Further Goodkind

A follow-up to yesterday’s post. I have read (rapidly, I confess) a few more instalments of Goodkind’s lengthy Fantasy series The Sword of Truth. Here, for instance, is The Pillars of Creation: Sword of Truth #7 (2002).

In this lengthy volume we get Richard-the-hero’s sister Jennsen, who spends much of the story being pursued by the evil Dark Lord Darken Rahl. Jennsen (and also another hitherto unmentioned sibling of Richard's, called Oba) are ‘immune’ to magic, ‘pristines’ as they are called, which makes them tremendously useful in the ongoing magical war. The writing however is not, to deploy the literary-critical technical term, ‘good’.

Of course he wasn't watching her. He was no longer watching anything. With his head turned to the side, toward her, though, it almost seemed as if he might be looking at her. [11]

I annotate this passage:—???

Her eyes glided carefully over the remarkable knife sheathed at his belt. [14]

It’s like that scene in Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou! I annotate this passage: ouch.

Jennsen smiled, but shook her head firmly to decline. As the woman in the horse-drawn cart returned a disappointed smile and started to move away Jennsen saw a sign on the cart proclaiming sausages for sale. [143]

Credit to Goodkind for the knight’s-move unexpected conclusion to the second sentence here. I didn’t see the sausage coming, I confess.

The eyes of the voice opened to look at him. [404]

Perfectly normal, comprehensible sentence, this. The kind of thing people say all the time. Ah, but I see you’re curious as to how Goodkind handles sex in this volume. Well let me enlighten you:

[Oba] reached out and grabbed her left breast. Oba reached out with his other hand and grabbed her other breast. He gave them a both a firm squeeze as he grinned at her … Oba liked her breasts. They were as nice as any he had ever held. Still, she was quite the unusual woman. [400]

I annotate this: phwoah! There’s a struggle, but it’s alright, because when a woman says no she doesn’t actually mean no, and Oba speaks the universal language of love: ‘he caught her arm, twisted it around until she cried out … before she could get her breath, he slammed a good punch into her middle.’ [402]. She tries to return the punch, but he catches her hand in his. Luckily, he has another: ‘that left him a hand to feel the delights of her feminine form. Oba slipped his hand down the front of her skintight leather pants.’ Anything else?

He licked the side of her neck, back behind her ear where the fine little hairs felt soft on his tongue. His teeth raked their way back down. Her neck tasted delightful … She moaned as she urgently collected his sac together in her greedy hand. [403]

Is there a sexier sentence in literature than ‘she urgently collected his sac together in her greedy hand’? Jane Austen eat your heart out. To quote Sense and Sensibility:

His hand glided up the mound of her breast. He fondled it gently in his big hand, just to show her that he could be gentle. He reached over and squeezed her other breast, but still she refused to acknowledge how excited she was by his gentle, tantalizing touch. [528]

Alright, enough of that. What else? Well, how about ‘Terry Goodkind, master of simile’?

Sebastian stood out like a swan among maggots. [418]

It’s an enduring image. Meanwhile:

The horses kicked up a shower of sod as they suddenly broke past a wide opening in a wall to find themselves charging up the expansive lawns of the Confessors’ Palace ... Jennsen rode beside Sebastian, between widespread flanks of howling men, straight up the wide promenade lined with mature maple trees. [450]

In other news, ‘Shower of Sod and the Howling Men’ is the name of my new band. Which brings us to:

Naked Empire: Sword of Truth #8 (2003). The focus is back on Richard and Kahlan for this instalment.

Kahlan had known various people in the Midlands, from simple people living in the wilds to nobles living in great cities, who hunted with falcons. [11]

That about covers it, social-diversity-wise, I think we can agree.

“Hot as it is, it seems to me we could do without any more heat.” Richard set the bedrolls atop a sack of oats already unloaded. [18]

Let me share with you a rule out of the Professional Writers’ Handbook: the number of usages of the word ‘atop’ that are permissible in any given novel is: zero. Atop his throne, the evil socialist/ communist/ liberal/ woke/etc dark lord villain Darken Rahl is still trying to take over the world. One thing about Darken Rahl: he does not approve of people eating meat.

He spotted a cavalry man atop his horse eating a meat pie. Darken Rahl lashed out with a flash of conjured lightning, beheading the man’s horse in an instant-——thump, it dropped into the hedge. The man managed to land on his feet as the rest of his horse crashed to the ground. Darken Rahl reached out, drew the man’s sword, and in a fit of anger slashed the belly of the horse open. Then he seized the soldier by the scruff of his neck and shoved his face into the horse’s innards, screaming at him to eat. The man tried his best, but ended up suffocated in the horse’s warm viscera. [91]

Vegetarians, eh? So, yes: you know what I said about the use of ‘atop’? A word literally nobody ever uses in ordinary communication? Well, Goodkind loves that word. There’s much ‘atopitude’ in this novel. A lot of atop. Atopness abounds.

Rikka folded her bare arms atop her nearly bare bosom. [198]

Harder to do than it looks, that. As for the accuracy with which the basically medieval-level world is developed, I offer you this scrupulously researched 14th-century-appropriate tin-can:

Scorn hurriedly pulled the tin off the shelf and opened the lid. The tin contained a yellowish powder. It was the right color. [703]

And finally, for now, Phantom: Sword of Truth #10 (2006).

In this volume the Sisters of the Dark, minions of the Keeper of the Underworld, have cast a spell that compels everyone in the world to forget Kahlan. Only Richard, because of the true-love connection he has with his wife, is unaffected, so he’s the only person in the world to remember her. Cue: questing, adventures, fighting, capture, torture, blah, blah. The main villain here is Emperor Jagang, a wicked tyrant with a Nightmare on Elm Street-y power: ‘the Emperor is a dream walker, a man with powers handed down to him through ancient magic. He uses that ability to invade the minds of others not only to gain knowledge, but to control them.’

The story is a long build-up, with lots of torturous and sadistic asides, all heading towards the ‘last battle’ between Richard’s troops and the vast army of the evil Jagang. The book ends before we get there, but not before Jagang, wearing one assumes his jagang pants, captures Kahlan and spends scores and scores of pages tormenting her, harassing her, making her strip naked in front of him so he can ogle her and so on.

Jagang folded his husky arms across his massive chest. [436]

His husky arms? (husky adj: ‘in relation to voice, hoarse and rough-sounding.’) Or does he have, instead of arms, the forelegs of a sled-dog? Is that what is meant? Kahlan plots with another captive woman to escape without raising the alarm. She will steal a knife and stab the guard, very specifically, in his kidney. But won’t his cries of pain alert the other guards?

Kahlan shook her head. “The pain is so great when you’re stabbed in the kidney that your throat clamps shut. The scream is locked in your lungs.” [410]

I must say, I doubt the physiological accuracy of this assessment. Meanwhile Jagang’s troops inflict horrors on the people of Ebyssinia, a country presumably four along from Abyssinia.

Kahlan didn't know what the name of the city had been, but it was no more. There hadn't been a single person left alive. From the number of corpses, as vast as they had been, she knew that many of the city's inhabitants had been taken as slaves. [78]

You need a special degree of ineptness to write From the number of corpses, as vast as they had been…: Goodkind must have meant ‘vast’ to modify ‘number’, but the plural means that it can only modify ‘corpses’. Big old corpses. Some several miles long.

Kahlan noticed a small cluster of men in the distance riding at breakneck speed … at every checkpoint, the men brought their horses to a skidding halt. [554]

A skidding halt? I guess that’s the danger when you oil your horseshoes, especially on a glass road. Or perhaps Goodkind believes horses ride exactly the same way motorcycles do? There’s plenty of atopness in this novel, too.

She was lying on thick furs that were atop something slightly elevated. [434]

Such a ludicrous, ungainly phrase! Please don’t do it. Stop the Atop.

Jagang scooped a handful of pecans from a silver bowl and popped a few in his mouth. [457]

Thoroughly medieval nut, the pecan. Lots of them in Chaucer. What else? Well, Richard is told that his mother was not alone when she died in a housefire. ‘Everything he had known for nearly his whole life seemed to be vaporized in an instant by the lightning strike of those words.’ How does Goodkind indicate the shock Richard is feeling?

Richard felt goose bumps race up his legs. [212]

I too feel goose bumps hurrying uplegward. They're currently at my knees. I’d better stop before they get any higher.

In sum: Goodkind is a terrible writer.

Terry Goodkind, ‘Soul of the Fire’ (‘The Sword of Truth: 5’ [1999])

Terry Goodkind’s The Sword of Truth was one of the better-selling Fantasy series of the 1990s and 2000s: twenty-one lengthy novels in which the improbably omnicompetent, handsome and upstanding forest ranger Richard Cypher, wielding the magic sword of the series’ title, fights the evil tyrant Darken Rahl to prevent him and his evil minions from taking over the world. Richard is in love with the beautiful female magician Kahlan Amnell, and she with him, but a magic curse means men who have sex with Kahlan die immediately, so the two lovers cannot be together.

I read the first volume, Wizard’s First Rule (1994) soon after it came out, and it did not make me want to read the subsequent instalments—a stew of Fantasy clichés rendered into dreary, flabby prose: a quest, monsters, wizards, fights, this and that, plus the element that Goodkind adds, to make his book stand-out from the rest of the Fat Fantasy crowd: a great deal of sexualised torture and violence. Partway on his quest Richard is captured by a wicked ‘Mord-Sith’ called Denna. She is a sexual sadist and tortures him for what felt like hundreds and hundreds of pages all described in painstaking and indeed painsgiving detail. Months of story-time is given over to it. The torture is designed to break Richard. Richard is unbroken. Later in the story another Mord-Sith tries to rape Kahlan. She overcomes him with her magic, then cuts off his testicles and makes him eat them.

We might call this ‘grimdark’, but that’s not really the flavour of the novel: the world of the text is otherwise entirely derivative of lighter, more brightly-coloured prior Fantasy writing, Richard and Kahlan are utterly upstanding, righteous, uncynical; ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are distinct, exteriorised qualities in this world: there’s none of grimdark’s moral grey areas, none of its realpolitik, or moral pragmatism. The violence in this novel is its own thing, the novel’s kink, the fetish of a writer at once excited and revolted by the sadistic drives he believes to be universals. Goodkind’s hard right-wing political views, his Ayn Rand-inspired beliefs, directly inform the novel: the titular ‘Wizard's First Rule’ (each volume has a different one) is ‘people are stupid’. That's not a summary: it's a verbatim quote of the First Rule. This contempt for humanity, a Randian disdain for the vulgar herd, the mass, the ordinary folk—you and me, that is—licences the intimately-described horrors the novelist inflicts upon the ‘people’, and therefore the ‘good’ violence of men like Richard that counters it.

Anyway: writing a Short History of Fantasy, as I am, I’m going to have to at least mention Goodkind: he sold millions and accrued a huge fanbase. But I’ll be honest, I have neither the time nor the inclination to read each of the twenty-one chunky volumes in turn. So I figured, having read the first, I’d read one from the middle of the series and another from the end, to get at least a sense of how things develop. Since I happen to have vol 5 to hand (I can’t remember when or why I bought it: from Oxfam, according to the price sticker on the cover) I read that.

So where are we? Evil still threatens the three kingdoms of Goodkindlandia, or whatever the realm of these novels is called. But the magical barrier preventing Richard and Kahlan from getting jiggy with it has been overcome, for the novel opens with them newly married and honeymooning in the village of the mud-people (‘his breathing quickened as he clutched her in his powerful arms. She slid her hands across the sweat-slick muscles of his broad shoulders to run her fingers through the thick tangle of his hair as she moaned against his mouth’ etc etc). There’s some business with an evil chicken—a ‘chicken that is not a chicken’ because it is possessed by ‘the chimes’, souls from the realm of the evil dead—and then more questing-about and fighting, building up to a lovingly-described violent massacre of an entire country by the Evil. But what struck me, as I worked through, was not the violence, or the padding, or the weird ungainly structure of the whole. What struck me was the hair. This novel is always mentioning hair, always having its characters playing with their hair or tossing it back or ‘raking’ their fingers through it. It is extremely repetitive, right down to the specific phrasing used. Here’s Richard, our Randian hero:

[19] ‘He took a purging breath as he wiped back his wet hair.’

[48] ‘“The chimes are from the world of the dead,” Richard muttered as he raked his fingers back through his hair.’

[63] ‘Richard paused, combing his fingers back through his thick hair.’

[96] ‘Richard raked his fingers back through his hair.’

[110] ‘He wiped hair off his forehead as he peered up.’

[237] ‘Richard raked his fingers back through his hair.’

[260] ‘Richard raked back his hair.’

[481] ‘Richard raked his fingers back through his hair.’

[511] ‘Richard swiped his hair back from his forehead.’

[563] ‘Richard wiped his wet hair back from his forehead.’

[596] ‘Richard ran his fingers back into his hair.’

[615] ‘Richard pushed his fingers back into his hair.’

[635] ‘Richard raked his fingers back through his hair.’

It’s extraordinarily lazy writing, quite apart from being cumulatively just immensely irritating: just leave your sodding hair alone, you berk. Kahlan’s long hair always seems to be wet, for some reason:

[6] ‘Kahlan tossed her cloak around her shoulders and then pulled the tangle of her long hair out from under the collar.’

[21] ‘Kahlan dropped to her knees beside Richard, pushing her wet hair back out of her eyes.’

[24] ‘Kahlan gathered her hair in one hand to keep the gusts from whipping it against her face.’

[26] ‘Wind whipped Kahlan’s hair across her face.’

[66] ‘Kahlan hooked a strand of damp hair behind her ear.’

[69] ‘Kahlan wiped wet hair from her face.’

[76] ‘Kahlan … pulled back wet strands of hair.’

[87] ‘Kahlan wiped her hair from her eyes.’

[231] ‘Kahlan pushed her damp hair back over her shoulder.’

[243] ‘Kahlan wound a long lock of damp hair on a finger as she turned her mind to the question … “Right.” Kahlan let the hair go and held up the finger.’

[247] ‘In frustration, Kahlan ran her fingers back into her hair.’

[255] ‘Sighing in frustration, Kahlan pushed her long hair back over her shoulder.’

[296] ‘Wearily, Kahlan gripped a handful of her long hair hanging down over her shoulder.’

[482] ‘Kahlan ran her fingers back into her hair, seeming unable to express her reservations and frustrations.’

It’s more than a writerly tic; it’s a kink: ‘sitting close to Kahlan, seeing the lamplight reflect in her green eyes, off her hair, seeing the way her thick tresses nestled in the curve of her neck, [Richard] was beginning to think about weeks before, in the spirit house — the last time he had made love to her: remembering her lush naked body. It was an impossible mental image to forget’ [474]. The last sentence there is ambiguous between: ‘it was a mental image that was impossible to forget’ and ‘it was an impossible mental image, and ought to be forgotten’. Goodkind presumably means the former, but I like the implications of the latter. Lush naked body indeed. 

It's not just Richard and Kahlan: it’s all the characters: ‘Tess, my darling. Your hair looks grand”’ [141]; ‘“Tess, darling, your hair is growing beautifully”’ [146]; ‘“Ah, my dear Teresa, have I yet told you that you look especially divine this evening. And your hair is wondrous.” Teresa fussed with the glittering sequins tied in her hair, aware of envious eyes watching her’ [190].

‘Franca wore her black, nearly shoulder length hair loose, yet it swept back somewhat from her face, as if it had been frozen stiff by an icy wind’ [218]

Magic? Hairspray? That scene from There’s Something About Mary? We may never know.

‘In the dim light, Zedd peered with one eye at his grandson. “But,” he whispered, “were the magic of the gambit moth to fail, for all we know it could very well begin a cascade of events that would result in the end of life as we know it.”’ [48]

The novel does not disclose to us the specific hair-do of the Magic Gambit Moth, which I daresay is a mercy.

Zodiacal Alice

 

[from Lewis Carroll, Symbolic Logic (1896)]

We know Carroll loved games, puns, diversions and cleverness of all kinds: the Alice books are shot through with these things, wordplay, equivalences, ludic strategems and patterns. And there has certainly been no shortage of critical and fannish interpretations of the books. So it's surprising to me that nobody has made the following suggestion: Alice in Wonderland is a zodiacal book, and Through the Looking-Glass is a gloss upon its zodiacal logic.

The zodiac consists of twelve stations or zones (Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces) that comprise eight animals—fish, ram, bull, scorpion, lion, crab, centaur and goat—and four other things: ‘water’, twins, the virgin and the scales of justice. The twelve chapters of the first Alice book are disposed between eight predominant animals and four other qualities (in what follows I notate the animals in lower case and the other qualities in capital letters):

I. Down the Rabbit-Hole [rabbit]
II. The Pool of Tears [WATER]
III. A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale [mouse]
IV. The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill [lizard]
V. Advice from a Caterpillar [caterpillar]
VI. Pig and Pepper [pig]
VII. A Mad Tea-Party [hare]
VIII. The Queen’s Croquet-Ground [flamingo]
IX. The Mock Turtle’s Story [fish]
X. The Lobster Quadrille [lobster]
XI. Who Stole the Tarts? [SCALES OF JUSTICE]
XII. Alice’s Evidence [VIRGO]

This doesn’t look, in itself, wholly zodiacal. Where, for instance, are the twins? The lion? Well, obviously, they are in Looking-Glass:

I. Looking-Glass House [?]
II. The Garden of Live Flowers [flowers]
III. Looking-Glass Insects [insects]
IV. Tweedledum And Tweedledee [TWINS]
V. Wool and Water [sheep/ram]
VI. Humpty Dumpty [shell]
VII. The Lion and the Unicorn [lion]
VIII. “It’s my own Invention” [man + horse = centaur]
IX. Queen Alice [?]
X. Shaking [?]
XI. Waking [?]
XII. Which Dreamed it? [?]

In other words, the true zodiacal Alice emerges when we superpose the latter design upon the former, thus:

I Down the Rabbit-Hole [Alice = VIRGO]
II. The Pool of Tears [WATER]
III. Looking-Glass Insects [goat and scorpion]
IV. Tweedledum And Tweedledee [TWINS]
V. Wool and Water [ram]
VI. Humpty Dumpty [bull]
VII. The Lion and the Unicorn [lion]
VIII. “It’s my own Invention” [centaur]
IX. The Mock Turtle’s Story [fish]
X. The Lobster Quadrille [crab (= lobster)]
XI. Who Stole the Tarts? [SCALES OF JUSTICE]
XII. Alice’s Evidence/Which Dreamed it? [Alice = VIRGO]

The doubling of signs in the third chapter, there, follows from the fact that (in Looking-Glass) this chapter leaps two squares on the chessboard instead of one, which is to say moves at double speed. It is the chapter containing both the actual goat (‘a Goat, that was sitting next to the gentleman in white, shut his eyes and said in a loud voice, “She ought to know her way to the ticket-office, even if she doesn’t know her alphabet!”’) whose beard Alice actually grasps in fright when the railway carriage ‘rises up’ suddenly—and then, in a new, unrelated episode, all the insects. A scorpion, as entomologists will tell you, is not actually an insect: it’s an arachnid of the order scorpiones. But the ancients did not make this distinction (that is, they considered it an insect): and the lack of actual scorpions in the landscapes of England—upon which Wonderland riffs—necessitates its replacement with the gnat and other insects of this episode. Humpty Dumpty, though bullish, is not actually a bull. But he is (with his mouth and therefore, we must suppose, alimentary canal) not a sphere or ovoid but a torus; a taurus; exactly the kind of pun in which the mathematically expert Carroll would delight. It is also relevant that Alice herself (born 4th May 1852) was herself a taurus.

The starsign ‘cancer’, though conventionally a crab today, was indifferently a crab or a lobster in medieval and ancient understanding (καρκίνος, whence the Latin cancer, comes from the pincers or claws of the beast. Of either beast.)

What is so appealing about this superposed Alice pattern is that it starts with ‘virgo’, Alice herself, and ends there again, in twelve chapters moving through the various animal and other signs in a celestial, wondrous (‘wonderland’) circle to return again home.


++++++++++++

Do I genuinely believe that Lewis Carroll sat down and plotted out a complex zodiacal patterning, to run across his two twelve-chapter volumes of Alice’s adventures? No, I don’t. It’s extremely unlikely anything like this was ever in Carroll’s mind. 

I lay this out here as an exercise in interpretation as such. In an earlier blogpost I did something similar with C S Lewis’s Narnia and Mithraism: that post being an oblique engagement with Ward's Planet Narnia book, and a way of thinking aloud, in a performative way, about what counts as ‘evidence’ in literary criticism. This is what strikes me: though the premise of this post is, in a sense, arbitrary—the coincidence of there being twelve zodiac signs and the fact that each Alice book has twelve chapters—and although there is no evidence that Carroll himself thought zodiacally about his creation, or anything else, as I worked-out the comparison I found myself strangely compelled by it, almost convinced. After all: Tweedledum and Tweedledee! The Twins! Gemini! The lion and the unicorn! Once you start looking, you find these things everywhere.

Even elements that, manifestly, don’t fit the schema—most obviously the lack of any bull in either story (an animal Carroll could very easily have included if he’d wanted to)—become nodes of significance. Alice’s own star-sign was taurus: perhaps that is why ‘taurus’ is represented not by an actual bull, but by an egg, that ovoid symbol of origins and birth (the egg from which Helen was hatched, to which all the mighty legends of Troy and Odysseus’s wanderings can be traced back). It’s nonsense, but by locating it, and writing it out, it starts to acquire strange power over you. 

This is a dangerous path, I’m well aware. It’s how people end up believing the measurements of the Great Pyramid at Giza encode the Hebrew Bible (or is it the other way around?) or that Shakespeare’s plays contain elaborate codes proving Baconian authorship: evidence, howsoever tenuous, is presented as evidence and absence of evidence is also presented as evidence. It locks itself around the mind, like the circle (cancer) made by the connected claws of the lobster.