informs Lindsay's frightening romance, which is a direct descendant of
"Sartor Resartus". Indeed Carlyle himself, I take it, is the perhaps uncon-
scious model for the god or demi-god Krag, just as Walter Pater and his
disciple Oscar Wilde served Lindsay as repressed models for Krag's
adversary, Crystalman or Shaping. But I will postpone an account of
the Carlyle-Pater agon in A Voyage to Arcturus until I have explored
some opening aspects of my clinamen or ironic swerve into a beginning
for a theory of fantasy. "Why was all this necessary?" is the question
that, with Nightspore, we must put to the elaborate inventions of any
particular fantasy, if we wish to apply those high standards of inevita-
bility in figuration and design that traditionally have been applied to
literary romance.

Fantasy is a literary sub-genre, by which I do not mean to depre-
cate it, but rather to state this formula: what is good in fantasy is ro-
mance, just as anything good in verse is poetry. Historically, the eigh-
teenth century, and subsequently Romanticism, replaced the heroic
genre by romance, even as the concept of the Sublime replaced theol-
ogy. If Freud, as I now believe, extended and rationalized Romanticism
rather than replaced it, we can aver that the literary element in dream,
as expounded by Freud, is always romance. In the anxiety of belated-
ness that the eighteenth century waning of the Enlightenment passed on
to Romanticism (and to Freud), can be found the repressed source of
modern literary fantasy, because fantasy beckons as a release to any
sense of belatedness.

The course of nineteenth century romance had to ensue in the sub-
mode of fantasy, first for children and then for adults, because romance,
in reclaiming itself, discovered that it had ceased to be in competition
with its Oedipal child, the novel. I would cite here not so much Novalis
and Hoffmann, though I will say something of them later, but rather
Hans Christian Andersen and Lewis Carroll, who seem to me the most
inventive of nineteenth century romance fantasists. What releases itself
in Andersen and Carroll is what I would call a natural Gnosticism, or
perhaps only a natural religion that is a kind of gnosis.

Gnosticism, largely an Alexandrian invention, I take as being
uniquely the religion of belatedness, and gnosis as a mode of knowing
seems to me, as it did to Emerson, finally the knowing of what is oldest
and so earliest in oneself, and so the true counterforce to a sense of
having arrived too late. Prose romance, particularly in its late version
of fantasy, attempts an end run around belatedness, and so must skirt
the dangers of appearing childish and silly, just as the jealous child of
romance, the novel, must skirt instead the dangers of appearing prosaic

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