Rhetorics of Fantasy. Farah Mendlesohn

419 where Sam is explaining Frodo to Pippin.

      “Begging your pardon,” said Sam. “I don’t think you understand my master at all. He isn’t hesitating about which way to go. Of course not! What’s the good of Minas Tirith anyway? To him, I mean, begging your pardon, Master Boromir.” (Fellowship, “The Breaking of the Fellowship” 419)

      Without deploying the ringing tones of authority, Sam cuts through the campfire discussion of politics, diplomacy, and strategy. But this change of voice is momentary. Elsewhere the book is dominated by the interpretive voice of Gandalf and Aragorn, who, while they may not control the movements of the hobbits, control their meaning. Later authors, however, have misunderstood the role of this material. Mistaken for an aspect of character, phatic discourse—the chats about cooking, about weather, the general reaffirmations of existence—becomes a mere attribute. Tolkien uses these moments to remind us what is real in both the metaphorical and fantastical sense.

      If the role of the guide is increasing, and the understanding of the protagonist is increasingly molded by the presence of the guide, we as readers are also under increasing pressure to pay attention to the moral significance of landscape, that semiosis that encodes the feelings of actors and readers (Rifaterre 14). For both Lewis and Tolkien, landscape was validated as adventure and character in and of itself. Landscape for Lewis must have purpose: it is there to be useful and to be reacted to. When the children see the beaver house, “you at once thought of cooking and became hungrier than you were before” (69). Although the passage concludes with description of the rushing water, frozen as it falls, this apparently purely aesthetic description provides vital information about the nature and magnitude of the witch’s power. At the same time: “Edmund noticed something else. A little lower down the river there was another small river which came down another small valley to join it. And looking up that valley, Edmund could see two small hills, and he was almost sure they were the two hills which the White Witch had pointed out to him when he parted from her at the lamp-post that other day” (69).

      Elsewhere, landscape is not expected to speak; it merely accompanies the events. Although the characters interact with the landscape it is in the sense that they act with and upon it. The landscape is there to be moved through. The “aliveness” of Lewis’s Narnian landscape with its dryads and hamadryads reduces the moral agency of the scenery: even in Prince Caspian (1951) where the land’s aliveness is most at stake, it is acted upon, it is not an actor. In contrast, Tolkien’s technique—and the one that will come to dominate the quest fantasy tradition—is to present the landscape as a participant in the adventure. It can indicate evil: “That view was somehow disquieting: so they turned from the sight and went down into the hollow circle”; “They felt as if a trap was closing about them” (Fellowship, “Fog on the Barrow-downs” 148, 149). The indication is that it is the landscape that actively traps them, pulling them down toward the barrow wights. Or, the landscape can simply influence: “The hearts of the hobbits rose again a little in spite of weariness: the air was fresh and fragrant, and it reminded them of the uplands of the Northfar-thing far away” (The Two Towers, “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit” 257). Emulating a number of myth structures, Tolkien ties the land to the king/leader or to the virtue of the people: Gondor’s townlands “were rich, with wide tilth and many orchards, and homesteads there were with oast and garner, fold and byre, and many rills rippling through the green from the highlands down to Anduin” (Return of the King, “Minas Tirith” 22). Pippin describes the feeling of connection thus:

      “One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with the ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present; like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know, but it felt as if something grew in the ground—asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.” (The Two Towers, “Treebeard” 66–67)

      Lewis never attempts this marriage of mise-en-scène with emotion, virtue, or character (with the exception of the martyrdom of Aslan, which presents a scene redolent with grief and horror, surrounded by cold and dark). Later writers, as Attebery points out, use landscape to fill the gaps of actual experience, “to rehistoricize fantastic assertions by placing them within an approximation of the most accessible milieu in which such statements could have been made” (Strategies 132). Vital to this substitution is the intense concentration on landscape, the insistence on a level of detail that is almost distorting. Brian Stableford wrote, “Descriptive prose can be like a pre-Raphaelite painting, attempting to specify the colour, position and texture of every object which the hypothetical observer would see” (The Way to Write 28). The metaphor can be extended into landscape painting as a whole, in which the “natural” is actually a clever contrivance that encodes specific messages about what the Land should be. The more I consider it, the more obvious this link to Pre-Raphaelite painting seems. Dalí once cited the Pre-Raphaelites for “their precise rendering of detail and the equal focus accorded each element of reality. The technique rendered their paintings awkward in some ways, since sharp-focused clarity of each part works against the illusion of perspective” (Mathews 39). Similarly, the “microscopic natural detail [which] appears at the expense of space, atmosphere or any feeling of light and shade … seems to belong to a world of dreams and enchantments”—as Allen Staley conjures Millais’s Ferdinand Lured by Ariel he also conjures the elaborate but curiously thin stage sets of so many quest fantasies (15). On the subject of the same picture, Staley quotes the 1851 Art Journal: “The emphasis of the picture is its botany, which is made out with a microscopic elaboration, insomuch as to seem to have been painted from a collection of grasses, since we recognise up to twenty varieties” (176). Exactly. As we shall see later, the insistence on a monosemic understanding of the world in so many quest fantasies works against the illusion of reality that this detail strives so hard to conjure.

      What there is surprisingly little of in the work of both Lewis and Tolkien, is the action adventure rhetoric that one associates with modern heroic fantasy. A rare moment is on page 337, at the start of “The Choices of Master Samwise”.

      Sam did not wait to wonder what was to be done, or whether he was brave, or loyal, or filled with rage. He sprang forward with a yell, and seized his master’s sword in his left hand. Then he charged. No onslaught more fierce was ever seen in the savage world of beasts, where some desperate small creature armed with little teeth, alone, will spring upon a tower of horn and hide that stands above its fallen mate. (The Two Towers)

      The language appears to have leaked in from the sword and sorcery genre that increasingly influences the quest narrative as the century proceeds. We can see it in the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber’s Grey Mouser stories. Both of these, like most sword and sorcery novels, are better considered when we turn to immersive fantasy,²³ but because in the post-Tolkien era sword and sorcery comes to influence the writers of quest fantasy—particularly Terry Brooks—the comparison of language is worth noting.

      Howard’s Conan is interesting because Howard focuses the reader’s attention upon the action. Whereas in Tolkien, the emphasis drives the reader through the action, Howard is interested in the action itself. To take just one example, from “The Tower of the Elephant” (1933): “Steel flashed and the throng surged wildly back out of the way. In their flight they knocked over the single candle and the den was plunged in darkness, broken by the crash of upset benches, drum of flying feet, shouts, oaths of people tumbling over one another, and a single, strident yell of agony that cut the din like a knife” (16–17). Take note of the hyperbole in the adjectives, “flashed,” “surged,” and “strident.” Although we do see hyperbole in Tolkien, it is rare. For Howard, the action itself is the point; the finding of the object sought after, or the completion of a task is almost irrelevant. Accompanying this style of writing is the sense that action is about what is felt. It is important that Conan reacts by instinct, and that when Murilo, Conan’s employer, is frightened, we feel “his blood congeal in his veins.” We are reading here to feel these emotions, to thrill with the hero, to fear with the onlooker.