Spellfire, Self-Help, Dictee

Question: What do Ed Greenwood’s fantasy Spellfire, Lorrie Moore’s first collection of short stories, Self-Help, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE have in common?  Answer: not much other than I read them recently.  Furthermore, they were published in the 1980s (respectively 1988, 1985, and 1982).  They are all works of imaginative writing; and finally, each of these works has a slightly seminal status in US fiction. 

Spellfire (1988) was the first novel by Ed Greenwood set in the Forgotten Realms, a world he created.  A number of characters, myths, regions, and plotlines that have reappeared for the past 20 years were first introduced therein.  Spellfire is often overshadowed by the commercially more successful Icewind Dale trilogy, the first book of which was published the same year (1988).  Elminster, the society of Harpers, the Dalelands, and Zhentarim are all introduced here for the first time in the form of a novel.  Perhaps most importantly, though, it is the first demonstration of Ed Greenwood’s great sense of humanity and humor and his ability to render this sensibility through witty dialogue.       

Self-Help (1985) was ground-breaking when it first appeared on shelves, contributing to the renaissance of the US short-story, the ensuing proliferation of MFAs and journals devoted to creative writing, and a “feminine” aesthetic that is shared by such otherwise disparate personalities as Martha Stewart, Miranda July, and Liv Tyler.  In other words, she provided an aesthetic and intellectual dimension to an emerging self-help culture targeting women: bubble butts, bad affairs, tension with mothers and children, jobs of drudgery, repetition and, ultimately, always, language.  Moore put language at the heart of everything else, from pathos to bathos, and by so doing provided an exciting new approach to the meaninglessness and passions of existence.  This approach is echoed in the title of her collection and the introduction of the “How to” genre as imaginative prose—the absurdity and inexplicably suddenly very necessity of the prescription.  

DICTEE (1982) is a highly experimental, multi-genre work.  Miranda July comes to mind for comparison, but only because both artists work in film, performance, and writing.  The work moves through generic linguistic registers (autobiography, biography, eschatology, poetry, text book, history, memoir, lists or notes, philosophy), languages (French, Korean, Chinese, English), and intersperses a strong visual element, including charts, maps, diagrams, heavy enjambment (like entire pages are “enjambed”), photos, drawings, and hand written text (in various languages).  Unlike Spellfire and Self-Help, DICTEE cannot readily be tied into a commercial industry or an economy of cultural desire.  Using a chemistry metaphor, it breaks down literary elements as it breaks down nationality, ethnicity, and language. 

Ultimately it always comes back to language.  The protagonist of Spellfire is a young woman named Shandril who at the opening of the novel longs for adventure.  By the end of the novel she is battling an ancient undead dragon.  Adventure indeed!  This kind of male (oriented) fantasy is the sort of indulgence that the narrators in the stories of Self-Help resist while at the same time long for.  They speak from the tension between resistance to and longing for an order that will readily consume them.  DICTEE grapples with the historical and epistemological conditions of just such an order, but at the level of “ideology,” of nationality, ethnicity, of political territories that grand institutions of power kill for, that young women die as martyrs for, and always at the level of language, always as a performance.  In this sense, the undead dragon (technically called a dracolich) is a fantastic projection of history itself (playing here on David Der-wei Wang’s discussion of “the monster that is history,” in the book by that name) and the death drive that lends DICTEE its pathos, to end historical tensions as a martyr, as a symbol or sign and thereby confirm a repressive symbolic order that one longs for and resists, is redirected in Spellfire as the pleasure principle, as wish fulfillment, that dreamwork.  Shandril, that unlikely hero, absorbs all power and unleashes it at will.  In the hands of such an innocent, the dracolich of history must face itself and be destroyed, the inverse of Nietzsche’s over-cited maxims: stare at the naïve barmaid and the pretty barmaid stares back (or, that which does not kill us makes us a naïve barmaid).