Kurghan, a time-traveling Scythian blacksmith with a jewellery business in Montreal’s Plateau neighbourhood, notices that his son Altai is losing the culture of his people. Kughan longs for nothing less than to feel the wind in his hair again and to ride his horse on a leopard hunt. He wants the same for his son. But should he force the way of the warrior on Altai? Or should Altai forge his own path?
My urban fantasy story “The Goddess in Him” is now available to read on NewMyths.com. I like this story because it’s about the immigrant experience. I was inspired to write it while teaching English to recent immigrants and refugees in the Plateau. But “Goddess” is about immigration across a time scale: how would immigrants from the B.C. era integrate into contemporary society? I believe that if you raised a Roman child in today’s society, she would be dancing on Tik-Tok soon enough. The past, if made accessible to us, simply becomes another country.
It’s also true that we project many of today’s values onto the past. It’s a stereotype that men in previous societies were somehow stronger, more rugged, violent, survivalist–in short, more manly than they are today. It may have been more common that people worked with their hands in the past, but this fantasy of manhood is more of a projection of our own society’s patriarchal values onto the past, a false nostalgia for something that never existed. Often, cultures in the historical past were surprisingly open to trans and gender non-conforming people, or men wearing clothes that today would be considered “effeminate.”
In some ways, Kurghan represents the man’s man Conan the Barbarian stereotype. But I also try to subvert assumptions about historical gender roles in this story. So hopefully, you find “Goddess” thought-provoking as well as laugh-out-loud funny. In a way, it’s a classic “fish-out-of-water” story, like Son of Zorn or George of the Jungle.
I would love to hear your comments on this story. I’ve accomplished a major goal of mine here: to write an urban fantasy story set in my home city of Montreal. Ever since reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and Charles de Lint’s Newford series, and seeing Claude Lalumière’s Island Dreams: Montreal Writers of the Fantastic at a book festival, I was seized by the idea of bringing the fantastic to Montreal. Now I’ve done it for the first time ever. I hope it’s the first in a series of Montreal-inspired fantastic stories.
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 RussianRevolution, 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.
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.
Charles de Lint and I
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.
At the beginning of another MythCon, this one in Colorado Springs–where I am now, giving a presentation–it is fitting to review the book of the first MythConer with whom I ever struck up a conversation. This is one of the only cases where I knew the author before I knew he was an author. I found him waiting in line to be registered at the desk and we started to talk.
“Mock,” he told me his name was, but then I realized he had an accent, that his name was “Mark.” He too was reading through John Crowley’s Aegypt Quartet at the time and I thought I was one of the only people in the world to be reading it. We struck up a rapport.
‘Mock,’ incidentally, is more or less what he does to the Arthurian tradition in Sleepless Knights, a novel shortlisted for the 2014 Mythopoeic Prize for Adult Fiction. Last MythCon, it went up against Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Land and the winner, The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker (which, also incidentally, I have just heard recommended as an audiobook by Mary Robinette Kowal on the Writing Excuses podcast). Mark is also a playwright and scriptwriter, having written for the Horrible Histories series–and traces of that series’s humour winds up in Sleepless Knights. I still have my old copy of Horrible Canadian History on a shelf downstairs.
If Sleepless Knights had been nominated for this year, I like to think it might have had a better chance of winning, since the MythCon theme this year is on the Arthurian Mythos. A review now, during the conference, is certainly a propos…
Toby Whithouse, a writer for Doctor Who and Being Human, calls Sleepless Knights “a cracking good read” and his British jargon accurately describes the book’s Monty Pythonesque humour. It is a unique mixture of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day–a very British but wholly unconventional pairing.
Lucas is King Arthur’s butler. He has served the Master with absolute devotion for thousands of years into the modern era, when one Ritual Day, Arthur vanishes to unknown parts. It is fundamental that Lucas rally the team and keep the Knights of the Round Table together. But since the glory days of Camelot, Sir Kay has become a book-hoarding murderer, Sir Lancelot has become an inspirational speaker, and Sir Pellinore is a crazed and delusioned hunter after the mysterious Questing Beast. Soon the only thing that can save them is Merlin himself.
But when they find the place in Wales where Merlin is said to lie in waiting, they unwittingly open a path to the Otherworld, unleashing a mass destructive Apocalypse that only the knights have a clue how to fend off. But as the modern era begins to grow uncomfortably aware of the existence of King Arthur, it becomes Lucas’s responsibility to ensure his Master’s safety and the integrity of the Round Table.
Sleepless Knights also contains a series of flashback chapters to the glory days of Camelot in which we see Lucas in his element, directing kitchen staff during a busy festival. How does a butler assist and provide for the guests with minimal intrusion? How does a butler organize the seating around the Round Table, especially when one of the knights, Sir Mordred, is destined to betray Arthur? There are passages where Mark successfully captures the sang froid of Kazuo Ishiguro’s butler Mr. Stevens, who at one point in Remains of the Day expresses admiration for the ability to remain calm and professional even if a tiger takes up residence under the dinner table. The difference with Sir Lucas is that he is slightly less repressed and has to deal not with tigers, but werewolves. Mark provides a fresh angle on Arthurian legend seen from the perspective of a servant. It is not so long before Sir Lucas must venture on a quest of his own.
I was pleasantly surprised by how well I enjoyed Sleepless Knights. One thing Mark did well and that I wanted a lot more of was Lucas’s sang froid attitude. That voice was strong in the beginning chapters, but the Apocalypse, for obvious reasons, provides only a few opportunities for exhibiting calm orderliness under Otherworldly duress. The only resistance I encountered in reading it was, since I read it nightly chapter by chapter, I had some difficulty picking up the thread of adventure after the day caused me to forget what was happening right before I put the book down. Some chapters end after suddenly introducing a wholly new situation–Sleepless Knights is, after all, a wild, cartoony, dragonback ride. That’s part of what makes it funny and I was happy to trust in the author through several out-of-nowhere surprises, which were eventually explained. The good thing is that these defects simply act as motivation to binge-read Sleepless Knights all the way through.
Mark confided to me that there is, actually, some textual/historical evidence for the existence of Sir Lucas in Arthurian legend. That satisfies the scholar in me. I suspect the reference might be to The Chronicles of Godfrey of Wales,the source text to which he appears, by his own admission, to have consulted. Sleepless Knights is a great example of a how a lost detail in a tale can be exploded into the concept for a whole novel.
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.
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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Charles de Lint
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.
What happens when you combine Robert Graves’s The White Goddess with Martin Scorsese’s mafia flick Goodfellas? I’m not sure, but it wouldn’t be far from Charles de Lint’s 1988 ‘mythic fiction’ novel Greenmantle.
Called the father of urban fantasy, Charles de Lint is the author of dozens of novels that combine fantasy with mainstream fiction. Perhaps ironically then, many of his novels concern the hipster class of bohemian folk musicians who certainly live beyond the ‘mainstream.’ However, Greenmantle abandons the usual urban settings and artsy protagonists of de Lint’s other fiction for a single mother and her bookish daughter who settles in the Ottawa suburbs.
De Lint stays true to mainstream fiction’s value of depicting how real people deal with real situations–it’s just that sometimes those situations are fantastic. Ali, the teenaged protagonist, moves outside the city after Frankie, her mother, wins the Wintario lottery. Ali’s fondness for classic works of fantasy that many readers will never have heard about–and the fact that she has moved between several different homes with her mother over her childhood–sets her apart from other teenagers. While living on the outskirts of a great forest, Ali makes the friendly acquaintance of a mysterious Italian neighbor, as she puzzles over the distracting, unearthly sounds of pan pipes that emerge from the bush.
This calm, even idyllic setup is preceded by intense scenes that seem to come from a Mario Puzzo novel. Tony Valenti, a member of the Sicilian fratellanza, is framed for the murder of his godfather–a crime he did not commit. He escapes Europe to hide away in his safe house in Canada while the heat dies down–right next door to Ali and Frankie. Meanwhile, Earl, Frankie’s ex, concocts a scheme to force her to sign over the Wintario money.
Alone, these plots could fuel a high-stakes thriller. Combined with the fantastic presence of the god Pan in the woods behind Ali and Frankie’s home, Greenmantle becomes something more than that.
An incarnation of the Horned One described in Robert Graves The White Goddess, Pan is a mystery, a being who appears at times as a human, a stag, a goat-footed satyr, or a combination of forms. The piping that summons him affects everyone differently, although for most people it produces feelings of hope. The only problem is, it seems, that a pack of baying hounds constantly hunts the great stag. Is the mystery’s power failing in a world that has no more need of mystery? Not only Greenmantle, but Charles de Lint’s entire oeuvre, seems to ask this question.
Without ever really making the thematic connections between the three interweaving plots explicit, de Lint places Frankie and Tony in the role of the hunted stag. Men from the fratellanza are coming to kill Tony, just as the baying hounds pursue Pan, and Earl is on the hunt for Frankie. I was half-expecting Tony to become the stag at one point, rather like how in Greek mythology–specifically, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses–Diana, the Virgin Goddess, transforms Actaeon into a stag. ‘The hunter becomes the hunted’ is both a mythological trope and something you can hang on the cover of an airport thriller novel. De Lint somehow makes it all work, elevating his thriller to the status of visionary art.
De Lint describes his chief inspiration for Greenmantle as Lord Dunsany’s novel The Blessing of Pan, in which a Christian vicar attempts to evangelize neo-pagan worshipers. Wolding, the paganized village in Dunsany’s story, becomes New Wolding in Greenmantle, after the inhabitants of the former village immigrate to found an independent, hidden, and self-sufficient village in Ontario. This gesture is one of several references to the history of fantasy contained in the novel itself, which reveals de Lint’s consciousness of writing within a tradition that stretches back long before Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. De Lint inhabits his ‘second generation’ status as a fantasy author with innovative purpose.
There is magic, mystery, and brutal murder behind the covers–certainly a work of adult fiction. Yet women and men should be equally attracted to reading this wonderful book. De Lint has a facility of writing strong female characters and, in my reading, I found the ‘male’ and ‘female’ elements of this novel to be well-balanced; it has features that will strongly appeal to guys and gals. One scene in particular includes Frankie lecturing Tony, who is a slightly macho Italian, on some of the finer points of feminism–a memorable scene.
Greenmantle is classic Charles de Lint and a great introduction to an author who should be read more frequently.
A graffiti-tagged lion guarding the gate to Chinatown, Montreal
When we left off last week, I was trying to prove that graffiti interrupts the rational order of the city, as a spatial tactic, and therefore can be compared to urban fantasy, inasmuch as it too subverts conventional “consensus reality.” I quoted Bramley Dapple in Charles de Lint’s short story “Uncle Dobbin’s Parrot Fair,” who says, “We live in a consensual reality where things exist because we want them to exist. […] Yet if you were to listen to the world at large, Goon [Dapple’ gnome companion] is nothing more than a figment of some fevered writer’s imagination—a literary construct, an artistic representation of something that can’t possibly exist in the world as we know it” (Dreams Underfoot 24). Dapple implies in a metafictional moment that collective belief is what defines reality. However, this definition of what constitutes reality can only be explained by an investigation of what forces in society constitute reality itself.
This is why, in North American especially, consensus reality is a political issue.
The rationalist, Cartesian, scientific discourse that divides space into a square grid is inextricably opposed to the perspective of ‘traditional,’ and especially indigenous, worldviews, which contain an entirely different ontology, or definition of what things are. I have explored problems of this conflict in other articles: among the Maori and Icelanders. Our consensual reality is tied up with capitalism. Our mode of production, to use a Marxist term, structures how power works and how ideas are disseminated in our society. It is also connected with the imperialism that was responsible for the expulsion and disenfranchisement of indigenous civilization in North America. Perhaps in introducing Native American mythology in books like Moonheart, Charles de Lint attempts to subvert the ideology that enables imperialism by presenting another ontology as valid. Charles de Lint’s urban fantasy can then be seen as subversive, inscribing, through his texts, the identity and worldview of traditional cultures—both Celtic and Native American—on the rational cityscape. (Although, this has been seen as problematic given certain accusations against de Lint’s cultural appropriation. See his response in his Afterword toMulengro.)
A whimsical yet mythical mural on St. Laurent Blvd. in Montreal
Let us now take a brief interlude and go explore through an example what I mean to say when comparing spatial tactics to urban fantasy. Remember: urban fantasy combines the space-time associated with urban reality and ‘crosshatches’ it with that of the folktale. You are walking on the street one day near the Redpath Museum on McGill campus, let’s say. Then in a glimpse of sublime might, you see the god Pan, cloven-hoofed and decked with horns on his head, standing against the wall. You blink. Pan is gone, but he has left his mark: you recover a set of panpipes. Maybe he sprayed his name in aerosol over the wall, but it would be partly the same effect. The panpipes are a sign: the god not only exists, but also, it is implied, every narrative, every myth, in which the god participates. He exists, but the meaningful space and time in which he exists also exists.
You come to recognize that if Pan is real, then the universe is operating according to a narrative, that the world is heterogeneous, divided between mundane and numinous realities. You have encountered “Story” and such a universe cannot have the random disorder which scientists assure us is the law of the universe.
This world of “Story” means that the Barthesian text of the city is altered forever and that you can conceive the world as whole—not as fragmented and shattered. “The worldness of the world” is restored, which, for Fredric Jameson, is a key mark of the romance genre, on which so many fantasy novels are based (98). In our capitalist mode of production, Jameson implies, romance lets us to re-imagine our alienated society as one, though this has an effect of painting an illusory picture of social reality. Charles de Lint operates less according to a Marxist agenda—which is my critique of how he deals with the urban—but he does align his ‘subversion’ of the urban squarely with the structure outlined in Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories.” He places more of an emphasis on the transcendent encounter with the fantastic and numinous ‘other.’ If the urban world is threatened again with fragmentation—if there is “Wrongness” that appears, threatening it with “Thinning”—then a hero, “Recognizing” the true “Story,” might attempt to “Heal” the city. This is possible in fantasy unlike in social realism, implying the utopian potential of fantasy, which de Lint sometimes invokes, as in the harmonious blending of Native American and Celtic cultures in Moonheart. What Charles de Lint’s novels ultimately do, is attempt to rescue this sense of “Story” from the fragmented urban world, as it already exists for us.
An example of political graffiti, which like sectarian graffiti, marks out a particular kind of space. In this case, a French Canadian Montrealer has expressed solidarity with the Scottish separatists.
Like “sectarian graffiti,” de Lint’s novels “make real, by making visible, certain claims to ownership: to convert space into territory” (243). You have all likely seen pictures, at least, of gang tags in bus shelters, a scribble of “FTP” perhaps or, in my province especially, a scrabble of “Vive le Quebec Libre!” These are examples of (respectively) African-Americans asserting space free from the racial profiling of police officers and of French-Canadians declaring that, in this space, there is a people who wish for Quebec to become an independent, de-colonized nation. Subaltern groups especially—those cultural communities who are ‘invisible’— feel an existential need to assert their existence in urban space.
Space is a hot topic given the many land claims First Nations groups are attempting to have Parliament approve. I believe that these claims to territory challenge how poets like Earle Birney have thought of Canada as a “country without a mythology,” because we are too young a nation. In fact, Canada is an ancient country with an erased mythology. These Native American myths, irrelevant to European settlers, have been forgotten, seen as irrelevant and peripheral to modernity—in a word, backwards. Urban fantasy might be a way of asserting not only the space of subaltern territories, but the sacred space of indigenous populations.
The effect would not be dissimilar to bringing the Native American Crow Girls to the center of Montreal in that mural—from the offshore reserve at Kahnawà:ke to a central neighbourhood not far from the transportation hub of the Decarie Expressway. Urban fantasy has an analogous effect: it brings peripheral mythologies and cultures into a central fictionalized-but-real city, in a similar way to how actual cities centralize and condense the populations of entire countries—and indeed form a multinational concentration of many cultures from across the globe.
Urban fantasy can be used in such a way that it engages in a project of representation of postcolonial narratives, bringing them within the central, urban spaces of Canada. In this way, urban fantasy contributes to the postcolonial genre of “New Fantasy” that Lawrence Steven argues expresses a particularly Canadian expression of hybrid identity—an identity composed of a fusion of opposites: central/peripheral, self/other, indigenous/migrant.
Lastly, there is one more potential similarity between spatial tactics and urban fantasy: the idea of play. W.R. Irwin in The Game of the Impossible defines fantasy as a genre of play: a structured game that does not have direct consequences on reality, but enables us to imagine how to deal with reality in a ‘safe’ way. The emblematic deity of play is Pan himself, “the spirit of the Arcadian,” who is “the deity whose disorder is both freedom and discipline” (157). Is it a coincidence that de Lint based Greenmantle on Lord Dunsany’s Blessing of Pan? Perhaps not. When Pan appears in the urban landscape, perhaps a break from the ‘serious’ world is signaled and with an introduction into the world of ‘play.’
However, I object to Irwin on one account: that fantasy as play cannot influence the real world. In urban fantasy in particular, the connection between the real world and fantasy can be fundamental. Play is still a useful way to conceive of fantasy in urban settings because play is a concept involved in subverting urban space, just as it is a concept in fantasy. A skateboarder ‘plays’ in a skatepark–but he can still use his board to travel place to place in a ‘serious’ but alternative manner. In a similar way, fantasy does not always need an alternate universe setting where it has no direct impact or reference to our world. Urban fantasy that refers to real places like Ottawa or Montreal, rather that to fictional locales like Middle Earth, is the equivalent of a skateboarder grinding a stair railing on the way to work. Urban fantasy can make a direct critique on our lived reality at the same time as it engages in subversive forms of ‘play’ through fantasy. Putting it in another way, fantasy does not have to be ‘escapist’ when it refers to and criticizes reality.
Whether Charles de Lint is consistent in addressing the issues I have here described is another matter. He may not be, in which case my theory is good purely as a theory, though useful to the degree that it might inspire me to adopt my own style of urban fantasy. At present, my readings of de Lint do not confirm my theory on every point, though they do on some. However, I believe I have achieved a valuable theoretical insight into how urban fantasy can be used. Given a free moment to write a short story or novel of my own, I might choose to address these theoretical issues in my own urban fantasy, set in Montreal. However, at present, I have SSHRC grant to fill out and graduate studies to work at.
Charles de Lint
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Works Cited:
Jameson, Fredric. “Magical Narratives.” The Political Unconscious. London: Routledge, 1981.
Irwin, W.R. The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1976.
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. LaBossière. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2004. 52-72.
Tonkiss, Fran. “Urban Cultures: Spatial Tactics.” Urban Culture: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. Ed. Chris Jenks. Vol. IV. London: Routledge, 2004.
A graffiti-tagged lion guarding the gate to Chinatown, Montreal: an example of an urban spatial tactic.
While conducting my research into urban fantasy, the subject of my SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Committee) grant proposal, I was stricken by a sudden inspiration. A few images and lines from scholarly texts united in my mind and I saw something bold in the connections. While the following essay is in no sense an exhaustive scholarly study, or even necessarily a completed lead-up to one, it does hint at what could make a promising introduction to an anthology of short stories. Perhaps there is even something of literary critical value in it as well. However, I suspect that the most this gives me is a model for thinking about urban fantasy as a creative artist, before any usefulness as a description of how urban fantasy texts actually function. I leave it to the judgment of my readers to determine if there might just be something linking street art to the urban folktale.
June 2013: Montreal street artists Fin DACx and Angelina Christina produce a mural on the corner of Notre-Dame and Côte St-Paul. The black and white mural depicts a pair of women whose hair styles are suggestive of raven feathers. Furthermore a bird’s skull—I suspect a raven’s or a crow’s—appears between them looking on at the gazer with hollow eyes. I immediately perceived the resemblance to Charles de Lint’s Crow Girls, a recurring pair of characters from his urban fantasy short stories.
The first time I spotted these Crow Girls, I was on the bus and I zoomed right by. But I had been paying attention to my surroundings and glimpsed them. It was exactly as if I were a character in de Lint’s Newford, catching a glimpse of a folkloric being in the interstices of the urban landscape. Like one of his characters, I doubted that the mural, though I had seen it distinctly, actually represented the Crow Girls. So I sent the author of Dreams Underfoot a Facebook message. He or one of his social media managers returned me an article from StreetArtNews, where the creation of the “Crow Girls” artistic project was reported (see above). Though I still did not have an explicit confirmation that the muralists intended their work to depict the Crow Girls, I was still left with the sense that they must have been familiar with de Lint’s work.
After thinking about it, I came up with the idea that de Lint’s novels are, in some respects, the literary equivalents of street art.
Charles de Lint
For those of you unfamiliar with de Lint, let me explain the general concept of his work. Charles de Lint’s works are based on what John Clute calls a crosshatch society—a place where the enchanted and magical mixes with the mundane world—and he does this by fusing urban settings and characters with mythical and folkloric figures. However, these fantastic beings are largely invisible in their urban settings, save to the bohemian, artistic protagonists of de Lint’s world who have knack for spotting them. One might often catch a glimpse of a fairy, or a Celtic god, in the margins of Ottawa, or in de Lint’s invented city of Newford, but the magical beings soon vanish. These encounters with the numinous can be moments of conflict, terror, or healing. This not only involves an encounter between states of being (the real and unreal, or the fantastic and mundane) and worldviews (traditional and scientific), but also different ways of interpreting time and space (the urban chronotope of homogenous space-time versus the folkloric/mythic chronotope of sacred, or heterogenous, space-time).
How do I connect graffiti to these crosshatched worlds? Fran Tonkis in her essay “Urban Cultures: Spatial Tactics” concerns himself with “the everyday escape routes that may be worked through the fabric of the city, ways in which spatial order can be disrupted through different modes of using and making space” (236). These spatial tactics include skateboarding and graffiti (I might also add parkour), which are practices that subvert and transform space. Strikingly, Tonkiss describes this subversion as a moment when the “mundane meets the enchanted,” a moment that enables one to think “about spatial tactics in the city,” a concept explored by Roland Barthes (241). Although I doubt Tonkiss meant enchanted in quite the same way as the magic you read about in fantasy, he is referring to a certain ‘magic’ element in how spatial tactics can change how we perceive urban space. It is easy to imagine a graceful skateboarder as unbound by gravity, for example, and in this ‘magic realist’ sense, reality itself seems to gain enchantment. The subversion and disruption of spatial order can appear as a form of enchantment, since it lets us see the city itself a fresh new way.
Another way in which we can see the city anew is through graffiti—or mural painting. Graffiti are an example of how “the everyday escapes,” though “such escape attempts are only ever partial or temporary—they slip between rather than tear apart the mesh of rational order” (242). A graffiti tag must be sprayed over, for example, a brick wall, but the brick wall is going to stay there. Tonkiss’ invocation of the interstice in his language of ‘slipping between’ made me think of Charles de Lint’s homeless Celtic gods in Forests of the Heart, who live in the ‘in between places’ or interstices of reality just as the homeless do. Since urban fantasies set in an actual North American city cannot enchant the entire city with a magical veneer without causing some cognitive dissonance on the part of the reader, the enchantment must happen within the city—even outside of conventional views of it. This is what may make Ottawa-native readers of de Lint fantasize that Celtic gods might be living in their own city without actually seeing them; maybe such readers have simply not looked carefully enough to see them. This also strikingly calls to mind how no one likes to gaze for too long at the homeless; homeless people are as ‘invisible’ as gods.
But the thing about graffiti is that they do interrupt, however briefly, the urban rational order. A form of political and territorial inscribing upon the the city, it asserts identity, “the simple statement that says ‘I am here.’” (243). Furthermore, “these assertions of presence by an author who has got away transform blank spaces into the scene of a crime” (243). Graffiti are illegal because they ‘deface’ public and private property, a crime. This is not to say, however, that it can be beautiful, or even, on occasion, fully legal and commissioned. The ‘Crow Girls’ urban art on St. Urbain is such an example of a legal enchantment of city space, although it loses its subversiveness since it was a legal act. However, continuing the analogy with urban fantasy, writing a magical being into an urban setting does breach a law—the law of ‘consensus reality,’ which is constituted by Cartesian, scientific principles, not only of ontology but of space itself. This hegemonic “rational order” found in the city is controlled by the hegemonic discourses that define our reality, a model we all give our consent towards by force of habit (242). As Bramley Dapple in “Uncle Dobbin’s Parrot Fair” declares, “we live in a consensual reality where things exist because we want them to exist. […] Yet if you were to listen to the world at large, Goon [Dapple’ gnome companion] is nothing more than a figment of some fevered writer’s imagination—a literary construct, an artistic representation of something that can’t possibly exist in the world as we know it” (Dreams Underfoot 24).
There is a great potential in urban fantasy to subvert this order, to break the rational laws of reality just as graffiti breaks the laws of the city. In fact, I could say so much on this topic that this would be a large blog post indeed. As such, I will continue these thoughts next week and given the reader a chance to gestate what I have said so far.
Next week, I will continue my thoughts on the political implications of this hegemonic rational order which is otherwise commonly called “consensus reality.” In the meanwhile, I must work on my SSHRC application!
Mural on St. Laurent Blvd., Montreal. What if this strange hybrid creature came alive?
Works Cited:
Charles de Lint. Dreams Underfoot. New York: Tor, 1993.
Kurghan, a time-traveling Scythian blacksmith with a jewellery business in Montreal’s Plateau neighbourhood, notices that his son Altai is losing the culture of his people. Kughan longs for nothing less than to feel the wind in his hair again and to ride his horse on a leopard hunt. He wants the same for his son. But should he force the way of the warrior on Altai? Or should Altai forge his own path?
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 
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.
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.
