Art, Civilization, and Propaganda

Introduction

Steven Erikson's engagement with art — as practice, as social institution, as index of civilisational health — runs deeper than most readers of the Malazan Book of the Fallen may initially recognise. Before he was a novelist, Erikson was a painter and illustrator; before the first novel, Gardens of the Moon existed as a film script; and his formal training at the Iowa Writers' Workshop placed him under the direct influence of John Gardner's moral aesthetics. These biographical facts are not incidental. They inform a sustained argument, developed across the ten-novel sequence and articulated explicitly in interviews, about the relationship between artistic expression and the vitality or decay of civilisation. Art, in Erikson's schema, is not ornamental. It is diagnostic. When art serves power, civilisation is already dying. When art opposes or stands outside power, it performs its essential social function: witnessing, questioning, and preserving what officialdom would prefer forgotten.

This essay traces that argument through Erikson's own theoretical statements, through the novels' treatment of historians, poets, and narrators, and through the broader claim — radical within genre fiction — that fantasy is not a marginal literary mode but the trunk of the literary tree.

Art as Diagnostic: The Health of Civilisations

Erikson's most systematic statement on art and civilisation appears in his interview with the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast, where he articulates a theory that would not be out of place in a seminar on the sociology of aesthetics:

"I think when art ceases to oppose or to stand outside the desires of the power block of a particular civilization, [it] gets into trouble... you can often see how art in the past is a reflection of the health of a particular civilization. There was a strong period of high propaganda, say, in Roman art, especially in the sculptures — elevating the Emperors basically to almost godlike or demigod status. You see that in paintings of royalty in Europe as well — oversized compared to the horse, and then looking fit in their armor even though they never were. All of these things are basically intended to reinforce the status quo of whatever element is in power at the time." (Geek's Guide to the Galaxy, Ep. 74 transcript)

The argument is that idealisation in art — the emperor rendered as god, the monarch rendered as warrior — is not a sign of cultural confidence but of insecurity. A civilisation that must propagandise through its art has already lost the capacity for honest self-examination that genuine art requires. Conversely, periods of artistic challenge to power — the "grey period" of Roman and Greek art that "removed the idealization of the human form" — may signal not decline but a last flicker of civilisational health, a culture still capable of confronting uncomfortable truths.

Erikson extends this analysis to the contemporary world with characteristic directness: "Advertising is the greatest example of co-opted art you can think of. It sort of removes the social function — I think one of the social functions, purposes — of art" (Geek's Guide transcript). The claim is that when art is instrumentalised — when its techniques of emotional engagement, visual beauty, and narrative persuasion are redirected from questioning power to selling products — the social immune system of culture is compromised. Art that should diagnose disease becomes a symptom of it.

The Painter in Forge of Darkness: Art as First Casualty

Erikson embeds this theoretical argument directly into his fiction through the painter character in Forge of Darkness, the first volume of the Kharkanas prequel trilogy. As he explains:

"I knew there are some other themes that are running through the trilogy and they relate to how does a civilization destroy itself, and one of the things that I'm sort of approaching is the various forms of art have to be destroyed first — the meaning of art, if you will — and so this first novel is very much tied into the painter." (Geek's Guide transcript)

This is a striking claim: that the destruction of art's meaning is not a consequence of civilisational collapse but a precondition for it. The painter in Forge of Darkness becomes a vehicle for exploring what happens when a society begins to lose its capacity for genuine artistic expression — when art ceases to interrogate and begins to decorate, when beauty is severed from truth. The interviewer summarises: "The idea of art being the first step in civilisation collapsing — you're saying that's sort of the first symptom." Erikson confirms. In his schema, the corruption of art is the canary in the civilisational mine.

The Historian as Witness: Duiker and the Problem of Official Narrative

The Malazan Book of the Fallen itself stages the tension between art-as-propaganda and art-as-witness most powerfully through the figure of the historian. Duiker, the Imperial Historian in Deadhouse Gates, occupies a position of structural irony: he is employed by the Malazan Empire to record its history, yet what he actually records — the Chain of Dogs, Coltaine's catastrophic march — is a narrative of imperial failure, suffering, and the heroism of those whom the empire has betrayed.

Duiker's meditation on the nature of civilisation reads as the series' thesis statement on the relationship between history and power:

"Conquerors could overrun a city's walls, could kill every living soul within it, fill every estate and every house and every store with its own people, yet rule nothing but the city's thin surface, the skin of the present, and would one day be brought down by the spirits below, until they themselves were but one momentary layer among many." (DG)

The metaphor is archaeological — civilisations as strata, each believing itself permanent while occupying only "the skin of the present" — but its implications are political. Official history, the history that power commissions, records only the surface. The deeper truth lies in the layers beneath, accessible only to the historian willing to dig — and willing to report what he finds, even when it contradicts the narrative his employers prefer.

The parallel case of Heboric — whose "revised history" of the Emperor is treated as treasonous by the Empress Laseen — makes the political stakes explicit. To revise official history is an act of resistance. The Empire does not merely govern territory; it governs narrative. To challenge the authorised version of events is to challenge the legitimacy of the regime itself.

The Poet as Counter-Narrator: Fisher kel Tath and Badalle

If Duiker represents the historian-as-witness, Fisher kel Tath and Badalle represent the poet-as-counter-narrator. Fisher, who appears throughout the series and most prominently in Toll the Hounds, produces poetry that documents what official histories omit:

"Oh frail city! Where strangers arrive / Pushing into cracks / There to abide... / Doomed city! Closing comes the night / History awakens / Here to abide" (TtH, "Frail Age")

Fisher's verse is explicitly counter-imperial: it names the city "doomed" and "frail" where official discourse would proclaim it prosperous and secure. His poetry performs the diagnostic function that Erikson attributes to healthy art — it tells the truth that power would prefer suppressed.

Badalle, the child-poet of Dust of Dreams and The Crippled God, represents an even more radical case: art produced from the absolute margin, by a starving child in a column of refugees, with no audience, no patron, and no hope of publication. Her verses document the "Snake" — the refugee column — with a clarity that no imperial historian would provide, because no imperial historian would be present. Badalle's poetry is art at its most essential: witness without institutional support, truth-telling without expectation of reward, the human impulse to make meaning persisting even in conditions that should extinguish it.

The Meta-Narrative: Fiction About Fiction

The Malazan Book of the Fallen is, among its many other qualities, a work of fiction that is self-consciously about fiction — about the acts of narration, framing, and interpretation that constitute storytelling. This meta-narrative dimension is not mere postmodern gamesmanship. It is integral to Erikson's argument about art and civilisation.

Characters like Kruppe in Gardens of the Moon and Toll the Hounds function as internal narrators whose unreliability is the point: they demonstrate that all narration is an act of framing, and that the question is not whether a story is "true" but whose interests it serves. As one commentator observes of Circle Breaker in Gardens of the Moon: "He is an everyman; he's also in a way Erikson's own kind of observer persona in there, witnessing all of this" (DLC transcript). The series populates itself with observers, witnesses, and storytellers who mirror the author's own act of narration — and in doing so, it foregrounds the political nature of storytelling itself.

Erikson has described this self-reflexive quality in terms that echo the Yeats quotation he is fond of citing: "We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves poetry." The distinction between rhetoric and poetry maps onto the distinction between art-as-propaganda and art-as-witness. Rhetoric — the quarrel with others — is instrumental, aimed at persuasion and control. Poetry — the quarrel with oneself — is interrogative, aimed at understanding, even when (especially when) the truths uncovered are uncomfortable. The Malazan Book of the Fallen, with its relentless internal questioning, its refusal of easy moral binaries, and its insistence that "there are no blacks and whites — it's all shades of gray" (DLC Dust of Dreams transcript), positions itself as poetry in Yeats's sense: a quarrel with itself and with its reader.

The Artist as Observer: Gardner, Frazetta, and the Origins of the Series

Erikson's conception of the artist draws heavily on John Gardner, whose books On Moral Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist were formative texts during his time at Iowa. Gardner's central injunction — that the writer must "treat each character you create with the dignity they deserve" and view them as "living, breathing human beings" rather than "structural plot functions" (A Conversation with Steven Erikson transcript) — underwrites the series' moral seriousness. But Gardner also provided a model of the artist's social position:

"John Gardner, I think in one of those books, when he describes writers, he says — imagine a party where everybody's standing in the corners looking at everyone else. That's basically the writer." (DLC transcript)

The artist as perpetual outsider, observing but never fully participating — this is not a romantic self-flattery but a structural description of the artistic function. To witness requires distance. To diagnose requires the capacity to see what participants cannot. Erikson extends this to his own experience: "The exercise then is to turn around and look back at my culture, my civilization, and my experience... really being present in a place as an observer rather than participant is one of the curses of the artist, I think, especially the writer. We're always on the outside looking in" (DLC transcript).

The series' origin itself reflects this dynamic. Erikson began as a painter and illustrator, drawn to fantasy through Frank Frazetta's covers for the Ace editions of Burroughs and the Lancer editions of Robert E. Howard's Conan: "I got into them not because of the content but because of the covers — Frank Frazetta illustrations on the covers just blew my mind" (Gardens of the Moon 20th Anniversary transcript). The transition from visual art to narrative occurred when Erikson realised that what interested him was not the image itself but the story behind it — the narrative context that gave the image its weight. The first iteration of Gardens of the Moon was a film script, co-written with Esslemont, which failed to find production and was subsequently reworked, first as a potential game system, then as the novel that launched the series.

Fantasy as the Trunk of the Literary Tree

Erikson's most provocative claim about art and genre is his insistence that fantasy is not a niche literary mode but the foundational one — "the trunk of the tree" from which all other genres branch:

"Epic fantasy — it is the core of literature, and you can reach back to Gilgamesh or the Iliad or all of these things, and they are all epic fantasies... Personally I see [contemporary fiction] as the smallest. It's a tiny twig on a branch, and the branch goes back to the tree. And the tree is epic fantasy, because the origins of literature — the Iliad, Gilgamesh, all the rest — that's the trunk of the tree. And its roots go down through the earth into mythology and legend." (Geek's Guide transcript)

This is not merely a defensive manoeuvre by a genre author. It is an argument about the ontological priority of the fantastic in human narrative. If the earliest and most enduring works of literature — Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Mahabharata, the Norse sagas — are works of fantasy, then the "realist" novel, far from being the default literary mode, is a relatively recent and specialised development. The literary establishment's elevation of contemporary realist fiction above genre fiction is, in Erikson's view, a category error: "Discussing genre is itself problematic. Contemporary fiction, so-called literary fiction, is a genre" (Geek's Guide transcript).

This argument connects directly to Erikson's thesis about art and civilisation. If fantasy is the root form of narrative — the mode in which humanity first made sense of its experience through story — then the marginalisation of fantasy by literary gatekeepers is itself a form of the civilisational malaise he diagnoses: a culture that has lost touch with the deep sources of its own narrative tradition, preferring the "tiny twig" of contemporary realism to the trunk from which it grew.

Rhetoric: The Lost Art

A recurrent concern in Erikson's interviews — and one that connects his views on art to his views on politics — is the decline of rhetoric as a taught skill:

"Rhetoric is something — I mean, and we see the absence of it in terms of poorly assembled arguments, counter-arguments, all the rest. Man, if everybody could actually get a course in rhetoric and logic, the world would be a lot better. If people understood just the fundamentals of forming an actual defense and attack of a topic, I think half the political problems would be solved." (DLC Dust of Dreams transcript)

Rhetoric, in the classical sense, is the art of structured argument — the discipline of making a case transparently, so that its premises can be examined and its conclusions tested. Erikson's lament is that this discipline has been largely abandoned in public discourse, replaced by the techniques of advertising and propaganda that bypass rational examination in favour of emotional manipulation. The loss of rhetoric is, in his schema, another symptom of the civilisational illness he diagnoses through art: a culture that can no longer argue clearly cannot think clearly, and a culture that cannot think clearly is vulnerable to the propagandists and demagogues who fill the void.

Conclusion

Erikson's treatment of art, civilisation, and propaganda constitutes a coherent aesthetic theory embedded within — and enacted by — a work of fiction. The theory holds that art's essential function is diagnostic: to observe, to witness, to question, and to preserve what power would prefer forgotten. When art is co-opted by power — whether through imperial statuary, royal portraiture, or modern advertising — it ceases to perform this function and becomes instead a symptom of the disease it should be diagnosing. The Malazan Book of the Fallen, with its historians, poets, narrators, and meta-fictional self-awareness, is both an argument for this theory and an enactment of it: a work of art that opposes, that stands outside, that quarrels with itself — and that insists, against the marginalisation of its genre, that fantasy is not the periphery of literature but its deepest root.

Sources

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