Romanticism and the Psychology of Mythopoetic Fantasy

How do we understand fantasy? Is it merely escapist, as E. M. Forster asserted? Is it utopian, as Jack Zipes insists? Is it religious, as J. R. R. Tolkien posited? Is it compensatory, as Freud thought?¹ William Gray's recent books argue that fantasy is "all of the above." Beginning with the works of German and English Romantic writers such as Novalis, E. T. A. Hoffman, Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and drawing heavily on M. H. Abrams's Natural Supernaturalism (1973), Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth traces the key tropes and mythologies that these fantasy writers use to take truth's measure. The yardstick is the "Grand Narrative" of Western culture—the account of humanity's Fall away from bliss and into alienation, what St. Augustine called "Original Sin," Blake "Experience," and Freud "the Oedipus complex." Using a mixture of historical-biographical and psychoanalytic criticism, Gray contends that Philip Pullman's acclaimed His Dark Materials series—despite Pullman's claims that he is a realistic writer who rejects everything Lewis (in particular) stands for—continues and extends the preoccupations of previous fantasy writers in this grand narrative tradition. Linking these writers is their use both of Milton's Paradise Lost, which set out to "justify the ways of God to Man," and the opposing "high argument" of Romantic writers such as Wordsworth, who "show how the Fall—that is, a prevailing human sense of separation, pain, loss and despair—can be overcome and a reconciliation can be achieved not through any transcendent supernatural agency, but rather through the immanent work of the human spirit" by means of the invention, in Carlyle's words, "of a new Mythus" (2). The book provides an important and welcome survey of the origins and tradition of mythopoetic fantasy in English literature.

The first chapter, "German Roots and Mangel-wurzels," unearths the roots of English fantasy in the literary and philosophical preoccupations of German Romanticism. Drawing on the account of M. H. Abrams in Natural Supernaturalism, Gray outlines the major trends of German Romanticism, especially its transition from utopian depictions of desire (Sehnsucht) for the marvelous, as in Novalis's otherworldly Blue Flower, to a bleaker evocation of the incommensurability of desire with lived reality, embodied in Gérard de Nerval's depressive oxymoron, the Black Sun. In Britain, early proponents of German Romanticism included Thomas Carlyle, who translated Tieck, Fouqué, and Hoffman into English and reviewed Novalis admiringly, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who appropriated the philosophies of Kant and Schlegel to assert the power of the poetic imagination. Both English and German Romantics anticipate postmodern theorists such as Barthes and Derrida in their theorization of the way in which perception determines reality and their awareness of the role that language plays in determining perception. What makes them Romantic rather than postmodern, however, is their account of imaginative production not merely as playful or performative, but as beautiful and terrible and real. Gray demonstrates that "[t]he characteristic theme of German Romantic literature [. . . is . . .] the discrepancy (and complex relationship) between the fantastic world of the (possibly Utopian) imagination, and the 'real' world of the bourgeois 'Philistines' (the Dursleys, if not 'Muggles' as such)" (24)—a theme productively embraced by fantasy writers ever since, as his analysis goes on to show.

Chapter two, "George MacDonald's Marvellous Medicine," surveys that author's fantasy from Phantastes (1858) to Lilith (1895). MacDonald's "medicine" is fairy tales, as shown in his realistic novel Adela Cathcart (1864), which features story therapy as the appropriate treatment for the titular character's soul-sickness. If reality is a matter of perception, powerfully imagined narratives can open the doors of perception to new realities and renewed identities, a frequent motif in MacDonald. Putting MacDonald's frequently excerpted fairy tales in their original context allows Gray to...