Ursula K. Le Guin, in addition to being an award-winning fantasy writer, has also disseminated a body of criticism that is useful in discussing not only her fantasy but that of other writers such as Beagle. In “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,” her best-known critical essay, first published in 1979, she discusses the fantasy writer’s use of language, preferring the “high style” of J. R. R. Tolkien and Evangeline Walton. More recently, in “Some Assumptions About Fantasy” and “The Critics, the Monsters, and the Fantasists,” she argues for both the usefulness and the delightfulness of fantasy. “The tendency to explain fantasy by extracting the fantastic from it and replacing it with the comprehensible,” she asserts, “reduces the radically unreal to the secondhand commonplace.” She sounds like a latter-day Tolkien, arguing for the value of a sense of wonder, or a more comprehensible Darko Suvin, speaking of the “arresting strangeness” of fantastic literature. Despite Suvin’s jargon, Tolkien’s Catholic apology, and Le Guin’s Taoist roots, all three are essentially talking about the same thing, and no single writer exemplifies it better than Peter S. Beagle.
IV.
Previous examinations of Beagle’s fiction have been limited. For example, as early as 1975 David Van Becker examined “Time, Space and Consciousness in the Fantasy of Peter S. Beagle.” In 1977 D. P. Norford published “Reality and Illusion in Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn.” In “Incongruity in a World of Illusion: Patterns of Humor in Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn,” I briefly reviewed Beagle’s use of comic technique in his second novel in 1979; this article forms the basis for Chapter Two below, and further served as an inspiration for this book. The next year A. H. Olsen in “Anti-Consolatio: Boethius and The Last Unicorn” examined a different aspect of that work, as did R. E. Foust in “Fabulous Pardigm: Fantasy, Metafantasy, and Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn.”
In 1986 Jean Tobin published both “Myth, Memory, a Will-o’-the Wish: Peter Beagle’s Funny Fantasy” and “Werewolves and Unicorns: Fabulous Beasts in Peter Beagle’s Fiction.” Don Riggs in 1988 examined “Fantastic Tropes in The Folk of the Air, and he republished it in 1997. Richard C. West has also published his study of Beagle twice, as “Humanity and Reality: Illusion and Self-Deception in Peter S. Beagle’s Fiction” in 1988, and “Humanity Cannot Bear Very Much Reality: Illusion and Self-Deception in the Fiction of Peter S. Beagle” in 1997. In Peter Beagle, Kenneth Zahorski attempted a comprehensive evaluation of Beagle’s fiction in 1988 but was limited by the restrictions of the series in which the work appeared and by the fact that much of Beagle’s best work was yet to come. In “Alchemy of Love in A Fine and Private Place,” Joel N. Feimer in 1988 examined Beagle’s first novel. George Aichele, Jr., compared Beagle and Philip K. Dick in “Two Forms of Metafantasy” in 1988.
David M. Miller examined The Last Unicorn in 1990 in “Mommy Fortuna’s Ontological Plenum: The Fantasy of Plenitude,” while Dave M. Roberts offered a different perspective on the first novel in “Love in the Graveyard: Peter S. Beagle’s A Fine and Private Place” in 1999. Also in 1999 Maureen K. Speller published her “Unicorns, Werewolves, Ghosts and Rhinoceroses: The Worlds of Peter S. Beagle.” In 2005 Sue Matheson discussed “Psychic Transformation and the Regeneration of Language in Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn.”
Many of these often excellent studies were first presented as papers at various academic conferences, most often the annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, and so first saw the light of day as roughly twenty-minute presentations. Note that almost all follow the tongue-in-cheek academic tradition of an ironic or comic title with a serious subtitle; I have done the same with this book. None of the previous treatments of Beagle can claim to be comprehensive, and all but one is limited to less than fifteen pages. Additionally, there have been several interviews with Beagle published; other articles in what are essentially fanzines such as Mythlore have appeared; theses and dissertations have been churned out; and various works for hire such as those published by Salem Press have treated Beagle.
V.
In this book I intend to examine the longer fiction of Peter S. Beagle using the helpful definitions provided by Manlove and Spencer. For each novel and novella I will attempt to discern the “substantial and irreducible element of the supernatural” or the “impossible worlds, beings or objects” with which the reader becomes familiar, with an eye toward establishing Beagle’s effectiveness as a writer of fantasy. Ultimately the question in each case will come down to another of Manlove’s questions: to what extent does the text “evoke wonder” in the reader? Where appropriate I will utilize Spencer’s idea of The Urban Gothic; Le Guin’s statements on the value of fantasy; Tolkien’s ideas of fantasy, recovery, escape, and consolation; and even Suvin’s concept of arresting strangeness. My primary critical mode, however, will be what is called “reader-response” criticism. Reader-response criticism focuses on the reader, or audience, and his or her experience of a literary work, rather than focusing primarily on the author or the content and form of the work. That is, I will examine each work from the point of view of an intelligent reader, making connections and responding to the text as appropriate. This approach has proven valuable in the analysis of popular fiction such as fantasy, science fiction, horror fiction, the western, the thriller, and the mystery.
In each of the following chapters I will discuss one of Beagle’s novels, along with any associated shorter fiction, with a final chapter for the major shorter fiction. Unfortunately my space is too limited for a comprehensive analysis of all the short fiction; there has simply been too much of it in the past ten years or so. My ultimate goal shall be to assess how well Peter S. Beagle conforms to the classic purposes of art: to teach and to please. How does he please us, and how does he teach us? The answers to these questions will provide us with sufficient insight to come to an understanding of Beagle’s effectiveness as a writer of modern fantasy.
In each chapter save one I shall proceed along two levels of analysis simultaneously: the fictional level and the functional level. The fictional level deals primarily with what Aristotle called mythos, or plot; the arrangement of the incidents. It is necessary first of all in understanding a work of fantasy, as any fiction, to understand who does what to whom. I perhaps err on the side of overinclusion in this analysis; but it is my assumption that most readers of this book will not be familiar with most of the works treated. The functional level deals with author-reader communication. After a reader understands what is going on in a work of fiction, it is then necessary to understand how the writer manipulates character, thought, and diction, Aristotle’s ethos, dianoia, and lexis, to communicate with a reader. My functional level analysis in all but one of the chapters that follow is interspersed with the fictional level analysis, and it leads to some specific conclusions in each chapter as well as a general conclusion to this book.
The one exception to this scheme is Chapter Two, in which I deal with The Last Unicorn. In this chapter my method is reversed: I deal with the functional level primarily, with discussion of the fictional level interspersed throughout as needed. The reason for this change in methodology is that I assume many if not most readers of this book will already be familiar with The Last Unicorn, either from the book itself, the animated film, the graphic novel, or perhaps the audio edition, and thus much less fictional level analysis is required. When in Chapter Two, however, I deal with lesser-known works (The Last Unicorn: The Lost Version; “Two Hearts”), I revert to my more usual mode.
CHAPTER ONE: A FINE AND PRIVATE PLACE
Beagle takes his epigram for A Fine and Private Place from Andrew Marvel’s “To His Coy Mistress”: “The grave’s a fine and private place,/ But none, I think, do there embrace.” He turns this thought upon its head, showing us a grave