Romanticism and the Psychology of Mythopoetic Fantasy

Naomi Wood

Children's Literature, Volume 38, 2010, pp. 241-248 (Review)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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 Romanticism and the Psychology of
Mythopoetic Fantasy
Naomi Wood

Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth: Tales of Pullman, Lewis, Tolkien,
MacDonald and Hoffman, by William Gray. Houndmills, Eng.: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009.
Death and Fantasy: Essays on Philip Pullman, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald
and R. L. Stevenson, by William Gray. Newcastle upon Tyne, Eng.:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.
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 Nar-
rative” 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 Pull-
man’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.

2010. Children’s Literature 38, Hollins University © 2010. 241

242 Naomi Wood

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 percep-
tion. 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). MacDon-
ald’s “medicine” is fairy tales, as shown in his realistic novel Adela Cath-
cart (1864), which features story therapy as the appropriate treatment
for the titular character’s soul-sickness. If reality is a matter of percep-
tion, 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 demonstrate the tales’ homeopathic efficacy, in
keeping with their author’s notion of the synergetic relation between
soul and body, mediated by fairy tale.
It’s an illuminating discussion; tracing the strong links between
MacDonald and the German Romantics, Gray attempts to rescue him
from the shadow of his advocate and appropriator C. S. Lewis. Al-
though MacDonald is read and published today chiefly because Lewis
Romanticism and Mythopoetic Fantasy 243

so frequently acknowledged him as “master,” Gray shows that there

are significant theological differences between the two. MacDonald,
in fact, shares much with Philip Pullman in his dislike of the image of
God as a gray-bearded “martinet” (46), his opposition to established
hierarchy, and his dialectical eschatology (38). In one particularly rich
discussion of a passage in The Princess and Curdie (1877, 1883) describing
Princess Irene and her spinning wheel, Gray links Novalis, Hoffman,
Kristeva, Tolkien, and Lewis to show how MacDonald evokes “joy” in the
semiotic, paralinguistic, almost deconstructive account of the Princess’s
song (54). Because MacDonald acknowledges and minutely depicts
both the pleasure and terror of imaginative creation, showing it to be
a theological as well as a literary act, he becomes “central to twentieth
century debates about fantasy literature” (60).
Though Tolkien was by no means as invested in the work of George
MacDonald as was C. S. Lewis, chapter three, “J. R. R. Tolkien and the
Love of Faery,” explores similarities in their mutual interest in imagina-
tive creation and its relation to the divine. This chapter concerns itself
primarily with situating Tolkien’s theoretical statements about fantasy
in “On Fairy Stories,” in “Leaf by Niggle,” and in “Smith of Wootton
Major” as essentially Romantic, despite Tolkien’s prejudice against
English literature later than Chaucer. While there is some discussion
of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, the primary focus is on the many
appendices and fragments that surround those works like spare lumber
or unused blueprints. Like MacDonald, Tolkien anticipates aspects of
poststructural theories of language by challenging Max Müller’s no-
tion that language abstracts qualities from things; Tolkien retorts that
language in fact invests things with qualities by providing the means
by which we can perceive them at all (89). Conscious of the tension
between his unorthodox passion for the self-generating realities of
language and his orthodox Roman Catholicism, Tolkien in his own
mythography sought to divide imaginative work from religious faith,
and many of his tales feature a wrenching renunciation of Faery—as
in the conclusion to The Lord of the Rings. At the same time, he insisted
along with Romantic thinkers that fantasy was “essential to human
completeness” (103).
In chapter four, “C. S. Lewis: Reality and the Radiance of Myth,”
Gray connects Lewis’s theory with earlier Romantic writers, affirming
Lewis’s “profoundly Romantic” sensibility (112). This chapter traces the
tension between Lewis’s rationalist and rather depressive personality
and his aesthetic and imaginative investment in myth as a source of Joy.
244 Naomi Wood

Lewis’s attempts to join reality and mythology by asserting their basic

unity through Platonic and other idealist forms are recounted and
analyzed by Gray in a survey of Lewis’s fiction and criticism. Challeng-
ing those (such as Philip Pullman) who dismiss Lewis as a reactionary
as well as those who put Lewis on a level with the apostles, Gray shows
Lewis becoming aware that his efforts to prove the rationality of belief
had fallen short, and recovering Joy through fairy tale instead. Yet the
need for history, for materiality, remained. Gray’s discussion of Lewis’s
finest novel, Till We Have Faces (1956), reveals that author’s affinity for
(if not complete alignment with) existentialism and other ostensibly
alien systems: “Far from producing the allegories of Christian doctrine
that [the Chronicles of Narnia] are popularly supposed to be, Lewis
sought in this re-telling of a pagan myth . . . to confront his readers with
an experience which, by being presented historically, that is, located (as
a ‘supposition’) in this world, powerfully calls in question, transcends
and yet glorifies this world—even if only ambiguously and in a glass
darkly” (151; emphases in original).
Chapter five, “Measuring Truth: Lyra’s Story,” argues boldly that
because “Pullman sees myth as a means to, and expression of, truth,”
he is linked “(their differences notwithstanding) with the tradition of
mythopoeic writers such as MacDonald, Tolkien and Lewis” (178). This
thesis is conveyed in a fittingly spiral argument (given the dependence
of the entire book upon Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism) that begins
with Pullman’s insistence that what he writes is not merely fantasy but
realism, then wends its way through a discussion of Pullman’s sources
and analogs—importantly, and ironically, C. S. Lewis himself—noting
their mutual investment in humanism, in its philosophical and literary
canon, and in the romantic project of dissent from the Enlightenment’s
“freezing reason.” Gray’s coup de grâce to Pullman’s protestations about
his differences from Lewis: both fantasists search for, and find, joy in
the creation of “true stories”; for all of these writers, the measure of
truth is to be found in the powerful imaginative work of myth.
Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth offers an illuminating survey
of this group of authors and texts, showing strong affinities, disputes,
and sometimes unexpected agreement. Gray’s approach of recounting
the personal and intellectual biography of each writer in relation to
his oeuvre, together with a discussion in chronological order of their
critical and literary works, provides a richly realized historical under-
standing of their context. Gray’s analyses are usefully skeptical about
authors’ pronouncements concerning their own and others’ work,
Romanticism and Mythopoetic Fantasy 245

teasing out interesting inconsistencies or aporia. At his best, as in the

chapter on C. S. Lewis, Gray challenges conventional valuations (both
hagiographic and demonizing) in favor of a nuanced understanding, in
this case of Lewis’s intellectual and aesthetic allegiances alongside his
religious beliefs. A less positive aspect of Gray’s approach is that it be-
comes somewhat repetitive by the fourth and fifth chapters, since many
of the main points have already been made. With such a fertile critical
context in German Romanticism and with such potent psychoanalytic
fodder, the schematic surveys of each author’s entire body of work at
times feel thin and underdeveloped. I would have liked to have read
more in-depth analyses of fewer books. Finally, the literary analysis at
times seems overly bound to a hermeneutic that presumes a text ought
to be read in a single way as if it were transparent (partly as a result of
the survey approach), despite frequent references to psychoanalytic and
poststructural interpretive strategies that could usefully problematize
some of the readings. In terms of production, I found the practice of
abbreviating titles of all the works and criticism in the text as well as in
the citations (particularly when they did not conform to the title of an
individual work in the series, e.g., CN for the Chronicles of Narnia vs. MN
or LWW for The Magician’s Nephew or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)
needlessly obscure and distracting, despite the index of abbreviations
usefully placed at the beginning of the book. This is not to say that I did
not learn a great deal from this volume’s interesting, valid, and valuable
insights; it is a pleasure to read and provides much to ponder about the
relationships between theology, philosophy, and fantasy literature. It
is refreshing to read a nonreductive and psychoanalytically informed
discussion of these authors that avoids the ahistorical essentialism of a
typical Freudian or Jungian reading.
Death and Fantasy was published before Fantasy, Myth and the Measure
of Truth, but Gray introduces it as a supplement to the later volume
(1). All essays in this collection appeared or were presented elsewhere
over a ten-year period; the methodology is chiefly psychoanalytic and
historiographic. Gray writes that he resisted the temptation to tinker
with the essays, preferring to leave them as they originally were writ-
ten, but at times this seems mistaken. Though the essays are loosely
connected thematically around death and fantasy, there is no overarch-
ing thesis about what that relationship is, and thus this book lacks the
strong narrative arc of Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth. Like that
later work, it focuses chiefly on George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, and
Philip Pullman: their engagement with fantasy theory and practice,
246 Naomi Wood

their potent theologically and psychologically charged investments and

inventions. The essays on MacDonald, Lewis, and Pullman explicate the
psychoanalytic implications of their imagery and motifs; they commit
the “personal heresy”2 of finding in the fiction evidence of unresolved
childhood grief and psychological conflict, and they consider these
elements in light of religious and philosophical scholars such as Rudolf
Bultmann, Hans Jonas, Elaine Pagels, and Martin Heidegger.
Chapters one and two, “George MacDonald, Julia Kristeva and
the Black Sun” and “The Angel in the House of Death: Gender and
Subjectivity in George MacDonald’s Lilith,” are both well-written
and interesting feminist-psychoanalytic essays in the critical mode of
the early 1990s. Chapters five through seven are shorter conference
paper–length essays that focus on C. S. Lewis. The first, “Death, Myth
and Reality in C. S. Lewis,” considers his treatment of death for most
of his career as a reaction-formation against his childhood grief at his
mother’s death—only coming to a more serious and engaged treat-
ment in one of his last books, A Grief Observed (1961). Next, “Spiritual-
ity and the Pleasure of the Text: C. S. Lewis and the Act of Reading”
examines the importance of pleasure in Lewis’s theology, particularly
the pleasure of reading. Far from the reader-response theory implied
in George MacDonald’s “The Fantastic Imagination,” Lewis saw the
pleasures of reading as “rapiers” that “pierced” the reader, drawing
him ([sic], since Lewis usually presumes a normatively male reader)
“in the end to the real object of desire, that is, to God” (70; emphasis
in original). Finally, in “The Lion, the Witch, and the Atlantean Box:
Psychoanalysis and Narnia Revisited,” Gray follows (rather as he does
in chapter five) Lewis’s response to death, and how the Chronicles of
Narnia might be read as his way of processing grief, enabling, perhaps,
the more realistic, compassionate, and sensitive persona that emerges
in his later theological writings. The essay concludes: “towards the
end of his life, Jack Lewis had in every sense found, and been found
by, Joy” (84), referring to Lewis’s late love match with Joy Davidman.
Since chapter six had followed Lewis beyond Davidman’s death to his
confessional account of the aftermath in A Grief Observed, a reader who
is proceeding through the book in a linear fashion might be pardoned
for experiencing a bit of whiplash at this point. It might have been a
good idea to combine these essays for a more sustained and consistent
treatment of the topic.
Chapters eight and nine discuss the relations between C. S. Lewis,
Philip Pullman, and George MacDonald in terms of Bloomian “anxi-
Romanticism and Mythopoetic Fantasy 247

eties of influence.” Both present aspects of arguments made more

thoroughly in Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth: namely, that in
a comparison of their work, Pullman and MacDonald turn out to be
sympathetic consumers and purveyors of Gnostic and liberal ideas,
and that Pullman and Lewis are equally indebted to Plato and to other
proponents (or perpetrators) of the Grand Narrative tradition.
The inclusion of two essays on Robert Louis Stevenson to this collec-
tion is startling because he is not usually seen as a fantasist—Stevenson’s
romances are emphatically set in the real world of history. Some of the
connections Gray demonstrates between Stevenson and the older writer
George MacDonald are interesting and intriguing—that Stevenson
referenced MacDonald and read his work seems worth more than a
cursory treatment. Stevenson’s late and frustrated project of writing a
volume of Märchen is suggestive, especially considering the very public
battle he fought with Henry James and George Moore over the relative
value of realism and romance.3 However, these essays were not truly
integrated into the death-fantasy thematic, and did not add much of
substance to the understanding of either.
Having just read Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth, I found too
many echoes (and some passages taken almost verbatim, as in the
discussion of “The Lion, the Witch and the Atlantean Box,” 74) to
feel that there was much that was new. Admittedly, in a collection that
acknowledges its derivations in journal articles and conference presen-
tations, that may be the point—that they offer not new material, but
different aspects of the same issues. This is a book to be consulted, I
suspect, rather than read through. Finally, as is unfortunately repre-
sentative of books I have seen from Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
the production values are not high. The book has not been carefully
edited; I found multiple evidences of optical scanning mistakes (such
as the transposition of “cl” into “d”) and incorrect running heads—for
example, in chapter eight.
Fantasy, Faith and the Measure of Truth is a valuable book for anyone
interested in the literary, philosophical, and theological contexts of
contemporary heroic fantasy. It is deeply learned, showing evidence of
extensive reading and thought. Death and Fantasy, a less coherent and
thoroughly argued work, is worth dipping into for food for thought
and accessible to beginning researchers in these topics. If your library
must choose between the two, choose Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of
Truth; if you can afford it, choose both.
248 Naomi Wood
Notes
1
Sigmund Freud, “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,” qtd. in Jackson.
2
The Personal Heresy: A Controversy contained essays by C. S. Lewis and E. M. W. Tillyard
debating the relevance of biographical information to the understanding of poetry. Lewis
argued that biography was not relevant, while Tillyard took the reverse position.
3
See Hughes.

Works Cited

Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1955. 108.

Hughes, Felicity A. “Children’s Literature: Theory and Practice.” ELH 45.3 (1978):
542–61.
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen, 1981. 174.
Lewis, C. S., and E. M. W. Tillyard. The Personal Heresy: A Controversy. London: Oxford
UP, 1939.
Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy Stories.” The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Ed. Chris-
topher Tolkien. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983. 158–61.
Zipes, Jack. Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture. New York:
Viking, 1991. xiii.