The Language of the Night, page 8
That it is told in the language of fantasy is not an accident, or because Tolkien was an escapist, or because he was writing for children. It is a fantasy because fantasy is the natural, the appropriate language for the recounting of the spiritual journey and the struggle of good and evil in the soul.
That has been said before—by Tolkien himself, for one—but it needs repeating. It needs lots of repeating, because there is still, in this country, a deep puritanical distrust of fantasy, which comes out often among people truly and seriously concerned about the ethical education of children. Fantasy, to them, is escapism. They see no difference between the Batmen and Supermen of the commercial dope-factories and the timeless archetypes of the collective unconscious. They confuse fantasy, which in the psychological sense is a universal and essential faculty of the human mind, with infantilism and pathological regression. They seem to think that shadows are something that we can simply do away with, if we can only turn on enough electric lights. And so they see the irrationality and cruelty and strange amoralities of fairy tale, and they say: “But this is very bad for children, we must teach children right from wrong, with realistic books, books that are true to life!”
I agree that children need to be—and usually want very much to be—taught right from wrong. But I believe that realistic fiction for children is one of the very hardest media in which to do it. It’s hard not to get entangled in the superficialities of the collective consciousness, in simplistic moralism, in projections of various kinds, so that you end up with the baddies and goodies all over again. Or you get that business about “there’s a little bit of bad in the best of us and a little bit of good in the worst of us,” a dangerous banalization of the fact, which is that there is incredible potential for good and for evil in every one of us. Or writers are encouraged to merely capitalize on sensationalism, upsetting the child reader without themselves being really involved in the violence of the story, which is shameful. Or you get the “problem books.” The problem of drugs, of divorce, of race prejudice, of unmarried pregnancy, and so on—as if evil were a problem, something that can be solved, that has an answer, like a problem in fifth-grade arithmetic. If you want the answer, you just look in the back of the book.
That is escapism, that posing evil as a “problem,” instead of what it is: all the pain and suffering and waste and loss and injustice we will meet all our lives long, and must face and cope with over and over and over, and admit, and live with, in order to live human lives at all.
But what, then, are the naturalistic writers for children to do? Can they represent the child with evil as an insoluble problem—something neither the child nor any adult can do anything about at all? To give the child a picture of the gas chambers of Dachau, or the famines of India, or the cruelties of a psychotic parent, and say, “Well, baby, this is how it is, what are you going to make of it?”—that is surely unethical. If you suggest that there is a “solution” to these monstrous facts, you are lying to the child. But to unload adult despair onto one too young to cope with it is itself a psychotic act.
The young creature does need protection and shelter. But it also needs the truth. It seems to me that the way you can speak absolutely honestly and factually to children about good and evil is to talk about the self—the inner, the deepest self. That is something children can and do cope with; indeed, our job in growing up is to become ourselves. We can’t do this if we feel the task is hopeless, nor if we’re led to think there isn’t any work to it. Growth will be stunted or perverted if a child is forced to despair or encouraged in false security, terrified or coddled. What we need to grow up is reality, the wholeness which exceeds human virtue and vice. We need knowledge; we need self-knowledge. We need to see ourselves and the shadows we cast. For we can face our own shadow; we can learn to control it and to be guided by it; so that when we grow into our strength and responsibility as adults in society, we will be less inclined, perhaps, either to give up in despair or to deny what we see, when we must face the evil that is done in the world, and the injustices and grief and suffering that we all must bear, and the final shadow at the end of all.
Fantasy is the language of the inner self. I will claim no more for fantasy than to say that I personally find it the appropriate language in which to tell stories to children—and others. But I say that with some confidence, having behind me the authority of a very great poet, who put it much more boldly. “The great instrument of moral good,” Shelley said, “is the imagination.”
NOTES
1. Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C. G. Jung (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 107.
2. Carl Gustav Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, Bollingen Series XX, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 11 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), 76.
3. Jung, Psychology and Religion, 83.
MYTH AND ARCHETYPE IN SCIENCE FICTION
(1976)
“Science fiction is the mythology of the modern world.” It’s a good slogan, and a useful one when you’re faced with people ignorant and contemptuous of science fiction, for it makes them stop and think. But like all slogans it’s a half-truth, and when used carelessly, as a whole truth, can cause all kinds of confusion.
Where care must be taken is with that complex word “mythology.” What is a myth?
“Myth is an attempt to explain, in rational terms, facts not yet rationally understood.” That is the definition provided by the reductive, scientistic mentality of the first half of the twentieth century and still accepted by many. According to this definition, the god Apollo “is merely” an inadequate effort made by primitive minds to explain and systematize the nature and behavior of the Sun. As soon as the Sun is rationally understood to be a ball of fire much larger than the Earth, and its behavior has been described by a system of scientific laws, the old mythological pseudo-explanation is left empty. The fiery horses and the golden chariot vanish, the god is dethroned, and his exploits remain only a pretty tale for children. According to this view, the advance of science is a progressive draining dry of the content of mythology.1 And, insofar as the content of myth is rational and the function of myth is explanatory, this definition is suitable. However, the rational and explanatory is only one function of the myth. Myth is an expression of one of the several ways the human being, body/psyche, perceives, understands, and relates to the world. Like science, it is a product of a basic human mode of apprehension. To pretend that it can be replaced by abstract or quantitative cognition is to assert that the human being is, potentially or ideally, a creature of pure reason, a disembodied Mind. It might indeed be nice if we were all little bubbles of pure reason floating on the stream of time; but we aren’t. We are rational beings, but we are also sensual, emotional, appetitive, ethical beings, driven by needs and reaching out for satisfactions which the intellect alone cannot provide. Where these other modes of being and doing are inadequate, the intellect should prevail. Where the intellect fails, and must always fail, unless we become disembodied bubbles, then one of the other modes must take over. The myth, mythological insight, is one of these. Supremely effective in its area of function, it needs no replacement. Only the schizoid arrogance of modern scientism pretends that it ought to be replaced, and that pretension is pretty easily deflated. For example, does our scientific understanding of the nature and behavior of the Sun explain (let alone explain away) Apollo’s remarkable sex life, or his role as the god of music and of the divine harmony? No, it has nothing whatever to do with all that; it has nothing to do with sex, or music, or harmony, or divinity; nor as science did it ever pretend to—only scientism made the claim. Apollo is not the Sun, and never was. The Sun, in fact, “is merely” one of the names of Apollo.
Reductionism cuts both ways, after all.
So long, then, as we don’t claim, either, that the science in science fiction replaces the “old, false” mythologies, or that the fiction in science fiction is a mere attempt to explain what science hasn’t yet got around to explaining, we can use the slogan. Science fiction is the mythology of the modern world—or one of its mythologies—even though it is a highly intellectual form of art, and mythology is a nonintellectual mode of apprehension. For science fiction does use the mythmaking faculty to apprehend the world we live in, a world profoundly shaped and changed by science and technology, and its originality is that it uses the mythmaking faculty on new material.
But there’s another catch to look out for. The presence of mythic material in a story does not mean that the mythmaking faculty is being used.
Here is a science fiction story: its plot is modeled directly upon that of an ancient myth, or there are characters in it modeled upon certain gods or heroes of legend. Is it, therefore, a myth? Not necessarily; in fact, probably not. No mythmaking is involved: just theft.
Theft is an integral function of a healthy literature. It’s much easier to steal a good plot from some old book than to invent one. Anyhow, after you’ve sweated to invent an original plot, it very often turns out to be a perfect parallel to one of the old stories (more on this curious fact later). And since there are beautiful and powerful stories all through world legendry, and since stories need retelling from generation to generation, why not steal them? I’m certainly not the one to condemn the practice; parts of my first novel were lifted wholesale from the Norse mythos (Brisingamen, Freya’s necklace, and episodes in the life of Odin). My version isn’t a patch on the original, of course, but I think I did the gods of Asgard no harm, and they did my book some good. This sort of pilfering goes on all the time, and produces many pleasant works of art, though it does not lead to any truly new creations or cognitions.
There is a more self-conscious form of thievery which is both more destructive and more self-destructive. In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain’t no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing courses the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that’s how Melville did it.I
Even when they begin to realize that art is not something produced for critics, but for other human beings, some of them retain the overintellectualizing bent. They still do not realize that a symbol is not a sign of something known, but an indicator of something not known and not expressible otherwise than symbolically. They mistake symbol (living meaning) for allegory (dead equivalence). So they use mythology in an arrogant fashion, rationalizing it, condescending to it. They take plots and characters from it, not in the healthily furtive fashion of the literary sneak thief, but in a posturing, showy way. Such use of myth does real disservice to the original, by trivializing it, and no good at all to the story. The shallowness of its origin is often betrayed either by an elaborate vocabulary and ostentatiously cryptic style, or by a kind of jocose, chatty discomfort in the tone. Watch me up here on Olympus, you peasants, being fresh with Aphrodite. Look at me juggling symbols, folks! We sophisticates, we know how to handle these old archetypes.
But Zeus always gets ’em. ZAP!
So far I have been talking as if all mythologies the writer might use were dead—that is, not believed in with some degree of emotion, other than aesthetic appreciation, by the writer and his community. Of course, this is far from being the case. It’s easy to get fresh with Aphrodite. Who believes in some old Greek goddess, anyhow? But there are living mythologies, after all. Consider the Virgin Mary; or the State.
For an example of the use in science fiction of a living religious mythos one may turn to the work of Cordwainer Smith, whose Christian beliefs are evident, I think, all through his work, in such motifs as the savior, the martyr, rebirth, the “underpeople.” Whether or not one is a Christian, one may admire wholeheartedly the strength and passion given the works by the author’s living belief. In general, however, I think the critics’ search for Christian themes in science fiction is sterile and misleading. For the majority of science fiction writers, the themes of Christianity are dead signs, not living symbols, and those who use them do so all too often in order to get an easy emotional charge without working for it. They take a free ride on the crucifix, just as many now cash in cynically on the current occultist fad. The difference between this sort of thing and the genuine, naïve mysticism of an Arthur Clarke, struggling to express his own, living symbol of rebirth, is all the difference in the world.
Beyond and beneath the great living mythologies of religion and power there is another region into which science fiction enters. I would call it the area of Submyth: by which I mean those images, figures, and motifs which have no religious resonance and no intellectual or aesthetic value, but which are vigorously alive and powerful, so that they cannot be dismissed as mere stereotypes. They are shared by all of us; they are genuinely collective. Superman is a submyth. His father was Nietzsche and his mother was a funny book, and he is alive and well in the mind of every ten-year-old—and millions of others. Other science-fictional submyths are the blond heroes of sword and sorcery, with their unusual weapons; insane or self-deifying computers; mad scientists; benevolent dictators; detectives who find out who done it; capitalists who buy and sell galaxies; brave starship captains and/or troopers; evil aliens; good aliens; and every pointy-breasted brainless young woman who was ever rescued from monsters, lectured to, patronized or, in recent years, raped, by one of the aforementioned heroes.
It hurts to call these creatures mythological. It is a noble word, and they are so grotty. But they are alive, in books, magazines, pictures, movies, advertising, and our own minds. Their roots are the roots of myth, are in our unconscious—that vast dim region of the psyche and perhaps beyond the psyche, which Jung called “collective” because it is similar in all of us, just as our bodies are basically similar. The vigor comes from there, and so they cannot be dismissed as unimportant. Not when they can help motivate a world movement such as fascism!—But neither can they furnish materials useful to art. They have no element of the true myth except its emotive, irrational “thereness.” Writers who deliberately submit to them have forfeited the right to call their work science fiction; they’re just popcultists cashing in.
True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blond Hero—really look—and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you.
The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. “You must change your life,” he said.
When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
The way of art, after all, is neither to cut adrift from the emotions, the senses, the body, etc., and sail off into the void of pure meaning, nor to blind the mind’s eye and wallow in irrational, amoral meaninglessness—but to keep open the tenuous, difficult, essential connections between the two extremes. To connect. To connect the idea with value, sensation with intuition, cortex with cerebellum.
The true myth is precisely one of these connections.
Like all artists, we science fiction writers are trying to make and use such a connection or bridge between the conscious and the unconscious—so that our readers can make the journey, too. If the only tool we use is the intellect, we will produce only lifeless copies or parodies of the archetypes that live in our own deeper mind and in the great works of art and mythology. If we abandon intellect, we’re likely to submerge our own personality and talent in a stew of mindless submyths, themselves coarse, feeble parodies of their archetypal origins. The only way to the truly collective, to the image that is alive and meaningful in all of us, seems to be through the truly personal. Not the impersonality of pure reason; not the impersonality of “the masses”; but the irreducibly personal—the self. To reach the others, artists go into the self. Using reason, they deliberately enter the irrational. The farther they go into the self, the closer they come to the other.
If this seems a paradox it is only because our culture overvalues abstraction and extraversion. Pain, for instance, can work the same way. Nothing is more personal, more unshareable, than pain; the worst thing about suffering is that you suffer alone. Yet those who have not suffered, or will not admit that they suffer, are those who are cut off in cold isolation from their fellow men. Pain, the loneliest experience, gives rise to sympathy, to love: the bridge between self and other, the means of communion. So with art. The artist who goes inward most deeply—and it is a painful journey—is the artist who touches us most closely, speaks to us most clearly.
Of all the great psychologists, Jung best explains this process, by stressing the existence, not of an isolated “id,” but a “collective unconscious.” He reminds us that the region of the mind/body that lies beyond the narrow, brightly lit domain of consciousness is very much the same in all of us. This does not imply a devaluing of consciousness or of reason. The achievement of individual consciousness, which Jung calls “differentiation,” is to him a great achievement, civilization’s highest achievement, the hope of our future. But the tree grows only from deep roots.
So it would seem that true myth arises only in the process of connecting the conscious and the unconscious realms. I won’t find a living archetype in my bookcase or my television set. I will find it only in myself: in that core of individuality lying in the heart of the common darkness. Only the individual can get up and go to the window, and draw back the curtains, and look out into the dark.
