Ethics and Form in Fantasy Literature

Tolkien, Rowling and Meyer

Lykke Guanio-Uluru

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137469687
• eBook ISBN: 9781137469694
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Ethics and Form in Fantasy Literature: Tolkien, Rowling and Meyer by Lykke Guanio-Uluru examines formal and ethical aspects of The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and the Twilight series in order to discover what best-selling fantasy texts can tell us about the values of contemporary Western culture.

1

Introduction

The initial motivation for undertaking the research presented in this book is an interest in ‘best-selling ethics’: the ethical ‘patterns of meaning’ embedded in best-selling literature. Due to the commercial success of fantasy literature over the past two decades, this genre has been chosen as a point of departure for the investigation of ‘best-selling ethics’ here presented. The enormous popularity of fantasy texts such as J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series makes their reflection (or refraction) of cultural values relevant to understanding contemporary Western society, and the persuasiveness of these texts suggests that their formative ethical influence is significant, perhaps globally.

Works by Tolkien, Rowling and Meyer are chosen on the basis of their viral appeal, but also since their texts, and the success of their texts, have acted as catalysts in the development and commercialization of fantasy as a genre. Gaining momentum since the 1990s, fantasy has become the single most popular generic category within both fiction and film. In 2008, 39 out of 40 of the top-grossing films worldwide were fantasy or science fiction films (Mendlesohn and James, 2009, p. 1). Following Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001–03), the literary version of J. R. R. Tolkien’s text has sold over 150 million copies in total (Wagner, 2007). J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has sold an estimated 450 million copies (BBC News, 2011), making it the world’s best-selling book series. Meyer’s Twilight series belongs to the fantasy subgenre of paranormal romance, which grew in popularity in the 1990s and developed into a publishing category of its own in the 2000s. In 2007, 243 paranormal romances were published (in addition to 460 fantasy titles), making up nearly a third of the texts published within the genre that year (Mendlesohn and James, 2009, p. 198). By October 2010, Meyer’s series alone had sold 116 million copies world-wide (Publisher’s Weekly, 2010).¹

Ever since Vladimir Propp’s influential study The Morphology of the Folktale (1968 [1928]), and fortified by Joseph Campbell’s equally authoritative The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1973 [1949]), fantasy texts have typically been analysed with reference to their ‘story skeleton’ and their structural patterns, emphasizing common features between texts. In this book, while noting such structural features, a ‘literary gaze’ is brought to three best-selling fantasy texts, paying attention to their unique ethical agendas. Part I examines the quest fantasy, which in many ways represents the ‘prototypical’ narrative form within the genre of fantasy literature. Based on analysis of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, as well as on comparison between them, a new way of looking at the relationship between ethics and form in the quest-fantasy is suggested, linking each text’s structural features to their respective ethical agendas.

Turning to the subgenre of paranormal romance, Part II analyses Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. Drawing on James Phelan’s concept of position,² textual causes for the pronounced split in allegiance within Twilight readership between ‘Team Edward’ and ‘Team Jacob’ proponents are examined. While showing that the text can accommodate a range of different readings, the chapter also discusses the contradictory gender criticism the series has garnered.

The last and concluding chapter contains comparisons between all the primary texts. Noting similarities in the way that the discourse on value is structured in Harry Potter and Twilight, the chapter also highlights how their ethical ‘visions’ are opposed in many respects. A comparison of all three primary texts as gendered coming-of-age stories underlines their individual formulation of value, even as they all draw on a common language of shared narrative structures and tropes.

The primary authors and texts

Tolkien: The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings

Tolkien started inventing his mythological realm of Middle-earth in 1917, after serving as a soldier in the trenches of the Somme during World War I. He gradually invented several languages and a mythology, both from sheer linguistic delight and in an attempt to reconstruct ancient gaps in English history. He began writing the story of The Lord of the Rings in December 1937. Working steadily, interrupted by other duties and the strains of World War II, it took him until October 1949 to complete the entire manuscript (Scull and Hammond, 2006, p. 540). Publication was further delayed due to paper shortages after the war. The last volume of The Lord of the Rings was published in 1955. Consequently, the two World Wars form an important backdrop for Tolkien’s work both with the mythology of Middle-earth, a version of which was published posthumously as The Silmarillion in 1977, and with The Lord of the Rings, which tells the story of the War of the Ring.

Tolkien aligned with his modernist context in that his work took a new form: in retrospect The Lord of the Rings has come to be regarded as formative of the genre of modern fantasy fiction.³ Moreover, in so far as the fantastic is unrealistic, fantasy as a genre represents a break with realism. The development of this new genre thus parallels the break away from representative realism that is a distinguishing feature of modernist art. Critic Tom Shippey (2003) has convincingly shown how Tolkien pondered place names in his vicinity, as well as the cultural ideas embedded in ancient word forms, surviving fragments of poetry, nursery rhymes and characters from fairy tales and used them all, distilled through the filter of philology, as elements of his stories. Often, characters or settings in Middle-earth are Tolkien’s imaginative solutions to philological puzzles.⁴ Thus, Tolkien took familiar representations and imaginatively put them together in a new way. He ‘made it new’, however, not by breaking with tradition – as did other modernists, but by embracing it all the way back to its linguistic roots.

Tolkien’s greater legendarium – available as an edited text in The Silmarillion – provides the historical and contextual backdrop for the War of the Ring as narrated in The Lord of the Rings. This book adopts the established practice of using The Silmarillion when referring to the published book and ‘The Silmarillion’ when referring to the full body of, sometimes contradictory, texts that Tolkien devised as versions of his mythology. In this book The Silmarillion⁵ is read as integrated into the narrative purpose of The Lord of the Rings.

Stylistically, The Lord of the Rings is written in prosimetrum, with alternating passages of prose, poetry, songs and verse, so that the prose text is broken into smaller fragments, juxtaposing different types of telling. Arguably, this makes the narrative voice more complex. The Lord of the Rings was intended by Tolkien as a one-volume text, containing six books. Due to the expense of paper in post-war Britain, it was first published in three volumes, still leading a number of people mistakenly to refer to it as a trilogy.

Chapter 2 argues that by aid of the concept of focalization⁶ the influences of two mythologies, Old Norse mythology and Judeo-Christian belief, may be discerned in different parts of The Lord of the Rings. Common to both these systems of belief is the symbolic importance of the tree. In Christianity several trees are central; particularly the Tree of Knowledge, the tree of the Cross and the tree in the New Jerusalem. The Tree of Knowledge is the means by which Adam and Eve become mortal. In Old Norse mythology, the ‘life-tree’ Yggdrasil connects the nine worlds and so structures the cosmos. This book argues that the tree figures as an important connective symbol both in Tolkien’s Middle-earth mythology (as laid out in The Silmarillion), and in The Lord of the Rings.

Rowling: the Harry Potter series

The first Harry Potter novel arrived in British bookstores on 26 June 1997. When Goblet of Fire (2000) was released, the novels had already been on the New York Times best seller list for 80 weeks, rotating in the top three positions for several of those weeks – a state of affairs that eventually led The New York Times to split its list into Best Sellers and Children’s Best Sellers (Anelli, 2008, pp. 72, 74). Rowling’s personal rags-to-riches story is now a popular legend of its own. The last book in the series, The Deathly Hallows, was published in July 2007.

An important factor in the astonishing popularity of the Harry Potter books was the development of computers, and, particularly, of the Internet. Between 1989 and 1999 the Internet’s user base tripled (Anelli, 2008, p. 88). At the same time, the first fan sites developed – and these sites frequently became devoted to all things Potter, as teenagers were in the forefront of assimilating the new technology (Anelli, 2008, p. 89). Thus three elements combined to boost the phenomenon: age, technology and timing.

Warner Brothers has made a series of block-buster Harry Potter movies from 2001 to 2011 that undoubtedly have furthered the sales of the novels. At the time of writing, three further films from the ‘Potter-verse’ are planned (Tartaglione, 2013), based on Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2001). A Harry Potter theme park opened in Florida in 2010, and Rowling still communicates interactively with her fan-base on www.pottermore.com, disclosing new information about her fictional universe. Although The Lord of the Rings has been turned into film (an animation by Bakshi in 1978 and the far more successful film trilogy by Peter Jackson from 2001 to 2003), these adaptations have impacted the scholarly interpretation of Tolkien’s novel far less, as by 2001 almost 50 years of Tolkien criticism had accumulated. By contrast, the first Harry Potter film was made only four years after the publication of the first novel – and six years before the completion of the last book. Consequently, from 2001 to 2007 there were parallel releases of new books and films, making it hard to dissociate the actors’ faces from one’s interpretation of the literary character, and making the ‘Potter phenomenon’ more entwined with the literary texts themselves – particularly as Rowling has played an active part in the adaptation process from books to films.⁷ While early academic work was focused on the literary texts, later criticism tends to concentrate on the Potter fan community (Mendlesohn and James, 2009, p. 176). Returning to the literary text, this book examines textual causes for the diverse readings and value controversies the series has generated.

Fantasy is often accused of being ‘formula fiction’, and John Granger has claimed that all the seven Harry Potter books follow a ten stage pattern of the hero’s journey, but that this formula is overlaid by another superstructure: that of a seven stage alchemical process (Granger, 2008a, pp. 22–3, 27). This book’s chapter 3 argues that as the protagonist develops and matures so does the narrative complexity of the stories so that the books effectively develop from a children’s fantasy story in the first volume toward the complexity of a modern adult novel in volume seven. The series’ generic and narrative intricacy creates a necessity for re-reading, and its ethical complexity is a main reason for the divergent readings that have been made of its value propositions.

Meyer: the Twilight series

For the sake of clarity, this book uses Twilight to refer to the series as a whole, and Twilight when referring to the first book in the series. Meyer has revealed that Twilight was inspired by a vivid dream about ‘two people in intense conversation in a meadow’ (Meyer, 2013c). In Meyer’s dream, the couple was discussing the problems inherent in the fact that they were falling in love. The woman was physically plain, while the man was a ‘fantastically beautiful, sparkly vampire’, driven frantic by the scent of her blood, and struggling not to give in to his instinct of instantly killing her. Waking up from the dream, Meyer wrote down what she could remember, and this recollection later formed the basis of chapter 13 in Twilight, ‘Confessions’ (Meyer, 2013c).

Meyer’s literary agent pitched the story for publishing as a three-book deal. For her sequels, Meyer outlined what later became Breaking Dawn. However, her publisher demanded two sequels featuring Edward and Bella in college as fulfilment of the three-book deal (Granger, 2010, p. 118). Consequently, Meyer wrote New Moon and Eclipse, leading up to her own originally imagined finale that eventually was published as Breaking Dawn in 2008. The saga as a whole has spent more than 235 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list for Children’s Series Books (Grossman, 2009b), and a series of successful film adaptations were released yearly from 2008 to 2012.

This book argues that the publishing history of Twilight is part of the reason why the series is aesthetically flawed, since New Moon and Eclipse build up reader involvement that Meyer’s implied author in Breaking Dawn does not fully deliver on, particularly in relation to the character of Jacob Black. However, without the two ‘intermediary’ books, Twilight would undoubtedly be more one-dimensional and, therefore, less ethically interesting.

This analysis of Twilight is angled towards its ethical aspects. A blank spot in Twilight criticism that this book seeks to address, is to narratively account for its divided readership: why has the series attracted a readership that is either pro-Edward or pro-Jacob? The position argued here is that the root of this division is a difference in the ethical position taken by respective readers – a position that partly hinges on the extent to which a reader ethically aligns with Bella as a focal character.

Analytical aims and methodology

The aim of this book is to give a literary analysis of the ethical arguments⁸ and structures of valuing in the three widely popular fantasy texts J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, and compare them to each other. The ethical aspects of the texts are explored along three axes. The first axis is a rhetorical analysis of the ‘single ethical universe’ of each text based on James Phelan’s rhetorical theory of narrative that serves to identify what issues are ethically salient within the text itself, drawing particularly on Phelan’s concept of ‘progression’.⁹ The second axis draws on the concepts of philosophical ethical theory to link the ‘ethical universe’ of each text with a wider and contemporary ethical context.¹⁰ The third axis is a set of questions posed to each text in order to facilitate their comparison: What are the distinguishing characteristics of good and evil in each narrative, and how is the reader guided to perceive these characteristics? What is the role of moral emotions, norms and rules in the ‘theory of right action’ that guides the characters in their situations of choice, and how does the narrative presentation influence the reader to side in the moral decision-making process?

The analysis is further focused on the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. Aesthetics is here primarily understood as narrative aesthetics, involving an emphasis on form, structure and imagery in the wide sense of that term.¹¹ ‘Ethics’ deals with values – with assessments of what is right or wrong, good or bad. In this book, ethics is understood both according to the rhetorical theory of narrative and in relation to theoretical ethics. This means that in the literary analysis, the ethical arguments furthered by the implied author are regarded as developing their force through the narrative’s form, so that the ethical is aesthetically formulated and accentuated.

Relying on the contested concept of implied author requires a brief presentation of my theoretical justification for this position. The implied author has been described by Wayne C. Booth as an implied version of the real author who ‘chooses, consciously or unconsciously, what we read; we infer him as an ideal, literary, created version of the real man; he is the sum of his own choices’ (Booth, 1983, pp. 74–5). Thus, as Ansgar Nünning notes, Booth does not regard the implied author as a technical or formal device, but as ‘the source of the beliefs, norms and purposes of the text [and as] the origins of its meaning’ (Nünning, 20...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms
• Chapter: 1 Introduction
• Part I Quest Fantasy
• Part II Paranormal Romance
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index