In honor of J. R. R. Tolkien’s birthday, the following is a discussion of literary critic John Clute’s theories of fantasy literature, their indebtedness to Tolkien, and the consequences of Clute’s secularization of what for Tolkien is a fundamentally religious enterprise.
Clute is an extraordinary critic. His decades of book reviews, editorial shaping of, and abundant contributions to, the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, which also stores digitally the Encyclopedia of Fantasy he co-edited and published in book form in 1997, together with the critical taxonomies he has developed to discuss the literature of the fantastic, are cumulatively one of the great literary-critical edifices of my lifetime. He is—happily—neither an academic nor, despite the conceptual terminology he deploys, a literary theorist. (Though he has his theories.) His critical authority is earned through engaged descriptions of what he sees, his style an often flamboyant conduit for both enthusiasm and profound cogitation, and his erudition as a reader-critic is mountainous yet nearly always deployed with ballet-point precision.[1]
At the core of Clute’s more theoretical understanding of fantasy literature are two phenomena that he calls Story and Recognition. Story refers both to the ordinary sense of a sequential narrative and the more metaphysical conviction that existence is fundamentally “story-shaped,” that our lives can be told. Clute’s definition of Recognition goes through a number of changes over time, though we can start with the entry in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy (hereafter Encyclopedia) in which he defines it as the meta-fictional moment in a narrative in which the book’s characters—and, it is strongly implied, the reader as well—become aware that they participate in Story, in a metaphysics of the tellable. Clute writes:
It is at this moment of Recognition that the inherent Story at the heart of most full fantasy texts is most visible, most ‘artificial’, and most revelatory. . . . [The protagonists] understand, in other words, that they are in a Story; that, properly recognized (which is to say properly told), their lives have the coherence and significance of Story; that, in short, the Story has been telling them.[2]
Fantasy, Clute maintains, has an especually intimate relationship to Recognition and Story. In the Encyclopedia he explains that “[p]art of the definition of fantasy is that its protagonists tend to know they are in a Story” and that “at moments of Recognition they find out just which Story it is that has, in some sense, dictated them.” Clute mentions a number of examples, including Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, whose characters know they have fallen into a fairytale, and John Crowley’s Little, Big, whose characters are, in Clute’s words, “obsessively concerned with the true nature of the Story that is telling them.” Additional fantasies could be cited as examples of this dynamic, for instance, by Michael Swanwick, Susanna Clarke, Michael Moorcock, Michael Ende, and others. Clute has written searchingly on all of these writers.[3]
A practical critic, Clute allows for exceptions, writing: “It would of course be injudiciously restrictive to claim that all fantasy texts convey a sense that their protagonists are under the control of an already-existing Story.” Moreover, he places the literary dynamic he describes in historical context. It is in the twentieth century, he says, that “a more conspicuously self-conscious attitude towards Story becomes evident,” particularly in “the 1980s and later.” Notwithstanding, Clute finds this self-referentiality to be fundamental to the most compelling modern fantasies. He observes, moreover, that Recognition marks an important difference between fantasy and a good deal of realist literature. For realist literature, such transparency, the awareness of characters and readers alike that they are witnessing a predetermined story, may be an indication of aesthetic failure. For fantasy it is achievement.[4]
Clute’s understanding of Story and Recognition is not only literary-formal but moral-political, though the latter dimension is less persuasive. In the section of the Encyclopedia entry on “Story” that Clute co-authored with science fiction scholar Gary Westfahl, they write: “Story. . . is not only the most important mode, from time immemorial, chosen by humans for the conveyance of meaning, but is a primary technique . . . for the inculcation of lessons inimical to the Thought Control Police who proliferate in this (as well as every previous) century, and who notoriously fear the anarchic, freeing power of the raw tale.” Such a banal assertion trails several begged questions. Don’t “Thought Control Police”—an unhelpfully vague phrase—usually inculcate their own lessons precisely through narrative, used as a means of control and self-justification? Communism, for instance, is among other things a story, with humanity as a protagonist, facing challenges and reversals but achieving a moment of revolutionary Recognition.[5]
More significant for our purposes is that Clute’s understanding of Story and Recognition entails a metaphysics without transcendence. This is surprising since much of what Clute has to say about Story and Recognition in fantasy literature is recognizably and often explicitly influenced by the very Christian J. R. R. Tolkien. Clute’s theoretical and taxonomical explanation of fantasy literature is to a large extent an attempt to secularize the reflections on fantasy literature found in Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories.”[6]
“A fantasy text,” Clute writes in the Encyclopedia, “may be described as the story of an earned passage from Bondage – via a central Recognition [. . .] into the Eucatastrophe, where marriages may occur, just governance fertilize the barren Land, and there is a Healing.” Clute’s map of fantasy thus includes as a key component Tolkien’s famous coinage in “On Fairy Stories”: the Eucatastrophe, which Tolkien calls the “true form” and “highest function” of fantasy literature. Clute is moreover explicit here about his secularizing of Tolkien, writing that, in fantasy texts, the characters’ experience of Recognition enables “the transition into what Tolkien calls ‘consolation’ but which we (more secularly) call Healing.”[7]
It is not mere quibbling, however, to observe that Clute misuses Tolkien’s term here. By Eucatastrophe, Tolkien did not mean the part of a fantasy in which, as Clute says, “marriages may occur, just governance fertilize the barren Land, and there is a Healing.” Clute describes the happy ending of a story, which Tolkien also does in “On Fairy Stories” before realizing his error and correcting his mistake. Eucatastrophe, writes Tolkien, is “the joy of the happy ending”—and then, “more correctly,” he continues, the Eucastastrophe is not an ending but rather “the sudden joyous ‘turn.’” It is “a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur.”[8]
Tolkien’s Eucatastrophe is not simply the happy conclusion of a story, for two reasons. One is that Tolkien sees all fantasy endings as provisional. There is, he says, “no true end to any fairy-tale.” In a footnote, he emphasizes that the familiar phrase “and they lived happily ever after” is not a true ending but “an artificial device,” a conscious formula to indicate that the tale-telling is to be temporarily suspended. If such formulae are standard in fairy tales, he says, it is precisely because “such tales have a greater sense and grasp of the endlessness of the World of Story than most modern ‘realistic’ stories,” and so can signal their pause with a “sharp cut in the endless tapestry.”[9]
The second, more important reason for distinguishing between Eucatastrophe and happy ending is that the Eucatastrophe is less the conclusion of a story than the promise of a fulfillment beyond the story. Tolkien emphasizes that Eucatastrophe “does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure.” What it does is to deny, “in the face of much evidence. . . universal final defeat.” Eucatastrophe therefore provides “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”[10]
In the Epilogue of the essay, Tolkien famously makes explicit the connection between fantasy and Christian faith. He proposes that the Eucatastrophe affects us with such emotional power in fantasy literature because it gestures towards an ultimate Eucatastrophe, the promise of salvation through the Gospel. Christ is the sudden turn of a fantasy story that, in this case, “has entered History and the primary world.” In the light of the Gospel, then, the relationship between Eucatastrophe and happy ending is not one of identity but of convergence. The Incarnation is “the eucatastrophe of Man’s history,” but it is not the ending of that history. It is not the conclusion of the story of humanity, but its interruption. Likewise, the Resurrection is the Eucatastrophe of the story of Christ, and it also promises a future turning that will be both interruption and complete fulfillment: Eucatastrophe and happy ending finally coinciding.[11]
For Tolkien, this means that Christians live their faith not as a completed fairy tale, but as hopeful awareness of the redemptive Story, a happy ending we can hope toward and that is echoed in romance, fairy tale, and fantasy.
Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the ‘happy ending.’ The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed.[12]
This is the divine, eschatological light of redemption that shines through Story, the real possibility for the Christian “that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation.”
Clute admires Tolkien as the paradigmatic modern fantasy author, yet his admiration is often tinged with what seems ambivalence regarding Tolkien’s faith. In his Encyclopedia entry on Tolkien, for instance, Clute mentions Tolkien’s Christianity only twice, peripherally, while propounding a dubious argument that Tolkien’s metaphysics is best understood in connection with Theosophy, due to what Clute calls the “obvious similarities between Tolkien’s mythological history of the world and that propounded by H P Blavatsky.” Much of Clute’s theoretical treatment (as opposed to his practical criticism) of fantasy literature, and certainly his pronouncements on Story and Recognition, read as an uneasy attempt to secularize the formulations of Tolkien in “On Fairy Stories.”[13]
That Tolkien has been a major influence on Clute is not surprising given Clute’s acknowledgement of Tolkien as “the 20th-century’s single most important author of fantasy,” though the specific influence of Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories” on Clute’s writings is sometimes tacit or displaced. For example, in one essay Clute describes the marginalization of fantasy since the Enlightenment, writing that “the great cauldron of irrational myth and story . . . was now deemed primarily suitable for children (the concept of childhood having been invented around this time as a disposal unit into which abandoned versions of human nature could be dumped).” This is Clute’s more anthropologically sophisticated gloss on Tolkien’s claim in “On Fairy Stories” that “Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the ‘nursery’, as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused.”[14]
But Clute’s real dialogue with Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories” consists of his increasingly despairing revisions to the concept of Recognition, both in and in the years following the publication of the Encyclopedia. Already in the Encyclopedia we notice a telling split in Clute’s definition of Recognition. As mentioned earlier, in the Encyclopedia Clute defines Recognition as that meta-fictional moment that looks toward a recuperative conclusion, toward “Healing.” Yet in the Encyclopedia entry on Tolkien, Clute introduces a second kind of Recognition. This “Recognition of wrongness” reveals the fundamentally disordered state of the world. (Clute writes that the “first sight of the Nazgûl in LOTR is a telling example of this intuition that the world is not what it should be.”) Recognition of wrongness is a necessary predicate for the progress of the fantasy tale, but it does not involve a transition toward Healing. It is a look into the darkness, a gaze “upon the heart of the thinned world.[15]
Clute subsequently develops this idea of the Recongition of wrongness in ways that resemble the concept of Recovery in Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories”—but without transcendence. Fantasy and its related genres are vital, says Clute, because they “are capable of achieving something like a literal gaze at the given.” They teach us “how to recognize the world, recognitions that must, if we hope to survive, be constantly and actively renewed.” Tolkien in “On Fairy Stories” describes the “Recovery” afforded by fantasy literature as the “regaining of a clear view. . . seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them.” Fantasy, says Tolkien, recovers our view of things “freed from the drab blur of triteness and familiarity.” But it is not only “freshness of vision,” an aesthetic refocus; it is also a moral enlivening. Recovery entails not simply how we see the world, but our proper relation to it. The obstacle to overcome here is not “triteness and familiarity,” but “possessiveness,” the failure to see things truly because we hold ourselves in some way to have acquired them. Recovery, says Tolkien, enables us to recognize our surroundings as “things apart from ourselves.”[16]
Both Tolkien and Clute therefore believe that fantasy can allow us to see the world truly. But for Tolkien this renewed clarity can itself be a restoration of moral health, a truer experience of the given, of others and our relationship to them. For Clute, the “literal gaze at the given” is not in itself healing; it is good only insofar as it provokes revulsion and protest against the state of the world.[17]
Indeed, in the Encyclopedia, Clute confesses himself confused by the moral aspect of Tolkien’s “Recovery”:
About “Recovery” Tolkien is not remarkably clear; and, when he indicates that the “recovery of freshness of vision” is only part of what he intends by the term, he does not go on to argue a case. It does seem, however, that he intends his audience to understand that the washed vision of Recovery returns us to a capacity to see things as we are meant (perhaps by Story) to see them.[18]
This is striking. Clute here interprets the moral restoration described by Tolkien not as the apprehension of an essential or transcendent order of truth and goodness, but rather as a diktat of Story—revealed as Clute’s God-substitute. Rather than God, it is Story that somehow intends us to see things in a certain way.
A few years later, Clute further develops the concept of Recognition, this time in ways that parallel what Tolkien, in “On Fairy Stories,” calls “Escape”—and, again, without Tolkien’s Christian frame of reference. Tolkien famously responds to the accusation that fantasy literature is a dereliction of what should be literature’s proper duty to “Real Life.” (Tolkien uses the capitals and quotation marks.) What people mean by “Real Life” is, he argues, too often an arbitrary simulacrum of reality created by those in power. It is the world as presented by modern technology: impoverished, inhuman, temporary. Yet it is not change itself that Tolkien critiques, but rather the the imaginative tyranny and moral deadening of a disposable present. Tolkien argues that “the ‘escape’ of archaism” so often seen in fantasy literature can be beneficial. “For,” he writes, “it is after all possible for a rational man, after reflection (quite unconnected with fairy-story or romance), to arrive at the condemnation, implicit at least in the mere silence of ‘escapist’ literature, of progressive things like factories, or the machine-guns and bombs that appear to be their most natural and inevitable. . . products.”[19]
Clute also sees in fantasy an essentially moral chastisement of modernity. Beginning in the eighteenth century, Clute writes, “the engines of change represented by the scientific and industrial revolutions begin palpably to increase the speed of history until it races.” Against the “world storm” of modernity, fantasy is a white-knuckle grip on some alternative, given particularly powerful expression by writers who “were shaped by the experience of World War One.” Clute continues:
[T]he attitude of J R R Tolkien to the world storm of his time is anguish and anger; he and other great fantasy writers of the third and fourth decades of the last century turn away from the world to shame it. . . . For them—and for almost all great fantasy since—the world itself is understood to be wrong. It is shameful to admit to the twentieth century. But it is possible to escape from prison. The only books we find it easy to love truly, like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, come from writers who have left us.[20]
Clute translates Tolkien’s Escape into “anguish and anger,” a “turn[ing] away from the world to shame it.” But this seems more of a reflection of Clute’s own rage and despair about the state of the world than an accurate description of Tolkien, who saw glimmers of ultimate goodness in our fallen world. Indeed, Tolkien continues his discussion by saying that fantasy affords “more profound” escapes than from “the internal-combusion engine. There are hunger, thirst, poverty, pain, sorrow, injustice, death,” the last leading into his discussion of the Eucatastrophe and Gospel. Clute has no Gospel to offer his readers, only the power of Story to give us the world as it is and remind us that we are still alive in it.[21]
In 2011, Clute is still thinking about the ultimate value of fantasy literature, and what to call the final phase in a fantasy narrative, the place in which we find ourselves at the end of the story. We will recall that he began in the Encyclopedia with “what Tolkien calls ‘consolation’ but which we (more secularly) call Healing.” But in his 2011 collection Pardon This Intrusion, Clute writes:
I’ve never been very happy with Healing and have more recently substituted Return as a place-holder. . . . have come in fact to think that part four of the model is essentially post-Story, and cannot really be told: which may just be another way of saying we are doomed: that we cannot tell a planet we are not destroying.[22]
Thus, Clute’s depiction of fantasy is revealed as the despairing inverse of Tolkien’s. Tolkien’s Eucatastrophe is also in some sense “post-Story,” but is the very ground of hope and joy. Clute, who had once made the case that Story is the basis for human freedom, meaning, and dignity, now suggests that it is the very condition of planetary suicide: “we are doomed.”
Such despair was perhaps inevitable, as Clute sought to replace transcendent meaning with narrative. “That we can still be told,” is the hope Clute holds out in the Encyclopedia entry on Story, but he does not answer: Told to whom? Told by whom? In the tradition of Biblical religion carried forward in Judaism and Christianity, God is the ultimate Teller of Story and the ultimate Hearer and Rememberer of Story, which is part of His creation and His Being. In “On Fairy Stories,” even before arriving at his explicitly religious Epilogue, Tolkien writes:
In such stories when the sudden ‘turn’ comes we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart’s desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through.[23]
Divine presence “rends indeed the very web of story.” For Tolkien, fantasy is a vessel that can be illuminated, and even momentarily pierced, by something “outside the frame.” There is an outside. There is hope.
By comparison, in the Encyclopedia Clute writes: “In full-fantasy texts, Recognition marks the moment when the Story means itself.” The web of Story is not rent, does not even let a gleam through; it cannot be rent since there is nothing but web. Recognition, as Clute’s secularized version of Eucatastrophe, marks the moment when the Story means itself, which is to say, nothing beyond itself—and perhaps nothing, period. Story reaches its pinnacle when, like the ouroboros, it swallows itself.[24]
Works Cited
Clute, John. Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm. e-Book. London: Gollancz, 2016.
Clute, John and John Grant, eds. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999.
Clute, John and Gary Westfahl. “Story.” In Clute and Grant 1999.
Tolkien, J. R. R. On Fairy-stories. Expanded Edition, with Commentary and Notes. Eds. Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson. HarperCollins, 2014.
[1] Clute’s collections of reviews include Strokes, Look at the Evidence, Scores, Canary Fever, Pardon This Intrusion, and Stay which, along with the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (https://sf-encyclopedia.com/) which, as mentioned, includes the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, feature his best work as a critic. His theoretical taxonomy of the horror genre is the 2006 The Darkening Garden.
[2] Clute, “Recognition,” in Clute and Grant 1999, 804, emphasis in original. Capitalized terms in the quotations from the Encyclopedia of Fantasy are generally in all-caps in the original print edition and hotlinked in the online version, as they refer the reader to additional entries.
[3] Clute, “Story 2,” in Clute and Grant 1999, 901, emphasis in original. Clute speculates that the crucial literary models “which shaped the use of Recognition in fantasy are probably the late Romances of Shakespeare,” with their stories that “climax in moments or ‘motors’ of Recognition” (Clute, “Recognition,” in Clute and Grant 1999, 804).
[4] Clute, “Story 2,” in Clute and Grant 1999, 901.
[5] Clute and Westfahl, “Story 1,” in Clute and Grant 1999, 900.
[6] Clute has claimed Aristotle as the main model for his category of Recognition but, as we will see, Tolkien is the decisive influence.
[7] Clute, “Fantasy,” in Clute and Grant 1999, 338-39
[8] Tolkien 2014, 75.
[9] Op. cit., 75, 84.
[10] Op. cit., 75.
[11] Op. cit., 78.
[12] Op. cit., 78-79.
[13] Clute, “Tolken, J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel),” in Clute and Grant 1999, 952. Clute has a similar mixture of admiration and ideological wariness regarding C. S. Lewis. Of Tolkien’s view that fantasy literature can constitute a salutory escape from the cheats of modernity, Clute writes: “It is here, perhaps, that Tolkien comes closest to C S Lewis’s characteristic attitude to the modern world, and where he makes himself vulnerable to the charge that – because he condemns the ‘robot’-infested twentieth century so vigorously – it follows that he values correspondingly the hierarchical world of LOTR, the Christian teleology underlining the cosmological tale it tells, the racism (which Theosophy has also been accused of) inherent in the Theodicy-ridden vision of races ranked by degree which LOTR promulgates with such great insistence (and whose clones throng the Fantasylands of his imitators)” (954).
[14] Clute, “Fantastika in the World Storm,” in Clute 2016; Tolkien 2014, 50.
[15] Clute, “Tolken, J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel),” in Clute and Grant 1999, 954. This is in contrast to the entry on Recognition, in which Clute finds a particularly joyful example of Recognition in the arrival of the eagles in Tolkien’s The Return of the King, a moment of unexpected rescue that announces the overcoming of evil and—importantly—coincides with the characters of Frodo and Sam accepting that they are in a Story, that their labors and sufferings make up a narrative that can be told.
[16] Clute, “Pardon This Intrusion,” in Clute 2016; Tolkien 2014, 67-68. Martin Buber’s distinction between the instrumental I-It attitude and the relational I-Thou experience comes to mind here; Buber’s I and Thou was first translated into English in 1937, two years before Tolkien first delivered “On Fairy Stories” as a lecture.
[17] Clute is more than anyone aware of how bad and mediocre fantasy products obfuscate rather than reveal a clear vision. Because the fantastic “gains its insights through cartoon exaggerations and garish shortcuts,” he says, its genres are predisposed to generate mere “tropes of recreation: golems” (Clute, “Pardon This Intrusion,” in Clute 2016). But, he says, we must risk such failure of vision if we wish to see the world as it is.
[18] Clute, “Tolken, J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel),” in Clute and Grant 1999, 954.
[19] Tolkien 2014, 71.
[20] Clute, “Fantastika in the World Storm,” in Clute 2016.
[21] Tolkien 2014, 73.
[22] Clute, “Notes on the Geography of Bad Art in Fantasy,” in Clute 2016. This is an authorial commentary rendered in all-caps in the e-Book edition.
[23] Clute and Westfahl, 1999, 900; Tolkien 2014, 76.
[24] Clute, “Recognition,” in Clute and Grant, 1999, 805. It is significant that the AURYN—both symbol and means of the fantastic imagination—in Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story is not a strict ouroboros but two snakes biting each others’ tails, a dialectical suggestion of the book’s openness to a transcedence beyond the metafictional confines of Story.
investigations and fantasies 