Aptly Pingouinous

"Don't talk like that to me" said Sam sternly. "If it ain't fair for Ellie and Fro to sit up after supper it ain't fair for them to be born sooner, and it ain't fair that I'm your dad and you're not mine. So no more of that, take your turn and what's due in your time, or I'll tell the King."

- The History of Middle-Earth

That's part of an alternate ending to the Lord of the Rings, with Master Samwise narrating in his own folksy manner to his rodential litter of offspring seventeen years after the ring's destruction. It caught my eye due to Sam extrapolating righteous bed-times from first principles. Unlike SciFi building its justifications from the bottom up, Fantasy's proceed dictatorially from the top down, from the whims of universal custodians. Fantasy fairness is not a matter to be weighed or justified but fitted to ordained precepts of ill-defined specialness, authority and primacy, just like the monarchic right to rule or the license to create. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note the assumption that under predicted parameters (e.g. seniority or anointment) similar pieces will fall into expected relationships. There is a time for everything, and trying to fight the flow gets you washed away faster than Canute's toenail clippings.

Given we don't live in a religious fiction world and events do not require divine license, it was for no good reason that my brain recently dredged up Anatole France's Penguin Island of all things... and for the bad reason that I want to sound interesting on teh internets, I am now bestowing mine brain fart onto thee, fair reader. The book came out when Tolkien was in his mid-teens, and without postulating any direct link between the authors, I have to note in both their writing the intrusion of a sort of anthropological causality upon what had been previous centuries' religious fabulism. The debates over evolution had finally settled into grudging acceptance. Verne and Wells had settled scientific fiction into a more or less modern form. Everyone could increasingly see WW1 looming on the horizon, not by any explicit decree but the implicit consequence of population pressures, expansionist mentalities, antiquated (and exploitable) political alliances and economic surplus stockpiled as military hardware. Though centuries slow in perfusing human irrationality, you can see the fiction of the time adjusting to the notion that the state of the world is neither "Just So" nor part of some master plan but an outgrowth of physical laws and changing conditions.

Think of Penguin Island as an early mockumentary. The titular island's inhabitants, accidentally given souls and reason, end up recapitulating various episodes of mythology and a millennium of French history. Hilarity ensues... if you can ever get the jokes. Let's face it, the book's dependence on historical references and ripped-from-the-headlines-of-1906 courtroom drama make it a hard sell these days. Even reading it decades ago, with both The Three Musketeers and high school history classes fresh in mind, I could not match up most of its allusions to their inspirations.

However, I found much of the story did not require me to "get" the precise context, which is where Tolkien comes back into this page. Since I first read his books in junior high I've kept hearing strained comparisons between his Middle-Earth and our Midgard: was Sauron supposed to be Hitler, was Isengard BMW, that sort of thing. Tolkien's response was no, he was presenting archetypes, which by their very nature apply to many individual examples. Dictators, fortress towns, barbaric swarms and wars over pigheaded pride all feature endlessly throughout history. With France's "penguins" you're better off applying that lesson of applicability, glossing over the precise place and time being lampooned and viewing his vignettes as satire of human behavior writ large, of the conniving of political power via facetious smiles and influence peddling, of sainthood built on successful scams and the worship of bandits, and justice preordained by social acceptability.

 

One thing I liked initially about Penguin Island and still like now skimming through it decades later is how France built up his imaginary nation's culture upon its own fables of the past, with otherwise petty figures and events snowballing into massive institutions over the centuries, flying in the face of heroic epics. Such observations presaged the yet uninvented game theory: events determined not by the pretense of morality but as the result of existing positions of power, not by personified fate but by natural weakness. It's not really the old chestnut about the thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters, as the process is not truly random but a grim sort of social undertow. The villain and the victim collude against heroism. Pygmalion lusts after his own Galatea. A confidence artist, if successful, somehow cannot help but be canonized by future generations as moral paragon.

 

Who ratified our bed-times anyway? Maybe you won't get all the obscure century-old French in-jokes, but if you've ever been intrigued by mythopoiesis and the pettiness of grandstanding, do try to thumb through Penguin Island.