EXILE FROM MIDDLE EARTH: HOW FANTASY FAILED US
© ORC BROTHERHOOD by Mike Dubisch
I
remember tears welling up in my eyes at the beginning of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship Of The Ring, when Frodo confronts Gandalf, upon his belated return to the Shire. When Gandalf replies that “a wizard always arrives precisely when he means to,” all the love and wonder Tolkien’s books had given me came flooding back. For so many of us, The Lord Of The Rings was the cornerstone upon which all modern fantasy rests, and to see it brought so lovingly to life was a visceral, overwhelming experience which only escalated with the successive entries in the trilogy. For me, it was much more, for it forced me to confront unexamined feelings for my father, who died when I was eight.
I remember my father always had the Tolkien calendar on his kitchen wall, the lavish Hildebrandt brothers artwork burning scenes into my mind long before I understood their context. He had two cats, Gandalf and Gollum. I remember seeing Bakshi’s Lord Of The Rings in the theater with him and watching The Time Machine on TV, and getting Conan comics and visiting a park to see concrete dinosaur statues, the last time I saw him.
Only later did I understand how vital a refuge fantasy was for my father, in a dreary world that never seemed to give him a break. Always relegated to the dimmest corner of the local library or B. Dalton Bookseller, a creaky spinner rack in the drugstore, the graveyard shift on local TV, any glimpse of fantasy was like a transmission from another world more magical and pure than our own, and balm for souls rubbed raw by the button-down bullshit of modern life.
Fast-forward forty years, and, of course, fantasy fandom has become a monolithic mainstream phenomenon. We all hunger for escape, and epic fantasy is a staple. Even people who can’t name their own elected representatives and don’t know when World War 2 happened, know all about the Siege of Gondor and the Red Wedding. It is a golden age of escapism, and yet fantasy remains a stagnant cesspool of cliché, bloated excess, and reactionary, toxic fandom. The thing intended to deliver us from the pressure cooker of modern life has become as fraught with frustration, entitlement, and bigotry as the world we sought to escape from.
As I’m hardly the first to observe, much of the problem lies in fantasy itself. Born out of the romantic, decadent and exoticism movements of the late nineteenth century, fantasy fiction as a genre had its roots as much in the Arabian Nights as in the European culture heroes, from the Scandinavian sagas and Arthurian myths. The rejection of modernity and rediscovery of primal attributes in seminal fantasy by Saki, T.H. White, Lord Dunsany and others, the yearning for strange perfumes and foreign shores, for quests and tests of valor and bouts of courtly romance was a luxury spared for those who had successfully foisted their will upon the rest of the world, and languished in the comfortable leisure hours bought by colonialism and white supremacy. If they expected to be swept away from the mundane, they also expected to have their cherished inner myths valorized. From the childlike Aryan race theory of Robert E. Howard to the elaborate Christian allegory of C.S. Lewis, early fantasy took readers to far-off places while validating the core values they brought with them from home. Witness the furious backlash against the casting of Jason Momoa as the last cinematic incarnation of Conan, and you see how zealously the white core readership cherishes its fantasy icons not as vehicles for experiencing the Other, but as reflections of their own perpetually imperiled whiteness.
If Tolkien stirred our noblest aspirations, he also created a benign propaganda that mythologized cultural differences until nationalities became species, and denied basic humanity to its antagonists, rendering the defense of the divine right of kings into a Manichean conflict between absolute light and absolute darkness––arguably, in spite of his denials, an allegory for Europe’s agonizing crusade against Hitler. As noted contrarian David Brin observed in an essay coinciding with Jackson’s grandiose adaptation of Lord Of The Rings, the humans and their allies worship at the altar of absolute hereditary rule, and libel the one agent of merit, inclusion and technological progress in Middle Earth. Certainly, the notion that the land might incarnate itself in the form of a devoted ruler is a beautiful conceit, but it’s only the most richly embroidered defense of a myth that’s brought little but tribulation and tragedy, in the real world. If one were to ask the Saudi Crown Prince in a candid moment about the butchery of Jamal Khashoggi only this month, he would no doubt clothe his rationalization by noting that the Washington Post journalist dismembered with bone saws in the Saudi consulate in Turkey was just another orc threatening his divinely ordained kingdom.
While lauded by critics and showered with awards, Jackson’s film adaptations were assailed by Tolkien-cult ingrates pining for Tom Bombadil, then pilloried for shoehorning in female characters with actual agency and blowing out gateway fantasy drug The Hobbit into a plodding trilogy of videogame cut-scenes and high-res irrelevance.
© MIDDLE EARTH LAST AGES by Mike Dubisch
Aside from gleaming outliers like Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy and Gene Wolfe’s Book Of The New Sun, epic fantasy since Tolkien seems to have taken up all his worst excesses without capturing his ineffable grandeur. Virtually all earlier incarnations of the genre were forgotten, despite the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line’s valiant attempt to capitalize on the boom by reviving Smith, Dunsany, Hodgson, Eddison, Beckford and others, in favor of the monolithic saga that foisted a humble peasant into the role of upstart challenger against some obligatory dark eminence from the east. Reactions to Tolkien tended to boil away the engrossing complexity into a stew of YA destiny-porn like Lloyd Alexander’sPrydain Chronicles or David Ebbings’ Belgariad, or drag an all-too-human element into the plot in troublesome, if not always edifying ways. Stephen Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant books, in particular, brought an ugly streak of self-loathing misogyny into his fantasy realm, in the form of a protagonist who utterly rejects the lofty role chosen for him by the guardians of The Land, only to accept it by committing a rape so monstrous, it obliterates any meta-message about fantasy vs. reality it might’ve hoped to send. Marion Zimmer Bradley’sMists Of Avalon, long championed as a feminist take on the Arthurian cycle, has since been condemned in light of its author’s creepy sexual proclivities, and John Norman’s risible Gor series endures primarily as a primer for sexual dominance play.
White men still rule modern fantasy, and women and people of color are still denigrated as magical elfin dream-girls and subhuman beast-creatures, respectively. In order to repay its influences while jockeying for mainstream success, the quest itself becomes a bloated mcguffin, as in the preposterously long grift of Robert Jordan’sWheel Of Time series, and the idealized depictions of good and evil have become no more illuminating, but far less inspiring, with injections of banal and base human nature. Martin’s Song Of Ice And Fire is a morbidly obese but still-incomplete drag that only television can bring to a conclusion, its plot a brutalist soap opera following equally unworthy rulers as they wreak havoc and desolation not to exterminate some stereotypical evil, but for power itself. While Tolkien resisted the reduction of his magnum opus to a fairy tale about World War 2, Martin has embraced fan theories that his epic of incest and internecine warfare symbolizes contemporary political dithering in the face of global climate change, seeking to shake us to a realization we’ve bitterly resisted absorbing from the daily news. In too many ways, the real world has invaded our dreams. If Sauron and the orcs were to invade Westeros, they would be welcomed as liberators.
But nowhere is the regressive nature of modern fantasy more blatant than J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Justly lauded for inspiring millions of young readers to embark upon more ambitious reading journeys, yet as high fantasy, it reflects a turning away from the crucible of conflict into the warm cloister of an uncannily nurturing boarding school that tacks every hoary fantasy cliché onto the real thrill of being every teacher’s pet in an adverb-larded parade of inevitable accolades and cake-walk quests. That Harry Potter’s cozy, saccharine comfort food commands such unswerving loyalty among ostensible adults suggests that too many readers dream less of a harrowing quest that will test their mettle, and more of simply staying in school and having all the answers to the tests given to them because they’re destined to win, anyway.
The biggest problem is the way we’ve been trained to escape, and what we’re escaping from. The medium has too long been subject to the publisher-pushed notion that fantasy must come in multi-volume door-stop epics to be taken seriously. We’re not seeking adventure to leaven a dull existence, so much as seeking to escape real chaos and conflict bordering on the fantastical. When America becomes Mordor and Sauron a New York reality show slumlord, fantasy realms become our new homeland.
The sheer volume of fantasy offerings in every medium makes escapism not a diversion from life, but a career, albeit an unpaid one, and less and less of a rewarding one.
THE EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES AND FOOL’S GOLD HAS LEFT US OVERSTIMULATED AND SPOILED, INCAPABLE OF SIMPLY LOSING ONESELF AS IN CHILDHOOD, EVEN AS THE PRESSURE WE ALL FEEL IN LIFE DRIVES US TO BRING THE GRIEVANCES OF WORKADAY LIFE INTO OUR BOOKS, MOVIES AND VIDEO GAMES AND SOCIAL MEDIA CONVERSATIONS ABOUT THEM.
The deep personal sense of nostalgia attached to our favorite works, long taken for granted and ruthlessly exploited by corporate media, dictates that fantasy should take us to other worlds while always looking, walking and talking like us, and so we’ve sealed ourselves in a bubble, huffing our favorite dreams like so many canned farts. Small wonder then, that so many who’ve never identified as racist or sexist find themselves raging at their peers as cherished fantasy properties are retconned, rebooted or otherwise adulterated from the “pure” forms they grew up with; if everything in life is stagnating or being taken away, it might feel like they’re really raping your childhood, but get a fucking grip.
The only reason all too many corporate purveyors of fantasy are in the business is because you’re buying what they’re selling. If you walk past the $28.00 tomes and sprawling movie franchises to seek out artists who create passionately on the fringes of the market, you’ll find that pure love, that escape from this world, that you’ve been craving.
We say that to survive its own commercial success, fantasy must welcome everyone and embrace and let us empathize with the Other, and not reinforce dangerous jingoistic fantasies. We say that true escapism should playfully speak to our real world anxieties in the sublimated symbolism of dreams, resisting bald political parable and instead taking us to new arenas to challenge the enemies that go faceless and unnamed in our wretched waking lives. We say that the best fantasies are not epic, self-serious slabs of verbal masonry, but the sort of short, sharp daydreams that shock us awake, and let us see with new eyes.
We are tired of Tolkien and mad at Martin, but dreaming of Smith and Dunsany, longing for Leiber, and mad for Moorcock. In all of these, we see pure imagination win out over warmed-over Euro-centric myth cycles, where we are all equally foreign invaders. In Leiber, we see a love of swashbuckling fantasy for its own sake, nevertheless imbued with poignant critiques of humanity worthy of the most lauded mainstream literature. In Moorcock, we witness the deconstruction of the archetypal fantasy hero and divorce his obligatory quest from flimsy and dangerous labels of good and evil, unmasked as merely Law and Chaos. In all of these, we see the short story and novelette elevated to mythic status, and all the bullshit burned away. With this issue, we hope to rediscover what we’ve always loved about conventional fantasy tropes while destroying the tired conventions themselves and reigniting in our readers a love of strange shores and alien dreams. And as always with this labor of love, we hope to do our fathers, and our mothers, proud.
