humor is peripheral to much fantasy, it is central to Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. Beagle creates a quasimedieval universe with built-in anachronisms to serve as the setting for his fairy tale that is at once high romance and self-parody. He presents a serious theme, that we are what people think us and we become what we pretend to be, with a comic technique, and much of the success of the novel can be traced to its humor.
Beagle leaves no doubt about his comic intentions very early in the novel. Before any of the important mortal characters are introduced, the unicorn meets a butterfly. While some important exposition is presented, the main purpose of the encounter is humorous. In Beagle’s world butterflies can talk, but all they can do is repeat what they have heard. This butterfly has apparently heard a lot of popular songs, a lot of television commercials, and a lot of Shakespeare and other medieval and Renaissance English poetry. Its speech is a combination of these elements, and the juxtaposition of the ridiculous and the sublime is very funny:
“Death takes what man would keep,” said the butterfly, “and leaves what man would lose. Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks. I warm my hands before the fire of life and get four-way relief.”
The other speeches from this brief section are just as incongruous. Responding to the unicorn’s question, “Do you know who I am?” the butterfly cheerfully pulls a few appropriate lines from its memory: “Excellent well, you’re a fishmonger. You’re my everything, you are my sunshine, you are old and gray and full of sleep, you’re my pickle-face, consumptive Mary Jane.” In response to nothing at all, but merely to pass the time, the butterfly leaps into the following soliloquy:
“One, two, three o’lairy.… Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, look down that lonesome road. For, oh, what damned minutes tells he o’er who dotes, yet doubts. Hasten, Mirth, and bring with thee a host of furious fancies whereof I am commander, which will be on sale for three days only at bargain summer prices. I love you, oh, the horror, the horror, and aroint thee, witch, aroint thee, indeed and truly you’ve chosen a bad place to be lame in, willow, willow, willow.”
It almost seems natural that, preparing to leave, the butterfly says: “I must take the A train.”
Incidentally, Beagle has recently said that the butterfly is as close to a self-portrait as he has ever written. A complete guide to the butterfly’s allusions will be contained in The First Last Unicorn and Other Beginnings, due from Conlan Press in 2012.
If the incongruities in the speech of the butterfly are rather obvious, they are only the beginnings of Beagle’s skillful use of incongruity for comic effect. We first learn the main character’s name, for example, in the following manner: “’I am called Schmendrick the Magician,’ he answered.” “Schmendrick,” of course, is a Yiddish word, meaning roughly “bungler,” from the same general group as “schlemiel.” Beagle says it means “someone who is out of his depth or his league, the boy sent to do a man’s job.” Schmendrick’s first words are in themselves funny, but the magician says the opposite of what we expect when he adds, “You won’t have heard of me.” Nor does it take a great leap of imagination to see “Schmendrick the Magician” as a play on words for “Mandrake the Magician.” Beagle has recently said that the idea for the character came from stories he used to tell his daughters about the world’s worst magician.
Incidentally, there is a delicious irony in Beagle’s use of the name “Amalthea” for the last unicorn in human shape. The mythology surrounding the young Zeus includes stories of the goat Amalthea who fostered him, one of whose horns the young god broke off and turned into the cornucopia, or horn of plenty. Amalthea in the myth thus became the first unicorn.
Beagle’s general use of incongruity is well illustrated in the following expository passage, where everything that is mentioned is twisted into the opposite of what is expected:
“He made an entire sow out of a sow’s ear; turned a sermon into a stone, a glass of water into a handful of water, a five of spades into a twelve of spades, and a rabbit into a goldfish that drowned. Each time he conjured up confusion, he glanced at the unicorn with eyes that said, ‘Oh, but you know what I really did.’ Once he changed a dead rose into a seed. The unicorn liked, that, even though it did turn out to be a radish seed.”
In most cases the incongruity involves an item that lowers the high, heroic tone that has been established: the incongruity deflates the puffed-up prose. In one instance, however, during the sequence in the camp of Captain Cully, a self-appointed Robin Hood, the incongruity serves to inflate the level. Jack Jingly, a member of the band of “merry” outlaws, says of the other men: “Cooped up in the greenwood all day, they need a little relaxing, a little catharsis, like.” It is also in the camp of Captain Cully that Schmendrick, to flatter his host, reels off a series of romantic escapades that he has heard of in connection with the Captain and then reveals to us that he “had never heard of Captain Cully before that very evening, but he had a good grounding in Anglo-Saxon folklore and knew the type.”
Beagle uses songs with incongruous elements throughout the novel, perhaps not surprising when we recall that he is an accomplished folk singer, at one time appearing at a local club in Santa Cruz, California, every weekend for 12 years. It is partly through these songs that the theme is revealed. Captain Cully is so concerned with songs about himself that he has written thirty-one of his own, and is constantly on the look-out for Mr. Child, in order to be properly classified and annotated. Cully has one of them sung to Schmendrick, whom he half-believes to be Mr. Child, and stanzas two and three (of the twenty-five!) show us Beagle’s technique:
“‘What news, what news, my pretty young man?
What ails ye, that ye sigh so deep?
Is it for the loss of your lady fair?
Or are ye but scabbit in your greep?’
‘I am nae scabbit, whatever that means,
And my greep is as well as greep may be,
But I do sigh for my lady fair
Whom my three brothers ha’ riven from me.’”
The two songs with incongruous elements that most clearly reveal Beagle’s theme are Prince Lír’s song to the Lady Amalthea, and Schmendrick and Molly’s song as they go away together at the end of the novel. Both deserve citing at length.
“When I was a young man, and very well thought of,
I couldn’t ask aught that the ladies denied.
I nibbled their hearts like a handful of raisins,
And I never spoke love but I knew that I lied.
And I said to myself, ‘Ah, none of them know
The secret I shelter and savor and save.
I wait for the one who will see through my seeming,
And I’ll know when I love by the way I behave.’
The years drifted over like clouds in the heavens;
The ladies went by me like snow on the wind.
I charmed and I cheated, deceived and dissembled,
And I sinned, and I sinned, and I sinned, and I sinned.
But I said to myself, ‘Ah, they none of them see
There’s a part of me pure as the
