Fantastic Worlds Read online

  Always: When the dragons use this word, its very stability highlights the instability of the situation we are in. Further, as a stable concept, it stands fantastically as an alternative to the real world of fluctuations and growth. And finally, the way “always” offers a temporal extension backward into the hazy, changeless past promises that what we are involved with is a fundamental value that had been suspended but now is to be confirmed. That is, our fantastic world of linguistic reversal is simultaneously a world of psychological wish fulfillment. This surely functions as an alternative to the real world which is usually indifferent to our thoughts.

  Thought: What is crucial for the dragons, and for us, is not what was known to be so, that is, previously experienced, but what was thought to be so, that is, previously desired. What is known is known, and there is no use worrying about it. One can accept it, reject it, work to change it, or try to ignore it, but what is, is. The true field of freedom is in consideration of what is not, what might be, what we think. What we think and how we think (are the dragons in the story any more mythical than the knights?) are inevitably crypto-subjects of fantasy, even when the overt subjects may be quite different. To have “always thought” something is, of course, impossible, so long as one recognizes that one was born at any time later than Creation. To identify “always” with one’s own recollections of one’s own thoughts is a kind of egocentric projection of the self onto the world that we normally associate with the very young, but clearly, as Tolkien’s story for adults makes obvious, the young still live somewhere inside even the oldest of us. Or in our thoughts.

  So: As we noticed in beginning this close analysis, the word “so” expresses the satisfaction of the confirmation of a belief that had been held in suspense. Now we can see that the belief, the desired freedom from fear (especially sexual fear), has been held since “always.” Certainly it has been held since the beginning of the two lines we have been examining. In poetry, rhyme creates in the reader a sense of satisfaction, a sense often made most obvious when it is missed: “Roses are red/Violets are blue/Sugar is sweet/And so is ice cream.” The failure of this quatrain to end with “you,” or at least some rhyme of “blue,” feels wrong because the structure of the quatrain has set us up to expect the rhyme. In the same way, despite all the reversals of meaning and convention and hidden beliefs, hopes and fears, a fantastic narrative—because it is art—ends by reasserting order. In these lines from Tolkien, the word “so” ends the passage with what amounts to a rhyme by repeating the word “so” with which the passage began. This significant repetition of word (which is paralleled in fantastic narratives by repetitions of setting, plot element, and much more) bounds the passage, contains it, and tames the narrative word to show us that, even with dragons in it, Tolkien’s world is a safe one. As such, it offers another kind of alternative to the turmoil of the real world. That we are mostly unconscious of the wealth of association and the nuances of change that the words ring only reveals how it is that we can give ourselves up so uncaringly to the fantastic world. The sense of artistic safety that Tolkien creates is a fantasy that old and young can all share because it is built upon a subtle and inspired manipulation of each reader’s response.

  THE FANTASTIC AND FANTASY

  A reader’s response to a given text depends on many things, among them, of course, the words of the text. But in addition to these words themselves, as the preceding section has argued, words, and words in certain contexts, call up many associations that may well be important in creating within a reader the experience of the fantastic. For any given reader, these associations might seem to be either impersonal and somehow outside him or personal and inside him. Every reader knows, for example, that his association of knights with a romanticized Middle Ages that never existed is knowledge in his own head, yet he understands nonetheless that this Arthurian mythology is part of the common heritage of readers, even those who have not encountered the particular text at hand, and hence that this mythology is part of an outside reality. Similarly, when the reader laughs at a joke in the text, he knows that every reader is supposed to laugh, but the laughter itself is his, part of his inside reality. Let us examine in more detail the outside and inside realities against which fantastic worlds are defined.

  Outside reality comes most obviously from the worldly experiences of readers. These experiences, perhaps surprisingly, vary from era to era and from individual to individual. Aristotle wrote, and we often still say, that nature abhors a vacuum, which means that matter naturally disperses itself so that it fills up, however tenuously, the full volume available to it. Today, of course, we recognize that atoms, with their electrons probabilistically whirring around their relatively minute nuclei, are mostly nothing, just as our solar system, with the vast majority of its matter compacted into a few planets and moons and the sun, is also mostly nothing. So nature clearly prefers a vacuum. When this fact first became clear, due to the experiments of Torricelli in 1643, the shock among those who understood the work was fantastic, quite literally. We live in a world that sees humanity as Homo sapiens, part of an evolutionary chain that will, we suppose, supersede us one day. The famous Scopes trial came about because to many people Darwin’s ideas were literally fantastic. To people in some eras, the Earth was flat; now, for most of us, it is “obviously” round. The inventory of outside reality is not, then, fixed entirely by outside reality but reflects to a large extent the state of the cultures that view themselves as inhabiting that outside reality.

  As readers of constructed worlds of art we are expected to engage our knowledge of the outside realities that have existed at different times. When the language of the art world conveys to us the impression that the text comes from the eighteenth century or later, then we know that dragons are to be taken as fantastic, alternatives to the real world in which, of course, dragons do not exist. But when the language of the King James Version of the Bible presents us with the dragon’s prototype, the talking serpent, we do not take that as fantastic because we believe (rightly or wrongly) that for people living “back then” (King James died in 1625), dragons were thought possible even by those who had never seen one—just as we today believe in pandas. On the other hand, the text of Genesis makes it quite clear that Paradise itself is a world alternative to the outside reality inhabited by King James’s subjects and hence we rightly read the account of Creation, with its shifts from no world to world and pure world to fallen world, as fantastic. An unsympathetic reading that does not respond to the clear intention of that text to provide alternatives for those readers misses the moral lesson which the alternative fantastic world is postulating for the reader’s edification in this world.

  Outside reality varies not only from era to era but from individual to individual. In a trivial sense, this merely reflects accidents of education. A French text can hardly be moving for a person who reads only German. But, in a significant sense, personal education reflects the stage one has arrived at in life. There are important and predictable differences between little children, for whom the world is egocentric, and somewhat older children; differences between these older children, who recognize the existence of physical danger, and children older yet, who recognize sexual dangers; differences between those who have felt the pressures of sexuality and those who have learned to live with them; differences between those who have merely begun their sex lives and those who have been changed by that fact into parents; differences between parents who are still children and parents who have lived through their own parents’ deaths. We can, of course, project ourselves back into the persons we once were, retaining a certain double vision because we are no longer that person, but we cannot fully project ourselves into the persons we will become. For children, Ovid’s tales of metamorphosis are fantastic not merely because the changing of a person into a stag or bird is an alternative to everyone’s outside reality but because the underlying sexual forces are also alternative to children’s reality. For Ovid’s tale of metamorphosis into
a flower, the underlying force is egocentrism, narcissism, and in reading this tale a child can take the change as less literal—and therefore less fantastic—and more metaphorical, just as an adult can take the changes to stag and bird as metaphoric. Hence, the degree to which an art world seems fantastic depends upon a reader’s projection of an outside reality as it must conform to his assumptions about the culture of the text, the culture of the reader, and the life experience of the reader.

  The fact of variable response to art worlds may imply to some that we are on shaky ground when we assert that something should or should not be taken as fantastic. And sometimes, of course, that is so. Jules Verne is generally thought today to have “predicted,” among other things, the submarine. This thought follows from our own ignorance of history, an ignorance not shared by Verne’s contemporaries who knew that a submarine had engaged in a naval battle in the American Civil War five years before the composition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. However, such cases of mass mistake are comparatively rare because the outside reality that one believes to be implied by the text is continually checked by the inside reality that one experiences from the text.

  The following passage comes from Lewis Carroll’s “The Garden of Live Flowers”:

  “Oh, Tiger-lily!” said Alice, addressing herself to one that was waving gracefully about in the wind, “I wish you could talk!”

  “We can talk,” said the Tiger-lily, “when there’s anybody worth talking to.”

  Alice was so astonished that she couldn’t speak for a minute: it quite seemed to take her breath away.

  Although a given reader may believe that outside reality provides talking flowers, Alice’s “wish” implies that at that moment in the world of this text Alice understands that flowers cannot talk. To read this passage properly, one must accept that ground rule as operating. Once accepted, the passage can then reverse the ground rule not only by creating a talking flower but by having the surprise of that fact make the child—usually quite talkative—mute. Just as the Tolkien passage made a small but stable narrative unit from “so” to “so,” here we have a small but stable narrative unit that goes from our projection of floral silence to our projection of child silence. That such a reversal is indeed fantastic is signaled not only by the reversal in roles but by Alice’s astonishment. The text trains us, word by word, to perceive reality—and shifting reality—in certain ways; it makes us pick from all possible outside realities the particular outside realities that make narrative sense of the text itself. Thus is created an inside reality, the moment-by-moment changing reality experienced by the reader.

  It is important that we recognize that the fantastic comes not from mere violation of “the real world,” but from offering an alternative to the real world; not from an alternative to some real world of immutable and universal law, but to a real world which our life and education have trained us to project as expectable as the context for a given text; and not to the projected real world in the fullness of its infinite and often conflicting elements, but to the particular real world which conforms to the needs of the world inside the text itself. Because we believe that wizards “obviously” do not exist, we might naïvely suppose that their occurrence in a story would make that story fantastic. But if that story cries out to be read as the life of a saint who performed miracles, then for believing readers the text is clearly not fantastic. Similarly, perfectly ordinary things from our world can make a moderately fantastic narrative world even more fantastic. For example, if a story began with “Once upon a time,” we would not be surprised to find a dragon or a witch or a golden-haired princess later. These would not elicit from us Alice’s reaction of shocked surprise. But consider a story that begins this way: “Once upon a time there was a beautiful golden-haired princess and she fell desperately in love with a plumber named Sid.” There is nothing in our world that is fantastic about there being a plumber named Sid, but in the world promised by “Once upon a time” Sid’s presence violates the ground rules, and our added astonishment should make this second beginning more fantastic than the beginning of an ordinary fairy tale. The fantastic is fantastic, then, not by virtue of simply violating some rules we have picked up in the real world, but by virtue of reversing the ground rules we are following at any given moment of reading.

  To be sure, other things being equal, we allow our personal and cultural sense of the real world to supply ground rules, but other things are never completely equal. We may usually presume that the dead do not rise again (so that ghosts must be fantastic), but, as we have seen, we presume in certain contexts that dragons or wizards may be more or less expectable. Since context is continuously created by the process of reading itself, once we know that we are in a ghost story the later occurrence of a ghost will not be particularly fantastic.

  The key to the fantastic, then, is not to be found in simple comparison with the real world but in examination of the reading process. We find the reader reaction that characterizes the fantastic, a parallel of Alice’s astonishment, when the operative ground rules are reversed. Whether those rules come from our projection of the outside reality or are established by the inside reality of the text, the fantastic is an affect generated as we read by the direct reversal of the ground rules of the narrative world.

  Many texts, such as standard fairy tales, make a host of reversals all at one moment. “Once upon a time” opens the world of Faërie which is, indeed, an alternative to our own world. But once in that world, fundamental reversal almost never occurs. Fairy-tale worlds—despite their ogres and spells—are stable literary worlds with foreknown rules. Neither the characters in fairy tales nor the readers of fairy tales are surprised when animals speak or magic spells work. But one could be surprised in a fairy tale either by the intrusion of the differently fantastic (backward time travel, for example, is not part of the conventional inventory of Faërie) or by the intrusion of the disconcertingly ordinary (Sid the plumber). In the very first chapter of Alice in Wonderland, for example, Alice takes a slow-motion fall to the bottom of a well, drinks a bottle of liquid that causes her to “shut up like a telescope,” and so “she had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.” In such a context the shock of the fantastic might seem difficult to generate. Alice eats a small cake with the words “Eat Me” written on it in currants:

  She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself “Which way? Which way?” holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing; and she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size. To be sure, this is what generally happens when one eats cake; but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.

  So she set to work, and very soon finished off the cake.

  Carroll, by providing Alice with an ordinary experience, makes his narrative even more fantastic, for this ordinary experience functions as a reversal of the ground rules then operating, and it surprises both Alice and the reader. While fairy tales and other narratives that require one—but only one—set of reversals to be understood are fantastic, Alice in Wonderland is a true Fantasy.

  The fantastic is the affect generated as we read by the direct reversal of the ground rules of the narrative world. Fantasy is that class of works which uses the fantastic exhaustively. One could not use the fantastic exclusively, since then there would be only reversal and no ground rules; so Fantasies must give some minimal sense of continuity, of reality. This conclusion accords well with our earlier observation that even the most realistic narratives must be fantastic to some minimal extent. Obviously literature presents us with a host of works that can be thought of as more or less fantastic (or realistic). The passage we have just noted from Alice in Wonderland comes from one of those rare, true Fantasies. Alice, in staying the same size, takes a non-action which, in context, is a fantastic bit of plot; in asking “Which way? Which way?” she remind
s us of the theme of change and development, but that theme is suddenly reversed; although Alice seems ready for changes in herself, when the narrative world does not enforce such changes she immediately reverts to the basic function of eating, a backward movement in character; and when the narrator opposes “into the way” with “out-of-the-way” we get linguistic reversal. Moderately fantastic worlds, like traditional fairy tales and most ghost stories, can be recognized by the inventory of elements within them, such as fairy godmothers and family curses. But the vast literature of even more fantastic narratives, and those especially fantastic narratives for which we might rightly reserve the term Fantasy, are recognized by our sensitivity to the reversals within them. These reversals can most easily be thought of as occurring in the four levels we have just observed in Lewis Carroll: plot, thematic development, character development, and style. Narratives that keep reversing their ground rules at all four of these levels, like the works collected in the third part of this anthology, are as fantastic as any tales humankind has been able to construct since the prehistoric day when we first began using the fantastic to cope with fundamental questions about life and death and the real world.