it was stupidity—a waste of precious time and effort” (603). Simon has changed; this reverie contrasts with the earlier Simon who complained that he was hard done by. But the reverie does not say this, it shows it.
In the same manner, Williams manipulates Simon to supply backstory and history to build his world. Tolkien demonstrated the nature and form of the oral tradition as delivered, but for Williams a crucial question seems to be why it is delivered. We do not just listen to Simon, we are grateful to him: in The Dragonbone Chair we learn what we do because Simon asks questions, an aspect of the character established very early on. Simon is hungry for stories, demanding them throughout. His curiosity is what brings him in reach of the adventure. His status as child renders acceptable his dependence on his companions for information, as it does for Garion in David Eddings’s The Belgariad and in hosts of other quest fantasies centered on youthful protagonists. Consequently, while in The Dragonbone Chair there are a number of delivered prophecies, there is no pretense that they are anything other than sealed narratives, a notion supported by the Scholasticism that dominates this book.29
In contrast, Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World (1990) makes a fetish of the techniques of the quest fantasy. Reader positioning in this book is rigid. We always ride with the protagonist, and this positioning is mitigated, not by any sleight of hand or subtle technique as developed by Williams or Kay, but instead by creating an inordinate number of travelers whose conversations and experiences we are allowed to try on throughout the novel. Dispersal becomes essential because it is the only route that Jordan allows us out of the claustrophobia of fantasy companionship.
Similarly, Jordan embraces the narrated world. Once, we hear rumors of a “false Dragon” (36) from a peddler, staged as a conversation between the peddler and his customers. Unreliability is built into the delivery, and unreliable it does indeed turn out to be. But elsewhere, information is delivered sealed: Rand learns that he may be adopted as his father lies deathly ill and he is given no opportunity to question. In its own way, this is “club” discourse, the uninterruptible and therefore “sealed” narrative—although in this case, its truth is held in question as his mother too was a stranger to the village so there is no one to corroborate the story (88). When Moiraine tells of the Aes Sedai, we are back to downloads, and a world that knows less than it once did: “In the Age of Legends … some Aes Sedai could fan life and health to flame if only the smallest spark remained. Those days are gone, though—perhaps forever” (92). The villain, Ba’alzamon spends a page and a half gloating, providing us with useful information at the same time (170–172); Moiraine tells Nynaeve about the symptoms she experienced as she broke through into her magic. At no point does Nynaeve intervene, although she does accuse Moiraine of lying when she has finished talking. There is no questioning, no actual discussion (269). The text is dotted with these deliveries. And the downloads in this book (and in others considered so far) are linked with a sense that the past is better, more knowledgeable, suggesting that the ideology is part of the form. The club narrative contains within it a melancholy of structure, a mourning, or at least nostalgia, for the past that makes it particularly useful for the expression of thinning: “So much was lost; not just the making of angreal. So much that could be done which we dare not even dream of” (92). As Tad Williams demonstrates, when Binabik declares, “there seems only one thing to do … it is back to the archives and searching again,” nothing truly new can be made in a fully Built world.
The Subversion of the Portal-Quest Fantasy
Having outlined the rhetorical structures of the portal-quest fantasy tradition in its early stages and at its most typical, I shall now test this outline against deliberately challenging and subversive versions of the form. If the strategies I have outlined are fundamental to the genre, then they will exist to some extent or other in these more subversive novels, even where that existence is self-consciously challenged.
One route to subversion is to refuse the portal. Jeff Noon structures Vurt (1993) around a search for a portal. The fantasy as a whole is immersive: told in the first person, we sit in Scribble’s brain and, for the most part, must work out what this modern Manchester looks like by the hints and clues dropped in the course of his search for the yellow Vurt feather and his sister Desdemona. When we are invited into Scribble’s thoughts, he is usually considering a problem, not contemplating who and what he is—although we do receive some backstory through dream sequences. But these are dream sequences or flashbacks and are presented as such, not as reverie; they are rarely narrativized. There are moments of intrusion, in that the Vurt leaks, but because there is little surprise enacted, this is not an intrusion fantasy. The intrusion has become proper to this frame world. It is not in itself the means by which the fantastic enters the text.
But the portal lurks; it is an actor in the drama; the fantasy is a cross-hatch and we slip and slide between states (Clute, Encyclopedia 237). Some Vurts contain the metaVurts, that can link Scribble to the fantasy world on the other side. MetaVurts are looking-glass Vurts, infinitely recursive. But when we are in a Vurt we can immediately see the difference in the way it is written. Despite the complexity of the nature of the portal as it is depicted, the difficulty of finding the portal, of being sure that it is a way through, and not simply a fantasy, the Vurt world is still described, whereas Manchester is taken for granted. It can be described from the outside—“Dreamsnakes came from a bad feather called Takshaka. Any time something small and worthless was lost to the Vurt, one of those snakes crept through in exchange” (25)—or it can be described from the inside,
The garden was serene and beautiful, quintessentially English, just like I remembered, with burbling fountains and a mass of flowers growing wild, overflowing their beds … its heady perfume was caressing my senses, and a burst of pleasure was choking me, like every drop of blood in my veins had taken a sap-ride to my cock. (121)
Noon is sensitive to the “rules”: only when he is in the Vurt, is through the portal, does Scribble give us this kind of florid description. Even the description of the Dog hang out does not match it in aesthetic intensity, for it is much more purpose driven:
Along one wall were nailed the carcasses of dozens of dream snakes, shimmers of green and violet. Three dog men were eating there.… The smell was sweet to my nostrils. (301)
The first quotation makes of landscape a character; buried in the second quotation is information to be unpacked. Yet it is only at the very end that Scribble makes it through into the portal world, and when he does, it is a world reduced to the very essence of the portal fantasy. The Game Cat and Scribbler sit in a room piled high with objects. The Scribbler is now just one of them, as undifferentiated as all the other props in fantasyland.
Michael Swanwick takes the refusal of portal even further. An immensely complex novel, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993) barely belongs in this category. (I shall discuss this novel in much greater detail in chapter 2.) But for the moment we should consider briefly the way in which Swanwick evades the imperative of the portal fantasy.
The portal in The Iron Dragon’s Daughter is so far in the protagonist’s past that Jane is a full citizen of the otherworld. A changeling, she functions in fantasyland as if a native. She is a native, and the rhetoric and language of the novel is that of the immersive fantasy, with information leaked in the interstices of the building site that is the fantasy. The portal is denied almost until the very end of the book: although there are leaks and slippages, only in chapter 23 does Jane finally enter the portal in Spiral Castle. There, for the first time, she is granted a guide, a self-declared cicerone (333) who baffles her with a description of his Trans Am and the Springsteen on the radio. According to the conventions, Jane should learn from this, but she does not: language cannot communicate meaning in the absence of a reference (MacDonald and Lindsay were right about that), and Jane is not the hero of a quest fantasy, conditioned by isolation to trust.
