If liberal democracy is the form of government best suited to our nature, why are our fantasies so feodal ? The very name “fantasy literature” evokes the image of Conan the barbarian. When we go to Paris, we visit Versailles, not the buildings of La Défense, which are supposed to be great works of modern architecture. It is always the same whenever one goes on a tourist trip: visits to temples and palaces.Of course it is because they are beautiful. But why can’t modern societies, which are immensely richer and more clever than the ones they’ve replaced, construct buildings which would fire our imagination to the same extent ? The words “palace” or “mosque” evoke worlds which we find evocative. The aspirations of those who had them built were grand : to evoke power and splendour, or to commune with God. In our age, the people hold power, and their aspirations are more humble: better schools, better hospitals. The 18th century philosophers who dreamed of an Age of Reason would be surprised, though , if they could see how much remains of the old society. In many democracies, the Head of State is still a monarch, and I suspect that things are even worse in presidential regimes, in that a crushing mantle falls on the shoulders of the elected one. A French president is not just supposed to be an able statesman. He has to possess an almost gloomy grandeur. No one expected De Gaulle or Mitterand to smile or hug babies. American presidents do that, but I think that it is part of that fluffy, just-call-me-Andy exterior of American society. America as a whole seems to me ( I’ve never been there) a profoundly serious, hardworking society. American presidents can play the saxophone as much as they want, but there is a kind of expectation of superhuman faculties made on them. Not only are they supposed to be superior strategists and economists, but they have to radiate a certain “enhanced” normality, a sort of heroism at rest. I suspect that Americans go to war from time to time only to produce future presidents.
The other great , or not so great maybe, survivor of the old society is religion. It is doing surprisingly well. The one we hear most about these days is Islam. A Muslim friend of mine has explained to me that much of the present troubles of Islam with the modern world comes from the fact that Islam has a more complete tool box than other religions: not only does it have a spiritual dimension, but a legal corpus, the Sharia. In Christianity, Pope and Emperor fought for temporal power, but neither Jesus nor Paul bothered much about inheritance law and the penal code . Hinduism’s laws of Manu are so laughably unfair ( for the same offence , the penalty varies according to the caste) as to make them an embarassment. This means that however much Evangelical Christians and the Hindutva crowd may dream of their respective Golden Ages, the picture they have of that time is blurred. For Evangelicals, the blessed age was that of the first Christians, but the latter were not a ruling group, but a persecuted minority. I guess that is why the Evangelicals love going to the most hostile country possible – Afghanistan ! Iraq ! - to spread the Holy Word. The Hindutva fantasy is a bizzare mixture of antiquity and science fiction in which ancient Indians threw atomic missiles at each other ( if the ancient Indians were so advanced, they must also have been the most ecologically correct civilisation the world has ever known, because no trace remains of their advanced industry).
With Islam, on the other hand, Golden Age reconstructionists get a pretty awesome toolbox. Not only is there the Sharia, which gives them a legal code, but there is the military glamour of the times of the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs, whose armies defeated vastly superior foes, and conquered immense territories, at a miraculous speed. However great this tool box may be, however, it still misses a vital element ( which cannot be found, actually, on this earth): an example of a perfect Islamic state which would be a viable model for today’s society. The society of 6th century Arabia is so remotely unlike ours that even when the Talibans tried to make an extremely poor and traditional country like Afghanistan look like the Arabia of those days, the attempt still took on a ludicrous turn. They ended up depriving the common people of the little technology that was available, while they themselves maintained a website and operated sophisticated weapons.
Why is it that, while living in the modern world, so many of our dreams take on such an archaic turn ? Many of the archetypes we have of role models have a medieval touch. For men, the main types are: the Hero, the King, the Wise Man/Wizard, the Father, the Clown/Madman/ Wise Fool. These are the figures of Mythology. When we progress to Tales, we can have, in addition to the figures of Mythology, lesser types such as the Evil Sorcerer and the Traitor. From then on, we go to modern literature, where even lesser figures start emerging, which do not even deserve capital letters: the tradesman, the peasant, the small town doctor, the lover, the picaresque adventurer and so on. For women, the declension is a bit more complicated. We have in Mythology: the Hero’s Beloved, the Queen, the Wise Woman/Witch, the Mother. Then to tales, where we also have the Evil Sorceress, the Evil Stepmother, the Princess. Then on to literature with its Emmas and Tesses: this is where the declension is a bit complicated, because the figure of a woman as a main character in a story is a rather modern invention. In the case of male archetypes, the greatest, most exalted of all figures is the Hero. In the case of female archetypes, there used to be a bit of a lack of a corresponding figure. The Hero’s Beloved is a passive character. Strangely, the only female character in Mythology who can approximately match the Hero in terms of power, is the Wise Woman. Circe did give Ulysses a fright, before falling in love with him. When we climb down to Tales, women get a bit of a push up, and Cinderella and Snow White appear as heroines of their own stories. Then on to literature, where, over the centuries, the balance starts getting even. The great exception to all of this is Spiritual-Erotic Poetry, which belongs more to religion, anyway, and in which both Laila and Qais, both Krishna and Radha are exalted to the highest planes.
Thus we see that the more we go in the literary past, the larger the figures get, until by the time we reach Mythology, we are puny tourists at the feet of great Colossuses. The Hero is still exalted , but he has been going through a bit of strange times lately. With the tectonic plates between the continents of Man and Woman going through some rumbles in the past few centuries, as the two lands crash more and more into each other, our Hero’s statue is trembling on its pedestal. But that is another story. My point is that man is a dreamer, and that the more ancient of his dreams tend to take fantastic shapes in his mind, like the ruins of great cities he sees far away trembling in the desert light. Modern literary figures seem like flies compared to the likes of Hector. But that could be an effect of time. Shakespeare’s characters, as they acquire the patina of centuries, are starting to grow in our imagination - Romeo and Juliet, Falstaff, Hamlet….Will they , in the 25th century, acquire the stature of Ulysses ? Does the quasi-godlike stature of the latter give him an edge over the more human characters of literature ? Or, on the contrary, will that very humanity make literary characters more endearing to the people of the future ?
We see the world through myths. What has been mythified, exists. Paris, London, New York are overladen with myths, and therefore they “glow”, they radiate existence, and people are drawn to them like moths(1).
The act of writing mythifies existence. But will today’s writing , with its subtler characters, be able , in the future, to displace in our mental map, the more elemental figures of the past ? Ah well, I wish I was a Wise Man/ Sorcerer to be able to know that ! A related question is: in the future, will people know either about Ulysses or about Romeo ? Television and cinema’s characters, for all the virtues of these media, tend to have a more coarse-grained texture than those of literature. Especially with today’s cinema, which loves the likes of Leonidas and Legolas. But still, Michael in “The Godfather” is as Shakesperian a character as the bard himself ever invented. There is hope for literature, and for a humanisation of our deep brain.
(1) A people who are not written upon, cease to “exist”. In a famous black novel ( which I have not read), “Nobody knows my name”, one of the black characters exclaims “They do not see me!”. As a black in early 20th century America, he is a “problem” figure, and his only way of surviving would be to lie low. But nowadays, with the powerful influence of American black culture, he is very much “seen” ( especially on MTV). When Salman Rushdie wrote “Midnight’s Children”, an American critic said: “The literary map of India is about to be redrawn..” . We all carry such maps, which give coherence to the world and we need myths and stereotypes so as to draw them. Later, after having explored of one part of the map, we can say: “Oh but it is much more complicated than what I thought..” but still, that first sketchy coastal outline was needed, as a landing point.
Myths are stereotypes, racial and cultural, but stereotypes which have “bloomed”: clichés which are enlarged into a wider corpus. There is a vast body of idées reçues about the French. There are, on the other hand, only very little things which the Nyamwezi, in Mozambique, evoke to us. If we have to imagine their lives,we can only borrow some images from our mental archives, at the rubric “tribal people”, and therefore visualise them as living in little round huts, the men going hunting, and the women planting grains. The French, therefore, are a “mythified” people, while the Nyamwezi only “possess” some stereotypes.
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