Fantasy fiction: old gods in disguise

When I was about 12, I discovered The Belgariad, perhaps the high point of 1980s fantasy fiction in the po-faced medieval style. David Eddings’ shepherd-boy-discovers-hidden-magic-and-saves-the-world format may seem hackneyed now, but my tween self was entranced: siblings would try and fail to get my attention before shouting “Fire! Death! Mary!” into my ear to wrest me from that world of infinite possibility and high adventure.

Back then, fantasy was a nerd hobby. Today, though, both fantasy and the moral policing of fantasy seems increasingly mainstream. Fantasy novels can be pulled for wrongthink and even wildly successful fantasy authors such as JK Rowling get dogpiled. Not even actors representing fantasy characters are safe: witness the treatment meted out to Mandalorian actress Gina Carano after being judged by the court of social media to be guilty of heresy.

To those uninterested in fantasy “fandoms”, these may seem absurd dramas. After all, when we’re talking about imaginary worlds populated by imaginary people, who cares about the private opinions of those who create the stories, or represent them on TV?

This dismissive attitude is a mistake. The truth is that a culture’s ideals are always delivered via stories, and in most cultures telling and re-telling these has been taken very seriously indeed. It’s only in our modern world that tales of gods and monsters, rather than taking centre stage in our shared cultural life, have been shoved off into a box called “fantasy fiction” and treated as a mezzobrow hobby for the incorrigibly childish.

It should be clear by now that I have a personal stake here: I’m a full-bore fantasy fiction nerd. Whether it’s solemn sword-and-sorcery, the comic adventures of Terry Pratchett, or the weird worlds of China Miéville or Josiah Banks, if it’s even half-decently written and concerns fantastic kingdoms and impossible adventures I’m there. But I’m also, to a modest extent, interested in literary history. And it’s striking how fantasy fiction popped into existence as a Western genre more or less at the exact point where epic poetry in the classical style stopped being taken seriously.

Rewind a few hundred years, and everyone writing in English sprinkled references to the Greek and Roman gods into their stories and poems, while the Homeric myths occupied a place in the Western imagination almost as central as the Bible. It’s difficult to imagine today but figures such as Athena, goddess of war and wisdom, Circe the sorceress and snake-headed Medusa were common cultural reference points for the educated class.

And it wasn’t just the mythic memes of antiquity that larded our literature — it was the forms as well. The hero’s quest, as set out in The Iliad and The Odyssey, and later in Virgil’s Aeneid, formed a template for heroic narrative that continued almost unchanged into the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Countless authors borrowed, imitated, translated and ironically reworked the epic mode, from Spenser’s hallucinatory Faerie Queene (1590) to Milton’s barnstorming retelling of the Christian story, Paradise Lost (1667), to arguably the last effort at epic poetry, Byron’s Don Juan (1819). But it couldn’t last. In Don Juan, Byron captured something sad but unmistakably true: the classical epics were losing their aura, leaving behind only a sense of lost grandeur. As Byron’s hero laments, while trapped on a Greek island (with only a nubile pirate princess for company):

THE isles of Greece! the isles of Greece
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.

Byron’s 16,000 lines of satire, sex and mourning for the vanished glories of classical antiquity put paid to epic as a usable form for anyone with a desire to be taken seriously as a writer. Or was it science? Imagine a looming form that by candlelight seems a shadowy, terrible monster — then turns out, with the lights switched on, to be just a coat-stand. With scientists explaining away ever more of the world’s mysteries by the light of reason, maybe the old gods just started to look a bit silly.

So a few short decades later, the epic style migrated into the first fantasy novels: George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858), and the children’s adventure The Princess and the Goblin (1871). Even as epic poetry died off, modern fantasy fiction was born.

The high point for our rational world — Peak Reason, if you will — was probably the end of the Cold War, when it seemed all the grand battles between good and evil had been won. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it was in the 1980s that the fantasy market went supernova.

Remembering my adolescence in the 1990s, the everyday world seemed flat, dull and stripped of all enchantment. But fantasy blossomed: after my baptism-by-Belgariad, I fell feet-first into the then freshly-published greats of modern fantasy, by now-classic authors such as Robin Hobb, Tad Williams and of course JK Rowling. Epic imagination scaled new heights, even as geopolitics sought perpetual peace under the “liberal international order”, the Communist threat evaporated, and the scope for heroic achievement in the “real” world seemed as vanished as Byron’s vision of classical Greece.

Those who went on dreaming of earth-shattering battles or heroes plucked from obscurity to save the universe have spent the Age of Reason with their heads down. Tolkien’s classic of 20th-century fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, is one of the best-selling books of all time; but one 1955 letter to WH Auden, Tolkien ruefully describes being “scourged with such terms as ‘pubescent’ and ‘infantilism’”. And everyone loves dragging millennials about the Harry Potter thing.

But while science has plenty to say about the “what” and “how” of our world, it has far less to offer on “why”. We may laugh at the tweeness of being a Harry Potter obsessive in your thirties, or someone with a mortgage and two kids cosplaying at a Star Wars convention. But we’re not so different from our fireside-storytelling ancestors, in craving stories that help us get at the dark, strange questions — or the big ones about power, empire, good and evil.

And while mythology seemed temporarily defeated by the End of History, today successive crises of finance, terrorism and pandemic have shown our world to be far more dangerous and unpredictable than we once imagined. So even as history has come roaring back, we shouldn’t be surprised to see gods and monsters doing the same. They might take the form of Baby Yoda memes or emetic Gryffindor avatars, but they’re playing the same role as the Greek and Roman pantheon centuries ago: providing a common narrative language for debates about the big questions.

From this perspective it’s easier to see how quarrels over whether or not an actress thinks you should wear a mask, or what JK Rowling thinks about transgender women, aren’t ludicrous culture war sideshows at all. Rather, they’re border skirmishes over the content of our moral operating system. The woke grasp this fact instinctively, which is why they reserve a special fury for policing heresy in our emerging new mythologies.

But the new would-be guardians of our epic mythologies are likely to find in time that their subject has a habit of escaping their control. The long history of stories that survive and replicate tells us it’s not the morally correct ones that make the cut, but the ones that ring true. No one today reads that classic of 17^th-century woke literature, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, unless they absolutely have to. Meanwhile, it’s a testament to the continued power of the old pantheons, that having disappeared from highbrow literature, they’ve since reappeared in (among other things) PlayStation games and the Marvel universe.

And the power of such gods lies partly in their refusal to be domesticated: they’re two-faced, ambivalent, bloody, capricious and awe-inspiring. They’re not at all inclusive. They carry a payload of intuitions about — for example — the persistence of power, violence and hierarchy, the often-untidy dynamics between the sexes, and the obnoxiousness of heroic personalities, that don’t sit comfortably with the sanitised modern imagination. Stories are too unruly to be easily contained by moral correctness.

It was the pursuit of Reason that chased the old gods into the shadows of children’s literature. But today, our faith in Reason is well on its way to collapsing. David Goodhart wrote recently about how, as media control has decentralised in the internet age, what looked like a consensus on “objective” discourse has been upended by a tidal wave of emotionally inflected personal testimony. Even the New York Times, which has for decades styled itself as the objective ‘paper of record’, has been convulsed by civil war over whether it should instead embrace more polemical, politicised stances.

As the lights go out and we see the world by firelight again, expect to discover the old gods striding, full-sized, across our imaginations again. We may find their return a mixed blessing.

Originally published at UnHerd

Why won’t our artists aim higher?

London ravaged by disease. Social and sexual mores collapsing. Shifting political alliances and a wobbling constitution. A Babel of competing voices vying to dominate new media channels, driving public discourse to fever pitch. It’s not the first time we’ve been here.

Today our artists embrace (and sometimes accelerate) the vibe. Sculptors are more interested in subverting statuary than glorifying anything; painters warn of an oncoming apocalypse in two-storey murals and most music is about getting laid. But back at the dawn of the modern world, when politics, culture, mores and faith were as much in flux as they are today, the 18th century’s artists took a more aspirational approach.

The cultural sphere they depicted was every bit as harmonious as the world that produced it was volatile. But while today we still listen to the measured strains of Handel, and marvel at the elegant proportions of a building by Inigo Jones, the poets of the same era are ignored. Of these, the most criminally underrated is also, perhaps, the one whose work offers the most intriguing clues for the modern world: Alexander Pope.

Pope was born the same year as modern Britain: 1688, when a group of English statesmen deposed James II as King of England, in favour of his son-in-law William of Orange. The reasons for James’ deposition were complicated, but included his Roman Catholicism as well as his insistence on the king’s divine right to abolish Parliament and govern centrally via decree.

Unenthusiastic about absolute monarchy, and nervous of future kings trying it on again, Parliament slapped new constraints on royal power — and the upshot was the constitutional monarchy we’ve lived with ever since.

As the old order liquefied at the end of the 17^th century, and the fight began in earnest for power at the beginning of the 18th, aristocrats and a new class of emerging industrialists poured in to fill the vacuum left behind by an absolute ruler. These politicos increasingly split between “Tory” defenders of James II, and “Whig” proponents of Protestantism, in a political configuration that gradually took the form that would become our modern adversarial Parliament.

This binary antagonism, every bit as values-driven and visceral as the Leavers and Remainers of today, drove a febrile “us and them” political discourse. And in a forerunner of today’s clickbait-for-profit content machine, the flames were fanned by advances in printing technology, that made the written word suddenly cheap and plentiful. Presses sprang up like mushrooms, and publishers grew rich selling the scandals, libels and “fake news” of the day.

Modern politicos blame social media for a decline in public civility. But compared to the grotesque caricatures, insulting posters, inflammatory street speakers and assassination plots against senior Tories that characterised politics in the early 18th century, what gets painted today as declining standards of politeness appears more like a return to form.

New governing elites, having displaced an absolute monarch less than a generation before, were sharply aware of how fragile public consent was for their newfangled constitutional monarchy — and how much potential hostile presses had to shatter that consent. In a move that foreshadows modern drives worldwide to regulate social media, new laws pushed to suppress dissent: the 1706 Star Chamber Case De Libellis Famosis ruled that accusations against the monarch or government could constitute seditious libel even if they were true.

Pope was in many ways an outsider, a condition that today we associate with a subversive mindset. Like the deposed James II, he was Catholic, and also a Tory in a hegemonically Whig era. But he was as preoccupied with order and stability as the Star Chamber, and — albeit in a different way — every bit as critical as they were of the newly democratic world of letters.

Rather than the law, though, Pope’s battleground was literature, where he emerged as a fierce defender of high culture and classical tradition against the pandemonium of “Grub Street”. First published 1728, The Dunciad pillories the hacks of “Grub Street”, in ironically high style, as a throng of “Dunces” under the Queen of Dullness herself.

It’s perhaps the most barbed and sparkling feature-length piece of literary shade ever thrown, by turns cultivated and scabrous. Where Twitter today might just call someone a shit writer, Pope depicts one rival as powered by the spatterings of Jove’s own chamberpot:

Renew’d by ordure’s sympathetic force,
As oil’d with magic juices for the course,
Vig’rous he rises; from th’effluvia strong;
Imbibes new life, and scours and stinks along; (Dunciad II, 103-6)

Without a working knowledge of Pope’s political and literary world, getting The Dunciad’s jokes is bit like someone from the year 2320 to try and follow the jokes on Have I Got News For You. But it’s hard not to see an echo in it of our access-to-all digital “publishing” environment, and the impact it’s had on the contemporary discourse:

‘Twas chatt’ring, grinning, mouthing, jabb’ring all,
And Noise, and Norton, Brangling, and Breval,
Dennis and Dissonance; and captious Art,
And Snip-snap short, and Interruption smart. (Dunciad II, 231-34)

Pope’s blend of wit, erudition and waspishness made him a sharp satirist of contemporary chaos, but his happier visions were of tradition and harmony. London, in Windsor-Forest (1713) was envisioned as a gilded, ordered, place and the rightful heir of antiquity. Faced with its glory, the Muses would quit singing about the glories of ancient Rome, and praise England’s capital instead:

Behold! Augusta’s glitt’ring Spires increase,
And Temples rise, the beauteous Works of Peace. (Windsor-Forest, 377-8)

“Augusta”, a Roman name for London, gives Pope and his contemporaries the name by which we know them today: the Augustans. And yet London in Pope’s day was not a vision of order and beauty at all, but famous for slums, licentiousness, corruption and STDs.

The print boom extended to a flourishing trade in porn, with smutty publications bought not just for private consumption but to read aloud in pubs and coffee houses. And prefiguring Frank Ski by some centuries, there really were whores in all kinds of houses: Covent Garden was a byword for the sex trade, from the low-class “flash-mollishers” and theatre-visiting “spells” to brothel-operating “bawds” and “Covent Garden Nuns”. Prominent prostitutes, such as Sally Salisbury (1692-1724) became celebrities: Salisbury’s noted clients including Viscount Bolingbroke, and even (according to rumour) the future George II.

On top of this gossipy, salacious and politicised backdrop, urban living conditions in the city were filthy and disease-ridden: more people died in London in the 1700s than were baptised every year. The century was characterised by near-continuous military engagement. So on the face of it, nothing makes sense about Pope’s depiction in the 1733 Essay on Man, of all the cosmos as “the chain of Love/Combining all below and all above”, in which “Whatever IS, is RIGHT”.

This seems especially strange today, in the light of our modern preference for art that’s “representative” of demographics or otherwise reflective of “the real world”. But Pope’s fixation on order, hierarchy and beauty make sense, because he feared that the alternative to an idealised order would be infinitely worse:

Let Earth unbalanc’d from her orbit fly,
Planets and Suns run lawless thro’ the sky,
Let ruling Angels from their spheres be hurl’d,
Being on being wreck’d, and world on world,
Heav’n’s whole foundations to their centre, nod,
And Nature tremble to the throne of God:
All this dread ORDER break – for whom? For thee?
Vile worm! Oh Madness, Pride, Impiety! (Essay on Man, Ep. I, 251-7)

Modern tastes run more to deconstructing than glorifying canonical art or the social hierarchies it idealises. Today we’re all about writing doctorates on marginalia, humanising a stammering monarch, or revealing the sexual licence beneath the aristocratic facade. But from Pope’s perspective, it was order that needed defending, as the only real defence against tyranny:

What could be free, when lawless Beasts obey’d
And ev’n the Elements a Tyrant sway’d? (WF, 51-2)

Read against the corruption, volatility and rampant, clap-infested shagging of Georgian high society, the restrained vituperation, classical learning and formal orderliness of Pope’s writing could be seen as a paradox. Or, perhaps, a state of denial. But what if it was more a set of aspirations that succeeded — just not straight away?

The ensuing century, dominated by Victoria and Albert, is perhaps Peak Order for modern Britain. If Boswell’s diaries, in the latter half of the 18^th century, record 19 separate instances of gonorrhea, Victoria’s ascent to the British throne in 1837 was characterised by a society-wide backlash against the excesses of the preceding era.

Whether methodically colouring the globe in red, or imposing strict codes of sexual conduct, public-spiritedness and emotional reserve at home, the Victorians reacted against the perceived licentiousness of the Georgian era — by delivering the kind of order that Alexander Pope both depicted in his writing and also, in his own political era, never saw realised.

In the time since Peak Order we’ve all become somewhat more free-and-easy again. But we should be wary of viewing this either as evidence of moral progress, or (depending on your outlook) of a decline that’s likely to continue indefinitely. Our age has its digital Grub Street, its own pandemic, its unstable political settlement, and its patronage politics. So perhaps it may yet produce its own Alexander Pope, and with it a new poetics of order — for a future none of us will live long enough to see.

Originally published at UnHerd