The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy

by Brian Stableford

  The nineteenth century French Romantics continued to carry these themes forward, and never doubted the respectability of producing fantastic fictions. Charles Nodier, Théophile Gautier and Anatole France became the leading producers of prose fantasy, but French poets were also extraordinarily fond of the exotic, and they continue to celebrate and explore it throughout the century. French writers were fascinated by “the Orient”, and with the interface between Classical antiquity and mythology. It was France which produced, in the work of the forefathers of the Decadent Movement - Baudelaire, Lautréamont and Rimbaud - the most explicit challenges to the oppressive “official” morality of Christianity. This challenge overflowed into prose fantasies to such an extent that many of the leading examples of French fantasy were considered far too indecent for early translation into English. Fantasy in France became an extravagantly eloquent champion of a warm and humane liberalism, frequently celebrating the power of erotic attraction.

  American supramundane fiction was rather more heterogeneous than that of France or Britain, and that heterogeneity could be found within the work of all its major writers, In the works of Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Fitz-James O’Brien we find the comic rubbing shoulders with the horrific and the sentimental, and though the authors pull in different directions - Irving towards the grotesque, Poe the paranoid, Hawthorne the moralistic - their canons each present the appearance of a mélange with less internal consistency than is exhibited by any European author.

  To some extent this variety reflects the fact that America had only the most meagre resources to draw upon in terms of a native folklore, and its writers tended to take their pick from a wide spectrum of European sources. One could argue with reasonable conviction that American fantasy stood in a similar imaginative relationship to Europe as the relationship which existed between French fantasy and “the Orient”. Europe was, from the American viewpoint, a kind of Antiquity, and when American fantasists came to mine its resources they tended to adopt the same Open Door philosophy which was subsequently to be formally articulated as an item of immigration policy. The distanced haphazardness of American borrowings from folkloristic sources, coupled with a marked irreverence in the invention of “new” folklore by writers like Irving (which seemed entirely appropriate to authors working in the thoroughly disenchanted milieu of the newborn nation), gave early American fantasy a heavily ironic flavour. Writers of madcap comic fantasy, including Mark Twain, Frank R. Stockton and John Kendrick Bangs, had gained ascendancy within the American genre by the end of the century.

  German fantasy began to crystallize out in the theoretically-supported kunstmärchen (“art fairy-tales”) of Goethe, Novalis and Fouqué, but German Romanticism always leaned so far toward the anxious pole of the magical spectrum that the greater part of its prose fiction belongs to the horror genre. If one can judge the matter accurately from the relatively sparse translations which exist, it seems to be the case that writers in Germany did not make much of the opportunity to construct moralistic fantasies either uneasily to support (as in Britain) or flamboyantly to oppose (as in France) the dominant morality of the day. Nor were German writers drawn to the kind of humorously sceptical fantasy which came to be produced in some quantity in America.

  All of these rival traditions - even the weak German tradition - had some slight influence on the evolution of British fantasy in the latter part of the century; but in the main it is the differences of attitude which stand out. Even when it draws on the folklore of other nations British fantasy usually stands in stark contrast to the nineteenth century fantasy of those nations. Tales of terror from France, Germany and America exerted a far greater influence on British horror stories, and have far more in common with them, than foreign fantasies have on and with British fantasies.

  The intellectual environment in which nineteenth century fantasy developed was by no means constant in its scepticism. The Romantic rebellion against the empire of Reason gave birth to some strange progeny, and certain kinds of magical beliefs - refined and refashioned by the processes of ideative natural selection - made a considerable comeback in the latter part of the century, when there was a remarkable resurgence of credulity with respect to the occult.

  The manifestations of this resurgence were many and varied, but they included Baron von Reichenbach’s championship of the healing powers of magnetism and the subsequent clinical uses of hypnotism; the cult of Spiritualism associated with those dishonest conjurors who set up in business as mediators between the human and spirit worlds; the Theosophy of Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant; and the neo-Rosicrucianism of such would-be ceremonial magicians as “Eliphas Levi” and the founders of the Order of Golden Dawn.

  The scholarly fantasies inspired by these overlappping cults attracted the interest and involvement of a good many notable persons, including both scientists and literary men. Many writers began to import the ideative flotsam and jetsam of these cults into superstitious didactic fantasies which took their place within the nascent tradition of moralistic fantasy. Their influence can clearly be seen in dozens of mawkishly optimistic literary accounts of the afterlife, which were mostly devoid of any merit whatsoever, but did help to open up imaginative space in Britain for the later development of a more philosophically-inclined subgenre of posthumous fantasy.

  Almost all occult fiction is awful; the missionary zeal of its authors frequently leads them to set matters of literary competence firmly aside. There were, however, some good writers among the credulous, and there were other writers who were prepared to borrow the vocabulary of ideas popularised by the credulous, without necessarily committing their own faith. There is little point in quibbling over such questions of definition as whether a credulous occult romance really qualifies as fantasy if its author believes religiously in the possibility of all that he (or, more often, she) has set forth. It is certainly true, though, that the literary interest of such works tends to stand in inverse proportion to the degree of conviction which the author has.

  This is not to say that credulous occult romance was not popular - the author who out-sold all others in Britain during the last few years of the century was Marie Corelli, who was by far and away the most fervent and most earnest of such writers - but its writers occupy a curious position in literary history. We can only try to account for their popularity in psychological terms; any estimation of their literary merits is bound to be confused and compromised by the knowledge that the items of faith which they sincerely and strenuously assert are irredeemably stupid.

  Credulity is not incompatible with the ability to tell a convincing horror story, but it does not lend itself effectively to the construction of a story whose ultimate intention is to be consolatory or uplifting. We know only too well that we are being paid in false coin when an author asks us not only to recognise the moral propriety of what he or she is saying, but also to believe that the world really is like that. Life in Heaven is a eucatastrophe in which many people try to preserve real belief, but such real belief is likely to be threatened and undermined by attempts at literary description, which inevitably raise more questions than they answer.

  The most effective moral allegories are produced by sceptics who need not be confused or weighed down by matters of dogma. Nowhere is the difficulty of writing fantasies based in sincerely held faith more obvious than in the “new legends” produced by devout Christians attempting to elaborate a mythos which is still, for them, sacred. Works in this vein offer clear evidence that serious and efficient literary investigation of the moral tenets of a sincerely held faith cannot leave that faith unaltered, and when the believer resists the loss of his belief he is inevitably led towards an uncomfortable heterodoxy. The mid-nineteenth century fantasies of George MacDonald offer clear evidence of this kind, as do later works by Laurence Housman.

  Having said all this, though, it must also be said that any straightforward attempt to separate out the attitudes displayed to the motifs deployed in ni
neteenth century fantasy into the credulous and the incredulous is bound to fail. The “secondary belief” required of readers is required of writers too, and may become for more serious fantasy writers a matter of considerable importance. They may acquire a strong proprietary interest in their own inventions, or in the borrowings which they deploy. The relationship between fantasy writers and their folkloristic sources is far too complex to be reduced to a mere matter of belief or unbelief.

  A “conservationist” regard for the value of folklore is frequently to be found in cultures which have come to fear their own erosion, as can be seen in those parts of the British Isles whose language and folkways were reduced to marginality by virtue of the economic and political dominion of the English. Several Scottish writers of the nineteenth century used fantastic fiction in a way calculated to capture and preserve something of the spirit of their eroded mythos. Yeats and others did the same for Ireland, and the Welsh mythology of the Mabinogion has similarly been redeployed in more recent times.

  Nostalgia generated by the erosion of mythos and mystery is correlated in much nineteenth century fantasy with the notion of the banishment of superstition by the march of reason and the corollary feeling that there is something to be regretted in this banishment. There is a depth of tragic consciousness in parables which describe the exile of the fairy folk from England, or the sad fate of other outdated objects of worship. Nostalgia is also a key component of one of the more popular sub-genres which lie on the margins of nineteenth century fantasy: the lost race story. Lost race stories rarely give a prominent role to the supernatural, but their internal dynamic takes them beyond the map into those exotic regions of the Earth where men may seek a romantic destiny outside the possibilities of actual society. Like the more admirable Secondary World fantasies, the best lost race fantasies offer no easy solutions by this route, and the eccentric masterpiece of the sub-genre - Rider Haggard’s She - is paradoxically determined in its uneasy ambivalence.

  The uneasy play of nineteenth century secondary belief is also complicated by a burgeoning of interest in the altered states of consciousness associated with hallucination and delusion. This has its straightforwardly clinical side, but its more interesting exhibitions are to be found in hallucinatory grotesques moving in the direction of surrealism and absurdism. Such themes are historically linked to ideas associated with mesmerism, animal magnetism and hypnotism, which are staples of credulous occult romance, but they are by no means imprisoned by the constraints of pseudoscholarly fantasy.

  Consideration of the relationships which exist between fantasy and the fashionable ideas of the nineteenth century should not be concluded without amplifying the observation that, with very few exceptions, nineteenth century fantasy existed on the periphery of the Victorian literary world. It never became fashionable in its own right.

  If we leave aside children’s books, which compete in a specialised marketplace, the best-selling novels of nineteenth century fantasy are very few in number, and they all appeared at the end of the century when the long reign of the three-decker novel came to its end; they are She, the romances of Marie Corelli, and Anstey’s Vice Versa. On the other hand, there were a few nineteenth century fantasies of a briefer kind which were spectacularly successful because they created - or at least colonised - their own market niches. Dickens’ Christmas Books helped to create a norm by which the Christmas annuals issued by British publishers in association with their periodicals were licensed to indulge in supernatural whimsy and other fanciful tales. This licence was shared by many of the annual volumes which were issued to take advantage of the Christmas present buying season: The Keepsake; The Continental Annual and Romantic Cabinet; Friendship’s Offering and many others.

  Periodicals were vital to the promulgation of all kinds of imaginative fiction in the nineteenth century, because so much imaginative fiction works best in short fiction forms. Despite the fact that literacy spread more slowly in Britain than in France or America, the relatively large population of Britain - and especially of London - meant that British writers were at least as well supplied with outlets as their French and American counterparts. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, which was consistently hospitable to all kinds of imaginative fiction was a vital outlet for many English writers as well as Scottish ones.

  The more downmarket a mid-nineteenth century journal was, the more space it was likely to give to supernatural fiction. Popular British magazines like The Olio, or Museum of Entertainment (founded in 1828) and Vickers’ London Journal (founded in 1845) are replete with stories of the supernatural, though almost all of them were either reprinted from familiar sources or of negligible quality. Penny fiction periodicals often featured fantastic tales and “legends” based in or masquerading as items of authentic folklore. Writers with higher literary ambitions usually had a hard time finding markets for their more enterprising and unusual work, and many of them obtained a significant start by publishing their works in their own periodicals. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, John Sterling and William Morris all contrived to publish their early fantasy work by such means, as did the notable Irish writer of horror stories J. Sheridan LeFanu. Had there been a recognised publishing category of the kind which now exists, the tradition of nineteenth century fantasy would undoubtedly be far richer and far more coherent.

  The end of the nineteenth century was an important watershed in the history of fantasy, whose importance can hardly be overstressed. In 1900 Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, a book which was to bring about a dramatic change in attitudes to the activity (whether private or literary) of fantasizing. Whether Freud’s account of the logic of dreams was actually true, or how widely it was believed, were matters of little significance in bringing about this change. The point was that a set of ideas had been produced which could not be entirely ignored, and whose attempt to penetrate the symbolism of fantasy - even if it was to be deemed entirely fatuous - could not help but make writers and readers more self-conscious in their fantasizing.

  The Interpretation of Dreams was the first of a series of highly significant works in which Freud worked out his theory of the unconscious and his ideas regarding the process of repression. It argued strongly that dreaming operates as a means of vicarious wish-fulfillment, in which the wishes and the means of their fulfillment are often disguised even from the fantasist by their encryption in a pattern of symbols. It went on to link the fountainhead of fantasy, and its internal symbolism, to the libido. In Freud’s view, literary fantasy could be treated in much the same way as dream-fantasy. Once literary fantasists had heard of this theory, therefore - even if they heard of it only in its popular extensions as rumour and jest - it was unforgettable. Its central theses might be rejected, but they could not be disregarded.

  It was, of course, well known to many literary fantasists of the nineteenth century that their creative work might involve symbolism and that symbols could be used to convey sexual meanings whose direct expression was taboo. When Christina Rossetti wrote in “Goblin Market” about “forbidden fruit” she used the euphemism quite deliberately, and it may have been in her mind when she wrote of the goblins trying to force their fruit past Lizzie’s resistant lips that the word “lips” is susceptible of more than one meaning. But in making such symbolic wordplay, the poet was not referring her practice to any theoretical context which spoke of the intrinsic nature of fantasy; she was simply making a fantasy of one particular kind. The way that twentieth century writers came to handle sexual symbolism in their fiction could not help but be different.

  Freud’s theory changed the way in which nineteenth century works were henceforth read, as well as the way in which subsequent works were composed. Many nineteenth century fantasies have erotic themes, subtly veiled by humour and sentimentality, but those themes tend to be treated innocently and reverently; it is nowadays difficult to read them with a similarly reverent eye. Thanks to Freud all twentieth century innocence has come to seem like shallowness where it is no
t mere pretence, and reverence a stylistic affectation. Just as dirty jokes came to be accompanied by a ritual nudge and wink, and sentimental displays with a mime of mournful violins, fantasies began to be packaged with token acknowledgements of their own particular artificiality; naive literary dreaming was very largely replaced by a form of “lucid dreaming” whose lucidity was supplied by theories of natural symbolism.

  We now know, of course, that Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams is not true in any strong sense; as a whole and coherent scientific theory it is quite exploded, although its remaining adherents still nurture the hope that its bare bones might yet be fleshed out into a theory which, though falling short of a general explanation of the phenomenon of dreaming, might still have some relevance to the business of thinking seriously about the psychological utility of fantasy. Freudian theory is itself, therefore, no more than a fantasy about fantasies, exactly on a par with many of the literary works whose composition and substance it overshadows. Freudian theory cannot explain fantasies any more than it can really explain dreams, even though it has altered forever the terms in which we think about fantasy, and the way in which writers go about the business of creating a fantasy.

  It is worth noting that Freud’s theory is itself merely the latest in a long series of images which represent the human psyche in terms of a crucial division and opposition. In Freud’s terminology, the ego must somehow negotiate between, and if possible reconcile, two sets of contradictory pressures: the anarchic and amoral bundle of appetites which is the id; and the censorious and orderly superego. In the conflict between these forces we can see one more version of the battle between passion and reason which has been recognised since the birth of philosophy.