What About Fantasy?
From time to time writers in The Refiner’s Fire have dealt with twentieth-century Christian fantasy writers. In the following comments Lionel Basney, associate professor of English at Houghton College, persuasively argues that our interest in fantasy may be in need of balance. In the second part of this section, Cheryl Forbes reviews a new book about fantasy and explains why she thinks the genre is so popular.
Can you overvalue fantasy? I think you can. Here is my real hesitation about the zeal and abundance of recent religious commentary on fantasy. I have read, enjoyed, thought and written about the works of Lewis, Tolkien, Chesterton, and so on. I plan to go on doing so. But aren’t we allowing them to dominate our horizons? And if we are, is it good?
Of course, with “mere Christianity” on the defensive, it’s heartening to find writers as brilliant as Lewis and Tolkien, for instance, on our side. As evangelicals become more receptive to literature and the arts, it is natural they should turn to congenial authors. And theology has interesting affiliations with fantasy as a literary mode, though not more interesting than its affiliations with allegory, perhaps, or with Johnson’s satires. On the other hand, a preoccupation with modern Christian fantasy encourages at least two errors.
First, we can forget that it is a coterie-taste. (This is not altered by the coterie’s being large, as in this case it appears to be.) Lewis preferred George Macdonald and Charles Williams to the “standard” masters of modern literature. That was his right. Our personal preference may be the same. But if we come to think that Macdonald and Williams were, in fact, greater writers than Eliot or Joyce, or that they are more important as agents and interpreters of modern culture, we are wrong.
For the fact is that modern literary culture looks to Pound, Joyce, and Beckett as its masters, and not to Tolkien. If we wish to understand modern letters, it is with Pound, Joyce, and Beckett that we must start. We may not like what we find. In effect, Beckett asserts the bankruptcy of Christian civilization. Whether or not this is comfortable, it is what most modern thinkers find accurate; and the brilliance of Beckett’s technique has changed the modern theater.
Second, I’m afraid we can exaggerate the inherent value of fantasy as a companion to theology, or as an avenue into it. Lewis’s fantasies are undeniably useful as Christian witness. Lewis intended this. Tolkien’s “joy beyond the walls of the world” is vaguer. But it too has invited some readers to identify a mythical vision of things with a Christian vision. If you like Frodo you must love Jesus.
But thousands of devoted secularists like Frodo without theological results. And “myth,” having become a password with Jungians, structuralists, various schools of literary critics, and so on, is as many-sided a term as you can find in modern English. To identify Christianity with “mythical thinking” is to generalize irresponsibly; at the same time, it dissolves Christianity’s claim to essential uniqueness.
J. W. Montgomery dedicated some lectures on history to Lewis, with the comment that “the fulfillment of history takes place in the land of Narnia.” As an affirmation of history’s mythical dimension, this is fine; as a compliment, it is graceful. But Montgomery knows, as Lewis knew, that history will not end in Narnia It will end in history, as Christ was born, suffered, and rose in history. The date and the event are in the Father’s hand. Reason cannot figure them out; nor can fantasy describe them. Fantasy is a product of human intelligence and culture, like logic, and like logic is subject to their limitations.
But God, his love, and his final intentions are quite beyond human intelligence and culture. They are beyond our best syllogism, our best myth, and our best guess. Tolkien offers a glimpse, “poignant as grief.” Aquinas, in his precise way, offers no more, but no less.
As I tried to indicate earlier, I do not oppose the interest in fantasy. I’m interested myself. What I argue for is moderation. It seems to me that evangelicals are liable to narrow their literary sights too far. We’re in danger of shutting ourselves in a wardrobe called “modern (Christian) myth,” and forgetting that most contemporary humans live in the house outside the closet door. Second, we’re in danger of identifying a Lothlorien vision of experience with Christ’s. They’re not the same, though they touch. Christianity is potentially as large as God’s understanding of himself. To that our symbols fail to reach, however clearly they give us a glimpse of our meanwhile moral condition.
LIONEL BASNEY
In Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (Cambridge, 308 pp., $18.95) C. N. Manlove deals with Charles Kingsley, George Macdonald, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Mervyn Peake. Manlove, English lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, carefully explains the purpose of his book and painstakingly defines fantasy. He says he intends to show the diversity among fantasy writers and the “varying successes of a range of its better-known writers in realizing a fully imaginative vision.” So far, so good. But when he begins to analyze the writers he loses sight of his initial goal and instead launches into a critical discussion of their underlying philosophies. And he doesn’t like what he finds.
The chapter on Charles Kingsley’s Water-Babies doesn’t belong with this discussion. That story is no more a fantasy than is Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub. And I suspect that in his reasons for writing the book Kingsley would be closer to Swift than to Lewis or Tolkien. Much of Manlove’s commentary confirms this. The Water-Babies doesn’t seem to fit his definition of fantasy.
Of the four remaining writers, only three try to develop fully “another world.” Macdonald’s fantasy is of another sort. The world to which his characters go is not clearly defined or described, the changes in the characters themselves being more important than where the changes happen.
But in Peake, Tolkien, and Lewis we have writers who try to create worlds embodying new realities. Here questions to ask are: How well does the author sustain his imaginative vision? Does he give us a unified, consistent universe? Can we clearly apprehend this world through our imaginations? Does the author violate in the story the reality he has created for that story? Manlove does not answer these questions.
Lewis is so obviously a gifted and imaginative writer that Manlove cannot fault him there. But he does criticize Lewis’s metaphysical idea of innocence in Perelandra. At times Manlove’s argument sounds like the reverse of that made about Milton’s portrayal of Eve. Manlove thinks Lewis presents us with such strong innocence that he has trouble convincing us that “the Lady” could fall.
Manlove criticizes Tolkien’s writing skills. His descriptions, writes the critic, are too vague and “stock” to seem real to the reader. And he faults Tolkien’s handling of certain themes.
Manlove recognizes that free will and predestination lie at the heart of The Lord of the Rings (see the December 19, 1975, issue, page 10). But he couples that recognition with a statement that there are few references to providence. Where he sees Tolkien manipulating the characters like puppets, I see providence strongly at work in the story. Manlove wants some obvious reference to God or the presence of a deus ex machina to convince him that providence is the strongest force of the tale. Tolkien could not be that literal. Manlove dismisses The Lord of the Rings as the greatest failure among the fantasies he considers.
Peake, who is probably the least gifted writer among the lot, comes in for Manlove’s highest praise. Peake afflicts the reader with sentence after sentence stuffed full of adjectives. Manlove calls his style vivid; I call it wooden. The first volume of Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy is static—a long, expository prologue to the interesting tale in book two. Such stasis succeeds in captivating this critic.
Manlove concludes with an astute observation, not about the writers but about certain readers, and ultimately about himself. In the medieval and Renaissance periods, certainly the height of fantastical romance, there was a “shared belief” between writer and reader, he says. “The universe was instinct with meaning, each phenomenon at once concrete and conceptual. Nor did anything stand alone: it was related to every other by a web of influence, meaning or analogy; reality was inexhaustibly metaphoric—even, in a sense, incarnational” (p. 259). Since we have lost that sense of reality, says Manlove, the fantasy writer today will never fully achieve that imaginative, numinous vision possible in an earlier era. Such writers will always have a problem of “distance.”
But they don’t. Perhaps Manlove has lost his sense of the universe as “inexhaustibly metaphoric” and has no desire to regain it. But I think that most of the millions of people who have read The Lord of the Rings appreciate the metaphorical and incarnational nature of fantasy. People need what might be called an “epic vision” in their literature. Poetry no longer provides it; fantasy does.
Despite the weaknesses of these writers, I think they succeed where Manlove finds they fail. They lower a drawbridge into worlds “instinct with meaning.” When the tale ends and the drawbridge closes behind the reader, the real world may appear more conceptual and simultaneously more concrete than it did before.
CHERYL FORBES
