Carroll and Gleim: ‘Life, what is it but a dream?’

 

Through the Looking-Glass (1871), that famous dream-narrative, ends with this acrostic poem:

A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July—

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear—

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die.
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream?

I think this poem, and especially its famous last line, is Carroll's version of a poem by celebrated eighteenth-century German poet, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, ‘Das Leben ist ein Traum’ (1784). We know Carroll spoke German, or at least that he worked at it: Robert D. Sutherland [Language and Lewis Carroll (The Hague: Mouton 1970), 40] quotes various diary entries to that effect (‘learn Prendergast's German hand-book’ and so on), and says: ‘that Carroll desired to achieve competence in French and German is apparent from his dogged perseverance in studying them ... for the better part of thirty years’. And in his day, Gleim was one of the most famous German poets. Here's ‘Das Leben ist ein Traum’:

Das Leben ist ein Traum!
Wir schlüpfen in die Welt und schweben
Mit jungem Zahn
Und frischem Gaum
Auf ihrem Wahn
Und ihrem Schaum,
Bis wir nicht mehr an Erde kleben:
Und dann, was ist’s, was ist das Leben?
Das Leben ist ein Traum!

Das Leben ist ein Traum:
Wir lieben, uns’re Herzen schlagen,
Und Herz an Herz
Gefüget kaum,
Ist Lieb’ und Scherz
Ein leerer Schaum,
Ist hingeschwunden, weggetragen!
Was ist das Leben? hör ich fragen:
Das Leben ist ein Traum.

Das Leben ist ein Traum!
Wir denken, zweifeln, werden Weise;
Wir teilen ein
In Art und Raum,
In Licht und Schein,
In Kraut und Baum,
Studieren und gewinnen Preise;
Dann, nah` am Grabe, sagen Greise:
Das Leben ist ein Traum!

Here's my English version:

Life is but a dream!
We slip into the world and float
With baby teeth
And eager gum
On dream-life's fleet
Drifting foam,
Til we no longer clasp the Earth:
And then, what is it, what is this Life?
Life is but a dream!

Life is but a dream:
We love, our hearts quickened,
As heart to heart
Barely join
In Love and Play
Turn but to foam
All gone, and washed away!
What is this life? I am questioned:
Life is but a dream.

Life is but a dream!
We ponder, study, we grow wise;
We share our stories
On Form, on Space,
On Light and Gleam,
On Plant and Tree,
Studying, we win the prize;
And, nearing death, the old ones deem:
Life is but a dream!

It's not just the refrain of this poem, but the imagery of the river, flowing with bubbles (Schaum, foam), that runs through it. The first five stanza's of Carroll poem owe little to Gleim, it's true: here he elaborates the specifics of his trip up the Thames with the three Liddell girls, and the ‘phantomwise’ vision of Alice herself—although that word contains, I'd argue, a kind of Gleim-y pun: phantomwise means both ‘affecting me as a phantom’ and also ‘wise in her phantom-ness’, that is: achieving the wisdom (Gleim's line 20, Weise) that is the poem's main theme: life is nothing but this phantom, this vision, this dream. And the final two stanzas of Carroll's poem strike me as a compacted gloss upon, or version of, Gleim's lyric.

Grimm

This morning’s lucubrations on Grimm. I’m not proposing to review Pullman’s new ‘retelling’ of the Grimms (Penguin 2012)—beyond saying that I think he does a good job. He writes cleanly and vividly, and concentrates (rightly, I think) always on the story. The retellings come with little afternotes that give just enough bibliographic detail; whether, for instance, the version he uses comes from the Grimms’ first edition of 1812, or the more elaborated second edition of 1819. And he has some sensible things to say in his introduction.

The serious student of Grimm (the grim student of seriousness) will probably want to buy this Routledge Classics edition—but Pullman will reach a far wider audience, and I for one am glad of that.

If not a review, then what? Well: I’m going to engage in some thinking aloud about Grimms’ fairy tales in general, and certain specific tales in particular. Today I want to think about Snow White (no relation to Breaking Bad's Walter I assume). But first, a message from our sponsor.


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Our sponsor in this case is the broad theoretical frame for any larger study of Childrens’ Literature. Maybe I should write a book. Maybe I will. And if I do, it will start with Romanticism.

This may look shortsighted of me. People (of course) have had children ever since there have been people; and for all of human history people have loved their children, and cared for them, and told them stories. In one sense, clearly, Grimm represents a kind of pay-off to a millennial-old culture of oral storytelling for children. Nonetheless, something happens to ‘Childrens’ Literature’ in the 19th-, and to a much greater degree in the 20th-, centuries. Partly this has to do with the printed-text bias of University Literature courses—you’re much more likely to find university courses on medieval Arthurian Literature (which, because it was aimed at posh nobs, tended to be written down) than on Robin Hood (largely oral, largely working class), not because the former has had a greater cultural significance than the latter, but because we need texts to work from when we teach. So, literacy becomes a widespread matter in the later 19th-century, and then there’s this new market (kids) you can sell books to and, presto!, a whole flood of books appears.

But there’s another factor here, which is the way the Romantic period reconceptualised the child. I haven’t space here to expatiate on this important point with anything approaching nuance, so I’ll limit myself to sweeping generalisations. Before the later eighteenth-century such literature as was specifically aimed at children (and there wasn’t much) was almost all didactic in purpose. The point was to educate, not to entertain; to educate either practically --

Or morally:

Or perhaps behaviourally:

This in turn reflected a culture in which infants were defined via notions of ‘original sin’ as creatures who needed a firm hand to ensure they grew up correctly: spare the rod and spoil the child and so on. If we are liable to look down our sophisticated 21st-century noses at the crudity of this approach—and I readily admit it to be a caricature of what was, in practice, a much more varied complex of attitudes to childhood—then we should at least have the courtesy to bear in mind the social and therefore emotional context of this world. In 16th- and 17th century Europe, 60% of children died before their sixteenth birthday. I’m going to repeat that datum, because it is so gobsmacking. In the 16th- and 17th century, 60% of children died before their sixteenth birthday. There is nowhere on Earth today—not Somalia, not Afghanistan, not the most war-torn or AIDS-blighted portion of third world that even approaches that level of infant mortality. It quite literally defeats my imagination, trying to think myself back into it. How could parents do anything other than grieve, over and over again? And by the same token, how could parents invest emotionally in the future of their children in such a world without being driven mad? Infant mortality rates improved a little in the nineteenth-century, but really not by much. It is not until right at the end of the century when we realised the twin causes for this massacre of the innocents (nutrition and, above all, infection) and were able to do something about it. One of the most massive and yet unremarked revolutions of the 20th century has been the heroic reductions in infant mortality, down to levels where I, as a parent of two children (and however much I naturally fret and worry) have the reasonable (touch wood) expectation they will survive to adulthood. One thing this does is make you rethink the tendency of families to be so much larger back then. If 17th-century me had wanted to have what 21st-century takes for granted—namely, the reasonable hope that I shall see two children grown up—he would have had to father six kids.

Anyway, for whatever complex of reasons, attitudes to children began to change in the later eighteenth-century in ways that flowered in the Romantic period. The main motor here was Rousseau, who insisted that the doctrine of original sin mischaracterised children. Children were not born corrupt; they were born innocent, pure, even holy; it was life—and especially city life—that corrupted them. This trope of the child as holy innocent has Biblical provenance, and Rousseau’s ideas chimed with what was in the 18th-century cutting edge philosophy of mind (Locke’s tabula rasa and so on). Still, it went through the Romantic art like wildfire. This is one of Blake’s core themes. This is the red, beating heart of all that is great and worthwhile about Wordsworth—read his Immortality Ode, surely the single most potent and influential restatement of this Rousseauian idea. This is what Coleridge kept coming back to. Children were more than just seeds that would one day grow into grownups. They came trailing their own clouds of glory.

One consequence of this was that, slowly, culture stopped seeing children in instrumental terms and began seeing them as locuses of value in their own right. By the former I mean: that tendency (still prevalent) to see kids as on their way somewhere important—adulthood—but not there yet. To treat them as not-yet people, and to gear their education and treatment to that end. It’s really not until Romanticism that an alternative mode of ‘reading’ childhood comes into play: the idea that ‘the child is father to the man’ in the sense of assuming a kind of spiritual and personal priority. The idea that we adults can learn something important from kids.

Now ‘innocence’, which becomes something like a cultic quality in relation to childhood around this time, and which still exerts a colossal cultural pull on the way we regard children today, is not a straightforward Good. In some respects of course we want to ‘protect’ our kids from ‘corruption’ by the world; we want to preserve their ‘innocence’. But in another way innocence is merely a synonym for ignorance; and ignorance is a Bad Thing. This, actually (to drag this blogpost back to its actual theme) is one of the things Philip Pullman has often talked about; and one of the main themes of his Dark Materials trilogy.

Much of this preamble is only glancingly relevant to a discussion of Die Gebrüder Grimm; except to say that the huge and lasting impact that their Kinder- und Hausmärchen undeniably had was a function of two main cultural forces. One was a new interest in the child as such. The other, also relevant, was a Europe-wide surge of interest in land, history and folk-art, which in turn was a function of nascent nationalism. The myriad German statelets were starting the long process of coalescence; a fascination with the roots of specifically German folk was part of that. Something similar happened across the continent, but its particular social acuity in Germany is one reason why it is the German versions of these (often) universal stories that have been set as the default versions.

One more point about the German-ness of these märchen (bearing in mind that my focus is English rather than Continental literature) is the way the Germanic played in a wider Romantic context. Here is a quotation from Marilyn Butler’s excellent Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760-1830 (Oxford 1981). Butler explores what she sees as an ideological division in 1810s/1820s English writing between a ‘right-wing’ reactionary Germanic-influenced tradition and a ‘left-wing’ liberal classical emphasis on the Mediterranean. She discusses De Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1810)—which praises German culture ‘as a rallying-point for opposition to Napoleon’: ‘Europe had two dominant cultural traditions: the classical, Mediterranean inheritance, perfectly expressed in comedy, and culminating in a predominantly French modern classicism; and the Northern or Germanic alternative.’

The German races did not organise themselves into large states. Man was isolated in very small communities, effectively on his own and dwarfed among the vast, oppressive, unmastered phenomena of Nature. He was obliged to look inward for inspiration, or upward to the mountains or to God. The literature of the North accordingly became introspective, pessimistic and essentially religious. Its religion was not social but individual, an intense unfulfilled aspiration which was perfectly expressed in Gothic architecture, or in the passionate irregularity of Shakespearian tragedy. The Northern or Romantic tradition (which as Madame de Staël makes plain is the unified culture of the Germans and the English, Napoleon’s leading enemies) has become the most vital and imaginative intellectual force of the present day. [120]

My sense is that Butler slightly overstates her ideological perspective (‘no disinterested exegesis of contemporary German literature or philosophy –nothing that separated [it] out … from the now triumphant cause of the extreme Right’) by way of explaining why the younger, liberal or radical writers (Byron, Shelley and Keats) gravitated so enthusiastically towards classical Greek and Roman literature. But nonetheless there’s something important, here, I think in the way Grimm ‘worked’, certainly for the first few generations of readers through the 19th-century, and arguably further into the 20th- and 21st-centuries too. These are not ideologically neutral texts.


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Enough preambling. Back to Pullman, and thence to Snow White. It’s clear from his introduction and notes that Pullman has not only worked from the original German, but has inflected his translations via a number of big name figures in the history of Fairy Tale criticism: Bruno Bettelheim, with his Freudian readings of these stories as symbolic narratives; the prolific Jack Zipes, who amongst other things recontextualises these stories in their original modes of cultural production, stressing things like rural poverty and suspicion of the ruling classes (that makes Zipes sound rather more Marxist than he actually is; and I suppose his main focus is on—to quote the title of his 2006 book—‘What Makes Fairy Tales Stick’); Marina Warner, with her very popular accounts of fairy tales as feminised discourses to do with culture power.

Pullman’s introduction makes a number of claims about the form. Here’s one:

There is no psychology in a fairy tale. The characters have little interior life; their motives are clear and obvious. If people are good they are good, and if they are bad they’re bad. Even when the princess in ‘The Three Snake Leaves’ inexplicably and ungratefully turns against her husband we know about it from the moment it happens. Nothing of that sort is concealed. The tremors and mysteries of human awareness, the whispers of memory, the promptings of half-understood regret or doubt or desire that are so much part of the subject matter of the modern novel are absent entirely. One might almost say that the characters in a fairy tale are not actually conscious. [xiii]

We see what he means, but surely this is wrong. It is one thing to say that these characters are not interiorised—clearly they are not, any more than the characters in Dickens or Star Wars. It is quite another to say that this mode is incapable of apprehending psychological complexity, for clearly it is so capable. Fairy tales characters don’t have psychological depth; they are psychological depth. ‘The Three Snake Leaves’ is a fascinating case in point: because there seems to me something psychologically very acute in the princess’s emotional volte face. The nameless hero of that story is poor man’s son whose bravery wins the approval of the king. He marries the king’s daughter despite her rather extreme insistence that any husband of hers must promise to be buried in the ground with her corpse in the event she predeceases him. When she does die, off the hero goes, into the tomb with her, ready to die. But thanks to the titular snake-leaves (I won’t go into details) he is able to revive his wife. After her joyful reunion with her father, she agrees to travel overseas to meet her husband’s father.

But once at sea she forgot the great devotion the young man had shown her, because she felt a lust growing in her for the captain of the ship. Nothing would satisfy her but to sleep with him, and soon they were lovers. One night in his arms she whispered, “Oh, if only my husband were dead! What a marriage we two would make!” [89]

I shan’t spoil the ending. My point is twofold. One is that this is, psychologically speaking, very acute. You (yes, I’m talking to you) are a woman not unusually wicked of heart or perverse, and you are loved by a man who adores you, is stupidly devoted to you, would gladly lay down his life for you. Maybe this flatters you, and maybe you respond to his love. But there’s something, shall we say, sappy about that level of devotion. Isn’t there? Maybe we think Rory’s undying love for Amy Pond is sweet and touching, but we can also see that Rory is ... well, he's a bit of a dweeb, really. That doesn't mean that we don't love him, in a way. But it also doesn’t mean there’s anything illogical about falling for a more forceful individual should we happen upon him. Sexual desire, famously, doesn’t run along the neatly scooped out channels of Social Propriety or even of Individual Moral Obligation. That, in part, is what ‘The Three Snake Leaves’ is about; and the fact that the princess is eventually punished doesn’t deflect that. Somebody performing ‘undying love’ may be flattering, but it is also weirdly emotionally constricting. It is a type of over-performance that, in its way, is as offputting as active hostility. The shine goes off it surprisingly quickly, and -- oh, look! Here's this handsome ship captain!

Two is, I think, even more interesting. Some years back I read this story to my 11-year old daughter, and afterwards we had a really interesting discussion about it, focussing on the princess’s change of heart. Was it (my daughter wondered) that it was coming back from the dead that changed the princess’s heart? Did the revival via the magic snake leaves entail a kind of zombification of the heart? Because if so, the hero—who is killed by his wife and the ship captain, and then revived using the same leaves by his faithful servant—would be in the same situation, wouldn't he? But how could he be, and still be the hero? The point here, of course, is the one famously developed in the opening chapter of Auerbach’s still-essential, magisterial Mimesis book. Auerbach contrasts the detail-rich, digressive, immersive mode of storytelling mimesis in Homer’s Odyssey with the more pared-down, elliptical mode of the story of Abraham and Isaac in the Bible; and part of his point is that, perhaps counterintuitively, the latter mode is more engaging and evocative. But, look: I don’t want to insult you by implying that you haven’t read Mimesis.

So, yes, I’m not disagreeing with Pullman when he says that the characters in fairy tales are ‘flat, not round’; only with his imputation that—as with Dickens—this is in any way to the detriment of the stories’ abilities to excavate profound truths of human psychology.

They seldom have names of their own. More often than not they’re known by their occupation or their social position, or by a quirk of their dress: the miller, the princess, the captain; Bearskin; Little Red Riding Hood. When they do have a name it’s usually Hans, just as Jack is the hero of every British fairy tale. [xiv]

Fair enough. Pullman dilates interestingly upon this point, actually.

Some of the characters in fairy tales come in sets of multiples. The twelve brothers of the story of that name, the twelve princesses in ‘The Shoes That Danced Themselves To Pieces’, the seven dwarfs in the story of Snow White … Realism cannot cope with the notion of multiples; the twelve princesses who go out every night and dance their shoes to pieces, the seven dwarfs all asleep in their beds side by side, exist in another realm altogether, between the uncanny and the absurd. [xiv]

This is a good point, I think. It’s symptomatic that one of the ways Disney adapts Snow White into his (peerless) film version is, precisely, to individuate the seven. It works, in a way—though, that said, how many of you can recite all seven names straight off? I'm sure some of you could do it; but more, I'd wager would go: ‘er, Sleepy, Dopey, Doc, er, Gum-, er, Grumpy, he’s one, er, er, Blinky? Is it? Jockey. Is that seven? [counts on fingers] four, five six … and Kylie. That’s it.’ Be honest.


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So finally I work my way around to Snow White. It’s a story so desperately familiar that precis is unnecessary. Pullman tells it well, with a brisk opening straight out of the original:

One winter’s day, when the snowflakes were falling like feathers, a queen sat sewing at her window, which had a frame of the blackest ebony. She opened the window to look at the sky, and as she did so she pricked her finger, and three drops of blood fell into the snow on the windowsill. The red and the white looked so beautiful together that she said to herself ‘I wish I had a child as white as snow, as red as blood and as black as the wood in the window frame.’ And soon afterwards she had a little daughter; and she was as white as snow and as red as blood and as black as ebony, so they called her Little Snow White. [206]

'As soon as the baby was born’ the story continues, ‘the queen died.’ Pullman notes: ‘In the Grimms’ first edition of 1812 the wicked queen was Snow White’s mother. She didn’t become a stepmother until the second edition of 1819.’ There is an evasion here in the Grimm retelling, a sort of symbolic splitting that is at root (of course) psychological. Marina Warner is good on this semantic strategy, as a way by which the interpolated female reader can simultaneously work through her feelings of frustration and anger with her mother without having to sacrifice her self-constructing sense that she loves her mother. Pullman adds: ‘what happened to her father? Dim, faint and sketchy, like many of the males in Grimm he was simply obliterated by the power of the monstrous queen.’ Modern versions often make this explicit: the king is already dead (in the recent motion picture Snow White and the Huntsman she is murdered by the wicked queen on their wedding night as part of an explicit military putsch), or away—in Sarah Pinborough’s retelling, Poison (2013) he is away on a conveniently prolonged military campaign in a distant country, giving his second wife free rein. But then again, Pinborough’s retelling opens with the wicked queen giving the compliant King a blow-job, which in turn highlights an important focus of the original tale. Why does it matter so much to the Wicked Queen that she is so beautiful? Or more specifically, that she is the most beautiful, that she can brook no competition, even to the point of attempting to murder her own (adopted) child rather than be outshone? The implication in Pinborough’s retelling is that we have to read ‘beauty’ more specifically as ‘sexual allure’, and that in the patriarchal world of the tale it is only by exploiting such allure that a women can get on in the world. This is (using the same word twice in one blog post! Tch!) to instrumentalise the fairy tale’s focus on ‘beauty’.

Now I’m not saying Pinborough’s interpretation doesn’t make sense; because it does. And, speaking personally, I’m with Woody Allen on the relative degrees of attractiveness of Snow White herself and the Wicked Queen.

But I wonder if there’s something else here. I don’t say so to knock Pinborough’s retelling, which I enjoyed reading. It is not so plain as Pullman’s (of course), and it adds in three things in particular: one, a kind of intertetuxality, where various other fairy tales intrude, Shrek-like, into the fabric of Snow White; two a sort of plain humour (Snow White, needing a partner for the ball, gets the seven dwarfs to stand on top of one another and puts a big coat over them); and three, well, sex. The sex is not especially explicit in Poision, and it manifests something very clearly latent in the original story, as in most fairy tales. Pinborough’s ancestor here is Angela Carter, and if Carter’s retellings have rather more eerie force to them than Poison that in part is a function of audience. Pinborough combines fairy tale and sex not for straightforward pornographic reasons, but to bridge precisely that readerly gap between the sexual ignorant reading of fairy tales of the very young, and the sexually knowing reading of grown-ups like Angela Carter. Still, the Wicked Queen is surely the most interesting figure in this story. Here she is, in Pullman’s version, with her mirror.

‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Who in this land is the fairest of all?’
‘Your majesty, you are still lovely, it’s true,
But Snow White is a thousand times fairer than you.’

She recruits the huntsman to kill Snow White; when he can’t bring himself to do it he kills a boar and brings back its lungs and liver. ‘The cook was ordered to season them well, dredge them in flour and fry them, and the wicked queen ate them all up. And that she thought was the end of Snow White.’ It’s not, of course; wandering in the forest our heroine is taken in by the dwarfs, who love her, and for whom she keeps house. The Wicked Queen learns of the failure of her attempt to kill of her rival via the magic mirror.

‘Your majesty, you are still lovely, it’s true,
But far far away in the forest so deep
Where she lives with the dwarfs since they found her asleep
Snow White is a thousand times fairer than you.’

‘The queen recoiled in horror!’ So she tries three times to kill Snow White herself, failing twice and each time being informed of her failure by the mirror. The third attempt (the poisoned apple) succeeds; the grieving dwarfs put Snow White in a glass coffin and then the prince comes along, dislodges the apple from Snow White’s throat and marries her. The story ends with the Wicked Queen learning from her mirror that this new ‘young queen’ is the fairest in the kingdom. ‘The wicked queen gasped with horror. She was so frightened, so terrified, that she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to go to the wedding and she didn’t want to stay away.’ She goes, and this is what happens to her:

A pair of iron shoes had already been placed in the fire. When they were red-hot they were brought out with tongs and placed on the floor. And the wicked queen was made to step into them, and dance until she fell down dead. [218]

Ow. That's exactly how the original ends, too.

I’m going to say something rather obvious about the Wicked Queen now. She is a narcissist. Her magic mirror is the story’s way of focussing this aspect of her (the mirror is the narcissist’s prime tool); as is the weirdly unexplained absence of her husband, the king—it is not that he is away, or dead, it is only that the Queen has no need of him, psychologically speaking. Her self-love is all the love she needs. This is also what is so upsetting for her about Snow White: merely the fact of her, and that her beauty interferes with the perfect expression of her own narcissism.

Now the one thing that especially interests me about the Wicked Queen’s narcissism is that the story explicitly connects it with notions of omniscience. The Queen’s mirror both reinforces her own sense of her own perfect beauty, and grants her a magically panoptic knowledge of everything in the world. That she only ever uses this magical ability to reinforce her own narcissistic self-obsession is entirely in keeping with her personality.

The default position in our culture about narcissism is that it’s a bad thing. As Adam Phillips puts it, ‘scrutiny of the self, but not celebration or adoration of the self’ has been ‘integral’ to our Judeo-Christian culture. As he goes on to note, the actual status of narcissism is more complex.

Great claims, either positive or negative, are always made on narcissism’s behalf … Do “creative artists” need to be narcissistic, or is that what they suffer from, or both? Is masturbation bad for people because it doesn’t involve other people? Are we primarily interested in other people, so that self-preoccupation is a symptom of thwarted involvements, or are we essentially self-involved creatures interrupted, every so often, by our unavoidable dependence on others? [Philips, Promises, Promises (Faber 2000), 201]

These are, as Philips notes, ‘the old questions’ and carry ‘oppressive historical baggage’. One need not follow Philips down into his complicated post-Laplanchean, post-Symingtonian meditations on the matter to say (a) that Snow White is also about the positivity and negativity of narcissism, about artistry—the Queen is an artist of wicked ingenuity (disguising, acting, planning and plotting) to Snow White’s blankly passive housewifeliness—and about, in a way, masturbation; and (b) that these are questions that have peculiar bite for children as they mature through adolescence and into the world. But then this oughtn’t to surprise us.

The story says: narcissism is selfish, and cruel, and will be punished. But the story also says: narcissism is sexier than selflessness (Woody surely has it right, here). This is because narcissism is more focussed than the alternative: Snow White’s encounter with those, as Pullman notes, clone-line unindividuated seven dwarfs says something like this. As if the tale is a symbolic narrative that moves from childhood to married adulthood only via a sort of emotionally disintegrated dissipation of attachment seven ways. We might imagine (as Pinborough does) Snow White having sex with the huntsman; we don’t imagine her having sex with any of the dwarfs. I wonder why not?

Interview with Will Wiles

[Will Wiles is the London-based author of The Care of Wooden Floors (2012), The Way Inn (2014) and Plume (2019) and now, as ‘W. P. Wiles’, the first volume in a marvellous Fantasy series, The Last Blade Priest. I first got to know him after reading The Way Inn, his expertly written, coolly brilliant topographical fantasia set in the fictitious chain hotel of its title (‘Terence Conran meets HP Lovecraft, Bulgakov staged in the Tate, Kafka as a new Ikea furniture range’ is how the Guardian described the book). When I needed a chain hotel location for my novel The Thing Itself I asked Will’s permission to reuse the brand, and he kindly agreed. Plume, a barbed and vivid journey through contemporary London, and a superb consideration of addiction, writing and place, confirmed his status as a major contemporary writer.

I knew about his love for classic Fantasy, and was able to read The Last Blade Priest in draft, so I wasn’t as surprised as some commentators were by what might look, on the surface, like a change in writerly direction. In fact the things that animate Will’s other books are manifest in this tale too: his superb prose, his fertile, slyly wrongfooting imagination, his engagement and range and potency. There is a kind of architectural solidity to this work (Will also writes, expertly, about contemporary architecture), but his distinctive skill is in the twist he gives to the realities he shares with us. Last Blade Priest is, in short, a great Fantasy novel, and I can’t wait for the next volume in the series. Because I rate the novel so highly, and as I’m working on a critical history of Fantasy, I wanted to ask him a few questions: about the book, and about Fantasy more broadly. In sum: buy his book !— links are at the bottom of the post.]

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AR: Let’s start with Fantasy. I’m curious what your perspective on the mode is, and how you see Last Blade Priest fitting into that tradition. It’s not — it seems to me — a particularly trope-y novel, where Fantasy is concerned: you don’t simply deploy those Tolkien/Dungeons and Dragons fixtures and fittings, heroic men, noble elves, stalwart dwarfs, evil orcs, mysterious wizards. Your elves are rather alarming, for one thing. And you have the Scary Big Birds. And a giant mountain that is also an actual god. Did you set out to thwart the expectations of genre cliché when you wrote this novel?
 
 WW: I started writing The Last Blade Priest as a palate-cleansing kind of exercise, hoping to reinvigorate my writing in general by doing something that was purely for my amusement. I deliberately set out to do something which was very much in the fantasy tradition — an homage really. And one thing I was very certain that I didn’t want to do, this time anyway, was subvert anything — I didn’t want to do “a literary take on” fantasy, I didn’t want to play with irony or allegory, I didn’t want to timeslip or worldslip, and so on.

It annoys me when literary authors venture into SF&F and have to go through all these distancing rituals to explain that their stuff isn’t like that other stuff — which often has more to do with marketing and the way space is organised in bookshops than “snobbery”, although snobbery often does play a part. I wanted something that was “pure” fantasy, and shelved that way. I love novels that genre-bend and play games with readers’ boundary expectations — I’ve written at least one [2014’s The Way Inn] — but that was not what I wanted to do here.

However I did want to avoid cliches and anything that’s tired, so I did have a list of things I wasn’t going to do: no dragons. None of the “traditional” fantasy “races” — chiefly Elves, Dwarves, Orcs. (My Elves are Elves in name only). No “chosen one”*, no prophecies**, no secret/unsuspecting royal birth. I would try to find a “middle way” with my magic: it would have serious limitations and rules and not be soft do-anything magic, but it wouldn’t have pedantic, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying type rules with entirely predictable inputs and outputs. Do-anything magic can be a narrative problem in all sorts of ways, and nerdy rules-based “hard” magic can be interesting but I feel on an emotional level that magic should be wild and paradoxical and mysterious and have unintended consequences.

[* Arguably Anton breaks this rule but he’s not the messiah, just someone who’s passed vetting.]

[** Arguably I break this rule as well in a very small way but the important thing is there aren’t widely known & believed, legendary prophecies in the world and the magic users do not have the gift of foresight. (Sometimes insight.) It’s not that I dislike prophecy as a form of magic — on the contrary, I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on prophecy in the middle ages! — but I find it’s over-used as a way of adding because-I-said-so authority to a plot. That’s what I didn’t want to do]

For my races, besides the Elves, I tried to think of “fantasy” creatures that weren’t much used. Knomes are abominable snowmen, but of course you can’t call them that without making people smile, so I didn’t. (They were called yetis, or a similar word identifiable as yeti, in the earliest sketches, but that had the same issue.) Bindlings started as mummies but have evolved. I am worried I am sandblasting away layers of mystique here and leaving behind Abbott & Costello so maybe I should stop. And of course there’s the Custodians: obviously I like it when their originality is praised but honestly I’m not sure how original they are. They came out of a simple worldbuilding question — what creatures would get to a magic mountain first? — and I also owe a fairly obvious debt to Dark Crystal.

As for “heroic men” — I think flawed heroes, reluctant heroes and antiheroes, and unlikeable dudes just trying to get on in the world, and deliberately hero-less narratives, are almost as tired as “pure” heroes now. Heroism is an incredibly difficult concept to approach originally. The best recent take has been Abercrombie’s in the First Law books, where he has a pretty useless schmuck manipulated by a scheming wizard into looking like Aragorn in the eyes of the world, but only for said wizard’s own ends. Anton has noble qualities that are consistent with “heroism”, and is moreover increasingly aware that he has to be a hero. But a hero is ultimate a man or woman of action, and that’s what he finds difficult.

I digress, sorry. I think calling my antagonists “Elves”, and then settin g up the book so you think “pointy eared immortal snobs” and only see what they really are quite late on, was the only real bit of intentional thwarting of expectations I did. (There was one other way, I suppose: I wanted to start at the end, or rather start in the world’s most important and secret and well-defended location and then work outwards. A more “typical” fantasy narrative would have the Brink and the Mountain — as it might be, Mount Doom, or the Eye of the World — as the destination and narrative climax — which I do, but I also have another narrative that heads out from there. This is not hugely original but it was a governing part of my thinking.) In general my intentions towards the median fantasy reader were less confrontational, I wanted to interest and amuse and avoid the obvious.

In terms of what I wanted to do, the way that I wanted my book (and, I hope, its sequels, if I’m allowed to write them) to fit in with the broader tradition of fantasy: I didn’t really think in terms of a shopping list of tropes, but rather in terms of atmosphere, and how a book makes you feel. Atmosphere and feeling were what I took from my formative reading in the genre, and those are the qualities I wanted to think about in particular and to develop in the prose.

AR: What Fantasy did you read, growing up (and by ‘read’ I mean: read, watch, play). Do you still read Fantasy?

WW: Very mainstream, I think, and typical for a SFF-loving boy of the 1980s. Tolkien at the foundation: My mother read The Hobbit to me and my sister when we were very young indeed. She later loaned me her copies of Lord of the Rings and I read those. In between those I read all of the Narnia books and the Earthsea books. (As an aside, I think it was the seven Narnia books that gave me a taste for the rewards of “the epic” in the conventional blurby sense — the sense of achievement at getting through to The Last Battle.) My father recommended Peake’s Gormenghast novels and I loved the first two of those, hated the third. I read Pratchett and Fighting Fantasy choose-your-own adventures. Richard Adams was also very important: I read Watership Down and Plague Dogs, but also Shardik (my father had a copy), which was strange and thrilling and had a real sense of contact with an unfamiliar world. So my parents did valuable work! I also read William Horwood’s Watership Downalike (Watershipshape?) Duncton Wood books, which I remember enjoying to a surprising degree. I keep thinking of rereading them, but I fear I won’t enjoy them to any degree on a reread, and their memory will be sullied.

After Tolkien I pursued similar books, and I read a few of Brooks’s Shannara novels, a couple of Donaldson’s Illearth books, the first two or three Wheel of Time novels, but at this point I was getting diminishing returns. Brooks was readable but obviously derivative. Donaldson was more original but I found the books repulsive. I gave up on Wheel of Time very quickly because I felt it was just another Brooks-like retread, obviously it became much more its own thing as it went along. This rather put me off fantasy from the age of about eighteen (1996) for about a decade, alongside an entirely mistaken and dumb notion that I should put aside childish things. (Although I kept reading SF — probably revealing some prejudices there, although I have since shed them.) I did read, and greatly enjoyed, Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun in that late teen period of disillusion though. I should also mention HP Lovecraft who I’ve been reading since I was ten or eleven, and who led me to Ashton-Smith, Dunsany, etc etc and their weird fantasy, which is directly referenced in the geography of The Last Blade Priest. The Gothic and “weird” have been huge influences on me but I will go on forever if I get into that. Er, what else? Helliconia, Once and Future King — I can’t list everything but these are things that steered me one way or another.

Beyond books, trying to be as brief as possible: I adored comics and read 2000 AD for years, which had some excellent fantasy, notably Pat Mills’s Sláine and Nemesis the Warlock. I played some Dungeons and Dragons but preferred Warhammer Fantasy Battle, and WH40K, and I read White Dwarf. I think the art in White Dwarf affected me very deeply: Ian Miller, John Blanche, Gary Chalk. Simon Bisley and Mike McMahon’s art for Sláine as well, and Kevin O’Neill art for Nemesis. Art is very important. It’s amazing how a single book cover can lodge in the mind and shape fantasy worlds. I won’t recap all film & TV but I do think some of the stranger, darker cartoons we got to enjoy in the 80s helped a lot: Ulysses 31, Cities of Gold. And in films: we’ve talked about Dark Crystal, also Labyrinth, Laputa, Time Bandits …

AR: I ask this next question with a particular sense of Last Blade Priest in mind. It’s this: what is the proper balance, would you say, in a Fantasy novel between worldbuilding and storytelling/character/everything else? By worldbuilding I suppose I mean not just the geographical and social lineaments of the imagined realm, but coherent (or otherwise) magical systems, or religious systems? You’ve already partly answered this with respect to magic but I wonder about the larger question.

WW: I suppose the simple, true and useless answer is “I don’t know” — I don’t know what the perfect balance is, or even if there is a perfect balance. I certainly doubt there is a single perfect balance, as it must depend on the tastes of the reader as much as anything, and some have a higher tolerance for worldbuilding than others. There are some readers for whom it’s all about the worldbuilding, and they can’t have too much. I think the increasing emphasis on worldbuilding in the discussion around Fantasy is an interesting phenomenon, and possibly stems from this being an age driven by content creation, since world-building provides excellent material for secondary content … here’s everything are told about X (land/religion/magic system/whatever) … here’s what we don’t know, but can infer or speculate about; here’s why X is good … here are the shortcomings of X. Effective worldbuilding would of course seamlessly tie-into story-telling and character and so on, so they aren’t in competition for space on the page and unfold together. That’s the trick, I suppose, not finding a balance but finding a synthesis.

A very similar question applies within worldbuilding itself, the iceberg question. How much of “worldbuilding” should go on the page, and how much should be left in the author’s head? Naturally the author knows more than the reader and there’s always a portion of the iceberg that’s hidden away, that never makes it onto the page. But the proportion of hidden/revealed varies. Leave too much hidden, and the reader may struggle to follow what is happening to an unpleasant degree (a little struggling is pleasant exercise, but too much ….). Spew too much onto the page and you end up with pages-long digressions into history or magical technique or whatever, and that can also be a struggle. It’s my belief that the reader wants to feel that there is a lot of iceberg under the surface, out of sight, and that this was what gave Lord of the Rings such power, that immense treasury of imagined myth that meant the characters on the page could realistically make historical allusions or references and so on. It certainly felt that way to me, anyway. You want to feel that the history is there.

However I don’t mean that every fantasy novel needs a Silmarillion sitting behind it. It just needs to feel that way. Effective worldbuilding works largely in allusion, I think. The author might, in fact, be only a couple of steps ahead of the reader, and not know anything about the allusions they are making — Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you! — but as long as it has the right ring to it, it works, it intrigues and enchants and gives a sense of a rich living backdrop. And writers should be helped here by remembering that people (real people, and also characters in books) don’t have accurate pictures of their own history or literature.

I’ve talked about my feelings re magic already, but the role of religion is an important one as well. In a lot of fantasy religion is oddly muted, amounting to characters’ choice of mascot, or it doesn’t feature at all, supplanted entirely by myth and magic. What religion are the Hobbits, for instance?

AR: Preshobbiterian?

WW: Certainly not. And you can see why it gets muted, as religions are very complicated things to render in an effective way. They have a particular body of history, myth and literature of their own. They have power structures and social structures, sometimes more than one, in competition. They shape and direct the thinking and behaviour of their followers — sometimes in straightforward ways like dietary restrictions, but also in hugely subtle and important ways, like the way the concept of forgiveness sits at the heart of Christianity. That’s a lot of world to be built, and it’s the subtle philosophical influence of religion, the mindset, the way it guides characters’ choices and internal dilemmas, that is the hardest to create and to render realistically, in a way that’s still engaging to the reader. You can’t always gloss and contextualise a character’s feelings in cases where they’re very different to our own — “rather than anger he felt shame because of this or that aspect of what his upbringing said about this situation”. It can be done, of course, and some of the greatest fantasy does it very well, which contributes to its greatness, but it’s difficult. No wonder most authors don’t really get into it, and stick to “we worship the mouse god, that’s why I have a mouse on my clothes and we don’t eat cheese on Tuesdays” or whatever. Or religion is made entirely literal, and you know what the mouse god wants because she came down here and told you (cheese, I expect). This is really something I wanted to dig into in my own fantasy — the mindsets and philosophies,I mean, not the mouse god.

AR: But the Mouse God is Apollo — also god of poetry, and our — yours and mine — patron saint!

WW: To be honest I only said mouse because we have one as an unwanted tenant and they’ve been on my mind. We’ve been leaving him offerings in temples of doom.

AA: The next question is lengthy, though your answer may be as brief, or nonexistent, as you like. But I want to lay out one of the theses I’m interested in developing in my History of Fantasy, and I’m curious what you think of the argument it makes generally, and how you think it relates to a novel like Last Blade Priest specifically. It’s not my thesis, in fact: I’m nicking it from my friend Alan Jacobs, who published an essay a few years back called ‘Fantasy and the Buffered Self’ [The New Atlantis 41 (2014), 3–18]. Jacobs takes the idea of the ‘buffered self’ from Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who says this:

Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less “enchanted” world. We might think of this as our having “lost” a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are “buffered” selves. We have changed.

Here is Jacobs’ gloss on the idea:

To put that shift in simple terms, a person accepts a buffered condition as a means of being protected from the demonic or otherwise ominous forces that in pre-modern times generated a quavering network of terrors. To be a pre-modern person, in Taylor’s account, is to be constantly in danger of being invaded or overcome by demons or fairies or nameless terrors of the dark — of being possessed and transformed, or spirited away and never returned to home and family. Keith Thomas’s magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) specifies many of these dangers, along with the whole panoply of prayers, rites, amulets, potions, chants, spells, and the like, by which a person might seek protection from the otherwise irresistible. It is easy, then, to imagine why a person — or a whole culture — might, if it could, exchange this model of a self with highly permeable boundaries for one in which the self feels better protected, defended — impermeable, or nearly so.

The problem with this apparently straightforward transaction, Jacobs notes, is that the porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic, while the buffered self is closed to both alike.

Those who must guard against capture by fairies are necessarily and by the same token receptive to mystical experiences. The “showings” manifested to Julian of Norwich depend upon exceptional sensitivity, which is to say porosity — vulnerability to incursions of the supernatural. The portals of the self cannot be closed on one side only. But the achievement of a safely buffered personhood — closed off from both the divine and the demonic — is soon enough accompanied by a deeply felt change in the very cosmos. As C. S. Lewis notes in The Discarded Image (1964), the medieval person who found himself “looking up at a world lighted, warmed, and resonant with music” gives way to the modern person who perceives only emptiness and silence. Safety is purchased at the high price of isolation, as we see as early as Pascal, who famously wrote of the night sky, “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie” (“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me”).

I quote this at length because it seems to me so interesting. Anyway, to the point: Jacobs’ thesis is that a kind of yearning back towards porosity and its attendant enchantments is behind the great contemporary vogue for Fantasy:

Might it not be possible to experience the benefits, while avoiding the costs, of both the porous and the buffered self? I want to argue here that it is precisely this desire that accounts for the rise to cultural prominence, in late modernity, of the artistic genre of fantasy. Fantasy — in books, films, television shows, and indeed in all imaginable media — is an instrument by which the late modern self strives to avail itself of the unpredictable excitements of the porous self while retaining its protective buffers. Fantasy, in most of its recent forms, may best be understood as a technologically enabled, and therefore safe, simulacrum of the pre-modern porous self.

Do you think this is right? Does it have any point of connection with what you, as a writer of Fantasy, are doing?

WW: Yes, this all sounds very plausible. Though I think there is perhaps more porosity in the modern “buffered self” than we might at first believe, and we do have our own demons and rituals and amulets and so on — and possibly this tendency is increasing as modernist certainties fracture into a hall of mirrors. I am reminded of Carl Sagan’s much-circulated quote about “clutching our crystals, heading into a new Dark Age”, where information isn’t lost or suppressed, but is overwhelmed by the signal-to-noise ratio and the decline of commonly agreed authorities. There are quack cures and pseudoscientific charms — magnets, crystals, copper bands etc to ward off 5G rays — but you can also see ritualistic behaviour around public health measures of proven merit, like mask wearing. If we’re not getting a good signal on our phone, we raise it in the air, even when it makes little sense to do so. Send us your bars, oh lord …

There are those who have fallen prey to disinformation and conspiracy theories and who believe that satanic child-trafficking cults rule over us; but there’s also a counter-tendency to that which sees disinformation and the hand of the enemy everywhere, like puritans seeing the devil’s work, and has developed into a rigid and brittle kind of “rationalism” that I think of as junk scepticism. But I suppose a key difference is that many of these tendencies fester in our little media cocoons rather than through direct personal contact with people in the agora, which we should be doing more of. We might have a slightly better rational apparatus than the pre-modern villager, but to our disadvantage we spend a lot more time on our own in the dark, staring into the fire, seeing visions of Hell. There’s also medicalisation: birth and death mostly take place in the hospital, not at home, and have little in the way of ritual accompaniment. We’ve just seen a vast and fascinating ritual exercise unfolding in this country, following the death of the Queen, with attendant effusions of popular enthusiasm and ritual behaviour — notably The Queue, a pure pilgrimage, undertaken by many not in spite of how arduous it was, but because it was arduous, and a physical expression of depth of feeling. These things evidently matter.

In terms of whether these things connect to my work: they absolutely do. I studied history at university, specialising in medieval history — a choice which was probably partially influenced by my fondness for fantasy. And various works of history, ones that do a particularly excellent job of getting within the often alien-seeming minds of people in that long, varied era, have become touchstones for me — including Keith Thomas. I would also mention The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy, about iconoclasm and Protestantism and state versus popular religion; Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, about a Friulian miller who came to the attention of the religious authorities in the 17th century for, more or less, coming up with his own religion, or cosmology, based on rather eccentric reading — an absolutely exquisite book; and Peter Burke’s work, in particular Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. And I think it’s significant that when I started writing TLBP, I was reading John Julius Norwich’s three-volume history of the Byzantine Empire, although that wasn’t something I read at university. (Runciman’s history of the crusades was.)

But there were two books that I would say have mattered above any others. First is Johan Huizinga’s classic The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919), which does a remarkable job of conjuring the people of the middle ages, and their lives and beliefs and sensory universe, into being for the reader. “Luminous” is an overused word when it comes to describing books, but it applies here. He seizes the reader in the famous opening paragraphs, and does not let go — it’s an opening that connects very strongly to what you outline above:

“To the world when it was half a thousand years younger, the outline of all things seemed more clearly marked than to us. The contrast between suffering and joy, between adversity and happiness, appeared more striking. All experience had yet to the minds of men the directness and absoluteness of the pleasure and pain of child-life. Every event, every action, was still embodied in expressive and solemn forms, which raised them to the dignity of a ritual. For it was not merely the great facts of birth, marriage and death which, by the sacredness of the sacrament, were raised to the rank of mysteries; incidents of less importance, like a journey, a task, a visit, were equally attended by a thousand formalities: benedictions, ceremonies, formulas.

Calamities and indigence were more afflicting than at present; it was more difficult to guard against them, and to find solace. Illness and health presented a more striking contrast; the cold and darkness of winter were more real evils. Honours and riches were relished with greater avidity and contrasted more vividly with surrounding misery. We, at the present day, can hardly understand the keenness with which a fur coat, a good fire on the hearth, a soft bed, a glass of wine, were formerly enjoyed.”

I could happily quote on. Huizinga cemented my affection for the study of the Middle Ages by making it feel like a quest into this fascinating, sensually rich, lost world, and of course that has a bearing on what I like to get out of fantasy as a reader and a writer.

The second important book was Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, about millenarianism, apocalyptic cults, and waves of religious mania, which more or less lies at the foundation of The Last Blade Priest and (if I am allowed to write them) its sequels. These religious manias — flagellants, pogroms, sudden revolts, roving peasant-armies — are superficially baffling to us. People would throw away their lives for them. And it takes a great deal of scene-setting and explaining and social and cultural history to understand them, which is what Cohn provides. He calls the fever dreams that drove these manias “phantasies”, which is apt. A particular recurring feature of many of these movements supplied The Last Blade Priest with a crucial aspect of its plot, although I can’t say what because it will spoil it.

The common thread through all this is religion, rather than kings or queens or knights and horses. Which is why I wanted religion to be at the heart of my own fantasy — and ultimately why I want to try and create this same sense of religious mania, cults, crusades and so on, through the series. A world that is in an advanced state of decline, but that rottenness is causing dozens of weird flowers of possibility to bloom. This seemed like territory in which something original could be done, and informed all the choices I made.

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Buy The Last Blade Priest from: [UK] Angry Robot; Waterstones; Amazon; Kobo; Black Dragon; signed-copies from Broken Binding. [US] Penguin; Amazon