Читать книгу Rhetorics of Fantasy - Farah Mendlesohn - Страница 23

The two writers who most thoroughly articulated the pattern for quest and portal fantasies for the post-Tolkien era are Terry Brooks and Stephen Donaldson. The Sword of Shannara (1977) and Lord Foul’s Bane (1977), are contemporaries. With the exception of Lord of the Rings, most fantasies prior to 1977 were short to mid-length books. After Brooks and Donaldson, the portal and quest genre would begin to sprawl. This is not a coincidence. Although very different writers, each homed in on certain aspects of Tolkien’s technique in such a way as to emphasize reader positioning, and to ensure the length of the book. What Tolkien does, by creating both world and landscape as character, may be impossible to do in a short book (although, as we shall see when we consider immersion and liminal fantasies, there are other ways in which these elements can be constructed). Brooks and Donaldson each attempt the same thing, although with quite different effects and degrees of success.

Prior to 1977, the fantasy genre was popularly represented by two types: the stylists (Beagle, Anderson, Harrison, Lindsay, and so forth.) and the adventure writers (Burroughs, De Camp, Howard). In 1977 a new third type of writer entered the fray: the romance writer. Of these three categories of fantasies, romance is the most inherently deterministic, in that the structure of the plot is intrinsic to its definition. The other aspect of romance is one of style: emotion is writ, not sensed; action is only a vehicle for emotion and reflection upon emotion. We have seen hints of this in Howard and Leiber, and even occasionally in Tolkien, but as Brooks and Donaldson influenced the genre, this stylistic quirk would come to play a particular part in the positioning of the reader.

Even though The Sword of Shannara is horribly overwritten (“was dumbfounded,” was “incredulous” that someone knew the way; adjectives are piled upon adjectives), what is immediately evident, and rather disconcerting, is that from the very beginning Flick, the protagonist, is a stranger in his own land. Nothing is taken for granted, everything is described in minute detail. For example, “Because he had traveled this same route a hundred times, the young man noticed immediately the unusual stillness that seemed to have captivated the entire valley this evening” (2).²⁴ Immediately the world is new to both him and us, even though it is new only in terms of what he is accustomed to.

This sense of the newness of discovery is extended to character and to the world. Brooks extends a technique that will permeate modern quest and portal fantasies: the reverie. Shea, Flick’s adopted brother, is introduced to us through Shea’s own internal reverie (20–21). The effect of the many reveries is that the characters are tourists in their own mind. Another example: “Menion also knew that he was not a part of this adventure for the sake of friendship alone. Flick had been right about that. Even now he was unsure exactly why he had been persuaded to undertake this journey. He knew he was less than a Prince of Leah should be. He knew that his interest in people had not been deep enough, and he had never really wanted to know them” (124). The effect is peculiar. It is intended to draw us into the mind of the character; instead, it reinforces the sense that we are tied companions. This is not real internal dialogue that is fragmented, or flashbacks that are confused, but rather Menion sitting with us, explaining to us his concerns. Reverie and self-contemplation break the immersion.

Self-contemplation is one aspect of the romance of adventure that Brooks inserts into the telling of the tale. The use of hyperbole in the description of action is the other. Where Leiber regarded adventure as an aspect of the baroque trappings of his world, for Brooks it is a source of emotive imagery, too often actually substituting for emotion: “But for the second time the hopelessly numbed humans were saved, this time from complete madness, as the powerful will of Allanon broke through the crazed sound to cloak them with protective reassurance.… The men stumbled mechanically through the heavy darkness of the tunnel, their minds groping at the safety line of coherence and calm that the Druid held out to them” (259). Because action is drawn in this highly emotive language²⁵ (each emotion is visited, much as each place on the map or in history is visited) there is no room to show emotional growth (plus the little problem of downloads substituting for phatic discourse of affirmation). So we have to be told: “Flick had changed considerably since his first meeting with Allanon weeks earlier in Shady Vale, developing an inner strength and maturity and confidence in himself he had never believed himself capable of sustaining” (541). I am amused to note that this approach is recorded by Bakhtin as one of the strengths of Dostoevsky’s writing.²⁶

The same effect is seen in the world-building. All necessary description is delivered by the wizard (Allanon) to the naive and ignorant Shea, who relies entirely on that conspiracy of companionship to which I have already referred (24–25).²⁷ Allanon thoroughly usurps the role of narrator-focalizer. Unlike Tolkien, however, Brooks does not use history to create a frame world that makes his fantasy world more real. Instead, history becomes a series of clues that thins the world by making the present less real than the past that must be fulfilled—the classic structure of Christian eschatology.

Although Brooks’s protagonists explore their land, what they mainly explore is their own inner landscape, hence the use of reverie to indicate change and development in the plot. Donaldson, a more subtle writer, makes the same connection, but here the protagonist and the land are much more self-consciously and intimately linked. Donaldson writes fantasy as “one long wild discharge of energy that seemed to create the landscape of the earth out of nothingness by the sheer force of its brilliance” (4). Our attention is first drawn to this in the narration of the frame world. In a sense, this too is fantasy, the construction of an alien world. As a consequence, it is far more convincing: the village is made fantastic as the intrusion—Thomas Covenant—is isolated and corralled. It is an intrusion fantasy written from the point of view of the monster. As the monster, Covenant knows the world to be strange and therefore can accept almost any strangeness; in forcing himself into the town, he also becomes the pilgrim negotiating the landscape in a way that is replicated later on. His relationship to the place he is in is crucial to the construction of the fantasy, and Thomas Covenant is a stranger in the land—both the frame world and otherworld he enters through the portal. His connection to the Land is written into his body: “The fog and the attar-laden air seemed to weaken Covenant, as if the strength were being absorbed from his blood” (26). As Benjamin Laskar points out, The Chronicles “literalizes the metaphor of the realization of existential dislocation into a sickness or ailment” (411). The care of leprosy depends on discipline and the surrender of the self to routine and ritual, and also to a dependency on authority for both information and care. Covenant subsumes his self into a round of rituals designed to ensure his physical (but not mental) well-being. One cannot but think of the rituals of Gormenghast. Donaldson’s work is successful in part because the construction of leprosy supports the demand of the narrative that we the reader will expect Covenant to have to listen and learn.

Nevertheless, the requirement that Covenant be the learner is a restriction on the creation of a full world. Having passed through the portal, he is at the mercy of whomever he meets and whatever he is told. Donaldson is cleverer than Brooks, whose sole concession to the problematic is to allow a moment of distrust to enter Shea’s mind.²⁸ Covenant doubts. Doubting is his mythic purpose, and his doubts facilitate the continual loading of information into the mind of the reader. Covenant’s continual denial supports the structure: we might doubt what we are told, but that Covenant doubts is confirmation that we should believe. W. A. Senior places this in a more positive light: “Covenant is the sole source of authority in Lord Foul’s Bane, so narrative tension grows from the narrator’s initial inability to provide any coordinate perspective. Any external criteria or evidence of the Land’s validity would serve only to expunge the necessity for Unbelief and make Covenant into a cantankerous and pitiful cynic, not an epic figure fighting for his life and sanity” (138).

The result is, in the end, a recapitulation of the self-referential “New Testament” structures I discussed earlier. We are as much tied into a closed narrative as we are when we follow the innocence of Shea. The increasing use of prophecy in quest fantasies, from Brooks and Donaldson onward, is clearly linked to this. Prophecies allow knowledge to be imparted, so that in fact the goal is “known” even though its meaning is not understood (which might also be said about Bunyan’s Celestial City). The hero does not have free will in a narrative driven by prophecy, and which might explain why the moment of recognition (Clute, Encyclopedia 804–805), the point at which the hero realizes his place in the story and loses free will, is usually displayed in snapshots rather than in gradual change. The hero cannot emerge, cannot slowly win the allegiance of colleagues, but must demonstrate fitness in some display; for example, Covenant displaying his white-gold ring. This recognition or analepsis seems vital even where the hero ostensibly wins allegiance through respect. Taran in Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain must still display the right (the wielding of Drynwyn) to prove his kingliness and kingship and fulfill the prophecy. The scene tells us what to think. Typically, in this structure, the moment of recognition is for others rather than for the hero himself.

The naive hero, however skeptical, ensures that the structure is geared to “show and tell” with the Land as the subject. Donaldson, however, by deliberately acknowledging and exploiting the reader position of the portal and quest fantasy can also offer us a hero who narrates his own moment of recognition, pulling us momentarily into a moment of solipsism: “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” (353). In Lord Foul’s Bane the omniscient narrator seems to be seeing only through Covenant’s eyes, so is perhaps limited-omniscient. This limiting affects both the presentation of the hero and of that which he moves through. In this kind of fiction descriptions must tell us more than we can possibly know because we do not have time to learn about people, nor do we believe that minor characters can change, because they are as much scenery as is a tree. Just as a tree is described, so are people: Lena’s “face bore the signs of that truce; her forehead seemed prematurely lined, and her eyes appeared to open inward on a weary battleground of doubts and uneasy consolations” (69). One consequence of this shorthand is that the characters who surround Covenant do not become real to him. Instead, they are merely information sources: Lena explains hurtloam, Altarian tells stories (80) and, on page 158 and elsewhere, Lena reveals that she has secret knowledge. In part this distancing is because Covenant cannot have proper discussions with other people: they are not real, they are simply devices. The alienation is exaggerated in Lord Foul’s Bane where that unreality is partially the point. The result, however, is to insist that any real sense of Covenant’s alteration comes not through how we see him behave but again through reverie, or through what he tells us of himself: “Of course he could not play the hero in some dream war. He could not forget himself that much; forgetfulness was suicide. Yet he could not escape this dream without passing through it, could not return to reality without awakening” (83). The overall effect, as it was in The Sword of Shannara, is to render the reader as therapist, required to accept this continuing internal analysis.

W. A. Senior points out, quite rightly, that this structure is prone to exhaustion. How long can a character remain new to a world? Donaldson revives the intensity of the books as he moves further into the sequence, by moving the Illearth Chronicler from the site of a portal fantasy, to the location of immersive fantasy with a fully immersed protagonist (Hile Troy). Just as Donaldson used leprosy as his driving metaphor in the first part, he comes to use “belief” as the controlling paradigm for the sequence as a whole, in neat parallel of form and content:

the narrative of the entire trilogy falls into three discrete parts, each matched to a book and predicated on the current value of Covenant’s Unbelief as its importance to him wanes: in Lord Foul’s Bane Covenant’s rejection of the Land is total, so the narrative does not diverge from his perception in any way; in The Illearth War his system of Unbelief begins to erode and fully one-third of the events of the Land are narrated from Hile Troy’s point of view in Covenant’s absence; finally, in The Power that Preserves, the narrative in the Land begins without Covenant present and separates into three tracks as Covenant’s Unbelief becomes a moot point, and he ceases to dispute with himself the Land’s reality or unreality. The evolving alteration of perspective within the text confirms, from our exterior understanding, the reality of the Land and concomitantly denies Covenant’s beginning premise of dream.” (Senior 140)

Having established the formula, we can begin to look at the degree to which authors are able to play with the form. From 1977 onward, quest fantasies in particular came to dominate the bookshelves of many bookstores, to the degree that in many minds, it was thought of as the default form of fantasy. Even the conventional portal fantasy diminished in popularity, while the shift between the mundane world of the quest hero and that of his fantasy world often became more marked. What remains of interest here, however, is the extent to which a number of very fine books were written in this period that, while often stretching the genre in terms of content conventions, continue to show the markers I have been discussing. For example, in Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Summer Tree (1985), which is both a portal and a quest fantasy, Kay deals with the problems of the negotiated fantasy, the stranger in the land phenomenon, by developing one of his characters as a seer. Kim has foreknowledge and familiarity with the world she is in and is thus able to be the competent character of the immersive fantasy: we can see the world through her accumulated understanding rather than riding beside her as she greets it for the first time. However, it also means that Kay can download the history we are going to need through Kim’s initiatory dreams: “And as she was whirled away from that bright vision, she came abruptly face to face with the oldest Dark in his stronghold of Starkadh … and she knew him for Rakoth the Unraveller” (97).

The vision, of course, is unquestionable. In the hierarchy of quest fantasy, street conversation is the least reliable, information given by a guide is very reliable, and visions generally unchallenged; because the vision is buried in the learning process, however, it is less ostentatious than someone sitting down to narrate a prophecy. To balance this, to make this approach work, Kay has also constructed Kevin. A rather relaxed character, Kevin is able to accept things without explanation. Between Kim’s visionary knowledge and familiarity with the fantasy world, and Kevin’s acceptance of it, Kay is able to sidestep at least some of the miniature show and tell sequences that form the backbone of his world-building. Elsewhere, because we still only know of the world what the characters learn as they travel, the world-building is not so easy. Dave and Paul, our primary guides in The Summer Tree, part company at least to some degree to expand our knowledge of the world: the more complex their routes, the more we shall come to understand the Land. Although each, individually, constructs a fellowship, and seals himself off from those external to that fellowship, these groups are linked so that the “conspiracy” or the club narrative is not entirely sealed.

At times Kay is forced to retreat to prediction within the tale, the narration of understanding rather than its depiction. When Paul and the King play a game of chess, they reach a point of almost understanding: “It was not to happen, but something else was born that night, and the fruit of that silent game would change the balance and the patterns of all the worlds that there were” (69). This narration succeeds in being simultaneously clumsy and subtle. Clumsy in that the import of the future is oversignaled; this is a novel so we expect something of import to happen. Subtle in that we are misdirected: we expect this to be a change of adventure; instead, the change is internal to Paul. As readers, however, we are dependent on a directed gaze. We are not allowed to look for significance elsewhere.

Tad Williams’s The Dragonbone Chair (1988) is technically an alternative world in which everything seems to have slipped sideways (the savior is hung upside down on a tree, and one of the swords was made from the meteorite that hit the temple when he died). Because Williams narrates his tale almost entirely through the story of Simon, we are tied to Simon’s side in what should be a rigid form of the reader positioning. We can see only what Simon passes through, understand the world only through his comprehension. At first, Williams seems to tackle this conventionally enough: “[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” (14). Although this is the conventional inner musing as download, it also functions to tell us that we have a complex space (which will be significant later), and that Simon is capable of independent thought, curiosity, and the research to satisfy such curiosity. Williams has taken a conventional trope, the reverie, and embedded within it the castle as character (at least the doctor’s rooms) and a sense of who Simon is. Accompanying this, we also learn about Simon first in his own actions—the fascinated observation of a beetle (3–4)—then through the use of the castle as a foil to Simon (5–6), and later through the mind of Rachel (22–26), contextualized in terms of her frustration, sense of duty, and of love. While in part this method of description is an indication of the quality of the writer, it is also a subtle shift of the reader position. Although we shall walk through this quest with Simon, observing mainly what he observes, we are focused not only on his interests, but on Simon himself. Simon is to us as he is to the beetle. To add to the interest, when Simon does consider himself, in the way used in Sword of Shannara, he does so in a way that does not merely download information, but moves the discussion on: “When you stopped to think about it, he reflected, there weren’t many things in life one truly needed. To want too much was worse than greed: it was stupidity—a waste of precious time and effort” (603). Simon has changed; this reverie contrasts with the earlier Simon who complained that he was hard done by. But the reverie does not say this, it shows it.

In the same manner, Williams manipulates Simon to supply backstory and history to build his world. Tolkien demonstrated the nature and form of the oral tradition as delivered, but for Williams a crucial question seems to be why it is delivered. We do not just listen to Simon, we are grateful to him: in The Dragonbone Chair we learn what we do because Simon asks questions, an aspect of the character established very early on. Simon is hungry for stories, demanding them throughout. His curiosity is what brings him in reach of the adventure. His status as child renders acceptable his dependence on his companions for information, as it does for Garion in David Eddings’s The Belgariad and in hosts of other quest fantasies centered on youthful protagonists. Consequently, while in The Dragonbone Chair there are a number of delivered prophecies, there is no pretense that they are anything other than sealed narratives, a notion supported by the Scholasticism that dominates this book.²⁹

In contrast, Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World (1990) makes a fetish of the techniques of the quest fantasy. Reader positioning in this book is rigid. We always ride with the protagonist, and this positioning is mitigated, not by any sleight of hand or subtle technique as developed by Williams or Kay, but instead by creating an inordinate number of travelers whose conversations and experiences we are allowed to try on throughout the novel. Dispersal becomes essential because it is the only route that Jordan allows us out of the claustrophobia of fantasy companionship.

Similarly, Jordan embraces the narrated world. Once, we hear rumors of a “false Dragon” (36) from a peddler, staged as a conversation between the peddler and his customers. Unreliability is built into the delivery, and unreliable it does indeed turn out to be. But elsewhere, information is delivered sealed: Rand learns that he may be adopted as his father lies deathly ill and he is given no opportunity to question. In its own way, this is “club” discourse, the uninterruptible and therefore “sealed” narrative—although in this case, its truth is held in question as his mother too was a stranger to the village so there is no one to corroborate the story (88). When Moiraine tells of the Aes Sedai, we are back to downloads, and a world that knows less than it once did: “In the Age of Legends … some Aes Sedai could fan life and health to flame if only the smallest spark remained. Those days are gone, though—perhaps forever” (92). The villain, Ba’alzamon spends a page and a half gloating, providing us with useful information at the same time (170–172); Moiraine tells Nynaeve about the symptoms she experienced as she broke through into her magic. At no point does Nynaeve intervene, although she does accuse Moiraine of lying when she has finished talking. There is no questioning, no actual discussion (269). The text is dotted with these deliveries. And the downloads in this book (and in others considered so far) are linked with a sense that the past is better, more knowledgeable, suggesting that the ideology is part of the form. The club narrative contains within it a melancholy of structure, a mourning, or at least nostalgia, for the past that makes it particularly useful for the expression of thinning: “So much was lost; not just the making of angreal. So much that could be done which we dare not even dream of” (92). As Tad Williams demonstrates, when Binabik declares, “there seems only one thing to do … it is back to the archives and searching again,” nothing truly new can be made in a fully Built world.