The cover article of TIME Magazine this week was about the impending release (but not impending enough, drool drool drool) of The Two Towers, the second film of Lord of the Rings. That article was followed by another, about the more general rebirth of fantasy as a central part of American popular culture. It is a fascinating article, but as a longtime reader and hopeful practitioner of fantasy, I found it a bit disappointing.
Firstly, I’m not sure if the current fantasy boom is really indicative of something deep or if it is more a fad. I’d like to believe that fantasy as a genre is gaining some new respect and that the potential it offers for storytelling and for the exploration of complex themes is at long last to be recognized. It would be nice to see a mainstream magazine’s book review section actually review a fantasy book as a book, instead of conveying a clear message that fantasy is like romance novels — OK in small doses, and as long as when you’re done you dutifully return to your John Updike or Norman Mailer like a good literatus. I’d love it if the current boom led to a weakening of the barriers that mark out the SF and fantasy ghetto, inside which authors like Charles de Lint and Neil Gaiman and Patricia McKillip are valued for the wonderful voices they are but outside which are barely even conceded to exist, when people like Oprah Winfrey sagely announce that they would never read a work of speculative fiction.
The authors of the article seem to view the shift toward the fantastic as happening for two basic reasons: a reaction against technology, and a desire for moral clarity in our own time of darkness. The latter is easily understood — we appear to be looking for comfort in our stories, seeking out tales in which the lines of good and evil are clearly marked, when the villains stand on one side of the battlefield and the heroes on the other, and the heroes and villains alike are unwavering in their pursuit of either heroism or villainy. We are looking for solace in the antiquated moral clarity of fantasy, even as we confront a real world where moral clarity is hard to come by and where the villains are not so easily found. I find this view erroneous, because it seriously underestimates the ability of fantasy to address questions of morality.
It all seems so easy in Lord of the Rings: Frodo, Gandalf and the rest are good, and Sauron and Saruman are bad. Those are the battlelines, and the entire epic is the tale of the confrontation of those two camps. But it really isn’t that simple, because Tolkien introduces a tertiary concept, that of temptation. The acts of evil that precipitate the story and drive it along are committed by persons who were once good. This is an aspect of Tolkien’s good-versus-evil dynamic that is easily overlooked and underestimated.
The lines between good and evil are also initially obvious in the Star Wars films, but then too the lines are blurred through temptation and justification. George Lucas postulates a view of evil that strongly suggests that evil does not arise in a vacuum, but more frighteningly it arises from the misapplication of a desire to do good. This is clearly seen in the way the Republic is not conquered by the Empire; instead, the Republic becomes the Empire. And this doesn’t even begin to discuss the possibilities Lucas raises about the subject of redemption.
Moral clarity is blurred spectacularly in the finest fantasy literature being written today. Guy Gavriel Kay’s seminal novel Tigana, for instance, depicts heroes who are at times less than sympathetic and willing to commit wrongs in the pursuit of their goals, and villains who — while certainly monstrous — are also very human in their motivations. The dualism of Kay’s moral questioning — “Is it possible for good to employ evil in its ends, and can a person be good and still do evil” — is pervasive in the work, part of which makes it so memorable. And then there is George R. R. Martin’s amazing Song of Ice and Fire series, in which as the series now stands — three books completed of a projected six — one would be hardpressed to even name who the villains and heroes are in the work. It goes on and on. Fantasy is not just “knights in shining armor taking on the evil wizard in black”.
The reaction against technology angle is also interesting but faulty. The authors of the TIME article suggest that the current fascination with fantasy may be due to a more pessimistic outlook toward technology and the future on our part, which has in turn resulted in our desire for lands of the past, lands that never were, a time when chivalry was the norm. Since a futuristic utopia does not appear to be in the offing, the authors say, a utopia of the past is desirable instead.
But I’m not really sure that this holds up. The fact that we didn’t get the world of The Jetsons, and don’t seem likely to, does not strike me as a reason for a newfound interest in fantasy. Not in a world of cell-phones, DVD players, MP3 file-trading, a computer in every living room, and cars that look like Star Trek shuttlecraft on wheels. Surely the big Civil War craze of a few years back did not imply an inner desire on the part of all those re-enactors to actually go storming the fields of North Carolina or to spill fresh blood on the field at Gettysburg; but that pop-culture phenomenon — as much as the current fantasy craze — is reflective of something. Something deep in the human soul, which is sometimes latent but always present.
I’m thinking that the current fantasy boom has to do with fantasy’s folkloric underpinnings, its roots in myth and legend and the archetypal stories that have woven through centuries of narratives since before the invention of writing. And there is nothing inherent to fantasy that makes it more successful than other genres at this; consider the above-mention Civil War craze. Yes, that had a great deal to do with American History and the repercussions of that war that are still being felt, but it also had to do with the heroic stories within it, and the treatment of that War in a way that is almost Homeric in nature.
The authors of the TIME article make a tenuous suggestion that the recent years of pop culture in America have been dominated by science fiction franchises, which are now moving aside as the Jetsons future fades from consciousness. But the franchises they name are not illustrative of the point they make. Star Wars, for all its SF trappings, is a fantasy, and an archetypal, Campbellian-structured story to boot. The Matrix is only beginning as a franchise, but its SF acoutrements — like Star Wars, are awash in mythic and religious subtext. Independence Day is not even a franchise. That leaves Star Trek, which alone gives some credence to the authors’ claim of fantasy’s rebirth arising from growing pessimism about the future. But is Trek on the wane because our tastes have changed? or could it also be because of the franchise’s oft-cited decline in quality?
Children’s literature is awash in fantasy right now, what with Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, and Philip Pullman’s brilliant His Dark Materials sequence. Why are the children so entranced? Are they picking up on the pessimism that has reshaped adult attitudes toward fantasy? I somehow doubt that. More likely, I think, that they are responding with the “sense of wonder” that adults tend to lose. There is a reason that Damon Knight once said “The Golden Age of science fiction is twelve”, and I don’t think he was being entirely derisive.
What I think is ultimately at work here is a swinging of the pendulum, away from the Age of Irony. I think we are returning to fantasy, in large part, because we want emotion in our art again. We want excitement, and we want to feel that things matter. We want to cheer the arrival of the Riders of Rohan, to hiss at the turning of Saruman, to dread the fall of Anakin, to cower in the darkness of Khazad-dum, to cry as Padme gives up her children. We want more than what the Age of Irony had to offer in its stories, when jaded cynicism was the rule, when boredom was embraced, and when a rolling of the eyes was the standard emotional reaction. I don’t think fantasy is more popular now because we want escapism from a dangerous world. I think it’s more popular now because we want to savor our world and our reactions to it.