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Shedding the ‘Light Fantastic’ on Terry Pratchett’s Narrative Worlds: An Introduction

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Part of the book series: Critical Approaches to Children's Literature ((CRACL))

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Abstract

In this chapter, Marion Rana provides a brief overview of Pratchett’s work in terms of content, literary technique and its impact on fantasy writing and fandom. A truly postmodern author, Pratchett rejuvenated the fantasy genre with his highly distinctive and influential narrative style, technical and scientific wit, stylistic and narrative creativity, as well as social, political and philosophical commentary. Focusing on Pratchett’s designation as a ‘democratic writer’ and his use of intertextuality and genre appropriation, the introduction sets the tone for the collection as a whole, which aims to give a detailed overview of both the multidimensionality of Pratchett’s work and the insightful scholarship surrounding it, and to provide a solid launching point for future engagement with his work.

[D]arkness isn’t the opposite of light, it is simply its absence, and what was radiating from the book was the light that lies on the far side of darkness, the light fantastic.

It was a rather disappointing purple colour.

(Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic: A Sequel to The Colour of Magic (London: Corgi Books, 1989 [1986]), 178–179.)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Pratchett, Lords and Ladies: A Discworld Novel (London: Gollancz, 1992), 7.

  2. 2.

    Gail-Nina Anderson, ‘The Folklore of Discworld’, Folklore 122:1 (2011), 111.

  3. 3.

    See Linda Richards, ‘Terry Pratchett’, January Magazine (August 2002), accessed 10 October 2016, http://www.januarymagazine.com/profiles/tpratchett2002.html.

  4. 4.

    Peter Hunt, ‘Terry Pratchett’, in Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction, eds Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz (New York: Continuum, 2001), 91.

  5. 5.

    Garan Holcombe, ‘Terry Pratchett: Critical Perspective’ (2015), accessed 10 October 2016, https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/terry-pratchett.

  6. 6.

    The Discworld novels for young readers are The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (2001, winner of the Carnegie Medal) and those of the Tiffany Aching series (The Wee Free Men [2003], A Hat Full of Sky [2004], Wintersmith [2006], I Shall Wear Midnight [2010] and The Shepherd’s Crown [2015]).

  7. 7.

    Pratchett, ‘Imaginary World, Real Stories’, Folklore 111 (2000), 160.

  8. 8.

    See, for example, Daniel Scott, ‘And the World Continues to Spin…: Secularism and Demystification in Good Omens’, in Shedding the Light Fantastic on Terry Pratchett’s Narrative Worlds: From Giant Turtles to Small Gods, ed. Marion Rana [Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave, 2017], xy.

  9. 9.

    As quoted by Alison Flood, ‘A Life in Writing: Terry Pratchett’, Guardian, 15 October 2011, accessed 10 October 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/oct/14/terry-pratchett-life-writing.

  10. 10.

    Richards, ‘Terry Pratchett’, n.p.

  11. 11.

    Anne Hiebert Alton and William C. Spruiell, ‘Introduction’, in Discworld and the Disciplines: Critical Approaches to the Terry Pratchett Works, eds Anne Hiebert Alton and William C. Spruiell (Jefferson: McFarland, 2014), 8.

  12. 12.

    See the bio blurb of several Discworld novels, e.g. Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic: The First Discworld Novel (London: Corgi Books, 1998 [1983]).

  13. 13.

    Pratchett, Soul Music: A Discworld Novel (London: Corgi Books, 1988), 24.

  14. 14.

    See Pratchett, ‘Imaginary World’, 158.

  15. 15.

    As a non-native reader, having discovered Pratchett while still studying English as a foreign language at school, I should know: in retrospect, I would say that a good 80 per cent of the cultural and English literature references went over my head, as did a lot of the puns, wordplays and descriptive names. Reading Pratchett today, I still discover meanings that eluded me when I first read his works—be it because of a lack of language, reading, cultural reference points, or merely because, as an adolescent, I had limited access to (or in fact interest in) some of the more mature wisdom that shines through a lot of Pratchett’s work. Be that as it may, I was instantly hooked, and am clearly not the only non-native who was and is: although Pratchett has always been most successful in the UK, he has a sizeable international fan base, a large part of which reads him in the original English.

    On the notion of understanding a plot while missing major intertextual or cultural references, see also Gideon Haberkorn’s chapter in this collection (Gideon Haberkorn, ‘Seriously Relevant: Parody, Pastiche and Satire in the Discworld Novels’, in Shedding the Light Fantastic on Terry Pratchett’s Narrative Worlds: From Giant Turtles to Small Gods, ed. Marion Rana [Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave, 2017], xy).

  16. 16.

    Flood, ‘Life in Writing’, n.p.

  17. 17.

    Pratchett, ‘Imaginary World’, 159.

  18. 18.

    Audrey Taylor, ‘Trapped: Fairytale in Pratchett and Lackey’, Gender Forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies 52 (2015), accessed 10 October 2016, http://www.genderforum.org/issues/special-issue-terry-pratchett/trapped-fairytale-in-pratchett-and-lackey/.

  19. 19.

    Gideon Haberkorn, ‘Seriously Relevant: Parody, Pastiche and Satire in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Novels’, in Shedding the Light Fantastic on Terry Pratchett’s Narrative Worlds: From Giant Turtles to Small Gods, ed. Marion Rana (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave, 2017), xy.

  20. 20.

    I would go even further than this: without a passing knowledge of folklore, central plot twists and preconditions are sometimes not understandable. When guardswoman Angua, a werewolf, is killed while in wolf-form, for instance, and later returns to life, her resurrection is only met with Carrot’s comment: ‘I wasn’t certain. […] But I thought, well, isn’t it only silver that kills them?’ No further narrative explanation is given as regards this assumed characteristic of werewolves (Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: A Discworld Novel [London: Gollanzc, 1994 (1993)], 278).

  21. 21.

    As Simpson points out, Pratchett is ‘well aware that folklore is not static, nor is it necessarily rural, but takes different forms in different social contexts’ (Jacqueline Simpson, ‘In Memoriam: Sir Terry Pratchett OBE (1948–2015)’, Folklore 126 [August 2015], 233). The conversation between Simpson and Pratchett on the folkloristic nature of his work is highly illuminative of the latter’s genesis (‘Sir Terry Pratchett in Conversation with Jacqueline Simpson’, recorded at the Annual Discworld Convention in Birmingham, 26 August 2010, accessed 10 October 2016, http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/terrypratchett/), as is his Katharine Briggs Lecture in 1999, which famously starts with his statement: ‘I am not a folklorist, but I am a vast consumer of folklore—an end user, if you like. I think about folklore the same way that a carpenter thinks about trees, although a good carpenter works with the grain of the wood and should endeavour to make a table that will leave the tree glad that it became timber’ (Pratchett, ‘Imaginary World’, 159).

  22. 22.

    Anderson, ‘Folklore’, 112.

  23. 23.

    The idea of fantasy’s literary non-normativity is a construction, of course: fantasy makes for a strikingly high proportion of the literary market, so readers of fantasy are by no means literary outsiders. That being said, fantasy writing is an outsider to what is commonly labelled as ‘high literature’, and although art’s division into ‘low’ and ‘high’ has long been questioned, it will probably take at least another generation of scholars to incorporate the discussion of fantasy and science fiction literature (to name only two) into the scholarly canon.

  24. 24.

    Christine Quail, ‘Hip to Be Square: Nerds in Media Culture’, Flow (2008), accessed 10 October 2016, http://www.flowjournal.org/2009/02/hip-to-be-square-nerds-in-media-culture-christine-quail-mcmaster-university/.

  25. 25.

    Kevin Kelly, ‘The Third Culture’, Science 279: 5353 (1998), 992.

  26. 26.

    W. Jeff Cooper, ‘Stereotypes in Television and Films: The Impact of The Big Bang Theory’, Men and Masculinities (Fall 2014), 8.

  27. 27.

    Kelly, ‘Third Culture’, 992.

  28. 28.

    See, for example, Terry Pratchett, Hogfather: A Discworld Novel (London: Corgi Books, 1997 [1996]), 145–151.

  29. 29.

    See William C. Spruiell, ‘Counting Dangerous Beans: Pratchett, Style and the Utility of Premodified Bits’, in Discworld and the Disciplines: Critical Approaches to the Terry Pratchett Works, eds Anne Hiebert Alton and William C. Spruiell (Jefferson: McFarland, 2014), 113.

  30. 30.

    As Spruiell argues, this scholarly feel enters the texts only on a formal level, and not on the level of content: The use of footnotes gives the texts a scholarly ‘look’, while the footnotes themselves aren’t written in an academic fashion: ‘Pratchett adopts the visual form of the scholarly convention (in that they are quite recognizably footnotes, in the printed editions), but the footnotes are in some cases adverbial which-clauses—a colloquial feature actively prohibited by some formal style guides’ (Spruiell, ‘Dangerous Beans’, 113).

  31. 31.

    Simpson, ‘In Memoriam’, 233.

  32. 32.

    Simpson, ‘In Memoriam’, 233.

  33. 33.

    Neil Gaiman, ‘An Interview with Sir Terry Pratchett’, boingboing, 10 October 2011, accessed 10 October 2016, http://boingboing.net/2011/10/10/an-interview-with-sir-terry-pr.html.

  34. 34.

    Pratchett, Guards! Guards! A Discworld Novel (London: Corgi Books, 1990 [1989]), 302.

  35. 35.

    Pratchett, Jingo: A Discworld Novel (London: Corgi Books, 1998 [1997]), 199.

  36. 36.

    See Emily Lavin Leverett, ‘‘At Times Like This It’s Traditional That a Hero Comes Forth’: Romance and Identity in Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards!’, in Shedding the Light Fantastic on Terry Pratchett’s Narrative Worlds: From Giant Turtles to Small Gods, ed. Marion Rana (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave, 2017), xy; Lucas Boulding, ‘‘I Can’t Be Having with That’: The Ethical Implications of Professional Witchcraft in Pratchett’s Fiction’, Gender Forum 52 (2015), accessed 10 October 2016, http://www.genderforum.org/issues/special-issue-terry-pratchett/i-cant-be-having-with-that-the-ethical-implications-of-professional-witchcraft-in-pratchetts-fiction/; Farah Mendlesohn, ‘Faith and Ethics’, in Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature, eds Andrew M. Butler, Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Baltimore, MD: Old Earth Books, 2004), 239–260.

  37. 37.

    ‘This I choose to do. If there is a price, this I choose to pay. If it is my death, then I choose to die. Where this takes me, there I choose to go. I choose. This I choose to do’ (Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith: A Story of Discworld [London et al.: Doubleday, 2007], 18)

  38. 38.

    Pratchett, Thud! A Discworld Novel (London: Corgi Books, 2006 [2005]), 396–397.

  39. 39.

    A recurring question in the Discworld novels is ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’, i.e. ‘Who watches the watchman?’, which Vimes eventually answers with a resounding: ‘I do.’

  40. 40.

    Janet Brennan Croft, ‘Nice, Good, or Right: Faces of the Wise Woman in Terry Pratchett’s ‘Witches’ Novels’, Mythlore 26, 3/4 (Spring/Summer 2008), 151–164.

  41. 41.

    Boulding, ‘Ethical Implications’, n.p.

  42. 42.

    Boulding, ‘Ethical Implications’, n.p.

  43. 43.

    See Lavin Leverett, ‘Medieval Romance’, xy.

  44. 44.

    Pratchett, Thud!, 86.

  45. 45.

    Amanda Craig, ‘The Shepherd’s Crown Review: Terry Pratchett’s Farewell to Discworld’, Guardian, 30 August 2015, accessed 10 October 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/30/the-shepherds-crown-review-terry-pratchett-discworld-posthumous.

  46. 46.

    Pratchett’s daughter, Rhianna, who curates her father’s estate, has already announced that she is not planning any posthumous Discworld releases (see Sarah Shaffi, ‘Pratchett’s Daughter Rules out Discworld Follow-Ons’, The Bookseller, 11 June 2015, accessed 10 October 2016, http://www.thebookseller.com/news/pratchetts-daughter-rules-out-discworld-follow-ons).

  47. 47.

    Despite Pratchett’s insistence that he does not feel closer to the character of Vimes (see Gaiman, ‘Interview’, n.p.), his choice of Granny Weatherwax as his alter ego is perhaps a little surprising: in a way, Pratchett the author always seemed to be most closely linked to Vimes, whose exasperation with the world, and annoyance with the sheer stupidity of his annoying yet ultimately lovable fellow humans, in a way always seemed to mirror Pratchett’s own view of the world. He, the brilliant thinker, loved to entertain his fans and held them in high regard. The rest of the world? Maybe not so much. And as Pratchett became older, Samuel Vimes became more domesticated, more housetrained, but also more cynical and, notably, more in love with his cynicism; not to forget the fact that he simply starred in more novels than Granny Weatherwax, particularly towards the end of the series.

  48. 48.

    Pratchett, Hogfather, 3.

  49. 49.

    Charlotte Webb, ‘The Watchman and the Hippopotamus: Art, Play and Otherness in Thud!’, in Discworld and the Disciplines: Critical Approaches to the Terry Pratchett Works, eds Anne Hiebert Alton and William C. Spruiell (Jefferson: McFarland, 2014), 106.

  50. 50.

    Pratchett, Lords and Ladies, 245.

  51. 51.

    Pratchett, Light Fantastic, 179.

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  1. Interjuli, Lorch, Germany

    Marion Rana

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Rana, M. (2018). Shedding the ‘Light Fantastic’ on Terry Pratchett’s Narrative Worlds: An Introduction. In: Rana, M. (eds) Terry Pratchett's Narrative Worlds. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67298-4_1

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