1 00:00:01,120 --> 00:00:07,270 Hello, my name is Andy Shamel and I am the chaplain of Lincoln College in Oxford, 2 00:00:07,270 --> 00:00:16,300 and I wrote my doctoral thesis on the way that human beings tell stories in order to encounter the world as meaningful. 3 00:00:16,300 --> 00:00:25,960 And a big part of that thesis was reflection on the way that modern fantasy literature represents a kind of this myth-making impulse. 4 00:00:25,960 --> 00:00:30,490 And Terry Pratchett was amongst the authors I studied in this way. 5 00:00:30,490 --> 00:00:36,310 In what follows, I will give an introduction to Pratchett's largest body of stories, the Discworld novels, 6 00:00:36,310 --> 00:00:46,460 and a bit of an examination of how fantasy and the real world interact in fantasy fiction in general, and the Discworld novels in particular. 7 00:00:46,460 --> 00:00:55,730 Being based as we are here at Oxford, I will take a bit of a look at Unseen University, the disc's premier institution of higher learning. 8 00:00:55,730 --> 00:01:05,300 And so we begin. In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, 9 00:01:05,300 --> 00:01:13,370 the curling star mists waver and part. See great A'Tuin the turtle comes swimming 10 00:01:13,370 --> 00:01:18,860 slowly through the interstellar Gulf hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, 11 00:01:18,860 --> 00:01:28,310rheum his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters. Through sea sized eyes that are crusted with room and asteroid dust, 12 00:01:28,310 --> 00:01:39,980 he stares fixedly at the destination. In a brain bigger than a city with geological slowness, he thinks only of the weight. 13 00:01:39,980 --> 00:01:47,240 Most of the weight is, of course, accounted for by Berilia, Tubul, Great T'Phon and Jerakeen, 14 00:01:47,240 --> 00:01:55,100 the four giant elephants upon whose broad and star-tanned shoulders the disc of the world rests garlanded, 15 00:01:55,100 --> 00:02:04,240 but the long blue waterfall at its vast circumference and domed by the baby blue vault of heaven. 16 00:02:04,240 --> 00:02:13,240 So begins 'The colour of magic', the first of the novels set on this strange and unlikely World and Mirror of Worlds. 17 00:02:13,240 --> 00:02:20,650 Those of a spiritual persuasion in our own world have sometimes spoken of certain islands, mountains, forests, 18 00:02:20,650 --> 00:02:29,600 waterfalls as thin places where the boundaries between the temporal and the eternal are less formidable than usual. 19 00:02:29,600 --> 00:02:35,730 The whole of the Discworld is a thin place between the impossible and the actual. 20 00:02:35,730 --> 00:02:42,450 And though as a setting for Terry Pratchett's forty-one Discworld novels, it has its own integrity. 21 00:02:42,450 --> 00:02:50,990 It also seems especially prone to influences bleeding over from our own world. 22 00:02:50,990 --> 00:02:59,780 The series of novels begins as a kind of parody of the 20th century pulp fantasies of people like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Fritz Leiber, 23 00:02:59,780 --> 00:03:07,910 which featured burly warrior heroes, stinking cities and wicked, decadent sorcerers. 24 00:03:07,910 --> 00:03:18,470 The musclebound Conan is replaced in the Discworld by the wiry and ancient Cohen the Barbarian, the world's only octogenarian hero. 25 00:03:18,470 --> 00:03:23,330 The foetid and treacherous city of Lankmar is replaced by Ankh-Morpok, 26 00:03:23,330 --> 00:03:29,370 which is a kind of cross between 14th century London and 19th century New York City. 27 00:03:29,370 --> 00:03:34,800 And the schemes and devious plots that characterise the evil sorcerers of pulp fantasy 28 00:03:34,800 --> 00:03:40,570 are transformed in time into the politics and petty rivalries of tenured faculty, 29 00:03:40,570 --> 00:03:50,060 the unseen university, which, as mentioned, is like an Oxford College seen in distorted reflection. 30 00:03:50,060 --> 00:03:55,340 As the series goes on, the influences from other worlds become more pronounced. 31 00:03:55,340 --> 00:04:06,110 There are topical books on Discworld treatments of everything from films in 'Mving pictures' and music with rocks in 'Soul music'. 32 00:04:06,110 --> 00:04:17,680 To the development of the printing press in 'The truth' and early ruminations on the moral status of A.I. in 'Feet of clay', a story about golems. 33 00:04:17,680 --> 00:04:26,500 Then there are more incidental or thematic conclusions, fairy godmothers who are reflective on their identity as fairy godmothers, 34 00:04:26,500 --> 00:04:33,970 a vampire going through caffeine withdrawal, who begins to have flashovers to the Vietnam War. 35 00:04:33,970 --> 00:04:45,000 And there's a whole continent on the Discworld called Fourecks that while it is not Australia, it is very Australian. 36 00:04:45,000 --> 00:04:52,980 The end result of all of this is a pastiche, a composite setting that participates freely in the tropes and expectations of the fantasy 37 00:04:52,980 --> 00:05:00,360 novel while being able to borrow freely from and distort with wild abandon familiar images, 38 00:05:00,360 --> 00:05:04,650 characters and cultural references from our own. 39 00:05:04,650 --> 00:05:13,710 Theorists of fantasy have long noted the way that fantasy fiction is able to take issues in our own world and defamiliarise them to the extent that 40 00:05:13,710 --> 00:05:24,190 one is able to see them anew or indeed to see them at all in a way that is at least somewhat protected from the anxieties of our own discourses. 41 00:05:24,190 --> 00:05:29,590 The Discworld novels do this with an almost manic degree, and yet with such charm, 42 00:05:29,590 --> 00:05:34,630 humour and felicity that by and large the reader can believe in the world, 43 00:05:34,630 --> 00:05:40,800 Pratchett has woven and at the same time see our own world in a different way. 44 00:05:40,800 --> 00:05:48,630 Our world shapes the Discworld and the Discworld reflects our world back to us. 45 00:05:48,630 --> 00:05:52,140 This dynamic is not unique to Pratchett's novels, of course, 46 00:05:52,140 --> 00:05:59,250 I will leave it up to art historians and theorists of literature to say whether all art does this, 47 00:05:59,250 --> 00:06:08,400 but we can safely say, I think that lots of art shows us ourselves reflected in a certain light. 48 00:06:08,400 --> 00:06:13,590 What is peculiar about fantasy literature in general and the Discworld novels in particular, 49 00:06:13,590 --> 00:06:19,090 is the way that this process is mediated and influenced by magic. 50 00:06:19,090 --> 00:06:28,730 The Discworld is famously suffused with magic. Its presence is what renders the world susceptible to influences from other worlds, 51 00:06:28,730 --> 00:06:35,350 and it conditions and changes the rules of what in our world we might call physics. 52 00:06:35,350 --> 00:06:42,790 We learn early on, for instance, that light travels more slowly in a magical field, which accounts for why, 53 00:06:42,790 --> 00:06:51,160 even though the sun rises each day over a flat disk of a world, the Discworld world still has what we might call time zones. 54 00:06:51,160 --> 00:06:57,690 Dawn oozes lazily across the disc, as does nightfall. 55 00:06:57,690 --> 00:07:06,180 One of the characteristic features of fantasy literature as a genre is the tendency, though by no means necessity, of that which is conceptual, 56 00:07:06,180 --> 00:07:13,560 spiritual or the province of symbolic and ritual practise in our world to be rendered as objective, 57 00:07:13,560 --> 00:07:18,520 palpable and accessible to the realm of the senses in the fantasy world. 58 00:07:18,520 --> 00:07:26,020 For instance, in the Discworld, the gods quite literally live on the top of a very tall mountain at the centre of the disk, 59 00:07:26,020 --> 00:07:32,860 you could go there, as Cohen the Barbarian does in the illustrated novella 'The Last Hero'. 60 00:07:32,860 --> 00:07:41,040 In our world, magic has always been something that exists in a realm closer to what otherwise might be classified as religion. 61 00:07:41,040 --> 00:07:48,180 A marshalling of spiritual forces and the interpretation of dreams and their spiritual meanings. 62 00:07:48,180 --> 00:07:55,140 In the Discworld, however, magic is very pragmatically real and is something more like technology. 63 00:07:55,140 --> 00:08:01,700 To study magic becomes something more like the study of physics, engineering and even psychology. 64 00:08:01,700 --> 00:08:10,480 The wonder of scientific discovery and the mysteries of the spiritual universe coincide. 65 00:08:10,480 --> 00:08:19,230 Before I continue, it is worth noting that in the Discworld novels, Magic is with a couple of notable exceptions, strictly gendered. 66 00:08:19,230 --> 00:08:30,280 There is Witch magic and there is wizard magic. Magic of witches tends to be more psychological and less flashy, more relational and protective, 67 00:08:30,280 --> 00:08:39,880 which as we learn guard the borders, borders between worlds, between people, between the interior and exterior of the self. 68 00:08:39,880 --> 00:08:48,460 Wizard magic is more technological, emerging from experimentation and rote memorisation and resulting in devices, 69 00:08:48,460 --> 00:08:54,680 spectacular displays and often no small amount of mayhem. 70 00:08:54,680 --> 00:08:58,610 Many people have written on the gender and sexual politics of the Discworld novels, 71 00:08:58,610 --> 00:09:04,480 which are often surprisingly complex and almost always self questioning. 72 00:09:04,480 --> 00:09:15,290 For now, suffice it to say that though magic remains broadly gendered and wizardly magic is given more social prestige in the novels. 73 00:09:15,290 --> 00:09:21,140 It can be argued that in the lights of the novels, it is ultimately judged the inferior sort, 74 00:09:21,140 --> 00:09:26,280 destructive and often self-centred as it is often seen to be. 75 00:09:26,280 --> 00:09:32,910 However, in keeping with the ancient customs of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which are now blessedly abandoned, 76 00:09:32,910 --> 00:09:40,860 the Discworld Unseen University is an all male establishment, like the celibate dons of bygone Oxford generations. 77 00:09:40,860 --> 00:09:45,480 The wizards of UU must be men and they cannot be married. 78 00:09:45,480 --> 00:09:51,960 I will leave you to make of this what you will, but it is an important aspect of the way in which the Real World University, 79 00:09:51,960 --> 00:10:03,060 from which I am now speaking, impinges upon its fantasy analogue and the reflection which Unseen university casts back upon us here. 80 00:10:03,060 --> 00:10:12,760 Gender is, of course, a huge marker of privilege in our society, even today, as well as that of the Discworld. 81 00:10:12,760 --> 00:10:18,220 It is only in the last hundred years that women here have been allowed to vote in most modern democracies, 82 00:10:18,220 --> 00:10:30,590 let alone attend the institutions of higher learning. Magic in the Discworld is arguably power made manifes; magic can do anything it 83 00:10:30,590 --> 00:10:36,900 is doing as an abstract idea turned into something objectively manipulable. 84 00:10:36,900 --> 00:10:42,420 The restrictions placed on its study are therefore inseparable from restrictions placed on its exercise. 85 00:10:42,420 --> 00:10:52,830 It is a classic case of not wanting the wrong sort to have power that they cannot be expected responsibly to use. 86 00:10:52,830 --> 00:11:00,720 Thankfully today, though the patriarchy continues to hinder the full participation of most people in the hierarchies of power, 87 00:11:00,720 --> 00:11:05,740 the gender requirements of admission to the halls of the academy have been cast aside. 88 00:11:05,740 --> 00:11:10,320 And while we may continue to find the high bar of entry to universities such as Oxford to be 89 00:11:10,320 --> 00:11:16,920 unjust and the advantage it still offers to those of a certain family and regional upbringing, 90 00:11:16,920 --> 00:11:23,100 we may at least count ourselves lucky that the requirement for entry is not as strictly determined by birth as the 91 00:11:23,100 --> 00:11:32,450 traditional qualification for the university in the Discworld that is to be the eighth son of an eighth son. 92 00:11:32,450 --> 00:11:36,920 The modern university is sometimes criticised for its support of very niche 93 00:11:36,920 --> 00:11:42,680 subjects or departments that seem disconnected from the nitty gritty of real life, 94 00:11:42,680 --> 00:11:48,300 which is itself a category that can mean many things to many people. 95 00:11:48,300 --> 00:11:51,560 The study of literature, for instance, often comes up for ridicule, 96 00:11:51,560 --> 00:11:58,470 let alone the visual arts and music in an increasingly competitive and materially oriented world. 97 00:11:58,470 --> 00:12:05,030 These subjects sound to many outside the university as irrelevant as the study 98 00:12:05,030 --> 00:12:11,450 of recent runes inadvisably applied magic and cruel and unusual geography, 99 00:12:11,450 --> 00:12:18,330 all of which are offered at Unseen University. However, as silly as those course titles may be, 100 00:12:18,330 --> 00:12:24,150 it is important to recall that the subject under consideration is magic and that the terminology of a 101 00:12:24,150 --> 00:12:32,100 discipline or a fandom or a hobby will always sound strange and a bit absurd to those on the outside, 102 00:12:32,100 --> 00:12:40,560 like the abstruse subjects of the real world, the study of magic Unseen university is ultimately the pursuit of the nature of things. 103 00:12:40,560 --> 00:12:46,410 It is a manifestation of the innate human desire to know what is over the next hill. 104 00:12:46,410 --> 00:12:52,510 What is under that rock? What happens if I press this big red button? 105 00:12:52,510 --> 00:12:59,560 It is about the fundamental wonderment that we as a species have for the situation in which we find ourselves. 106 00:12:59,560 --> 00:13:09,460 And so it is not a coincidence that academia and magic collapse into each other in the fantasy environment of Discworld. 107 00:13:09,460 --> 00:13:16,390 The university comes in for no little amount of mockery in the novels, but this is only to be expected. 108 00:13:16,390 --> 00:13:22,330 They are fundamentally satire, laughing at the world in order to expose its contradictions, 109 00:13:22,330 --> 00:13:29,000 deflate its pomposity, and finally reveal its basic and precious humanity. 110 00:13:29,000 --> 00:13:39,430 This humanity is Pratchett's overriding concern, even as it is manifest in dwarfosity, goblinety and werewolfitude. 111 00:13:39,430 --> 00:13:45,220 Throughout the novels, project uses the magical to make apparent the precious value of the ordinary, 112 00:13:45,220 --> 00:13:56,840 just as so much of academic study seeks to do to show how wonderful and terrible is culture, biology, politics or the recesses of human thought. 113 00:13:56,840 --> 00:14:04,670 In this fantasy world, riding through space on the back of four elephants standing on the back of an impossibly huge turtle. 114 00:14:04,670 --> 00:14:09,800 We see the value of these things and the miracle of our humanity through the lens of 115 00:14:09,800 --> 00:14:17,090 the fantastic and so we discover our own being to be just a bit magical as well. 116 00:14:17,090 --> 00:14:18,456 Thank you.