The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

by Stableford, Brian M.

  Like intrusive fantasies, portal fantasies also begin by cultivating simulacra of the primary world, but their protagonists often do not remain in those simulacra for very long. Instead of fantastic elements merely intrud-ing upon their home territory, the protagonists of portal fantasies are physically removed to unfamiliar ground, into a secondary world. The great advantage of the portal fantasy method, so far as writers and readers are concerned, is that readers can be guided from one world to the other in a conveniently linear fashion. The reader enters the secondary world in the intimate company of a protagonist to whom it is equally unfamiliar; as the character learns about the secondary world, the reader learns too, sharing the character’s astonishment, inquisitiveness, and gradually increasing ability to feel at home.

  As with intrusive fantasies, the seemingly “natural” story arc of a portal fantasy is a normalizing one; dream fantasies can have no other ending, because every sleeper eventually wakes. The same problems apply, however; once Gulliver has been to the land of the Houyhnhnms, or Dorothy to Oz, England and Kansas can never be the same again. There is, moreover, a sense in which every individual portal implies an infinite array of potentially accessible secondary worlds, all of them “beside” our own—sideways being a much more expansive direction than the single temporal thread that connects the present to the past. The utility of “once upon a

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  time” as a facilitating device hinged on the fact that it was indeed once—

  that there was only a single mythical past, which could be securely known in its basics if not its details. Modern intrusive fantasies began by bringing most of their intrusions out of that mythical past, but they eventually moved on to other sources. Modern portal fantasies were always far more versatile, as the examples of Gulliver and Lewis Carroll’s Alice readily exemplify.

  From the viewpoint of a reader, a book is itself a kind of portal, in a metaphorical sense extravagantly literalized in such flamboyant works as Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story. The metaphor in question is sturdier than the notion of the gates of ivory and horn; a book is a physical object, which the reader opens in order to gain access. Having done so, the reader ceases to use the sense of sight in the manner for which nature designed it; even if the text is read “by ear” rather than “by eye,” the eyes are employed as an input port for the decoding of a long string of symbols—

  which, if cleverly interpreted, will convey the reader into an imaginary arena with its own decor, its own population, and its own standards of normality. This too serves to emphasize that the employment of a normalizing story arc in a portal fantasy cannot simply restore a privileged status quo.

  Once a character and a reader have stepped into the infinite array of possible worlds, there is a sense in which they are there forever, even when the character has come home and the reader has closed the book. There are always more books to be read.

  Mendlesohn observes that portal fantasies, unlike intrusive fantasies, are usually didactic. Intrusive fantasies usually present mysteries to be unraveled, traps to be escaped, and adversaries to be exorcized, in the interests of temporary excitement. Portal fantasies usually present obstacle courses to be ingeniously negotiated, quests to be bravely carried out, and—most importantly—lessons to be permanently learned. This is a subtle transformation of the standard normalizing story arc; the point is not that the dreamer-cum-traveler returns home but that he or she returns home intellectually better equipped and morally rearmed.

  The situation of individual portal fantasies within a potentially infinite array emphasizes the supposition that imaginary travel broadens the mind, that life in the actual world may be enhanced, not merely by particular intrusions of magic or trips into secondary worlds, but by a wide acquaintance with a range of such experiences. If so, that process can obviously be further assisted by the cultivation of the skills required for the navigation of secondary worlds without the kind of step-by-step guidance that portal

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  fantasies supply. This pressure has been the principal evolutionary force governing the development of modern immersive fantasies.

  THE RENAISSANCE OF IMMERSIVE FANTASY

  Portal fantasies sometimes serve as precursors of immersive fantasies, as in the series developed from the best known portal fantasy of the 19th century, L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. As the sequence extended, Dorothy eventually left Kansas permanently in order to live in Oz, and the later volumes make increasing use of native protagonists who have never lived anywhere else. This development was facilitated by the fact that followers of the series no longer needed to be guided into Oz and introduced to its eccentricities; they already knew the way and already felt quite at home there—perhaps, like Dorothy, more at home there than they could ever hope to feel in the primary world.

  This last observation sounds alarm bells in the minds of many unsympathetic observers, for exactly the same reason that the didactic elements of portal fantasies soothe anxieties. Critics who will grant, gladly or reluctantly, that portal fantasies can and sometimes do offer a precious cargo of useful lessons to be transported back into the primary world by their protagonists often take a dimmer view of immersive fantasies, whose protagonists seek their goals and find their destinies within imaginary worlds. That kind of “escapism” seems to them to be dangerously untemporary, even though the reader must still return through the portal that is the book.

  The most important narrative consequence of total immersion in a secondary world, as Mendlesohn points out, is that viewpoint characters in immersive fantasies have to take the fantastic elements by which they are surrounded entirely for granted; the reader’s fantasy is their normality, the reader’s secondary world their primary. This tends to weaken, or even to negate, the “sense of wonder” associated with fantastic manifestations in intrusive or portal fantasies, by requiring the reader to share the viewpoint character’s assumed familiarity.

  Such dissonant association is what Darko Suvin calls “cognitive estrangement,” although his use of the term restricts it to science-fictional immersive fantasies, whose secondary worlds are constructed on allegedly rational principles. The reading skills involved in this kind of imaginative identification are markedly different from those associated with reading

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  mimetic fiction; they involve an effect that Tolkien—whose policy of critical exclusion is the converse of Suvin’s, applauding fairy tales while remaining suspicious of sf—calls “enchantment.” In speaking of enchantment and secondary belief, however, Tolkien was thinking in terms of

  “once upon a time”: of a syncretic mythical past to which all fairy tales—

  no matter how far they have traveled from one culture to another or how drastically they have been transfigured by a modern teller—always refer.

  He did not believe that modern fantasy literature could escape from the constraints of that assumption, or even that it ought to try. Suvin, by contrast, argues that if modern fantastic literature is to be worthwhile it not only can but must escape, and that the way to do it is to discard the follies of once-upon-a-time in favor of the rational extrapolations of sf.

  There is, of course, no logical reason why the secondary worlds of immersive fantasy cannot simply be resituated in the same kind of infinite—

  and infinitely various—array as the secondary worlds of portal fantasy, but there are practical reasons. How are readers supposed to accommodate themselves within imaginary worlds without some set of default assumptions on which to draw so as to “fill in the gaps” that writers have perforce to leave? This problem affects all the subgenres of fantasy, but the writers who had the most obvious incentive for trying to solve it, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were those interested in exploring hypothetical futures rather than hypothetical pasts—and it is for this reason that Suvin and critics of a similar stripe consider sf to be innately superior to other kinds of fantasy
.

  Writers ambitious to use the future and other planets as imaginative spaces for speculation could not be content with the narrative frameworks of intrusive fantasy and portal fantasy, although they had perforce to put up with them for a while; they had to develop means of using viewpoint characters native to their heterocosmic constructions rather than always displacing them from the here-and-now by means of spaceships and time machines. In order to make that possible, on any considerable scale, they had to educate readers in the skills necessary to navigate immersive fantasies.

  This process of education was difficult, and it was slow. A few 19th-century texts dealing with the future do take the form of immersive fantasies, but they go to great pains to explain in advance to the reader what they are doing, usually by embedding a prefatory essay into the text. Such devices seem clumsy nowadays, when they are routinely stigmatized as

  “info dumps,” but they were necessary in their day, and they laid valuable

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  groundwork in preparing readers to take futuristic settings aboard without such careful preparation. The headway made in the early 20th century was gradual, but a crucial breakthrough came when magazines appeared that specialized in sf. The label itself had the effect of informing readers, even before they began to read, that the story they were about to enter might not be set in the primary world; it functioned, in effect, as a minimal metanar-rative preface.

  Many of the stories in the early sf magazines retained intrusive fantasy and portal fantasy frameworks; those that did not soon began to reproduce a pattern reminiscent of folktales. The future began to be vaguely manifest in the sf magazines as a kind of syncretic consensus in which certain common elements began to fill the same cartographic role as the default assumptions of once-upon-a-time. In a sense, the creation of this third set of default assumptions completed a natural set, in which the experienced present was supplemented by imaginary extensions backward and forward in time. As with the world of once-upon-a-time, though, the imaginative common ground established in this hypothetical future initially subtracted more from the experienced world than it added.

  Although it always remained nebulous, the formulation of this consensual image of the future was based in the myth of the “space age,” which saw the future history of humankind in terms of a phased colonialist expansion into the universe. The same myth facilitated the development of a similar consensual frame in which alien worlds could be held: the “galac-tic empire.” Unlike the world of once-upon-a-time, however, the future of the space age was capable of infinite extension, and it eventually began to acquire the complexity it had initially sacrificed in the interests of laying foundations. In the latter half of the 20th century, sf writers and readers left behind the necessity of invoking a set of default assumptions; the ability to map and navigate immersive fantasies without the aid of any such rough-hewn crutch became increasingly widespread.

  In retrospect, it is easy to see why science fiction emerged as a popular genre before fantasy, and why it had to take such pains to develop the narrative skills required to read immersive fantasy. By the same token, it is easy to see now that once those skills had been sufficiently refined, the scope would be opened up for a renaissance in fantasy literature, which would apply them not merely to rationally plausible hypothetical futures and a fairly narrow range of alternative pasts and parallel dimensions but to the whole range of imaginable pasts, alternative presents, and conceivable futures.

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  The development of immersive fantasy by sf writers facilitated the simultaneous redevelopment of immersive fantasies of other kinds, initially in the pages of such specialist magazines as Weird Tales and Unknown—

  but the fantasy subgenres thus encouraged lived a fugitive existence in the margins of the sf field for half a century, because they seemed to lack the conspicuous modernity of sf. Many fans of sf assumed that the principles of rational explanation supposedly guiding science-fictional visions of the future and alien worlds were the principal justification for the genre’s existence and a key element of its reader appeal. That was the basis of the apologies and manifestoes written by the genre’s leading ideologists.

  Much of the fiction published under the sf label, however, never made any serious attempt to live up to the ideals of rational extrapolation, and many of its readers showed no sign of caring. By the early 1950s, critics found it necessary to distinguish “hard” science fiction from various other materials sheltering under the label, but the coinage of the term was eloquent testimony to the fact that hard sf had already lost the battle for the hearts and minds of the majority of readers. The first sf book to break out of the critical and commercial “ghetto” to which the genre had long seemed confined was Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, whose image of Mars was stubbornly archaic and nostalgic, deliberately fusing the imagery of the space age with elements drawn from the well of once-upon-a-time. Within three years of its publication, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings supplied a much more powerful exemplar.

  To some extent, Tolkien’s Middle-earth was merely one more once-

  upon-a-time—albeit one developed in extraordinary and unprecedented detail—but its secondary world seemed entirely self-contained, quite independent of the primary world rather than reproductive of a mythical past. The Lord of the Rings was by no means unprecedented; it was itself a sequel to The Hobbit, similarly formatted as an immersive fantasy, which had managed to pass in 1937 as an unusually elaborate once-upon-a-time fantasy for children. When Lin Carter took his “look behind” the trilogy, he was able to identify a whole series of august predecessors, including works by Lord Dunsany, William Morris, and George MacDonald. All

  those earlier works had, however, remained esoteric, designed for and consumed by tiny coteries of highly atypical readers. When The Lord of the Rings became a huge paperback best seller in the 1960s—or, to be strictly accurate, when slavish imitations of its narrative method proved in the 1970s that its salability was not an unrepeatable fluke—it changed the face of modern publishing.

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  The early imitations of The Lord of the Rings contrived in the 1970s and 1980s had to be slavish in order to exploit the particular expectations generated by Tolkien’s work in readers who had not previously been exposed to immersive fantasy. The first effect of Middle-earth’s success was that a host of new genre writers soon produced a syncretic “fantasyland” similar to the traditional once-upon-a-time of fairy tales or the newer orthodoxy of the space age—whose instant clichés were mercilessly satirized in Diana Wynne Jones’s Tough Guide to Fantasyland.

  The establishment of this Tolkien-refined once-upon-a-time as the archetype of a commodified genre seemed to many observers to be a bad thing. Critics like Ursula Le Guin loudly condemned “commodified fantasy” as something crudely imitative and wholly devoid of imagination, by contrast with “real” fantasy, whose principal claim to intellectual seriousness was the originality of its designs and internal dynamic. As Le Guin’s own example demonstrates, however, the establishment of Middle-earth as a key model of a secondary world permitted transfiguration—

  and hence diversification—as well as recycling. The process of cloning Middle-earths by the score (or, as rapidly became the case, by the thousand) did indeed result in a vast array of smudged carbon copies—but it also resulted in a fringe of calculated modifications that grew and extended as quickly as the genre’s imitative core. Le Guin’s Earthsea recycled many elements of Middle-earth, but it also modified them, and the more Earthsea grew from text to text the more far-reaching its modifications became.

  It is probably true that most inexperienced readers who acquire a taste for fantasy rely on a rapidly accumulated stock of knowledge about “fantasyland” to navigate their way through texts; such readers undoubtedly sustain a core of formularized material whose wide appeal is entirely dependent on its unoriginality. It is, however, almost certainly true that many suc
h readers make substantial progress in the skills required to read immersive fantasies and that they free themselves soon enough from the prisoning effects of that initial stock. Those who want to move on from the fantasyland of commodified fantasy to fresher pastures—including the works of Diana Wynne Jones and Ursula Le Guin—are assisted to do so rather than inhibited. As a steadily increasing population of readers developed, between the 1970s and the present day, the ability to accommodate and orient themselves in such worlds without undue difficulty, the scope of genre fantasy’s variation and ambition increased dramatically. The debt owed by genre fantasy to the training accomplished by sf is clearly reflected in the manner in which genre sf has largely forsaken its ambitions

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  of “hardness” in favor of reckless experiments in chimerization, experiments that strongly emphasize the fact that sf was always a subgenre of fantasy literature.

  THE AESTHETICS OF IMMERSIVE FANTASY

  In addition to the status of their viewpoint characters, there is another significant factor distinguishing immersive fantasies from intrusive and portal fantasies: that they have no seemingly “natural” story arc built into them. Because immersive fantasies do not begin in the primary world, they cannot return to it; “normalization” is not an option. Traditional immersive fantasies, being set in a past that had supposedly produced the present, had mirrored the ambitions of the present—most fairy tales, like most early novels, end with a wedding and an inheritance—but the constraints of this kind of conventional reward became as dispensable as the other constraints of once-upon-a-time.