Let us begin with the axiom that the fantastic exists in contrast to - and as a complement to - the real. This tension between reality and fantasy is a cultural universal; folklorists have found it in every human society. The universality of the fantastic journey, the protagonist's progress from the real world to the otherworld and back again, has been viewed as an archetypal pattern by Jungian scholars - most notably Joseph Campbell. Many folklorists, on the other hand, have pointed out that in traditional narrative there is not one, but two otherworlds. The otherworlds of fairytale and of myth (to use English-language terms for universal narrative types), while similar, ultimately are quite distinct. Further, in order to avoid the coils of rooting human universals in a posited "race unconscious," Kurt Ranke has proposed the term ontological archetypes. That is to say, certain types of narrative recur because they functionally address recurrent issues of human existence. I will not suggest that fantasy novels are myths or fairytales, but they sometimes are the functional equivalents of those traditional narratives.

Because there are two different kinds of otherworld, if we are to imagine a narrative spectrum that encompasses the real and the fantastic, we cannot set "the real" at one pole and "the fantastic" at the other. Rather, we must imagine a spectrum in which the center position represents the world of everyday reality, and the two extremes are characterized by the mythic otherworld and the fairytale otherworld. In traditional cultures, the difference between the two is belief. The setting of nonbelief narratives ranges through the somewhat realistic world of the novella (Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves) to the fantastic world of the fairytale (The Glass Mountain). These narratives require, in the often-used phrase, "a willing suspension of disbelief." On the belief side of the spectrum we have the somewhat realistic world of the legend, which must be believable within the framework of a given culture's worldview, and the fantastic world of myth, which is believed even though it is in distinction to the "real" world of everyday experience. Finally, let me note that while a journey from the real world to the otherworld may be a part of myths, fairytales, and novelle, legends characteristically involve an impingement of the otherworld into everyday existence.

To begin to return to the problem at hand, let us briefly consider modern science fiction. Science fiction plays directly off of modern culture's perception of everyday reality - and that perception is deeply rooted in scientific rationalism. In order to "work," science fiction must be believable. (But not, of course, believed - hence science fiction. Science, on the other hand, is Western society's equivalent of myth.) Science fiction extends today's scientific "facts" to create a certain kind of fantasy world. And I am speaking here of a process, not a result. I am well aware of Arthur Clarke's edict that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Fantasy, conversely, has no such constraints of believability. Yet to eliminate the belief side of the spectrum is to impoverish the narrative palette by half. In order to recover the styles, structures, themes and, above all, functions of belief narratives, the fantasy novel must negotiate with its audience an everyday reality against which the fantastic exists.

At this point I am almost ready to explore the topic of today's paper, but first allow me to establish one convention of terminology. The "real" world of "everyday experience" is itself a culturally relative notion - an intestinal malaise caused by a virus in one culture is the result of hostile magic in another. Thus, when I refer to "reality" I mean the everyday world of normalized Western society. I will reserve the term "pseudo-reality" to mean a negotiated reality particular to given work of literature. And finally, let me assert that one measure of the success of any work of fantasy is the degree to which the pseudo-reality of the novel is able to illuminate and inform our real world.

Not all fantasy novels need a pseudo-reality. One possibility is to begin explicitly in our real world. Gordon R. Dickson's The Dragon and the George is one of many examples in which individuals are transported from the real world to an otherworld. The mechanism is that of the fairytale - the narration moves the audience into the fantastic and requires a willing suspension of disbelief. The technique has the advantage of being able to address explicitly realworld sensibilities and worldview. Some fantasy novels employ the technique of legend; instead of a boundary-crossing journey to the otherworld, the otherworld impinges on everyday life. The approach works well if the fantastic elements relate to the supernatural belief elements of western society - above all angelic and demonic forces. The resulting work may be difficult to distinguish from another popular genre, the horror novel. One solution is to begin within the Western belief system, then expand the boundaries of the fantastic. Terry Brooks' Running With the Demon. A Novel of Good and Evil deals with a young girl's encounter with demonic forces. Whereas a horror story such as The Exorcist remains rooted in this real world, Brooks takes us more deeply into the fantastic with the introduction of a Knight of the Word whose battle against evil is bound up with his oaths to an otherworldly Lady. (Although Brooks never moves too far from the real world. The Knight encounters this Lady in a real place - the Fairy Glen in northwestern Wales.) Neil Gaiman has several novels that move from the gritty realism of a horror novel into the realm of the fantastic. But Gaiman, in collaboration with Terry Pratchett, takes a different approach in Good Omens. The theme is nothing new - merely the struggle for world dominance between angelic and demonic forces. The tale moves into the fantastic simply by the addition of humor. The agents of the eternal conflict are a worldly-wise angel and a not-so-horrible demon who have more pleasant things to do than pit themselves against each other in a struggle where the stakes are more than life or death. The humorous touch is sufficient to transcend believability and move the tale into the fantastic.

Two masterpieces of early twentieth century fantasy, Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter and Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita negotiate a pseudo-reality while appearing to use an explicit real world. In Bulgakov's work the Devil and several of his minions appear to impinge on the everyday reality of Stalinist Russia. As the work progresses, we come to realize that the Moscow of the novel is not precisely the Moscow of reality, nor are either the Devil or Christ precisely the Devil and Christ of the real world. Dunsany uses another approach. A tangible boundary separates Elfland from the Vale of Erl, which at the outset appears to be our real world - an appearance that is strengthened by Dunsany's famous refrain, "The fields we know." In short order, though, we discover that Erl is not our reality, but a pseudo-reality in which stolid countryfolk are "bell-fearing" and in which the religious leader undertakes his rituals with bell, book, and candle. The negotiation of a pseudo-reality that is only slightly removed from the real world emphasizes the need for a metaphorical mapping from pseudo-reality to reality. That is to say, these novels stress the fact that fantasy is not mere escapism but is, like all good literature, a commentary of the human condition. Finally there is an interesting variation to this creation of a close pseudo-reality. A novel may negotiate a pseudo-reality that is almost based on some culture of our real historical past, but with minor variations. Among contemporary fantasy writers, the master of this technique is Guy Gavriel Kaye. His most recent work, the Sailing to Sarantium duology, is 95% historical novel rooted in the Byzantine Empire of late antiquity. Yet a few fantastic touches serve to transform reality to pseudo-reality and transcend the historical.

Tolkien's approach to negotiating pseudo-reality in The Lord of the Rings trilogy takes a different tack. Instead of constructing a pseudo-reality that is only slightly different from our real world, he emphasizes differentness. To be sure, this world has recognizable similarities to the real medieval Germanic West, but Tolkien draws from both the legendary and the mythic worldviews of the period. At the outset, the pseudo-reality that Tolkien constructs is that of the Shire. Like Dunsany's Vale of Erl it is a seemingly safe haven, but fantastic forces of evil have crossed the boundary of Mordor and impinge on this bucolic world. Only the beginning and end of the trilogy deal with this intrusion of the fantastic into the everyday pseudo-reality of the Shire. The majority of the work involves journeys, centrally Frodo's journey across the boundary of Mordor and back again. Still, for all its epic breadth and complexity, the "anchor," the core of the pseudo-reality of Tolkien's Middle Earth, remains the Shire. The wonders of Middle Earth are to be understood through the filter of the Shire's mundane worldview.

For all that the Shire is inhabited by hobbits, not humans, it remains suspiciously similar to our everyday real world (or at least the real world of Britian in the first half of the twentieth century). Further, while Tolkien employs considerable creativity involving the creatures of Mordor - creatures from beyond the boundary - most of the beings of Middle Earth are drawn from the supernatural cast of Germanic myth and legend. It seems obvious that Tolkien, like other fantasy writers, is inviting us to metaphorically map Middle Earth onto our everyday existence. Tolkien was, in fact, famously resistant to that approach. Before I return to this conundrum, though, I would like to discuss another tool by which Tolkien constructed his pseudo-reality - meta-narration.

By meta-narration I mean a commentary on the narrative process. It is a powerful tool for negotiating a pseudo-reality because it adds verisimilitude even as it further distances the narration from our everyday reality. Tolkien frames his tale with a scholarly prologue and appendices that, among other things, discuss manuscript sources and their reliability. Thus we are instructed that the tale is not a fictive work of Tolkien, who after all is an inhabitant of our everyday reality, but instead the tale is a redaction of historical documents ultimately based largely on the lost Red Book of Perrianath. The Oxford don must have taken great pleasure in building a scholarly meta-narrative for his tale. Interestingly, Tolkien seemingly undoes much of his effort by adding another meta-narrative in the form of an author's preface. It is here that he pleads with us not to draw parallels between his tale and historical circumstance, yet the very act of including the meta-narrative bridges the carefully crafted gap between our reality and the internal pseudo-reality of the tale. The answer rather clearly lies in Tolkien's ultimate goal, which was to create a mythology for England. Myth is not a commentary on any particular historical circumstance, it is a narrative that is used repeatedly in various circumstances to interpret recurrent human situations. While Tolkien rejects any narrow historical interpretation of his tale, he nonetheless invites us to apply his tale to the great conundrums of human existence.

Let me return to the topic of scholarly meta-narration. Because it fits so well with the scientific rationalism of Western worldview, it has proven a powerful tool. Michael Crichton uses the technique in The Eaters of the Dead. The tale tells of the intrusion of the fantastic into a pseudo-reality based on the Germanic heroic world. The meta-narrative frame insists that the entire account is a translation of a medieval description of an Arab's journey north into the Germanic world. Such a manuscript does exist. The Petersburg Chronicle contains a fragmentary account by Ibn al Fadlan of his journey with Swedish Vikings northward from the Black Sea. So Crichton's novel begins in our real world. The narrator, however, claims to have found another, complete, manuscript of al Fadlan's journey. Thus we move seamlessly from historical reality into the pseudo-reality of the novel, and then on into the realm of the fantastic.

To this point we have looked at fantasy that either employs our real world, or constructs a pseudo-reality using elements of some real world culture or traditions. It is possible to construct a pseudo-reality with little or no relationship to our real world. One of the most complex of these fantasy worlds is found in Robert Asprin's Myth series. The pseudo-reality of the series is the home world of Skeeve, an apprentice magician. The fantastic impinges on the world in the form of Aahz the demon - a term which turns out to be slang for a dimension traveler. In a series of adventures Skeeve and his companions repeatedly cross the dimensional boundaries and experience a variety of fantasy worlds - with considerable comic effect.
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Allow me to summarize. I began with the assertion that the fantastic exists in distinction to the real. In some narratives the fantastic will intrude upon the real, and in other narratives the protagonist will journey from the real to a fantastic otherworld and return. And there is a two-fold mapping here. On the one hand, the entire fantasy novel may exist as an otherworld in counterpoint to the real world of the audience. One the other hand, in order to preserve the functionally important theme of the journey of the hero, some fantasy novels must negotiate a pseudo-reality to stand in distinction to the otherworld. And, finally, since many fantasy novels correspond functionally to belief narratives such as legend and myth, the negotiated pseudo-reality often has some element of pseudo-believability for the audience. Of course there are many approaches that I have not been able to explore today, but I hope that I have suggested some ways in which these negotiations between author and audience are carried out.