Thursday
Today I will be delivering the following talk as part of Sewanee’s Lifelong Learning series, delivered in a venue that used to be my high school and where I spoke 50 years ago.
It may sound strange to some of you that a literary scholar such as myself would talk about fantasy. Aren’t we supposed to be studying real literature? And don’t many of us think of fantasy as, well, just fantasy? Aren’t fairy tales and sword and sorcery stories childish things that we’re supposed to put away when we grow up?
Yet over the past few decades, literary scholars have been finding special significance in fantasy, as witnessed by publications like Tolkien Studies and by well-attended academic conferences like the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. Even if we confine ourselves to revered classics, we see many that can be labeled fantasy or contain fantasy elements.
For instance, in my own specialty of British literature, we find Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Arthurian tales of Geoffrey of Monmouth and Sir Thomas Malory, various tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, The Faerie Queene, Doctor Faustus, Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, Paradise Lost, Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels, the gothic novels of Horace Walpole, Anne Radcliffe, and Charles Maturin, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Frankenstein, Alice in Wonderland, Idylls of the King, and Goblin Market,
Even in realistic novels one can see the influence of fantasy: Jane Austen considered writing gothic novels—it’s where the big money was—until she realized her genius lay elsewhere, at which point she wrote Northanger Abbey as an anti-gothic. The Bronte sisters essentially wrote gothic novels—there’s a hint of the supernatural in both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights—and Charles Dickens incorporated fairy tale elements into many of his novels. And of course he wrote A Christmas Carol.
America has its own fantasy tradition, tracing back to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. One can find rich fantasy strains in German, French, Japanese, Indian, Nigerian, and Jamaican literature—in fact, in pretty much all literatures. One of the most vibrant literary genres in recent times has been magical realism, where authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Gunter Grass, Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, and Laura Esquivel weave fantasy into their otherwise realistic fiction.
My aim today is to provide you with theoretical tools to figure out what fantasy in general means and what purpose it plays in our lives. Drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell, I claim that fantasy identifies our most pressing problems and provides a powerful space for imagining solutions. Today I will focus on two works that specialize in the problem of violence.
In the Q&A session, or when you see me around Sewanee, feel free to ask me what your favorite works of fantasy mean. I never tire of such explorations.
When people in the 19th century tried to figure out the meaning of myth and fantasy, figures like Freud, his pupil Jung, and later his pupil Campbell latched on to its resemblance to dreams, reasoning that to understand the one was to understand the other. I know that Freud and Jung are not held in high esteem by mainstream psychology, although Freudian and Jungian therapists still practice. But these two figures provided powerful frameworks for understanding what fantasy is up to.
For Freud, a basic psychological force is repression—we push under unpleasant or taboo desires—which then show up when we are sleeping, when our internal censors are less vigilant. Our dreams give voice to our forbidden desires although, because our censor hasn’t entirely absented itself, even in dreams our desires appear as coded images and stories. A skilled dream interpreter, working with the dreamer, is needed to read between the lines—or as Freud puts it, to discover the latent content underlying the manifest content.
One of Freud’s most useful concepts, widely accepted by scholars who study gothic horror, is the uncanny. Because we are horrified by our repressed desires—that’s why we repress them—we deny they exist. Yet a part of us recognizes they are there, meaning that we must expend psychic energy denying them. We can’t bring ourselves to admit that what horrifies us is actually in us, and the more denial energy we expend, the greater the horror. As Pogo famously put it, riffing off of Commodore Oliver Perry, “We have met the enemy and they is us.” Freud called this “the return of the repressed.”
To show the uncanny at work, I have sometimes asked my students to figure out why they are so terrified by the horror film that frightens them the most. Often, they uncover a drama that is personal to them. If you’re interested, in the Q&A session I’d be glad to share with you why I find Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining the most horrifying film I’ve ever seen.
If repression is at the core of Freud’s understanding of dreams and fantasy, individuation or self-actualization is at the core of Jung’s thought. As the Swiss psychologist saw it, our purpose in life is to realize our essential self, and our dreams function as guides. When we listen to our dreams, they will show us the path we should take—Joseph Campbell expressed this as “follow your bliss”—but if we ignore the guides, they show up as nightmares. Within this framework, Jung identified certain archetypes, some benign, others threatening. These figures show up in both our individual dreams and in what Jung called the collective unconscious.
Storytellers tap into the collective unconscious to provide us with the symbols or archetypes that we need to flourish. These archetypes are most evident in dream-like myths and fairy tales, which can be regarded as collective dreams. As soon as we hear the words “Once upon a time,” we are ushered into a dream-like realm where we encounter symbolic versions of our longing for wholeness and symbolic versions of the internal forces that stand in our way.
Following up on Jung’s ideas, his student Campbell looked at hundreds of myths from around the world and discovered a monomyth, which he called the journey of the hero. Campbell sets forth the journey’s stages in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, written in 1949. At the beginning, the hero is living a static or stagnant life in familiar surroundings, but he then crosses a threshold into a magical land, albeit sometimes reluctantly. His quest is to obtain some magical elixir or talisman that will lead to his own growth and save his society.
During his journey, he encounters certain figures who serve as guides (wise old men, benevolent enchantresses) and others who seek to deter him (seductive temptresses, devouring beasts). He may experience a “belly of the whale” moment when he doubts himself and the quest. When he obtains the elixir, he must cross back over the threshold and rejuvenate his society.
In recent years, Campbell’s emphasis on male heroes has been attacked so we now talk of female as well as male journeys. We also focus on collective as well as individual heroes. After all, self-realization is not limited to single men.
When I speak of fantasy as offering hope for a fallen world, I start with how it provides psychological guidance to individuals. We engage with fantasy because it speaks to something deep within us, and I love talking to kids about their favorite Harry Potter character or their favorite Harry Potter book.
Moving past individuals, we can see how stories also help societies as a whole that have lost their way. Freud, Jung and Campbell all believed that myths and fairy tales represent society’s collective dreaming, and they regarded storytellers as our shamans, warning us of dangers and pointing the way to health. Fantasy literature, I am claiming, works the same way.
I’ll get into specific examples in a moment, but I want to add one final theory to the mix. As I see it, fantasy always opposes the accepted norms of reality. Opposition is in fact fantasy’s defining feature. But to oppose the norms, it has to acknowledge them. While we think of fantasy as an escape from reality, whatever we want to escape from always shows up in the fantasy.
To cite an example, the legions of Harry Potter fans escaped into a world that featured tyrannical teachers, long homework assignments, harassment by bullies, self-esteem issues, relationship problems, and peer pressure. Some escape! Rowling, however, offers her young readers ways to negotiate very recognizable problems. All great fantasy operates this way.
To illustrate these theories, I’ve chosen an old work and a contemporary one. I return to Beowulf time and again because it addresses one of our most intractable problems. To our deep sorrow, we recently experienced another mass killing, this one in Virginia Beach, and Beowulf specializes in domestic violence. King Hrothgar has built a mead hall so imposing that it deters every foreign foe, but he’s unable to prevent the violence that regularly breaks out in the hall itself. Doesn’t that sound a lot like current-day America?
The trolls that invade Hrothgar’s mead hall are regarded as outsiders—we scapegoat “the Other”—but a close reading of the poem indicates that we can’t pass the buck so easily. While Grendel and Grendel’s Mother are described as living on the outskirts of society, their killing doesn’t differ substantially that that perpetrated by some of the poem’s human characters. The monstrosity they represent is human monstrosity.
For example, when Beowulf first enters Hrothgar’s court, he is challenged by Unferth, who himself has killed family members. After Hrothgar dies, his nephew will kill one of his sons, and then be killed by the other son in a struggle over succession. When Beowulf as an old man looks back over his life, he sees nothing but a succession of violent deaths. Anglo-Saxon society didn’t want to admit that internal violence was endemic to warrior society, just as America doesn’t want to admit that the mass killings are somehow its fault. As Freud and Pogo would say, we repress the fact that the enemy is us. Consequently, the repressed returns in the form of nightmare monsters.
Trolls in the Anglo-Saxon epic represented disaffected Anglo-Saxon warriors who vented their resentment or exacted revenge on fellow Anglo-Saxon warriors, but the society didn’t want to acknowledge it had a troll problem. Race hatred and class resentment drive many of our own mass killers today but we don’t want to admit that we are a racist or classist society.
If Beowulf names the society’s violence problem, it also offers up solutions. The hero is a man who you can’t bait with a tweet, who keeps his calm when he is insulted, who faces up to his fears rather than avoiding them. As a result, he models behavior which, if followed, could lessen his society’s violence. The firm grip he uses to defeat Grendel can be seen as self-possession and firm resolution. The giant sword he uses to defeat Grendel’s mother can be seen as invoking higher ideals at the moment when despair threatens to pull us under.
Beowulf had a profound influence on the work of fantasy that has come to define the genre as many of us understand it today. J. R. R. Tolkien is the scholar most responsible for resurrecting Beowulf and elements of the poem can be found throughout Lord of the Rings.
Regarding my theory that fantasy always opposes given reality, Tolkien’s reality was 20th century violence. He began imagining his story when he was an officer in the World War I trenches. He came to see the process of fantasy as “world building,” and given that he created actual genealogies, historical timelines, and even languages, “world building” is not too strong a phrase. His imaginary world stood in opposition to the horrors of World War I, to the rise of totalitarianism in the 1920s and 1930s, and to the devastation of World War II.
Although Tolkien warned against finding political parallels in his work, they are too obvious to be ignored. Sauron brings to mind Hitler, the Nazgul the Nazi stormtroopers, Saruman Stalin, the Battle at Helms Deep trench warfare, Saruman’s “fires of Orthank” modern weaponry, the Fellowship of the Ring the allied forces, and so forth.
Or to step to a more general plane, in a world that has moved from cavalry charges to mechanized warfare, Tolkien harkens back to a more artisanal age of medieval technology. In an age that is experiencing environmental devastation, Tolkien has Tom Bombadil, the Lothlorien elves, and the Ents. In an age that is becoming increasingly urbanized and industrialized, Tolkien finds refuge in the Shire, where the only industrial-like contraption is the watermill, and even that is suspect.
To be sure, there’s an element of nostalgia is all of this and one can’t turn back the clock. But Tolkien’s main drama goes deeper than longing for a simple past. In a world where people will sell their souls for power, he has Frodo wrestling with his dark double, who is Gollum. Through the workings of the ring, Tolkien shows us that the desire for power lies within each of us. We have met the enemy and he is us.
Because we repress this truth, preferring to see ourselves as virtuous and on the side of right, our dark tendencies return in monstrous form. Frodo’s quest has all the elements that Jung identifies in the self-actualization drama and that Campbell identifies in the hero’s journey. The elixir he brings back that will save society is a deeper understanding of how power corrupts. Just because the “good guys” possess the ultimate weapon, whether in the form of the atom bomb in 1945 or in America’s military superiority in the 21st century, doesn’t guarantee that they will use if wisely.
Like Beowulf, Frodo provides a model of how to battle against the dark forces. He triumphs over the corrupting influence of the ring through fortitude, high ideals, sacrifice, and grace. He is shaped by Tolkien’s Christian vision, but it is not only Christians who find his vision inspiring.
The analysis I’ve applied to Beowulf and Lord of the Rings can be used with any work of fantasy. The greatest fantasists, working as our shamans, provide us with a deep understanding of the problems that beset us, a sensitivity to our own interior landscapes, and models to emulate. Even lesser fantasists, while they are more prone to shallow social diagnoses and shallow wish fulfillments, have a good nose for sniffing out our most pressing issues. That’s why people read them and why, say, a significant portion of the country was transfixed by HBO’s Game of Thrones.
In sum, next time you encounter a work featuring swords, dragons, wizards, and enchantresses, don’t reflexively dismiss is as “just fantasy.” Deeper forces are at work.