Landscapes and Journeys, Metaphors and Maps: The Distinctive Feature of English Fantasy

Abstract

Landscapes and Journeys, Metaphors and Maps:The Distinctive Feature of English Fantasy Peter Hunt (bio) The author should know his countryside, whether real or imaginary, like his hand. . . . It is my contention. . . that who is faithful to his map, and consults it, and draws from it his inspiration, daily and hourly, gains positive support, and not mere negative immunity from accident. The tale has a root there; it grows in that soil; it has a spine of its own behind the words. —(Robert Louis Stevenson, quoted in Salway 418-9) . . . creative Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, not a slavery to it. —J.R.R. Tolkien (72) The journey is a central, vital element of children's literature. In texts for "younger" readers, it is often a metaphor for exploration and education; readers go, like Tolkien's Hobbit, "there and back again" in a circle that enables them to gain knowledge—possibly to be stabbed by experience—and to return to home and security, and to a satisfying psychological "closure". As the readers grow, so the journeys become longer, and the circles are broken: the text become bildungsroman. The elements of quest and rites of passage lead to new levels of physical and psychological development. The journey is specifically characteristic of fantasy literature for children. Whatever your definition, fantasy needs a backbone, some shape or principle which it relates to or reacts against. If magic "simply is" and does not need to be explained in its context (Mobley 2), then there must be rules—about what you can do with it, where you can go with it. Like irony, it only works by reference to an understood norm. As Irwin says, in a fantasy, the reader "is persuaded to play the new system of 'facts', which he has wilfully and speculatively accepted, against the established facts, which he only pretends to reject" (67). So, however fantastic the world, we depend, for our understanding, at least in part, on the metaphors for human behaviour contained in the narrative—the quests, the strategies for battle, the chases and flights. As LeGuin has noted, 'fantasy is a journey. . . a journey into the subconscious mind' (Lynn 5), and the journey itself is a powerful organizing factor. Perhaps because of these basic metaphors, children's literature has tended to be based in, indeed, to be about narrative, about the business of getting on with the story; and it has taken over the basic drives of the folk tale, search and pursuit, and moved them into fantasy. The sequential "chaining" of primitive narrative, to which children may respond because it is close to their natural idiom, lends itself to the picaresque; the elemental thrust of storytelling in an oral culture—to which children belong, at least residually—resists complexity (Ong 139ff). In short, the journey has become the paradigm of the children's fantasy story. But in English children's fantasy, there is often an extra dimension, an added depth to the metaphoric structure. Not only do the complex layers of history embedded (as it were) in the landscape enrich the texture of the stories, but the meanings of the landscapes themselves provide a subtext for the journeys: places mean. The American tradition of fantasy journey seems to be—at least to an Englishman like myself—one reaching outwards and westwards; it is a linear matter. Because there is little to dig down into, American fantasy tends to be set in secondary worlds, and to rely for its success on more abstract structural metaphors (good/evil, east/west—for example, LeGuin, Norton, Hoban—even Lloyd Alexander). The English, in contrast, are re-treading ancestral ground. Their reference points are more concrete, deep-rooted cultural symbols which seem to lie, sometimes literally, underfoot. Garner, Mayne, Aiken, Gordon, and earlier, Grahame and Milne root themselves firmly in English soil. Neil Philip notes of Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen that it "was not conjured from some airy inspiration, but drawn from the rock, soil and sky of Cheshire" (A Fine Anger 12), whereas of Susan Cooper, who does not...