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.