Happy birthday, rodneyorpheus!

The fantasy course is pretty much complete. Just in case anyone is interested, here's the reading list.

Brin, David. “J. R. R. Tolkien - Enemy of Progress.” Salon.com . http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/feature/2002/12/17/tolkien_brin/index.html (accessed June 29, 2009).

Burke, Richard C. ““Every Church Is the Same: Control, Destroy, Obliterate Every Good Feeling”: Philip Pullman and the Challenge of Religious Intolerance.” Forum on Public Policy Online 2007, no. 3. http://forumonpublicpolicy.com/archivesum07/burke.pdf.

Butcher, M. “Reading fantasy literature and its effect on the development of empathy: A study of Harry Potter readers.” (accessed February 2, 2010). http://jupiter.plainedgeschools.org/highschool/Maggie%20Butcher%20paper.doc.

Cecire, Maria Sachiko. “Medievalism, Popular Culture and National Identity in Children's Fantasy Literature.” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 9, no. 3 (2009): 395--409.  

Easterbrook, Gregg. “In Defense of CS Lewis.” The Atlantic Monthly, October 2001, pp. 46--49.

Gagnon, Laurence. “Philosophy and Fantasy.” Children's Literature 1 (1972): 98--103.  

Le Guin, Ursula. “The Critics, the Monsters, and the Fantasists.” The Wordsworth Circle 38, no. 1--2 (2007): 83--87.

Pennington, John. “From Elfland to Hogwarts, or the Aesthetic Trouble with Harry Potter.” The Lion and the Unicorn 26, no. 1 (2002): 78-97.

Plato. The Republic. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992.

Rearick, Anderson. “Why is the Only Good Orc a Dead Orc? The Dark Face of Racism Examined in Tolkien's World.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 4 (2004): 861--874.  

Shippey, Tom. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the century. London: Harper Collins, 2000.

Thomas, M. “Teaching Fantasy: Overcoming the Stigma of Fluff.” English Journal 92, no. 5 (2003): 60–-64.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Silmarillion. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977.

Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical investigations (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell, 1958.

I just came across an interesting article from a gaming site: Overused Standards of Fantasy Literature. Embarrasingly, my projected novel (which I will return to this summer) contains no less than five of these overused features, notably:

1. The Great Disaster/Cataclysm/Doom, etc.
2. The Ancient Super-Advanced Society
3. The Ancient Scholars' Language
4. The Quest for the Uber Artifact/Weapon
5. The Conquering Horde.

On the other hand, there are no knights, mages, elves (unless you count the bad guys as quasi-elves) or crystals.

Last night, I finally got around to watching Sex and the City II. After we had eagerly awaited its arrival in Turkey and got furious about the possibility of its being banned, poor health and hectic circumstances meant that we had to wait for another week after it was released before we actually saw it. This was not such a bad thing, because it was a late-night show on a Sunday and we had the place to ourselves.

Unlike my wife, who never takes any notice of film reviews, I went expecting at best a bad film that was just about worth watching if you really like Sex and the City, and at worst a film so bad that it spoils your happy memories of Sex and the City. Every review I had read had panned it; even articles decrying Abu Dhabi's censorship of the film felt obliged to say that it was a bad film. In fact, it wasn't a bad film. It wasn't a great film either; I'm not putting Sex and the City II in the same league as The Seven Samurai or Fanny and Alexander, but it didn't deserve the venom spat at it.

The most cogent criticism of SATC2 is that the plot is slow-moving, fragmentary and, well, a mess. If SATC2 were a stand-alone film, that would be enough to sink it. As it is, though, when you go to see a SATC film, you're not really going to see a film, you're going to see a few more episodes of SATC. Of course for some critics, that was the problem, but if you don't like SATC, why go and see a SATC film? I can understand X-Files fans finding the film disappointing because it didn't do justice to the series, but a film critic who didn't like the series not liking the film is a bit like a music critic not liking a performance of Beethoven's Ninth because he doesn't like classical music. Any review that criticises the film because it's about four middle-aged women who obsess about clothes and relationships is not worth more than a second of your reading time. I mean come on, would you take a review of Schindler's List seriously if it complained that the film had too many Jews in it?

Of course you can argue that no film, TV series, novel or whatever should be about middle-aged women who obsess about clothes and relationships, but if you go there, then you are going into very dangerous territory. I am notorious for disliking Jane Austen on the grounds that, as Tom Shippey once said, "she writes about boring people doing boring things," but I would not go on to say that Sense and Sensibility was trash. I think Austen is actually a brilliant writer, who almost managed to get me interested in what her characters were doing; I also think it is a tribute to the writers, cast and production team of SATC that they really did get me interested. If someone out of the blue were to say "Hey, let's go and watch a film about a bunch of women obsessing about clothes and men," I would politely decline, and maybe point out that there was a good werewolf film on at the same cinema.

Related to this, much of the harshest criticism is implicitly or blatantly misogynistic, as a review in The Guardian pointed out:

Sukhdev Sandhu in the Telegraph sneered at the women for "all getting older" adding that Sarah Jessica Parker "looks like a cross between Wurzel Gummidge and Bride of Chucky", while Miranda "looks badly embalmed". In the Observer, Philip French ridiculed the "bitchy heroines" who enjoy "an orgy of self-pity" and described Carrie as "equine" (horse-like, people).

In the London Evening Standard Andrew O'Hagan seethed like an Olde Worlde pontiff giving himself a hernia over the vile perfidy of Woman. "These girls are so hung up on looking great they've forgotten there are several ways to be ugly." The women are "greedy, faithless, spoiled, patronising . . . morons". Samantha is a "blonde slut" with "the desperate mentality of the School Bike", Miranda is "the ginger one", Charlotte plumbs "the depths of her own venality" and Carrie is stuck in a "wind-tunnel miasma of selfish needs. Yuck." The women behave like "materialistic whores".

Two things are shocking here. The first is that someone who uses a phrase like "wind-tunnel miasma" can succeed as a professional writer. The second is that, in 2010, it is still obviously not OK to make a film about the sexual adventures of middle-aged women. (We're not even talking old women here; even Samantha is only 52.) O'Hagan's response is not much less bigoted than the men who chase our heroines through the streets of old Abu Dhabi.

That brings me naturally to the last point, which is the accusations of racism, Orientalism, Islamophobia or whatever. As I said, when the Turkish release of the film was delayed, there were rumours that this was because the government was following Abu Dhabi's lead in banning it for being disrespectful to Islam. This was greeted by howls of outrage from many Turks who saw this as sucking up to the Arabs, and there probably wasn't much to the rumours in the first place, but it's interesting to look at what supporters of the ban saw as slanderous, and why even many who didn't saw fit to throw the word "Orientalist" at it.

1. A number of comments, usually glib, are made about the veil. A woman is shown painstakingly poking chips under her veil, reminding me of an interview I read with a British woman who had recently covered up and was explaining proudly how she'd even come up with a technique for eating a hamburger without taking it off. Sorry sisters, but trying to eat with a piece of cloth in front of your face makes you look silly, so either take the thing off, don't eat in public, or don't get angry when people laugh at you. And don't hide behind Islam, because a veil is not an Islamic religious requirement; if it were, then it would be worn much more widely. After all, Iranian women don't wear the veil, and Iranians aren't exactly wishy-washy liberals when it comes to religious issues. If I were going to accuse the film of anything, it would be of failing to point out that most Muslim women don't wear veils, but to be fair, you see plenty of shots of unveiled women, so we should assume that the directors trusted their viewers to use their common sense rather than listening to Miranda. (And by the way, dear reviewers, when Miranda gushes patronisingly about Middle-Eastern culture, that's supposed to be comic.)
2. Samantha is arrested for having sex on the beach. Well, it is true that you can get arrested for having sex on the beach in the UAE, but you can also get arrested for having sex on the beach in the UK. Samantha claims they were only kissing, but that is beside the point; she was arrested on the charge of having sex in a public place, which is illegal pretty much everywhere. On the other hand, even if the film had shown her getting arrested just for kissing, that has happened in Dubai, which is just down the road from Abu Dhabi. This isn't Orientalism; this is telling it like it is. And just in case it weren't obvious, Samantha is not intended to be a role model in this or any other SATC production: Samantha is just a horny woman who is always getting into trouble because of her libido. If she were a male character, no eyebrows would ever be raised.
3. Speaking of Samantha, there is that famous bazaar chase after she brandishes condoms and yells about having sex. It's embarrassing, but then it's meant to be embarrassing. Did I mention that Samantha isn't supposed to be a role model? I don't know if men in Abu Dhabi would react like they do in the film, but there are plenty of places in the Muslim world where they would—and plenty of places where they'd just laugh it off.
4. The funniest of the criticisms is about the scene when the women who rescue them from the mob take off their robes to reveal their fashionable clothes. I'm sorry but I can't think of any way in which this is insulting to Islam, to Muslim women or to anybody. It's what they do.
5. The Middle East is seen as "exotic". Well, yes. These are Americans; to them, France is exotic. Of course there are a few clichéd lines and bad puns that make you wince ("Laurence of My Labia"), but these no more constitute cultural imperialism than innuendos about lederhosen would if they'd been to Bavaria instead of the Gulf.

I'd like to say this once again: Samantha is not a role model. Neither are Miranda or Charlotte. Not even Carrie is meant to be a role model, though many women both in and out of the series seem to insist on seeing her as one. They are comic characters, and comedy comes from people's flaws, not their virtues. Not that they are without virtues; like Seinfeld, it's that combination of flawed and lovable that makes the series so successful. If the Fabergé Four suddenly became spiritually aware, culturally sensitive and politically radical ... now that is when I would start to complain.

While thinking about the tangle of features that distinguish fantasy from other genres I just came across one that it had in common with a different genre: martial arts films. Of course, martial arts films often overlap with fantasy anyway, from the historical/legendary wuxia pian of mainland China to frolics like Big Trouble in Little China. That is only to be expected. The point that struck me, though, is that both genres there is a link between a person's power and their personal qualities. When people have unusual powers, it is because they are unusually good—or unusually bad. This is true of many genres, but it is brought out in particular in the fantasy and martial arts traditions.

The whole Campbellian hero's journey thing is about some kid who is the Chosen One, goes through a load of ordeals which prove his moral superiority to the Unchosen Ones and then (often with the help of some magical object which only the Chosen One can wield) kicks ass righteously, thus removing any doubts about his Chosen status. This is very like a typical martial arts scenario, though there is usually less emphasis on the hero's original chosenness and more on the ordeals (martial arts films have a strong work ethic). Aaron Anderson, who has the wonderful dual occupation of academic and fight choreographer, writes in a paper on Kill Bill:

a script that shows a character voluntarily subjecting herself to physical pain also tells us something about the inner "strength" or "desire" of that character. Martial arts films often therefore use training sequences as a shorthand description of the strength of a character’s inner desire ("heart" or "willpower").

Beatrix Kiddo is an invincible fighter not least because of the kind of person she is: she persists in the training ("The Cruel Tutelage of Pai Mei") and learns the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique that lets her kill Bill in the end. If she'd just picked up a gun and shot him, it wouldn't have been the same. The way she wins shows that she deserves to win.

All this is very reminiscent of Star Wars, and not only because Star Wars draws on the same martial arts film tradition. The whole Jedi/Shaolin/Samurai thing serves to mark the hero out as a person whose physical feats come from his spiritual worth, which in turn melds with the "noble blood" (Midi-chlorians) theme of Western legend—unfortunately, in my opinion. Luke's destruction of the Death Star is achieved by his use of the Force, and it is only Luke who can do it. This is one reason why, as I mentioned in an earlier post, Star Wars is on the blurred edge of the fantasy/SF divide. Another example is the light saber, which combines "the iconography of the samurai sword" (as Anderson puts it) with the long tradition of magic swords in the legends of both Europe and the Far East. Certain weapons are such that only certain people are meant to use them: only the true king can draw Excalibur from the stone; to wield the Green Destiny, "first you must learn to hold it in silence."

This is not the approach of most hard science fiction. In SF, a powerful weapon is a powerful weapon; it doesn't usually require a powerful person to wield it. Now you can write a SF story about a weapon which will only respond to a certain kind of person, but to the extent that it's still SF and not fantasy, the emphasis will be on the weapon, and the weapon could be reprogrammed to respond to someone else. When the focus moves towards the qualities of the person, as in, say, the Dune books, then the genre starts to shift away from hard SF and towards space opera, which is already half way to fantasy.

It looks like I am about to commit the heresy of teaching a course on fantasy without mentioning Joseph Campbell. For two courses on Tolkien I dutifully included the most readable text on the Hero's Journey I could find, and had students apply it to The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars—the last because it's about the only epic tale that closely follows Campbell, and that's only because Lucas made it so. The Hero's Journey is like any of these structuralist templates: it works up to a point, but that point is usually nothing to make a song and dance about. After we'd diligently applied Campbell's wisdom to a variety of fairy tales and legends in addition to the above fantasy classics, I threw up my hands and said, "Well, what we can conclude here is that all stories have a beginning, a middle and an end."

The real problem, though, is that it's very hard to get any decent writing from students infected with the Hero meme. I set two choices for the second essay in the Tolkien course: the first was to compare Tolkien's view of evil with that of any other fantasy or SF author; the second, as you've probably guessed already, was to apply the Hero's Journey idea to TLOTR and any other fantasy or SF work. With a few exceptions, the essays on the first topic were better. Maybe it was self-selection, as the good students were more likely than their weaker classmates to tackle a subject which required contrasting Boethean and Manichean evilology; on the other hand, there is the possibility that Campbellism actually encourages mechanical essay-writing (not to mention script-writing).

And there you have another problem: setting students an essay about the Hero's Journey is an open invitation to low-level, cut-and-paste plagiarism. There are so many essays out there, that the temptation to take an idea from one, a sentence from another and the works cited page of a third is hard to resist. And even if you want to write an entirely original paper, you risk unwittingly reproducing the work of others. I mean it would probably be OK to apply Campbell's ideas to The Happy Hooker, but write about TLOTR and what can you say? Gandalf isn't the Herald? Moria isn't the Belly of the Whale? Those eagles have nothing to do with Magical Flight? Of course there is the most important and totally un-Campbellian point that Frodo is not on a quest to find a talisman but to destroy one, but that too has been gone over in hundreds of high school essays.

Maybe it's time to bid farewell to the Hero with a Thousand Faces. We've come a long way together, but, as Tom Shippey once said in a class I was in, we need new archetypes—even if that's an oxymoron. Perhaps the interesting fantasy heroes are the ones on a different journey.

After adding houseboatonstyx, I get the message "houseboatonstyx is your mutual friend." How Dickensian!

I'm still looking for a good article about defining fantasy literature. By "good", I mean "suitable for my students, who are first-year undergraduate non-native speakers. That means nothing by people who spell "theory" with a capital "T" and talk about "otherizing the discourse of post-colonial queerness" on the one hand, and nothing too colloquial on the other. I might even drop David Brin's wonderful "We Hobbits Are A Merry Folk" from the course because his chatty style throws a curve-ball at foreign students, in the way that "throws a curve-ball" does.

This has naturally made me ponder about whether fantasy can be defined. If you look at all the different things that are called fantasy—and I mean just in the context of fantasy literature, not sexual fantasies etc.—you start to get all Wittgensteiny. In fact I might make students read part of Philosophical Investigations (as I did in my games course) just to let them know what they are letting themselves in for when they try to define things. Laurence Gagnon's definition, "any story might justifiably be called ‘a fantasy’ which gives us some explicit indication of the personality of one or more of the characters and which is also about a world that is conceivable but physically impossible," is appealing at first sight. However, there is the difficulty of saying exactly what is impossible; given what we know of physics, dragons are a far more likely possibility than faster-than-light travel. Moreover, as Gagnon admits, the term "fantasy" is here used "in a very general way such that some writings called ‘fairy-tales’, some labeled ‘science-fiction’, and, perhaps, some designated ‘dream-stories’ will fall under the concept of fantasy." In a course on fantasy fiction, I can't afford to be that general; I need something that will explain why The Lord of the Rings is definitely fantasy, The Day of the Triffids definitely isn't and Star Wars and Twilight are on the fuzzy borders with SF and horror respectively. I recently read Twilight described as "urban fantasy", which is silly considering that it takes place in a village, but does at least note that fangs do not a horror film make. Twilight could fairly be described low fantasy (i.e. a tale where fantastic elements are found in the normal world, as opposed to high fantasy, which has a world all of its own). But if that is true, then why do we not say the same of Dracula?

It could be that the distinction between fantasy and horror is of a different kind than the distinction between fantasy and science fiction. Horror is like comedy or pornography, in that it is a genre defined by the feelings it is designed to arouse, whereas fantasy, like westerns, is defined by the kind of things it describes. That is why such disparate creations as The Saw and The Omen can both be called horror films, and why when you reduce the scare quotient in a lot of so-called horror, you see that it is fantasy or SF (Of course there are people who are genuinely scared of the vampires in Twilight, but they're just wusses.) The categories of fantasy and horror overlap, not because of Wittgensteinian vagueness, but because they should. If you have an overlap between the sets of plants and animals, then you assume that the concepts "plant" and "animal" are a bit fuzzy, but there is nothing surprising about an overlap between the set of plants and the set of edible things.

Coming to the more notorious overlap between fantasy and science fiction, we therefore need to ask which kind of overlap it is: is it a plant/animal or a plant/edible overlap? Both the fantasy and science fiction genres are defined largely in terms of what they describe, and both involve describing things which we are fairly sure do not exist and have never existed. They are also the kind of things which not only do not exist but would surprise us if they were to exist. If a connoisseur of nineteenth-century fiction were to read in the Times Literary Supplement that Madame Bovary was actually a real person, he might put down his teacup and murmur "Well I never!" This is probably not how we would react if it were proved that Sauron was a real person.

Both fantasy and science fiction, then, deal with things that make us go "wow!" They are "astounding tales," and in this respect, the genres are also a little like horror, in that their definition includes the feelings they are designed to evoke. A novel set in a world which was exactly the same as ours with addition of toast that always falls with the buttered side up would fit Gagnon's definition of fantasy, but would not be fantastic; neither would it make for interesting science fiction. But is the "wow" of fantasy the same as the "wow" of science fiction? If that were the case, fantasy would be decidedly less impressive, as Ryan Somma argues in a fictitious dialogue between "fanboy" and "scientist": for every impressive fantasy creature, device or journey, science fiction has something bigger, stronger, faster or whatever. Shadowfax may carry Gandalf faster than any horse, but that's still well below the speed of light ... or even the speed of a family car. But this is not how it works: the "wow" of fantasy is subtly different from the "wow" of SF. As I said, dragons are a much more feasible proposition than faster than light travel, but dragons strike us as more magical and mysterious.

Let us imagine, then, a science fictional account of dragons (something Anne McCaffrey comes close to in the Pern books). Someone, somewhere, messes with the genes of birds to make them very big, featherless and scaly. (In other words, to make dinosaurs.) Then they work on the digestive system so that the creature produces methane which can then be ignited in its mouth. Voila, a dragon, which can then make the story interesting by escaping and laying waste to cities. We're talking something between Jurassic Park and Godzilla here.

This would make passable, if rather unoriginal science fiction, but despite the presence of dragons it definitely wouldn't be fantasy. The fact that the dragons' genesis is explained identifies it as SF, but this is not the most important point; it is a side-effect of an essential feature of science fiction, which is that it follows, or at least claims to follow, the rules of our universe. It may bend them, as with FTL travel or telepathy, but it cannot flout them. If a SF novel has spaceships travelling faster than light, it doesn't give a satisfactory explanation of how they do it; anyone who could provide one would already have a Nobel prize. They may have explanations of a kind ("tachyon drives", "wormholes" etc.) but this is just a way of saying "This is happening in our universe, according to the laws of that universe." They are most definitely not saying "Faster than light travel is physically impossible, but our hero can do it because he has a magic spaceship." That would be fantasy. What fantasy does is not to bend or even flout the rules; it says "The rules here are different." Not only are we not in Kansas any more, we aren't even in hyper-Kansas. This may be what makes the "wow" of fantasy different from the "wow" of SF. When Shadowfax gallops at the speed of a Citroen, we aren't saying "Wow, that's fast!" We're saying "Wow, a magic horse!"

If it is true that what makes fantasy is the idea of different rules, then that would explain why Star Wars sits so uncomfortably (but effectively) on the fence between fantasy and SF. It has all the trappings of space opera, but we are in no doubt that we are being told a fairy tale. When we see those words "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away ..." we don't think "Hang on, all galaxies are far away. I mean the nearest galaxy to us is Andromeda, and that's 2,500,000 light years away." What we think is "Once upon a time ..." and what we understand is "The rules are different here."

Nappy birthday ironed_orchid!

I once said in class (during a discussion of American Beauty) that the reason I wasn't having a mid-life crisis was that I was still having problems coming to terms with puberty. Nevertheless, I am now at the age when you start to worry that you haven't achieved anything in your life. True, I've done a little bit of a lot of things, but although I've been described in one online publication as a "renaissance man", there are few job offerings for renaissance men. I suspect it wasn't that good for them even in the renaissance: Leonardo was always losing money because he couldn't stay on task and finish commissions on time. On the other hand, when I look back nostalgically at that time in my youth when life seemed full of unlimited potential, I should consider what would have happened if I had actually realised some of that potential. If you make your mark on the world when you are young, the world will make its mark on you; it is possible to reinvent yourself at any time in life, but it's very difficult if you are labouring under the weight of your own success. Think of Lemmy. If he had retrained as an opera singer, I bet that on his opening night at La Scala, someone in the audience would still shout out "THE ACE OF SPAAAADES!"