Is Phantastes Worth Reading?

Phantastes has a fame that far outstrips the number of people who have read it. Why? Because one cold evening at the bookstall in a railway station, C.S. Lewis picked up a copy in a “dirty jacket.” (The “dirty jacket” is a really odd detail to mention.) Lewis marks that moment as one of the biggest events of his life. As he later reminisces in Surprised By Joy, “I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes.” “That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer.”

With that note in his autobiography, Lewis inaugurated an eternal interest in MacDonald’s book. The book that sent the great Christian apologist on the path of conversion to Christianity! What could be more exciting than that? To those for whom Lewis is their Patron Saint, Phantastes is like a Holy Relic. But wait, there is more! In The Great Divorce, Lewis has MacDonald play the role of Beatrice, his guide to Heaven!

But, truth be told, the three pages in Surprised By Joy which describe Phantastes do not exactly make the book come alive. In describing the book, Lewis gets completely wrapped up in his mystical language of Joy. Piecing it together, it is obvious that this book is in the genre of fiction Lewis had grown to love—tales of faeries and Norse Gods and medieval legends—and that somehow this book made all that realm he loved seem more real than reality. But, Lewis never really explains the book. His description was just enough to make me think, “I should probably read Phantastes someday,” but not even remotely enough to make me want to rush out and track down a copy.

Interestingly, I do not seem to be alone in that reaction. I never saw a copy in a bookstore or ran across any mention of the book outside of discussions about Lewis. Sure enough, when Lewis would get discussed, sooner or later a mention of Phantastes would be made. But, again, I never met anyone who said that they had actually read the book, let alone that it was life changing or even recommending that I should read it.

I finally read it. Having done so, I finally understand its strange reputation.

The quick evaluation: it’s good, but not great. [Insert gasps of horror from those addicted to Lewis.]

It is really obvious why Lewis loved it, why it had such a huge impact on his life. It is a very self-conscious book, a painstakingly deliberate attempt to take the genre of the fairy story and use it to convey the essence of Christianity. It contains a nonstop series of episodes, every one of which tries to capture the inexpressible parts of the nature of God and what Christ has done. It’s not exactly a Christian allegory. It is more a mystical book which conveys the same impression as the mystical parts of Christian theology. You read it and you recognize the religious feeling.

I am well aware that the last paragraph makes zero sense to anyone who has not read MacDonald. Indeed, it probably makes less sense than Lewis’ attempt to explain the impact of the book. Phantastes seems to defy explanation, which is exactly the point of the book.

Here is another way of describing it. Take any Neil Gaiman book and make it far less concrete. There is a real world and there is this other world lingering right outside the real world; this is, by the way, a summary of every story Gaiman ever wrote. But Gaiman explains the connections between the worlds. Phantastes conveys a sense one gets when contemplating things that are there but just beyond our comprehension; the connections of the fairy world and the real world are just hovering there, incapable of being explained.

You, Dear Reader, are now exclaiming, “Enough with the mystical feelings stuff. What is the book about?”

Plot summary: Anodos, our hero, wakes up one morning in Fairy Land. He wanders around the land for many days. Then one day he wakes up back in the real world.

Ah, but what does he do in Fairy Land? Therein lies the problem with describing the book. Anodos really does simply wander around. It is just a steady stream of episodes, with no apparent forward motion. A few characters show up more than once. But, there is no quest, no grand thing that Anodos must accomplish. There are villains, but they also just wander in and out. There are also allies who join Anodos every now and then. Some inexplicable episodes are later explained when a character pops back in for a chat.

I enjoyed reading the wanderings of Anodos. But, if I had read this when I was younger, back when I was obsessed with fantasy literature but before I knew how to read well, I would not have enjoyed the book at all. As a straight fantasy story, it is a miserable failure. This is undoubtedly why the book is not nearly as popular as Lewis would have liked it to be. Nobody coming from The Lord of the Rings and picking up Phantastes looking for more of the same is going to be impressed at all.

Since the book doesn’t make it as a ripping good yarn, how does it rate as a disguised work of philosophy? Again, it is good, not great. It echoes a lot of the themes that Lewis promulgated—the influence of MacDonald on Lewis’ thinking is obvious.

Consider:

Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call the reality?—not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier? Fair as is the gliding sloop on the shining sea, the wavering, trembling, unresting sail below is fairer still. Yea, the reflecting ocean itself, reflected in the mirror, has a wondrousness about its waters that somewhat vanishes when I turn towards itself. All mirrors are magic mirrors. The commonest room is a room in a poem when I turn to the glass….In whatever way it may be accounted for, of one thing we may be sure, that this feeling is no cheat; for there is no cheating in nature and the simple unsought feelings of the soul. There must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning. Even the memories of past pain are beautiful; and past delights, though beheld only through clefts in the grey clouds of sorrow, are lovely as Fairy Land. But how have I wandered into the deeper fairyland of the soul, while as yet I only float towards the fairy palace of Fairy Land! The moon, which is the lovelier memory or reflex of the down-gone sun, the joyous day seen in the faint mirror of the brooding night, had rapt me away.

That is a nice description of the idea that this world is not all there is. That world of reflections is showing us a glimpse of heaven, a world more beautiful than anything contained in this world. That feeling that the reflection world is more beautiful than the real world is not a cheat; “there must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning.” Though now we see through a glass darkly…

Or this:

They who believe in the influences of the stars over the fates of men, are, in feeling at least, nearer the truth than they who regard the heavenly bodies as related to them merely by a common obedience to an external law. All that man sees has to do with man. Worlds cannot be without an intermundane relationship. The community of the centre of all creation suggests an interradiating connection and dependence of the parts.

Again, MacDonald draws out that sense that the physical world, the laws of nature, are only a part of the great cosmic dance in which we participate.

There are also the moral lessons:

Then first I knew the delight of being lowly; of saying to myself, “I am what I am, nothing more.”…I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. In nothing was my ideal lowered, or dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself for a moment beside it. Indeed, my ideal soon became my life; whereas, formerly, my life had consisted in a vain attempt to behold, if not my ideal in myself, at least myself in my ideal. Now, however, I took, at first, what perhaps was a mistaken pleasure, in despising and degrading myself. Another self seemed to arise, like a white spirit from a dead man, from the dumb and trampled self of the past. Doubtless, this self must again die and be buried, and again, from its tomb, spring a winged child; but of this my history as yet bears not the record. Self will come to life even in the slaying of self; but there is ever something deeper and stronger than it, which will emerge at last from the unknown abysses of the soul: will it be as a solemn gloom, burning with eyes? or a clear morning after the rain? or a smiling child, that finds itself nowhere, and everywhere?

That passage the sort of thing that gives the sole reason for reading Phantastes. If you like the sudden appearance of moral lessons drawn from the Bible and then dropped into a tale, lessons that make you long for greater understanding, lessons that make you think you are surely missing something important, then Phantastes is a book you should read.

Just don’t mistake the book for something by Tolkien or Gaiman. Don’t expect that the lessons will be succinctly explained. Don’t expect that the allegories will be clean and obvious. If you are willing to go along for the ride with an interesting raconteur telling tales that are somehow larger than life, then you will enjoy Phantastes. And maybe, if you are a lot like Lewis, it will change your life.

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