Beyond Horatio's Philosophy: The Fantasy of Peter S. Beagle. David Stevens
Haven’t you ever been in a fairy tale before?” And on the next page he says: “It’s a great relief to find out about Prince Lír. I’ve been waiting for this tale to turn up a leading man.”
Another reference to the story within the story occurs shortly after Schmendrick turns the unicorn into a human being:
“You’re in the story with the rest of us now, and you must go with it, whether you will or no. If you want to find your people, if you want to become a unicorn again, then you must follow the fairy tale to King Haggard’s castle, and wherever else it chooses to take you. The story cannot end without the princess.”
The exaggeration that we saw in Beagle’s description of Molly’s typical day is enlarged upon in Prince Lír’s discussion with Molly about his deeds:
“I have swum four rivers, each in full flood and none less than a mile wide. I have climbed seven mountains never before climbed, slept three nights in the Marsh of the Hanged Men, and walked alive out of that forest where the flowers burn your eyes and the nightingales sing poison. I have ended my betrothal to the princess I had agreed to marry—and if you don’t think that was a heroic deed, you don’t know her mother. I have vanquished exactly fifteen black knights waiting by fifteen fords in their black pavilions, challenging all who came to cross. And I’ve long since lost count of the witches in the thorny woods, the giants, the demons disguised as damsels; the glass hills, fatal riddles, and terrible tasks; the magic apples, rings, lamps, potions, swords, cloaks, boots, neckties, and nightcaps. Not to mention the winged horses, the basilisks and sea serpents, and all the rest of the livestock.”
Any one of these deeds, of course, would be sufficient to win the hand of the fair lady in the average fairy tale—but this is far from the average fairy tale. Prince Lír knows the way things are, and he tells the Lady Amalthea:
“My lady.… I am a hero. It is a trade, no more, like weaving or brewing, and like them it has its own tricks and knacks and small arts. There are ways of perceiving witches, and of knowing poison streams; there are certain weak spots that all dragons have, and certain riddles that hooded strangers tend to set you. But the true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock on the witch’s door when she is away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophesies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.”
After he becomes King, Lír says to Schmendrick: “A hero is entitled to his happy ending, when it comes at last.” But since Lír cannot have the Lady Amalthea, a substitute must arrive, and Beagle obliges. Just before Schmendrick and Molly ride off into the sunset, “out of this story and into another,” a damsel in distress (apparently out of another story, but certainly in need of a hero) rides up, saying:
“A rescue! a rescue, au secours! An ye be a man of mettle and sympathy, aid me now. I hight the Princess Alison Jocelyn, daughter to good King Giles, and him foully murdered by his brother, the bloody Duke Wulf, who hath ta’en my three brothers, the Princes Corin, Colin, and Calvin, and cast them into a fell prison as hostages that I will wed with his fat son, the Lord Dudley, but I bribed the sentinel and sopped the dogs—”
Shmendrick replies, apparently keeping a straight face: “Fair princess, the man you want just went that way.”
This continued reference to the story within the story has been called “metafantasy”, or more broadly “metafiction.” It is one of the hallmarks of postmodernism, and it is perhaps somewhat surprising to see it as the centerpiece of Beagle’s communication with his audience. It certainly indicates that Beagle was not writing for children, or at least not for children only, in The Last Unicorn. Such a sophisticated technique can be used in a variety of ways, and we will see it again in Beagle’s later work.
Schmendrick and Molly and the others refuse to take themselves seriously in The Last Unicorn, and so the reader doesn’t take them seriously either. Beagle has carefully and lovingly created a work that satirizes and glorifies its form, much in the same way that the music of P.D.Q. Bach satirizes and pays homage to baroque music. Various forms of incongruity play a major role in the success of the enterprise.
Beagle published The Last Unicorn: The Lost Version, containing the text of his first start at The Last Unicorn from 1962, in 2006. He says in his Introduction that he began the book “with absolutely no plan for anything except a light, Nathanesque fable of modern society, and equipped only with a hazy vision of a unicorn journeying somewhere with some sort of companion.” He abandoned it after about eighty pages.
In The Lost Version the unicorn’s traveling companions were Azazel and Webster, the two heads and personalities of a demon exiled from hell. Beagle says the “snarky” dialogue between them “is clearly modeled after the conversations, private jokes, and role-playing games that Phil and I entertained ourselves with in those days, during long late-night waits for the D train, and in the cabin, and during our arduous scooter trip across America.” “Phil” was Phil Sigunick, Beagle’s closest childhood friend, with whom he rented a cabin in Massachusetts during the summer of 1962 and with whom he went on the trip memorialized in I See by My Outfit.
There are other significant differences from the published version as well. The butterfly was the one original character beyond the unicorn who survived, but its dialogue was wider-ranging. There was a dragon which was a major character which disappeared completely, and the time was most definitely the twentieth century instead of once-upon-a-time. Beagle in his Afterword says of both of these things that in order “to recast the story as a fairy-tale, the dragon had to go, along with the entire twentieth century.”
There are two encounters that stand out in The Lost Version, one with a beautiful female demon sent to pursue Azazel and Webster and who fools Azazel into giving her all of his jewelry, and the other with a modern city. The first is a source of mirth, as the demon is beaten at her own game, while the second appears merely to provide an excuse for Beagle’s lamentation on life in the modern world. Neither episode survived into the published version, although a fat man who tries to capture the unicorn while seeing her as only a horse appears with his wife in The Lost Version, and there is a encounter with a virgin that also survives.
Very little need be said here about The Lost Version. It is interesting only as a curiosity to committed fans, with little of the charm or metafictional elements which stand out in the published version. Beagle, however, has also published a short story sequel to The Last Unicorn that is worthy of examination. “Two Hearts,” winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Fantasy Novelette, first appeared in the October/November 2005 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and was reprinted in The Line Between in 2006. It is especially interesting that Beagle eventually wrote a sequel to The Last Unicorn, since in his Foreword to Giant Bones he asserted emphatically that “never for a moment did I feel the least interest…in what became of Molly Grue and Schmendrick the Magician.…” His fans apparently did, however, and Beagle obliged with “Two Hearts.”
The narrator of “Two Hearts” is a nine-year-old girl named Sooz, but the more interesting characters are Schmendrick, Molly, and King Lír. The story picks up the characters many years later, and shows us how life goes on for them.
Sooz tells us she will be ten next month, on the anniversary of the day the griffin came. It stayed in the Midnight Wood, and ate sheep and goats until the last year, when it began eating children. The men tried to organize some sort of patrol, so they could see when the griffin, with its lion’s body and eagle’s wing, with its great front claws like teeth and a monstrous beak, was coming. They sent messages to the king, who sent first a single knight and then five knights together. They rode into the woods, and all but one were never seen again, and that one died before he could tell them what happened. The third time an entire squadron came, and after that they didn’t send to the king any more. Then the griffin took Felicitas, Sooz’s best friend even though she couldn’t talk. That was the night she set off to see the king herself.