On Fantasy Endings

Okay, because it makes me nervous, I can no longer use the b-word and Candy in the same paragraph. Reason: Candy was the name of my childhood pet, a (female) sheltie, who was sweet and dumb and it's giving me unresolved cognitive sevenths. Henceforth, Candy is Just Smart.

Anyway, hope this counts as an SB entry, since it did start back when.

Candy said, "p.s. I hereby modify my statement about fantasy/SF endings to include a caveat about some cyberpunk novels and Philip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury short stories.... but by and large they do require the Evil Empire to be vanquished."

Science fiction is much more wildly varied than that, of course - thinking about classics by John Brunner and Ursula Le Guin but even Space Opera - the terrific Hooded Swan series by Brian Stapleford which ended with the death of (some of) the bad guys, but there was nothing at stake other than the feelings of a race, and the resolving cadences were all about loneliness. Being able to opt for upbeat, downbeat, or ambiguous endings (despite commercial pressures - the lowest-common-denominator reason why sf movies tend to be as Candy describes, but not all the books) is a fandamental as whether Molly Bloom says "Yes" or "No."

The saving-the-world resolution in fantasy is stronger, especially on the brainless and derivative mass market side - the Terry Brooks and so on. The Harlequins of the genre. I'd say there are actually four or so common resolutions in even this: saving the world, saving the kingdom, rescuing a damsel or someone else in distress, personal attainment. But Candy is right that the Good Will Out (through marvellous gifts, or destiny (true enough, considering the author is the Fates), or just because it's Good) is as contricting and artificial and false as the required happy-pair ending of a romance. Perhpas even more so, because the Good Will Out is more sweeping and wrong than Two People Can be Happy.

The things is that this is not what happens even in the precursors of the fantasy genre, things like the Arthurian romances, where the Arthur ends up dead and the kingdom sundered - or the legend of Robin Hood, where the hero dies from being overbled by a treacherous nun.

The two widest read fantasy classics demonstrate what happens with the save-the-world fantasy. In the last volume of Narnia, the exact opposite happens: the world is not saved; the forces of good lose the last battle. And then God rather gruesomely destroys the entire universe of Narnia, and the Good (and the heroes get killed by a freak accident in our world) get to be in Heaven. Now, it's true the C.S. Lewis had Christian eschatology on which to rely - but that's the point. Once you put in magic or wonderous creatures or alternate sword-swinging universes, you filfilled the single generic obligation of fantasy. (It's too depressing to contemplate whether the existence of this kind of wonder and what it implies about the beauty and possibilities of the world represents a more fundamentally childish lie than the romance myth, so let's not talk about that.) The point is that you don't have to go to Jurgen or Gormenghast or Silverlock to find a fundamental freedom to represent mainspring of the organization of the world in any number of ways.

Which brings us to the other classic, The Lord of the Rings, accidental progenitor of most of the Save the World extruded fantasy product. Cut and dried: the great quest is successful and Sauron is detroyed; the Rightful King restored with his elven bride at his side; and in the wake of a magic-assisted harvest, hobbits get to eat a lot.

But it's not quite like that: that's why there are two full chapters after the happy resolution (even more after the climactic battle): The Scouring of the Shire and The Grey Havens. On one level, Scouring/Shire is another battle piece, with the subtext that even the peace of the insignificant Shire must be paid for with blood. To me, though, what's significant is that ruined Shire is our world, as interpreted by the long English tradition stretching back to Blake and his "dark Satanic (Sarumanic) mills." After the destruction of the Ring, the voice of the Nazgul are never heard again in that age of the world. In ours, of course, you can pick them up on any of the major networks. This is the point - not that Aragorn won, but that we subsequently lost.

And The Grey Havens - a lesson about the aftermath of heroism as bleak but not as heartless as another fantasy precursor, the fate of Jason long after the voyage of the Argonaut - his head crushed by a timber of his rotting boat, as he sat in it contemplating his then-distant adventures.