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In both portal and quest fantasies, a character leaves her familiar surroundings and passes through a portal into an unknown place. Although portal fantasies do not have to be quest fantasies the overwhelming majority are, and the rhetorical position taken by the author/narrator is consistent.

The position of the reader in the quest and portal fantasy is one of companion-audience, tied to the protagonist, and dependent upon the protagonist for explanation and decoding (see also Branham, who makes the same connection). This reader position is quite different from the one we shall see in the immersive fantasy: there the implied reader, although dependent on the protagonist’s absorption of sight and sounds, is not required to accept his or her narrative. One way to distinguish the two, is that despite the illusion of presence (the tales are usually told in the third person) the listener is represented as if present at the telling of a tale. Although I hesitate to describe the position constructed in the portal-quest fantasy as infantilizing—some of the novels I shall discuss demand significant intellectual commitment—it is perhaps not coincidental that the classic portal tale is more common in children’s fantasy than in that ostensibly written for the adult market.

As Clute defines portals (Encyclopedia 776), they litter the world of the fantastic, marking the transition between this world and another; from our time to another time; from youth to adulthood. The most familiar and archetypal portal fantasy in the United Kingdom is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), while in the United States the Oz tales are perhaps better known.¹ In both, and crucially, the fantastic is on the other side and does not leak. Nonetheless, there are differences in the placement of the protagonist, and in the role the elements of transition and exploration play. The extent to which the mode of narrative shifts as we traverse the portal from the frame world to the other world influences the degree to which we shall settle into the fantasy world and accept it as both fantasy and as “real.” Different authors have handled the transition in different ways, and in the early period of the development of this form of fantasy there was little consensus.

Modern quest and portal fantasies rely upon very similar narrative strategies because each assume the same two movements: transition and exploration. The portal fantasy is about entry, transition, and exploration, and much quest fantasy, for all we might initially assume that it is immersive (that is, fully in and of its world), adopts the structure and rhetorical strategies of the portal fantasy: it denies the taken for granted and positions both protagonist and reader as naive. Characteristically the quest fantasy protagonist goes from a mundane life, in which the fantastic, if she is aware of it, is very distant and unknown (or at least unavailable to the protagonist) to direct contact with the fantastic through which she transitions, exploring the world until she or those around her are knowledgeable enough to negotiate with the world via the personal manipulation of the fantastic realm. There is thus little difference between Belgarion in David Eddings’s Pawn of Prophecy (1982), who only discovers his magic when he leaves his village, and Andrew Carr, in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s rationalized fantasy² The Spell Sword (1974), who discovers his telepathy on the world of Darkover.

Although individuals may cross both ways, the fantastic does not. Such an effect would move the fantasy into the category of intrusion, which (as I shall discuss in chapter 3) uses a very different grammar and tone. Very occasionally both categories may occur in the same book, but while immersive fantasies may contain intrusion, it is relatively rare for portal-quest fantasies to do so. One of the few crossovers are the Harry Potter novels, which typically begin as intrusion fantasies—the abrupt arrival of the owls in Privet Drive in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998), causing chaos and disturbance—but very rapidly transmute into almost archetypal portal fantasies, reliant on elaborate description and continual new imaginings.

Despite its reputation as a “full secondary world,” the most familiar quest fantasy, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, follows the structure outlined: Frodo moves from a small, safe, and understood world into the wild, unfamiliar world of Middle-Earth. It is The Silmarillion, the book told from within the world, about people who know their world, that is the immersive fantasy. And as The Lord of the Rings (1956) contains within it the portal from the Shire into the big wide world, so The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), and many of their portal fantasy successors contain the journey and the goal of the quest narratives.

Typically, the quest or portal fantasy begins with a sense of stability that is revealed to be the stability of a thinned land—Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story (1979) is the most explicit³—and concludes with restoration rather than instauration (the making over of the world). Most portal-quest fantasies associate the king with the well-being of the land,⁴ and the condition of the land with the morality of the place. These thematic elements may seem coincidental, but they serve to structure the ideology of a narrative that is directive and coercive, and that narrows the possibilities for a subversive reading.

The origins of the quest fantasy, if not strictly speaking the portal fantasy, lie in epic, in the Bible, in the Arthurian romances, and in fairy tales. From the epic, portal and quest fantasies draw a certain unity of action, the sense that we follow characters through their beginning, middle, and end. This unity holds even where there are numerous characters. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time sequence (1990 to present) rapidly disperses its cast, but we follow each character through their adventures in turn. The disunity of narrative is illusory; while it may appear to challenge the primacy of the single hero in the epic, in actuality this device operates to create linked epic narratives. The plot—while containing many convolutions—retains the essential simplicity of the epic. It is perhaps worth noting that of my suggested categories only the plots of portal-quest fantasies and intrusion fantasies seem indicated by their form.

Toohey suggests that epic, like tragedy, should contain reversal, recognition, and calamity, a structure that is instantly identifiable in the modern, three-volume quest fantasy and that often lurks in the background of the portal fantasy, as do the elements of glorification and nostalgia. Similarly, chronicle epics usually concentrate on the fortunes of a city or a region (Toohey 1–5), which in the modern fantasy may be transmuted into the land. The classic city epic is relatively uncommon in modern fantasy, although K. J. Parker’s Colours in the Steel (1998; discussed in chapter 2) is precisely an account of the rise and fall-through-hubris of a city-state.

From epic, and from its descendants, the portal-quest fantasies have drawn ideas of sequenced adventures, journeys as transition, and the understanding that there is a destiny to follow.⁵ But it is in the New Testament and from later Christian writings that we find the notion of a portal: what else is a posthumous heaven (a notion almost completely absent from the Old Testament) other than the ultimate in portals? But while portal and quest fantasies have been heavily influenced by these taproots, the transition is neither seamless nor without consequence.

Most modern quest fantasies are not intended to be directly allegorical, yet they all seem to be underpinned by an assumption embedded in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678): that a quest is a process, in which the object sought may or may not be a mere token of reward. The real reward is moral growth and/or admission into the kingdom, or redemption (although the latter, as in the Celestial City of Pilgrim’s Progress, may also be the object sought). The process of the journey is then shaped by a metaphorized and moral geography—the physical delineation of what Attebery describes as a “sphere of significance” (Tradition 13)—that in the twentieth century mutates into the elaborate and moralized cartography of genre fantasy. The journeyman succeeds or fails to the extent he listens to those wiser or more knowledgeable than him, whether these be spiritual, fantastical, or human guides. It is of course quite possible to argue that the connection between Pilgrim’s Progress and the portal-quest fantasy is tenuous: in Pilgrim’s Progress, the pilgrim knows where the Celestial City is, so that it is a journey, rather than a quest; the point is simply to get there through many perils. Yet the same is true of a number of quest fantasies where the goal is to reach the city: Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871) charts a path to the crown that lies at the end of the chessboard; C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle (1956) concludes with a journey to the celestial city, as does—in a more mundane sense—The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), in which the children must reach Caer Paravel. Later books with the same structure include Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Thendara House (1983), Sheri S. Tepper’s Marianne sequence (1985–89), and Jeff Noon’s Vurt (1993), where escape through the portal is the ultimate end of the novel, and the result disappointing. And where it is not true, we should accept that many writers believed themselves to be emulating the structures of much favored books while in reality doing quite the opposite: hundreds of “Tolkienistas”⁶ have failed to notice that The Lord of the Rings is not a quest for power, but a journey to destroy power.⁷ In any event, the very presence of maps at the front of many fantasies implies that the destination and its meaning are known.

Similarly, many of the differences between the structures laid down by Bunyan and those created in the shared world of the quest fantasy are due to a reworking of expectations and codings to produce a moral rhetoric and moral geography more acceptable to modern tastes. It is commonly assumed that the opposition to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that has emanated from many Christian fundamentalists in the United States centers simply on the use of magic and of the telling of untruths. There is a partial truth in this interpretation today, but the original opposition to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was directed at the highly individualistic morality of the main character. For the generation brought up on the film and modern ideas of American individualism, it is easy to miss the fact that Baum’s Dorothy is not a nice child and that the message of the book has little to do with the communitarian values that prevailed in America’s Christian heartland at the turn of the century,⁸ before the individualism of the West became the dominant discourse of the United States. This is encoded in the journey Dorothy undertakes. Unlike Bunyan’s Pilgrim, Dorothy’s journeys do not result in her own moral growth—she herself is a representation of a new morality—but in the moral growth of those she influences. She is grace, a concept quite offensive to those who believe that grace can be bestowed only by the Redeemer.

What underpins all of the above is the idea of moral expectation. Fantasy, unlike science fiction, relies on a moral universe: it is less an argument with the universe than a sermon on the way things should be, a belief that the universe should yield to moral precepts. This belief is most true of the portal-quest narratives, and of the intrusion fantasies. But if intrusion fantasies are structured around punishment and the danger of transgression (see chapter 3), the portal-quest fantasies are structured around reward and the straight and narrow path. The epic and the traveler’s tale are closed narratives. Each demands that we accept the interpretation of the narrator, and the interpretive position of the hero. The hero may argue with the gods, or with the rules of the utopia, but it is assumed that we will accept the paradigms of his argument. In modern fantasy this element is maintained even where, as in A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsey (1920) and The Scar by China Miéville (2002), we are dealing with an anti-quest.

Portal-quest fantasies have other, less visible, taproots. These others have contributed to the fantasies’ rhetorical and moral structure and in particular have tended to reinforced this closed narrative. Most significant among these is the club narrative, a cozy discourse that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and that profoundly shaped the portal-quest fantasy in the second half of the twentieth century.

The Club Story is simple enough to describe: it is a tale or tales recounted orally to a group of listeners foregathered in a venue safe from interruption. Its structure is normally twofold: there is the tale told, and encompassing that a frame which introduces the teller of the tale—who may well claim to have himself lived the story he’s telling—along with its auditors and the venue.… At all levels of sophistication, the Club Story form enforces our understanding that a tale has been told. (Clute, Conjunctions 39: 421–422)

The last point, the understanding of the completeness of story, is perhaps the most crucial contribution of the club story to the portal-quest fantasy. The story made is one that is bounded by the rules of the club rhetoric. The Canterbury Tales is a club story, and so too, although less obviously, are Pilgrim’s Progress, George MacDonald’s Lilith (1895), and The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. In each of these cases, a tale is recounted as if it has happened in the past. Elsewhere, the club story is embedded within the frame narrative.

In the club story, the storyteller, whatever his designation, is possessed of two essential qualities: he is uninterruptible and incontestable; and the narrative as it is downloaded is essentially closed. Although not entirely relevant here, it is hard to avoid the acknowledgment that the club story has a gendered origin, and that there are consequences embedded in these foundations. The club narrative is diegetic, a denial of discourse, an assertion of a particular type of Victorian masculinity, a private place uninterrupted by the needs of domesticity or even self-care (there are always servants in the club), combined with a stature signaled by the single-voiced and impervious authority. This sense of authority matters because, as we shall see, the modern portal-quest narratives are hierarchical: some characters are presented with greater authority than others—authority that is intended, destined, or otherwise taken for granted—and this hierarchy is frequently encoded in speech patterns and the choice of direct or indirect speech. Although a tenuous connection, the tendency of portal-quest fantasies to ignore the personal needs of the protagonists may be less a mere accident of poor writing, than a direct consequence of the link with this mode of storytelling. As their personal needs will be ignored, so too will be the needs of characterization. What matters is that there be no chinks in the story entire. Discussing Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” (1899), John Clute has written:

Like any Club Story, “Heart of Darkness” is both a story and a device to mandate its reception. The impurity of this is obvious—what we’re describing here is in a sense a form of reportage—and may help account. It may be the “impurity” of this element of reportage at the heart of the Club Story form that accounts for the fact that no literary theorist has ever mentioned it. Critics of the fantastic, dealing as they do with a set of genres intensely sensitive to the world, should have no such compunction. (Conjunctions 39: 422–423)

As in the true club story, it is the unquestionable purity of the tale that holds together the shape of the portal-quest narrative. In the club narrative, the ability to convince and to hold the floor is the sign of success, but the risk is always that the whole will not be sustained. In order to sustain it, the impurity and unreliability to which Clute alludes must be consistently denied and the authority and reliability of the narrator must be asserted. Either the story is accepted in its entirety, or it is entirely vulnerable; there is no room for the delicacies of interpretation. This structure and its attendant denial has a significant effect on the language of the portal-quest fantasy: in order to convince, to avoid too close analysis, the portal and quest fantasies attempt to convince through the accumulation of detail.

Fantasyland is constructed, in part, through the insistence on a received truth. This received truth is embodied in didacticism and elaboration. While much information about the world is culled from what the protagonist can see (with a consequent denial of polysemic interpretation), history or analysis is often provided by the storyteller who is drawn in the role of sage, magician, or guide. While this casting apparently opens up the text, in fact it seeks to close it down further by denying not only reader interpretation, but also that of the hero/protagonist. This may be one reason why the hero in the quest fantasy is more often an actant than an actor, provided with attributes rather than character precisely to compensate for the static nature of his role.

In the quest and portal fantasy much of the narrative is delivered in this club-story mode among a group of friends isolated in a context in which they will not be interrupted. Although “the journey” is a recognized function-trope in portal-quest fantasies, it is usually interpreted as a metaphor for a coming of age—it provides a space for the protagonists to grow up. But “the journey” also serves to divorce the protagonists from the world, and place them in a context in which they cannot question the primary narration because there is no evidence against which they can test the veracity of their source. Diana Wynne Jones manipulates this path in The Crown of Dalemark (1993): the quest journey is begun precisely to avoid exposing an imposter. This approach, however, is not usual. More commonly, the journey is where information is discovered, interpreted, and disseminated, safe from the awkward questions the outside world might provoke. The resemblance to the isolation inflicted on Kate in The Taming of the Shrew is not coincidental. In The Lord of the Rings, after Gandalf’s “death,” the questors are even more willing to follow his interpretation of the adventure. Jones, again, makes the connection explicit in another Dalemark tale, the short story “The True State of Affairs” (1995), in which a woman traverses a portal only to find herself seized as a spy and locked in a tower. She can build a picture of the world she is in only by what she is allowed to know. The process of the quest or portal fantasy works, in one way or another, to construct an element of isolation and a focus on “the club.” In contrast, and as I shall demonstrate, the intrusion fantasy is structured to encourage the protagonist to break out of the monologue.

There are almost always two clearly identifiable narrators in the portal-quest fantasy: the narrator of the microcosm (the world within a world) that we call the point of view character; and the narrator of the macrocosm, she who “stories” the world for us, making sense of it through the downloaded histories so common to this form of fantasy, or in the fragments of prophecy she leaks to us throughout the course of the text. Usually, but not always, this person is the implied narrator.

Let us consider first that point of view or diegetic character, for it is she who conditions our relationship to the fantasy world. She exemplifies the Bakhtinian insight that the narrator-focalizer dispenses the authoritative ideology. One of the defining features of the portal-quest fantasy is that we ride with the point of view character who describes fantasyland and the adventure to the reader, as if we are both with her and yet external to the fantasy world. What she sees, we see, so that the world is unrolled to us in front of her eyes, and through her analysis of the scene. One result is that the world is flattened thereby into a travelogue, a series of descriptions made possible by the protagonists’ unfamiliarity with it. Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara (1977), a text to which I shall be referring frequently in this chapter because of the degree to which it is the generic quest fantasy, illustrates the point neatly. At the beginning of the novel, Flick, one of the two heroes, is a stranger in his own land. He should be so familiar with the area that all is taken for granted but instead: “the young man noticed immediately the unusual stillness that seemed to have captivated the entire valley this evening.” Immediately the world is new to both him and us, even though it is new only in terms of what he is accustomed to. Such defamiliarization is necessary in order to justify the explanation of the world to the reader, and prepares us for the process of familiarization that takes place throughout the novel.

This extract characterizes the mode of engagement within the portal-quest fantasy: the hero moves through the action and the world stage, embedding an assumption of unchangingness on the part of the indigenes. This kind of fantasy is essentially imperialist: only the hero is capable of change; fantasyland is orientalized into the “unchanging past.” This rejection of change is particularly noticeable in David Eddings’s The Belgariad (1982–84), where we meet one culture dedicated to preserving the past (the faux-medievalist Arends) and one whose idea of preparing for the future is very much rooted in preservation (the Rivans). The Rivans have spent the previous centuries preserving their culture precisely for the appearance of our protagonist. This allows the protagonist not merely to insist upon his interpretation as he relays it to us, but to insist that it will always be valid. In this context, Garion’s confusion ensures that we accept his realizations unquestioningly. To counteract such blind acceptance one might expect that a fantasy would work by making the unfamiliar strange, and we shall see just this effect in George MacDonald and David Lindsay’s work. More commonly, however, the quest fantasy works by familiarization (Scholes 84), creating a world through the layering of detail, and making that detail comprehensible. Given the need for comprehensibility, the only way to continually create the sense of wonder needed by the portal and quest fantasy is to embroider continually, to prevent the accretion of comfort. When taken to excess we see the likes of the Harry Potter novels in which almost all of the imaginative material is in the world-building (the adventures themselves are game sequences and rather derivative)—or, as Colin Manlove has pointed out, the work of Lord Dunsany, of whose descriptive passages he writes, “Dunsany knows he is into a good thing here … and goes on for three more pages making it rather too much of a good thing” (Impulse 135). Michael Rifaterre describes this device as diegetic overkill, in which the representation of ostensibly insignificant details—in the case of the texts I’m discussing it could be jumping frog chocolates, lembas bread, or clothes that change color⁹—becomes a feature of realism (29–30).

This mode mediates between us and the protagonist. In seeing what he narrates to us, we are prevented from seeing him. The solution adopted by most writers in this genre—although not, interestingly, by Tolkien—is the reverie, a form of mimetic excess (Rifaterre 29–30). Bakhtin calls this form “the continuous hidden polemic or hidden dialogue with some other person on the theme of himself,” but reverie is easier in the long term (207). The reverie is that moment when the protagonist (or on occasion another character) meditates on his own character, usually in terms of a flashback, to achieve a “profound dialogic and polemical nature of self-awareness and self-affirmation” (207). This meditation should not be confused with a moment of memory, which tends to focus on the emotion felt, rather than the story (McCabe and Peterson 165). What characterizes these reveries is that they are fully narrativized: pages 2–4 of Mindy Klasky’s The Glasswright’s Apprentice (2000), for example, tell us of the heroine’s entry into the guild and the conditions pertaining to that place. Later, Rani worries about a theft she has committed:

The theft made Rani nervous—she had been hired to clean the captain’s quarters and she would be the most likely suspect when the soldier discovered his loss. She had become enough of a fixture in the Soldiers’ Quarter that any of the girls who consorted with the guards would know to find her in Garadolo’s lair.…

Even now, she looked back to her life as an apprentice with blinding fondness. She’d been so lucky then, so privileged that her most difficult task had been scrubbing a whitewashed table. (184–185)

What should be already known to us, the context of the world, is delivered as memory, and more specifically, as story.¹⁰ Because we cannot stand outside the narrative, the “omniscient narrator” is compromised: it is able to tell us only what Rani knows. We both see into her mind but are not, as in the first-person narrative, inside her head. The “omniscient narrator” limits our vision while asserting that we have privileged insight.

Occasionally these reveries are expressed as mutual revelation, a device Deborah Tannen suggests in real life is intended to show rapport: “By this strategy, the speaker expects his or her statement of personal experience to elicit a similar statement from the other.” Unfortunately, authors rarely seem to remember that the “effectiveness of this device is dependent upon the sharedness of the system” (79). The single direction of information works instead to indicate the status-within-the-story of the speaker.

To steal yet again Clute’s idea of “making storyable,” I note that these reveries make storyable character and characteristics. Indeed, reverie and self-contemplation, far from creating depth, break the sense of immersion in a society, and are fundamentally antithetical to either character development or an immersive structure. It is a false mimesis that reminds us that we are in a narrated text and that the protagonist’s version must be true. To doubt the validity of the reverie would be to destroy the impermeable nature of the club discourse: either the reverie is “true” or the entire structure collapses. Such is the case even where, as in Tad Williams’s The Dragonbone Chair (1989), the reverie that describes the protagonist is actually that of another person; it is Rachel (31–38) who—with improbable detail—remembers Simon’s childhood for us. On the other hand, Robin Hobb, in the opening pages of The Farseer: Assassin’s Apprentice (1996), acknowledges the persistent doubts: “on that day they [memories] suddenly begin, with a brightness and detail that overwhelms me. Sometimes it seems too complete and I wonder if it is truly mine. Am I recalling it from my own mind, or from dozens of retellings by legions of kitchen maids and ranks of scullions and herds of stables boys as they explained my presence to each other” (2).

Memory does not have to be delivered this way. Lloyd Alexander gets to the heart of the matter in The Black Cauldron (1965), a quest fantasy that is also a rite of passage novel, but is not a portal fantasy inasmuch as Taran is always familiar with his world. When Taran tries to buy the cauldron from Orddu, Orwen, and Orgoch in the marshes of Morva, one suggested price is a warm summer’s day. Memory here is sense and feeling, yet this suggestion and its alternative—that they take one of his memories of Eillonwy—tell us much more about Taran than does a recounting of his childhood. Similarly, Tad Williams does not need to have his hero Simon think about being curious; his actions tells us that he is. Simon “could never understand how rooms that seemed as small as the doctor’s did from outside—he had looked down on them from the bailey walls and paced the distance in the courtyard—how they could have such long corridors” (The Dragonbone Chair 14). At this point Simon is in the world in which he grew up, and Williams demonstrates neatly that in this—pre-quest—world he is fully immersed.

The reverie is a commodification of memory: one aspect of this ritualization of memory is that it reduces characters to that which can be described in terms essentially photographic. Stephen R. Donaldson, in Lord Foul’s Bane (1977), provides us with a good example: “But where Lena was fresh and slim of line, full of unbroken newness, Atiaran appeared complex, almost self contradictory” (51). This kind of description tells us more than we can possibly know or that the observing character can possibly know. There are two aspects to this formulation. To begin with, the narrative structure of the portal-quest fantasy, in which we move through the map, posits many characters as mere signposts. In this context we do not have time to truly learn about people, any more than we would “learn” about the tree we passed. The second, and related, aspect is that we are therefore forced to rely on intuition. The portal-quest fantasy is thus often the last resting place of physiognomy, a tradition the sf writer Jeffrey Ford has mocked brilliantly in The Physiognomy (1997). This tradition is usually discussed in terms of race and fantasy, but the “racing” of heroes and villains is in part a consequence of a rhetoric that posits insight in terms of visual perception.

The narrativization of memory also affects the description of action. It is not action that is of interest but response; action has to be “seen” by the protagonist and the protagonist cannot see “his” own physical movements. In this form, expression and feeling cannot be interpreted; they must be described, pinned down for the reader. They must also maintain primacy in the narrative drive of the novel. In this mode of fantasy, action is there to carry emotive weight, so that fighting is “valiant” (see Brooks again) rather than “wild” (see Howard’s Conan the Barbarian). This emphasis on emotion is a distinct shift from, for example, the worlds of Conan the barbarian. The shift is from an externalized discourse of action—what we usually mean when we refer to the omniscient narrator—to the internalized discourse. Even the moment of recognition can be shaped by this demand. Toward the end of Lord Foul’s Bane, Thomas Covenant learns some of what was intended for him, but it is framed not as action, but as self-regard: “Then, with a sickening vertiginous twist of insight, he caught a glimpse of Lord Foul’s plan for him, glimpsed what the despiser was doing to him. Here was the killing blow which had lain concealed behind all the machinations, all the subterfuge” (353).

This raises the question as to whether this internal narrative is intended to parallel the external narrative of exploration and observation. Can one have an internal quest that does not require the protagonist to move through a physical and internal landscape? There are very few portal fantasies that are not succeeded by journeys.¹¹ The implication of what I have set out above is that the journey through the mind, while not absolutely necessary to the format, is one way that has emerged to handle the need to create closed and reliable characters—reliable only in the sense that we must trust their own assessment of themselves in order for the veracity of the story to hold. Thomas Covenant is a twist, not an exception to the rule. His misinterpretation of his role, his refusal to accept responsibility, is the surety of his character’s narration. We believe him because Doubting Thomas is, in the final analysis, the most reliable witness—a double bluff.

This discourse and the insistence on the narrative and descriptive competence of the protagonist—even when we are told that they do not understand what is happening—thins the complexity of the world and makes of it a poorly painted stage set. The portal-quest fantasy by its very nature needs to deny the possibility of a polysemic discourse in order to validate the “quest.” There can be only one understanding of the world: an understanding that validates the quest. And yes, that is recursive, a point I shall discuss further on.

There are some exceptions: the original grail stories offer polysemic narratives and question the reality, desirability, and possibility of “goal,” as do some modern quest fantasies (which I shall discuss at the end of the chapter). More generally, however, this issue is extended into the world-building of fantasyland. Nonspecific landscape is unrolled like a carpet in front of the character. This landscape even embraces the contrived design of Romantic landscape painting.¹² Note this comment from Raymond J. O’Brien: “Viewers, whether river travellers or gallery-goers, were commonly impressed with the importance of foreground. In landscapes, the foreground—although not always available to steamboat passengers—was the means by which the observer entered the scene (e.g., a path, a stream or falls, a river road, a railroad track, a cleft in the rocks). And while the middle ground contained the subject matter or object (mountain, river, or townscape), a distant background was also imperative to create a hazy, far-away panoramic effect” (171). The entrant into the portal-quest fantasy is precisely this kind of tourist—and as an aside, in so many they are tourists in an American landscape painting, moving through and into the grandeur of the landscapes—“Imagining forth vastness” (R. Wilson 5). In the British equivalent the viewer is more likely positioned gazing at a vista (Wilton).¹³ But in the absence of real depth, history, religion, and politics must receive a similar treatment. The difficulty is balancing the requirement that such matters must always have been there with the ignorance of the protagonist.

To some extent, almost all portal and quest fantasies use the figure of a guide to download information into the text. Here is where the classic portal fantasy has an advantage, in that those traveling through a declared portal are expected to be ignorant: it is perfectly plausible for the dwarf to fill in the children about the past few hundred years of Narnian history in Prince Caspian (1951). But in many quest fantasies, the portal is merely a move from the familiar village to the unfamiliar world. An impromptu civics class always seems unnatural. Most people, however ignorant, know a little about most matters, enough to interrupt, to argue, to disturb the narrative. Yet these narratives, including the one described in Prince Caspian, are distinctive because they are delivered entirely in the authoritarian mode. These narratives are uninterruptible, unquestionable, and delivered absolutely in the mode of the club discourse: the travelers group around the narrator and listen to his (less commonly her) description of great events or political structures. When the narratives are delivered by a guide figure, the result is that the guide usurps the narratorfocalizer role that might usually be supposed to belong to the protagonist (Rimmon-Kenan 83).

This form of fantasy embodies a denial of what history is. In the quest and portal fantasies, history is inarguable, it is “the past.” In making the past “storyable,” the rhetorical demands of the portal-quest fantasy deny the notion of “history as argument” which is pervasive among modern historians. The structure becomes ideological as portal-quest fantasies reconstruct history in the mode of the Scholastics,¹⁴ and recruit cartography to provide a fixed narrative, in a palpable failure to understand the fictive and imaginative nature of the discipline of history.

Tolkien set the trend for maps and prehistory, establishing a pattern for the quest narrative in which the portal is not encoded solely in the travelogue discovery of what lies ahead, but in the insistence that there is past and place behind, and that what lies behind must be thoroughly known and unquestioned before the journey begins. As Diana Wynne Jones has pointed out, maps are a substitute for place, and an indication that we have to travel; they also, however, fix the interpretation of a landscape. Maps are no more geography than chronology and legend are history, but in portal-quest fantasies, they complete the denial of discourse.

Since the late 1970s, genre fantasy has frequently been signaled by these two devices: the map—which, as Diana Wynne Jones sarcastically observed, lists everywhere we will be visiting (Guide 10)—and the fixed and narrated past. Far too many post-Tolkien portal-quest fantasies begin with a download of legend. Their very anonymity creates the status that the closed club narrative requires. Occasionally, they are signed by a legendary figure, or by “a historian,” but the presentation of these extracts is rarely placed against other, disputatious sources. Authors of these fantasies write as if Mark Twain had never pointed out the danger of trusting the presentable document. Jones puts it memorably:

Scrolls are important sources of information about either HISTORY or MAGIC, and are only to be found jealously guarded in a MONASTERY or TEMPLE. You will usually have to steal your copy. Against this inconvenience is the highly useful fact that the Information in the Scroll will be wholly correct. There is, for some reason, no such thing as a lying, mistaken or inaccurate Scroll. (Guide 166)

See also her entry for PROPHECY (148–149). The consequence is that the found document is in the chair relating the club story; either all of it is correct, or none of it is. We can no longer debate history, in the sense of interpretation, analysis, discovery; we can only relate the past. This scholasticism permits only macronarratives: the past in these books is always what has been recorded about the greats, and it has always been recorded somewhere.

Yet concomitant with this is a reverence for the book, even while seeing books as alien artifacts to be decoded. This returns us once more to Bunyan and to generations of evangelicals for whom the Bible was not an ethical discussion but a book of riddles and challenges (Keeble xxiii).

Things that seem to be hid in words obscure,

Do but the Godly mind the more allure;

To Study what those Sayings should contain,

That speak to us in such a Cloudy strain.

(Pilgrim’s Progress, 130)

This verse might come straight from the prologue of a modern fantasy. Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising (1965–77) sequence is structured around rhymes to be deconstructed; The Belgariad has its Codex capable of predicting the coming of the Rivan King; Jeff Noon’s feathers in Vurt are encoded fantasy-game riddles that offer a way out into otherworld. Each, like Pilgrim’s Progress, constructs the text as a portal into a promised world. Running alongside this is an ideology of heroism that denies current authority in favor of an omnipresent power, yet prizes specifically the ability of the common man to decipher the code that will lead one through the gate. External means of testing veracity are closed off, and we are further sealed into the story.

As Keeble describes it: “The regenerate are distinguished from the unregenerate not by any exceptional abilities or virtue but by their faith: they keep on going” (xvii). Such describes both the regenerate Christian and the predestined hero in modern quests (and crops up most in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials sequence [1995–2001]). Keeble points out: “The saint only gains final assurance of perseverance when he has persevered” (xix). Similarly evident in many modern portal-quest fantasies is the Puritan belief that “it is by playing a full part in this world that salvation is won” (xiii). Yet perseverance is defined in part by the ability to stay on the straight and narrow path, to follow the words of prophecy and the delivered interpretation—in effect, for the hero to maintain his own position-as-reader.

The idea is picked up in a number of fantasies, but perhaps most explicitly at the end of Lloyd Alexander’s The High King (1968), where Taran is informed that he was only ever a collection of “ifs.” In fantasy sequences such as The Belgariad, Assassin’s Apprentice and its sequels, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and many others, there is an overwhelming sense of this predictive narrative shaping the text, of the book of riddle interpreted only in the light of the successful conclusion. Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), which I shall otherwise be considering predominantly as an immersive fantasy, could be read as a reply to Pilgrim’s Progress—and to the classic portal fantasy, as will subsequently emerge, because of its message accept what is and contextualize your evidence; do not rely on only one source. Even anti-quest fantasies such as The Scar seem able only to fight against this structure; with their dead ends and celestial cities rejected, they cannot construct anything else.

The assumptions that “the past” is unarguable, that it just is, and that “knowledge” is to be rediscovered rather than generated, has narrative consequences. Binabik, the historian-mage of Tad Williams’s Dragonbone Chair (1988), assumes that in order to learn anything, he must return to the archives for research. Robin Hobb’s Assassin sequence is structured within the writing of a history that depends for its backstory on material found in other, written histories. Each chapter begins with a memoir not dissimilar to the Venerable Bede’s history: recollection and gossip masquerading as an accurate description of the past. The argument is circular, but nonetheless valid; yet the consequence for the author is that in order to preserve this sense, any history narrated must be done so in an authoritative fashion. The moment one introduces argument, one also introduces research and experimentation: portal-quest fantasies are full of learned people, who have read many books. Knowledge is fixed and it is recursive, and in this it demonstrates the peculiar and specific Christian heritage of the modern portal-quest fantasy. As Northrop Frye wrote, “How do we know that the Gospel story is true? Because it confirms the prophecies of the Old Testament. But how do we know that the Old Testament prophecies are true? Because they are confirmed by the Gospel story. Evidence, so called, is bounced back and forth between the testaments like a tennis ball” (Code 78). This circularity creates a reductiveness that utterly undermines any real notion of learning in the portal fantasy and has led me to muse on what a truly Jewish fantasy—with all the argument endemic to my religion—might look like. Peter David’s Sir Apropos of Nothing (2001), whose sidekick refuses his predestined role, who spends much of the time raging at fate, and who frequently finds his achievements unapplauded, is one candidate.

But to get back on track, this one element, the insistence of the fixedness of history and of learning, divides quest fantasy from immersive fantasy. Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000) can make room for the experimental method (as, interestingly, can the later and more immersive Discworld novels) but The Scar, also by Miéville, must send people looking for a lost book and a lost scientist. Very occasionally, there is an understanding displayed that history cannot be written and preserved with fixative. Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner’s The Fall of the Kings (2002) is a book about the writing of history, whose protagonist is a scholar who wishes to return to the documents, to reconstruct history from source materials, and to argue with the belief of a fixed past, a found narrative. But the tale betrays the reader and the protagonist: at the end, history is again “found,” the past revealed to us through dreams and through magic, rendering the research pointless and restoring “the past” to its rightful place above mere history. The historian’s craft is swapped for the club-story narrative, fully hermetic.

The nature of the club story is that it valorizes the control of the narrator. This one factor may help to explain why, although many quest fantasies claim to be about a remaking of the world, few can be considered genuine instauration fantasies. A contributing factor is the portal-quest fantasies’ denial of argument with the universe. It is a truism that fiction is about conflict, but in the portal-quest fantasies the possibilities for such conflict are limited by the ideological narrative that posits the world, as painted, as true. Consequently, it is this closed narrative that restricts the plot possibilities for most quest and portal novels. If multiple interpretations are to be denied, if the narrative is to be hermetic, then the novel becomes locked in the patterns that Clute observed in the full fantasy: wrongness, thinning, recognition, and healing/return (defined in Clute and Grant’s Encyclopedia of Fantasy.) Such patterns, rather than being a coincident archetype, become fundamental to the structure. The genre accrues formalisms, and authors negotiate with these forms; one aspect of this negotiation is experimenting with which positions and rhetorics best familiarize (or defamiliarize) the reader with the fantastic.

Given the huge number of books written in this category, the books discussed below have been selected according to their historical significance, to their status as archetypes. (They are also the consequence of a trawl among the recommendations of a number of readers, to ensure that the choices presented here would not be entirely self-justifying.) While Tolkien and Lewis may have provided the archetypes of modern fantasy, the taproots of the genre are rather different. The emergence of a rhetoric to accompany this position can be traced to the earliest of the portal fantasies. Therefore, if we are to consider the development of the rhetorical styles and grammar of this mode of fantasy, we should begin by considering the condition of portal and quest fantasy before Tolkien and Lewis. The best known are George MacDonald’s Lilith (1895), Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), and David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920). When we lay these alongside one another, and in the company of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—a book that has had an immense if unconscious influence on the structure of quest fantasies and that shows many of the traits that later emerge of markers of this particular subgenre—certain patterns emerge.