As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality by Michael Saler (review)

In As If, the intellectual historian Michael Saler explores the rise of complete fantasy worlds from the late Victorian period to the mid-twentieth century. He ambitiously aims to uncover the genealogy of today’s internet-mediated, largely avatar-based virtual worlds by thickly describing three writers whose works became the basis for what he describes as “empirically detailed” fantasy world-making: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth (25). Each, Saler argues, becomes a “public sphere of the imagination” (98). By this he means not that they are simply available for aesthetic responses, but that the entire world the writer presents has been taken on and extended, sometimes massively extended, as a kind of common empirical project by devoted fans. Readers engage not with a character but with a world—and are urged on to explore, add on to, even modify that world in further publications or by other kinds of active and interactive immersion.

Saler argues that Doyle, Lovecraft, and Tolkien presented—or perhaps simply made possible for the reader’s uptake—a total world that works by activating a sense of “animistic reason” and “disenchanted enchantment” (16, 12). Further world-making is the essence of disenchanted enchantment: knowing that this is a made-up world, fans nonetheless devote themselves zealously to exploring its possibilities, mapping its spaces and its genealogies, and ramifying its narrative (and ludic) possibilities.

The execution of Saler’s chapters on Doyle’s, Lovecraft’s, and Tolkien’s oeuvres is very strong. Each writer is given a thorough going-over, their rationales of composition and philosophies exhaustively researched (Doyle’s penchant for fairies is reconciled with his detective writing, for example, while Lovecraft’s and Tolkien’s racial and other biases are meticulously detailed). Saler does an excellent job describing Lovecraft as what might be called a visionary or outsider artist, someone who moved easily between everyday life in early twentieth-century Rhode Island and a supervening fantasy realm. I look forward to visiting his house on Angell Street in Providence when I feel ready to enter the fantastic realm he overlaid onto the unprepossessing, decidedly disenchanted feel of that New England industrial town.

The scope of Saler’s project, too, has some great strengths. He argues lucidly that the late nineteenth century marked a turning point, when large numbers of avid ironic fantasists began to turn a writer’s work into an empirically detailed site of disenchanted enchantment. (Saler could probably do a lot more with the Wagnerian Ring Cycle, a Gesamtkunstwerk that has spawned serious opera-phile passion as well as a theme park in Bayreuth.) It is unclear, however, that Saler’s scope of three case studies is truly distinct. His argument looking forward is for causation: these three are the first forebears of the explosion of immersive fantasy that surrounds us. This is why the book is billed as a “literary prehistory.” Unfortunately the opening claim that “we are all geeks” promises more on contemporary virtual worlds than Saler actually delivers (3). There is effectively no analysis of either Second Life, or modern board-game worlds (about which Matthew G. Kirschenbaum and others have written so vividly) nor even about those Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) that are now a multi-billion dollar industry. Saler’s claims about why these new kinds of empirically detailed fantasy worlds arose in the late Victorian period, flourished in the mid-twentieth century, and exploded in the last two (internetted) decades, would benefit from more consideration of the cultural and technological changes that made enthusiastic collaborative audience buy-in more feasible.

Saler’s argument is clearly laid out and readily accessible: he finds a wide range of sources and delivers them cogently to the reader. His crucial claim is that the...