Inspired by Jack: Phantastes

C. S. Lewis claimed that George MacDonald's Phantastes 'baptised his imagination'. I'm learning to understand why.

Dear Friends,

Well, the book is submitted, and I am returned to the land of the living—er, the land of people not buried in books. Thank you for your patience. Publishing is a long process, and there’s plenty of editing ahead, but rest assured that I’ll let you know when the book becomes available.

Meanwhile, it’s a joy to be back with you, and this week starting our “Inspired by Jack” series, wherein I read books that either influenced C. S. Lewis or were influenced by him. Our first selection: George MacDonald’s Phantastes. (By the way: if there’s a book you particularly want me to include in this series, do let me know!)

Every so often, you pick up the perfect book: the one that precisely suits your mood, your preoccupations, your spiritual needs. It’s one of life’s great joys, like meeting a kindred spirit. You wonder how you’ve lived your life up to that moment without knowing these words, this story—even as you rejoice in the experience of reading it for the first time. It can feel like a divine appointment, an intellectual lightning strike.

Phantastes is not one of those perfect books—not for me. But it was for C. S. Lewis.

You see, part of the magic lies in its specificity. The book that strikes me as a revelation may leave you cold, and vice versa. In spite of those inevitable disconnects, though, it can be helpful to read other people’s ‘perfect books’, simply as a window into their minds.

For me, Phantastes is primarily a way to understand Lewis better. I observe his lightning strike from a distance, with detached admiration and interest.

Here’s how Lewis describes the book’s effect on him, after picking it up from a railway bookstall in 1916 and reading it on a train journey:

A few hours later I knew that I had crossed a great frontier. I had already been waist deep in Romanticism…. Now Phantastes was romantic enough in all conscience; but there was a difference. Nothing was at that time further from my thoughts than Christianity and I therefore had no notion what this difference really was. I was only aware that if this new world was strange, it was also homely and humble; that if this was a dream, it was a dream in which one at least felt strangely vigilant; that the whole book had about it a sort of cool, morning innocence, and also, quite unmistakably, a certain quality of Death, good Death. What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptise (that was where the Death came in) my imagination. (Phantastes, Eerdmans, xi)

Lewis summarises the experience more pithily, and more famously, in Surprised by Joy: “A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading” (182).

I’ve always been perplexed, given this rave review, to find that MacDonald’s works leave me pretty cold. I read Phantastes years ago, did not enjoy it, and mostly forgot it. The characters, fairy or human, feel more allegorical than real; the plot meanders; though relatively short, the book feels long. Same with Lilith. The Princess and the Goblin is charming, but not a book I’ve ever felt the urge to pick up again. So I was curious to see if I would get more out of the reading experience this time around.

And spoiler alert: I did. In fact, the elements of Phantastes that interested me this time around correspond pretty closely to the features that Lewis points out in the quote above. So I’m going to point out a few of those connections, and leave you to explore Phantastes for yourself if you’re inclined.

Lewis starts by commenting on the obvious Romantic influences on MacDonald’s work. These are obvious from the novel’s first page: Phantastes begins with a long epigraph from the German Romantic writer Novalis, who asserts: “A fairy-story is like a vision without rational connections, a harmonious whole of miraculous things and events—as, for example, a musical fantasia, the harmonic sequence of an Aeolion harp, indeed Nature itself” (3). This emphasis on the fantastical and on “Nature” (note the capital N!) immediately signals the Romantic frame of reference which Novalis and MacDonald share. Likewise, the Aeolian harp, which makes music when wind blows across its strings, is one of literary Romanticism’s favourite metaphors for artistic inspiration.

Novalis’ words give us a clear summation of MacDonald’s approach to narrative in Phantastes: this is a fairy story, one governed by dream-logic rather than by reason or realism. The plot meanders, one incident following another almost haphazardly. It is “the privilege of the country [of Fairy Land]… to go unquestioned,” we are reliably informed near the end of the novel (171).

Another feature of Romanticism is an interest in the medieval which lingers in British literature through the nineteenth century. Like William Morris, another of Lewis’ favourites, MacDonald draws on many of the tropes of medieval romance in depicting his hero’s journey through Fairy Land. By the end of the book, Anodos, the wandering protagonist, has become a knight in the Arthurian tradition (Galahad is mentioned at several points in the story), pursued and lost a maiden, and learnt lessons about love and honour. In this sense, the story is strongly reminiscent of (though theologically distinct from) tales of Chrétien de Troyes or Marie de France.

It’s no wonder that Lewis, with his affinity for the romantic and appreciation for Medieval literature found Phantastes gripping.

What I find more intriguing in Lewis’ reaction is his emphasis on “Death, good Death.” Scholars often reference the idea of a ‘baptism of the imagination’, described in that long quote above. I had never noticed before that Lewis explicitly links that baptism to MacDonald’s portrayal of death. That connection is really suggestive, both for a reading of Phantastes and of Lewis’ later work.

MacDonald’s novel is explicitly a coming-of-age story: a newly twenty-one year old man is given the keys to his father’s desk, finds a fairy (or some such supernatural creature) within, and is thereafter transported to Fairy Land. There he travels through a forest, discovers himself as a singer, a sinner, and a warrior, and finally dies, before awaking in his own home once more. The book ends with Anodos wondering:

Could I translate the experience of my travels… into common life?… Or must I live it all over again, and learn it all over again, in the other forms that belong to the world of men, whose experience yet runs parallel to that of Fairy Land? These questions I cannot yet answer. But I fear. (184)

What has Anodos learned? A great many things, it transpires: How to love unselfishly, without demand of requital; How to be humble; What it means to die well.

We have to remember that Lewis picked up Phantastes in the midst of World War I. In less than two years, he would enter the trenches himself. He was a boy who would very soon have to become a man, in unimaginably adverse conditions. So a book about heroism, self-sacrifice, and meaningful death must have struck him powerfully, even as it fed his taste for Romanticism and for medieval imagery.

Lewis’ life was almost perpetually shadowed by death: his mother died when he was a small child; he and his brother came of age during the Great War, then lived through World War II; he was deeply affected by the deaths of friends like Charles Williams, and most famously by the untimely death of his wife Joy. So it’s not surprising that his works often confront the fear of untimely death and imagine heaven.

We can see that preoccupation in books like The Great Divorce and The Last Battle, in the end of The Screwtape Letters and in many of his letters. What he suggests in his description of reading Phantastes is that some of his thinking—and equally importantly, some of his feeling—on these questions can be traced back to his first encounter with MacDonald.

I haven’t yet experienced any lightning strike reading MacDonald, but maybe I will one day. In any case, I certainly appreciate Phantastes more now than I did before this re-read. I’m hoping to read MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons this year, and I wonder if I will find in his spiritual writings something more suited to my specific tastes and habits of mind.

What about you, gentle reader? Do you have an opinion on Phantastes or MacDonald more generally? Want to share about one of your ‘perfect books’? Leave a comment and let me know.

Meanwhile, I wish you a week of sunshine and readerly serendipity,

Sarah

Cover photo: worksofmacdonald.com