What is the Land?

[wayfriend]

Wayfriend, so we are in agreement? I think that's what you are saying.

Heh. Says a lot about my prose.

Actually, I agree with your application of Plato, but I offer a better IMO explanation to how it fits in with the Land being "for" Covenant and Linden. Or I tried to say it.

[Nerdanel]

What Xar said. In addition, the Last Chronciles have some stuff that's seriously implausible if one believes all the Land stuff to be a dream.

Spoiler

Like how Joan has suddenly acquired supernatural talents to make her restraints just fall off - on video that was presumably watched by more people than just Linden. And how there was some seriously supernatural lighting with eyes that consistently refused to hit treetops in favor of hitting certain distinct low-lying areas, and killed Joan while she was standing in a deep hollow.

And that's just two examples.

[wayfriend]

Isn't it possible that the Land is neither a dream nor real? Are there no alternatives?

Could it merely be that the author is letting go of realism at certain points in the story in order to acheive an effect for the reader?

In another work, we might read something like: She thought about her lost love. Just then, a white dove flew into the air, and she heard his name in the beat of its wings.

Do we, as readers, go: what is the scientific explanation for that? How can a pidgeon speak words by flapping it's wings? :no, we don't.

Do we, as readers, go: that can't possibly happen! she must be dreaming! :no, we don't.

Sometimes it isn't a dream and it isn't real, either. An author can lower the verisimilitude level at times, in order to create poetic or ironic or symbolic situation which, if you forget about how real it is, brings us art.

Isn't that what is happening here? Could it be that the author is not primarilly concerned with internal consistency and fantasy physics when Foul appears in the flames, when Joan escapes her manicles, when Troy appears in the land? Could it be that something in logic is being sacrificed so that something of art can come through? If you don't care whether the Land is real or not, as either the author or as the reader, why struggle for a consistency that would serve one or the other point of view?

Perhaps Donaldson is intentionally creating an inconsistent picture of the Land's reality/non-reality intentionally. We know why.

[Zarathustra]

Xar, you are making an admirable attempt at supporting your view. I think this exhibits both critical thinking on your part, as well as a clever set of books by SRD. He certainly wrote these books in a way to make it difficult to settle this issue one way or another, giving justification for multiple interpretations.

However, there is one main point of confusion in our debate: I do not think the Land is a dream. I did mention lucid dreaming, etc., but only as a comparison, a way to show how my interpretation is plausible based on real phenomena. If you read through this entire thread, you'll see that I think the Land is MUCH more complex than a simple illusion or fabrication or dream. A metaphorical myth world of universal archetypes that are symbolized by interactive characters which multiple people from the "real world" can meet and interact with--this is MUCH different from a dream. I realize that my own comparisons to dreaming may have led to this confusion. However, most of your long, thoughtful response is aimed at disproving a position I do not hold. My position can sustain arguments such as "multiple characters from the real world experiencing the same Land" because I don't see it as any one person's dream, but instead more like Jung's theory of collective unconsciousness (again, merely a comparison).

she herself tells Covenant, once she has drunk his blood, "he hates you" referring to Lord Foul.

Of course we are supposed to make this inference, but there's a reason why SRD doesn't have her actually say "Lord Foul hates you." Such specificity would tip the scales in favor of the Land being real. With the way it is written, her comment can still be seen as the ramblings of a crazy woman, or she could be referring to a part of herself that hates Covenant, a part from which she disassociates by calling it, "he." If SRD goes to so much trouble to avoid violating the doubt over the Land's reality, there must be a reason, right?

I'll make an example from a famous role-playing game - D&D.

Need I point out the irony of using a fictional world to prove the reality of another fictional world? I see nothing in Donaldson's work to support a theory of two separate, PHYSICAL bodies. We see just the opposite: as Covenant approaches the time when he must leave, his apparently separate Land "body" assumes the condition of his real body. If they are truly separate, then why is his Land body dependent upon the real body in this way? Isn't this convergence intentionally added by the author to highlight the illusory nature of this "separate body" theory? In SRD's words, are we supposed to think he was just kidding about this "Land might not be real" idea?

Linden's Healthsense: she doesn't really learn anything by using it that she couldn't tell by just looking at Covenant's near-death body with normal, medically trained eyes. Internal bleeding could be seen by abnormal swelling, loss of fluid could be seen by, well, lots of blood on the rock, the blade missing his heart is obvious from the fact that he's still alive, flickers of life aching in his lungs could be a poetic way to say that he's still barely breathing, and the flickers of life in his brain could be seen by eye movement under his lids. The only problematic bit of knowledge here is his quivering heart muscle, but perhaps the massive blood loss is enough to deduce an irregularly beating heart. OR, all this could just be in her head. Health sense in no way proves the physical reality of the Land, even if you have it here in the "real world." People claim psychic powers here in our world all the time . . . I've never heard them claim to have visited the Land.

you still haven't satisfactorily explained how Linden could see Lord Foul in the fire - and see him in exactly the same appearance he has at the end of TPTP, down to carious eyes, flowing robes, majestic beard and so on

Well, maybe during the transitional moments from one "world" to the next, the symbolic lines are blurred a bit. Flowing robes, majestic beards--these are archetypal symbols of god-like beings. It wouldn't be a stretch to suppose that if she is going to hallucinate something at this point due to extreme stress and fear, that her brain might pull such an archetypal image from her subconsciousness--especially an inherently Father Figure type of image, given her past with her own father.

I find it odd that you have no trouble whatsoever with people from the "real world" summoning Lord Foul by putting their hands into the fire, as if this kind of thing happens in the real world all the time. Rather than proving the reality of the fantasy world, doesn't this instead undermine the reality of the "real" world?

Actually, TWL doesn't say summon, it says create. "He stood blood limned with his arms folded across his powerful chest--created by pain out of fire and self-abandonment." Surely this is symbolic of a major theme: the evil of suicide, and hence the god-like Father Figure halluncination?

Anyway, I think it is important to remember that Covenant's "real" world is just as much a fantasy world as the Land. Foul "appearing" in it doesn't make him any more real. In fact, SRD has said that, in a sense, the Land is MORE real than Covenant's world. So how does Foul's appearance in a "less real" world make his existence in the "more real" Land, well, real?

It's obvious that we can go round and round on this issue. And that's because SRD built his fictional world to make this possible. By assuming the Land is physically, literally real, you ignore all the reasons why SRD did that in the first place. Was he just kidding after all?

[Zarathustra]

Wayfriend, well said. I agree in a sense. I don't think it is either dream or literally real. And while I agree that he is creating a complex work of art, I don't necessarily think he violates the rules he has set up by intentionally making it inconsistent. Or maybe a better way to say it is that the intentional inconsistencies can be understood on a higher level . . . which is what you are saying, I think. Maybe the points where the consistency apparently breaks down are put there intentionally to make us think on this higher, less literal level.

Your dove example was great. We readily accept symbolism in more "mundane" writing. Why not in fantasy?

[Nerdanel]

I don't see any inconsistencies and I don't think SRD would cheapen his creation that way. Taking all the very significant real-world mysterious events and explaining them as our heroes' wild imaginings would turn the entire thing an essentially irrelevant exercise in toying with the reader. I for one think that all that weird stuff is vastly more implausible and improbable as series of delusions than if these events really happened in an internally consistent fantasy world.

What is happening is I think result of the Arch of Time weakening. The Arch of Time does not only affect the Land, but also the so-called "real world" (which very importantly is not OUR real world). When Laws get broken, Lord Foul gains the possibility of reaching to the "real world" ever more and breaking the local Laws which in the normal course of things wouldn't allow any sort of magic. The end of the Land would mean an end of the world for the fantasy world called the "real world" too.

[Buckarama]

I think just because of the other people in the land proves that the land is more than a dream. I mean the entire LC are NOT from TC's POV.

This in itself tells me there is something to the Land other than it's a "dream"

[wayfriend]

The end of the Land would mean an end of the world for the fantasy world called the "real world" too.

[Dagonet]

Do any of these (admittedly very complicated) issues get simplified if we posit the Chronicles as the story of a man who falls into his own novel(s)? While we're told almost nothing about TC's first book, the description of "Or I Will Sell My Soul For Guilt" ("innocence is a wonderful thing except for the fact that it's impotent--guilt is power. Power for good, mind you--only the damned can be saved") sounds like a dead-ringer for The Land under the Sunbane.

Cheers,

Dagonet

[Xar]

I'd think that Covenant would have noticed it if any of his novels bore too many resemblances to the Land or its plight. Furthermore, Covenant's concept of "Or I Will Sell My Soul For Guilt" obviously derives from his experiences in the First Chronicles, where ultimately it was his sense of guilt over his early actions, such as the rape of Lena, that enabled him to face Foul and defeat him in an attempt to make restitution, among other things.

[Nerdanel]

There's not much evidence either way, but I've always thought Covenant wrote mainstream novels, of the serious literary kind even, after the first one at least.

- The absence of mention of any kind of genre could indicate that Covenant wrote in the literary non-genre genre (the genre that dares not call itself a genre).
- A lowly genre author probably wouldn't necessarily have gotten the adulation of the rural book clubs even if he was a local. Though, Covenant did write a bestseller.
- Not writing "proper" novels would in fact have been yet another reason for the towsfolk to be suspicious of Covenant, but the list of reasons does not mention that. (Being a leper, not going to church, and having money are mentioned.)
- "Or I Would Sell My Soul for Guilt" does not sound like a fantasy title or any other genre title for that matter. I think it sounds like a "serious" mainstream title. (No non-metaphorical souls would be sold in the actual book, of course.)

[Xar]

There's not much evidence either way, but I've always thought Covenant wrote mainstream novels, of the serious literary kind even, after the first one at least.

- The absence of mention of any kind of genre could indicate that Covenant wrote in the literary non-genre genre (the genre that dares not call itself a genre).
- A lowly genre author probably wouldn't necessarily have gotten the adulation of the rural book clubs even if he was a local. Though, Covenant did write a bestseller.
- Not writing "proper" novels would in fact have been yet another reason for the towsfolk to be suspicious of Covenant, but the list of reasons does not mention that. (Being a leper, not going to church, and having money are mentioned.)
- "Or I Would Sell My Soul for Guilt" does not sound like a fantasy title or any other genre title for that matter. I think it sounds like a "serious" mainstream title. (No non-metaphorical souls would be sold in the actual book, of course.)

Agreed.

[Buckarama]

TC wrote 2 best sellers I thought. I could be worng though.

[Zarathustra]

In researching for another thread, I've been rereading Donaldson's essay on Epic Fantasy. I don't think this has ever been quoted before on this site, so I'll do so here. All emphasis is mine.

Put simply, fantasy is a form of fiction in which the internal crises or conflicts or processes of the characters are dramatized as if they were external individuals or events. Crudely stated, this means that in fantasy the characters meet themselves - or parts of themselves, their own needs/problems/exigencies - as actors on the stage of the story, and so the internal struggle to deal with those needs/problems/exigencies is played out as an external struggle in the action of the story. A somewhat oversimplified way to make the same point is by comparing fantasy to realistic, mainstream fiction. In realistic fiction, the characters are expressions of their world, whereas in fantasy the world is an expressions of the characters. Even if you argue that realistic fiction is about the characters, and that the world they live in is just one tool to express them, it remains true that the details which make up their world come from a recognized body of reality – tables, chairs, jobs, stresses which we all acknowledge as being external and real, forceful on their own terms. In fantasy, however, the ultimate justification for all the external details arises from the characters themselves. The characters confer reality on their surroundings.

This is obviously true in "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant." The villain of the piece, Lord Foul, is a personified evil whose importance hinges explicitly on the fact that he is a part of Thomas Covenant. On some level, Covenant despises himself for his leprosy - so in the fantasy he meets that Despite from the outside; he meets Lord Foul and wrestles with him as an external enemy

Also:

In "real" terms, of course, the only thing that really happens to Thomas Covenant - at least in the first three books - is that he gets knocked out a few times and wakes up willing to go on living.

This essay is fascinating. In it, SRD argues that his books are popular because they reintroduce the epic back into the literay landscape, something that had been missing for a century. Even for Tolkien, the "epic" was explicitly separate from the real world ("it's not allegory!"). For this reason, SRD purposefully chose a "real" human from our world as his main character, connecting the epic with the real again. He takes a real, mundane, flawed character and surrounds hims with epic characters. And Covenant comes away from the experience enriched because he allows himself to dream again, to cherish and love and have hope, to reject the futility and meaninglessness of life.

he learns to accept his life, affirm his spirit - to acknowledge the value of the things he loves and believes in, the things that seduce him, the epic vision.

[danlo]

Sorry to keep following you around with Camus quotes,

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

...but to me this one supports the last line of your SRD quote in Salvatore's book. (5 best sellers--I believe--he wrote 4 more between Chrons 1 & 2)

[Zarathustra]

Don't be sorry. I think Camus is relevant to TCTC.

[Nerdanel]

Once again, I think there are three worlds involved here.

1) Our world in which the story of Thomas Covenant is fictional and SRD needs to write about other worlds in which internal events can be externalized.

2) The "real world" which looks at first identical to our world, but then supernatural events take place and the overwhelming preponderance of evidence reveals the "real world" to be a fantasy world.

3) The Land, an out-and-out fantasy world that can be said to exist in the same universe as the "real world" but on a different plane of existence, or something.

Lord Foul can make appearances in the "real world" too...

[Insanity Falls]

And I'm afraid that your explanation about the mental instability of Joan makes no sense: she herself tells Covenant, once she has drunk his blood, "he hates you" referring to Lord Foul. Who else would have been "he"?

Roger! Roger! Roger!
(disclaimer - I don't have the book to check the consistency of that idea)

... the whole drinking blood thing could not be explained by mental instability, because it psychologically has nothing to do with any feelings of guilt for having left Covenant.

Erm ... couldn't she be deliberately trying to share in Covenant's leprosy, out of crazy guilt?

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Imagine that the First Chronicles are an essay trumpetting the validity and worth of fiction and fantasy in general. An essay that boldy states that every fiction and fantasy and dreaming is unreal, *and yet*, and still, and nevertheless, how we react to it, and "act" in it, is of critical, pyschophysical importance.

After climaxing this essay in "and the white prevailed", SRD has established with the reader the validity of having fantasy elements in a story (and that now also includes having fantasy elements in the "real world part" of SRD's Covenant story!).

In reading any further into the Chronicles, we are recommended to think of all fantasy elements in these terms.

Thus from the salvationary ending of the first chronicles, we are all ready to accept, and appreciate, fantastical elements in *any* further progression of the story.

It is therefore supremely cool of Mr. Donaldson to overtly bring "impossible elements" into the "real world" setting so blatantly in 2C (and even more so in 3C) after having having to treat that as anathema throughout the 1C.

And when I say "supremely cool", I mean TREMENDOUSLY cool! And funny!

And it is *very* funny that people are debating real/unreal after 1C.

SRD aint kidding when he indicates that the story has *so* left that behind!





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IMO the author invites us, throughout 1C, to carry the consciousness of the unreality of the story predominantly in our minds as we read it.


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Imagine that the First Chronicles are an essay trumpetting the validity and worth of fiction and fantasy in general. An essay that boldy states that every fiction and fantasy and dreaming is unreal, *and yet*, and still, and nevertheless, how we react to it, and "act" in it, is of critical, pyschophysical importance

Of course, every reader is free to accept or reject the contention of this "essay", (not to mention my intepretation!)

I am in two minds about the contention of this "essay" myself.
*Very* often I think that fantasy is worthless, and excisive realistic thinking is absolutely necessary, and that engaging in "fantasy" is dangerous. (Only in writing this have I noticed that this is almost the essence of Covenant's attitude!)

And yet I also know that we spend a great deal of our lives dreaming, and what happens in our dreams *does* impact our activities in our real lives. (And what I see, and how I react to, watching "Battlestar Galactica", effects how I react to things in real life). Joss Whedon is shouting in my memory now that "I want to invade people's dreams!"

And so there it is!
Dreaming is dangerous/invaluable.
And dreaming and imagining *can* impact the real world!

[Zarathustra]

SRD aint kidding when he indicates that the story has *so* left that behind!

Yeah, left it so far behind that it's the first thing the characters talk about when they get in the Land in TWL.

I think that SRD's comments about the reality issue no longer mattering reflects a change in what's he's personally interested in exploring, not that it is no longer matters in an ontological sense. He doesn't need it as a means to develop the characters, because doubt is an issue Covenant himself has overcome. TC doesn't need doubt anymore to protect him from the seductive fantasy of the Land.

However, some people here are treating SRD's shift in focus as proof that the reality issue has been solved, that we can now safely assume the Land is real. This is completely different from saying that the reality issue doesn't matter anymore for his narrative goals.

SRD's shift in focus doesn't invalidate the issues of the first Chronicles. He just moves on to new issues without ever resolving the reality problem. His "answer" to this problem isn't a solution to it, but a way to ignore it, to diminish it's importance because his narrative interests have shifted.

In our own lives, we, too, can go about our activities without worrying about the reality of our world--most of us do this all the time. But it doesn't mean that the enigma at the center of our being has disappeared just because we have shifted our focus upon more "mundane" aspects of our being. Certain activities--e.g., going to the grocery--simply do not require the question to be asked. But this doesn't mean that our little trip to the store isn't built upon more fundamental layers which we are taking for granted. We are at each moment engaged with our own being-in-the-world, even if we choose not to think about it.

I choose to think about it. That's just me.

[Cmdr_Floyd]

To put it simply....at first Covenant thought the Land was a dream....in the end he accepted the dream and to him the Land was real.... 'nuff said