour of its music, as it were, flitting across the great billows of the ocean outside this air in which I make such a storm; but what I do hear, is quite enough to make me able to bear the cry from the drowning ship. So it would you if you could hear it.'

'No it wouldn't,' returned Diamond stoutly. 'For they wouldn't hear the music of the far-away song; and if they did, it wouldn't do them any good. You see you and I are not going to be drowned, and so we might enjoy it.'

'But you have never heard the psalm, and you don't know what it is like. Somehow, I can't say how, it tells me that all is right; that it is coming to swallow up all the cries. . . . It wouldn't be the song it seems if it did not swallow up all their fear and pain too, and set them singing it themselves with all the rest.’ ”

At the Back of the North Wind (1871)

George MacDonald