The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy

by Brian Stableford

  In preliterate societies, where belief in magic is still sustained there is always an intimate connection between magic and morality. Magical explanations and magical practices are invoked on precisely those occasions when the real world fails to measure up to the ideal. The hunter in search of meat makes magic against the possibility of failure, but he may fail if he has broken a taboo. The crop-grower makes magic to bring the rain which he needs, and magic to fertilise the soil, but if the tribal ancestors have been offended by the wickedness of their children the rain will not come and the soil will not bear fruit. The medicine-man makes magic to fight illness and oppose the evil of witches who would bring all manner of misfortune upon the tribe. Magic is an expression of desire; it is the attempt to create, at least in the imagination, a world where the human will is the master of fate. But desire without moral responsibility is itself an evil, and magic of that kind is black magic. Institutionalised magic is intimately bound up with the question of whether men truly deserve to succeed in their endeavours.

  Magic does not, in fact, work - but that does not mean that it is not useful to those societies which practice and believe in it. The real utility of magic does not lie in the practical arena of human endeavour but in the theatre of the psyche, but it does have a real utility, and that is why it is wrong to regard belief in magic as though it were simply a silly mistake. Institutionalised magic builds confidence and morale; its operations are of purely symbolic value, but it nevertheless opposes defeatism and despair, and conserves hope. Magic - or some psychological substitute - is vital to all human endeavour at a causal level, because confidence may be a necessary condition of success, and despair is generally a guarantee of failure. In all societies where belief in magic is sustained (and ours has by no means been entirely purged of such ways of thinking) forms of magical practice and magical belief are largely defined by moral priorities, dependent upon notions of reward and punishment.

  The characterisation of magic as an expression of desire is ironically inverted in Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of the emotions, which attempts to characterise emotion as a “magical” form of sensation. How we feel about an object, Sartre suggests, reflects the relationship we would have with that object if the world were indeed magical, and the emotions fill a spectrum which extends from a conviction of our own omnipotence to a sensation of utter helplessness - from megalomania to paranoia. The emotions, of course, have a moral gravity of their own whenever passion moves us, there is a moral danger.

  If we look at supernatural fiction in general from this perspective, we will recognise that horror fiction exemplifies the negative end of the emotional spectrum, while fantasy exemplifies the positive. Horror stories characteristically deal with the frustration of desire, or with temptation leading to destruction; fantasy characteristically deals with the measured victory of desire, or with constructive temptation. Horror stories frequently built to a climax which involves the escape of the characters from whatever has threatened them, but such an ending is a matter of relief rather than achievement. By the same token, fantasy stories often contain a partial negation of their own logic, which shows not only in occasional tragic resolutions but also - more frequently - in a bittersweet undercurrent of irony. The lovely sadness of knowing that fantasy is, after all, fantasy, supplies a characteristic savour to the masterpieces of the genre.

  In all supernatural fiction matters of morality are at stake. Good and evil are in the balance, and the question at issue is whether and how the characters will be delivered from evil. Horror fiction tends to emphasize the threat, and to build suspense upon the question of whether deliverance is possible; a happy ending, in a horror story, is a restoration of normality. Fantasy, although it is often comical and calculatedly quaint, conceals beneath its relative lightness of tone a greater ambition; in fantasy, normality is never enough, and though the preferable ideal may in the end turn out to be unattainable - or attainable only at a terrible price - fantasy nevertheless moves in search of eucatastrophe, in the hope of improving the quality of life. Horror stories comprise the fiction of fear; fantasy stories comprise the fiction of hope.

  Nineteenth century fantasy is so various that it is not a simple matter to isolate its key themes or point out the coherent undercurrents guiding its evolution. However, Tolkien’s identification of the three key features of Secondary World fantasy does offer a set of analytic instruments which help to make these unifying themes and methods a little clearer.

  Tolkien is clearly right to argue that recovery of a clear view of the world is something which requires imaginative effort. Such an effort is required to make us look beyond and through the triteness of the taken-for granted, and to discover new perspectives from which the familiar looks odd. Tolkien, borrowing from G. K. Chesterton, calls this kind of effect “Mooreeffoc”, after an odd thrill reportedly felt by Charles Dickens upon observing from the wrong side the phrase “Coffee Room” inscribed on a glass door.

  We have all experienced similar thrills and fascinations. It is not only words spelled backwards which sometimes acquire this mysterious aesthetic appeal; most other kinds of wordplay can do it, whether they consist of sophisticated exercises in rhyming and punning or the malapropisms and naive misunderstandings of children. Language, as a map of the world, is mutable in all sorts of ways which introduce happy absurdities and discontinuities into its work of reference. The same is true of fiction, which maps human experience in a fashion analogous to the way in which language maps reality, and which generates many of its happy absurdities and discontinuities in the form of fantasy.

  A large number of nineteenth century fantasies work in this fashion, creating new viewpoints which administer a series of shocks to our conventional assumptions about the way our world works. The characters which Alice meets in her odysseys underground and through the looking glass use the instruments of wordplay to do this, but there are other ways in which the trick can be worked. There are, for instance, wonderful visits paid to our world by the ambassadors of others ways of thought: more-or-less amiable demons, or angels, or various creatures and characters borrowed from pagan belief. Then again, fantasy provides the opportunity for personalities to be displaced by trading places. All such stories serve the function of showing their characters and their readers the world’s stage lit from an unconventional angle.

  The daydream fantasies which we make up for ourselves in order to escape temporarily from everyday life are often described as “idle fancies”, mainly because they come to us in moments of idleness and may be used to distract us from burdensome matters of duty. But our everyday fantasies are often idle in another way too: they fall readily into stereotyped patterns, and we rarely elaborate them beyond the point of enjoying their vicarious satisfactions. For the most part, we obtain gratification from our fantasies quite easily; we usually do not put a great deal of effort into their formation. We may, of course, enter into collaboration with writers in the construction of our fantasies, appropriating their efforts to make our daydreams more detailed and more lively, but the best writers inevitably do this kind of job more thoroughly and more artfully than the vast majority of their readers, and if we draw too heavily on their resources we may find our daydreams reduced in value because they are not specifically tailored to link up with our particular feelings and frustrations.

  There are some kinds of fiction which apparently exist largely to fulfil this kind of daydream-fuelling purpose; pornography is the most obvious example. Those who despise fantasy as a genre often speak of it as if it had no other functions, but that is an obviously mistaken view, and fantasy stories which do deal with the theme of wish-fulfillment usually do so in order to issue cautionary warnings against the perils of idle daydreaming. This can most easily be seen in parables which inform us that wishes which are granted (such wishes traditionally come in sets of three) will always, perversely, lead us to disaster. Nineteenth century fantasy contains many examples of such stories, which show us ill-advised wishes going
absurdly or tragically wrong; it is also rich in accounts of dream-worlds where characters are educated in the folly of their fancies.

  Where writers are more generous in their treatment of daydreaming - as they often are in childrens’ stories - they remain very conscious of the temporary nature of such fantasies, careful to emphasise that daydreamers must always return from their fantasies to deal with the world from which they fled. Usually, fantasy stories which are sympathetic to the stuff of daydreams make their apology on the grounds that a daydreamer may return to the vexing problems of real life refreshed, or having learned some lesson which will make those problems more tractable.

  When nineteenth century fantasy writers lead us into Secondary Worlds they are facilitating an escape from our imprisonment by mundanity, and we may often feel ourselves to be tourists out for enjoyment rather than earnest seekers after knowledge avid for instruction. Nevertheless, the authors invariably have some didactic purpose in escorting us upon such odysseys. Even when they boldly declare that they are peddling pure nonsense they unobtrusively guide us towards an entirely proper irreverence for the sordid habit of taking things for granted.

  The most significant of the nineteenth century journeys into the land of Faerie and its many analogues were authentic voyages of exploration and discovery, undertaken by writers who were concerned to learn as well as to teach. The authors too were trying to escape, and though they were usually uncertain where their destination truly lay they were nevertheless eager to make progress in their journey towards it. The writing of many of the most effective fantasies must have been acts of catharsis on the part of their authors: attempts to purge confusion.

  Inevitably, the purgation can only have been half-effective. Allegory, though it can be a valuable instrument of thought, can produce no real solutions to the the moral problems which it brings into sharper focus; but we must not underestimate the value of that half -effect simply because it is, in functional terms, entirely magical.

  The magical worlds devised by fantasy writers, whether they lie in a hypothetical past or in some parallel dimension, often seem to lie closer to the world of Platonic Archetypes than to the real world of the nineteenth century. They are dramatically purified worlds, where good and evil are more clearly polarised and whose characters very often embody single virtues and vices. They are worlds where rewards and punishments are more extreme, where social roles are generally very distinct. For the heroes who move through them, though, they remain problematic, and no matter what success the heroes attain in material and spiritual terms those problematic features can never be entirely resolved. Often, the conclusion of the story is a dissolution of the dream which leaves the protagonist with mixed feelings - richer in experience and understanding, but no more certain than before what the answer is to the question of how men and women should live.

  For this reason, even the most positive and constructive of nineteenth century fantasies do retain a darker and more anxious side. The quest for eucatastrophe is haunted by the awareness that success rests on compromise. Fantasy is by no means as simple-minded or ritualistic as its opponents sometimes claim, and serious fantasies inevitably bear adequate testimony to the moral doubts as well as the moral determination of their authors.

  Given all this, there can be no doubt that the Tolkienian function of Consolation, as served by nineteenth century fantasy, is by no means to be dismissed as a mere literary equivalent of the compensatory consolations of private daydreams. The Escape which it offers is by no means a cushioned refuge which simply insulates its readers from the stresses of confrontation with the real and the weariness of social conformity. Both these functions remain associated with (and perhaps subservient to) the function of Recovery, in which we are allowed to regain a proper reverence for the strangeness of our own world by confrontation and intercourse with imaginary ones which, because they are magical, are less strange to the emotional aspects of perception.

  Like any other genre, fantasy derived its instruments largely from pre-existing forms. Writers throughout Europe borrowed from the folkloristic material which had been adapted into fiction, and moulded to the cause of bourgeois moralising for the purpose of “civilising” young minds, by the likes of Perrault and the Grimms. Fantasy writers of all nations also borrowed from the chivalric romances of the late Middle Ages, which had in the latter part of their history begun to escape (albeit rather halfheartedly) from the straitjacket of moralistic and pietistic allegory into which they had earlier been crammed by the monks who controlled the distribution of literacy in Medieval Europe. Other rich sources of material were provided by the Oriental fantasies which (aided by a less rigorous style of moralising) had become popular in the wake of translations of the Thousand-and-One Nights, and by the ancient religious systems of Europe, especially the Greek and Roman mythology which was so richly interwoven into the texture of Classical literature, and thus into the ideological heritage of Western Europe.

  When we look at British fantasy in isolation, we can easily identify several distinctive strands which are of cardinal importance. These are, of course, the contributions made to it by native British folklore and legendary. These are complicated, first because Scottish and Celtic folklore are in many ways distinct from English folklore, and secondly because of the legacy of Norman invasion of 1066. The Normans imported a strong Gallic element into the reporting of English folkloristic materials, which were mostly committed to paper for the first time by Anglo-Norman chroniclers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, although Scottish and Celtic materials were less-heavily polluted.

  Gallic intrusions are evident to a fairly limited extent in the mythology of Faerie which provides one of the principal fountainheads of British fantasy, but they are glaringly obvious in the pseudohistorical legends deployed in one of the first and most enduringly popular English printed books, Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Although Arthurian legend may reasonably be reckoned specifically British, in that it refers to a pre-Norman king already recognised in British legend, Malory’s “Arthurian Bible” is cast in the form of French chivalric romance, and borrows several of the central themes of that genre, including the chivalric code and the quest for the Holy Grail.

  It is important that while we recognise the importance in British fantasy of folkloristic materials which are specifically British, we also recognise that works by British writers which use Oriental or Classical sources are no less authentic or significant as participants in the evolution of British fantasy. The uniqueness of British fantasy is a matter of attitude rather than choice of materials, and part of the delight of fantasy is its readiness to deal with the strange and the alien. The native folkloristic tradition is a major contributor to the distinctive flavour of British fantasy, but it was never a straitjacket setting boundaries of parochiality.

  In nineteenth century Britain, Victorian morality came to exercise a powerful dominion over the written work, and this dominion has very clear effects on the development of British fantasy. Early in the century one can find Shelley attempting to claim for the poets the privilege of being the world’s true legislators, and Keats proclaiming the equivalence of truth and beauty. Both writers practised what they preached, and their work is replete with fantastic themes whose exoticism is openly celebrated, and which champion a liberal morality. But British fantasy - especially prose fantasy - was quickly and conspicuously chilled by the icy winds of moral oppression. By the time Victoria came to the throne in 1837 fantasy stories were already becoming prim and conservatively moralistic, and this primness became exaggerated almost to the point of grotesquerie in the work of the most ardent disciples of Victorianism.

  Victorian painters were able to use fantasy motifs as a means of sidestepping moral restraint. There was a mid-century fashion for fairy painting, occasioned in part by the fact that one way to present images of female nudity while insulating the artist from accusations of indecency was to add a pair of gossamer wings to the figures in question (a similar excepti
on was made for female figures in paintings illustrating scenes from Classical myth). Writers found no such parallel move available; verbal indecencies and indelicacies could not be excused by context. Thus, the most obvious response to Victorianism in supramundane fiction was the development of a highly stylized and carefully chastened school of fantasy best exemplified by the works of Mrs Craik, George MacDonald and William Morris. This was not, however, the only response.

  The anarchic spirit which remains submerged in Victorian fantasy tended to sidestep confrontation with official morality by displacing its energies into a more radical confrontation with logic and reason, best exemplified by the nonsense poetry of Edward Lear and the works of Lewis Carroll. It was not until the 1880’s that this kind of deliberate trafficking with absurdity began to confront issues of behavioural morality in a less elliptical fashion - very cautiously in the works of Walter Besant and F. Anstey, more calculatedly in the deceptively light fantasies of Richard Garnett and Oscar Wilde. Even then the forces of repression remained sufficiently powerful to destroy Wilde for his temerity. Beneath the surface of all the classic Victorian fantasies, though - usually hidden by a veil of grotesquerie or humour - bitter responses to the pressure of Victorian moral extremism can be discovered; a sensitive decoding of the allegories of Charles Dickens and John Sterling, and even those of George MacDonald, reveals a full measure of confusion and pain.

  As might be expected, this history contrasts strongly with the development of fantasy in other nations. The contrast is most obvious in the case of France, which had been the first European nation to develop an elaborate supernatural literature which had relatively little horror in it. Long before the revolutionary period, France had been the home of the chivalric romance, and in the eighteenth century French writers - aided in their inspiration by the examples of Perrault and the Galland translation of the Arabian Nights - produced dozens of exotic romances which combined the whimsicality of fairy tales or the lushness of Arabian mythology with the politesse of French courtly manners.