Jewish Fantasy

:1:

I’ve been thinking about Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn (1968) lately. If you don’t know the novel, you ought to read it; and if you do know it, you ought to re-read it. It’s wonderful. The titular unicorn leaves her enchanted forest to find out what happened to all the other unicorns. In the world (recognisably our modern, which is to say 20th-century, world) she encounters various people and has various adventures, accompanied by a small group of people she meets on the way: particularly a schlmiel-y sort-of wizard called Schmendrick, whose control over his own magical powers is hazy and intermittent, and a bandit’s wife called Molly Grue. The unicorn is for a time imprisoned in a carnival and put on display with various other monsters and wonders; but she escapes and she, Molly and Schmendrick make their way to a city by the sea for a show-down with the terrifying Red Bull, who threatens to destroy her.

Here is Michael Weingrad’s review-article from The Jewish Review on Beagle as a Jewish writer of Fantasy, an excellent starting-point for thinking about the book. According to Weingrad, Beagle’s roots were ‘in mid-20th-century American Yiddishkeit’, and his Jewishness ‘inflects his fantasy writing in ways both direct and subtle.’ He says that ‘of all Beagle’s books’ Unicorn is ‘the most Jewishly resonant:

Beagle’s depiction of the unicorn’s melancholy quest for the rest of her kind borders on secular post-Hasidic parables of God discovering what has become of His Jews in the wake of the Shoah. “Wherever she went,” Beagle writes, “she searched for her people, but she found no trace of them.”

Though the novel cannot be reduced to allegory, its language is infused with suggestive parallels to God and the Six Million. The unicorn repeatedly refers to the other unicorns as her “people.” “How terrible it would be,” she says ominously, “if all my people had been turned human by well-meaning wizards — exiled, trapped in burning houses. I would sooner find that the Red Bull had killed them all.”

Beagle’s unicorn resembles a god who has been living apart from the world. When the unicorn leaves her timeless forest she enters into history and is shocked and saddened by what she discovers, not least that human beings are no longer able to recognize her. “There has never been a world in which I was not known,” she muses, surprised when a farmer takes her for an ordinary mare.

The whole review seems to me insightful and fascinating. Indeed, I was pleased to hear that Weingrad was running an online event about Beagle’s novel, and doubly pleased to be invited to attend. It sent me back to the novel and made me reconsider some of my assumptions about the development of Fantasy as a genre.

This last is a subject I have been thinking about for a while, slowly getting around to pulling my thoughts into a book on the subject. But those thoughts are proving resistant to coalescence, somehow. You can read me sketching this ground, chronologically and in terms of how it might best be theorised , in this old post. There I argue that what we now call ‘Fantasy’, or ‘genre Fantasy’, was galvanised by the enormous success of Tolkien and Lewis, especially Tolkien, in the 1960s and 1970s. So my thumbnail history (in that post) traces a three phase development: [1] the various examples of ‘Fantasy’ that predate and in some cases influenced Tolkien-Lewis (William Morris, Hope Mirrlees and so on, although I am particularly interested in three influences: Bunyan’s allegorical fantasyland in Pilgrim’s Progress, the 19th-C fascination with Arthurian legend, and Wagner); [2] Narnia and Middle Earth, and [3] the way the success of those two Fantasy series played out in the great delta of often frankly derivative Fantasy writing that has been so prominent over the last four decades or so. There are thousands and thousands of novels written in this mode, after all:

It started with Terry Brooks’s Shannara series (1977 and ongoing) and Stephen Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (1977–2013). By the later 80s bookshop shelves groaned with fat fantasy novels, and the genre had finally arrived as a commercial genre in its own right. And whilst connoisseurs of the mode might sometimes make noises about the importance of William Morris, Dunsany or Hope Mirrlees in the pedigree of Fantasy as such (all three fine and important writers, of course), the brute fact remains that this was a mode that came out of Tolkien. For although the reaction against Tolkien began early — Moorcock’s sneer that LotR was ‘Winnnie-the-Pooh posing as Epic’ dates to 1987 — books written in reaction were very much written in reaction: they bracketed the book’s emphasis on nobility, service, loyalty, bravery, its pre-raphaelite colour-scheme and general uplift with its dodgy racial and sexual politics and took the sledgehammer to the lot: voilà, Grimdark. We’re still being offered a basically medievalised, feudal or otherwise pre-Industrial world threaded with magic, elves, dwarfs, dragons and all that; but now the emphasis is on rape and slaughter, on betrayal and realpolitik (narrowly, indeed adolescently, conceived) and a general horribleness. This is a mode marked by Tolkien even as it shouts its antagonism for everything Tolkien represents.

Since that blogpost was written, I have changed my mind somewhat. I still think the impact and influence of Tolkien-Lewis is crucial to the larger history of Fantasy, and I’m hanging on to my thesis that Bunyan (ie allegory), Arthuriana and Wagner are crucial roots for the mode. But my emphasis is too Brit-centric. In that post I do concede that ‘we need also to factor in the Fritz Leiber US sword-and-sorcery tradition, and also the smaller but not negligible tradition of Robert Howard’s Conan and its muscly imitators — which predates LotR’, but I don’t go far enough there. This makes it hard for me adequately to account for Beagle’s very American (I think) Fantasy novel.

And in fact my mind was changed by trying to factor-in another (I’d argue) major, unignorable Fantasy novel of recent years: Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004). I was helped by reading Jamie Williamson’s The Evolution of Modern Fantasy: From Antiquarianism to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series (2015), which argues that what we tend to think of as Fantasy nowadays is actually the creation of Lin Carter’s ‘Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series’ (1965–974), a string of books published to cash-in on the then-new vogue for Tolkien and sword & sorcery.

That’s actually the list before Lin Carter was hired as editor; it went on under him to add another 65 titles. You can see Beagle’s novel there, as number 14.

Williamson persuasively argues that Carter did for the fantasy canon what Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler did with their “Great Books” series, effectively codifying a list of canonical “great” works that ended up “homogenizing” what we think of as Fantasy (“a sort of timeless Platonic Form, involving magic and invented preindustrial worlds” is how he puts it). One consequence of this, he suggests, is a comprehensive misreading of earlier works of Fantasy that comes from ‘viewing pregenre fantasy through a postgenre lens’. Pre Ballantine, Williamson thinks, Fantasy actually drew on the traditions of Romantic antiquarianism. That, I belatedly realised, is what Strange & Norrell is doing: attempting, with notable success, to restore that earlier mode.

Williamson has interesting things to say about the antiquarian movement, its actual scholars and antiquarians but also pseudo-antiquarians like James Macpherson/Ossian, in effect inventing a new way of writing stories: an elegiac, archaic style, the discovery of the past in the present, ballads and other things embedded in the main body of the work as expressive revenants of a notionally older culture, lots of footnotes and appended essays on context. Williamson argues that, as methods to enhance verisimilitude, these are adopted by what he calls ‘literary fantasists’ like Morris and Tolkien. Why does Williamson think that the modern genre, post-Ballantine Fantasy, has turned its back on this older tradition? He’s not sure, though he thinks it might show a genre “in retreat from the revolutionary intentions of many of the Romantics.” I’m not sure about that explanation, to be honest. But it strikes me as the right context to read Clarke.

For what it’s worth, I read JS&MN as not just an intensely English but an intensely Protestant book. Fantasy as whole (both Williamson’s older tradition and the post-Tolkien Lin Carter stuff) is really about enchantment, I think; or more specifically about re-enchantment. What I mean is that the whole mode exists in reaction to what Weber diagnosed as the “disenchantment” of modernity — the deployment of magic not so much as a pseudo-scientific system but more as an affect, a vibe, a hairs-standing-up-on-the-back-of-the-neck-ness: of charm in the strong sense, of glamour, of transcendence and wonder. What disenchants the older enchantment? Protestantism does. Which is to say … science does, materialism does, capitalism does; but all do so as iterations of this earlier breach: Weber’s famous book is called The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism after all. Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age also sees the Protestant Reformation as ‘central to the abolition of the enchanted cosmos and the eventual creation of a humanist alternative to faith’ [Secular Age, 77].

What this means is that the project of ‘re-enchantment’ is inevitably tangled-up with the dangerous (to Protestant modernity) allure of the Catholic past — basically every Walter Scott novel is about this. Clarke feels it intensely. She seems to me a very Protestant writer (former Methodist, now CofE) who is both spooked by and drawn to Catholicism. There’s a surprisingly large number of Anglo-Protestant writers of Fantasy who do something similar, actually.

So now I’m thinking about a four-phase account of the development of Fantasy as a genre. First, the pre-Tolkien/Lewis tradition, which I now take as a cultural braid woven of the use of a fantasy topography to actualise a fundamentally Christian allegory, with (nostalgic, Christian) medievalism, this latter in particular informed by the antiquarian logics of Percy’s Reliques, Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border as well as the more specifically Arthurian fantasies of Arnold, Tennyson, Morris and (yes) Wagner. These are the sources on which Tolkien (The Hobbit was 1937, though LotR didn’t appear until the 1950s) and Lewis (in the 1950s) drew. The success of these books, first local then, post-60s, global prompted Ballantine’s list, and inspired many writers to imitate and many readers to read those imitations: that’s phase three. Finally we arrive, today, in the midst of a fourth phase, where genre Fantasy is everywhere.

One implication of this account is that there’s something going on in Fantasy, though often in subterranean ways, ‘to do’ with Christianity. Lewis was steeped in medieval allegory, and in his Narnia books wrote Christian allegory (like Bunyan before him). But Tolkien declares in the preface to LotR that he ‘cordially dislikes’ allegory, and has done even since he grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. Like Beowulf before it, LotR is an emulsion of pagan and Christian, but the thing that fascinated Tolkien (and which is picked-up, consciously or otherwise, in a million Tolkien-derivative Fantasy novels) is not allegory but incarnation. It’s a very important consideration of Christian faith that Christ in the world is not an allegory for God. He does not symbolise or ‘represent’ God; he is God, God in human form. Incarnation is a very different thing to the differance of symbolic allegory.

In that abovementioned blogpost [here’s another link to it] I discuss Adorno’s reading of Wagner’s works as intensely bourgeois (think: burghers, burglars, hobbits) and how far he went, despite all his grand mythic posturing, to accomodate the middlebrow respectable tastes of his audience. There was an occasion in which Wagner, Nietzsche and others were discussing the great man’s opere. “The conversation had turned,” Adorno says, “to the poor attendance of the Bayreuth Festival. Nietzsche’s sister reports that Wagner had once observed angrily. ‘The Germans no longer wished to have anything to do with heathen Gods and heroes; what they wanted was something Christian’.” This is what I say about that (I think) revealing quotation.

Parsifal swiftly followed, to supply this market need; not only the most explicitly Christian of Wagner’s operas, but, in its portrait of its villain Klingsor, the most nakedly anti-Semitic. Poor old Nietzsche. So much for Gott ist tot.

Still it is strange (that is to say: I’m suggesting it’s structurally or formally strange) that Modern Fantasy emerges out of an emulsion of Pagan and Christian in the way that it does. It’s not that a large audience are clamouring for specifically Christianised mythic legend, I’d say; but slice it and dice it howsoever we want, it is the bourgeois Christianity of Bunyan, Idylls of the King and Wagner’s final compromise with his audience, through Tolkien and Lewis, that feeds the river that becomes the delta of the modern genre. In my time I have wondered if this has something to do with ‘magic’ — that necessary component of Fantasy worldbuilding, and which we might want to understand this as a broad-brush attempt to capture something of the spiritually transcendent, the numinous, in the reified logic of magical systems, spells, wizards and so on. Adorno had a different angle, and I wonder if he isn’t righter than I:

A contradiction of all autonomous art is the concealment of the labor that went into it, but in high capitalism, with the complete hegemony of exchange-value and with the contradictions arising out of that hegemony, autonomous art becomes both problematic and programmatic at the same time. This is the objective explanation for what is generally thought of in psychological terms as Wagner’s mendacity. To make works of art into magical objects means that men worship their own labour because they are unable to recognize it as such. … The work of art endorses the sentiment normally denied by ideology: work is degrading. [Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 72]

This is why Fantasy is filled with aristocrats and warriors, or at the least of hobbits of independent means: with travellers and questers (which is to say: with holidaymakers) and so on — as, also, with rascals, thieves, rogues etc. And I suppose sometimes with students, at Hogwarts’ or the Unseen University and whatnot. The point is that Fantasy cannot be written in the John Berger, or even the Zola mode: not because of the generic mismatch of Fantasy as le naturalisme, or not only for that reason, but because Fantasy is a realm where work as such is always transmuted magically into magic.

I still think there’s something in that. But I come back to it now, because I’m not sure how far it goes in terms of explaining the appeal of a novel like The Last Unicorn. Is Beagle’s novel about incarnation? Is it an antiquarian exercise in the textual nostalgia of magic? Is it about the transmutation of labour into magic? Or a larger and very important question: what is the place of the Jew in my (arguably still too-Brit centric, too Christianised) narrative of the development of Fantasy? For here a Jew, Beagle, has written a masterpiece of the mode; and if Michael Weingrad is correct, has done so in order to articulate some profoundly Jewish concerns.

:2:

One thing to say is that the place of the Jew in the Tolkien-Lewis tradition of fantasy is not an appealing one. As Jews were othered, denigated and persecuted in the European Middle Ages that form the template for so much modern Fantasy, so ‘the Jew’ appears as persecution-worthy Other in many of these books.

Take for example: dwarfs (or, as JRRT idiosyncratically insisted on pluralising that word, ‘dwarves’). Dwarfs are, of course, figures from Germanic and Norse legend (yes) who appear in various Grimms’ tales (of course) and whose anti-Semitic cultural associations certainly predate Tolkien. But nonetheless here they are, popping up in bulk in The Hobbit, a novel published in 1937 at a time when anti-Semitism was in the process legally and officially of swallowing the whole of Continental Europe. Here they are, these big-nosed, bearded, strange, keep-themselves-to-themselves folk, living in underground tunnels and dens like vermin, devoting their energies to accumulating and hoarding money, pursuing their own mysterious rites and secret rituals [Tolkien himself was quite upfront about this, actually]. We might want to argue that staging a work as Fantasy gives its author a kind of plausible deniability (‘how can you say Jar Jar Binks is a racist stereotype! He’s an alien!’) but we can be grown-up about this. Tolkien’s dwarfs are no more to be blithely acquitted of anti-Semitism than are C S Lewis’s Narnian dwarfs, those willing assistants to Jadis, those stubborn refuseniks when it comes to the manifest bounty of Aslan’s grace — even the Calormen, or at least some of them, come to accept Aslan’s grace as Narnia ends in The Last Battle, but not the Lewisian Jews: ‘Yah! The dwarfs are for the dwarfs!’ they yell, turning their backs on the heaven-of-heavens opening directly before them. ‘“You see,” said Aslan. “They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is their own minds.”’ By the time we get to J K Rowling’s dwarfish goblins, hook-nosed crafty-eyed abstainers from the great battle of Dumbledoric good against Voldemortal evil who literally run the global banking system, the mask has slipped so far it’s lying on the floor.

Weingrad’s discussion of Beagle’s Last Unicorn as a Jewish novel is hard to gainsay; but we could at least try to mount a counter-argument to the effect that the most manifestly Jewish character in the novel, Schmendrick, is — affectionately, but unmistakeably — a sidekick, a. n. other, a bit ridiculous, a little out of the main thrust of the whole. That thrust is magic, I think; and it is one of things that gives Beagle’s novel it’s extraordinary power is the skill with which it not only describes but evokes magic, the way it makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, the way (to go back to a point a made above) it re-enchants the world.

Could we not read The Last Unicorn very specifically as a Christian fable? Weingrad concedes that ‘some of the novel’s resonances are Christian’ (‘the medieval unicorn was a symbol for Christ’ he says, rightly) and he does note that in the second half of the tale the unicorn is transformed into a human woman. But he denies that this makes it a novel about incarnation in the Christian sense: ‘this fairy tale incarnation doesn’t follow the Christian story; the now-human unicorn does not herself atone or make sacrifice (one of the other characters does), and we are reminded that, unlike Jesus, “she is a story with no ending, happy or sad”.’ I don’t think this isn’t quite right, though. It gives too much priority to the specific narrative-elements of the passion story, and so misses the really crucial part of it: incarnation as such as a means of reconnecting the mundane and the divine. The Lord of the Rings does not follow the same story beats as the passion narrative either, and yet, as Tolkien himself noted, it is ‘of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like “religion,” to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.’

There are a great many Jewish specific references in Beagle’s novel of course (Weingrad mentions ‘Molly Grue making “bricks without straw” or the Sodom-like town of Hagsgate whose citizens warn “we allow no strangers to settle here”’). But I suppose I wonder how central these are to the novel’s magical throughline, its beautiful generative evocation of the numinous reilluminating the world.

Schmendrick, charming, good-hearted, a bit inept, comical, is a figure from the rich tradition of Jewish comedy (I mean, the Jewish comic novel, but also clowning and comedy more broadly, the Marx brothers and their many successors) and Jewish comedy is a cultural tradition and idiom of long-standing of course. It is amongst other things a way of dealing with the dangers and precarity of living life as an outsider, as a persecuted other — a way both of defanging the hostility of others by making them laugh, and of coping psychologically with the trauma and stress of living life in such conditions. Saying so is hardly a very original observation, I know; but it’s worth adding that there is almost no humour in the (often ponderous and earnest) Lord of the Rings, and that even the much wittier and funnier Lewis soon steps away from that aspect of his nature as he develops his series (the jokes about ‘Spare Oom’ and so on right at the beginning of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe) to write in a more serious, even reverent, mode, until we get to the pious ecstasies of the end of The Last Battle. But Beagle is a very funny writer and manages to thread his wit and his magic together all the way through. It’s a wonderful thing.