The Roots—and Branches—of Fantasy
The thing to remember about fantasy, it seems to me, is that it’s deeply rooted in reality. It didn’t start out in story form. It’s older than that. The fantasies came first; then the stories came along to embody them. When you’re writing a fantasy story, you’d better understand that and keep it at the front of your mind, or the story won’t work. For fantasy is primarily a symbolic language for dealing with three very real and fundamental human attributes: We fear, we hope, and, because life can be very dull sometimes, we need to be diverted. Of course, these three categories have a way of blurring into each other at the edges. Superstition, for instance, lies between fear and hope, and overlaps both. But in general, you can cover most of the territory by sticking to the big three.
Fear fantasies can be defined as what we don’t want to believe. Hope fantasies are what we do want to believe. And diversion fantasies are what we half believe because they make life more interesting.
Fear first. Not surprisingly, it divides itself into its own categories. There is, for instance, the fear that comes from misinterpreting the facts. Let’s say you are waked in the middle of the night by a thumping noise. Immediately your imagination supplies possible explanations. The furnace is getting ready to blow up. Someone has broken into the house and is looking for your grandmother’s silver. Someone has broken into the house and is looking for you. Someone is on the roof, and it isn’t Santa Claus because it isn’t December twenty-fourth. Why would someone be on the roof? There is no healthy answer, so the only answers your imagination can come up with are all unhealthy. In my most recent encounter with night thumps, investigation the following day revealed that our neighbor in the other half of our converted carriage house was banging on his ceiling with a broom handle in an effort to dislodge a bunch of pigeons who were holding a convention on the roof over his bedroom. The truth is very often a letdown.
Other kinds of fantasies arising from misinterpretation of the facts might include discovering a bump on your foot which leads you to conclude that you have somehow contracted jungle rot and have only hours to live. Subsequently you find out that the bump is a bunion. Jungle rot would have been far more romantic.
In the picture-book story Bedtime for Frances, Frances sees an ominous shape in the corner of her room at night. She thinks it is a monster, but it turns out to be her bathrobe draped over a chair. A relief, and yet—somehow also a disappointment. And then, of course, there’s the story of Chicken Little, she on whom the sky fell.
These are modern misinterpretations, but because we have all experienced them, it ought to be easy to understand our caveman ancestors’ fear of thunder, for instance, and the colorful explanations their own imaginations provided.
A second type of fear fantasy is caused by fear of the unknown. First and foremost here is fear of death. What fun we’ve had down the centuries personifying death in stories! It’s usually a male figure: the Grim Reaper with his scythe, or a hooded wraith with skeletal limbs like Scrooge’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. It is closely tied to Satan on the one hand, like Melville’s white whale, and to natural but chilling human remains on the other, like the skull and crossbones on a pirate flag or a bottle of poison. Sometimes, certainly, it is represented as some kind of benevolent angelic force, as in the death of Beth March in Little Women, or that of little Paul Dombey in Dickens’s Dombey and Son. But these are hope fantasies, not fear fantasies, though Dickens can turn it all around in the same novel and bring it crashing down on his villain in the form of an onrushing train, where it is very much a fear fantasy.
Other fears of the unknown might be the lifelong recurring question as to whether or not there is something unnamed and indescribable under the bed. Or down in a corner of the cellar. Something that moves fast and has unfathomable purposes, none of them good. We have all raced up many a flight of cellar stairs in our day. Or night. And we have kept our hands on top of the bed.
A subtype of this fear of the unknown is fear of strangers. The unidentified voice on the telephone. The ringing of the doorbell when we’re in the house alone. The shadowy figure on the sidewalk after dark. I just used, above, the word unnamed, and that’s an important element if you want a character or a substance or an object to suggest evil. A student of mine once wrote a story in which two girls were investigating a pair of witches. At first she had the witches dropping the customary wing of bat and eye of newt into a cauldron, but between us we decided it would be far more effective if they dropped in a heavy, unnamed something wrapped in newspaper. In my story Tuck Everlasting, the man in the yellow suit had a name in an early draft. Later I took it out. Named, he was somehow accessible, and therefore diminished. Unnamed, he was a stranger and suggestive, therefore, of fear and evil.
Beyond death and the unknown, there is also the fear of losing control of normalcy, as the children do in Chris Van Allsburg’s Jumanji. This can mean losing what we like to imagine is the control we have over our natural environment, control which is erased in earthquakes, floods, plagues, and hurricanes. Or it can mean losing control of ourselves—our bodies or our minds. Robert Cormier is a master at stories where things go haywire and people lose control. Edgar Allan Poe was no slouch at it, either. And the old TV series The Twilight Zone embodied it perfectly.
Whatever type of fear it is, in whatever type of story, the chills the storyteller brings to the story are enriched by what our own fantasies, with their ancient roots, provide as we listen or read. And yet, by means of our fantasies, we not only flesh out and personalize the fear, but also, most of the time, we provide the means for coping with it. So fantasy stories based on fears are in the end therapeutic. They allow us to name the unnameable and face the unfaceable. They allow us to become the hero.
A brief parenthesis here about superstition. Superstitions define punishments for various crimes, but they also provide methods for prevention. If you don’t walk under the ladder, if you don’t break the mirror, you’ll be all right. However, there are other superstitions, having to do with random occurrences, that have no prevention spelled out. One I came across recently is that it’s a sure sign you’re going to be in trouble if your cow moos three times in your face. Presumably, however, if you’re aware of this downside to mooing, you can simply arrange not to stand face-to-face with your cow.
Hope fantasies are just as universal as those dealing with fear. A lot of our favorite fairy tales are hope fantasies, and most of the time they have to do with ego satisfactions of one kind or another. But we are full enough of these without having to resort to reading the Brothers Grimm to find them. They are with us every day.
Our view of our personal appearance makes a good example. Everyone who sees us knows what we look like. But we don’t. Not really. We are full of fantasies about ourselves. What else can explain the terrible shock of catching a glimpse of ourselves unexpectedly in a mirror? “Who,” we wonder, “is that tacky-looking woman?” And then we realize it’s us we’re looking at, and the heart drops into the shoes. But ego is a wonderfully elastic thing. A few minutes later it has bounded back, and we’re ready for the next shock.
The wish to feel better about ourselves seems to be responsible for most of the fantasies we have about ourselves. My mother believed that if a certain courthouse in Maryland hadn’t burned down, she’d have been able to prove she was a descendant of Martha Washington. My father believed to the end of his days that his ship would come in, a belief that made me wonder, when I was very small, how that ship was going to make its way down our street in southern Ohio.
The belief that we are, or soon will be, beautiful, aristocratic, rich—surely these are three of the most common themes in all hope fantasies, perhaps in all fiction. They are the three usual routes to love and power. They imply nobility, and nobility implies virtue, which in turn implies heavenly reward. Cinderella is able to marry into money and an aristocratic heritage because she is beautiful, which includes having small feet. The feet alone would let most of us out. But we are somehow able to go right on identifying with her anyway.
Romance novels capitalize on these hope fantasies, and therefore prosper. So does the world of advertising. But we believe because we want to believe, not because of Madison Avenue coercion. It’s pleasant to believe that if we use Estée Lauder’s vanishing cream, we will look like Elizabeth Taylor. Or if we use Charles Atlas’s muscle-building machines, no one will ever kick sand in our faces again.
Some hope fantasies, sponsored by a great variety of institutions, offer easy answers to difficult problems. For instance, if we read the New York Times every day, the act will have a positive effect on the arms race. If we quit smoking, we will live forever. If we can get our children to stop watching TV, they’ll be accepted at Harvard. And if our children get into Harvard, they will be forever after happy and successful. And rich.
Ah, money! How many of our hope fantasies revolve around money. My mother, otherwise a very intelligent and perceptive person, had this idea that all rich people are good—a notion somehow connected with the belief that money is a reward for noble behavior, as in the novels of Horatio Alger. And, incidentally, as in many children’s stories, especially fairy tales. The hero or heroine begins poor and lowly, like Ali Baba, and because of virtuous, clever behavior, he or she ends up with a large bank account.
But sometimes it isn’t a virtuous or clever act that turns things around. Sometimes the turning is due simply to the intervention of good luck in the shape of a fairy godmother. The fairy godmother takes many forms in our fantasies of hope. She can be a distant relative we didn’t even know we had, who will die and leave us ten thousand shares of IBM stock. She can be a plastic surgeon who will turn back the clock thirty years with nothing but a needle and thread. She can be as formless as the state lottery or as specific as the only eight-legged fairy godmother in all of literature, E. B. White’s Charlotte.
There are psychiatrists who say that the kind of wishful thinking represented in fantasies of hope is very bad for us, that it blocks out reality and keeps us from facing the truth. The Bible says flat out that the truth shall make you free. But I don’t always go along with that, and neither did T. S. Eliot, for he said in Murder in the Cathedral that “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.” And it seems a peculiarly contradictory thing for the Bible to say in one place that truth is liberating when in another place it puts hope on a level with faith and charity as something devoutly to be pursued. For hope and truth don’t always go together. Many truths do not set us free. They can often pave the way to resignation and despair. But hope can often keep us going. The Little Engine That Could is in many ways a monotonous and irritating story, but it demonstrates the point admirably.
There is one other category to touch on, and that is fantasies of diversion. These don’t try to demonstrate anything much; they merely entertain us. And we are very, very fond of them. Students of television advertising—as who of us is not?—will know what I mean. There have been a lot of memorable little fantasy plays acted out in the minutes devoted to ads. Who can forget the naval officer in that rowboat in the toilet tank? Or the talking margarine? Or the enchanting golden retriever puppy with his pacifier on a blue ribbon around his neck? There is charm even in the Fruit of the Loom guys and the Keebler elves. These fantasies were not made for children. They were made for us. They are trivialities, to be sure. Our lives are not improved by them in any measurable way. But they have tremendous appeal. Their silliness makes us laugh, and we need laughter. And, like fantasies of fear and hope, they are rooted in reality, if only in the reality of the frequent silliness of our own thoughts.
I have shared my life continuously with dogs. One dog after another, and sometimes two or three at a time. I have cleaned up after them; sat up with them through thunderstorms; vacuumed up their hairs; pursued their fleas with collars, powders, sprays, and exterminators; spent time and money on endless veterinarians for shots, X-rays, pills, and bandages. I have even driven our current dog, Rosie, long miles to visit two separate veterinary gastroenterologists on the advice of two separate regular vets who couldn’t get to the bottom, so to speak, of her terrible intestinal problems.
These four-legged creatures have been indisputably dogs. And yet I will confess that when I think about them, they don’t quite have the faces of dogs, somehow. Their faces, in my mental pictures of them, are rather blurred and indistinct, but decidedly more human than canine. I suspect that I am not alone in this. In fact, I know I am not alone. So do the dog-food people. So of course we are entranced by dogs who talk in television commercials, or by rabbits who talk in books as small and simple as Beatrix Potter’s or as long and complex as Watership Down. Giving human speech to nonhuman life is one of the most endearing things we do in our fantasies of diversion, though I should point out that we do it in our fear and hope fantasies, too. Perhaps we do it because we are lonely. I don’t know. I do know that we sometimes do it to point out things that would seem too harsh or preachy if our characters were human beings. But most of the time we do it simply because it gives us pleasure.
There is another kind of fantasy of diversion that has been around longer than the pyramids, and this kind involves creatures we wish were there but aren’t. Generation after generation, we pass along the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, more than willing to risk the indignation of our children when they find out it’s all a tissue of lies. But then they grow up and join us in our wistful longing for proof that there really is a Loch Ness monster, an Abominable Snowman, a Bigfoot. Expensive expeditions go out again and again to look for these creatures and they never find anything. But no expedition is ever the once-and-for-all final expedition. Like psychosomatics going from doctor to doctor in search of confirmation that they really are sick, we are never satisfied with the diagnosis that there is nothing there. And why should we be? Life is infinitely more interesting when we can believe in the possibility of something wonderful hidden just over the next hill, to be discovered at last by just one more expensive expedition. For, every once in a while, a tenacious and fantasy-laden person does find something wonderful. With nothing more to go on than that well-known myth Homer’s Iliad, Heinrich Schliemann went out and dug up Troy.
All fantasy is rooted somewhere very deep in reality. It is the voice of our reachings-out for explanations of the riddles of our lives and for enrichment of their texture. All can be set forth in stories told in many different ways: in dream stories like Alice in Wonderland, in stories where the fantasy world exists across some kind of threshold as with Oz and Narnia, in stories where some single element of fantasy appears in the hard, real world as with Charlotte’s Web, or in stories where a rich fantasy world coexists on the same plane with reality, as Shakespeare presented it in such plays as The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
And little by little some fantasies come true. My mother had an expression she used to demonstrate impossibility: She would say, “Why, I could no more do that than fly to the moon!” I find myself saying the same thing sometimes before I remember it’s no longer an impossibility. In my favorite childhood version of “Beauty and the Beast,” Beauty found, in a room in the Beast’s palace, a picture that could move and talk—and now we have television. A real gorilla has a real kitten for a pet, and has his picture taken while he cuddles it. There is a kind of photography now that can create a three-dimensional image that isn’t really there at all.
In these terrible days of uncertainty, and fear not just for our own individual lives but for the life of our lovely, lonely planet, we need our fantasies more than ever, especially our fantasies of hope. I wish the adult world could recognize that need, and stop insisting that such things are only for children. For these fantasies are not something to retreat into, not sand in which we can bury our heads. They are the voices of our innermost cravings for pleasure and beauty and peace. Oh, Charlotte, how lovely if you could come back and spin a miraculous web of words at the next summit meeting! If our leaders won’t listen to us, surely they are human, with hope fantasies of their own, and maybe they would listen to you.