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What Writers Can Learn From Joss Whedon’s The Avengers

What Writers Can Learn From Joss Whedon’s The Avengers

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avengers-movie-poster-1Disclaimer: This article will reference some scenes from The Avengers film. While I’ve tried to avoid specific spoilers about major twists, there are some things that give away plot elements and twists from the other Marvel Comics movies, such as Thor.

If you are a writer, be sure that you get a receipt when you go to The Avengers, because you should be claiming it as a work-related research expense on your taxes this year. (This should not be considered tax advice. Please consult with your tax preparer before making financial decisions.)

There has been no shortage of digital ink spilled gushing over how great the movie is. I’ll provide a link to some of the highlights below if you want to delve into the film itself. However, I wanted to go beyond discussing The Avengers as purely a viewing experience, but to focus on a couple of elements that writers can best take away from it.

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Traditions and Criticisms

Traditions and Criticisms

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English MusicLiterary traditions are useful things. They’re constructions of literary critics, sure, but useful constructions. A well-articulated tradition can show how different writers deal with the same idea or theme, demonstrating different approaches to a given problem or artistic ideal. It can show affinities between writers, sometimes bringing out resemblences between different figures in such a way as to cast new light on everyone involved. At the grandest level, the whole history of writing in a given language or from a given nation can be seen to be part of a tradition, showing the evolution of a language or the concerns of a people.

The problem with the idea of a tradition is that it can also lead to ossified thinking. A set of writers can be fixed as a canon not to be questioned, examplars of an ideal that can only degenerate. Or a critic might focus on works written within one tradition alone, ignoring works from beyond that tradition. And, as a result, ignoring the existence of other traditions entirely.

I’ve been thinking along these lines since I recently stumbled across an article at the Atlantic website. Written a few months ago by Joe Fassler, it tries to explain why ‘literary’ fiction is suddenly full of ‘genre’ elements (Fassler takes the distinction between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ for granted; I’m less sure). I thought the piece failed to establish its premises and then failed to make a convicing argument based on those premises. And those failures, I think, come from a limited idea not only of what literature is, but of the existence of the muliplicity of literary traditions within the Anglophone world.

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Tolkien and Attila

Tolkien and Attila

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The Fellowship of the RingWhat follows may well be total coincidence.

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings over the course of many years of his life, a life shaped in part by his experience as a young man fighting in the trenches of World War One against the Germans. Or, as they were sometimes called at the time, the Hun.

The Germans had been equated with Huns for over forty years by then. It had begun as a term of abuse in French newspapers, but some Germans adopted the comparison with pride. Kaiser Wilhelm II notoriously inspired his soldiers by linking them to the historical Huns and their great leader, Attila.

Now so far as I know Tolkien made few direct references to Attila in his writing. He refers in a letter to attending a lecture his son Christopher gave about Attila, and to being thrilled by a reference to the etymology of the name — from ‘Atta,’ ‘father,’ so meaning something like ‘little father.’ And I understand in The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, Attila makes an appearance, as he did in the original poems on which Tolkien based his story. But I’ve begun to wonder if the idea of the Huns didn’t have a bit more of an influence on Tolkien than that.

I want to be clear in what follows that I’m not talking about conscious influence. I don’t think that Tolkien had the history of the Huns actively on his mind at any point as he wrote. What I’m wondering is whether that history unconsciously suggested certain plot patterns to him that manifested in his writings.

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The Nightmare Men: “The Enemy of Evil”

The Nightmare Men: “The Enemy of Evil”

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JohnThunstoneManly Wade Wellman is responsible for the creation of a number of supernatural sleuths, occult detectives and werewolf punchers, including Judge Pursuivant. But, arguably one of the more well-known of Wellman’s coterie of heroes is John Thunstone. Big and blocky, with a well-groomed moustache and eyes like flint, Thunstone is an implacable and self-described ‘enemy of evil’. He hunts it with the verve of a Van Helsing and strikes with the speed and viciousness that puts Anton Zarnak to shame.

Well read and well-armed against vampires, werewolves and all things dark and devilish, Thunstone seeks out malevolent occult menaces in a variety of locales. The sixteen stories and two novels have settings which range from the steel and glass corridors of Manhattan to the mountains of the rural South, or the pastoral fields of England. He faces off against Inuit sorcerers, demonic familiars and worse things in the name of protecting the Earth and all its peoples from the hungry shapes in the dark that would otherwise devour it and them.

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Transcendent Fantasy, or Politics as Usual?

Transcendent Fantasy, or Politics as Usual?

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My Black Gate post this week is not a review, nor an essay proper, but a question: Is it possible for fantasy to move beyond the political? Or because it is written by authors of a particular time and place, must fantasy—however fantastic its subject matter—forever remain trapped within the circles of our own world?

China Mieville
China Mieville

China Mieville and others say that no, you cannot read fantasy except through the lens of politics, and that there is no escape. In this interview from 2000, Mieville says:

The problem with escapism is that when you read or write a book society is in the chair with you. You can’t escape your history or your culture. So the idea that because fantasy books aren’t about the real world they therefore ‘escape’ is ridiculous. Fantasy is still written and read through the filters of social reality. That’s why some fantasies (like Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels) are so directly allegorical–but even the most surreal and bizarre fantasy can’t help but reverberate around the reader’s awareness of their own reality, even if in a confusing and unclear way.

I think that as we’ve grown more secular and rational fantasy is following suit. Led by writers like George R.R. Martin and Joe Abercrombie, fantasy has become less whimsical and more historical, less hopeful and more gritty and pessimistic. Many “fantasies” now actively grapple with issues like racism and misogyny, or conservatism vs. liberalism, which lurk beneath the veneer of strange secondary worlds that in other fundamental ways closely resemble our own.

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The Nightmare Men: “The Haunted Wanderer”

The Nightmare Men: “The Haunted Wanderer”

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thumb_john_kirowanWhile Robert E. Howard is perhaps best known for creating Conan, he had his share of occult investigators of one stripe or another. There was Steve Harrison of River Street, Solomon Kane with his fiery Puritanism and cat-headed ju-ju staff and, of course, John Kirowan.

Kirowan is of an age and appearance with a number of Howard’s other characters, being tall, slender, brooding, and black haired — a Celt of the modern age. Sorrow hangs about him like a shroud, and his history is tragic. Though few agree on what form said tragedy might have taken, all believe that it has something to do with the years that he spent studying the occult arts in the black hills on Hungary and the secret places of Inner Mongolia.

What is known for certain is that Kirowan renounced these studies, and assumed the guise of a sceptic. But, when the nightmarish denizens of diabolical realms intrude upon the lives of his friends and companions, John Kirowan shows his true colours, and the haunted wanderer once more thrusts himself between the innocent and the devils in the dark.

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Real vs. the Unreal, Worlds Other Than Our Own, and the Starting Line of Fantasy

Real vs. the Unreal, Worlds Other Than Our Own, and the Starting Line of Fantasy

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masterpieces-of-fantasy-and-enchantmentWhenever discussions of fantasy fiction arise, the question of “which came first?” inevitably follows. Newbies mistakenly think that J.R.R. Tolkien started the genre, overlooking authors like William Morris and E.R. Eddison who had already begun a rich tradition of secondary world fantasy. The same arguments swirl over the many sub-genres of fantasy, too. For example, most believe that Robert E. Howard is the proper father of swords and sorcery, beginning with his 1929 short story “The Shadow Kingdom.” But others have pled the case for Lord Dunsany’s “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth” (1908), and so on.

Once begun, these arguments inevitably reach further and further back in time. George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858) was published before Morris’s The Well at the World’s End (1896), didn’t you know? Oh yeah, what about Malory’s LeMorte D’Arthur (1485)? I’ve got that beat: The Odyssey (8th Century BC). I see your Odyssey and raise you The Epic of Gilgamesh (1300 BC, or thereabouts). And so on. Until it seems that fantasy has always been with us.

But perhaps that isn’t the case. In an introduction to the 1988 anthology Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment, editor David Hartwell draws one of the most neatly defined starting lines for fantasy I’ve encountered. Hartwell describes fantasy as a story written deliberately as unreal, and one which does not take place in the real world.

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A Few Words on Clark Ashton Smith

A Few Words on Clark Ashton Smith

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A Rendezvous in AveroigneLast Friday was Friday the thirteenth. It was also Clark Ashton Smith’s birthday. In memory of that conjunction, I’d like to write a bit about Smith and his work. I have only a few thoughts about Smith’s prose style; Ryan Harvey’s excellent and insightful look at Smith’s fiction can be found in four parts, here, here, here, and here. And you can find an online collection of Smith’s works here.

Smith’s probably a familiar figure to many readers of this site, but for those that don’t know him, some background: Born in 1893, Smith suffered from a fear of crowds, and never attended high school. He was an autodidact and dedicated reader; he apparently read, in fact, through the Encyclopedia Britannica and Webster’s Dictionary. He wrote novels as a teenager (I haven’t read them, though in recent years they’ve been put into print), sold a few stories at 17, and then published a collection of verse at 19. Plagued by ill-health, he continued to write poetry, and in 1922 received a fan letter from H.P. Lovecraft. The two men became pen pals, and shared ideas and imagery.

In 1929 Smith began writing weird fiction, odd mélanges of horror, science fiction, and fantasy. He published in Weird Tales, like Lovecraft, and like Robert E. Howard, with whom he struck up a friendship by post in 1933. Howard died in 1936, Lovecraft in 1937, and then late in 1937 first Smith’s mother and then his father passed away. Smith had for the most part stopped writing fiction in 1935; although a few stories came in later years, as well as more verse, Smith shifted his focus to sculpture for much of the rest of his life. He died in 1961.

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The Nightmare Men: “The Supernatural Sleuth”

The Nightmare Men: “The Supernatural Sleuth”

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941723-lLin Carter’s Anton Zarnak is a man of mystery. With a jagged streak of silver running through his black hair from his temple to the base of his skull and his exotic features and peculiar mannerisms, Zarnak is almost as outré as the enemies he fights. With a startling knowledge and a somewhat sinister history, Zarnak battled evil in three stories penned by Carter — “Curse of the Black Pharaoh”, “Dead of Night”, and “Perchance to Dream” — as well as in a half dozen or so more contributed by the likes of Robert M. Price, CJ Henderson, Joseph S. Pulver Sr. And James Chambers. All of these stories, for those interested, are collected in Lin Carter’s Anton Zarnak: Supernatural Sleuth from Marietta Publishing.

Like the pulp characters Carter based him on, Zarnak is something of a Renaissance man. Educated at a number of prestigious universities, including the Heidelberg (where he studied theology with a certain Anton Phibes, according to “The Case of the Curiously Competent Conjurer” by James Ambuehl and Simon Bucher-Jones), the Sorbonne and Miskatonic University, he is an accredited physician, musician, theologian and metaphysicist. He speaks eleven languages and has one of the finest and most complete collections of occult literature in existence. His home drifts like a soap bubble between Half-Moon Street in London, No. 13 China Alley in San Francisco and a cursed apartment building in New York; always decorated in oriental splendour, it is filled to bursting with esoteric paraphernalia, including a hideously decorated mask of Yama which always hangs in a place of honour above Zarnak’s desk.

And, as the saying goes, ‘so a man’s home, his mind’ — Zarnak is the proverbial odd duck. By turns consoling and caustic, arrogant and affectionate, and almost inhumanly ruthless, Zarnak is no comforting Judge Pursuivant or soothing John Silence. He is singularly and irrepressibly Zarnak.

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Temeraire, Harry Potter, and Some Thoughts on Ambiguity

Temeraire, Harry Potter, and Some Thoughts on Ambiguity

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His Majesty's DragonI’ve been in unwilling low-content mode for the past couple of weeks (question: what’s worse than getting the flu at Christmas? Answer: getting the flu along with a sinus infection). That’s meant I’ve had some time to read, which is good for a number of reasons. As it happens, though, one of the things I picked up to read left me wondering something I’ve wondered several times before: why do certain books pull me along, and compel me to read them, even when I think they’re not particularly good?

The best example of what I mean is the Harry Potter books. I don’t dislike them, but I’ve never understood the way they absorb me when I read them. They’re tightly-plotted, yes, and the world is carefully-built — but these things together only create an odd video-game feel, where every riddle has its designated solution, and the lead characters wander around finding clues to unlock new areas or gifts or side quests, until everything’s resolved in a climactic scene. The characters are flat, the dialogue’s occasionally funny but not especially memorable, and the prose is bland at best. Yet the fact remains that when I read a Potter book I find it easier to move my gaze along the text on the page rather than turn away. It’s like being on a railway train, being carried over a fixed track, with no way to disembark except by something like an act of force, jumping to the ground while the thing’s moving at speed.

Over Christmas — just before, actually — I found another example of this phenomenon, when I read His Majesty’s Dragon, the first of Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series. It’s a story about the Napoleonic Wars, in a world where intelligent dragons exist and bond with human riders. I’d had it in mind to look into the series for a while, so when I found a used copy of the first book I grabbed it. And then found it had grabbed me. It’s unusual for me these days to find that I literally can’t put a book down; but that’s what happened with His Majesty’s Dragon. And I’m not sure why.

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