Phantastes
by George MacDonald
I thought I had read this before. It wasn’t too many pages in before I knew that there was no way I had. I would have remembered the feeling.
My Omnibus class read it. We talked about fairy tales, about Bildungsroman, about how C.S. Lewis credited MacDonald with baptizing his imagination.
I’m glad I finally read it, though I wouldn’t say that it wet my imagination.
PPart of the point, I accept, of this genre, is not the precise words used but the effect of the words. That doesn’t have to be a postmodern perspective, MacDonald certainly wasn’t a PM, but it’s a feature of this kind of narrative. We get that witches and wolves are bad. We get that monsters need to be killed not cuddled. We get that chasing beauty for itself will probably lead a man into a forrest of trouble. All this in Phantastes, and I wouldn’t stop you from reading it.