At the risk of massive over-simplification, the English children's fantasy novel tends to come in one of three forms, to which I propose to give the pompous titles of the Fantasy Heroic, the Fantasy Comic and the Fantasy Psychological. It is my thesis that we should be grateful to America for giving us a fourth form: the Fantasy Philosophical.
I'll start with the three characteristically English versions. First, in the Fantasy Heroic, the characters have fantastic powers or circumstances which are employed in a struggle worthy of their fantastic character, often to defeat evil and save the world. The Narnia and Harry Potter books are good examples of this, and I think Peter Pan fits here too, albeit a little unhappily. Insofar as The Lord of the Rings is a book for children, it belongs here, as does The Hobbit. And of course we have The Dark is Rising and any number of lower-budget offerings in a similar vein. There is often no shortage of ideas in a story of this kind but they tend to be implicit or allegorical rather than openly stated (it is famously possible for a child to read all of the Narnia books without even thinking about Christianity), and if one character does sit down to expound an idea to another then it will tend to be a purely moral one (e.g. standing up to our enemies takes courage but standing up to our friends takes more). Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it's a little different from what we are coming to a little later.
Second, we have the Fantasy Comic. The Fantasy Comic takes characters with fantastic powers or circumstances and then delights in putting them incongrously into everyday life. Five Children and It is the classic example of this: children have magical powers at their disposal, but have to navigate a grumpy fairy with a prickly ego to get to them, and generally find that using those powers gets them into scrapes. Mary Poppins is another example: infinite power is employed in making the lives of an upper-middle class family slightly more comfortable. There is something of this, in mood at least, to The Sword in the Stone and The Wind in the Willows. (There is a Max Beerbohm short story featuring authors who have written A Faun in the Cotswolds and Ariel in Mayfair: one knows just what kinds of merry havoc these creatures wrought on the ordered lives of the good people of Edwardian England.) This kind of fantasy can be charming if it 'comes off' but can perhaps exemplify the kind of English lack of seriousness that so infuriates foreigners. At any rate, to the extent that it includes ideas, they are taken to be already in the minds of the educated reader and ripe for being played with; ideas are for amusement rather than anything to worry about.
Finally, we have the Fantasy Psychological. This involves characters in a world that works, if it works at all, on something akin to dream logic, or stories where it is not clear what is really going on, but the suggestion is that it is something to do with the darker reaches of the psyche. The Alice books belong here, as do Where The Wild Things Are and perhaps also The Cat in the Hat. Lear's nonsense - an overt turning against sense and logic - is a touchstone. (Peter Pan is not really a book of this kind, but the elements of it that disturb and delight are: a dog nanny, Pan's shadow, the clock ticking, the Lost Boys, never growing up.) Again, there are ideas in these books, but they are more psychological than philosophical, and they tend not to be openly stated. Lewis Carroll was a mathematical logician and perfectly capable of addressing philosophical ideas openly in a manner suitable to children (I recall once reading a cleverly done dialogue, perhaps between Zeno and his tortoise?, which I am sure was by him about the ever-increasing premises needed to establish the validity of modus ponens), but we see very little of that in Alice.
So, those are our English approaches to fantasy. The Americans too have plenty to contribute to those approaches. A Wizard of Earthsea is the American Fantasy Heroic in book form (Le Guin is capable of philosophical stories - see Omelas - but Earthsea is not one of them), and American comic books and films are perfectly happy with that theme as well. The Fantasy Comic is well-supported by Edward Eager, and I have already mentioned a couple of American books in setting out the Fantasy Psychological above.
But American fantasy adds a distinctive further dimension. Let us take The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Phantom Tollbooth, two well-established classics known also on this side of the Atlantic, to which I will add The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban and The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, neither of which I had heard of until very recently but each of which has its own following. These are all examples of the Fantasy Philosophical, that is to say, a fantasy novel in which more or less philosophical - and not merely moral - concepts are openly discussed.
Let's start with Oz. This features characters who want a heart, a brain and courage. That is to say, the concepts are there in plain sight; there's no hinting, no allusions, no English skirting around the themes. Big Ideas with a capital B and a capital I, sitting right there on the page, with no escape for the child reading the story. And so the story goes until we reach the Wizard himself, the great man who is a humbug, the nothing behind the curtain - an openly philosophical invention. You can derive a merely moral lesson from the revelation of the Wizard of Oz, but there is much more to think about, to do with authority and knowledge and belief and politics and so on.
Tollbooth is perhaps the clearest example of all: a much-loved children's story which is about uniting Rhyme and Reason with the help of a Dodecahedron and other such characters (such as the shortest giant and tallest dwarf), and features an exploration of phrases such as "jumping to conclusions" and "eating one's words". It is all done in a light and comic fashion, but it is straightforwardly about mathematical and linguistic concepts.
Mouse is a little different. For those of you who don't know it, it's a 'toys come to life and have adventures' kind of story, albeit of a superior kind. In it we find political thinking (one character explains what one's "territory" is: "It's where everything smells right. It's where you know the runways and hideouts, night or day. It's what you fought for, or what your father fought for, and you feel all safe and strong there. It's the place where, when you fight, you win"), a character who deals with Pure and Applied Thought, another who has proved that everywhere is the same, and our heroes have to look beyond infinity and beyond nothingness. As with Tollbooth, albeit with a more serious tone and, paradoxically, in perhaps a more playful way, all of this is made patent to the reader. And just as with Oz, the reader can't leave the concepts behind and 'just enjoy the story': the concepts are part of the story.
Finally, Unicorn. I should explain that everything I know about this book and film comes from this careful, intelligent and only intermittently silly video essay. The story, for those of you who don't know it, is a 'set in a magical mediaeval neverland' kind of fantasy involving witches, wizards and, as the title suggests, a unicorn. The concepts that are openly explored here concern, in particular, time, immortality and death. I'll give some examples:
- We have a couple of mortal baddies who seek immortality in different ways. One is a witch who has captured two immortal creatures, the eponymous unicorn and a harpy, and says this of the harpy: "oh, she'll kill me one day or another, but she will remember forever that I caught her, that I held her prisoner - so there's my immortality". The other is an sub-Robin Hood outlaw who is intent on capturing his name in ballads that he writes about himself: "One always hopes, of course, even now - to be collected, to be verified, annotated, to have variant versions, even to have one's authenticity doubted." (Ah, there's immortality - to have variant versions of oneself!)
- The immortal unicorn at one point becomes a mortal woman and immediately feels herself dying - our essayist (at the link) is reminded of Heidegger and the confrontation with mortality. A wizard (who has had immortality thrust upon him) opines that beauty requires death, while the unicorn feels that nothing that dies can be beautiful.
- At one point, a skeleton says this: "When I was alive, I believed - as you do - that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said 'one o'clock' as though I could see it, and 'Monday' as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year's Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls." What is the child reading this to think about Time? Something, at least. The Big Idea is squarely stated and openly up for grabs.
My point is not to look at the quality of this philosophical thinking - although I would say that the examples I have given are all worth a thinking child's time and attention - but rather just to marvel that it is there, in such rich volume, in classic works of American children's literature from 1900 (Oz) to 1982 (the film of Unicorn), and I am sure beyond those dates in both directions too. This is quite different from the English tradition. Terry Pratchett became confident at throwing in a Big Idea from time to time but never, I think, quite as openly as the American tradition: his treatment of themes such as Death, 'headology', glamour and tradition is intelligent but has an English kind of plausible deniability ("I was only joking!") that the American books do not. I recall a character in one of the Narnia books saying, "in our world, stars are just balls of gas", to which the response was, "no, even in your world, that is only what they are made of", but dialogue of that kind is rare. Philip Pullman's books perhaps come closest, but I think even they prioritise plot, allegory and allusion over people worrying out loud about Big Ideas in the way the Americans do, and they are keen on hammering home moral lessons rather than, say, thoughts about infinity.
Why should this be? One might suggest that the greater earnestness or seriousness of the intelligent American writer inclines him against the slightness and knowingness of the Fantasy Comic and makes him more ready to deal with big questions head on. But I wouldn't put too much weight on that idea. The British sci-fi author - at least in his incarnation as Arthur C. Clarke - has been happy to put his Big Ideas face-up on the page, and I can't see why fantasy should be so very different; and JK Rowling (for one) is not lacking in seriousness or earnestness. "Seriousness" is the wrong word anyway: all of the four American books I have mentioned are openly comic or humorous to a greater or lesser extent.
So I don't have an explanation. But, whatever the reason, it is, I think, very much to the benefit of children everywhere that the Americans plough (or plow) this furrow (or furrough). There are many things that should be kept out of children's reach, but not, I think, the biggest questions of philosophy.
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