spoke of speaks, and just as naturally it uses anticlimax. When speaking to Schmendrick, the skull remarks: “Matter can neither be created nor destroyed.… Not by most magicians anyway.” And while sounding the alarm for King Haggard, the skull shrieks: “Help ho, the king! Guards, to me! Here are burglars, bandits, moss-troopers, kidnapers, housebreakers, murderers, character assassins, plagiarists! King Haggard! Ho, King Haggard!”
It seems clear that this comic device is not being used for character delineation but simply for humorous effect. This belief is confirmed by the number of uses of anticlimax in narrative and expository passages where there is no dialogue. For example, the confrontation between the followers from Hagsgate and Schmendrick and company goes like this: “The magician stood erect, menacing the attackers with demons, metamorphoses, paralyzing ailments, and secret judo holds. Molly picked up a rock.”
A typical evening in King Haggard’s castle is described as follows: “And in the evenings, before she went to bed, she usually read over Prince Lír’s new poems to the Lady Amalthea, and praised them, and corrected the spelling.” Finally, Molly’s typical day is described:
“Molly Grue cooked and laundered, scrubbed stone, mended armor and sharpened swords; she chopped wood, milled flour, groomed horses and cleaned their stalls, melted down stolen gold and silver for the king’s coffers, and made bricks without straw.”
All of these uses of humor have a common effect: they break the empathic bond that the reader might form with the characters by drawing attention to themselves as devices of the author. There is no subtlety here, but a purposive and carefully planned exaggeration. The mechanics of the form are being laid bare, and the writer’s technique revealed. The basic critical question must by why, and the answer can be found in one final pattern of incongruity existing in the text: a consistent pattern of self-parody. The Last Unicorn is cast in the form of a fairy tale, and throughout the novel the various characters (but especially Schmendrick) make observations about the form and how their story fits it.
For example, in Hagsgate Drinn describes Prince Lír’s birth like this:
“‘I stood by the strange cradle for a long time, pondering while the snow fell and the cats purred prophecy.’ He stopped, and Molly Grue said eagerly, ‘You took the child home with you, of course, and raised it as your own.’ Drinn laid his hands palm up on the table. ‘I chased the cats away,’ he said, ‘and went home alone.… I know the birth of a hero when I see it,’ he said, ‘Omens and portents, snakes in the nursery. Had it not been for the cats, I might have chanced the child, but they made it so obvious, so mythological.’”
Molly, talking to Schmendrick about the apparent cruelty of leaving the child to die in the snow, says: “They deserve their fate, they deserve worse. To leave a child out in the snow—” Schmendrick, of course, knows better, and replies: “Well, if they hadn’t, he couldn’t have grown up to be a prince. 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
