The Seeker — Fantasy in the Real World

Once upon a time, when I was writing a sequence of books called The Dark is Rising, I began having a recurrent dream. It was a fragment of dream, really: a set of images, short on narrative. In the dream I found myself in the library, a big wood-paneled room full of book-crammed shelves and heavy wooden tables and chairs, all set on an odd mixture of levels. As I walked through this library, I saw people reading, sitting at the tables, but although I spoke to one or two of them, they paid me no attention; it was as if I wasn’t really there. As indeed I wasn’t, of course.

I noticed that one long wall of the room was completely lined with bookshelves, but that the opposite wall had none. And then suddenly, as I looked, that bookless wall vanished away, leaving blank space, and I was looking down over the edge of the floor into the dark, shadowy auditorium of a vast theater. The library and I were high above its stage, facing row upon row of empty seats stretching back into the darkness.

Then by another of those flicker-changes of dream I was down in the theater, out in the auditorium, looking back up at the library. There it hung, suspended, as if it were a long gallery above the stage. The theater was dark; only that hovering room and its books were brightly lit, and the readers, absorbed, sat unheeding at their tables and read on.

And at that point, always, I woke up.

I dreamed this dream three or four times in a period of, I suppose, three or four years. Eventually, when I was writing the last book in my sequence, Silver on the Tree, I came to a point in my story where two boys walked through a door. I left them there, walking through, at the end of one writing day. I didn’t know what they would find on the other side. The next day, when I began to write about what they saw, I found myself describing the strange library-theater of my dream – and I’ve never dreamed about it since. Perhaps it wanted a life of its own, a chance to get into other imaginations than mine, and was now content that it had been set free. For this of course is what happens to any character or place or image that a writer puts into a story: born in one imagination, he, she or it is then born again, over and over, in the separate imaginations of every reader of that story, until the last copy of the book falls apart or the last reader forgets. No wonder Tolkien called storytelling “sub-creation.”

My dream itself had the usual echoes in it of the past, present, and future of the dreamer. All my life I had been rooted in libraries, both as a reader of other people’s books and writer of my own. All my life I had been stagestruck, haunted by the theater. Within a year of finishing Silver on the Tree and my sequence of novels, I was writing scenes for John Langstaff’s Christmas Revels at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge and beginning to collaborate with the actor Hume Cronyn on a play called Foxfire, which eventually made its way to Broadway. The wall of the library had melted away, and I was down in the theater which had been waiting beyond. I’ve been moving between the two ever since.

But if we detach that little dream from personal experience, it can be a useful metaphor of another kind. Take a man or woman at an early age, in the condition which is known as childhood, and put him or her into a library. Give the child a book to read. (I am using my library to stand for any nook or cranny in which a child may read, from the bedroom to the subway, from the breakfast table to – well, the library.) Once the child’s imagination is caught up in that book, particularly if it deals with experiences beyond his own world, beyond reality – then boundaries vanish, walls disappear, and he finds himself facing a wonderful space in which anything can happen. He’s transported into my dream theater.

The theater. Consider the image. A magical place, quiet and dark most of the time – sometimes for months on end, if its owner is unlucky – but a place which once in a while is brilliant with light and life and excitement. It lies there sleeping, closed up, its doors all locked – until suddenly one day the doors are open and you can go in, and find wonder and delight. That isn’t a bad image of the unconscious mind.

Fantasy, our subject and my preoccupation, comes from and appeals to the unconscious. It draws all its images from that dark wonderland, through the mysterious catalyst of the creative imagination. Nobody has ever described the process better than that great librarian, Lillian H. Smith, in her book The Unreluctant Years. “Creative imagination,” she said, “is more than mere invention. It is that power which creates, out of abstractions, life. It goes to the heart of the unseen, and puts that which is so mysteriously hidden from ordinary mortals into the clear light of their understanding, or at least of their partial understanding. It is more true, perhaps, of writers of fantasy than of any other writers except poets that they struggle with the inexpressible. According to their varying capacities, they are able to evoke ideas and clothe them in symbols, allegory, and dream.”

Symbols, allegory, and dream. Like ritual and myth, those other mighty ancestors of fantasy, they have in recent years been much more widely discussed than is usual in this country, thanks to the television journalist Bill Moyers. First, public television gave us Moyers: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, Moyers’s six one-hour interviews with mythologist Joseph Campbell, and then Doubleday published what I suppose would be called the book of the series, The Power of Myth. The interviews were watched by two and a half million people, and the book was on The New York Times best-seller list for six months. Between them they made Campbell’s ideas far more accessible than his own books had done over the last forty years; he was a good writer but a better teacher, and The Power of Myth, both on film and on the page, is captivating. When Joseph Campbell talks about myth, he is talking about the tree of which fantasy is a branch – or more accurately, a whole cluster of branches. And his great complaint is that we live today in a demythologized world: a society without the guidelines of ritual, a society which lacks the unconscious awareness of long-established patterns of civilized behavior, and falls into destructive violence as a result. The United States, says Campbell, has no ethos. Ethos had me reaching for my dictionary, because to me it meant character, and you could hardly accuse the United States of having no character. In the Oxford English Dictionary I found a more specific meaning, deriving from Aristotle on Rhetoric: “The characteristic spirit, prevalent tone of sentiment, of people or community; the ‘genius’ of an institution or system.” So, back to Campbell. The United States, he says, has no ethos: as a vast jumble of people from different nationalities and traditions, it lacks the web of assumptions about social behavior that you find in a deep-rooted homogeneous culture – “an unstated mythology, you might say.” Instead it is held together by law. Our children in America share with all mankind a deep and ancient hunger for myth, but there are no myths for them to inherit – so some of them make up their own. “This is why we have graffiti all over the city,” says Campbell. “These kids have their own . . . morality, and they’re doing the best they can. But they’re dangerous, because their own laws are not those of the city.”

He is talking only about a particular stratum of urban youth, but there is no question that we live in the most violent society in the so-called civilized world. One statistic will do. In one year – 1990 – the number of people killed with handguns in Japan was eighty-seven; in Sweden, thirteen; in Australia, ten; in Canada, sixty-eight. In Great Britain, the total was twenty-two. The population of the United States is four times as large as that of Great Britain. Multiply the British figure by four and you get eighty-eight. But the number of people killed with handguns in the United States that year wasn’t eighty-eight; it was 10,567.

For Joseph Campbell, this is the violence of a cultural chaos; a civilization without mythological foundation. Myths are “stories about the wisdom of life,” he says. “What we’re learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We’re learning technologies, we’re getting information.” Whenever he lectured, he says, he found a real hunger in his students, because “mythology has a great deal to do with the stages of life, the initiation ceremonies as you move from childhood to adult responsibilities . . . the process of throwing off the old [role] and coming out in the new.”

He says: “[Myths] are the world’s dreams. They are archetypal dreams, and deal with great human problems. I know when I come to one of these thresholds now. The myth tells me about it, how to respond to certain crises of disappointment or delight or failure or success. The myths tell me where I am.”

The myths tell me where I am. Fantasy tells me where I am.

Perhaps I shouldn’t use these two words interchangeably, in this context, without justifying what I am doing. Joseph Campbell, as you might expect, is eloquent in defining myth. “A dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society’s dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth . . . Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world.”

He’s saying that artists have inherited the myth-making function of the shaman and the seer, and of course he’s right. Where the art of writing is concerned, his point applies most of all to the poets and writers of fantasy. Both deal with images, and with their links to and within the unconscious mind. And the fantasist – not one of my favorite words – deals with the substance of myth: the deep archetypal patterns of emotion and behavior which haunt us all whether we know it or not.

All of us who write fantasy are creating, in one way or another, variations on a single theme: we have a hero – or heroine – who has to cross the threshold from his familiar world into the unknown. In search of some person or thing or ideal, he has a series of adventures, undergoes trials, survives dangers and disasters, until he achieves his goal, his quest. And having achieved it, he comes home again a wiser person, better prepared for the longer journey which is now ahead of him, the adventure of living his life.

This is not a blueprint which every writer deliberately follows: God forbid. Indeed many try assiduously to keep away from it. But when you look back over a book of genuine fantasy, you can always see the pattern lurking inside of it, in however shadowy a form. The echo of myth runs through fairy tales and folk tales from every culture, every tradition; in our own literature it runs through Pilgrim’s Progress to Gulliver’s Travels, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to The Wizard of Oz, from Macdonald to Tolkien, from Lewis to Le Guin. When I look at my own books, I see a continual reiteration of the quest theme; not only in the Dark is Rising books and my other fantasy novels, Seaward and Mandrake, but even in the nonfiction. I wrote a book called Behind the Golden Curtain which was, now I come to think about it, my personal quest in search of the nature of America; I wrote a biography of the English author J. B. Priestley which spent much of its time portraying him as a man in search of his own lost youth. And as I reflect on the book I’m writing now, I can see it is already taking on the pattern of a leaving and a search, to be followed no doubt (though I haven’t the least intention of this at the moment) by a return. I am clearly stuck: so deeply imbued with the archetypes of fantasy and myth that I can’t write about anything else. Well, I’m in some good company.

It is quite possible that I need these archetypes, not just as an artist, but personally. After all, writers are at the mercy not only of the quality of imagination they inherit, but the quality of character that came along with it. What is certainly true is that certain readers seem to need that archetypal pattern.

The children who write to authors of fantasy novels fumble to explain why they like such books, and come up with sentences like these from my own mail. From a thirteen-year-old in Texas: “Your books are my escape from the world I live in. I often wish I were one of the Old Ones, fighting the Dark and protecting Mankind from harm.” A thirteen-year-old boy in Britain: “When I open your books I feel myself slipping out of this world and into another. I am one of those people who long for adventure, and reading your books is the closest I have ever come to being in one.” From a twenty-year-old in Illinois: “You give us all the chance to leave the mundane struggles we face and enter a slightly grander struggle for a while.” A sixteen-year-old in Sweden: “I get such a feeling when I read your books. It’s like I want to climb up the pages and walk straight into it and help Will and his friends.” And from a twelve-year-old in Britain, the simplest and perhaps the most accurate: “Your books seem to fit me just right.”

All of us need adventure, though of course it’s easier to handle vicariously, through the pages of a book, than when it actually arrives. The celebrated cathartic effect, that mixture of pity and fear which is supposed to refresh the soul, is better acquired by watching King Lear, or reading about him, than by actually being King Lear. Just consider being King Lear. You have two psychotic daughters who murder each other, your best friend had his eyes torn out, and you go raving mad on a stormy heath, and end up dying of a broken heart with your third daughter’s body in your arms. A memorable life, but not an enjoyable one. Fantasy, unlike real life, offers amazing adventures with no price tag: all you have to do is open a book. And afterwards, if one of its adventures does ever happen to overtake you, somewhere in your unconscious mind you will be equipped to endure or enjoy it.

We all need heroes, too, and not only when we’re children. In story, in myth, the hero may die, but he must be replaced. The king is dead; long live the king! Among the few societies which still keep this patter alive, Great Britain is a fortunate country; there is a great deal to be said for constitutional monarchy. The actual governing is all done by democratically elected Parliament; the monarch has no power at all, but leads a benevolent and very public life as a figurehead, a focus for ritual and emotion – a hero. Popularity is less important for a British prime minister than for an American president, since in Britain the public can focus all its adoration, all its hero-worship, upon the Queen – not to mention Prince Charles, Princess Di, and the younger Royals, who continue to attract huge attention despite behavior which is far from regal. The allure of royalty even spreads beyond national boundaries, to wistful millions in kingless, queenless countries: When Charles and Diana were married in 1981 it was estimated that the wedding was watched on television by an eighth of the population of the globe. And despite the merciless spotlights that shine ever more brightly on his unfortunate private life, if Prince Charles ever manages to succeed to the throne, he will instantly acquire new stature; through the ritual of the coronation, the magic of monarchy, he will become a new worldwide hero.

We are short of such figures in the United States. (I take the liberty of saying “we” even though I’m not an American, because I have after all lived here for twenty-five years.) We have rich and powerful men and women; we have people of great talent and intelligence or beauty, or all three – but where are the figures to attract that deep, worshipful fervor drawn out by the mystique of the ritual hero? Who are our heroes? Ronald Reagan? Donald Trump?

There have been figures with the stature of heroes: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. But they’re dead, assassinated, and their stature has been vastly increased by the fact that they did die, as if they were powerful images of ritual sacrifice. They died, but they weren’t replaced. Today, in general, we don’t have heroes; we have celebrities – people well known not for their gigantic accomplishments but simply for being well known. Joseph Campbell was appalled by the results of a questionnaire which was sent around a high school in Brooklyn, asking the students, “What would you like to be?” Two-thirds of them ticked off the answer: “A celebrity.” They didn’t aspire to achievement, Campbell unhappily noted; they wanted simply to be known, to have name and fame. It’s small wonder, with this scale of values in place, that we have such depressing presidential elections, with the candidates judged less by their ability or potential or beliefs than by their charisma, their image – or lack of it.

This is a very, very young country. Yes, we need outlets for mythic adventure, and we need mythic heroes. But you can’t expect development that in other lands took three thousand years to be accomplished here in less than three hundred. The history of England, for instance, is a long layering of different traditions, as one culture after another came invading the island and taking control from the one which had invaded last time. There were lots of invaders, and each one of them lasted at least three hundred years. The English have ended up as an extraordinary interbred mix of English, Italian, Irish, German, Scandinavian, African, Polish, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, West Indian – you name it. But they haven’t blended; they haven’t had enough centuries; and the first invaders (who came from England) didn’t even try to blend with the culture that was here before them – instead they did their level best to destroy it. The myths and imagery of the Native American could have become as potent a basis for this country’s cultural development as the classical and Celtic myths were for Western Europe – but that didn’t happen, and now it can never happen. The nation had to grow too fast; there wasn’t time – and there certainly isn’t time now. Almost every one of the older nations of the world has a slow-grown mythological foundation: what Campbell called its own ethos. The United States, instead, has a gap.

I think perhaps that the task of fantasy, in our contemporary world, is to help fill that gap. Our society itself tries to fill the gap, without knowing it, but it does so from the wrong end; it tries to put in a foundation by stuffing things into the attic. Let me digress, in order to explain.

When I first came to this country in 1962, as a wide-eyed young newspaper reporter, I was hit very hard by two overwhelming impressions. The first was wonderful; it was the sense of opportunity, “anybody can do anything” – the sense of freedom that always enraptures visitors from England’s comparatively rigid structure of tradition and behavior. The second impression was less wonderful, but fascinating: a more gradual realization that this freedom-loving society was gripped by a longing for ritualization. It began from the moment I stepped off the airplane in Washington; the first thing I saw, after the startling glimpse of policemen wearing real guns, was a line of about twenty-five teenage girls all dressed as Little Bopeep, marching through the airport, chanting. I said to my American escort, “What’s that?” He looked slightly embarrassed and he said, “Oh, they’re from a sorority. That’s something they have to do, to join it. A kind of initiation rite.”

I’d never heard of Joseph Campbell then.

Fraternities and sororities, like the Elks and Kiwanis and the Sons of Italy, the golf clubs and the country clubs – they all thrive on rituals of membership. Then there’s American football, an amazing ritualization of the relatively simple game of rugby. The players no longer wear simple shorts and shirts; they are all decked about with special helmets and padding, as ceremonially armored as medieval knights approaching a joust. They huddle together to murmur ritual numbers to one another; they launch into a sequence of ritual movements – and then someone waves a flag or blows a whistle, and they all stop, in order that the ground may be ritually measured and the ceremony start all over again. During any pause, groups of nubile young women leap in unison beside their team, and chant ritual chants to the god Ra (as in Rah! Rah! Rah!). At a central break in the ceremony, another group of acolytes moves in stylized patterns over the sacred ground, playing musical instruments, while a priest figure makes ritual motions with a sacred stick. On particularly sacred dates all this may be watched by as many as one hundred million people on small ritual boxes containing a glass screen.

Other kinds of ritualization are more insidious, based on the second of the two founding principles of the United States: freedom, and the right to make a profit. There are no longer any sacred festivals in the American calendar, religious or otherwise; there are only celebrations of commerce, filling the stores with Christmas goods in October and turning Thanksgiving into the year’s biggest buying weekend. Eighty-five percent of the load carried by the average American mailman consists of ritual pieces of paper exhorting folk to spend money. Alternatively, they ask them to give money away. Charities have adopted the complex and manipulative ceremonies of advertising – and so have senators, who reach their positions of power not simply by free elections but by raising an average of three million dollars for their election campaign – ten thousand dollars for every week of a six-year term. The only known exception has been Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin, who claimed to have spent on his last election campaign in 1982 a total of $145.10, all out of his own pocket. And he won.

The newest and fastest-growing ritual imposed on modern life is that of the computer, whose complex ceremonial amounts to a new secret language and way of thinking. The Power of Myth rehearses the story of President Eisenhower, confronted with the first major computer complex and told that he can ask it any question he pleases. The president eyes the machine and asks, “Is there a God?” And the lights flash, and the wheels turn, and after a while the voice says, “Now there is.”

The computer is an Old Testament God, says Joseph Campbell, with a lot of rules and no mercy. I think of that every time I try to communicate with my Macintosh and it shows me a small frowning face, or says, like the Mad Hatter, “No Room!”

The kinds of ritualization I’ve been contemplating here are those which a society unconsciously imposes on itself out of a deep, unwitting sense of need. But they can’t satisfy the need. Instead they produce phenomena like those high-school children whose dream was not heroism, not achievement, but celebrity. Underneath, there is still the gap – down there in civilization’s basement, in the collective unconscious. If fantasy is the only thing with a chance of filling the empty basement of what Campbell calls “our demythologized world,” what are its chances of success?

It would be nice to be able to say: Let’s make all the children in the country read more, and let’s introduce more of them to fantasy. Make sure curricula and reading lists are full of the myths of the founding civilizations – Greek, Roman, Norse, Celtic, Native American, and so on. Make sure too that children have the chance to read new fantasy, in which – let us hope – patterns of the future emerge from the mythic echoes of the past. Yes, we must do these things. But a great proportion of our children will never voluntarily open a book outside the doors of school, mostly because their parents don’t. They may never even be able properly to read, but become part of the mind-boggling percentage of functional illiterates which our educational system lets slip through the cracks. You can be pretty sure that when these children were between the ages of two and eleven, they were at the very high end of the scale which in a recent report produced an average figure, for children in that age group, of twenty-eight hours a week spent in front of a television set. Twenty-eight hours a week! Four hours a day, including schooldays! That’s my idea of hell, not pleasure – proof, if it were needed, that television is a drug.

The screen, small or large, is not intrinsically a bad thing. Like most other drugs, it can serve wonderful ends. The pressure of commerce keeps its standards low, but individuals of talent and determination can use the screen to re-create a mythological pattern as powerful as any story written down, or told aloud. And if one of them does it well, the results can be astounding. Star Wars and E.T. are both variants of the fantasy hero pattern that I was describing earlier; Luke Skywalker’s quest runs through “a galaxy far, far away,” and the little Extra-Terrestral comes from his world to ours and back again. More people have seen those two films, throughout the world, than have seen any other film ever made; not because they are the best films ever made, but because they managed, for a couple of hours, to satisfy the longings of the collective unconscious. “Mum!” said my children, as we left the cinema after seeing Star Wars twelve years ago, “it’s all about your books!” They sounded indignant, as if they felt George Lucas had been cribbing from The Dark is Rising, but of course he hadn’t; their indignation only served to point up the fact that where the archetypes of myth are concerned, there is no such thing as a new story. There is only, as Professor Tolkien observed, the cauldron of the story, which is available to all of us through the unconscious, and from which we all draw. Nearly every fantasy author I’ve ever met has had the experience of having a glorious new idea for a story, only to find that some bard or minstrel had the same idea eight hundred years ago.

Television does not produce fantasy of the quality of Star Wars. Nor very often does the cinema, for good and simple reasons. A few years ago I had an idea for what I thought was a fantasy novel, but when I began to work on it I found it wanted to be a film. The Cloud People, it was called. So I wrote it as a film treatment. It went to a number of producers from Steven Spielberg on down, and it came back again, and although there’s now an Englishman who has hopes for it, I very much doubt whether it will ever get made, even assuming it’s good of its kind. The trouble with my small story is that to become a film it would require a budget of at least thirty million dollars, and at the requisite rations of two-and-a-half to one, it would have to earn at least seventy-five million before it could even break even, let alone make a profit. That’s a large risk for a producer to take. I really wish The Cloud People had wanted to be a book.

So fantasy and its archetypal patterns are not going to reach a mass audience very often today. Even amongst that limited part of the population which reads books – books, not newspapers or magazines or escapist thrillers or romances – even amongst them, it isn’t going to reach everyone. Every teacher or librarian knows the sturdy child who is a dogged realist and thinks fantasy is for the birds. There are more children like that than there are fantasy readers, and from a practical point of view that’s probably just as well. Back in the mists of time, as everyone sat around the campfire listening to the shaman telling the sacred stories, there was always the realist in the group. “I don’t want to listen to those boring old myths,” he said, and he went off on his own and invented the wheel.

“Your books seem to fit me just right,” said the little girl. Those are the children we have to reach: to drop into that shadowy pool of their unconscious minds a few images that – perhaps, with luck – will echo through their lives and help them understand and even improve their world, our world. If America doesn’t have what Aristotle and Mr. Campbell call an ethos, if instead there is a gap, we need to make sure that our children are given an early awareness of the timeless, placeless archetypes of myth. And since we have no one single myth, that has to mean all the different – and yet similar – mythic patterns we inherit, collectively, in this country from our very diverse beginnings. I am speaking not only of ancient myth but of the modern fantasy which is its descendant, its inheritor. Like poetry, these are the books which speak most directly to the imagination. As Ursula Le Guin once wrote, “It is by such statements as ‘Once upon a time there was a dragon,’ or ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’ – it is by such beautiful non-facts that we fantastic human beings may arrive, in our peculiar fashion, at the truth.”

Parents, teachers, librarians, authors, publishers; we are the people with the responsibility for putting together the right child and the right book. Any child and any book will do, but it helps if they match.

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