it with her.
Once in Oz, however, conversation becomes the crux of the dynamic. Questions drive the narrative, and give rise to narrative. Speech in Oz is relatively egalitarian: one cannot tell the status of someone from the use of direct or reported speech (although Attebery points out that it is encoded in who is described and in what detail (Tradition 100).19 Reported speech is used only to relate something that we have already seen happen. In this book there is very little introspection from Dorothy; only occasionally does she feel the need to relate her tale or her emotions/reactions.20 In contrast, all the characters she encounters introduces themselves with a tale, not of where they are going or what they are doing, but of who they are. Dorothy’s narrative position, her domination of the story, comes in part from the conversational offerings of those wishing to make her acquaintance. There are four actors here, but only one is interpreting the world for us, even though the other three interpret the world for her.
Like Alice, Voyage to Arcturus, and Lilith, the book is a series of sequential movements through a landscape in which it is the landscape and its effects, rather than an adventure per se, that fascinates. As Attebery has pointed out, the journey itself is the plot (Tradition 87). The adventures are often the weakest part of the book—why use mice to pull a truck that the woodman and the scarecrow could pull?—because they are the elements closest to fairy tale. This form of fantasy, in which the adventures are often discrete and are added to until the author decides it is time to move to an ending, or a change of direction, I term a “bracelet” fantasy. Many of the links/adventures could simply be removed without fundamentally altering the tale.
What is most interesting about this book is that although landscape is the center of the book’s wonders, Dorothy is oddly uncurious and takes much of it for granted. Take, for example, the Emerald City, where she does not question the use of the spectacles (117–118). It is the omnipresent narrator who notices the lack of animals (122); Dorothy herself does not comment upon it. Similarly she does not comment on the throne room, the narrator does (126). Her discovery of the Tin Woodman (54) shows little astonishment at the enchantment. Dorothy is happy to accept what she is told of the world by those she meets, she does not herself interrogate it. Dorothy accepts the fantastic while marveling at the colors and brightnesses (much, perhaps, as the magic of the storefront window was accepted while simultaneously a source of marvel). As we see more than Dorothy inquires about, or demonstrates curiosity for, we are not positioned as Dorothy’s companion per se. We are frequently taken into an immersive fantasy, as we wonder at things she accepts. One explanation for this is that Dorothy has already traversed one portal, in moving from an eastern city to Kansas.21 She is practiced at dealing with the unknown. Alternatively, this story is simply a very unusual portal fantasy, one that shifts the reader position from continually requiring explanation through the senses of the naive protagonist, to shifting through those senses in order to interpret what the heroine herself takes for granted.
Tolkien and Lewis
The classic quest fantasy, as I now envisage it, was set into its “final” form by J. R. R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) codified much of how the quest fantasy deals with landscape, with character, with the isolation of the protagonists into the club-story narrative and with reader positioning. More or less contemporaneous with The Lord of the Rings was the publication of the first in the Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), a classic portal fantasy. These novels set the pattern for what Clute describes as the full fantasy: the novels presume a thinned world, one in which wrongness already exists—a motif absent from Lilith or Wonderland but already present in Oz—and a consolatory healing or restoration (rather than transmutation), in which the participants are fulfilling an agon, “a context conducted in accordance with artistic rules” (Encyclopedia 12).
It is rather useful to compare the ways in which each approach the problem of creating a satisfactory and entire otherworld, to illuminate what it was that Tolkien achieved and how, and how each of the elements I have described are constructed. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is not an inferior novel, but in terms of the creation of the fantastic it is far more visibly aware of the juxtapositions of its two worlds. Consistent with my argument throughout has been that the portal and the quest fantasy use essentially the same means of entry into the fantastic, and thus are required to take up the same narrative position: essentially one that posits the reader as someone to whom things are explained through explanations offered to the protagonist.
The opening of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, perhaps because it is a children’s story, is much more self-consciously narrated than we have seen previously. The frame world is a story to be told, as much as the fantasy world is: “Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy” (9). It is narrated as if it were further in the past than the adventure itself: “It was the sort of house that you never seem to come to the end of, and it was full of unexpected places. The first few doors they tried led only into spare bedrooms, as everyone had expected that they would; but soon they came to a very long room full of pictures and there they found a suit of armour” (11).
This use of the past tense to create the frame world is also employed by Tolkien, but here the purpose and direction of the technique is rather different. Tolkien deploys this distanced past to build the history of his world, to create depth for the fantasy. Lewis is using it to create depth for the frame world, to make that real. Consequently, the unfanciful tone of Tolkien’s prologue makes real, not the fantasy between the “there and back again,” but the frame world of the Shire, which in turn makes real the adventure. By framing the Shire and the outside world with a viable past, a real, potential, future of the Shire is projected that is interwoven with ours.
Both Tolkien and Lewis feel the occasional need to rupture their fantasy lands. For Lewis, Narnia is unstable. It needs to be made more real by being rooted in our own world. By speaking directly with his readers, Lewis simultaneously breaks the fantasy and reminds us that it is real. So, for example, “This was bad grammar of course but that is how beavers talk when they are excited; I mean, in Narnia—in our world they usually don’t talk at all” (100). Narnia is made the more real because the frame world from which Narnia is accessible is made the more real by this reminder.
In contrast, Middle Earth is rendered stable by the relationship of the Shire to the rest of the world. This dynamic depends entirely on the structure of registers that Tolkien has developed for his epic. The Hobbit sections are written in the immersive style (which I shall discuss later). Much is taken for granted and the conversation is chatty, while neither interrogative nor excessively informative. What is particularly noticeable is that Gandalf is a questioner as well as questioned. He is not the source of all knowledge in this early part of the book (Fellowship 49, 50). However, while Frodo and Sam do not explain the Shire to us because they already know it, they do explain it to Gandalf, Aragorn, and to others they meet. Unusually, at these moments we look back through the portal to have the frame world described to ourselves as audience.
The difference of registers influences the shaping of the past. There is a clear difference between history as it is delivered in Tolkien’s Prologue, and that delivered, often in rolling tones, by those with information to pass on, whether it be Gandalf narrating the history of the Ring, or the poetic prophecies interrupting the otherwise demotic narratives of the Faun Tumnus and the Beaver. High formality is reserved for delivering history and status, for establishing shots of relationships and characters. It distances not just us, but the hobbits and the four children, and reminds us that this is not their world either. And because it is not their world, they are reliant on what they are told. Tolkien and Lewis use different ways of closing the discourse down. Lewis simply puts doubt into the mouth of Edmund, whom we already know to be unreliable. We can trust the robin, because it is Edmund who casts doubt on its trustworthiness (61). Tolkien uses another, less coercive method, ensuring that all the kind people that the hobbits meet once they
