Rhetorics of Fantasy. Farah Mendlesohn

to this frame world. It is not in itself the means by which the fantastic enters the text.

      But the portal lurks; it is an actor in the drama; the fantasy is a cross-hatch and we slip and slide between states (Clute, Encyclopedia 237). Some Vurts contain the metaVurts, that can link Scribble to the fantasy world on the other side. MetaVurts are looking-glass Vurts, infinitely recursive. But when we are in a Vurt we can immediately see the difference in the way it is written. Despite the complexity of the nature of the portal as it is depicted, the difficulty of finding the portal, of being sure that it is a way through, and not simply a fantasy, the Vurt world is still described, whereas Manchester is taken for granted. It can be described from the outside—“Dreamsnakes came from a bad feather called Takshaka. Any time something small and worthless was lost to the Vurt, one of those snakes crept through in exchange” (25)—or it can be described from the inside,

      The garden was serene and beautiful, quintessentially English, just like I remembered, with burbling fountains and a mass of flowers growing wild, overflowing their beds … its heady perfume was caressing my senses, and a burst of pleasure was choking me, like every drop of blood in my veins had taken a sap-ride to my cock. (121)

      Noon is sensitive to the “rules”: only when he is in the Vurt, is through the portal, does Scribble give us this kind of florid description. Even the description of the Dog hang out does not match it in aesthetic intensity, for it is much more purpose driven:

      Along one wall were nailed the carcasses of dozens of dream snakes, shimmers of green and violet. Three dog men were eating there.… The smell was sweet to my nostrils. (301)

      The first quotation makes of landscape a character; buried in the second quotation is information to be unpacked. Yet it is only at the very end that Scribble makes it through into the portal world, and when he does, it is a world reduced to the very essence of the portal fantasy. The Game Cat and Scribbler sit in a room piled high with objects. The Scribbler is now just one of them, as undifferentiated as all the other props in fantasyland.

      Michael Swanwick takes the refusal of portal even further. An immensely complex novel, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993) barely belongs in this category. (I shall discuss this novel in much greater detail in chapter 2.) But for the moment we should consider briefly the way in which Swanwick evades the imperative of the portal fantasy.

      The portal in The Iron Dragon’s Daughter is so far in the protagonist’s past that Jane is a full citizen of the otherworld. A changeling, she functions in fantasyland as if a native. She is a native, and the rhetoric and language of the novel is that of the immersive fantasy, with information leaked in the interstices of the building site that is the fantasy. The portal is denied almost until the very end of the book: although there are leaks and slippages, only in chapter 23 does Jane finally enter the portal in Spiral Castle. There, for the first time, she is granted a guide, a self-declared cicerone (333) who baffles her with a description of his Trans Am and the Springsteen on the radio. According to the conventions, Jane should learn from this, but she does not: language cannot communicate meaning in the absence of a reference (MacDonald and Lindsay were right about that), and Jane is not the hero of a quest fantasy, conditioned by isolation to trust. Then, in chapter 24, Swanwick fully rejects the rhetoric of the portal fantasy. “Restored” to her own world, to the ostensible frame world that has not framed this narrative, Jane acts as if she has always been there. We know she has not, and she knows she is a stranger in the land, but she has learned to act as if she is competent in her world and she takes this learning with her into the new world. Jane will provide us with no more explanation than she did in her previous world: we must decode, rather than passively receive, a reader position disguised by our knowledge of the new world.

      Perhaps the easiest way to subvert the portal fantasy is to reverse the direction of travel. Two very good examples are in Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle and Barbara Hambly’s The Magicians of Night (the second book in The Sun-Cross sequence).³⁰ Howl’s Moving Castle contains within it a portal fantasy that underlines the differences in language for immersive and portal texts. Although the book as a whole is clearly an immersive fantasy, toward the end Howl, Sophie, and Howl’s assistant (Michael) travel through the entrance of the Moving Castle into Wales. Immediately we are into the conventions of portal fantasy. The characters obey a guide (Howl), ask questions, and describe to us what they see. No longer must we just exist and interpret a foreign language; instead, they are our (mis-)translators in a world we know better than do they. Despite the book’s diversion into our primary world, it never ceases to be high fantasy because this glimpse of our primary world is contextualized through Sophie’s eyes as fantastic, creating in the reader “a feeling of awe and wonder” (Zahorski and Boyer 57). This moment, what M. John Harrison has described as “counter-trajectories of the counter-liminal,”³¹ is in itself a critique of the genre: with her inversion Jones challenges reader acceptance of the protagonist-interpretation intrinsic to the functioning of portal fantasy. It is also—and incidentally—interesting because it answers the question of whether a quest fantasy can take place in a “known space.” While the superficial answer is in the affirmative—all the characters find their treasure close to home—in reality only one of the characters actually knows the John Donne poem that forms the intellectual, or cognitive, space through which they move.

      Barbara Hambly takes a slightly different approach. Here our protagonist, Rhion, knows that he is entering a different world. Yet in the opening chapters of The Magicians of Night, Rhion arrives ready to trust the guide. But Hambly wants to collapse this edifice, and she does this in part with the intense language of the portal fantasy: the language is both deceptive and revealing. Clues to Rhion’s real situation are planted in the shaping of the world around him: he is led at the very beginning to trust in the “glow of candles, a constellation of six small flames” (1) because they are a key to familiarity. He is welcomed by “the pitiless beauty of a god carved in ivory” (2), a phrase that warns both Rhion and ourselves. And elsewhere, Hambly is deliberately deceptive, severing the link between landscape and morality. The hills that are splashed with golden sunlight, covered in wild ivy and buttercups, shelter evil, not elves (12). Later, Rhion will be alerted to evil through the material objects he touches: it is interesting that in Hambly’s world, the psychic traces are attached to made objects. The world itself is not an active participant in the fantasy.

      One critical difference that reshapes the entire fantasy is that we do not, in this case, ride exploring with Rhion. Except in the details of the plot, we are more familiar than is he with the environment he is exploring. We are displaced from our customary position. Consequently, when Hambly offers the usual little explanations of the customs and practices of the country (“Most of the people in this world were addicted to the inhaled smoke of cured tobacco leaves, and everything—cars, house, furniture, and clothing—stank of it” [13], she is playing a double game. Where in the conventional quest fantasy this detail is intended to familiarize us with the world, to make us feel increasingly at home, here the same tactic estranges us, reminds us that the “we” that is Rhion are strangers here.

      Donaldson used the doubt of Thomas Covenant to convince the reader to trust. Hambly sets out to challenge the entire ideological edifice of the portal fantasy that assumes trust and constructs stupidity and passivity in the response of the protagonist in order to support that construction. Rhion is never a passive protagonist: once he is fully conscious, he interrogates the world around him. In other quest fantasies, the assertion that a gang of prisoners deserved to die, or to be used to test a drug (18–19) might be perfectly acceptable until conclusively proved otherwise³² (usually by a counternarrative delivered by a competing party). Rhion, however, from the first glimpse of an ethical dilemma, begins to doubt, and by chapter 4 is in a case of permanent suspicion. Estranged from the usual source of learning in the portal fantasy, he must do that which the hero of this subgenre is usually not required to do: he must analyze. In this fantasy Rhion learns not from what he is told but from newsreels, from newspapers, and from the behavior of those around him (69). There are no shortcuts, no physical markers of evil, no guide (unless we count the Jewish