{"id":106615,"date":"2017-01-10T14:47:28","date_gmt":"2017-01-10T19:47:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=106615"},"modified":"2017-01-10T15:18:58","modified_gmt":"2017-01-10T20:18:58","slug":"historical-fantasies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/01\/10\/historical-fantasies\/","title":{"rendered":"Chasing the (Literal) Dragon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once I became a historian, I began to regret my teenage obsession with fantasy novels.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When the Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore<\/a> and the avuncular \u201ccompassionate conservative\u201d George W. Bush ascended to the presidency, I didn\u2019t bat an eyelash. Bush and Gore were, I thought, small potatoes, and I, at age seventeen, was preoccupied with Winter\u2019s Heart<\/em>, the ninth book in Robert Jordan\u2019s Wheel of Time fantasy series, in which an ever-growing roster of oddly-named characters sought to unite a fractious, war-torn world against the machinations of the \u201cDark One\u201d and a bunch of other, self-interested factions. I\u2019d read the first book, The Eye of the World<\/em>, a few months earlier, then charged through the rest. Real life, which for me was mostly dreadful, held scant appeal. I needed an alternative universe comprising\u00a0details, trivia, minutiae\u2014and Jordan obliged.<\/p>\n

Sixteen years later, I had thousands of pewter fantasy figurines<\/a>, hundreds of dog-eared fantasy novels and, perhaps not coincidentally, a Ph.D. in history. Most of the fantasy I liked was pure genre schlock, R. A. Salvatore<\/a> and Margaret Weis<\/a> titles heaped one atop the other; others, like J. R. R. Tolkien\u2019s Middle-earth<\/a> titles, boasted a certain literary cachet, but I\u2019d never cared about that. Whether it was a companion to J. K. Rowling\u2019s Hogwarts tales or those cocktail-napkin notes Chris Tolkien compiled and passed off as \u201cHistories,\u201d what mattered to me most was that they were chock-full of facts that I could memorize. I took creative-writing courses in high school and college, whiling away the hours as I filled notebook after notebook<\/a> with imaginary family trees and historical sketches about a dysfunctional family of half ogres who were tasked with securing a remote outpost of some collapsing empire. Only years later did I realize that these efforts, sophomoric and clich\u00e9d though they might have been, represented an attempt to explore the toxic father-son dynamic<\/a> that had defined my childhood.\u00a0<\/p>\n

My interest in history\u2014in any and all history, invented or not\u2014had evolved from an escapist hobby to an undergraduate avocation to, somehow, a viable career. Now that I was no longer a directionless teen trying to forget an abusive childhood<\/a>\u00a0but a harried adult tasked with caring for many other people, I began to curse all those years lost to fantasy novels, stacks of which remained in my mother\u2019s garage. Mind you, I wasn\u2019t cursing these authors or their work. They need to earn a living, and providing mass entertainment is one way to accomplish this. But I was angry\u2014furious, even\u2014that I\u2019d wasted some of my most impressionable years neglecting my responsibilities as an academic and an activist; that I\u2019d been so entirely frivolous. \u201cThere is no excuse for those who could be scholars and are not,\u201d wrote Josemar\u00eda Escriv\u00e1<\/a>. \u201cRead history incessantly until you master it,\u201d admonished Marcus Garvey<\/a>. At one time or another, I would have pointed to these men as role models; at no point did I ever heed their advice.<\/p>\n

Now, outlining syllabi for graduate seminars and colloquia<\/a>, what arrows did I have in my quiver? A bunch of monographs I\u2019d read in preparation for my comprehensive exams<\/a>, along with whatever other worthy selections I could fit in there? I struggled with an intense desire to fill every gap in my knowledge, while also avoiding the torment that characterizes academic book chat: \u201cDid you read so-and-so\u2019s latest yet?\u201d \u201cRead it<\/a>? I haven\u2019t even reviewed it!\u201d<\/p>\n

As a teen, I had nothing but time. Now every minute of my intellectual life felt precious and insufficient. Even granting that some of my time should\u2019ve been earmarked for leisure, why hadn\u2019t I managed to read about queer domesticities<\/a> in Edwardian England or Pan-Africanism<\/a> instead of constantly dragon riding through Pern<\/a>? What wonders could I have worked with those hours lost to chronicling the fates of Prydain and Narnia? This was, of course, counterfactual history of the sort ridiculed by E. H. Carr<\/a>: How could an introverted, adenoidal youth, surrounded by no literature aside from a heaping helping of 1940s and 1950s sci-fi and fantasy, have possibly acquainted himself with more serious scholarship of which he knew nothing?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

For a decade, I put these thoughts aside and soldiered on. In the background, a millennial media landscape coalesced, growing ever hungrier for content even as it became increasingly unable or unwilling to pay for it. This new media world demanded what the grown-up wits condescendingly labeled \u201chot takes\u201d or, if the writers\u2019 aspirations were bit loftier and their language more scholarly, \u201cthinkpieces<\/a>.\u201d Some of this writing was strong, acute, and profound\u2014particularly from heretofore underrepresented or marginalized voices\u2014but much of it was eminently forgettable.<\/p>\n

And fantasy writing, now ubiquitous thanks to Game of Thrones<\/em>, has proved an inexhaustible, inescapable source of hot takes<\/a>. Important questions related to gender, sexuality, consent, and even race are explored and reexplored through the lens of the Westeros<\/a> universe\u2014a ludicrous development that the three-man crew of the Chapo Trap House<\/a> has mocked to good effect.<\/p>\n

A hypothetical think piece like \u201cHow Game of Thrones <\/em>Predicted Donald Trump\u201d offers an inviting target: insipid premise, clickbait keywords, and almost assuredly superficial execution. Losing one\u2019s mind because J.K. Rowling was ignorant of the rudiments of African geopolitics gave folks something to do, but it also made me wonder what we should expect from Rowling, Martin, or anyone else earning their keep by fashioning fantastic worlds for commercial consumption.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe quarrels of popes and kings \u2026 the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all\u2014it is very tiresome, and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention,\u201d Catherine Morland remarks in Jane Austen\u2019s Northanger Abbey<\/em><\/a>. Morland\u2019s scorn was directed at her generation\u2019s tedious, \u201cimportant\u201d histories\u2014the work of Gibbon, Hume, Hallam\u2014which, in their exclusion of anything and anyone that didn\u2019t fit their grand narratives<\/a>, closely resemble the just-so stories written by Robert Jordan and George R. R. Martin.<\/p>\n

By contrast, history as a modern discipline showcases a diverse array of voices discovered in archives or dredged from the soil: sad voices, serene voices, angry voices\u2014voices seemingly lost not just to this time but to all time. There is no career long enough, an accomplished colleague once told me, to do justice to even a single day in the life of one person. And this is doubly true if a historian hopes to plumb the depths of Marx\u2019s Capital<\/em><\/a> (full confession: I haven\u2019t) or come to grips with Gayatri Spivak\u2019s principal assertion in \u201cCan the Subaltern Speak<\/a>?\u201d (Not to mention the hundreds of other wonderful new books, listed in one university-press catalog or another, for which he or she cannot designate a spare moment to \u201creview,\u201d much less read.)<\/p>\n

As a child, I devoured fantasy fiction because I believed that it could transport me to a new world. Given that my self-contained \u201creal world\u201d consisted mainly of my father bellowing at my mother, foaming at the mouth, or headbutting holes into plaster walls, this material was a welcome distraction. I wanted out, had nowhere to go but my room, and thus lost myself in a series of page-turning stories. And some of what I read, such as Maureen McHugh\u2019s China Mountain Zhang<\/em><\/a> or Gene Wolfe\u2019s New Sun<\/em><\/a> series, provided the \u201cconceptual dislocation\u201d and \u201cshock of dysrecognition (sic<\/em>)\u201d that Philip K. Dick argued<\/a> was essential for any work hoping to offer something more than a few hours of escapist entertainment. But in most cases, I wound up confronted only by the familiar: white men or women, middle class, college educated, Anglophone or at least European in origin, and either curiously uninterested in sexual matters regardless of their orientation (the Inklings) or way too<\/em> interested (R. R. Martin). It almost goes without saying that the worlds they created, like Martin\u2019s Westeros or Tolkien\u2019s Middle-earth, were just pastiches; caricatures of the Old Days bedazzled with unsurprising eccentricities (fairies, elves, manticores, wyverns, bugbears, owlbears, goblins, kobolds, frost giants, et al) taken from the fantasy author\u2019s curio cabinet.<\/p>\n

This is not an argument against escapism, per se, but against the deceptions of that we most readily escape into. Our mass-market fantasy stories are a prime example, but one could replace them with by-the-numbers superhero blockbusters<\/a> (which will surely seem as risible to future generations as swim champion Johnny Weissmuller\u2019s dozen or so Tarzan <\/em>films<\/a> do to ours) or rote sequels to shoot-\u2019em-up video games and leave the fundamental analysis unchanged. We escape to worlds that are safer and more understandable than this one, and nothing about, say, Ron Weasley\u2019s casual racism<\/a> can shed any meaningful light on our own, except to remind us that racism is pervasive. He\u2019s an object in a wind-up world of one white heterosexual British woman\u2019s devising; he cannot be the tool of anyone\u2019s deliverance.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The actual history that we\u2019re painstakingly piecing together, whether of the U.S. government\u2019s genocidal policies toward Native Americans<\/a> or the operation of historical societies lacking a seemingly \u201cnatural\u201d gender binary<\/a>, is more unnerving by far. It\u2019s unnerving because it is so alien, so fantastic, so impossible, that every generation struggles to understand it and every subsequent generation must interpret it anew. Each tiny sliver awakens more questions in the student: How could we possibly know it all, or know even one modest portion of it?<\/p>\n

There were times when I could recite, in precise chronological order, even the most minor historical events of Krynn<\/a>, the Four Lands<\/a>, or Toril<\/a>. I cannot say the same for any particular regional or thematic section of this world\u2019s past. As regards this present crisis\u2014and the present, clouded by old fears and prejudices, is always <\/em>in a state of crisis<\/a>\u2014I wish that some of my previous efforts spent memorizing the niceties of these imagined pasts could now be reapplied toward more constructive ends. For history, always being seized from the past in a moment of desperation by those of us stuck in the present, edifies even as it terrifies. Unlike these make-believe lands where nothing really happens and all the best rulers end up benevolent dictators<\/a>, our world\u2019s vast gap between the then and the now should remind us that, much as things weren\u2019t always like they are now, they needn\u2019t remain that way in the future, either.<\/p>\n

As for those boxes of fantasy novels: my mother donated them to the library bookstore where she works. Two volumes were spared: John Crowley\u2019s Little, Big<\/em><\/a>, which I have been halfheartedly reading for five years and have no pressing desire to finish, and George MacDonald\u2019s At the Back of the North Wind<\/em><\/a>, the closest approximation to a religious text that still appears on my bookshelves. Some of my pewter fantasy figures sit atop my printer. \u00a0The rest of that stuff, as they say, is history.<\/p>\n

Oliver Bateman<\/a> is a historian and journalist who lives in Pittsburgh.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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