Why Fantasy Needs Postmodernism: Morality

This post is meant as an introduction or synopsis of a concept that should be very familiar to long-time readers of fantasy, especially fans of some of the postmodern-influenced contemporary fantasy I'll be covering in this series (and if you're not a fan of Game of Thrones, c'mon). Anyway, don't expect anything groundbreaking here.

Fantasy Violence

Fantasy, high or low, dark or heroic, usually involves a lot of murder. Bloody sword fighting and gruesome monster slaying are so deeply enmeshed in the genre that few works are bold enough to eschew them entirely. There is a bit of dissonance, then, in the fact that fantasy works are often belittled as children's media. Children can't be exposed to raw ultra-violence, so fighting that takes place in these stories has to be put in some kind of context, a space where it is regulated, justified, or comprehended.

The Heroic Frame

There are a few moral frames that are typically used for this purpose. The first, because it's probably the oldest, is the heroic frame. It views violence as an occasion to demonstrate personal virtues: loyalty to the clan, willpower and courage, but most of all strength and skill in the practice of violence itself. This sort of violence is often ritualized in formal duels and accompanied by song, dance, and often a minimum of actual death. It represents warfare in many indigenous cultures, and in Western cultures it has become entirely subsumed by sports.

Some fantasy works, especially products of historical cultures, use this frame for violence (The Iliad, Beowulf, The Worm Ouroboros) but it is not typically sufficient in works that involve larger political strife. Most contemporary works that depict men who fight and kill for personal honor use that trait as a shorthand for evil.

The Postmodern Frame

The newest frame for violence, as far as I'm aware, is postmodern. The postmodern frame paints violence as the inevitable consequence of ecological, economic, and political conflicts. They make no attempt to justify violence, occasionally commenting on the tragic circumstances that spawn it. It generally acknowledges that both parties bear some blame for violence, that both believe themselves to be doing right in some measure. I'll be covering some of these works in this series, but some conspicuous examples are The Wire, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and Game of Thrones.

The Moral Frame

The one overwhelmingly common frame for fantasy violence is moral. The moral frame is familiar from works like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter. The binary of good and evil in these worlds is common to many religions, but most directly reflects and references Christianity. Western fantasy has deep roots in late medieval chivalric romances (King Arthur and his many continental counterparts) and the expressions of morality in contemporary fantasy can be traced back to those explicitly Christian stories.

Much of early modern fantasy was explicitly allegorical and, especially insofar as it was aimed at children, contained explicit moral lessons. In a long tradition of what Simon Schama calls "grafting," Christian authors used pagan stories, creatures, and settings to enliven what was essentially Bible commentary. C.S. Lewis' Narnia books are the most famous example, though he got the idea from his predecessor George MacDonald.

The Lord of the Rings series, written by Lewis' friend and fellow Christian fantasist JRR Tolkien, was often interpreted as a comparable allegory, especially for political realities at the time he wrote it (World War II) or conceived it (World War I). Tolkien found this unduly limiting; his ambitions were broader. Steven Allen Carr tells us that:

Tolkien in fact encouraged the view of his work as an open-ended allegory, yet denied particularly specific allegorical applications. . . . According to National Public Radio, Tolkien considered Lord of the Rings “an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power,” – in other words, a kind of master allegory.

Thus the story is not meant to represent World War 1 specifically; it can be mapped onto any war. The Ring doesn't represent nuclear weapons; it represents any war machine of unbalanced power. As a "master allegory," the iconography of Middle Earth has had a long and illustrious history as a political narrative, particularly in foreign policy. This history is reviewed in Steven Allen Carr's 2002 piece Confronting Lord of the Rings as Allegory.

Following in Tolkien's tradition (and reflecting the shift to secularism and away from symbolism in art generally), most contemporary fantasy works are not allegorical. The stories they are telling don't come from the Bible or reference its characters in a specific sense - Obi-Wan is not intended as a Christlike figure (though Gandalf may be). But they persist in reaching for Tolkien's "master allegory," which in the abstract refers to the existence of good and evil in the judgments and outcomes of the world itself.

(Image from http://chipweir.weebly.com/the-hobbit-reading-blog/gandalf-a-christ-figure)

In Christianity, Evil literally exists, is personified by Satan, and is propagated by minions under his sway. The Dark Side of the Force, Sauron, and Voldemort, are all to a greater or lesser degree analogues of this system (the extent to which this is literal or simply implicit can vary, but the result is the same). Evil is portrayed as a temptation that acts a test of the protagonists' moral fortitude and commitment to Go(o)d. One's position in this divine conflict is to some extent preordained - entire races are irretrievably corrupted to evil, while some men are born to be righteous kings who fight on God's behalf.

Murder committed against Satan's servants is justified, even necessary. It's a task that needs doing, that can only be completed by virtuous and powerful men, and the completion of which improves the world and reflects well upon them. When Sauron's forces are defeated, Aragorn pardons his human thralls, but hunts down and kills every orc that can be found. It was only recently, in the postmodern era, that it became possible for us to memorialize the nearly three million people Luke Skywalker killed when he destroyed the Death Star.

Of course, Christian fantasists didn't apply their worldview to stories to justify and contextualize violence meant primarily for entertainment. Dragon slaying was a spiritual metaphor. Recapitulating the worldview of medieval fantasies today is not, I think, a harmful instance of cultural appropriation, but it certainly feels inadequate and superficial.

Escaping the Moral Frame

Binary moral narratives should by all rights be dead by now. They simply don't suit the realities of a complex and globalized world, a multicultural world, and a world informed by a wealth of scientific context. The binary worldview has a bunch of corollaries with destructive consequences for real people. Its implicit racial and national essentialism, legacy of classism, and the jingoist dehumanization of putative enemies express themselves in pernicious social issues.

That said, I'm not going to argue that fantasy fiction is actually causing these issues, or that alternatives will make a meaningful dent in changing them (though it can directly achieve smaller goals, like representation of diversity). Fiction is just one part of a massive cultural dialogue, and the dialogue determines the influence of individual works as much as they set the dialogue.

I think it's more interesting to argue that binary morality limits storytelling in a profound way, and that stories that escape it are opening a whole new world of plot and characterization opportunities. Video games offer the most extreme case study. RPGs (Bioware is by far the most prominent example) often mechanize morality explicitly by applying good and evil point values to certain actions.

Players expect that making "good" choices will have the intended results, eliminating a degree of spontaneity and failing to make the player question the limitations of their understanding and intentions. Storylines must be written to fit into this binary framework, pruning away ambiguity and stories that function more on quirk and flavor than moral conflict. In extreme cases, players stop thinking about their choices at all and simply vote by party lines. Games encourage this by rewarding ideological purists with special items and abilities.

Ambiguity is interesting, provocative, and fun. It creates complex characters. Imagine a character like Arya Stark happening in Lord of the Rings, or Ender Wiggin in Star Wars. Remember how clumsy Anakin Skywalker's turn to the Dark Side was in Revenge of the Sith, how artificial and strained it felt. And as much as you might hate it at the time, you know it's a good thing for narrative interest when bad things happen to good characters - when old mentors and assholes aren't the only protagonists with faulty plot armor.

When violence isn't the righteous removal of evil from the world, it needs to be addressed in other ways. It regains some of its rightful brutality, and it can resensitize us to its realities. Characters see the consequences of their choices; they experience grief, guilt, and pain, and grow as a result. Readers are forced to empathize with enemies who once would have been anonymous soldiers trudging into a heroic meat grinder.

The best postmodern stories present several sides of a story. The Wire and Game of Thrones encourage us to identify with some characters over others, but they never let us accept that people like Cersei Lannister are simply evil. Their actions have logic and context, human emotions, and emerged from a particular personal history.

By presenting multiple perspectives, postmodern fantasy can illustrate the limitations of our viewpoints and ideologies, calling attention to if not resolving partisan and international gridlock (condemning people who disagree with you as evil feels great but is ultimately counterproductive). Smart writers can also incorporate material forces that drove historical conflicts in our world.

For the purposes of this piece, I tried to stick to very popular examples I could count on most readers having some familiarity with. The rest of this series will highlight a number of postmodern fantasy works more or less off the beaten path, so if you're here looking for recommendations, hang in there and check back later.

PS While modern authors have done great things with non-binary morality, it's certainly not a new approach. And outside of genre literature, things have been a lot more nuanced for a very long time.

PPS Postmodern works are not inherently superior to binary works. I still love Star Wars. :/ Execution matters as much as anything, and there are of course dozens of hacks writing postmodern fantasy, especially now that Game of Thrones is so popular. I'll be one of them, some day!