Thoughts on ‘Instauration Fantasy’
In his entry on Lord Dunsany in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy John Clute categorises The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924) as an ‘instauration fantasy.’ The term means — turning to the entry on ‘Instauration Fantasy’ in the same volume — ‘restoration after decay, lapse or dilapidation’, and the ‘instauration fantasies’ Clute identifies are ‘fantasies about the matter of the world’. He thinks them relatively rare in fantasy literature: more usually, he argues, transformations affect the secondary world of fantasy rather than ‘our’ world. More, his account of the phenomenon considers them predominantly a feature of the last two decades of the twentieth-century (‘possibly the approach of the millennium inspired writers to create tales about profound shifts in the nature of reality’) —so much so that, contradicting himself grandly, he pegs John Crowley’s Little Big (1981) as ‘the first full-fledged instauration fantasy’.
Clute first floated the term in a review of Robert Holdstock’s third Mythago Wood novel, The Hollowing, in 1993:
I’m trying to call it something, this new novel by Robert Holdstock, and I’m not getting very far. My need comes from a sense that The Hollowing … makes up part of a new instauration of fantasy. There’s a word for you. “Instauration” — a term which Sir Francis Bacon used as early as 1620 — could almost be the term I’m looking for. So: Instauration fantasy: a term we might use to describe a late twentieth century tale in which the contemporary world is transfigured and/or restored through the metamorphic intersection of normal reality and some reality or conjoined realities out of deep fantasy; characterized by an acute attention to the invasive and sometimes death-involving potency of the metamorphosis-bearing fantasy world by genre-crossing plots which tend to evoke a plethora of themes and icons, by a powerful tendency to mix time future, time present and time past, by plot structures which serve as conscious enactments of a deep Story which absolutely must be told, by an obsession with Portals, and by the almost constant presence of Visitors from Other Tales. [Clute, Scores: Reviews 1993–2003 (Beccon 2003), 62; he notes that this review served as the germ for the much longer Encyclopedia of Fantasy entry]
Clute adds a deflating touch: ‘but Instauration Fantasy is a term without a ring to it, and would anyway have to be explained every time it was invoked.’ I’m not sure the term has caught-on, in critical circles, although it seems to me to be pointing in a really interesting direction. Though my take on it differs rather from Clute’s.
I yield to no-one in my admiration for Clute’s insight and scope as a critic, but I think he was distracted by a flurry of these kinds of books appearing in the run-up to the year 2000 into seeing them as a millenarian phenomenon. I think they go back much earlier than Little, Big, and even than The King of Elfland’s Daughter. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew (1955) is one example. Kingsley’s Water-Babies (1863) is another — a story that starts in our world, loops into its fairyland of riverine and marine metamorphosis only in order to return to a version of our world recuperated by Tom’s redemption in that place. I mean, Spenser’s Faerie Queene is about the ‘instauration’ of the virtues and tenor of the ‘faerie-land’ splendours of its epic narrative into the actual functioning of Queen Elizabeth’s England, and Vergil’s Aeneid (I’m quoting George Steiner here, something I tend to do rarely and with caution, though in this case I think he’s right) is about ‘the instauration of civic institutions, of a state cult, of a politically-animate historicity’ via the fantastical adventures and battles of mythic storytelling. Not only is ‘instauration’ not a specifically Y2K crotchet, it is actually one of the political and life-world functions of fantastika as such. D. S. Carne-Ross’s Instaurations: Essays in and out of Literature Pindar to Pound (University of California Press 1979) argues all great literature achieves this. Though since one of his bookends is Ezra Pound, I might take his claim with a small pinch of salt.
I’m suggesting, actually, that Clute is being too self-deprecating in downplaying his critical category. I mean, I’m not ready to follow him wholly into his essentialist invocation of ‘deep Story’, and I’m honestly not sure — to follow-up on his specific Dunsanian example — that the human kingdom of Erl is ‘restored’ by the forced Anschluss it experiences with Fairyland at the end The King of Elfland’s Daughter (somewhat the reverse, I feel). But this idea that ‘fairyland’, broadly conceived, enables a fantastical instauration of the ‘real’ world is a fascinating one.
Bacon (or ‘Lord Verulam’— I’m never quite sure which moniker we should use: the latter is ‘correct’, and was generally used in the nineteenth-century when referring to the author, although contemporary Baconists seem to eschew it) meant something particular by ‘instauration’. Here’s Charles Whitney:
From about 1603 until his death in 1626 Francis Bacon referred to his plan for the reform of learning as the Great Instauration or, since he usually wrote about it in Latin, the Instauratio Magna. The phrase became his trademark. He apparently first used it in a work he never completed or published called Temporis Partus Masculus, sive Instaur Magna Imperil Humani in Universum, “Time’s Masculine Birth, or the Great Instauration of Human Dominion over the Universe” (1603). Bacon never explained or discussed the notion of instauration even in his most important work on the new science, the Instauratio Magna of 1620, which includes the Novum Organum. Since the English cognate, coined in the late 1500s, never caught on and has remained inkhorn, Bacon’s illuminating uses of the word instauratio in a variety of contexts as part of his working Latin vocabulary are themselves obscured in translation. [Charles Whitney, ‘Francis Bacon’s Instauratio: Dominion of and over Humanity’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 50:3 (1989), 371]
Whitney notates ‘restore’, ‘reconstruct’ and ‘establish’ as common English versions of Bacon’s ‘hard term’. He also makes plain the dominionist, the power-over logic of the way Bacon used it: that by ‘instauration’ he meant the conquest of and proper ruling over the natural world.
Bacon, an excellent Latinist, knew that īnstaurātiō meant ‘the act of renewing, renewal, repetition’ and more specifically referred to an Ancient Roman practice of redoing of a ceremony or ritual that has gone awry in some fashion (no matter how minor). The word derives from the first conjugation verb instauro: ‘I repeat, start, or perform anew or afresh; renew (after a period of disuse); I repair, restore, renew (from wear, age, or damage)’, itself deriving from in + sto, ‘I stand’. This is at root what an instauration is: a standing, or re-standing of something. A recuperative setting-up of something in good standing.
It seems likely that Bacon himself took the term out of the Vulgate, where instauratio is the term used for the proposed restoration of Solomon’s Temple, and thereby more broadly to spiritual edification and repurification. The temple stood; then it was demolished; it will stand up again, brick built on brick. The word is also used in non-Biblical literature: Livy describes an ‘instauratio templorum’ at the Great Games in Rome, following what might look to us like a fairly trivial infraction of the religious protocol:
It so happened that at Rome preparations were making for the repeat [instauratio] of the Great Games. The reason of the instauratio was as follows: at an early hour of the day appointed for the games, before the show had begun, a certain householder had driven his slave, bearing a yoke, through the midst of the circus, scourging the culprit as he went. The games had then been begun, as though this circumstance had in no way affected their sanctity. Not long after, Titus Latinius, a plebeian, had a dream. He dreamt that Jupiter said that the leading dancer at the games had not been to his liking; that unless there were a sumptuous repetition of the festival the City would be in danger. [Livy, History of Rome, 2:36; transl. Benjamin Oliver Foster]
I don’t mean to be too literalist about this, but it seems to me that a properly ‘instauration fantasy’ would do one of two things: it would rerun the ritual properly, correcting some prior ritualistic delinquency; or, more ambitiously, it would rebuild the temple.
The ‘rerun’ angle particularly interests me, since Fantasy is, or has become, such a repetitive, reiterative mode — there are so many, so very many new Fantasy novels that in essence retread the same Tolkienian, Lewisian, Robert Howardian, Peakeian or Grimdark formats, adjusting one or other small element (a slightly different magical system! a more ethnically diverse cast of characters!) in an attempt to, this time, get the ritual right. Tolkien (let’s say) is taken as the Ludi Magni, and seen as still worth performing: it’s just that he doesn’t quite exercise the ritual correctly, doesn’t attend to the needful hieratic exigences: — he doesn’t have enough (or any!) female characters, his racial politics is offensive, his morality is too black-and-white, he doesn’t get the realpolitik or the supply-side practicalities of military campaigns right — or whatever. And so in ten thousand new Fantasy novels Tolkien is rewritten with these elements tweaked. Instaurated.
Of course this isn’t what Clute means by the term. And — of course — these ‘instaurations’, in their myriads, don’t actually improve or correct or resacralise Tolkien. But, by speaking to a belief that there is an as-it-were Platonic form of the ritual that is fantasy literature that has fallen into desuetude but which can be restored, these reworkings and reimaginings say something very interesting about the mode itself. This original Solominic fantasy novel, this temple which has been knocked down but which Brandon Sanderson or Marlon James or N K Jemisin can stand back up, is not a prior historical construction. William Morris’s fantasy novels, or Tolkien’s, or Lord Dunsany’s, reflect the commonplace attitudes of their time with respect to gender and race and so on; and these things can now be amended in the Fantasy literature being published in the 2020s. But such amendment does not construe an actually historicised narrative: as it might be ‘Tolkien didn’t know any better back then, but we have evolved into a more virtuous and better behavied society now’. Rather it says ‘this is how Fantasy ought to be’ and, in a sense, how it always was before sexism, racism, neoliberalism etc poisoned it. Something that ‘fell into’ time and which needs to be rescued from it — as with the tidal overcoming of time-bound Erl by timeless, glamorous, beautiful Elfland. This is, in other words, to speak to the fundamental appeal of Fantasy as such — its backward-looking nostalgic logic, so different to the fundamentally forward-looking, futurist, restless logic change and extrapolation and strange new worlds that informs SF. There was a temple: a old world of magic and wonder, a transcendent place. But it was demolished. The world fell into Modernity: life grew disenchanted (as per Weber), secularised and ‘buffered’ (as per Charles Taylor). This change happened because of capitalism and industrialisation— Tolkien’s bugbear — or because of the ‘Orbis Spike’, the coming of colonisation, slavery and genocide, neoliberalism. Fantasy is that mode that seeks to instaurate the old ritual, rebuild the temple, to reactivate the wonder and glamour, as also the terror. It’s a myth, but that’s fitting for a mythographic mode like Fantasy.
