La monarchie en fantasy
Posté : jeu. juil. 19, 2012 7:39 am
Le site SF Signal a mis en ligne un article autour de la monarchie dans la fantasy. Plusieurs auteurs y ont répondu dont Martha Wells, Jim Hines C et Daniel Abraham (parmi les noms publiés en français). L'idée c'est de savoir pourquoi la royauté est le régime préféré des auteurs de fantasy.
Voici la réponse de Daniel Abraham
"The big advantage that I see to that kind of divine right monarchy from a strictly *technical* perspective is that it lets the writer put the personal, psychological level of the story even with the larger sociopolitical level very easily. When the government is a single person, you can narrow the focus of a story enough to make the larger events — often wars — explicable. If there’s a parliament with a hundred people in it, then there are a hundred perspectives that you’d have to make clear and complicated group dynamics and the whole thing gets very fuzzy very quickly. If it’s Claudius, Hamlet, Gertrude, and the ghost, it’s small enough to manage.
That’s probably a petty answer, though.
More to the point, we are still a very Christian culture, and that’s a very Christian view of the universe. The Great Chain of Being structure where power goes from king/God down to the subject in the political world as it does from father to wife and children within a family is a central cultural narrative for us. When we’re trained into that model, whatever our intellectual opinion about it is, the familiarity gives stories that also use that a lot of narrative power. The roots of modern fantasy pretty much all run to the devoutly Roman Catholic J. R. R. Tolkien, and through him to explicitly Christian fantasists like George MacDonald. That piety, with its full load of medieval theology, is in the bones of the genre.
When someone does write a second world fantasy that draws from a non-Christian tradition, and I’m thinking of Ursula Le Guin here, it’s often such a profoundly different experience that it almost feels like it’s part of a different literary project, and often kind of a subversive one."
Voici la réponse de Daniel Abraham
"The big advantage that I see to that kind of divine right monarchy from a strictly *technical* perspective is that it lets the writer put the personal, psychological level of the story even with the larger sociopolitical level very easily. When the government is a single person, you can narrow the focus of a story enough to make the larger events — often wars — explicable. If there’s a parliament with a hundred people in it, then there are a hundred perspectives that you’d have to make clear and complicated group dynamics and the whole thing gets very fuzzy very quickly. If it’s Claudius, Hamlet, Gertrude, and the ghost, it’s small enough to manage.
That’s probably a petty answer, though.
More to the point, we are still a very Christian culture, and that’s a very Christian view of the universe. The Great Chain of Being structure where power goes from king/God down to the subject in the political world as it does from father to wife and children within a family is a central cultural narrative for us. When we’re trained into that model, whatever our intellectual opinion about it is, the familiarity gives stories that also use that a lot of narrative power. The roots of modern fantasy pretty much all run to the devoutly Roman Catholic J. R. R. Tolkien, and through him to explicitly Christian fantasists like George MacDonald. That piety, with its full load of medieval theology, is in the bones of the genre.
When someone does write a second world fantasy that draws from a non-Christian tradition, and I’m thinking of Ursula Le Guin here, it’s often such a profoundly different experience that it almost feels like it’s part of a different literary project, and often kind of a subversive one."