The language of the nigh.., p.10
The Language of the Night, page 10
Dunsany is indeed the First Terrible Fate that Awaiteth Unwary Beginners in Fantasy. But if they avoid him, there are others—many others. One of these is archaicizing, the archaic manner, which Dunsany and other master fantasists use so effortlessly. It is a trap into which almost all very young fantasy writers walk. I know; I did myself. They know instinctively that what is wanted in fantasy is a distancing from the ordinary. They see it done beautifully in old books, such as Malory’s Morte d’ Arthur, and in new books the style of which is grounded on the old books, and they think, “Aha! I will do it, too.” But alas, it is one of those things, like bicycling and computer programming, that you have got to know how to do before you do it.
“Aha!” says our novice. “You have to use verbs with thee and thou.” So she does. But she doesn’t know how. There are very few Americans now alive who know how to use a verb in the second person singular. The general assumption is that you add -est and you’re there. I remember Debbie Reynolds telling Eddie Fisher—do you remember Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher?—“Whithersoever thou goest there also I goest.” Fake feeling; fake grammar.
Then our novice tries to use the subjunctive. All the was’s turn into were’s, and leap out at the reader snarling. And the Quakers have got us all fouled up about which really is the nominative form of Thou. Is it Thee, or isn’t it? And then there’s the She-To-Whom Trap. “I shall give it to she to whom my love is given!”—“Him whom this sword smites shall surely die!”—Give it to she? Him shall die? It sounds like Tonto talking to the Lone Ranger. This is distancing with a vengeance. But we aren’t through yet, no, we haven’t had the fancy words. Eldritch. Tenebrous. Smaragds and chalcedony. Mayhap. It can’t be maybe, it can’t be perhaps; it has to be mayhap, unless it’s perchance. And then comes the final test, the infallible touchstone of the seventh-rate: Ichor. You know ichor. It oozes out of several tentacles, and beslimes tessellated pavements, and bespatters bejeweled courtiers, and bores the bejesus out of everybody.
The archaic manner is indeed a perfect distancer, but you have to do it perfectly. It’s a high wire: one slip spoils all. The man who did it perfectly was, of course, Eddison. He really did write Elizabethan prose in the 1930s. His style is totally artificial, but it is never faked. If you love language for its own sake he is irresistible. Many, with reason, find him somewhat crabbed and most damnably long; but he is the real thing, and just to reaffirm that strange, remote reality, I am placing a longer quotation from him here. This is from The Worm Ouroboros. A dead king is being carried, in secrecy, at night, down to the beach.
The lords of Witchland took their weapons and the men-at-arms bare the goods, and the King went in the midst on his bier of spear-shafts. So went they picking their way in the moonless night round the palace and down the winding path that led to the bed of the combe, and so by the stream westward toward the sea. Here they deemed it safe to light a torch to show them the way. Desolate and bleak showed the sides of the combe in the windblown flare; and the flare was thrown back from the jewels of the royal crown of Witchland, and from the armoured buskins on the King’s feet showing stark with toes pointing upward from below his bearskin mantle, and from the armour and the weapons of them that bare him and walked beside him, and from the black cold surface of the little river hurrying for ever over its bed of boulders to the sea. The path was rugged and stony, and they fared slowly, lest they should stumble and drop the King.5
That prose, in spite of or because of its archaisms, is good prose: exact, clear, powerful. Visually it is precise and vivid; musically—that is, in the sound of the words, the movement of the syntax, and the rhythm of the sentences—it is subtle and very strong. Nothing in it is faked or blurred; it is all seen, heard, felt. That style was his true style, his own voice; that was how Eddison, an artist, spoke.
The second of our three “conversation pieces” is from Book of the Three Dragons, by Kenneth Morris. This book one must still seek on the dusty shelves behind the cartons, probably in the section marked “Children’s”—at least that’s where I found it—for Mr. Carter has not yet reprinted more than a fragment of it, and if it ever had a day of fame it was before our time. I use it here partly in hopes of arousing interest in the book, for I think many people would enjoy it. It is a singularly fine example of the re-creation of a work magnificent in its own right (The Mabinogion)—a literary event rather rare except in fantasy, where its frequency is perhaps proof, if one were needed, of the ever-renewed vitality of myth. But Morris is also useful to my purpose because he has a strong sense of humor; and humor in fantasy is both a lure and a pitfall to imitators. Dunsany is often ironic, but he does not mix simple humor with the heroic tone. Eddison sometimes did, but I think Morris and James Branch Cabell were the masters of the comic-heroic. One does not smile wryly, reading them; one laughs. They achieve their comedy essentially by their style—by an eloquence, a fertility and felicity of invention that is simply overwhelming. They are outrageous, and they know exactly what they’re doing.
Fritz Leiber and Roger Zelazny have both written in the comic-heroic vein, but their technique is different: they alternate the two styles. 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. It is strange, because both Leiber and Zelazny are skillful and highly imaginative writers, and it is perfectly clear that Leiber, profoundly acquainted with Shakespeare and practiced in a very broad range of techniques, could maintain any tone with eloquence and grace. Sometimes I wonder if these two writers underestimate their own talents, if they lack confidence in themselves. Or it may be that, since fantasy is seldom taken seriously at this particular era in this country, they are afraid to take it seriously. They don’t want to be caught believing in their own creations, getting all worked up about imaginary things; and so their humor becomes self-mocking, self-destructive. Their gods and heroes keep turning aside to look out of the book at you and whisper, “See, we’re really just plain folks.”
Now, Cabell never does that. He mocks everything: not only his own fantasy, but our reality. He doesn’t believe in his dreamworld, but he doesn’t believe in us, either. His tone is perfectly consistent: elegant, arrogant, ironic. Sometimes I enjoy it and sometimes it makes me want to scream, but it is admirable. Cabell knew what he wanted to do and he did it, and the marketplace be damned.
Evangeline Walton, whose books, like Kenneth Morris’s, are reworkings of The Mabinogion, has achieved her own beautifully idiosyncratic blend of humor and heroism; there is no doubt that the Celtic mythos lends itself to such a purpose. And while we are on the subject of humor, Jack Vance must be mentioned, though his humor is so quiet you can miss it if you blink. Indeed the whole tone of his writing is so modest that sometimes I wonder whether, like Leiber and Zelazny, he fails to realize how very good a writer he is. If so, it is probably a result of the patronizing attitude American culture affects toward works of pure imagination. Vance, however, never compromises with the patronizing and ignorant. He never lets his creation down in order to make a joke and he never shows a tin ear for tone. The conversation of his characters is aloof and restrained, very like his own narrative prose; an unusual kind of English, but clear, graceful, and precisely suited to Vance’s extraordinary imagination. It is an achieved style. And it contains no archaisms at all.
After all, archaisms are not essential. You don’t have to know how to use the subjunctive in order to be a wizard. You don’t have to talk like Henry the Fifth to be a hero.IV
Caution, however, is needed. Great caution. Consider: Did Henry the Fifth of England really talk like Shakespeare’s Henry? Did the real Achilles use hexameters? Would the real Beowulf please stand up and alliterate? We are not discussing history, but heroic fantasy. We are discussing a modern descendant of the epic.
Most epics are in straightforward language, whether prose or verse. They retain the directness of their oral forebears. Homer’s metaphors may be extended, but they are neither static nor ornate. The Song of Roland has four thousand lines, containing one simile and no metaphors. The Mabinogion and the Norse sagas are as plainspoken as they could well be. Clarity and simplicity are permanent virtues in a narrative. Nothing highfalutin is needed. A plain language is the noblest of all.
It is also the most difficult.
Tolkien writes a plain, clear English. Its outstanding virtue is its flexibility, its variety. It ranges easily from the commonplace to the stately, and can slide into metrical poetry, as in the Tom Bombadil episode, without the careless reader’s even noticing. Tolkien’s vocabulary is not striking; he has no ichor; everything is direct, concrete, and simple.
Now, the kind of writing I am attacking, the Poughkeepsie style of fantasy, is also written in a plain and apparently direct prose. Does that make it equal to Tolkien’s? Alas, no. 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 as a whole is profoundly inappropriate to the subject.
To what then is it appropriate? To journalism. It is journalistic prose. In journalism, the suppression of the author’s personality and sensibility is deliberate. The goal is an impression of objectivity. The whole thing is meant to be written fast and read faster. This technique is right, for a newspaper. It is wrong for a novel, and dead wrong for a fantasy. A language intended to express the immediate and the trivial is applied to the remote and the elemental. The result, of course, is a mess.
Why do we seem to be achieving just that result so often, these days? Well, undoubtedly avarice is one of the reasons. Fantasy is selling well, so let’s all grind out a fantasy. The Old Baloney Factory. And sheer ineptness enters in. But in many cases neither greed nor lack of skill seems to be involved, and in such cases I suspect a failure to take the job seriously: a refusal to admit what you’re in for when you set off with only an ax and a box of matches into Elfland.
A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you.
The general assumption is that, if there are dragons or hippogriffs in a book, or if it takes place in a vaguely Keltic or Near Eastern medieval setting, or if magic is done in it, then it’s a fantasy. This is a mistake.
A writer who doesn’t know the West may deploy acres of sagebrush and rimrock without achieving a real Western. A writer may fumble about with spaceships and strains of mutant bacteria and never be anywhere near real science fiction. A writer may even write a five-hundred-page novel about Sigmund Freud which has absolutely nothing to do with Sigmund Freud; it has been done; it was done just a couple of years ago. And in the same way, a writer may use all the trappings of fantasy without ever actually imagining anything.
My argument is that this failure, this fakery, is visible instantly in the style.
* * *
Many readers, many critics, and most editors speak of style as if it were an ingredient of a book, like the sugar in a cake, or something added onto the book, like the frosting on the cake. The style, of course, is the book. If you remove the cake, all you have left is a recipe. If you remove the style, all you have left is a synopsis of the plot.
This is partly true of history; largely true of fiction; and absolutely true of fantasy.
In saying that the style is the book, I speak from the reader’s point of view. From the writer’s point of view, the style is the writer. Style isn’t just how you use English when you write. It isn’t a mannerism or an affectation (though it may be mannered or affected). It isn’t something you can do without, though that is what people assume when they announce that they intend to write something “like it is.” You can’t do without it. There is no “is,” without it. Style is how you as a writer see and speak. It is how you see: your vision, your understanding of the world, your voice.
This is not to say that style cannot be learned and perfected, or that it cannot be borrowed and imitated. We learn to see and speak, as children, primarily by imitation. The artist is merely the one who goes on learning after growing up. A good learner will finally learn the hardest thing: how to see one’s own world, how to speak one’s own words.
Still, why is style of such fundamental significance in fantasy? Just because a writer gets the tone of a conversation a bit wrong, or describes things vaguely, or uses an anachronistic vocabulary or shoddy syntax, or begins going a bit heavy on the ichor before dinner—does that disqualify the book as a fantasy? Just because the style is weak and inappropriate—is that so important?
I think it is, because in fantasy there is nothing but the writer’s vision of the world. There is no borrowed reality of history, or current events, or just plain folks at home in Peyton Place. There is no comfortable matrix of the commonplace to substitute for the imagination, to provide ready-made emotional response, and to disguise flaws and failures of creation. There is only a construct built in a void, with every joint and seam and nail exposed. To create what Tolkien calls “a secondary universe” is to make a new world. A world where no voice has ever spoken before; where the act of speech is the act of creation. The only voice that speaks there is the creator’s voice. And every word counts.
This is an awful responsibility to undertake, when all the poor writer wants to do is play dragons, to entertain us all for a while. Nobody should be blamed for falling short of it. But all the same, if one undertakes a responsibility one should be aware of it. Elfland is not Poughkeepsie; the voice of the transistor is not heard in that land.
And lastly I believe that the reader has a responsibility; if we love the stuff we read, we have a duty toward it. That duty is to refuse to be fooled; to refuse to permit commercial exploitation of the holy ground of Myth; to reject shoddy work, and to save our praise for the real thing. Because when fantasy is the real thing, nothing, after all, is realer.
NOTES
1. Katherine Kurtz, Deryni Rising (New York: Ballantine Books, August 1970), 41.
2. E. R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (New York: Ballantine Books, April 1967), 137.
3. Kenneth Morris, Book of the Three Dragons, Junior Literary Guild (New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1930), 8. (This excerpt also contained in Dragons, Elves and Heroes, ed. Lin Carter [New York: Ballantine Books, October 1969], 59.)
4. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (New York: Ballantine Books, October 1965), 351.
5. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros, 56–57.
I. Note for the British edition (1989). I don’t know where “Poughkeepsie” is, in England. Reading, perhaps, or Surbiton?
II. Note (1989). I don’t find it as easy as I did in 1973 to separate “art” from “ethics, racism, sexism, and politics”—a dangerous, usually illusory, separation.
III. Note (1989). All the heroes in the fantasies I quoted from, even the one written by a woman, are men.
IV. Note (1989). I’m more certain than ever of the second statement, but I think the preceding one is wrong. Wizards operate in the subjunctive mode.
AMERICAN SF AND THE OTHER
(1975)
One of the great early socialists said that the status of women in a society is a pretty reliable index of the degree of civilization of that society. If this is true, then the very low status of women in SF should make us ponder about whether SF is civilized at all.
The women’s movement has made most of us conscious of the fact that SF has either totally ignored women or presented them as squeaking dolls subject to instant rape by monsters—or old-maid scientists desexed by hypertrophy of the intellectual organs—or, at best, loyal little wives or mistresses of accomplished heroes. Male elitism has run rampant in SF. But is it only male elitism? Isn’t the “subjection of women” in SF merely a symptom of a whole which is authoritarian, power-worshipping, and intensely parochial?
The question involved here is the question of The Other—the being who is different from yourself. This being can be different from you in its sex; or in its annual income; or in its way of speaking and dressing and doing things; or in the color of its skin, or the number of its legs and heads. In other words, there is the sexual Alien, and the social Alien, and the cultural Alien, and finally the racial Alien.
Well, how about the social Alien in SF? How about, in Marxist terms, “the proletariat”? Where are they in SF? Where are the poor, the people who work hard and go to bed hungry? Are they ever persons, in SF? No. They appear as vast anonymous masses fleeing from giant slime-globules from the Chicago sewers, or dying off by the billion from pollution or radiation, or as faceless armies being led to battle by generals and statesmen. In sword and sorcery they behave like the walk-on parts in a high school performance of The Chocolate Prince. Now and then there’s a busty lass among them who is honored by the attentions of the Captain of the Supreme Terran Command, or in a spaceship crew there’s a quaint old cook, with a Scots or Swedish accent, representing the Wisdom of the Common Folk.
