Monday
This coming week I will be teaching a four-session lifelong learning course at Sewanee entitled “Literary Wizards and Enchantresses, from Merlin and Morgan Le Fay to Gandalf and Galadriel.” I’m using today’s blog post to sort out my ideas for the first class, which will focus on Merlin and his successors.
Before turning to Merlin, however, I will set the stage by exploring what fantasy is, how it works, and what role it plays in human lives. As I see it, fantasy is an oppositional genre, always pushing against reality as people of the time saw it. To understand fantasy, see it as operating in counterpoint to the culture that produced it.
We are drawn to fantasy because our conventional understanding of the world seems too limited. We feel hemmed in by the real and turn to fantasy to explore new possibilities for ourselves. Tales of magic introduce the marvelous into our lives.
In saying this, I distinguish between shallow escapist fantasies and transcendent fantasies. The former, while certainly oppositional since they arise out of dissatisfaction with the way things are, go no further than shallow wish fulfillments and revenge dreams. They are simply mirror opposites of the world as it is.
The world’s great fantasies, however, understand that we are limited by our conventional understanding of the here and now and open up new horizons. While I don’t mind discussing escapist fantasy, I prefer talking about the classic works. I attribute their staying power to the way they change the parameters of what we previously though was fixed and solid.
I’ll be talking about fantasy’s reality-expanding dimensions on two levels: fantasy works on us psychologically as individuals, and fantasy plays a critical role in the life of societies and cultures. Regarding the second, I will show how the original medieval Arthur tales, the Arthurian revival in Victorian England, and the Tolkien phenomenon each spoke to deeply felt historical needs and offered alternative ways of being.
For psychological understanding, I rely heavily on Carl Jung and his student Joseph Campbell. Fantasy, Jung noted, has a lot in common with dreams. As the Swiss psychologist saw it, both dreams and fantasy point to a full realization of the Self, a process Jung called individuation. If we disregard or otherwise repress the messages from this Self, it will send us increasingly dire warnings, sometimes in the form of nightmares (say, devouring monsters). We can even become sick, but at any rate we will not find contentment so long as we ignore these warnings. Think of this as an inner alarm system.
We move from individual to society when we look at folk tales, which Jung regards as collective dreaming. The storyteller, functioning as a kind of shaman, senses the needs of the society and shapes them into narrative. All great authors do this, but fantasy is more overtly associated with dreams than realist fiction.
Campbell gave Jung’s theory a memorable image in “the journey of the hero.” Examining thousands of folk tales from around the world and throughout history, Campbell found versions of the hero’s journey everywhere he looked. In this journey, there is always a moment when the protagonist must decide whether to heed a received call or refuse it. Heeding the call is necessary if one is to grow into one’s potential while refusing it leaves one stagnant. Arthur must pull the sword from the stone if he is to become England’s king.
It’s easier to refuse the call than to embark on a growth quest. Heroes, however, step out of their comfort zone, overcome the obstacles that stand in their way, and in the end share what they have gained with the rest of society so that all benefit.
While I will be drawing on Jung’s and Campbell’s framework in the works we will study, I hasten to say that one doesn’t need them to talk about the transformative potential of fantasy. Applying my oppositional theory, one can simply ask in what ways a work reflects the concerns of the society that produced it and what counter vision it offers us. For example, Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy reflects the cataclysmic events that shook the United Kingdom in the first half of the 20th century, and our urgent task is to figure out what life-affirming perspectives he offers up in response.
In tomorrow’s post, I will turn my attention to Merlin and his successors, looking at whether or not he was originally a Celtic druid and how he conforms to the Jungian archetype of the wise old man.