What is real and what is not? What is fiction and what—truth?
In reading, then thinking, over The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, I am conflicted with these very questions. It's Beagle who's brought them bubbling to the surface. What with his characters in one ethereal dialogue after the next:
"Spells of seeming," the unicorn said...The magician is referring to Madame Fortuna's nighttime circus where a lion in a cage is seemed to be a manticore, and, reversely, a unicorn appears as simply a white mare, to the customers and crowds who come to the circus to see a manticore—and thereby do. By the power of their expectations coupled with the power of a conjurer. Of a witch who validates those expectations.
The magician answered: "[Madame Fortuna's] shabby skill lies in disguise. And even that knack would be beyond her, if it weren't for the eagerness of those gulls, those marks, to believe whatever comes easiest."
Here is another example of Beagle's ceaseless quest to unravel magic from reality:
"Fools, fools and children! It was a lie, like all magic! There is no such person as Robin Hood!"Or perhaps, it is Beagle's quest to infuse magic into reality. Such that the two are truly inseparable. I think it's a nifty idea to look at the fallacies of human perception, and beliefs, that we all hold, every day, every one of us, and say: what about these non-real things we all believe in? These myths, these fairy tales, these gods and heroes, histories and tall tales and scriptures...
"Nay, Cully, you have it backward," Molly Grue called to him. "There's no such a person as you, or me, or any of us. Robin and Marian are real, and we are the legend!"
They're not real—are they? Not in the way we think of them. Not in the way we repeat their stories down through time, person to person.
What's even the difference between a character at that point—and who the person really was? Is?
"Haven't you ever been in a fairy tale before?" said the magician. "The hero has to make a prophecy come true...and has to be in trouble from the moment of his birth, or he's not a real hero."Don't you and I do this? Aren't our expectations for a story, for a hero, so strong and ingrained, that if the storyteller but veer a little this way or that from that standard model, then, well, it's just not the same. Is it?
(Yes, we could go into antiheroes and such, but antiheroes are always, at least two-thirds, not just half, hero...)
Are we all just trying to gain back that blind innocence of believing, of being enraptured, of enchantment, by those fairy tales told to us as bedtime stories?
King Lir: "It's strange to have grown to manhood in a place, and then to have it gone, and everything changed—and suddenly to be king. Was none of it real at all? Am I real, then?"What's your character?
Is your character real? Who do you think you are? How can that be? If a hundred thousand million began screaming and calling you a hero—wouldn't you start to believe them? That just maybe you were? And even if you were, wouldn't you say: I won't believe what they believe. I know who I am. I'm not a hero. No matter what they say...
And when they tell the story of you, what will they say? What will they expect to hear?