Darcy Pattison: Children's Book Author

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The Mask of Fantasy

Speech give at
Children's Literature Assembly
National Council of Teachers of English
November 15, 2001

     When my daughter, Jinny, turned eight, I took her to get her ears pierced. When she became a teenager, she wanted multiple piercings. I told her that she had to wait until she was eighteen and out of my house. She ignored the "out of my house clause": the week of her eighteenth birthday, she came home with extra ear piercings and it hasn't stopped yet. She now has a dozen ear piercings and her belly button sports a glittering gem. When she had her tongue pierced, I cried.
     Yet, I understand a harmless obsession; I'm obsessed with reading, especially with reading fantasy.
     It began when I was in sixth grade. My oldest brother was at the University of Arkansas. When he came home at Christmas, he brought Tolkein's The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and Frank Herbert's Dune. At various times, I've read Agatha Christie mysteries or thrillers by popular authors. But I've always returned to fantasy and science fiction as my favorite genre. Why does the genre appeal to me?
     The first appeal of fantasy is the story it contains.
     John Barth has commented on the writer's dilemma: "It is Sheherazade's terror: the terror that comes from the literal or metaphysical equating of telling stories with living, with life itself. I understand that metaphor to the marrow of my bones."
     Fantasy literature is part of the larger context of stories, and stories sustain life. You can't be a writer and not believe this on some level.
     During World War II, my father was serving in the army in the Phillipines when it fell to the Japanese; he was a prisoner of war for three years. Prison camp is a place where life can easily be abandoned; there were men who decided it was too awful to endure, so they turned their faces to the wall and died. Instead of giving up, my father read and reread to his fellow prisoners the 1847 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, "Evangeline." In 1755, the French speaking Acadians were expelled from Nova Scotia. The poem's heroine, Evangeline, is torn from her lover, who is exiled to Louisiana, thus creating the Cajun community there. It was a story rich enough in details, emotions, depth, that the prisoners debated the fine points endlessly. My father recited poetry to keep alive his spirit; he came home from the war, married my mother and had eight children; stories, in part, sustained his life and eventually gave me life.
     A story has a basic structure. Some have said that a story is something with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I prefer to think of it as a conflict that is resolved. No conflict, no story. Yet, how we chaff about various conflicts. We want nice stories, entertaining stories, especially for our younger children and even for young adult literature. Stories with evil characters, where horrible things happen, don't seem appropriate for kids. I agree that we need to provide age appropriate material. But I also think it's much better to let a teens experience evil in a book first before they experience it in reality. For one thing, it helps them recognize evil as evil when they do meet it.
     It's not always easy to encourage a teen to read a book with a strong conflict, especially if it's only partially resolved, such as in Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War, or if the ending is tragic. It takes courage to give a teen a strong book.
     Flannery O'Conner puts it this way: "St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens wrote: ‘The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.' No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past the dragon, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller."
     It takes courage to read fiction! It takes courage to encourage a teen to read a strong book.
     And notice that O'Conner invokes fantasy–the dragon who sits by the side of the road–to make her point.
     So–we have a story that has conflict that evokes strong emotions. Critiques say, "The author shouldn't have let the baby die," or, in the case of The Wayfinder, "The author shouldn't have let Zanna die when she fell into the Rift."
     I like O'Conner because she writes from a religious standpoint with which I identify. Her faith informs her writing. "When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic, I cannot afford to be less than an artist."
     Likewise, because I am a Christian, I can't afford to use a simplistic conflict. Without conflict, there is no story. Without a strong conflict, there isn't a strong story.
     Brian Attebery in his book, Strategies of Fantasy, says, "Fantastic tales are generally seen as naive or artless because they emphasize story over verbal texture and depth of characterization." The narrative flow of events is of primary importance in fantasy; fiction, especially fanciful fiction isn't poetry (where style is supreme), or theater (where characters are supreme). Instead, Story is–again in Attebery's words–"a compelling flow of discovery, transformation, confrontation, and reconciliation."
     I need powerful stories in order to avoid the death that threatened Sheherazade. I read fantasy because I need strong stories.
     Second, fantasy literature is literature of the fantastic.
     My dictionary defines fantasy as "imagination, a wild or fantastic product of the imagination." From a similar root is the word, fanciful: "adjective, (of people) using the imagination freely, imagining things." Writers of fantasy are fanciful people. Debra Doyle and James Macdonald say that writers of the fantastic are those ". . . who seek to make the strange and wonderful into something both plausible and full of significance."
     Here's something ordinary: How now, brown cow.
     Here's something strange and wonderful, the product of an imagination: How now, purple cow.
     By breaking the repetition of the "ow" sound, I've emphasized the fanciful part of the sentence: the color purple. Of course, it would take a great deal more to make the purple cow both plausible and full of significance, but this is the beginning of fantasy. You take reality, tweak it a bit, and make it plausible and turn it into a symbol carrying significance. (Easier said than done!)
     Fantasy can include magic, time travel, talking animals, a hero's quest, medieval-type settings, contemporary settings, only-in-the-imagination setting or any other fanciful element; but it is always grounded in reality.
     Attebery calls it provoking a sense of "wonder," not just for things you long for, but also the means to provoke desire for something not desired before.
     I've never understood why fantasy gets a bad rap. But I'm glad that others have gone before me on the path of writing fantasy because they've put it into context for me. Ursula LeGuinn says it best: "It took me years to realize that I chose to work in such despised, marginal genres as science fiction, fantasy, young adult, precisely because they were excluded from critical, academic, canonical supervision, leaving the artist free; it took ten more years before I had the wits and guts to see and say that the exclusion of the genres from ‘literature' is unjustified, unjustifiable, and a matter not of quality, but of politics."
     Literature of the fantastic is literature; that's why I like it.
     Last, fantasy is a mask for the truth. Julie Taymor, who directed the Broadway production of "The Lion King," and won a Tony for costume design, says this about masks:
     "People think a mask covers their personality, that it hides something. But that's not true. Your own face hides something. Your own face is a mask. As soon as people can get rid of their own face, all sorts of things come out."
     Fantasy does this same sort of dance with truth. The Wayfinder is a story full of adventure: giant eagles, royal telepathic dogs, albino crocodiles, tatzelwurms, prairie fires, wolf packs and more. But it's really about the stages of grief. The fantasy story, complete with a new world and the special ability of wayfinding, is the mask for talking about grief. Look at the Table of Contents of The Wayfinder and you'll see these sections which reflect the stages of grief: The Loss, The Denial, The Search, The Healing.
     The Loss tells of how Zanna, Win's sister, wanders out in the f'giz, the worst fog of the year, and falls to her death. Win believes that he could have prevented her fall, if only he had been a moment earlier in Finding her. Like other's grieving, Win tries to Deny that Zanna is gone. He searches for her, until he comes face to face with her burial cairn. Then, he wanders in the depths of Rift (symbolically, the depths of grief). When he tried to climb out of grief, he is harried by the tatzelwurm, who warns him that he'll never make it. Coming out on the other side of the Rift, he is now in a position to accept Healing. He actually gives up the right to drink from the Well of Life and be healed, but the grieving process takes its course and he Finds a peace in the end.
     When I was a freshman in college, my roommate, Cynthia Louise Craig, was studying sociology. For a term paper, she wrote about death and dying. I thought she was crazy.
     "No," she explained, "everyone dies at some time or other and we need to discuss the costs, the traditions and rituals surrounding death."
     But eighteen year olds are invincible and death doesn't happen to them or anyone they know. Today, I understand that grief happens to everyone at sometime in their life. CL was right; we need to discuss it. But what kid will pick up a book about grief? On purpose?
     If I had done this topic as a contemporary fiction, it could become dark indeed. But fantasy allows a dark topic to be discussed in a way that isn't as depressing or negative. You can keep the topic as arm's length–a safe distance away–but still examine it.
     Julie Taymor says: "We have freedom in theatre to do much more outrageous things, because everyone knows it is false. So that is tremendous freedom. And once you've got the audience's imagination, you've got tremendous leeway to use their imagination to fill those holes, those dots. And that is something very different than landing a helicopter on stage."
     Everyone knows that fantasy is false; therefore, we have the freedom to reveal truth. Fantasy gives freedom to delve into the emotional depths of something in a non-threatening way, a way that evokes imagination and understanding. For example, Dune, Frank Herbert's classic science fiction book is really about Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest. Charlotte's Web is about an unlikely friendship.
     Psychological truth is important in all literature, but especially so in fantasy.
     Again, from Brian Attebery's Strategies of Fantasy: he says realistic fiction bases characters on close observations of real people; fantasy characters are, by contrast, archetypes which represent "internal phenomena," "embodiments of a psychological phenomena acting out their struggle toward integration in a projected landscape of the mind.' (P. 70) "It is not inartistic, as E. M. Forster and others have maintained, to have characters whose primary significance is their advancement of the story. Some psychological processes are inaccessible except through the narrative interaction of archetypal characters."
     The Wayfinder combines the stages of grief with the hero's journey to create a story of an character triumphing over grief. The Great Rift is the internal landscape of grief, through which Win must journey.
     Most discussion today of the stages of a hero's journey go back to Joseph Campbell's work, but the best resource for writers is The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler. The stages he suggest for a hero's journey are the ordinary world, the call to adventure, the refusal of the call, the meeting with a mentor, crossing the first threshold, tests/enemies/allies, the approach to the inmost cave, the supreme ordeal, the reward, the road back, the resurrection, and the return with the elixir.

Ordinary World:

Win is working as an apprentice Wayfinder during the Mayor's party.

Call to adventure:

Loss of Zanna

Refusal of call:

Win refuses to function as a Wayfinder.

Call to adventure:

The Prince arrives with news of a plague and gives Win a Finding for the Well of Life.

Refusal of call:

Win refuses to go into the Rift.

Meeting with Mentor:

Hazel, Win's mother has been in the Rift before and gives him the wolf's head amulet and advice on how to deal with Paz Naamit.

1st Threshold:

Descending into the Rift.

Tests enemies and Allies:

Lady Kala becomes Win's ally, as does Paz Naamit. They face the test of the call of the wild for Lady Kala. Climbing out of the Rift, they face the test of the tatzelwurm. On the other side of the Rift, the Wolf Clan is another test.

Approach to the inmost cave:

Win must allow Lady Kala to go with the wolf pack. The challenge of the prairie fire forces Win to commit to protecting Lady Kala.

Supreme Ordeal:

Win sacrifices his own healing in order to save Lady Kala.

Reward/Seizing the Sword:

Win takes the water from the Well of Life.

The Road Back:

Win and Lady Kala must travel back through the Wolf Clan territory. They stop to offer healing to the Clan and in the process, the clan chases them.

Resurrection:

While fighting, Lady Kala slips and falls into the Rift. Win catches hold of her and falls with her. At the last minute, Paz Naamit catches them.

Return with Elixir:

Win and Lady Kala are flown over the Rift and bring the water from the Well of Life to heal the plague. There is also the elixir of healing from grief.

     If there is any depth in The Wayfinder, it is because the stages of grief are overlaid with a hero's journey. This structure gives a built in layering of events and themes.
     What I find fascinating about critiques of novels, of literature, in general, is that people decry the dark. And I almost agree. Why did George have to kill Lennie in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men? But what else is fiction about if not the dark side of our natures? Without strong conflict, there is no strong story. Without story, there is no literature. Without imagination, there is no literature of the fantastic.
     So, I wonder: Are my daughter Jinny's multiple piercings a mask? Taymor says, "Your own face hides something. Your own face is a mask." Are the multiple piercings and tattoos the mask of today's teenager, the uniform that says I belong, the mask that hides their uncertainties? Quoting Taymor again: "As soon as they were liberated from their own body, their own face, there is another character, another real self that comes out."
     Maybe, I should get a dozen piercings in each of my ears! Instead, I put on the mask of a novelist and thus freed all sorts of fanciful things come out.

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