folklore and fantastic literature

Folklore and Fantastic LiteratureAuthor(s): C. W. Sullivan, IIISource: Western Folklore, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 279-296Published by: Western States Folklore SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1500409Accessed: 25/10/2009 19:05

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Folklore and Fantastic Literature C. W. SULLIVAN III

I

At first blush, joining a term like "folklore," which has its roots deep in traditions traceable back through generations, with terms like "fantasy" and "science fiction," which seem to have less to do with the past than with alternate realities or projected futures, may seem like ajuxtaposition of dubious value. Folk materials, it seems, are something we recognize quickly in nineteenth-century writers like Cooper, Melville, or

Hawthorne, or something we use to decode writers from longer ago and farther away-Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the Gawain poet, for example. But this latter use of folklore, to help decode literatures of the remote

past and therefore substantially removed from the world in which we now

live, is a key to that juxtaposition: the writer of fantastic literature, the creator of impossible worlds, has need of and uses folklore to make those

imagined words accessible to the reader in much the same way, if obverse, as the modern critic might use a knowledge of folk materials to gain access to the meaning(s) behind Shakespeare's depictions of "heroic deaths" in Macbeth, Chaucer's use of the color red in reference to the Wife of Bath's stockings, or the Gawain poet's attention to hunting lore. In short, fantasy and science fiction authors use traditional materials, from individual motifs to entire folk narratives, to allow their readers to

recognize, in elemental and perhaps subconscious ways, the reality and cultural depth of the impossible worlds these authors have created.

The word "impossible" appears in many of the leading critical definitions of fantastic literature. C.S. Lewis, in Experiment in Criticism (1965), defines fantasy as "any narrative that deals with impossibles or preter- naturals" (50). In Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (1975), Colin Manlove

argues that a "substantial and irreducible element of supernatural or

impossible worlds, beings, or objects" is essential to fantastic literature; and he defines "supernatural or impossible" as "of another order of real-

ity from that in which we exist and form our notions of possibility" (3). In The Fantastic in Literature (1976), Eric Rabkin argues that the "polar opposite" of reality is fantasy (15). And in "Problems of Fantasy" (1978),

Western Folklore 60:4 (Fall 2001):279-296. Copyright ? 2002, California Folklore Society

280 C. W. SULLIVAN III

S.C. Fredericks calls fantasy "the literature of the impossible" (37). These critical exercises, which took place in the 1960s and 1970s, as fantastic literature was experiencing an enormous increase in popularity, led Gary Wolfe, in 'The Encounter with Fantasy" (1982), to assert that the "criterion of the impossible . . . may be the first principle generally agreed upon for the study of fantasy" (1-2).

Although the foregoing definitions have appeared to set fantastic literature in opposition to realistic literature, critic Kathryn Hume suggests that we should see the real and the impossible as separate ends of a continuum that includes all fiction. She argues that

literature is the product of two impulses. These are mimesis, felt as the desire to imitate, to describe events, people, and objects with such verisimilitude that others can share your experience; and fantasy, the desire to change givens and alter reality-out of boredom, play, vision, longing for something lacking, or need for metaphoric images that will bypass the audience's verbal defenses (20).

And fantasy, Hume continues, "is any departurefrom consensus reality" (21, italics in the original). All literature is, then, part mimetic and part fantastic, with realistic fiction toward one end of the spectrum and fantastic fiction toward the other.

The creation of a fantastic world is not just a matter of introducing impossible people or things into an otherwise realistic world, blending the mimetic and the fantastic-although that is basically the strategy of much horror fiction. Science fiction and fantasy require the author to create a world that makes sense in and of itself. J.R.R. Tolkien may have been the first to articulate the principle of the Secondary World.

What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful "sub-creator." He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is "true": it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed (37).

Numerous critics since have echoed Tolkien's argument. Jane Yolen, in Touch Magic, says that the "amazing thing about fantasy is its absolute

consistency" (77); in "Flat-Heeled Muse" (1965), Lloyd Alexander remarks that a fantasy writer's muse asks bothersome questions about

consistency (141-146); in The Green and Burning Tree (1962), Eleanor Cameron argues that the author must "create an inner logic for his story and ... draw boundary lines outside of which his fantasy may not wan- der" (17); and in The Fantasy Tradition in America from Irving to LeGuin

Folklore and Fantastic Literature

(1980), Brian Attebery asserts that fantasy "needs consistency" (2). In

light of these remarks, it might be argued, as I have in "Fantasy" (Sullivan 1992:99) and Welsh Celtic Myth in Modern Fantasy (Sullivan 1989:94-96), that the criterion of the logically-created or cohesive

Secondary World is, to follow Gary Wolfe's phraseology, the second principle agreed upon for the study of fantasy.

Some part of the creative process through which the mimetic and the fantastic elements are combined-or reconciled-into a logically-cohesive Secondary World must also include a strategy or strategies by which the reader will be able to connect with, be able to understand, and be able to decode any meaning inherent in the story set in that Secondary World and also decode that Secondary World itself. There must be

enough of the familiar, the mimetic, within the story so that the reader can understand the nature of the unfamiliar, the fantastic. Some of the familiar elements may be a part or parts of the kind of story being told. Arthurian fantasy and High Fantasy in general will take place in a familiar western European, medieval landscape and will be acted out by people in familiar roles: knights, ladies, villains, wizards, elves, dragons, trolls, and the like. Stories of space exploration and warfare will have their own stock interplanetary journeys and settings and will be acted out by characters in familiar roles: the ship's captain, the friendly alien, the unfriendly alien, and the like.1

A more complex strategy by which the author of fantastic literature can connect the reader with the Secondary World and its characters is

through folklore. As is obvious from the preceding paragraph, an author of fantasy, and sometimes science fiction as well, can take whole tales from the general store of legendry, and not only western European legendry, and retell those stories making them more fantastic in the

process, as Marion Zimmer Bradley does with the Arthurian materials in The Mists of Avalon. But Bradley and the other Arthurians are obvious

examples, and will be dealt with in their turn. There are also less obvious uses of folklore that connect the reader with the text-both more

complex uses, which operate on the level of cultural worldview, and sim-

pler uses, which employ specific motifs and other individual elements of folklore to make the Secondary World a more homey place for the reader. This Secondary World, whether set in an imagined future or re-

imagined past, needs to have within it materials such that the world "makes sense" to the reader; in this regard, recognizable folklore (and materials modeled on that folklore) are central to the creation of that world. It is to these uses of folklore that I wish to turn now.

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II

In "Real-izing the Unreal: Folklore in Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy" (Sullivan 1992:141-155), I examined J.R.R. Tolkien's fan-

tasy novel, The Hobbit, and Robert A. Heinlein's twelve 'juvenile" science fiction novels in terms of each author's use of folk materials. Both Tolkien and Heinlein, for example, co-opt traditional proverbs, using the familiar sayings in fantastic situations. "Out of the frying pan and into the fire," 'Third time pays for all," and "Where there's life there's

hope" appear in The Hobbit; and various proverbs, proverbial compar- isons and traditional metaphors such as "Don't let him pull your leg," "I can straighten out and fly right," "Pretty as a picture," "Deader than a

doornail," "I'll fix his clock," "Fish or cut bait," and "Half a loaf is better than none" appear in Heinlein's works. These are all traditional sayings that even young adult readers would recognize and that would make the characters saying them more familiar to those readers.2

But Tolkien and Heinlein use these traditional expressions for another purpose as well. Both create "new" sayings, that is, sayings which are a part of the invented world but not a part of the reader's world. Tolkien's Bilbo remembers a saying of his father's, "Every worm has his weak spot," and coins one himself, "Never laugh at a live dragon." Various Heinlein characters remark, "Don't burn out your jets before

you take off" and "Don't blow your tubes," obviously variations on the same formula. Heinlein has an acquatic Venerian creature say, 'Tell thy impatient daughter to chase her fish and I will chase mine," which the reader should recognize as a traditional way of saying "mind your own business"-on Venus. Both authors have used traditional, recognizable sayings with which the reader would be familiar to set up for later sayings indigenous to the Secondary World on which they are heard. As Neil Grobman suggests in "A Schema for the Study of the Sources and

Literary Simulations of Folkloric Phenomena" (1979), these are two of the main functions of folklore in literature: (1) "to give verisimilitude and local color," and (2) to serve as "models for production of folklore- like materials" (28-30).3

In addition to traditional materials they might well have grown up with, both authors drew on their educations for materials from mythology, legend, and history to give their novels a "familiar" feel. In addition to following the general structure of the Marchen, The Hobbit, as I have

argued elsewhere, may also be patterned after the Icelandic family sagas that Tolkien knew well; moreover, the three-leveled world of the saga- mythic, heroic, and familiar-is very much the world of The Hobbit and


even more so the world of The Lord of the Rings (see Sullivan, 'Tolkien the

Bard," 2000).4 In addition, much of the paraphernalia of The Hobbit can be traced to Tolkien's study of Scandinavian myths, legends, family sagas, and folklore in general: the names of the dwarves come from The Prose Edda, the dragon, Smaug, is directly descended from the dragon in

Beowulf, and the magic arrow, ancestral swords, wizards, elves, trolls,

giants, shape-changers, and others come from the more general store- house of western European lore. Even Tolkien's opening of the story proper, "One morning long ago in the quiet of the world," (3) is but a

slightly-changed variant of "Once upon a time." As Tolkien looked to the Scandinavian materials, Heinlein looked to

American folklore and history. The title of Heinlein's Farmer in the Sky (1975), which described the settlement and terraforming of one of

Jupiter's moons, is certainly meant to remind the reader of the traditional play rhyme, 'The Farmer in the Dell," and one chapter of that book is entitled 'Johnny Appleseed." For Heinlein, the exploration of

space in the juvenile series was much like the settlement of the American west. In Tunnel in the Sky (1955), the men who lead settlers to new planets look like Buffalo Bill; in Space Cadet (1948), one of the characters is

constantly recounting the exploits of his "Uncle Bodie," a character who could have stepped right out of a traditional tall-tale; and in Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), the mother of one of the young main characters defends his wish to go into space on a risky venture by comparing it to that of the

boy's own great-great-grandfather, who crossed the plains in a covered

wagon at age nineteen with his seventeen-year-old bride, much against the wishes of either family. The traditional and historical references Tolkien and Heinlein make would not all be lost on their readers and would give those readers another mode within which to apprehend those

novels; for example, even though the new wagon trains in Tunnel in the

Sky (1955) are going from this world to another through a time and space "gate," Heinlein's description of them evokes the nineteenth-century American migration west and helps the reader understand that, technol-

ogy aside for the moment, this activity is one in which humans have par- ticipated-and may well continue to participate-for millennia.5

The reliance of fantastic literature on the elements of folktale and legend is also easily verified by quick look at the Motif Index for items which are common to both traditional tales and fantastic literature. Under Animals, for example, dragons have their own number: B11. Under that

heading are included "transformed princess as dragon" (Bl1.1.3.0.1), "many-headed dragon" (B11.2.3), and various sub-divisions according to

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the actual number of heads, "fire-breathing dragon" (B11.2.11), "dragon guards treasure" (Bl 1.6.2), and "fight with dragon," the largest single cat-

egory (B1.11). Surprisingly, there are very few entries for unicorns. Under Magic Weapons are, among others, "magic sword" (D1081), "knife" (D1083), "spear" (D1084), "sling" (D1087), "bow" (D1091), "arrow," [the largest single category] (D1092), "club" (D1094), "firearms" (D1096), with various subdivisions, "bullet" (D1096.3), and "armor" (D1101). And under Unpromising Hero are included "orphan hero" (L 11.4), "swineherd as hero" (L 13.1.1), and "stable-boy as hero"

(L 13.1.2). This is only a minuscule sampling of the motifs that are common to both fantastic literature and traditional stories. These motifs-

along with such things as proverbs and other sayings, riddles, rhymes, and the like-become the initial building blocks upon which the reality of the Secondary World is constructed and through which the reader is connected to that Secondary World.

III

Science fiction and fantasy authors depend on more than just motifs and other individual elements from tradition to create a cohesive

Secondary World and connect the reader to it; they also may depend on such larger constructs as entire stories to structure their works of fantastic fiction. In some cases, the myths, legends, folktales, or ballads themselves are sufficiently fantastic that nothing needs be added and a

retelling, usually expanded, is the result. In other cases, the traditional tale provides something like the skeletal structure of the plot, and the author fleshes that structure out to present a theme that may or may not have been implicit in the original. At the farthest remove are authors like Tolkien who use the basic Marchen structure but invent their own characters and events within that structure. Obviously, the writers of fan-

tasy are more likely to use entire traditional tales than are science fiction writers, but even the latter group will build a futuristic and technologi- cal tale on a traditional foundation-as George Lucas has done with at least the first film of the Star Wars saga.6

Much fantastic fiction follows the familiar Marchen structure out- lined by Linda Degh (1972), among many others from Vladimir Propp to Albert Lord, in which the ordinary and often orphaned main character is pulled from his mundane world into an adventure which takes him

through the "magic forest" (in science fiction, of course, the magic forest is outer space) with staunch companions to defeat a great evil and from which he returns older, wiser, and often wealthier and well wed


(Degh 63). But the structure itself is only the beginning; science fiction and fantasy writers use that structure for a rhetorical purpose. As Roger Abrahams comments in "Folklore and Literature as Performance"

(1972), "The idea that lies behind performance is a remarkably simple one: to set up rhythms and expectancies which will permit-indeed, insist upon-a synchronized audience reaction" (78). Fantasy or science fiction readers, having been exposed to these structures or patterns from their childhood readings and even Disney movies, will, consciously or unconsciously, respond to the familiar pattern in a predictable way- Abrahams's "synchronized audience reaction"-when they find it in fantastic literature.

The most popular traditional quarry for modern fantasy writers has been the one containing the Arthurian materials. Although T. H. White was not the first, his rendering of the Arthurian materials in The Once and Future King (1939) did much to shape the twentieth-century sub-

genre of Arthurian fantasy as a whole. White, like Tennyson before him, looked to Malory as his source but then adapted the material to his own

vision, and where Tennyson made Camelot a distinctly Victorian place, White used it as a platform from which to present his anti-war ideas. More important, however, was the humor with which he invested the sto-

ries, a humor which changed Arthur and his court from idealized and remote beings to recognizable and sympathetic humans, and White added these more mundane elements without sacrificing the greater dimensions of the story which have been there since before even

Malory. The authors who have followed White, from Lerner and Lowe, in their highly sentimental Camelot (1960) to Rosemary Sutcliff, in her historical Sword at Sunset (1963) have, like White, given us human characters caught up in great events.

At a significant remove from the Arthurians are the fantasy authors who use traditional British ballads to structure their novels. Ellen Kushner's Thomas the Rhymer (1990) retells the story found in Child #37, and Pamela Dean's Tam Lin (1991) and Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock (1985) retell Child #39. But they do more than retell. Kushner andJones include materials from other Child ballads in their works, and Dean andJones set their works in the twentieth century. Kushner's story is told from four different perspectives, but essentially she chooses to focus on Thomas's return from Elfland and his struggle to use the power given him. Dean and Jones bring most of the fairy characters from the

past to the present because time passes very differently for the fairy folk than for mortals; however, the female characters taking the 'Janet" role

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are from the twentieth century and appear to be normal, mortal women of sufficient strength to rescue the men they love from the clutches of the fairy queen.

Yet other authors have drawn on ancient myth for the patterns of their stories. Alan Garner's The Owl Service (1967) and Evangeline Walton's Mabinogi tetralogy, for example, have drawn on the medieval Welsh prose pieces known as the Four Branches of the Mabinogi for the

plots and characters in their books. In both cases, the authors take a 20-

page original and expand it into a several hundred page novel. Walton sets her novels in a mythical past, but Garner's is contemporary and takes place in a remote valley near Aberystwyth where the same pattern of events has been cycling down through the generations and the centuries.7 Some authors-most notably Kenneth Morris, in The Fates of the Princes of Dyfed (1914) and Book of the Three Dragons (1930), Lloyd Alexander, in the five-book series, the Chronicles of Prydain, and Nancy Bond, in A String in the Harp (1997)-have also used materials from Welsh myth and folklore in their novels; and Louise Lawrence's Earth Witch (1981) depicts an ancient fertility ritual involving human sacrifice

taking place in contemporary Wales. Other authors have drawn on other mythologies: Roger Zelazny based his Lord of Light (1967) and Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969) on Indian mythology and Egyptian mythology, respectively; Stephan Grundy's Rhinegold (1994) and Diana Paxson's Nibelungenlied trilogy (1993, 1995, 1996) are based on Scandinavian/Teutonic mythology, and so on.8

Following the lead of the authors who looked to ancient pre-Christian traditions, some authors have drawn on Christian materials, recorded in the New Testament as well as in the more likely Old Testament, as a source for fantasy literature. Not surprisingly, many of those stories have focused on either the story of Adam and Eve or the story of Christ. To some extent, C.S. Lewis's Narnia series and Space trilogy, Madeleine

L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time series, and George MacDonald's Phantastes (1858) and Lillith (1895) retell Old or New Testament stories or present basic Old Testament conflicts. Many of the Adam and Eve stories, like Charles Harness's '"The New Reality" (1950), pose a more scientific ori-

gin for the first couple than the one provided in Genesis while still fol-

lowing the Genesis plot outline. Harlan Ellison's "The Deathbird" (1975) offers an insane Jehovah and a sane Lucifer, reversing the roles found in Genesis. The story is dedicated to Mark Twain. Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man (1966) tells of a time traveler who goes back to see the real Christ, finds a congenital idiot namedJesus, and takes his


place-doing the miracles and dying on the cross. In James Morrow's recent TowingJehovah (1994), a discredited ship's captain is offered the

job of towing the enormous corpse of Jehovah from where it has fallen into the south Atlantic to the Arctic, where it can be preserved. Ellison, Moorcock, and Morrow are using the Christian materials for satiric pur- poses, and the satire is as often sociological as religious.

The best fantasy authors who do not draw on a specific body of lore- such as the Arthurian corpus, on a particular ballad or set of ballads, on certain pre-Christian myths, or on the Christian stories themselves-may synthesize all of those sources and weave a masterpiece of fantasy as did

J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien structures both works like folktales and then overlays and fleshes them out with char-

acters, scenes, and other items borrowed from or modeled after the traditional materials he had studied all his life, western European prose and

poetry composed in the middle ages or earlier. Tolkien's creation is virtu-

ally seamless (although T. A. Shippey's The Road to Middle Earth (1983) provides an excellent account of the sources on which Tolkien drew). It is because of both the traditional materials and his synthesis of them that Tolkien's novels are the standard by which all of the others are judged.

These and other fantasy authors do not draw on traditional folk materials out of a lack of imagination or creativity. The fantasy author, in many ways, works like a traditional tale teller; his or her transmission medium, however, is the printed page and not the oral recitation, and so the traditional narrative nature of the fantasy story may be overlooked, as I have

recently argued ('J. R. R. Tolkien and the Telling of a Traditional Narrative" 1996). The fantasy author, whether using the general sense of the traditional tale, as Tolkien does, or patterning a novel after the plot of a specific ballad, as Kushner does, wants above all to tell a good story, or more specifically in some cases, tell a good 'Tam Lin" or 'Thomas the

Rhymer" or Arthurian story. The reader's understanding of story, and

especially traditional story, allows him or her access to this new telling, access that might not be available with the elite or mainstream novel

(Sullivan, "Learning the Structure of Traditional Narrative" 1992).

IV

The most complex level on which fantastic literature operates and

depends upon traditional materials for that operation is the level of cultural worldview. Generally, fantasy and science fiction have supported western cultural values and worldview. Fantasy has upheld general notions of good and evil and, again drawing on traditional tales, has

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shown the good being rewarded and the evil punished. Science fiction, while not always so clear about good and evil as it is constructed by Western culture, has generally supported the western attitudes toward

industrialization, capitalism, and expansion. Writers of science fiction's 1940s and 1950s "Golden Age," men (generally) such as Robert A.

Heinlein, believed in the direction inherent in western progress since the Industrial Revolution and were able to portray people building better machines (including those that would take them to the stars), having a better life (both healthier and materially richer), and spreading that worldview to the other planets (no matter what stood in the way). The Star Trek television series, in all of its incarnations and spin-offs, is based on the rightness and inevitability ofjust those three premises. While this vision has dominated, it has not been uniform; and there have been an

increasing number of voices in the field asking the readers to examine their cultural values.

Literary critic Kathryn Hume's concept of "consensus reality" (above, page 1) is very similar to a folklorist's or anthropologist's concept of cultural worldview. In his definition of cultural worldview, Barre Toelken

argues that "objective reality ... actually varies widely according to the viewer's means of perceiving it" (225). Worldview, then, is a product of cultural consensus. In asking the reader to examine his or her cultural values, the writer of fantastic literature is, again using folk narrative, as Abrahams suggests, "to set up rhythms and expectancies which will permit... a synchronized audience reaction" (78). But this time, instead of

confirming the traditional values inherent, if not explicit, in the folk narrative, the author is using those traditional materials in ways that may actually force the reader to re-examine those values; the author may, in fact, "set up rhythms and expectancies" that will result in "a synchronized audience reaction" opposite to the reaction to a traditional narrative.

One fantasy work which stands out in this regard is Marion Zimmer

Bradley's The Mists of Avalon (1982), an account of Arthur's story told from the points of view of the women in the story-Igraine, Morgause, Gwenhwyfar, and Morgaine. But changing the point of view does more than merely shift the focus from the battlefield to the domestic events, it highlights the two-fold change that Bradley sees happening in Arthur's Britain. The first change involves the transition from the Old Beliefs (Celtic, Druidic) to Christian, with Arthur sworn to uphold faery and Gwenhwyfar championing St. Patrick. The second transition, and an integral part of the first, is the change from a matrilineal (and perhaps matriarchal) culture to a patrilineal and patriarchal culture.


Morgause and Morgaine challenge and oppose both changes through- out the novel and force the reader to look at beliefs he or she has taken for granted, and perhaps never examined, in a new light. With the dis-

appearance of Avalon at the end of the book, Bradley suggests, some-

thing important is gone from the world.9 Science fiction, or perhaps better, science fantasy has a history of chal-

lenging and critiquing cultural assumptions. Science fantasy is an odd sub-

genre that has some of the hardware of science fiction but is not as

scrupulous about scientific theory as is true science fiction. Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950) opens as a series of stories about the colonization of Mars, but Bradbury really wants the reader to consider the Earth culture which is doing the colonizing and consistently forces the reader to see his or her own culture through the eyes of the Martians. Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (1953), part of the genesis for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, portrays the US and USSR space race, and the cultural attitudes behind it, as interfering with the true destiny of the human race and potentially destructive to the other civilizations in the galaxy; and Robert Wise's film, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), criticizes the arms- race worldview without positing any better destiny for Earth's people. All three of these works-The Martian Chronicles, Childhood's End, and The Day the Earth Stood Still-appeared in the early 1950s. Frank Herbert's Dune and its sequels, which are set in the far future, tell the story of the descen- dants of the Greek House of Atreus and use the basic structure and elements of the Romance and Hero Tale to illustrate the negative consequences for a society, in Herbert's words, "afflicted by a hero" (511).

Even a hard-science science fiction writer can challenge a reader's notions about culture. Robert A. Heinlein routinely did just that in his

juvenile novels published between 1947 and 1958. Willis, the Martian

"puppy" in Red Planet (1977), was one of the first "cute" aliens to appear in science fiction, and Heinlein followed Willis with a whole series of

interesting creatures. In fact, Heinlein depicted the acquatic Venerians of

Space Cadet (1978) as a matrilineal and matriarchal society-certainly a

challenging concept for (mostly male) teenage readers in 1948. Except for a very few cases, such as the "wormfaces" in Have Space Suit-Will Travel (1958), the aliens in Heinlein's juveniles are far from the "shoot first and ask questions later" aliens of much science fiction. In fact the tradition of examining cultural attitudes can be dated back to the original science fiction writers, Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells, writers who used science in their fiction to examine and comment on their own cultures; it is ironic that popular culture has remembered and continues to return to

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Shelley's monster and Wells's Martians much more vividly than to the cultural criticisms which were the main themes in Frankenstein and The War

of the Worlds. More recently, as the so-called soft sciences of sociology, anthropology,

economics, and the like have made their way into science fiction, there has been more examination of culture in science fiction. In Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and several other novels, John Brunner has used science fiction's basic ability to extrapolate, focused on the socio-ecomonic near future of Earth instead of the far future of interplanetary exploration, and tried to show what the world might be like in a few generations if trends continued as they were when he wrote. Brunner's future is a dis- mal place of large warfare in small countries, crippling overpopulation, poisonous pollution, and a generally-decaying quality of life. Ursula K. LeGuin drew heavily on her background in anthropology for The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), a novel set on the planet Gethen whose people are hermaphroditic and can be either male or female during the fertility period. The reader-counterpart in the novel is a man from Earth who is there to discuss membership in the Federation with the Gethenians, and his discomfort among them is a mirror for the reader's; both find much about the Gethenians that is admirable and much than is unsettling-if not threatening. Like the other authors mentioned in this regard, Brunner and LeGuin are asking their readers to consider perhaps heretofore unexamined cultural attitudes.

Not content with challenging the reader's cultural worldview, Samuel R. Delany wants readers to examine the basis of reality itself. In The Einstein Intersection (1967), Delany offers the possibility that reality is not what we have been led to believe, and he has a basis in scientific philos- ophy and theory for offering that possibility. The conflict in Delany's novel is between the Einsteinian universe, which we have chosen, and the Godelian universe, which we have chosen to ignore. Einstein's universe is the rational one, the one that has been in the process of being officially formulated in western thought since the seventeenth century. The G6delian universe admits too much irrationality for most people; Godel, a contemporary of Einstein's, showed that there were elements in any system that could not be proved using the tools of the system itself or, in Delany's words, Godel "stuck a pin into the irrational and fixed it to the wall of the universe so that it held still long enough for people to know it was there" (121). Within the structure of that conflict, Delany tells a story that includes Orpheus, Billy the Kid, Christ, Jean Harlow, and other figures of myth, legend, folktale, and history.


As I have already mentioned, science fiction's roots lie in social criti-

cism, but science fiction's brand of social criticism is more complex than

merely pointing out the damage pollution or littering can do; if that was all there was to it, it would not be fiction. Science fiction, and occasion-

ally fantasy, challenges and asks the reader to examine the attitudes behind the behaviors it is criticizing; that is, these authors are not merely pointing out bad behavior and telling the reader to stop doing that, they are asking the reader to examine the long-held traditional attitudes or beliefs which have made that behavior seem, at least at one time, per- fectly acceptable. Although much science fiction and fantasy represent dominant western cultural attitudes, there is a large body of writing, most of it science fiction, which recognizes that those attitudes are only attitudes and asks the reader to examine their validity and viability.

V

In "Myth as Structure in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon" (1980), A. Leslie Harris makes the point that Morrison uses myth not only to provide the structure of events in the novel, but also to make the concepts in the novel more comprehensible. Morrison's use of mythology, Harris

contends, makes "contemporary, localized events and characters speak to those [readers] who cannot share her characters' background and

experiences" (69). In other words, Morrison is employing the universal-

ity of myth to make the readers of one culture understand literary characters and concepts from a culture unfamiliar to them. The inclusion of traditional materials in novels like Beloved and Song of Solomon adds cultural depth to the story and, in some cases, makes the actions of the characters more significant, tying them to persistent concerns which

preceding generations of Africans and African-Americans have preserved as themes in their sacred and secular narratives.10

The use of traditional Euro-American materials in science fiction and

fantasy, often dismissed as trivial or escape literature, can have the same effect. Hume suggests (above, page 1) that one of the reasons authors write fantasy is to "bypass the audience's verbal defenses." By couching Christian theology in fantastic novels, authors like C.S. Lewis, Madeleine

L'Engle, and George MacDonald (to name but the most obvious) pro- duced popular novels which are read first as fantasy novels but can also be understood as dealing with complex issues of good and evil, sacrifice and redemption. Less obviously, Tolkien's novels, like the epics and

sagas from which they were drawn, deal with courage, loyalty, honor, love, loss, and of course good and evil in much the same terms as does

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Beowulf. Even writers of hard science fiction, like Heinlein, deal with these questions; Heinlein'sjuvenile heroes and heroines are confronted with ethical questions much more often than they are put to some physical test, and Heinlein, like Tolkien and the others, ties these ethical tests to the reader's own time and time before that by his inclusion of and references to folk materials.

To be sure, the first task of these writers is to "tell a good story," and much science fiction and fantasy stops there; but the best writers use the

settings provided by science fiction and fantasy to struggle with what may well be the deepest and most eternal questions of all-what it means to be human and how to conduct oneself in the world. And they all deal as

cogently with these themes as do the writers of modern, realistic fiction.

Although there is still much work to be done in this area, even in the mundane field of categorizing and cataloging the traditional materials to be

readily found in science fiction and fantasy, it should be clear that fantastic literature depends upon traditional materials in ways that perhaps no other fiction does to provide the reader with access to the text. The problem of

creating a fantastic Secondary World that is at once unreal or impossible and is also accessible to the reader familiar with only this ordinary world is a problem solved by compromise. The science fiction or fantasy author must include enough recognizable material in his or her story so that the reader can decode the unrecognizable. The inclusion of traditional materials by these authors or the use of traditional materials to structure whole stories has proved to be a reliable strategy for connecting the reader from the everyday world with a story set in a fantastic one and for enabling that reader to decode both the worlds about which they are reading as well as the significance of that world and the actions which occur there.

East Carolina University Greenville, North Carolina

NOTES

1. Unfortunately, these elements have become stereotypical of science fiction and fantasy literature, and all too often, in fact, science fiction and fantasy are characterized only by these stereotypes and by their formulaic structures. This, of course, is what happens in all branches of popular fiction as John Cawelti was among the first to point out in The Six-Gun Mystique: "the compelling thing about it was ... the vigorous clarity and the dynamic but somehow reassuring regularity of the form itself" (2).


2. In "The Identification of Folklore in American Literature" (1957), Richard Dorson argues that the critic should provide corroborative evidence from external sources (indexes, collections, and the like) to prove that what

appears in the literary work is, indeed, folklore. In this case, I believe that the proverbs and other traditional sayings in Tolkien and Heinlein are suf-

ficiently well known to stand on their own. 3. Grobman's "A Schema for the Study of the Sources of Literary Simulations

of Folkloric Phenomena" (1979) was an attempt to synthesize earlier studies of folklore in literature. The particular functions noted here had previ- ously been noted by, among others, Richard Dorson, "The Identification of Folklore in American Literature" (1957), Daniel Hoffman, "Folklore in Literature: Notes Toward a Theory of Interpretation" (1957), and Alan

Dundes, 'The Study of Folklore in Literature and Culture" (1965), all of whom argue that the first step was to identify the folklore before attempt- ing a consideration of how or why that folklore is being used.

4. In "Early Icelandic Imaginative Literature" (1989), Hermann Palsson suggests that the "literary cosmos of early Icelandic literature divides into three

primary worlds. First, there is the timeless, hypothetical world of myth, inhabited by gods and other extramundane beings.... Second, we have the

alien, aristocratic world of heroic legend and romance, a world which is human though it shares certain obvious features with myth.... Third, there is the familiar world of experience, mirroring the physical and social realities cf the author's own environment" (27-28).

5. Heinlein claimed that this kind of science fiction "has prepared the youth of our time for the coming of the age of space" (60), and although he does not

acknowledge it as such, a part of the reason that science fiction has been able to do this is through its use of traditional materials, materials which link-as does Heinlein's patterning of the exploration of outer space after the settlement of the American continent-the past and present with the future.

6. In the first Star Wars movie released, Luke Skywalker is working on his aunt and uncle's farm when two androids literally drop out of the sky and entan-

gle him in an adventure which includes an elderly advisor with mystical powers, a beautiful princess, several companions with particular abilities, and an evil adversary appropriately clothed all in black. In spite of the futuristic hardware, the story actually takes place in a galaxy "long, long ago and

far, far away"-or, "Once upon a time." 7. Garner's use of Welsh myth in The Owl Service (1967) is particularly inter-

esting. In presenting a mythic pattern that has directly affected the lives of the people reliving that pattern over the centuries, Garner is commenting on the power of the past to shape the present and the future and on the

importance of one's knowing his own, or his culture's, mythic background. These myths, he might say, are not just old stories but active forces which continue to have an influence.

8. The use of materials from mythology raises some interesting questions. While most readers would know Hercules and Thor from even cursory stud-

293


ies of Greek and Scandinavian mythology, it is less likely that they would know figures from Egyptian or Indian mythology as well, and figures from Welsh or Irish mythology might be completely unknown to many readers. If the reader does not know who Gwydion is, does that figure still carry its

mythological '"weight"? Has the original mythic power of the figure persisted as an archetype, in racial memory, or in the Jungian collective unconscious?

9. With a fantasy novel such as Bradley's, set in an actual historical and cultural

past, approaches like Carl Lindahl's in Earnest Games can help the scholar decode the story. Bradley's conflicts, female versus male and pre-Christian versus Christian, all have some historical and cultural bases. Works such as

Marija Gimbutas's Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe and Anne Ross' Everyday Life of the Pagan Celts contain materials that explain the traditional back-

grounds of Bradley's novel. 10. Toni Morrison's novels have been classified as magic realism or magical

realism, but not fantasy. But magic realism seems to be a designation created solely to prevent mainstream novelists from being called or classified with fantasy novelists, for while the belief about the ghost in Beloved may well be culturally tied to African-Americans, the ghost itself (specifically a revenant in this case) could easily place this novel in the fantasy category.

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