MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 4

 In my essay MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 3 I made this statement:

Thus I am saying that magical fantasy stories recapitulate the sense of a space and time far from our own profane world, where all wonders spring from the loins of magic. This world can be entirely divorced from our own, as with Middle-Earth, or it may also be a very abstracted version of some distant historical era, like the unspecified Arabian setting of ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. The world may display an author's scrupulous intent to center all the fictional events within a specific historical period, as Marion Zimmer Bradley does in THE MISTS OF AVALON, or it may utilize a hodgepodge of historical eras, like the teleseries XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS. The fidelity to history is only important to a given author's creative priorities, and often the religious sources of magical fantasy stories may also be a hodgepodge of material from different historical periods, as is said to be the case with both the Arthurian corpus and the Thousand and One Nights. 

In this essay I established that, although I specified that the category of fantasy stories I call "magical fantasy stories" are not intrinsically better than other metaphenomenal fictions, they are better with respect to one literary goal. That goal consists of transporting the readers of our various post-industrial cultures back into worlds where magic is the primary instrumentality through which the denizens of said worlds understand existence. I explicated this idea with the formulations of Mircea Eliade, with some caveats that I didn't think Eliade was always very clear about his distinctions between "the sacred" and "the profane." Having lodged that complaint, I thought I ought to try to be equally clear about how "far" magical fantasy stories can get from our profane world.

The answer is that they can never escape the shadow of the profane entirely, at least partly because they're being written by authors who have lived in profane worlds. But more than that, there's often a "domain of impurity" within the fantasy-worlds that calls the magical domain into question.

For instance, few fantasy-tales take place at the real "beginning times," when God has (or the gods have) just made the world. One of the few exceptions that comes to mind is C.L. Moore's 1940 short story "Fruit of Knowledge," which relates the story of the Garden of Eden from the POV of Adam's first wife Lilith. But it's far more frequent for the magical-fantasy author to set his stories in a world where humankind has acquired some level of advancement short of what we call "the industrial age." And as soon as humankind attains such a level, a certain amount of life's profane nature assumes its own domain within even worlds where magic rules.

The simplest form of profanity is one in which everyone in the world is aware that magic exists or has existed, but individuals believe that for various reasons that the power of magic cannot affect them. Clark Ashton Smith often created characters living in utterly magical worlds who nevertheless had some blindness on that matter. In the masterful "Voyage of King Euvoran," the monarch witnesses a mage challenge his power, and then foolishly pursues the wizard for vengeance, leading to his undoing. In many ways, such stories parallel the dynamics of the modern-day supernatural story, in which, say, unbelievers trespass on a mummy's tomb and suffer a magical revenge.

Sometimes magical fantasy narratives include characters who are either of a materialistic bent or take actions that have the effect of post-industrial materialism. THE BEAR AND THE NIGHTINGALE, set in medieval Russia, depicts a village of people who are overtly Christians but who still covertly observe the old pagan ways of propitiating the spirits of houses and forests. A fanatical Christian monk enters the village and belabors the citizens until they put aside their pagan practices-- which brings about a major conflict for the heroine to cope with.

There also may be an inbuilt sense that the world of magical phenomena is doomed to be superseded by a profane one. Every "fall of Camelot" story implies that ordinary history will take over once the wonders of Arthurian Britain are no more. Patently, J.R.R. Tolkien followed the same pattern at the end of LORD OF THE RINGS, by implying that "The Time of Men" will succeed the era in which Men mingle with Elves, Dwarves and Hobbits. 

A. Merritt's SHIP OF ISHTAR provides a variation on the above theme. Modern archeologist John Kenton, despite knowing that Babylon has long been superseded by more mundane historical cultures, plunges into a cosmos where the Babylonian gods still exist-- though they rule a very limited cynosure, limited to one island and the titular Ship of Ishtar. The author never explains how this sub-cosmos comes into being, but one may fairly assume the deities created the world, probably so that they could continue to enjoy mortal worship.

All of the forces that countervail against the total efficacy of magic and the sacred within a "secondary universe" can be viewed as "agents of the profane," and thus of the author's awareness that he or she exists in a time when magic has been diminished if not extirpated. Because all such authors have themselves have lived in cultures where magic and the sacred are continually called into question, that may be a prime reason as to why most magical fantasies take place in worlds with a medieval, but pre-industrial, level of advancement. A qualified exception may be made for stories patterned after rural folktales. PINOCCHIO probably takes place in post-industrial times, based on a very tiny number of internal references. But the novel remains steadfastly in a rural, small-town universe, never letting the reader see any phenomenon that suggests the heavy industry that existed in the 19th century. Further, the author reinforces the sense of a folktale universe by showing humanoid animals who can talk and wear clothes, as well as numinous entities not strictly allied with any established religion.