LEV GROSSMAN: My mom is English
and she grew up in London.
And like the
[INAUDIBLE] kids, she
was evacuated from London
to escape the blitz
during World War II.
Although unlike the
[INAUDIBLE] kids,
she did not find her way
into a secret, magical world
of talking animals.
And in fact, apparently,
she was so naughty,
in her host family's house that
they sent her back to London,
because being bombed by Hitler
was like a suitable punishment
for whatever it is she did.
I never found out what it was.
And then years later,
she went to Oxford
and she was on her way to her
final exams her senior year,
and she stopped in to a
pub for a pint, as one did.
And there was this
old gaffer at the end
of the bar, who
said well, you're
going to take your orals,
you know, you should probably
have a brandy.
And my mom had never
had brandy before.
But, the guy at the end
of the bar was CS Lewis.
And if CS Lewis
offers you a Brandy,
you're going to drink that
brandy, which she did.
She claims to have no
memory of anything else that
happened that day.
But she did get a first.
So it all worked out OK.
So I was a fantasy fan
as a kid, especially,
"the Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe,"
which was for me-- I'd read
it when I was about eight.
And for me it was the novel that
taught me what novels are for,
what they do for you, which is
to take you away to somewhere
more interesting temporarily.
But I was also into Tolkien.
I was especially into T.H White.
"The Once and Future King."
I read Piers Anthony.
Not many people cop to
Piers Anthony anymore,
but Piers Anthony was
great, huge influence on me.
As far as I know
he's still writing.
I made it to, "Golem
in the Gears,"
and I think I crapped
out around then.
But those books were
really important to me.
Anne McCaffrey, Fritz
Lieber, who as far as I know
is not even in print anymore.
I read the, "Fafhrd and
the Gray Mouser" books
more than I read Tolkien.
If you haven't
read them, I think,
"Swords and Deviltry"
is the first one.
They're truly fantastic.
Michael Moorcock, all the rest
of those writers-- Ursula Le
Guin.
I was deeply obsessed with
them and immersed in them.
And I remain so when I
grew up, which I think
was dismaying to my parents.
The other thing I'll say
about the house I grew up in,
it was slightly odd in
that my parents were
both English professors.
It was a hyper
literary household.
It was just stuffed with books.
My parents had fancy degrees.
They taught at
fancy universities.
They were kind of high priest
and priestess of the canon
of the great books.
And I think that
they had anticipated
that I would grow out of
fantasy and at some point
cease to be obsessed with it.
But someone asked China Mieville
once how he got into fantasy.
And he said, "how did
you get out of it?"
Fantasy always stayed with me.
It always remained important
to me, even after I grew up.
I went to college, I
studied literature.
I went to graduate school in
comparative literature, sort
of following in my
parents footsteps.
But something sort
of odd happened.
I mean, I still read
fantasy that entire time.
It was sort of
driven underground
by like, the pressure
of the cannon
pressing down on it from above.
But I always kind of
kept faith with it.
And I read it constantly.
And I only intermittently
thought about writing fantasy.
I think it was 1996, I reread
the, "Wizard of Earthsea"
books.
And I had remembered them--
I always loved the bits where
he's on the island of Roke.
And he's getting his
magical education.
And I remember that as being
like two-thirds of the book
on Roke.
And it's actually
like two chapters.
And I had this killer idea.
What if we did a whole
book that was set entirely
at a school for magic.
I literally have the
notes for this idea, which
occurred to me in 1996,
just like the last instant
before Harry Potter
came into the world.
I probably could not have beaten
Rowling to a market anyway.
But, as it happens, because I'm
an idiot, I shelved this idea,
and I didn't come
back to it until 2004,
which was a complicated
year for me personally.
I had at that point--
I was a writer already.
I had published two novels.
But I was painfully aware
that for whatever reason,
I had not found my voice
as a fiction writer,
which, two books
into your career,
it's a bit late to be
finding your voice.
But I was very
conscious that I had not
been able to say what it
was that I wanted to say.
And I was working, pretty
much in the mode of my sort
of high literary heroes.
I imagined myself as a literary
novelist, in like, you know,
your Jonathan Franzen,
your Zadie Smith.
I sort of imagined
that as the path.
But when it got to
be 2004, a number
of really important
things happened to me.
I had my first child.
I read "Johnathan Strange &
Mr. Norrell," by Susanna Clark.
Not as important as my
first child, but still
a very important
experience for me.
And maybe most
important, I turned
35, which experts disagree
as to whether 35 counts
as sort of early middle age.
But it was not totally
deniable that I might possibly
be entering early middle age.
And because death was
hovering at my shoulder,
I began to think really
seriously about what
I should do for my next book.
My first book had taken
me five years to write.
My second book took
me six years to write.
These are books that should
not have taken that long.
Something was not
really clicking for me,
and I had embarked already
on something else, which
wasn't panning out.
Oh, the other thing
that happen is
that my brother sent me a
draft of his novel in progress.
I have a twin brother
who's also a writer.
Up until that time, he had
been a designer of video games.
But for some reason, it
occurred to him to kind of horn
in on my turf, and he was
going to write a novel too.
And I was all like, that's super
cute that you're doing that.
And then he sent me the first
five chapters of his book
and it was incredible.
It was so good.
And it was so much
better than anything else
that I had ever written.
And this filled me
with a great rage.
And it caused me to reconsider
many of my life choices.
The book, by the
way, it's called,
"Soon I'll Be Invincible."
It was published in 2007.
It's totally-- it's
totally fantastic.
You'll see what I mean
when you pick it up.
So I sort of withdrew
into my fastness
and started thinking about, what
was the most important reading
experience of my life
that I had ever had?
What was most compelling,
the most immersive novel
I had read?
And I kept coming back
to, "The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe."
And I wondered if
there was something
that I could do,
something that i
could try to write
that would give people
that same experience.
And, you know, it was an
interesting moment for fantasy,
because things had been sort of
changing seismically in fantasy
for a while at that point.
When I was a kid, this was
pre-internet-- being a fantasy
fan felt sort of different
because you weren't as aware
that other people were into it.
It felt as though
that it was this thing
that you did privately because
something was wrong with you.
And you didn't really
understand that there
were all these other
people out there for whom
it was really important.
It wasn't until--
really it wasn't
until Harry Potter happened,
at which, I think not
coincidentally happened
at the same time
the web was really going
mainstream that you understood
that you weren't alone.
That there were
millions of other people
who cared about this stuff,
and to whom it was important.
And at the same time,
fantasy was changing.
People, including
myself, often forget
that George R.R. Martin had
published Game of Thrones--
I think it was '96, '95.
I think it was '96.
So he was publishing, "A Song
of Ice and Fire," those novels.
And those novels changed
everything for me.
He's super famous
and people love him.
I think he still underrated.
I think people still don't
understand how radically he
changed fantasy by rewriting
the epic tradition,
rewriting Tolkien
in the way that he
did, as if it were history,
written straight ahead
for adults, in realist
language, full of all the kind
of moral gray areas and
really horrible things
of which history is full.
It was just-- it was a seismic
experience, reading him.
And he was-- you know, he was
the thin edge of the wedge.
Philip Pullman was
really important for me.
That was late '90s.
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
came out, I think in 2001.
And then "Jonathan Strange &
Mr. Norrell," came out in 2004.
And when I read
that, I thought, you
know, it was no
longer possible, even
for as obtuse an
individual as myself,
to ignore that something really
interesting was happening.
"Jonathan Strange
& Mr. Norrell,"
it's a book that I love.
And I think it affected
me particularly
because it does all the things
that literary fiction is
supposed to do.
It's moving in that way.
It's ambiguous and strange and
beautiful and melancholy and
funny.
It does all these things
that literary fiction
is supposed to do, and it does
all the fantasy things too.
And I just-- I didn't understand
that that was possible.
And reading it was just--
it was electrifying.
It was within a
week of finishing
that book that I started
writing, "The Magicians."
When I think of it now, it seems
like the natural thing for me
to have done.
It was surprisingly
difficult for me
to do that, I think in part,
because although I always
was a fantasy reader, I never
thought of myself as a fantasy
reader.
I always imagined myself
as a literary guy,
who would in future
collect Pulitzers and Nobel
Prizes in great numbers.
Making that decision to
be a fantasy writer, it's
an interesting one,
because you kind of opt out
of a certain-- you
know, there's still
a level at which literary
culture discriminates
against fantasy, and a
lot of genre fiction.
The same value is
not attached to it
as is attached to some of
those other literary books.
And we sell better
than them so it's OK.
But still, it was
a surprising thing.
I knew that my parents
would be shocked.
And it's sad to think
that my solo act, I think,
as far as I can remember
of adolescent rebellion was
writing a fantasy
novel when I was 35.
But that was it.
And it was exciting.
It was thrilling to know-- and I
was writing and I was thinking,
this is crazy.
They're never going to
let me get away with this.
It was very fun, and if
any of you write fiction,
if you feel as though a silent
alarm has been tripped when
you're writing something,
that is always a good sign
that you are on something.
And that's how I felt.
But it was when I
started to write--
I dusted off my idea of
writing about the education
of a wizard.
Which is an odd thing.
It was an odd thing to write
about for a fantasy writer,
especially in that moment, 2004,
because we were at peak-Potter.
We're still at peak-Potter.
But we were at
peak-Potter at that point.
It was in between,
"Order of the Phoenix,"
and, "Half-Blood Prince."
And that subject, the education
of a wizard, that was owned.
That was owned by J.K. Rowling.
And yet I couldn't let go of it.
I kept coming back to it.
And
I felt so closely identified
with Harry, and also with Lyra
from, "His Dark Materials."
It was a major one for me too.
I felt sure that there must
be a way for me to make
this topic, this story, my own.
And the way I
ended up doing it--
I was conscious that I
identified so closely
with these characters,
and yet my life was
very different from theirs.
I was 35.
I had a child.
I was paying estimated quarterly
taxes which Harry never does.
He never has to do that.
You ought to hear
about it if he does.
I felt as though the
problems that I was wrestling
with in my life were so
different from the ones
that he was confronting.
And I kept thinking,
is there a way for me
to write a story like this
story about a young man who
is discovering that he
has power that he didn't
know that he had, who
finds his way into a world
that nobody else knows exists.
But to write it for
adults, and somehow
make it about the
things that I felt
like I was struggling with.
So almost as a
thought experiment,
I started writing this story.
And you know, I
changed it to make
it look closer like my life.
I moved it to America, which was
itself actually a major thing.
I was writing in a tradition
that was very English--
the Lewis tradition,
the Pullman tradition.
Just to move that
story to America
felt weird and kind of radical.
The characters were
not-- you know,
the characters in
those books, they
talk in this marvelously correct
English, where they actually
articulate very well, and they
never call each other dude,
and their sentences and
paragraph are perfect.
Just to have the characters
talking like American kids
immediately felt funny and
kind of interesting to me
and different.
And so I decided
that I would use
a different kind of language.
I wanted to see what it
was like to write fantasy,
but using the literary
language of realism.
What if you were to
write about magic,
but you try to
describe it, you know,
the way Hemingway would describe
a bullfight or Virginia Woolf
would describe, I don't
know, a beach or a table
or some flowers
or a busy street.
Just to write it in that
straight ahead kind of way.
Not as well, because
I'm not as good
a writer as Hemingway or Woolf.
But to approach it in
that way and try to shed,
I guess, some of
the common tropes
that we associate with magic.
Just actually to actually look
at the magic in this very close
way-- those writers like
Hemingway and Woolf,
the modernists, they
were the absolute masters
of observing the
world around them.
Nobody else had ever noticed
the world around them the way
those people did
and record of it.
And I always felt that if
I had a beef with fantasy,
and the way people
write about magic,
it was as if they just didn't
describe it closely enough.
I always felt so
the camera cut away,
and like I didn't quite see
everything I wanted to see.
What if you just kept
the camera on there,
you saw exactly what the person
was doing with their hands.
You heard the kind of-- what
does the magic sound like?
What sort of fizzy
noises does it make?
What does it smell like?
Does it leaves something in
the air after it's been cast.
You know, I really want to get
precise and clear in that way.
And then, you know,
I wanted the story,
while structurally resembling
a lot of the stories
that I'd read, to be
about different things.
Which meant that they had
to be altered in some ways.
I wasn't going to write
about little kids.
I aged the characters
up so that they were-- I
think Quentin's 17
when the books start.
I wanted to make them drink.
I wanted them to have sex lives.
I want them to have
mood disorders.
I wanted to leave in some of the
things that get airbrushed out
of a lot of fantasy,
just because that's
the way that it's written.
That's the convention
of the genre.
I mean, you know there's a lot
of sex happening at Hogwarts.
It's way beyond snogging, and
it's just happening just out
of frame, you know.
The people are just,
they're going at it.
And the camera just
doesn't quite capture it.
What if you just sort
of expanded the frame
and put that stuff in there?
So that was part
of the experiment.
And it was going to be a
different kind of story.
What if you took away the
sort of avuncular adviser
figure, which is such
a staple of fantasy.
You so often have a
Gandalf or a Dumbledore.
Somebody who's there, who when
the main character wanders
a little bit off the path
and gets confused about what
he or she is
supposed to be doing,
takes them by the shoulders
and just says, look, you know,
we have this evil ring.
It's a terrible thing
and the world is ending,
but you see that
volcano over there?
Just go to the volcano, put
the ring in the volcano,
and then everything's
going to be fine.
There's a lot of orcs
between here and the volcano,
but that's what
you're going to do.
I always felt that there
was nobody in my life,
in particular, who was giving
me that kind of advice.
Or they were but they were
just as full of crap as I was.
It was at a time in my life when
I personally felt very lost,
and I wanted my characters to
feel lost in that same way.
I really felt as though, you
know, in a wizard's life,
the '20s is not a decade that
you hear very much about.
You often meet wizards
when they are small,
or wizards when
they're super old
and they have big long beards.
But what is it like when
they're first finding their way
and trying to figure out what
to do with all this magic
that they've just learned?
I wanted to write
a book about that.
Likewise, what if you subtract
the big bad from the equation?
What if you write a story like
this, but there's no Voldemort,
and there's no White
White, there's no Sauron.
What happens if you remove
that person from the equation?
Those people, while they do
many terrible things that
are regrettable,
they have this sort
of wonderful organizing
influence on the universes
that they inhabit.
Very much of a time, with some
notable exceptions, like Snape,
you can tell which
side people are on.
You know it they're
a death eater
or you know their trying
to stop the death eaters.
You know that
you're good or bad.
Everybody knows what
side that they're on,
what team they're playing for.
Well likewise, there was
nobody like that in my world.
I didn't know who was
good and who was bad.
I didn't know if
I was good or bad.
I didn't know if
what I was doing
was the right or wrong thing.
And even after I
had done it, I still
don't know if it
was the right thing
to have done, because
nobody ever told me.
You know, there was no answers
at the back of the book.
And I want to write
a story about that,
which turned out to be a
very different kind of story.
It was much less a
story about using
magic to fight
evil and much more
a story about people
just trying to figure out
what magic was for.
So I did that.
And they have been
looking now, trying
to figure out what magic
is for, for three books.
And the Magician's
Land is the third one,
in which they figure
out the extent
that they're ever going to
figure out what magic is for.
And I'm going to read you
a short passage from it,
which I don't think requires
terribly much set up.
It takes place in a magical
land called Fillory,
which, for legal purposes,
bears no resemblance whatsoever
to Narnia.
But in some accidental ways,
unintended, may in some ways
resemble it.
It's called Fillory.
And at the beginning
of the books-- people,
they know about Fillory, but
they don't know that it's real.
One of the things that
was important to me
about the hero, Quentin, and
really all the characters,
is that they read books.
One of the things that I always
thought was funny about Harry
is that, as far as I can tell,
Harry has never read a novel.
You would think that,
you know, having spent
so much of his early
life, locked in a closet,
with his abusive kind
of adoptive family,
all he would have
done would be to read
and re-read the Narnia books,
over and over and over again.
But as far as I can tell,
he's never read them.
I mean, I know
Hermione's read them,
but she never talks about it.
Except for, "Beedle
the Bard," there
is no fiction in the Hogwarts
library, which I always
thought was very
interesting and I understood
why Rowling went that way.
But I was thought,
if it were really
to happen-- if there were to
be a school for magic, then
the people who went there
would actually be huge fantasy
nerds, lots of them.
And they would arrive at
the school having read
a lot of fantasy literature.
And it would in some ways
be very confusing to them,
as it is confusing
for Quentin, who
has grown up reading these
books, which are the Fillory
books.
He loves them and when he
arrives at Brakebills, which
is the school for
magic, he naturally
imagines that he's kind of going
to be the hero of a fantasy
novel, like the
books that he's read.
And of course, real life
isn't like that at all.
And so he gets his
magical education,
he's forced to-- he undergoes
a series of disappointments
when he realizes
that life really
isn't like stories at all.
And really just beginning
as a matter of realism,
I feel like he would have
read a lot of fantasy novels.
The book actually became
a little bit about,
what is that difference
between fiction and reality?
Why is reality so much less
well organized than fiction,
and frequently so much
less satisfying than it?
So we have this land of Fillory,
which turns out to be real.
And the passage
I'm going to read
is actually not from
Quentin's point of view.
It's from the point of view
of a character named Elliott,
who is a friend of Quentin's.
He comes from our world,
but he has gone over
to Fillory and become
the High King there.
And as frequently happens
with magical lands,
Fillory is being
invaded by Its neighbors
to the north, who are
called the Lorians.
This is Elliot reacting to news
that the Lorians are invading
and figuring out how
he's going to repel them.
"We he first got the news that
the Lorians were invading,
it had been grimly exciting.
Antique formulas
and protocols were
invoked, a lot of serious
looking non-ceremonial armor
and weapons and flags and tack
had come up out of storage
and been polished and
sharpened and oiled.
They brought up with
them a lot of dust too
and a thrilling smell of great
deeds and legendary times.
An epic smell.
Elliot breathed it in deep.
The invasion was not
a complete surprise.
The Lorians were
always up some kind
of bad behavior in the
books-- kidnapping princes,
forcing talking
horses to plow fields,
trying to get everybody
to believe in their slave
quasi-Norse gods.
But it had been centuries
since they actually
crossed the border and forests.
They were usually too busy
fighting among themselves
to get organized.
Eliot moved rapidly
to expel the Lorians,
although he found
himself reluctant to be
the direct cause of
any actual killing.
This wasn't Tolkien, these
weren't orcs and trolls
and giant spiders and
whatever else-- evil creatures
that you were free
to commit genocide
on without any complicated
moral ramifications.
Orcs didn't have wives
and kids and back stories,
but he was pretty sure
the Lorians were human,
and killing them would
be basically murder.
And that wasn't going to happen.
Some of them were
even kind of hot.
Anyway those Tolkien books
were fiction, and Elliott,
as High King of Fillory
didn't deal in fiction.
He was in the messy
business of writing facts.
It was a tricky,
ticklish business.
There was nothing in Elliot's
admittedly limited experience
more tedious than virtue.
Fortunately, the Fillorians
had an advantage,
which was that they had
every possible advantage.
They out-matched the Lorians
in every stat you could name.
The Lorians where a bunch
of guys with swords.
The Fillorians were every beast
in the monster manual, led
by a click of wizard
kings and queens,
and Elliott was
very sorry, but you
knew that when you invaded us.
See, the Lorians had made
a mistake on their way
down from the northern
barrier range.
They set some trees on
fire, and an outlying farm,
and they killed a hermit.
Even Janet was surprised
by Eliot's anger.
I mean, she was furious,
but she was Janet.
She was pissed off all the time.
Poppy and Josh looked grim
which is how they got angry.
But Elliott's rage was crazy.
It was over the top.
They burned tree?
His trees.
They killed a hermit.
They killed a hermit.
Where Fillory and the
Fillorians were concerned,
Elliot no longer had any irony.
His heart went out to
that weird, solitary man,
in his uncomfortable hut.
He'd never met him.
They wouldn't have had much to
say to each other if they had.
But whoever that hermit
was, he obviously despised
his fellow man, and that meant
that he was OK in Eliot's book.
And now he was dead.
Elliott was going to
destroy the Lorians.
He would annihilate them!
He was going to murder them!
Not murder murder.
But he was going to
mess them up good.
Elliot went alone,
disguised as a peasant.
He waited in the
middle of the road.
He didn't move.
He let them notice
him gradually.
The man leading the
front lines stepped out
to invite him,
not very politely,
to kindly get out of the way
or 1,000 Lorian linebackers
would pull his guts out
and strangle him with them.
Eliot smiled.
He shuffled his feet
humbly for a second,
and then he punched
the guy in the face.
It took the man by surprise.
'Get the fuck out of my
country, asshole,' Eliot said.
He knew we hadn't
done much damage
and that he wouldn't
get another shot,
so he held up his
left hand and he
force pushed back
the man so hard,
he brought six ranks of
Lorians down with him.
It felt good.
Elliott had no
children, but this
must be what protecting
your children felt like.
He just wished Quentin
could have seen it.
He dropped the
cloak, and stood up
straight in his
royal arraignment,
so it was clear that he was
a king, and not a peasant.
A couple of eager beaver arrows
came arcing over from back
in the ranks, and he burned them
up in flight, puff puff, puff.
It was easy when you were
this angry, and this good.
And god, he was angry, and good.
He tapped the butt of his
staff once on the ground--
earthquake.
All 1,000 Lorians fell down
on their stupid, violent asses
in magnificent synchrony.
He couldn't just
do that at will.
He'd been out here all last
night, setting up the spells,
but it was a great effect,
especially since the Lorians
didn't know that.
He allowed it to sink in.
And then he undid a spell.
He made the army behind
him visible, or most of it.
Take a good look, gentleman.
Those ones with the horse
bodies are the hippogriffs.
The griffins have
the lion bodies.
It's easy to mix 'em up.
And then-- and he indulged
themselves here-- he
made the giants visible.
You do not appreciate
at all from fairy tales
how unbelievably
terrifying a giant is.
These players were
seven-story giants,
and they did not mess around.
In real life, humans
didn't slay giants
because it was impossible.
It would be like
killing an apartment
building with your bare hands.
It doesnt' make sense, because
apartment buildings aren't
alive, but you see
what I'm saying.
They were even stronger
than they looked.
They had to be to beat
the square cube law that
made land organisms
that big physically
impossible in the real world.
And their skin was
half a foot thick.
There were only a couple
dozen giants in all of Fillory
because, even Fillory's
hyper-abundant ecosystem could
not have fed more of them.
Six of them had come
out for the battle.
Nobody moved.
Instead, the Great
Salt River moved.
It was right behind them.
They had just crossed
it, and the nymphs
took it out of its
banks and straight
into the mass of the Lorian
army like an aimabled tsunami.
A lot of the soldiers
got washed away.
He had made the nymphs
promise to drown as few
of them as possible, although
they were free to abuse them
in any other way they chose.
Some of the ones who
weren't swept away
wanted to fight anyway, because
they were just that valiant.
Eliot supposed they must
have had difficult childhoods
or something like that.
Well, join the club, he thought.
It's not that exclusive.
He and his friends gave
them a difficult adulthood
to go with it."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Now we do have two
microphones available
if anybody is interested in
and willing to ask a question.
I'm always very grateful
to whoever will.
I never ask questions
under these circumstances.
Thank you.
Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: Hi, great talk
and I loved the excerpt.
I just have a really
quick question.
So I'm now with fiction like
Game of Thrones coming out,
your novels which are much more
realistic, yours has much more
moral gray area, if
there's still a place for,
of if there will be
a place for-- it's
almost a pejorative
term, but escapism?
Or novels that
deal with escapism?
I mean, part of the function
of novels where the heroes are
good guys and the
bad guys are bad guys
and the heroes are
honorable, and the bad guy
are just dastardly and there's
a titanic objects somewhere
in the distance, all that
kind of good stuff is, you,
after a long day go
home and read this book
and it's escapism, and
you don't necessarily
get all of the stuff you would
be reading Game of Thrones
or the Magician's
Trilogy, but you get that.
And I'm wondering if there's
a place for that still?
Or if that's going away, and if
we should be happy about that
if it is?
LEV GROSSMAN: I'm going
to respectfully disagree
with the premise
of your question.
AUDIENCE: OK.
LEV GROSSMAN: I have never felt
that escapism was a real thing.
To me-- and I say to me,
because literally this
is my personal opinion--
for at least for me
it's a fundamental
misunderstanding
of what reading does for me,
especially reading fantasy.
You know, I think
it's an easy shot
to take to say that
fantasy is escapism,
it is a way of avoiding
the real world.
This is obviously a
hobby horse of mine.
Let's go back to the
18th century first.
You know, at some point
it was the 18th century.
Sort of, reading culture
developed a huge obsession
with realism.
Realism, for some reason,
clamped down on literature
and became the definition
of what literature was.
Fictional worlds were supposed
to look like the real world.
It's like around Robinson
Crusoe or something like that.
And the other stuff, the fantasy
stuff, you know, the goblins ,
whatever else, it got pushed
into various different margins.
It got pushed down
to the children.
It got pushed off to
the supermarket racks,
you know, Gothic
literature, to the genres.
And this, you know,
death-grip of realism, it only
tightened when the
Modernists came along
who really codified it.
But that wasn't always the case.
You go back a little further,
you get into Shakespeare.
Shakespeare's not a realist.
He writes about witches,
ghosts, monsters, magic fairies.
You know, anywhere back past
1700 and it's all fantasy.
That's what literature was.
And we don't think
of that as escapist.
And what we think
of it is as a way
of confronting with, or
getting a grip on the problems
that we deal with in reality in
a kind of transmogrified form.
You know, it's a way of
getting more direct access
to the junk that hangs down
underneath your conscious mind.
You know, you just you all those
subconscious monsters get out
and they start to look
like real monsters
and you can wrestle with them.
That is what fantasy
is about for me.
It's a way, not of
getting away from reality,
it's another way of
coming at the problems
that you deal with in
reality, and getting traction
on them form a slightly
different angle.
Somebody, and I forget
who it is, and I'm
going to mangle the quote,
said a very wise thing to me
once which was, "fantasy
isn't how we escape reality,
it's what we need in order
to be able to stay in reality
and survive in it."
And I truly believe that.
I truly believe that.
And you know, it's partly--
and you do look back
at Tolkien and Lewis and it is
much clearer, the moral lines.
You know, which is-- it's an
interesting complicated thing.
And I can only think that at
that historical moment, that's
what they needed.
And our moment is so much
different from theirs,
and we need something different.
There you have a personal
theory of mind, which
has no factual substantiation.
But it's how I think
about that question.
And who knows what fantasy is
going to start looking like.
I don't know, but
it'll look like what
we need it to look like.
AUDIENCE: So a lot
of fantasy books
come in these series that
just sort of go on forever
and ever and ever
and you can sort of
continue to follow
Pug and whoever
your favorite characters through
books and books and books
and books.
So how do you feel about that?
Not with respect other people's,
but with your own world?
I mean, is this a
world that you would
want to have inhabit
forever and ever and ever?
And have Quentin go on and
become an old geezer himself?
Or is it something that you'd
want to see something new?
How do you feel about-- what are
your theories about these sorts
of trade-offs?
LEV GROSSMAN: Yeah,
well, they're evolving.
Next question.
When I wrote, "The Magicians,"
I wrote it as a one-off.
It actually didn't occur
to me that I would never go
anywhere else with that story.
And that was partly because,
when I was writing it,
I was writing it on spec.
I had no idea it
would be published.
I wasn't really thinking
about the future.
And then when it became a
trilogy, it was incredibly fun.
I really got to
explore this world.
But when I got to
the third book,
I realized I needed to end it.
For me as a writer,
there's a funny thing
that happens when you're
writing a series, which
is that you're playing this
delicate game in which you're
wrapping up, sort of the
local narrative threads.
And the broader
narrative threads
have to dangle
and keep on going.
You have to sort
of something back.
When I came to the
third book, I realized
that I needed a free hand.
I needed to be able
to kill whoever
I wanted to kill, marry off
whoever I wanted to marry,
raze the cities, salt the Earth.
I felt like I had
to stop holding back
and just be able
to just do whatever
I like without an
eye on the next book.
Also I had run out of ideas.
So, you know, so I'm
super pro-long series.
And my hat is off to the
people who can sustain them,
like Martin.
But you know when
your business is
finished in a particular
universe, at least
for the time being.
I'm always mindful that Le Guin
went back to Earthsea, what,
20 years later?
Many years later, and realized
that she had something more
to say there.
And you know, I would never
rule that out about this world.
But I couldn't do the
balancing act any longer.
I've given it up for now.
AUDIENCE: Hi, thank
you for coming here.
One way to think
about literary fiction
is that a set of techniques like
realism and a sort of concerns
that you can apply to
other things like fantasy.
Another way to
think about it might
be as its own genre with its
own tropes and things like that.
I like, "The Magicians" a lot.
If I had to criticize
it a little bit,
I might say it was much more
playful with the fantasy tropes
then it was about any of
the literary fiction tropes.
I wonder if you think
of literary fiction
as a genre like
that, or not, or why?
LEV GROSSMAN: It's a
really important question.
And I do think of it that way.
Another quote which I will
mangle and fail to attribute,
because I can't remember
who said it-- somebody once
said about literary
fiction, "the sooner
that literary fiction
can wake up and recognize
it's status as a genre, the
sooner it can get the help
it so desperately needs."
There is a sense, you
know, that literary fiction
that holds itself apart that
has a sort of exceptionalism
about it.
But it is another genre.
And yeah, it's true.
I mean, I thought a lot
about "The Magicians" books
as a collision between
literary fiction and fantasy.
And I guess in that collision,
if one of the bodies
crumpled more than the
other, it was definitely
fantasy that crumpled.
And, you know, I'm aware that.
The model for them was
very much Watchmen.
Watchman was-- I'm super old so
I read Watchmen in high school
when it first came out.
And it was totally
transformative for me.
And I often thought, when
I was trying to figure out
what the model was for the
magicians, it was, you know,
to try to interrogate the
fantasy genre in the same way
that Moore and Gibbons
interrogated the superhero
story.
Now to write the Watchmen
of literary fiction-- well,
I mean, in some ways I felt
that work had been done
by people like Joyce and Woolf.
They took the
Victorian novel, they
sort of looked at the kind
of bland epistemological
certainties of out of it
and just disassembled.
Took it to pieces and
just left it lying
and its component parts
on the garage floor.
And said, just
look at this mess.
You know, this
ridiculous machine.
We just took it apart for you.
And in a lot of ways,
I felt as though I
was doing something
radical to literary fiction
just by walking that back.
By writing a book that was about
the pleasure of storytelling,
that stopped saying, look how
false and wrong, you know,
these narratives are.
Let's stare at the
ways in which they
failed to represent reality,
and was a little bit more like,
actually let's go back and
see what they have to teach us
and why they're so pleasurable.
But, yeah, I don't know.
I didn't know how
to get traction
on literary fiction
in the same way
that I felt like I had
something to say about fantasy.
But I'd love to read the book
that did it the other way.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
So I've read the first
two chapters of the book
and I'm looking forward
to reading more of it
after this talk.
So thank you for that.
My question is about, kind of,
not about the series, not about
fantasy, but as you as a
writer, and as a critic.
You could argue that, kind
of the rise of social media
has brought public figures
closer to the public.
LEV GROSSMAN: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: And I'm on a
website called Goodreads.
LEV GROSSMAN: I know it well.
AUDIENCE: And you've been
very prevalent or very active
on your own Goodreads account.
Goodreads, for those
who don't know,
is where you can keep track,
catalog the books that you've
read, write reviews, socialize,
join groups, join reading
challenges, things like that.
So you have your own account.
You have books that you've read
and have a link to your blog.
And so you've been very active,
engaging with your audience.
Recently you've
also annotated one
of the chapters of your
book on genius.com,
rapgenius.com, which I
thought was pretty cool.
So my question is, as a
critic working for Time,
do you see this sort of melding
of public and public figure
opinions about media
that people produce,
as kind of being the
way forward for just
kind of a discussion on media
that's out in the public?
And you can give the
opinions of others
that you've heard,
your own opinion
or if time has it
in the contract
that you can't say
too much about this,
then give that as well.
What are your thoughts?
LEV GROSSMAN: It's
an interesting issue,
which I think this is
really under-discussed.
I mean, the climate in which
books are read and written,
just the sort of
informational environment
in which this happens
has completely
transformed in the past
10 years, 15 years,
and in a very strange way.
I mean, barriers and
boundaries that we
think of as firm and solid
are completely porous.
It's actually an
anecdote worth telling
that my mom met CS Lewis and
had a little chat with him.
Now, when people finish, "The
Magicians," the first thing
they do is Google me.
They see that I'm on
Twitter and tweet at me
and we have a little exchange.
So the quantity of
information that's
flying back and forth between
reader and writer is enormous.
And in effects the way
that books are written
and I think experienced in ways
that are hard to understand.
I mean, in some ways
I think it's great.
One of the reasons I'm
on Twitter and Goodreads
is just because I don't really
like this sense that it's
easy to get, that
authors are austere
or sort of mystical
beings, even godlike.
You know, they're
just normal people
who are trying to words
together like anybody else.
And I like that sort
of de-mystification
that is accomplished
by social media.
But it's a strange thing.
And as a writer,
you definitely have
to watch it because,
you know, you're
really getting a ton of
feedback in near real-time
as to how people are
reacting to your work.
And, you know,
there's a temptation
to kind of bob and
weave and sort of feed
that back into
what you're writing
and think, oh, you know
that guy tweeted me.
He's going to love
this, you know.
And I better not do that
because this other person
didn't like it.
You know, you'll rapidly
go insane and also write
really bad novels,
if you're just
trying to guess what
people want all the time.
It's a strange thing,
and I am absolutely
sure that it's changing
literature in significant ways.
I don't quite know
how yet, but I
think later we're going
to go back and notice
that this was an inflection
point and very weird one.
AUDIENCE: So this is probably
a slightly rude question.
But sparked from a
couple of answers
ago, what thoughts are
you willing to share about
where next?
As you say, you've sort of
salted the earth and moved on.
What are you willing to
say about what's next?
LEV GROSSMAN: Well,
what I'm doing
next-- I'll tell
you what I'm not
doing next, which is this book
that I just spent a year on
and then didn't work out.
I'm still sulking
from that experience.
It's a strange thing.
I've actually
written five novels,
and yet it's still possible
for me to get completely lost,
go down a rabbit hole, throw
away tens and tens of thousands
of words on something
that's just not working out.
I now feel like I've found
the trail again with something
else.
It is fantasy.
I think it's going to
feel very different from,
"The Magicians."
I've been reading a
lot of Thomas Malory.
He's one of the many
hundreds of people
who wrote a version
of the Arthurian epic.
I've been reading a lot of him.
That's probably
all I should say.
But that's where my
research is going right now.
I think that's probably
it for the hour.
Thank you all for coming.
And for those who
didn't come anyway, just
are watching at your
desks, thank you too.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
