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quote:Originally posted by Mordant Carnival:
Good point. And in the DWJverse you're made to feel that magic brings a shedload of responsibilities, as well as power; nobody really gets a free lunch.
I think that's part of the main thing that makes me love DWJ's fantasy so much. I have some serious reservations about the transcendentalized hero-figure of much fantasy - the theme of the hero who is in some (usually naturalized through inborn magical powers or some quasi-genetic quirk) way inherently special, has powers that other men know not of, etc. As people have pointed out to me before, this hero-figure does key into very powerful fantasies (particularly in children, who are monumentally misunderstood, misrepresented and powerless in society and thus perhaps seek to manage these feelings through fantasies of super-powers), and isn't entirely to be discarded.
However, I still feel that the Romantic/fascist focus on the individual hero is politically *extremely* problematic. Trotsky, apparently, condemned individual acts of terrorism on the ground that they contributed to the disempowerment of the proletariat, by fostering the belief that a 'special individual' would come and 'rescue' them and hence obscuring the need for collective action, and action which is sensitive to particular socio-cultural-material-historical circumstances, rather than yer standard "quest narrative" (New Mini Looks For Centre Of Power. Blows It Up. The End.)
Ahem. Anyway, so what I like about DWJ - particularly in comparison to the transcendentalized workings of power and good/evil in JKR - is the way that an individual's particular abilities are contextualized not in terms of some transcendent battle between good and evil, but in terms of a fully realized social world and a world of inter-human relationships. Christopher Chant is, it's true, a rare and powerful nine-lived enchanter (from birth) - but 'The Lives of Christopher Chant' is not about Christopher's heroic, super-powered victory over the forces of evil, but about the way he comes to terms with his abilities and the social constraints placed upon him by them. He is not called to find the magic sword and conquer the Evil Emperor of Doom, but to take up his place as a Government official, negotiating the power dynamic between magical and non-magical citizens. His magic scar does not throb when the Evil One is near. And so forth. DWJ's books seem to me to focus on negotiation, rather than transcendentalization, and I like that.
Hmmm. What do you lot think? |
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