Fantasts: Studies of J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, Mervyn Peake, Nokolay Gogol and Kenneth Grahame 0861272129, 9780861272129

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The Fantasts Studies in J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, Mervyn Peake,

Nikolay Gogol and Kenneth Grahame

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Edmund Little

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Rockford Public Library Rockford, Illinois 9 9 1987 1A

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Studies in J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, Mervyn Peake, Nikolay Gogol and, Kenneth Grahame

Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

(T. S. Eliot, ‘Murder in the Cathedral’)

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/fantastsstudiesi00OOlitt

THE FANTASTS Studies in J. R. R. TOLKIEN, LEWIS CARROLL, MERVYN PEAKE, NIKOLAY GOGOL and KENNETH GRAHAME

by

EDMUND

ALV) EBs 1984

LITTLE

RY

For Muriel Delf and F. M. Gibson

First published in 1984 by Avebury Publishing Company, Amersham, England. © T. E. Little, 1984. All rights reserved.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: Little, Edmund The fantasts.

1. Fantastic fiction, English—History and criticism 2. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism 3. English fiction—20th century—History and criticism Eoitle 823'.8'0915 PRSSO:EY ISBN 0—86127—212—9

Printed in Great Britain by Redwood Burn Limited, Trowbridge, Wiltshire, and bound by Pegasus Bookbinding, Melksham, Wiltshire.

CONTENTS

Author’s preface

vil

One

The making of other worlds

Two

J.R.R. Tolkien (1892—1973): Middle-earth

Three

Lewis Carroll (1832—1898): looking-glass land and wonderland

Four

Mervyn Peake (1911—1968): Gormenghast

Five

Nikolay Gogol (1809—1852): the town of NN

Six

Kenneth Grahame the river bank

Seven

The otherness of other worlds

Eight

Epilogue

References

(1859—1932):

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PREF

AGE

Faérie is a perilous realm, Tolkien warns us, and there are dungeons for the overbold.’ I am acutely aware of this danger, but have nevertheless trespassed in worlds of Fantasy in an attempt to discover their essential characteristics. The task is difficult, because not every world which seems unreal to the traveller is admitted to the genre of Fantasy by the critics, whereas others which are admitted differ greatly from one another. It would be tempting to dismiss the concept of genre altogether and to judge each world, and each author, on their ‘own merits’. Nevertheless a longing to classify lies deep in all critics, and in most

readers, even

if it lies dormant

and

unsuspected for many a long year. Most of us approach a work of literature with certain expectations which we hope to find fulfilled within it. In the fulfilment or thwarting of these expectations we encounter the concept of genre. Imagine the perplexity of a reader who finds that a tale labelled ‘detective story’ has a genuine ghost as a solution to its mystery. What would the followers of Sherlock Holmes have thought had the Hound of the Baskervilles turned out vil

to be a real phantom, and not an overlarge dog done up in luminous paint? Even the most pragmatic anti-theorist critic would surely have raised a protest. ‘The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply’, Holmes informs Watson in the case

of the Sussex Vampire, (which turns out, of course, to

be no vampire at all). Holmes was unaware inhabiting a literary genre, but his creator Conan Doyle was a serious student of the prominent spiritualist. As a writer, however, detective work was one thing, ghosts another. him to thwart readers’ expectations.

that he was knew it well. occult and a he knew that It was not for

So, whatever our contempt for the mistier notions of literary theorising, we cannot completely avoid the question of genre, although a proper definition of one is as perilous an occupation as any other in Faérie. Todorov” warns that the terms ‘genre’ and ‘species’ are borrowed from the natural sciences, but it is nevertheless wrong to treat literature as though it were a science. Being familiar with the species tiger we can deduce from it the properties of each individual tiger. The birth of a new tiger does not modify the species in its definition,

whereas in the realm of art, every work modifies

the sum of possible new works, each example alters the species. In any case, literary criticism is often an attempt to rationalise what has already been proclaimed at popular or

instinctive

level,

so

it is difficult

to achieve

absolute

consistency. Literature is not a science and, if a reader chooses, he can follow the precepts laid down by Humpty Dumpty and make a word, or genre, mean what he wants it to mean. Yet even the anarchistic egg has to consider evidence before making his decision. In exploring unreal worlds, a reader will notice characteristics which distinguish them from the worlds of conventional fiction. The purpose of this study is to try and identify those characteristics, and the techniques by which an author can change ‘Reality’ or the purpose of his tale. Having identified them, Humpty Dumpty can decide for himself

how

many

of them, and in what

constitute the Fantasy genre proper.

vill

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Chapter1

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MAKIN

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ODER»

WORDS

Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, was the heart

of the desire of Faerie. (Tree and Leaf)

Despite its popularity the Fantasy genre does not lend itself to easy definition. J. R. R. Tolkien is accepted as the chief Fantast of our age and his name is often linked with certain other, highly diverse writers, who are also rated as authors of Fantasy.1 Among them are Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) who became a ‘cult’ figure soon after Tolkien; Charles Williams (1886-1945) who was a friend of Tolkien and of C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), another highly acclaimed Fantast; George Macdonald (1824-1905) who allegedly influenced Williams, Tolkien and Lewis; William Morris (1834-1896) and Lord Dunsany (1878-1957). It would be difficult to deduce a coherent, consistent definition of the Fantasy genre from these writers who differ so markedly from one another in content, style and register. E. F. Bleiler, in a complaint echoed by C. N. Manlove several years later,” affirmed that Fantasy may be all things to all men, and professed himself at a loss to answer what is meant by the term. Obviously 1

Fantasy implies a literature which is non-realistic, but there is plenty of non-realistic literature which, in popular critical writing, does not seem to be considered Fantasy. Bram

Stoker

(1847-1912),

numbered among the (1883-1924). The two best and order in the situation fairy stories, and by of Modern Fantasy.

of Dracula

author

(1897)

is rarely

Fantasts, and nor, apparently, is Kafka

most coherent attempts to bring some are by Tolkien himself in his essay on C. N. Manlove in his important study Tolkien’s remarks are much quoted and, in view of his own eminence as a Fantast, deserve particular attention. He views the Fantast as the subcreator of a Secondary World, an ‘other’ world, which stands in contrast to Primary existence. Tolkien avoids the term ‘real’,

world. Inside the Secondary World, what the author relates

is ‘true’, and should inspire Secondary Belief in the reader. Tolkien strongly emphasises the need for inner consistency. Anybody, he asserts, can say ‘the green sun’. To create a Secondary World inside which that green sun becomes credible requires special narrative skill. He makes the important proviso that, should any satire be present, the magic itself must never be made fun of, but must be taken seriously, neither laughed at nor explained away. He concludes with an impassioned discourse on the purpose of fairy stories which he sees as ‘recovery’, ‘escape’ and ‘consolation’. They enable us to recover a clearer vision of the world ‘...so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity...’ They provide escape from a world which has grown industrialised or dull, and finally an escape from death. Consolation is provided by the happy ending which, Tolkien asserts, all complete fairy stories must have. Tolkien’s statements were written with his own work in mind. They cannot be applied consistently to all works popularly assigned to the Fantasy genre. Many offer no recovery or consolation, and a reader might wish to escape from rather than into them. The happy ending is not a descriptive feature of many worlds and can hardly be made prescriptive. There is no joy in Peake’s Gormenghast, and none in Lord Dunsany’s Pegana. Magic need not be treated in totally humourless fashion. Merlyn in T. H. White’s Arthurian novel® is presented as a comic figure whose magic can go wrong, but that is not a satisfactory reason for excluding the

2

work

from

infallible

Fantasy.

Inhabitants

or humourless,

of Faérie

as Tolkien’s

need

not

be

own work shows, and

there is no reason why a wizard should not make a mistake in his spells. Even Gandalf comes close to absurdity when he fails (despite being a learned loremaster) to identify the simple password which will open the door to the mines of Moria. Secondary Worlds can have marvels without having magic, and fairy stories need not necessarily contain fairies, as Tolkien himself observes.* Tolkien therefore has not defined either fairy stories or Fantasy as such. Instead he has defined the task faced by any writer of creative fiction, because, in a sense, all creative fiction is Fantasy. The life and people of the Primary World supply the imagination of the writer with raw

material.

The

finished product

in the shape of a novel,

story or play might be realistic to the mind’s eye, and command the Secondary Belief of enthralled readers; but it still remains a Secondary World, the verity of which is open to doubt.

A student,

who was once asked to read some novels

famous for their psychological and social realism, made the querulous complaint that they were as unrealistic as anything else he had been obliged to read in that they lacked any explicit reference to sex or sanitation. A less perverse reproach may be levelled at the European Romantics who sang the joys of nature, outdoor life and oriental climates without mentioning illness, insects and other disadvantages attached to these states. Life always has to be pruned and tidied up before it can enter literature, and few works reflect the Primary World in a pure, undistorted image. A truly realistic novel would be the literary equivalent of the map in Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded which aims to be as large as the country it represents.° Like any other artist, therefore, a writer has to be selective, choosing his characters from life or from his own imagination, placing them in a setting and putting them into action. He can clarify or obscure their motivations, inject his own judgments into the work, or maintain a pose of detached objectivity — if it is possible to be objective about characters one has invented and placed in situations of one’s own contriving. Outright changes in the Primary World are permitted. Few novels or plays reproduce human speech with all its padding words, repetitions, pauses and grunts. Phonetic

3

renderings of local dialect can strain the eyes and ears of all but the most fervent realist, as D. H. Lawrence proved by reproducing the patois of Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Shakespeare’s plays embellish reality by having people speak in iambic pentameters and blank verse. When Cleopatra informs Antony that ‘eternity was on our lips and eyes...’ she is speaking great poetry, but few inhabitants of the Primary World could express their love so eloquently. Consistency is a virtue Tolkien proicsses to see in tales about Faérie, but its presence in realistic literature can hardly be taken for granted. Authors of high repute have permitted situational and psychological absurdities which could not occur in the Primary World. Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest is securely founded on them. Even the impeccable Jane Austen has implausibilities of a less extravagant kind. Miss Morland of Northanger Abbey is foolish enough to see life through the eyes of Mrs Radcliffe and her Gothic novels, but she is not made quite foolish enough to be plausibly taken in by the hypocritical Isabella for so long. Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfteld Park is a perspicacious, intelligent man, but only towards the novel’s end does he become aware of Mrs Norris’s blatant malice and stupidity. Mr. Palmer of Sense and Sensibility undergoes a radical, inexplicable character change from nastiness to affability. Such points are minor compared to the wild coincidences in Dostoyevsky’s novels or the liberties taken with plot and psychology by authors of detective and thriller

fiction.® Tolkien attempts to set limits around Faérie by excluding from it certain types of writing. He discounts such works as Gulliver’s Travels — not on account of its satirical intent: I rule it out, because

the vehicle of the satire, brilliant invention though it may be, belongs to the class of travellers’ tales. Such tales report many marvels, but they are marvels to be seen in this mortal world in some region of our own time and space; distance alone conceals them. (Tree and Leaf, p. 18)

This seems

a minor quibble. Gulliver travels in the Primary

World or, to be more exact, in Swift’s replica of it, and visits

distant countries. Is this much different in principle from Tolkien’s Middle-earth which is set in the far history of our Primary World? Why should distance in space be less worthy than distance

in time? Moreover,

4

The Hobbit and The Lord

of the Rings are travellers’ tales. Bilbo and Frodo journeys ‘there and back again’, both of which recorded in “The Red Book of Westmarch’, the source from which Tolkien claims to have drawn Tolkien also excludes any story which uses the of dream, the dreaming of actual human sleep, to

make great have been

manuscript both tales. machinery explain the

apparent occurrence of marvels. A fairy story, he thinks, should be presented as ‘true’, and it cannot therefore tolerate

any mechanism which suggests it to be a figment or an illusion. Because of their dream framework Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories cannot be accepted as fairy stories. The very root of their marvels, Tolkien adds, is satiric, a mockery of unreason. The dream element is not a mere machinery of introduction and ending, but inherent in the action and transitions. Tolkien raises several interesting questions which should be explored further. The Alice worlds are presented within a technical dream framework, but Tolkien does not pursue the question of what actually makes them dream-like, and does it follow, in any case, that a dream is ‘untrue’? Whether Alice’s adventures can be reckoned a dream is itself a debatable point, and having made no objection to the satire inherent in Gulliver’s Travels, why object to its presence in the Alice books? Another type of story excluded from Faérie is the beastfable: The magical understanding by men of the proper languages of birds and beasts and trees, that is much nearer to the true purposes of Faerie. But in stories in which no human being is concerned; or in which the animals are the heroes and heroines, and men and

women, if they appear, are mere which the animal form is only device of the satirist or preacher, not fairy-story... (Tree and Leaf,

adjuncts; and above all those in a mask upon a human face, a in these we have beast-fable and p.20)

There are several objections to this. The very possession of language by beasts and trees is, in itself a humanising factor, particularly if they can hold rational conversations of the sort we associate with the human species. And why can animals not be the centre of a story? Tolkien writes before the appearance of Richard Adams’ novel Watership Down’ which places rabbits at the centre of attention. Admittedly a crudely moralistic beast-fable would kill the charm of a work,

5

just as a too blatant ‘message’ can kill most works of creative fiction, but Watership Down has no crude message of this kind. Among beast-fables Tolkien numbers Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, a work not immediately known for blatant preaching or satire, but, even if a work does have satirical elements, much depends upon the reader’s ability to perceive them. Gulliver’s Travels has been read by many children and adults who have been oblivious to its satirical purpose, whereas Tolkien, who denied all satirical and allegorical intent, saw his The Lord of the Rings interpreted in such terms.® What matters, after all, is whether a work can

stand up on its own after the object of the satire or allegory has been forgotten. Such is the case with Swift’s work but not, unfortunately, with the work of Tolkien’s fellow Fantasy writer, C. S. Lewis, in whose books christian allegory is so obvious that, if Tolkien’s doctrine were followed, they

should lose their place in Faérie.® Manlove formulates definition of Fantasy:

the

following

succinct

and

useful

A fiction evoking wonder and containing a substantial and irreducible element of supernatural or impossible worlds, beings or objects with which the reader or the characters within the story become on at least partly familiar terms. (Modern Fantasy, p. 10)

A work must be an acknowledged piece of fiction by its author, and not an account of remarkable experiences which he claims to be true. As an example of the latter, Manlove cites Bishop Leadbeater’s account of fairies in Ireland.!° The point is a good one, but the example unfortunate. Leadbeater was not attempting to tell a tale. Whatever the authenticity of his vision, he was recording his observations of the fairy population. His work has no plot or story line. An anthropologist, writing up his observations of life in primitive tribes, would not be regarded as an author of realistic fiction, so there is no reason to regard the bishop as an author of fantastic fiction in the literary sense. It is a work such as Joan

Grant’s Winged Pharaoh’

which causes problems of classifi-

cation. Set in the first dynasty of ancient Egypt, and narrated in the first person, it tells of a young princess who enters a

temple to be trained as a priest of Anubis, thereby acquiring supernatural powers. She afterwards rules as joint Pharaoh with her brother. The novel fulfils all the requirements of the 6

above

definition,

and could

therefore

be rated a first class

novel in the Fantasy genre. Matters are complicated, however, because the ‘novel’ is allegedly an autobiography of one of Joan Grant’s many previous incarnations. She believes it to be true in Primary, not Secondary World terms.!? A definition of the novel’s genre will therefore depend upon an assessment of Joan Grant’s truthfulness or sanity, which readers cannot judge anyway. And, if the novel can be enjoyed as Fantasy, does it matter what its author believes?

Lin Carter seems to think it does.'? She states with alarming certainty that the poets of the Homeric age believed in their gods and monsters. So to a lesser extent, did the authors of medieval

romances.

None

of them,

therefore,

was

con-

sciously writing Fantasy. William Morris, on the other hand, was an educated Englishman who knew that dragons were a biological impossibility but still put them into a story. This point of view bristles with difficulties. In many cases it is impossible to assess the author’s own beliefs, and why should a reader be bound to them? For Dante, who believed in heaven

purgatory and hell, his Divine Comedy was presumably a work of creative fiction. A reader, who considers angels and devils to be in the same category of impossible beings as elves and unicorns, might prefer to see it as Fantasy. Manlove draws an interesting distinction between Fantasy and Science Fiction: Peake’s

Gormenghast,

for instance,

has no

connection

with our

sphere of possibility: the author suggests no way in which it might be reached from our world, nor does he give it any location in time or space. Nothing ‘supernatural’ or magical by our standards is in fact present... Only the existence of the realm itself is impossible or wholly ‘other’ in relation to ours... In science fiction we find that such otherness is never present, however remote the location: for example, the planets described in Frank Herbert’s Dune or the far galaxy in Asimov’s Foundation trilogy are possible worlds in that they are set in our universe and describe the sorts of events and civilizations that conceivably could exist, whether now or in the future. (Modern Fantasy, p. 3)

A distinction between Fantasy and Science Fiction based on conceivability is difficult to sustain. Gormenghast is not

located in a place or time one can readily identify, but that alone does not make it an ‘other’ world. Although a bizarre place, packed with ludicrous people, it is less strange than many worlds presented in Science Fiction. If a world becomes 7

possible merely because its author pronounces it to be on another planet, then Peake would only need to insert a statement to that effect and his Gormenghast would become, in theory, a ‘possible’ world. The Foundation trilogy’* has itself many inconceivable and impossible things: jumps by space ship through ‘hyperspace’, atomic reactors the size of walnuts, and men with startling powers of mental telepathy. The ‘time kettles’ of another Asimov

novel,’5

short stories,!©

and the time

are no more

‘shuttle’ of Poul Anderson’s

conceivable in Primary World

terms than the magic stone of Charles Williams’ novel,’’ or the magic rings by which C. S. Lewis sends children into other dimensions.'*® Neither rings nor the dimensions are less conceivable than the ‘parallel’ universes of another Asimov

novel.!® When Faérie is industrialised and given a technology, it is called Science Fiction. The machine replaces magic, technical jargon the spell or incantation, and the wizard acquires a labcoat to be called a scientist. Different types of magic, perhaps, but both are equally impossible. Manlove follows Tolkien in asserting that the supernatural or impossible element in a story must be substantial or irreducible,

and therefore

rejects beast-fables, and the Alice

books: the former because the supernatural is part of the moral purpose of the tale, the latter because the supernatural is a symbolic extension of a purely human mind. T.H. White’s The Once and Future King is excluded because Arthur,

Merlyn and Gramarye ‘are all versions of Britain idealized’.”° The final clause in Manlove’s definition states that the mortal characters in a story should be on at least partly familiar terms with the supernatural or impossible elements within it. This distinguishes Fantasy from the ghost or horror story, where the supernatural is encountered as an alien force, particularly effective when it intrudes into ordinary domestic life. Supernatural forces are present in Fantasy too, but they are matched by almost equally potent supernatural powers for good. This too is an interesting distinction which loses

its force on closer inspection.

Bram

Stoker’s Dracula

represents an intrusion of evil into the domestic affairs of a group of people, and he is matched by potent powers for good in the shape of brave young men and sacred symbols. The

more

characters

in the work,

and

the readers,

become

far

familiar with the: Count than anybody ever does with 8

Tolkien’s Sauron, and yet the novel is not generally numbered among works of Fantasy. Moreover, supernatural interventions need not always be gruesome. They can be friendly and helpful.*? Whether hostile or cooperative, the intrusion of supernatural forces into human life is impossible by normal Primary World standards, and the separation of ghost and horror stories from Fantasy on these grounds is unconvincing. A definition of Fantasy to include all the works commonly accepted as belonging to the genre would be a near impossible achievement. Rather than quibble ungratefully over other people’s attempts, it would be more constructive to return to

the concept which both Tolkien and Manlove see as the essence of Faérie and Fantasy: the making of a Secondary World which is ‘other’ and ‘impossible’. All writers of creative fiction are subcreators of Secondary Worlds. The Secondary World of a non-fantastic writer will be as close to the Primary World as his talents and the needs of his art will allow. By the very nature of his art, some changes have to be made to the Primary World before it enters literature, if only to make the work easier to read. A licence is granted to writers of ‘normal’ creative fiction to change the Primary World for the purpose of their art. Fantasy begins when an author’s Secondary World goes beyond that licence and becomes ‘other’. It is impossible to seek a definition of Fantasy without enquiring about the licence and its limits. Which aspects of ‘Reality’ have to be changed, and to what degree, to turn the normal Secondary World of creative fiction into an ‘other’ world of Fantasy? Answers to these questions require an examination of some Secondary Worlds, but a few general observations can be made now. Whatever the state of affairs inside a Secondary World, a degree of ‘otherness’ can be imparted by that world’s location in relation to the Primary World. Some works of Fantasy do not take the reader into a Secondary World away from our own. Instead, the author constructs a replica of the Primary World into which he imtroduces impossible creatures or objects, or allows impossible things to happen. Bram Stoker introduces a vampire into Victorian London, and Alan

Garner a unicorn into Manchester.” In this type of narrative the reader enjoys a certain security, because he still has his feet on Primary soil, no matter how pleasant or repelling the intruding forces might be. The result is perhaps less exotic, )

less glamorous

than the subcreation

of a new ‘other’ world

away from Primary life, which might explain a general reluctance to accept such Secondary Worlds as Fantastic, demonstrated by Tolkien’s rejection of Gulliver’s Travels and Manlove’s desire to put ghost stories into a separate genre. Why the intrusion of impossible objects, like magic stones, should bring Charles Williams into Fantasy, whereas the intervention of equally impossible creatures such as ghosts, or vampires, should put a work into a different genre is a little hard to see. The second type of location is more readily admitted to Fantasy. A secondary World is set apart and made distinct from the Primary World, and yet still remains in some sort of visible relationship with it. If previous terms are adhered to, such a subcreation should be called a Tertiary World, because the author’s replica of the Primary World is, strictly speaking, itself a Secondary World. A Tertiary World can be set apart from our own in time, and placed in the past or future of our

own world. It can be distanced in space, and located in some region of our own planet (The Water Babies; Gulliver’s Travels). It may be located on some other planet of our Primary Universe. A popular device is to locate the Tertiary World in another ‘dimension’ which is reached through some type of doorway or by some means of transport. The children of Alan Garner’s Elidor reach the country of that name on the vibrations of a fiddle played within the ruins of a church. C. S. Lewis’ children find their way into Narnia through the back of a wardrobe. His adult hero Ransom reached Perelandra in a mysterious box. A more controversial means of entering another dimension, condemned by Tolkien, is the dream. There are many possible permutations. If a Tertiary World is reached by some form of machinery, such as a space ship, or if the World possesses a technology of its own, the work will probably be labelled Science Fiction. If reached by machineless methods, by spell or magic doors or magic rings, it will be dubbed

Fantasy. The same principle, however, operates in

each case: a world set apart from our own is entered through a type of doorway or by some form of transport. A third type of location is a world set apart from the Primary World but having no visible link with it. The works mentioned above have a traveller or a dreamer who leaves 10

the Primary World for adventures in Secondary life. In the third category Secondary Worlds are simply presented as existing, and there are no intermediary characters to travel between them and Primary existence. There is no clue as to the whereabouts of Lord Dunsany’s Pegana.*? The world might be in the past, present or future of this or some other planet or dimension. The very absence of a link can have an unsettling effect on the reader, quite apart from any strange things to be found within the world itself. Theoretically it would be possible for an author to place his Secondary World in another dimension, or on another planet, and then to narrate a tale of suburban life in amodern English provincial town. The ‘otherness’ of such a tale would lie in the intriguing assumption that life in other dimensions could be an exact replica of the more humdrum kinds of existence available here. As amusing as the assumption is, it is not the sort of Secondary World lovers of Fantasy would wish to see. Location plays an important role in determining a degree of ‘otherness’, but works commonly accepted as Fantastic also contain ‘marvels’. The Primary World has not only to be duplicated, even in another dimension. It has to be changed. To see how and where it can be changed is the purpose of this study. The choice of Worlds is large and space is limited. As interesting as it would be to wander at length through various realms of enchantment and gloom, only five authors are considered here. Tolkien is an obvious and inevitable first choice as an author and a theoretician of Fantasy. An exploration of Middle-earth will serve two purposes: the first to establish the changes he makes in Primary existence to make his Secondary World ‘other’, the second to examine his theories in relation to his practice. Lewis Carroll comes next. His Secondary Worlds are uncompromisingly ‘other’, and in strong contrast to Middle-earth. His techniques can be usefully compared to Tolkien’s, and the exercise is particularly interesting in view of Tolkien’s opinion of the Alice books. Peake is also an inevitable choice. Second in popularity only to Tolkien as an acknowledged author of Fantasy, he is the subcreator of a Secondary World different from Tolkien’s, yet equally powerful in its imaginative force. Nikolay Gogol follows after Peake. From a different century and country, Gogol shows a close affinity with Peake, although there can 14

be no question of influence. They use similar techniques to construct their Secondary Worlds, but Gogol is unique among the five writers in that his ‘other’ world is ostensibly the Primary World of his own day and age. Tolkien objected to Gulliver’s Travels because its marvels are taking place in our own world separated only by distance. What would he have said of a work in which the Secondary World is separated from its author by no distance at all? And yet NN is arguably the strangest place under consideration. Kenneth Grahame’s River Bank is the last world to be explored. Banished from Faérie by Tolkien’s decree, its ethos is the closest to Middleearth, and the wisdom of Tolkien’s ban will therefore have to

be considered. All the worlds in this study represent substantial Secondary or Tertiary Worlds, as distinct from works in which the ‘other’ world figures only briefly in the tale. Moreover, with the possible exception (to be qualified later) of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, none of these worlds depends greatly for its otherness on the intrusion of magic or supernatural forces, no matter whether the magic is worked by magician’s spell or scientist’s machine. This is not to imply that such Secondary Worlds have no place in Fantasy. On the contrary, magic and spurious technology are all too obvious methods of inducing otherness,

as many

imitators

of Tolkien, and the writers of

pulp science fiction have proved. There are alternative methods as the following chapters will try to show.

12

Chapter 2

J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973): MIDDLE-EARTH

Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world.

(The Lord of the Rings)

Middle-earth

of Tolkien’s

lished in 1954,!

The Lord of the Rings, first pub-

is not set in another dimension or in a dream

but on our own earth at some remote geological epoch. We are assured in the Prologue that those days, the third age of Middle-earth, are long past and that the shape of the land has been changed, while in the narrative itself there are hints of cataclysmic upheavals in the past and of more yet to come. Our attention is focused on the events of one year of the Third Age, according to the elven calendar, from the autumn of 3018 to November 3019. Rooted firmly in the Primary World, Tolkien and the reader are not contemplating an ‘invented’ world, but are looking as historians at events long passed, and so there is much in Middle-earth that is familiar to us: the sun and moon, the seasons, many familiar landscapes, plants and flowers.” Against this background of 13

familiarity Tolkien introduces exotic and alien things without straining Secondary Belief, because they appear as objects or creatures

which

once

existed

in the world

but,

with

the

changefulness of mortal lands, have now vanished or altered their appearance. The physical laws of the Primary World are not flouted. Middle-earth is a stable place with no startling changes of shape and size. Frodo once expresses the mocking hope that Gandalf will change Sam into a spotted toad, but Gandalf does no magic of this kind in the novel, and it is doubtful whether he could. Most of Gandalf’s feats are those of a man with a strong will and highly developed powers of mind, whose magic is never of the fortuitous abracadabra kind where marvellous effects are achieved by the waving of a wand. It is the result, instead, of hard work and the manipulation of forces which we do not understand, although Tolkien cleverly gives the impression that, had we the necessary learning, we too might master them. Gandalf’s ‘spells’ require knowledge and a mental energy which is not inexhaustible. He is weakened by the closing spell he puts on the door in the Mines of Moria, so that he feels in no condition to cope

with the Balrog afterwards. But he can never perform miracles even at the best of times, and his powers, although great and wonderful in the eyes of others, are limited. The rings of power, particularly The One Ring, are the most prominent magical objects in the book with the power to make their wearer invisible. They too are not ‘magical’ in a casual or fortuitous sense, but are the products of knowledge combined with long, arduous toil. Tolkien describes their making, and the principles behind it, as an ‘art’ or ‘craft’. The rings are ‘forged’ by elven smiths, or by Sauron in the furnaces of Orodruin. Only a slight difference in presentation would make them ‘scientific’ rather than magical. Galadriel is puzzled by Frodo’s and Sam’s use of the word ‘magic’ to describe her arts, and hears with dismay that the same word is used to describe the deceits of Sauron. For Galadriel her mirror is an art, for Sam and Frodo it is magic, and only the absence of technical or mechanical terms stops the mirror from becoming a prop of Science Fiction, perhaps a rather advanced form of radar. The laws of time, space and distance are the same in Middle-earth as in our own world. Most people travel on foot 14

or on horseback with no magical form of transportation. Occasionally journeys are effected by super-beasts, such as Gwahir and Shadowfax, who do not tax our credulity, because they are presented as species which have either vanished or become diminished in the course of evolution. The main, serious adjustment to our sense of time is in Tolkien’s clever treatment of history. Having placed Middle-earth in a remote epoch of our own world, Tolkien gives it a long and complex history of its own. The novel covers one year of the Ring-bearer’s quest, yet to grasp fully the significance of that year, a fair knowledge of events in the preceding six millennia is required. The narrative of The Lord of the Rings has countless references to Middle-earth’s past, not as digressions but as information vitally relevant to events in the ‘present’. Gandalf tells Frodo at the beginning how the rings of power were forged, and how the One Ring came to be made. Aragorn tells the Hobbits how Beren the mortal man

loved an Elf-maid, Tinuviel, who

renounced immortality to remain with him. Both fought the Enemy Morgoth and his servant Sauron. The story has particular significance for Aragorn: he too is an enemy of Sauron and in love with another Elf-maid, Arwen, descendent of Tinuviel, and she too must become mortal to remain with

him. Interest and poignancy is added to history by the different perspectives on it which a short, long or endless lifespan

can

bestow;

and here we encounter a serious violation

of Primary World norms. Some of Middle-earth’s inhabitants such as the Elves, the Ents and Tom Bombadil are immortal.

Aragorn and other Numenoreans have a life span three times that of other mortal men, while the Hobbits are long lived by ordinary mortal standards, with their coming of age fixed at thirty-three. Bombadil calls himself ‘Eldest’, a title which Celeborn also gives Treebeard. Tom remembers the first acorn and the first raindrop, and was on earth before it was

even inhabited. For Treebeard, Saruman is young Saruman who only appeared in Middle-earth two thousand years previously. The King of Rohan comes from an ancient line but, for the Ents, he and his ancestors are only a passing tale,

and, for Legolas the Elf, five hundred years is ‘but a little while.’ It is Legolas who explains the elvish concept of Time and its duration to the Company after they have left Lothlorien,

15

where

the month spent under Galadriel’s protection seems

like two

or three days. Time, Legolas tells the others, does

not tarry, but change places:

and growth are not the same in all

For the Elves the world moves, and it moves both very swift and very slow. Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by: it is a grief to them. Slow, because they do not count the running years, not for themselves. The passing seasons are but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream. Yet beneath the Sun all things must wear to an end at last. (The Lord of the Rings, part I, pp. 404-5).

In the elvish calendar a year is the equivalent of 144 years in mortal time, so it is clear why love between Elf and Mortal is fraught with tragedy. When Elrond tells Aragorn that Arwen is older than he, there is no question of exaggeration, for she is 2,710 years old at their first meeting while Aragorn is a mere 20.2 No wonder that the Elves’ view of history differs from that of men. Something of their attitude is communicated to the Hobbits who come to see history as a stream which flows relentlessly on. “The story seems to be going on, but I am afraid Gandalf has fallen out of it,’ Pippin tells Treebeard. On the stairs of Cirith Ungol, Frodo and Sam

suddenly see themselves not as a separate episode in history but as the continuation of one long tale. Sam observes that he and Frodo are carrying on the same story as Beren and Tinuviel: Don’t the great tales never end?’, he enquires ungrammatically, to which Frodo replies that they never end as tales, but people in them come and go as their part ends. A general preoccupation with the past in Middle-earth is matched, in some quarters, by a concern for the future. Gandalf

reminds

Denethor,

Steward

of Gondor,

that

in

sending the Ring to the fire, he is thinking of other men, other lives and time still to be. In ‘The Last Debate’ he describes his present task as uprooting the evil in the fields that we know so that those who come after may have clean earth to till. ‘What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.’ The full point of his message becomes clear at the end of the novel, which also marks the end of the Third Age, when

Gandalf tells Aragorn that his reign will inaugurate a new age. All lands around him shall be the dwelling of Men, and the Elves shall fade or depart. This completes and strengthens Tolkien’s historical framework around his Secondary World, 16

because

the

reader,

a Mortal,

is made

to feel that we

are

continuing Middle-earth’s history today as part of Frodo’s and Sam’s story. Elves, Dwarves, Ents no longer exist on earth, not because they are figments of Tolkien’s imagination, but because their time in Middle-earth is over. Tolkien further strengthens the plausibility of his subcreations by ‘correcting’ our misconceptions of the Elves. We have erred by trivialising them into wee folk with wings and amusing habits. The historical ‘truth’ behind our misconceptions is much greater than hitherto imagined: the Elves were a race high and beautiful, the People of the Great Journey, the People of the Stars and, dwelling now beyond the circles of the world, they do not return. No Secondary World now under study has such a wealth

of historical detail and such a complex of perspectives. Plausibility is further strengthened by Tolkien’s exactitude with dates and times. When Frodo wakes up in Rivendell after his escape across the ford, Gandalf informs him that it is ten o’clock in the morning of 24 October. Throughout the narrative it is possible to follow events nearly on a day to day basis. In the “Tale of Years’ Tolkien gives almost a year by year account of events which took place during the Second and Third Ages, and a day by day record of the Great Year leading to the Ring’s destruction. The appendices in volume three are a masterly device to give the whole narrative historical credibility, because in them we find the ‘documents’ from which Tolkien has written up the story. The principal source of his history is Bilbo’s diary, with supplementary accounts by Frodo, which constitute The Red Book. The original has not been preserved but has come down through many copies made principally for the descendants of Sam’s children. Part academic joke, part literary device, these spurious documents complete the artistic illusion and make Middle-earth a substantial world which easily inspires Secondary Belief. A well defined geography matches Tolkien’s historical exactitude. Maps are obligingly supplied to indicate the whereabouts of different lands and to follow the routes of everybody’s travels. Without these maps it would be nearly impossible to grasp the sequence and point of many events, and the constant necessity of consulting them gradually increases our belief in the story. Tolkien has a marked talent i

for describing landscape, and again he mixes the familiar and the strange in a manner which makes us ready to accept the unfamiliar. In Fangorn Forest we encounter the ash, elder and rowan trees, together with the cypress and the cedar. In Ithilien are olive and bay trees and the scent of thyme is smelled in the air. Amidst this familiar vegetation are the mallorn tree, the flowers elanor and niphredil of Lothlorien,

and the herb athelas

of Gondor

and the North. They are

accepted as readily as we accept strange beasts, because they are species which once grew in Middle-earth but have since disappeared. Tolkien’s achievement lies not so much in the

invention of landscapes but in his ability to represent familiar scenery, which is entirely in accordance with the view, expressed in his essay on fairy-stories, that one of the aims of Fantasy is to help us see our own world afresh. Magic in Tolkien’s world is reduced to the level of an ordinary craft while normal aspects of the Primary World are cast in a new and exciting light. A volcano becomes a ‘mountain of fire’, and its upheaval when the Ring is dropped into its ‘furnaces’ is an accurate description of a volcanic eruption. By avoiding such technical terms as ‘lava’ the volcano becomes an exciting figment of Tolkien’s ‘other’ world but no less exciting, in fact, than the ‘real’ thing to which our imaginations have become accustomed and consequently dulled. Frodo is made to undergo an experience in Lothlorien that Tolkien doubtless thinks should be shared by us all: ..-never before had he been so suddenly the feel and texture of a tree’s skin and felt a delight in wood and the touch of as carpenter; it was the delight of the

and so keenly aware of of the life within it. He it, neither as forester nor living tree itself. (Part I,

p. 366)

There are no landscapes in Middle-earth which cannot be imagined in our own Primary World, from the gardens of the Shire to the green pastures of Rohan. Forests become much more exciting places once we have identified them with the Ents and the Galadhrim, and anybody who has entered a thick and ancient wood will recognise his own feelings in those experienced by the Hobbits as they enter the Old Forest: Looking ahead they could see only tree-trunks of innumerable sizes and shapes: straight or bent, twisted, leaning, squat or slender, smooth

or gnarled and branched; and all the stems were

18

green or grey with moss and slimy, shaggy growths... There was no sound, except an occasional drip of moisture falling through the still leaves. For the moment there was no whispering or movement among the branches; but they all got an uncomfortable feeling that they were being watched with disapproval, deepening to dislike and even enmity. (Part I, p. 122)

In conversation with Merry and Pippin Treebeard paints a contrast between wild and natural scenery, beloved of the Ents, and the cultivated gardens desired by the Entwives: ...for the Ents loved the great trees, and the wild woods, and the

slopes of the high hills; and they drank of the mountain-streams, and ate only such fruit as the trees let fall in their path... But the Entwives gave their minds to the lesser trees, and to the meads in the sunshine beyond the feet of the forests; and they saw the sloe in the thicket, and the wild apple and the cherry blossoming in spring, and the green herbs in the waterlands in summer, and the

seeding grasses in the autumn fields. (Part II, p. 79)

All Middle-earth is permeated with Tolkien’s love for living and growing things. It is a sign of Sauron’s evil that he has power to torture and destroy hills and gardens, and his own land is desolate. The history and geography of Middle-earth have been carefully delineated. What now of its inhabitants? On the whole, Tolkien adheres to the usual division of Primary Life and keeps minerals, plants, animals and human beings separate. No rabbits wear frock coats;no mirrors answer the riddles of

a Queen. Nevertheless distinctions are blurred as inanimate objects are sometimes awarded human qualities to a degree which goes beyond the requirements of figurative speech. The Ring in particular is personified. Gandalf assures Frodo that a Ring of Power looks after itself, and that The Great Ring left Gollum deliberately because it ‘was trying to get back to its master’. Does Gandalf imply that the Ring has

human powers of thought and reflection, or does he refer to a degree of magnetism which, for technical reasons beyond our knowledge, exists between it and Sauron? Similarly

personified is the mountain Caradhras. Gimli the Dwarf always speaks of it as a person who dislikes Elves and Dwarves. Tolkien seems to concur and describes an avalanche as the last stroke of the mountain’s malice, ‘as if Caradhras

was satisfied that the invaders had been beaten off and would not dare to return’. A tree filled with equal malice traps Merry and Pippin. Its very name, ‘Old Man Willow’, suggests Lg

human attributes, and Tom Bombadil addresses it as a person. Treebeard also refers to his trees as people, some good, some bad. He once knew some old willows ‘as quiet and sweetspoken as a young leaf’, whereas other trees were physically ‘sound as a bell’ yet morally ‘bad right through’. Beasts too are credited with rational thought and reflection. The Eagles think and converse intelligently, and even the fox who encounters the three Hobbits sleeping outdoors in the Shire is credited with sophisticated ponderings: ‘ “Hobbits!” he thought. “Well, what next...? There’s something mighty

queer behind this”’.’* This humanisation of objects, plants and beasts is, apart from longevity, the most drastic amendment to the Primary World so far encountered. Fortunately it does not mar the plausibility of Middle-earth, because an author is at liberty to populate his Secondary World with rational beasts who did perhaps exist in the past, and may even do so today, if we knew how to address them! Nevertheless Tolkien seems to have violated his own ban on beast-fables in which human beings wear animal masks. A more serious fault is inconsistency. Why are the Eagles capable of rational conversation with Gandalf whereas a highly intelligent horse, Shadowfax, can only listen to his instructions? If birds are articulate enough to act as Saruman’s spies, and a fox can have coherent thoughts, are other small creatures similarly gifted? If so, Sam and Frodo seem to be guilty of cannibalism in eating that rabbit on the borders of Mordor. Such inconsistencies may be reckoned an artistic blemish on Tolkien’s part, or simply an aspect of Middle-earth’s life he never got round to explaining. Nevertheless Tolkien maintains a physically stable Secondary World in which only Beorn and his kin can change shape. Although he figures prominently in The Hobbit, Beorn does not appear in the longer novel, maybe because Tolkien realised that such fluidity of shape was not in accordance with the more serious ethos of his later work. Even in bear form, Beorn and his kind seemed to preserve their human nature, and this is true

of all the ‘people’ of Middle-earth, whatever their size or shape. Most of them remain essentially human in manner and appearance. Only the Ents, twelve to fourteen feet tall, resembling the trees they look after, depart drastically from human shape and even they have arms, legs, eyes and human 20

voices. The Hobbits, like Dwarves, are smaller than men and

have furry feet. Elves too are manike but more handsome with rich voices. Physiologically and_ biologically these peoples are much the same. They eat the same food, apart from the Ents who have a liquid diet, and the Orcs who eat

food others consider unclean. Differences between races in Middle-earth seem to be mainly cultural, not biological, although the immortality possessed by the Elves poses a problem. What stops them ageing, and, if like Arwen, one of them chooses mortality, how is the process of decay set in motion? Tolkien does not enlighten us. In the portrayal of cultural differences Tolkien demonstrates another aspect of his genius. Each people of Middleearth has a clearly defined culture and life pattern reflected in their names, dwelling places, language, history, folk-lore, aesthetic tastes and food. Nomenclature is carefully worked out and could form the subject of a lengthy separate study. It is impossible to analyse names fully here, or to discuss their origins. The dwarf names, and Gandalf’s, are derived from the The Elder Edda, but such knowledge is not essential to our enjoyment. It is more important for the reader that names should ring ‘true’ within the context of the Secondary World. When elven names are grouped together they all sound unmistakeably elvish. Mellifluous and soft to the ear, many have more than two syllables with the liquid consonants | and r predominant. Longer names are rich with assonance and partial

vowel

harmony:

‘Galadriel’,

Gilgalad’,

‘Celeborn’:

melodious names for a lofty and beautiful people. The Orcs, in contrast, have names

‘Shagrat’, ‘Ufthak’.

‘Azog’,

which are short and harsh: ‘Gorbag’,

‘Ugluk’,

‘Grishnakh’,

‘Lugdush’,

‘Snaga’,

Velars, back vowels, harsh sibilants and cacophan-

ous sounds express the nature of this uncouth race, the pronounciation of whose names seems an exercise in spitting, hissing and sneering. The Hobbits show a fondness for disyllabic forenames and an attachment to the vowel o: ‘Frodo’,

‘Lotho’,

‘Bilbo’, ‘Milo’, ‘Hugo’, ‘Drogo’, ‘Dora’ and

‘Rory’ all roll easily from the tongue. Their surnames are quaintly absurd. Note the pleasure Tolkien takes in a roll call of participants in Bilbo’s farewell party: Then there was a dead silence, until suddenly, after several deep breaths, every Baggins, Boffin, Took, Brandybuck, Grubb,

21

Chubb,

Burrows,

Bolger,

Bracegirdle,

Brockhouse,

Goodbody,

Hornblower, and Proudfoot began to talk at once. (Part I, p. 39)

These names are combinations of quaint sounds or mildly incongruous meanings, and reflect the charming, ridiculous but not quite helpless character of their owners. Any race which boasts the name Hornblower and Proudfoot must have a streak of steel buried deep within its absurdity — soft as butter but tough as old tree roots, as Gandalf puts it. This duality in their character is also suggested by their habit of combining quaint surnames with high-sounding forenames as in ‘Meriadoc Brandybuck’, ‘Peregrin Took’. Some people have more than one name. Gandalf is given various names by different races in accordance with their own culture, so he is ‘Mithrandir’ to the Elves and ‘Tharkun’

to the dwarves. A difference in name can denote a difference in status or function. ‘Strider’ is the contemptuous nickname for Aragorn in Bree which is also adopted by the Hobbits when he joins their company. As something of his dignity becomes known, ‘Aragorn’ is used more often. In Lothlorien he is known as ‘Elessar’, the name he afterwards bears as King. Because a name can be used to exert power over its owner, some races of Middle-earth are reluctant, like Treebeard, to reveal their ‘true’ names to strangers. The Dwarves do not reveal theirs at all. And, lest its very sound bring evil, Sauron is never named in Gondor. The mere name of Elbereth, as

Sam and Frodo discover, has a potency for good.® Places are named with as much care as people. Maps reveal a multitude of names which ring true with the people who have named the place. Shire names have an Old England flavour. Divided into ‘Farthings’ it boasts of such village names as ‘Overhill’, ‘Bywater’, ‘Hobbiton’ and ‘Needlehole’ — comfortable,

ridiculous

names

for a secure and rather com-

placent people. Elven place names are sonorous and beautiful. Elrond

dwells

‘Lothlorien’,

in

an

‘Imaladris’

abbreviation

or

‘Rivendell’,

Galadriel

of ‘Laurelindorenan’

in

meaning

‘Land of the Valley of Singing Gold’. ‘Mordor’ and the ‘Barad-dur’ bespeak their own terror which is sharpened by ‘The Mountains of Doom’ and ‘The Ash Mountains’ which surround the country. Nomenclature is only part of Tolkien’s process of individualisation. Each race has its own history within the general

22

history

of Middle-earth.

Nimrodel,

awesome

the

and

Dwarves

more

The of

Elves Durin

homely

sing of Tintviel and

is the Old

Kazad-dtim.

Took

and Less

of Hobbit

history. The Ents do not seem to have heroes, but sing instead of their long search for the Entwives. Races have not only history but also legends, and it is part of Tolkien’s humour to have legends come ‘true’. Just as he presents Dwarves and Elves to us as the historical truth behind our fairy stories, so Ents and Hobbits appear to the men of Middle-earth as materialisations of a legend. Theoden is amazed on seeing Merry and Pippin, even more so on beholding Fangorn and his people, and is sharply rebuked by Gandalf for not recognising them: “They are shepherd of the trees’, answered Gandalf. ‘Is it so long since you listened to tales by the fireside? There are children in your land who, out of the twisted threads of story, could pick the answer to your question. You have seen Ents, O King, Ents out of Fangorn Forest, which in your tongue you call the Entwood. Did you think that the name was given only in idle fancy?’ (Part II,

p. 155)

Each race has its own language, hints of which are often given in the text while longer accounts appear in the appendices. Tolkien presents speech and names as ‘translations’ from the original tongue: ‘In presenting the matter of the Red Book, as a history for people of today to read, the whole of the linguistic setting has been translated as far as possible into terms of our own times,’® he solemly assures us. The Hobbits speak a rustic dialect and conversations in the Shire are rendered appropriately. In Gondor and Rohan a more antique tongue was used, more formal and more terse which explains the loftier speech of Denethor, Eoden and Aragorn. Note the ‘heroic’ manner in which Eowyn addresses the Lord of the Nazgul: ‘Begone, fowl dimmerlaik, lord of carrion!.. Eowyn I am, Eomund’s daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin.

Begone, if you be not deathless!.. (Part III, p. 116)

and compare it to Sam’s challenge to Shagrat: ‘Well, come

on somebody!..

Tell Captain Shagrat that the great

Elf-warrior has called, with his elf-sword too!” (Part II, p. 179)

Orc language is as coarse and vulgar as the Orcs themselves, and Tolkien has modified it in translation, the original

23

language being even more degraded and filthy. Occasionally, loftiness of speech among the ancient peoples makes it difficult to distinguish them one from another. Sam’s rustic, ‘faithful servant’, ‘salt-of-the-earth’ image is also overdone. The most striking examples of individualised speech are seen in Gollum and Treebeard. The Lord of Fangorn has a unique, explicit linguistic philosophy. Entish, he declares, ‘is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to’.? Few people are so honest or unapologetic about their longwindedness! Even out of context, Gollum’s speech is unmistakeable, and curiously harrowing, especially as the Ring comes nearer to destruction: ‘Don’t kill us,’ he wept. Don’t hurt us with nassty cruel steel! Let us live, yes, live just a little longer. Lost lost! We’re lost. And when Precious goes we'll die, yes, die into the dust!’ He clawed up the ashes of the path with his long fleshless fingers. ‘Dusst!’ he

hissed. (Part III, p. 221)

Nomenclature and language help give each race, and individuals within it, a specific colouring. The process of individualisation is carried on with reference to architecture, clothing, aesthetic tastes and cuisine. The Hobbits live in holes which,

as Treebeard observes, sounds very right and proper. Their buildings have round doors and round windows, presumably in sympathy with the over-fed roundness of their bodies. They dress in bright colours, and their garments (waistcoats, breeches, etc.) seem normal by the European standards of the Primary World. Tolkien tells us a lot about their social customs. They like food and are good at cooking. They meet in pubs and drink beer, have parties and give lots of presents. Many smoke a pipe. They are great gossips and will talk endlessly about the ‘small doings of their fathers, grandfathers, and great- grandfathers’ as Gandalf warns Théoden. An insular folk, they distrust foreigners. Dwarves are small but sturdy. Beards are their physical motif as furry feet are of the Hobbits. They wear hoods and belts, their weapon of war is the axe. Underground creatures,

they have the same reverence for caves as Elves have for trees. Their chief fault is greed and a tendency to harbour grudges, but Tolkien dwells at length on their most attractive feature which is a love of beauty in stone, metal and wood. Bilbo’s party is enlivened by wonderful toys from Dale, but their 24

highest aesthetic aims are embodied in Gimli’s discourse to Legolas in which he reveals the lyrical streak, hidden beneath his dwarfish dourness, by describing how he and his race would ‘tend these glades of flowering stone’ beneath Helm’s Deep. The Elves are a mystery. Man-like, and yet apart from men, they are the most attractive people of Middle-earth and the least concretely portrayed, for Tolkien evokes rather than describes them. They are beautiful in voice, appearance and manners, lovers of all growing things. Galadriel’s people actually live in trees. A constant motif in Tolkien’s evocation of them is light. Gollum fears the light in Elvish eyes; the sun shines on Lothlorien but not on Dol Guldur; Galadriel’s phial

flashes rays of unbearable light into the eyes of Shelob, creature of darkness. Elven clothes are not described in detail, but also serve as expressions of light in their whiteness and radiance. Arwen, who has the ‘light of stars’ in her eyes, has a cap of silver lace netted with gems of glittering white. Celeborn and Galadriel dress in white and ride white horses. At her departure from Middle-earth she is robed in ‘glimmering white’, and the single white stone on her ring flickers like a frosty star. Gimli, on leaving Lothlorien, speaks ruefully of

‘the danger of light and joy’. Tolkien explores the difference between the various races as he brings their representatives together. The friendship between Legolas and Gimli highlights many of them. Sometimes a contrast can be amusing. Lindir tells Bilbo that it is not easy for Elves to tell the difference between two mortals: ‘To sheep other sheep no doubt appear different’, he continues tactlessly, ‘But Mortals have not been our study. We have other business’. What that other business is we

never find out. Their love of beauty and the preservation of beautiful things is one of their avowed aims. They are lovers of music and song, preservers of history and tradition. The Elves of Lothlorien have practical skills too: they are skilled archers and horsemen, are good at rope making, ship building and weaving. None of these occupations fully explains how they occupy the long hours of immortality, unless a clue is provided by references to their strange powers of mind. They can evoke mental images as real and convincing as those of waking life. Dreams and memory have a reality for them which mortals cannot experience. Legolas sleeps, ‘if sleep it 25

could be called by Men, resting his mind in the strange paths of elvish dreams, even as he walked open-eyed in the light of this world’.? The ghosts of mortal dead hold no fear for them, and those who have lived in the Uttermost West have power over the seen and the unseen. Yet, in other respects, they are

people of flesh and blood who eat, drink, and fight like mortals. Although they can be killed by violence, natural death does not touch them. They are conceived and born like men, and share the same sexual and intellectual desires. Food, and the manner of eating it, provides another insight

into

cultural

differences.'°

The

Hobbits

in their prosaic

Arcadia rightly consider eating to be a way of life. In The Hobbit Bilbo and the Dwarves consume a carefully documented meal of cakes, tea, beer, red wine, seed cake, coffee, apple tart, buttered scones, mince pies, cheese, cold chicken

and pickles. His farewell feast in The Lord of the Rings lasts all day. The food is rich, varied and prolonged. Guests sit at tables covered with cloths and set with cutlery. Apart from putting their feet on the table, and occasionally dancing on its surface, their manners are good. They have a passion for mushrooms which Farmer Maggot serves to the accompaniment of bacon and beer. Hobbit fare is plain and plentiful, a combination of Old English Farmhouse and Tea Shop. Nothing foreign and fanciful about them: Hobbits avoid grande cuisine to concentrate on home goodness. Red wine is found in the Shire; garlic, one suspects, is not. This is the

food of a people who are happy and hospitable at home but distrust the world outside, fearing the magic of Gandalf as much as the rumours of Mordor. They would not read foreign cookery books. Despite Treebeard’s reference to eating wild fruit dropped from trees, entish diet appears to be exclusively liquid. He gives the Hobbits a draught which, he says, will keep them green and growing for a long time. The effects of this draught begin at the toes and rises steadily through every limb, bringing refreshment and vigour as it courses upwards to the tip of their hair which consequently becomes more curly — a fitting drink for tree-like creatures who are themselves shepherds of trees. The evil peoples of Middle-earth have disgusting eating habits to match their vile natures. The Orcs eat human flesh,

so do Wormtongue

and Gollum. Shelob eats anybody, even

26

~

Orcs. Her vomit, Tolkien tells us, is darkness: the only reference to evacuation of food in the work. Culinary tastes are sharply contrasted in the conflict between Sam and Gollum on the subject of rabbit. Scorning such niceties as vegetables

and herbs,

dear to Sam’s gardener heart, Gollum

wants his meat raw. He also rejects Sam’s offer of fish and chips: ‘Spoiling nice fish, scorching it. Give me fish now, and

keep nassty chips!’'? There are several elven feasts in The Lord of the Rings, but the food is rarely listed. Instead Tolkien concentrates on other peoples’ reactions to it. After the sylvan picnic with Gildor during the Hobbits’ flight to Rivendell, Pippin remembers little of the food and drink; only that the bread surpassed ‘the savour of a fair white loaf to one who is starving.’ The fruits were sweet as wildberries and ‘richer than the tender fruits of gardens.’ He drained a cup filled with ‘a fragrant draught, cool as a clear fountain, golden as a summer after-

noon’.’? Nothing is said of the food in Rivendell, except that it was

all humans

could

desire. Galadriel

holds

a feast, but

only whitemead is mentioned. Two specific forms of food unknown to the Primary World are introduced: Elrond’s drink miruvor and Galadriel’s lembas or waybread. Both are given to travellers as a form of ‘iron rations.’ Tolkien’s reluctance to be more specific about elven diet is understandable. This high and beautiful people, possessed of deep spirituality, must have a cuisine of exceptional taste. Yet, to

invent a whole range of different food for them would upset the balance between the familiar and the unfamiliar which Tolkien otherwise seems anxious to preserve. Moreover, the Elves share the food of other races and so have the same stomachs, in a physiological sense, as mortals. But the imagination shrinks from seeing fish and chips in fair Lothlorien, lest the shimmering, otherworldly image of the Elves, carefully evoked by Tolkien, collapse in bathos. Tolkien is therefore wisely content to let it be known that elven food is much the same as mortal cuisine, but of a rare quality and flavour which, in the absence of actual tasting, can only be conveyed by lyricism. Whatever the attraction of this lofty cuisine, most mortal stomachs would prefer a meal from the sonorously named Barliman Butterbur at The Prancing Pony: There

was

hot soup,

cold meats,

2h

a blackberry

tart, new loaves,

slabs of butter, and half a ripe cheese: good plain food, as good as the Shire could show, and homelike enough to dispel the last of Sam’s misgivings (already much relieved by the excellence of the beer). (Part I, p. 166)

Even the honey distilled from the undying flowers of Elvenhome has little attraction in comparison to this robust collation. Accommodation, food and drink are important requirements in our Primary World. The manner in which they are obtained is dictated by, or reflected in, the economic system. The Shire seems to be an agricultural community and some Hobbits derive their living from the land. Bilbo and Frodo are well-to-do Hobbits and do not work for a living. Bilbo had his money by inheritance, but neither he nor Frodo seem to collect rents from

land, so we assume

that the fortune is in

cash. Where, though, is it kept? We hear of post offices in the Shire but nothing of banks. The Shire has a monetary system, because Bilbo gives away some pennies, and it would be interesting to know

where

these coins are minted. Nobody

ever mentions currency exchange between the different lands. In fact, money and finances are hardly mentioned at all. The economies of Gondor and Rohan are presumably agricultural and feudal. Saruman and Sauron have introduced a measure of industrialisation which relies on slave labour. The Ents live happily on Entdraughts and need no shelter apart from what nature supplies, so presumably do not need money or to earn a living in the conventional sense. Dwarves are skilled miners and craftsmen who seem to get a living by selling their handiwork. The Elves, as usual, are a mystery. Nobody in Lothlorien seems to till the earth, if any could be found in a land which is almost exclusively forest. There is light industry in the form of boat building, handicraft in the form of weaving, but Rivendell does not seem to have even these. In neither country do we hear of a monetary system or trade. Do these lands contain everything that is essential to the Elves’ apparently high standard of living, including raw materials for food and clothing, or does the power of the rings extend to putting them on a firm financial footing? Tolkien is not obliged to give an account of Middle-earth’s commercial life — there is detail enough on other points — but the apparent ability of the Elves to be independent of such considerations is a deviation from the Primary World 28

even more drastic than the phenomena of immortality and talking beasts. Middle-earth contains a wide variety of human virtues and failings: nobility of mind and deep compassion, petty meanness and high cruelty. There is love of many kinds: the love of people for one another and for the living things of the earth. We encounter affection and cordiality among friends, pain at parting, joy at reunion. There are many natural and informative conversations in the work. People exchange views and information, reach understanding, express feelings and find themselves understood. There are misunderstandings too: Gloin’s outburst at Elrond’s council, Gandalf’s snappishness with the Hobbits, Frodo’s comic difficulties with the

Sackville-Bagginses. In short, Middle-earth has the minor joys and upsets common among people of the Primary World. Significant too are the changes in moral and intellectual states. Middle-earth is not a psychologically static world. Frodo grows and matures in the course of his quest and under the burden of the Ring, and at the end he is not the slightly irresponsible Hobbit he was at the beginning. There are important changes in relationship. Gimli overcomes his people’s enmity with the Elves to develop a close friendship with Legolas and a hopeless, platonic love for Galadriel. The closest and most successful study in relationship is found in the journey of Sam, Frodo and Gollum to Mordor. Gollum, enslaved by the Ring and suffering in consequence from a split Gollum/Smeagol personality, is bound by love and hatred, to Frodo the Ring-bearer who is himself fighting the Ring’s malevolent influence. Sam, who dimly perceives this strange bond uniting Gollum and his master, is torn by his love for one and his hatred for the other, while feeling a strange pity for Gollum amidst his general perplexity about the whole situation. Middle-earth is not a place of ‘sans souci’ where sorrow is not allowed to enter. Together with petty faults and trivial shortcomings it contains savage evil committed by creatures seemingly devoid of any moral goodness. Sauron and his Orcs practise torture of mind and body, and know nothing of mercy and compassion. Orcs, trolls, dragons are all creatures

dedicated to evil in its starkest form, and there appears to be a division of Middle-earth’s inhabitants into the good and the bad. None of Sauron’s servants seems capable of goodness or 29

achieving any possibility of redemption. Treebeard tells the Hobbits that trolls were made by the Dark Lord as counterfeit

Ents, just as Orcs were made in parody of the Elves.'? As sub-

creations of Sauron they seem to have no choice but to follow him, because they are intrinsically evil. Other peoples, called the ‘free peoples’ by Treebeard, appear to have a choice because, whereas none of the bad people become good, several of the good fall into evil. Most of the main characters in The Lord of the Rings are made to undergo temptation. Some resist, others fail. Saruman, the greatest wizard of them all, fell even before the narrative started, and

yielded to the powerlust which has long gripped Sauron who, according to Gandalf, was not evil in the beginning. Gandalf, Elrond and Aragorn all resist the great temptation of the Ring. Galadriel’s encounter with this temptation is sharply dramatised by Tolkien. It is Frodo who offers it to her as a free gift which she had been tempted to take by fear or force. Galadriel herself tests the members of the company and senses Boromir’s lust for the Ring to which he finally yields. The

free

people,

therefore,

are

not

immune

to the great

temptations and often fall victim to lesser ones. Much of the difficulty in resisting Sauron arises from the alienation which he has helped to foster among the different peoples. The men of Gondor view the Elves with suspicion: Eomer even refers to Galadriel as a sorceress. The Elves and Dwarves have been enemies for countless years and Gimli is almost refused admission to Lothlorien. Celeborn gives vent to an imprudent and uncharitable outburst against him when he learns of Gandalf’s death. It is Gandalf’s task — and an uphill one — to arouse the conscience of the free peoples against Sauron (without the use of force or fear), a task which would hardly have been necessary were they all ready to do at once what seems good and virtuous. It can be dimly percieved that, in coping with evil, mortals and immortals alike achieve moral growth. The process is not easy, for at the core of it all lie the principles of self-sacrifice and obedience. Evil has to be fought with hard endeavour and no guarantee of success or happiness at the end. Galadriel and Celeborn fight the ‘long defeat’ against Sauron, although she believes she will never be permitted to return to Valinor.'* Galdalf’s encounter with the Balrog, his death and 30

unexpected return, is not a cheap dramatic device. Tolkien could easily have had Gandalf remain alive after defeating the Balrog. Instead, the wizard’s death is emphasised, and he returns having been ‘sent back’ as a more powerful figure to assume the role which should have been Saruman’s. A failure of Will and a submission to evil are counteracted by a volun-

tary encounter with evil and a submission to death.!> Gandalf and the good triumph, and Tolkien has had much to say about the importance of the happy ending. How happy, though, zs the end of The Lord of the Rings? Compared to the they-got-married-and-lived-happily-everafter conclusion of fairy-tales and pantomime, the history of the

Ring

comes

to

a

rather

gloomy

finish,

with

overall

happiness tempered by the unfortunate consequences of victory. The destruction of the One Ring has deprived the other great rings of their power, and the Elves must either leave Middle-earth or fade. Lothlorien is ended. The Ents too feel that their time on Middle-earth is drawing to a close as the Fourth Age begins and with it the dominion of Men. Arwen must taste ‘the bitterness of the mortality that she had taken upon her’, and endure a parting from her father which will last forever, ‘sundered by the Sea and by a doom

beyond the end of the world.’’® Frodo returns to his country and home occupied by Saruman and, even when order is restored, he is without honour in his own country, still suffering the effect of three wounds and the long burden of the Ring. In a world where history goes on, there can be no such thing as an ending, happy or otherwise, until history itself is ended in dissolution or fulfilment. A quest is ended, great deeds are accomplished, but the story still continues. What, then, is the point of virtue and endeavour? In Tolkien’s

Secondary World the point lies in a transcendental destiny beyond Middle-earth itself. Implicitly in the narrative and explicitly in the appendices we learn that there is a ruling force over Middle-earth. In the Uttermost West, close to Elvenhome, are the Valar, demiurgic

guardians of the world who are responsible to “The One’. The men of Gondor observe a ‘standing silence’ before meals: ‘we look’, Faramir says, ‘towards Numenor that was, and beyond to Elvenhome that is, and to that which is beyond

Elvenhome

and will ever

be.'7 The Queen of the Valar,

Elbereth or Varda, the exalted, is frequently invoked by the on

Elves, and by Sam and Frodo in Mordor. On the first occasion ‘another voice’ speaks through Frodo to aid him against Shelob, and both Hobbits defeat the Silent Watchers by invoking Elbereth. The intervention of higher powers is seen throughout the work. Gandalf reveals that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring and not by its maker; Frodo too was meant to have it. Boromir and others dream true dreams telling them to seek help of Elrond in Rivendell. Higher powers, it seems, are determined on the destruction of Sauron and his Ring, making Gandalf, Frodo and the rest servants for this

purpose. Does this mean that their heroism is of little account and that they are merely to walk along a foreordained path? There are factors which seem to militate against the existence of free will even among the free peoples. Nobody

who

wields

the One

Ring ever has strength to

resist its evil — this is the moral dilemma of the book. Use of it brings total corruption to anybody no matter how great, good or wise, and hence the necessity for Gollum’s presence on Mount Doom to achieve by accident(?) what nobody on Middle-earth could have done deliberately. The plot of the novel is tightly constructed to make evil constantly «trip

itself up and achieve its own undoing.'® Boromir’s greed for the Ring and his attack on Frodo sends the Hobbits off to Mordor all the more quickly. The Orcs capture Merry and Pippin and consequently bring them all the faster to Fangorn where, by accident (?), the Hobbits meet Treebeard and rouse the Ents to Saruman’s defeat. Saruman’s treachery ultimately helps the cause since, by setting up arival establishment to Sauron’s, he splits and weakens the enemy. The quarrel between his and Sauron’s Orcs actually helps Pippin and Merry escape. Sauron is trapped by the limitations of his own evil: he cannot conceive that anybody in Middle-earth would prefer to see the Ring destroyed rather than use it. In addition to these examples of good coming out of evil are the numerous ‘lucky’ escapes: from the Nine Riders, the Balrog, Old Man Willow, the Barrow Wight and from many other perils. Even when Sam and Frodo are mistaken for Orc soldiers in Mordor and made to run with the troops, this only serves to get them to Mount Doom speedily. Luck or providence play such a large part as to make at least one critic sceptical about the plausibility of the plot and Frodo’s status as a hero.’? If he is so protected, how can there be any 4

element of risk? Despite this apparent predestination there are constant references in the narrative to ‘choice’ where a decision seemingly depends on the exercise of free will. Frodo accepts the task of guarding the Ring and afterwards, in Rivendell, of bearing it to the fire: ‘I am commanded to go to the land of Mordor, and therefore I shall go’,?° he tells Gollum. After Galadriel has resisted Frodo’s offer of the Ring she remarks: ‘I pass the test...and remain Galadriel...for now we [note

the plural] have chosen, and the tides of fate are flowing.’?? Saying farewell to the Company she says: ‘Maybe the paths that you each shall tread are already laid before your feet,

though you do not see them.’”? From all this it appears that free

will

has

a limited

but

essential

function

and, when

exercised by key people in key situations, it determines a whole course of events. The limited function of free will is to accept or reject an appointed task, to answer promptings of duty, or to ignore them. Frodo accepts the task laid upon him, and his providential protection stems from that basic act of obedience. Galadriel knows that her decision too is a key one. Nobody can resist the Ring’s malevolence once they have chosen it, but that initial choice is free. By taking the Ring from Frodo at that moment, and knowing how to wield it, she could have brought about a new sequence of disaster. By refusing it of her free will she ‘predestines’ another, more worthy set of events, and so can talk later about ‘tides of fate’ and the paths already laid before the Company’s feet. Her apparent fatalism is merely a knowledge of the events her own and Frodo’s free decision will bring about, and so she can foresee his battle with Shelob and prepare the phial to help him through it. The same theme of choice, and of response to a duty, is taken up on the stairs of Cirith Ungol when Sam remarks that heroes of the past did not seek out

their adventures :”° ‘Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually — their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t... We hear

about those as just went on — and not all to a good end...at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end... I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?’ (Part II,

p. 321)

Frodo observes that the people in a tale do not know whether 33

it will have a happy or sad ending, and thereby pinpoints his own heroism. His path is probably laid and he has been protected but, even if he feels protected as a result of his frequent escapes from danger (which is unlikely), he does not know to what end. Many heroes in the past had perished, after narrow escapes, in the wars with Morgoth and Sauron. Frodo has no reason to believe he is going to survive even if he destroys the Ring, and he and Sam have no means of knowing they will ever get out of Mordor alive. It does seem that the ruling powers of Middle-earth had decreed the end of Sauron and, had Frodo refused to co-operate, somebody else would have been chosen: but it is idle to speculate on other permutations of success or failure, because the victory or defeat of Sauron is, in the long run, of minor importance. The story will go on and, as Gandalf assures us, other emissaries of evil will come to Middle-earth. Sauron was but a servant.”* Middle-earth is a testing ground. There are other existences beyond it and death is not annihilation. Gandalf is sent back from death. The oathbreakers are earthbound spirits who are ultimately released to it after expiating their crime. Whether fated to die in Middle-earth or to have ‘immortality within the circles of the world’, each people is conscious of a destiny above and beyond its present state. Arwen, facing the Doom of Men, is assured by Aragorn that they are not bound forever to the circles of the world and will meet again. In Mordor Sam is comforted by the thought that: *...in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was

light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.’?*

We are

not told the nature of this life after death, nor do we know

anything about the Undying Lands where the Elves can live out their immortality, but the certainty of an after death existence runs deep through the narrative, which represents a marked deviation from the Primary World where exist only hope and faith. Because of such certainty, the supernatural in our sense of the word does not exist in Middleearth. The ghosts of the oath breakers do not become ‘familiar’ either to us or to the characters who encounter them. They inspire terror in everybody except Aragorn and Legolas the Elf; but the terror is of a slightly different order from that which would have been experienced in the Primary World. In Middle-earth people are at ease with the fact that 34

the soul survives physical death. Sauron is a spirit who once had a mortal body. Gandalf comes back from the dead in a new incarnation. The ghosts of the oath breakers are terrifying, but they still belong to the natural order of Middleearth. The only unnatural thing about them which doubtless inspires fear is their having to linger in Middle-earth instead of going to whatever sphere is normally destined for them — perhaps the ‘long home of those that fall in battle’ mentioned

by Galadriel.?® Another difference between Middle-earth and our own world lies in the clarity of moral issues. Most moral dilemmas, particularly with regard to the Ring, involve a direct choice between something recognised as evil and something else known to be good. In the Primary World agony is more often caused by uncertainty as to which choice is the good one. However, Tolkien’s Secondary World resembles our own all too well in that many people insist on the ‘wrong’ choice no matter how clear the issue is in their own minds. Enticed by lust, greed or a craving for power, many will go to extraordinary lengths to ensure their own misery and, like Saruman, will even refuse to be helped out of it, having convinced themselves it is somebody else’s fault other than their own. The division of Middle-earth into good and evil peoples is not so distinct or naive as may at first be imagined. We find no organised race of Orcs in the Primary World, but there have been, and still are, individuals and groups whose malice and powers of destruction obscure any signs of perceptible goodness in their characters. Besides them, the normal, bumbling trivial misdeeds of common humanity are as nothing. Why do they exist, why are they like that? Tolkien’s Middle-earth simply puts the old problem in a fresh form. He fervently denied that he was writing allegory, but spoke instead of the applicability of the work to the world that we know. A reader is therefore quite justified in applying the problem of the Ring to the possession of nuclear bombs, and to perceive political parallels between our world and Middle-earth. But there are many more aspects of Middleearth life which find ready applicability here. Nobody in the Primary World is likely to find himself on the same mission as Frodo, but many have been faced with an unpleasant task which, by their own concept of duty, can be done only by them. Many too have laboured at an appointed task and OD

found, on its completion, that glory and triumph have gone elsewhere. The problem of the Ring is one which the wise and powerful of Middle-earth cannot solve, because their very greatness makes them ready victims of its peculiar influence. Only the obscure, humdrum Hobbits can cope. In The Primary World the meek have not yet inherited the earth, but occasionally they will rise from obscurity and achieve what would be impossible for whole armies. Sam and Frodo make a gesture at once practical and symbolic when they throw away weapons and shields on approaching Mount Doom. There are tasks here and in Middle-earth which have to be done by naked will and natural strength, and weapons are useless. Nevertheless, Tolkien is no pacifist. The wizards are forbidden to match Sauron’s power with power, or to seek to dominate Elves or Men by force and fear, but they can, apparently, persuade others to use force against Sauron. Yet Gandalf praises Bilbo’s act of pity in sparing Gollum’s life and urges Frodo to think likewise: ‘Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in

judgement.’?” Why it is permissible to deal out death to an enemy army but not to Gollum

(as bad as an Orc, Frodo

claims), neither

Gandalf nor Tolkien explain, except on the slim grounds that Gollum is destined to destroy the Ring. Whatever the ethics of warfare and killing are in Middle-earth, heroic acts of virtue, compassion or mercy, do yield good results, as they sometimes do in the Primary World, although nobody here or there should take them for granted. Life in both worlds can be cheerful and beautiful, and there as here, some people are more fortunate than others. Whatever they achieve for good or ill everything under the sun, as Legolas observes, wears to an end at last. What then? Immortality, within or outside the circles of the world, enjoyed by Middle-earth inhabitants is applicable as a hope to our Primary existence. To see that hope realised in this vivid Secondary World constitutes its most attractive and enticing quality, and forms an essential part of Tolkien’s affirmative vision of life. It would seem almost inappropriate to assign such a richly documented world to Fantasy, and certain aspects of it do not accord with the principles laid down by Tolkien and 36

Manlove. It is a form of traveller’s tale. The merging, in some cases, of human, animal and inanimate

attributes is not only

a violation of Primary World reality but also of Tolkien’s own precepts on beast-fable. The happy ending, essential in Tolkien’s view for a good fairy story, is seriously overshadowed by the less happy outcome of Sauron’s defeat. Despite its prodigious length and Tolkien’s fondness for description,

the

work

is dynamic,

not

static. It moves

in-

exorably on through a well constructed plot to a dénouement which marks the end of the tale but not, as Gandalf makes clear, the end of history. Characters might drop out of it;

history, as Frodo observes, continues. If T. H. White’s The Once and Future King is to be excluded because it is Britain idealised,

Middle-earth

too

should be banned

from

Faérie.

The Shire with its pubs, gardens, home cooking and rustic contentment is much closer to an ideal Britain than White’s novel, most of which, in any case, is devoted to the gradual disintegration and tragic fall of Camelot. Moreover, Middleearth, with its strict moral laws and the ultimate reward of virtue, either on earth or beyond it, is close to an ideal world,

and parts of it, despite Tolkien’s intentions, come close to christian allegory. The otherness of Tolkien’s subcreation, is caused by several things. It contains ‘impossible’ creatures with physical and mental attributes. Ghosts, wizards and magic are likewise unrecognised in the Primary World. Unlike the Primary World Middle-earth seems to have no recognisable system of economics, finance or trade, but does possess a certainty of immortality, and a knowledge of transcendental powers which here can only be appreciated by hope or faith. Much of this otherness, however, is carefully modified. By putting his events and people in the far geological history of our own World, Tolkien has given his narrative greater verisimilitude. Such wonders as he describes are no less conceivable in an utterly remote past than in an utterly remote future. Magic is not ostentatious. Gandalf performs no stupendous feats. His and Galadriel’s powers of mind are rather less dramatic and ‘impossible’ than those possessed by the inhabitants of Asimov’s Second Foundation.”*® Indeed, had there been a stronger hint of technology in The Lord of the Rings, it too might have been rated as Science Fiction rather than as Fantasy, yet another indication of how thin 37

the alleged distinction between the two genres actually is. Geography, landscape and nature, together with many other things, are the same in Middle-earth as in the Primary World, thus creating the background of familiarity which makes it easier to inspire Secondary Belief in the unfamiliar. Even Middle-earth’s inhabitants, for all their exotic qualities,

are merely variations on the human being. Their physique, although sometimes enlarged, diminished or distorted, is basically human and, what is more important, they have human psychologies. By and large Tolkien has preserved in Middle-earth the same laws governing physical and psychological change as in the Primary World. Galadriel uses her ring to slow down the duration of time in Lothlorien; the Great

Ring has power to prolong life ‘unnaturally’ while many of the characters have ‘natural’ immortality. In most other respects psychological and physical change come about by familiar means: through natural growth and decay, or by the application of external force and skill, and for this reason, Middle-earth, although wonderful, is never weird. A Secondary World in which the normal processes of growth and change are disregarded or distorted can be very odd indeed, as Alice discovers.

38

Chapter3

Lewts Carroll (1832-1898): LOOKING-GLASS

LAND

AND

WONDERLAND I had a dream, which was not all a dream. (Darkness) Thou

dost snore distinctly: There’s meaning in thy snores. (The

Tempest)

Carroll’s Alice books’ are a fascinating contrast to Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Both stories are presented as dreams, with Alice as the dreamer who wakes up into ‘real’ life at the end of each» Her dreams constitute Tertiary Worlds, because each narrative opens with the Secondary World of Alice’s waking life, but there is uncertainty over what constitutes the distinction between waking and dreaming. Carroll had given the problem an airing in his diary:? Query:

when we are dreaming and, as so often happens, have a dim consciousness of the fact and try to wake, do we not say and do things which in waking life would be insane? May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life? We often dream without the least suspicion of unreality. ‘Sleep hath its own world,” and it is often as lifelike as the other.

Carroll

plays

games

with

the idea throughout 39

both

Alice

books. Alice, falling down the rabbit hole, begins to get rather sleepy and speaks to herself ‘in a dreamy sort of way’ wondering whether cats eat bats. Just before landing she feels she is dozing off, and begins to dream of walking hand in hand with her kitten. From this dream she awakes — into another dream — by landing with a thump at the bottom of the well. There is a nagging suspicion that she awakens at the end of her adventures into a bigger dream world which we dignify with the name of ‘Reality’. ‘Life, what is it but a dream?’ asks Carroll at the end of Through the Looking-Glass. Alice’s sister complicates matters by dreaming of Alice’s dream, but it is Tweedledum and Tweedledee who put the problem in characteristically brutal fashion in Looking-Glass Land. They assure her that she is only ‘one of the things’ (not a person!) in the Red King’s dream and is therefore not real. When

she wakes up, the infection of doubt is still with her,

and she asks the inattentive kitten who did dream it all. The kitten pays no attention, so the question is addressed to the reader who, by this time, has begun to entertain his own doubts. Within the context of the dreams there are two official entrances to the Tertiary Worlds: a rabbit hole and a mirror. As the Mad Hatter and the March Hare turn up in both places — disguised behind the Looking-glass as Hatta and Haigha in Anglo-Saxon attitudes — there are grounds for supposing that Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land constitute one

and the same

World, but we need not debate this

question. The important point to note is that Carroll has technically isolated both lands from the reader by the double device

of dream

and entrance, and Alice, as dreamer, is our

intermediary. We do not look on the land as historians but as witnesses to Alice’s dream which may, or may not, have a substantiality of its own. Once in the dream worlds there is little to make us feel at home. Neither land has a history. The Mouse at the pool of tears bores the assembly with a short account of William the Conqueror, a piece of Primary World history which might have something to do with the Tertiary World, but we are given no further information. Scant attention is paid to geography. Some episodes in both books are enacted in gardens, in houses, in forests and even by the sea. Location,

however,

is only

stated

not 40

described.

An

exception

is

Carroll’s description of a landscape in Looking-Glass Land when Alice sees the countryside set out for a game of chess. There is nothing here to match the Old Forest of Middleearth or even the desolation of Mordor. The garden of Wonderland is only a set for a mad game of croquet; in Looking-Glass Land it is the stage for some unpleasantly garrulous flowers. The impersonal nature of the place is further strengthened by the absence of place names. We hear of no towns, villages or cities, and no name

is given to river,

hill or wood. With no history and little geography, both lands offer Carroll plenty of scope for playing games with Time and Space. The grinning clock on the other side of the lookingglass, and the watch which the March Hare dips into his tea, symbolise the whole state of affairs. The Red Queen informs Alice that to have only one day at a time is a poor way of doing things: “Now here, we mostly have days and nights two or three at a time, and sometimes in the winter we take as many as five nights together — for warmth, you know.” (Through the Looking- Glass,

Chapter IX)

In Wonderland the Mad Hatter asserts, with some feeling, that Time is a him and, because of a quarrel, it is always six o’clock tea-time. This does not apply to the White Rabbit who has a watch by which he judges himself to be late — an impossibility if time were uniformly fixed. As though to emphasise Time’s sluggishness, we experience no change of day or season, no rising or setting of the sun. If the Red Queen is to be taken literally there is no rhythm of day and night behind the Looking-Glass anyway. The time and method needed to cover distance differ from those of the Primary World. The Red Queen makes Alice run furiously to stay in one spot, and to actually get anywhere she would have to travel twice as fast. Looking-Glass Land is particularly rich in spatial transitions. Having jumped over the first of six brooks Alice suddenly finds herself in a train which, after a bizarre journey, disappears leaving Alice sitting

under a tree. Standing in a shop she suddenly finds herself in a rowing boat, and equally suddenly back inside the shop.

“Things

flow

about so here!’’ she complains, and indeed

both lands boast

a fluidity of shape, size and identity. In 4]

Wonderland Alice herself keeps changing size. The chess pieces of Looking-Glass Land change to human size and back again. Pebbles turn into cakes. The Duchess’s baby turns into a pig. Questioning Alice about this incident the Cheshire Cat enquires, “Did you say pig or fig?”, which indicates that in Wonderland the difference is of little account. The whole hierarchy of human, animal, vegetable and mineral is overturned. The White Queen turns into a sheep. Cards and chess pieces behave like humans with speech and movement. Animals are also disturbingly articulate. The pig/baby, and the puppy who plays with the diminished Alice, are the only

two animals without powers of speech. Tolkien’s Old Man Willow and the Eagles had certain human attributes, but they did not perform any functions beyond the limitation of their physical bodies. Here, Fish and Frog footmen move and speak like human

beings. A caterpillar speaks and smokes

a

hookah. Flowers conduct a brisk conversation and even a plum-pudding addresses Alice in a suety voice. No wonder Alice gets confused early on and has an identity crisis not long after arrival in Wonderland. Matters are exacerbated by the caterpillar who asks her rudely who she is. Alice replies that she knew who she was when she got up but has changed several times since then:? “What do you mean “Explain yourself!”

by

that?’

said

the Caterpillar,

sternly.

“T can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.” “T don’t see,” said the Caterpillar.

(Alice in Wonderland, Chapter V)

Together with fluidity there is a disconcerting suspension of Primary World physical laws. Alice experiences a long free fall down a hole at a much slower speed than in the Primary World; she even has time to extract a jar of Orange Marmalade from a shelf and put it into a cupboard. The Cheshire Cat keeps vanishing and reappearing. The Red Queen vanishes too after showing Alice how she should move on the chess board and, when Alice herself is Queen, both Red and White Queens vanish while sleeping propped up against her. What can we make of the inhabitants of this unstable world? Despite initial appearances, Carroll introduces little that is unknown to the Primary World. There are monsters of a kind: the unicorn who is familiar as a figure in legend and 42

nursery rhyme; the gryphon known to us through heraldry; the Jabberwock who appears in a tale within the main narrative;

and

the Mock

Turtle who represents

an elaborate

joke on the theme of soup. The weirdness of Wonderland consists not in the wholesale invention of unfamiliar things, but in the re-ordering of a familiar universe, so that things exist in strange relationship to one another. White rabbits exist in the Primary World, and so do waistcoats and white gloves, but only in Wonderland do they meet in a single entity. Nomenclature furthers the process of alienation. With few exceptions, nobody bears a name which sounds ‘nice’, ‘normal’

comes

or even

officially

human.

from

Alice does not count, because she

the

Primary

World.

We

hear

of a

servant called Mary Ann who makes no appearance, and Pat the gardener, also employed by the White Rabbit (a severe reversal of animal human roles!), is heard speaking in an Irish accent but never seen. Two other normal human names are heard: Lily and Bill, and they belong to a chess piece and a reptile respectively. More frequently the inhabitants are known by appellations rather than proper names. People are often designated by title: The King and Queen of Hearts; or by occupation and function: the White Knight, the

Executioner. Sometimes an adjective is put lation to produce The Mad Hatter and The Beasts and flowers are known by species: the Dormouse, the Tiger-lily and the Rose. The absence of proper names increases

into the appelUgly Duchess. Caterpillar, the

strangeness fosters the alienation already inspired by the lack of geographical names. The world is anonymous and impersonal, and, after initial laughter, unfriendly. Apart from the kindly, bumbling White Knight nobody is, loving or lovable. After her conversation with the Caterpillar, Alice decides she has never been so of Wonderland

and

Looking-Glass

Land,

the and

contradicted in her life, but people and beasts carry on contradicting her. The conversations in which both books abound are never happy or cordial exchanges. From the Queen of Heart’s “Off with his head!” to the Red Queen’s “Open your mouth a little wider when you speak, and always say your Majesty”, all is argument, harassment and bluster. People shout, scream, coax, persuade, insist or retort. Most of the creatures are either offensive or, like the Mouse, easily

offended. The principal characters are constructed around a 43

dominant trait which is then exploited to the full in every situation. The White Rabbit is fussy and bossy; Humpty Dumpty an aggressive pedant; the Red Queen best described

by Carroll himself:* The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm; she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the tenth degree, the concentrated essence of all governesses!

The White Queen is the concentrated essence of all that is vague and perplexed, always losing things, hopelessly unorganised and yet as domineering as the rest. Tweedledum and Tweedledee, borrowed from the nursery rhyme, are a geometric joke. Carroll has made their physique match their names and turned them into identical mirror-image figures,

with complementary speech habits.° There are no fully rounded character portrayals, because Carroll has virtually eliminated softer feelings and nobler aspirations from his creatures. In a world without love or affection the White Knight alone stands out as the only person or creature to help Alice and to wish her well. Carrollian scholars seem to agree that the White Knight is his self portrait, and the poignant farewell to Alice as she moves, untroubled, on to the next square is an expression of his foreboding that she too, like his other child friends, will leave him in adulthood. Whatever the cause of this genuine pathos, it comes in stark contrast to the harsh ethos of Wonderland in general.

The

episode,

however,

is carefully

timed

and

measured: too strong a dose of sentiment could have wrecked the whole nonsense fabric of Carroll’s Tertiary World, but the very transience of these softer feelings stresses their absence from the rest of Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land. It may be argued that Tolkien too had removed the kindlier feelings from a large segment of Middle-earth, but on closer inspection, even his Orcs display a broader spectrum of feeling and intellect than Carroll’s creatures. The Orcs do at least

have

a crude

and

cruel

sense

of humour,

ambition,

jealousy and greed. Their type exists in the Primary World as

concentration

camp

attendants,

torturers,

assassins

and

terrorists. Carroll’s people are highly unpleasant, but it is difficult to call them evil. Apart from a dominant motif of either bad temper, an argumentative disposition or bumbling 44

foolishness, they lack distinctive characteristics. They have no ethics for good or ill, except the desire to win arguments and score points. They lack any sense of humour, and are devoid of self mockery. Laughter arises from the reader’s contemplation of them, as they take themselves so solemnly within their own little world. It is scarcely surprising that there is no spiritual or moral growth in Carroll’s subworld. We witness no development of relationships among the people, no growing awareness or heightened perception. Alice the visitor is an exception. She displays a variety of reactions: fear of the puppy, vexation and perplexity at the rudeness she encounters, and even amusement at such people as the White Knight and the White Queen. Occasionally, when pushed too far, she puts up stout resistance: she reduces the Queen of Hearts to silence by a firm statement of ‘nonsense’, asserts her authority at the Knave of Heart’s trial and finally takes matters into her own hands at the feast which concludes Through the LookingGlass. Her personality is attractive. She keeps her temper amidst provocation, shows concern for the pig/baby when the cook is throwing things at it and rescues three gardeners from the wrath of the Queen of Hearts. Alone among the people she meets, she preserves a sense of humour. They are static and onesided, she is a developing personality with a variety of feelings and reactions: she is human. The fluidity of Wonderland and Looking-Glass is matched by the episodic story line and the absence of a continuous

plot. Alice moves through a series of encounters with Tertiary World characters whom she confronts with her own values. She is not only a touchstone of common sense and sanity but a technical centre of unity. In both works the episodic narrative ends in a grande finale when all the characters previously encountered by Alice meet together. The trial of the Knave of Heart’s and Alice’s banquet are occasions when the Tertiary World disintegrates as a prelude to Alice’s ‘waking up’. This episodic structure makes cultural delineation difficult. Carroll does not divide his creatures into different cultural groups with the finesse of Tolkien. We know

that the White Rabbit lives in a neat little house, wears

white gloves and keeps a maid. The Ugly Duchess lives in a house four feet high with a cook who likes pepper and missiles. The Mad Tea-Party takes place in the garden of the March 45

Hare’s House which has chimneys shaped like ears and a roof thatched with fur. Such details do not constitute a cultural background but, like names and appellations, are part of a joke. A curious function is served by the songs and poems which regularly punctuate the narratives. Tolkien’s novel also has many, but they shed light on the cultural background of the reciter and his people, and frequently narrate a part of Middle-earth’s history necessary for an understanding of plot and characters. Carroll’s songs and poems are mostly parodies of poems and hack verse well known to contemporary readers, and have little to do with the plots, such as they are, of the books. Their satirical function is now lost on most readers® without a suitable commentary and, were they to depend on that alone for their appeal, interest in them would

have died long ago. Apart from being excellent and amusing pieces of versification, they add yet another dimension to Carroll’s sub-world. The Tertiary World shimmers and goes transparent to reveal yet more worlds in which a walrus and a carpenter lure oysters out for a walk, a whiting invites a snail to a lobster quadrille, a brave boy slays a Jabberwock (which, without the waistcoat it wears in Tenniel’s drawing, would do

nicely as the steed of a winged Nazgul). Some of these episodes have a better developed story-line than the main narrative, insofar that their plot is linear rather than episodic. Occasionally a song or poem reflects the character of the singer. Humpty Dumpty’s ditty about the fish who do not listen to his advice is typical of his bossy and peremptory nature. The Mock Turtle’s song about soup is of course entirely appropriate to his Primary World function. Carroll’s own narrative style is even. He does not blend homely chattiness with lofty eloquence in the manner of Tolkien and, given the nature of Wonderland, where nobody

is heroic apart from the slayer of the Jabberwock, lofty and sentimental prose would be out of place anyway. Both books consist largely of conversation but, when Carroll does interpolate a comment,

it is often in the arch tone Tolkien uses in

The Hobbit and the earlier chapters of The Lord of the Rings. On her way down the rabbit hole Alice muses: “Please, Ma’am, is this New Zealand or Australia?” (and she tried

to curtsey

as she

spoke

—

fancy,

46

curtseying

as you’re

falling

through the air! Do you think you could manage it?) (Alice in Wonderland, Chapter I)

Carroll keeps up his unworried, conversational tone through-

out the works — with the exception of Alice’s encounter with the White Knight. Only in the poem which prefaces Alice in Wonderland, and in the two which preface and terminate Through the Looking-Glass, is a startling contrast of mood found. In the latter work Carroll speaks of ‘the shadow of a sigh’ which ‘may tremble through the story’. The theme is taken up again in the terminal poem where Carroll speaks frankly of his love for Alice: Long has paled that sunny sky: Echoes fade and memories die: Autumn frosts have slain July. Still she haunts me, phantomwise, Alice moving under skies Never seen by waking eyes.

It is tempting to play at amateur psychology and perceive Wonderland as Carroll’s humorous sublimation of a vision of life without Alice. Against the background of nastiness her charm

stands

out

all the more

clearly,

and so, in a more

subtle way, does her physical beauty. Wonderland and the territory behind the Looking-Glass are full of physical ugliness as Tenniel’s drawings indicate: heads and legs out of proportion

to

bodies,

scowling

and

tearful

faces,

strange

shapes and expressions. The Ugly Duchess is not unique in her lack of physical charm. If beauty is a product of goodness and a sense of proportion it cannot exist in lands where all is bad temper and exaggeration. Its absence or fleeting nature is symbolised by Carroll in several ways. A beautiful garden espied through a key hole attracts Alice’s delighted attention. She finally enters it to find a screaming monarch dealing out death to her cowering subjects. During her strange boat journey with the knitting sheep, she picks rushes of extraordinary beauty from a stream, but there is always a more lovely one just outside her reach. She does not notice, Carroll tells us with irony, that every one she picks immediately loses its scent and beauty. Another aspect of the Primary World with which Carroll zestfully meddles are the norms of logic and reason. Any world populated by animals who dress, speak and act as 47

human beings must produce situational absurdity. Nobody in the Primary World has tea with a March Hare and a Dormouse, although a Hatter is a less remote possibility. A fertile source of Carrollian humour is the bringing to life of nursery rhymes in the shapes of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty and so on. In the Garden of Flowers behind the Looking Glass he is parodying a section of Tennyson’s Maude. In the Mock Turtle episode, Carroll exploits the ambiguity of language to make the Mock Turtle appear as an animal instead of a mere description of soup, and it is this strange beast who has the most devastating identity crisis in all literature: “Once,” said the Mock Turtle at last, with a deep sigh, “I was a real Turtle.” (Alice in Wonderland, Chapter IX)

Much of Carroll’s game with the intellectual norms of the Primary World is coloured by his training in logic and mathematics. Alice has to run away from an object in order to meet it, up to it if she wishes to avoid it. The poem Jabberwocky is written in mirror script. Cake has to be handed round before it is cut. Hatta languishes in prison before his trial, and even before committing his crime. These reversals of the laws of cause and effect, inversions of our concepts ‘before’ and ‘after’ are quite logical once the reverse principle of mirror life (and Wonderland life) has been grasped. Similar reversals of Primary World norms occur when the Red Queen gives Alice a dry biscuit to quench thirst. The most delightful reversal of attitudes is shown when the Unicorn contemplates Alice in wonder and disbelief as a monster he supposed to be legendary. Frequently these games with logic are tied up with language. The Caterpillar in a previously quoted conversation had taken Alice’s “you see” literally, and later he does the same with her “‘you know’’. The Mouse after the Caucus race reads the assembled beasts a dry (i.e. boring) passage froma book to dry them out (i.e. remove the wetness from their clothes). A more elaborate example of taking figurative usage literally comes in the White King’s conversation with Alice: “TI see nobody on the road,” said Alice. “T only wish J had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as J can do to see real people, by this light!” (Through

the Looking- Glass, Chapter VII)

48

The Dormouse bewilders Alice by treating abstract things as though they were concrete, and asks Alice whether she has ever seen a drawing of a ‘muchness’. Puns too play a prominent part, particularly in the Mock Turtle’s conversation At his school he learned ‘Reeling’ and ‘Writhing’ and the different

branches

of Arithmetic:

‘Ambition’,

‘Distraction’,

‘Uglification’ and ‘Derision’. Many of these absurdities occur in conversation. Occasionally, however, Carroll dramatises a well known linguistic or philosophical problem. The White Knight offers to sing Alice a song. The name of it is called ‘Haddocks’ Eyes’, the name of it really zs “The Aged, Aged Man’. The song is called ‘Ways and Means’ but the song itself zs ‘A-sitting On A Gate.’ All this, Martin Gardner assures us,’ makes perfect sense to the student of logic and semantics who distinguishes between the names of things, what the names are called, what the thing itself is called, and what the thing actually is. Humpty Dumpty gives Alice a lecture on names but, as might be expected, his practice is the opposite to that of the Primary World: he berates Alice for not knowing the meaning of her name: “my name means the shape I am — and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.’’* In his view proper names must mean something whereas other words can mean just what he chooses them to mean, so ‘glory’ in his vocabulary, means a “nice, knock-down argument.’ The importance of nomenclature is dramatised by Carroll when he makes Alice go through a wood in which things have no names.’ In this wood, she experiences

symbol-manipulating

‘the universe itself, as it is apart from

creatures

who label portions of it.’'®

The experience, both for Alice and the reader, is eerie.

Conversations battles in which

in Wonderland the norms

consist

of cause

largely

of verbal

and effect, action and

reaction are turned upside down. The March Hare at the Tea Party offers Alice some wine and then reveals that there is none. Alice observes that the table is laid for more than three, to which the Hatter replies that her hair wants cutting. She rebukes him for making personal remarks and in reply gets a riddle: “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” After a fruitless discussion the Hatter reveals that he doesn’t know. This entire exchange is a reversal of normal expectations in a Primary World conversation. If somebody offers food or 49

drink to another it is generally expected that he has it on hand to offer. An observation about the table would in normal circumstances bring forth a relevant comment. Riddles are posed on the assumption that the questioner knows the answer. Within his tightly enclosed Secondary World, Carroll is playing a game with the conventions which govern social life and thought in the Primary World. The game, however, has serious implications, because the toys he uses are problems which have troubled philosophers and scientists ever since humanity began to think. Chesterton has warned us of the dangers inherent in taking a humorous work seriously. Describing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a soap bubble which Dodgson blew into the sky in a lucid moment of lunacy, he complains that many educationists have robbed the book of the lightness of the bubble retaining only the

horrible healthiness of the soap.'? Nevertheless the soap is still there and, if it tastes nasty, it is not the reader’s fault.

Tolkien offers a vision of hope, and his characters look beyond the very mixed world of Middle-earth to something greater, while Carroll is exploiting for humorous purposes a negative vision of our world. His characters have no spiritual development and no hope of any destiny beyond their mad world, although there are many jokes about death in the two books and much comic exploitation of insanity. The absurdities produced are symbolic of grim experiences in our Primary World. C. P. Snow has given accounts of University Life in a series of novels held to be realistic. For the jaded academic the essence of a University committee meeting (or any committee meeting for that matter) is better summed up in the Mad Hatter’s tea party: endless debate on questions to which nobody can find a solution, much talking at cross purposes, a shifting of positions all round during which somebody spills the milk and only one other person gets any benefit from the change. Somebody always falls asleep and is subsequently jammed into an awkward position by his more alert colleagues anxious to take advantage. The Queen of Heart’s solution to any pressing problem involves the execution of the people concerned, an absurdly disproportionate reaction to any event; but the Queen is only doing what a number of Primary World tyrants have zestfully done

50

for

centuries,

and

like

the

Knave

of Hearts,

their victims

have had trials. There is no escape from this Secondary World except by waking up into a Primary World where Wonderland’s absurdities are diluted by more pleasant things. Unfortunately its inhabitants have no desire to wake up and so, for them, there is no exit. Despite

the

wonderful

creatures

inhabiting

it, Middle-

earth is a familiar and secure place. Alice’s dream worlds are less exotic — no Elves, Orcs, Ents or Balrogs — and yet they possess a weirdness absent from Tolkien’s subcreation. Some reasons may be tentatively suggested. Middle-earth is a place of psychological and physical stability. In Alice’s worlds identity, shape and size are fluid, while personalities are static, cast in vivid, unchanging moulds. People do not change in response to intellectual, emotional

or physical stimuli, but shapes often do. Instead of beauty there is physical and spiritual ugliness; in place of transcendental hope there is self-contained complacency. Some comfort may be derived from the knowledge that both worlds are a dream and therefore, if Tolkien is right, ‘untrue’. The reader might see them as entertaining tricks of the sleeping mind with no disturbing implications for the waking state. Elizabeth Sewell sees the dream mechanism of the books as a device to isolate the reader emotionally from the characters within Alice’s worlds:!? This, I believe, is the true purpose of the dream which ushers in each of the Alices. It is not to induce a dreaming state of mind as such, with its tangle of associations and its irrationality. It is to isolate the mind completely from all possible contact with real life and real people, with which games have nothing to do. No-one is more isolated than the dreamer, unless it be the lunatic...

Freed from the necessity to treat Wonderland’s inhabitants as human beings we can contemplate their dehumanised natures, and their misfortunes, with some degree of equanimity. A midsummer night’s dream, as Puck assures us, need bother nobody once the dreamer has awoken and the offending shadows are dispersed. But what if the shadows have, after all, a substantial reality of their own? Socrates expressed similar views to those recorded by Carroll in his diary and

quoted at the beginning of this chapter:'* Socrates: There’s a question you must often have heard people ask — the question what evidence we could offer if we were asked

onl

whether in the present instance, at this moment, we are asleep and dreaming all our thoughts, or awake and talking to each other in real life... Indeed we may say that, as our periods of sleeping and waking are of equal length, and as in each period the soul contends that the beliefs of the moment are pre-eminently true, the result is that for half our lives we assert the reality of the one set of objects, and for half that of the other set. And we make our assertions with equal conviction in both cases.

Alice’s own doubts about her experiences again prompt the question whether the worlds she has visited are but figments of her dreaming imagination or ‘other’ realities. Her abrupt transitions from place to place and the fluidity of size, shape and identity are similar to dream experience, except that, in most dreams, such phenomena, if they are noticed at all, cause no particular surprise or shock to the dreamer until after his awakening. In Alice’s worlds she and the reader are aware of the changes and surprised by them while the dream 1s still in progress. Moreover, as Elizabeth Sewell points out, Alice’s experiences are too rational and

controlled to count as proper dreams, despite the technical dream frame-work. The situations in which she finds herself are of controlled illogic, dramatisations of logical problems or deliberate reversals of Primary World laws, particularly behind the Looking-Glass where Alice’s dream is constructed around a perfectly coherent game of chess, the movements of which are represented by the movements of the animated pieces. In many respects too, Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land are more rational than our own, as Alice discovers when

their argumentative inhabitants expose her sloppy speech and thought. The White King feels faint and so eats a hay sandwich: “There’s nothing like eating hay when you’re faint,”’ he remarked to her, as he munched away. “T should think throwing cold water over you would be better,”

Alice suggested: ‘‘— or some sal-volatile.”’ “I didn’t say there was nothing better,”’ the King replied. “I said there was nothing like it.” Which Alice did not venture to deny.

(Through the Looking- Glass, Chapter VII)

Alice’s worlds are subcreated by a master logician whose madness has a decided method. Within their own frames of reference they are quite rational and fulfil Tolkien’s dictum that a subworld should have internal consistency and that

Fantasy is a rational activity.14

52

Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land may therefore be perceived not as ‘untrue’ dreams but as parallel universes in which aspects of the Primary World have been rearranged and put into a different relationship with one another. Alice’s falling asleep is as legitimate an entry into other dimensions as machines which carry people into worlds of alternative probabilities and, had Carroll sent Alice off in sucha machine,

Science Fiction might well have claimed the books for its own. The use of a magic ring, or her projection in an ‘astral body’'* would have brought them into the category of ‘Fantasy’. Classification here seems to depend very much on relatively unimportant structural technicalities but, whatever pigeon hole is finally allotted to the Alice Worlds, their otherness is undisputed. If we accept the strong hints that Alice visits other dimensions and undergoes an experience which is ‘true’, in Tolkien’s

sense, the emotional detachment

which the dream

framework gives will disappear, obliging us to lands and their inhabitants more seriously as the human situation. At this point the death again assumes sinister proportions, and any

treat the two comments on dealing Queen laughter pro-

voked by the work is swiftly cut off,’® which is the main reason why the Alice works are not books for children but, as Chesterton observed, are works for philosophers to go mad over.'? Let us make use of Carroll’s ambiguity and hope that they are but insubstantial shadows of a dream. Whatever their quaintness or nastiness the Alice worlds do at least have one link with the Primary World in the shape of Alice herself, the dreamer who wakes up. We must now consider a Secondary World where even that link is missing.

53

Chapter4

Mervyn Peake (1911-1968): GORMENGHAST EEE

‘Where is it, boy? This place. This Gormenghast?’ ‘I don’t know,’

said Titus. (Titus Alone)

Nobody knows where Gormenghast is, least of all its inhabitants. There are no entrances to it from the Primary World. We do not approach it through history, or down a rabbit hole or through a mirror. There is no dreamer who can awake and reassure us that it is but a figment of his sleeping imagination. Gormenghast exists nowhen and nowhere on what appears to be a replica of this planet. It is described in two novels, Titus Groan (1946) and Gormenghast (1950).'

A third novel, Titus Alone (1959),? follows the titular hero on his journey from Gormenghast to the world outside. Commonly reckoned by critics, but not by their author, to be a trilogy,? our concern here is with the first two novels in which the castle is depicted. Peake sets Gormenghast and its surroundings in careful isolation from the Primary World. A globe of the world in chapter ten of Gormenghast, complete with Arctic Circle and equator, if not an oversight on Peake’s part, might 54

indicate the castle’s location in some other epoch of our Primary World or in a dimension parallel to our own. It seems to have our sun and moon, and the four seasons pass in appropriate order. We have no other clues to its whereabouts, but

Gormenghast

is, in any

case, a land enclosed

in itself.

Peake avoids place names. We know of no other countries, and neither does Titus Groan, the heir presumptive: His eyes moved to Gormenghast Mountain. What lay beyond? Was there another land..? Another world? Another kind of life?

(Gormenghast, Chapter Sixty-Four)

Even more amazing in a land so ancient is the absence of history. Titus’s father is the seventy-sixth Earl of Groan, and life in the castle is conducted according to the Groan Lore, a daily series of complex, utterly pointless rites, their origins long forgotten, which everybody, particularly the reigning Earl, must scrupulously observe. The keepers of the Lore and masters of ritual, Sourdust and afterwards Barquentine, are besotted with the castle’s ancient tradition which, for them,

is of greater importance than the castle’s present. And still we learn nothing of Gormenghast’s origins. How and when the

Groans

acquired

an

Earldom,

or from

whom,

is never

revealed. We are presented with the paradox of a place crushed under the load of its own history which, unlike Middle-earth’s, remains entirely invisible. The sole function of the ‘living’ people in Gormenghast is to hand down that load to posterity. The date of the present is unknown. ‘It is the eighth day of the eighth month, I am uncertain about the year,’ Rottcodd informs Flay in the opening chapter of Titus Groan. Peake plays no games with Time in the manner of Carroll. Instead he fudges the reader’s historical sense by mingling several historical epochs from the Primary World. Gormenghast seems a Gothic, medieval edifice: cobwebs, shadows, sinister

goings-on in a feudal system accompanied by violence and sudden death. Amidst all this appears a twentieth century English preparatory school in which are taught classics and chemistry.* There are signs of modernity in that the doctor speaks of microbes and gives the Earl an injection. Prunesquallor and Irma both wear spectacles, but the castle has no electric light and is illuminated by torches and lanterns. 5D

This confusion of historical epochs is matched by geographical uncertainty. The whereabouts of Gormenghast in relation to the rest of the planet is unknown. There are no place names, apart from ‘Gormenghast Mountain’ and ‘The Twisted Woods’, a deprivation which strengthens the impersonal, sinister flavour of the whole subworld. The landscape around the castle contains life familiar to the English countryside such as peewits, curlews and moorhens who inhabit the swampy lands between the castle and the mountain. Oddly incongruous in this cold, windswept terrain are cactus trees and the ‘jarl root’ which the Outer Dwellers use as food and as material for manufacturing belts. Peake describes landscape in some detail, not out of joy, but because, in the schematic structure of the novel, landscape is symbolic and reflects the spiritual character of the castle: The midsummer sun, and how much less this autumn light, had no power to mitigate the dreary character of the region that surrounded Gormenghast. It was like a continuation of the castle, rough and shadowy, and though vast and often windswept, oppressive too, with a kind of raw weight. (Titus Groan, ‘The

Grotto’)

The themes of darkness, desolation and disharmony are woven throughout the narrative and recur in descriptions of places and people: Between the castle and Gormenghast Mountain the land was desolate, for the main part empty wasteland, with large areas of swamp... To the east of Gormenghast Mountain, but detached from the trees at its base, spread the undulating darkness of the Twisted Woods. To the west the unkempt acres, broken here and there with low stunted trees bent by the winds into the shape of

hunchbacks. (Titus Groan, ‘The Grotto’)

Here there is no joy in living things, no pleasure in the change of seasons and their individual beauties. Rocks point ‘blasphemously’ to heaven, trees are bent and deformed. Sourness and horror pervade everything. In Mordor Sauron actually destroys living things, in Gormenghast they are preserved but devoid of any power to inspire or delight. The theme of loneliness and isolation is carried on with zest in the description of Gormenghast’s inhabitants. The distinction between

man,

beast, vegetable and mineral is, at

first sight, preserved. There are no monsters, although the landscape sometimes seems in need of a dragon to complete 56

the air of menace. Peake’s inhabitants are variations on the human theme: they have arms, legs and heads, and they speak, presumably, English. Peake gives us no explanation about the language of Gormenghast, and does not pose as a translator or historian. We must just accept the fact that they speak English without knowing the origin of the tongue. These speaking and rational characters are human in the biological sense of that term, but in the spiritual and emotional

sense Peake sets about a process of careful dehumanisation. The process starts with nomenclature. Rarely can a group of characters have acquired such a collection of labels. Tolkien’s mames sound natural and normal within the cultures he creates for them. Carroll’s nomenclature depends heavily on appellations rather than proper names. Peake’s names constitute a combination of phonetic and semantic absurdities. They sound odd and often contain some inherent meaning, frequently suggestive of disintegration and uncleanliness. The very name Gormenghast carries associations with ‘gore’ and ‘ghastly’. The inconsistently applied title and family name of the Earls, ‘Sepulchrave’ and ‘Groan’,® contain two allusions to entombment (‘sepulchre’ and ‘grave’) and a cry of distress; suitable names for the lord of a domain which is spiritually and intellectually dead. His wife, Gertrude, has the most natural forename in the realm. “Titus’ and ‘Fuchsia’ sound quaintly archaic in terms of the English Primary World. ‘Prunesquallor’, having associations with an absurd fruit (its purgative qualities probably suit the profession of a doctor) and hints of dirt, stands in contrast to its bearer, the

elegant medical man of Gormenghast who has nothing squalid about him. The elegance of ‘Barquentine’ is in gross contrast to the filthy person who bears it. ‘Sourdust’ is apt for a gloomy librarian steeped in ritual. A masterpiece of naming is ‘Steerpike’. Like the fish in his name, he is a ruthless predator, carefully navigating his way up to power, destroying any small fry he meets in his course. Names therefore may be richly symbolic of the person who bears them, or stand in bizarre contrast to their owner. Often they seem to serve no symbolic purpose at all and simply sound weird, such as the names of professors ‘Bellgrove’, ‘Splint’, ‘Perch-Prism’, ‘Spiregrain’ and ‘Throd’. Whatever the motif behind

each

name,

the

overall

bearers and render them ridiculous. Ou

effect

is to

belittle

their

The isolation of Gormenghast from the Primary World, and from the other countries of the Secondary World, is reflected in the isolation of individuals and groups within Gormenghast. Various groups have nothing to do with one another. The Bright Carvers are dependent on the castle for food, but are not allowed to enter it, and despise the castle

dwellers as much as they are despised. The professors of the improbable school are completely self contained. They have no social life outside the common room and no social intercourse with the other inhabitants. In death they have their own mortuary. Even the servants have their own hierarchy and do not apparently mix with people outside it. Within these groups individuals are isolated from one another. Bitterness and rivalry, Peake tells us, are the bread and wine

of the outer dwellers; introspection and frustration mark the inhabitants of the castle. Nobody is happy, or ever seems to have been so. Their lives are as joyless as their surroundings. Most of them are in love with objects or possessed by ambitions; people, on the whole, do not command their affections. The Earl is absorbed in his library and in melancholia. Fuchsia has her attic. Flay is fanatically loyal to the institution of Gormenghast. Sourdust and Barquentine are in love with Groan ritual. Barquentine’s loyalty to the House of Groan,

we

are

told, had far outstripped

his interest

or

concern for the living members of the line itself. His only ‘blind’, ‘passionate’ and ‘cruel’ love is for the dead letter of the castle law. He dimly remembers on one occasion that he once had a wife and child! There is no affection between the Earl and Countess, and they meet only when ritual demands it. The Earl has no affection

Clarice, which,

who,

for his own

in their turn, yearn

they think, Gertrude

nor

Countess

cats

and

birds,

exhibit

any

robbed

parental

he his books.

When

sisters, Cora and

only for the power

of

them. Neither the Earl

affection. Titus

earns

She prefers Gertrude’s

gratitude after the killing of Steerpike she can find nothing to say to him, and when he recovers from his illness she retreats again into apathy and torpor. Her reaction on seeing the new-born Titus is significant. She tells Nannie Slagg to take him away until he is six years old, then she will see him again. Irma Prunesquallor is desperate for a man, but it is uncertain whether she desires love or sex, and in any case, her marriage to Bellgrove soon turns sour. 58

Steerpike loves nobody except himself. It is typical of his nature that he happily plots the death of people, but feels qualms about the destruction of things, and dislikes the ‘necessary’ evil of burning down the library. He has no concern for living creatures, Peake informs us but, in a well made object, whatever its nature, a sword or a watch or a book, he felt an excited interest. This is not the pleasant love of Dwarves or Elves for things of beauty, but the detached admiration of a soulless technician. Steerpike would have been happy among the goblins. ‘Oh how [ hate! hate! hate! How I hate people! How I hate people!’ shouts Fuchsia. She has, in fact, great affection for Nannie Slagg and her affection is returned, but a mutual lack of comprehension prevents their feelings finding full reciprocation. Dr Prunesquallor is fond of Fuchsia and would doubtless be fonder were it not for the unbreachable wall of her

adolescent

moodiness.

She,

in turn,

is put off by his

nervously prolix speech. Such love as exists in Gormenghast is disappointed, unreturned or misunderstood. Beautiful relationships are doomed from the beginning, because there is a distinct absence of beautiful people, in either the physical or spiritual sense. Physical ugliness is frequent in Gormenghast and often forms the subject of Peake’s most humorous descriptions, from the ungainly bulk of Swelter, the cook, to the unfortunate angularity of Irma Prunesquallor. The castle itself is ugly and its inhabitants take after it. As though to pinpoint and stress the prevailing absence of light and beauty, Peake occasionally allows them to flicker momentarily through his narrative. The Bright Carvers are physically beautiful until their nineteenth year when their beauty vanishes. Their carvings are displayed on the first of June every year for judgment by the Earl of Groan. The unsuccessful works are burned, the three best are relegated to Rottcodd’s museum for a permanent exhibition which nobody ever visits. The pleasantest place in Gormenghast is the Cool Room: ‘homely’ and ‘elegant’ it has a quiet and pleasing distinction. It is seldom used. Pentecost the gardener, who makes only a brief appearance, brings knowledge and love to all growing things, reserving a special fondness for apples which he polishes with a silk cloth. Every morning he fills the Cool Room with flowers which he arranges with taste and artistry, but like the 59

exhibits in the museum of Bright Carvings, his art is never looked at. Flay expresses the true spirit of the castle by refusing to see the room as part of Gormenghast. He looks malevolently at the flowers. A closer study of Peake’s characterisation methods reveals further dehumanisation.

Loveless, isolated and, for the most

part ugly, his characters are oddly static, and so is the plot. John Batchelor has already drawn attention to the absence of a linear plot in both novels.° Much of Titus Groan is expository with one chapter frequently devoted to a whole character. The narrative is punctuated by a series of conflicts, each of which ends up in the death of one of the combatants. ‘These

outbreaks

of

violence’,

Mr

Batchelor

continues,

‘present Peake with opportunities to write virtuoso pieces; otherwise the narrative depends heavily on exposition, the creation and filling out of settings and characters’.’ Much the same may be said of Gormenghast, except that the characters exist in groups as well as in isolation. In general Peake’s descriptions are tightly packed, highly concentrated accumulations of visual detail. If people grow at all psychologically or physically, the growing is long, and unconvincing. Weak in portraying psychological development, he is strong in the description of a single moment. His detailed studies of human beings (using that term in a loose sense) rely for their effect on his relish for the absurd and preposterous, and much of his characterisation is more an exploitation of comic themes than serious psychological portrayal. His favourite device is to award a character one or more leitmotifs — a physical trait, a speech mannerism or an emotional quality — which he proceeds to embroider and develop. Both Tolkien and Carroll used the technique. Gandalf is always ‘accompanied’ by big boots, bushy eyebrows and a quick temper. The Red Queen is in a perpetual rage. The technique is an old one. Homer has Athene, constantly accompanied by her flashing eyes, Hera of the white arms, and Dawn with her rosy fingers. With Carroll and Peake it is pushed to the point of comic absurdity. Nannie Slagg is constantly accompanied by the motif of her ‘chicken breast’ and phrases such as ‘my faint heart’, ‘my caution’ and ‘my precious’. Irma Prunesquallor is swallowed up by her pelvis, her bun

of hair, and her dreadful

60

features. The leitmotif is

dwelt

and enlarged upon, in and around the character, until

he or she is lost in his own attributes. Sometimes a person’s physique, speech and surroundings are continuations of one or two motifs. Swelter provides a convenient example. His themes are sweat, vastness and food. His huge hot kitchens are an extension of his hot sweaty self, just as the Grey Scrubbers are as grey and lifeless as the walls they scrub. When he comes across his enemy Flay in the Cool Room: Swelter, as soon as he saw who it was, stopped dead, and across his face little billows of flesh ran swiftly here and there until, as though they had determined to adhere to the same impulse, they swept up into both oceans of soft cheek, leaving between them a vacuum, a gaping segment like a slice cut from a melon. It was

horrible. (Titus Groan, ‘First Blood’)

Swelter’s imagery:

speech,

mocking

and churlish, is full of culinary

A voice came

boiled

out of the face: ‘Well, well, well’, it said, ‘may I be to a frazzle if it isn’t Mr. Flee. The one and only Flee.

Well, well, well. Here before me in the Cool Room. Dived through

the keyhole, I do believe. Oh, my adorable lights and liver, if it

isn’t the Flee itself’. (Titus Groan, ‘First Blood’)

All Swelter’s attributes are summed up and concentrated horribly in a description of his ghost as it prowls about the castle at the beginning of Gormenghast: Of all ponderous volumes, surely the most illusory, if there’s no weight or substance in a ghost, is Abiatha Swelter, who wades in a

slug-like illness of fat through the humid ground mists of the Great Kitchen...he has become the ghost of a ghost, only his swede-like head retaining the solidity of nature. The arrogance of this fat head exudes itself like an evil sweat. (Gormenghast,

Chapter One)

Dr Prunesquallor’s character is nervous laugh, a convoluted but and teeth. His conversation is eloquent monologue which makes

built upon a high pitched elegant pattern of speech, frequently reproduced: an reply difficult:

‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, my dear Mrs Slagg, let me take your tray, — ha, ha, until you have tasted the fruits of discourse and told me what you have been up to for the last month or more. Why have I not seen you, Nannie Slagg? Why have my ears not heard your footfall on the stairs, and your voice at nightfall, calling...calling..? “Her ladyship don’t want me any more, sir,’ said Nannie Slagg, looking

61

up at the doctor

reproachfully’.

(Titus

Groan,

Prunesquallor’s

Knee-Cap)

The teeth are a constant subject of verbal pyrotechnics. In one memorable passage, Peake converts Prunesquallor’s mouth into a cemetery and his teeth into headstones which gleam in the sunlight when Prunesquallor smiles: He grinned again. This time there was nothing of the yawn left in the process. His jaws opened out like a crocodile’s. How could any human head contain such terrible and dazzling teeth? It was a brand-new graveyard. But oh! how anonymous it was. Not a headstone chiselled with the owner’s name. Had they died in battle, these nameless, dateless, dental dead, whose memorials, when the jaws opened, gleamed in the sunlight, and when the jaws met again rubbed shoulders in the night, scraping an ever closer acquaintance as the years rolled by? Prunesquallor had

smiled. (Gormenghast, Chapter Six)

In the persons of Cora and Clarice, the Earl’s twin sisters, we have another variation on the theme of identical twins. Like Tweedledum and Tweedledee these ladies are enantiomorphs: their dress, habits, physical appearance and speech are identical, and their characterisation is a constant joke on the

subject of their similarity. They dress in purple, their faces are ‘identical to the point of indecency.’ Clarice’s voice is so perfect a replica of her sister’s ‘as might lead one to suppose that her vocal cords had been snipped from the same line of gut in those obscure regions where such creatures are compounded’. Their moral leitmotif is stupidity and lust for power, so they fall ready victims to Steerpike’s guile. Their speech habits are the most successfully rendered of all Peake’s characters. Ignoring any other person in the conversation, they address complementary remarks to one another, as in this conversation after Steerpike has hypocritically expressed his delight at being under the same roof as they: “He says he’s glad he’s under the same roof as us’, she said. ‘Under the same roof’, echoed Cora. ‘He’s very glad of it.’ ‘Why?’ said Clarice emptily. ‘What difference does it make about the roof?’ ‘It couldn’t make any difference whatever the roof’s like,’ said her sister. ‘I like roofs.’ said Clarice; ‘they are something I like more than most things because they are on top of the houses they cover, and Cora and I like being over the tops of things because we love power, and that’s why we are both fond of roofs.’ ‘That’s why’,

62

Cora continued. ‘That’s the reason. Anything that’s on top of something else is what we like, unless it is someone we don’t like who’s on top of something we are pleased with like ourselves.’

(Titus Groan, ‘Reintroducing the Twins’)

The insane flavour of this conversation derives partly from the fact that the twins proceed by verbal association rather than by logic, repeat one another, and rarely listen to anybody else. Most people’s mode of speech in Gormenghast is individual and idiosyncratic as Peake carefully delineates their vocabulary and syntax, from the irritating ‘my caution’ of Nannie Slagg to the strident repetitions of Irma Prunesquallor. Speech, like appearance, is the exploitation of a comic theme and forms part of the schema along which the characters are constructed. But these monologues and dialogues do not constitute genuine human communication. Very funny and very distinctive though they may be, few conversations in Gormenghast are normal exchanges of opinion and feeling with all the nuances of natural human speech. Some of the main characters seem unable to converse at all. The countess, we learn, is no conversationalist. The Earl is usually too depressed to say anything. The twins neither listen nor keep

to a point. Dr Prunesquallor pays as little attention to his sister’s irritable and repetitive speech as she does to his long winded monologues. Fuchsia talks to herself in alliterative cadences: ‘Fat clouds’, said Fuchsia...‘Why seven?..Seven is for something...for a hundred hollow horses; four for a knight with a spur of speargrass; five for a fish with fortunate fins...ten for a tower of turbulent toast...’ (Titus Groan, ‘Prunesquallor’s Knee-Cap’)

This

confuses

poor

Nannie

Slagg,

easily

confused

at the

best of times, who makes little noises in her throat (her way of filling in time) and says: ‘Would you like some hot milk, my precious?’ Her lack of understanding is typical of conversation throughout Gormenghast. Like characters in the Alice books its inhabitants talk over one another’s heads, past one another and through one another. In nasty moments they indulge in deception, imperative browbeating or plain bullying. Speech therefore is not only a comic continuation of a person’s leitmotif, but reflects too the prevailing isolation of the people. This is a common human situation which in Gormenghast is pushed to absurdity, and demonstrates the 63

isolation of its inhabitants from one another as well as the isolation of Gormenghast from the Primary World. The cultural and environmental distinctions of his characters are carefully delineated, often by a mass of detail. Peake gives careful descriptions of the Prunesquallor’s living quarters, the Countess’s bedroom, Fuchsia’s attic and the Professors’ accommodation. Fuchsia’s attic is minutely described, together with its huge assortment of objects: an orange, a toy lion, boxes, musical instruments, toys, kites, pictures, bamboo armour and helmets, flags and relics, the

head of a skinned baboon, the stuffed leg of a giraffe. The dark crowded attic is an extension of her gloomy crowded mind, just as the epicene elegance of Prunesquallor’s character and physique is matched by the effeminate decoration of his house. The Professors are a seedy bunch and their surroundings take after them: To enter the room from extraordinary change of swimmer in clear white struggling to keep afloat

the Professors’ corridor was to suffer an atmosphere, no less sudden than if a water were suddenly to find himself in a bay of soup. Not only was the air

fuscous with a mixture of smells, including stale tobacco, «dry chalk, rotten wood, ink, alcohol and, above all, imperfectly

cured leather, but the general colour of the room was a transcription of the smells, for the walls were

of horsehide, the dreariest of browns, relieved only by the scattered and dully twinkling heads of drawing-pins. On the right of the door hung the black gowns of office in various stages of decomposition. (Gormenghast,

Chapter Ten)

Peake’s description of their ‘culture’ is amusing and revolting. They dress in red gowns every evening, perform strange rites of their own and, above all suffer no change. Their delight is ‘To eye the scaling paint, the rusting pen-nib, the sculpted desk lid, with understanding and approval.’ After their meal, by ancient tradition, they turn the long tables upside down and sit within the upturned tops as though they were boats, ‘and were about to oar their way into some fabulous ocean.’ They then raise their voices ‘in an obscure chant of former days.’ Food does not play quite such an important part in characterisation as in Tolkien’s work. When menus are given they are familiar to the English Primary World. Fuchsia demands hot milk, eggs, and lots of toast done only on one side. Nannie Slagg brings her a meal of farmhouse cosiness, 64

in weird contrast to the gothic ethos of the castle: a tray of tea, toasted scones, current bread, butter and eggs and a jar of honey. It is odd too that another item of diet in this remote and alien edifice is porridge. Sepulchrave has a breakfast of a more exotic kind, described by Peake with evident relish: ...he saw before him a snow-white tablecloth. It was set for two. The silver shone and the napkins were folded into the shapes of peacocks and were perched decoratively on the two plates. There was a delicious scent of bread, sweet and wholesome. There were

eggs painted in gay colours, toast piled up pagoda-wise, tier upon tier and

each

as frail as a dead

leaf; and fish with their tails in

their mouths lay coiled in sea-blue saucers. There was coffee in an urn shaped like a lion, the spout protruding from that animal’s silver jaws. There were all varieties of coloured fruits that looked strangely tropical in that dark hall. There were honeys and jams, jellies, nuts and spices and the ancestral breakfast plate was spread out to the greatest advantage amid the golden cutlery of the Groans. In the centre of the table was a small tin bowl of dandelions and nettles. (Titus Groan, ‘Sepulchrave’)

The overall beauty of this breakfast table is naturally marred. The presence of dandelions and nettles, and the simile of the

dead leaf continue the theme of death and corruption which runs through Gormenghast. A similar incongruity is seen in the Earl’s appearance: he wears the iron crown of the Groans on his head, tied with a strap under the chin. On his body is a dressing gown. There is no apparent mingling of the species in Gormenghast. No baby is suddenly changed into a pig. People do not seem to change size and shape, and inanimate objects do not assume

human

attributes and behave

like men

but, on closer

inspection, numerous changes do in fact take place, effected mainly by innuendo and simile. The novels abound in comparisons of normally incomparable objects. Frequently the object produced for comparison with the original has emotive associations which lend grotesque colour to the whole atmosphere. The dwellings of the bright carvers swarm ‘like

an epidemic.’ Rottcodd’s skull is ‘dark and small like a corroded bullet’. There is a horrible sound of ‘laughter like porridge.’ In more outlandish similes Peake shows a fondness for fish. Irma twitches like a ‘section of conger eel that has been chopped off but which still has ideas of its own.’ Cora gives Steerpike a smile which is as mirthless ‘as the curve 65

between the lips of a dead haddock.’ Her voice is ‘like the body of a plaice translated into sound.’ Deadyawn gives a smile and ‘one end of the mouth lifted as might the cold lip of a trout.’ Sometimes the imagery is reptilian. Opus Fluke has a large and lipless mouth rather like the mouth of a ‘huge and hairy lizard.’ Taken as a group these similes perform a similar function to Carroll’s poems, and offer a glimpse into another subworld, beyond Gormenghast, inhabited by spook creatures who cling precariously to the narrative on the edge of a metaphor or simile. Often similes and metaphors are extended to Homeric proportions until a miniature Tertiary World opens up for a few sentences, only to disappear again as the narrative continues. Homer brings his similes to life until they become a scene complete in itself. After Agamemnon has spoken to the Argives in Book II we are told that: The Argives welcomed Agamemnon’s speech with a great roar, like the thunder of the sea on a lofty coast when a gale comes in from the South and hurls the waves against a rocky cape which they never leave at peace whatever wind is blowing. (The Iliad, translated by E. V. Rieu, Penguin Books, 1950) .

In this simile there is a pleasing, poetic association between the grandeur and ruggedness of the army and of Agamemnon’s speech. Peake’s similes are less lofty in their function. We have already observed how Swelter’s features take on a life and will of their own, how Prunesquallor’s mouth becomes a cemetery of the nameless dead. In these little worlds, which open up so tantalizingly in the fabric of the novels, strange transmogrifications take place, and the

apparent stability of Peake’s Secondary World is shaken. The castle itself is changed into a monster: Strung

across

windows,

the

the

capstone

jaws of its great

size of teeth, reflected

the dawn.

head

a hundred

(Gormenghast,

Chapter Fifteen)

In another passage the castle and its inhabitants are swallowed up by a humanised autumn: Autumn returned to Gormenghast like a dark spirit re-entering its stronghold. Its breath could be felt in forgotten corridors, — Gormenghast had itself become autumn. Even the denizens of this fastness were its shadows. (Titus Groan, ‘Flay Brings a

Message’)

66

The Countess is converted into a lighthouse: She stood in coiling froth like a lighthouse. By the dim glow of the hall lamp her red hair threw out a sullen light. (Gormenghast,

Chapter Seven)

A word uttered by the Countess at the beginning of Titus Groan is humanised. She shouts ‘Squallor’ and: The word echoed along the corridors and down the stairs, and creeping under the door and along the black rug in the Coldroom, just managed, after climbing the doctor’s body, to find its way into both his ears simultaneously, in a peremptory if modified condition. (Titus Groan, ‘A Gold Ring for Titus’)

In a vivid and prolonged simile, Swelter becomes a galleon: ‘...the chef, like a galleon, lurched in his anchorage. The great ship’s canvas sagged and crumpled and then suddenly an enormousness foundered and sank. There was a sound of something spreading as an area of seven flagstones became hidden from view beneath a catalyptic mass of wine-drenched blubber. (Titus

Groan, ‘Swelter’)

The professors are changed into birds: Like rooks hovering in a black cloud over their nests, a posse of professors in a whirl of gowns and a shuffling roofage of mortarboards, flapped and sidled their individual way towards, and eventually through, a narrow opening in the flank of the Master’s Hall. (Gormenghast, Chapter Eighteen)

In a moment they become a black, hydra headed dragon with a hundred flapping wings. Trees are humanised, but there is nothing Entish about them: But it was plain to see that whereas the nearest of these groups to Titus was in an irritable state, not one of the trees having anything to do with his neighbour, their heads turned away from one another, their shoulders shrugged, yet not a hundred feet away another spinney was in a condition of suspended excitement... (Gormenghast, Chapter Sixteen)

Blushes on Prunesquallor’s face are metamorphosed into an ambush of little red indians. Clocks become creatures with legs and fists: It was as though no mechanism on earth could strike or chain that ghost of time. The clocks and the bells stuttered, boomed and rang. They trod with their iron imprint. They beat with their ancient fists and shouted with archaic voices... (Gormenghast,

Chapter Twenty-Three)

67

Faces are often turned into landscapes. Barquentine, whose leitmotifs are his crutch, his one leg, and filth of speech and body, is described thus: ‘...Steerpike found himself staring down into an upturned patch of wrinkles. In this corrugated terrain two eyes burned. In contrast to the dry sand-coloured skin they appeared grotesquely liquid, and to watch them was ordeal by water; all innocence was drowned. They lapped at the dry rims of the infected well-heads. There were no lashes. (Titus Groan, ‘Barquentine and Steerpike’)

Three faces, all belonging to professors, are transformed first into glass, sand paper and water and then into a landscape. Sometimes facial features take on a life of their own to form another little subworld. The Poet’s face, for example: It was a wedge, a sliver, a grotesque slice in which it seemed the features had been forced to stake their claims, and it appeared, that they had done so in a great hurry and with no attempt to form any kind of symmetrical pattern for their mutual advantage. The nose had evidently been the first upon the scene and had spread itself down the entire length of the wedge, beginning among the grey stubble of the hair and ending among the grey stubble of the beard, and spreading on both sides with a ruthless disregard for the eyes and mouth which found precarious purchase. (Titus Groan, ‘Near and Far’)

Such confusion of the animate and inanimate, of the human

and the animal, are all the more eerie for being indirect. Another sinister reversal at the beginning of Gormenghast is of the living and the dead. There are days when the living have no substance and only the dead are active, so the dead Swelter,

the

deceased

Earl, Sourdust

and Keda

all walk in

Gormenghast as live phantoms while the rest ofits inhabitants occupy it as animated corpses. Peake writes in a variety of registers and tones, as the diversity of his characters’ speech shows. His narrative prose delights in rhythms and cadences, assonance and alliteration to the extent that sound sometimes seems rated above sense. There is no time here to debate whether Peake’s novels could be called poems in prose, but the opening lines of Gormenghast, are designed to stir the senses rather than inform the mind: Titus is seven. His confines, Gormenghast. Suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual: for his ears, echoes, for his

eyes,

a labyrinth of stone:

and yet within his body something

68

other — other than this umbrageous legacy. For the first and ever foremost he is child.

Sometimes Peake uses contrast of styles for comic effect, particularly when Nannie Slagg attempts to grasp the convoluted thoughts of Fuchsia and Prunesquallor. He permits the professors and Barquentine® to use crude colloquialisms and slang in contrast to the more refined diction of other characters. Lyrical outbursts are found in unexpected places. Describing Fuchsia’s attic, Peake launches into a Homeric simile which is not, for a change, burlesqued to absurdity: This is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or of a women for their world. For the world of their centre where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame. The love of the diver for his world of wavering light. His world of pearls and tendrils and his breath at his breast. Born as a plunger into the deeps he is at one with every swarm of lime-green fish, with every coloured sponge. As he holds himself to the ocean’s faery floor, one hand clasped to a bedded whale’s rib, he is complete and infinite. Pulse, power and universe sway in his body. He is in love. (Titus Groan, ‘The Attic’)

This lyricism is pleasantly incongruous amidst the studied irony of Peake’s general style and the grotesque absurdities of his characters. The phantom diver in his underwater cavern fits comfortably, if oddly, into the novel’s texture and dimly foreshadows Fuchsia’s death by drowning. The episodes which do not fit into it are those concerning Keda, Rantel and Braigon. Their very names are suspect, because they seem to be an attempt at ‘serious’ nomenclature just as their triangular love affair is a serious attempt at portraying human feelings. Deprived of irony, absurdity, or even of the diver’s colourful lyricism, Peake’s prose is pretentious and his

dialogue artificial. The description of landscape when Keda returns to her people is strongly reminiscent of Mary Webb with even more disturbing echoes of Cold Comfort Farm. Psychological analysis here would be amusingly absurd were it not for the suspicion of Peake’s serious purpose: It was

not passion that she felt: not the passion of the body,

though

that was there, but rather an exultation, a reaching for life, for the whole of the life of which she was capable, and in that life which she but dimly divined was centred love, the love for a man. She was not in love with Rantel: she was in love with

69

what he meant

to her as someone

she could love. (Titus Groan,

‘Keda and Rantel’)

Pushed a little further this involved passage could be caricature, and so could this conversation, just a little removed

from the style of the twins: He moved forward in the light so that his face was darkened to her and only the top of his ruffled hair shone like wire. ‘Keda,’ he whispered. She took his hand. ‘I have come back.’ He felt her nearness: he held her shoulders in his hands. ‘You have come back,’ he said as though repeating a lesson. ‘Ah, Keda — is this you? You went away. Every night I have watched for you.’ His hands shook on her shoulders. ‘You went

away,’ he said. (Titus Groan, ‘Keda and Rantel’)

It is possible that Peake meant these, and other passages, to be ironic? Is he, perhaps, writing a parody of a bad film script? It is difficult to believe that he could write such portentous and inflated prose, and express such trite sentiment, with complete seriousness. In a Secondary World which is one big absurdity in itself, it is a long task to single out situational absurdity. There is a disconcerting discrepancy between Peake’s detailed descriptions of Gormenghast life and his complete silence about how different aspects of that life fit together. We know that there is a ngid and complex ritual to be observed, according to which the Earl and others have to do pointless tasks their origins and purposes completely forgotten. The castle’s own origins and history remain a mystery, and in the same spirit, we are given little biographical information about the main characters in the narrative. If the castle really is isolated from the outside world, what zs the point of having

a school? Perch-Prism is a classical scholar. Which classics? Who are the ‘Martrovian dramatists’ and ‘Sonian poets’ read by the Earl? Where in fact do any books come from in his library? Apart from the Poet and the Bright Carvers, we learn of no literature or art flourishing in Gormenghast’s ‘present’. If the Groan family is forbidden to mix with ‘outsiders’ and people of inferior rank, where do the Earls find their brides? Where did Prunesquallor do his medical training, the professors receive their own education? We know nothing of the castle’s economic system. It seems to be a feudal estate, but we hear nothing of farming tenantry or of industry. Money 70

appears to exist, because Steerpike asks Barquentine about a salary, although no information about coinage or a monetary system is forthcoming. These anomalies, the ill defined relationship of disparate elements in Gormenghast to one another, and of Gormenghast itself to the outside world, constitute situational absurdity. Yet there is no assault on logic and reason in the manner of Carroll. Sparks of Carrollian logic occasionally fly up: ‘I want a big breakfast,” said Fuchsia at last. “I want a lot to eat, I’m going to think to-day.” The twins: ‘“I heard him,” said her sister, “I’m not blind, am I.”’ So great is the entire situational absurdity of Gormenghast itself that these minor illogicalities are mere salt to the main dish. Time duration seems to be the same in Gormenghast as in the Primary World except that, as in Lothlorien, it moves exceedingly slow. Galadriel’s kingdom, under the power of her ring, was in a different space-time continuum, but in Gormenghast the apparent slowness of time is merely areflection of the boredom the castle inspires. John Batchelor draws attention to one peculiar aspect of the place: Gormenghast covers ten years of the hero’s life, yet Gertrude does not seem to age and Fuchsia remains a moody teenager. Irma and Prunesquallor do not age either although, if they are middle aged in the first novel, Irma must be in her seventies when she marries Bellgrove.? Although this state of affairs is attributable to Peake’s oversight, the error is a happy one, for such discrepancies fit in remarkably well with other anomalies abounding in Gormenghast. In a place where time sits heavily on all its inhabitants, it is fitting that some of them should grow old more slowly than others. A world enclosed: if Gormenghast is unaware of any physical worlds on the same globe, does it pay homage to any supernatural world above or beyond itself? The Outer Dwellers take the supernatural for granted, and a few ghosts haunt the beginning of Gormenghast. No hope is held out for any worthwhile existence beyond death. Gormenghast is an end, a religion in itself. The ritual which surrounds birth and death is not Christian but part of Groan liturgy. We witness the gloomy rites of Sourdust’s and Nannie Slagg’s funerals.'° Irma’s marriage to Bellgrove is not described. Titus undergoes what is called a Christening, but he is dedicated to no transcendent or personal God, only to the walls of the castle. DA

The

exclusion

of love, beauty, friendship, the isolation of

Gormenghast and the people within it are horrible enough, but the direction of individual loyalties towards things, the overall loyalty towards the castle, is monstrous. Even the lord of Gormenghast is an abstract symbol; his person matters not at all. There is little longing or hope within its walls for a better future. Nobody in Gormenghast, even the unhappiest, seems willing or able to strive for higher values. There is much humour in the book but the laughter provoked, as in Alice’s worlds, is not joyful, and scarcely could be in this singularly joyless place. To laugh the reader has to suspend his or her human feelings, and view Peake’s characters as elaborate jokes; but once Irma, Dr Prunesquallor and the rest are caught by the imagination as suffering human beings, even nervous laughter has to cease, because the problem of Gormenghast’s whereabouts has been solved. It is nowhere and everywhere. It never existed but always has existed and is present now. Its essential features can be reproduced in any human institution: house, hospital, factory and university and church. Once tradition and external observance become more important than the humans who carry them out, Gormenghast is born. The iron bound ritual of the castle may stand as a symbol for many institutions ‘gone wrong’, from the oppressive bureaucracy in a national state to the hospital where patients have become mere ciphers in a medical routine. Once the principle of applicability has been grasped, most of us can identify a Gormenghast. Some readers may actually live in one. As Titus finally wrenches himself from the castle he hears his mother’s voice: ‘There is nowhere else,’ it said. ‘You will only tread a circle, Titus Groan. There’s not a road, not a track, but it will lead you home. For everything comes to Gormenghast.’ (Gormenghast, Chapter

Eighty)

We need not share the Countess’s view on Peake’s pessimism, but we can heed the warning. The otherness of Gormenghast does not spring merely from uncertainty about its location. Peake has achieved, by different

methods,

similar

effects

to Carroll.

There

are no

monsters in Gormenghast but instead we find a severe distortion of human nature. Peake’s characters, purged of

72

beauty and love, are schematic figures rather than living portraits, possessing a static psychology and a weird fluidity of identity. Gormenghast has no Alice to represent a refreshing ‘reality’, and no dreamer to act as intermediary between it and the Primary World. And yet is has much better claim to be considered a dream world than Carroll’s subworlds. The many inconsistencies and anomalies are hardly questioned while the reader is inside Gormenghast and in the grip of Secondary Belief, whereas in Alice’s worlds they are blatently obvious. Moreover, the oddities encountered by Alice actually have a certain consistency as the products of ‘logical illogic’, while no such consistency exists in Gormenghast so, if Tolkien’s logic were rigorously applied, Peake’s subworlds could not be admitted into Faérie or Fantasy, despite popular and critical acclamation. The most depressing features of Gormenghast are the themes of decay and death running through descriptions of places and people. Ruled over by the appropriately named Sepulchrave family, it is a kingdom of dead souls and, for this and other reasons, has affinities with Gogol’s town of NN.

TO

oo

———

Chapter 5

Nikolay Gogol (1809-1852): THE

Here I saw what in general, mean; absence of light Selected Passages

LOWNc

Gt

GNiN

matter taken from the soul, and spiritual truth and in what aspect darkness and the terrifying can perhaps be shown for the horror of man. from a Correspondence with Friends

The genius of Russia’s Nikolay Gogol has been overshadowed in Britain by the more easily translated works of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. His best known works are a comedy, The Government Inspector (1836) and a novel Dead Souls (1842) which, like their author, have been the subject of much critical controversy. To include Dead Souls among works of non-realistic fiction is in itself a controversial act, because Gogol has long been acknowledged as the founder of a realistic school in Russian literature, but it would be tedious

to give an account of the arguments here and, in any case, our reasons for treating Dead Souls as an ‘other’ world become apparent in the course of this chapter. Gogol was a strange man and it is all too easy to write facetiously of his life and personality. He was born in the Ukraine, the son of a minor landowning family. After an undistinguished schooling he moved to St Petersburg where 74

he worked for a while in the civil service, and afterwards held

for one year the improbable post of lecturer in World History at the University of St Petersburg.” His literary reputation was growing on the strength of some short stories set in his native Ukraine, but the staging of The Government Inspector in 1836

made

him famous

and, in some

circles, notorious.

Frightened by the uproar over his play he fled to Western Europe where he stayed until 1848 with only occasional visits to Russia. Dead Souls was written during this sojourn abroad. Spending his last years in fruitless wanderings, he became possessed of a messianic zeal to preach to his fellow countrymen and to reform their souls. He died in Moscow of causes which have never been satisfactorily explained, but religious problems and medical treatment played their part. His personality is of more interest than his life story. Vladimir Nabokov has drawn attention to his topsy-turvy mind: ‘As a schoolboy he would walk with perverse perseverance on the wrong side of the street, would wear the right shoe on the left foot, emit courtyard morning sounds in the middle of the night and distribute the furniture in his room according to a kind of Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass logic.’* He often found it difficult to separate the Secondary World of his own imagination from the Primary World of his everyday life. Critics and biographers have been kind to him on this point: they speak of his tendency to exaggerate, his underdeveloped sense of reality, and his flights of imagination. Few use the term ‘liar’. In 1829 he made a sudden and inexplicable trip to Germany financed by money embezzled from his mother. In his subsequent letters to her he gives various and contradictory reasons for his mysterious journey, including imaginary illness and a non-existent woman of extreme beauty. In later years he once took elaborate steps to make his mother believe he was still in Italy when he had already returned to Russia. To an uncle he claimed a good knowledge of law, a subject he had never studied, and asserted once that a committee of doctors in Paris had discovered his stomach to be upside down. His mother, showing a fertility of imagination which was clearly the prototype of her son’s, attributed to him various works of literature written by other people and credited him, among other things, with the invention of the steam engine. The novel written by this extraordinary man is probably 75

unfamiliar to the majority of British readers and will need explanation. One of the quainter aspects of serfdom in Russia was the custom of referring to peasant slaves as ‘souls’. Like any other property they could be bought, sold or mortgaged within certain statutory limitations. A landowner was obliged to pay a tax on each male serf in his possession, and every five years a census was taken to determine his tax liability. If any serf died in the five year period between one census and the next, the landowner was still obliged to pay tax on the dead soul who lived on as a spook figure among the bureaucrats. These serfs are the dead souls of Gogol’s title. Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, the central figure of the work, is an enterprising gentleman who spends his time trying to buy up these dead souls from various country squires around the town of NN. Towards the end of the novel we finally learn what his plan is: he intends to raise a government mortgage on the dead serfs who, on official paper, are still alive. Whether this scheme of fraud was plausible in terms of the Russian Primary World is open to doubt, because legislation forbade the separation of peasants from their families — our first intimation that Gogol’s ‘realistic’ novel might belong to a different kind of writing. Much lionised by the local gentry on account of his supposed wealth, Chichikov becomes the centre of attraction for ladies with marriageable daughters. All goes famously until one of the squires, Nozdryov, a drunken braggart, informs everybody that Chichikov’s souls are all dead, upon which horror and speculation fill the town and Chichikov prudently flees. Gogol was weak on plot. Like Titus Groan and Gormenghast, Dead Souls is a series of tableaux linked by the presence of Chichikov, and by Gogol’s own interpolations and digressions. It has eleven chapters. The first is introductory when Chichikov first enters the town and meets some of the squires. Each of the next five chapters is devoted to an individual squire and to Chichikov’s manoeuvres to buy the dead peasants. Korobochka,

He meets Manilov, sentimental and indolent, a stupid little old woman

with a shrewd eye for

business, Nozdryov, the loud mouthed liar, Sobakevich, bear-

like and coarse, and finally returns to NN which acts events. Although the novel in retrospective analysis a

Plyushkin, the miser. Chichikov as a focal point for subsequent seems full of frenzied activity, reader might have trouble in 76

describing what actually happens in it. Much space is taken up with episodes which in a ‘normal’ novel would be irrelevant to the plot. In one long digression a clerk tells the tale of Captain Kopeykin, a former soldier who became an outlaw. The misdemeanours of a group of peasants and merchants are recounted in a profusion of detail grossly disproportionate to their importance for Chickikov’s affairs. In a strange necromantic reverie, Chichikov brings to life some of the dead serfs who act out small dramas

of their own, like little

dreams within the greater dream of the novel. The novel has an appearance of historical reality, and the action allegedly takes place in Russia, not long after the Napoleonic Wars in and around a small provincial town. Details of Russian life are supplied by Gogol, whose authorial presence takes the form of a garrulous narrator. We hear of landowners,

serfs, country inns and samovars, and references

are made to the destiny of the Russian Empire and of its peoples. But more is required in an authentic picture of Russian life than the presentation of certain details. A smock, a sheaf of corn,

a battered

hat and a rustic accent

do not

necessarily constitute an English farmhand; and in Gogol’s case even the details are suspect. An early work, Evenings on a farm near Dikan’ka (1831) was reckoned by many to give a colourful insight into Ukrainian beliefs and customs, although it contains many inaccuracies fervently denounced by contemporary Ukrainian readers. Many Russian and Ukrainian

words

which

figure in these stories, and in Dead

Souls itself, as examples of local dialect, Gogol had forgetfully invented. He also invented a monster called the Vzy in a story of that title and assured his readers it was a creature derived from Ukrainian folklore. If Gogol could play such games

with, or make mistakes about, his own native region,

his portrayal of provincial Russia must be regarded with some suspicion as a socio-cultural document. His knowledge of provincial Russia was, in any case, slight. Reared in the Ukraine his time in Russia was passed mainly in the two capitals,

Petersburg

and

Moscow,

written during his long stay therefore, a strangeness about Russia (and of urban Russia, the suspicions of later critics. in 1909:*

and

the novel itself was

in Western Europe. There is, Gogol’s portrayal of provincial for that matter) which aroused Valery Bryusov had this to say

17.

...it is no longer possible to regard Gogol as a consistently realistic writer whose works reflect the Russian life of his times in an unusually faithful and accurate manner. Quite the contrary: although Gogol did make a strenuous effort to present an honest picture of the life around him, still, in everything he wrote, he always remained a dreamer, a fantast, and in his art, essentially,

he embodied only the ideal world of his visions. Whatever the mode — “fantasy”, as in the shorter tales, or “‘realism’’, as in Dead Souls, Gogol’s works are the creation of a dreamer who lives alone within the solitude of his imagination, isolated from the entire outside world by the unbreachable wall of his reverie.

Closer inspection of Dead Souls reveals some interesting oddities. Although Gogol’s Secondary World is ostensibly the Russia of his own day, not far from the two capitals, Moscow

and St Petersburg, the town of NN remains carefully nameless. Two other towns in the area are called ‘Solvyshegodsk’ and ‘Ustsysolsk’, names which sound as cacophonous and absurd to the Russian ear as to the English. A couple of villages have improbable names which may be loosely translated as ‘Lice-ridden Pride’ and ‘Rotten-Bully’. Presumably the grotesque connotations of these names are a reflection of the people who inhabit them. Descriptions of landscape also seem

to have a symbolic function: flat, dreary, monotonous,

with nothing to catch the eye except shabby ramshackle towns. This is the Russia of Gogol’s imagination, not the Russia of the Urals, the Altai and the Caucasus and, like the countryside around Gormenghast, it is less a geographical reality than an expression of the spiritual sterility of its inhabitants. Gogol’s techniques of characterisation, which bear resemblance to those of Peake, widen the gap between his own and the Primary World. In Gormenghast there had, at least, been unrequited or disappointed love. Fuchsia had entertained an adolescent and disastrous passion for the calculating Steerpike; Irma and Bellgrove were in love until their marriage turned sour. In Gogol’s world even these are absent. Unwilling or incapable of forming any mature relationship with a woman in his own life, his female characters get short shrift in his work. His typical young woman is a sort of plastic doll, usually fair-skinned with an enchantingly oval little face and

little hands (Russian is rich in diminutives). Older women are ugly and described in similes which match Peake’s for absurdity.

One

lady is compared 78

to a palm

tree, another

glides into the narrative like a swan and a third is compared to a ripe, juicy turnip. There are burlesqued relationships. Manilov has a sugary relationship with his wife, and Chichikov himself has a parody of affection for the governor’s daughter, a lady with a face like a freshly laid egg. Not even an unsuccessful attempt is made at portraying a serious love relationship

and,

indeed,

it would

have

been

out

of place

anyway in a novel pitched at this level of ironic absurdity. Simple affection and cordiality between friends are also absent (unless one includes Manilov’s ludicrous ideals of friendship), and even the pathos of a White Knight is missing. As in Peake’s

and Carroll’s worlds, moral turpitude finds

its counterpart in physical ugliness. Sobakevich resembles a bear. Nature, Gogol tells us, used no delicate instruments to form

his face,

only

an axe.

One

blow produced

the nose,

another the lips, the eyes were gouged out with a drill. No soul, we

are informed,

seems

to inhabit the body, unless it

is hidden under the thick crust. The soullessness of these living people is conveyed by hint and symbol. Plyushkin the miser, whose filth and squalor matches Peake’s Barquentine, lives in a house of grave-like coldness inhabited by no other living person. His face is wooden, the clock is stopped (the dead do not need time), and dead flies inhabit the inkwell.*

Even the cheerful, cloying Manilov exudes a ‘deadly boredom’. Gogol’s dehumanisation of his characters is carried out by similar methods, but in more ruthless fashion than in Peake’s

subworld. The main characters, particularly Chichikov and the landowners, are built up by a thorough exploitation of one or two leitmotifs, so that everything around and about the character is a lunatic extension of himself. Nomenclature is an essential part of the process. Nobody has a name which sounds normal or human. To the English ear most Russian names

sound a little odd, but it will have to be taken on faith

by those who speak no Russian that Gogol’s names sound odder than usual. They possess either strange phonetic qualities or an inherent meaning. ‘Sobakevich’ is derived from the Russian sobaka, meaning dog, and is suitable for a man whose basic trait is animal coarseness. ‘Manilov’ has associations with manit’, to entice, and malina, raspberry, to match

a man whose motif is sentimentality and a mania for friendship. Occasionally people are known by appellations rather than names, and it is an interesting feature of Gogol’s art that (ps)

these appellations swallow up their owners.° In chapter nine Gogol reproduces a conversation between two ladies. One is ‘agreeable in all respects’, the other is ‘merely agreeable’. They have no names, but by some Gogolian alchemy these labels become the persons themselves. Gogol’s presentation of the squire follows a fairly regular formula. Not all the elements are present in every case, but the basic pattern begins when Chichikov approaches the squire’s estate, giving Gogol the opportunity to describe its condition and the appearance of the mancr house. The interior of the house, its furniture,

pictures and ornaments

are often carefully noted. A description is always given of the squire’s external appearance and, where necessary, a description of his wife, children and serfs. On each occasion Chichikov is invited to eat with the squire, and the food too is often an extension of the squire’s physical or moral motif. Careful attention is paid to speech which is highly individualised and in keeping with the speaker’s character. So methodical is all this that the reader’s suspicions are aroused. In the Primary World a person’s surroundings will reflect something of himself but, in his Secondary World, Gogol has pushed this fact to a preposterous degree where self and surroundings merge into one another. Chichikov is a chameleon, and is made by Gogol to take on the character of the people he encounters. He has his own motif

of

smoothness,

and

his

Mirsky observes, is roundness.’ is often

mentioned

geometrical

expression,

as

Constantly on the move, he

in association

with a wheel, and a bent

wheel at that. He seems incapable of approaching anything in a straight line but approaches people and objectives at an angle. He has chubby, satin smooth cheeks, chubby little buttocks, and his plump little body is regularly washed down with Eau de Cologne. A constant companion in his travels is a box with a multitude of drawers accommodating a host of little objects. Chichikov loves his box — it is, as Bely observed, his own soul — because things in general excite his admiration more than people. On first entering the town he takes a playbill down from its post, keeps it until evening when he carefully peruses its unimportant contents by candlelight, and then places it carefully into his box. In his meticulous attention to detail, his ability to adapt himself to any circumstances, and in his ruthlessness, Chichikov is 80

a smoother

version

of Steerpike. He commits

no murder,

but his relentless search for dead souls, together with a ruthless ambition for money and status, make Chichikov a spiritual confrere of Peake’s predator. There is no space to follow Chichikov on his complete tour of the squires and thus see Gogol’s characterisation formula in its entirety. A few examples will suffice.* As Chichikov approaches the estate of Sobakevich everywhere he sees evidence of solid clumsiness. The courtyard is enclosed by a strong, thick fence. The house which was originally designed to be symmetrical, with four columns on each side of the centre, has a lopsided appearance, because Sobakevich has removed one of the columns and blocked up the windows on one side. The landowner, Gogol tells us, was very much concerned about solidity, because thick heavy beams had been used for the stables, barns and kitchens. The peasants’ village too is solidly built, and Sobakevich himself is very large and solid. Continuing the animal motif found in his name, Sobakevich is compared to a medium sized bear, an impression fortified by the colour of his clothing and face. His habit of treading on peoples’ toes carries on the theme of clumsiness suggested by his bear-like body and the lopsidedness of his house. Being strong and healthy himself (he has legs like iron posts), he surrounds himself with portraits of strong healthy people. The furniture in his room is solid and ungainly. The pot bellied bureau looks like a bear. The table,

chairs

and

armchairs

are

of ponderous

and

uncom-

fortable shape; every object, every chair seems to say: ‘I, too, am Sobakevich’ or ‘I am very much like Sobakevich’. Even the food happily takes after him. He serves a turkey as big as a calf. If he wants pork, the whole pig is served at table (note the animal motif again), if mutton, the whole sheep. When Chichikov begins negotiations for the dead serfs, even they, according to Sobakevich’s description, are (or were) as huge and strong as himself. Korobochka,

the only female landowner in the book, has

a name which means ‘little box’, and everything about her, particularly the furniture, is squarish and box-like, with things contained within other things. Her food is a riot of stuffed dishes. Her mirrors are enclosed in heavy frames in which envelopes are stuffed. Chichikov’s box, naturally, excites her profound admiration. Plyushkin’s decrepit 81

surroundings, his filthy peasants and wild overgrown garden reflect his own decay. The roofs of his peasants’ broken down huts are stuffed with rags, an echo of the rags he wears himself. His house looks like ‘a decrepit invalid’, and green mould covers the rotting wood of fence and gate. He offers Chichikov a cake from which the mould has been scraped off, and a decanter of wine from which dead insects have been removed. It is difficult to render in translation Gogol’s extraordinary rhythmic and convoluted prose,’ both in the conversations of his characters

and in his own

narrative, but here is one

example from Chichikov’s farewell to the Manilovs. As a chameleon he readily assimilates other people’s styles, so the characteristics of the Manilovs’ speech have not been lost on him: ‘My dear lady,’ said Chichikov, laying his hand on his heart, ‘it is here, yes, here, that the delight of the time spent with you shall

be cherished! And believe me, no bliss could be greater for me than to stay with you, if not in the same house then in the uttermost vicinity.’ ‘But, you know, Mr Chichikov,’ said Manilov greatly pleased by, this idea, ‘it would indeed be fine if we could be together under one

roof, or beneath

the shade

of an elm

tree, to philosophise

awhile about this and that, to delve deep into...’ ‘Oh! absolute bliss,’ said Chichikov, heaving a sigh. ‘Farewell, dear lady,’ he continued, going up to Mrs Manilov’s tiny hand. ‘Farewell, most honoured friend.’ (Chapter Two)

The gooey absurdity of this exchange can only be hinted at in English which lacks the necessary prefixes and suffixes to convey its superlatives. Distinctive, colourful and idiosyncratic as they are, such conversations are not Primary World speech, but they are part of Gogol’s elaborate exploitation of a comic theme. There is nothing in this novel which resembles a normal human conversation, even having in mind the licence which allows a novelist to tidy up human speech for literary purposes. As in Peake’s and Carroll’s worlds, people here spend much of their time coaxing, bullying, deceiving, persuading or mocking others. The dehumanisation of the landowners by this schematic presentation of their personalities is matched by the whimsical tricks Gogol uses to present other characters. Frequently he practices sleight of pen. It seems as if he has described a person whereas he has fobbed us off with a joke or, in fact, talked about

82

something else. The girl with the egg face makes appearance in the company of her mother:

another

Before him stood the governor’s wife — and she was not alone. On her arm was a youthful young girl of sixteen, fresh of face and blonde of hair, so delicate and refined of feature. Her chin was pointed, her face enchanting in its rounded ovalness, such as an

artist would use as a model for a madonna, and which only rarely turns up in old Russia where absolutely everything likes to take on large dimensions: hills, forests, steppes, lips, feet... (Chapter

Eight)

Gogol’s ‘description’ of this plastic young lady consists of hackneyed similes, and a minor digression on the Russian landscape weirdly allied with physical anatomy. We learn nothing of substance about the girl, but the use of bathos for humorous purposes, and as a means of avoiding characterisation, is a bold artistic technique. Our introduction to Chichikoy in chapter one is a remarkable piece of writing, as Gogol presents a series of balanced negatives which cancel one another out to produce a genuine non-entity: In the carriage sat a gentleman who was not handsome, but also not of ugly appearance, neither too fat nor too thin; one could not call him old, but, on the other hand, one

could not say that

he was excessively young.

We learn too, later, that his rank was neither excessively high, nor terribly low. Gogol’s characters do not develop or change, but are static and immune to growth. He makes two attempts at portraying moral and psychological change. Towards the end of the novel we are taken back to Chichikov’s childhood, only to discover that Chichikov the boy is as round, smooth and ingratiating as Chichikov the man. We do not see a young

Chichikov, only a Chichikov of smaller size. Having shown us the miser Plyushkin, Gogol attempts to trace his decline from a happily married family man to an embittered and lonely skinflint. The attempt fails, because he can only state the change, not

describe

it, and, like Peake, is not at ease with

genuine psychological processes unless they are presented with irony and grotesque imagery. Bad translations of Dead Souls could give the impression that NN and its surroundings constitute a stable world. It is, however, a world, like Gormenghast, of strange transitions and metamorphoses effected not by magic, but through simile, metaphor, and digression. Carroll opens up Tertiary 83

Worlds in the poems recited by his creatures. Peake employed metaphor and weird versions of the Homeric simile. Gogol also uses parodies of the Homeric simile, but achieves many effects through innuendo and suggestion. The absence of a strong linear plot!® and the tableauesque structure of his work facilitate a certain fluidity, as numerous digressions draw the reader’s attention from smooth Mr Chichikov. The postmaster diverts his colleagues with the tale of Captain Kopeykin, because he thinks Chichikov could be this outlaw captain in disguise. The long and complex tale (a linguistic tour de force) might therefore seem to have a point until it dawns on the chief of police that Kopeykin lost an arm and leg in the Napoleonic campaign whereas Chichikov has all his limbs intact. The postmaster calls himself a ‘veal chop’ and this splendidly pointless sub-narrative disappears with no further significance for the work. Captain Kopeykin may be called a spook character, one of many who infest this novel in varying degrees of substantiality. In chapter one, as Chichikov makes his entry into the courtyard of an inn, two peasants debate whether the wheel of Chichikov’s carriage would ever get it to Moscow’or to Kazan. At the same time a young man passes by wearing white trousers and a shirt pin of Tula manufacture in the shape of a pistol. None of these characters is ever seen or heard of again. Very often spook characters crawl into the narrative on the tail end of a simile. In Peake’s description of the Professors’ room a swimmer in soup makes a brief appearance. Another one swims into Gogol’s narrative: It is said that a drowning man will clutch at a mere splinter of wood because at that moment he lacks the sense to realise that even a fly could hardly hope to ride astride the splinter, whereas he weighs almost a hundred and forty pounds, if not a hundred

and eighty, even. (Chapter Ten)

Note the exactitude in assessing the weight of this phantom swimmer and compare him to the phantom soldiers who emerge in drunken state from a description of the weather: Even the very weather was anxious to oblige: the day was not bright nor was it gloomy, but a sort of light grey colour as is found only on the old uniforms of garrison soldiers, who are, incidentally, a troop of peaceful disposition but apt not to be

sober on Sundays. (Chapter Two)

84

We must observe too the mysterious official who makes a fleeting appearance at the beginning of chapter ten. The scandal of Chichikov’s serfs, together with the appointment of a new governor general, has made many of the officials

nervous: Everything went downhill: the president grew thinner, the inspector of the medical department grew thinner, the prosecutor grew thinner, and a certain Semyon Ivanovich whose surname was never used, and who wore a signet-ring on his index finger which he used to let the ladies examine, even he grew thinner.

Who is this phantom figure about whom we have so much detail, and whose emaciation causes particular comment? Gogol never tells us, and so reverses the practice of many writers who casually introduce a character early in the narrative because he is to play an important role later. In Gogol’s work a character is introduced with elaborate detail never to be heard of again. The hierarchy of inanimate object, beast and man is ostensibly preserved. Gogol records the thoughts of Chichikov’s horses which seem rational and human, but the only speaking animal is a turkey who wishes Chichikov good morning. There are no direct transmogrifications: identity is confused and undermined in more subtle ways. A man and a samovar are declared to be identical in appearance, except that one of them is wearing a black beard. Sobakevich’s identification with a bear is so firmly stressed that he virtually turns into the beast, while his furniture, as large and bulky as he, begins to take on a human personality. Peake’s relish for fishy imagery is matched by Gogol’s taste for fruit and vegetables. He had a particular enthusiasm for pumpkins, turnips and melons. The peculiar similes used to describe women have already been mentioned. Sobakevich’s head is held to resemble a Moldavian pumpkin and his wife’s a cucumber. In the opening chapter some faintly humanised cockroaches peer out like prunes from the walls of the inn. The most astonishing changes are effected through comic exploitation of the Homeric simile. In the first chapter Chichikov attends a ball, and as he watches the dancers: Everything was drenched in light. The black frock-coats flickered and flapped singly and in swarms, now here now there, like flies fluttering over a dazzling white chunk of sugar in the heat of a

85

July summer when the old housekeeper is cutting and dividing it into glittering lumps before the open window; the children cluster around her, gaze and follow inquisitively the movements of her rough hands wielding the hammer, but the airy squadrons of flies, lifted by the light air, fly in boldly, complete mistresses of the situation, and taking advantage of the old woman’s blindness and the sun troubling her eyes, spread themselves over the tasty morsels, now singly, now in swarms.

From a group of dancers in a ballroom we are transported to a hot July day in the country, complete with a cast of flies, housekeeper and small children. The association of these dancers with flies, and the implied humanisation of the flies within the simile, is another smaller erosion of identity within the greater. The fabric of the Secondary World has shimmered and gone transparent to reveal a Tertiary World beyond. The transformation of man into beast or insect is commonplace. We have noticed how Sobakevich merges into his bear-like furniture and surroundings, and the more sinister manner in which the wooden-faced, decrepit Plyushkin

blends into his house

(itself like an invalid), and into the

rotten wood of his mouldy fence. The transformation is effected with trenchant irony in the case of Nozdryov who, Gogol informs us, neglects his motherless children and yet, amidst his numerous dogs, he stands ‘as a father amidst his family.’ In another remarkable Homeric simile, as Chichikov approaches Korobochka’s house, a chorus of dogs is transformed into a choir: In the meantime the dogs were bursting out into all sorts of voices: one, throwing its head back, was giving forth for so long and with such zeal as though he were getting God only knows what wages for it; another was yapping quickly like a sacristan; between them a tireless treble rang out like a postman’s bell, probably a young puppy; all this was surpassed by a bass, probably an old man, endowed with a sturdy canine nature because he wheezed like a double bass when the concert is in full blast and the tenors stand on tiptoe in their urgent anxiety to achieve the top note, and absolutely everything and everybody is striving upwards with head thrown back, but the bass alone, plunging his unshaven chin into his cravate, squatting down almost to the floor, emits from there such a note as to make the window panes

rattle and shake. (Chapter Three)

The canine and human identities of this phantom choir are cleverly merged until the reader, already fuddled by the sheer 86

length of the sentence, can scarcely distinguish them. A more elaborate transformation takes place in chapter four when Nozdryoyv, about to assault Chichikov, is changed into a lieutenant and Chichikov himself into a fortress under attack,

a transformation as sudden as Swelter’s transmogrification into a galleon. Inanimate objects sometimes show a strong desire to be humanised. The clocks of Gormenghast would feel at home with Korobochka’s timepiece which becomes a mass of snakes endowed with human feelings: To the great alarm of her guest [Korobochka’s] words were interrupted by a weird hissing, as though the room suddenly swarmed with snakes but, on glancing upwards, he calmed down, realising that the clock on the wall had been overcome by a desire to strike. The hissing was immediately replaced by wheezing and, at last, straining itself to the utmost, the clock struck two as though somebody were thumping a broken pot with a stick, after which the pendulum again started to flick quietly to and fro.

(Chapter Three)

Sometimes clothes take on a life of their own. In chapter eight an overcoat ambles down the street, and earlier, in the

town’s legal office: Our heroes

(Chichikov and Manilov)

saw a lot of papers, rough

drafts and fair copies, bent heads, broad necks, tail-coats, frock-

coats of provincial cut and even a sort of light grey jacket standing out in sharp outline, which, with head to one side almost touching the paper, was copying out some report or other...

(Chapter Seven)

Some translators, not realising the point of all this, have laboriously inserted relative pronouns: ‘the man who was wearing...’ etc. A dramatic example of how one inanimate object can be changed into another is the melon which becomes Korobochka’s coach: In the remote streets and alleys of the town wobbled a peculiar carriage causing some perplexity as to its type. It was not like a tarantass,

blance

or

a barouche

or a britzka

to a plump-cheeked,

but bore

a closer resem-

bulging water-melon

mounted

on

wheels. The cheeks of this water-melon, i.e. its doors, bore traces

of yellow paint and shut very badly on account of the poor state of its handles and locks which had been haphazardly tied up with string. The melon was full of cotton cushions looking like tobacco pouches, bolsters and just ordinary pillows stuffed with sacks of bread, white wheatmeal loaves, stuffed buns, griddle

87

cakes, and pretzels made of boiled dough. Chicken pies plain, and chicken pies stuffed with pickles peered out from the top.

(Chapter Eight)

Continuing Korobochka’s motif of boxness and containment, this mobile melon is stuffed with other stuffed things, and even the food, like that served earlier to Chichikov, is a riot

of stuffed dishes and pies. Leaving this phantom vegetable to trundle its way through the narrative (it has become a proper coach by the time it reaches its destination), we may pause to consider that Gogol’s subworld is as fluid and incongruous as Peake’s, despite its ostensibly firm location in our own Primary World. Its fabric is often shaken by the peculiar reversal of death and life in the narrative. In Chichikov’s reverie (chapter seven) his dead souls attain a more lively resurrection than Peake’s ghosts, when their life histories are revealed with a wealth of colourful detail and a multitude of spook characters caper into and out of the text. Another resurrection scene occurs in chapter five when Sobakevich, in a lyrical outburst, dwells upon the merits of the dead peasants he has sold to Chichikov, all of whom, as one might expect, were as

large and beefy as himself. The vigour of these dead souls stands in contrast to the soullessness of the living, and the

novel’s title begins to assume a new significance." A more

sinister invasion

of the Secondary

World

takes

place after the townspeople learn the nature of Chichikov’s purchases. The dream threatens to become nightmare as spook characters of a different kind invade the town. Gogol evacuates his position of authorial omniscience and casts an aura of supernatural evil over NN which seems no longer a town but a symbol of decay and disruption: Everybody stopped in his tracks, like a sheep with bulging eyes. Dead souls, the governor’s daughter and Chichikov were mixed and mingled up in their heads in a weird and wonderful manner... Why dead souls? What was the point? There was no logic to dead souls: how on earth do you buy dead souls?..and how did the governor’s daughter get mixed up with them?..the hitherto sleepy town was whipped up as though by a whirlwind. All the sluggards and sleepy heads slithered out of their holes...a certain Sysoy Pafnutovich and a Macdonald Karlovich, never heard of before, made their appearance; a certain long and lanky personage with a shot up arm and of a height never ever seen before began to lurk about the drawing rooms. Closed carriages, unknown

88

traps, rattling carriages with squeaky wheels street — and hell was let loose. (Chapter Nine)

were

seen in the

Aware of Gogol’s own preoccupations with the devil, symbolist critics were apt to see these spook invaders of a phantasmagorical city as representatives of hell: petty demons galvanised into frenzied life by the appearance of Satan. Far fetched, perhaps, but the reader has seen enough to realise that in Gogol’s works, as in Peake’s, the real life of the novel is carried out among the spook characters and in the Tertiary Worlds which lurk beneath the surface plot. Literature of this kind, as Nabokov observes, *...appeals to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like

the shadows of nameless and soundless ships.’ !? The weirdness of Gogol’s subworld is strengthened by his games with semantic and situational logic. He does not conduct the same assault upon reason as Lewis Carroll. The latter was a professional mathematician and logician whose absurdities are seen to be quite rational once the basic point (usually the dramatisation of classical problems in logic) has been grasped. Gogol’s absurdities have no such rational

foundation.

A distinctive

feature

of his work is the dis-

crepancy between an event and the reactions of his characters to it. The uproar which follows the discovery of Chichikov’s purchases is already one example, yet his offer to buy dead serfs is itself a situational absurdity but, despite their surprise, none of the squires reacts to his proposition in the manner one would expect in the Primary World. Manilov is only too anxious to assist his new friend; Korobochka is merely worried unless she is selling them too cheaply; Sobakevich is concerned to screw as much money out of Chichikov as possible. Nobody is outraged. When the news spreads that his serfs are dead the two ladies, ‘agreeability in all respects’ and ‘mere agreeability’, conclude that he is planning to elope with the governor’s daughter! A non sequitur of this kind is Gogol’s speciality. It is often difficult to detect, because Gogol has the habit of slipping in absurd statements in the middle of something quite rational. A frequent device is the pseudo-scientific discourse, or a weighty observation, delivered in solemn tone. Discussing Chichikov’s feelings towards the governor’s daughter Gogol announces: 89

It is impossible to say for certain whether the feeling of love had awakened in our hero’s heart. It is even doubtful whether gentlemen of this kind, that is to say, not exactly fat, and yet not exactly thin, are capable of falling in love. (Chapter Eight)

The implication behind this meditation — that a man’s capability of falling in love is dictated by his size — is outlandish, but in Gogol’s world it takes on a strange plausibility. In chapter three we are treated to a discourse on French, German and Russian modes of address, and in chapter four an equally nonsensical lecture is delivered on the eating habits of middle-class men. In an account of a trial at which some peasants are accused of murdering a policeman, the judge stresses the importance of a verdict in the peasant’s favour, because they are alive and the victim is dead, and therefore cannot benefit from a judgment in his favour. Together with non sequitur, hyperbole is the keynote of Gogol’s humour, from the turkey as big as a calf on Sobakevich’s table to Manilov’s dream that the Tsar, hearing of his friendship with Chichikov, will make them both generals. Like Peake’s novels, Dead Souls is rich in diverse tones and

moods couched in rhythmic alliterative prose. Famous among the passages of high rhetoric is Gogol’s lyrical addresses.to his motherland as Chichikov speeds out of town in chapter eleven: Russia, oh Russia! I see you from afar, from a wondrous beautiful distance I see you... But what incomprehensible, mysterious force draws me to you. Why does your mournful song sound and ring ceaselessly in my ears from sea to sea across and along your vastness... Russia! What do you desire of me?.. Why do you thus gaze upon me, and why does everything within you turn to me with eyes full of expectation?

It is typical of Gogol’s relish for bathos that this spate of rhetoric is interrupted by a state courier threatening to flay Chichikov’s soul if he does not get out of the way. The laughter provoked by Dead Souls is uneasy. In its spiritual sterility NN resembles Gormenghast, despite the nominal adherence of Gogol’s characters to the Orthodox faith. Chichikov, the acquisitive chameleon, is exploiting the corrupt values of society to his own advantage. He is a familiar figure: the entrepreneur, on the move, on the make; his type may be seen in any society of any age. The squires and townspeople of NN are little better than he: all are 90

complacent, some foolish, others spiteful. A combination of moral torpor and physical indolence makes them representatives of an evil which lacks the romantic glamour of Satanic rebellion. They are not Orcs, but embody instead a monstrous mediocrity. Gogol, who seemed to have a more fervent faith in the Devil than in God, was acutely sensitive to demonic mediocrity, probably because he recognised a good deal of it in himself. It is interesting to speculate on the extent to which the vices of his squires are projections of Gogol’s own: the greed of Sobakevich and the lies of Nozdryov certainly equal some of Gogol’s achievements and, perhaps, he saw in Chichikov a reflection of his own deviousness in the embezzlement of his mother’s money. Dead Souls, as it stands today, is only the first part of an intended trilogy. The first shows

Chichikoyv

the

sinner,

the

second

(of which

some

chapters are still extant) was to bring him to remorse, the third was to show him redeemed. Unfortunately Gogol’s talents did not stretch to the creation of morally brilliant heroes, a situation he was apt to attribute to his own sinful-

ness. His inability to redeem Chichikov might well have become, in his muddled and conceited mind, a symbol of his own gloomy destiny and, perhaps, one of the causes of his death. Tolkien’s Middle-earth is but a temporary dwelling place for its inhabitants whose final destiny lies in other spheres. Alice wakes up from her dream into what she hopes is the real world.

But NN, Gogol’s private hell, has no exit. Like

Gormenghast it is a world enclosed and isolated within itself. Its fluidity, the psychological stagnation of its inhabitants and the ruthless elimination from their characters of all that is beautiful and noble, make it a world of gruesome otherness in which the dead have more vigour than the living. As Dostoyevsky pointed out later, Gogol’s characters are all types which in real life appear in diluted form,'* so we can recognise among us less colourful versions of Sobakevich and Plyushkin with the same ease that we identify bumbling White Queens. Mercifully, for all their faults, inhabitants of

the Primary World possess virtues and aspirations beyond the comprehension of these Secondary World creatures. NN is the first sub-world of this study to be ostensibly placed in the Primary World of the author’s own epoch and country, a fact which increases rather than diminishes its OH

otherness. A tale set in the Primary World offers the reader a certain security even if strange things invade it, but in Gogol’s work the very fabric of the Primary World itself trembles and grows thin. As weird and nasty as Peake’s world might be, the reader may derive some comfort that it is located in another dimension, time or planet. There is no such comfort in NN. If it is a dream, neither the reader nor Chichikov are destined to

wake up. The last of our subworlds is also set ostensibly in the Primary World of its subcreator’s time. Grahame’s River Bank seems to lie in a tranquil part of Edwardian England and displays some qualities similar to those seen in the less attractive worlds of Peake, Carroll and Gogol. Nevertheless, its ethos is quite different.

U2

Chapter 6

Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932):

THE

RIVER

BANK

But Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, and can recapture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty of it, the

beauty! (The Wind in the Willows)

The Wind in the Willows, first published in 1908,’ is a subworld in refreshing contrast to the bizarre and loveless worlds of Carroll, Peake and Gogol. It restores us to the more optimistic vision of Middle-earth, less magnificent but more comfortable. The most blatant distortion of Primary World reality is the human behaviour of the animals who are the book’s principal characters. A mole, rat, badger and toad make unlikely companions, but this defiance of Natural History causes no weirdness. Written by a Scot,” the book is a masterpiece of creamy English charm in a setting which contains nothing frightening or exotic. The birds, beasts and flowers of the narrative are those familiar to the English countryside. Cars exist and play an important part in the tribulations of Toad. There are railways, magistrate’s courts, Sunday Schools, hospitals and other familiar institutions of our time. The animals all speak English and there is no 93

pretence that the author is ‘translating’, as the ‘teach ‘em, learn ‘em’ debate of chapter eleven proves. Food too is good, solid, no-nonsense English fare, and the contents of Rat’s picnic basket could be eaten by any self-respecting Hobbit. We hear a fair amount

knives, plates, forks, mustard

about

pots and washing up, suggesting the untroubled domesticity of Bilbo Baggins before his great adventure with the Dwarves. Bacon and eggs are eaten by hungry hedgehogs in Badger’s house. The gaoler’s daughter gives bubble-and-squeak to the imprisoned Toad. Nothing in this Secondary World seems alien to middle-class English culture, and if there are no Balrogs to frighten, nor are there Elves or mallorn trees to delight us. We can make the easy assumption of being in rural England, at the turn of the century, in a replica of the Primary World with a history, judging by Mole’s statues of Queen Victoria and Garibaldi, the same as our own. The

assumption,

however,

is too

easy,

and undermined

by a closer inspection of the episodic and loose plot. It begins and ends in tranquillity and has, as its hard core, the adventures of Toad. They start only in the sixth chapter and assume overriding importance towards the end. Other episodes precede them, almost complete in themselves and only slightly related to Toad’s escapades. The first chapter acquaints us with Rat and Mole, and briefly introduces the other characters. The canary-coloured cart of chapter two is an

adventure

in itself, but Toad’s

infatuation

with

the car

sows the seeds of later trouble. The next chapters concerning Mole’s adventure in the Wild Wood form a separate episode which brings Badger into sharp focus. Dulce Domum of chapter five is an independent story. Even the narrative of Toad’s adventures is interrupted by two unconnected episodes: the search for Portly, and Rat’s encounter with the seafarer. In the final chapter all the characters are brought together for a happy conclusion. Meandering like the river itself, the plot is marked by a dream-like lack of verisimilitude. To get twenty years for stealing a car is peculiar enough in terms of the Primary World. That this dreadful fate should be suffered by a Toad exceeds all the legal horrors presented by Carroll, Gogol or Kafka. Fortunately, Toad’s escape from prison is as easy and as impossible as his arrival there and, having reached his ancestral home, he is free from further arrest despite the twenty-year sentence still looming over 94

him. In a dream world, of course, strange causes may produce unlikely effects, or no effects at all, or the effects may simply

cease to operate. Despite the familiar things in Grahame’s landscape there is a remoteness about the River Bank which can be partly explained by the complete absence of place names. We have to go outside the text and learn from Grahame’s biographer that the River Bank represents that stretch of the Thames from Marlow to Pangbourne, in particular the area around Cookham Dene.*? While within the Secondary World, we encounter geographical anonymity. Toad goes up to town to order a motor car, and the animals go through a village in chapter five. Neither is named. We hear of the ‘Wild Wood’ and the ‘Wild World’, but these are descriptive labels, not names. Characters too lack proper names, with the exception of Portly, Otter’s son and Billy, one of the hedgehogs. Otherwise, as in Carroll’s sub- worlds, animals are known by species

and

human

addressed

beings as

‘Rat’,

by rank or function. ‘Mole’,

‘Badger’,

The

sometimes

animals

are

with

the

prefix ‘Mr’ attached, and often in affectionate moments, they are known by diminutives: ‘Ratty’, “Toady’, and so forth. Of the four heroes only Badger is not addressed in such familiar terms, as befits his superiority in age and wisdom. Human beings such as the gaoler’s daughter and the barge-woman remain nameless. It is interesting to ponder the effect had Grahame given his animal creations human proper names, because nomenclature here is just part of a broader problem in his presentation of character. Unlike Carroll, Grahame makes his anthropomorphic animals a blend of human and animal characteristics. They are not, as Tolkien thought, merely human beings in animal mask. It is Grahame’s remarkable achievement to effect a union of two natures so that his main characters seem completely human and yet completely animal to the reader’s inner eye.* The balance which Grahame achieves is a fine one, and any loss of it would be disastrous for the whole ethos of his Secondary World. Were his characters to appear as human beings with animal characteristics

(snout, paws human

and fangs for example), or as animals with

features, he would

be using the formula which has

produced the werewolf of legend and the monsters of horror films. Grahame keenly appreciated the dangers of having his book illustrated and, for a long time, refused to do so until 5

Ernest Shepard produced his drawings. A picture by Arthur Rackham of Rat and Mole at Mole End amply demonstrates Grahame’s fears.° Both animals are shown in human size and the effect, inevitably is horrible. Small animals dressed and behaving like human beings are charming or quaint. A mansize Rat and Mole are frightening. Ernest Shepard usually refrains from showing the size of the animals in relation to human

beings

but,

when

he does, the animals

are animal-

size. A very small Toad is shown riding a large horse, and at the massive gates of his house, Toad is toad-size in comparison with them. This carefully preserved balance between human and animal causes anomalies which Grahame leaves unexplored, lest the quaintness of his tale turn to horror. How do these small animals drive human cars, ride horses, buy tickets at railway stations? Their human attributes and activities are numerous. They speak English, eat human food, read newspapers, use shops, buy goods with British currency, and are subject to a human judicial system. When Toad is ill he demands a doctor, not a vet. At the inn where he has luncheon, he is treated and behaves like a human diner. The

barge-woman

knows

of Toad

animals

human

clothes,

wear

Hall and its grandeur. The Toad

brushes

his hair, and

Badger is once, inadvertently perhaps, described “...he has never

been

as a man:

a very smart man, the Badger, at the

best of times.’’® But once the reader has become accustomed to the human aspects of these creatures, their animal nature reasserts itself, sometimes as a joke. ‘“You exasperating rodent,”’ says the angry Mole to Rat as the latter digs outside Badger’s door. “I’m going to make an animal of you, my boy!’’” the enthusiastic Toad informs Rat as they set off with the canary-coloured cart. On a more serious note, we are frequently reminded of animal habits and customs. Mole, after his adventure in the Wild Wood, clearly sees he is an animal of the tilled field and hedgerow, linked to the ploughed furrow, the frequented pasture, the lane of evening lingerings, the cultivated garden plot. In chapter five the humanised animals are seen to be alienated from human beings: The animals did not hold with villages, and their own highways, thickly frequented as they were, took an independent course, regardless of church, post office, or public-house. “Oh, never

96

mind!”

said the Rat. “At this season of the year they’re all safe

indoors

by this

time,

sitting round

the fire; men,

women

and

children, dogs and cats and all. We shall slip through all right, without any bother or unpleasantness, and we can have a look at them through their windows if you like, and see what they’re doing.”

And yet these are the same animals who, in other parts of the work, are perfectly at ease with human society and institutions. In the same chapter Grahame informs us that: ‘We others [meaning human beings], who have long lost the more subtle of the physical senses, have not even proper terms to express an animal’s inter-communications with his surroundings, living or otherwise...’. We learn too that no animal according to the rules of animal etiquette is expected to do anything strenuous or heroic, or even anything moderately active, during the off season period of winter — a rule which Badger strictly observes by dozing in his study after breakfast, and refusing to do anything about Toad until the coming of Spring. The same dual vision of animals is demonstrated by human characters in the book. The gaoler’s daughter proposes treating Toad as she treats her own domestic pets, and promises her father to make him eat from her hand, sit up and do all sorts of things. Afterwards she speaks to him as to an imprisoned human being, taking especial delight in his description of Toad Hall. The bargewoman accepts Toad as a human-size washerwoman but, when he proudly reveals his identity, she reacts like any other stout minded, stout bodied lady to something reptilian: The woman moyed nearer to him and peered under his bonnet keenly and closely. “Why, so you are!” she cried. ‘Well, I never! A horrid, nasty, crawly Toad! And in my nice clean barge, too!

Now that is a thing that I will not have!” (Chapter X)

Has Toad now shrunk, or did the barge-woman never notice the diminutive size of this supposed washerwoman whom she is now able to pick up by two legs and throw into the river? The blending of human and animal natures causes many other anomalies. In the first chapter Rat tells Mole of the Wild Wood and of the Wide World beyond it but, rather stuffily, imposes a ban on speaking about it: “I’ve never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either, if you’ve got any sense at all. Don’t ever refer to it again, please.” The next chapter sees them both out on the road in Toad’s Oy

canary-coloured cart, showing a perfect familiarity with metalled roads, shops and railway stations. Their dwelling places reflect the duality of their natures. Rat lives in a hole in the river bank which is furnished in human style. Badger lives underground in a humanised set (sheets on the bed smell of lavender), and there is certainly nothing toad-like about Toad’s stately home. Under certain circumstances the animals lose attributes normally associated with their species. Toad is not at home in water and, when lost in the Wild Wood, Mole seems to forget his previous life underground, for it never occurs to him to dig or burrow. Badgers in our Primary World have disagreeable habits and a great appetite for hedgehogs, but Badger, in this tale, gives them

shelter,

sixpence

apiece and a pat on the

head.® Another anomaly, which also occurred in Middle-earth, is here glossed over. These talking rational beasts consume the same food as human beings, including bacon and chicken — a form of animal cannibalism. There are several examples in the story of talking rabbits,? yet Toad on the barge looks forward to eating one. This ambiguity of relationship is seen elsewhere. Sometimes the principal animal characters treat other animals as equals. Rat and Mole speak to the birds, field-mice and other inhabitants of River Bank as though to close acquaintances. On other occasions the relationship is of man to beast. The horse who pulls the canary-coloured cart is a talker who ‘grumbles terribly’ at having so much work and at being left out of things, whereas the horse which Toad sells to the gypsy has nothing to say for itself. Most puzzling is the fact that the animals display the human trait of keeping a canary in a cage who cries pitifully to be released. Amidst fluidity of size and identity Grahame’s Secondary World is relatively stable in time and space, with one noticeable exception. After his trial Toad seems to undergo a timeshift. He is taken not only to gaol but back into the Middle Ages — not as they were, but as popular imagination conceives of them. The prison is a stout castle complete with rack chamber, thumbscrew room and a private scaffold. The sergeant of police takes off his helmet and addresses the gaoler in language which is totally incongruous with any notion of a modern British copper: 98

“Oddsbodikins!” said the sergeant of police, taking off his helmet and wiping his forehead. ‘Rouse thee, old loon, and take over

from us this vile Toad, a criminal of deepest guilt and matchless artfulness and resource. Watch and ward him with all thy skill; and mark thee well, grey-beard, should aught untoward befall, thy old head shall answer for his — and a murrain on both of

them!” (Chapter VI)

Another incongruity concerns economics. We know that Toad has his money by inheritance, but what is the source of the other animals’ income? They do not work for a living, yet they handle British Currency. Are we to assume that they are all ‘gentleanimals’ of leisure? Rat speaks of getting a smoking jacket when he can afford it. Toad is regarded as being rather rich, and none of them actually seems to be poor. We hear nothing of trust funds or of rents derived from tenants living in other holes by the river. Any such information would mar the idyll’s charm by prosaic Primary World detail, but the lack of even implicit reference to it strengthens the dream

nature of the book.'° Namelessness, fluidity of shape and identity, implausibilities, situational absurdities were all to be found in the works

of Peake, Carroll and Gogol whose subworlds were thereby made eerie or grotesque. A Toad large enough to drive a train and a car, and hold down a human being with his elbow could, in many other contexts, be a thing of horror — the beast has long been associated with graveyard and ghoulish tales — yet by the River Bank he is a lovable creature. Grahame does not draw attention to the anomalies of his world. and so conceals

its fluidity. That, however, can only

be a partial explanation. The essential difference between his subcreation and the other three is that, amidst physical fluidity and situational anomaly, Grahame preserves psychological consistency. Unlike the inhabitants of NN and Gormenghast or Wonderland, the animals of River Bank are fully rounded characters capable of a wide variety of feelings and reactions. They develop and change in the course of the narrative as individuals and in relation to one another. The four principal animals are bachelors and presumably celibate, so the book has no love interest. Instead it presents a study in friendship, cordiality and affection such as Gormenghast, NN and Wonderland never knew. Mole and Rat strike up a spontaneous friendship in the first chapter, and

og

live out an idyllic existence of mutual trust and help. We do not encounter the high herosim of Middle-earth where faithful companions go out to battle with a great and global evil. The four animals demonstrate

a more humdrum,

albeit

important set of virtues, among which a quiet loyalty is the most prominent. Rat consents to travel with Toad in chapter two, because the impressionable Mole has been already persuaded. He also sets out to look for the Mole in the Wild Wood, and both are given shelter by the kindly Badger. When Otter loses his son (the only example of parental love in the book), the good-natured Rat and Mole naturally help to look for him. Three animals combine to help Toad who is decidedly unwilling to be helped. It is Badger who lays down the precepts on which their unwanted assistance is based: “Independence is all very well, but we animals never allow our friends to make fools of themselves beyond a certain limit; and that limit you’ve reached.” (Chapter VI). When Toad refuses to comply with sensible advice, his friends react by locking him up in his own home. Badger’s doctrine has a paternalistic flavour, but the sincerity of Toad’s friends cannot be doubted, and they do restore him to his former . glory. Instead of high aspirations and noble ideals, the River Bank presents an ethic of common decency, and a willingness to put up with inconvenience for the sake of a friend. In the absence of a Sauron no high heroism is necessary anyway. Rat, Mole and Toad are all at one time or other guilty of rash behaviour and foolishness, from Mole’s trying to row a boat to Rat’s infatuation with the seafarer’s tale. Toad’s misdemeanours are in a higher order of stupidity, but he is not a representative of cosmic evil. Even at his more irresponsible he remains cheerful and generous. Only the stoats and weasels who take over Toad Hall have strong claims to wickedness. They are unpleasant, but would be no match for the Orcs, and after their defeat the weasels

turn out to be

basically decent types who have been misguided. All blame for the seizure of Toad Hall is laid on the Chief Weasel and the stoats. It is easy to see the whole situation as part of the class struggle, and Mr Green assures us that the stoats and weasels, in Grahame’s mind, represent the proletariat usurping the privileges of the middle class. This might well be true. It is possible to take a less sectarian view and see 100

the stoats and weasels as the quintessence of irksome and destructive people who exist in any social or political system. The main characters of Middle-earth are faced with a large

problem in the shape of the Ring, and a number of moral decisions to make in consequence of it. There is no such testing by the River Bank, but Grahame’s characters do grow

and develop in response to situations and crises. None is presented with a direct choice between good and stark evil: a crisis is often emotional, such as Mole’s yearning for his old home and rat’s feeling the call of the sea. Mole in particular grows to maturity as the book progresses. In the beginning he is a carefree, brash animal who leaps eagerly into situations from which he has to be extricated by the patient Rat. He capsizes the boat, gets lost in the Wild Wood and lacks the sense to appreciate the significance of the door-mat which Rat finds in the snow. No wonder he is a ready victim, at first, of Toad’s persuasive tongue. In chapter five Rat, after an initial misunderstanding, helps Mole out of an emotional crisis by insisting that they return to Mole End. Thereafter a change takes place. Rat, who is seen at first as the eminently practical animal in comparison to Mole’s naivité, is revealed as a poet and dreamer who falls under the Sea Rat’s spell as violently as Mole had succumbed to Toad’s eloquence in the second chapter. Now it is Mole who helps him out of an emotional crisis, and in the later chapters it is Mole who gets things done, even to the extent of being imposed upon by the others. He organises the cleaning squad in Toad’s house at Badger’s request (“‘I’d send Rat, if he wasn’t a poet,” he perspicaciously observed), and it is Mole who writes out fresh invitations to Toad’s banquet. Badger, who seems at first to be unsociable and disagreeable, is revealed as a kindly person and a born leader. Toad, the charming, feckless and ever generous braggart, is finally brought to a more responsible way of life by the efforts and exertions of his friends. His conversion is the least plausible psychological event of the book. One suspects that many other private sessions of boastful singing took place after his official submission to humility. The joy of living, which was absent from Gormenghast and NN, is restored by the River Bank. Grahame and his creatures take a delight in nature and the seasons, to the rhythm of which the whole narrative is attuned. The book 101

opens in the spring as Mole, exhilarated by the season, sets out on his great adventure. Toad and his cart set out in summer. Mole’s adventure in the Wild Wood takes place in winter, presumably of the same year; his return to Mole End at Christmas. Toad begins his adventures in early summer. when Badger decides this is the appropriate time to take him in hand. Although not explicitly stated, it seems that Toad spends a year in prison and his escape takes place early in the following summer. His tale is interrupted by the search for Portly in midsummer, and by the episode of the seafaring Rat towards summer’s end. Both events happen, presumably, in Toad’s absence. The Hall is recaptured soon after his return, and so the tale begins in spring and reaches its happy conclusion in early summer. And the conclusion really 7s happy, with no awkward consequences attached to it. The seasonal background to these events is given with sensuous detail, and an enthusiasm which is readily communicated to the reader. Like Tolkien, Grahame presents the world to us afresh. We experience the joy of spring in chapter one and the restlessness of autumn in chapter nine: To all appearances the summer’s pomp was still at fullest height, and although in the tilled acres green had given way to gold, though rowans were reddening, and the woods were dashed here and there with a tawny fierceness, yet light and warmth and colour were still present in undiminished measure, clean of any chilly premonitions of the passing year. But the constant chorus of the orchards and hedges had shrunk to a casual evensong from a few yet unwearied performers; the robin was beginning to assert himself once more; and there was a feeling in the air of change and departure.

We experience the crispy tang of winter in chapter five and the languor of a hot summer in chapter seven. Mole’s wanderings in the Wild Wood epitomise the horror of being lost in a strange and unfriendly place, while the description of Badger’s kitchen conveys the joy of friendly refuge after an ordeal: One of these [doors] the Badger flung open, and at once they found themselves in all the glow and warmth of a large fire-lit kitchen... Rows of spotless plates winked from the shelves of the dresser at the far end of the room, and from the rafters overhead hung hams, bundles of dried herbs, nets of onions, and baskets

of eggs. It seemed a place where heroes could fitly feast after

102

victory, where weary harvesters could line up in scores along the table and keep their Harvest Home with mirth and song, or where two or three friends of simple tastes could sit about as they pleased and eat and smoke and talk in comfort and contentment. The ruddy brick floor smiled up at the smoky ceiling; the oaken settles, shiny with long wear, exchanged cheerful glances with each other; plates on the dresser grinned at pots on the shelf, and the merry firelight flickered and played over everything without

distinction. (Chapter IV)

Here, the personification of inanimate objects is a cheerful process. They come alive to participate in the happiness of living creatures, not to assist in their degradation. The optimism inspired by the River Bank is further enhanced by hints of a destiny beyond itself. Skilfully Grahame has combined pagan and Christian hopes. The animals celebrate Christmas — the field-mice sing carols — while the great god Pan keeps a gentle and protecting eye on their lives. Grahame does not explore the implications of this mingled paganism and Chnistianity, and his Secondary World reveals no cosmic scheme. It has an ethic of good order, kindly concern for one’s neighbour and loyalty to one’s friends. In Middleearth evil looms large and horrible; only the certainty of a life after death lessens the horror. By the River Bank evil, such

as

it is, seems

Unpleasant Portly,

things

followed

to be of little account

are

discreetly

by Mole’s

mentioned.

even

on earth.

The

and Rat’s encounter

loss of

with Pan,

makes it clear that there are traps set for unwary animals whom Pan makes it his business to free. The Wild Wood is not a place for weaklings; the stoats, weasels and ferrets are meant to be a ferocious crew. Otherwise catastrophe is muted, and death is absent from the narrative. All unfortunate incidents have happy endings, and the whole work ends in an easily won victory after which, we are assured, the animals lived out their lives in great peace and contentment. Hobbitlike, enjoying good meals and good company, the animals are not troubled by rumours of war. No Gandalf turns up to disturb their peace with news of a Ring. Were he to do so, who could doubt that they would respond to greater duties with the same zeal as to the lesser? Meanwhile they lead lives apparently free from the drudgery of our Primary World, an idyllic existence of joy and contentment. Can such a place be relevant to our own world where summers are rarely golden, winters not crisp and clean, 103

friendships frequently broken and loyalties betrayed? If we grant Peake and Carroll the right to portray the quintessentially nasty aspects of our world, we cannot deny Grahame the right to dwell upon the quintessentially pleasant. Some friendships last, some loyalties are sustained, and even the English climate is capable of producing the weather enjoyed by the River Bank. Fair weather and happy children, as C. S. Lewis observed, are as ‘real’ as the sight of human

entrails from a body hit by a bomb."

Life in the Primary

World, for most of us, lacks the sequestered tranquillity of the River Bank but, even amidst these outposts of Gormenghast, moments of joy and contentment flicker and pass, either as mocking shadows

of what can never be, or as

intimations of a reality which might one day come. Tolkien’s exclusion of The Wind in the Willows from Faérie is as unfortunate as it is unconvincing. The inhabitants of River Bank are not merely humans in animal mask, nor does the story serve as a vehicle for satire or preaching. Moral conclusions may be drawn from it, just as they may be drawn from Tolkien’s own works, but there is no didacticism. He apparently overlooks the dream-like nature of Grahame’s subworld, probably because of the absence of a dreamer, although it is much more a dream than the Secondary Worlds of Lewis Carroll. Its anomalies and fluidity do not trouble the reader or the characters within the dream, and are only noticed in retrospective analysis. Moreover, the work fulfils several of the purposes which Tolkien attributes to the fairytale. It helps us recover a clear vision. Many joys, and some terrors of the Primary World are taken up and presented to us anew. As a rustic Arcadia it offers escape from the industrialisation which Tolkien feared and abhorred. If the Christian and pagan elements within it are to be taken seriously, it offers an implicit hope of immortality. Consolation is provided by a happy ending which is unmarred by any forebodings of doom. A love of life, delight in nature and pleasure in friendship make the River Bank a Secondary

World which could well form part of Tolkien’s own Shire.

104

Chapter7

PE ISO ARNES S70

FOr A ER

WORDS

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? (The Hitch

Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)

Many elements can form the otherness of ‘other’ worlds. Location plays a significant part, and the five worlds explored here are placed in various relationships to the

Primary World. Tolkien’s Middle-earth is in the far past of our own globe; Alice’s worlds are reached through a ‘dream’ in the first instance, and thereafter down a rabbit hole and through a looking-glass; Peake’s world is nowhen, nowhere;

Gogol’s NN is allegedly in his own time and native country; the River Bank seems to be in rural England at the turn of the century, but the author’s careful avoidance of geographical nomenclature puts it in as uncertain a relationship with the Primary World as Peake’s Gormenghast. Having given his world a location, an author is then free to act as god within the confines of his subcreation, imitating the Primary World, or deviating from it as he wishes. A major cause of otherness is the introduction of impossible objects, creatures or forces which have no recognised existence in the 105

Primary World.

Dragons,

unicorns,

fairies, angels, vampires,

gods, ghosts, magic carpets, magic rings, time machines will automatically make a Secondary World ‘other’. An objection could be raised that some, if not all these things, are believed

in by many people, and that there is evidence to support their existence. The whole question of credibility, credulity and plausibility could constitute a study in itself, but suffice it to say here that, presented with a list of impossible things, an individual will find some less impossible than others. Religious faith commits many to a belief in angels, demons and, of course,

to God

Himself.

Bishop

Leadbeater’s belief

in fairies is still shared by many within and without the Theosophical Society. For the purpose of fiction, however, an impossible object or creature is one whose existence has not yet been accepted by a consensus of scientific, academic and popular opinion. In other words, it has not yet achieved ‘respectable credibility’. Thus, the introduction of a dragon into a Secondary World will help make it ‘other’, the appearance of a duckbilled platypus will not, despite the peculiarities of that wonderful but real animal. Creatures and objects may be considered impossible for two reasons: their existence may be deemed a biologital or physical impossibility by the known laws of science; they may be scientifically possible, but have never been known to exist. A fire-breathing lizard, such as the dragon, and a creature

composed

of fire and shadow,

such as the Balrog,

are biological impossibilities. So is the unicorn because, in Primary World nature, horns come only in pairs. Tolkien’s Orcs, Dwarves and Elves are merely variations on normal human beings. Only the existence of these variations is unproved and ‘other’. Impossible attributes may be given to otherwise possible creatures.

Tolkien’s

Elves are made

immortal,

and some

of

his mortal men are given lifespans which are impossible by Primary World standards. Common to all five writers in this study,

and

to cartoon

films and comics,

is a confusion of

attributes which, in the Primary World, we assign rigidly to a specific order of creation. Speech and human reasoning are considered human attributes. Tolkien makes animals think

and

speak,

and

awards

human

qualities

to animal,

vegetable and mineral objects. Carroll and Grahame take the process even further. Cards and chess pieces walk and talk 106

like human beings; animals wear human clothes and perform human movements. In Gormenghast and NN the merging of man,

beast

and

inanimate

object

is no

less a compelling

phenomenon of language. Impossible creatures may be invented by a subcreator or drawn from the reservoirs of myth and legend. Writers often make real in their Secondary World the legends of Primary existence. Whatever type of unfamiliar creature he produces, it will usually be a compound of strangely assorted attributes. The monsters of pulp Science Fiction are apt to be permutations on the theme of jaws, claws, fangs and tentacles. Beasts of myth and legend are also rearrangements of familiar attributes. Give a man a horse’s body, and we have a Centaur. A horse acquires wings, and becomes Pegasus. The Questing Beast of Arthurian legend has a serpent’s head, a leopard’s body, the hindquarters of a lion and the feet of a hare. In overturning these divisions of creation, a writer violates identity which, in its turn, is closely associated with human psychology, any tampering with which is a potential source or otherness. A creature with an animal or humanoid body may be given a fully rounded human nature — a technique common

to Grahame

and

Tolkien.

Rat, Mole, Badger

and

the Ents have rounded human psychologies and even the Orcs show human nature in corruption. The characters of Peake’s, Gogol’s and Carroll’s worlds reverse this situation. Although for the most part human in appearance, they possess humanoid mentalities. By some psychic surgery on the part of their subcreators, whole segments of human nature have been removed from them, individually and collectively. Softer passions and nobler feelings are eliminated or neutralised.

Their personalities are exploitations (usually comic) of two or three motifs, and their identities are confused not merely with animals and inanimate objects, but become incorporated into the whole impersonal schema of their surroundings. An important violation of Primary World psychology is the static nature of these ‘people’. In any work of creative fiction, especially if it spans a long period of time, we expect characters to develop, change and mature. A good example is Natasha of War and Peace who grows up from a small girl into a mature woman in the course of the story. The older Natasha is a development of the younger, the same person at a different age. Gogol’s young Chichikov is a smaller, not a

107

younger version of the older man. The timespan of the Alice worlds does not permit development of character in this way. Alice herself shows a fairly complex series of feelings and reactions to the phenomena she encounters, but the inhabitants of her dream-worlds are all, in contrast to her, vivid yet

static non-humans. In addition to all this, and partly in consequence of it, emotional and logical links, by which creatures in the Primary World maintain relationships with each other, are subtly tampered with to produce logical and situational absurdity. Reactions to events in such Secondary Worlds are out of key with the reactions normally expected in the Primary World, even if the event itself happens to be within the bounds of Primary World probability. A whole castle and its inhabitants conduct their lives according to an ancient ritual of long forgotten meaning. A King eats hay because he feels faint. A Toad steals a car and is sentenced to twenty years imprisonment. A man proposes the purchase of dead souls, and one of the sellers wonders whether she is letting them go too cheap, while two other ladies conclude that the purchaser is about to elope with the governor’s daughter. In this whole process of psychological and logical disruption nomenclature plays an important part because, in the Primary World, names are closely linked with identity. The writer of a normal work of creative fiction will try to give his characters names which match their supposed nationality and culture, and would therefore refrain from calling the inhabitants of a Welsh mining village ‘Peregrine’ and ‘Ursula’. But successful nomenclature is not Just a matter of avoiding obvious gaffes. Names can serve as a quick yardstick to measure the otherness of a Secondary World, and are of great assistance to a writer in determining the ethos of his work. The names of Middle-earth’s inhabitants are carefully chosen to reflect the diverse cultural and linguistic patterns of those who bear them. Within the context of Tolkien’s Secondary World they ring ‘true’ and inspire Secondary Belief. The names of Peake’s and Gogol’s characters reflect the absurdity and non-humanity of their owners. A lack of proper nomenclature, in conjunction with other factors, can have odd effects. To know a person’s name might not necessarily give the speaker power over him, as was thought in some ancient cultures, but it does assist in the setting up of a relationship 108

with him. To know and address a person by name brings a degree of psychological proximity which would otherwise be absent. In the totalitarian state of Zamyatin’s novel We nobody has a proper name — only a number, a fact which, at one

stroke,

prepares

us

for the impersonal, inhuman

nature

of the Secondary World in question. Carroll’s use of appellations instead of proper names reflects the weirdness and alienation of his subworlds. We cannot but feel friendly towards somebody called ‘Bilbo Baggins’, or stand in awe of somebody named ‘Galadriel’, while ‘The Mad Hatter’ and ‘The White Queen’ inspire another type of response. The namelessness of Grahame’s River Bank produce a different effect from that in Carroll’s worlds. Weirdness is counteracted by the use of diminutives and the pleasantly human natures

of the characters

concerned,

so the final result is a

quaint strangeness rather than alienation. In making value judgments on the characters subcreated by our five authors we encounter the question of morals and thereafter of good and evil. In the Primary World most of us have some concept of good and evil and a perception of the difference between them. There are, too, many ‘grey’ areas of morality where principles clash and nobody can speak with certainty of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. In ‘other’ worlds the grey areas are often removed so that the issue is between two sharply delineated forces of black and white. Although Tolkien’s good characters can make mistakes and backslide into evil, we are left in no doubt as to which side is which. Much

literature

written

for children, and many

fairy-tales,

abound in such crystal clear morality upon which Victorian melodrama and the old fashioned cowboy films also thrived. Nobody is puzzled (while inside the Secondary World) as to which side is good: suspense and interest derive from the question of which side will win. Fundamental goodness or evil is reflected in the daily activities of the characters. The inhabitants of the River Bank preserve a basic decency against the caddish stoats and weasels, and pursue a life of small, harmless pleasures. Activities in Middle-earth vary from the cultivation of gardens to the pursuit of power, and in all these deeds of good and evil there is innocence or, in the case of evil, a sinister magnificence. The small pleasures of the Hobbits have the sort of humility and self-forgetfulness about them 109

which Screwtape so distrusted.” Other occupants of Middle-earth have a grander vision; Gondor defends its land and heritage against destruction by the Enemy; the Elves pursue ‘understanding, making and healing’; the Ents preserve and guard their trees. All these ambitions and motives have as their focal point something outside and beyond the individuals concerned, transcending the faults to which even the good people are prone. The bad characters such as Saruman and Sauron entertain vast schemes of self-aggrandizement, while the less grandiose Orcs pursue similar aims on a more restricted scale. There is something recognisably human or inhuman about these virtues and vices, but what can one say about the goings-on in NN, Gormenghast and the Alice Worlds where all morality is grey? Their inhabitants are conceived in terms which put them apart from normal moral considerations of good and evil. As they lack a huge segment of human nature, it is difficult to judge them according to human values. Their activities can be described as non- or sub-human, directed for the most part towards themselves, with no greater vision beyond. The cardmen and chessmen of Alice’s worlds indulge in endless, pointless arguments. In Gormenghast the central object of attention is the castle and its ritual — not a person or an ideal — so that even Flay, who shows some glimmer of nobility and self sacrifice, is more devoted to the building than to human values. Steerpike shows something of grand evil in his desire to rule over the place, but, whereas Sauron

aims at world domination and the enslavement of free peoples, Steerpike’s vision is limited to a monstrous pile of stone and a group of people already enslaved to it. Who would be king of such a castle except a greater mediocrity among the smaller? The conflict between him and Titus is not a battle between good and evil, as between Gandalf and Sauron, because both of them are rebels against Gormenghast,

and can anybody blame even Steerpike for resenting a place which its own subcreator has presented as basically horrible? Steerpike’s rule over the castle would probably be no worse than that of the Groans’, and Titus, in any case, is going to renounce his inheritance. The conflict therefore is not so much between good and evil as between two sets of mediocrity. True, Steerpike has murdered to gain his ends, 110

but can one really murder those who were never really alive in the first place? Mediocrity is the hallmark too of Gogol’s sub-human characters. Chichikov is a rogue and swindler out to defraud the government, but a government which cheerfully allows living souls to be ‘owned’ cannot really be ‘victimised’ by the purchase of dead ones. Far from being a grand villain, Chichikov is a mediocrity among other mediocrities. The life of the

landowners

is almost

a parody

of life in Hobbiton,

with the happy innocence missing. Bereft of all aspirations beyond self satisfaction, the inhabitants of NN pursue their various activities from mere custom, and even their food is organised by Gogol to be part of a schematic device rather than a source of enjoyment. In Grahame’s and Tolkien’s worlds

meals

are

occasions

of communion

and friendship,

whereas the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, the Earl’s breakfast table and the landowners’ banquets are at best ritual affairs of gluttony and quarrelling, revealing the essential isolation of the eaters. This state of affairs which can be called neither immorality nor amorality — perhaps better non-morality — is weirder in its total effect than other more blatant causes of otherness such as magic and monsters. Having virtually eliminated the pleasanter aspects of human nature from their subcreations, all three writers manage to ban beauty from their realms, both moral beauty and beauty of form, qualities which are fully present in Middle-earth and by the River Bank. Otherness may depend as much on the environment of a Secondary World as on its inhabitants, and there are several aspects of Primary existence which a writer may imitate or change. A sense of history (no matter how vague) lies deep in human consciousness, and forms part of our mental background in Primary Life. Few of us share the Hobbits’ preoccupation with the trivial doings of remote ancestors, but there is a vague awareness that collectively and individually we have a past which has helped to shape the present just as our present will determine the future. We are content to leave closer investigation to the historian, but the knowledge that history has been studied and documented imparts a degree of security which would be absent were, by some gloomy miracle, all records of the past to be erased from the collective consciousness. AIAEe

Tolkien cleverly exploits this historical sense by giving his Middle-earth a complex history of its own. To know a person’s or a country’s history is to strike up some sort of closer relationship with it: yet another reason why we feel at home in Middle-earth. C. S. Lewis uses a similar technique in the Narnia stories. Readers witness the creation of the land,

participate in various crises of its history, and finally attend its dissolution. Asimov’s Foundation trilogy is enacted in the distant future of the Primary World but written up from the point of view of a historian in the even more remote future. This is not to imply that a subcreator has to give his world a detailed history, but the presence or absence of one, in conjunction with other factors, can effect the ethos of that world. The absence of a history from such an ancient world as Gormenghast is so strong a paradox as to produce otherness, and yet history there would be a dangerous thing, for even a grim history (as that of the Groans surely is) would provoke an intellectual or emotional response from a reader, and commit him more deeply to the place and the people in it. But if a reader began to feel even slightly at home in Gormenghast, its peculiar ethos would be damaged. Moreover, an historical account of the castle and the Groans would force Peake to explain (away) the situational anomalies and inconsistencies which, despite Tolkien’s precepts, constitute a substantial part of its otherness. A Gormenghast explained and rationalised would no longer be an ‘other’ world, even if it did not quite become a normal one. Finally, could history, the record of change and development, be successfully recorded in a realm where all is static? In a Secondary World such as Tolkien’s where people develop in a normal manner, history poses no threat and serves to embellish the narrative and increase its verisimilitude. Another important aspect of Primary Life, and a source of security, is our location in space and an awareness of surroundings. Our knowledge of geography might be bad, but we have our own comfortable sense of where we live in relation to other places, perhaps in terms of travelling time, or in terms of their position on the map. This security of location is important in determining the nature of a Secondary World. A writer of normal creative fiction will usually locate his work in some recognisable part of the Primary World with a description, more or less accurate, of Ti

the appropriate town or landscape. The subcreator of a Secondary World can also impart this geographical security, as Tolkien does, by supplying generous maps of Middleearth so that the reader knows where each place is, and where it stands in relation to the others — all of them being abundantly named. On the other hand, a subcreator might choose to deny his readers such security, and withhold information about the layout of his subworld, giving few or no names of other places within it. This technique is particularly effective when the location of the subworld as a whole, in relation to the Primary World, is not explained. Peake,

of

course,

serves

our

as

present

example,

but

the

subworlds of Lord Dunsany are also cases in point. Nomenclature again plays an important role, because to know the name of a place is to become in some way familiar with it, whereas a geographically nameless world could be as weird as a world with nameless people. Peake, Carroll and Gogol all have geographical anonymity, a factor which combined with the psychological peculiarities of their characters, strengthens the otherness of their worlds. Treatment of landscape is also important. An easy method of making a world impossible is to give familiar things a

strange appearance: purple grass, a green sun or pink seas. Peake and Gogol demonstrate more skilful ways of fudging up geography by carefully schematising their descriptions, so that landscape does not exist in its own right but merely serves as an extension of the characters who occupy it. Mordor reflects the horror of the Dark Lord by a deliberate act of Sauron’s will. In the worlds of Peake and Gogol it is as though landscape deliberately subordinates itself to the spiritual and mental state of its inhabitants. Despite geographical namelessness, the River Bank is rich in descriptions of landscape,

of seasons

and

weather,

which

brings

us to

another important aspect of Primary World life: our concept of Time. We are accustomed to daily and annual rhythms in nature: the change from night to day, from one season to another; the rising and setting of the sun and moon. A subcreator may change all this and compose an ‘other’ world which has two suns or no moon, one season only or ten instead of four. The easiest pretext or frame for such a world is another planet, so such games with nature are a regular feature of ie)

Science Fiction. In the worlds we have explored, Tolkien and Grahame again make us feel at home by their obvious delight in the cycles of Primary World nature which are reproduced in their Secondary Worlds. Carroll’s worlds lack all feeling for nature and any sense of changing seasons or passing days. It can be no coincidence that there is no sense of time duration just as there is no sense of history. In Gormenghast and NN weather, like landscape, is merely a reflection of mood. They do not determine that mood, but are determined by it.

More drastic games with Time are a frequent source of otherness, from the legends of Rip Van Winkle and Thomas the Rhymer to the Time Machines of Science Fiction; and any Secondary World with a different time sense or duration from our own immediately becomes strange or exotic. Tolkien carefully preserves the same duration as in the Primary World, accounting for virtually every hour of the novel’s

action,

but

even

he

describes

a land,

Lothlorien,

in which the passing of time is slowed down through the working of Galadriel’s ring. His characters emerge from it to discover that Time has moved more quickly outside than within the enchanted realm. Similarly, four children reign for many years as kings and queens in Narnia while only a few seconds pass in the Primary World. In Wonderland the Mad Hatter and his companions are condemned to time stasis, a never-ending state of six o’clock tea. Toad undergoes a timeshift to a medieval dungeon, while in Gormenghast and NN time moves sluggishly, if at all, and for certain characters it moves more slowly than for others. Another popular method of changing the Primary World is to alter or suspend natural laws governing the physical and biological processes of movement, growth and change. The acom grows into an oak in its appropriate time, and a child grows into an adult at a recognised pace. The caterpillar becomes a butterfly and the tadpole a frog. We can bring about change by the application of force and skill, so that a wood carver converts a block of wood into a model of a ship, and the sculptor makes an image from stone. Our powers of movement are defined and limited by the shapes of our bodies and the law of gravity. We are accustomed to the fact that,

without

mechanical

aids, man

cannot

fly while birds

can. We are aware, consciously or unconsciously, of a range of causes and effects, and accept that certain actions will 114

have specific results. If a heavy weight drops on a man’s head he will die. We know that fire burns and that water quenches fire. In ‘other’ worlds all this can be set at naught, and the suspension of natural laws is the source of all magical and supernatural acts. A fairy can wave her wand and produce changes which in the Primary World could not take place at all, or only at a much different speed. A pumpkin can become

a coach,

hedge can Gravity can impossible concept of

white

mice

turn

into

footmen.

A thorn

spring up and surround a castle at rapid speed. be defied not by a scientific aeroplane but by an carpet, and Seven League Boots can upset our distance and the time needed to traverse it on

foot. Cartoon films are full of impossible causes and effects,

as every episode of Tom and Jerry proves. A steamroller can squash a character flat, but instead of being killed he presently assumes three dimensional form and emerges unscathed. A man is given the power of flight and becomes a Superman. Many of the impossible creatures and people already mentioned constitute in themselves a violation of the natural laws. Of the five authors in our study only Tolkien and Carroll blatantly suspend the natural laws of our world, while Grahame does it covertly. In Middle-earth the One Ring prolongs its wearer’s life and makes him invisible. Gandalf can open doors by word of command. All these magical actions are carefully moderated and, with a stronger kind of technology, would become an unknown science rather than magic. Carroll plays deliberate havoc with natural laws by making Alice fall slowly down a well, and having the Cheshire Cat appear and disappear at will. Alice eats certain foods and abruptly becomes bigger or smaller. Physical fluidity is commonplace by the River Bank but goes unremarked by its subcreator. Any physical fluidity in NN and Gormenghast is part and parcel of fluidity of identity in the psychological sphere, and tightly bound up with Peake’s and Gogol’s schematic methods of characterisation. An interesting and little remarked source of otherness is the apparent suspension of the economic necessities prevalent in the Primary World. Most of us here have to earn a living or have a source of income, but in some subworlds the characters

seem completely free of any such necessity, or their subcreators do not see fit to comment on it. Only in Dead Souls 31

do we have a clear idea of how the characters get their daily bread as landowners, serfs or salaried civil servants, while the

finances of Middle-earth, Gormenghast and the River Bank remain a mystery. It would, of course, be absurd to maintain that a writer should document the economic system of his Secondary World, but complete silence on the subject in the absence of any obvious explanation constitutes a severe violation of Primary World life. Fairy-land as a whole has its economic mysteries. Who looked after the Sleeping Beauty’s kingdom while the castle slept? What effect did Aladdin’s remarkable lamp have on the monetary system of his country? Any unlimited and free source of gold, jewels and hard cash would, in the Primary World have severe repercussions on an economic system. In an ‘other’ world the laws of cause and effect are as fanciful in economics as in physical nature and psychology. The subcreator’s role as god in his own small world has already been apparent in his ability to suspend or change the natural laws of Primary Existence, just as God in Primary

Creation can suspend His own laws to produce miracles. The other important aspect of life over which an author can exercise divine powers is death, and the nature of existence after it. This is the spiritual equivalent of making legendary beasts ‘real’ within the Secondary World. A writer can make immortality an established ‘fact’ in his subcreation, or at least make it a stronger possibility than here. He can also reverse the procedure and make immortality a definite fiction. The fundamental optimism of Middle-earth and the River Bank owes something to the certainty of immortality given by Gandalf and the Valar, and to the strong hints of it imparted by the presence of Pan. The gloom of Gormenghast is deepened by the utter absence of transcendent hope. The location of a Secondary World, the moral and physical nature of its inhabitants, the treatment of their psychology, the presentation of history, geography and economics, the realisation or denial of faith and myth, suspension of natural laws, all offer an opportunity of making a Secondary World ‘other’. How many aspects of the Primary World have to be changed,

and

in what

permutation,

to make

a Secondary

World wholly ‘other’ is a matter of individual temperament, and each Humpty Dumpty must construct his own formula. In view of the fact, pointed out in the first chapter, that all 116

writers of creative fiction have to change the Primary World to some degree, it is possible to equate all fiction with Fantasy, and there are people who do so. Peter the Great of Russia thoroughly approved of manuals on practical subjects, but detested ‘mere tales that simply waste time’.? Fictionhaters exist, even in universities, who prefer ‘true’ stories drawn from ‘real life’. This is an extreme view, the existence

of which must be acknowledged, although there is no time here to undertake a defence of literature as a whole. Fictionhaters will not have read this far anyway, and fiction-lovers will accept the writer’s licence to adjust Primary existence in the sub-creation of a Secondary World, even if they are uncertain as to how far that licence extends. A suspension of natural laws to produce supernatural or magical events or impossible creatures and objects, will normally place a work beyond the bounds of conventional realistic fiction and make a Secondary World ‘other’. Some impossible things come closer to respectable credibility than others, an important point to keep in mind when attempting to classify Secondary Worlds. The appearance of a unicorn in a Secondary World of English provincial life will make a Secondary World more ‘other’ than one which merely has ghosts. This is not because ghosts are more alien or sinister: they simply inspire more belief than the mythical animal. In a country where every town boasts a haunted house, everybody knows somebody who claims to have seen or heard a ghost. Sightings of unicorns are rather more rare and do not seem to figure in the annals of psychic literature. Otherness is destroyed if the impossible things or events prove to be the consequence of fraud, hallucination or mistake. Dream worlds, as we have seen, pose a problem. Much depends on the author’s presentation and the reader’s perception of the dream itself. If the offending shadows turn out to be mere figments of the dreamer’s imagination, otherness disappears. If the dream world, as in the Alice books, can claim to be another dimension of reality, otherness is reasserted. There are dream worlds without a dreamer. If Peake and Grahame had made the River Bank and Gormenghast the nightmare and dream of a Primary World sleeper, would these Secondary Worlds become less ‘other’? Had Alice been sent to Wonderland by a magic ring, or through a warp in the space-time continuum, would her Wz

world consequently be deemed more ‘other’? If Tolkien’s views are wholly accepted, the answer would appear to be yes in both cases, and a definition of otherness or Fantasy could depend, rather unsatisfactorily, on a mere technical device or

framework. The ambiguity of dreams brings us to another problem in classification. How ‘other’ are those works in which the author deliberately sets out to make the authenticity of his impossible phenomena uncertain? Are the ghosts in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw genuine phantoms or mere figments of imagination? Is the devil who appears to Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov a real spirit or a hallucination caused by Ivan’s illness? The reader must decide for himself whether these apparitions are real and yet, as much as one dislikes being forced by an author into a certain point of view, such ambiguity is irritating if the reader suspects that the author is shirking an issue. The introduction of a genuine, impossible phenomenon within the confines of a ‘straight’ novel

could

alienate

readers

who

dislike

otherness,

unless

prepared for it by title or introduction. Ambiguity, therefore, can serve not only as a literary technique, but also as a device to hold the attention of a reader whose powers of Secondary Belief should not be overtaxed. Many

works

have

no

impossible

creatures

or

objects

and yet, like Gormenghast and NN, are decidedly ‘other’ on account of inconsistencies or anomalies which strain respectable credibility. We may safely dismiss such as are an oversight on the part of an author. A silver icon on a silver chain around Prince Andrey’s neck in War and Peace later becomes a gold icon on a gold chain. No otherness about that: simply a case of Homer nodding. Some mistakes, like Peake’s confusion of people’s ages in Gormenghast, can accommodate themselves quite happily into the texture of the novel, and even

enhance

it. Lack of talent, careless and

slipshod writing can account for psychological and situational absurdities,

so

a

theoretical

distinction

must

be

made

between otherness and bad fiction. This distinction can be made with some clarity in Titus Groan where there is speech and dialogue which is impossible in Primary World terms, and yet forms an essential part of the novel’s bizarre fabric. The dialogues of Keda, Braigon and Rantel are impossible because they are untrue in terms of both Primary and Secondary 118

World life, and are also artistically bad. The practical distinction between the otherness of Fantasy and the impossibilities caused by incompetence is not always so easy to make. Manlove is sceptical about the numerous lucky escapes in The Lord of the Rings, but apart from any philosophical justifications of these implausible events, based on Tolkien’s concept of providence and free will, it could be argued that lucky escapes are a conventional part of any adventure novel, which The Lord of the Rings is. A theoretical distinction, therefore, has to be made between convention

and otherness, although again, in practical terms, it is not easy. The tidying up of human speech for literary purposes may be regarded by all, except the diehard fiction-hater, as a helpful convention rather than a source of otherness. In making his characters speak in blank verse, Shakespeare too is following a convention of a different kind, without deluding himself that he was composing true-to-life human speech. Other conventions are more controversial. Adventure

novels,

thrillers

and detective

stories all hover

on the verge of otherness and could, by strict critics, be called works of Fantasy of a special sort. Such writers are playing a game with their readers by presenting a puzzle of the ‘Who-dunnit or ‘How-was-it-done’ kind. Convention will permit implausibilities in the engineering of the problem, although it might frown on too many in the finding of a solution. It is implausible that Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey should constantly be encountering corpses,’ or having them thrust upon him, but such coincidences are devices to set the mystery in motion which, in Miss Sayers’ works, are usually solved in credible fashion. And since her public was as devoted to her detective as to his detection, he had to keep finding corpses so that his subcreator could carry on writing about him. It is the detective writer’s task to absorb his reader in the mystery, which surely demands strong powers of inspiring Secondary Belief, and if the writer manages to give a tall story a degree of verisimilitude within the

confines

of his subworld,

he has fulfilled, in Tolkien’s

terms, the aim of Fantasy writing and a fully fledged subcreator of an ‘other’ Even the impossible may sometimes inducing otherness. The William of books has adventures spanning many 119

should be regarded as world. be permitted without Richmal Crompton’s years, yet he remains

the same age from beginning to end. This covert suspension of natural growth is the device by which William’s subcreator keeps him and the books in circulation. Compare this to Peter Pan in which the hero’s refusal to grow up is an integral part of the plot and a flagrant violation of Primary World laws. Classification here though is further helped by Barrie’s suspension of gravity in permitting the children to fly to Never-Never-Land where they encounter all sorts of impossible creatures. A strict realist, however, could point out that the whole question is one of degree: that the William books happen to be less exotic fantasy than Peter Pan, and although William’s eternal boyhood is a technical device, it still remains an impossibility. There are works which lack any impossibilities of this kind but have psychological and situational absurdities pushing them close to otherness. The absurd activities of P. G. Wodehouse’s characters are scarcely a realistic study of the British landed gentry, nor is Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest. In the play both Gwendolyn Fairfax and Cecily Cardew accept a proposal of marriage on the grounds that the man in question is called Ernest — a motivation worthy of Gogol and Carroll. Situational absurdity is added to psychological quaintness when the men in question are discovered to be long lost brothers. A multitude of coincidences, many amusing non sequiturs and some odd nomenclature (‘Canon Chasuble’ a clergyman, and ‘Miss Prism’ a governess) set the play in a no-man’s-land between mild Fantasy and highly improbable fiction. Confusion of identity is an important contribution to an impossible world, but it does not necessarily follow that the presence of animals behaving like human beings will make a world undoubtedly fantastic. Watership Down to some extent justifies Tolkien’s precept that fairy-tales are about human beings, because the rabbits are credited with a high degree of rational thought, communication and behaviour. They have a language of their own in which they exchange complex information and display a broad and sophisticated set of human emotions so, at first sight, the novel could be taken

for a work in the vein of Beatrix Potter’s tales, or of

The Wind in the Willows. Yet the humanisation of Mr. Adams’ rabbits is taken only to a certain degree. They do not wear clothes, adopt human speech or eat human food. 120

Their aims and ambitions are those of rabbits and conceived in rabbit terms. They apparently do little which rabbits have not been known to do in the Primary World. If liberties have been taken with animal nature to give the rabbits more complex personalities than they really possess, has Richard Adams gone beyond the licence extended to writers of creative fiction? In other respects his work adheres to the norms of the Primary World and, in terms of psychological and situational verisimilitude, is more plausible than Wilde’s play. The strongest element of otherness occurs at the end when we learn that rabbits enjoy a life after death. El-ahrairah summons Hazel, who leaves his body in a ditch and enters what is presumably a rabbit heaven. Whether this constitutes a substantial degree of otherness will depend upon the reader’s attitude to immortality — and to rabbits. There are many other works which occupy a border country between Fantasy and fiction. Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World® is an adventure story in which a group of explorers discover a plateau in South America occupied by living prehistoric animals. The existence of these animals in the past enjoys respectable credibility. Their continued existence in the present does not. We could resort to the same unsatisfactory arguments whereby Tolkien excluded Gulliver’s Travels from Faérie: the marvels take place on our own planet and only distance separates them from our own existence. Hadrian VII by Fr Rolfe® poses a problem of a different kind. It has no magic or supernatural events, and it contains acute psychological perception. The Secondary World of the novel is set in the Primary World of England and Italy after the death of Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903). Whereas, in Primary history, the conclave elected Pius X to succeed him, in this novel an obscure Englishman, George Arthur Rose, is elevated to the papal throne under the title of Hadrian VII. Does this changing of history suffice to make Rolfe’s world ‘other’? We could grasp at the faint hint that the whole novel is a dream by George Arthur Rose and therefore not a proper Fantasy.’ Unfortunately there is no waking-up sequence at the end of the work, nor is there a convenient machine to convey us to a parallel world of alternate probability which would, presumably, have safely assigned the novel to the category of Science Fiction. 121

A discussion on the nature of otherness could be prolonged indefinitely, but two points emerge clearly. No matter how ‘other’ a world might be, no matter what its pecularities, it will appear relatively ‘normal’ if its subcreator does not seriously distort human nature. This is true even if the human nature resides in the bodies of animals or inanimate objects. Once the subcreator tampers with human nature, its logical processes and its emotional capacity, a Secondary World will become weird and alienating. The second point brings us back to Tolkien’s description of the writer as a subcreator of a Secondary World. Doubtless Tolkien was speaking with theological precision. In classical Christian theology only God can create ex nthilo. Had He wished, He could have created an infinite number of universes, each different from our own

and from one another, and all totally beyond our conceptions of mind and matter. A subcreator, a created being himself, cannot stray outside the concepts of Primary Creation, but can only imitate, distort, rearrange or suppress them. From this arises a paradox that the more ‘other’ a world is, the greater its applicability can be to the Primary World. Tolkien takes the view that Faérie offers recovery, and makes us see our own world afresh. This works against his other notion that Faérie offers escape, for only Tolkien’s world (in its pleasanter parts) and Grahame’s, in this study, are worth escaping into, to recover the quintessentially pleasant aspects of our own world. The worlds subcreated by the other writers recover the quintessentially unpleasant aspects of our reality. Nice or nasty, all these worlds are applicable not only to the Primary realities of their author’s day, but to the past, present and future of Primary existence. Great

writers, with no hint of otherness, have made what

appear to be penetrating studies of society in their own time and country: Jane Austen in England, Tolstoy in Russia, Proust in France. And yet, for all the vigour of their perception, could any of them have conveyed the bumbling foolishness of a White Queen, the oily slickness of a Chichikov, the scheming predatoriness of a Steerpike, or the model of a fossilised society which is Gormenghast? Nonfantastic

literature

tends

to

deal

with

the actual,

‘other’

worlds with the quintessential, and so the colours of the latter remain faster, more vivid, and their impact is accordingly stronger. It is significant that, when faced with a striking 122?

phenomenon in real life, the mind seeks to compare it with an example from ‘other’ worlds rather than from ordinary Secondary Worlds. Most of us know a White Rabbit or a Badger in the Primary World; it would be more difficult to pin a label of Mr Darcy on any of our acquaintances. If a reader uses an ‘other’ world as an escape from the Primary, he will therefore be disappointed. While in Faérie he will only encounter again the phenomena from which he is fleeing, albeit illuminated in an unfamiliar light. Some objects may be cast in painful prominence, others may be bathed in an enhancing glow. An unpleasant ‘other’ world can console him that our own could be even worse than it is,

a pleasant one might leave him depressed that our own could be much better. Not all roads lead to Gormenghast, as the Countess

misinforms

Titus, but all that lead to Faérie turn

back again to Reality, for nobody can escape from the Primary World unless death proves the gateway to a better existence.

rasa)

Chapter8

PoP his O G Uy “Well,

now

that

we

have

seen

each

other,’’

’

said the Unicorn,

“if you'll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?” (Through the Looking- Glass) ‘“*A man was taken to the Zoo and shown the giraffe. After gazing at it a little in silence: ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said.” (Clouds of

Witness)

We have used the terms ‘respectable credibility’ and ‘impossible’ somewhat glibly in this work, measuring both by the standards of popular and scientific opinion despite the fact that they can be capricious and fallible forces. Those who will believe anything are only slightly more exasperating than those who believe nothing, and the friars who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope have remained alive and well in different guises throughout the ages, even in scientific circles. Stones had been falling from the sky for many centuries, yet only in the very early nineteenth century did the scientific establishment finally admit the fact which the French Academy itself had previously condemned as impossible. Scientific aversion might have been sharpened by religious groups who had prudently venerated these windfalls 124

from the sky as sacred objects.! Wegener had to endure years of derision or silence until his theory of continental drift was even admitted to be plausible.? Thor Heyerdahl encountered similar attitudes when he first put forward his theory that the Polynesians had crossed the Pacific because, as everybody knew, it was impossible to cross the Pacific from Peru by pait.” Things are often more impossible in the mind than in fact and, curiously enough, some impossible things are easier to believe than the allegedly possible. Tolkien goes a little far in calling the evidence for prehistoric animals ‘slender’* but, to anybody acquainted merely with the beasts of this island, a

unicorn,

being

but

a horse

with

a horn,

looks

a more

probable beast than the dinosaur which, in its various reconstructions, seems a figment of nightmare. Like the dragon the unicorn lies outside the scientific pale, but who knows whether the beast might one day be dragged inside it by the discovery of some bones? The consequences would not be entirely happy. As a child Tolkien did not like being told that certain creatures in his book of Natural History were dragons. He took the view that dragons were creatures of the ‘other’ world not to be confused

with

animals

of this. The

cause

of his annoyance,

although not explicitly stated, can be plausibly conjectured. Once something has been scientifically identified and given respectable credibility, part of its glamour vanishes. A dragon found in ice and then preserved, stuffed, in a museum would be seen by many with the same dismay as C. S. Lewis contemplated Conan Doyle’s ‘authentic’ photographs of fairies.° If irrefutable evidence of an early mid-Atlantic civilisation were discovered under the sea, Atlantis, the thrilling subject of speculation in twenty thousand books, would become yet another boring ancient civilisation of interest only to archeologists and historians. Enthusiasm in occult circles would doubtless plummet as it probably did when the stones from the sky became respectable as ‘meteorites’. Mankind loves a mystery, and many marvellous things are more exciting for being left unexplained. Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot of Yahweh; Swedenborg’s trips to heaven and hell;? helpful nature spirits on the Moray Firth® who assist human beings in the growth of fruit and vegetables; ghosts and

poltergeists;

monsters

in

125

Loch

Ness;

witches

in the

suburbs.? None of these things has been given respectable credibility despite being believed in by many people, yet the scientific evidence for them, or behind them, might one day be forthcoming. Troy was long thought to be a Homeric. invention until Schliemann dug it up. Nineveh too was consigned to Old Testament legend until the great city was

found by Paul Emile Botta.’° If any distinction is to be made between Science Fiction and Fantasy, it cannot be on grounds of conceivability because the marvels of science in technological Secondary Worlds are often greater than machineless magic performed by wizards. Nevertheless machineless magic possesses a glamour which any hint of chemistry or machinery would destroy. Tolkien invests the natural phenomenon of a volcanic eruption with unfamiliar glamour by presenting it in non-technical terms. A primitive man who sees and hears a radio for the first time might speak in awe of a magic speaking box, while civilised man smiles indulgently because he has heard of radio waves

and transistor valves, even if he

has no idea how they work. Yet both men are talking about the same box although their perception is different, just as the Hobbits saw Galadriel’s mirror as ‘magic’ which to her was an art, or even a science. The two concepts are not contradictory and much depends on modes of perception. The fault doubtless lies with us for having lost our sense of wonder at the world around us. After hinting at the possibility of the impossible, we should reverse the process and consider the impossibility of the possible. Science has not sanctioned the dragon, but we remain insensitive to the marvels it has revealed. Respectable credibility is too often based on what the ‘normal’, ‘sensible’ man can appreciate with his five senses which in aggregate make up ‘common sense’, a term which can so often be synonymous with collective ignorance. The sight of a shepherd blowing his inaudible whistle to an attentive sheepdog should make anybody wary of his five senses, and it was common sense, apart from Aristotle, which led many to believe that the sun moves round the earth. Fluidity is a sign of an ‘other’ world and we assume, for everyday purposes, that our world is fixed and solid. Seemingly solid matter is a multitude of whirling atoms in constant movement. The great globe itself spins on

its own

axis

and

round

126

the

sun, while

the solar

system is part of an ever moving galaxy. Since Einstein our sense of Time has been shaken and talk of other dimensions

no

longer seems

outlandish.’

Wondrous

beasts populate

land and sea. They do not put on human clothing but some, like the dolphin, appear to have some form of linguistic communication with each other and display a high level of intelligence. The boundary between fact and fantasy shimmers and shifts as the strangeness of Reality and the reality of the Fantastic become yearly more apparent. Because of this it can be difficult to determine the ‘otherness’ of futuristic novels. Fantasy, in Mr Manlove’s terms,

is more

concerned

with

the

past

whereas

Science

Fiction concerns itself with the future. The apparent reason is that the latter usually portrays an as yet impossible technology which is not known to have existed in the past of our Primary World and so, to inspire Secondary Belief, must be placed in the future. It is easy to deem things impossible in relation. to the past or present, but less easy to state which aspects of science or magic will become possible in the future. The time machine still strains respectable credibility; the space ship does not. With the development of ESP and growing interest in psychokinetics, much of Gandalf’s magic knocks on the door of probability, and concepts of genetic engineering make monsters ominously plausible. Who knows whether time-shifts and other dimensions might also one day form a background to our everyday lives, and that on some other planet, in some other dimension, all our ‘impossible worlds’ could have their existence? Morally, too, our Primary World is perplexing, because it contains rigid natural laws and astonishing chaos. We marvel at the symmetrical beauty of the snowflake and are puzzled by the arbitrary acts of the storm. The human body is a masterpiece of biological engineering behind which it might be possible to see the wise plan of a benevolent designer. Was he malevolent or careless in permitting deformity and disease to mar the plan? The human mind can reach great heights in the form of an Einstein or St Francis of Assisi, but why do we have to shudder over an Eichmann or a Stalin? Which scale of values represents the real world? This tension between cosmic order and chaos creates absurdity because the absurd, as Geoffrey Clive points out, is impossible in a totally random or totally ordered

bay

universe.'? In organising his Secondary World an author will often express his own degree of hope or despair. The Gods of Lord Dunsany’s Pegana are a motley creation of a super deity

known as MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI who spends most of his time asleep, and when he awakes, will annihilate gods and men. C. S. Lewis’s Narnia, like Tolkien’s Middle-earth, envisages a higher transcendental destiny whereas other Secondary Worlds offer no hope at all. Chesterton points out that the apparent absurdity of life can actually enkindle faith. Job, he thinks, was not converted by the ordered benefice of creation but the huge undecipherable unreason of it. Things have an exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and of our trivial definitions, a state of affairs which underlies both spirituality and nonsense humour.'? Unfortunately God does not appear very often in a whirlwind to reassure his creatures that there zs a point to it all. We might be part of the Red King’s dream, a plaything of MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI, or a cog in a random machine operated by a cosmic maniac. On the other hand we could be part of a benevolent scheme planned by a wise god, and maybe, somewhere in a quiet corner of the world, the unicorn peacefully grazes, utterly unperturbed by his failure to inspire respectable credibility.

128

REFERENCES

Author’s Preface 1. J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, London 1964, P.11. This book is based on a lecture delivered by Tolkien at the University of St Andrews in 1938. 2.

Tzvetan

Todorov,

The

Fantastic,

Cornell

University

Press,

1975, pp. 5-6.

Chapter 1 1. Lord

See Tolkien and the Critics, Essays on J. R. R. Tolkien’s The of the Rings, edited by Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo,

University

behind

of Notre

The

Lord

Dame

Press,

of the Rings,

1969;

Lin

Ballantine

Carter,

Books,

Tolkien:

New

a look

York

1972.

Randel Helms, Tolkien’s World (1974), Panther Books, 1976; C. N. Manlove, Modern Fantasy, C. U. P. 1975. The subjects of Manlove’s study are Charles Kingsley, George Macdonald, C. S. Lewis, Mervyn

Peake and J. R. R. Tolkien. 2. C. N. Manlove, op. Modern

3.

cit. p.1; E. F. Bleiler,

A Checklist

of

Fantastic Literature, Shasta Publishers, 1948, p. 3.

T. H. White,

The Once

and Future

King (1958),

Fontana

Books, 1971.

4. ‘Stories that are actually concerned primarily with ‘fairies’, that is with creatures that might also in modern English be called ‘elves’ are

relatively rare, and as a rule not very interesting’ (Tree and Leaf, p. 16). 5. In chapter eleven of the work a gentleman called ‘Mein Herr’ tells of a map on the scale of a mile. It proved impossible to spread out, and so was abandoned. The country was thereafter used as its own map. On the same analogy, a truly realistic literature should be abandoned in favour of life itself! 6. The demand for realistic consistency is comparatively recent in

129

literature. Mallory’s The Death of Arthur shows scant regard for it. Chaucer too is riddled with anomalies. His churlish miller relates a tale of high literary sophistication when almost too drunk to remain seated on his horse.

7.

Richard

Adams,

Watership

Down

(1972),

Penguin

Books,

OVO: 8. In his Foreword he takes issue with such critics, denying that his novel has any inner meaning or ‘message’, and asserting that it is neither allegorical nor topical. (The Lord of the Rings, Three Parts, Part I, George Allen & Unwin, 1973, p. 6). 9. See The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), Puffin Books, 1978. Entering the land of Narnia, children discover a country frozen in snow and ice by the magic of a wicked witch. Its inhabitants are awaiting the arrival of their emperor’s son to free them from the witch’s dominion. He comes in the form of a lion and defeats the witch by a sacrificial death and a subsequent resurrection. The whole tale is a reworking of christian doctrine concerning Christ’s Passion and Resurrection which frees the world from the dominion of Satan. 10. Bishop C. W. Leadbeater, The Hidden Side of Things, Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, 1913. 11.

Joan Grant, Winged Pharaoh, Arthur Barker, 1937.

12. See her account of how she recalls previous incarnations, in Many Lifetimes, Victor Gollancz, 1969. 13) sini Garter, Nolkien, plas. 14.

Isaac

Asimov,

Foundation

(1952) and Second Foundation Oars 15.

Isaac Asimov,

(1951),

Foundation

and

Empire

(1953), all in Panther Science Fiction,

The End of Eternity

(1955), Panther Science

Fiction, 1971. 16. Poul Anderson, Guardians of Time (1961), Pan Books, 1972. 17. Charles Williams, Many Dimensions (1931), Faber and Faber,

1963. 18. 1976.

19.

C. S. Lewis,

The

Magician’s

Nephew

(1955), Puffin

Books,

Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves (1972), Panther Science

Fiction, 1976. C. S. Lewis’ novel, Voyage to Venus (1943), Pan Books,

1953, which is discussed by Manlove as a work of Fantasy, has been reissued by Pan Books as a work of Science Fiction. 20. This seems true only of the first book in the novel, The Sword in the Stone, which represents the Middle Ages ‘as they should have been’ rather than as they were. Thereafter the narrative tone becomes

sombre and ultimately tragic, as the ideal of Camelot is shattered by adulterous love and treachery. 21. See the delightful story by Arthur Quiller-Couch, ‘A Pair of Hands’, Fifty Masterpieces

of Mystery,

Odhams

Press, pp. 687-98, in

which a helpful ghost does housework.

22.

Alan Garner, Elidor (1965), Puffin Books, 1971.

23.

Lord

Dunsany,

Beyond

the Fields we Know,

Carter, Ballantine Books, 1972. This volume contains Pegana (1905) and other works by Lord Dunsany.

130

edited by Lin The

Gods

of

Chapter 2 1, For an account of Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien, 2. For an elaboration Master of Middle-earth, the and Hudson,

1973.

The

Tolkien’s life and works see Humphrey a biography, George Allen & Unwin, 1977. of this and other points see Paul Kocher, achievement of J. R. R. Tolkien, Thames

present

author

is much

indebted

to this work.

3. According to ‘The Tale of Years’ Arwen was born in the year 241 of the Third Age, Aragorn in the year 2931 — an age gap of 2,690 years. They meet for the first time in 2951 in the gardens of Imladris/ Rivendell, and are bethrothed in 2980.

4. Shelob the spider is full of malice and cunning, but she is described as an evil thing in spider form, implying that her physical appearance is merely the permanent materialisation of some supernatural force. 5. In semitic thought, as in other ancient cultures, knowledge of a person’s name gives power over him. In the Old Testament a name does not only designate a person but makes him what he is, and a change of name brings about a change of destiny. Thus Abram becomes Abraham

and, in the New Testament, Simon becomes Peter, and Saul is

changed to Paul. The invocation of a name, in christian and semitic theology, invokes the presence of power of the person who bears the name. A major power or deity should never be invoked frivolously. See The Jerusalem Bible, edited by Alexander Jones, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966; pp.33, 81. 6. The Lord of the Rings, Part III, p. 411.

(eee Spe OM

bids, Pari’, p68: eibide Pantalyp. 2497 bids want lilyp. ole

10. Patricia Meyer Spacks points out that the good people in the novel eat wholesome food while the bad people eat foul food and drink. alcohol to excess. ‘Power and Meaning in The Lord of the Rings’, Tolkien and the Critics, p. 85. 11. The Lord of the Rings, Fart Il, p. 263. 125 Sibidl want Tepe 13. See J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, George Allen & Unwin, 1970, p. 50 for more details about the origin of the Orcs in Eldar Days. Their lack of choice in moral matters seems an oddity of divine justice in Tolkien’s world. They are treated by other characters as things verminous in themselves, fit only to be destroyed. 14. A fact mentioned obliquely in the novel itself, particularly in

Galadriel’s farewell lament (Part I, p. 394) but explicitly revealed only

in The Road goes Ever On, a song cycle, poems by J. R. R. Tolkien, music by Donald Swann, George Allen & Unwin, 1968, p. 60. Here Tolkien is coming close to christian allegory. Gandalf’s 15. descent into the Underworld, his death and subsequent return to life on the top of the mountain have strong associations with the death and resurrection of Christ. 16. The Lord of the Rings, Part III, p. 343. T7s Vibidt; Part Il, ps 235:

131

18. See Paul Kocher, op. cit., pp. 33-56. 19. C.N. Manlove, op. cit., pp. 180-93. The Lord of the Rings, Part Il, p. 246. Who in fact had com20. manded Frodo, except his own conscience? Gandalf and Elrond give him no orders. Zi lbide bark lap ou. 22. Ibid., Part 1, p. 384. 23. Again there are many biblical parallels. Old Testament heroes and prophets, New Testament apostles and saints are frequently shown as responding, not always willingly, to divine calling. Often, as with St. Paul, divine choice falls upon unlikely candidates. 24. The Lord of the Rings, Part III, p. 155. 2 bee lbidenbantellnsp shoOn 26 ibid Partiliapa383. Zien ibidhe Patel; ps169) 28. The inhabitants of the Second Foundation can exercise more formidable mental and emotional control over other people than Gandalf.

Chapter 3 1. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), commonly referred to as Alice in Wonderland, and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). The edition of these works quoted from here is The Annotated Alice, introduction and notes by Martin Gardner,

Penguin Books, 1970. An anthology of critical articles on Carroll will be found in Aspects of Alice, edited by Robert Phillips, Victor Gollancz, 1972. For a biography of Carroll see Florence Becker Lennon, The Life of Lewis Carroll, Collier Books, New York, 1962. 2. Quoted by Harry Levin, Aspects of Alice, p.177. 3. ‘Not only is Alice’s previous identity meaningless in Wonderland; the very concept of permanent identity is invalid.’ (Donald Rackin, Aspects of Alice, p. 397.) 4. Quoted in Martin Gardner, op. cit., p. 206. 5. The technical term for this is ‘enantiomorph’, Martin Gardner, Opmcliaipacole 6. Florence Milner gives a useful account of the original works parodied by Carroll, Aspects of Alice, pp. 245-252. 7. Martin Gardner, op. cit., p. 306. 8. Through the Looking- Glass, Chapter VI. 9. Ibid., Chapter III.

10.

Martin Gardner, op. cit., p. 227.

11. G. K. Chesterton, A Handful of Authors, edited by Dorothy Collins, London 1953. This did not prevent him affirming elsewhere that Carroll’s books were too serious for children. See Footnote 17. 12. Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense, Chatto and Windus, 1952, p. 144. 13. The Theaetetus of Plato, translated by M. J. Levett, Glasgow 1928, pp. 33-34.

132

14.

‘Fantasy

is a rational

not

an

irrational

activity’,

observes

Tolkien (Tree and Leaf, p. 45). In asserting the need for internal consistency Tolkien seems to have overlooked the possibility that a world might be consistently illogical, or consistently inconsistent. On the question of Carroll’s rational illogic see, apart from Martin Gardner’s annotations, Roger W. Holmes, ‘The Philosopher’s Alice in Wonderland’ Aspects of Alice, pp. 159-174. 15. Carroll was interested in psychic phenomena but we have found no evidence to support his interest in ‘out-of-body’ experiences. Bishop Leadbeater and the theosophical society spent some time mapping out other worldly terrains. See The Reality of the Astral Plane, Theosophical Publishing Society, Madras 1906. Dennis Wheatley made the concept of astral travel a part of his spy thriller/fantasy Strange Conflict, Hutchinson, 1961. 16. The Gryphon’s assurance to Alice: “...they never executes nobody, you know,” carries little conviction. The Queen of Hearts has

just stomped off to see the executions she has ordered. 17. G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Library of the Nursery’, Lunacy and Letters, 1958, quoted by Martin Gardner, The Annotated Snark, Penguin, 1967, p. 15.

Chapter 4 1. 2. the first 3.

Quotations are from the Penguin edition of 1971 and 1973. The Penguin edition 1970, incorporates material not found in edition. For further information about the writing of the novels and

about Peake

himself see: Maeve

Gilmore,

A World Away, a memoir of

Mervyn Peake, Victor Gollancz, 1970; John Batchelor, Mervyn Peake a biographical and critical exploration, Duckworth, 1974; John Watney, Mervyn Peake, Michael Joseph, 1976.

4. The activities of the school have grotesque affinities with Evelyn Waugh’s Llanabba and with Tom Brown’s Schooldays. 5. Sometimes the Earl is ‘Lord Sepulchrave’, occasionally ‘Lord Groan’. 6. ‘One can tell immediately that the writer is not accustomed to linear narrative, and that the mode of expression which is easiest for him is the creation of a stylised tableau which he then fills out with

detail’ (John Batchelor, op. cit., p. 73). In his excellent introduction to the Penguin edition of Titus Groan, Anthony Burgess writes: ‘It remains essentially a work of the closed imagination, in which a world parallel to our own is presented in almost paranoiac denseness of detail’ (p. 13). 7. John Batchelor, op. cit., pp. 74-75. 8. ‘To black hell with you whoever you are! I will see no son of a bitch today!’ This is Barquentine’s response to a knock at the door. (Gormenghast, Chapter Thirty-Nine). 9. John Batchelor, op. cit., p. 95. Manlove draws attention to other discrepancies; the vague and

133

contradictory motives which supposedly compel Titus to leave the castle; the relative absence of ritual from Titus’s own life despite Peake’s insistence on the shackling nature of the Groan lore. (C. N.

Manlove, op. cit., pp. 230-255). 10.

Sourdust

is buried with the skull of a calf, tied with ribbons,

attached to his own headless skeleton — another unpleasant confusing of identity.

Chapter 5 1. Victor

For further information about the life and works of Gogol see Erlich, Gogol,

Yale

University Press, 1969; Vladimir

Nabokov,

Nicolay Gogol, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973; Vsevolod Setchkarev, Gogol, his life and works, Peter Owen, 1965. Dead Souls, translated by David Magarshack, is available in Penguin, 1961.

2. He delivered his first lecture with dazzling panache but thereafter his teaching became mediocre. He would appear with his face bandaged up, as though suffering from toothache, and occasionally hand out pictures of classical ruins to his doubtless bewildered students. 3.

Vladimir Nabokov,

op. cit., p. 11-12. It was the White Knight,

of course, who would ‘madly squeeze a right-hand foot into a left-hand shoe.’ : 4. Valery Bryusov, ‘Burnt to Ashes’ (1909) translated by Robert A. Maguire, Russian Literature Triquarterly, no. 3, Spring 1972, p. 107. 5. See Carl R. Proffer, The Simile and Gogol’s “Dead Souls’’, Mouton, The Hague, 1967 for an account not only of Gogol’s similes but also of his complex network of interlocking symbols. 6. A common feature of Gogol’s mature work. In his two short stories The Nose (1836) and The Overcoat (1843) the inanimate objects of the titles assume greater importance than their owners. 7. D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature, edited by FrancisJ.Whitfield, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1960, p. 153. 8. See my own article on Dead Souls in Knaves and Swindlers, Essays on the picaresque novel in Europe, edited by Christine J. Whitbourn, published for the University of Hull by the O.U.P. 1974. 9. Gogol actually called his work not a novel but a ‘narrative poem in prose.’ 10. ‘His stories only mimic stories with plots.’ Vladimir Nabokov, Op Cit., Palo2s 11. Gogol was forced by the censorship to give his work another title The Adventures of Chichikov on the grounds that souls, being immortal, could not be described as dead.

12. Vladimir Nabokov, op. cit., p. 149. There is evidence that Gogol did have a morbid, pathological fear of the Devil which might have come from his mother. 13. See the opening paragraphs of part four of his novel The Idiot (1869), Penguin, 1961.

134

Chapter 6 1. Reprinted many times. The edition quoted from in this chapter is published by Methuen children’s books, 1972. 2. See Peter Green, Kenneth Grahame 1859-1932. A study of his life, work and times,

So.

John Murray, 1959.

Peter Greensop.ict., p240.

4. ‘As Mr Guy Pocock intelligently observed, the book is neither a pure animal book, nor a fairy tale like Puss in Boots in which an animal is simply a human being dressed up; ...for all its frank anthropomorphism, the story shows an extraordinary insight into the feelings and doings of little wild animals.’ (Peter Green, op. cit., p. 285). 5. Published by Peter Green opposite page 162. See also his remarks about the fluidity of River Bank, p. 285. 6. This is in chapter eleven. In the following chapter Badger addresses the other animals as ‘boys’. 7. ‘Go on Ratty...tell me all... I am an animal again,’ says Toad to Rat in chapter eleven. 8. T.H. White’s Badger is closer to the Primary World: ‘They do have a sort of pathetic appeal,’ said the badger sadly, ‘but I’m afraidI generally just munch them up.’ (The Once and Future King, Part I,

Chapter XXI). 9. In the first chapter a rabbit attempts to bar mole’s way and is taunted by that animal with cries of ‘Onion Sauce!’ In chapter four Otter asks a rabbit for news of Mole. C. S. Lewis, faced with the problem of animal eating animal in his Narnia books, arranges matters so

that it is permissible to eat dumb beasts, but wrong to eat ones which talk. See the horror expressed by the children when they realise they have been eating a talking stag in The Silver Chair (1953), Puffin Books, OT Sep tS. 10. See Peter Green’s observations on the finances of the River Bank, op. cit., p. 248. 11.

C. S. Lewis,

The

Screwtape

Letters,

Fontana

Books,

1960,

jos Alleys)

Chapter 7 1. Yevgeniy Zamyatin, We, Penguin Books, 1977. Written in 1920, it has never been published in Russia. The two principal characters of the novel are D-503 and E-330. 2. C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, p. 69. 3. Ernest J. Simmons, English Literature and Culture in Russia (1553-1840), Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, vol. II, New York, 1964, p. 134. 4. Sherlock Holmes’ encounters with crime are more plausible in that he is, by profession, a consultant detective with official rooms in Baker St to which enquirors can resort when they have a problem. Things just seem to happen to Wimsey. He even has a corpse in the cellar of the house in which he spends his honeymoon (Busman’s

135

Honeymoon

(1937), New English Paperback, 1977).

Those for whom

genre classification is of paramount importance can occupy themselves with the interesting question whether this particular novel is a detective story with love interest attached, or a love story with elements of detective fiction included within it. 5.

Arthur

6.

Fr

Conan

Doyle,

The Lost World, Hodder

& Stoughton,

OMS

Rolfe

(‘Frederick

Baron

Corvo’),

Hadrian

VII

(1904),

Picador edition, 1978. The novel is an essay in wishful thinking by its embittered author who failed, somewhat dramatically, to become a Roman Catholic priest. It may therefore be called a personal fantasy, in the sense of a daydream, on the part of its author. 7. Rose falls asleep but subsequent events are not clearly designated as part of his dream. In the dramatised version of the novel, the election and pontificate of Hadrian is presented as a daydream on the part of Rolfe who appears on stage, after Hadrian’s assassination, clutching the manuscript of his novel. Peter Luke, The Play of Hadrian VIT, Penguin Plays, 1969.

Chapter & 1. See H. H. Nininger, Out of the Sky, An introduction to Meteoritics, Dover Publications 1952. At the opposite pole to this type of intransigence is the dreadful willingness of Von Daniken (See Eric von Daniken, Chariots of the Gods, Souvenir Press, 1969) and his followers to attribute all the marvels of past civilisations to visitors from space. 2. See The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, fifteenth edition, vol. 5 under ‘Continental Drift’. 3. Thor Heyerdahl, The Kon-Tiki Expedition (1948), Penguin, 1978. See in particular chapter two in which a scientist refuses to look at Heyerdahl’s arguments because the conclusions are impossible! 4. Tree and Leaf, p. 66. 5. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies, Hodder and Stoughton, 1922. See also C. N. Manlove, op. cit., p. 2.

6. Ezekiel, chapter 1-2. 7. Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell... A Relation of Things Heard and Seen, The Swedenborg Society, London 1885. 8. See Paul Hawken, The Magic of Findhorn, Fontana, 1976. 9. See Stewart Farrer, What Witches Do, Sphere Books, 1973. Mr. Farrer is a witch himself and claims impressive results for, among other things, the healing powers of witchcraft. 10. See C. W. Ceram, Gods, Graves & Scholars, Book Club Associates by arrangement with Victor Gollancz, 1971, pp. 26-60, Ze 222, 11. See J. W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time, A. C. Black, 1927. 12. Geoffrey Clive, The Broken Icon, Macmillan, 1972, Dele 13. G. K. Chesterton, ‘A Defence of Nonsense’, The Defendant, London, 1901, p. 49.

136

The Fantasts Studies in J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, Mervyn Peake,

Nikolay Gogol and Kenneth Grahame

Fantasy is a popular genre, but ill-defined. Tolkien described fantasy as the making or glimpsing of ‘other-worlds: In this book, Edmund Little seeks to identify the techniques used to create such ‘other’ worlds by studying five classic authors. He examines the locations of their worlds, the laws governing space, time, growth and movement, and the nature and character of the inhabitants. The use of magic and the supernatural is a popular and obvious method of creating an ‘other’ world but not necessarily the most effective. Even the borderline between fantasy worlds and the worlds of conventional creative fiction is hard to determine, because most authors change the ‘real’ world to some degree, voluntarily or otherwise, for the purpose of their art Dr. TE. Little is Lecturer in Russian Studies at the University of Hull. Cover: Dragon, by M.C. Escher. Picture by courtesy of the Escher Foundation

LAB UV MT OMAN

Ii\

Avebury Publishing Company, Amersham, Enguae ISBN (paperback) 0-86127-212-9