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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no subject
Date: 2003-03-24 05:34 am (UTC)I feel so strongly against the forgetting that I don't believe it. No, come on, they didn't forget, she can say they did, but actually the author isn't always right against the force of that. They need to remember, for goodness sake. The first time I read SotT, after having waited for it to come out, the first book ever I waited to be published, I just put it down in disgust when she did that. I didn't re-read it for years, though I re-read the others.
As for the mari llwyd, horrible as it is, I don't know why she didn't call it a "night mare" in English. It's a real folklore thing, all the bits in SotT are real folklore things, though some of them are put together oddly. It must be a really different experience reading the book if you don't already recognise them. I think Cooper was the first thing I read that used things from my cultural tradition. Now, I can see her being clever, then I just thought everyone knew those things... Anyway, the mari llwyd, I think it isn't of the Dark because it is nightmare, it is wild, it is the nihilistic evil in people, maybe?
Nobody would choose to forget. It would be to give up who they are, to give up the memories that have brought them there. Someone on rasfw once suggested that Cooper's implied child readers could, on finishing, and identifying with the Drews, imagine that it was they themselves who had done those things and forgotten, which made me inexplicably incandescent. Susan turning her back on Narnia is nothing on that.
no subject
Date: 2003-03-24 09:39 am (UTC)I've been thinking about what you said about the Mari Llwyd--from the perspective of a non-Welsh speaker, of course, because I am so non-Welsh-speaking that I could win prizes for it--and I think the effect of using the Welsh name, on those of us who had never heard of the Mari Llwyd before reading SotT is palpable and worthwhile. It has what litcrit jargon calls a "distancing" or "alienating" effect, and by that makes the thing even more frightening. Calling it the Night Mare, or the Nightmare, would let English-only-speaking readers slide into a feeling that they knew something about it. "Nightmare" as a word in English has such broad currency and can be used to describe things that in actuality have nothing to do with the experience of a nightmare. (Having woken up from one Sunday at 2 a.m., I am feeling particularly sensitive to the inaccuracy of saying, "Oh, it was a NIGHTMARE," about trying to find parking or being trapped by a bore at a party.) For me, if it had been called the Nightmare, it would have been smaller, not as threatening. I read that scene very much in Will's position, and part of what's terrifying for me is not having the SLIGHTEST idea what the thing is, or what it represents. Bran doesn't explain it to Will until after the Mari Llwyd has been defeated.
So, while that wouldn't have been nearly as effective had I been Welsh--or not effective in the same way--I nonetheless do understand why she did it. And for me, it works.
For the rest of what you said, I agree with you. Whole-heartedly.
no subject
Date: 2003-03-24 12:17 pm (UTC)I think the way my family used Welsh, I heard "mari llwyd" more for "nightmare" as a kid than I did "nightmare", nightmare was the literary word, mari llwyd was the word when you're crying in the middle of the night.
Trying it now, I think the emotional balance is about the same.
Of course, if I lost out on that being exotic, Harriet the Spy was incredibly exotic in the everyday details, and I grew up thinking Little Women was contemporary Boston and Anne of Green Gables contemporary Eastern Canada, and that Roger Zelazny had invented the broad liberal education as an incredibly SFnal concept, so swings and roundabouts.
A different spin on 'forgetting'
Date: 2003-03-25 08:23 am (UTC)The way I look at it, in the universe of TDiR, humans are the only people who can actually make moral choices. The Old Ones and the Lords of the Light did not choose sides, they were chosen; Light or Dark, it's something that they are, and that constrains them in all sorts of ways. Both Light and Dark are bound by the laws of the Lost Land for instance, but the human Gwion can, and does, choose to break those laws and aid the Light. It's that human ability to be surprising, to be creative that gives us the potential to be both better than the Light or worse than the Dark. And it's that creativity that is valued by both sides in the war. (I know Will is a singer, but I doubt very much that he could ever write a song, or maybe, as the last Old One he is more nearly human than others of his kind. He did after all make the gift for the Greenwitch, but was that craft or art?)
Merriman doesn't have the imagination to see that, for all its surface kindness, causing the mortals to forget their ordeals is a massive denial of choice, that in attempting to help them he is abusing them. Will at least has the humanity to be discomfited by this, at least in some of the earlier books. What Merriman does drives home the sheer inhumanity of the Light, emphasising something that John Rowlands has already pointed out. We come away from the book pissed off with Merriman, and that's as it should be. The Light is not merely a crutch, it has the potential to be actively harmful in its monomania.
Re: A different spin on 'forgetting'
Date: 2003-03-25 08:48 am (UTC)My problem with your reading comes in the tricky nuances of interpretation. Let me list off the bits of evidence I would bring to counter your argument, and then maybe try to talk about it.
1. I would argue that Will's reluctance to remove people's memories in the early books comes from his reluctance to sever himself for mortal life, not any concern about what it does to them.
2. NO ONE protests Merriman's decision. None of the children, either mortal or otherwise.
3. The Lady makes the choice regarding John Rowlands, and the Lady is, quite specifically, good and wise, along with all the rest of it.
4. There are never EVER anywhere in the five books, any negative repercussions to mortals having their memories tinkered with.
5. It makes a weak and undercut ending to have us leave the book disgruntled with a character, when there is no hope, either in the world of the books themselves, or in any possibility of a sequel, that his morally ambiguous decision will be reconsidered. Now, it's perfectly possible for an author to choose to undercut their own series, but that's not how it reads to me. This isn't an unmitigated happy ending, but it is one in which good has triumphed and evil has been defeated, and the surviving characters turn together to face the new day. I think if Cooper had INTENDED us to disagree with Merriman, Will's last line--and the last line of the book and of the series--would have been something other than, "I think it's time we were starting out. ... We've got a long way to go" (Cooper 269).
The Light is throughout TDIRS portrayed as being hard and ruthless, but it does not, itself, do harm. The Dark, working through Caradog Prichard, kills Cafall; it is not the Light's fault that the White Rider decided to marry John Rowlands. Hawkin is punished for betrayal and deliberately refuses an offer of forgiveness and peace. And the forgetting bit is portrayed as an act of mercy, most specifically in Greenwitch, but also in general--perhaps the only mercy Cooper thinks the Light can offer.
So, I like your reading, and it's a reasonable extrapolation from what we're given. I think I'd like Cooper better if that HAD BEEN what she was doing. I just don't think that she was.
Re: A different spin on 'forgetting'
Date: 2003-03-25 10:44 am (UTC)Your first point about Will's reluctance in the early books, while he still thinks like a human just underlines this reading; that humans are repelled by the idea.
The children trust Merriman. He's an adult that they love and while they grow dramatically during the series I doubt they've grown enough to stop trusting someone as charismatic as Merriman.
The Lady is also an Old One with the failings that go with that. The Old Ones' culture is one that assumes that it is better to have mortals forget, if only to allow the Old Ones to remain hidden. It's very easy to let your culture do your thinking for you. And it's Old One's that tell us that the Lady is good and wise, her actions in removing Rowlands' memories show us that she isn't quite as wise as the Old Ones would have us believe. But maybe no Old One can be truly wise, for the same reason that no Old One can make a moral choice.
Your fourth point is a little trickier to find evidence against, but I would point to the episode in Greenwitch where Barney's memory is manipulated by the Dark as evidence that messing with someone's mind is not a nice thing to do. And one could argue that some of Bran's pain in The Grey King results from the way the adults in his life (proxy Old Ones?) have concealed parts of his past from him (which is akin to making someone forget, but it's done beforehand rather than after the events). Or maybe that's just me projecting from occasions when my parents haven't told me things 'as a kindness'.
Again, the author's intent doesn't necessarily mean we should read a book according to that intent. And note that those last words are put in an Old One's mouth. Damned good last words mind.
Okay, coming to your point that the Light 'does not itself do harm'. Well, it all depends on your definition of harm doesn't it. Hawkin's feet are set on the road to betrayal precisely because of Merriman's lack of empathy and understanding of what it is to be human. John Rowlands repeatedly presses Will on the ruthlessness of the light, and the conversation endsI read that as Will accepting that he is prepared to allow harm to befall others if it helps him win (quite whether that counts as doing harm is a matter for debate). Note that I am not in anyway saying that the Light intends harm, just that it does, in its monomania and inhumanity do harm by accident. Merriman and the Lady don't mean any harm, they don't even see the possibility that they could be doing harm.
I just reskimmed Greenwitch and my memory of it and can't find or remember any enforced forgetfulness at all (apart from that inflicted by the agent of the Dark). Feel the irony.
It's actually rather hard to divine Cooper's intentions regarding this; everything that I can find/remember on the subject is either from put in the mouth of a character or is obviously tied to a character's viewpoint; there's no authorial voice intoning The Truth (Hurrah!), just characters and their words, actions and thoughts.
You could well be right about Cooper's intent in the inference you draw from the way the sequence ends, but I don't think that invalidates my reading; it certainly seems to be consistent with what's in the text, and it's way more satisfying than deciding that the author failed at the last fence.
Re: A different spin on 'forgetting'
Date: 2003-03-25 11:46 am (UTC)The passage in Greenwitch to which I was referring is this one; Will and Merriman have just dived off the cliff on their way to talk to Tethys (end of Ch. 6):
Now, I should say, that I agree with you about the effects of the forgetting and what it says about Cooper's conceptualization of the Light. But for me, turning that observation from a critique into an interpretation means that TDIRS leaves too much of the work for the reader to do. Yes, the narration is extremely tight third, so we get no objective view of the Light, the Dark, or any of the mortal characters. But by that same argument, if the narrative itself accepted any subversion of its Light=Good, Dark=Bad structure, that subversion would have to be given to one of the characters (or the characters would have to be treated with a great deal more irony throughout than is in fact the case). It's true that the children trust Merriman--although Will, remember, is his colleague and equal--but Will and Jane in particular have been our moral touchstones throughout, and if the narrative itself protested Merriman's act, then one of them (or possibly Bran) would voice it.
This isn't to say that you can't read the narrative subversively, against the text. You're welcome to. But reading only the ending subversively and the rest of the series straightforwardly is changing the rules of the game in the final quarter. And I think it's much less painful to assume that Cooper and I have a major philosophical difference than to try to believe that a writer of her talent, subtlety and control would write such a cryptically and clumsily ironic ending, such that it would be misread more often than read properly. Moreover, we have five books' worth of evidence as to how the narrative goes about its work. Nothing in those five books has suggested that we cannot take the narrative and its values absolutely as we find them.
There's a pit here, which I want to point out because I've never been able to clarify it properly, and I want to explain that I'm not using a double standard out of hypocrisy or something: the Pit of Intentionality. I don't know what Cooper INTENDED to do any more than you do. But I think it is possible to understand from reading a narrative what that narrative expects its readers' responses to be. Sometimes the narrative fails, and becomes an object of derision, but in that case it's funny precisely because we can tell it's trying to elicit a response from us that we are not feeling. Or mores and literary tastes change; we read Victorian novels very differently than the Victorians read them, and in doing so I, at least, have always understood that I am not reacting to the story in the way I am intended to. So, for me, the fact that I disagree violently with the ending cannot be assimilated as a characteristic of the narrative. It remains a metacommentary on the author.
I'm not concerned one way or the other with convincing you, but I do hope I've managed to make the grounds of my argument clear.
Re: A different spin on 'forgetting'
Date: 2003-03-25 02:20 pm (UTC)I'm not sure that I agree about 'leaving the reader with too much to do'. Mostly based on my own experience of rereading whole series for the first time in 20 years. When I first read the books, the problem of forgetting never occurred to me, I was reading a boys' adventure and they deliver solidly on that level. I was aware of stuff going on under the surface (and I kept finding echoes of the mythology in things I read later), but didn't really have the mental or emotional tools to analyze them. Coming back to them now, I'm reading on a different level and taking different things from them which I'd not noticed before. I don't have a problem with the book allowing different readings. If you aren't bothered by the problem of forgetting then you can happily read the books and not worry. If you are bothered, then there are enough clues in the text to admit a second reading and insight about the limitations of the Light and the possibilities and capabilities of humanity.
I'm not sure either that I'm 'changing the rules in the fourth quarter' as you put it, merely extrapolating from things we've been shown to explain something that bothers me throughout the sequence.
The problem with having a character voice concerns at the point where Merriman works his mojo is that it's a hell of a googly to chuck at a young reader; deliberately and explicitly undercutting something that doesn't need to be undercut. There's a lot to take from these stories even if you don't have a problem with the forgetting. We are shown that Will has qualms about it, even as late as the beginning of Silver on the Tree:And just like that, Stephen, Will's favourite brother, has part of himself stolen. And Will knows it, and regrets it, but says farewell to the 'old' brother and makes the world more convenient for himself. He doesn't have to do it like that. We know from the example of John Rowlands that humans can cope with the knowledge that Old Ones walk among us. I don't doubt that Will could have explained things to Stephen far more effectively and 'enlisted' him as a friend of the Light. Instead he tells him in a fashion that's almost guaranteed to engender disbelief and upset on Stephen's part and then cuts that experience out of his brother. It's at this point (as if we weren't aware of it by now) that it's driven home forcefully how inhuman Will has become, but he still regrets what he has done (or feels he has had to do). It's also why, by the end of the book, I don't really think of Will as one of the children; he's one of the three from the circle.
Bah, this is turning into a bloody dissertation isn't it? I think my point is that I don't believe that this interpretation is really reading against the text, just drawing out something that was there anyway if you want to look for it. And I wouldn't have gone looking for it if I didn't think Cooper was good enough at her job for the search to be worth my while.
Phew, back down below 4300 chars.
Re: A different spin on 'forgetting'
Date: 2003-03-25 02:38 pm (UTC)I think the sticking point for me--the porcupine I cannot swallow--is that if you're right, and we are SUPPOSED to understand that Merriman has done something bordering right up on evil (within the context of the world, that is, since as I've said, I think the forgetting bit IS wrong), then that is a TERRIBLE TERRIBLE TERRIBLE ending. It's like the ending of A Clockwork Orange or 1984 (or Twin Peaks), and I cannot reconcile the sequence as a whole, or my experience of reading the sequence, to a bleak, irrecuperable dystopian ending. It's never going to work for me.
Re: A different spin on 'forgetting'
Date: 2003-03-25 03:23 pm (UTC)I don't think it's that bleak myself. I think Merriman and the Lady's intentions count for a good deal and I don't think that there's any doubt that they see what they offer as a benediction. And I'm not sure they can be said to have done any actual harm in the story's world of men, after all, if the mortals don't even know that anything is missing then how can they hurt by the absence? It's only a moral problem for the reader who, in Merriman's position would have made a different choice.
I'm stretching here aren't I?
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.
Re: A different spin on 'forgetting'
Date: 2003-03-26 07:19 am (UTC)If you found out that -- hang on, story idea, back later.
Re: A different spin on 'forgetting'
Date: 2003-03-26 08:08 am (UTC)The thing is, if you believe, as I do, that we are the sum of our experiences, then obliterating experience is akin to unmaking a person and replacing them with someone else who lives in the same body (and who believes that zie has always lived there) and it all goes a bit Greg Egan on us. Note that the 'new' personality isn't really 'harmed' by this, how could it be? It's only those who stand outside time, the Circle and the Reader if you will that can see the harm. Doesn't make it right though.
The thing is, Cooper is aware that this is what is happening too. It's implicit in Will looking at Stephen with a 'sort of farewell' as he excises the memories of the Light (and not with pinpoint accuracy either, Stephen even forgets the mink that they've seen).
I find myself drawn to Men in Black here. In that work the memories are obliterated, but the wipee is given a suggestion by the wiper as to how to fill in the blank. The difference between Smith and Jones' suggestions is itself instructive. Jones' stories tend to be the kind that could leave the wipee with a lingering paranoia, Smith tries to leave them with a happy explanation. And there are hints in the film that this makes a difference to the later lives of people who get wiped (please don't ask me for chapter and verse). I think the presence of that framework makes MIB wipes rather different from those in TDIR though, I just think it's an interesting diversion.
Y'know, I'm more and more drawn to your "pretend it didn't happen" approach. I could just about stomach the mass wipes if the Old Ones wiped themselves out at the same time and Will lost his powers and went back to the innocence of youth, after all, both Light and Dark are somewhat nihilistic, once the Dark has been finally defeated what is the Light for? Its sole purpose is to prevent the Dark destroying humanity's freedom to choose.
Gah! I really wish I hadn't found this interpretation, but now I have I'm damned if I know how to back away from it; it fits too well, could somebody please blow it out of the water for me?
Re: A different spin on 'forgetting'
Date: 2003-03-26 09:50 am (UTC)We don't KNOW that Bran forgets Cafall, because the book ends. She doesn't specify how extensive the forgetting is and what it encompasses. And, again, in five books worth of text, we never see any negative effects of the forgetting. Paul's not lapsing into early senility from having been zapped in The Dark Is Rising, nor has he lost his ability to play the flute, nor in any way we are shown become a different person. In other words, I think what we're seeing here is a place where Cooper failed to think things through. It's a flaw in the books, but it's not an existential crisis; it's just something that happens to writers, no matter how good they are.
I've gone very meta with this, which may not be any help to you. But it's how I look at things.
Re: A different spin on 'forgetting'
Date: 2003-03-26 10:11 am (UTC)If there was a universe full (to bursting) of worlds containing a) magic and b) evil dark lords, and all of these worlds contained gates to our world, whence, and only whence, came people capable of defeating evil in the other worlds, and the people came back after, those who survived, but lots of them with amnesias and nothing but odd dreams and almost everyone had done it whether they knew or not, mostly as children -- the trouble with this thought is that what it would take to balance it on this side would be this world (magicless) being threatened by a looming and near future evil, and talk about the rock in the cloth of _The Magicians of Night_ I can't, I can't even think about writing something in the near future of this world, not starting from here and now.
Re: A different spin on 'forgetting'
Date: 2003-03-26 10:14 am (UTC)Re: A different spin on 'forgetting'
Date: 2003-03-26 04:26 pm (UTC)Re: A different spin on 'forgetting'
Date: 2003-03-27 12:02 am (UTC)I just reread the last chapter of SOTT and it's a fur lined, ocean going balls up of an ending. I mean, WTF? John Rowlands (at a point when he is The Judge with the high magic behind him) has delivered a speech about the importance of choice (and gets offered a choice about forgetting himself but throws it back to the lady, who fumbles the ball -- why not just have him forget about Blodwen's true nature?) Then Merry gives the kids the long speech (and tells them to remember!) about Drake not being in his hammock any more and the fate of the world being finally in the hands of a freed human race for good or ill. And having told them that he makes with the brainwipe.
My current theory is that the wrong draft got printed. And I can find a small amount of (weak) internal evidence to back me up. Suddenly, in the final chapter, the Sign of Water is referred to throughout as the Sign of Light. Tenuous, but it'll have to do.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-14 12:54 pm (UTC)And it's part of the tradition; the price of not going to Faerie, of going back to your life, is often to lose your memory of it. Often it's a kindness, so that you don't waste away from longing for what you can never have again.
The forgettings seemed to me like a rewinding of the mind rather than a snipping out; in the church Will's brothers and the vicar go back to the conversation they were having before the Dark attacked.