The Eladogran Cosmogony

My fiction is based on a set of documents that came to me from a source which must remain secret. However, because this is my blog, where I may do as I like, I will here offer one document for the reader's perusal. If inclined to doubt its authenticity (or my sanity), please regard it merely as an exercise in mythopoeic verisimilitude and an attempt to gather my extensive notes into one place, somewhere among Plato's Timaeus, Tolkien's Ainulindalë, Blake's Book of Urizen, and The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick.

The text comes from the counter-earth at the cosmic antipodes, though whether from the future, the past, or some other cycle I cannot say. It appears to be of Recusant authorship. The editor's introduction, however, is plainly the product of Enochite erudition, which tends to miss the point about most things.

The edition relies on secondary sources, namely, transcriptions of the original codex into the cylinders used by the Enochite archives. Cylinders are decoded by mechanical readers, and are known to be more durable than other forms of record-keeping, but even slight damage to a cylinder can make entire passages completely inaccessible, a drawback not shared by paper or baked clay.

Though I didn't scruple to make use of modern English punctuation and vocabulary in my translation, I did my best to retain the flavor of the original. One word posed a special difficulty, however. The nephelic tongue uses different terms for the human species as a whole and for the male of that species, while the English word "man" can refer to either. "Human being" is an unforgivable solecism, and "human" is, properly speaking, an adjective, not a noun. In the end I went with traditional English usage, though this does some injustice to the text.

The manuscript in my possession (which, strangely enough, is on paper, not a cylinder) is accompanied by a number of curious pictures. Unfortunately, the gamma radiation to which they were exposed during their long sojourn in the deeps of space has caused them to fade badly. I fear that the harsh light of a document scanner would only cause further damage. Even the darkened, climate-controlled room where I keep the manuscript has not proved entirely adequate. I may attempt to reproduce the pictures by hand at some future date. If I do so, I shall certainly append them to this post.

I caution the reader not to expect too strict an adherence to the letter of this document in my writing. The account reflects philosophical, mythological, historical, and topological traditions, whereas my stories are works of literature.

And now, on to...

Fantasy: Matter and Form

In an earlier post, I discussed C. S. Lewis’ “mythopoeic dualism,” his theory that myth-making is a distinct art whose product is a sequence of ideas, existing immaterially, but accidently embodied in written or spoken form.

Colin Manlove, in his Modern Fantasy: Five Studies, objects to this dualism, as I do. But his counterargument is hardly sufficient. He merely takes a passage from MacDonald, criticizes it line by line, and concludes (without further argument) that its defects in style do vitiate the whole. His criticisms are unassailable but miss the point. He and Lewis are speaking about different forms—Lewis would probably have conceded that the writing detracted from the novel, but what about the myth?—and anyway the passage Manlove cites is surely too short to invalidate Lewis’s view, which concerns global aspects. Perhaps Manlove denies the existence of a mythopoeic art as distinct from writing or telling, but if that is the case he should say so, and justify his position. Even better, he should explain why MacDonald’s style fails him insofar as he is writing a fantasy novel. But doing so would involve him in stating the role of style in fantasy (as opposed to other forms of writing), whereas he approaches his subjects merely as literary novels about fantastic things.

This brings us to a more profound question: what is fantasy? Is it its own distinct branch of literature, subject to its own rules? What are the material elements? What cements these elements into a work of fantasy qua fantasy? Manlove would seem to say that the art-form of the fantasy novel is the same as that of the ordinary novel—the difference is in the material. But, like Lewis, I don’t think people read fantasy novels for the same reason they read "literary" novels. The fantastic elements serve a necessary albeit material role: they act as a trigger mechanism for a way of viewing the whole, shifting the reader into a certain mode of enjoyment. This role, as we have seen, is closely tied to the style of the telling.

I would say that “myth” is one of several material elements, among which is literary style. The “myth” element of a work of modern fantasy can certainly be enjoyed for its own sake (just as any technical virtuosity can), but bad or inappropriate writing vitiates the work as a whole. Both are necessary ingredients, but both are subordinate to the form, the final shape that determines the work as a work of fantasy. And this form is not the same as for the ordinary work of literature.

In my opinion, the writer who has come closest to elucidating the matter is Ursula K. Le Guin. In her essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,” she makes the point that, without style, there simply is no writing, which is just as valid in fantasy as in other types of writing. Good, honest Aristotelianism. She goes even further, offering some hints as to what constitutes the fitting approach to style in fantasy as such. But the essay, while suggestive, suffers from nebulosity, and fails to come to a decisive point. The question is, what are the special demands placed upon style by the art-form of fantasy? To fully answer it, we need to have an idea of what fantasy is.

In a future post I’ll hopefully be able to explain in more detail why Le Guin’s essay, while pointing in the right direction, comes up short, and how our unanswered question might be answered.

Mythopoeic Dualism

Does style play a special role in fantasy?

C. S. Lewis speaks in several places of a mythopoeic art, holding it as distinct from the manner of telling. This is an art is whose objects exist in the ideal, independent of any embodiment in tangible form. In his introduction to an anthology of George MacDonald’s works, he writes:

If you try to take the theme of Keats’ Nightingale apart from the very words in which he has embodied it, you find that you are talking about almost nothing. Form and content can there be separated only by a false abstraction. But in a myth—in a story where the mere pattern of events is all that matters—this is not so. Any means of communication whatever which succeeds in lodging those events in our imagination has, as we say, “done the trick.” After that you can throw the means of communication away.

Lewis did not think style unimportant, of course. He was sensitive to the defects in MacDonald’s style; he praises Eddison’s writing while deploring Lindsay’s as “wretched”; his own novels are quite polished. But he holds that what is important in each case is independent of the verbal presentation. The telling is just the wrapper. The myth is the soul, the true reality; the telling is the body, necessary for the time being, perhaps, but to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible.

Being more of an Aristotelian than a Platonist, I am not quite comfortable with this “mythopoeic dualism.” Lewis would make the mythopoeic art a liberal art, like composition: a story exists even if no one is telling it, just as a piece of music exists even if no one is playing it. But the product of this mythopoeic art supposedly consists of a sequence of ideas with no guidelines as to how to “play” them, whereas composition leaves no such freedom. Is that what myth-making is really like?

For one thing, whoever has told a story to children knows very well that they are at least as sensitive to style as their elders, quick to point out the slightest deviation in wording. Analogously, in primitive societies, the manner of telling is fixed, and the story-teller assumes something of a priestly office. The same is true of the Greeks and other peoples of antiquity. They did not retell Homer: they recited him, and the poems themselves are highly formulaic. But even modern retellings of ancient myths follow certain traditional channels. Edith Hamilton’s Mythology is probably the best compendium of Greek myths for children—it’s what I grew up reading, at any rate—and this owes to the fact that she pays deference to the texts. It lends her book a certain heterogeneity. Or again, there are four different Gospels rather than one “harmony”; such harmonies have been written, but they never supersede the texts.

No, I begin to wonder if certain aspects of style are not intrinsic to myth as such. Lewis avers that he has always loved the tale of the Golden Fleece while never being particularly fond of any single telling; nevertheless, I think there must be something about the manner of telling, the style, that tints the story in all its different tellings. Style and story are mixed; they represent, not distinct categories, but a multiplicity of interwoven elements. Even the retelling of a modern “mythopoeic” novel (e.g., The Trial, Lewis’ example) must retain something of the author’s style.

If this is so, then myth is more akin to poetry than Lewis concedes. His enjoyment of MacDonald’s stories as “myths” must owe something to their style, and not merely exist in spite of it. What would we have if we stripped Phantastes of all stylistic elements? Not much more than we would have of Keats’ Nightingale, I think. Faërie would not survive the operation. But even Lewis was not consistent in his dualism, for he excludes The Night Land from his canon of story precisely because of its atrocious and foolish style. And how could we separate the story of The Worm Ouroboros—which Lewis praised so highly—from its ringing Jacobean idiom? Does not the manner of telling cast an enchanted mantle over the entire proceedings?