Читать книгу Rhetorics of Fantasy - Farah Mendlesohn - Страница 22

The classic quest fantasy, as I now envisage it, was set into its “final” form by J. R. R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) codified much of how the quest fantasy deals with landscape, with character, with the isolation of the protagonists into the club-story narrative and with reader positioning. More or less contemporaneous with The Lord of the Rings was the publication of the first in the Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), a classic portal fantasy. These novels set the pattern for what Clute describes as the full fantasy: the novels presume a thinned world, one in which wrongness already exists—a motif absent from Lilith or Wonderland but already present in Oz—and a consolatory healing or restoration (rather than transmutation), in which the participants are fulfilling an agon, “a context conducted in accordance with artistic rules” (Encyclopedia 12).

It is rather useful to compare the ways in which each approach the problem of creating a satisfactory and entire otherworld, to illuminate what it was that Tolkien achieved and how, and how each of the elements I have described are constructed. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is not an inferior novel, but in terms of the creation of the fantastic it is far more visibly aware of the juxtapositions of its two worlds. Consistent with my argument throughout has been that the portal and the quest fantasy use essentially the same means of entry into the fantastic, and thus are required to take up the same narrative position: essentially one that posits the reader as someone to whom things are explained through explanations offered to the protagonist.

The opening of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, perhaps because it is a children’s story, is much more self-consciously narrated than we have seen previously. The frame world is a story to be told, as much as the fantasy world is: “Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy” (9). It is narrated as if it were further in the past than the adventure itself: “It was the sort of house that you never seem to come to the end of, and it was full of unexpected places. The first few doors they tried led only into spare bedrooms, as everyone had expected that they would; but soon they came to a very long room full of pictures and there they found a suit of armour” (11).

This use of the past tense to create the frame world is also employed by Tolkien, but here the purpose and direction of the technique is rather different. Tolkien deploys this distanced past to build the history of his world, to create depth for the fantasy. Lewis is using it to create depth for the frame world, to make that real. Consequently, the unfanciful tone of Tolkien’s prologue makes real, not the fantasy between the “there and back again,” but the frame world of the Shire, which in turn makes real the adventure. By framing the Shire and the outside world with a viable past, a real, potential, future of the Shire is projected that is interwoven with ours.

Both Tolkien and Lewis feel the occasional need to rupture their fantasy lands. For Lewis, Narnia is unstable. It needs to be made more real by being rooted in our own world. By speaking directly with his readers, Lewis simultaneously breaks the fantasy and reminds us that it is real. So, for example, “This was bad grammar of course but that is how beavers talk when they are excited; I mean, in Narnia—in our world they usually don’t talk at all” (100). Narnia is made the more real because the frame world from which Narnia is accessible is made the more real by this reminder.

In contrast, Middle Earth is rendered stable by the relationship of the Shire to the rest of the world. This dynamic depends entirely on the structure of registers that Tolkien has developed for his epic. The Hobbit sections are written in the immersive style (which I shall discuss later). Much is taken for granted and the conversation is chatty, while neither interrogative nor excessively informative. What is particularly noticeable is that Gandalf is a questioner as well as questioned. He is not the source of all knowledge in this early part of the book (Fellowship 49, 50). However, while Frodo and Sam do not explain the Shire to us because they already know it, they do explain it to Gandalf, Aragorn, and to others they meet. Unusually, at these moments we look back through the portal to have the frame world described to ourselves as audience.

The difference of registers influences the shaping of the past. There is a clear difference between history as it is delivered in Tolkien’s Prologue, and that delivered, often in rolling tones, by those with information to pass on, whether it be Gandalf narrating the history of the Ring, or the poetic prophecies interrupting the otherwise demotic narratives of the Faun Tumnus and the Beaver. High formality is reserved for delivering history and status, for establishing shots of relationships and characters. It distances not just us, but the hobbits and the four children, and reminds us that this is not their world either. And because it is not their world, they are reliant on what they are told. Tolkien and Lewis use different ways of closing the discourse down. Lewis simply puts doubt into the mouth of Edmund, whom we already know to be unreliable. We can trust the robin, because it is Edmund who casts doubt on its trustworthiness (61). Tolkien uses another, less coercive method, ensuring that all the kind people that the hobbits meet once they are dispersed from the fellowship accord with the dominant interpretation—what we might call a conspiracy of companionship. In both cases, this closure is for our benefit. As readers we are positioned to be dependent upon what we are told, but both Tolkien and Lewis recognize that if the internal narrative is to convince, it must be sealed from within, not without.

Many of the “histories” we receive are oral retellings, which might alert the reader to unreliability. In the hands of Tolkien and Lewis, however, they do the opposite. The first example is when Gandalf visits Frodo to tell him of what the Ring portends, “ ‘Ah!’ said Gandalf. “That is a very long story. The beginnings lie back in the Black Years, which only the lore-masters now remember’ ” (Fellowship, “The Shadow of the Past” 60).²² We then segue rapidly into the formal, the gloomy atmosphere conjured up by the capitals in the sentences. And it is here that language is used to convince us: “The Enemy still lacks one thing to give him strength and knowledge to beat down all resistance, break the last defences, and cover all the lands in a second darkness. He lacks the One Ring” (“The Shadow of the Past” 60). There is no space for doubt here, no question that there might not be an enemy. Others may doubt later in the book—particularly in the bar at Bree—but no one who has spoken to Gandalf will do so, just as the word of Aslan is by its very nature the Truth. Whereas Lewis achieves it by positing Aslan as a sacred figure, who cannot be challenged, Tolkien constructs a style that defies the doubter. The style shifts: it becomes impersonal, in part because Sauron’s name may not be spoken, but also to give the sense of a Built Past. From Strider:

In those days the Great Enemy, of whom Sauron was but a servant, dwelt in Angband in the North, and the Elves of the West coming back to Middle-earth made war upon him to regain the Silmarils which he had stolen; and the fathers of Men aided the Elves. But the Enemy was victorious and Barahir was slain, and Beren escaping through great peril came over the Mountains of Terror into the hidden Kingdom of Thingol in the forest of Neldoreth. There he beheld Luthien singing and dancing in a glade. (Fellowship, “A Knife in the Dark” 206)

The cadences are those of oral telling. The very seamlessness of it maintains the momentum that makes it sound formal but also sung. The narrative use of “and,” as in Old Testament language and the narratives of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, provides the story with extra authenticity. Language in Tolkien is directed to the telling, that they be seen to be told. Stories, not just language, are in and of themselves convincing. When Bombadil speaks,

The hobbits did not understand his words, but as he spoke, they had a vision as it were of a great expanse of years behind them, like a vast shadowy plain over which there strode shapes of Men, tall and grim with bright swords, and last came one with a star on his brow. Then the vision faded, and they were back in the sunlit world. (Fellowship, “Fog on the Barrow-downs” 157)

The vision compels belief, and this visionary element is present whenever History is retold. As reportage it takes on elements of the club narrative: impervious and protected by the reputation of the teller, and reinforced by the isolation in which the story is told. In contrast, we can consider the role of demotic language in Lord of the Rings. Although much information is delivered in formal storytelling sessions, many of the really significant decisions, observations, and pieces of information are actually exchanged in the low vernacular of the hobbits.

Sam, who operates as the voice of the narrator does in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, is the one who reminds us that he is a real person moving through the fantasy. Thus while Aragorn or Gandalf worry about the historical significance of actions taken or not taken, Sam reminds us of the realities of a cross-country trek, even down to a forgotten rope. This one small paragraph, and others like it, is crucial to the success of the quest. That it is told in an unspectacular style, drawing no attention to itself save as a bit of comic business, is marvelous. Hayakawa talks of the “value of unoriginal remarks” as both mood setters, and ways in which to control an atmosphere (80–81). Tolkien has embraced this understanding: much of what is really going on is hidden by the high-flown rhetoric of the “politicians.” Nowhere is this understanding more evident than on page 419 where Sam is explaining Frodo to Pippin.

“Begging your pardon,” said Sam. “I don’t think you understand my master at all. He isn’t hesitating about which way to go. Of course not! What’s the good of Minas Tirith anyway? To him, I mean, begging your pardon, Master Boromir.” (Fellowship, “The Breaking of the Fellowship” 419)

Without deploying the ringing tones of authority, Sam cuts through the campfire discussion of politics, diplomacy, and strategy. But this change of voice is momentary. Elsewhere the book is dominated by the interpretive voice of Gandalf and Aragorn, who, while they may not control the movements of the hobbits, control their meaning. Later authors, however, have misunderstood the role of this material. Mistaken for an aspect of character, phatic discourse—the chats about cooking, about weather, the general reaffirmations of existence—becomes a mere attribute. Tolkien uses these moments to remind us what is real in both the metaphorical and fantastical sense.

If the role of the guide is increasing, and the understanding of the protagonist is increasingly molded by the presence of the guide, we as readers are also under increasing pressure to pay attention to the moral significance of landscape, that semiosis that encodes the feelings of actors and readers (Rifaterre 14). For both Lewis and Tolkien, landscape was validated as adventure and character in and of itself. Landscape for Lewis must have purpose: it is there to be useful and to be reacted to. When the children see the beaver house, “you at once thought of cooking and became hungrier than you were before” (69). Although the passage concludes with description of the rushing water, frozen as it falls, this apparently purely aesthetic description provides vital information about the nature and magnitude of the witch’s power. At the same time: “Edmund noticed something else. A little lower down the river there was another small river which came down another small valley to join it. And looking up that valley, Edmund could see two small hills, and he was almost sure they were the two hills which the White Witch had pointed out to him when he parted from her at the lamp-post that other day” (69).

Elsewhere, landscape is not expected to speak; it merely accompanies the events. Although the characters interact with the landscape it is in the sense that they act with and upon it. The landscape is there to be moved through. The “aliveness” of Lewis’s Narnian landscape with its dryads and hamadryads reduces the moral agency of the scenery: even in Prince Caspian (1951) where the land’s aliveness is most at stake, it is acted upon, it is not an actor. In contrast, Tolkien’s technique—and the one that will come to dominate the quest fantasy tradition—is to present the landscape as a participant in the adventure. It can indicate evil: “That view was somehow disquieting: so they turned from the sight and went down into the hollow circle”; “They felt as if a trap was closing about them” (Fellowship, “Fog on the Barrow-downs” 148, 149). The indication is that it is the landscape that actively traps them, pulling them down toward the barrow wights. Or, the landscape can simply influence: “The hearts of the hobbits rose again a little in spite of weariness: the air was fresh and fragrant, and it reminded them of the uplands of the Northfar-thing far away” (The Two Towers, “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit” 257). Emulating a number of myth structures, Tolkien ties the land to the king/leader or to the virtue of the people: Gondor’s townlands “were rich, with wide tilth and many orchards, and homesteads there were with oast and garner, fold and byre, and many rills rippling through the green from the highlands down to Anduin” (Return of the King, “Minas Tirith” 22). Pippin describes the feeling of connection thus:

“One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with the ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present; like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know, but it felt as if something grew in the ground—asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.” (The Two Towers, “Treebeard” 66–67)

Lewis never attempts this marriage of mise-en-scène with emotion, virtue, or character (with the exception of the martyrdom of Aslan, which presents a scene redolent with grief and horror, surrounded by cold and dark). Later writers, as Attebery points out, use landscape to fill the gaps of actual experience, “to rehistoricize fantastic assertions by placing them within an approximation of the most accessible milieu in which such statements could have been made” (Strategies 132). Vital to this substitution is the intense concentration on landscape, the insistence on a level of detail that is almost distorting. Brian Stableford wrote, “Descriptive prose can be like a pre-Raphaelite painting, attempting to specify the colour, position and texture of every object which the hypothetical observer would see” (The Way to Write 28). The metaphor can be extended into landscape painting as a whole, in which the “natural” is actually a clever contrivance that encodes specific messages about what the Land should be. The more I consider it, the more obvious this link to Pre-Raphaelite painting seems. Dalí once cited the Pre-Raphaelites for “their precise rendering of detail and the equal focus accorded each element of reality. The technique rendered their paintings awkward in some ways, since sharp-focused clarity of each part works against the illusion of perspective” (Mathews 39). Similarly, the “microscopic natural detail [which] appears at the expense of space, atmosphere or any feeling of light and shade … seems to belong to a world of dreams and enchantments”—as Allen Staley conjures Millais’s Ferdinand Lured by Ariel he also conjures the elaborate but curiously thin stage sets of so many quest fantasies (15). On the subject of the same picture, Staley quotes the 1851 Art Journal: “The emphasis of the picture is its botany, which is made out with a microscopic elaboration, insomuch as to seem to have been painted from a collection of grasses, since we recognise up to twenty varieties” (176). Exactly. As we shall see later, the insistence on a monosemic understanding of the world in so many quest fantasies works against the illusion of reality that this detail strives so hard to conjure.

What there is surprisingly little of in the work of both Lewis and Tolkien, is the action adventure rhetoric that one associates with modern heroic fantasy. A rare moment is on page 337, at the start of “The Choices of Master Samwise”.

Sam did not wait to wonder what was to be done, or whether he was brave, or loyal, or filled with rage. He sprang forward with a yell, and seized his master’s sword in his left hand. Then he charged. No onslaught more fierce was ever seen in the savage world of beasts, where some desperate small creature armed with little teeth, alone, will spring upon a tower of horn and hide that stands above its fallen mate. (The Two Towers)

The language appears to have leaked in from the sword and sorcery genre that increasingly influences the quest narrative as the century proceeds. We can see it in the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber’s Grey Mouser stories. Both of these, like most sword and sorcery novels, are better considered when we turn to immersive fantasy,²³ but because in the post-Tolkien era sword and sorcery comes to influence the writers of quest fantasy—particularly Terry Brooks—the comparison of language is worth noting.

Howard’s Conan is interesting because Howard focuses the reader’s attention upon the action. Whereas in Tolkien, the emphasis drives the reader through the action, Howard is interested in the action itself. To take just one example, from “The Tower of the Elephant” (1933): “Steel flashed and the throng surged wildly back out of the way. In their flight they knocked over the single candle and the den was plunged in darkness, broken by the crash of upset benches, drum of flying feet, shouts, oaths of people tumbling over one another, and a single, strident yell of agony that cut the din like a knife” (16–17). Take note of the hyperbole in the adjectives, “flashed,” “surged,” and “strident.” Although we do see hyperbole in Tolkien, it is rare. For Howard, the action itself is the point; the finding of the object sought after, or the completion of a task is almost irrelevant. Accompanying this style of writing is the sense that action is about what is felt. It is important that Conan reacts by instinct, and that when Murilo, Conan’s employer, is frightened, we feel “his blood congeal in his veins.” We are reading here to feel these emotions, to thrill with the hero, to fear with the onlooker.

Fritz Leiber aims for a similar impression, although writing with greater delicacy. While his descriptions of swordplay match those by Tolkien of landscape, his attention is on the beauty—and hence internal morality—of the action: “The Mouser made a very small parry in carte so that the thrust of the bravo from the east went past his left side by only a hair’s breadth. He instantly riposted. His adversary, desperately springing back, parried in turn in carte. Hardly slowing, the tip of the Mouser’s long, slim sword dropped under that parry with the delicacy of a princess curtseying and then leaped forward and a little upward” (“Ill-Met in Lankhmar” 9). Infusing the text is the sense that little can be done without emotion. Although more sparing with his adjectives than later imitators, Leiber allows Fafhrd to respond “gruffly, at the same time frantically” (151). Attention to action and emotion is much more specific, is much more a focus for the reader’s attention than what we usually see in the portal and quest narratives. I do not consider it a coincidence that it is Sam for whom Tolkien writes these moments. He is the character most of the world and most physically engaged with it. Lewis is even coyer than Tolkien. Even when he presents action, there is no shift to the action adventure style with its emphasis on wild emotions and forceful movements. Instead, action is simply “a horrible, confused moment like something in a nightmare” (122).

But what are the consequences in all of this vis-à-vis the position of the reader? Lewis, the writer of an acknowledged portal fantasy, keeps the reader almost continually on the outside of the action. His double distancing of feelings and of action remind the reader that these events happened some time ago. If we are in danger of forgetting it, Lewis breaks the spell by reminding us of the differences between Narnia and our world, a technique that may be one of the distinctions between the true portal fantasy and the classic quest fantasy. Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996), a recent full portal fantasy, uses a similar technique, creating dissonance quite deliberately by overlaying the fantasy world on the familiar diagram of the London Underground system. We are never fully in the other world. In contrast Tolkien uses a range of tones to create the effect of embedded realities and to convince us that we are in a fully real otherworld, in which there is no door to elsewhere. When Sam breaks the fantasy with his pragmatism, we are thrown back a step into the Shire, not into our own world, a Shire built by history and narrative. When the rolling rhetoric of Elrond, or Aragorn, or Gandalf becomes too much, one or another will launch into a story that both deepens the tale and—by its use of the oral narrative—pulls us to the fireside with the other listeners. Crucially, while we are capable of moving between the parties, we only ever know as much as we have been told. The degree to which this process is compelling is dependent in part on the extent to which both speakers seal the internal narratives from challenge by a continual reminder that the senior narrators are worthy of trust.