Narnia, Game of Thrones, and the Stormlight Chronicles: the Reenchantmant of Fantasy (Part II)

(Part I)

Connected to Game of Thrones' pessimistic anti-heroism is a sense of realism. Beyond a few dragons, there is remarkably little magic. In fact, the series often seems to function more as historical fiction, only being held back by the technicality that the story is not actually taking place within the War of the Roses or the French Wars of Religion but on another planet. Just as the series abandons the physical magic of fantasy in favor of a disenchanted realism, it abandons fantasy's psychology of heroism in favor of a more "realistic" disenchanted anti-heroism.

Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Chronicles has much in common with Game of Thrones. While there is a lot more magic, Sanderson represents a key turn within modern fantasy toward science-fiction. Mid-twentieth century science-fiction, as exemplified by writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke, turned away from black box technology that differed little from magic in favor of engineering stories that placed how a technology might plausibly work at center stage. Similarly, even as Sanderson starts from a different set of natural laws, his characters approach their magic in a scientific spirit. It is useful to think of Stormlight as the kind of science-fiction novel that someone living in a platonist universe might have written. The naturalism in Stormlight goes so far as to include heroes like Jasnah Kholin, who is an atheist, and her uncle Dalinar, who loses his faith in the Almighty as the series goes along. These plot lines are particularly intriguing as Sanderson is a religious Mormon.

The really crucial connection between the two series is this crisis of heroism. In Stormlight, this occurs very literally at the cosmological level with the death of a divine being called Honor. Nine of the ten Harelds refuse to continue to damn themselves to Desolation every few thousand years in a never-ending cycle to save the world from the Voidbringers. In essence, Jesus has refused to get back on the Cross. At a human level, the story focuses on the implications of this death, much in the same way that Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God presaged the start of World War I. In fact, the war between the Alethi and the Parshendi, the central event of the story, is essentially a fantasy world version of World War I. You have the assassination of a royal figure, King Gavilar of Alethkar (an event that is retold in every book from the perspective of a different character). This leads to a war that quickly turns into a stalemate on the Shattered Plains.

The irony of the Alethi light-eyed aristocracy is that they had just enough sense of honor to declare war to avenge the death of their king but not enough to stop the war once it became a stalemate and spare the lives of the common soldiers (particularly the bridge crews, callously sacrificed as cannon fodder). The dark truth is that the light-eyes have the pretense of an honor code without its substance. The pretense, as manifested in the keen attention to ritual, is necessary considering that their lives of privilege could only be justified by laying claim to serving a higher code. Beyond the rare sets of shardplate and shardblades, what protects the light-eyes is that the masses of dark-eyes honestly believe that the light-eyes are honorable and deserve to rule. The moment they stop believing this, you will have a revolution on your hands (which is one of the main subplots of the second book, Words of Radiance). The pretense of honor allowed the light-eyes to declare war to avenge their king while serving their real goal of collecting gemhearts out on the Shattered Plains battlefield and plotting against each other to improve their individual family positions. The real reason why this war is not ending is that the light-eyes want there to be a war as an end in itself.

Worse than honor just being dead, its very death has allowed it to be corrupted. The light-eyes, in a  sense, have the corpse of honor, its ritual forms. Because of the almost total absence of actual belief, they are able to parade themselves draped in that corpse. (Considering what shardplates and shardblades are eventually revealed to be, this is not exactly a metaphor.) Honor becomes what elevates them above the rest of society. This means that, by definition, everything they do becomes honorable. Furthermore, acts that conventional thinking might consider dishonorable are now not only not dishonorable but the very height of honor for only a "truly honorable" person could ever do them. In dealing with light-eyed villains like Amaram and Sadeas, much of their charm and effectiveness comes from their ability to be openly cynical about honor and still to be thought of as honorable. As with Ayn Rand villains, their nihilism is not taken seriously. This makes it a surprise when they can commit such cold-blooded actions without any sense of guilt or remorse.   

This crisis of honor is played out from the perspectives of the dark-eyed commoner Kaladin and the light-eyed Dalinar. Kaladin comes into the story as an idealist, who believes in the honor of his light-eyed commander, Amaram. This faith is cruelly shattered when Amaram repays Kaladin's heroic slaying of a shardbearer by taking the spoils for himself and having Kaladin's men executed to leave no witnesses. As for Kaladin, Amaram's "mercifully" has him branded and sold as a slave. This eventually leads Kaladin to serve on Bridge Crew Four.

If Kaladin is disenchantment from the bottom up, Dalinar is disenchantment from the top down. He is part of the aristocracy, the brother of the assassinated king, and one of the main Alethi commanders. More than anyone else, he honestly tries to live up to the code of chivalry as taught in the Way of Kings. Because he is a true believer, he is unable initially to see the treachery around him as manifested mainly by his friend, Sadeas. From Sadeas' perspective, betraying Dalinar to his death is the decent thing to do for a friend, who has lost his touch and a truly noble defense of the aristocratic right to feud without the forced unity of a strong king. One of my favorite moments of the entire series comes in book two when a stylized duel is allowed to turn into a trap for Dalinar's son, Adolin. Dalinar is left pleading for mercy and with the realization that none of his fellow light-eyes, including his nephew, King Elhokar, possess anything but the hollow outward trappings of honor.

To deepen the disenchantment, it is not just that Kaladin and Dalinar are good people in a bad world; they themselves are highly flawed individuals. Not only have they made mistakes, their mistakes are of such a nature that there is no coming back from them. Repentance is, by definition, impossible as any attempt to do so demonstrates that one never truly appreciated the gravity of the sin in the first place. Beyond Kaladin's anger at Amaram's betrayal, he is weighed down by the guilt of failing to protect his men. He joined the army because he wished to protect those who could not protect themselves, particularly his drafted younger brother Tien. The reality is that, despite his best intentions, he has only gotten people killed. First, he failed in the particular task of protecting Tien and then he failed even at the symbolic level of protecting the men under his command. The need to redeem himself by fixing the world leads Kaladin to agree to allow Elhokar to be assassinated despite having sworn to protect him. There are good reasons for killing Elhokar and it is not unreasonable to imagine that Alethkar would be a better place if Dalinar took over. There is just that small issue of cold-blooded murder and treachery. 

As for Dalinar, much of the new Oathbringer novel is devoted to revealing that, for most of his life, he was not really any better than Sadeas and Amaram. Dalinar's slaughtering whole towns in "service of the Crown and the Almighty" led to the death of his wife. His subsequent turn to drink to drown his guilt led to his being drunk during the assassination of his brother. In fact, it was Sadeas, who put himself in harm's way trying to protect Gavilar. Dalinar finally managed to strike a magical bargain to escape his guilt that removed all memory of his wife from his mind.

It is Kaladin's and Dalinar's task to save the world by restarting the ancient order of Knights Radiants, who once served the Harelds. In essence, they have to reenchant the world by restoring heroism to it. In this disenchanted world, in which even the heroes are irreparably tainted, reenchantment is achieved by acknowledging both one's sins and inability to atone for them. Next, one tries to do better even while knowing that this may fail. The most important step in a journey is simply the next one. In a story about saving the world, it is amazing to the extent that the major acts of salvation come about by people not trying to save the world but by humbly doing the right thing in front of them.

Kaladin comes to accept protecting a flawed king after Elhokar acknowledges his failures as a king and asks Kaladin to teach him to be better. Elhokar's limited repentance with its honesty in looking at both the past and the future allows Kaladin to step back from "heroically" trying to fix the world in one grand gesture to redeem his past failure to fix the world and instead simply do the honorable thing. It should be noted that Elhokar's moment does not mean he transforms himself into either a good king or a good person nor does it mean that things turn out well for him. 

Similarly, Dalinar's "heroic" attempt to live according to the Way of Kings, while well-intentioned, simply continued the light-eyed practice of donning the forms of honor. He is still trying to atone for his sins, which, as this is an impossible task, leads to him simply continuing to run from the past and ignore it. The big change is when he struggles to negotiate a complex series of alliances as the head of the new Knights Radiant. He is burdened by the fact that he has no experience in trying to convince people to cooperate as opposed to using brute force. With time ticking down to an apocalypse, Dalinar begins his redemption by not trying to seize power even as that accusation is used as an excuse by others to not confront the looming threat in front of them. This sets ups the climax when Dalinar attempts to resist possession by the satanic figure Odium. The trap is that Odium can offer Dalinar the one thing he has been seeking all this time, salvation from guilt. If only Dalinar would consent to possession, he would no longer be responsible for his actions. One might even put this into the past and say that Dalinar had always, in some sense, been under the control of some evil force, which is really what was responsible for what he did. Dalinar saves himself precisely by embracing his guilt and asking to remember. Rather than being a hero, he takes responsibility for his own past and allows the heroic image of himself to be destroyed.

It is interesting to contrast Sanderson and Martin in terms of their production. Sanderson's gigantic body of work has essentially been produced over the same time as Martin has given us only Dance of Dragons. A possible reason for why Martin has not been able to finish his series is that a disenchanted world, by its very nature, does not allow for a satisfactory ending. Martin has to choose between not solving anything, which would be true to his world even as it would be narratively unsatisfactory, or solving things (Daenerys and Jon Snow getting together and ruling happily ever after), which would be dishonest and probably unsatisfactory as well. I suspect we are heading to something like Lost in which, at best, we can hope for an ending that is emotionally satisfying in terms of the characters even as the real issues are ignored. As for Sanderson and Stormlight, there is still a long road ahead and I am sure it will happen at some point that he will write himself into a narrative box. That being said, I am confident that he will see this through and much as a saved Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time and brought it to a satisfactory ending, Stormlight will end in a way that justifies having read it from the beginning.   

  
 

Narnia, Game of Thrones, and the Stormlight Chronicles: the Reenchantmant of Fantasy (Part I)

(Happy birthday to Lionel Spiegel.)

I drive my son Kalman to and from pre-school most weekdays. In the car, he usually asks to listen to Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis. You can clock an average trip as the amount of time it takes to get from the beginning of the book until Mr. Tumnus confesses that he is in the pay of the White Witch as her kidnapper. Kalman knows that the White Witch is bad because she is the government and she makes it always winter. I guess I can live with him not picking up on the "and never Christmas" part.

Lewis opened with one of the finest dedications ever. Writing to Lucy Barfield, the daughter of fellow Inkling, Owen Barfield, Lewis apologized to the teenage girl that she grew up faster than he could write but he hopes that one day she will be old enough to read fairy tales once again. This is a good example of one of the key concepts in Lewis' writing, reenchantment; that one can once again fall in love with the things of childhood that one's more cynical self had abandoned as part of "growing up."

Reenchantment should be understood as a response to Max Weber's notion of disenchantment and Friederich Nietzsche's more poetic "God is dead." Disenchantment is the notion that under modernity our very way of thinking is materialistic and does not allow us to truly operate within a supernaturalist framework. For example, early in LWW, the other children are simply unable to believe that Lucy has traveled to Narnia; to them, it is simply not possible that she could be anything else but either a liar or insane. They are prejudiced against belief even though logically there is nothing to suggest that portals to other universes do not exist.

It is important to understand that contrary to conventional secularist theories of modernity, Weber was not claiming that modernity had intellectually refuted religion and that people, particularly the educated, no longer believed. On the contrary, the prospect of modern secularism could cause many people to cling more tightly than ever to the outward forms of religion. Thus, it may even appear that religion is doing better than ever under modernity with more people attending church and insisting on hardline fundamentalist interpretations of the faith. That being said, such religiosity only serves to cover the fact that religion has been fossilized into something that people practice out of tradition. As such, it lacks the ability to truly inspire its adherents. In this sense, disenchantment stands as a far graver threat to religion than simple secularism. If people are convinced by argument to abandon religion then it might be possible to engage in apologetics and win them back. On the other hand, if people stop believing not because of any argument and without even realizing that they no longer believe then it is practically impossible to ever bring them back.

In addition to religious disenchantment, Lewis, in his own personal experience, confronted a more tangible disenchantment, World War I. Lewis was part of a generation of young Englishmen, who listened to their teachers and did the "right and honorable thing;" they marched off to the French trenches to be slaughtered in the mud, sacrificed to pay for the political and military miscalculations of their elders.

World War I was the death of heroism. In an earlier generation, a man could be said to be brave to stand tall in the face of enemy fire and resolutely march forward. One might die in the attempt but one could believe that he was sacrificing himself to spur his comrades on to victory. During World War I, that became suicide. Thus, the very ethos of heroism led men to their deaths in utter futility. It should be emphasized that dying was never the issue. Young men have always been marched off to war by their elders and died in great numbers. What was new here was this sense of futility that robbed one even of the ability to honor the dead for their sacrifice. By contrast, World War II could once again offer a cause to die for even as it brought the new disenchantment of the massive aerial bombardment of urban centers. As with disenchantment with religion, what was at stake was less an intellectual attack on heroism but the inability, at a gut level, to take heroism seriously in the first place. Someone who seems heroic must either be a scoundrel trying to deceive others or a fool to have bought into such nonsense.

As with fellow veteran J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis' use of fantasy can be seen as an attempt to become reenchanted with heroism. For example, in Narnia, the children are able to abandon the air raids of World War II for a land in which chivalry is still possible. This reenchantment must be understood as something distinct from enchantment. The horrors of the World Wars were real and there can be no going back. That being said, the fantasies of Lewis and Tolkien were attempts to acknowledge the incomprehensible horror of what they experienced yet still allow for heroism. If the blood and the mud were real, the courage shown by the men was equally real.

This project of using fantasy to resurrect heroism must be understood within a larger effort to bring about the reenchantment with religion. Was it not that earlier generation of disenchanted believers, with their mixture of Christian ritual now supplemented with a sense of duty to king and country and a confidence in progress all while being hopelessly naive regarding the implications of industrialized warfare, that had sent all those young men to die? Perhaps, it was not heroism that was obsolete, but the ideologies of modernity? (See Joseph Loconte's Hobbit, a Wardrobe and a Great War.)

If one could recover heroism, perhaps it could lead back to faith and to a religion that might once again be relevant to a modern world. As Screwtape, the Satan of Lewis' disenchanted world, notes, the very fact that non-believers (much like the teenage Lewis, who was then an atheist) march off to war, to give themselves to a cause larger than themselves places them at risk of becoming open to the "enemy." Part of what is going on here is the ability to believe in things that are beyond the physical senses. Disenchantment works precisely by taking the physical as the gold standard of what is real. Thus, before the debate even begins, the spiritual has already lost to be relegated to being less real. The moment we introduce something that is non-physical yet more real than the world of the senses, the spell of disenchantment is broken and the process of reenchantment can begin.

Regardless of this wider religious context, a major aspect of Lewis and Tolkien's legacy to fantasy as a genre has been a kind of optimistic faith in heroism in the face of modern cynicism. (In Lord of the Rings, this optimism is only sharpened by the fact that the book is fundamentally a tragedy.) Thus, it could only be expected that if Lewis and Tolkien represented a kind of enchantment with heroic fantasy, it would produce a backlash of disenchanted fantasy. The most important example of this has been George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones series. This series is a repeated exercise in both the physical and ideological murder of heroism. Those like Ned Stark and his son Robb, who risk themselves doing the right thing, do not come out ahead. It is not even that they die achieving some noble goal. On the contrary, they come to ignominious ends marked by utter futility. On the other side, you have the anti-heroism of Jaime Lannister. Jaime commits regicide and incest even as the former probably saved lives and he is faithful to his sister as his one true love. To Martin's credit, Jaime fails to be a simple caricature of chivalry. Rather, (much like the more comic Harry Flashman), readers can still love Jaime for his simple honesty in knowing himself to be a scoundrel. In a world without moral absolutes, hypocrisy is the only sin and honesty in one's sinfulness the only virtue.             

2011 in Reading

So for the year 2011, between Kindle, iPod and traditional print, I read or listened to about 100 books. Here are my nominations for the best books. Some of these books are recent, others are not. I would be curious to hear from readers any thoughts on these particular books or favorite books from their past year of reading.

Non-Fiction Related to My Dissertation

1)      The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers by Carl L. Becker - A series of lectures on the Enlightenment, which Becker viewed a product of rather than a simple break with the Middle Ages. If I ever teach a historiography course this book will be assigned along with Sir Herbert Butterfield's The Whig Interpretation of History for the topic of the Whig narrative and why it fails to explain the origins of modernity.

2)      The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement by Pawel Maciejko - The best history hands down on the Frankists, an eighteenth-century heretical movement in eastern Europe, which resulted in a mass conversion of Jews to Catholicism. I would particularly recommend this back as an example of counter "great man" history. Not in the sense that Jacob Frank was a pretty infamous character, though he was, but in the sense that Maciejko places the Frankist movement as the center, as opposed to Frank himself. In fact, Maciejko's central argument is that a strong Polish Sabbatian movement existed apart from Frank and outside his control; Frank reacted to and was the product of "Frankist" movement much more so than the other way around.    

3)      Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History by David Ruderman - There is little original with this book, but Ruderman does a great job bringing the major issues of interest to me regarding early modern Jewish history together, particularly the relationship between conversos, Sabbatians and the early Enlightenment. As I am doing with my own discussion of Sabbatianism, Ruderman places a heavy emphasis on mobile networks of individuals.

Non-Fiction Not Related to My Dissertation

1)      Infidel: My Life by Ayaan Hirsi Ali - A powerful autobiography by a Somali ex-Muslim. What particularly impressed me about Hirsi Ali is that she is remarkably non-bitter and non-polemical in her account of her family and of Islam, particularly if you consider how easy it would have been for her to have made it so. Yes she places Islam as a threat to Western Civilization, but this book is hardly of the "Muslims are evil" or even the "religious people are evil" genre. I particularly relate to this book as someone who has taken a step away from a fundamentalist religion, though not as radical a step as Hirsi Ali, via means of classical liberalism. This is a conscious rejection of the authority of community and tradition in favor of the individual and reason, backed by a nation-state. Because of this experience, Hirsi Ali thinks in terms of either classical liberalism or religious fundamentalism. Her objection to modern multi-cultural liberalism is precisely that it fails to appreciate the attraction of religious fundamentalism. As I see it, how can someone appreciate the attraction of something that never appealed to them in the first place and which they cannot seriously imagine themselves having followed? This unwillingness to take religious fundamentalism seriously at an intellectual level means that modern liberals are not prepared to go up against fundamentalist apologists, who use modern liberalism's own abandonment of the absolute authority of the individual, reason and the placement of any type of national culture as fascism to justify the continued existence of fundamentalist enclaves funded by public tax dollars.    

2)      The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto - As with the previous book, this is a defense of classical liberalism that focuses on the experiences of those outside the West. De Soto makes the libertarian case that government bureaucracy causes poverty in third world countries. More importantly, de Soto, following in the tradition of Frederick Hayek, is an eloquent defender of rule of law. He is not anti-government; on the contrary, he believes in government based on principled rules as opposed to arbitrary whims of politicians and interest groups. As in the case of Hirsi Ali, I think there is something about living in a society where a belief in liberal principles is not a given and where one must consciously defend such positions against intellectually serious non-believers to force one back to the basics of liberal principles. In de Soto's Peru and the other countries he describes there is no two-hundred-year history of a constitional system which commands the loyalty of the entire political system. If one is going to take a stand for constitutional government and the rule of law then that stand must be a principled one or stand in line with those willing to use force of arms and politics to take what they believe to be rightfully theirs.       

3)      Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas - If I ever were placed in charge of Artscroll's hagiography division for the writing of gedolim biographies I would assign this book to everyone working for me as an example as to writing inspirational biographies. There is little need to use over the top rhetoric to make Dietrich Bonhoeffer sound heroic. He was an anti-Nazi German pastor, who returned to Germany right before the start of World War II because he felt he needed to actively oppose Nazism on the ground in Germany. He did not survive the war. With that out of the way, Metaxas is free to spend the book explaining Bonhoeffer's theology and offering some background on early twentieth century Protestantism. This book also makes some useful arguments for viewing Nazism as something other than a conservative movement.  

4)      Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis - Certainly the most interesting book on sports I have ever read. For those who like the Freakonomics/Malcolm Gladwell style counterintuitive arguments, Lewis offers a different way of thinking about sports and possibly about life as well. If you wish to articulate why sports announcers are full of nonsense, who consistently fail to say anything useful about the game this is the book for you. What I particularly took from Moneyball is a lesson on the vulnerabilities of self-replicating elites; they tend to recruit people who look the part rather than genuine capability. Baseball scouts tend to jump for athletes who are tall, well built, fast and can throw over 90 miles an hour as opposed to hitters who can rack up walks. One wonders if the Haredi leadership and the journalists who empower them place too much emphasis on people who come from the right families, make the right public statements and are photographed at the right weddings as opposed to engaging in actual scholarship.   

Fiction (I Will Leave It as an Open Question as to whether Any of This is Related to My Dissertation)

1)      Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill - One of the best-written horror stories I have ever come across. It takes a very simple concept, a suit with a ghost attached to it, and scares the pants out of you with it. It makes little use of graphic violence; who needs gore when you have a deliciously psychotic dead hypnotist to talk people into suicide. The book also features lead characters who are actually likable as opposed to a parade of hunks and blondes just lining up for the slaughter. If the writing sounds a bit like Stephen King's, the author happens to be his son.     

2)      Elantris by Brandon Sanderson - There is something to be said for handing characters over to true destruction, the sudden loss of family, position, and reputation. Death is too easy and for it to actually matter it almost needs to render the character narratively useless. So it is to Sanderson's credit that he can craft a truly unique vision of a Hell on Earth to cast his Christ-like hero. As with Orson Scott Card, Sanderson's stories are first and foremost about characters and relationships. In this case, a hero faced with the task of rallying the denizens of an inescapable Hell into a community. (He does this brilliantly as well in Way of Kings.)

3)      Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson - More Sanderson. This one features a pair of princesses, one of them in a Queen Esther type scenario, a pair of comic henchmen, who go off into libertarian style monologues in defense of their profession and a really cool system of magic involving colors and souls.  Sanderson's fantasy is not about heroes off questing to defeat evil dark lords and save the world. Keeping to the best of the Tolkien tradition, Sanderson is a world builder. If Tolkien built his worlds through language, Sanderson works through systems of magic. Imagine a world governed with a slightly different set of physical laws (Sanderson's magic is always based on clear and consistent rules) and ask yourself what sort of society would spring up under such circumstances. Any system that allows a minority of people to become even slightly more powerful than most is going to be hierarchical, but what sort of hierarchy and how might it become vulnerable?        

4)      Song of Fire and Ice Series by George R. R. Martin - Murder, sexual immorality and idolatry and I am loving the series. I have never read a fantasy author who gets the medieval mindset like Martin does. These books should practically be classified as historical fiction. Is it that big a deal that the books do not actually take place during the War of the Roses and involve some dragons in one of the side plots?