Ursula Le Guin, page 4 of 6

Published in 1994, Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon is a celebration of great literature. It has achieved a certain notoriety for Bloom’s taking a stance against what he saw as the unwanted politicisation of literary criticism (‘the School of Resentment’ as he calls it, being deliberately provocative), when for him the key to all ‘deep reading’ is the experience of the individual, alone with a book. ‘Such a reader,’ he says, ‘does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.’ But the real core of the book is Bloom’s attempt to, as he puts it, ‘confront greatness directly’. Doing this, he necessarily talks about ‘the canon’ — his particular Valhalla of great works from Western literature — but whether you agree with his choices or not is beside the point. It’s the conclusions he draws, or the aspects he celebrates, that are the reason to read The Western Canon. My own experience certainly chimes with his:

‘When you read a canonical work for a first time you encounter a stranger, an uncanny startlement rather than a fulfilment of expectations.’

As well as the standard reasons you’d expect for a work to be considered great — ‘mastery of figurative language, originality, cognitive power, knowledge, exuberance of diction’ — Bloom adds another, ‘strangeness’:

‘…a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange.’

Wildest of Bloom’s many wild ideas is that the way we’ve come to see ourselves as human beings has been, at least in part, formed by the representations of human beings in our greatest literature. For him, Shakespeare is the greatest of the greats, and the most influential on human nature itself. His pronouncement that ‘The more one reads and ponders the plays of Shakespeare, the more one realises that the accurate stance towards them is one of awe’, may sound overblown, but frankly, it’s nice to be in the presence of someone who allows themselves a little bombast when talking about what they love. ‘Shakespearean drama,’ Bloom writes, ‘seems at once utterly familiar and yet too rich to absorb all at once.’ And whether you agree or you don’t — or whether such statements could ever be lived up to by any work by any writer — I certainly find them inspiring, both as a reader as a writer. And that’s one of the things I like about this book: it makes me want to read better, to read ‘deeper’ or ‘stronger’, as he puts it. Bloom’s model as a reader (and critic) is Dr Johnson, who is, he says, ‘everything a wise critic should be: he directly confronts greatness with a total response, to which he brings his complete self.’

Reading properly, then, makes you both human and whole.

Bloom’s canon is no mere dusty list. It is, rather, an eternal battlefield on which current works must fight it out with the greats of the past to win a place: ‘a conflict between past genius and present aspiration, in which the prize is literary survival or canonical inclusion.’ Bloom’s judgements and summaries of writers and their works have a wonderful strangeness of their own, being utterly unverifiable but always illuminating, intriguing, and provocative, like the literary criticism version of Zen koans. ‘Shakespeare,’ he says, ‘is the inventor of psychoanalysis; Freud, its codifier.’ Or, to put it another way: ‘Hamlet did not have an Oedipus complex, but Freud certainly had a Hamlet complex and perhaps psychoanalysis is a Shakespeare complex.’ Later he says, ‘Freud, slyly following Shakespeare, gave us our map of the mind; Kafka intimated to us that we could not hope to use it to save ourselves, even from ourselves.’

The thing that brought me to Bloom’s book was when someone told me he’d included David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus in his long list of canonical works (a list required of him by his publishers, apparently, rather than being something he set out to compile). In an earlier book, Agon (from 1982), Bloom devotes a chapter to sketching out a ‘theory of literary fantasy’, which he then applies, in some detail, to Lindsay’s novel (as well as offering an explanation of sorts for his one venture into fiction, his — dull, in my opinion — attempt at a Lindsay-esque novel, The Flight to Lucifer). This ‘theory of literary fantasy’ is short, but I’ve always found it to apply whenever I pause to test it on a work of fantasy I’m reading. Rather than an all-encompassing theory, it’s an attempt to understand a peculiar aspect of fantastic literature: why, when given the freedom to invent anything, and therefore to potentially indulge oneself in nothing but power-fantasies and pleasurable daydreams, great fantasy literature ends up confronting genuinely difficult and meaningful themes — in other words, what rescues truly good fantasy from the accusation of escapism:

‘What promises to be the least anxious of literary modes becomes much the most anxious… The cosmos of fantasy, of the pleasure/pain principle, is revealed in the shape of a nightmare, and not of hallucinatory wish-fulfilment.’

Fantasy, for Bloom, is the ‘compounding of Narcissism and Prometheanism’ (which sounds like a neat counterpart to Brian Aldiss’s definition of SF as ‘hubris clobbered by Nemesis’). It certainly applies to the best of the fantasy books I’ve reviewed on this site — think of, for instance, Ursula Le Guin’s Threshold, where two characters seek to escape from their daily lives in a fantasy world, only find themselves on a quest to face something even more dangerous and difficult; or a similar situation in William Mayne’s A Game of Dark, where an escape from a difficult home life is illuminated by a parallel quest to destroy a truly disgusting dragon.

Bloom’s The Western Canon has persuaded me to read a few of his choice of great books (among them, appropriately, Jane Austen’s Persuasion), though by no means all of them. But always, dipping into it, I’m revitalised as a reader. My canon is not, and will never be, Bloom’s (I’d put Peake’s Gormenghast books in there for sure, as well as Le Guin’s first two Earthsea books), but I can’t help but agree with him about the core purpose of reading, and of writing about what one reads:

‘Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.’

‘Our ultimate inwardness’ — the thing I, for one, certainly search for between the covers of a book.

Although there’s said to be a giant buried beneath a plain the elderly couple Axl and Beatrice cross early in their quest to join their son in another village, the ‘buried giant’ Ishiguro’s novel’s title refers to is metaphorical, not literal: it is the violence and atrocities of a recent past in which Christian Britons under ‘the great and beloved Arthur, now many years in heaven’ subdued the pagan Saxons, and which resulted in the two peoples now living together in apparent peace. But this is also a land under a strange curse: a mist of forgetfulness has fallen on its people, and many of them have almost no recollection of those terrible events. Axl and Beatrice have uneasy feelings about unremembered difficulties in their own long marriage, too, and can’t quite recall even what their son looks like, though they’ve set out to find him, always sure he’s only a village away in the pre-hedgerow English wilds. On their way, they encounter several figures who bring them back to a realisation of what the land has been through, including the aged Sir Gawain (long charged with killing the dragon Querig, whose breath some say is the cause of the land’s forgetfulness), and the young saxon warrior Wistan, who has his own reasons for travelling from his people’s native fenlands to complete the task Sir Gawain is tarrying over. Rumour has it the local lord Brennus has found a way to tame a dragon so it can be used in a genocidal war he intends to make against the local Saxon people, a rumour the militant Saxons of Wistan’s country believe because they, unlike Axl and Beatrice, remember the betrayal and slaughter of innocents that ended the recent wars.

This is not new thematic territory for Ishiguro, whose past novels — A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World, and The Remains of the Day — explored the idea of buried, terrible secrets scattered among the recollections of seemingly blameless, otherwise unremarkable lives, particularly (with those latter two) in relation to the events of the Second World War. An article on The Guardian goes into why Ishiguro chose to set his latest assault on this theme in a fantasticated Dark Ages England:

‘[Ishiguro] said The Buried Giant’s fantasy setting served as a neutral environment to explore the idea of collective memory and how societies heal after atrocities by forgetting the past. He revealed that he considered Bosnia, America and post-second world war Japan and France as potential settings, but worried that sort of a recent historical scenario would make the story too political. “I always feel the pull of the metaphorical landscape, I am not a straightforward realist,” he said. “As far as I am concerned, I am trying to make a universal statement.”’

Unfortunately, Ishiguro found himself stepping on an unanticipated Buried Giant of his own, no way near as terrible as past war crimes or genocide, but still incendiary to some of the more Saxon (pagan, angry, armed with tech) areas of the internet: the 20th century’s culture war between genre and the literary establishment, now long decided (the genre side won, though there are diehards who remain unaware of the fact) because the internet undermined the cultural elite’s ivory strongholds (literary magazines, print reviews, the major publishers). What was once a ghetto within the world of publishing is more mainstream now than the mainstream itself. But some survivors of the conflict — Ursula Le Guin being one — still smart when they hear someone protesting, ‘It’s not fantasy’ or ‘It’s not SF’, and rattle their sabres. I don’t think Ishiguro intended to distance himself from the genre, but he evidently didn’t walk as carefully as he needed to over this particular unquiet burial mound.

Is the book fantasy? Undoubtedly. As well as the dragon Querig, there are ogres, pixies, and some sort of undead peeled-looking dog-thing met in an underground escape-passage. These aren’t treated exactly as a genre writer would treat them, keen to point out how they’ve re-thought and revitalised standard tropes. Ishiguro handles them almost too lightly for the fantasy reader in me (though in a way that recalls Gene Wolfe). His ogres are almost never glimpsed fully or alive — the first appearance of one in the book, outside rumour, is of a severed lump of featureless flesh, at first mistaken for a head, later realised to be a sliced-off piece of shoulder, while another is seen dying at the bottom of a pit, covered in the remains of a torn-apart poisoned goat(!). The pixies are the most intriguing. They get one brief appearance:

“A sound made him turn, and he saw at the other end of the boat, still bathed in orange light, the old woman slumped against the bow with pixies – too many to count – swarming over her. At first glance she looked contented, as if being smothered in affection, while the small, scrawny creatures ran through her rags and over her face and shoulders. And now there came more and more out of the river, climbing over the rim of the boat.”

I’d like to know more about those pixies, but unlike your true fantasy author, I doubt Ishiguro intends The Buried Giant to be the first in a series, so that’s all we’re getting. The dragon, meanwhile — which I was quite prepared to accept was going to be wholly projected superstition — turns out to be an actual dragon, but like the creature met at the end of Le Guin’s Threshold, or Mayne’s A Game of Dark, one whose monstrousness only serves to emphasise the genuinely human element of the evil or wrongness that dominates The Buried Giant’s Britain, rather than being a full, Smaug-like evil in its own right.

I found The Buried Giant patchy. Moments really worked for me. The way, for instance, the warrior Wistan sees a monastery the travellers visit as the re-purposed Saxon stronghold it is, down to the way various parts of it exist for no other reason than to trap and kill the enemy in the largest possible numbers. Occasionally, though — as with the last Ishiguro novel I read, and the one that put me off reading him, When We Were Orphans — I found the world and characters almost ludicrously unconvincing, as when Sir Gawain (in a slightly age-addled reverie, it has to be said), recalls helping a woman get revenge for the death of her husband. A battle is raging (or is just over), yet Gawain puts her on his horse, rides straight to the man she wants to kill, despatches the three other soldiers with him, and all without any sign of any other enemies, even though the man she wants to face is presumably important enough to be in some sort of encampment. And then another important character just wanders in. It’s more like the sort of abbreviated battle scene you get in Shakespeare, but at least there you accept the lack of realism because it’s being staged. Here, I just couldn’t help wishing Ishiguro had concentrated a bit on making it more realistically convincing, despite being fantasy. But then there’s the occasional bit of writing which surely even Le Guin would agree passes her Poughkeepsie test. There’s no denying this particular warrior is of Elfland (even though a Saxon):

‘The giant, once well buried, now stirs. When soon he rises, as surely he will, the friendly bonds between us will prove as knots young girls make with the stems of small flowers. Men will burn their neighbours’ houses by night. Hang children from trees at dawn. The rivers will stink with corpses bloated from their days of voyaging. And even as they move on, our armies will grow larger, swollen by anger and thirst for vengeance.’

It’s not a plot-driven book, but a theme-driven one, and as usual with such books, I find they may dissatisfy along the way, but they usually end well. The final chapter, in which the lesser buried secrets of Axl and Beatrice’s marriage are brought out and put to the test by a boatman who can only be the Ferryman himself, is both moving and meaningful. Elsewhere shot through with moments that work and some that don’t quite, I’d say The Buried Giant is not as good as it could have been were it a full-blown fantasy (which has often dealt with similar themes to Ishiguro’s — the Harry Potter series, for instance, in its later novels, deals with the past atrocities of Voldemort’s first spree and the way people try to forget this ever happened, and how this allows a new, fascistic magical government to gain power), but it didn’t leave me unsatisfied at the end.

Following my mewsings on Michael Moorcock’s Wizardry & Wild Romance, I thought I’d take a look at another book on imaginative fiction (fantasy and science fiction, in this case) which I came across early on — in one of those wonderful bookshop sales where a single table would be crammed with all sorts, from academic obscurities to battered, failed bestsellers, and where you really could make discoveries, back before the internet neatly ordered everything — Ursula Le Guin’s collection of essays, introductions and talks, The Language of the Night (or the revised edition, anyway, issued by The Women’s Press in 1989). This book contains some touchstones of writing about fantasy that have stayed with me ever since.

In ‘The Child and the Shadow’, Le Guin retells a Hans Anderson fable and relates it to Jung’s ideas on archetypes (particularly the one he calls the Shadow) and the process of individuation. Fantasy, she says, ‘is the natural, the appropriate language for the recounting of the spiritual journey and the struggle of good and evil in the soul… Fantasy is the language of the inner self.’ This led to me making several attempts on Jung’s own tangled thickets of prose — books about his ideas are usually better than those he wrote himself, with Man and His Symbols being perhaps the best (it has pictures!). And, whether Jung’s ideas are ‘true’ or not — whether they’re the roots of a very peculiar science or (far more likely) an extended, imaginative metaphor for the inner life — I’ve always found them useful.

In ‘Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction’, Le Guin talks about what a myth is, in terms of what a writer is trying to do when they write fantasy or science fiction, and how it comes not purely from the unconscious, or the conscious, but from an equal meeting of the two, a forging of something somehow universal from the deeply personal — something another favourite writer of mine, Alan Garner, has said, too (‘A writer has to live an insoluble paradox. He requires a public, and can achieve it only by becoming most private.’ To which Le Guin would no doubt have said, ‘Less of the “he”, please.’).

The essential essay, from a fantasy reader’s point of view, is ‘From Elfland to Poughkeepsie’. Here, Le Guin provides an almost cruelly neat test to tell the would-be fantasy that just mimics the proper use of faraway never-never lands, dragons, wizards and magic, from a genuine emanation of Elfland. For Le Guin, it’s style that makes something fantasy. She praises Dunsany, E R Eddison, Kenneth Morris and James Branch Cabell, and says Leiber and Zelazny could do better (‘When humour is intended the characters talk colloquial American English, or even slang, and at earnest moments they revert to old formal usages.’). The test is simple: take any passage, change the names from mock-fantasy ones to mundane ones, and see if it still reads as fantasy. She uses as an example a passage from Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni series, which neatly summed up my own feelings the one time I tried to read it — it’s not fantasy, it’s fancy dress.

Elsewhere, there are good short essays on Philip K Dick, James Tiptree Jr., and Tolkien. Moorcock, of course, hated Tolkien with a profound hatred, but for Le Guin, he’s the high point of the genre, a writer she’s glad she didn’t read too early, because that might have skewed her own writing:

‘Those who fault Tolkien on the Problem of Evil are usually those who have an answer to the Problem of Evil — which he did not. What kind of answer, after all, is it to drop a magic ring into an imaginary volcano?’

But here, Le Guin is doing a very different job from Moorcock. She is, mostly, defending fantasy and science fiction for their own sakes — often, defending imagination for its own sake — rather than sifting out the good from the bad. (She does have the occasional go at a specific author — not as frothingly vitriolic as Moorcock, but just as damning: ‘The recent fantasy best-seller Jonathan Livingstone Seagull is a serious book, unmistakably sincere. It is also intellectually, ethically and emotionally trivial. The author has not thought things through. He is pushing one of the beautifully packaged Instant Answers we specialise in in this country.’)

Like Wizardry and Wild Romance, The Language of the Night is very much of its time, as a lot of the essays chart the early stages of SF’s emergence from the ghettoes of the past:

‘SF is pretty well grown up now. We’ve been through our illiterate stage, our latent nonsexual stage, and the stage when you can’t think of anything but sex, and the other stages, and we really do seem to be on the verge of maturity now.’

But some of Le Guin’s exhortations are just as relevant. In ‘Stalin in the Soul’ — a wonderfully-argued piece about the art of art — Le Guin holds up Zamyatin’s We as an example of what she thinks is the best of all SF novels, yet one that was written under a repressive regime, and only ever published outside its author’s home country. She compares this to the sort of art most often produced in her own, free country, which is all too often self-enslaved to the market.

Perhaps the problem nowadays is that fantasy and SF — in certain forms — are too easily accepted, so much so that we fail to remember what they can do, what they can be. ‘Fantasy,’ Le Guin says, ‘is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is.’ It’s a jolt to read this, in a culture swamped with fantastic imagery, in novels, films, and games. It reminds you there are really profound, great, even dangerous things to be found in works of the imagination, and that they are, perhaps, just as rare today, even when fantasy and SF are so much more culturally acceptable.

‘The great fantasies, myths and tales are indeed like dreams: they speak from the unconscious to the unconscious, in the language of the unconscious — symbol and archetype. Though they use words, they work the way music does: they short-circuit verbal reasoning, and go straight to the thoughts that lie too deep to utter.’