Rhetorics of Fantasy. Farah Mendlesohn

God; but John, The River of the water of life” (90). Omniscience is asserted, and with it the fantasy is ruptured: omniscience as a vehicle for explanation, proves hostile to the portal-quest fantasy.

      Although there are two centuries between Bunyan and George Mac-Donald, Lilith (1895) is actually less certain in its form. Although a portal fantasy, the portal structure of Lilith is unsupported by the narrative tone. An example of a portal novel written before the conventions of the form were settled, in its experimentation with register and with focalization, Lilith reveals patterns we can identify in its successors.

      Lilith repeatedly veers between the Gothic style, as commonly found in the intrusion fantasy or the liminal fantasy, and the detailed creation and description of landscape and people that is more common to the portal fantasy. The reader is forced into a variety of positionings vis-à-vis the text and the protagonist. The use of the Gothic, of estrangement and intrusion in the frame-world sections of Lilith, is disruptive to the acceptance of the otherworld. It makes strange the familiar, denying the increasing comfort usually found as we proceed through the tale, and runs contrary to the balance that is normally associated with the portal fantasy. The otherworld of the portal fantasy relies on the contrast with the frame world, on the world from which we begin the adventure, an understanding manipulated by authors such as Diana Wynne Jones and Barbara Hambly.¹⁶ Instead MacDonald makes the present world strange.

      We begin Lilith in an environment that is unfamiliar to us but should be familiar to the protagonist: his family home. We should be in a fully immersed, taken-for-granted setting that we decode from the cues and sensibilities of the protagonist. Instead, the setting is made strange by a process of deliberate defamiliarization in which the protagonist, to bring us into his tale, describes in detail the library that is at the heart of his story, leaving vague the conformations of the house itself. It becomes an edifice, more complex in its interior than its facade. Nothing is taken for granted, and the result of this excessive detail, as in a medieval painting, is a distortion of perspective that pushes us outside the fantastic realm, making of us audience.

      In the introductory sections of the book, the disruption is portrayed initially as nebulous. It is a sense, a feeling: “The garret at the top of it pervaded the whole house! It sat upon it, threatening to crush me out of it! The brooding brain of the building, it was full of mysterious dwellers, one or other of whom might any moment appear in the library where I sat!” (17). The alliteration, the emphasis on movement, on the activity of the presence, combine to create a sense of the protagonist under attack. This sense is increased by his focus on his own reactions: “The mere words, however, woke in me feelings which to describe was, from their strangeness, impossible” (18). Elsewhere in the novel, when the focus becomes exploration, the role of emotion is diminished; here, however, the emphasis is on regaining control of the present world. The fantastic is signaled by a loss of that control rather than, as in the classic portal fantasy and in later sections of the text, the movement through the fantastic.

      If Lilith contained but a single portal, the effect of this might be minimal: once one had left the frame world, the rhetoric of the portal fantasy would take over and the sense that the frame world was itself a fantastic place might recede. But Lilith is multiply portalled, so that we are shuttled between fantastical worlds narrated in different modes. The second chapter offers an example of this in the exploratory, complex neorealism—the making real through intense description of the landscape—of the portal fantasy in which the protagonist describes his landscape, a wood of tall, slender pine trees: “I spied before me something with a shine, standing between two of the stems. It had no colour, but was like the translucent trembling of the hot air that rises, in a radiant summer noon, from the sun-baked ground, vibrant like the smitten chords of a musical instrument” (16).

      Then, and almost immediately, the protagonist is rejected, thrown back into his own world, a world no longer impervious to the fantastic, but penetrated and made unsafe by its presence: “Terror seized me, and I fled. Outside the chamber the wide garret spaces had an uncanny look. They seemed to have long been waiting for something; it had come, and they were waiting again! A shudder went through me on the winding stair: the house had become strange to me!” (16–17). The rendering of the frame world as uncanny, means that MacDonald must struggle harder to make his other world fantastical. He cannot rely on the contrast of realism and fantasy.

      Because the uncanny is a mode focused on emotion—the fantasy as expressed experience—the first person is a logical choice of focalization. In Lilith (particularly prior to the revelation that the raven is in fact Adam) the first person is deployed to confuse and to place a barrier between ourselves and the fantasy world. The portal-quest genre as it develops will demand the illusion that the protagonist ride with the reader by his side, decode and understand the fantasy world in which they exist. But the spiral structure of Lilith, its multiple portals and frequent “return to start,” and its insistence on the creation of the fantastic in terms of emotional response, makes the focalization much clearer: we are forced to acknowledge that we are mere recipients of the tale.

      What we are privy to is recorded emotion: we can feel only what Vane says he feels. This is first person narrated. To make an obvious point, it cannot be clear whether this is a reliable or unreliable narration. On the one hand, what is the point of an unreliable narrator? On the other, it is made clear that Vane does not understand and that he himself cannot express everything he sees and is aware of this. The raven assures Vane—duplicitously—that he can give no guidance because “you and I use the same words with different meanings. We are often unable to tell people what they need to know, because they want to know something else, and would therefore only misunderstand what we said” (58–59). This concept, unsurprisingly, structures the novel, but it does so by convincing us of the incompetence of the narrator who cannot understand and therefore must trust, and of the incomprehensibility of the world—a notion at fundamental variance to the ideology of any text of exploration. At the conclusion of Lilith, we really know very little more of this fantasy world than we did at the start.

      The outright statement of confusion and meaninglessness fractures the creation of the otherworld and prevents the accretion of familiarity associated with the modern portal fantasy. Vane is continually subjected to riddles and told that his judgment is valueless.¹⁷ The process of decoding is denied: “it involves a constant struggle to say what cannot be said with even an approach to precision, the things recorded being, in their nature and in that of the creatures concerned in them, so inexpressibly different from any possible events of this economy, that I can present them only by giving, in the forms and language of life in this world, the modes in which they affected me—not the things themselves, but the feelings they woke in me. Even this much, however, I do with a continuous and abiding sense of failure” (60–61).

      The emphasis is on the emotional response. Instead of mimesis, we receive allusion. Modern portal fantasies rely on the false belief that the reader interprets the world, but here MacDonald denies this: we cannot see what our narrator sees. We can only truly understand the world either through simile (all is described in likenesses, for example, “a head as big as a polar bear”), or in its effect upon him (“I dared not turn my eyes from them”; “I strove to keep my heart above the waters of fear” [64]), or through his reactions. The emphasis in this book is less on what passes or is passed through, but on how the protagonist feels about these movements. There are exceptions but they are oddly inserted into metastories (such as Vane’s encounters with the skeletons), moments when Vane watches an event and tells it, not as part of his experience, but almost as a fireside tale.¹⁸

      In later portal-quest fantasies, although the guide may be mysterious, he is usually comforting, offering guidance and wisdom. But in the first part of Lilith, Mr. Raven offers not guidance but disquiet and disorientation. He is an intruding alien who challenges the reality of the world. When he digs for a worm and it turns to a butterfly, he challenges what is and where is the fantastical. He is the alien to be met and decoded, to be revealed as Adam in the last section of the book. This unmasking is his undoing; he ceases to perform as a portal for dissonance and disruption from the moment that his identity becomes clear. The shift from disrupter to unreliable