Rape, Fantasy: Lev Grossman s The Magician King If you have not read The Magician King and you don t want the ending to be spoiled, then go no further! So, there s a trend in fantasy, SF, and comics, one that is much much bigger than Grossman or his Magicians books, which I have otherwise enjoyed quite a lot. The trend, though, is disturbing, and we re all familiar with it: rape as plot device. The reviews I had read about the second book in his series tended to point out two things: the plot structure and the character of Julia, and the relationship of the two contributes to how problematic the rape in this book really is. The plot structure of The Magician King is much tighter and more unified than The Magicians, a book that feels more like a mini-series than a novel (which also helps it translate into television). The Magician King, however, uses a non-linear A-and-B plot structure. In the present (the A-plot) Julia is emotionally detached and fears that she has lost her humanity (i.e., her soul). In the past (the B-plot), Julia ventures into the world of underground magic. This structure is familiar from shows like Lost and Arrow, but it s also in Ancillary Justice, a novel I happened to read just before diving into Grossman s Magicians series. This structure means that we find out how Julia got to be so detached at the end of the novel, just before the climax (such as it is) of the A-plot. Second, the reviews say that Julia, who is a minor character in the first book, is the real star of the second one, and that her character has at least as much if not more depth than the ostensible protagonist, Quentin, and that s true! She s a great character with an emotionally compelling arc who has some fantastically interesting experiences. The world of underground magic that Grossman creates
is really fun. It s exactly what I like about modern fantasy; at its best (or at least, when it s the kind I like), it s a twist on Gibson s infamous maxim that the street finds it own use for things. The street would find its own use for magic, too. The magical underground mirrors internet culture where demonstrating that you re already able to find things on your own qualifies you to be let into spaces where you can learn more. You have to prove yourself. There are problematic elements of that story, though, specifically what Julia calls her nuclear option ; she occasionally trades sexual favours for new spells if she can t get them another way. The narrative characterizes it as tawdry and contributing to her degenerating emotional state, but my objection is that the text presents it as if a hot girl can always get what she wants by giving a guy a handjob in a bathroom (which Julia does, repeatedly) and that the text utterly fails to present any of the sexism that she would bump into in that world (except perhaps for a short relationship she has with a man who uses minor magic spells to impress young women into sleeping with him, but it s only described after the fact, not really explored). My point is, if you re going to acknowledge that, in the real world, people very often engage in unspoken sex work I ll give you this if you give me that then you should really acknowledge the systemic sexism that surrounds that practice. Which is to say, Julia has access to the nuclear option because women s bodies are already thought of as commodities within patriarchy. And that is what brings me to my topic. The climax I referred to above contains a double-meaning that I find very uncomfortable. Here s what happens, Julia and a cohort of underground wizards attempt to summon a mother goddess but are tricked into instead summoning a god called Reynard the Fox, which is a particularly stupid name since renard is just fox in French. It just reads as Fox the Fox (or Reynard le Renard if you prefer). It would have been so easy to just call him Reynard or Fox, like Coyote or Spider. Fantasy readers would have understood that just fine. Anyway, Reynard starts brutally murdering Julia s friends; it s a parallel scene to the first book in which the protagonists do basically the same thing (accidentally summon a god who tries to kill them), but it s actually a god-like villain that Grossman creates for the novel. The level of gore and violence is in strong juxtaposition to the largely light tone of the book, but that s a feature of the series, not a bug. The contrast is very powerful in The Magicians, and it s similarly shocking here, but there s a difference. After everyone in the room is killed except Julia and a teenaged girl (a side character
called Asmo, and a wizard in her own right, but only seventeen years old), Julia offers to sacrifice her life to Reynard if he ll spare Asmo, but instead of killing her you already know where this is going if you ve read any fantasy novels or comics in the last twenty years. It s not depicting rape in fiction that I have a problem with. Rape has to be talked about to be understood, and it has to be understood to be prevented. The problem I have is in how it s presented here, although I want to add, again, that this problem is much bigger than Grossman or this book. The act of summoning Reynard, even though they were tricked into doing it, characterizes it as if it were Julia s fault. It s not explicitly victim-blaming, but there is an implication that those characters were trying to tamper in the world of the gods, and they suffered the consequences. In fact, that act of trying to make a god serve their purposes results in the threat of removing all magic from the universe, so it s not just Julia s rape that she s responsible for, but the whole plot of the book. It s distantly analogous to saying that if you hadn t been wearing that dress or walking in that neighbourhood, then you wouldn t have been raped. If you say that, you re not claiming that rape is justified or good, but you are saying that it s the victim s responsibility to have prevented it in the first place, and that s blaming the victim rather than the perpetrator. It s especially unnerving when it comes just a few pages after Julia makes a similar observation. I have a few different problems with this. First, there s the way it s described: in lurid, nearly pornographic detail. I get the feeling that there are male writers who think it s somehow heroic to go into the gory details of a rape, to talk about specific sensations and experiences that they have never had. Perhaps they think they re showing off just how compassionate they are for imagining what it would be like? I honestly don t know. The goal seems to be to construct a scene that is aesthetically pleasing imagery, emotional states, a narrative arc even though what you re depicting is inherently ugly, so what you end up with is aesthetically pleasing brutality. It s deeply disquieting, not least because it s unnecessary. In its own twisted way, it glorifies the act, makes it exciting (although not erotic in this case, which is a small blessing). It s a bit of a tangent, but it s also weird that Grossman depicts Reynard, a fox, using brutal strength and rape to get what he wants. I m not overly familiar with
Reynard stories, but some very cursory research online shows that, like most tricksters, he s a peasant hero who uses wits and speed to outsmart stronger, more dangerous animals. He s like Coyote in Cree religion, Spider/Anansi in West African folklore, or Monkey King in the Chinese popular culture. It s just a dumb choice for a scene about a physically imposing monster. It s like having a monstrous Bugs Bunny murder a room full of people and then rape the protagonist. It s the wrong character, which implies that Grossman was really just looking for a god-like character to perform a rape, a pure plot point, not something that organically grew from his research in French folklore. Anyway, Grossman wrote what he wrote, and I hate critiquing an author for failing to write what I think they should have written, but I m going to engage in a bit of that in order to make my point. Instead of that scene, we could have stopped the narrative right after it says but Reynard didn t kill her (paraphrase; I m not reading that scene again). Then, we could jump to afterwards and her reaction: in shock, disgusted, traumatized. What I m saying it, you could make it about her, not about the rapist and not the act of rape. Alternatively, just don t make it a goddamned rape at all. Run the plot some other way, but that brings me to my last point. There is a truly bizarre trend, particularly strong in superhero comics, but also in fantasy fiction, in which having been raped is, somehow, the origin story of a superhero (or more often, supervillain); the source of her superpowers. It s analogous to the way that Batman gets his grim determination from witnessing his parents murder or Superman s planet is destroyed, so he comes to Earth and get powers from our Sun. In fantasy, I m reminded of The Fionavar Tapestry, which has its own, extended, brutal rape scene that defines one of its characters, and basically just exists to make the villain look particularly horrifying. With women in comics, though, it s not watching someone else get brutally assaulted or killed (it s being assaulted, themselves), and it s very often sexual violence because, as far as I can tell, a lot of male writers think of female characters as just rape victims waiting to happen, and those writers use rape as a fate worse than death. Where a male character might be disfigured or permanently injured to prolong a tragic story arc (at the end of which, he usually dies), a female character is raped, which leaves her symbolically dead, or dead inside. On the rare occasion that a male character is raped, it s usually done by an improbably beautiful woman, or if it is an ugly woman, it s played as comedy.
Two things happen during Julia s rape that set up her character for the rest of the book. Raynard s orgasm fills her with godly power, and his penis pulls her soul out. I m not being flip, here. That s how the narrative describes it. I have no desire to repeat Grossman s imagery, go look for yourself if you re interested. In any case, as a result, she zombie-walks through the rest of the novel without any emotional connection to anything, and she can t use abbreviations (yes, it s a plot point, lots of cannots ), but right after the rape scene (in the B-plot), the narrative returns to the present (the A-plot), and Julia suddenly grows several inches taller, starts glowing, and is visited by the Earth Mother goddess they were trying to summon when Reynard showed up. To be clear, the Earth Mother doesn t show up and turn her into a demi-goddess. She turns into a demi-goddess, and the Earth Mother basically just congratulates her for it. The causality, here, is disturbing: being raped by a god turns her into a demi-goddess. One of the things I m good at is running problematic things like this rape plot through different kinds of ideological filters. Certain things are logical from within, say, colonialist racism that are not at all actually logical, but they do follow if you buy into certain premises. For example, if your premise is that the native peoples of Africa or the Americas aren t really human, then you can steal their lands and goods, brutalize their bodies (including mass rapes), or take them as slaves. Inside that conceptual construct (colonialism) those actions are logical. Obviously, this logic is not only self-serving and inhumane, it also rests on an offensively erroneous premise, but being able to understand that logic from the inside allows us to see the mechanisms of systemic oppression, which is necessary if we want to dismantle them. The greatest thing Marx ever did, for example, was to explain how capitalism really works (the actual Marxism part I m not totally convinced). I m especially good at doing this with patriarchy. I get patriarchy because my culture has been telling me since birth that my desires and safety, as a man, are inherently more important than women s desires and safety. But even within the twisted logic of patriarchal assumptions about women s bodies, I cannot fathom Julia s story. It makes no sense. If it were that power has a price that Julia sacrificed her life to Reynard in order to get power for herself I could at least unpack the causality. If it were that you shouldn t try to make gods do anything they don t want to do, then I could understand that, too. But neither of those things are true in this book. She offers her life to save another woman, not to get
power, and a running theme of the series is that most gods are jerks whose will we can and should defy. Hell, the leads are all magicians; by definition, they re stealing the power of the universe from the gods to begin with (within Grossman s cosmology, anyway). What I m left with in the absence of a way to place this narrative within patriarchal logic, is the unavoidable sense that Grossman just really, really wanted to write a horrifying rape scene, and then he built a novel around it.