Kateri Kramer reviews Enchantment by Katherine May.
ย
ย
ย
***
Phantastes is all about doubling: reflections in mirrors, a cave of making juxtaposed to a grotto of destruction, a loving womanly beech-tree versus a malicious Maiden of the Ash, a bedroom in an ordinary Victorian home and the twin of that bedroom in Fairy Castle. All of these doublings are most fully embodied in the contrast between our world โ where the waters reflect but the sky does not โ and Fairy Land โ where just the opposite is true.
On the day after his 21st birthday, a man named Anodos enters Fairy Land, undergoes many adventures and trials, and returns to his home twenty-one days later โ though the period feels to him like twenty-one years, that is, the equivalent of the time he had previously spent in our world. (The one life mirrors the other.) His parents both being dead, he has now, at reaching his majority, become the head of his household:
My mind soon grew calm; and I began the duties of my new position, somewhat instructed, I hoped, by the adventures that had befallen me in Fairy Land. Could I translate the experience of my travels there, into common life? This was the question. Or must I live it all over again, and learn it all over again, in the other forms that belong to the world of men, whose experience yet runs parallel to that of Fairy Land? These questions I cannot answer yet. But I fear.
These concerns about the effects of such doubling (such โparallelโ experiences) are, it seems clear, George MacDonaldโs own concerns about the writing of fantasy. In his essay โThe Fantastic Imaginationโ MacDonald confesses quite directly a complication in the writing of what we would now call fantasy but when he called (as he himself said, for lack of a better term) fairy tale:
MacDonald knows that this will not be pleasant news to the didactically inclined. But the didactically inclined are free to work in (and to read) genres other than the fairy tale.
If a writerโs aim be logical conviction, he must spare no logical pains, not merely to be understood, but to escape being misunderstood; where his object is to move by suggestion, to cause to imagine, then let him assail the soul of his reader as the wind assails an aeolian harp. If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it. Let fairytale of mine go for a firefly that now flashes, now is dark, but may flash again. Caught in a hand which does not love its kind, it will turn to an insignificant ugly thing, that can neither flash nor fly.
A work of fantasy, then โ in addition to being a firefly, and a wind โ, may be described as a mirror, but as with the Mirror of Galadriel, what one seesย in it is largely determined by who one is. (And anyway, if G. C. Lichtenberg was right, thatโs true of all books without exception: โA book is like a mirror,โ he said; โIf a jackass looks in, you canโt expect an apostle to look out.โ)
But if this mirror will provide any kind of reflection at all in what Lord Dunsany liked to call โthe fields we know,โ whatโs necessary, MacDonald believes, is a kind of consistency in the imagined world one offers to the reader.
Man may, if he pleases, invent a little world of his own, with its own laws; for there is that in him which delights in calling up new forms โ which is the nearest, perhaps, he can come to creation. [โฆ]ย His world once invented, the highest law that comes next into play is, that there shall be harmony between the laws by which the new world has begun to exist; and in the process of his creation, the inventor must hold by those laws. The moment he forgets one of them, he makes the story, by its own postulates, incredible. To be able to live a moment in an imagined world, we must see the laws of its existence obeyed. Those broken, we fall out of it.
This is obviously an adumbration of Tolkienโs more famous concept of โsecondary worldsโ โ but it is clear (see my previous post on mythopoeic promiscuity) that when MacDonald talks about the โlawsโ of an imagined world he cannot possibly mean the kind of consistency in world-building that Tolkien so prized, and so lamented the absence of in Lewisโs fiction.
I think the laws that MacDonald refers to are mystical and spiritual, and unconnected altogether to the material furniture of the fictional environment. But I need to think about that further โ and about the specific ways that MacDonaldโs crazy-quilt fictional world just might possess a consistency that allows it to serve as a useful mirror of our own.