'Merlin', 'Camelot' and Why Aithusa saved Morganna

I've been waiting for an inspiring enough topic to pitch me back into blogging, and there is a kind of comfort in that the one that came along is a continuation of a favourite I've previously developed: adaptations of the story of King Arthur. I have been following two recently, Camelot, a cinema-scale epic featuring Joseph Fiennes (as Merlin) and Eva Green (Morgen), and the British series Merlin, a lighter adaptation with mostly unknown actors, which I've mentioned before. Specifically, Merlin has struck me as bad on so many levels that I'm fascinated by what the source of its appeal is. It certainly has both interested and moved me more than Camelot, despite the latter's stylistic superiority and impressive cast.

Some ideas of how these two compare might already be apparent from the short descriptions given above. Camelot, with its seeming Game of Thrones/Rome ambitions, is violent, sexual, dark, clearly adult-oriented. Its textures and style suggest an appeal to historical resonance, if not accuracy, and it includes in its narrative (one feels it sometimes revels in) the more disturbing aspects of the story that have been boiled into it over the ages. Merlin, on the other hand, has a flat, cartoonish feel and a soundtrack reminiscent of the Gummy Bears. It clearly doesn't take its historical resonance too seriously and has cleaned up the story (so far) of its more uncomfortable elements in what I can only guess is an attempt at being child-friendly. And yet, I have found myself watching it almost compulsively while Camelot seemed to drag on endlessly.

The chiefly characterizing feature of Merlin is that it is a story about the characters' Becoming before Camelot's Golden Age, as if this angle had never been taken before. Actually the mythic resonance of the story lies precisely in the fact that it is built on an inescapable trajectory, and the art of the majority of retellings lies not in the depiction of What Happens but in How They Got There. Even the focus on Merlin as the central character is not new. What is new is that this telling offers Merlin, not as the bearded magical mentor, but as a youth himself, a kind of magical parallel to Arthur's Becoming. A dragon's prophecy that Arthur and Merlin are 'two sides of a coin' anchors the point of this angle. Even so, this twist might have worked against the series if the relationship between the two boys had not been written with such a bitter-sweet charm. Since magic has been outlawed and demonized, Merlin has to hide his gifts whilst simultaneously protecting the boy he gradually grows to believe in and alone bearing the burden that he and Arthur are the foundations to the kingdom that is to come. This alteration to the tale regarding the persecution of those with magic and Merlin's youth is a simple one and combines in Merlin his traditional role of guide and protector to Arthur with an adolescent vulnerability that is appealing on many levels. More importantly it adds a tension to the story that has a high emotional factor; not only is there the danger to Merlin should his nature be discovered, but there is the painful question of Arthur's reaction to the discovery of Merlin's identity. While there is little art in the transparent dialogue between the two boys, their mutual affection actually comes through with a touching fragility. It is clear that Arthur values, is even dependent on, Merlin's friendship, and that Merlin has a painful need for Arthur's acceptance. This is the kind of emotional effectiveness, even subtlety, that is missing from Camelot, where there are no narrative quirks that enable an access to the humanity behind the underwhelming given of Arthur's goodness.

The third significant factor figuring in Merlin is Morganna, based on the staple-Arthuriana character Morgan Le Fay. Morgan Le Fay is another area where Camelot disappoints. Here, as elsewhere, she is conniving, envious, boringly malevolent. Merlin originally seemed to figure her as something more complex; the ward of King Uther (Arthur's father) with a sincere affection for Arthur, Merlin and Guinivere, and a fierce sense of justice, especially regarding Uther's oppression of magic. However, this character became increasingly dark, eventually becoming simply annoyingly malicious. That was my assessment until the surprising end of Series 4, where after a formidable battle, she is inexplicably healed by a white infant dragon called Aithusa, a creature that was previously identified to Merlin as an omen of good for Camelot. Why did Aithusa heal Morganna?

Morgan Le Fay is often called the antagonist of King Arthur and his knights, but actually her legend is far more complicated. Her appearances in Arthurian legend date back to some of the earliest sources, which also identify her as both Arthur's sister and a Fay (a way of saying she was 'of Fairy', meaning she has a link to magic) from the beginning, but of all the characters most traditionally associated with the legend, her character has coalesced around the most contradictory roles. The most nefarious deeds ascribed to her include trying to kill Arthur, sending monstrous warriors to test the knights of the Round Table and attempts at exposing Guinevere's adultery, but, oddly, she also appears as an ally, a gifted healer, one of the queens who receive Arthur's body after his death, and strongly associated with the magical island of Avalon, mostly a good place. She is a truly enigmatic figure, whose very human motivations seem complicated and deepened by her link to a mysterious mysticism. Al this means that she is actually the most unpredictable character in retellings, and affords the most space for thematic exploration. It's therefore really annoying to me that few retellings have exploited this potential, preferring to depict her as uninterestingly evil, a vain, often over-sexualized sorceress with an irredeemable lust for power and undiluted hostility towards Arthur. A prominent exception is The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley, in which she is a central character, and which brilliantly combines all her contradictory, traditional roles in what adds up to a truly complex and sympathetic character, in my opinion thereby fulfilling the height of her tantalizing potential. Morgan Le Fay is Arthur's half-sister and the female counterpart to Merlin, and her relationship to magic and political power often says loads about the depiction of women in the narrative. As such her presence has always, for me, highlighted a potent tension between a female mysticism and male chivalry that I think is inherent in the story (a dualism with heavy qualifiers, but, I think, one that ultimately holds). In any case, she has always been far more appealing to me than Guinevere, who cannot seem to escape definition through her relationships to her husband (Arthur) and her lover, (Lancelot).

Aithusa's healing of Morganna in Merlin gestures enticingly to the contradictions embedded in Morgan's legend. These contradictions may have happened accidentally, but, as in Bradley's version, they have enriched the story and acquired an integrity of their own, so that in seeing the vacillations of human behaviour in them, they can enable us to envision the sheer voluptuousness of human complexity. As a story about Becomings, will the series attempt to account for the traditional roles played by this mysterious figure? I would love to see Merlin's decisions complicated not by Morganna's power, but by her, for want of a better word, goodness.

Of course, this is not to say that the series doesn't have an awful lot to be desired. But to me, it has effectively accomplished that which begins good art, interesting the emotions.

The Good, the Short and the Scary

There is a widely-believed myth that short stories are kind of easy-for-idiots versions of novels - easier and faster to write because they are shorter in length. A frequently suggested solution to my writer's block is to take a step back and write short stories for a while, until I refine my 'voice' and can get into the serious business of writing novels.

I'm not a short story writer. The short story is a particular aesthetic form with conventions, cliches and genius-requirements of its very own, quite distinct from novel writing. An easy way to distinguish the two is that short stories tend to be denser in meaning, and less dense than poetry. Bottom line: it takes a particular kind of writer to master the short story.

Of course I believe that we no more really live in an age that appreciates the short story any more than we are in an age in which poetry is the literature of the day. I wonder why that is. Even people who read widely tend to avoid anthologies of short stories.

When I was in school and frequented libraries I loved one kind of short story, the horror. I devoured anthologies of short horror tales, some classics like the American gothics of Edgar Allen Poe, but more often the more modern tales. I think horror tales are particularly suited to the short story form. Not because they ought to finish quickly, but because there is a kind of formula to the effect of the uncanny that roughly follows the strict, tricky limitations of the short story. When I read horror anthologies I read them for their cleverness, not for their scariness. Many good ones were written for children. Some excellent ones even made me laugh. The best horror tales made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up with sheer delight in their ingenuity, their wit and elegance, and these are are qualities highly important for good short story writing. They require a great deal of intelligence to enable one to work with creativity and style within the strictness of the form.

Alice in Fantasyland?

Humbly bearing in mind my maximum readership of two, as well as the fact that I write these pseudo-academic ramblings mostly for my own satisfaction, I shouldn't have to begin by making this point again, but I will. The essay writer's imperative to begin with the assumption that one's readers are completely unfamiliar with one's subject is too deeply etched within me:

I am not a story purist. When I approach retellings of stories, or re-imaginings, and, especially, film adaptations...of previously known tales, I don't dislike deviations from the original simply because they are deviations. It is true that I always enjoy spotting the deviations, and pointing them out to less-than-enthusiastic friends, but that doesn't mean I disapprove of them per se. My approval depends on several factors, among the most important: what they accomplish (or fail to accomplish), and how they facilitate dialogue across mediums (film and novel) and/or generations.

Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland was a toss-up for me. Let me state for the record that I enjoyed it. I like Fantasy, and that is what the movie has turned the Alice books into. The Alice books are certainly not Fantasy stories, but Dream tales, and the difference between the genres of Fantasy and Dream is a crucial one, but I'll get to that. Right now I want to state my central observation, which is that in converting the genre the film has essentially sacrificed the most striking value of the books: their peculiarity. And in return it has given us a story so generic that we can, as my sister aptly stated, predict exactly how the story will go simply by looking at the movie poster. Which is not to say the film-makers have done a bad job. A good story told before, even many many many...many many many many times before...is still a good story.

In terms of genre the one family trait that Dream and Fantasy share is their unreality...their offer of the avowedly impossible. And in both genres, the key to their impossible visions may lie in psychology...but that is where they part ways. Because if Dream is a map of the subconscious, then Fantasy is most certainly closer to the conscious, systematically resolving the unconscious impulses that do not tally with the conscious notions of the morally (meaning socially) acceptable. What sets Fantasy so far from the Dream tale is that its writers are strictly constrained by structure and above all, by morality. Fantasy stories are profoundly moral. Dream tales carry no such restriction. They can be whimsical, and idiosyncratically so, without relying on myth to give resonance to their visions.

The Alice books have the distinction of being the first children's tales that were written without the intention of trying to teach children something, which, in the strict socio-cultural context of Victorian England, was a big deal. If anything the books parody that most ubiquitous trait of children's literature, didacticism, with particular glee. If there is one theme that is continuous in the books, it inheres in the recurrent image of various characters assuming authority over Alice and attempting to teach her something, or reprimanding her, while Alice notes that they speak pure nonsense. Such exchanges provide abundant plays on language, with rhymes and maxims turned upside down and inside out. And they are truly dream tales, which accounts for an almost complete absence of a plot. Therein lies the fun of the Alice books, their wit, and most importantly, their uniqueness.

Despite my admiration, however, the Alice books do leave me unsatisfied on one count: they do not move one emotionally. Why should they? They were written to amuse, and so they do, and in a way that has become iconic worldwide. But it seems that even more than a hundred years later, we still cannot fathom the value of telling a story simply to amuse kids.Oh no. We love the imagery that the Alice books provide, but let's give it a plot: a hero, a quest, a battle, and thus give it that one thing that it seems to be sorely lacking: a message. In other words let's make it into something completely different from what it is, a fantasy, and moreover of a kind that is as common as it is predictable.

Erika in the Painting

My collection of stories, in both cinematic and novel form, is extensive. And numbered among them are many films and books that I dislike in their entirety, for whatever the reason. Yet I would not pass up the chance to buy them if I could rewind time, and that's because there's a very particular reason behind my acquisition of every book and DVD I've ever bought.

I process stories in fragments, in terms of the individual frames of a film, or passages in a book. I also judge stories in terms of their wholeness, but very few have passed on that score. Most frequently, I find myself arrested by one scene where beauty, eloquence, and transcendent vision converge in a two-hour film that is otherwise pure crap. I would never pass up the opportunity to acquire such a film. That one scene may be the key to the conception of something beyond the banality of the story in which it is trapped.

The movie that has inspired this tirade is not to be ranked with such overwhelmingly sullied gems, however. The 1990 film adaptation of Roald Dahl's "The Witches", starring Anjelica Huston, has always been one of my favourite fantasy pictures of all time. While the opening sequence possesses the true thrust of the movie's captivating mystique, the second half is mostly saved by the elegant evil of Anjelica Huston's exotic performance.

Yet there is one scene in this movie that has stayed with me since the first time I ever watched it, and has remained as haunting as ever as I watch it now with the jaded, penetrating eyes of the literary scholar: Luke's grandmother is telling the story of how her friend Erika was stolen by witches. Not long after her friend's disappearance, she recalls coming to Erika's house:

The return to the time of a grandmother's childhood in Norway is both locked within the frame of a lost time and evocatively embodied before us. The tense specter of a child's unexplained disappearance is unstated and in every detail present. Then comes that moment of chilling strangeness when our tense separateness from fantasy dissolves in the full apprehension of a fairy-tale evil. Luke's grandmother relates the scene in the voice that is key to the enchantment at work:

"Then that day, while Erika's mother was pouring the coffee, her father came walking towards us. It was as though he had seen a ghost...His face was all twisted up as he walked towards the painting behind me. There...as if it always had been there...was Erika...locked in the painting...gazing at us..."

The scene as described is not overtly penetrating. But experienced in its form - something to do with the captured face of a child that could never exist anywhere but in the suffering of the eerie torment of being locked in a painting, in the composition of the figures, and the lulling chill of the voice of the grandmother and the spare chimes of a sweetly insistent score - few cinematic moments have struck me like this one.

In my book, Erika in the Painting is one of the few truly perfect accomplishments of cinematic story-telling. It will stay with me always as a reminder of the essence of fairy-tale...the apprehension of pure strangeness...like a melody at the shrill edges of the dark side of music.

King Arthurs and Their Stories

I recently started watching the series “Merlin”, which has pitched me back into one of my favourite subjects: the stories of King Arthur, sometimes called Arthuriana or The Arthurian Cycle in academic contexts.

Let me state for the record that I have not always been a great fan of these stories, which has always been distinctly out of character, since I have tended to fall on the sword-and-sorcery side of aesthetic pleasure, of which the Arthurian tales are considered the epitome, since before I can remember. Puzzling over this recently has led me to the realization that despite containing all my childhood favourite ingredients for a story – magic, sword-play, mythic beasts and ladies in smashing outfits – the Arthurian stories never appealed to me because I’d never been able to tap into a female connection to the story, an absolute necessity for my enjoyment of a tale. Two discoveries led to my conversion: the first was of Morgan Le Fey, at last a female character I could root for, and secondly, the astounding thematic space afforded by the mythic nature of the tales, which I did not have the sophistication to appreciate as a child. I should explain what I mean by 'thematic space', while I hope that my meaning of 'myth' will speak for itself.

There is no definitive source for the all the elements linked to the Arthurian stories, no ‘original’ text from which it derives its fundamental material. J.R.R. Tolkien compared its formulation to the steady brewing of a soup over centuries of story-telling, involving participants of various kinds – story-tellers, legend-bearers and some bits of history – all of which have added to the mix. What it is now is a collection of associated tales and a family of characters and events in endless variations occasioned by innumerable retellings. Its central significance, holding the lot together, lies in the rise and fall of a golden age, the age of King Arthur. Less to the abstract, King Arthur’s reign has come to represent an idealized Britain, situated and sustained within the ahistorical boundaries of mythic time.

To date, the tale has come to assume the following ‘core’ formulation: Arthur unites the factions of Britain and reigns over a stable and flourishing kingdom. In this he is either aided or opposed by the established characters in the Arthurian cycles, Merlin the wizard, Morgan Le Fay, the Lady of the Lake, and of course his trusty Knights of the Round Table. The key themes underlying Arthur's success are unity and brotherhood, symbolized in the literary device of the Round Table. The fall of the kingdom coincides with the affair of Arthur’s queen, Guinevere, and his First Knight and dearest friend, Lancelot, which unravels the fabric of brotherhood and thus destabilizes the kingdom (symbolized in the fidelity between King and Queen and between King and Knight). Hence many retellings (and it should be stressed that all tellings of the Arthurian tales are retellings) reduces the tale to these elements. These are the bare bones of the tale as they have evolved; no matter what archetypes are evoked by the characters in each telling, heroic king, tragic knight, doomed lover, selfish seductress or suppressed female, the tale always ends the same, and that is what enables the story’s mythic function.

But what is fun about the Arthurian stories is that so many additional elements, complex and compelling in themselves, have been boiled into the mix that there is an almost limitless possibility of themes that can be played out, so that the story is at once always familiar, always mythic, and yet always delightfully different, always able to yield new and rich stories.

End of Part 1.

On Austen's Clues

Clueless, the 1995 Alicia Silverstone fluff-fest, was based on Jane Austen’s Emma; surprising, but apt you must allow. I never cease to enjoy the expression that comes over people’s faces when I share this piece of trivia, whether they be lit-buffs/Austen fans or just plain Clueless haters.

Let me first note that there has been a long tradition since Clueless for fluffing down various canonical works into teen-aimed flicks, which may or may not have been sparked off by the movie. Most people do not know that Clueless is based on a Jane Austen novel, and it was never marketed that way, not is it ever mentioned. That Ten Things I Hate About You is a version of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew is better known. Less witty modernizations of canonical works are even more publicized, like the dreadful She’s the Man starring Amanda Byrnes, a lamentably predictable excuse for Twelfth Night. Clueless may not be as witty as Ten Things or even as stylish as Cruel Intentions, but I think it certainly shares more with Emma than any of the ones I’ve mentioned, and that sheds some interesting light on the work of Miss Austen, particularly as the relationship between Clueless and Emma is so seldom thought of.

Cher Horowitz is the ostensible contemporary take on Emma Woodhouse, in characterization if not social location; after all modern day Beverly Hills is hardly the most pleasing equivalent for the classes Austen wrote about, who though wealthy and privileged (and not always that) were not really glamorous. Both heroines are blessed with good looks, affluence and social superiority, and marked with the same flaws, although Cher’s vanity and self-regard is less advertised than Emma’s. Both fancy themselves as instrumental in the matchmaking of a teaching figure (Miss Geist in Clueless, Miss Taylor in Emma) with someone else, which inspires an ostensibly well-intentioned pageant of good deeds (and I do mean pageant) which inevitably go wrong. Both have to learn that the inherent flaw in their good deeds is the vanity which underlies them all, and that they are not as socially competent as they had thought themselves (in a word, clueless). Both end up with the one person who is able to criticise them (Josh in Clueless, Mr Knightley in Emma), symbolizing their arrival at humility and self-knowledge.

Why then, is Clueless such a fluff-fest, and Emma a canonical work? What stopped the many that don’t and didn’t know where the plot blueprint for Clueless came from, from applauding the movie the way many received Austen’s works and still do? Is the dressing up really that important? Surely if one has profound significance then the other should too?

I suppose the answer in part does have much to do with the dressing, or the fluffing down. Jane Austen was praised not only for her use of irony and wit but also for her keen observation of a society that she represented very well, all of which in Clueless is naturally dismissed. Consequently the meticulous representation of the manners, propriety, hypocrisies and virtues of a small slice of human experience have been largely sacrificed.

Jane Austen was, fundamentally, a realist writer, and Clueless, for all its amusing translation into contemporary fluff, is a fantasy world. It is not the sort of fantasy that this blog celebrates, but the kind which ultimately yields little more than spectacle and decadent self-indulgence. In doing so, it really makes fun of itself, representing its trivia as exactly that: trivia. Because no matter how polished or trend-setting Clueless was, or how great Alicia Silverstone looked in it, we are meant to laugh at Cher, and never for a moment take her or her trivia seriously. It is ironic, but not the way Austen was ironic. Emma, on the other hand, though every bit as vain and self-indulgent as Cher, is somehow a heroine whose redemption we do take seriously, whose trivia, it seems, we do take seriously.

Why is this? Perhaps the crucial difference between Clueless and Emma is that Emma's [social] cluelessness was never the primary flaw, but her lack of respect for a complex system of conventions meant to serve courtesy and honour, as a result of arrogant dismissiveness. And curiously, in its very irony, Clueless replicates this flaw, by mocking the trivia which emerges with such skill in Austen's novels as anything but. Because if Austen's novels teach us anything, it is that playing justly by society's rules is never trivial if it serves their original purpose to sustain virtue and express compassion.

Of Seeing and Believing

I am always excited about film adaptations of books. The same is also true of books that movies have been based on. Even if I didn’t particularly like the movie, if I discover there is a book behind it, I will get my hands on that book. I can’t exactly say why this is. I suppose I love comparing a story-telling across two mediums. Most of the time I am disappointed of course, but that is a universal cliché. I still always get something out of it, see something there I hadn’t considered before: the director’s vision sometimes so far from my own it enters my consciousness as an entirely new aesthetic, if not an entirely new story, so that I can appreciate it for its own sake. And I believe that is fairly peculiar of me.

The Golden Compass, the film adaptation of Phillip Pullman’s Northern Lights is what I consider a good example of a film adaptation. I say this particularly because I didn’t really enjoy this book, and that has nothing to do with the current controversy whirling around its religious themes. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I was reading it for a class, but I didn’t feel the wonder and heightened emotion that one should feel from a good fantasy work. I didn’t ‘recover’ the ordinary through its fantastic estrangement. The movie effected this. The movie made me realize there were things in that story that had tuned in to my sense of the epic and the fundamental. But it had taken the movie to bring these feelings to flower. I find this quite remarkable, that the movie did what the book could not…definitely a first for me. And I have never cultivated prejudice for one medium, over the other. For me both books and movies nurture imagination in their own particular ways. Yet undoubtedly we have fewer opportunities to find book adaptations of movies than movie adaptations of books. I have found both, and been very surprised by both experiences. If anyone has any doubt of this, take a scene from what you consider a ‘good’ movie, try and write down all the subtle and fine touches in a single expression on a character’s face, make it into a ‘book’. You could write pages, but I don’t think you would get the same effect, not without being a tyrant over your reader’s imagination. And the same is true, curiously, of movies based on books; no actor could precisely capture what you felt for the words that originally evoked those emotions.

Maybe it was the effect of the succinct and the visual, and the medium just more properly suited the fairy-dimension. Then again I shall definitely enjoy the book more when I get it again.

One can read fantasy in the ‘right’ way of course, while still not succumbing to its emotional seduction. By the ‘right way’ I mean that we can ask ourselves the questions that we are supposed to ask, that the fantasy compels us to ask. In the case of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, people have been reducing this complex process to seeing ‘through’ the story to what it is ‘really about’. But this is missing the whole point of the value in fantasy’s extraordinary power to pull us back to the heart of the things we do. Reading (or watching) fantasy is never about what the story is about. It should give narrative form to ideas, the way myth does, but it is in its displacement to a world made strange, a world of magic and fairy-tale beings, it allows us to examine those ideas critically and consciously, without the distractions of the material. So the fantasists tell us.

And I confess I will always try to believe them, so long as they play fair and give us such worlds of wonder and peril as this. Whether seeing (movies) or imagining (reading), it is always really about imagining, isn’t it? It is just a way of feeling more than we ever could at the height of the mundane, in realms far beyond what is right there.

Happy Endings in the Land of Nothing

I recently watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding again. Not one of my favorite movies, not particularly profound, but always enjoyable nevertheless. I think one of the reasons it strikes people so is because it is essentially a fairy-tale in all the mechanics, and because its selling grace lies in its representation of cross-cultural contact resolving in classic eucatastrophe, the happy ending inserted in that space which in reality is so often the scene of the tragedy this movie flirts with. Ostensibly this is a brave, admirable message with contemporary relevance. But I couldn't help thinking how much this movie's happy ending depends on not only constructing a space in which it can operate, but on displacing that space where vital tragic elements should have been resolved.

Examined closely no inter-cultural understanding takes place in the movie, because there is no contact. What happens from the beginning of the movie is that a place is introduced for one culture, the colourful warm American Greek family. That culture is set up in Tula’s opening lament against a vague unresisting homogenized ‘norm’, invested with the authority of its status as ‘normal’, but essentially no real character of its own. This ‘norm’ is represented first by the ‘blond, delicate’ girls who mock Tula’s Greek culture as a little girl, and later by Ian and his parents, the Miller family. The function of the first is to provide a context for Tula’s angst and to locate the American Greek culture as defined by ‘difference’, a difference which is celebrated and whose short-comings are redeemed through sentimental comedy. The function of the second (the Miller family) is simply to maintain the basis for that celebration through simultaneously emphasizing its peculiarity and locating the culture’s value in its difference from the Miller family, whose homogenized lack-lustre status is epitomized in Tula’s father’s phrase ‘the toast family’. How is that celebration maintained?

Who is the Miller family, and just what are they supposed to represent? If the comparison between the two families is examined it is plain that their primary signification is that of emptiness, comprised of negatives, ‘not-being’, ‘lack’. Ian’s family lacks loudness so there is space for Tula’s family’s loudness and even for Ian to learn their language. They are not religious so there is space for Ian to assume Tula’s religion. Ian is a vegetarian, his diet defined by lack, while Tula’s family are big eaters. All contact with the Greek culture then is defined by ‘filling’, a ‘filling’ which is enabled by their structured emptiness. A large part of that structure consists of Ian giving in to all Tula’s family’s demands while there is no instance where the opposite ever needs to occur.

Their silence is contrasted with the Greek family’s loudness; their dispassionate secularity with the colourful faith in the Greek Orthodox Church; even their colouring tends to hues and lines (beige, white and understated shades) suggesting ‘space’, while Tula’s family wear bright or dark colours. Gus calls them ‘dry’, the ‘toast family’ and they lack life, emotion and even religion. Ian tells Tula ‘I came alive when I met you’, and the sign of the Miller parents getting up and dancing at the end of the movie signifies the same. ‘Life’ enters the empty culture through being substituted by fullness, signified by the American Greek culture.

I want to be plain here that my complaint is not simply that inter-cultural understanding occurs at the expense of any one culture. I am not implying that Western culture, secular culture or whatever is being represented by the Miller family is vilified by the movie, because it simply isn’t present in the movie. The Miller family are rather conveniently empty; and as such they don’t so much signify a culture as a vague West emptied of culture. Ian effectually ‘becomes culture-ed’ by accepting Tula’s culture where before there was none. And what this implies is that there is only a space for other cultures if we make absent the vitality of the dominant culture, implicitly, because other cultures simply cannot hold their own in a direct tackle with it were it allowed to be present in its true complexity and vitality, and that is deeply discouraging and offensive.

The Death of L. and Other Shadows

It is frightening how close one can come to the fictional realities encountered in stories…how keenly one can feel the loss of characters that were never ‘alive’ in the first place. Of course, given another blogging day I would be glad to take that idea up. It is my contention that probably most of the protagonists I’ve read about in fiction are more alive than most real people ever will be…in the sense that they embody so much of the spectrum of human life and meaning whereas most of the everyday people one meets are more mundane, more flat and one-dimensional than the heroes of the cheesiest cartoon.

It is of course a mark of good story-telling that we ‘feel’ the loss of the characters created especially for that purpose. Their deaths signify something because their ‘lives’ signified something that has crept intimately close into the inner realities of the emotional and spiritual components of our being. In the case of a significant number of recent stories, that emotional force seems to derive its primary vitality from its life as ‘half-self’ to the protagonist we are supposed to be identifying with. We feel the loss of the character more keenly in narratives where that character has been set up as our own underground, shadow self.

This idea seems prevalent in all the anime I’ve yet encountered, which admittedly is not by any count a representative number. And obviously it is a common reading of fantasy stories that everything in the story is an element in the protagonist’s psyche, so that the villain is always some version of a dark self. Yet still there is something peculiar about the shadow, to use Jungian terminology, in anime that I haven’t noticed any where else. And this is the sense of an essential bond between the two selves represented as protagonist and antagonist; the sense that the shadow is not only vital but profoundly beloved.
In the Harry Potter stories, Harry may see himself in Voldemort on numerous occasions, but he never develops an emotional relationship with him. In A Wizard Of Earthsea, the gibbeth may be an essential part of the protagonist but it still evokes nothing but thorough revulsion in Ged. Frodo takes pity on Gollum, his shadow self, but he never learns to love him.

In contrast to this, there is always some kind of intrinsic desire for the dark-self in anime. And the dark self tends to be more than a representation of what the protagonist despises in himself. In Naruto Orochimaru may be the story’s primary villain, later succeeded by Akatsuki, but neither of these threats represents the catastrophe to Naruto that Sasuke's fall does. The best thing about this series was that we never knew where the self ended between these two, where the hate stopped and the love began. In Blood+ the inner conflict had expression in a less subtle metaphor, between actual twins. Yet the most searing moment in the story is not where Saya recognizes her dark self in Diva, but at the end when she learns that to sacrifice her sister is indeed a terrible price to pay. She is horrified when, running each other through simultaneously with the blood-soaked swords that bring death to them, the sisters fall to the ground but only Diva dies. Implicit in the violence their existences mean to each other is a profound consolation, that in killing each other at least they can be together.

In my most recent anime excursion, Death Note, an interesting spin on the old duality is that we follow the story through the eyes of the ‘villain’, but the m.o. is the same. Light and L. are geniuses with opposing convictions, and at the heart of their perfect opposition is the old truth of a perfect equality. As such a friendship on a level outside the realm of belief develops between what are essentially cold and isolated positions. This ultimately culminates in L.'s downfall. There is something inconsistent with L’s genius in that he doesn’t figure out Light’s crowning manoeuvre before it’s too late. Just before his last appearance there is the uncharacteristic scene of him standing in the rain mumbling vaguely about things remotely connected to sentimental images of his childhood. His last conversation with Light has the sense of sloppiness, of him buckling under a growing intimacy with his nemesis.

Of course we never doubt in these stories that the protagonists will never allow their shadows to take flight and grow. Naruto would never allow Sasuke to destroy Konoha. There is never a question that Saya would let Diva be Diva and live. Given the smallest scrap of evidence, L. would have grasped at the opportunity to have Light arrested as Kira. But the sense of sacrifice accompanying the defeat of these shadows almost neutralizes any sense of triumph, always resulting in an irreparable void, an inconsolable sense of loss.

Redeeming the Cliché

And so it is that I’ve experienced my second foray into the world of anime, as, much to the contemptuous impatience of my sister the anime expert, I have passed through the Painted Glass and enjoyed Blood+, a series which enjoys said sister’s arched derision and contempt. Much of this has to do with the unabashed angst of the series. Among her gripes is one which amused me; apparently the beautiful delicate heroine who eats a lot but never gains weight is a cliché abundant in anime…who knew?

The angst doesn’t really bother me. Blood+ is styled much in the tradition of the science fiction gothic, and I always find that once I can identify a grand aesthetic tradition to which a story is paying homage to I don’t mind clichés, as long as the style is done well. I find that this is generally true for the postmodern audience well-versed in the lore of aesthetic traditions. Take Kill Bill, for instance. Much of the movie’s cleverness inhered in the demand for a certain ironic stance towards the over-the-top violence and deliberately bad dialogue. To appreciate it, we had to be aware that one, the lameness was on purpose, and two, that the purpose had to do with a salute to a style of 1970s kung-fu revenge narrative that either once had been great, or which had anyway cultivated a genre-specific audience with a rich stylistic structure. Kill Bill would never have commanded the critical respect it did if we hadn’t been aware of the contract it made with an outdated aesthetic. That awareness demands sophistication and so we read the lameness not for what it exhibits but for what knowledge (of a tradition) it demands. Same is true for Mary-Jane’s line in the recent Spiderman movies, “Go get ‘em, Tiger.” Consider the cheese of that for a second, and then consider that it was comic-book canon that Mary-Jane used that line. Kirsten Dunst therefore had to say it at least once in the movie, and that idea of a salute made to the rich tradition of the Spiderman comics elicited delight in audiences because it signified a certain subtlety specific to pop-culture know-how. In other words we enjoyed it not because we liked it but because we recognized it.

I think, really, that a lot of these ‘homage’ trends signify in a way, a certain longing for the cliché. If something is old (read by us as outdated) or too well recognized (cliché), there is a certain pressure to let it go, despite what value we still find in it. The contract of recognition, or homage, redeems what we have lost, restoring to it if not its old meaning then a kind of artificial glamour on which we skate delicately careful to avoid losing our ironic retrospection or academic distance.

Blood+, for me I think, skated on the latter. Once I had identified the genre, and knew to expect haunted pasts, tall-dark-and-handsomes, and narrative manipulations designed to simultaneously characterize the heroine as violently strong and hopelessly vulnerable, I could allow them to slide. I knew they had been done before.

The Problem of Knowing

Information has always been, in some form or other, a currency of prestige. It is the material from which we spin our reality, but more importantly it codifies the focal point around which that reality radiates, a sense of self, the I in the face of the universe. We use it to tell us who we are and it both sustains and illuminates the cultural geographies that frame our hierarchies of social status.

More importantly, though, are the politics of visibility that validate those geographies. In a real sense, it isn’t what we know as who knows we know it, not what we know reveals about ourselves, but how it portrays us for others, and what they choose to do with that which counts, and now becomes knowledge in confrontation with their own focal points of knowing.

I can wrap information around myself like camouflage or I can filter everything I know through the sift of who I want to be. I can’t know everything I know and be myself, the Self I choose to sell to others, to counter the self they will make subordinate to their own selves.

I have also learned now where ignorance cannot be disdained. Of course we punish this for reasons that can be entirely arbitrary; people who do not know have chosen not to know, not to live in some way which we see as vital to our own selves, and so they must have chosen not to be wise, not because they have validated other aspects of being, but because this in some way then signifies their spiritual laziness. But those reasons, in the main, have especial tendencies to self-serving agendas, so intrinsic and insidious, that we’ve forgotten the reasons we punish for not knowing, and for not being as we see being.

It is neither wrong nor especially reprehensible to be ignorant of certain things, even things that are supposedly ‘commonly known’. It is however wrong to express disparaging opinions, opinions which have not drunk from knowledge, which have not partaken of the selves of others and stewed in that rare wisdom, compassion.
That is not autonomous being, as I have attempted to qualify it; it is crudeness. Not because it is spiritually lazy or even self-involved, but because it is violence without purpose and without being. It is not human, and it is not animal; it is base.

Answers We Should Be Giving

To understand fantasy, one must firstly understand its enemy, and its enemy is not ‘reality’ whatever that may be, neither is fantasy someone’s laughably literal-minded idea of what constitutes 'magic'. In short, fantasy’s enemy is the kind of thinking that says ‘what I can see, what I can touch, that’s real’. One only has to think of the Dursleys in the Harry Potter books; there is no spiritual dimension for such people, there is no wonder in God’s creation because they will never accept or see what is not of their making, in their control, or in their direct understanding. And they can never understand the touch and the peace of the divine, or the heroic potential of the inner self. To represent such worlds, the world of the spirit and the psychology, fantasy uses magical worlds, the worlds of magic, of wonder. These are of course, in every way, ‘other’ worlds. We need faith to pass through, as we need faith to understand that there is more to reality than the seductive realm of the Possession; where the absence of the newest model of whatever coveted artifact (cars, food, phones) signifies absence of self in some way, (reducing of identity, of status). This is of course, exactly the world the Dursleys live in: the world of the mundane and material, of expensive cars and neat suburban homes.

Magic in these books, is of course a double edged sword; on the one hand it clearly signifies power and a certain kind of wisdom. Wizards are born, not made, that is clear. But to be a great wizard definitely signifies a mastery of the inner self, not of physical prowess. To produce a patronus, we need a happy memory, so we need to understand what happiness is to us, therefore we need to understand ourselves. Good readers of fantasy will be drawn into wondering what constitutes happiness for them, and about the power of positive thinking; they’ll start thinking about hope in a very sophisticated sense, and that will inevitably bring them to faith. Fantasy maps that journey with a metaphorical pen on a sort of paper called Destiny.
Poor readers of fantasy, on the other hand, will start wondering how cool they would look if they pointed a wooden stick at someone and shot out a silver animal at them.

Both Good and Evil can evil can master the inner self, which is why the Other world is always in peril, in some way a battlefield. Having faith is not the end of the journey; we need to know evil as it whispers in ourselves. I once read that in a fantasy novel, there is no character or place that does not symbolize something within a single human being. Elves and hobbits are two different faces of humankind…so are orcs. We are both Harry and Voldemorte. Stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia is only the first step, but if you can’t; if you get to that point and think “how stupid…how can a country exist inside a wardrobe?”, and toss the book over your shoulder in disgust…well, you haven’t even begun.

The Painted Glass

My father recently took up reading the last two Harry Potter novels, rather defensively justifying himself by saying he ‘needed to know what happened’ and that the stories sustain their appeal through the drive of plot, which is to say that he adamantly denies that the stories are any kind of ‘good’ literature. I would agree that Rowling’s fantasy series doesn’t have the aesthetic literary quality of the canon; you cannot, as is at any point possible of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or Charlotte Bronte, take out a single line and go ‘wow’. But not many who have read Rowling could deny that while reading the stories they were not utterly immersed in the world she created, or hopelessly compelled by the events she described and that, whatever else you may say about her, is story-telling at its most skilful. In fact if anyone really sits down to systematically consider what enthralled them so about the books, they might be amazed at the way Rowling’s story worked at them on a hundred different levels, and I am not just talking about plot. I am talking about her ability to make a story work and work well. Again this gets frustratingly confusable with canonical judgments, so let me rather put it this way: I am talking about the ability to make a story story good, not about good literature. But where then is the line over which one crosses into bad story? Where do the forces of subjective judging hold sway and when is something just irredeemably cheesy?

Anime here offers the most fascinating example of all. In particular I am referring to Naruto, but I think the series serves to demonstrate ideas that are peculiar to anime, not least because it is richly thematic and, like the Harry Potters, seemingly simple in its aesthetic.

Naruto makes use of the crude mechanisms of cartoons to convey some of its humour, but also has the full flush of epic in its emotional scope and thematic complexity. Being a fan of either can bring one to ‘the other side’, and this is where the mode’s genius and greatest disadvantage lies. It is difficult to ‘pass into’ a story, to go from being a mere spectator to an emotional participator in it, when the mode through which that story is conveyed is something like animation. It is difficult to take animation seriously on the level on which Naruto makes its emotional demands, which is sophisticated in both its depth and its complexity. This means that it is difficult to see the story for what it is, to pass through the painted glass that is the mode of story-ing, the animation, and breathe the living emotion that is so vibrant and astonishing behind.

The Painted Glass does not always take the form of crude artifice. I believe it is the obstacle of our prejudices, that keep us from ‘passing through’ into a story, an essential transformation if we are to access it at its most yielding, and only then, attain the authority to judge it fairly.

Beyond Peril

Note: The following contains explicit spoilers for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

I finished the latest and final Harry Potter book at precisely 8:10 this morning. What I call self-sanctity (although a more honest term would be identity pride) compels me to clear up at the onset that although I received the book at one of the many hype-ridden Release Parties (a topic for another post, where my apologies are in order) this was due mainly to the fact that I’m currently sharing my copy with my sister, and this has restricted my reading time to late nights and early mornings. But that is not the subject of this post. Right now I want to talk about the effects of the book on me.

For quite a while I couldn’t think what I found so distasteful; after all there was much in the book I heartily applauded and found immensely satisfying: Snape’s innocence, Draco, Ron and Hermione’s kiss…I even approved of the losses, intimate to heighten the cost of the struggle but not enough to mutilate its worth. And then…after worrying it and worrying it I realized that my problem was on an academic level and rather generic: I disapproved of Harry’s isolation.

This may confuse someone who would want to know what I’m referring to – after all Harry ends up the furthest thing from alone at the end of the story. But I’m not talking about the absence of friends or personal fulfilment…I'm talking about a crude articulation of the paradox of fantasy, a line that has been crossed where Harry's story inhabits a realm between adventure and myth, upsettingly, towards the latter. I am not saying that fantasy must not play it's inherited mythic role, but not to the extent where the protagonist is elevated above the reach of psychological identification, which is what adventure enables in its qualties of earthiness and the immediate extraordinary.

Now nothing I should have enjoyed is free of a certain mythic glow; Harry’s children and even Ron’s jokes are bathed in it. Where before Harry's story was a journey to be taken, for the pleasure of his life and the purpose of navigating our own labyrinthine psyches, now it is a relic on a wall. Something to be treasured, dusted, worshiped, but not touched. Not experienced, because in isolating Harry, his character has been elevated, depressingly I found, from hero-as-me to hero-as-sign.

The Shadowy Marches of the Country of Idleness

Far greater peril runs rampant in a land of not so far kin to the realm of faerie, one where the sun neither dims nor shines, or admits of night announcing its incestuous presence. There is a stream of consciousness alive in the place it is true, without rhyme of reason, signposts or destination. It feeds and births dreams, neither of the waking consciousness nor the sleeping subconscious. We are creative therein, it is so. But no craft takes shape in our hands for we have none therein, but are only disembodied ecstasies and streaming yearnings. We are alive and well, but the blood does not run in our veins as it ought, and we bleed grey syrap when wakefullness pricks us.

This is the land of the grey mist, the faint light not of the sun. It is the land immortal, unchanging, whose time is like a vacuum for our own. Youth is to be gotten there, it is so, but not without sacrifice. Not without life. Not without peril.

Is She Wyrd?

Wyrd Sisters as a play was pulled off with astonishing flair by superiors and contemporaries on Saturday afternoon. And it's little to do with the fact that Terry Pratchett is difficult to screw up in the entertainment zone, because the book was simply not as good. Actors (who by the way have no professional training whatsoever) found two or three jokes in lines in which I hadn't even detected one. Even minor roles were sparkling and sometines momentarily stole the show, in particular one of the guards and a certain chambermaid. The witches were more than characters; they were people, brought (to use a cliche) in all their earthy jaggedness and charming eccentricity properly to life.

Something about taking on the roles in a story, however, which does seem to tap into some spiritual essence even more than a book. This is exactly one of the central themes of the play itself, and it is worthwhile to consider the perils of a realm not so easily designated.

And while you're doing that it'll also be worth your while to get hold of the song 'Is She Weird?' by The Pixies, which played with characteristic spunk as the actors took their last bows. As it did I sat on the edge of my seat, a rapt smile on my face, thinking that in some untried but not unimagined physical way, I'd been to the Perilous Realm and felt story with my skin and blood. Now that's weird.

A Comedy of Contacts

The most recent post on my sister's blog, appropriately (rather cleverly I thought) entitled 'Networking', is what provided the impetus for this train of thought. I won't spend time, however, clearing up the story, although that was my original idea, because as I considered with immense amusement the prospect of taking different sources and putting them together I realized something. Essentially, this was that the story didn't so much as show up the value of itself on face alone, as both my sister and I presumed, because not everyone saw the value in it as we did. And that taking the extra effort to piece together the story would either baffle most of the people involved or strike them as a ludicrously trivial waste of time.

That said some offering of the occurence from my point of view will serve as useful. I was sitting with a friend in a restaurant when she got a call from another friend of mine, one who she knows only artificially. The event essentially circles around my sister losing her phone, and although most of it seemed to have been managed by my other friend, who phoned the friend I was sitting with, the 'network' of people who were roped in to facilitate its return to its owner was amazing to us. Most of these people had only the barest connection to each other, and yet for a single afternoon they were drawn into the accomplishment of a single goal. They ranged from the secretary in the University department where I work as a tutor, to a boy in Jo'burg whose connection to my sister through my other friend was itself obscure. It involved another tutor in the English department who had studied with my other friend and who used to work as a tutor in the department where I was now working. It criss-crossed from my school best-friend's little sister to Jo'burg, to another girl who had studied with my other friend, who was also a friend of the friend sitting across from me, and who also worked as a tutor in the same department.

It is striking to me that so many people in the department where I work on campus got drawn into the task of helping my sister's phone get back to her, since she has nothing whatsoever to do with any of them, and not very much to do even with me. It is striking that it drew into contact a boy my sister was studying with (who found the phone) with a boy she was friends with in Jo'burg, striking that my friend sitting with me in a restaurant in Menlyn had cause to say my best friend's little sister's name, via a childhood nickname given to my best friend, who she will probably never meet in this lifetime.

It is striking not because of how far we have come with technology, or because the world can be so amazingly small. It is striking because my sister and I have a peculiar way of being moved by every single person that touches us in our lives, whether it reaches her only through her connection to me or vice versa. We are amazed every day that there are so many, that those people are so different, and that we all cherish them on some level in a truly personal way because, even the most random mundane incidents show how they are in some way part of us.

The Beautiful Realm

Of course our stories must be beautiful, and what follows necessarily is that our heroes must be too. The very act of this, poetry-writing, story-telling/writing, is the production of 'aesthetic'. This, I find, applies even to those explosively vulgar creations so common of our age. In fact such creations, it may be argued, deal more dishonestly than Romance with life's ugliness, taking the ugliness itself and lying with it. These creations are fond of disguising their Romance with raw, honest, meaning-making. What is more Romantic than presenting excessive filth as 'art', insisting that there is value in confronting those most bestial aspects of the human condition without shame?

My question, then, does not attend to whether or not stories are about the beautiful, for there is no question about that. The Realm of Art is perilous for precisely that reason. All is faerie within. Even the raw, gritty, supposedly honest stuff. My question is about the role of meaning in all this, now the revelation has descended. For when we extract the moral of the tale, once we have caught the abhorrent message within what we inexorably must denounce as propaganda afterward; what is the value of such art except to feel beauty, what is the function of those creations which deliberately set out to not do so, except to make us feel beauty. Feel, not see, because to be true such things can only be true to something in us, something which after all, is not spirit, but still within.

Of Capes and Cartoons

I recently read a book which referred to the narrative craft of comic books as 'urban fantasies'. Although no doubt a term which thinly disguises its apologetic stance (not unlike 'graphic novels'), I like it. I can attach it to a genre I have come to know and love through years of afternoon cartoon adaptations and have come to respect through a recent boom in Hollywood exploitation and hours of window shopping on the pavements of the information residential areas of Wikipedia. I can locate it in the vast multiverse of the Perilous Realm, not as it turns out, all elves and nymph-spun moors.

I loved watching Spiderman and X-men as a kid. I remember they gave me my first liberating inkling that fantasy and growing up need not be mutually exclusive. I remember the thrill of seeing magic at work not in a Romantic pseudo-medieval past or high tech imagined future, but right here, right now. I remember feeling exhilarated at the thought of those tremors collapsing the real with the wonderful.

I love the breakdown in our time between the so-called poles of High culture and Low culture. I love that they are melting and pouring into each other, so that more of fiction can be enjoyed on a more intellectual level if we choose. I love that we are truly free in the Perilous Realm.

Concerning Others, Selves and Stories

I recently had cause, although certainly not for the first time, to wonder again about the role of the familiar in the Perilous Realm. Granted, what constitutes the 'familiar' is different to every individual, and in a postmodern world, the 'familiar' is also fraught with ambiguities and politics when it comes to those still forced to negotiate the post-colonial identity. Such as us, or to use Queen Lestat's terms, Blaaaahnians. We, it seems, are in a continual state of conflict with our 'Selves', our projected selves, our given selves, our spontaneous selves. And in that, when it comes to fantasy, there is curiously something both soothing and defeating in the pages of the classics, to cite a notable example, The Lord of the Rings.

Of course we may argue, we know that the values embodied by the narrative are not alien to us, not alien to the values which we grew up with, in the stories we were told by our teachers or our parents or our books. Even if they might have come to contraries when it comes to the actual practice of some of our illustrious elders. For the themes are the same, war against tyranny, the unexpected heroics of the meek, the lights of faith and kindness in the darkest of hours. The ringing of elvish laughter, which is to say laughter which was sad and thus most true in its joy, wise laughter, silver with moonlit nights of yearning for a better world. But then I have to remind myself that the very act of arguing brings into conflict those stories, whether they in nature, are in fact the same. Why do we need to argue, I need ask, why is the familiar always strange, always in conflict with the beautiful?

Perhaps we lack the metaphors which would have brought our own beauty to the familiar, to the strange. Perhaps we lost the sense of the beautiful in our Selves, oh, far too long ago now for the reaches of the memory or the heart.