The Problem of Prophecy
First I would like to point out that I know how much people love prophecy. The very idea speaks to our deepest metaphysical and religious notion of the universe. This complaint is NOT a long diatribe regarding why prophecy is not a physical reality and therefore should not show up in fiction. Having said that, I hope that authors will avoid using prophecy in any form in all future fiction, but that desire has nothing to do with the Problem of Prophecy.
In any story that involves prophecy we have what I will call the "Agent of Prophecy", henceforth the "AOP". The AOP is the person, object, animal, whatever, that delivers the prophecy to the story. The AOP can be a major or minor character, it can be inanimate or animate, there is no restriction. In the "Matrix" the AOP was an old black woman, in "Oh Brother Where art Thou" the AOP was an old black man, in "Dune" the AOP was Paul Atreides, a major character, in the Bible it was a burning bush, an object. In any story that contains an AOP there immediately follows an " Obvious Question" henceforth known as the "OQ" . The OQ screams for resolution. The OQ is simply, "Who is in charge?" In other words what being provided the prophecy to the AOP and to what extent is that being powerful enough to ensure the fulfillment of the prophecy?
The Problem with Prophecy is that if the consumer of the story takes the simple step of asking the OQ he or she instantly flies well beyond the range of the material. It should never be so easy to get beyond the author's depth by simply pondering the direct material of the text, but whenever prophecy is introduced you are always one obvious question away from falling off the edge of the story. Despite the fact that the author presents solid textual evidence of a metaphysical reality beyond the material lives of the story participants, the author then demands that you do not ask ANY serious questions about that metaphysical reality. The author is depending on the fact that his or her reader does not think to much about what is going on. I think that is taking the easy way out.
Take this example from "Oh Brother Where art Thou" (the Blind Seer is shown in the production photo on the right in case you forgot who he was...):
The OQ is "who or what told the seer what to say, and why is this thing or person manipulating things in this way?" Unfortunately if one dares to ask the OQ one better be prepared for an answer so philosophically loaded that it is an impossible waste of time. It is far more baggage than the author wanted to ask. In this particular example the answer to the OQ is presumably the Judeo Christian God of the Bible, but that raises a mountain of theological problems that there is no reason to believe that author intended or indeed even understands.
The most egregious recent example of NOT answering the OQ comes from
"The Matrix", which oddly enough goes to great
lengths to explain
everything else. Here we have a woman (see still on right) who presumably
sees the future well enough to know that the "One" is coming, but not
well enough to tell Neo that he is the One, or SO well that she knows that she
must tell him he is NOT the One. The OQ is "Who or what is pulling
the strings of this horrible, unfortunate future?" Is it God?
Alien overseers? Are they making the future happen or just knowing what will
happen? Can they be wrong? It seems to me that the answer to the OQ in this case will
reveal the REAL bad guys, not just their agents (i.e. the computer that has imprisoned
and enslaved the humans).
Another problem has to do with the impossibility of failure. Whenever a prophecy is introduced into the story with an unanswered OQ then no matter how many twists and turns the story takes we know the outcome. Our protagonist can not fail. In fact, in the case of the Blind Seer, he tells the protagonist this fact outright. In addition one always wants to know why some aspect of prophecies are specific and some are not. If an author leans on our general understanding that prophecies are not so specific then they all need to be Delphic, but they rarely are. If you are a savvy consumer of the story you will in fact realize that the outcome will not likely be the outcome the character expects, but nevertheless it will be a successful ending. Also we all know that no matter how awkwardly worded a prophecy is, it must be fulfilled.
So can prophecy ever be used well in a story? Certainly, and this is how: ANSWER THE OBVIOUS QUESTION! Frank Herbert keenly understood the importance of the OQ in "Dune" and carefully constructed his universe to give the OQ and answer. (A detailed and quite wonderful discussion of how Herbert answers the OQ can be found here.) So did Asimov in "Foundation" and any story about the Biblical Apocalypse has a very straightforward answer to the OQ: the God of the Christian Bible. It is interesting how science fiction writers seem to zero in on the OQ, they understand the Problem of Prophecy very clearly. Shakespeare does well with "Macbeth" where he introduces the audience to Hecate at some point who presumably is behind the scenes making things happen. The witches are the AOP and Hecate and all her unnatural friends are the primal force. However he leaves us puzzling over the source of prophecy in "Julius Caesar". The point of my general complaint is that SMART authors answer the OQ because they realize that it is a big problem and they want their audience to stick with the story, lazy ones don't care about or don't notice this problem.
An interesting marginal case is the "Lord of the Rings" Trilogy including the Hobbit. It is my contention that the story is laced with occasional little prophecies ( in fact I found four) and perhaps one big prophecy that is implied but not stated. The most important explicit prophecy in LoTR is the omen delivered to Boromir in his dream. This omen sent him on a journey to Rivendell where co=incidentally many other important figures were gathering. Who put the prophecy in Boromir's dream? What power does this force have? Is all of middle earth just puppets of this force? That possibility deflates the power and urgency of the story Regardless, there does not seem to be any AOP in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and this confuses things. Perhaps at a later time I will address this issue more carefully.
