The Use of Fairies in “Creature of the Night”

Kate Thompson’s Creature of the Night uses fairies in an intriguing way.  During my first read, I really did wonder why Thompson bothered with the fantastic at all.  In class we discussed reasons why Alan Garner put the Welsh myth in Owl Service.  The myth intensifies the teen problems in that novel.  What do fairies do for Thompson?

It could be said that the book is about the reform of a juvenile delinquent, a topic that seems to butt heads with fairies.  Why would a kid whose main concerns are drugs and money care about fairies?  But I think sometimes seemingly unrelated topics could achieve something haunting when mashed together.  For this book, the concern about fairies gives the book a metaphorical aspect.  The fairy is the creature of the night, who in the end takes the blame (in some respect in Bobby’s mind) for the stabbing of Lars.  At an early point in the book, Bobby proudly claims that he is the creature of the night.  It could be read that throughout the book, Bobby has to project these dark, latent desires onto another being, and therefore escape himself.  He identifies with the fairy in that it also lacks love.  He transfers his darkest rage onto the fairy.  Theoretically, he identifies himself in another and then to separate from it.  It doesn’t really matter if he believes in fairies, only that there is the possibility of something looming out there, and he does not want to be part of it.

Now that I think of it, there is an axe that shows up in the beginning of the book and is not used by the end.  He does not use it, but someone has.  Someone has chopped up Lars.  They say that if there is a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I, it better go off by Act III.  Does the gun go off?  I think the whole point of the story is the avoidance of putting the gun in Bobby’s hands.  That’s the whole point.

We could talk about the fantastic as metaphor all day, but what about the reality within the story?  Does the possibility of the fairy change anything?  It makes Bobby afraid.  But what does that do?  Does it scare Bobby into going to the Dooleys?  Actually, in a way it does.  But the Dooleys live right next to where the fairy is supposed to live, so it’s not a physical fear that drives him.  Perhaps another function of the fairy is to show the readers what exactly Bobby has been afraid of the whole way through—not the physical fairy, but the will of the fairy.  In a way, the will of the fairy is very real, since someone had to have killed Lars.

The fairy is also a physical presence of danger throughout the book.  Without it, danger of a murderous mind cannot be personified.  Without it, there is only the real murderer, which, if shown in the book, brings up another stew of plot deviances that the book as is does not delve into, and does not seem to be about.  Even if the fairy is not a personification of Bobby’s dark side, its presence shows that danger is out there.  With the fairy, the book is oddly a realistic depiction of the world.  Not that there are fairies, but that there are minds that has a motive just as sad and sinister.

Why the comics form?

I would like to pose the question: what types of story need to be told in the comics form?

We have said in class that plot-driven stories, action-packed stories could benefit from the art, and also benefit from the gift to the readers of the ability to speed up or slow down at their own will.  Indeed, most of our booklist include action-packed books: InuYasha, Tintin in Tibet, and American Born Chinese.  For American Born Chinese, another benefit from the form is to be able to show the visuals of the monkey king as well as the different versions of Jin.  Since the whole book is concerned with the truth of appearance, the comics form works well.

But what about stories like The Babysitter’s Club and Fun Home?  Raina Telgemeier has said that in adapting The Babysitter’s Club, she made a conscious effort of making the characters do something since they sat around most of the time.  But Babysitter’s Club is not originally conceived as a graphic novel.  Personally I think that Fun Home utilizes the medium fuller.  The reason that Bechdel could not have told the same story in prose form is that she has already tried, and failed.  She says so in her journal.  Words, pure words are too one-dimensional.  The comics form is a way to juxtapose words with something else to create a resonance that otherwise would not be there, or at least in the same way, to the same degree.  This juxtaposition is special to comics, and Bechdel uses it in spades.

Picture books versus Comics

I agree that the line between picture books and comics is very blurry.  But why is it that usually people have no trouble identifying one from the other?  I have noticed that for picture books, the images are not possibly sequential.  That is, for comics, there will very probably be at some point a series of images that connect to one another.  I am thinking about the two pictures in McCloud’s book where we perform closure to understand that the gentleman is raising his hat.  By the images alone, some sort of story is told.

Picture books, on the other hand, seem to work more with individual pictures.  They seem to depend more on the text to carry the plot.  (I am, of course, speaking generally here.)  There is a sense that pictures and texts in picture books are more additive, or interdependent, as opposed to parallel. Perhaps this goes back to the intended audience.  Younger children might not be expected to perform closure.  The pictures are, in a sense, “pretty.”  They are what the children look at while the adults read the text.  In a way, it could be grotesquely generalized that in picture books, the pictures are for the children and the texts are for the adults.  However blasphemous that statement sounds, on some level it is true.  If we are talking about the picture books written for children, and not written for “adult literary purposes,” then they are targeted at people who have just started or learning to read.  For better or worse, when comics and picture book writers think about how to present their ideas, the target audience does matter.

Exploring the boundaries of comics

Personally, I think comics is just another form of art, like film, or theater, or music, or even the more minute categories of the written word such as novel, short stories, and poem.  In that way, comics could be for children or they could be for adults, or they could be ageless.   I do agree that historically comics have been mostly slated as “kids’ stuff,” maybe it’s because it mostly has been targeted at children.  I think that with more critical analysis about comics, more and more writers are starting to realize comics as a form, that to use the form does not require a specific content.  This is a catch-22 because the reputation of comics makes many “serious critics” shy away from discussing them, and without being taking seriously, comics could not shake a reputation that is now becoming untruthful.

I agree with Matthew Prickett (from class) that maybe some “mature” graphic novels are part of the resistance to the concept that comics are just for kids.  I don’t believe that’s the whole reason though.  I think with Matt’s primary source of the graphic novel of the Alice’s daughter returning to Wonderland, the choice of the comics form is intentional in that it is playing with the idea that comics is a “children’s medium.”  The choice of medium parallels the original story.  And the perversion of that story goes along with the perversion of the medium.  (I use “perversion” here to mean an exploration that deviates from the supposed intent, or the socially presumed notions, of the original story and form.)

Tintin in Tibet, from comics to film

The film version of Tintin in Tibet is an amazingly close translation of the comics.  The major difference I noticed is that the film medium has a need for close-ups that comics do not.  Often it looks as if a scene in the film is an animated picture, only shown not at once but through a pan.  The panning shows sequence that comics can show through the order of the speech bubbles.  Both forms have advantages and disadvantages.  The film version shows reaction in real time, which could seem more realistic.  But sometimes the trade off is that the action has to be slowed down.  For example, the walk into the mountains drags on because it is in real time.  In the comic, the page space shows time, and the reader can go at his or her leisure.  Of course, there are cinematic techniques that could show time passing while not having to make people experience it.  The film version does it to some degree.  It fades out /fades in, and uses the slowing down of music to denote the mood of the travelers.  However, the film still takes some time in showing the passage of time.  Another difference with film is that it has to show the event from beginning to end.  That is, film cannot take a snapshot the scene at its most heightened emotional moment and have the viewer receive the emotional impact.  The film can create emotional impact through the playing out of a scene.  In this way, what seems dangerous in a comic book might not seem as dangerous in a film version.  An example is the scene where Captain Haddock crosses the wrong bridge.  In the comic book, I as the reader imagine the danger.  Watching the film version, I did not get the same sense of danger because everything is shown, and therefore there is not as much closure (in Scott McCloud’s sense of the word).  Of course, film is also capable of closure, such as panning away when an axe is raised over an actor.  However, there are some scenes such as the bridge-crossing scene that does not offend sensibilities and therefore does not call for a panning away.  In these scenes, the viewer is less free than the reader to impose an emotional reaction.

Sometimes stories lend themselves to specific forms.  The choice of the form could create different audiences, critical discussions, or as simply as different experiences.  For Tintin in Tibet, the film version seems to have a narrower audience than the comics version.   It seems to be targeted solely at children.  It could be argued that the comics version also targets children, but I personally feel that it reaches a broader audience.

LeGuin’s “Other” and Heinlein

In “American SF and the Other,” Ursula LeGuin calls to action SF writers to portray the alienated, specifically women, as equally human with the patriarchal white male.  Her argument is that if a group of people were portrayed as The Other through stereotype or thoughtless convention, then “you have made [them] into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship,” and either hate or reverence would deny them spirituality equality and human reality (99).  I agree with her argument, and believe it applies not only to SF or Fantasy, though the fantastic perhaps lends itself more easily to the critique of the unfair portrayal of The Other.

In the beginning of Robert Heinlein’s Have Space Suit—Will Travel, the monsters are presented as simple aliens.  The Mother Thing is deified, and slugface is human repulsion incarnate.  They stay that way throughout the book.  Their characters are never complicated.  It just seems difficult to create something different from humans and not heighten certain aspects of human nature.  How could we see outside our own box?  How could we truly create something alien?  Maybe one of the ways to come close is what Heinlein does at the end of the book.  He creates a no-body, patched together with millions of species.  It is no longer a creature.  It is a machine.  But it is a conscious one, and because of its non-living status it is the fittest to be the judge of the living.

The machine judge, then, is the ultimate Other.  It does not belong to any species of any time.  But does that mean that it is the ultimate insider?  To have a clear view of the entirety of the contents of a box, one must be outside it and able to see it as a whole.  In a way, the machine judge is defies LeGuin’s sense of the Other in that it is all the Others combined, and therefore so complete that it makes any single species feel fractured, minute, and alienated from the Truth.  Humans are an Other.  The combining of all the Others, including humans, into one entity makes it un-Othered.  SF and Fantasy can explore this concept, as Heinlein does, by making the idea into fantastic reality.

Stepping back to look at LeGuin’s broader argument, I would say that it is true that SF and Fantasy still uses stereotypes and portrays certain types or groups of people unfairly.  I would also argue that all types of creative writing have the danger this pitfall.  However, it is easy to say that certain portrayals are sexist or racist or ageist or holds any other prejudice, it is harder to say how writers should portray characters.  But then again, if we knew exactly how to write anti-Other characters, then the anti-Other character would become a stereotype.  The machine judge might be an example: the nonliving entity that judges the living.  Should literature simply reflect the truth?  Or should it be finessed with to reflect a certain truth?  I vote for the latter.  Too much truth is too cluttered.  Too much reality in one work would make it lose its theme.  Sad to say, it is hard to fit all of humanity into one book.

**

LeGuin, Ursula. “American SF and the Other.”  The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1979. 97-100.

Campbell on Myth

“Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world.”

~~ Joseph Campbell

L’Engle and Lewis

I have never thought of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time as a religious story.  It’s true that I’ve always envisioned IT as the embodiment of evil.  And even as a child I have thought that the story has an extremely warm ending (maybe too mushy for my taste).  The ability to love saves Charles Wallace.  I suppose it is possible to view Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which as the three messiah, but I’m reluctant to do so.  I love that this book is not as easily mapped onto Christianity as C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.  Or perhaps I’m overlooking something.  I think it’s important that as a person who is not Christian, I get full satisfaction out of L’Engle’s book even though I do not receive the religious message.  Perhaps the lesson is love and faith, or faith in love, but personally, I do not have to take it as love for Christ.  For me a good book works for many different people for different reasons.  L’Engle’s book is one of them.

As for Lewis’s book, the first time I heard the story I also did not know that it was about Christianity.  After having that pointed out, it is almost impossible to miss it.  How does symbolism work in a story?  That is, when symbolism is obvious, does the symbol become the symbolized?  Is this book a story about Christ, or is it a story about a lion, a witch, and a wardrobe?  I think it’s the latter.  Christianity, or any type of doctrine or ideology could be the motivation behind writing a piece of work, but the story is still the story.  It is just possible that people who do not follow Christianity could get a message out of this book just as profound.

**

L’Engle, Madeleine. A Wrinkle in Time. New York: Crosswicks, Ltd., 1962.

Lewis, C.S. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. New York: MacMillan, 1950.

Order and Chaos

Neil Gaiman makes use of sequence and repetition in his picture books The Wolves in the Walls and The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish.  I had originally thought that he uses the rule of three, but that doesn’t seem to be the case all the time.  In The Wolves, the protagonist has three relatives that she goes to when she has something new to tell people, and the readers get three different reactions.  With The Day, the dad is swapped with four different children.  There is definitely something to be said about repetition here that is similar to the trials of a hero.  What does the traditional hero tale structure lend to these picture books?  There is a sort of comfort in the repetitions.  In both books, the world is so messed up and has such dark and disturbing undertones that the repetition seems to bring some sort of order to the lives of the children protagonists.  I think the discordant juxtaposition between chaos and order is part of the reason why I find these books so fascinating.

Picture Book Illustrations

I’m going to compare two picture books, The Dragon and the Unicorn and The Shaman’s Apprentice.  They are both illustrated by Lynne Cherry.  She has also written the first.  The second is written in collaboration with Mark J. Plotkin.  I picked these two books because I wanted to see whether or not working with someone else alters Cherry’s storytelling.  It does not.  At least not by much.  Both books are didactic, not that they aren’t fun to read.  The Dragon and the Unicorn is about saving the growth forest.  The Shaman’s Apprentice is about respecting the Tirio knowledge (although at one point the main character says to the shaman, “Tamo, Wise One, the day must come when they again see that you are the wisest of them all.”  This seems to put the Tirio knowledge back into a hierarchy with the “white men’s knowledge,” which makes me uncomfortable.)  The writing style and mood of the books are similar, and what strikes me is that there are more differences with the illustrations than there are with the writing.

Both books have a green-tone base and the characters are realistically drawn, though the similarities end there.  The Dragon and the Unicorn has thick borders around every page, filled with fairytale vines and images from the plot on that page.  The borders help set the mood for the story, and help highlight character arcs.  They also constantly remind the reader that this story is a fairytale with a good ending.  The Shaman’s Apprentice has no borders.  The illustrations always fill up both pages of the book and text is imposed onto the left-hand side with a box.  The picture style and the coloring are bolder.  Maybe this choice adds a sense of reality to the book, in that this is about a real place, as opposed to a magical forest.

On a slightly different note, why has Cherry chosen to use dragons and unicorns for the first book?  Why did she decide to use fantastical elements to tell a story about saving the old growth forest?  One reason could be that it might augment the interest of a child in a topic that they might otherwise be indifferent to.  Fantasy personifies “wisdom” with the unicorn, and therefore shows the child that it is to be cherished.  A fantastical setting also allows Cherry to draw the forest as more enchanted than a photograph might show, again to augment interest and care in the reader.  I think that it is successful in these goals.

I do want to bring up Cherry’s choice of the race of the royal family.  Although the story is set in a time with knights and dragons, the royal family is African American.  I love that this is the case, and it makes me more interested in the book than I otherwise would be.  This story does not follow the traditional of Arthurian legends or the history of the English royal family.  I am curious as to the Cherry’s reasons behind this choice.  One of the effects this choice has on me is to make me like the book more.  It also makes me like the royal family more, maybe because the family challenges literary traditions.

**
Cherry, Lynne. The Dragon and the Unicorn. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995.
Cherry, Lynne, and Mark J. Plotkin. The Shaman’s Apprentice. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1998.