Abstract
This essay traces medievalist nostalgia in the representations of music in fantasy fiction. I argue that, in high fantasy fiction of the Tolkien/Lewis tradition, music and the medieval function as joint, mutually enriching indicators of a blissful, paradisal state promised to the reader. Fantasy fiction in this tradition writes the blissful object of desire in a form of apophatic discourse, using language in a way which undoes its signifying function in order to indicate a bliss which cannot be described. But since, as Susan Stewart asserts (and I will argue) ‘nostalgia is the desire for desire’ (Stewart, 1993, 23), fantasy fiction does not keep its promise to the reader. Its indications work to fend off the bliss, instead sustaining the reader in the unending enjoyment of unsatisfied desire.
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