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NYTimes.com Article: Which Wizard Beats 'Em All?
Posted by Lale on 11/1/2002, 16:10:51
It has been such a bad time in so many ways that it feels a
bit odd to point out that it has been a very good time for
There can't be many people left who haven't read a Harry
Potter book or seen the movie, who don't find the name
Dumbledore at least vaguely familiar. And Gandalf, the
great wizard of "The Lord of the Rings," has long been
almost as ensconced in the popular imagination as Merlin.
This eruption of wizards is intriguing. Certainly it's a
good thing for actors. Who would not want to stand on a
stone bridge and confront an evil Balrog, raising a staff
and intoning, "You shall not pass"? That's almost like
singing Wotan in that other "Ring" story.
It also seems a strange coincidence that fantasy is having
a popular surge in troubled times. But in fact all movies
are fantasies, many serve as escapes from daily life, and
there are plot twists as far from reality in "Ocean's
Eleven" as there are in "Harry Potter."
Having more than one wizard in the multiplex does, however,
raise one tremendously important question. Not, What is the
meaning of fantasy? Not, Can the cinema ever truly capture
Tolkien's work? Not, Are orcs true evil-doers?
No, the big question is: Who is your favorite wizard?
Gandalf? Dumbledore? Merlin? The Wizard of Oz?
I'll give my answer up front, although I won't say why just
yet. My favorite is not as famous as the ones I just
mentioned. He is Ged, the hero of "A Wizard of Earthsea,"
by Ursula K. Le Guin. He may be less well known, but to
anyone who would actually think about ranking wizards, he
I started thinking about this question partly because of
the new movies, partly because I'm a longtime reader of
fantasy and partly because I have a 10-year-old son. He
lives and breathes questions like: O.K., in a match between
the greatest ancient kung fu master and Jet Li, who would
win? The best samurai of all time vs. the best European
knight ever? How about all the modern armies vs. all the
This approach has an obvious application to the wizard
question. Imagine a kind of World Wizarding Federation
Ultimate Magic Smackdown. Gandalf vs. Dumbledore, no holds
Admittedly, this is a crude way to judge literary
creations, but much more fun than the sort of thing you
learn in college. It can be done with other characters as
well. Monstro vs. Moby-Dick? Captain Kirk vs. Captain Nemo?
Portnoy vs. Holden Caulfield? (I'm betting on Moby-Dick,
My money would have to be on Gandalf in the wizard duel. No
question. I'd even give odds. Dumbledore is supposed to be
powerful, but the world of Harry Potter just doesn't
contain the same level of evil as the world of Tolkien.
Book or movie, Voldemort is a minor league prospect
compared to the Dark Lord (Tolkien's ultimate bad guy).
My son and I went down all the wizard matchups. First off,
the Wizard of Oz was disqualified, for obvious reasons: a
wizard must be a person who has developed real magical
power. That left us with a final four: Gandalf, Merlin,
Dumbledore and Ged. I know we've left out somebody's
favorite, but these were our choices.
He picked either Gandalf or Merlin (of "The Once and Future
King" by T. H. White, who calls him Merlyn) as the overall
winner, depending on whether we were talking about Gandalf
the Grey, or his later, more powerful incarnation, who will
be familiar only to Tolkien fans, Gandalf the White. My
wife insists that Dumbledore is the best.
I kept wanting to vote for Ged, but I had to admit that he
was more of a sentimental favorite, so naturally I had to
come up with some other criteria so he could come out on
Best beard would have to go to Gandalf. (Ged is clean
shaven.) Best hat would be tough, but I would have to vote
for Dumbledore. (I don't think Ged wears a hat, certainly
Perhaps, I thought, the wizards ought to be judged by their
stories. I called Ms. Le Guin to talk to her about fantasy
and its appeal. She has written eloquently about
imaginative fiction and its seriousness. Rather than being
primarily about good and evil, she said, "I think a lot of
fantasy is an exploration of what power is."
Certainly the Potter books and "The Once and Future King"
deal with the use and abuse of power, but both are gentle
stories. The fear of unleashed power is not as near the
surface as in Tolkien's world. I asked my son what was the
scariest part of the movie "The Lord of the Rings." It
wasn't any of the orcs or monsters. They were quite
familiar to him from their descendants in computer games.
Nor was it Sauron himself, the Dark Lord, the
He said he was frightened at only one moment in the movie,
when Bilbo, Frodo's beloved uncle and a wise and gentle
hobbit who held the ring for many years, turned on Frodo.
It happens when he is tempted by the ring, now held by
Frodo, and he lunges at his nephew, his teeth bared, his
face twisted in rage and greed.
The transformation of a beloved friend was what scared him
more than any special effect. The moment captured the
potential for power to transform anyone, which Ms. Le Guin
suggests is at the heart of much fantasy.
And this idea brings me to Ged. So far his story has been
available only to readers, but he will be coming to the
small screen because the Earthsea saga is being adapted for
a mini- series on the Sci-Fi Channel.
I suppose Ged requires some explanation. He is an oddity
among wizards, at least in modern books. Earthsea is not a
variant of medieval England. Ged is dark-skinned, rare in
the realms of English-language fantasy. And he is
thoroughly human, causing much of the trouble that he has
He is also, as my 17-year-old daughter pointed out, the
hero of his own saga. (Not everyone in our family is
besotted with wizards, but it's safe to say that realism
has to struggle to keep up in our household.) Other
wizards, like Merlin and Gandalf, tend to be wise guides to
small, often foolish young heroes, some with furry feet,
some not. Ged, on the other hand, is the hero who comes of
age in the Earthsea books, and the struggle over power is a
In the end, however, that's a very dry reason to favor a
wizard. Ged has all the wizardly chops. He can cause
storms, transform himself into a hawk, make light and split
rock. He speaks to dragons. You get the sense that he and
his magic are connected to the very heart of the world.
And that is why he's my favorite: his magic. Wizards and
their magic are inseparable. It is the nature of, and the
rationale for, Ged's magic that make him so compelling.
Gandalf and Merlin appear in their stories as already fully
formed wizards, their magic taken for granted.
Ged, although he has power, has to learn his wizardry.
(This raises the question of whether Harry Potter himself
should be in this equation. But he's not a wizard yet.)
What Ged learns is a language. Magic in the Earthsea
stories is built on the true names of things, the words
once used to speak his world into existence.
Words. Ged finds his power in language. That in the end is
why he's my favorite and why his magic is so appealing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/11/movies/11FANT.html?ex=1011759539&ei=1&en=a664a52f00ed2c3a
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 11/1/2002, 20:27:19, in reply to "NYTimes.com Article: Which Wizard Beats 'Em All?"
"Fantasy," these days, means the shelf section between "mysteries," and "science fiction" in our bookshops. It is the last refuge for real life dragons and damsels in distress, for magic swords and hairy hunks seduced by an evil sorceress. And of course of the indispensable and all-important fetish whose possessor will save the world or destroy it. Often "Fantasy" and "SF" overlap in a twilight zone where the sorcerer's staff crosses swords with the atomic blaster. For the talented writer all this is fair game and it is an amusing and sometimes thought provoking sight to notice the often fanatic cult following this kind of literature can create. Amusing for the critic; for a full time author this is the base of his subsistence. For him survival depends on sold copy; honorary degrees and Nobel prices are not likely to stud his road to fame, only the occasional brush with a critic's snobbery about pulp-fiction and "hacks."
As we left the cinema I apologized to my company that I had taken her through the ordeal of LotR. I found it a chore to sit out the film ("thin on story," said my sweetheart) I found it even more of a chore to read the book. But telling so to a Tolkien fan can provoke a surprisingly emotional outcry. Suddenly some perfectly nice people pronounce from the top of their lungs: "A book that changed my life!" "The best film of all times!" Excuuuse me! "Cinema Paradiso," "The Life of Brian," "Fellini's Satyricon" "Blade Runner," "Schindler's List," hey "Lawrence of Arabia" for crying out loud, "Patton," "12 angry Men," "The seven Samurai," "Doctor Strangelove," "Lady Killers," "Apocalypse Now," "Amadeus," Peckinpaw's "Billy the Kid," "Once upon a Time in the West," "Berry Lyndon," "Catch 22," Pasolini's "Decamerone," "Titus," and scores of films which I remember though I would have to dig for the title (the salespeople flick with Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon and a half dozen other first bill actors in the cast) - have they suddenly vanished from memory? Been obliterated? Never existed? It can be a spooky experience to come home and the key doesn't fit the lock while nobody around seems to notice anything unusual.
Tolkien's own claims were modest enough. He denied any "allegorical significance or contemporary political reference" and as for "the inner meaning or 'message,' it has in the intention of the author none." LotR was composed "at intervals during the years 1936 to 1949" and published in 1954. Tolkien was a noted scholar on medieval literature and especially fond of the "Kalevala." He made no secret of it. At times the tone mimics the voice of a storyteller from the nursery: evil words not to be spoken but in a whisper, ancient languages not to be divulged to the profane ear, quick glances from beneath bushy eyebrows. The narrative ploy of withheld information, or the right word passed on at the wrong time or to the wrong person comes a bit too often. Tolkien certainly had more fun in drawing up his maps and inventing all those languages for his trolls and elves, then it was for me to slog through. If you postulate too many propositions up front, things become circular, and you pull out in the end only what already had been stipulated. Frodo went on a mission - so what? It went to nowhere, I don't already know.
Tolkien had the advantage of a cushy academic position to bring bread to the table. So after dinner Tolkien could withdraw to his toy trains where he constructed, as tolkienists insist, an entire alternative world. And certainly, this is what an author does! Whether he writes "Anna Karenina," or "Madame Bovary," or "Swan's Way," it is all a mock-up to flesh out a fairy tale, no matter how closely it may resemble our familiar every day. The stuff of good imaginative writing is made neither from great ideas nor moral and political convictions. It is in the detail, and when it all comes together, the narrative begins to sing and the harmonies in the spheres resound to the novel's intricate calculus of destiny. Endowing a hobbit with one or two endearing characteristics and sending the creature on a wild goose chase after a foregone conclusion (in terms of story and plot) is not quite the same as creating an ambiguous human being to the point that the protagonist is shouldering the story on his or her own and carry it boldly where no one went before.
Northrop Frye has pointed out that imaginative literature, not unlike math, is based on stipulated propositions. Hamlet is not about ghosts, but the ghost a stipulated prop to propel the story. Shakespeare was a wise man, he left it by one ghost and did not distract us from the story with an addition of sorcery. A Summer Night's Dream is a bit different, but characteristically, a comedy. A real good fairy tale doesn't lose sight of the difference between the miraculous and the plausible. The angels in the bible still need wings or at least a ladder (Gen. 28:12). In Lucius Apuleius' ancient novel from 170 AD, which has lent its name to my upcoming webpage, the protagonist finds himself magically transformed into an animal and witches besmear their skin with potions, grow feathers and fly out the window. But magic and witchcraft always come as the extraordinary event, the thing that is not supposed to happen. It is an old narrative convention but it is there for a good reason.
In his days, in 1822, E.T.A. Hoffmann was more influential than Keats, Goethe, and Byron together. Hoffmann's thing was the intrusion of the magic world through the seams of the every day. It is not always clear how this is accomplished. Sometimes a carnival princess turns out to be a real princess - but where? In the dreams of a comedia del arte impresario? Or is she living incognito in a small Italian town and surviving as a seamstress? Did Anselmus see his new employer stretch coat tails and fly across the river? Could it be Loewenhog is actually a silver thistle in search for his lost lover? Can a flea really talk to you and make you look into the ganglia behind your adversary's eyes? Who can tell? The man who experiences it, is a bachelor in his thirties who every year buys a boy's world of toys as a Christmas present to himself. That superman has a second identity as a bungling news reporter is a ploy invented by Hoffmann.
Hoffmann was a child of the 18th century, he admired Lawrence Sterne. He also was a romantic. His stories and novels are a prank on the cold rationalism of the older generation. A teapot can pull a nasty face; a doorknob suddenly raise a snake's golden head and hiss at you. Magic happens, but unannounced and not as a matter of course. What scares the wits out of the protagonist, barely rattles anybody else who merely admires the craftsmanship of the door handle's polished brass. Magic occurs only to the simple heart of the bungling fool (an old cliche) who in the end will be rewarded for his meek existence with the robe and scepter of a prince of fantasy. Every writer of the period learned a trick or two from Hoffmann. E.A.Poe, Gogol, Victor Hugo, Balzac. The great Pushkin's "Queen of Spades" is a close adaptation of Hoffmann's original story, transposed from first person narrative to the third person.
Obviously all this has little to do with Tolkien's world, where everybody is taking magic in his stride, like in the nursery stories of the brothers Grimm. "Fantasy" without the sustained ambiguity between the miraculous and the plausible is just fast food for the hasty reader. The stupid old fetish doesn't bite when you spit at it in the museum, but here it is supposed to save the world from - well, from what? To me, the Manichean chess game between black and white magic, has always been particularly pointless. What evil? What good? The two sides are at each other's throat basically for rewards and lifestyles, sometimes even for the same reward and lifestyle. What's the difference? If I had to choose, I would emigrate. It is easy to be anti-civilization when Tylenol and central heating keep you comfortable. And isn't it strange how few people, even in good fiction, actually suffer from the flu? Sword wounds yes, but a simple cough? Or a toothache?
I mean, who in his right mind, will get himself in harm's way of a sword, even in the old days? These are cop-outs for the writer who lacks the imagination to find an angle on pneumonia and consumption. Not that I doubt that unicorns exist! Five glasses of Jonny Walker Black Label work wonders, and I can clearly see the creature from my window. Incidentally, Lucius Apuleius and E.T.A. Hoffmann had been great humorists. So is Adams. By contrast, "SF" and "Fantasy" are serious business. The lack of humor reaches biblical proportions. To be a good writer should mean to write well, regardless of genre and subject matter. Kafka, Borges, Douglas Adams, even Mervyn Peake's "Gormenghast" trilogy is proof that neither "Fantasy" nor "SF" should be a license for bad writing. Tolkin's kind ofÊ"Fantasy" is a nostalgic take on barefooted yeomen, and the haunts of black magic. The book is anti-technology with magic doing the plumbing (I needed that last X'mas, my toilet was flooding), anti-economy, which is easy when you have gnomes and dwarfs working the mines (even a hobbit needs pots and pans), and anti-politics. Cute! What next?
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Posted by Lale on 12/1/2002, 14:00:40, in reply to "The latest outbreak of Tolkienitis"
He'd just come along and scoop `em up under his arm
Like that, quick as a cat in the jungle
But Clark Kent, now there was a real gent
He would not be caught sittin' around in no
Junglescape, dumb as an ape doing nothing
For saving the world from Solomon Grundy
And sometimes I despair the world will never see
Hey Bob, Supe had a straight job
Even though he could have smashed through any bank
In the United States, he had the strength, but he would not
Folks said his family were all dead
Their planet crumbled but Superman, he forced himself
To carry on, forget Krypton, and keep going
Tarzan was king of the jungle and Lord over all the apes
But he could hardly string together four words: "I Tarzan, You Jane."
Sometimes when Supe was stopping crimes
I'll bet that he was tempted to just quit and turn his back
On man, join Tarzan in the forest
But he stayed in the city, and kept on changing clothes
In dirty old phonebooths till his work was through
And nothing to do but go on home
Brad Roberts - Crash Test Dummies
from "The Ghosts That Haunt Me" copyright 1991 BMG Music
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Posted by Lale on 22/1/2002, 16:55:37, in reply to "Superman's Song - by Brad Roberts"
By the third Harry Potter book, I was in just the state two
young readers had predicted. Until then I'd been having
such a good time with cosmic crises, games, all those
vehement school friendships and rivalries, and the
efficient way children move between compliance and
well-planned anarchy. The magic is literal in these books,
like those old tales where children stowed away on ships or
ran off to the circus; it's also as quick and exact as a
video game. The values -- courage, independence,
camaraderie -- are honorable. J. K. Rowling can plot as
well as any thriller or television drama writer. And she
knows how to use social realism too; think of Hermione
trying to unionize the house elves, or being an
overachiever partly because her undistinguished background
(nonwizard parents) makes her the equivalent of a lowly
But Sara and Sam were right. I felt as you do when you
start skipping new episodes of what used to be your
favorite television series. It was the old Wizard of Oz
problem -- you see how the thing is done, and even if you
can't predict what will happen next, you can anticipate how
it will happen, within what limits (narrative and
emotional), and what the effect on you will be. So you
start to register all the tricks of characterization, of
style, of ambition. You yawn, you get irritable, you turn
Read Philip Pullman's ''His Dark Materials'' series, Sam
told me. I finally have, and I am completely enchanted.
Fantasy literature is filled with visions of antiquity:
lost kingdoms, ancient peoples and a stock of images and
language rhythms drawn from folklore, fairy tales and
religion. The most ambitious kind of fantasy is science
fiction too -- it draws on the work and the language of
science to imagine alternate, futuristic ways of thinking
and living. Struggles between good and evil dominate both.
So does social criticism, whether realistic or theological.
Philip Pullman is English and, like C. S. Lewis and J. R.
R. Tolkien, Oxford educated. So it's fitting that the first
book in his trilogy, called ''The Golden Compass,'' begins
at Oxford. And just as fitting, since he is a critic of
Lewis and Tolkien, that his Oxford turns out to be in
another universe altogether and that the most important
member of that august community turns out to be a grubby,
headstrong young girl whose lies are as detailed and
elaborate as a scholar's research.
Pullman is also a true citizen of our world. Clearly he
knows and loves British literature and folklore; also that
of Scandinavia and Russia. And his imagination is stirred
by myths and practices from Asia and Africa, and by the
legends of Indians and whites in North and South America.
There's nothing dutiful or didactic here. It's all part of
the story, because his people inhabit multiple worlds, just
as physics tells us our cosmos has multiple dimensions.
Allow a small digression here. Writing of two kinds of
dimensions in his book ''The Elegant Universe,'' the
physicist Brian Greene tells us, ''If you sweep your hand
in a large arc, you are moving not only through the three
extended dimensions, but also through these curled-up
dimensions.'' And this spatial fabric can tear; in fact the
universe could be rupturing now, but so slowly that we do
I give you this because it is beautifully dramatized in
Pullman's tales, in which the fabric that separates the
various worlds -- one of them ours -- is being torn and
traveled through by all kinds of people, obsessed with the
nature of what some of them call Dust, some Shadows, some
particles. Our scientists would call this stuff elementary
particles, but Pullman makes it conscious, responsive to
the thoughts and desires of people. These books have a
truly wondrous population: the more traditional, but
freshly imagined, witches and harpies; armored warrior
bears; antelopelike diamond-shaped creatures with a leg in
front, a leg behind, and two in the middle; the mulefa, who
propel themselves forward on seedpod wheels; and
Gallivespians, haughty creatures no larger than the width
of a man's hand who ride hawks and carry poisonous spurs in
At the tale's center is a struggle. On one side, the
Kingdom of Heaven's ruler and his forces, who, supported by
church authorities, consider Dust the equivalent of
original sin; on the other, a vast army of rebels from
every world who consider it the source of intellectual,
moral and sensual joy. And at the heart of the struggle --
a struggle for our imaginations, really -- is Lyra, whose
journeys take her from Oxford to the Arctic North, to the
Pullman has made clear in a lovely essay called ''The
Republic of Heaven'' that he is passionately against any
religion that puts its vision of the spirit and the
afterlife above human life and the natural world, where our
moral and spiritual tests as well as our pleasures are
found. He opposes the tradition of children's literature as
Christian allegory, made famous by the Narnia chronicles of
C. S. Lewis. He is a disciple of that sensual visionary
William Blake. And by revising (as Blake did) Milton's
theology of Paradise lost and regained, he is paying
tribute to Milton the poet and political dissident. He
thinks it's dangerous to believe that innocence is at its
best when untouched by experience. Or that morality is at
its purest when untouched by joy. And what does he mean by
''the Republic of Heaven''? ''No kings, no bishops, no
priests,'' says one of the rebels. ''The Kingdom of Heaven
has been known by that name since the Authority first set
himself above the rest of the angels. And we want no part
of it. This world is different. We intend to be free
citizens of the Republic of Heaven.''
War, politics, magic, science, individual lives and cosmic
destinies are all here. They are not flung together, they
are shaped and assembled into a narrative of tremendous
pace by a man with a generous, precise intelligence. If you
are going to preface your books with passages from Milton,
Rilke and John Ashbery, then you had better write well.
Pullman does. His prose has texture and flexibility, like
excellent fabric. And he gives us so much. Suspense of
course, but such degrees of pleasure, excitement (the
excitement of meeting characters, not just adventurers) and
grief. And such joy -- the joy of thinking, of testing your
senses and feelings, of knowing your imagination is
entering worlds not dreamed of in the usual philosophies.
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Posted by Gerrit on 22/1/2002, 22:57:41, in reply to "The latest outbreak of Tolkienitis"
Agreed, Lord of the Rings is at its heart as it is at its surface: a simple story about the good guys, hobbits, elves and what have you more getting some nasty bruises but ultimately beating the bad guys. But what explains its worldy success, the huge masses reading it and now watching it? I went to the movie myself too and told other people that it was a good movie, but what did I mean by that I wonder. That is visually stunning and worth a few bucks to watch or that it elevates the mind ? Well the latter it did not, I felt only sleep. The first then I guess, but why is there a need to be stunned? Is this a symptom of a social disease dare I ask? Am I right to suppose that we only seek such stuns to dull the weight of overachieving individualism at large?
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 29/1/2002, 4:09:54, in reply to "NYTimes.com Article: Harry Potter for Grown-Ups"
Thank you Lale. Makes the mouth watering. And so true on the H.P. account.
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