Date of Award

2024-05-01

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts

Department

Creative Writing

Advisor(s)

Daniel Chacón

Abstract

The Value of Fantasy in Exploring Intangibles

Often, a story is sparked because of asking the question, “what if?” which is what happened to create the hydra that is Deal with a Dead Man. Two percolating ideas happened to coincide, and eventually crashed together. Early on, it began when I was introduced to the Russian fairytale of Koschei the Deathless and his fear of death, but inability to enjoy life. Over the past year, my family experienced several deaths, one tragically early, and another of ripe old age. My fascination with the fairytale grew as I watched myself and family members react in different, even opposite, ways to death. A little later, while working with my teenage creative writing students a very specific character emerged; a boy named Curi who could see everyone’s moment of death and found himself employed by a man who was already dead. Looking back, I was projecting my own conflicting attitudes about death into Curi’s creation, and I never intended him to be anything else except a teaching demonstration. However, my students wanted to know more, wanted to know where the boy’s story would go. It was then a new question emerged: what if Koschei, the deathless sorcerer, originally had help to become deathless? In the fairytale he’s obviously not very good at being a loner, as he continually steals princesses and fair maids to keep him company. This new character, Curi, seemed to know the answers, not only to the sorcerer’s dilemma, but my own morbid questions. The two morphed, Curi’s employer taking on a role similar to that of the fairytale sorcerer, searching for a way to never taste of death for a second time, and young Curi discovering exactly what his own relationship to death and life meant. Deal with a Dead Man is a fantasy novel in the tradition of exploring fairytales from a different perspective, the interplay between opposites such as death and life, and the hero’s universal struggles in choosing a correct path.

First and foremost, the question arises, why write a fantasy? I have often been told it is not a serious genre, that it is something to be read when you don’t want to think. I speculate that this attitude became ingrained during the 1960s and 1970s when works such as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, as well as others, made their way into popular culture. The rise of movies and animation, Disney being the reigning champion, reinvented traditional fairytales and marketed them for all audiences, especially children, thereby helping to entrench the attitude that myths, fairytales, and fantasy, were less than serious. Now, are these stories entertaining? Yes. Did their authors and creators set out to do more than tell a compelling story? Not necessarily. However, there is something to be said for providing an escapist space for a reader to explore life’s difficulties divorced from an accurate similitude of reality. Not long ago, the British Library hosted a conversation between Neil Gaiman and Roz Kaveney entitled, “Why We Need Fantasy: Neil Gaiman in Conversation.” Kaveney expresses that “fantasy is a way of making things more real than the real,” while Gaiman explains that he enjoys making metaphors concrete. They discuss how fantasy is a “reconciliation of the mundane and the miraculous” (“Why We Need Fantasy”). Peter Beagle provides an excellent example of this as he frequently addresses the subject of regret and mortality; two very real things that are made more real through the lens of a fantasy. The character of the unicorn states, “’I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, though I cannot weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die…I regret’” (Beagle 289). The reader is asked not only to examine their own regrets and desires, but what it would be like not to have them. Through the use of a mythical, immortal unicorn, Beagle is able to express something very basically human in a manner that speaks to our imagination, and even to a level of spirituality. This is what a fantasy can do.

In my own life, fantasy has always made it simpler to examine reality as a whole; the known and the unknown, tangible and intangible, all at once. Faced with my speculations on one of the world’s greatest unknowns, death, I have needed to employ imagination. As Einstein once said, “’Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world’” (Lachman 127). To be fair, Einstein is referring more to imagination as an essential of scientific discovery. However, fantasy allows me to imagine a reality in which death, and life, can be treated more tangibly, where I can make “metaphor[s] concrete” (“Why We Need Fantasy”).

The characters of Curi and Lord Vasilik provide two opposing perspectives on the theme of death. On the one hand, Curi accepts that death is inevitable. Lord Vasilik rejects such inevitability, having already died, and come back. He continues to “live,” seemingly without consequence, although upon first meeting him, Curi says there is “a palpable wrongness to him that grated and crashed against my every nerve” (Reed 24). He cannot deny that Lord Vasilik has turned what he knows to be impossible on its head. He is left to question, what does death mean, what really happens after that initial moment of dying, and are there consequences of avoiding death. The hope is that Curi’s opinions of death gradually shift from an indifference to a more active understanding, and in contrast, Curi must begin to consider what he wants in life.

While delving more deeply into the theme of death, and Curi’s journey with it, I realized that the story was full of polar opposites that emphasize the immediate conflict of life and death. In his book, The Writer’s Journey, Christopher Vogler discusses how both in life and in a story, “Unity begets duality; the existence of one implies the possibility of two” (385). Vogler goes on to describe the polarized system, positive and negative, as two ends of a single line. “These polarities create potential for contrast, challenge, conflict, and learning. As the polarized nature of magnetic fields can be used to generate electrical energy, polarity in a story seems to be an engine that generates tension and movement in the characters and a stirring of emotions in the audience” (386). How do these opposites present within Deal with a Dead Man, and how do they also work in shaping the characters and story? One of the main ways life and death come to be highlighted throughout the story is constant references to the forces of day and night, light and darkness. Most of the story takes place at night, which in turn forces the characters to constantly make use of candles and fires to see, or wait for daylight. For example, as the story begins, Curi wakes from a nightmare and cannot get rid of it until dawn.

The sky was lightening, the tree trunks beginning to change from dead black to frosted, ash-browns. I picked a fallen log and sat down, drawing my feet up out of the snow, and watched the eastern sky fade white with dawn. The heavy stillness of the night vanished with the shadows the moment the sun slivered over the horizon, allowing me to let go of the last vestiges of the dream. I needed to head back. Like most towns, the majority of Avishki’s population were up with the sun, and I had a job to do. I slid off the log, crouched and drew a sunflower in the snow with my finger, acknowledging the Bright gods influence in another day (Reed 4).

Curi is inundated with juxtaposing symbolism, constantly using language to emphasize what he knows to be the natural order. Even the deities are categorized into bright or dark, supposedly making the world easy to understand. But again, the entrance of Lord Vasilik, his request, and duality of both death and life, blur the dual extremes, forcing Curi to reconsider what he knows and figure out where on the spectrum he is.

As a compliment to the themes and dualities, consideration must be given to the world being built. Within the world of the story, particularly a fantastical story, the author must create “an internal logic…even if their internal logic is to be illogical” (Temple). So, what is the internal logic of Deal with a Dead Man, and why is it important to the story and to the genre? This is twofold, including the magical worldbuilding elements integral to a fantasy which Temple is referring to, and the use of the hero’s journey in concert with the fairytale.

During my time in the MFA program, I have been introduced to various theories of how our imaginations interact with our physical world, including our long history with religion and the occult. In his famous book on the history of the occult, Colin Wilson admits that his own fascination with “magic and mysticism” began because “they were an escape from the world of factories and neurotic landladies, [and] because they confirmed my intuition of another order of reality, an intenser and more powerful form of consciousness than the kind I seemed to share with eight million other Londoners” (46). My intentions with Deal with a Dead Man were to create the feel of “another order of reality.” Rather than the feel of a full-on epic Dungeons and Dragons type of fantasy, I wanted it to be a bit more down to earth, so to speak. The sort of fantasy in which you could see influences from our own history, where things such as premonitions and fortune telling were not unfamiliar to reality, and felt anchored to our own various forms of mysticism and the occult. True to the fairytale, the scientific logic of reality sometimes just doesn’t work, and that affects how the characters act and interact with the world. The character of Curi embodies ideas of mysticism in that he believes that his premonitions guide him where he should go in life, and while it is never expressed aloud, appears to subconsciously assume he will be led to something better.

The premonition still lingered, like a flame that wouldn’t go out, but there was no reason I should be afraid for my life. I put another bunch of [pine] needles in my mouth, walked on to find another stand of young trees.

My last premonition had led me to Peytik’s caravan six months ago. Four months before that, I’d understood how to escape from my father and Maxim’s army. Each time I had known it, as sure as I knew death, and the Harvester, came for everyone. But at least they had made sense (Reed 4).

Here, Curi magnifies the mystical worldbuilding elements within the story. He is a fortune teller who, apart from seeing death, periodically deals with knowing what will happen to himself. How many people have had moments like that? Moments when we know, in some unexplainable way and from a source outside of ourselves, that something is going to happen? Within our own reality in which most people would agree, Colin Wilson included, that magic was generally “a first crude attempt at science” (47), Something like a premonition can be explained. However, within the logic of the story, just as in a fairytale, Curi’s skills and powers are taken as fact. This is clear when Curi is initially introduced to the dead man, Lord Vasilik, and what he wants Curi to do: “’The sort of things you already do; tell fortunes, make charms, and predict when a man’s life will end.’ Heat crept into my face. He knew” (Reed 26).

All throughout the narrative, Curi uses rune bones to find answers to difficult questions: My hand wavered, the bones feeling almost hot. The wolf’s dead eyes loomed, as though it were still watching me. I’d start there. I sucked in a breath through my teeth, asked my first question: “How do we get rid of the dead wolf?”

The bones dropped from my hand, clicking against each other as they fell. One stuck to the sweat of my palm, but I didn’t shake it off. I turned my still open palm up, cupping the bone against my life line, enfolding it in my fist. I didn’t look at it. Apparently, it wasn’t meant to be part of the answer (Reed 76).

I take many liberties, fitting the overall how’s and why’s of Curi’s power into the logic of the story. In the nature of a hero’s journey, Curi’s abilities increase from where he began. Eventually, he is not only able to see the moment of death, but also to “walk” along death’s edge, to see a small part of what waits once mortal existence is severed.

Terrified, I slowly turned, and blinked in astonishment. The colors and frost were a misted field. Dry grass peeked through a thin skiff of snow, barely enough to hide the ground. It was difficult to see where mist ended and frost began. Carefully, I stood up, still holding the medallion. The colors were spread across the sky, half hidden by the mists; tinges of purple, faded green and shadowed blue, as of twilight just before the stars appear. In a strange way, it felt familiar, like the long fields of destruction in my dreams” (Reed 87-88).

For this, I needed a visual, a representation of what death would be like. Not only does it show Curi’s progress, but muddies the strict opposition of death and life, dark and light, as the sky has color.

Again, there is a familiarity to the scene. Every religion and philosophy in the world has its own version of what death is like as a place, and as a state of mind. How many mythologies introduce a journey in which the hero must travel into death and then return? The world’s earliest epic sees Gilgamesh endeavor to rescue Enkidu from death. The Japanese god Izanagi travels to the underworld to try and bring back his wife, Izanami. Dante spends quite some time in every level of the afterlife. And in at least one version of the tale of Koschei the Deathless, he can put himself back together after being killed (“Myths and Legends”). It is a journey that everyone must experience in their own way. This is where fictions such as Deal with a Dead Man can again make use of the imagination and speak to the possible answers, providing differing perspectives. Margaret Atwood’s does this to the Greek afterlife in her book, The Penelopiad. “It’s dak here, as many have remarked. ‘Dark Death’, they used to say. ‘The gloomy halls of Hades’, and so forth. Well, yes, it is dark, but there are advantages – for instance, if you see someone you’d rather not speak to you can always pretend you haven’t recognized them” (Atwood 15). Here death is gloomy, where the dead wander around doing nothing much. Death is, in many ways, boring, yet Atwood adds the very small twist in that it allows the Penelope to ignore others more easily.

I wanted death to be a bit more dynamic than Atwood’s Hades, as visiting death is an important part of Curi’s journey. Within the context of a hero’s journey, not only does death figure as a place where Curi experiences several ordeals in preparation for fulfilling his bargain, but it becomes a place where he gets answers (Vogler 220). This reflects my own complicated reactions towards death. On the one hand, death is bleak, and that comes out in the snow-skiffed, misted field Curi finds himself in. It can feel intimidating, which comes through in the appearance of a dark line of trees. This place appears to truly be the edge of death, and so whatever lies beyond the trees is still an unknown. As I was contemplating and writing this description of death, I was surprised by the addition of a mentor figure, in the form of the god of death, or the Harvester. As in many fairytales, he serves to plant information that Curi will need, as well as act as a trickster, questioning Curi’s decisions. I also realized that without meaning to, I had made death a bit more like life; even after the inevitable act of dying, the dead still had to make a choice, to move on or remain in the fields.

One of the challenges I have experienced is in how to structure Deal with a Dead Man, as a large part of the story’s internal logic comes from the fairytale of Koschei the Deathless. Curi’s story begins prior to where the fairytale begins, and yet seems to be heading for a similar ending; with a princess escaping from, and destroying the sorcerer. Restructuring a fairytale is not new, neither is it new to closely follow the preestablished plot of these traditional tales, the author adding their own conjectures into the lives and opinions of the established characters, or added characters as in the case of Curi. The trouble was how to do it, as I had both pieces of Curi’s original story, and the restructured fairytale. I went back to reading various novels that had inspired me, looking for what their authors had done to flawlessly weave various storylines together. I turned to The Penelopiad, as Atwood moves between Penelope’s current dead state, her past while alive and waiting for Odysseus to return, and a Greek chorus of servant girls who were murdered. Each storyline contributes to the themes of Penelope’s guilt over the girls’ deaths and who is to blame. Patrick Rothfus and his novel The Name of the Wind follows a similar pattern, interchangeably narrating the past and the present with the character of Kvothe telling the story of his early days. I decided to try something similar with Deal with a Dead Man, renouncing a strict chronological order, and alternating between the fairytale storyline, and Curi’s.

I discovered several problems to this narrative strategy of a story within a story. While the fairytale structure created parallels, such as Curi and the kidnapped princess Melet making a bargain similar to Curi’s and Lord Vasilik’s original one, it felt clunky.

Another difficulty that occurred accidentally was the use of both first person and third person narration. While it is not common, I have seen it used to great effect, providing a means of keeping parallel narrative and timelines distinctive. However, I wanted Curi to remain the primary, first-person narrator, keeping a closer psychic distance with the reader. Naturally, this creates more of a bias, a limiting of information, and works very well to the development of themes. As Curi’s opinion changes concerning death, so does the reader’s, as he understands more about Lord Vasilik, so does the reader, etc. That didn’t happen. Instead, his voice became lost in the back and forth.

Along with Curi’s diminishing importance, I realized it would be impossible to keep some information from the reader. For example, Lord Vasilik is referred to as a “feeder,” with only hints of what that means along the way. It is deliberately meant to keep a sense of mystery, and distance for the reader. I discovered the story was stalling, hesitating, and I had forgotten a cardinal rule: “The needs of the story dictate its structure,” and that “stories are alive. They seem to be conscious and purposeful. Like living beings, stories have an agenda, something on their minds. They want something from you” (Vogler 266, 368).

In order to rectify my mistake, Deal with a Dead Man has been returned to chronological order. This does not mean that I have removed the fairytale, but placed it as a second part to Curi’s original narrative. The reader has the opportunity to become invested in Curi before introducing the character of Melet. However, this second part is currently in the experimental stages and I may discover that it demands yet more structural changes.

As mentioned previously, fairytales touch on basic aspects of our human existence. They are also, very systematic, the characters serving specific functions that can be nearly interchangeable, allowing the reader to pick out the themes being expressed more easily. Vladimir Propp describes the interchangeability of the fairytale in this way:

The name of the dramatis personae change (as well as the attributes of each), but neither their actions nor functions change. From this we can draw the inference that a tale often attributes identical actions to various personages. This makes possible the study of the tale according to the functions of its dramatis personae (20).

In other words, within the fairytale, each of these roles is played by either a single character, or by a combination of several characters. What is important, is the function they serve within the story. This is what makes fairytales so viable for interpretation, it’s not the characters themselves that are important, but the function they serve within the story. It doesn’t matter if you name the villain Koschei, Lord Vasilik, or Voldemort, the function of antagonist to the hero is still served. Not much attention is paid to personality, which leaves a lot of room for speculation. Propp addresses this issue by pointing out the function of character motivation within a fairytale:

By motivations are meant both the reasons and the aims of personages which cause them to commit various acts. Motivations often add to a tale a completely distinctive, vivid coloring, but nevertheless motivations belong to the most inconstant and unstable elements of the tale…The majority of characters’ acts in the middle of a tale are naturally motivated by the course of the action, and only villainy, as the first basic function of the tale, requires a certain supplementary motivation (75).

In short, motivation is driven by the plot, not the character. And it is at this point that stories become messy, and is perhaps better understood within the context of the hero’s journey. Vogler introduces the reason myths and fairytale characters remain popular as follows:

The repeating characters of the world myth such as the young hero, the wise old man or woman, the shapeshifter, and the shadowy antagonist are the same as the figures who appear repeatedly in our dreams and fantasies. That’s why myths and most stories constructed on the mythological model have the ring of psychological truth.

Such stories are accurate models of the workings of the human mind…they are psychologically valid, emotionally realistic even when they portray fantastic, impossible, or unreal events (5).

Are the characters in Deal with a Dead Man psychologically valid? Do the characters fulfill their functions within the fairytale? It employs a clear-cut villain in Lord Vasilik. Curi acts as the hero, even though it is not until later, chronologically, that he works against Lord Vasilik. Asa and Hepsiba contribute with the role of the helpers and allies – there at the right moment to lend a hand where needed. And eventually, Melet. As the protagonist, Curi is a loner, and selfish in that he’s just trying to get by. At first, he wants to fulfill his bargain with Lord Vasilik, that is all that stands in his way of leaving for, what he sees as, his freedom, and it astonishes him to discover that he wants more than that. “Before the next dawn, I’d be free. And maybe, I wouldn’t be alone. I’d never contemplated the idea, but I cupped it like an orange, barely daring to breath in its bright scent…” (Reed 164).

Curi has realized that there is more to life than just his survival and own interests, even if he can’t say it yet. However, by the time the princess Melet meets him, he's suffered severe failure and disappointment, and is ready to bargain with her to kill Lord Vasilik. He will have to relearn how to change a second time, repeat the ending of his hero’s journey.

As for Lord Vasilik’s motivations. He embodies a fear of death, hence he originally contracts Curi to find a way to keep him from ever tasting of death again. As a villain, it makes him highly motivated, which the readers see in his attempt to become ruler of the north. However, he is a villain who changes, expressing different aspects of the duality of death and life. If death is perceived as an absence of life, as Lord Vasilik initially sees it, then there is no reason not to try and extend that life by whatever means necessary. And yet, his perspective also shifts by the time Melet comes along. What is life without the possibility of death? Although it is never explicitly stated in any version of Koschei’s fairytale, the immortal sorcerer seems to have lost his savor for life. He does the same thing over and over, riding his horse over the land and returning to his empty castle.

This monotony is one of the reasons I became so fascinated by Koschei the Deathless to begin with. For the last three years of his life, my grandfather lived with my family, and by the time he reached his last year, nothing interested him anymore. Books that he would normally voraciously read sat unopened, the mere act of having to stand up and move from the couch left him asking when he’d get to go home and see his wife. (She’d been dead for twenty years, and he knew it.) When he died, I was relieved, even happy, because he was no longer really living anyway. That may sound harsh to some people, and yet…So it seems to be with the character of Lord Vasilik. He has become “Something in between…caught on the boundary, pinned to the board, unable to go back, unable to go forward” (Nix, 430). He recognizes this, Curi recognizes this. Lord Vasilik has outlived any advantages in continuing to cheat death. He tries to fix it by denying it, trying to fill that lack with the deluded fantasy that every fairytale villain seems to try; getting a kidnapped girl to fall in love with him. Curi seeks to end his undead existence, send him on into death where he belongs.

Deal with a Dead Man began as two ideas colliding within the framework of a fantasy. As I have continued writing, discovering adjustments that need to be made, my initial questions are developing in ways I did not expect, and certainly into nothing as concrete as direct answers. I have become more aware of something Stephen King said, that a story is like a fossil, and the “writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of [it] out of the ground as intact as possible” (163-64). That is what has begun to happen here. I have gone from confidently thinking I knew best, to completely changing the structure simply based on the demands of the story itself. It is a story that asks after the polarities of death, life, and what they mean, and it is still a reimagined fairytale, but I have no doubt things will continue to change. I find myself more willing to let Curi guide me on his hero’s journey, and tell the story as it should be.

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

248 p.

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Afton Reed

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