On the Thinness of Fantasy Thinking

Regular readers can give themselves a treat and listen to/watch this fascinating discussion of the philosophy of Owen Barfield. You don't need to know anything about Barfield to enjoy it (I didn't, except that he was a member of 'the Inklings' along with CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien) - what you hear will make you very curious.

The conversation's subject, really, is the way in which ancient people thought - and its difference to how modern people not only think but think about thinking. It ranges across all manner of subjects, from the importance of religion and the gods, the 'nature' of nature, the distinction between process-based understandings of human interaction with the world and dualistic/instrumental ones (very McGilchristian one for you McGilchristians among my readership), the bicameral and unicameral mind, and so on. But ultimately I suppose the most fascinating observation of all comes right at the beginning: why is it that, for all that modern people have read and written about the classical philosophers, there is still a sense that we don't quite know what they were driving at, and our understanding of their work seems so thin?

I have often been similarly disappointed with fantasy writers and fantasy role playing games in this regard. It just so happens that I am currently re-reading Julian May's Sage of Pliocene Exile after it came up in conversation on StuPat's blog, and have been very struck by this sense of disappointment during my reading. Don't get me wrong: I think Julian May was a very gifted storyteller and writer, if a little hackneyed in her dialogue and characterisation, but what impresses me about the various alien and early-hominid characters she creates is how thoroughly modern their thoughts and concerns are. In their needs, desires and perceptions of reality they are totally comprehensible and relatable to a contemporary readership - and this just doesn't ring true to the richness of difference that must surely exist between a late 20th/early 21st century reader and a member of a race from a foreign planet or a people from a distant time.

What you could say about Julian May is of course true of 99% or more of fantasy fiction (think of how George RR Martin's characters all behave - like us, but a bit more sociopathic and 'Machiavellian', or think of the internal dialogue of China Mieville's characters and how completely they come across as modern day Londoners even while purpotedly inhabiting Bas-Lag). Nobody ever stops to consider how different the structure of thought itself would be in a world in which magic genuinely exists; in which there are actually supernatural entities walking around; in which there really are many gods with whom one could personally interact. What would it mean to be a human being in those circumstances? How would humans think about themselves and, indeed, about the nature of thinking? How would one interpret one's relationship to the magical and divine?

To give a brief entry point into how big and interesting these questions are, the discussants in the Barfield discussion I linked to earlier on bring up the ancient Greek word pneuma (which apparently has cognates in many other ancient languages), which simultaneously meant both wind, breath, and spirit. To the ancient Greeks, it seems, these concepts were not distinct, but the same, and Plato even describes this concept as being a process wherein what we call the 'wind' is taken into the body in the 'breath' and becomes 'spirit'. What, phenomenologically, would it be like to concieve of things in this way: the act of breathing, and hence living, being part of the same unity as the wind itself? And what would this mean for one's understanding of the world around one?

To give another from my own experience: imagine there is somebody who you vaguely know or have seen around and who you find attractive - not just objectively physically but because there is 'something about them'. You'll know what I mean, I'm sure. How would you describe that feeling? You might say you fancy them, if you're where I'm from, or that they're 'fit'. In Japanese, somebody would, informally, say something rather like ano hito ga nanka ki ni naru, meaning that, with regard to that person, 'something happens to my spirit'. The nuance is totally different, and so, also, I think, the thought itself. It's not just the use of a different word, but the use of a different concept, which says something different about the nature of the relationship between beholder and beheld.

The only fantasy writers who I think come close to capturing something of what I am talking about - going somewhat deeper into the matter of how different the human experience would be in a world not our own - are JRR Tolkien and Gene Wolfe (and it's probably no accident in this regard that Wolfe was such a Tolkien fan). For Tolkien himself it was probably a case of having imbibed so much in the way of medieval texts in various languages that he almost unconsciously developed the capacity to think in a different way; for Gene Wolfe it seems to have been an act simply of great creative genius and imaginative insight. (Think of the scene in the last book of The Book of the New Sun with the storytelling contest, for example, to see this creative power at work.) There may also be a hint of this ability shown in M. John Harrison's Viriconium stories, too: a genuine attempt to think through how people in the very distant future would themselves think. 

But it is vanishingly rare in my experience. And what is rare in fantasy fiction is even rarer in fantasy role playing games (is Pendragon or Ars Magica an exception?). Let's leave aside the question of what it would really feel like to 'be' a dwarf or an elf. What it would really feel like to be a human being in a standard D&D-type world? According to almost everything I've ever read, it would be like being a modern post-enlightenment liberal person but running around in chainmail or a spangly star-covered magician's robe. How would such people think, and how would they regard the world around them and the other living things within it? Well, like a modern post-enlightement liberal person given the incentives thrust upon them by the game system to gather gold and XP.

This is fun, but imaginarily unsatisfying and, to use the word I deployed earlier, thin. I understand why things are that way: it's because sitting around trying to operationalise abstract ideas about the structure of thought is not exactly an exercise that has mass-market appeal. I'm not even arguing it would have appeal for me, most of the time. But it would have appeal some of the time, and I'm interested in the exercise of trying.