Glare Report 10/16/04: Fire and Ice, Jacks and Kings

[pegkerr]

Continuing to read Fire & Ice: The History of the Saint Paul Winter Carnival by Moira Harris. Yesterday I read the chapter on the St. Paul Winter Carnival "legend" and how it has been developed through the years, and I thought about how it should be reflected in the novel. The Carnival has a very elaborate story about King Boreas, god of the North Wind, and his nemesis, the King of Fire, who has been called a variety of names through the years: Ignis, Vulcan, Vulcanis, etc. I'd read bits of it before, but I didn't know how elaborate the whole legend is. All sorts of ritual, characters, costumes. I didn't know about the parts played by the Prime Minister to King Boreas, or the other four wind brothers (south, east and west, and a lesser north wind brother). The South Wind wears a sort of south-of-the border Mexican charro outfit, the East wind wears a turban, vest, and baggy Mid-eastern pants with boot tips curled upward, and the West wind wears cowboy garb with hat and boots. Or about the traditions and personalities of the seven members of the Vulcan Krewe (General Flameous is traditionally played by someone of military background, etc.)

I had figured that the Carnival legend is an indication, sort of a half-remembered echo, of the "real" magical story going on. In that respect, what I'm doing is rather similar to what Tim Powers does in his books: public ritual reflects the underlying more powerful magic truth. But what I realized yesterday is that the Carnival legend is so complicated, so elaborate, that I have to give a great deal of further thought to how much I want to make the characters in my story fit the legend.

One thing I realized, thinking it over, (and then I thought, duh, why didn't you think of it before, Peg?) is that I've got something going on that I didn't perhaps intend before, having a character called "Jack" and a King. Jacks and Kings, like the playing cards. This strongly reminds me of Tim Powers' Last Call, where Jacks are potential candidates for the role of the king, trying to overthrow the old king. And isn't that what Jack might be trying to do, in a way? Yet, he was named, I'll admit it, for Jack Frost. I discovered yesterday that in the early days of the carnival, some of the kings' costumes had features which were supposed to suggest a deck of playing cards.

The other thing I need to think about is that there is a role of the king's nemesis, Vulcan, the king of fire. In the legend, it's the role of Vulcanus Rex and his Krewe to celebrate the unexpected and the fun of the Carnival. And that sounds, in a way, like Jack. Yet I hadn't particularly thought of him as being a force for summer or fire magic. I had thought that to be a generally female force. (Although Solveig, strong in winter magic is, of course, female. Okay, so I'm inconsistent). To add to my perplexity, I seem to be setting up Rolf to be the Boreas figure, and yet he's definitely the villain of the book, which is the exact opposite of the way it goes in the legend.

This all makes me want to read naomikritzer's story about the St. Paul Winter Carnival--and yet, like Larry Millett's book, I sorta think I'd better not for fear it would influence me too much.

My reading yesterday also suggested another title: the name for the Queen of the Carnival is "Queen of the Snows." And that's certainly Solveig's role, not only as the architect of the ice palace, but because of the specifics of the exact nature of her relationship to Rolf, which I won't get into here. It sounds a little like "The Snow Queen," which is nice: the business about the heart of ice is right out of that Hans Christiansen story. Yet although there are a number of books called The Snow Queen (Joan Vinge, of course, springs immediately to mind) there are none called Queen of the Snows. The closest is a children's book called Stella, Queen of the Snow.

Rob doesn't like it. Yet I'm not ruling it out yet. It's just another potential title to go into the hopper. It's really still too early to decide.

Comments

[avengangle.livejournal.com]

My goodness, this is amazing. I'm utterly fascinated and simultaneously awed by the amount of material you've researched and the amount of stuff you've discovered for this book.

Personally, I still like "Glare", but that's just me. :)

Keep up the work. It's awesome.

[naomikritzer]

Peg, my story is about fifteen generations removed from the Winter Carnival story. My train of thought went something like this: "Wow, those Minnesotans think that they're all Lutheran and stuff, but all their public rituals are sooooo pagan. They've got the Winter Carnival, which is totally pagan, and the Mayday Parade, which is totally pagan. Wouldn't it be fun to write a story that brought this to the surface? And isn't it funky that in traditional mythologies that have gods associated with various seasons, summer is associated with order and winter with chaos, but in Minnesotan mythology it's the opposite?" The story that resulted was set generations after some sort of civilization-ending catastrophe and the only people who know it was inspired by the Winter Carnival are the people I've mentioned it to, it's not like you'd EVER get it from just reading the story. I think most of the readers didn't even realize that it was set in Minnesota. I can send you the text if you'd like to read it (you'd have a hard time finding it in print at this point, it was published in Realms of Fantasy back in 2000) and really, I don't think you need to worry about any sort of excess influence.

If you found that some of the ideas in the story sparked further thought, I think that would fall into the category of cross-fertilization rather than "oh no! I'm stealing ideas!" Because you know, even in the unlikely event that you were to read the story and think, "Hey, this is GREAT! I'm going to just lift this entire mythology that's going in the background and stick it into my own novel!" you would necessarily have to develop it so thoroughly to make it fit into the modern day world that no one (including me) would ever know unless you said something.

Something to think about, regarding Rolf being a good guy or a bad guy: the thing that struck me about King Boreas was that he represents ORDER while Vulcanis Rex represents CHAOS. (And this fits in interestingly with the Mayday Parade, which is a wonderfully chaotic festival, as well as the beginning of spring here, regardless of what the calendar says happens on March 21st.) And one thing that's interesting about that -- our harsh winters do offer us a measure of societal stability. To put it like the North Dakotans, "Forty Below Keeps the Riff-Raff Out." On the other hand, "order" is not always a good thing and "chaos" is not always a bad thing. The person who represents order can absolutely be the Bad Guy.

[siriologist.livejournal.com]

I'd never heard that summer = order and winter = chaos. Scientifically cold/winter is much more structured and ordered than warmth/summer. Think of the way atoms act in solids, liquids, and gasses. Solids are structured and orderly compaction of atoms, whereas gaseous atoms float randomly around. So it would make much more sense to have winter magic be more structured/orderly and more crystalline (which kind of goes with the ice palace thing) and summer magic be more free form and flowing...more riverine. Don't know if that helps or not, but it makes sense to me.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm certainly looking at something in this book along these lines. Winter magic is being associated in my mind with solidity, ice, cold, form, compactness, solitariness, slowness, and, um, maleness (Solveig being an interesting exception). Summer magic is associated with fire, airiness, attenuation, spaces-in-between, quickness, femaleness.

I'm sure this will distill further as I get further along in the process of writing.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

I think in that case I'd like you to send me the text, if you'd be willing, Naomi. Thanks.

[magentamn.livejournal.com]

I'm glad the current Winter Carnival mythology is so intriguing to you, but remember - you are writing fiction, and you can change things. Well, maybe not winter being cold ;-)

That riff about Jacks and Queens and Kings is fascinating. Whole new dimension to the words.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, exactly, that's my point: I have to decide how much of this am I going to use and how much am I going to ignore? Or even, how much of this am I going to subversively twist.