5 Reasons Why Christopher Marlowe is an Elizabethan Hipster Poet

Bonus: Reason #6 is he already has the requisite mustache. All he needs are the glasses.
Bonus: He grew hipster moustaches literally centuries before they were trendy.

Elizabethan England’s most celebrated poet and playwright, in underground kind of way, was Christopher Marlowe, although he was soon eclipsed by Mr. Will Shakespeare, whose popular plays would define the mainstream for centuries to come. It was the 90s. The 1590s to be precise. Marlowe was at the height of his powers, writing the politically subversive and experimental poetry that would come to define his generation. Doctor Faustus, for instance, would stand the test of centuries as a profound representation of Renaissance humanism.

Many have tried to label Marlowe. Attaining his MA at Cambridge, he was a member of a generation of college wits. The civil service was not large enough to accommodate the young poets of London, so they turned to more edgy professions, like poetry.

Poet, playwright, spy, homosexual, Catholic, atheist: even if the labels didn’t make any sense, they stuck. Marlowe’s response? Haters gonna hate.

Here are five reasons why Marlowe was basically a hipster:

1. He avoided all labels.

Although Edward II depicts the homosexual relationship between a king and his favourite courtier (fun fact: Edward II is Longshanks’ son in Braveheart), Marlowe cannot be outed of the closet based on textual evidence alone. In a similar way, scholars have argued about whether Doctor Faustus celebrates or a condemns Renaissance humanism and the pursuit of scientific knowledge–they have to settle on seeing the play as expressing a paradox. Neither can they determine with absolute certainty whether he was an atheist, or for that matter, a closet Catholic. You can’t pin Marlowe down or place him in any particular intellectual camp–being classified would make him way too mainstream.

2. He was over-educated and underemployed.

Sound familiar? Like a certain generation of young, college- and university-aged people today (such as yours truly), he had no money unless he sought patronage. Furthermore, his education in classical literature went nowhere towards finding him a job. He couldn’t just be a cobbler like his father, Mr. John Marlowe. Way too mainstream. Instead, the only way Marlowe was able to get his MA was by serving in Her Majesty’s Secret Service–such as it existed back then. Marlowe was sent to France to spy on Catholics for Elizabeth I, or at least that’s what scholars have argued. If only that was all you had to do today: become James Bond for a while and then bang! your degree is conferred, your tuition paid. (I’ll stop dreaming about it now.)

3. He was into retro.

Marlowe painstakingly tried to bring back the first-century Roman poet Ovid. Although he was not alone in reviving interest in Ovid’s poetry, most people came to know Ovid only in grammar school textbooks. Marlowe remixed a collection of Ovid’s poems, the Elegies, by translating them into English verse. Then he brought Ovid to popular audiences by writing highly pretentious  allusions to Ovid’s Metamorphoses into his plays. I don’t suppose you’d understand the reference, but…

4. He was unappreciated as an artist for centuries.

Marlowe’s art was so ahead of his time that his seventeenth- and eighteenth-century readers devalued him as only a necessary precursor to the Bard–John the Baptist to Shakespeare’s Christ. Well, the Romantics reappraised him after almost 200 years and his works, which explore tyranny and the dark side of politics, had new resonance in the twentieth century. Like Vincent Van Gogh, the archetypical unappreciated artist, the genius in Marlowe only became relevant after his death.

5. He wrote in blank verse before it was cool.

Rhymes were way too fashionable. Not to mention, they were just distasteful. I mean really. His contemporaries were infatuated with couplets, Spenserian stanzas, and rime royal. Marlowe was one of the first to realize that rhymes were overrated. Iambic pentameter blank verse in English, so characteristic of Shakespeare’s great dramatic speeches, was actually pioneered by his more underground predecessor. Unfortunately, Shakespeare is given all the cred for this. What everyone should come to realize is that Marlowe was not some kind of mindless trend follower; he started one of the greatest poetic trends in English literature, thank you very much.


Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje

Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje
Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje

Before jazz became what it is today, before it was mainstream, Buddy Bolden blew his cornet in the streets of New Orleans. No recording of his music survives. A famous musician in his time, his genius and the threat of vanishing into silence tormented him. The quest Michael Ondaatje undertook in 1976 to discover the genius of this unheard-of jazz legend involved meticulous historical research, but also–inevitably–a certain amount of fantasy. The result is a novel that runs like a dream sequence, filled with erotic moments that are violent, frenzied, and at other times, romantic.

By erotic, I mean the entire novel is a slow uncovering. Every sentence has a perceptive, tender, yet improvised quality. You might know Ondaatje as the author of The English Patient, which was turned a movie. Written nearly twenty years before The English Patient, Coming Through Slaughter is the novel of a more rogue Ondaatje, who helped, along with other poets such as Robert Kroetsch, develop the literary movement of postmodernism in Canada.

You might say Coming Through Slaughter is jazz. I have already mentioned its improvised quality. This is not, however, a novel printed off a first draft, but a meticulously crafted set of poetic scenes. You should expect nothing less from Ondaatje, whose reputation as one of Canada’s greatest writers is an acknowledged fact. I tried to catch Ondaatje committing the poetic treason of writing a single cliché, but I failed to locate even one. Every phrase he says is original. Both Ondaatje and Bolden’s art is the result of a genius instinct.

Buddy Bolden’s quarter of New Orleans, Storyville, “had some 2000 prostitutes, seventy professional gamblers, and thirty piano players.” His jazz synthesizes all the sounds around this lively area of town, where he works in a barber shop by day and plays sweet jazz by night. In a similar way, Ondaatje’s prose-poetry seems to be taken directly from life–from its most tender, private moments, and its most public, eccentric displays of passion.

But how can Ondaatje write so much about Buddy Bolden given the lack of historical records about his music? Necessity compels him to create a partly fictitious character out of Bolden–though perhaps not as fictitious as Count Almasy in The English Patient. Ondaatje caused some controversy with his best-known work of historical fiction, for depicting the character of the count, who really existed, in ways that clearly went against historical evidence. Guy Gavriel Kay discusses the topic of historical characters being used in works of fiction at some length in “Home and Away.” Some poetic invention of the past is necessary in order to create the stories we treasure as a society and a nation. England would not have Shakespeare’s Richard III, Kay paraphrases Ondaatje as saying, if not for poetic license with historical characters. I would add that Canada would never have Ondaatje, if a certain amount of historical fantasy were impossible to ‘get away’ with.

Bolden becomes Ondaatje’s vehicle to explore his ideal of poetic genius, which he found in the figure of the outlaw, or the artist ‘on the edge’. Going outside the novel for a minute, I would like to quote a passage from “White Dwarfs,” a poem by Ondaatje that expressed his perfect hero: “Why do I like most / among my heroes those / that sail to that perfect edge / where there is no social fuel?” Ondaatje is fascinated by the outlaw, especially in his early work (see The Collected Works of Billy the Kid), and Bolden, while not a criminal precisely, is still on the edge, a lonely figure. He must come through slaughter–encounter mortality and his own imperfection–to reach that perfect edge, where beyond there is only silence.

Trapped in relationships with two different women, Bolden runs away from his wife, but later returns home, a changed man–more quiet, not his gossipy old self. But the silence is only a buildup to the defining moment of his history as an artist. He blows his cornet in a parade down a New Orleans street and, after a moment of musical ecstasy, loses his mind, vanishing among the stars.

Just as the poem “White Dwarfs” proposes that the meaning of language is found in silence, so is the significance of Bolden’s life found in his silence–the absence of his music. This blankness enables Ondaatje–along with his reader–to search for Bolden’s music, if such an ephemeral thing as music can ever truly be found, or artistic perfection ever attained.

Just as jazz is all about the silences you leave between the notes, so is Coming Through Slaughter all about the absence of Bolden. It is even about the physical white space on the page. Each scene is followed by white space, where, if we linger, we are left to imagine the untold. White space becomes the perfect mirror onto which we project our own fantasies of what Bolden and the other characters do between scenes. On one particular page, only the lyrics to a song, or poem appear: “Passing wet chicory that lies in the field like the sky” (57). And that is all we need.

Ondaatje dares to go places other authors don’t ever go. His tale of Bolden’s life and death confirms his interest in transgression. Bolden’s story is like that of Icarus: he flew too high, too close to the sun where no one could catch him, on the wings of his own genius, and plummeted to his slaughter in the ocean. And like Doctor Faustus, Bolden even made a deal with the devil, according to his Christian critics: he dared to mix sacred hymns with blues, a music very earthly and secular. What came out of that has become to be known as “jazz.”

Ondaatje finds a wholly original way to express this Icaro-Faustian transgression: Bolden was always so short, he writes, that he couldn’t reach the blades of the fan in his barber shop. But later, after his fall, the following passage appears alone with itself on a page: “Bolden’s hand going up into the air / in agony. His brain driving it up into the path of the circling fan. / The last movement happens forever and ever in his memory” (138). Bolden’s artistic pride has caused him to reach out so far that he hurts himself, like he would if his fingers struck the blades of a fan.

I must now mourn Buddy Bolden using the words Christopher Marlowe’s chorus used to mourn Doctor Faustus at the end of his famous play: “cut is the branch that would have grown full straight / and burnèd is Apollo’s laurel bow.” Transgression is the only way to achieve artistic innovation, yet there is always a price to pay for it.

Buddy Bolden in William Cornish's band. Bolden is the cornet player in the top row, second from the left, just above Brock Mumford on guitar.
Buddy Bolden in William Cornish’s band. Bolden is the cornet player in the top row, second from the left, just above Brock Mumford on guitar.

I think Coming Through Slaughter makes excellent reading, especially if you are on a bus heading to a Jazz Festival concert in downtown Montreal. You can also read it before attending a summer festival in your hometown. Even if you don’t like jazz, if you are an artist, or appreciative of good art, then this novel is worth a read. All art deals with blank space, whether poetry, music, painting, sculpture, or even architecture. For the historical fantasy novelist, blanks spaces that show up in the historical record are also the perfect place to stage a work of imaginative, even fantastic, fiction. In a way, this is what Ondaatje does in Coming Through Slaughter.

Which is why I leave you off, with this proposal: in addition to being antithetical, anti-real, and even heretical, historical fantasy, as we may see it through the lens of Michael Ondaatje’s oeuvre, is also jazz. The two syncopated rhythms of realistic history and fantastic mythology–one a linear, regular, pattern, the other free-flying and circular–give historical fantasy an edge. And nowhere is this phenomenon better explored than in Coming Through Slaughter.

Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje

Photo Credits:

Ondaatje: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michael_Ondaatje_Tulane_Lecturn_2010.jpg

Bolden band: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_Bolden

The Vinciolo Journal’s First Anniversary!

















An alchemical woodcut.
An alchemical woodcut.








Photo Credits:

Alchemy: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~clauspat/stonea.htm


7 Ways in which Saruman is like John Dee

SarumanJohn Dee http://wp.me/p32Kr4-aF



So, without further ado, here is my list:


1. Physical resemblance to Christopher Lee


2. Crystal balls


John Dee's Shewstone at the British Museum
John Dee’s shewstone at the British Museum
Saruman and the Palantir of Orthanc

3. Spoke with ‘angels’



4. Consorted with a necromancer


Sauron the Necromancer
Sauron the Necromancer
Edward Kelley the Necromancer

5. Polymath Wizards


6. Spy Network


7. Similarity to John Faust

John Faust




John Faustwoodcut.

Photo Credits


John Faust: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Georg_Faust


Dee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dee




Sauron: http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Sauron

Top 10 Things I Learned While Studying English Literature at McGill University

McGill University
McGill University



Here we go.


1. Writing is murder.



2. Cadence comes before meaning.



3. Texts are physical and unstable.




4. Form matters.



5. Things happen and are done in texts.




6. Authorial intention can be irrelevant.




7. You can analyze anything.


Guy Gavriel Kay


I learned this in my first semester.



9. English teaches you a skill more than knowledge.




10. Reading poetry must affect you.





Goethe's Faust
Goethe’s Faust

Photo Credits:






Shakespeare: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobbe_portrait


Faust: http://www.hberlioz.com/paintings/BerliozWorks3b.html


Behind Guy Fawkes: the History of Catholic Conspiracies

Happy Guy Fawkes Day!
Happy Guy Fawkes Day!

But as a nation—continued he in his reveries—these Spaniards are all an odd set; the very word Spaniard has a curious, conspirator, Guy-Fawkish twang to it.” -Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno.”

The imaginary is part of history.” -Michel de Certeau, The Possession at Loudun.

[A] good case could be made that the last unchallenged and most perniciously pervasive element in the whig view of modern English history is an unacknowledged tendency to privilege all things protestant while sedulously marginalizing all things catholic.” -Peter Locke with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat.


It is finally November 5! Celebrate this day with your friends. Or if you want to stay indoors reading blogs…

The final part of the “Behind Guy Fawkes” series opens with the three epigraphs above. The first one, by Melville, is one I find humorous and relateable. It reveals that Protestant paranoia had a way of infusing itself even into nineteenth-century American culture.

Due to Jesuitophobia, the fear of Jesuit-led conspiracies that hit England after the Gunpowder Plot and inspired a literary genre of Jesuit slander, the English associated the Jesuits with Fawkes’ conspiracy. Since the English also associated any threat to their Protestant nation with the Spanish, it becomes intuitive for Herman Melville to associate the word “Spaniard” with Guy Fawkes–even though he was neither Spanish nor a Jesuit.

I have long imagined the word “Spaniard” to have exactly the kind of ‘twang’ Melville describes, although I may not have been always fully conscious of it. When I think of Guy Fawkes, Inigo Montoya is never far behind in my thoughts…

Inigo Montoya is the archetypical Spaniard. Do you agree?
Inigo Montoya is the archetypical Spaniard. Do you agree?

The other two epigraphs, the more serious ones, are also epigraphs to a fascinating book, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England, by Arthur F. Marotti. Marotti challenges how history is received and created in England. He examines the “process in which real and fabricated historical ‘evidence’ and events are translated into a developing set of rhetorical codes and ideological fantasies” (2). What is striking is how Marotti avoids discussing fact in his book and focuses on how historical events are imagined or embellished, in order to serve ideological ends.

The unofficial motto of this blog is that “history is fantasy.” As a result, I thought Marotti’s insights quite fascinating. History is what we imagine, after all. The past only exists in our memory, and our imagination inevitably colours even that.

Fawkes executionsWe pick up the story from last time: the Gunpowder Treason had fallen apart. England was in an uproar. But another battle was beginning: the war of the press.

Pamphlets, books, and sermons formed the blogosphere of early modern England. Then as now, political and religious factions battled it out to win the hearts and opinion of the population. Remember the terror that suffused the media after 9/11? That was what was happening in England, give or take, except instead of watching CNN or Fox, you would most likely hear a sermon from a preacher. England’s Most Wanted was the Pope—the Osama bin Laden of the day. And, if we continue this problematic analogy, the Jesuits were the Al-Qaeda.

The Jesuit Insignia
The Jesuit Insignia

Of course the world is not so simple, and I mean no slander on Jesuits of the time, much less the Jesuits of the present day. But black and white morality tends to appear whenever people are afraid of the “other.” When action is necessary to protect a nation, you don’t want to talk about your enemy in terms of “shades of grey.” You don’t want to let remorse slow you down, in doing what you believe must be done. Extreme fear in the state results in a superfluous amount of hatred that stimulates the masses—and produces an ideal moment for the king to step in and look good clearing up the situation. Morals become black and white when we think it is convenient for them to appear that way.

The Jesuits first came under suspicion in connection to the Gunpowder Plot when Thomas Bates, a servant to one of the conspirators, confessed that Father Henry Garnet, a Jesuit, was in on the conspiracy. Garnet became one of the most loathed figures in England, and an example for many Protestants of why Jesuits should never be trusted.

Sir Edward Coke and the earl of Northampton wrote the propaganda masterpiece A True and Perfect Relation of the Proceedings at the several Arraignments of the Late Most barbarous Traitors in 1606. Right away, you can tell it is not true and perfect, since they say that it is true and perfect, instead of letting the evidence stand on its own. In this Relation, the Gunpowder Plot is called the “Jesuit treason,” reminding readers that Fawkes’ conspiracy was only the most recent in a long string of Jesuit-centred regicide attempts.

The Assassination of Henry IV
The Assassination of Henry IV

Throughout, Coke focuses on the ecclesiastical plotters, not those with secular motivations. He claims that Jesuits formed an international society of conspirators. For example, they were supposedly responsible for James Clement’s assassination of Henry III and, through the involvement of the Jesuit William Holt, Edmund of York’s plot to kill the Queen in 1594. Later, Juan de Mariam would say Jesuits were behind the deaths of Protestant leaders William of Orange and Henry IV, who was killed by radical Catholic François Ravaillac. Jesuits were also blamed for the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of Protestants in Paris, sparked by the attempted assassination of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny. (The massacre is more traditionally pinned on Catherine de’ Medici.)

Robert Cecil called the Jesuits “that generation of vipers” (47-48). The stereotype of a Jesuit ran as follows: he had the Pope in his belly, Machiavelli in his head, and Mercury’s wings on his feet. Not only could they think deviously in the Pope’s service, but they could be anywhere and travel from country to country with speed. This fear, spurred on by paranoia, turned the Jesuit into an evil supervillain.

Mephistopheles and Faustus in Doctor Faustus
Mephistopheles and Faustus in Doctor Faustus

In one colourful piece of libel, Thomas Dekker, playwright of the world-famous Shoemaker’s Holiday, says that Jacques Clement, a Jesuit, used black magic to conjure a devil in the likeness of a friar. One can only suppose that Dekker suffered from an unhealthy over-familiarity with Christopher Marlowe‘s Doctor Faustus, in which the titular blasphemer does just that.

But why all this hate against the Jesuits? To begin with, Jesuits understood themselves to be soldiers not only of God, but the Pope himself. Their presence in England was seen as a threatening encroachment of foreign power. The intellectual disciplines of the Jesuit priesthood were also seen as unsavoury. They moved in secret among the underground Catholics, masters of disguise and rhetoric, which they used to persuade Catholics to commit treason and even sacrifice their lives suicide-bomber style, for the sake of God. They were said to seal such pacts with the “superstitious” ritual of the sacrament of Holy Communion. Fact is difficult to separate from fantasy here, but it seems fair to assume that Jesuits were not half so Satanic as they were depicted as being.

What’s worse, from a Protestant standpoint, was the Jesuit practice of mental reservation and their doctrine of equivocation. Essentially, the doctrine of equivocation said, that it was not a sin to break or swear an oath that would force you to betray the cause of Catholicism. It also freed the conscience of Jesuits to give false confessions while under torture, if it meant saving the lives of their friends. Equivocation threatened the integrity of the oral bonds and oaths that held society together.

Henry Garnet defended himself by defending the doctrine of equivocation, papal disposition of power, the general innocence of Catholic recusants, and the innocence of Jesuits who played no part in conspiracies.

Northampton rebutted, claiming the Gunpowder Plot was devilry, that “the cursed snake who eats the dust of powder, now eats gunpowder with them [the conspirators]” (141). The Papacy’s temporal claims and its claiming of the right to depose kings corrupted the institution of the holy church and removed its legitimacy. So ran the Protestant argument.

fawkes libelA series of plates and engravings also served a widespread, if crude, propaganda. A typical plate shows Guy Fawkes holding his infamous lantern, about to ignite the powder, when the eye of God turns on him and casts him in a spotlight. The letter that detailed the conspiracy could also be seen being given to state authorities by an angel (or an eagle, in honour of Mounteagle).

john miltonJohn Milton’s In Quintus Novembris frames the Gunpowder Plot as a hellish conspiracy, following this rich tradition of writings. His poem depicts Satan, the hero of Paradise Lost, in envy of England, bothered by how it does not accept the yoke of Roman Catholicism (144). The Church at this time was called Babylon, or the Romish Babylonians, or even the Synagogue of Satan.

From a twenty-first century standpoint, of course, these epithets sound pathetically hilarious, “Romish Babylonians” sounding more like a sports team than anything else. However, the Church was much more powerful in the early seventeenth century, a force to contend with that had temporal interests.

The main tension point on the Protestant side came from its demand for liberty of conscience in all things, against the general opinion of Catholicism’s intolerability. The foreign authority of the Pope simply did not mix with the absolute authority of the English monarchy after the Restoration. The defence of the ‘ancient liberties’ of the English frequently trumped any desire for toleration through ‘liberty of conscience’—even though liberty of conscience was what Protestants had traditionally fought for, since the beginning of the Reformation. Robert Southwell and Robert Parsons both wrote directly about this irony.

In human psychology, to arrive at an individual identity, one must be able to separate the “self” from the “other.” When we can tell the difference between the outside and our interior, then we have an identity. The same is true in the growth of nationhood. It might be said, that England had to find a group to exclude, in order to create their identity as a Protestant nation.

The same phenomenon occurred in Spain in 1492: nationalism surged after the Reconquest was complete, Muslims forced from Catholic lands. Likewise, German nationalism soared under Hitler, when Jews were excluded from participating in the country. If you create and “in” group, you must exclude those who are “out”: observe this phenomenon on any high school lunch table. This does not mean, however, that the process of exclusion is unproblematic. The example of the Nazis is an obvious warning.

Catholics were excluded from the running of English society, for the longest time unable to hold public office or become heirs to the throne. That is now changing. Marotti seems to imply that it is also time to rethink how we frame the history of England. Finding voices that have been forced underground can be a subversive way to open up the questions history poses us.

No doubt if someone should tell Guy Fawkes’ story, and the general story of Catholicism in England, it would run much differently from what Protestant historians have written. History, as we understand it, depends much more on who writes history, than it does on what actually happened. Simply because we have received a historical tradition does not mean there is only one way to understand events. Take V for Vendetta, as an example. Questioning the claims of the fascistic government’s legitimacy, V was able to unmask the conspiracy that got it into power. For these, and many other reasons, Gunpowder Treason really should never be forgot.

How will you remember the fifth of November?



Works Cited:

Buchanan, Brenda, David Cannadine, and Justin Champion, et al. Gunpowder Plots. London: Penguin, 2005.

Haynes, Alan. The Gunpowder Plot: Faith in Rebellion. Dover: Alan Sutton, 1994.

Marotti, Arthur F. Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005.


Picture Credits:

The Guy: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-489089/Bonfire-night-cancelled-Guy-Fawkes-home-town-health-safety-killjoys.html

Inigo Montoya: http://www.comicvine.com/forums/battles-7/inigo-montoya-vs-madmartigan-653118/

Jesuit Logo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Jesus

John Milton: http://1year100books.wordpress.com/2011/06/23/36-samson-agonistes-by-john-milton/

Mephistophilis: http://www.mgoodliffe.co.uk/

Ravaillac: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Ravaillac

Is Fantasy Heresy?


“War begets war. Destruction begets destruction. On earth, a century ago, in the year 2020, they outlawed our books.” -Edgar Allen Poe, in Ray Bradbury’s “The Exiles.”

Edgar Allan Poe fights rocket men on a Mars mission to annihilate everything fantastic or non-realistic, in Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Exiles.” Bradbury’s short story stands with Fahrenheit 451 as a grim chronicle of a dystopian world where imagination is prohibited, even to the point of it being considered a mental disorder. In these worlds, fantasy—the ability to imagine realities other than the “consensus”—is outlawed, exiled, and, ultimately, considered heretical.

One fascinating question arises out of how Bradbury saw the role of fantasy literature in this future world. Is fantasy heretical? More specifically, does the literary mode or genre we refer to commonly as “fantasy” hold any innate capacity to oppose the dominant, orthodox “consensus” understanding of truth and reality? If there is such a capacity, what does it mean fantasy-as-heresy can do? And if it is not true that fantasy is heretical, why is it not?

“Fantasy itself is heretical. It denies what everyone knows to be the truth. And, if you’re lucky, the untruth shall make you free.” These words may sound counter-intuitive, even a little Nietzsche-esque, but they are part of Brian Attebery‘s argument for fantasy’s subversive potential in his essay “The Politics (If Any) of Fantasy” (11).

Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Brian Attebery argues that fantasy is heretical in "The Politics (If Any) of Fantasy"
Brian Attebery argues that fantasy is heretical in “The Politics (If Any) of Fantasy”

Since it accepts the non-real, fantasy can say that “reality is a social contract, easily avoided” (10). Indeed, most fantasy novels contain an element of escape from the humdrum of modern-day, middle-class North American life (or whatever is your current milieu). While fantasy can slip into “escapism,” what escape does for readers is break the jail cell bars which contain us within the accepted reality that we accede to ever day. It demonstrates that out world is “a fluke, a localized and temporary aberration” (10). I like to think of Neil Gaiman in The Ocean at the End of the Lane saying that the world we know as our own is only the icing on a much larger and much deeper cake, lying just under the surface of things.

The slightly more dangerous and “most profound political statement that fantasy can make is to let the Other become a self” (10). Fantasists write from the point of view of aliens, animals, and other fantastic creatures—and analogously, other human cultures right here on earth. In fantasy, “the past threatens to break into the present, colonies become capitals, and the natural world takes revenge on civilization” (10).


The way fantasy novels do this is clearly evident. Epic fantasy, for starters, is almost completely based on the ways in which the past interferes with the present, and novels such as Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay do this in a twentieth-century our-world setting. And how subversive would the Ents of Fangorn be, if they waged a crusade against Amazon rainforest deforestation? In our globally-warmed world, the whole Mayan apocalypse craze was partially a result of our fear of nature’s TiganaYsabelvendetta against our race, and that surely inspired a few fantasy stories. On the subject of decolonization, I need go no further than Kay’s other novel Tigana in order to indicate a subversive book: a tale of rebels who overthrow the yoke of foreign domination in order to restore their nation’s identity. This belongs not only to the mythic history of the USA and France, but also to Ireland, Wales, Quebec, the Basque regions in Spain, and Communist East Europe.

Choose any binary: man/woman, dark/light, subject/object, self/society, victor/victim, man/nature, past/present, self/other: fantasy gains its subversive, heretical edge by showing us the “other,” by presenting both sides of the coin, and thus challenging us, whether we choose heads or tails. Even when an author such as C.S. Lewis attempts to reinforce a worldview—Christian orthodoxy—Attebury argues that the fantastic frame “resists any kind of orthodoxy” (11). Fantasy has infinite possibilities, which makes any limitations upon those possibilities (the “rules” of the secondary world) contrast with what lies beyond those boundaries, letting us question what set those limitations in the first place.


Why is Aslan a lion, we might ask, and not, say, a dragon? Lewis’ choice reveals Aslan’s significance as a symbol for the “Lion of Judah,” Jesus Christ. At the same time as Christian orthodoxy is reinforced, the fantastic elements in Narnia—such as witches, centaurs, and giants—recall a more pagan world, the other side of the coin. Even a fascistic fantasy that reinforces a certain ideology or orthodoxy will be subverted, argues Attebery, because the possibility of asking, “What else?” remains. There will always be another side, an “other” that the fantasy implies exists.

Since fantasy brings down the orthodox, it is intrinsically heterodox, which is a fancy way of saying “heretical.” Attebery is not alone in drawing conclusions like this. Rosemary Jackson in Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion observes a similar phenomenon. For her, fantasy (defined more as a left-wing absurdist type of literature than post-Tolkien generic fantasy, which she viewed as too conservative and conventional) is a literature of desire that can thwart dominant understandings of reality.

Which brings us back to Edgar Allan Poe in his Martian exile. The dominant orthodoxy of the rocket men eventually triumphs over Poe, when the captain burns the pages of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, The Land of Oz, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—the last copies in the universe. Bradbury’s short story gains its power from the binary contrast between the world of the imagination and the world of science and progress that the rocket men represent. Even though the rocket men triumph and they see that “there’s no one here at all” in the now-emptiness of Mars, the fantastic remains in the unconscious. One man who sees the fall of the city of Oz must report for psychoanalysis. Although orthodoxy might presume to establish itself over all the universe, the fantastic remains in the mind, as an “other” understanding of reality, a heterodoxy.

BrunoImagining other worlds and other heterodox realities is not, of course, a phenomenon limited to fantastic fiction. Any heretic who opposes orthodoxy must have an imagination. In fact, we can further explore how imagining other worlds can be subversive by looking at one sixteenth-century heretic: Giordano Bruno.

Bruno is best known for championing a Copernican understanding of the universe. While this was not precisely the reason for his condemnation as a heretic, it nonetheless presented an alternate understanding of the universe’s order. Humans were no longer the center of the universe after Copernicus’ theories gained acceptance. The “self” had become an “other.” Interestingly, Attebery writes that we can understand fantasy as “the meeting ground between empirical and traditional world views” (10) The whole Copernican debate was also fueled by the very tension between empiricism and the traditional church teachings.

helipo versus geoOne of the actual reasons that Bruno was burned was that he asserted that Jesus could not have been God: since God, as he saw it, was infinite, it was impossible for infinity to become incarnate in a finite, human form. In my personal opinion, this leaves out the following possibility: in the infinite possibilities of the universe, such a thing could perhaps be possible. Nonetheless, Bruno was also one of the first to champion the idea that there might exist other worlds (such as Mars!) beyond our own, that the universe did not end, but stretched on to infinity. Implicitly, (the following is also my own thought) there are infinite possibilities to reality, no matter how fantastic they might seem to us. Whatever exists in our imagination could exist (we do hope!) somewhere out there.

Bruno2Giordano Bruno’s was the core of all heresies. By asserting that the universe was infinite and that human beings were not at the center, he challenged the dominant “consensus” reality of his day. An infinite universe has no boundary between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Implying there are worlds and things that lie outside of any explanation orthodoxy can provide necessarily undercuts that orthodoxy. Furthermore, implying that there are infinite things outside those boundaries can render those boundaries insignificant. Bruno’s beliefs not only made him a heretic for denying Christ’s divinity, but his teaching of infinity also denied the very legitimacy of the word “heretic.”

The Spanish Inquisition tortures a suspected heretic.
The Spanish Inquisition tortures a suspected heretic.

Fantasy, like Bruno’s infinite universe, has endless possibilities. It can therefore subvert any distinction made to divide the universe into binaries, whatever they might be. Furthermore, Bruno’s philosophy suggests that everything is in the universe, whether or not you believe it is real. Science, the orthodoxy of today, does not believe in dragons or the Emerald City of Oz. But Bruno’s philosophy can imply that these places do exist, if not on Mars, then somewhere in the infinite.

So the universe contains everything that can fit under one’s distinctions, as well as everything that exists outside of it. White swans and black swans in equal measure. Your best dreams, and your worst nightmares.

Going back to our original question, I can now confirm that fantasy is intrinsically heretical. However, this does not mean that all fantasy novels go “against the system” or challenge our most profoundly held beliefs. What it does mean is that the element of fantasy, when placed even in a conservative fantasy novel, implicitly subverts the worldview put forward in its story, by opening up the possibilities of the novel to infinity.

DDSome fantasy literature (we can all imagine the names of a few culprits) has become so codified that board games such as Dungeons and Dragons suggest formulas for crafting genre narratives using a nearly automatized technique. Elves, half-elves, barbarians, bards, and paladins run amok fighting goblins, orcs, and trolls. What particularly scandalizes me about formula dictating a work of fantasy is that—however fun playing a game might be—the story runs counter to everything fantasy stands for.

Fantasy is for imagining other things, new things, things not yet imagined, or things that break the mold of the orthodoxies to which we all implicitly hold. The elves and orcs, which began as an imaginative escape from our boring everyday twentieth- or twenty-first-century life, have become the new prison for our imagination.

Fantasy abhors a prison. It is free spirit. Formulaic genre literature undoes itself when we recognize the boundlessness of the fantastic and ask, “Why is this land populated exclusively by elves, dwarves, humans, and orcs? Why not other things we can imagine?”

In fantasy as in infinity, everything is possible. The creed of the Assassins comes to mind: “Nothing is true; everything is permitted.” Since everything in fantasy is permitted, it implies that what we assume to be true about the genre—and what we assume to be true about the universe—is not always so. Fantasy, a free radical, undoes whatever boundary lines the orthodox assumptions of society can set in its path.

The creed of the Assassin brotherhood is "Nothing is true; everything is permitted." Screen shot from Assassin's Creed.
The creed of the Assassin brotherhood is “Nothing is true; everything is permitted.” Screen shot from Assassin’s Creed.

In conclusion, I can confirm that fantasy itself is heretical. If it finds itself in a novel set by boundaries (and every work of fiction must have boundaries to exist), it breaks them. We may not intend this as authors. We may not pick up on it, as readers. But as soon as the windows to infinity are opened, the boundaries of the world we construct—either in the narrative of a story, or in the world in which we live—become exposed, and they are revealed for what they often are: arbitrary limitations. Faced with infinity, it becomes our duty to react. Do we stand by our current structures, definitions, and beliefs, or do we find some way of opening our mind to what we do not understand?

The tricky part of answering this question is that no matter what our answer is, we will always, at least implicitly, be forming a new orthodoxy in our minds—perhaps one more expansive, but still with its limits. A human mind cannot completely encompass infinity. Doctor Faustus tried that and failed miserably. However, if we are careful, fantasy is still a good thing: it’s work is never done, and in this world, the ability to help us press the boundaries of our imagination is a continual need.

Illustration on Title Page of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus
Illustration on Title Page of Christopher Marlowe‘s Doctor Faustus. Faustus is an example of a scholar who transcends orthodoxy–but perhaps goes too far by signing a contract with the devil for his soul. (Wait … doesn’t that reinforce the orthodoxy?)

Works Cited:

Attebery, Brian. “The Politics (If Any) of Fantasy.” Modes of the Fantastic. Ed. Robert A. Latham and Robert A. Collins. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995. 1-13.

Bradbury, Ray. “The Exiles.” Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales With an Introduction by the Author. New York: HaperCollins, 2003.

Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion. London: Routledge, 1998.

Photo Credits:

Aslan: http://narnia.wikia.com/wiki/Aslan

Assassin’s Creed: http://assassinscreed.wikia.com/wiki/Rashid_ad-Din_Sinan

Bradbury: http://www.thecimmerian.com/subpress-publishes-bradburys-martian-chronicles/

Brian Attebery: http://www.isu.edu/english/Faculty/BrianAttebery.htmlEdgar Allan Poe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe

D&D: http://halfblaked.blogspot.ca/2011/07/how-d-made-me-better-storyteller.html

Doctor Faustus: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Theatre/DoctorFaustus?from=Main.DoctorFaustus

Ent: http://genedoucette.me/category/small-children/

Giordano Bruno: http://johns-spot112948.blogspot.ca/2013/02/giordano-bruno.html

Helio vs. Geo: http://www.technologijos.lt/n/mokslas/astronomija_ir_kosmonautika/S-29955

Infinity Bruno: http://www.theharbinger.org/xvi/971111/birx.html

Spanish Inquisition: http://fineartamerica.com/featured/victim-of-the-spanish-inquisition-everett.html

Nietzsche: http://pasolininuc.blogspot.ca/2011/11/friedrich-nietzsche.html

Tigana: http://chachic.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/once-upon-a-time-v-challenge/

Ysabel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ysabel