Over the last weeks I’ve been subjecting you to the history of the novel as an art form. Part 1 covered the general history of the novel’s development and what makes a novel different from other forms of writing. We also briefly looked at the difference between art novels and popular novels. Part 2 built on the foundations we laid in Part 1, looking at the differences between genre and art fiction. Finally, we considered the rise of fantasy, and what occasioned it, all of it looking through the lens of Marxist Literary Theory (which, in case you missed the lecture, posits that nothing happens in isolation, but is a response to a cause. Trace the cause to understand the effect.)
Your responses have helped me revise my own thinking. The consensus seems to hold that novels rose beside a widespread improvement in education and literacy, along with economic trends that allowed people leisure to read and access to reading material. (I would also mention the founding of public libraries, which Andrew Carnegie praised in his essay “The Gospel of Wealth” and which certain current plutocrats today would greatly benefit from reading. Probably aloud so they don’t miss the important parts.) Excellent Marxists we are.
Three weeks ago (it’s been a rough couple of weeks) I asked why fantasy became popular when it did, and why has it grown into the juggernaut that it has in recent decades. The comments are fascinating, and speak to the need for the imagination to sustain the human spirit through times when reality is just too soul-crushing. In some ways I think there’s truth in that observation, but I also think that the perspective is a bit...foreshortened.
By foreshortened, I mean that times have always been grim for at least half our population, and the desire to escape the realities that grind hope out of life is pretty much eternal. The desire to escape the drudgery of factory and bureaucratic piecework that was lampooned in Brazil had pretty much run its course by the 1960’s, when fantasy began to rise in popularity among the denizens of the Sci-Fi Ghetto (1). Still, it’s an important factor and a brilliant observation. And, without doubt, it had an effect, along with a few other factors.
A Sketch of Fantasy’s Rise in Popularity
The literature of fantasy in Europe and the United States begins in Britain; it’s almost exclusively a British phenomenon. Leaving aside the English preoccupation with Arthurian legend that traces through the Middle Age to become the founding myth of the Empire: Rex Quondam et Rex Futurus, and excepting a few well-debated ancestors of fantasy literature and solid British fairy tales—quite adult fairy tales, by the way; it’s a safe assertion to chart fantasy as beginning as a mainstream form with Tolkien and his mythography of Middle Earth. The Lord of the Rings was published during the disoriented and hardscrabble aftermath of World War II. It enjoyed a modest reception among some, and serious disapproval among many, especially among the highbrow critics. C.S. Lewis wrote the Narnia series shortly thereafter, and I would contend that the pairing of Lewis and Tolkien in the public mind, built in part by their great friendship and the identification of both as Oxbridge medievalists, went a long way toward juvenilizing interpretations of the Ring trilogy by conflating it with Narnia. In the mainstream, Tolkien was dismissed as a curiosity at best, as trash at worst.
This part of the history is well-explored and endlessly explicated. The Lord of the Rings refused to lapse into obscurity; instead, through the 1960’s and 1970’s, Tolkien remained in print, passed hand-to-hand from one reader to another, as friends tend to share their passions among friends. Readers and writers loved the books, openly and unashamedly, despite the canon’s attempts to browbeat its enthusiasts into “serious” literature. [Nota bene: I came of age in the 1970’s, and many well-meaning teachers and professors attempted to destroy my love for the Trilogy by branding it “immature” and “childish.” If you are a reader of A Certain Age, you probably got the same business. I had one high school English teacher lower my class grade because I refused to agree that Steinbeck was a superior writer. I responded that comparing Tolkien and Steinbeck was possible only insofar as they both wrote in the same language. It was not good enough to help my grade.]
Something else happened in the 1970’s: Tolkien imitators—some good, some not so good. Americans began to write fantasy, Brits wrote fantasy, and all of it found a voracious audience. Their works were based mostly on the medieval and British models, but swords and orcs didn’t hold the field alone for long. Then came the backlash, and so were born dark fantasy, gritty fantasy, “realistic” fantasy, fantasy/horror mashups, alternate histories, science fiction crossovers, zombie dystopias and vampire romances, and now, most recently—a return to folktale roots, ably represented by Neil Gaiman, Naomi Novik, Nnedi Okorafor, and a great many others. A revival of wonder and joy, as well as an infusion of cross-cultural traditions from Norse hammer-wielders to desert djinns and Japanese samurai. Great stuff, and what a time it is to be a fantasy reader!
Okay, what have I forgotten?
The why. That what I forgot — the why it all happened. The what that made it possible for fantasy to set roots in the contemporary imagination. After all, it’s not like the Establishment woke up and suddenly realized that fantasy is a legitimate literary form: the September/October 2017 cover story of Poets and Writers lauds Salman Rushie’s “triumphant return to realism,” as if Rushdie had spent his career nattering around on the edges of respectability, mucking about with magic realism. The article is a peculiarly condescending take on Rushdie’s career, and I can’t imagine that he was particularly pleased. No, as far as the gatekeepers of High Art go, fantasy is still very much in the ghetto.
Who cares about the gatekeepers, though? Fantasy is very popular, so you can’t help but think that even the most highbrow critic indulges a secret pleasure now and then.
Anyway, they’re not my focus, or my concern. I’m interested in what happened in culture generally that made room for fantasy. And what happened shook culture to its foundations.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
--Yeats, “The Second Coming,” lines 3-6
The ceremony of innocence…..
Yeats saw it coming before almost anyone else did: the loss of ceremony leads to a loss of faith, but ceremony itself is something precious:
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.
— “A Prayer for my Daughter,” lines 77-80
Ceremony is an important concept in culture; it serves a psychological need, a spiritual need, for people. Its loss requires a compensation.
This is murky territory, so bear with me, please. Look to the poets as bellwethers of culture. TS Eliot grieved the loss of ceremony and looked to its shards as bricolage, the materials with which to build a world-view. Philip Larkin saw the end of religion not exactly as a loss, but
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
— “High Windows,” lines 17-20
A beautiful and limitless atheism. I’m not just referencing the decline of organized religion, although many religions have taken a serious hit in the last century even as “spirituality” and agnosticism have risen to supplant them. Nietzsche might have declared God dead in 1882, but it took a long time for the word to get out.
Meanwhile, at least in Christianity, which is still the dominant organized religion in the West, reform happened. Streamlining happened. Loss of ritual happened. With loss of ritual, you also got diminished theology and less focus on education. Something else supplanted those losses: emotionalism. I contend that you can trace a fairly straight line from Jesus Christ Superstar with its ending at the crucifixion, which gave a great many Christian leaders a collective hissy fit and led them to label Broadway as Sodom on Times Square, to the backlash that birthed the televangelist movement and the rise of Fundamentalism.
But Fundamentalism and Prosperity Theology are themselves intellectually impoverished; for all their focus on emotionalism, they’re also emotionally unsatisfying. There isn’t much meat to ground the sugar high. Still, there are not a great many people who can face Existentialism without recoiling and people will eat what Michael Polan calls “edible foodlike substances” when real food isn’t available, so Joel Osteen will keep raking in the bucks and Pat Robertson will keep chalking up natural disasters, not to natural causes, but to human behavior.
Still, although loss of religion is a part of this, it’s not the whole burrito. No, I’m also talking about the loss of form. The loss of myth.
In Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, one god after another tells Shadow that “this is not a good country for gods.” This is not a good century for gods, either. Or for belief in general. Belief serves a profound psychological function for human beings: it gives us a place in the world and a role to play in that world. Religion does this; myth does this. Without religion—without the forms of religion, we will seek out things to believe in.
So What Does This Have To Do With Fantasy?
Am I really saying that Fantasy supplants religion? No, not at all.
I’m saying instead that the decline of religion, the withering of the mythic roots of religion have opened up space — psychological space — for fantasy to flourish. No, really—hear me out.
Religion—all religion—is grounded in myth. This is as true for Christianity as it is for any faith that interprets a random world in an organized fashion. That’s what religion does—it makes reality comprehensible; it imposes order by building a framework for understanding the randomness that is reality.
Now consider LeGuin:
...fantasy, which, instead of imitating the perceived confusion and complexity of existence [which is the purview of realism], tries to hint at an order and clarity underlying existence (emphasis mine, 2, p. 87)
Let’s combine general literacy and cheap books with concurrent cultural poverty: the effect of a process of commodification of human experience whereby life becomes cheap; at the same time toss in a mix of declining value in myth and you have a barren but realistic landscape, indeed. Little wonder that Star Wars hit such a sweet spot in culture that there are actually people alive today who list their formal religion as Jedi.
Myth, if you recall your Joseph Campbell, serves four basic purposes:
1) Mystic — It awakens in us a sense of wonder and awe at the mysteries of the world, the universe, and life itself.
2) Cosmic — It shows us what the world is and where we fit in it.
3) Social — It shows us how humans are supposed to behave in the world, positive examples being heroes and negative ones being villains and tricksters.
4) Psychological — It provides us what we need to be fully human no matter the situation; it gives us both examples to follow and the rituals we need to navigate the different stages of life: birth, coming of age, marriage, parenthood, and the biggest change of all: death.
All four of these purposes are important; the first two situate the human in relation to the world; the third in relation to society, and fourth in relation to the self. It’s that fourth function that we miss so keenly in contemporary living. Fantasy—the products of (psychologically speaking) primary modes of thinking, the mythic works exemplified by writers like Tolkien, Gaiman, LeGuin, MacDonald, and yes—Lewis, and others whose writings address that order underlying reality and operate on that fourth level; they provide a compensatory vision, complete with ritual and ceremony, a vision that calls to us on an other-than-rational level. It’s the level that George Lucas tapped with Star Wars and Joseph Campbell mapped, more in his Masks of God series than in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, but yes, there too.
Fantasy flourishes now because the time is right for it, because it fills a need that nothing else fills. Part ceremony, part spiritual, deeply psychological.
And here we are, finally, at the conclusion. And we haven’t really started on what it all means, but we will. For the next few weeks, Angmar will take the helm and navigate us through Halloween and the thinning of the veil between the worlds. Once we’re in November, I want to pick up this thread write a little more about Joseph Campbell and a lot more about Jung. You see, for all the brouhaha about the Hero’s Journey, the really important text for fantasy is Symbols of Transformation. If you want to really understand form’s potential and source of power, that’s where you go.
For now, though, we have navigated a long path, and it’s time to rest under the trees.
Notes
1. If you want to read ahead, I plan to spend some of 2018 looking at Hal Duncan’s Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions. Maple Shade, NJ: Lethe Press, 2014.
2. Ursula Le Guin, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,” in The Language of the Night, ed. Susan Woods, NY: Putnam, 1979, pp. 83-96.