Well, first and foremost, why do we do anything we do? How often do we really know what we do? That mischievous imp (or fairy) that led you to do A instead of B and cause all that trouble last Thursday was probably inspired by some idea or feeling that you’ve picked up from your family or your national culture and have never really analysed to the point where you are aware of it. Perhaps you were rude to someone and only realised later that they reminded you of a teacher who once bullied you - that’s the revenge fairy. Wouldn’t it be nice if we were aware of - and so in control of - these influences lurking within us!
If you believe in those kind of fairies, that’s all you need to believe in to get involved in fantasy. It was difficulty with such entities that led me to read, and become very fond of, C G Jung all those years ago. His work is based on the idea of a ‘race’ or ‘collective’ memory. He does not insist on the existence of anything magical but says human beings function ‘as if’ they are born with a template of ‘archetype’ characters. In other words, we know how a mother, daughter, son, lover, wise old man etc should behave; we know what we mean by impish, dragonish etc, and we use this knowledge as shorthand to explain each other to ourselves. We have a set of common symbols that we use in art and literature to represent the moods and events around these characters - the sea is the pool of the unconscious, the stormier the sea, the more issues you have boiling away under the surface. Flight is the imagination, the higher amongst the clouds you are, the nearer to a godly intellect you are trying to reach. A castle stands for old power, usually patriarchal, a little cottage in the wood for matriarchal goings on etc.
In fairy stories and fantasy games, we see children using these symbols to learn the shorthand of our society. What you may not have noticed (although if you are an artist or a fiction writer you probably have) is that we continue to use this language all our lives in our dreams, our choices of music and theatre, in the way we choose and decorate our homes - the list is endless, and as we go through life we add more and more detail to our inner templates according to our personal experience and relationships.
The literature of early cultures tends to be pure fantasy - that which has been handed down to us is known as a culture’s ‘defining mythology’. In Britain we have King Arthur, Robin Goodfellow, The Mabinogion. In France they have Melusine and the lost city of Is. Greece has its Olympian stories which have been passed all around the western world … Fantasy defines and creates the community. In time, most cultures start experimenting more with individualist (realist) fiction and art. That progression seems to be saying, ‘okay, now we know who ‘we’ are so, within that, who am I? Who are you?’ But realist fiction depends on a base of sound fantasy. Look at the contributions of the weather and the landscape to the plots of fiction writers like E M Forster and Thomas Hardy. Look at the subtle statements made by landscape and architecture in Ishiguro novels. Realist fiction is not an escape from, but an intellectual working in, fantasy. That’s why I’m of the opinion that an understanding of fantasy is an advantage no writer should be without.
‘But it’s basic, it’s generic, an educated person should bypass that with intellectual understanding,’ - said one of my recent arguees. My answer would be, ‘is our society perfect yet?’ Only if you are sure the answer is yes, may we dump the fantasy.
‘But I don’t believe in fairies,’ said another. My answer is, ‘are all the people in our society at peace with their history and their feelings yet? If not, do you think we can arrange for everyone to take on full-time psychoanalysis?’ Only if you are sure the answer is yes, can we dump the fairies.
A more sensible answer might be, a thing doesn’t have to exist to be believable - in fact, there is no point in believing in something that exists. Has anyone ever rang your doorbell, waved a holy book at you and tried to persuade you to believe in tables or lamp posts? Not necessary is it, cos they exist - we know they do. So belief is for things we need although they may not exist.
A Case Study - The Phantom of the Opera (the stage musical)
It’s romantic, simplistic, populist, sensational, a money spinner: Proud academics and intellectuals enjoy sniffing at West End Hits. And yet a large proportion of us - especially women - have seen the show, bought the CD, been to the film more than once… because women are silly and romantic, or because they are gaining something useful from it?
The plot is archetypal fantasy - it’s a portrait of the female psyche. A boy-child is rejected, shamed, brutalised. A young girl who is being trained to be a beautiful, elegant dancer rescues and hides him.
A young woman loses her father. She remembers his promise of an ‘Angel of Music’ to save her. She has to compete with an aging prima donna in order to establish herself.
She is seduced by a mysterious, older man who claims the role her father promised - he sets himself up as the Angel of Music. As the story reaches its climax, she visits a graveyard, trying to separate in her mind the memories of her father from the problems of today. She sings,
Too many years fighting back tears
Why can’t the past just die?
and,
Dreaming of you won’t help me to do
The things that you dreamed I would
The phantom is revealed, and in that graveyard, whilst she struggles with her feelings, the young man who is her peer, her equal, challenges and fights the phantom. Eventually, she comes to terms with the ‘phantom’ - of course, he turns out to be the outcast, the child who was shamed and driven into hiding at the start. She comes to terms with him, but makes her life with the young man.
It takes no more than a brief knowledge of psychology to see that this fight goes on in every young woman’s head. - Can I tell the difference between a father and a life-partner? Can I see the difference between a relationship of equals and a flight into the false security of being controlled by another?
But why go to all the bother of visiting the West End and paying for a theatre ticket? Why not just use your intellect and learn to avoid Svengalis? Firstly because not everyone has that kind of intellect. You can learn the lessons of The Phantom without having to analyse the plot. And secondly, the intellect deals only with ideas. You also need to deal with the emotions - the songs and the drama of The Phantom do that for you. Any woman who has the bruises of a failed relationship to deal with knows instinctively that it takes more than one listening to those songs to sort out the bruises. You keep listening until they don’t bring tears any more.
Another Case Study - The Earthsea novels of Ursula le Guin
Sci-fi and fantasy writer and social commentator Ursula le Guin is one of my heroes. She is a socialist and a feminist - she is intelligent and gentle, and she is a poet. Those things don’t often go together so sweetly!
There are not many women writing science fiction. The driving force of sci-fi is the ‘what if…’ genre. Novels which try out theories of where we might be going, and when Le Guin started out on her writing career it had largely been taken over by people trying out scientific theories - especially those of advanced weaponry and empire-building. But le Guin builds imagined future worlds in order to try out theories of social and psychological developments. Ever wondered if anarchy could work? Read ‘The Dispossessed’. Ever wondered what it would be like to live without the influence of gender? Read ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’.
Some of le Guin’s sci-fi and fantasy novels work better than others. That is, I believe, because she is always working at the edge of her understanding, always trying out new ideas. The reason a lot of people write off fantasy as boring and adolescent is the reams and reams of ‘magic sword’ stuff that has been produced, all of which is limited to the idea, I seem to have this big hard thing. It has a life of its own, what shall I do with it? Those stories have their uses if you happen to be a 13 year old boy - and there is such a demand for them that they are produced in their millions but there’s no virtue in being a mature male and endlessly producing new magic sword stories. Some of us have other rows to hoe, and our work won’t be so slick because we haven’t set up camp on such well-known territory.
Some years ago now, le Guin completed her ‘Earthsea trilogy’: A set of fantasies about an inquisitive young man who ripped a hole in the veil between the known and the unknown. Something scary got through and followed him through all three books. He trained at a school for magicians and learned the way to power which is in naming things. Eventually, he learned that the name of the dark thing that followed him - it was a revelation indeed.
The series was flawed though. I got to the end of it feeling a lack of hope, a lack of direction. It worried me. The hero’s dealings with the country of the dead were particularly depressing. A few years back, I was fascinated to learn that le Guin had written a fourth book which, she said, resolved some issues in the previous ones. It is a wise and satisfying novel and whilst reading it, I realised that the earlier Earthsea books were disturbing because le Guin had written them before she herself had come to terms with the facts of mortality and suffering. The added book solved the issues gracefully.
Flawed fantasy is inevitable. If it is pure, high fantasy the writer must be writing at the limits of their understanding - and provoking others who have the same issues to deal with. Tolkien’s Middle Earth is a good example. The cloistered, misogynistic Mr Tolkien had huge gaps in his ability to deal with human relationships. The fact that his work was recently made into such a successful film showed beautifully the progress we have (and in some cases haven’t) made - For example, it was necessary to give more of the action to the female characters to make the film acceptable to modern viewers. And there was much discussion about how the orcs - the irredeemable baddies - should look: Big black guys?? Stupid, loveable rogues? - in reviewing and discussing those issues, the state of our racism, speciesism and gender attitudes were brought out and assessed in a very promising way.
I have a fancy to make a law that anyone who wishes to be a politician or hold a position of power in our society should first write and publish a few fantasy novels. Let us see, as HG Wells let us see, what their dreams are really made of. Let them show us their fantasies, before they ask for permission to build real worlds.
Kay Green’s book ‘Jung’s People’, a series of stories illustrating Jungian archetypal characters, is a good read just for pleasure but can also be used as a guide for readers and writers of fantasy. It can be purchased from the ‘Stories, Poetry and Articles’ page at
Writer, editor and English teacher, Kay Green is a lifelong lover of story in all its forms. Her collection ‘Jung’s People’ was first published by Elastic Press and is now available through her own small press, which is also a club for the promotion of independent writers and illustrators. The club has an online forum for developing stories and poetry and ‘enclaves’ around the UK where like-minded writers get together for workshopping and discussion, and to organise book
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