Since it's been a while since I posted anything here (not much to say, since I'm just busy typing, but Misty and I handed in the first Arcanum book to Tor and now we're hard at work on the second one) I thought I'd dredge up something ancient and toss it out here (because I still cherish the look on John Clute's face at that Readercon panel... *VBEG*)
Aaaaand, the fine print:
This essay evolved from a number of posts on GEnie and SFF.NET, and while except where noted I'm using my own words, responses, and ideas, this essay would not exist without the dialogues I had with Debra Doyle, Doris Egan, Greer Gilman, Connie Hirsch, Jennifer Stevenson, and probably countless others who have escaped the prison of my memory....
THE PHATIC DISCOURSE RANT
Phatic speech is a term used by cultural anthropology to label "content-free" speech; the sort of conversation that is used as social and hierarchical signals rather than as a means of communicating hard information (this is what John Clute said, anyway. I really should look this up someday to make sure...) At a Readercon a few years ago (a lot of years ago at this point, sigh), John Clute, Jennifer Stevenson, Connie Hirsch, and a couple others of us started kicking the notion around on a panel, and one of the things we decided was that big fantasies (those things labeled as "in the great tradition of Terry Brooks") were examples of phatic discourse as text.
Think about it. Nobody's learning anything new, here, and the story plays very strongly to reader expectations. In fact, if the reader expectations are confounded, the reader will often say "this is a bad story", no matter how good the writing and how vivid the characters. This is because the phatic discourse is the primary reason for the reader to embrace the text. In short, what we will hereafter refer to as the Phatic Novel is a style of book in which the book maintains both voices in a dialogue (as opposed to the Conventional Wisdom that a book is a dialogue with a reader in which the reader takes an active part, being affected and changed by the experience of reading the text) so that the reader need only eavesdrop.
In its purest form, this book echoes the reader's own opinions back at them in a reinforcing and soothing matter, mimicking the social affect of a group of friends. In effect, a book written in phatic discourse becomes a friend of the reader.
Holly Lisle's books (and this is meant in only the most appreciative fashion, because, actually, I not only love the Phatic Novel, I hope that's what I'm writing) are prime examples of phatic discourse in F&SF, a niche she shares with Jennifer Roberson's Chesuli series, Mercedes Lackey (all books), Melanie Rawn, Kate Elliot, and diverse others including Terry Brooks and Robert Jordan.
Debra Doyle notes that Phatic Novels are, almost by definition, not regarded as part of the High Canon even in a field, such as F/SF, where all of its member texts are allegedly pop-cultural. So in essence, the F/SF Phatic Novel (commonly stigmatized as "wish fulfillment") is relegated to the basement of the basement of literature, providing, as Doyle further notes, a mark of the deep and abiding Calvinism of our supposedly secular culture that insists that having one's wishes fulfilled is a Bad Thing.
The thing about the Phatic Novel is that it often appears to break a number of the rules for soi-dissant "good writing", and so it is universally dissed. (It is worth noting that the modern novel itself drew similar criticism when it first appeared in England in the 18th century.)
Have I mentioned that Phatic Discourse novels tend to be long? And enormously commercial, of course - this is the market share that buys books. Lots of books.
One of the indicators of a Phatic Novel is that what readers and writers have been trained to look for as traditional conflict is to a very great extent absent. A good example of this is in the work of Anne McCaffrey. As Dave Langford truly says, it becomes patent in reading her villains that she cannot imagine why anyone would wish to be mean to her lovely people. In the Phatic Novel, the villain is very often a pretext, not a well-rounded character. He isn't meant to be (or doesn't manage to be) truly emotionally threatening on any level, and certainly not to engage with any issues the reader might confront in his or her own life.
Unfortunately, the conflict-free genre novel is yet to be born, and so even Phatic Novels require some reason for the characters that the author likes best to go running around in circles. This is sometimes handled by making the villain a thing (the old Man Against Nature plot.) You see this in both Pern and Darkover, where the natives rejoice in a homeworld that you or I would run screaming from by any means necessary, but which is just berries and cream to them.
Despite the plot-mechanical necessity for conflict, an important part of the Phatic Novel is that the "proper" viewpoint is never significantly challenged. The Proper Viewpoint for Phatic F/SF is fairly clear (there's also a proper viewpoint for Phatic Romance, but that's a whole nother article): it's Fans are Slans (or SCAdians are God); the right-thinking individual will always triumph over the institutionalized power; the socially-disenfranchised are wellsprings of some uber-power viewpoint. Basically, put Kirk's Classic Trek speeches into a blender and you have the Unchallengeable Assumptions of Skiffy Phatic Text.
The test for this is quite simple. Posit a counter-trope to one of these in the context of a phatic novel, and the sense of discontinuity is jarring. Phatic Novels are not - whatever their outward appearance - novels of the literary canon. What they are is disguised fairy tales, and the fairy tale is a literature of reinforced social expectation.
When we discuss the Phatic Novel, we are talking entirely about content: the tale, not its telling. These books are, with very few exceptions, written in the style known as transparent. The whole point of these books is to be non-challenging (in the sense of presenting ideas and concepts contradictory to the reader's worldview in a fashion that is easy to assimilate), and content must preclude all questions in the mind of the reader (i.e., they cannot be left to wonder exactly what things look like or what the hell is going on.) Mysteries may be created for the characters, but not for the reader (though a legitimate amount of suspense is perfectly okay), but at the same time, the majority of questions that arise at any point in the narrative must be answered immediately. In detail. Rooms, people, clothing, meals, must all be described outright, not insinuated or referred to in an offhand fashion. In a sense, these are books written as if for readers who have a distrust of their own core curriculum knowledge - their responses to social norms and their RW environment may have been extensively challenged before they pick up a Phatic Text, and it is far less stressful, as a reading experience, for them to be told precisely what their responses to objects and events are "supposed to be": in short, a Phatic Novel presents an idealized fantasy experience, but no, it isn't the one in the plot, about the never-ending Last Battle Between Good and Evil, which Good always wins (and no, I'm not objecting to that, because it's a damned good story, has been for the last seven thousand years, and still bears repeating): the fantasy experience is the one of immersing oneself in a fantasy world that is absolutely stress-free due to the fact that one is being led through it by a benign omniscient guide.
This is also why nearly all Romances are written as phatic discourse: Writer tells Reader who the hero and heroine are, what they look like, what they think, why they think it, and how and when and why they are going to change what they're thinking. Reader knows exactly what their sensorium and emotions are, and explicitly what their physical surroundings are. This level of detail is necessary for Reader to UNAMBIGUOUSLY DUPLICATE the experience that Writer has planned, in order to - without surprises - arrive at exactly the same place that all other readers of the phatic document do.
The Phatic F/SF Novel did not, of course, spring into existence full-blown and overnight. It has ancestors, the proto-phaticists, who, while not phatic, educate the reader in the direction of the phatic discourse novel: Robert A. Heinlein and Gordon R. Dickson are practically its poster-boys. Andre Norton, oddly, is a non-phatic writer who reinforces disenfranchised social expectations (hallmark of the phaticist); but I find that her texts are too hermetic to open a proper choral monologue with the reader (which is not to say she isn't one of my favorite writers.)
So, do we have enough of a concept of what the Phatic Novel is to bell this cat? Let's see:
Poul Anderson, C. L. Moore: two of the greatest skiffy writers of the century and possibly of all time. Non-phatic with a bullet.
Phillip K. Dick, of course, is non-phatic. Michael Swanwick is actually anti-phatic. Zenna Henderson is proto-phatic. Idris Seabright: no (but more people should be reading her - go!) Jane Emerson is phatic. John M. Ford isn't. Michael Moorcock isn't, but one senses that he could be with enough Prozac, which would be amusing in a quiet way....
Edith Wharton is not a phatic writer. And well, she isn't a skiffy writer, either, but I do love her.
Anyway, a few of my rambling twice-told thoughts on a subject that's interested me for years. Yours?
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