“Heart of Darkness” (1899), John Clute has written:
Like any Club Story, “Heart of Darkness” is both a story and a device to mandate its reception. The impurity of this is obvious—what we’re describing here is in a sense a form of reportage—and may help account. It may be the “impurity” of this element of reportage at the heart of the Club Story form that accounts for the fact that no literary theorist has ever mentioned it. Critics of the fantastic, dealing as they do with a set of genres intensely sensitive to the world, should have no such compunction. (Conjunctions 39: 422–423)
As in the true club story, it is the unquestionable purity of the tale that holds together the shape of the portal-quest narrative. In the club narrative, the ability to convince and to hold the floor is the sign of success, but the risk is always that the whole will not be sustained. In order to sustain it, the impurity and unreliability to which Clute alludes must be consistently denied and the authority and reliability of the narrator must be asserted. Either the story is accepted in its entirety, or it is entirely vulnerable; there is no room for the delicacies of interpretation. This structure and its attendant denial has a significant effect on the language of the portal-quest fantasy: in order to convince, to avoid too close analysis, the portal and quest fantasies attempt to convince through the accumulation of detail.
Fantasyland is constructed, in part, through the insistence on a received truth. This received truth is embodied in didacticism and elaboration. While much information about the world is culled from what the protagonist can see (with a consequent denial of polysemic interpretation), history or analysis is often provided by the storyteller who is drawn in the role of sage, magician, or guide. While this casting apparently opens up the text, in fact it seeks to close it down further by denying not only reader interpretation, but also that of the hero/protagonist. This may be one reason why the hero in the quest fantasy is more often an actant than an actor, provided with attributes rather than character precisely to compensate for the static nature of his role.
In the quest and portal fantasy much of the narrative is delivered in this club-story mode among a group of friends isolated in a context in which they will not be interrupted. Although “the journey” is a recognized function-trope in portal-quest fantasies, it is usually interpreted as a metaphor for a coming of age—it provides a space for the protagonists to grow up. But “the journey” also serves to divorce the protagonists from the world, and place them in a context in which they cannot question the primary narration because there is no evidence against which they can test the veracity of their source. Diana Wynne Jones manipulates this path in The Crown of Dalemark (1993): the quest journey is begun precisely to avoid exposing an imposter. This approach, however, is not usual. More commonly, the journey is where information is discovered, interpreted, and disseminated, safe from the awkward questions the outside world might provoke. The resemblance to the isolation inflicted on Kate in The Taming of the Shrew is not coincidental. In The Lord of the Rings, after Gandalf’s “death,” the questors are even more willing to follow his interpretation of the adventure. Jones, again, makes the connection explicit in another Dalemark tale, the short story “The True State of Affairs” (1995), in which a woman traverses a portal only to find herself seized as a spy and locked in a tower. She can build a picture of the world she is in only by what she is allowed to know. The process of the quest or portal fantasy works, in one way or another, to construct an element of isolation and a focus on “the club.” In contrast, and as I shall demonstrate, the intrusion fantasy is structured to encourage the protagonist to break out of the monologue.
There are almost always two clearly identifiable narrators in the portal-quest fantasy: the narrator of the microcosm (the world within a world) that we call the point of view character; and the narrator of the macrocosm, she who “stories” the world for us, making sense of it through the downloaded histories so common to this form of fantasy, or in the fragments of prophecy she leaks to us throughout the course of the text. Usually, but not always, this person is the implied narrator.
Let us consider first that point of view or diegetic character, for it is she who conditions our relationship to the fantasy world. She exemplifies the Bakhtinian insight that the narrator-focalizer dispenses the authoritative ideology. One of the defining features of the portal-quest fantasy is that we ride with the point of view character who describes fantasyland and the adventure to the reader, as if we are both with her and yet external to the fantasy world. What she sees, we see, so that the world is unrolled to us in front of her eyes, and through her analysis of the scene. One result is that the world is flattened thereby into a travelogue, a series of descriptions made possible by the protagonists’ unfamiliarity with it. Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara (1977), a text to which I shall be referring frequently in this chapter because of the degree to which it is the generic quest fantasy, illustrates the point neatly. At the beginning of the novel, Flick, one of the two heroes, is a stranger in his own land. He should be so familiar with the area that all is taken for granted but instead: “the young man noticed immediately the unusual stillness that seemed to have captivated the entire valley this evening.” Immediately the world is new to both him and us, even though it is new only in terms of what he is accustomed to. Such defamiliarization is necessary in order to justify the explanation of the world to the reader, and prepares us for the process of familiarization that takes place throughout the novel.
This extract characterizes the mode of engagement within the portal-quest fantasy: the hero moves through the action and the world stage, embedding an assumption of unchangingness on the part of the indigenes. This kind of fantasy is essentially imperialist: only the hero is capable of change; fantasyland is orientalized into the “unchanging past.” This rejection of change is particularly noticeable in David Eddings’s The Belgariad (1982–84), where we meet one culture dedicated to preserving the past (the faux-medievalist Arends) and one whose idea of preparing for the future is very much rooted in preservation (the Rivans). The Rivans have spent the previous centuries preserving their culture precisely for the appearance of our protagonist. This allows the protagonist not merely to insist upon his interpretation as he relays it to us, but to insist that it will always be valid. In this context, Garion’s confusion ensures that we accept his realizations unquestioningly. To counteract such blind acceptance one might expect that a fantasy would work by making the unfamiliar strange, and we shall see just this effect in George MacDonald and David Lindsay’s work. More commonly, however, the quest fantasy works by familiarization (Scholes 84), creating a world through the layering of detail, and making that detail comprehensible. Given the need for comprehensibility, the only way to continually create the sense of wonder needed by the portal and quest fantasy is to embroider continually, to prevent the accretion of comfort. When taken to excess we see the likes of the Harry Potter novels in which almost all of the imaginative material is in the world-building (the adventures themselves are game sequences and rather derivative)—or, as Colin Manlove has pointed out, the work of Lord Dunsany, of whose descriptive passages he writes, “Dunsany knows he is into a good thing here … and goes on for three more pages making it rather too much of a good thing” (Impulse 135). Michael Rifaterre describes this device as diegetic overkill, in which the representation of ostensibly insignificant details—in the case of the texts I’m discussing it could be jumping frog chocolates, lembas bread, or clothes that change color9—becomes a feature of realism (29–30).
This mode mediates between us and the protagonist. In seeing what he narrates to us, we are prevented from seeing him. The solution adopted by most writers in this genre—although not, interestingly, by Tolkien—is the reverie, a form of mimetic excess (Rifaterre 29–30). Bakhtin calls this form “the continuous hidden polemic or hidden dialogue with some other person on the theme of himself,” but reverie is easier in the long term (207). The reverie is that moment when the protagonist (or on occasion another character) meditates on his own character, usually in terms of a flashback, to achieve a “profound dialogic and polemical nature of self-awareness and self-affirmation” (207). This meditation should not be confused with a moment of memory, which tends to focus on the emotion felt, rather than the story (McCabe
