Rhetorics of Fantasy. Farah Mendlesohn

Chapter 1

       The Portal-Quest Fantasy

      In both portal and quest fantasies, a character leaves her familiar surroundings and passes through a portal into an unknown place. Although portal fantasies do not have to be quest fantasies the overwhelming majority are, and the rhetorical position taken by the author/narrator is consistent.

      The position of the reader in the quest and portal fantasy is one of companion-audience, tied to the protagonist, and dependent upon the protagonist for explanation and decoding (see also Branham, who makes the same connection). This reader position is quite different from the one we shall see in the immersive fantasy: there the implied reader, although dependent on the protagonist’s absorption of sight and sounds, is not required to accept his or her narrative. One way to distinguish the two, is that despite the illusion of presence (the tales are usually told in the third person) the listener is represented as if present at the telling of a tale. Although I hesitate to describe the position constructed in the portal-quest fantasy as infantilizing—some of the novels I shall discuss demand significant intellectual commitment—it is perhaps not coincidental that the classic portal tale is more common in children’s fantasy than in that ostensibly written for the adult market.

      As Clute defines portals (Encyclopedia 776), they litter the world of the fantastic, marking the transition between this world and another; from our time to another time; from youth to adulthood. The most familiar and archetypal portal fantasy in the United Kingdom is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), while in the United States the Oz tales are perhaps better known.¹ In both, and crucially, the fantastic is on the other side and does not leak. Nonetheless, there are differences in the placement of the protagonist, and in the role the elements of transition and exploration play. The extent to which the mode of narrative shifts as we traverse the portal from the frame world to the other world influences the degree to which we shall settle into the fantasy world and accept it as both fantasy and as “real.” Different authors have handled the transition in different ways, and in the early period of the development of this form of fantasy there was little consensus.

      Modern quest and portal fantasies rely upon very similar narrative strategies because each assume the same two movements: transition and exploration. The portal fantasy is about entry, transition, and exploration, and much quest fantasy, for all we might initially assume that it is immersive (that is, fully in and of its world), adopts the structure and rhetorical strategies of the portal fantasy: it denies the taken for granted and positions both protagonist and reader as naive. Characteristically the quest fantasy protagonist goes from a mundane life, in which the fantastic, if she is aware of it, is very distant and unknown (or at least unavailable to the protagonist) to direct contact with the fantastic through which she transitions, exploring the world until she or those around her are knowledgeable enough to negotiate with the world via the personal manipulation of the fantastic realm. There is thus little difference between Belgarion in David Eddings’s Pawn of Prophecy (1982), who only discovers his magic when he leaves his village, and Andrew Carr, in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s rationalized fantasy² The Spell Sword (1974), who discovers his telepathy on the world of Darkover.

      Although individuals may cross both ways, the fantastic does not. Such an effect would move the fantasy into the category of intrusion, which (as I shall discuss in chapter 3) uses a very different grammar and tone. Very occasionally both categories may occur in the same book, but while immersive fantasies may contain intrusion, it is relatively rare for portal-quest fantasies to do so. One of the few crossovers are the Harry Potter novels, which typically begin as intrusion fantasies—the abrupt arrival of the owls in Privet Drive in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998), causing chaos and disturbance—but very rapidly transmute into almost archetypal portal fantasies, reliant on elaborate description and continual new imaginings.

      Despite its reputation as a “full secondary world,” the most familiar quest fantasy, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, follows the structure outlined: Frodo moves from a small, safe, and understood world into the wild, unfamiliar world of Middle-Earth. It is The Silmarillion, the book told from within the world, about people who know their world, that is the immersive fantasy. And as The Lord of the Rings (1956) contains within it the portal from the Shire into the big wide world, so The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), and many of their portal fantasy successors contain the journey and the goal of the quest narratives.

      Typically, the quest or portal fantasy begins with a sense of stability that is revealed to be the stability of a thinned land—Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story (1979) is the most explicit³—and concludes with restoration rather than instauration (the making over of the world). Most portal-quest fantasies associate the king with the well-being of the land,⁴ and the condition of the land with the morality of the place. These thematic elements may seem coincidental, but they serve to structure the ideology of a narrative that is directive and coercive, and that narrows the possibilities for a subversive reading.

      The origins of the quest fantasy, if not strictly speaking the portal fantasy, lie in epic, in the Bible, in the Arthurian romances, and in fairy tales. From the epic, portal and quest fantasies draw a certain unity of action, the sense that we follow characters through their beginning, middle, and end. This unity holds even where there are numerous characters. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time sequence (1990 to present) rapidly disperses its cast, but we follow each character through their adventures in turn. The disunity of narrative is illusory; while it may appear to challenge the primacy of the single hero in the epic, in actuality this device operates to create linked epic narratives. The plot—while containing many convolutions—retains the essential simplicity of the epic. It is perhaps worth noting that of my suggested categories only the plots of portal-quest fantasies and intrusion fantasies seem indicated by their form.

      Toohey suggests that epic, like tragedy, should contain reversal, recognition, and calamity, a structure that is instantly identifiable in the modern, three-volume quest fantasy and that often lurks in the background of the portal fantasy, as do the elements of glorification and nostalgia. Similarly, chronicle epics usually concentrate on the fortunes of a city or a region (Toohey 1–5), which in the modern fantasy may be transmuted into the land. The classic city epic is relatively uncommon in modern fantasy, although K. J. Parker’s Colours in the Steel (1998; discussed in chapter 2) is precisely an account of the rise and fall-through-hubris of a city-state.

      From epic, and from its descendants, the portal-quest fantasies have drawn ideas of sequenced adventures, journeys as transition, and the understanding that there is a destiny to follow.⁵ But it is in the New Testament and from later Christian writings that we find the notion of a portal: what else is a posthumous heaven (a notion almost completely absent from the Old Testament) other than the ultimate in portals? But while portal and quest fantasies have been heavily influenced by these taproots, the transition is neither seamless nor without consequence.

      Most modern quest fantasies are not intended to be directly allegorical, yet they all seem to be underpinned by an assumption embedded in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678): that a quest is a process, in which the object sought may or may not be a mere token of reward. The real reward is moral growth and/or admission into the kingdom, or redemption (although the latter, as in the Celestial City of Pilgrim’s Progress, may also be the object sought). The process of the journey is then shaped by a metaphorized and moral geography—the physical delineation of what Attebery describes as a “sphere of significance” (Tradition 13)—that in the twentieth century mutates into the elaborate and moralized cartography of genre fantasy. The journeyman succeeds or fails to the extent he listens to those wiser or more knowledgeable than him, whether these be spiritual, fantastical, or human guides. It is of course quite possible to argue that the connection between