Rhetorics of Fantasy. Farah Mendlesohn

Progress, the pilgrim knows where the Celestial City is, so that it is a journey, rather than a quest; the point is simply to get there through many perils. Yet the same is true of a number of quest fantasies where the goal is to reach the city: Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871) charts a path to the crown that lies at the end of the chessboard; C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle (1956) concludes with a journey to the celestial city, as does—in a more mundane sense—The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), in which the children must reach Caer Paravel. Later books with the same structure include Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Thendara House (1983), Sheri S. Tepper’s Marianne sequence (1985–89), and Jeff Noon’s Vurt (1993), where escape through the portal is the ultimate end of the novel, and the result disappointing. And where it is not true, we should accept that many writers believed themselves to be emulating the structures of much favored books while in reality doing quite the opposite: hundreds of “Tolkienistas”⁶ have failed to notice that The Lord of the Rings is not a quest for power, but a journey to destroy power.⁷ In any event, the very presence of maps at the front of many fantasies implies that the destination and its meaning are known.

      Similarly, many of the differences between the structures laid down by Bunyan and those created in the shared world of the quest fantasy are due to a reworking of expectations and codings to produce a moral rhetoric and moral geography more acceptable to modern tastes. It is commonly assumed that the opposition to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that has emanated from many Christian fundamentalists in the United States centers simply on the use of magic and of the telling of untruths. There is a partial truth in this interpretation today, but the original opposition to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was directed at the highly individualistic morality of the main character. For the generation brought up on the film and modern ideas of American individualism, it is easy to miss the fact that Baum’s Dorothy is not a nice child and that the message of the book has little to do with the communitarian values that prevailed in America’s Christian heartland at the turn of the century,⁸ before the individualism of the West became the dominant discourse of the United States. This is encoded in the journey Dorothy undertakes. Unlike Bunyan’s Pilgrim, Dorothy’s journeys do not result in her own moral growth—she herself is a representation of a new morality—but in the moral growth of those she influences. She is grace, a concept quite offensive to those who believe that grace can be bestowed only by the Redeemer.

      What underpins all of the above is the idea of moral expectation. Fantasy, unlike science fiction, relies on a moral universe: it is less an argument with the universe than a sermon on the way things should be, a belief that the universe should yield to moral precepts. This belief is most true of the portal-quest narratives, and of the intrusion fantasies. But if intrusion fantasies are structured around punishment and the danger of transgression (see chapter 3), the portal-quest fantasies are structured around reward and the straight and narrow path. The epic and the traveler’s tale are closed narratives. Each demands that we accept the interpretation of the narrator, and the interpretive position of the hero. The hero may argue with the gods, or with the rules of the utopia, but it is assumed that we will accept the paradigms of his argument. In modern fantasy this element is maintained even where, as in A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsey (1920) and The Scar by China Miéville (2002), we are dealing with an anti-quest.

      Portal-quest fantasies have other, less visible, taproots. These others have contributed to the fantasies’ rhetorical and moral structure and in particular have tended to reinforced this closed narrative. Most significant among these is the club narrative, a cozy discourse that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and that profoundly shaped the portal-quest fantasy in the second half of the twentieth century.

      The Club Story is simple enough to describe: it is a tale or tales recounted orally to a group of listeners foregathered in a venue safe from interruption. Its structure is normally twofold: there is the tale told, and encompassing that a frame which introduces the teller of the tale—who may well claim to have himself lived the story he’s telling—along with its auditors and the venue.… At all levels of sophistication, the Club Story form enforces our understanding that a tale has been told. (Clute, Conjunctions 39: 421–422)

      The last point, the understanding of the completeness of story, is perhaps the most crucial contribution of the club story to the portal-quest fantasy. The story made is one that is bounded by the rules of the club rhetoric. The Canterbury Tales is a club story, and so too, although less obviously, are Pilgrim’s Progress, George MacDonald’s Lilith (1895), and The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. In each of these cases, a tale is recounted as if it has happened in the past. Elsewhere, the club story is embedded within the frame narrative.

      In the club story, the storyteller, whatever his designation, is possessed of two essential qualities: he is uninterruptible and incontestable; and the narrative as it is downloaded is essentially closed. Although not entirely relevant here, it is hard to avoid the acknowledgment that the club story has a gendered origin, and that there are consequences embedded in these foundations. The club narrative is diegetic, a denial of discourse, an assertion of a particular type of Victorian masculinity, a private place uninterrupted by the needs of domesticity or even self-care (there are always servants in the club), combined with a stature signaled by the single-voiced and impervious authority. This sense of authority matters because, as we shall see, the modern portal-quest narratives are hierarchical: some characters are presented with greater authority than others—authority that is intended, destined, or otherwise taken for granted—and this hierarchy is frequently encoded in speech patterns and the choice of direct or indirect speech. Although a tenuous connection, the tendency of portal-quest fantasies to ignore the personal needs of the protagonists may be less a mere accident of poor writing, than a direct consequence of the link with this mode of storytelling. As their personal needs will be ignored, so too will be the needs of characterization. What matters is that there be no chinks in the story entire. Discussing Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” (1899), John Clute has written:

      Like any Club Story, “Heart of Darkness” is both a story and a device to mandate its reception. The impurity of this is obvious—what we’re describing here is in a sense a form of reportage—and may help account. It may be the “impurity” of this element of reportage at the heart of the Club Story form that accounts for the fact that no literary theorist has ever mentioned it. Critics of the fantastic, dealing as they do with a set of genres intensely sensitive to the world, should have no such compunction. (Conjunctions 39: 422–423)

      As in the true club story, it is the unquestionable purity of the tale that holds together the shape of the portal-quest narrative. In the club narrative, the ability to convince and to hold the floor is the sign of success, but the risk is always that the whole will not be sustained. In order to sustain it, the impurity and unreliability to which Clute alludes must be consistently denied and the authority and reliability of the narrator must be asserted. Either the story is accepted in its entirety, or it is entirely vulnerable; there is no room for the delicacies of interpretation. This structure and its attendant denial has a significant effect on the language of the portal-quest fantasy: in order to convince, to avoid too close analysis, the portal and quest fantasies attempt to convince through the accumulation of detail.

      Fantasyland is constructed, in part, through the insistence on a received truth. This received truth is embodied in didacticism and elaboration. While much information about the world is culled from what the protagonist can see (with a consequent denial of polysemic interpretation), history or analysis is often provided by the storyteller who is drawn in the role of sage, magician, or guide. While this casting apparently opens up the text, in fact it seeks to close it down further by denying not only reader interpretation, but also that of the hero/protagonist. This may be one reason why the hero in the quest fantasy is more often an actant than an actor, provided with attributes rather than character precisely to compensate for the static nature of his role.

      In the quest and portal fantasy much of the narrative is delivered in this club-story mode among a group of friends isolated in a context in which they will not be interrupted. Although “the