Interlude: Galatea's Theory

I've mentioned a couple of times now that I have a theory about why some of the earlier chapters of The Name of the Wind are the way they are.  Now that we're out of the framing narrative, I think it's time to expound on that a little.  Simply put, my theory is this: after the Prologue, Chapter 7 was originally the first chapter of the book, and Chapters 1-6 did not exist (at least in their current state) until a long time after the rest of The Name of the Wind was written.

Rothfuss doesn't talk a lot about the order in which he wrote things, except to say that the whole process from start to now took about 15 years.  From interviews, I think I can gather that the prologue has pretty much always been there, and that the framing narrative as a whole also entered the picture pretty early on.  So it's not like The Kingkiller Chronicle was originally just a linear first-person account of Kvothe's life and Rothfuss shoehorned Devan in at the last minute; that said, I think there's a good case to be made that five or six of the first seven chapters just didn't exist until the book was pretty close to publication.

For all my complaining about the details (and the padding), I've paid Rothfuss a lot of compliments in these early chapters.  The prose isn't masterful but it's generally fine - even rather good in some places.  There are relatively few punctuation and grammar problems, the voice is fairly consistent, and there's some nice imagery, as well as a handful of metaphors Rothfuss manages to execute without beating his readers over the head with them.  Even the little bit of conlang can be parsed so that it makes grammatical sense, though it takes some creativity to do it.

The characters are pretty decent too.  Kvothe is quiet and restrained, is kind or cordial to those around him, and even shows a bit of a sense of humour in his interactions with Bast.  Devan's chapters have that dry wit I mentioned, and Devan himself is self-assured and clever before he starts really talking to Kvothe.  Subsidiary characters, like the townspeople and the highwaymen, have a richness to them that comes from clear characterisation and natural actions and dialogue.  In short, chapters 1-5 have all the hallmarks of a fairly mature writer, and the rest of the book...does not.

I suspect that editor intervention persuaded Rothfuss to bulk out the framing narrative late in the game.  Perhaps the editor recommended filling out Devan's character or adding more context to Kvothe's hiding out in Newarre; perhaps the notion was to plant some early seeds for concepts that pay off later in the series.  It might even have been as simple as wanting to create some narrative space between the "silence" metaphor of the prologue and the "beginnings" metaphor of what was once the first chapter - because after all: placing an extended metaphor about beginnings at the beginning of a novel seems like exactly the sort of meta-wordplay Rothfuss would go for.

Chapter 6 is where I go from sometimes having to reach for things to critique to actively screaming at the book every other line, and I think that comes from Rothfuss' awkwardly smooshing together the immature writing of the book proper with the much more confident writing of those early chapters.  Somehow the self-assured and witty Devan of the first few chapters had to be reconciled with the early-draft Devan who was a simple facilitator for Kvothe's story: the result is Devan's lobotomy.  Similarly, the smug, entitled Kvothe of early drafts - whose assholishness remains consistent enough through the rest of the book you can almost believe it's a deliberate character flaw - had to be reconciled with the gentler Kvothe of the new chapters, with the result that it looks like Kvothe is deliberately and needlessly cruel to Devan in particular.

Ultimately, I think that's the reason that the early chapters - confident as they are in the prose - are nothing but narrative wheel-spinning.  By the time they were added, the story was set in stone, meaning that the absolute most these chapters could do narratively was to add a little context to what had already been written.  They couldn't affect the story in any meaningful way without necessitating massive re-writes, and, while I'd have loved to see that (and a more mature book as a consequence), Rothfuss took the easy option and used them basically as prose exercises.  They add nothing to the story, and if you take them out the rest of the book doesn't have to change at all to compensate.

The maturity present in the early chapters does come back, in "interludes" spaced throughout Kvothe's story that return us to the present day in the Waystone Inn.  Again, I would guess that at least some of these interludes were the suggestion of an editor, correctly surmising that readers would care more about the story being told if they got to spend a little more time with those doing the telling and the listening.  Taken together, the early chapters and these interludes do one important thing: they convince us that we're reading a much better book than we really are.

I'm not kidding.  If the entire book were written with the prose and characterisation of the first few chapters, I might not think it was a work of genius but I'd certainly enjoy it.  I'd be much more forgiving of research fails and internal inconsistencies, and I sure as hell wouldn't feel the need to spork it.  The first time I read The Name of the Wind, I was well out of the framing narrative before I went from relative indifference to actively hating it.  And it's worth noting that, of the in-depth reviews I've read, even those that sing the book's praises all make similar apologies for major problems in the book proper, but applaud the imagery and characterisation of the book's opening.  I do find myself wondering if the people who love Rothfuss' work can just last longer on doses of decent prose than I can.

I suppose what I'm getting at is this: we've reached the end of my magnanimity when it comes to this book.  All the counts that have stayed low because they were symptoms rather than problems?  They're about to become problems.  The rest of this book is a convoluted, inconsistent, juvenile mess, and the sad part is that it clearly didn't have to be.  Given another few years under the careful direction of a really good editor, Rothfuss could have re-written the thing in his newly-mature style, and delivered an epic meta-fantasy that is every bit as good as people think it is.  If anything about The Kingkiller Chronicle frustrates me above everything else, that's it.

I wanted to save this for the end, but I think it's more appropriate here: I don't begrudge Rothfuss his success, and I certainly don't think anyone who genuinely enjoys these books is an idiot.  While there's some problematic content coming up, to be sure, at the end of the day these books are harmless - unlike, say, Twilight or 50 Shades of Grey, whose success says some terrifying things about the ideas their fans are internalising.  More than that, Rothfuss has used his success to do genuine and tangible good through his Worldbuilders charity, and frankly that's far more important than whether his books are any good.

Consider this interlude, then, an olive branch of sorts.  I'm not going to stop sporking, and the sporkage is only going to get more vicious as we get into the bits of the book that aren't just terrible but that speak directly to things about which I'm passionate.  But it's definitely worth taking a rare double post to say that 1) if you love The Kingkiller Chronicle and all that Rothfuss stands for, then that's cool by me, and 2) I can see how this series could have been quite something, if only Rothfuss and his editors had taken more time and been more ruthless as they honed it.

On that note, I'll see you all in Chapter 8, when we finally get out of the Waystone and into Kvothe's own telling of his story.