An Exploration of Conflict Through Logic and Nonsense in Lewis Carroll's Children's Fantasy Stories

Alice In Wonderland is well known for being both nonsensical and also logical. I love both the nonsense and the logic, like children do, because for them logic, and actually for adults too, represents a safe world, a world where there are answers, there's a correct answer, and you can move around within it, like within a square, and know what the angles are and how they bisect. When you get to the real world or the natural world or the world of the sea, everything changes constantly, and children are more aware of this than adults, because they are growing constantly, and I think Lewis Carroll was very aware of this when he had Alice grow tall and grow short, a bit like in a fun house of mirrors. But in fact that's the world seen from a child's point of view.

What was revolutionary I think about his work is that nobody had ever said "Oh my god, the world through the eyes of a child must look really crazy", and I think that is what is precious about his writing.I think it was radical for Victorians and it was maybe a first in the history of thought really. Because he was a teacher of mathematics Lewis Carroll did realize how sharply it contrasted with the logic and mathematics of the so-called adult world, but of course adults, while they use logic and mathematics are subject to this terrible evolution that's going on in themselves and their bodies, and the world around them, and ignore it by focusing on what they can mentally achieve.

In Wonderland and the Looking Glass, we become immersed in conflicts between the characters, they are very much talking nonsense and are quite concerned about the fact that they don't agree with each other and are in conflict. They're argumentative, and it shows conflict in a different light and perhaps the light of something more detached.

You see Alice being subjected to all these experiences, and she doesn't agree with a lot of them, so she's in conflict with them, but its a dreamlike conflict that is episodic and goes from one conflict to another without ever being resolved. But it still is a playful conflict, Lewis Carroll demonstrates that conflict can be very playful, absurd, if carried to extremes or even if trivialized and that's part of the wonder of his books.Its something that appeals to me as somebody who's written plays most of my life and dealt with conflict on the stage continually, sometimes very seriously, sometimes comically, with the realization that each dramatic incident I've ever written about, whether its serious or comic could also be acted as the other. For example the serious could be acted as a comedy, and the comedy could be acted seriously, and that's the kind of thing that I think Lewis Carroll was fully aware of.

In the Alice stories children, particularly, can see conflict happening in the action, but they also see at the same time that its very silly. This could be a good perspective for them in terms of understanding what happens in life and also a good perspective for us too! And of course children's lives are entirely spent in conflict from the time they open their eyes in the morning till the time they shut them at night. there's no minute in the day I don't think that the child is not in conflict with the adult world. From the time they don't want to drink their milk or go to school or go feet first down the stairs instead of head first, whatever - they're in conflict with adults.

And it must make the world seem very absurd to them, because it is spent entirely in conflict. Maybe they make it into a silly conflict just in order to be able to stand it. This gives them more perspective by seeing others (in the stories) wrestle with logic and nonsense at the same time, and they can also see that what's being said on both sides is really playful ultimately.

That's what we as adults see when we see a drama onstage, we get a perspective and we can see it could be a comedy, and we can see the tragic side of the comedy because we have a certain distance from it. And children are able to make that leap and have distance, and laugh at themselves as well as at the adults, within the conflict, and that is an amazing thing to see and to experience.

That perhaps is the key to understanding how not to be in conflict, its that one comes to a sense of one's own detachment and fullness of life. We are not emaciated by the conflict but we stay present to it and see through it, which is perhaps what the world at large misses.

Because we stop learning, we stop being beginners, I think, perhaps children do inherently know that its only through conflict that they can learn and grow, and treat conflict as a learning, growing experience and when we stop doing that and regard it as an annoyance, we stop being a child and stop learning and growing.

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How to Write Good Fantasy Fiction

Following the cinematic success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Harry Potter, the Narnia Chronicles and, now, the Philip Pullman novels would-be fantasy authors are busy redusting their manuscripts in the hope they will be the next thing to be discovered. Theoretically fantasy fiction should be easy to write. As an author you have little factual research to do, the members of your target audience are already predisposed to the suspension of disbelief that's required of readers, your plot line is not hampered by real-world limitations and your characters do not even have to be human.

By all accounts fantasy fiction should have a huge volume of work and a huge number of writers and yet the fact that it is still considered niche publishing indicates that it is neither easy to write nor can it be always written well. This also means that the current success of Tolkien, Rowlin and Pullman notwithstanding fantasy fiction is still regarded as science fiction's, let alone mainstream fiction's poor relation.

It was in search of answers to these questions that I spoke to Thoma Hunt via email in what is probably one of the rarest exchanges in fantasy fiction. Those who know Thomas Hunt, know he wrote The Shade and know that he does not do media interviews. He is, however, never short of answers when it comes to either writing fiction or talking about the publishing industry and the way it is evolving which is how him and I got going in the first place.

Fantasy fiction, Hunt says, is more about writing about mythical universes. Its appeal harks back to fairy tales and the Jungian archetypes within each culture and each person. Because the appeal occurs at a basic and largely subconscious level it is exceedingly hard to write Fantasy Fiction that reiterates the things we find familiar and comforting in fairy tales and yet breaks new ground in a way that is fresh without being disturbing.

"It's a little like sex," says Thoma Hunt rather disingenuously, "in order for it to work it has to have a certain familiar structure in the sense that we need to roughly know where we are going and what we should expect on the way there. It really does not matter if the payoff is exactly what we expect or something that totally surprises us or even disappoints us. What is important is that the tropes work in such way that they achieve two things: 1. They prepare us, mentally and psychologically, for the journey ahead 2. They make us, through the process of subconscious expectation and mental and psychological preparation, whole-hearted participants to the enterprise. Then the fantasy novel becomes a shared journey of discovery between the author and the reader and a masterpiece is born."

Thomas Hunt makes it sound easy because he's an expert and knows the genre inside out. His novel, The Shade, treads much of the territory. In his analysis of literature, culture and archetypes Jung laid out four main archetypes:

The Self, the regulating center of the psyche and facilitator of individuation. The Shadow, the opposite of the ego image, often containing qualities that the ego does not identify with but possess nonetheless

The Anima, the feminine image in a man's psyche

The Animus, the masculine image in a woman's psyche

Although the number of archetypes is limitless, there are a few particularly notable, recurring archetypal images which appear again and again in fairy tales, epic poems, parables, stories, novels and great literature:

The Syzygy

The Child

The Hero

The Great Mother

The Wise old man

The Trickster or Ape

The Puer Aeternus (Latin for "eternal boy")

The Cosmic Man

The artist-scientist

These archetypes appear with such consistency that it is evident that there is a lot more than mere assumption to the theory. Fantasy Fiction writers who embark upon a tale without an awareness, at least, of the way these archetypes work on the reader's imagination and the reader's expectation are doomed to fail.

"Fantasy fiction has a lot in common with fairy tales," says Thomas Hunt, "it needs to have a message and a moral and it needs to be clear-cut." Which is why, I suppose, sex is such a taboo subject in the genre. "There is very little Fantasy fiction written which actually depicts sex in anything more than hints," says Hunt, "this is one of the conventions of the genre which means that, depending on how you look at it, the time has come to either make it a sacred cow and never question it, or prick the bubble and see what happens."

In The Shade Thomas Hunt has chosen to do the latter depicting sex between adults in a way that makes the story feel claustrophobic almost and makes the almost inhuman protagonist seem, suddenly, very vulnerable and very human.

Is that enough to make a Fantasy novel stand out from the crowd?

"Absolutely not!" says Thomas Hunt, "if you approach writing this way you may as well start believing that changing the font is enough to make a badly written book, good. When I was writing The Shade I had to make a conscious choice whether to stick to the accepted norm regarding sex in Fantasy fiction or stay faithful to the story. I chose to go with the latter conscious of the fact that I was breaking with convention but really wanting to tell the best tale possible."

So writing great Fantasy fiction requires an awareness of the tropes of the genre plus the necessary strength of vision to know when to stay faithful to the story and depart from convention. It requires a story which taps into the arcane archetypes of our psyche and it requires characters which are also reflected by these archetypes. Put all these elements together, allow them to percolate and what you end up with is a tale that is powerful, memorable and fun to read.

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