02_csb_text.pdf

CHAPTER ONE

FANTASY: RECOVERING WHAT WAS LOST

“The whole secret of the study of nature lies in learning how to use one’s eyes”

---George Sand

With the recent popularity of the Harry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling, as well as the

cinematic adaptations of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and the latest installment of the Star

Wars saga, it seems that fantasy has resurfaced as a major mode of expression in the popular

imagination. Perhaps what is most intriguing about this is that fantasy is not only embraced by

a small clique of devotees, nor is it aimed simply at children. The gap between the child and

the adult has apparently been bridged by fantasy, and one may find many adults as eager to

indulge in the pleasures of it as any child. This validates J.R.R. Tolkien’s familiar evaluation of

the genre: “If fairy-story as a kind is worth reading at all it is worthy to be written for and read

by adults.” 1

However, with this admission, certain questions must immediately be addressed: why

are children and adults interested in fantasy? Is it a mere form of escapism, or is there

something of intellectual value within this mode of expression? What does it do, if anything,

for us or to us? And, finally, the deceptively simple question, just what is fantasy?

One way of defining fantasy is suggested by Brian Attebery, who states that one must

merely point to a bookshelf full of personal favorites, 2 maybe Tolkien, Lewis, Lindsay, Wells,

and say, “read this or this. This is fantasy.” However, as this is not a critical definition of a

form of literature, it is best to turn to those academicians who have attempted to study what

1 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Tolkien Reader: Stories, Poems and Commentaries by the Author of The Hobbit and The

Lord of the Rings (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), 67.

2 Brian Attebery, The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin (Bloomington: Indiana

University, 1980), 1.

fantasy is. Yet any cursory study will show that their methods are just as subjective as pointing

to the bookshelf. They will choose some familiar set of criteria and base their definition on

these, saying “this is fantasy.” In her critical study entitled Fantasy and Mimesis , Kathryn

Hume shows that many theories of fantasy suffer from exclusivity, focusing on fantasy as a

separate genre identified by elements such as text, audience, author or reader. This isolation of

certain elements of fantasy, for Hume, is too limiting. Instead, Hume argues, fantasy must be

seen as one of two impulses which inform all fiction. The first impulse is that of mimesis,

which Hume states is “felt as the desire to imitate, to describe, events, people, situations, and

objects with such verisimilitude that others can share your experience... .” 3 The other impulse,

fantasy itself, is defined by Hume as “any departure from consensus reality.” 4 It may seem that

this definition of fantasy suffers from the opposite of exclusivity, being overly inclusive and

allowing for works from the ancient world up to the present day to be considered “fantasy.” It

could also be argued that this definition fails to maintain any distinction between the boundaries

considered important by critics in the field, such as those between fantasy and science fiction or

the horror story. However, because of its very inclusiveness, her definition is the most effective

and the most applicable in terms of capturing the full range of fantasy’s potential.

Probably the most useful insight in Hume’s discussion of fantasy is her answer to the

question of how fantasy is used. She posits four basic approaches to reality which literature,

either mimetic or fantastic, addresses. It will be important for later discussion to briefly outline

these approaches. The first approach to reality is the literature of illusion . Works in this

category attempt to offer an escape from the complexities of life and the overall boredom of the

everyday world. Whether they be pastoral texts, such as Wind in the Willows , which offers an

idyllic Eden free from responsibility, or the adventure story in the Wizard of Oz, where the

reader is encouraged to identify with the main character, these texts disengage the readers from

the ordinary world in order to offer them comfort. According to Hume, these books “offer us

roses without thorns and pleasures without payment.” 5

The next two approaches to reality are related, being two ends of a continuum, the

literature of vision and the literature of revision. While they both aim at engaging the reader,

3 Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality and Western Literature (New York: Methuen,

1984), 20.

4 Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis , 21.

the literature of vision attempts to disturb readers by taking them away from a secure sense of

reality and positing a new one for them to contemplate. Authors such as Beckett, Kafka, and

Vonnegut all employ fantasy to show how reality can be limited. On the other end of the

continuum lies the literature of revision. This type of literature takes the vision further by not

only offering a vision of a different reality, but comforting the reader with a “plan” or way to

actively engage the new reality. According to Hume, “Literature of revision allows people to

escape from their culture’s imperfect systems of authority based on reason, and lets them

experience other possibilities for ordering experience, whether religious or utopian.” 6

Often these forms of fantasy are didactic, whether on a human or cosmological level,

offering the reader a possible course of action to improve some existing condition. For

example, when Hume discusses C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy , she sees it as a form of cosmic

didacticism: Lewis is attempting to revise morality in order to bring it into accord with his

Christian cosmological worldview. Of course this is what readers also experience in the world

of Narnia, as will be seen in chapter four. Hume says that Lewis “takes theological doctrines

which have gone dead for most Westerners, strips them of their immediate connotations and

contexts in order to evade our stock responses, and then makes their inner dynamic vivid again,

attempting to reimpress us with the wonder of it all.” 7 The emphasis on “reimpressing” and

“wonder” will be key themes as to how fantasy functions with respect to the authors discussed

in later chapters.

The last approach to reality which Hume discusses is the literature of disillusion , which

aims at disturbing the reader’s vision of reality and fails to offer any alternative program for

revision. This type of literature offers up the disconcerting admission that reality is finally

unknowable. Whether these texts employ dream frameworks, drug experiences or psychosis,

the visions are always perspectivist in the sense that reality is only a form of subjective

interpretation. 8

The purpose in briefly outlining Hume’s definition of the literary approaches to reality is

not just to applaud their accuracy, but also to suggest more precise ways in which the tradition

of fantasy authors such as Coleridge, MacDonald, Lewis, and Tolkien may fit in. Based on her

5 Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis , 55.

6 Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis , 123.

7 Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis , 118.

inclusive definition of fantasy as “any departure from consensus reality,” the selections Hume

draws upon are considerable, leaving little engagement with specific texts. Hume does spend

time discussing Lewis, especially the Space Trilogy , in terms of the literature of revision, 9 but

the other authors who are the focus of the present discussion require more careful consideration.

Although The Lord of the Rings is referred to on many occasions, Hume seems to place

Tolkien’s work within the literature of illusion. She suggests his work is a “literature of

desire,” a desire to turn one’s back on the world, to escape it, and to ponder the idyllic beauty of

Middle-Earth as a form of wishful longing. 10 Her contention that these works of illusion are

“crippled myths” and that Tolkien “fans” find life unsatisfactory is to miss the fact that

Tolkien, 11 like Lewis, is rather writing literature of revision, allowing his readers not an escape

from reality but urging a rediscovery of it, especially in its deepest religious form.

This dissertation aims at adopting Hume’s categories of literature but revising her own

application of them by placing the four authors not within a literature of illusion, which offers

readers escape, but within the literature of revision. What these authors are attempting, in both

their fiction and in their criticism of fantasy, is the employment of fantasy as the appropriate

means, in fact the only means, to help readers respond to their world religiously, seeing the

world not as it is , but the world as it was meant to be seen. 12 This literature of revision endows

the reader with a sacramental vision of the world, not only as it exists in the fantasy novel, but

metaphorically as a means of recreating his or her own world once the book has been put down.

In treating certain fantasy authors within the literature of illusion, Hume fails to

acknowledge these authors’ unique visions. In discussing this literature of illusion, Hume states

that since “there is no generally accepted mythology or religion, so our adventure literature

offers a completely secularized ego-centered equivalent to stories that once had transcendent

elements.” 13 I would argue the contrary, that these fantasy authors are mythopoeic, that is, they

are attempting to recreate ( mythos =“story”; poenin =“recreate”) a new mythology in order to

8 Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis , 125.

9 Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis , 117.

10 Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis , 59.

11 Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis , 66.

12 Tolkien, The Tolkien Reader , 77.

13 Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis , 68.

infuse readers with the sense of the transcendent which is no longer accessible, for many

people, in religion.

Hume’s contention that the function of literature is to impart a meaning-giving

experience is especially appropriate for these mythopoeic authors. 14 Their desire is to offer

their readers new perspectives and, most importantly, for these readers to respond with feeling

and emotion, both in the created world of fantasy, and in the revisioning of their own world.

Hume argues that fantasy creates meaning structures for readers, in much the same way that the

historian of religions Mircea Eliade argued that ancient cultures imitated mythic patterns to

create reality. 15 For Hume, however, those readers who do not have these structures are “cut off

from any experience of the numinous” either inwardly or outwardly. 16 This respect for the

transcendent is what is at the heart of the mythopoeic imagination, is in fact what mythopoeic

authors hope to implant in their readers, and will be discussed in subsequent chapters. What is

important in all these works is the emotional response to them, a response that most of these

authors would agree can not really be put into words at all. This seems to be a position with

which Hume agrees as well when she says “our sense of meaning is essentially a matter of

feeling and emotion---i.e., not rational or objective.” 17

Further contributions to the present project emerge from the works of Rosemary

Jackson. In her text Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion , Jackson draws upon Tzvetan

Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as the “absolute hesitation” on the part of the protagonist

and the reader in the face of the unexplainable. 18 Making a distinction between the Marvellous,

that which has a supernatural explanation, and the Uncanny, that which has a natural

explanation, Todorov argues that the fantastic exists in-between these two categories, disturbing

the main character as well as the reader as to the true nature of a perceived event. Todorov’s

classic example of a text which embodies this “hesitation” is a story by Jaques Cazotte entitled,

“Le Diable Amoreux.” 19 In the story, Alvaro is in love with Biondetta who is, in fact, a devil.

However, the uncertainty throughout the text experienced by Alvaro as to the true nature of

14 Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis , 170.

15 Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis , 191.

16 Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis , 172.

17 Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis , 168.

18 Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (New York: Routledge, 1981), 27.

19 Jackson, Fantasy , 28-29.

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