Chciałbym Wam zaproponować lekturę pracy pisemnej, którą napisałem na studiach. Zależy mi na tym, by wyczerpać możliwości wynikające ze studiowania w taki sposób, aby studia z kolei nie wyczerpywały mnie. Poniższa praca połączyła przyjemne z pożytecznym, ponieważ stanowi pół-akademicką analizę powieści należącej do gatunku fantasy. Niektórzy z Was na pewno znają powieści o Alvinie amerykańskiego pisarza, Orsona Scotta Carda. Jeżeli znacie przynajmniej pierwszą powieść, to zapraszam do lektury. Przypisy z powodu przystosowania pracy do publikacji na blogu zostały usunięte.
Conventional Colonial Discourse and Authorial Discourse in Orson Scott Card's Seventh Son, Book One of The Tales of Alvin Maker
I. Introduction. The Genre(s) of The Tales of Alvin Maker and Its Place in Popular Literature
Orson Scott Card (b. 1951) the person is a Mormon of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a self-proclaimed conservative Democrat; Orson Scott Card the writer proclaims himself a popular novelist in opposition to critically-acclaimed 'high' literature, because, as he believes, 'high' art, 'serious' art, has stopped trying to communicate with the unschooled audience. As a novelist Card translates his personal views and experiences into literature and his fiction often serves as a moralist vehicle for propagating virtues and condemning vices. Despite it not being his primary concern, his novels are often didactic. In the words of Card himself – We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness – the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction. It is therefore no wonder that his ongoing series of novels, The Tales of Alvin Maker, the first of which was published in 1987, adopted the form of an alternate-history-America epic, abundant with subtle Mormon metaphysics, conventional American discourse and ideologically-motivated authorial discourse.
The Tales of Alvin Maker tell the history of Alvin the blacksmith as a witness of and participant in the self-proclamation of the American nation
The Tales of Alvin Maker tell the history of Alvin the blacksmith as a witness of and participant in the self-proclamation of the American nation with its identity, ideals and beliefs, filtered through Mormon faith and morality. Structurally the series also serves as a history of American literary genres, as the novels pay tribute to the popular genres of the periods they describe – Seventh Son (1987) is abunant with puritan discourse; Red Prophet (1988) is to an extent a captivity narrative; Prentice Alvin (1989) and Alvin Journeyman (1995) are both courtroom novels; Heartfire (1998) is to some degree a slave narrative with abolitionist discourse; The Crystal City (2003) is a retelling of the founding myths of the Mormon faith. The "Alvin books" are often described as "popular historical fantasy novels", and while such a description is by no means derogatory, it does not do the series complete justice.
The series is labeled as "alternate history" because it is set on the American frontier, though in a world where neither the American nor the French Revolution ever happened. It is "an" America where the colonial period extends far into the end of the nineteenth century and independence is yet to be proclaimed. Therein historical figures, or rather – characters loosely based on historical figures, coexist with those completely fictional. Card's America is a literary and ideological retelling of American folklore and founding myths, the history of which may be read as a narrative rather than an objective catalogue of fixed meanings and signifiers. While Card alludes to various real persons and texts, he by no means intends his novels to be intertextual in the extreme (post)modern understanding. As Kessel points out in his article Demonizing Literature, Card criticizes literary modernism for leading to some elitist work that does not easily invite the reader in, and that at its worst can become a kind of self-referential game.
The "fantasy" label stems from the fact that in Card's America folk magic, Native American shamanism and African American voodoo are all a normal and functioning part of reality. Whites are gifted with "knacks" – outstanding skills helpful in colonizing the wilderness; Reds feel a natural bond with the land and are capable of comprehending animal communication; Blacks are skilled in voodoo enchantments and curses. The main protagonist is a Maker – a human capable of magnificent invention and creation.
One should proclaim The Tales of Alvin Maker a popular Tolkienian mythopoeia.
Having said that, one should also proclaim The Tales of Alvin Maker a popular Tolkienian mythopoeia. Indeed, the series aspires to be for the United States of America what J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings was for Great Britain – a contemporary, myth-making vehicle for long-forgotten tales of virtue. And while some critics believe that mythopoeias can at best deliver an artificial mythology, their influence on readers (as in the case of The Lord of the Rings) proves to be considerably genuine. Not only does a mythopoeia bring mythology (here: American founding myths) to modern readers, it also attempts to recover lost, fundamental virtues found therein. Orson Scott Card himself seems to approve of the claim that his novels serve a mythopoeic function.
When normative stories come from religion, fiction is less necessary; we get our mythic framework from the stories of the public religion (which usually includes patriotism as well as theology and ritual). But when, as in our society, public religion has been denigrated, debased, and/or replaced by weak substitutes, fiction remains as a source of moral and causal truth (i.e., stories so believed that they are acted upon). We are so hungry for this that we will share stories even when we're dying, not as an escape to "take our minds off it," but as a palliative, to make life make sense, to make sacrifice worthwhile, to make loss bearable, to make happiness recognizable.
Card's conservative approach to positive myth-making in contrast to progressive myth-deconstruction mirrors the words of Tolkien from his poem "Mythopoeia":
I will not walk with your progressive apes,
erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends –...
The belief that new, "positive" mythology must be created for modern mankind was also shared by Joseph Campbell, who disapproved of the modern, Nietzschean society. In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell advocates for the idea that universally, all myths – ancient and modern alike – follow the same structural pattern, best summarised by words from the book's Introduction:
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
It comes as no suprise to find out that The Tales of Alvin Maker function structurally as a Campbellian monomyth. This is not an overstatement, since Campbell himself showcased Star Wars, another popular fantasy, as a modern monomyth. Not only does Alvin follow "the hero's journey" throughout the whole series, the monomyth is also found as a complete cycle within the first novel, Seventh Son. Alvin experiences the supernatural during his dialogue with The Shining Man, from whom he gains the necessary knowledge to survive his rite of passage, healing his wounded leg. He then commits himself to fighting with the Unmaker for the benefit of humankind. Other elements of the Campbellian structure are found throughout the novel – Taleswapper functions as Alvin's mentor figure, Alvin comes to the world by means of a miraculous birth, experiences his apotheosis in confrontation with The Shining Man and is later forced to withdraw from his family.
For the very same reasons The Tales of Alvin Maker constitute a Bildungsroman.
For the very same reasons The Tales of Alvin Maker constitute a Bildungsroman. Throughout the novels, readers experience Alvin's passage from childhood to maturity; from childlike selfishness to social empathy. He is at first prosecuted by society and authority represented by the Church, only to found his own cathedral in The Crystal City. Alvin constitutes his identity parallell to the formation of America, thus growth and wisdom are present on many levels of narrative – American discourse evolves along with the character. Though seemingly only a series of "popular historical fantasy novels", The Tales of Alvin Maker are indeed more than meets the eye.
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Wakacje 2008
