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truepennyThis panel was rather more interesting--in the Chinese sense--than I had expected, since I learned at about 9:30 Friday morning that I was going to be moderating it.
Luckily for me, my fellow panelists--P. C. Hodgell, Tiffany Trent, and Diana Sherman--were articulate and thoughtful, as was the audience. We spent most of our time trying to circle in on a definition of dark fantasy (a lot of panels at sf cons have definitions as their raison d'être, and I actually think that's kind of cool as long as nobody gets possessed by the spirit of Linnaeus), boucing it off urban fantasy, secondary-world fantasy, heroic fantasy, horror, the gothic, and tragedy. And we came up with a few formulations that at least give the shape of the thing we all thought we were talking about.
--Dark fantasy is about internalizing darkness. Both horror and fantasy, in their different ways, externalize evil, make it a separate entity to be fought against. Dark fantasy (we argued) says that darkness is internal, one way or another, and the books that are dark fantasy are about dealing with that darkness as a part of the self.
--If in a different book, your hero would be the villain, you are probably writing dark fantasy.
--Both horror and dark fantasy are about the relationship between the self and the Other. Horror demonizes the Other (sometimes literally) and insists that if you do not defeat it, it will defeat you. Dark fantasy admits that the Other is also the self and tries to negotiate a way to survive that revelation.
--We also talked about gender/sexuality (Shock. Amazement. Faint in coils.) and the possibility that for men the Other is the masochist while for women the Other is the sadist. This idea was put forward by someone in the audience and (a.) I don't remember exactly what she said, (b.) we were kicking the possibility around, not glomming onto it as gospel truth, and (c.) the foregoing sentence is my formulation/summary and may not be an accurate representation. I think my formulation, while tidy, is in fact reductive, but it's the best I can do to reconstruct the idea.
That's everything I can remember. If you were at the panel, as participant or audience member, I encourage you to post comments to expand and correct and refine on what I've said. And if you weren't at the panel, I encourage you to join the conversation here if you're interested. But please, if you don't have an lj account, SIGN YOUR COMMENT.
ETA: forgot one. We also agreed that dark fantasy is, in one of its protean forms, fantasy in which "dark" things happen and in which the protagonist has to deal with the psychological consequences. This is another way of internalizing darkness.
Luckily for me, my fellow panelists--P. C. Hodgell, Tiffany Trent, and Diana Sherman--were articulate and thoughtful, as was the audience. We spent most of our time trying to circle in on a definition of dark fantasy (a lot of panels at sf cons have definitions as their raison d'être, and I actually think that's kind of cool as long as nobody gets possessed by the spirit of Linnaeus), boucing it off urban fantasy, secondary-world fantasy, heroic fantasy, horror, the gothic, and tragedy. And we came up with a few formulations that at least give the shape of the thing we all thought we were talking about.
--Dark fantasy is about internalizing darkness. Both horror and fantasy, in their different ways, externalize evil, make it a separate entity to be fought against. Dark fantasy (we argued) says that darkness is internal, one way or another, and the books that are dark fantasy are about dealing with that darkness as a part of the self.
--If in a different book, your hero would be the villain, you are probably writing dark fantasy.
--Both horror and dark fantasy are about the relationship between the self and the Other. Horror demonizes the Other (sometimes literally) and insists that if you do not defeat it, it will defeat you. Dark fantasy admits that the Other is also the self and tries to negotiate a way to survive that revelation.
--We also talked about gender/sexuality (Shock. Amazement. Faint in coils.) and the possibility that for men the Other is the masochist while for women the Other is the sadist. This idea was put forward by someone in the audience and (a.) I don't remember exactly what she said, (b.) we were kicking the possibility around, not glomming onto it as gospel truth, and (c.) the foregoing sentence is my formulation/summary and may not be an accurate representation. I think my formulation, while tidy, is in fact reductive, but it's the best I can do to reconstruct the idea.
That's everything I can remember. If you were at the panel, as participant or audience member, I encourage you to post comments to expand and correct and refine on what I've said. And if you weren't at the panel, I encourage you to join the conversation here if you're interested. But please, if you don't have an lj account, SIGN YOUR COMMENT.
ETA: forgot one. We also agreed that dark fantasy is, in one of its protean forms, fantasy in which "dark" things happen and in which the protagonist has to deal with the psychological consequences. This is another way of internalizing darkness.
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no subject
Date: 2006-05-27 01:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-27 02:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-27 02:27 pm (UTC)Did anyone provide any examples in the context of which that was a useful theory? I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around it, sans examples.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-27 02:38 pm (UTC)I think what I said was that in Freudian psychology, the forbidden perversion for men is masochism and the forbidden perversion for women is sadism -- they're both very gendered disorders and very associated with, respectively, the sacrifice of power and the claiming of it. (I should add that I'm speaking of emotional neuroses and not the consensual sexual practices bearing the same name.) So for women claiming the monster within can be difficult and subversive whereas for men it's acknowledging powerlessness that's so. And that this is interesting given the way Tim Powers' protagonists, say, get tend to get maimed and disfigured, or the way you've split the traditional roles/markers between Mildmay and Felix, where Mildmay bears the monstrous scars (and the internal fear of being a monster) and Felix is victimized to a deliberate and flamboyant excess.
Tomorrow I may think something completely different, though.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-27 03:31 pm (UTC)I'm not sure this is quite correct. I mean, I don't know that much about the history of Freudian psychoogy in America, but there's nothing like this at all in Freud's writings themselves. Firstly, Freud considered sadism and masochism as two sides of the same coin, and argued that the one fuels the other. Secondly, he didn't regard them as neuroses or perversions per se, but rather as forms of libidinal activity which can be found to a certain extent in all of us.
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Date: 2006-05-30 04:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-28 01:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-27 02:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-27 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-27 03:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-27 07:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-29 08:59 pm (UTC)More notes
Date: 2006-05-31 04:09 pm (UTC)After trying to define what dark fantasy is, the question arose of how dark fantasy is distinguished from horror, with horror typically being associated with violence and gore (or, as I like to refer to it, the body count), while dark fantasy is more psychological. My marginalia response to this is, "What are your nightmares made of?".
Best quote: "moments where the lights flicker for me"
More quotes: "pigtail gothic" and "the girl who grew up to be dark"
"Everybody has their dark other."
"Dark fantasy represents a move away from the fantasy where the hero is unproblematically good."
example: Iago, who states from the beginning "I am a villain and I don't know and don't care why" - but he's lying to himself
he has all these reasons but he wants to BE a villain
horror novels set out to scare you that's the purpose
Barbara Hambly vampire novels are not horror because they share the sense of wonder element with sf, horror doesn't have that element of wonder
Shirley Jackson's The haunting of hill house is horror rather than dark fantasy because there is no explanation
DF is about world-building, and building a house=world-building
df is interested in finding out why the house is haunted + trying to resolve the problem
Kes: I asked a question at this point about the dismissive attitude of male horror writers+readers toward such DF genres as paranormal romance, which seemed ot me to be very close to the original gothic source of horror. the following question was a theme throughout the rest of the discussion "Q: Is horror for women more psychological and horror for men more graphic?"
There was some discussion regarding recommendations, sadly, much of which I missed because it was difficult to hear people speaking from the back of the room where I and others who came in late were sitting.
Multiple recommendations: Tim Powers The Stress Of Her Regard
Also. Bone Doll, Bag of Bones
paranormal romances not frightening because they are the romantic figures bad boy gothic
"horror is a weirdly moral genre="=citing stephen king's discussion of this idea from danse macabre
Kes: I also recommended robin wood's writing on horror which has a strong queer and feminist sensibility, particularly "what lies beneath," which Joss Wheaton cites as a major influence (Wheaton used both the title and Robin Wood's name in his final season of Buffy)
acknowledgement of the strong link between comedy and horror [Kes: anyone interested in this subject should check out Thomas Doherty's Laughing/Screaming]
dark fantasy is about sympathizing with the monster not about condoning what they do but realizing that they may not want to be monsters
emotional truth of vampires is made into the vampire now we're coming back to talking about the emotional truth in which the vampire is externalized
there are rules to get rid of the vampires- folklore the vampire always comes to the family first the loved one will destroy you
Stoker, Camilla=fear of sexuality and
aliens somebody you love who no fault of their own has become a monster:
unclear where this quote came from: "I'm the monster's mother"
origins of fairytale as dark fantasy and description of the ultra-vilence of older fairytales which have been watered down: Deerskin is dark fantasy
what's the other? its the thing you're defining as not you
horror is about defeating or being defeated by the other
A lot of heros of dark fantasy could be the villains of a horror story
deerskin is concerned about being a monster the monster is not one you try to understand
From unidentified panel member who discussed research into history of insanity: first manuscript of deerskin linked to the patron saint of the criminally insane
Re: More notes
Date: 2006-05-31 10:53 pm (UTC)Also, J. Sheridan Le Fanu's sapphic vampire story is Carmilla.
Thank you for posting these--it's very helpful!
Re: More notes
Date: 2006-06-01 03:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-10 01:03 pm (UTC)I think the person that mentioned horror as being something designed to scare draws a good definition. If something is fantasical or paranormal and deals with the darker side of life, darker emotions and psychological stress, but doesn't have, as it's primary intention, the desire to scare readers, then it would certainly seem to be dark fantasy.
My own work is contemporary, set in the world we know and in our own time, but with many elements of magic, gods, demons and various other paranormal creatures and situations, and it is often quite unpleasant in its characters and the things they do. If I were to call it fantasy, people would think first of swords and sorcery, which it isn't. If I were to call it horror, people would expect a scary story, which it (on the whole) isn't. So perhaps dark fantasy is more a description of what something is not, rather than what it is!
The previous mentions of Earthsea are certainly valid. I would call that dark fantasy as it deals with the darkness inside and the black that follows Ged. I would also call Neil Gaiman's work dark fantasy, even though that is far removed from something like Earthsea. The fact that Gaiman's novel American Gods won three major awards, one recognised as primarily a horror award, one recognised as a sci-fi award and one recognised as a fantasy award, goes some way to demonstrating how hard a time people had categorising that novel. I think dark fantasy is the perfect category for it. I read American Gods after people started drawing comparisons between it and my novel RealmShift. I'd only previously read his Sandman comics (which I would also classify as dark fantasy).
I think a lot of Stephen King's and Dean Koontz's books would also be better classified as dark fantasy rather than horror, but they are both authors that certainly blur the lines between those two genres.
The movie Dark City would be another good example of dark fantasy. It's certainly fantastical, it's often scary, but it's not a horror film.
So, to me, a work is dark fantasy if it deals with any elements of fantasy and/or the paranormal in a way that studies the dark and frightening side of human nature, psychology and the weird, sublime and uncanny. If it doesn't shy away from the gore and horror of its own darkness, yet doesn't aim to spook. If it has heroes that are not knights in shining armour, but people that sometimes have to do unsavoury things. If it has villains that aren't necessarily all bad as well as villains that really are all bad!
It is definitely a very hard thing to pin down with a single definition, but it is far and away the best definition for many things that don't quite fit within the generally accepted genre of fantasy or horror.
Alan Baxter
www.alanbaxter.info
no subject
Date: 2006-06-11 03:52 am (UTC)Alan Baxter