The Wheel of Lost Time

There are two competing definitions of the word adult, as it is applied to literature, film, and other arts. It may signify a thematic complexity and denseness likely to be off-putting to younger folk; or, it may mean the sorts of things you would have really enjoyed when you were twelve if only your mother had let you get your hands on them. I suspect most of the books using the anti-Tolkien label to sell themselves fall into the second category rather than the first. (I've hardly performed an exhaustive survey of the genre. I'm planning to read Moorcock's Doctor Who novel when it comes out, if that counts for anything. No? Thought not.)

As influential and defining a figure as Tolkien undoubtedly is, he doesn't seem to me to be enough of an extreme to be seen as one end of a spectrum, something with a clear opposite. Having given this some thought, I've come up with two figures who, perhaps, could be seen as opposing bookends, existing on opposite sides of all their literary fellows. Both are known primarily for producing an extremely long multi-volume work, but that is as far as I can stretch their similarity: Robert Jordan, author of The Wheel of Time; and Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time.

I've read the first volume of both works. Jordan's The Eye of the World marked the moment I decided to stop reading popular fantasy novels. Upon finishing the book, I thought to myself, "Ungh. I bet this series drags on forever. I bet the author dies before finishing it." I listened to an audiobook of Swann's Way a few months ago. I thought it was delightful. What Jordan's and Proust's works have in common is length; their most significant difference can also be summed up in one word: urgency. People are always going on about how the world could end any minute in Eye of the World. In Swann's Way, life simply carries on as it always has. People have their private little dramas, but the world is untouched.

Tolkien's focus was on the good people who struggled against evil in the world. The anti-Tolkien view is that to show the world as it really is there has to be a focus on the evil as well. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it's just as ridiculous to show a world without any good in it as one where good always triumphs. It seems less that one of these depictions is more realistic, and more that there is a desire in many of us to revel in wickedness once in a while; for some, that is what fantasy is for, and Tolkien can't provide for that need.

Contrasting Proust and Jordan, it's not about good and evil. In Jordan's fantasy world, the characters' actions matter and not just to themselves and those immediately around them; the fate of everything lies in the balance. None of Proust's characters' actions shape the world around them in anything but the most insignificant ways. The world rolls by; time marches on and is lost. The fantasy that our actions matter, more than just in this brief moment and only to ourselves, that we are somehow the most significant people at the center of our universe, is at the heart of adventure fantasies of all kinds. That we will inevitably be forgotten, in most cases sooner rather than later, as soon as we depart this life, is the real opposite to the concept of the fantasy heroes and villains who—rather than canceling each other out—are actually totally dependent on one another in order to exist.