If you took away anything from last time’s discussion of “Layers of Meaning” as we work through Ann Swinfen’s In Defence of Fantasy, a now-dated but important early (important because it’s early) academic study of fantasy as it stood in the early 1980’s, it should be the archetypal structure of the critical essay: statement of thesis; explanation with examples (this is always the fun part); restatement of thesis with a final flourish, a soupçon of significance, also known as the “tell ‘em what you plan to tell ‘em, tell ‘em, and tell ‘em what you told ‘em, and tell ‘em why it’s important” recipe. Once you get the formula down, academic articles are a lot easier to read: if you stumble over an idea the first time, don’t give up. That brass ring is coming around at least one more time.
So it is with Chapter 6: “Experience Liberated.”
Swinfen never defines what she means by “experience liberated.” Following the second important point of my last installment, “mind the block quotes,” she turns to the timeless tradition of getting someone else, someone more famous, to provide the critical verbiage that informs the rest of the chapter. This time it’s Henry James, writing about romance novels (yes, I know—it’s a stretch. Roll with it—it’ll make sense eventually.)
The only general attribute of projected romance that I can see, the only one that fits all its cases, is the fact of the kind of experience with which it deals — experience liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to and, if we wish so to put the matter, drag upon it, and operating in a medium which relieves it, in a particular interest, of the inconvenience of a related, a measurable state, a state subject to all our vulgar communities.
(qtd. in 1, p. 123)
If you understood that on a first read, let me know. I will nominate you for the First Circle in the Rhetorical Hall of Fame. Because I did not understand it. Repeated reading didn’t help, but then I’ve been known to be a very slow thinker. But reading the rest of the chapter fleshed it out for me, which is what I meant by the big brass ring coming around again.
I think essentially the passage means that romance novels expose readers to experiences they would not normally have in real life. Or, as George R.R. Martin famously put it, “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” (It’s from A Dance with Dragons, if you’re interested.)
If romance “liberates” a reader’s experience from the “measurable state...subject to all our vulgar communities,” fantasy does it on steroids. Which is Swinfen’s point. This chapter, which introduces the idea that fantasy exposes readers to settings, experiences, perspectives, conundrums, mysteries, and, well, life, lived as we don’t experience it in our messy breathing/eating/working/sleeping daily existence, the idea that we come to fantasy in part to have our views on reality challenged and warped and refashioned — this chapter limits itself to fantasy set in the primary world, with portal and secondary-world fantasies reserved for the next chapters.
Fair enough. Swinfen’s perspective is sometimes jarring, until we remember it’s an early study. Like the chapters on animal transmogrification and time travel, the subjects of “Experience Liberated” are not now considered part of mainstream fantasy, but are rather side channels to the main river. When she wrote, though, it was early in the academic study of fantasy and no one knew how things were going to shake out. So...here we are. Primary world fantasies. And because no critical study is complete without critical jargon:
Such fantasy within the primary world is a very specialized form: through marvellously augmented physical powers, or some form of metamorphosis in the fictional characters, the reader is led into a vivid and enriching imaginative exploration of primary world experience. The use of such marvellous powers leads to heightened awareness and keener perceptions, a freeing of the normally limited human capacity for exploring both the surface reality of the primary world and also its inherently numinous qualities. (1, pp. 123-124)
In other words, Swinfen restates Tolkien’s observations in “On Fairy-Stories,” that the altered perception inherent in fantasy brings the reader back to reality with a fresh perspective on the commonplace: your time in the Otherworld has changed your perspective, and you bring that refreshed perception back to reality. (See? And you thought literary criticism was hard! Ha — it’s hard-seeming, seemingly impenetrable, but once you crack the glass and figure out how to get inside it’s mostly common-sense. Anyway, back to Our Gentle Author.)
The first of Swinfen’s examples of altered-perspectives in primary world fantasy are books in which characters are changed into animals: Paul Gallico’s Jennie, in which Peter becomes a cat, and T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, in which Wart is educated by animals by becoming them, at least temporarily. But she’s discussed these fantasies earlier, and they’re a way in to the main examples of this chapter, books in which perspective shifts, mostly perspectives in size. Yes, folks, we’re talking about Lilliputians.
Actually not. Swinfen discusses perspective and size in Mary Norton’ The Borrowers books, Pauline Clarke’s The Twelve and the Genii (a love letter to the Brontë children) and T.H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose.
What precisely is the imaginative experience which the reader undergoes in these novels? In the first place, he is required to re-evaluate his concept of physical scale and the way in which it is used as a framework for his perceptions and experience. If this fundamental concept is disrupted, experience is indeed ‘liberated’, sometimes in quite a disturbing way. (1, p. 125)
Not only does dealing with six-inch characters wrench perspective from big-to-small, it works in the opposite direction, as when used to cinematic advantage in films like Ant Man, Fantastic Voyage [really, please please please click the link and enjoy the glory of 1966 film voice-overs] and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. We’re used to it as a trope, but at the time it was edgy, to consider looking at common objects in an altered scale, as in scaling a step using rappel lines.
Although I’ve occasionally been dismissive of Swinfen’s choice of texts (okay, more than occasionally), now that we’re in the heart of her study I have to admit that her discussion of the different novels is done very well, indeed. More than random summaries of different books that fill out a category, Swinfen chooses her examples carefully and discusses them with great thoughtfulness and sensitivity. In Mistress Masham’s Repose, for instance, the book’s narrative focus is not on the Lilliputians in Exile, but on Maria’s development and maturation as a character. The same is true for the other novels:
...[A]ll three writers are agreed in this, that power, however benevolent in its intentions, eventually corrupts, and is corrupted into tyranny, while personal independence and freedom are human values which must be respected in Lilliputians or in any vulnerable individuals, including children, as much as in full-size humans.
The element of the marvellous in the primary world — the changed perspective of scale — is used to heighten our awareness of human dignity and the need for mutual respect regardless of outward appearances. (1, p. 127)
From little people, Swinfen turns to Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wind in the Door, and we take the perspectives “by turns galactic and microsocmic” (1, p. 132). As the characters move, with a cherubim, into quantum perspectives and immeasurable time and space. (I tend to think A Wind in the Door is more a portal fantasy, but you know, po-ta-to po-tah-to.)
[F]antasy operates largely through an extension of the creative and empathic faculties, and in the enhancement of primary sense perceptions empathy is the dominant mode. Writers considered earlier in this chapter [and discussed above] united their use of empathy with some thematic purpose, but in … [her] novels Penelope Farmer employs it almost in pure form, in its intrinsic magical and mystical quality, thus raising to the level of the marvellous a common mental experience which has powerful physical associations. (1, p. 138)
Farmer’s novels, Swinfen asserts, deal almost exclusively, not with character or theme, but with the sensation of the marvellous, or “’experience liberated’ for its own sake” (1, p. 140). Empathy. Identification with characters, identification so powerful we can imaginatively feel the flight of a bird, the strength and endurance of a Sisyphus — this is common to all fiction. Swinfen argues that the effect of empathy is heightened in fantasy, because the subject, the protagonist, literally becomes what was metaphorical in realism.
By projecting himself into the consciousness of the fictional figure, he experiences vicariously all that the latter experiences. Thus the experience of the fictional character is not normally empathy, but some partial or total physical metamorphosis, while the experience of the reader is indeed a kind of empathy. (1, p. 139)
In other words, the character might become a cat or a dragon, but readers, much as they might identify with said cat/dragon, don’t themselves become cat/dragons. This in response to an assertion by Richard H. Fogle in The Imagery of Keats and Shelley: A Comparative Study (2) that empathy is a merging of the reader’s self with an object, in which the reader’s consciousness of self is lost. This may seem like a weird nit for her to pick, but it’s a strong critique that runs through the literature of the Romantic movement, hence its emergence in a study of Shelley and Keats.
Swinfen asserts, sensibly, that this is an impossibility in fantasy, however strongly a reader’s perception may be altered, because
The method in fantasy is to deal with two separate consciousnesses. The consciousness of the fictional figure is fully aware of the experience being undergone and it is described by both character and narrator. The reader may identify himself empathically with the metamorphosed character, but he is constantly having the experience explained to him. (1 p 139)
And the experience to be constantly explained is, in this chapter anyway, the challenge to perspective, the making of the mundane into something new and strange, something different, something evocative and important.
Swinfen finishes with one final type of shifting perspective, and that is the layering of history onto the present and, as is true with fantasy, the metaphorical is made literal in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series. All of which, like the other books in this chapter, deepen the reader’s perception of the primary world.
Next time: secondary worlds and depictions of idealism. Three chapter left. I’ll try to speed things up.
Previous Installments
Reference
1. Ann Swinfen, In Defence of Fantasy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.
2. Fogle, Richard H. The Imagery of Keats and Shelley: A Comparative Study. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1949.