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What If? What if rugs could fly? What if pigs could talk? Every writer of fantasy poses a what-if question that is the theme of his book. He can ask it in many ways, and all of these ways are different approaches to the dividing line between truth (the real world) and fantasy (the unreal world). For E. Nesbit, the dividing line was a piece of cloth. There is a curtain, thin as gossamer, clear as glass, strong as iron, that hangs forever between the world of magic and the world that seems to us to be real. And when once people have found one of the little weak spots in that curtain which are marked by magic rings, and amulets, and the like, almost anything can happen. (1) There are at least eight different uses which have been made of this cloth by writers of fantasy. In the first, the fabric remains whole. It is merely stretched a little out of shape. The entire story happens on the real-world side of the curtain. These books are tall tales. Who's to say they couldn't happen? What if, for example, someone imitated the Pied Piper and invented a contraption to trap mice with music? Through the streets of Centerburg rolled Mr. Michael Murphy . . . The mice came running from every direction!...They all went running up the ramps and runways and disappeared in Michael Murphy's musical mouse trap.(2) A musical mousetrap? Unlikely, but not impossible, not beyond the stretch of the fabric we're talking about. The cloth may be getting a little thin in spots, but it's still whole. In a second kind of book, the cloth is punctured. The characters leak through the hole into another world. Somewhere near the beginning of all of these books there are episodes like these. In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room.(3) "This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!" thought Lucy, going still further in and pushing the soft folds of the coats aside to make room . . . A moment later she found that she was standing in the middle of a wood...with snow under her feet.(4) Sometimes the weak point in the cloth is not a place but a thing, a device, a charm of some sort. For the children in one of my books, it is the Astonishing Stereoscope. There was a great clanging sound. The lenses in front of his eyes rushed outward on all sides, the papery specks and cracks on the surface of the picture disappeared, and Eddy suddenly found himself inside the stereoscope.(5) Edward Eager's children find an extraordinary book on the bottom shelf of the fairy-tale section in the library, which turns on some Seven-Day Magic. Barnaby nodded excitedly: "It all adds up. Think of it sitting there all those years, with the magic from all those other books dripping down onto it!...And we came and wanted a magic story; so that's what it turned into."(6) Eleanor Estes invented one of the cleverest devices for tearing a hole in the fabric. The two little girls in her Witch Family (Harcourt) draw pictures with crayons, and it is the pictures themselves which create and control what happens on the other side of the cloth. In some of the most celebrated books of fantasy for children, the knife that rips the cloth is not a place nor a thing but a magic person. Peter Pan is one; Mary Poppins is another. Jane and Michael edged toward Mary Poppins . . . "How did you come?" Jane asked. "It looked just as if the wind blew you here." "It did," said Mary Poppins.(7) It is interesting to see how carefully all the writers who teal holes in the fabric of reality patch it up again at the end of the book. The magic volume goes back to the library; the stereoscope is put back under Eddy's bed; the children tumble out of the wardrobe. Mary Poppins flies away; so does Peter Pan. But the reader is often left with the pleasant suspicion that the stitching on the patch isn't very good and that the hole will fray through again. In a third kind of fantasy, the cloth dividing here from there is invisible and totally permeable. The two worlds live side by side. No device is needed to turn peculiar events on and off or to escape into the unreal world. It is there all the time, hidden from view. Its inhabitants live uneasily just out of sight of ordinary human beings. In T. H. White's Mistress Masham's Repose (Putnam) his young heroine, Maria, stumbles upon a hidden colony of the descendants of Lemuel Gulliver's Lilliputians. She saw: first, a square opening, about eight inches wide, in the lowest step...next, she saw a seven-inch door in the base of each pillar...finally, she saw that there was a walnut shell, or half one, outside the nearest door . . . There was a baby in it.(8) Mary Norton's pocket-sized people, the Borrowers, go to great lengths not to be seen by the human beings from whom they borrow. "Stillness...that's the thing," Pod whispered to Arrietty the first time he saw Miss Menzies crouching down behind her thistle. "They don't expect to see you, and if you're still, they somehow don't. And never look at ‘em direct — always look at ‘em sideways like. Understand?"(9) Of necessity, perhaps, the inhabitants of all of these secret side-by-side worlds seem to be small in scale. The fourth kind of what-if fantasy has its origin in myth, folk tales, and fairy tales. It is the opposite of the first kind. Again the fabric is whole and unbroken, but this time we are on the other side of it. We do not have to find a way through to some fantastic place where anything might happen, because we are there already. We know from the beginning of the story that we are in Once-Upon-a-Time. This realm is no Centerburg nor Cherry-Tree Lane nor domestic establishment under the kitchen or, but it is a kingdom we all know and recognize and feel home in. If we were to place it vaguely in space and time, we would attach it to northern Europe sometime between the fall Rome and the invention of the internal-combustion engine, and populate it exclusively with wizards, witches, jesters, goose-girls, youngest sons, aristocrats of royal blood, absolute monarchs, and a scattering of peasantry. "That may be as may be," said the Swan Maiden. "For listen! I serve the witch with three eyes. She lives on the glass hill that lies beyond the seven high mountains, the seven deep valleys, and the seven wide rivers; are you man enough to go that far?" "Oh, yes," said the prince, "I am man enough for that and more too."(10) The next morning she asked the princess how she had slept. "Slept!" cried the princess. "I didn't sleep a wink!"(11) Perhaps it is presumptuous to say anything against a form which has survived so long and which still has so many distinguished exemplars, but in my opinion it is difficult in the age of television to say anything fresh in this format. Ten thousand TV cartoons have cranked the life out of it, often cleverly. THWUP! The beautiful princess turned into a toad. The fifth kind of fantasy asks the question, "What if beasts could talk?" In this sort of book, loquacious animals from the other side of the dividing membrane punch their way through into the real world and take over. There is no magic; there are no spells. Everything is perfectly normal with the single exception that animals behave like human beings. Kenneth Grahame's Mole and Rat, for example, behave exactly like a pair of polite Edwardian gentlemen living on comfortable incomes of a few hundred pounds a year. And listen to this white mouse, conducting a meeting of the Mouse Prisoner's Aid Society, in Margery Sharp's Miss Bianca (Little). "And now," said Miss Bianca, consulting her notes, "we come to the main item on the Agenda . . . Can everyone hear me at the back?"(12) In Hugh Lofting's stories about Dr. Dolittle, Polynesia the parrot is a kind of Rosetta Stone. Being a parrot, Polynesia could talk in two languages — people's language and animal language. She was able to explain to the Doctor the meanings of the nose-twitching, ear-scratching and tail-wagging signals that make up the language of animals."(13) This, of course, is the reverse of animals talking like human beings, since it is Dr. Dolittle who talks like animals, but the sober domesticity of Hugh Lofting's beasts is altogether human. All of these books, too, have ancient beginnings. But unfortunately, the Hare overslept himself; therefore when he awoke, though he ran his best, he found the Tortoise was already at the goal. He had learned that "Slow and steady wins the race."(14) In the sixth kind of fantasy, there are overlays in time. In some of these stories the present moment dissolves and becomes the past; in others someone from an earlier period in history bursts through the fabric dividing now from then and emerges among us, to be astonished by washing machines and Chevrolets. In A Traveler in Time (Viking) Alison Uttley uses the device of an Elizabethan house as the permanent background for shifting sets of occupants. A child opens doors to find ancestors in ancient rooms, and then returns to the present. But no one merges past and present more seamlessly and masterfully than William Mayne. In some of his settings, the past is embodied in relics and monuments which litter the landscape, it incarnates itself in optical effects of light, it spills out of the cracks in the sky, it moves restively under the soil, it maintains a kind of urgent pressure on the present day. Witness the emergence into the here and now of Nellie Jack John, Mayne's eighteenth-century drummer boy, in Earthfasts (Dutton). The ground stirred. The stirring did not extend beyond the swelling in the turf. But there was movement, a lot of movement. It was as if someone were getting out of bed. And with the movement came clear drumming . . . There was light, increasing light, pure and mild and bleak. David tried to say that it was the last of the day shining on moving water, but the words would not form themselves, because his jaw was trembling . . . It was not light on moving water . . . The light was from a little flame. The little flame came out from the hillside, and balanced in the air, and the wind bent the flame over but did not blow it out . . . There was a shadow before their eyes, against the hill . . . In the dusk the little flame was brighter than they had imagined. It was not standing in the air by itself. It was being held there by a person, and that person was drumming on a side drum, and looking round, and smiling . . . "I wasn't so long," said the drummer. "But I niver found nowt."(15) In a seventh kind of fantasy (ghost stories), the dividing piece of cloth is a shroud, a veil between life and death. The dead pluck at the curtain, draw it aside with their wasted hands, and enter among the living. Behold Sir Edmund Orme. He stood there without speaking—young, pale, handsome, cleanshaven, decorous, with extraordinary light blue eyes and something old-fashioned, like a portrait of years ago, in his head, his manner of wearing his hair . . . He looked again strangely hard at me, harder than anyone in the world had ever looked before; and I remember feeling rather cold and wishing he would say something. No silence had ever seemed to me so soundless.(16) Henry James has tempted me away from the subject of children's books, but, of course, there are masters of the same tradition writing for young people. Leon Garfield is one. The phantom stood in the merciless sunshine: a little boy of seven, dressed in an old-fashioned sailor's suit. Its hair was fair and curling; its face was of an unearthly pallor. The clerk gave a harsh scream and clutched onto the area railings. He glared down in rage and terror at the ghost of his childhood."(17) In this catalogue of an uncataloguable subject there is an eighth and final item, science fiction: a vast body of literature irreducible to a single example. One can only suggest that in such works of the fantastic imagination the curtain hangs between a finite present and a kind of infinite future, a time in which the possibilities of knowledge will be infinitely extended or in which nature itself will be discovered to be infinitely varied.
1. E. Nesbit, The Enchanted
Castle. (back)
From the October 1973 issue of The Horn Book Magazine |
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nalyzing
books of fantasy for children is like explaining a joke after everyone
has laughed. Who cares how Stuart Little (Harper) differs
from Mary Poppins (Harcourt)? If you've read them,
that's all that matters. But, as a writer of fantasy for children,
I want to find out exactly what I've been trying to do so
long by intuition and imitation. So I've been sorting and
categorizing a lot of old and new favorites to see if I can make
some sort of sense out of them. The result is a modest set of conclusions
concerning the three primary questions which each fantasy asks and
answers: What if? Then what? So what?
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