How to and how not to read Earthsea

The first time I read the Earthsea Trilogy, I was fifteen years old and on the outer banks of North Carolina. Short of the Azores, that might have been the best place to read the original trilogy—on an island with the Atlantic washing the sands outside my door. At that point, that was all that Le Guin had written of Earthsea. I was a fifteen year old reading a YA series (as Le Guin herself describes it) about a 19 year old Wizard (and later a younger—16 or 17 year old?—Tenar). Le Guin doesn’t commit, simply saying that Tenar (as central to the series as the Wizard Ged) was ‘not even that old’. In a sense, I was the perfect age, reading a fantasy series written for me.

I still have the books that I read over 40 years ago—the same issue as the books above.

Close to ten years after I had read the original trilogy, Le Guin published Tehanu (for Le Guin, it was 18 years). Tehanu is a horse of a different color. Firstly, Le Guin decided the book wasn’t going to be a YA novel, but one for adults and with adult themes and secondly, she set out to right the perception that her initial trilogy (if it wasn’t misogynist) took a dim view of women in an uncritically patriarchal fantasy world. The men were wizards of great schooling, power and wisdom while women were, at best, smelly village witches living in dank, smelly little houses who pedaled deceit and ignorance. “There is a saying on Gont, Weak as woman’s magic, and there is another saying, Wicked as woman’s magic,” Le Guin wrote.

Le Guin changed all that with Tehanu. She would write:

[A woman’s magic] goes down deep. It’s all roots. It’s like an old blackberry thicket. And a wizard’s power’s like a fir tree, maybe, great and tall and grand, but it’ll blow right down in a storm. Nothing kills a blackberry bramble. [Tehanu 100]

This is spoken by the Witch Moss (who was still smelly) but whose mythology in the series, as a whole, undergoes a considerable transformation. This revision of women’s place in the Earthsea universe was beautifully written about in a paper called Witches, Wives and Dragons: The Evolution of the Women in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea—An OverviewUrsula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea—An Overview.

The point I would make, in regards to this, is that to read Earthsea as a unified vision, in the same manner as Lord of the Rings, is going to leave the reader disappointed. There are any number of critiques by readers bemoaning the “feminist revision” of the initial three books—the loss of the archetypal hierarchies easily recognizable from the fairy tales of the past thousand years. But if you’re going to read Earthsea this way, then you’ll likely be disappointed, wondering why she ruined the first three novels.

What makes Earthsea fascinating is to see how an author revisits a world that was ostensibly complete. Le Guin probably never planned to write another Earthsea book after completing the initial trilogy. Normally, the author drops hints and clues as to what’s to come. This propels the reader forward. Plot threads need to be tied up. But Le Guin tied up all her plot threads. Ged had lost his power. Like King Arthur, he was carried off into the mists of legend.

What makes the latter three books fascinating is to see how an author re-enters her own world, and radically transforms it. She can’t rewrite. The initial books are done and written, and yet she has to make the radical revision feel organic—as if the themes of the latter books were there, all along. Her solution is to make their very “completeness” a central problem. In this case, she treats their completeness as an artifact of Earthsea’s patriarchal bias. They only seem complete because it was the male perspective, in a sense, that was telling the story. It’s a neat feat, since she, Le Guin, was the author of the first three books, but the latter three books treat this perspective as the “evil” that threatens the latter books.

Melanie Rawls, the author of the paper cited above, puts it this way:

The “author” of the first three books did not know why women’s magic was weak or wicked, or she gives no explanation in the books, presenting that information as everyday fact. The “author” was unaware of the history of the founding of Roke. The author of the first three books seems to know the nature of dragons, and it is a nature familiar to us from our western myths, epics and folktales. In these books, dragons are indisputably male.

And then later:

The latter three books, however, demonstrate how much the earlier “author” does not know about dragons. The dragons of the last three books are female: the Woman of Kemay, Tehanu, Orm Irian.

It’s in that sense, in my opinion, that Earthsea should be read, as a fascinating and archetypal story of the author’s inner journey, her revision of self (perhaps redemption). You’re reading the work of an author who has turned her inner journey into an archetypal fantasy novel. That said, it’s a curious thing (and I speculate) but the author Le Guin seems to favor men over women. Even when she expresses a “feminist” critique of the first three novels, one gets the sense that she continues to adore her male characters (which is why I find some of the criticism leveled against her latter books—by readers who resent the intrusion of feminism—to be ironic if not oblivious). She does this even as she turns two of her female characters into goddess-like all-powerful beings—namely dragons—as if to balance the male power of the earlier novels. Her impulse to adore men—to attentively portray their struggles, foibles, tenderness, and nobility—remains, while her suspicion of female characters also subtly persists. I don’t consider that a failing. It’s refreshing, especially when compared to Tolkien, who absurdly idealizes women (if he bothers to write about them at all). It’s another reason that I find criticism of her “feminism” to be misplaced. Le Guin seems to possess a well-tested knowledge of female treachery— even in a male dominated fantasy world. She is disinclined to treat women as helpless victims. Speaking through Tenar, she scolds the young Kargish princess Seserakh, instructing her to get her act together and become the Queen, the co-ruler of Earthsea, that she is meant to be.

Literary Style in Fantasy

Yesterday I was out grocery shopping and was waiting to pick up my wife at the bus depot (returning from Europe), and killed some time at Barnes & Noble. The Sci-Fi Fantasy section was my playground, and I was there for one reason. I wanted to see how fantasy authors were writing their novels—stylistically. That meant me starting on the left and going right. I read, on average, one paragraph from each book, opened at random. What I discovered is what I had already suspected. All of them are writing in a modern vernacular that, apart from descriptions of swords and ox carts, could just as easily be narratives set in the modern day. Of those on the shelves, none of the authors made a discernible effort, at least to me, to shift their language to a less modern vernacular. Modern colloquialisms abounded. For example, one author used the phrase “despite the fact” in the middle of a medieval battle. The expression comes with a whiff of cliché but, more damningly, reads like the anachronistic narration of a second tier documentary. I like to compare the writing of fantasies to costuming in historical dramas. (One of my favorite Youtubers, Burnadette Banner, annually rates historical dramas in terms of their faithfulness to period clothing.)

The writing of modern fantasy authors, for me, compares to historical dramas that pay zero attention to period clothing. And music has the same disorienting effect. Modern background music in medieval movies is one thing, but when musicians show up, within the world of the movie, and start playing utterly anachronistic music on modern musical instruments, that really makes me—unhappy. Now I admit that we can’t have movies set in the medieval time (let alone novels) written in Middle English or Anglo Saxon (although that would be pretty cool). It would also be pretty cool if time travelers were actually confronted with the languages spoken in a given period. Go back to King Arthur’s court and good luck to you if you don’t speak Anglo Saxon or the Latin of Rome at minimum. And don’t expect to see any suits of armor (à la the movie Excalibur). Suits of armor wouldn’t show up for another several hundred years. But, in my opinion, the two fantasy authors who have written the standards of the genre, JRR Tolkien and Ursula Le Guin, both adopted a more rhetorical (oratorical style) that contributed to their world building (also worth mentioning in this regard is Micheal Moorecock’s Elric of Melniboné, although Moorecock’s stab at linguistic world building can sound more like Dungeon & Dragons than literature.). Just to really show you what I mean, and rather than pick on any particular, contemporary fantasy author, I’m going to take a paragraph from Le Guin and Tolkien, then rewrite them the way our modern fantasy novelists would write them:

Ged spent three days in that village of the West Hand, recovering himself, and making ready a boat built not of spells and sea-wrack, but of sound wood well pegged and caulked, with a stout mast and sail of her own, that he might sail easily and sleep when he needed. Like most boats of the North and the Reaches she was clinker-built, with planks over lapped and clenched one upon the other for strength in the high seas; every part of her was sturdy and well-made. Ged reinforced her wood with deep-inwoven charms, for thought he might go far in that boat. [From the opening of Chapter 9, Iffish, Wizard of Earthsea]

And our modern fantasy novelist:

Ged spent three days recovering in West Hand. He pegged and caulked his boat, getting it ready. It wasn’t like his old boat. His old boat had been held together by spells. It was constructed with good wood. It had a strong mast and a sail that was made from cloth. He would sleep easily when he needed to. Like most in the North and the Reaches, the boat was clinker built. The planks overlapped and were drawn tightly together so they’d be strong. The boat was sturdy and made well. Ged wove charms into the wood because he thought he would use the boat for a long time.

And from Tolkien:

Now the Captains of the West led their host towards the City, and folk saw them advance in line upon line, flashing and glinting in the sunrise and rippling like silver. And so they came before the Gateway and halted a furlong from the walls. As yet no gates had been set up again, but a barrier was laid across the entrance to the City, and there stood men at arms in silver and black with long swords drawn. Before the barrier stood Faramir the Steward, and Húrin Warden of the Keys, and other captains of Gondor, and the Lady Éowyn of Rohan with Elfhelm the Marshal and many knits of the Mark; and upon either side of the Gate was a great press of fair people in raiment of many colours and garlands of flowers. [p. 244 The Return of the King]

And our modern fantasy novelist:

At sunrise, the Captains of the West marched lines of soldiers towards the city. They flashed and rippled like silver. The soldiers stopped at the gates and were several hundred feet from the walls. New gates weren’t up yet, but there was a barrier at the entrance and there were armed men in silver and black with long swords. There was the steward Faramir and Húrin, who was Warden of the Keys. There was Lady Éowyn and Marshal Elfhelm, who were from Rohan. And then there were the Captains of Gondor. They all stood in front of the gate with crowds of happy people on both sides. They were wearing colorful clothes and garlands of flowers.

What I’ve done is to remove nearly all of the hypotactic and syndetic writing, the inversions, the nominal phrasing (the prepositional phrases), and archaic words like “upon” and the obsolete usage of the prepositional “for”. In short, I tried to remove all the rhetorical devices that signaled a more formal, archaic or heightened syntax. The revisions are okay. They get the job done. Most importantly, they tell the story. The revised paragraphs are typical, for example, of what you might find in Brandon Sanderson’s many (and successful) fantasy novels. George RR Martin, who I’d consider the finest writer contemporary author of fantasy, splits the baby. He gives to his characters a slightly more archaic/heightened rhetoric, while narrating in an ostensibly modern vernacular. For example, the narrator:

“picking the way”, “muttered to himself”, the sarcastic “but try and tell”. The phrase “but try and tell” belongs to a modern vernacular and is the least likely to be found in anything by Tolkien or Le Guin (let alone the medieval period). The other phrases probably also don’t belong in any medieval world. I don’t recall that Gollum ever “muttered to himself”, though that would have been a likely description. On the other hand, the destrier (the warhorse) is “great“—an adjective that is a wholly owned subsidiary of the fantasy genre. And many are the “unwary” who sojourn in medieval fantasy worlds. But watch what happens when a character from GOT speaks:

While the character’s language doesn’t make use of the rhetorical heightening typical of Tolkien and Le Guin, he also doesn’t let anything conspicuously modern slip in. “It steals up on you” is a nicely antiquated phrase. “It burns, it does” and “Peaceful, like” is some nice cockney, “old world” signaling. Hollywood has long associated the English accent (and cockney specifically) with the old world and so Martin goes there. All well and fine. Ultimately, Martin settles on a sort of mid-Atlantic formality (for lack of a better description). He assumes a heightened literary style that avoids common colloquialisms (and the modern vernacular in general) but also largely steers clear of archaic syntax and grammar. Largely. He still peppers his modern prose with little Dungeon & Dragony gestures: “[He] slipped his dirk free of its sheath.” If Martin had fully committed to writing like this (like Le Guin or Tolkien) then it might sound less, to my ears, like a Dungeon Master remembering, every now and then, to throw in some old-school prepositional phrases (for atmosphere).

But there was a reason I was browsing through the fantasy section. In my own fantasy novel(s), I’ve gone full Tolkien and Le Guin. And how. And I’ve done it because, mainly, I enjoy it. The fantasy genre gives me the excuse to write in a lovely, heightened, rhetorical style that is a bit like poetry. It’s forgivable in the realm of dragons, so why not? It’s part of the world building. And maybe that’s the reason modern fantasy novels disappoint me so much. At least try. Why, with such a golden opportunity, do today’s fantasy novelists write in such a modern and generic prose? Translate the Iliad or Odyssey into this same prose and most, if not all of the magic and nobility is lost.

On the other hand, they’re published and I’m not. So there’s that.

I’m ready to try my hand at another Dickinson poem.

Pick one out!

The Hook & the Fisherman

My next novel was going to be Writer Writer. I would describe it but I’m shy about sharing too many ideas with the entire online population of planet Earth. When I was in Berlin with my daughter this past June, also a gifted writer, I tried to talk her into writing a fantasy trilogy. At some point, like a damned fool, I said: If I, as in me and myself, were going to write an epic fantasy, then this is what I would write. And godammit if I didn’t talk myself into writing a fantasy epic. I wasn’t on board until last week. I woke up at 3:30 AM, working out the story and couldn’t get back to sleep. That’s a sign. I’m already closing in on ten percent of Book One, called Wistþistle: Under and Over the Bridge. I’ve always loved Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy and have wanted to write high fantasy in that spirit—and so I’ve adopted the high mimetic style one finds in Tolkien and Le Guin’s high fantasy. (The trilogy is all about the power of language.) I’ve never found fantasies convincing when they’re written in the flat vernacular of contemporary English. Since there are only so many ways to map a world, mine is full of islands like Le Guin’s. Call it derivative, but the choice is to look like Le Guin or Tolkien. Anyhow, I just wanted to share a first fable that appears in the early pages of the novel.

And so the youth told her a little story about a fish that swallowed a fisherman’s boat and made the fisherman ride on her back until she had carried him to her own land and transformed into a beautiful young woman. So long as I stand on this isle, she said, I appear to you as what I am, yet the curse may be lifted if you love me as I do you.  The fisherman, who hadn’t suffered the same sudden love as she for him, and having no way to leave the island without his boat, refused and begged her to let him go. She promised she would but first he would have to spend three nights with her and in return she would only ask for one thing already in his possession. The fisherman saw no harm in agreeing.

On the first night she took him to a room filled with gold treasures collected from the seabed. But a man may have as many treasures as he wishes if he will only work for it, he said. On the second night she seated him in a great hall and cooked such foods for him and served such wine as will never be tasted. He ate and drank but said he would not stay for a man might as easily learn the art of cooking as the art of fishing. Now the fisherman eagerly awaited the third day, but on the third day the beautiful woman said she had no more goods to offer. He was free to leave. His boat was moored and ready. Now I ask for my one gift, she said; and she took from him a kiss. This made the fisherman very angry for he had been spoiled by the treasure and food and expected more. And yet as he sailed home, and after he had forgotten the food and treasures, he was nettled by the kiss.

What use, he asked himself, was a kiss? And yet her kiss was like a hook in his heart. The more he resisted it, the deeper plunged the barb. And no man may have a woman’s kiss but from a woman. The kiss tugged and tugged at him. But where was the island? One day a stranger appeared at the fisherman’s door and said that there was an old witch who knew where the woman lived, and all the fisherman would have to do was to cook her the best fish of any tasted and to serve it on a flawless plate of gold. The fisherman spent the next years learning to cook and smithy gold. Then he went to the witch, who lived in a hut overlooking the expanse of sea and earth. When he served the witch, and the old woman was satisfied, the fisherman asked where the beautiful woman’s island was. Give me a kiss, she said, and I will show you. The fisherman might have refused, but now the hook in his heart was like a killing pain. He knelt in front of the old witch and kissed her, and when he opened his eyes the beautiful young woman of the isle sat before him, for a kiss is the only gift that receives what it gives in the giving.

And there you have it. I may also post the first chapter for first impressions. Don’t forget that my first book, Tiny House, Big Mountain, a novel about a girl and her mother’s spiritual journey in the Greens of Vermont, is in print and available. Feel free to ask me about it or to let me know what you thought of it, if you’ve read it.

up in Vermont | August 21st 2023

My melodramatic Dark Night of the Soul, and other diversions…

I’ve started submitting queries for Murder Most Monstrous. There was one agent in particular to whom I was excited to send the novella. She had described what she was looking for and my novella fit perfectly (and I cannot stress this enough). It matched her “wish list”—perfectly. And did I mention the novella is exactly what she requested? A day later I received her rejection: “Not a good match at this time.” This seems to be the you’re-not-my-type euphemism that all agents have flocked to. I’ve since received a couple more rejections. Of course, nothing reminds one so much of online dating as being told “We’re not a good match”, only then to be told, in so many words, “It’s me, not you.” Fine print: Their rejection isn’t meant to be a commentary on the quality of ones work. Was it my picture? Was it something I said? Too many adverbs? Should I have used the soup spoon instead of the fork?

I don’t know.

The response sent me into a fit of rage. What in the hell is an author supposed to do? Agents order pâté de foie gras from the menu. The author gives them pâté de foie gras plus the Antique Victorian 1847 Rogers Brothers Crown Shell Sugar Spoon, ca. 1885, that they simply can’t stir their tea without, and they sniff and say: “It’s just not—a match.” Why couldn’t I live in the 18th century and to hell with all this nonsense. One could simply walk into town and have a pint with the publisher. I came close to vowing I would never write again. What’s the point? Nothing I’ve ever written has been published, recognized or accepted*. (*See: So on and so forth.) Maybe this reminds you of a certain fictional character. Pippy Longstocking? She wished for her own death, and what a glorious and retributive death it would be. Then everyone would weep at her grave, by God, weep and beg for her forgiveness. That would show them. Me and Pippy Longstocking. And today I’m back to submitting queries. It’s good for me. I’ve never taken rejection well. And well? There’s no time like the present to overcome a hang up. Maybe this is what I’m supposed to learn. And if that’s the case, better get busy. Enough with the self-pity. Just write the god damn queries and get over yourself.

In unrelated news, I visited Concord, MA and the bookstore there. A great bookstore with one of the nicest and most generous poetry sections I’ve seen in a long time. That cheered me up. I picked up Vendler’s book on Emily Dickinson’s poems, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentary, and, little did I know, a Libarary of America collection of poems by Ursula Le Guin. Was there anything that woman couldn’t write? The choice was between Ellen Bryant Voigt’s poetry and Le Guin’s Collected Poems. I chose Le Guin. That’s not a commentary on the quality of Voigt’s poetry. It just wasn’t a match. If you know what I mean. I did find Le Guin’s poetry to be more diverse, interesting, and imaginative, and not just compared to Voigt but to most/any(?) contemporary poet I know of. Correct me if you know of other poets, but this is the kind of poem I seldom, if ever, find in contemporary poetry:

The People

Some people have begun to come into my dreams
from a long way away,
traveling over the mountain passes
that nobody living knows.
Old people who smell like fog
and the soft bark of redwoods.
They talk together softly.
They know more than I know.
I think they come from home.

The poem has that visionary feel to it, and could easily fit into the Wizard of Earthsea. There’s something about the simplicity that appeals to me. Or consider this:

Mendenhall Glacier

I never thought of a cold dragon
till I saw one dragging    its slow body
down the wide wadi    it had gouged
out of a mountain,    saw the bluish spatter
of icy water    from its mouth.
I'd felt the chill breath    long before
I came close and saw    it crawling there
half scaly, half bare,    dirty grey, old.
That breath was cold,    the hard breath
of a hard death,    slow, cold death.

She was a writer of fantasy and sci-fi, and she brings that imaginative sensibility into her poems. Poets prior to the twentieth century brought this kind of visionary symbolism into their poetry but seldom, as far as I know, with such a sympathetic touch. After the examples of Pound, Eliot and the confessional poets, the vast majority of twentieth century poets probably would have died of embarrassment before writing a similar poem. She can also use rhyme and meter beautifully:

Buz

At first my impulse was to swat,
but impulse yielded to thought,
or hardly thought, mere fellow-feeling
as I watched it walk across the ceiling.
It's a fat fly, but not obscene,
nor dirty, since the house is clean.
It does not take its meals with me,
but eats them somewhere privately,
As night comes on I see it grow
sleepy with darkness, shy and slow.
With morning light it wakes to zoom
cheerfully from room to room.
And my mind, wandering, follows it,
the whining loop, the pause, the flit,
until it stops somewhere to sit
and wash its hands and clean its eyes
after the custom of houseflies.
Then with a hum it's on the wing
a small, inhuman, wild thing,
aware of me, as I'm aware
of it. We do not touch. We share
a while the mild summer air.

It’s the kind of poem I always wished Mary Oliver had written, but Oliver never veered from her amorphicly stanzaic free verse. I’ve also been reading much Wallace Stevens. It’s easy to loose patience with him, and not because his poetry and reasoning are willfully convoluted and circular, but because he gets so damned repetitive. Some poets try hard not to repeat themselves; not Stevens. He revels in repetition. If you read and can understand The Snow Man, one of Stevens’s earliest poems, then you’ve read Stevens. Period. All the rest of his poetry, in terms of his philosophy of aesthetics, is simply an elaboration on The Snow Man. He’s also always returning to the same grab bag of colors, images, symbols, analogies, and allusions; and to the same self-contradictory rhetoric that goes from being profound to a cheap card trick. Credences of Summer is a sort of Rorschach test, as I see it. It teeters. One either reads it as sublime, as most do, or as the moment Stevens makes cliché out of his own rhetoric. He plays the same cheap rhetorical card trick in each stanza, all while dressing it up in sublime poetry.

On the subject of recurring imagery, the woman in the flapping cloak, most famously and convincingly appearing in Ideas of Order at Key West, is an image that apparently fixated Stevens. She’ll appear many times. Here, for instance: “But her he had not foreseen: the bitter mind/In flapping cloak. She walked along the paths/Of the park with chalky brow scratched over black/And black by thought that could not understand…” [p. 568 Library of America] Even as early as the middle of his career, his poems (especially his longer poems) begin to sound like knock-offs of his earlier poems. His output starts to sound like the soapboxing of an insurance executive you cross the street to avoid, and who shouts at you from across the street. What is imaginatively revelatory in his shorter poems becomes fussy and pedantic in his longer poems. He nags. And yet— And yet, even with the pedantic nagging of his increasingly exhausted philosophizing, he sustains it all with sublime poetry. He does what too few poets do—and that’s to always firmly ground the reader in the real world—in the visible, tactile, tangible and sensual. And so, from his uncollected poems, you get a moment like this:

Green is the path we take
Between chimeras, and garlanded the way
The down-descent into November's void.
The spontaneities of rain or snow
Surprise the sterile rationalist who sees
Maidens in bloom, bulls under sea, the lark
On urns and oak-leaves twisted into rhyme.

[p. 588 Library of America]

That’s the elixir of the gods, even if Stevens has said it all before (and he has), that’s sublime blank verse. If you ever want to write a pastiche of Stevens, or forge one of his poems for fun and profit, then for God’s sake throw in the colors ‘Green’ and ‘Blue’ at every opportunity. Don’t worry about it making sense. Leave that to the reader. But its passages like these that will always make Stevens worth reading. His poetry is like a street in Berlin. It’s a hodge podge of architecture, some god-awful and some stunning, but walking the streets is worth it because you never know what’s going to appear around the corner—something old?—something new? And countless readers have essentially said the same thing. They say: Don’t try to understand him; just read him. Ignore his self-absorbed, philosophical bloviating, and read for the wash of colors, imagery, sensation and masterful versifying. But that’s me coming to terms with Stevens. Read him for the poetry and ignore the rest.

And that’s all for today.

I hope to have a longer poem ready to post before I leave for Berlin and Hamburg next week.

upinVermont | May 25 2023

High Fantasy & The Oratorical Style

[This ‘sort of’ belongs on this blog. It’s a college paper. The only one that was of any interest to me. The paper tries to draw a distinction between a high mimetic mode and a low mimetic mode. According to my reading, the majority of fantasy writers are unaware of the distinction and if they are, use the high mimetic mode clumsily. The paper will probably be of little interest to most people but I have posted it for those few who might enjoy it –  as well as for those who have an interest in Rhetoric as it is used (or not used) by modern writers. Naturally, it also applies to poetry. Since writing it, J.K. Rowling has written her series, Harry Potter, as well as Christopher Paolini, Eregon. Neither writer has adopted or possibly even recognized Tolkien’s rhetorical  techniques. With Rowling, the tone probably would not  be suitable, but Paolini’s prose seems flavorless for the lack of it. If you like this sort of discussion – then enjoy and give me your impression.]

High Fantasy & the Oratorical Style:
The Use of Style in the Creation of the Secondary World

As early as the sixteenth century, Cervantes had killed the romance with Don Quixote, a novel which was both the culmination and the greatest parody of the romance form, and which introduced a new style of prose narrative in what Northrop Frye calls the “low mimetic” mode.  Low mimetic writing deals with the life of ordinary people, with the everyday life we live, seen from the inside, where the mythic and high mimetic modes treat the life of heroes and kings, seen from the outside.(i)

Style is not often discussed in its relation to the creation of a secondary world, or as Tolkien expressed it, in its contribution to the creation of literary(ii).  Yet the style in which narrative is written is the most tangible portion of any work and to disregard it is to disregard its most fundamental feature.
At the time when Cervantes wrote his narrative in prose it was an age of verse with strictly observed metrical patterns.  The choice was provocative and unmistakable.  He himself said of the work:  “It is so conspicuous and void of difficulty that children may handle him, youths may read him, men may understand him, and the old may celebrate him.”  It was as much a part of the work as the characters within it.  The twentieth century is the age of prose.  There are no major works in verse.  The closest a juvenile novel comes to verse may be discovered in Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff.  It is written, as it were, in broken prose — the purpose being, perhaps, to imitate the cadence of the characters’ speech.  There is, however, nothing to separate it from prose but line breaks.
But for such obvious diversions, the real stylistic difference between the high mimetic mode and the low mimetic mode (iii) is now far more difficult to pinpoint occurring within the confines of prose.  The “high mimetic modes [treating] the life of heroes and kings, seen from the outside” would seem to have, arguably in the twentieth century, a home in the genre of fantasy.  Yet how does the high mimetic mode, as found in the cantos of Spenser or the lofty blank verse of Milton, translate into prose — the century’s predominant mode?  The answer may be found in Rhetoric.  Rhetoric was first classified by the Greeks as a means of codifying the techniques by which an orator might sway his audience.  Rhetoric therefore has its origins in oratory.  It is only natural then that one should find those same devices used in the epic poetry of Homer, Spencer, or Milton.  The poet is addressing the audience, as it were, as an orator.  He is relating events and wishes to communicate them effectively and persuasively.  It is only natural then that the writer of High Fantasy, in his attempt to more persuasively relate the events of his world, would consciously or subconsciously utilize the rhetorical devices of the orator.  The oratorical voice, that is, will lend weight to the narrative.  This is a High Style which, for the sake of clarity, I’ll call the Oratorical Style.
The genre examined will be a narrow one — that wherein a secondary world is created.  Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising cannot be contrasted with J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1) or Lord of the Rings because she does not attempt to create a secondary world. The more effective contrast is between The Wizard of Earthsea and Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown or Lloyd Alexander’s The Book of Three.

The Figures of Oratorical style in Le Guin and Tolkien

Ursula K. Le Guin and J.R.R. Tolkien, it is broadly agreed, have both most successfully created secondary worlds — A Wizard of Earthsea and The Lord of the Rings.  Among the features the books hold in common is an achieved high mimetic style within the confines of prose.  This high style, the oratorical style, is achieved by the use of rhetorical figures historically common to the poetry of tragedy and the epic poem, themselves rooted in oratory.  The following contains the first, and perhaps the most important of the six figures to be examined.
A feeling of fear had been growing in [Fatty Bolger] all day, and he was unable to rest or go to bed: there was a brooding threat in the breathless night air.  As he stared out into the gloom, a black shadow moved under the trees; the gate seemed to open of its own accord and close again without a sound. iv

The figure prosopopoeia v, personification, is found in the poetry of Homer, medieval sagas and epics, and naturally enough in Milton; though which, in the serious poetry of the twentieth century has all but died out vi.  It is telling that it is alive and well in the literature of high fantasy, which “[treats] the life of heroes and kings.”
In the example above, the night is breathless and the night air is brooding.  Tolkien is, perhaps, unique in the way in which he uses prosopopoeia to effectively create an elemental force that both threatens and sustains the characters within it.  The landscape contains the same elemental force as the good and evil that struggles to control it.  Adding to the impression of the animate within the inanimate, the gate seems “to open of its own accord and close again”.  The world itself becomes, as here, a character within its own universe.
A second figure, perhaps less common today, found in epic poetry is amplificatio vii.  The Longman Dictionary of Poetic Terms provides the following definition:
The elaboration or, sometimes, the contraction of a statement (as in Meios).  Cicero considered this device of enlargement and ornament “one of the highest distinctions of eloquence.”  Quintilian listed four types of a.: 1.) by augmentation (incrementum), 2) by comparison, 3) by reasoning, and 4) by accumulation (congeries).  The device is prominent in epic and tragic poetry.

The figure of amplification is one often confused by rhetoricians.  It is, for example, treated by some as its own figure and by others it is treated as a category of figures.  The term amplification shall be used for the category and amplificatio as the figure.  The figure may be seen in the following:
When he joined Ged and Serret for supper he sat silent, looking up at his young wife sometimes with a hard, covetous glance.  Then Ged pitied her.  She was like a white deer caged, like a white bird wing-clipped, like a silver ring on an old man’s finger…viii

Syntactic parallelism is used — a series of similes — to elaborate upon the nature of Serret.  It may also be observed more fully in the following paragraph:
As their eyes met, a bird sang aloud in the branches of the tree.  In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the waterfalling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves…ix

Examples like these are far less frequent, as shall be shown, in the writings of Robin McKinley and Lloyd Alexander, revealing a concerted effort by Le Guin to recreate in the realm of prose the techniques previously reserved for the poetry of the epic tradition.  This figure may also be found in Tolkien.  The following example of amplificatio is achieved by the parallelism of anologia (analogy) which in A Handbook to Sixteenth Century Rhetoric, is described by Quintillion as a figure “used for amplification, [that] seeks to rise from the less to the greater…”
The hobbits ran about for a while on the grass, as he told them.  Then they lay basking in the sun [1] with the delight of those that have been wafted suddenly from the bitter winter to a friendly clime, or [2]of people that, after being long ill and bedridden, wake one day to find that they are unexpectedly well…x

The third figure which will be considered in the creation of the oratorical style is called the Trope.  Again referring to The Longman Dictionary of Poetic Terms the following definition is offered:
A general term for FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE, that is, language whose semantic meaning must be taken in a metaphorical or figurative sense rather than its literal sense.  Poetic devices such as METAPHOR, METONYMY, SIMILE, and SYNECDOCHE fall under the categories of tropes.

We will concern ourselves only with Metaphor, and at that, only with Verbal Metaphor (2), as it is considered the most potent form of metaphor.  The paragraph following provides two examples:
Once more she lifted her strange bright eyes to him, and her gaze pierced him so that he trembled as if with cold.  Yet there was fear in her face, as if she sought his help but was too proud to ask it. xi

When Le Guin writes that “once more she lifted her strange bright eyes to him”, the use of the verb lifted is an example of Trope — figurative language.  It is a figure which, among other effects, can add a tremendous degree of weight and formality, can elevate the prose idiom by introducing a primarily poetic affect.  The formality introduced further reinforces the presence of the fictive narrator, the orator, mentioned earlier.  Compare this with a comparable passage from Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown.

She looked up at him and smiled: a lover’s smile, sweet and brilliant, but it was directed at him; her eyes looked at something invisible that she herself did not recognize, and yet his heart stirred in a way he did not recognize. xii

We perceive the character’s actions directly.  It may be said of it that it is less poetic and therefore more immediate.  It is stylistically compatible with the low mimetic mode which “deals with the life of ordinary people, with the everyday life we live, seen from the inside.”  We do as the character does and the division between narrator and character is blurred.  The reader’s initial impression is not of an oratorical delivery.  It may be argued that “her eyes looked at something” is an example of prosopopoeia, however it is not.  Prosopopoeia relies upon catachresis (3), of which this is not an example.  Le Guin’s “Her gaze pierced him” is an example of catachresis as is McKinley’s “his heart stirred,” although McKinley’s verbal metaphor is so overused as to be more readily considered a dead metaphor.

Another figure, antisagoge, especially with the conjunctive FOR, is ubiquitous especially in the prose of fable and fairy tale but is also found in fantasy.  It is rarely found, significantly, outside of these genres.  It is often over-used by clumsy writers because of its feeling that it elevates prose.  The Longman Dictionary offers the following definition:
A logical figure dealing with cause and effect, or antecedent and consequence.  In a., the antecedent and consequence are linked together in a logical dimension: “Do as your father commands / and you will inherit his lands…”  A. Is often used in discursive as well as poetic PROSE.

The following is an example which follows immediately on the paragraph already quoted from page 119 and so some of that paragraph will be included.
He saw… how they had used his fear to lead him, and how they would, once they had him, have kept him.  They had saved him from the shadow, indeed, for they did not want him to be possessed by the shadow until he had become a slave of the Stone.

The bolded portion is the consequence and the italicized portion is the antecedent.  In this construction the antecedent and the consequence are reversed.  The figure may also be found in Tolkien, though with less frequency than with Le Guin.
Many eyes turned to Elrond in fear and wonder as he told of the Elven-smiths of Eregion and their friendship of Moria, and their eagerness for knowledge, by which Sauron ensnared them.  For in that time [Sauron] was not yet evil to behold… xiii

The next figure, one of the most common of the six figures considered here, found especially in the prose of high fantasy, and especially in the writing Le Guin, is Acervatio or, as it is more commonly known in Greek, polysyndeton.  The Longman Dictionary of Poetic Terms again provides the definition defining it as “a grammatical device of rhythm and balance in rhetoric that employs the repetition of conjunctions to effect measured thought and solemnity…” (Bold by Author)  It should be noted that Quintillion includes adverbs and pronouns as characteristic connecting particles. xiv It is a rhetorical device which, if we are to use Milton’s Paradise Lost as a model of the high mimetic mode, finds its home most clearly in this mode.  The following example will suffice as the figure is so frequent as to need no further examples.
Now what Pechvarry and his wife and the witch saw was this: the young wizard stopped midway in his spell, and held the child a while motionless.  Then he had laid little Ioeth gently down on the pallet, and had risen, and stood silent, staff in hand. xv

I have only bolded those conjunctions which are grammatically unnecessary, serving rather stylistic concerns.  The figure of polysyndeton, that is, describes the use of conjunctions which unnecessarily connect words or phrases in a series.  As an extension to this is Le Guin’s polysyndetic use of and and but between phrases and sentences.  The following paragraph illustrates Le Guin’s extensive use of the technique, — an uncommon feature, significantly, in the low mimetic style; and which illustrates the writer’s conscious effort to recreate oratory.  The polysyndetic conjunctions have been bolded.
To Petchvarry it seemed that the wizard also was dead.  His wife wept, but he was utterly bewildered.  But the witch had some hearsay knowledge concerning magery and the ways a true wizard may go, and she saw to it that Ged, cold and lifeless as he lay, was not treated as a dead man but as one sick or tranced. xvi

The final figure, hyperbaton, is such a frequent figure in the realm of fable, fairy tale, and high fantasy as to need little explanation.  It is a “generic name for rhetorical figures that work through a reorganization of normal word order.”  A specific type of hyperbaton, for example, is anastrophe (involving only two words), a “grammatical construction in which an INVERSION or reversal of the normal word order takes place for the sake of emphasis in meaning, rhythm, melody or tone.” xvii Tolkien uses hyperbaton and its various types throughout The Lord of the Rings where it heightens the tone of the language.  “Like a deer he sprang away.  Through the trees he sped.  On and on he led them, tireless and swift, now that his mind was at last made up.  The woods about the lake they left behind.” xviii It is also especially frequent where the intent of the author writing fantasy is to obsolesce the language spoken by the characters.

The Analysis

The six rhetorical figures described above are not those most commonly found in the oratorical style of high fantasy.  Other figures are equally common within this style — simile, hypotaxis (subordination) and polysyndetic connectives in the writings of Le Guin and, hyperbaton and prepositional metaphor in the writings of Tolkien are so ubiquitous as to seem less a reflection of style than of an author’s habit of thought.  I have chosen the six figures above only because they were the first of the many I happened to isolate.
Nevertheless, these figures are common to all writers in whatever medium.  None of these figures are exclusive and so the distinction is one of degree.  The following table will compare the frequency of these figures in six books:  A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin, The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis xix, The Taran Wanderer by Lloyd Alexander xx, The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley xxi, Milton’s Paradise Lost xxii, and Shizuko’s Daughter by Kyoko Mori xxiii.  The final two are a control.  The novel by Mori provides an example of contemporary realistic fiction.  If the suppositions concerning these figures are correct, that they are figures primarily associated with the high mimetic mode, with oratory, then they should occur with the least frequency in Mori — for there is no need to persuade when one writes realistic fiction — and with the most frequency in Milton.  The first fifteen pages from each book will be examined.  Narrative and dialogue will be treated separately.
Lastly, it ought to be said that these numbers only point to a larger pattern.  It might be argued that such a small sampling hardly argues for a consistent style.  Yet if all the rhetorical figures used by the writers of High Fantasy (those writing within the oratorical style) were tallied, they would prove this sampling to be an accurate indicator of a larger stylistic consistency.

Conclusion

McKinley and Lewis use the least figures followed by Alexander.  Alexander and Lewis’ fantasies are clearly written for a younger audience and so the use of oratorical figures is restrained and of the most obvious type.  There is no sense of the orator.  Yet neither is the orator’s voice present in McKinley’s work, which, in tone, comes closest to the contemporary realistic fiction of Mori.  Depending on the experience and preference of the reader, the lack of the orator’s presence may produce a disjunctive affect and may even harm her attempt to create a secondary world.  She is, in effect, using a low mimetic style in a high mimetic mode; she is speaking of times past with a twentieth century voice.  As is apparent, Tolkien and Le Guin use the most figures of oratory, writers who are considered to have most successfully created a secondary world, no doubt, reinforced by the oratorical style.  The oratorical voice removes the narrator into the world which he or she is describing, and so helps to create a more self contained universe.

1 The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings offer two very different narrative voices. It wasnít until the Lord of the Rings, in fact, that Tolkien attempted and succeeded in creating a high style, in the same sense that Paradise Lost is written in a high style. The narrative of the Hobbit is a much more personable style. This is achieved primarily by the rhetorical figure Aversio, the sudden alteration from the third person to the second (which never occurs in The Lord of the Rings)p. 160, and by Digressio, or more simply digressions, lending to the narrative a certain home-spun confiding quality.

2“Some verb metaphors are derived from verbs, some from adjectives, and some from compressed noun phrases. The sentence ‘I have blinded myself with optimism’ could have been derived from either the verb ‘to blind’ or the adjective ‘blind.’ We can transform the noun simile ‘He ran away as fast as a rocket can fly’ into the verb m. ‘He rocketed away…’” (The Longman Dictionary of Poetic Terms. See Metaphor.)

3“…A figure of similarity and dissimilarity, which uses a word that belongs in one dimension of meaning in another dimension. ‘Her hands sniffed into the bag of candy,’ in which hands act as if they were a nose.” (The Longman Dictionary of Poetic Terms)

i “Literary Realism and Its Effects” 6.

ii J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in his Tree and Leaf, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1965, p.47.

iii Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1957, p. 33.

1. If superior in degree to other men and to the environment of other men, the hero is a divine being, and the story about him will be a myth in the common sense of a story about a god.

2. If superior in degree to other men and to his environment the hero is the typical hero of romance, whose actions are marvelous but who is himself identified as a human being. The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power violate no rule of probability once the postulates of romance have been established. Here we have moved from myth, properly so called, into legend, folk tale, m‰rchen, and their literary affiliates and derivatives…

3. If superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environment, the hero is a leader. He has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature. This is the hero of the high mimetic mode, of most epic and tragedy…

4. If superior neither to other men nor to his environment, the hero is one of us: we respond to a sense of his common humanity, and demand from the poet the same canons of probability that we find in our own experience. This gives us the hero of the low mimetic mode, of most comedy and of realistic fiction…

5. If inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironic mode. This is still true when the reader feels that he is or might be in the same situation as the situation is being judged by the norms of greater freedom.

iv J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, New York, Ballantine Books, 1973, 238.

v Prosopopoeia,” The Longman Dictionary of Poetic Terms, 1989 ed.

“A rhetorical figure of definition that through vivid and imaginative description lends human qualities to an abstraction, or to an animate or inanimate object.”

vi “Personification,” The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1993 ed.

“The following enumeration of abstractions in Gray’s [18th c.] ëOde on a Distant Prospect of Eton College shows how such personifications had lost their capacity to produce emotional effects like those in medieval morality plays or in Milton:

These shall the fury Passions tear
The vultures of the mind,
Disdainful Anger, pallid Fear,
And Shame that skulks behind;
Or pining Love shall waste their youth,
Or Jealousy with rankling tooth,
That inly gnaws the secret heart,
And Envy wan, and faded Care
Grim-visaged, comfortless Despair,
And sorrow’s piercing dart.

vii Lee A. Sonnino, A Handbook to Sixteenth Century Rhetoric, New York, Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1968 (see Amplificatio).

viii Le Guin, 114.

ix Le Guin, 35.

x J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, New York, Ballantine Books, 1973, p. 199.

xi Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea, New York, Bantam Books, 1977, p.118.

xii Robin McKinley, The Hero and the Crown, New York, Greenwillow Books, 1984, p. 145.

xiii Ibid. 318.

xiv The Handbook of Sixteenth Century Rhetoric, 19.

xv Le Guin, 81.

xvi Le Guin, 81-82.

xvii The Longman Dictionary of Poetic Terms.

xviii Tolkien, The Two Towers, 26.

xix C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe, New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1968.

xx Lloyd Alexander, The Taran Wanderer, New York, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1967.

xxi Robin McKinley, The Hero and The Crown, New York, Greenwillow Books, 1984.

xxii John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Roy Flannagan, New York, MacMillan Publishing Company, 1993.

xxiii Kyoko Mori, Shizukoís Daughter, New York, Henry Holt and Company, 1993.