P ARFEVAL

Writing in 1981 Rosemary Jackson claimed that, “the current popularity of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings indicates the strength of a romance tradition supporting a ruling ideology” (155). She cites Tolkien’s nostalgic vision of a pre-industrial society and his “naïve equation” (155) of morality and aesthetics, so that industry is coterminous with evil, and the Elves’ eminence is conveyed through their elevated speech and beautiful handcrafted garments, weapons and unique gifts. “For Tolkien, the only way is backwards: the chauvinistic, totalitarian effects of his vision are conveniently removed from present material conditions, by providing ‘escape’ from them” (156). Although Jackson’s analysis of fantasy literature draws together structuralism,

psychoanalysis and ideological critique, her emphasis lies on the psychological impact on the reader through the narrative structure of the novel. She offers the disclaimer:

A more extensive treatment would relate texts more specifically to the conditions of their production, to the particular constraints against which the fantasy protests and from which it is generated, for fantasy characteristically attempts to compensate for a lack resulting from cultural constraints: it is a literature of desire, which seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss. (3)

Jackson develops Tzetvan Todorov’s structuralist schema that divides fantasy into the marvellous, fantastic and uncanny. Without recourse to psychoanalytic theory, Jackson argues, Todorov’s insights fail to extend from historical context (the fantastic emerges in an atmosphere dominated by realism) to individual and unconscious experience: “fantasy in literature deals so blatantly and repeatedly with unconscious material that it seems rather absurd to try to understand its significance without some reference to psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic readings of texts” (6). Jackson’s revision attempts to shift Todorov’s study of the fantastic from “being one limited to the poetics of the fantastic into one aware of the politics of its forms” (6, italics in original).

Jackson studies the narrative structure and the way in which this

framework either “tells of” or “expels” desire. Materialist critic Darko Suvin dismisses desire as a “buzzword” of fantasy criticism (“Considering” 247), but Jackson argues convincingly that fantasy articulates the “absences” and “losses” that stem from the capitalist and industrial society out of which the genre

emerges as a literary form. Fantasy therefore manifests the “unsaid and unseen” of culture: that which is “impossible” according to the contemporary realist worldview. Jackson suggests that, “since this excursion into disorder can only begin from a base within the dominant cultural order, literary fantasy is a telling index of the limits of that order. Its introduction of the ‘unreal’ is set

against the category of the ‘real’ – a category which the fantastic interrogates by its difference” (4).

But not all fantasy texts are subversive; some forms of fantasy expel the same desire that initiated the text. Jackson establishes her schema of fantasy literature from this perspective, preferring to offer the “marvellous”, “mimetic” and “fantastic” as modes not genres.19 _{The marvellous includes heroic fantasy,} fairy tales and narratives of romance, magic and supernaturalism. Jackson identifies this mode as authoritative and definitive, retrospectively describing events from an objective point of view. The narrator’s “absolute confidence and certainty towards events” (33) situates the reader as a passive audience, merely registering the formulaic opening (“Once upon a time”) and ending (“and they lived happily ever after”). The reader is not invited to reflect upon the

implications of this closed structure, which is to acknowledge the socially threatening desires that the text articulates; return the text returns the reader to the ruling ideology by closing off what Suvin would describe as “cognitive activity” – the inclination to question and critique social norms.20

19 _{As a mode, the emphasis lies in the affect, the way the text “operates” on the reader, rather} than on a pre-ordained set of attributes or elements a text must include to be considered part of a genre (R. Jackson 32).

20 _{Where R. Jackson disagrees with Tolkien in this debate is whether the heroic fantasy, or} marvellous text or fairy tale as per their lexicon respectively, generates political apathy or is capable of sparking a cultural revolution, and further, whether or not this political affect is the ultimate purpose of fantasy literature.

The next mode, the mimetic, describes those texts that endeavour to reproduce the real world in narrative form. This mode deflects critique of the narrative’s psychological impact on the reader through its appeal to reality and verity by way of the “knowing third person voice” (R. Jackson 34) as well as ordering the text into a recognisable and meaningful structure. The nineteenth- century realist novel exemplifies the mimetic mode. However, it is the

“fantastic” mode that evokes dissent and instigates change in the real world. In contrast to the comfort offered by the heroic fantasy, the fantastic text disturbs the reader through its “dislocated narrative form” (23), embedding the reader’s existential anxiety into the structure and refusing to dispel such angst with cosy images of ideal characters and neat, pre-ordained happy conclusions. Jackson claims:

Where more subversive texts activate a dialogue with this death drive, directing their energy towards a dissolution of repressive structures, those more conservative fantasies [e.g. heroic fantasies] simply go along with a desire to cease “to be,” a longing to transcend or escape the human. They avoid the difficulties of confrontation, that tension between the imaginary and the symbolic which is the crucial, problematic area dramatized in more radical

The instability of the narrative is central to the potentially subversive effect of the fantastic mode. Impossibility impinges upon the otherwise

mimetic text so that the fantastic includes elements of both the marvellous and mimetic. The intrusion of the unreal produces uncertainty for the characters as much as the reader: “the narrator is no clearer than the protagonist about what is going on, nor about interpretation; the status of what is being seen and recorded as ‘real’ is constantly in question” (34). Franz Kafka’s “The

Metamorphosis” (1937) is emblematic of Jackson’s fantastic, with the character Gregor as baffled as the reader by his inexplicable transformation into a beetle.

While Clute and Grant agree with Rosemary Jackson that Kafka is of “seminal significance” (528) to fantasy, they are dismissive of her theoretical contribution. In their brief entry on Jackson in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy they dismiss her theory of desire as not applicable to modern fantasy:

This theory is most clearly and generally applicable to the genre’s formative years (approximately 1780-1850), when the fantasy premise could be understood as an act of imagination that avowedly undermined the world. But later, when secondary worlds of varying textures began to be created, the normative weight of fantasyland gave to texts an air more of refusal than of

subversion. Modern fantasy’s relationship to the inhibiting world is so lubricated as now to be more or less unperceived, and almost

always painless. (511)

Jackson’s theory fails to exhibit “any large current relevance” Clute and Grant argue because most fantasy narratives are embedded in a thoroughly imagined secondary world with no direct reference to the real world (511). Even without the explicit contrast between the fantasy world and the reader’s social context (such as Stephen Donaldson and J.K Rowling portray in their work), it is difficult to imagine a reader not even subconsciously registering the differences between the two and longing for aspects of the alternative world. It seems to me that Jackson’s reference to desire is immediately applicable to understanding the enjoyment or disquiet occasioned by a fantasy text.21

Clute and Grant’s dismissal of Jackson’s theory of desire applicable to fantasy literature is representative of a larger refusal to engage with

psychoanalytic critique in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. Although the reference book reports enthusiastically on Jungian psychology, there are no entries on

21 _{See Freud’s “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” (1908). He theorises that fantasies are a} response to the ego’s frustration at having to act in accordance with the reality principle. The ego’s requirement to satisfy social conventions produces conflict with the pleasure principle, which generates psychological pull toward fulfilment of the id’s demands. Ultimately, then, the “phantasy represents a compromise between the two: it creates an internal world which

Freud, Bettelheim or psychoanalysis. This ideological blindspot seems

inexplicable, given psychoanalysis’ productive relationship with fantasy. For example, like Jungian explanations, psychoanalytic interpretation of heroic fantasy often reads the genre as a guide to subject development, with the hero’s advancement reflecting the reader’s own potential. 22 _{Bruno Bettelheim’s The} Uses of Enchantment (1976) has been greatly influential in this regard, although focusing on heroic fantasy’s progenitor, the fairy tale. After World War II the fairy tale regained widespread social appreciation given psychoanalytic

protestations of the genre as both restorative and educational, with Bettelheim’s study instrumental in this cultural shift (Warner 413). He asserts that the value of fairy tales lies in their work on the psyche: “The unrealistic nature of these tales (which narrow-minded rationalists object to) is an important device because it makes obvious that the fairy tales’ concern is not useful information about the external world, but the inner processes taking place in an individual” (Bettelheim 25).

Although Bettelheim’s analyses have lost currency (his methodology unsophisticated in comparison with the post-Freudian theories of Jacques Lacan or Slavoj Žižek) psychoanalytic interpretations of heroic fantasy also argues that the genre’s appeal lies in its representation of unconscious desires, or

22 _{For example Randel Helms presents Frodo as an “anti-Faustian” hero by reference to} psychoanalytic theory (56-75) and Sharon Black draws directly on Freud and Bettelheim to explain her daughter’s cross-gender identification with the character Harry Potter (241).

fantasies.23 _{Kelly Noel-Smith undertakes such an analysis, positing that “the} extraordinary success of the Harry Potter books is due, in part, to the universal phantasies they contain, in particular, those deriving from the Oedipal period.” Freud’s Oedipal complex refers to the psychical process by which infants

become gendered subjects. Boys come to identify with their fathers through the realisation of sexual difference with the mother and a resulting fear of

castration, while girls identify with their mothers once they recognise their “castrated” state and satisfy themselves with the prospect of bearing children instead of possessing a penis.

Freud’s significant “discovery” is that subjectivity is not innate, but a process to be negotiated and achieved. Subjectivity is fraught with

complications; if the Oedipal complex is not successfully navigated then the individual will not be properly socialised, will not achieve a “normal”

heterosexual subjectivity, and therefore will be unable to interact appropriately

23 _{For example, Bettelheim’s reading of “Cinderella” utilises Freud’s understanding of the} Oedipal Complex. Freud proposed that both genders negotiate the phase through attitudes toward the penis; girls as penis envy and boys through fear of castration. “Cinderella” therefore demonstrates to the unconscious that men and women can find psychological confirmation in an intimate relationship together. The ritual of exchanging rings during the wedding ceremony symbolises the acceptance of the other’s penis or vagina as their own, thereby satisfying their unconscious desire for the other: “By having the ring put onto her finger, the bride acknowledges that from now on, her husband to some degree will have possession of her vagina and she of his penis” (271). Neither Lacan nor Žižek have specifically critiqued heroic fantasy.

with others. The heroic fantasy provides a guide for this difficult and ongoing process, with the hero reflecting the reader’s ego as Freud observes of fiction in his 1908 article “Creative Writers”:

One feature above all cannot fail to strike us about the creations of these story-writers: each of them has a hero who is the centre of interest, for whom the writer tries to win our sympathy by every possible means and whom he seems to place under the protection of special Providence. . . . The feeling of security with which I follow the hero through his perilous adventures is the same as the feeling with which a hero in real life throws himself into the water to save a drowning man or exposes himself to the enemy’s fire in order to storm a battery. It is a true heroic feeling, which one of our best writers has expressed in an inimitable phrase: ‘nothing can happen to me!’ It seems to me, however, that through this revealing characteristic of invulnerability, we can immediately recognise His Majesty, the Ego, the hero alike of every daydream

and of every story. (149-150)

“Did Harry, like so many heroes before him, have to be yet another poignant orphan?” Anthony Holden opines in The Observer, and it would appear from a

Freudian psychoanalytic perspective that the answer is yes, he does. 24 _{As an} orphan the hero satisfies the reader’s unconscious Oedipal wishes, where the father is killed so that the child can possess the mother exclusively. Quoting Freud, Noel-Smith advances that these fantasies are an expression of repressed childhood wishes: “falling in love with one parent and hating the other forms part of the permanent stock of psychic impulses which arise in early

childhood”. It is through Harry then that readers reaffirm their own Oedipal process, “gaining psychical release from unconscious desires by reading about his exploits. But Harry’s dead parents do not represent his wish fulfilment, but rather fulfilment of the reader’s unconscious fantasies” (Noel-Smith, italics in original). Harry’s dead parents are idealised and the replacement parents Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon are terrible, suggesting that the good and bad parts of parents have been split off into different objects. Voldemort therefore becomes the repository of all evil aspects that could possibly be attributed to Harry’s parents, and similarly Harry’s own propensity for wickedness is

24 _{From a slightly different formulation, the adult hero of Dale Elvy’s The Spirit Shinto Trilogy,} Tane, is also bereft of immediate family. I asked Elvy if it would have been possible to write Tane as a hero while still a husband and father. Elvy believed that he could have, but wished to elicit sympathy for his hero and achieved this by taking away from him his most important relationships (Email interview). By contrast, I argue through this thesis that in heroic fantasy the hero needs to be cast adrift of close familial relations in order to fulfil his “mentoring role” for the reader; that his loneliness and alienation from the social group are alleviated when he conducts himself according to the moral code and, having saved the collective, is rewarded with reconnection through marriage.

divested into the character of Voldemort’s younger self, Tom Riddle. Only as the child matures is he able to integrate these split objects and accept a less idealistic view of his parents and of himself, which is increasingly evident in the Harry Potter stories. For example, Harry learns of his father’s cruel “jokes” on Severus Snape and, more importantly, becomes aware of the blurred boundary between his own (good) identity and Voldemort’s (bad) identity with his visions in the fifth novel.

Psychoanalysis provides a seductive account of how subjectivity is achieved, but reinscribes masculinity as the normative gender. Although, as Juliet Mitchell points out, psychoanalysis is a description of patriarchy, not a prescription for its imposition (xv), Freud used his theories to “cure” women who were troubled by the social conventions that described their gender as secondary, fragile and irrational. Freudian psychoanalysis was not employed to challenge or revolt against the biases of patriarchy, but to a significant extent it encouraged patients towards psychical acceptance of the system. By contrast, ideological critique specialises in monitoring and contesting the economic, social, cultural and political conditions that shape our lives, and is the topic of the next section.