I Fear Thee, Ancient Mariner

So, a while back, after much conversation, I agreed to advise a senior thesis on the Harry Potter books. One does not do this without some misgivings. It has started me thinking about the role that fantasy now plays in the English major.

I teach our gateway majors course, and one of the things I do on the first day is ask the students to explain why they declared as English majors. Along with the inspiring stories of beloved high school English teachers who opened their minds to the wonders of literature--thank you very much, beloved high school English teachers, without whom our entire field would wither away and die--what typically emerges is evidence that reading contemporary mass-market fantasy was a major part of their formation as readers. It used to be that everyone mentioned Harry Potter. HP hegemony, however, seems to be in jeopardy, judging by the most recent group, who are more drawn to Hunger Games and Game of Thrones. It is interesting that though most of these students have read the Twilight books, these are typically invoked only to be reviled; perhaps this is their way of saying, "Look, I read genre fiction, but it has to be GOOD." I was teaching an early Northrop Frye essay on archetypes--like Foucault says, power is most effective when it's invisible, so if you want your students not to be controlled by an interpretive paradigm you teach them about it, that's my theory--last semester and suggested that fantasy is the contemporary survival of what Frye demoninates as "romance." I suggested that fantasy series in particular might lend themselves to "Fryed" readings (the whole patronus thing in Harry Potter is also a fascinating demonstration of the continuing power of Freud's "Totem and Taboo," but let's not go there). I was startled by the explosion that followed. I like to think that my students are typically animated during class discussion, but this was something different. Pretty soon they were engaged in their own intellectual debate, without any help from me, about whether this or that series did or didn't follow the schemata that Frye lays out in that essay--and it was obvious that they had a personal investment in this debate that I sadly foresaw would not carry over into our upcoming discussion of the pros and cons of using Frye's paradigm to read Yeats's "The Second Coming."

I can see why people would see this as a sign of the apocalypse. But fantasy was part of my formation too, and I believe that an exposure to fantasy can have its benefits. Fantasy, for instance, is one of the few places where the idea that another world is possible is kept alive. Fantasy allows writers to imagine what the world would be like if the givens were changed, and therefore encourages us to wonder which of our givens might not actually be irrevocably given. Readers who discover the pleasures of entering into a created universe might be more likely to think it worthwhile to imagine ways of re-creating our own. If historically fantasy and science fiction have frequently replicated imperialist narratives of conquest and produced harmful and oppressive visions of the Other, they have also provided women writers, queer writers, and writers of color with ways of representing experiences and visions which could not easily be conveyed in literature that had to confine itself to the "real world." I suppose that it is precisely because I reject the tyranny of "common sense" that I see anything that expands the boundaries of the imaginable as a potential ally.

I phrase all this conditionally because mass-market fantasy seems to be getting more and more dystopian. And though there are different lessons to be learned from dystopian fiction, I always fear that the primary lesson will be: the world is irretrievably broken and cannot be saved, no matter how heroically you as an individual struggle with it. With fantasy set in a dystopia you basically have three possible resolutions for the protagonist struggling against it: 1) protagonist is crushed. 2) protagonist escapes. 3) protagonist teams up with revolutionaries to change the world. Ending #3 is very difficult to pull off, especially now. Everyone is too skeptical of the staying power of a revolution; and of course since 9/11 it has become much more politically dangerous to depict revolution as either positive or necessary, even in a fantasy context. Ending #1 just makes the reader feel like the world is a cruel and horrible place; and ending #2 does nothing to encourage people to think about changing their own world.

Even in fantasy aimed at children you can see this now. I took my five year old daughter to see Rise of the Guardians (it was not my idea, I should point out) and was appalled by it from start to finish. Though the film is clearly marketed to children, it is based on the action-movie formula that controls so many movies for grown-ups. A group of folk characters known as the "Guardians"--the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Sandman--are appointed through some mystical process controlled by the moon as the 'guardians' of various precious childlike qualities (wonder, hope, fun, etc.). Why do children need 'guardians'? Because they are menaced by creatures like Pitch Black, the movie's Big Bad, who seeks to transform the happy dreams that the Sandman gives them into dark and terrifying nightmares. The art concept on Pitch Black was stolen straight out of the Harry Potter movies--PB even looks and talks a little bit like Ralph Fiennes--and Pitch commands an army of nightmares who are a cross between the Nazgul mounts from Lord of the Rings and the Dementors. There's so much wrong with that movie that I hardly know where to start; but the biggest immediate problem was simply that the world created (with a great deal of technical expertise and artistic pride, I should note) by Rise of the Guardians is dark, dark, dark, and more dark. The good guys win in the end, but only after about an hour of despair, darkness, violence, destruction, the 'death' of the most sympathetic and lovable character, and infintely proliferating minions of evil filling the screen with their menace. My daughter was compelled by its sensory power, but also terrified by it. She was relieved to hear me express a dislike for it and we spent a lot of time talking about why we didn't like the movie. Now, it is clear to me that this movie was pitched to older children--boys in the 7-10 range, I would imagine--and so the fact that a group of five-year-olds were terrified by it is not surprising. But even for its target demographic, I still have to ask: Why so dark? Sure, there's a lot about the real world that's mean and hateful and scary and bleak and dark dark dark. But wouldn't this be an argument for using children's entertainment to offer brighter alternatives, instead of creating a world which is actually darker and more violent than the real one?

Oh. Wait. Newtown.

I take it back. Rise of the Guardians is not darker or more violent than the world a twenty-first century American child lives in. Not any more.

But I digress.

For my students, at any rate, I would say that fantasy does not have the effect on their literary sensibilities that I would hope for; and I think this has more to with form. A couple gateway courses ago my students went off on a tirade about Shakespeare's use of magic in The Tempest. It was easy enough to find the source of the antipathy. Contemporary mass-market fantasy incorporates all kinds of antirealistic content, but formally speaking it is typically indistinguishable from realism. In fact, to the extent that an individual fantasy series rises above the herd, it's usually because the author is better at realism than his or her peers. What satsifies people in fantasy is the experience of being immersed in the world, and that world is typically built using techniques that haven't changed that much since Middlemarch. The pacing and style are different, of course; the proportion of action to characterization and description is often much higher; the standards for what counts as a credible plot are often more flexible; but otherwise, your typical mass-market fantasy novel follows the same rules that govern realistic fiction.

What this means is that readers raised on Harry Potter and its competitors expect magic to be rational. In other words, to render magic credible within the boundaries of realism, the author has to create what is known in the biz as a "magical system" with a coherent and explicable set of rules founded on some kind of symbolic logic. These rules, of course, are invented; but once invented, they have to be followed, or else they are no longer 'real' and the world is no longer compelling. My students' problem with magic in The Tempest is that it appears to be arbitrary. There are no clear rules or obvious boundaries defined for Prospero's magic or for Ariel's power. Prospero's magic is in fact often used to allow Shakespeare to end-run around dramatic conventions and to break what my students see as the iron laws of plot and causality; and as a pre-realism text, The Tempest does not conform to most of the expectations created by the fantasy they're familiar with. So magic, from their point of view, may not be real; but they do demand that it be realistic.

All this is just to say that I was once again defeated by Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" yesterday. I love Coleridge to death, but I find it difficult to get his work to behave in a classroom. The students all seemed to have read it and to be interested in it; but the imperative to interpret--the drive to find a reading that will make sense of the entire text--is something that poem in particular seems to be designed to both evoke and frustrate. Rightly or wrongly, I see "Rime" and "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel" as fantasy; it seems to me that much of their appeal initially must simply have been their ability to transport the reader into a world s/he would never have been able to imagine on his/her own. I like the poem precisely because it resists explication--because its mythologies are so many and so self-contradicting--and then every time I teach it I get to rediscover the obvious fact that it is difficult to teach something that resists explication. The students all want to understand it, of course; so we typically wind up debating the various symbolic/allegorical interpretations. This usually--for me, anyway--generates not so much a reading as an ever-expanding pool of ambguities. And I like ambiguity; but I find that no matter how much I commit intellectually to the idea that my job is not to provide them with an authoritative reading that they could just as easily look up on Wikipedia, I can't help being frustrated when at the end of the period we've got a huge pile of question and not very much answer. I suppose that if I were a romanticist for real, instead of someone teaching a survey course that only barely intersects with my field of expertise, I would have better strategies. But then I also think that the only reason I enjoy teaching this course is that it takes me beyond my field of expertise, and forces me to grapple with texts that my mad pedagogical skillz have yet to subdue.

And I suppose that what I really want them to get out of Coleridge's poetry is exposure to a kind of imagination which is unconstrained by the demands of realism, and which is therefore wilder and weirder than what they have been introduced to via Harry Potter and friends. Wild and weird and macabre but not, despite all the pain involved, dark in the way that so much of our post-idealism literature is dark. An imaginary world that includes both perdition and redemption; a story that celebrates the saving power of love in the midst of horror. A story that kind of turns me into the Ancient Mariner, walking into that room and wishing that I had the power to hold them all with my glittering eye...and instead, I feel like all I can do is repeat, like the greybeard loon I have become, "There was a ship...There was a ship."