Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Fantasy, Myth, Religion and Spin

I was fascinated to watch as the world's leading and probably most wealthy fantasy writer, Jo (JK) Rowling investigated her family heritage in the documentary series "Who do you think you are?" What separated JK Rowling from others I have watched is the juxtaposition of three traditions - the making of fantasy (I use that word 'making' deliberately, rather than 'creation', to indicate a kind of 'making' akin to 'making a sandwich'), the evolution of myth and the forensic investigation of myth.

First, I disclose that I despise Harry Potter and I have not been able to stomach more than a couple of pages of reading Harry Potter and the movies are only as interesting as the special effects. I find the characterisation thin, the plot formulaic and the settings overly romantic (in a kind of English way also found in those other famous fantasy writers, Lewis and Tolkein).

Don't get me wrong or cast me too thinly. If Harry Potter had emerged from somewhere 30 years early when I was a child, I would have gobbled it up, as I did the Narnia series and the Lord of the Rings tome. To live in a fantasy world is blessed; a childish indulgence that switches time off and takes you away from the pressing concerns of the world. We must, I fear, have fantasy to keep us sane. It is the refuge that we can no longer find in many quarters.

A fantasy character must not be too real. They must not be sordid. No addiction, no homelessness, no hopelessness. How delightfully ironic is it that Kirsten Stewart, star of Twilight, was recently sacked from a film because her 'real' life (or the life that the media spun) become too 'sordid' because she (gasp!) become someone's mistress? Heavens! How could wowser Stephanie Meyer ever approve of a character that, well, was sexually flawed?

No, authors that nuance characters to resemble real life just don't sell. They just aren't fulfilling our lust for escapist serenity; of our timeless moment with a two-dimensional world. And here I disclose again, in the interests of fairness. I spend far too much time in a two-dimensional world of Age of Empires.

But, back to someone genuinely interesting - JK Rowling. According to the documentary, she inherited a family myth of a war hero amongst her ancestors, a young man who came to England in the 19th century and made his way in world of hospitality, working his way through the ranks at the Savoy Hotel. Later, in the war, he performs acts of bravery for which he is awarded France's equivalent of the Victoria Cross.

The story of her ancestry twists and turns, but her attention is caught by a young girl from Alsace who loses her father at a young age and struggles in poverty in a large family to make her way in the world, eventually falling pregnant while working as a maid (as many maids did, too often to their masters). The characters are large, alive and compelling. At times, despite editing, JK Rowling is visibly overwhelmed and at other times exuberant. These people provide a satisfaction incomparable to Harry Potter.

Even more compelling, however, is Rowling's journey through myth. In crude terms, all myth is the embellishment of the truth of events with details that make the narrative flow, thus making it accessible and transferable. We add fantasy to experience. But myth does not suffer the 2-dimensionality of fantasy. Myth must have concrete referents, objective evidence that can be verified. No-one inherits a family myth about ancestors who lived on the moon, nor one where Texas has ceded from the US, despite both of these being credible elements of fantasy.

Rowling is surprisingly relentless and forensic in uncovering that the Louis that she has down as a war hero is actually, incredibly, a man of the same name but a different person to her forefather. This 'imposter' to her myth is certainly a war hero, but certificates prove conclusively he is not related to Rowling. Laughably, the 'war medal' that the family has carefully harboured turns out to a badge that identifies his membership of a trade union. You can see that this revelation has a kind of crushing effect on Rowling. Her spontaneous reaction (laughing) is then matched by a resolve to pursue the family myth deeper; to validate her family's memories.

Myth does this. When we discover that a cherished element of myth is quite plainly 'bullshit', our reaction is not to set it aside and move on. It gets under our skin. We are determined to separate truth and fantasy for the sake of our identity. It drives us to scientific endeavour - to uncovering, systematically, those primary historical sources which either add to or deny the narrative we have inherited.

In an unimaginable coincidence (one no novelist could conceive), Rowling's Louis, after being raised first as the illegitimate son of that maid, and leaving the family to find his way in England, living for years in England and raising a family from which he is alienated by sad circumstances, but returning in his thirties to serve in the French army in WWI, turns out to be a reluctant hero when the war came unexpectedly to a part of France defended only by 'old men', poorly trained and reserved to defend bridges. Rowling's delight at finding that her Louis is, in fact, a hero of greater standing than the 'imposter', is palpable. The family myth is validated beyond expectations.

But some curious elements of Rowling's investigation of her family myth are just as telling as this evidentiary support for the myth. Rowling is determined not to be German. Rowling is clearly fluent in French, reading it and translating from historical documents with surprising ease and fluency. Her blunt reaction when encountering an offcial document written in German is, "Oh. What's this language!", betraying a deep animosity towards anything German.

Despite the maid's surname being Schuch, there being a real possibility that she spoke German and the national identity of people of Alsace being somewhat blurry, Rowling seeks to 'ethnically cleanse' her heritage of Germans. Shades of "don't mention the war". A Prussian army marching through the village of Schuch's youth is considered sinister. Fantasy, it seems, continues to be layered upon that forensic evidence to bolster a sense of deep seated tribalism.

I confess to be entirely taken with Rowling. She is intelligent, engaging and not at all arrogant, despite her fabulous success. Her polished English accent occasionally lapses and we hear some the accent of her youth, especially in her emotional reactions. Most certainly, she is English, through and through, yet identifies so determinedly as French.

Myth can never really be 'untangled' nor properly analysed to determine what might be claimed as historical and what as gratuitous embellishment. Rowling's quest was never really going to myth-busting. Instead, the already rich mythology of the family narrative was further enriched and expanded and new, more provocative and endearing characters were added.

As humans have journeyed through space as a curious species on a lonely island in our galaxy, the trillions of narratives have been woven into the fabric of myth. No surprise, then, that religion, with its formidable arsenal of cultural mechanisms, was able to distil myth into a coherent world view by which humans could contextualise their personal narrative. As surely as the Internet and social media, this curious social animal was going to create the myth of 'the universe and everything' and this myth was going to be carried along through generations of telling and further creative embellishment.

Of course, embellishment had to serve tribal prejudice. It was not sensible to add aliens from the cosmos who came to earth to erect communication beacons. Embellishment must reinforce that others are 'baddies' and we are good. Embellishment must establish our eating practices as clean and others as dirty. Religion as systematic mythology settled into codes of conduct and became a handy mechanism for opportunistic despots to rule. In Constantine's quest to become the one emperor, the pervasive theology of One God was fortunate 'grist'.

But to dismiss myth as a kind of plague on culture or historical memory is to neglect the baby kicking and screaming in the bath water. Myth, and its aggregating mechanism, religion, creates in us a  most compelling drive for verification. As Montgomery discovered in debunking creationism in The Rocks Don't Lie, the very engagement with myth drives humans to search for objective verification. We are never properly satisfied with myth without some 'hard evidence'. Rowling's quest is an entirely human quest.

Of course, such engagement leads inevitably to scientific method as the means of verification. Science grows directly from myth. Ptolemy's precursor to the heliocentric model of the solar system, buried so comprehensively by Christendom, is most certainly resurrected by someone driven to claim an objective truth behind the story they have inherited, whether it be about stars or conquerors. As surely as myth breeds fantastic embellishment, so myth drives our deep seated desire to 'know the truth'; a truth, that Colonel Jessop reminds us in A Few Good Men, we are deeply uncomfortable with.

In the twilight years of the tradition of myth-making, people today are clinging to religion to quench their thirst for that narrative. Unfortunately, most religions carry huge embarrassing baggage of codified savagery and cruelty and breath-taking bigotry. Despite the sanitising of this baggage (keep "Thous shalt not kill" but omit "God hates fags"), it is increasingly an unwanted side-effect of maintaining a yearning for myth. In nail-clinging desperation, religions are spinning these myths into a myriad of directions.

Thus, we witness the rise and rise of clumsy paradigms driven by spin. Science and religion, cultural cohabitants, are driven into conflict by increasingly shrill voices. You must choose a side. Either you are for the war in Iraq or against. You cannot complicate nor nuance your position. The army of the Lord or the army of the secular horde. Choose now, pilgrim!

Ironically, notable atheists like Sam Harris have enlisted on the side of rank tribalism. Islam is a religion of violence, unmistakably. We should, he posits, profile people for security checks, premised on their religion. Of course, the logical extension is that every Islamic person is suspect and we have good reason, as sensible Americans, to maintain a vigilance that could well justify vigilantism and perhaps even the horror of 84 shot dead on Utoya Island.

The spin that virally infects the WWW is that the average Islamic person actually subscribes to violent jihad. Simply ignore the hundreds of millions of Muslims who daily go about their life with not much more malice than one might reserve for a mother-in-law. Spin, unlike myth, cannot afford to admit either objective investigation nor doubt about the narrative. You are either with us, or against us. You either believe or you don't. It has no positive off-shoot in driving people to science, as myth has so long provided. It plays only on the guilt of betraying one's tribe; it throws the 'traitor' starkly into relief.

We may be in awe of Julia Gillard's recent Canute-like stance against the sea of spin, but, in the end, this bravery may go unrewarded. Rowling's Louis may have stood against an overwhelming enemy and triumphed, despite personal injury, but Julia has no hope. The very viral nature of social media and the WWW has put myth, science and religion firmly into their death-throes. We may be the last of the human myth makers. We may be the last real humans.