Naturalizing the Fantastic:Narrative Technique in the Novelsof Charles Williams

KATHLEEN SPENCER

To understand the language of a text is to reeognize the world to which it refers.Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics

The basic convention which governs the novel, according to JonathanCuller, is "our expectation that the novel will produce a world." The novelrepresents "the semiotic process at its fullest scope: the creation and orga-nization of signs not simply in order to produce meaning but in order toproduce a human world charged with meaning"(189). Though no singlephrase can adequately describe the novels of Charles Williams, "a humanworld charged with meaning" comes remarkably close, provided that theworld Williams believed in, the world he produces in his novels, is notexclusively human. Intermixed with the human is a generous measure ofthe superhuman. For Williams, it is precisely this intermixtureor coin-herence, to use his term for itof nature and supernature that creates themeaning of his world.

His belief in the interpenetration of these two realms, the natural and thesupernatural, helps to explain the characteristic shape of Williams's novels.His works, like those of his friends C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, arecommonly called fantasies, but unlike theirs Williams's are not set in separ-ate magical realms with special laws of their own, but in contemporaryLondon and the surrounding countryside.' Lewis's and Tolkien's storiesconcern kings and queens, heroes and great fighters, talking animals, andother fabulous creatures. In Narnia and Middle-earth, wizards are fearedbut are recognized as part of the natural order of things; magic is under-

Extrapolation, Vol. 28, No. I, 1987 by The Kent State University Press

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stood as a rare gift, but no less common than any other kind of genius orgreat power.

Williams, on the other hand, fills his London stories with ordinarymiddle-class people: secretaries, publisher's assistants, students, junior edi-tors, wives, daughters, and maiden aunts, along with the occasional doctor,lawyer, teacher, or artist. The majority of these characters, far from believ-ing in magic or the supernatural, have never even thought seriously aboutthemuntil the Stone of Suleiman begins transporting people throughspace, until the Archetypal Beasts materialize to menace the countryside,until the original Tarot deck creates a magical and deadly blizzard, until aliving woman's spirit roams the city ofthe dead while a dead woman meetsher living husband on a London street. Faced with circumstances that seemimpossible, the characters must learn to accept the reality of their experi-ences to meet successfully the challenge of events. Nor can they lightlyrefuse or fail this challenge, for at stake are not just their own fates, butoften the fates of many other people, if not of all of civilization.

The characters are not the only ones who must accept the reality ofthemarvelous occurrences. To experience the text fully, readers also must be-lieve in the events being narrated, at least as long as they are reading. Bychoosing to set his supernatural tales in perfectly mundane and realisticsurroundingsby choosing, that is, the genre of the fantastic rather than offantasyWilliams has created some special technical problems of inducingbelief in his readers. An examination of those problems and how Williamshas approached them yields considerable insight into the way the fantasticoperates and what its potential powers might be.

Williams's novels all belong to the fantastic genre. But whose "fantas-tic"? Alas, "fantastic" is one of those protean literary words that meanssomething different in the hands of almost every critic who uses it. Else-where I have discussed the more popular models ofthe fantastic (TzvetanTodorov's, Rosemary Jackson's, and Eric Rabkin's) and explained why Ifind them inappropriate to my purposes;^ here I will restrict myself to theobservation that the most precise and functional model of the fantastic isthat proposed by Polish critic Andrzej Zgorzelski.

The fantastic, Zgorzelski states, "consists in the breaching ofthe internallaws which are initially assumed in the text to govern the fictional world"(298). All texts begin with meta-textual information about the genre towhich they belong: though not always in a single phrase, like the "Onceupon a time" of the fairy tale, they nonetheless and unmistakably signaltheir nature in the opening pages. In the case of the fantastic, the initialsignals indicate a fictive world based on objective reality, what Zgorzelskicalls "a mimetic world model." However, the entrance of the fantastic ele-ment breaches this model and changes it into a different world, one follow-ing different laws. The genre of the fantastic, then, consists of those texts

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which "build their fictional world as a textual confrontation of two modelsof reality" (298).

Because the crucial aspect ofthe definition is that both models of realitybe contained within the text itself, Zgorzelski does not include in the fantas-tic those texts based on a unified but nonrealistic world modelfantasyand fairy tales on the one hand or science fiction on the other. While thenonrealistic worlds of fairy tales and science fiction do, of course, challengethe reality of the readers, the confrontation does not occur within the textbut only when readers disengage from it, when they stop reading. In thefantastic, however, since both world models are contained in the text itself,it is during the reading that readers experience the confrontation.

Zgorzelski identifies two primary markers ofthe fantastic. The first in-volves the tone or focus ofthe narrative itself: the emphasis is on provokingthe readers' sense of wonder, the unexpected, the unknown. They mustnever be allowed to forget the strangeness ofthe fantastic occurrences tak-ing place. At the same time, the author must find a way of justifying ormaking credible the improbable events or characters of the story. Theproper response from the reader faced with such occurrences is: "This can-not be happeningbut it is!"

By contrast, science-fiction writers, who construct a text built on a uni-fied non-mimetic world model, direct their efforts "not towards makingthis world probable, but towards making it ordinary; not towards justify-ing the appearance of improbable events, characters or elements of thesetting but rather towards making it appear normal, everyday-like withinthe suggested laws of the given reality" (299; emphasis added). The readersof science fiction, faced with what appears to be a breach in the laws ofthetextual world, assume merely that they have not fully understood thoselaws and that the event, when explained, will turn out to be entirely natural.The readers ofthe fantastic, on the other hand, must accept that the remark-able occurrences are actually happening (they must, as Todorov points out,interpret the events literally, rather than reading either "poetically" or "al-legorically" [321]), but they should never come to regard those events asnormal or ordinary.

In sustaining this sense of the extraordinary, the reader is guided by thereactions of the characters and/ or the narrator: these reactions are the sec-ond of Zgorzelski's markers ofthe fantastic. Naturally the characters andnarrator are all aware of the laws of their own world, the initially estab-lished mimetic world model, so that when the laws of their world arebreached by the fantastic, they respond with astonishment, disbelief, awe,terror j^ust as the reader does in sharing their experience. The text itself,therefore, testifies repeatedly and in multiple ways that a breach has indeedoccurred.

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fantastic tale follow. In the beginning, the ordinary conventions of realismapply. The world of the text refers to a recognizable world, full of realisticobjects, customs, and institutions. The characters are, for the most part,not real historical personages but are realistica blend of generalizedcharacteristics appropriate to their periods, classes, occupations, and ages,combined with individualizing traits. The events described must fall withincertain parameters of probability, given the personalities ofthe charactersand their situations; above all, events must obey the natural laws of thereaders' physical world.

The intrusion of the fantastic modifies some of these conventions andadds others. The fantastic element must represent a genuine breach in thenatural laws ofthe mimetic world model; that is, it must actually be what itappears to benot a hallucination, not a dream, not the result of a trickedor overstimulated imagination. The characters or narrator or both mustrecognize the occurrence as a violation of the natural laws of their world.

Paradoxically, however, to make the fantastic event convincing, the au-thor must apply the same techniques of verisimilitude that create the realis-tic elements of the text. Surely one of the simplest and most effective ofsuch techniques is the detailed, particularized description of objects andevents, the fantastic and the realistic alike. This technique is a variation ofwhat Jonathan Culler calls a "descriptive residue," items in a story that tellus nothing about plot or character, whose only function in the text is todenote concrete reality"trivial gestures, insignificant objects, superflu-ous dialogue"to represent the simple thereness oHht world (193). If suchdescriptions of ordinary objects are convincing in the reality of the text'sworld, they will also convince readers ofthe reality ofthe fantastic elementswhich intrude into that world. The more specific and intimate the details ofappearance and behavior given, the more convincing the fantastic occur-rence will seem.

One of the aspects ofthe fantastic that contributes most crucially to theverisimilitude of the genre may well be the initial mimetic setting. If theworld is recognizable and acceptable and its characters are realistic, readerscan enter the characters' perceptions and experiences, thereby making anemotional commitment to the text as verisimilar and committing energy tobelieving in it. Even when the fantastic challenges the initial mimeticworld's credibility, the characters experience the same doubts and disloca-tions as do the readers. Consequently, though readers' identification withthe world ofthe text has been disrupted, identification with the charactersis not diminished; instead, it is reinforced. Rather than rejecting the textaltogether, readers experience that typical and paradoxical reaction to thefantastic: this, readers think, cannot be happening, but it is.

Given this model, all seven of Charles Williams's novels are quite clearlyfantastic.3 They begin with ordinary contemporary places and eventsat a

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university dinner in honor of a returned explorer, in the offices of a Londonpublisher, with two friends on a country ramble, with a bickering middle-class family just before dinner, with the discussion of a new play by anamateur theatrical group." Then, more or less rapidly, each of these ordi-nary scenes opens up into a series of increasingly astonishing and impossi-ble occurrences to the surprise, excitement, bafflement, and occasional ter-ror of the characters.

The question of most importance, then, concerns Williams's techniquesfor encouraging reader sympathy for and identification with these charac-ters, so that their responses and the fantastic events to which they respondare believable. Primarily, he relies on control of narrative point of view andnarratorial authoritythe reliabiity of the source through which readerslearn of or experience the fantastic. Williams's narrator is omniscient, butseldom intrusive: he is free to enter into the minds of all the characters atwill, but says very little (aside from the usual reportorial functions) is hisown proper voice. But to have said this is to have made only the broadest,most general of observations about Williams's narrative technique. Inpractice, the variations and gradations of narrative voice in these novels arequite subtle and admirably suited to the rather delicate task at hand: lead-ing readers by small, gradual steps into an acceptance (within the text, atleast) of the fantastic events he has described.

As a rule, Williams introduces the fantastic element of his stories onlygradually, in a way not initially committing the narrator to a position on itstruthfulnessEprimarily, that is, through dialogue.5 In War in Heaven, hisfirst published novel, the Graal (or Grail) is discovered in an English coun-try church and becomes the center of a struggle between some Satanists andan opposing group. However, this is not the kind of story that the bookinitially suggests it will tell. In fact, it begins like a classic murder mystery:"The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there wasno one in the room but the corpse."* From the murder scene (the offices of aLondon publisher), the story spreads out, building a network of interre-lated characterstwo young employees of the publisher, Lionel Rack-straw and Kenneth Mornington; Rackstraw's wife and young son; Mor-nington's priest-friend who introduces the clerk to the Archdeacon ofFardles; the harried publisher himself, Stephen Persimmons, and his fa-ther, Gregory, the former head ofthe firm and a student ofthe more horri-ble branches ofthe occult who announces serenely to Stephen that he is themurderer; and Sir Giles Tumulty, an associate of Gregory's whose book onSacred Vessels has just reached proof stage in Persimmons's firm.

Gregory Persimmons is a rather puzzling character. In the first place, heviolates the conventions of detective fiction by casually revealing himself asthe murderer in the early chapters ofthe book. In the second place, he endshis confession by saying to himself, cryptically: "The wizards were burned,66

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they went to be burned, they hurried. Is there a need still? Must the wizardbe an outcast like the saint? Or am I only tired? I want another child. And Iwant the Graal" (28).

His final remark seems to be a particularly odd non sequitur, but severalpages later, there is a kind of explanation. The Archdeacon drops in at thepublisher's to leave a manuscript with Mornington and is shown the proofsof Sir Giles's book as something touching his professional, clerical con-cerns. The book includes the following passage:

"It seems probable, therefore, . . . if we consider these evidences, and the hy-pothetical scheme which has been adduced, not altogether unreasonably, to ac-count for the facts which we havea scheme which may be destroyed in thefuture by discovery of some further fact, but till then may not unjustifiably beconsidered to hold the fieldit seems probable that the reputed Graal may be sofar definitely traced and its wanderings followed as to permit us to say that itrests at present in the parish church of Fardles."

"Dear me!" the Archdeacon [of Fardles] said. . . . (36)

At that same moment across the hall, Gregory has just delivered Sir Giles'sinstructions to delete this paragraph from the text, not knowing it has cometo the attention of the last person in the world he he would have wanted tosee it.

Williams's rhetorical strategy here is multilayered and quite subtle. Onthe one hand, this passage is convincing and authoritative in tone. It hasthat peculiar academic blend of caution ("it seems probable," "hypotheticalscheme," "not unjustifiably," "not altogether unreasonably," "the reputedGraal") and confidence ("hold the field," "definitely traced," "it rests atpresent"). On the other hand, this is not the authority ofthe narrator but ofSir Giles, whose reliability has not been established. A further notablecharacteristic ofthe passage is how gradually it arrives at its point: the longsentence winds slowly along, heavily dependent on passive contructions,interrupting itself with qualifying adverbs, parenthetical observations, andreduplicated phrases. It labors to come to the point in the native tones ofscientific/academic discourse, taking all elements into account, clutteringup the crucial observation with unnecessary words and finally burying thepoint in a relative clause. All of this works to diminish the impact of thepassage. But even though in a relative clause, the key pharsethat theGraal "rests at present in the parish church of Fardles"is stated quitesimply and ends the sentence, with the result that it receives considerablerhetorical emphasis. Out of this turgid and murky paragraph, the final linebursts forth with startling clarity. No wonder the Archdeacon exclaims" 'Dear me!' " Readers are inclined to share his sensation.

Nevertheless, at this stage in the text, the fantastic is not yet fact butmerely proposition, however vigorously presented. The same thing is true

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in Williams's other novels. Many Dimensions opens with (again) Sir GilesTumulty, his nephew, and a Persian prince discussing the powers of theStone in the Crown of Suleiman, which sits on the desk before them. How itis supposed to work is not particularly clear, but from the conversationreaders gather that the Stone transports people instantly to wherever theywish to go. That these three men obviously believe the Stone can do thismakes it hard to dismiss, especially since one ofthe three is Sir Giles, whomreaders ofthe earlier volume remember as a scientific student ofthe occult.However, there is no demonstration, no proof, ofthe Stone's powers (yet);and when the Prince returns to his embassy, the Persian ambassador, hissuperior, is gently sceptical. " 'I believe that is has seemed to [Ali] that aman has been here and there in a moment. But how, or whether indeed, thishas been I do not know, and I do not desire to argue upon it with theEnglish ministers'" (16). The ambassador's cool, balanced, courteousscepticism seems so much more plausible than the fantastic tale of theStone that readers immediately are inclined to identify with him. TheStone's powers remain a curiously powerful but untested proposition.

In the next stage ofthe presentation ofthe fantastic, Williams generallyallows the reader to enter the character's mind, to share with her or him afantastic experience. There are two ways to convey the thoughts of a char-acter, ways which are distinguishable but often found together: the narra-tor's direct reports of those thoughts and the technique called free indirectspeech, which contains elements of both character and narrator.

What makes free indirect speech so important a device is the way readersrespond to its combination of character and narrator. As Roy Pascal ex-plains in his detailed study ofthe technique. The Dual Voice, in free indirectspeech "the narrator, though preserving the authorial mode throughoutand evading the 'dramatic'form of speech or dialogue, yet places himself,when reporting the words or thoughts of a character, directly into the expe-riential field ofthe character, and adopts the latter's perspective in regardto both time and place" (9).

An example might help to clarify this definition:

1. Direct speech: She hesitated and asked herself, "Is this where I was yester-day? Then where is Henry? He was supposed to meet me here."

2. Indirect speech: She hesitated and asked herself whether this was where shehad been the day before, and if so, where Henry was, since he was supposed tomeet her there.

3. Free indirect speech: She hesitated. Was this where she had been yesterday?Then where was Henry? He was supposed to meet her here.

Free indirect speech retains the authorial modethe past tense, she insteadof /but it enters the character's experiential fieldthe retained questionform, the use of here and yesterday rather than there and the day before.68

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More than this, while ordinary indirect speech tends to be entirely dena-tured language, free indirect speech retains the characteristic speech man-nerisms ofthe characterhabitual vocabulary and sentence forms, recog-nizable patterns of expression and turns of pbrase.

The most important result ofthe combination of character and narratoris that it allows the narrator to report the character's words and to com-ment on them at the same time, which is why Pascal calls it a dual voice.This makes free indirect speech a particuiary valuable device either forirony, when the narrator denies or ridicules the character's words, or forsympathetic identification, when the narratorial authority is used to vali-date the character's response. Jane Austen, for example, employs free indi-rect speech extensively for the first purpose, Williams generally for thesecond, to reinforce readers' identification with a character in the grip ofthe fantastic.

The effect in Williams's hands is subtle. Because he intertwines free indi-rect speech with simple reporting of characters' thoughts and feelings,readers tend not to notice consciously the narratorial participation andvalidation, but they respond to it nevertheless. The fantastic experiences socommunicated not only link readers closely with the character involved butare also entirely persuasive and compelling.

For example, consider how Williams uses free indirect speech in an ex-tended passage from The Greater Trumps. The brackets added identifythose portions ofthe passage that seem to be the narrator's reports of Nan-cy's thoughts, generally characterized by a kind of external view of her andher actions, marked by complete sentence structuresa pronoun and averb. Added italics identify those portions that seem to be Nancy's freeindirect speech, the long passages of absolutes.

Nancy, with Henry's guidance, is about to try an experiment with thespecial Tarot cards her father has inherited. As Henry knows, though hehas not yet told his fianc6e, this is the true, original pack and, hence, hasreal power in the world. The four suites, he tells her (sceptres, swords, cups,and coins [or deniers]) correspond to the four elements (air, fire, water,earth). Giving her the deniers, he tells her to shuffie the cards and think of"earth, garden-mould, the stuff of the fields, and the dry dust ofthe roads:the earth your fiowers grow in, the earth to which our bodies are given, theearth which in one shape or another makes the land as parted from thewaters" (46).

[She bent her mind to its task, a little vaguely at first, but soon more definitely.She filled it with the thought of the garden,] the earth that made it up, dry dustsometimes, sometimes rich loamthe worms that crawled in it and roots oftheflowers thrusting downno, not worms and rootsearth, deep thick earth.Great tree-roots going deep into italong the roots her mind penetrated into it,along the dividing, narrowing, dwindling roots, all the crannies and corners

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filled with earth, rushing up into her shoulder-pits, her elbows sticking out, littlebumps on those protracted roots. Mould clinging together, falling apart; a spadesplitting it, almost as if thrust into her thoughts, a spadeful of mould. Diggingholes, pits, mines, tunnels, gravesno, those things were not earth. Gravesthebodies in them being made one with the earth about them, so that at last therewas no difference. Earth to earthshe herself earth; body, shoulders, limbs,earth in her arms, in her hands.

There were springs, deep springs, cisterns and wells and rivers of water downin the earth, water floating in rocky channels or oozing through the earth itself;the earth covering, hampering, stifling them, they bursting upwards through it.No, not waterearth. [Her feet clung to it, were feeling it, were strangely draw-ing it up into themselves, and more and more and higher and higher that sensa-tion of unity with the stuff of her own foundation crept. There were rocks, butshe was not a rocknot yet; something living, like an impatient rush of water,was bubbling up within her, but she felt it as an intrusion into the natural part ofher being. Her lips were rough against each other;] her face must be stained andblack. [She almost put up her wrist to brush the earth from her cheeknot herhand, for that also was dirty; her fingers felt the grit. They were, both hands,breaking and rubbing a lump of earth between them; they were full and heapedwith earth that was slipping over them and sliding between the fingers, and shewas trying to hold it innot to let it escape.]

Nancy again becomes conscious that she is shuffling the cards, or ratherthat the cards are shuffling themselves while her hands try to keep up.

[A slight sound reached her]a curious continuous sound, yet hardly a sound atall, a faint rustle. The cards were gritty, or her hands were; or was it the persistentrubbing of her palms against the edges of the cards? What was that rustlingnoise? It wasn't her mere fancy, nor was it mere fancy that some substance wasslipping between her fingers. [Below her hands and the cards she saw the table,and some vague unusualness in it attracted her.] It was blackwell, of course,but a dull heavy black, [and down to it from her hands a kind of cloud wasfioating. It was from there that the first sound came; it was something falling]it was earth, a curtain, a rain of earth falling, falling, covering the part ofthetable immediately below, making little sliding soundsearth, real black earth.(46-48)

Some passages are easy to identify, especially when she comments on orinterrupts her own thoughts {"no, not worms and rootsearth"; "no, notwaterearth") or when she speaks with characteristic turns of phrase orwhen emphases are heard which seem to derive from a speaking voice {"thecards were gritty").

Many of these attributions could easily be disputed by readers who hearthe lines differently, and other lines (in regular type above) are so perfectlypoised between the two voices that they are impossible to attribute with anycertainty, but seem instead to function as transitions between the morestrongly characterized portions. The overall effect ofthe passage is totally

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convincing: the final v/OTds"earth, real black earth"heard both as Nan-cy's stunned realization and the narrator's assertion of the simple, conclu-sive factemerge from the swirl of images and sensations with compellingforce and demand assent to the actuality of the incident just experiencedthrough Nancy.

The style of this passage, which is characteristic of descriptions of thefantastic in all of Williams's novels, has best been explained by GunnarUrang. The novels, he remarks, "are not about the vision; they want to bethe vision" (80). Williams aims not so much to describe these experiences asconsciously to recreate them for the reader. Free indirect speech, particu-larly when blended with direct reportage of thoughts, is an economical,graceful, and effective way of allowing readers into characters'minds whileretaining narrative authority and control.

This scene from The Greater Trumps also demonstrates another charac-teristic of Williams's fantastic novels: that while many of the characters,always including the protagonist, have no awareness of the supernaturalwhen the novel begins, others are already students of the occult or arespiritual adepts of some kind. Since all the novels begin when a humanbeing attempts to bend supernatural forces to his own will, the camp oftheantagonists, by definition, must include at least one occultist. However,one of tbe qualities that makes Williams's novels unusual is that the pro-tagonists are always guided and supported by a person who understandsthe supernatural realm.

That is, while some characters are shocked, baffled, or terrified by theincredible events transpiringincluding the character with whom readersmost closely identifyan unusual number of characters have already ac-cepted the reality ofthe supernatural, as does the narrator himself (in thiscase, readily identifiable with the author, who believed quite genuinely inthe supernatural). The result is that the degree of shock and horror is ratherless than might be expected: the emphasis here is less on the "fantastical-ness" of the fantastic than on the protagonist's struggle, first, to accept thereality ofthe events, and second, to act properly in responsefor the pro-tagonist must always act to prevent a supernatural catastrophe on a sweep-ing scale. The readers, then, are caught up in excitement, puzzlement, curi-osity, exaltation, and suspense, but not exactly, nor primarily fear.' How-ever afraid some of the characters may be (generally not the protagonistafter the initial shock and disbelief), the narrator's voice reassures readersthat the supernatural is as bound by law as the natural world and that thoselaws can be discovered and used to reestablish the breached boundariesbetween the two realms.

Having led up to it through gradual stages, the narrator finally begins totell readers of the fantastic on his own full authority and in richly textureddetail. The rhythm of these different modes of presentationdirect dia-

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logue, unsupported by the narrator; the character's reported thoughts andfeelings, sliding over into free indirect speech in which the narrator vali-dates the character's responses; and full narratorial presentationvariesfrom novel to novel in the series. Shadows of Ecstasy, the first novel Wil-liams wrote, does not introduce the fantastic at all, even in dialogue, untilthe fifth chapter, some seventy pages into the book, and does not give nar-ratorial confirmation until the eleventh chapter (out of fourteen). By con-trast, his last novel. All Hallows'Eve, opens with the consciousnessbothreported thoughts and actions, and free indirect speechof a youngwoman named Lester Furnival who lives in London at the end of WorldWar II: on the fifth page of the text, she suddenly realizes that she is dead.Yet her consciousness remains intact, and we enter into it periodically untilthe very end of the novel. The ordinary "real" world and living charactersdo not enter the story until the second chapter. Another peculiarity of thisvolume is that from the very beginning the narrator commits himself to theactuality of the fantastic events, telling things about the occurrences thatthe characters do not knowunlike the earlier novels when he leads up tothat stage gradually. It is as if, at the end of his life, Williams had developeda new confidence in his story, or his audience, or both.

The rhythm and pace of his presentation may vary from novel to novel,but the goal does not. In all of his novels, more so than in most examples ofthe fantastic, Williams is writing about events which, despite the opinionsof his own culture to the contrary, he believed to be possible. That is, it wasnot his own fictional evocations of the supernatural in which he believedbut rather the conception of the universe upon which his fictions werebased: a universe where the supernatural is real, coinherent in the naturalworld, and governed by laws allowing readers to comprehend it. This beliefgoes a long way to explain the special quality of Williams's novels, thekinds of stories he chooses to tell, the heroes he selects, the assured, confi-dent tone of the narrative and, above all, his choice of genrethe fantastic,which blends the ordinary real world with incredible characters and events.

The fantastic genre can be used for many purposes besides the one Wil-liams chose, which was, at least in part, to give his audience a vivid expe-rience of the numinous world in which he believed. Other nineteenth- andearly twentieth-century writers use the genre for this same purpose, as asort of pleasant propaganda for Spiritualism or Theosophy or magic.Some fantastic tales arejust for the fun of a marvelous adventure or pro-vide the special pleasures of the ghost story, the delightful frisson of being(safely) scared witless. Other tales, like most of what Tobin Siebers calls theRomantic Fantastic (a more precise term for the works Todorov discussesunder the label of the fantastic) use the genre more seriously to explore theproblems of subjectivity through the device of unreliable narrators and the

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unusual states of consciousnessmadness, frenzy, hallucination, dreamwith which many Romantic artists were obsessed.

Whatever the purpose to which the fantastic has been put, the sort ofanalysis to which I have here subjected Williams's novels can be a usefulapproach to any fantastic text. The pace at which the narrative hints at andthen confirms the fantastic, the source of that confirmation and its reliabil-ity, or whether the text ever commits itself at all (as in Todorov's sense thatthe true fantastic consists of those texts which refuse to commit themselvesto the actuality of the events being described) can provide sensitive clues tothe central concerns of the text and can suggest reasons why the author haschosen the fantastic as the appropriate genre for the tale.

Notes1. This is the model Lewis follows in his best-known fantasies, his children's series. The

Chronicles ofNarnia. His later Ransom Trilogy looks more like Williams's typical pattern,especially the third volume, That Hideous Strength (1946); however, it is my convictionthat in That Hideous Strength Lewis was modeling his work on the novels of his recently-deceased friend, novels which he greatly admired.

2. In "The Urban Gothic in British Fantastic Fiction 1880-1930." Diss., University of Cali-fornia, Los Angeles, 1986.

3. \nA Reader's Guide to Charles W/V/Zami (Starmont House, 1986), 1 argue that Williams'snovels are romances, but this is not incompatible with identifying them also as fantastic.There is, in fact, a close historical affinity between the two genres, which has been recentlyobscured since two of the most significant contemporary variants of the romancethewestern and the detective storyhave abandoned the fantastic element. The situation maybe further complicated because the most common contemporary form of the fantastic is theGothic, which uses the supernatural to such different ends than Williams that the readingprotocols for the one do not really apply to the other.

4. Many Dimensions. Williams's second published novel, is a partial exception to this, butnot so great a one as to violate the necessary condition of the fantastic: the initial establish-ment of the mimetic world.

5. There are two exceptions to this. The Place of the Lion and All Hallows'Eve. However.thelatter is an exception to almost all of the general observations about Williams's narrativetechniques. It is not only his last novel, but, while the others were written fairly closetogether and very rapidly, Alt Hallows'Eve is separated by some eight years from its near-est predecessor. It is also his most deliberately crafted novel, produced after his involve-ment with the Inklings, who gave him the most detailed responses to his work in progress hehad ever receivedEindeed, who were the first to take his fiction seriously. As a resit of bothhis developing technique and his developing theme. All Hallows'Eve differs significantlyfrom the earlier pattern.

6. The citations in this paper will be to the most readily available editions of Williams'snovels: the paperback editions by Eerdmans.

7. This is what most clearly distinguishes Williams's novels from the Gothic, in which thedominant emotional atmosphere is fear and horror.

Works CitedCuller, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study

of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975.

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Pascal, Roy. The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and Its Functioning in theNineteenth-Century Novel. Manchester, England: Manchester Univ. Press,1977.

Siebers, Tobin. The Romantic Fantastic. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984.Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre.

1970. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975.Urang, Gunnar. Shadows of Heaven: Religion and Fantasy in the Writings ofC. S.

Lewis, Charles Williams, and J. R. R. Tolkien. Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press,1971.

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