TMS Course - Rings, Swords, and Monsters - Fantasy Literature

This is a 7 hour series of lectures by Prof. Michael D. C. Drout.  Ostensibly, it's about Fantasy literature, but Prof. Drout is a Tolkien scholar, so it's most of the lectures address the Tolkien works (and universe), although there are mentions of other significant cycles (I very much appreciated the discussions of Donaldson's works - Lord Fouls' Bane et al).  I was glad to be introduced to acquainted with some works by authors that I with whom I was previously unfamiliar (but not many... this is mainstream stuff after all).

Prof. Drout's reflections on the 'deep backstory' behind LOTR that creates the sense of a story within a much more vast story were appreciated, particularly the point that when LOTR was published, Tolkien had created much of those materials, but the early LOTR reader could not have been aware.  The commentary points out that Tolkien's scholarship (philology, linguistic) was then engine behind this vast backstory.

Another point that I liked in the course is the recognition of the legitimacy (in sufficient moderation) of 'saved just in the nick of time' device (Ex Deus Machina) in good fantasy (and probably good story telling in general).  This is how good outcomes sometimes appear in the real world.  Of course we find things in the nick of time, and in the last place we look, and of course we drift up on a dessert island at the very brink of death from dehydration.  If not, we wouldn't have lived to tell the tale.  Prof. Drout's example from the Hobbit ("the Eagles are coming, the Eagles are coming") is a good example.  The point is that our story drifts along in a huge world, and the actors from that world will sometimes impinge on our actions... for good or ill.  Thus the gun in act One does not have to go off...  it can be confiscated by police or accidentally fall in a vat of molten metal.

Prof. Drout notes several time the critical bias toward realistic novels (Henry James' school), but he neglects the point out that all stories can succeed or fail depending on the ability of the reader to draw on their knowledge of the backstory "canvas" to fill in all that the writer cannot say for lack of space.  It must work just as the mind continously generates rationalizations and the eye nicely fills in the blind spot.  Realistic novels simply have a more handy, convenient and familiar backstory - the 'Real World'.  Any book that does not rely heavily on the 'Real World' is necessarily more ambitious, and necessarily requires more imagination (and ink) to allow the reader that essential ability to fill in.

Another critical element that Prof. Drout points to is the need for a sympathetic character (he calls it something else), someone to 'translate' the action of the story to the world of the reader.  The hobbits serve this purpose in the Hobbit/LOTR.  (And they are notably missing in the much less successful Silmarillion.)  In a sense, this is a shame.  A story told by an alien about other aliens with alien senses and sensibilities would apparently not translate nor be comprehensible.  Too bad that this is the sort of story I would benefit most from, if I could only understand it.

I missed further commentary from Prof. Drout on the 'speculative fiction' ground where fantasy and scifi meet.  Perhaps he can cover this in a new course on Gene Wolfe, my favorite Speculative Fiction author.

Snow Crash

Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson is a chunky DQ Blizzard blended up from berries, lychee, and wax jambu fruit.  Or in literary terms, it's a Scifi / cyberpunk / satire / adventure story with an enormous enthusiasm for a turn of phrase.  So I liked it.  (Standard advice:  look in Amazon or Wikipedia to learn more about the book itself.  And ignore the theology/history lessons... it's fiction!)

This is the first book I've read that was set in a 'world' that felt like it was just like a tall pile of dry sand... in a critical state, where a single grain falling would cause a small landslip, if not a collapse of the whole pile.  The degree of randomness and sense of multipoint interaction (mostly off screen, as it were) helped to create this, but also the lack of broad internal legal-political-economic consistency in the semi-collapsed burbclave-franchise ghetto-Fed America-Raft and Metaverse dominated world.  The whole plot hangs together like a Reason (depleted uranium needle railgun) blasted yacht... that is, just barely, with imminent collapse a distinct possibility.  And this adds to the fun.

It is possible that the method that one might use to construct such a world would be to take subunits of a societal system and give them independence, but ignore all the trade/finance/defense etc. consequences of such independence.  Perhaps there exists (or could exist) good scifi premised on crafts (lightspeed drive mechanics) guilds being essentially independent nations... with a small territory (perhaps an asteroid somewhere), and all of the nationals serving as expats everywhere else.  Or lose the idea of territory as the basis of nationality entirely, and go with something else, like IQ score or language fluency.  Consider that nations may only exist to defend citizens from other citizens and to engage in common good projects.  Corps and commerce can do the latter (for user fees); perhaps nations aren't needed in a world with sufficiently advanced personal defense systems?

Kabloona

"Kabloona - Among the Inuit" (by Gontran De Poncins and read by Grover Gardner) is a 1st person narrative of the author's experiences in the high Canadian Artic in the late 1930's.  (Amazon and Wikipedia articles have more specifics and reactions - all positive, and which I endorse.)

Core hunter-gatherer social norms are on clear display in this book.  The Artic itself is a major player: the harsh life means typical overpopulation issues: territory scarcity and threat of invasion are not present (although risk of starvation is a major issue).  The community is therefore uncommonly free from strife and rituals of warfare.  Gatherings are small, rarely more than a dozen people, and power never concentrates.  Leadership is generalized.  Social conventions are strictly enforced, partially in language itself.  Consumables are community property (consumption, if not management), individual worth is measured (to the extent it is measured at all) by contribution,  and conversation is about the humor that is the other reaction (besides upset) to interrupted action.

The contrast between the 'pure' remote Inuit and the 'near' Inuit provide a glimpse of what appears to happen to clan/communal property when unusual objects (traded, arising from specialization elsewhere in the world) arrive in this environment.  The normal life of the aboriginal Inuit only suffers from seasonal scarcity of any particular object pre exposure to these objects... so it is pointless for an Inuit to worry about the replaceablity of any object.  Hence anything (even wives and dogs) can be lent in the expectation that an equivalent will be returned when the need is there.  This 'nothing is scarce over any sufficiently long span of time' paradise is deflated by the arrival of the robustly scarce items... things that neither the Inuit nor the enviroment can create or provide, and may or may not be available at some point through trading.

Material wealth and poverty are experienced as an individual relationship to relative scarcity.  Inuit are not poor when fish and seal and caribou are abundant, nor when, as an individual, one's fellows have been successful hunting.  Wealth and poverty are subjective, psychologically determined states of mind.   Economists (and politicians) would have us believe that poverty is due to a 'low' income, when in reality, it has to do with ability to access what one either wants or needs in their local environment.  

Another sense of the words 'materially poor' would related to the number of options available to a person.  The Inuit were poor in this sense.  But fixation on invisible and largely irrelevant material choices seems alien to what was the Inuit point of view.

Altogether an unforgettable book.  On the ethnographic studies bookshelf, it's up there with Yanomamo - The Fierce People (Chagnon), Tiwi of Northern Australia (Hart et al) and Twilight of the Spears (Descola).