Rhetorics of Fantasy. Farah Mendlesohn

fantastic on the soul should be the heart of the matter and our attention directed to it. The result is that the adventures often seem weak and almost irrelevant. When Maskull fights Crimtyphon, the whole is rushed, made small of. The “duel of wills” lasts only one paragraph (102). This is neither heroic or adventure fantasy.

      Similar issues are at stake with Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Of the three novels, Carroll’s work is clearest that it is the portal and the space beyond that is of intrinsic interest, and this emphasis is reflected in the confidence of tone with which the tale is delivered. To begin with, the portal is both a passage and a space. When Alice falls through the rabbit hole, it is lined with cupboards and shelves. The transition is not instant but is to be explored as much as other places. The second Alice book, however, is composed almost wholly of Alice moving into, assessing, and moving beyond a place/incident. Each time the mise-en-scène is described, Alice engages with it, but in the absence of a task, she then chooses to leave it behind. This form of encounter is quite different from most portal and quest fantasies, where such moves necessitate that tasks be performed, but markedly similar in that the emphasis is on place rather than an adventure, a happening. As with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, it reinforces the notion that the heart of the portal fantasy is always the land and not the adventure.

      Perhaps the strangest aspect of the Alice books (in terms of their rhetoric) is that Alice proceeds as if she understands the world around her. In a reversal of the usual structure, Alice understands the rules of society and seeks to implement them, coming unstuck because those around her do not seem to understand them, while very superficially implementing them. Alice imposes herself on fantasyland, anticipating while puncturing the straight-faced “stranger/savior” politics of modern portal fantasies. The most obvious example is the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, to which Alice invites herself, although she knows this to be rude, while condemning the party for being unwelcoming. Despite the chaos, Alice does not act as a stranger in the world in quite the way we expect in a portal fantasy. Crucially, however, there is nothing she needs to find out, no place she needs to go, or quest to achieve. The result is that she asks relatively few questions. And when she does question, it is usually about the nature of the one she confronts who is equally interested in her. A question we might ask of Wonderland (as indeed Alice asks it in Looking Glass) is just whose adventure this is. It is clear from the balanced nature of interrogations between Alice and the caterpillar, Alice and the pigeon, and Alice and the Cat, that they each regard this as their adventure, and Alice merely someone they have met on the way.

      Before leaving the Alice books, it should be noted that although the entrance to the rabbit hole does not signal a shift in Carroll’s style—we might argue that this is because Alice is already asleep, is already in the fantasy—at the end of the book there is a very obvious break. Forced back into reality, into the frame world, Carroll opts for reverie. It is quite possible to regard this as a slippage into the conventions of the time, the rather sentimental tone adopted toward children that saw them all as potential adults, and childhood as a charmed rather than a fantastical time. Yet the reverie alerts us to something: in creating Alice, Carroll opted for an ironic macrorealism, in which the brutality of society is made fantastical as the language of society is revealed to be brutal. That refreshing tone is crucial to the creation of an unquestioned fantasy—which may suggest that Wonderland, for all the presence of that rabbit hole, is a precursor not to the portal fantasy but to the immersive.

      As I write, I am increasingly convinced that the primary character in the portal fantasy is the land. In Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) we can see this element emerging. Baum understood that the fantastic can be intensified if contrasted with the most mundane Real possible. Attebery writes: “Baum is doing what a painter does when he paints a large, flat, colorless area on a canvas: he is creating negative space which acts to make any positive design all the more vivid. Kansas is gray, so we begin to think about color. It is flat, so we long for contour. It is vast so we wish for something on a human scale.… Before the paragraph is done, we have been given, by contraries, a picture of Oz” (Tradition 84). This effect is intensified because in that very first (Kansas) segment, what is perhaps most noticeable is that the text is all description. There are only two lines of conversation, in which Dorothy is commanded to take refuge from the cyclone. The bleakness of Kansas is in part the absence of sound, paralleling that absence in the landscape. Dorothy’s voice is a shock as much for being a voice as it is for its merry tone, but it is also a reminder that Kansas is a set of ideas as well as a place, and that Dorothy will be taking it with her.

      Once in Oz, however, conversation becomes the crux of the dynamic. Questions drive the narrative, and give rise to narrative. Speech in Oz is relatively egalitarian: one cannot tell the status of someone from the use of direct or reported speech (although Attebery points out that it is encoded in who is described and in what detail (Tradition 100).¹⁹ Reported speech is used only to relate something that we have already seen happen. In this book there is very little introspection from Dorothy; only occasionally does she feel the need to relate her tale or her emotions/reactions.²⁰ In contrast, all the characters she encounters introduces themselves with a tale, not of where they are going or what they are doing, but of who they are. Dorothy’s narrative position, her domination of the story, comes in part from the conversational offerings of those wishing to make her acquaintance. There are four actors here, but only one is interpreting the world for us, even though the other three interpret the world for her.

      Like Alice, Voyage to Arcturus, and Lilith, the book is a series of sequential movements through a landscape in which it is the landscape and its effects, rather than an adventure per se, that fascinates. As Attebery has pointed out, the journey itself is the plot (Tradition 87). The adventures are often the weakest part of the book—why use mice to pull a truck that the woodman and the scarecrow could pull?—because they are the elements closest to fairy tale. This form of fantasy, in which the adventures are often discrete and are added to until the author decides it is time to move to an ending, or a change of direction, I term a “bracelet” fantasy. Many of the links/adventures could simply be removed without fundamentally altering the tale.

      What is most interesting about this book is that although landscape is the center of the book’s wonders, Dorothy is oddly uncurious and takes much of it for granted. Take, for example, the Emerald City, where she does not question the use of the spectacles (117–118). It is the omnipresent narrator who notices the lack of animals (122); Dorothy herself does not comment upon it. Similarly she does not comment on the throne room, the narrator does (126). Her discovery of the Tin Woodman (54) shows little astonishment at the enchantment. Dorothy is happy to accept what she is told of the world by those she meets, she does not herself interrogate it. Dorothy accepts the fantastic while marveling at the colors and brightnesses (much, perhaps, as the magic of the storefront window was accepted while simultaneously a source of marvel). As we see more than Dorothy inquires about, or demonstrates curiosity for, we are not positioned as Dorothy’s companion per se. We are frequently taken into an immersive fantasy, as we wonder at things she accepts. One explanation for this is that Dorothy has already traversed one portal, in moving from an eastern city to Kansas.²¹ She is practiced at dealing with the unknown. Alternatively, this story is simply a very unusual portal fantasy, one that shifts the reader position from continually requiring explanation through the senses of the naive protagonist, to shifting through those senses in order to interpret what the heroine herself takes for granted.

       Tolkien and Lewis

      The classic quest fantasy, as I now envisage it, was set into its “final” form by J. R. R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) codified much of how the quest fantasy deals with landscape, with character, with the isolation of the protagonists into the club-story narrative and with reader positioning. More or less contemporaneous with The Lord of the Rings was the publication of the first in the Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), a classic portal fantasy. These novels set the pattern for what Clute describes as the full fantasy: the novels presume a thinned world, one in which wrongness already exists—a motif absent from Lilith or Wonderland but already