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De Re Militari | Book Reviews

Flo Keyes

The Literature of Hope in the Middle Ages and Today: Connections in Medieval Romance, Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction

Jefferson, NC and London: MacFarland, 2006. 197 pp. ISBN 978-0786-42596-9. $39.95.

In Keyes’ preface it is noted that, “people who read fantasy and science fiction often talk about the obvious connection between those literatures and medieval romance literature.” (1) This reviewer can only agree with this, having once envisioned working on medievalist science-fiction (e.g., LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Poul Anderson’s “Kyrie”). The task Keyes set herself was to explain why two such apparently disparate bodies of work, the very old and the consciously newer-than-new, seem to fit so well together, and “to spell out the comparisons so that they can be considered and evaluated.” (10) “The Literature of Hope” is the goal Keyes attributes to both forms: “that of providing their respective time periods with hope.” (4)

This literary exploration may seem far-removed from the concerns of military historians who might well wonder what Camelot has to do with Jerusalem. One possible response is that the romances are the literature of the ordo militaris. Thus, reading chivalric romances may give some insight into the character of those who waged unchivalrous war.[1] A better answer is that this is what you’re up against when dealing with students or the general public: most people derive their view of the Middle Ages from the romances, often at two removes, untroubled by critical thought.

First, a few definitions: the medieval romance, fantasy, and science fiction are subsets of the literary category of romance which is in turn a member of the larger Jungian category of visionary literature; folklore is a close relative. What unites these works written or created centuries apart is the need on the part of their creators or audience to convince themselves that there is a better alternative. Here romance parts ways with religion because the better place is not heaven. The critical substratum of this book is Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism and, of course, Carl Jung, whose works (Modern Man in Search of a Soul, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious) are cited throughout. It is the deployment of the archetypes that gives escapist literature a psychological reality potentially more substantial than the literal or social realism of more critically respected genres. (Those realities are lost over time. Thus, the rather odd situation that age and difficulty made medieval epic and romance acceptable topics of scholarly research while the same types of stories written centuries later were not.) Science-fiction criticism and the study of F&SF as literature, by contrast, is only about forty years old.

The effort to define fantasy and science fiction has a satisfyingly elusive conclusion as the two genres seem to resist boundaries, but the effort to create such boundaries revealed a discontinuity between the authors studied by critics and the authors read by those whose expenditures of reading time and pocket money created the genres. Pace Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke—only LeGuin seems to have a foot in both camps. In an homage to Tolkien’s famous essay, this first chapter could have been subtitled “The Monsters Are the Critics.”

The attempt to connect the medieval and the post-modern takes three chapters. Both the medieval period and the twentieth century are considered times of Jungian “collective distress” which produce works that seem to provide a solution and thus relieve the stress. These chapters are attempting what is probably impossible: to equate the nearly four hundred years from the writing down of The Song of Roland to the completion of Le Morte D’Arthur with the dark days of the 1900s through a discussion of historical events, and doing so relying largely upon undergraduate surveys and popular works (Hollister, Cantor, Tuchman). Even if one does not accept the equation of apples and oranges, what medieval romances and science fiction have in common is that both genres focus, although not exclusively, on the possibility that, “the future offers something better than the present or that is some other dimension humankind managed to evolve into something more admirable.” (49) The dystopianists, whether George Orwell or Harlan Ellison (not mentioned here), are not welcome at this feast.

While few would quibble about the medieval presence in modern fantasy, the point might be less obvious in science fiction where the borrowings–structure and themes–are less obvious than the presence of castles and wizards. What holds these three seemingly disparate genres together is the use of the Jungian archetypes–the hero, the quest, the transformation–which are discussed in the remaining chapters. Examples are given from Tolkien (at least The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings), LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness, Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, some Norton, Bradbury, Bradley, Sturgeon, Herbert, and so on to compare with Tristan, Gawain, Perceval, Beowulf, and Roland.

For those too young to remember the heyday of the theory of archetypes (a subset of psychoanalytic criticism), chapter seven explains it all. Archetypes are universal human reactions and so deeply embedded in our minds that we don’t usually think of them. The archetypes change as slowly as humanity itself, but archetypal images, the means by which the archetypes are expressed, are as variable as individual personalities or environments. Thus the Earth Goddess, the Virgin Mary, the dragon and the sea are among the numerous expressions of the unchanging archetype of the mother. A number of archetypes appear repeatedly in romance literature. They are presented differently in the literatures of different ages, but the choice of similar archetypes suggests a certain similarity of values and perhaps also of the “social occurrences” (84) that made them the archetype of the era.

What is possibly the best example of the S-F hero is created by Keyes from mainstream fantastic literature, an epitome of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” as it would have been written by a science-fiction writer:

“Wow! I’m a cockroach. No insecticide known to man can kill me, maybe not even nuclear radiation . . . and I can walk on ceilings.” Then the cockroach would tumble out of bed, squeeze through one of those impossible small spaces no one can believe that a cockroach can fit through and set off to save humanity from itself . . . . (181)

That has all the elements. (Cerebus, a comic book series that spoofs super heroes, featured a cockroach anti-hero who seemed impossible to kill off.)

Reading this book resulted in a certain déjà vu, not because of papers-not-written long ago, but because it is written in the generic masculine; or possibly because Silence is not among the romance heroes. These relics of things past seem out of place in a book written after the emergence of Amazon fiction and feminist F&SF criticism. These get short shrift, although chapter 12 is devoted to the archetype of the Great Mother and to the anima, the feminine side of the hero. [2] Also puzzling is that Samuel R. Delaney, usually considered a structuralist or post-modernist critic, is represented by a single piece of critical writing rather than by his neo-Arthurian fiction. On the plus side, another thing that is missing is the typos that frequently mar scholarly books. Someone proofread this book, for which this reviewer is thankful.

Notes

[1] Cf. Georges Duby, “Youth in Aristocratic Society,” in The Chivalrous Society, trans. C. Postan (Berkeley, 1977) pp. 120-21; Conor Kostick, “Iuvenes and the First Crusade (1096-99): Knights in Search of Glory,” Journal of Military History 73.2 (2009) pp. 369-392 discusses youth as an identifiable group in First Crusade narratives.

[2] Gender role non-conforming women have always had a place in fantasy and science fiction; by the 1980s such characters had become staples. Valerie Eads, “Military Women in Fantasy and Science Fiction,” Minerva: Quarterly Journal of Women and the Military,” 1.3 (1983) pp. 59-68.

Valerie Eads

School of Visual Arts, New York <[email protected]>

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