Last week we charted into choppy waters with Ursula Le Guin’s seminal essay, From Elfland to Poughkeepise. The purpose of the essay is two-pronged, both lines of thought emanating from a single point, one we’ve been examining for a few weeks—the nature of fantasy and its relationship to myth and primary forms of thinking. Other writers have other things to say about fantasy, whence it rises and how seriously it should be taken, but Le Guin’s status as the matriarch of modern fantasy makes her opinions important, and important enough to be considered carefully.
Last week we looked at the Lords of Elfland. This week we’re going to look at the other prong: language. The two purposes stem from this passage:
The Lords of Elfland are true lords, the only true lords, the kind that do not exist on this earth: their lordship is the outward sign or symbol of real inward greatness. And greatness of soul shows when a man speaks. At least, it does in books. In life we expect lapses. In naturalistic fiction, too, we expect lapses, and laugh at an “over-heroic” hero. But in fantasy, which, instead of imitating the perceived confusion and complexity of existence, tries to hint at an order and clarity underlying existence—in fantasy we need not compromise. Every word spoken is meaningful, though the meaning may be subtle…. (1, pp. 87-88)
The lens through which Le Guin views fantasy is the same lens that Tolkien employed, although the vocabulary has evolved. If you take Tolkien’s “secondary world, commanding secondary belief” as a requirement—an invented world that lives and breathes on its own, there will be, there must be, an order and clarity that unites that world and is discernible despite the clutter and detail of culture, setting, clothing, linguistic tics, invented languages and religions, geography and economics and general strategery of that invented world.
Language is the means by which the secondary world is accessed. When stated this way, it’s patronizingly and painfully obvious, but it’s also true and often forgotten: we imagine the created world, building the vision in our own heads according to the writer’s blueprint; we build it out of our memories and visions, but we do it entirely through the writer’s words. Not a small bit of magic, that collaborative effort, and when it works, we are transported out of our world and into some other place.
Therefore, the language used to build that new world has to be important. Heroic fantasy, which is the form that most people envision when considering fantasy, casts an immense shadow for a literature that is relatively limited in size, but such was the effect that Tolkien had on the genre that he became one of the most imitated fantasy writers ever to pound a typewriter. He became the standard, but his followers did not always follow the lesson.
Heroic fantasy, Le Guin notes, often uses the language of archaism to provide narrative distance and gravity, following the Lord Dunsany and E. R. Eddison Model of King James Revisited. (And all this time, you thought you were imitating Tolkien, silly writer.) Trouble is, the Dunsany/Eddison Style (also practiced by Lovecraft) is hard to imitate. “The archaic manner is indeed a perfect distancer, but you have to do it perfectly. It’s a high wire: one slip spoils all” (1, p. 90).
Le Guin calls archaism one of the “Terrible Fate[s] that Awaiteth Unwary Beginners in Fantasy” (1, p. 89), and there are others. When they’re done poorly, the sensitive reader grieves. When done well, the language provides a path and it’s really only a path—a way into a story. For the record, Tolkien doesn’t write in archaic form—his style is clear and plain, supple, musical, easily allowing both comic touches, as in the conversations between Sam and the Gaffer, or elegiac dignity, as in the death of Theoden, all thanks to his marvelous ear and his extensive training in prosody.
The essay From Elfland to Poughkeepsie is well worth seeking out. It’s reprinted in The Language of the Night and in Fantasists on Fantasy and probably in other places, and available in pamphlet form for a ridiculous price on Amazon. Although the essay is (in)famous for its criticism of Katherine Kurtz and her style of fantasy, she assails other writers, as well, among them Fritz Leiber and Roger Zelazny, who
have both written in the comic-heroic vein...When humor is intended the characters talk colloquial American English, or even slang, and at earnest moments they revert to old formal usages. Readers indifferent to language do not mind this, but for others the strain is too great. I am one of these latter. I am jerked back and forth between Elfland and Poughkeepsie; the characters lose coherence in my mind, and I lose confidence in them (1, p. 91).
Le Guin never says that archaic English is the only appropriate form for fantasy—far from it; it is but one technique, and its practitioners occupy one small corner of a large landscape. In discussing heroic fantasy Le Guin is not talking about distancing language or Important Capitalizations That Mask Empty Metaphors or any of the Victorian tatting that adorns the fairy tale, but about the language most appropriate for “a modern descendant of the epic” (1, p. 92), a literary form that, rooted in oral culture, is plain and straightforward in language, mythic in meaning. Like Tolkien’s language, and in comparison to Tolkien, Le Guin writes
...the kind of writing I am attacking, the Poughkeepsie style of fantasy, is also written in a plain and apparently direct prose….It is a fake plainness. It is not really simple, but flat. It is not really clear, but inexact. Its directness is specious. Its sensory cues—extremely important in imaginative writing—are vague and generalized; the rocks, the wind, the trees are not there, are not felt; the scenery is cardboard, or plastic. The tone of the whole is profoundly inappropriate to the subject….A language intended to express the immediate and the trivial is applied to the remote and the elemental… (1, p.93).
Just as, she writes, sagebrush and cowboys don’t make a Western, and a spaceship doesn’t make Science Fiction, fantasy elements without connection to the mythic and the archetypal don’t make fantasy. Or maybe they don’t make Fantasy. You can enjoy Robert Asprin, but he’s not going to stick with you over a lifetime; his characters are not good traveling companions on your journey. But Ged and Tenar—they’re not going away, any more than Frodo and Same would ever leave you in crisis.
For the record, since a great many readers took offense at Le Guin’s slap at Katherine Kurtz (and I can’t read that passage without feeling a stab, myself) Kurtz did get to respond:
Language seems to be the thing that’s criticized most by reviewers. They seem to think that fantasy has to be full of thee’s and thou’s and lots of archaic language. That can be good, if it’s done well, but it can make a book limp along very badly if it isn’t just right. From as objective a point as I can manage in answering that charge, I would have to say that I’m not J. R. R. Tolkien or C. S. Lewis, and I don’t think it’s valid to criticize the Deryni books because my language is not theirs. I try to keep blatant modernisms out of the language, but I am writing for modern readers, and communication is sometimes more important than formal style (2, p. 258).
Which pretty much misses the point, not that anyone could blame her. But Le Guin’s point stands: If the world the writer makes is made up entirely of words; language that throws the reader out of that secondary world breaks the spell. As I understand Le Guin’s criticism, it’s less that the language Kurtz uses is modern, and more that it points to known things in the real world. The language itself breaks the spell. We don’t see or smell or hear or taste her world—instead, we think of a vaguely medieval style world with images straight out of photo stock. Contrast Kurtz’s world with, say, Connie Willis’ medieval world in Doomsday Book. Willis paints a breathing fourteenth century and does so without huge paragraphs of description, but a reliance on its strangeness and Kivrin’s growing attachment to the people she meets. Willis’ world is more than just a setting; it’s a thematic counterpart to the twenty-first century one that moves in parallel to the medieval, and what we see happening in the plague-stricken fourteenth century corresponds to a modern world dealing with a mysterious plague-like disease..
The difference between Kurtz and Le Guin is not just sparring over language—it’s also a disagreement over what lies behind that language—the intention, the sense of history, the awareness of power and potential. To Le Guin, the potential of fantasy is that “fantasy is the natural, the appropriate, language for the recounting of the spiritual journey and the struggle of good and evil in the soul” (emphasis mine, 3, p. 68). Kurtz spins a story, but she writes without a sense of that potential, without respect to its power.
Language is the vehicle for story; the fantasy writer builds a world out of words, so the language is essential. Can the language appropriate for this kind of spiritual journey be translated into contemporary prose? Absolutely. Neil Gaiman does it in Neverwhere, and in The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and in just about everything else he writes. I would challenge you to apply the Le Guin Language Test to The Sandman. Or to Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence or The Satanic Verses. Patrick Rothfuss uses colloquial style with ease, and I could find no better introduction to both a compelling world fit for a spiritual journey and a Lord of Elfland than when Chronicler meets Kvothe:
“You just followed a strange fire into the woods at night?” The hooded figure shook his head. “You might as well come here.” He motioned Chronicler closer, and the scribe saw he was wearing thick leather gloves. “Tehlu anyway, have you had bad luck your whole life, or have you been saving it all up for tonight?”
“I don’t know who you’re waiting for,” Chronicler said, taking a step backward. “But I’m sure you’d rather do it alone.”
“Shut up and listen,” the man said sharply. I” don’t know how much time we have.” He looked down and rubbed at his face. “God, I never know how much to tell you people. If you don’t believe me, you’ll think I’m crazy. If you do believe me, you’ll panic and be worse than useless.” Looking back up, he saw Chronicler hadn’t moved. “Get over here, damn you. If you go back out there you’re as good as dead.” (4, p. 36).
And just like that, snap, we’re in Elfland. Rothfuss won’t let us go until the last word of the novel, and even then, Kvothe hangs by our shoulders for a good long while.
Personally I think that Kurtz was not aware of the potential power that Le Guin sees as essential for fantasy. Her criticism of Kurtz’ language is not unwarranted, harsh though it is. Elsewhere Le Guin has grieved the cheapening of the form: “For fantasies are rife and many-colored upon the bookshelves. The head of the fabled unicorn is laid upon the lap of Mammon, and the offering is acceptable to Mammon. Fantasy has, in fact, become quite a business” (5, p. 40). Her criticism of Kurtz is tempered by her comment that she could have chosen other, much worse, examples, but that Kurtz exemplifies something good that, in her opinion, had gone wrong. A great many lesser writers have published fantasy-like narratives that would absolutely flunk Le Guin’s language test. As we’ve said before, 90% of what’s out there isn’t going to pass the test, but the 10% that will is where the Art is practiced, and where the magic lies.
I suspect we will disagree with each other and even with ourselves in considering Le Guin’s exacting standards and hard-won wisdom. After all, the field and the form have grown considerably since Le Guin made the journey from Poughkeepsie to Elfland, and we have both great and truly awful comic fantasies, urban fantasies, urban/comic/dark/horror fantasies with demons, angels, witches and gods. Heroes and antiheroes, Cap and Bucky, Morpheus and Delirium roadtripping through America in search of Destruction. And zombies. Lots of zombies. Dystopias and utopias galore. Even so, that essential journey—the human soul faring forth through life—that has not changed. Although Le Guin was writing specifically about one style of fantasy, it’s less about style than about the world of the writer’s imagination—and she demands that world be taken seriously.
Previous Installments
Notes:
1. Ursula Le Guin, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,” in The Language of the Night, ed. Susan Woods, NY: Putnam, 1979, pp. 83-96.
2. Katherine Kurtz and Jeffrey M. Elliot, “Interview Essay,” in Fantasists on Fantasy, eds. Robert H Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski. NY: Avon, 1984, pp. 235-260.
3. Ursula Le Guin, “The Child and the Shadow,” in The Language of the Night, pp. 59-72.
4. Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind. NY: Daw, 2007.
5. Ursula Le Guin, “Things Not Actually Present,” in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. Boston: Shambhala, 2004, pp. 38-45.