The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (6 page)

My next essay will be about whether or not I want to be told to call a stranger Ishmael.

THINGS NOT ACTUALLY PRESENT

O
N
The Book of Fantasy
AND
J. L. B
ORGES

In 1988 Xanadu Press published
The Book of Fantasy
, a translation of the
Antologia de la literatura fantástica
, which Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo first published in Buenos Aires in 1940. Asked to contribute a foreword to the English edition, I did so with pleasure. I have revised it so that I could include it in this collection, wanting to render some small homage to Borges.

There are two books that I look on as esteemed and cherished greataunts or grandmothers, wise and mild though sometimes rather dark of counsel, to be turned to when my judgment hesitates. One of these books provides facts, of a peculiar sort. The other does not. The
I Ching
or
Book of Changes
is the visionary elder who has outlived fact, the ancestor so old she speaks a different tongue. Her counsel is sometimes appallingly clear, sometimes very obscure indeed. “The little fox crossing the river wets its tail,” she says, smiling faintly, or, “A dragon appears in the field,” or, “Biting upon dried gristly meat.” One retires to ponder long over such advice.

The other Auntie is younger, and speaks English. Indeed she speaks more English than anybody else. She offers fewer dragons and much more dried gristly meat. And yet
A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles
, or the OED as she is known to her family, is also a Book of Changes. Most wonderful in its transmutations, it is not the
Book of Sand, yet is inexhaustible; not an Aleph, yet all we have said and can ever say is in it, if we can but find it.

“Auntie!” I say, magnifying glass in hand, because my edition, the Compact Auntie, is compressed into two volumes of print no larger than grains of sand, “Auntie! Please tell me about fantasy, because I want to talk about a Book of Fantasy, but I am not sure what I am talking about.”

“Fantasy, or Phantasy,” Auntie replies, clearing her throat, “is from the Greek
phantasia
, lit. ‘a making visible.’” She explains that
phantasia
is related to the verbs
phantasein
, “to make visible,” or in Late Greek, “to imagine, have visions,” and
phainein
, “to show.” And she summarises the earliest meanings of the word
fantasy
in English: an appearance, a phantom, the mental process of sensuous perception, the faculty of imagination, a false notion, a caprice, a whim.

Then, though she eschews the casting of yarrow stalks or coins polished with sweet oil, being after all an Englishwoman, she begins to tell the Changes—the mutations of a word moving through the minds of people moving through the centuries. She shows how
fantasy
, which to the Schoolmen of the late Middle Ages meant “the mental apprehension of an object of perception,” that is, the mind’s very act of linking itself to the phenomenal world, came in time to signify just the reverse: an hallucination, or a phantasm, or the habit of deluding oneself. And then the word, doubling back on its tracks like a hare, came to mean the imagination itself, “the process, the faculty, or the result of forming mental representations of things not actually present.” Though seemingly very close to the Scholastic use of the word, this definition of
fantasy
leads in quite the opposite direction, often going so far as to imply that the imagination is extravagant, or visionary, or merely fanciful.

So the word
fantasy
remains ambiguous, standing between the false, the foolish, the delusory, the shallows of the mind, and the mind’s deep connection with the real. On this threshold it sometimes faces one way, masked and costumed, frivolous, an escapist; then it turns, and we
glimpse as it turns the face of an angel, bright truthful messenger, arisen Urizen.

Since the compilation of my
Oxford English Dictionary
, the tracks of the word have been complicated still further by the comings and goings of psychologists. Their technical uses of
fantasy
and
phantasy
have influenced our sense and use of the word; and they have also given us the handy verb “to fantasise.” If you are fantasising, you may be daydreaming, or you might be using your imagination therapeutically as a means of discovering reasons Reason does not know, discovering yourself to yourself.

But Auntie does not acknowledge the existence of that verb. Into her Supplement (through the tradesmen’s door) she admits only
fantasist
, and defines the upstart, politely but with a faint curl of the lip, as “one who ‘weaves’ fantasies.” She illustrates the word with quotations from Oscar Wilde and H. G. Wells. Evidently she means that fantasists are writers, but is not quite willing to admit it.

Indeed, in the early twentieth century, the days of victorious Realism, fantasists were often apologetic about what they did, offering it as mere word weaving—fancywork—a sort of bobble-fringing to
real
literature, or passing it off as being “for children” and therefore beneath the notice of critics, professors, and dictionary makers.

Writers of fantasy are often less modest now that what they do is recognised as literature, or at least as a genre of literature, or at least as a subliterary genre, or at least as a commercial product. For fantasies are rife and many-colored on the bookshelves. The head of the fabled unicorn is laid upon the lap of Mammon, and the offering is acceptable to Mammon. Fantasy has, in fact, become quite a business.

But when one night in Buenos Aires in 1937 three friends sat talking together about fantastic literature, it was not yet a business.

Nor was it even known as fantastic literature when one night in a villa in Geneva in 1818 three friends sat talking together and telling ghost stories. They were Mary Shelley, her husband Percy, and Lord Byron—and Claire Clairmont was probably with them, and the strange
young Dr. Polidori—and they told awful tales, and Mary was frightened. “We will each,” cried Byron, “write a ghost story!” So Mary went away and thought about it, fruitlessly, until a few nights later she had a nightmare in which a “pale student” used strange arts and machineries to arouse from unlife the “hideous phantasm of a man.”

And so, alone of the friends, she wrote her ghost story,
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
, which is the first great modern fantasy. There are no ghosts in it; but fantasy, as the OED observed, is more than ghoulie-mongering.

Because ghosts haunt one corner of the vast domain of fantastic literature, both oral and written, people familiar with that corner of it call the whole thing ghost stories, or horror stories; just as others call it Fairyland after the part of it they love best or despise most, and others call it science fiction, and others call it stuff and nonsense. But the nameless being given life by Frankenstein’s or Mary Shelley’s arts and machineries is neither ghost nor fairy; science fictional he may be; stuff and nonsense he is not. He is a creature of fantasy, archetypal, deathless. Once raised he will not sleep again, for his pain will not let him sleep, the unanswered moral questions that woke with him will not let him rest in peace.

When there began to be money in the fantasy business, plenty of money was made out of him in Hollywood, but even that did not kill him.

Very likely his story was mentioned on that night in 1937 in Buenos Aires when Silvina Ocampo and her friends Borges and Bioy Casares fell to talking, so Casares tells us, “about fantastic literature . . . discussing the stories which seemed best to us. One of us suggested that if we put together the fragments of the same type we had listed in our notebooks, we would have a good book.”

So that, charmingly, is how
The Book of Fantasy
came to be: three friends talking. No plans, no definitions, no business, except the intention of “having a good book.”

In the making of such a book by such makers, certain definitions
were implied by the exclusion of certain stories, and by inclusion other definitions were ignored; so, perhaps for the first time, horror story and ghost story and fairy tale and science fiction all came together between the same covers. Thirty years later the anthologists enlarged the collection considerably for a new edition, and Borges suggested further inclusions to the editors of the first English-language edition shortly before his death.

It is an idiosyncratic selection, completely eclectic; in fact it is a wild mishmash. Some of the stories will be familiar to most readers, others are exotic and peculiar. A piece we might think we know almost too well, such as “The Cask of Amontillado,” regains its essential strangeness when read among works and fragments from the Orient and South America and distant centuries, by Kafka, Swedenborg, Yeats, Cortazar, Akutagawa, Niu Chiao, James Joyce. . . . The inclusion of a good many late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers, especially British ones, reflects, I imagine, particularly the taste of Borges, himself a member and perpetuator of the international tradition of fantasy that included Kipling and Wells.

Perhaps I should not say “tradition,” since it has no name as such and little recognition in critical circles, and is distinguished in college English departments mainly by being ignored. But I believe there is a company of fantasists that Borges belonged to even as he transcended it, and that he honored even as he transformed it. As he included these writers in the
Book of Fantasy
, we may see it as a notebook of sources and affiliations and elective affinities for him and his fellow editors, and for their generation of Latin American writers, which preceded the ones we call magical realists.

By saying that fantasy is for children (which some of it is) and dismissing it as commercial and formulaic (which some of it is), critics feel justified in ignoring it all. Yet looking at such writers as Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez, Philip K. Dick, Salman Rushdie, José Saramago, it is possible to believe that our narrative fiction has for years been going, slowly and vaguely and massively, not in the wash and slap
of fad and fashion but as a deep current, in one direction—towards rejoining the “ocean of story,” fantasy.

Fantasy is, after all, the oldest kind of narrative fiction, and the most universal.

Fiction as we currently think of it, the novel and short story as they have existed since the eighteenth century, offers one of the very best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Fiction is often really much more useful than lived experience; it takes much less time, costs nothing (from the library), and comes in a manageable, orderly form. You can understand it. Experience just steamrollers over you and you begin to see what happened only years and years later, if ever. Fiction is much better than reality at providing useful factual, psychological, and moral understanding.

But realistic fiction is culture-specific. If it’s your culture, your decade, fine; but if the story takes place in another century or another country, reading it with understanding involves an act of displacement, of translation, which many readers are unable or unwilling to make. The lifeways, the language, the morals and mores, the unspoken assumptions, all the details of ordinary life that are the substance and strength of realistic fiction, may be obscure, uninterpretable to the reader of another time and place. So writers who want their story to be understood not only by their contemporary compatriots but also by people of other lands and times, may seek a way of telling it that is more universally comprehensible; and fantasy is such a way.

Fantasies are often set in ordinary life, but the material of fantasy is a more permanent, universal reality than the social customs realism deals with. The substance of fantasy is psychic stuff, human constants: situations and imageries we recognise without having to learn or know anything at all about New York now, or London in 1850, or China three thousand years ago.

A dragon appears in the field. . . .

American readers and writers of fiction may yearn for the pure veracity of Jewett or Dreiser, as the English may look back with longing
to the fine solidities of Arnold Bennett; but the societies in and for which those novelists wrote were limited and homogeneous enough to be described in a language that could seriously pretend to describe, in Trollope’s phrase, “the way we live now.” The limits of that language—shared assumptions of class, culture, education, ethics—both focus and shrink the scope of the fiction. Society in the decades around the second millennium, global, multilingual, enormously irrational, undergoing incessant radical change, is not describable in a language that assumes continuity and a common experience of life. And so writers have turned to the global, intuitional language of fantasy to describe, as accurately as they can, the way “we” live “now.”

So it is in so much contemporary fiction that the most revealing and accurate descriptions of our daily life are shot through with strangeness, or displaced in time, or set upon imaginary worlds, or dissolved into the phantasmagoria of drugs or of psychosis, or rise from the mundane suddenly into the visionary and as simply descend from it again.

So it may be that the central ethical dilemma of our age, the use or nonuse of annihilating power, was posed most cogently in fictional terms by the purest of fantasists. Tolkien began
The Lord of the Rings
in 1937 and finished it about ten years later. During those years, Frodo withheld his hand from the Ring of Power, but the nations did not.

So it is that Italo Calvino’s
Invisible Cities
may serve as a better guidebook to our world than any Michelin or Fodor’s.

So it is that the magical realists of South America, and their counterparts in India and elsewhere, are valued for their revelatory and entire truthfulness to the history of their lands and people.