Chapter 11: The Binding of Iron (Part I)
In which Galatea comes back from a longer-than-intended hiatus rested, refreshed, and not at all questioning why she chose to do this in the first place.
Previously, in The Name of the Wind, Rothfuss managed to be anachronistic in an invented universe, which Galatea conceded was quite a feat.
I sat in the back of Abenthy's wagon.Time for a blanket count. I'll concede that section breaks are tough in a first-person oral narrative, because you have to find a balance between the very human tendency to want to string everything together in a linear fashion, and getting to the fucking point. As always, I can make some allowances for flow and readability; the simple fact that I'm reading the book as text on a page instead of literally listening to Kvothe tell it means there's already some suspension of disbelief going on.
That said, Kvothe's section and chapter breaks are absolutely, 100%, written breaks rather than spoken ones. Rothfuss likes to employ a type of in media res section opening that works fine written down, but sounds utterly unnatural when spoken aloud. It happened in Chapter 8 as well, when Kvothe launched into his account of the argument with the mayor by diving right into dialogue, and I find it hard to pin down exactly what's so wrong about it except that real people - even professional storytellers - just don't talk like that. If I figure out a better way to explain it later (or come across an example that lends itself to a clearer breakdown) I'll go into more detail, but for now I'll just give it one count to cover all the many, many, many times Rothfuss does this.
Over-reliable Narrator: 3
The sad thing, as per usual, is that it's a simple fix. Changing that sentence to "I remember sitting in the back of Abenthy's wagon" would immediately evoke that sense of oral storytelling, and the rest of the chapter could continue pretty much unchanged. I'd go so far as to say starting more sections with a similar little reminder that Kvothe is telling the story aloud, recalling as he goes, would spare the book a lot of Over-reliable Narrator counts later on by buttressing the reader's suspension of disbelief.
So Kvothe's sitting in the back of Abenthy's wagon, enjoying all the oddities associated with it. Except, apparently, that he's not enjoying the oddities nearly as much as usual, because Abenthy has gone into lecture mode. Abenthy has time to go into lecture mode because, once a-fucking-gain, Rothfuss has no idea how being an itinerant performer actually works.
It had rained heavily the night before, and the road was a thick morass of mud. Since the troupe was not on any particular schedule, we had decided to wait for a day or two to give the roads time to dry.The small amount of goodwill I felt at the Elizabethan players origin of the Ruh is rapidly being drained away. The only way this makes any sense is if Kvothe's troupe are buskers in the absolute truest sense, going wherever and playing wherever, building crowds on their own terms wherever they happen to be. Then this lackadaisical "not on any particular schedule" approach sort of works...assuming they aren't chasing the season (which itinerant perfomers often do), trying to hit a certain number of populated areas before the season ends (which is another thing itinerant performers often do), trying to make money in a consistent and predictable way (which is something most everyone does), or concerned with which days and times are likely to be most profitable wherever they're going (which is definitely something buskers keep in mind when they travel). Sure, a talented performer or troupe might make some money if they roll into town in the middle of a Wednesday - or the Kingkiller-verse equivalent - but they'll make much more if they time their performances for the end of the work week, when people have free time and a fresh paycheck to burn. A travelling performer is going to be on a schedule even if they aren't actually booked into a specific venue on a specific day.
Except...the Ruh kind of are. We know already that they are court performers, which means when they aren't touring they're playing scheduled performances in Baron Greyfallow's court. Moreover, when they roll into a town they expect to use the public house, which means they damn sure have to do enough scheduling to be sure they aren't trying to play the same time as a wedding, town meeting, banquet, festival, or any of the other events that could quite logically cause the public house to be already occupied. On top of that, if they're scheduled regularly at Greyfallow's court, they should be using their touring months to cram in as many performances as possible in as many different venues as possible to maximise their income, especially given that the winter months - and we know there's a winter because there's a Pageantry in the Mid thereof - are probably shit for travelling and performing, and likely to be lean financially if they haven't planned their profitable months extremely carefully.
And then there's a bit of circus superstition that might not apply to the Ruh, since they aren't technically a circus, but that certainly feels like it should, given how circus-esque they are in many respects: there is no harbinger of bad luck more potent than being late to a scheduled performance. Circus troupes have literally skipped entire runs in a venue rather than risk the bad luck associated with being late enough to miss the first scheduled performance of a run, and it's a key part of circus lore that the worst disaster in circus history was immediately preceded by the train being late and the circus missing the first show of the run. Again, the Ruh aren't a direct analogue for a circus troupe, but that's a piece of circus lore Rothfuss could, and probably should, have coopted to round out the Ruh in a more believable way.
I Have An Interrogative: 37
In case anyone was wondering, by the way: yes, I am once again digging in deep to something relatively unimportant because the chapter as a whole is incredibly boring and mostly pointless.
NaNoPadMo: 25
*grumbles* Anyone wondering why it's taken me so long to get my mojo back after the unexpected break, well...wonder no more.
So Abenthy's lecturing, and Kvothe's being an entitled brat - but, as per usual when we're dealing with precocious-kid-Kvothe, I don't find his brattishness too irksome. He might be speaking like an adult, since he's narrating this as an adult, but he's acting fairly believably as a smart, uppity kid.
Abenthy takes note of Kvothe's sour mood, and decides it's time to up the magical stakes - but not before trying to put things in the circus context that Kvothe apparently understands and Rothfuss absolutely does not.
He looked at me. “Did you learn to juggle all at once? Five balls at a time? Knives too?”
I flushed a bit at the memory. Trip hadn’t even let me try three balls at first. He’d made me juggle two. I’d even dropped them a couple of times. I told Ben so.For the record, there are many ways of learning to juggle. My brief flirtation with circus school included a juggling instructor who started us out tossing a single bean bag from hand to hand - and sucking even at that modest task was what ended my brief flirtation with circus school (I spun plates like a fucking boss, though). On the other hand, I've absolutely known people who have launched right in with three balls or clubs and been just fine. In fact, one of the funniest experiences of my life involved a friend who was taught to juggle by two different professional jugglers, one of whom proudly passed down his old practice clubs to my friend as a sort of ceremonial expression of mentorship. Juggler #2, who is much younger and trained via a different school, took one look at the ancient, heavy clubs and immediately concluded that Juggler #1 was trying to murder my friend and make it look like an accident.
So no, it's not the technicality of starting with two juggling balls instead of three that bothers me - though if Trip comes from the "start slow" school of juggling training, he probably would have started Kvothe on a single ball so he could build up coordination in his non-dominant hand and learn certain passing techniques without having to multi-task.
I Know Stuff: 14
Bite me. Anyway, what really bugs is Kvothe's snotty "I'd even dropped them a couple of times". For fuck's sake, you little brat: this might be the most blatant humblebrag I've ever seen in anything. I think I know what Rothfuss is trying to do here: he's trying to show that Kvothe is so naturally gifted that he genuinely considers imperfect-but-well-above-average performance worth flushing over. In the hands of a better writer, this might even work; again, Rowling pulls it off with Harry Potter's learning of the Patronus charm, and Suzanne Collins does a very believable job of showing how Katniss doesn't appreciate her own archery skills in The Hunger Games. It can be done. Rothfuss just ain't doing it.
Stu Stew: 39
Unlike me, Abenthy doesn't know a damn thing about juggling, so he lets Kvothe's humblebrag slide and moves on.
Instead he held out the handful of iron drabs. “What do you know about these?” He clattered them together in his hand.My God, are we about to get an explanation of the Kingkiller-verse's currency? Because sure, it's not the smoothest way to introduce it, but I'm all for anything that'll allow me to feel like I'm reading something that takes place in a real space and not the half-formed dreamscape of Rothfuss' attention-deficient imagination!
“In what respect?” I asked. “Physically, chemically, historically—”I beg you, Kvothe, shut up and talk about the ratio of drabs to shims. I'm not even kidding.
“Historically,” he grinned, “Astound me with your grasp of historical minutiae, E’lir.”No...
“A long time ago, the people who—”
“How long ago?”Stop it...
I frowned at him in mock severity. “Roughly two thousand years ago.The nomadic folk who roamed the foothills around the Shalda Mountains were brought together under one chieftain.”Please don't...
“What was his name?”
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME WITH THIS BULLSHIT? NO ONE FUCKING CARES! THIS IS BULLSHIT WORD-PADDING OF THE WORST FUCKING KIND! BAD ROTHFUSS! BAD EDITOR! THIS BOOK IS BAD AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD!
Pardon me, gentle readers. That may have been building for a while.
Look, I teach creative writing, which means I am a motherfucking expert on the foibles of amateur storytellers. I know the common errors so well that I have a fucking bingo card I bring out at the beginning of every semester, and by the time midterms roll around I don't just have a bingo line - I have the whole fucking board. And one of the most common - the absolute most common and egregious - issues that shows up in every script or manuscript from an inexperienced author is clumsy exposition. This right here, where Rothfuss uses a common household item as an excuse to launch into 200 words of historical waffle that has fuck-all to do with the plot? Bad storytelling 101.
The only purpose for Kvothe's 200 words of historical wank is for Rothfuss to show off how much thought he's put into his imaginary universe. That's it. It doesn't matter whether or not any of it becomes relevant to the plot (and, unless Book 3 has some real surprises up its sleeve, it doesn't): it's the fact that it has no relevance whatsoever to this fucking scene that makes it so incredibly, amateurishly awful.
I'll skip ahead: Kvothe talks about how, two millennia ago, the nomadic tribes became agrarian, settling down near natural resources which included deposits of iron. When they learned to work iron, they developed a system of currency based on dividing a standard-sized iron bar into five smaller pieces, those pieces forming a basic monetary unit. It's all a preamble to Abenthy using the idea that two iron drabs might have been struck from the same bar as a mental workaround for Kvothe to see their sympathetic connection, which allows him to start manipulating one by manipulating the other, but by the time we get there we do not give a single flying fuck because we've drowned in the names of several generations of monarchs and tribal leaders who sound like they named themselves via a drunken game of Boggle. At least Tolkien had the good grace to put all the Kings of Numenor in the appendices of Lord of the Rings, where those of us who didn't feel like making sense of thirty near-identical names at once could comfortably avoid them.
And once a-fucking-gain, the real frustration is that it didn't have to be this god-fucking-damn clumsy. All Rothfuss had to do was switch the order of the telling: have Kvothe start with the iron drabs being units of currency, and then have Abenthy gently lead him back through the history to bring him to the conclusion that they might have been struck from the same bar. It would have been more interesting to read, it would have guided the reader through the same thought process as Kvothe, which is always more satisfying than just being told shit, it would have let Abenthy actually do some honest-to-God teaching, and it wouldn't have screamed EXPOSITION AHOY! at us in giant flashing neon lights.
NaNoPadMo: 26
I Know Stuff: 15
I Have An Interrogative: 38
Over-reliable Narrator: 4
These should all be pretty self-explanatory. If anything, I've under-counted all the times Kvothe's little history lesson just invites more questions - or features Rothfuss showing his ass regarding how history works.
Stu Stew: 40
For Kvothe being an irritating little know-it-all.
Repetition(epetition): 36
They grin, they frown, they glower, they cycle through a series of predictable facial expressions like an early-stage animation test.
Alert The Editor: 61
For abusing commas and capital letters, for inappropriate paragraph breaks, for using "grinned" as a reporting verb, and for the editor not whacking Rothfuss over the head with a copy of Creative Writing for Dummies.
By the way: we do actually get a brief explanation of the currency. Actually, we get half of one: after 200 words of mostly-useless history, Abenthy cuts Kvothe off before he can finish giving us the one piece of information that would actually be useful for understanding a lot of what happens in upcoming chapters, given how much of the book is spent on Kvothe worrying about money. Since I'm trying to pretend I'm too professional to include a Fuck You, Rothfuss count, I suppose I'd better give it one of these:
I Have An Interrogative: 39
Also: fuck you, Rothfuss.
Abenthy starts demonstrating sympathy by sticking two drabs together with a bit of pitch, pulling them apart again, mumbling an incantation, and showing Kvothe how he what he does to one happens to the other. It's written pretty perfunctorily; Rothfuss has a real way of blowing his descriptive wad on all the stuff that doesn't matter, then frogmarching the reader right past the stuff that should actually have impact.
He set one on the table, keeping the other in his hand. Then he muttered something else and relaxed.
He raised his hand, and the drab on the table mimicked the motion. He danced his hand around and the brown piece of iron bobbed in the air.See what I mean? After a fairly loving description of the way the strands of pitch hang between the two drabs after Abenthy pulls them apart, that's the only description we get of the actual fucking magic. I don't love the way Rothfuss tends to blow the impact of a moment with paragraphs of foreplay, but I like it much better than "oh, by the way: some magic happened".
Over-reliable Narrator: 5
Kvothe should feel something here! This is a first-person fail not so much in terms of technique, but in terms of Rothfuss temporarily forgetting that he's writing in first person at all. There's no way this moment didn't have an emotional impact on Kvothe that would have been worth describing - not unless Kvothe really is a Fucking Sociopath.
Abenthy starts explaining sympathy, Kvothe is a bratty know-it-all, same song, different verse. There must be a glitch in the Matrix, because I know I've read this before.
Stu Stew: 41
I gave a hesitant nod, trick questions were fairly common around lesson time.You know what's also fairly common around here? Fucking comma splices.
Alert The Editor: 62
“Would you rather learn how to call the wind?”
Title Drop: 4
His eyes danced at me.Did they, now?
Alert The Editor: 63
Proper usage matters, people.
I felt a grin capture my face, wolfish.
Alert The Editor: 64
*weeps*
Whatever. Abenthy writes the incantation down for Kvothe, and tells him that what he just saw is the "Sympathetic Binding of Parallel Motion", which is the beginning of Rothfuss really trying to sell this notion that all the magic in the Kingkiller-verse is really sort-of science.
It isn't.
Rothfuss likes to say - in interviews, on his blog, in reddit AMAs - that he has this sympathy thing worked out mathematically. There are laws, formulae and equations for how things are sympathetically bound, how much energy is lost in inefficient sympathetic links, and how sympathetic principles work in concert with one another.
It doesn't hang together, no matter how much Rothfuss thinks he's got the mathematics of it down - but more importantly, it doesn't fucking matter. Sure, maybe every one of Rothfuss' decimal places is in the right place and you really could sit down with the mathematics of sympathy and work it through like a real-world science, but it still comes out feeling less realistic than the magic of Harry Potter, and that's because knowing the details matters not a whit if you can't write it in a way that feels naturalistic and lived-in. It's that pesky sense of permanence again: giving us a poncy-sounding name for the principle, especially in a universe that demonstrably has limited science so far, does less to convince us that there's sound science beneath the magic than it looks like Rothfuss waving his arms around and yelling "SEE HOW SCIENTIFIC MY MAGIC IS! IT'S SCIENCY-SCIENCE! THE MOST SCIENTIFIC OF SCIENCES! I AM SCIENCE AND SO CAN YOU!" Just like the pointless worldbuilding earlier, it's just kind of wedged in there, when any number of small changes to the way that information was presented could have introduced the principle without drawing so much attention to the Hand of the Author.
I Know Stuff: 16
I'll have plenty of interrogatives about sympathy later, but for now I just don't care enough.
Abenthy fucks off so Kvothe can practice, which he does by ostentatiously repeating what the Alar is - something we learned about last chapter and about which Abenthy reminded us last paragraph.
Repetition(epetition): 37
Kvothe speaks the words and moves a drab, and lo and behold! The other drab moves too. And, after performing his first bit of magic ever, Kvothe feels rather disappointed that it isn't all that impressive. For all the waffling and wank Rothfuss has put me through to get to this point, I actually really like this. The prose of it isn't masterful, but it's very consistent with the Kvothe we know that he feels let down at his first experience of magic feeling this mundane: you really get the feeling that it's not the magic itself that so disappoints him, but the sense that anyone could do the same thing. Maybe I'm reading more into the paragraph that Rothfuss intended, but this is literally the first paragraph in the book that has invited that kind of reading between the lines, so I'll take it whether Rothfuss meant it that way or not.
On that unusually positive note, I'm actually going to break the chapter. There's a more natural break coming up, but I've already written more than 3,000 words on this chapter and there are some paragraphs coming up that I'm almost certain will send me on another lengthy tear. Besides: I've already used three gifs in this post and I feel like if I include any more I'll hit some kind of event horizon. See you next time!
Alert The Editor: 68
I mean it this time.
Yay, it's back!
ReplyDeleteYou know, I always wonder why writers choose first person perspective. It is really damn hard to get right and really easy to fuck up, and it rarely adds anything to the story. Third person limited is almost exactly the same, except much easier to use. I have written in first person but I only do it when I want a stream of conciousness style, that being the one style that in my opinion really works in first person.
I mean, there are ways he could have made it work. He could have done away with the oral account and instead made it into an honest-to-god autobiography. He could have written it in a more fun, rambling style that really separated it from the third person passages. Of course, then he would have to make it much shorter and I guess that would just be too much of a sacrifice. But since he clearly didn't want to put in the effort that would make the first person perspective worthwhle, why didn't he just write flashbacks like the rest of us?
Re: world-building. This, I feel, is a mistake that many writers do. I can recognize it because I do it myself. Once you've created a world, you want to put as much into it as possible, because you think it will make it appear more real. I've written history, culture and even stuff like folk songs for my made-up world. But the thing is, you need to know what to put in the book and not. Just knowing the world is usually enough, since the readers can tell that there is a lot more to the world that what is shown. If you tell the reader everything, it will feel limited and less real. As a writer, you need to know more about your world than the readers do. If it isn't relevant to the plot, don't put it into the story, no matter how important you think it is for the understanding of the world. Because if you know the world well enough, it will fall into place by itself.
Back, and (hopefully) on track, so thanks for your patience!
DeleteThere are ways to make first person work, especially when the limited worldview of first-person narration helps the story along. It can be great for humour, where what a character knows can be playfully contrasted against what's really going on; it's good for mysteries and thrillers, where it enables the reader to discover information at the same rate as the protagonist and can help protect a central mystery against being discovered too soon. I've enjoyed playing with first-person narration when I have a character with a particularly strong voice or distinctive worldview, as it can really help with some of the character and worldbuilding heavy lifting.
In Rothfuss' case, precisely none of those things are true. Kvothe's voice is spectacularly bland, and we as readers would actually be helped by being outside of his limited worldview. I know what Rothfuss was trying to go for with the contrast of Kvothe's legend with his actual story, but it's still a baffling choice to write it this way.