ENCHANTMENT. A term derived from the Old French enchanter, a version of the Latin incantare (literally “sing against”), meaning to assault, delude, or render captive by means of magic. It is closely related to the Old French faerie, in which the actors of enchantment are elusive and perhaps imaginary supernatural beings. The term is frequently used in the critical literature to describe the effect of fairy tales on the reader, as in Bruno Bettelheim’s study of The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. In J. R. R. Tolkien’s seminal essay “On Fairy-stories,” enchantment is the psychological process that induces the secondary belief necessary to the sustenance of secondary worlds.
Apologists for fantasy often argue that a measure of this kind of enchantment is necessary to mental health and routinely prescribe re-enchantment as an antidote to the dispiriting effects of disenchantment.
The seductive aspect of enchantment is conserved in much erotic fantasy, although its traditional association with the luring away of children is preserved in tales ranging from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” to Kate Thompson’s The Beguilers (2001). See also FAIRY.
ENDE, MICHAEL (1929–1995). German writer whose father was the surrealist painter Edgar Ende. His first children’s fantasy was translated
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as Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver (1960; tr. 1963), but Momo (1973; tr. 1974, initially as The Grey Gentlemen) is a very different and far more sophisticated allegory about a time bank, counting the existential cost of maturation. The best-selling The Neverending Story (1979; tr.
1981) sets out a detailed exemplary argument for the necessity of enchantment while remaining conscious of its hazards. Mirror in the Mirror (1984; tr. 1986), based on a sequence of lithographs by his father, is a surreal classical fantasy. In Ophelia’s Shadow Theater (1988; tr. 1989), a prompter in a theater collects shadows and teaches them to perform. Ende returned to metafictional children’s fantasy of a more relaxed kind in The Night of Wishes; or, The Satanarchaeolidealcohellish Notion Potion (1989; tr. 1992), in which Beelzebub and Tyrannia Vampirella concoct a punch that might allow them to reach their quota of evil by the New Year’s Eve deadline.
EPIC FANTASY. An epic is a long narrative poem, usually based in mythology and featuring legendary heroes. Epics were the first works of fantasy literature; even such early examples as the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and the Hindu Ramayana are unmistakably literary constructions, albeit mingled with pseudohistorical material. Wholly artificial constructions like Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene were produced long before Elias Lonnrot synthesized the Kalevala (1835) as the Finnish national epic and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow borrowed its rhythmic method to fake the Native American epic Hiawatha (1855). The tradition of epic poetry, further sustained by Christian fantasists like John Milton and Romantic poets like Percy Shelley, continued to produce fantasies in abundance in the 19th and 20th centuries, including Andrew Lang’s Helen of Troy, Gerhart Hauptmann’s Till Eulenspiegel, John Cowper Powys’s Lucifer, John Gardner’s Jason and Medeia, and Robert E. Kauffmann’s The Mask of Ollock (2002).
Many epic poems are key taproot texts of modern fantasy, but there is a particular link between the epic tradition and commodified fantasy, in that J. R. R. Tolkien’s lifelong dalliance in Middle-earth was conceived as an attempt to synthesize the epic that Old (i.e., pre–Norman Conquest) England never had; insofar as The Lord of the Rings is spun off from The Silmarillion, the primary model of commodified fantasy retains and exemplifies many of the pretensions as well as the narrative formula of the epic. This makes the notion of “epic fantasy” more than a mere advertising slogan, although its frequent use as such has reduced
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its critical utility somewhat. Epic fantasies are multivolume works—
usually insistent immersive fantasies, although some retain portal fantasy frames—that routinely extend far beyond their initial trilogies; they gradually build up detailed historical and geographical images of secondary worlds, within which elaborate hero myths are constructed.
Although most epic fantasies are strictly commodified, the format
readily lends itself to greater ambition, as seen in the works of such practitioners as Guy Gavriel Kay, Tad Williams, George R. R. Martin, Steven Erikson, and Terry McGarry’s Eiden Myr series, begun with Illumination (2001) and The Binder’s Road (2003). From the viewpoint of most readers, it provides the core of the modern genre, constituted by the works of Terry Brooks, Stephen R. Donaldson, Katherine Kurtz, David Eddings, Robert Jordan, Robin Hobb, Terry Goodkind, and Kate Elliott. The success of these works prompted commercial publishers to commission hundreds more in the late 1990s, resulting in a glut. Examples include Laura Resnick’s trilogy, comprising In Legend Born (1998), The White Dragon (2003), and The Destroyer Goddess (2004); Marcus Herniman’s Arrandin trilogy, comprising The Siege of Arrandin (1999), The Treason of Dortrean (2001), and The Fall of Lautun (2003); John Marco’s Tyrants and Kings trilogy, comprising The Jackal of Nar (1999), The Grand Design (2000), and The Saints of the Sword (2001); Ricardo Pinto’s Stone Dance of the Chameleon couplet, comprising The Chosen (1999) and The Standing Dead (2002); and R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Nothing trilogy, launched by The Darkness That Comes Before (2003).
ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN. The collaborative signature adopted by
Émile Erckmann (1822–99) and Alexandre Chatrian (1826–90),
French-speaking natives of Alsace. Much of their fiction reflects the marginal status of their homeland, especially the partly recycled folktales and offbeat horror stories (refer to HDHL) first collected as Contes fantastiques (1860) and Contes du bord du Rhin (1862). After the successful theatrical production in 1867 of a melodrama of supernatural revenge known in English as The Polish Jew or (in Henry Irving’s adaptation) The Bells, they restricted themselves to historical fiction.
The bibliography of Erckmann-Chatrian’s fantasies is inordinately
complex, but most can be found in a series of translations issued by Ward Lock in the 1870s, including Popular Tales and Romances
(1872), Confessions of a Clarinet Player (1874), The Man-Wolf and Other Stories (1876), The Wild Huntsman and Other Stories (1877),
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Stories of the Rhine (1877), and The Polish Jew and Other Stories (1880). An 1873 novelization of The Bells bears their byline but is not by them. The Best Tales of Terror of Erckmann-Chatrian (1981), ed.
Hugh Lamb, is a useful sampler.
ERICKSON, STEVE (1950– ). U.S. writer whose postmodern/
metafictions employ fantastic devices to distort landscapes and time schemes in the attempt to find a mythical essence within the perceived realities of the 20th-century United States. Days between Stations (1985), Rubicon Beach (1986), Tours of the Black Clock (1989), Arc d’X
(1993), Amnesiascope (1996), American Nomad (1997), and The Sea Came In at Midnight (1999) feature alternative histories stocked with exotic characters and images.
ERIKSON, STEVEN (1959– ). Canadian writer born Steven Rune
Lundin, under which name he published his first book in 1991. His epic fantasy series The Malazan Book of the Fallen, begun with Gardens of the Moon (1999), Deadhouse Gates (2000), Memories of Ice (2001), House of Chains (2002), and Midnight Tides (2004), offers an unusually detailed account of its secondary world. Blood Follows (2002) is a linked novella. The Healthy Dead (2004) and Fishin’ with Grandma Matchie (2004) are offbeat dark fantasies.
EROTIC FANTASY. In common parlance, erotic fantasies are daydreams constructed as part and parcel of sexual experience, whose commodified literary extensions form the subgenre of pornography.
However exaggerated they may be, the vast majority are necessarily naturalistic; ideals of sexual attractiveness do, however, test the boundaries of actuality, with the result that the most perfect partners imaginable tend to become supernaturalized in var
ious ways. For the extreme Romantic—Théophile Gautier is a cardinal example—no merely human partner could ever live up to the standard set by daydream ambition.
Furthermore, sexual passion is routinely conceived and represented as if it were a kind of supernatural force, irresistible in its most powerful manifestations and in its more durable versions, providing a kind of magical glue binding couples together; “love potions” are a chief stock in trade of witches. It is arguable that the idea of love promoted and celebrated by modern genre romance is sufficiently supernaturalized to make the entire genre’s status ambiguous, if not hybrid—in which case its recent extension into paranormal romance is readily understandable.
EROTIC FANTASY • 133
For these reasons, there is a substantial sector of fantasy literature that consists of projections of the erotic impulse; this strain extends across several subgenres and often stretches their limits. Sexual attraction is a powerful force generating literary timeslips and summoning the ghosts of sentimental fantasy, as well as motivating quests (a cliché mercilessly satirized in Cervantes’s definitive delusional fantasy Don Quixote). It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Aphrodite—the Greek goddess of love and beauty, called Venus by the Romans—is one of the two GrecoRoman deities whose importance extends far beyond classical fantasy, the other being Pan, who functions to some extent as a male equivalent.
Aphrodite’s symbolic presence dominates such contes philosophiques
as Pierre Louÿs’s Aphrodite, John Erskine’s Venus the Lonely Goddess, George S. Viereck’s Gloria, and Daniel Evan Weiss’s Honk If You Love Aphrodite (1999). Her co-option into chivalric romance, via the legend of the German knight Tannhaüser, inspired such works as Ludwig
Tieck’s “The Faithful Eckhart,” Max Adeler’s “Mr Skinner’s Night in the Underworld,” Aubrey Beardsley’s Under the Hill, and Vernon Lee’s “The Gods and Ritter Tanhuser” (1913). A legend of similar provenance reported in Richard Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), in which a ring is unwisely placed on the finger of her statue, has been recycled in Prosper Mérimée’s “The Venus of Ille” (1837), F. Anstey’s The Tinted Venus, and Anthony Burgess’s The Eve of St. Venus. Although Aphrodite’s son and accomplice Eros, called Cupid or Amor by the Romans, was the source of the term “erotic,” he is less widely reflected in literature than in art, where he is often represented as a cherubic bowman firing arrows of desire.
The fascination Aphrodite holds for male authors is further reflected in the immense significance in Romantic literature of the femme fatale, whose powers of sexual attraction are so great that her pursuers become utterly careless of their own well-being, often perishing as a result—a notion reflected in classical legends of sirens, blood-drinking lamias, and sorceresses like Circe. The archetypal femmes fatales of Judeo-Christian myth and legend are Lilith—Adam’s first wife, allegedly expelled from Eden for refusing to submit to his mastery—and Salome, the daughter of Herodias who pleased Herod with her dancing and
claimed the head of John the Baptist as her reward. An extravagant analysis of the significance of femmes fatales in the context of romanticism can be found in Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony (1933), which
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has chapters devoted to “The Beauty of the Medusa” and “La Belle
Dame sans Merci.” Gautier’s “Clarimonde” (1836) and “One of Cleopatra’s Nights” (1838) take it for granted that the intensity of the erotic experience provided by a femme fatale would compensate for its brevity; the luxurious exoticism of Gautier’s erotic fantasies was fervently echoed in the work of Gérard de Nerval but was treated more cynically by Charles Baudelaire and the decadent fantasists who came after him, as in Catulle Mendès’s series tr. as Lila and Colette and the Isles of Love (1885; tr. 1931).
The femmes fatales of the decadent imagination tend to be more de-
ceptive than their Romantic forebears, as well as more cruel; key French examples include Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques (1874), Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s L’Ève Future, and Octave Mirbeau’s Torture Garden (1899). Their extreme equivalents in English literature tend to be sinister figures of menace, as in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk, J.
Sheridan le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1872), Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Parasite; sincere masochistic appreciation can, however, be found in such poems as John Keats’s
“La Belle Dame sans Merci” and Algernon Swinburne’s “Dolores” and
“Faustine” (both 1866), as well as Vernon Lee’s lubricious “Amour
Dure,” Rider Haggard’s awestricken She, and Max Beerbohm’s sarcastic Zuleika Dobson (1911). Such American examples as Edgar Allan Poe’s “Morella” and “Ligeia,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and Fitz-James O’Brien’s “The Diamond Lens” (1858) are
mostly anemic, although Robert W. Chambers, in “The Demoiselle
d’Ys” (1896), and A. Merritt, in Dwellers in the Mirage, tried to breathe new life into Gautieresque romanticism. The Weird Tales writers C. L. Moore and Clark Ashton Smith tried to sustain it, even while satirists like James Branch Cabell and John Erskine were cultivating a determinedly sceptical kind of sophistication that became the dominant voice of 20th-century erotic fantasy.
The most obvious male counterpart of the femme fatale is Don Juan, whose legend was first recorded in the early 17th century and was dramatized by Molière in 1665 before Mozart turned it into the opera Don Giovanni (1787). The account of the rake being dragged off to hell by an outraged statue is, however, merely the anxious underside of male fantasy. The equivalent female fantasy was very rarely found in supernaturalized versions in the 19th century, although Emily Brontë’s Heath-cliff came close. For most of the 20th century, the prevalent assumption
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of genre romance was that the only explicit supernaturalization required in female erotic fantasy involved building bridges to the lost world of Romance, especially to figures based on the popular image of Lord Byron. Such figures were, however, largely confined by female writers to the genre of historical fiction until the advent of paranormal romance.
Notable modern attempts to put more fantasy into erotic fantasy, in various ways, include Hélène Cixous’s The Third Body (1970; tr. 1999), Seamus Cullen’s Astra and Flondrix (1976), Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffmann, Storm Constantine’s Hermetech, Francisco Rebolledo’s Rasero (1993; tr. 1995), Nicholson Baker’s The Fermata (1994), Ann Arensberg’s Incubus (1999), Francesca Lia Block’s Nymph, Christopher Moore’s The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove (1999), Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart, Geoff Ryman’s Lust, and Jennifer Stevenson’s Trash Sex Magic (2004).
ERSKINE, BARBARA (1944– ). Byline used by British writer Barbara Hope-Lewis, a significant pioneer of paranormal romance. Lady of Hay (1986), Kingdom of Shadows (1988), Midnight Is a Lonely Place (1994), House of Echoes (1996), and On the Edge of Darkness (1998) all feature timeslips or other transtemporal exchanges of passionate experience, as do some of the stories in Encounters (1990) and Distant Voices (1996). Child of the Phoenix (1992) is a historical fantasy.
Whispers in the Sand (2000) describes an Egyptian journey attended by a ghostly ancestor; two sequel novellas are included with other materials in Sands of Time (2003). Hiding from the Light (2002) also features subtler echoes of the past.
ERSKINE, JOHN (1879–1951). U.S. writer whose early essay “Magic and Wonder in Literature” was reprinted in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent and Other Essays (1915). Most of his works recycle myths and legends—usually purged of their supernatural components—for
satirical purposes. The Private Life of Helen of Troy (1925) employs classical materials, Galahad (1926) those of chivalric romance. The Edenic fantasy Adam and Eve (1927) contrasts Lilith and Eve as ideals of femininity, the pusillanimity of Adam’s choice echoing in the
Odyssean fantasy Penelope�
��s Man (1927). The stories in Cinderella’s Daughter and Other Sequels and Consequences (1930) transfigure the classic fairy tales. Uncle Sam (1930) deals with myths of a more modern stripe, while Solomon, my Son! (1935) is more wide ranging. Venus, the Lonely Goddess (1949) is atypically sentimental.
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ESCAPISM. Escape is one of the three fundamental functions of fantasy identified by J. R. R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-stories,” which defends the notion of escapism against the pejorative connotations frequently attached to it. Tolkien denies that literary escapism is a kind of desertion reflective of cowardice or laziness, although he refrains from using the analogy of a holiday taken for purposes of refreshment. Many critics who condemn fantasy as escapist fare do not, in any case, think that a temporary escape from the burdens of social responsibility is an inherently bad thing; their argument is that there are much healthier secondary worlds to escape to than are found in fairy tales or genre fantasies.
Countering the latter argument requires a more robust apologetic
strategy, like the one employed by Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), which emphasizes the contribution ambitious fantasy might make to the escaper’s mental flexibility and imaginative reach. Burke’s argument seems irrelevant to the stereotyped formulas of fairy tales and commodified fantasies, whose familiarity does not breed contempt and more readily invites consideration as affirmative ritual. Tolkien’s notion of eucatastrophe and Bruno Bettelheim’s analysis of The Uses of Enchantment, both of which stress repetitive affirmation rather than imaginative flexibility, tacitly surrender this point.
Literary fantasies couched as celebrations or critiques of escapism include Joseph Shield Nicholson’s A Dreamer of Dreams, George du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson, Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams, Vernon Knowles’s The Ladder, Maude Meagher’s Fantastic Traveller (1931), James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” Jonathan Carroll’s Bones of the Moon, and Christopher Fowler’s Calabash (2000). The most outspoken apologies for escapism tend to focus on protagonists in extreme circumstances, such as Jack London’s strait-jacketed prisoner in The Star Rover (1915) or Majgull Axelsson’s para-plegic girl in April Witch (1997; tr. 2002). James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933) made the Tibetan lamasery of Shangri-La—a precious quasi-Arcadian refuge from a sick world—a potent symbol of escape.
The A to Z of Fantasy Literature Page 26
