17.1nikolajeva

Fairy Tale and Fantasy: From Archaic to Postmodern

Nikolajeva, Maria.

Marvels & Tales, Volume 17, Number 1, 2003, pp. 138-156 (Article)

Published by Wayne State University PressDOI: 10.1353/mat.2003.0014

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MARIA NIKOLAJEVA

Fairy Tale and Fantasy: From Archaic to Postmodern

The concepts and terms used in the discussion of the many types of “non-realistic” narratives are often imprecise and ambiguous. In different studiesand reference sources, the concepts overlap and are used interchangeablywithout further argument, creating confusion. Fantasy has been treated as agenre, a style, a mode, or a narrative technique (see e.g., Hume; Jackson;Rabkin), and it is sometimes regarded as purely formulaic fiction. Withinthe context of children’s literature, the concepts of fairy tales and fantasy areoften used indiscriminately to denote anything that is not straight realisticprose (e.g., Sale). The least adequate distinction is that fairy tales are shorttexts while fantasy takes the form of full-length novels.

Although drawing clear-cut borders between myth, folktale, fairy tale,literary fairy tale, high or heroic fantasy, science fantasy, and so on, is impos-sible and not always necessary, some basic generic distinction is desirablefor theoretical consideration. There are several ways of distinguishingbetween fairy tales and fantasy, of which three seem to be most fruitful:ontological, structural, and epistemological.

While fairy tales and fantasy are undoubtedly generically related, and itmay even be argued that fantasy grows out of the fairy tale, their origins arequite different. Fairy tales have their roots in archaic society and archaicthought, thus immediately succeeding myths. Myths have close connectionto their bearers and folktales are “displaced” in time and space, while liter-ary fairy tales and fantasy are definitely products of modern times. Although

Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2003), pp. 138–156. Copyright © 2003 byWayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201.

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we may view certain ancient authors in terms of fantasy (Homer, Ovid,Apuleus), and although some important features of fantasy can clearly betraced back to Jonathan Swift, fantasy literature owes its origins mostly toRomanticism with its interest in folk tradition, its rejection of the previous,rational-age view of the world, and its idealization of the child.

Traditional fairy tales generally strive to preserve the story as close to itsoriginal version as possible, even though individual storytellers may conveya personal touch, and each version reflects its own time and society (seeZipes). Fantasy literature is a conscious creation, where authors choose theform that suits them best for their particular purposes. The purposes may beinstructive, religious, philosophical, social, satirical, parodical, or entertain-ing; however, fantasy has distinctly lost the initial sacral purpose of traditionalfairy tales. Fantasy is an eclectic genre, since it borrows traits not just fromfairy tales, but from myth, romance, the novel of chivalry, the picaresque, thegothic novel, mysteries, science fiction, and other genres, blending seeminglyincompatible elements within one and the same narrative, for instance paganand Christian images, magic wands and laser guns. The relation between fairytales and fantasy is similar to that between epic and novel in Mikhail Bakhtin’stheory: the fairy tale is a fully evolved and accomplished genre; fantasy aneclectic genre under evolution (Bakhtin, “Epic”).

Different sources give different information about “the very first fantasynovel” ever published, and it is also primarily a matter of definition whethera text should be classified as fairy tale or fantasy. Although most scholarsagree that The Nutcracker (1816) by E. T. A. Hoffmann matches most defi-nitions of fantasy and is therefore acknowledged as a pioneering work, itcan be questioned whether The Nutcracker really is a pioneering work, notleast in the context of Hoffmann’s other works. Fantasy became a strong tra-dition in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century because of thework of such writers as Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley, and George Mac-Donald. Of the three, MacDonald stands closest to fairy tales proper (seePrickett). At the turn of the twentieth century, Edith Nesbit, findingimpulses from many predecessors, renewed and transformed the fantasytradition, focusing on the clash between the magical and the ordinary, onthe unexpected consequences of magic when introduced into everyday real-istic life. Unlike the fairy tale, fantasy is closely connected with the notionof modernity; for instance, Edith Nesbit’s first time-shift fantasies are evi-dently influenced by contemporary ideas in the natural sciences, as well asby the science-fiction genre, particularly the work of H. G. Wells.

The Golden Age of the English-language fantasy arrived in the 1950sand ’60s, with names like C. S. Lewis, Philippa Pearce, Lucy M. Boston,Mary Norton, and Alan Garner. All these authors are obviously indebted to

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Nesbit, but their fantasy ascends to a higher level of sophistication. Again,this tradition was affected by the tremendous changes that the modernworld had undergone. The development of science and technology, the the-ory of relativity and quantum physics, experiments with atomic energy andthe first atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, achievements in spaceexplorations, investigations of artificial intelligence, alternative theories inmathematics and geometry, new hypotheses about the origins of the uni-verse—all this changed the very attitude toward natural laws. From a lim-ited, positivistic view of the world humankind has turned to a wider, moreopen view of life. We have thus become sufficiently mature to accept thepossibility of the range of phenomena that fantasy deals with: alternativeworlds, nonlinear time, extrasensory perception, and in general all kinds ofsupernatural events that so far cannot be explained in terms of science, butthat we are not willing to ascribe to the traditional fairy-tale magic.Therefore, since the basic narrative patterns of contemporary fantasy, suchas the multitude of material worlds or nonlinear time, are dependent on theideas developed within quantum physics, fantasy must be regarded as atwentieth-century phenomenon. Further, if fairy tales, displaced as they are,reflect archaic thought, fantasy seems to reflect the postmodern humanbeing’s split and ambivalent picture of the universe.

Most fantasy novels have many similarities to fairy tales. They haveinherited the fairy-tale system of characters, set up by Vladimir Propp andhis followers: hero/subject, princess/object, helper, giver, antagonist (Propp;Greimas). The essential difference between the fairy-tale hero and the fan-tasy protagonist is that the latter often lacks heroic features, can be scaredand even reluctant to perform the task, and can sometimes fail. Fantasyrarely ends in marriage and enthronement; in contemporary philosophicaland ethical fantasy it is usually a matter of spiritual maturation. Fantasyalso allows much freedom and experimentation with gender transgression.

Further, fantasy has inherited many superficial attributes of fairy tales:wizards, witches, genies, dragons, talking animals, flying horses and flyingcarpets, invisibility mantles, magic wands, swords, lanterns, magic food anddrink. However, the writers’ imagination allows them to transform andmodernize these elements: a genie may live in a beer can rather than a bot-tle; flying carpets give way to flying rocking chairs, and supernatural char-acters without fairy-tale origins are introduced—for instance animated toys(for a good overview of fantasy themes see Swinfen). Nevertheless, theirfunction in the story is essentially the same.

Fantasy has also inherited the basic plot of fairy tales: the hero leaveshome, meets helpers and opponents, goes through trials, performs a task,and returns home having gained some form of wealth. It has inherited some

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fundamental conflicts and patterns, such as the quest or combat betweengood and evil. However, just as fairy tales are not a homogeneous genre cat-egory, featuring magical tales as well as animal and trickster tales and so on,so fantasy is a generic heading for a variety of different types of narratives,some taking place in a fairy-tale realm, some depicting travel between dif-ferent worlds, some bringing magic into the everyday (see Nikolajeva, TheMagic Code). There is, nevertheless, a principal difference in the way fairytales and fantasy construct their spatiotemporal relations. According toMikhail Bakhtin, the particular construction of space and time in a literarytext, a feature he calls chronotope (an interdependent unity of space andtime), is genre specific, that is, each genre has its own unique chronotope(“Forms of Time”). With this structural approach, we may define fairy talesand fantasy by the way time and space is organized in them.

One element that we immediately recognize as characteristic of the fan-tasy chronotope is the presence of magic, or any other form of the supernatu-ral, in an otherwise realistic, recognizable world. This presence may bemanifest in the form of magical beings, objects, or events; it may be unfoldedinto a whole universe or reduced to just one tiny magical bit. This element initself is not different from fairy tales, but the anchoring in reality is.

The spatiotemporal condition, or chronotope, of fairy tales may be sum-marized in the initial formulas such as “once upon a time, not your time,and not my time,” (“Es war einmal . . . ,” “Il était une fois . . .”), “in a cer-tain kingdom,” “East of the sun, West of the moon,” “beyond three moun-tains, beyond three oceans,” and so on. It can occasionally be more concrete,but still mythical rather than realistic: “In the reign of King Arthur . . .” (orin Russian, “in the reign of Czar Green-Pea”). Thus fairy tales take place inone magical world, detached from our own both in space and in time.Myths, too, take place in the eternal nonlinear time, kairos (see Eliade;Heindricks; Nikolajeva, From Mythic). However, while the bearers of mythare positioned within its time/space, the reader or listener of a fairy tale isdetached from its space and time, which may again be emphasized byrhetoric formulas, for instance “once upon a time in the week of sevenSundays.” For the listener, this time is beyond reach. In fantasy literature,the characters are temporarily displaced from modern, linear time—chronos—into mythical, archaic cyclical time—kairos—and return to linear-ity at the end of the novel. The eternity of the fairy-tale time, expressed inthe final formula “lived happily ever after,” is alien to fantasy. Thus, the pro-tagonists of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe live a long life in the archaictimespace of Narnia, but are brought back and become children again.

In myth and fairy tale, the hero appears and acts within the magicalchronotope. In fantasy, the main premise is the protagonist’s transition

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between chronotopes. The initial setting of fantasy literature is reality: ariverbank in Oxford (Alice in Wonderland), a farm in Kansas (The WonderfulWizard of Oz), a country house in central England during the Second WorldWar (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), or a park in Stockholm (Mio,My Son). From this realistic setting, the characters are transported intosome magical realm, and most often, although not always, brought safelyback. Alternatively, the magical realm itself may intervene into reality, in theform of magical beings (the Psammead, Peter Pan, Mary Poppins), magicaltransformations, or magical objects. Naturally, in fairy tales, too, the hero istransferred to another realm (Propp’s function number fifteen), but as hestarts from “a certain kingdom beyond thrice three mountains,” the trans-portation is not as dramatic as for fantasy protagonists, who find themselveswhisked away from Oxford to Wonderland, from Kansas to Oz, fromLondon to Neverland, or from Stockholm to Farawayland. Similarly, whenthe fairy-tale hero brings back magical objects or helpers from his travels,they fit much better into the “certain kingdom” than in our own time andreality. In fact, many fantasy plots are built around the impossibility ofbringing anything back from the magical travels. This anchoring in recog-nizable reality is the most essential difference in the construction of the uni-verse in fairy tales and in fantasy.

The most common denomination for the various representations ofmagic in fantasy literature is the concept of the Secondary world, originat-ing from J. R. R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories.” Thus, fantasy may beroughly defined as a narrative combining the presence of the Primary andthe Secondary world, that is, our own real world and at least one more mag-ical or fantastic imagined world. Although fairy tales often include trans-portation to some other realm by means of a magical agent, they take placein one imaginary world, which does not have any connection with reality,at least not the reader/listener’s reality. Patterns of introducing magic into theeveryday in fantasy literature, of combining the Primary and the Secondaryworld, can vary from a complete magical universe with its own geography,history and natural laws to a little magical pill that enables a character in anotherwise realistic story to fly, to grow and shrink, or to understand the lan-guage of animals.

There is one specific motif in fantasy literature that has caused somescholars to view the texts where this motif occurs as a special subcategoryof fantasy: the motif of time distortion. It presumably appears first inNesbit’s The Story of the Amulet and, more than any other fantasy motif, isinfluenced by contemporary scientific thought, especially the theory of rel-ativity. The scope of problems fantasy authors meet when they venture onthe exploration of time patterns—the questions of predestination and free

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will, of the multitude of possible parallel times, of time going at differentpaces or even in different directions in separate worlds, the mechanisms oftime displacement, and the various time paradoxes—is irrelevant in fairytales (see Aers). Some scholars maintain that time-shift fantasy is the mostintellectually demanding of all types of modern fantasy, for both writers andreaders. Indeed, time-shift fantasy allows the author more freedom to elab-orate in sophisticated patterns while it allows the readers to see them moreclearly (see Cameron). However, complicated time relations are present inall fantasy texts, independent of the dominant type or theme.

The relation between real and magic time in fantasy is exactly thereverse of that in fairy tale. A common folktale motif is the land (or island)of immortality where the hero spends what to him may seem a day, or threedays, or a week. When he returns to his own world, it appears that manythousand years have elapsed. Here magical, mythical time becomes com-pressed and insignificant (see Bak). By contrast, in fantasy, the charactersmay easily live a whole life in the imaginary world while no time will passin their own reality.

Most scholars make a clear distinction between what they assume arethe two principal motifs: Secondary worlds (Alice in Wonderland, TheNarnia Chronicles, Mio, My Son, The Neverending Story) and time travelingor time displacement (The House of Arden, A Traveller in Time, Tom’s Mid-night Garden, Playing Beatie Bow). There is undoubtedly more obsessionwith time as such in time-shift fantasy: the very notion of time, its philo-sophical implications, and its metaphysical character. But as to the con-struction of a magical universe and, as a direct consequence, the build-upof the narrative, there are surely more similarities than differences in novelsinvolving time shift or Secondary worlds as the dominating pattern. Theprincipal feature of time fantasy, time distortion, is also present in theSecondary world fantasy. At the same time, what is believed to be the prin-cipal pattern of the Secondary world fantasy, the passage between theworlds, is most tangible in time fantasy. The passage is often connected withpatterns such as the door, the magic object, and the magic helper (messen-ger), all of which are also manifest in Secondary world fantasy. All these pat-terns have their origins in fairy tales.

Postmodern fantasy takes all the spatiotemporal conditions one stepfurther. Heterotopia is the most exciting example. Heterotopia, or a multi-tude of discordant universes, denotes the ambivalent and unstable spatialand temporal conditions in fiction. It can be argued that a multitude ofworlds is not precisely a new idea; we may, for instance, recall the Copper,the Silver, and the Golden realms, with all the variants, in fairy tales. These,however, are merely duplications of similar space. The “hetero” of the term

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“heterotopia” emphasizes dissimilarity, dissonance, and ambiguity of theworlds. In Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, the multitude of worlds isimplied only at the end and does not evolve in its full view until the sequels.The novel, which specifies its initial setting as Oxford, very soon appears tobe taking place in a world similar to our own, but not identical with it,which, among other things, allows the author to play with language, geog-raphy, and history. In this alternative world, the Reformation has never hap-pened, the Inquisition still exists in the twentieth century, the pope has hisseat in Geneva, the Tartars ravage in Muscovy, the far north is inhabited bywitches and intelligent polar bears; quantum physics is called “experimen-tal theology,” electricity is “anbaric light,” America is “New Denmark,” andthe fastest transportation is by zeppelin. All this invites reflections over therandom nature of Fate. Our own world is described in the sequel, The SubtleKnife, through the young protagonist Lyra’s eyes by means of defamiliariza-tion, that is, presenting familiar things as if they were unfamiliar. A thirdworld into which the characters escape is substantially more alien. In thefinal book, The Amber Spyglass, there are still more strange worlds to keeptrack of (see Hunt and Lenz 122–69).

Heterotopia is also the trademark of Diana Wynne Jones’s novels (seeNikolajeva, “Heterotopia”). Like Pullman, Jones frequently starts in Other-worlds, depicting our own world as strange—defamiliarization again. Thisgives her an opportunity to view our own world through an outsider’s eyes,observing its unexpected and peculiar aspects and thus questioning the values and attitudes we take for granted. In The Power of Three, for instance,radios, cars, and dishwashers are perceived by the inhabitants of Other-world as magic, while their own magical qualities, such as seeing into thefuture or finding hidden things, are thought of as natural.

The most conspicuous difference between our world and the worldsJones’s protagonists come from is the absence of magic. For the universaltraveler Christopher Chant, our world is one of the bleakest and dullest,and the only exciting thing worth bringing from it is girls’ boarding-schoolnovels. In Otherworlds (named by the naive child protagonist of The Livesof Christopher Chant as Anywheres), magic is a natural part of the everyday,and magical power is a skill to be developed in a child, just like language,math, or athletic achievements.

Our own, sober world devoid of magic is always somewhere in theperiphery in Jones’s novels. In Howl’s Moving Castle one of the four doors inthe castle opens into what is eventually recognized as Wales, from whereHowl the wizard originally comes. In the sequel, Castle in the Air, it turnsout that most of the characters in this Oriental-flavored story come fromour own world, but have been transformed and trapped in a variety of

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bizarre forms: an old soldier, two cats, a bottled genie, and a flying carpet.In the Dalemark quartet, where the three first parts take place wholly in amythical, magical real, the last volume, The Crown of Dalemark, suddenlybrings in a connection with present-day Britain. Describing our own worldfrom Otherworld’s perspective enables Diana Wynne Jones to discuss exis-tential questions, such as: What is reality? Is there more than one ultimatetruth?—questions pertinent to postmodern thinking. The multitude ofworlds is thus not merely a backdrop for adventures, but a reflection of theyoung protagonists’ split and distorted picture of the reality in which theyare living. This is perhaps presented best in The Homeward Bounders, wherethe protagonist is forever lost in an infinite multitude of worlds. Such chaosis hardly possible in the ordered world of fairy tales.

The world structure in Deep Secret is the most explicit and consistentof all Jones’s works. It is described by the magnificent neologism Multiverse,which has the form of the sign of infinity, ∞, or Möbius strip, this fascinat-ing three-dimensional paradox in which two sides of a twisted band sud-denly become one. In Multiverse, worlds are placed along the endlesscontinuum and multiplying incessantly. The infinity and instability of theworlds make this structure particularly disturbing. One half of the infinityfigure contains worlds that are “negative magically, or Naywards, and theother half is positive, or Ayewards” (1). This does not, however, merely sig-nify good or evil magic, but primarily the acceptance of and attitude towardmagic in the respective world. In good worlds, magic is a natural part ofeveryday life, while in the evil, rational worlds, to which our own Earthbelongs, magic is despised and persecuted. Earth is situated Naywards, inthe negative loop of the spiral. This is in no way a coincidence. Childhoodand adolescence are not safe and stable places, contrary to the Romantic,idealizing view of the innocent child. By exposing the young characters(and thus the young readers) to a variety of other, more harmonious andsolid, worlds, the author suggests that harmony can be achieved, perhaps atsome later stage in life.

In the course of the novel, as happens in several other works by Jonesas well as in Pullman’s trilogy, the very existence of Multiverse is threatened.It is, however, not explicit that by saving Multiverse the protagonist is serv-ing the purpose of good. Good and evil change places easily, and every con-cept, every belief, is relative. This is of course totally impossible in fairytales with their clear-cut and unequivocal ethical categories. Fairy taleknows no nuances; its characters are either thoroughly good or thoroughlyevil; they are not allowed any doubts or hesitation, or in general any ethi-cal choices. Early literary fairy tale and fantasy follow this principle. TheNutcracker is noble, the Mouse King vile. The noble must inevitably win

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over the evil. One of the first cautious interrogations of this rigid patternoccurs in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where Edmund, one of thefour child characters of the story, takes sides with evil—in Propp’s terms, he isthe false hero, the one who fails the task. However, unlike the fairy-tale falsehero, Edmund is not evil as defined by his function in the narrative. He isgiven some essential psychological traits. The narrator even defends his dis-graceful behavior, stating that he had gone to the wrong kind of school.Further, Edmund is enchanted by the food he accepts from the Witch, andhe knows from the start that he is doing wrong. Fairy-tale villains andbetrayers do not possess such qualities. Edmund is given a chance to evolveand repent; indeed, in the sequels, he becomes a rightful hero.

Postmodern fantasy goes considerably further in its ambiguity. Lyra, thesingle protagonist in Northern Lights, is the focalizer of the narrative, whichencourages the reader to adopt her subjectivity and therefore perceive heras essentially good. Not unexpectedly, Lyra is given a special role: she is theonly one who can read and interpret the signs of the alethiometer, the mag-ical truth machine. The firm Romantic belief that the child is good bynature and therefore more suitable to struggle against evil is central in allfantasy novels. However, Pullman’s heroine is more subtly portrayed. Shehas in fact caused the death of her best friend, Roger. Morally, she is not aspure and innocent as traditional fantasy prescribes. In the final novel, shesuddenly feels remorse over her betrayal and decides to seek Roger in theRealm of Death and bring him back.

The ultimate battle of good and evil in The Amber Spyglass concernsLyra, the chosen child who will decide the fates of all the parallel worlds.The problem is that it is not self-evident which choice is the right one. Asreaders, we are given to understand that Lyra, like Eve of the Bible, will besubject to a temptation. It is, however, far from clear whether she is sup-posed to fall or to withstand, and in the first place what consequences eitherof these actions will have. This dilemma engages the reader much morethan the simple tasks in fairy tales, such as killing a dragon, winning overan antagonist, or finding a treasure.

Some of Diana Wynne Jones’s novels go so far as to make the child pro-tagonist explicitly evil, a representative of the Other—a taboo seldom bro-ken in children’s fiction. The young character of Archer’s Goon realizes to hisdismay and horror that he is himself one of the evil wizards he has beenhunting. The story is told from Howard’s point of view, and up to the lastpages of the novel the reader has no clue to the identity of the evil power.A similar dilemma is skillfully explored in The Lives of Christopher Chant,where the protagonist successively—and quite reluctantly—discovers hismagical powers. Unlike Edmund, who succumbs to the White Witch’s

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charms only to be redeemed and reformed, Christopher repeatedly servesthe abominable purposes of his greedy and evil uncle, bringing profitableloot from the many parallel worlds he visits, including mermaid flesh anddragon blood. As readers, we see Christopher’s horrible errors as well as hisnaive blindness and false loyalties. In order to do so, we have to free our-selves from the protagonist’s subject position—a demand never put on therecipient of a fairy tale.

Rupert in Deep Secret is a Magid, one of the many lower-rank magicianswho conscientiously serve a higher authority to govern a multitude of re-lated worlds. Ostensibly, they are working for the benefit of all, keeping thebalance of good and evil in the Multiverse. Most often this involves manip-ulating people to do the right things at the right moments. Seemingly,Rupert does a good job: “I had only the day before returned from America,where I had, almost single-handed, managed to push the right people intosorting out some kind of peace in the former Yugoslavia and NorthernIreland” (2). However, the very idea of some higher power “sorting out”world affairs is disturbing enough. As a magician, Rupert is superior to mor-tals on Earth, and his primary task is to serve the higher authority. However,he does not find this mysterious authority, called the Upper Room, particu-larly good or just. On the contrary, as in other novels by Jones, notably ATale of Time City, The Homeward Bounders, and Hexwood, the authority isplaying its own games of power, treating the inhabitants of the Multiverseas insignificant and worthless, mere pawns in their own games, whetherthey live in good or bad worlds. Even Rupert himself feels manipulated, or,in the special language of the magicians, “Intended.” At the same time,Rupert does not hesitate about manipulating the fates of people when hefinds it useful.

The Homeward Bounders and Deep Secret are narrated in the first person.First-person perspective is traditionally uncommon in fairy tales. JohnStephens goes so far as to claim that it is impossible in nonmimetic narra-tives (251). I can add as a side comment that, contrary to Stephens’s state-ment, first-person narration was used in fantasy in works as early as AlisonUttley’s A Traveller in Time or Astrid Lindgren’s two fantasies, Mio My Sonand The Brothers Lionheart. It is, however, true that personal narration is anuncommon and more demanding form in fantasy, since both writers andreaders lack the immediate experience of the characters. First-person per-spective in some contemporary fantasy novels adds to the overall shift fromthe action-oriented toward the character-oriented nature of the stories.

Not only protagonists, but also supporting characters in postmodernfantasy have lost the clear-cut distinction between good and evil. Since suchcharacters often perform the roles of parental substitutes, their ambiguity

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undermines the sense of security that young protagonists normally receivefrom such figures. In fairy tales, the roles of supporting characters are clearlydetermined: they are either helpers or opponents; there is either the benev-olent (often dead) mother or the evil stepmother. In The Lion, the Witch andthe Wardrobe, the White Witch represents—in concordance with theauthor’s Christian views—absolute evil. There is no doubt that her plans aremalicious, and in the prequel, The Magician’s Nephew, we witness her previ-ous destruction of yet another world by means of a powerful DeplorableWord. The child characters’ struggle against the White Witch is thereforethe only rightful thing for them to do.

In Alan Garner’s Elidor, the unnamed enemy of Otherworld is only rec-ognized through Malebron, the sly and unscrupulous magician who luresthe four siblings into Elidor in pursuit of his own designs. Based on our pre-vious experience of fantasy, we assume that Malebron is “a good guy”; how-ever, his obsessive behavior does not speak in his favor, and his namesuggests malevolence. On closer look, we cannot be sure that the destruc-tion of Elidor is not desirable. In supporting Malebron, the children may infact be running evil’s errands, and at least one of them pays a high price forthis involvement.

In Pullman’s trilogy, the ambiguity of good and evil adults is driven tothe extreme. Lyra’s mother, Mrs. Coulter, is from the beginning presented ina less favorable light, and since she is the primary opponent of Lyra’s father,Lord Asriel, we assume that he represents the good forces. However, in theend of the first volume, Asriel sacrifices the life of Lyra’s friend, Roger, topursue his own goals. His moral image is strongly questioned, and togetherwith Lyra we do not trust him anymore. When Mrs. Coulter in the thirdbook kidnaps Lyra and keeps her asleep with a magic potion, we immedi-ately classify this behavior as evil, although it finally appears that Mrs.Coulter has been acting out of the best intentions. It is hard to understandher motivation, and her ultimate reformation, ostensibly driven by her sud-den maternal instincts, is psychologically implausible. However, witnessingher martyr’s death for Lyra’s sake, most readers will be convinced. Humannature is enigmatic and inconsistent, and the character of Mrs. Coulter is agood illustration. A fairy-tale character cannot possibly go through a simi-lar transformation; an evil stepmother cannot be reformed. Further, the por-traits of Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel reflect a typical young person’scontradictory feelings toward her parents. In fairy tales, the biological par-ents’ primary function is to be absent (Propp’s function number one).

Such utter ambiguity of character is based on the postmodern conceptof indeterminacy, of the relativity of good and evil. By intuition, we decidethat the forces who wish to kill Lyra are evil, while those who seek to hide

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and protect her are good. However, the motivation of both sides is equallydubious. We also learn that the subtle knife, one of the major attributes ofthe trilogy, featured in the title of the second novel, is of a double nature.The magical knife or sword in fairy tales is necessarily used for the purposeof good. Pullman’s subtle knife is used to open passages between the differ-ent worlds, and as such seems to serve a good cause. Later, however, thecharacters learn that the passages they create are the very source of thethreat to the universe they are trying to save. Nothing and nobody are whatthey seem to be in Pullman’s trilogy, and the reader is not given any clues.

The two sequels to Northern Lights also pose the question of intersub-jectivity. Unlike the collective actant of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobeand many other similar fantasy novels, Lyra and Will are not merely twointerchangeable figures introduced to keep the gender balance. The post-modern concept of intersubjectivity presupposes the absence of a single,fixed subject in a literary text, instead suggesting that the complex “subject”of a narrative has to be assembled by the reader from several individual con-sciousnesses. This phenomenon may also be described through MikhailBakhtin’s concept of polyphony, or heteroglossia, an interplay of differentvoices and perspectives within a narrative (Bakhtin, Problems). The principaldifference between the collective and the intersubjective character lies in theabsence, in the latter case, of an omniscient perspective in which the narra-tor has simultaneous access to several characters’ minds. While a collectivecharacter is a simple sum of its constituents, an intersubjective character isconstructed through an intricate interplay of subject positions in the text.

Lyra is the sole protagonist and focalizer in Northern Lights. In TheSubtle Knife she is joined by a male companion, Will, who like Lyra pos-sesses supernatural powers, even though he comes from our own, magic-less world. But Will is not merely the female heroine’s faithful squire. He ison a quest of his own, and the two characters’ consciousnesses are pre-sented to the reader as enhancing and complementing each other. In TheAmber Spyglass, several more minds are added to this interplay of thoughts,beliefs, and opinions, without any narrative authority interfering with ourinterpretation. We are allowed to enter both Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter’sminds, as well as those of several other characters from both sides. A keyperson, whose role we do not realize until very near the end, is a femaleresearcher from our own world who goes astray in one of the many paral-lel worlds. Since we are primarily interested in Lyra, these satellite plotsmay seem distracting, but we know of course that they will be broughttogether, and that everything must have an impact on Lyra’s fate. We arethus manipulated to add up other people’s perspectives to illuminate theprotagonist.

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The concept of intersubjectivity can also be illustrated by SusanCooper’s novel Seaward, in which we follow one of the two characters whilethe mind of the other remains opaque, according to the complementarityprinciple. Seaward takes place in a complicated mindscape of the two ado-lescents who have both gone through losses and psychological traumas.The dreamlike narrative prompts us to read it as a description of internalrather than external reality. However, such an approach usually demandsthat we decide who is dreaming.

Westerly is introduced first, in the first sentence of the first chapter:“Westerly came down the path at a long lope, sliding over the short moor-land grass” (7). In this chapter, nothing suggests that the story is other thanrealistic or that the setting is other than perceptible reality. We do not knowwhere the boy is going or why, but there is nothing to lead our genre expec-tations toward the extraordinary. In the next chapter, Westerly is aban-doned, and we meet Cally in a similar in medias res manner: “Cally sat inthe apple tree” (10). In contrast to the Westerly chapter, here we are imme-diately initiated into Cally’s dilemma: her father is dying. The woman whohas come to take him, ostensibly, to a hospital, may be seen as the symbolicfigure of death. She says to Cally: “We’ve met before . . . but only at a dis-tance. We shall meet again soon” (11). Apparently, Cally has seen deathbefore, “at a distance,” perhaps when a distant relative died; the mysteriouswoman will soon come to collect Cally’s mother, and Cally will presentlymeet Death itself, Lady Taranis, in the dark landscape of her mind. At thesame time, Taranis can also be viewed as the darker side of Cally’s mother,which Cally has to recognize and accept: “Cally had a sudden nightmareimage of her mother hostile to her, of a malevolence aimed at her whichsomehow was retribution for everything she had ever failed to do, or donewrong. In place of the loving forgiveness she had always known, in hermind she saw her mother’s face twisted with ill- wishing [ . . .]” (17). AfterCally has escaped from her dismal reality through a mirror—a straightfor-ward Jungian symbol representing the darker side of the ego, the Shadow—the narrative switches back to Westerly, and several more chapters arewritten in this antiphonic manner (chapters 3 and 4 for Westerly, chapters5 and 6 for Cally), until the two characters finally meet. From this point on,they must cooperate, trust, and help each other in order to succeed. Theyare focalized alternately, yet the two points of view almost coincide. Thecharacters merge in their actantial roles, but continue to complement eachother psychologically: Cally has intuition, Westerly is rational and resolute.Their actions have immediate impact on one another; they must learn to besensitive and considerate. In Jungian terms, Cally is Westerly’s Anima, andhe is her Animus. These positive, creative sides of their respective psyches

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must counterbalance their dark sides, the Shadows, Lugan and Taranis.Although Lugan seems to be benevolent, while Taranis is evil, both areambiguous in their messages, and in the end both are equally treacherousand supportive.

For Westerly, too, Lady Taranis is the symbolic maternal figure. His realmother had somehow managed to send him over to the Otherworld justbefore she was brutally murdered in an unnamed totalitarian country, faraway from Cally’s peaceful British countryside. Westerly feels guilty abouther death. He is searching for his father, and Lugan, the male parental sub-stitute, plays the natural role of guide: “I am your . . . watchman. As a hawkhangs watching in the sky. I see those things that happen to you—but onlywhen they are happening, not before. Sometimes I may intervene. Notalways. There are perils in this country, but there are also laws [ . . .]” (30).Interpreting the Otherworld as Westerly’s mindscape, full of fear and anxi-ety, the novel presents his inner journey toward acceptance of his parents’death, thus paralleling Cally’s quest. The description of the journey is illog-ical, almost incoherent; it evokes the unmistakable sense of a nightmare. Theworld where Cally and Westerly wander is unstable, unpredictable, undeter-minable. During the journey, both come to the understanding that their par-ents are neither perfect nor totally reliable. They recognize the time has cometo liberate themselves from parental protection and continue on their own.

The goal of Cally’s and Westerly’s quest is the sea. The sea in Jungian psy-chology represents the unconscious, and it is a very transparent symbol inthis novel. It is introduced in the second chapter: “Cally had never heard thesea, or seen it” (10). Characteristically, as it turns out, Cally is a descendantof selkies, the mythical seal-people. However, the sea is also a symbol ofdeath. Cally’s mother tells her, in the beginning of the novel: “Your father’sgoing away for a little while . . . He’s going to a special hospital by the sea”(10). The mother soon follows him, supposedly to visit. Eventually, Cally hasto accept that her parents are not coming back. Similarly, Westerly has beentold by his mother to travel seaward in search of his father. Taranis, deathincarnated, tries to tempt Westerly into following her: “Come with me,Westerly. I will take you to the sea, and there shall be no more pursuing andno more peril. Come with me, and I will send you over the ocean, to the landof Tir n’An Og, the ever young, where there is neither loss nor age nor pain.You will find your father there” (32). Taranis promises Westerly eternalyouth, but she entices him to follow her into the realm of death—on themimetic level, to commit suicide. She then says the same to Cally: “‘Comewith me, Cally. I will take you to the sea, to your mother and your father, andyou will be safe again. All together’ “ (49). The duplication of the temptationemphasizes the identical roles of the two characters in the story.

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The intersubjective reading of the characters enables us, just as inPullman’s trilogy, to reconcile the two separate narratives, the two separateinner journeys, viewing them as two sides of the same quest for self, in whichthe two concrete figures are interconnected, not least because their gendercomplementarity makes their story more universal. They learn to under-stand and trust each other just as an individual would explore his or herown psyche in an extreme situation. They share their fears, nightmares, andvisions; they virtually become one. Just as their parental figures are the twosides of one inseparable whole: day and night, Life and Death, impossiblewithout one another, so Cally and Westerly are ultimately two sides of thesame mind and soul. Once again, it is quite obvious that fairy-tale heroesnever reach such complexity.

I have in this last analysis interpreted the fantasy realm as a mindscape,an externalization of the protagonist’s inner world. Naturally, fairy tales havealso been interpreted this way, in the first place by the Jungian-inspired crit-ics (see, e.g., von Franz; J. C. Cooper) However, the presence of the real, per-ceptible world in fantasy novels supports the view of the fantastic world asa symbolic representation of the character’s mind in a manner more imme-diate than in fairy tales. The protagonist of Russell Hoban’s The TrokevilleWay enters his own mindscape through a picture puzzle he has bought froma street musician with the anagrammatic name of Moe Nagic. The motif ofgoing inside a picture has its origins in folklore, the most prominent exam-ple being the myth of Wu Lao Tsu, a painter who disappears into his ownpainting. The myth ends with his disappearance and shows no further inter-est in his experience. In Mary Poppins, where there are several episodesdepicting characters entering pictures, the experience does not go beyondadventure and the very thrill of passing a magical threshold. For Nick, in TheTrokeville Way, the picture, showing a bridge with two people on it, is merelya gate into the dark, frightening, and complex world of his own mind. Nickis on the verge of becoming a teenager, and crossing the bridge he finds him-self in a nightmare, involving his parents, his bullying classmate, the girl heis interested in, and other figures of his past and present. There are, however,no dragons for Nick to fight beyond the bridge, and no treasures to find. Hisjourney is a pure quest of self-discovery, and the solidity of the old stonebridge is just as illusory as Moe Nagic’s disappearance tricks. Nothing everturns out as it seems to be, and the whole story has a disturbing sense ofuncertainty and indetermination.

This brings me to the final question of this essay, the epistemology offairy tales and fantasy, the matter of belief and the “suspension of disbelief.”The most profound difference between fantasy and fairy tales is in fact theposition of the reader/listener toward what is narrated. In traditional fairy

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tales, taking place, as we have seen, in a clearly detached timespace, read-ers are not supposed to believe in the story. The addressee of a fairy tale issituated outside the text; the communication is based on an agreementbetween the sender and the addressee. Among others, Vladimir Proppmaintains that the addressee of a fairy tale knows that the story is not true.This fact accounts for the recurrent final patterns of many tales, like thefamous Russian: “I have been to the feast myself, drank wine and beer, butnever got drunk.” The ironic assurance that the story is “true” reminds thelistener of its own conventionality. This is also, as has already been pointedout, the basic difference between myth and fairy tale: for the bearer of amyth, the events described are true; myth is based on belief. The mythichero’s deeds are essential for the survival of his society. The hero’s task in afairy tale is totally impossible for an ordinary human being; it is always asymbolic or allegorical depiction. In fantasy, characters are ordinary; thewriters often assure their readers that the protagonist is “just like you.”

In most fantasy novels there can be at least two possible interpretationsof the events. They can be accepted as “real,” having actually taken place,which means that as readers we accept magic as a part of the world createdby the author. But magic adventures can also be accounted for in a rationalway, as the protagonist’s dreams, visions, hallucinations, or imaginingscaused, for instance, by fever, or by psychical or emotional disturbance. J. R. R.Tolkien was among the first to question the legitimacy of rational explana-tions. In his essay “On Fairy Stories,” he dismisses Alice in Wonderlandbecause in the end the heroine wakes up, and her adventures turn out to havebeen a dream. Tolkien’s concept of fantasy literature (although he speaks offairy stories rather than fantasy) is based on the suspension of disbelief; that is,unlike the case of fairy tales, we as readers perceive fantasy, within its ownpremises, as “true.” For Tolkien, genuine and skillful fantasy creates SecondaryBelief (unlike the Primary Belief of myth and religion), putting the reader in a temporary state of enchantment. As soon as suspension of disbelief is disturbed, the spell is broken, and, Tolkien adds, art has failed. For Tolkien,The Trokeville Way would, unlike Alice, qualify as a genuine fairy story, sinceNick’s dream is too much interwoven with reality, and it is impossible to separate his mindscape from the real world in which he lives. The reader isthus kept in suspension of disbelief throughout the story, even though Nickdoes wake up every now and then, only to discover that his dream has indeedbeen true.

Fairy tales, on the other hand, often subvert their own credibility, eitherin initial or in final formulas: “Once upon a time, when pigs drank wine[. . .].” The hero (and the reader/listener) of a fairy tale does not experiencewonder when confronted with magical events or beings; they are taken for

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granted. The characters of a fantasy novel, anchored in the real world, donot normally expect a rabbit to have a watch or to wear a waistcoat; neitherdo they expect to discover magical realms behind looking glasses or insidewardrobes. The essence of fantasy literature is the confrontation of the ordi-nary and the fabulous. Here, the categories proposed by Tzvetan Todorovmay prove useful. In his study of the fantastic, Todorov draws clear distinc-tions among the uncanny, the marvelous, and the fantastic, in which the lastis characterized by a strong sense of hesitation. Fairy tales will, in this typol-ogy, chiefly fall under the category of the marvelous, while the essence offantasy lies in the hesitation of the protagonist (and the reader) when con-fronted with the supernatural—which can be anything that goes beyondnatural laws. I have in this essay repeatedly pointed out uncertainty, inde-terminacy, and ambiguity as typical features of postmodern fantasy on everylevel. Together with the fairy-tale hero, readers/listeners do not question theexistence of dragons or witches, because they are part of the fairy-talebuildup. For the fantasy protagonist, the encounter with the supernatural,whether the appearance of witches or unicorns in his own reality, or beingtransported into another world, presents a dilemma, which readers mustshare. The events may be actually happening, causing us to accept the exis-tence of magic, of parallel magical worlds, and of the possibility of travelbetween worlds. Alternatively, characters (and readers) may decide thatthey are dreaming or hallucinating. In postmodern fantasy, the boundariesbetween reality and the Otherworld become more elusive, and the passageoften subtle, so that the hesitation is amplified. Actually, Christopher Chantinitially believes his explorations of Related World to be dreams. Theworlds constructed as a Möbius strip may be the product of a confusedyoung mind, and the nightmarish landscape beyond the bridge in TheTrokeville Way most definitely invites being interpreted as the character’smindscape. However, no definite answer is to be found in the text. Alicewakes up from her nightmare and can go free from any consequences of heractions in Wonderland. Dream and reality are clearly delineated. For post-modern characters, there will be no awakening, the boundaries betweendream and reality are blurred, and they often pay dearly for their involve-ment in Otherworlds. Further, following the development of natural sci-ence, fantasy literature tends to view parallel worlds as equally real, so thatnothing is, positivistically, acknowledged as the utmost reality. In quantumphysics, which has inspired postmodern authors, we meet the uncertaintyprinciple, developed by Werner Heisenberg. Contrary to the straightfor-wardness of fairy tales, fantasy accepts more than one reality and more thanone truth.

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