Shannon
Kizzia eternaldancer1@yahoo.com
Dr.
Catherine Pavlish
English
123
6 June 2008
The Luminous
Liminal:
Transformation
In and Through
Mulder/Krycek Slash
Liminal: of, relating to, or being
an intermediate
state, phase, or condition: In
between, Transitional. (Merriam-Webster
Online Dictionary)
According to Urban
Dictionary, fanfiction is “a
piece of fiction .
. .
utilizing characters and situations from a pre-existing
work including
(but not limited to) books, television programs, films, and comic
strips.” Slash,
though it got its linguistic beginnings as merely the slash, the
“/” between
character names indicating that those people would be romantically
and/or
sexually paired in the story, with the advent of Kirk/Spock fanfiction
(fanfic,
fic) became exclusively associated with same sex pairings. (Satina)
It was in
reading
a chapter from my Mythology textbook on rituals and their liminal
nature that
this paper started to go through a metamorphosis as I realized how very
liminal
the experience of writing and reading Mulder/Krycek slash fanfiction
(M/K) is.
Slashers put Mulder and Krycek into liminal spheres in order to play
with them,
to transmute the effects of traumas dealt them on the series, The
X-Files,
and transform their outcomes, their relationships to themselves and
each other,
and the world.
It is in
their own
liminal sphere, sitting down at their computer to point, click, and
enter the
world the slash writer has crafted for them, that the reader then
undergoes
their own altered-from-the-norm experience and, sometimes,
transformation. It
is in the larger liminal playground of “fandom”
– the community of slash writers and readers in which sharing
of stories and
feedback takes place – that readers and writers come together
to celebrate the
liminal experience of slashing -- writing the characters into some form
of
same-sex relationship -- Mulder and Krycek.
It was this layer of phenomena that I felt drawn to
illuminate, as the
very liminal nature of M/K has helped illuminate themes for me and
others such
as love, forgiveness, violence, sex, sexuality, and transformation.
Pre-Slash
I got
into slash kicking and screaming.
I was
a Mulder/Scully “shipper” (relationshipper) and
writer to the bone. Or
so I thought. I had
gotten involved in watching The
X-Files in the first place while trying to get over an
unrequited
love. I turned to
science fiction, to
hours in front of the television, watching Mulder and Scully solve
cases and
search for the Truth. My
own search led
me to move from the Midwest out to San
Diego.
I had
finally met a real, live lesbian, and I began to write Mulder/Scully
(heterosexual) fic. Life was strange but working.
But
another lover found me. She
found my
writing. She was a
writer, too. She
was getting into slash. She
went against the grain, against the
Mulder/Scully doctrine. She
was
indulging in Krycek. I
wanted her. But I
didn’t want my MSR (Mulder/Scully Relationship)
broken up. As the
Stones say, “You can’t
always get what you want. But
if you try
sometimes, you might just find, you get what you need.” (The
Rolling Stones)
The
same, I came to realize, was true of Mulder and Krycek themselves. The new road I needed to
walk, that I found
myself walking in spite of my fear and confusion, one that changed my
sexuality, made me surrender, and led to transformation, that took me
through
my own liminal space, I could not have walked with Scully, and neither
could
Mulder. She is a
scientist, not a ‘believer’.
For the road I was taking, I needed, I
wanted, to believe….
Krycek:
I
hate this
part. The let down. That this is all there is. Just a body on the floor
and my
gun smoking in aftermath. Unsatisfying.
They told me there was nothing like
it. Better than orgasm. Better than crisp, green American money. They
told me
it was justified. I didn’t believe a word of it, of course.
But a little part
of me had hoped that it would suit me. That I’d be good at
it, at least, and
avoid throwing up once it was over.
And I am. Good at it. I’ve
never thrown up. Murder doesn’t make me sick. But neither
does it elate me. I’d
wonder if I’m a sociopath, but I’ve read
Mulder’s profile on me, and he says
I’m not, so I think I’m out of the woods on that
one.
Maybe I’m just…numb.
Mulder:
It
had stung.
Their last conversation about her cancer. She spoke about giving it
meaning
even while she knew good and well why she had it. Knowing it was for
Mulder. To
make him believe.
Mulder leaned back, feeling his
bones ache. It hadn’t been too long ago that he’d
wanted to eat his gun. He
still felt it, hard and nonjudgmental against his thigh. He felt the
silence
around him in the cocoon of his basement.
All. His. Fucking. Fault.
And the funny thing was…it was
starting not to hurt.
The above is
an
excerpt from my story, Stimulus.
I wrote this in cooperation with my partner, Satina. It comes from
the beginning of the story and
falls into the category in this essay I’ve titled,
“Pre-Slash.” Pre-Slash
is a term that slashers use to
indicate that there is no explicit “slashing” going
on in this particular
story, but if they had continued it, there would have been in the
characters’
future. I’m
using it here to show that Mulder
and Krycek have yet to be put in a position by the author, The Goddess,
to
transform their lives and the world through their relationship with
each
other. And just
like Mulder and Krycek,
we have to start there, too: Pre-Slash.
As mentioned
above, the first time slash references a same sex pairing seems to be
Kirk/Spock fanfiction, which was written pre-Internet.
In an interview with a good friend and reader
of M/K slash, Nancy,
she told me, “I
started reading Kirk/Spock back in the days it was kept in boxes under
dealers’
tables at Star Trek conventions.”
Contraband.
And
that’s the
very essence of something universal people seem to find in
Mulder/Krycek slash,
something we crave: this
juicy
otherness. This
illegal drug. Bel,
a reader and slash writer wrote, “I do
tend to look first in slash-based archives and communities for my
recreational
reading, as this is where the bulk of unconventional relationship-based
stories
are found….”
And J corroborates, “I
found M/K by accident, and after my initial shock, found pleasure in
taking
enjoyment in the forbidden.”
Maybe this is
where
we all start. Mulder/Krycek
was not
forbidden to me because of the queer aspect of the stories; I, myself,
was
queer. But it went
against the
Mulder/Scully status quo I was used to.
It also challenged ideas I had about violence,
forgiveness, and sex.
In a sense,
all of
us – Mulder, Krycek, the readers, and the writers –
are all starting at the
same point on Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey (as
outlined in Introduction
to Mythology: Contemporary Approaches to Classical and World Myths): The Call to Adventure and
in some instances,
like my own, The Refusal of the Call.
(Thury 137)
As seen above, both
Mulder and Krycek are experiencing a crisis within their status quo,
within the
norm. It is the
call, indeed the clash
or collision with the other, that forces them to separate from their
known
world, and it is our first encounter with slash – and readers
remember their
first like they remember a first kiss – that prompts us to
disengage from the
status quo and embark on a new and “forbidden” or
“unconventional”
journey. This step
involves a jump to
the liminal, a crossing of a threshold within and without
one’s self.
In the story
excerpted above, the characters enter the liminal sphere of the gay
club called
Stimulus. It
represents for each
a departure from their norm – Mulder’s norm being
the FBI and Krycek’s his work
as an assassin and power broker. Victor
Turner, in his book The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu
Ritual,
explains that “the essence of liminality is to be found in
its release from normal
constraints, making possible the deconstruction of the
‘uninteresting’
constructions of common sense…” (qtd. in Thury 383) In this sense, slash
itself is the fertile,
liminoid ground that we and the characters must walk to resolve the
conflicts
and fears with which we’ve begun.
This liminal
story-ground resembles what Gloria Anzaldua refers to as the
borderlands: “A
borderland is a vague and undetermined
place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state
of transition. The
prohibited and forbidden are its
inhabitants.” (3) Certainly
Mulder and
Krycek are forbidden to each other;
Krycek betrayed Mulder in multiples ways throughout the
series, and he
was the hitman in Mulder’s father’s murder in the
episode Anasazi, thus
a romantic and sexual relationship between the two, by our cultural
standards,
would be unexpected and probably unpalatable even independent of the
fact that
both characters also appear heterosexual on the show. (FOX
Broadcasting, 1013
Productions)
Slash, the
same-sex
pairing of two popular characters who may or may not actually be gay in
the
original work or in the fanfiction, is the land on
the other side of
society’s unnatural boundary that intimates that it is not
okay for
heterosexual women (or anyone else for that matter) to be turned on by
gay sex
or for women to explore their masculinity and sexuality.
Furthermore,
gay
clubs could certainly be described as the product of
society’s unnatural
boundary against homosexuality. Stimulus,
the gay club and the story, is that liminal place where we witness the
right
two people colliding in the right place at the right time. We have begun the journey
with them into
slash.
Violence as
Liminal Space in M/K
It
comes down to this
Your
kiss
Your
fist
And
your strain
It
gets under my skin
Within
Take
in
The
extent of my sin.
(Sin, Nine Inch Nails)
Now, there
are as
many different kinds of M/K slash stories out there as there are
authors, but
one thing they all have in common, one thing that they all necessarily
must
address, is the violent nature of these two men’s
relationship. It is
precisely the violence that some slash
enthusiasts use to provide proof of Mulder and Krycek’s
“slashability”.
After the
death of
his father, Mulder uses every chance he gets when he runs into Krycek
to “rough
him up”, to put his hands on him, shove and pin him up
against walls, to punch
him in the mouth. In
the words of David,
Satina’s and my former partner and the only heterosexual male
M/K slash writer
that I know,
“I
have to say that
the writers of the X-Files definitely teased the M/K relationship to
the point
where it would take little imagination on the point of the viewer to
make their
relationship more explicit.”
Indeed, it
is theorized that Mulder’s need
to hit Krycek is, in part, a sublimation of his sexual desire for
Krycek. As J
explains, “I think everyone has had the
feeling at some point that if they could just pummel someone, they
would feel
better. . . . I think that’s
Mulder’s problem. His
emotions toward Alex [Krycek] are so
strong that he has not developed a means to process them, and so it
comes out
in beatings….”
But the
violent nature of their relationship on the show provides a breeding
ground in
fic where authors use it to resolve something that the almost
exclusively male
writers on The X-Files left
unhealed. M/K
slashers use the show’s
violent Mulder/Krycek scenes to create their own stories of revenge and
pain,
yes, but also to explore profound healing through forgiveness
“and/or the
transmutational power of sex.” (Satina)
The show gives us scenes, such
as the one in Anasazi, where Mulder throws Krycek down
on the hood of a car
and punches him because he believes (and is correct in believing) that
Krycek
assassinated his father. (FOX
broadcasting, 1013 Productions) This
is
not an isolated incident on the show, and yet Krycek never hits Mulder
back; he
defends himself only once and not successfully.
The one time he has the chance to hurt Mulder, when he
visits Mulder in
the episode called The Red and the Black and catches him unaware, holding
him at gunpoint
(Mulder’s gun that Krycek has stolen off of him) in order to
give him intel on
a captured alien rebel, all Krycek does is kiss Mulder on the cheek and
return
his gun to him before he leaves. (FOX,
1013)
Slash takes this tendency toward
violence and
instances like the kiss and expounds on them in a liminal space denied
the
characters on the show. I
think that
male aggression and, indeed, violence in the forms of hitting, kicking,
threatening, shoving, gunplay, etc. are examples of culture-approved,
even
conditioned masculine responses to conflict.
Slash, and the mostly women who write it, takes this same
conflict into
a liminal sphere, i.e. a place not sanctioned by a patriarchal
culture or society, in order to access
answers also denied by that same society.
As Turner asserts:
[Liminality is] a time outside
time in which it is
often permitted to play with the factors of sociocultural experience,
to
disengage what is mundanely connected, what, outside liminality, people
may
even believe to be naturally and intrinsically connected, and to join
the
disarticulated parts in novel, even improbable ways.
(qtd. in Thury 385)
What
I think society sees as “naturally and intrinsically
connected” here is the
masculine response: the necessity for violence against one’s
perceived enemies
and the witholding of forgiveness from them.
So slash takes Mulder and Krycek places that the societal
norm, the
show, doesn’t take them, such as:
“Get
the hell out of my way,” I growl.
I’m
staring at his chest. His
unripped
clothes. They smell
like laundry
detergent. And
I’m about to walk back
out into hell. My
tears fall and
suddenly I’m fighting him, shoving at his chest and spitting
in his face, “Go
to hell, Krycek! Fucking
go to
hell! You coward! You fucking dirty
coward!”
And he’s taking it.
My exhausted blows to his belly, his ribs,
the slaps to his chest and neck, the nails clawing, my body ricocheting
off his
with the force of my assault. I’m
only
wearing myself down, not him.
“Mulder…” he murmurs, and I
punch
him for that. Right
in the mouth.
“You piece of shit,” I hiss.
He takes my wrist and whirls us
around, so that my back is against his door and we’re still
face to face. His
lip is bleeding. He
pushes me into the steel with his body and
licks the blood away. (Kizzia, Burn to
Shine)
In
this story, the violence serves a positive function: it is a
catalyst for the release of Mulder’s pent up resentment and
an expression of
his vulnerability. It
is a chance for
Krycek to stand witness to Mulder’s pain and be held
accountable. It is
the beginning of a
healing, and this healing takes place
within the fic element known as hurt/comfort.
P.J.
Falzone writes (with a short quote from Camille Bacon-Smith, a writer
with a
PhD in Folklore from the University of Pennsylvania) in her/his
article, “The
Final Frontier is Queer: Aberrancy, Archetype and Audience Generated
Folklore
in K/S [Kirk/Spock] Slashfiction”, “’One
of the most commonly written about
themes has been hurt/comfort’ in which one of the characters
sustains an injury
or hurt, and is cared for by the other character.
This hurt/comfort trope seems to be intrinsic
to much of slash . . . and operates as a gateway through which the
slashed
characters become cognizant of their queer feelings.”
I would add that hurt/comfort
has much more
far-reaching functions, such as a means for healing (physical and
emotional),
forgiveness, and resolution/transformation, not just for the characters
but for
the readers and writers who, in the process of healing Mulder and
Krycek,
realize a different way to deal with conflict and forgiveness in their
own
lives. J says,
“Hurt/comfort is probably
my favorite because it requires more than one facet to a person,
it’s more than
just sex. . . . There is so much hurt in
the world that
sometimes you just need to have a happy ending, and sometimes you need
a
reminder that people can surprise you and put someone else ahead of
themself
[sic].”
Slash
is not the only queer fiction that takes advantage of hurt/comfort. Larry McMurtry and Diana
Ossana’s screen
adaptation of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback
Mountain uses this device when Ennis
gets thrown from his horse
and Jack tries to clean his wound by their campfire.
(Lee, McMurtry, Ossana, Proulx)
This act of compassion furthers the true
meaning of their relationship even as it initially distances Ennis from
Jack
when he rejects the offer, angrily snatching away the cloth. It is this parting from
the patriarchal,
learned masculine response, this reaching out to help another, that
moves them
toward a fuller expression of themselves.
It is definitely worth noting, as well, that Brokeback
Mountain itself,
the place where they got to know one another, fell in love with one
another,
and first had sex, is the liminal space in which Ennis and Jack can be
together; neither one of their normal worlds will allow such a
relationship.
(Proulx) So
liminality seems to be a
common, perhaps even universal, aspect not just of slash fiction but of
queer
fiction of all kinds.
Sometimes
the hurt/comfort of Mulder/Krycek slash takes place in a completely
liminal
environment constructed by the author specifically to explore healing,
to force that healing on one or the
other and usually both of
the characters. This
is true in two of
Satina’s stories, Trust and Mayday.
In Trust,
Mulder finds Krycek in a Syndicate testing facility in which he has
been
tortured. He finds
Krycek with two
broken legs, a broken right arm, (and a missing left arm courtesy of
the
episode of the X-Files, Terma.)
Mulder must decide if he’s going to care for
Krycek or continue their feud of betrayal and leave him there. The entire rest of the
story takes place in (liminal)
hotel rooms where Mulder cares for Krycek and their relationship
develops.
(Satina)
In Mayday the tables are turned. Mulder finds Krycek in an
ice cave in Antarctica while he’s tracking
the body of an alien that Krycek
has in his possession. A
storm blows in prohibiting
them from taking their leave of each other.
Mulder suffers hypothermia and it is Krycek’s
turn to choose to help him
or let him suffer. Obviously,
the choice
to help Mulder instead of betray him once more is pivotal to the
relationship
and the plot, and the ice cave, far from the back alleys or dimly lit
parking
garages of D.C. where Mulder and Krycek might expect to find each
other, acts
as the liminal atmosphere that forces relationship growth. (Satina)
Another
form of liminal violence in M/K slash is that of rough or even
nonconsensual
sex. Imajiru’s
Departure series is a perfect example of
“noncon” in M/K
slash. It’s
also one of the first. It
was first posted on August 16th,
1998, after the fifth season of The X-Files when the episode The
Red and the Black aired, featuring the slash
famous kiss scene
referenced above. Her
story is
considered a classic in the Mulder/Krycek fandom.
I can’t speak for Imajiru as to why she wrote
noncon. I can only
speak for myself and
say that when I’ve written it, I’ve had multiple
motivations, including a
feeling that it only fits with the violent nature of their relationship
on the
show and therefore makes for a more believable way that they could
enter into a
sexual relationship, a belief that such drastic measures need to be
taken to
provide the necessary catalyst for healing, and a desire to explore the
darker
parts of myself and fantasies of nonconsensual sex that I would not
explore or
write about elsewhere.
Other
stories don’t contain explicit nonconsensual sex while still
indicating that it
would still be relevant to, and to some degree typical of, Mulder and
Krycek. In Stimulus, Krycek has a dagger tattooed
to the underside of
his penis. This is
a symbol of his
belief in violence, the walls he’s put up around himself, and
his need for
control. When he
has anonymous sex with
Mulder via a glory hole (a way to receive or give anonymous oral sex
literally
through a hole in a wall) in the club, it acknowledges the unspoken
violent
nature of their relationship and recognizes the dual aspect of that
violence:
physical/sexual, damaging/healing, destroying/creating. Mulder is both afraid of and
enthralled with
the bodyart. The
reader might well have
the same reaction. We,
too, are in that
liminal space where the sexual rules of society may be bent in order to
achieve
the writer’s purpose: in this case sexual arousal, the
revelation of contact,
and subsequent healing. (Kizzia)
Some stories take the characters
into the safe, sane,
consensual, and prototypically liminal playground of “bondage
and discipline,
Domination and submission [D/s], and sadomasochism” (BDSM) to
work out their
issues. (Wikipedia) Stories
that explore
this dynamic of healing include the collaboration between Satina and
myself, It’s
Not Enough,
in which Mulder dominates
Krycek in what’s called a “24/7”, a BDSM
relationship that is not exclusive to
“scenes”, sexual or other scenes of D/s, bondage,
humiliation, punishment, role
playing, etc., but that pervades every aspect of their lives in which
they live
together. They
strike this agreement,
indeed a contract, in order to balance the unhealed energy between them
in
which Krycek had previously had power Mulder did not and used that
power to
hurt Mulder.
Another example is Louise
Wu’s Echo Lane. This story represents the
liminal within the
liminal. The
characters are already
placed literally between worlds when Mulder experiences a mysterious
jump into
a parallel universe in which he and Krycek had become lovers early in
their
work relationship instead of Krycek betraying Mulder.
The “norm”al Mulder ends up with the
liminal
Alex (Krycek) and Mulder’s counterpart, Fox (Mulder), winds
up in the “norm”al
world with Krycek.
Within
this already liminoid experience, Mulder finds out that Fox and Alex
play with
BDSM in their sex life. This
knowledge
is part of a long and agonizing healing process in which Mulder
gradually
releases his anger and blame and comes to see what could have been if
only he had made a different choice
early in their
relationship. (Wu)
This is but one of many ways
slash writers use sex
and violence combined to heal and unite the characters in a way that
would
never be and was not attempted on the show.
Love
in the Liminal
He bends his head to his work
once more, careful and confident as he puts the ring through my nipple
and
finally finishes by twisting the ball into place so the fragile gold
circle is
complete. My breath
leaves me in a shaky
rush as I look down at Mulder and at my ring.
He’s looking at it, too, an expression of wonder
and pride on his
face. He leans in,
making fear burst
along my veins, but he places a kiss just over the deep-red little
hurt, over
my heart, lingering there, hot and wet.
Then he rises up off his knee, leaning in close, his
breath hard on my face. He’s
trembling.
“Hurt?” he asks, little more than a
whisper.
I nod, hands reaching up and finding him as his are
finding me, cupping, holding, stroking as my nipple stings and aches. “Yeah,”
I husk, not knowing what comes next.
“I guess it’s supposed to,”
he says. . . . (Kizzia, Find Your
Way)
“On
her site
[Annie] Proulx admits, ‘There is one lie in this interview
where I said I had
never fallen in love with any of my characters.
I think I did fall in love with both Jack and Ennis, or
some other
strong feeling of connection which has persisted since the 8 years
since the
story was written.’”
(The Missouri Review Online Archives)
Audre Lorde defines the difference
between the erotic and the pornographic as follows:
“[P]ornography is a direct denial of the
power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes
sensation without
feeling. The erotic
is a measure between
the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest
feelings.”
(qtd. in DeShazer 537) When
beginning
this paper, I knew my own opinion of Mulder/Krycek.
I knew my own and others’ writing and knew
that M/K, as a general rule, tended to transcend the pornographic. Even my most graphically
sexually stories,
even those containing nonconsensual sex, have sufficient evidence of
Lorde’s
definition of the erotic: that deep connection to feeling. I am, like Proulx, in love
with my characters.
And
yet, is this
love I feel because of a personal connection I have with my characters
and a
sense that they are revealing me as I reveal them?
Or, as a woman writing queer men (I say queer
because often I write Mulder as heterosexual but having a gay
relationship with
Krycek only. Queer,
for me, is a more
open-ended label.), am I denying my femaleness in the writing?
J’s interview might support the latter. “I was so
confused about my own sexuality,
that if I was reading about men, then I wasn’t caught up in
any issues that a
female character brought to the story.
Without a woman involved, I didn’t have any of
my own problems come up
and could just enjoy the fantasy.”
Bacon-Smith
is quoted once again in Falzone’s paper on this topic: “Homoerotic
fiction interest groups . . .
seem to include a much higher percentage of women who seem to find
relationships
with men simultaneously attractive and threatening . . . [T]he
homoerotic
stories stimulate sexually through the fantasy while at the same time
they distance
the woman from the risk sexual relationships with men
represent.”
But Falzone goes on to call such
summaries “heteronormative at best, heterosexist at
worst.” And
my interview with J went on to reveal
further feelings that support Falzone’s accusation. “[W]hen you
consider that I didn’t even know
what sex was until I was 19, I was relatively new to the whole concept. And even then [gay] male
sex was never spoken
about, other than to say it was wrong.
So when this entire world of sexuality was opened up to
me, it was like
finding parts of me I didn’t know I had.”
Nancy expounds on this idea. “I am much more
[accepting] of alternative
lifestyles than I was before [reading slash.]
Also, I am more open to trying different things sexually. Or would be, but my spouse
hasn’t kept up!”
This seems like a good argument for slash reacquainting
women with their own bodies and sexuality rather than distancing them
from
themselves.
Or maybe, to find an in-between
place, a liminal
answer, women’s experience of opening to and enjoying slash
is just one of many
ways she can experience her own sexuality, her own experience of
masculinity
perhaps previously disowned, her own desires to dominate or submit or
switch,
her own unacknowledged parts, parts necessary to understanding her
deeply
feminine body and self.
Bel wrote about her own experience
with slash and her sexuality:
Being poly[amorous], [having,
desiring, or being open
to having and loving more than one lover] and bi[sexual] and knowing it
made me
feel as though I was all alone when I was younger, and although
I’ve never
really cared what others thought of me, it was difficult to think that
nobody
would understand. Now
I know I was right
and there really is no one else like me, but that’s okay
because I have that,
at least, in common with everybody else.
. . . What
involvement in fandom
has done, is open my eyes to the many different ways in which people
live and
love, and I’m more confident in being myself publicly as well
as privately
because of this.
Regarding Mulder and Krycek, slash
writers sometimes write them falling in love, sometimes not. In one very dark story by
Zoe Takashi called It
Has To Be You,
Mulder rapes Krycek with
a gun to his head and just when Krycek climaxes, Mulder pulls the
trigger. It would
be a lie to insinuate that M/K is
always about healing, transformation, forgiveness, and love. Sometimes it is precisely
the answer to the
question Ray Bradbury proposes in Zen in the Art of
Writing,
“How long has it been since you wrote a story where
your real love or your real hatred somehow got onto the
paper?” (7) The
truth is, sometimes M/K is our real
hatred. It was my
own and my partner’s
real hatred that got onto the page in Snakebite when our vampirized Mulder and
Krycek baited and
then killed a group of homophobes.
Because of the nature of the characters and the
series-written lives
they live, it is unrealistic to exclude pain, suffering, hatred,
violence, and
malice. In the
liminal sphere of the
slash story, these are the very emotions we can best confront and heal,
or at
least express, through Mulder and Krycek.
I think the author, whether female
or male, works as Joseph Campbell’s Goddess, and Mulder and
Krycek must meet
her in order to gain what they must in the story.
Dave Whomsley, who wrote a summary of Campbell’s The
Hero with a Thousand Faces while a student at Drexel University, is quoted in Introduction
to Mythology:
Contemporary Approaches to Classical and World Myths as saying about Campbell’s Meeting with the
Goddess, “The hero meets a
goddess, who can be good or evil.
To
unite with her, the hero must ignore the temptations of human life,
break the
bonds of humanity to see beyond that which his human senses experience
and win
the boon of love . . . .” (qtd. in Thury 139)
I would clarify that the “bonds of
humanity” in M/K are actually the
bonds of patriarchy, of male-dominated ideals and a dearth of feminine
influence which slash seeks to rectify.
The meeting with the author as
Goddess can work figuratively
in the story, in that Mulder or Krycek or both have to come to terms
with the
feminine wisdom that only the author has in order to break out of their
superpatriarchal world of responses to one another.
It can also be quite literal as well.
This artifice is known in fanfiction as the
“Mary Sue”, i.e. the author writing her/himself
into the story as a character who
interacts with the principals.
This can be done in a campy,
tongue-in-cheek fashion or it can act as a profoundly healing and
impactful
scene in the story in which Mulder and/or Krycek come face to face with
the
benevolent (or sometimes malevolent) force that guides their actions
toward a
desired goal. An
example of the latter
is Satina’s Mary-Sueing of herself into Snakebite as the character Talia, a
psychic who helps Mulder
come to terms with his vampirism and what he must do at this crossroads
in the
story to reverse his and Krycek’s mistakes and turn the
situation from dark to
light. (Satina)
From
Dark to Light:
Transformation
Within and Without the Liminal
Not every M/K story seeks to
transform the characters
in a significant way, but every
M/K story has the potential to
transform them. Often
in the series it
appears that Mulder is the good guy, the hero, while Krycek is the bad
guy, the
villain. What some
fics seek to do is
blur these harsh lines between black and white, to have the characters
learn
from one another the “other” in order to achieve a
wholeness that is not the
norm for them outside the liminal story.
In this light, Mulder takes on anti-heroic properties,
embracing his
dark side in order to embrace and heal Krycek and find wholeness for
himself,
while Krycek comes out resembling the Trickster – the shape
shifter, the
mischievous and manipulative creature between worlds that does harm and good.
(Thury
288) As Krycek says
of Mulder in my
story, Tasting Bach, “He’s my
vice. He’s
my mirror. He’s
everything I cannot be. .
. .
I am so much less than his enemy right now.”
The point of the transformation has
at its heart both global and personal goals.
If slashers can reconcile these two characters, it
furthers the chances
of both to succeed in their
shared goal to stop colonization of the planet by a malevolent alien
force. In
other words, it takes a feminine and sometimes female perspective to
heal them
and the world. Satina
says in her author
notes preceding Trust, “May
this story go out to as many people as possible and help them effect a
healing
in their own heart, contributing to the growing energy of World
Peace. If
Mulder and Krycek can open their hearts to one another, we can,
too.”
If the author writes Mulder and
Krycek falling in love, it is that love that acts as Joseph
Campbell’s Elixir
with which the hero must return at the end of their adventure. This is what they, now two
heroes, bring back
to the world to share. (Thury
141) Thus,
Mulder and Krycek sometimes come to
the end of the story with a foot in two worlds, or as Whormley
summarizes,
“Some heroes achieve the ability to pass back and forth at
will between the
ordinary human world and the mythical land of adventure which is the
source of
enlightenment and transcendence (Master of the Two Worlds).” (Thury 142)
This occurs in a very literal way in
Burn to Shine, when, after
Mulder convinces Krycek not to use nuclear force to defeat the
malevolent
aliens, leaving room for the benevolent aliens to come in and resolve
the
situation peacefully, Mulder remains in contact with the
“Friendlies”, going
aboard their ships for conferences periodically and then returning to
the
“normal” world which Krycek now represents and
inhabits but in a much more
healed and balanced way than before their coming together.
Such an ending reveals what I find
most fulfilling about writing Mulder/Krycek:
transferring and translating the liminal experience
directly into the
every day reality. Not
leaving that wisdom
and “forbidden” knowledge in the liminal world, but
living it from that moment
of integration on. And
if I have written
my story well, it is what I hope to give to readers of slash as well: something to take into
what online readers
call RL (Real Life), something new to them, previously unconventional,
borderland stuff that they can’t help but remember and use in
their lives,
whether that is an open mind toward homosexuality in J’s
case, a renewed
validation of self for Bel, or a new idea about what forgiveness is for
myself.
In the story, Brokeback
Mountain,
this elixir of love and its
wisdom comes too late for Ennis to share with Jack – Ennis
doesn’t open to a
different way of living his life, a less fear-based and more love-based
existence, until Jack has died -- but
we
see him take it into his life nonetheless when he agrees to skip work
to attend
his daughter’s wedding.
We hear it in
his voice, “Jack, I swear ---”
(Proulx
54) In M/K, my goal
has always been to
achieve that integration of balance and give J her happy ending with
Mulder and
Krycek together.
…[Mulder] was talking about
his visions of the future. And
they were
my visions, too. Visions
I couldn’t
deny, even if I was afraid to trust that the world would give that to
me. Mulder would
give that to me. And
he wanted to.
…I took his hand and, naked, we walked out onto
the
deck. It was full
night and I gasped at
the stars overhead, clear and brilliant.
Mulder pulled me to the bow and we stood overlooking the
sparkling black
water. He looked at
me, completely alive
and full of something he’d always hid from me, perhaps from
everyone. I
couldn’t help but return a part of it, the
only thing I could spare right then and not fall apart in his arms: I
smiled at
him, shyly, warily, but real.
“On three,” he said, gripping my hand
tight.
I nodded.
“One,” he said.
I took a breath.
“Two,” I added.
“Three!” we shouted and jumped
together into the waves.
(Kizzia,
Midnight
Mass)
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