TDIRS: The Dark Is Rising

[truepenny]

but first, some business ...

Happy birthday, penmage!

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I originally friends-locked my anagrammatic post, in case anyone objected to my playing fast and loose with their chosen username. But nobody did; I'm unlocking it, because otherwise the in-joke-y-ness is just too much to bear. And if you're one of the people subjected to anagrammation, and you do object, just let me know and I'll delete the relevant item.

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In which we continue to explore Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Sequence

(For the first installment of this Thrilling Serial Adventure, look here.)

It took me a while to get through The Dark Is Rising this time, because reading it with full attention made me painfully aware of what a sad book it is. Loss is Cooper's theme; it's no accident that "Greensleeves" is the song that keeps recurring throughout the book. I'll be talking a lot about elegy in TDIRS as this project continues; there are only hints of it in OSUS, but starting in TDIR it becomes the dominant theme.


First off, I have to say perfectly honestly, Susan Cooper's poetry is not the great attraction of her books. I'm not going to go into detail, and I'm not going to dwell on it; you can just take it as read from here on out: Susan Cooper's poetry is for crap.

That's by way of clearing the ground. My analysis proper begins with plot.

Back in 1986, Nick Lowe offered a disquisition on Plot Coupons, in which he well and truly put the boot into Susan Cooper. (Parenthetically and if you haven't already, I recommend reading "The Well-Tempered Plot Device" if you're interested in fantasy and especially if you're at all interested in writing it. Also handy (and funny!) is Neil Gaiman's rundown on the same topic, back on October 22, 2002, which you will have to scroll down approximately three miles to find. The entry starts, "Several people asking what I meant by Plot Coupons.") I'm not arguing with Lowe; it's true that plotting (like poetry) is not Cooper's strong point. But I also think that pitching a fit about the mechanical treasure-hunt nature of the plot blinds one to her strengths, to all the stuff that the treasure-hunt is carrying along with it. And that's the stuff I want to focus on.

First off, because it's a Thing with me (and because I'm still setting up my argument about Greenwitch), I want to take a quick look at the female characters.

There aren't many. Will's mother and sisters (Mary, Barbara, Gwen), Miss Greythorne, the Lady. John Wayland Smith's blue-eyed and nameless wife. Assorted villagers. Sorting the Lady, and Mary Stanton out of the pack for a moment, all of these women appear in support roles (including Miss Greythorne--I quite like her, but she doesn't get to do anything except play pompom girl for Will's quest). They do what they're told, even the Old Ones. (I'm especially annoyed by the Blue-Eyed and Nameless Wife, who apparently only has a spine by proxy.) The Lady (again with the nameless) is there to be worshipped and not much more. She's powerful, yes, but also incredibly fragile; her action in the book is limited to fixing one of Will's stupidest mistakes. And then she becomes a rather grail-like personage herself. (Is it just me, or is it more than a little disturbing that she is apparently interchangeable with a dead bird?) I should admit, frankly, that if we're supposed to be able to figure out who the Lady is, I've never managed it. If someone can enlighten me, that would be cool.

And then there's Mary. The only one of Will's sisters with a character (Gwen and Barbara are indistinguishable, both from each other and from their mother), and what is she? Stupid, vain, selfish, whiny ... I wouldn't care if the Black Rider did drop her in the Thames. She's a walking compendium of negative cliches about femininity.

Greenwitch is going to turn a lot of this on its head, so the big important parts of this argument are still coming. All I want to do here is establish that in the world we see through Will Stanton's eyes, women are bit-players, useful or useless according to temperament, but fundamentally unimportant--pawns. It isn't even misogyny; it's just an unthinking acceptance of the gender definitions supplied by a patriarchal culture. Keep that thought in the back of your mind for the next discussion; I'm going to leave it there and turn to elegy, adulthood, and power.

In some ways, TDIRS is in polar opposition to the Chronicles of Narnia. One, of course, is the attitude toward religion; churches aren't bastions of the Light:

But in a church? said Will the Anglican choirboy, incredulous: surely you can't feel it inside a church? Ah, said Will the Old One unhappily, any church of any religion is vulnerable to their attack, for places like this are where men give thought to matters of the Light and the Dark.
(Cooper 123)

The Light in Cooper's world is uninhibitedly pagan. Religion is neither a force of good, as in Lewis, or a force of badness (as in much fantasy literature); it's really just kind of unimportant. In Lewis, all truth reduces into Aslan, and that makes the process of discovery incredibly simple. In Cooper, finding the truth about the world does not make things simpler; it makes them infinitely more complicated.

That moment--the quick dialogue between Will the Anglican choirboy and Will the Old One--also highlights the most pervasive and striking difference between Cooper and Lewis: their attitude toward adulthood. (I go on about this ad nauseum in reference to Lewis, here in particular.) Lewis wants to protect his characters from adulthood, which he sees as a draining away of imagination and courage. Cooper figures it as a loss of innocence, yes, but also as something that cannot be avoided, and so must be borne with what strength we can. She tropes this very neatly in Will's dual perspective on the world; part of Will is an eleven-year-old boy, but part of him is not and cannot be. This gets him in trouble occasionally (and reminds me very powerfully of Buffy's problems with her Slayerness in Seasons 1 & 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer), but more often is simply a source of melancholy:

"Come, Old One," he [Merriman] said softly, "remember yourself. You are no longer a small boy."

"No," said Will. "I know."

Merriman said, "But sometimes, you feel how very much more agreeable life would be if you were."

"Sometimes," Will said. He grinned. "But not always."
(Cooper 211)

Will has accepted what he is and what its ramifications are, but still first and foremost his power is figured as loss. Over and over again, we see Will's hidden adulthood alienating him from his family, most heart-breakingly in scenes with his brother Paul (who is my favorite of the Stanton children, second to Will). Cooper is a big believer in the fragility of mortal minds; over and over again, the mortal characters have to forget the things they've seen and done. It irritates me, because that's one of my least favorite fantasy conventions, but she's consistent about it, and her heroes' reasoning is allowed to reek of self-interest, more pragmatic than idealistic:

... the chief image before his mind was not Mr Beaumont's disturbed theological assumptions, but Paul's face. He had seen his brother looking at him with a kind of fearful remoteness that bit into him with the pain of a whiplash. It was more than he could stand. His two worlds must not meet so closely.
(Cooper 131)

And later:

Paul looked at him for a moment, expressionless. Will thought of his patient understanding that night in the attic, at the beginning, and of the way he played the old flute and knew that if there were any one of his brothers that he could confide in, it would be Paul. But that was out of the question.
(Cooper 174)

Will seems at least partly to talk himself into the idea that he can't tell anyone what he is, but it is, for him, a real prohibition. Again, as with Buffy, the teenager's stereotypical complaint, You don't understand!, is here the literal truth. Will has become alienated from his large, loving, supportive family in a way that he cannot explain and they cannot understand. The process of becoming an adult is a process of drawing away from one's family, finding an identity independent of them. Will's embarkation on that process is merely externalized, made a disjunct rather than a continuum.

Side by side with adulthood goes power, and with power responsibility. Will is in danger before he knows what he is; his awakening to his own power is coupled with the attack of the Dark and his own supreme foolishness, causing the Lady to be lost. His reaction to the Gift of Gramarye exemplifies Cooper's thinking on the subject: "To know so much, now, to be able to do so many things; it should have excited him, but he felt weighed down, melancholy, at the thought of all that had been and all that was to come" (Cooper 94). Will and the other Old Ones do not revel in their power; they bear it as a burden.

Adults--both the chronological grown-ups and the hyper-adults, the Old Ones--are emphatically not perfect: fallible, vulnerable. Jane, Simon, and Barney's unhesitating and complete trust in Merriman in OSUS is shown for the child's naivete it is in TDIR with the story of Hawkin. Merriman and Hawkin stand in a parent-child relationship, as much as in a master-servant or a liege lord-liegeman relationship. Hawkin trusts Merriman as the Drews do, until Merriman makes that terrible, thoughtless error of judgment and treats Hawkin as a tool instead of a person. (Yes, he does, although he doesn't mean to and doesn't realize that's what he's doing until it's too late.) And then they begin their dance of betrayal and counter-betrayal; Hawkin's unforgiving bitterness is very much that of a child betrayed by a parent, and Merriman's pain is that of a parent who has lost a child. Mistake and blame rest equally on both sides; neither adulthood nor childhood is especially idealized.

Will's dual nature makes him equal with Merriman, and so the mystique of adulthood, visible in OSUS, is dispersed. Merriman is powerful and wise and strong, but he is not perfect. He is, like Will, a flawed and tired hero.

TDIR is very weak on plot and structure; the narrative flops resignedly from one Sign to the next. But the things she's using that narrative to say, about power and growing up, are truthful and sad and worth saying.


---
WORKS CITED
Cooper, Susan. The Dark Is Rising. The Dark Is Rising 2. Illus. Alan E. Cober. N.p.: Aladdin-Atheneum, 1973.

Comments

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Nice. Very nice. "Elegaic" is a perfect word for so much of what I loved about that book, I just never codified it in my mind before.

Greenwitch is going to turn a lot of this on its head, so the big important parts of this argument are still coming.

I think I have an idea of where you're going to go with that. So get moving and let me read it! [ahem. calming down now.]

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'll go with most of that.

What I love about TDIR is the way in which Cooper weaves her story into English myth so effectively whilst telling her own story. I don't have too much of a problem with the 'floppiness' of the plot, which is very much in keeping with the old stories she's tapping into. (You can't really accuse the Arthurian Grail Quest of having much in the way of plot for instance). She gets inside the experience of singing rather well too. Or so I thought when I first read the book not that long after my voice had broken and I'd left the church choir.

Well, the collected volume just arrived from Amazon and, if I can tear myself away from the wonderful The Child That Books Built I'll start catching up with you.

I'm really enjoying this.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I don't have too much of a problem with the 'floppiness' of the plot, which is very much in keeping with the old stories she's tapping into.

Oh, I agree with you. It's never something I've thought of as a problem until I read TDIR this time and, in preparation for making this post, was trying to think about the book in terms of its structure. Doing that, you realize you're trying to build a wall with over-cooked spaghetti. There's no coherence to the action; the other characters drop in and out of sight as needed. (Farmer Dawson and Old George, in particular, are awfully damn convenient.) There's no resonance between the individual bits of Will's quest, save the single unifying plot thread of Hawkin/the Watcher--and even that wobbles in and out of focus without much control. And since I spend most of my time these days thinking about narrative structure (either trying to create it in my own stories or analyzing it in revenge tragedies, which are VERY structured), I'm particularly sensitized to the fact that TDIR's plot is a remarkably limp excuse for a story framework. (If I'm recalling The Grey King correctly, this is something Cooper gets better at.)

Also (and, oh god, I'm about to get nit-picky AND pedantic) the Arthurian stories, the whole great untidy mess of them (Thomas Malory, Chretien de Troyes, etc., etc.), are a completely different genre than anything anyone writes today. They're writing lais, romances ... not novels. (Some Arthurian stories, like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are obsessed with structure, in their own twisted, medieval way.) But Cooper is, very decidedly, writing a novel; her source material is Arthurian, but her form is modern.

Enough of that. The plot qua plot is weak, but I agree with you: it's not a big deal and doesn't interfere with the things TDIR does extremely well.

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

It would just be quibbling about semantics if I were to say that I think she's using novelistic techniques whilst telling a story in an old form wouldn't it? Nor would it make a blind bit of difference I suppose.

One could possibly make the case that the lack of structure in the plot mirrors Will's confusion at the new state he finds himself in. The plot flaps around like spaghetti because, in a sense, that's what Will feels is happening as he oscillates between Will the human child and Will the Old One. But to make that case I'd have to show that the plots get better as the sequence progresses and I'm still going on old memories rather than recent rereadings.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Dude, you can argue anything you want. I'll be delighted if you can come up with a good water-tight theory that explains the deboned narrative structure of The Dark Is Rising as anything other than the author learning as she goes. You make a case, and I'll poke holes in it, and we'll see what happens. *g*

[papersky.livejournal.com]

The plot structure is the poem.

Not just the signs, the way the poem falls in pieces and goes through. I did this once myself so I ought to be able to be coherent about it -- the novel is the poem expanded, everything that's in the novel is inherent in the poem, the poem is the spine of the novel and the axle on which it turns. Yes, it would help if it were a better poem. (It works for me if I imagine that the original was in Welsh and it's a weak translation.) She does the same thing much better with The Grey King and Silver on the Tree.

It's "collect plot coupons" yes, but the plot coupons have been deliberately set there for Will to collect as he gathers his power, it's Will coming of age, they represent his education as an Old One.

I'm not good at plot myself, so I tend to be forgiving of it.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

This reminds me vividly of when I was in high school and had to write a paper about the structure of Emerson's "The American Scholar." That was probably the worst paper I've ever written, bar none, because I could not grasp what I was supposed to be doing. It was like listening to someone speaking backwards in French. I understood that there was something there I was supposed to see, but no matter how hard I looked, it just wasn't there. (Kind of like those stupid Magic-Eye things, really.) My teacher got very frustrated with me, but she wasn't half as frustrated as I was. (Come to think of it, that experience may also be the root of my deep and abiding hatred for the Transcendentalists.)

Which is the long way around of saying: I completely believe that what you're saying makes sense--it certainly sounds cool--but you've hit the spot where I'm intellectually tone-deaf. All I can do here is smile and nod.

I do, though, very much like the idea of the poem as a bad translation from the Welsh. That helps a lot.

[pdcawley.livejournal.com]

Damn. I was just about to write this. I've just finished a reread of Greenwitch and it's actually better than I remember, but it definitely keyed me back into the fact that the series turned on the poems.

I actually don't have a problem with the poetry being 'bad' to be honest. It's not 'art' poetry, but ritual poetry. For me, it sits well with 'real' poems like The Lykewake Dirge, Hunting The Wren or John Barleycorn which are terrible doggerel but have power when sung and I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that Cooper was consciously aping these. Forget the 'bad translation from the Welsh' theory for the 'When the Dark comes rising' poem, my theory is that what we're missing, and what makes it so leaden on the page is that we're missing the tune.

I've just finished reading Francis Spufford's The Child That Books Built and in that book he makes (for me) a telling distinction between novels and stories/tales. Stories are, in a sense 'older' stuff, stuff for passing on orally with all the forms and 'once upon a times' that go with that. And I still maintain that Cooper is using the 'tale' as her model for this sequence of books, but is also using the tools of the novel to illuminate and define (some of) her characters instead of leaving them in the storyteller's realm of archetypes.

I remember, from when I read the books the first time, begin pleased with myself for seeing the way the poem 'tied' itself to the individual books in different ways. In TDIR, the six that turn back the dark are the signs that Will seeks out. In Green Witch, they are the three Stantons and Will, Merriman and Captain Toms, neatly split into three humans and three Old Ones. And I remember how satisfying it was to fit the pieces together. I think that might be why I'm so defensive of the plotting of them, I remember how much I liked it at the time.

Will's dual nature makes him equal with Merriman

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Yes.

And this is what made me love The Dark Is Rising when I wasn't much more than Will's age.

Orson Scott Card writes about this in an introduction he wrote to Ender's Game some years after it was published. He said that he has been challenged by adults - never by children - for writing unrealistic children, but, he said (I'm repeating what I remember, not quoting, it's been a while since I read it and I can't be bothered to go dig it up) he wrote from what he remembered being a child was like, and he never thought his problems and his feelings and his thoughts were somehow lesser or inferior because he was only a child: in his head, however young he was, he was a real person. (And that's why I keep reading Card, even though I find his homophobia distasteful - because even when he's writing about characters for whom he feels bigoted hatred, he still writes them as real people, not cardboard cutouts.)

I identified with Will because he was separate from his family, feeling and judging by different standards from them, and his authorial voice approved his doing so: he had the right, and he was right. (He makes mistakes, but that's not what I mean.) Yes, the "quest motif" is thin, and I find the ultimate battle between good and evil (jumping ahead a little!) to be more than thin, but that's not what I read/re-read the book for. Will broke from his family and held a secret that they could not share, and knew that if they knew what he really was they would change their attitudes towards him: he would lose their love and acceptance. Of course I identified with it, with Will.

Who is the Lady?

[alecto23.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you'll be getting to this in your write-up of Silver on the Tree and I agree that it's not at all clear in The Dark Is Rising, but I think it's clear that she's a manifestation of the wise old woman archetype and therefore associated with other female/bird figures like Athena (with owl), Rhiannon (of the birds) and probably many others that I can't think of off the top of my head. The harpy, I suppose, though that's hardly complimentary.

Later on in the series you discover that she is fairly clearly associated with Jane - Juno - Jennifer - Gwynhwyfar and all sorts of other mythological figures (I haven't read that particular one in years, but I remember the conversation taking place quite clearly, if not the actual statements). But now that I think of it, there does seem to be a theme of pedestal women: figures who sit on thrones, or pedestals, and inspire or advise (often badly) or react to what goes on around them rather than actually do anything.

It's odd, that this characterisation never bothered me. I, like will, unquestioningly loved and trusted the Lady. And I always thought it perfectly reasonable that she didn't have a name, since she is so much the embodiment of that particular feminine archetype.

I think you're a little unfair to Cooper's treatment of women. Although it's true that they are mostly bit players except for the loathsome Mary (is she a Susan clone or what?), much of what I love about this book is in the details: his mother's evident sense of humour, the good-natured and slightly frazzled love they all have for each other, Miss Greythorne's lack of self-pity. For me it's these kinds of details which bolster up the plot, which I always think of as a series of set pieces like Hitchcock's fully-visualised scenes that he would build an entire movie around. And it is essentially a boy's story.

Re: Who is the Lady?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I think you're a little unfair to Cooper's treatment of women.

It's completely true that all of the women except Mary (and Maggie Barnes, whom I seem to be constitutionally incapable of remembering--she does stuff, bad nasty stuff, seductress stuff like Polly Withers in OSUS) are sympathetic. I'm emphasizing the relative unimportance of women in The Dark Is Rising because I need it to play off of in my analysis of Greenwitch, not because I think Cooper has internalized patriarchal assumptions or anything of the sort, but because she's doing something subtle and clever, and it needs some digging to make it clear enough to see. The Dark Is Rising IS a boy's book. That's my point.

Re: Who is the Lady?

[alecto23.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, Maggie Barnes. That's who it was. I couldn't think of her name so I didn't bring her up - very definitely echoes of Polly Withers there.

I agree that women are a backdrop in TDIR - they're just not without their flashes of personality.

And I was agreeing with you about the boy's story thing.

[vass]

I haven't been reading these posts yet, because I haven't read TDIR sequence. Once I've read it I'll double back and read your comments.

But I felt like mentioning that that should be soon now, since certain naughty, *naughty* rats have now ensured that I have my own copy. I had to pay the library the full cost plus a handling fee, and felt very remorseful about destroying their property, too (it's easily replaceable in the same edition, I hasten to add.) Still, I now have a nice thick Susan Cooper volume, with a bitten-through patch on the cover, but otherwise legible.

And that was what happened when Francis Crawford Rat and Vlad Taltos Rat met Susan Cooper.

Interchangeable with a dead bird indeed!

[papersky.livejournal.com]

She is the wren, Jenny Wren, and therefore the Goddess. I think she doesn't get a name because she is the triple goddess and Cooper doesn't want to pin herself down because she's doing her as crone-aspect and she doesn't want to thump herself down hard on Classical names and call her Hecate (well, I wouldn't!) and the Celtic ones would be too obscure -- Coventina do much for you? Mess Buachalla? I think she's intended as the ur-crone, connecting on to the stuff in Greenwitch.

Names drive me crazy anyway. You wouldn't believe the knots I tied myself in on this exact thing in the Sulien books. I actually designed their whole name-pattern culture to get me out of one name requirement for pinning down a goddess!