heart. Maskull’s first experience of the new world is physical, of himself as landscape and as fantastical. As the presence or absence of various limbs proves crucial to the narrative, the morality of the tale is shaped on and with his body. The language is pregnant with the fantastic, but does not build the stage set I associate with this kind of fantasy. With Maskull, we explore not the world he is in, but his reactions to it. The description of landscape, although in the third person, is through perception. “When it came near enough he perceived it was not grass.…Some uncanny, semi-intelligent instinct was keeping all the plants together, moving at one pace, in one direction, like a flock of migrating birds” (48–49). Like MacDonald, he uses avoidance in the face of the realized fantastic: the “sense-impressions caused in Maskull by these two additional primary colours can only be vaguely hinted at by analogy” (49).
Conversation in A Voyage to Arcturus shows similar stylistic shifts. As with Vane, Maskull’s interpretative agency is repeatedly denied. Although this is ostensibly a novel of exploration, he must not ask questions about the cut on his arm because “the effect is certain, but you can’t possibly understand it beforehand” (34). Joviality is used to ensure compliance not just of Maskull, but of the reader. It is we who are being chivvied along into the fantasy through a denial of explanation—a lack of information is buried in apparent volubility. This denial wouldn’t matter but, like many adventurers in the portal fantasy, he accepts whatever he is told (especially when it contradicts what he has been told before). We see this most clearly toward the end when he briefly follows a new prophet, only to change when his bodily configuration changes. It is unclear why this happens. A query about Crystalman results in the lesson that he is called Shaping and has many names (46). This mode later emerges as central to the uncanny, but is antithetical to the delivered mode of the modern portal-quest fantasy. When information is actually exchanged we move to excessive formality:
“And well you may, for it’s a fearful thing for a girl to accept in her own veins the blood of a strange man from a strange planet. If I had not been so dazed and weak I would never have allowed it.”
“But I should have insisted. Are we not all brothers and sisters? Why did you come here, Maskull?”
When what is to be delivered is not description, but a genuine discussion of a problem, Lindsay reverts to a more colloquial style: “It begins to look like a piece of bad work to me. They must have gone on, and left me” (45). Anything that discusses the fantastical is described in the slow, measured language of poetry. Anything that is about the “real” slips back into the colloquial and takes the fantasy characters with it. Joiwind is asked if she is being weakened: “ ‘Yes,’ she replied, with a quick, thrilling glance. ‘But not much—and it gives me great happiness’ ” (54). It is that “not much” that seems rather odd. When Digrung is slandering Tydomin he again slips into the vernacular, because his slander is not a matter for fantasy: “I see into you, and I see insincerity. That wouldn’t matter, but I don’t like to see a man of intelligence like Maskull caught in your filthy meshes” (118). Digrung continues in much the same style, because he is talking about the mundane. When told not to kill someone he says “Thanks for that” (120). But as soon as he gets onto the subject of sin, he is back to excessive formalism “As for you, woman—sin must be like a pleasant bath to you” (120).
Although the séance is ended with a sudden rush into the room, action is rare. The predominant pace is slow, meandering; the planet Arcturus is the principal character whom Maskull must get to know. But Lindsay, like MacDonald, feels that landscape is not enough: the emotion, the effect of the fantastic on the soul should be the heart of the matter and our attention directed to it. The result is that the adventures often seem weak and almost irrelevant. When Maskull fights Crimtyphon, the whole is rushed, made small of. The “duel of wills” lasts only one paragraph (102). This is neither heroic or adventure fantasy.
Similar issues are at stake with Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Of the three novels, Carroll’s work is clearest that it is the portal and the space beyond that is of intrinsic interest, and this emphasis is reflected in the confidence of tone with which the tale is delivered. To begin with, the portal is both a passage and a space. When Alice falls through the rabbit hole, it is lined with cupboards and shelves. The transition is not instant but is to be explored as much as other places. The second Alice book, however, is composed almost wholly of Alice moving into, assessing, and moving beyond a place/incident. Each time the mise-en-scène is described, Alice engages with it, but in the absence of a task, she then chooses to leave it behind. This form of encounter is quite different from most portal and quest fantasies, where such moves necessitate that tasks be performed, but markedly similar in that the emphasis is on place rather than an adventure, a happening. As with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, it reinforces the notion that the heart of the portal fantasy is always the land and not the adventure.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of the Alice books (in terms of their rhetoric) is that Alice proceeds as if she understands the world around her. In a reversal of the usual structure, Alice understands the rules of society and seeks to implement them, coming unstuck because those around her do not seem to understand them, while very superficially implementing them. Alice imposes herself on fantasyland, anticipating while puncturing the straight-faced “stranger/savior” politics of modern portal fantasies. The most obvious example is the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, to which Alice invites herself, although she knows this to be rude, while condemning the party for being unwelcoming. Despite the chaos, Alice does not act as a stranger in the world in quite the way we expect in a portal fantasy. Crucially, however, there is nothing she needs to find out, no place she needs to go, or quest to achieve. The result is that she asks relatively few questions. And when she does question, it is usually about the nature of the one she confronts who is equally interested in her. A question we might ask of Wonderland (as indeed Alice asks it in Looking Glass) is just whose adventure this is. It is clear from the balanced nature of interrogations between Alice and the caterpillar, Alice and the pigeon, and Alice and the Cat, that they each regard this as their adventure, and Alice merely someone they have met on the way.
Before leaving the Alice books, it should be noted that although the entrance to the rabbit hole does not signal a shift in Carroll’s style—we might argue that this is because Alice is already asleep, is already in the fantasy—at the end of the book there is a very obvious break. Forced back into reality, into the frame world, Carroll opts for reverie. It is quite possible to regard this as a slippage into the conventions of the time, the rather sentimental tone adopted toward children that saw them all as potential adults, and childhood as a charmed rather than a fantastical time. Yet the reverie alerts us to something: in creating Alice, Carroll opted for an ironic macrorealism, in which the brutality of society is made fantastical as the language of society is revealed to be brutal. That refreshing tone is crucial to the creation of an unquestioned fantasy—which may suggest that Wonderland, for all the presence of that rabbit hole, is a precursor not to the portal fantasy but to the immersive.
As I write, I am increasingly convinced that the primary character in the portal fantasy is the land. In Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) we can see this element emerging. Baum understood that the fantastic can be intensified if contrasted with the most mundane Real possible. Attebery writes: “Baum is doing what a painter does when he paints a large, flat, colorless area on a canvas: he is creating negative space which acts to make any positive design all the more vivid. Kansas is gray, so we begin to think about color. It is flat, so we long for contour. It is vast so we wish for something on a human scale.… Before the paragraph is done, we have been given, by contraries, a picture of Oz” (Tradition 84). This effect is intensified because in that very first (Kansas) segment, what is perhaps most noticeable is that the text is all description. There are only two lines of conversation, in which Dorothy is commanded to take refuge from the cyclone. The bleakness of Kansas is in part the absence of sound, paralleling that absence in the landscape. Dorothy’s voice is a shock as much for being a voice as it is for its merry tone, but it is also a reminder that Kansas is a set
