Rhetorics of Fantasy. Farah Mendlesohn

of Fantasy.) Such patterns, rather than being a coincident archetype, become fundamental to the structure. The genre accrues formalisms, and authors negotiate with these forms; one aspect of this negotiation is experimenting with which positions and rhetorics best familiarize (or defamiliarize) the reader with the fantastic.

      Given the huge number of books written in this category, the books discussed below have been selected according to their historical significance, to their status as archetypes. (They are also the consequence of a trawl among the recommendations of a number of readers, to ensure that the choices presented here would not be entirely self-justifying.) While Tolkien and Lewis may have provided the archetypes of modern fantasy, the taproots of the genre are rather different. The emergence of a rhetoric to accompany this position can be traced to the earliest of the portal fantasies. Therefore, if we are to consider the development of the rhetorical styles and grammar of this mode of fantasy, we should begin by considering the condition of portal and quest fantasy before Tolkien and Lewis. The best known are George MacDonald’s Lilith (1895), Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), and David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920). When we lay these alongside one another, and in the company of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—a book that has had an immense if unconscious influence on the structure of quest fantasies and that shows many of the traits that later emerge of markers of this particular subgenre—certain patterns emerge.

       Early Quest and Portal Fantasies

      For Bunyan, the fantastic was that which was made up, rather than that which was supernatural, and it is in this context that we need to consider the dream sequences that provide the contextual structure of Pilgrim’s Progress. In the modern fantasy, the dream sequence is conventionally seen as a distancing from the fantastic, a means of denying belief. When taken at face value in a text—such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—it has very specific consequences for the grammar of the fantastic. A consideration of Pilgrim’s Progress, however, suggests that, in its religious context, dream as an entryway to the fantastic functioned rather differently.

      Although Bunyan felt compelled to use dreaming to contextualize his allegory (perhaps because of the Puritan suspicion of fiction), that dream is closer to a vision of the prophetic than to the modern idea of the dream as unreal. It brings the afterlife closer, making the consequences of sin manifest. Bunyan’s Pilgrim comes to him in a dream because the story is more than allegory; it is a spiritual gift, an aspect of visionary fancy.

      Yet within Pilgrim’s Progress, the dream structure is under attack from the needs of the narrative. The “Dream” as vision is a reminder of the reality of heaven; as dream it deprives us of completeness. While Bunyan avoids much of the exposition of landscape and personnel that will mark the portal fantasy and prevents full immersion in the fantastic, the repeated lines “and in the Dream” serve the same purpose, to distance the reader and to remind us that we are mere external observers of Christian’s quest, not part of his company. The tale is being narrated to us. At other times, our immersed participation is demanded as a spiritual exercise. The effect on the tone of the fantasy is to create an unevenness, an alternation of description and immersion, of distancing and familiarity. At times we walk beside Christian, at other times we observe him from afar. But while in a dream we may be ineffectual, there is nonetheless the sense that we are at the center of the dream.

      The vision is of elsewhere; it presumes that the frame world (our world) is already thinned, and provides the moment of rupture in which elsewhere becomes here. In Pilgrim’s Progress it is the moment of recognition, where the man becomes Christian “(for that was his name)”; we know that we are now fully in the tale (10). The one significant difference in the second part of Pilgrim’s Progress (which narrates the tale of Christiana’s search for her husband, and for God through him) is that the dream becomes a matter of doubt. Although it is couched as a dream at the beginning of the act, it is also phrased as “Travels into those Parts” (143). An ambiguity creeps into the text, an ambiguity remade at the close, “Shall it be my Lot to go that way again, I may give those that desire it, an Account of what I here am silent about.” For Bunyan, it might have been a sign to the reader that he was “fantasizing” in the second book, making up what came to him as divine inspiration in the first. To secular eyes, however, the narrative has become a greater part of reality because the power of vision is no longer reliable—or has, perhaps, become more metaphorical. The challenge to future fantasists is to make that vision more real, and they do so by making the portal of dream into a material portal of wood and wardrobe.¹⁵ What proves less easy is to move beyond the positioning of reader as recipient of the tale told.

      Bunyan’s own insistence that Pilgrim’s Progress is allegory reinforces the problem. Attebery argues that allegory “continually points beyond itself to the moral or metaphysical truths under examination” (Tradition 180). But in order to do this, Bunyan must strain his narrative structure. We cannot merely follow Christian, because that would be to risk that we do not understand the message. Instead both the omniprescient narrator (by lapsing out of the dream sequence) and Christian (in a pattern of telling and retelling as he meets each signpost character) guide our interpretation of the quest. In this narrative, it is the telling thereof, the rethinking of it, that is significant, rather than the adventure itself. Some of this rethinking remains in The Lord of the Rings: Bilbo’s writing of his and Frodo’s story will have resonance; Pippin and Merry will relate their tales to Treebeard, who will become part of the narrative and will be convinced. This element remains only hesitantly in the modern tradition, expressed, as we shall see, within the club story. The point is, the fantasy is made fantasy in part by being related.

      In the periodic absences of the omniscient narrator, the text proceeds as a Socratic dialogue. Although this dialogue is to some extent feigned—Christian almost always has the correct answers, and the book he carries “was made by him that cannot lie” (11)—in the conversation between him and Faithful, and later Hopeful (104 and 205), we proceed to the Truth of the quest through a narrative more open than those of many modern fantasies. The structure, when between equals, is of question and answer, each drawing out the other’s spiritual journey, using the questions to exhort as well as to query. However, when it is not between equals, Bunyan signals status through direct and indirect speech, by the abrupt changes in tone, from the mimetic, personal address of Christian, to the diegesis of reported reactions of the crowds or opposition. Form and Hypocrisie, “made him but little answer; only bid him look to himself” (33). Repeatedly, speech is given to that person who holds the higher countenance, while the one who is to listen, or learn, is described and distanced. The diegetic mode is used to create both status and differing levels of reality. This rule holds true even of Christian, who is reduced to a reaction shot in his conversation with Evangelist:

      Evan. Then, said Evangelist, How hath it fared with you, my friends, since the time of our last parting? What have you met with, and how have you behaved your selves?

      Chr. Then Christian, and Faithful, told him of all things that had happened to them in the way; and how, and with what difficulty they had arrived to the right place. (71)

      The entire description of Vanity Fair, because it concerns those who are inferior and not in conversation with Christian and Faithful, is told in this diegetic mode so as to happen, in effect, offstage, to be less real. We have been evicted from our spectator seats. Less consistently, we frequently see the same technique in modern fantasy, most recently in Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights [The Golden Compass] (1995), which drops into reported speech when the point is to communicate interpretation rather than events (see chapter 11, “Armour”). It reminds us again that this is a tale being told.

      Pilgrim’s Progress’s omniscient narrator is ultimately a ruse. The point of view is Christian’s: we experience only Christian’s doubt, are told that of Faithful. But once the narrator admits that this is allegory, he hastens to explain things to us, not through Christian’s eyes, but through his own: “I saw then that they went on their way to a