Disapointing Fantasy

Here I'm going to introduce one type of regular entry I hope to regularly put onto this blog. I'm calling it the NPRKJ, or the "National Public Radio Knee-Jerk." Basically I'll present a story which I ran into while perusing the NPR.org stories of the day, and share my knee-jerk reaction to it. It's not my fully formed and crafted position, it's just a quick (sometimes not so quick) response.
-D.A.

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The story Morally Complex 'Magicians' Recasts Potter's World left me very frustrated and disappointed. It did so because it came so very close to addressing a fundamental aspect of good literature, but then went the exact opposite direction.

Here's a quick lowdown, the author Lev Grossman was heavily influenced by writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, particularly Lewis, but disliking the moral clarity of such stories, decides to rewrite the same story only with "believable" characters who are more gritty at match his worldview. This means the college students do drugs, have sex with each other, and generally act like rebellious and selfish kids.

Now, on a bad day, I'd tend to take this personally and get really riled up against Grossman, but really it's not him, and it's not the "gritty realism" either, though generally you need to convince me why I should be interested in reading something with that kind of content. You really do have a world like that here, let's be honest, the moral caliber of most U.S. Universities isn't exactly stellar... But we're not talking about real life here, we're talking about fantasy. And it's this bigger fact that I'm trying to make. Grossman, like a few other authors these days, don't use the genre for its highest purpose. (In fact, as we go farther along, we'll see he's doing something worse, but we're not there yet.)

Here's a telling quote:

Grossman: Voldemort and anyone like that in a fantasy novel, any big, bad villain, has a kind of powerful organizing presence on the universe. You know who's good, you know who's evil and you know what magic is for. It's for fighting evil. Well, when you take that away, suddenly the universe gets a whole lot more complicated...

There's that word "complicated." The NPR headline said "Morally Complex" story... but the truth is, it's not morally complex. It's just morally ambiguous. You can't even say it's "misguided" because at this point, it's not even trying to teach something. This is precisely the opposite of what fantasy is about.

Fantasy is a creative writer's dream of a literary form, because it basically let's you do anything and the reader tends to go along with it. The sky is purple? Ok. People can shoot magic beams from sticks? Ok. The adventure happens in a rip of alternate-reality? Sure. But here's where the line between cheap entertainment and real literature is drawn. Because that's not all there is to a book.

At its very core, fantasy is a genre of moral allegory meant to inspire, it offers a vessel to "Be all you cannot be," in order to come away with something. And this is where I become be disappointed, and sometimes frustrated, when I find these kinds of books. Without resorting to quote Spider-man, not every author who writes a fantasy book uses rises to their level of power and responsibility. Some don't even still believe you can inspire people. And worse, since we live in a pretty ugly nihilistic society, sometimes you get people who want to deliberately inspire the wrong things. It's not the author's fault per se, but it still causes a knee-jerk reaction in me. And once you get to this point, that's when I have to start drawing a line in the sand and saying "this is bad."

I hit that point when in the interview Grossman described what he did with his own heavy critical allusions to C.S. Lewis' Narnia series and his intentions of re-interpreting it. This is what he says:

Grossman: I remember being very angry as a child and as an adult at Aslan. I always felt that here is a world that had a, you know, a proper god in it, a god who you could see, who would come down and change the course of events, but he didn't do it very much, and he would often let battles go on and events really spin out of control, and people would die before Aslan would step in. Why would a God not help people in every possible way that he could?

So basically he's admitting that he doesn't like "god" and therefore he's going to re-write the story where his characters get a chance to confront him and accuse him of doing it all wrong. Does this sound familiar?

It's always just so annoying when you get an author who has a great imagination and plenty of craftsmanship in creating a world, but they do it to spite God instead of glorify Him... it's even more annoying because I've recently found myself more of the opinion that you really can't justify that kind of literature and say "but it's just so well written" and writ- off the anti-God message. That suggests you're not reading properly, either being ignorant of the power of themes in a book, or deliberately ignoring them. In each case, the book isn't being used properly.

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Now, to close up, with all NPR KJs, I'd like to give a list of links to further consider some of the icebergs I smash into above. Here ya go:

Fortunately, this was not the only story out this week. For a great list of books to read that are wonderfully positive examples worth reading and celebrating, listen to author Leslie Blume's summer reading list.

If you ever feel like really getting into the Theodicy debate, where you really ask "What if God really did come and help us all the time like we ask," listen or read this essay by Frederica Matthewes-Green.

Also, I can't close this out without leaving a link and recommendation for a great interview discussing the purpose of stories and fantasy as moral tools. The second half of this podcast hits the nail right on the head summarizing why we need literature, and what it's good for. (Click here for the mp3 directly, otherwise here for a pop-up viewer.)