Chapter 12: Puzzle Pieces Fitting (Part I)
In which Galatea combines Surrealism and Saturday morning cartoons.
Previously, in The Name of the Wind, Kvothe learned the basics of sympathy and recited a rhyming list of euphemisms for genitalia. Sadly, the latter was not the mechanic for the former.
Toward the end of the summer I accidentally overheard a conversation that shook me out of my state of blissful ignorance. When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.*grumbles*
See, on the one hand this is a decent chapter opening in that it reinforces that sense of oral narrative - none of this in media res bullshit from previous chapters that does nothing so much as it makes it look like Rothfuss forgot that he was writing an oral first-person narrative at all. So that's good.
On the other hand, I fucking hate the entire notion that childhood is this magical state of being that can be looked back on through rose-tinted glasses, and for which one can pinpoint a definite and suitably poetic end.
When I was a child - especially when I was around Kvothe's eleven years - I thought about the future all the fucking time. Every child I knew did. We'd all change our ideals and ambitions as we grew, of course, but I had not just a strong sense of what direction I wanted to go in as I grew up (academically, professionally, whatever), but a pretty strong sense of anxiety about the future too. That's the thing about being old enough to understand that the future exists, but not old enough to be able to put that future into the context of years or decades of living. There's a reason kids tend to freak out when they're first introduced to the idea that the universe will die someday: children are acutely aware of the future because they don't have a whole lot of past yet to balance it out.
Stu Stew: 43
I Know Stuff: 18
If I'm honest, this falls somewhere in between the two counts, since I genuinely can't tell if it's Kvothe being patronising or Rothfuss, but it annoys me enough that I'll gladly count it once under each.
It was evening, and the troupe was camped by the side of the road. Abenthy had given me a new piece of sympathy to practice: The Maxim of Variable Heat Transferred to Constant Motion, or something pretentious like that.Hanging a hat on it does not make it less pretentious.
I Have An Interrogative: 46
I can infer what the Maxim of Variable Heat Transferred to Constant Motion is easily enough; the name, though irritatingly poncy, is actually pretty straightforward. What I don't understand - and what I'd much rather be reading about - is how Kvothe actually practices something like that. So far what we know about actually performing sympathy is that you basically have to will it so, and the fancy principles seem more than anything to dictate how well that works. So does he have to will it differently based on the principle? Practice doing calculations on the fly to predict how well it will work? Is understanding the principle different than actually performing the sympathy?
It was tricky, but it had fallen into place like a puzzle piece fitting.It occurs to me that I should be including a Title Drop count for every time a chapter's title is dropped in that same chapter. Honestly, I think it actually happened the other way around: Rothfuss wrote the chapter and then named it by pulling a few words from somewhere therein. It isn't necessarily a terrible way of naming chapters, except that 1) you do get that "Boom: Title!" moment every chapter that yanks you out of the story, and 2) Rothfuss rarely picks fragments that have much thematically to do with the chapter as a whole. This isn't the worst of them by any means, but he really could have taken an extra minute or two to find more appropriate chapter quotes - or, even better, come up with chapter names that weren't pulled direct from the chapters themselves.
Title Drop: 17
One for every chapter, and one for the prologue. A couple of chapters may double-drop their titles, but damned if I have the motivation to go back and count them.
It had taken about fifteen minutes, and from Abenthy’s tone I guessed he had expected it to take three or four hours at least.
Stu Stew: 44
Go die in a fire. Once more, I feel duty-bound to point out that it's not Kvothe's being gifted and precocious that bothers me: it's the very adult way that he's aware of it.
So Kvothe goes looking for Abenthy, hoping for more stuff to study (or for an opportunity to show off), and he runs head-first into that most contrived of plot contrivances: the Conveniently-Overheard Conversation™. Abenthy is hanging out near Kvothe's parents' wagon, and the adults just so happen to be talking about the Chandrian.
To explain why his parents are talking about the Chandrian at all, Kvothe tells us that his father has been working on a song about them. Arliden being a trouper, he writes songs all the time, but this particular song is a Big Fucking Deal because it's taken him more than a year to write it, and no one but Kvothe's mother has got to hear any of it while it's been under construction. This makes it a source of considerable curiosity to everyone in the troupe, not least little Kvothe, who's picked up just enough to know that Arliden has gone from researching people named Lanre and Lyra to asking questions about the Chandrian.
Kvothe, of course, expresses his curiosity in the form of a very tortured taste metaphor.
Simile Soup: 46
Abenthy being an educated man, he's just the person Arliden wants to talk to about the Chandrian, and Kvothe conveniently overhears the entire conversation, save what's obscured by crackling fires and rustling leaves.
Over-Reliable Narrator: 7
I'll dig into the conversation itself momentarily, but this count applies to the whole thing, because Rothfuss' narration here is absolutely appalling. Kvothe's recall of the conversation is, of course, word-for-word perfect, but what's missing is the slightest sense of the effect that conversation is having on Kvothe himself. He tells us what he does during his eavesdropping - he moves closer to the wagon, he strains to hear, he ducks into the shadow - but if you were to change the passage from first person to omniscient third, the only thing you'd have to do is change the pronouns and verb agreements. In fact, the ubiquitous eavesdropping scenes in the third-person Harry Potter give us more insight into what's going on inside Harry's head than the first-person narration here gives us into Kvothe's!
I still have my diaries from when I was around Kvothe's age, and they are absolutely rife with what I think and feel about events. I was a very competent writer even back then, so I narrate the events of my life fairly clearly, but that narration is laced throughout with my reactions, my thoughts and my emotions. Even now, if I were to tell stories about my childhood as an adult, much as Kvothe is to Devan, my recollection of those events would be centred around the impact they had on me emotionally. Screw the benefit of age and wisdom: I still remember the way my heart felt like it exploded into confetti when a boy I had a crush on was kind to me, or how devastated I was when I overheard my parents having an argument that sounded too serious to bounce back from. I can look back on those events now and feel differently, but that doesn't change the fact that my emotional reactions in the moment colour how I remember those events and how I talk about them to this day.
From Kvothe? We get nothing. If I weren't saving it for special occasions I'd give him a You Fucking Sociopath count, because the emotionless, "He said this, she said that, I stepped closer" narration is chillingly detached. I know, however, that it's not Rothfuss' distorted sense of morality when it comes to Kvothe at work here, just as I know that Rothfuss didn't intend to write Kvothe as an emotionless recall machine. It's just Rothfuss failing at writing in first person.
Let's dig in, though, shall we? Because Rothfuss is about to use this long and convenient conversations to push an awful lot of my buttons.
“I’m glad to talk with an educated man on the subject.” My father’s strong baritone was a contrast to Ben’s tenor. “I’m weary of these superstitious country folk, and the . . .”You are country folk, Arliden. Spending a few months out of the year at court doesn't change the fact that you live in a fucking wagon, and the Edema Ruh have a good number of their own superstitions. I hate this insistence that the Ruh are just so very enlightened and that the country bumpkins around them are only good for paying them to play - and I say this as a proud intellectual snob. Besides, Arliden is a ballad-writer and folk singer, which means he should have a damn sight more respect for local folklore and superstition than he ever shows.
Abenthy wants to know if Arliden is hunting for some fact behind all the fiction, which prompts Arliden to launch into one of the most bizarre and tortured metaphors I've ever seen:
“It’s like looking at a dozen grandchildren and seeing ten of them have blue eyes. You know the grand-mother had blue eyes, too.”Uh...no, actually. In fact, every person in every generation prior to the blue-eyed kids themselves could have had brown eyes. Blue eyes are a recessive trait, which means that you have to carry two copies of the gene to express it. A whole load of brown-eyed people having majority blue-eyed babies strains the limits of probability a little bit, but it's a long way from impossible. Rothfuss, you fail at genetics and at similes.
Simile Soup: 47
I Know Stuff: 19
That's not close to the worst of it, though.
“The story’s older,” my mother explained. “It’s more like he’s looking at great-great-grandchildren.”
Jeez, Arliden, I really don't know, because if you're truly looking at that much ocular variation you aren't so much dealing with different families as with different fucking species, probably with a healthy dose of radiation and/or comic book genetics thrown in for good measure. The blue-eyed grandkids simile was factually bogus but at least made a little sense in terms of trying to find the relationships between folk tales; this sounds like René Magritte sketching out storyboards for a Salvador Dalì-directed episode of Futurama. Which I would watch the fuck out of, by the way.“And they’re scattered to the four corners,” my father groused. “And when I finally do find one, it’s got five eyes: two greens, a blue, a brown, and a chartreuse. Then the next one has only one eye, and it changes colors. How am I supposed to draw conclusions from that?”
Simile Soup: 48
Ben cleared his throat. “A disturbing analogy,” he said.And again I say: hanging a hat on it does not make it any better.
Arliden asks Abenthy how many Chandrian there actually are, saying the sources give pretty mixed accounts. Remember this, please, because it will invite many interrogatives later.
“That I can answer,” Ben said. “Seven. You can hold to that with some certainty. It’s part of their name, actually. Chaen means seven. Chaen-dian means ‘seven of them.’ Chandrian.”Much as I hate to admit it, I cannot provide the promised hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing. There's too little information here for me to make a call regarding Rothfuss' level of etymology fail. It feels clumsy in the way most of Rothfuss' conlang does, but it's not inconceivable that Chaen-dian could translate to "seven of them", nor that a rogue "r" could get slipped in there over time to form Chandrian. You win this round, Rothfuss.
Arliden asks Abenthy why the Chandrian do what they do - which seems to be to visit random destruction - and Abenthy says he doesn't know. Arliden says that he actually does know, but he's not telling, which makes him just as much of a snotty know-it-all as his son.
Kvothe's mother - who, now that I think about it, has not been named...
Ladies And Gentlemen: 13
Yes, it gets one of these. The reason Kvothe's mother has so far gone unnamed is not that her name would reveal some great mystery - which, to be fair, it might later - but that she is entirely defined by her relationship to the men around her. She is Arliden's wife-in-all-but-name and Kvothe's mother before she is herself in anything. Not once has she had any kind of narrative treatment outside of the two of them; while we get to see Arliden arguing with the town mayor and being the head of the troupe, Kvothe's mother drops right out of any scene that doesn't revolve around Arliden or Kvothe. We haven't had many women at all in the story so far, but recall that Hetaira, the "courtesan", was introduced by her profession before her name. Rothfuss just straight-up writes men and women differently, even when I'm fairly sure he doesn't mean to.
Anyway, Kvothe's mother asks Abenthy about the Chandrian's signs, which prompts Arliden and Abenthy to go off on a tangent about blue flames in mines and stagecraft...
NaNoPadMo: 28
...and functions really as a clumsy introduction to the Chandrian's signs so we'll be able to recognise them later. The signs themselves...well, they're kind of stupid and inconsistent. There's blue flames and there's dying plants, both of which are serviceable harbingers of the Chandrian's arrival, but then there's one of the Chandrian having black eyes, which isn't a harbinger of anything except a need to visit an optician. The three adults talk about the confusing nature of the signs possibly meaning that the Chandrian can split up and travel in smaller groups, but honestly I think it just means that Rothfuss wasn't quite sure whether he wanted to go for "I am Chandrian"-type signs or actual portents.
I Have An Interrogative: 47
Since the Chandrian splitting up was Kvothe's mother's idea, Abenthy calls her clever and asks Arliden if he can buy her.
Ladies And Gentlemen: 14
Ew.
Arliden says no, but jokes that he might be able to figure out a rental.
Ladies And Gentlemen: 15
Again I say: ew.
The issue, by the way, is not strictly the joke (though the joke is awful): it's that the joke is made to Arliden, not to Kvothe's mother - who, by the way, STILL HAS NO FUCKING NAME. I will happily get in on raunchy sex jokes with my guy friends with no issue, but if said guy friends make raunchy sex jokes about me, without me, while I'm in the fucking room, I'm going to get angry.
Abenthy has trouble remembering one of the Chandrians' epithets, which prompts Arliden to ask about their actual names. Abenthy cuts Arliden off, saying he doesn't want to speak them out loud.
There was a deep piece of silence.Rothfuss, you whore.
Simile Soup: 49
Arliden is skeptical of Abenthy's superstition, which leads to a lengthy discussion of superstition and its links to valid fears. During this time Kvothe continues to inch closer to the conversing adults, but keeps stubbornly refusing to register any emotional response to what he's hearing.
NaNoPadMo: 29
There's the germ of a good idea in the talk of how superstitions come to be created from real fears, and I'd love it if I had any confidence Rothfuss would follow through when it comes to the Chandrian, but the whole thing is so tinged with disdain for the country bumpkins who believe in monsters that it just feels like beating the same dead horse Arliden's been thrashing since he first looked down his nose at the mayor.
Anyway, Abenthy's point is that none of the stories anyone has ever heard about the Chandrian are pleasant, and that might be reason enough to avoid the things the stories say not to do, such as naming them.
“Now I’m not saying that the Chandrian are out there, striking like lightning from the clear blue sky. But folk everywhere are afraid of them. There’s usually a reason for that.”Quoting just for the "like lightning from the clear blue sky", which is the exact same phrase Abenthy used for the Chandrian a couple of pages ago. The context is different enough to make it clear that it's an accident, not deliberate repetition for emphasis.
Is This The Real Life: 18
Repetition(epetition): 38
Abenthy finishes up his drink, and Arliden asks him what he came over to talk about in the first place.
Hang on.
Abenthy didn't go over to Kvothe's parents to discuss the Chandrian. He went for some other reason entirely, and Kvothe's parents decided that, instead of letting him ask whatever he wanted to ask, they'd head him off with entirely unrelated questions about the Chandrian first. And they just so happened to do this on the night Kvothe had the time and the motivation to eavesdrop on them.
I think what I mean to say is: Holy contrivance, Batman!
Abenthy has been travelling with the troupe for months. Arliden has been working on this song for over a year. It is no kind of surprise to anyone at this point that Arliden has this song in the works, nor that Abenthy is educated and might know more than the average country bumpkin. This conversation should have happened weeks - if not months - ago.
It gets worse, too, because what Abenthy actually came over to talk about his how wonderful Kvothe is, which is another conversation that it is entirely too coincidental that Kvothe is around to hear. Once again: Abenthy has been teaching Kvothe for weeks at least, and Kvothe surprised him with his acuity from day one. There's no reason at all for Abenthy to have waited until this plot-convenient moment to talk to Arliden and his not-quite-wife about Kvothe's brilliance - except, of course, that Rothfuss wanted Kvothe to hear it.
Either subject on its own is just within the bounds of narrative license. Harry Potter relies heavily on its main characters being conveniently within eavesdropping distance of important conversations, but it's well-enough executed in the moment that you don't really notice until you tally up all the instances after the fact. But for Kvothe to hear both conversations at once...well, I don't know whether Rothfuss was consciously attempting to un-pad by condensing what should have been two overheard conversations into one, or whether he genuinely didn't realise how cliche it is to have two relevant conversations conveniently dumped on the protagonist at once, but either way: Holy contrivance, Batman!
Stu Stew: 45
It is a well-known fact that Stus and Sues have a sixth sense for plot-relevant information being discreetly discussed somewhere nearby.
*sighs* I don't want to, but I am going to have to break it here. Full credit to Rothfuss for pulling a rare Double Conveniently-Overheard Conversation, but we're about to head into several pages worth of Kvothe-wank, and I just don't have the energy. Congratulations, Rothfuss: you broke me - for now, at least. I'll tally typos and minor repetitions for this half of the chapter, and then I'm off to shore up my strength for some truly epic Kvothe-wank, with a generous side of music fail for good measure.
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