On the subject of Reality

[wayfriend]

No!!!! Don't get lurch going about Lost!!!!

[shadowbinding shoe]

Okay..okay..I got it..Linden is clinically dead. her heart has stopped beating but the ambulance is still a few minutes from the hospital.. The medics pull out the stops,, They shoot a huge needle of adreailn into her heart.. They pull out the padddles..CLEAR!! ZAP!! Linden convulses , she coughs and a large bubble of blood red comes out of her mouth..POP!...Linden lives!

Okay maybe not..but the idea that the first thing out of her mouth in " reality" would be a color bubble...just strikes me as .....vile.

lol

But to really transcend all previous rules and expectations I believe what Donaldson would do is give us a reformed Sheriff Lytton. Covenant is in despair for his inability to act, Linden feels totally inadequate, Roger is laughing maniacally as he burns Andalain to ashes and Joan is opening one last caesure big enough for Lord Foul to escape from his prison but just as everything is about to crumble, Sheriff Lytton appears. Instead of a rifle he holds a treasure berry bush and he's singing Kum Ba Yah. Covenant weeps as he finally receives love and acceptance and gives his ring to the Sheriff, Linden plants her Staff in the ground and turns it into a new One Tree Forest, Roger fiery hand wilts and Joan regain her sanity.

[amanibhavam]

Recently I have been contemplating a theory (okay, that's too posh a word for this hazy idea) that allows for a reconciliation of the "Land is a dream" and "Land is real" ideas - it being that the Creator is truly a Creator, who has created the Land and its inhabitants out of the raw materials found in Covenant's and Linden's memories and personalities.

Just a thought, it can probably be refuted a thousand different ways, but I like it nonetheless:)

[Rocksister]

amanibhavam, you've been in the springwine again, but I like your theory. Quite innovative and worthy of some serious consideration. Since Linden and Covenant were both chosen, it makes sense that the reason they were is that the entire scenario was created from them. Awesome theorizing, amanibhavam, and pass the jug!!

[Krazy Kat]

I met Stephen Donaldson last September at a booksigning in Waterstone's here in England. After he read a passage from The Runes, (he didn't wish take anything away from Fatal Revenant), he invited the audiance to ask him questions. There wasn't a large crowd and it suddenly struck me that I probably wouldn't have another opportunity like this - so I raised my hand!

Now I'm sure, if I'd thought long and hard about it, I might have come up with a more intelligent question, but before I knew what I was doing my mouth popped open, and I blurted out..."How did you find it, the wild magic?"

After a long, and scary pause, he said that he had giants looking over his shoulder when he wrote the Covenant story. He mentioned J.R.Tolkein: I understood what he meant.( I'm sure L.Frank Baum was one of those giants too? ). He talked about actually having a shack next to a real Righter's Creek, and also, to truly understand a character he had to walk around in his shoes. He also talked about himself and his wife choosing white gold for their wedding rings. Then finally he said that he hoped my question had been answered.

I thought at the time that he was being slightly evasive. In hindsight, he had answered my question the best way he knew how. Actually, it wasn't really important - It was just my clumsy way of saying..."Thanks, Mr.Donaldson. I believe you."

Is the Land real? Stephen Donaldson certainly thinks so.

It seems to me the keystone is the wild magic. If such a thing can exist in our world, then by reflection, so does the Land.

[amanibhavam]

amanibhavam, you've been in the springwine again, but I like your theory. Quite innovative and worthy of some serious consideration. Since Linden and Covenant were both chosen, it makes sense that the reason they were is that the entire scenario was created from them. Awesome theorizing, amanibhavam, and pass the jug!!

amanibhavam in springwine, now there's a thought! might be even more potent than mithrim plus diamondraught...

[Zarathustra]

Krazy Kat, nice story, good question. Giants over his shoulder--great answer.

Yes, I think he believes the Land is "real." After all, he writes about what it means to be human . . . and I'm pretty sure he thinks humans are real.

Now, exactly how the Land relates to "what it means to be human" is the entire source of the problem here--how to describe that complex relationship between TC in the Land, TC out of the Land, and both relationships as they relate to Our Land.

[Krazy Kat]

Hi Malik - I found it too difficult to comment on what you wrote so here's a few thoughts and ideas. You'll find they stray from the subject but there might be a nugget or two you can use. Also I'm sure when I read this again at a later date I'll cringe, fall into despair, contemplate suicide, turn to drink and drugs, and wind up living on a park bench crusty with vomit. OK, I'm exaggerating...

If Thomas Covenant's name translates to: Thomas, as in, Doubting Thomas, and Covenant to represent the gift of God, therein might be the problem you have posed. Does the Land exist? Is the wild magic real?Does God exist?How can we formulate evidence to substantiate these questions? Let's suppose that Thomas Covenant must always follow his path of disbelief. Without it, the story would lose direction or we would get fed up hearing him disbelieve, then believe, then disbelieve...and so forth. His state of belief then has to be magical so that we can share his experience ourselves, and this happens simply because we care about him and can relate to his trials and tribulations. Covenant has an effect on us if we allow him to.

If Thomas Covenant's leprosy symbolizes an impure spot which sits inside every human being, and which can also render the soul into a state of numbness, then the wild magic is the cure. It simply burns away the spot. Christians call this spot the original sin and say it will be removed by God as they enter Heaven. No doubt it will be, but I for one prefer more practical measures of dealing with what I suspect is a product of Lord Foul's magnifying glass. Here we see the fictional character stretching out his hand into the real world, and another who has just left in a taxi back to Haven Farm.

I've often thought the Land has it's roots in Oz more than in Middle Earth. Maybe because I can see the similarities between Lord Foul and the merry Wizard. Is Lord Foul just the guy behind the curtain, pulling all the levers to make his laughter like the "crushing of boulders", and his voice boom like thunder? And yet the Despiser always has a knack of throwing me off balance, catching me unaware, and scaring the living daylights out of me. After I read Reave the Just I knew that Foul would return with a few more nasty surprises I really wasn't going to enjoy. Which isn't so differant to a child being scared witless by an old hag on a broomstick. In Oz the message was, "there's no place like home". Can we use the same premise regarding the Land?

When I made the previous post I was thinking about how the two gold rings are used to express a viewpoint. Writer's use elements of our own world to focus their ideas, so they can give words to what essentially can't be described. For instance, the diamond ring that occurs during a total eclipse of the sun and the moon, or a rainbow appearing in the sky after rainfall, are both phenomena which can't happen without the combination of the two. Though they may never fail to amaze us, we accept these events as real. We live in a world that functions primarily on reality which unfortunately has made magic extinct. Well, almost. I think we read these books to catch glimpses of the magical so that they can take us back to a time when magic was commonplace. Like our childhood. There's comfort in knowing that we can always close the book, do some work, pay the bills, muddle through the mundane - but I'm always left with an impression of well being, a sense of enhancement, something I can't quite put my finger on that draws me back to the fireside chair to read some more.

Maybe we have to investigate the relationship between Thomas Covenant and Lord Mhoram. There must be many clues in their discussions on reality versus dream. I think that High Lord Elena and Bannor might also hold some revelations on this subject. Elena's marrowmeld sculpture looked more like Bannor than it did Covenant. Which isn't really surprising, boggle-eyed as she was. As she was moulding it she must have been thinking of Covenant but looking at Bannor. And the bust was a source of deep thought for Mhoram. I'm wondering if he saw the pure white heart of a flame within the sculpture and made an intuitive leap towards the secret of the Ritual of Desecration. Does this mean that Elena had already figured it out: the white gold and proof that Thomas Covenant wasn't dreaming? It makes me now think that Elena was given a capital E when she became the High Lord. Did she ever call him father? I'll have to check that out later, my train of thought just rushed into a tunnel!

[thewormoftheworld'send]

I certainly don't agree with Donaldson in his explanations.
His definition of "fantasy" is bogus (just as in the Afterword to The Real Story his distinction between "drama" and "melodrama" was bogus.)

There is evidence that the Land is real. Not the strange behavior of some of the people in the "real" world: the Creator appears there and so does Lord Foul in the flames at the cult ritual. Foul's influence on the cult members is also very real. The ring didn't transfer from Covenant's finger to Linden's hand by some real world magic that doesn't exist anyway. Donaldson is being really disengenuous in explanations such as these.

I find that, to a great extent, when Donaldson answers certain question in his GI about the Covenant novels he falls back into the realm of the average reader trying to interpret, in this case, his own writings from the perspective of decades, because the books are no longer fresh in his mind.

Jeff, excellent post. I'll have to chew on that one for a while. You gave me a lot to think about.


Shadowbinding Shoe, I don't think SRD was saying the Land is literally a place of Platonic Forms. I think he was trying to give an example of how to think about the issue of its reality. You are right that the Land is full of death and dying (though Lord Foul is at least immortal), and this is inconsistent with a literal interpretation of the Land as Platonic.

You asked for links, but I don't have any handy. I have some quotes I saved in Word files.

. . . the Land clearly exists in a different kind or order of reality than Covenant's "real world". In the Platonic sense, the Land is *more* real than Covenant's "real world."

I disagree emphatically with your central assertion (that the "reality" of the Land has been absolutely confirmed). When I said that "unreality/reality" is no longer relevant, I was speaking of the themes of the story: in crude terms, after the first trilogy Covenant and Linden don't *care* whether the Land is real or not. But I insist that I'm still playing by the same rules which govern the first trilogy. I believe that there is nothing in Covenant's/Linden's "real" world which unequivocally confirms the Land's independent existence (I mean independent of their perception of it). Sure, there are a number of people in the "real" world (in both "The Second Chronicles" and "The Last Chronicles") who behave pretty strangely. And sure, no one in Linden's "reality" knows how Joan keeps getting out of her restraints. But "the Land and Lord Foul are 'real'" is not the only *possible* explanation for those things. Meanwhile, what happens to Covenant and Linden in the Land never has any material, physical effect on their subsequent "real" lives--a detail which implies the "unreality" of their experiences in the Land.

And remember, I'm dealing with a "reality" which is inextricably bound to the mind(s) of my protagonist(s). According the rules I've created, we simply *can't* have the Land without Covenant/Linden. It really would be cheating if I suddenly announced, "OK, I was just kidding about that whole maybe-it's-not-real, you-are-the-white-gold shtick. Let's pretend it never happened."

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.

[deer of the dawn]

I really didn't agree with SRD's definition of Fantasy, either. He takes one possible literary element and overextends it. Still I wouldn't be too critical. I think people in general tend to get excited about an idea and see it in everything for a while. If you asked him the same question today, the answer may be different (although he'd deny it vehemently).

[thewormoftheworld'send]

I really didn't agree with SRD's definition of Fantasy, either. He takes one possible literary element and overextends it. Still I wouldn't be too critical. I think people in general tend to get excited about an idea and see it in everything for a while. If you asked him the same question today, the answer may be different (although he'd deny it vehemently).

Yes, exactly, and that's a good example. In fact, it is easy to see that SRD is only defining things in terms of the way he writes books. I believe he said that in fantasy writing the character creates the world, while in non-fantasy the world creates the character. I'm certain that's true of his Chronicles, in which Covenant's "real" world creates his problems, whereas the fantasy world is his own creation. It almost goes without saying that a "fantasy" is someone's creation, that's why it's fantasy in the first place, so I can see his point from that perspective. But still, that is not the case with other books in the fantasy genre.

[Krazy Kat]

I know I'm stating the obvious, but Thomas Covenant is a fictional character from a fictional world. The fact that he happens to be a novelist makes him the perfect instrument to channel Stephen Donaldson's point of view, who of course lives in the real world. Thomas Covenant is the direct link between the fantasy, the fiction, and the reality.

I read somewhere that when J.R.Tolkein was asked if the war in Middle Earth was an analogy to the Great War 1914-1918, he replied that it wasn't but as a writer he had to draw on his personal experiences. As an officer Tolkein would have had a batman and this could be why Sam follows Frodo - or perhaps not. Although - when they see the faces of the dead kings in the Marshes then I can begin to understand the meaning of the growing weight of the ring that he bears, and recognize the comparison to the poor unfortunate souls who lost their lives in the trenches. The emotional venture these stories contain can make them real.

I will continue to wave the banner. (What's actually written on it I will keep to myself.)

[thewormoftheworld'send]

I know I'm stating the obvious, but Thomas Covenant is a fictional character from a fictional world. The fact that he happens to be a novelist makes him the perfect instrument to channel Stephen Donaldson's point of view, who of course lives in the real world. Thomas Covenant is the direct link between the fantasy, the fiction, and the reality.

I read somewhere that when J.R.Tolkein was asked if the war in Middle Earth was an analogy to the Great War 1914-1918, he replied that it wasn't but as a writer he had to draw on his personal experiences. As an officer Tolkein would have had a batman and this could be why Sam follows Frodo - or perhaps not. Although - when they see the faces of the dead kings in the Marshes then I can begin to understand the meaning of the growing weight of the ring that he bears, and recognize the comparison to the poor unfortunate souls who lost their lives in the trenches. The emotional venture these stories contain can make them real.

Subjectively real, yes. But then you have SRD in his GI railing against Creator questions, questions about the Bloodguard wives, people aching to know more about the mission to Seareach - as if these things were all real. And so there is a certain danger in blurring the distinction between subjective and objective reality, in which fiction begins to appear as non-fiction to some of his readers. I don't see SRD as intending to create such confusion in the minds of his readers, but only as he says, to entertain them by creating exciting novels.

So to put your last statement in more precise terms, the emotional venture these stories contain can make them appear real. And that's the problem with some fiction. But, staying on track with your first comment above, who would have thought this was possible through a character such as Thomas Covenant?

I think it's because readers project their own fantasies onto the character about what they want to happen, what they want TC to do. And they are hoping, in the long run, to get their fantasy fulfilled, this is what draws them in deeper and keeps them reading. They want TC to DO something, and the fact that he doesn't is maddening. In effect, they want TC to perform the unrealistic act of believing in the Land and in his own reality at the same time, an act which would surpass the limits imposed upon him by his leprosy in the "real" world.

Well, they got their wish with Hile Troy, and we all know what happened to him...

The lesson (which SRD was not necessarily intending to portray) through TC's example is therefore not to treat fantasy as objectively real. Let it remain on the subjective, emotional level, and when you put the novel down, forget about it and return to your normal plane of existence. A bit of escapism is fine, but even TC with his leprosy had the courage to resist the temptation to believe in the reality of the Land, and so should we.

[Vraith]

Hee hee...I hope you all noticed that srd called his own definition both "crude" and "oversimplified"...this is a fun topic, but I dare anybody to define "fantasy" in less than 1,000,000 words and make everybody happy.
J---------------

[thewormoftheworld'send]

Hee hee...I hope you all noticed that srd called his own definition both "crude" and "oversimplified"...this is a fun topic, but I dare anybody to define "fantasy" in less than 1,000,000 words and make everybody happy.
J---------------

I searched the GI and could not find SRD calling his definition crude and oversimplified. It is definitely self-referential and idiosyncratic.

However, I could answer my own post with this from the GI:

Covenant's final confrontation with LF in "The Power that Preserves" *does* represent an absolute commitment--with absolutely everything at stake (for himself as well as for the Land). But that commitment is not, "Yes, the Land is real," or "No, the Land is not real." His commitment might be (crudely) paraphrased as, "I don't care whether the Land is real or not. It has become desperately important to me. In fact, it *is* me whether it exists objectively or not. And I've done terrible harm to it--as I have to myself. So I'm willing to sacrifice everything and anything, including my life, in an effort to counter that harm with affirmation."

So what is the lesson there, if any? Probably nothing.

[lurch]

..The only " thing" that is real in TCoTC..is the feelings evoked by the author from the reader. Those feelings once experienced by the reader..essentially the reader experiencing his or her's own Truth,,is the only " real" reality. All else is just the means the author uses to that end. The Land is an ethereal place located somewhere in the infinite globe of Imagination. The small town and the farm etc etc , how " real are they,?, oh gee,, look a old fart in an ochre robe popping out of nowhere and spouting dire tests to come..etc,,,

I CAN understand how it is the author gets upset with questions about the realness of the land,,and the Haruchai wives etc etc,,From his point of view,,the questioner is missing the forest for the trees. Its like somebody looking at a Salvador Dali painting and asking,,do clocks really melt like that?..what makes the clock melt like that?..is that real?
Donaldson's defining of Fantasy is very close to Surrealism. So, imho,,there you are ..What is fantasy literature?..A form of Surrealism.

[thewormoftheworld'send]

..The only " thing" that is real in TCoTC..is the feelings evoked by the author from the reader. Those feelings once experienced by the reader..essentially the reader experiencing his or her's own Truth,,is the only " real" reality. All else is just the means the author uses to that end. The Land is an ethereal place located somewhere in the infinite globe of Imagination. The small town and the farm etc etc , how " real are they,?, oh gee,, look a old fart in an ochre robe popping out of nowhere and spouting dire tests to come..etc,,,

I CAN understand how it is the author gets upset with questions about the realness of the land,,and the Haruchai wives etc etc,,From his point of view,,the questioner is missing the forest for the trees. Its like somebody looking at a Salvador Dali painting and asking,,do clocks really melt like that?..what makes the clock melt like that?..is that real?
Donaldson's defining of Fantasy is very close to Surrealism. So, imho,,there you are ..What is fantasy literature?..A form of Surrealism.

Once again, I see him defining "fantasy" in terms of SRD himself when there is a ton of fantasy out there that is totally unlike SRD's. There is definitely solipsism, in terms of Covenant dreaming up the Land. But SRD says in the GI that Covenant's "real" world controls Covenant. That however doesn't explain Lord Foul's influence upon the "real" world or the appearance of the Creator in that world.

Sometimes I just think that SRD did not, in the beginning, expect his readers to put this much thought into his works, and of course he didn't expect them to be published at all. We are supposed to just travel along with SRD and not venture beyond the text, because there is nothing beyond the text itself until SRD himself dreams it up.

It becomes obvious that the Creator is SRD himself in the novels. My reasoning is backed up by the fact that at the end of the first Chronicles the Creator offered Covenant a chance to live out his remaining years in the Land. This would have meant that he dies in the "real" world. And the Creator (SRD) makes that choice become "real."
But Covenant rejected his offer, maintaining his commitment to the "real" world and his leprosy:

The voice smiled. "It is done. You will live."

This choice is made imminently clearer in the words of the doctor attending Covenant at his bedside:

"No. Just the opposite-he's going to live. One minute he's in allergic shock, and dying from it because his body's too weak and infected and poisoned to fight back-and the next- Pulse firm, respiration regular, pupillary reactions normal, skin tone improving. I'll tell you what it is. It's a goddamn miracle, that's what it is."

We're not supposed to understand these things. It's a miracle, that is, by Deux ex Machina...

[rdhopeca]

Sometimes I just think that SRD did not, in the beginning, expect his readers to put this much thought into his works, and of course he didn't expect them to be published at all. We are supposed to just travel along with SRD and not venture beyond the text, because there is nothing beyond the text itself until SRD himself dreams it up.

I guess I don't see a problem with this. Wouldn't this be true of most fantasy authors? I don't necessarily see Covenant's "real" world as any more real than, say, the Earth that is one of the reflections of Amber. Or even the world where Rosenberg's characters come from, where members of other fantasy realms have come to play.

It becomes obvious that the Creator is SRD himself in the novels. My reasoning is backed up by the fact that at the end of the first Chronicles the Creator offered Covenant a chance to live out his remaining years in the Land. This would have meant that he dies in the "real" world. And the Creator (SRD) makes that choice become "real."
But Covenant rejected his offer, maintaining his commitment to the "real" world and his leprosy:

Quote:
The voice smiled. "It is done. You will live."


This choice is made imminently clearer in the words of the doctor attending Covenant at his bedside:

Quote:
"No. Just the opposite-he's going to live. One minute he's in allergic shock, and dying from it because his body's too weak and infected and poisoned to fight back-and the next- Pulse firm, respiration regular, pupillary reactions normal, skin tone improving. I'll tell you what it is. It's a goddamn miracle, that's what it is."


We're not supposed to understand these things. It's a miracle, that is, by Deux ex Machina...

I don't find this to be Deux ex Machina. If we accept that the Creator was in our world at the beginning of the story, and has some power to affect Covenant during the transition between his world and ours, we can accept this scenario as completely plausible. I have no problem accepting this as part of the overall story, and I don't feel that the Creator is Donaldson himself as a result.

[thewormoftheworld'send]

..how is it you find it ludicrous?...This is fantasy. The author's dogma sets the stage. Its his rules we have to read by..not ours. How can you apply your logic an reason to a authors imaginated " reality."? If the author says there is no gravity in the Land then there is no gravity in the Land.

In fantasy writing the Figurative becomes primary and it subjugates the literal. The fantasy world is NOT of logic and Reason so why does every one apply logic and reason when reading fantasy? Maybe because those are the only tools folks have been taught to use,,as if they are the Only tools to think and perceive with. Well, they are not the only tools people have to think and perceive with. Intuition is another...and just for schitts and grins,,allow me to introduce the idea that.." Love" is another possible way of "thinking and perceiving."

Any way.. Shared Dreams is just an explanation offered by one character to another of an unexplainable phenomena . That the phenomena of The Land is largley unexplainable is just as it is; a dogma of the author's that has to be accepted. Without a suspension of disbelief then the rest is also ludicrous.

The reader can find the analogous and metaphoric in what appears ludicrous in order to bridge to the understandable. Then , what is presented as the " understood" by the reader, is a reflection of the reader , not the author. This is how it should be. Perhaps TC and Linden are halves of a whole entity. You know, the male and the female side that makes up each of us, including the author...as in Yin and Yang,,X and Y chromozones...etc etc etc etc etc. Point being,,TC doesn't have a hard explanation for the LAND...because there is none. The Land is of the ethereal Fantasy realm,,not of the tangible earth reality. There is a fine as silk humor involved here by the author,,in calling this ethereal fantasy realm.ironically,,.The Land.

Nevertheless, the author should have some kind of logic to work with, even if it's only the internal logic of the book he's writing. The problem with the Covenant books is the Deux ex Machina. And that's what it is.
The Creator in the novels cannot influence events in the Land, but somehow he is able to create miracles in the "real" world, as when Covenant makes a swift comeback from the antivenin poisoning which was killing him. It is the Creator who brought Covenant back from certain death, and that is only because the Creator is SRD himself.

The question to be answered therefore is a personal one: What would you do in Covenant's place? What would you do on Kevin's Watch upon finding there is a "passenger" along for the ride? One thing you might do is state that this is a shared dream.

This is the only plausible explanation for why SRD writes the way
he does: create a real-world person and suddenly plant him in an implausible, even outlandish, situation. And give him leprosy to make it even more interesting. Different "real world" people would react differently to such an event, as did Hile Troy, with his pro-active approach to affairs in the Land. In such an experiment, we're not interested literally in how any of it is possible, we are only interested in the actions and reactions of those involved in it and who are, obviously, unaware that they are only characters in someone's fertile imagination.

Certain Deux ex Machina events are no more Deux ex Machina than the very fact that Covenant, implausible as it is, had the dream to begin with. It does, however, strain credibility since, after all, Covenant's "real" world is not a fantasy world as in LoTR and is portrayed realistically.

[thewormoftheworld'send]

Sometimes I just think that SRD did not, in the beginning, expect his readers to put this much thought into his works, and of course he didn't expect them to be published at all. We are supposed to just travel along with SRD and not venture beyond the text, because there is nothing beyond the text itself until SRD himself dreams it up.

I guess I don't see a problem with this. Wouldn't this be true of most fantasy authors? I don't necessarily see Covenant's "real" world as any more real than, say, the Earth that is one of the reflections of Amber. Or even the world where Rosenberg's characters come from, where members of other fantasy realms have come to play.

I don't see a problem with it either. But SRD's writing is different in that the "real" world in his novels, while portrayed more-or-less realistically, really isn't realistic. It is whatever SRD needs it to be at the time. He plays "fast and loose" with the logic of "reality" in order to create a more exciting and interesting experience for his readers. That is good enough for most readers, but it poses logical dilemmas for those who question it. SRD's only possible response to any of that would go something like, "It's my novel, and I can do whatever I damn well please with it!" (Not an actual quote, btw.) And in the long run, it sold well, so that proves his case at least pragmatically: he pulled off his Deux ex Machina well enough that people bought his novels in droves, his publisher was pleased, and that's all that really matters.

It becomes obvious that the Creator is SRD himself in the novels. My reasoning is backed up by the fact that at the end of the first Chronicles the Creator offered Covenant a chance to live out his remaining years in the Land. This would have meant that he dies in the "real" world. And the Creator (SRD) makes that choice become "real." But Covenant rejected his offer, maintaining his commitment to the "real" world and his leprosy:

Quote:
The voice smiled. "It is done. You will live."


This choice is made imminently clearer in the words of the doctor attending Covenant at his bedside:

Quote:
"No. Just the opposite-he's going to live. One minute he's in allergic shock, and dying from it because his body's too weak and infected and poisoned to fight back-and the next- Pulse firm, respiration regular, pupillary reactions normal, skin tone improving. I'll tell you what it is. It's a goddamn miracle, that's what it is."


We're not supposed to understand these things. It's a miracle, that is, by Deux ex Machina...

I don't find this to be Deux ex Machina. If we accept that the Creator was in our world at the beginning of the story, and has some power to affect Covenant during the transition between his world and ours, we can accept this scenario as completely plausible. I have no problem accepting this as part of the overall story, and I don't feel that the Creator is Donaldson himself as a result.

The presence of the Creator in Covenant's world, unforunately, has no other explanation. And SRD refuses to provide any such explanation as being irrelevant to his purposes. To build upon the message I just posted: it doesn't matter how the Creator got there, all that matters is that he is there.

Now, we all know that SRD puts things in his novels as he needs them, he has stated that many times in his GI. For example, he stated that Vain was invented because SRD needed him. The same could be said for the Creator. But beyond that, I would say that SRD needed him to add more plausibility to his Deux ex Machina, with the Creator acting in his place to bring Covenant back from near death in such a dramatic way. (I mean, he is literally God after all, although not necessarily the Creator of TC's world.) SRD produces excellent drama, and it would have been much less interesting but more plausible if, at the end of TPTP, Covenant had only made a very slow and difficult recovery from an illness which was touch-and-go at the time. This happens all the time, after all.