Review: Phantastes
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 9, 2014
Phantastes is a beautifully-crafted story of a young man's adventures in Faerie Land and the lessons he learns there. Anodos, the narrator, on coming of age is given a key to a cabinet belonging to his late father. When he opens the cabinet a tiny woman appears who tells him he has faerie blood in him, and will be granted his once-expressed wish to enter Faerie Land.Anodos awakens the next morning to find his bedroom slowing changing into a woodland glade, and his wash basin overflowing to become a forest stream. He follows the stream into a world of mystery and magic, peopled by talking flowers, walking trees, ogres, giants, knights and damsels.Inside a cave he encounters a young woman apparently frozen into a block of alabaster. She is more beautiful than anything he has ever seen, and Anodos is sure that she will become his if he can only free her from the stone. He can't reach her to kiss her, but on a sudden inspiration he tries song. Sure enough, his singing gradually melts away the stone, but when she is free the young beauty jumps up and runs away. Anodos spends much of his time pursuing this ideal beauty, but is frustrated at every turn.Anodos's adventures are numerous, bizarre, and sometimes unsettling. There are also several stories within stories, such as one where a young man in Prague attempts to free the woman he loves from an enchanted mirror. Mirrors and reflections figure prominently throughout the novel, with the common question being: "Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call the reality?--not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier?" And later: "All mirrors are magic mirrors. The commonest room is a room in a poem when I turn to the glass."Anodos learns that the pursuit of the ideal, be it a woman or a reputation, is a sign of false pride. "I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood." He also learns that the joy is in loving, not in being loved.Most of the images and events in Phantastes have no obvious meaning or message, and appear to be there just to stimulate the imagination. There are some obviously Christian concepts and values, but no overt theological message or allegory. The purpose of the novel may, perhaps, be revealed in this passage:"But is it not rather that art rescues nature from the weary and sated regards of our senses, and the degrading injustice of our anxious everyday life, and, appealing to the imagination, which dwells apart, reveals Nature in some degree as she really is, and as she represents herself to the eye of the child, whose every-day life, fearless and unambitious, meets the true import of the wonder-teeming world around him, and rejoices therein without questioning?"