A change of pace. Last words on George MacDonald
George MacDonald, A Valedictory
I began work on George MacDonald in 1970 when he was a relatively obscure figure from the Victorian period. We had Joseph Johnson’s 1906 study, C.S. Lewis’s influential Anthology (1946), and Robert Lee Wolff’s The Golden Key (1961). Shortly after I began my studies came work by Robert Reis, Muriel Hutton, Colin Manlove, Rolland Hein, Stephen Prickett, and David Robb. I met all of these people, with the exception of Richard Reis and Rolland Hein. I also met George MacDonald Davies, MacDonald’s godson, and somewhat later William Raeper, John Docherty, Bob Trexler, and John Pennington. All of the people I met in the MacDonald community were warm, friendly, and unfailingly kind and supportive. I think this speaks to MacDonald’s deep influence. In any case, since my work on MacDonald slowed down, and then stopped, much work by many minds has raised the profile and increased our knowledge of MacDonald’s life and work. I think we appreciate him as a writer of prose more than we once did. We now have many scholars working on MacDonald’s life and writing. I could mention several names, but I will just note that MacDonald has moved both those inside the academy and those who work independently. He is a writer who elicits passionate response. Just think of the academic journal North Wind and the independent journal created by Barbara Amiel, Wingfold. In short, MacDonald is a writer who unites people far and wide, professionals and non-professionals. His is a rare and important voice.
Most of us have a book or books that are formative, that somehow motivate us in important ways. Meeting such books can come at any time. For example, I recently read Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger (2023), and the book not only impressed me with its incisive exploration of our cultural moment, but it also appealed to me simply because what Klein has to say fits so neatly into my sense of value, my ideology, if you will. It may seem strange to hear, but this book reminded me of when I met another book that proved to be formative in my life. I refer to George MacDonald’s Lilith (1895), a book by a writer who lived in another time and another place, but whose vision struck me as essential when I first encountered his mysterious fantasy. This encounter happened in the fall of 1968 in a movie theatre in Toronto. I was there to watch Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and this proved appropriate not only because Kubrik’s film takes us to another world, but also because my quest to learn about George MacDonald began just then. I can remember feeling I had come across what a “kindred spirit.” Lilith was strange, but strange in the way the mythopoeic works of William Blake are strange. What I did not know at the time is that MacDonald was an admirer of Blake and used one of Blake’s drawings for Robert Blair’s The Grave, a drawing known as “Death’s Door” (1808), for his bookplate. In any case, what struck me then is the kinship between imaginative visions of Blake and MacDonald, visions that are the product of what MacDonald calls “the fantastic imagination.”
“The most sublime act is to set another before you.” This aphorism from Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell,” seems to me to fit MacDonald’s vision. The aphorism, “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees,” reminds me of MacDonald’s belief that each reader who reads a story will “read its meaning after his own nature and development” (“The Fantastic Imagination” 316). Perhaps the only difference between these two visionaries is that MacDonald’s sense of a person’s “nature and development” is that these may evolve or devolve. But, clearly, Blake’s call for a marriage of Heaven and Hell is a call to a coming to completion of all things in a unity, not uniformity, of being.
“The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended.” MacDonald writes in his essay “The Fantastic Imagination.” This pretty much sums up my initial impression of both Blake’s mythic work and MacDonald’s Lilith. These writers nudge us toward clarity of vision by first activating feeling. In his essay, “The Fantastic Imagination,” MacDonald stresses the importance of a work of art first activating feeling that then prompts thought. But what connects MacDonald and Blake is that word “vision.” I take this word to mean a comprehensive understanding of things, an ability to make connections that may, at first, not appear connected. Both writers have the ability to take us to places we have not been before while at the same time making these places uncanny, doppelgangers of reality, if you will.
When MacDonald discusses how the imagination works by first moving our feelings which then promote thought, he acknowledges that a genuine work of art will strike one person differently from the way it strikes another person. We call this interpretation, and the interpretation of art is expansive, open, full of possibilities. As MacDonald says, a work of art may mean many things. What matters is the creative relationship between the reader and the book. Let me offer an example. The opening paragraph of Chapter XVIII of Lilith sees Vane, just after his encounter with Lord and Lady Cokayne, walking in a forest. His companion is the moon; she is ”dark and dented, like a battered disk of old copper” (273). She looks dispirited, and Vane imagines her saying, “Is this going to last forever.” In the previous chapter, the Raven, sitting in a beech tree, advises Vane that some words, all and ever are two of them, are too big for him and for Vane. Now Vane imagines the moon wondering if her situation is forever. He appears to have forgotten that some words are too big for him, and most likely for the moon too. In any case, Vane and the moon walk together for a while, “she the dull shine, and I the live shadow.” Vane is just about to discover the emaciated body of a woman who will turn out to be Lilith. I might also add that moon and shadow offer a binary that gives us male and female, light and dark, high and low. I will return to binaries a bit later.
For now, let me notice that this first paragraph is a brief account of two travellers, strangers both in a strange land. The moon portends the ensuing encounter between Vane and Lilith. The short narrative lets us know that Vane is conscious of having a companion, here the distanced moon that Vane imagines as a female companion. The short bit also allows MacDonald to echo his first fantasy, Phantastes, thereby suggesting the connectedness of his work. Indeed, connectedness is a thematic thread throughout Lilith. This short paragraph also connects with the reader, in this case me, allowing me to play with interpretive possibilities. Vane’s companion here is female, reflective, virginal, mutable, and continually on the move. She connects to the various female figures Vane meets, Eve, Mara, Lilith, Lona; she suggests that these females constitute one figure, a malleable constantly changing figure. She is here connected to an old copper disk, copper being a metal that turns up several times in the Old Testament, sometimes connected to judgement. Vane mentions the moon as travelling companion just prior to his coming across Lilith. Lilith has connections with the moon in the Zohar, especially with the waxing and waning of the moon. Waxing and waning is a suitable description of the Lilith Vane is about to encounter.
As soon as the second paragraph begins, Vane spies “Something on the ground” (273), something white and “cold like that which was once alive, and is alive no more.” This is the emaciated Lilith who turns out not to be dead, but to be clinging to life and in need of succour and care. The following couple of chapters carefully recount how Vane cares for this emaciated woman, using a nearby hot stream to warm her and grapes to give her sustenance. This lengthy episode serves to enlighten Vane. He learns that a person needs company to be fully a person. Two people are the beginning of a company, and a goodly company is what makes for humanity. Dare I say, “it takes a village” before humans can understand who and what they are. Vane puts it like this:
I saw now that a man alone is but a being that may become a man – that he is but a need, and therefore a possibility. To be enough for himself, a being must be an eternal, self-existent worm! So superbly constituted, so simply complicate, is man; he rises from and stands upon such a pedestal of lower physical organisms and spiritual structures, that no atmosphere will comfort or nourish his life, less divine that that offered by other souls; nowhere but in other lives can he ripen his speciality, develop the idea of himself, the individuality that distinguishes him from every other (279-280).
We see the necessity for a community, a human family, throughout Lilith, in the Little Ones and most ecstatically in the “glorious resurrection-morning” near the book’s end.
Vane celebrates this resurrection-morning with the following description:
The children went gamboling before, and the beasts came after us. Fluttering butterflies, darting dragon-flies hovered or shot hither and thither about our heads, a cloud of colours and flashes, now descending upon us like a snow-storm of rainbow flakes, now rising into the humid air like a rolling vapour of embodied odours…. I walked on the new earth, under the new heaven, and found them the same as the old, save that now they opened their minds to me, and I saw into them. Now, the soul of everything I met came out to greet me and make friends with me, telling me we came from the same, and meant the same. (414)
All is interconnected, children, beasts, insects, and all are friends. The synaesthesia here – embodied odours, snow-storm of rainbow flakes, smell, sight, touch all intertwined – communicates MacDonald’s sense of wholeness, unity rather than uniformity. All is connected, and each is distinct. What we have here is a call for an end to conflict and the beginning of a truly human community, a city on a hill (Matt. 5:14). That Vane finds himself back in his earthly house simply reinforces the need for an endless ending, an ending always in the making, a community always taking shape.
In other words, an ending that is not an ending. Paradox gives us a doubling, and doubling is at work throughout Lilith. From the outset, we have this world and the mirror world, the mirror signaling doubling, then Vane and his father. The old Librarian doubles as a Raven. Once Vane finds himself in the world beyond the mirror, he discovers a series of doubles: the Little Ones and the Bags, Mara and Lilith, Eve and Lilith, Adam and the Great Shadow, Bulika and the city on the hill, two leopardesses, grey cats and wolves, sun and moon, dark and light, self and other, reason and imagination, waking and dreaming, and so on. What Naomi Klein calls a “culture crowded with various forms of doubling” (11) is at work here in Lilith. We live in a world of doppelgangers, news and fake news, actual selves and virtual selves, theories and conspiracy theories. Sorting out the actual from the fake has become more difficult. In any case, way back in the late nineteenth century MacDonald was grappling with doubles and sorting out just what is real and what is not. Vane concludes his account with the comment that once he finally wakes, he will “doubt no more.” For the time being, he will live with doubts and uncertainty, with doubles ever present: does he wake or sleep?
Uncertainty is valuable because it indicates an ongoing quest for certainty, and certainty claimed without prior uncertainty, without prior grappling with issues and possibilities, results in stasis. Stasis is what the Bags offer. Let me return to Klein who focuses on “branding,” the modern way of placing an end-stop to questing. The brand, Klein remarks causes humans to “lose their capacity for internal dialogue and deliberation, and find themselves only able to regurgitate slogans and contradictory platitudes” (66). In other words, branding gives us a form of doubling that is unhealthy, us and them, the Bags and the Little Ones. What MacDonald envisions is a form of doubling that is expansive, more than doubling. Take for example, the doubling of female figures in Lilith. We not only have Eve and Lilith, the two wives of Adam, but also Lilith and Lona, mother and daughter, Lilith and Mara and Lona and Eve all four aspects of the feminine. The Raven is a librarian and also Adam. Earthworms are butterflies and souls. Endings are beginnings and everything in between.
Lilith focuses on the individual’s search for understanding and connectedness. But MacDonald’s book is not without its political suggestiveness. Bulika is a city ruled by a dictatorial Queen; its citizens are fearful and secretive. The Bags too are a brutish citizenry. As for the Little Ones, they are as yet fully formed as a civilization, in need of the careful eye of Lona. As we move toward the apocalyptic ending, we move closer to a vision of an acceptable civilization, a city that offers safety and succour to all, a city in which doubling becomes tripling and quadrupling and so on. A sanctuary city indeed.
Works Cited
Klein, Naomi. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Canada: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.
MacDonald, George. A Dish of Orts. London: Sampson Low Marston & Co, 1895.
--------. Phantastes and Lilith. Grand Rapids, MI: WM. B. Eerdmans, 1964.
