Volume 26, Number 14 · September 27, 1979
The Heavy Fantastic
By Julian Symons
The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
by Ursula K. LeGuin, edited and with introductions by Susan Wood
Putnam's, 270 pp., $9.95
Fantastic Worlds: Myths, Tales and Stories
edited and with commentaries by Eric S. Rabkin
Oxford University Press, 478 pp., $15.95
'We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark; and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.' The rhetorical phrase that provides a title for Ursula Le Guin's essays, notes, and speeches about fantastic fiction becomes less plausible the longer you look at it. 'We'—you and I and Ursula Le Guin—do live almost all of our waking lives in real or artificial daylight, and if half the world is always dark, that affects us very little. And then much poetry and a good deal of fantasy uses the language of rational and logical discourse, which is I suppose what Ms. Le Guin would call the language of day. Very little fantasy uses that language of the night which speaks 'from the unconscious, to the unconscious, in the language of the unconscious,' to quote her definition of great fantasies, myths, and tales. It is not a mere literal quibble to insist that there is no such thing as the language of the unconscious, and that the Grimm brothers and Hoffmann and Poe and Cabell and Tolkien use the language of day. They may use it, more or less deliberately, to suggest symbols, myths, and archetypes, but the interest of those symbols and archetypes is that they refer back to the real world, the world of daylight in which we live.
Review, 3692 words
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