Writing and Fantasy

Ceri Sullivan, Barbara White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317883784
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Writing and Fantasy brings together essays which restore a sense of the fantastic as a political response to cultural opportunities and pressures. It moves on from two conventional fields of discussion: the psychoanalytic, where phantasies are produced by the emergence of the consciousness, and the social, where fantasies are the production of nineteenth-century individualism. Chapters run from the classical period to the twentieth century, each focusing on a local reading of how fantasy acts as a strategy to contain or exploit specific historical and cultural moments. A wide variety of sites are investigated including the feminization of the wild west, originary and maternal spaces, highwaywomen, financial credit, and the ideal home. Multiple genres containing fantasy are explored, ranging from ghost stories to feminist utopias.

Aids to the reader include an introduction summarising recent discussions of fantasy, illustrations dealing with visual fantasies, and an annotated bibliography. The new research presented here will be of great interest to academics and students in literature, history and cultural studies departments who are working in the field of the historical development of concepts of fantasy, cultural opposition, and the imbrication of politics and modes of representation.

Part One

Early

1 Modern fantasy and ancient dreams

Christopher Pelling

Ancient dreams are in fashion. Enterprising historians are increasingly exploiting our knowledge of those dreams, especially those collected and discussed in the second century AD by Artemidorus, to give a variety of new perspectives on the ancient world. In particular, dreamers’ preoccupations have illuminated the social construction of sexuality, or changing attitudes towards personal identity;¹ the various codes for deciphering dreams also afford insight into the symbolic modes of thought through which people would filter and process their perceptions.² Instead of dismissing dream-content as ‘mere’ fantasy, we can therefore see ancient dreams as an insightful mode of conceptualization, related in shifting and unstraightforward ways to the representational strategies of waking reality. Dreams and fantasy have something in common: both re-sort the ideological patterns of everyday existence at the same time as challenging them by their difference.³

This chapter will suggest that this contemporary historiographic trend mirrors one already present in the development of ancient historiography. Dreams had always been important in that genre, just as they are important in epic, the genre from which historiography ultimately sprang; but Greek and Roman historians and biographers found new ways in which dreams could illuminate aspects of an individual or a whole culture, and their ways of coping with reality.

There is, however, one obvious difference between ancient and modern perceptions. Ancient audiences were primed to expect a connection between dreams and the divine. Dreams could be ‘invasive’, sent from external powers to afford insight into the future or the otherwise unknowable present. Of course it was a familiar phenomenon for people to dream, and to realize that they had dreamed, about their daytime preoccupations (what Freud called ‘the day’s residue’); or for particular types of physical disorder to be seen to promote particular types of dreams. But there was still a tendency to think of dreams as most interesting when they came from outside. That was not merely a literary convention: the practising dream-interpreter Artemidorus drew a distinction between enhupnia, dreams inspired by the day’s experiences, and oneiroi, prophetic dreams sent from outside, and it was the latter class which excited his interest.⁴

It remains a question how the classical historians fit into this pattern; and here one may find a further parallel with modern literary fantasy. Here, like Jackson, we may find useful Todorov’s distinction between the ‘marvellous’, i.e. the readers’ acceptance of a supernatural explanation for irregular phenomena, and the ‘uncanny’ (l’étrange), where strangeness is an effect produced by the distorting mind of the individual.⁵ Jackson charts the development whereby ‘[f]rom Gothic fiction onwards, there is a gradual transition from the marvellous to the uncanny – the history of the survival of Gothic horror is one of progressive internalization and recognition of fears as generated by the self’. This chapter will explore a similar development within the ancient historians, and uses four dream narratives reproduced in the documents section on pp. 253–60 below.⁶ Originally, dreams are indeed sent ‘from without’, are in Todorov’s terms ‘marvellous’: they still illuminate human psychology, but typically by pointing the distinctive way in which the dreamer responds to such an invasive experience. But later writers incorporate more problematic patterns, whereby there is at least a possibility that the dreams may be generated ‘from within’, as an ‘uncanny’ product of the dreamer’s pre-existent psychology: in other words, historians found interest in precisely the patterns which Artemidorus neglected. Still, this is often precisely that, a possibility. Matters are rarely clear, and, again as in much nineteenth- and twentieth-century fantasy,⁷ some of the more interesting cases will be those which leave the reader uncertain – as uncertain, indeed, as the dreamers themselves must, or at least should, have been. This raises the further narratological question of the relation between the questions put to their experience by the dreamers and those put by the informed historiographic reader.

As we examine this development through some particular cases, we shall see continuity as well as change. Even in our later cases, it is important that the possibility of invasive, supernatural dreams remains; it is important also to notice some recurrent features of narrative technique. Here too it will be useful to apply some of Todorov’s categories, namely his three conditions for the ‘fantastic’:⁸ first, that the reader should hesitate between a natural and supernatural explanation of the events described; second (in most cases but not universally), this hesitation may be focused through the same hesitation on the part of a character; third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude in accepting the text’s descriptions of strange experiences, rejecting non-literal and figurative interpretations of the sort Todorov terms ‘allegorical’ or ‘poetic’. Naturally, not all of these terms will prove straightforward to project backwards onto ancient experience.⁹ They can still serve as a useful starting point for our examination of four particularly thought-provoking passages.

Herodotus’s dreams of Xerxes and Artabanus

Herodotus, writing in the second half of the fifth century BC, includes many dreams,¹⁰ and by this stage of his History the reader has grown to expect them to be invasive and god-sent. This passage is his most elaborate and longest dream-sequence. It comes at the crucial moment of the entire narrative, where the Persian king Xerxes is deciding to launch his fateful invasion of Greece. The setting is Spring 484.

It follows an extended narrative of a Council meeting. Xerxes, still relatively new upon the throne, had first set out his reasons for wanting to attack Greece: expansion is a Persian tradition, driven on by some divine force; attack will bring glory and revenge. Therefore ‘I am going to yoke the Hellespont and drive my army through Europe into Greece’: the language captures both the fixity of the resolve and the way in which Xerxes’s plan cuts across the natural boundaries of the Persian empire. This, he says, will enable him to extend the empire over every land seen by the sun, and everyone, guilty or not, will become their slaves. His counsellors are finally told to prepare their troops; but ‘so that I should not seem to be self-willed, I am putting the matter for public discussion …’ (7.8). This, by Greek standards, is already seen as a charade of consultation, a travesty of a debate.

The loyal Mardonius responds with eager, sycophantic flattery: it will all be easy, there is nothing to fear from Greece, Xerxes is invincible (7.9). Most keep silent. Only Artabanus, Xerxes’s uncle (and it is the relationship which made him so bold, 7.10.1), dares to put a different view, and even he has to speak indirectly. It is always good to hear an opposite view, just so that you can be sure of the better course. Take your time, call another council once you have reconsidered; the biggest animals, the tallest trees, the greatest houses are most vulnerable to the lightning-bolt. The direct attack is reserved for Mardonius, whom Artabanus reviles for his poor advice (7.10). Xerxes is furious: only the family relationship with Artabanus saves him; it is unthinkable that a Persian king could leave the Greeks unpunished … (7.11).

So much for the advice Xerxes sought, such is the nature of council at a court. It contrasts eloquently with several debates on the Greek side, most starkly with that at Athens at the end of Book 8, where the Athenians, civilized and free as they are, listen to unpalatable views and reply with urgency and dignity.

Then follows the long description of the dream (given on pp. 253–5 below) – and so the greatest expedition of them all begins.

This intriguing scene has provoked intense scholarly controversy. Let us begin with Artabanus, particularly his suggestion that Xerxes’s dreams are simply the consequence of his daytime preoccupation. That reluctance to accept the supernatural explanation reminds us of Todorov’s second category, the presence of a character to focus the reader’s own doubtfulness. But readers’ response to Artabanus’s hesitation is more complex than this. On one level, we understand, even empathize with it, as we empathize with much in Artabanus’s predicament. In everyday life, we would offer similar rational doubts. The ancient reader would doubtless have felt the same way: the fourth-century writer of the ‘Hippocratic’ On Regimen 4.88 counts such dreams, representing the day’s concerns, as utterly normal. Yet we know Artabanus is wrong. That is partly because, by now, Herodotus’s reader has heard of too many other genuinely supernatural dreams; partly also because we know that this is a critical moment, not a time for the trivial, and Artabanus’s casualizing is unlikely to capture the attitude of concerned gods. But there is more. There is an implicit contract between the reader and writer of history, and we know that an occurrence would only be recorded if it were significant. Had Artabanus been right, the story would not be being told at all. So the reader is in a curious position of superiority over the character. However rational Artabanus’s doubts, we know better, and we know that we know. Not for the only time, Artabanus is being over-rational. His contributions chart the limits of human insight into a complex world.¹¹

It would, however, be a strangely insensitive reader who felt no doubts at all, even if they are not Artabanus’s doubts. In particular, what is the relation of this sequence to the Council which precedes? That had seemed to give an adequate explanation for Xerxes’s decision to invade; indeed, it had directed our attention in a subtle way to the dynamics of an autocratic court, where megalomaniac drives are unlikely to be successfully opposed. How do the human and divine sequences relate? Might this even be some sort of externalization of internal conflict, a shorthand way of remaining on the human level and dramatizing the inner disquiet of both Xerxes and Artabanus?¹²

This ‘externalization’ approach is unlikely to be sufficient, at least in a crude form: too many of Herodotus’s other dreams resist that approach, for instance by conveying information that the dreamer could not possibly have known; and anyway that approach works better for Xerxes, who might well ‘internally’ regret his impulsiveness, than for Artabanus. We can certainly detect some unease in Artabanus’s roundabout rhetoric, beautifully written and contrived as it is, but it is natural to relate this to the dangerous suggestion that he adopt the king’s clothing and usurp his role.¹³ It is harder to think him internally uncertain about the wisdom of his advice. It is always a mistake with Herodotus to collapse divine explanations into human: that is, after all, only another version of Artabanus’s rationalizing mentality which is here seen to fail. In other words, we can here accept Todorov’s third formulation, that we should not read a strange experience as some sort of figurative description for something other than what it is.

Still, the divine explanations are not wholly divorced from human, either. Here, much of what Xerxes’s phantom says resonates with themes intimated by the preceding Council scene. Take his first words:

Are you changing your mind, Persian, and deciding not to invade Greece, after telling the Persians to gather an army? You are wrong to change your mind, and there is not one here who will forgive you; just as you chose during the day, keep to that path.

Notice how he is addressed, ‘Persian’, and how this is echoed in ‘after telling the Persians …’. At the Council, an important element in Xerxes’s argument had been the need to continue the great Persian tradition of expansion, and the dangers of quietude; the peril of abandoning that tradition is not far to seek – especially after making public such a plan. The phrasing ‘there is not one here who will forgive you’ is itself sinisterly vague. Does the phantom refer to itself, as many translators and commentators assume? Or is it referring to a threat from those Persian grandees present at the Council? True, they welcomed the abandoning of the plan, and ‘fell at Xerxes’s knees in delight’; but the loss of face involved in abandoning such a plan – even an unpopular one – is still very clear.

Then:

Son of Darius, so you make it clear among the Persians that you have abandoned the expedition, and are dismissing my words as if they come from a nobody? Be certain of this, if you do not attack immediately, this is what will result for you: just as you became great and formidable in a short time, so swiftly will you be humbled once more.

This time he is ‘son of Darius’, and that too tells on a theme which Xerxes had aired: Darius had expanded the empire, and now there is a burden on Xerxes to live up to that tradition; and Darius had been rebuffed by the Athenians, and so there is a need for revenge. Artabanus had drawn a different moral from Darius’s experience, stressing how close Darius’s invasion of Scythia cam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• General editors’ preface
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part One: Early
• Part Two: Early Modern
• Part Three: Twentieth Century
• Extracts
• Select bibliography
• Notes on contributors
• Index