The A to Z of Fantasy Literature
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“The Self-Seer,” Gerald Bullett’s Mr Godly beside Himself, Frank Baker’s Sweet Chariot (1942), and Gill Alderman’s Lilith’s Castle (1999), which involve exchanges with otherworldly doppelgängers, are similarly philosophical. The alternative humorous tradition, spear-
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headed by Robert MacNish’s Faustian fantasy “The Metempsychosis”
(1826 as by “A Modern Pythagorean”), was popularized by F. Anstey’s Vice Versa; variations of the cautionary theme of the latter include Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Great Keinplatz Experiment,” R. Andom’s
“The Strange Adventure of Roger Wilkins,” Thorne Smith’s Turnabout, P. G. Wodehouse’s Laughing Gas (1936), Angus MacLeod’s The Body’s Guest (1958), and George McBeth’s erotic fantasy The Transformation (1975).
The piratical element of Théophile Gautier’s Avatar is echoed in such thrillers as T. W. Speight’s The Strange Experiences of Mr Ver-schoyle (1901), Barry Pain’s An Exchange of Souls, Seabury Quinn’s Alien Flesh, and Tim Powers’s The Anubis Gates. Accounts of posthumous identity hijacking include Elleston Trevor’s The Immortal Error (1946) and J. Russell Warren’s This Mortal Coil (1947).
ILLUSTRATION. The illustration of fantasy literature, which became increasingly important in the 19th century, had a long tradition of fantastic art to draw upon, much of which was and is a significant influence upon the literary imagination. Much classical myth imagery survives in sculpture and much Egyptian material in tomb paintings. Early painters in oils whose imagery remains a significant stimulant include Hieronymus Bosch, Matthias Grünewald, and Pieter Brueghel. The romantic
imagination—especially its Gothic offshoot—was primed by Salvator Rosa and Henry Fuseli; later 19th-century fantasy took some inspiration from the allegedly insane John Martin and the Bedlamite Richard Dadd.
The latter was one of many Victorian artists swept up by a vogue for painting fairies; other major contributors included Joseph Noel Paton and John Anster Fitzgerald. The first important fantasist to fuse text and illustration into a coherent whole was William Blake.
Illustration became a vital generic support for texts in the marketing of children’s fantasy, a significant precedent being set by William Mul-ready’s illustration of William Roscoe’s The Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast (1807). George Cruikshank was one of the first artists to recycle a fairy tale to fit it to his own illustrations, while John Tenniel was the first to form a “symbiotic” relationship with a particular writer, Lewis Carroll. Many fantasy classics were re-released in the 19th century in lavishly illustrated editions; those which proved particularly attractive to artists include Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost, both of which brought heroic efforts from Gustave Doré, the most prolific fantasy illustrator of his era.
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For much of the century, there was a wide technological gulf sepa-
rating the artistic possibilities open to oil painters and those available to engravers of illustrations, although hand coloration was not out of the question for such expensive projects as Richard Doyle’s In Fairyland (1870). New techniques permitted photographic reproduction to become commonplace in the 1860s, and a further revolution took
place at the end of the 1880s as a new era of color illustration began.
The techniques thus condemned to obsolescence, however, had pro-
duced abundant work that had a beauty unique to their methods,
which had brought monochromatic work to various peaks of achieve-
ment in the pre-Raphaelite produce of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, Aubrey Beardsley’s illustration of Le Morte d’Arthur, and Laurence Housman’s decorative work. The new color illustrators also produced line drawings—color plates usually supplied only a
small fraction of the illustrative material for most books—but it was usually their work in color that attracted most attention and defined their achievements.
The most celebrated fantasy illustrators of the late 19th century include Arthur Rackham, Charles Robinson, Edmund Dulac, Willy
Pogany, Kay Nielsen, and Harry Clarke. Those who produced some of
their own texts included Howard Pyle, William Heath Robinson, and Jean de Bosschère—a tradition carried forward into the 20th century by Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, and Edward Gorey. Early 20th-century writers whose work benefited from distinctive illustration included Lord Dunsany (by Sidney H. Sime), Ben Hecht (by Wallace Smith), and various writers reprinted by the Bodley Head in sumptuous series that matched James Branch Cabell and Anatole France with Frank Papé and Richard Garnett with Henry Keen.
Several 19th- and 20th-century movements that gave rise to a good
deal of literary fantasy also embraced artistic endeavors. The French Decadent movement was illustrated and inspired by Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and Felicien Rops, while its Belgian offshoot was greatly encouraged by Jean Delville and Fernand Khnopff. Surrealism’s visual component, developed by such painters as Max Ernst and Salvador Dali, had an even more intimate feedback relationship with its literary arm.
On the other hand, illustrators working in the commercial arena for the pulp magazines also found their most extravagant opportunities in the fantasy arena, where Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok did their finest work.
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The role played by illustrators in assisting the emergence of com-
modified fantasy in the 1970s was considerable, the belated success of Robert E. Howard’s sword and sorcery stories being closely associated with their illustration by such artists as Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo. Fairy painting made a dramatic comeback in the work of Brian Froud, whose Faeries (1978) launched an influential series; Richard and Wendy Pini, in the ElfQuest comic series (launched 1978); Roland and Claudine Sabatier, in The Great Encyclopedia of Fairies (1996; tr. 1999, with text by Pierre Dubois); and Suza Scalora, in The Fairies (1999).
This boom was accompanied by similar booms in artwork depicting unicorns and dragons. Modern children’s fantasy still provides a vital arena for lavish illustration, exemplified by key works by such writers as Jane Yolen and Nancy Willard.
“Fantasy Art” rapidly became a medium in its own right within and
alongside genre fantasy, promoted by Ballantine’s serial of heavily illustrated Ariel anthologies (4 vols., 1976–78) and has continued to exist in symbiotic relationship with it; its significant contributors often contribute to graphic novels as well as producing cover art for books, record sleeves, and independent paintings; significant contributors to the medium include Roger Dean, Stephen Fabian, Rodney Matthews,
Don Maitz, Bob Eggleton, and Greg and Tim Hildebrandt. Its accom-
plishments are chronicled and celebrated in an annual showcase edited by Cathy and Arnie Fenner, Spectrum: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (launched 1994). Literary projects prompted by fantasy art include Naomi Mitchison’s Beyond the Limit, based on drawings by Wyndham Lewis, texts written by Michael Ende to accompany paintings by his father, Harlan Ellison’s Mind Fields (1994, written to accompany paintings by Jacek Yerka), and a series of novellas based on Brian Froud’s paintings that include Patricia McKillip’s Something Rich and Strange.
Contemporary writers/illustrators who have produced texts inseparable from their illustrations include Tove Jansson, Dahlov Ipcar, Russell Hoban, Alasdair Gray, Patrick Woodroffe—in Pentateuch (1980; rev. 1987 as The Second Earth: The Pentateuch Retold; originally issued with a double album of progressive rock music by Dave Greenslade), The Adventures of Tinker, the Hole-Eating Duck (1979), Mickey’s New Home (1985), and The Dorbott of Vacuo; or, How to Live With the Fluxus Quo (1987)—and Shaun Tan, in The Lost Thing (2000) and The Red Tree (2001). Other notable illustration-based items include Paul
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Stewart and Chris Riddell’s Deepwoods series, Nick Bantock’s eccentric afterlife fantasy The Museum of Purgatory (1999), and Ernest Drake’s
Dragonology (2003). Fantasy art is showcased online by such sites as Elfwood (launched 1996) and artpromote’s Fantasy Art Gallery.
IMMERSIVE FANTASY. A term employed in Farah Mendlesohn’s “Toward a Taxonomy of Fantasy” (2001), in company with intrusive fantasy and portal fantasy, to contrive a fundamental trisection of the field of fantasy literature. Immersive fantasies are those set entirely within secondary worlds, and in which the protagonists belong to those worlds. The most important consequence of immersion, Mendlesohn
points out, is that viewpoint characters must accept the fantastic entities with which they are surrounded as aspects of their normality, however exceptional particular encounters may be. This tends to diminish the
“sense of wonder” ordinarily associated with fantastic manifestations in intrusive or portal fantasies, by requiring the reader to share the character’s assumed acceptance—an act of imaginative reconstruction enabled by the process J. R. R. Tolkien calls “enchantment,” leading to the establishment of what he calls secondary belief. The distinctive charac-teristics and effects of “high fantasy” are side effects of the immersive process.
IMMORTALITY. The most awkward attribute of human consciousness, according to existentialist philosophers, is an awareness of the inevitability of death. Corollaries of this awareness include angst (death anxiety) and all manner of psychological avoidance strategies, which inevitably generate psychological and literary fantasies of immortality, including various kinds of afterlife fantasies and such fervent wish-fulfillment fantasies as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Immunity to death by natural causes is routinely attributed to gods, angels, demons, and other spiritual beings, who are often imagined to be able to gift such immunity to human beings. The notion that humans might discover a magical means of acquiring longevity for themselves was a central element of alchemical fantasy before sf (refer to HDSFL) provided a plethora of imaginable methods of defying aging and disease.
Given its psychological foundations, it is not surprising that many fantasies go to great lengths to construct arguments to the effect that human immortality would be a curse rather than a blessing, ruined by the ennui of endless repetition—a thesis exemplified in the legends of the
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Wandering Jew and the Flying Dutchman. Most traditional tales of immortality gained are cautionary, often—like the myth of Tithonus, recapitulated in Jonathan Swift’s Struldbruggs, in which longevity is not accompanied by immunity from aging—involving an unanticipated
sting; much fantasy literature reemphasizes the argument in a manner reminiscent of Aesop’s parable of the fox and the grapes. Notable examples include Mary Shelley’s “The Mortal Immortal” (1834), W. Harrison Ainsworth’s Auriol (1850), Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s The Romance of the Fountain, George Allan England’s “The Elixir of Hate”
(1911), Claude Farrére’s The House of the Secret (1923), Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting, John Boyne’s The Thief of Time (2001), and Pete Hamill’s Forever (2003).
The suggestion that boredom, alienation, and the continual loss of loved ones might be prices well worth paying for the reward of eternal life is relatively rare, although it is acknowledged in Eden Phillpotts’s The Girl and the Faun and loudly trumpeted by George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah (1921) and by George S. Viereck and Paul Eldridge in My First Two Thousand Years. The frustration of demands for immortality is one of the key challenges to the ingenuity of Faustian fantasy. The kind of conditional immortality featured in vampire stories is easier to balance in terms of costs and benefits, as is the often-interrupted kind featured in karmic romances where protagonists are held in bondage.
The advent of genre fantasy renewed literary fascination with the idea of longevity as a key reward of magical expertise and a useful endpoint for quests, as in Fletcher Pratt’s The Well of the Unicorn, Tanith Lee’s The Birthgrave, and Tim Powers’s On Stranger Tides (1987)—to the extent that Diana Wynne Jones’s Tough Guide to Fantasyland sarcastically deduces the rule that “the longer a person marinades her/himself in Magic, the longer she/he lives.” Jones provided her own reappraisal of the role of the accursed wanderer in The Homeward Bounders (1981).
The ultimate extrapolation of the existential plight of immortals buoyed up by hope in spite of being plagued by ennui is Michael Moorcock’s
“Dancers at the End of Time” sequence.
The elixir of life and the fountain of youth are the most popular fantasy motifs associated with immortality; another is Gilgamesh’s pearl of immortality, as featured in Brenda W. Clough’s How Like a God (1997) and The Doors of Death and Life (2000). Longevity is frequently used as a facilitating device in panoramic historical fantasies, as in Frank
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Stockton’s The Vizier of the Three-Horned Alexander, Charles Godfrey Leland’s Flaxius, Cutcliffe Hyne’s Abbs: His Story through Many Ages (1929), Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man.
INFERNAL COMEDY. Hell was invented by theologians as a kind of ultimate deterrent for the purposes of psychological terrorism. Although it retains that function in much horror fiction, afterlife fantasy has mobilized a good deal of resistance, often by conflating the Dantean inferno of Christian fantasy with the gloomy but relatively hospitable underworld of classical mythology and drawing narrative energy from the chimerical combinations of damned individuals that might be contrived there.
The tradition of infernal comedy was pioneered by John Kendrick Bangs’s A Houseboat on the Styx and carried forward by Edgar C.
Blum’s Satan’s Realm (1899), Robert B. Vale’s Efficiency in Hades (1923), Frederick Arnold Kummer’s Ladies in Hades, John Collier’s The Devil and All, and Marmaduke Dixey’s Hell’s Bells (1936), although it fell into disuse after World War II, when images of the afterlife became more inventively various. Infernal comedies routinely suppose that the Inferno is not far from Paradise in geographical terms, and not so very different as a habitation; there is, therefore, a parallel subgenre of “paradisal comedies,” whose notable examples include Mark Twain’s Extracts from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven and Alan Griffiths’ Strange News from Heaven (1934).
INGALLS, RACHEL (1940– ). U.S. writer resident in Britain since 1965.
There are elements of religious allegory in her early fiction, including Theft (1970) and some of the stories in Mediterranean Cruise (1973; rev. as The Man Who Was Left Behind and Other Stories; combined with the previous item as Something to Write Home About, 1988). Mrs. Caliban (1982) and Binstead’s Safari (1983) are erotic fantasies with a sexual political agenda; the former is combined with the similar contents of Three of a Kind (1985; aka I See a Long Journey) and The End of Tragedy (1987) in Mrs. Caliban and Other Stories (1993). Black Diamond (1992; abridged as Be My Guest: Two Novellas) and The Pearlkillers (1986) include further items in the same distinctive vein.
THE INKLINGS. A discussion group that first met in C. S. Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen College, Oxford, in the 1930s, subsequently moving to a local pub. J. R. R. Tolkien and Owen Barfield were key members,
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and Charles Williams joined in 1939; it slowly faded away after Williams’s death in 1945 and had ceased to exist by 1950, but Tolkien’s slowly expanding text of The Lord of the Rings and its associated materials had by then been subject to intensive collective scrutiny. Barfield, the author of Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (1928)—which advanced theoretical arguments regarding the intimate involvement of myth in the evolution of language—had an important influence on his fellow members’ uses of taproot texts and theories of fantasy.
INSTAURATION FANTASY. A term used by John Clute in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy to refer to fantasies of large-scale renewal and restoration—
re-enchantment writ large. Some such wholesale transformation is often the aim, if not always the outcome, of the quests undertaken in the messianic variants of heroic fantasy.
T
HE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE FANTASTIC IN
THE ARTS (IAFA). An organization formed in 1982 to maintain an annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA), which had been inaugurated in 1980 under the sponsorship of Margaret Gaines Swann, the mother of Thomas Burnett Swann, as a memorial to her son. IAFA continued the tradition of inviting professional guests, including artists as well as writers, in order to maintain a more eclectic input than the general run of academic conferences. In 1985, the organization introduced an annual William L. Crawford Memorial Award,
sponsored by Andre Norton, for the best debut fantasy novel; it added a Distinguished Scholarship Award in 1986 and created its own Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts in 1988.
INTRUSIVE FANTASY A category defined by Farah Mendlesohn in
“Toward a Taxonomy of Fantasy” (2001), where it forms part of a basic trisection of the field with immersive fantasy and portal fantasy, although it is also associated with the splinter category of liminal fantasy.
Intrusive fantasies are those set in the primary world, in which context the introduction of a magical object or supernatural being is disruptive—a “bringer of chaos,” whose effect on the viewpoint character is one of amazement or horror. Intrusive fantasies almost invariably follow normalizing story arcs: the story begins with the advent of the intrusion and is oriented toward its eventual exorcism.
Mendlesohn points out that intrusive fantasy differs from portal fantasies—where portals are initially manifest as intrusions—in that its protagonists, and hence its readers, “are never expected to become
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accustomed to the fantastic”; this difference reemphasizes the normalizing tendencies of its story arcs, because amazement is a wasting asset. Thus, while the protagonists of portal fantasy sequences like L.
Frank Baum’s Oz series eventually find their fantasy worlds becoming immersive, intrusive fantasies tend to discard familiarized protagonists in favor of new ones, thus resisting extrapolation into series; series can, however, be generated by using particular locations as