Dustfinger's Lover

Cornelia Funke in the second installment of the Inkheart series offers a display of architectural writing that is so imperious that it borders on the villainous. 

Yet it would be too much to say that architectural writing is innately domineering, for this is as false as to say that all discovering writing is necessarily flaky and fitful. While these are the pitfalls of each style of writing, neither is always the case. 

What is necessary for both types of writing is a healthy dabbling in each style, a dalliance of architectural planning combined with the easy whimsy of discovery. Each needs a dose of the other for the story to feel coherent and complete.

 

 

 

At the end of Funke's Inkheart Fenoglio, the fabricated author of the fictional book Inkheart from which characters like Dustfinger are derived, is whisked into the fictional world he believes he has invented. 

Then in Inkspell we come across him in the Inkworld by which time he has become a well known poet known as the Inkweaver. He is still caught up in the belief that the world around him is a product of his own invention, and while this is in part true, it is nonetheless problematic.

Although Fengolio has by this time spent much time in his own world he still sees it as a place of his own making. Every time he encounters a new character he wonders whether this is one of those he had invented. Every time something doesn't go his way he kicks himself for making his world the way it is, as the problems which he viewed from the safety of the writer's chair are now his reality. Furthermore, every time one of his characters makes a choice of which he disapproves he rebukes them, bickering with himself that this is not what he created them for or that this is not what he would have had them do. 

In short, Fengolio is an author whose work has not only swallowed him up into its fictional realms, he is an author faced with the very real fact that his work has escaped his control, that his characters have minds of their own and choices independent of his authorial intentions for their destinies. 

What results is a writer who is constantly frustrated by his limited powers to keep his world under his control, a writer who meets beings of his own imagination and wonders why they are so unfamiliar, who is puzzled when he encounters things in his own world that he did not create. Yet even though his fictional world has become his real life he still feels the right to impose on it. His desire to tamper with the lives of his characters is nearly tyrannical as he crosses the limits of natural power to bring people back from the dead and later to kill, even writing real life people into his fictional world. 

Yet Fengolio is not portrayed as evil, only foolish. The image one is left with is one of an ignorant author sitting at a desk, the wildness of fiction outside his door, refusing to see that the wonders of his own creation have taken on a life of their own. Since the book was first written, characters have been born and died. Rulers have come and gone. Love has been abandoned and found. Characters have led lives and grown because of them. 

One cannot help but think that if Fengolio had laid back and simply discovered this world he would have found wonders beyond his wildest imaginings and a story more untamed and more real than he could ever have written.

The idea that characters keep on living after the author has put down his pen, that there are corners of fictional realms outside the author's maps, is pure fantasy.

 

There is a moment part way through the book in which Fengolio nearly has an epiphany. When he meets Dustfinger's lover for the first time he is so astounded by her beauty that cannot but put her beyond the credit of his own making. 

"All this is nonsense! What makes you think you invented her? She must always have been here, long before you wrote her story. A woman like this can't possibly be made of nothing but words!"

 

Fenoglio is of course right, and not just because that woman is literally standing before him as a being of flesh and bones with breath in her lungs and thoughts in her head that he did not put there. This fictional woman is also made up of all the things that words can conjure, whether that be wonder, love, hate, jealousy, longing, fear. No one can deny that fictional characters inspire real emotions in people.

So, while it is right to say that Dustfinger and his lover are made up of words, this could never explain why it is I as the reader care about them so much, why I hurt for Dustfinger when he suffers and why I am happy when he finally makes it home.

Perhaps he simply reminds me of someone I once knew, but if that is the case, it is someone I no longer remember, which means I know the fictional Dustfinger better than the real life person that makes him something familiar to me. 

Another explanation would be that he awakens feelings in me that I have felt before, feelings that make him fiercely relatable. After all, most every reader who spends time with Dustfinger will have known what it is like to miss someone, to be separated from the people that you love; they will have experienced homesickness in some shape or form. These types of longings are familiar, and this makes them real. 

 

 

This is perhaps what Fengolio fails to realize. The emotions and ideas behind these characters might have stemmed from his mind once. But there is something beautiful and dangerous that comes about when fictional characters are given real human desires, hearts that can yearn and hurt and resist. It awakens something real in these beings made up of someone else's words because they awake something in their readers who root for them and connect with them, who hope for their success and pity them for their failures.

The problem is that Fengolio hasn't changed. He has refused to grow as a writer, even though he recognizes that his love of unhappy endings is hurting fictional people made real, and even though he sees that his favourite characters are burdened by his own desires to keep them unhappy. Furthermore, he refuses to see that his characters have grown since he last knew them, that the story has gone on without him and thus doesn't really need him to continue. 

He wants to be an architect, wants to use his words to construct fictions entirely under his finger, keeping the unruly and unforeseen bits neatly out of his story.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the architectural writer and their careful ways, so long as they leave room for the unexpected, for a story's ability to grow of its own accord and evade the expectations of writers and their rules. After all, readers don't read for rules. They do not read because they wish story's to fulfill their expectations. They read to be pleasantly surprised by them, and because stories give them things to ponder which were not there before.

 

 

Fengolio doesn't want to see that, if a story can go one telling itself after the author is finished with it, it could certainly have begun before the author first took interest in it, in which case he hasn't made any of it up after all. He simply discovered it and gave it the possibility to be put into words.

The fact that Fengolio realizes this briefly when he looks at a wildly beautiful woman and then quickly forgets it shows that he still not really grown as a writer. His attitude towards his own story and his role in it hasn't grown. Yet something still changes for Fengolio after he meets Dustfinger's lover. 

 

His relentless desire to take control of his story subsides. His struggle to hold the power in his pen ends and so, when he writes the story's ending for Meggie to read aloud, he decides to write the ending that the story needs, not the ending he himself desires, unconsciously showing for the first time that some stories outgrow their writer's, that a story might know things the writer never did, and give thoughts to readers the writer himself never had. 

 

Whether one creates stories or discovers them, every writer, be they a builder or a wanderer, must eventually let go of their work and stand in its shadow to marvel at how much bigger it is than they ever hoped it could be, how many unforeseen paths there are still to wander, or how much sprung up in the background while they were busy laying their bricks.