I’ve finished two superlative works of art in the last few days, and I hope to write something about each of them. The first was One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and I first thought I might write a formal review. But what could I possibly add by my blatherings to one of the most celebrated and analyzed books of the 20th century? Better to let Marquez speak for himself.

I present the following long quote from near the beginning of the book. I nearly wept the first time I read this. A parable (he who has ears, let him hear), for we who wait in absurd rooms and hope to receive a draught of that gentle liquid and remember.

No one was alarmed at first. On the contrary, they were happy at not sleeping because there was so much to do in Macondo in those days that there was barely enough time. They worked so hard that soon they had nothing else to do and they could be found at three o’clock in the morning with their arms crossed, counting the notes in the waltz of the clock. Those who wanted to sleep, not from fatigue but because of the nostalgia for dreams, tried all kinds of methods of exhausting themselves. They would gather together to converse endlessly, to tell over and over for hours on end the same jokes, to complicate to the limits of exasperation the story about the capon, which was an endless game in which the narrator asked if they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon, and when they answered yes, the narrator would say that he had not asked them to say yes, but whether they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon, and when they answered no, the narrator told them that he had not asked them to say no, but whether they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon, and when they remained silent the narrator told them that he had not asked them to remain silent but whether they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon, and no one could leave because the narrator would say that he had not asked them to leave but whether they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon, and so on and on in a vicious circle that lasted entire nights.

When Jose Arcadio Buendia realized that the plague had invaded the town, he gathered together the heads of families to explain to them what he knew about the sickness of insomnia, and they agreed on methods to prevent the scourge from spreading to other towns in the swamp. That was why they took the bells off the goats, bells that the Arabs had swapped them for macaws, and put them at the entrance to town at the disposal of those who would not listen to the advice and entreaties of the sentinels and insisted on visiting the town. All strangers who passed, through the streets of Macondo at that time had to ring their bells so that the sick people would know that they were healthy. They were not allowed to eat or drink anything during their stay, for there was no doubt but that the illness was transmitted by mouth, and all food and drink had been contaminated by insomnia. In that way they kept the plague restricted to the perimeter of the town. So effective was the quarantine that the day came when the emergency situation was accepted as a natural thing and life was organized in such a way that work picked up its rhythm again and no one worried any more about the useless habit of sleeping.

It was Aureliano who conceived the formula that was to protect them against loss of memory for several months. He discovered it by chance. An expert insomniac, having been one of the first, he had learned the art of silver work to perfection. One day he was looking for the small anvil that he used for laminating metals and he could not remember its name. His father told him: “Stake.” Aureliano wrote the name on a piece of paper that he pasted to the base of the small anvil: stake. In that way he was sure of not forgetting it in the future. It did not occur to him that this was the first manifestation of a loss of memory, because the object had a difficult name to remember. But a few days later he discovered that he had trouble remembering almost every object in the laboratory. Then he marked them with their respective names so that all he had to do was read the inscription in order to identify them. When his father told him about his alarm at having forgotten even the most impressive happenings of his childhood, Aureliano explained his method to him, and Jose Arcadio Buendia put it into practice all through the house and later on imposed it on the whole village. With an inked brush he marked everything with its name: table, chair; clock, door; wall, bed, pan. He went to the corral and marked the animals and plants: cow, goat, pig, hen, cassava, caladium, banana. Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use. Then he was more explicit. The sign that he hung on the neck of the cow was an exemplary proof of the way in which the inhabitants of Macondo were prepared to fight against loss of memory: This is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk. Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.

At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a sign that said MACONDO and another larger one on the main street that said GOD EXISTS. In all the houses keys to memorizing objects and feelings had been written. But the system demanded so much vigilance and moral strength that many succumbed to the spell of an imaginary reality, one invented by themselves, which was less practical for them but more comforting. Pilar Ternera was the one who contributed most to popularize that mystification when she conceived the trick of reading the past in cards as she had read the future before. By means of that recourse the insomniacs began to live in a reality built on the uncertain alternatives of the cards, where a father was remembered faintly as the dark man who had arrived at the beginning of April and a mother was remembered only as the dark woman who wore a gold ring on her left hand, and where a birth date was reduced to the last Tuesday on which a lark sang in the laurel tree. Defeated by those practices of consolation, Jose Arcadio Buendia then decided to build the memory machine that he had desired once in order to remember the marvelous inventions of the gypsies. The artifact was based on the possibility of reviewing every morning, from beginning to end, the totality of knowledge acquired during one’s life. He conceived of it as a spinning dictionary that a person placed on the axis could operate by means of a lever, so that in very few hours there would pass before his eyes the notions most necessary for life. He had succeeded in writing almost fourteen thousand entries when along the road from the swamp a strange looking old man with the sad sleepers’ bell appeared, carrying a bulging suitcase tied with a rope and pulling a cart covered with black cloth. The old man went straight to the house of Jose Arcadio Buendia.

Visitacion did not recognize him when she opened the door and she thought he had come with the idea of selling something, unaware that nothing could be sold in a town that was sinking irrevocably into the quicksand of forgetfulness. He was a decrepit man. Although his voice was also broken by uncertainty and his hands seemed to doubt the existence of things, it was evident that he came from the world where men could still sleep and remember. Jose Arcadio Buendia was found sitting in the living room fanning himself with a patched black hat as he read with compassionate attention the signals pasted to the walls. The old man greeted him with a broad show of affection, afraid that he had known him at another time and that he did not remember him now. But the visitor was aware of his falseness. The old man felt himself forgotten, not with the irremediable forgetfulness of the heart, but with a different kind of forgetfulness, which was more cruel and irrevocable and which he knew very well because it was the forgetfulness of death. Then he understood. He opened the suitcase crammed with indecipherable objects and from among them he took out a little case with many flasks. He gave Jose Arcadio Buendia a drink of a gentle color and the light went on in his memory. His eyes became moist from weeping even before he noticed himself in an absurd living room where objects were labeled and before he was ashamed of the solemn nonsense written on the walls, and even before he recognized the newcomer with a dazzling glow of joy.

Leo Grin kicked a hornets nest late last week when he asserted that modern fantasy is represents a nihilistic turn away from the glorious heritage of Robert E. Howard and JRR Tolkein. I’ve been following the article and its responses across the net since then, trying to come up with something to say about the proceedings, though at this point the conversation is too broad for me to do more than poke at the most interesting bits. But such interesting bits those are!

I’m more than a little sympathetic to Grin’s complaint, as I had suffered the same thing with the disappointment of Chronicles of the Black Company. But unfortunately I think that the original piece comes across as too much of a personal complaint, with enough political slant that it was easy for his detractors to dismiss him. That’s why I’m glad for Theo’s essay at Black Gate, which expands on the original points and turns the discussion away from gripes and into actual analysis of the texts in question. I agree with nearly every point that Theo makes here, though I also appreciated the counterpoint by Matthew Surridge, whose demonstrates mostly that the “new” trend of anti-heroic fantasy is actually quite old. Also, if I may be forgiven one more link and one more self-contradiction, I found that this “rebuttal” from Philip Athans is also pretty close to what I would want to say.

If I may reiterate one point that several people made in the links above, there is an enormous difference between fantasy that is merely dark and fantasy that is actually nihilistic and anti-heroic. Tolkein could be very dark (I won’t comment on Howard, as I’ve never read him), and the Silmarillion drinks deeply from the chilly well of Norse mythic fatalism. Thus, for example, this blog post titled “Missing the Point” is guilty of missing the point in a far worse way than Grin. Tolkein’s world may be hopeless and often tragic, but it is a world in which goodness unambiguously exists, and in which heroes distinguish themselves by fighting for the good even when their defeat is assured. This is the furthest thing in the world from a fantasy with no notion of virtue, in which there are no heroes who comport themselves virtuously. And again: the existence of Tolkeinian heroes who falter in virtue and who are seduced or corrupted by evil is not a repudiation of goodness, but a way of putting it into high relief. If I may quote the original article:

Think of a Lord of the Rings where, after stringing you along for thousands of pages, all of the hobbits end up dying of cancer contracted by their proximity to the Ring, Aragorn is revealed to be a buffoonish puppet-king of no honor and false might, and Gandalf no sooner celebrates the defeat of Sauron than he executes a long-held plot to become the new Dark Lord of Middle-earth…

This wouldn’t just be a different story, but a dramatically worse one. Fortunately, Tolkein didn’t write it that way.

Moving on to a different angle, I was very intrigued by Kate Elliot’s hypothesis about the reason for “nihilism” in contemporary fantasy:

It does occur to me that a reason — one possible reason — for the rise of the new gritty may be not the death of morality but the death of belief in the stories that we were told to believe were the truest measure of what is foundational….

So I am not surprised to see some of the writers of today writing skeptically or critically or even cynically about the institutions and “sentiments” that we have societally been raised to valorize even and maybe especially in the fiction we tell ourselves to try to describe what I might call “deeper truths” about culture and society and our place in it. So maybe those people write in ways that are uncomfortable, unpleasant, or downright ugly.

This is the most original take on the whole controversy, but I still want to pick it apart.

On the one hand: it’s possible that the “new gritty” is meant as a reaction against old narratives that have lost their power. But if that’s what those authors are trying to do, then I think they’re doing an awfully poor job of it, because—look, you can question conventional narratives or whatever without sliding into nihilism and madness. What you might do, instead, is offer an alternate model of heroism, an alternate view of goodness. If you do this well you can wind up with something that is compelling, inspiring, and life-changing in much the way that Tolkein and the classical heroic narratives are, but which compels people in a direction that you find more salutory. If you don’t think this can be done, I refer you to the entire oeurve of Ursula K. LeGuin, especially the Earthsea novels and her recent Annals of the Western Shore books. These books repudiate conventional heroic tropes in a variety of ways, but the result is not a demoralizing darkness, but the calm and confident demonstration that there is another way.

Of course, we can’t all be Ursula K. LeGuin. (Oh, but what if we could?) Still, if we grant that the foundations of reactionary fantasy are rotten (not something I agree with, but for the sake of argument), then a lot of the dark, gritty fantasy that I’ve sampled seems like it’s just kicking in the creaky old doors and drawing obscene graffiti in the entrance hall. If the literary building is decrepit, who cares? But this doesn’t impress me. Better you build something beautiful in the ruins.

A final aside: Elliot also mentioned that Grin doesn’t talk about female fantasists at all, and I agree with her that this is an important omission. As I look over my shelves, I notice that all of the really good fantasies that I’ve read in the past few years have been written by women. The real solution to the problem of too much rotten nihilist fantasy may be to just read less Joe Abercrombie and more Carol Berg.