Notes for my talk for the Oxford University Speculative Fiction Group

Back in February, I was invited to be a guest speaker at a meeting of the Oxford University Speculative Fiction Group. (A remote appearance, alas. I'll get to Oxford one of these days!) I decided to speak about archetypes in fiction, and specifically character archetypes, and how they can support or undermine political structures. The talk draws on some examples from my own work, especially my next book, so it's a bit of a sneak peek at that as well.

We had a long and interesting Q&A session after this, but what follows is more or less what I said during the lecture portion.

On July 20, 2020, I was scrolling through Twitter on my phone, as one did in those days, and I came across a question from someone I didn't follow, just one of those questions people throw out on social media to get a conversation going. The question was this: "Combine the first movie you ever saw in theaters (that you can recall) with the last movie you saw in theaters. What film monstrosity have you created?"

I had to think about it. July 2020. We were about half a year into the pandemic at that point, and I hadn't been to a movie since January. In fact, it had been on my birthday, which I'd celebrated in part by going to a theatre to see Gerta Gerwig's latest movie.

I combined that with the earliest movie that I remember seeing in theatres. Now, frankly it seems impossible that my parents would have taken me to see this particular movie when I was four and a half years old, when the movie came out. But whether this is fact or just my own personal mythology, that's how I remember it. 

So I tweeted what I'd come up with: "Little Women: Raiders of the Lost Ark."

It was just a silly tweet, but immediately, I felt it: the reverberation, the clang of the bell, that rings through the body when a novel idea is born. This was a book, and I knew it.

In September 2024, HarperVoyager UK will publish my next novel, The Tapestry of Time, which is about four clairvoyant sisters trying to stop the Nazis from getting their hands on the Bayeux Tapestry. 

It isn't really "Little Women: Raiders of the Lost Ark", but that's where it started.

What was it about that particular combination that made me see, immediately, how it could be a book?

Little Women, the 1868 novel by Louisa May Alcott, is about four sisters in Massachusetts whose father is away serving in the American Civil War. Each of the sisters has a strong and consistent personality type. Meg is traditional and wants a husband, a family and the comforts of home. Jo is an independent tomboy who is happiest up in the attic eating apples and reading books. Beth is quiet, godly and loyal, the peacemaker and homemaker. Amy's the frivolous blonde with hidden depths – a material girl who grows into her artistic talent with passion and steely determination. 

I read Little Women over and over when I was a kid. I know those characters, and I know exactly what they'd do if they were presented with the kind of adventure that tends to happen to Indiana Jones.

In a book of essays about Little Women, called March Sisters, Carmen Maria Machado writes that "Little Women was an early example of character archetypes as clearly mappable, Cosmo magazine-style personality types, a prototype for Harry Potter’s houses or His Dark Materials’ daemons."

Girls who read Little Women could sort themselves. They could decide whether they were a wife, a tomboy, a saint or, well, a blonde. 

The fact is, I've been all of those things. So have many women, in some way or another, or to some degree. And as soon as I started writing a story in which these four sisters face Nazis, the idea of women conforming to certain feminine archetypes took on a different dimension.

The fact is that there's a natural connection between the occult obsessions of fascism and the urge to sort human beings into a kind of taxonomy. To pronounce on who is allowed to be a woman, and how a woman is allowed to behave. I had Little Women and its archetypes on one hand, and I had Indiana Jones and its occult obsessions in the other, and I found that when I fit these things together, I had more than just an adventure about women punching Nazis on my hands. The book presented me with glaringly obvious themes and connections that I hadn't really intended to explore, but couldn't ignore.

Some of the same Nazis who raced all over the world looking for crystal skulls and holy spears also believed in a version of the Atlantis myth, in which a great Nordic people, long long ago, were ruled by a matriarchy of perfect Aryan women – women who would never, ever break out of their proper behavioural boxes. The idea of universal, ancient wisdom about how people ought to be has always been very attractive to fascism.

As I worked on this book, I found that I wanted to set aside the boxes my characters came in – even though those boxes were what made them so interesting to play with in the first place. Once I had taken the dolls out of the box, they came to life.

The moral of the story is: never tweet something that might turn into a novel that causes you to tear out your hair for the next three years figuring it out. 

Well, not really.

The moral is actually that archetypes are ways of saying: This is how people are. That's why archetypes are powerful and useful, and this is what can make them dangerous.

The word archetype can mean many things. The psychologist Carl Jung argued that the human mind has a tendency to form certain patterns. In Man and His Symbols, he wrote, "What we properly call instincts are physiological urges, and are perceived by the senses. But at the same time, they also manifest themselves in fantasies and often reveal their presence only by symbolic images. These manifestations are what I call the archetypes."

I don't know how much stock I put in Jung, to be honest, but I do know that fantasies and symbolic images are the stock in trade of speculative fiction. So it's no wonder that our literature often uses recurring patterns and character types as building blocks. 

In fact, it's arguable that all literature does this to some degree, and has for a very long time. 

Fiction is, among other things, a machine for sparking empathy. When we show the reader a character that seems instantly recognizable, all of a sudden the reader feels at home. 

Ah yes, I know someone just like that. I've heard about a weird old lady who doles out advice and gross remedies. I have a friend who loves mischief and never tires of poking the powerful, but who has a heart of gold and a strong sense of justice. I grieve an elder who imparted their wisdom to me and made me the person I am today.

And the author says, yes, I know those people too! A witch, a trickster, a mentor. This is How People Are, am I right?

In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio tells Benvolio, "Thou art like one of these fellows that, when he enters the confines of a tavern, claps me his sword upon the table and says 'God send me no need of thee' and, by the operation of the second cup, draws him on the drawer when indeed there is no need." Benvolio replies, "Am I like such a fellow?" Even in his teasing of his friend, Mercutio tells a story using a pattern or a type, asking Benvolio to recognize the sort of person he means, and then find himself in it. Thou art like one of those fellows.

The shared language of archetypes facilitates communication. You can sit down at a table to play a roleplaying game with people you've never met before, and you'll be able to talk about whether the party needs a paladin or a rogue. The idea that characters fall into classes or categories is built into a lot of storytelling in games, although certainly not all of it.

Twenty-first century fantasy fiction has a long history, fed by tabletop games and comics as well as literature, of sorting its characters into types. Many of these archetypes have a very long lineage. 

But I don't think that particular archetypes are universal, or permanent, or somehow hard coded into human nature. Like everything else, our ideas of how people are can be partly determined by culture. If I read the comedies of the Roman playwright Plautus, I know that his stock characters will not resonate the same way with me as they did for his audience. I can recognize certain traits in his portrayal of a boastful soldier, for example, but I might not associate those traits with certain story patterns or expectations. 

Before I wrote The Tapestry of Time, I worked on a novel called The Valkyrie, which was published in 2023. It's a reimagining of a batch of very old Norse and Germanic legends about a hero named Siegfried or Sigurd, a Valkyrie or sorceress-queen named Brynhild, and a princess named Kriemhild or Gudrun, whose mother may or may not be a witch, depending on the version you read. 

This story has always been historical fiction; in the earliest manuscripts that have come down to us, it tells the story of the downfall of the city of Worms during the time of Attila the Hun, a real historical event. But the story has evolved into myth – to such an extent that I'm sometimes asked why I chose to set the story in real history, where it was always firmly set from the beginning, as far as we know. It's a story that has been pulled so far out of real life by its later interpretations that it's become more foundational to fantasy than to history.

The character types in the story ring familiar to modern readers, even to those who haven't read the Germanic poems or Norse sagas. They're familiar in large part because they inspired some of the most influential writers of 20th century fantasy. Siegfried, for example, is a brave hero with a magic ring who slays a dragon. We know that guy. These stories have informed modern fantasy, especially in the anglosphere, to such a degree that I found myself having to peel off layers of story like an onion, just to get at a different idea of what that story could be.

Not surprisingly, the Nazis (yep, them again) were fond of Siegfried the dragonslayer. 

As Umberto Eco wrote in his classic essay "Ur-Fascism", fascist ideology is hierarchical and cultivates a state of permanent warfare. Eco wrote: "In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death." 

It is also linked, as he goes on to explain, with machismo and a disdain for women. 

So if you're telling a story about a brave hero, the kind of guy everyone knows because everyone has read his story before, what language are you speaking and how are you going to use that language? 

One of the goals I set myself, with The Valkyrie, was to peel away those layers of story to show that they were all just somebody's choices, that underneath it all, archetypes aren't sacred. They aren't even real. They're constructions, albeit useful ones. When a story tells us, This is how women are, am I right? We can answer, I don't know, are they? Or we can answer Except for all the times when they aren't. Or we can answer in any number of ways that have and haven't been tried before. 

Stories are made of people. The stories that became the Nibelungenlied and the Song of the Volsungs began as real history. At some point, during the attack on the city of Worms in the 5th century, real women who lived there made choices. I don't know whether those women were anything like Brynhild and Gudrun, in any versions of the story, including mine. But I do know they were real, and complicated. Complicating our archetypes, bringing them back to a reckoning with the wholeness of real people, is a way of keeping them from becoming boxes to put real people into. This is one reason I like to write historical fantasy, to look at how the real and the imagined dance together.

I said earlier that an archetype is a way of saying this is how people are. But that can be a descriptive or a prescriptive statement. It can become a text for telling people how they should be. It can lay down expectations for all the things they are allowed to be, or not allowed to be.

By complicating the archetype, we ask the reader to think about their assumptions. 

My favourite novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, includes a female character called Lady Pole, who draws on some familiar patterns for women in stories. From one perspective, she's the wayward dancing princess or enchanted abductee of fairy tales. From another perspective, she's the madwoman in the attic of 19th century literature. But she's also the character in the novel who most wants to speak for herself, and who refuses to be what anyone expects her to be. The biggest thing we learn about Lady Pole is that almost nobody in her life knows, or wants to know, the whole truth about her. By combining the archetypes that she seems to inhabit, the novel invites us to question our assumptions about outward appearances and inward truths.

Between the descriptive use of archetypes and the prescriptive use is the fulcrum, the point that the author uses to move the world, even a little bit.

The Saint of Bright Doors, the brilliant 2023 novel by Vajra Chandrasekera, picks up the "chosen one" archetype and plays with it, uses it to ask questions about the individual in the collective, about justice and memory. It's not a book in service to archetypes, but a book that uses them as it uses all language, to set a new table. Myth is a part of our lives, as human beings. What does that myth do to us, and what do we do back? These are interesting questions for speculative fiction to ask.

Terry Pratchett was a master of the use of archetype in creative and gently subversive ways. His novel A Hat Full of Sky is largely about archetypes, about learning how to be a witch, and about choosing what sort of witch one will be. "Change the story, change the world," Granny Weatherwax says.

I think about Granny Weatherwax a lot these days, as a woman who's waving to middle age as it zips past me. She is, in many ways, a caricature, but she is also achingly real. I don't look to her as a model for how to age according to expectations; I look to her as an example for how to not give a damn. It's a bit weird, as someone who has consumed stories based on the maiden-mother-crone framework her whole life, to be hurtling toward menopause and realize that it isn't going to change me from one archetype into another. 

Archetypes aren't real.

I don't think that changing the story, as Granny Weatherwax exhorts us to do, requires that we do away with archetypes altogether, even if we could. It does require opening ourselves up to the truth that people, real people, are whole and complicated. Old stories don't define our boundaries. But they are part of what we're made of, even when we grow and evolve.

Toward the end of A Hat Full of Sky, a young witch thinks: "Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colours. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving."

Circling back to archetypes, always seeing them with new eyes and with an open mind, is not the same as pretending they don't exist. They can be tools and toys for us to play with. But I hope that we can use them to build empathy and open up possibilities, and not to put people into boxes.

-the end-