Rhetorics of Fantasy. Farah Mendlesohn

impression, although writing with greater delicacy. While his descriptions of swordplay match those by Tolkien of landscape, his attention is on the beauty—and hence internal morality—of the action: “The Mouser made a very small parry in carte so that the thrust of the bravo from the east went past his left side by only a hair’s breadth. He instantly riposted. His adversary, desperately springing back, parried in turn in carte. Hardly slowing, the tip of the Mouser’s long, slim sword dropped under that parry with the delicacy of a princess curtseying and then leaped forward and a little upward” (“Ill-Met in Lankhmar” 9). Infusing the text is the sense that little can be done without emotion. Although more sparing with his adjectives than later imitators, Leiber allows Fafhrd to respond “gruffly, at the same time frantically” (151). Attention to action and emotion is much more specific, is much more a focus for the reader’s attention than what we usually see in the portal and quest narratives. I do not consider it a coincidence that it is Sam for whom Tolkien writes these moments. He is the character most of the world and most physically engaged with it. Lewis is even coyer than Tolkien. Even when he presents action, there is no shift to the action adventure style with its emphasis on wild emotions and forceful movements. Instead, action is simply “a horrible, confused moment like something in a nightmare” (122).

      But what are the consequences in all of this vis-à-vis the position of the reader? Lewis, the writer of an acknowledged portal fantasy, keeps the reader almost continually on the outside of the action. His double distancing of feelings and of action remind the reader that these events happened some time ago. If we are in danger of forgetting it, Lewis breaks the spell by reminding us of the differences between Narnia and our world, a technique that may be one of the distinctions between the true portal fantasy and the classic quest fantasy. Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996), a recent full portal fantasy, uses a similar technique, creating dissonance quite deliberately by overlaying the fantasy world on the familiar diagram of the London Underground system. We are never fully in the other world. In contrast Tolkien uses a range of tones to create the effect of embedded realities and to convince us that we are in a fully real otherworld, in which there is no door to elsewhere. When Sam breaks the fantasy with his pragmatism, we are thrown back a step into the Shire, not into our own world, a Shire built by history and narrative. When the rolling rhetoric of Elrond, or Aragorn, or Gandalf becomes too much, one or another will launch into a story that both deepens the tale and—by its use of the oral narrative—pulls us to the fireside with the other listeners. Crucially, while we are capable of moving between the parties, we only ever know as much as we have been told. The degree to which this process is compelling is dependent in part on the extent to which both speakers seal the internal narratives from challenge by a continual reminder that the senior narrators are worthy of trust.

       The Modern Era: Brooks and Donaldson to the 1990s

      The two writers who most thoroughly articulated the pattern for quest and portal fantasies for the post-Tolkien era are Terry Brooks and Stephen Donaldson. The Sword of Shannara (1977) and Lord Foul’s Bane (1977), are contemporaries. With the exception of Lord of the Rings, most fantasies prior to 1977 were short to mid-length books. After Brooks and Donaldson, the portal and quest genre would begin to sprawl. This is not a coincidence. Although very different writers, each homed in on certain aspects of Tolkien’s technique in such a way as to emphasize reader positioning, and to ensure the length of the book. What Tolkien does, by creating both world and landscape as character, may be impossible to do in a short book (although, as we shall see when we consider immersion and liminal fantasies, there are other ways in which these elements can be constructed). Brooks and Donaldson each attempt the same thing, although with quite different effects and degrees of success.

      Prior to 1977, the fantasy genre was popularly represented by two types: the stylists (Beagle, Anderson, Harrison, Lindsay, and so forth.) and the adventure writers (Burroughs, De Camp, Howard). In 1977 a new third type of writer entered the fray: the romance writer. Of these three categories of fantasies, romance is the most inherently deterministic, in that the structure of the plot is intrinsic to its definition. The other aspect of romance is one of style: emotion is writ, not sensed; action is only a vehicle for emotion and reflection upon emotion. We have seen hints of this in Howard and Leiber, and even occasionally in Tolkien, but as Brooks and Donaldson influenced the genre, this stylistic quirk would come to play a particular part in the positioning of the reader.

      Even though The Sword of Shannara is horribly overwritten (“was dumbfounded,” was “incredulous” that someone knew the way; adjectives are piled upon adjectives), what is immediately evident, and rather disconcerting, is that from the very beginning Flick, the protagonist, is a stranger in his own land. Nothing is taken for granted, everything is described in minute detail. For example, “Because he had traveled this same route a hundred times, the young man noticed immediately the unusual stillness that seemed to have captivated the entire valley this evening” (2).²⁴ Immediately the world is new to both him and us, even though it is new only in terms of what he is accustomed to.

      This sense of the newness of discovery is extended to character and to the world. Brooks extends a technique that will permeate modern quest and portal fantasies: the reverie. Shea, Flick’s adopted brother, is introduced to us through Shea’s own internal reverie (20–21). The effect of the many reveries is that the characters are tourists in their own mind. Another example: “Menion also knew that he was not a part of this adventure for the sake of friendship alone. Flick had been right about that. Even now he was unsure exactly why he had been persuaded to undertake this journey. He knew he was less than a Prince of Leah should be. He knew that his interest in people had not been deep enough, and he had never really wanted to know them” (124). The effect is peculiar. It is intended to draw us into the mind of the character; instead, it reinforces the sense that we are tied companions. This is not real internal dialogue that is fragmented, or flashbacks that are confused, but rather Menion sitting with us, explaining to us his concerns. Reverie and self-contemplation break the immersion.

      Self-contemplation is one aspect of the romance of adventure that Brooks inserts into the telling of the tale. The use of hyperbole in the description of action is the other. Where Leiber regarded adventure as an aspect of the baroque trappings of his world, for Brooks it is a source of emotive imagery, too often actually substituting for emotion: “But for the second time the hopelessly numbed humans were saved, this time from complete madness, as the powerful will of Allanon broke through the crazed sound to cloak them with protective reassurance.… The men stumbled mechanically through the heavy darkness of the tunnel, their minds groping at the safety line of coherence and calm that the Druid held out to them” (259). Because action is drawn in this highly emotive language²⁵ (each emotion is visited, much as each place on the map or in history is visited) there is no room to show emotional growth (plus the little problem of downloads substituting for phatic discourse of affirmation). So we have to be told: “Flick had changed considerably since his first meeting with Allanon weeks earlier in Shady Vale, developing an inner strength and maturity and confidence in himself he had never believed himself capable of sustaining” (541). I am amused to note that this approach is recorded by Bakhtin as one of the strengths of Dostoevsky’s writing.²⁶

      The same effect is seen in the world-building. All necessary description is delivered by the wizard (Allanon) to the naive and ignorant Shea, who relies entirely on that conspiracy of companionship to which I have already referred (24–25).²⁷ Allanon thoroughly usurps the role of narrator-focalizer. Unlike Tolkien, however, Brooks does not use history to create a frame world that makes his fantasy world more real. Instead, history becomes a series of clues that thins the world by making the present less real than the past that must be fulfilled—the classic structure of Christian eschatology.

      Although Brooks’s protagonists explore their land, what they mainly explore is their own inner landscape, hence the use of reverie to indicate change and development in the plot. Donaldson, a more subtle writer, makes the same connection, but here the protagonist and the land are much more self-consciously and intimately linked. Donaldson writes fantasy as “one long wild discharge of energy that seemed to create the landscape of the earth out of nothingness by the sheer force of its brilliance” (4). Our