W. P. Kinsella’s Butterfly Winter: Towards Gothic Baseball Fiction

Abstract

W. P. Kinsella’s Butterfly WinterTowards Gothic Baseball Fiction Chifen Lu (bio) This essay aims to point out the so far ignored Gothic elements in the Canadian writer W. P. Kinsella’s novel Butterfly Winter. Long acclaimed as the most representative magical realist baseball fiction writer, Kinsella nevertheless infuses distinct Gothic characters, settings and themes into this last baseball work. The protagonists—the twin baseball players Julio and Esteban Pimental—partake in the enchanting literary tradition of the Romantic Gothic doubles, which have been recurrent in fiction at least since the eighteenth-century. The Hall of Baseball Immortals, a fictive Caribbean version of the Baseball Hall of Fame, alongside its adjoined “wound factory,” distorts the revered pantheon of baseball gods to a Gothic haunted house, locked attic, freak show tent or torture room. While Dr. Noir, the great dictator who is also a medically-trained torturer, assumes a role comparable to the sadist Bluebeard, Quita Garza reminds us of the typical Gothic heroine who is often punished for her excessive curiosity, dangerous desire for forbidden knowledge and her transgression across the tabooed boundaries delineated by the patriarchal order. These Gothic elements, among others, derail Butterfly Winter from the generic conventions of sports fiction, making it eccentric, intriguing and worth further investigation. What’s more, as the last part of the article will elaborate, the Gothic aspect of Butterfly Winter is rendered rather complex and ambivalent by an opposing textual movement towards mythification in the later part of the story. The fundamental contradiction between the Gothic and the mythic makes this work rather problematic. This article demonstrates how the two distinct sets of aesthetics and ideologies co-operate to communicate Kinsella’s peculiar view of baseball or “play” in a broad sense. Different from Kinsella’s favorite physical setting of most of his previous baseball stories—rural American locales—Butterfly Winter is set in central America, more exactly in a nonexistent imaginary country, Courteguay, self-claimed [End Page 83] to be located between Haiti and Dominican Republic. In this tiny Caribbean island country, the air is permeated with tropical exoticism and vivacious whimsies. The military dictator, Dr. Lucius Noir, after a bloody overthrow, seized the political power and began to drive the Western forces away, putting Christian priests to exile, then cloaking the nation in pre-modern superstitions and wizardry. The first half of the novel is hence profuse in occult practices such as curses and shape-shifting magic. It is in such thick fantastic air that magic happens on the daily basis, doing all kinds of tricks to the characters of the story. The paired heroes, the Pimental twins, are born in a supernatural manner, likening them to many demigods in ancient myths. Being born in full baseball outfits and with miniature baseball equipment, their subsequent lives are filled with more magical occurrences, both in the sportive careers and in their involvement in political turmoil. One of the novel’s remarkable traits is its intricate interweaving of sports and politics. Pitching themselves to the international baseball stardom, the Pimental brothers also concern themselves closely with the Courteguayan politics. Their magical athletic careers are contrastingly interwoven with political realism, as Harriet Zaidman notes: “Although the story is full of humor, satire and irony, it also mirrors the history of Central America and the succession of tinpot dictators the US helped install there for 100 years. The political sickness that plagued Central America infests the paradise of Courteguay, too, with similar violent, cruel results at the hands of a former chiropractor.”1 Attempting to explore the Gothic elements in Kinsella’s work, I am nevertheless very aware that this approach has been rarely adopted in previous criticisms. 2 So far the most commonplace critical approach to Kinsella’s work has been identifying the religious and mythical motifs in his baseball narratives. Allen E. Hye dedicates one entire chapter to Shoeless Joe in The Great God Baseball (2004), which is tellingly subtitled Religion in Modern Baseball Fiction. The approach remains prominent in recent research; for example, Brian Aitken directs the reader’s attention to “the mythical element” in Kinsella’s work that “conveys his religious vision and offers some insight into how...