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Overview
This sweeping study of fantasy literature offers “new and often surprising readings of works both familiar and obscure. A fine critical work” (Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts).
Transcending arguments over the definition of fantasy literature, Rhetorics of Fantasy introduces a provocative new system of classification for the genre. Drawing on nearly two hundred examples of modern fantasy, author Farah Mendlesohn identifies four categories—portal-quest, immersive, intrusion, and liminal—that arise out of the relationship of the protagonist to the fantasy world. Using these sets, Mendlesohn argues that the author's stylistic decisions are then shaped by the inescapably political demands of the category in which they choose to write.
Each chapter covers at least twenty books in detail, ranging from nineteenth-century fantasy and horror to some of the best works in the contemporary field. Mendlesohn discusses works by more than one hundred authors, including Lloyd Alexander, Peter Beagle, Marion Zimmer Bradley, John Crowley, Stephen R. Donaldson, Stephen King, C. S. Lewis, Gregory Maguire, Robin McKinley, China Miéville, Suniti Namjoshi, Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Sheri S. Tepper, J. R. R. Tolkien, Tad Williams, and many others.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819573919 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/13/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
FARAH MENDLESOHN teaches at Middlesex University, London. She was editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction for six years, and is the author of Diana Wynne Jones and the Children's Fantastical Tradition (2005) and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (2006), winner of a Hugo Award. She is the program director for the World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal in 2009.
Read an Excerpt
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. 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 fantasy 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 explicit — 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, 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, threevolume 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. 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 Pilgrim's Progress and the portal-quest fantasy is tenuous: in Pilgrim's Progress, the pilgrim knows where the Celestial City is, so that it is a journey, rather than a quest; the point is simply to get there through many perils. Yet the same is true of a number of quest fantasies where the goal is to reach the city: Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass (1871) charts a path to the crown that lies at the end of the chessboard; C. S. Lewis's The Last Battle (1956) concludes with a journey to the celestial city, as does — in a more mundane sense — The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), in which the children must reach Caer Paravel. Later books with the same structure include Marion Zimmer Bradley's Thendara House (1983), Sheri S. Tepper's Marianne sequence (1985–89), and Jeff Noon's Vurt (1993), where escape through the portal is the ultimate end of the novel, and the result disappointing. And where it is not true, we should accept that many writers believed themselves to be emulating the structures of much favored books while in reality doing quite the opposite: hundreds of "Tolkienistas" have failed to notice that The Lord of the Rings is not a quest for power, but a journey to destroy power. In any event, the very presence of maps at the front of many fantasies implies that the destination and its meaning are known.
Similarly, many of the differences between the structures laid down by Bunyan and those created in the shared world of the quest fantasy are due to a reworking of expectations and codings to produce a moral rhetoric and moral geography more acceptable to modern tastes. It is commonly assumed that the opposition to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that has emanated from many Christian fundamentalists in the United States centers simply on the use of magic and of the telling of untruths. There is a partial truth in this interpretation today, but the original opposition to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was directed at the highly individualistic morality of the main character. For the generation brought up on the film and modern ideas of American individualism, it is easy to miss the fact that Baum's Dorothy is not a nice child and that the message of the book has little to do with the communitarian values that prevailed in America's Christian heartland at the turn of the century, before the individualism of the West became the dominant discourse of the United States. This is encoded in the journey Dorothy undertakes. Unlike Bunyan's Pilgrim, Dorothy's journeys do not result in her own moral growth — she herself is a representation of a new morality — but in the moral growth of those she influences. She is grace, a concept quite offensive to those who believe that grace can be bestowed only by the Redeemer.
What underpins all of the above is the idea of moral expectation. Fantasy, unlike science fiction, relies on a moral universe: it is less an argument with the universe than a sermon on the way things should be, a belief that the universe should yield to moral precepts. This belief is most true of the portal-quest narratives, and of the intrusion fantasies. But if intrusion fantasies are structured around punishment and the danger of transgression (see chapter 3), the portalquest fantasies are structured around reward and the straight and narrow path. The epic and the traveler's tale are closed narratives. Each demands that we accept the interpretation of the narrator, and the interpretive position of the hero. The hero may argue with the gods, or with the rules of the utopia, but it is assumed that we will accept the paradigms of his argument. In modern fantasy this element is maintained even where, as in A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsey (1920) and The Scar by China Miéville (2002), we are dealing with an anti-quest.
Portal-quest fantasies have other, less visible, taproots. These others have contributed to the fantasies' rhetorical and moral structure and in particular have tended to reinforced this closed narrative. Most significant among these is the club narrative, a cozy discourse that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and that profoundly shaped the portal-quest fantasy in the second half of the twentieth century.
The Club Story is simple enough to describe: it is a tale or tales recounted orally to a group of listeners foregathered in a venue safe from interruption. Its structure is normally twofold: there is the tale told, and encompassing that a frame which introduces the teller of the tale — who may well claim to have himself lived the story he's telling — along with its auditors and the venue. … At all levels of sophistication, the Club Story form enforces our understanding that a tale has been told. (Clute, Conjunctions 39: 421–422)
The last point, the understanding of the completeness of story, is perhaps the most crucial contribution of the club story to the portal-quest fantasy. The story made is one that is bounded by the rules of the club rhetoric. The Canterbury Tales is a club story, and so too, although less obviously, are Pilgrim's Progress, George MacDonald's Lilith (1895), and The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. In each of these cases, a tale is recounted as if it has happened in the past. Elsewhere, the club story is embedded within the frame narrative.
In the club story, the storyteller, whatever his designation, is possessed of two essential qualities: he is uninterruptible and incontestable; and the narrative as it is downloaded is essentially closed. Although not entirely relevant here, it is hard to avoid the acknowledgment that the club story has a gendered origin, and that there are consequences embedded in these foundations. The club narrative is diegetic, a denial of discourse, an assertion of a particular type of Victorian masculinity, a private place uninterrupted by the needs of domesticity or even self-care (there are always servants in the club), combined with a stature signaled by the single-voiced and impervious authority. This sense of authority matters because, as we shall see, the modern portal-quest narratives are hierarchical: some characters are presented with greater authority than others — authority that is intended, destined, or otherwise taken for granted — and this hierarchy is frequently encoded in speech patterns and the choice of direct or indirect speech. Although a tenuous connection, the tendency of portal-quest fantasies to ignore the personal needs of the protagonists may be less a mere accident of poor writing, than a direct consequence of the link with this mode of storytelling. As their personal needs will be ignored, so too will be the needs of characterization. What matters is that there be no chinks in the story entire. Discussing Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" (1899), John Clute has written:
Like any Club Story, "Heart of Darkness" is both a story and a device to mandate its reception. The impurity of this is obvious — what we're describing here is in a sense a form of reportage — and may help account. It may be the "impurity" of this element of reportage at the heart of the Club Story form that accounts for the fact that no literary theorist has ever mentioned it. Critics of the fantastic, dealing as they do with a set of genres intensely sensitive to the world, should have no such compunction. (Conjunctions 39: 422–423)
As in the true club story, it is the unquestionable purity of the tale that holds together the shape of the portal-quest narrative. In the club narrative, the ability to convince and to hold the floor is the sign of success, but the risk is always that the whole will not be sustained. In order to sustain it, the impurity and unreliability to which Clute alludes must be consistently denied and the authority and reliability of the narrator must be asserted. Either the story is accepted in its entirety, or it is entirely vulnerable; there is no room for the delicacies of interpretation. This structure and its attendant denial has a significant effect on the language of the portal-quest fantasy: in order to convince, to avoid too close analysis, the portal and quest fantasies attempt to convince through the accumulation of detail.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Rhetorics of Fantasy"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Farah Mendlesohn.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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Table of Contents
<P>Acknowledgements<BR>Introduction<BR>Chapter One: The Portal-Quest Fantasy<BR>Chapter Two: The Immersive Fantasy<BR>Chapter Three: The Intrusion Fantasy<BR>Chapter Four: The Liminal Fantasy<BR>Chapter Five: "The Irregulars": Subverting the Taxonomy</P>What People are Saying About This
"Mendlesohn goes well beyond a survey to offer new and often surprising readings of works both familiar and obscure. A fine critical work that offers fresh insights on almost every page."
— Brian Attebery, editor, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
"Mendlesohn goes well beyond a survey to offer new and often surprising readings of works both familiar and obscure. A fine critical work that offers fresh insights on almost every page."—Brian Attebery, editor, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
"Mendlesohn goes well beyond a survey to offer new and often surprising readings of works both familiar and obscure. A fine critical work that offers fresh insights on almost every page."—Brian Attebery, editor, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
"A useful and deliberately flexible taxonomy, and an intense engagement with the arms race of rhetoric between makers and users of fantasy. For authors and readers as well as academics and commentators."—M. John Harrison, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award
“A useful and deliberately flexible taxonomy, and an intense engagement with the arms race of rhetoric between makers and users of fantasy. For authors and readers as well as academics and commentators.”