The jam pot and the lembas
Brady, Charles A.
FANTASY REPRESENTS AN ESCAPE INTO REALITY The jam pot & the lembas CHARLES A. BRADY Fantasy. .. is, I think, not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and...
...The staple accusation against fantasy is that it represents an escape from reality...
...and no one in any tradition has ever surpassed his work in the two Jungle Books...
...The woods and mountains around Lake Noir could be "the ghoulhaunted woodland of Weir.'' A Poesque marmalade cat kills Hiram Bellefleur— otherwise, be it noted, Bellefleurs tend to disappear, like sojourners with Bopjums, rather than to die, at least up to the day of the final family holocaust...
...The Eastern tradition is more concerned with animal empathy than the Western—the Jataka's Birth Tales of the Buddha are a case in point...
...Adams has a definite affinity with the fantasy modality...
...is, I think, not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent...
...but that fact does not impair the force of Alice as an exemplar displaying the cool matter-of-factness and commonsensicality which must underlie and counterpoint all successful chronicles of wonder...
...I have stressed those roots of fantasy which inhere in the imagination of Western and Northern paganism most particularly for the simple reason that Lewis's and Tolkien's overt Christianity, however masked in The Lord of the Rings, may lead one to a false conclusion about the nature of the modality their work embodies...
...Of course, it does exist: it exists in Poe...
...Again, the precocious, not yet fouryears-old clairvoyante and enfant terrible who is Germaine Bellefleur is given to poring over the same books that once regaled Poe's Roderick Ussher...
...It is the dimension of the timeless glimpsed in time...
...Far from reposing on the special objective reality of fantasy, fantasia tends to be totally subjective and to produce a dithyramb of guff, a surrealistic extravaganza of image and idea akin to a good deal of contemporary painting and growing out of the trend towards epistemological collapse which marks the modern imagination...
...and the second half of "Fateful Mismatches," wherein Hepatica Bellefleur mates with a black bear, a marchen grimmer than Grimm...
...of the Bright Elves...
...The Alice books are actually triumphs of fancy rather than of the shaping imagination working in the mode of fantasy...
...Lewis's phrase for them, those creatures of "hard, bright, and vividly material splendor...
...Tolkien in On Fairy-Stories ONE OF THE GREATER SURPRISES of our surprising day has been the return of the fairies, the High Fairies more especially, those "vital, energetic, willful, passionate beings," to use C.S...
...All too often a reader gets the sensation nowadays that Baudelaire's devil of ennui is puffing a mouthful of hallucinatory smoke from his infernal hookah straight into the reader's face and sending him on a meaningless "trip...
...He, who had attributed their retreat to the rationalizing constriction of the Reformation, would CHARLES A. BRADY, book columnist and literary caricaturist for the Buffalo Evening News as well as author of numerous books, including A Catholic Reader, Church Mouse, and St...
...she did not like to drop the jar for fear of killing somebody underneath, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she passed...
...On its highest level, it is the Paradiso's alta fantasia: man's "high imagination" at its purest, as one finds it in the Odyssey, the Sixth Book of the Aeneid, The Tempest, The Magic Flute—Mozart's music, that is, for the libretto is by no means altogether satisfactory—Wagner's Ring, Andersen's Snow Queen, Macdonald's At the Back of the North Wind, The Jungle Books, The Lord of the Rings, the seven Narnia books...
...Quite to the contrary, fantasy of the highest order represents escape into reality of a different and, often, of a most significant sort...
...J.R.R...
...Fantasy, of course, is an ambivalent term...
...that she is after bigger game than fantasy's frisson—if, to be sure, cerebral assent in literature can ever be bigger game than imaginative...
...Cross-bred" would be a better description of the most recent of these, this spring's Duncton Wood (McGrawHill, $12.95) by Williams Horwood which crosses Tolkien's Ring with Watership Down...
...Many, actually...
...Nevertheless, the ancient Celts had an even stronger concept of survival after death than either the Jews or the Egyptians—and Gauls from the Loire 5 December 1980: 691 had brought it into the Middle East 3 SO years before the birth of Christ...
...Ragnar Norst, in "The Bloodstone," turns out to be one of the more convincing vampires...
...If ours is really the age of the Holy Spirit's luce intellectual piena d'amore—"intellectual light filled with love...
...as Dante has it in his Commedia—that consummation, so far at least, may be found more in fantasy than in philosophy...
...In it, talking moles strike somewhat palsied Anglo-Saxon attitudes and read mole-braille with their snouts...
...For, in the new Gothic of the flicks, Lucifer always wins the last round...
...his animals are stalkinghorses for pointing human morals...
...I do not wish to claim too much for fantasy...
...I do not wish to be unfair to Miss Oates's stupendous experiment in gigantomachy...
...and—least regarded but, possibly, most influential of all—that bespectacled American charioteer of the archetypes beginning with his AdamTarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs...
...Alice's action, as she falls down the rabbit-hole in slow Commonweal: 692 dream-tempo, is so perfect an illustration of this cardinal law for securing verisimilitude in fantasy that I quote it: She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed...
...Since man is a union of body and soul ever striving to be a unity thereof, his art, too, is characteristically mixed...
...The reverse is true of much contemporary fantasia—and fantasia is a very different thing from fantasy...
...In a word, too much of Tolkien's lembas, the elf-bread that helped sustain Frodo Baggins and his high company, can cloy the palate...
...Poe's somewhat "camped" shadow lies dark over this account of the doomed Bellefleurs...
...Rudyard Kipling cut his milk-teeth on the Jatakas...
...It should not be assumed, by the way, that there was any abiding hiatus in fantasy writing between Shakespeare's day and the 1940s when Lewis and Tolkien began their rise...
...In fact, if the 18th century could be fairly described as a wasteland in this regard, the period that stretches from 1800 to 1914 might almost be termed the golden age of fantasy for both letterpress and illustration, containing, as it does, the German romanticists, the great European folktale collections, Hans Andersen, George Macdonald, James Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, and such master portraitists of faery as Walter Crane and Arthur Rackham...
...Really to succeed, fantasy must achieve pure imagination...
...Another distinct danger is peculiarly of our day...
...Bishop Corbet was several centuries premature when, in the early 1600s, he bade those Others, "Farewell, rewards and fairies...
...be highly gratified to know that his own and Lewis's Ecclesia Anglicana in concert with Tolkien's Mother Church of Rome—two fairy godmothers in this particular context—have been prime agents of the great return...
...In his seminal essay, "On FairyStories," Dr...
...Athens will forever remain the capital of man's mind: Jerusalem of his soul...
...It is one kind of essential reality viewed through the lens of mythos, not of logos, because, as Genesis demonstrates, some realities are too big to be seen in any other way...
...The high imagination must be grounded on homely as well as fantastic detail...
...Behind everything else, in this superb fairy epic, trembles a constant intimation of immortality...
...Even, perhaps, a shade too many...
...One also comes on the spoor of fantasy in Joyce Carol Oates's enormous new Bellefleur, (Dutton, $12.95) an attempt to achieve the apotheosis of the Gothic which fails because Miss Oates ignores the cautionary example of fantasy's practical muse, Lewis Carroll's Alice...
...In Mircea Eliade's words, mythic narrative, by abolishing' 'profane time," causes' 'the narrator and his readers" to be "rapt into sacred and mythic time...
...Wells as preface to a collection of his science fiction...
...Rome of his governmental institutions...
...Nothing "remains interesting where anything may happen," wrote H.G...
...I do not think the future is going to judge that either John Barth or Donald Barthelme have, in the last analysis, pulled off the trick...
...The trick is always the same trick," Dorothy Sayers concluded of Dante, "it is the trick—and to some minds, the scandal—of particularity...
...and, if C.S...
...Snow...
...Hamlet and Anna Karenina, to single out but two of literature' s mixed masterpieces, would not be the towering successes they are if they were as "pure" as, say, The Ancient Mariner or Comus...
...it was labeled "ORANGE MARMALADE," but to her great disappointment it was empty...
...and, in the end, of the fulfillment of that strongest of all primordial desires, the desire of immortality...
...Lewis's eldila have refurbished the angelic ikon and rendered it once again plausible, the contemporary cinema has elevated the Prince of This World to Emperor of the Cosmos...
...but that is not the way to secure conviction on the reader's part...
...It can also, on occasion, involve a sinister lapse into decadence—after all, there are bad as well as good fairies...
...of the Longaevi, the Long-Lived Ones, as Martianus Capella called the fauns and nymphs...
...Consider the reputations of the three oddly assorted Magi who stand behind the varieties of fantasy we know today: that white-bearded Presbyterian Hesiod, George Macdonald...
...Much as I have admired Miss Oates's work in the past, I reject Bellefleur's gallimaufry, revolted above all else by the ultimate Use majest'e of Gideon Bellefleur's encountering Rip Van Winkle's dwarves still at their eternal game of bowls, shooting one of them, taking him home, rechristening him Nightshade, and establishing him as a faithful servitor...
...of the Sidhe...
...Thomas, was an English professor for many years at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York...
...A book of our day, however, comes close to equaling it: Richard Adams's long rabbit Odyssey-and-Iliad conjoined, Watership Down...
...It is also true Miss Oates will have it...
...Tolkien spoke of fantasy's satisfaction of "certain primordial human desires," one of these being "to hold communion with other living things...
...Good inheritors like Ursula Le Guin and Lloyd Alexander...
...Miss Oates piles a Pelion of marvels on her Gothic Ossa...
...I do not count Aesop...
...As she affirms in a prefatory note, Bellefleur "is a region, a state of the soul, and it does exist...
...He breaks new as well as traditional ground in 1980's Girl in the Swing (Knopf, $10.95) which is de la Motte Faugae'sUndine with a more erotic ambiance...
...that votary of assorted white goddesses, Sir Henry Rider Haggard...
...of destiny—the word fairy, always remember, derives from fatum...
...5 December 1980: 693...
...What is it, at bottom...
...But I am unregenerate in this matter of fantasy...
...This saga of coney life has bred the inevitable imitators...
...If parts ever add up to something more than a whole, it might be pointed out that her ' 'Room of Contamination" chapter makes a first-rate bogle story...
...Whether one is constructing a Paradiso or a Perelandra, a faun's house in Narnia or Middle-Earth in all its complexity, one needs both lembas to lift up the spirit and a jam jar to anchor it to earth...
...Fantasy is the testament of the Others: of the gods and heroes...
...Be it also noted that the Manor's chief cat, Mahalaleel, is really more like Yeats's Minnaloushe than anything in Poe...
...It is always necessary to correct the diet now and then with deep drafts of such honest beer of everyday as Trollope brews or, to come to our own day, as C.P...
...Joyce was a genius, and got away with it—perhaps but barely in Finnegan...
...There can be no doubt that it was Lewis and Tokien who renewed the fonts of contemporary fantasy for us...
...It is true that a great deal of the appeal of Tolkien's Ring is that its basic images of the cosmic struggle and of man's part therein reflect, without most readers realizing it, the Judaeo-Christian schema of the universe...
...There were, naturally, higher and lower levels of critical regard...
...Now that they have followed Hobbit Frodo to the Grey Havens, have there been inheritors of the "glass of Galadriel" that softly lights their books...
...But it is the Celtic West, buttressed by the Northland of the Eddas, which stays the highest citadel of his imagination...
...The Clavichord" gives off a pleasant set of chords worthy of that past mistress of the Gothic in needlepoint, Isak Dinesen...
...Mediocre imitators whose names it is unnecessary to mention...
Vol. 107 • December 1980 • No. 22
