Chapter 11: The Binding of Iron (Part II)
In which Galatea admits to having been a really insufferable child.
Previously, in The Name of the Wind, Kvothe shoved irrelevant history down our throats and performed his first magic, though not at the same time.
Having performed sympathy for the first time - and having been surprisingly but convincingly unimpressed by the feat - Kvothe goes on to play around with the principle, making sympathetic links between things and seeing what he can do with them. Once again, the prose is kind of perfunctory: just a laundry list of things Kvothe tries binding together. That said, there's at least a sense of fun in the things he tries to bind, so the passage isn't completely devoid of personality.
It took me about two hours to figure out that the pine pitch wasn’t necessary. When I asked him, Ben admitted that it was merely an aid for concentration. I think he was surprised that I figured it out without being told.I swear, I could set my watch by how regularly Kvothe makes me want to slap him for being an arrogant little shit. I genuinely don't, on principle, object to Kvothe actually being preternaturally talented. This is, after all, a fantasy story, and having a protagonist who is exceptionally gifted at whatever the key mechanism of the universe is in that story is as good a pretext as any both to get them involved in the story and to move the story along.
It's the way Rothfuss writes it that grates. Half the time I can't tell if he's trying to be meta, or if he genuinely thinks he's downplaying Kvothe's ability in a convincing way. Again: I was a precocious child. I was naturally good at a lot of things, and very talented indeed at a small handful. I'll also readily admit that I could be a real little shit about it, too; the point is, Kvothe's handling of his own skills as a child, both in the moment and recounted later as an adult, don't ring true at all to my own experience of being a gifted child. I basically had two extremes: either I was hyper-aware that I was gifted at something and was a total snot about it - and got very angry and competitive whenever someone bested me at it - or I was completely oblivious to something being impressive because to me it felt natural. I had zero awareness of my parents or teachers being impressed by the things that I did or said; it's only in their recounting of it later that I'm able to slot their reactions into my memory of events. It might have to do with children being fundamentally self-centred; it might have to do with not yet having the emotional range to identify "I am surprised that this child can do this" as an adult reaction, especially when whatever I was doing didn't feel all that impressive to me at the time; whatever it is, I can't read Kvothe's pointing out Abenthy's surprise as anything other than Rothfuss drawing attention to Kvothe's gifts and then attempting (badly) to downplay them so Kvothe doesn't read as quite so arrogant.
Consider Lyra in His Dark Materials. Her ability to read the alethiometer is exactly this kind of fantasy-universe gift, and there's a strong implication that she's the only person in Pullman's entire invented multiverse who can do it. Adults certainly express their surprise at her ability to read the device, but their surprise barely registers to Lyra herself: as far as she's concerned, it's just something she does. Like Kvothe here, she has no benchmark for how difficult reading the alethiometer should be, and it takes another character sitting her down and explaining, carefully and in detail, how rare that skill is for it to register that she's doing something impressive at all. Anything less than that is lost in Lyra's straightforward action of just reading the damn thing, and it's a spectacularly believable depiction of a gifted child's relationship to her own skills.
Stu Stew: 42
Anyway, Kvothe goes from bothering me to outright pissing me off in the next paragraph:
Let me sum up sympathy very quickly since you will probably never need to have anything other than a rough comprehension of how these things work.Ahem.
NEED I REMIND YOU THAT YOU ARE TALKING TO DEVAN, WHO IS NOT ONLY AN ACCLAIMED BIOGRAPHER BUT WHO WENT TO THE FUCKING UNIVERSITY WHERE ARCANISTS ARE TRAINED, AND WHOM WE WILL LATER DISCOVER TO BE NOT JUST A MEMBER OF THE FUCKING ARCANUM BUT SOMEONE WHO KNOWS THE TRUE NAME OF FUCKING IRON.
Jesus motherfucking Christ, this is literally the single most blatant example I have ever seen of an author reaching through the page and grabbing me by the hand. If I could pepper spray an author through a book, I would do that so hard right now.
Over-Reliable Narrator: 6
I get that an epic first-person oral narrative is hard to pull off, but Rothfuss just straight-up forgot that Kvothe is talking to Devan, and not directly to the reader.
First, energy cannot be created or destroyed.
I Know Stuff: 17
Oh Rothfuss, talk nerdy to me. Preferably with something better than grade-school level physics.
When you are lifting one drab and the other rises off the table, the one in your hand feels as heavy as if you’re lifting both, because, in fact, you are.This is actually really interesting! It's a fairly unique take on magic; a genuinely believable version of the "magic has a cost/takes energy" concept that is broadly and vaguely present in so much fantasy. In fact, if Rothfuss had done away with all the fancy nomenclature and the attempt to ground it in extant science and just given us this - this notion that you can lift one drab by lifting the other, but it still feels like you're lifting both - I would have bought into it eagerly and enthusiastically. What a fantastic way to make magic feel grounded; what a great implication that magic has its basis in real physics. It's dead simple, but the best fantasy concepts are, and it instantly gives us a sense of this magic having limitations and stakes, which is far too often absent in fantasy books.
What kills it is that, once again, Rothfuss just can't leave well enough alone. Remember back in Chapter 7, how I talked about Rothfuss making Devan's shorthand unimpressive and nonsensical with his compulsion to explain all its details? He's doing the exact same thing here. Sometimes vagueness is an author's best friend: it lets a reader fill in the blanks according to their personal level of expertise, and indemnifies the author against being patronising or showing his ass. That vagueness is exactly what Rothfuss needed here, because in trying to explain sympathy in terms of the Law of Conservation of Energy, which is literally grade-school-level physics, he manages both to be patronising and to show his ass.
I mean, come on. Yes, simplicity is gold in worldbuilding, but Rothfuss is literally using one of the most basic principles of physics to explain magic, which doesn't so much make the magic believable as it invites all sorts of questions, most particularly "How in the hell is sympathy a thing if it relies on simple laws identical to the ones we already have?" If Rothfuss really needed to use actual physics here (he didn't, but that's a different cushion of pins), he should have upped the difficulty level by using a principle that we know to have enough complexity to believably allow for magic to exist along with it. The Law of Conservation of Energy has relativistic and quantum corollaries that deal with scientific territory that is much less well-understood; if Rothfuss had picked one of those, which can still be stated fairly simply but which invite that mystery just by having the word "quantum" attached, I'd find the idea that this scientific principle has room for magic that much easier to swallow.
And, of course, it's with those relativistic and quantum variations that Rothfuss shows his ass, because it doesn't take much reading to know that the Law of Conservation of Energy actually isn't that simple: if it were, we wouldn't have E = mc². Rothfuss is trying to explain his principles of magic by taking a very simple physical principle entirely at face value, when the reality of it is many times more complex. Reading "energy cannot be created or destroyed; therefore magic" doesn't make me nod my head and go "yep, sounds legit": it makes me ask whether relativity and quantum theory exist in the Kingkiller-verse; worse, it makes me question whether Rothfuss is too ill-educated to understand science in anything but the most basic terms, or whether he thinks I am. That's not a question an author should be inviting.
I Have An Interrogative: 40
NaNoPadMo: 27
Kvothe then tells us (by which I mean Devan, who should know this already) that no sympathetic link is perfect, so it's really more like lifting three drabs. He describes it in terms of a leaky aqueduct, which is a decent enough metaphor, but he does it so patronisingly that I really have to give it one of these:
Simile Soup: 45
For instance I tried linking a piece of chalk to a glass bottle of water. There was very little similarity between the two, so even though the bottle of water might have weighed two pounds, when I tried to lift the chalk it felt like sixty pounds. The best link I found was a tree branch I had broken in half.Okay, but...predictably, I have questions. What exactly constitutes "similarity" here? Is it physical? Chemical? Philosophical? A diamond and a piece of charcoal are both pure carbon; are they more "similar" than two pieces of steel, which might have very different ratios of iron and carbon? Are a steel sword and a steel drum more or less similar than a violin and a trombone, which are physically very different but which both have the purpose of producing music? Speaking strictly chemically, Kvothe's chalk and glass bottle of water, both of which contain carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and silicone, might be more similar than the two halves of the tree branch, which, depending on where the leaves, flowers and fruit are, might be very different at one end than at the other.
I Have An Interrogative: 44
I can't believe I didn't think of it before, but there actually is a story that does exactly what Rothfuss is trying to do with his science ≈ magic thing here, but that does it several orders of magnitude better. I'm talking, of course, about Fullmetal Alchemist (manga, anime, other anime, take your pick), whose Law of Equivalent Exchange is an in-universe bastardisation of the Law of Conservation of Energy. The basic notion is that, in order to gain something, something of equal value must be lost, and its most basic usage is to fix a broken thing by adding the missing components, or to transmute one thing into a chemically identical thing, with "alchemy" (the in-universe magic) as a catalyst.
It's exactly as straightforward as Rothfuss' sympathy, with a couple of major differences that make it much more successful. First, the Law of Equivalent Exchange isn't quite the same as the Law of Conservation of Energy. It's similar enough that anyone with a basic knowledge of science can buy into the principle, but deliberately different enough that the Fullmetal Alchemist universe can play with the concept without being at odds with that real-life science.
Second, Fullmetal Alchemist makes the incredibly smart choice to keep the principle of Equivalent Exchange about as simple as it gets, but to get its story mileage out of asking exactly the questions I'm asking Rothfuss about sympathy. What exactly is "equal value"? Does a human being have value equal to the chemical components of his/her body (answer: definitely, horrifically no)? What are "gain" and "loss"? Does the alchemy itself, which catalyses the transmutation, have value? Rather than have a cast-iron set of laws, worked out mathematically to the decimal point and then presumably written up in a spreadsheet so Rothfuss can plug in his story beats and hit "calculate", Fullmetal Alchemist constantly pushes and tests the limits of Equivalent Exchange, forcing characters to question their assumptions about the limits of alchemy and often to make terrible choices about what they can and will give up so that their exchange has true equivalence. The Law of Equivalent Exchange is never broken - not one, single, solitary time - but it is tested to its absolute limit, making the story thematically incredibly tight and keeping the magic system consistent yet flexible. In fact, when you get right down to it, even the most bizarre and inexplicable "magic" in Fullmetal Alchemist comes down to someone finding a new way not to break the Law of Equivalent Exchange, but to exploit it.
I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here - and I guarantee I'll come back to Fullmetal Alchemist when Rothfuss digs even more into sympathy - but that beautiful balance of consistency and flexibility is something that Rothfuss never achieves with sympathy. By so doggedly sticking to "real" science, even a science that doesn't quite fit what he's trying to do, he hamstrings his in-universe magic, and I think it's very telling that, when he wants to get into bigger magic like Naming and Faerie, he has to leave sympathy behind altogether and create new systems from whole cloth.
Anyway, Kvothe keeps fiddling around with sympathy, but tells us that the details of his lessons are quite tedious and he's going to skip over the minutiae. To which I say: thank God.
We then get a section break, re-entering the story to find Kvothe getting into trouble with his mother for chanting a rude rhyme:
“Seven things has Lady LacklessY'know...I have to hand it to Rothfuss, who will more than earn his Kvothe The Raven counts quite soon: this is rather good. Sure, some of it's a bit nonsensical, but it has consistent rhyme and meter, and it does exactly what it's supposed to do, which is to cram as much sexual innuendo as possible into twelve lines and pull double duty as the clues to a mystery later on. I don't even mind the puerile "hur, sex!" of it all, which is normally part of Rothfuss' writing that makes me cringe; again, in this particular rhyme, it's actually the point. And, as regards the mystery later, Rothfuss does the absolute right thing in treating the rhyme solely as a dirty ditty right now. There's no need to hang a sign over the rhyme that says "THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT LATER": the simple fact of having the rhyme there at all means that, when the mystery begins to have relevance to the plot, it will feel organic and not like something that got thrown in to pad the book. As much as most of this book infuriates me, it's interesting to see that sometimes Rothfuss really does write his fantasy exactly right.
Keeps them underneath her black dress
One a ring that’s not for wearing
One a sharp word, not for swearing
Right beside her husband’s candle
There’s a door without a handle
In a box, no lid or locks
Lackless keeps her husband’s rocks
There’s a secret she’s been keeping
She’s been dreaming and not sleeping
On a road, that’s not for traveling
Lackless likes her riddle raveling.”
Kvothe's mother takes him to task for what she basically considers gossiping, and it's a sweet and believable scene. Kvothe's stubborn reaction to his mother is naturalistic, and his mother comes across as genuine and caring in a way that she never really does when she's being written in the same scene as Arliden (Kvothe's father). I genuinely wish we had more of this and less faffing around with the minutiae of sympathy and the motley collection of half-baked personalities in Kvothe's troupe, because it would bring a poignancy to these early chapters that Rothfuss never really achieves before he needs to draw on it for plot.
Simile Soup: 45
Even in a sweet and well-written scene, I can't let "smiled like the sun" go without a slap on the wrist.
Another section break, and we get a brief mention of Kvothe continuing to do troupe-ish things while studying with Abenthy, which does nothing so much as it confirms that Rothfuss knows neither how busking nor time work.
I Have An Interrogative: 45
Let's tally up the typos, and then we're done with Chapter 11.
Alert The Editor: 80
And we're out! Join me next time as we watch Rothfuss attempt to get technical over music and etymology. I promise much hair-pulling and gnashing of teeth.
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