What Makes This Book So Great (39 page)

I travel hopefully, and there’s always something to look forward to.

MARCH 9, 2010

100.
Fantasy and the need to remake our origin stories

Left to themselves, people remake their origin stories every few generations to suit present circumstances. Once our stories were set down in a way that made it hard to revisit them for different purposes, some of us turned to telling different kinds of stories, some to faking new origin stories, and then a whole generation to outright fantasies of origin—Tolkien, Lovecraft, Peake, Eddison, Dunsany, Mirrlees, Anderson, etc. Since then, fantasy has been retelling and reinventing their stories for our own changing purposes, because that’s what people do, what people need to do. If they don’t do it, they tend to go a bit mad. Patrick Nielsen Hayden and I put this theory together over dinner at Boskone, and yes, there was alcohol involved.

Graham Robb’s
The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War
(2007) is a book about the innumerable tiny subcultures of pre-modern France, and how wildly diverse they were until surprisingly recently. He discusses the way many of these little cultures changed their origin stories every few generations, without really being aware of it:

History in the usual sense had very little to do with it. In the Tarn, “the Romans” were widely confused with “the English”, and in parts of the Auvergne, people talked about “le bon Csar”, not realizing that “good old Caesar” had tortured and massacred their Gallic ancestors. Other groups—the people of Sens, the marsh dwellers of Poitou and the royal house of Savoy—went further and traced their roots to Gallic tribes who had never surrendered to the Romans.

Even if this was oral tradition, the tradition was unlikely to be very old. Local tales rarely date back more than two or three generations. Town and village legends had a rough, home-made quality, quite different from the rich, erudite heritage that was later bestowed on provincial France. Most historical information supplied by modern tourist offices would be unrecognizable to natives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After a four-year expedition to Brittany, a folklorist returned to Paris in 1881 to report—no doubt to the disappointment of Romantic lovers of the misty Armorican peninsula—that not a single Breton peasant had ever heard of bards or Druids.

In 1760, James McPherson faked a long epic poem in pseudo-Celtic style.
Ossian
became very popular. It was much more appealing in the eighteenth century than actual Celtic poetry, because it was so much more to their taste. This seems to me related to the way it’s often easier for the work of someone in a majority group writing about a minority group to appeal to the majority, than it is for work directly coming out of the minority group. People enjoy just the right amount of strangeness, and authenticity is often too strange.
Ossian’s Ride
provided a bridge for eighteenth-century readers towards Celtic originals—though today it seems such a clear fake it’s hard to believe anyone could have believed it real. As well as McPherson in Scotland there was also Iolo Morgannwg, the Welsh antiquarian and forger, who has irrevocably muddled the entire field of scholarship. Through the nineteenth century (and even more recently) there were people in Wales busily faking not only documents but whole archaeological sites.

Were they doing this because they needed to rewrite their origin stories, but with their origin stories written down and already too fixed to alter?

Our myths, our legends, aren’t necessarily true, but they are truly necessary. They have to do with the way we interpret the world and our place in it. Origin stories, and perhaps fairy tales too, can be the story you need them to be, if you can change them.

A while ago I was involved in a discussion of Arthurian retellings, where I jokingly said that nobody updates them to the present. Nobody tells the story of General Douglas MacArthur as Arthur. Nobody says that when Cromwell left Ireland he’d killed everyone except for seven pregnant women hiding in a cave.

There are other kinds of origin stories. The stories we tell about how Paleolithic people lived are one. In the fifties, Paleolithic people lived in nuclear families with a hunting father bringing back food to a mother who cooked and looked after the children. In the sixties, they lived in larger more communal groups, with frequent festivals with art and music and sex. In the seventies, the women’s contribution via gathering started to be noticed. In the eighties, we heard about the alpha male with a harem driving out the other males. In the nineties, we heard how the other more geeky males came back while the alpha was off hunting and impregnated the females. In the last decade we started to hear what an advantage it was to the cavepeople to have gay uncles. It’s not that any of these stories are true or untrue, it’s the way we tell them. I think the same can be said for the stories of the origin of the universe. It’s not about the evidence, it’s about interpreting the evidence to make a useful story.

With the invention of the printing press and widespread literacy, it becomes harder to revise origin stories, or any stories. Once canonical versions exist, retellings are a different thing. Several things happened—one was the advent of something quite new, mimetic fiction. This caught on in a huge way in the nineteenth century, people were for the first time reading stories about relatively realistic characters set in what was supposed to be the real world, with no fantastic elements at all. There were the fakers. Later came the new mythologies.

Tolkien said:

I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story—the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths—which I could dedicate quite simply to: to England; to my country. (Letter to Milton Waldman 1951,
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien,
ed. Carpenter, 1981, p. 144)

It has always seemed strange that after centuries where people wrote very little original fantasy there should suddenly be this explosion of it at about the same time. First, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, came new children’s fantasy—no longer retellings and revisions of old fairy tales, which now had canonical versions, but new stories.
Alice in Wonderland
.
The Jungle Book
.
Five Children and It
.
Peter Pan
. There hadn’t been a separate children’s literature, and what there had been was mostly morality tales. Then, a generation later, came the fantasists writing for adults—Lovecraft and Tolkien and Peake don’t have much in common, but they lived at the same time and they reacted to their time with a new mythology. Dunsany’s a little earlier, but a lot of what he wrote, and certainly where he started, with Pergana, also looks like a new mythology. Eddison too, and Mirlees—none of these people were influenced by each other (well, Tolkien had read Dunsany) and they were writing very different things, yet they all feel as if they were trying to achieve the same goal, trying to tell an origin story.

Fantasy, post-Tolkien, has been largely involved with retelling Tolkien, or revolting against Tolkien. That isn’t all it’s been doing, but that’s one of the things that’s been central. I think one of the things that caused the huge popularity of first Tolkien and then genre fantasy is that it provided a new origin story that people needed and liked.

Horror hasn’t got stuck with this kind of problem. Horror has kept revising the stories into the present and relevant—there’s no canon that stops it being reinvented to be useful. Those sparkly vampires are a sign of health, not sickness.

MARCH 26, 2010

101.
The mind, the heart, sex, class, feminism, true love, intrigue, not your everyday ho-hum detective story: Dorothy Sayers’s
Gaudy Night

It’s always the books I like the most that I feel I haven’t done justice to when I write about them.

Gaudy Night
was published in 1936. It’s still in print, and more than that, it’s still relevant. It’s not science fiction or fantasy by any stretch, its genre is cosy detective story. It’s about a series of incidents in a women’s college in Oxford in which someone is trying to provoke a scandal. But what it’s really about is the difficult balance between love and work and whether it is possible for a woman to lead a life of the mind wholeheartedly, and whether it’s possible for her to do this and have love and a family. Sayers examines this seriously and with examples. You might think that the issues might be dated. Some of the attitudes are, but on the whole the fulcrum point of “having it all,” marrying as an equal and not as a helpmeet, is still an interesting question.

Gaudy Night
is one of Sayers’s series of novels about Lord Peter Wimsey, and it’s a courageous book because all the previous books have been clever mystery puzzles rather like crossword puzzles, but this is a real novel about psychologically real people. The series starts out as shallow fun, gets better and deeper and develops continuing characters and events, and then, with
Gaudy Night,
becomes as good as books get. If you like classic cosy detective stories with timetables and letters of confession, I recommend starting at the beginning and coming at
Gaudy Night
with the full backstory. If you don’t especially care for them, I recommend reading
Gaudy Night
alone—everything that’s relevant is there, and you might be surprised how good it is.

I was thoroughly spoiled for
Gaudy Night
by Connie Willis’s
To Say Nothing of the Dog
. I expect Willis thought that a book more than fifty years old would have been read by everyone who wanted to read it, but in fact new people come along all the time. Willis didn’t spoil the mystery plot but the emotional plot—and I do think I might have appreciated it more without that. If you haven’t read it, do consider that re-reading is forever but you can only read something for the first time once, and that after this paragraph I am going to have no hesitation about spoiling everything. (You could go and read it and come back. I’ll still be here next week.)

George Orwell wrote a review of
Gaudy Night
in which he comprehensively did not get it, so comprehensively that it astonishes me. Orwell was a perceptive person, but he wrote about
Gaudy Night
as if it is just another episode in the detecting career of Lord Peter. I don’t know if this was a blind spot of his, or a common reaction among men in 1936, or if possibly he didn’t have time to read it and “reviewed” it on a quick skim. I don’t know which of these is least discreditable. In any case, it is salutary to consider that one intelligent male reader, and one whole magazine, saw it as nothing more than a clever detective potboiler with an exotic setting, and one in which the detective finally gets the girl. The thing that makes me think that Orwell might not have actually read
Gaudy Night,
while having perhaps read some of the earlier ones, is that he swipes in passing at the way Sayers uses Lord Peter’s title but doesn’t enter into the actual class issues of the book at all.

There’s no murder in
Gaudy Night
. The situation is that a women’s college in Oxford, the fictional Shrewsbury College, is being plagued by poison pen letters and mean practical jokes, and Harriet Vane is asked to help capture the culprit, who could be anyone among the senior members or servants of the college. The atmosphere is all of academic women distrusting each other. The actual culprit turns out to be one of the servants, Annie, who has a grudge against one of the dons specifically and all of them generally for, in her eyes, taking jobs that should belong to men. Her husband was an academic who married beneath him, and after his suicide Annie has been reduced to scrubbing floors for a living. The first time I read this I had barely noticed the existence of Annie and was astonished at the revelation—as a servant she seems part of the wallpaper. So in one way Sayers was noticing class and making someone invisible visible, and in another she was reinforcing class prejudices by making the culprit an outsider and uneducated. You’d think Orwell would have found something to say about that, even if he was blind to the wider feminist implications. Annie is motivated by a desire to humiliate Miss de Vine, who revealed Annie’s husband’s plagiarism and made it impossible for him to continue as an academic which led to his suicide and Annie’s subsequent poverty. From that she wants to humiliate all female academics. Annie sees her life ruined by Miss de Vine’s adherence to academic truth—that in fact it was ruined by her husband’s lack of such adherence is beyond her. She’s part of a set of women we see mirroring each other. This is a book about women—culprit, victims and the primary detective are women. Annie’s closest mirror is Mrs. Goodwin, also a widow with a child away at school, who has trained as a secretary. We also see two old students, one whose marriage has ruined her mind, and one who has made a team with her husband and works with him. Then there’s the young don Miss Chilperic, who is engaged to be married, and will therefore leave the college. It was actually illegal for married women to teach in Britain before WWII. Sayers doesn’t say this because she assumes her readers will be utterly aware of it and can’t imagine things being any different, but if ever there was anything that should be footnoted for a modern audience, this is it.

The other academics might as well be nuns, they are devoted not just to scholarship but to virginity as well. This is said explicitly—and really in 1936 those were the choices. Marriage meant giving up the work, and not marrying, for women, meant maintaining virginity. This leads me to Harriet. Harriet lived with a man in Bloomsbury without marrying him, somebody else murdered him, and she was tried for the murder and acquitted because of Lord Peter. (
Strong Poison
.) Because of the notoriety of the trial, Harriet’s sexual status is known to everyone—and some people consider her utterly immoral because she had sex without marriage. This attitude—that people would care—is completely dated, gone like the dodo, and I have to work at understanding it. Harriet, in her thirties and unmarried, would be presumed to be a virgin were it not that her cohabitation had been gossip in the newspapers after her lover’s death. Now the fact that she has had sexual experience is public knowledge, and affects people’s behaviour towards her.