The World's Last Mysteries (And Other Fallacies)

When I read the novel Ready Player One, I made a blog post about it: “Ernest Cline’s READY PLAYER ONE is 80s Cyberpunk Bliss.” While I downplay the novel’s weaknesses and may overstate my praise for its strengths, I think the post generally holds up. Now, though, we’ve had a film, and I’ve finally seen said film, and it invites at least a brief word of comparison. So, taking a break from preparing to move house and from the latter stages of drafting and editing my dissertation, I’ve decided to revisit my thoughts on the story and mull it all over. This will not, I note, be particularly a film review. I enjoyed the film, and I think it both improved on some of the book’s shakier elements while remaining true to its spirit, but it did lose some of what I loved most about the book, and it certainly had a few cringe-worthy moments. If I were writing a film review, I’d probably say something like that it “starts strong but loses something along the way.” Still, it was a fun movie. But I’m getting distracted! So, onward.

Warning: very belated spoilers for both book and film ahead!

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“The continuing appeal of Tolkien’s fantasy, completely unexpected and completely unpredictable though it was, cannot then be seen as a mere freak of popular taste, to be dismissed or ignored by those sufficiently well-educated to know better. It deserves an explanation and a defence, which this book tries to supply. In the process, I argue that his continuing appeal rests not on mere charm or strangeness (though both are there and can again to some extent be explained), but on a deeply serious response to what will be seen in the end as the major issues of his century: the origin and nature of evil (an eternal issue, but one in Tolkien’s lifetime terribly re-focused); human existence in Middle-earth, without the support of divine Revelation; cultural relativity; and the corruptions and continuities of language.”
– Tom A. Shippey

In Tom A. Shippey’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, he examines the appeal and distinction of Tolkien and his work, noting that “Tolkien wanted to be heard, and he was,” while asking, “But what was it that he had to say?” (Shippey loc. 51). Beginning with the well-known anecdote of Tolkien grading essays, coming across a blank page, and writing “In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit,” Shippey explores where hobbits may have come from, what Bilbo and the Shire may represent archetypally, and how they echo a historicized view of British culture. Explored also are Tolkien’s contributions to the public understanding of the “fairy-tale” and of his method, called mythopoeia, of combining such stories into a larger shared world. Much attention is given to the origins of names and how they originated in ancient legend and myth.

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“Like other forms of media, computer games can work to build up, maintain, or reject what players (among others) believe about a wide range of subjects, from the constitution of truth and goodness to understandings of social mores and global politics. Like poetry, fiction, journalism, and film, computer games can work work to maintain the status quo, celebrate liberation, tolerate enslavement, and conjure feelings of hope and despair, assent and dissident, clarity and confusion. They can play equally well on emotion and rationality, pervade radical discourse and common sense alike, and exist comfortably at all points along a semiotic continuum that spans the idiosyncratic to the universal. In short, a good deal of the work of computer games is that they are always making and managing meanings, sometimes by demonstration and sometimes through interpretation. Such work is always simultaneously, then, the work of power negotiation.”
–Ken S. McAllister

In Game Work: Language, Power, and Computer Game Culture, Ken S. McAllister examines video games as a cultural phenomenon. He compares his method to Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad, setting out to examine agents, functions, influences, manifestations, and transformative locales, a sort of “grammar of gameworks” (1). At the start of the book, McAllister examines the “computer game complex,” reviewing such issues as the cultural impact of violence in video games and games themselves as mass culture.

In discussing games as mass culture, he indicates the importance of power dynamics and the idea that these mass cultural influences are produced by a small number of people with a disproportionately large impact on the cultural landscape (11). Their pervasive appeal also makes them a form of mass media, able to effect real world action by affecting the perceptions and opinions of players (13).

In reviewing games as a “psychophysiological” force, McAllister negotiates conflicting scholarly and scientific conclusions about the “good and bad” impact of games on their players thusly: “the computer game complex is dialectical, a complex and ever-changing system constructed out of innumerable relationships among people, things, and symbols, all of which are in turn connected to other vast dialectical systems: the entertainment industry, the high-tech business, capitalism, articulations of democracy and freedom, and so on” (16).

He goes on to review computer games as economic (18) and instructional (24) forces, which includes the idea (reminiscent of Raph Koster) that computer games are always teaching something.

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“The second challenge for data interpretation is the lack of real-world analogues for some kinds of virtual events (Salomon 1994). For example, some virtual worlds permit ‘teleporting’ between locations within the environment (Fields and Kafai 2007). When users teleport, they disappear from one virtual location and appear in another without following a contiguous path. While much of the activity in virtual worlds can be described and interpreted through reference to real-world behaviors (e.g., walking, chatting, buying, etc.), there is no offline action with a situated meaning equivalent to teleporting. Other users present in the virtual environment are unable to determine whether the disappearance of someone’s avatar is due to teleportation, intentional termination of an online session, or an undesired loss of Internet connectivity without explicit communication through the avatar in question (Cherny 1999)” (Feldon 576)

In “Mixed Methods for Mixed Reality: Understanding Users’ Avatar Activities in Virtual Worlds,” David F. Feldon and Yasmin B. Kafai publish the findings of a study on online user activities using a social media site called Whyville, which is aimed at children. After reviewing their report, much of it is not immediately useful to me, as it pertains to the way they designed their study–certainly a valid thing to consider if I undertake a similar project in the future, but for now a bit outside my purview. Still, they did come up with a few interesting results.

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“I believe that the fantastic is an area of literature that is heavily dependent on the dialectic between author and reader for the construction of a sense of wonder, that it is a fiction of consensual construction of belief. This expectation is historical, subject to historical change, and is not unique to fantasy. Wayne C. Booth has written that ‘for experienced readers a sonnet begun calls for a sonnet concluded; an elegy begun in blank verse calls for an elegy completed in blank verse’ (Fiction 12). This dialectic is conditioned by the very real genre expectations circling around certain identifiable rhetorical techniques that I will be describing. Intrinsic to my argument is that a fantasy succeeds when the literary techniques employed are most appropriate to the reader expectations of that category of fantasy.”
–Farah Mendlesohn

In Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn sets up the project of “understanding of the construction of the genre; specifically, I wish to consider its language and rhetoric, in order to provide critical tools for further analysis” (loc. 100-102). She further sets forth a focus on “the way in which a text becomes fantasy or, alternatively, the way the fantastic enters the text and the reader’s relationship to this” (loc. 116-117) and identifies “four categories within the fantastic: the portal-quest, the immersive, the intrusive, and the liminal” (loc. 132-133). She puts this forth as a taxonomic understanding of the genre, though she does not attempt to claim universal applicability or to preclude other such taxonomies, preferring to “open up new questions” rather than to “offer a classification” (loc. 143-145). She emphasizes, “Generally speaking this is a book about structure, not about meaning” (loc 169).

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“I hope that teenagers find the real heroic fantasies, like Tolkien’s. I know such fantasies continue to be written. And I hope the publishers and packagers and promoters and sellers of fantasy honor them as such. While fantasy can indeed be mere escapism, wish-fulfillment, indulgence in empty heroics and brainless violence, it isn’t so by definition–and shouldn’t be treated as if it were.”
–Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula Le Guin opens Cheek by Jowl with a refutation of what she identifies as three myths–in her phrasing, “assumptions”–about the fantasy genre: that the characters are always white, that the setting is always medieval (or medieval-inspired), and that the central conflict is always a simplistic battle between good and evil (4). She closes this introductory section with the quote displayed above, going on to reflect that: “imaginative literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots of power, and to offer moral alternatives,” and she concludes, finally, that “Imagination is the instrument of ethics. There are many metaphors beside battle, many choices besides war, and most ways of doing right do not, in fact, involve killing anybody. Fantasy is good at thinking about these other ways. Could we assume, for a change, that it does so?” (7).

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“In college I was in love with literature. I mean wild about it. I typed poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins over and over again so I could memorize them. I read John Milton, Shelley, Keats aloud and then swooned on my narrow bed in the dormitory. In college in the late sixties, I read almost exclusively male writers, usually dead, from England and the rest of Europe. They were very far removed from my daily life, and though I loved them, none of them reflected my experience. I must have subconsciously surmised that writing was not within my ken. It never occurred to me to write, though I secretly wanted to marry a poet.”
–Natalie Goldberg

Informed by long experience as a writing teacher and a mindful Zen philosophy, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within is one of those classic treatises on writing: It’s essentially a collection of insights and advice on how to discover one’s own writing practice. I was particularly struck by the passage above, from her introduction, that resonates with my own thoughts on writing and literature: the concept of not seeing oneself as part of a community because one does not fit its apparent demographics. (In this case, writers are old, dead, white men.) As for myself, I owe my ability to articulate said thoughts to Chimamanda Adichie’s 2009 TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story.” My own experience is more concerned with interest and subject matter than identity–at the least, perhaps that is so, though I could certainly explore the latter as well–yet the same general theme emerges. Thus, I find myself drawn to the work.

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“As I begin writing I think of a stained-glass window submitted as a student project for a course in fantasy literature. […] I think of Tolkien’s fantasy world, fabricated out of shattered myths which we, as ‘postmoderns,’ ought no longer to believe in. Like the window, The Lord of the Rings is essentially a re-creation, a synthesis of rejected myths and images into a fragile new composition. Humpty-Dumpty miraculously reassembled, with all the cracks showing. In both the window and the trilogy: art built out of a heap of cultural trash, something new from something used, a sense of wholeness barely removed from absurdity. In both cases the shards held together with borrowed materials and makeshift ingenuity: a crude frame and Elmer’s glue, the worn structure of romance and ponderous philological apparatus. These two artifacts have come to seem to me suggestive emblems of the appeal of fantasy in our time.”
–Robert Crossley

In this 1975 College English article, Robert Crossley sets out to explore the power and value of the fantasy genre, and he begins by criticizing the “hedging” and “avoidance of definition and rational discourse” that he believes characterize many discussions of the genre (even referencing directly Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories,” for instance). Crossley addresses the presumed childishness of fantasy, citing examples such as Alice in Wonderland, and concludes that adult readers may be afraid of what this represents, leading them to silence or scorn on the subject. He writes:

“Analytical language impedes the adult’s response to fantasy because it threatens to reopen the gap between childhood and adulthood which his imagination has tried to close. The adult fears his language will give him away, that he will not be able to pose a child’s questions without betraying the accents and vocabulary of adult rational consciousness. To achieve the vision he has had to put on a new self; and silence becomes the instrument which allows him to keep his old and new selves in tenuous balance” (Crossley 284).

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“Tolkien’s great essay ‘On Fairy-stories’ is the best and deepest consideration I have encountered of the nature, origin, and value of myth and fantasy, as well as the most cogent commentary on his own work. Here, among the many nuggets of pure gold, is the clearest statement of his working theory of fantasy. ‘For creative fantasy,’ he writes, ‘is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it.'”
–Verlyn Flieger

In Verlyn Flieger’s Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (original edition 1983), she offers a discussion of the relevance of Tolkien’s work, particularly his less popular collection of lore, The Silmarillion. She also addresses Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories,” as referenced in the quote above, which I have long regarded as the best succinct discussion of the fantasy genre that I’ve yet encountered. (Gratifying, I note, to find support for this perception.) As the book unfolds, it attempts to reconcile Tolkien’s lived experiences with aspects of his writings–of interest to me is the way (and perhaps the reasons?) Tolkien used fantasy.

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“So maybe that’s where the power in writing comes from that I want to call magic: context.”
–Peter Elbow

Peter Elbow’s 1981 book, Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process, has long presented me a conundrum. On the one hand, everything Elbow says in the book feels right–I want to cheer for it, applaud the accommodation he makes for magic and abstracted power over mechanical hyper-scrutiny and slogs through agonizing attempts to tame one’s “authentic voice” as a writer into something more acceptable and conventional. And yet, I do not know that I am even comfortable with the concept of “authentic voice” anymore. I do not believe that I can readily accept Elbow’s magical thinking–but I do not know that I cannot, either.

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Shippey’s J. R. R. TOLKIEN: AUTHOR OF THE CENTURY

McAllister’s GAME WORK: LANGUAGE, POWER, AND COMPUTER GAME CULTURE

Feldon and Kafai’s “Mixed Methods for Mixed Reality: Understanding Users’ Avatar Activities in Virtual Worlds”

Farah Mendlesohn’s RHETORICS OF FANTASY

Le Guin’s CHEEK BY JOWL

Goldberg’s WRITING DOWN THE BONES: FREEING THE WRITER WITHIN

Robert Crossley’s “Education and Fantasy”

Verlyn Flieger’s SPLINTERED LIGHT: LOGOS AND LANGUAGE IN TOLKIEN’S WORLD

Peter Elbow’s WRITING WITH POWER: TECHNIQUES FOR MASTERING THE WRITING PROCESS

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