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Paper short abstract

An exploration of the tensions between consensus reality and the varied mythic sources that inform the fantastic and mythopoeic constructions in the works of Charles de Lint, including the "Jack of Kinrowan" books, "Moonheart", "Spiritwalk", and "Spirits in the Wires".

Paper long abstract

Where other writers have postulated mythopoeic constructions on the North American continent that demand a hierarchy and succession pattern that reflects different levels of invasion where the spiritual world and beliefs of Indigenous peoples are superseded by those of colonizing peoples and then contemporary technologies, Charles de Lint’s works instead attempt to imagine inclusive borderlands of wonder woven into the urban contemporary. By looking at the overlay of Kinrowan/1980s Ottowa in the Jack of Kinrowan books, Tamson House in Moonheart and Spiritwalk, and The Wordwood in Spirits in the Wires, I trace how de Lint’s mythopoeic constructions depend on a tension between the idea of consensus reality and the simultaneous idea that all the mythic sources he draws from exist as equally valid, multivocal pluralities of the mythic spirituality that underlies his fantastic constructions, rather than competing forces that necessitate overwriting each other. By focusing on the ‘real’, the everyday lives and experiences of his characters as they encounter borderlands and otherworlds, question their beliefs, and take their own journeys through what he terms ‘Mystery,’ de Lint builds urban spaces in dialogue with the varied mythic traditions he taps into, which become liminal spaces where characters, and therefore readers, are able to discover new pathways into wonder in the world they thought they knew, to discover more of ‘the world as it is.’ As such, the idea of consensus reality becomes less what everyone agrees exists, and more, what everyone believes might yet be.