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Riders of the Storm
I’m writing this in my study in the attic of my three story house atop a hill as Hurricane Sandy attempts to blow the whole affair down. It remains to be seen if she’ll be successful, but I expect the house to be victorious in the end. This house has been here since 1930, and it’s seen meaner storms than this (though not in the past twenty years).
Then again, maybe its time has come.
There is something viscerally terrifying about big storms like this. Unlike earthquakes and tornadoes and tsunamis – all of which can be just as destructive – we seem to establish relationships with big storms. They have moods, personalities, and seem to make decisions. We assign them names to make this process of anthropomorphosis easier to manage and watch their every move as they bear down on us, ready to potentially crush that which we have spent so long building. While other natural disasters demonstrate the fickle and unknowable hand of fate, there is something basically different about a storm; they suggest premeditation, aggression, malice.
There is no such emotion attached, of course – they’re just meteorological phenomena, and every bit as fickle and unknowable as any other disaster. Yet, given how long they last and how many they affect and how much time we have to consider them, they afford us puny humans an opportunity to have a conversation with the Great Unknowable or, as some folks call It/Him/Her/They: God. We shake our fists at the heavens and yell ‘God, why are you knocking trees down on my garage? Why you gotta be like that, dude?’ We ponder our sins, even if we do not believe in any such thing as divine punishment, because it is easier to look upon your faults if you can ascribe the universe the sentience sufficient to punish you for them.
When Lieutenant Dan, legless and angry, ascends the mast of Gump’s fishing boat and screams his heart out at the raging storm, we understand him. We, too, rail against the inevitable. We, too, rage against the mighty, inexorable power of nature. It is, as ever, all about us. How dare the skies seek to smash our dreams? How dare the seas rise up and drown our hopes and plans? We are humanity, supreme overlords of all that we survey, and it is an affront to our collective pride to have us thusly neutered and abused. In the storm’s fury it is easier to mirror our own, and all the better for the storm to have a name by which we may curse it. “Sandy”, we say, “I am here, and you aren’t moving me. I matter. I am greater than you.”
But, of course, it’s just a storm. When we yell, we are not yelling at anything that cares to hear us. When we yell, we are only yelling at the doubts we harbor within ourselves. When we vent at the storm, we are only venting the energy and the fury of the storm that rages always without our hearts. The storm that drives us onward. The storm that rules us.
The storm that will, by and by, tear us all down.
The God of the Fantastic
Isn’t this portrayal absurd? Why, then, do we always stick to it?
Recently I attended a dramatic staging of CS Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. The performance was engaging and it did a good job of refamiliarizing me with a work that I had only really skimmed while in college (and that primarily so I would have frame of reference to understand what some of my friends were talking about), but it also got me thinking about God, gods, and the fantastic portrayals of them.
In particular, I recall feeling a certain sense of discomfort with the way in which the Devil and, by extension or association, God is presented by Lewis in the Letters. It isn’t that I objected to the religious sentiments and moral quandaries being explored *via* the dramatic portrayal – that didn’t bother me in the least. Rather, the issue I had was the way in which God, the Infinite, the Creator of All Things was pigeonholed into the basic ‘angel on your shoulder’ thing and Evil, also, was likewise simplistic, cartoonish, and more ’emblematic’ than ‘realistic’ (insofar as any portrayal of the infinite can be judged on the basis of realism). I suppose it’s easier to think of God in terms of a big guy in the sky and set Him up as oppossed to some fork-tailed, well-spoken demon in the underworld. It’s easier because it’s where we started – symbols and simplistic explanations for things we don’t or can’t understand. I don’t see God that way, or at least not since I ever sat down and give this idea some good, serious thought. Seeing as I don’t really mean to make this into a theological post, I’ll leave it at that.
What this line of thinking led me to is the use of gods and demons in fantasy literature. Like in The Screwtape Letters, gods are typically very tangible, understandable, and even physical things in fantasy literature. We know, for instance, that the Blood God of the Warhammer World, Khorne, sits on a Throne of Skulls, has a big sword, and bellows for blood to be spilt in his name. In Tolkien, we know the dispositions and behaviors of the Valar, and the Maiar, like Mithrandir and Sauron, are likewise personal, physical (on some level), and understood in concrete terms – Sauron needs a ring, Mithrandir is called Gandalf and blows smoke rings, etc.. There are numerous other examples, of course, but it isn’t just physical manifestations of the divine that I find interesting. Also curious is the extent to which the divine is demonstrably real in fantasy. Priests wield actual magical power; prayers can have actual, metaphysical effect; miracles are made real. The Red God of Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series has real power, if called upon, just as the Old Gods seem to.
The divine is an unquestionable power in Fantasy, as often as not, and the more characters question it, the more we expect them to be proven wrong by some ‘unexplainable’ miracle that is, with a wink and a nudge from the author, obviously evidence of the divine power the character themself doubts. Think Han Solo – he doesn’t believe in the Force, but we know he’s wrong. You’d think that the Force wouldn’t be open to question, given what Jedi are known to do, but it is. It’s even doubted by people who live in the world of the prequels, where Jedi are much more common. Lucas does a good job trying to ruin his own world by giving the Force a ‘scientific’ explanation with the Microbes-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, but we ‘real’ fans of Star Wars (cue snort and a push-up of the glasses) know that it’s religion, not science, that drives the Jedi.
Why is this so? Why does the divine get such unquestionable back-up in fantasy lit? Where is the agnostic or atheist or, heck, even skeptical fantasy? Why can’t that moment of faith, where the paladin calls upon his God, be answered not with lightning from the sky or some magical burst of inexplicable fortune, but rather with a feeling of peace and certainty and even energy that is so often the fuel of the faithful and the target of the doubters? Is fantasy literature there to reassure us, on some level? Is it there to help us believe in things, whether they be gods or simply the purity of good and evil? I think this might be the case, and I’m honestly a little bothered by it. If I believe in God, I don’t need to have my belief bolstered by tales of a parallel world where a little boy really believed and had his belief confirmed from a light from on high and a magic sword.
I’d rather explore the doubt – I think that’s where the real drama lies, anyway. I want to pit believers who can’t furnish miracles pitted against non-believers who can’t furnish sufficient doubt to sway the believers. I’ve set Alandar up this way, at any rate – absentee Gods, conflicting mythology, magic more akin to science than anything else, but just mysterious enough to confuse. Maybe I’m wrong about this; maybe that isn’t what fantasy should be. Then again, it’s my fantasy, isn’t it? I get to explore what I like.
Auston Habershaw 