Fantasy in Film Part Two

A while back I wrote a couple of posts complaining about the lack of fantasy in film. As I noted then, there are lots of fantasy films in a generic or material sense. Some of them (e.g., Conan the Barbarian) are among my favorite movies. The problem is that they fail to convey the sense of myth, of mystery, of otherworldliness, that I'm always looking for. To see what I mean, think of Fantasy as Tolkien describes it in "On Fairy Stories," translated into film.

The best good example I could come up with at the time, The Night of the Hunter, technically isn't fantasy at all. It comes close, though, in that it translates tales like Hansel and Gretel and The Juniper Tree into an American idiom. It's gothic masterpiece, by turns beautiful and terrifying.

My search has since led me to two more examples of good fairy tale movies.

The first is La Belle et la Bête (1946), a French adaptation of the traditional tale of Beauty and the Beast (most famously novelized by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in 1756) directed by the great Jean Cocteau. What a beautiful, bizarre, unsettling film this is!

Its plot hews fairly closely to the original story, though introducing a ne'er-do-well brother and his freeloading friend, who also happens to be Belle's failed suitor. Everyone knows how the tale itself goes, so I'll not comment on that directly.

What makes this movie magical is the style: the sets, the acting, the camera work. The Beast's castle is alive, with candelabras that are living arms, and hearth ornaments that watch you as you move about the room. There's an overpowering sense of claustrophobia and decay: the rooms are broodingly dark and stuffy, the gardens are overgrown, and everything is over-decorated and run down. It gives me the same feeling that certain nightmares give me, vaguely unsettling rather than frightening. Cocteau has been called a Surrealist filmmaker and, though I think he denied the connection, there is a strong element of surrealism in this film. The image of ants crawling in and out of a man's hand is not far away here. At many points I was also reminded of Gustave Doré.

The Beast himself is well portrayed. The actor is Jean Marais (shown below), who also plays the friend as well as the Prince into whom the Beast transforms. He also happened to be Cocteau's lover. This leads us to the film's subtext, which is very strange, and something I'm not sure I understand. Of course, it may be that I'm just misinterpreting the emotional framework. To explain, I'll have to discuss the ending, so I suppose I should issue a spoiler alert.

Toward the end, as the Beast lies dying of his hitherto-unrequited love for Belle, the brother and friend sneak onto the Beast's castle grounds and try to break into a treasure-house called Diana's Pavilion, which (we've been told) houses the Beast's true riches. As the friend attempts to climb through the glass roof, a statue of the goddess comes to life and shoots him with an arrow. He drops into the chamber, transforming into the Beast.

The Beast becomes a handsome Prince at the same instant. He's a pretty popinjay, with golden hair, poofy pantaloons, and tights. He glibly explains what had transformed him into a Beast. He's flip. He's chatty. He's annoying. He's the precise antithesis of his tragic and brooding former self.

The look on Belle's face is priceless, a mixture of pleasure, surprise, and (perhaps) dismay – it's plain that she doesn't exactly know what to make of him. Is she disappointed that the Beast she has come to love has been replaced by this chattering doll? The Prince embraces her. They fly up into the sky to return to his kingdom, and that's the end.

So what exactly is going on here? At first the ending really bothered me, but on reflection it seems like something is going on under the surface. The film is just too conscious of what it's doing for it to be an accident. There's a sense I get when I think about the most powerful fairy tales, myths, and stories, that it isn't good to dissect things too much. They have mystery rather than meaning, in the sense that there is something there, something subconscious that can't be reduced to words or concepts. That's how this movie makes me feel, so perhaps I'll stop there.

At any rate, it's apparent that this film has influenced many things; Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Legend and Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula spring to mind. (Come to think of it, both Legend and Bram Stoker's Dracula are decent examples of fantasy in film. I haven't seen either in a very long time, so perhaps I'll have to revisit them soon.)

The second movie I'd like to discuss is Guillermo del Toro's El Laberinto del Fauno (2006), known in English as Pan's Labyrinth.

Del Toro is a director I've been coming more and more to appreciate; I've watched a number of his works from various phases in his career, e.g., Cronos, Blade II, the Hellboy movies, and Pacific Rim. Though ranging from low-budget horror to art films to popcorn fare, his movies exhibit certain common themes, as well as an obsessive precision and explicitness and a preoccupation with clockwork and insects. For years he's been wanting to do an At the Mountains of Madness adaptation, which, because of our sins, continues to be put off. His gothic romance Crimson Peak is coming soon, and I'm very excited about it.

Most of del Toro's works are tinged with some horror, and Pan's Labyrinth is certainly no exception. It features what may be the most terrifying monster ever to appear on screen: the infamous Pale Man. The monsters and other creatures are largely done with make-up and animatronics, heightening the realism and very real terror.

After a mythic prelude, the story unfolds against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War, in the forests and mountains of the northwest. The protagonist is a little girl named Ofelia, the stepdaughter of a brutal, psychotic Francoist military commander, Captain Vidal. Ofelia and her pregnant mother have come to stay at the outpost because Vidal wants his wife by his side when she gives birth. There are really two parallel story lines, one centered on Ofelia and her soon-to-be-born baby brother, the other on Mercedes, Vidal's housekeeper, a spy for rebel guerillas in the area (one of whom is her brother).

Ofelia encounters a friendly but sinister faun in the ancient labyrinth behind the outpost. The faun informs her that she is really the princess of a magical kingdom, and gives her three tasks to complete before she can return to the land of her birth. The film leaves open the possibility that all of her experiences are dreams or hallucinations. At one point she is even dressed as Alice, whose adventures took place in a dream. And, after all, she is named after a mad girl who drowned herself. The ending suggests that her return to the kingdom is only a vision that passes before her eyes as she dies. But of course it's all real; why would I watch a movie about a little girl hallucinating and then dying?

Incidentally, despite the Spanish language and location, the movie made me think more of English fairy tales and literature than (say) magic realism, what with the Celtic artifacts, the references to Lewis Carroll and Shakespeare, and so on. Of course Goya's Black Paintings and Disasters of War are never far away, either.

Pan's Labyrinth is a dark and beautiful masterpiece, a terrifying fairy tale brought to life. Both these films make you remember that a true fairy tale is a story that begins in the prosaic and ends in the unbounded wonders and horrors of the irrational subconscious.

A Black Gate Review of "The Scale-Tree"

Fletcher Vredenburgh offers a nice review of "The Scale-Tree" in his July short-story roundup over at Black Gate:

Raphael Ordoñez dives into the blacker depths of storytelling in the “The Scale-Tree.” Zeuxis, a “flying artist and geometer”  and his family live in a tower in Enoch, the great world-city that features in several of Ordoñez’s other stories as well as his novel, Dragonfly. Zeuxis tries to provide for his family by selling his paintings but it’s a constant struggle. 

When he dies in a flying accident his wife and two children wind up in the middle of a tale inspired by the Grimm’s “The Juniper Tree” (think creepy step-parent, a child at severe risk, and a meal you should definitely not eat). This is one of the more unsettling stories I’ve read in months and one of the best. Ordoñez’s writing is rooted in the less genre-bound styles of early fantasy and fairy tales, coupled with a contemporary concern for creating more complex and fully human characters. If you haven’t read any of his work till now, this is the perfect place to start.

I keep up with Black Gate because a shocking number of people who like to read the same slightly obscure things I do hang out there (thank you, Internet), so as always it's a pleasure to have my name appear in its cyber-pages.

"The Scale-Tree" at Beneath Ceaseless Skies

My newest story, "The Scale-Tree," is out at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, together with "The Insurrectionist and the Empress Who Reigns Over Time" by Benjanun Sriduangkaew and an audio podcast of "Stone Prayers" by Kate Marshall. On the cover this month is Migration by Julie Dillon.

As always, it's an honor to have my work appear in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, a wonderful venue for literary adventure fantasy, and the first and only magazine I really aspired to when I started trying to get published.

My story is inspired by brother-and-sister fairy tales like "Hansel and Gretel" and "The Juniper Tree"; as I've mentioned here several times, my evenings are often spent reading Andrew Lang's collection of many colors to my kids. I'd seen The Night of the Hunter for the first time not long before writing it, so that's doubtless in the mix as well. It also goes somewhat more deeply (and elliptically) into the mythological-topological underpinnings of the world in which my novel, Dragonfly, is set.

I hope you read and enjoy my story, and the others as well.

On Reading Fairy Stories

I've read fairy tales to my children off and on for several years. I've always enjoyed such things myself – I have most of the Andrew Lang collections, and some of my short stories are inspired by them – so it pleases me greatly that my kids enjoy them.

And they do, considerably. As I've mentioned before, we don't watch television here at Casa O., so their play generally comes from what we read. Every tale we've gone through works its way into their make-believe. But naturally they each have their own preferences.

My six-year-old boy, who enjoys piano, chess-playing, and math, prefers stories that have some kind of repetitive pattern. His favorite is "The Fisherman and his Wife." We of Casa O. are obstinate papists, and the enormity of the wife's demands bowls my kids over every time and makes them howl with laughter. When we last read it, my boy said that some stories make him wonder whether he's hearing them or actually there as the events are unfolding, and that "Fisherman" is one of these. How glad that made my heart! They were both excited when we saw a flounder at the aquarium last week – I'd forgotten the fish-prince was of that species – and recited the incantation from memory.

It's a funny thing, but "Fisherman," which really is a very simple and repetitive tale, hooked me when I was a kid, too. At one point my junior high language arts class had to write and perform modernized fairy tales in front of the whole school; at my suggestion, my group chose "Fisherman." I played the husband, who discovered a talking fish filet inhabited by the reincarnated soul of Elvis at Luby's Cafeteria. We even had a brown paper fish-puppet that danced to "Don't Be Cruel."

But I digress.

My four-year-old daughter, on the other hand, likes "Rapunzel" most of all. She loves whimsical ideas and often makes up such stories on her own. She's told me about Nobody the friendly giant, who's invisible (nobody knows Nobody but Nobody knows everybody, she says), and about the tree that gives eggs instead of fruit, eggs that hatch into "clear" cats, which can only be seen with special goggles, and fly through the clouds over the city. She likes witches, bad fairies, and ogresses, but doesn't have any use for princesses; once I called her Princess (as I'm wont to do) and she said, "Never call me Princess. I hate princesses. I like dinosaurs, sharks, and every animal that's scary." She also has flaming red hair, and (in a remarkable display of good fashion sense) refuses to wear pink.

In one of his introductions, Lang asserts that "Is it true?" is the great question children ask. My children have certainly done so. Chiefly, though, they ask about the scarier things, and from a strictly practical point of view. For instance, when we read about an ogress-queen who tries to devour her son's wife and children, they like to know – quite sensibly, in my opinion – if there's any danger of that happening to them. I remember Tolkien saying somewhere that his children were more wont to ask "Was he good?" That has been my experience as well. They want to classify each character as good or bad and are bothered when someone's actions are ambiguous, as they often are in fairy tales.

Incidentally, I don't care for the writing in a lot of the stories in Lang's collections. I guess the writers thought it cute to ridicule the story they were telling, but over the children's heads, so that they could share a smug little smile with the adult reader. Such condescension disgusts and angers me. When I read with my kids I want to be right down on their level. They – my daughter, especially – tend to find stories with little jokes and witticisms extremely tiresome. By contrast, the Blue Fairy Book contains Lang's own retelling of the Perseus myth ("The Terrible Head"), which uses simple, unadorned language, but plays it straight. They've never sat so still as they did last night when I read it to them, clinging to their respective arms of the big green chair where they perch for bedtime stories.

My son, who's very sensitive in some ways, has always been afflicted with strange spectral fears. For instance, he used to be terrified of a certain pair of framed child's handprints at my parents' house. Stop signs and lamp-posts with globes also made him hysterical – he said they were "happy," which still gives me the shivers. Certain images make him extremely uncomfortable.

I experienced similar fears when I was young, and am rather careful about the movies I watch. What's interesting is that the same sort of terror doesn't attach to fairy tales, for him or for me. They may involve the most monstrous crimes (as the mother's in "The Juniper Tree") but they play the role of symbols, as it were, in an abstract pattern, and actually produce a kind of pleasure at their appearance in the larger context of the story.

Then again, right now my kids desperately want me to read "Bluebeard," because I mentioned it at some point as being too creepy, but I don't think I shall, not for some time yet. I can't abide the thought of their working through that in their games.

An American Fairytale

Fairytales don’t tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairytales tell children that dragons can be killed. [G. K. Chesterton]*

This is a continuation of my previous post.

I've always loved myths and fairy tales. I have most of the colors of Andrew Lang's fairy tale collection, and have read most of the stories in them. I grew up reading Lang and Edith Hamilton and Padraic Colum and Bulfinch. Among fairy tales, my favorite were and remain Grimms', in all their unbowdlerized savagery: Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, The Juniper Tree, Bearskin, Rapunzel, The Goose Girl. It's hard to find much in modern literature to compare with them for strange, sudden beauty and violent resolution. Flannery O'Connor comes close.

At any rate, this probably explains why I find The Night of the Hunter (1955) such a beautiful movie. Though set in the countryside of the Great Depression, it's as close as a fairy tale has ever come to being turned into film. It's closest to Hansel and Gretel, perhaps, but bears relation to a great many others, and (to my mind, at least) well effects what Tolkien calls Recovery. Amazingly, it is the only film Charles Laughton ever made.

The Wikipedia entry describes it as a film noir, but that it most certainly is not. It may share common roots in German expressionism, I suppose. It opens with the kindly old rescuer, Rachel who has a lot in common with George MacDonald's recurring wise-woman character, talking about the Sermon on the Mount to a ring of disembodied children, all superimposed against a field of pulsating stars that make me think of the Babel myth image in Metropolis. She's warning them to beware of false prophets.

The False Prophet being, of course, the Preacher, Harry Powell, the fellow with HATE and LOVE tattooed on his knuckles.** A serial killer of widows, a thief, and an itinerant preacher who, far from being a mere hypocrite, prays to God whenever he's alone, and believes God to be on his side.

Well now, what's it to be Lord? Another widow? How many has it been? Six? Twelve? I disremember. [Tips hat.] You say the word, Lord, I'm on my way. You always send me money to go forth and preach your Word. The widow with a little wad of bills hid away in a sugar bowl. Lord, I am tired. Sometimes I wonder if you really understand. Not that You mind the killin's. Your Book is full of killin's. But there are things you do hate Lord: perfume-smellin' things, lacy things, things with curly hair.

A worthy descendant of Bluebeard.

The Ohio River flows as a living thing through the story, like the Deluge of Noah and the Nile that bore the baby Moses. There is a scene – how did Laughton even film this? – of the preacher's murdered wife sitting in her car at the bottom of the river, her long pale hair waving with the trailing plants that grow there.

Ah, if you could have seen it, Bess, down there in the deep place, with her hair waving soft and lazy like meadow grass under flood water, and that slit in her throat, like she had an extra mouth.

The scene of the children's escape from the monster, drifting with the current in their little skiff, as Pearl sings her curious song –

Once upon a time there was a pretty fly,
he had a wife this pretty fly
but one day she flew away, flew away.
She had two pretty children,
but one night those pretty children
flew away into the sky, into the moon.

– and the night creatures – the bullfrogs, the rabbits, the spiders – watch them, must be the most beautiful in American film.

And the film is very American, and strongly reminiscent of American art. The landscapes could have been painted by Grant Wood (American Gothic) or Thomas Hart Benton (Persephone). Some of the shots remind one particularly of Benton's lithographs. The boat scene has a spiritual connection with Edward Hicks' Peaceable Kingdom and the like. There's an image of the old woman, Rachel, rocking in a chair while holding a shotgun that must surely be a reference to Whistler's Mother. Laughton also emphasizes the link to American or Southern gothic through use of points and spires, the most memorable instance being the killing scene, when the violently steep cathedral ceiling echoes Powell's open stick-knife.

As in Flannery O'Connor, the Bible is woven unapologetically  into the texture of the landscape. And there are no cheap, ham-fisted denunciations of religious hypocrisy here. Even the villain is complex, in his way. Because, as I said, he believes. He believes and he is a rank puritan, horrified and disgusted by sex. That is what defines him. In a revealing opening scene, he sits in the dark in a cabaret, watching a girl dance on the stage, meditating on killing her but reflecting that there are too many such in the world. He puts his hand in his coat pocket, and the blade of his stick-knife tears through the cloth; apparently, the original screenplay had it tearing through his pants pocket instead.

It's probably Robert Mitchum's most memorable role. He's delightfully creepy – Children! Childre-e-e-en? – and cruel, but also comically mawkish at times, capable of losing all dignity in an instant, driven by his sordid desires. The scene where Rachel shoots him after the cat attacks him and he runs, howling like a wounded animal, into the barn, is both terrifying and hilarious. And Lillian Gish is wonderful as Rachel. Her goodness and strength is a perfect contrast to Powell's perfidy.

I'm a strong tree with branches for many birds. I'm good for somethin' in this old world, and I know it, too.

I'm not sure I've been particularly coherent here, but that's where I'll stop. If you haven's seen this film, and you treasure the silence, beauty, and arresting strangeness that would-be fantasy-filmmakers seem incapable of producing in their films, then please watch The Night of the Hunter. I'll close with Rachel's words, spoken after she watched a barn owl pounce on a rabbit, bringing us full circle to the Chesterton quote up top:

It's a hard world for little things.

* Not actually Chesterton, though he said something similar.
** I find it difficult not to think of Sideshow Bob throughout the movie.

What Fantasy Is

Here are some wing shots on the definition of fantasy literature, typed in no very systematic order and with no attempt at justification.

Fantasy is a literature of secondary worlds. The setting or secondary world of a work of fantasy plays a material but distinctive and necessary role. The sapient characters don't merely move across this world as a backdrop or exist in opposition to it. On the contrary, they are part of its warp and woof. In this sense we can say that fantasy is "ecological" literature, "comedy," literature that affirms man's dependence on his environment. Fantasy, even grotesque fantasy, is Consolation in that it reaffirms the goodness of all that is.

The secondary world represents a simplified, "closed" model of reality in which we can see very clearly the ties between it and its denizens. This closure frequently expresses itself through the secondary world being literally insular or confined (Barsoom, Tormance, Gormenghast, Earthsea, Narnia, Perelandra, Arrakis), or isolated in a remote epoch with a transparent history and cosmology (Atlantis, Middle Earth, Hyperborea, Hyboria, Zothique, the Night Land, the Dying Earth). There is something dissatisfying about a fantasy that tapers into the "messy" real world.

The sapient races are part of the secondary world and serve to simplify society by dividing it into easily identified castes with stark differences and formalized relationships. They also help the reader regard man as one species among many in a rich, diverse world.

The secondary world is part of an affective structure operating on an existential level. Fantasy aims to help the soul take stock of her own ambient reality, helping her to perceive and appreciate things as they are in themselves. It is Escape and Recovery in that it enables her to escape from the prison of familiarity and to recover herself and the simple things of life. It is the opposite of the White Witch's bad magic food, which ruins the taste of good, ordinary food.

Style plays a crucial role in this structure. An unfitting style results in a flat fantasy. The point isn't that trees are flat in fantasy if not properly described, for flat trees figure in many good "literary" novels. The point is that flat trees simply are not allowable in fantasy as such. Fantasy is literature in which we care about the trees.* For this reason and others, fantasy is a fully incarnational art. The tale cannot be divorced from the telling any more than a man's soul can be divorced from his body.

The objection to "messiness" above is not to say that fantasy is somehow "tidy" in the Disney sense. It also differs from fairy tales and myths and epic romances through its meticulous naturalism, which at times devolves into slum naturalism. It is more akin to the Divine Comedy or Don Quixote than Orlando Furioso. It places the reader in a fully realized environment.

Fantasy often arises as a metaphor for an author's system of belief or philosophy, but it is diametrically opposed to allegory, and its elements quickly acquire a life of their own. They serve as an embodiment or living incarnation of transcendant propositions. The system of belief is but a material element, and one needn't share it to enjoy the work. In the end it feeds into the affective structure: the reader "believes" whatever the book presents as true, within the context of the secondary reality. Fantasy in which propositions gain the upper hand (as in Perelandra) ultimately fails. On the other hand, fantasy lacking a substantial purpose or underlying philosophy runs the risk of silliness or frivolity.

* "Very little about trees as trees can be got into a play." From Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories."

Tolkien on Fantasy and Recovery

"Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say 'seeing things as they are' and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say 'seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them'—as things apart from ourselves. We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness. Of all faces those of our familiares are the ones both most difficult to play fantastic tricks with, and most difficult really to see with fresh attention, perceiving their likeness and unlikeness: that they are faces, and yet unique faces. This triteness is really the penalty of 'appropriation': the things that are trite, or (in a bad sense) familiar, are the things that we have appropriated, legally or mentally. We say we know them. They have become like the things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them…

"And actually fairy-stories deal largely, or (the better ones) mainly, with simple or fundamental things, untouched by Fantasy, but these simplicities are made all the more luminous by their setting… It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine."

—J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories"

Style in Fantasy

In an earlier post I cited Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” as an antidote to mythopoeic dualism. In this essay, after considering a number of examples illustrating the role of style in fantasy—and the penalty paid by those who neglect it—Le Guin concludes:

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 expresses my own view of the matter perfectly. (It also echoes E. B. White’s concluding remarks in The Elements of Style.) But Le Guin goes on to form a conjecture as to the precise role of style in fantasy, and this, I feel, is where she comes up short.

[W]hy is style of such fundamental importance in fantasy?... 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 Peyton Place. There is no comfortable matrix of the commonplace to substitute for the imagination, to provide ready-made emotional responses, 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.

Surely this can’t be all there is to it. Such a necessity would call for exhaustive descriptions but not for a distinctive style. There are plenty of terse ordinary novels about remote times or exotic places, while some of the best fantasies take place in settings that are more or less familiar. The fantasy-writer’s skill is perhaps most apparent in his or her ability to use familiar things to evoke unfamiliar responses. Think of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, for instance. Most of it unfolds against a backdrop drawn from European topography. The Shire was based on the English Midlands, the Misty Mountains on the Alps, and Ithilien on the Mediterranean countries. In fact, Tolkien’s use of extraordinary settings is rather sparing. What sets him apart from so many imitators is that he is able to cast an aura of beauty and mystery about the ordinary good things of life. But this, he says, is one of the primary roles of fantasy: Recovery.

By the forging of Gram cold iron was revealed; by the making of Pegasus horses were ennobled; in the Trees of the Sun and Moon root and stock, flower and fruit are manifested in glory. And actually fairy-stories deal largely, or (the better ones) mainly, with simple or fundamental things, untouched by Fantasy, but these simplicities are made all the more luminous by their setting. For the story-maker who allows himself to be “free with” Nature can be her lover not her slave. It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.

The problem is not that trees, etc., are flat in fantasy if not properly described, for trees are flat in many types of good, ordinary novels. The problem is that flat trees simply are not allowable in fantasy. Fantasy is the branch of literature in which we care about the trees. Not because they are supernatural or extraordinary, &c., but simply because they are. Perhaps supernaturality is merely a way of heightening what most affects us, or should affect us, about real trees. Clearly style plays a crucial role this. Not even the most exhaustive description is enough; in fact, it is probably a great deal too much. What is needed is the gift of seeing combined with a touch of magic.

Where the mass-produced clones spawned by the advent of the fantasy genre fall short is in taking the typical devices of fantasy as ends in themselves. As Le Guin saw so clearly, weakness in style vitiates the pleasurability of these devices. But the devices themselves must be oriented as directed by the work as a whole, as a work of fantasy. They are but material elements subservient to an art that aims at a certain type of beauty. The writer who fails to comprehend this merely manipulates material elements, forming something lightly entertaining to a certain type of reader but banal and superficial.

*Which itself can never be entirely divorced from style, in my opinion. —raphordo