Naturalizing the Fantastic:

Narrative Technique in the Novels

of 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 Jonathan
Culler, is "our expectation that the novel will produce a world." The novel
represents "the semiotic process at its fullest scope: the creation and orga-
nization of signs not simply in order to produce meaning but in order to
produce a human world charged with meaning"(189). Though no single
phrase can adequately describe the novels of Charles Williams, "a human
world charged with meaning" comes remarkably close, provided that the
world Williams believed in, the world he produces in his novels, is not
exclusively human. Intermixed with the human is a generous measure of
the superhuman. For Williams, it is precisely this intermixtureor coin-
herence, to use his term for itof nature and supernature that creates the
meaning of his world.
His belief in the interpenetration of these two realms, the natural and the
supernatural, 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, are
commonly called fantasies, but unlike theirs Williams's are not set in separ-
ate magical realms with special laws of their own, but in contemporary
London and the surrounding countryside.' Lewis's and Tolkien's stories
concern kings and queens, heroes and great fighters, talking animals, and
other fabulous creatures. In Narnia and Middle-earth, wizards are feared
but 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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Naturalizing the Fantastic
stood as a rare gift, but no less common than any other kind of genius or
great power.
Williams, on the other hand, fills his London stories with ordinary
middle-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 about
themuntil the Stone of Suleiman begins transporting people through
space, until the Archetypal Beasts materialize to menace the countryside,
until the original Tarot deck creates a magical and deadly blizzard, until a
living woman's spirit roams the city ofthe dead while a dead woman meets
her living husband on a London street. Faced with circumstances that seem
impossible, the characters must learn to accept the reality of their experi-
ences to meet successfully the challenge of events. Nor can they lightly
refuse or fail this challenge, for at stake are not just their own fates, but
often the fates of many other people, if not of all of civilization.
The characters are not the only ones who must accept the reality ofthe
marvelous occurrences. To experience the text fully, readers also must be-
lieve in the events being narrated, at least as long as they are reading. By
choosing to set his supernatural tales in perfectly mundane and realistic
surroundingsby choosing, that is, the genre of the fantastic rather than of
fantasyWilliams has created some special technical problems of inducing
belief in his readers. An examination of those problems and how Williams
has approached them yields considerable insight into the way the fantastic
operates 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 means
something different in the hands of almost every critic who uses it. Else-
where I have discussed the more popular models ofthe fantastic (Tzvetan
Todorov's, Rosemary Jackson's, and Eric Rabkin's) and explained why I
find them inappropriate to my purposes;^ here I will restrict myself to the
observation that the most precise and functional model of the fantastic is
that proposed by Polish critic Andrzej Zgorzelski.
The fantastic, Zgorzelski states, "consists in the breaching ofthe internal
laws which are initially assumed in the text to govern the fictional world"
(298). All texts begin with meta-textual information about the genre to
which they belong: though not always in a single phrase, like the "Once
upon a time" of the fairy tale, they nonetheless and unmistakably signal
their nature in the opening pages. In the case of the fantastic, the initial
signals indicate a fictive world based on objective reality, what Zgorzelski
calls "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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Kathleen Spencer
which "build their fictional world as a textual confrontation of two models
of reality" (298).
Because the crucial aspect ofthe definition is that both models of reality
be contained within the text itself, Zgorzelski does not include in the fantas-
tic those texts based on a unified but nonrealistic world modelfantasy
and fairy tales on the one hand or science fiction on the other. While the
nonrealistic worlds of fairy tales and science fiction do, of course, challenge
the reality of the readers, the confrontation does not occur within the text
but only when readers disengage from it, when they stop reading. In the
fantastic, 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 provoking
the readers' sense of wonder, the unexpected, the unknown. They must
never be allowed to forget the strangeness ofthe fantastic occurrences tak-
ing place. At the same time, the author must find a way of justifying or
making credible the improbable events or characters of the story. The
proper 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 making
this world probable, but towards making it ordinary; not towards justify-
ing the appearance of improbable events, characters or elements of the
setting but rather towards making it appear normal, everyday-like within
the suggested laws of the given reality" (299; emphasis added). The readers
of science fiction, faced with what appears to be a breach in the laws ofthe
textual world, assume merely that they have not fully understood those
laws 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 as
normal or ordinary.
In sustaining this sense of the extraordinary, the reader is guided by the
reactions of the characters and/ or the narrator: these reactions are the sec-
ond of Zgorzelski's markers ofthe fantastic. Naturally the characters and
narrator 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 are
breached by the fantastic, they respond with astonishment, disbelief, awe,
terror^just as the reader does in sharing their experience. The text itself,
therefore, testifies repeatedly and in multiple ways that a breach has indeed
occurred.
From this general description ofthe genre, other textual elements ofthe
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Naturalizing the Fantastic
fantastic tale follow. In the beginning, the ordinary conventions of realism
apply. The world of the text refers to a recognizable world, full of realistic
objects, customs, and institutions. The characters are, for the most part,
not real historical personages but are realistica blend of generalized
characteristics appropriate to their periods, classes, occupations, and ages,
combined with individualizing traits. The events described must fall within
certain parameters of probability, given the personalities ofthe characters
and their situations; above all, events must obey the natural laws of the
readers' physical world.
The intrusion of the fantastic modifies some of these conventions and
adds others. The fantastic element must represent a genuine breach in the
natural laws ofthe mimetic world model; that is, it must actually be what it
appears to benot a hallucination, not a dream, not the result of a tricked
or overstimulated imagination. The characters or narrator or both must
recognize 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 of
such techniques is the detailed, particularized description of objects and
events, the fantastic and the realistic alike. This technique is a variation of
what Jonathan Culler calls a "descriptive residue," items in a story that tell
us nothing about plot or character, whose only function in the text is to
denote concrete reality"trivial gestures, insignificant objects, superflu-
ous dialogue"to represent the simple thereness oHht world (193). If such
descriptions of ordinary objects are convincing in the reality of the text's
world, they will also convince readers ofthe reality ofthe fantastic elements
which intrude into that world. The more specific and intimate the details of
appearance and behavior given, the more convincing the fantastic occur-
rence will seem.
One of the aspects ofthe fantastic that contributes most crucially to the
verisimilitude of the genre may well be the initial mimetic setting. If the
world is recognizable and acceptable and its characters are realistic, readers
can enter the characters' perceptions and experiences, thereby making an
emotional commitment to the text as verisimilar and committing energy to
believing in it. Even when the fantastic challenges the initial mimetic
world's credibility, the characters experience the same doubts and disloca-
tions as do the readers. Consequently, though readers' identification with
the world ofthe text has been disrupted, identification with the characters
is not diminished; instead, it is reinforced. Rather than rejecting the text
altogether, readers experience that typical and paradoxical reaction to the
fantastic: this, readers think, cannot be happening, but it is.
Given this model, all seven of Charles Williams's novels are quite clearly
fantastic.3 They begin with ordinary contemporary places and eventsat a
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Kathleen Spencer
university dinner in honor of a returned explorer, in the offices of a London
publisher, with two friends on a country ramble, with a bickering middle-
class family just before dinner, with the discussion of a new play by an
amateur 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 techniques
for encouraging reader sympathy for and identification with these charac-
ters, so that their responses and the fantastic events to which they respond
are believable. Primarily, he relies on control of narrative point of view and
narratorial authoritythe reliabiity of the source through which readers
learn of or experience the fantastic. Williams's narrator is omniscient, but
seldom intrusive: he is free to enter into the minds of all the characters at
will, but says very little (aside from the usual reportorial functions) is his
own proper voice. But to have said this is to have made only the broadest,
most general of observations about Williams's narrative technique. In
practice, the variations and gradations of narrative voice in these novels are
quite subtle and admirably suited to the rather delicate task at hand: lead-
ing readers by small, gradual steps into an acceptance (within the text, at
least) of the fantastic events he has described.
As a rule, Williams introduces the fantastic element of his stories only
gradually, in a way not initially committing the narrator to a position on its
truthfulnessEprimarily, that is, through dialogue.5 In War in Heaven, his
first published novel, the Graal (or Grail) is discovered in an English coun-
try church and becomes the center of a struggle between some Satanists and
an opposing group. However, this is not the kind of story that the book
initially suggests it will tell. In fact, it begins like a classic murder mystery:
"The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was
no one in the room but the corpse."* From the murder scene (the offices of a
London 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 of
Fardles; 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 the
murderer; and Sir Giles Tumulty, an associate of Gregory's whose book on
Sacred Vessels has just reached proof stage in Persimmons's firm.
Gregory Persimmons is a rather puzzling character. In the first place, he
violates the conventions of detective fiction by casually revealing himself as
the murderer in the early chapters ofthe book. In the second place, he ends
his confession by saying to himself, cryptically: "The wizards were burned,
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Naturalizing the Fantastic
they went to be burned, they hurried. Is there a need still? Must the wizard
be an outcast like the saint? Or am I only tired? I want another child. And I
want the Graal" (28).
His final remark seems to be a particularly odd non sequitur, but several
pages later, there is a kind of explanation. The Archdeacon drops in at the
publisher's to leave a manuscript with Mornington and is shown the proofs
of 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 the
future by discovery of some further fact, but till then may not unjustifiably be
considered to hold the fieldit seems probable that the reputed Graal may be so
far definitely traced and its wanderings followed as to permit us to say that it
rests 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's
instructions to delete this paragraph from the text, not knowing it has come
to the attention of the last person in the world he he would have wanted to
see it.
Williams's rhetorical strategy here is multilayered and quite subtle. On
the one hand, this passage is convincing and authoritative in tone. It has
that peculiar academic blend of caution ("it seems probable," "hypothetical
scheme," "not unjustifiably," "not altogether unreasonably," "the reputed
Graal") and confidence ("hold the field," "definitely traced," "it rests at
present"). On the other hand, this is not the authority ofthe narrator but of
Sir Giles, whose reliability has not been established. A further notable
characteristic ofthe passage is how gradually it arrives at its point: the long
sentence winds slowly along, heavily dependent on passive contructions,
interrupting itself with qualifying adverbs, parenthetical observations, and
reduplicated phrases. It labors to come to the point in the native tones of
scientific/academic discourse, taking all elements into account, cluttering
up the crucial observation with unnecessary words and finally burying the
point in a relative clause. All of this works to diminish the impact of the
passage. But even though in a relative clause, the key pharsethat the
Graal "rests at present in the parish church of Fardles"is stated quite
simply and ends the sentence, with the result that it receives considerable
rhetorical emphasis. Out of this turgid and murky paragraph, the final line
bursts 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 but
merely proposition, however vigorously presented. The same thing is true
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Kathleen Spencer
in Williams's other novels. Many Dimensions opens with (again) Sir Giles
Tumulty, his nephew, and a Persian prince discussing the powers of the
Stone in the Crown of Suleiman, which sits on the desk before them. How it
is supposed to work is not particularly clear, but from the conversation
readers gather that the Stone transports people instantly to wherever they
wish to go. That these three men obviously believe the Stone can do this
makes it hard to dismiss, especially since one ofthe three is Sir Giles, whom
readers 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, his
superior, is gently sceptical. " 'I believe that is has seemed to [Ali] that a
man has been here and there in a moment. But how, or whether indeed, this
has been I do not know, and I do not desire to argue upon it with the
English ministers'" (16). The ambassador's cool, balanced, courteous
scepticism seems so much more plausible than the fantastic tale of the
Stone that readers immediately are inclined to identify with him. The
Stone's powers remain a curiously powerful but untested proposition.
In the next stage ofthe presentation ofthe fantastic, Williams generally
allows the reader to enter the character's mind, to share with her or him a
fantastic 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 indirect
speech, which contains elements of both character and narrator.
What makes free indirect speech so important a device is the way readers
respond to its combination of character and narrator. As Roy Pascal ex-
plains in his detailed study ofthe technique. The Dual Voice, in free indirect
speech "the narrator, though preserving the authorial mode throughout
and 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 regard
to 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 she
had been the day before, and if so, where Henry was, since he was supposed to
meet 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 instead
of /but it enters the character's experiential fieldthe retained question
form, the use of here and yesterday rather than there and the day before.
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Naturalizing the Fantastic
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 narrator
is 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 for
irony, when the narrator denies or ridicules the character's words, or for
sympathetic 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 the
second, to reinforce readers' identification with a character in the grip of
the 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 and
validation, but they respond to it nevertheless. The fantastic experiences so
communicated not only link readers closely with the character involved but
are 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 identify
those 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 and
her actions, marked by complete sentence structuresa pronoun and a
verb. Added italics identify those portions that seem to be Nancy's free
indirect speech, the long passages of absolutes.
Nancy, with Henry's guidance, is about to try an experiment with the
special Tarot cards her father has inherited. As Henry knows, though he
has not yet told his fianc6e, this is the true, original pack and, hence, has
real 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, the
earth which in one shape or another makes the land as parted from the
waters" (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 dust
sometimes, sometimes rich loamthe worms that crawled in it and roots ofthe
flowers 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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Kathleen Spencer
filled with earth, rushing up into her shoulder-pits, her elbows sticking out, little
bumps on those protracted roots. Mould clinging together, falling apart; a spade
splitting it, almost as if thrust into her thoughts, a spadeful of mould. Digging
holes, pits, mines, tunnels, gravesno, those things were not earth. Gravesthe
bodies in them being made one with the earth about them, so that at last there
was 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 down
in 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, but
she 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 of
her being. Her lips were rough against each other;] her face must be stained and
black. [She almost put up her wrist to brush the earth from her cheeknot her
hand, 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 heaped
with earth that was slipping over them and sliding between the fingers, and she
was trying to hold it innot to let it escape.]
Nancy again becomes conscious that she is shuffling the cards, or rather
that 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 at
all, a faint rustle. The cards were gritty, or her hands were; or was it the persistent
rubbing of her palms against the edges of the cards? What was that rustling
noise? It wasn't her mere fancy, nor was it mere fancy that some substance was
slipping 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 was
fioating. 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 ofthe
table immediately below, making little sliding soundsearth, real black earth.
(46-48)
Some passages are easy to identify, especially when she comments on or
interrupts her own thoughts {"no, not worms and rootsearth"; "no, not
waterearth") or when she speaks with characteristic turns of phrase or
when emphases are heard which seem to derive from a speaking voice {"the
cards were gritty").
Many of these attributions could easily be disputed by readers who hear
the lines differently, and other lines (in regular type above) are so perfectly
poised between the two voices that they are impossible to attribute with any
certainty, but seem instead to function as transitions between the more
strongly characterized portions. The overall effect ofthe passage is totally
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Naturalizing the Fantastic
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 compelling
force and demand assent to the actuality of the incident just experienced
through Nancy.
The style of this passage, which is characteristic of descriptions of the
fantastic in all of Williams's novels, has best been explained by Gunnar
Urang. The novels, he remarks, "are not about the vision; they want to be
the vision" (80). Williams aims not so much to describe these experiences as
consciously 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 while
retaining 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 supernatural
when the novel begins, others are already students of the occult or are
spiritual adepts of some kind. Since all the novels begin when a human
being attempts to bend supernatural forces to his own will, the camp ofthe
antagonists, 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 understands
the supernatural realm.
That is, while some characters are shocked, baffled, or terrified by the
incredible events transpiringincluding the character with whom readers
most closely identifyan unusual number of characters have already ac-
cepted the reality ofthe supernatural, as does the narrator himself (in this
case, readily identifiable with the author, who believed quite genuinely in
the supernatural). The result is that the degree of shock and horror is rather
less 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 the
reality 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 protagonist
after the initial shock and disbelief), the narrator's voice reassures readers
that the supernatural is as bound by law as the natural world and that those
laws can be discovered and used to reestablish the breached boundaries
between the two realms.
Having led up to it through gradual stages, the narrator finally begins to
tell readers of the fantastic on his own full authority and in richly textured
detail. The rhythm of these different modes of presentationdirect dia-
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Kathleen Spencer
logue, unsupported by the narrator; the character's reported thoughts and
feelings, sliding over into free indirect speech in which the narrator vali-
dates the character's responses; and full narratorial presentationvaries
from 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, until
the 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 consciousnessboth
reported thoughts and actions, and free indirect speechof a young
woman named Lester Furnival who lives in London at the end of World
War 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 until
the very end of the novel. The ordinary "real" world and living characters
do not enter the story until the second chapter. Another peculiarity of this
volume is that from the very beginning the narrator commits himself to the
actuality of the fantastic events, telling things about the occurrences that
the characters do not knowunlike the earlier novels when he leads up to
that stage gradually. It is as if, at the end of his life, Williams had developed
a 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 of
the fantastic, Williams is writing about events which, despite the opinions
of his own culture to the contrary, he believed to be possible. That is, it was
not his own fictional evocations of the supernatural in which he believed
but rather the conception of the universe upon which his fictions were
based: a universe where the supernatural is real, coinherent in the natural
world, and governed by laws allowing readers to comprehend it. This belief
goes a long way to explain the special quality of Williams's novels, the
kinds 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- and
early twentieth-century writers use the genre for this same purpose, as a
sort 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 the
Romantic Fantastic (a more precise term for the works Todorov discusses
under the label of the fantastic) use the genre more seriously to explore the
problems of subjectivity through the device of unreliable narrators and the
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Naturalizing the Fantastic
unusual states of consciousnessmadness, frenzy, hallucination, dream
with which many Romantic artists were obsessed.
Whatever the purpose to which the fantastic has been put, the sort of
analysis to which I have here subjected Williams's novels can be a useful
approach to any fantastic text. The pace at which the narrative hints at and
then 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 that
the true fantastic consists of those texts which refuse to commit themselves
to the actuality of the events being described) can provide sensitive clues to
the central concerns of the text and can suggest reasons why the author has
chosen the fantastic as the appropriate genre for the tale.
Notes
1. 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 conviction
that 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's
novels 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 recently
obscured since two of the most significant contemporary variants of the romancethe
western and the detective storyhave abandoned the fantastic element. The situation may
be further complicated because the most common contemporary form of the fantastic is the
Gothic, which uses the supernatural to such different ends than Williams that the reading
protocols for the one do not really apply to the other.
4. Many Dimensions. Williams's second published novel, is a partial exception to this, but
not 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.the
latter is an exception to almost all of the general observations about Williams's narrative
techniques. It is not only his last novel, but, while the others were written fairly close
together 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 he
had ever receivedEindeed, who were the first to take his fiction seriously. As a resit of both
his developing technique and his developing theme. All Hallows'Eve differs significantly
from the earlier pattern.
6. The citations in this paper will be to the most readily available editions of Williams's
novels: the paperback editions by Eerdmans.
7. This is what most clearly distinguishes Williams's novels from the Gothic, in which the
dominant emotional atmosphere is fear and horror.
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Kathleen Spencer
Pascal, Roy. The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and Its Functioning in the
Nineteenth-Century Novel. Manchester, England: Manchester Univ. Press,
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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.
Williams, Charles. All Hallows'Eve. New York: Avon Books, 1969.
. Descent Into Hell. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1970.
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. Shadows of Ecstasy. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1965.
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