Chapter 19: Fingers and Strings (Part I)
In which Galatea reads two entire other books so as to spork half a chapter.
Previously, in The Name of the Wind, Kvothe was a terrible psychologist but a more-than-adequate dreamer.
The lengths I go to for this blog.
Let me explain. This chapter is Kvothe's "Surviving alone in the woods" chapter - something I'd honestly remembered as taking up much more of the book than it actually does. The weird reality is that something I'd thought went on for chapters and chapters really plays out in the space of a scant few pages.
Normally, except for some specific points in Book 2 (which will even get their own special count), I'd commend Rothfuss for not wasting time on stuff that doesn't really affect the plot, and move on to something more spork-worthy. And I tried for this section, I really did. I blew past a clumsy first sentence...
IN THE BEGINNING I was almost like an automaton, thoughtlessly performing the actions that would keep me alive.
...resisted the urge to comment on another dry laundry list of actions...
I ate the second rabbit I caught, and the third. I found a patch of wild strawberries. I dug for roots. By the end of the fourth day, I had everything I needed to survive: a stone-lined fire pit, a shelter for my lute.
...and even decided not to dig into how quickly Kvothe manages to build a food store despite having nothing on him that would enable him to collect large piles of food or stop any of it from spoiling:
I had even assembled a small stockpile of foodstuffs that I could fall back on in case of emergency.
And then I hit the third paragraph, and my resolve went to shit.
I also had one thing I did not need: time. After I had taken care of immediate needs, I found I had nothing to do.
You've known me long enough by now to know that I have a broad knowledge base, and a pretty well-tuned bullshit detector. I'm not always right about Rothfuss being wrong, but my bullshit detector is reliable enough that, when it goes off, I always take the time to do a little research and see if it's going off for a good reason. And at the notion that an eleven-year-old boy with no real survival training could find himself alone in the woods after a major trauma, and then sort himself out for food and shelter efficiently enough to find himself bored, my bullshit detector went off like a fucking klaxon.
I'm no survivalist. I've camped before, but never more than a short walk from functional toilets. But I trust my bullshit detector, and I'm good at research, and so this is the story of how Galatea, absolute queen of not knowing when to fucking quit, went and read TWO ENTIRE OTHER BOOKS just to spork what amounts to about three paragraphs of Rothfuss fail.
See, my issue was this nagging feeling - one not born of personal experience in this case - that a young boy surviving alone in the woods would just not have the time or energy to sit idle. And, as luck would have it, I knew of a book that's a near-perfect corollary to this little section of Kvothe's story, and that will help me make a pretty good case that, as per usual, Rothfuss is writing right out of his arse.
Sidebar, before we continue. I've gone on tangents before. You've seen them. I spent a cool 600 words in Chapter 9 explaining why the names of two donkeys broke the entire book for me. It's who I am as a sporker, and I refuse to apologise for it. But I will warn you that, for this section, I'm about to fucking outdo myself. This is the tangent to end all tangents. Records will be broken. This post is nothing but tangent. So if you want to check out here and meet me in the next post for a more traditional spork, I shall not hold it against you.
If you're with me for the long run...here we go.
Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen, is a YA novel from the mid-1980s about a thirteen-year-old boy named Brian who is stranded in the Canadian wilderness when the pilot of his short-haul flight has a heart attack and dies. Brian is forced to land the plane himself, and spends the next fifty-four days learning how to feed and shelter himself, armed with nothing but a small hand axe. It is a fast read and a blisteringly good one, and my memory from the last time I read it is that it approaches the idea of wilderness survival with a harsh authenticity that pulls very few punches.
So I went and re-read the entirety of Hatchet, just to see what this chapter would have been like if it were 1) played out to novel length, and 2) written by a much better author. And then, because I was curious whether the authenticity in Hatchet were genuine or just the result of strong imagination and stronger writing, I went and read the entirety of Guts, which is the autobiographical book Paulsen wrote specifically to answer fan questions about the authenticity of Hatchet.
And I have to get this out of the way before I say anything else: Gary Paulsen is a goddamn motherfucking badass. He spent a lot of his childhood in poverty in the wilds of Minnesota, hunting his own game for food because his alcoholic parents kept forgetting to feed him. He's been an emergency rescue volunteer, he was in the army, and he's run the motherfucking Iditarod, multiple times. This is a man who knows, in his very bones, what survival in the wilderness is like, and in Guts he draws deliberately straight lines between his own lived experience, and the fictionalised survival story of Brian in Hatchet.
In other words, Hatchet is about as good as we're going to get for an authentic exploration of a young boy's survival in the wilderness.
I'm going to be reasonable, and start by making note of the one way in which comparing this chapter to Hatchet really isn't fair: this is one chapter, and Hatchet is an entire book. Paulsen can - and does - go into way more detail than Rothfuss because for him, survival alone in the woods is the entire narrative. For Rothfuss, this section is just a pit stop on the way to the actual story, and with how much I've yelled at him for padding, I can't rightly fault him for dwelling on this section for much less time than I remembered.
HOWEVER. There are a number of ways in which this comparison is absolutely fair:
- Kvothe and Brian are about the same age: Kvothe is twelve, and Brian is thirteen.
- They're both smart boys with the benefit of a little preexisting knowledge: Kvothe has the bits and pieces he's picked up from the troupe, while Brian is able to recall things from nature documentaries and books.
- They're in the woods for similar amounts of time: fifty-four days for Brian, and about three months for Kvothe.
- They seem to be in similar regions in similar seasons: they're both experiencing relatively temperate late summers, and both comment later that they likely would not have survived a cold winter.
- They've both recently experienced major trauma: for Kvothe it's the death of his family, while Brian is experiencing the disruption of his family via divorce, and witnessed the pilot of his plane dying of a heart attack right in front of him.
- They're both starting their survival story from scratch, with no preexisting shelter, food, or equipment to give them a head start. Brian has a small hatchet; Kvothe has a knife (and a book and a lute, but since he doesn't use either for survival I'm not really counting them). The rest is up to skill, luck, and ingenuity.
As you can see, Brian comes at his story of survival with a pretty close real-world match to what Kvothe has in his Kingkiller-verse version of the wilds. And by the end of a similar stretch of time - four or five days - Brian's put together about what Kvothe has: basic shelter, a fire, and a very small store of food.
By the end of his first week in the wild, Brian has everything Kvothe does...except for time.
Surviving alone takes all the time Brian has. Sure, he takes a little time to feel sorry for himself, or to recover from injuries or plan his next move, but he can't afford much. And Brian makes mistakes that eat up some of that precious time - mistakes we might reasonably assume that the obnoxiously-clever Kvothe wouldn't - but honestly not many. One of the things I like about Brian as a protagonist is that he's very smart - smarter than he realises. Facing the wilderness alone awakens a latent ability to plan and think ahead; to identify what needs to be done and find a way to do it. That process of planning, of learning from his mistakes and taking the steps he needs to feed and protect himself, takes everything Brian has, and the thrill of the book is in how - even with substantial cleverness - Brian is always this close to having his means of survival snatched away.
Paulsen doesn't lay this out explicitly in Hatchet or Guts, but there's a reason Brian has to put so much time and energy into his solo survival: humans just aren't built for it. We're at the apex of the food chain because we combine two specific things in a way that most other animals don't: tools, and community. When we have access to tools, we're astoundingly good at using them; when we have access to other people, we're brilliant at dividing effort efficiently. When we have neither, we're kind of squishy and useless.
So when Brian's only option is to forage for berries, it takes time and resources, because there's nothing innate that tells him where to go or what to look for. When he needs fish and meat, he has to spend the time and energy to make tools, because most of the animals he could eat are too quick for him to catch bare-handed. He can't just make a fire happen: first he has to figure out how, which is itself a struggle, and then he has to keep it going. The small game Brian is able to hunt isn't enough for a meal on its own; in order to eat properly for a day, never mind build up food stores, Brian has to hunt and fish again and again and again and again. Rabbits have to be skinned and grouse plucked. Meat has to be cooked for eating or smoked for storage. Wood must be gathered, injuries tended, and predators deterred. The smartest thing Brian does in the entire book is to realise how much of each day has to go into preparing for the next day, because survival in the wilderness is always just one bad storm or injury or predator or stupid mistake away from having to start from scratch (or worse).
If Brian had one other person with him - one other human being with whom he could share the daily tasks of survival - he might have time to sit idle. But he doesn't, and so all his time goes into food and safety, because humans might be shockingly good at surviving but we're not innately built for it.
Let's take a brief breather before I explain the point of all this.
One thing I genuinely try to avoid in this spork is criticising The Name of the Wind for not being a completely different book. There's no point in saying "This book would be better if it took place on a space ship" when Rothfuss clearly didn't want to write a book set on a space ship. I try to keep my criticism to pointing out the ways Rothfuss fails at writing the book he intended to write, not to wishing he'd written another book entirely. Even when I re-wrote an entire chapter out of rage, I did so with as many of Rothfuss' own words as I could keep, trying to get at the meat of the chapter as I think he intended it, not to make it mean something utterly different.
That makes this half-a-chapter very difficult for me, because it's clear Rothfuss didn't want to write a wilderness survival story. He has no problem at all dwelling on all the stuff he's interested in, whether or not it needs to be dwelt upon. A large portion of my hatred of this book comes from the amount of words he wastes on exactly such dwelling. When it comes to the half-chapter of Kvothe surviving alone in the woods, it's clear that that's just not a story Rothfuss wanted or thought was important to this book, and so he didn't really write it.
And yet...I really wish he had. Another thing I try to avoid is being too forward-looking in each chapter's criticism, in case there are fresh readers who are encountering the book for the first time via or concurrently with this spork. But I have to break that rule here a bit, because it's impossible to talk about why this overlong book would have benefited from spending more time in the woods without talking about how a lot of what follows is less effective than more survival story would have been.
We're about to spend around thirteen chapters on the streets of the city of Tarbean, a portion of the book that covers three years of Kvothe's life and is, to put it very bluntly, maudlin poverty porn. I'll dig into the details of it when we hit those chapters, but for now, suffice to say that Kvothe does very little except beg, steal, and get beaten up, and while I'm sure it's supposed to give us a sense of the forces that make him before he gets to the University and something approaching the actual plot, it really does nothing except put Kvothe through hell and remind us that Rothfuss has no idea how poverty and homelessness work. It's a long stretch of chapters that really drive home something that is a problem more or less throughout the book: that Kvothe is an incredibly passive protagonist.
Sure, he does things, here and there. He takes initiative on the odd occasion. But for the most part, he goes where external forces move him. Tell me: did anything in the story so far suggest he was going to leave the troupe on his own initiative to go to the University? After Ben leaves, the troupe - not him - finds ways to fill his days. In Tarbean, he settles into three years of nothing but existence and survival. Coincidence sets him back on the path to the University, and, once he gets there, he settles into student life and seems to forget about the Chandrian altogether. Sure, he tries to research them a bit, but when an obstacle arises he just sort of bounces off it and pinballs around the University for a while. The objectives towards which Kvothe acts tend to be very low-stakes; when it comes to the actual larger story, Kvothe really just lets it happen around him.
I'm getting ahead of myself. The point is, swapping out most of the bullshit in Tarbean for more survival in the wilderness would force Kvothe to be active, because - as Paulsen so effectively conveys in Hatchet and Guts, survival is action.
This would accomplish a couple of things. First and foremost, it would buy space for Kvothe to be less active later on, by earning him the impression of being an active protagonist now. Think about Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, and how much passivity he earns himself by volunteering to take the Ring at the Council of Elrond. A lot of what follows is Frodo being buffeted around by external forces, but that's okay, because, in that moment of action, he claimed the Ring's journey as his own. For Tolkein, placing this small, physically unimpressive Hobbit in the middle of ancient, world-changing forces, that one action is a goldmine: it allows him to throw immense quantities of shit at Frodo without the reader ever losing sight of Frodo's choice to carry the Ring on this journey. If Rothfuss wants to spend time throwing shit at Kvothe for Kvothe to bounce off, it would be better to do it with a protagonist we've had some cause to believe can be active and self-driven.
Secondly, it would be a much, much better crucible for the kind of hero Rothfuss wants to forge than any of the later nonsense in Tarbean. Remember, we're ultimately aiming towards a Kvothe who knows the Names of things - specifically, the Name of the Wind (ba-dum tish). Our ultimate Kvothe is a powerful wizard, who has trouble relating to people, who sees the world differently than everyone else, and who has deep reserves of internal strength that allow him to do things like (massive spoiler alert) travel to unnatural realms and hold his own against demons and Fae.
What if Rothfuss had been smart enough to sow the seeds of that here? What if, truly alone for the first time, Kvothe had learned to listen to silence, and hear the speech of the wind? What if, in his desperation to survive, Kvothe had learned to tune the world around him to his will in ways he doesn't yet understand? What if, in studying which plants were edible and which were poison, Kvothe had started to learn the Names of them? What if he'd started to see the signs of Faerie in the woods around him?
In Hatchet, one of the things Paulsen does best is convey how fifty-four days in the wilderness changes Brian on a fundamental level. He learns to understand and respect the world around him in a way he never could have done if he'd had the conveniences of the city the whole time - or even the convenience of a hunting rifle.
I went from simply walking through the woods, bulling my way until something moved for me to try a shot at, to trying to understand what I saw, and from that, to “feeling” what the woods were about: a sound here, a movement there, a line that looked out of place or curved the wrong way, a limb that moved against the wind at the wrong time or a smell that was wrong. And not just one of these things, not a single one but all of them mixed together, entered into my mind to make me a part of the woods, so that I came to know some things that were going to happen before they happened: which way a grouse would probably fly, how a rabbit or deer would run or what cover it would make for next.
This didn’t come all at once—at first it was slow—but before long I understood things that I didn’t quite know how I comprehended: a line would catch my eye and I would know, know that it was a grouse and that it was going to fly slightly up and to the left—and it would happen in just that way. I would hear a sound, just the tiniest scrape or crack of a twig, and I would know it was a deer and that it had seen me and would run before I could turn and get an arrow off. To learn these things, to know how all of it worked and to be part of it, was one of the great achievements in my life and has stayed with me.
The above quote is from Guts, and you tell me: doesn't that sound a little like magic? Rothfuss could have conveyed the exact same change in Kvothe, and made the influence of the Kingkiller-verse's magic explicit to set Kvothe up for what's to come.
I try not to criticise a book for not being an entirely different book, but this should have been a survival-in-the-wilderness story. It would have elegantly accomplished what Rothfuss really needed at this stage by keeping Kvothe away from the main narrative with a preoccupation with survival, while also preparing him to reenter the story proper. And it would have accomplished all of this in a more interesting way than the later Tarbean chapters, by not being a giant fucking cliche. "Penniless orphan survives in an unfriendly city" narratives are a dime a dozen, in stories both realistic and fantastical. Wilderness survival stories are much less common in high fantasy, and Rothfuss blew a real opportunity to convey the harshness of existence he really wants for Kvothe in a way we just don't often see in big fantasy tomes.
Anyway, I think I've made my point, and I've certainly banged on enough about a sliver of a chapter. I'm going to give this two counts for the section: one for the unbelievable ease of Kvothe's survival, and one for all the missed opportunities of this scrap of a section. We'll meet back here next time for a more traditional sporking of the music fail that comes next.
"hold his own against demons and Fae"
ReplyDeleteThe phrase "hold his own" meaning "fuck the high holy hell out of"
I am trying so hard not to think about that bit until I absolutely have to...
Delete*hopes that the fairy fucking reminder didn't discourage our intrepid reporter*
ReplyDelete