“ I will discuss SF and its connection with Marxism and utopian socialism.” You could also look at fantasy utopian Marxism with the ideaology in the works of Ursula Le Guin. Perhaps over simplification of the left and right causes the argument to fall over, after all the left has only been around 200 years. It’s possible for anyone to romanticise and fantasise of utopias regardless of genre.
Thank you for the suggestion! I am certainly going to discuss Le Guin. And you are absolutely right that the distinction between right and left is provisional at best. There is a whole tradition of right-wing utopias, very prominent in the Weimar Republic. Some historians argue they heavily influenced Nazism. So speculative fiction is certainly enmeshed with political ideology.
It’s an interesting premise. Fascism as I understand the term was a specific historic movement curated by Mussolini as a reaction to Communism. In the modern epoch, the word has become a handy, albeit easy, trope to denote some broad application of oppressive rule.
Myself, I exercise restraint in uttering terms like “fascist” and “dictator,” as dark impulses and tendencies and worst-case scenarios swim below the surface of every individual’s psychic pool. (Dostoevsky, as you know, wrote about this without parallel.)
These arguments come along every epoch or so and have an irresistible allure. My suspicion is that our interpretation of works by Tolkien and others exist independently of their creators’ artistic intentions. Perhaps they speak more to the biases and psychological DNA, as it were, of the reader rather than those of the artist. (Unless you’re someone like a George Lucas, who very consciously — and conscientiously — modeled his whole fantasy-scape after Joseph Campbell. I tend to not love that mode of contrivance.)
I am using Roger Griffin’s definition of fascism. Griffin, one of the foremost experts on this ideology, defined fascism as a narrative of national regeneration through an apocalyptic and violent crisis. Historically, fascism and Nazism were different as the latter focused on race (not nation). Later on, they became closely connected, through not the same. And just to be clear, using fascism as a label to critique your political opponents is lazy and stupid.
Another fascinating essay! I am aware of Spinrad's book although I haven't read it. Two caveats: I think it's a mistake to focus on "The Lord of the Rings" as the only model for fantasy. I think other fantasy books even from the same era e.g. the Gormenghast books or "The Once and Future King" (the originally unpublished final volume of which is explicitly pacifist) complicate this scheme.
Also, while there's definitely a fantasy strain to Fascist ideology, I think there's also a (dystopian) science fiction one too. The Nazis at least genuinely saw themselves as a progressive (in the sense of forward-looking) ideology driven by science. We may dismiss eugenics as pseudo-science, but they thought it was real. When I first heard the term, "racial hygiene," I assumed it was a euphemism, but they really did think that mass murder on the grounds of race or disability was the same sort of thing as having an efficient sewage system and a vaccination programme.
You are absolutely correct on all points. My focus on LOTR was because of a recent online debate about the book being fascist (which seems to flare up periodically). Now it was because of Giorgia Meloni, of all people! I wanted to make it clear where I stood: Tolkien is not a fascist, but fascism is fantasy. However, a polemical essay like this necessarily omits or simplifies many points. I am planning several follow-ups, to consider the utopian strand in Nazism and communism and how they were different and similar. There is a great book on Nazi utopias: Peter Fisher, Fantasy and Politics: Visions of the Future in the Weimar Republic.
As for the genealogy of fantasy, it is so much more interesting and complicated that LOTR. Gormenghast is a stunning novel, but I would also add George McDonald (Christian fantasy) and Lord Dunsany. In fact, when I taught a seminar on fantasy, my students like The King of Elfland’s Daughter better than LOTR (also, it is considerably shorter).
I am a terrible person in some sci-fi/fantasy circles. I like The Hobbit. I loathe LoTR and it’s absolute black and white thinking. I prefer Stephen Donaldson to Tolkien even and dislike Star Wars as Campbell for The Crowd because I was 24 and at uni before I ever saw the original films.
I hate Star Wars! There, I said it! And I love Stephen Donaldson. I think he is under-appreciated. The first Thomas Covenant trilogy blew me away, and in some ways, the second one was even better.
I don’t hate Star Wars, but I do think it’s overrated and that most of the vast universe of content is disappointing. A lot of interesting stuff COULD be done with it, but it’s mostly crap.
Wow. I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve talked to someone who admitted to liking Thomas Covenant. I read them once when I was considerably younger. I didn’t find the story or world building to be all the compelling, but I loved that Donaldson was willing to challenge his readers with such a morally complex protagonist. I’ve thought about re-reading it, but my TBR list is absurdly long as it is….
The first trilogy of SW was great. After that, it was all downhill, so I guess I hate them because they disappointed me. And Donaldson is not a great stylist for sure, but I did find the world-building compelling, especially in the second trilogy with the destructive sunrises of different colors. And yes, the moral complex dilemma is startling in a genre that is used to black and white.
I haven't read a lot of fantasy. LotR and The Hobbit, as a kid. Song of Ice and Fire, when everyone else was. Recently, I've been reading Thomas Covenant, and while reading the idea of fantasy genre as fascist came to me by way of Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism essay. In particular, nostalgia for a romanticized unreal yet perfect past. While modernism is represented as unclean and degenerate. Covenant has leprosy, thus making him unclean and outcast in the modern world. Yet the fantasy realm he inhabits is stone age, filled with people of honor, fighting great forces of good and evil. Covenant must find a way to cast out his own uncleanliness, making him an anti-hero to this fantasy realm. He bridges the gap of degenerate evil to pastoral good, so the peoples of the fantasy realm may survive in war, and boy does that sound a whole lot like the mythology fascists would use to justify themselves. Just a thought.
A great reading of the Covenant series! I have to admit I liked it, even though Donaldson is not a great stylist. Still, I appreciated the epistemological hesitation in the series - is the Land real or just a hallucination? I don’t know of any other fantasy that uses this kind of epistemology as its main device. I also liked the second trilogy with its
weird imagery of the sick sun. This said, I agree with your interpretation. Certainly, fascism is an attempt to cure the social malaise through return to some imaginary wholeness of the past. Of course, this does not,Ean Donaldson was a fascist. It s all about the distinction between the ideology of the form (fantasy) and ideology of the content.
To be honest, I've just recently finished the first book, Lord Foul's Bane. And thinking about it is what led me to the idea of fantasy's relationship to fascism. I searched that wondering if I was crazy (or out on a limb) and found your post. Which I felt like, OK, so maybe some others see this too. Somewhat comforting.
I have mixed feelings about this book. The wooden prose is tough to slog through, though I get why it might stylistically be used to depict a fantasy realm. It's in 3rd Person, Free Indirect, which is often used to depict internal states of a protagonist without the clutter of excessive tags. Which brings up, who is the narrator? Free indirect implies that Covenant is the narrator, telling the story to himself. And the distinction between his own self-loathing versus the perceptions of external characters, who revere him, sets up a contrast for the character. So I get that. But I feel like, if that's what Donaldson was shooting for maybe he'd have been better off writing minimalist and objective prose during the early chapters where we see Covenant in the real world, then shifting to that wooden purpleish style for the fantasy realm. That could have made the contrast more obvious. Maybe? But that's a stylistic quibble, I guess.
On the nature of the two worlds, your epistemological point, this is clearly derivative of The Wizard of Oz. Is it real, is this story of that fantasy realm only in his head? This is a trope that Donaldson certainly isn't alone in using.
The rape scene early on is transgressive and very much of its era. I'd compare it to Bukowski's Post Office, where Henry Chinaski, also the protagonist, rapes a housewife while on his mail delivery route. But there's one difference, Chinaski's rape only affirms his despicable character. The housewife never returns to the story and never files charges. The idea of justice for this criminal act isn't even addressed. But Bukowski's work is intentionally transgressive, like similar works by William Burrows or the films of John Waters. Narrative transgression is baked into audience expectations with their work. But that clearly pissed off a lot of fantasy readers, especially in later years where readers have clearly been turned off to Donaldson's work by that scene alone. And I think one point to make about that scene, it's relationship to fascist ideology, is how the supporting characters justify Covenant's conduct. Atiaran, the mother of the girl he rapes, is tasked with leading Covenant on a journey. She learns of her daughter's rape at his hand, but instead of seeking vengeance she suborns her own (and daughter's) needs for that of the collective. This implies both that a collective is more important than the rights of individuals, and further, given the rigid aristocratic social stratification depicted, suggests that the merit of individual rights is relative to social status. And that's very fascist, which is built upon the idea of suborning one self to the needs of a collective. Fascism also demands sexual purity of the lower classes, while extolling the rights of depravity by the upper classes. See: Sade. So, by nature of his relative social status, Covington is given the defacto right to commit a sex crime.
We see many such depictions of that throughout Song of Ice and Fire too.
Getting back to Covington as an anti-hero, do you see similarities to Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces? Because Ignatius is also utterly pugnacious. You hate him and laugh at him, but it's early cringe humor. And it follows the same pattern where the reader sees this division between Ignatius' delusional self perception versus how external secondary characters see him. In Ignatius' case, to showcase his absurdity, whereas in Covenant's case, to showcase his self deprecation.
Why am I thinking so much about this damned book? Do I want to read more of the series? I have no idea. Should I? There's so much of it. And I'm really on the fence about whether it's actually good. lol
I think there are better fantasy books to read than the entire Covenant series. But the relationship between fantasy and fascism is real. I explored it in an academic paper called “Aliens Among Us: Fascism and Narrativity” which is available on ResearchGate and Academia.edu if you are interested.
You make a very interesting point about the narrative form of the novel. Covenant is the focalizer, not the narrator, but the transitions from free indirect discourse to omniscience are clumsily handled. Again, Donaldson is not a great writer. The epistemological hesitation is similar to “the fantastic” as described by Todorov but he never envisioned a mammoth fantasy series hinging on the “fantastic”, so I find this interesting.
As for the rape scene, I don’t know why it’s there. It adds nothing to the characterization and its shock value is minimal, at least for me (I am not easily shocked). Sexual violence is not exclusively the provenance of fascism, of course, and de Sade is not a fascist in any real sense of the word. So, I suspect that Donaldson just wanted to make his fantasy edgier and darker than the standard Tolkienesque fare but miscalculated.
Thanks for your interesting observations! And here is the link to my article
Thanks for the response! Yes, Tchaikovsky’s series is an interesting counter- example. But of course, not all fantasy or SF use the language of nausea and abjection to stigmatize the Other. Another counter-example would be Perdido Street Station by China Mieville in which the heroine has the body of a beetle instead of her head and yet represented as both intelligent and beautiful. SF allows for a variety of ideological positions. But when you change the form, you change the content (and vice versa). Incidentally, I also found Children of Time a narrative mess. And Brian’s Uplift series is better. Anyway, thanks again!
So I read your paper (took some time). The focus seems to be on Heinlein's The Pupper Masters and Starship Troopers (which I read as a kid), and The Turner Diaries (which I have not read, but know of).
I think the earlier part of your paper dealing with a historical connection to fascist literature during the Wiemar Republic resonated more with me, in particular your cite of Peter Fisher (who I didn't know about, but will look up).
One part of your text I made notes on: "Ideological hatred was translated into the language of nausea caused by the body on the 'alien,' while revolution became bodily purification."
Later there are two paragraphs about metaphors of monstrosity, where you cite Brian Attebery, on discourse of othering. Here, the argument is that purification by genocide is endemic to fantasy and science fiction in monster texts. And while I don't contradict this, I did write a note about Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which is one that is contrary to Attebery's (and your) thesis. In that, spiders are uplifted to sentience on a remote planet by a previous human civilization. The last remnants of humanity traveling in an interstellar ark find this planet and confront these spiders seeking to kill the pestilence and colonize the planet. But the spiders win the war, but instead of killing all the humans they genetically re-engineer the humans to accept the spiders as equals.
So, I see that that as a kind of a subversion of the fascist trope you write about. I read the book and didn't much like it, but only because I thought it was a stylistic mess and highly derivative of Brin. Still, if one believes your thesis, it's an attempt to counter prevailing fascist narrative in the genre, which is interesting.
Anyway, thank you for the read. And I'll be reading your substack as you post. Best wishes.
Interesting read! As you mention Jameson is applying his arguments a very specific type of fantasy i.e. "Epic" or "High" of which LOTR is the obvious example. It'd be interesting to explore Jameson's thinking within the context of some of the more recent forms (e.g. Urban Fantasy or The Weird) where (for the most part) there's much less racial manichaenism.
Yes indeed. Thank you for this suggestion. I am planning to address New Weird later, but it is pretty clear that what you call "racial Manicheanism" (I like this term) hardly applies to, say, Miéville's New Crobuzon books or Vandermeer's Southern Reach series. The whole question of what is, or is not, fantasy is fascinating to me. The book I edited recently "The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy" is about the varieties of fantasy across the globe. In my Introduction to this book I tried to give a more inclusive, yet targeted, definition of fantasy.
Yes, think you’re totally right. There’s a good case perhaps for viewing the new weird as radically anti-authoritarian in some ways. Vandermeer esp. can be read as very post-human. Might be interesting too to consider the intersection with this and the “old Weird” too like Blackwood, Barrows-Bennet and Machen et al.
A great idea, especially in relation to Blackwood and Machen, both of whom are, in my opinion, misunderstood and under-valued. I would also add William Hope Hodgson to this list. I read The Night Land as a struggle between nostalgic humanism and bleak anti-humanism in the vein of Nietzsche or H. G. Wells. This would account for the puzzle of its archaic language. I might even write this book after I finish all my current projects which should take me about...20 years tops? But seriously, a very interesting suggestion. Thank you.
Two (anec)data points that popped into my head from the title - there's an interview with Right-wing MK SImcha Rothman on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5IQ45_m2Wo that opens with him discussing blockbuster cinema with the interviewer, they mention Avatar 2, which Rothman explains to the interviewer is a leftist movie - all anti-colonialism and noble savages vs. the evils of industrial capitalism, and he goes on and says that in contrast, the Lord of the Rings is a Right-wing movie, it has what he calls a right-wing plot with clearly delineated good and evil, no uncertainty or doubt, no "maybe they have a good side" or "maybe Sauron has a point".
The other anecdote was at a visit to my barber this week. While chatting with another customer, he asked, in reference to Gaza, "so what are we going to do about those Orcs?"
So two examples demonstrating fascist viewpoints present in the Good vs. Evil Fantasy exemplified by Tolkien's work.
Thanks, Dotan! Great anecdotes both! I will add that when I gave a lecture outlining the connection between fantasy and fascism in TA, the one person in the audience who was in agreement was one of the POWs who first translated LOTR into Hebrew.
I agree. Fantasy is different today, and one of the ways in which it escapes its content of the form is, I think, via generic hybridization. Dark fantasy, science fantasy, urban fantasy create a different tradition - though in some ways, they also go bacl to the pre-Tolkien roots of fantasy in late-Victorian England.
It's interesting to think about how the supposed social realism of ASOIAF or, say, the historically grounded fantasies of Guy Gavriel Kay may work as an antidote to the ideology of form - or at least express a more complex approach. Have you read Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman? It's a shocking medieval horror set during the Black Death and the Avignon Papacy, with the magical aspects being rooted in the way medieval Catholics understood the world - e.g. literal saints, war in the heavens, etc. I daresay it feels more like a terrifying form of time travel than the usual fantasy tropes.
Thanks for the recommendation! No, I haven't read this novel but I should. I am getting very interested in historical horror as a genre. Until now, most of it was Victorian of later but I think medieval horror is gaining in popularity. I think that the rise of hybrid genres, such as dark fantasy, science fantasy and so on is creating new "ideologies of the form" in response to the cultural and political shifts.
Enjoyed your essay. Look forward to your discussion of “SF and its connection with Marxism and utopian socialism.” There are many issues with Lord of the Rings but I still consider that it is still the template upon all fantasy that follows is measured.
Thank you! I have already started working on Part 2 and there is lot to say. I have no issues with Tolkien. I used to love LOTR but I just got tired of its endless remakes/imitations/pastiches in epic fantasy and moved on to dark fantasy and SF.
Oh, I love LOTR and will undertake a reread in the near future. But its failure to address the economics of Middle Earth continues to annoy me. Also, I do not associate the Orcs and Uruks with black skinned peoples but I am suspicious and annoying that all the heroic peoples are white skinned. For me at best it is unconscious racism.
I frequently see this idea, that LOTR is the well-spring of the entire fantasy genre, and I understand why people say this. I would qualify it, that it's the inspiration for a very popular swath of the genre, particularly dealing in quest narratives and based on northern European folklore.
Contrast that with a series like Malazan Book of the Fallen, which is more Homeric than Tolkienian, and is inspired by Robert E. Howard, Vietnam War literature, and anthropology. Or for that matter, Le Guin's fantasy, which owes little to Tolkien and a lot to Taoism.
All that to say, there are non-Tolkien-derived fantasy novels/series, but he certainly helped create a market for them.
When I taught a seminar on the origin of fantasy, I excluded Tolkien (largely because I find him boring). We did Lord Dunsany, Robert Howard, Lewis, Le Guin, Vandermeer, China Miéville, and Neil Gaiman. I probably should have included Malazan but could not inflict a giant series on my students. When I tried to make them read Martin's Songs of Ice and Fire, they rebelled and said it was the history of England with dragons (true). But I found some early Martin's novellas which work as science fantasy. All this is to say that there is a lot of fantasy outside of LOTR (thankfully!)
Equation is a figure of speech. But the items appear to be taken for the same right from the beginning of your essay. Do you want me to quote your words?
“ I will discuss SF and its connection with Marxism and utopian socialism.” You could also look at fantasy utopian Marxism with the ideaology in the works of Ursula Le Guin. Perhaps over simplification of the left and right causes the argument to fall over, after all the left has only been around 200 years. It’s possible for anyone to romanticise and fantasise of utopias regardless of genre.
Thank you for the suggestion! I am certainly going to discuss Le Guin. And you are absolutely right that the distinction between right and left is provisional at best. There is a whole tradition of right-wing utopias, very prominent in the Weimar Republic. Some historians argue they heavily influenced Nazism. So speculative fiction is certainly enmeshed with political ideology.
Sorry I meant liberal democracies have only been around since the Age of Enlightenment, not the left has been around 200 years.
It’s an interesting premise. Fascism as I understand the term was a specific historic movement curated by Mussolini as a reaction to Communism. In the modern epoch, the word has become a handy, albeit easy, trope to denote some broad application of oppressive rule.
Myself, I exercise restraint in uttering terms like “fascist” and “dictator,” as dark impulses and tendencies and worst-case scenarios swim below the surface of every individual’s psychic pool. (Dostoevsky, as you know, wrote about this without parallel.)
These arguments come along every epoch or so and have an irresistible allure. My suspicion is that our interpretation of works by Tolkien and others exist independently of their creators’ artistic intentions. Perhaps they speak more to the biases and psychological DNA, as it were, of the reader rather than those of the artist. (Unless you’re someone like a George Lucas, who very consciously — and conscientiously — modeled his whole fantasy-scape after Joseph Campbell. I tend to not love that mode of contrivance.)
I am using Roger Griffin’s definition of fascism. Griffin, one of the foremost experts on this ideology, defined fascism as a narrative of national regeneration through an apocalyptic and violent crisis. Historically, fascism and Nazism were different as the latter focused on race (not nation). Later on, they became closely connected, through not the same. And just to be clear, using fascism as a label to critique your political opponents is lazy and stupid.
Another fascinating essay! I am aware of Spinrad's book although I haven't read it. Two caveats: I think it's a mistake to focus on "The Lord of the Rings" as the only model for fantasy. I think other fantasy books even from the same era e.g. the Gormenghast books or "The Once and Future King" (the originally unpublished final volume of which is explicitly pacifist) complicate this scheme.
Also, while there's definitely a fantasy strain to Fascist ideology, I think there's also a (dystopian) science fiction one too. The Nazis at least genuinely saw themselves as a progressive (in the sense of forward-looking) ideology driven by science. We may dismiss eugenics as pseudo-science, but they thought it was real. When I first heard the term, "racial hygiene," I assumed it was a euphemism, but they really did think that mass murder on the grounds of race or disability was the same sort of thing as having an efficient sewage system and a vaccination programme.
You are absolutely correct on all points. My focus on LOTR was because of a recent online debate about the book being fascist (which seems to flare up periodically). Now it was because of Giorgia Meloni, of all people! I wanted to make it clear where I stood: Tolkien is not a fascist, but fascism is fantasy. However, a polemical essay like this necessarily omits or simplifies many points. I am planning several follow-ups, to consider the utopian strand in Nazism and communism and how they were different and similar. There is a great book on Nazi utopias: Peter Fisher, Fantasy and Politics: Visions of the Future in the Weimar Republic.
As for the genealogy of fantasy, it is so much more interesting and complicated that LOTR. Gormenghast is a stunning novel, but I would also add George McDonald (Christian fantasy) and Lord Dunsany. In fact, when I taught a seminar on fantasy, my students like The King of Elfland’s Daughter better than LOTR (also, it is considerably shorter).
I look forward to those follow-up essays!
I am a terrible person in some sci-fi/fantasy circles. I like The Hobbit. I loathe LoTR and it’s absolute black and white thinking. I prefer Stephen Donaldson to Tolkien even and dislike Star Wars as Campbell for The Crowd because I was 24 and at uni before I ever saw the original films.
I hate Star Wars! There, I said it! And I love Stephen Donaldson. I think he is under-appreciated. The first Thomas Covenant trilogy blew me away, and in some ways, the second one was even better.
I don’t hate Star Wars, but I do think it’s overrated and that most of the vast universe of content is disappointing. A lot of interesting stuff COULD be done with it, but it’s mostly crap.
Wow. I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve talked to someone who admitted to liking Thomas Covenant. I read them once when I was considerably younger. I didn’t find the story or world building to be all the compelling, but I loved that Donaldson was willing to challenge his readers with such a morally complex protagonist. I’ve thought about re-reading it, but my TBR list is absurdly long as it is….
The first trilogy of SW was great. After that, it was all downhill, so I guess I hate them because they disappointed me. And Donaldson is not a great stylist for sure, but I did find the world-building compelling, especially in the second trilogy with the destructive sunrises of different colors. And yes, the moral complex dilemma is startling in a genre that is used to black and white.
Absolutely!! I’ve even tried to watch the pre sequels and such and they annoy or bore me, much like the Herbert Jr/Anderson Dune books.
Keith Roberts “Pavane” is my favorite alt history fantasy. Can’t heart response on my iPhone
I haven't read a lot of fantasy. LotR and The Hobbit, as a kid. Song of Ice and Fire, when everyone else was. Recently, I've been reading Thomas Covenant, and while reading the idea of fantasy genre as fascist came to me by way of Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism essay. In particular, nostalgia for a romanticized unreal yet perfect past. While modernism is represented as unclean and degenerate. Covenant has leprosy, thus making him unclean and outcast in the modern world. Yet the fantasy realm he inhabits is stone age, filled with people of honor, fighting great forces of good and evil. Covenant must find a way to cast out his own uncleanliness, making him an anti-hero to this fantasy realm. He bridges the gap of degenerate evil to pastoral good, so the peoples of the fantasy realm may survive in war, and boy does that sound a whole lot like the mythology fascists would use to justify themselves. Just a thought.
A great reading of the Covenant series! I have to admit I liked it, even though Donaldson is not a great stylist. Still, I appreciated the epistemological hesitation in the series - is the Land real or just a hallucination? I don’t know of any other fantasy that uses this kind of epistemology as its main device. I also liked the second trilogy with its
weird imagery of the sick sun. This said, I agree with your interpretation. Certainly, fascism is an attempt to cure the social malaise through return to some imaginary wholeness of the past. Of course, this does not,Ean Donaldson was a fascist. It s all about the distinction between the ideology of the form (fantasy) and ideology of the content.
To be honest, I've just recently finished the first book, Lord Foul's Bane. And thinking about it is what led me to the idea of fantasy's relationship to fascism. I searched that wondering if I was crazy (or out on a limb) and found your post. Which I felt like, OK, so maybe some others see this too. Somewhat comforting.
I have mixed feelings about this book. The wooden prose is tough to slog through, though I get why it might stylistically be used to depict a fantasy realm. It's in 3rd Person, Free Indirect, which is often used to depict internal states of a protagonist without the clutter of excessive tags. Which brings up, who is the narrator? Free indirect implies that Covenant is the narrator, telling the story to himself. And the distinction between his own self-loathing versus the perceptions of external characters, who revere him, sets up a contrast for the character. So I get that. But I feel like, if that's what Donaldson was shooting for maybe he'd have been better off writing minimalist and objective prose during the early chapters where we see Covenant in the real world, then shifting to that wooden purpleish style for the fantasy realm. That could have made the contrast more obvious. Maybe? But that's a stylistic quibble, I guess.
On the nature of the two worlds, your epistemological point, this is clearly derivative of The Wizard of Oz. Is it real, is this story of that fantasy realm only in his head? This is a trope that Donaldson certainly isn't alone in using.
The rape scene early on is transgressive and very much of its era. I'd compare it to Bukowski's Post Office, where Henry Chinaski, also the protagonist, rapes a housewife while on his mail delivery route. But there's one difference, Chinaski's rape only affirms his despicable character. The housewife never returns to the story and never files charges. The idea of justice for this criminal act isn't even addressed. But Bukowski's work is intentionally transgressive, like similar works by William Burrows or the films of John Waters. Narrative transgression is baked into audience expectations with their work. But that clearly pissed off a lot of fantasy readers, especially in later years where readers have clearly been turned off to Donaldson's work by that scene alone. And I think one point to make about that scene, it's relationship to fascist ideology, is how the supporting characters justify Covenant's conduct. Atiaran, the mother of the girl he rapes, is tasked with leading Covenant on a journey. She learns of her daughter's rape at his hand, but instead of seeking vengeance she suborns her own (and daughter's) needs for that of the collective. This implies both that a collective is more important than the rights of individuals, and further, given the rigid aristocratic social stratification depicted, suggests that the merit of individual rights is relative to social status. And that's very fascist, which is built upon the idea of suborning one self to the needs of a collective. Fascism also demands sexual purity of the lower classes, while extolling the rights of depravity by the upper classes. See: Sade. So, by nature of his relative social status, Covington is given the defacto right to commit a sex crime.
We see many such depictions of that throughout Song of Ice and Fire too.
Getting back to Covington as an anti-hero, do you see similarities to Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces? Because Ignatius is also utterly pugnacious. You hate him and laugh at him, but it's early cringe humor. And it follows the same pattern where the reader sees this division between Ignatius' delusional self perception versus how external secondary characters see him. In Ignatius' case, to showcase his absurdity, whereas in Covenant's case, to showcase his self deprecation.
Why am I thinking so much about this damned book? Do I want to read more of the series? I have no idea. Should I? There's so much of it. And I'm really on the fence about whether it's actually good. lol
I think there are better fantasy books to read than the entire Covenant series. But the relationship between fantasy and fascism is real. I explored it in an academic paper called “Aliens Among Us: Fascism and Narrativity” which is available on ResearchGate and Academia.edu if you are interested.
You make a very interesting point about the narrative form of the novel. Covenant is the focalizer, not the narrator, but the transitions from free indirect discourse to omniscience are clumsily handled. Again, Donaldson is not a great writer. The epistemological hesitation is similar to “the fantastic” as described by Todorov but he never envisioned a mammoth fantasy series hinging on the “fantastic”, so I find this interesting.
As for the rape scene, I don’t know why it’s there. It adds nothing to the characterization and its shock value is minimal, at least for me (I am not easily shocked). Sexual violence is not exclusively the provenance of fascism, of course, and de Sade is not a fascist in any real sense of the word. So, I suspect that Donaldson just wanted to make his fantasy edgier and darker than the standard Tolkienesque fare but miscalculated.
Thanks for your interesting observations! And here is the link to my article
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241897241_Aliens_Among_Us_Fascism_and_Narrativity
Thanks for the response! Yes, Tchaikovsky’s series is an interesting counter- example. But of course, not all fantasy or SF use the language of nausea and abjection to stigmatize the Other. Another counter-example would be Perdido Street Station by China Mieville in which the heroine has the body of a beetle instead of her head and yet represented as both intelligent and beautiful. SF allows for a variety of ideological positions. But when you change the form, you change the content (and vice versa). Incidentally, I also found Children of Time a narrative mess. And Brian’s Uplift series is better. Anyway, thanks again!
I don't know China Mieville's work or the book. I'll check that out. Thanks for the recommendation!
Professor Gomel,
So I read your paper (took some time). The focus seems to be on Heinlein's The Pupper Masters and Starship Troopers (which I read as a kid), and The Turner Diaries (which I have not read, but know of).
I think the earlier part of your paper dealing with a historical connection to fascist literature during the Wiemar Republic resonated more with me, in particular your cite of Peter Fisher (who I didn't know about, but will look up).
One part of your text I made notes on: "Ideological hatred was translated into the language of nausea caused by the body on the 'alien,' while revolution became bodily purification."
Later there are two paragraphs about metaphors of monstrosity, where you cite Brian Attebery, on discourse of othering. Here, the argument is that purification by genocide is endemic to fantasy and science fiction in monster texts. And while I don't contradict this, I did write a note about Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which is one that is contrary to Attebery's (and your) thesis. In that, spiders are uplifted to sentience on a remote planet by a previous human civilization. The last remnants of humanity traveling in an interstellar ark find this planet and confront these spiders seeking to kill the pestilence and colonize the planet. But the spiders win the war, but instead of killing all the humans they genetically re-engineer the humans to accept the spiders as equals.
So, I see that that as a kind of a subversion of the fascist trope you write about. I read the book and didn't much like it, but only because I thought it was a stylistic mess and highly derivative of Brin. Still, if one believes your thesis, it's an attempt to counter prevailing fascist narrative in the genre, which is interesting.
Anyway, thank you for the read. And I'll be reading your substack as you post. Best wishes.
I will check your paper out. Thank you!
Interesting read! As you mention Jameson is applying his arguments a very specific type of fantasy i.e. "Epic" or "High" of which LOTR is the obvious example. It'd be interesting to explore Jameson's thinking within the context of some of the more recent forms (e.g. Urban Fantasy or The Weird) where (for the most part) there's much less racial manichaenism.
Yes indeed. Thank you for this suggestion. I am planning to address New Weird later, but it is pretty clear that what you call "racial Manicheanism" (I like this term) hardly applies to, say, Miéville's New Crobuzon books or Vandermeer's Southern Reach series. The whole question of what is, or is not, fantasy is fascinating to me. The book I edited recently "The Palgrave Handbook of Global Fantasy" is about the varieties of fantasy across the globe. In my Introduction to this book I tried to give a more inclusive, yet targeted, definition of fantasy.
Yes, think you’re totally right. There’s a good case perhaps for viewing the new weird as radically anti-authoritarian in some ways. Vandermeer esp. can be read as very post-human. Might be interesting too to consider the intersection with this and the “old Weird” too like Blackwood, Barrows-Bennet and Machen et al.
A great idea, especially in relation to Blackwood and Machen, both of whom are, in my opinion, misunderstood and under-valued. I would also add William Hope Hodgson to this list. I read The Night Land as a struggle between nostalgic humanism and bleak anti-humanism in the vein of Nietzsche or H. G. Wells. This would account for the puzzle of its archaic language. I might even write this book after I finish all my current projects which should take me about...20 years tops? But seriously, a very interesting suggestion. Thank you.
Two (anec)data points that popped into my head from the title - there's an interview with Right-wing MK SImcha Rothman on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5IQ45_m2Wo that opens with him discussing blockbuster cinema with the interviewer, they mention Avatar 2, which Rothman explains to the interviewer is a leftist movie - all anti-colonialism and noble savages vs. the evils of industrial capitalism, and he goes on and says that in contrast, the Lord of the Rings is a Right-wing movie, it has what he calls a right-wing plot with clearly delineated good and evil, no uncertainty or doubt, no "maybe they have a good side" or "maybe Sauron has a point".
The other anecdote was at a visit to my barber this week. While chatting with another customer, he asked, in reference to Gaza, "so what are we going to do about those Orcs?"
So two examples demonstrating fascist viewpoints present in the Good vs. Evil Fantasy exemplified by Tolkien's work.
Thanks, Dotan! Great anecdotes both! I will add that when I gave a lecture outlining the connection between fantasy and fascism in TA, the one person in the audience who was in agreement was one of the POWs who first translated LOTR into Hebrew.
Thanks for this! It was great to learn about The Iron Dream, it sounds like a very clever and thought provoking book.
> Fantasy today, even epic fantasy, is not the same as in the 1950s days of LOTR
I would have loved to hear more about the ways in which modern fantasy escapes from any possible labelling as fascist?
I agree. Fantasy is different today, and one of the ways in which it escapes its content of the form is, I think, via generic hybridization. Dark fantasy, science fantasy, urban fantasy create a different tradition - though in some ways, they also go bacl to the pre-Tolkien roots of fantasy in late-Victorian England.
It's interesting to think about how the supposed social realism of ASOIAF or, say, the historically grounded fantasies of Guy Gavriel Kay may work as an antidote to the ideology of form - or at least express a more complex approach. Have you read Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman? It's a shocking medieval horror set during the Black Death and the Avignon Papacy, with the magical aspects being rooted in the way medieval Catholics understood the world - e.g. literal saints, war in the heavens, etc. I daresay it feels more like a terrifying form of time travel than the usual fantasy tropes.
Thanks for the recommendation! No, I haven't read this novel but I should. I am getting very interested in historical horror as a genre. Until now, most of it was Victorian of later but I think medieval horror is gaining in popularity. I think that the rise of hybrid genres, such as dark fantasy, science fantasy and so on is creating new "ideologies of the form" in response to the cultural and political shifts.
Enjoyed your essay. Look forward to your discussion of “SF and its connection with Marxism and utopian socialism.” There are many issues with Lord of the Rings but I still consider that it is still the template upon all fantasy that follows is measured.
Thank you! I have already started working on Part 2 and there is lot to say. I have no issues with Tolkien. I used to love LOTR but I just got tired of its endless remakes/imitations/pastiches in epic fantasy and moved on to dark fantasy and SF.
Oh, I love LOTR and will undertake a reread in the near future. But its failure to address the economics of Middle Earth continues to annoy me. Also, I do not associate the Orcs and Uruks with black skinned peoples but I am suspicious and annoying that all the heroic peoples are white skinned. For me at best it is unconscious racism.
I frequently see this idea, that LOTR is the well-spring of the entire fantasy genre, and I understand why people say this. I would qualify it, that it's the inspiration for a very popular swath of the genre, particularly dealing in quest narratives and based on northern European folklore.
Contrast that with a series like Malazan Book of the Fallen, which is more Homeric than Tolkienian, and is inspired by Robert E. Howard, Vietnam War literature, and anthropology. Or for that matter, Le Guin's fantasy, which owes little to Tolkien and a lot to Taoism.
All that to say, there are non-Tolkien-derived fantasy novels/series, but he certainly helped create a market for them.
When I taught a seminar on the origin of fantasy, I excluded Tolkien (largely because I find him boring). We did Lord Dunsany, Robert Howard, Lewis, Le Guin, Vandermeer, China Miéville, and Neil Gaiman. I probably should have included Malazan but could not inflict a giant series on my students. When I tried to make them read Martin's Songs of Ice and Fire, they rebelled and said it was the history of England with dragons (true). But I found some early Martin's novellas which work as science fantasy. All this is to say that there is a lot of fantasy outside of LOTR (thankfully!)
I stopped after the easy equation of “the right” and Fascist, just as I would after a similar equation of “the left” and Communist.
Where did you this equation?
Equation is a figure of speech. But the items appear to be taken for the same right from the beginning of your essay. Do you want me to quote your words?