Rhetorics of Fantasy. Farah Mendlesohn

and that what lies behind must be thoroughly known and unquestioned before the journey begins. As Diana Wynne Jones has pointed out, maps are a substitute for place, and an indication that we have to travel; they also, however, fix the interpretation of a landscape. Maps are no more geography than chronology and legend are history, but in portal-quest fantasies, they complete the denial of discourse.

      Since the late 1970s, genre fantasy has frequently been signaled by these two devices: the map—which, as Diana Wynne Jones sarcastically observed, lists everywhere we will be visiting (Guide 10)—and the fixed and narrated past. Far too many post-Tolkien portal-quest fantasies begin with a download of legend. Their very anonymity creates the status that the closed club narrative requires. Occasionally, they are signed by a legendary figure, or by “a historian,” but the presentation of these extracts is rarely placed against other, disputatious sources. Authors of these fantasies write as if Mark Twain had never pointed out the danger of trusting the presentable document. Jones puts it memorably:

      Scrolls are important sources of information about either HISTORY or MAGIC, and are only to be found jealously guarded in a MONASTERY or TEMPLE. You will usually have to steal your copy. Against this inconvenience is the highly useful fact that the Information in the Scroll will be wholly correct. There is, for some reason, no such thing as a lying, mistaken or inaccurate Scroll. (Guide 166)

      See also her entry for PROPHECY (148–149). The consequence is that the found document is in the chair relating the club story; either all of it is correct, or none of it is. We can no longer debate history, in the sense of interpretation, analysis, discovery; we can only relate the past. This scholasticism permits only macronarratives: the past in these books is always what has been recorded about the greats, and it has always been recorded somewhere.

      Yet concomitant with this is a reverence for the book, even while seeing books as alien artifacts to be decoded. This returns us once more to Bunyan and to generations of evangelicals for whom the Bible was not an ethical discussion but a book of riddles and challenges (Keeble xxiii).

      Things that seem to be hid in words obscure,

      Do but the Godly mind the more allure;

      To Study what those Sayings should contain,

      That speak to us in such a Cloudy strain.

      (Pilgrim’s Progress, 130)

      This verse might come straight from the prologue of a modern fantasy. Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising (1965–77) sequence is structured around rhymes to be deconstructed; The Belgariad has its Codex capable of predicting the coming of the Rivan King; Jeff Noon’s feathers in Vurt are encoded fantasy-game riddles that offer a way out into otherworld. Each, like Pilgrim’s Progress, constructs the text as a portal into a promised world. Running alongside this is an ideology of heroism that denies current authority in favor of an omnipresent power, yet prizes specifically the ability of the common man to decipher the code that will lead one through the gate. External means of testing veracity are closed off, and we are further sealed into the story.

      As Keeble describes it: “The regenerate are distinguished from the unregenerate not by any exceptional abilities or virtue but by their faith: they keep on going” (xvii). Such describes both the regenerate Christian and the predestined hero in modern quests (and crops up most in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials sequence [1995–2001]). Keeble points out: “The saint only gains final assurance of perseverance when he has persevered” (xix). Similarly evident in many modern portal-quest fantasies is the Puritan belief that “it is by playing a full part in this world that salvation is won” (xiii). Yet perseverance is defined in part by the ability to stay on the straight and narrow path, to follow the words of prophecy and the delivered interpretation—in effect, for the hero to maintain his own position-as-reader.

      The idea is picked up in a number of fantasies, but perhaps most explicitly at the end of Lloyd Alexander’s The High King (1968), where Taran is informed that he was only ever a collection of “ifs.” In fantasy sequences such as The Belgariad, Assassin’s Apprentice and its sequels, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and many others, there is an overwhelming sense of this predictive narrative shaping the text, of the book of riddle interpreted only in the light of the successful conclusion. Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), which I shall otherwise be considering predominantly as an immersive fantasy, could be read as a reply to Pilgrim’s Progress—and to the classic portal fantasy, as will subsequently emerge, because of its message accept what is and contextualize your evidence; do not rely on only one source. Even anti-quest fantasies such as The Scar seem able only to fight against this structure; with their dead ends and celestial cities rejected, they cannot construct anything else.

      The assumptions that “the past” is unarguable, that it just is, and that “knowledge” is to be rediscovered rather than generated, has narrative consequences. Binabik, the historian-mage of Tad Williams’s Dragonbone Chair (1988), assumes that in order to learn anything, he must return to the archives for research. Robin Hobb’s Assassin sequence is structured within the writing of a history that depends for its backstory on material found in other, written histories. Each chapter begins with a memoir not dissimilar to the Venerable Bede’s history: recollection and gossip masquerading as an accurate description of the past. The argument is circular, but nonetheless valid; yet the consequence for the author is that in order to preserve this sense, any history narrated must be done so in an authoritative fashion. The moment one introduces argument, one also introduces research and experimentation: portal-quest fantasies are full of learned people, who have read many books. Knowledge is fixed and it is recursive, and in this it demonstrates the peculiar and specific Christian heritage of the modern portal-quest fantasy. As Northrop Frye wrote, “How do we know that the Gospel story is true? Because it confirms the prophecies of the Old Testament. But how do we know that the Old Testament prophecies are true? Because they are confirmed by the Gospel story. Evidence, so called, is bounced back and forth between the testaments like a tennis ball” (Code 78). This circularity creates a reductiveness that utterly undermines any real notion of learning in the portal fantasy and has led me to muse on what a truly Jewish fantasy—with all the argument endemic to my religion—might look like. Peter David’s Sir Apropos of Nothing (2001), whose sidekick refuses his predestined role, who spends much of the time raging at fate, and who frequently finds his achievements unapplauded, is one candidate.

      But to get back on track, this one element, the insistence of the fixedness of history and of learning, divides quest fantasy from immersive fantasy. Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000) can make room for the experimental method (as, interestingly, can the later and more immersive Discworld novels) but The Scar, also by Miéville, must send people looking for a lost book and a lost scientist. Very occasionally, there is an understanding displayed that history cannot be written and preserved with fixative. Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner’s The Fall of the Kings (2002) is a book about the writing of history, whose protagonist is a scholar who wishes to return to the documents, to reconstruct history from source materials, and to argue with the belief of a fixed past, a found narrative. But the tale betrays the reader and the protagonist: at the end, history is again “found,” the past revealed to us through dreams and through magic, rendering the research pointless and restoring “the past” to its rightful place above mere history. The historian’s craft is swapped for the club-story narrative, fully hermetic.

      The nature of the club story is that it valorizes the control of the narrator. This one factor may help to explain why, although many quest fantasies claim to be about a remaking of the world, few can be considered genuine instauration fantasies. A contributing factor is the portal-quest fantasies’ denial of argument with the universe. It is a truism that fiction is about conflict, but in the portal-quest fantasies the possibilities for such conflict are limited by the ideological narrative that posits the world, as painted, as true. Consequently, it is this closed narrative that restricts the plot possibilities for most quest and portal novels. If multiple interpretations are to be denied, if the narrative is to be hermetic, then the novel becomes locked in the patterns that Clute observed in