and gossip masquerading as an accurate description of the past. The argument is circular, but nonetheless valid; yet the consequence for the author is that in order to preserve this sense, any history narrated must be done so in an authoritative fashion. The moment one introduces argument, one also introduces research and experimentation: portal-quest fantasies are full of learned people, who have read many books. Knowledge is fixed and it is recursive, and in this it demonstrates the peculiar and specific Christian heritage of the modern portal-quest fantasy. As Northrop Frye wrote, “How do we know that the Gospel story is true? Because it confirms the prophecies of the Old Testament. But how do we know that the Old Testament prophecies are true? Because they are confirmed by the Gospel story. Evidence, so called, is bounced back and forth between the testaments like a tennis ball” (Code 78). This circularity creates a reductiveness that utterly undermines any real notion of learning in the portal fantasy and has led me to muse on what a truly Jewish fantasy—with all the argument endemic to my religion—might look like. Peter David’s Sir Apropos of Nothing (2001), whose sidekick refuses his predestined role, who spends much of the time raging at fate, and who frequently finds his achievements unapplauded, is one candidate.
But to get back on track, this one element, the insistence of the fixedness of history and of learning, divides quest fantasy from immersive fantasy. Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000) can make room for the experimental method (as, interestingly, can the later and more immersive Discworld novels) but The Scar, also by Miéville, must send people looking for a lost book and a lost scientist. Very occasionally, there is an understanding displayed that history cannot be written and preserved with fixative. Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner’s The Fall of the Kings (2002) is a book about the writing of history, whose protagonist is a scholar who wishes to return to the documents, to reconstruct history from source materials, and to argue with the belief of a fixed past, a found narrative. But the tale betrays the reader and the protagonist: at the end, history is again “found,” the past revealed to us through dreams and through magic, rendering the research pointless and restoring “the past” to its rightful place above mere history. The historian’s craft is swapped for the club-story narrative, fully hermetic.
The nature of the club story is that it valorizes the control of the narrator. This one factor may help to explain why, although many quest fantasies claim to be about a remaking of the world, few can be considered genuine instauration fantasies. A contributing factor is the portal-quest fantasies’ denial of argument with the universe. It is a truism that fiction is about conflict, but in the portal-quest fantasies the possibilities for such conflict are limited by the ideological narrative that posits the world, as painted, as true. Consequently, it is this closed narrative that restricts the plot possibilities for most quest and portal novels. If multiple interpretations are to be denied, if the narrative is to be hermetic, then the novel becomes locked in the patterns that Clute observed in the full fantasy: wrongness, thinning, recognition, and healing/return (defined in Clute and Grant’s Encyclopedia of Fantasy.) Such patterns, rather than being a coincident archetype, become fundamental to the structure. The genre accrues formalisms, and authors negotiate with these forms; one aspect of this negotiation is experimenting with which positions and rhetorics best familiarize (or defamiliarize) the reader with the fantastic.
Given the huge number of books written in this category, the books discussed below have been selected according to their historical significance, to their status as archetypes. (They are also the consequence of a trawl among the recommendations of a number of readers, to ensure that the choices presented here would not be entirely self-justifying.) While Tolkien and Lewis may have provided the archetypes of modern fantasy, the taproots of the genre are rather different. The emergence of a rhetoric to accompany this position can be traced to the earliest of the portal fantasies. Therefore, if we are to consider the development of the rhetorical styles and grammar of this mode of fantasy, we should begin by considering the condition of portal and quest fantasy before Tolkien and Lewis. The best known are George MacDonald’s Lilith (1895), Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), and David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920). When we lay these alongside one another, and in the company of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—a book that has had an immense if unconscious influence on the structure of quest fantasies and that shows many of the traits that later emerge of markers of this particular subgenre—certain patterns emerge.
Early Quest and Portal Fantasies
For Bunyan, the fantastic was that which was made up, rather than that which was supernatural, and it is in this context that we need to consider the dream sequences that provide the contextual structure of Pilgrim’s Progress. In the modern fantasy, the dream sequence is conventionally seen as a distancing from the fantastic, a means of denying belief. When taken at face value in a text—such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—it has very specific consequences for the grammar of the fantastic. A consideration of Pilgrim’s Progress, however, suggests that, in its religious context, dream as an entryway to the fantastic functioned rather differently.
Although Bunyan felt compelled to use dreaming to contextualize his allegory (perhaps because of the Puritan suspicion of fiction), that dream is closer to a vision of the prophetic than to the modern idea of the dream as unreal. It brings the afterlife closer, making the consequences of sin manifest. Bunyan’s Pilgrim comes to him in a dream because the story is more than allegory; it is a spiritual gift, an aspect of visionary fancy.
Yet within Pilgrim’s Progress, the dream structure is under attack from the needs of the narrative. The “Dream” as vision is a reminder of the reality of heaven; as dream it deprives us of completeness. While Bunyan avoids much of the exposition of landscape and personnel that will mark the portal fantasy and prevents full immersion in the fantastic, the repeated lines “and in the Dream” serve the same purpose, to distance the reader and to remind us that we are mere external observers of Christian’s quest, not part of his company. The tale is being narrated to us. At other times, our immersed participation is demanded as a spiritual exercise. The effect on the tone of the fantasy is to create an unevenness, an alternation of description and immersion, of distancing and familiarity. At times we walk beside Christian, at other times we observe him from afar. But while in a dream we may be ineffectual, there is nonetheless the sense that we are at the center of the dream.
The vision is of elsewhere; it presumes that the frame world (our world) is already thinned, and provides the moment of rupture in which elsewhere becomes here. In Pilgrim’s Progress it is the moment of recognition, where the man becomes Christian “(for that was his name)”; we know that we are now fully in the tale (10). The one significant difference in the second part of Pilgrim’s Progress (which narrates the tale of Christiana’s search for her husband, and for God through him) is that the dream becomes a matter of doubt. Although it is couched as a dream at the beginning of the act, it is also phrased as “Travels into those Parts” (143). An ambiguity creeps into the text, an ambiguity remade at the close, “Shall it be my Lot to go that way again, I may give those that desire it, an Account of what I here am silent about.” For Bunyan, it might have been a sign to the reader that he was “fantasizing” in the second book, making up what came to him as divine inspiration in the first. To secular eyes, however, the narrative has become a greater part of reality because the power of vision is no longer reliable—or has, perhaps, become more metaphorical. The challenge to future fantasists is to make that vision more real, and they do so by making the portal of dream into a material portal of wood and wardrobe.15 What proves less easy is to move beyond the positioning of reader as recipient of the tale told.
Bunyan’s own insistence that Pilgrim’s Progress is allegory reinforces the problem. Attebery argues that allegory “continually points beyond itself to the moral or metaphysical truths under examination” (Tradition 180). But in order to do this, Bunyan must strain his narrative structure. We
