Great thread! I'm blown away by the initial post. Not much I could possibly add, so I'll just offer this, the core of which I wrote the other day after watching a critique of the Chronicles on YouTube and scrolling through the comments. It's sort of a personal account of my own encounter with the New Epic.
Reading Lord of the Rings at the age of 12 made me feel something had been restored to me that I'd never known was missing. Reading the first four Covenant books at 19 made me feel
I could be restored.
Originally read these books in 1977. I was 18. Found Covenant frustrating rather than unlikable.
He was a broken, wounded animal fighting for his sanity and his life. I felt sorry for him. I wonder how I'll feel after 47 yrs. About to find out.
– @Splucked, commenting on Library Ladder's YouTube video, “Are The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant Essential Reading?” (emphasis mine)
Probably the best thumbnail description of Covenant at the beginning I've ever seen.
At 19 when I first read the books, I not only felt sorry for him—I identified with him.
Because I too was broken and wounded and fighting. I didn't realize it because I had never been anything else, but I felt it very keenly. “Seeing” someone else go through this fight, the way only a novel can show it to you; seeing that person go through several hells and emerge with a smile—because they are alive—made it not only possible but permissible to continue my own battle, which wasn't simply with “mental illness.” There probably could, maybe even should, have been a diagnosis involved, but the threats to my sanity and life, as to Covenant's, were also cultural, moral, and at least partly self inflicted: existential in the true sense of the word.
And hey, if this guy could get through it...
I would like to say I was horrified at the rape scene, but in all honesty, it didn't shock me. The scene, and the pages leading up to it where an experienced reader who can bear to look can see it coming, have gotten harder to read over the years, especially knowing how it will affect both characters. But what truly upsets me now is not only my lack of reaction back then, but the reason for it.
It wasn't that I didn't understand what had happened. I knew what rape was. In fact, I had been taught all my life that every man, without exception--even my gentle father and generally protective older brother--were rapists at heart and by nature. As men, they just couldn't help it.
As a woman--and especially, a girl--it was up to me to prevent them from acting on it. Simply being alone with a man, I was taught, implied that I wanted to have sex with him, and as a “good girl” I wasn't supposed to want that until my wedding night. I was supposed to be simultaneously as attractive as possible, in order to “catch” a husband, and always on guard in order to protect the men around me from acting on their own terrible urges.
Leprosy might have been easier.
So it didn't surprise me at all that poor, innocent, star-struck Lena, who had obviously never been given such crucial instruction—the Land was different from our world, indeed—fell to harm upon going into a dark place with a strange man. It's not that I felt she got what she deserved; I just felt sorry for her, that she didn't know any better.
And to my shame, I identified so strongly with Covenant that I didn't really feel the severity of what he had done. I felt the intensity of his relief; I understood having strong desires thwarted, could imagine how sweet would be the release. But because I had been taught this was just the way all men are, I didn't really understand how wrong it was, to take that release from someone who didn't know any better, to take his rage out on her in that particular way. I didn't even stop to think about it. Like him, I just kept going, to find out what happened and how he got through all this. Because on some level, I urgently needed to know.
Looking back on that time, it astonishes me that it was only a matter of weeks before personal, real world experience changed my view on such things. Part of my own torment came from questioning everything I had been taught, on a level that in hindsight went beyond simple adolescent testing of boundaries. Some of those teachings were so plainly wrong—the overt racism of my parents' pre-Civil Rights Movement South, for instance—that I felt compelled to question all of it, in deed as well as thought. I went into dark places with strange people, literally and metaphorically. Once or twice I suffered similar harm as Lena did. Not metaphorically. I learned my own brand of caution, for my own reasons.
Those incidents happened in the few months between reading Lord Foul's Bane and the rest of First Chronicles, plus Wounded Land, which I think had just come out in paperback. My experience didn't affect my opinion of Covenant. I didn't come out of denial about what had happened for several more years, didn't yet name it as rape, let alone connect it with that scene in the book. But my woundedness and sense of fighting for my life were amplified, enhancing my identification. Wounded Land in particular gave me some concepts and catchphrases useful for survival. Caamora. “Run. Fight if we have to. Live.”
Without knowing it, in reading about Covenant's journey of moral recovery, I had begun my own.
It's still going on.
Over the years, I re-read the first six books several times, usually at moments when I needed to get back to the basics of who I am. They were so formative for me, reading them again served as a reminder of where I had come from and what I was about.
Each re-reading brought new insights, new watchwords. “There is also love in the world.” I continued to grow and learn, but it wasn't until I finally braved Last Chronicles that I could appreciate these books as something more than just a personal touchstone. Reading Donaldson's other works, as well as Last Chronicles, has put some things in perspective for me.
Watching the Library Ladder videos, I had the sense that the critic onscreen was missing something, possibly several very important things. Reading wayfriend's initial post, re-reading Donaldson's essay, it strikes me that the videos were critiquing simply on the level of craft while ignoring the far more important—and impressive—level of artistry. It's that level, the deeper currents of thought, that impresses me most about Donaldson's work. Are there flaws in his writing? Of course. Does that negate the enormous value of it? Of course not.
Wayfriend makes the point in the initial post that
The fantasy world here is not walled off from us; it is accessible, because it is only a metaphor...In a sense, anyone who understands the metaphor can go there. Because anyone who understands what the Chronicles shows us can learn from it and apply it to their own lives.
Most of the critics who dismiss Donaldson on the basis of craft and style—reliance on deus-ex-machina, all those obscure words—seem to be missing the metaphor. It's not only the rape scene that's “divisive.” If you get the metaphor, the flaws are easy to live with. If you don't, they become inexcusable, because style and craft are all you're looking at. Which is a shame--there's so much more here, and it really can change, or even save, your life.
That said, one of my favorite parts of the Gradual Interview--and one of the best responses to the inevitable fan-gush of “You saved my life!” I've ever heard--was when Donaldson said something like: You saved your own life. I'm just glad my words were there to help.
Me too. Other, more specific help came along later, but Donaldson's words were among the first, and I remain very grateful for that.