Rhetorics of Fantasy. Farah Mendlesohn

street conversation is the least reliable, information given by a guide is very reliable, and visions generally unchallenged; because the vision is buried in the learning process, however, it is less ostentatious than someone sitting down to narrate a prophecy. To balance this, to make this approach work, Kay has also constructed Kevin. A rather relaxed character, Kevin is able to accept things without explanation. Between Kim’s visionary knowledge and familiarity with the fantasy world, and Kevin’s acceptance of it, Kay is able to sidestep at least some of the miniature show and tell sequences that form the backbone of his world-building. Elsewhere, because we still only know of the world what the characters learn as they travel, the world-building is not so easy. Dave and Paul, our primary guides in The Summer Tree, part company at least to some degree to expand our knowledge of the world: the more complex their routes, the more we shall come to understand the Land. Although each, individually, constructs a fellowship, and seals himself off from those external to that fellowship, these groups are linked so that the “conspiracy” or the club narrative is not entirely sealed.

      At times Kay is forced to retreat to prediction within the tale, the narration of understanding rather than its depiction. When Paul and the King play a game of chess, they reach a point of almost understanding: “It was not to happen, but something else was born that night, and the fruit of that silent game would change the balance and the patterns of all the worlds that there were” (69). This narration succeeds in being simultaneously clumsy and subtle. Clumsy in that the import of the future is oversignaled; this is a novel so we expect something of import to happen. Subtle in that we are misdirected: we expect this to be a change of adventure; instead, the change is internal to Paul. As readers, however, we are dependent on a directed gaze. We are not allowed to look for significance elsewhere.

      Tad Williams’s The Dragonbone Chair (1988) is technically an alternative world in which everything seems to have slipped sideways (the savior is hung upside down on a tree, and one of the swords was made from the meteorite that hit the temple when he died). Because Williams narrates his tale almost entirely through the story of Simon, we are tied to Simon’s side in what should be a rigid form of the reader positioning. We can see only what Simon passes through, understand the world only through his comprehension. At first, Williams seems to tackle this conventionally enough: “[Simon] could never understand how rooms that seemed as small as the doctor’s did from outside—he had looked down on them from the bailey walls and paced the distance in the courtyard—how they could have such long corridors” (14). Although this is the conventional inner musing as download, it also functions to tell us that we have a complex space (which will be significant later), and that Simon is capable of independent thought, curiosity, and the research to satisfy such curiosity. Williams has taken a conventional trope, the reverie, and embedded within it the castle as character (at least the doctor’s rooms) and a sense of who Simon is. Accompanying this, we also learn about Simon first in his own actions—the fascinated observation of a beetle (3–4)—then through the use of the castle as a foil to Simon (5–6), and later through the mind of Rachel (22–26), contextualized in terms of her frustration, sense of duty, and of love. While in part this method of description is an indication of the quality of the writer, it is also a subtle shift of the reader position. Although we shall walk through this quest with Simon, observing mainly what he observes, we are focused not only on his interests, but on Simon himself. Simon is to us as he is to the beetle. To add to the interest, when Simon does consider himself, in the way used in Sword of Shannara, he does so in a way that does not merely download information, but moves the discussion on: “When you stopped to think about it, he reflected, there weren’t many things in life one truly needed. To want too much was worse than greed: it was stupidity—a waste of precious time and effort” (603). Simon has changed; this reverie contrasts with the earlier Simon who complained that he was hard done by. But the reverie does not say this, it shows it.

      In the same manner, Williams manipulates Simon to supply backstory and history to build his world. Tolkien demonstrated the nature and form of the oral tradition as delivered, but for Williams a crucial question seems to be why it is delivered. We do not just listen to Simon, we are grateful to him: in The Dragonbone Chair we learn what we do because Simon asks questions, an aspect of the character established very early on. Simon is hungry for stories, demanding them throughout. His curiosity is what brings him in reach of the adventure. His status as child renders acceptable his dependence on his companions for information, as it does for Garion in David Eddings’s The Belgariad and in hosts of other quest fantasies centered on youthful protagonists. Consequently, while in The Dragonbone Chair there are a number of delivered prophecies, there is no pretense that they are anything other than sealed narratives, a notion supported by the Scholasticism that dominates this book.²⁹

      In contrast, Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World (1990) makes a fetish of the techniques of the quest fantasy. Reader positioning in this book is rigid. We always ride with the protagonist, and this positioning is mitigated, not by any sleight of hand or subtle technique as developed by Williams or Kay, but instead by creating an inordinate number of travelers whose conversations and experiences we are allowed to try on throughout the novel. Dispersal becomes essential because it is the only route that Jordan allows us out of the claustrophobia of fantasy companionship.

      Similarly, Jordan embraces the narrated world. Once, we hear rumors of a “false Dragon” (36) from a peddler, staged as a conversation between the peddler and his customers. Unreliability is built into the delivery, and unreliable it does indeed turn out to be. But elsewhere, information is delivered sealed: Rand learns that he may be adopted as his father lies deathly ill and he is given no opportunity to question. In its own way, this is “club” discourse, the uninterruptible and therefore “sealed” narrative—although in this case, its truth is held in question as his mother too was a stranger to the village so there is no one to corroborate the story (88). When Moiraine tells of the Aes Sedai, we are back to downloads, and a world that knows less than it once did: “In the Age of Legends … some Aes Sedai could fan life and health to flame if only the smallest spark remained. Those days are gone, though—perhaps forever” (92). The villain, Ba’alzamon spends a page and a half gloating, providing us with useful information at the same time (170–172); Moiraine tells Nynaeve about the symptoms she experienced as she broke through into her magic. At no point does Nynaeve intervene, although she does accuse Moiraine of lying when she has finished talking. There is no questioning, no actual discussion (269). The text is dotted with these deliveries. And the downloads in this book (and in others considered so far) are linked with a sense that the past is better, more knowledgeable, suggesting that the ideology is part of the form. The club narrative contains within it a melancholy of structure, a mourning, or at least nostalgia, for the past that makes it particularly useful for the expression of thinning: “So much was lost; not just the making of angreal. So much that could be done which we dare not even dream of” (92). As Tad Williams demonstrates, when Binabik declares, “there seems only one thing to do … it is back to the archives and searching again,” nothing truly new can be made in a fully Built world.

       The Subversion of the Portal-Quest Fantasy

      Having outlined the rhetorical structures of the portal-quest fantasy tradition in its early stages and at its most typical, I shall now test this outline against deliberately challenging and subversive versions of the form. If the strategies I have outlined are fundamental to the genre, then they will exist to some extent or other in these more subversive novels, even where that existence is self-consciously challenged.

      One route to subversion is to refuse the portal. Jeff Noon structures Vurt (1993) around a search for a portal. The fantasy as a whole is immersive: told in the first person, we sit in Scribble’s brain and, for the most part, must work out what this modern Manchester looks like by the hints and clues dropped in the course of his search for the yellow Vurt feather and his sister Desdemona. When we are invited into Scribble’s thoughts, he is usually considering a problem, not contemplating who and what he is—although we do receive some backstory through dream sequences. But these are dream sequences or flashbacks and are presented as such, not as reverie; they are rarely narrativized. There are moments of intrusion, in that the Vurt leaks, but because there is