Sinister Landscapes in Black Death

A placeholder post to showcase screenshots from Black Death and some Caspar David Friedrich paintings as loose points of reference. Click on one to enter slideshow view.

(This one is by Thomas Cole, called Cross at Sunset)

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!

Postmodernism in Fantasy #2: Intro to Postmodernism

I gave a brief discussion of the concepts encompassed by postmodernism in the intro post of this series, but I thought it might be helpful if I provided some further readings. These books and articles are good sources on what postmodernism is (or at least, what I take it to mean) in literature, politics, science, and criticism. 

These are all works I'd consider accessible, and they're generally pretty short reads (with the exception of the Berger). But I'll also link to some videos, because they can help to frame and simplify complex ideas, before or as a substitute for further reading. 

Nonfiction

Derrida For Beginners

Derrida and his concept "deconstruction" have become largely synonymous with postmodernism in the part of the public eye aware of such things at all. Both names are typically tossed out as superlative incarnations of academic inscrutability. I haven't read Derrida's prose, and I suspect that reputation is not entirely unearned. But he was apparently a brilliant thinker who pioneered many of the concepts that defined postmodern thought.

Jim Powell's comic-illustrated Derrida for Beginners does an excellent job of breaking down Derrida's thought, life, and career into plain English. The concepts are often disarmingly intuitive. Deconstruction is illustrated with a visual analogy that makes the philosophical idea, at least in its broad strokes, feel almost obvious.

Deconstruction takes aim at metaphysical dichotomies: true/false, beauty/ugly, mind/body, normal/abnormal, nature/culture, etc. According to Derrida, these dichotomies are generally aligned in a hierarchy: truth is better than falsehood and beauty better than ugliness, for instance. 

The process of deconstruction begins by recognizing each element of the dichotomy as central in turn - to flip from viewing the face to the vase and back again until one can preserve the understanding that both images are present, but more importantly, that both are defined by the presence of the other. If either face were missing, there would be no vase.

It's a rather facile assertion applied to the vase, and indeed even to a dichotomy like good and evil (how many times have we read a fantasy protagonist pontificate that evil exists to glorify the good?). But Derrida takes the idea well beyond the obvious yin/yang cosmic balance, applying it to language and epistemology and questioning some of our core assumptions about reality. 

By decentralizing the dichotomy between true and false, he suggests the whole relativist premise of modern postmodernism. It is the first bold and significant step away from the premise that the world contains a divinely created order governed by apparent rules. Derrida's revolutionary and still-contentious assertion is that we don't actually have access to those rules. Our language does not refer to the world itself, but only to other ideas that already exist within the framework of language. He sums it up neatly: 

"There is nothing outside of the text."

The implications of deconstruction for fantasy tropes are limitless, and only a few of them have been applied. Perhaps the most profound dichotomies in fantasy are us/them (found in works with only one nation's point of view represented) and good/evil, a defining feature of the fantasy monomyth, (and ultimately a microcosm of the Christian worldview), but there are dozens more: civilized/savage; prosaic/magical; male/female; lawful/chaotic; human/monster; noble/commoner, etc.

If you're still confused and don't have time for Powell's book, here's a YouTube video.

The Social Construction of Reality

Peter Berger's The Social Construction of Reality is a foundational text of modern sociology but it is also one of the clearest statements of philosophical postmodernism to be found. Berger takes Derrida's ideas and applies them to our basic interaction with the world (and he does it with fairly clear prose, to boot!). 

The gist is that all of our concepts about the world, from the most physical and intuitive to the most abstract and esoteric, are framed in learned, cultural ideas. Once again, "there is nothing outside of the text" - no imaginable object can enter our experience without being coated in a thick layer of cultural concepts - even if those concepts simply concern how to respond to the unknown, or grasp for inadequate analogies to past experience. These concepts are learned and propagated through everyday interactions and the use of language - the procedural building blocks of culture. 

Here's a short video I find somewhat inadequate and a longer one that suits my predilection for dour academics. 

Identity Protective Cognition

One of the very first articles on Vox.com laid out the postmodern, science-based approach to politics that defines their content. It is essentially a politics-specific extension of the Social Construction of Reality, showing that the facts we take as reality flow more from our identity groups than from any presumed objective consideration of facts. There is more to it - the article doesn't go into material and economic concerns driving thought at all - but this is a concise explanation of the postmodern approach to politics. 

The Young Turks explain the study cited above.

Death of the Author

If you're prepared for some primary source reading, Roland Barthes' Death of the Author is short, readable, and a landmark essay in postmodernism and literary criticism. Death of the Author can be thought of as an application of deconstruction to works of literature. Barthes undermines the idea of a single, privileged interpretation of the text (historically defined as authorial intent). Instead, Barthes sees the work floating in a vast context of culture: history, other art, social mores, biographical details, etc. 

"The text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture." 

Each time a work is read, it is seen in a new context, by new eyes with new ideas and experiences. The reader, the critic, approach the work and ascribe a meaning to it, but this meaning is never The Meaning.

Work that takes this interaction between text and reader as a given and creates structures that explore it is called metafiction. Dark Souls is the epitome of metafiction in fantasy.

Mike Rugnetta explains Death of the Author in this episode of Idea Channel.

Fiction

Barthes' Death of the Author is perhaps best understood through Borges' fictional illustration, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. The choice of Don Quixote is at once incidental - any historical work would do - and precise, since the book was intended as a meta-fictional satire of existing fantasy romance novels.

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is an orientalist fantasy dreamscape that falls squarely in Borges' tradition, though never approaching his genius (nothing ever does!). Nonetheless, it's a great introduction to postmodernism. Many of the stories are like parables, explaining basic concepts in economical prose, dressed up in imaginative and evocative landscapes.

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse V is certainly the most famous and widely read postmodern novel. Its simple prose, historical subject matter, and emotional and philosophical resonance make it both accessible and relevant to the public in ways that are not the norm for postmodern works. If you're curious to see what postmodern literature has to offer, this is probably the place to start.

Additional Recommendations

Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire

Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow

Thomas Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Many more will be coming in individual profiles through the rest of this series. 

Postmodernism and Fantasy

Background

As a longtime fantasy reader and recent postmodernist, I've spent a decent amount of time googling the words together. I hoped to find works that explored and reinforced my worldview set in one of my favorite aesthetics. But my search for postmodernism in fantasy online was often frustrating and unproductive. I have found a fair number of good candidates in my broader exploration of what the genre has to offer. On the assumption that there are other people out there like me, I decided to summarize what I’d found and hopefully collect some recommendations from you all.

I’ll add the requisite caveat that I’m not a literature scholar by any means, and while I’ve read a bit more widely in both postmodern literature and fantasy literature than most people, I’m not prepared to give a history or synthesis. What would really be ideal is to get a postmodern scholar involved, preferably one also interested in fantasy (surely you exist? Get in touch if you’re real!).

But I am convinced I can improve on the dialogue out there right now. Existing discussions of pomo in fantasy are fairly disappointing. NK Jemisin treats pomo ideas as inscrutable academic concepts available only to people with a graduate degree (though her question "what's modernism in epic fantasy?" is apt). Brandon Sanderson acknowledges his ignorance and then launches a fairly long essay on a flawed provisional definition. Jeff VanderMeer chimed in just to point out the limitations of Sanderson’s piece, but didn’t take the conversation any further.

What is Post-modernism?

The main difficulty comes in getting a grip on this slippery word, postmodernism. There are a few working definitions floating around. “The cultural logic of late capitalism” comes from Frederic Jameson’s 1991 book of the same title. I don’t know about you, but I don’t find that very helpful. Most critical definitions contrast it to modernism. That’s a fine approach for an art historian, but fantasy literature has a different historical trend that isn’t easily coerced into a parallel progression (it would be an interesting exercise, perhaps, but not one I have the experience or wherewithal to carry out right now). Moreover, the first postmodern fantasy book was published in 1605, which sort of flummoxes the chronological approach. 

Postmodernism is a label applied after the fact to a wide array of schools of thought and artistic production, and the search for a definition is doomed to fail. Instead of a definition, it’s useful to look at a series of common threads and uniting characteristics. Broadly, I think postmodernism is characterized by a concern with subjectivity and perspective. In politics, this means acknowledging the ways our community, our language, our class, etc, shape our ideologies. It’s a foundational concern in science (and why I believe, despite some historically acrimonious dialogue between pomo scholars and scientists, that science is a fundamentally pomo endeavor). Modern anthropology grew out of the internalization of cultural relativism.

Wikipedia lists a dozen techniques postmodern literature uses to explore those ideas, from metafiction that highlights the role of the reader in bringing meaning to a story to intertextual approaches that play with the web of references that frame every work. Unreliable narrators, nested framing devices, stylistic pastiche, fragmentation, self-conscious and ironic tone, mixing high and low culture, hyperreality, paranoia, and magical or temporal distortion of reality are all tools that characterize postmodern works. I’m also going to include works that are primarily postmodern in their politics and philosophies.

So that's the concept, and some of the techniques used to explore it. But again, it's a slippery question. It's less about the techniques than how they are used. So framing devices and Inception-style layering are colloquially "meta" but not inherently metafictional; the layers need to interact to comment on the reader's relationship with the text. Irony is of course not unique to postmodern literature. It isn't sufficient to subvert a trope - a work must show some self-awareness, delivering a commentary or an intelligent deconstruction. Postmodernism is not synonymous with novelty or innovation. Nor is every work that builds on existing genre tropes a pastiche of that genre - again, there should be some signs of intelligent and self-conscious commentary.

If that's all sufficiently confusing, I'll just conclude by saying that postmodernism, in the context of this blog, means whatever I feel that it means. :D 

Scope of the Series

My definition of fantasy is going to be quite loose. I may include sci-fi (cyberpunk is a genre that grew up entirely in the wake of postmodern philosophy), New Weird, and some works that would never be shelved as genre fiction of any stripe. The goal is to curate a collection I think my potential audience might find worthwhile.

In addition to the main series of posts highlighting specific works, I'm planning some posts on topics germane to the theme: some recommendations for intro Pomo reading; a few history of fantasy posts, if I can convince myself I'm competent; and a few discussions on what exactly postmodernism has to offer fantasy readers.

Anyway, if you stumble across this and find it interesting, let me know you're here. I hope I can share recommendations and ideas you find new and stimulating.