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The Structure of George Macdonald's Phantastes The Structure of George MacDonald’s Phantastes Adrian Gunther ritics have tended to see Phantastes1 as a fantasy without structure,C as a picaresque series of random events, a book without a plot, a work put together in a hurry and therefore without proper form, a stream-of- consciousness work spontaneously emerging from its author’s subconscious and therefore having no rational controlling framework.2 More recently, two critics3 have taken issue with this view and we have begun to see a more respectful-approach to the intellectual organisation of Phantastes. There can be no doubt that the principles of structural form underlying this book are both elaborate and extraordinarily self-conscious and some understanding of these principles is essential for a true appreciation of it. Phantastes is structured around a pattern of paradoxical oppositions, parallels and key transition points. It progresses in both a centripetal and a centrifugal manner as well as in a more conventional linear mode. On this most obvious linear level its protagonist Anodos begins a typical fairy-tale quest as a young and ignorant boy and his journey traces his development through certain emotional, sexual and chivalric adventures from ignorance and self-endulgence to a conscious sacrifice of ego, presaging an adult male role on his return to his “normal” reality. This linear mode is reflected in the changing forms of his adventures, which develop from somewhat mawkish childish experiences with fairies, through adolescent romance and sexual preoccupation, to an adult male role of chivalrous action. His quest can also be seen as cyclic in the obvious sense that it begins and ultimately returns to the same place. However the structure is far more complex than this suggests. On its periphery lie two chapters outside of Fairy Land and functioning rather as prologue and epilogue. At its centre are seven chapters during which Anodos resides at the Fairy Palace. At the heart of the book and centre of this sevenfold section are two chapters in which he retells, and lives through, stories he has read in books in the palace library. Critics have variously found these chapters irrelevant or obtrusive and even insisted that the book would be better without them.4 However, as I will show, these two tales give the key to much of what Anodos experiences. Hence their central place in the [43] structure. In fact the external form of the book is largely determined by the principles implicit in these stories. So too the North Wind 12 (1993): 43-59 forms which characterise Anodos’s experiences in the Fairy Palace, even though he cannot fully grasp their significance, are the pivot on which all his other experiences turn. They provide an ideal in the sense that they offer a glimpse into the source, the “harmony of the centre,” on which all the secondary events depend. He is cast out of this centre because he fails to grasp the full significance of his experiences there, perhaps partly because these experiences are granted through grace rather than his own merit. It is a significant part of MacDonald’s scheme of things that despair provokes the granting of grace, as it does here. Anodos’s most profound experiences occur in two sacred centres, the Fairy Palace and the island cottage, and both these high points are preceded by moments of despair. In each case the plunge into despair frees a magical boat5 which carries Anodos to the centre. As with all Anodos’s adventures the external forms are to a large extent dependent upon his internal imaginative state, but in these two centres there is an added dimension not present elsewhere. The Fairy Palace is “real,” and, in some profound sense, seperate from and beyond Anodos and his personal limitations. He is aware all the time of a wealth of potential experiences present in the palace but just eluding him, mysteriously unactualised, in the sense that he cannot quite see or hear them. He comments: nor, I grieve to say, did I ever come much nearer to these glorious beings, or ever look on the Queen of the Fairies herself. My destiny ordered otherwise. (93) The Fairy Palace therefore offers him a crucial glimpse into what transcends and gives meaning to his suffering, a glimpse which colours all his experiences thereafter, but also retrospectively places his previous adventures in their true context. That he is unable fully to absorb the lessons implicit in this exposure in no way invalidates the fact that they are there. We therefore have a work where the central section places all that precedes and all that follows it in its true perspective, working from the centre outwards. We also have adventures on both sides of this centre, structured from the outside and directed towards this central ideal. However the structural principles at work go well beyond this, with the sections on either side of this centre balancing each other in a whole range of ways. Key stages in Anodos’s travels are marked by sojourns in a series of different buildings which parallel and contrast with each other. The two cottages with positive [44] but limited mother figures, in the first half, culminate in the cottage on the island with the wise young/old mother figure in the second. Here Anodos undergoes his most important rite of passage and rebirth. The “church of darkness” with its ogress, in the first half, is the negative side of these cottages, and it is here Anodos experiences his greatest evil in the finding of his shadow. This church finds its structural counterpart in the final section, in the great and evil open air “temple” where Anodos experiences his “real” death and rebirth in conscious sacrifice of self, and hence destruction of that same shadow. Between the nurturing and transforming island cottage and the evil cathedral lie two parallel and contrasting towers, one round and the other square. The first tower provides Anodos with the crucial opportunity for heroic action (in obedience to the wise lady in the cottage), the second, as a result of the false pride engendered by this action, imprisons him in subjection to his shadow. Even the noble labyrinthine palace, with its harmonious blending of nature and art, has its structural negative counterpart outside its gates, in the dead, entombing underground labyrinth of tunnels and caves which brings Anodos to despair. The ideal white lady and the lady of the beech tree combine to find their negative counterpart in the monstrous Alder-maid. And the different female characters, as a whole, are deliberately blurred together as if they form a continuum of female experience. One needs only examine MacDonald’s recurring association of his female characters with images of marble statues to see this deliberate confusion in action.6 A “maiden” whom Anodos encounters in the first part is “happy as a child,” but she provokes one of Anodos’s most negative experiences when, under the influence of his shadow, he breaks her “globe” (a passage conveyed in images suggestive of rape). This negative event is balanced in the second half of the book by her delivering him from his deathly confinement in a tower. The positive cancels out the negative, her disinterested action freeing him from the “shadow” which initially provoked his violence against her. Each negative has its positve counterpart and vice-versa, the implication being that both experiences are necessary for their transcendence. Anodos’s singing into being of the elusive and ideal marble lady has its sinister counterpart in the same singing into being of the horrific and destructive Alder-maiden. So too, his seduction by the Alder-maid is balanced in the second half by his refusal to be seduced by the goblin woman underground. [45] As MacDonald expresses this principle elsewhere: “Our human life is often, at best, but an oscillation between the extremes which together make the truth.”7 Anodos too recognises its importance when, in the Fairy Palace, he finds himself: trying to find the root of a manifestaton, the spiritual truth whence a material vision sprang; or to combine two propositions, both apparently true, either at once or in different remembered moods, and to find the point in which their invisibly converging lines would unite in one, revealing a truth higher than either and differing from both; though so far from being opposed to either, that it was that whence each derived its life and power. (95) Thus Phantastes reveals a network of interradiating contrasts and parallels, within sections, between sections, and between first and second halves, such as no critic has begun fully to elaborate, and these parallels function on major and minor levels. Goblins in a desert region of rocks mock Anodos as he approaches the baptismal experience in which the magic boat carries him to the Fairy Palace. When cast out of that palace he returns to a parallel “country of rock” (158) underground and is tormented again by malevolent goblins, an experience which leads into his second major baptismal rite of passage when carried in the second magic boat to the island cottage. Add to these structural devices MacDonald’s recurring use of key symbols such as water, music, statues, mirrors, caves and shadows, and one has some idea of how complex this work is. Even a minor image such as the beech tree slips in and out of the text until by the final scene it carries associations of profound significance. One of the most interesting aspects of MacDonald’s organisation of Phantastes is the way in which he plays with notions of fiction and reality, and how they relate to each other and to us the readers.
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