khiemtran | The Tao of Fantasy (and Why Hobbits Need Waistcoats...)

One interesting feature of the Chinese classics I've been reading lately has been their approach to realism and internal consistency. It's something that's quite different from most modern fantasy, but strangely, quite similar to successful modern fantasy.

There are a surprising number of contradictions and inconsistencies in the stories, but they are all taken care of by the preconditions (or possibly

papersky's "mode") of the story itself. There are open contradictions and impossibilities in Journey to the West, for example, but Journey to the West is a story where impossibilities are allowed to happen. There are dreamlike coincidences in A Dream of Red Mansions, but is not the whole reality of the story possibly a dream? In the same story, there are unrealistic comic touches, but was not the whole story readily admitted to be an embellished account as it was written upon the stone? The inconsistencies become not so much a problem as the point.

There is a licence there that is established early and used with a confidence that overrides any disbelief. It is exactly the same as giving hobbits waistcoats from the very beginning - because once the reader has swallowed hobbits with waistcoats (and picked their teeth clean), they've also given you licence to fit Tom Bombadil into the same world as Théoden.