The Sleeping Sorceress (31 page)

ASPECTS OF FANTASY
(1963)

1.
I
NTRODUCTION

W
HAT
IS
“FANTASY fiction”? It is, of course, a broad field but, on the other hand, fairly easy to define. It is fiction which deals in the fantastic, in what is outside of ordinary human experience.

It contains many sub-categories of which science fiction is one; it is written on many levels by writers of varying ability who use it for a great number of purposes. Today it ranges from the ill-written ghouloperas published in poor-quality paperbacks to the well-written extravaganzas of Peake, Tolkien and others.

A more interesting question, and one which I hope partially to answer in these articles, is
why
is fantasy? Why is it written, why is it read, what is its appeal?

H. P. Lovecraft, that well-known describer of the indescribable, says in his book
Marginalia
:

That I disagree with this judgment will be obvious, for I believe that dissection of the fantasy story into its component parts does not detract from the story but rather adds a new dimension to it—a dimension which, to me, is far more interesting and rewarding. In an article published in the
Woman Journalist
for Spring 1963, J. G. Ballard writes:

Lovecraft was writing forty years ago, Ballard is writing now and I feel it is likely that the developments in physics and psychology which have taken place since 1922 would have caused Lovecraft to revise his views if he were living today, for Einstein and Jung between them have, by analysis, broadened rather than destroyed the scope of the artist.

The increasing interest in the fantasy form seems to show that intelligent people are, indeed, looking beyond its purely sensational and romantic aspects and finding it a rewarding literary field. Those critics who still decry it for its usual lack of deep characterization do not see that it completely reverses the “real” world of the social novel—placing its heroes in a landscape directly reflecting the inner landscape of the ordinary man. The hero ranges the lands of his own psyche, encountering the various aspects of himself. When we read a good fantasy we are being admitted into the subterranean worlds of our own souls.

Therefore the fascination of the fantasy story may well lie in its concern with direct subconscious symbols. The mingled attraction and revulsion felt by its readers may well express the combined wish to see into themselves and at the same time withdraw into “normal” life when they begin to feel they are probing too deeply.

Generally speaking, fantasy stories can fall into two broad categories. There is the kind that permanently disturbs and the kind that comforts. Part of the purpose of the child’s fairy story is to describe the horror and then, by means of an easily identifiable hero, destroy it, thus laying the ghost. The child is full of fears and fancies. Therefore one of the differences between fairy stories and the major proportion of adult fantasy stories is that an adult story rarely produces a comforting end. Whether the hero wins through or not, the reader is left with the suspicion or knowledge that all is not quiet on the supernatural front. For supernatural also read subconscious and you’re still with me.

The typical
Unknown Worlds
story is a kind of rational ghost-laying substitute for the child’s fairy story—it diminishes that which is described to the level of whimsey and makes it appear harmless—but it avoids the essential nature of the horror story/supernatural romance and is in many ways a corrupt and unproductive form. Most of the Gothic novels, incidentally, tried to tack “rational” explanations of their horrors on to their last chapters, although here the rationality was so totally superficial that it did not, in most cases, convince—whereas the supernatural episodes
did
.

The fantasy which we read today is not really very much different from the fantasy of, say, 2000
B.C.
It is the oldest form of storytelling and, essentially, it has not changed much.

We are all familiar with the Greek legends, English folk tales and the stories of King Arthur and his Round Table, even if we haven’t read them since our schooldays. One thing is obvious in all of these, and that is the repetition of certain kinds of characters (archetypal characters) and situations (classical situations). They recur constantly and they recur in Chivalric and Gothic romances, in Goethe, Wagner and the Jacobean tragedists, the works of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Bierce, Dunsany, Blackwood, Machen, etc.—through the first half of the twentieth century with James Branch Cabell, E. F. Benson, Charles Williams, Lovecraft, Howard and the
Weird Tales
school, to Bloch, Leiber, Bradbury and others in the USA and Peake, Tolkien, Powys, etc., in this country. And, apart from complexities of plot, more sophisticated means of storytelling and the odd change of scenery, the basic form has not changed since Cervantes took the mickey out of it in
Don Quixote
. It is romantic, it is sensational and, at its best, illuminating.

There are writers who go directly to their source of inspiration and write within its context (Thomas Burnett Swann or Treece, for instance), others who remove the whole machinery to an imaginary setting (Merritt, Howard, Leiber, Tolkien) and yet others who specialize in a contemporary setting, contrasting the prosaic with the supernatural to produce their effects (this particular talent seems to have been all but lost since the days of the Edwardian school). There is the kind of story intended only to horrify (the typical
Weird Tales
story) and the kind which seeks to entertain the reader on a wider canvas (the typical Lost Land or Sword-and-Sorcery story). The difference between these is that the one
hints
at entities, worlds and events existing beyond ordinary human ken, whereas the other attempts to describe them in more concrete terms. Other writers go further—they make use of the symbols, archetypes and narrative machinery of the fantasy story—and attempt to weave them into a structure which, in its implications, causes the reader to sense more deeply the nature of his existence. Cabell’s Poictesme mythos and, I suppose, Lewis’s
Perelandra
trilogy are obvious examples of authors consciously exploiting the form in order to discuss their own ideas about the nature of Man.

This use of archetypes and classical situations is, of course, to be discovered in the entire body of literature, but only in fantasy, whether it is intended merely to entertain or to enlighten as well, is it at once apparent. This is one of the reasons why writers like Iris Murdoch, William Golding and John Cowper Powys find a sympathetic audience amongst adherents of fantasy fiction, for all three writers use only a thin disguise to clothe their central characters. Indeed, far from limiting the writer, direct use of mythic material increases the richness and range of the work, whether he’s a Realist or a Romantic.

As Lovecraft shows, there is no need for the writer to be aware of his real sources, though, as Ballard’s work illustrates, it can be greatly improved if he is.

Having sketched in these few initial ideas about the form, I shall now sketch in its development.

First, if we leave aside the basic mythologies and religions of the world, we come to a body of Western literature which, in the form we know it, emerged from the Dark Ages. This literature, though still disguised as hero legends, was created by men who made it their living to journey from place to place telling stories of mighty deeds and supernatural horrors, usually in verse.
Beowulf
is the best-known of these.

Later we begin to find examples of what are generally called Chivalric Romances, stories of brave knights, doomed hero-villain knights (such as Lancelot), fair maidens, dark sorceresses, mysterious magicians and foul monsters. The legends of King Arthur and his Table Round are probably the best-known in Britain and America, though there are two other important bodies of Chivalric Romance—Charlemagnian and Peninsula. The Charlemagnian cycle involves a set-up similar to the court of King Arthur, with a king uniting his nation and vanquishing the pagan, helped by a group of paladins (usually twelve in number) who are his right-hand men. If Lancelot and Galahad are the best-known Arthurian knights, then Roland and Oliver are the best-known Charlemagnian knights.

The Peninsula Romances are not quite so complex. Many are based on the character of El Cid, the legendary champion of Spain who drove the Moslem invaders from his homeland. It is in the Peninsula Romances that we find the main body of what are termed by the experts “decadent Romances” and it is in the decadent Romance that we find our first real examples of the fantasy story as opposed to the folk-legend for, from about the fourteenth century on, the romance-chronicler ceased hanging his stories onto already existing heroes and began to invent new ones.

Chief of these is
Amadis de Gaul
, probably created by the Portuguese Vasco Lobeira, comprising in the original four long books but, in sequels by a host of imitators, making up some fifty books in all. Whereas the original Chivalric Romances were a mixture of ancient pagan legend, later Christian revision, history and myth, the decadent Romances, though borrowing heavily from the original body, were of definite authorship. They were, in fact, the first novels. The fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries produced a vast spate of these with titles like
Palmerin of England
(a four-volume Romance reprinted in 1807, translated by Southey),
Tirante the White
,
Felixmarte of Hyrcania
,
The Mirror of Chivalry
and hundreds more.

It was these Romances that Cervantes satirized in
Don Quixote
and, in rejecting the Romance form, laid the foundations for the modern novel in his pastoral and picaresque stories.

About fifty years after
Don Quixote
debunked the form, the last of its examples was published. It had given way to the novel of country life and the colourful novel of thieves and vagabonds, though, in drama and poetry we still find evidence of its appeal—
The Faerie Queene
, for instance, makes direct use of Romantic imagery, while the Jacobean Tragedy, with its emphasis on gratuitous horror was later to influence the Gothic.

For over a hundred years, as the Age of Reason reigned, the prose romance was unpopular with intellectual and general public alike and it took an aesthetic and antiquarian politician, Sir Horace Walpole, to instigate the return of the romance in Britain with what is generally thought to be the first real Gothic novel—
The Castle of Otranto
. Though there were one or two hints in other works that it was coming, it was Walpole’s short novel that launched the Romantic Revival in English literature. This was published in 1764. It deals with all kinds of sensational supernatural events in and about the grotesque Castle, makes no attempt to rationalize them, from the mysterious appearance one day of a gigantic helmet in the first chapter, to the “awful spectre” who reminds one of the characters of his duty in the last chapter.

Since later articles will deal with examples in detail, I won’t bother to describe the best of the Gothics here. These included the works of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (
Mysteries of Udolpho
), Matthew Gregory Lewis (
Ambrosio; or, The Monk
), Mary Shelley (
Frankenstein
), Charles Maturin (
Melmoth the Wanderer
) and many, many more. For fifty years, from 1770 to 1820, the Gothic novel was the most popular form in England and its influence remained with later writers such as Scott, the Brontës, even Austen, Le Fanu and, of course, Poe and the Victorian/Edwardian school of horror-story writers. In fact it never really died after
The Castle of Otranto
, but continued to develop to the present day (my own early “Elric” stories are written, I feel, in the tradition of the Chivalric and Gothic Romance).

The fantasy story, with its overtones of romance and its undertones of the “inner world of the psyche,” has never lost its appeal, though it often goes through periods where serious critics abhor it and a large section of the public disdains it. If we take into consideration folk-epics and religious works such as the Bible, the
Bhagavad Gita
, traditional tales such as
The Arabian Nights
and the Norse
Eddara
, we can see that its development has been continuous since primitive man first began to invent stories. For better or worse, this can hardly be said of any other form.

I should like to finish this introductory article to a series which will deal with specific works of fantasy with a quote from Jung (
Modern Man in Search of a Soul
, Routledge and Kegan Paul, pages 180–181):