we do not understand the message. Instead both the omniprescient narrator (by lapsing out of the dream sequence) and Christian (in a pattern of telling and retelling as he meets each signpost character) guide our interpretation of the quest. In this narrative, it is the telling thereof, the rethinking of it, that is significant, rather than the adventure itself. Some of this rethinking remains in The Lord of the Rings: Bilbo’s writing of his and Frodo’s story will have resonance; Pippin and Merry will relate their tales to Treebeard, who will become part of the narrative and will be convinced. This element remains only hesitantly in the modern tradition, expressed, as we shall see, within the club story. The point is, the fantasy is made fantasy in part by being related.
In the periodic absences of the omniscient narrator, the text proceeds as a Socratic dialogue. Although this dialogue is to some extent feigned—Christian almost always has the correct answers, and the book he carries “was made by him that cannot lie” (11)—in the conversation between him and Faithful, and later Hopeful (104 and 205), we proceed to the Truth of the quest through a narrative more open than those of many modern fantasies. The structure, when between equals, is of question and answer, each drawing out the other’s spiritual journey, using the questions to exhort as well as to query. However, when it is not between equals, Bunyan signals status through direct and indirect speech, by the abrupt changes in tone, from the mimetic, personal address of Christian, to the diegesis of reported reactions of the crowds or opposition. Form and Hypocrisie, “made him but little answer; only bid him look to himself” (33). Repeatedly, speech is given to that person who holds the higher countenance, while the one who is to listen, or learn, is described and distanced. The diegetic mode is used to create both status and differing levels of reality. This rule holds true even of Christian, who is reduced to a reaction shot in his conversation with Evangelist:
Evan. Then, said Evangelist, How hath it fared with you, my friends, since the time of our last parting? What have you met with, and how have you behaved your selves?
Chr. Then Christian, and Faithful, told him of all things that had happened to them in the way; and how, and with what difficulty they had arrived to the right place. (71)
The entire description of Vanity Fair, because it concerns those who are inferior and not in conversation with Christian and Faithful, is told in this diegetic mode so as to happen, in effect, offstage, to be less real. We have been evicted from our spectator seats. Less consistently, we frequently see the same technique in modern fantasy, most recently in Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights [The Golden Compass] (1995), which drops into reported speech when the point is to communicate interpretation rather than events (see chapter 11, “Armour”). It reminds us again that this is a tale being told.
Pilgrim’s Progress’s omniscient narrator is ultimately a ruse. The point of view is Christian’s: we experience only Christian’s doubt, are told that of Faithful. But once the narrator admits that this is allegory, he hastens to explain things to us, not through Christian’s eyes, but through his own: “I saw then that they went on their way to a pleasant River, which David the King called The River of God; but John, The River of the water of life” (90). Omniscience is asserted, and with it the fantasy is ruptured: omniscience as a vehicle for explanation, proves hostile to the portal-quest fantasy.
Although there are two centuries between Bunyan and George Mac-Donald, Lilith (1895) is actually less certain in its form. Although a portal fantasy, the portal structure of Lilith is unsupported by the narrative tone. An example of a portal novel written before the conventions of the form were settled, in its experimentation with register and with focalization, Lilith reveals patterns we can identify in its successors.
Lilith repeatedly veers between the Gothic style, as commonly found in the intrusion fantasy or the liminal fantasy, and the detailed creation and description of landscape and people that is more common to the portal fantasy. The reader is forced into a variety of positionings vis-à-vis the text and the protagonist. The use of the Gothic, of estrangement and intrusion in the frame-world sections of Lilith, is disruptive to the acceptance of the otherworld. It makes strange the familiar, denying the increasing comfort usually found as we proceed through the tale, and runs contrary to the balance that is normally associated with the portal fantasy. The otherworld of the portal fantasy relies on the contrast with the frame world, on the world from which we begin the adventure, an understanding manipulated by authors such as Diana Wynne Jones and Barbara Hambly.16 Instead MacDonald makes the present world strange.
We begin Lilith in an environment that is unfamiliar to us but should be familiar to the protagonist: his family home. We should be in a fully immersed, taken-for-granted setting that we decode from the cues and sensibilities of the protagonist. Instead, the setting is made strange by a process of deliberate defamiliarization in which the protagonist, to bring us into his tale, describes in detail the library that is at the heart of his story, leaving vague the conformations of the house itself. It becomes an edifice, more complex in its interior than its facade. Nothing is taken for granted, and the result of this excessive detail, as in a medieval painting, is a distortion of perspective that pushes us outside the fantastic realm, making of us audience.
In the introductory sections of the book, the disruption is portrayed initially as nebulous. It is a sense, a feeling: “The garret at the top of it pervaded the whole house! It sat upon it, threatening to crush me out of it! The brooding brain of the building, it was full of mysterious dwellers, one or other of whom might any moment appear in the library where I sat!” (17). The alliteration, the emphasis on movement, on the activity of the presence, combine to create a sense of the protagonist under attack. This sense is increased by his focus on his own reactions: “The mere words, however, woke in me feelings which to describe was, from their strangeness, impossible” (18). Elsewhere in the novel, when the focus becomes exploration, the role of emotion is diminished; here, however, the emphasis is on regaining control of the present world. The fantastic is signaled by a loss of that control rather than, as in the classic portal fantasy and in later sections of the text, the movement through the fantastic.
If Lilith contained but a single portal, the effect of this might be minimal: once one had left the frame world, the rhetoric of the portal fantasy would take over and the sense that the frame world was itself a fantastic place might recede. But Lilith is multiply portalled, so that we are shuttled between fantastical worlds narrated in different modes. The second chapter offers an example of this in the exploratory, complex neorealism—the making real through intense description of the landscape—of the portal fantasy in which the protagonist describes his landscape, a wood of tall, slender pine trees: “I spied before me something with a shine, standing between two of the stems. It had no colour, but was like the translucent trembling of the hot air that rises, in a radiant summer noon, from the sun-baked ground, vibrant like the smitten chords of a musical instrument” (16).
Then, and almost immediately, the protagonist is rejected, thrown back into his own world, a world no longer impervious to the fantastic, but penetrated and made unsafe by its presence: “Terror seized me, and I fled. Outside the chamber the wide garret spaces had an uncanny look. They seemed to have long been waiting for something; it had come, and they were waiting again! A shudder went through me on the winding stair: the house had become strange to me!” (16–17). The rendering of the frame world as uncanny, means that MacDonald must struggle harder to make his other world fantastical. He cannot rely on the contrast of realism and fantasy.
Because the uncanny is a mode focused on emotion—the fantasy as expressed experience—the first person is a logical choice of focalization. In Lilith (particularly prior to the revelation that the raven is in fact Adam) the first person is deployed to confuse and to place a barrier between ourselves and the fantasy world. The portal-quest genre as it develops will demand the illusion that the protagonist ride with the reader by his side, decode and understand the fantasy world in which they exist. But the
