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Wednesday 8 October 2008

Our magic kingdom

The supernatural is as British as fish and chips

We’re all accustomed to stories about credulous Americans; as an American living in Britain I am constantly asked to defend the 43 per cent of my compatriots who believe in creationism.

This impression is reinforced by the recent renaissance of immensely popular stories on both sides of the Atlantic concerned with the supernatural — a surge that includes a wave of bestselling nonfictional investigations into the existence of God (such as those by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens). The fact that these books repudiate the existence of higher powers by no means suggests a comfortably secular society: if we were certain, or disinterested, these books wouldn’t have become bestsellers. Moreover, we have recently been inundated by fictional stories in which ordinary people wrestle with supernatural forces: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X-Men, His Dark Materials, Lost, Heroes, Harry Potter, to name just the most prominent, all concern apparently ordinary people who discover that they have extraordinary powers and extraordinary fates. In none of these stories is destiny easy; power remains a poisoned chalice. And yet, just as continually denying God’s existence hardly makes him less of a cultural preoccupation, so does insisting that power is a difficult burden not lessen the degree to which these stories all fantasise about power.

But they also all consistently grapple with the great questions that dominate all theistic religions: transcendence, destiny, knowledge, free will. Most fundamentally, perhaps, these stories all seem to be about morality and power. In other words, popular fiction seems increasingly to scratch the same existential itches as religion: these stories dramatise ordinary-but-special people’s attempts to solve eternal mysteries, reconcile individual ambition with the social order, and promise ultimate justice, in which good will prevail and evil be punished.

This would all seem to be a species of mythmaking, but I have to tread carefully here, apparently, because when I recently wrote an article about mythmaking in Heroes, I was called a pretentious and idiotic academic (a tautology nowadays, of course) who was reading too much significance into popular culture. I thought it was an entirely uncontroversial claim: what is a story about people who can fly and predict the future if it is not a myth? Catastrophe and war have always provoked myths: Anglo–American culture is today grappling with both, so it should come as no surprise that the apocalyptic strain in our fantasies is resurfacing, and that we are telling each other stories about power and about good and evil.

Put another way: all of these stories are folk tales, and one needn’t be a Freudian — or a pretentious idiot — to recognise that all folk tales work on an unconscious level as well as a conscious one. This doesn’t mean that they’re not entertainment; The Iliad and The Odyssey were that. Indeed, they were entertaining precisely because they engaged with the issues that preoccupied their audiences; very few people are entertained by a tale that seems entirely meaningless or irrelevant.

More articles from: Sarah Churchwell | this section

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