Fantastic Language: Lord Dunsany and Catherynne Valente

A fantasy writer can summon magic through story and setting and things that happen, or through the power of words. Many writers try to do both; Tolkien is the most obvious example. Most writers, however, do not possess these two powers in anything like the same degree. Today I take up books by two writers who try to bespell us mainly with their words. 

Lord Dunsany (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the eighteenth Baron Dunsany) was born in 1878 and to me his writing feels deeply Edwardian. He lived for much of his life in Dunsany Castle, near Dublin. Although he wrote a bunch of books – I have seen numbers varying from "more than 50" to "more than 90" – he is famous these days for The King of Elfland's Daughter, published in 1924.

The story is very simple. A mortal king sends his son to woo and wed the daughter of the King of Elfland. With some help, he succeeds. They have a child. Eventually, the elf princess misses her home and goes back. The hero quests for her again, while their son grows into a different sort of hero. Eventually, all is resolved by magic. 

But that is not the point. The point is the evocation of the eldritch, the magical, the strange, and the wonderful by the deployment of prose that drips with paradox, archaism, and the highest extremes of extravagance. Some examples:

Near the Castle of Erl there lived a lonely witch, on high land near the thunder, which used to roll in Summer along the hills. There she dwelt by herself in a narrow cottage of thatch and roamed the high fields alone to gather the thunderbolts. . . .

Then Alveric strode away and came to the field he knew, which he remembered to be divided by the nebulous border of twilight. And indeed he had no sooner come to the field than he saw all the toadstools leaning over one way, and that the way he was going; for just as thorn trees all lean away from the sea, so toadstools and every plant that has any touch of mystery, such as foxgloves, mulleins and certain kinds of orchis, all lean toward Elfland. By this one may know before one has heard a murmur of waves, or before one has guessed an influence of magical things, that one comes, as the case may be, to the sea or the border of Elfland. . . .

He stood there with the cries of Earth faint in the late evening, behind him, and the mellow glow of the soft earthly twilight; and before him, close to his face, the utter silence of Elfland, and the barrier that made that silence, gleaming with its strange beauty. And now he thought no more of earthly things, but only gazed into that wall of twilight, as phrophets tampering with forbidden lore gaze into cloudy crystals. The little cries of the earthly evening behind him he heeded no more nor heard. And with all these little cries were lost to him also the ways and the needs of men, the things they plan, the things they toil for and hope for, and all the little things their patience achieves. . . .

The Elf King stirred not, nor changed; but held to that moment in which he had found content; and laid its influence over all his dominions, for the good and welfare of Elfland; for he had what all our troubled world with all its changes seeks, and finds so rarely and must at once cast it away. He had found content and held it.

It is sometimes lovely and sometimes frankly tedious. When it works, it evokes the longing one might feel standing by the ruin of an ancient castle, wishing fervently that a gate into wonder might open in the gray stone. When it doesn't work, it makes you wish the story were more compelling or the characters at least halfway plausible. 

Lord Dunsany's words are like the notes of an elvish music, calling us away to a more beautiful place; Catherynne Valente's are like the spears picadors thrust into the bull to drive it mad. Valente is a contemporary writer, born in 1979. I first discovered her through a novel for older children, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Boat of her Own Making (2011). As I said when I reviewed it, I was immediately captured by her language, which seemed to me to evoke perfectly the feel of a fairy tale.

I have now read two more of her books, most recently her first, Labyrinth (2004). The point of Labyrinth is also to take our minds away to someplace else, but this Labyrinth is nothing like Elfland. It is an absurd, grotesque dreamscape. The language is like a psychedelic drug, destroying our normal sense of reality and replacing it with an incomprehensible vision. I was reminded of the visions of Carl Jung and Philip K. Dick, absurd on the face but hinting at mysterious depths. But if there are any mysterious depths, I confess that I did not find them.

Our narrator is a nameless female being of unknown origin:

I am the Walker. The Seeker-After. I am the Compass-Eater and the Wall-Climber. I am the Woman of the Maze.

An entirely typical passage goes like this: 

A half-realized body stretches out coral-encrusted fingers to seize it. Useless, of course it is useless – Each spindle-moment gone before my limbs could ever escape the glassine softness of their essential corporeality, could achieve escape velocity and roar away from themselves in a bloom of fire. I walk (will walk, have walked, I told you there is no coming or going here) in the Maze, a spinning silver coin in the sky, and the names of the flowers float out of my honeycombed skin, the mystic botany I once knew when was (am, will be) wrapped in my sanguine turban.

Our narrator wanders, feeling her mind slip away, meeting various spirit guides that don't seem to be much help, seeing strange wonders, speaking strange words. Another snippet:

And. There are here tremors of Doorways. They appear in the morning like dew-dampened butterflies, manic and clever. They travel in packs. At night the hinges change from right to left, or vanish completely. Some are no more than flaps of fur, iridescent in the light of the walls, or sweeping veils of gauze and silk, long curtains like a woman's hair. Some are hard and ornate, carved with a fantastic code of Arabic and Greek, letters drawn in a paste of crushed diamonds and the hooves of a drowned horse, written with the elegant tip of a black cigarette holder.

I find this sort of writing very impressive, and also tempting; it might be fun to try to write like this, to spin out dreams and visions without worrying over whether anything makes sense, to let the sound of the words guide my mind rather than the dictates of the story. But, ultimately, I find books like this very hard to read. I finished The King of Elfland's Daughter mainly because it is a classic near the roots of modern fantasy, and The Labyrinth only because I had already decided to write this post.

I want the books I read to have stories, and characters. I want them to make sense. I have never been tempted by vision, in the form of drugs or any other way. I prefer to see clearly. I wonder if this is a limitation. Are there, perhaps, truths that I cannot see because I am so wedded to the mundane, too earthbound to hear the call of the woodpecker who would be my spirit guide?

Lord Dunsany was a friend of W.B. Yeats, whose poetry I love but whose philosophy sounds to me like gibberish. Thinking over these two books, I have a sense that their language is more suited to short poems than to novels. That way, the way of the quick insight and the tremor of feeling, they can hint at meaning, can seize us for a moment from this world. Stretched out to 180 pages, they cease to charm or  to summon, and their lack of any truth to tell us beyond the hints of another world begins to drag and grate.