Grownups in Cloaks: A Celebration of Dorky Fandoms

For a discussion topic this week, Masha chose literary fandom. I took her cheery post as license to break from heady theoretical essays—or what passes for them on my blog, anyway—and have some fun.

After all, she introduced the topic with anecdotes of her own:

I can catch [an unkind attitude toward fans] in any review of Tolkien because I'm a fan. Not the dorky kind, the one who names her kids after characters or watches the awful movies Peter Jackson made from The Lord of the Rings over and over. I’m the kind that learned elvish and Old English in College, studies the Appendices and can tell you all about the First Age of Middle Earth. So, the dorkier kind, I guess.

To which I must say: How did I not know you studied Elvish, Masha?! Nai i Valar nauvar as elyë.* (All right, I admit I had to look that up. I didn't study that much Quenya.)

Dork on exhibit at a WWU Yule Ball

Anyone who has read this blog for more than a couple of days knows I take Harry Potter fandom very seriously. It's also true that I've got Jane Austen's books half memorized, have written two songs about Wheel of Time characters, have at various points made it through the first chapter of the Council of Elrond's Quenya workbook and most of The Silmarillion, and am only waiting for MissPhotographerB's next visit to buy a jar of glittery makeup and drive to Forks, but none of that quite compares to what happened when I met Harry. More on that later.

Masha notes that devoted fans are responding, in part at least, to the creation of a myth:

...there is something similar in the way all fans relate to their books. For me the real relationship [to Tolkien's work] was possible because there was a whole mythology, there was depth and meaning and intention, along with a story to follow and characters to love.... I like being able to fall into a world that is real enough to believe in.

Nearly all fantasy and science fiction fandoms, from Tolkien's to Trekkies, arise to some extent from just this sentiment. The Wizarding World is certainly part of Harry's appeal. Given an audience, good immersive worldbuilding usually results in at least a cult following.

Commenter BTanaka suggests, over at Masha's, that fans are made when a story generates personal investment during formative reading years:

...I suspect that most 'hardcore fans' of a particular story or character encountered their story early on in their reading/viewing career and found it to be the most engaging story in their experience to date. From then on, it sort of becomes the 'benchmark' by which they judge other stories, and they retain a nostalgic fondness for it even as they develop into a more mature consumer of fiction.

He's right about some of us, anyway, depending on how you define early on. I read Lewis, Grimm, Austen, Dostoevsky and Hemingway before I came across Rowling, but Harry Potter—and literary analysis thereof—transformed me from a passive reader to an active one. Literature, instead of being either museum or playground, became the Hogwarts castle: a massive school full of talking portraits, magic rooms hidden behind doors pretending to be walls, and staircases that go different places at different times—in other words, a living and mysterious world of infinite secrets and endless corridors to explore.

When something opens up your perspective that dramatically, you love it. So yes, I'm a fan of the dorkier kind: a wizard rocking**, trivia-spouting, occasionally costume-wearing, text-analyzing geek. I sit with the Blogengamot at The Hog's Head—my proudest fan moment was joining that circle. I've even threatened to name my kids after some of the characters (not seriously, though. My relatives would kill me. And a name like Hermione or Luna would be rather hard to live up to.)

Dork being unoriginal at Vancouver
HP club's Yule Ball

It's true, as Masha noted, that outsiders often look askance at fandom or condemn it outright. It looks like obsession to the uninitiate, especially if they've heard a news story or two about someone who took fandom from crazy fun to just plain crazy.

To most of us in the cloak-wearing crowds, however—whether the cloaks come with wands, Darth Vader masks, pointed plastic Elf ears, or glittery makeup—fandom simply celebrates something that changed us. It seems no more likely to be harmful than an annual hard-core session of fantasy football, or a willingness to drive a few hundred miles to see a favorite band, or a lifelong quest for the perfect home brew.

But now I've gotten to my own point: the stories that make us into fans change us, I think, or quicken something in us. Sometimes that's quite subtle, but Harry wasn't. To this day, I lean on that boy for some of my relationship to life and faith and books and what it means to be a decent person. It's not that he taught me something I didn't know; it's that he turned knowledge into emotion and planted it in my soul like the astronauts planted the flag on the moon. This ground has been gained.

Sometimes I show my gratitude by blasting wizard rock while I clean house. If the world doesn't understand that, well—I don't understand their love for MTV. So we're even.

Tell me a tale of magic
Carry me away into a land where anything can happen
Anything at all
Tell me a story
Lay adventure like a road before me
Capture me in glory and the wonder of it all

* "May the Valar be with you."
** wizard rock: music inspired by and/or including lyrics based on the Potter stories.

Arches, Bells, and Supernatural Story

A blogalectic with Masha and Mr. Pond.

Masha's latest installment, a celebration of comforting mythologies, contained this lovely statement:

The essence of myth is not something that can be studied, it can only be experienced. The stories and characters can be written down, studied, and known, but the essence is elusive, like a half-remembered dream.

Which tells me she doesn't entirely disagree with Mr. Pond, who wrote one of the more important posts that has yet come out of this conversation:

Mythology grabs us round the throat and tells us the way the world is. It demands from us sacrifices and rituals and prayers and traditions. If we accept mythology, we don’t have the luxury of choice. The world is in some way set. The stories are there. We can embellish them if we want. We can question them. We can, of course, walk away from them. But at that point we are no longer within the mythology. We have stepped outside of that story. This is laudable, or foolhardy, or despairing—it depends.

Mr. Pond quite fairly questions a certain sensibility in the way both Masha and I presented the word mythology; that is, the suggestion that we get to pick and choose which supernatural narrative we want, and how much of it. I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Pond here. My use of the words "sampler platter" was meant (if rather opaquely) as a subtle jibe, not as support for the Western treatment of mythology as a giant free-for-all buffet. It's one thing to live in peace with beliefs other than our own; it's quite another to treat all belief with so much attempted scientific objectivity that we forget, ultimately, that it holds the right over us, not we over it.

This week's word is mythos, defined by the Oxford as (1) “a myth or mythology” or (2) “(in literature) a traditional or recurrent narrative theme or plot structure” or (3) “a set of beliefs or assumptions about something.”

Not so different from the words we've already discussed, really. But it emphasizes the narrative aspect. I tend to think of mythos as the overarching (usually supernatural) story or stories that define and shape a culture.

In the post that Masha and Mr. Pond were responding to, I spoke of fantasy fiction as a way to deal with big questions outside the clash of polarized modern mythologies. But there's another reason for loving fantasy fiction, and that's because it's a place where mythos is still allowed to exist and flourish.

Under a magical mythos, the beauties and the horrors are both greater than we often meet here. It's not just your life in danger; it's your soul—the dementors may suck it from your body, or the magic ring may waste it away, or the Myrddraal and the Black Ajah may come in thirteens to turn you to the Shadow.

But there are the feasts and songs of Elrond's house and the flowers of Lorien, and the magic and wonder of Hogwarts, and shepherd-boys may marry royalty. And at the end, there is light and the hope of salvation in Going On.

And all of it echoes against a bell inside of us, something that was made for more than lattes and ten-hour workdays, parties and television and stress and sickness and grief.

If I disagree with any part of Mr. Pond's rejoinder from last week, it's the plain (and quite possibly hyperbolic) statement that mythology is dead. I suggest, rather, that it has gone into hiding:

It is one of the ironies of history that classical models and pagan myths were so intricately intermingled with Christian themes that when the elite rejected Christian civilization, they implicitly rejected Classical paganism as well....

For all their fine talk of freedom and of dictatorships of the proletarian, the elite wished nothing other than to bar talk of modesty, decency, fortitude, honor, and self-sacrifice from the public square. They wanted to replace all reasoning about the nature of virtue with rhetoric and oration on feelings about values. To do so, not only Nuns and Knights had to be banished from the public imaginations, but also Vestal Virgins and Homeric Hoplites.

Whence, then, scourged and half-stripped of the golden plumes of their wings, did the trembling muses flee, when they fled from the scornful lashes of modernity?

Why, to the only ghetto that held no love for modernity: to us, we happy few, the sons of fantasy whose eyes were fixed with dreamy nostalgia on the things long past (including pasts that never were) and to the sons of science fiction whose eyes were fixed with mingled hope and fear on things to come. —John C. Wright, Harry Potter and the Christian Magicians, Part II: Baptizing Dumbledore

But there is one realm outside speculative fiction where mythoi still exist, for those who long for such things. I trust Mr. Wright, Mr. Pond, and Masha will all gladly agree that some of us still willingly live under great narrative arches, where the bell that echoes at the words of Harry Potter rings clear and true at sacred words and mysteries.

P.S. If you haven't read John C. Wright's treatise on paganism in literature, 'Harry Potter and the Christian Magicians', I highly recommend it. It took me 45 minutes to read, and was worth every second. The links: Part I, Part II and Part III. Enjoy.

Everyday Mythologies

A blogalectic with Masha and Mr. Pond.

Saw the ghost of Elvis
On Union Avenue
Followed him up to the gates of Graceland
Then I watched him walk right through

—Marc Cohn, Walking in Memphis

In last week's discussion of mythopoesis, Masha had this to say:

When I think of our myth-makers, I think first of the Boss, whose lyrics make myth out of the mysteries of American life, out of factory work, long drives at night, out of trampled dreams and broken love.

And Mr. Pond had this:

We are not so much interested in events, but the people caught up in them; mythopoeia could arguably be the harmony of person and event, a specific combination which for one reason or another evokes powerful emotion, wonder, eucatastrophe.

This week's word is mythology, which, given the nature of classical education, means I think first of characters like Zeus and Athena and the Furies. Greek mythology. But I didn't come here today to discuss the quibbling, unscrupulous gods and goddesses of the ancient world. Bring out the Oxford!

¹ a collection of myths, especially one belonging to a particular religious or cultural tradition:
     Ganesa was the god of wisdom and success in Hindu mythology
     a book discussing Jewish and Christian mythologies
  a set of stories or beliefs about a particular person, institution, or situation, especially when exaggerated or fictitious:
     in popular mythology, truckers are kings of the road

² the study of myths.

I liked Masha's reference to Bruce Springsteen. His work builds and reinforces popular American mythology (definition 1), and it works so well because it goes in for Mr. Pond's point about the harmony of person and event and the evocation of eucatastrophe. (That word could have its own week for discussion.)

America, of course, is hardly a unified culture with a consistent, shared mythology. We have mythology by all the Oxford's definitions in wild variety—an enormous sampler platter both for use and study, not only of belief systems but of exaggerated tales by which we're all credulous about our neighbors and crazy relatives and Californians and Midwesterners and the Founding Fathers. We have New York and Washington and Hollywood. We have religions and the lack thereof in every imaginable form. We have playful nonsense about Chuck Norris, of whom the dark itself is reputedly afraid. We'll also buy into the most appalling rumors and lies about Barack Obama or Sarah Palin, depending on which side we're on.

Some of us study our myths with the detachment of a scientist, others with the passion of a lover, and still others with the apathy of young boys in their least favorite classes on the day before summer break.

And out of all this, we make art.

I firmly believe that mythology is a good and important thing, but like all good and important things it has dangers. And one of the reasons I love fantasy fiction is that it allows me to detach from the baggage of everyday mythologies, particularly the polarizing political and religious ones, and focus on the aspects I love and believe.

In our own little corners, in our own little chairs, fantasy writers dream of different realms. The exaggerations and fictions that humans believe about each other, that turn us against each other, that make it impossible to have some conversations without an eruption of conflict—these things take a night off existence, and we can take the tough questions one at a time.

We may not come up with magic solutions. Our art may not bring about peace in the Middle East, or heal the breach between Rome and the Reformation, or even convince Democrats and Republicans to stop calling each other evil morons. But it might take two people of impossibly disparate mythologies and stand them side by side for a moment, caught up in shared wonder and eucatastrophe.

And there's a lot to be said for that.

Mythmakers

A blogalectic with Masha and Mr. Pond.

The week off has ended. Masha's installment, if you recall, covered myth's "half-hidden truths and beautiful mistakes." And Mr. Pond's last-Friday post directed the blogalectic naturally toward discussion of the word mythopoesis:

"Instead, I’m building on Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson’s suggestion that the essence of mythopoesis, or myth-making, is ultimately relational—partly between the characters within the myth, partly and perhaps mostly the tripartite relationship between the tale, the teller, and the hearers."

Myth is not made alone. It always entails one heart, one soul, one spirit going out to another or others.

As a writer, especially of fantasy fiction, I feel that truth as I go about making myths for imaginary worlds and people. I give my characters ideals, narratives, things to believe in and trust, because I have such things. But I can't claim even that act of creation as a purely individual event. The myths that set the parameters for my stories are formed in communion between me and the myths I love and live with.

The new myths grow with my development of and love for the characters themselves—my soul-and-ink-and-paper children, whose lack of fleshly existence I sometimes have a hard time remembering. It's frightening, sometimes, how dear those people are to me.

Slightly cuckoo writer's asides aside, however—perhaps the above is why, when I'm passing days at my computer with no one but me and the cat in the house, I rarely feel alone.

Beautiful Disaster

A blogalectic with Masha and Mr. Pond.

As Masha pointed out Wednesday, the blogalectic is taking a bit of a new direction and considering myth. Before I get into that, however, let me remind you to read Masha's lovely piece on the relation of the fairy tale to beauty, and Mr. Pond's short and humorous fairy tale about fairy tales.

The word myth has multiple definitions, so our best hope of starting this discussion on the same page is to get some help from a dictionary. Quoth the Oxford:

¹ a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events.

The shades of definition two are more commonly thought of nowadays, leaving most people with the general idea that myth is the opposite of fact. After all, no one really believes the Greek and Roman myths anymore. But myth, by definition one, doesn't necessarily imply falsehood. Be that as it may, the three of us intend to deal with this concept of traditional stories, tales that—whether true or false in the details they relate—bring something to bear upon our reality.

For this week, our focus is primarily upon the word itself, and what it calls to mind. I think, among other things, of magic. And oddly, I find myself chanting an old Kelly Clarkson song:

He's magic and myth
As strong as what I believe...
Yeah, he's so beautiful
Such a beautiful disaster

The song doesn't have anything to do with myth, not really. It's just a pop tune about a girl in love with a charismatic guy who's too messed up to make a good match. I like the words beautiful disaster, though. Myth is full of that paradox. Examples from the Greeks: Zeus having a little fling—Zeus was always having little flings—by raining down on Danaë in a shower of gold. Artistically appealing, at least if you don't think too hard about it; morally and sensibly disastrous. The sirens, singing music so lovely that Odysseus had to have himself lashed to the mast of his ship to keep himself from sailing toward them, where they would have brought certain ruin.

Of course, the beauty and the disaster aren't always one and the same. Sometimes the loveliness is a reward reached only by avoiding the dangers on every side. But myth always seems to contain both peril and paradise.

How myth affects us, how it fills our lives and stories, and why it matters, are topics strictly reserved for future weeks. For now, it's enough to know that it informs our imagination, becoming the life and breath of our art.