Posted by
Daniel Crandall on Friday, February 02, 2007 4:00:37 PM
Reader D. B. Light, noting my admiration for the work of Tim Powers, made me aware of another Southern California native who writes fantasy fiction, James P. Blaylock.
I did a breif web search and came across this
interview Blaylock gave back in 1988. It includes a fascinating exchange that begins with the Wandering Jew myth.
Glen Cox: In the majority of versions, is the Wandering Jew Judas Iscariot?
James Blaylock: No, no. I find that in the majority of versions the Wandering Jew
was generally a shoemaker who had been sitting on a stoop or something
like that while Christ was hauling the cross up the hill. And as I
recall the story, but I may have this wrong, Christ wanted to sit and
rest but the cobbler wouldn't let him sit on his stoop to rest, and
Christ as a consequence said that he would never die but would wander
the world forever. It doesn't seem to matter which version of the myth
you read, there are always certain similarities--affinity to
animals--and also the fact that despite his starting out being a sort
of nasty character, he always turned into a highly-regarded character,
kind of a folk hero type.
GC: I really liked that you made him Judas Iscariot. I had heard a
version of the Wandering Jew legend like you just described, but when I
read that, something clicked saying, "Yeah, Judas." It's a form of
change. You always think about, "Does the character change in the
novel?" but here's a character who's changed before the novel and we
get to see what he's changed into. And you've always known the bad
stuff.
JB: Well, in fact, one of the first detailed Wandering Jew tales that I
heard had it simply that Judas was so overwhelmed with remorse for
having betrayed Christ that he attempted to hang himself and failed--he
couldn't--and was condemned to wander. And at that point there were a
lot of things that had clicked in my mind having to do with the thirty
pieces of silver. There's a pretty fascinating discussion in...I can't
remember if it's Matthew or John--the whole notion that it was
necessary for Judas to betray Christ with a kiss when in fact the
people who were out to arrest him knew exactly who he was. Why was it
necessary to identify him? There are a lot of, as is true throughout
the Bible, a lot of strange and peculiar elements that are never summed
up or explained, and which invite a fictional explanation.
GC: That brings up an interesting point. Not too many people are writing fantasy based on the Bible...
JB: No.
GC: And here's a fantasy that's got a basis in the Bible, yet it's not. It really doesn't have a Christian moral.
JB: Not really. Not any more than any other book.
GC: It looks to me like a mine that has yet to be tapped in fantasy.
Orson Scott Card has been going on about how he's tired, like most of
us are, of fantasies about medieval 15th and 16th century British
culture. This was part of the reason behind his Alvin Maker series, to
capture some of the American folklore. And yet, here's this biblical
folk stuff that we have and no one's tapping it.
JB: Oh, yes, absolutely. I grew up going down the street to the
Presbyterian church. I've been steeped in biblical stories my entire
life, as many of us have. Given what Christianity has evolved into
throughout Europe and the world, why, man, there's this giant, almost
untapped quantity of stuff.
If this motivates you to begin mining the Christian history for story ideas, Blaylock is quick to remind you that first and foremost tell a good story; do not proselytize.
One of the things that I wanted to do in [The Last Coin] was to avoid
insulting anybody's religious notions. I wanted to be very careful not
to have anybody think I was proselytizing or trying to insult Catholics
or Jews or anybody else. I wanted to use the mythology without anybody
saying, "Here's a Christian novel." I really admire the writings of
C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, for example, two of the great
fantasists without a doubt, especially Charles Williams. One of the
things that I admire about those two is that they had a real obvious
Christian persuasion and yet they developed their plots by drawing on
world mythologies. Neither one of them had anything against hauling
Egyptian gods or hauling Eastern mythology into their books. No problem
at all. Because I think that they genuinely saw it as one big
fascinating connected thing.