Rhetorics of Fantasy. Farah Mendlesohn

also challenged: as much as in any other quest, knowledge is fixed and sealed either in the mouths of the narrative authority or between the covers of books. The sacredness of book knowledge is a given and here it is duly reverenced. The Lovers steal books, make of them communal property. The errors in their filing are lovingly described. Books are searched for because knowledge can only be recreated from what is already written. Thus Bellis’s destruction of the book is all the more shocking, because the convention is that what has been destroyed cannot be re-created, it can only be rediscovered. This convention is reinforced by what the found text says and how it says it. Krüach Aum does not claim invention or originality. Like Gandalf he narrates a history of what was done and discovered in the mists of legend: “I have … found a story to tell, of what had not been done since the Ghosthead Empire and was achieved once more, a thousand years ago” (190). At the most, he is a theoretician who has worked out the equations but never tested them. The dynamic of the novel demands not a reworking of the equations, not a pursuit of the physics that made it possible, but a pursuit of the physicist, or at the least, of his books—a dynamic reinforced when Krüach Aum is described as the one who “fishes for old books in ruins” (287). For all we know, the book at the center of this section is itself a copy of a copy of a copy, made valuable only by a belief that knowledge does not mutate but sits, waiting to be found. In part this dynamic may have been what Justina Robson meant when she wrote that The Scar “has the seeming of subversion but it doesn’t really blow up the foundations” (Robson, e-mail 20 May 2003).

      I have grouped The Scar with quest and portal novels, and I have already identified the moment of portal transition, but the quest is harder to pinpoint in this novel. Miéville, like the other writers in this section, is actively denying us the conventional quest narrative, but this time in a much more direct fashion, and in a way that depends heavily upon the conventions of the quest novel.³⁶ The Scar is an anti-quest novel. We are set up, time and time again, to expect that something will be found, a hero identified, a mission launched. And each time we are denied. Shekel does not turn out to be the predestined orphan; the magus fin is precisely that, a maguffin, even though it is perhaps the one moment of undisputed magic (as opposed to alternate science) in the book; and the Scar in the ocean is never reached nor is its power ever quite defined. The Scar may not even exist—we never have a direct view of the chasm.

      For many involved, the quest remains opaque, a quest without the power to inspire. As Miéville has argued, the She-Lover is the only character unreservedly inspired by quest-narrative logic, and she is a sociopath, the solipsism of the quest hero taken to the extreme (e-mail 16 January 2003) If there is a true quest narrative in The Scar, one that drives a group of characters in a way we identify as the classic quest fantasy—encounters with various peoples, miniadventures, the search for information, and a clear sense of moral justice, which results in success and which allows the protagonists to return home as heroes—it is one we see only intermittently. This is the Grindylow’s quest narrative. In the final analysis, Miéville has pulled off the very neat trick of writing an entire quest fantasy from the point of view of those—ignorantly—on the wrong side.

Chapter 2

       The Immersive Fantasy

      The immersive fantasy is a fantasy set in a world built so that it functions on all levels as a complete world. In order to do this, the world must act as if it is impervious to external influence; this immunity is most essential in its relationship with the reader. The immersive fantasy must take no quarter: it must assume that the reader is as much a part of the world as are those being read about. It should construct an irony of mimesis in which ornamental speech and persuasive speech become inseparable (Frye, Anatomy of Criticism 245). The immersive fantasy is both the mirror of mimetic literature and its inner soul. It reveals what is frequently hidden: that all literature builds worlds, but some genres are more honest about it than others. Mimetic literature, that fabulous conjuration of “the real,” is the product of a cumulative “bible.”¹

      Mimesis is the art of persuading the reader to forget the mediation of language. Irony of mimesis does not necessarily mean that we are assumed to be in the world (although this is one technique), but that we must share the assumptions of the world as much as a contemporary reader of Jane Austen shared the assumptions she presented in Pride and Prejudice.² If we imagine different levels of “reality” as concentric shells around the world, then the reader of the immersive fantasy must be able to sit between the shell that surrounds the narrative and the shell that protects the world as it is built from any suggestion that it is not real—a position Gary Westfahl has termed double estrangement (237). In effect, we must sit in the heads of the protagonists, accepting what they know as the world, interpreting it through what they notice, and through what they do not. In this form of fantasy, the positioning of the omniscient narrator (should one exist), is crucial. The immersive fantasy must partake of Irwin’s “quiet assertion”: “There are no authorial exclamations about how astonishing all this is … [and characters express] straightforward observations, expressing interest rather than amazement” (69). Peter Nicholls, discussing science fiction, describes this strategy as seeking to “domesticate [the world] … rather than draw attention to its absolute oddity” (32).

      If the above seems prescriptive, let us pause for a moment to consider two fantasies that strive for immersion, but that in their rhetoric make both the protagonists and the readers strange in the land. In the first, Golden Armour: The Helmet (Scholastic, 2000) by Richard P. Brown, the children have lived in the castle all their lives and have lived with themselves all their lives, but the insistent narration rehearses who and what they are: “When she was a small child, Cassie had discovered that she could heal little creatures that seemed sick” (12), while “Keiron had a gift too—not such a powerful one, but inexplicable nevertheless. From an early age he had learned that he could ‘speak’ to things in his head, they all had a voice in his head and would answer his questions if they had a mind to” (13). The second example to consider is G. P. Taylor’s Shadowmancer (2003), a tale in which two children in a northern village strive to defeat the wicked sorcerer-vicar Obadiah Demurral. Again, we have the description of things a child knows about himself: “Thomas Barrick was thirteen years old. He had lived all his life in Thorpe and had never been any further than Whitby. His father had been lost at sea in a great storm when Thomas was seven years old” (17–18). His friend Kate, “always said that she feared nothing. She didn’t believe in ghosts, creatures of the night, or God himself. Her father had beaten all the belief from her. To her father she had to be the nearest thing to a son. The son who had died two years before she was born” (39). The list of information—much of it irrelevant and with no impact on the actual novel—processes like a social worker’s report across the pages. It is of course a classic example of telling, rather than showing, and as such could simply be dismissed as poor style. But the ability of the writer to show rather than tell depends in part on the assumption of a consensus reality. These writers have made no such assumptions, even though Taylor is writing a deliberately Christian fantasy, and therefore might assume common knowledge. The result in both is to break the consensus reality, to position the readers as ignorant as they might be in a quest fantasy. In a world they are supposed to know, the result is discordant.