MacDonald and fantasy

Here’s something I’ll be talking about in my class on fantasy today — we’re just getting started with Phantastes. So I’m asking my students to look at the title page.

First, let’s look at all the words on this page that help orient us:

Phantastes: An odd word, obviously related to “fantasy” (sometimes spelled “phantasy”). Its only prior use in English seems to be from an allegorical poem by Phineas Fletcher, The Purple Island (1633), which MacDonald slightly misquotes at the outset of his book.

The root here is the Greek phantasia (ϕαντασία), which first appears in Plato and from him makes its way into later works. It means something like “appearance.” Curiously, its only use in the New Testament is in Acts 25:23, which begins “So on the next day Agrippa and Bernice came with great pomp” — with πολλῆς φαντασίας, great display, a really big show.

St. Augustine renders phantasia into Latin as imaginatio, which is important because of something we’re familiar with, the double valence of “imagination”:

“Ah, that’s just your imagination”

“What a wonderful imagination she has”

So we get the sense of fantasy as something that might be either profoundly deceptive or surprisingly revelatory. It may hide or reveal the truth.

Faerie: This is not a creature but a place, just as in Spenser The Faerie Queene does not mean “The queen who is a fairy” but rather “The queen of the land called Faerie.” Thus Tolkien:

[F]airy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy, that is Faërie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being. Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted….

Romance: Not what people today call romance — i.e., a story about luuuvv — but rather a story that has a more capacious sense of the real than the realistic novel typically has. So Northrop Frye in a discussion of kinds of hero:

If superior in degree to other men and to his environment, the hero is the typical hero of romance, whose actions are marvellous but who is himself identified as a human being. The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power violate no rule of probability once the postulates of romance have been established. Here we have moved from myth, properly so called, into legend, folk tale, märchen, and their literary affiliates and derivatives.

See also two meanings from the OED:

I.1. A medieval narrative (originally in verse, later also in prose) relating the legendary or extraordinary adventures of some hero of chivalry. Also in extended use, with reference to narratives about important religious figures.

I.3.a. A fictitious narrative, usually in prose, in which the settings or the events depicted are remote from everyday life, or in which sensational or exciting events or adventures form the central theme; a book, etc., containing such a narrative. Now chiefly archaic and historical. A gradual development from sense A.I.1, from which it is not always easily distinguished…

For Men and Women: That is, not for children.

“In good sooth”: Looks like a quote but isn’t. It’s a very brief summary of what MacDonald hopes his story will be for his readers. He does not claim to make a door through which one can pass into a greater world — but he does hope you will by reading his book begin to see that greater world. C. S. Lewis acknowledged that MacDonald did just this for him when he wrote that reading Phantastes, which he did for the first time at age 16, “baptized my imagination.” (Note: imagination, imaginatio, the forming of images.)

The German passage from Novalis may be translated:

One can conceive of narratives without coherence, yet with association, like dreams; poems that are merely melodious and full of beautiful words, but also without any sense and coherence, at most individual stanzas comprehensible, like fragments from the most diverse things. This true poetry can at most have an allegorical sense in the large scale, and an indirect effect, like music. That is why nature is so purely poetic, like the chamber of a magician, of a physicist, a nursery, a lumber room and storage chamber.

A fairy tale is like a dream image without coherence. An ensemble of wondrous things and events, for example a musical fantasy, the harmonic sequences of an Aeolian harp, nature itself.

In a true fairy tale everything must be wondrous, mysterious and coherent; everything animated, each in a different way. The whole of nature must be strangely mixed with the whole spirit world; here enters the time of anarchy, of lawlessness, freedom, the natural state of nature, the time before the world…. The world of the fairy tale is the one absolutely opposed to the world of truth, and precisely for that reason so absolutely similar to it, as chaos is similar to the completed creation.

(Thanks, Claude.)

The link between fantasy and dreams is pervasive and absolutely central — for dreams too may reveal or deceive. See Odyssey XIX (Emily Wilson’s translation):

But shrewd Penelope said, “Stranger,
dreams are confusing, and not all come true.
There are two gates of dreams: one pair is made
of horn and one of ivory. The dreams
from ivory are full of trickery;
their stories turn out false. The ones that come
through polished horn come true.”

The idea is repeated in Book VI of the Aeneid.

As with dreams, so with fantasy. One must become a shrewd judge of truth and falsehood.