Fantasy: Realms of Imagination

And the other artistic expedition that I made on my trip to LA was to venture down to the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, because it was hosting the touring version of the British Library exhibit by the above title.

A couple hundred items in four or five rooms, mostly books and manuscripts (usually from the BL collection) but a fair number of media items, less illustrations (though there were some of those) than screens showing videos. Some of these were talks of the interview sort with authors, of whom the only one I knew was Terri Windling. But there were also some clips from movies and tv shows, ranging from the 1910 Wizard of Oz film to a clip from Buffy (Tara running away from the Gentlemen).

At one end of one room was a 14th-century manuscript of the Iliad, at the other a 1983 kit for Dungeons & Dragons. That'll give you an idea of the scope and range. No single author got more than minimal attention. CSL had an early US edition of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and a copy of the poster of Pauline Baynes's Narnia map. Tolkien had a first edition of The Hobbit, open to Thror's Map, and a Swedish translation open to an illustration by Tove Jansson depicting Gollum as a giant troll-like blob. The caption astutely noted that Tolkien subsequently added the adjective "small" to Gollum's description, but it leaves the impression that Jansson was the only artist who made this strange interpretation: no, she wasn't.

Manuscripts included the faint pencil of a page from The Wind in the Willows, a typescript page with extensive pen changes from Macdonald's Lilith, and the notebook in which Le Guin wrote the first draft of A Wizard of Earthsea, placed so far back in the case it was not possible to read any of it.

Such a circumstance was the locale of the one factual error I found in the caption. It said we were looking at the "original manuscript" of Terry Pratchett's The Colour of Magic, but it wasn't. It was the galley proofs. I mentioned this to the clerk in the exhibit gift shop, figuring to get a shrug, but no, she was a former part-time English lit grad student who was very interested and promised to pass this on, though I had to explain both what galley proofs were and why they're called that.

I wasn't in a position to say what really bothered me about the way the exhibit was presented, which was its depiction of all these assorted authors as if they were engaged in a conscious group project, each contributing a stone or two to a vast edifice. But at least until the advent of a publishing genre of original fantasy in the 1970s (or earlier if limited to sword and sorcery), the characteristic of literary fantasy was that, though authors were intermittently aware of and admiring of one another, each plowed their own furrow; they were distinctive for their individuality. There was no "group project" about it and it belittles them and the field to suggest there was.

That there was something naive and belittling about the entire thing was communicated by the animated illustration at the entrance. It was of a unicorn, depicted as a horse with a horn in its forehead. There's more to a unicorn than that, but I'm not going to bother saying so.