by which the observer entered the scene (e.g., a path, a stream or falls, a river road, a railroad track, a cleft in the rocks). And while the middle ground contained the subject matter or object (mountain, river, or townscape), a distant background was also imperative to create a hazy, far-away panoramic effect” (171). The entrant into the portal-quest fantasy is precisely this kind of tourist—and as an aside, in so many they are tourists in an American landscape painting, moving through and into the grandeur of the landscapes—“Imagining forth vastness” (R. Wilson 5). In the British equivalent the viewer is more likely positioned gazing at a vista (Wilton).13 But in the absence of real depth, history, religion, and politics must receive a similar treatment. The difficulty is balancing the requirement that such matters must always have been there with the ignorance of the protagonist.
To some extent, almost all portal and quest fantasies use the figure of a guide to download information into the text. Here is where the classic portal fantasy has an advantage, in that those traveling through a declared portal are expected to be ignorant: it is perfectly plausible for the dwarf to fill in the children about the past few hundred years of Narnian history in Prince Caspian (1951). But in many quest fantasies, the portal is merely a move from the familiar village to the unfamiliar world. An impromptu civics class always seems unnatural. Most people, however ignorant, know a little about most matters, enough to interrupt, to argue, to disturb the narrative. Yet these narratives, including the one described in Prince Caspian, are distinctive because they are delivered entirely in the authoritarian mode. These narratives are uninterruptible, unquestionable, and delivered absolutely in the mode of the club discourse: the travelers group around the narrator and listen to his (less commonly her) description of great events or political structures. When the narratives are delivered by a guide figure, the result is that the guide usurps the narratorfocalizer role that might usually be supposed to belong to the protagonist (Rimmon-Kenan 83).
This form of fantasy embodies a denial of what history is. In the quest and portal fantasies, history is inarguable, it is “the past.” In making the past “storyable,” the rhetorical demands of the portal-quest fantasy deny the notion of “history as argument” which is pervasive among modern historians. The structure becomes ideological as portal-quest fantasies reconstruct history in the mode of the Scholastics,14 and recruit cartography to provide a fixed narrative, in a palpable failure to understand the fictive and imaginative nature of the discipline of history.
Tolkien set the trend for maps and prehistory, establishing a pattern for the quest narrative in which the portal is not encoded solely in the travelogue discovery of what lies ahead, but in the insistence that there is past and place behind, and that what lies behind must be thoroughly known and unquestioned before the journey begins. As Diana Wynne Jones has pointed out, maps are a substitute for place, and an indication that we have to travel; they also, however, fix the interpretation of a landscape. Maps are no more geography than chronology and legend are history, but in portal-quest fantasies, they complete the denial of discourse.
Since the late 1970s, genre fantasy has frequently been signaled by these two devices: the map—which, as Diana Wynne Jones sarcastically observed, lists everywhere we will be visiting (Guide 10)—and the fixed and narrated past. Far too many post-Tolkien portal-quest fantasies begin with a download of legend. Their very anonymity creates the status that the closed club narrative requires. Occasionally, they are signed by a legendary figure, or by “a historian,” but the presentation of these extracts is rarely placed against other, disputatious sources. Authors of these fantasies write as if Mark Twain had never pointed out the danger of trusting the presentable document. Jones puts it memorably:
Scrolls are important sources of information about either HISTORY or MAGIC, and are only to be found jealously guarded in a MONASTERY or TEMPLE. You will usually have to steal your copy. Against this inconvenience is the highly useful fact that the Information in the Scroll will be wholly correct. There is, for some reason, no such thing as a lying, mistaken or inaccurate Scroll. (Guide 166)
See also her entry for PROPHECY (148–149). The consequence is that the found document is in the chair relating the club story; either all of it is correct, or none of it is. We can no longer debate history, in the sense of interpretation, analysis, discovery; we can only relate the past. This scholasticism permits only macronarratives: the past in these books is always what has been recorded about the greats, and it has always been recorded somewhere.
Yet concomitant with this is a reverence for the book, even while seeing books as alien artifacts to be decoded. This returns us once more to Bunyan and to generations of evangelicals for whom the Bible was not an ethical discussion but a book of riddles and challenges (Keeble xxiii).
Things that seem to be hid in words obscure,
Do but the Godly mind the more allure;
To Study what those Sayings should contain,
That speak to us in such a Cloudy strain.
(Pilgrim’s Progress, 130)
This verse might come straight from the prologue of a modern fantasy. Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising (1965–77) sequence is structured around rhymes to be deconstructed; The Belgariad has its Codex capable of predicting the coming of the Rivan King; Jeff Noon’s feathers in Vurt are encoded fantasy-game riddles that offer a way out into otherworld. Each, like Pilgrim’s Progress, constructs the text as a portal into a promised world. Running alongside this is an ideology of heroism that denies current authority in favor of an omnipresent power, yet prizes specifically the ability of the common man to decipher the code that will lead one through the gate. External means of testing veracity are closed off, and we are further sealed into the story.
As Keeble describes it: “The regenerate are distinguished from the unregenerate not by any exceptional abilities or virtue but by their faith: they keep on going” (xvii). Such describes both the regenerate Christian and the predestined hero in modern quests (and crops up most in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials sequence [1995–2001]). Keeble points out: “The saint only gains final assurance of perseverance when he has persevered” (xix). Similarly evident in many modern portal-quest fantasies is the Puritan belief that “it is by playing a full part in this world that salvation is won” (xiii). Yet perseverance is defined in part by the ability to stay on the straight and narrow path, to follow the words of prophecy and the delivered interpretation—in effect, for the hero to maintain his own position-as-reader.
The idea is picked up in a number of fantasies, but perhaps most explicitly at the end of Lloyd Alexander’s The High King (1968), where Taran is informed that he was only ever a collection of “ifs.” In fantasy sequences such as The Belgariad, Assassin’s Apprentice and its sequels, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and many others, there is an overwhelming sense of this predictive narrative shaping the text, of the book of riddle interpreted only in the light of the successful conclusion. Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), which I shall otherwise be considering predominantly as an immersive fantasy, could be read as a reply to Pilgrim’s Progress—and to the classic portal fantasy, as will subsequently emerge, because of its message accept what is and contextualize your evidence; do not rely on only one source. Even anti-quest fantasies such as The Scar seem able only to fight against this structure; with their dead ends and celestial cities rejected, they cannot construct anything else.
The assumptions that “the past” is unarguable, that it just is, and that “knowledge” is to be rediscovered rather than generated, has narrative consequences. Binabik, the historian-mage of Tad Williams’s Dragonbone Chair (1988), assumes that in order to learn anything, he must return to the archives for research. Robin Hobb’s Assassin sequence is structured within the writing of a history that depends for its backstory on material found in other,
