How the law of symbols applies to tales of fantasy, and is the author’s best friend
One of the seminal works at all fantasy writers ought to read is Sigmund Freud’s book on dreams. In this book one of the primary truths about dreams that Freud announces, is that dreams show us things that are two things at once – or are even more than two things at one and the same time.
Of course, artists and madmen have long been aware of such things as symbols. And long, long ago – when all tales were fantasy tales, and the realistic and rational world that we live in today had not yet been invented – the notion that some object or person could beat itself and at the same time something entirely different was a commonplace. A burning bush was God, a young herald in the army was also the god Apollo, and so forth.
But then, alas, the realistic and rational world was invented, and we were all condemned to live in it from cradle to grave, without any choice or say in the matter. We who have thus been condemned to a life and the world in which each and every object, person, animal and plant can be nothing besides itself, have the most difficult time in imagining what our ancestors of ages past knew as easily as breathing. So we are impoverished in our imagination, and power attempts at fantasy are laughably simple and even I might say crippled, halt and lame. Some of us cannot even imagine a world of fantasy, and we are compelled to create ‘rules’ that govern our magical objects and powers, and are harshly critical of stories in which there are no ‘rules’ governing their magical objects creatures and powers.
This worst of all limits ourselves in the very mechanics of our tales. In a fantasy tale, because every single character, object, animal and plant can be both itself and something else – anything else – as well as a third thing, at one and the same time, any plot device and story turn is possible.
Remember this, the next time you have any trouble with your fantasy story. There is no story difficulty that cannot be solved with a little recourse to magic. More than this, when you tell a fantasy tale you can tell two stories at ones – or three or more. If you want your hair out to be a prince, he can be a prince; but if you would also like to tell the story where the prince is a pauper, you can do that as well – all in the same tale. If you want the heroine to end up with George, she can do so; if you also find yourself feeling a little sorry for Edgar, she can end up with him as well, because George and Edgar can be the same person.
This comes up as a result of a note from Bardelys, who for a long time struggled with one of his tales. He couldn’t decide whether his young hero should be in the end revealed as a prince, or a nobody who helped a prince. The ‘Prince’ model is the typical, what I call ‘American Superboy’ model. In America, all our heroes must be princes, and in the fantasy tales, any son-of-a-nobody will in the end be shown to be in truth the son of a king, or or some powerful magician, or to have unusual powers of his own, or to be the Fated or Destined One of Ancient Prophecy (or multiples of these combined).
How very different was Tolkien’s model of the humble Hobbit, who in both The Hobbit, or There and Back Again and in The Lord of the Rings had his hobbits as mere helpers, and not princes themselves. (We can argue that Bilbo had common-sense shrewdness and resisted better than Dwarves Men or Elves the madness of lust for Dragon’s Gold, and that Frodo had extreme powers to resist the commands of the Ring; but I imagine that Tolkien would have insisted that these are the virtues of the common English peasant and reveal more of a reverse snobbery than any insistence that Bilbo and Frodo were extremely virtuous in any way. Tolkien’s very point was that the hobbits had more in them than the great and wise could guess on first glance.)
So Bardelys, having already built up his structure with the boy as a revealed Prince, thought better of it, and asked himself, ‘Yes, but what if he is a nobody all the way through?’ He liked this notion, and set up a parallel structure. Along the way he had to give up some things, of course, and in the end, he grudgingly returned to the Prince model.
And yet he kept looking back with longing at the notion that the boy would be a nobody through and through… And so in the end he managed it, by having the boy both a Prince and a nobody all the way through. To see how he managed it, you must read the full tale … if he ever gets around to finishing it.
(Composed by dictation Sunday 5 April 2009)
