Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

W. A. Senior

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781612771120
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant examines Donaldson's first three novels in an attempt to define their place in the fantasy canon. The book begins with an extensive introduction to the fantasy genre in which W.A. Senior eloquently defends fantasy against charges of being mere escapism, or simply juvenile, and not warranting serious critical considerations.

The heart of the text treats such issues as Donaldson's debt to Tolkien, the use of myth and the creation of sustaining mythologies within the novel, and the theme of life and death—a topic that fantasy, by its very nature, can explore in radical fashion. In chapter seven, Senior discusses the Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. He concludes that Donaldson has cerated an important contribution to the canon because of his serious intent and adult concerns, his powerful mythopoesis, and his manipulation of the conventions of epic fantasy.

As appendixes to this work, there are two illuminating interviews with Donaldson in which the author of the Covenant series reveals his own views on questions raised by Senior's study. Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant will be of great interest both to devout Donaldson fans and to general readers of fantasy.

1

Modern Fantasy
and Stephen R. Donaldson

It is only since the rise of “realism” as an evaluative principle in criticism of the nineteenth century that fantasy has fallen into any sort of disrepute. In its broadest sense, fantasy is among the oldest literary devices known to man; so old, in fact, that even the term “literary devices” seems inadequate to describe the hold that myths, legends, fables and fairy tales have had on their audiences since primitive times. But despite this venerable history, fantasy has seldom been regarded as anything more than an adjunct to other forms of literature, a tool to be used by poets and storytellers to another end.

—Gary K. Wolfe, “Symbolic Fantasy”

In recent years, the financial success and accession of individual science fiction and fantasy novels to the best-sellers list, the growing popularity of college courses on science fiction and fantasy, and the turn of academic and critical attention to both genres, especially by such notable figures in mainstream scholarship as Northrop Frye, Robert Scholes, Harold Bloom, and Leslie Fiedler, have begun to earn them respect and praise, both as elements in “serious” literature and as viable literary categories on their own. The first wave of influential works came in the 1960s with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Herbert’s Dune, Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, and Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, all of which dealt with contemporary issues and attracted a readership that crossed many boundaries. Other notable examinations of modern technology and of modern life through the lens of the fantastic came from writers such as Harlan Ellison, Arthur C. Clarke, Walter Miller, Jr., Stanislaw Lem, Ursula K. Le Guin, and many others. Since then, growing interest in popular literature as a whole, including horror, mystery, and western fiction as well as studies in children’s literature, has begun to open up new areas of academic interest and scrutiny, and fantasy, or the more generic fantastic, has begun to work itself way back into its historically wonted position in mainstream fiction. Among recent best-sellers are the works of Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Anthony Burgess, John Fowles, and John Barth, all of whom write fantasy or use the fantastic in their novels and short stories and whose works stand side by side with those of “pure” fantasy writers.

So association with popular fiction or fantasy itself does not invite terminal infection. Yet a major, and comprehensive, barrier before modern fantasy is the stigma attached to popular literature in the main and the peculiar but widespread belief that works which achieve financial success and attract a large reading (or at least purchasing) audience must be in some way inferior. John Sutherland’s Bestsellers opens with a trenchant quotation from Irwin Shaw: “For some literary critics writing a book that is popular and commercially successful rates very high on the list of white collar crime” (vi). Conventional wisdom decrees that such works must be shallow and formulaic, little other than sensationalistic storytelling and hack writing, a view that carries some validity when one considers the preponderance of mass-produced, quickly written bodice-rippers, family sagas, and Hollywood romans à clef with covers that fairly shout off the racks at the front of the bookstore chains. And this is not a simply modern phenomenon, for there is also sufficient precedent in earlier times for the popularity of works that pander to social sensationalism, like the late-Victorian obsession with crime stories. However, categoric pillorying by genre (or period) is not a sound way to make judgments on anything, least of all literature. Perched on high, atop the classics of the centuries, the naysayers deny popular literature, including fantasy, legitimacy, forgetting—or ignoring—that all genres and periods have their schlockmeisters who, Polonius-like in their zeal to excel or please, commit the error of the tragical-comical-historical-pastoral. As a result, they can overlook others who produce works of high quality that will stand the test of time. Moreover, these same critics forget the importance of fantasy in many of the works on which the academy has conferred its grace ex cathedra: Malory’s Mort d’Arthur, Beowulf, the body of medieval romance and its later manifestation in the Gothic novel, Jane Eyre, Ivanhoe, Poe’s short fiction, and so on. The dismissal of the fantastic is a recent critical development and would itself bemuse earlier audiences.¹

In fact, many of the works in the “serious” canon today were born of the popular literature of the past. In Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, John Cawelti outlines the origins and changing face of popular literature from the eighteenth century on and includes, among many, works by Samuel Richardson, the various writers of Gothic romances, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frank Norris, Sinclair Lewis, and, of course, Charles Dickens (see 268ff). In the last, one finds all the traits associated with popular fiction and derided by the defenders of the faith: melodrama, sensationalism, a premium on narrative effect and a complex narrative with many crises, stock characters, and so on. Cawelti’s primary defense of formula or popular fiction recalls Isaac Asimov’s stipulative definition of science fiction as a social literature dealing with the effects of science and technology on people and society; Cawelti offers the hypothesis that “best-selling social melodrama” attracts a wide readership because it “synthesizes the archetype of melodrama with a carefully and elaborately developed social setting in such a way as to combine the emotional satisfactions of melodrama with the interest inherent in a detailed, intimate, and realistic analysis of major social or historic phenomena” (261). Only if the fiction appeals to the readership’s identification of cultural or social issues will the work achieve success. Those novels that strike a universal chord go on to become classics; those that do not and address only an issue particular to one time or group may be fleetingly popular but will be dismissed by a later generation of readers whose social and cultural assumptions differ too widely from those of the original audience.

In view of the popularity of modern fantasy, its large readership has clearly discovered concrete pleasures and benefits. One question involves what that readership consists of, but no scientific data exists to permit any definitive groupings or classes.² Resistance to fantasy, however, has more easily defined roots and comes from a range of sources: social, historical, and philosophical hostility or simply closed-mindedness. “Some critics and academics condemn the whole genre with a passion which seems to have its roots in emotion rather than objective critical standards” (Swinfen I). Brian Attebery explores the suppression of fantasy by puritanism, rationalism, and transcendentalism to demonstrate the historical rejection of fantasy in mainstream American thinking (26). Ursula K. Le Guin sees a rejection of fantasy as arising from a fear tied to “our Puritanism, our work ethic, our profit-mindedness, and even our sexual mores” (Language 39–40); Americans are afraid of dragons because they represent a different orientation to life and thus threaten the monolithic authority of American material culture and our inherited puritanical distrust of pleasure.³ Roger Schlobin seconds such an observation and points out that fantasy is ungovernable and thus unacceptable to establishment thinking: “fantasy threatens personal and social complacency through its apparently uncontrollable quality. It is ‘an irrational, instinctive function’ that—like its child, art—leads mankind away from reason to intuition” (xxiii). In a similar vein, Rosemary Jackson theorizes that the intent of the fantastic is subversive and therefore a challenge to doctrinaire modes of authority and perception. However, the ongoing weather change from the dismissal of fantasy achieved by eighteenth-century rationalists and adopted as gospel by portions of twentieth-century materialistic society signals an alteration in outlook and need and the attendant creation of a receptive modern audience. “Fantasy, at least of the mythopoeic variety, arises when the dominant cultural attitude of a generation grows so narrow that it fails to account for, or to provide sufficient means for the expression of, any significant aspect of man’s psychological or spiritual make-up” (Wolfe, “Symbolic Fantasy” 205). The growing attention paid to fantasy and its popularity indicates that it does supply something lacking in a modern audience’s spiritual or psychological diet. So we must ask briefly what elements or what attributes of modern fantasy have effected such change and created its attraction and what issues and questions it explores.

First, a number of cultural preconceptions or prejudices have relegated fantasy to a secondary status: Fantasy is merely escapist, only wish fulfillment. Fantasy has nothing to do with the real world. Fantasy is for children. Adults (and some voices cry children as well) should read “realistic” literature to teach them about the world they live in. For fantasy can teach us nothing—or fantasy teaches all the wrong things. Fantasy is unhealthy; fantasy encourages laziness, self-absorption, irresponsibility, and so on. Fantasy works are all the same. Fantasy is a crutch. Such derogations are repeated over and over until many who have not read any fantasy accept them without question. C. S. Lewis objects to such objections:

No one that I know of has indeed laid down in so many words that a fiction cannot be fit for adult and civilized reading unless it represents life as we have all found it to be, or probably shall find it to be, in experience. But some such assumption seems to lurk tacitly in the background of much criticism and literary discussion. We feel it in the wide-spread neglect or disparagement of the romantic, the idyllic, and the fantastic, and the readiness to stigmatize instances of these as “escapism.” We feel it when books are praised for being “comments on,” or “reflections” (or more deplorably “slices”) of Life. We notice that “truth to life” is held to have a claim on literature that overrides all other considerations. (60)

The irony here is that this quotation comes from Lewis’s Experiment in Criticism, which in my local library has “Y.A.,” young adult, handprinted on it. Obviously the local librarian associates Lewis with the Narnia series, which in his or her view is only children’s literature; therefore, any book by Lewis that deals with elements of fantasy must also belong in such a category. A walk through the children and young adults section, itself something of a contrivance, reveals a number of fantasy novels probably beyond the abilities of all but the most advanced readers in these classes, including a number of works by Ursula K. Le Guin, Patricia McKillip’s Riddle-Master trilogy, and R. A. MacAvoy’s Damiano trilogy.⁴ More broadly speaking, the placement of these works as children’s literature indicates narrow preconditioned assumptions that determine not only the public perception of works by a given author but the entire marketing strategy behind many authors, which itself presupposes and prescribes both audience and appeal (see Sutherland, chaps. 1 and 2). A check of most of the major bookstore chains reveals an almost comical division of offerings into fiction or literature and a further separation of Mystery (labeled “Crime” in the more pretentious stores), Romance, and Science Fiction (often amputated to the deplorable “Sci-fi”). Fiction, one must suppose, is easily read and enjoyed by the broad-chested, leisure-seeking masses, while Literature (introduced, no doubt, with fanfare and drumroll) demands toil and earnestness of spirit and is thus appropriate for only pasty-faced, myopic denizens of university libraries. Through such categorization, prejudices are generated against works simply by association, even against those one might call “serious” literature. How many people seeing Pride and Prejudice or even Dracula in the Literature section will forgo it, assuming it to be just another desiccated classic? In the case of popular literature especially, such generic prejudices are both limiting and unfortunate in that they lump together the good, the mediocre, and the poor regardless of individual merit. Tzvetan Todorov denigrates popular literature with the totally arbitrary assumption that only it (detective fiction and science fiction, for instance) can be classified scientifically in genres, which do not apply to “strictly literary texts” (6). For fantasy especially, the dismissive view “makes no distinction between fine fantasy and poor fantasy, but more seriously, it shows a misunderstanding of the nature of fantasy” (Egoff 308).

Supposedly the most damning of the objections to fantasy is the charge of escapism, which comprehends also a lack of value in real life; however, such an attainder overlooks one of fantasy’s most powerful allures:

So the fantasy book, like the fairy tale, may not be Life Actual, but it is Life in Truth.

Life Actual tells us that the world is not perfectly ordered; it is, in fact, most often immoral or anyway amoral. Endings are as often unhappy as happy. Issues are seldom clear-cut. Judgment is as capricious as justice. Babies starve and there is no resurrecting them. Mothers die or run off and are never found. Families are torn asunder and there is no mending them. And honesty is rarely the best policy when it comes to exposing your friends. That is Life Actual.

But Life in Truth tells us something else. It tells us of the world as it should be. It holds certain values to be important. It makes issues clear. It is, if you will, a fiction based on great opposites, the clashing of opposing forces, question and answer, yin and yang, the great dance of opposites. And so the fantasy tale, the “I that is not I,” becomes a rehearsal for the reader for life as it should be lived. (Yolen, Touch Magic 64)

This distinction between Life Actual and Life in Truth opens a doorway for readers who are searching for reassurance in their worlds, for it demonstrates the paradoxical link between reality and fantasy: all fantasy is a reaction to reality. “Departure from reality does not preclude comment upon it: indeed, this is one of fantasy’s primary functions” (Hume xii). Sheila Egoff defines a particular class of fantasy that she labels “enchanted realism”; an exploration of the eerie, the uncanny, the dreamlike elements of reality, enchanted fantasy is based on the conventions of realism but introduces “a delicate alteration of the everyday world” in order to transcend the realistic novel, “not as a form but as an expression” (7). Eric Rabkin comes to the same end by another route: “Believability is not simply a matter of the truth of one’s assertions but of one’s place in the social fabric, a place defined by one’s own experience and attested to by one’s own life story” (“Descent” 20). Rosemary Jackson insists that the fantastic must be read in its historical, social, economic, sexual, etc., context (3). And W. R. Irwin explains fantasy as an elaborate game based on the recognition of and acceptance of authority (60–62). In his reply to Escape’s belittlers, J. R. R. Tolkien points out the irony in this complaint: “In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds” (“On Fairy-Stories” 79).⁵ Is escape, therefore, bad or invalid in itself? The answer is yes if the escape is serendipitous or simplistic, if there is no valid motive for escape; on the other hand, the answer is no if there is a genuine threat that the audience understands and identifies with and if the escape leads to inquiries and solutions applicable to the audience’s concerns.

Only through its relation to and refraction of reality can fantasy present subjects that its audience deems important and meaningful. One of fantasy’s most powerful appeals exists in its conscious application of contemporary issues. Ann Swinfen contends in A Defense of Fantasy that many fantasies “operate on an adult level of meaning” and “are frequently imbued with a profound moral purpose and, even when set in a different historical period or, more interestingly, in a complete otherworld, display a concern for contemporary problems and offer a critique of contemporary society” (2). If we, as a modern audience, recognize that an individual fantasy has its genesis in a particular reality, that its end is not pure escapism but a purposive redirection of perception through a primarily symbolic encounter, then it achieves the classical milestone of instructing while delighting. For instance, one of contemporary fantasy’s attractions in an increasingly polluted world is its insistence on pristine nature and the ultimate triumph of nature in repairing itself, regardless of the assault on it. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Le Guin’s Earthsea, Donaldson’s Land, Lewis’s Narnia, Kay’s Fionavar—all such imaginary places possess the magic of renewal. A subsidiary enchantment to the modern world is the rustic simplicity and pastoral sufficiency that characterize these worlds. As technology becomes more overwhelming and most of us have trouble programming our VCRs or using video cameras, which come with techno-gibberish instructions and language sanitized of human touch, a backlash is generated against complexity, and Wordsworthian images of sportive wood run wild can haunt like a passion.⁶

A fantasy text also offers a wholistic view of things, linking worlds closely to those who inhabit them. One might oversimplify the standard conflict in fantasy as a clash of good and evil, but in most cases individual decisions are critical and address more than an abstract encounter. One of the most common dilemmas in fantasy is the choice between individual/self and community/others, where self is destructive and community is constructive; whatever action follows has implications for all involved. Irwin asserts that a prime function of fantasy is to promote community (184). One main subject of Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea is Ged’s selfishness and self-centeredness. In The Hobbit Bilbo must learn that he belongs to more than Bag End and has responsibilities to others that may preclude his domestic comfort. In Kay’s Fionavar trilogy individuals sacrifice themselves for others with abandon: Ysanne to the dagger Lokdal, Paul to the Summer Tree, Kevin to the fertility goddess, Diarmuid in battle. The recognition of a greater corporate good and the courage to abandon purely selfish interests demonstrates a moral strength attractive to many readers in a too often me-centered, wannabe world.

Other themes recognizable in daily life and common to most fantasies are the virtue of loyalty, the power of friendship and companionship, the importance of action over passivity, the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Modern Fantasy and Stephen R. Donaldson
• 2. Thomas Covenant: Leper as Hero
• 3. Donaldson and Tolkien
• 4. Myth
• 5. Narrative, Structure, and Knowledge
• 6. Life and Death
• 7. The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: “To Bear What Must Be Borne”
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index