We here at Mutable wanted to commemorate George MacDonald this week, and his esteemed lineage. Though he, along with several of his more interesting intellectual progeny are no longer well-known to the world at large, I would suggest that MacDonald is essential in any “secret history” of the industrial and post-industrial mind, not entirely dissimilar to Greil Marcus’ own secret history of the twentieth century, Lipstick Traces, that when we consider the history of revelation in relation to the culture industry and the prefabricated visions it has produced in the form of lighter allegorical fair such as Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within and The Matrix, what we are seeing is a similar degradation of this unacknowledged literary tradition as filtered through Alan Watts’ watered-down buddhism.
It should be obvious to anyone who has read George MacDonald why he has not retained whatever renown he had in the nineteenth century. As vivid and fabulous as the worlds he created are, the message is unabashedly Christian, and not the sort that can live in a suburban library either—like C. S. Lewis would be—a man who called George MacDonald his master. MacDonald is just a little more restrained than Blake in terms of his sometimes bizarre imagery—note the hawthorne tree as an old man in chapter four of Lilith below—and not surprisingly, because Blake was one of his key influences, as well as Novalis, and Swedenborg.
George MacDonald (10 December 1824 — 18 September 1905) may no longer be well-known in the world of fantasy, but besides being the “master” of C. S. Lewis, he was the mentor of Lewis Carroll, it being both Macdonald’s advice, as well as the hearty reception of his daughters, that convinced Lewis Carroll (the pen-name of Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) to publish his manuscript, Alice in Wonderland. MacDonald was admired by W.H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Madeleine L’Engle. G. K. Chesterton cited MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin as a book that had “made a difference to my whole existence”. Even Mark Twain, who initially disliked MacDonald, eventually befriended him. (As if genius were solely dependent upon likability.)
Not much can be said of his life, as is probably true of most fantasy writers. He married in 1851, toured and lectured in America in the 1870’s, but his eventual resting ground would be in Bordhigera, Italy. He was acquainted with most of the literary luminaries of the day; a surviving group photograph shows him with Tennyson, Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Trollope, Ruskin, Lewes, and Thackeray. While in America he was a friend of Longfellow and Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson came to hear him lecture. MacDonald also served as a go-between in Ruskin’s long courtship with Rose la Touche.
His best-known works being Phantastes, The Princess and the Goblin, At the Back of the North Wind, and Lilith, all fantasy novels, and fairy tales such as The Light Princess, The Golden Key, and The Wise Woman, MacDonald often deals with themes of death and renunciation. “I write, not for children,” he wrote, “but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.” We will be focusing on one of MacDonald’s later novels, Lilith, in this essay. ”All the doors you had yet seen—and you haven’t seen many—were doors in; here you came upon a door out! The strange thing to you,” he went on thoughtfully, “will be, that the more doors you go out of, the farther you get in!” Download a free audio recording of it here.
It is the first text to employ the idea of going through a mirror into another world though this other reality is not a neatly allegorical alternative, and C. S. Lewis—the man we now most often associate with traveling through looking glasses, as well as of course falling down holes—struggles to define Lilith as “fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic”, but the effect of reading MacDonald is more than dreamlike; he is, in the true sense of the word, “uncanny”, and H. P. Lovecraft praises Lilith for its “compelling bizarrerie all its own”. There is the aforementioned riddle-speaking raven, a house of death, a hut in the moon, dwarfs, giants, and a strange philosophy of redemption underneath it all. “I was lost in a space larger than imagination, for if here two things or any part of them could occupy the same space, why not 20 or 10,000?”
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But how does all this relate to the “secret history” we mentioned previously? Obviously MacDonald exerted a strong influence on one of the most famous allegorical writers known today, specifically, Lewis Carroll, and other notables in the history of that art, and by so doing has had an affect on the history of fantasy that is more than clandestine. But is there another side to his heritage? Of course, I am going to argue yes.
In an article on Lilith, John Pennington notes that George Bataille in Death and Sensuality contends that “discontinuous beings that we are, death means continuity of being ” as we “yearn for our lost continuity.” Death as continuation of life—only better life—is what Bataille labels “religious eroticism” that is, “concerned with the fusion of beings in a world beyond everyday reality”, and it is precisely this sort of religious eroticism that we find in MacDonald, that through the embrace of death we can discover eternity. When seen in this light, MacDonald’s fiction reeks of escapism. True, we must face death, but if we do, we will also escape it. I trace this back to the Swedenborg/Blake influence.
Though it may seem strange to some to place both Blake and Swedenborg as influences, considering the enmity Blake professed towards the mystic, specifically in his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, they are not so far apart as it may seem. “Swedenborg is the Angel sitting at the tomb: his writings are the linen clothes folded up,” Blake has been quoted as saying, and in Fearful Symmetry, Northrop Frye writes of Blake, “According to Locke ideas come from space into the mind; according to Blake space is a state of mind. But, as fallen man sees around him only the ruins of a fallen world which his own fall produced, space is a low state of mind. In higher states, where the world we live in is not objective but created, space is no longer an indefinite extent but the form of what we create. This portion of Blake’s argument comes, mutatis mutandis, from Swedenborg,” and is also the basic assumption underpinning MacDonald’s work, the real world of library and house, being “so strangely . . . one” (L.153) with that other world the narrator explores beyond the looking-glass, but more than this the sense that the fantastical world the narrator enters (or seven-dimensional world) contains the everyday (or three-dimensional) world within it, that is that the world we see every day of our waking lives is only so because we have not yet developed the senses to see our surroundings in their larger allegorical sense.
It is precisely this assumption that underpins the films mentioned in the opening paragraph of this article, though this philosophy, without any allegorical content becomes sheer escapism, and feeds the Stockholm Syndrome we at Mutable first heard about in Hermenaut Issue 16, the Stockholm Syndrome being when captives fall in love with their captors. In Lilith, MacDonald states plainly in several place that through love of the purely physical, through base greed and gluttony (as found in the people of Bulika and The Bags respectively) we become captives of the physical, and thereby incapable of waking to a larger understanding of the world, captives of the three dimensions. The two could be seen as two sides of the same coin, that to love what has imprisoned us, and to be imprisoned by what we love, are related in so far as in the eye of the captive, the distinction becomes moot, and of the order of, What came first, the chicken or the egg?
But a third perspective enters the equation when virtual reality is considered in relation to this question of imprisonment within a three dimensional world. This is the direction that the watered-down allegorical fiction mentioned in the first paragraph of this article has always been leading, to a fantasy that acts as simple release of impulses kept in check in the base material world, a fantasy transformed from transcendental vision (think Dante) into visionless blockbuster (think Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings) or literal chatroom (think Second Life), and so no longer beyond but within the physical realm, where I go to play out my most infantile fantasies, as the upright victorian citizen might have gone to the brothel to explore sexual urges he did not feel comfortable mentioning within the confines of his home. It is interesting to note that Olof Lagercrantz, a Swedish critic and publicist, called Swedenborg’s theological writing “a poem about a foreign country with peculiar laws and customs”, i.e. a fantasy, and thereby unrelated to the world in which we live.
Bataille takes the opposite approach. Rather than entering an allegorical world that is larger than our own, Bataille suggests that we mire ourselves in this one, and by so doing, transcend it. In Bataille’s article, “The Pineal Eye”, he posits the human form as imagined as a giant phallus with an eye directed straight at the sun, “a kind of nimbus of tears,” or “vomiting of flavorless blood,” directed at “the sun, situated at the bottom of the sky like a cadaver at the bottom of a pit.” Here the sun, which for MacDonald was a symbol of God, is placed not at the top of the spiritual heirarchy, but put at the bottom, and mystical experience is transformed into something carnal e.g.:
“The eye, at the summit of the skull, opening on the incandescent sun in order to contemplate it in a sinister solitude, is not a product of the understanding, but is instead an immediate existence; it opens and blinds itself like a conflagration, or like a fever that eats the being, or more exactly, the head. And thus it plays the role of a fire in the house; the head, instead of locking up life as money is locked in a safe, spends it without counting, for, at the end of this erotic metamorphosis… myth is identified not only with life but with the loss of life — with degradation and death… existence no longer resembles a neatly defined itinerary from one practical sign to another, but a sickly incandescence, a durable orgasm,” (Visions of Excess, 1985 ed., p. 82).
Bataille is the offspring of MacDonald by his very negation, positing more than just the individual’s death as the starting place of revelation, instead the death of deity itself, that only when we have mired ourselves in shit, can we become “surrounded by a halo of death, a creature who is too pale and too large stands up, a creature who, under a sick sun, is nothing other than the celestial eye it lacks.” This is not unlike the negative proof of God posited by pseudo-Dionysius and Maimonides, though instead put towards mystical experience itself. Rather than only being able to know God by what he is not, Bataille seems to be saying, we can only know God when He is not. Only when I am a captive, will I know what it means to be free.
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Now, beyond the names above, another forgotten writer was inspired by MacDonald. This would be David Lindsay, whose most famous novel, A Voyage to Arcturus, may very well have originally been inspired by Lilith. Lindsay has suffered from the same sorts of deprecations as P. K. Dick among others, i.e. that his writing is far from good, even if his ideas are wild and interesting, but I beg to differ. Although both have been accused of creating somewhat wooden characters, and although this charge may hold some weight with Dick, whose characters exist in a strange but knowable world, to say that Lindsay’s characters, at least in Voyage, are wooden, is like accusing the characters in the Baghavadgita of being wooden. These beings do not belong to our world, and their dialogue furthermore is stylized and philosophical in a similar manner as the Baghavadgita or other ancient texts. In short, Lindsay succeeded in creating in actuality, what James MacPherson attempted only in appearance (through the pseudonym Ossian, an author of supposed antiquity “discovered” by MacPerson), to create something ancient in our times.
A Voyage to Arcturus begins at a seance which is interrupted by a strange phantasm, and it is here that Maskull, Krag and Nightspore meet. The apparition that had broken up the seance had died with a gruesome grin upon its face, and the three had to go to another place to confront Crystalman, taking a strange spacecraft to Arcturus, a world where sensory organs change depending upon your location, and new lights are added to the larger spectrum of light.
“It was dense night when Maskull awoke from his profound sleep. A wind was blowing against him, gentle but wall-like, such as he had never experienced on earth. He remained sprawling on the ground, as he was unable to lift his body because of its intense weight. A numbing pain, which he could not identify with any region of his frame, acted from now onward as a lower, sympathetic note to all his other sensations. It gnawed away at him continuously; sometimes it embittered and irritated him, at other times he forgot it.
“He felt something hard on his forehead. Putting his hand up, he discovered there a fleshy protuberance the size of a small plum, having a cavity in the middle, of which he could not feel the bottom. Then he also became aware of a large knob on each side of his neck, an inch below the ear.
“From the region of his heart, a tentacle had budded. It was long as his arm, but thin, like whipcord, and soft and flexible.
“As soon as he thoroughly realized the significance of these new organs, his heart began to pump. Whatever might, or might not, be their use, they proved one thing — that he was in a new world,” (A Voyage to Arcturus, 1998 ed., p. 40).
E. H. Visiak says, in The Strange Genius of David Lindsay: “The author who had most influenced him, he told me, was George MacDonald,” and although the aforementioned novel may be more akin to Phantasmes stylistically, there does seem some odd kinship between this book and Lilith in particular. When the raven of chapter three, that “sees through accident into entity” talks of Uranus, and what a grand time the burrowers and field mice who live there must be having in this rain, such as the dry box serpent for example, we see an inkling of Lindsay’s idea. Just as in Beetlejuice, wherein Saturn is somehow linked to the afterlife with its giant worms, so it is in Lilith, and when the travelers in A Voyage to Arcturus take their trip, it is this sort of trip they take, going so far out because they have gone so far in. For the most part, Lilith has more in common with C. S. Lewis and Lewis Carroll, but I can imagine Lindsay reading that particular passage, and the germ of his idea beginning to sprout, to create an allegorical tale is literally grounded in the heavens. According to Adelheid Kegler, Nights pore in Tormance (the title originally intended by David Lindsay for his Voyage to Arcturus) not only provides the key to the meaning of this enigmatic work, but also throws a light upon its debt to MacDonald’s Lilith.
According to Kegler, the meaning of Lindsay’s original title is ‘the soul in the realm of the planet of suffering’ and his book deals with the destiny of the soul. Both Lindsay’s novel and Lilith are concerned with the contemplation and the agonizing experience of a long night, illuminated only by the approach of the darker side of dawn, as by an uncertain light, and this only at the very end of the book. Lindsay’s neologism, if understood in its phonetical sense as “a tormented brooding on the conditions of the night,” could characterize the imagined world’s of both authors.
But unlike Lilith, Arcturus is gnostic insofar as it concerns a man on a path of discovery who finds that his world is a false reality created by a false god. Furthermore, his world transcends any particular religion, but travels through multiple world-views, beginning with an animistic understanding, to a world ruled by will, a world ruled by suffering, and on and on, into stranger and more profound perspectives. In the end he discovers that even he has a false face of his own (thus the character’s name — Maskull, i.e. mask skull), but this is not to say there is a “true” face lurking behind it. In fact, as we move through this world, what we find instead is always negation once again, that each new realm that is presented to us, is always to be proven false, the author’s ever-present skepticism always presented to us in the form of the broad grins appear on each and every one of the corpses that people his journey.
Eric S. Rabkin, in his The Fantastic in Literature, claims that “Maskull, like Alice [from Alice in Wonderland] and Milo [from The Phantom Tollbooth], enters his fantastic world out of boredom.” I would argue the same is true in Lilith. At the opening of the book we find the narrator loitering in his library, another of the idle gentry. At first the narrator cannot see the world he is in, seeing only shimmerings, and a formlessness he cannot define. By the end, the seven-dimensional world he had entered in the beginning has become as real as the other world, that the book is a tale of waking up to the larger surrounding world was there all along. (This concept of the “seven-dimensional world” was borrowed from seventeenth century german philosopher and mystic Jacob Boehme by the way, who once said, “When thou art gone forth wholly from the creature [human], and art become nothing to all that is nature and creature, then thou art in that eternal one,” which could of course be read as an exhortation to become completely suffused in the fantasy film affords, whether this was the original intention or not. What care we concerning intentions, while submerged in the world of appearances?)
Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus on the other hand, has a more ambiguous ending. In Lilith, death is something wonderful that all things need to accept before they can live, but in Arcturus, death proves the fallacy of the thing, not that death itself is false, but that death here is used to signify the acknowledgement of a falsehood, a philosophy of the world shown as the nothing it was all along. I would argue that behind the obvious gnosticism in Arcturus, can be seen a buddhist understanding of the world. Not only that the world is mere projection, but that to be alive, the self itself must die. In Lilith, the person accepts death, but the person remains, while in Arcturus, the person remains because he himself is no more. This is the difference.
MacDonald posits a renewal of the world, but at the end of Arcturus, the world hasn’t changed at all; there is no perfection of a spiritual essence, but an acknowledgement of the all-pervasive nature of Crystalman. In Lilith, when the universal process has reached its final goal, then the supra-spiritual, the spiritual and the soul realms will become visible in their corresponding material forms: “Whatever is, must seem (L.97),” while in Arcturus, despair of redemption is the answer, or that there is no answer. Hence the abrupt ending. Crystalman still and always will be, and all we can do is face the horror of his evil grin found on our dead, and know that eventually the joke will be on us.
Harold Bloom suggests that the character of Crystalman is derived from “[Walter] Pater’s first essay, Diaphaneite, where the artist is called a crystal man, transparent and apollonian, more than human in his perfection,” while Gary Wolfe mentions the “crystal self” referred to by Raven in Lilith, and also Schopenhauer calling the crystal (which has “only one manifestation of life”) “the corpse of that momentary life,” but wherever the original source, it is an evil that is also a good. The dichotomous thinking of MacDonald having been transformed into an inescapable paradox. Lindsay himself says: “Schopenhauer’s ‘Nothing’, which is the least understood part of his system, is identical with my Muspel [of A Voyage to Arcturus]; that is, the real world.”
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. read more about him here
