The Dharma of Fantasy
With great power comes great responsibility
Some of the greatest modern fantasy novel series are unfinished. The Game of Thrones series by George Martin has five novels published, the final two have been awaited eagerly since 2011. Similarly for Patrick Rothfuss' unfinished Kingkiller trilogy.
Here at Urthona we cannot speed up these authors but we can ask why they have been so successful, making fantasy novels by far the best selling literary genre. And more importantly, we can ask what such writing has to offer the world. Is it just escapism? Or does it offer a doorway into wider vistas of myth, meaning and engagement with the human condition not easily available elsewhere?
Urthona Issue 37, due out later this summer, is about fantasy writing that engages the fundamental issues – of birth, death, power, pleasure, friendship, love and the need for wisdom in a fractured world, that all human beings must face one way or another.
Mythopoetic novels might be a better name for the genre at its best. It is writing that engages with who we really are, rather than offering comforting regression to a past that never existed.
Realism (whatever that is) can show us these issues embodied in the lives we think we actually live in the modern world. Fantasy writing can highlight the perennial themes of human life stripped of incidentals, in all of their raw, luminous power...
In Urthona Issue 37 well as articles covering the Inklings – C. S Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams – Buddhist writer Caroline Ivimey-Parr will be taking a broader look at modern fantasy and how it has helped her on her spiritual path (she has just been ordained into the Triratna Buddhist order):
"Fantasy novels were the outlet for an imagination and ambition that had little interest in worldly prosperity or status. I couldn’t articulate even to myself what I wanted, but I knew it was something of a different order to mundane life (‘This can’t be it. This can’t be all there is to life’). I wanted a purpose worth giving my whole being to; a family, mortgage, and 9-5 wouldn’t cut it. I was following an inkling of a meaning for life, a meaning that was cloaked in mystery and soaked in magic.."
Caroline doesn't mind that the Kingkiller Trilogy is unfinished:
"It seems fitting that my favourite fantasy series is exquisite, yet incomplete – like the Dharma life, beautiful and poignant, constantly moving towards an incomprehensible end.
Kvothe, the flawed hero of the Kingkiller Chronicles – who is suspended in a literary bardo – learns how to control the wind by the power of naming. With great power, naturally comes great responsibility. Something that Kvothe does not always live up to. Just so Ged, in Ursual Le Guin's Earth-Sea novels, misuses the power of naming to call up a shadow from the world of the dead that haunts him for the rest of the series. As Caroline says:
"In The Kingkiller Chronicles real magic is incomprehensible to the ordinary mind. Even when Kvothe stumbles across the true name of the wind, it is not a word he can simply recall. The knowledge is hidden within his mind; he does not control this power... Really seeing the world (either through the lens of magic, or removing the lenses/veils through Dharma practice) is such a different perspective to the everyday mind; it is essential to act with responsibility and with great care."