The following is the first part of a presentation I gave for this year’s MA colloquium. I have included the accompanying PowerPoint file as well.

 Historicizing Moonheart Presentation

A Multicultural Utopia: Historicizing New Fantasy in Charles de Lint’s Moonheart

“Utopia would seem to offer the spectacle of one of those rare phenomena whose concept is indistinguishable from its reality, whose ontology coincides with its representation”: what Fredric Jameson says in his essay “The Politics of Utopia” might also be said about the existence of fantasy (35). Charles de Lint’s modern fantasy novel Moonheart: A Romance (1984) represents utopia by distending reality and merging contemporary urban Canada with supernatural forces from First Nations and Celtic folklore. Laurence Steven terms de Lint’s novel a “new fantasy” for Canada’s “majority multiculture” (70). Referring to Jameson’s theories of interpretation in The Political Unconscious, I will present Moonheart as symbolically resolving cultural anxieties about Canada’s colonial history, through its Othering of the figure of the “colonizer” in its romance structure (Mains 347). Moonheart’s liberal multicultural ideology exists in an uneasy relationship to its rhetorical structure of intrusion, which adds colonial resonances to its inside/outside, self/other divisions. Despite the limits of multiculturalism, de Lint’s use of fantasy and magic is subversive in how it functions as a tactic of representational space in opposition to the strategy of realism, the hegemony of capitalism, and the state’s production of space. Historicizing Moonheart locates it as a text that imagines a utopia during the rise of Canada’s policy of liberal multiculturalism, while using fantasy as a visionary technique to resolve anxieties about the Other, the colonial past, and the capitalist present.

Attebery in his essay “The Politics (If Any) of Fantasy” ventures to define fantasy as the formal “meeting ground between empirical and traditional world views,” but fails to grasp the relevance of Fredric Jameson to his own definition, dismissing strict political readings of fantasy as “beside the point” (10). I differ from Attebery in my use of Jameson to historicize the politics of fantasy. In The Political Unconscious, Jameson describes the form of the novel “as not so much an organic unity as a symbolic act that must reunite or harmonize heterogenous narrative paradigms which have their own specific and contradictory ideological meaning” (130-1). Once these narrative paradigms are identified, it becomes possible to historicize modern fantasy, which borrows from romance and yet relies on a grounding in realism. This is particularly true in Moonheart, which is a “contemporary fantasy,” a genre of modern fantasy that, according to John Clute, “sets the mundanity of the present day in clear opposition to the fantasy premise” (225).

In order to historicize Moonheart, it is necessary to understand the full significance of why Laurence Steven calls it a “new fantasy” (70), a term that places de Lint’s innovative genre on a synchronic axis that stretches back to what might be called the imperialist tradition in fantasy. Such early authors of fantasy included Lord Dunsany, who influenced de Lint. Dunsany wrote “oriental fantasy” (Clute 734) in his works The Book of Wonder and Tales of Wonder and was profoundly implicated with the structures of British imperialism (House-Thomas 89). De Lint broke from this tradition in the 1980s, during the beginnings of Canada’s commitment to multiculturalism. Northrop Frye observes the “creative schizophrenia” that comes from artists being conscious of Canada as “not only a nation but a colony in an empire” (qtd. in Steven 62); likewise, Linda Hutcheon claims that Canada is both capable of critiquing imperialism “and complicit with it” (qtd in Steven 62). Steven argues that authors of new fantasy are frustrated since, in their borrowings from mythology and folklore, they are constantly forced to adopt either an imperialist attitude of cultural appropriation, or to submit to the cultural colonialism of Europe.

Steven argues that new fantasy, emerging after the 1960s, resolves this tension by letting authors go beyond the “dyad of colonizer/colonized” (63), enacting Margaret Atwood’s idea of the “third thing […] somebody who would be neither a killer or a victim” (qtd. in Steven 62). New fantasy blends realism and fantasy into a hybrid genre that emphasizes what Homi Bhabha calls the “hybridity” of the nation-state (qtd. in Steven 63). New fantasy recognizes the dialectical complexity of cultural interaction over the course of history.

The Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1988, which followed Pierre-Elliot Trudeau’s introduction of Canada’s Multiculturalism Policy in 1971 (Dewing 16), was created, in the words of Michelle Reid, not to “infringe on the autonomy of First Nations” or on other ethnic groups (426). Multiculturalism is Canada’s state policy for the management of immigration and cultural difference. However, the mosaic metaphor for Canadian multiculturalism also implies, according to Reid, a “gridlocked rigidity” (425). For the Canadian nation-state, the management of groups requires clear divisions between them. According to Henri Lefebvre, this includes organizing spaces into cultural “ghettos” (“State” 94), such as First Nations reservations. Multiculturalism serves the Canadian nation-state as a policy that homogenizes the hybridity that characterizes difference in new fantasy.

In Moonheart, the chronotope of the Otherworld serves as an ideal stage on which a narrative depicting a more dialectical approach to cultural difference can be played out. Mikhail Bakhtin describes the chronotope as “the primary means for materializing time and space […] for concretizing representation” (250). Space and time in the primeval forests of the Otherworld, where much of the action of the novel takes place, are more flexible, with multiple levels of different worlds interpenetrating each another—the way cultures should behave, according to progressive multiculturalism. Time and space—even thousands of years or kilometres—can be crossed in a few instants. The Otherworld, which Mains describes as a “multicultural utopia” (348), succeeds in bringing cultures closer together, particularly those of the ancient Celtic and Canadian First Nations traditions.

The most succinct articulation of the principles of de Lint’s utopia is in the Forest Lord’s ‘new way,’ in which First Nations and European cultures can find harmony and freedom from the burdens of the past. The Forest Lord appears after Kieran Foy, one of Moonheart’s protagonists, a magician of mixed French-Canadian and Irish blood, fights the War Chief of an Otherworld tribe in a ritual combat. Although the War Chief draws first blood, and is declared the victor, he attempts to kill Kieran to prevent him from becoming a member of the tribe. The Forest Lord himself stops the spear with magic force and tells the War Chief, “I would have you accept a new Way. Truth wears many faces, Red-Spear. Many paths lead to one destination. It is the spirit that will not accept change that will dwindle and be lost. […] There can be no return to the old ways. Life goes on […] If it were otherwise, life would be stagnant” (384). Since tribes will now be permeable to outsiders, the utopia is one that recognizes hybridity and rejects evidence of cultural ‘impurity.’

Despite de Lint’s representation of unity, the bias of his particular version of multiculturalism is Eurocentric. Anglo-Canadian characters still occupy the central narrative of Moonheart, which is utopian insofar as it claims to transcend the errors of the past and anticipates a better possible world to emerge out of the present. It locates what Fredric Jameson would call the “root of all evil” (“Utopia” ) in what Mains calls “the human force that perpetuates the colonial encounters of the past into the lived present” (347). The Forest Lord’s new Way roughly corresponds to the classic liberal multiculturalism of the Trudeau era. While not containing the faults of conservative multiculturalism, which was founded on white supremacy (McLaren 47), liberal multiculturalism still caters to the values of dominant groups. According to Peter McLaren, liberal multiculturalism is predicated on the “natural equality” between all races that enables them “to compete equally in a capitalist society,” a view that “often collapses into an ethnocentric and oppressively universalistic humanism” that identifies the norm of acceptability with “Anglo-American cultural-political communities” (McLaren 51). De Lint’s rejection of imperialism in favour of liberal multiculturalism places him as a representative of a particular historical moment, when new fantasy as a specific form symbolically reconciled the divisions in Canadian society in the 1980s.

The romance narrative of Moonheart can thereby be historicized through its ‘Othering’ of imperialism. Evil is always connected to “Otherness,” explains Fredric Jameson; an “Other” is considered “evil because he is Other, alien, different, strange, unclean, and unfamiliar” (Unconscious 101). This is as true in imperialist fantasies as it is in multicultural, or ‘new,’ fantasies. The ideologeme of the good/evil binary presents itself as “a form of social praxis, that is, as a symbolic resolution to a concrete historical situation” (104). Moonheart attempts to resolve the political struggle between the federal government and First Nations, who have fought to assert their claims over their cultural status and their ancestral lands, by symbolically depicting a resolution to colonial history in which the historical past and present encounter each other. Since the ‘good’ is liberal multiculturalism, then the ‘evil’ must be its opposite, namely imperialism. However, there is no straightforward battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ characters per se; rather, since Moonheart is a romance, in the words of Jameson, “the ‘experience’ or the seme of evil [is] expelled from the realm of interpersonal or inner-wordly relations [to] be projectively reconstituted into a free-floating and disembodied element,” which is to say, a supernatural element (Unconscious 106-7).

Mal’ek’a, The-Dread-That-Walks-Nameless, is the evil supernatural force that completes Moonheart’s ideologeme. The evil spirit comes “from across the Great Water” (20). The monster’s association with Europe is not accidental. The quin’on’a, or manitous, call Mal’ek’a “the white man’s curse” (366), confirming that de Lint has ‘Othered’ imperialism and has displaced this evil from human social relations onto a supernatural entity.

The denizens of Tamson House represent the ‘good’ side in the ideologeme. A home for those “different from the norm” (29), Tamson House is its own chronotope. The House acts as a bridge between the mundane world and the Otherworld, what Michel de Certeau would call a “transformation of the void into a plenitude, of the in-between into an established place” (“Stories” 127). It is a multicultural space, where, according to the novel’s protagonist Sara Kendell, “Stepping over its threshold was like stepping into a place where everything you knew had to be forgotten to make way for new rules” (29). The House is a place of diversity, tolerance, and redemption. When Mal’ek’a’s minions, a band of tragg’a, or wolfmen, besiege Tamson House after transporting it into the Otherworld, de Lint evokes colonial history by mimicking the mythology of the surrounded fort—classically, an inside/outside division that pits Europeans against First Nations. In this case, however, the outside Other is Mal’ek’a, who represents colonial history itself. Tamson House—a building given the power of dialogue—tells Jamie Tams, the house’s owner, that he is not, in fact, facing Mal’ek’a, “but the evil of our ancestors given a life of its own” (416). Since Jamie in fact shares blood with the originator of Mal’ek’a, the Celtic druid Thomas Hengwyr, the irony of the siege becomes that the enemy is within. This twist implies that European-descended Anglo-Canadians, such as Jamie and Sara, have a dark history behind their heritage and an accompanying moral resposibility to overcome it. Jamie sacrifices himself to slake Mal’ek’a’s revenge at the cost of his life. As a symbolic act that mediates social relations, this ending satisfies the unquantifiable cost that Canada owes First Nations for hundreds of years of colonial abuse. The defeat of Mal’ek’a is thus a symbolic way of clearing the grievances of history so that white, Anglo-Canadians can transcend the mistakes of past.

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