Books and Dreams

Books are a good way of seeing inside other people's dreams to help understand our own; no matter how hard you may try, when you write a book you can not help being affected and influenced by the time you live in and your own subconscious feelings. Take for instance, Charles Dickens's 'Great Expectations'

‘Money in Great Expectations... is the principal system whereby relations between the individual self and society are established’

Steven Connor

This story is about Pip’s quest for fulfilment, which he does finally achieve but not quite in the way that he or the reader expects. The story is so well written with so many themes it is hard to find them all, such as: the dignity of hard work in a money oriented society; destiny against free will; private lives and public displays (Pumblechook being a good example of public displays); natural justice and the reality of lawful justice; the outcast and his difficulty fitting in with society; the idea of cause and effect from one generation to the next; how education may or may not be a possible route to self-awareness; the sharp contrast between appearance and reality, as Jaggers says, ‘take nothing on its looks; take everything on its evidence. There’s no better rule’. There are dozens more themes that could all have their own book written about them.

Money can be represented in many ways; property, clothing and lifestyle. One of the way money is represented as a means of depicting individuals interacting with society is through eating. Partaking of meals on various levels is a common image throughout Great Expectations and is almost always done for a purpose. Dickens has a wonderful sense of the reader, like he can read his own work as if he were someone else and is able to tell exactly where to move the plot on before the reader can relax, sum up the story so far or simply start to become bored. It is during the first meal with Magwitch that the plot gets its first boost and where the whole subject of money and inheritance begins. It is important that Pip is a child because it is his naïve innocence and kindness that impresses Magwitch for the rest of his life. As well as being naïve toward Magwitch, Pip himself feels no sense of social superiority on himself or inferiority on the convict; therefore, even though the social implications are not lost on the reader, Pip is not disgusted by Magwitch’s resemblance to the family dog while he eats. Instead he feels slightly uncomfortable about the man’s poor situation, that he is so hungry he is eating like a famished dog, and feels compelled to offer some polite words to better humanise the situation and informs Magwitch that he is glad he is enjoying the food. Magwitch humanises himself with a ‘Thankee, my boy. I do’. This first meal sets itself up as a comparison for all the meals to follow, it may be the basest of all the meals but it does contain love, generosity and gratitude, the main themes of the novel. Gratitude from Magwitch in the form of wealth which is destined to haunt Pip for the coming years. The gratitude and love, for any readers that hadn’t noticed it yet, is reiterated in chapter V when Magwitch lies about stealing the food to protect Pip and Joe’s gentleness and sense of human worth over that of money is shown when he says, ‘God knows your welcome to it- so far as it was ever mine… We don’t know what you have done, but we wouldn’t have you starved to death for it, poor miserable fellow-creatur.- Would us, Pip?’ Joe is referred to as ‘poor Joe’ by Pip so often in the story that the reader can sometimes sympathise with him but it doesn’t take much interpretation to see that Joe is neither poor as in unhappy or stupid, nor poor in money; he doesn’t have much money but he does have all the wealth he needs and wants. Joe is probably the only character that isn’t concerned with money.

It has been said that the greatness of Great Expectations is in the title, society bases itself on great expectations. Every expects, or at least hopes, for something better in their future and Pip coming into money is a story that appeals to nearly everyone. The events are soon forgotten and brushed aside by the appearance Miss Havisham, with her huge house, apparent vast wealth and unusual eccentric way of life. There is a strange hierarchy of status here, Joe is a poor man and can’t imagine why Miss Havisham would want anything of poor Pip. Mrs Joe sees it as obvious that the grand Uncle Pumblechook is a close friend of Miss Havisham and that he must have been asked by her to provide a young boy. Uncle Pumblechook is slightly well off but nowhere near as well off as his ego and delusions of grandeur would suggest. He is nowhere near the same level as Miss Havisham and is even superseded by Pip when he comes into his money and supposed support from Miss Havisham. Nevertheless, he does brag around town about his close relations with Pip and his family and Miss Havisham and how he brought them together, as if Pip’s entire fortune was down to him. This does work in his own small town where he is respected for his self-styled status but in London there are millions like him and he is swallowed up, playing foolish parts and being laughed at in the theatre; of course back home he will be an established and fine actor in the big city. Everyone knows that Miss Havisham is a little crazy but his sister already has ideas of her making his fortune before he’s even met her. Mr Pumblechook is shown his rank and status by Estella in a humiliating fashion when he presents Pip to Estella and tries to follow him through the front gate,

‘Oh!’ she said, ‘Did you wish to see Miss Havisham?’
‘If Miss Havisham wishes to see me,’ returned Mr Pumblechook, discomfited.
‘Ah!’ said the girl; ‘but you see she don’t’

As well as dismissing him it also has the effect of showing Pip how Estella looks down on Mr Pumblechook, at the time making Pip feel very lowly but later, when Pip is at a similar level to Estella, makes him look down on Pumblechook too. Pip is told that the name of the house ‘Satis’ means ‘enough’ or that whoever owns the house will want for nothing more at which Estella makes a remark that people must have been easily pleased in earlier days. This reflects her miserable conditions living inside the house but to Pip would seem odd that a building so large and expensive would not satisfy Estella, already blowing her status up in his child’s mind. As Estella and Pip are playing cards she says, ‘He calls knaves, jacks, this boy!’ which is a curious link to the Jack near the end of the story who steals clothes and property from dead bodies that are washed up out of the Thames, a sort of forewarning of future events. When Pip leaves he is so miserable about his low status and his thick boots that he’s ready to do anything to change it, even denounce his upbringing and future with Joe. It’s as if wealth and status were a disease and he was infected after only one visit. Joe and his sister have such fanciful ideas about wealthy people that out of frustration Pip makes all kinds of fanciful happening to please them, about them all waving flags and a golden coach and four dogs- ‘Immense,’ said I. ‘And they fought for veal-cutlets out of a silver basket. Again the idea is reiterated that something will come out of Pip’s visits, that Miss Havisham would ‘do something’ for him. His sister was thinking of property, Mr Pumblechook suggest a premium that might bind him to a genteel trade like his own trade. Even with all the splendid descriptions, level headed Joe suggests that she may simply present Pip with one of the dogs.

Pip embarks on his quest to make himself uncommon by trying to learn everything that Biddy knows. On his second visit to Miss Havishams he meets her money grabbing relatives who are aptly named Pocket. Pip meets the young Herbert near the end of this visit and Estella allows Pip to kiss her. All these event, young Herbert, Pip falling in love with Estella and the many meetings with Miss Havisham all serve to draw the attention further away from Magwitch as a possible source of money. Miss Havisham pays Pip off for his visits and is signed over to Joe as his apprentice which leaves the reader with a feeling that Miss Havisham must intervene and save Pip from such a lowly life. And, just as Pip is settling in as an apprentice, Jaggers appears!

It is from this point in the tale that money rises to the surface, where the reader gets to see actual cash in large amounts being spent. Everything to do with Jaggers is about money, he does virtually nothing without being paid and thinks that everyone else should take money as seriously as he does and is sometimes surprised when they don't, like when Joe says he doesn’t want any money for Pip to be taken from him. In fact Joe is so annoyed by Jaggers for suggesting that he might like a present in exchange for Pip that he almost starts a fight with him. Pip is overwhelmed by the money and the thoughts of his dreams coming true, the money instantly elevates him above Biddy and Joe and almost everyone in the town. When he goes to visit Mr Trabb the tailor to buy some clothes, he looks up at Pip as he enters and doesn’t think it worth bothering to leave his breakfast for. Mr Trabb is fairly wealthy and obviously sees himself as a cut above the rest but his manner instantly changes when Pip tells of his new fortunes and how he has come into some property. This is Pip’s first experience of the effects of owning lots of money, when he tells Mr Trabb that he needs a new suit he looks down at the money in his own hands as if wondering what the effect might be. Of course the effect is instantaneous and Mr Trabb bows and smiles, all pleasantries saying he doesn’t need to see the money; implying he just needs to know it’s there. From now on with his new clothes everyone will know or assume he has money; the effects of this appearance are so strong that he ends up in debt by the end of the story. Pip still shows his naivety about his money when he arrives at London in the coach, the coachman is obviously expecting a tip when Pip asks him how much he owes; ‘A shilling- unless you wish to make it more.’ Pip innocently tells the coachman that he wouldn’t like to make it more. The coachman may have argued had they been somewhere else but accepts the shilling as payment from fear of reprisals from Jaggers, who of course would never pay a penny above the price of anything.

There is a sense of nouveau riche in Pip, he does learn the manners of high society but doesn’t know how to hold on to his money; rich people are notorious for not spending a lot of money. In fact the only sensible thing Pip ever does with his money is invest it in Herbert’s future. Pip always thought about Herbert as not being very good with money but when he sees him being successful with it at the end he wonders if it were himself that had not been able to hold on to money. ‘The time comes,’ says Herbert, ‘when you see your opening and you go in, and you swoop upon it, and you make your capital, and there you are! When you have once made your capital you have nothing to do but employ it’. Pip, through Miss Havisham, supplies Herbert with the capital and he employs it.

Joe is the only character who remains unaffected by money, Pip is picked up by it but is thrown back to where he came from when he loses it, though he does gain Estella in the end. Magwitch has lots of money but is completely unable to interact with society with it on any level, even Jaggers cant help him no matter how much money he has. It does seem odd that Jaggers can secretly help bequeath money from Magwitch to Pip but cannot do the same for Estella who is, as he knows by the end, Magwitch’s natural daughter.

Myth and Legend in Modern Comedy Writing

Over the centuries there have been many different styles or genres in writing and although there have been fantasy stories in the past and many comedies there has never been such a proliferation of books with themes including wizards and witches; goblins and trolls etc set against a comical background. During the last decades of the 20th Century they was a complete boom in the fantasy genre and it is the purpose of this paper to examine what the reason for that might be. There are not that many authors today that one could pick out but three of the more prominent figures in England are Terry Pratchett, Robert Rankin, and Tom Holt; all of which have their own distinct styles. Rankin was actually the first of the three to start writing in this genre but didn’t really become popular until after Pratchett became well noticed. It was more due to Pratchett’s fans that wanted to read more of the same that helped the likes of Rankin and Holt. This being said, although the fans maybe to some extent be of the same ilk the three authors writings are by no means copies of each other.

Terry Pratchett first started writing when he was a child, he came up with the idea for Carpet People when he was thirteen; a story about a whole culture of tiny people that live in between the pile of a carpet. Pratchett has also dabbled in science-fiction with Dark Side Of The Sun and Strata but he is most famous for his Discworld series of books. Like Carpet People the Discworld novels deal with a whole collection of people but instead of just occupying a flat area of carpet the people in these stories live on a whole world shaped like a flat disc; like some people in Earth history believed their planet was shaped. A lot of the comedy in Pratchett’s stories revolves around old-fashioned beliefs that most people today find ridiculous, risible. There are many gods on the Discworld that really do exist, also there are werewolves, vampires, witches and wizards, trolls, dwarves and pixies and virtually every fantasy creature anyone would care to think of, even Death is a main character on the disc. Even the disc itself rides on the back of four elephants which in turn ride on the back of a giant turtle; this is not an invention of Pratchett’s though but that of an Earth culture in history. With just the items mentioned so far one can see the potential for comedy but the Discworld is much more than a collection of farcical creatures with even more farcical life-styles; Pratchett takes situations from real life, sometimes from current affairs, and imposes them on his character living on their strange world and has them react accordingly. Often there is an underlying message to show us the farcical nature of our own lives; the comedy is in laughing at ourselves. When Pratchett first began writing his Discworld stories there were dozens of writers of the fantasy genre all using the typical recipe for this type of story; i.e. kings and queens, princesses and dragons in a medieval backdrop. As well a satirising real life Pratchett also wanted to break away from the stereotype role of the fantasy tale by making fun of it. This is very clear to see in his first two Discworld novels The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic which are a kind of pastiche of late 1970’s fantasy writing and the role playing game ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ so much so that the reader can say ‘ah, there’s an Anne McCaffrey bit’. He has his character stuck in a fantasy world facing modern day problems.

Robert Rankin uses far less mythical creatures in his stories but still relies on myths to keep his readers interested. The type of legends Rankin prefers to adhere to are those of a local kind and more contemporary. So even though in his Armageddon books he has characters like the sister of Jesus Christ, he also has a living Elvis who is travelling about through space and time with what he calls a Time sprout. There are aliens watching the lives of earthlings in the same way that earthling watch soap operas on TV. In his Brentford series of books his two main characters, Omally and Pooley, are loutish blokes that drink as often as they can in their local pub The Flying Swan. They are based on real characters Rankin has seen in pubs and the kind of things people in pubs talk about when they have been drinking; flying saucers, Santa being the name Satan jumbled up, people performing real magic, time-travel etc. Ostensibly the characters are just normal people who like to drink a lot but they always end up getting embroiled in the kind of plots one would only hear down the pub, plots one would only believe if one had been drinking heavily or is an avid believer in tabloid news stories and conspiracies.

Top Holt likes to write stories about very ordinary people with ordinary jobs or lives, and have extraordinary things happen to them. For instance in his first comic fantasy book Expecting Someone Taller, the main character Malcolm is driving home in his car when he runs over a badger who turns out to be there on purpose to give Malcolm a ring which leads to him getting involved with Norse gods and mythical happenings with hilarious consequences. He has since gone on to publish a further fifteen books in the same genre. Holt is often compared to Pratchett even though they both write with very different styles, the main probable reason for this is that they are both British and both write comic fantasy. All of Tom Holt’s humorous fantasy novels are free standing where Pratchett’s and , to some degree, Rankin’s do have a kind of continuity- same characters reoccur and situations are referred to in subsequent stories, often for humorous effect.

As already mentioned this document is attempting to analyse why these authors are successful today and why they would not have been earlier, remembering that even Rankin was not popular as late as the early 1980’s. It should also be noted that when the term ‘society’ is mentioned within this document it is mainly referring to readers in Britain, Western Europe and North America.

Contemporary Readers

So why do people want to read comic fantasy today more than any other time? Historically, the novel is primarily an invention of the 19th Century, the period when it blossomed to popular acceptance and the age where it became the undisputed dominant literary form. The novel is a product of the industrial revolution where machines and society-wide divisions of labour produced a thriving middle class who had a new-found commodity on their hands: leisure time. For the first time in human history enough people had enough free time to both read and write book-length treatments of fiction.
With the advent of mass telecommunications of the 20th century, the size and scope of the novel has changed. Fewer and fewer tomes presenting casts of thousands, depicting sweeping social conditions and offering deliberations on the human condition. The depth and breadth of history and the social commentary of many 19th century novels have given way in the 20th century to more psychological examinations of the relationships between one or two characters, sometimes depicted with stylistic experimentation.

At the end of the 20th century and into the 21st century it is possible that readers have become saturated with the extent of self analytical-styles of writing. Every human condition and relationship angst has been trawled, terms like Freudian and countless examples of the Oedipus Complex have been used over and over during the 20th century. Although self-awareness and self-help ideas may have originated earlier, the self-help books really boomed during the 1980’s and 90’s. There are counsellors for almost every conceivable condition; even to ridiculous levels like the addict’s clinic in California for people suffering from Drug, Alcohol and Video Game addiction. There has been a tremendous rise in law firms that deal with personal injuries for people who’ve tripped over something at work or anywhere. People are suing other people for any amount of reasons for any amount of money. The media throw around words like computers and experts as if they are all encompassing labels that can explain, prove or achieve anything. People talk about the computer-age and the space-age as if they were somehow intertwined and magical in themselves when deep down everybody knows that computers are the things that lose your bank records and send your mail and luggage to the wrong destination, and in over forty years of so called ‘space exploration’ the furthest anyone has ever been is the Moon.

Computers and science are supposed to be making things easier for people yet there is even more paperwork to be done these days then ever before, just in case a system crashes or there have to be copies in triplicate to be sent to different people. Philosophy has been taken to such extremes it has almost annihilated itself with the post-modern idea of putting an end to thought, meaning there can be no decisive arguments to put and end to thought because any such arguments would be merely thinking again. Not many people today question the so-called ‘scientific view of the world’ that in times past put the fear of God in popes and kings. Its appeal is in its claim to rely on brute facts and none of the vagaries and abstract theories of religion and philosophy; in essence the cold facts of nature and society as seen by a healthy mind that no longer tries to think of what is real but fully immerses itself in the stark realities life and science. Moving far away from speculative metaphysics as a ‘fraudulent appeal to indemonstrable figments’, instead it promotes a comprehensive, realist, demystified, ‘metaphysics-free’ account of man, nature and history which promises never to stray from the path of the scientific, provable and factual world of man; an account which is positive and not theoretical and therefor is not open to doubt and distortion.

It is partly because of this, some might say, bleak outlook on life that many are finding it harder to accept a situation when something unexpected happens, something unexplainable. Science and modern philosophy have covered a lot of subjects but they still do not have any answers to offer society regarding any of our most pertinent questions. Why are we here? Where are we from? And where are we going? Because, as yet, these questions cannot be answered it appears that modern philosophy has neatly side-stepped these issues and concentrated on the what-we-do-know attitude of thinking, or not thinking as the case may be. Many people still need this gap in their lives filled, at least they need some theories if answers aren’t there. Because society is bound-up in its philosophy it is difficult for most to turn to religious texts because they belong to yesterday and the old way of thinking and, despite the odd ‘revolution’ in history, most people want to move forward. One attribute humans have always being proud of is the ability to laugh, laughing can make everything seem alright, if only for short periods sometimes, and can even mock the human condition and its plight. That comic fantasy writing gives its readers an opportunity to laugh is certain, but what makes it truly appealing today is much more than just something to laugh at. The works of comic fantasy offer a comforting outlook on life as well as a critique of society. There is nothing new in novels criticising society but they have never been forced to do it in such a setting. The self analysis and perspectives on life in the works of Pratchett, Holt and Rankin are set against a background of the impossible, like miracles in the bible, but the situations within the stories are very real. The stories offer theories as to what happens us when we die and where we are from and the possibility of there been a God or gods. They may be comedy and fantasy and sold as entirely fictional but the ideas within them are somehow comforting. They offer readers a system of belief that, because of their fantasy setting, does not contradict the somewhat nihilistic philosophy of modern society.

Why is it Comforting?

The subject of dying and the afterlife today is something that is only properly looked at by those who study, research, work with or teach about the dead and the dying. Papers are submitted by all kinds of people on the subject from many élitist areas such as historians, sociologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, media and cultural theorists, philosophers, medical and health practitioners, palliative care workers, bereavement counsellors, and death practitioners. It seems like a long and comprehensive list yet it is true that very little of what all these people learn is filtered through to the rest of society. In times past it could be argued that people were a lot closer to the subject of death than they are now, it is as if the whole area has been left to others (the above mentioned) to deal with, often leading to great stress as the time inevitably comes when everyone does have to deal with it. What happens to us after we die cannot be properly rationalised and fit into the modern philosophy of concrete proof. The afterlife and the existence of the soul cannot be scientifically argued for or against, it is the one enormous fact of existence that irritatingly avoids scientific probing; which is why most scientists tend not to bother with it and stick to the here and now.

There are some that say dying is as natural as being born. Immortality is a natural physical phenomenon. They say that the study of immortality is an area of science, not faith. That scientific proof has existed for over a century and we all survive the death of our bodies, irrespective of our religious beliefs. There are many people that feel this way but very few who actively take up the cause of studying it publicly, the ones that do are usually thought of as crackpots or just not worth listening to and generally laughed at by the bulk of society. Or if the subject is ever lucky enough to be broached by the media it pops up on TV like in an episode of Equinox on channel 4 entitled ‘The Secrets of Psychics’ in 1997; which ultimately made a mockery of the subject by having Dr. Susan Blackmore and Dr. Richard Wiseman bumbling about in an old house with ghost-busting equipment. But why does society find these ideas so hard to swallow today when not long ago they adhered to the idea of Jesus being the son of God and that the righteous would live an afterlife in paradise? Why has society become so sceptical about almost everything?

If we look back to times before Christianity we can see that there were many more fantastical myths than going to heaven, the Greeks and the Romans had a pantheon of gods and all kinds of strange and wonderful creatures existed especially in the Greek legends, all believed in as strongly as they are not believed in today; so what happened to them? It was the great thinkers of Greece that invented the word psyche, meaning soul, in order to account for paranormal phenomena; a great deal of our mathematics arose from the ancient Greeks as did philosophy, psychology, teachers and doctors.

“Pity poor psychology,” it is said. “First it lost its soul, then its mind, then consciousness, and now it’s having trouble with its behaviour.”

There are those that believe the success of western society is largely thanks to Christianity and there are those that believe that society has got to where it is today in spite of Christianity. There is always more than one side to a story. For instance: Saint Cyril is thought by many to be a Greek Christian missionary who, with his brother Methodius, is known as one of the two ‘Apostles to the Slavs’ who were sent to convert the Khazars and the Moravians to Christianity; he is also said to have invented the Cyrillic alphabet. It is also said that a Christian mob acting under orders from Archbishop Cyril murdered Hypatia, the female principal of the library at Alexandria, who was also allegedly an astronomer, mathematician, philosopher and physician. The story goes that she was dragged from her chariot and had the flesh flayed from her body till she died. The mob was then ordered to burn down the library wherein lay priceless manuscripts. This incident is not thought to be an isolated case but one among many where Christianity has brutally set about eradicating so-called ‘paganism’ from the Roman Empire. It is believed that by destroying so many priceless manuscripts and records that Christianity caused the West’s plunge into the Dark Ages, a plunge that is still being recovered from today.

In many of the history books written by Christians it’s as if Christianity were fighting a war of good (themselves) against bad (pagans) and have eventually won. The definition of a pagan is that of a rustic person, unenlightened, idol worshipping and heathen. Hypatia, along with all the great Roman and Greek scientists, philosophers, engineers, architects and teachers are all described as pagans in Christian history books. It could be said that Christendom finally destroyed this great era of ‘paganism’ after the Council of Nicaea (modern Iznic, Turkey), in 325; ostensibly to deal with the uprising of Arianism, a theological school based on the teachings of Arius(c. AD 250-336). Arius taught that Christ was a created being and that even though the Son of God was divine, he was neither equal nor eternal with the Father. It was at Nicaea that an all-embracing (Catholic) religion was formulated and adopted as the official faith of the Roman Empire. Jesus, some say an unhistorical Jewish teacher, was officially made into the god called Christ. All who did not conform to these new rules were murdered or exiled; the known world was plunged into the Christian Dark Ages, witch trials, inquisitions and public heresy-driven executions.

The point of all this is not to give the reader a history lesson but rather to highlight how thoroughly Christianity has destroyed all society’s feelings and tastes for anything spiritual, supernatural, magical or anything beyond reality apart from a Christian God. Also just as Christianity has shattered popular myths, science has proved to make society more than a little sceptical about Christianity. Dinosaurs, for instance, are one subject that the church stays very clear from and yet it is commonly accepted as truth by almost everyone that these huge monsters roamed the Earth long before God is said to have created everything. Just as the final demise of paganism can be dated about the time of the Council of Nicaea, it is fairly common knowledge that the decline of Christianity began during the Renaissance when the printed book first came to life. More and more people could read anything they liked but, more importantly, they could read the holy books that had hitherto been the privilege of the clergy alone. People were able to read the holy books and make up their own minds, some rejecting Christianity but most people in more recent times deciding that they don’t need to go to church and only need follow their faith in their own way. Again this chapter is meant to be neither a history lesson nor an attempt to ridicule Christianity, but an attempt to outline how the psyche of society may have arrived at the point it is at today; in order to explain why people today may be comforted by fantasy writing.

It could be that there is a gap or void in people’s spirituality that was beaten into submission by Christianity then plucked out all together by science. Some people are yearning for a time in the past, or even in the future, where life still holds mysteries and adventures; where things are not so certain. It would be naïve to think that things are certain today, but when they are not certain there always seems to be an ‘expert’ there to give a logical explanation. One of the most comforting characters in Pratchett’s ‘Discworld’ is Death. Death is personified in the ‘Discworld’ novels. He doesn’t have much of a personality but he has just the right kind of character for such a creature to make the reader laugh at the story, at himself or herself and at life. Death possesses an egg timer, or life-timer, for every single person and creature on the ‘Discworld’; when their time is up the sand in their life-timer has run out and Death pays them a personal visit to cut their souls loose from their bodies. He doesn’t assure anyone of where they are going next, he admits that he doesn’t know but doesn’t say nowhere, but he does assure them that it is their time to die, that it is a universal necessity that they end now. It is a comforting thought that there are no real accidents and that our time is already allotted; there is no point in worrying that your next journey may be fatal because if it is, it was already planned that way and there is no way to avoid it. It doesn’t explain death and the afterlife but it does paint a humorous picture of the event where the church makes it into a crossroads where one might spend eternity in Hell or Heaven which is why most tend not to think about it. This could also be one of the factors that has helped people’s disinterest in the church and why they have adhered more to scientific facts where nothing at all is better than a tortured afterlife.

Why is it Funny?

The ‘why is it funny’ can be, and is, closely linked with the ‘why is it comforting’ in that society is naturally prepared for this type of humour; which means that half of the answer was wrapped up in the previous chapter. The ‘Discworld’ Death has already been mentioned as comforting in that it helps the reader laugh at his or her situation; that is having the knowledge that one is going to die without being able to do anything about it. In this manner the character Death draws a parallel with what people know as actual death, wherein lies the comedy. People like to laugh at themselves but they prefer it if they can laugh at someone else, even more so if the ‘someone else’ is a person they know. For instance it is said that everyone knows a Granny Weatherwax, the headstrong witch from the witch based (not all the novels are based on the same group of characters, some focus on the witches, some on the city guards and some on the wizards etc) stories of ‘Discworld’. Granny Weatherwax first appears in Pratchett’s third ‘Discworld’ novel Equal Rites published in 1987, the title alone was topical at the time and ‘equal rights’ are still an issue today. At first Granny is a midwife delivering a blacksmith’s baby boy that is destined to be a wizard, and an old wizard is present to give over his powers and his staff to the new wizard. When he does this he dies but they all realise too late that the boy is a girl, there has never been a girl wizard before as it is thought to be too dangerous. Granny knows this is bad and her personality switches from sympathetic midwife to all-powerful witch, ordering the blacksmith to destroy the staff in the forge. When attempts to move the staff prove futile, Granny has at it with an axe. This one seen sets up the building blocks of Granny Weatherwax’s personality throughout the many more witch based ‘Discworld’ novels that follow. Everyone can think of someone that has a caring nature but a short temper when it comes to setting things to rights. As the story develops the girl becomes a wizard against the better judgement of all around her, encountering the ‘glass ceiling’ phenomena that many women experience in the corporate world when she tries to join the Unseen University where wizards learn on the ‘Discworld’. Even though Granny is not over enamoured to the idea of the girl being a wizard in the beginning she confronts the university with an almost Thatcherite wrath when see comes against their views on women and learning.

It is said that when two Englishmen meet abroad the first thing they talk about is the weather. This is not a phenomenon unique to the UK, most people wherever they come from talk about the weather; but it is a kind of common folklore in Britain that its people are obsessed with the weather. People have even made songs about weather forecasters, so it is only natural that an English author should write a comedy about them. Which is what Tom Holt did when he wrote Nothing But Blue Skies in 2001, a story that could have been written earlier but is especially fitting now with today’s technology and satellite photography. In a country where it rains so often it seems that when weather presenters predict ‘nothing but blue skies’ it never comes true. People are always complaining about how they always get it wrong but in Holt’s novel the weather is controlled by dragons and has nothing to do with storm fronts and El Nino. The ancient myth of the dragon is brought right into modern society and is secretly controlling the weather all over the world.

There is also a sardonic edge to Nothing But Blue Skies, Holt is very fond and adept at writing comic conspiracy theories, here he reveals just why British weather consists of a wide variety of rain. While the weathermen believe it is all their fault it turns out that the real culprits are Chinese water dragons. The young heroine, Karen, is herself a water dragon but for the sake of love she has taken on the form of a human to pursue an estate agent called Paul. She is not very good at romance and is constantly paranoid that Paul fancies another estate agent called Susan which makes her cry which, unfortunately for Britain, makes it rain.
Rebellious TV weathermen, enraged by sabotaged predictions of sunny days, have kidnapped Karen's father and trapped him in the third shape available to dragons: a goldfish. But the kidnappers fall foul of imperialist conspirators who believe that Britain's terrible weather it what made it great, inspiring the British to go out and conquer all those hot places. Behind this outfit are the even more megalomaniac schemes of an Australian media tycoon who wants to capture all the dragons and use their third eye abilities for cheap television transmissions. The reader also learns about Britain's real state religion, featuring human sacrifices to the Queen, and the North Welsh cult which believes "that when we die, we'll be reunited on the other side with all the used paper hankies we've discarded over the years." Holt also takes random pot-shots at Microsoft and Bill Gates.

The readers are having their need for myth and magic fulfilled and they are getting a ridiculous explanation for their terrible weather and all that is wrong with the world, again an excuse to laugh at their situation. A lot of the story is written from the dragons’ point of view, as in what they think of the human race, they pick on normal everyday things like traffic jams; a subject that irritates most people. The dragons wonder why we all travel about on the ground, getting caught in traffic jams, when there is so much more space just above them in the air. Many people must have thought that we’d be all driving flying cars by the 21st Century, Space 1999 predicted we’d have people living on the Moon, the number of cars has increased almost beyond imagination yet they are still using the same roads, crawling along looking at the empty skies through the windows and sunroof.

Nothing But Blue Skies has the dragons, mythical creatures brought down to earth to experience the mundane lives of human beings, it explores humanities blind belief in science despite the obvious; i.e. the weather can not be predicted. It asks questions like why do humans all rush around so much? Lie and waste time so much, and have pointless wars started by politicians and madmen when they all live such short lives? The dragons live for many thousands of years. Again these issues are being addressed in these types of stories, they are important issues but many people seam more able to face up to them within this comedy genre; perhaps because they are not being offered the opportunity anywhere else, or perhaps it is too uncomfortable against a sensible setting. Expecting Someone Taller also by Tom Holt is almost the opposite situation to Nothing But Blue Skies, instead of the mythical being brought to the mundane; the ordinary, in the shape of Malcolm Fisher, is suddenly thrust into the fantastic. Malcolm is driving home in the dark when he runs down a badger, the badger talks and tells Malcolm that he is the ruler of the world and must hand over a ring and a magical helmet to Malcolm as he is the one that has killed him. Malcolm’s ordinary life becomes embroiled in adventures with gods, valkyries, dwarves and an enormous Rhinemaiden. This is another fantasy that would appeal to today’s society in their fully accountable world, the appeal and fun in the story is in asking ‘what if this happened to me?’

There is something else special about Expecting Someone Taller and that is the novel is a comic variation of Wagner’s ‘Ring Cycle’. Something all of the authors do in some form or other. Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters is a comic variation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, it also sees the second appearance of Granny Weatherwax and two other witches Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick. The three witches represent a kind of motley crew sense of humour, as already mentioned Granny is the sensible one and although witches don’t have leaders Granny Weatherwax is ‘the most highly regarded of the leaders they didn’t have’. Nanny Ogg is completely the opposite of Granny, she hardly ever takes anything seriously and like to spend her time drinking strong cider and singing rude songs. While Nanny and Granny have different characters they still represent a kind of old style type of witching; Magrat is more into flower and tree power, a kind of ‘new age’ witch, she is younger than the other two and is always trying to show the older ones new ways of doing things. It is a kind of comic situation that all ages can appreciate, both age groups think they know better than the other; one because of experience, one because they are in the here and now and keeping abreast of new ideas. A combination that is easily comparable to situations in real life.

Robert Rankin’s novels are of a humorous science-fictional nature a little more than the others, which stick closer to fantasy. His books deal with the macabre and how it interacts with everyday life. A Dog Called Demolition, for example, places a demon in a mundane urban setting. Something that, in itself, may seem unremarkable; when discussing the subject at had. What makes Rankin's work different is that his heroes are genuinely ordinary people, each seeing the ongoing plot through their own eyes, each taking something personal from the events as they unfold.
Where the other two authors are mainly writing humorous stories with jokes interwoven around them, Rankin’s stories are full of one-liners, running jokes and innuendoes with a story wrapped up in between. This level of depth means that no two readers will ever think of the books in the same way, and that any reader will always find something new each time he or she reads one of the books. On top of all that, there are many streams and running jokes that hop from book to book, and within the same book. Taking the books to an even deeper depth still, Rankin challenges the conventions of normal story telling by the use of two rather unique and successful methods. The first, bringing the readers into the story, by the use of references outside the expected experience of the characters. The second, bringing the characters out of the book, by occasionally having them aware that they are being written. He often writes parts of the texts as if they were films, one chapter fading out and panning into the next. His ‘running gags’ are the type of things one usually only sees in films and he uses this knowledge by using references to films he knows most people have seen. For instance the ‘7.62mm M134 General Electric Minigun’ pops up frequently and is referred to as ‘like the one Blaine uses in ‘Predator”. He has a character who is just an ordinary person in the story but looks just like the real-life Harrison Ford, so that when he describes the line of his jaw the reader (assuming they know what Harrison Ford looks like) gets an instant image of an ‘Indiana Jones’ type face. The same is true of the minigun, before it is even fired the reader has a pre-installed image of Arnold Swartzenegger ripping trees and jungle to shreds with the killing machine that fires a 7.62 mm round from 6 rotating barrels at peak cyclic rates of up to 6,000 rpm. It is almost as if the author know that by simply invoking certain scenes from the movies he can get a better image on the page than by actually describing things like the spinning barrels in his own words; which he does not.

Pratchett and Holt are appealing to the spiritual need for more myths and adventure, Rankin is doing the same but he also tackles science head on in his comedy writing. Nearly all his stories involve some kind of cover-up that disproves even the most basic theories that scientists and experts assure us are true. In his novel The Greatest Show Off Earth there is a kind of giant circus that flies through space in an old style sailing ship, the oddest thing being that space is not a vacuum as we were led to believe but full of breathable air, it was just that a privileged few wanted to keep it to themselves. Pratchett tends to keep his conspiracy theories within the realms of the believable, corrupt politicians and so forth. Holt makes his conspiracies almost believable if the reader could accept the existence of dragons and gods living on earth. Rankin takes every conspiracy he has heard drunken people talk about and written a story about it. The truth is that everyone like a conspiracy theory but very few actually bother to pursue it any further than a paranoid chat amongst friends. Everyone likes to have a whinge at ‘them’ in control and how ‘they’ couldn’t care less about the ‘normal’ people on the street, so it is not surprising that all three authors use these kinds of stories in their texts and that the readers enjoy reading them.

Conclusions

Some may argue over whether the comic fantasy genre is new at all. Shakespeare wrote comedies that included fantasy characters within them, Oberon and Titania of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for instance. It has being said that Pratchett is a comparable modern-day Charles Dickens. There will always be a counter argument to every theory no matter what modern philosophy is trying to achieve; the point here is that no one has ever lived in a time like now so no one can really have written the way these comic fantasy writers have written today. Shakespeare could not have written about a computer that is capable of downloading one’s soul into a necronet which turns out to be inside God’s head as Rankin does in The Dance of the Voodoo Handbag. There was no such thing as Alcoholics Anonymous in the time that Dickens was writing so he could not write a parody of them by having a vampire swear himself off drinking blood so that he may fit better in society as Otto does in Pratchett’s The Truth. It is only relatively recently that blasphemy has become socially acceptable, all three authors would be guilty of that. A good example of how blasphemy is looked upon is when Robert Rankin attempted to write a version of his Armageddon The Music for the stage, on the first night hardly any tickets were sold. Rankin himself admits the play was awful and a review in the local paper said in its headline, ‘Blasphemy and bad taste makes Armageddon a disaster’; the next day the play was sold out.

The writers are basically going out into the world and observing everything then coming back and writing down their version of what they think is going on. It is much easier for the reader to digest because it is set in a comedy background. If they were trying to get the same points across on a non-fictional level it is very likely that no one would take any notice of them. People feel more comfortable and at ease taking in critical information about their lives and surrounding within the comic fantasy genre; it is written for the reader to have fun and the reader knows this so, no matter what opinions are voiced within the texts, they can in know way be offended while at the same time they are learning something about their surroundings.

It is possible that the rise of comic fantasy was held back by the first and second World War, after which people were just happy to be alive which was fantasy enough. Even though Tolkien did write his epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings it was still largely a good against evil yarn; yet oddly enough it is during the present era of fantasy appreciation that Tolkien’s work has finally (there was an earlier attempt to adapt it to cartoon but the person behind the venture died before it was finished) being properly brought to film. It is at least equally possible, if not more likely, that the World Wars and subsequent wars in Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf etc have facilitated in people turning to fantasy and laughter as a form of escape from the negetivities of the outside world; while at the same time still learning about it. Pratchett’s Jingo was an attempt to explore how easily two countries can be set against each other, enough so that they will go to war. Just the fact that someone is writing such a story to appeal to a large audience is proof in itself that it is an issue on many people’s minds.

It may seem a little over zealous to suppose that an event like the First Council of Nicaea could have eventually lead to people’s attitudes today but it is possible that it was a major beginning. It seems necessary here to reiterate just how big an event the Council was, not just its effects but the event itself. The debate over what to do about Arius and others like him had been going on for some time, there had been earlier meetings to come to some kind of agreement but ultimately war broke out between Constantine and Licinius causing a stream of religious conflicts. Eventually Constantine was victorious and became the sole emperor, and began to concern himself with religious peace and civil order. He addressed letters to St. Alexander and Arius in the hope of settling the discord between the two regarding questions of no practical importance. The records of the church write here that it is likely that Constantine did not realise the significance of Arius’s heresy; some argue that he did know all about Arius and thought his theories to be unimportant. The letters were not delivered successfully and no headway was made, the emperor saw no alternative but to call for an oecumenical council, that is to bring the Christian church throughout the known world together. The emperor wrote personal letters begging every bishop to come and attend council at Nicaea. Bishops from outside the Roman Empire also attended and it is thought that the emperor was working alongside Pope Sylvester to expedite matters. The conveyances and posts of the Roman Empire were put at the disposal of the bishops in order to get as many to attend as possible. Nicaea was chosen because it was ideally situated for the maximum number of bishops from nearly all the provinces, especially those of Asia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Greece and Thrace. The sessions were held in the great hall of the imperial palace as it is said that a huge space was needed for the amount of people in attendance, one source speaks of over 250 bishops where another says there were around 2000; no one really knows the actual size, but as well as the bishops there would have been priests, deacons and acolytes making the numbers great.
The First Council of Nicaea was begun with great solemnity, the emperor Constantine waited until everyone had entered before making his own grand appearance. He was clad in precious stones and gold like an Egyptian king, a chair of gold stood waiting for him and when he seated himself everyone else followed. What followed was a lengthy discussion about the future and what was to be done, all sounding very official and legal but often ending in tragic brutality at the receiving end. None the less, the size and grandeur of the meeting can not really be compared with anything today, except perhaps with Bush’s fight against terrorism which is still not as large as what the Council was suggesting; Catholic Christianity forcibly imposed on the known world.

Nietzche described Christianity as ‘a religion of slaves’. If this is true then it is science that has released the slaves but unfortunately it has left society in a kind of sophisticated despair. A time where everything and nothing is explained without any comfortable clarity. The works of Holt, Pratchett, Rankin and others like them are a step towards relieving the despair.

Jonathan Malory

Useful Reading:

The Undiscovered Self by C. G. Jung