Cultural Palimpsests: Terry Pratchett's New Fantasy Heroes (Critical Essay‪)‬

EVERY CULTURE HAS ITS HEROES. THEY APPEAR IN ITS ARTIFACTS, WHICH, AS Harriett Hawkins notes, both mirror and shape the culture that creates them (xiii). Thus, a culture's heroes are not just the result of, but actual participants in, the discourse on heroism. A hero or heroine is a person who is admired, who exhibits noble character traits to an extraordinary degree, who does great deeds, who is at least implicitly superhuman, often linked to the gods, even immortal. In the words of Bonnie Tyler, a hero is strong, sure, larger than life, and usually fresh from the fight. (1) Heroes embody and defend a society's most important values. They are folk models of the ideal member of a given society. Thus, changes in the characteristics of the heroes who appear in a society's cultural artifacts can be argued to both affect and reflect developments within that society. It is against this background that I will examine Terry Pratchett's revisions of the modern fantasy hero--who in turn is a specialized version of the cultural hero--in order to argue for a description of Pratchett's heroes as palimpsests. That is, at first, Pratchett simply ridicules the heroic tradition, but then he moves on to a complete and thorough reinvention. All of his reinscriptions overlay both the concept of the hero in general and the concept of the modern fantasy hero in particular. I will first offer brief sketches of these lower layers before exploring Pratchett's various versions. In reacting against previous types of hero, Pratchett scrapes clean the surface, before reinscribing it with his own type of hero. Just as the present layer of a palimpsest contains traces of what went before, and will in turn shine through whatever comes after, so Pratchett's reinscriptions both reflect and contribute to the cultural discourse on heroes. Reading Pratchett's heroes as palimpsests reflecting and affecting our cultural discourse on heroes provides insights into the workings of that discourse, such discourses in general, and the way literature can, and often does, interact with them.