FANTASY NOVELISTS.vp
Page 1
Critical Survey
of
Long Fiction
Fantasy Novelists
Editor
Carl Rollyson
Baruch College, City University of New York
Salem Press
Ipswich, Massachusetts
•
Hackensack, New Jersey
Cover photo:
Lewis Carroll (© Stapleton Collection/Corbis)
Copyright © 2012, by Salem Press, A Division of EBSCO Publishing, Inc.
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978-1-42983-676-0
978-1-58765-927-0
CONTENTS
Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv
The Fantasy Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Richard Adams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Reinaldo Arenas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Marion Zimmer Bradley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Mikhail Bulgakov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
James Branch Cabell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Lewis Carroll . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Angela Carter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
José Donoso . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Anatole France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Julien Green . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
L. P. Hartley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
Robert A. Heinlein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
Alice Hoffman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
E. T. A. Hoffmann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
Stephen King . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
C. S. Lewis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
Haruki Murakami . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
Juan Carlos Onetti. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
J. K. Rowling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
José Saramago. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
Ramón José Sender . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
Andrei Sinyavsky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
Jun’ichiro Tanizaki . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
J. R. R. Tolkien . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
Amos Tutuola . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
T. H. White . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256
Jeanette Winterson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
Glossary of Literary Terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270
Guide to Online Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282
Geographical Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288
iii
CONTRIBUTORS
Linda C. Badley
Djelal Kadir
Robert C. Petersen
Original Contributor
Original Contributor
Original Contributor
David Barratt
Steven G. Kellman
Murray Sachs
Farnsfield, England
University of Texas at San
Original Contributor
Antonio
Bernadette Lynn Bosky
Joachim Scholz
Yonkers, New York
Charles L. King
Original Contributor
Original Contributor
William Boyle
Lynne P. Shackelford
University of Mississippi
Rebecca Kuzins
Original Contributor
Pasadena, California
Joseph Bruchac
Paul Siegrist
Original Contributor
William Laskowski
Fort Hays State University
Jamestown College
Mitzi M. Brunsdale
Brian Stableford
Original Contributor
Charles E. May
Reading, England
California State University,
J. Madison Davis
Christopher J. Thaiss
Long Beach
Original Contributor
Original Contributor
Laurence W. Mazzeno
Thomas Du Bose
Janet G. Tucker
Alvernia College
Louisiana State University in
Original Contributor
Shreveport
P. Andrew Miller
James Whitlark
Northern Kentucky
John R. Holmes
Texas Tech University
University
Franciscan University of
Gay Pitman Zieger
Steubenville
David B. Parsell
Santa Fe College
Furman University
Jane Anderson Jones
Original Contributor
Janet Pérez
Original Contributor
iv
The Fantasy Novel
The term “fantasy” refers to all works of fiction that attempt neither the realism of the realistic novel nor the “conditional realism” of science fiction. Among modern critics, the primacy of the realistic novel is taken for granted. Realistic novels not only describe normality but also constitute the normal kind of fiction; fantasy, in dealing with the supernatural, seems to be almost perverse. Prior to the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, however, this was far from being the case. Prose forms such as the imaginary voyage, the dialogue, and satire blurred even the basic distinction between fiction and nonfiction, let alone that between “realistic” and “fantastic” subject matter. The separation of realistic and fantastic began not with the casting out of fantastic genres from the literary mainstream, but rather with the withdrawal of a realistic genre—the novel—from a mainstream
that had easily accommodated fantastic motifs.
Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
To speak of the “fantasy novel” in the context of the eighteenth century comes close to
committing a contradiction in terms: Novels were about life as it was lived and had left behind the conventions of allegory and fable along with the decorations
of the marvelous and the magical. It is arguable, though, that the withdrawal left behind a connecting spectrum of ambiguous works, and—more important—that it soon led to some important reconnections. Jonathan Swift’s use of the techniques of narrative realism in his chronicling of the imaginary voyages of Lemuel Gulliver gave to his work a crucial modernity that is responsible for its still being widely read and enjoyed today.
The rise of the gothic novel in the last decades of the eighteenth century, in connection with the emergence of the Romantic movement that spread from Germany to France,
England, and the United States, represents a definite reaction against the advancement of literary realism. The gothic novel, indeed, is almost an “antinovel” of its day, substituting a fascination with the ancient for a preoccupation with the modern, an interest in the bizarre for an obsession with the everyday, an exaltation of the mysterious for a concern with the intelligible, a celebration of the barbaric for a smug appreciation of the civilized. From the standpoint of today, the gothic can be seen to have been subversive in several different ways. It was subversive in a literary context because it opposed the dominant trend toward the development of the modern realistic novel. It was subversive in a sociological context because it reflected the fact that the values of the ancien régime were under stress and that the decadence of that regime was symptomatic of its imminent dissolution. It was subversive in a psychological context because it provided a parable of the impotence of the conscious mind to complete its oppressive victory over the forces of the unconscious, whose imprisonment could never be total.
Gothic novels dealt with strange events in strange environments, organized around the
passions of the protagonists. The passions were frequently illicit in a perfectly straightfor-1
The Fantasy Novel
Critical Survey of Long Fiction
ward sense, often involving incest and the breaking of sacred vows, but the more careful and controlled gothics—the archetypal example is The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), by Ann Radcliffe—emphasized the extent to which the trend toward a less permissive morality would eventually rule, especially in England.
With the exception of the gothic novels, few of the products of the Romantic rebellion
were cast in the form of long prose narratives. Short stories were produced in much greater quantity, and the evolution of the short story in Europe and America is closely intertwined with the Romantic reaction against realism and classicism. Poetry, too, was affected dramatically. Even the gothic novel underwent a rapid decline—not into nonexistence but
into inconsequential crudeness. After the appearance, in 1824, of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner—a masterpiece of psychological terror involving paranoid delusions—there followed a long period in which gothic romance
was primarily associated with the lowest stratum of the literary marketplace: with the
partworks and “penny dreadfuls” marketed for the newly literate inhabitants of the industrial towns. Such interminable narratives as Varney the Vampyre (1847), by James Malcolm Rymer, and Wagner the Wehr-Wolf (1846-1847), by G. M. W. Reynolds,
achieved considerable success in their own time but have little to offer modern readers.
Although the gothic novel was primarily a species of horror story, its supernatural trappings did overflow into moralistic fantasies that might be comic extravaganzas, such as
James Dalton’s The Gentleman in Black (1831) and The Invisible Gentleman (1833), or earnest parables, such as John Sterling’s The Onyx Ring (1839). The themes of these novels—
tricky deals with the devil, invisibility, wish-granting rings, and personality exchange—
were to become the staples of what Nathan Drake had called “sportive gothic,” while curses, ghosts, vampires, and madness remained the characteristic motifs of “gloomy gothic.”
The writers who produced the most notable works of fantasy in the middle of the nine-
teenth century—including Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne in the United
States, George MacDonald and William Gilbert in England, and Théophile Gautier and
Charles Nodier in France—primarily worked in the short-story medium. The novels writ-
ten by these authors often have fantastic embellishments, but for the most part they pay far more heed to the restraints of conventional realism than do these authors’ short stories.
Victorian era
The revival of the fantasy novel in the last two decades of the nineteenth century was
associated with several trends that can be traced through the fiction of the twentieth century. The partial eclipse of substantial work in fantastic fiction in the mid-nineteenth century is clearly related to the repressive morality of that period—it is notable that in France, where the repression was less effective than in Great Britain, the United States, and Germany, the Romantic heritage was more effectively conserved. It is possible, in conse-
quence, to see the various threads of the revival in terms of reactions against and attempts to escape from that repression.
2
Fantasy Novelists
The Fantasy Novel
During this repressive period, indulgence in fantasy came to be seen as a kind of laxity: It was in the Victorian era that the notion of escapism was born. An exception was made in the case of children’s literature (though even here there was a period when fantasy was frowned upon), and there eventually arose in Britain a curious convention whereby fantasies were considered suitable reading for Christmas, when a little token indulgence might be overlooked, an idea that led to the emphasis on fantasy in the Christmas annuals to which Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray contributed. Such writers as Thackeray, MacDonald, and Lewis Carroll brought to the writing of books nominally aimed at children an artistry and seriousness that commended them to the attention of adults and helped to open a space for the production of fantastic novels within the British literary marketplace.
Another form of fantastic fiction that became to some extent associated with the Brit-
ish Christmas annuals was the ghost story, which became extremely popular in the 1880’s
and remained so for half a century, during which virtually all the classic British work in that genre was done. There is, however, something intrinsically anecdotal about ghost stories that keeps them more or less confined to short fiction. Though there have been some excellent novellas, there have never been more than half a dozen outstanding ghost novels.
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, who stands at the head of the line of British ghost-story writers, produced several neogothic novels, but almost all of them are so ponderous as to be nearly unreadable. M. R. James wrote only short stories, and Algernon Blackwood’s novels have
not worn nearly as well as his shorter pieces.
The Victorian interest in ghosts, however, went far beyond the traffic in thrilling anecdotes. The influence of such contemporary fads as spiritualism and Theosophy sparked a
new interest in the occult that began to be reflected quite prolifically in literary production.
The great majority of the spiritualist fantasies of communication with the dead and ac-
counts of the afterlife supposedly dictated by the dead through mediums are wholly in-
consequential in literary terms, despite the eventual involvement in such movements of
writers of ability, such as Arthur Conan Doyle. They did, however, lay important ground-
work for those authors who followed. The fevered Rosicrucian romances of Edward
Bulwer-Lytton, Marie Corelli’s exercises in unorthodox theology, and commercially suc-
cessful accounts of life “on the other side” by such writers as Coulson Kernahan and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps paved the way for much more substantial posthumous fantasies by
Wyndham Lewis ( The Childermass, 1928) and C. S. Lewis ( The Great Divorce, 1945) and for the theological romances of Cha
rles Williams and David Lindsay. Williams’s All Hallows’Eve (1945) is possibly the best of the ghost novels, while Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) is a masterpiece of creative metaphysics.
The 1880’s also saw a renaissance of comic fantasy, exemplified in Britain by the nov-
els of F. Anstey and in the United States by Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). The calculated irreverence of these stories reflects a self-confident rationalism that stands in opposition to the mystical movements inspiring most posthumous fantasy. The primary target held up for ridicule in these stories, however, is not the 3
The Fantasy Novel
Critical Survey of Long Fiction
vocabulary of fantastic ideas itself but rather the moral pretensions of the contemporary middle classes. Anstey’s stories use fantastic premises to expose the limitations of the attitudes that were rigidified within closed Victorian minds.
In the twentieth century, this tradition of humorous fantasy thrived more in the United
States than in Britain—the leading American exponent of the species has been Thorne
Smith—and this reflects, in part, the fact that as Britain has become somewhat less ob-
sessed with the protocols of middle-class culture, the United States has become gradually more so. It was in the United States also that the absurd logical consequences of fantastic premises began to be exploited for pure amusement, largely in connection with the short-lived magazine Unknown, whose leading contributors were L. Sprague de Camp and
Fletcher Pratt, who produced, in collaboration, a series of excellent comic fantasies.
A third species of fantastic fiction that first became clearly delineated in the last decades of the nineteenth century is the kind of story that translocates contemporary persons into fabulous imaginary worlds. Stories of this kind are among the oldest that are told. The mundane world has always had its fantastic parallels: its earthly paradises, the land of Cokaygne, and the land of Faerie. In the mid-nineteenth century these alternate worlds
were retired into juvenile fiction, except for a few desert islands populated in a relatively mundane fashion. Victorian romances of exploration, however, celebrating the journeys
of white men into the heart of the dark continent of Africa, reopened imaginative spaces for more exotic traveler’s tales.
Numerous “lost race” stories and a few “hollow earth” romances were published be-