Charles Aznavour, the French singer, turned up one day at a class I was attending. The teacher was a huge fan, and had invited him to drop by if he was passing. It turned into a question-and-answer session about his art and career—and someone asked him the question that often gets asked:
“Who are your influences?”
I’d always felt that that was a bit of a loaded question, as if asking who someone is copying, but his answer put it in a new light. He replied:
“We are all products of the others. It is impossible for anyone to emerge fully formed from the forest.”
How right he was.
One of my favourite lines of poetry is by Alfred Lord Tennyson:
I am a part of all that I have met.
The other day I was on a Tolkien podcast, discussing his influence on modern fantasy writing—which is, of course, enormous. And he himself acknowledged that he by no means “emerged fully formed from the forest.” His influences stretch back over a thousand years, to Beowulf, the Eddas and Sagas, and, pivotally, Wagner’s Ring Cycle. “Without the Ring Cycle there would have been no Lord of the Rings,” he said. As a professor at Oxford University of Old English (aka Anglo-Saxon), Tolkien brought a half-forgotten archive of our oldest texts back from obscurity to prominence.
So many of the world’s earliest writings, going all the way back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, are works of fantasy. Beowulf has its monsters and a dragon guarding a hoard of gold. The 1001 (Arabian) Nights; the Faerie Queen; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the tales collected by the Grimm Brothers in the early 1800’s; the Gothic tales of the Nineteenth Century, from Frankenstein at one end to Dracula at the other: all explore the human condition through the prism of Unreality. As William Shatner has said, “Science Fiction is just human beings in other places.”
Why do we love these Wonder Tales, as Marina Warner calls them, so much? I have mischievously quoted the 20th Century novelist Kingsley Amis on the point. He joked that he couldn’t read Literary Fiction because it was “all about women being miserable in Fulham.” Yes, he was a grumpy old misogynist indeed, but there is something in what he is saying. Sometimes, you need the light rather than the dark, the comedy instead of the tragedy, the Unreal as well as the Real. We escape into books, into worlds that are wildly and wonderfully unfamiliar or are even grimmer than the one we live in. As T.S. Eliot said:“Human Kind cannot bear very much Reality.”
It takes all sorts to make a library.
For more of my musings, I conducted a question and answer session with the members of the British Fantasy Society. You can take a look by clicking this link.
