For those of us who spent our youths immersed in fantasy literature and role-playing games, Michael Saler's history of the literary precursors of today's virtual worlds reads like a scholarly validation of all those fun-filled hours. Saler starts by reintroducing his concept of enchanted disenchantment. Unlike earlier supernatural beliefs, the ironic imagination's ability to consciously engage with fantasy through acknowledging its unreality allows modern enchantments to delight without deluding. Conceptually, this initially appears to add little to ideas that were convincingly examined in Saler's coedited (with Joshua Landy) The Re-enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (2009). However, from these rather familiar beginnings, As If builds into an entertaining study of the twentieth century's cultural trend toward creating shared imagined worlds populated by virtual communities.
Chapter 1 establishes the nineteenth century as a period that marked the end of a Western tradition of subordinating imagination to reason, thereby creating a more favorable context for the future colonization of imagined worlds. To reinforce this argument, Saler provides a brisk but convincing summation of the different branches of human knowledge that were embracing the imagination in this period. The second chapter examines the influence of aestheticism and the “New Romance” writing of Rider Haggard, Kipling, and Conan Doyle from the 1880s, demonstrating how these authors blended the fantastic with the mimetic techniques of realist writing, particularly drawing upon scholarly props such as footnotes, maps, and photographs to enhance the illusion of reality. The focus then shifts to sci-fi pulp magazines of the 1920s, their letter pages creating virtual communities that bloomed into organized fandom, societies, and the convention culture of the 1930s and beyond. The formation of these imagined communities had a synergistic effect, causing the visions of single authors to transform into shared worlds.
The book then turns to three well-chosen case studies—Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, and J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth. Each study considers not only the individual author's creative influences but also the imaginative processes of reception and appropriation within public spheres of the imagination. Chapter 3, a revised version of an earlier article, explores how some readers naively or ironically believed Sherlock Holmes to be a real person. The chapter suggests Holmes's lasting appeal partially resides in his animistic reason, his seemingly “magical” use of deductive logic in reenchanting the mundane by imbuing even the smallest details with significance. Chapter 4 demonstrates that Lovecraft's challenge to disenchantment was considerably different. The monstrous figures of the Cthulhu mythos are presented as beings of cosmic terror rather than supernatural horror, and by shifting our focus onto a cosmological scale, Lovecraft alters our anthropocentric perception of reality, downgrading humanity into insignificance. This chapter also tries to make a case for the rehabilitative influence of public spheres of the imagination and the communities that operated within them. Saler cautiously suggests that Lovecraft's renowned elitist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic prejudices and his essentialist attitudes were somewhat tempered by his voluminous correspondence with other writers and fans. Chapter 5 presents Tolkien as the key articulator of enchanted disenchantment, his essentialist religious beliefs held in tension against his recognition that imagination rather than faith had the power to reenchant a more secular modernity. Saler illustrates how the world of Middle Earth was built by grounding it in rich histories, genealogies, and invented languages; in short, it was constructed and made recognizable by forms of information that also construct our sense of the primary (real) world.
Fantasy, Saler maintains, forces us to reflect on the contingent narratives that determine our sense of reality and normality. He asserts that the collective habitation of imagined worlds leads people to view the real world “not in essentialist, ‘just so’ terms but rather in provisional, ‘as if’ perspectives” (7). This is certainly an intriguing notion, but as indicated in this book, such a bold claim proves difficult to measure beyond anecdotal evidence.
Saler frequently touches upon but does not interrogate issues that may have proven potentially awkward for his thesis. The founding of the British-based Tolkien Society to challenge the counterculture's appropriation of Middle Earth in the 1960s suggests how different fan bases introduced their own essentialist interpretations into their secondary worlds, but Saler does not fully explore this point. He notes that fan communities were composed predominantly of white males, but a more developed consideration of how virtual communities might replicate power imbalances in the primary world would have obviously tainted the optimistic claims Saler wants to make for these public spheres of the imagination. Saler even alludes to the difficulties of sustaining the ironic imagination's balance between delight and delusion (Conan Doyle serves as a model of the way in which an urge to sincere belief in spiritualism and fairies might destabilize it), thereby weakening the very notion of enchanted disenchantment that is dependent upon such a feat.
That said, there is much to admire here. Saler's serious engagement with Lovecraft and Tolkien is to be applauded, especially in a cultural history that seeks to explore their significance beyond the ghetto of fantasy literature. Unlike Conan Doyle, these two twentieth-century giants of the fantastical have been dogged by critics' snobbish dismissal of their work as juvenile. As If convincingly illustrates how the terrors of the Cthulhu mythos and the magic of Middle Earth does not simply foster a solipsistic retreat from the real world but rather makes us reflect on it anew. Saler's innovative study offers us suggestive ways in which to develop a historicized approach to the modern popular imagination. At its best, this book is a boldly stated appeal to recognize the positive functions and value of fantasy in a century that is too often associated with the darker imaginings of war, genocide, and ideological extremism. It might engage us as historians; it should certainly stir us as imaginative human beings.
