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.

Jane Austen's Usually Unknowable Characters

Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is filled with people that don’t know each other, people who create public personas, participating in an act of polite deception all the while hiding private misgivings about those around them. 

As Austen’s characters actively construct personalities for themselves, they change behaviours like sets of clothes, one specifically cut out for the presence of polite society, while the unembellished self stays in private. Even the pretense that they know one another is part of the act. Yet this process of contriving false identities is not only undergone by imposters and cheaters. Elinor, the main protagonist, is no less proficient at playing pretend. Furthermore, identities are contrived and changed with such casualness that there is rarely any moral consequence involved. On the contrary, Austen illustrates in Marianne the perils of not participating in this polite deceit as Marianne constantly suffers for her honesty. 

In this world, playing pretend is clearly an expected custom, and to be honest is to be vulnerable. What results is a common sitting room populated by perfect strangers all happily deceiving each other into the belief that they really know one another. Yet that is only what lies on the surface. Ultimately, the novel is concerned with what lies underneath and how one can get to know anyone in the company of pretenders. 

For this, instances are provided in which a person fails to pretend convincingly, allowing brief views into private windows. These passing glances are crucial because without those public glimpses into personal lives there would be no evidence of the contradictory and changing nature of a person, for it is when the external fails to match up with the internal that Austen’s characters become complex and unknowable. 

Ultimately, it is in the conflict of the private and the public person that Austen’s concern lies as each is revealed to be critical to the completion of a person’s character. Thus, the connection between the contrived and the sincere is constantly being brought to the surface as Elinor and Marianne come to know the inconsistencies within themselves and those around them. In the end, it is only when both the public and the private person are seen in unison that unknowable people can be known with any certainty at all. 

 

Of all the ways that Austen incorporates the unknowableness of people into the plot, the constant claim of characters that they know each other better than they do is the most overt. The speed with which these comments are disproved by others shows that the definition of knowing someone is equally disputable. People are constantly wishing to be closer to others than they really are, not just in intimacy, but in proximity. Thus, Mrs. Palmer claims to live closer to Willoughby than she does, and the Dashwood sisters are consistently getting invited to spend more time with the Middletons than they would like. When Sir John is asked if he knows Willoughby he expresses great confidence in his knowledge of Willoughby’s character simply because “he is down here every year”. 

Of course, Sir John’s assessment of Willoughby’s character is proven to be horribly false. The problem with his view of knowing is later revealed as the narrator states that “to be together was, in his opinion, to be intimate”. 

Austen offers further cases of mistaken intimacy by displaying various unsuccessful pairings, couples who seem to play at marriage without knowing the other person at all, such as Mr. and Mrs. Palmer. It is debatable whether anyone outside the pair believes in their act, for not even Mr. Palmer seems to care enough to pretend that they really know each other.

These instances not only set the bar for what it means to know someone humorously low, it shows that many characters are contended to take others at face value. The falseness of surface appearances runs so deep throughout the lives of these characters that not even their claim that they know another can be trusted. They merely wish to appear as if they are well acquainted without actually taking the time to get to know one another. 

When Willoughby’s true character is revealed Mrs. Palmer suddenly decides to be glad that she was never “acquainted with him”. It is only after it has been publicly acknowledged that Willoughby is less than decent that he can be treated with anything less than politeness. Willoughby has, to put it simply, become someone who is no longer worth knowing, and, since they never really knew him at all, it is easy for those who had been acquainted with him to claim that they do not know him. It is, after all, true. 

In this way, the communal agreement at false intimacy works fine, for the most part, so long as its falseness is never publicly acknowledged. Yet for young women looking for a spouse, it makes for a dangerous playing field. 

 

The difficulty of knowing someone is most evidently displayed in the way the male characters are constantly mistaken for one another, hinting that, on the surface, a scheming man and an honest one look dangerously similar. Thus, when Edward and Willoughby are seen from a distance or in passing they are difficult to tell apart. It is precisely because Willoughby is not the only one who disguises himself that he blends in so well with common company, for the problem with surface appearances is that there is not much to them, and because people are generally expected to act amiably, they quickly start to resemble each other.  

Susan Morgan writes about the possible perils of blending people together in this way, saying that it creates a world “of uncertainty... without characters above reproach or beneath contempt”. The problem with everyone acting amiably is that they must be treated amiably in turn. Willoughby’s behaviour should thus be cause for suspicion from the start, for he is claimed to be known extremely well by many, all of whom “think him extremely agreeable”. Statements like these suggest that Willoughby is an extremely adept pretender, for he possesses an ability to be agreeable to anyone, whoever they may be. It is doubtful whether any of his acquaintances have ever seen the real Willoughby, for not only is he well liked by everyone, he possesses the ability to make everyone believe they know him intimately. 

In contrast, Colonel Brandon and Edward Ferrars, whose surface appearances are painted to be quite boring, are also safer, for both turn out to be equally steadfast in their private and public lives. 

Meanwhile, any sign of the real Willoughby is so well hidden that those who meet him once a year believe they have already gotten to know him. No one openly pries Willoughby for his secrets in the way they do with Brandon, for there is no evidence that he has anything private to hide. Altogether, Willoughby is so proficient at displays of false intimacy that his deceit extends even into relationships of real private emotion, such as his relationship with Marianne.

Austen shows in Marianne that to be publicly known is to be horribly vulnerable, for Marianne is one of the few characters whose public self is the same as the private. Because Marianne does not participate in public deceit, her private affairs don’t just become public, she is left unprotected without anything to hide behind. The entirety of her relationship with Willoughby, from its positive start to its painful end, is completely exposed. In contrast with those other secret engagements and private affections shown throughout the novel, there is very little about Marianne’s relationship with Willoughby that is private. The majority of their romance, even the very public humiliation that ends their relationship, happen under the eyes of others. Morgan writes that the role of polite lies is to offer a “public avowal of continued feelings and thoughts... It is a polite lie which promises truth”. The problem, of course, is that the promise Willoughby’s public actions make is the extent of it. The intimacies in which Marianne and Willoughby participate in public are not backed up by any private promises. Marianne’s mistake is to assume that Willoughby is who he publicly pretends to be. The mistake of those who are looking in on their relationship is the assumption that there is a private relationship backing up the public, namely, that an engagement has been privately agreed upon. 

There are also reverse examples of this throughout the narrative as various engagements are agreed upon which signal at affections that don’t actually exist. Morgan notes that “neither Willoughby’s engagement nor Edward’s reflects the state of their affections”. The public assumption is typically that one’s actions reflect the state of one’s mind and the affection of one’s heart. Yet, though this is certainly a comforting thought, it is rarely shown to be the case. People are far more complicated than that, and it is this that makes them unpredictable and difficult to know. R.F. Brissenden writes about this, saying “Austen’s wry insistence that absolute honesty in conversation would make ordinary intercourse impossible is amusing rather than horrifying”. It is by lying that others are spared the discomfort of truth, just as it is by lying that her characters are spared the discomfort of being publicly known. 

By allowing glimpses of her character’s contradictory nature, Austen shows that, when a character’s public and private lives don’t line up, there is usually something wrong, for it suggests that there is something that is painful or base enough to merit hiding. In the case of Willoughby, it is the selfishness of his true nature. For Elinor, it is the pain of loving a man who is engaged to another woman. For Brandon, it is the cruel fate of the first woman he loved and how little he could do to save her. 

 

For better or worse, Austen’s characters are rarely who they appear to be. Thus, the inaccuracy of their first impressions serves as an insight into how they wish to be seen rather than who they actually are. By complicating their first impressions, Austen provides insight into the contradictory nature of her characters, leading into the question of why exactly her characters wish to be seen this way and what their public personas say about their private motives. Brissenden writes about this process, describing how Austen introduces her characters by showing “how their (manner) strikes people on first acquaintance” only to ask within the following sentences “whether the appearance accurately reflects or expresses reality”.  

This is what Marianne fails to do and what Elinor is constantly attempting to find out. In this way, Marianne’s desire to see Willoughby as good says more about her than it does about Willoughby. Elinor’s need to hide her emotions speaks volumes about the vulnerability she feels. Colonel Brandon’s demeanour, which many think is boring, allows insight into his desire not to be publicly inspected. Similarly, the insistence of others that Lucy Steele is a sweet girl says more about Lucy’s need to be liked than her temperament, for Lucy is a character whom John Mullan describes as “a kind of monster”, something which is not sweet at all. 

The common assumption that Marianne represents sensibility while Elinor embodies good sense is merely Austen’s way of tempting further false first impressions, this time on the part of the reader. Ultimately, the point is not that each sister represents one or the other, but how their ability to be both sensible and sensitive complicates their lives, their ability to feel and to make choices. 

 

Despite all its concern with private and public behaviour, the narrative spends little time with people when they are alone, suggesting that it is not really in the private where its interest lies. Rather, Austen is concerned with what public pretences promise about the private. Solitude is usually observed from afar, and a person is put into private places only to be intruded upon by unwanted visitors.   

In many ways, Austen’s avoidance of private places serves to preserve their privateness, for the narrator consistently refuses to impinge on moments of intimacy. What goes on in private is usually implied through the gossip of outsiders or the unintentional intrusions of other characters into scenes of intimacy. Furthermore, intimacies of any kind are typically relayed by the narrator without any kind of indulgence, and they usually end quickly. Proposals of marriage are preserved by removing them from public view, omitting them from the narrative entirely. The intense emotions of those more private characters are likewise protected as characters constantly withdraw into solitude in order to dwell on their feelings. Even Elinor, the character that is followed most closely by the narrator, is allowed to step away and experience her emotions in private. Thus, after learning of Edward’s betrothal Elinor waits until after the Steeles have departed to “think and be wretched”, upon which the first volume abruptly ends, allowing Elinor privacy even from narrative intrusion. 

In this way, the narrator takes great care in offering just enough to suggest the contradiction of a character’s private and public self, giving a glimpse at the truth beneath the deception without allowing for a complete understanding of their real character. Austen, in short, does not care so much about the truth as she does about the process of obtaining that truth, for it is in the act of knowing that her real interest lies. 

In the end, Austen’s characters are not there to be known but to learn and to teach how to go about knowing. 

 

Although the unknowableness of Austen’s characters allows for them to be misunderstood by an inattentive reader, this does not seem to concern Austen in the least, for any reader who would dismiss her characters based on their surface appearances has failed to learn the lesson she is trying to show. 

Morgan writes that “the limited truth that learning mere facts can provide constantly remind the reader of how difficult it can be to...understand others without actually seeing into their minds and hearts”. In this way, Austen’s choice to tell the story largely through the eyes of Elinor makes sense. Elinor starts off the narrative already knowing one of the most important lessons about getting to know someone: that knowing takes time. Morgan writes that “judgment requires...being able to give oneself time. But human relations do not wait for judgments to be conclusive. They happen in the meantime”. 

It is in what Morgan refers to as “the meantime” that human relationships are formed, either to fall apart and fade away or stand the test of time and continue forming. Morgan concludes by saying that “(although) politeness is not an adequate expression of our feelings and thoughts... it leaves space and time for something still to be known”. 

In short, Morgan believes that Austen’s polite deceit functions as a promise. It is in its very inadequacy that its value lies, for it leaves space for something still to be known, for people to be more or less than their first impressions. While this allows for betrayal and the pain of being mistaken in someone, it also makes room for hope, for people to pleasantly surprise, or to be more than one thought they could be.

Sense and Sensibility ends with a feeling of incompleteness, suggesting that the process of knowing remains unfinished. The marriage of Marianne and Colonel Brandon, though built towards since their first meeting, is mentioned in passing as the story moves to its conclusion. Altogether, more time is spent in telling how Willoughby never stopped loving Marianne than in relating how Marianne came to love Brandon. This is because in many ways the Marianne of the beginning of the story is already gone, just as the Marianne that comes to love Brandon is one the reader never gets to know. Yet the very fact that the novel ends with marriage is a promise that knowing will continue. Edward, a character who throughout is barely known at all, will be known by Elinor, just as Brandon and Marianne will get to know one another. Knowing continues, and so it is never complete.   

In this way, Austen’s characters will always be unknowable, for, in the scope of a novel, the process of knowing ends when the story does. Thus, as Elinor and Marianne move on into love and a lifetime of knowing, the versions of them that have been briefly revealed by the narrator are already being left behind.

The Day of the White-Out

 Writing Ghost Stories during a White-Out

The world was a ghost of itself that day. The trees were ghosts. The building across the way was ghostly through the snow. 

I spent it mostly in my chair by the window, looking out of it from time to time, wondering how much paler the world could get.

 

 

 

The stuff came down thick as cotton, like fluffy rabbit tails, getting caught on everything it happened to touch. The tree outside my window was laden with fluff. The cars out-front disappeared under it, frosted over into hibernation. It filled up the world, disguising the town around me.

 

You forget you live in a town on those days. No cars come by. No people wander out their doors. Paths and roads get lost on those days, and all the town's people go missing under the weight of snowed in rooftops. We all live under ground on those days, like happy moles, the world and the wind barely remembered. 

 

I watched as the wind pack snow onto my windows all throughout the day. It was the most literal snowing-in I could imagine, and it thrilled me. I could faintly see the tree that stands just outside, bare limbs scratching, waving lonesomely.  

 

It thrilled me because I thought my chances were higher this time than the time the streets flooded whilst I stayed home and edited my book. This time wind and sky and snow were banning together, I thought, to build a snow-fort around me. In the morning, all I'd see is the close winter, pressed against the glass of every window, refusing to let me out, letting little in besides a faint impression of light, weakly melting.

I would not complain, not about the mountain on my front steps, too much for one shovel to muster; I would not mind about the car which has gone missing somewhere in a driveway which has equally disappeared. 

We can go dig out the world later.

 

I can go anywhere on the white page. And, though the white winter world is gone and distant, the ghosts on the page are more tangible than the cold seeping through the glass, just so long as the storm lasts. 

 

Still, my windows were only partly covered when the dark settled in, as it comes in winter, somehow softly, touching everything evenly. You look away, and then the day is over, and you bring out the candles and pretend the night will last forever so that the snowday does not end.

A lifetime of snowdays should me enough for me, I think. Books depend on snowdays, after all.

    

 

 

In the meantime, I will sit here in my snowfort through the school days and the times when cafes close. They will start to wonder where I went. They will forget where the front door is.

 

But sometimes in the dark a wanderer will dare the winter, and if they come by the snowfort which has a house under it, and maybe a lonely tree, they might see a light glowing faintly from somewhere under the snow and they will know someone is still in there and that they have not run out of candles. They will know someone inside is still awake, writing in secret.

 

For now, I would like the time to edit. I would like the days to fill themselves with winter, so I can stay snowed in. I would like to stay in my snowfort, safely forgetting that I live in a town, and not inside a book.