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age propaganda and an extended advertisement for the
local Renaissance Faire.
Neil Gaiman has tension, however. From what I know
of him I’d peg him as a pagan (if only in sentiment; he
seems to really dig those old-time gods), yet he writes
essentially Christian stories of sacrifice and redemption.
He is also brave enough to show just what dark, bloody,
vicious, vengeful energy hides in the old pagan stories.
Yet, for all his tensions, Gaiman seems less like the
purveyor of a new style of fantasy writing, and more like
the culmination of an old style, a style I would term the
‘Jungian.’ 20th-century English and American fantasy
flourished in a world very much alive to the notion that
wisdom could be found in those old pagan stories, and
that was okay because everyone knew, after Jung, that
those stories were conduits to the collective archetypes.
Even C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, so notoriously dismissive
of ‘Continental’ influences, read and admired Jung
(though they always resolutely sniped at Freud). He
seemed to provide a foundation for fantasy, his theories
a sort of undeclared manifesto for – and justification of
– the genre. They had much in common, Jung and the
fantasy genre; in this one thing, if nothing else: they believed
in the power of stories; they believed that stories
could teach us something. The great fantasy writers of
the 20th century believed that stories were either healing
balms of the psyche or agents of unsettlement, chinks in
the armour of our everyday assumptions.
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I use the past tense because the work of Gaiman, and
contemporaries such Holdstock, Carroll and Crowley,
seems to have exhausted the possibilities of writing a
‘Jungian’ fantasy. Appealing to the collective unconscious
is becoming less tenable as a deus ex machina in
a world where memetics and evolutionary psychology
have replaced depth psychology as the essential means
of understanding the self. It is difficult to see how the
kind of fantasy written in the last century can be anything
but a cliché in our brave new millennium.
The question is this: can fantasy re-invigorate
itself in the face of these new conceptions of the
self? There is some slight hope that a new kind of
fantasy writing could appear, instigated by writers
such as Steve Aylett and China Mieville, who give
the impression that they are ready to write ‘weird
stories’ for a culture that no longer necessarily believes
in the unity of the psyche, the mythic power
of stories or the efficacy of any kind of healing balm
that doesn’t come in the form of a pill. However, so
long as such writers are squeezed out of bookstore
shelves by the bloated works of Jordan, Eddings,
Williams, et al, I’m afraid that we must conclude
that fantasy will collapse under its own weight
and metamorphose into a genre as rule-bound and
derivative as the Mills and Boons romance.
And that would be a triumph even Sauron could be
content with. �
346
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