Fantasy: Help or Hindrance?

Elijah Wood as Frodo

Elijah Wood as Frodo

My friend Alan Paskow, who is struggling with cancer, queried me about my post on Alfred Noyes’ “The Highwayman,” wondering whether the poem wasn’t just an insubstantial fantasy. I’ve been writing about The Lord of the Rings as a fantasy perhaps indulged in by a World War I veteran who wasn’t willing to face up to the meaninglessness of the war (see previous entry). And I certainly used Lord of the Rings when I was growing up to escape from the nasty emotions triggered by the desegregation lawsuit brought my family and others against the Franklin County Board of Education (described here). I am a far way from settling the pros and cons of fantasy in my mind, but today I will take the first of what are sure to be many stabs at this issue.

I was in full retreat from the world when I started reading Lord of the Rings. As I’ve mentioned before, desegregation stress may have caused a case of mononucleosis in seventh grade.  I stayed home and read, grabbing every fantasy work I could find.

Which was hard to do in those days, when there weren’t very many of what today are called sword and sorcery novels. Today you can find shelves of them in almost any bookstore, but back then there were C. S. Lewis and Tolkien and that was about it. I did manage to find The Princess and Curdie by George MacDonald, an author that Lewis cites as a major influence. I also read and enjoyed books like Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott, and The Scottish Chiefs, by Jane Porter, but they didn’t have magic. If the Harry Potter books had been around, I would have devoured them as kids today do.

So Tolkien was about it, and I read him over and over. I felt like an outsider doing so since no one else was reading him (I envy the Harry Potter readers their communities). I knew that I felt alive and vibrant. The hobbits were enough like kids that I could relate to them, and I was impressed with how they start off silly (splashing in the bathtub) but grow in stature until, by the end, they have become knights of Rohan and Gondor and have gone head-to-head with Sauron. I was inspired by Frodo’s quest, I understood how he could feel weighed down by responsibility, I went through his moral struggles about what to do with Gollum (I got a major ethics lesson from their interchange), and I was moved by his friendship with Sam.

When Gandalf “dies” and Frodo determines that he must set out on his own, I understood at some level that my own childhood along with its dependence on my parents, was ending.

Yet in other ways the book didn’t confront me with the moral quandaries that later books would. No one has any compunction about slaying goblins, for example, and Gimli and Legolas even have a killing contest at the Battle of Helms Deep.  The world is fairly easily bifurcated into good and evil.

Contrast this with, say, Catcher in the Rye, which I read three years later. I mention Salinger’s novel because I hated it and wanted to go running back to fantasy fiction.

I will explore my aversion in a later post—I’ll just say here that Holden Caulfield was way too real for me—but I mention it because of the way that fantasy became associated with holding on to childhood. It is as though what had been a support became a kind of impediment.

As I say that, the Bronte family comes to mind. They were impressively precocious children, writing hundreds of stories and poems about their invented world of Gondal. They had a devil of a time negotiating the real world when they grew up, however.

I am no longer drawn to fantasy literature as I once was, so maybe I have indeed put away childish things. Even “The Highwayman” seems flat, although I still invoke it.

Freud tells us, however, that we never give up what we loved as children. We just find substitutes. My substitute is adult fiction, which, after all, also involves invented worlds. I have a special fondness for magical realism, works like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight’s Children and Beloved. When my friend Rachel Kranz creates a New York psychic, first in Leaps of Faith and then in the novel she is currently writing, I am able to imagine, as I did when a child, that the world is less matter of fact and more mysterious than people think.

These books are like bridges that allow me to travel back to my childhood sense of wonder while still remaining in touch with my adult self. Our reading needs become more complex as we get older because we are more complex. But we are still fed by fantasy.

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