Metaphysical Romance: Phantastes
Part II of an ongoing series reviewing fiction novels with metaphysical themes. The first installment is here: Moby-Dick
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Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women is an otherworldly novel by Scottish minister George MacDonald, first published in London in 1858.
Forgotten by critics, despite that it is the first fantasy novel properly so called of the modern era, it is recalled and reread these days largely, if not exclusively, by fans of C.S. Lewis, for whom the little book was the prime inspiration and polestar of his own immortal imaginative work.
I can neither recommend nor fail to recommend this tale of wonders. Too much depends on you, dear reader, to say whether you will find this tale too twee, archaic, fustian and labyrinthine to bother, or the most beautiful and profound you ever read, or dreamed you’d read.
The work seems, at first, as pathless and dreamlike as the tales of Lewis Carrol, MacDonald’s friend, and as full of strangeness — albeit of far more profound weight that the light nonsense of Alice.
(As an historical note, it is MacDonald who first urged Carrol to publish “Alice’s Adventures Underground” — as it was called then. Alice’s cat Snowdrop in “Through the Looking Glass” is named for the MacDonald family cat.)
Critics have sought for a structure, some finding none, some seeing it as akin to a spiritual coming of age story, some seeing it as a mirror labyrinth, a psychological dreamscape, or a pagan allegory.
But to those who see in this work a vision, a reflection, a dream, a poignant as the memory of paradise in worlds of flight children retain from the days before their conception, this book will be, for you, a voyage into Fairy Land in truth, with all its wonder and strangeness: forest flowers, deathly Ash trees, long-toothed ogresses, knights and beggars, wise old wives and evil nymphs, palaces of unseen dancers, secret doors, deep loves, noble deeds, self-sacrifice, visions and shadows, death and waking. And, above all, magic mirrors.
For those for whom this tale is penned, it will be as the Perilous Wood itself would be: confusing, soothing, wonderful, terrible.
Here is a realm more stiffly formal and deeply romantic than what we know in these barren days, and frequently adorned with song and poem.
But if such fare is tasteless to your tongue, pass it by. I can think of a year, not long behind me, when I would not have cared a farthing for this word. Now, I am fascinated by it, but cannot unravel its riddles.
The tale begins with the protagonist, still wrapped in the hues and confusions of a dream, laying abed remembering yesterday’s events, when he came of age, came into his inheritance, and heard a fairy story read to him by his sister. ‘Is there a fairy-country, brother?’ she had asked. He had answered: ‘I suppose there is, if one could find the way into it.’
He inherits a key to a locked rolltop desk kept in a dark room. He finds a hidden switch behind a false panel, opening an dusty cubby, empty save for faded petals and a yellowed papers.
At once on a threshold stands a miniature woman of fairyland, dressed in timeless simplicity of style, and fair as a Greek statuette. She mocks his doubts and certainties, for she is his grandmother, and grants him his true inheritance: to enter fairyland.
In the morning gloom, the furniture in his bedroom transform to their fairy archetypes: his washbasin into the fountainhead of a crystal stream, his green carpet into a green carpet of grass, the carved ivy-leaf decorations of his dressing-table into an ivy trellis. The stream leads by a path into the forest of the fairy realm. Of course he ventures into the forest right away, and of course he departs from the path, which he wonders perhaps he should not. Things go awry.
His name is Anodos, which, as is only fitting, a word of double meaning, or more. In Greek, this wayward word in means both “pathless” and yet it means “ascending” but it also refers to the rites of spring of long lost cults, when the sleeping flowers wake and ascend, seeking sunlight.
I fear to attempt a summary of what follows, for it would be like holding up the withered leaves of winter memory, much as the narrator himself attempts when trying to relate the tales in the elf-books he read in the enchanted library of the Fairy Queen, who is never seen. The elf-books make the reader at once the protagonist of any tale he reads, for he enters and can speak to the characters, and partake or make the events.
He does meet what Disney’s fantasia would call fairies: delicate and giddy children, no bigger than dragonflies, dwelling in flowers, playing pranks and singing sings and drawing sparks from the tail of an angry cat. Once flower-elf in malice has bitten the stem of a cowslip and killed him: this is greeted with gaiety and song, a solemn procession, and forgotten: the sprites skip lightly away, laughing.
Deeper in the wood are greater things: Within the trees, wise and old or empty and horrid, are spirit beings as well, whose black shadows can stretch a hand of horror across the moon, or whose white limbs can enfold a weary survivor like a lover’s embrace.
Men live nigh. Some see nothing of the fairy world, despite it is at hand. But old wives and young girls are open-eyed, or perhaps have the fairy blood, needed to see the unseen.
One old mother tells him that no one comes to Fairy Land but for some reason, either known to himself or to those who have charge of him. Here, Anodos knows little, but his heart, at first, is high, and he fails to heed her warning against walking beneath the moon. This is the first of many warnings he will not heed.
His name suits him. Little voices tinkle amid the grass sing out: “Look at him! Look at him! He has begun a story without a beginning, and it will never have any end. He! he! he! Look at him!”
I have heard, that, for those who enter Fairy Land, there is no way of going back. They must go on, and go through it. How, I do not in the least know.
Here also is a knight whose armor is red with rust, for he neglected his chivalry and, indeed, his morality. No mortal burnish can restore the lost luster, but only the blows of foes. He might fight until each inch of tarnish is scraped away by blade and axe of deadly combat.
There are more huts than palaces in the fairy wood, which is perhaps a comment on the humility of soul needed to see such subtle things, beautiful or perilous. But some are the huts of ogresses.
Be warned that the story is not a story as such: there is no quest, no one antagonist, and the man does not get the ideal woman he pursues. She is meant for a better man. Instead, after much suffering and sacrifice, he loses the shadow pursuing him.
This shadow may or may not have also been the evil knight that bore his face and form, who locked him in an unlocked tower of torment, where his dreams of daily imprisonment are interrupted by his real-world illusion of freedom beneath the moon — until he is freed by the enchanted song woman he wronged a month before, when she was a little girl with a shining bauble of music.
The landscapes are flowery and barren as events proof the worth of our protagonists, or tempt him into folly and despair.
In one place is a block of marble where those with eyes to see can see the fairest form of an idea woman is trapped. Poetry can free her, but from where the words come to fill the poet’s mouth, he cannot say. She flees, and he pursues.
Anodos get lost. More lost. He does that often. He is warned not to touch a golden orb or a shining statue. He fails to heed, and pays the price. The theme of the tale is that there is a guide behind all seemingly random adventures, a fairy blessing, or, more to the point a divine providence.
In the center of the forest, and the story, a boat brings the weary Anodos to the palace of the Fairy Queen. Here he spends the central chapters bathing, or, rather, being baptized in a pool that may be an ocean; sleeping in his own bed back home; reading magical books of history, metaphysics, poetry, and story where narrator and rapt reader are one.
Two stories form the midpoint of the tale:, and one of a strange world where winged women live without knowing the embraces of men, and death there is birth here. The second tale of a student in Prague, an alchemist, who purchases a magic mirror whose glass holds a woman he loves, which tells in miniature of the sad quest of Anodos for his living marble lady whose love belongs to a nobler man.
Expelled from the fairy palace into underground realms of kobold mockery, Anodos meets in reverse the perils and temptations which met him when first he entered the perilous woods. He finds an island of peace whose four-sided hut contains and old crone with young eyes, who may or may not be the very beech tree who saved him from the evil Ash erenow. Within are doors leading to woe, to sighs, to despair, and to a timeless void, yet each of these doors somehow reaches our world. He finds brothers, he fights giants, he wins victory, he is plunged into sadness, he is imprisoned, and he meets once more the Red Knight whose armor is now burnished and pure.
Death and peace and reawakening back into our world is sure to follow, including a chapter spent as a cowslip, that same humbler flower killed by bite of a fairy in the opening chapters.
The tale is metaphysical in a way few other tales before or since have attempted: themes of reincarnation and universal salvation are touched upon, but whether meant as symbols of orthodox import, or doubtful theology, I leave to the reader to unriddle.
Myself, I rather doubt when a Scottish preacher uses a pagan metaphor, he is actually a secret advocate of pagan. Instead, I suspect he is one whose imagination baptizes everything in rich and deeper meaning, rich as porphyry dye.
Here is one passage, which I quote to show the theme and thought of the narrator. Few books touch on such subjects in so profound and careful a way, and none use the instruments of fairy tale, wise old wives and gallant knights, Pygmalion’s statue or fairy queens, to tell the tale.
They who believe in the influences of the stars over the fates of men are, in feeling at least, nearer the truth than they who regard the heavenly bodies as related to them merely by common obedience to an external law.
All that man sees has to do with man.
Worlds cannot be without an intermundane relationship. The community of the centre of all creation suggests an interradiating connection and dependence of the parts. Else a grander idea is conceivable than that which is already imbodied.
The blank, which is only a forgotten life, lying behind the consciousness, and the misty splendour, which is an undeveloped life, lying before it, may be full of mysterious revelations of other connections with the worlds around us, than those of science and poetry. No shining belt or gleaming moon, no red and green glory in a self-encircling twin-star, but has a relation with the hidden things of a man’s soul, and, it may be, with the secret history of his body as well.
They are portions of the living house wherein he abides.
Postscript:
I can think of only one tale that this is remotely like: VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS by David Lindsay. This book is the perfect opposite of that. PHANTASTES is bright where it is dark, full of hope where the other is full of despair. ARCTURUS is filled with images of ugly many-armed or three-eyed men whereas PHANTASTES is filled with fairies, fair maidens, noble knights. ARCTURUS is filled with murder, and corpses grin the nasty, empty smile of the world’s evil creator. Each are trying to sing about the truths beyond the walls of the world, a truth that cannot be spoken. Linday is a crow. MacDonald is a nightingale.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
