Fantastic Spiritualities: Monsters, Heroes, and the Contemporary Religious Imagination (review)

We live in a postmodern age, and one of its characteristics is a secular quest for an authentic spirituality usually outside of the confines of a traditional religious institution. A significant part of today's television, film, and literary world now concerns itself with spiritual quests, the supernatural, alien life forms, and the occult. The predominance of this material in today's market suggests that it answers a contemporary need. Jobling in her book suggests this need is to find a narrative that allows its purveyors to deal with truth, morality, otherness, authority, and identity. Her spirituality is really ethics. When she examines her four major examples of the fantastic, she admits they all "lay considerable emphasis on the significance of both human choice and human responsibility in universes with no discernible transcendent external authority. . . . All are rooted in a robust sense of ethical commitment; the significance of personal engagement and discernment in ethical matters is foregrounded" (200).

She examines four major examples of the fantastic genre—the Harry Potter series (Rowling), His Dark Materials (Pullman), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Whedon), and the Earthsea cycle (Le Guin)—and shows that the world views of these four are actually marked by profoundly modernistic assumptions. Her book is divided into ten chapters and looks at four major themes of two chapters each, along with an introduction and conclusion. Those themes are "transforming selves," "metaphysics and transcendence," "transforming worlds," and "the good and the monstrous." "Transforming selves" examines how one becomes one's true self. Here one looks at Harry Potter's journey to self-realization, and the coming of age of the young female protagonist in Le Guin's The Tombs of Atuan from her Earthsea trilogy. Both provide templates for contemporary readers to examine and appropriate their own growth to individuation. The background to that sense of independence is traced in the next two chapters on "metaphysics and transcendence," which examines the structures against which one struggles to come to an authentic sense of self. For this Jobling uses Pullman's Dark Materials and Le Guin's Earthsea. Pullman presents the antagonistic world as organized religion and the institutional Church (63), and it is against those soul-destroying forces that the hero and heroine of Pullman's trilogy fight, just as it is against patriarchal ethnocentrism that Le Guin posits a new world order where the hero myth does not prevail but a new thing emerges. In her work that new thing, disempowered and disenfranchised by patriarchy, brings forth a changed way of living where "care, community and a network of relations" (102) determines one's identity. Thus changed, one now has a new and different relationship with the world as one finds it.

"Transforming Worlds" are the next two chapters in Jobling's book and in these she looks at Buffy the Vampire Slayer, not as a young woman, characterized as the innocent little female victim, prey to demonic and secular forces, but rather as one who destroys those forces. A similar thing happens in the Harry Potter series. Both show that the world of oppression and evil can be challenged, overcome, and changed.

The last major theme to be explored in the book is entitled "The Good and the Monstrous." It looks at the struggle every human engages in while trying to discern good from the monstrous and in aligning oneself with the forces of good. To explore this theme Jobling uses Pullman's Dark Materials to come to the conclusion that in that text "human knowledge, responsibility, and potentiality are valorised" (167). One does not need God or institutionalized religion to know how to behave. To be human is sufficient for discernment. Similarly, in Buffy, "there may be no religious absolutes, but there remains powers, for both good and evil" (169). Buffy is read as a "liminal creature, poised between dark and light" (179), and like the postmodern subject, caught up...