InsaneJournal

Current mood:	anxious
Entry tags:	fic, uni

Pre-fic study on Steerpike from Gormenghast
Two semesters ago I attended a course called "Academic and creative writing" at university. One of the tasks tapped into the realm of fanfiction: after being told about the rough content of the book series Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake and being shown extracts from the BBC miniseries, we had to imagine why the character Steerpike developed the way he did, from servant to a murdering traitor trying to overthrow Lord Titus.

It's not really fanfic, more the thoughts you have before writing about one character, but I told a couple of people I'd post it here, so here it is.
Please let me know what you think, even if you don't know the books.

It's "beta'd" by my language teacher, the great Ms Baker, but if you see something, holler.

Steerpike must have been born in the vast basement of Gormenghast Castle, a place that is never reached by daylight, a place that is perpetually damp, dark, and cold. This would explain why Swelter’s scorching hot kitchen with its open flames, in which he has to toil when he is seventeen, is such a horrible place to him. His father is probably a Grey Scrubber, working the floors and walls all day, while his mother could be busy washing the castle’s laundry like all the other laundry maids. As it is a highly viable thesis that all inhabitants of the basement are heavy workers and therefore busy all day, their children would be looked after in an institution loosely related to what we would call a kindergarten. This institution would most likely be situated in a large, cavernous hall as damp and cold as the rest of this subterranean underworld. There the children of the low working class, to which the Grey Scrubbers belong as well, would be supervised by a few men and women that have become too old for any other work in the castle. One of these men could have had relations among the Bright Carvers; he would spend an hour every day telling the children about the great carvings and the even greater feast to celebrate them. Only occasionally would daylight be mentioned in these stories, daylight and the blue sky that stretched across the whole land, both things none of the children had ever seen and would most probably never see in their life.
By appointing the children light work, the supervisors would divide them into groups that suited the children’s ability for the areas of work they were to commence. Should any of the heads of the departments need new apprentices to work in their section, they would come to the ‘kindergarten’ to select a few children who appealed to them the most. Not seldom would that appeal go further than plain looks and obvious capability for the area of work in question. The consequences of this, witnessing it happen to others and suffering as a result of it himself, would cause Steerpike to loathe Swelter even more. Adding to this loathing would be the latter’s regular punishment of the kitchen boys whenever they failed to do the appointed tasks correctly or sufficiently quickly.
Probably from the beginning, Steerpike differed slightly from the other children: he preferred not to speak unless absolutely necessary, although, in contrast, he was the only one who asked the old man questions about daylight and the land of Gormenghast. When he was not listening to the old man and asking him questions, he dreamed; he dreamed dreams he never mentioned to anybody. When he dreamed, he often had one of the bugs, that special species that populated the basement along with the workers, in his hands, slowly ripping of one leg after the other. Not only did he hardly speak to anybody, nobody ever really spoke to him. Never did anyone tell him that what he did to those bugs was wrong. He could have been ripped out of his dreams and have had to start working as a kind of apprentice for the Gray Scrubbers, simply because his father was one. But not even his father could deny the fact that Steerpike was not made for the hours and hours of scrubbing, he always started dreaming and stopped moving. It would have been during this time that Swelter had laid eyes on him and decided to have him in his kitchen. This is why, at a rather advanced age, he joined the kitchen boys, boys who were suffering from the heat of the kitchen fires and the brutality of Swelter all by themselves, all of them too scared to intervene on other’s behalfs.
In that hot and dry kitchen full of loud people, Steerpike would long to be back in the quiet hall of his childhood days, listening to the old man’s tales, or even back with the scrubbers, arms always immersed in cold, soapy water instead of the scalding grease of Swelter’s realm. Because back in those days, he could dream of daylight and blue skies without burning himself or, even worse, burning the food and getting punished. Such a punishment was the reason why Swelter had him at his neck when the manservant Flay, higher in status than anybody Steerpike had ever encountered, entered the kitchens, intervening and helping him, consequently making the dreams rise once again in Steerpike. That unexpected help gave him the motivation to flee and follow his saviour, Flay, into the upper storeys of the castle and ultimately to daylight.