Whose Return Is It Anyway?
Some thoughts about fantasy and kings, inspired by Robert Jackson Bennett
Robert Jackson Bennett’s author’s note to A Drop of Corruption is a great investigation of the fantasy genre’s whole thing about kingship, and I’m glad it’s available to read for free online (though you should also read the Ana and Din mysteries in which it appears; I’m saving the second but the first was an excellent Nero Wolfe riff with its own wonderful weird fantasy identity, there could be twenty of these and I’d read them all). Bennett builds off a personal favorite Pratchett bit about how there seems to be, inside people’s heads, a blank spot on which is written: kings, what a good idea. In years past I have been on many a fantasy panel about why there are so many fantasy-monarchies. Those of us in the United States have a great deal more skin in the game with regard to this question than I’m happy with at the moment. You’ve got a blank space, baby, and I’ll write my name, as the prophets say.
Read Bennett’s essay, it’s good. I have too much to say on the subject to write it out in the time I have, but I’m going to sketch out an idea.
Part of the trouble is that it’s quite hard for many people (including me, more often than I’d like) to tell the difference between fiction, or dream, and reality. (News media, in the United States in particular, has not helped draw this distinction for a long long time, and in many ways has made the whole problem worse—I think about Zizek’s essay Welcome to the Desert of the Real a lot, and also Hunter S Thompson’s essay after September 11, and also, you know, everything that’s happened in the last twenty-five years.) Why might we tell a fantasy story in which the return of a king is a good idea? Why might we dream about kings?
Part of the answer is, we aren’t dreaming about the return of any-old-King—in the dream, the return is a return of our own agency, an integration of self and society.
One common fantasy story shape that’s deeply related to kings and the return thereof, goes something like this: the village is in danger, so loser outcast sets out into the wilderness, confronts many challenges, retrieves Something Important, brings it back, becomes Central to Village. So far, so Moana, right? But you can’t just blame this on Disney or the stranglehold of impoverished monomyths on Hollywood. One of my favorite books is Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown, and Aerin definitely follows this pattern, going from awkward loner to semi-divine wizard knight who anoints the king (and kicks out the Dragon Depression, that book rules). I could make a case that the Broken Earth books fit this general shape, too.
There are obvious reasons this type of story might be well-received by the loser outcasts of the world—and lest we forget the lessons of “Teenage Dirtbag” and Hazbin Hotel, we’re all losers, baby. We don’t quite fit in our beds, even if we made them ourselves. (Dr Procrustes to surgery, please.) We feel this keenly in adolescence, but oh, damn would it be nice if this were just an adolescent phenomenon. Adolescence is simply the moment when many of us feel this out-of-placeness for the first time, when we’ve outgrown the obvious answer to the question “who are you”—so-and-so’s kid—and have to find a new one. And each answer we find is, we soon discover, temporary. We have to find new ones again and again with each new school, each major life change, each new job, each transition from Economic Unit to caregiver, each expansion of our community of care. We’re leaving town over and over again, entering the wilderness of our souls, and coming back, dear God we hope, in some kind of right position, of agency in the world.
If you confuse fantasy for reality, I can see how you might read this kind of cycle story to process your experience and end up with some version of kings, what a good idea! But real kings in this fallen world are inimical to this story playing out where it needs to, that is, in your soul and in the souls of every being everywhere. One function a king serves—more pronounced the more autocratic—is to break and buckle human agency, to deprive others of the right to shape their lives. When we’re telling a story or having a dream, we imagine all the characters in that dream as diffractions of the central character or concept of the story—like a rainbow emerging from a prism—so the cycle becomes the story of a self integrating. Kingship in our world is the story of selves subjugated. Our challenge is to learn how to stand up. One of the multigenerational cathedral wonders of civil society, always under threat and always under construction, is its slow and painful project of expanding the space within which people develop the agency required to stand up, to build themselves and their communities—and reinvent both self and community—so as to become strong and whole, take up their tools, and get to building the cathedral.
There are, thankfully, many ways to tell stories about integrating the self. Star Trek at its best presents a vision of mutual respect within a functioning society, with plenty of conflict—you can envision the Enterprise as a society but you can also envision it as a single sort of meta-person, each crew-member mapping onto one of our many human responses to external circumstances. (Be logical! Go with your gut! Get mad! Think the problem through! Talk to people! Rebel! Hide on the holodeck and fantasize about your coworkers(sorry, Reg).) And at the same time, individual Star Trek episodes can focus on individual crew members as individuals seeking agency—without requiring that agency to involve subjugating others. Pratchett’s Discworld books are another good example: you can consider each “region” of the Disc, and certainly each storyline, as its own sort of meta-self, grubby and weird and contradictory and gloriously human, figuring itself out in different ways each book, achieving a staggering, lurching wisdom—and you can see each individual character struggling to figure themselves out. The wizards-roman is another approach: LeGuin’s fantasies of coming-into-power (and dismantling that power) hinge on naming and confronting the inescapable: yourself, your desire, your death.
I could probably write a separate essay about most of the sentences in this one—which is maybe a sign I should let it mellow in a drawer for a while! But here’s what I’ve got. Take care of yourselves, friends, & work for the liberation of all sentient beings.
Both this and Bennett's piece remind me of a recent moment of collective familial outrage in which the other-wise critics of Pop Culture Happy Hour were answering the question "Which television world would you choose to live in?" and _two_ of them answered "Westeros." (Obviously our answer was Star Trek:TNG, but I think you know that already....) But this also invokes Mary Renault's lovely and lesser-known book "The Mask of Apollo," which is about the real-life historical moment in which the philosopher Plato thought he had a chance to make the wealthy and prosperous city of Syracuse into the Ideal City ruled by the perfect philosopher-king - and he blew it completely, in part because he was an outsider coming in and telling people what to do and in part because his king-candidate was neither very talented nor very enthusiastic about the philosophy. Which is all to say that Plato and Aristotle, who are responsible for _A Lot_, really helped inflict this whole notion of "all we need is the Right King" onto Western culture. Yet they, two very thoughtful dudes, both ultimately failed in their kingmaking projects, even though Aristotle lucked into having an extremely talented, ridiculously charismatic, smart protege in the form of Alexander the Great - who still got himself poisoned at 33 after being responsible for the deaths of over 1 million people. There is no Best Possible system. If you're lucky you get FDR, _and you still get Japanese internment camps and an unstable succession and racism baked into the new social safety net._
Tangentially from the Le Guin reference - it's really struck me, rereading some of her work over the last few years, how often her stories' climaxes involve passing through a wilderness, literal or metaphorical, where there's nothing to do *but* grapple with those big questions of identity and who you are in adversity.
A Wizard of Earthsea does it quite obviously out in the open sea, and indeed is probably the one where it's most explicitly the character going into the wilderness *so that* he can face himself without distractions or danger to anyone else; but as well as its sequels exploring the same idea, we have the glacier in The Left Hand of Darkness (interesting for being *two* people alone together in the wilderness) and the famine in The Dispossessed doing very much the same narrative purpose.
I think there's a lot to grapple with on this topic in particular in the way her work tends to make that knowledge-of-self come from struggle and hardship, as well as confrontation, and the way solitude ties into that. No real conclusion from me here but I think there's some meat to this.