Fantastic Worlds Page 4
EXPLORING THESE WORLDS
How might one use this book? The most obvious answer, of course, is that one should read these selections for entertainment. We have not, so far, talked about the fun of the fantastic and this has been intentional. The most common charge made against fantastic literature is that it is “merely entertainment” or that it offers “escape.” There is nothing, however, wrong with escape. If one is imprisoned, the desire to escape is sane and valuable. If the real world oppresses a reader by the fact of mortality or the ambiguities of sex, a fantastic world that handles his fears for him or, at least for the time of reading, clarifies his confusion, is a world that offers not escape but liberation.
When people say that a work is “merely entertaining,” they avoid a fundamental question: How is it that some works entertain us while others do not? There are, of course, effectively told and ineffectively told stories; matters of technique are not to be ignored. But more important than technique itself is the underlying story in the service of which that technique is used. Hamlet is a dour and grisly story and yet it is entertaining; the story of Genesis is in some sense terrifying and yet it too is entertaining. We are thrilled when Hamlet is first visited by the ghost of his dead father; we project ourselves into the scenes of Hamlet’s vacillation; we are horrified and purged by Hamlet’s death. In a similar way, we are awed when the Holy Ghost forms the world out of Chaos; we project ourselves into the world of the Garden; we are horrified and purged by the enormity of the Fall. Entertainment is not “mere”; it is the effective engagement of a text with issues of fundamental importance to the audience. We have argued that, in their special ways, depending on the reversals of ground rules, fantastic worlds give us precisely this sort of experience. So, read this book for its entertainment.
The human sources of fantastic entertainment are few but important. The selections here are arranged in part so that comparisons will suggest themselves. The first two pieces are alternative Creation myths; the next two each concern the advent of death; the next three depend upon metamorphosis and two of those stand together as being sexually motivated changes. The introductions to the three parts will make these connections more explicit. At this point one should recognize that our treatment of the fantastic has been general and hence implies comparisons that would not be confined to the separate sections. Metamorphosis, for example, is a fantastic device used for making dramatic a quality which had previously been only a part of a character’s psychology. This is true in the three early selections from Ovid and in the change of a living human into a ghost and in the exchange of personalities in the story by Cortázar. The fact of all art being to some extent fantastic has encouraged fantasists to explore repeatedly the relation between art and life, an exploration implicit in the narrative situations of the African folktales and explicit in the stories of pictures written by Poe and Lovecraft and thematically central in the modern pieces by Brautigan and Holst. The question of whether or not there is a life beyond human life figures significantly in the religious myths, in Tolkien’s allegory, in the stories of curses and ghosts, and in Kafka’s allusion to “The Judgment.” These are all thematic concerns.
Thematic concerns include all of the psychological categories that we have seen dealt with in fantastic literature and such matters as the nature of art, of human perception, and of escape. In addition to thematic comparisons, one could profitably look for comparisons at the three other levels of narrative. For example, certain character developments recur: the hero learns that his early attitudes were wrong or that his early attitudes were right, that he must submerge himself in the community or that he must strike out on his own. At what stages does a culture pick one of these alternatives or another? In stories aimed at what age audience does one character development predominate over another? Plot comparisons are equally significant. We find the recurrence of the hero violating an injunction or falling into delusion or being forced to defend the status quo. In which types of stories is one plot element or another crucial? Style too invites comparisons. Some works, like fairy tales and heroic fantasies, are told with great sobriety, while others, like Norton Juster’s punning piece or much of modern fantasy, rely on the quick linguistic reversals of irony and oxymoron. What do works of one style or another have in common?
One can read each story alone, of course, but our argument that fantastic reality is dependent on the reader’s experience of the world implies as well that fantastic reality is dependent on the reader’s prior training as a reader. Alice says that “when I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one!” To understand the significance of this passage one must know what fairy tales are, of course, but what is more important, one must recognize that in fairy tales no character ever doubts the fairy-tale reality and hence never makes such a comment as Alice’s that reflects on the nature of the narrative. Such self-reflexive comments are stylistic reversals characteristic of development toward the fantastic within a given genre. Alice’s comment would never be uttered in a true fairy tale and hence the comment is itself incorrect: Alice is not in a fairy tale but in something more fantastic yet. As we have seen, Alice is in a Fantasy. But to recognize this, to see that Alice’s world is constantly shifting and hence does not offer the child-like security of fairy tales but rather the adult exploration of the nature of reality, requires that we make comparisons between Alice’s style and, say, that of the brothers Grimm. Comparison is not an academic exercise but a continuing aspect of each reader’s own education, a process of self-instruction which is essential for gaining a full sense of the technical achievement and human significance of a given story. Writers too learn technique by reading and so it is fitting that the selections here be arranged by types as those types emerged chronologically. The order of this collection is intended to prompt comparisons not just between adjacent stories but between a given story and all its predecessors in matters of plot, character, theme, and style. Taken together, these stories should be not “merely entertaining” but illuminatingly entertaining; they should reveal the techniques by which humankind has been able to deal with real and serious issues in the creation of fantastic worlds.
The Sources of the Fantastic
THE SOURCES OF THE FANTASTIC
The narrative sources of the fantastic fall into three interpenetrating categories: myth, folktale, and fairy tale. Myth is the oldest of these. Ernst Cassirer in Language and Myth (1925) went so far as to argue that the very origins of human language and of human myth were simultaneous. Even today we speak of casting a spell with words; the word spell itself comes from an Old High German word that means tale. If we can name something we may feel that much closer to controlling it. This obvious superstition has not died, though perhaps we rely on the magic of words less than people once did. Still, we ensure the fairness of choosing sides by saying “Eeny, meeny, miney, mo”; we require that a marriage be sanctified according to the proper formula of “With this ring I thee wed”; we admit and even welcome our community with all those who have also lost loved ones by saying, over a grave, “Rest in peace.” There are huge and common life experiences that our language—and our myths—have tried to handle for us since before history. It is easier to deal with those larger-than-human forces if we can name them: Eros, Thunder, Death, Sun. Once these are named, their power can be admitted by making them gods. And as gods, they can have stories told about them. The god stories that seem to a culture to explain the ways of the world are its myths.
In the thousands of years since our myths first formed, they have become less and less important as explanation and yet have more and more become embedded in our language. Especially in the later, written forms (which some scholars like to distinguish as mythology rather than myth) we find the sources of Herculean feats and Procrustean beds and the Oedipus complex. This last is especially important because it points to the reason myths have persisted: the narrative shapes of myths, the fantastic wor
lds which offered an ordered alternative to the real world of our prehistoric ancestors, are narrative shapes which still seem to offer important alternatives to the real worlds we seem to inhabit. The basic issue of father-son competition has not gone away, but we can individually begin to face father-guilt by the recital of a myth.
Myths, as the common property of a culture, serve as subjects of art long after the myths have been superseded as explanations. Even atheists observe the neutrality of the Red Cross; even grown-ups enjoy dressing as Santa Claus. As cultures become more sophisticated, more conscious of the artistry behind their myths, they begin to shape examples of those myths more consciously and offer them first as entertainment and only second as explanation. In this way, folktales are produced, the corporate productions of a whole culture, narratives that are common property, that are taken as significant but, unlike myths, are admitted man-made. An analogy might be helpful here: the so-called wolf whistle used to express physical appreciation has a special tone and interval and duration in our culture. No one knows the source of the wolf whistle. Similarly, no one knows the origin of the tunes of some children’s chants (like the taunting one that goes “Nya nya, na, nya nya”), yet we all recognize the meanings of those chants, meanings that, for all we know, belong to prehistory. But in more sophisticated times, we find folk songs, corporate productions that may be thought of as important (think of certain work songs, for example, or songs of lost love) but are sung ostensibly for their entertainment value rather than their historical verity; folk songs are canonical, but, unlike myths, they are not sacred. In the same way, folktales deal with the same issues as do myths, but these more sophisticated narratives are not sacred.
Some stories, especially the sacred ones, are worth telling again and again, but others are not. The story of “Little Red Riding Hood,” for example, is very nice for a child, but there is a limit to how many times an adult can hear it freshly. A special set of narrative conventions can grow up as a culture gets yet more sophisticated, and those conventions will attach to one class of stories—and its associated audience—or another. The most widely known such conventions are those of the fairy tale, with its audience of children and, in later life, adults who can enjoy the stories once again by watching or imagining the reaction the story fosters in a child’s eyes. Myth, folktale, and fairy tale then form a sliding scale along which the stories become more conventionalized, the audience becomes more limited, the teller becomes more sophisticated, the truth value becomes more symbolic and less literal, but in all of which the issues remain the same. We open this section of Fantastic Worlds with Genesis and the story of the Fall; we close this section with Tolkien’s “Leaf by Niggle,” the conventionalized, sophisticated, allegorical, modern, man-authored fairy tale of Salvation. Although we have named three narrative sources of the fantastic—myth, folktale, and fairy tale—the single impulse behind the creation of those narratives is the need of people.
THE NEED FOR THE FANTASTIC
People have always wondered about their place in the scheme of things. Jean Piaget has argued that all infants, because their needs are met in ways that seem to them automatic, develop an “illusion of central position.” They think that the universe revolves around them. This must be a very nice feeling. It is little wonder that we resist learning otherwise and that, even as adults, we may cherish this illusion within us. Fantastic narratives often support this illusion of central position. The complete selection of myths, and also “The Magic Swan Geese” and “Leaf By Niggle,” implicitly project a universe that cares about individual humans and responds to their needs and desires.
A special case of the illusion of central position is what Freud called “the omnipotence of thought,” the fantasy that, should one think something, it will come to pass. Freudians trace much of our feelings of guilt about wishing our parents dead to this residual infantile sense that the thought might be as good as the deed. It is clear that the real world does not conform to our thoughts; it is not sunny simply because we want to have a picnic. And yet we are not entirely free of a belief in the potency of our thoughts; if it rains when we want to have a picnic, we say, “Wouldn’t you just know it!”—as if some greater power resented the power of our thoughts and thwarted us. Since we do not believe in the simple omnipotence of thought, a narrative world that indulged this alternative to our world would be fantastic; since we do, to some degree, accept a secondary potency for thought, the device of thoughts becoming deeds is easily made believable to us in a narrative. Most fantastic narratives indulge the illusion of central position, and a majority of these narratives do so by dramatizing the omnipotence of thought.
“Hansel and Grethel” is a good example of the way a fantastic narrative accepts the omnipotence of thought, and it is a good example of a number of other basic human issues as well. Let us examine this story in some detail. As we recall, Hansel and Grethel live alone with their father. He remarries. The stepmother hates the children and she arranges to have them left in the forest. Although this fails at first because Hansel leaves a trail, it finally succeeds. Wandering lost, the children find a house made of goodies. Attracted by this, they are captured by a witch who intends to eat Hansel after she fattens him. Grethel feeds Hansel and he offers a chicken bone instead of the finger that the myopic witch wants to squeeze to gauge his fattening. Finally Grethel kills the witch by pushing her into her own hot oven. The children then have no trouble finding their way home and there they discover that the stepmother has died. The last image is of the children each holding one of the father’s hands. Let us look beneath the surface to see what human materials this story is dealing with.
First, one should observe, as Max Lüthi has in Once Upon a Time (1970), that no one ever says “I love you” in a fairy tale; instead, one character feeds another. Fantastic literature generally can make dramatically overt matters which normally remain within the feelings of a character or the implications of a situation. Mother-love is sustaining; it offers sustenance. Witches, Lüthi points out, are recognizable as inversions of this: they are cannibals. Instead of wanting to feed a child, a witch wants to eat it. Witches are symbolic anti-mothers. Food imagery is everywhere in “Hansel and Grethel.” The children are in the woods to gather firewood for cooking. Hansel’s trick of leaving a trail is a good one until he leaves breadcrumbs, a track the birds eat: the children must learn to take biological needs into account. They themselves are trapped by the temptation of goodies. Hansel is only spared because he can present a bone, a remnant of flesh already eaten. The witch wishes to eat Hansel. Grethel saves him by killing the witch, specifically, by putting her in the oven and cooking her as she would have cooked Hansel. Because the witch is an anti-mother, Grethel is morally allowed to kill her in the anti-mother way yet without herself being taken for a witch. When they return home, the hated stepmother is (as) dead (as the witch). The children return to their father’s full protection. Thus the right use of love (food) has led from the initial situation of lack (the true mother dead) to a new stable situation in which Grethel can take over the role of cook.
If one projects the thoughts of the children, especially of Grethel, who is the active heroine, one sees not only a basic concern with food, but a related basic concern with sex. As we know from having read the story, Grethel and the stepmother are in competition for the father’s affection. Since the stepmother is, after all, the father’s wife (beloved), his daughter, Grethel, could not justifiably kill her. However, the witch may be killed, and that deed done, the stepmother is discovered to be dead. This is the omnipotence of thought. Lest even the thought appear unwarranted, the witch’s guilt that flows from her desire to eat the children is foreshadowed by the stepmother’s guilt that flows from her desire to kill them. An aggressive Freudian reading would also suggest that Grethel had been in competition for the father’s affections since even before the true mother’s death, and that her death, then, was a result of Grethel’s omnipotent thought, her wish to have no
competitor. In this reading, the proto-sexual desire of Grethel is the initial problem that is dramatized by the substitution of a stepmother for a true mother (a fairy-tale true mother, of course, could not respond negatively to Grethel even if the daughter were a competitor); Grethel’s task, saving her brother from an anti-mother, morally allows Grethel to fulfill the role of true mother (symbolized by her cooking the witch). Having become the true mother, no competitive mother (true or step) is on the scene when Grethel returns to her now wifeless father. Hence, the fairy-tale plot, which revolves around food and the characters’ relations to it, is a device for allowing Grethel—or a listener who can identify with her—to indulge the omnipotence of the normally forbidden thought that one may want to supplant one’s parent.
The guilt that might attend competitive thoughts in the child auditor’s mind is assuaged by the story. This saving of emotional energy is what Freud called “psychic economy.” Freud believed that we read always to achieve this psychic economy. If “Hansel and Grethel” is “entertaining,” this analysis would suggest that its entertainment value resides in its ability to deal symbolically with such basic human issues as parent/child competition. There are other such basic issues too, of course: fear of sex, the desire to die, the need to understand, the wish for power, and so on. In fantastic narratives, alternatives to the real world, these issues can be embodied. In the narratives of this section, the fear of sex can be confirmed in Actaeon’s fate or removed in Sleeping Beauty’s; the desire to die can be justified by the Fall or ameliorated in the Pawnee tale; the need to understand can be accepted by explanatory tales like that about the tortoise and can be applauded by moral tales like that about Mr. Rabbit; the wish for power can be chided in “The Magic Swan Geese” or fully accepted in “The Tinderbox.” Fantastic worlds, confronting as they do issues that are often hidden in the real world, are created in the service of human need.