Linden's (and other characters') externalizations
Posted: Thu May 09, 2013 6:48 am
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Official Discussion Forum for the works of Stephen R. Donaldson
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Can I have your White Gold Dollars?__ wrote:[deleted]
Well said.I think discussion of the books picks up each time a new one comes out, or when a new member joins and has things to say that haven't been discussed before. Some of us who have been around for years have already said about as much as we can on these books, and don't feel the same enthusiasm for discussions where we end up repeating ourselves. However, many of us are currently rereading (as you may have noticed Cool ) and finding new things to say. So it will ebb and flow. We're gearing up for the finale of Donaldson's most famous work. I'm sure the Covenant forums will come to life in the coming months.
Pretty much how I operate as well...IrrationalSanity wrote:For what it is worth, I normally check forum sections where I notice a "new" icon lit up. Sometimes, for whatever reason, I don't get to read all of the "new" stuff on a single visit, and on my next opportunity to pass through, I again focus on what's lit, with the fact that I may have missed something from a prior visit slipping my mind.
The forum was lit, and I certainly found the title of this thread intriguing, so imagine my disappointment. Not only was the titular post gone, but so was the poster! I can only imagine what insight it might have held...
It was just your typical THOOLAH rant.IrrationalSanity wrote:! I can only imagine what insight it might have held...
Frostheart wrote:Some talk has sprouted up about the various externalizations of Linden and Covenant's traits (and lives outside the Land), so I raked my brain for some parallels I've drawn during the reading process. I couldn't absorb the exact meaning of the term externalization until over the past few months--and then figured it denotes the same concept I coined as varjominä/varjosielu ("shadow-self"). This expression arises from the traditional Finnish belief where a person possesses a multipart soul, and the shadow-self mirrors the true self in a fashion, able to manifest itself outside the body or for instance cause doppelgangers. I'm going to keep utilizing this form, as it's more familiar.
I don't know how well the topic has been perused in the misty dawn of the board, but I shall begin with Linden and half a half-handful of characters. It stands obvious that the Land became plagued by some of her internal conflicts after Foul's last defeat by laughter. The Sunbane and other cyclopean horrors cannot arise from Covenant's state alone: while he does not dance hula around Haven Farm, neither does he wallow in a black mudpuddle of anguish any sane hog would circumvent.
The First
She towers as the most distinctive shadow-self of Linden, her past echoing several of Linden's personal tragedies.
Both lost their fathers to a suicide. Whereas Brow Gnarfist sacrificed himself in a heroic, albeit despairing, attempt to save his daughter and a host of other Giants, Linden's progenitor opened his wrists in a bout of self-spite, cursing his daughter with a hatred that would pursue her for decades. A beeline, or more like a stingier waspline, might be drawn between the storm in the Soulbiter and the onset of Linden's black moods: it seems as if the very same cruel sea drags her down into its unfathomable abysses.
From out of the cracked floorboards and the untended walls had come pouring a flood of darkness. It was not there: she was still able to see everything. [. . .] She was foundering in the viscid midnight of his condemnation, and no rescue could reach her.
Gossamer's mother perished while giving birth to her, thus rendering the Swordmain, no matter how indirectly and unwittingly, the ultimate reason for the loss. "She kenned not her mother's love", Pitchwife explains, and so did not Linden. In her case, she becomes the explicit reaper by suffocating her mother in sickbed--which does not sprawl far off from the concept of childbed.
Both fall in love with an older man, a "grotesque": Covenant appears to traipse about ten years ahead of Linden, and Pitchwife must have left his apprenticeship far behind while working aboard Wavedancer, watching the young Gossamer hoard decades during the voyages. My estimate of their age difference lies somewhere between 300 and 500 years. One can even hear reverberations of Linden's sentiments in the Elohim's masquerade games in Elemesnedene: it transpired that the First loved her husband's spirit and did not cling to him due to pity. In a similar fashion, Linden accepted Covenant's leprosy.
Both possess a dark personality caking a fraying self-assurance: whereas the First elbows such flaws behind a mask of perpetual sternness and Pitchwife, whom she drags everywhere and finds a single day's separation nigh-on unbearable (or, read: Pitchwife is her confidence), Linden has her aloof, clinical professionalism, which ceases to function in the Land. If one must compile fine statistics, both also cry almost as often, in many cases due to maudlin mush: pompous poetry makes the First melt into a puddle of pink goo, Linden snuffles after catching Pitchwife's "shout of love" to the First.
In the end, while Linden does not reach the First's happily ever after including a veritable horde of kids by Giantish standards, she does return to the real world with a mended spirit, and later adopts Jeremiah. Thereafter, the 3rd Chronicles delve into the enchanting wonderland or more or less deranged or tortured offsprings. The First pops up anew as Longwrath's grandmother; Linden's adopted son is locked into the prison of his mind.
* *
I am tempted to believe that SRD uses female characters to externalize Linden's dilemmas and peculiarities. Hollian wields her eh-brand stick--later Linden becomes the rightful owner of the Staff of Law. What other aspects could she echo? How about the other ladies of the 2nd Chronicles, no matter how "insignificant"? Galewrath, Memla, the waynhim in Hamako's kresh that liked lipstick and nose-shadow? Could one extend this quest for analogies to the males? Can one discover fluttering scraps of Linden even in Honninscrave or Seadreamer?
* *
Rime Coldspray
In the 3rd Chronicles, one of Linden's shadow-selves manifests itself again in a Giantess, Rime Coldspray, a mature woman topped with perhaps more gray hair than the anti-heroine. Both have tended a bedlamite who slips free or his/her bindings, and while Linden did not smash Joan's skull in, granting her the white gold ring caterpillared open quite a few ominous, fateful paths winding their way towards the end of all things. Personality-wise, Rime portrays the confidence (And assertiveness?) of the pre-tragedy Dr. Linden, an adept leader of her ward. Both hunt a lost young man, both become lost in Foul's madhouse of schemes and eldritch dangers.
Why Swordmainnir? Granted, life is a struggle, but even so...
Does the Mahdoubt reflect Linden's attributes?
Spoiler
How about the major bogey in the caves, She Who Must Not? Joan herself embodied in a huge, raving clump of despair, or an avatar of Linden's woe? Or both?
Regarding the physical ailments of Covenant and Linden erupting as geological disturbances in the Land (ie. the onset of his leprosy and Kevin's landwasting), at one point I scratched my head over any possible parallels between the decay of Covenant's dead body and the Land's turmoil. Norse mythology provides this...uh...creative insight into the world's geography:
From Ymir's flesh the earth was formed,
and from his bones the hills,
the heaven from the skull of that ice-cold giant,
and from his blood the sea.
Do the skurj that consume even the bedrock of the Land mirror graveworms gnawing on Covenant's bones?
What I take out of this is three things:In Epic Fantasy in the Modern World, Stephen R Donaldson wrote: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.
So we have:In Epic Fantasy in the Modern World, Stephen R Donaldson wrote: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.
"The world is an expression of the characters."In Epic Fantasy in the Modern World, Stephen R Donaldson wrote: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 [sic] 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.