“As I begin writing I think of a stained-glass window submitted as a student project for a course in fantasy literature. […] I think of Tolkien’s fantasy world, fabricated out of shattered myths which we, as ‘postmoderns,’ ought no longer to believe in. Like the window, The Lord of the Rings is essentially a re-creation, a synthesis of rejected myths and images into a fragile new composition. Humpty-Dumpty miraculously reassembled, with all the cracks showing. In both the window and the trilogy: art built out of a heap of cultural trash, something new from something used, a sense of wholeness barely removed from absurdity. In both cases the shards held together with borrowed materials and makeshift ingenuity: a crude frame and Elmer’s glue, the worn structure of romance and ponderous philological apparatus. These two artifacts have come to seem to me suggestive emblems of the appeal of fantasy in our time.”
–Robert Crossley
In this 1975 College English article, Robert Crossley sets out to explore the power and value of the fantasy genre, and he begins by criticizing the “hedging” and “avoidance of definition and rational discourse” that he believes characterize many discussions of the genre (even referencing directly Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories,” for instance). Crossley addresses the presumed childishness of fantasy, citing examples such as Alice in Wonderland, and concludes that adult readers may be afraid of what this represents, leading them to silence or scorn on the subject. He writes:
“Analytical language impedes the adult’s response to fantasy because it threatens to reopen the gap between childhood and adulthood which his imagination has tried to close. The adult fears his language will give him away, that he will not be able to pose a child’s questions without betraying the accents and vocabulary of adult rational consciousness. To achieve the vision he has had to put on a new self; and silence becomes the instrument which allows him to keep his old and new selves in tenuous balance” (Crossley 284).