Darling, You Know Better Than to Trust a Pack of Cards · 11:16pm May 2nd, 2016
This was inspired by last week’s post on the Fantasy genre. It started with a direct link, specifically to the point I made about Fantasy stories being more psychological than social commentary, but then it kind of… went off the rails into a totally different aspect of fantasy.
I probably would have left it, but this song is on the list of songs I put on when I’m putting Trixie to sleep:
I’ve linked to that one before, it reminds me a lot of Pinkie Pie, at least in her most archetypal aspect. But as I was listening to it, it brought me back to my thoughts on Fantasy. And I kept editing this, to try to make it explain things right. I still don’t know if I did, and I don’t know if I’ll ever know. These are subjects that some people have a kneejerk reaction against even when I can see them at work in that person specifically.
But I’ve spent more time on this post than some stories I’ve written, so what the hell.
My thoughts here start with the tarot. I own a half a dozen tarot decks, along with a handful of other sets of divination cards. I also made my own rune stones, and I own a pretty thorough book on astrology. A few times when friends or relatives have stumbled across these things, they’ve asked me, “Do you think this works?”
My answer is yes, but probably not the way they’re thinking.
To me, all of these things, along with others like the Myers-Briggs personality test, work by offering a new way of looking at things.
When you’re trying to figure out who you are and how to live your life, when you’re looking for explanations and solutions for the challenges you face, or when you’re trying to consider how a course of action will affect you down the road, it’s too easy to fall into a rut in terms of the information you consider important. It might be that things you’ve experienced or been taught all your life give information weight that it doesn’t actually have in the real world; it might be that you’re missing the forest for the trees, so focused on one aspect that you’re not even considering others. It might be that you don’t even know where to start thinking about things you’ve never thought about because you’ve never thought about them.
Tarot, runes, I Ching, astrology, and the Myers-Briggs all work by using broad language and symbols that you apply to your life and situation. Nothing “magical” (or scientific, in the case of the Myers-Briggs) needs to be going on, your brain is picking up on ideas, turning them around, and seeing how they fit.
But this is useful, because often you find things that do fit that you never thought of before. Brains are pretty amazing in their ability to make connections, even between random points that don’t otherwise have meaning, and these tools are putting that to use in self-understanding and problem solving. None of them should be treated as the last word on who you are and what you should do, but in terms of gaining perspective, they’re a private way of asking yourself for a second opinion.
Of all of those things, my personal favorite is the tarot. Tarot cards are designed to be symbolic, with images intended to represent the meanings associated with them. To me, those symbols help even more, presenting a wider range of ideas to consider. A card like this:
(I didn’t even go with the Major Arcana; they’re much sexier in terms of symbolism.)
...has a lot to unpack. Those are some shiny gold things! And a rainbow kind of thing! There’s a ship that seems to be coming in, and a dolphin, but he doesn’t look happy. The Ship and the dolphin are kind of foggy, and under the moon, and the land around him doesn’t look too inviting.
This card, the two of coins or pentacles, is interpreted as being about life balance and time management, especially in business. But maybe your question had nothing to do with business, and this came up. Maybe you asked if you should go on a diet. Then it’s time to start thinking and looking. Are there time and financial concerns related to dieting for you? Do your current plans involve some idea of how you’re going to afford or take the time to cook healthy food? Are there going to be times, at game nights or parties, where you’re going to have to balance being part of the fun with temptation to overeat? Do you have a plan in place to deal with that that will make you happier than the guy in the picture?
A tarot card can make you think like that. And a deck is full of 78 of them. Plus they look neat.
Tarot and the rest are a distorted mirror -- a rorschach test as a reflection and a predictor -- and in deciphering what they mean and what parts are accurate, you make choices about the perspectives you take. Sometimes they reveal surprising new ones, and sometimes the reaffirm things you know. But they make your brain work for it, and two people looking at the same card with the same question in mind can reach entirely different conclusions.
To me, fantasy works the same way, and that starts with magic.
Almost by definition, fantasy stories contain magic in some form, whether prophecies, magic items, races, creatures, spells, or totally impossible situations. I don’t think this is just a matter of tradition or handwaving, though authors might decide to use it for either reason. But as a genre, and to readers, I think it conveys an important message:
What you are reading is not real. It has never been real, it can never be real. Do not take it literally.
Now, no fiction claims to be real, and there’s plenty of Science Fiction out there that’s as unlikely as Fantasy. But other fiction does claim to represent reality in some way. Even an alien planet or alternate universe in Sci Fi implies that you, and your earth, exist somewhere else out there. But what separates Fantasy is that it’s not even pretending to exist in this universe. That is its defining trait, right there on the label: the faculty or activity of imagining things, especially things that are impossible or improbable. That’s the dictionary definition of “fantasy.”
This is important, I think it’s more than just semantics.
Let me take a second here to separate text and subtext. Textually, a Fantasy story needs to be a good story. To that end, it needs to build an internally consistent setting that allows someone to suspend disbelief. It needs protagonists and antagonists. It needs a plot with a satisfying conclusion. The things here can be talked about without regards to genre.
Textually, Fantasy does have a habit of moralizing. There are other kinds of stories that do this too—Oliver Twist wasn’t Fantasy despite Dickens wearing his favorite virtues on his sleeve as blatantly as Tolkien, but in terms of the modern world Fantasy is probably second only to Christian Literature in terms of Sending a Moral Message. This probably comes from its relationship to myth and fairy tales, which were designed to teach and proselytize. It’s not true of all Fantasy, but it’s worth noting.
These virtues and philosophies can be good or bad, realistic or unrealistic, but to me that seems to be tangential to the worth of a Fantasy story. If you’re judging it based on that, you’re judging it as if it has a correlation to real life. Often this is even how the author intended it.
But, as noted, it’s blatantly not real; a direct correlation isn’t possible. This is not showing you a world that works the way your world works. It told you that in the genre name, and it showed you by presenting a world where things happen that could not happen in our reality, no matter how far in the past or future, yet is recognizable enough for you to be interested in it. It’s a distorted mirror, like the tarot cards.
And like the tarot cards, I think what’s important about Fantasy is subtextual. It’s in the symbols it brings to the table, whether old or new, and how it uses them.
More than any other genre, Fantasy leans on symbols: magic macguffins, places, races, archetypes, heraldry, tropes, situations and trappings from myth and folklore and history. If an author doesn’t use the ones we already know, they almost always make new ones and often the success of a story depends on how vividly and strongly they can make us see and care about those symbols. They’re obvious in Fantasy stories, and while they often work towards the plot and/or moralizing, the best of them surpass that.
As an example of that, JK Rowling gave us a lot of symbols in Harry Potter, both new and old, but here’s a set of her most widely resonant:
Most of us are aware they represent intelligence, ambition, hard work, and bravery; that’s spelled out in the text. The text also deepens our understanding by showing us how people from those houses behave, what the trappings of the houses are like, which professors are in charge and what they do. And almost everyone who’s read Harry Potter has wondered which house they and the people they know would be.
But textually, Rowling messed up Slytherin. In their part in the story she was telling, they ended up almost all evil or at least unsympathetic, with the exception of Snape, who the text suggests should have been in a different house.
But most Fantasy readers recognize that’s not right, even though Rowling is the one who made them up. And it’s not just a matter of Draco or Snape being popular characters, or of logic saying that if they’ve been in Hogwarts for hundreds of years there must be something good about them. It’s because we know that what they represent isn’t always evil, and we recognize good people who would be Slytherin -- that this attribute and these trappings have value as more than just antagonists.
Rowling’s plot and moral couldn’t get in the way of a good symbol.
So the author lays out a story like tarot cards, revealing symbols that clearly indicate general directions to think in, but the associations and larger understanding are personal. Our brains twist them and turn them and connect them to our lives.
The takeaway from Fantasy shouldn’t be “monarchy would be cool,” or “people who face death for pure reasons get to come back and finish beating the bad guy” or “it’s a good idea to let traitors go because your mercy will turn the tide,” or even “you can make friends with anyone if you try hard enough.”
The real, important takeaway from Fantasy is different for everyone, because it’s about the symbols you see and what they mean to you.
Do you use a lightsaber or a blaster? Do you know your True Name? Do you want to go on an adventure? Do you want your birthright? Are you ambitious or brave or clever or hardworking? Are you a good witch or a bad witch? Seelie or unseelie? Are you honest, loyal, kind, generous, or funny? Do you believe in True Love? Can you trust in yourself? Are you ready to be king?
Do you want to go to Neverland? Do you want to leave Neverland?
These questions are recognizable, but they mean different things to everyone. And in spite of what it might indicate in the texts, there are no wrong answers to these questions. In fact, most of them are answered different ways in different stories in the Fantasy genre, which is one of the benefits of using sets of tried and true symbols. But whatever specific story you read, those characters and their stories and endings are not real; they’re literally Fantasy.
But those questions are real, and your answers are telling you things about your life.
Many different kinds of stories can leave you wondering what it all means, or what you would do or should do in the situations shown. But the best of Fantasy directs you towards answers that are intensely personal. Those answers are a reflection of who you are specifically, because you handed your brain pieces and symbols that aren’t real, that can mean lots of things or nothing, and asked yourself what it thinks of them. And honestly, I think that’s more likely to make people think something new, or help them to grow and change, than all the moral and philosophical arguments you can throw at them.
Take the path to left or right, with just your gut to guide you
The story is not for anyone else to tell.
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that's a nice way of looking at divination, a compromise of sorts.
A fascinating perspective on fortune telling, fantasy, and the human mind. Thanks for making me think about thinking from a different angle, even if the essay is real.
Interesting!
Though, really, I think your articles and Bad Horse's are best understood when one considers that there really are three things we call a genre: Genre-as-marketing-tool, genre-as-trappings, and genre-as-worldview. The first is whatever the suits think will push the book the farthest and depends on a certain word being vaguely associated with something people like to read. The second is a series of surface tropes which represent the skin of a genre, its most basic flavor. At this level, a spaceship is much the same as a magic chariot[1].
What you and Bad Horse discuss is this last, elusive form of a genre. Genre-as-worldview is fascinating but difficult to pin down because, of course, the fantasy worldview can be split apart from its trappings and one can play with symbols and archetypes and the raw stuff of story while using any sort of trapping one pleases. Indeed, the reason fantasy concerns itself with such things as true kings and ancient swords is that fairy tales (in which these figure prominently) are a common point of reference. But as time passes new things, symbols, and images are invested with this narrative power and start filling out their own tarot deck. I once wrote a story where I tried to play on just such imbued power in such a thing as a used bookstore.
So, in this genre-as-worldview context, I am not sure that, perhaps, it is impossible to find truly elemental genres that also correspond to what the mythical average person would recognize as familair genres. Perhaps fantasy, as you describe it, is really the special case of some hidden genre of... symbolcraft? Whatever you call it it is that which plays with symbols and with the belief and vividness we invest in them.
[1] Those bringing up Von Däniken at this juncture will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G. CHIEF OF ORDNANCE.
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I don't think it's really a compromise. I own a tarot deck[1] and if you asked me if it works I'd start inventing new ways of saying no. But as a toy? An aid to creativity? Sure it works! Besides, how do you properly read Calvino without a deck of tarot cards, I ask you?
[1] I would not have a book on astrology in the house, however. I seethe at astrologers. I can't help it. Spent too much of my life among astronomers.
I know what you mean: some of the Arcana resonate strongly with my own life-experiences.
images.somethingawful.com/mjolnir/images/cg03302004/Arkannoyed3.jpg
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I would buy that tarot deck in a heartbeat.
Hm. I think what you've gotten is a method of reading fantasy, to complement, say, Tolkien's method of writing it.
P.S.--I really like that song. My friend WillowWren introduced me to it.
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I honestly don't know anything about it or what it might represent, so I can't support or argue that claim.
I will say that there are plenty of symbols outside of Fantasy (the red pill and the blue pill in The Matrix[1], for example,) especially in individual works, and especially in terms of symbols that resonate with an individual person. I was just pointing out that this kind of symbolism is an inherent part of the fantasy genre.
[1] Though I've kind of been back and forth about how much The Matrix is Sci Fi and how much it's Fantasy-in-Sci Fi clothes like Star Wars. but for now, I'm happy to go with Sci Fi.
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That's... not quite what I'm talking about? I think? Once again, it's hard to say, having not read the book.
I'm talking more about symbols that are totally understandable, even to the point of being spelled out in the text, but still have a lot of interpretations when you apply them to yourself or your life.
A good example is cutie marks. The show tells us what a cutie mark is: It's a special talent, a destiny, a symbol of what makes one unique. We can easily accept it when we're told what a pony's cutie mark means to them.
But when you start to consider that in terms of you, a human outside of Equestria, it's going to bring up a lot of bigger questions. What does make you unique? Is there something you're meant to do in life, and are you doing it?
A lot of kinds of fiction use deep, complex, multi-faceted symbols that are intended to be considered as part of the story (Moby Dick, or the moors in Wuthering Heights, for example.) What's uncommon outside of Fantasy is for the story to almost or outright say "this is a symbol. Here's what it means to people in an imaginary world." and then let you try to fit that into your mental landscape. In the same way that boundaries sometimes make the most creative art, symbols like that with clear meaning sometimes result in the most creative thinking as your thoughts figure out how to adapt to them, rather than the other way around.
Like I said, I don't know if the symbol you're talking about in Solaris is one of those.
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I hope you don't mind if I reply one more time; I'm kind of trying to make sure I have a clear definition for myself, so you're kind of offering me someone to bounce off of. Thank you.
I'm not sure it always needs to be specifically an in world symbol, but I do think it's something that is accorded symbolic significance in the setting. For example, the "adventure" offered to Bilbo in The Hobbit is, in a way, just a military operation, and the dwarves have good reasons for going, and good reasons for wanting Bilbo to go. But at the same time, Bilbo recognizes it as having larger meaning for himself than just a psuedo-political mission to restore Throin's kingdom. For a hobbit to go on an adventure means something about that hobbit, and that's a part of his decision making. Whatever other considerations there are to be made, the characters also consider what it means to them.
Edit: Another example. For Aragorn, becoming king is both a political consideration-- someone needs to lead the men of Middle Earth -- but it's also symbolic for the heir of Isildur to reforge Narsil and complete the destruction of the ring. But in a totally different story, when Wart pulls the sword from the stone and becomes king, it's more like getting his cutie mark: it gives him a place in the world, it validates his studies with Merlin, and gives him a destiny of his own. Yet he still worries that he can't actually be the political leader of a nation. Similar symbols (kings, swords) with an understood meaning for the characters that's a part of the story, but also carrying practical in world considerations that are part of the story.
I like your discussion of how fantasy lets people take away their own lesson, maybe more than any other genre.
Is Shia Lebouff supposed to be the Two of Pentacles?
A good question would be what you consider a tarot deck. Because, even a pinochle deck and a standard 52 pickup can be used for tarot with an understanding of Lenormand.
In my opinion assigning meaning to a storytelling game, or luck in general, while denying an inborn talent for the standard 50-80% accuracy humans have for predicting the consequences of their actions as supernatural is closer reinforcing a delusion than true fantasy.
I am also of the opinion that all stories have morals, but not all morals reflect the values of the reader. As such, the moral remains an unseen theme throughout the story that is dismissed just as quickly. For instance, chivalry and good governance are present throughout MLPFIM but you rarely notice the more deviant aspects of social control that are being used to justify harm, disarm, disrespect, disempower, or destabilize and blackmail characters.
Because the show specializes in front-loading even mentioning the potentially harmful aspects of social control is dismissed as a delusion, or seen in the context of a game. One where oneupmanship is a game of contempt. Then again, the 9 of <3's is The Rider... and if a pegasus is a poet, and a unicorn is a million dollar startup, what does that make a brag?
I was going to make another comment but it turned into a blog post.
I agree with that approach to Tarot and similar things, how they can still be useful without necessarily being taken literally. I'd never thought of how that connects to fantasy stories before.
This got me thinking about how FiM uses this in season 1 and its pilot episodes. The Nightmare Moon story is much more of a fantasy; here's 6 characters and what each of them symbolizes. Strange magical challenges appear, and they succeed by using their symbols (e.g. Pinkie laughs away the scary evil trees). Then for the rest of season 1, it seems to pull away from that fantasy, and show these characters in a world more grounded in reality. The challenges are no longer magical, but come from social conflicts, and the solutions aren't quite so simple anymore (e.g. Pinkie tries to cheer up Gilda and throw a party, but it backfires. ditto on the Settlers vs Buffalo situation).
Even the adventure episodes with dragons and diamond dogs seem to take place in a different world from the pilot. There's the obvious fact that they never mention the elements of harmony nor how they previously saved the world, but more importantly they don't rely as much on the power of symbols. Well, the dragon can still symbolize something, but the plot uses it as a character instead of a monster. (now I'm not even sure. maybe it's still fantasy? or sci-fi?
)
anyway, that contrast between the types of episodes does help me understand how fantasy stories work, thanks to this blog post.