Kevin's Watch

Runes pg 112
Foul: "Fool, I have no heart. I have only darkness. For that reason I strive to free myself. For that reason I do not relent, though my torments are endless. For that reason, you may no longer oppose me. No mortal may stand in my path. I have gained white gold, and my triumph is certain."

As we know, everything Foul says comes to pass.
He just doesn't get the end result he's looking for.

"Darkness" is the reason he wants to be free?
I thought it was to get back at the Creator.
Is darkness the same as rage?

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I looked up "darkness"

dictionary.reference.com/search?q=darkness

I'm sure it's not #5 :# Served without milk or cream: dark coffee.

#10 is interesting: Lacking enlightenment, knowledge, or culture:

If Foul is a part of TC but doesn't know it this definition makes a lot of sense.

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"no mortal" is interesting too.
There's only a handful of non mortals that I can think of.

High Lord Tolkien wrote:"Darkness" is the reason he wants to be free?

No. That he has only darkness is the reason. Subtle, but significant, distinction.

I think here, darkness means 'darkness of the spirit'. Foul is imprisoned - that darken's the old spirit fer sher.

Ah good. I finally get a chance to discuss Lord Foul, himself. (evil chuckle)

I was astounded that Lord Foul was going along with Linden, but with his possession of Anele, that was exactly the case.
As I told a friend: Linden has as her fellow travelers: Anele, Liand ... and Lord Foul.
Sorta like saying: Frodo has as his fellow companions in the Shire: Sam, Pippin, and Sauron.

Anyways ...

Lord Foul is ...

A sociopath.
A whiner.

I know a sociopath personally. He sees everything in terms of What He Gets. There is no love, friendship, companionship, and nothing in the world has any meaning, except as it relates to What He Gets. He victimizes everyone around him freely, manipulates freely (and he is a good manipulator), and is perfectly friendly and congenial when it suits him to be so.
Lord Foul is like that. When defeated by Covenant at the end of the First Chronicles, he speaks of manipulation as being easier and better than dealing with other peoples' so called loves, problems, and everything else about them that makes them human.

Lord Foul is a whiner. (The sociopath I know is also a whiner ... )
His take is constantly: Oh pity me, look how I've been imprisoned in this horrible place. Look at all the bad things the Creator did to me. Look at all the suffering poor old me is having to endure.
So what is it he says to Linden? Something on the order of: I've suffered so much that I'll let nothing stop me this time? Uh huh. Right. When Covenant stopped him at the end of the Second Chronicles, he kept on whining and blasting at Covenant with the Wild Magic until he literally destroyed himself. Poor old Foul. Always mistreated, always outsmarted and outdone by this horrible leper and his friend the doctor.

I do believe that in the Gradual Interview, the author comments that Lord Foul came to be as he is now, because he endlessly felt sorry for himself due to his imprisonment in the world.
Nevermind that Lord Foul is an immortal being, so this little sojourn in the world is small potatoes to him.
Nevermind that this world is BEAUTIFUL (and probably a great alternative to the Void where the Creator works) and has a nice Andelain to spend countless millennia enjoying (if you're immortal like Lord Foul.) No, he must ruin and destroy all that the Creator made, to hurt the Creator, and not enjoy one little bit of it, or one little inkling of the time of his imprisonment.

Thomas Covenant felt sorry for himself, at times. He hated and railed futilely against the world that despised him for his disease. And he was a sociopath at first. But Thomas Covenant grew out of all these things. Lord Foul never did.

What Lord Foul needs REAL BADLY is for Linden to put him over her knee and give him a good spanking, then to be reraised (like a child) under her strict tutelage.
And she should have told him just that, in Runes of the Earth.

Very good post, Edelaith!

I would quibble with one point, though. I don't think the evidence supports the view that Covenant was a sociopath, even 'at first'. He behaved sociopathically at times during his first visit to the Land, but we have fairly clear indications that this was not his normal mode of behaviour. (Would a sociopath have given his wedding ring to a beggar in the street? Likely not.)

In describing Lord Foul as a sociopath, you say: 'There is no love, friendship, companionship, and nothing in the world has any meaning, except as it relates to What He Gets.' This applies equally well to an Unbeliever, for different reasons. In a sense, a sociopath is an Unbeliever of another kind: he doesn't believe in the value or importance of anybody but himself. Covenant, at first, didn't believe in the existence of anybody in the Land, and used this to justify his actions. (It's hard to perceive any value or importance in a person who doesn't even exist.) That's sophistry, if you like, but not sociopathy in the full sense. In that particular situation, the two disorders have much the same effect, but it's still important to distinguish between them.

(By the way, I've sometimes thought about what I would have done in Covenant's position. I might well have thought I was dreaming — for I am thoroughly unused to being a person of any sort of consequence — but I like to think I'd have behaved better towards the people in my 'dream'. Even if they're not real, I would rather not rape and abuse those who try to help me. If it's bad to abandon the skills that keep you alive as a leper, it's far worse to abandon the skills that keep you alive as a human being. And bad habits, once formed, are dangerously hard to break.)

Perhaps Covenant wasn't a true sociopath: I think you're right here, and I misspoke.
Covenant wasn't a full sociopath, but he did act sociopathically at times, as you have noted.

Frankly, the Land did him a great service. It kept him from becoming a true sociopath. It turned him back into a decent person.
In a sense, one could say the Land was a kind of psychotherapy for Thomas Covenant. It was a very ROUGH form of therapy, but it was effective.
Sadly, the cost of that therapy fell on the Land as heavily as it did on Covenant, and the Land and it's peoples suffered profoundly because of Covenants actions.

Lord Foul was what Covenant would have been, if Covenant had not been taught by consequences that sociopathic behavior was ultimately self destructive. Self sympathy was destructive too: self sympathy may be normal and common, but it does not change the reality a person faces!
Lord Foul refuses to accept the Law of Consequences. He believes himself above consequences. He is a deity-like creation: he is immune to consequences. He is a powerful being, so he can throw all that power around, and no consequences can touch him. That is his creed.
Lord Foul, you would think, in tens of thousands of years, would figure out he was wrong. He would figure out he needed to Think Again. But no, he must obsessively, endlessly, insist that his thinking is the ultimate right (Does not Corruption always believe in it's own rightness?)
Let's see:

He could have lazed in Andelain for millennia. Instead, he lived in a frigid gloom: Fouls' Creche.
He could have had plenty of companionship. Instead, he was absolutely alone (slaves and hated rivals do not count as companions.) Loneliness HURTS.)
He could have had self actualization in helping make a better Creation. Instead, he sulked in his self made prison, full of lice and worms and vermin and steam (yes, for him, the World was such a place, for he insisted on thinking of it like that.)
He was temporarily destroyed by laughter, compliments of Covenant. He schemed for 2,000 years to pay Covenant back, only to find Covenant winning over him again. And this wasn't very pleasant: Lord Foul committed suicide, effectively, over it.
Not what I'd call a very pleasant life. If I were an immortal being like Lord Foul, I'd want to live my life more pleasantly and productively. But as long as Lord Foul doesn't learn from consequences - and he still hasn't learned, apparently - he will find his prison just gets all the hotter, steamier, rat infested, filth infested, vermin infested, the guards all the more brutal, and the food rations all the more rotten.
That's the Law of Consequences. It's also justice. Nobody, not even the great and powerful and immortal Lord Foul, is above justice: not in the Land and the Creators' world! And no amount of rationalization and justification, self pity and moping, intellectualizing, scheming and plotting, is ever going to change that.

Lord Foul in Runes of the Earth, to Linden Avery:

'Fool, I have no heart. I have only darkness. For that reason I strive to free myself. For that reason I do not relent, though my torments are endless. For that reason, you may no longer oppose me. No mortal may stand in my path. I have gained white gold, and my triumph is certain.'

Translation:

I know you're smarter, wiser, and better than me, so I must call you names to make myself feel better.
I know I'm a complete incompetent and loser, but my willingness to commit more crimes compensates for that.
Because I have felt sorry for myself for tens of thousands of years, I'm going to go on feeling sorry for myself until the end, and you won't stop me!
I have been terribly, terribly, terribly mistreated by this wondrous, beautiful world the Creator made. Not that this world has ever actually mistreated me: that is not the point. I say it has mistreated me, and therefore it has mistreated me. Look at all the horrible things it has done to me because I say it did!
Because of my self pity, I am invincible.
Because I am invincible, I shall escape from a prison that does not exist.
I'm exalted by self pity and suffering, so no mortal can oppose me.
Joan has White Gold, which somehow makes it mine, which somehow makes me invincible. (Nevermind that having White Gold didn't help me the last time. Nevermind I don't even understand what White Gold IS.)

Not sure I concur on the translation. I don't see Foul as believing any of those things about Linden, or about himself. (At least in terms of incompetence etc.)

And I think that the existence of the world is what is mistreating him. And that it is, in his eyes at least, mistreatment. The existence of the world imprisons him, and it is clearly a definable prison, for if it was not a prison, it would imply he was free to leave it, and its clear that he is not.

Remember, the bars may be golden, but a cage is still a cage.

--Avatar

Edelaith wrote:Nevermind that this world is BEAUTIFUL (and probably a great alternative to the Void where the Creator works)

I have two things to say about this. Firstly, there's that old cliche, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", and this beholder has a very inhuman eye. I doubt he sees beauty in the same way we do.
My second, and main, point is one I've tried to make before about Foul's imprisonment. He was accustomed to having the run of the universe, or a large portion of it, and he's now crammed into this tiny matchbox of a world. Not only that, but he's had laws and rules of nature forced on him that probably don't exist "out there". We don't know what the imposition of such strictures could do to a being like Foul. Incessant pain or worse - who knows? The point is, the Land may be a beautiful pasture to a tiny mortal, but an entity of Foul's stature, it could very well be a living hell.

Avatar wrote:Not sure I concur on the translation. I don't see Foul as believing any of those things about Linden, or about himself. (At least in terms of incompetence etc.)

I agree. Foul has always conveyed to me an arrogance that doesn't fit with someone who holds himself in such low regard. And if he really was utterly convinced of his own inferiority, would he have a thousand contingency plans for every possible eventuality? I think he's too resolute for that.

CovenantJr wrote:We don't know what the imposition of such strictures could do to a being like Foul. Incessant pain or worse - who knows? The point is, the Land may be a beautiful pasture to a tiny mortal, but an entity of Foul's stature, it could very well be a living hell.

Excellent point.

(About that other envelope...)

--A

Avatar wrote:(About that other envelope...)

I concur with CJ too. Foul at full unimprisoned stature must be on a par with the Creator - a being who can make worlds. Earthbound he's powerful, but definitely reduced and limited by the Law. Very probably that's the endless torment of which he speaks.

On a related note, in a strange way it seemed to me that "chatty Foul" was actually glad to see Linden (I suppose someone has to be ). I almost wonder if one of his torments is boredom - after all, he's been imprisoned for the best part of 10000 years - and as such he was glad to see an old opponent return.

I also found it curious that Foul himself would possess Anele to direct Linden. In the past he's always acted through surrogates, and this in particular struck me as something he'd have a Raver do. One is in Joan but where's the other one? In Roger perhaps? It seems Foul is strangely low on resources if he's having to do his own dirty work.

I think Lord Foul has a poor opinion of himself because he is always talking about how great he is, and how stupid everyone else. If he is so intelligent and everyone else is so idiotic, there is no need to endlessly say so, for the facts would speak for themselves. Yet Foul persists, which indicates to me that he has another motive.
Someone once told me that if you argue your case by justifications and rationalizations, that you actually weaken the case you are trying to make. Foul tries to endlessly justify and rationalize why he is so superior and everyone else is so inferior. If he really felt so good about himself, why does he feel the need to endlessly talk about it?

Foul is alone. That, the author makes clear. Loneliness, as we know, is devastating, and Foul seems human enough to feel the pain humans feel with loneliness.
For us, just a few months of loneliness can be devastating. Foul has been alone for over ten thousand years. If Foul wants to speak of being tortured and make a legitimate case, he could make a legitimate case on that.
Yet it is his fault.
Foul chooses not to make friends. The Old Lords befriended him, but he did not befriend them: he used them and betrayed them. Foul could have befriended the Giants: certainly the Giants enjoy good company. Instead, Foul sent his raver to slaughter the Unhomed. And so on, and on, and on.
He creates his own torture, by his actions. By acting like he does, he ensures his own loneliness, and thus the pain of loneliness.

Perhaps the world is a torture to Lord Foul, because of his inherent nature. I don't know. I am fairly certain that the world is a torture for the ur-viles: that they are in constant pain, psychologically and probably physically as well (at least, that's what I believe.)
Maybe Lord Foul is like the ur-viles, and has - like them - gone half mad from the pain, seeking to end the world to end their own pain, and exacting retribution against the Creator for creating such a hellish reality for them (don't you think that's how the ur-viles thought?)
But I don't know.
He should remember he chose to sabotage the Creators world, during it's creation. He should remember that his imprisonment is his own fault. And he should consider how petty, vicious, and stupid he was being, to strike at the world for the sake of ... what? ... just being badly behaved towards his brother, who had down nothing to him?
I don't know. Maybe he is in too much pain to be rational. If so, he is a mad dog. But if he is being rational, and I think he is being rational, then pain is not an excuse (anymore than pain is an excuse for anyone) for his actions. He is sick. Sociopathy is a form of sickness.

Perhaps Linden Avery needs to heal ... Lord Foul.
Linden Avery is a healer. That's what she truly is. If anyone can heal Lord Foul, it is Linden.
But how she's going to do it, is beyond me. Lord Foul is a complicated being, and any resolution to him is going to be similarly complicated.

I think an in depth conversation between Linden Avery and Lord Foul would be fascinating. Absolutely fascinating, be it about philosophy, or behavior, or the history of the Creators world, or about the whys of what has happened, or many other things.
Unfortunately, neither of them has yet been willing to actually sit down and converse: threats, insults, and veiled hints of this and that seem to be the primary forms of communication.

Edelaith wrote:I think Lord Foul has a poor opinion of himself because he is always talking about how great he is, and how stupid everyone else. If he is so intelligent and everyone else is so idiotic, there is no need to endlessly say so, for the facts would speak for themselves. Yet Foul persists, which indicates to me that he has another motive.
Someone once told me that if you argue your case by justifications and rationalizations, that you actually weaken the case you are trying to make. Foul tries to endlessly justify and rationalize why he is so superior and everyone else is so inferior. If he really felt so good about himself, why does he feel the need to endlessly talk about it?

You're missing an important distinction here, I think:

If you argue a case by justifications and rationalizations, you weaken your argument; the actual case may still be irrefutable. If someone tries to prove by a completely idiotic argument that two and two make four, that doesn't disprove that two and two make four; it just demonstrates that the person arguing is an idiot.

Further, I would say that Foul does not 'endlessly talk about' his own superiority. He talks a great deal about the folly and weakness of his enemies, but every word is calculated for the effect it will have on his hearers. He wants to induce despair in them, and trick them into bad strategic choices by focusing their attention on intractable problems instead of possible solutions.

In any case, all this talk about people puffing themselves up to compensate for a deep-seated inferiority complex is just bad pop psychology. In clinical psychology nowadays, they no longer use 'complex' as a diagnostic term, and the idea of overcompensation has been dethroned from the central position to which some of the early Freudians elevated it. Many people believe (they even teach it in education programs at universities) that school bullies are merely acting out because they have low self-esteem. Current research shows exactly the opposite: they are acting out because they have absurdly exaggerated self-esteem, and no esteem for anyone else. If you try to cure a bully by feeding his self-esteem, you will only validate his behaviour and make an even bigger bully out of him. I would maintain that Lord Foul is that kind of bully.

Unfortunately, in the First Chronicles, and particularly in LFB, SRD had not yet fully mastered his art. At times he followed some of the sillier traditions of the genre (the kind that Clute & Grant call 'maggots'), including the tradition that the arch-villain shall explain his brilliant plot by gloating over the helpless hero. A lot of Foul's dialogue in LFB reminds me of the villain in a James Bond movie. So I don't think you can tell anything useful about Foul's psyche from those early scenes. They just won't bear the weight of that kind of serious analysis.

The Foul of Runes is much better drawn; he has by now been fully established as a spirit who speaks only to mislead and manipulate, whose 'snares are ever beset with other snares', and if he talks more than he once did, it is because (like Saruman after Gandalf broke his staff) he has no weapon left but his voice.

I don't think the evidence points to any kind of poor self-image on Foul's part at all.

Good points, Variol.
And yes, Lord Foul is a complex character (not a James Bond villain!) who requires complex treatment. He is not cliched, in my opinion. And he does create complicated games and snares of his own.
Sorta like the Haruchai, he is difficult to fully comprehend. I simplified him, but I was merely dissing the Despiser.

I don't see Foul as having those kinds of human attributes. Personally, I would be very disappointed if the story took that kind of direction - "Foul needs a friend" or "Foul needs healing."

I have yet to see a complete profile done on Lord Foul. Certainly, I haven't tried (my earlier posts on this thread being very shallow, and somewhat frivolous.)
I think one could write a doctoral thesis on Lord Foul. The author poured psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, theology, and all the cleverness of his own mind into that character. Did I mention our author is bright? He is, and so are those characters he wanted to be smart, like Lord Foul.
A GENUINE discussion on Lord Foul is beyond me. I don't have the background and education necessary to truly address the character. What I say, is going to sound shallow and even ridiculous (like a Bad Armchair Psychologist, as it were.) I'm in over my head, and smart enough at least to know it, and honest enough to admit it.

For example, why did laughter do what it did to Foul? Wht analogies is the author drawing? What themes is he using? I don't know.
Why doesn't Lord Foul just go to Revelstone personally and finish the Lords off himself? I don't know, and I don't credit the answers that seem readily apparent.
Why does Lord Foul suffer in the prison of the Creators' creation? I don't know.
Why did Lord Foul have his raver possess Linden Avery at the end of the Second Chronicles, after allowing her freedom all through the Second Chronicles until then? I don't know.
Why didn't Lord Foul send his entire army against Hile Troy at once? I don't know.
Why does Lord Foul do what he does? Why does he think like he does? WHAT is he? I really don't know.

Foul needs something, that is for sure. Not a friend, and not healing, perhaps ... but something. I think Linden Avery would agree with that, that SOME sort of final reckoning is needed with this powerful being.

He could have lazed in Andelain for millennia. Instead, he lived in a frigid gloom: Fouls' Creche.

Remember how the Creche was described? As a place of severely perfec symmetries, the domain of a being “who understood perfection”. The problem with the world (any workd, our own, the Land, ec.) is that it isn’t in fact perfect. Its symmetries are often broken and in general it’s very messy very imperfect. I once heard the Devil’s evil in Christianb myth described as frustration that God would have made a place so impefect as the material world. I think this describes Foul as well.

I couldn't find any of the mentions of Lord Foul's possible madness, so I decided to lob this thought in here, since it relates to perfectionism. I originally posted this in the Gormenghast thread in General Fantasy/Sci-Fi, but it's also relevant to Runes.

I'll put it in spoilers for anyone who hasn't read the Gormenghast novels but intends to:

Spoiler

Steerpike, at the height of his ingenious capabilities, began to remind me of...Lord Foul. Steerpike came first, of course.

Both are meticulous planners, with complex, Machiavellian manipulations (if the word Machiavellian was designed for one person, other than Machiavelli, it was Steerpike) and various contingency plans; and they both have an almost obsessive love of perfection (this is specifically mentioned in both texts).

This leads me to speculate on something that has been mentioned in Runes Discussion.

It has been suggested that Lord Foul is mad - that he has lost his grip on his already questionable sanity during the millenia of his confinement. Steerpike, during his dance around the bodies of the Twins, is quite clearly deranged. But it's a strange kind of madness that would also fit Foul well. He's still rational, still cold, still calculating - but his rationality has become slightly skewed. His logic is as impeccable as ever, but it begins to head in a slightly different direction. Witness Steerpike crowing like a cockrel to prove to himself that he can stop and start such behaviour whenever he wants and remain in complete control. Add to this the fact that his perfectionism seems to be getting out of hand - it's the niggling thought of a loose thread that leads him to visit the corpses and ultimately fail - and we end up with a kind of sane madness, or manic sanity. A perfectly functional mind steered slightly off course. This could be true of Foul too.

I side with the idea that Lord Foul is smart, arrogant, and lives where he does because it's the nicest place in his opinion.

I think a factor previously overlooked in this thread is that Foul is forced to live within the Arch of Time, which is for him an unnatural environment. If Linden and the others were in a terrible pain when they experienced timeless, perhaps the pain could go the other way too... It would certainly make some comments sound more like understatements than whining.

The combination of the factors of boredom and endless change is in addition to that. Humans die of old age quick as flies and everything gets rearranged when one gets used to it, but still nothing is really new either. (*) Nicer beings like Tolkien Elves might just mope around feeling superior and detached, but Foul makes himself excitement at the rest of the world's expense when he is not designing the ideal floorplan for Ridjeck Thome or something.

I think the reason Foul never went personally to attack Revelstone is that before the white gold he was really just passing time and playing a cruel board game against the Lords. Later on there wasn't any real need to go to Revelstone.

The scary thing is, I can sort of see where Lord Foul is coming from...

(*) Is The Runes of the Earth subtly reinforcing this point by having so many old players return?