Underworld as Otherworld: Combined and Uneven Development in Charles de Lint’s Urban Fantasy Fiction

On March 10, 2016December 1, 2017 By matthewrettinoIn EssaysLeave a comment

Today I will be presenting on urban fantasy and how it relates to the conditions of combined and uneven development.

Modern fantasy as a literary form has diversified since The Lord of the Rings (1954) and its subsequent paperback imitators. Stereotypically set in medieval or pseudomedieval kingdoms with dragons, elves, and faeries, these paperbacks were rarely set in cities, but usually in the countryside or in a sublime, pre-Raphaelite wilderness. As a form, what provided the historical impetus to the rise of modern fantasy, as early as the late nineteenth century, was the rise of literary realism and the modern novel, the techniques of which authors began to apply to older, or residual forms, such as chivalric romance and epic. Fantasy is therefore a quintessentially modern form even though its settings might be throwbacks to medieval forms. With urban fantasy, a subgenre that originated in the 1980s, fantasy continues to employ residual literary forms such as fairy tale, folktale, romance, and epic, but places the fantastic content within a modern milieu—the contemporary, usually North American, city.

Charles de Lint, a Canadian author resident in Ottawa, has been called the Father of Urban Fantasy. Fantasy novels set in the modern world have older antecedents, such as the supernatural detective stories of Charles Williams, but ‘urban fantasy’ per se, as a market category, emerged during the 1980s, when de Lint wrote many of his classic works, including Moonheart (1984). De Lint’s fiction sets fairy tales, myths, and folktales derived from Celtic, Romany, and Native American traditions—as well as urban legends—within urban space, with novelistic, modern protagonists who interact with mythical, otherworldly figures. Instead of imposing the plot of a conventional fantasy novel onto urban space, de Lint is interested in how ordinary people interact with the fantastic and the numinous on their own terms, and he does so with a social conscience.

Urban fantasy lends itself to an analysis framed by the concept of combined and uneven development because it can claim to represent an uneven modernity in its content as well as its form. But first we must ask, “What is combined and uneven development?” The Warwick Research Collective, referring to Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, describes combined and uneven development as “a situation in which capitalist forms and relations exist alongside ‘archaic forms of economic life’ and pre-existing social and class relations” (WReC 11). Uneven development rears its head whenever you see a high-rise financial district skyline within close proximity to seemingly ‘backwards’ and impoverished slums, or when agrarian farmers are wrenched from the cotton fields they have tilled for generations right into the disorienting presence of advanced industrial machinery. Capitalism must be understood as a world system that encompasses the whole globe under a single, though uneven, modernity—not just as a European development that has spread outward across the globe, bringing modernity with it. This understanding refutes the idea that some societies, especially former colonies, are somehow ‘backwards,’ or behind modernity. Although societies across the globe experience the modern age differently, they are all irreducibly modern, part of one combined system. Neocolonialism may establish hierarchies between one singular modernity and another, but this simply makes it an uneven, combined system, rather than two distinct systems.

How does all this tie in to urban fantasy? Just like the world-system, the form of all modern fantasy is itself combined and uneven, since it joins residual forms that originated in pre-modern periods with the modern novel. In a sense, this is true of all novels, even in realism, where displaced romance forms the novel’s deep structure. But modern fantasy differs from realism because it displays this structure upfront, often as a self-conscious imitation of pre-modern forms, the magical content of which, however, it retains. These disjunctures deepen in urban fantasy, which blends the pre-modern and the modern on the level of content as well as form. The disjuncture between elves, mermaids, fairies, spirits, and goblins coexisting with a modern, urban setting becomes explicitly represented and narrativized in urban fantasy. We can read this disjuncture as an allegory of the combined and uneven system.

This system also describes the dynamic in the hierarchy between the city and the country that urban fantasy mediates. The city dominates the countryside but this relationship nonetheless joins the two spaces. In a similar way, urban fantasy appropriates the pastoralist content of fairy tales and folktales, joining residual, rural culture with the dominant urban culture. This combination of disjunctive content allegorizes the hierarchical relationship of the city over the country. However, urban fantasy does not simply reflect urban dominance as much as it appropriates the natural and the rural to awaken a utopian desire for a less alienated existence within the urban.

Western culture, as Cat Asthon describes in her essay on de Lint in The Canadian Fantastic in Focus, traditionally treats the idea of nature and wilderness as a cure for alienated modernity. However, de Lint’s fiction recognizes the truth that an escape to pure nature is an escape from history and responsibility. Nature is, after all, a cultural construct produced by humans, an aspect of modernity even though it describes a non-human world. Instead, de Lint adopts an urban environmentalism in which his fiction seeks what spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre would call a “renewed right to urban life” (“Right to the City”).

Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city, which counters urban alienation, finds common cause with the politics of de Lint’s urban fantasy. “The right to the city is like a cry and demand,” Lefebvre writes, a revolution of space that places “appropriation over domination, demand over command, and use over exchange” (“Space as a Social Social Product”). Since the city dominates space and nature by transforming it into exchange value—for example, by exploiting natural resources for export and by constructing vast condo projects—Lefebvre calls for the production of socialist space, in which the working classes will use, or appropriate, space for themselves. Nature is the source of all use value, and asks for nothing in return. The city will become a healthier environment if people can use it, rather than it using them.

In the remainder of my presentation, I will demonstrate how two of de Lint’s books—the novel Mulengro (1985) and the short story collection Dreams Underfoot (1993)—respond to the call for the right to the city while also representing the conditions of combined and uneven development in North American cities, specifically Ottawa and de Lint’s fictional city of Newford.

Mulengro is a ghost story about the community of Rom living in Ottawa, mixed with a police procedural subplot. A series of gruesome “Gypsy” murders around Ottawa has the cops lost for any plausible explanation. Janfri, a Romani fiddler, watches his home burn down with the Rom symbol for marhime, meaning unclean, painted on his house. Since the Romani are nomad, owning a home is a sign of defilement, an unacceptable adoption of Gaje, or non-Rom, ways—or at least this is what the arsonist’s gesture implies. As the criminal murders more Rom, the elders decide to flee the Ottawa. They know the culprit to be a ghost named Mulengro, a survivor of the Nazi persecutions who has come back to cleanse the Rom from their Gaje ways. Ola, a Rom who practices draba, or magic, flees her house after being attacked by local ruffians, and Mulengro targets her. She hides out with Zach, a hippy living off the land in cabin country. Eventually Janfri makes a final stand with her and the police against Mulengro and his feral wolf minions.

Mulengro denies the Rom the right to the city. His reasoning for committing the murders is that he sees the Rom’s impoverishment as a result of their being marhime, owing to their adoption of Gaje ways—in a word, because of their modernizing. However, the novel’s resolution makes clear that cultural identities are not so clear-cut, that it is possible and even favourable to partake of modernity and retain connection to traditional ways of life, including magic. The Rom are a non-modern culture living a quintessentially modern life. Furthermore they are subjected, like the native peoples of North America, to a settler culture that seeks to manage and even criminalize difference.

What are we to make of the role Mulengro himself plays, a revenant who consumes the souls of doomed Rom? The imagery of consumption calls upon vampire lore—and the Gothic vocabulary in Marx that references vampiric capitalists who extract surplus value from the working class. Mulengro harasses those Rom who own real estate and thus live between the worlds of capitalism and the Rom pre-capitalist, handicrafts mode of production. In other words, he consumes the souls of those most aware of the unevenness of modernity. As the Rom become incorporated into the capitalist economy, most importantly through the real estate market, they experience sudden change. The replacement of use value with exchange value in their increasingly commodity-filled lives leads the Rom to feel cognitive dissonance between the capitalist system they inhabit and their traditions, where a belief in ghosts and the law of marhime still holds sway. Mulengro’s horror represents a structure of feeling among the Rom, a social formation in the process of developing. The ghost is an allegorization of how their society experiences the turmoil of poverty while living on the margins of modernity.

I now turn to Dreams Underfoot, which is more centrally focused on urban experience. Here the urban underworld becomes a faerie Otherworld unnoticed by most denizens of Newford, although occasionally glimpsed by the bohemian artists, street kids, and homeless men that distinguish de Lint’s fiction. The Tombs, for instance, used to be a developer’s dream for a sprawling yuppie paradise, but when this late capitalist urban planning venture failed, the ruins of the city blocks that were demolished remained behind—now a refuge for winos, bag ladies, and the homeless. The Tombs, abandoned by the city government after the attempt to produce exchange value from its space, has now fallen into a state of nature or wilderness and become appropriated by the underclass. Although it is a dangerous area of the city, the Tombs is where the underprivileged can tactically appropriate their right to urban space.

A space they share with colourful characters derived from fairy tales and urban myths. In one short story, “That Explains Poland,” a young photographer finds Bigfoot in the Tombs, which is not so unusual a discovery, because of the various disenfranchised people who live in this wilderness-like area. In another story, “Winter was Hard,” the presence of certain genii loci, or spirits of a place, in the Tombs contributes to making the city a tolerable place to live, while their departure signals the moment the city takes on a more haunted, less homelike character. The right to the city is thus tied directly to the presence of these pre-modern fairy-like creatures. They are pieces of agrarian European folklore transplanted to a North American city and they directly oppose alienation. If we believe in them hard enough, they might come back and restore the city.

The story that concludes Dreams Underfoot strongly suggests that de Lint sees his own fiction as a way to counter urban alienation and foster a sense of community. The fictional urban fantasy writer Christy Riddell, a stand-in for de Lint, finds his muse in Tallullah, the spirit of Newford itself. But Tallullah must leave Christy because of the rise of urban crime and a loss of connectivity among people, which drives her away. In the end, Christy holds the hope that his story collections might restore a sense of community to city dwellers and bring her back.

Dreams Underfoot and Mulengro both use fantasy to question the Enlightenment epistemology and to assert that if this epistemology does not extend to everyone, everywhere, equally—if, for example, it is still possible for people to believe in ghosts and fairies—then modernity itself cannot be evenly developed. While a text asking you to believe in fairies and spirits might seem flaky, seeing as this gives us no solid program to reclaim the city, such faith does awaken the desire to see the postmodern, uneven city restored from its ruins. It implies that there is more to modernity, and that the residual survives and coexists with the modern. De Lint’s fiction arouses our desire to become instruments of social progress. This is the utopian imagination and the power of fantasy.

This concludes my presentation, which could not have been possible without the financial assistance of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I thank them, and I thank you for listening.

The following has been a transcript of a talk given at the English Department of McGill University’s MA colloquium on 10 March 2016 in Montreal.

Did you like this article? You might also like:

Part 1: A Multicultural Utopia: Historicizing New Fantasy in Charles de Lint’s Moonheart

Part 2: A Multicultural Utopia: Historicizing New Fantasy in Charles de Lint’s Moonheart

Forests of the Heart by Charles de Lint

World Fantasy Convention 2015, Part II: My Interview with Charles de Lint

World Fantasy Convention 2015, Part II: My interview with Charles de Lint

On November 20, 2015November 13, 2015 By matthewrettinoIn World Fantasy Convention 2015Leave a comment

Last week I talked about Guy Gavriel Kay reading from his upcoming historical fantasy Children of the Earth and Sky at the World Fantasy Convention 2015 at Saratoga Springs, NY. This week, I continue my account of the weekend’s events and provide a paraphrase of my interview with Charles de Lint.

First, allow me to talk a little bit more about the events on Friday. I had an engaging conversation in the dealer’s room with Russell B. Farr, an editor for Ticonderoga Publications, which is actually based in Australia, not New England. I bought a Year’s Best anthology of Australian fantasy and horror from his table, but got much more in return in the form of a discussion about Southern Hemisphere fantasy fiction.

I asked if there were any authors employing Maori or Aborigine myths Down Under and Russell talked to me about the anxiety and tension that surrounds issues of cultural appropriation when white authors try to use such cultural motifs in their work. There are other schools of thought that favour white authors who employ indigenous myth, because at least this means the stories get out there. However, for all that, not too many indigenous authors are emerging as fantasy writers, although I should think there are at least a few hidden somewhere. It seems to me a pity that these Pacific myths do not receive wider audiences, but the politics surrounding the “mining” or “exploiting” such myths are significant.

When I asked Russel Farr what made Australian fantasy unique, he gave me an interesting reply. Although these things can be hard to pin down, he claimed that there is less of a tendency to set stories in Australia. Some Aussies employ European myths set in European locales and some write about Aussies living abroad in Japan, London, New York, but comparatively rarely in Melbourne, Sydney, Townsville. This could be explained by the Australian gaze being directed outside of the country because of its geographical isolation from the main centres of Anglophone culture, rather than being focused within itself. I found this discussion highly interesting because my MA thesis will deal with fantasy as a globalized form.

Afterwards I spoke with Janeen Webb, who is an Australian fantasy author with a new book called Death at the Blue Elephant. She has studied fantasy academically and told me about the Australian gaze, how news mostly comes from outside the country, rather than from within, and how this shapes the Australian psyche. This outward gaze blends with an inward gaze, creating a complex self-regard that defines the Australian literary sensibility. Webb directed me to a study she helped edit called Aliens and Savages: Fiction, Politics and Prejudice in Australia that I might look into in order to provide a learned footnote for my thesis.

Steven Erikson in conversation with Stephen R. Donaldson

Another thing that happened Friday was a conversation between two giants of the epic fantasy genre: Steven Erikson (pseudonym of Steve Rune Lundin) and Stephen R. Donaldson. It was entertaining to watch the banter between them and their approaches to certain epic fantasy tropes. Erikson notably wrote one of his novels while subsisting on a Canada Council grant. More recently, a scholar has for the first time looked through his collected papers and notebooks, which must be a strange feeling for an author to first experience! An archaeologist for some time, Erikson has gone on various fieldwork excursions, once getting seriously ill on a Mongolian dig after drinking a poorly-prepared goat’s head soup. He was finishing up his 10-book epic fantasy series Malazan at the time and almost couldn’t finish it because of his illness, he said. When he did complete the series that Wikipedia says is the most significant since Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series, he explained to us that he felt like he had accomplished what he had been set on this earth to do and that it was now over. The feeling of completion lasted a mere few weeks…

…

After this presentation I went to Charles de Lint’s reading of his still in-progress novel The Throwaway Child, a longer adult novel that takes place on a Southwest Indian reserve. After the reading I had the privilege of sitting with Charles de Lint for around 15 minutes next to the fireplace by the registration desk. The following is a paraphrase of that interview.

I asked him my first question: How would you define the social role of the artist, given that so many of your works concern fairies or magical beings interacting with the homeless, the dejected, the marginalized? How do you view your own role in relation to the marginalized? He answered that in his formative years, he was a street kid and that most of the people he knew then were outsiders. He wrote what he knew. Those he knew were musicians and artists, quite like the characters that populate his Newford novels and short stories. He likes to make people realize that everyone has a story.

Having supernatural entities such as fairies, gnomes, ghosts, or pixies interact with marginalized people enables them to have conversations that move the story forward. This is a way around boring the reader with soliloquies. Since these beings are magical, they can appear out of nowhere and such characters can speak to them. It takes the narrative out of these characters’ heads and out into the world.

When I asked what tradition Charles de Lint saw himself as a part of, he talked about the attempts of editors to label his work. He indicated that when his novel Someplace to be Flying came out, he and his editor Terri Windling decided to label it before the markets did, as ‘mythic fiction.’ I was aware of this label from other interviews, but it was interesting to note the relationship between de Lint and Windling, because, as I discovered upon arriving home, her art helped to inspire Dreams Underfoot. I can only imagine the full impact her visual arts have had on de Lint’s fiction.

Talking more about where he would position his own work, and of how he tends to write the endings of his novels, de Lint said that his story arcs don’t tend to follow the arcs of other fantasies. He points to Seanan McGuire as another author who refashions urban myths, of the ‘serial-killer at Make-Out Point’ and ‘suspicious hitchhiker’ variety. Also, he mentioned Alex Bledsoe, whose stories tend to take place in the Appalachians, and the Silver John stories by Manly Wade Wellman. He said he grew up on William Morris, Lord Dunsany, E.R. Eddison, James Branch Caball, and J.R.R. Tolkien–through what I presume included the Ballantine adult fantasy series, which republished many early works of fantasy, as Brian Attebery told me at MythCon this year. Every one of these authors gave me a sense of wonder in a different way, de Lint explained. I could sense in de Lint the younger author, searching among these examples for his own voice and the angle he would adopt on the wondrous, a distinct style he has certainly found in himself.

I then asked a more particular question: what prompted you to include the Mafia subplot in Greenmantle? If you read my review of this book, you might have a sense of the incongruity of the scenes that seem excerpted from Mario Puzzo’s The Godfather or Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas appearing next to a plot that involves a sequel to Lord Dunsany’s classic novel The Blessing of Pan. De Lint replied that he was trying to represent the perception of the Mafia, the mythology of the mob, rather than the real Mafia, who are thugs with no code of honour. He thought the Mafia as mythologized resembled elves–an ‘underground’ culture who you have do favours for and who might act benign or malicious depending on their whim. He liked the idea of having ‘elves’ on one hand and then using the myth of Pan on the other. The interesting story here is that his publisher ACE asked him to take the Mafia subplot out of the book. But Charles de Lint stood by his guns and the scenes involving Tony Valenti and the men coming to kill him were included.

My last question was whether Charles de Lint’s literary agent ever influenced the form of any of his novels. Russ Galen is Charles de Lint’s agent and although he had no amusing stories about him, he did mention that for the Wildings series, Galen made a suggestion to target a YA rather than adult audience. Good agents won’t lay heavy hands over your manuscript, after all. However, de Lint’s answer opens the possibility that this suggestion may have (perhaps) influenced the style of the novel in certain ways, so as to better target a younger audience. I think the relationship between agents and authors is frequently an under-examined one that may present many surprises about the way books are written and marketed.

This concludes the second week of my report on World Fantasy 2015. Next week, I’ll be finishing with a discussion of the fantasy canon and Sunday’s awards ceremony.

MythCon 46: The Arthurian Mythos Part IV: The Conclusion

On October 2, 2015September 19, 2015 By matthewrettinoIn MythCon 2015Leave a comment

The final day of MythCon 46 was Monday August 3rd, during which I only took notes on one presentation: Vicki Ronn on “Graphic King Arthur,” that is, the history of King Arthur comic books. Ronn presented a series of comics featuring or starring the mythical king, evaluating each for the quality of its illustrations, story, and characterizations, from Prince Valiant to Camelot 3000 and beyond.

Mike Barr and Briand Bolland worked on Camelot 3000 from 1982-85, a DC Comics series that was able to escape the restrictions of the Comics Code Authority, by selling only to comic book stores. There were several surprises in this series, noted for its 1980s camp. The story is that King Arthur has been cryo-frozen and has been awoken in the futuristic world of 3000 AD. Galahad appears as a Japanese samurai, Gawain as a South African Zulu, and Tristan is Tristana–a woman! This last is remarkable because many comics of the past rarely featured women, King Arthur and His Knights by Frank Bellamy (1955-6) actually having an all-male cast. Morgan Le Fay also appears in Camelot 3000 as the leader of an evil alien force. Unforgettably, the final panel contains the image of a very weird alien drawing Excalibur from a stone, hinting that the Arthurian mythos repeats itself throughout time and (outer) space. Another interesting observation I had, when allowed a chance to view the comic, was that Arthur’s knights are each represented by a special sigil on a wall, not unlike the sigils of the Endless in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.

The Knights of Pendragon included Marvel characters such as the Fantastic Four and Iron Man–not to mention the Incredible Hulk, who was interpreted as a kind of Green Knight figure. It was printed on environmentally friendly paper and references modern poetry. Fables: Camelot was a series Ronn described as quite compelling, a post-9/11 treatment of the Round Table as a place for those who need a ‘second chance.’ Instead of culminating in a huge, epic battle at the end, the two forces, led by fairy tale characters Rose Red and Snow White, decide to put aside their differences and go their separate ways.

Here are several links to various pieces of Arthuriana that Vicki Ronn listed during her presentation:

Camelot 4 Colors: http://www.camelot4colors.com/

An Arthurian Web Comic: http://www.arthurkingoftimeandspace.com/

The Camelot Project: http://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot-project

And now for the run-down of how my presentation went on Sunday, 2 August 2015.

Click here to view the YouTube video of my presentation. [If you haven’t read Moonheart, there are spoilers, so WARNING.]

The swift abstract to my presentation is the following:

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

Charles de Lint’s modern fantasy novel Moonheart: A Romance (1984) represents utopia by distending consensus reality and merging contemporary urban Canada with supernatural forces from First Nations and Celtic folklore. Steven Lawrence terms de Lint’s novel a “new fantasy” for Canada’s “majority multiculture.” Referring to Fredric Jameson’s 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. De Lint’s use of fantasy 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.

You can read more about Moonheart here.

Brian Attebery was in attendance and his comment to me was that although Moonheart does project a resolution to the colonial history of Canada, the ending has always left him dissatisfied. There is a certain lack of closure that leaves the social issues unresolved, even though they are resolved symbolically through the fantastic adventure in contains.

My reply to him today, after reading through the first two chapters of Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious yet again, would differ only a little from the one I offered him that Sunday.

Yes, de Lint leaves the social issues unresolved. There is a disconnection between the decisive victory of the protagonists and the changes this brings to Ottawa at large in the novel–namely, the fact that there are no social changes that result from the supernatural battle.

What does happen is that Sara, the novel’s main protagonist, recognizes that she shares the legacy of imperialism, being a woman of Anglo-Canadian stock. More importantly she learns that she must carry this legacy with her into her everyday world. Presumably, this means she must now work as an white-Canadian ally of Native Americans in order to work for real social justice. However, in Spiritwalk, the sequel to Moonheart, she spends most of her time in the Otherworld with Taliesin, her lover (a Welsh bard), instead of working to repair the real damage of colonial abuse. Of course, the problem might as a whole be too big for Sara to ‘solve’ alone, providing it can be ‘solved’ at all, but the fact is that we never see her, for example, lending a hand to Native American homeless kids, campaigning for better on-res living conditions, etc.

The idea behind such political readings of fantasy literature is not to get on Charles de Lint’s case about not writing fantasy that is sufficiently politically engaging, but to prove that all narratives are situated in history. If de Lint had made Sara into an Aboriginal rights crusader, the story would only reveal other contradictions existent in Canadian society–the difference being that they would be deeper contradictions.

What these kinds of analysis can prove for our times is the relevance of fantasy to our society–it enables us to imagine other worlds and suggest new ways of overcoming problems. The best fantasies are progressive, not merely reactions, but calls to action.

And on that note, I conclude my final report on MythCon 46. I hope the posts over the last few weeks have taught you something new about fantasy and myth you might never have thought about before. Till next time!

Forests of the Heart by Charles de Lint

On July 24, 2015July 22, 2015 By matthewrettinoIn Urban FantasyLeave a comment

Does magic exist in the contemporary world? Charles de Lint’s mythic fiction brings supernatural beings into the context of the everyday and Forests of the Heart explores the contact between ordinary people and what he calls Mystery.

Bettina and Adelita are sisters, both partly Mexican, partly Indios, and raised by their grandmother to see la époco del mito, the time of myth. However, as they grow older, Adelita puts the childish stories away, while Bettina becomes trained by her grandmother to become a skilled curandera, or healer. After her grandmother disappears, she comes up north to Newford, the imaginary setting of many Charles de Lint’s novels and short stories, and finds work as a model for a high-end artist’s retreat.

Meanwhile in Newford the folk/Celtic music scene that de Lint writes about so well is thriving even as an especially frigid winter threatens to upset the normalcy of the city. Miki and Donal are sister and brother, a musician and artist, who came years ago to Newford from an abusive family background in Ireland. Hunter, a man who stands out somewhat because he has no artistic leanings at all, owns Gypsy Records, a music record store that forms a hub for local musicians. De Lint provides copious details about the ins and outs of running such a store, likely because he has had experience running his own store. The author’s talent as a folk musician likewise brings an irresistible spark of life to his depictions of the musical communities of Newford.

But it is not into this community that serves as our introduction to Newford. At first we see Ellie, a sculptor, at work with the city’s Angel network, which helps out the homeless. Work is especially needed now that the weather is getting steadily worse. Our first impression of her comes from her heroic act of saving a homeless man choking to death on his own vomit, by giving him a most unpleasant mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Her companion on these outings with the Angel relief van is Tommy, a young Native American whose many aunts seem, to Ellie, to be mythical characters than real women.

When Ellie meets a mysterious man, who may also be a woman, on the streets that night who gives her a business card with the name Musgrave Wood upon it, she feels the first inkling of destiny beckoning to her. Is it a sculptor’s contract or something weirder?

Meanwhile at the Irish pub, Miki, Donal, Hunter, and Ellie grow suspicious about a group of dark strangers who sit in the back of the room to hear the Irish reels. Donal claims that they are hard men, made bitter by years of drunken Irish angst, and that it is better you don’t look at them for too long lest they try to make you their friend–an honour conferred by a punch to the guts. The weird thing is that Bettina, across town, can see them too, standing without winter clothing in the cold snow smoking just outside her window. And she grows steadily more convinced that they derive from the same magic world her grandmother showed to her.

It turns out these dark men are none other than the Gentry, exiled Irish spirits who wander homeless in the city. And they want their revenge against the native manitous, or Mysteries, the rightful spiritual guardians of North America. Their plot to assert dominance over the Mysteries will cause much destruction and draw all of de Lint’s characters into a test against the destructive potential that lies in the bitterness and darkness that all human beings carry deep inside of them.

Although this is not a new novel by Charles de Lint, it is more recent than his classic work Moonheart, a product of the 1980s. I strongly suspect the winter storm was inspired by the ’98 Ice Storm, a turn-of-the-century ordeal that blew out the power in hundreds of cities across the eastern seaboard and is still etched clearly in my memory. The conflict of the musicians/artists against the dark forces of the Gentry gains something of the air of the Fisher King myth, where the salvation of the land itself and its fertility is at stake. What’s so great about this is everyone over a certain age can remember this Ice Storm and feel that much closer to the myth. That’s part of the payoff of setting fantasy novels in the here-and-now.

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

On April 17, 2015May 15, 2015 By matthewrettinoIn EssaysLeave a comment

The following is the second 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

[…]

The narrative structure at work during Mal’eka’s seige is part of a larger rhetorical structure in Moonheart that produces a colonial dynamic between the Otherworld and the mundane world. Farah Mendlesohn calls this structure the “intrusion fantasy”: “In intrusion fantasy the fantastic is the bringer of chaos. […] It is horror and amazement. It takes us out of safety without taking us from our place” (xxi-xxii). An intrusion implies that the fantastic comes from outside and invades the mundane world. Since this dynamic sets the denizens of the mundane world against the evil forces invading from the Otherworld, the intrusion fantasy maps the inside/outside conflict of Northrop Frye’s “garrison mentality” (73) onto the fantastic/mundane binary.

An ambivalent politics surrounding the intrusion fantasy also appears in what Brian Attebery calls “indigenous fantasies,” a genre that appeared in the 1980s but that rarely involves “indigenes” (Mendlesohn 147). Such novels, according to Mendlesohn, bring “the fantastic into the cities” in order to add “complex historical layers” to modern America or, equally often, they use European folklore simply to say, “The modern world is boring, there must be something more than this” (147). The indigenous fantasy can be subversive when merged with a rhetoric of intrusion. Mendlesohn claims that such fantasies construct “consensus reality” and “then [render] the walls of the world-story translucent” to reveal lurking presences (116). This rhetorical mode is called “latency” (116). Indigenous fantasy is set squarely within a familiar, identifiable world. For example, De Lint situates Tamson House, in which the fantastic is generally latent, in a locatable area of Ottawa, invoking street names like “Patterson Avenue,” “O’Connor Street,” and “Clemow Avenue,” a series of firm anchors to geographical reality (24). These spatial descriptions bring the fairy tale framing device of ‘once upon a time’ into the ‘here and now.’ To quote Michel de Certeau, they begin the story to “authorize the establishment, displacement or transcendence of limits” (“Stories” 123), to establish the reality that fantasy transgresses. This non-realist violation of consensus reality is a tactic of what Henri Lefebvre would call “representational space” (Production 33), against the strategies of realist depictions of space.

Contemporary, indigenous fantasy presents a restorative vision that contrasts with realist representation. Fantasy can be a “literature of vision,” a body of work that makes us, according the Kathryn Hume, “feel the limitations of our notions of reality, often by presenting one that seems more rich, more intense, more coherent (or incoherent), or somehow more significant” (82). The Otherworld is one of these more coherent spaces, what Christine Mains calls a “representation of the enduring moment of colonial encounter” (342). Crucially, a literature of vision enters “our consciousness not as verbal argument to be accepted or rejected on logical grounds, but as a vision” (101). Through the mode of fantasy, Moonheart thus mediates multicultural interaction between Celtic, First Nations, and modern cultures in order to depict a convergeance of the supernatural within the real, a tactic of representational space that creates an enchanting literature of vison. These presences gain political resonance when they are associated with indigenous peoples, who have been repressed historically by colonialism and by Canadian “neo-colonialism” (McPherson and Robb 11).

The Otherworld’s colonization of the mundane world counters the imperialism of state-produced, scientifically-defined space. Henri Lefebvre describes how the state’s production of space creates a homogeneous order that can be reduced to its visual nature: “Through its control, the state tends to accentuate the homogeneous character of space, which is fractured by exchange. […] In modern space, the body no longer has a presence; it is only represented, in a spatial environment reduced to its optical components” (“State” 88). Moonheart’s literature of vision opposes this optical reductionism by making characters and readers aware of realties beyond the visual and by making distant history present within contemporary spaces.

Historicizing de Lint’s new fantasy reveals how Moonheart is constituted by the liberal mulitcultural ideology of its time, a progression from the imperialist tradition of fantasy, but nonetheless a position biased in favour of an Anglo-Canadian reading public. The imperial past is represented in a romance narrative by an ‘evil’ spirit, against the ‘good’ forces representing more tolerant and hybrid cultural identities. In presencing this Other as an invasive entity, de Lint creates a potentially subversive situation where supernatural creatures representing First Nations beliefs counter-colonize the colonized space of Canada. Fantasy proves subversive to the modern state’s production of homogeneous and optically reductive space by introducing a literature of vision that proposes, through a rhetoric of latency, that there are realities beyond the visible—including certain historical realities, the memory of which the state attempts to render invisible. In opposing realism, modern fantasy opposes the carefully constructed consensus reality associated with empirical, mostly Western systems of knowledge. For as long as realism maintains its hegemony, contemporary fantasy will continue to look for tactical victories to modify representations of reality and to look for roads that might lead from fantasy to utopia.

Works Cited

Attebery, Brian. “The Politics (If Any) of Fantasy.” Modes of the Fantastic. Ed. Robert A. Lantham and Robert A. Collins. Westport: Greenwood, 1995.

—. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Forms of Time and of the Chrontope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics.” The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas, 1981.

Bastien, Betty. “Indigenous Pedagogy: A Way Out of Dependence.” Aboriginal History: A Reader. Eds. Kristine Burnett and Geoff Read. Don Mills: Oxford UP, 2012.

Bechdel, Gregory. “The Word for World is Story: Towards a Cognitive Theory of (Canadian) Syncretic Fantasy.” Diss. U of Alberta, 2011.

Brydon, Diana. “The White Inuit Speaks: Contamination as Literary Strategy.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1994.

Clute, John. “Contemporary Fantasy.” The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

—. “Crosshatch.” The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

—. “Oriental Fantasy.” The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

—. “Otherworld.” The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

de Certeau, Michel. “Spatial Stories.” The Practice of Everyday Life. 1984. Berkeley: University of California, 2011.

—. “On the Oppositional Practices of Everyday Life.” 1980. Cultural Theory. Vol. I. Ed. David Oswell. Los Angeles: Sage, 2010.

de Lint, Charles. Greenmantle. New York: Ace, 1988.

—. Moonheart. New York: Ace, 1984.

—. Svaha. New York: Ace, 1989.

Dewing, Michael. Canadian Multiculturalism. 2009. Library of Parliament, 2013.

Frye, Northrop. “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada.” 1965. Mythologizing Canada: Essays on the Canadian Literary Imagination. Ed. Branko Gorjup. New York: Legas, 1997.

House-Thomas, Alyssa. “The Wondrous Orientalism of Lord Dunsany.”Mythlore 31.1 (2012): 85-103.

Hume, Kathryn. Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature. New York: Methuen, 1984.

Irvine, Alexander C. “Urban Fantasy.” The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature. Eds. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. 1981. London: Routledge, 2002.

—. “The Politics of Utopia.” The New Left Review 25 (2004): 35-56.

Lefebvre, Henri. “Space and the State.” 1978. State/Space: A Reader. Eds. Neil Brenner, Bob Jessop, Martin Jessop, et al. Malden: Blackwell, 2003.

—. The Production of Space. 1974. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.

Mains, Christine. “Old World, New World, Otherworlds: Celtic and Native American Influences in Charles de Lint’s Moonheart and Forests of the Heart.” Extrapolation 46.3 (2005): 338-350.

McLaren, Peter. “White Terror and Oppositional Agency: Towards a Critical Multiculturalism.” Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader. Ed. David Theo Goldberg. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.

McPherson, Dennis H. And J. Douglas Rabb. “Indigeneity in Canada: Spirituality, the Sacred, and Survival.” Aboriginal History: A Reader. Ed. Kristine Burnett and Geoff Read. Don Mills: Oxford UP, 2012.

Mendlesohn, Farah. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2008.

Miéville, China. “The Conspiracy of Architecture: Notes on a Modern Anxiety.” Historical Materialism 2.1 (1998): 1-32.

Reid, Michelle. “Urban Space and Canadian Identity in Charles de Lint’s Svaha.” Science Fiction Studies. 33.3 (2006): 421-437.

Steven, Laurence. “Welwyn Wilton Katz and Charles de Lint: New Fantasy as a Canadian Post-colonial Genre.” Worlds of Wonder: Readings in Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature. Eds. Jean-François Leroux and Camille R. La Bossière. Ottawa: U of Ottawa Press, 2004.

Tonkiss, Fran. “Urban Cultures: Spatial Tactics.” Urban Culture: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. Vol. III. Ed. Chris Jenks. London: Routledge, 2004.

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

On April 10, 2015May 15, 2015 By matthewrettinoIn EssaysLeave a comment

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.