The Rules of Fantasy
Today’s lead story in Salon mentioned author Neil Gaiman and his new children’s book Coraline. I haven’t read it yet, but I did read Gaiman’s last novel, American Gods. Like much of Gaiman’s fantasy work, the plot of American Gods involves a parallel world of supernatural beings who, despite their great power, are constrained by a number of highly complex rules and rituals. Transgression of even the most innocuous of these rules invariably has dire consequences in Gaiman’s hand-made universe. (Rule one if you ever find yourself in a Neil Gaiman novel – don’t accept any gifts).
As I pondered this strain in Gaiman’s work, it occurred to me that almost every major fantasy author since genre took shape in the late 19th century uses a variation of this same convention. Fantasy universes in literature are invariably extremely orderly places, and their authors, despite their considerable imaginations, are positively compulsive about maintaining not only internal logic, but a fastidious adherence to a set of invented traditions and laws.
Consider the 800-pound gorilla of fantasy literature, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – a work where the superstructure of history and ritual virtually triples the number of pages required to tell the story. Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft’s works are possessed by a visceral terror of chaos. The evil beings in his stories are always threatening to dissolve the rules and boundaries that keep social, physical and metaphysical order, and his protagonists often end up insane because their minds are unable to come to grips with the implications of such pandemonium. In the stories of sword-and-sorcery master Robert E. Howard, there is one overarching law: blood is destiny. Lost sons of kings find their way to the throne, villains are undone by the inherent corruption of their inferior stock, and the victories of Howard’s barbarian heroes are celebrated as the triumph of a master race. This racist ideology makes the work of Howard – a superb storyteller – difficult to stomach by contemporary standards, especially because his commitment to “race as law” is so central to the worlds he creates.
The three examples above are just the tip of the iceberg. Roger Zelazny, Michael Moorcock, George Lucas, Joss Whedon and many of the other real giants of the field, up to and including Gaiman, rely on the making and breaking of the imagined rules of fantasy universes to drive their plots and set up their conflicts. Perhaps this is a way to make otherwise-strange worlds intelligible to mundane readers. Or perhaps it is necessary to constrain supernatural or heroic action within certain arbitrary limits to prevent too many deus ex machina plots.
In any case, it’s odd that in the modern world, with standards and certainties crumbling all around us, one place that readers can turn for the security and certainty of eternal standards is a literary genre based entirely outside of reality, history, physics or human experience.
5:38:43 PM 
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