The idea of the mythic vision, or the mythic imagination, is a common one when dealing with popular culture. Douglas E. Cowan stresses its functional importance throughout Magic, Monsters, and Make-Believe Heroes. He asserts that people need fantasy stories, which he defines using the phrase “unnatural narratives” (17), to “remind us who we are and encourage us to find out who we can be” (8). Cowan, a religious studies scholar, brings into his analysis ideas that also drive the work of folklorists, such as the notion of variants and retellings. He also draws upon the notion of participatory culture.
Cowan’s chapters explore fantasy intrusions into the “real” world (ch. 2), the nature of fantastical magic and its domestication (ch. 3), the eternal child and eternal life (ch. 4), heroisms (chs. 5-7), and fantasy culture (ch. 8). Throughout the analysis he focuses on the notion that fans use the mythic vision of fantasy stories, defined loosely as “larger frames of meaning into which we continually write ourselves and through which we often give our lives direction and purpose” (xiii). With this framework, he explicates numerous texts to demonstrate how they express this mythic vision and invite fans to use them in mythic ways, which often include creating their own texts.
We live in a time of textual superabundance. When there’s always more of a subject to study, how do we decide when to stop? How do we determine relevance? In other words, how can we uphold standards of academic rigor and thoroughness? Knowing he can’t cover it all, Cowan has chosen to write about fantasy narratives, but he has not limited his subject by author, culture area, time frame, or medium. Instead of attempting to be exhaustive, he frames his choices in this book as “invitational, not exhaustive” (xiv)—doing so in an attempt to pre-empt the critique that he has not analyzed readers’ favorite story.
Cowan gives no rationale for including or excluding any given text, neither in the introductory material nor in the analytical chapters themselves. The result is a book that feels less like a unified argument about a genre and more like a volume of loosely related sections of ideas the author has about some texts, many of which—but not all, strangely—can be classified as fantasy.
While Cowan does address some aspects of “fantasy culture,” he never discusses what this phrase means, nor does he offer any original ethnographic research. He relies on a single study of costumers, and quotes interviews found on YouTube as well as texts produced by fans. While studying a culture through representations of itself is certainly a good place to start, the reasons for doing so should be presented as part of the discussion.
Folklorists will likely be frustrated with the methodology, especially when dealing with folkloric subjects. He cites A.K. Ramanujan as he makes a distinction between “telling” and “variant” (32), but there is no attention to the folkloristic scholarship on the oral traditions that are the wellspring of contemporary fantasy narrative.
Strangely, there is a chapter on Eastern heroes with the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—which has an American screenwriter. That chapter includes a discussion of films about Wong Fei-Hong, a historical personage featured in many films, none of which could be called fantasy. So why did he select them for study? This question comes up again in discussion of the television show Kung Fu, which raised the question of the relevance of a text entirely lacking fantasy elements to his argument about the role of myth and religion in fantasy culture.
Cowan’s book is one of a great many that theorize an audience for a narrative genre rather than approach that audience through fieldwork. This isn’t always a problem—Cowan makes good use of the metatexts created by fans themselves that speak to the reception of this genre—but when he relies on the results of ethnographic work we see a greater potential.
Rather than inspiring me to formulate my own thoughts on the matter, this book left several lingering frustrations, such as why there’s no discussion of the folkloristic work on the subjects (such as the discussions of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella [37-49]), or of the interdisciplinary work on heroes for any of the three relevant chapters. Though the book’s main points are valid (many people do need fantasy stories and organize their lives around them, using what they learn from them to make moral decisions, carve out a niche in life, and form communities of friends), these points have been made before.
Despite these criticisms, I enjoyed reading Magic, Monsters, and Make-Believe Heroes. In part, this enjoyment comes from Cowan’s own passion for the genre. He covers texts that I like, and his insights are interesting. Fantasy, Cowan argues, serves needs for those who read, watch, create, and participate in it. In this sense, the book is celebratory without problematizing any of the texts or the cultural industries behind them. As an invitation, it works well enough.
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[Review length: 829 words • Review posted on November 7, 2019]