Rhetorics of Fantasy. Farah Mendlesohn

construction of an alien world. As a consequence, it is far more convincing: the village is made fantastic as the intrusion—Thomas Covenant—is isolated and corralled. It is an intrusion fantasy written from the point of view of the monster. As the monster, Covenant knows the world to be strange and therefore can accept almost any strangeness; in forcing himself into the town, he also becomes the pilgrim negotiating the landscape in a way that is replicated later on. His relationship to the place he is in is crucial to the construction of the fantasy, and Thomas Covenant is a stranger in the land—both the frame world and otherworld he enters through the portal. His connection to the Land is written into his body: “The fog and the attar-laden air seemed to weaken Covenant, as if the strength were being absorbed from his blood” (26). As Benjamin Laskar points out, The Chronicles “literalizes the metaphor of the realization of existential dislocation into a sickness or ailment” (411). The care of leprosy depends on discipline and the surrender of the self to routine and ritual, and also to a dependency on authority for both information and care. Covenant subsumes his self into a round of rituals designed to ensure his physical (but not mental) well-being. One cannot but think of the rituals of Gormenghast. Donaldson’s work is successful in part because the construction of leprosy supports the demand of the narrative that we the reader will expect Covenant to have to listen and learn.

      Nevertheless, the requirement that Covenant be the learner is a restriction on the creation of a full world. Having passed through the portal, he is at the mercy of whomever he meets and whatever he is told. Donaldson is cleverer than Brooks, whose sole concession to the problematic is to allow a moment of distrust to enter Shea’s mind.²⁸ Covenant doubts. Doubting is his mythic purpose, and his doubts facilitate the continual loading of information into the mind of the reader. Covenant’s continual denial supports the structure: we might doubt what we are told, but that Covenant doubts is confirmation that we should believe. W. A. Senior places this in a more positive light: “Covenant is the sole source of authority in Lord Foul’s Bane, so narrative tension grows from the narrator’s initial inability to provide any coordinate perspective. Any external criteria or evidence of the Land’s validity would serve only to expunge the necessity for Unbelief and make Covenant into a cantankerous and pitiful cynic, not an epic figure fighting for his life and sanity” (138).

      The result is, in the end, a recapitulation of the self-referential “New Testament” structures I discussed earlier. We are as much tied into a closed narrative as we are when we follow the innocence of Shea. The increasing use of prophecy in quest fantasies, from Brooks and Donaldson onward, is clearly linked to this. Prophecies allow knowledge to be imparted, so that in fact the goal is “known” even though its meaning is not understood (which might also be said about Bunyan’s Celestial City). The hero does not have free will in a narrative driven by prophecy, and which might explain why the moment of recognition (Clute, Encyclopedia 804–805), the point at which the hero realizes his place in the story and loses free will, is usually displayed in snapshots rather than in gradual change. The hero cannot emerge, cannot slowly win the allegiance of colleagues, but must demonstrate fitness in some display; for example, Covenant displaying his white-gold ring. This recognition or analepsis seems vital even where the hero ostensibly wins allegiance through respect. Taran in Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain must still display the right (the wielding of Drynwyn) to prove his kingliness and kingship and fulfill the prophecy. The scene tells us what to think. Typically, in this structure, the moment of recognition is for others rather than for the hero himself.

      The naive hero, however skeptical, ensures that the structure is geared to “show and tell” with the Land as the subject. Donaldson, however, by deliberately acknowledging and exploiting the reader position of the portal and quest fantasy can also offer us a hero who narrates his own moment of recognition, pulling us momentarily into a moment of solipsism: “with a sickening vertiginous twist of insight, he caught a glimpse of Lord Foul’s plan for him, glimpsed what the despiser was doing to him. Here was the killing blow which had lain concealed behind all the machinations” (353). In Lord Foul’s Bane the omniscient narrator seems to be seeing only through Covenant’s eyes, so is perhaps limited-omniscient. This limiting affects both the presentation of the hero and of that which he moves through. In this kind of fiction descriptions must tell us more than we can possibly know because we do not have time to learn about people, nor do we believe that minor characters can change, because they are as much scenery as is a tree. Just as a tree is described, so are people: Lena’s “face bore the signs of that truce; her forehead seemed prematurely lined, and her eyes appeared to open inward on a weary battleground of doubts and uneasy consolations” (69). One consequence of this shorthand is that the characters who surround Covenant do not become real to him. Instead, they are merely information sources: Lena explains hurtloam, Altarian tells stories (80) and, on page 158 and elsewhere, Lena reveals that she has secret knowledge. In part this distancing is because Covenant cannot have proper discussions with other people: they are not real, they are simply devices. The alienation is exaggerated in Lord Foul’s Bane where that unreality is partially the point. The result, however, is to insist that any real sense of Covenant’s alteration comes not through how we see him behave but again through reverie, or through what he tells us of himself: “Of course he could not play the hero in some dream war. He could not forget himself that much; forgetfulness was suicide. Yet he could not escape this dream without passing through it, could not return to reality without awakening” (83). The overall effect, as it was in The Sword of Shannara, is to render the reader as therapist, required to accept this continuing internal analysis.

      W. A. Senior points out, quite rightly, that this structure is prone to exhaustion. How long can a character remain new to a world? Donaldson revives the intensity of the books as he moves further into the sequence, by moving the Illearth Chronicler from the site of a portal fantasy, to the location of immersive fantasy with a fully immersed protagonist (Hile Troy). Just as Donaldson used leprosy as his driving metaphor in the first part, he comes to use “belief” as the controlling paradigm for the sequence as a whole, in neat parallel of form and content:

      the narrative of the entire trilogy falls into three discrete parts, each matched to a book and predicated on the current value of Covenant’s Unbelief as its importance to him wanes: in Lord Foul’s Bane Covenant’s rejection of the Land is total, so the narrative does not diverge from his perception in any way; in The Illearth War his system of Unbelief begins to erode and fully one-third of the events of the Land are narrated from Hile Troy’s point of view in Covenant’s absence; finally, in The Power that Preserves, the narrative in the Land begins without Covenant present and separates into three tracks as Covenant’s Unbelief becomes a moot point, and he ceases to dispute with himself the Land’s reality or unreality. The evolving alteration of perspective within the text confirms, from our exterior understanding, the reality of the Land and concomitantly denies Covenant’s beginning premise of dream.” (Senior 140)

      Having established the formula, we can begin to look at the degree to which authors are able to play with the form. From 1977 onward, quest fantasies in particular came to dominate the bookshelves of many bookstores, to the degree that in many minds, it was thought of as the default form of fantasy. Even the conventional portal fantasy diminished in popularity, while the shift between the mundane world of the quest hero and that of his fantasy world often became more marked. What remains of interest here, however, is the extent to which a number of very fine books were written in this period that, while often stretching the genre in terms of content conventions, continue to show the markers I have been discussing. For example, in Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Summer Tree (1985), which is both a portal and a quest fantasy, Kay deals with the problems of the negotiated fantasy, the stranger in the land phenomenon, by developing one of his characters as a seer. Kim has foreknowledge and familiarity with the world she is in and is thus able to be the competent character of the immersive fantasy: we can see the world through her accumulated understanding rather than riding beside her as she greets it for the first time. However, it also means that Kay can download the history we are going to need through Kim’s initiatory dreams: “And as she was whirled away from that bright vision, she came abruptly face to face with the oldest Dark in his stronghold of Starkadh … and she knew him for Rakoth the Unraveller” (97).

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