to the ostensible frame world that has not framed this narrative, Jane acts as if she has always been there. We know she has not, and she knows she is a stranger in the land, but she has learned to act as if she is competent in her world and she takes this learning with her into the new world. Jane will provide us with no more explanation than she did in her previous world: we must decode, rather than passively receive, a reader position disguised by our knowledge of the new world.
Perhaps the easiest way to subvert the portal fantasy is to reverse the direction of travel. Two very good examples are in Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle and Barbara Hambly’s The Magicians of Night (the second book in The Sun-Cross sequence).30 Howl’s Moving Castle contains within it a portal fantasy that underlines the differences in language for immersive and portal texts. Although the book as a whole is clearly an immersive fantasy, toward the end Howl, Sophie, and Howl’s assistant (Michael) travel through the entrance of the Moving Castle into Wales. Immediately we are into the conventions of portal fantasy. The characters obey a guide (Howl), ask questions, and describe to us what they see. No longer must we just exist and interpret a foreign language; instead, they are our (mis-)translators in a world we know better than do they. Despite the book’s diversion into our primary world, it never ceases to be high fantasy because this glimpse of our primary world is contextualized through Sophie’s eyes as fantastic, creating in the reader “a feeling of awe and wonder” (Zahorski and Boyer 57). This moment, what M. John Harrison has described as “counter-trajectories of the counter-liminal,”31 is in itself a critique of the genre: with her inversion Jones challenges reader acceptance of the protagonist-interpretation intrinsic to the functioning of portal fantasy. It is also—and incidentally—interesting because it answers the question of whether a quest fantasy can take place in a “known space.” While the superficial answer is in the affirmative—all the characters find their treasure close to home—in reality only one of the characters actually knows the John Donne poem that forms the intellectual, or cognitive, space through which they move.
Barbara Hambly takes a slightly different approach. Here our protagonist, Rhion, knows that he is entering a different world. Yet in the opening chapters of The Magicians of Night, Rhion arrives ready to trust the guide. But Hambly wants to collapse this edifice, and she does this in part with the intense language of the portal fantasy: the language is both deceptive and revealing. Clues to Rhion’s real situation are planted in the shaping of the world around him: he is led at the very beginning to trust in the “glow of candles, a constellation of six small flames” (1) because they are a key to familiarity. He is welcomed by “the pitiless beauty of a god carved in ivory” (2), a phrase that warns both Rhion and ourselves. And elsewhere, Hambly is deliberately deceptive, severing the link between landscape and morality. The hills that are splashed with golden sunlight, covered in wild ivy and buttercups, shelter evil, not elves (12). Later, Rhion will be alerted to evil through the material objects he touches: it is interesting that in Hambly’s world, the psychic traces are attached to made objects. The world itself is not an active participant in the fantasy.
One critical difference that reshapes the entire fantasy is that we do not, in this case, ride exploring with Rhion. Except in the details of the plot, we are more familiar than is he with the environment he is exploring. We are displaced from our customary position. Consequently, when Hambly offers the usual little explanations of the customs and practices of the country (“Most of the people in this world were addicted to the inhaled smoke of cured tobacco leaves, and everything—cars, house, furniture, and clothing—stank of it” [13], she is playing a double game. Where in the conventional quest fantasy this detail is intended to familiarize us with the world, to make us feel increasingly at home, here the same tactic estranges us, reminds us that the “we” that is Rhion are strangers here.
Donaldson used the doubt of Thomas Covenant to convince the reader to trust. Hambly sets out to challenge the entire ideological edifice of the portal fantasy that assumes trust and constructs stupidity and passivity in the response of the protagonist in order to support that construction. Rhion is never a passive protagonist: once he is fully conscious, he interrogates the world around him. In other quest fantasies, the assertion that a gang of prisoners deserved to die, or to be used to test a drug (18–19) might be perfectly acceptable until conclusively proved otherwise32 (usually by a counternarrative delivered by a competing party). Rhion, however, from the first glimpse of an ethical dilemma, begins to doubt, and by chapter 4 is in a case of permanent suspicion. Estranged from the usual source of learning in the portal fantasy, he must do that which the hero of this subgenre is usually not required to do: he must analyze. In this fantasy Rhion learns not from what he is told but from newsreels, from newspapers, and from the behavior of those around him (69). There are no shortcuts, no physical markers of evil, no guide (unless we count the Jewish barmaid, Sarah) to absolve him from interpreting the world as best he can.
This content is reflected in the rhetorical structure that Hambly deploys. Only those accounts of the world that are most unreliable, most despicable, are delivered as a closed narrative, whether an account of the disappearance of magic (11) or von Rath asserting the inferiority of women (68). It is not a coincidence Hambly has Rhion reject the “rediscovered” scholarship of past ages with its claim to be copied from yet older documents: “This was a usual claim made by occult societies, in Rhion’s world as well as this one” (134). Nor that the coven consists of men who will not listen either to Rhion or to each other: books and men are each engaged in constructing and delivering their own sealed narrative, impervious to experimentation or to reason. Both elements are usually critical to the success of the portal fantasy. Here, dismantling them becomes the quest.
Samuel R. Delany’s Neveryóna (1983) begins with a dragon flight; it follows a young girl’s adventures, but at the end leaves her neither with a quest achieved nor returning home. But despite this, and although his appendix B rather undermines my case—Delany states that he took the structure from Frank Romeo’s Bye Bye Love—there is a rather startling resemblance to the structure of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,33 starting with Pryn’s ride on the dragon, a veritable whirlwind: “Flying, she saw the crazy tilting mountains rise by her, the turning clouds above her, the rocking green, the green-licked rock” (6). Pryn leaves behind her aunt, in a place of poverty, but thinks about her constantly. Being the person her aunt brought her up to be is at least part of the reason for her journey. She is inquisitive and self-centered, much as her aunt was in her obsession with developing the loom. As desperate as she is to leave, there remains a sense of “There is no place like home.”
Once Pryn arrives in the world, the action seems to take place over a year. And yet, as with Dorothy, there is very little development of Pryn (what happens to the pregnancy?); we actually learn very little about her. Instead, she becomes the vehicle through which we ride through the fantasy. The world is narrated to Pryn in much the way it is narrated to Dorothy. There is one solitary moment where we might be seeing the world through an omniscience narrator: in chapter 8, “Of Models, Mystery Moonlight, and Authority,” Madame Keyne, and Jade are talking in the garden. For nine pages (159–168) it seems as if we see them separately from Pryn. Then:
Somewhere a branch fell, off in the bushes …
Certainly it was no more than a branch.
But it made Pryn pull sharply back from the window’s edge. (166)
It has been an illusion. Even in this private moment, we have seen the world through Pryn’s eyes.
But Delany is not using his protagonist to create an impermeable narrative. Neveryóna, like Oz, is a bracelet tale, each section linked at the beginning and end but otherwise with relatively little overlap: each section is a discrete adventure and the incidents are frequently less important that the understanding of the world that is communicated. This need to understand the world is perhaps clearest in chapter
