Volume 15 Number 4 Article 2 Summer 7-15-1989 Innocence and Experience and the Imagination in the World of Peter Beagle John Pennington Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore Part of the Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons Recommended Citation Pennington, John (1989) "Innocence and Experience and the Imagination in the World of Peter Beagle," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Vol. 15 : No. 4 , Article 2. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol15/iss4/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Mythopoeic Society at SWOSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature by an authorized editor of SWOSU Digital Commons. An ADA compliant document is available upon request. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To join the Mythopoeic Society go to: http://www.mythsoc.org/join.htm Mythcon 51: A VIRTUAL “HALFLING” MYTHCON July 31 - August 1, 2021 (Saturday and Sunday) http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-51.htm Mythcon 52: The Mythic, the Fantastic, and the Alien Albuquerque, New Mexico; July 29 - August 1, 2022 http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-52.htm Abstract A detailed study of Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, analyzing in particular its metafictional techniques. Notes the Blakean synthesis of opposites achieved by Beagle. Additional Keywords Beagle, Peter S. The Last Unicorn; Metafiction; Opposites in The Last Unicorn This article is available in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol15/iss4/2 Pagc 10 Summer 1989 MYTHLORE 58 Innocence and Experience and t he Imagination in t he W orld of Pet er Beagle John Pennington taneous entities; these oppositions become the touchstone to the imagination and to creativity. Songs of Innocence and Experience, Blake's most accessible work, is also structured upon contraries: innocence and experience, the lamb and the tiger, the echoing green and London, the shepherd and the bard. The prelapsarian world of innocence, however, needs the influence of the experienced world since the Fall; otherwise, innocence becomes a victim of experience, as attested by the chimney sweeper's hopeful and naive rationalization for his pitiable condition. Experience, part­ ly bom from rigid and binding reason, blights innocence, but this too is essential. Mary Lynn Johnson and John Grant suggest that in the reader's mind the claims of Innocence and Ex­ perience should be weighed against each other; it is possible for the reader to share with the artist a vision that encompasses both and allows for the growth that comes out of continual strife of contraries. (17) In a sense, Blake's mythology is anti-romantic and highly realistic. "Opposition is true Friendship," writes Blake in The Marriage: "From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy." Yet such good and evil are symbiotic, and our preconceived notions of these dichotomies must be modified and refined to encapsulate a more realistic design. This overly succinct and limited synopsis of Blake's mythology points to the archetypal patterns that are the bases of romance, fairy and folktale, and fantasy. Brian Attebery claims that more than realistic fiction, it [fantasy] can clarify "Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and philosophical and moral conflicts, embodying them in Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are neces­ story lines that may not be directly applicable to our own sary to Human existence," writes William Blake in his complex and muddied lives but which can please or radical and paradoxical The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a inspire because of their open and evident design. This is marriage that prompted C.S. Lewis to annul in The Great one of the most important accomplishments at which fantasy can aim, to give comprehensible form to life, Divorce. In Blake's universe opposites attract and repel and death, good, and evil; this has always been the primary inform one another. As Martin Nurmi explains, aim of the earliest kind of fantasy, the folktale. (3-4) A human world must be informed by opposed yet posi­ tive and complementary forces which, when allowed to And R.E. Foust contends that interact without external restraint, impart to life a motion and a tension that make it creative. (559) it is by the unambiguity of this core encounter between Good and Evil that fantasy, unlike realism, asserts its mythic intentions: it conserves by reasoning ancient so­ This dialectic is extremely complex, for unlike Yin and cial ideals of decency, order, and proscribed behavior. Yang which separates light from dark, good from evil into (17) balancing forces (a philosophy at the heart of many of Ursula Le Guin's fantasies and science fiction tales), Attebery and Foust identify, it seems, the more conserva­ Blake's philosophy encompasses contraries as simul­ tive and simplistic design and function of much fantasy - CPyTHLORe 58 SummeR 1989 Page 11 good versus evil, often a cut-and-dry separation where Blake's cosmos. Beagle creates in The Last Unicom a new good prevails over evil, a structure that C.S. Lewis and breed of fantasy that is dependent upon traditional fairy­ Tolkien basically follow. There are, however, more com­ tale structures and themes but one that also undercuts plex fantasies which muddle these polarities and explore these and forges into new fantasy territory. Beagle's the tenuous relationship between good and evil, fantasies precursors? George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, James that subscribe to Blake's theory of contraries. Thurber. In his review essay on the The Lord of the Rings, Peter S. To define fantasy is to open Pandora's box - near chaos Beagle argues that the forces that power Tolkien's trilogy reigns. Tolkien, Todorov, Brooke-Rose, Rabkin, Irwin, are similar to those that control our daily lives - "history, Swinfen, Jackson, to only name a few have all attempted chance, and desire " (129). "The Lord of the Rings," continues to define fantasy; each study has its own merits, but as in Beagle, any kind of classification and definition, these studies are limited to the select few fantasies that "fit" an individual is a tale of Frodo's journey through a long nightmare of theory. Definition of fantasy becomes exclusive, myopic, greed and terrible energy, of his education in both fear and true beauty, and of final loss of the world he seeks often useless as a literary tool. This is the central concern to save. In a sense, his growing knowledge has eaten up of Kathryn Hume in Fantasy and Mimesis, an engrossing the joy and the innocent strength that made him, of all study of fantasy in relation to realism. Hume intends to be the wise and magic people he encounters, the only one more inclusive in her definition of fantasy; she contends fit to bear the Ring. (130) that literature is the product of two impulses. These are Beagle's diction - energy, knowledge, innocent - is peculiarly mimesis, felt as the desire to imitate, to describe events, Blakean, and in Beagle's fantasy world we can see Blake's people, situations, and objects with such verisimilitude contraries at work. Reason and Energy. Love and Hate. that others can share your experience; and fantasy, the Good and Evil. Innocence and Experience. These op­ desire to change givens and later reality - out of posites are what keep Beagle's imaginative world alive, boredom, play, vision, longing for something lacking, or need for metaphoric images that will bypass the and in The Last Unicom, his most sustained fantasy, such audience's verbal defences. (20) contraries are the key that keeps the work progressing. In his recent fantasy The Folk of the Air, Beagle takes literally The Last Unicom has received overwhelming praise. As Hume's conception of literature and tries to fuse the realis­ the blurb on my edition claims, it is "one of the world's tic with the fantastic, with definitely mixed results. Hume most beloved fantasies," even made into a successful, identifies two strains of fantasy that help us begin to though overly childish, animated feature film. Robert H. categorize The Last Unicom. One strain is the fantasy of Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski believe that "if there were vision which "aims to disturb us by dislodging us from our a 'ten best' list of modem fantasy, The Last Unicom would settled sense of reality, and tries to engage our emotions certainly be on it" (51). And that would include a list of on behalf of this new version of the real" (56). A fantasy of such luminaries as Tolkien, Lewis, Williams, Le guin. Yet vision can achieve this end by "manipulating our literary some critics are unimpressed with Beagle's creation, most expectations, giving us a different presentation of reality notably C.N. Manlove and Brian Attebery. Manlove con­ than we expect from the form or story (as Gardner does in siders The Last Unicom an anemic work, and though At­ Grendel)" (83). The fantasy of revision, on the other hand, tebery praises moments of the work - Mommy Fortuna's ’lays out plans for revising reality, for shaping futures" Midnight Carnival, the barren Hagsgate, the sea-enslaved (56); this type of fantasy focuses on man and the cosmos - unicorns, and the Red Bull - he feels that "its characters on man's relation with himself and the world - and works and imagery go flying off in all directions, without refer­ more on the didactic level, for ence to the patterns of significance that should command" (159).