INTRODUCTION
Many elements go into the act of creation, not least of which are imagination, hope and perseverance. First comes inspiration—an idea or inkling of what is possible; next is hope that the possible can be made actual; then begins the struggle to make this happen. Without perseverance, an idea is nothing more than potential. Without hope of achievement, a dreamer will not even try to convert dream to reality. And without a vision of what could be, the most persevering optimist has nothing to create.
Fantasy can feed these three aspects of creation. Furthermore, by presenting the world as it might be, it can inspire readers with a sense of what their lives could be. And, by offering readers the hope that anything is possible, it can encourage them to strive to be responsible for the creation of their own lives.
Such may be fantasy’s potential, but it is not its inevitable achievement. There are stories that contain all the conventional elements of fantasy yet fail to induce in readers even the faintest sense of life’s possibilities. Then there are stories in which the conventions are remolded, or even discarded, and yet the stories delight and amaze and instill in the reader the profound belief that anything is possible.
What are these conventions, and why is it that the reshaping or discarding of them can result in fantasy stories that fulfill the promise of the genre, showing us ourselves and our lives as they are and might be?
To answer these questions it may be instructive to seek out some of fantasy’s roots, explore how the conventions came to exist, and why they persist, then examine the work of Diana Wynne Jones—a writer who reshaped these conventions and in so doing created fantasies that fulfill the potential of fantasy.
Chapter 1: THE ROOTS OF FANTASY
i The Medieval Romance
The conventional hero of modern fantasy has much in common with the hero of medieval romance. Margaret Schlauch points out in her discussion of Old and Middle English literature that one of the most famous of the medieval romance plots is actually a blending of the Arthurian legend and the Celtic Grail myth.
On its own, Schlauch states, the Arthurian legend expressed the idea of courtly love, which had its roots in French feudal aristocracy and the cult of the Virgin Mary. Central was the notion that a knight take as his highest inspiration a noble lady who was virtuously inaccessible. For her he would perform his most valiant deeds.
The Grail myth was Celtic in origin but was adopted by Medieval Christians who claimed the Grail as the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper.
There is a third legend, Schlauch adds, which fired the medieval imagination: the tale of Troy. This tale about Paris’s abduction of Helen from the Greeks and the resultant ten-year war and fall of Troy focused on the deeds of heroes and supernatural gods.
Heroic narratives were common before the middle ages and dealt, for example, with warriors such as Beowulf who defeated the monster Grendel. But it is in the medieval romance plots, Schlauch claims, that the disparate elements of courtly love, Christianity, and the supernatural come together. Hence, Christianity inspires the convention of male heroes ranged with the forces of good to do battle with the forces of evil. Evil is embodied by ‘the other’ in the form of wicked magicians and enchantresses who provide a glamorous supernatural element. The larger-than-life hero fights the evil out there with a supernatural, magical weapon only he is special enough to wield. Virtuous female characters are helpless and virginal, in keeping with the conventions governing courtly love. Powerful or active female characters are, in general, evil or morally weak, and are justly punished.
The similarity of these thirteenth century storytelling elements to the conventions of modern high fantasy some seven hundred years later is striking. One can infer that such conventions are drawn directly from the medieval romance tradition. If so, are there consequences to modern readers when modern stories are modeled on the story traditions of a time long past? Possibly the answer may be found by examining what impact the original romance plots may have had on medieval society.
ii The Feudal System
Romance plots were not only a source of entertainment. They also helped perpetuate a feudal hierarchy. Under early feudalism, knights pledged allegiance and military service to their lords. As feudalism progressed and rulership became more centralized in kings, this vassalage became linked with fiefdom whereby land and its revenues were granted to nobles in return for their military loyalty to their overlord king. Serfs paid homage in their turn by providing manual labor on the land. Thus the social hierarchy was institutionalized. Initially, fiefs reverted to the lord upon the death of his vassal. But eventually they became hereditary, and land—the source of wealth and power in the absence of money-based capitalism—came to be controlled by the male aristocracy.
At the same time, the aristocracy began to adopt the chivalric code popular in feudal France. It outlined rules governing knighthood and under it a knight no longer pledged overt allegiance to his lord. Instead he pledged allegiance to a noble lady. However, that lady was usually the lord’s wife, and as such his property, so the balance of power remained unchanged beneath a veneer of noble idealism. The chivalric code efficiently denied women actual power, and at the same time ensured that those not brought up in the code could no longer rise up the social ranks, for only boys of noble birth were eligible for the extensive military and social training knighthood required. Thus the social system was cemented and control of the land remained in the hands of the aristocracy.
Earlier heroic narratives such as that of Beowulf had carried the implicit message that strength and bravery were all that were needed to rise in the ranks of society. Now, with the landed aristocracy concerned with retaining the power and social system that benefited them, such stories were replaced with those that promoted the chivalric code and courtly love.
iii The Church
The other major influence on medieval society was the Church, so it is not surprising that romance plots became intertwined with religion. The romance plots dealing as they did with heroes battling evil lent themselves to allegorical interpretation, and it is not coincidental that the Middle Ages saw an upsurge in Christian crusades against the eastern infidel who were labeled evil because ‘unfaithful’ to the ‘true’ God. However, in reality, it was not religious fervor alone that propelled the crusades. Since land (and therefore wealth and power) passed under feudalism to the first-born son, additional sons in aristocratic families saw the crusades as an opportunity to amass wealth through the spoils of war in foreign countries. In addition those otherwise condemned to a lifetime of serfdom also flocked to join the crusades. Medieval romances however perpetuated the notion of the crusades as righteous and idealistic and something to be aspired to.
Later, as merchants profited from the increasing disposable income of the landed aristocracy, a middle class of new power-holders grew up. Once capitalism was established as an alternate source of wealth and power, these middle class merchants demanded stories of their own that featured, not aristocratic heroes, but heroes who were men like themselves. The aristocracy in these stories were presented in quite another light than they had been in their own romances.
It would seem, then, that medieval romances were not only a source of inspiration or entertainment, but were also the highly effective means for society to promote and preserve the dominant culture. If so, then what does it say about modern society if literary conventions from feudal times are alive and well in the twenty-first century? Perhaps a closer look at modern fantasy and its conventions can shed some light on the question and thus on the implications when fantasy narratives diverge from these conventions.
Chapter 2: FANTASY AND PARADOX
i Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast
If it is the case that romance plots served to promote and preserve a way of life, then it seems something of a paradox that fantasy, a genre so wedded in our minds to the imaginary, the unknown, and the surprising, should be so firmly rooted in a form of storytelling essentially concerned with standing still and maintaining the status quo.
Nor is this the only paradox governing fantasy. Indeed, there is a paradox at the heart of even realistic stories. A realistic story is, in the end, an artificial representation of reality, not reality itself; but teller and listener form a contract with each other to behave as if the story were true. In fantasy, the teller and listener stretch that contract to its limits. Indeed, the listener must strive, like the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, to become capable of believing “as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” (238) All it takes, the Queen points out, is practice.
ii Subtle Censorship
Fantasy calls into question just what reality is by revealing it to be dependent, occasionally, on some form of consensus. Heresy indeed for those who wish to maintain the status quo. After all, what is to stop people from deciding, by consensus, that they would like a different kind of ‘reality,’ a different kind of society?
One solution might be to present change as undesirable. And so we see an interesting phenomenon. High fantasy usually concerns the battle between good and evil. In such fantasy, the audience is often presented with a society experiencing a sort of idyllic golden age where everyone is content with life as it is. On the horizon, however, storm clouds loom: the world (society) is threatened by external evil forces that might destroy (change) it forever. The forces for good, led by a self-sacrificing hero, resist to the utmost the encroachment of this transforming evil and ultimately restore the world to its former idyllic state, thus ensuring a ‘happy’ ending.
These fantasies, despite their imaginative elements, are not, at heart, about imagining a new society. They are not about change. In these stories, change is dangerous; transformation is death. Here we see stories that flirt with the seductive unknown but retract back into the warm and familiar, where society, the world, life, unfolds according to a grand plan created by a higher power. It is not really for the individual to question the way things are, it is only for the individual to choose whether to support or oppose that way, to pick which army he wants to fight for.
The central conflict may dovetail neatly with Christian doctrine wherein the soul’s battle against temptation reflects man’s inherent spiritual craving for perfection. But such stories may also leave readers ill equipped to deal with mundane reality, for real life is not clear cut; it is not so easy to define the world in terms of black and white, good and evil. And if readers are taught that violence is the solution to any perceived threat, then the result is a violent society. Furthermore, rather than truly identifying with the powerful, active, perfect protagonists of such stories, readers tend to project their qualities onto those whom they perceive as powerful and active in real life: our political and social leaders for example. Such leaders are expected to be strong and perfect and when they fail to live up to our projections, as they inevitably must being human and imperfect, rather than question our tendency to hero-worship, rather than question a status quo in which authority is not to be challenged, we tear down the leaders with feet of clay and look around for someone else to raise in their place. In this way we can abdicate responsibility for when things go wrong in society and blame someone else. And if we forfeit the power to change things, well, at least we are permitted to stay within the ‘safe’ confines of society rather than be ostracized and forced to act alone.
It is ironic that Fantasy itself, consisting as it does of imaginative, implausible components, is not naturally suited to the task of preserving the status quo. It does demand the suspension of disbelief in its audience, and in that state the audience is perhaps less likely to question just what they are agreeing to believe. But there remains that element in fantasy of idealism—a search for the perfect state of being, where the hero is special and chosen, not lost in a morass of others just like him. This yearning for specialness conflicts with society’s need for homogeneity, and it is interesting to realize that Fantasy heroes, for example, often have unique talents or acquire secret knowledge denied everyone else, but that high fantasy has often demanded that the talent or knowledge—the power—of the individual is used to benefit the group by restoring the world to the way it used to be. The idealistic yearning for individual specialness is only permitted expression through being dedicated to the group.
What does this mean beyond the world of the fantasy story? It means the group may be special compared to other groups, but the individual may not, unless that specialness benefits the group. In a sense society subverts or censors the convention and uses it to promote society’s needs, and the result is tension.
On the one hand, the individual, yearning for specialness but always forced to submit to the collective, may begin to experience the warm and familial safety of belonging to a group as rigid and confining. On the other hand, in the eyes of the group, the autonomous individual threatens the group’s social cohesion. The individual, exposed to new ideas, may bring back special gifts for the group but there is the risk that he may be seduced into leaving the group, leading to the eventual dissolution of the group and thence to chaos and anarchy. The need for the known exists in conflict with the yearning for the unknown, and the reader receives mixed messages. On the surface it seems that specialness is rewarded because after all the hero often appears to be acting autonomously. But stories usually end with the individual back in a group in some way. Specialness is not really acceptable in these stories so that society might be saved.
Chapter 3: SUBVERSION
Storytelling has not only been used to uphold an existing social order. Frequently it has been used to subvert it. Despite the efforts of the group there is always someone somewhere ready to flout its expectations—on principle, or, failing that, even from simple perverseness. One can look to the trickster tales of many cultures, the satires, the folktales, and especially the oral tradition, which is not dependent on the infrastructure for dissemination of its messages, and see many examples of powerless heroes succeeding in spite of their seeming weakness because they break the rules of the game. With these stories, the powerless create the heroes they need to inspire them in resisting or transforming the dominant culture and the status quo.
Fantasy, as a literature of the impossible made believable, naturally lends itself to attempts to question and transform the way things are because it heightens our sensitivity to the question of what, precisely, constitutes reality. The audience, after all, consciously chooses to believe in impossible things for the duration of the story—impossible things the teller makes seem plausible. Together teller and audience create a ‘reality’ by consensus, and this act of creating may perhaps, by inference, be carried into the real world and applied to social reality or rules of conduct.
This is not the only way fantasy sharpens our awareness of reality however. Another way that it does so relates to memory and the passage of time. To a medieval audience, many of the things we take for granted would have seemed fantastical. Flight was once upon a time an impossibility outside of fantasy. But modern audiences take it for granted and are thus in a position to understand how reality can sometimes depend on point of view. The way things are now is not necessarily the way things will always be; it is not the way things must always be.
That being so, fantasy then becomes not only a literature of the impossible, it becomes, too, a literature of the possible, and thus a vehicle for subversion. Even the traditional conventions of fantasy no longer need be sacrosanct. They can themselves be subverted and adapted, and the fantasy form, with its language of possibilities, is so malleable it can evolve to absorb these new ‘rules.’ Fantasies can show us any possible world, including our own. Especially our own. Our world, our society, with its unquestioned rules which are our creations, its constructs formed by consensus, its myths about the way things are. As Ursula Le Guin points out in her essay, Earthsea Revisioned, “we can see the myth as a myth: a construct, which may be changed; an idea which may be rethought, made more true, more honest.” (Le Guin, 169-173) And Diana Wynne Jones, in her fantasies for children, does just that. She reconstructs and rethinks the myths and conventions and makes them “more true, more honest.”