Читать книгу Rhetorics of Fantasy - Farah Mendlesohn - Страница 21

For Bunyan, the fantastic was that which was made up, rather than that which was supernatural, and it is in this context that we need to consider the dream sequences that provide the contextual structure of Pilgrim’s Progress. In the modern fantasy, the dream sequence is conventionally seen as a distancing from the fantastic, a means of denying belief. When taken at face value in a text—such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—it has very specific consequences for the grammar of the fantastic. A consideration of Pilgrim’s Progress, however, suggests that, in its religious context, dream as an entryway to the fantastic functioned rather differently.

Although Bunyan felt compelled to use dreaming to contextualize his allegory (perhaps because of the Puritan suspicion of fiction), that dream is closer to a vision of the prophetic than to the modern idea of the dream as unreal. It brings the afterlife closer, making the consequences of sin manifest. Bunyan’s Pilgrim comes to him in a dream because the story is more than allegory; it is a spiritual gift, an aspect of visionary fancy.

Yet within Pilgrim’s Progress, the dream structure is under attack from the needs of the narrative. The “Dream” as vision is a reminder of the reality of heaven; as dream it deprives us of completeness. While Bunyan avoids much of the exposition of landscape and personnel that will mark the portal fantasy and prevents full immersion in the fantastic, the repeated lines “and in the Dream” serve the same purpose, to distance the reader and to remind us that we are mere external observers of Christian’s quest, not part of his company. The tale is being narrated to us. At other times, our immersed participation is demanded as a spiritual exercise. The effect on the tone of the fantasy is to create an unevenness, an alternation of description and immersion, of distancing and familiarity. At times we walk beside Christian, at other times we observe him from afar. But while in a dream we may be ineffectual, there is nonetheless the sense that we are at the center of the dream.

The vision is of elsewhere; it presumes that the frame world (our world) is already thinned, and provides the moment of rupture in which elsewhere becomes here. In Pilgrim’s Progress it is the moment of recognition, where the man becomes Christian “(for that was his name)”; we know that we are now fully in the tale (10). The one significant difference in the second part of Pilgrim’s Progress (which narrates the tale of Christiana’s search for her husband, and for God through him) is that the dream becomes a matter of doubt. Although it is couched as a dream at the beginning of the act, it is also phrased as “Travels into those Parts” (143). An ambiguity creeps into the text, an ambiguity remade at the close, “Shall it be my Lot to go that way again, I may give those that desire it, an Account of what I here am silent about.” For Bunyan, it might have been a sign to the reader that he was “fantasizing” in the second book, making up what came to him as divine inspiration in the first. To secular eyes, however, the narrative has become a greater part of reality because the power of vision is no longer reliable—or has, perhaps, become more metaphorical. The challenge to future fantasists is to make that vision more real, and they do so by making the portal of dream into a material portal of wood and wardrobe.¹⁵ What proves less easy is to move beyond the positioning of reader as recipient of the tale told.

Bunyan’s own insistence that Pilgrim’s Progress is allegory reinforces the problem. Attebery argues that allegory “continually points beyond itself to the moral or metaphysical truths under examination” (Tradition 180). But in order to do this, Bunyan must strain his narrative structure. We cannot merely follow Christian, because that would be to risk that we do not understand the message. Instead both the omniprescient narrator (by lapsing out of the dream sequence) and Christian (in a pattern of telling and retelling as he meets each signpost character) guide our interpretation of the quest. In this narrative, it is the telling thereof, the rethinking of it, that is significant, rather than the adventure itself. Some of this rethinking remains in The Lord of the Rings: Bilbo’s writing of his and Frodo’s story will have resonance; Pippin and Merry will relate their tales to Treebeard, who will become part of the narrative and will be convinced. This element remains only hesitantly in the modern tradition, expressed, as we shall see, within the club story. The point is, the fantasy is made fantasy in part by being related.

In the periodic absences of the omniscient narrator, the text proceeds as a Socratic dialogue. Although this dialogue is to some extent feigned—Christian almost always has the correct answers, and the book he carries “was made by him that cannot lie” (11)—in the conversation between him and Faithful, and later Hopeful (104 and 205), we proceed to the Truth of the quest through a narrative more open than those of many modern fantasies. The structure, when between equals, is of question and answer, each drawing out the other’s spiritual journey, using the questions to exhort as well as to query. However, when it is not between equals, Bunyan signals status through direct and indirect speech, by the abrupt changes in tone, from the mimetic, personal address of Christian, to the diegesis of reported reactions of the crowds or opposition. Form and Hypocrisie, “made him but little answer; only bid him look to himself” (33). Repeatedly, speech is given to that person who holds the higher countenance, while the one who is to listen, or learn, is described and distanced. The diegetic mode is used to create both status and differing levels of reality. This rule holds true even of Christian, who is reduced to a reaction shot in his conversation with Evangelist:

Evan. Then, said Evangelist, How hath it fared with you, my friends, since the time of our last parting? What have you met with, and how have you behaved your selves?

Chr. Then Christian, and Faithful, told him of all things that had happened to them in the way; and how, and with what difficulty they had arrived to the right place. (71)

The entire description of Vanity Fair, because it concerns those who are inferior and not in conversation with Christian and Faithful, is told in this diegetic mode so as to happen, in effect, offstage, to be less real. We have been evicted from our spectator seats. Less consistently, we frequently see the same technique in modern fantasy, most recently in Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights [The Golden Compass] (1995), which drops into reported speech when the point is to communicate interpretation rather than events (see chapter 11, “Armour”). It reminds us again that this is a tale being told.

Pilgrim’s Progress’s omniscient narrator is ultimately a ruse. The point of view is Christian’s: we experience only Christian’s doubt, are told that of Faithful. But once the narrator admits that this is allegory, he hastens to explain things to us, not through Christian’s eyes, but through his own: “I saw then that they went on their way to a pleasant River, which David the King called The River of God; but John, The River of the water of life” (90). Omniscience is asserted, and with it the fantasy is ruptured: omniscience as a vehicle for explanation, proves hostile to the portal-quest fantasy.

Although there are two centuries between Bunyan and George Mac-Donald, Lilith (1895) is actually less certain in its form. Although a portal fantasy, the portal structure of Lilith is unsupported by the narrative tone. An example of a portal novel written before the conventions of the form were settled, in its experimentation with register and with focalization, Lilith reveals patterns we can identify in its successors.

Lilith repeatedly veers between the Gothic style, as commonly found in the intrusion fantasy or the liminal fantasy, and the detailed creation and description of landscape and people that is more common to the portal fantasy. The reader is forced into a variety of positionings vis-à-vis the text and the protagonist. The use of the Gothic, of estrangement and intrusion in the frame-world sections of Lilith, is disruptive to the acceptance of the otherworld. It makes strange the familiar, denying the increasing comfort usually found as we proceed through the tale, and runs contrary to the balance that is normally associated with the portal fantasy. The otherworld of the portal fantasy relies on the contrast with the frame world, on the world from which we begin the adventure, an understanding manipulated by authors such as Diana Wynne Jones and Barbara Hambly.¹⁶ Instead MacDonald makes the present world strange.

We begin Lilith in an environment that is unfamiliar to us but should be familiar to the protagonist: his family home. We should be in a fully immersed, taken-for-granted setting that we decode from the cues and sensibilities of the protagonist. Instead, the setting is made strange by a process of deliberate defamiliarization in which the protagonist, to bring us into his tale, describes in detail the library that is at the heart of his story, leaving vague the conformations of the house itself. It becomes an edifice, more complex in its interior than its facade. Nothing is taken for granted, and the result of this excessive detail, as in a medieval painting, is a distortion of perspective that pushes us outside the fantastic realm, making of us audience.

In the introductory sections of the book, the disruption is portrayed initially as nebulous. It is a sense, a feeling: “The garret at the top of it pervaded the whole house! It sat upon it, threatening to crush me out of it! The brooding brain of the building, it was full of mysterious dwellers, one or other of whom might any moment appear in the library where I sat!” (17). The alliteration, the emphasis on movement, on the activity of the presence, combine to create a sense of the protagonist under attack. This sense is increased by his focus on his own reactions: “The mere words, however, woke in me feelings which to describe was, from their strangeness, impossible” (18). Elsewhere in the novel, when the focus becomes exploration, the role of emotion is diminished; here, however, the emphasis is on regaining control of the present world. The fantastic is signaled by a loss of that control rather than, as in the classic portal fantasy and in later sections of the text, the movement through the fantastic.

If Lilith contained but a single portal, the effect of this might be minimal: once one had left the frame world, the rhetoric of the portal fantasy would take over and the sense that the frame world was itself a fantastic place might recede. But Lilith is multiply portalled, so that we are shuttled between fantastical worlds narrated in different modes. The second chapter offers an example of this in the exploratory, complex neorealism—the making real through intense description of the landscape—of the portal fantasy in which the protagonist describes his landscape, a wood of tall, slender pine trees: “I spied before me something with a shine, standing between two of the stems. It had no colour, but was like the translucent trembling of the hot air that rises, in a radiant summer noon, from the sun-baked ground, vibrant like the smitten chords of a musical instrument” (16).

Then, and almost immediately, the protagonist is rejected, thrown back into his own world, a world no longer impervious to the fantastic, but penetrated and made unsafe by its presence: “Terror seized me, and I fled. Outside the chamber the wide garret spaces had an uncanny look. They seemed to have long been waiting for something; it had come, and they were waiting again! A shudder went through me on the winding stair: the house had become strange to me!” (16–17). The rendering of the frame world as uncanny, means that MacDonald must struggle harder to make his other world fantastical. He cannot rely on the contrast of realism and fantasy.

Because the uncanny is a mode focused on emotion—the fantasy as expressed experience—the first person is a logical choice of focalization. In Lilith (particularly prior to the revelation that the raven is in fact Adam) the first person is deployed to confuse and to place a barrier between ourselves and the fantasy world. The portal-quest genre as it develops will demand the illusion that the protagonist ride with the reader by his side, decode and understand the fantasy world in which they exist. But the spiral structure of Lilith, its multiple portals and frequent “return to start,” and its insistence on the creation of the fantastic in terms of emotional response, makes the focalization much clearer: we are forced to acknowledge that we are mere recipients of the tale.

What we are privy to is recorded emotion: we can feel only what Vane says he feels. This is first person narrated. To make an obvious point, it cannot be clear whether this is a reliable or unreliable narration. On the one hand, what is the point of an unreliable narrator? On the other, it is made clear that Vane does not understand and that he himself cannot express everything he sees and is aware of this. The raven assures Vane—duplicitously—that he can give no guidance because “you and I use the same words with different meanings. We are often unable to tell people what they need to know, because they want to know something else, and would therefore only misunderstand what we said” (58–59). This concept, unsurprisingly, structures the novel, but it does so by convincing us of the incompetence of the narrator who cannot understand and therefore must trust, and of the incomprehensibility of the world—a notion at fundamental variance to the ideology of any text of exploration. At the conclusion of Lilith, we really know very little more of this fantasy world than we did at the start.

The outright statement of confusion and meaninglessness fractures the creation of the otherworld and prevents the accretion of familiarity associated with the modern portal fantasy. Vane is continually subjected to riddles and told that his judgment is valueless.¹⁷ The process of decoding is denied: “it involves a constant struggle to say what cannot be said with even an approach to precision, the things recorded being, in their nature and in that of the creatures concerned in them, so inexpressibly different from any possible events of this economy, that I can present them only by giving, in the forms and language of life in this world, the modes in which they affected me—not the things themselves, but the feelings they woke in me. Even this much, however, I do with a continuous and abiding sense of failure” (60–61).

The emphasis is on the emotional response. Instead of mimesis, we receive allusion. Modern portal fantasies rely on the false belief that the reader interprets the world, but here MacDonald denies this: we cannot see what our narrator sees. We can only truly understand the world either through simile (all is described in likenesses, for example, “a head as big as a polar bear”), or in its effect upon him (“I dared not turn my eyes from them”; “I strove to keep my heart above the waters of fear” [64]), or through his reactions. The emphasis in this book is less on what passes or is passed through, but on how the protagonist feels about these movements. There are exceptions but they are oddly inserted into metastories (such as Vane’s encounters with the skeletons), moments when Vane watches an event and tells it, not as part of his experience, but almost as a fireside tale.¹⁸

In later portal-quest fantasies, although the guide may be mysterious, he is usually comforting, offering guidance and wisdom. But in the first part of Lilith, Mr. Raven offers not guidance but disquiet and disorientation. He is an intruding alien who challenges the reality of the world. When he digs for a worm and it turns to a butterfly, he challenges what is and where is the fantastical. He is the alien to be met and decoded, to be revealed as Adam in the last section of the book. This unmasking is his undoing; he ceases to perform as a portal for dissonance and disruption from the moment that his identity becomes clear. The shift from disrupter to unreliable guide takes place from the moment that Vane decides to place his trust in Mr. Raven, to accept that it is Mr. Raven, not Vane, who is capable of judging his character growth (24–25). The issue of trust is crucial to the construction of the portal-quest fantasy; it is this that leads us into the closed, unquestioning narrative. Lilith enfolds us doubly into this closed narrative.

Once trust is established (around chapter 7), the rhetorical structures of Lilith shift from the description of nebulous fears, sensations, and emotions to the creation of a fantastical landscape, and an exploration of its geography. This landscape is constructed of people, as well as places, or moralities as well as landmarks. Mr. Raven’s wife is part of this construction: “It was as if the splendour of her eyes had grown too much for them to hold, and, sinking into her countenance, made it flash with a loveliness like that of Beatrice in the white rose of the redeemed” (40). But the landscape remains constructed of likeness, often coined in the negative: the moon “is not like yours” (44); “Fatigue or heat she showed none”; “It was nearly noon, but the sense was upon me as of a great night” (149). Alongside this is the insistence that everything is done in great emotion: “The light, like an eager hound, shot before me into the closet, and pounced upon the gilded edges of a large book.” In turn, the narrator springs to his feet and cries aloud (47). The use of simile indicates the shift to the neorealism of the portal fantasy: where metaphor estranges, simile seeks to make familiar. We are now inside the portal more fully, yet the reality of the world is cast into doubt by the continual references to the framing world, and to the insistence on an unusual intensity of emotion.

Equally experimental, A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay (1920), comes nearer to the rhetoric of the full portal-quest novel, even while, in its inconsistencies and baroque style, demonstrating the ruptures of grammar of the early form. A Voyage to Arcturus continually shifts tone, from the supernatural (the fantastic as felt) through the descriptive (the fantastic as seen) at various points throughout the text. Unlike Lilith, there is no clear division between the mode of the frame world and the mode in which the otherworld is related. Instead, there are continual shifts among the Gothic, the baroque elaboration of fantasy exploration, and unnerving moments of apparent realism. These latter moments are usually dropped into the conversational structures of the book; in avoiding the mock medievalism used at other moments, they approach the plain puritan delivery of Bunyan. Yet in Voyage to Arcturus much is hidden in words that seem open. All is reversals and negatives.

We begin with a séance delivered in the low-toned popular style, essentially mimetic, reminiscent of Conan Doyle. Lindsay can conjure up unease without relying on the intonations of horror, because the séance itself is understood, both familiar yet semiscandalous. The opening of A Voyage to Arcturus is the opening into a club story. It is matter-of-fact, prosaic. But the sudden shifts in tone are a source of unease: there are attempts to deliver a travel fantasy through emotion rather than description, and the odd lapse into colloquialisms when the discussion is something which can relate to our own world (such as the use of “Thanks” when blood is shared). In order perhaps to put Maskull at his ease, Krag addresses him, “Oh, you will get your twenty four hours, and perhaps longer, but not much longer. You’re an audacious fellow, Maskull, but this trip will prove a little serious, even for you” (18). But the offhandedness is deceptive: it is dismissive, it closes down the questions, begins the sealing off of the fantasy that ensures that none of the questions Maskull asks will challenge his received impressions, and that he will trust all the answers given.

But chapter 2 begins with the semi-Gothic. It leads to the supernatural, not to the portal: “The three men gathered in the road outside the house. The night was slightly frosty, but particularly clear, with an east wind blowing” (15). For this one moment in time, Maskull is presented as an inhabitant rather than an explorer of the world, and the tone conjures the latency crucial to the intrusion fantasy (see chapter 3, this volume). In the tower, things begin to get more sinister. The jovial tone is dropped and what is observed—the beating of the drums—is increasingly phrased not as an event but as an indicator: they “seemed somehow to belong to a different world” (29).

Unlike Lilith and subsequent portal fantasies, the actual portal is almost irrelevant to this fantasy. Like Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter, Maskull is transported instantaneously to the new world. With this alteration, we have shift of tone and focalization. On awakening, Maskull describes not what he sees but his bodily feelings: “he was unable to lift his body on account of its intense weight. A numbing pain, which he could not identify with any region of his frame, acted from now onwards as a lower, sympathetic note to all his other sensations” (40). He becomes aware of changes, of the fleshy protuberance on his forehead, and a tentacle on the region of his heart. Maskull’s first experience of the new world is physical, of himself as landscape and as fantastical. As the presence or absence of various limbs proves crucial to the narrative, the morality of the tale is shaped on and with his body. The language is pregnant with the fantastic, but does not build the stage set I associate with this kind of fantasy. With Maskull, we explore not the world he is in, but his reactions to it. The description of landscape, although in the third person, is through perception. “When it came near enough he perceived it was not grass.…Some uncanny, semi-intelligent instinct was keeping all the plants together, moving at one pace, in one direction, like a flock of migrating birds” (48–49). Like MacDonald, he uses avoidance in the face of the realized fantastic: the “sense-impressions caused in Maskull by these two additional primary colours can only be vaguely hinted at by analogy” (49).

Conversation in A Voyage to Arcturus shows similar stylistic shifts. As with Vane, Maskull’s interpretative agency is repeatedly denied. Although this is ostensibly a novel of exploration, he must not ask questions about the cut on his arm because “the effect is certain, but you can’t possibly understand it beforehand” (34). Joviality is used to ensure compliance not just of Maskull, but of the reader. It is we who are being chivvied along into the fantasy through a denial of explanation—a lack of information is buried in apparent volubility. This denial wouldn’t matter but, like many adventurers in the portal fantasy, he accepts whatever he is told (especially when it contradicts what he has been told before). We see this most clearly toward the end when he briefly follows a new prophet, only to change when his bodily configuration changes. It is unclear why this happens. A query about Crystalman results in the lesson that he is called Shaping and has many names (46). This mode later emerges as central to the uncanny, but is antithetical to the delivered mode of the modern portal-quest fantasy. When information is actually exchanged we move to excessive formality:

“And well you may, for it’s a fearful thing for a girl to accept in her own veins the blood of a strange man from a strange planet. If I had not been so dazed and weak I would never have allowed it.”

“But I should have insisted. Are we not all brothers and sisters? Why did you come here, Maskull?”

When what is to be delivered is not description, but a genuine discussion of a problem, Lindsay reverts to a more colloquial style: “It begins to look like a piece of bad work to me. They must have gone on, and left me” (45). Anything that discusses the fantastical is described in the slow, measured language of poetry. Anything that is about the “real” slips back into the colloquial and takes the fantasy characters with it. Joiwind is asked if she is being weakened: “ ‘Yes,’ she replied, with a quick, thrilling glance. ‘But not much—and it gives me great happiness’ ” (54). It is that “not much” that seems rather odd. When Digrung is slandering Tydomin he again slips into the vernacular, because his slander is not a matter for fantasy: “I see into you, and I see insincerity. That wouldn’t matter, but I don’t like to see a man of intelligence like Maskull caught in your filthy meshes” (118). Digrung continues in much the same style, because he is talking about the mundane. When told not to kill someone he says “Thanks for that” (120). But as soon as he gets onto the subject of sin, he is back to excessive formalism “As for you, woman—sin must be like a pleasant bath to you” (120).

Although the séance is ended with a sudden rush into the room, action is rare. The predominant pace is slow, meandering; the planet Arcturus is the principal character whom Maskull must get to know. But Lindsay, like MacDonald, feels that landscape is not enough: the emotion, the effect of the fantastic on the soul should be the heart of the matter and our attention directed to it. The result is that the adventures often seem weak and almost irrelevant. When Maskull fights Crimtyphon, the whole is rushed, made small of. The “duel of wills” lasts only one paragraph (102). This is neither heroic or adventure fantasy.

Similar issues are at stake with Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Of the three novels, Carroll’s work is clearest that it is the portal and the space beyond that is of intrinsic interest, and this emphasis is reflected in the confidence of tone with which the tale is delivered. To begin with, the portal is both a passage and a space. When Alice falls through the rabbit hole, it is lined with cupboards and shelves. The transition is not instant but is to be explored as much as other places. The second Alice book, however, is composed almost wholly of Alice moving into, assessing, and moving beyond a place/incident. Each time the mise-en-scène is described, Alice engages with it, but in the absence of a task, she then chooses to leave it behind. This form of encounter is quite different from most portal and quest fantasies, where such moves necessitate that tasks be performed, but markedly similar in that the emphasis is on place rather than an adventure, a happening. As with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, it reinforces the notion that the heart of the portal fantasy is always the land and not the adventure.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of the Alice books (in terms of their rhetoric) is that Alice proceeds as if she understands the world around her. In a reversal of the usual structure, Alice understands the rules of society and seeks to implement them, coming unstuck because those around her do not seem to understand them, while very superficially implementing them. Alice imposes herself on fantasyland, anticipating while puncturing the straight-faced “stranger/savior” politics of modern portal fantasies. The most obvious example is the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, to which Alice invites herself, although she knows this to be rude, while condemning the party for being unwelcoming. Despite the chaos, Alice does not act as a stranger in the world in quite the way we expect in a portal fantasy. Crucially, however, there is nothing she needs to find out, no place she needs to go, or quest to achieve. The result is that she asks relatively few questions. And when she does question, it is usually about the nature of the one she confronts who is equally interested in her. A question we might ask of Wonderland (as indeed Alice asks it in Looking Glass) is just whose adventure this is. It is clear from the balanced nature of interrogations between Alice and the caterpillar, Alice and the pigeon, and Alice and the Cat, that they each regard this as their adventure, and Alice merely someone they have met on the way.

Before leaving the Alice books, it should be noted that although the entrance to the rabbit hole does not signal a shift in Carroll’s style—we might argue that this is because Alice is already asleep, is already in the fantasy—at the end of the book there is a very obvious break. Forced back into reality, into the frame world, Carroll opts for reverie. It is quite possible to regard this as a slippage into the conventions of the time, the rather sentimental tone adopted toward children that saw them all as potential adults, and childhood as a charmed rather than a fantastical time. Yet the reverie alerts us to something: in creating Alice, Carroll opted for an ironic macrorealism, in which the brutality of society is made fantastical as the language of society is revealed to be brutal. That refreshing tone is crucial to the creation of an unquestioned fantasy—which may suggest that Wonderland, for all the presence of that rabbit hole, is a precursor not to the portal fantasy but to the immersive.

As I write, I am increasingly convinced that the primary character in the portal fantasy is the land. In Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) we can see this element emerging. Baum understood that the fantastic can be intensified if contrasted with the most mundane Real possible. Attebery writes: “Baum is doing what a painter does when he paints a large, flat, colorless area on a canvas: he is creating negative space which acts to make any positive design all the more vivid. Kansas is gray, so we begin to think about color. It is flat, so we long for contour. It is vast so we wish for something on a human scale.… Before the paragraph is done, we have been given, by contraries, a picture of Oz” (Tradition 84). This effect is intensified because in that very first (Kansas) segment, what is perhaps most noticeable is that the text is all description. There are only two lines of conversation, in which Dorothy is commanded to take refuge from the cyclone. The bleakness of Kansas is in part the absence of sound, paralleling that absence in the landscape. Dorothy’s voice is a shock as much for being a voice as it is for its merry tone, but it is also a reminder that Kansas is a set of ideas as well as a place, and that Dorothy will be taking it with her.

Once in Oz, however, conversation becomes the crux of the dynamic. Questions drive the narrative, and give rise to narrative. Speech in Oz is relatively egalitarian: one cannot tell the status of someone from the use of direct or reported speech (although Attebery points out that it is encoded in who is described and in what detail (Tradition 100).¹⁹ Reported speech is used only to relate something that we have already seen happen. In this book there is very little introspection from Dorothy; only occasionally does she feel the need to relate her tale or her emotions/reactions.²⁰ In contrast, all the characters she encounters introduces themselves with a tale, not of where they are going or what they are doing, but of who they are. Dorothy’s narrative position, her domination of the story, comes in part from the conversational offerings of those wishing to make her acquaintance. There are four actors here, but only one is interpreting the world for us, even though the other three interpret the world for her.

Like Alice, Voyage to Arcturus, and Lilith, the book is a series of sequential movements through a landscape in which it is the landscape and its effects, rather than an adventure per se, that fascinates. As Attebery has pointed out, the journey itself is the plot (Tradition 87). The adventures are often the weakest part of the book—why use mice to pull a truck that the woodman and the scarecrow could pull?—because they are the elements closest to fairy tale. This form of fantasy, in which the adventures are often discrete and are added to until the author decides it is time to move to an ending, or a change of direction, I term a “bracelet” fantasy. Many of the links/adventures could simply be removed without fundamentally altering the tale.

What is most interesting about this book is that although landscape is the center of the book’s wonders, Dorothy is oddly uncurious and takes much of it for granted. Take, for example, the Emerald City, where she does not question the use of the spectacles (117–118). It is the omnipresent narrator who notices the lack of animals (122); Dorothy herself does not comment upon it. Similarly she does not comment on the throne room, the narrator does (126). Her discovery of the Tin Woodman (54) shows little astonishment at the enchantment. Dorothy is happy to accept what she is told of the world by those she meets, she does not herself interrogate it. Dorothy accepts the fantastic while marveling at the colors and brightnesses (much, perhaps, as the magic of the storefront window was accepted while simultaneously a source of marvel). As we see more than Dorothy inquires about, or demonstrates curiosity for, we are not positioned as Dorothy’s companion per se. We are frequently taken into an immersive fantasy, as we wonder at things she accepts. One explanation for this is that Dorothy has already traversed one portal, in moving from an eastern city to Kansas.²¹ She is practiced at dealing with the unknown. Alternatively, this story is simply a very unusual portal fantasy, one that shifts the reader position from continually requiring explanation through the senses of the naive protagonist, to shifting through those senses in order to interpret what the heroine herself takes for granted.