The Bathroom Break that Made Me Rethink Fantasy

One day nearly a decade ago on an Autumn afternoon in Princeton’s Briar Hall, Albert Raboteau, the Henry W. Putnam Professor of Religion taught a seminar titled “Holy Ordinary: Religious Dimensions in Contemporary Fiction.” Students, as you might have imagined, learned to identify the hidden person of Christ in several different texts such as Walker Percy’s “Love in the Ruins” and Georges Bernanos’ “The Diary of a Country Priest.”

But what struck me most was the following passage in the news story:

“Explaining that the appearance of the divine ‘often is described as a spectacular and miraculous in break into this world from another,’ Raboteau is offering another perspective by using contemporary texts that present the holy in everyday life.

‘I’ve been struck in reading contemporary fiction at how the emergence of the holy is described as occurring within the ordinary events of daily life,’ he said. ‘So it occurred to me that a course in which students could read and discuss some of this literature would be an interesting window on the contemporary vision of experiencing the sacred.’”

This brings me to the following passage in Stardust:

“The carriage clattered and shook.

Once, it stopped, for each of the three lords to relieve himself. Then it clattered down the hilly road(88).”

What purpose could such an excerpt serve? Might I suggest the interjection of the sacred, or the wholly potent other.

Most recently during the British Fantasy Literature course, our discussion turned from the Stardust story at large in order to tackle the question of Gaiman’s use of human carnality in the text. Sex, it was suggested, was a powerful human drive. The reality of hunger made an early appearance in the text as did violence and human-made power structures.

Why include such banal aspects of experience in these narratives? They are the sacred, the queer, in these texts.

If you were to reduce Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Epistemology of the Closet” into some basic concepts, you might argue queerness as the potentially destructive would be one of them. In the secondary world of such as Gaiman’s Fairie where trees try to kill you, the oddest thing you could experience is a tree considered typical in the primary world.

 Imagine, for a moment, Hogwarts School from the Harry Potter narratives. Could there be anything more frightening than reading of a police squad knocking on its doors, demanding to speak to the people in charge? In our (primary) world such a seen might be unwanted but not outside the realm of possibility, however in the strange (secondary) world beyond the woods they are queer. And the wherever the other is located, worship, fear, reverence and danger are always tempted.