We Need a Great American Fantasy

Any cultural critic can complain, as I did in last weekend’s column, about the lack of creativity in American popular culture right now and the unmet “hunger for a certain kind of popular art” amid so much institutionalized unoriginality. It’s a bit harder to give writers or filmmakers specific marching orders. What exact kind of popular art are we missing? What specific achievement should American creators be aiming for?

Nevertheless, let’s try a last-newsletter-of-the-year thought, one occasioned by recent social media discourse, my Christmas shopping and personal interests, and the box office success of “Wicked.” If I were giving out assignments for would-be invigorators of our stuck culture, I would suggest new experiments in the national fantastic and a quest for the Great American Fantasy story.

By this I don’t just mean a great fantasy novel written by an American. From the originating genius of J.R.R. Tolkien to the “grimdark” revisionism of our own day, fantasy as created and consumed in the English-speaking world is strongly associated with the Northern European past even when it’s being written by New Worlders like George R.R. Martin. (This includes my own experiment in novel-writing, which is working firmly within this Celtic-Germanic-Arthurian tradition.) Tolkien forged a legendarium tailored to the English, a people he felt deficient in mythological back story, and many decades later the most culturally influential sub-creations, from Narnia to Hogwarts, still tend to share an essential “Anglo” or “Old World” framework and appeal. In many of the Disney empire’s fairy tales, you have a partial Americanization of European forms — but there, too, the original power belongs to the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen, with plucky American-style heroines planted for the most part in pre-American realms.

Of course, contemporary fantasy writers draw from wider cultural influences: There are fantasy novels set in versions of China and Arabia and India and sub-Saharan Africa. But America presents a distinctive opportunity to the would-be fantasist — it’s the dominant culture of the modern world, so who wouldn’t want to help elaborate its mythological back story? — and also a distinctive challenge, since as the modern nation par excellence, the United States lacks a straightforward pre-modern patrimony to draw on and adapt in the way that, say, Martin draws on the history of medieval England and France to create his Westeros.

Just as political thinkers like Louis Hartz have argued that America lacks a true conservative tradition, being a liberal nation from the get-go, someone could argue that the Great American Fantasy is actually an impossibility, since the fantasy genre is concerned with the transition from the pre-modern to the modern, the enchanted to the disenchanted, and America has been disenchanted and commercial and capitalist from Day 1.

But no one who knows America deeply would regard ours as a truly disenchanted culture; if anything, we’re the place where disenchantment has reached a limit and stalled out or reversed, whether in the Jesus-haunted South or in New Age California. We do have a deep pre-modern past through our Native American inheritance, however obscured by conquest and dispossession its influence may be. And we are fascinated, indeed obsessed, with the places that embody our own transition from the pre-modern to the modern, from Puritan New England (visit Salem today if you think the American past has no magical resonance) to the landscape of the American West (where the struggle over civilization and its discontents continues).

So yes, the material for the would-be American fantasist is a bit different, a bit more patchwork, than what’s available in European history and mythology. But for the creative world-builder there is ample material to create a very American sub-creation — one that’s potentially as organically linked to the real New World as Middle-earth is to England or Northern Europe, and one that even might serve as a reclamation effort for certain half-forgotten aspects of our past.

For an argument about what that “organically” means, I recommend (without fully endorsing) these comments from the writer Tanner Greer, strung together as social media posts:

A distinctly American fantasy work, a work that grappled with the “mythic” elements of our culture, would be something like a Cormac McCarthy or Herman Melville novel, but set in an ambiguous somewhere else …

Tolkien has his characters speak the idiom of a lost medieval age. The American counterpart would have his characters speak the idiom the 19th century yeoman, the frontiersman, or the foreman of a railroad gang …

It would be interesting to compose a book list for this sort of project. You would need the KJV Bible, Shakespeare, a collection of hymns. 19th century newspapers; the slave oral histories, travelogues of Appalachia. Sermons and speeches. …

The point with all that reading is just to have that way of thinking and speaking come naturally — as had Tolkien with the early and late Middle Ages. …

And to instill that you are carrying on a tradition — and the tradition needs to be grounded not in other fantasy titles, but American literature, the American experience, the myths of our people.

Greer commends the musical “Hadestown” (which I have not seen) for trying to work in this terrain, and there are plenty of other examples of attempts at the American fantastic. I mentioned “Wicked” earlier because L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” is probably the most enduringly influential work of American sub-creation, but a longer list would encompass pulp magazines and weird tales and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars books, and then work its way forward to Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series, Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods” (an Englishman writing American fantasy) and of course Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” saga, with special nods to H.P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury for working in zones where fantasy blurs into horror or science fiction. (You could also argue that space opera, from “Flash Gordon” to “Star Wars,” is actually the key American contribution to the fantasy genre, but that would take a separate essay to unpack; you could argue that superheroes are the American form of fantasy, but you’d be wrong.)

But none of these works have quite achieved the contemporary influence of Narnia and Harry Potter and Westeros, let alone of Tolkien himself. And in part that’s because none of them are quite good enough. Gaiman’s big novel has a lot of interesting ideas but the mythology doesn’t quite cohere and the plot is unmemorable. (His very English “Neverwhere” is the superior book.) King’s “Dark Tower” saga has the right ambitions but it succumbs to late-career bloat. (The American fantasy novel King co-wrote with Peter Straub, “The Talisman,” is the more successful work.)

So the assignment, then, is — well, maybe there are a few of them. One would be to merely (“merely,” ha!) achieve what Gaiman and King in different ways were aiming for: A pop fantasy best seller that completely works, a very American saga that matches the success of other contemporary fantasists, that’s as big as “Game of Thrones” but belongs fully to the New World.

Another assignment would be to aim as high as possible, to try to forge a work of great literature, an actual Great American Novel out of fantasy’s tropes and impulses and materials. As the novelist and critic Aaron Gwyn noted recently in a social media post, the high points of American literature often emerge out of engagement with genre conventions: “MOBY-DICK is built off the adventure tale; ABSALOM, ABSALOM! inverts the haunted house story; BLOOD MERIDIAN remyths the western; BELOVED structures itself around the ghost story.” So why shouldn’t the next Melville or McCarthy or Toni Morrison, writing in an age of fantasy fiction, try to achieve a similar outworking from the fantasy genre?

Last — and this might be the assignment I’d give myself if I were suddenly graced with extra time and extra talent — you could try to write more as Baum did and create an All-American children’s fantasy (not a “Y.A.” fantasy, perish the thought).

The models, along with Oz and J.K. Rowling’s Hogwarts, would be Narnia, Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain and Susan Cooper’s “Dark Is Rising” novels; some influential American antecedents would include Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time” quintet and Jane Langton’s “The Diamond in the Window” and its sequels.

And the goal would be straightforward: Dethrone that precious Harry Potter and all his twee tea-sipping chums, free American kids from the tyranny of the British boarding school system (did we lose a war?) and give them a magical country that matches the scope and scale and impossibly wide horizons of their own.