Rhetorics of Fantasy. Farah Mendlesohn

of judging his character growth (24–25). The issue of trust is crucial to the construction of the portal-quest fantasy; it is this that leads us into the closed, unquestioning narrative. Lilith enfolds us doubly into this closed narrative.

      Once trust is established (around chapter 7), the rhetorical structures of Lilith shift from the description of nebulous fears, sensations, and emotions to the creation of a fantastical landscape, and an exploration of its geography. This landscape is constructed of people, as well as places, or moralities as well as landmarks. Mr. Raven’s wife is part of this construction: “It was as if the splendour of her eyes had grown too much for them to hold, and, sinking into her countenance, made it flash with a loveliness like that of Beatrice in the white rose of the redeemed” (40). But the landscape remains constructed of likeness, often coined in the negative: the moon “is not like yours” (44); “Fatigue or heat she showed none”; “It was nearly noon, but the sense was upon me as of a great night” (149). Alongside this is the insistence that everything is done in great emotion: “The light, like an eager hound, shot before me into the closet, and pounced upon the gilded edges of a large book.” In turn, the narrator springs to his feet and cries aloud (47). The use of simile indicates the shift to the neorealism of the portal fantasy: where metaphor estranges, simile seeks to make familiar. We are now inside the portal more fully, yet the reality of the world is cast into doubt by the continual references to the framing world, and to the insistence on an unusual intensity of emotion.

      Equally experimental, A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay (1920), comes nearer to the rhetoric of the full portal-quest novel, even while, in its inconsistencies and baroque style, demonstrating the ruptures of grammar of the early form. A Voyage to Arcturus continually shifts tone, from the supernatural (the fantastic as felt) through the descriptive (the fantastic as seen) at various points throughout the text. Unlike Lilith, there is no clear division between the mode of the frame world and the mode in which the otherworld is related. Instead, there are continual shifts among the Gothic, the baroque elaboration of fantasy exploration, and unnerving moments of apparent realism. These latter moments are usually dropped into the conversational structures of the book; in avoiding the mock medievalism used at other moments, they approach the plain puritan delivery of Bunyan. Yet in Voyage to Arcturus much is hidden in words that seem open. All is reversals and negatives.

      We begin with a séance delivered in the low-toned popular style, essentially mimetic, reminiscent of Conan Doyle. Lindsay can conjure up unease without relying on the intonations of horror, because the séance itself is understood, both familiar yet semiscandalous. The opening of A Voyage to Arcturus is the opening into a club story. It is matter-of-fact, prosaic. But the sudden shifts in tone are a source of unease: there are attempts to deliver a travel fantasy through emotion rather than description, and the odd lapse into colloquialisms when the discussion is something which can relate to our own world (such as the use of “Thanks” when blood is shared). In order perhaps to put Maskull at his ease, Krag addresses him, “Oh, you will get your twenty four hours, and perhaps longer, but not much longer. You’re an audacious fellow, Maskull, but this trip will prove a little serious, even for you” (18). But the offhandedness is deceptive: it is dismissive, it closes down the questions, begins the sealing off of the fantasy that ensures that none of the questions Maskull asks will challenge his received impressions, and that he will trust all the answers given.

      But chapter 2 begins with the semi-Gothic. It leads to the supernatural, not to the portal: “The three men gathered in the road outside the house. The night was slightly frosty, but particularly clear, with an east wind blowing” (15). For this one moment in time, Maskull is presented as an inhabitant rather than an explorer of the world, and the tone conjures the latency crucial to the intrusion fantasy (see chapter 3, this volume). In the tower, things begin to get more sinister. The jovial tone is dropped and what is observed—the beating of the drums—is increasingly phrased not as an event but as an indicator: they “seemed somehow to belong to a different world” (29).

      Unlike Lilith and subsequent portal fantasies, the actual portal is almost irrelevant to this fantasy. Like Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter, Maskull is transported instantaneously to the new world. With this alteration, we have shift of tone and focalization. On awakening, Maskull describes not what he sees but his bodily feelings: “he was unable to lift his body on account of its intense weight. A numbing pain, which he could not identify with any region of his frame, acted from now onwards as a lower, sympathetic note to all his other sensations” (40). He becomes aware of changes, of the fleshy protuberance on his forehead, and a tentacle on the region of his heart. Maskull’s first experience of the new world is physical, of himself as landscape and as fantastical. As the presence or absence of various limbs proves crucial to the narrative, the morality of the tale is shaped on and with his body. The language is pregnant with the fantastic, but does not build the stage set I associate with this kind of fantasy. With Maskull, we explore not the world he is in, but his reactions to it. The description of landscape, although in the third person, is through perception. “When it came near enough he perceived it was not grass.…Some uncanny, semi-intelligent instinct was keeping all the plants together, moving at one pace, in one direction, like a flock of migrating birds” (48–49). Like MacDonald, he uses avoidance in the face of the realized fantastic: the “sense-impressions caused in Maskull by these two additional primary colours can only be vaguely hinted at by analogy” (49).

      Conversation in A Voyage to Arcturus shows similar stylistic shifts. As with Vane, Maskull’s interpretative agency is repeatedly denied. Although this is ostensibly a novel of exploration, he must not ask questions about the cut on his arm because “the effect is certain, but you can’t possibly understand it beforehand” (34). Joviality is used to ensure compliance not just of Maskull, but of the reader. It is we who are being chivvied along into the fantasy through a denial of explanation—a lack of information is buried in apparent volubility. This denial wouldn’t matter but, like many adventurers in the portal fantasy, he accepts whatever he is told (especially when it contradicts what he has been told before). We see this most clearly toward the end when he briefly follows a new prophet, only to change when his bodily configuration changes. It is unclear why this happens. A query about Crystalman results in the lesson that he is called Shaping and has many names (46). This mode later emerges as central to the uncanny, but is antithetical to the delivered mode of the modern portal-quest fantasy. When information is actually exchanged we move to excessive formality:

      “And well you may, for it’s a fearful thing for a girl to accept in her own veins the blood of a strange man from a strange planet. If I had not been so dazed and weak I would never have allowed it.”

      “But I should have insisted. Are we not all brothers and sisters? Why did you come here, Maskull?”

      When what is to be delivered is not description, but a genuine discussion of a problem, Lindsay reverts to a more colloquial style: “It begins to look like a piece of bad work to me. They must have gone on, and left me” (45). Anything that discusses the fantastical is described in the slow, measured language of poetry. Anything that is about the “real” slips back into the colloquial and takes the fantasy characters with it. Joiwind is asked if she is being weakened: “ ‘Yes,’ she replied, with a quick, thrilling glance. ‘But not much—and it gives me great happiness’ ” (54). It is that “not much” that seems rather odd. When Digrung is slandering Tydomin he again slips into the vernacular, because his slander is not a matter for fantasy: “I see into you, and I see insincerity. That wouldn’t matter, but I don’t like to see a man of intelligence like Maskull caught in your filthy meshes” (118). Digrung continues in much the same style, because he is talking about the mundane. When told not to kill someone he says “Thanks for that” (120). But as soon as he gets onto the subject of sin, he is back to excessive formalism “As for you, woman—sin must be like a pleasant bath to you” (120).

      Although the séance is ended with a sudden rush into the room, action is rare. The predominant pace is slow, meandering; the planet Arcturus is the principal character whom Maskull must get to know. But Lindsay, like MacDonald, feels that