(Apparently) SRD wrote:
"I am not going to play some authorial trick on you where TC at the end of the story, turns out to be both the Creator and the Despiser himself. That doesn't mean he isn't, it just means I'm not going to play some authorial trick on you. It would be difficult to argue that TC is the despiser."
Though this does indeed sound like classic Donaldson, a link would be nice. You said you
watched these? We wouldn't be lucky enough to find something like that on Youtube, would we? A quick search for "Stephen R Donaldson" revealed nothing.
Don't get me wrong, I don't doubt that it's actually him. This is exactly the kind of "answer" he'd give--one that requires a bit of consideration, and doesn't say exactly what one might assume. For instance, if he actually wants to eliminate the possibility that TC = LF or Creator, why would he go to the trouble of adding that middle part? He is deliberately, explicitly making the distinction between
revealingthat TC = LF or Creator via some authorial trick, and the
possibility of TC = LF or Creator. TC could be LF (or rather, LF could be a part of TC) in a way that didn't involve some authorial trick.
What would some "authorial trick" be? We certainly can't infer that this trick is the linkage of these characters, as you seem to imply. In fact, the only thing we can know for certain is that an "authorial trick"
can't include this linkage, because he went to the trouble of
explicitly distinguishing the two. However, I believe your argument depends on just that interpretation: i.e. that Donaldson has confirmed the fact that TC does not = LF or Creator, when in fact all he has done is reveal a fact about how he would go about
treating such a linkage (if one exists--which I believe it does, see below).
An authorial trick would be having Covenant wake up in the real world after a dream and look in the mirror and see two "fang eyes" in a cloud of smoke. Or, having Foul escape to the real world and become (or look just like) Covenant. In other words, any event where they literally meld together into one person, or are directly perceived as being the same person in the real world. That's a cheap trick.
This doesn't, however, eliminate the interpretation that Lord Foul is a symbol for Covenant's (and perhaps everyone's) own self-hatred. That is not an authorial trick. It's not a gimmick. That's simply the story he was trying to tell. But it would violate the rules of this story, and the symbolic integrity, for this metaphorical boundary to be crossed in the other direction such that characters from the Land are literally real in Covenant's "real" world.
In the essay, Epic Fantasy in the Modern World, p 7, SRD wrote:
. . . In realistic fiction, the characters are expressions of their world, whereas in fantasy the world is an expressions of the characters. . . .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.
www.stephenrdonaldson.com/EpicFantasy.pdf
