The Magician's Craft

I've heard there is such a thing as a "short" blog entry. I'm skeptical, but I'll try one.

Stumbled upon an interesting quote from Laura Miller's The Magician's Book:

The Chronicles [of Narnia] are unified, not by anything resembling the exhaustive cultural stuff that Tolkien invented for Middle-earth, not by a single aesthetic or style, and not even, really, by a cogent religious vision, but by readerly desire. Lewis poured into his imaginary world everything that he had adored in the books he read as a child and in the handful of children’s books he had enjoyed as an adult. And there is more, too: treasures collected from Dante, from Spenser, from Malory, from Austen, from old romances and ballads and fairy tales and pagan epics. Everything that Lewis had ever read and loved went into Narnia, and because he was a great reader, these things were as deeply felt by him as actual experiences. In his own way, Lewis, too, believed that everything in the Chronicles was true, and this conviction is what he communicates to his young readers.

I think she has in mind a very important distinction, and one not exclusive to Lewis. "The Medieval" in post-medieval literature has often (like the orient) been considered a place of disorder, anarchy, and chaos. In a sense, that has given medieval fantasies--whether the early Gothic novels of Walpole or the bizarre dream-visions of MacDonald or the postmodern pastiches of Gaiman--a particularly immediate link with "readerly desire" and the experience of fiction. If one can put whatever one wants into a story, without fretting too much about the physical realities of the world, then one is better equipped to put down, well, whatever one wants. But of course, what one wants is often a lot more complex and weird than one might first assume.

But I wonder. Following Tolkien, a whole industry seems to have popped up centered around realistic, non-fantastic otherworlds; that is, books where magic is just an alternate system of physics, with politics, economics, history, religion, and geography fleshed out to a remarkable degree. I enjoy these books. At their best they offer an alternate perspective from which to question our own world while sidestepping the reality of our position in favor of abstract thought. Recently I've greatly enjoyed Robin Hobb's alternative take on the social, economic and political development of a land that doesn't exist. More commonly, these tales offer a believable world in which to see characters who don't exist overcome struggles and become happy. It may be "escapist," but it's a nice break between periods of dealing with an often scarier reality.

But I wonder. While the relatively iron-clad realism of these books seems designed to make them sell, Lewisian fantasy hasn't lost any of its popularity. Think of Gaiman's Stardust (now a Major Motion Picture), in which the characters are rescued by sky-pirates, as Gaiman put it, "because I kinda thought it seemed cool at the time." Or almost any film by Tim Burton, in which creativity is king and continuity a secondary afterthought. Or for that matter the Chronicles of Narnia themselves, which (despite considerable stylistic roughness) continue to sell well even among people who violently disagree with Lewis's religion and politics.

Fantasy always has existed on the edge of dream-land; sometimes I wonder why it seems so obsessed with crystalizing itself into the solidity (and respectable predictability) of our daylight hours.

**edit: well, maybe not so short an entry after all.