NETFLIX AND THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE

FILM AND LITERATURE are two very different mediums, and it is pointless to expect a smooth translation from one to the other.  There are reasons why Arwen was at the Ford of Bruinen rather than Glorfindel in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings; reasons why Mat Hooper doesn't hook up with Ellen Brody in the film adaptation of Jaws; and yes, even reasons why Ozymandias's sinister plan in the cinematic Watchmen doesn't include tentacles.  It's pointless to rail against such things.  Very few films are scene-by-scene faithful to the books that inspired them.

There are a few.  Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby is essentially just the novel put up on the big screen.  Robert Mulligan didn't stray far from Harper Lee for To Kill a Mockingbird.  And in 1963, legendary director Robert Wise did an adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House under the title, The Haunting.  There have been two subsequent film versions, one in 1999 and now a ten-hour television adaptation for Netflix.  Wise's faithful version is widely considered one of the finest haunted house films ever made.  The two subsequent versions missed the entire point.

Now, I did not object to the complete overhauling of the novel's plot; Jackson's legendary novel is far too short and to the point for a ten-hour binge-worthy Netflix adaptation.  Making the protagonists a family, rather than a collection of strangers brought together to investigate a haunted house, was not on the face of it a bad idea.  Nor was it a bad decision to flash backwards and forwards between the characters as children--when they lived in Hill House and it destroyed their mother--and adults still dealing with the echoes and the fallout of that tragedy.  But when fate has handed you one of the scariest pieces of fiction ever written to work with, you might wish to pay attention to the engine that makes it work. That engine is Hill House itself.

What distinguished Jackson's novel is that we are never really certain if Hill House--despite a reputation for being the "Mount Everest of haunted houses"--is really haunted at all.  Are there ghosts in Hill House?  We never see any.  To borrow a line from H. P. Lovecraft, "What I heard in my youth about the shunned house was merely that people died there in alarmingly great numbers."  That is the essence of Hill House.  People have terrible accidents there.  People kill themselves there.  But the implication is not that specters walk the halls, it is that the house itself is bad. Stephen King understood this, referencing Hill House directly in his 'salem's Lot.  His own Marsten House--like Hill House--holds evil in its "moldering bones."  King, like Jackson, is asking us to consider the possibility that a house, like a human being, can be wrong.

In the novel, and the superb Wise adaptation, there are poundings on the doors, there is writing on the walls.  But not all of the characters hear the poundings, and we are never really sure if it was a ghostly hand or--far worse--one of the characters wrote the words themselves.  To sum the Jackson novel up in the colloquial, Hill House is fucking with their heads.  People died there, but did they actually leave any ghosts?  Not according to Jackson;

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Hill House, "not sane," stands "by itself."  Whatever walks there, "walks alone."  The problem with the 1999 adaptation, and now Netflix's, is that the house is not alone.  It is filled to the rafters with ghosts.

Don't get me wrong, the Netflix The Haunting of Hill House is a bit more subtle about it than the 1999 version, and is superior to that one in nearly every way.  Right up until the tenth and final episode you can't be certain the ghosts are real or just hallucinations.  But it is in that final installment that the writers and producers demonstrate they either never fully understood the point of the novel or they simply did not care.  Hill House is bad, yes, but the ghosts are real and some of them are "good."  A husband is reunited with his wife there and they two of them live happily ever after as ghosts forever.  The Dudley's die there so they can live eternally with their child.  And in a rewritten line that is essentially a giant middle finger at Shirley Jackson, "whatever walks there, walks together."

Yes, there are legitimate reasons to rewrite books for films.  The film version of Goldfinger, for example, turns Ian Fleming's daft idea of the ultimate bank robbery into a far more chilling act of terrorism.  Yet despite this change, Goldfinger remains fairly true to the core of the novel.  This Hill House doesn't give a damn about Jackson.  It just wants to cash in on the title.

If you like well-written family drama, if you like uplifting tales of familial love overcoming obstacles, this is a good series for you.  It has genuinely scary moments, and the final revelation of the secret of the "Red Room" is brilliantly done.

But if you were looking for The Haunting of Hill House, go rewatch Robert Wise.    

'SALEM'S LOT IN THE TRUMP ERA

Baby mama drama's screamin' on and too much for me to wanna

Stay in one spot, another day of monotony's

Gotten me to the point I'm like a snail

I've got to formulate a plot or end up in jail or shot

Success is my only mothaf****n' option, failure's not

Mom, I love you, but this trailer's got to go

I cannot grow old in Salem's lot

- Eminem, Lose Yourself

I grew up in 'Salem's Lot. Many Americans did. The town that is the titular character in Stephen King's second published novel is instantly recognizable to millions of us. It's a dead little place. Nothing ever happens there. Everyone knows everyone, and it is so safe you can leave the keys in the ignition of your pick-up truck at night. If you live there, you probably don't even have a lock on your front door. After all, the crime rate is just about zero. Because 'Salem's Lot doesn't know the inflated and grotesque evils of the big city; its evils are all the small and whimpering kind. The neighbor's wife cheating with the postman. The guy who smacks his girlfriend around. The kids who shoplift at the dime store.  The alcoholism and addiction that springs from despair, from knowing the jobs have all gone and you can't feed your family.  These are the small town evils, evil with a small "e," the monotonous and banal evils that slowly bleed you dry like a million paper cuts.  Everyone knows the really big "E" Evils could never happen here.

Until, of course, Big "E" Evil waltzes--by your invitation--into town.

...Tourists and through-travelers still passed by on Route-12, seeing nothing of the Lot but an Elks billboard and a thirty-five-mile-an-hour speed sign. Outside of town they went back up to sixty and perhaps dismissed it with a single thought: Christ, what a dead little place...

  
In terms of plot, 'Salem's Lot is essentially Dracula; an ancient European vampire relocates from East to West and begins vampirizing the populace.  But the book is actually far more than that.  In his introduction to the 2005 Illustrated Edition, King talks about the naive arrogance of a 23-year-old writer thinking he could rewrite Bram Stoker's Dracula as "the great American novel."  Maybe it would be a stretch to bestow that title on 'Salem's Lot, but what amazes is how close King actually came. Forty-two years after its publication, the novel rings true more than ever.  This is the story of a rural American town well past its glory days; no jobs, no hope, no future.  In their despair the townspeople make a Faustian bargain with a stranger, a man who comes into their lives with empty promises of great things.  Submit to him, put your faith in him, and he will make you great again.  Out of quiet desperation they turn their backs on the light and lose their souls in the process.

In the wake of the 2016 election and the more recent events in Charlottesville, 'Salem's Lot seems very relevant.  

When horror works, and it works extraordinarily well in 'Salem's Lot, it does so because it makes us uncomfortable with ourselves.  Vampires don't cast reflections, but 'Salem's Lot makes us squirm because it turns the mirror on us.  Dracula was a very 19th century novel, in which the liberal and democratic British easily put down the threat of foreign imperialism.  But 'Salem's Lot emerged at the tail end of the 20th, and just a generation removed from the people who fought World War II, King understands fascism far better than Stoker ever could have.  Fascism, whether it happens in Germany or Italy or middle America, is always the willing submission of the populace, the surrender of morals and freedoms, born out of despair.  Fascism is something that must be invited, like the vampire, into your home.

Like Eminem says in the song, he can't bear the idea of growing old in 'Salem's Lot. He's desperate to escape and become something more. And that is what the vampires in King's novel feed on, far more than blood. They drink up that quiet desperation, that ennui. With their cold dead smiles they seem to say "don't you worry about a thing, close your eyes and I will make everything go away."

King makes several references in 'Salem's Lot to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, a book that deeply influenced him. No where is that more clear than in the way he characterizes Small Town, USA. 'Salem's Lot is the geographic incarnation of Jackson's protagonist, Eleanor Vance, a deeply conservative and self-obsessed woman who secretly longs for something, anything, to "happen" to her. It finally does; she encounters Hill House and allows it to seduce her. The small Maine town of Jerusalem's Lot just about does the same with its vampires...creatures that of course have to be invited in. There is a grim undercurrent running through the novel that the town is pleased something interesting is finally happening to them.  For once they are not being ignored or dismissed.  Someone is listening to them.  Someone cares.  And if the price for that is vampirism, or racism, or anti-semiticism, why not? 

...The town knew about darkness. It knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul. These are the town's secrets, and some will later be known and some will never be known. The town keeps them all with the ultimate poker face...

I reread 'Salem's Lot biennially.  It was one of the novels I read in my childhood that made me want to write.  There are a thousand reasons for this.  I could talk about the stealthy and devious way King creeps up on you and makes you believe in vampires.  I could talk about the memorable characters.  I could talk about King's easy, almost folksy prose.  I could praise his intimate understanding of small town people and small town life.  But I think it rises to the level of a great novel because it has a warning for us.  It understands the narcissism that is ultimately at the heart of the vampire tale, the poisonous notion of Prince Charmings and politicians and saviors who we think will sweep in and make all the pain just magically go away.  And maybe above all, it understands the necessity of fighting this in whatever form it takes.

THE DRACULA DOSSIER: A REVIEW

"I write to tell you how very much I have enjoyed reading Dracula. I think it is the very best story of diablerie which I have read for many years."

Letter, Arthur Conan Doyle to Bram Stoker

Dracula does not immediately present itself as a spy thriller, until you stop and think about it.  Here is a foreign power from the shadows of Eastern Europe, secretly buying up properties and planning the covert invasion of a Western democracy.  Here is an illegal immigrant smuggled into the country, a terrorist in the deepest sense of the word.  Here is a foe secretly recruiting the young and the vulnerable, brainwashing and turning them to his cause.  Here is a conspiracy that threatens the Crown.  Academics have wrangled over how exactly to classify Bram Stoker's 1897 masterpiece for more than a century, and many have described it first and foremost as invasion literature, the fear of the foreign creeping into society and taking it over.  Seen in this light, it becomes a spy thriller, or at least lends itself to being one with a little help.  That is where Ken Hite comes in.

Some of us have been Hite groupies since the days of Chaosium's Nephilim, and despite a wide variety of RPG credits (he was the line developer, for example, of Last Unicorn's Star Trek: The Original Series) he is probably best known as the guy you go to for painstakingly researched horror games.  We're talking Secret Societies and Major Arcana, we're talking Mage the Sorcerer's Crusade and The Cainite Heresy, we're talking GURPS Cabal and the definitive edition of GURPS Horror.  The list goes on.  Of late he has been with Pelgrane Press, writing the exceptional Trail of Cthulhu around Robin Laws' Gumshoe system.  But it is with The Dracula Dossier, a campaign setting for his Gumshoe-powered game Night's Black Agents that Kenneth Hite outdoes himself.  This thing, ladies and gentlemen, is a masterpiece.

Hite describes NBA as "Jason Bourne meets Dracula," but this is selling the core rules short.  Offering a wide variety of play modes, styles, and options, Agents could just as easily be "George Smiley meets Lestat," "Richard Hannay meets the alien energy drainers from Lifeforce," or "Jack Ryan meets Miriam Blaylock."  Essentially it comes down to the player characters being spies who discover, and take on, a massive vampire conspiracy, but both the type of spy thriller--from gritty, paranoid conspiracy tale to cinematic shaken-not-stirred action--and the nature of the vampires can be tailored to taste.

Agents was good, but the appearance of The Dracula Dossier elevated it to amazing.  While it consists of a full line of materials, I will be talking specifically about two books here; Dracula Unredacted and Director's Handbook.

The backstory goes like this:

In 1894, British Intelligence attempted to recruit the ultimate deniable asset, a vampire.  Their assets--George Stoker and Armin Vambery--had uncovered the existence of these creatures nearly two decades earlier on the front lines of the Russo-Turkish War.  Spymaster Peter Hawkins sends a young agent, Johnathan Harker, to bring the vampire in.  Transport is arranged for him to Britain and a safehouse secured.  But this vampire, Count Dracula, cannot be controlled.  He turns on his handler and launches his own schemes.  British Intelligence has no choice but to recruit others to terminate him.

In the fall-out of this mess, George Stoker's brother, Bram, is assigned the task of collecting all pertinent documents (diaries, telegrams, newspaper clippings) to prepare the after action report.  For whatever reason, the original is then heavily redacted and released to the public as a misinformation campaign.  The rogue branch of Intelligence that attempted to recruit Dracula, Operation Edom, goes underground.

Neither Dracula, nor Edom, surrenders so easily.

In World War II Edom attempts to recruit Dracula again, and in the 1970s realize Dracula had left behind his own network of agents that was preying on British Intelligence and feeding secrets to the Romanians.  After the terror attacks of 7/7 in 2011, Edom crawls out of the woodwork yet again, hoping to recruit Dracula to eat his way through Al-Qaeda and ISIS.  But like the back of the book says, "Dracula cannot be controlled and Edom cannot be trusted."

This is where the players come in.  Intelligence agents, they come into possession of the original, unredacted Stoker report.  This is the complete record of the 1894 operation, annotated over the years by three different Intelligence agents (one in the 40s, the 70s, and the present day--charmingly they use the work names Van Sloan, Cushing, and Hopkins after the actors who played Van Helsing).  Using this file, the "Dracula Dossier," they follow up its clues and attempt to hunt down the vampire once and for all, taking on his own massive conspiracy and Operation Edom in the process.

None of this does justice to the immensity of what Hite and co-author Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan have done here.  Dracula Unredacted is Bram Stoker's entire, full-length novel, published with hundreds of annotations scrawled in the margins in three colors of ink by the three different "Van Helsings."  Each of these corresponds to an entry in the Director's Handbook that offers several different takes on what the entry might mean.  Dracula Unredacted is then given to the players as what has to be the most amazing player handout ever conceived, and they use it to steer the campaign.  The players read it, and decide which entries to investigate.  The GM then consults the Director's Handbook and responds by taking the option that best suits his campaign.

For example, Lucy Westenra finds a brooch on the beach in Whitby.  An annotation mentions that this item was not found among her personal belongings after death.  If the players chose to pursue this clue, several different locations for where the brooch might be found are given in the Director's Handbook, as well as options for the brooch's significance.  Is it an occult artifact that calls out to vampires?  An ornament Dracula gives out to his agents?  Just a simple piece of jewelry with no significance at all?  Each choice leads to other options, allowing the players to follow the trail of clues back to Dracula.

In essence we are talking a sandbox campaign here, with the novel itself serving as the map.  The players go where they deem best and the GM responds.

The Director's Handbook also helps the GM set up the structure and purpose of Dracula's conspiracy, as well as determining what sort of vampire the Count really is.  Everything is a choice in this campaign, from the true names of the principal characters (was "Johnathan Harker" really his name, or was this a cover identity) to their exact roles (Quincy P Morris...a Texan?  Really?  Or was this an elaborate cover for an Edom agent or minion of Dracula?).  The end result is that no two playings of the Dracula Dossier would ever be the same.

For hardcore Stoker fans, Dracula Unredacted is a treasure unto itself.  While it is essentially the original Stoker novel, Hite and Ryder-Hanrahan have gone back into the author's original notes to replace characters, subplots, and events eventually cut from the novel.  These have been flawlessly inserted and repurposed.  I will say no more without spoilers, but the way Stoker's famous Dracula's Guest is put back into the book is a stroke of genius.  Even just reading Dracula Unredacted alone is a game of figuring out where Stoker ends and the new additions begin.

Because this is set in the modern day, because just as in our world Dracula was published and made into umpteen films, plays, and television programs, Dracula Unredacted is not even the players' only resource.  Nothing stops them from pulling out their smartphones and tablets in the midst of play, Googling historical figures, locations, and details from the text.  Hite hasn't just made shit up, he's drawn on a ridiculous number of other sources and references for players to chase down.  Again, this makes the Dracula Dossier a genuinely one-of-a-kind experience as reality itself conspires to further the tale.

If you have the kind of group that likes to be genuinely challenged--not just falling back on dice rolls and optimizing character stats--this is for you.  It will push players to the limits of their own ingenuity as they match wits against Dracula and attempt to dismantle his schemes.  If you like gothic horror, historicity in games, globe-hopping spy thrillers, you need to own this.  It is truly unique.

  

HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSED CHILD: A REVIEW OF THE SCRIPT

LEAVE IT TO J.K. ROWLING to come up with the only thing worse than being an orphan fated to confront the most terrible dark wizard of all time...being the son of the man who saved the world from Voldemort.

Albus Potter is not the wizard wunderkind his father was.  He is not terribly good at spells, he is lousy at Quidditch, and he is the only Potter sorted into Slytherin rather than Gryffindor.  From his first day at Hogwart's forward, everyone is clucking their tongues about how disappointing he must be to his father.  Even his cousin Rose--Hermione and Ron's daughter--turns her back on her childhood friend.  The only companion he has is another "cursed child," Scorpius Malfoy, the son of Harry's old rival Draco.  Scorpius has his own baggage, not the least of which are dark whispers that his father was really Lord Voldemort.  These two social outcasts from the teen wizarding world form a bond, and a wild plan, to right certain wrongs and redeem themselves in the eyes of their families and peers.   

I will not be spoiling the plot here, but Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was not at all what I expected.  Then again, maybe it was.  It is trademark J.K. Rowling in the way it uses the utterly fantastic to showcase real human feelings of frustration and pain, to shine a spotlight on the uncertainties of adolescence in the middle of a wild adventure tale.  At the same time, it seems even more grounded in reality than the seven novel saga that spawned it.  Yes, there are still puzzles to solve and spells to cast, but instead of the classic Arthurian myth of the boy hero raised in obscurity and destined to save the kingdom, we have two boys who want nothing more than to be accepted.  And Harry, now a middle-aged father, has never seemed less magical.  True, he is the Boy Who Lived, but he is now the Man Who Grew Up Without a Father and Has No Idea How to be One Himself.  He tries very hard but fumbles, at one point shockingly, setting the entire plot in motion.  

John Tiffany and Jack Thorne's script (based on a story by Rowling) brings back many of the characters from the novels, now all grown up.  Hermione Granger (who kept her maiden name when she married Ron) is the Minister of Magic and Harry's boss (he's the Head of Magical Law Enforcement).  They have problems of their own.  Defeating Voldemort did not necessarily mean an end to the Death Eaters.  In a way these two characters seem scarred by their childhoods, still obsessed with the only thing they seem to know how to do (fight Voldemort).  Ron seems to have escaped, inheriting Weasley's Wizard Wheezes and making a living producing novelty magical items, but there seems something sad even about this.  The story doesn't romanticise; amazing kids have grown up to be fairly normal adults.  Even old Draco seems powerless and diminished, unable to save his beloved wife from terminal illness.  Their pasts and obsessions inevitably haunt and complicate the lives of their children, leading to a tale in which Harry's latest case entangles Albus and Scorpius up in it.

This is about all I can really say.  The reader needs to be prepared for the fact that this is a play script, a collection of dialogue and stage directions.  It doesn't read or unfold the way the novels do.  The reader also needs to be prepared for what is the most adult Harry Potter fable.  Just as the books grew up with their protagonist, from the "aw shucks" wonder of Philosopher's Stone to the grim angsty confrontation with life and death in Deadly Hallows, Cursed Child is about middle age, about being caught between your own childhood and the childhood you have given your offspring.  It's heart-tugging, uplifting, and occasionally disappointing, just like you expect parenthood and adulthood to be.  

Three out of Five stars. 

CAROLE SATYAMURTI'S "MAHABHARATA," A REVIEW

Despite the availability of various versions of the Mahabharata, on page, screen, and in live performance, I am assuming that it will be less familiar to the average American or European reader than the Iliad or the Aeneid, for instance. I have seen my task as one of trying to open the reader's eyes--as my own were opened--to the richness of a literary masterpiece they may hardly have heard of until now...

Carole Satyamurti, from her Preface

FIFTEEN TIMES THE LENGTH OF THE BIBLE, the Mahabharata is a sprawling saga of gods and mortals, demons and monsters, comedy and tragedy. It is the story of Kuruksetra, a cosmological war that ended the previous Golden Age and gave rise to our Age, the fallen Kali Yuga. On on side, divine beings incarnated in mortal form as Lord Krishna and the five Pandava brothers. On the other, demonic powers incarnated as Duryodhana and his ninety-nine Kaurava brothers. Disguised as a dynastic struggle between human cousins, it is actually a fight for the destiny of the Earth.

Composed around two thousand years ago, but with an oral tradition stretching back a millennium before that, the Mahabhrata is as familiar to the people of India and South Asia as the stories of Adam and Eve or Moses and Pharoah are to most Westerners. Usually compared to the Iliad and Odyssey, it certainly shares much in common with them; Sanskrit and classical Greek are close cousins, with vocabulary and grammatical structures strikingly similar. Both descend from an earlier Indo-European ancestor, and it is easy to see the linguistic and thematic relations between Greek and Vedic mythologies (a clear example is the god Uranus and the god Varuna, both lords of the night sky). But the Mahabhrata differs sharply from its classical Greek cousins in that for hundreds of millions it remains a religious scripture, and enjoys a position in Indian culture that is more Biblical than Homeric. The Bhaghavad Gita, the section Westerners are most likely to have heard of, is still a source of moral, ethical, and spiritual teachings to many on the subcontinent, and indeed has inspired people far beyond. Because it is such a significant text, people have been attempting English translations since the 19th century. The best known is probably KM Ganguli's, but despite being the most complete translation in English, its stilted Victorian prose is nearly as alien to modern readers as the Sanskrit. Several others, among them William Buck, R.K. Naryan, and C. Rajagopalachari, have published condensed versions also in prose. All seem to be missing something.

The problem seems to be that its very heart, the Mahabharata is a poem. Traditionally, audiences would have experienced it in song or chant (indeed Bhaghavad Gita means "the song of God"). The English retellings, concentrating on making it clear and comprehensible for modern audiences, have generally ignored this, opting for prose instead. This isn't necessarily a bad decision; any attempt to directly imitate the metrical form of the shlokas (the stanzas used in classical Sanskrit literature) in English would sound jarring anyway. But undeniably something is lost by changing it to prose, and these Mahabhratas all seem drier and dustier for it. So while there are certainly good translations to be had in terms of accuracy and keeping alive the stories, no one has really been able to make the epic sing in English as it must have sung to its audiences so very long ago.

No one until Carole Satyamurti, that is.

Mahabhrata, a Modern Retelling is glorious, and like so many brilliant ideas you are dumbfounded no one ever got around to thinking of it before. It starts with the realization that retelling the Mahabharata isn't a job for scholars, it's work that requires a poet. Satyamurti, an award-winning poet with several published collections under her belt, comes at the work not as a Sanskritist would--primarily concerned with hewing close to the original language--but as an artist who paints pictures with English verse. Since she does not, by her own admission, read Sanskrit, she allows herself to trust the most respected translations of those who do, soaking them up and respinning them in a way that sings to the English ear. The result is the Mahabharata I first longed for twenty years ago, when I read it in Sanskrit, and desperately wanted to share it with my English-speaking friends and family. It's the retelling you can hand to English speakers and say "this is why it has been loved for two thousand years."

This is no mean feat. Satyamurti has distilled 100,000 Sanskrit shloka couplets into 27,000 lines of English blank verse, keeping the structure of the original 18 books largely intact. Her choice of blank verse, with nine to eleven syllables per line and an average of five stresses, is perfect. The Sanskrit shloka, consisting of 32 syllables in two 16 syllable lines, was a widespread and well known form in ancient and classical India, just as blank verse--the meter of Shakespeare's plays and Milton's Paradise Lost--is for modern English speakers. Reading Mahabharata in this form is a subconscious cue that we are reading a classic.

It is also vibrant. With all due respect to Ganguli, his 5000 page retelling is often numbingly dull to even devoted Sanskritists and scholars. Satyamurti's poem by contrast is nearly impossible to put down, racing through the massive storyline with lithe, economical verse. On the crucial scenes she slows to focus attention, then picking up pace to speed through the less vital sections of the narrative. In addition to her story-telling skills her sense of character is pitch-perfect. Each of the twenty four or so principal figures she portrays in all their multiple dimensions, and the secondary characters are consistently distinct and memorable. This is the work of an artist just as devoted to her craft as she clearly is the Mahabharata, and the fact that this is a retelling should never detract from the fact that Satyamurti has composed one of the longest narrative poems In English history, and is it masterful.

I simply cannot recommend this retelling enough.

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THE REFUSALS OF GALADRIEL: TOLKIEN AND FEMINIST CRITICISM

"You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women.”

-Neil Gaiman 

The Tolkien Misreader

Watching Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy, TIME magazine's Ruth Davis Konigsberg wanted to know "Why Are There No Women In Tolkien's World?"  She's not alone in her inquiry; for decades people have been taking about the "anti-feminist" streak in his works.  The arguments usually come down to there being a lack of women, to his habit of putting women on pedestals, and to the "fact" that there are no female role-models in his Middle-earth.  All sorts of explanations are offered for this, ranging from his devout Catholicism to the death of his mother when he was twelve.  None of them are satisfactory, however, for one important reason: the fault lies in an assumption made the audience, not in the author's work.

I had a great-grandmother who walked into Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds once thinking it was going to be a documentary about our feathered friends.  Needless to say, she had a rude surprise coming to her.  If you pick up The Lord of the Rings, and expect it to be a modern novel, or mistakenly assume Tolkien was a "novelist," you are in for the same kind of shock.  Tolkien was exactly the opposite of a novelist.  Intentionally.

We need to think about the word a minute here, because as a professional philologist, that is exactly what Tolkien would do.  The word "novel," from the Latin for "new," means something that is "...new and different from what has been known before."  The word becomes associated with "narrative literature" only around 1640, because at the time, the novel was something novel.  

For, centuries, the role of the storyteller had been that of custodian.  The storyteller preserved the language, culture, and ethics of the past by passing them down, generation after generation, in the form of tales and fables.  Traditional literature, whether the Iliad or Odyssey, the Ramayana or Mahabharata, the Kalevala or Mabinogion, was simply oral tradition finally making its way into writing.  Sir Thomas Malory didn't invent Arthurian Romance any more than Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm invented their fairy tales.  They were part of the older tradition, of preserving the past in writing.  In the late Renaissance, by sharp contrast, we see the emergence of modern novel--a new story invented by an author, and frequently as a social criticism meant to initiate change.  This was a complete reversal of previous written literature, and it is not until the 19th century that it rises to dominance.

J.R.R. Tolkien was an academic and a writer, but certainly not a novelist.  His career as a philologist, his groundbreaking work with traditional pieces like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, his academic writings, all make it clear he was dedicated to preserving the kind of literature that the modern novel was trying to supplant.  To read him as you might read Martin or Jordan is to completely miss the point.

Now you might be thinking at this point "but Middle-earth is just fantasy, it's something Tolkien 'made-up.'"  Yes and no.  It is true that Tolkien invented the Elvish tongues, with a smattering of Black Speech and Dwarvish for spice, but otherwise his "invention" was in fact a kind of "imaginative reconstruction."  Looking at the scattered fragments of fairy tales and legends of Northern Europe, especially the old Anglo-Saxon and Germanic bits, Tolkien played a game of trying to imagine where it all might have come from.  Who are the dwarves in Snow White?  Are they the same as the dwarves scattered throughout Arthurian romance?  What about elves? Goblins?  Trolls?  Tolkien sifted through all the pieces and tried to imagine a primordial myth cycle that might have originated them.  

The clearest example of this lies inside The Hobbit.  The dwarves in The Hobbit are all drawn from a section of the Norse Eddas call the "Völuspá," specifically a chapter entitled Dvergatal or "catalogue of the Dwarves." This ancient poetry fragment lists Durin, Kili and Fili, Bifur and Bombur, Thorin, et al.  Nestled among these names was one that to Tolkien would have stood out like a sore thumb...Gandalf.  Not only did it sound different than the others, it meant literally wand elf.  What was an elf doing in a list of dwarves, and what on earth was a wand elf?  Eventually he would conclude a wand elf was a wizard, not really an elf at all but a staff-bearing immortal from the Undying West where the elves lived.  Is he making this up?  Of course he is, but hardly from scratch.  He was trying to imagine what these things might have meant.

And this brings us back to the charges of anti-feminism.  Neil Gaiman is right; you could take a machine gun to The Lord of the Rings and not hit any women.  But the same could be said for Beowulf, or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  It would have been impossible for Tolkien, who so clearly and painstakingly tried to emulate traditional literature, to include Peter Jackson's version of Arwen, or the elf maiden Tauriel, in his works.  They would have stood out as obvious anachronisms.

Tolkien himself was aware of this.  Take for example his understanding of fine amor, the medieval tradition of "courtly love."  The idea, essentially, is of a pure and chaste woman who inspires a man to preform great deeds.  Loving her from afar, the hero elevates himself out of a desire to be worthy of her.  This is exactly the kind of relationship Arwen and Aragorn have, because if you are writing an authentic piece of medievalism like The Lord of the Rings then fine amor can't be ignored.  All the same, Tolkien, both as a modern man and especially as a Catholic, rejected the concept;

"Its (fine amor) center was not God but imaginary Deities, Love and the Lady.  It still tends to make the Lady a kind of guiding star or divinity - of the old-fashioned 'his divinity' = the woman he loves - the object or reason of noble conduct.  This is, of course, false and at best make-believe....The woman is (just) another fallen human-being with a soul in peril..."

- Letter to Michael Tolkien, 6-8 March 1941

Tolkien then is not the one elevating women to such a status, the genre is.  He recognizes the idea of a perfect, ideal woman as "false" and "make-believe," and that women are human beings just as flawed as men, but there is simply no way he could authentically preserve medieval literary tradition by omitting fine amor, taking Arwen down off her pedestal so she could go out adventuring with Aragorn as a modern writer (or filmmaker) might have preferred him to do.  

The Refusals of Galadriel

While we can agree that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, like the literature they are meant to emulate, have few women characters, and that Tolkien includes the medieval trope of elevating women to paragon status in The Lord of the Rings, the claim he presents us with no feminist role models is simply wrong.  Again, I tend to think this oversight arises from a fundamental misapprehension of his work.  If you read The Lord of the Rings as a self-contained novel, which is in fact to misread it, then you are missing a full understanding of the character of Galadriel.  Only reading the book in the context of Tolkien's greater myth cycle, published in The Silmarilion, does it become possible to see Galadriel as exactly what she is; a role model.  Indeed, in Tolkien's mind she might have been the role model, for reasons we will soon discuss.  As this status does not depend on her gender, and if we accept feminism as being "the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes," this makes her a powerful feminist role model by default.

But before we get there, we need to cover a few concepts first.  Most importantly, we are not talking about Galadriel solely as a character in The Lord of the Rings, but as a key figure in a larger myth cycle.  This is crucial to fully understanding her significance. 

Keep in mind that in The Lord of the Rings Tolkien is writing a history, not a novel.  Consider his famous quote from the front matter of The Fellowship of the Ring;

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

Tolkien refers to The Lord of the Rings as a history time and time again, and for him, it was just the tail end of an immense saga stretching back eons, the final chapter of the great history of Middle-earth.  Because he is writing a history, he does things no sane novelist would ever do.  When Galadriel appears in The Fellowship of the Ring, for example, there is no real explanation of who she is or why she matters.  A novelist would never have done this, but a historian would.  Consider, when Sir Gawain's shield is described to us in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (a work I reference again because Tolkien knew it so well and translated it into modern English), we are told the inside of it bears the face of the Virgin Mary.  The anonymous author doesn't stop to tell us who Mary is...he simply expects us to know.  The same is true of Galadriel, who anyone in Middle-earth would presumably know of.  Telling us about her breaks the illusion of Middle-earth being a real world, and Tolkien likely hoped we would go and reference other documents (The Silmarilion) to get those answers.  If we did, our understanding of Galadriel in The Fellowship of the Ring would completely change.

Galadriel--based solely on her scenes in The Fellowship of the Ring--has been compared to Glinda the Good Witch by some critics, who see her as almost one dimensional in her cartoon goodness.  She is so virtuous and pure that when Frodo offers her the Ring she refuses it.  Then she gives the Fellowship some nifty parting gifts and sends them on their way.  And oh, how cute that she gives the dwarf Gimli three strands of her pretty hair.  It is easy to see her as little more than the goody two-shoes fairy queen, or--as others have more flatteringly hypothesized based on Tolkien's devout Catholic faith--some sort of reflection of the Virgin Mary. 

But if you read The Silmarillion, or Tolkien's notes and other writings about her, these scenes look completely different.  Galadriel is anything but sweetness and light, and she is certainly not the Virgin Mary.  In some ways she has more in common with Lucifer than the Mother of God.  She is an exceedingly complex character and central to one of the author's themes.

Let's get the Marian comparisons out of the way first.  Mary, in Catholic doctrine, is revered because of her submission to the Divine Will;

By her complete adherence to the Father's will, to his Son's redemptive work, and to every prompting of the Holy Spirit, the Virgin Mary is the Church's model of faith and charity.

- The Catechism of the Catholic Church

But "complete adherence to the Father's will" is hardly how you would describe Galadriel, who is defined primarily by her refusals, rather than obedience.  Galadriel is half Noldor, a race of elves that once dwelled in timeless Paradise by the grace of the Creator and his emissaries, the archangelic Valar.  Rebelling against the Divine Will, Galadriel and her brethren became exiles from Paradise, driven by pride and anger.  They were banned from these lands of bliss.  Later, given a second chance to return to grace, Galadriel was among those who refused again, too proud to surrender the queenly status she had attained in the fallen world of Middle-earth for the role of servant in the Undying Lands.  As Tolkien summed up the Marian comparisons;

I think it is true that I owe much of this character to Christian and Catholic teaching about Mary, but actually Galadriel was a penitent; in her youth a leader in the rebellion against the Valar (the angelic guardians). At the end of the First Age she proudly refused forgiveness or permission to return...

Letters, p. 407

Tolkien reiterated her position more strongly elsewhere;

(Galadriel) joined the rebellion against the Valar who commanded them to stay; and once she had set foot upon that road of exile, she would not relent . . . Her pride was unwilling to return, a defeated suppliant for pardon...Pride still moved her when, at the end of the Elder Days after the final overthrow of Morgoth, she refused the pardon of the Valar for all who had fought against him, and remained in Middle-earth...

-The People's of Middle-earth, p. 338

Again, this idea of "Fallen elves" is not something Tolkien was just "making up."  Elves, in pre-Christian mythologies, were a class of intermediary spirits between gods and men.  In medieval tradition they were reinterpreted in light of the new religion.  Folklore had it that after Lucifer's rebellion in Heaven, the third of the Angels who sided with him fell and became demons, the third that fought with Michael stayed in Heaven, and the third that remained neutral were cast down to Earth to become elves.  Tolkien's Noldor reflect that tradition; they are not strictly evil, but they are angelic immortals banished from Paradise.

But what does this have to do with Galadriel being a role model, let alone a feminist one? 

For starters, Galadriel is significant in her total equality.  When we meet her in The Fellowship of the Ring, she is the co-ruler of Lothlórien, described as equal in everything (including physical stature) to her husband, Lord Celeborn.  Tolkien calls her not only the "greatest of elven women," but also the "mightiest and fairest of all the Elves that remained in Middle-earth." She is second to no one, male or female.  Indeed, even her name implies a kind of transcendence of gender stereotypes; not "Galadriel," the name she has come to be called in Middle-earth, but "Nerwen," a name she bore in the Undying Lands that means "man maiden," given to her by her mother because she was as tall and strong as any male elf.  

This must not be taken as meaning her "mannishness" is what defines her.  Galadriel's feminine attributes are key as well;

...and she grew to be tall beyond the measure even of the women of the Noldor; she was strong of body, mind, and will [...] Even among the Eldar she was accounted beautiful, and her hair was held a marvel unmatched. It was golden like the hair of her father and of her foremother Indis, but richer and more radiant, for its gold was touched by some memory of the starlike silver of her mother; and the Eldar said that the light of the Two Trees, Laurelin and Telperion, had been snared in her tresses...

—Unfinished Tales, The History of Galadriel and Celeborn

The significance of her femininity is also reflected in the importance of being a mother, and in fact a grandmother to Arwen, the elf maid Aragorn loves.  

Thus, just as her beautiful hair combines the golden and silver light of the two divine trees, Galadriel combines qualities we might see as both masculine and feminine, but what really distinguishes Galadriel is her complexity.  In a cycle of tales often criticized for their "black and white morality," Galadriel stands out as very grey.  She is not, like Morgoth or Sauron, evil, but neither is she as loyal and obedient as Gandalf.  Galadriel knows her own mind.  And again, we come back to her refusals.  Not only did she refuse the command of the Valar to remain in the Blessed Lands, not only did she refuse to return, it was her refusal that started--indirectly--the fall of her entire race.  It was Fëanor, her kinsman, who fashioned the three Silmarils, enchanted jewels that captured the golden and silver light of the two trees that lit the Undying Lands.  The fallen angel Morgoth poisoned the trees and stole these gems, taking them to Middle-earth, and this is why the Noldor went into exile; against the wishes of the Valar they decided to go after Morgoth and the stones.  But Fëanor forged those jewels because of Galadriel's refusals.  For it is said her beautiful hair also captured the light of those trees, and Fëanor asked her three times for a strand of it.  Three times she refused, and so he made the jewels instead.

And here, her gift to the dwarf Gimli takes on special significance.  Reading only The Lord of the Rings we may think nothing of it, but it was a monumental act;

Her parting gift to Gimli is highly significant. He asks for a single hair from her head, which he intends to enshrine within imperishable crystal. In the elder days Fëanor had asked the same, and been refused three times, for her tresses were famed for seeming to contain the light of the Two Trees. . . . Now she gives Gimli three hairs, one for each of the ancient refusals, which were bound up with so much grief for the Elves. Galadriel's gift heals the long rift between her people and the Dwarves. It implies that she now repents of any part her pride may have played in the long tragedy. 

The Power of the Ring, p. 54

Here again is Tolkien's excellence as a mythographer and historian and "failure" as a novelist.  We cannot grasp the immense significance of Galadriel's gift by reading The Fellowship of the Ring alone.

Which brings us at last to the act that makes Galadriel heroic, and absolutely central to Tolkien's work as a role model to us all.  

Tolkien succinctly summed up his themes in a letter later published in The Silmarillion. "Anway, all this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine" (The Silmarillion, p. xvii).  The Fall in particular haunts his tales, from the Fall of the Dark Lord and the Fall of the Elves to the Fall of the proud Men of the West.  As we have seen, Galadriel is bound tightly to the theme, and the Fall of the Elves.  But she does something amazing in The Fellowship of the Ring.  When Frodo Baggins offers her the One Ring, she refuses it;

"And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night!" . . . She lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a great light that illumined her alone and left all else dark. . . . Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a simple elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad.

"I pass the test," she said. "I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel." 

Fellowship, p. 381.

This is not, as critics would have it, because she is one dimensional and too good to take it.  As we have seen, Galadriel has twice refused the Divine Will already, and chosen to "rule in Middle-earth rather than serve in Paradise," to paraphrase Milton. The One Ring signifies rulership of the world, and Galadriel is a fallen immortal who refused forgiveness because she desired to rule in Middle-earth.  Offering her the Ring is to tempt her with everything she ever wanted.  But unlike Lucifer, or Sauron or Morgoth for that matter, Galadriel refuses this.  It is this last of Galadriel's refusals that changes her destiny.  

It was not until two long ages more had passed, when at last all that she had desired in her youth came to her hand, the Ring of Power and the dominion of Middle-earth of which she had dreamed, that her wisdom was full grown and she rejected it, and passing the last test departed from Middle-earth forever. 

The Peoples of Middle-Earth, p. 338

Here at last we come to Galadriel the role model.  Tolkien famously said, "The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work," and we have seen some of this in the many "Falls" that happen in the  mythology.  Morgoth falls.  Sauron falls.  Saruman falls.  The Men of the West fall.  And most of the Noldor elves fall.  Likewise, there are many who resist temptation and do not fall; Tom Bombadil, Gandalf, Samwise, Faramir, etc.  But Galadriel is very nearly unique in that she falls and is then redeemed, in a sense representing the whole of the human condition as Tolkien understood it.  There may be a shortage of women in Tolkien's quasi-medieval fiction, but we cannot simply dismiss the fact that the character that best embodies Tolkien's faith--that it is possible to sin and be forgiven--is a woman.  And a proud, self-possessed, regal woman at that.  

You don't have to be a Catholic or a a Christian to appreciate this; I am certainly neither.  But you are on very shaky ground when you accuse Tolkien of anti-feminist tendencies when one of the most important figures in his work is a woman.  Galadriel doesn't swing a sword or wear armor, but the strength she demonstrates in resisting temptation far exceeds any action-heroine antics.  The author clearly meant her to be a role model for us all, male or female.  Galadriel is neither Eve nor Mary, but an "every person" meant to represent us all.  If we are looking for feminist role models, and quality is to outweigh quantity, then Tolkien was perhaps a feminist after all.

GOTHIC and GOTHICKA: A Look at Victoira Nelson's New Book

Gothic [ˈgɒθɪk]

adj

3. (Literary & Literary Critical Movements) (sometimes not capital) of or relating to a literary style characterized by gloom, the grotesque, and the supernatural, popular esp in the late 18th century: when used of modern literature, films, etc., sometimes spelt: Gothic

For the last twenty-five years of my life I have been playing with a dark jigsaw puzzle.  Perhaps you have seen the pieces strewn across the entries of this blog; religion, occultism, dreams, horror, imagination, the fantastic, the macabre.  I've never met Victoria Nelson, but having just finished her fascinating new Gothicka (Harvard University Press, 2012), it is clear that she has been playing with the same puzzle.  Gothicka shifts back and forth between literary criticism and spirituality, tracing the origin of "Gothick" (her spelling) as a post-Enlightenment genre of fiction and following its shadowy trail through Western society into the present.  She leaves no stone unturned as she tries to understand how the genre came to be, how it has grown into a thriving subculture, and where it might be leading us.     

Generally said to have all started with Horace Walpole's 1764 The Castle of Otranto, Gothic fiction is the precursor of the modern horror tale.  Like all genre fiction it is littered with certain tropes; the innocent young heroine, a dark and menacing stranger, grim family secrets, brooding and ancient architecture, and the power of the past to act upon the present.  But the black heart of the Gothic isn't these trappings.  It is about the intrusion of the supernatural into a rational and ordered world.  I think it is important to emphasize this because it is what separates Gothic from fantasy fiction.  In fantasy, the supernatural belongs.  It is part of the fabric of the setting.  In the Gothic, the supernatural is the iceberg and rational reality the Titanic.

Nelson clearly places the Gothic into historical context.  It appears during the Enlightenment, a period in which the earlier, medieval view of the world--a supernatural hierarchy ruled by God, administered by angels, and seeped in magic and miracles--has by and large been shattered.  To the medieval mind the world was supernatural and mysterious; to the minds of the Enlightenment it was something ordered and rational.  Reality could be studied and understood.  The Gothic emerges to preserve that earlier world view.  It seems to suggest that maybe we are wrong...maybe the world is irrational after all.  This is why we call it Gothic, a name that conjures up the Dark Ages.  In the Gothic story, scratch the surface of the modern world and the medieval is there looking back at us.

Which, of course, explains the disproportionate presence of Catholicism in the Gothic tale.  Roman Catholicism and medievalism are inextricably linked in the Western mind.  The Church dominated that era.  Thus whether it is The Amityville Horror, The Conjuring, The Rite, The Exorcist, The Last Exorcism, or even the classic vampire tale ('Salem's Lot, Fright Night), it is to Catholicism and the trappings of Catholicism that people automatically turn in the face of the supernatural.  When was the last horror film in which you saw a Baptist minister summoned to cleanse a haunted house?  A Lutheran pastor?  Deep inside, we understand that these newer protestant sects have no power over the intrusion of the Dark Ages back into our lives.  It has to be the Church that was there.

Gothic fiction thrived in the 19th and 20th centuries in the vacuum created when the supernatural was banished from daily life.  People now continued to experience the supernatural in the pages of fiction or on the silver screen.  But as we drew closer to the 21st century, something unexpected began to happen to the Gothic, and this is the core of Victoria Nelson's book.  Since the 1960s the monsters have been undergoing a transformation.  The Witch became the beautiful Samantha Stevens, the feisty Willow Rosenberg, the ladies from Charmed.  The Werewolf became sexy hunks like Jacob Black and True Blood's Alcide Herveaux.  And the Vampire, from True Blood to The Vampire Diaries and Twilight, is the brooding heartthrob.  And across the board they all had one thing in common...the transformation of the human being into something larger, greater, "higher."  The monsters of Gothic fiction stopped representing states of damnation and became instead paths to ascension.

None of which is as strange as it seems.  Again, we must remind ourselves that in the medieval imagination nothing, not even Satan, was as terrifying as God.  It was God who sent the Black Death, it was God who watched you at all times, it was God who would punish you if you disobeyed.  God, as the ultimate representative of the supernatural was terrible, awful, and inexplicable.  It was wise to be "God fearing."  But at the same time, God was the gateway to the numinous, to transformation, to becoming something greater than your self.  Horror and awe go hand-in-hand.  

Modern religions have been increasingly about the evolution of the self into a state of godhood.  The doctrine of salvation from above has become one of self-transformation.  We see this in Scientology, Mormonism, and Christian Science.  We see it in newer occult movements like Thelema, Satanism, or some schools of Wicca.  And we see it happening in the heart of the Gothic.  The shock and terror of the supernatural breaking down the walls of ordered reality has given way to possibility...to the notion of escaping the rational world into a higher state of potential and power.  Where once the Vampire was the ultimate state of damnation, cast forever from the grace of God, in the absence of God he becomes a transformative savior figure who offers liberation from human frailty and death.

It is clear that in the Gothic genre and the subculture it has spawned, Nelson sees a kind of emerging spirituality.  Though she mentions Anton LaVey several times in the book, in many ways she echoes exactly what he envisioned.  This is particularly the case when she discusses "Primary Believers" (religious practitioners who inhabit an ultimately supernatural world) and "Secondary Believers" (people who suspend disbelief and enter into a supernatural world temporarily).  This is exactly what LaVey believed his new religion to be, a society of Secondary Believers who experience the supernatural as self-created and self-transformational psychodrama.  I suspect the Church of Satan is a precursor of the kind of experience she sees Gothic heading for.

There is a lot going on in this book, too much to sum up here.  For me, reading it was a sort of validation for things I've been trying to express for years.  I would strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the Gothic, in horror, or the supernatural. It was a gripping, highly informative and provocative read.