new third type of writer entered the fray: the romance writer. Of these three categories of fantasies, romance is the most inherently deterministic, in that the structure of the plot is intrinsic to its definition. The other aspect of romance is one of style: emotion is writ, not sensed; action is only a vehicle for emotion and reflection upon emotion. We have seen hints of this in Howard and Leiber, and even occasionally in Tolkien, but as Brooks and Donaldson influenced the genre, this stylistic quirk would come to play a particular part in the positioning of the reader.
Even though The Sword of Shannara is horribly overwritten (“was dumbfounded,” was “incredulous” that someone knew the way; adjectives are piled upon adjectives), what is immediately evident, and rather disconcerting, is that from the very beginning Flick, the protagonist, is a stranger in his own land. Nothing is taken for granted, everything is described in minute detail. For example, “Because he had traveled this same route a hundred times, the young man noticed immediately the unusual stillness that seemed to have captivated the entire valley this evening” (2).24 Immediately the world is new to both him and us, even though it is new only in terms of what he is accustomed to.
This sense of the newness of discovery is extended to character and to the world. Brooks extends a technique that will permeate modern quest and portal fantasies: the reverie. Shea, Flick’s adopted brother, is introduced to us through Shea’s own internal reverie (20–21). The effect of the many reveries is that the characters are tourists in their own mind. Another example: “Menion also knew that he was not a part of this adventure for the sake of friendship alone. Flick had been right about that. Even now he was unsure exactly why he had been persuaded to undertake this journey. He knew he was less than a Prince of Leah should be. He knew that his interest in people had not been deep enough, and he had never really wanted to know them” (124). The effect is peculiar. It is intended to draw us into the mind of the character; instead, it reinforces the sense that we are tied companions. This is not real internal dialogue that is fragmented, or flashbacks that are confused, but rather Menion sitting with us, explaining to us his concerns. Reverie and self-contemplation break the immersion.
Self-contemplation is one aspect of the romance of adventure that Brooks inserts into the telling of the tale. The use of hyperbole in the description of action is the other. Where Leiber regarded adventure as an aspect of the baroque trappings of his world, for Brooks it is a source of emotive imagery, too often actually substituting for emotion: “But for the second time the hopelessly numbed humans were saved, this time from complete madness, as the powerful will of Allanon broke through the crazed sound to cloak them with protective reassurance.… The men stumbled mechanically through the heavy darkness of the tunnel, their minds groping at the safety line of coherence and calm that the Druid held out to them” (259). Because action is drawn in this highly emotive language25 (each emotion is visited, much as each place on the map or in history is visited) there is no room to show emotional growth (plus the little problem of downloads substituting for phatic discourse of affirmation). So we have to be told: “Flick had changed considerably since his first meeting with Allanon weeks earlier in Shady Vale, developing an inner strength and maturity and confidence in himself he had never believed himself capable of sustaining” (541). I am amused to note that this approach is recorded by Bakhtin as one of the strengths of Dostoevsky’s writing.26
The same effect is seen in the world-building. All necessary description is delivered by the wizard (Allanon) to the naive and ignorant Shea, who relies entirely on that conspiracy of companionship to which I have already referred (24–25).27 Allanon thoroughly usurps the role of narrator-focalizer. Unlike Tolkien, however, Brooks does not use history to create a frame world that makes his fantasy world more real. Instead, history becomes a series of clues that thins the world by making the present less real than the past that must be fulfilled—the classic structure of Christian eschatology.
Although Brooks’s protagonists explore their land, what they mainly explore is their own inner landscape, hence the use of reverie to indicate change and development in the plot. Donaldson, a more subtle writer, makes the same connection, but here the protagonist and the land are much more self-consciously and intimately linked. Donaldson writes fantasy as “one long wild discharge of energy that seemed to create the landscape of the earth out of nothingness by the sheer force of its brilliance” (4). Our attention is first drawn to this in the narration of the frame world. In a sense, this too is fantasy, the construction of an alien world. As a consequence, it is far more convincing: the village is made fantastic as the intrusion—Thomas Covenant—is isolated and corralled. It is an intrusion fantasy written from the point of view of the monster. As the monster, Covenant knows the world to be strange and therefore can accept almost any strangeness; in forcing himself into the town, he also becomes the pilgrim negotiating the landscape in a way that is replicated later on. His relationship to the place he is in is crucial to the construction of the fantasy, and Thomas Covenant is a stranger in the land—both the frame world and otherworld he enters through the portal. His connection to the Land is written into his body: “The fog and the attar-laden air seemed to weaken Covenant, as if the strength were being absorbed from his blood” (26). As Benjamin Laskar points out, The Chronicles “literalizes the metaphor of the realization of existential dislocation into a sickness or ailment” (411). The care of leprosy depends on discipline and the surrender of the self to routine and ritual, and also to a dependency on authority for both information and care. Covenant subsumes his self into a round of rituals designed to ensure his physical (but not mental) well-being. One cannot but think of the rituals of Gormenghast. Donaldson’s work is successful in part because the construction of leprosy supports the demand of the narrative that we the reader will expect Covenant to have to listen and learn.
Nevertheless, the requirement that Covenant be the learner is a restriction on the creation of a full world. Having passed through the portal, he is at the mercy of whomever he meets and whatever he is told. Donaldson is cleverer than Brooks, whose sole concession to the problematic is to allow a moment of distrust to enter Shea’s mind.28 Covenant doubts. Doubting is his mythic purpose, and his doubts facilitate the continual loading of information into the mind of the reader. Covenant’s continual denial supports the structure: we might doubt what we are told, but that Covenant doubts is confirmation that we should believe. W. A. Senior places this in a more positive light: “Covenant is the sole source of authority in Lord Foul’s Bane, so narrative tension grows from the narrator’s initial inability to provide any coordinate perspective. Any external criteria or evidence of the Land’s validity would serve only to expunge the necessity for Unbelief and make Covenant into a cantankerous and pitiful cynic, not an epic figure fighting for his life and sanity” (138).
The result is, in the end, a recapitulation of the self-referential “New Testament” structures I discussed earlier. We are as much tied into a closed narrative as we are when we follow the innocence of Shea. The increasing use of prophecy in quest fantasies, from Brooks and Donaldson onward, is clearly linked to this. Prophecies allow knowledge to be imparted, so that in fact the goal is “known” even though its meaning is not understood (which might also be said about Bunyan’s Celestial City). The hero does not have free will in a narrative driven by prophecy, and which might explain why the moment of recognition (Clute, Encyclopedia 804–805), the point at which the hero realizes his place in the story and loses free will, is usually displayed in snapshots rather than in gradual change. The hero cannot emerge, cannot slowly win the allegiance of colleagues, but must demonstrate fitness in some display; for example, Covenant displaying his white-gold ring. This recognition or analepsis seems vital even where the hero ostensibly wins allegiance through respect. Taran in Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain must still display the right (the wielding of Drynwyn) to prove his kingliness and kingship and fulfill the prophecy. The scene tells us what to think. Typically, in this structure, the moment of recognition is for others rather than for the hero himself.
The naive hero, however skeptical, ensures that the structure is geared to “show and tell” with the Land as the subject. Donaldson, however, by deliberately acknowledging and exploiting
