Wisdom from reflection in Phantastes

I like the way the messages of George MacDonald's Phantastes, which I've recently read, come about. The story clearly has messages to get across, and the character learns a lot from his journey, and yet the story is subtle, the messages and their sources ambiguous and arising indirectly of symbolism and reflection—

Many spoiler warnings, as much as a story like this one can really be spoiled.

So, Anodos doesn't learn his lessons by consequence. There'd be something sort of simplistic or preachy about sending a protagonist into another world to just experience conditions like those in the real world, fail at them, and then return to the real world to apply the particular lessons he learned. The wisdom gained from something like that would seem sort of overly literal and practical, and that is not what this book does.

Rather, the sources of his lessons are much more indirect and complex than mere experience, despite what his death might imply about his time in Fairy Land being a sort of miniature practice-life. He learns from songs and stories that are themselves not explicit about but symbolic of the sort of ruin he could fall into if unwary. He is punished for his ill choices mostly by his shadow, which isn't something external but something that is part of him and created by him. Even when his decisions lead to good or bad external consequences, the lessons are complicated and contradictory: he breaks the globe, but while it looks like the moral here is "You might hurt people through disobedience," the moral is later complicated by the reappearance of the globe's owner and the favorable outcome of stepping out of line while in the service of the knight. All are indirect, and the actual content of each lesson seems to come more from within than from without: his own reactions and willful interpretations of the lessons that come to him.

The characters in the Fairy Palace storybooks die from love; the woman flees when Anodos touches her after bringing her to life; the knight in the song accidentally touches his ghost lover. And yet, what Anodos learns from all this is not that love is dangerous, but a lot else about love. I suppose it is true that the old woman in the cottage does give him some direct advice—be a "well of love" and not a "cistern of love"—but even this is not an obvious consequence of the scene behind the cabin door he has just been shown. What she shows him and tells him are all rather cryptic. The meanings of anything presented to Anodos are rather cryptic. The messages do not follow easily from their sources.

And the lessons he gets don't function in the narrative in the orderly way that would be expected. When he learns something, whether new information about Fairy Land or new motivations or new wisdom, it does not directly, at least in an orderly way, affect what happens to him next or what he does next. The conspicuously disorderly narrative, lacking an obvious progression as driven by his lessons, reinforces his lessons' indirect nature, that they're not so much about experience and direct applications as more about reflection and gradual improvement of his character.

I like these means of getting the message across because it makes for a good balance between really 'saying something', and being subtle and not preachy. Partly, it makes the story much better for me as a reader to take something from it and to learn something. I am still asking myself what I should have gained from the narrative, since every bit of it seems to be saying so much, and as I scroll through the e-book after finishing the story I notice so many ambiguities of what various events mean with regard to the overall themes. Like, what exactly is it saying about romantic couple-love, for instance? Or about obedience?

Part of the role of the Fairy Palace storybooks—access to an academic journal database is a nice supplement after finishing a book—is to prime us to think about the relationship between fantasy and reality, and fiction and reader. I really fancy the idea of a reader taking wisdom from the fantasy of Anodos in the same way Anodos takes wisdom from his Fairy Land experience, heavy with thought and individual interpretation. Supposedly, it's quite easy to want to do a religious reading of Phantastes given similarities with MacDonald's sermons, but I didn't know that while reading and instead, as is more meaningful for me, extracted from it quite a bit of secular wisdom. Anodos is "one-and-twenty"; I am two-and-twenty, and I could use some character development in the manner of his.