Fantastic Worlds Page 2
ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK
Certain questions seem universally to have occupied people’s minds since prehistoric times. Where did the world come from? How can one explain the feelings of awakened sexuality? Why must there be death? Is there an afterlife? Fantastic worlds dramatize answers to these real questions for the ease of the questioners. In their oldest forms, these answers are the myths that cultures live by; in somewhat more modern forms, these answers become the folktales by which cultures entertain themselves; and in yet more modern forms, these answers become the fairy tales through which cultures amuse—and thereby educate—their young.
The first part of this anthology presents all three types of fantastic world from diverse cultures in order to provide a sample of the universal sources of the fantastic. Once a modern literary tradition becomes established, writers can capitalize on the conventional knowledge of readers. We all know that “Once upon a time” leads into stories about golden-haired princesses and evil stepmothers and handsome princes. When one of those characters enters the scene, we recognize that entrance as fitting. Similarly, we know that stories that begin around fireplaces on Christmas Eve always have ghosts in them. And what are ghosts, after all, for those of us who have not actually met one, but ectoplasmic embodiments of literary tradition? A writer is expected to know that his audience knows that vampires cannot see themselves in mirrors and that fake medieval syntax doth proclaim for those who will attend thereunto the deeds of the nobles of yore. Whether the conventional signals, then, are standard phrases or elements of setting or linguistic habits or anything else, the literary tradition can and does use convention to build fanastic worlds economically. “If I had not myself experienced what I am about to relate, I would not believe …” already tells us that the story to follow will be chilling, perhaps supernatural, and certainly set in an isolated environment. Would any among us be surprised to discover that the story concerned a murder in a crumbling castle, that the owner was a recluse, a cousin of the narrator, and that his mother had died in giving him life? Of course we would not be surprised. In fact, once conventions become established a creative author needs to supersede them lest they define too narrowly the stories he can tell.
The second part of this anthology presents stories within the English-language literary tradition in order to show how conventions can lead economically to the creation of fantastic worlds and how the repeated creation of those worlds leads in turn to the development and change of the conventions. Hoffmann’s work is included here, although he wrote in German, because it had such a profound influence on such authors as Poe who initially established the conventions for the diverse branches of fantastic literature. Only some branches of this luxuriant and magical tree are represented. However, the stories collected here include work by nearly all of the great authors whose names are most commonly associated with fantasy.
Every fully developed literary tradition has its own heritage of fantastic literature, a heritage that reaches back to the oldest sacred texts and extends through the advent of a wide reading public knowledgeable in the literary conventions themselves. Fantastic worlds, like ghosts, begin to take on an independent life, and newer fantastic worlds can be constructed as alternatives to the older fantastic worlds (and through them as alternatives to the real world). In our modern world of hyper-accelerated change one would expect fantastic worlds that twist and reverse other fantastic worlds; in our modern world in which traditional answers are ever more frequently discarded as outmoded, one would expect literary experimentation and the search for further alternatives. Both of these forces combine to generate internationally a modern form of fantastic literature that is openly conscious of its fantastic nature and means to flaunt it. Some of the most exciting writing of this century has gone into the development of this new sort of fantastic world; the third part of this anthology presents an international sample of some of the best.
This book, then, proceeds in a developmental, approximately chronological way. The first part offers a selection of stories from oral and early literacy periods of many cultures in order to reveal some of the pervasive human questions that find treatment through the fantastic. In the second part, the enormous growth of fantastic codes in a single culture illustrates how refined can be the artistic response to our continuing need to face such fundamental issues. The third part, by virtue of its internationalism, implies that the work of fantasists, even after the development of literary traditions, bears a common stamp and fulfills a common need. Each of the widely different pieces in this anthology, and in the wider universe of fantastic worlds, reveals on close examination some of those elements found always and everywhere in the art people produce in expressing their common need for alternatives to our one real world.
ANALYZING THE FANTASTIC
J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit (1937) and the Lord of the Rings trilogy (The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954; The Two Towers, 1955; The Return of the King, 1956) is universally acknowledged as one of the most important fantasists of this century. His somewhat Norse/somewhat Old English/somewhat original world of balrogs and hobbits is too extensive to be properly felt in an excerpt that would fit appropriately in this volume. However, we can turn to other work of this master for an example of distilled prose that captures much of what is crucial in fantastic literature. Here are two apparently simple sentences from Tolkien’s eighty-page social satire called “Farmer Giles of Ham” (1949):
“So knights are mythical!” said the younger and less experienced dragons. “We always thought so.”
To see just how these sentences—and the fantastic—have their effect on a reader, let us examine these few words one by one.
So: This word, especially coupled with the emphatic “are” (“‘so knights are mythical!’”), indicates that the speakers (younger dragons) feel a sense of satisfaction at having had a prejudgment confirmed. This is a feeling we can all share when, after “Once upon a time,” we read of the expected “golden-haired princess.” Temporally, the “so” connects us automatically to the earlier state of the dragons’ knowledge, in which the belief was held but its confirmation was in suspense. The structure of confirmation of suspended belief is typical of much art, particularly so-called “romance” (including Gothic romance, love stories, and so forth), tales in which the reader’s ideals are confirmed. When these ideals clearly flout reality, as, for example, when the ideal is that hidden guilt will be uncovered—although in real life most crimes go unsolved—the particular romance is obviously fantastic in more than the minimal sense common to aesthetically ordered art. Tales of Great Detectives, then, like those about Sherlock Holmes or Nero Wolfe, are fairly fantastic; they are fairy tales for adults in which the unworldly ideal is first suspended (“Will the guilty part be discovered?”) and then confirmed (“Ah so!”).
Knights: This word automatically activates a literary tradition that includes feats of derring-do, ornate armor, virgins with unicorns, and noble service to King and God. In other words, although there are historical knights, the term “knight” in a modern literary context refers not to parasitic landlords but to heroes who are foreknown to be larger than life, that is, alternative to the real world. Knights habitually participate in such supernatural events as pulling enchanted swords from enchanted rocks, falling prey to love potions, and, most important in this context, killing dragons. Thus, if against all the odds stacked up by reading the beginning of Tolkien’s story, one were to read “knights” and think of both the fantastic and the historical contexts, the word “dragons” would quickly settle us into our choice for the fantastic. In addition to this activation of literary codes and a sense of adventure, the word “knights” brings us back to an earlier time in our own English-speaking culture. The desire for a throwback way of life, for atavism, is common even to those fantastic worlds ostensibly set in the future, as we will discuss in another section. Atavism is a reasonable fantasy when one considers that we all know that Western Civilization has, af
ter all, made it through the Middle Ages intact; we are not nearly so sure we will make it through the Nuclear Ages at all. By contrast, the old times offer a wonderful alternative to the real world, an alternative that must be fantastic since the very fact of history demonstrates that Western Civilization could not fix itself at the year 1400.
Mythical: One of the commonest meanings of “mythical” is “untrue.” All fantastic worlds, of course, are mythical, and the worlds of myths, even if they are symbolically true, are obviously not historically true. No one believes that someone named Prometheus stole fire from the gods, brought it to Earth, and, as punishment, was chained to Mount Caucasus. Nonetheless, myths are stories which the cultures that support them find significant. Western Civilization has consistently felt fear of the power conferred on it by increasing knowledge, and this fear has been given dramatic life in the story of Prometheus. Prometheus suffered daily for us; the fault in our having fire was his, not ours; the sense of fear we have need not turn into guilt for fires gone out of control. The myth, obviously, plays a crucial role in offering a fanastic world, an alternative to the real world in which the fire-making human may be the destroyer of home and family willy-nilly. In this sense of “untrue,” “mythical” may be a magical word used to banish fears: “Oh, the Mafia is only mythical.” Myths, like so many fantastic stories, handle fears for us. In Tolkien’s lines, the dragons’ fear that the word “mythical” tries to banish is a fear of knights, people we readers know existed in the real world. One ignores a real-world problem at one’s peril, as the chief dragon discovers later in the story. Myth and history make an impractical combination. Mythical time is time out of time, a time unconnected with historical, real-world time. If this is 1980, then we know that World War II started 41 years ago; that the Declaration of Independence was signed 204 years ago; that Julius Caesar was killed 2024 years ago. How long ago did King Arthur ride? All events in the real world are connected by the clock called history; the events of myth are not. Hence, mythical elements—like “knights” here—are an alternative to the real world of the speaker. Part of the joke for the reader, of course, is that the real world for the speaking dragon is mythical for us reading humans. This sense of continuous reversal is the heart of fantasy. The repeated application of fantastic reversal to traditional materials is one of the chief mechanisms by which the fantastic myths of old become the fantasies of our own era.
Younger: This word puts the reader in mind of children. In our era, and since at latest the beginning of the nineteenth century, literature that was recognized as fantastic was usually thought somehow to be most fit for children. This agism, however, did not always exist. Myths, especially sacred tales, have been and are taken to be serious adult material in those cultures for which the myths seem an adequate explanation of some facet of reality. Devout “Fundamentalists” who believe in the historical accuracy of the Bible find that the account of Creation in Genesis is worth extended contemplation as adults. Most people, however, in our post-Enlightment and relentlessly “scientific” age, believe at most that the biblical account of Creation has only literary (that is, artistic; that is, at least minimally fantastic) value, and they find Genesis a fit object for study by children in Sunday school but not worth much concern to an adult.
Adults, mature adults, have learned to distinguish the real world from their own fantasies. Good adults know which side their bread is buttered on, never volunteer, keep a stiff upper lip, and learn to accept “the way things are.” Children, on the other hand, do not yet know irrevocably how things are and so have the delightful habit of accepting them as they are not. Just because a place is called “Never-Never Land” does not mean it “never-never” was. Oh, to be sure, children do know that Barrie’s fantastic world is fantastic; but children are not yet so willing to accept reality that they are unable to accept the unreality as well. Adults, most of whom began as children, are similarly ambivalent. A good adult would have no interest in Peter Pan, but the child who refused to grow up inside the adult can be captivated by Peter Pan so long as this captivation passes the adult’s ingrown social censor. The best way to quiet this curmudgeon, as everyone knows, is to make believe that Peter Pan’s story is a story for children. And it is that, of course, a tale in which children can indulge in fantasies of power and flight and adventure and freedom from parental restraint; but the play ends with the children quite happy to return to the home run by their parents, and the final image of outgrown Peter is really quite sad. Finally, this children’s fantasy is much more for adults; it is a fantasy that panders to the childhood fantasies still in us and then confirms the adult fantasy that the stable world we have bought was worth the price of our youth. That price, mortality, is a terrible one. Fantastic worlds may indulge our atavism not only in presenting an earlier time of our culture, but an earlier time of our selves. For a brief moment of reading time in Tolkien’s story, we share the adventure of new-found knowledge—and confirmation of belief—with those who are “younger.”
Less experienced: This phrase underscores an attribute one necessarily finds among the young: ignorance. You cannot make a grown-up believe in Santa Claus or convince a two-year-old that he is unimportant. Experience is an opposite of innocence, especially in our culture, which often sees innocence as goodness and experience as corruption. Experience means experience of the real world. Although it is objectively clear that the real world offers us examples of love, say, and happiness, experience as the opposite of innocence has usually been taken to mean the experience of a real world of lust and filth and hunger and violence, a world on which some have focused so exclusively that these extremities characterize a romantic style of writing called “Naturalism.”
In using the word “experienced,” Tolkien reveals the fundamental connection of his fantastic world with the real world to which it offers an alternative. In having his speakers be “less experienced,” he hints that they will eventually learn better and have to reverse their attitudes. Since they have just concluded that knights are mythical, a conclusion we already know to be false, we can confidently expect that this implication of the phrase “less experienced” will be borne out by the story. At one reading moment the word “younger” allows us an atavistic identification with the joys of youth and at the next its apparent synonym, “less experienced,” allows us the smug adult satisfaction of knowing better. This is the same covert movement we noted in Peter Pan. “Less experienced,” then, connects the fantastic world with the real world, promises alternatives (reversals) of the speakers’ attitudes, and creates a world alternative to that of the childhood fantasy of two words earlier. This continuous use of reversal is at the heart of fantastic literature.
Dragons: This is a conventional word that calls to mind fire-breathing beasts, princesses in distress, and mortal combat. Fertility is very much at issue when there is a dragon on the scene. Dragons are also called serpents and worms, phallic symbols, perhaps; certainly symbols identifiable with the tempter of Eve in the Garden. The association with agricultural fertility has already been mentioned. For prepubescent boys, tales in which the fearful sleeping power of sexuality is put to rest by an older, wiser Saint George offer psychic consolation. Tolkien here offers a fantastic reversal of the traditional fantastic materials, for his innocent (“less experienced”) dragons are relieved to discover that the danger (sexual potency) symbolized for them by knights need not be feared. Nonetheless, “dragon” does call to mind for most human readers an atavistic, mythic time of easy right-versus-wrong conflicts, sex, danger, adventure. At the same time that “dragon” by itself vivifies these conventional associations, “dragon” in its particular usage in this sentence has in part the effect of reversing those associations.
Every sentence carries more information than the mere words of which it is composed. For example, “The boy goes shopping” presupposes, among other sentences, a sentence that says “There exists a boy.” The speaker who says “The boy goes shopping” may or may not
be lying about what the boy does, but we take him to be seriously asserting in his implicit way that there exists such a thing as a boy, that there exists such an activity as shopping. Had Tolkien’s sentence read, “‘so knights are mythical!’ the lunatic exclaimed,” we readers would have taken all of the markers of the fantastic to apply to the private world of the insane speaker. The narrator would have been asserting merely that “There exists a lunatic.” In the actual Tolkien sentence, however, the prior sentence that we suddenly must recognize asserts that “There exists such a thing as a dragon,” thus not only making a joke but offering a reversal of the very narrative ground rules by which, for example, we have been able to follow the orderly development from “younger” to “less experienced.”
While the dragons, whom we know to be nonexistent, are ignorant enough to assert that knights are mythical, our narrator—with whom we must necessarily share a point of view—is ignorant enough to assert that dragons exist. This has the effect of our asserting, by reading the narrator’s sentence, that dragons exist. In other words, we make the same mistake as the dragon-speakers: wrongly assigning an element to the real or fantastic world. We suddenly share something with the dragons and thus the fantastic world is forced on us by this fundamentally fantastic technique of reversal.
We: This word, which should apply to the dragons alone, seems in part to apply to us now because we have been made to share not only the viewpoint of the narrator (who is presumably human) but the viewpoint of the dragons (who are mythical—are they not?). Thus the plural pronoun implies in a minor way that we are dragons (but we are not mythical—or are we?). We have been implicated in this vertiginous process of reversal and re-reversal. Yet the appeal of the mythic time, the time out of time, is dependent in large part on its stability. Although the real Middle Ages obviously did not last, that is no reason not to hope against hope that a fantastic world that returned us to the Middle Ages might prove stable. Why are we reading fantastic literature, after all, if not to find an alternative to the real world, that ever-shifting and never-understood real world? How can Tolkien’s fantastic world be itself so shifting? This continuous reversal makes Tolkien’s world even more fantastic than the relatively stable fantastic worlds of, say, the Grimms’ fairy tales. “We” never enter those worlds directly; they exist, as they are supposed to, changelessly, always.