I skipped out on my weekly writer’s group meeting last night to attend a signing by Lois McMaster Bujold at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego. I debated about going for a few days, because San Diego is a long way, gas is not cheap, and it was a school night. But when I didn’t manage to talk myself out of wanting to go, I decided to make the trip, and am very glad I did.

Ms. Bujold was a very engaging speaker and answered a lot of questions from what I feel was a very enlightened audience. I’ve been to a lot of signings where the audience asked a lot of questions about the content of the books — why did this happen, what about that character, etc — but this group were more interested in her process and experience as a writer. Very interesting stuff, from this writer’s point of view. It was recorded for a podcast, so within a few weeks you can hear it yourself if you like.

There’s one point in particular that I’m glad she brought up, which had caught my attention while reading an interview with her last week:

I have come to believe that if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, F&SF are fantasies of political agency. (Of which the stereotypical “male teen power fantasy” is again merely an especially gaudy and visible subset.) (Source: Fantasy Book Critic

I think it’s an interesting observation, but I am not sure I entirely agree. Or maybe it’s that I disagree that fantasy should be that way, though it certainly seems to be the case with the bulk of modern popular fantasy. I’m currently preoccupied with the labels we apply to the different genres. Typically, we classify them according to their dressing — this one is fantasy because it has magic, elves and dragons, that one is SF because it has spaceships, time travel and alien viruses. But with all the cross-over and blending, this way only leads to madness and an eternally growing list of sub-genres. Maybe we need to start labeling stories according to the kind of story they tell, instead … but that’s a topic for another post, when I have a better grasp on what it is I actually want to say.

After the signing (I had my ARC of Passage signed, along with my copy of Paladin of Souls and a second copy of Passage that will be a gift for my eldest sister) I got to enjoy a long Girl Geek Gab. I paused on the way out to tell Sam, who works at the store and who is also the co-host of the afore mentioned podcast, Adventures in SciFi Publishing, that I was a fan of the show — this is a very out-of-the-box action for me, since it is not always easy to get my introverted self to initiate conversation, but it really paid off.

We were joined by two other attendees (whom I had conversed with previously while in line to get my books signed) and spent the next hour talking about just about every major SF&F fan topic that you can think of, with topics ranging from whether it was Eowyn or Merry who killed the Witch King, why it was probably a good thing that The Golden Compass didn’t do well at the box office, and a comparison of the relative sizes of particular body parts of certain Jedi knights (”May the Schwartz be with you.”) It was GREAT!

I don’t often get the opportunity to converse about this sort of stuff anymore. My co-workers are great, but none of them are into the SF world (except for the owner of the company, who surprised me by being a Firefly fan) and only look at me strangely when I burst out in defense of Star Wars at a company luncheon. Oh, they all have their own fannish pleasures, so they understand, but their different fandoms so we can’t really share them. My social contacts outside of the office are very slim to none (I’m such a houserat). How rare a treat to be able to say, “Have you seen Viggo’s photography?” and have them know exactly what I’m talking about!

So it was a good night, and not too late (I was home by 11), and hopefully Lost was taped properly so I can watch it over the weekend without having to download it. Next week it will be back to the writer’s group (another group of people I enjoy talking with, but also not into SF-dom) and maybe, just maybe, I’ll have something to share for critique.

Vera Nazarain has posted an interesting essay at Fantasy magazine about how popular, formula-driven urban/paranormal fantasy (in the mode of Anita Blake, with vampires, were-whatevers, etc.) loses the sense of wonder (and thus her interest) at the fantastic when the characters in those stories regard magical encounters as ordinary, everyday, mundane events. It’s an interesting read, and I think she nailed my own reasons for not being a fan of that sub-genre, though I’ve never explicitly defined those reasons before. What’s the point of fantasy, after all, if it ceases to be fantastic?

That is the underlying question that Nazarain’s essay doesn’t quite reach: what’s the point of fantasy? What is it about that sense of wonder that is so compelling?

In an essay that appeared recently in the Telegraph, fantasist Mark Chadbourne suggests that the appeal of the fantastic is in its irrationality, that readers crave this antidote to the increasingly rational boundaries of our everyday lives. “It’s about turning off the mobile phone and the computer and remembering who we are in the deepest, darkest parts of ourselves.” I can’t say I disagree, at least with the last half of that statement. (The article doesn’t have much more in depth to say, but it does provide a good overview of the evolution of the modern genre.)

In my opinion, though, I wouldn’t say that its computers and cell phones (and the general technologizing of our society) creating those rational boundaries. My gut feeling is that it’s the secularization of society, the decline of the importance of religion and myth as an active force in how we perceive our relationship with the universe. As the world grows smaller physically (because of technology) and philosophically/spiritually (thanks to the work of comparative religion scholars such as Joseph Campbell) I think more and more of us find it harder to use religion as a doorway to the collective unconscious — a doorway it is necessary to go through in order to evolve individually and as a tribe.

Fantasy, using the same language as myth and dream, opens the doorway for a more rational (or maybe just embittered) mind, without requiring belief. Religion and myth create awe in those who believe in them, because they provide a glimpse at the magic and wonder and awe-fulness of the universe, and so should fantasy that is functioning properly — there’s something True even if it’s all impossible.

Ergo, I would go on to conclude that this sort of urban paranormal fantasy (though it can happen in any sub-genre I suspect) that is stripped of awe and wonder and replaced magic with mundanity is no longer functioning as fantasy. It’s romance, it’s horror, it’s crime fiction, it’s whatever … it’s just using fantasy tropes to tell its story. But putting fairies in a story doesn’t make it fantasy anymore than putting cowboys in a story makes it a Western.

A few nights ago, I watched a History Channel special on the mythology of Star Wars. Nothing in the show was particularly groundbreaking, especially to someone like myself who has paid attention this sort of mythic analysis for a lot of years. It was not very critical, but I think it was produced (at least in part) by Lucasfilm, so that’s not very surprising. But it did have a lot of fun clips from the movies along with an interesting panel of guests: along with the expected representatives of academia, it featured comments from notable filmmakers Joss Whedon, Kevin Smith, J.J. Abrams and Peter Jackson, news commentators Linda Ellerbee, Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw, and some unexpected oddballs (for this subject) like Newt Gingrich, Nancy Pelosi and Stephen Colbert.

The special is part of the 30 year anniversary hoopla celebrating the release of the first Star Wars film in 1977, and wow does it feel strange to think that it’s been 30 years already. Even stranger to think that there are people — adult, grown-up, with-kids-of-their-own people — who have lived their entire lives post-Star Wars. Some of them are probably reading this right now and thinking, “Yeah, so…?” To them, I can only extend the feeble explanation that life is just somehow different in a world with Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.

I don’t know that it’s exactly right to claim that Star Wars changed my life — it’s possible I would have fallen into the world of fantasy and mythic storytelling without its influence, that my predilection for these things are in fact what made Star Wars so appealing to my developing creative personality. I would have still found the Wardrobe, after all, and after Narnia I would have journeyed into Prydain, and Earthsea, and Middle Earth, and Camelot. But Star Wars…Star Wars was first, and it colored everything, in more ways than I have yet been able to perceive.

A big one was this: at 8 years old, when I first saw the commercials for Star Wars, I didn’t even want to see it. Why? Because it was about space, and it was about war. It’s natural that an 8-year-old wouldn’t want to see an war movie, right? But I think the whole space thing chilled me more. I remember being newly conscious of the vastness of the universe beyond the sky blue vault of our earthly heavens, and it freaked me out. I had no inclination to go watch something that was going to remind of all my fears of the strangeness above, especially if it was a war movie to boot. But my best friend, Karen Brown (who must have moved away not long after), dragged me to see it with her family. As we waited in the long line outside the theater, she assured me that her dad had seen it, and that it was funny, not scary. So, trepidatious but willing to suck it up for my friend, I went in.

I loved it, naturally. I don’t know that my fear of space dissipated immediately upon that first viewing, but it certainly opened the door. I insisted my whole family go to see it, of course, and I remember sitting in the fourth or fifth row with my dad and grandfather (neither of whom ever went to movies with us), gaping up as the Imperial Cruiser inched across the screen over our heads. My grandfather’s work in the space program was suddenly much more interesting. I didn’t mind watching Star Trek reruns with my family on the weekends. I didn’t care for the creepy television production of Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, but when Battlestar Galactica came along, oh yeah, I was there!

My younger sister and I collected Star Wars action figures (sadly, all gone, except for one Han Solo floating around somewhere). We collected trading cards (also sadly gone, but here’s a funny trivia note: the profiles of Luke and Leia in the set for the Empire Strikes Back have their ages set at two years apart; in light of the later revelation that they were twins, I never forgot that detail). I joined the Star Wars Fan Club one year. I dressed up as Luke Skywalker for Halloween, inflatable light saber and everything. We had books and comic books and read-a-long storybooks.

One of my last and favorite memories of my grandfather is Star Wars related. For Christmas in 1983, I was given (at last!) the two record soundtrack album for the first movie. My cousin (living with my grandparents at the time) was the only one I knew with a record player with an attached tape deck and I asked her to make a copy of it for me, so I wouldn’t risk scratching it. One afternoon, I walked into their house to the sounds of Star Wars blaring at top volume. It was my grandfather (redoing the recording my cousin had done), loving it every bit as much as I did. Even though I’ve got all the soundtracks on CDs and in my iPod, I still have the tape he made that day, just a few weeks before his unexpected death. I think about it on days like this, when my girls ask me if we can listen to Star Wars in the car.

I wrote Star Wars fan fiction in high school (though my sister claims the more complete work here…I’ll have to type it in some day and post it, just to embarrass her!). I crushed majorly on Mark Hamil and plastered my closet door with his picture. In college, a close friend and I all but worshiped George Lucas, only half-joking when we called him god. We had buttons made up once that just said “George” on them: they were great conversation starters. I imagined myself as part of the team that would, someday, bring the promised prequels to life.

Sadly, my faith in George was destroyed when the prequels finally did make it to the screen, and I have to admit to an absurd load of guilt for how poorly they turned out. If only I’d followed through on my dreams, what might George have wrought with my help? I’ll always wonder.

My adoration for the original trilogy remains undiminished; only The Lord of the Rings has come close to eclipsing the emotional response Star Wars is capable of creating in me. It’s not that I think they’re the best movies ever made: you can’t watch Star Wars as many times as I have and not know the flaws that are there. But there is something raw and powerful in it; at a very early age, it created a connection for me to the world of mythic storytelling that I have pursued ever since. It’s the standard by which I judge everything else I see and read — not the movies themselves, but my response to the movies. To recapture that moment of awe, to be able to create that moment of awe in someone else…that’s what it’s all about. That’s what I’m all about, why I continue this struggle with words and characters and concepts, trying to understand how it all works, trying to make it work for myself. Egads, what standards I have set for myself! Can anyone hope to live up to the expectations of their 8-year-old self? I guess I have no choice but to continue trying.

I’ve just pre-ordered my copy of Fairy Tales for Writers, by Lawrence Schimel, due out next month from A Midsummer Night’s Press, from my local Borders. Kind of a joke, really…the pre-ordering, I mean. Every time I go in, I never fail to hear how screwed up the special orders desk at the store has been since I left the position a few months ago (a comment less on my own outstanding capabilities, but rather showing that they just haven’t bothered to fill the job).

At any rate, from the sample posted on the Mythic Imaginations website, I think it will be an interesting read, worth looking for elsewhere even if it never shows up at my Borders. The title of this post is a line from “Sleeping Beauty”, the above linked poem, a bittersweet reminder of how talent and dreams may be put to sleep and forgotten until it is too late. A second poem, “The Little Mermaid“, is likewise sad, but the publisher’s blog promises some happy endings as well.

As ever, Mythic Passages is full of lots of other interesting tidbits, but I’m feeling too lethargic after two weeks of extra hours at work and a trip to Disneyland to focus properly on any of it. Instead, I’m downloading some of the podcasts to my new gifted-for-Mother’s-Day iPod, to enjoy in a more comfortable chair.

I’ve been a Arthurian fangirl since before “fangirl” was a word. I think it was in junior high that we were first introduced to excerpted, modernized sections of Malory (probably the sword in the stone episode), and I remember my best friend complaining how boring it was. I could only gape and stare and stutter, “Are you kidding me? This is ripping good stuff!” Okay, I didn’t really say “ripping good stuff” but I did find the material thrilling and didn’t understand how anyone could think otherwise. Ultimately, my love Arthuriana led me to a major in Medieval Studies (though somehow I got distracted by all the other cool Medieval topics out there and never actually studied King Arthur and his knights) and to graduate studies in Folklore & Mythology.

But I have to confess that I’ve never understood the whole emphasis on Lancelot and Guenevere. While I appreciate the extra dimension the tragic love story gives the legend, I hate the way so many treatments (especially modern ones) blame the fall of Camelot and the demise of Arthur on the affair of his queen had with his best friend. It is the same, in a way, as saying that the original Star Wars trilogy was about Han and Leia falling in love. The way I see it, Arthur, a Hero in the mythological sense of the word, should not fall because of the actions of two other people, no matter how close they were to him. Only his own actions, his own flaws, should be capable of his destruction. In short, Arthur died because he killed the babies. And no cinematic version of the story is going to be fully satisfying unless it acknowledges that fact.

This is a long introduction to a point about characterizing villains I’d like to make, which I mentioned a while ago as a post-worthy subject. The topic back then was Martha Well’s The Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy, in particular the substanceless nature of the villains; to quote myself, “the antagonists are something like the false front of an old building: there�s not much behind the ominous presence.”

As a novice writer, I spend a lot of time looking around at various writing sites trying to distract myself from writing to learn as much as I can about my craft, and have read any number of articles about characterizing villains. Largely, the advice revolves around the idea of humanizing the villain, so that the bad guy is not just some cardboard evil in a black hat. Just like a hero, the villain should have goals and motivations and probably shouldn’t think of himself (or herself) as the bad guy. The writer, at least, should have empathy for the villain, even if the reader cannot. That’s hard to argue with. The Dark Lord trope has been done to death in fantasy literature, and the idea of absolute evil is hard to pull off convincingly in a world where gray is the dominant color.

But I don’t think it’s enough that you understand your villain, which is where most advice ends. Yes, you need to know why your character is going to perform evil deeds. It’s more significant to know why your protagonist is going to be the one to defeat him. Why? Because ultimately the story is not about the villain, but the protagonist — just look at the Star Wars prequels to see what happens when you try to make the story about the villain.

Protagonists, we’ve known since Aristotle wrote The Poetics, must have a tragic flaw. Usually we talk about this flaw (or mistake, as Aristotle’s term harmartia might be interpreted) in terms of how it leads the hero to his downfall — Oedipus, Macbeth, Willy Loman. That’s because Aristotle was talking about tragedies. Arthur’s fall, likewise, should be interpreted as a result of harmartia (his fatal mistake was killing the babies). We’re less fond of tragedies these days, and tend to prefer stories where the protagonist doesn’t end up dead or maimed, but overcomes his flaw (or mistake) and triumphs over adversity. But the flaw is still there.

Now, in order to understand how the concept of harmartia relates to creating meaningful villains, we must jump from Aristotle to Jung (and please pardon my very novice Jung skills — specifics may be off, but I think I have the gist of it right). Central to Jungian psychology is the concept of the Shadow, which in psychological terms represents the repressed aspects of the conscious self. While not necessarily evil, Jungian psychology maintains that the shadow-self must be confronted in order to prevent negative behaviors from emerging.

The Shadow is one of four primary archetypes named by Jung (the other three are the Self, the Anima, and the Animus) that operate on both a personal, psychological level as well as existing on a universal level as part of the collective unconscious. Scholars, such as Joseph Campbell, have shown us over and over again how these archetypes emerge in myths throughout history, and continue to influence structure and characterization in storytelling today. (This is interesting stuff, but I’m going to skip further explanations here, to keep to the point; follow the links if you need more details.)

If you’ve ever investigated dream analysis, a field heavily influenced by Jung, then you have probably encountered the guideline that anyone encountered during a dream should be interpreted as an aspect of the dreamer’s self. In the same vein, I would suggest that the characters in a myth (or any story based upon mythic structures) can be interpreted as aspects of the protagonist’s Self, which is a reflection of the Self of the collective unconscious (which is why we’re able to relate to the protagonist in the first place). What I mean to say is that when a protagonist of a myth has a meaningful interaction with any other character, it can be interpreted as a dramatization of the internal interactions between aspects of the personality that take place in the psyche.

Still with me? I know I’m generalizing a lot, and the academic merits of my argument are lacking, but bear with me. To summarize, the two main points I want to emphasize are 1) the protagonist should be forced to confront his tragic flaw/error (harmartia) in the course of a story; and 2) a mythic story should dramatize the psychic development of the protagonist (by which I mean the development of his psyche, not that he’s going to start reading people’s minds!).

In a mythic story (which fantasy most often is) the protagonist’s tragic flaw is a reflection of his Shadow and should be personified in the role of the Villain. Therefore, when the protagonist confronts the villain he is symbolically confronting his own Shadow. Sometimes the connection between the protagonist and his Shadow is made explicit: Frodo’s climactic battle is with Gollum, a creature who was once very like a hobbit himself. Luke, who has already been shown that he is dangerously in peril of turning into Darth Vader himself, finds out that his antagonist is actually his father. And King Arthur meets his doom at the hands of his own son, Mordred, who’s death he tried to arrange in order to prevent such a fate. Talk about sublimation!

Of course, not every hero is so explicitly connected to the external representation of his Shadow. We’d get pretty tired of everyone being related if that were the case. But if there is not at least an implicit association between the hero’s Shadow and the villain, then the villain becomes nothing more than a catalyst for the internal struggle of the hero. A McGuffin, if you will. This happens a lot in “character driven” fiction, where the hero must conquer his inability to trust others, or his fear of heights, or some other flaw the author has decided upon, before he is able to confront the villain. By the time the final climax occurs, the hero has already won the essential battle within himself and only has to defeat the villain in order to tie up the plot.

But when the villain actually embodies the hero’s Shadow, then there’s a real sense of tension when the climax occurs. Both Frodo and Luke are perilously close to succumbing to the dark within them, and only the physical confrontation with their Shadows allows them to survive in the end. King Arthur, too, confronts his Shadow physically, but his death on the field of Camlann is a keen reminder that there is a real risk in the struggles of the psyche, and “victory” is not always assured (but, like Arthur, there is always a promise of another chance).

I need to wrap this up now — I’ve been literally working on it for months, adding a paragraph here and there (and loosing a few more through browser crashes than I care to dwell upon) as I nursed this random thought that there needs to be more to villains than just good characterization. Like I said, the story belongs to the protagonist — it doesn’t matter how well your villain is characterized if there’s no intrinsic connection to the protagonist, something that makes it important that the protagonist is the one who defeats (or fails to defeat) him in the end. It doesn’t have to be an explicit connection, but it does need to be there, on some level, perceivable by the reader, so that — at least subconsciously — they understand that the victory over the villain represents a psychic victory for the protagonist as well.

I should, probably, bring this back around to King Arthur again, to make a well-rounded conclusion. But all I can think of is “it didn’t have anything to do with Guenevere and Lancelot.” Instead, I’ll mention the book I just happened upon last week that agrees with my supposition that a story is the dramatization of the inner struggles of the psyche. I’m only about half-way through Stealing Fire from the Gods so far, and will write more about it when I’ve finished it. Like Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, it’s by a screenwriter and promises to be a roadmap, based on Jung and Campbell, that will help other aspiring screenwriters (along with storytellers in other mediums) create “great stories.” It has a lot more substance behind it than Vogler, however, which focused archetypes and patterns, and…well, I’ll save the rest for a proper summary when I’ve finished the book.

I’ve spent a lot longer than I should have just now reading John Scalzi’s recent post The Lie of Star Wars as entertainment. The crux of his argument is that Lucas was not trying to create entertainment but mythology. My favorite quote from his post is “What’s interesting about mythology is that it’s the residue of a teleological system that’s dead; it’s what you get after everyone who believed in something has croaked and nothing is left but stories.”

My favorite quote from the lengthy (but definitely-worth-reading) comments: “Which makes the prequels the world’s most expensive exercise in fanfiction.” Hah.

I feel like I ought to say more about the mythology quote, but can’t think what. I’ll think about it and maybe come back to it at a later day. On a side note, another viewpoint about mythology from Neil Gaiman’s interview with Bookslut: “Mythology tends to be what religion decays into. A sort of second stage religion. Or it�s the bits of religion that won�t get you shot or harmed if you don�t take them seriously enough.”

I’m a great believer in synchronicity, or meaningful cooincidence, so I don’t believe it was mere chance that I laid hands on a volume of essays by C.S. Lewis just a day after completing Yann Martel’s astounding novel, The Life of Pi. I was just wandering around the library, looking for some papermaking books while the kids busied themselves in the children’s section, and there it was, perched on the end of a stack like it was just waiting for me to find it: C.S. Lewis On Stories and Other Essays on Literature. I slipped it under my arm with the other books I brought home that day because, well, I was hoping to find a topic I might write about here.

I never expected that the title essay, “On Stories”, would explain in theory what had been demonstrated in practice in the novel I had just finished.

It will be hard to explain in full without providing spoilers from The Life of Pi, and since I don’t want to ruin anyone’s first read of the book, I’ll start with Lewis’ theory and then talk about the novel behind the split.

The basic premise of the essay is that there are two ways of reading “romances”, or stories read purely for pleasure. With plenty of personal anecdotes as evidence, he proposes that some readers are driven by pure excitement — it doesn’t matter what sort of danger is faced, so long as there is a constant, inscreasing level of fear. For other readers, atmosphere or the sense of otherness, is a more important factor in their enjoyment of a story. You don’t have to guess which type of reader Lewis is, and I have to admit that, like him, I am of the latter sort. He tries not to denigrate the excitement-loving reader, but there is a subtle disdain for the type, which he associates with cinema and American “scientifiction” (this essay was first published in 1947 ).

The bulk of the essay goes on to elaborate on his preference for stories that rely on mood, atmosphere and language to provide pleasure instead of merely providing a series of exciting events. I’ll let his words speak more to the point:

Jack the Giant-Killer is not, in essence, simply the story of a clever hero surmounting danger. It is in essence the story of such a hero surmounting danger from giants. It is quite easy to contrive a story in which, though the enemies are of normal size, the odds against Jack are equally great. But it will be quite a different story. The whole quality of the imaginative response is determined by the fact that the enemies are giants. (page 8 )

He makes the same point about pirates in the next paragraph, and then later:

I have sometimes wondered whether the ‘excitement’ may not be an element actually hostile to the deeper imagination. In inferior romances…we often come across an really suggestive idea. But the author has no expedient for keeping the story on the move except that of putting his hero into violent danger. In the hurry and scurry of his escapes the poetry of the basic idea is lost. (page 10 )

And later yet again:

Good stories often introduce the marvellous or supernatural, and nothing about Story has been so often misunderstood at this. Thus, for example, Dr Johnson, if I remember rightly, thought that children liked stories of the marvellous because they were too ignorant to know that they were impossible…Belief is at best irrelvant; it may be a positive disadvantage. (page 12 )

While he does not explicitely state the point (it’s couched in examples too numerous to quote), the purpose of the marvellous in a story is united with the purpose of Art itself: “to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude.” (page 10 ) Which is why, I expect, that I have always favored fiction with some element of the fantastic. Real life is narrow and desperate enough as it is, right?

How often a person re-reads favorite stories is an indication of whether or not they read for pure excitement or if their imagination is being stimulated by a sort of poetry:

The re-reader is looking not for actual surprises (which can come only once) but for a certain surprisingness…In the only snese that matters the surprise works as well the twentieth time as the first. It is the quality of unexpectedness, not the fact that delights us. It is even better the second time. Knowing that the ’surprise’ is coming we can now fully relish the fact that this path through the shrubbery doesn’t look as if it were suddenly going to bring us out on the edge of the cliff. So in literature. We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which mearely wants cold wetness. The children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words. They want to have again the ’surprise’ of discovering that what seemed Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother is really the wolf. If is better when you know it is coming: free from the shock of actual surprise you can attend better to the intrinsic surprisingness of the peripeteia. (page 17 )

(The above passage doesn’t relate directly to Martel — I haven’t re-read it yet — but I wanted to keep it for my own reference. But I do re-read my favorite books, and rewatch my favorite movies for that matter, and the pleasure only deepens over time.)

Thus, Lewis’ “On Stories”. How does that apply to Martel? (more…)

I feel much the same way as Gregory Maguire when it comes to sharing the magic of reading with my children. These past weeks, I’ve been reading them the Chronicles of Narnia and loving every minute of it, and we’ll go see the movie for the second time tomorrow. The best part is when I overhear them working Narnia into their play, or when Anna confesses to me, “Yesterday, I looked in the back of my closet to see if I could get into Narnia.” See, I did the same thing when I was a kid. I love being able to share that magic with them.

Unsurprisingly, there is much in the media these days about C.S. Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia. Personally, I am thrilled with anticipation at the impending theatrical release of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, even if it is Disney, and even though I know should maintain at least a small degree of cynicism about potential changes the filmmakers might have made to what has been one of my favorite stories since I first read it in the fourth grade. Look what Hollywood did to Earthsea, after all. But I can’t help being excited, if only because in the trailers everything looks so splendid and I can’t wait to fall into that magic again, like Digory and Polly falling into the pools in the Wood Between Worlds.

The media seems to be concentrating on two themes. One is Narnia vs. Harry Potter. Personally, I think the Narnia movie will tromp all over the fourth HP movie this season, if only because with it’s PG-13 rating many younger kids won’t get to see Goblet of Fire. On top of that, Narnia is fresh, cinematically, and has been aggregating fans for 50 years, most of whom will be as ga-ga as I am about seeing it on screen, especially if it’s told as faithfully and as well as its cousin, The Lord of the Rings. As an extra bonus, Narnia has the potential to draw in the Christian audience that condems the “occultist” tendencies of Harry Potter, and likes to glorify the Christian allegories present in the Narnia books. That, of course, is the second major theme the media is focusing on — how much emphasis one can or should place upon the Christian elements of the Chronicles of Narnia.

By far, the most interesting article on the subject I’ve come across is Adam Gopnik’s “Prisoner of Narnia: How C.S. Lewis Escaped” over at The New Yorker, which tries to understand Lewis, his faith, and his creation without extolling Lewis as a paragon of Christian morality, nor condemning him for being…well, a paragon of Christian morality. What comes across most clearly is that Lewis was someone who was caught between fantasy and faith, wanting them very much to be the same thing all the while knowing that they were not and could never be.

As a member of the Inklings, Lewis is rightly hailed as one of the founding fathers of the modern mythopoeic arts, which brings me to the heart of why I am writing about this article at all. I know, personally, that Lewis inspired my first forays into mythopoeia — my first novel, co-authored with my best friend when I was 10, had many elements directly derived from the world of Narnia — and I’m certain he’s inspired many other authors as well. Gopnik’s article provides some brief insight into the workings of the mythopoet’s mind, starting with a quote from Lewis’s work of literary criticism, “The Allegory of Love”, which identifies three worlds available to the writer: the actual world of experience (it’s true because you can see it), the world of religious belief (you believe it to be true), and the world of the marvelous (you know it’s not true). Gopnik’s summary of Lewis’ observations is a succint “rule to live by” for any aspiring mythopoet:

“When we sit down to write a romance, then, we make up elves and ghosts and wraiths and wizards, in whom we don�t believe but in whom we enclose our most urgent feelings, and we demand that the world they inhabit be consistent and serious.”

This also goes a long way towards explaining why the Narnia books continue to be of such importance to Christians and non-Christians alike. It doesn’t matter that the tales happen to contain a message that is compatible with the Christian faith. The mythology contained within the books sustains itself without any external references at all, and its Truths are revealed through honest storytelling — actions, reactions, and emotion — not through didatic exposition or otherwise telling us what we should be learning. If Christians recognize similarities between their own beliefs and the mythology of Narnia, that’s fine, but even non-believers can take pleasure — Lewis’ “joy” — in a sojourn to a magical realm that emerges so completely from the page that even today, more than 50 years after it was written, kids are still poking around in the backs of closets, hoping to find a way in.

Gods of Pegana, a text he downloaded from Project Gutenberg. He knows I’ve been wanting to practice my nascent bookbinding skills on, so it was a very thoughtful and well-thought-out gift.

I bound the first copy over the weekend, a simple sewn tape binding with pages of plain printer paper. This is really meant to be the test product, as the second copy of the text is on very nice, heavy weight bond paper. There’s a couple pictures if you click on “continued” below, if you’re interested. I’m planning on doing something a bit more elaborate for the second copy, with different ribbons and beads and charms threaded onto the stitches. I think a somewhat fetishist look will fit the subject matter.

Once it was bound, I started reading the book. I hadn’t, before, though I’m familiar with other books of Dunsany. This one is pretty much a creation mythos with a listing of the gods of some imaginary world. As I was reading, I wondered if Dunsany was the first person to make up a complete imagined pantheon like this. There’s no publication in my book, but I think it was first published in the first decade of the 20th century. I’m really interested in investigating Dunsany’s inspiration for this work, and examining the text more closely. After all, inventing gods is really the heart of mythopoeia.