Superstructuralism and Beyond: An Interview with Richard Harland
Richard Harland was one of the early English-speaking heralds to tackle the structuralist and the post-structuralist legacy - as when he wrote such famed books as Superstructuralism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and Post-structuralism (1987) and Literary Theory from Plato to Barthes (1999). These days Harland is better known for his committed fantasy writing which spans many sub-genres, - and which appeals to audiences far beyond academia as well as outside philosophically inclined circles. Nonetheless, the academic world, and philosophers in general - continue to highly regard his early philosophical writings. Jacob E. Andrade and Anastasia Nicephore decided to conduct an interview with Harland at his home near Wollongong, so as to attain a better sense of where this influential thinker and cultivator of the fantasy aesthetic finds himself these days; to ask him questions on the biographical turn from academia into fiction - and the relation of philosophy to his ongoing creative endeavours.
Anastasia: I must say, that your book, the first of yours that I read, was like a godsend from heaven when I was an undergraduate at London University. I mean, ‘Literary Theory from Plato to Barthes’… it being such a book that it enabled me to say what I thought I would never be able to, i.e. “oh, I get it now!” At the time, I recall huge debates concerning the differences between Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, and what it all meant, - and, here it was all detailed by you in a very fluid, accessible way, - controversial, though perfectly lucid… Reflecting back, it had such an impact on the literary world, and I am one of the first to admit being impacted by it.
Harland: Well, lucid is what I aimed to be, so if I didn’t manage lucidity, I would be very disappointed. It’s certainly what I aimed for (laughs).
Jacob: Lucidity, as well as the ability to condense so much in so few pages; as with your other works. Was there a particular time in your life, when you knew you wanted to be a writer or author, in general?
Harland: I wanted to be a fiction writer from a pretty young age. It goes back to a time of actually selling stories from around the school playground, and this goes back to when I was about 11 years old. The trouble was that as soon as I wanted to become a little more serious about writing, I got writer’s block. For 25 years I couldn’t finish anything; I kept starting stories and many manuscripts, but writing remained, at most a dream. Particularly the main dream of writing fantasy-like fiction.
In the meantime, I had to begin doing other things with my life. So, I went to university and studied English literature (laughs). It was not so much that I wanted to become an academic for the sake of being an academic, but more in the sense that I had ideas about books and literature which I wanted to explore and express. In any case, when I finished my degree in England, I came to Australia on a scholarship to do a PhD at Newcastle University… it was on something rather ambitious which related to my literary pursuits… a Big Theory of language in poetry; but I still had the habit of not being able to finish. (laughs)
Anastasia: How old would you have been at this time?
Harland: I came to Australia when I was about 21, possibly 22. Three years at Newcastle University to begin with.
Anastasia: Still rather young. I myself finished my PhD rather late in life. In my 20s there were just too many things going on… and I guess I was just not mature enough at that stage. (laughs)
Harland: Well, it’s nice to hear there were other late developers (laughs). Because I scaled down to an MA and a different postgrad thesis at Newcastle Uni and didn’t complete a PhD until 12 years later. The good part of it is that, when something finally does arrive, you really appreciate it. You don’t expect it, in that you’ve become used to it as a dream. But yes, if and when the dream actually eventuates - it’s all the sweeter.
Which leads me to explain something: the ideas that eventually got worked through in Beyond Superstructralism, were what I wanted to work on in my first planned but unwritten PhD at Newcastle. That unwritten Phd took a more literary angle, but it depended on a theory of language which I wasn’t capable of producing at the time.
So, I bummed about writing poetry and playing songs instead. I eventually turned 35, at a time when I was doing part-time tutoring at NSW University. Here is when I started writing about ‘Superstructuralism’ (a word I coined to cover Structuralism and Post-structuralism). It was originally going to be just an article, but the lecturer I was working for suggested I make it into something longer, possibly even a PhD for the General Studies degree at NSW University. I agreed; beginning as if it was a hobby, but becoming more and more serious until many years later I actually finished it. The contents of this PhD included what became published as my first book Superstructuralism, and an extra part, which was to be expanded and published as Beyond Superstrutralism, later on …
Jacob: What might have been the reason for your initial attraction to Structuralism and its offshoots, of all things?
Harland: I guess I like thinking about big abstract topics. I have no university background in philosophy. I did my BA at Cambridge, where, if you studied English, that was it; apart from a tiny bit of French, no other subjects whatsoever. But I was always interested in philosophy. A side-interest as it were, - for whatever reason. And it was from philosophy that I started getting more and more interested in theories of language.
The theory of language that I eventually came to espouse, most likely had something profoundly to do with my ambition to write fantasy fiction. Fantasy fiction, in a way, is the creation of things that never existed. And what started dissatisfying me about existing theories of language (be they Structuralist or Post-structuralist or Logical Positivist or Ordinary Language), was that there wasn’t much focus on the creative side of language. For example, Structuralism constantly reminds us that we are forever constrained by the language that comes down to us. Which is very true, but I just came to believe that it wasn’t the whole truth. So yes, though I agree with the point that one is constrained by the language and the words that come down to us, I would want to add, that there are ways of being creative through language – and not the Post-structuralist way.
Jacob: Might you have had hopes, when you were starting out; contrasting the Analytical theories of language with French theory, - that it seemed like the Structuralists (especially the Post-structuralist camp) were indeed doing something more creative, on the surface, than the Analytical camp? That they had the outward appearance of being quite inventive?
Harland: It’s still not the sort of inventiveness that interests me: the creation of something genuinely new. The Post-structuralist ‘play’ is more like the cascading of meanings in single words that are already there. They love undermining pre-existent systems and subverting them - which is not the same as putting something fundamentally out into the world which wasn’t there before.
At the time I wrote Superstructuralism, though, I was fascinated by elements in Structuralism, and do still agree that we are governed by cultural codes we are not even aware of. It even comes into my novel Worldshaker for instance: that all sorts of assumptions are built into the protagonist, Col, through the culture he’s are brought up in. This is an important insight; but I nonetheless feel one can get outside of it all by using sentences in language to create new concepts.
Anastasia: These Structuralist insights would have been very new at the time; subjects that very few people would even have chosen to study in academia.
Harland: The books were certainly being written, but they weren’t percolating into England or Australia by this stage.
I suppose when I was reading philosophy as an eccentric hobby, I was always drawn to Immanuel Kant, Phenomenology and what I’ve called ‘I-philosophy’ approaches. My own syntagmatic theory has its origins in thinkers like Kant, Brentano, Husserl and Piaget. All European philosophies that focus on the active, world-creating side of the mind. My nark with Structuralism and Post-structuralism (as well as philosophers in the Analytical and Ordinary Language traditions) being that they didn’t allow much space for real creativity.
It is kind of interesting that when I started writing about Structuralism, it was then I started re-thinking my old theories of language that I couldn’t work out in my original, unfinished PhD thesis at Newcastle Uni. Finally, I got more of a clear idea of what I was trying to do. Thus, I eventually came full-circle. Studying Structuralism and Post-structuralism not only produced a thesis on Superstructuralism, but led me back to the study of other non-Superstructuralist philosophers and to the working out of an alternative theory of language. The alternative ‘syntagmatic’ theory featured as the fifth of five parts in the PhD thesis, but was left out for the ‘New Accents’ book titled Superstructuralism.
A serendipitous stroke of luck was when the lecturer who supervised the PhD had also contacted a couple of overseas markers. I don’t even know how he got such big names to be markers of this humble PhD in General Studies from Australia. But nonetheless, Johnathan Culler and Terence Hawkes were the overseas markers, both of whom had important names in the field, and both thought very highly of the thesis. Sort of ironic that the third marker, who was an Australian academic, thought it was rubbish, saying in effect “I don’t think this sort of thing ought to pass, but if the other views are in favour then I’ll let it go through”.
Anastasia: Do you happen to know who this Australian academic was?
Harland: No, I don’t - and they wouldn’t tell me. And probably just as well (laughs). In any case, it was Jonathan Culler who thought it should be published. So, I re-worked the thesis, dropping the fifth part, and he sent it to the ‘New Accent’ series devoted to literary theory topics. It was published in the UK by Methuen (which later became Routledge).
Anastasia: You mentioned Immanuel Kant earlier, and in consideration of your fantasy fiction, I am wondering how you could be all that fond of his Rationalist, Enlightenment-style thinking? The philosopher Kant was a very structured, turgid type thinker, no? Which is interesting, as I do not see the connection; from Kant to your fantasy-based novels. Isn’t this quite a juxtaposition?
Harland: Well… Kant doesn’t count as a Rationalist for me. Rationalism is usually thought of in the Descartes, Spinoza and Leibnitz vein, whereas Kant is a Transcendental Idealist (in his own specialised sense of ‘Transcendental’)
Jacob: Is there not also a strong relationship with Kant and this German Idealist tradition that extends to Structuralism and its variants?
Harland: Well, yes, as described in the Beyond Superstructuralism book. I should explain that Beyond Superstructuralism: The Syntagmatic Side of Language is the book which presents the alternative theory of language first clearly developed in the fifth part of the PhD thesis on Structuralism and Post-structuralism. That fifth part expanded to become a whole follow-up book on its own, published by Routledge a few years later, which also relates the syntagmatic theory of language to other philosophical positions.
So, back to German Idealism. For my purposes I distinguish three overarching philosophical traditions. One is the Anglo-Saxon tradition, which includes the movements of Logical Atomism, Logical Positivism and Ordinary Language philosophy in the 20th century, harking back to Hume, Berkeley and Locke of the early Empiricists. Another tradition is what I call ‘I-philosophy’, as mentioned before; and the third tradition includes the various forms of Structuralism and Post-structuralism along with Hegelian Objective Idealism, as you imply. For the Hegelian kind of Idealism, there are historical formations through which we think and that determine the possibilities of thought, (to put it somewhat simplistically).
Jacob: Was this not a feature already located in Kant though, as when he spoke about the ‘categories of understandings’, in and though which we make sense of things?
Harland: Right, however, Kant’s categories are more enabling categories, I think. The distinction I make between Kant and Hegel is perhaps more extreme than we usually make if describing them as philosophers in their own right. But the distinction is crucial for me. Namely, that Hegel is in some ways more like Plato… for an Objective Idealist, Ideas are really Real and “Out There”. Hegel’s historical formations aren’t that far away from the social formations posited by the varied Superstrutralisms, though of course he didn’t particularly locate them in language. So, for example, even our idea of ourselves as individuals actually comes from what we are taught about being individuals, though cultural impositions including language.
Kant’s version of categories, however, are innate or inborn in individual minds, not dependent upon history or society (or language). And they’re enabling rather than constraining in that they enable us to see and think in ways that would be otherwise unavailable to us. To take a prime example, the category of causality enables us to see one event as causing another … without which, we wouldn’t see anything, only separate, happenstance events. Kantian categories enable us to objectify and synthesize, i.e. put two things together and reach a whole that’s greater than the sum of the parts. In other words, Kant’s categories are not ‘final frames’ that enclose everything; but rather, fields upon which we can posit new forms of content that wouldn’t otherwise exist. We see the world through categories, yes; but if we didn’t see through categories, we wouldn’t see anything “out there” at all.
In my book, Kantian philosophy is sympathetic to creativity (which is what Romantics like Coleridge and Schiller and similar aesthetic theorists took from Kant). You can see why my syntagmatic theory of language lines up with Kant even as it justifies the possibility of writing fantasy fiction.
Jacob: So, Kant and Hegel are somewhat in agreement that concepts, in some-way-or-other, mediate experience; but Hegel and his fellow Idealists insist that these categories are themselves fundamentally “out there” and objective … a position which, was someone to stress too much, - would lead one to be (philosophically at least) caught-up in constraining orders that don’t give room for much creative engagement with the world; much less the creation of new worlds?
Harland: Right. In both cases, categories are a priori and come before experience; the difference is whether you envisage them as closing us off from reality or making up our reality for us. Though, to be fair, I’m interpreting Hegel rather in the light of Structuralism/Post-structuralism here.
Jacob: How about the question of our coming into a world, first without a language, and then, acquiring the linguistic categories of a societal ‘milieu’ which grants us the possibility of communication though signs; as it relates to Kant categories?
Harland: Yes, well, - I haven’t even got on to language or syntagmatic theory, have I?! My suggestion in Beyond Superstructuralism is that the enabling categories for language are actually the primary grammatical categories. Can you even imagine a language without nouns, verbs and adjectives? In fact, there are none without nouns and verbs, and I think perhaps a very tiny few where adjectives are subsumed under verbs. Things or doings – it’s very hard, I’d say impossible, to think of slicing up our experience in any other way. And whether we acquire those categories through language or they’re the categories that found and ground language, they’re certainly indispensable to being able to think in sentences. And if languages always work with differing grammatical categories – then why?
For me, it’s an amazing fact that not only do all languages have grammatical categories, but all languages have sentences. Again - why? If sentences merely involved stringing together the meanings of individual words –they’d be no more than an optional extra. But think of a string of nouns one after the other, for example – something missing, no? Something absolutely vital! My claim is that sentences aren’t mere strings of word-meanings, but synthesize meaning seen under differing grammatical categories. And that synthesis projects old meaning out into new meaning to create something that didn’t previously exist. In syntagmatic theory, sentence-meaning is different in kind to word-meaning; it’s the locus of creativity, that gives us the possibility of putting something genuinely new “out there’. Think of a word in isolation (and not in any modifying context) and you’re thinking of old meaning, the meaning that you’ve taken in from social usage. In terms of individual words, yes, you are constrained to think as your society has always thought. But sentences – that’s where we can have new thoughts (with difficulty, to some degree … I don’t want to suggest that it happens easily or that we’re as original as we like to imagine in our non-philosophical lives!)
By the way, you wouldn’t have read Worldshaker have you?
Jacob: Not as of yet.
Harland: It’s been my big success story as a fantasy writer - a steampunk fantasy set in a Victorian industrial-age alternate-reality. I mention it only because the main character finds it so very, very hard to see what’s really happening out in his world apart from the world his society has constructed for him. But in the end, he does manage to see beyond his ingrained assumptions. I guess that’s what I like to think of as the syntagmatic possibility! We can think for ourselves just a bit in the end!
Jacob: Sounds like a retelling of Plato’s cave.
Harland: Well yes; the protagonist is trapped in the ideas he absorbed from his society even before he knew he was absorbing them. And the meanings and implications of particular words are very much a part of what stops him from “getting through” to a reality that hasn’t been culturally created. That’s the Superstructuralist vision, and I do think that there is an important truth there; but with syntagmatic theory, I can claim that we also have the possibility of creating something new, breaking out from the limiting, imposed frameworks.
Jacob: Limiting, but also somewhat indispensable an understanding perhaps, - for how could one possibly be creative unless one was also receptive to ongoing conditionality and involved in the social or public use of words?
Harland: Well, I guess I could turn that around and say that Structuralists, for example, typically have original thoughts about other people generally not having original thoughts! It depends where you want to put the emphasis – because what you call the ‘ongoing conditionality involved in the social or public use of words’ is important. No argument from me there. But one can also throw the emphasis upon the fact that some people, at least, have been able to have fresh insights into said ‘conditionality’. Don’t we need to explain that too?
You know what my explanation is going to be! Structuralist and Post-structuralist thinkers can theorize about the constraining conditions of words because they themselves all write in sentences! And when Derrida, say, unpacks paradoxes of old meaning in words, he has to explain what he’s doing through sentences.
Anastasia: Do you see this as a way of breaking down the rigid structures upheld in philosophical traditions, as well as those that currently exist in society, - once we are able to play with language in this way? Listening to you speak on this subject, is great - as I did not even realise how important these linguistic theories were to your fictional work until now. In that, when I look at your fiction work, one seems, on a superficial reading at least, to find something very different occurring. It is indeed very interesting to see how something very philosophically structured; brought forth something different, - so unstructured, - so to speak.
Harland: I’m wary of the phrase ‘play with language’. That’s what Post-structuralists do, and it seems to me it’s a technique for literary critics to apply to novels rather than a technique for producing novels in the first place. I aspire to the kind of originality novelists have always aspired to – a (relatively) original story, world and characters.
I’m not sure why you’d think of my fiction as unstructured. Putting a story together, getting all the elements to synthesize and create a whole that’s greater than the sum of the parts – that’s a tremendous structuring activity as I see it. And particularly important for fantasy fiction writers for several reasons. But I suspect I haven’t understood what you mean when you say unstructured …
I’d want to say that syntagmatic theory doesn’t bring forth my novels – I’m merely doing what everyone does when they use sentences and tell stories. Syntagmatic theory is for philosophers interested in understanding what we do when we do that. There is a sense in which Structuralist thinking features in that one particular novel, Worldshaker, but syntagmatic theory doesn’t feature at all. When the protagonist - Col – rebels, he merely does what everyone does when they rebel. No theory needed unless you want to get philosophical (as we’ve been doing)! Maybe I was misleading in my way of talking about it before …
Jacob: So, you as a writer, are not so much consciously reflecting on these ‘philosophical matters’ when writing the novels.
Harland: Right. When I’m writing fiction, I’m not making a philosophical argument. The world, characters and story, are all that matters. Even with Worldshaker, it was only when I was well into writing the story that I realised there was a Structuralist-like angle coming through. I don’t think one should ever begin a novel with a program or belief-system in view. What comes out, comes out - and in this one particular novel, given the story and social world of Worldshaker, I guess this angle was just waiting to come out, un-programmatically. For me, as I’ve said, Structuralist-like insights are fascinating and true as far as they go … but my own ultimate philosophical position is something else again.
I suspect the fiction writing and the philosophizing come from different halves of my brain! When I’m theorising, I’m very abstract, whilst when I’m writing fantasy, my fiction seems to be very visual. Indeed, many have said my novels “read like a movie”, which used to surprise me when I first switched over from academic writing. I guess one part of my mind is just strongly visual and the other analytic, and I don’t know exactly how the two halves go together (laughs).
Jacob: Like the alleged, two hemispheres of the brain being happily co-existent but differentiated…
Harland: I like to think that actually. I discovered that I can’t write two lots of the same sort of material in the same day; can’t switch, say, from a short story to a novel or from one novel to another. But I can go from writing fantasy fiction to working on an abstract theory, because they are so different. There was a time when I actually did this quite often, finishing Literary Theory from Plato to Barthes in the afternoons while devoting my mornings of writing to Taken by Force in the ‘Eddon and Vail’ series.
Jacob: A point where continental Post-structuralist philosophy and novels perhaps do in fact coalesce (by way of their interests), is with their obsession with language, and worlds created by nothing but language. For instance, if ‘Superstructuralists’ are all basically one in thinking that language not only mediates experience, but that one cannot even meaningfully talk of a world outside language (the world being entirely included in all the ways it is spoken about, etc.) - then, at this point, it seems to me the Structuralists are basically admitting to be writing novels in which they are characters ‘inside’. That the world one lives in, is ‘structured’ like that of a story... Did you not remark at one stage too, that one can find a ‘thread’ which connects all the varied strands in Structuralism and Post-structuralism, - and that this thread, is that they are basically telling a similar “tale” or “narrative,” - that one could read their entire thematic as a story? Might this be a point where perhaps novels and continual styled-philosophy do coincide and are not altogether that different?
Harland: I don’t think I said ‘tale’ or ‘story’ – if I did, I must have been thinking more of a ‘myth’ in the sense Barthes gives to the term in Mythologies. ‘Myths’ as recurrent associations, patterns of social thought – but definitely not ‘story’ in the sense that matters for syntagmatic theory. As regards fictional stories, the Structuralist approach emphasises pre-existing figures, formulae, genres, which condition anything a writer can ever write in advance. The writer is allowed to re-shuffle the elements, but never to synthesize something genuinely new.
Jacob: Was it somewhat of a “new” idea for them to propose though? (Riding on the backs of Hegel and the likes). I mean, to say that the world we inhabit is like that of a narrative, made of language - and all the categories we use to mediate objects and things are given though human intercourse, etc. Before them, the general impression seemed to have been that the world was simply some non-narratival entity, some block-like “thing” independent from all the stories we told about it; a reality wholly indifferent to our sense-making frameworks. Cause what seemed to have happened with a lot of the thinkers in the Structrual and Post-structural cannon, was that “reality itself” got conflated together with language and the way it is held together though conceptual schemes; in that, “reality” was just-about seen as the sum-total of all the narratives we have told about it.
Harland: I suppose the everyday view may have been – and still is - that the world is simply independent of our frameworks for assessing it, but I don’t think any philosopher since the time of Kant has had that view. Still, I have to object to the way you talk of narrative and language as though the two are profoundly interdependent. What about narratives in film? We can recognise essentially the same narrative whether it’s given to us through English or Gaelic or Indonesian, or film or mime or puppet play. (I don’t claim entirely the same, but I don’t have to – only that there’s something that’s recognizable as not entirely different.)
I guess one reason I like fantasy is that it goes against the postmodern tendency in literature to bring everything down to a flat surface of words and language… Indeed, I’m actually not all that interested in writers who write only about writing and language; I like fantasy writers who look through language to a world beyond.
Anastasia: I find fantasy writing very difficult to teach for this reason, since it’s hard to put any labels on it. That it’s very free-flowing, unstructured, and unsystematic, - and thus can be approached from a near-infinity of angles.
Harland: Well, some people are very fond of putting labels on it – like epic fantasy, dark fantasy, steampunk, animalia, alternative history, gothic, etc etc. I think of the labels as a marketing exercise – it doesn’t bother me too much provided it comes after the event, when the creative business is over. But of course, there’s also the backwash, when writers are pressed to produce according to existing formulae. ‘Let’s have another Harry Potter!’ – so fantasy writing is reduced and diminished by endless lookalikes and imitations. Whereas what I love about fantasy writing is that, in spite of marketers and publishers, new worlds and new story-appeals do keep turning up out of the blue. Not often, but so long as the possibility is always there …!
Jacob: So, using language as a medium to convey an experience outside language. You admit that language is nevertheless being used to do all this. For instance, one could raise the question: if one takes away all the language used in its production, does one leave the reality behind (the reality of the novel and the people in it, for instance), or does the reality of the individual characters disappear also with the disappearance of language?
Harland: It’s a good point (laughs). Yes, take away the words of a fantasy novel and very obviously the world “out there” disappears. But then, take away all the cells and corpuscles of a human being, and you’ve got nothing remaining. But does that mean a human being is only the materiality – the flat surface, as it were – of cells and corpuscles?
I believe any story, world and characters can come to us through different media (like film) or different languages. But fantasy tends to take off from its language more than most. Think of Lord of the Rings and all the passing references to events and history ‘outside’ the novel … like Morgoth, Thangorodrim, all those tantalizing glimpses of a world extending beyond the scene and chronology of the novel itself. For any fantasy-lover, that’s one of the things we love about our genre! And in the case of Tolkien, of course, we know that Tolkien was working on the creation of Middle Earth through notes and maps for something like twenty years before he penned the first words of a novel set in Middle Earth.
It’s a common thing with fantasy writers, to create the world before launching into the words of a novel. In a sense you have to, because your new non-real inventions must work together. How does the fauna tie in with the flora in this imagined environment? How does the language of this imagined people cohere with their culture? A realistic or autobiographical writer can largely transcribe from experience, where reality has already taken care of the concatenations; ditto the imitative writer of fantasy merely borrowing from a world that someone else has worked out. But to the extent that your world is genuinely new, you have to think through impacts and consequences.
And then, once you have your fantasy world, it’s always liable to keep on evolving through sequels …!
Jacob: Fantasy fiction seems to have some parallels with what we would understand as mythology or religious fictions about dimensions that are largely imperceptible, but which are described as being labyrinthine worlds unto themselves with beings that dwell within them. Do you think there is a religious element to fantasy writing?
Harland: I don’t know. I know Tolkien was a religious man, but religion is not so apparent in his novels. I’m not religious myself, but I’m fascinated by religions - and that comes through in some of the worlds I create, e.g. the Ferren trilogy, and the big adult fantasy I’m working on at the moment.
Jacob: But the religious idea, say, of transcendence; the “beyond” of our immanent (conditioned) experience to something unique, differentiated and altogether new or other. The structuralists are always harping about our total embeddedness in limit-case situations, which seems to be your gripe with them, - though it may seem, from their standpoint - that the fantasy writer almost wants to lift themselves up from the ground, to explore possibilities that aren’t contained within the given structures around us; language included.
Harland: I guess fantasy writers are always looking to explore possibilities – that’s almost the definition of our vocation. Possible worlds and beings, but also possible mental states outside of normal mental states in our world. If I can call Frank Herbert’s Dune ‘science fantasy’ (as many people do), one thing I love in that book is the way Herbert creates altered states of mind, semi-mystical states of experience. Not that these have to be a part of fantasy… but fantasy makes an opening available for this kind of exploration. I admit that I am personally very interested in this.
Anastasia: Well, it’s again, like breaking down structures, the tangible structures in place around us, to lead us through to something else.
Harland: Well, yes, that makes sense. Of course, what we do in fantasy generally extends what we can know in ordinary life into something outside of ordinary life – an imaginary projection rather than an absolute novelty. What I’ve been saying about genuine creativity and genuine originality doesn’t mean I believe that any creation is 100% original. Only that the 5% or 10% or 20% of originality (I don’t know how you’d calculate) is there, and it matters. Even 1%!
With paranormal mental experiences it’s very obviously necessary to start from something a reader can know – and has in some tiny degree known - in personal experience. Because if you fail to carry the reader along into an empathetic experience with your characters, then you’ve failed as a novelist.
Anastasia: Religious frameworks are very tricky, I quite agree. On the one hand they create rigidity, and on the other, break up rigidity in the pursuance of something ‘other’ than one’s life. A difficult balance, determining what to hold onto and what to let go of, a very prickly path so to speak. A lot of writers don’t like to allude to religion for this reason.
Harland: I suppose all writers are also cautious of offending an audience, and giving opinions on religion is one sure way of offending an audience. Especially in the US! Look at Philip Pullman and the troubles he ran into with his militant atheism. But I do think of religion as an important part of culture, and fantasy makes a habit of imagining possible cultures. This is why, perhaps in the end, I am more a fantasy writer than a science-fiction writer.
Jacob: As you are no doubt aware, there exists in addition to the Platonic inherence of the Structuralists (via Hegel), also a strongly anti-Platonic streak running through much of the Poststructuralist corpus; such as found in Barthes, Derrida and Deleuze. Plato, we can recall, infamously tried to purge all narrative and myth out from the rightful, ‘philosophical way’ of thinking. (But of course, in retrospect, to me at least - Plato really only seems to have provided us with but a number of seductive tales of his own.)
Harland: Well, that is one thing Plato put forward – mainly in line with his ethics, I think. He didn’t just want to philosophize, he wanted philosopher-like behaviour from people generally! Ironically, poets ever since have often described themselves as Platonists or Neo-Platonists (e.g. in the Renaissance, e.g. Romantics and idealists like Shelley) and have often found other Platonic ideas highly compatible with their personal aesthetics.
At the same time, philosophers who see the world very differently to Structuralists and Post-structuralists can be very sympathetic to literature, and even a literary style of philosophising. I’m thinking of ‘irrationalists’ like Nietzsche, Existentialists like Kierkegaard and Heidegger.
As for Plato’s ethics as he applies it to myth and narrative, his idea seems to be that characters in drama and literature are typically violent, over-emotional, irrational in their behaviour. Since he doesn’t approve of such behaviour, he wants to drive out the (narrative) poets and dramatists. It’s an entirely logical position, and it’s true that the characters we typically like to watch and read about are exactly as he says. Where he goes utterly and totally wrong for me is that he we watch and read about characters in order to model our own behaviour on them.
I have a very deep objection to the “role model” way of thinking ... the idea that one reads books or watches plays and movies simply in order to acquire role models to imitate. So simplistic! But the role model way of thinking still seems as popular with one kind of literary critic as it ever was …
Jacob: This reminds me of what good novelists do all the time: showing us situations of cruelty where there is no one there to comment that it is cruel, except the reader reflecting upon the portrayed situation. Almost a reverse version of a ‘role model’, in that one reflects often upon the very worst of invented situations.
Harland: That’s fits just about perfectly as a description of Worldshaker, a steampunk dystopia where the whole society behaves with monstrous cruelty – and no one within that society can recognise or reflect upon the wrongness of what’s going on. Injustice and cruelty excite the emotions of any reader!
I guess the opposite would be a fictional utopian society where everyone behaves sensibly, resolves all issues by talking them through, and wisely keeps their emotional impulses under control. Perhaps Plato would have approved, but I bet even he would have fallen asleep over a story set in a world like that! Personally, I think if you want role models for your own life, one should stick to self-help books.
Anastasia: Well, this was an immense pleasure. Thank you, Richard, for your engaging thoughts. I think it is evident that there is much in narrative that has yet to be understood and interpreted. We have enjoyed this discussion immensely.
Harland: It is not every day one has such conversations, so thank you also. I likewise had a lot of fun.
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Conducted by GCAS: Sydney Division in 2019
The Director of which is Anastasia Nicéphore
Editor of Diasporic Identities and Empire: Cultural Contentions and Literary Landscapes (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), and the upcoming Platωn’s Reality: Baudrillard’s Nostalgia, as well as Organised Hallucinations. Has a Doctor of Philosophy in English from the University of Sydney Australia 2016, MA in Educational Leadership and Management from the University of London Institute of Education UCL 2014, MA from the University of Sydney, and BA (Honours) in English from the University of London Goldsmiths College. Anastasia is also an academic and research assistant at the School of Arts Literature and Media at the University of Sydney. https://www.gcas-sydney.com/director
With her assistant: Jacob E. Andrade
A postgraduate philosophy student from the University of Sydney who took particular interest in eastern religion and pragmatism. He is currently working on some projects of creative fiction.