Chapter 7: Of Beginnings and the Names of Things (Part I)
In which Galatea learns shorthand to prove a point.
Previously, in The Name of the Wind, Rothfuss ruined a perfectly good chapter with paragraphs of purple prose, with the result that - once again - nothing really happened.
One piece of housekeeping before I dive in: I'm aware that I got a little heavy-handed with the Alert The Editor count last chapter. I stand by it because the instances where I stretched the count beyond its nominal purpose of tallying typos and grammar fails really do fall under the editor's purview. A big part of an editor's job is to save over-enthusiastic writers from themselves; to find the point of a scene or chapter and help an author pare away the excess prose so that point remains clear. Chapter 6 was unusual in that it was very easy to point to specific things that the editor should have made Rothfuss cut in order to keep the scene focused, but, unless future chapters are similar, the count will by and large stick to copy-editing mistakes.
Anyway, we're in the home stretch - by which I mean that this is the last chapter of framing narrative before the story proper begins. We'll return to Devan, Bast and the Waystone periodically throughout the rest of the book, but this is the last we'll see of them for a while. As with almost all the rest of the framing narrative chapters, this one is wheel-spinning and spectacularly frustrating, but at least it'll finally get us where we're going. Sort of.
Sunlight poured into the Waystone. It was a cool, fresh light, fitted for beginnings.I am begging you, Rothfuss: do not do what I think you're about to do.
Inside the Waystone, the light fell across Chronicler’s face and touched a beginning there[...]God fucking dammit.
The light flowed across the bar, scattered a thousand tiny rainbow beginnings from the colored bottles, and climbed the wall toward the sword, as if searching for one final beginning.Stop. Just stop.
But when the light touched the sword there were no beginnings to be seen.*weeps*
If you take the "thousand tiny rainbow beginnings" line literally, there are 1,006 beginnings mentioned in the first page of this chapter.
Simile Soup: 1,035
Okay, fine: you're not supposed to take it literally. The "beginnings" metaphor is still pounded into us seven times, which is seven times more than it has any right to be.
Simile Soup: 1,035 36
Look, it is not at all uncommon for certain types of fiction - weirdly, epic fantasy and literary fiction being the most likely - to take a metaphor and stretch it out as far as it will go, using it as a leitmotif or thematic underpinning for a page, a scene, a chapter or even the whole book. I once wrote a short story in nothing but "moments", using that motif to try and capture the way depression can make you fixate on individual negative points in time rather than seeing a more holistic and well-balanced picture of your life. It worked rather well, mostly because I knew that it was a heavy conceit and so poured a lot of effort into making sure it was consistent and well-balanced: that meant keeping the prose fairly spare and resisting the urge to get metaphorical elsewhere unless it felt extremely natural to do so.
The point is that, if it were much better-written, I could conceivably see The Name of the Wind being able to support the weight of one extended metaphor: the silence or the beginnings. The very best of literature by the very best of writers can rarely support two. It pulls you out of the narrative and yells "THIS IS LITERATURE" at you, which is something readers rarely want to have yelled at them even when they're actually reading literary fiction.
In fact, the light the sword reflected was dull, burnished, and ages old.Fun game: when I say "'dull' and 'burnished' are literally antonyms, you incompetent hack", am I talking to Rothfuss or his editor?
Simile Soup: 37
Alert The Editor: 21
Because I am a generous and giving soul, I choose to address them both.
Devan is distracted by the miraculously antonymous sword - as I suppose anyone would be - but he snaps to when Kvothe starts asking him about his process. Devan starts off well, saying that he listens carefully to what his subjects remember, and then goes home and cleans it all up into a clear and cogent narrative: basically what any good biographer would do. He doesn't mention any sort of research or corroboration effort, but I'm disinclined to be picky about that, since he's really giving Kvothe the simplest possible overview of what he does.
Kvothe, of course, is not happy with this, and in trying to placate him, Devan makes me regret saying "good biographer":
Chronicler gave him a shy smile. “Storytellers are always different. They prefer their stories be left alone. But they also prefer an attentive audience. I usually listen and record later. I have a nearly perfect memory.”First of all, that "shy smile" really rankles. We've discussed Devan's lobotomy since the last chapter but it is just impossible to reconcile the bold and witty Devan of Chapter 2 with the one I'm currently imagining giggling behind a fan like a bad Japanese cliche.
Doesn't matter really, because Devan just lost me. I have a nearly perfect memory. I've worked as a journalist, and more often than not I would transcribe interviews from memory and check them against my recordings and notes for errors, since I get a better sense of how to arrange the text if I can mentally put myself back in the room with the interview subject. The point, however, is that I do have recordings and notes, because my brain is a squishy sack of meat sloshing around in a bone box, and I have absolutely no guarantee against something happening to that sack of meat - from catastrophic injury to simple lack of sleep - that might mess with my recall.
I was just a journalist, and not the kind who could cause an international incident if I recorded someone's words wrong. At most I'd have two hours of talking to remember in one go, and I never had a subject who much minded if I played with their words a little to make sure they were readable and their meaning was clear.
Devan is a biographer. He told us last chapter he spent two days interviewing Oren Velciter, which is far more to remember than the two hours' worth of talking I'd usually have to deal with. The human brain just isn't designed to handle that much text without error. On top of that, Devan just said that "listen now, record later" is the strategy he uses for storytellers, the people least likely to be forgiving if their words are messed with in transcription. And he has a concussion.
In other words: fuck you, Devan - take notes. We're about to find out that Devan has a shorthand system that lets him transcribe accurately at speed, but even if he didn't he should still be taking notes. I never used a formal shorthand during my journo work, but I certainly had a basic toolkit of tricks and shortcuts so that I could take accurate notes and still make my subjects confident that I was paying attention when we spoke.
I Know Stuff: 7
I'd buy that Rothfuss has never met an actual biographer, but has he never even read a biography?
For once Kvothe and I are on the same wavelength, and Kvothe asks Devan about his note-taking system. Devan pads for a page taking out pen, ink and paper, which he really should have had out and ready at the beginning of the chapter.
NaNoPadMo: 19
Even if you buy Devan's ability to listen now and record later, he should still have pen and paper out and ready to go, because there are countless things that might require note-taking beyond Kvothe's exact words. Unusual words for which he might want to note the spelling; complicated geography that benefits from diagrams or rough maps; even personal notes of things to research further when he gets home or to a library.
And I know - because I've done the same thing in many a NaNo - that describing Devan's taking the tools of his trade out of his bag wasn't supposed to be anything except padding. It's a cheap and easy trick to up your word count: describing mundane actions that any half-awake reader could easily assume. But, just like the contrivance of Devan and Kvothe meeting in the woods just in time for the scrael attack, it's recognisable as bad padding because of all the unnecessary questions it invites. If Devan had just picked up a pen, I wouldn't have questioned where it came from or whether he also had ink out; by showing him taking pen, ink and paper out of his bag, Rothfuss forces me to wonder whether Devan is actually the world's worst biographer.
Kvothe spouts some nonsense for Devan to transcribe, including ¾ of a dirty limerick that isn't half as funny as it's supposed to be (the last word is "cock" - how daring). Devan transcribes using some kind of shorthand, and Kvothe promptly insists that Devan show him how it works.
“As soon as you show me how to read this, we can begin.”
Stu Stew: 10
The clear sense of entitlement in Kvothe's demand frankly makes my blood boil. I honestly don't know what Rothfuss was trying to go for here: I have a vague feeling that we're supposed to think that Kvothe just has an insatiable curiosity and thirst for knowledge, but it certainly doesn't read like that after reading pages of his being an absolute ass to Devan. Nor does it work as Kvothe's being suspicious that Devan will be writing something other than what Kvothe is saying, because what does Kvothe expect to do, read along at speed with an unfamiliar cipher while he's talking? If I'm honest, there are only two ways I can read Kvothe's demand, and neither is pretty: either he's still trying to beat Devan down by holding his story hostage in exchange for Devan's personal information (and make no mistake, a proprietary cipher Devan invented to increase his skill at his job is personal information), or he literally feels entitled to know because he's Kvothe, and knowledge by default belongs to him.
There is a lot to unpack in the brief (but not brief enough) shorthand lesson that follows, so we'll summarise first and then dig in. Devan says the system is complex, but Kvothe insists, so Devan shows Kvothe the basics and is astonished when Kvothe is able to deduce the complete shorthand system in the space of minutes by reverse-engineering it from the nonsense he gave Devan to transcribe earlier.
Stu Stew: 12
The double count is very deliberate. See, there are two particular hallmarks of Mary Sues/Gary Stus that go hand in hand and that - perhaps more than any other characteristic - make a Stu a Stu and not just a character with a lot of unusual traits.
The first is that a Stu will almost always encounter a circumstance wherein they take a very short space of time to master a skill that other, non-Stu characters have taken a great deal of time and effort to develop or perfect. This will prove that the Stu is talented, skilled or straight-up blessed enough to justify their being the protagonist or Chosen One of the story.
Now, while that preternatural skill is typically a Stu signifier, it doesn't have to be. Take Harry Potter conjuring a Patronus for the first time: true, we're told outright that this is a spell that many adult wizards struggle to perform, and that Harry has done so extraordinarily quickly. It succeeds, however, because Harry does struggle, even if he overcomes that struggle quickly. His first few attempts to conjure a Patronus fail and leave him drained, and despite his eventual success in the classroom he fails to conjure one at a key moment in the real world, demonstrating that no matter how skilled he is, this is still a fucking difficult spell. Moreover, he's had a difficult life with a lot of tragedy, making it very believable both that he has the unusual mental fortitude to conjure a Patronus and that his happiest memories, which he needs for the spell, would be especially happy in comparison to his darkest days. Finally, we later see him teaching other teenagers the spell, many of whom master it almost as quickly as Harry, suggesting not so much that he's Just That Special, but that he just had the right combination of drive and pressure a little earlier than the students he ended up teaching.
Rowling succeeds with Harry Potter and the Patronus in part because she's an excellent character writer, and in part because the broad magic system she created lets her control the difficulty curve of any particular spell. But writing preternatural skill is actually really fucking hard, because as the writer you have to do at least a passable imitation of being much, much smarter than you probably actually are. That's what leads to Stu-signifier number 2: dumbing everyone else down to make the Stu look more genius by comparison.
To test whether this is what Rothfuss is doing when he has Kvothe reverse-engineer Devan's shorthand in 15 minutes, I went hunting for a brief passage of Gregg shorthand, the most common US shorthand for journalists and stenographers. With the original longhand text on one side and the shorthand text on the other, I did my best to figure out which symbols meant what and come up with a key for the phonemes in the passage. It took, all told, about ten minutes.
I'm rather clever and I've had some practice with ciphers, but I'm not nearly as clever as Kvothe is supposed to be, and Gregg is much more complex than Devan's shorthand. The point isn't that I'm a genius (I'm not): the point is that shorthand just isn't that bloody hard to figure out. It takes a lot of practice to write it fluently, but to reverse-engineer it from a passage for which you have the original text? Really not that tricky.
Even if I were some kind of shorthand savant, the text still bears me out on Rothfuss artificially inflating Kvothe's skills:
He pointed. “These are different vowel sounds.”
“All vertical lines,” Kvothe said, looking intently at the page.
Chronicler paused, thrown off his stride. “Well . . . yes.”Why is Devan so impressed that Kvothe recognised that a series of vertical lines are, in fact, vertical lines? This is less instinctively understanding a deeply complex system than it is pointing out the absolutely bloody obvious. The only reason for Devan to be "thrown off his stride" is to validate Kvothe's observation with the shock and awe of someone who's an expert in the skill being learned.
Having figured out the vowels, Kvothe asks Devan about the consonants, which are horizontal lines. Devan gets halfway through the list before Kvothe takes over and finishes noting all the consonants himself.
Chronicler watched and listened as Kvothe completed the list. From beginning to end the whole process took about fifteen minutes. He made no mistakes.And that right there is a corollary of the dumbing-down: if it's too much to make your Stu amazing by dumbing everyone else down, you could always just make your Stu do the literally impossible. Kvothe can't complete the list of consonants without making mistakes, because he simply doesn't have all the necessary information. The nonsense he dictated to Devan doesn't contain all the consonant sounds for a full phoneme system, so unless Devan's system is logical in a way that language, honestly, isn't, Kvothe shouldn't be able to infer the missing consonants without help.
Stu Stew: 13
I'm not done.
“Wonderfully efficient system,” Kvothe said appreciatively. “Very logical. Did you design it yourself?"Actually...it's kind of a shitty shorthand. Let's break it down:
“There are around fifty different sounds we use to speak.”Depending on the language, sure: around 50 phonemes could be right - though it's worth noting that Devan says he could conceivably use his shorthand to transcribe any language, and the International Phoneme Alphabet (the closest thing we have to a universal phoneme system) has over 400 characters. Devan's 50 symbols shouldn't be enough to transcribe languages more than a step or two removed from his native tongue. You can handwave it with the fact that all of Rothfuss' conlangs sound pretty much the same, but that's not exactly a ringing endorsement of the realism of the book.
I Know Stuff: 8
Mother Tongue: 6
“I’ve given each of them a symbol consisting of one or two pen strokes. ”See, the thing that slows down regular handwriting isn't the strokes: it's the breaks between strokes. The less you have to lift your pen, the quicker it is to move from one letterform or symbol to the next, and the easier it is to keep up with the cadence of spoken words. That's why cursive exists: being able to loop from one letterform to the next gives cursive a huge speed advantage over print.
He pointed. “These are different vowel sounds.”
"All vertical lines,” Kvothe said, looking intently at the page.And there's your problem. Let's say you're writing the word "stoic", which has two consecutive vowel sounds: a long "oh" and a short "ih". In order to get from one vertical stroke to the next, you have to lift your pen. Same with the horizontal consonants, actually: you have "s" followed by "t", so once again you have to lift your pen between sounds. Unless Devan has a system of joining symbols that Rothfuss hasn't told us about, this is a very inefficient system. And let's be honest, with all the padding going on: if there were a system for joining symbols, Rothfuss would have told us.
I'm still not done. Shorthand systems don't just work by reducing the number of marks you have to make per sound: they also abbreviate the words themselves. Shorthand transcription often jumps from consonant to consonant, skipping the vowels entirely because they're usually easy enough to infer after the fact. Transcribed, Kvothe's dirty limerick should have read: "Thr ws a yng wdō frm Fætn..." In other words, either Kvothe shouldn't have had any vowels to infer from Devan's transcription, or Devan was needlessly slowing himself down with a shorthand that isn't up to the task.
Oh, and on top of that, most shorthands also have symbol systems for common words, reducing pronouns, articles, conjunctions and so on to single symbols. Kvothe starts his nonsense dictation with simple conjugations of the verb "to be" - exactly the sort of thing that is usually assigned a shorthand symbol to speed things up even further. Kvothe figures out which vowels are which by identifying the "ah" of "am", but that shouldn't have had a discrete symbol in the first place. It should have been a single symbol to denote the entirety of "I am".
The point is threefold: 1) Devan's shorthand system sucks, 2) if the shorthand doesn't suck, there's no way Kvothe should have been able to figure it out, and 3) because Kvothe is the authorial mouthpiece who cracked Devan's code, when he tells us it's a wonderfully efficient system we're supposed to believe him.
I Know Stuff: 9
Stu Stew: 15
And after all of that rubbish, what really irks is this: it was all still padding. I don't mind the idea of Devan's having a shorthand and Kvothe's being curious how it works: in principle it supports both their characters and helps answer how Devan is able to keep up over three full days of storytelling. But the only reason to go into this much detail is to pad the word count, and just as with Devan's unpreparedness earlier, it is clearly padding because of all the inconsistencies it causes. The more specific Rothfuss tries to get, the more obvious it is that he hasn't the faintest idea what he's talking about.
In a film called Proof (also a play), the main character figures out a difficult mathematical proof and then has to prove her authorship, which is complicated by the fact that her now-senile father was also working on the same proof before he lost his marbles. The most explanation we get is that "it's a very important proof to do with prime numbers": we never see the actual equations written on a board, and the hypothesis she's trying to prove is never named.
If you know your theoretical maths it seems likely that she's working on the Riemann Hypothesis, which is a well-known unsolved hypothesis to do with prime numbers. But not naming the hypothesis is the smartest choice the writers make in both the play and the movie, because it proofs (heh) the story against the mathematicians in the audience, who would instantly be able to pick holes in any demonstrated proof, and against the Riemann Hypothesis actually being proved in the real world and robbing the play of all its tension. As long as we, the audience, only know the broad strokes of what she's trying to prove, we can fill in the details according to our own level of mathematical knowledge and the play can't accidentally contradict itself. The added beauty of it is that for me, she's proving the Riemann Hypothesis, but to an actual mathematician she could be proving something completely different.
Rothfuss could easily have done the same: given us the broadest possible strokes of Devan's shorthand and let us fill in the rest. After all, all we need to know is that Devan can write as quickly as Kvothe can speak. Shorthand experts among the readers can have fun imagining the intricacies of a fantasy shorthand system; everyone else knows as much as they need to.
But no, Rothfuss had to dig into specifics, and in his attempt to show us how clever Devan is for having a shorthand and how clever Kvothe is for deciphering it, he gave us a system that makes Kvothe look like a psychic and Devan like a moron. Welcome to Padding 101.
NaNoPadMo: 20
And by the way: shorthand systems have been around for literally thousands of years. What is wrong with this world that makes Devan's shorthand such a fucking revelation?
I Have An Interrogative: 24
I hate this book. There's a more natural break in the chapter coming up, but I don't care: I need a breather. See you in Part II.
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