Why Fantasy?

Meta-truth in fiction and fantasy.

The other day

Eric Falden

posted this note:

He was asking a simple question, but I was having a funny day and my brain produced an answer that I’m sure was much longer and overly complicated than what he was looking for. The thing is, the answer I gave on that note was the short version.

This is the long answer:

Why do I write fantasy?

Most of the fiction I write is fantasy. At the most simplistic level of analysis, I write it because I love it. There’s something about fantasy, mythology, and folklore that intuitively grips me in a way that I can’t quite articulate. But more than that, I write it because I think it’s an extremely powerful genre in which to tell stories, allowing for much deeper explorations into the nature of reality and the human condition than is often acknowledged. 

Many people dismiss fantasy. They will tell you it’s for children, that it lacks depth, that it’s nothing but an endless rehash of tired tropes and cliches. Very rarely is it taken seriously as literature. While some of the criticisms levelled at fantasy are valid, many lack nuance. Many stop at the surface level aesthetics and fail to delve into the depths of profound, symbolic story telling that dwells beneath. 

What is fiction?

To truly illustrate where I’m coming from, I think I need to take a step back for a moment and ask: what is fiction and storytelling more generally?

The way I see fiction and storytelling is as something like the presentation of meta-truth¹, i.e. a higher level metaphorical truth, distilled from the patterns consistent across sets of lower level literal truths.

The storyteller subconsciously takes their subjective experience and understanding of their own life, the lives of the people around them, and the nature of the wider world, then through the filter of their own psychology, distils the patterns that are true across multiple observed iterations of a given phenomena down into their fundamental essence. This distilled essence is what I’m referring to as a meta-truth. So when the storyteller then tells or writes a story, it is their meta-true understanding of the subject matter that’s being presented to the audience. 

By extension, traditions of mythological, religious, and cultural stories are created in much the same way, except the understanding of the world is filtered through the collective psyche of an entire society, and instead of the distillation of this understanding taking place over the course of a human lifetime, it takes place over ‌centuries or even millennia.

I know this might be a lot to wrap your head around, so as an example of this process, at least as it pertains to the individual storyteller, let's have a look at the creation of a love story.

The author of a love story will probably have experienced love and romance in their lives. They’ll have witnessed the romances of their friends and family. They’ll probably have read and watched countless stories in which, if romance isn’t central to the narrative, it at least constitutes a sub-plot.² They’ll have seen and experienced many different facets of love and romances within many different circumstances and between many different people. As these experiences percolate and filter through their subconscious, their mind will find the patterns that exist across all of them and distil these patterns down into something akin to the fundamental essence of what romance is; an internal archetypal image of what romance is, i.e. a meta-true understanding of what romance is. This is what comes out when the romance author puts pen to paper. 

Now that’s not to say that the meta-truth the romance author is presenting will be fully formed. I can almost guarantee you that it’s not. It’s certain to be flawed in all sorts of ways that are unique to the author. If their meta-truth has been distilled from exposure to rom-coms, it’s probably fundamentally broken.³ But in a way, that’s the point. The meta-true understanding of romance within the mind of the author is subjective and personal. The insights the author is able to express are unique to them, and through fiction and story, they’re able to share these unique insights with the rest of the world. It is in the difference and contrast between the meta-truth of the author with the meta-truth of the reader that the power of fiction truly lies. That’s how fiction can be such a potent vehicle for growth, learning, and insight. 

So Why Fantasy?

When you’re writing contemporary fiction, the way in which the meta-truth you’re trying to present to the reader has to conform to certain, obvious conventions. Anything that the author wishes to express must be shaped to fit within the agreed upon understanding of the world and reality. Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Often, the themes and perspectives being presented by the author are more readily understood by the reader on a conscious and intellectual level. The characters and scenarios can feel much more relatable, so any messages and lessons present can be grasped and integrated more easily, especially given the manner in which people are taught to think in the materialist, post-enlightenment world. 

The problem is that a subjectively shaped meta-truth does not always fit into an objectively shaped world.

The subconscious dreamscape in which the distillation of meta-truth occurs is a place of near incomprehensible strangeness. Because of this strangeness, there are many who dismiss it as meaningless, but this I feel is a mistake. After all, just because you can’t understand Javascript, doesn’t mean that the esoteric lines of code lurking behind ninety-nine percent of every webpage is meaningless.

As an insight or experience passes through the filter of the mind, the subconscious is liable to give it all manner of shape and form, to build a meta-true image of a given phenomena using all manner of metaphor and symbolism. This has always been the way of the human mind. One only has to perform a cursory study of mythological and religious stories to see the endless array of bizarre forms many cultural meta-truths have taken. But during the enlightenment, the way in which we were taught to think was pushed more and more towards a sort of reductionist, materialist, literalism. In the process of this shift of worldview, we gained an undeniable mastery over the physical world, but I fear we lost touch with the fundamental grounding on which human cognition, perception, and psychology operate. As humans, we are fundamentally symbolic creatures, and our understanding and perception of the world is fundamentally built upon a bedrock of symbolism and story.⁴

This is why storytelling of all kinds, across all manner of mediums, remains such a potent force within our society, despite the materialist, literalist worldview being pushed as something of a gold standard. This is why genres like fantasy and science fiction are so insanely popular. Not because people are infantile losers seeking mindless escapism. But because these genres present stories in a manner which is far more in line with the fundamental working of our psychology. Although given that we’ve been taught to view the world in a manner which contradicts the fundamental nature of our psyches, escapism isn’t an inaccurate term. But escapism from what? That’s the real question. Fantasy offers the reader an escape into a view and understanding of the world, which is more symbolic in nature and therefore in some ways far less alien than the literalism of the modern day. 

When an author is writing a piece of contemporary fiction, to some degree the meta-truths within their mind must be translated back into a form that conforms more with the agreed upon nature of objective reality. This translation, of course, occurs in the subconscious without the author even realising. 

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As I mentioned before, given the literalism of the modern worldview, it can be a very powerful way to reach people. And this also isn’t to say that contemporary fiction cannot be an absolute tour de force of symbolic storytelling in its own right; read just about anything by Cormac McCarthy to see what I mean. 

But anytime a translation of anything occurs, meaning is inevitably changed and lost. 

When writing fantasy, especially the more dreamlike and surrealist styles, there is no need for translation. The author can draw on the strange, dreamlike archetypal symbolism within them and present it to the world as is. Therefore, in some ways, fantasy is a purer expression of these meta-true representations of reality than other forms of storytelling. And because it is a pure expression of the writer’s subconscious, symbolic landscape, they are able to reach out, and bypassing the conscious, intellectual mind, touch their reader’s subconscious directly. The themes, messages, and insights contained within the text can affect the reader without them fully realising what’s happening. 

There’s a reason why someone can read something like The Lord of the Rings, or Dune, and come away saying, “that changed my life,” but then cannot articulate why, or even fully articulate what it was about. It’s because these works are steeped in archetypal symbolism built out of the unique meta-truths that make up the author’s understanding of the world and the human condition. And because they’re so rich in the symbolism of the author’s subconscious, they resonate with readers on a subconscious, intuitive level. That’s not to say they aren't also extremely engaging on a conscious and intellectual level, because of course they are. But they’re both at the same time, and both aspects serve to bolster the power of the other. 

Now you might be saying, “but we know what The Lord of the Rings is about. After decades of dedicated Tolkien scholarship, we’ve got it all figured out.”

But the fact that people have been analysing The Lord of the Rings for decades, searching for its deeper meanings and the ways in which it serves as a distillation of Tolkien’s worldview, shows its depth and serves to illustrate my point. Especially if you stop to consider how much of the theme, message, and symbolism were conscious inclusions by the Author. Some perhaps, but not all. Tolkien himself was famously against allegory, and yet he produced arguably the most allegory rich text of the twentieth century. And if we’re still debating and analysing The Lord of the Rings today, just imagine what untapped and undiscovered depths of meaning might await us within those pages.

A slight problem with all this

To finish off, I’d like to illustrate an issue with fantasy and storytelling of this kind. Unlike mythological and religious symbolism, which draws its imagery from the collective psyche of entire societies, distilled over extremely long periods of time, the symbols drawn from the minds of individuals are inherently subjective. While they will, at least to some degree, be informed by the tradition of symbolism present in the larger culture, they are also informed by the distillation of the individual’s personal experience and understanding of the world. As such, what is being presented is something unique to the author. This coupled with the fact that it is touching a part of the reader which is itself highly unique makes it ripe for misinterpretation. 

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this, as the interplay of what is unique within the author and what is unique with the reader is the testing ground upon which the reader may learn and grow as a result of having engaged the text. 

After all, interpreting, misinterpreting, and reinterpreting stories, then fighting about those interpretations, is a time-honoured tradition of people everywhere.

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Eric’s note has started a trend of writing essays about the value of the fantasy genre:

• The Brothers Krynn
  have written a beautiful and passionate love letter to the fantasy genre here.

• Eric Falden
  has written a semi-autobiographical essay outlining how his love for the fantasy genre grew over time here.

We fantasy writers have to stick together. If you’ve got a piece about your love for the fantasy genre, either inspired by Eric’s note or not, let me know and I’ll add it to the list.

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Let me know if you have any thoughts in the comments.

Since writing this I’ve started another, non-fiction focused publication called Myth and Meaning. If you enjoyed this essay and want to see more like it, consider subscribing:

If you’re still reading after all that thank you so much for your time and attention, I truly do appreciate it.

1. This term was first coined, as far as I know, by Dr. Jordan Peterson, although it is also somewhat analogous to what Joseph Campbell called the personal myth.

2. Although the degree to which the author's meta-truth is distilled from exposure to novels and movies, especially low-brow, formulaic ones, the more that it will be a simulacrum of other people's meta-truths. But more on that in a future essay.

3. As well as a simulacrum.

4. This one sentence alone really deserves its own essay to unpack.