Chapter 3 of Ann Swinfen’s In Defence of Fantasy examines parallel worlds. Swinfen is quite specific about what she considers a parallel world. It requires a grounding in the primary world (often the “real world” setting from which the protagonists start and to which they return) and a movement into a different world, one in which events mirror or influence the primary setting. In her study, these books belong:
to an intermediate area of imaginative experience, where an often precarious balance must be maintained between two distinct worlds, and where the awareness of one world is constantly coloured by awareness of the other…. [M]ovement from world to world and the constant cross-reference between them creates a sense of parallelism between the two. Their structures are inevitably thrown into sharp juxtaposition, while action in the secondary world may parallel hidden tensions and desires in the primary world. (1, p. 44)
She limits the requirements of parallel world fantasy rather strictly and considers two main types. The first, and major, type is:
Time Travel
Or “time displacement.” Swinfen cites a few different varieties of these kinds of books, examples drawn from children’s literature. The parallel world/time displacement novel is a relatively new kind of beast, according to Swinfen, with just about the earliest example she names being Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill from 1906, but you could also arguably throw Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in the mix.
Anyway, it’s time travel, but the phenomenon of time travel isn’t quite sufficient, because events in the secondary world must also influence the protagonist in the primary world. In many of the time displacement novels she examines,
the secondary world may indeed be a separate world, but when such dual worlds occur an apparently independent secondary world tends often to be a mirror of the inner mind. (1, p. 44)
If this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve been here before. As Ursula Le Guin wrote in the essay wherein I lifted the title for this series, fantasy is the natural language for dream and for the subconscious.
Anyway, Swinfen distinguishes the “time displacement” novels (even the ones that are psychologically-inflected) from traditional dream vision literature, which is a storied form that goes way back. In dream visions, dreamers voyage often into allegorical lands, often guided and instructed by someone wise on journeys undertaken for the education and edification of the dreamer.
She also barely touches on what I loosely call “portal fantasy,” where a protagonist moves from one world into another by means of a wardrobe, or being knocked out, or any sort of physical contrivance, except to mention that often time passes at a different rate in the secondary world — as in, for example, Narnia, where months can pass although in the primary world it’s been only minutes. Instead, Swinfen examines fantasies that are set at different times in the ‘real” world, with characters that move from one time to another.
The modern time fantasy, on the other hand, is concerned above all with time movement. It may be movement backwards or forwards through time, where time is envisaged as a linear continuum. More daringly, it may attempt to portray different times as coexistent layers, through which the characters of the fantasy may move, possibly experiencing more than one time at once. (1, p. 45)
The distinction is one of intentionality. Dream visions are didactic pieces, time fantasies are novels that
involve the relationship of time to the space dimensions, the concept of eternity, and some of the simpler problems and paradoxes in philosophical definitions of time. In turn, these raise problems of predestination and free will, as well as demanding an imaginative understanding of the past. (1, pp. 45-46)
Most of the books that Swinfen discusses don’t delve into the philosophical implications, multiverses, and issues of free will and predestination; I strongly suspect she introduces the concepts because she expected that writers post 1980 would expand into these directions. But looking at setting, a place of three dimensions that moves through time—here her discussion becomes quite interesting as she examines books like The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy Boston, Tom’s Midnight Garden by Phillipa Pearce, and Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer. Although the plots are different in each book (obviously) in her examples the protagonists share some basic characteristics: they’re lonely, alienated, adolescent, and struggling to cope. In the stories, the protagonists’ adventures in displaced time help them in their primary worlds, often teaching them perspective and strategies for dealing with their “real world” challenges.
Paging Dr. Freud
While some of the time displacement stories explore the protagonists’ psychological difficulties, Swinfen discusses a subset of this type, wherein “the secondary world embodies the mental landscape” (1, p. 61) : Catherine Storr’s Marianne Dreams, Penelope Farmer’s A Castle of Bone, and William Maynes A Game of Dark which “uses the secondary world to explore the terrors of a sick mind,” (1, p. 61). Once a beloved and preeminent children’s author, Maynes’ reputation took a nosedive when he was convicted in 2004 of eleven counts of child sexual assault and his books mostly repudiated. Swinfen writes that his work is dark, complex, and challenging; I’ll take her at her word, because I’m not particularly interested in reading him.
In all, Swinfen considers that the parallel world fantasy form is particularly challenging because, as she writes,
It has neither the firm underpinning of realism found in the fantasy set entirely in the primary world, nor the combination of imaginative freedom and logical discipline which shapes the creation of the pure secondary world fantasy. Two worlds seen in parallel tend to clash, to contrast too strongly, to work against each other — making one or the other less credible, or undermining the relationship between the two….[G]reatest artistic success in the parallelism between the primary world and the secondary world of mental landscapes seems to result where there are clear symbolic parallels, and when both worlds are fully realized. The problems in presenting two worlds in parallel are, above all, those of balancing the conflicting tensions and of uniting what must be, of its nature, a centrifugal structure. (1, p. 74)
That’s the chapter, in brief. Although she presents interesting ideas in theory, Swinfen’s discussion of parallel worlds is hampered by her examples, which are relatively thin and drawn almost exclusively from children’s lit, or at most what today we could call Young Adult. Her cutoff is 1980; I can think of a number of fantasy novels that fit her time frame but are not addressed, and I’m sure BMScott and thejeff can think of twenty to my one. To mention Lewis’ Narnia but to ignore, for instance, Thomas Covenant? It is strange, that on one hand Swinfen complains about the infantilization of fantasy literature and on the other draws on children’s lit for her examples.
Next time, finally — secondary creation! Until then, special thanks to democratos for a wealth of resources related to graphic arts and comics, and especially the French traditions. Check the comments from last time for a cornucopia of goodness.
Previous Installments
Reference
1. Ann Swinfen, In Defence of Fantasy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.