There is a scene in the sci-fi film Avatar that tells you everything.

Jake Sully — a paraplegic marine, broken and discarded by his own civilisation — arrives on the planet Pandora as a spy. Within the film’s runtime, he tames the supreme aerial predator leonopteryx, becomes Toruk Makto (rider of the great leonopteryx) and leads the indigenous Na’vi against the very military he came with.

The indigenous people of Pandora do not merely accept him. They anoint him. The land, the creature, the prophecy — all of it folds around the outsider and declares him chosen.

This is not a coincidence of plot. It is a structure. And it is ancient.

Fantasy returns obsessively to the same architecture: an outsider enters a world not his own, encounters a people whose customs are foreign to him and, through exceptional ability and romantic initiation, fulfils a prophecy the indigenous people had kept for themselves.

The trope is not the result of a personality flaw in individual storytellers. It is a narrative technique. And from Robinson Crusoe to Dune’s Paul Atreides and Avatar’s Jake Sully, it has been doing the same work…

The trope is not the result of a personality flaw in individual storytellers. It is a narrative technique. And from Robinson Crusoe to Dune’s Paul Atreides and Avatar’s Jake Sully, it has been doing the same work…

Paul Atreides in Dune becomes Muad’Dib, rides the sandworm and leads the Fremen against the empire strip-mining their world — before building a larger empire of his own. In Game of Thrones, Daenerys Targaryen arrives among the Dothraki as a transaction, a girl traded for an army. She takes the heart of the khal [warlord], learns the language, walks into fire and emerges khaleesi [queen].

The pattern is not the prophecy. The pattern is the transfer. The pattern holds across genre, medium and decade.

STRUCTURE AS IDEOLOGY

The Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant called this vulnerability by its right name. His concept — the right to opacity — holds that indigenous and marginalised peoples are entitled to keep their cultural practices, their prophecies and their interior life inaccessible to outsiders.

Glissant understood that, to become readable to the nation, to the empire, to the state, is to become conquerable.........

© Dawn (Magazines)