Closing the Hermeneutic Circle on George MacDonald: For the Child or the Childlike?

Given the paradoxically proto-modern qualities of George MacDonald's Victorian fantasies for children, it is remarkable that such a collection of contemporary critical essays on this complex and enduring writer has not appeared sooner. But it is never too late, and Roderick McGillis has admirably filled the gap with this varied assortment. Ranging from scholarly source studies to Jungian analysis, from gender and class critique to mythical reassessments, from structural and linguistic examinations to theological appreciations, these fifteen essays (ten of them entirely new) by both noted MacDonald scholars and fresh voices promise rich rewards. Admirers of At the Back of the North Wind and the Princess books, as well as devotees of Phantastes or Lilith, will be informed and stimulated by their range and depth.

Two of the three finest essays in the collection are by McGillis: "The Community of the Centre: Structure and Theme in Phantasies," a new essay, and "Language and Secret Knowledge in At the Back of the North Wind," which appeared originally in the 1981 Durham University Journal. In the former he examines structure as theme and reveals MacDonald's sense of the "double consciousness" that a community of readers must bring to the text—that is, both "human" and "poetic" shared knowledge (52). McGillis successfully defends Phantasies against charges of structurelessness and shows that it has been misread because its form is poetic rather than psychological; that is, the achievement of transcendence comes about through the literal breaking of "circles of selfhood" rather than through the linear progression one expects from pilgrimage narratives (53). The essay is both technically precise and eloquently persuasive.

In "Language and Secret Knowledge" McGillis extends this centrality of the poetic to a thematic and narrative study of Diamond as MacDonald's "poetic genius," "in touch with the noumenal" (155). By revealing MacDonald's paradoxical narrative method, McGillis reiterates in modern critical terms the central tenet of all MacDonald's work: "the certainty of uncertainties" (158). McGillis understands, as many commentators on MacDonald do not, that "each reader must engage in interpretation," must crack the code and break the "hermeneutic circle" for him- or herself (156). This approach is a far cry from the customary insistence that MacDonald is paradoxical but ultimately readable in only one way: as a religious mystic whose theology must be understood in Christian terms.

The third groundbreaking essay in the group, "Reading "The Golden Key': Narrative Strategies of Parable," by Cynthia Marshall, which first appeared in the Spring 1989 ChLAQ, McGillis aptly calls "splendid" (3). Reading "The Golden Key" in terms of the parable of the hired laborers in the gospel of Matthew (20:1-16), Marshall meticulously illustrates the parabolic method by which MacDonald celebrates the active experience of reading, "rather than" (as McGillis puts it) "reaching irritably after fact and meaning" (3-4). As she rightly asserts, "MacDonald himself was tantalizingly resistant to the notion of stable meaning" (104). This reading corresponds to my own: MacDonald continues to appeal to both postmodern critics and resistant children precisely because his rich ambiguities frustrate attempts at closed readings.

Two other essays should also be singled out for their fresh perspectives. The first, A. Waller Hastings's "Social Conscience and Class Relations in MacDonald's 'Cross Purposes,'" which uses some of Jack Zipes's formulations, is notable for its positioning of this problematic tale within an emergent tradition of nineteenth-century literary fairy tales concerned with class. Comparing MacDonald to Hans Christian Andersen, for example, Hastings demonstrates that MacDonald had highly developed Christian Socialist reformist ideas, even though he did not advocate social activism. Combining " social critique with visionary narrative" (78), MacDonald reveals a consciousness of class and gender issues, according to Hastings—even when he cannot or will not resolve them. (I might add that anyone who could create a woman who literally "runs with the leopards" in Lilith had views of gender that are bound to elude a conventional Victorian interpretation.) Finally, however, Hastings...