Rhetorics of Fantasy. Farah Mendlesohn

content is reflected in the rhetorical structure that Hambly deploys. Only those accounts of the world that are most unreliable, most despicable, are delivered as a closed narrative, whether an account of the disappearance of magic (11) or von Rath asserting the inferiority of women (68). It is not a coincidence Hambly has Rhion reject the “rediscovered” scholarship of past ages with its claim to be copied from yet older documents: “This was a usual claim made by occult societies, in Rhion’s world as well as this one” (134). Nor that the coven consists of men who will not listen either to Rhion or to each other: books and men are each engaged in constructing and delivering their own sealed narrative, impervious to experimentation or to reason. Both elements are usually critical to the success of the portal fantasy. Here, dismantling them becomes the quest.

      Samuel R. Delany’s Neveryóna (1983) begins with a dragon flight; it follows a young girl’s adventures, but at the end leaves her neither with a quest achieved nor returning home. But despite this, and although his appendix B rather undermines my case—Delany states that he took the structure from Frank Romeo’s Bye Bye Love—there is a rather startling resemblance to the structure of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,³³ starting with Pryn’s ride on the dragon, a veritable whirlwind: “Flying, she saw the crazy tilting mountains rise by her, the turning clouds above her, the rocking green, the green-licked rock” (6). Pryn leaves behind her aunt, in a place of poverty, but thinks about her constantly. Being the person her aunt brought her up to be is at least part of the reason for her journey. She is inquisitive and self-centered, much as her aunt was in her obsession with developing the loom. As desperate as she is to leave, there remains a sense of “There is no place like home.”

      Once Pryn arrives in the world, the action seems to take place over a year. And yet, as with Dorothy, there is very little development of Pryn (what happens to the pregnancy?); we actually learn very little about her. Instead, she becomes the vehicle through which we ride through the fantasy. The world is narrated to Pryn in much the way it is narrated to Dorothy. There is one solitary moment where we might be seeing the world through an omniscience narrator: in chapter 8, “Of Models, Mystery Moonlight, and Authority,” Madame Keyne, and Jade are talking in the garden. For nine pages (159–168) it seems as if we see them separately from Pryn. Then:

      Somewhere a branch fell, off in the bushes …

      Certainly it was no more than a branch.

      But it made Pryn pull sharply back from the window’s edge. (166)

      It has been an illusion. Even in this private moment, we have seen the world through Pryn’s eyes.

      But Delany is not using his protagonist to create an impermeable narrative. Neveryóna, like Oz, is a bracelet tale, each section linked at the beginning and end but otherwise with relatively little overlap: each section is a discrete adventure and the incidents are frequently less important that the understanding of the world that is communicated. This need to understand the world is perhaps clearest in chapter 3, “Of Roads, Real Cities, Streets and Strangers,” in which Pryn is taken around the city by Gorgik. His narrative of the city takes up two-thirds of an approximately fourteen thousand–word chapter. Yet what disturbs the reader is the ease with which Pryn moves from one truth to another. She is always slightly distrustful: what do each of the free liminals want from one another? She specifically breaks the rule that says the protagonist of the quest narrative must trust those who interpret the world on her behalf. But equally, the links of the bracelet are constructed of those moments when she carries the desires of each person encountered over into the next sequence.

      The critique of the quest narrative that structures the book. Neveryóna is a discussion of the structures of narrative and the epistemological conventions of fantasy. It begins when Pryn first meets the storyteller at the end of the dragon flight. The storyteller’s tale is polysemic, and shaped by this polysemy. What is told is mutable. And the tale is understood, not because it is right, or prophetic, or handed down from an authority, but because it is constructed. We are made to understand that neither storytelling nor oral traditions are natural; they are learned, and the rolling phrases of the high oral narrative, the understanding of the importance of reader response, is as yet uncoded in Neveryóna: “You want to know the outcome—I think it’s very important to alert your listeners to the progress of their own reactions. I can foresee a time, after lots more tales have been told, when that won’t be necessary. But for now it’s a must” (15). Pryn’s reactions are shaped in part by the rudimentary nature of storytelling. We may be able to judge her choices, but that is because, as we are told, “it was all a very long time ago, so that many tales that have nudged you to such a reading had not yet been written” (56).

      There is also an issue of ownership of the tale: in a market that is, arguably, driven by reader demand for sequels and continued worlds, Pryn considers, “it was the teller’s tale; the teller ought to know what happened in it, for all her multiple versions” (15). This attitude carries over to Pryn’s reception of Gorgik’s guided tour. She accepts the version of the city he narrates for her, yet notes: “Occasionally the huge slave’s monologue had seemed to coincide with the real market they walked through; more times than not, however, it seemed to exist on quite another level” (55). Gorgik sees a promising young musician, pretty and talented, where Pryn sees a young woman, shabby, ill-kempt and not quite in touch with the world. Both Gorgik and Pryn are making story, but—atypically for quest fantasies—Gorgik’s authority and role as a leader/counselor does not give him the authority to force his story upon Pryn; it is her freedom to resist that allows her to apparently switch sides at various points in the tale. She does not. It is rather that others view her as a pawn, to be engaged and captured; in Carroll’s terms, she is in fact a Queen, self-directed and ultimately only on her own side.

      In a pastiche of the quest tale, many of Pryn’s tales are “abbreviated” into a lengthy narrative of what might have been told in another kind of tale:

      Were this another story, what we have told of Pryn’s adventures till now might well have been elided or omitted altogether as unbelievable or, at any rate, as uncharacteristic. In that other story Pryn’s next few weeks might easily have filled the bulk of these pages.

      Such pages would tell of a dawn’s waking in the public park.… They would describe the two young women Pryn met working there [in the market] who dissuaded her from her plan for the next day: to go to the New Market and ask for a job as a bucket carrier. (188)³⁴

      Instead of listening to Pryn’s experience day by day, we are allowed, for a while, to have been there, to have seen it happen. The diegetic ellipsis is used here to divide the Real from the Unreal, the true fantasy from the mundane life; the unity of the epic is broken. Delany does not tie us to his character with handcuffs, but he acknowledges the presence of such detail in other such novels. At the same time, the structure offers another function. Given that Delany’s historical narratives of invention are always questioned and permeable, in that first short paragraph, and others like it, he builds his world out of denial. This is not this kind of story, it is another.

      The epistemological ideologies of fantasy are challenged and challenged repeatedly in Neveryóna (as they will also be in The Scar). The storyteller claims to have invented a syllabary (9); Belham and Venn seem, between them, to have invented so much that one comes to wonder if they were indeed contemporaneous geniuses, or if a variety of inventions have come to bear their mark as a kind of catchall. Yet even that claim is challenged as we hear that this wonder “humankind will know and forget” (153 and again from another speaker on page 306): inventions are repeatedly reinvented, continuously disappear and reappear, so that there may be nothing new in the world. But we also hear that this is a tale told to account for the spread of knowledge. And tales and their telling are a rooted part of the system of knowledge. The making of double soup becomes first magical and then believably a thing of magic. The astrolabe that Pryn carries travels in the opposite direction, to stand first as a tool of mystical power, and later to be denied even the status of tool, or key, map, or coded message. The revealed knowledge endemic to the quest fantasy is denied; the nature of knowledge becomes transmuted. History does not carry