Keftu Dissected

The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how to make oneself ridiculous and not to shrink from the ridicule.

— Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

Being halfway completed, my Enoch novels are undergoing their midlife crisis. Where are they coming from? Where are they going? Should they shave their head and get a sports car?

Since my blog is the place where I write about things I want to think about, my lucky readers get to glimpse some writerly musings in the next few posts. Today let's begin with Keftu, my protagonist.

Keftu is of a sanguine temperament. He would never write a post like this, unlike melancholic-phlegmatic me! He's also a bit of a fool, as my other characters remind him from time to time. He owes a lot to Percival, the bumpkin-turned-quest-knight whose innocence and stupidity allow him to be used by God. Whether Keftu is useful to the abscondent gods of Enoch remains to be seen, of course.

Like Daedalus, he makes his own wings, but he really has more in common with Icarus. My depiction of him with only one wing on the back cover of Dragonfly is meant to suggest Paul Klee's The Hero with the Wing, which depicts a tragicomic figure who has injured himself in his idiotic attempts to fly.

Quite a few other figures from fable, myth, history, and romance are present in Keftu's DNA, both positively and negatively. He is Gilgamesh (seeker after immortality), Cain (wanderer) and Abel (sacrifice-offerer), Noah (ark pilot), Nimrod (mighty hunter), Abraham (visionary) and Jacob (dream-traveler), Moses (seer of the burning bush), Tobias (vanquisher of demons), and Christ (harrower of hell). He is Prometheus (fire-giver), Hermes (argus-slayer), Theseus (maze-runner), Perseus (gorgon's head-bearer), Bellerophon (steed-tamer and chimera-slayer), Heracles (monster fighter), Orpheus (singer of the dead), and Odysseus (trickster). He is Solon the Lawgiver and Pompey the Great. He is Beowulf and Siegfried. He is the Continental Op and Gilbert Gosseyn. He is Batman, Superman, and Luke Skywalker.

In addition to all of this, I consider Keftu an ironic antitype of Frodo Baggins. Frodo's quest is more or less handed to him. You know where he's going from the first chapters of The Lord of the Rings. The drama lies in the spiritual cost of his continued adherence to this goal. But what if he'd been driven out of the Shire – driven into the arms of the quest, so to speak – without ever having heard of Gandalf, Sauron, or the One Ring? Gandalf is busy elsewhere, with no time to spare for Hobbits; Sauron himself couldn't care less about them; there never was a Ring to wrap incarnate evil up in a neat little package. Frodo has no high destiny but, cut off from his past, finds himself unable to live without one, and therefore invents it for himself. Nevertheless, not a day goes by in which he doesn't look into the abyss and think: what if I'm only deluding myself?

Who in our time hasn't experienced this anxiety? I've gone through phases when I imagined myself acting on a divine mandate. I'll bet that just about everyone, even thoroughgoing materialists, try to see some kind of pattern or logic in the events of their lives. It's part of being human. But, for me, it's always been undercut by a nagging doubt that I'm just talking to myself. After many colorful disappointments, I've come to decide that, if there is a divine agency guiding us to some appointed end, then its action is dark and mysterious, not a voice booming on a mountaintop. It's something that acts from outside time, and therefore in a way that's not really comprehensible to us, and is much less concerned with "geography" than we are.

I attempt to capture some of this in my description of Keftu's songlines, which I adapt from the worldview of the Indigenous Australians, combining it with the mnemonic palace of Sephaura inspired by the method of loci developed by Simonides of Ceos. Keftu's greatness, if he has any greatness, lies in that he knows that he does not know. But his world is littered with grand failures, with persons, human and otherwise, who think they know but do not.

One such is Vaustus, whose character is a composite of several pastors and missionaries I encountered back in my wild college days. The episode that lost him his leg actually happened to someone I knew, except that my friend was unsuccessful in his amputation, which he attempted, naked, with a handsaw in a stranger's open garage. (There, doesn't that make you want to read my book?) But we were all a bit like that.

You'd think that a person, when faced with the cosmic contradiction to the divine mandate they've claimed as a guide for their personal actions, would be forced to admit that they've been acting under a delusion. But you'd be wrong. Their entire ego and worldview are wrapped up in a particular vision of themselves. So, instead, they go a little bit crazy. They revise the past, reinterpret the prophecy, attempt to see what isn't there. Every time this happens, they go a little bit crazier. Deliberately short-circuiting your ability to see reality isn't good for your psychic integrity.

My point is, life is a frightening, painful, messed-up experience ending in death. We all desperately want it to have some kind of meaning. A quest fantasy is comforting because it seems to present life as a logical progression of events with a clear and definite end. But real life isn't like that. Attempts to live like it is only result in madness and despair, or else boundless fatuity and narcissism. Sword-and-sorcery, as opposed to epic fantasy, seems to take what we might call the cynical view. At any rate, it's not particularly concerned with overarching narratives. That's what I like about it.

Still, we are all on a kind of journey, aren't we? It's just that we're making the quest up as we go along. We're more like Don Quixote than the Redcrosse Knight. The joke's on us. Perhaps there is a path, but, if so, it's not like the road to Rivendell. We go blindly, trustingly or not, choosing as seems best at each moment, never quite knowing whether we do well or ill. The climax of our journey is otherwise than we imagine it, and what we regard as most insignificant is possibly quite the contrary.

Come to think of it, though, that could be applied to Frodo's journey. At no point is he altogether certain of his means. The goal is never really in question, but all responsibility is laid on his shoulders. Even Gandalf and Elrond refuse to advise him. And, in the end, he fails! Or would have failed, had not Gollum intervened. In fact, you could argue that, far from being Winnie-the-Pooh for adults, The Lord of the Rings is way more cynical (or mature) than the Elric Saga. So I find that my characterization of Frodo's quest doesn't do justice to the text, though it does describe your cookie-cutter mass market quest fantasy.
 
Still, it's true that Keftu has no Gandalf, as is pointed out in the passage quoted at the top of Fletcher Vredenburgh's kind review of my most recent novel. He's on his own in a way that Frodo never was. He has no goal but what he sets himself.

Mining the Bible

The Book of Tobit isn't the most well-known book of the Bible. For one thing, it's very short; for another, it's not in all Bibles. Catholics refer to it as "deuterocanonical," indicating that it is not in the current Hebrew Bible, but regard it as canon; to Protestants it is "apocryphal," hence non-canonical.

The events Tobit describes are placed in the 8th century BC, but it was probably written in the 3rd or 2nd century, or at any rate sometime after the return from the exile. It was written in Aramaic, but most modern editions are based on one of several ancient Greek versions. The Aramaic and Hebrew versions were thought lost until fragments were found in Cave IV at Qumran. St. Jerome claimed to have based his version for the Latin Vulgate on an Aramaic copy.

The book is, according to most scholars, a kind of religious fairy tale:

Tobit is a righteous Israelite living in Nineveh after being deported by Shalmaneser, the king of Assyria who conquered the northern kingdom. He adheres to the Mosaic law, practices charity, and is especially solicitous regarding the burial of the dead. This gets him in trouble with Sennacherib, Shalmaneser's successor, forcing him to flee for his life. (There are some historical errors here, but I'm presenting the story as-is.) After Sennacherib's assassination, Tobit's nephew Ahiqar (a Near Eastern folk hero) pulls some strings to allow for his return. He takes up his dead-burying activities again, prompting the derision of his neighbors. After burying a man strangled in the marketplace, he sleeps in the open, and birds poop in his eyes. This causes cataracts and, eventually, blindness. He prays for death.

Meanwhile, a young Israelite woman named Sarah, who lives in Ecbatana in Media (in modern-day Iran), is experiencing troubles of her own. She's gotten married seven times, but every time, just as she was preparing to go to bed with her new husband, the demon Asmodeus (from the Persian aeshma daeva, demon of wrath) appeared and killed the groom to prevent their consummating their union. Her maid accuses her of having strangled them all. She prays for death.

Both prayers are heard by God, who sends the angel Raphael to make things right.

Tobit sends his son Tobias to Media to retrieve a large sum of money he deposited there many years ago. Tobias enlists the service of a young man (Raphael in mortal disguise) who claims to know the roads. While en route, a fish tries to eat Tobiah's foot as he's bathing in the Tigris River. He catches the fish, and Raphael advises him to keep the liver, the heart, and the gall. The first two repel demons when roasted, and the third is a cure for cataracts.

They reach Sarah's house. Tobiah marries Sarah and they go to the bridal chamber. He places the liver and heart on embers prepared for incense. Asmodeus is driven by the smoke into Upper Egypt, where he is bound by Raphael. Tobiah and Sarah rise to say a prayer together. It's a prayer of thanksgiving that goes from the cosmic to the intimate, dwelling on the heavens and the earth, Adam and Eve, sexual complementarity, mutual support, sincere love, and the hope of growing old together.

Sarah says, "Amen," and they get in bed together. Sarah's father, who had ordered a grave to be dug in the night, has it filled in when he discovers the happy outcome. The money is retrieved and the couple goes to Nineveh. Tobiah applies the gall to his father's eyes and is able to peel the cataracts off his eyeballs. The angel then reveals his true identity:

I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels who present the prayers of the saints and enter into the presence of the glory of the Holy One.

He also gives some insight into the nature of his supposed corporeality:

All these days I merely appeared to you and did not eat or drink, but you were seeing a vision.

Years later, from his deathbed, Tobit admonishes his son to return to Ecbatana, for the prophet has preached the destruction of Nineveh. So Tobiah and Sarah and their family return to Media, where they hear about the fall of Nineveh and praise God.

All in all, it's a strange, beautiful tale full of bizarre happenings and vivid details that passes freely and unapologetically from the scatological, the visceral, and the sexual to the angelic and the divine. It's entertaining – it could almost be the basis for a story in the Arabian Nights – at the same time as being edifying and thought-provoking. More than anything, viewed purely as a story, it's a wonderful mine for writers.

John O'Neill of Black Gate fame recently mentioned his surprise that fantasy authors don't do more with Biblical material:

When I was editing fiction for Black Gate, I was always a little surprised at how many writers were eager to tap the dead religions of Ancient Greece, Rome and Scandinavia, and how few seemed interested in the rich storytelling of the Bible. Maybe it was an overabundance of respect — or, more likely, a lack of real familiarity with the source material.

I suspect that, culturally speaking, it's just too close, for believers as well as non-believers. There's a sense of ownership. We know the Bible, or so we think. It's old hat.

The truth is, the Bible has a lot of weird, sexy, and violent parts that don't come up in Sunday school. The Old Testament is a Bronze-Age epic of love and revenge and worship and war, rich in historical detail and local color, with poetic images that are some of the most beautiful in any language. It's a bridge from the cosmic to the historical, establishing a supernatural link and parallel between the Temple liturgy and the creation of the universe.

Even the New Testament has more strangeness to mine than most people suspect. Think, for instance, of the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac, in which Jesus casts the demon called Legion ("for we are many") out of a tomb-dwelling demoniac, but, at its request, allows it to enter a herd of swine, which promptly drown themselves in the sea. That story alone prompts countless questions about the nature of the world of spirits; it makes you feel like you're catching just a glimpse into a strange and frightening plane with its own secret laws.

One fantasy author who did do a lot with Biblical material is Madeleine L'Engle. I read her Time Quartet many times when I was a pre-teen. My favorite was Many Waters, in which the "normal" Murray twins Dennys and Sandy are accidentally time-warped into the days leading up to the Deluge, where they meet the patriarchs, fall in love with a beautiful young woman, and come into contact with nephilim, seraphim, virtual unicorns, and tiny wooly mammoths. When I was in the fourth grade I began a project of reading the King James Version of the Bible, and Many Waters went hand-in-hand with the strange things I was encountering there. I even dressed as Japheth for Book Day in the fifth grade.

I happen to do a lot with Biblical material myself. The world of Antellus represents a blend of Greek and Semitic mythology. Like L'Engle, I'm especially drawn to the first part of Genesis, from the creation accounts (there's two of them, you know) down to the Tower of Babel. Robert Alter's Genesis: Translation and Commentary (W. W. Norton) is an excellent non-religious translation. I'm also fascinated by the mythologies of other Semitic peoples, especially the Arabian/Islamic jinn, on which I base my nephelim, as well as some of the other ancient Jewish traditions. But I have a special affection for Tobit, which is one reason I chose my pen name as I did.

So, go read your Bible. If you don't have one, get one. I'm sure you can find someone more than willing to give you a nice one for free, even if you tell them that you just want to mine it for material. It just might not have the deuterocanonical books in it...

Upcoming Fiction ~ Updated

I'm pleased to announce that my story "Day of the Dragonfly" has been accepted by Beneath Ceaseless Skies and will appear there some time in the not-so-distant future. This will be my longest published story to date. It's inspired by various myths, Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, hardboiled fiction, and a well-known tale I liked when I was a boy but always felt ended the wrong way.

Update: I've just been notified that my first pro-published story, "Misbegotten," has been selected for the fifth annual Beneath Ceaseless Skies best-of anthology. As usual, I'm both pleased and honored. Check back here for future updates.

The Day of the Orcs

"All right, all right!" said Sam. "That's quite enough. I don't want to hear no more. No welcome, no beer, no smoke, and a lot of rules and orc-talk instead. I hoped to have a rest, but I can see there's work and trouble ahead."

This is tangentially related to my last post.

I've instituted a new family tradition: every week we have a movie night. My children, who are four and six, don't watch television – we don't even get it at our house – and have practically no media exposure. So, I thought, maybe it's time to begin introducing them to a rich if vulgar vein of our artistic culture.

Last weekend's showing was The Wizard of Oz. My wife had been concerned that the witch and the flying monkeys would be too scary (they are for her!), but, no, not our kids. I guess all these years of telling them creepy fairy tales like "Hansel and Gretel" and "Jack the Giant-Killer" and "The Juniper Tree" have finally paid off.

Actually, what really bothered my son (the six-year-old) was the implication that the story was all a dream. He asked about it while I was tucking him in, and I told him I thought the movie left it up to the viewer. We decided together that it wasn't just a dream. But I was a bit put out by it too, though I confess that the movie as a whole – which I hadn't seen in a long time – greatly delighted me.

I told someone else about it, and they mentioned that they'd been taught in college (they were an educator) that this is the good kind of children's fantasy, the kind that makes it very clear what's real and what's not, so that the poor dears don't get their heads turned and start looking for Technicolor dream worlds inside tornados. The bad kind of fantasy treats the events of the tale as real events. The child never wakes up or, if they do, they discover the rainbow scepter in their bed.

The main problem I have with the "good" type of fantasy is that it's stupid. When I was a kid I hated dream-stories with a passion. Why on earth would I want to read about a silly dream of the chief pencil sharpener's assistant at Acme Widget? As an adult I feel just the same way, and I discover that my children do as well. Fiction is fiction, I suppose, but the dream machinery just drapes the story with a layer of condescension: "Ha ha! You thought this was real! But it's not." Or: "No, you idiot, things like this don't really happen. You knew that, right?"

Granted, exposing the idiocy of assertions made by child development "experts" is like shooting fish in a barrel. But this particular attitude is, I think, more than just annoying. It's nothing short of damnable. It was beaten out, hammer and tongs, in the deeps of the earth by a secret cabal of Orcs.

Yes, that's right. I said Orcs. Their numbers being too small now to plot large-scale domination, they seek to influence events from behind the scenes.

 

And what Orcs most dearly want, more than anything else in the world, is for the children of Men to become efficient slaves. They want lesser breeds of imps and goblins to lord it over. They hate anything that makes the children look out the window and dream of a better place, so naturally they heap scorn on Fantasy, calling it a form of Escape (a bad word on their lips).

To which Tolkien replies:

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which "Escape" is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter. Just so a Party-spokesman might have labelled departure from the misery of the Führer's or any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery. In the same way these critics, to make confusion worse, and so to bring into contempt their opponents, stick their label of scorn not only on to Desertion, but on to real Escape, and what are often its companions, Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt. Not only do they confound the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter; but they would seem to prefer the acquiescence of the "quisling" to the resistance of the patriot. To such thinking you have only to say "the land you loved is doomed" to excuse any treachery, indeed to glorify it.

Now, if the Orcs can't keep children from reading fantasy, they at least want them to understand that it's just a silly dream that we put away when there's real work to be done. Hence their compromise on dream-stories.

Their approach to adults – and, I think, their more recent approach to children – requires a bit more subtlety but goes a step further. Rather than settling for making adults despise the medium – which they still do, to be sure – they aim to make its very ideals despicable in the eyes of its readers. After all, we know what Orcs think about heroes:

"There's a great fighter about, one of those bloody-handed Elves, or one of the filthy tarks."

What's a tark, you ask? For the etymology of the term, please see the Appendix to The Return of the King. However, to our excellent diversity-minded modern Orcs, Frodo son of Drogo is just as much a tark as Aragorn son of Arathorn. It's all the same to them, and they're as tired as hell of it. Enough with your Hectors, your Beowulfs, your Rolands, your Arthurs! No more Gilgameshes and Galahads and Godfreys! Grow up! Give us something different! Except, when they say, "give us," they really mean, "give the great unwashed masses," because these Orcs always know what's best for everyone else.

To accomplish their ends of making the ideals of Fantasy despicable, they create (as Saruman his pitifully derivative pits and engines) meta-stories, stories that masquerade as Fantasy but serve rather to browbeat the casual reader and insult the perspicacious or principled reader through "subversion" and "deconstruction." The condescension of the dream machinery mentioned above now comes out in the open and slaps the reader in the face.

In the end, of course, such stories are read only by critics and other writers, and the sub-genre becomes a Worm Ouroboros, devouring its own tail. The one to whom Tolkien and Lewis, or even Howard and Smith, are like fine wine, decried now as a fool who reads knaves, flees with terror before the face of such insipid, self-regarding, effete, irrelevant "literature" as the Fellowship of the Ring fled the Balrog, except in this case there's no fire to ignite his mantle of darkness, because "No Smoking" signs are hung on all the walls.

Here, then, are the three main thrusts of the Orcs' assault on Fantasy:

1. Keep people from reading Fantasy.
2. Make Fantasy seem unreal and silly.
3. Mock the ideals of Fantasy.

To which I reply with the words of the Marsh-Wiggle:

"Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world."

And so I'll keep looking for the land of the sun, though all the Orcs ever spawned oppose me. I'll keep reading (and trying to write) books that aren't afraid to tell tales straightforwardly, without the winks and nods and other cheap tricks the literati use to dress up the watery barf they call "writing." I'll keep painting pictures of flowers and insects and saints and princesses and knights without an iota of irony, commentary, or self-reference. And I'll read my children the stories I like, and guide them (for a brief time) through the beauties and terrors of the world, and protect them, until they are mature enough to fight for themselves, from the clutches of "experts" whose smiling, concerned faces hide the hearts of Orcs.

"The world is all grown strange. [...] How shall a man judge what to do in such times?"
     "As he ever has judged," said Aragorn. "Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house."

It's not the first time the Orcs have tried to take over, and it won't be the last. The proper responses are the same as ever: Escape, Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt.

A Common Thread

I like to link ideas. What do the following passages have in common? Do you see it?

"Chrysaor was joined in love to Callirrhoe, the daughter of glorious Ocean, and begot three-headed Geryones. […] And in a hollow cave she bare another monster, irresistible, in no wise like either to mortal men or to the undying gods, even the goddess fierce Echidna who is half a nymph with glancing eyes and fair cheeks, and half again a huge snake, great and awful, with speckled skin, eating raw flesh beneath the secret parts of the holy earth. And there she has a cave deep down under a hollow rock far from the deathless gods and mortal men. There, then, did the gods appoint her a glorious house to dwell in: and she keeps guard in Arima beneath the earth, grim Echidna, a nymph who dies not nor grows old all her days. Men say that Typhaon the terrible, outrageous and lawless, was joined in love to her, the maid with glancing eyes. So she conceived and brought forth fierce offspring; first she bare Orthus the hound of Geryones, and then again she bare a second, a monster not to be overcome and that may not be described, Cerberus who eats raw flesh, the brazen-voiced hound of Hades, fifty-headed, relentless and strong. And again she bore a third, the evil-minded Hydra of Lerna, whom the goddess, white-armed Hera nourished, being angry beyond measure with the mighty Heracles. […] She was the mother of Chimaera who breathed raging fire, a creature fearful, great, swift-footed and strong, who had three heads, one of a grim-eyed lion; in her hinderpart, a dragon; and in her middle, a goat, breathing forth a fearful blast of blazing fire. […] Echidna was subject in love to Orthus and brought forth the deadly Sphinx which destroyed the Cadmeans, and the Nemean lion, which Hera, the good wife of Zeus, brought up and made to haunt the hills of Nemea, a plague to men."

– Hesiod's Theogony

"Come, now, tell me, where hast thou proved thyself a seer? Why, when the Watcher was here who wove dark song, didst thou say nothing that could free this folk? Yet the riddle, at least, was not for the first comer to read; there was need of a seer's skill; and none such thou was found to have, either by help of birds, or as known from any god: no, I came, I, Oedipus the ignorant, and made her mute, when I had seized the answer by my wit, untaught of birds."

– Sophocles, Oedipus the King

"Then someone suggested that their plaything should be exhibited in the nearest building, and so I was led past the sphinx of white marble, which had seemed to watch me all the while with a smile at my astonishment, towards a vast grey edifice of fretted stone."

"Above me towered the sphinx, upon the bronze pedestal, white, shining, leprous, in the light of the rising moon. It seemed to smile in mockery of my dismay."

"I stopped very gently and sat upon the Time Machine, looking round. The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red and motionless. The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish colour, and all the trace of life that I could see at first was the intensely green vegetation that covered every projecting point on their south-eastern face. It was the same rich green that one sees on forest moss or on the lichen in caves: plants which like these grow in a perpetual twilight."

— H. G. Wells, The Time Machine

"I stood in one of the embrasures of the Last Redoubt—that great Pyramid of grey metal which held the last millions of this world from the Powers of the Slayers."

"To the North-West I looked, and in the wide field of my glass, saw plain the bright glare of the fire from the Red Pit, shine upwards against the underside of the vast chin of the North-West Watcher—The Watching Thing of the North-West… 'That which hath Watched from the Beginning, and until the opening of the Gateway of Eternity' came into my thoughts, as I looked through the glass…"

"[O]lden sciences […], disturbing the unmeasurable Outward Powers, […] allowed to pass the Barrier of Life some of those Monsters and Ab-human creatures, which are so wondrously cushioned from us at this normal present. And thus there had materialized, and in other cases developed, grotesque and horrible Creatures, which now beset the humans of this world. And where there was no power to take on material form, there had been allowed to certain dreadful Forces to have power to affect the life of the human spirit. And this growing very dreadful, and the world full of lawlessness and degeneracy, there had banded together the sound millions, and built the Last Redoubt; there in the twilight of the world."

"And then, so it would seem, as that Eternal Night lengthened itself upon the world, the power of terror grew and strengthened. And fresh and greater monsters developed and bred out of all space and Outward Dimensions, attracted, even as it might be Infernal sharks, by that lonely and mighty hill of humanity, facing its end—so near to the Eternal, and yet so far deferred in the minds and to the senses of those humans. And thus hath it been ever."

— William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land

"At length they came to the door upon the outer court, and they halted. Even from where they stood they felt the malice of the Watchers beating on them, black silent shapes on either side of the gate through which the glare of Mordor dimly showed. […]
     "Sam drew out the elven-glass of Galadriel again. As if to do honour to his hardihood, and to grace with splendour his faithful brown hobbit-hand that had done such deeds, the phial blazed forth suddenly, so that all the shadowy court was lit with a dazzling radiance like lightning; but it remained steady and did not pass.
     "'Gilthoniel, A Elbereth!' Sam cried. For, why he did not know, his thought sprang back suddenly to the Elves in the Shire, and the song that drove away the Black Rider in the trees.
     "'Aiya elenion ancalima!' cried Frodo once again behind him.
     "The will of the Watchers was broken with a suddenness like the snapping of a cord, and Frodo and Sam stumbled forward. Then they ran. Through the gate and past the great seated figures with their glittering eyes."

— J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

On Angels

For my birthday I received a complete set of the Britannica Great Books collection. Neoluddite that I am, I can now rest assured that I, for one, will survive the coming collapse of civilization. I'll be a cultural ark, if you will, floating on the waters of oblivion; all you other people relying on your e-readers (i.e., rented electronic secret decoder rings) are screwed. The firemen of the future will have to come personally to my house to spew kerosene all over my secret collection. Your collection they'll just delete from the main office; or maybe they'll simply change the password. Actually, since we all know that a sprawling bureaucracy will cripple the future state, they'll probably never get around to coming for me at all.

Be that as it may, I've been perusing the collection. One thing that made its publication a truly great undertaking is its preface, the fat, two-volume Syntopticon, which lays the Great Ideas out under one hundred headings, cross-referenced with the other volumes in the set. The first entry is "Angels," and it is that of which I wish to speak. You must forgive me if the discussion sounds rather professorial; I am, after all, a professor. Though a mathematician, I think about angels a lot, as my idea of them plays a significant role in my writing.

Angels are one of the great myths of our culture. They're part of a continuous tradition stretching back into the mists of prehistory, from the astral religion of Babylon to the Hebrew scriptures, the New Testament, and the Koran; from the speculations of the pagan neo-Platonists to the great philosophers of the Middle Ages, Jewish and Muslim and Christian. And I'd wager that most Americans believe in them today.

So, what is an angel? A guy with wings and blue jeans? A vision of fire and light? The fullest, most detailed account of their nature is to be found in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, the "Angelic Doctor." This Scholastic vision is woven from several historical strands, the first of which is, of course, Scripture, together with Patristic exposition.

Now, the few angels we encounter in Scripture are either mysterious and aloof, like Abraham's guests at Mamre and the angel who wrestled with Jacob, or frightening, inhuman beings, a far cry from Clarence, Michael Landon, and their descendants.

And this was their appearance: they had the form of men, but each had four faces, and each of them had four wings. Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the sole of a calf's foot; and they sparkled like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands… And the living creatures darted to and fro, like a flash of lightning. Now as I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel upon the earth beside the living creatures, one for each of the four of them. As for the appearance of the wheels and their construction: their appearance was like the gleaming of a chrysolite; and the four had the same likeness, their construction being as it were a wheel within a wheel… The four wheels had rims and they had spokes; and their rims were full of eyes round about… Wherever the spirit would go, they went, and the wheels rose along with them; for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.

It's a commonplace that these conceptions borrow from the astral worship of ancient Mesopotamia.

"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"

The connection between stars and angels is clear even in something as late as the Book of Revelation.

And another portent appeared in heaven; behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems upon his heads. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth.

This borrowing or cross-fertilization wasn't a secret waiting to be uncovered by modern professors of comparative religion. It's no accident that Magi from the east were led to Bethlehem by a star.

The most prolonged angelic appearance occurs in the deuterocanonical Book of Tobit. (Centuries before modern searchers into ancient secrets were discovering obscure gnostic gospels hidden on the racks of Barnes and Noble, Catholics had their very own secret suppressed texts about prophets and angels.) Tobit describes the adventures of a young man named Tobias who journeys to the east on his father's business. With the help of the angel Raphael he weds the girl Sarah and vanquishes the demon Asmodeus, who had destroyed seven of her suitors. The angel reveals himself at the end:

"I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels who present the prayers of the saints and enter into the presence of the glory of the Holy One." They were both alarmed; and they fell upon their faces, for they were afraid. But he said to them, "Do not be afraid; you will be safe… All these days I merely appeared to you and did not eat or drink, but you were seeing a vision."

Scriptural and Patristic ideas about angels found an echo in the speculations of the neo-Platonists, who, led by a philosophical instinct, wanted to see a continuous gradation of spiritual beings from the gods down to men. The word "demon," which appears so often in the New Testament, is a Greek word, and carries connotations from the Greek conception of the world of spirits. Modern philosopher-types seem inclined to pass over theories of angels as partaking more of mythology than metaphysics, but they shouldn't be. These theories reflect various solutions to the problem of how the human mind relates to the body. The vein passes through the schools of Plato and Aristotle, the neo-Platonists, Dionysus the Areopagite, the Arabian philosophers, Moses Maimonides, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas.

Reading Aquinas himself, you might get the feeling that you're in the realm more of science fiction than fantasy. C. S. Lewis has one of his characters in That Hideous Strength refer euphemistically to angels and demons as macrobes; the word seems particularly apt. Aquinas asserts, first of all, that, not only are angels incorporeal, they are immaterial as well. The words have different meanings. The word matter in his usage has a broader import than in modern scientific jargon; it refers to that which distinguishes one member of a species from another. Since angels are immaterial, then, each angel must be its own species.

Some people, whose minds have been formed by modern physics, imagine that angels must be beings of pure energy like something out of Arthur C. Clarke. Passing over the ignorance of special relativity implied by this, we just have to say that angels aren't that kind of thing at all. They aren't physical. They can't be studied by physical methods.

On the other hand, as regards the plain physicality of many angelic apparitions in Scripture, Aquinas holds that angels are able to compact air particles so as to appear in human form and interact with human beings. But the bodies they assume have only the semblance of life, as Raphael explains to Tobias. Also, an angel can't be said to be in a place in the same sense that a man is in a place. An angel is like a living stream of thought; it becomes "present" at a location through a focusing of its power, but "whereness" as we generally conceive of it is limited to material beings. An angel's mode of apprehension is simple and direct: it doesn't abstract from singulars perceived through the senses or reason from premises to conclusion. On the other hand, no angel can read the secrets of a man's heart. They do have access to occult information, however, and may be able to discern the import of physical or psychological processes in the human brain.

Aquinas, following the Areopagite, separates the angels into three main classes, each of which is further divided into three ranks. The classes reflect the relative exaltedness of the angels' perception of truth. The highest perceive things as they emanate directly from God; these include seraphim, cherubim, and thrones. The middle class—dominions, virtues, and powers—perceive the reasons of things in the plurality of universals. And the lowest class perceive intelligibles in the multitude of particulars. These include principalities (who oversee nations and peoples), archangels (like Gabriel), and angels properly so-called (e.g., guardian angels).

Recently I told my four-year-old son about the idea that every human is guided by his own guardian angel; surprised, he thought about this for a moment, then asked (somewhat skeptically): "Are there seven billion angels?" To which Aquinas would reply: There are many, many more than seven billion. In the Middle Ages it was commonly held that angels oversaw the motion of the heavenly bodies, and it's a myth that the medievals thought we inhabit a flat earth in a small universe. A casual perusal of the books they studied and wrote suffices to explode the idea. Well, Aquinas opined that the number of angels is finite but vast, with far more angels than there are material objects, so that there's a fairly smooth gradation from the most exalted down to man. This desire to "fill in the gaps" strikes a common chord with the pagan philosophers as well as the great fantasists of modern times.

The Harrowing of Gotham

I've been meaning to write a bit about The Dark Knight Rises. I've mentioned that I seldom go to the movies. This is mostly because the theater sends me into sensory overload, but also because I live in a small town in the middle of nowhere. We do have a movie theater, but it's a little scary, and seldom shows the kinds of movies I like to see. For Batman I braved it, though. I was quite overwhelmed by the film; I even drove all the way to the city to rewatch it at a Nice Theater.

The critical response to it at the time was positive but a little on the tepid side. Certainly the film has its faults. The plot is ungainly. There are noticeable holes and contrivances. More annoyingly, it tries too hard to conceal the true identity of the Miranda Tate character, almost to the point of dishonesty. If you want to spring a surprise on the viewer, you have to do it honestly. We all know that actors can act like anything they want, but real people in real situations can't, and there are some psychological obfuscations here that amount to miracles. Not fair. You have to lay everything out on the table. If the viewer guesses it, fine. It won't matter if the story is good enough. A story that depends on withholding information is a weak story. A great director, like Hitchcock, will actually underscore whatever it is the protagonist doesn't see, use it to ratchet up the tension, and then still somehow shock the viewer.

So the film has its faults. But it also has great beauty—a rich and gloomy majesty—and I don't think it got enough credit for that at the time. For one thing, Christopher Nolan clearly has great integrity as a director. He refused to bow to the scourge of our times, the 3D format. He also (I've read) refused to film digitally as a point of craftsmanship. CGI effects were used sparingly, preserving a sense of exhilaration wholly lacking from various eye-popping extravaganzas. (Peter Jackson, I'm talking to you.) Nolan actually used miniatures, life-size models, and sets. What a concept!

The Batman movies are generous movies. They give us more than they have to. They are far more beautiful than we have any right to expect of a superhero movie. Every shot in The Dark Knight Rises is artfully arranged; it uses stark chiaroscuro and an almost monochromatic palette to powerful effect.

Part of the problem with the reception of The Dark Knight Rises is that the film really sits better as a myth or a fantasy than an action adventure. Symbolism abounds. As fire was a motif in The Dark Knight, so is ice a motif in this film. It begins with the image of the bat encased in cracking ice and ends with the city surrounded by a river of ice like Dante's Cocytus. The climax takes place on a snowy morning in the dead of winter, when Batman returns from the dead—the underworld—and sets the city free. The typology of the film places it squarely in Northrop Frye's "mythos of summer": romance.

The complete form of the romance is clearly the successful quest, and such a completed form has three main stages: the stage of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero or his foe, or both, must die; and the exaltation of the hero. We may call these three stages respectively, using Greek terms, the agon or conflict, the pathos or death-struggle, and the anagnorisis or discovery, the recognition of the hero, who has clearly proved himself to be a hero even if he does not survive the conflict. A three-fold structure is repeated in many features of romance—in the frequency, for instance, with which the successful hero is a third son, or the third to undertake the quest, or successful on his third attempt. It is shown more directly in the three-day rhythm of death, disappearance and revival which is found in the myth of Attis and other dying gods, and has been incorporated in our Easter. (The Anatomy of Criticism)

In The Dark Knight Rises we see this threefold structure in multiple ways, from Bruce's three attempts to escape from the pit to his defeat by Bane, disappearance from Gotham in its hour of need, and return at the last minute. Bruce/Batman even has a kind of sacrificial role, like Attis: he was the scapegoat driven out of the city at the end of The Dark Knight, while at the end of this film he immolates himself as a nuclear holocaust, delivering Gotham from its long darkness and winter.

The central form of romance is dialectical: everything is focused on a conflict between the hero and his enemy, and all the reader's values are bound up with the hero. Hence the hero of romance is analogous to the mythical Messiah or deliverer who comes from an upper world, and his enemy is analogous to the demonic powers of a lower world. The conflict however takes place in, or at any rate primarily concerns, our world, which is in the middle, and which is characterized by the cyclical movement of nature. Hence the opposite poles of the cycles of nature are assimilated to the opposition of the hero and his enemy. The enemy is associated with winter, darkness, confusion, sterility, moribund life and old age, and the hero with spring, dawn, order, fertility, vigor, and youth. (ibid.)

Ultimately, the foe is the dragon—leviathan—identified with the sterility of the land and the impotence of its king. There's an almost mystical feeling in The Dark Knight Rises that, though things may seem all right on the surface, the city is sick. What is it sick from? An ingested lie. Bruce Wayne is sick too, and from the same malady. The decay of the city and Bruce's senility are one. The unsettling peace won at the end of The Dark Knight wasn't a real peace. The lies have to be exposed and bear their fruit before true healing can come. Bane himself shows that he understands his role when he calls himself "necessary evil."

I do like Bane considerably. He's an urban Lord Humungus, brutal yet articulate, a composite of countless revolutionaries leading men into deeper darkness, the warlord of a city cut off from the outside world by forces of the state like the Duke in Escape from New York. But he isn't an antagonist you can really feel much enmity toward. As he himself noted, he isn't the real foe. The real foe is the knot into which Bruce's life and the life of Gotham have gotten tied, the labyrinth in which they've gotten lost.

In the folk tale versions of dragon-killing stories we notice how frequently the previous victims of the dragon come out of him alive after he is killed… Hence the symbolism of the Harrowing of Hell… Secular versions of journeys inside monsters occur from Lucian to our day, and perhaps even the Trojan horse had originally some links with the same theme. The image of the dark winding labyrinth for the monster's belly is a natural one, and one that frequently appears in heroic quests, notably that of Theseus… In many solar myths, too, the hero travels perilously through a dark labyrinthine underworld full of monsters between sunset and sunrise. (ibid.)

This last may serve as a template for the narrative arc of the trilogy. Bruce journeys through the underworld from the day he falls down the well and is attacked by bats. The bottleneck prison of The Dark Knight Rises is a kind of huge, nightmare version of his well, and the crazy Escheresque labyrinth of the pit is an image of the maze in which he's been lost since he was a boy. His escape is a harrowing—he drops the rope behind him as he leaves—and so is his liberation of the police imprisoned beneath the city.

Then, as day dawns, the dark knight fights alongside the police at last. The city is set free—aptly described through a famous passage from A Tale of Two Cities quoted at length in the movie—and Bruce, dead now to Gotham, is liberated to live a life of obscurity in the sun.

It is a beautiful movie, a dark masterpiece.

Mythopoeic Dualism

Does style play a special role in fantasy?

C. S. Lewis speaks in several places of a mythopoeic art, holding it as distinct from the manner of telling. This is an art is whose objects exist in the ideal, independent of any embodiment in tangible form. In his introduction to an anthology of George MacDonald’s works, he writes:

If you try to take the theme of Keats’ Nightingale apart from the very words in which he has embodied it, you find that you are talking about almost nothing. Form and content can there be separated only by a false abstraction. But in a myth—in a story where the mere pattern of events is all that matters—this is not so. Any means of communication whatever which succeeds in lodging those events in our imagination has, as we say, “done the trick.” After that you can throw the means of communication away.

Lewis did not think style unimportant, of course. He was sensitive to the defects in MacDonald’s style; he praises Eddison’s writing while deploring Lindsay’s as “wretched”; his own novels are quite polished. But he holds that what is important in each case is independent of the verbal presentation. The telling is just the wrapper. The myth is the soul, the true reality; the telling is the body, necessary for the time being, perhaps, but to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible.

Being more of an Aristotelian than a Platonist, I am not quite comfortable with this “mythopoeic dualism.” Lewis would make the mythopoeic art a liberal art, like composition: a story exists even if no one is telling it, just as a piece of music exists even if no one is playing it. But the product of this mythopoeic art supposedly consists of a sequence of ideas with no guidelines as to how to “play” them, whereas composition leaves no such freedom. Is that what myth-making is really like?

For one thing, whoever has told a story to children knows very well that they are at least as sensitive to style as their elders, quick to point out the slightest deviation in wording. Analogously, in primitive societies, the manner of telling is fixed, and the story-teller assumes something of a priestly office. The same is true of the Greeks and other peoples of antiquity. They did not retell Homer: they recited him, and the poems themselves are highly formulaic. But even modern retellings of ancient myths follow certain traditional channels. Edith Hamilton’s Mythology is probably the best compendium of Greek myths for children—it’s what I grew up reading, at any rate—and this owes to the fact that she pays deference to the texts. It lends her book a certain heterogeneity. Or again, there are four different Gospels rather than one “harmony”; such harmonies have been written, but they never supersede the texts.

No, I begin to wonder if certain aspects of style are not intrinsic to myth as such. Lewis avers that he has always loved the tale of the Golden Fleece while never being particularly fond of any single telling; nevertheless, I think there must be something about the manner of telling, the style, that tints the story in all its different tellings. Style and story are mixed; they represent, not distinct categories, but a multiplicity of interwoven elements. Even the retelling of a modern “mythopoeic” novel (e.g., The Trial, Lewis’ example) must retain something of the author’s style.

If this is so, then myth is more akin to poetry than Lewis concedes. His enjoyment of MacDonald’s stories as “myths” must owe something to their style, and not merely exist in spite of it. What would we have if we stripped Phantastes of all stylistic elements? Not much more than we would have of Keats’ Nightingale, I think. Faërie would not survive the operation. But even Lewis was not consistent in his dualism, for he excludes The Night Land from his canon of story precisely because of its atrocious and foolish style. And how could we separate the story of The Worm Ouroboros—which Lewis praised so highly—from its ringing Jacobean idiom? Does not the manner of telling cast an enchanted mantle over the entire proceedings?