Chapter 10: Alar and Several Stones
In which Galatea wonders why this is a separate chapter at all, and explains the settings on her Anachronism Alarm™.
Previously, in The Name of the Wind, Rothfuss broke the book.
This is another short chapter that serves purely to introduce another element of Rothfuss' invented magic system. In fact, it could have been part of the last chapter with zero modifications. In fact, it probably should have been part of the last chapter so as to spare readers that absurdly abrupt chapter ending. I've talked a lot about word-padding before, but sometimes I wonder if Rothfuss is page-padding too: splitting chapters arbitrarily to bulk the book up by that extra half-page between chapters.
You know what? I'm giving it a count.
NaNoPadMo: 24
I'd call it an Alert The Editor - since addressing improper chapter breaks is part of the editor's job - were it not for the very strong feeling that it really is all in the name of book-bulking. Whether it's splitting a chapter arbitrarily to get that extra half-page or expanding out a scene into a chapterette for no real reason, it hits that NaNoPadMo criterion of feeling like something I'd do if I were scrambling to reach my word count for the day.
That said, I am actually glad of the chapter break, improper as it may be. I don't know how much longer I'd have been able to spork that last chapter without succumbing to the temptation to fling my laptop off a cliff.
Having stopped practically mid-sentence in a discussion of Abenthy's weird mental exercises for Kvothe, we re-enter with a demonstration of one of Abenthy's weird mental exercises. Exactly the kind of thing that shouldn't have been broken up with a chapter break, in other words. Anyway, Abenthy asks Kvothe what'll happen if he drops a rock he's holding, and Kvothe says it'll probably fall.
Lovely bit of writing, there. It reinforces what we know about Abenthy's tendency to scorch his own eyebrows off, gives a sense of the deepening relationship between Kvothe and Abenthy, and supports the passage of time, all in the space of a sentence. More of this, please.He raised an eyebrow. I had kept him busy over the last several months, and he hadn’t had the leisure to accidentally burn them off.
“Probably? You sound like a sophist, boy. Hasn’t it always fallen before?”Mmph. "Sophist" bugs. Sophism was an actual school of philosophy, though the word itself has the secondary meaning of "a person who reasons with clever but false arguments", which I think is what Abenthy is aiming for here. It's a contextual thing, I think: with the Alpha and Beta book-breaking last chapter, it's impossible not to think of Abenthy as someone who has knowledge of Greek culture, which makes me instinctively assume he means Sophist-with-a-capital-S, not the secondary meaning. It's a case of the word feeling wrong more than its actually being so, and I don't think I can count it in all fairness.
I stuck my tongue out at him. “Don’t try to boldface your way through this one. That’s a fallacy. You taught me that yourself.”We interrupt this broadcast for your regularly-scheduled reminder that Kvothe is eleven. Again, as someone who literally was an exceptionally precocious eleven-year-old: this is not how eleven-year-olds talk.
Stu Stew: 38
I also, by the way, have no idea what Kvothe means by "boldface". I've only ever seen that word applied to typography, and a quick peek at the dictionary confirms that that is because it only ever applies to typography. I think Rothfuss means "bold-facedly lie/employ a fallacy/whatever", but once again: it's fucking confusing to take a word that already means something and awkwardly try to make it mean something else.
Mother Tongue: 13
Anyway, Abenthy tells Kvothe to believe as hard as he can that the stone will float away when he drops it instead of falling.
The only thing that is stopping me from adding an Anachronism Alarm count is the fact that, as a fantasy series, The Kingkiller Chronicle genuinely is not tied to a particular time period. I know I seem pretty harsh on potential anachronisms in this book but I am honestly aware that fantasy gets a lot of wiggle room when it comes to what happens when. Not only can you posit that an alternate universe might have developed in a different way than ours - which is what gives rise to Steampunk and the like - but the introduction of magic systems allows an author to play a little fast and loose with what technology develops at what speed.I tried. It was like doing mental gymnastics. After a while I nodded. “Okay.”
HOWEVER. Fantasy and AU get to play a little fast and loose with chronology, but they don't have carte blanche. Human development - societal, technological and so on - is a series of causes and effects, and by and large those causes and effects just make logical sense. That means that when a fantasy universe parks itself in something that resembles a particular era of human history, be that the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, the Industrial Revolution or even the Swingin' Sixties, it has to have some awareness of what caused that era to be the way it was, and it can't deviate too horribly wildly without things ceasing to make sense. Sure, you can have dinosaurs coexisting with the internet in a fantasy universe because dinosaurs and the internet aren't mutually exclusive; you shouldn't have the internet coexisting with telegrams because the internet literally rendered telegrams obsolete. You also probably shouldn't have the internet in a society that hasn't figured out electricity yet, because understanding electricity is a fundamental step in creating the internet.
I've already said that this book could generally exist anywhen from the early Renaissance to the beginning of the 19th century: that's a broad stretch of time but not so broad as to throw me out of the story. It's clearly pre-Industrial Revolution but post-Middle Ages, a broad period during which the relatively fast pace of scientific and technological development was evened out by the massive difference in lifestyle and development between urban and rural areas. That's a large and diverse playground for Rothfuss to play in, and he can - and does - get away with a lot by exploiting that difference between city and country living before grand industry came along to help the country catch up.
All that said, there's still a pretty hard cutoff for when things stop making sense in that playground, and on the modern side that's the Industrial Revolution. The Kingkiller-verse seems - at least in places - to be right on the cusp of its own Industrial Revolution, with the beginnings of the kinds of technological and manufacturing processes that will cause an exponential increase in the speed of technological development and quality of living. For example, we know from Chapter 1 that this universe has introduced coke into the blast furnace process, which happened in the real world in around 1709; however, we're also pre-machine manufacturing and factory processes, and well before steam and electrical power.
Hot damn. That's actually a much narrower potential window than I'd thought. Please hold while I recalibrate my anachronism alarm.
Okay, I'm back. The point of all that is to say that, while there's a lot Rothfuss can get away with in his pre-Industrial Revolution Europealike universe, anything that happened noticeably after the Industrial Revolution in our universe is going to feel like an anachronism regardless of the fact that the Kingkiller-verse is fictional and arguably shouldn't have to pay attention to the history of the real world at all. A major tenet of fantasy worldbuilding is knowing how far you can push something before it becomes unbelievable, and I don't just mean the size and flame-breathing capacity of your dragons (and oh, God, I just wrote that as a random example but it's going to be painfully unfunny much later); you have to know how far you can push small things like fashion and speech patterns too.
What set me off on this rant? The word "okay". Now, I don't think you have to be a language nerd like me to know that the word "okay" feels modern. Weirdly, it's actually older than I though: its first recorded usage is in 1929, but "OK" is first recorded almost a century earlier, in 1839. Even with its earlier-than-expected first usage, though, "okay" is still a slang term that didn't enter common usage until after the Industrial Revolution: in other words, after an "era" cutoff that Rothfuss' world clearly doesn't meet.
If this were a better book - if Rothfuss were a better writer and we hadn't already sung this song with "pants" and "slipstick" - I could let "okay" slide; after all, it's common slang and it is generally acceptable, even in historical fiction, to take liberties with language for readability. Look at Deadwood: that show flings "okay" around as often as it flings "cocksucker" and "motherfucker" (I love that show). The difference between Deadwood and The Kingkiller Chronicle is that in Deadwood there isn't a word in the script that hasn't been considered for whether it fits the characters, the setting, and the rhythm of the dialogue. Deadwood is riddled with linguistic anachronisms, but they are deliberate linguistic anachronisms, used to evoke the roughness of frontier living in a way that is natural to a modern audience, and placed in the script with such care that every line of every episode is in fucking iambic pentameter.
One last thing before I move on to the rest of this mostly-useless chapter. Anachronisms in fantasy worldbuilding get worse by orders of magnitude if they're location-specific: as in, if they are tied not just to a particular time but to a particular place. "Okay" fits that bill because it didn't just arise in the late 1830s; it arose in Boston and New York specifically, as the result of a very region-specific type of idiomatic speech. In other words, "okay" could not have arisen at all in Rothfuss' world; during the one period of the word's history in which it would have been least anachronistic for it to show up in a pre-Industrial Revolution/post-Enlightenment fantasy world, "okay" was only used in a specific region of an America that doesn't exist in that world. That's another reason that "slipstick" stood out so badly in the previous chapter: it wasn't just anachronistic slang but American slang, and what we've seen so far of the Kingkiller-verse reads European, if not specifically British (thank you feudal system and "Wydeconte Hills"). "Okay" and "slipstick" don't just feel like they come from the wrong time; they come from the wrong place, too.
Again, if this were a better book from a better writer, I could let it slide. If Rothfuss were writing Deadwood-level dialogue I'd be all over this shit, anachronisms or no. But the prose is too amateurish for me to believe anything other than that "okay" was laziness and "slipstick" was Rothfuss reaching for his thesaurus because he didn't like "slide rule".
Mother Tongue: 14
Anyway, Abenthy keeps on at Kvothe to believe the stone will not fall, poking at Kvothe's other beliefs - including God and his parents - to make his point.
STOP TRYING TO MAKE WORDS MEAN OTHER WORDS, ROTHFUSS.He snorted and unhooked the slapstick he used to goad Alpha and Beta when they were being lazy. “Do you believe in this, E’lir?”
I swear to God...
Mother Tongue: 15
Ahem. The "slapstick" (fuck you, Rothfuss) is a visual aid for "Alar", or "riding crop belief". I...have no idea what that means. According to the text it's a state of mind that allows you to believe whatever the fuck you want regardless of physical evidence, but God only knows what a riding crop has to do with it.
I Have An Interrogative: 36
There is the germ of a good idea here, and Abenthy sums it up rather neatly:
There are actually a lot of really interesting places Rothfuss could go with this idea: that, in order to control the world through magic, you must will yourself into a state of arguable insanity. Rothfuss could explore all sorts of implications of arcanists having to be pathological liars to practise their craft.“If you are going to impose your will on the world, you must have control over what you believe.”
Instead, we get more Kvothe-wank. Kvothe picks up Alar in the space of an afternoon and becomes so good at it he can all but will himself into a state of dissociative personality disorder.
Being able to think about two disparate things at once, aside from being wonderfully efficient, was roughly akin to being able to sing harmony with yourself. It turned into a favorite game of mine. After two days of practicing I was able to sing a trio. Soon I was doing the mental equivalent of palming cards and juggling knives.Oh, go fuck yourself, Kvothe. I lack the extra vocal cords to actually sing harmony with myself - though it is actually possible and another matter entirely - but holding multiple melodic lines in my head at once is just counterpoint training. Come to that, anyone who can play a keyboard instrument can handle playing at least two melodic lines at once. Come back to me when you can pull a Mozart and transcribe a symphony after one hearing.
Face The Music: 3
And "palming cards and juggling knives"? Seen it. Multitasking while juggling is difficult but it's a skill many pro jugglers master, and card manipulation while juggling is just one variation. Rothfuss isn't doing dick to convince me that what Kvothe is doing is all that impressive.
You know what he could have done? Referenced actual ambidexterity. Writing a different passage of text with each hand is an exceptionally rare skill because it doesn't just require equal dexterity with each hand; it literally requires the writer to be able to hold two thoughts clearly and simultaneously in his/her mind, something made all the more difficult by the fact that one hemisphere of the brain is less adapted for language than the other.
I Know Stuff: 13
Part of Kvothe's training includes playing a game called "Seek the Stone", which involves Kvothe hiding a stone somewhere with half his mind and using the other half to find it - also known as Hide and Seek for kids with no friends. It's supposed to be impressive but really, it just makes him sound bug-nutty:
I remember one time I looked for the stone for almost an hour before I consented to ask the other half of me where I’d hidden it, only to find I hadn’t hidden the stone at all. I had merely been waiting to see how long I would look before giving up. Have you ever been annoyed and amused with yourself at the same time? It’s an interesting feeling, to say the very least.You know what I feel? Bored. I just got introduced to what could be a fascinating underpinning for a magical system, and the only thing I can feel about it is boredom because Rothfuss' bratty little self-insert won't stop showing off.
Stu Stew: 38
That's okay, though, because that pretty much brings us to the end of this chapter. Amazingly there are no Alert The Editor counts to tally up, so I will leave you with the very telling fact that I had far more fun going on a 1200-word screed about anachronisms than I did reading any of what Rothfuss wrote.
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