| 作者： | Lillian H. Smith |
| 原題： | The Unreluctant Years: A Critical Approach to Children's Literature |
| Chinese Title： | 富春文叢（二十）《歡欣歲月》 |
| Chinese Publisher： | 富春文化事業股份有限公司, 1999年11月 |
| Chinese Translator： | 傅林統 |
| Chinese Translation： | 第十章 幻想故事 |
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Your wife...can hardly, being a woman, dislike The Butterfly That Stamped. It is just possible, however, that she may remain indifferent to it as a trifle, a playing with fancies, of obvious purport, silly in its language, unworthy of attention. This simply means that she is educated above its knowledge, that she has outgrown it-in a word, that she is old. Brian Hooker, "Types of Fairy Tales" in The Forum |  |
There are factors other than imagination which determine the enduring place in literature of any book of fantasy, such as the writer's experience of life and his power of language, among others. But since he has chosen to write a book of fantasy, the degree of creative imagination he possesses must be our first concern. Creative imagination is more than mere invention. It is that power which creates, out of abstractions, life. It goes to the heart of the unseen, and puts that which is so mysteriously hidden from ordinary mortals into the clear light of their understanding, or at least of their partial understanding. It is more true, perhaps, of writers of fantasy than of any other writers except poets that they struggle with the inexpressible. According to their varying capacities, they are able to evoke ideas and clothe them in symbols, allegory, and dream.
The degree of a writer's capacities may range from the original and creative expression of a Lewis Carroll or the other-worldly vision of a George Macdonald, down to the merely invented or manufactured story which their authors mistake for genuine fantasy. A long series of fantastic happenings which are unrelated (except that some of the same characters reappear) and which follow no logical course of development and arrive nowhere, makes tedious reading. When we find that a book of so-called fantasy is full of trite phrases, pretty-pretty sentiments, and contrived rather than imagined events, and when the writing is forced and condescending, the result is not fantasy but shoddiness and fatuity. This leads us to conclude that writers who are inexpert, or who are unaware of the rare qualities required for genuine fantasy should avoid attempting to write it.
Every book of fantasy cannot be an Alice in Wonderland, but if it is to be given serious consideration as literature it must contain some of the ingredients found in Alice and in all good fantasies. There are certain well-written books of fantasy which give a genuine if simple kind of pleasure, whose values are those of entertainment and lively humor. There is undeniable enjoyment in A. A. Milne's imaginative insight into the private lives of toy animals, in the combination of unexpectedness and moral rectitude in Mary Poppins, in the genial Doctor Dolittle's preference for the company of animals, in the predicaments of the Doll family shipwrecked on Floating Island, in the resourceful enterprise of Mr. Popper and his penguins. Such books have their own integrity and value, though these are perhaps too weighty words with which to burden their gaiety, simplicity, and charm, or to describe their quality.
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This book reaches out beyond its doll characters into the fundamental questions of human life: good and bad; right and wrong; the recognition of true as opposed to ephemeral values. These are questions that are universally important. They are themes found in all great literature. To find them treated in this microscopic way does not lessen their importance; perhaps it even clarifies them and brings them into perspective. It will be argued that this inner meaning eludes children and that their enjoyment of the book is solely in the story it tells. But perceptive children cannot help hearing some of these overtones and so becoming more sensitively aware of the world about them. |
Fantasy, like other books of fiction, must first of all tell a story. It must arouse our interest and concern for the imagined characters whose story the author tells, whether they be human, supernatural beings, animals, or toys. It must show the characters in relation to each other and to the things that happen to them in a way to arouse our curiosity. The rising scale of suspense must ascend to the climax and the story round itself out with a satisfying inevitability. A book of fantasy must also conform to the standards of good writing which we apply to all fiction. But fantasy lives in a different climate from other fiction in an atmosphere of reality in unreality, of credibility in incredibility.
The values of fantasy may be irrelevant to those of the fiction of actuality, yet they have their own laws and conventions to be accepted and understood if we are to approach the subject with a sound basis for critical judgment. A child's ready acceptance of fantasy is based on imagination and wonder. An adult lacking these universal attributes of childhood is often at a loss when he is asked to consider seriously a work of purely imaginative content, far removed from the reality of his experience of life. Before the adult can feel at ease in this different world of fantasy he must discover a means of approach. There is an interesting discussion on fantasy by E. M. Forster in his Aspects of the Novel, in which he says: "Our easiest approach to a definition of any aspect of fiction is always by considering the sort of demand it makes on the reader... what does fantasy ask of us? It asks us to pay something extra."
E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (N.Y.:Harcourt, 1949), p.101.
That is to say that over and above what we ordinarily bring to the reading of a story, fantasy demands something extra, perhaps a kind of sixth sense. All children have it, but most adults leave it behind with their cast-off childhood. There is a story from Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill called "Dymchurch Flit," which suggests that this sixth sense was a gift of the fairies to their human friends. It tells that when Henry the Eighth set all England by the ears with his Reformation the fairies were driven to take refuge in Romney Marsh, crying "Fair or foul, we must flit out o' this, for Merry England's done with, an' we're reckoned among the Images,"
| The fairies packed into the marsh until it was filled with the heaviness of their wailing, and the trouble of it brought the Widow Whitgift one night to her door. At first she thought it was all the frogs in the dikes peeping. Then that it was the sound of the reeds. At last she heard the fairies cry to her to lend them her sons to man a boat so they could make their escape to France. When the boat left England, only Puck of all the little people remained behind; Puckand the gift the grateful fairies promised the Widow Whitgift: that in every generation there would be one of her family who could see further through a stone wall than most. |  |
Let us consider Alice in Wonderland as an example. Probably no other book of fantasy has paid such "dividends of pleasure" through childhood into maturity to those who have brought that "something extra" to the reading of Lewis Carroll. Yet there are people to whom the mention of Alice brings only vague memories of a little girl and a rabbit, or perhaps a mad hatter, or a Cheshire cat Perhaps, as Percy Lubbock has suggested in reference to reading books of fiction, "our glimpse of it was too fleeting, it seems, to leave us with a lasting knowledge of its form." An inattentive or a cursory reading of Alice in Wonderland may indeed leave us with only a confused impression of fantastic happenings, as unrelated and formless as half-forgotten dreams. It is only when we give ourselves wholly to the book, allowing Lewis Carroll to have his way with us, that we find in Alice the quality of lasting pleasure so many other people have enjoyed; nor wfll it surprise us to find lines from Alice quoted so often both in life and in literature.
The child, Alice, is herself frequently confused when her logic, the logic of forthright common sense, is opposed by a totally different logic which seems fantastic to her, but against which no argument carries weight. When the White Queen says to her "The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday but never jam today? Alice objects.
"It must come sometimes to "jam today,"
"No, it can't," said the Queen. "It's jam every other day: to-day isn't any other day, you know."
"I don't understand you," said Alice. "It's dreadfully confusing!"
But the reader is not confused. He appreciates the fantastic logic of the queen as well as he understands Alice's matter-of-fact point of view. Surely an early acquaintance with Alice in Wonderland should reduce the possibility of holding too many dogmatic opinions and increase a willingness to hear another person's point of view, fantastic though it may seem. However that may be, the book itself, the wit and imagination of Lewis Carroll are here for a second reading, if the first proved inauspicious.
When we analyze Alice in Wonderland we see that it is not, as Pilgrim's Progress or Gullivers Travels, a thinly disguised allegory or a satire on life. It depends on other qualities for its unity. Lewis Carroll builds up striking patterns of language and idea, each part held in subtle relation to the others. The unity of the book is not in the design alone, but also in the consistent point of view. The story is Alice's dream as Alice dreamed it; the point of view is invariably that of the rational child in an irrational dream. The language is the language ofnonsense, but at the same time we are sensible of the essence of truth it contains for example, this dialogue during the trial concerning the theft of the tarts.
"What do you know about this business?"
"Nothing," said Alice.
"Nothing whatever?" persisted the King.
"Nothing whatever," said Alice.
"That's very important," the King said, turning to the jury. They were just beginning to write this down on their slates, when the White Rabbit interrupted:
"Unimportant, your Majesty means, of course," he said in a very respectful tone, but frowning and making faces at him as he spoke.
"Unimportant, of course, I meant," the King hastily said, and went on to himself in an undertone, "important unimportant unimportantimportant" as if he were trying which word sounded best.
Some of the jury wrote it down "important," and some "unimportant."
About this scene Paul Hazard says: "It is nonsense. But it is not pure invention: there are trials conducted in this way. We laugh for some profound reason of which we are hardly conscious, but which takes shape in our mind. The idea is caricatural, but it is not completely false. On the contrary it touches us by the element of truth that it contains.
Paul Hazard, Books, Children and Men (Boston:Hom Book, 1944), p.140.
There are few incidents in the two Alice books which do not have what De la Mare calls "the compelling inward ring." Lewis Carroll may be joking when he upsets the accepted logic of events, but, as the Red Queen said to Alice, "even a joke should have some meaning," For instance: When Alice runs forward to meet the Red Queen whom she sees ahead of her she is bewildered to find that the Queen has disappeared. "I should advise you to walk the other way," said the Rose. This seemed nonsense to Alice but it was only when she did so that she found herself face to face with the Queen. Is there a suggestion here that what may appear nonsense can hold in its essence a higher truth not to be apprehended, perhaps, through the mere logic of common sense?
There are adults who have said that Alice in Wonderland is not a children's book. The implications of hidden meaning found on almost every page are not there for the child who reads the story. The brilliant and ironical wit the adult rejoices in is often not noticed by a child. It is said that when Lewis Carroll first told Alice in Wonderland on the river to three little girls, there was another auditor in the boat with them, an adult. He was a scholarly, perceptive, experienced colleague of Lewis Carroll's, who recognized the originality of the story and was urgent in having it written down.
Perhaps these circumstances of the origin of the book give some clue to the right appreciation of it and to an understanding of the two levels of experience on which the book is written, and from which it must be approached and valued. To repeat Lewis Muxnford's phrase "the words are for children and the meanings are for men." But it must not be forgotten that Lewis Carroll told Alice's adventures to entertain a little girl of seven who begged to have them written down so she could read them again and again. We remember too that when Alice was read aloud to six-year-old Greville, son of George Macdonald, he cried "There ought to be sixty thousand words of it!" Alice in Wonderland is a children's book as well as a universal one.
Little children enter freely and easily into the spirit of Alice. To them it is a story about a topsy-turvy world where anything can happen; where the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle went to school to learn Laughing and Grief (taught by an old crab) as well as the different branches of Arithmetic "Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision." To the children the story is full of good jokes and comical transpositions like these; to read it is a hilarious experience in which they identify themselves with Alice, the polite, trustful, yet curious child who follows a White Rabbit down a rabbit-hole and finds herself in a long lamp-lit hall with rows of locked doors. The tiny golden key she discovers fits a very little door through which she has a glimpse into "the loveliest garden you ever saw. But even her head was too large to go through the small door.
The plot of Alice in Wonderland revolves around Alice's determination to get into the enchanted garden, her efforts to do so being endlessly frustrated by the odd way things happen. "Curiouser and Curiouser" is how Alice expresses it. She is puzzled, too, to find that she doesn't keep the same size but is constantly changing, and it is not until she is the right size to go through the little door that she finds herself at last in the garden with the roses. It turns out that, besides roses, the garden has other, and less agreeable, inhabitants; that it is in fact the kingdom of the pack of cards. Alice's adventures among them flow faster and faster until she finds herself running hand in hand with the Gryphon to the final scene where the whole pack of cards collapses and Alice wakes up.
Both the Alice books are dream fantasies, the one built of a pack of cards, the other a game of chess. In each the illusion created by Lewis Carroll is so complete that we lose sight of the complicated and ingenious pattern of their structure. The books are undeniably written on two planes, that of the child and that of the adult. Perhaps it would be truer to say that the writing is a language to which the heart of childhood has the little golden key, while the implications of the ideas reveal themselves more and more with the added experience of life. As we ponder them we cannot wonder that Alice in Wonderland is to so many an inexhaustible source of pleasure in its crisp fresh humor, its rich and subtle symbolism, and the infinite speculation it leads to.
When we are considering the books of Lewis Carroll, it is impossible not to recall such writers of fantasy as Bunyan and Swift, Charles Kingsley and George Macdonald, W. H. Hudson and Kenneth Grahame. Various as these writers are in both gifts and methods, they have a common quality which makes their books memorable and universal. They are all men whose profound understanding and experience of life give significance to the creative ideas behind their writing. Each uses his own method and device. But since all are men of understanding, able to project their philosophy, their view of life, in the form of fantasy, their books have values over and above the story they tell. Their writing, too, is often touched with poetry.
Not all these authors wrote for children. It has happened in the past that a book written solely with adults in mind and with some adult concept to convey has been taken over by children and numbered among their classics. Such a book is Pilgrims Progress, written by John Bunyan to inculcate in grown up sinners a sense of the burden of original sin they must carry throughout their earthly pilgrimage. But John Bunyan chose to clothe his theological teaching in rich allegory. He told it as an adventure story in simple and powerful language. Is it strange that children seized it for their own? Is it strange that children, who have followed with sympathy the fortunes of so many "younger sons" whose courage and endurance are tested in all the ways known to fairy tales, should find in Christian a similar, if more mysterious, hero beset as he is by difficulty and danger on his pilgrimage to the gates of the City of Light?
"How did the children happen to get hold of Swift?'asks Paul Hazard. Like Pilgrim's Progress and Don Quixote, GuUwers Travels owes its pkce as one of the immortal classics of childhood to the fact that children stumbled on it in an age which produced little else from which children could obtain the imaginative sustenance they craved. Gullivers Travels proved an antidote to the dreary moral and didactic tales with which their elders strove to improve the young.
Children have always refused to be bored by what does not interest them. They excel in the gentle art of skipping. It is the miniature world of Lilliputia and the reverse world of the giants that beguile them in Gulliver's Travels. As Paul Hazard says "They like its wild inventions that are not only comical but concrete." The rest of the book is forgotten.
A child's imagination is at times his real world. There is for him no abyss between the real and the unreal. He moves from the one to the other as he would move from one window to another. Like Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley and George Macdonald have used the dream fantasy when they wrote for children; but, unlike the author of Alice, these writers were preoccupied with the mysteries of the spiritual universe. They created a world of beauty and imagination in which a child is free to explain for himself the life of which he is a part.
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George Macdonald has insight into the heart of a child. He understands the world that the child is seeking to discover; and he has the art of making these worlds of imagination much more real and vital than our everyday realm of facts and formulas. In At the Back of the North Wind, the North Wind is the personification of a child's questionings about things mortal and immortal. The reader is swept along as by a strange impelling force. The story answers for him the unanswerable; it gives him a vision of the mysterious and the inexplicable.
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George Macdonald gives expression to Diamond's inarticulate desires in Ms conversations with the North Wind during his dream journey. The conversations are presented with childlike simplicity and often with great beauty of expression. In this way, the child who reads Diamond's story is led to think about questions which are at the back of his mind, but which, being intangible, he cannot express.
The world of fantasy that George Macdonald creates is, for the time being, a real world which he presents as strange, magical, and mysterious. It is a believable world because the author's attitude is one of entire acceptance of its truth. The child who reads the book does not doubt that Diamond, child of the London street, can be whisked in a trice to the chill palaces of the North Wind.
The story, with its unpromising setting in a livery stable, deals with the commonplace happenings of the life of a little boy who through the power of imagination finds the realities of life, not in his everyday existence, but in the elemental world of the North Wind. The book begins in the hayloft, proceeds to Diamond's strange friendship with the North Wind, and reaches its climax with his experience at the back of the North Wind. The rest of the story tells what befalls when Diamond, with all his senses sharpened and aware, returns to everyday life.
Always true to the loyalties of human relationships, the story, even with its moralizing touches, still has room for nonsense and fun. Its basic structure is a childlike understanding of the fundamental principles of a way of life in which divine love and trust find wholehearted acceptance. As with all great books its inward spirit has something to say to each succeeding generation and to each individual child who keeps a heart open to wonder.
At the Back of the North Wind has a quality of pure imagination which, until it appeared, had been found only in the fairy tale. It is, perhaps, more didactic than one who read it in childhood remembers, but both qualities were part of the writer who was a Doctor of Divinity as well as an imaginative Scot.
The literature of fantasy is various, both in subject and treatment. It has, however, a tendency to follow certain well-defined patterns that have been set in every case by great originators. This does not mean that when a pattern is repeated, it necessarily becomes a weak copy of the original. The imagination that is found in good fantasy is an aptitude of the creative mind of the writer which takes a form that is personal to him. Each writer, though he may use the pattern of dream as both Lewis Carroll and George Macdonald have done, will express the dream differently because he has thought about it and imagined it differently.
There are other patterns than that of the dream found in the literature of fantasy. Perhaps the most significant among them are the quest, and the symbolic presentation of the natural world. Sometimes two or more patterns are intermingled; we follow a double or even a triple thread, and the pattern becomes more complicated.
| Let us examine, for instance, W. H. Hudson's story A Little Boy Lost. The pattern the author follows is that of the quest, but are there not other patterns subtly interwoven with the main thread of the book? The story is about a little boy, Martin, who follows a mirage, and in trying to find it, becomes lost. We follow him as he explores the mysteries of plain, forest, and mountains until he reaches the sea and his wanderings are over. Martin's experiences along the way blend the mistiness of dreams and the realities of his expanding life. As Hudson tells it, the story is an allegory whose theme, in essence, is man's eternal search for the unattainable, for the beauty that stretches always just ahead of him but is never quite within reach. |  |
The power of nature to sustain and protect all who trust in her is Hudson's constant and recurring theme. He clothes it with the cool lush greenness of his imagery, he illuminates it with the intense light of nature where all is bright and still and waiting. The immensities of space and distance he envisions give room for the contemplation of universal truth. W. H. Hudson weaves native legend and myth into the story, and their indirect application to what he is trying to say enhances the truth behind the book's symbolic form. If Martin chases a mirage, so do we all, and Martin's story gives a sense of a universal experience and a universal urge toward the strange and beautiful in the world.
Coming now to the third pattern, Kenneth Grahame has given us a statement for all time of the symbolic presentation of the natural world. In a letter to Theodore Roosevelt, Kenneth Grahame describes The Wind in the Willows as "an expression of the very simplest joys of life as lived by the simplest beings." He speaks of it again as "a book of ... life, sunshine, running water, woodlands, dusty roads, winter firesides." In retrospect, the picture it calls up may be of Toad sitting on the dusty roadside in a kind of trance, uttering "Poop-poop!", a picture which recalls joy of new experiences told with the particular kind of rich, illuminating, and amusing not merely funny humor which the book contains. Or the picture may be of the field-mice singing carols outside Mole's TDulce Domum" or of the "embracing light and warmth" of kindly Badger's home, bringing a sense of the obligations of friendship and the meaning of true hospitality. The most significant picture of all is that of the pageant of the river bank with the coming of the dawn and the music of the whispering reeds, as Mole and Rat work their way upstream, impelled to follow the sound of distant piping. This picture more than any other shows us Kenneth Grahame's view of the universe seen through the world of nature.
It is impossible to read The Wind in the Willows without a heightening of emotion and a sharpening of our perceptions as we enter into the excitement of Kenneth Grahame's feeling for the simplicity and beauty of nature a world where instinct predominates. He sees the minds and memories of the animals as a race memory; as in the migration of the swallows to the south and in the odyssey of the seafaring rat as told in the chapter "Wayfarers All." The story is bound up with the familiar things of everyday life, but each contact with reality is made a springboard into an imaginative experience.
The Wind in the Willows is a rich book, the output of a rich mind. It is written with great clarity and lustre; its language is full of the incantation of verse. It is a joy to read aloud, for its rhythmic prose and for what Arnold Bennett calls "the woodland and sedgy lore in it."
Although the subject matter of a fantasy, like the pattern, may often be repeated in other books, it is not the subject matter nor the pattern which gives a book of fantasy the degree of quality it possesses. Its quality lies in the creative imagination of the writer and in his own personal expression of that imagination; in the consistent integration of his original idea with the drama of events; and in the integrity with which he gives verisimilitude and reality to the unreal world of fantasy.
There will always be people who do not enjoy fantasy. This in no way reflects on their literary taste, any more than the inability to like olives impairs one's enjoyment of other food. It does, however, restrict their pleasure in a field of reading which is singularly enriched by distinguished writinga form of writing the enjoyment of which depends, more than others, on individual appreciation and personal taste.
Fantasy is timeless and placeless; it lives in the eternal country of the imagination and is never outmoded by succeeding social periods and conventions. In his introduction to Reading Fve Liked Clifton Fadiman concludes:
Twenty centuries from now ... I do not see why people should not still be laughing and exclaiming over Alice in Wonderland. Among the few things resistant to the tooth of time, great fantasy is one, and great fantasy is always the special possession of children.
Clifton Fadiman, Introduction to Reading I've Liked (N.Y.:Simon & Schuster, 1941), p.xxii.
Associative Reading
Chalmers, Patrick R. Kenneth Grahame. Dodd, 1935. Methuen, 1933.De la Mare,
Walter. Hans Christian Andersen (in Pleasures and Speculations). Faber & Faber, 1940.
──.Lewis Carroll (in The Eighteen-Eighties, ed. by Walter de la Mare). Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1930.Moore, Doris Langly. E. Nesbit. Ernest Benn, 1933.