“Afraid of dragons”

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Last night on CBC* radio there was a fascinating profile of Ursula K Le Guin. At one point during the program, Le Guin was asked about the rather low regard that fantasy and speculative fiction is given by readers and critics alike. She replied that people “are afraid of dragons.”** She went on to explain that fantasy and spec fic are unpopular, in part, because they are inherently “subversive” (her own word), and that they often make the reader “uncomfortable” with their alternate – and alternative – (re)visions of the world and of humanity.

Le Guin did not really expand upon this point, but in subsequent comments I began to understand that what she finds “subversive” about fantasy is that it is rooted in a vision or version of the world that is “freed” from the everyday. In fantasy, she argued, authors are free to offer up versions of our world in which the comfortable truths that we live in are either suspended or turned on their head. Her central point seemed to be that realist fiction is based on conforming to the accepted, the normative, and the comfortable, whereas fantasy is all about “alternatives” – specifically, she identified “good” fantasy as being about “other ways of being or living.”

Now, I must say here that I’m not so sure that I agree with her characterisation of realist fiction (although I suspect that I was hearing an edited-for-broadcast version of her ideas), but her comments on the essentially subversive nature of fantasy really got me to thinking over Tolkien. Middle-earth, interestingly, never came up in the program, but it seems to me that Tolkien’s works present both an interesting challenge to Le Guin’s theory, and an interesting test of it.

There is a long tradition amongst readers and critics of Tolkien’s works (not to mention on the Downs) of emphasising how conservative Tolkien’s writing is: his portrayal of women, for example, while certainly not sexist, is far from a “subversive” re-vision of women’s roles in society (right?). There are many other examples of a decidedly conservative world view: monarchical rule; rural values; anti-industrial; the list goes on.

But this interview with Le Guin got me to thinking: is there not some way in which Middle-earth is wildly subversive? By positing a world that is so unlike the one we live in, and by valuing that world over our own in many ways, is Tolkien not setting himself up a radical critic of human and social institutions, as they are currently, and challenging us to (re)imagine them in some new form?

There are several examples of quite subversive behaviour and institutions in his works, I think. The Hobbits, for example, live communally without an elaborate state structure and in a state of political anarchy (not chaos, but not ordered by an elaborate state apparatus). He gives nature the power to fight back and destroy technology (the Ents laying waste to Isengard). I even began to see his supposedly conservative models of leadership as being subversive – I mean, what could be more radical than to imagine the Return of the King in the midst of the most democratic century in history? Eru himself could perhaps be seen as subverting a dominant view: in our increasingly materialist society, God is dead. Not in Middle-earth.

Following Le Guin’s argument more closely, I suspect that the most subversive aspect of Middle-earth is its very existence. Tolkien goes against the established norms and the comfortably familiar truisms which state that only in art that reflects this world can we see the human condition fully or adequately reflected. He rather grandly and marvellously rejects that normative truism and set out to explore the nature of human society through and in a world that is decidedly not our own. Rather than relying on the familiar, he turned to something that is radically other and strange – he presents us with a world and a world-view that is truly alternate to our own. It is not our world, and yet it is.

But is it “subversive”? And if so, of what?


* The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

** What LeGuin actually said was that “Americans are afraid of dragons”; she then remembered that she was speaking with a Canadian radio network and added, “Canadians are also afraid of dragons.” She didn’t weigh in on other nationalities.