TDIRS: Silver on the Tree, pt. 1
Mar. 23rd, 2003 08:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyPrevious discussions: Over Sea, Under Stone, The Dark Is Rising, Greenwitch, The Grey King.
I seem to have rather a lot to say about Silver on the Tree. This post is going to talk about overarching themes. There'll be another post to talk about Jane, the Lady, and Blodwen Rowlands. And maybe another one after that, if I've still got things that need saying. But, for now, here's thoughts on maturity, loss, sacrifice, hatred, despair, and art.
I need to start with a philosophical objection. I do not agree with Cooper's belief that it's better for mortals to forget, even hard things. Somebody somewhere pointed out that this device negates the whole point of the book, that if you don't remember the experiences, you can't remember the things those experiences taught you and the maturity you earned. Yes, it's less painful for John Rowlands not to remember Blodwen's true nature; it's less painful for Bran never to remember that he is (or was) the Pendragon. But at the same time, John Rowlands is forced to forget that he made a great and wise decision, that he played a crucial part in the triumph of the Light. And I think that self-knowledge, that memory, might in fact be worth the pain. Ditto for Bran. And even more so for Jane, Simon, and Barney, who have no pain or loss to exculpate the removal of their memories. They're going to miss Merriman bitterly anyway, and again, would it not make that grief easier to bear to know where he truly went?
Her argument, insofar as there is one, is given to Merriman:
And none of them protests. But I do. Perhaps I'm being wildly naive, but I think the human mind is stronger than Cooper does. I think it's demeaning, insulting, and patronizing for her to decree otherwise. And it seems to me that the business of living in the present would in fact be conducted with greater presence, awareness, and mercy by those who had seen the great stark forces of the Dark and the Light. John Rowlands's speech to Will, which I quoted in my post on The Grey King, suggests as much, that the Dark and the Light are inhuman because they admit of no ambiguity. And because human beings tend to dislike and distrust ambiguity, it seems to me all the more important that Bran and the Drews should remember just how uncaring and bitter perfect Good is.
On the other hand, I agree with Cooper and Merriman completely on what he has to say on the responsibility of mortals now that the Dark has been defeated:
This is feeling particularly a propos at the moment, of course, but even aside from that it is the ultimate message of the books. And in this way, I think she handles the magic-going-out-of-the-world especially well. Starting in Greenwitch, we've seen magic becoming less relevant, less powerful, less able to help. And now, in its leaving, we are shown that in fact it was a crutch, a child's simple version of the world. In losing magic, Jane, Simon, Barney, and Bran are also losing their childhood. Responsibility, maturity, and realism go hand in hand. And while I'm not entirely sure I want to march behind that banner, in the context of TDIRS it seems to me to be a valuable and important thing to say. In the Chronicles of Narnia, adulthood and realism were also yoked together, but it was a realism of hypocrisy and joylessness. One thing the mortal adults in TDIRS do extremely well is show that the mundane world is as vibrant and beautiful as the magical one. Against the magic and adventures, we have the Stantons (who, honestly, are one of the fictional families I'd most like to spend time with), the Drews, the Evanses, John Rowlands ... There's no sense that anyone LOSES anything in growing up. John Rowlands is just as capable as any of the children of sensing and responding to wonder.
And growing up in TDIRS is also about sacrifice. I have a separate theory, which I haven't been pursuing here, that one marker of great children's literature is the open acknowledgment that sacrifice is sometimes necessary. TDIRS shows it; The Lord of the Rings shows it (I know, not really children's lit, but I think of it that way because I read it for the first time at the age of 9); The Chronicles of Prydain show it. Madeleine L'Engle's books show it, particularly A Swiftly Turning Planet.
The Chronicles of Narnia do not show that, and I've talked about my great dissatisfaction with them on that ground elsewhere. Also, as of yet, the Harry Potter books have not reuquired any kind of sacrifice from their hero, and I'm waiting with great interest to see if they ever do.
Cooper faces up to the necessity of sacrifice and she doesn't sugar-coat it. We see the sacrifices Will has to make starting in The Dark Is Rising even before we see his power. The day before his birthday, Will begins to lose the comfortable life he has always known. Merriman sacrifices Hawkin, both knowingly and unknowingly, and we see that that still pains him deeply and bitterly a century later. We see Bran's sacrifice in Silver on the Tree, as he foregoes his rightful place as Arthur's son (and I noticed there was no sign of Guinevere anywhere on the Pridwen); it's interesting to contrast this to his loss of Cafall in The Grey King, and to observe that perhaps that loss has made Bran stronger. (And that loss he won't forget, right? Because it happened in the mortal world out of mortal malice. Except that it was because of the milgwn ... dammit, Cooper, see? You make a travesty of the whole enterprise by having them forget the things that hurt.) John Rowlands sacrifices his love for his wife. And these are sacrifices which have to be made and which are also incredibly painful, and she faces both the need and the pain and writes them beautifully.
But her theme throughout (with a partial exception for OS,US) has been loss; it's no accident that the non-Welsh action of the story takes place in the Lost Land, nor that that land's king shows so vividly how loss can destroy you if you let it. Nor is it an accident that the linking emotion that moves Will from the Romans building Caerleon to the Anglo-American team excavating it is homesickness. Loss is the motif of the Light.
Whereas the motif of the Dark is hatred and bigotry. The mink which startles Stephen, James, and Will and kills the Stanton chickens (and which, I realized this time through, is the source for my metaphor for my competitive drive) is echoed by both by Richie Moore's bullying of Manny Singh and Mr. Moore's unthinking hatred of people unlike himself. The polecats bring a feeling of hatred with them (and drive the children right onto Blodwen Rowlands). The Black Rider's intense personal hatred of Will is in fact his only personal characteristic. Hate, hate, hate. It's what the Dark does. Hatred and greed. The Dark seems perfectly described by the fable of the dog in the manger. They don't care if they can use the sword; they just want to be sure the Light can't use it. The Brenin Llwyd is never going to use the harp himself, in The Grey King, nor is there any sign that he would be able to; he can't wake the Sleepers to ride for the Dark. He merely wants to prevent Will from waking them. The Dark is entropy and nihilism and negativity. And, I think, it is the Mari Llwyd. Although the Mari Llwyd is specifically not the Dark's tool (Cooper 187), I think that it shows us--more purely than we ever see it from the Black and White Riders, who after all have human form and human voices--just exactly what the Dark is.
The Mari Llwyd is terrifying--for me, the single most frightening thing in the entire series:
It's grotesque, of course--and it's the touch of the red ribbons that sends shivers up my spine every single time--but I think the horror of the Mari Llwyd comes from its two repeated and related characteristics: its grin and its silence. It mocks Bran and Will "as a kitten plays with a beetle" (Cooper 171); just before the hawthorn tree defeats it, "out of its hollow-eyed skull the creature laughed dreadfully, soundlessly in at them for a second" (Cooper 173). It torments Will and Bran in very much the same way Richie Moore and his thugs torment Manny Singh. Cooper is not a writer with a tremendous sense of humor (I'm not either, so I sympathize), but she is very clear and very accurate about how cruelly humor can be wielded, how much mockery can hurt. Evil characters in TDIRS laugh more often than good characters do, and their laughter is always a weapon, a weapon the Dark shares with the Mari Llwyd.
And the Mari Llwyd's silence, its state of being dead (Is there a word in English for that? 'Cause I can't think of one.), reveals what it is that the Light is fighting. Just as the Light is associated with snatches of music, this nothingness is ultimately what the Dark has to offer.
I don't have a theory to offer as to why a creature not of the Dark should so clearly represent the Dark--unless it is another reinforcement of Merriman's point that the end of the struggle between Light and Dark does not mean the end of the struggle against evil and despair. But the Mari Llwyd on the one hand and the King of the Lost Land on the other play out the ways in which nothingness can destroy--what happens if you give in to loss, the Mari Llwyd on the existential level, the King on the personal, psychological level.
The King's despair is the despair of being mortal, fallible, the despair that we all have to fight against every day to continue to create, to love, to live. The Lost Land is a metacommentary on the artistic process, of course--owing allegiance neither to Dark nor to Light, capable of both helping and hurting, where the integrity of art comes before all other considerations. Thus it makes perfect sense that Will and Bran should be guided through the Lost Land by a bard and a poem, and that their quest (represented by the sword) is to reunite the King with his own joy in his art. Physical death, Cooper makes perfectly clear, is less terrible than this Death-in-Life that Gwyddno suffers. (I am, by the way, restraining myself from breaking out into Marxist language. I just want y'all to appreciate that.) And the clearest embodiment of human evil in SotT is the ship-builder Caradog Lewis, who takes no pride in his craft. Artists and craftspeople are scattered throughout the series: Mrs. Drew is a painter, Miss Hatherton a sculptor; Mr. Stanton is a jeweller (and himself makes the bracelet that is the Black Rider's excuse for gaining entry to the Stanton house); Max is an artist, Paul a flutist; Will & James are choirboys, and Will's extraordinary voice is vitally important to SotT. In Greenwitch we see Barney beginning to become an artist himself, and in The Grey King both John Rowlands and Bran are harpists. (That, crucially, is one of the things Blodwen Rowlands mocks as she becomes the White Rider: "A soft one, yn ffwl mawr! ... A shepherd and a harp-player! Fool! Fool! (Cooper 252). Simon has acted in Shakespeare; although he's disparaging about it, he still remembers Prospero's lines. And then Gwion and Gwyddno, musician and craftsman. Art matters in Cooper's world; it matters tremendously. The evil of the painter in Greenwitch shows nowhere more clearly than in his art and the virulent green that disturbs Barney so much. The Things of Power are all specifically beautiful things, beautifully crafted. So this is no trivial matter for Cooper; the waking of Gwyddno to his art, despite the loss of his kingdom, is a triumph, for which the blazing sword Eirias is a symbol--the symbol of the Light's defeat of the Dark.
TBC ...
WORKS CITED
Cooper, Susan. Silver on the Tree. The Dark Is Rising Sequence 5. N.p.: Aladdin-Atheneum, 1977.
I seem to have rather a lot to say about Silver on the Tree. This post is going to talk about overarching themes. There'll be another post to talk about Jane, the Lady, and Blodwen Rowlands. And maybe another one after that, if I've still got things that need saying. But, for now, here's thoughts on maturity, loss, sacrifice, hatred, despair, and art.
I need to start with a philosophical objection. I do not agree with Cooper's belief that it's better for mortals to forget, even hard things. Somebody somewhere pointed out that this device negates the whole point of the book, that if you don't remember the experiences, you can't remember the things those experiences taught you and the maturity you earned. Yes, it's less painful for John Rowlands not to remember Blodwen's true nature; it's less painful for Bran never to remember that he is (or was) the Pendragon. But at the same time, John Rowlands is forced to forget that he made a great and wise decision, that he played a crucial part in the triumph of the Light. And I think that self-knowledge, that memory, might in fact be worth the pain. Ditto for Bran. And even more so for Jane, Simon, and Barney, who have no pain or loss to exculpate the removal of their memories. They're going to miss Merriman bitterly anyway, and again, would it not make that grief easier to bear to know where he truly went?
Her argument, insofar as there is one, is given to Merriman:
And none of you will remember more than the things that I have been saying now, because you are mortal and must live in present time, and it is not possible to think in the old ways there. So the last magic will be this--that when you see me for the last time in this place, all that you know of the Old Ones, and of this great task that has been accomplished, will retreat into the hidden places of your minds, and you will never again know any hint of it except in dreams.
(Cooper 268)
And none of them protests. But I do. Perhaps I'm being wildly naive, but I think the human mind is stronger than Cooper does. I think it's demeaning, insulting, and patronizing for her to decree otherwise. And it seems to me that the business of living in the present would in fact be conducted with greater presence, awareness, and mercy by those who had seen the great stark forces of the Dark and the Light. John Rowlands's speech to Will, which I quoted in my post on The Grey King, suggests as much, that the Dark and the Light are inhuman because they admit of no ambiguity. And because human beings tend to dislike and distrust ambiguity, it seems to me all the more important that Bran and the Drews should remember just how uncaring and bitter perfect Good is.
On the other hand, I agree with Cooper and Merriman completely on what he has to say on the responsibility of mortals now that the Dark has been defeated:
"For remember," he said, "that this is altogether your world now. You and all the rest. We have delivered you from evil, but the evil that is inside men is at the last a matter for men to control. The responsibility and the hope and the promise are in your hands--your hands and the hands of the children of all men on this earth. ... For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you. Now especially since man has the strength to destroy this world, it is the responsibility of man to keep it alive, in all its beauty and marvellous joy. ... And the world will still be imperfect, because men are imperfect. Good men will still be killed by bad, or sometimes by other good men, and there will still be pain and disease and famine, anger and hate. But if you work and care and are watchful, as we have tried to be for you, then in the long run the worse will never, ever triumph over the better.
(Cooper 267)
This is feeling particularly a propos at the moment, of course, but even aside from that it is the ultimate message of the books. And in this way, I think she handles the magic-going-out-of-the-world especially well. Starting in Greenwitch, we've seen magic becoming less relevant, less powerful, less able to help. And now, in its leaving, we are shown that in fact it was a crutch, a child's simple version of the world. In losing magic, Jane, Simon, Barney, and Bran are also losing their childhood. Responsibility, maturity, and realism go hand in hand. And while I'm not entirely sure I want to march behind that banner, in the context of TDIRS it seems to me to be a valuable and important thing to say. In the Chronicles of Narnia, adulthood and realism were also yoked together, but it was a realism of hypocrisy and joylessness. One thing the mortal adults in TDIRS do extremely well is show that the mundane world is as vibrant and beautiful as the magical one. Against the magic and adventures, we have the Stantons (who, honestly, are one of the fictional families I'd most like to spend time with), the Drews, the Evanses, John Rowlands ... There's no sense that anyone LOSES anything in growing up. John Rowlands is just as capable as any of the children of sensing and responding to wonder.
And growing up in TDIRS is also about sacrifice. I have a separate theory, which I haven't been pursuing here, that one marker of great children's literature is the open acknowledgment that sacrifice is sometimes necessary. TDIRS shows it; The Lord of the Rings shows it (I know, not really children's lit, but I think of it that way because I read it for the first time at the age of 9); The Chronicles of Prydain show it. Madeleine L'Engle's books show it, particularly A Swiftly Turning Planet.
The Chronicles of Narnia do not show that, and I've talked about my great dissatisfaction with them on that ground elsewhere. Also, as of yet, the Harry Potter books have not reuquired any kind of sacrifice from their hero, and I'm waiting with great interest to see if they ever do.
Cooper faces up to the necessity of sacrifice and she doesn't sugar-coat it. We see the sacrifices Will has to make starting in The Dark Is Rising even before we see his power. The day before his birthday, Will begins to lose the comfortable life he has always known. Merriman sacrifices Hawkin, both knowingly and unknowingly, and we see that that still pains him deeply and bitterly a century later. We see Bran's sacrifice in Silver on the Tree, as he foregoes his rightful place as Arthur's son (and I noticed there was no sign of Guinevere anywhere on the Pridwen); it's interesting to contrast this to his loss of Cafall in The Grey King, and to observe that perhaps that loss has made Bran stronger. (And that loss he won't forget, right? Because it happened in the mortal world out of mortal malice. Except that it was because of the milgwn ... dammit, Cooper, see? You make a travesty of the whole enterprise by having them forget the things that hurt.) John Rowlands sacrifices his love for his wife. And these are sacrifices which have to be made and which are also incredibly painful, and she faces both the need and the pain and writes them beautifully.
But her theme throughout (with a partial exception for OS,US) has been loss; it's no accident that the non-Welsh action of the story takes place in the Lost Land, nor that that land's king shows so vividly how loss can destroy you if you let it. Nor is it an accident that the linking emotion that moves Will from the Romans building Caerleon to the Anglo-American team excavating it is homesickness. Loss is the motif of the Light.
Whereas the motif of the Dark is hatred and bigotry. The mink which startles Stephen, James, and Will and kills the Stanton chickens (and which, I realized this time through, is the source for my metaphor for my competitive drive) is echoed by both by Richie Moore's bullying of Manny Singh and Mr. Moore's unthinking hatred of people unlike himself. The polecats bring a feeling of hatred with them (and drive the children right onto Blodwen Rowlands). The Black Rider's intense personal hatred of Will is in fact his only personal characteristic. Hate, hate, hate. It's what the Dark does. Hatred and greed. The Dark seems perfectly described by the fable of the dog in the manger. They don't care if they can use the sword; they just want to be sure the Light can't use it. The Brenin Llwyd is never going to use the harp himself, in The Grey King, nor is there any sign that he would be able to; he can't wake the Sleepers to ride for the Dark. He merely wants to prevent Will from waking them. The Dark is entropy and nihilism and negativity. And, I think, it is the Mari Llwyd. Although the Mari Llwyd is specifically not the Dark's tool (Cooper 187), I think that it shows us--more purely than we ever see it from the Black and White Riders, who after all have human form and human voices--just exactly what the Dark is.
The Mari Llwyd is terrifying--for me, the single most frightening thing in the entire series:
It was the skeleton of a giant horse, staring with the blind eye-sockets of a skull, running and leaping and prancing on legs of bone driven by ghostly muscles long rotted away. It caught them almost at once. Faster than any living horse it galloped, and without any sound. Silently it overtook them, head turned, grinning, an impossible horror. The white bones of its great rib-cage glittered in the sun. It tossed its dreadful silent head, and red ribbons dangled and fluttered like long banners from the grinning lower jaw.
(Cooper 171)
It's grotesque, of course--and it's the touch of the red ribbons that sends shivers up my spine every single time--but I think the horror of the Mari Llwyd comes from its two repeated and related characteristics: its grin and its silence. It mocks Bran and Will "as a kitten plays with a beetle" (Cooper 171); just before the hawthorn tree defeats it, "out of its hollow-eyed skull the creature laughed dreadfully, soundlessly in at them for a second" (Cooper 173). It torments Will and Bran in very much the same way Richie Moore and his thugs torment Manny Singh. Cooper is not a writer with a tremendous sense of humor (I'm not either, so I sympathize), but she is very clear and very accurate about how cruelly humor can be wielded, how much mockery can hurt. Evil characters in TDIRS laugh more often than good characters do, and their laughter is always a weapon, a weapon the Dark shares with the Mari Llwyd.
And the Mari Llwyd's silence, its state of being dead (Is there a word in English for that? 'Cause I can't think of one.), reveals what it is that the Light is fighting. Just as the Light is associated with snatches of music, this nothingness is ultimately what the Dark has to offer.
I don't have a theory to offer as to why a creature not of the Dark should so clearly represent the Dark--unless it is another reinforcement of Merriman's point that the end of the struggle between Light and Dark does not mean the end of the struggle against evil and despair. But the Mari Llwyd on the one hand and the King of the Lost Land on the other play out the ways in which nothingness can destroy--what happens if you give in to loss, the Mari Llwyd on the existential level, the King on the personal, psychological level.
The King's despair is the despair of being mortal, fallible, the despair that we all have to fight against every day to continue to create, to love, to live. The Lost Land is a metacommentary on the artistic process, of course--owing allegiance neither to Dark nor to Light, capable of both helping and hurting, where the integrity of art comes before all other considerations. Thus it makes perfect sense that Will and Bran should be guided through the Lost Land by a bard and a poem, and that their quest (represented by the sword) is to reunite the King with his own joy in his art. Physical death, Cooper makes perfectly clear, is less terrible than this Death-in-Life that Gwyddno suffers. (I am, by the way, restraining myself from breaking out into Marxist language. I just want y'all to appreciate that.) And the clearest embodiment of human evil in SotT is the ship-builder Caradog Lewis, who takes no pride in his craft. Artists and craftspeople are scattered throughout the series: Mrs. Drew is a painter, Miss Hatherton a sculptor; Mr. Stanton is a jeweller (and himself makes the bracelet that is the Black Rider's excuse for gaining entry to the Stanton house); Max is an artist, Paul a flutist; Will & James are choirboys, and Will's extraordinary voice is vitally important to SotT. In Greenwitch we see Barney beginning to become an artist himself, and in The Grey King both John Rowlands and Bran are harpists. (That, crucially, is one of the things Blodwen Rowlands mocks as she becomes the White Rider: "A soft one, yn ffwl mawr! ... A shepherd and a harp-player! Fool! Fool! (Cooper 252). Simon has acted in Shakespeare; although he's disparaging about it, he still remembers Prospero's lines. And then Gwion and Gwyddno, musician and craftsman. Art matters in Cooper's world; it matters tremendously. The evil of the painter in Greenwitch shows nowhere more clearly than in his art and the virulent green that disturbs Barney so much. The Things of Power are all specifically beautiful things, beautifully crafted. So this is no trivial matter for Cooper; the waking of Gwyddno to his art, despite the loss of his kingdom, is a triumph, for which the blazing sword Eirias is a symbol--the symbol of the Light's defeat of the Dark.
TBC ...
WORKS CITED
Cooper, Susan. Silver on the Tree. The Dark Is Rising Sequence 5. N.p.: Aladdin-Atheneum, 1977.
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Re: A different spin on 'forgetting'
Date: 2003-03-25 03:31 pm (UTC)And anyway, if we agree that Merriman and the Lady think they're doing the right thing, and that in fact it doesn't do any harm to the characters in the world of the story, then we're right back where we started: Cooper has made a choice we disagree with. I think that if she had intended Merriman's action to be seen as wrong, we would have gotten consequences.