| Towards or Back to Human Values? Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006. Towards or Back to Human Values? Spiritual and Moral Dimensions of Contemporary Fantasy, treats a topic of great interest and relevance to contemporary global culture: the ways in which literature offers moral and spiritual guidance by appealing to imaginary and imaginative constructs. I write this review from the buckle of the Bible Belt: Kansas, U.S.A., with a sitting president who begins each day with Bible reading and a workout before turning to policy and who is reported to "me[e]t America's foreign challenges with decisiveness born of a brand of preternatural, faith-based, self-generated certainty" (Ron Suskind qtd. Danner 87). The contrast--or the similarity--between the type of reading that produces George W. Bush's fundamentalist "preternatural, faith-based, self-generated certainty" and the readings and texts discussed in Towards or Back to Human Values has informed my reaction to the collection. This contrast between certainty and agnosticism, between the supernatural and the natural, between faith and reason provide a critical lens--bifocals, if you will--for my response, which lauds attempts to maintain the tension between these poles without necessarily resolving it in favor of one strategy over the other. The great virtue of this book is that it brings the discussion to the table; I hope that it will inspire more critics to take up the challenge presented by the conflicts between fundamentalism and secularism in the world today. The book compiles a wide-ranging set of essays from European, U.S., and Australian scholars on the relationship between fantasy and religious or ethical thought. The book questions secular education's separation of questions of faith and spirituality from the education process, arguing that the current popularity of fantasy demonstrates people's interest in and need for literature that engages with the peculiarly human traits of ethical awareness, spiritual curiosity. As editor Marek Oziewicz writes in the opening essay of the collection, "although the exploration of human values in literature is still rather unpopular in academia--this is reflected as much in its bias against liberal humanism as in its bias for theory--I think that they naturally come into the focus of anyone who is not embarrassed to ask important questions about the role of imaginative literature in our culture and in our lives" (14). I strongly agree with Professor Oziewicz that such questions ought and must be discussed, especially with regard to humanity's role in nurturing or destroying the planet on which we all live, a question discussed in depth in section three of the anthology. At the same time, the insights garnered from the explosion in theory of the last thirty years--the questioning of the unified subject by psychoanalysis, the critique of ideological bias based on gender, class, race, and national identities, the mapping out of social and political power's effects upon ordinary people both for good and ill, the ways in which readers and consumers appropriate and perform their parts in these dynamics--cannot be simply ignored or placed on the side, or we risk reading texts with "preternatural, faith-based, self-generated certainty" that precludes being arrested (in the sense of being stopped), being made to think differently about Otherness and what it means to be a spirit inside a body, what it means to be a spirit-body in relation to other "humanimal" spirit-bodies. Essays are divided into four categories: 1) : "Theorizing fantasy through mapping its spiritual territory; 2) "Fantasy on the role of imagination in human life"; 3) "Fantasy as asserting interconnectedness of all life, stressing the need for cooperation, and fostering environmental awareness"; 4) "Fantasy as exploring human experience." Authors discussed in the collection range from the famous, such as Philip Pullman, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Madeleine L'Engle, and Ursula LeGuin to the less-well-known Hiromi Goto, Robin Hobb, Matsutani Miyoko, and others. Critical perspectives are similarly diverse: some (such as Oziewicz' piece on L'Engle, Corinne Buckland's theorization of the "Numinous," Pat Pinsent's discussion of contemporary fantasy writers David Almond, Jeanne DuPrau, and John Burningham) employ archetypal critics such as Joseph Campbell or C.S. Lewis, who unabashedly embrace a para-rational view of the universe informed by western mythologies. These discussions fall prey to some of the disadvantages of archetypal criticism--ethnocentrism, unawareness or dismissal of human difference (let alone animal or other differences)--but also offer engaging readings of various writers and texts. For example, Buckland's essay on "Fantasy and the Recovery of the Numinous" takes as its center the assumptions of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien about the "numinous" without acknowledging the rather problematic essentializing claims Lewis in particular made about the virtues of "the north" or "the east." I am also troubled by this essay's valorization of "intuition" and "wonder," resistance to logical and scientific knowledge, especially in the light of how such perspectives are currently preventing the U.S.A. from taking meaningful action on the problem of global warming, or have (until recently) prevented South Africa from educating its populace about how AIDS is transmitted and may be treated. Other essays demonstrate more awareness of the problematic relationship between desires for transcendence and living in the here and now. A particularly engaging and persuasive example of this approach can be found in Robert A Davies' excellent "Seeing Everything At Once: Myth, Freedom and Determinism in Alan Garner's The Owl Service and Red Shift." Rather than relying on the essentialist tropes of archetypal criticism, Davies elegantly demonstrates the tension between history and myth as it is played out in Garner's classic works, showing how Garner "complicates both the advocacy of, and the opposition to, the recovery of myth by children's literature" (228). Likewise, the essays on children's fantasy, ecocriticism, and morality by Piotr Skubala and Marek Oziewicz, by Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, and by Maija-Liisa Harju demonstrate that we ignore historical trends at our peril--that moral fantasy offers us ways of understanding and engaging with our primary world. Work Cited Naomi Wood, Associate professor of English, Kansas State University. |