Bureaucratic Evil

Tobie has an excellent piece discussing the nature of evil in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters and That Hideous Strength. The Magisterium of His Dark Materials, the forces of Hell in the Screwtape Letters and the N.I.C.E. of That Hideous Strength are all evil forces that are notably bureaucratic. From my perspective, what I find so compelling about Screwtape as a character is that, while he may Hell’s Undersecretary of Temptation and is devoted to ensnaring souls for “our father down below,” the fact that he is a bureaucrat puts a human touch to him. He is not “evil” in the sense of having horns and a tail and gleefully plotting the destruction of the world; he is someone who goes about his job and does it with absolute efficiency. One can easily imagine Screwtape as a mid-level manager of a firm, a company man; the sort of fellow who might strike one as a bit standoffish, but is a model employee who claims the respect of all who know him. This human portrayal of demons is a part of Lewis’ notion of the fallen state of man. If a fallen angel such as Screwtape is really not all that different from your average company man, doing their job without any particular moral concern, then your average company is also not really that different from a fallen angel and is walking down a path straight to Hell. When he gets there he will fit right in.

So this is what the Catholic League is so Scared of? A Review of the Golden Compass

As regular readers of this blog know, despite my loathing for Philip Pullman, I am a fan of his fantasy series, His Dark Materials. I have been waiting with anticipation for months now for the film adaption of the first part of the trilogy, the Golden Compass. The film, of course, has drawn its share of controversy with the Catholic League attempting to boycott the film. The mainstream media, true to form, is treating the protests from the religious community as attacks on freedom of expression against a work which only “supposedly is atheistic.” Of course, anyone who actually bothered to read the books or to listen to Pullman before he tried to get the books made into films knows that His Dark Materials is not supposedly atheistic, it is straight atheism. Pullman wrote these books as a counter to Narnia and as a way to sell atheism to children. So when religious leaders complain about His Dark Materials they are not making things up or being paranoid. I still believe that a copy of His Dark Materials should be placed in the hands of every boy, girl, and adult in this country, but then again I am strange.
So last night, with a friend from my building, who is also a fan of the books, in tow, I went off to see the Golden Compass. To keep things simple, the film was absolutely dreadful. Not even fighting polar bears could save this film. I found that I could not care less about any of the characters. None of them made any sense. Despite the fact that Tom Stoppard helped write it, the screenplay was a mess. It was a series of tenuously held together events crashing into each other. I admit that the book was quite episodic itself, but you can get away with it much more easily in books than you can on film.
How does one go about taking one of the most original pieces of fantasy literature and reduce it to a pile of clichés? In the books alethiometers are rare and the Magisterium takes an active interest in them. In the movie, I guess feeling that they needed to raise the stakes to make the story more like the common stereotype people have of fantasy, they made Lyra’s alethiometer the last one in existence. In the books, the members of the Magisterium maintain at least some semblance of being human. They are not evil per se but bureaucratic. In making the film someone must have decided that, being that this is fantasy, the Magisterium needed more like traditional fantasy villains. "Fearing any truth that is not their own," they are out to catch Lyra and destroy her alethiometer. I was reminded a bit too strongly of how the Da Vinci Code film made Opus Dei even more over the top than the book did. One is left to wonder why anyone actually bothers to follower an organization that is as evil and incompetent as the Magisterium. For me, the biggest crime against the books was the ending. Those who have read the books know that, at the end of the Golden Compass, Lord Asriel, Lyra’s uncle (really her father), murders her best friend Roger in order to use the energy released by Roger’s dying soul to open a gateway to another world. The movie decided to end before this point. Lyra and Roger are still traveling toward Lord Asriel and we are told that there is a prophecy about Lyra telling how she will decide the coming war.
His Dark Materials were books that purposely defied the traditional fantasy cliché in which the world is divided into neat categories of Good and Evil. Lord Asriel is one of the good guys. Lyra's mother Mrs. Coulter is also, in her own way, on the good side, despite the fact that she also does some pretty horrible things. For the life of me, I cannot understand why the writers of the film could not keep to this. Could it be that Pullman felt that he needed to simplify his atheistic message to make it more digestible to today’s TV addicted youth? And I thought that atheists were the smart ones.

The Continued Adventures of HaRav HaGaon HaTzadik Thomas Covenant HaKofer: Rebetzin Kofer to the Rescue I.

I met my best friend, AS, a few years ago. Some people whom I had just met invited me to come along to some friends of theirs to watch Star Trek. The couple, to whose house we were going to, had a son, which these people thought I might get along with. I walked into the basement and behold there was the Extended Edition of the Lord of the Rings Movies. So that was already one thing we had in common. It took a few more seconds to move from Lord of the Rings to a whole range of other things that we had in common. For example, we both have the habit of making passing references to obscure topics that for some strange reason most other people are not familiar with.

It was AS who introduced me to the work of Stephen Donaldson and his fantasy series, the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. The original books were written back in the late 70s and early 80s. They consisted of two trilogies, the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever and the Second Chronicles of Thomas the Unbeliever.

The story is about a man named Thomas Covenant who suffers from leprosy. Covenant found out that he had leprosy when he was taken to a hospital after a cut on his hand, which he had not even noticed turned gangrene. This accident lost him several fingers. When his wife found out about this she abandoned him, taking their young son, Roger with her. Covenant, in order to cope with his predicament, needs to believe two things about himself. One, that nothing that has happened to him is his fault. Two, that he does not have the power to cure himself.

Covenant finds himself mysteriously transported to this magical place known as the Land. Covenant, with the aid of his wedding ring which is the focus of wild magic in the world, must defend the Land against the evil Lord Foul the Despiser. Now wait you say, this is Narnia and Lord of the Rings and just about every other work of fantasy ever written. Covenant must learn to believe in himself, cast off his notions of what is real and not real, have faith and all will be well. Or at least that is what you would expect. This story, as the title indicates, is not about belief but about unbelief. Covenant does not believe that the Land is real and persists in actively disbelieving in it, earning him the title Unbeliever. It is crucial for Covenant to maintain his disbelief because to believe in the Land and in himself as its savior violates the very principle upon which he has built his life, the belief in his own helplessness. As the series goes on it becomes imperative for Covenant to continue to disbelieve in the Land even as he falls in love with it and finds himself risking everything to save it. It is because Covenant refuses to give in to simple belief that he has the power to stand against Foul.

The spirit of the series can best be summed up in the tagline to the third book, the Power that Preserves, which is: “Be True Unbeliever.” AS and I have adopted this as the official salute between ourselves.

It would be easy to categorize the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant as a work of atheistic fantasy similar to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant though is far more nuanced than a simple attack or confirmation of faith. It is about the dialectic between faith and disbelief. If the series is a polemic against anything it is against absolutism and the demand for simple, concrete answers.

It is for this reason that AS and I so strongly identify with this series. We are both deeply committed religious individuals. Our faith though is about questioning and challenging things. God is the person we love to yell at and Judaism the religion we love to criticize. Aside from Judaism, we love to talk about sci-fi, fantasy, and Christian theology. He does nineteenth-century evangelicals. I do medieval Catholicism. This is not an easy balancing act, but we keep each other strong in the faith.

(To be continued)

And Now a Taste of Something Whigish

A friend of mine, who works as an archivist and has an interest in the history of science, sent this to me before Yom Kippur. It is from the introduction to a book published in 1883 titled: Zoological sketches: a contribution to the outdoor study of natural history. The name of the author was Felix Leopold Oswald

"The tendencies of our realistic civilization make it evident that the study of natural science is destined to supersede the mystic scholasticism of the Middle Ages, and I believe that the standards of entertaining literature will undergo a corresponding change. The Spirit of Naturalism has awakened after its long slumber..."
"...Whatever is natural is wrong, was the keystonedogma of the mediaeval schoolmen...The worship of joy yielded to a worship of sorrow, the study of living nature to the study of dead languages and barrensophisms...The moralists that had suppressed the Olympic festivals compensated the public with autos-da-fe. The whole history of the Middle Ages is, indeed, the history of a long war against nature.
[Note that he doesn't blame religion or even Catholicism but the scholastics for everything wrong in Western thought! Safer in England and America to do that]
"But nature has at last prevailed. Delusions are clouds, and the storm of the Thirty Years' War has cleared our sky...Ghost-stories are going out of fashion...And, moreover, the progress of natural science tends to supersede fiction by making it superfluous-even for romantic purposes."

What I find interesting about this piece, besides for its total distortion of the Middle Ages, is its assumption that modern civilization would have no need for fantasy. As we know so well, stories about boy wizards do not sell over 300 million copies in our modern civilization. This does raise an interesting question though as to what is the relationship between the writing of fantasy fiction and belief in the supernatural? It would seem to be reasonable to classify fantasy as a genre for religious people and science fiction as a genre for secularists. Religious people, who put their hopes in a supernatural world, should find it very easy to suspend their disbelief when confronted with fantasy supernatural. Secularists, who place their hopes in science should be open to suspending their disbelief at the scientific fantasies of science fiction. Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia were written by Tolkien and Lewis, who were both deeply religious individuals. On the other hand science fiction was pioneered by the likes of H.G Wells, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, all quite hostile to organized religion. The only problem with this theory is that it does not pan out in reality. Orson Scott Card is one of the greatest science fiction writers today and he is a Mormon. Not only that but his science fiction has very explicit religious overtones. One of the greatest fantasy writers today, Philip Pullman, is militant atheist. His Dark Materials, besides for turning Paradise Lost on its head, is an atheist allegory written to open children up to the idea of overthrowing God and all those who claim to speak in his name. (Its a brilliant series of book, so please do not let any religious qualms you may have get in the way of reading it.) Furthermore, as we saw with Harry Potter, fantasy, even when it is not explicitly hostile to religion, can still raise its ire.
I happen to be a fan of both science fiction and fantasy. I believe that these forms of fiction have an important role to play in society in that they force us to think outside of the normal box of our reality. They tyranny of everyday expectations and of the society around us is one of the hardest things to fight against. It is only by being able to break outside of the box of what our own preconceptions of reality that we can truly become free thinkers.

A Final Goodbye to Harry Potter

I finished reading Deathly Hallows and am now coming to terms with the fact that this is the end. I feel personally indebted to J. K. Rowling for all the good times she has given me over the years. I got into the series when I was sixteen back in January of 2000. I waited along with millions of others for the fourth book, Goblet of Fire. I endured three years waiting for Order of the Phoenix and another two years for the Half-Blood Prince. Now, after waiting seven and a half years, the story has been told and it has run its course. Voldemort has been defeated and the survivors (the bodies do pile up in this book) go on to build new lives for themselves. As a final chapter, Rowling sticks in an epilogue taking place nineteen years down the road in which some of our favorite, and not so favorite, surviving Hogwarts students are now parents themselves taking their children to King's Cross station 9 3/4 to catch the train to Hogwarts.

I could not think of a more definitive way to end the series, barring going Dr. Strangelove on people. (Speaking of Dr. Strangelove, I would imagine he would particularly approve of Wormtail's fate.) The world has moved on and it is now time for a new generation of children to experience Hogwarts. The story of Harry, Ron, and Hermione is finished. The only purpose to be served by writing more Harry Potter adventures would be for the author to make more money. Not that I have a problem with authors making money. Rowling deserves every penny she has earned. The problem is that writing for the bottom line is seldom going to put out books that authors and fans of a series can be proud of. Look at Brian Jacques' Redwall series. I truly wish that it ended after six books. Instead, Jacques has simply told the same stories over and over again pouring out pale imitations of his first books. (I do recommend his early books though.) While there is nothing further to do with Harry, the wizarding world is a rich one and I for one would love to still explore it if the story is right. I am not sure though what kind of story would work. It would be tempting to do prequels about James Potter at Hogwarts. The problem though is that we already know the story of James Potter and his friends. Furthermore, such stories would lack a Voldemort to keep some purpose to the stories. Without Voldemort the stories would simply be repeats of the first two Potter books; kids at school getting into and dodging trouble.

In truth, I was always much more interested in the wizarding world itself than I was with Harry. In a sense, my biggest disappointment of the final four books was that Rowling did not do more with Sirius Black and Remus Lupin. The story remained firmly about Harry, Ron, and Hermione. I suspect though that Rowling may have done the right thing. Part of the charm of unexplored horizons is that they remain unexplored as unrequited desires.

I would never claim that Harry Potter is the greatest series of books ever written. If one wishes to put them under a critical lens one can find plenty to attack. If you doubt me read Prof. Harold Bloom. That being said, I have never had so much fun reading a series of books as I have had with Potter. I do not even know why this is the case, it defies logical analysis. I suspect people will be debating this issue for decades. What made Potter so special? There are plenty of fantasy writers out there who on the surface would seem to be as talented or even more so than Rowling. Take authors like Garth Nix (Abhorsen Trilogy and Keys to the Kingdom) and Phillip Pullman (His Dark Materials) for example. They both deal with similar types of material to what you find in Rowling and, on technical grounds, one can make a pretty good case that they are stronger writers than her. Neither of them has sold 300 million copies. They have written some great books, which I enjoyed immensely, but neither of them ever grabbed me the way that Potter's universe did.

Goodbye Harry and Thank You, J. K. Rowling.