The 2 Questions and “Puss in Boots”

Much of this post is cut and pasted from an old myspace blog. Some of you (Magggie) may recall it.

My creative writing teacher Dennis Covington once told me that there are two important questions that all good stories ask. Those two questions are Who is the Father? and Who owns the land? “Puss in Boots” (PiB) fits into this mold quite nicely.

If you’ve never heard me wax deconstructively re: the 2 questions here’s the idea in a nutshell:

We can always know who our mother is. It’s always possible to know with 100% certainty which woman birth to you. However, you can never know with the same kind of certainty who your father is. All you have to go by is the word of your mother. This brings up all sorts of neat little existential questions that literature (at least good literature) can try to answer.

And land is the only thing that we can really own. Having a place to make a home is the only thing of real substance that one generation can pass on the next. Everything else is temporary.

So we come to PiB. The father is dead. He has dispersed his land among all of his children. Except you. What you get is seemingly worthless. One way of looking at PiB (at least the first part) is as a quest to find out what your father really thought about you. Of course since he’s dead no answer is going to go beyond speculation. Or is it? What if the man had a hidden plan to give you everything – all you had to do was prove to everybody else what he had an inkling of – namely that you’re worth the whole kit and kaboodle. The plan would have to be hidden because he knew that your other siblings would tamper with the will anyway and see to it that you received nothing (or effectively so in any case). Now you have to use your intelligence, guile, faith in humanity, compassion, and keen sense of what a person is really worth (oh, and the cat) in a quest to win back what is rightfully yours.

At least that’s where I’d like to take the idea.

The New Idea

The idea is a rif fon “Puss in Boots.” A very well-to-do young man finds out his father has diedin mysterious circumstances. The young man discovers that because of the machinations of his three siblings he has basically been written out of the will. He is left with only one serving girl from a supposedly primitive society. A daughter of a slave that was a spoil from a war his father fought in when he was the young man’s age. The serving girl remebers the young man as having been the only member of the household to treat her kindly but nevertheless, he was one of her captors. She makes him a bargain: she will help him regain his fortune and title, get revenge on his siblings, and find out who killed his father in return for her freedom.

The serving girl might also have other reasons to help our hero: I am toying with the idea that she was raped by one of our hero’s brothers. Perhaps she is pregnant. But I don’t want to gild the lily.

She is from a seemingly primitive desert-dwelling society. They are nomadic and much more in tune with the earth than our hero’s more “civilized” people. Definitely reminiscent of the Middle East. Maybe there’s even a tradition of magic tied to the earth and its cycles. Lots of talk about the sun and the moon and the seasons. Wicca stuff.

My feeling right now is to have them fall in love during the course of the story. I suppose it would be natural and it would raise the stakes for the ending.

The moral will concern the evil of keeping someone against their will – the evil of keeping political prisoners. Maybe a little lofy but I don’t think the story will be heavy-handed. At least I’ll try my best.

Here is a synopsis of Charles Perrault’s version of the Puss in Boots story from wikipedia:

“The division of property after a miller’s death leaves his youngest son with nothing but the granary cat. Disappointed, the son contemplates eating the animal, but the cat bargains with him, promising him riches in return for a bag and a pair of boots. Though dubious, the miller’s son goes along with him and provides the items.

Puss-in-Boots takes the bag and catches a succession of items of game – rabbits, partridges, etc. – which he takes to the palace and presents to the king as presents from his master, the ‘Marquis de Carabas‘. Eventually the cat learns that the king and his beautiful daughter will be travelling by the river road. Puss-in-Boots tells the miller’s son (who is ignorant of all this) to go and bathe in the river at the time that the royal party is due to pass. The boy does so, and as he bathes the cat steals his clothes, and runs to the road calling for help for his master, the Marquis de Carabas, who is drowning. The boy is “rescued” from the river, and his lack of clothes is explained as the work of robbers. He is therefore wrapped in rich robes and driven off in the king’s coach.

The cat speeds ahead of the king’s party to the lands of a powerful ogre. He threatens the people working in its fields that they will be chopped to bits if they don’t say that the fields belong to the Marquis of Carabas. As the king’s coach reaches the ogre’s lands, the king asks after the ownership of the fields, and is told that they belong to the Marquis de Carabas. Puss-in-Boots goes ahead of the party, and confronts the ogre. He flatters the ogre on his magical shape-changing abilities and challenges him to turn into a mouse. The moment the ogre does so, Puss-in-Boots eats him, thus claiming the palace and lands in his master’s name.

Upon reaching the ogre’s palace, the royal party is welcomed by Puss-in-Boots in his master’s name. The king marries the princess to the miller’s son.

…

Puss became a personage of great importance, and gave up hunting mice, except for amusement.”

What I will do is change the gender of Puss and sort of spread the story out a little. Try to make it a little darker.

One of the reasons I like this story so much is because Puss is a trickster figure. I’ve always been drawn to trickster figures in fiction – ever since being introduced to possibly the best example of the trickster the twentieth century produced: Bugs Bunny. I have much to say about the Trickster character type. So much that I’ll not say anything else about it here.

I need to thank Paul Di Filippo for his story “Ailoura” which obviously gave me the idea for all of the above.