The Canon Gap

Jeffro Johnson wrote a herculean series of 48 entertaining columns of interest to the devout Dungeons and Dragons player. Gary Gygax in Appendix N to his rules left of list of authors and novels useful and inspirational for the campaigns in the way the early campaigns were run. Mr. Johnson decided to read and review at least one book from each author or series mentioned.

He posted his final in this cyclopean monument to retrofiction: http://www.castaliahouse.com/appendix-n-matters

He peppers his review with observations about D&D and the way it was originally meant to be played, or insights about the influence of “picaresque” fiction on the giants of early Weird Tales and pulp fiction stories.

Picaresque is not a word I had heretofore met. I love learning new words. It refers to fiction starring lovable rogues outwitting the bullies and officials of a decadent society: think of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, or, less lovable, Cugel the Clever.

Most D&D adventures that I have played in, were played not in the hero’s home town, and usually on the outskirks and ugly underside of society. It is ‘urban fantasy’ in the sense that “city mouse”morals apply. Earthsea and Middle Earth and Narnia have something more like “country mouse” morals. Sparrowhawk of Gont may be as ambiguous between light and dark as a Tao symbol, but there is nothing gritty, weary, or cynical about him. But most Weird Tales heroes would fit cheek by jowl with Phillip Marlowe or Sam Spade. (Except that Cugel would have pocketed the Maltese Falcon and gone with the Fat Man to Marrakech; and Solomon Kane would have stabbed the gunsel straight off with his Toledo steel blade.)

The columns are interesting to me not as book reviews — I’d read them all, or almost all — but as an artifact of sociology. You see, Mr Johnson and his generation are on the far side of a ‘canon gap’ from me and mine.

The boys of my generation read the adventure fiction and fantastic stories our fathers and grandfathers had. The boys of Mr Johnson’s youth, on the other hand, read only the slicker but more derivative texts of today, and have a disturbing and parochial tendency (which Mr Johnson himself does not share) to dismiss the older works unread, or, worse not to dismiss them because they never heard of them.

In times past, I could make reference to Solomon Kane or Cugel the Clever to a science fiction audience, and expect to be understood. Now, not so. We live in a golden age of science fiction: it is abundant, it is exploding. But the drawback is that the young whippersnappers have no need to seek back to prior decades of work to slake their thirst for the fantastic.

That itself would not be so bad a thing — Tempus Fugit, after all — save that a deliberate and concerted effort is afoot to stuff all the old writers down the memory hole, and work that is worth remembering is subject to calumny solely due to its age.

Jeffro Johnson says this:

I really don’t think that many of us on the wrong side of the canon gap even know what we’re looking at when we see the list of Gygax’s inspirations. I think the fact that people are so quick to suggest that authors like Lord Dunsany be removed from it so that people like Le Guinn can replace them kind of miss the point. They’re simply not in tune with the times that produced it. This is a small thing, maybe… but in some sense it may be one of the most important thing that the Appendix N list preserves.

I say this because when I went and spoke to Ken St. Andre, someone that helped pioneer one of the earliest efforts in role-playing game design in response to and in competition with Gygax, I got a very different tone in his reactions than what I see in most Appendix N discussion. …

And there… towering over all the other authors in both stature and influence was the man that dominated both Gygax’s and St. Andre’s concepts of fantasy and world building. No, it wasn’t J. R. R. Tolkien. It was Edgar Rice Burroughs. And the book series I needed to drop everything to go take a look at based on his advice…? It was Tarzan of the Apes, a hero that dates all the way back in 1912!

Mr. Johnson, who is familiar with the fact that epigones and mimics are very different from the seminal tales that sparked them, was nonetheless taken by surprise when he cracked open the pages of a one hundred year old Edwardian era novel. Tarzan was written before the Great War, before Einstein published his theory of general relativity.

But when I went and looked it up anyway, nearly every chapter had something in it that could surprise me. The savagery of it! The action! The oft omitted details that actually make sense of this character and which are absent from so many derivative works. The nuance that the many smear campaigns against the pulps have convinced me would not be there…! I was blown away. Repeatedly even.

I had the same reaction reading THE MOON POOL by A Merrit, RED NAILS by Robert E Howard, and certainly I felt that way about A PRINCESS OF MARS by Burroughs.

The fact of the matter is that these men were craftsmen, and put a lot of work, including good old fashioned scientific speculation, into their works, and they are remembered and loved for a reason (or were until the Morlocks burned the seedcorn of the next generation).

So Edgar Rice Burroughs should be on the short list of must-read authors, and Robert E Howard as well.

ADDENDUM: Ever the gentleman, Mr Johnson hastens to correct the impression that the theory of the Picaro influence on D&D was not his own. He first saw it on Grognardia. http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/10/picaro-and-story-of-d.html