Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature: Fantastic Incarnations and the Deconstruction of Theology, By Taylor Driggers

Abstract

The study of religion has long known how to show students where to find religion where they might not at first see it. The tradition of fantasy literature is one such site. University students can easily see Christian elements in various works of C.S. Lewis’ fiction that they might not have seen when they first read them as children, and how the genre of fantasy literature was imagined along theological lines in J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘On Fairy-Stories’ and its account of fantasy as offering consolation through what he called ‘eucatastrophe’. But, given Lewis’ and Tolkien’s traditionalism, how do we show students how to find dissident religious expressions where they might not at first see them? Taylor Driggers offers at least two answers to this question in Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature. The first answer has to do with canon curation. The works that Driggers focuses on here are Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977), Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), and Lewis’ Till We Have Faces (1956). Some of these choices are obvious. As Driggers shows, ‘Carter juxtaposes religious narrative with the tropes and trappings of fantasy precisely to undermine any claims to ultimate or “natural” reality’ (p. 43), and the work of Le Guin’s book in getting past the binary of two sexes that is fundamental to theological orthodoxies is well known, even if a tad messy or even unsuccessful (pp. 94–101). The attention to Till We Have Faces is a bit more surprising, but Driggers convinces that ‘the inevitable failure of language and religious doctrine’ (p. 54) is an important theme in that book, and one that might ground the development of a theologically heterodox reading, one that is pro-sex and feminist (see pp. 117–18). The display of another possible Lewis, contrary to the traditionalist known from The Chronicles of Narnia and other fictional and nonfictional writings, is the greatest of Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature’s pleasures.