klwilliams | The numinous in America

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numinous

The numinous in America

At Westercon, both Lois McMaster Bujold and Michael Swanwich brought up the idea that fantasy needs to contain "the numinous", a spiritual or divine element, the supernatural. I've been thinking about that in regards to fantasy set in the United States. I find that stories with elves set in the downtown of a major city usually (though not always) feel grafted on, because elves aren't something that started out in the U.S. Neil Gaiman's American Gods were gods brought over to the U.S. from other countries. There are good stories with Native American gods and mythology, but I've been wondering what "the numinous" means in the WASP, urban United States, without bringing over gods or mythologies from other continents.

Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series springs to mind, based as it is on American folk magic and the Mormon religion. While both have their roots in Europe, they are still distinctly American. (The Book of Mormon is, roughly, the story of Jesus traveling though North America bringing his Word to the Indians.) Nina Kiriki Hoffman's The Thread That Binds the Bones, and her other supernatural stories, are another example. Michaela Roessner's Vanishing Point, while more science fictional than fantasy, is set in the Winchester Mystery House and contains at least a supernatural (science indistinguishable from magic) element.

What are the numinous elements in, say, downtown Manhattan, or the Financial District of San Francisco, or even downtown Pocatello, Idaho? There are always ghosts. Neil Gaiman created the Endless. American churches, such as the Baptists or Presbyterians, don't have the same kind of almost-magical liturgy that Catholic-based churches have.

I'd love to hear your suggestions.

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What are the numinous elements in, say, downtown Manhattan, or the Financial District of San Francisco, or even downtown Pocatello, Idaho?

I'll suggest, actually, that there are largely none. American history is so tightly bound up in actual history that supernatural claims are almost always tacked on, as you correctly put it. Which is why no book of "American" fantasy has gone very far -- because, as a nation, we simply don't have the dizzying mysticism of Europe. We have no goblins in our forests. We have no dwarves in our mountains. We have no dragons in our lakes. We are amongst the most materialist nations on earth, which is why when we go for fantasy we overwhelmingly go for a pastiche of European feudalism, which is sufficiently removed and yet culturally relevant to us to provide background for fantasy elements.

(The reason why First People's fantasy has never taken off is because for most of us there is far less resonance between ourselves and that sort of mythology than ourselves and European mythology and legendry.)

The closest we Americans get to legitimate fantasy mythology as a culturally relevant form is more science-fiction, really: conspiracy theory. Our mythology, insofar as we have one, as to do with aliens from the stars and vast conspiracies to dominate the world than traditional fantasy. I could probably go on about why that is, too, if a body was interested. ;)

Just my 2 cents. ;)

I think the reason science fiction is such an American form is because we don't have a legitimate fantasy mythology, and because we are such builders. Although the superhero comic is an American fantasy mythology, though embued with science fiction elements.

Well, I'm not sure we're more builders than, say, the Japanese or Germans. I honestly do think it is because we lack the medieval experience, specifically. We have no stories like King Arthur, where history and fantasy are mixed up inextricably. I feel pretty stronger it's the American lack of that that makes it hard to write distinctly American fantasy combined with our extreme technophilia. But it can't just be the technophilia, because Japan is even more absurdly technophile than we are, but they have a lot of Japanese themed fantasy -- because they, too, had a dark age where legend and history gets mixed up.

But the reason I said conspiracy theory instead of comic books is because the same sort of mixing of fact and the absurd happens with conspiracy theory as it does with legend. Oh, comic books routinely produce the most iconic characters in American literature, but no one past the age of 8 believes in Batman -- but a lot of people believe that aliens come down and probe people, or slaughter cows, or make art in fields, or even have replaced the government with robots. Like with King Arthur or Robin Hood or Roland, they can't seperate fact from fiction.

(And, for what it is worth, comic books are far more sci-fi than fantasy. Almost all the popular and successful characters have sci-fi backgrounds and the number of sci-fi stories strongly outweighs the number of fantasy stories, in large. So comics are more sci-fi with some fantasy than the other way around, for what it is worth.)

I think the combination of no historical mythology plus being builders is what makes us a science fiction culture rather than a fantasy culture. We have hints of fantasy, but as others have said, we tend more towards horror than the numinous.

Well, no one in the Christian range of beliefs has an exorcism rite except the Catholic Church (to the best of my knowledge), so it would make sense that America would have less...fey than many places. In the First Nations mythology I've read, their fey tend not to bother you if you don't bother them, unlike the Fair Folk in Britain who appear to think that your mere presence gives them permission to mess with you.

There are no fairy tales set here, you see, unlike most of the rest of the world. The best we have is Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill and such, and they are less than 200 years old.

Our numinous elements would be perhaps created by our beliefs, such as Wall Street having a minor god of not greed, exactly, but More. Bujold's Five Gods (four in one area) are like the Greek gods in that they made sense. Here in North America we haven't been here long enough to have anything make sense that isn't science. Which seems to be our only fey.

After our talk the other night I thought of mysteries, specifically Sharon McCrumb's Appalachian series.

Thought of Paul Bunyan and the Blue Ox too. (nodding at Galeni)

Of course the Hillerman series of mysteries. Perhaps the genre lends itself to more mythic themes. Science Fiction isn't about myth, per se and Fantasy is mostly written entirely in a fantastic realm.

Hey, Thorne Smith. Topper and his ghosts, the ghosts were definately urban Americans.

The problem is that Christianity just doesn't have room for the fey. Recently, there's been an outbreak of angels in popular culture, but they're not very interesting; they're all on the same side. (I gather the forms of Christianity that like the idea of guardian angels would rise up in arms against any story that took the logical step of including devils for the angels to fight.)

You'll have to look beyond Christianity. Some forms of New Age and Wicca seem to include a belief in pervasive spirits; but the problem there is that you won't be resonating with readers who don't hold those beliefs.

So, let's see. We can't find spirits in commonly held American beliefs. You don't want to import foreign spirits, because they feel tacked on. The standard American answer is to build our own; but, of course, that won't distinguish itself from a host of other fantasies that talk about the Tricksies and the Tracksies, or whatever.

Perhaps you could solve the problem by importing it into the story. A group of spiritualists are disappointed that America doesn't have its own spirits, so they set out to create their own. They might do so by magic (summon up raw spirit and shape it into a form that makes sense to Americans), or they might use technology. Personally, I think the tech approach works better; it fits into the "American ingenuity" meme/myth. The spirits might take the form of AIs which spread as viruses through the Internet—you can make them more effective by setting the story around 2020 or so, when you can postulate ubiquitous wireless broadband, cameras, and CPUs. You could have just a few spirits (Greed, Ingenuity, Hard Work, maybe more), each working as a distributed system; each CPU infected with a Greed virus is then running part of the Greed AI. Each camera that CPU can access is one of Greed's eyes; each machine it can control is one of Greed's hands. If the tech background includes augmented reality, then the spirits can really invade my sensorium. Ingenuity can look through my eyes and highlight the book in the library that includes a clue to solve the problem I'm working on; Hard Work can keep me from smelling the popcorn that might distract me from my problem; Greed can filter my hearing and amplify the conversation in the next cube about the new gadget it thinks I should want.

Could be pretty scary, actually.

Arrgh, I misformed my closing tag. I wish LJ would let me edit my comment.

I think Harlan Ellison did a good job with gods and machines in Deathbird Stories, with such fare as "Ernest and the Machine God" and "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes". These worked within the context of the story, but weren't really universal.

I think that in the sixties and seventies that computers held for us the kind of awe reserved for the supernatural, but now that we have Microsoft instead of the Enterprise computer, that's gone by the wayside.

This is an interesting question to me, since Bones of Faerie is set in St. Louis, which is not one of the more numinous places on the planet. Admittedly, I had to set it after the end of the world to get there. :-) But I'm shopping a novel now that I also like to think touches on the numinous set in present-day Arizona ... I think for me, it comes to looking back to the land itself, and it's inherent, deeper nature: the dense plants and thick air and deep rivers of the midwest; the warm winds and summer wildfires of the southwest. I don't much find the numinous in the man made things, especially the newer man made things, though I know that's in part just me.

Though come to think of it, I did turn the Gateway Arch to something of (I hope) a numinous element, too. Because if you stand under the Arch, and look up at the right angle, there is a touch of the strange and magical there.

Maybe the numinous is all about the filters through which one views the world?

Interesting. The Anita Blake stories are set in St. Louis, which might have something to say about the ambiance there. Personally, I think the confluence of the mighty rivers in the area lends a great deal of power to the landscape there.

Heh. I actually wrote the very start of Bones when I was still in a critique group with Laurell, before I left St. Louis. (More than a decade ago now--it took me a long time to finish that book!)

I think, though, that we all wrote stories set there because we lived there, and it was a landscape we knew, and then all found ways to do more with it. (And the Anita Blake books did this particularly well.)

But when you begin looking for the power and the numinous in St. Louis, those rivers pretty quickly come to mind.

Interestingly, it took me a couple years living in the desert, before I began writing stories set here, too.

I think for those of us born in this generation (I'm 50+, YMMV), it takes a couple of years for the inherent power and character of a setting can really seep into us sufficiently to describe specific locals well. Some of the pleasure (or horror*) of reading things set in your area comes from seeing the places in your mind's eye, and seeing how the other person describes what they feel.

*I read a Jerry Bledsoe true crime story set in my hometown of Greensboro, NC, about a series of horrific murders that took place in one family in the area over a few years. The ending event took place at an intersection in Guilford College that I'd passed through hundreds of times a year. After being away for 20 years, the depiction of what had happened in places where I'd spent time was even more horrible because I could see the geography/locations so well.

I'm right around 40, and I feel like it takes time for the power of most places to seep in, too. There've been exceptions through the years, but mostly, yeah.

(Make that "locales well." I wish I could edit comments...

I think you're on to something here.

Our fantasies are based on our fears in this country. Like leprechauns in Erie, we have Chucky and his ilk, as well as some classier things like the Poltergeist movies and Stephen King.

We are afraid to have real, positive contact with other-worldly stuff. Americans are very connected to the material world and don't like to even think about elsewhere, except to decide it's a scary, unwelcoming, dangerous place.

The Tommyknockers and Insomnia are two novels by King that I very much enjoyed. The former has spaceships (see "conspiracy theory" and "science fiction" in the posts above), and the latter has a great deal of mythical connection to a sort of other dimension. Both have telepathy, which can really be either science fiction, reality, or fantasy, since the gods seem to have telepathy in their omnipotence.

Our numinous icons are all frightening, not inspirational.

--Coke

Very good point. Look at all the horror movies that are out there, and so popular, too.

I think this is a great point, too. *nods* When Americans get mystical, it's often in the direction of horror.

Speaking a bit more specifically on spirituality, we also have the revenge fantasies that are the Left Behind series of stories and, since religion is morality, we have the Hellboy kinds of visions of the afterlife (this can even include Buffy and the like, for argument's sake) and even the kind of Hell depicted in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and The Meaning of Life.

We are obsessed with a very American idea of Hell well beyond Italy's Dante, and all of the bad stuff that comes with it, as well as retribution, guilt, anger, and meaninglessness. These are the American numinous ideas, all negative.

The Manitou and Revenge of the Manitou stories propose a theory that the White Man's world has the spirits of mechanical, electrical, and other items that we create and use. They defeat the evil shaman by calling on the manitous of the various appliances and the power grid itself, whereas the bad guy is using the traditional evil spirits. It's an interesting thought, in and of itself. I think it would fill the position you describe.

Oh, one more thing. You said:

As an "immersed" Baptist I'd have to disagree with that -- the ritual where the youngsters just coming into puberty are taught the dogma, and then dressed in white "sacrificial" robes and then dunked by the pastor with a blessing on their accepting Jesus as Savior is plenty magical. The candidate is ritually dressed and attended by the elders (male and female) of the Church, literally washed or reborn, depending on your particular liturgical point of view, and then re-dressed in new clothing and feted by the congregation.

I'd also have to say that in many churches the ritual of "speaking in tongues" and the translations thereof, as well as the overwhelming passion in revival meetings, have a great deal of the spiritual and magical in them.

(As it happened, the magic ended up not being the right flavor for me. But it's certainly called upon and used.)

I'm thinking more of the Sunday service. I went to Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches as a kid (though I wasn't baptized until I was in my 30's), and didn't find anything of the fantastic about them. I suspect that that is just me, though, since they obviously have that hold for many, many people.

Ah. Well, I ca't disagree too strongly with that, as I agree almost totally. The vanilla services are much as you describe. The sects more "out there" -- foot washing, speaking in tongues, etc -- and the black churches have more going on than the white suburban, for sure.

While our mythology is younger than that of other countries, I think we do have one and it would be interesting to explore and expound on it in fiction. American "mythology" is not the "class of super-natural / para-normal beings" ie. fairies, goblins, etc. type. Ours is the interesting cast of lunatics type like the Norse or Greek gods. On both a national and a local scale there are historical and literary figures who have developed beyond the facts of their origin. They populate American myths and create Americana.

On the local note, the San Francisco's "spirit" is good hearted whimsy and eccentricity. We are named for a well meaning nut job who gave up fabulous wealth to hang out with animals. Our most beloved historical nut is a man who believed himself to be an Emperor, and we let him and encouraged him, and still, more than a hundred years later, revere him as our emperor.

With time, this will become richer, especially as we lose the details of the actual history and just make up stories.

I wonder whether the late 19th/early 20th century spiritualism movement, which I think existed here as well as in Europe, wouldn't be one vein to mine--I do think of it as city based.

Here's something from Native American lore, too, though it's less urban--there's this strong sense of place. That this or that mountain is sacred. And looking up at the mountains here in the desert is a pretty good way to feel the numinous.

I think the hard thing is finding the numinous in a new city. I, at least, need something beyond the city itself, more based in the land it's build on. This may be less true in Europe, though, where the cities are much older, part of the land themselves, in some ways.

"I think existed here as well as in Europe"

Yup, Houdini was connected with it. He's been written about alot, but could be folded into a plot line in some fashion.

"I think the hard thing is finding the numinous in a new city."

What about a Central or South American city that is in a place where indiginous peoples had a large city? Like Mexico City? I don't think of the North American pre Columbian cultures as having much in the way of large settlements, but I could be wrong on that. Just trying to point out that not all New World cities are new.

San Francisco and Boston feel old enough to me to have magic in their stones, while Chicago and even New York City don't. (YMMV.) Salt Lake City, possibly because it's in the mountains, has magic for me, too, though Seattle doesn't.

What is numinous in America?

The Redwood Forest. Walk even 100 yards into it by yourself and you are surrounded by something ancient, powerful and strong. "The greatest of Earth's living forms, Tall conquerors that laugh at storms; Their challenge still unanswered rings, Through fifty centuries of kings" (Joseph B. Strauss)

The Pacific Ocean, pulling against the defiant cliffs or the Pacific Northwest. The rivers, now peaceful, now spiteful. The Great Lakes - "they go from calm to a hundred knots so fast they seem enchanted" (Stan Rogers)

The Earth itself is alive here, pushing up from the floor of Yosemite Valley, baring her soul before the ruthless Colorado River, snorting derision in the wind at Yellowstone.

Places that are holy by men's hand? Go to a Civil War battlefield. It's not the fact that men died there. It's that they believed so passionately on both sides that this is what America should be. That many people cannot believe something so strongly and not leave an impression. "In great deeds something abides. On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear; but spirits linger, to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls" (Joshua Chamberlain)

The cathedrals of Europe were built over decades or even centuries, by toil and devotion. Here they were built mostly by modern techniques at very little effort by anyone. The Glory of God may be served, but it is not a testament to faith. For that, go seek the backcountry church in South Carolina, in Idaho, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Churches put up by farmers who took precious time from their crops to hew timbers, whitewash the clapboards. More remarkable still: unlike the great cathedrals where all too often God only creeps in after hours when the tourists are gone, He still waits in there, beneficent and loving.

Good points. Very nice. Thanks.

I was just wondering why it is that we have civil war fantasies, but not revolutionary war fantasies that I can think of.

I've wondered the same thing, myself. Even when I was living in New England, the Civil War seemed more important to people than the Revolutionary War. I couldn't fathom it and never got a good response.

Probably because the Revolution was akin to a child leaving home to make its way in the world, but the Civil War was a full blown crisis of conscience. It put two of our most cherished principles in direct conflict with each other - the rights of property, where no one can simply come and take what is yours against your will and without due recompense; and a belief in freedom, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Agreed. For the most part, the revolutionary war was "us" against "them. The civil war was "us" against "us". There were many cases where families were split during the civil war (one brother fought for the north, another for the south).

Also, until just a few years ago, it was possible to have known a civil war veteran, or someone who had lived through the war. And whenever an elder died, it was reported nationally that "another civil war vet passed away." We have pictures and movies of the war -- all these things make the civil war a lot more personable than the more mythic revolutionary war.

A few other places that are "numinous" (in no particular order):
- the cliffs of the Anastasi -- listen to the wind whistle through the canyons and you will feel the lifeforce of the universe
- Disneyland (haven't you ever felt the magic of walking down main street towards the castle in the far distance and felt transported elsewhere, or walking back, late at night, exhausted from your day at the park and feel the "pull" because the buildings get larger the closer you get to the exit)
- Las Vegas (not the gambling part, per say, but there is a tremendous amount of raw energy in that town)
- The Niagra Falls. The power of all that water is very humbling.

So, Branwen, I think the answer is that there are a lot of numinous points in North America, but we haven't had the history to distill them into recognizable motifs. I'm going to overgeneralize, but "everyone" knows what an elf looks like (Orlando, of course :-). But what does the "magic" of Las Vegas or the southwest desert wind look like?

hit send too soon.

....look like. To a certain extent, to rely on European mythos is to cheat -- you can say Joe's an elf and most everyone will "see" Joe as tall, thin, and ever young. To use an American mythos, writers have to spend the time to build up the image in the reader's mind. And that's a difficult job.

That can be part of the fun of it, though.

Agreed. I think of Eluki's series about the elves in New York. That worked because she understood what was unique about elves and about New York.

But, so many books fall flat.

I was thinking about what Coke said, and if I could merge it into what I was thinking about with technology and conspiracy theory.

I think what Americans think is numinous is . . . humans. We are numinous. Both in the positive fashion -- with our transhuman telepaths and our passion for invention -- and in the negative way with our serial killers and madmen.

That's a very interesting idea. I think you're on to something.

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The numinous in America

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Angels

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