Hey friends, long time no write about the Name of the Wind, Kingkiller, etc. I’ve intended to do a Name of the Wind analysis reread (not to mention the other books) for some time now. —
You should assume spoilers henceforth! Forthwith! This post shall take a fortnight of hours to read!
Table of Contents
- You should assume spoilers henceforth! Forthwith! This post shall take a fortnight of hours to read!
- Note about me:
- Name of the Wind Analysis — Ch 6:
- Navigate to other chapters:
Note about me:
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Name of the Wind Analysis — Ch 6:
Today’s page and chapter is the number 6 MWAHAHAHA, please turn your hymnals to the appropriate place. Chronicler is asked if he’s related to the duke. Which duke? The one Kvothe’s related to?
Or perhaps, as /u/Zorangi said:
Well Chronicler says he left his name Devan behind him a long time ago. And he suspects “Kvothe knows something of that himself.” I think it’s highly likely that Chronicler has also become a rhinta. Or something similar. Again, consider how the skin dancer asks them similar questions. And Kote ignores the question. The text says that quite clearly.
Kvothe says he taught him the idea that “dragons don’t exist” — that’s a hard lesson. But do dragons not exist? We find out later they do — so it really depends on what we mean. Chronicler’s called a rumor monger — that’s very, very true for a demythologizer, particularly one who only believes in the physical and hasn’t done their metaphysics work on, say, the nature of our obviously contingent reality, moment to moment.
And also, Chronicler has come to prove that Kote doesn’t exist. Is it prove? Or is it tell the kind of rumor that will become true at the end of the telling?
“We heard a rumor…”
This story is about two kinds of people who chase rumors. Chandrian and Amyr. Or perhaps the same people, different sides of the same coin. Kvothe calls them both rumor mongers: both the debunker and the mythologizer.
One reader even quotes Denna. “Then, if someone saw the writing, even if they couldn’t read it, it would be true for them. They’d think a certain thing, or act a certain way depending on what the writing said.”
Perhaps Chronicler, in debunking, is lying (whether he knows it or not) and disguising the dragon to make it look like a lizard. Again, in this case, you need to remember Rothfuss’s favorite book: The Last Unicorn, in which both the harpy and the unicorn are actually disguised in plain sight so that folks can’t see them. The witch also does the opposite, disguising the shabby old lion to make it look like the manticore. She makes common things look a little more fantastic (as if the existence of a frigging LION isn’t spectacular enough) and she makes fantastic creature more quotidian and palatable (does a unicorn poop in the woods?).
The mediating spectacle isn’t needed: the world is both more common and more fantastic than we have ever dreamed possible. What maters is encountering the world and living the poetry of it, not doing what the family does in Marquez’s A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.
Scarpi and Chronicler are both concerned with obscuring the truth, it seems. In hoarding and spreading rumors, controlling the narrative. Again this parallels the historical coverups, hidden transcripts, subtext.
Kvothe calls him an apprentice of Scarpi. Chronicler calls them colleagues. So Chronicler is frustrated about the hierarchical language, considers himself peers, and they work towards the same ends in the same industry.
But on being called a rumor monger, Chronicler was seriously insulted. He thinks he’s finding the truth, but Kvothe sees it as obscuring it. Demythologizing is as problematic as apotheosis.
Chronicler is working with Skarpi, whose name means either “to cut” or “knife” or “sharp.” Could mean that he’s witty, but more likely that he divides. Or, perhaps, that he wields the knife that stabbed out his own eye. That’s weird if Skarpi is an Amyr/singer/angel. He tells people that he actually knows Tehlu.
Consider we have no description of his appearance or age:
And he may have other names:
To Connor’s observations:
Lochees, lockless, lockless, laclith a lot of name changing among the family. Luckless/lackless/lockless/lochees/laclith/leoclos/etc.
Plus I thought you’d be older. I am. A lot more time in the Fae than just with Felurian in WMF.
— Connor Hathaway
Or that the time lapse with Felurian is HUGE. I also forgot about the “Not tally a lot less” for whatever reason until reading it through this time. You cannot, it seems, know the name of time. But that’s because you cannot know the name of height. I do wonder if naming is something like knowing the substance verses the praedicamenta:
Of things said without any combination, each signifies either substance or quantity or qualification or a relative or whereor when or being-in-a-position or having or doing or being-affected. To give a rough idea, examples of substance are man, horse; of quantity: four-foot, five-foot; of qualification: white, grammatical; of a relative: double, half, larger; of where: in the Lyceum, in the market-place; of when: yesterday, last-year; of being-in-a-position: is-lying, is-sitting; of having: has-shoes-on, has-armour-on; of doing: cutting, burning; of being-affected: being-cut, being-burned. (1b25-2a4)
In this case, “time” would be one of the things you could adjust for a given substance like the wind — not mererly its position or passion:
A brief explanation (with some alternative translations) is as follows:[5]
- Substance (οὐσία, ousia, essence or substance).[6] Substance is that which cannot be predicated of anything or be said to be in anything. Hence, this particular man or that particular tree are substances. Later in the text, Aristotle calls these particulars “primary substances”, to distinguish them from secondary substances, which are universals and can be predicated. Hence, Socrates is a primary substance, while man is a secondary substance. Man is predicated of Socrates, and therefore all that is predicated of man is predicated of Socrates.
- Quantity (ποσόν, poson, how much). This is the extension of an object, and may be either discrete or continuous. Further, its parts may or may not have relative positions to each other. All medieval discussions about the nature of the continuum, of the infinite and the infinitely divisible, are a long footnote to this text. It is of great importance in the development of mathematical ideas in the medieval and late Scholastic period. Examples: two cubits long, number, space, (length of) time.
- Qualification or quality (ποιόν, poion, of what kind or quality). This determination characterizes the nature of an object. Examples: white, black, grammatical, hot, sweet, curved, straight.
- Relative (πρός τι, pros ti, toward something). This is the way one object may be related to another. Examples: double, half, large, master, knowledge.
- Where or place (ποῦ, pou, where). Position in relation to the surrounding environment. Examples: in a marketplace, in the Lyceum.
- When or time (πότε, pote, when). Position in relation to the course of events. Examples: yesterday, last year.
- Relative position, posture, attitude (κεῖσθαι, keisthai, to lie). The examples Aristotle gives indicate that he meant a condition of rest resulting from an action: ‘Lying’, ‘sitting’, ‘standing’. Thus position may be taken as the end point for the corresponding action. The term is, however, frequently taken to mean the relative position of the parts of an object (usually a living object), given that the position of the parts is inseparable from the state of rest implied.
- Having or state, condition (ἔχειν, echein, to have or be). The examples Aristotle gives indicate that he meant a condition of rest resulting from an affection (i.e. being acted on): ‘shod’, ‘armed’. The term is, however, frequently taken to mean the determination arising from the physical accoutrements of an object: one’s shoes, one’s arms, etc. Traditionally, this category is also called a habitus (from Latin habere, to have).
- Doing or action (ποιεῖν, poiein, to make or do). The production of change in some other object (or in the agent itself quaother).
- Being affected or affection (πάσχειν, paschein, to suffer or undergo). The reception of change from some other object (or from the affected object itself qua other). Aristotle’s name paschein for this category has traditionally been translated into English as “affection” and “passion” (also “passivity”), easily misinterpreted to refer only or mainly to affection as an emotion or to emotional passion. For action he gave the example, ‘to lance’, ‘to cauterize’; for affection, ‘to be lanced’, ‘to be cauterized.’His examples make clear that action is to affection as the active voice is to the passive voice — as acting is to being acted on.
Anyways, Connor steers me towards Not Tally:
Which is absolutely true especially because K recognizes Meluan, and then all the funny business that another Edema Ruh successfully woos a Lackless.
— Connor Hathaway
“In a box, no lid or locks
Lackless keeps her husband’s rocks.”―Folk song
I think there’s something to this too. Like I keep saying with the priest of Diana thing. I think you’re bound to the moon once you swap with whoever’s inside the box. Sort of like Davy Jones’s heart.
Haha. Just thought of this: how does K learn Alar? By playing “seek the stone” what’s in the box? Lackless’s husbands rocks. Someone’s Alar is locked within the box.
— Connor Hathaway
Might be a chicken and egg thing. That the Cthaeh is imprisoned in a Roah tree. And his box and the sword are made of the original tree. If it’s impermeable to flame, then it might be impermeable to lightning, which is a further move towards the mistletoe theory.
What if Haliax wanted Lyra — who is the moon — for his own? And Selitos (the tinker) tried to barter anything to keep her? What if Haliax, unsatisfied with that, built the Fae as the lockless box (as a sort of pocket dimension) and trapped part of the moon inside?
What if doing so killed him?
What if Lyra, who was beholden to him, died to bring him back? Or at least part of her died? Half? The fight with Cinder ensued, burning them both, and Haliax used his immortal soul as kindling for the sympathetic moving of the moon? And what if that started the dark/light moon cycles between the worlds as well as the split personality (and therefore the actual reificaiton of the moon) thing I keep riding?
Depending on the cycle of the moon, that’s the personality we get. After all, as we see in the cover of Narrow Road, the moon is actually missing. It’s not the dark side, it’s gone. It’s literally not in the sky.
What if Haliax reveals what all it cost him to do this and is bound up partially inside the box? Part of his soul / name / death?
What of Selitos cannot help him and, rather than try to kill him, takes out his own eye with the mountain glass?
That isn’t, as some have pointed out, mutually exclusive with them being the same people.
As others have said: what’s so maddening about this serious is how damn vague everything is.
If we combine the above with the copper blade of Taborlin for naming, then “her husbands rocks” could be mountain glass, copper, etc. the manifestations of the tools of Taborlin. Basically the trinkets that have been used to kill all of her husbands and take over the role as keeper of the fae — priest of the fae — making the keeper the “sun” and her the moon. Or perhaps all the ones needed for the very specific spell of controlling the moon.
So the box holds both the Fae and what killed those who kept the Fae.
In that case, Kvothe is still King of Fae (both Old Holly and King Oak / Leshy), killed the King of Fae, serves as priest of the moon, and is trying to get back in because part of him is stored in the Fae not unlike the moon.
The redemption of the world and these characters would involve the reconciliation of the fae and human realms.
Further, the signs of the Chandrian would potentially indicate what it takes to unlock it: blue flame (copper blade), cold iron, the obsidian, it being the death box, the box of silence, sickness, and the “hame” of the shadow realm, the reigns of the horse of the Fairy box. Pandora’s box, as it were.
And lastly, the “seven words to make a woman love you” would therefore be the seven names of the Chandrian who did just that: tried to make the moon love them or sided with him who did. Correspondingly, the “ten to bind a man’s will” would be the names of the Amyr/Angels: the ten names of the servants of Selitos.
I’m really watching for _any_ color blue _anywhere near_ the Waystone. Has anyone done a search for indigo and other colors?
Also obvious:
Way / stone
I.e. — doors of stone. Or roads of stone. Is it possible the inn itself is a threshold? Or the stones are paths? Here’s one theory:
K negotiates with a threat *to make* Chronicler write the story about him as much as he wants. Not as a result of C convincing him. Or to get away from him. As a bargaining chip to make him do it on Ks terms.
— Connor Hathaway
Kvothe says he’s never been on the best terms with God. I think he means this not in the way most people mean this, but in terms of Tehlu / Haliax. He killed the demiurge, Cinder.
“Everyone thinks you’re dead.”
Maybe he is?
Or, rather, undead?
A Draugr?
“That’s the whole point. People don’t look for you when you’re dead. Old enemies don’t try to settle scores. People don’t come asking you for stories.”
We come across this with Lanre too. He’s dead. Kvothe is dead. Or was. Now he’s a Draugr. A barrow-wight. BTW in Old Norse, a Draugr can be a tree trunk or dry dead wood — broken tree. As in the lightning tree. Trees, in Old Norse kennings, often refer to men. The early Odin myths said he made man from trees. A felled tree, therefore, paralleled a corpse.
“The broken tree” is that corpse.
Also in modern Swedish, draug is a loanword for “a pale, ineffectual, and slow-minded person that drags himself along,” which is what Kote is.
Comes from the PIE stem dʰrowgʰos, which also means “to deceive.” “Shag-boys” and “hog boons” are similar. It’s a type of vampire, honestly, according to Andrew Lang. Not blood-sucking, so much, as contagion. Sometimes the chain of contagion is an outbreak kind of like an epidemic.
Or spores.
Fungus.
Like the scrael.
Maybe they’re just returning to their master’s call?
Forgive me, but I’m going to just straight-up quote the wiki at this point:
Þráinn (Thrain) the berserker of Valland “turned himself into a troll” in Hrómundar saga Gripssonar was a fiend (dólgr) which was “black and huge.. roaring loudly and blowing fire”, and moreover, possessed long scratching claws, and the claws stuck in the neck, prompting the hero Hrómundr to refer to the dragur as a sort of cat (Old Norse: kattakyn).
Draugr are noted for having numerous magical abilities (referred to as trollskap) resembling those of living witches and wizards, such as shape-shifting, controlling the weather, and seeing into the future. (Selitos?)
The undead Víga-Hrappr Sumarliðason (Killer-Hrapp) of Laxdaela saga, unlike the typical guardian of a treasure hoard, does not stay put in his burial place but roams around his farmstead of Hrappstaðir, menacing the living. Víga-Hrappr’s ghost, it has been suggested, was capable of transforming into the seal with human-like eyes which appeared before Þorsteinn svarti/surt (Thorsteinn the Black) sailing by ship, and was responsible for the sinking of the ship to prevent the family from reaching Hrappstaðir. The ability to shape-shift has been ascribed to Icelandic ghosts generally, particularly into the shape of a seal.
A draugr in Icelandic folktales collected in the modern age can also change into a great flayed bull, a grey horse with a broken back but no ears or tail, and a cat that would sit upon a sleeper’s chest and grow steadily heavier until their victim suffocated.
Draugar have the ability to enter into the dreams of the living, and they will frequently leave a gift behind so that “the living person may be assured of the tangible nature of the visit”. Draugar also have the ability to curse a victim, as shown in the Grettis saga, where Grettir is cursed to be unable to become any stronger. Draugar also brought disease to a village and could create temporary darkness in daylight hours. They preferred to be active during the night, although they did not appear to be vulnerable to sunlight like some other revenants. Draugr can also kill people with bad luck.
A draugr’s presence might be shown by a great light that glowed from the mound like foxfire. This fire would form a barrier between the land of the living and the land of the dead.
The undead Víga-Hrappr exhibited the ability to sink into the ground to escape from Óláfr Hǫskuldsson the Peacock.
Some draugar are immune to weapons, and only a hero has the strength and courage needed to stand up to so formidable an opponent. In legends, the hero would often have to wrestle the draugr back to his grave, thereby defeating him, since weapons would do no good. A good example of this is found in Hrómundar saga Gripssonar. Iron could injure a draugr, as is the case with many supernatural creatures, although it would not be sufficient to stop it. Sometimes the hero is required to dispose of the body in unconventional ways. The preferred method is to cut off the draugr’s head, burn the body, and dump the ashes in the sea—the emphasis being on making absolutely sure that the draugr was dead and gone.
Any mean, nasty, or greedy person can become a draugr. As Ármann Jakobsson notes, “most medieval Icelandic ghosts are evil or marginal people. If not dissatisfied or evil, they are unpopular”.
The draugr’s motivation was primarily envy and greed. Greed causes it to viciously attack any would-be grave robbers, but the draugr also expresses an innate envy of the living stemming from a longing for the things of life which it once had. They also exhibit an immense and nearly insatiable appetite, as shown in the encounter of Aran and Asmund, sword brothers who made an oath that, if one should die, the other would sit vigil with him for three days inside the burial mound. When Aran died, Asmund brought his own possessions into the barrow—banners, armor, hawk, hound, and horse—then set himself to wait the three days:
During the first night, Aran got up from his chair and killed the hawk and hound and ate them. On the second night he got up again from his chair, and killed the horse and tore it into pieces; then he took great bites at the horse-flesh with his teeth, the blood streaming down from his mouth all the while he was eating…. The third night Asmund became very drowsy, and the first thing he knew, Aran had got him by the ears and torn them off.
The draugr’s victims were not limited to trespassers in its home. The roaming undead devastated livestock by running the animals to death either by riding them or pursuing them in some hideous, half-flayed form. Shepherds’ duties kept them outdoors at night, and they were particular targets for the hunger and hatred of the undead:
The oxen which had been used to haul Thorolf’s body were ridden to death by demons, and every single beast that came near his grave went raving mad and howled itself to death. The shepherd at Hvamm often came racing home with Thorolf after him. One day that Fall neither sheep nor shepherd came back to the farm.
Animals feeding near the grave of a draugr might be driven mad by the creature’s influence. They may also die from being driven mad. Thorolf, for example, caused birds to drop dead when they flew over his bowl barrow.
The main indication that a deceased person will become a draugr is that the corpse is not in a horizontal position but is found standing upright (Víga-Hrappr), or in a sitting position (Þórólfr), indicating that the dead might return. Ármann Jakobsson suggests further that breaking the draugr’s posture is a necessary or helpful step in destroying the draugr, but this is fraught with the risk of being inflicted with the evil eye, whether this is explicitly told in the case of Grettir who receives the curse from Glámr, or only implied in the case of Þórólfr, whose son warns the others to beware while they unbend Þórólfr’s seated posture.
The revenant draugr needing to be decapitated in order to incapacitate them from further hauntings is a common theme in the family sagas.
Traditionally in Iceland, a pair of open iron scissors was placed on the chest of the recently deceased, and straws or twigs might be hidden among their clothes.[74] The big toes were tied together or needles were driven through the soles of the feet in order to keep the dead from being able to walk. Tradition also held that the coffin should be lifted and lowered in three different directions as it was carried from the house to confuse a possible draugr’s sense of direction.
The most effective means of preventing the return of the dead was believed to be a corpse door, a special door through which the corpse was carried feet-first with people surrounding it so that the corpse couldn’t see where it was going. The door was then bricked up to prevent a return. It is speculated[by whom?] that this belief began in Denmark and spread throughout the Norse culture, founded on the idea that the dead could only leave through the way they entered
In Eyrbyggja saga, draugar are driven off by holding a “door-doom”. One by one, they are summoned to the door-doom and given judgment and forced out of the home by this legal method. The home was then purified with holy water to ensure that they never came back.
A variation of the draugr is the haugbui (from Old Norse haugr’ “howe, barrow, tumulus”) which was a mound-dweller, the dead body living on within its tomb. The notable difference between the two was that the haugbui is unable to leave its grave site and only attacks those who trespass upon their territory.
One of the best-known draugar is Glámr, who is defeated by the hero in Grettis saga. After Glámr dies on Christmas Eve, “people became aware that Glámr was not resting in peace. He wrought such havoc that some people fainted at the sight of him, while others went out of their minds”. After a battle, Grettir eventually gets Glámr on his back. Just before Grettir kills him, Glámr curses Grettir because “Glámr was endowed with more evil force than most other ghosts”, and thus he was able to speak and leave Grettir with his curse after his death.
A somewhat ambivalent, alternative view of the draugr is presented by the example of Gunnar Hámundarson in Njáls saga: “It seemed as though the howe was agape, and that Gunnar had turned within the howe to look upwards at the moon. They thought that they saw four lights within the howe, but not a shadow to be seen. Then they saw that Gunnar was merry, with a joyful face.”
In the Eyrbyggja saga, a shepherd is assaulted by a blue-black draugr. The shepherd’s neck is broken during the ensuing scuffle. The shepherd rises the next night as a draugr.
In more recent Scandinavian folklore, the draug (the modern spelling used in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) is a supernatural being that occurs in legends along the coast of Norway. Draugen was originally a dead person who either lived in the mound (in Norse called haugbúi) or went out to haunt the living. In later folklore, it became common to limit the figure to a ghost of a dead fisherman who had drifted at sea, and who was not buried in Christian soil. It was said that he wore a leather jacket or was dressed in oilskin, but had a seaweed vase for his head. He sailed in a half-boat with blocked sails (Bø Municipality in Norway has the half-boat in its coat of arms) and announced death for those who saw him or even wanted to pull them down. This trait is common in the northernmost part of Norway, where life and culture was based on fishing more than anywhere else. The reason for this may be that the fishermen often drowned in great numbers, and the stories of restless dead coming in from sea were more common in the north than any other region of the country.
Lancelot’s note: this could explain some of the missing sailing story.
A recorded legend from Trøndelag tells how a cadaver lying on a beach became the object of a quarrel between the two types of draug (headless and seaweed-headed). A similar source even tells of a third type, the gleip, known to hitch themselves to sailors walking ashore and make them slip on the wet rocks.
But, though the draug usually presages death, there is an amusing account in Northern Norway of a northerner who managed to outwit him:
It was Christmas Eve, and Ola went down to his boathouse to get the keg of brandy he had bought for the holidays. When he got in, he noticed a draugr sitting on the keg, staring out to sea. Ola, with great presence of mind and great bravery (it might not be amiss to state that he already had done some drinking), tiptoed up behind the draugr and struck him sharply in the small of the back, so that he went flying out through the window, with sparks hissing around him as he hit the water. Ola knew he had no time to lose, so he set off at a great rate, running through the churchyard which lay between his home and the boathouse. As he ran, he cried, “Up, all you Christian souls, and help me!” Then he heard the sound of fighting between the ghosts and the draugr, who were battling each other with coffin boards and bunches of seaweed. The next morning, when people came to church, the whole yard was strewn with coffin covers, boat boards, and seaweed. After the fight, which the ghosts won, the draugr never came back to that district.
ANYWAYS.
Lots of stuff there. I promise I won’t quote every single myth, but this and Koschei and some of the other “hide your death” stories seem to me to be the more important ones. That and things like sympathetic magic (which he gets from Frazier), taboos, etc. Just read Frazier, not because Frazier is right (he’s wrong), but to understand some source material for this book.
But yes, people don’t come asking for stories or settle scores when you dead.
Or were dead.
Or are sealed behind the doors of the Waystone.
Chronicler refused to back down. “Other people say you’re a myth.”
“I am a myth,” Kote said easily, making an extravagant gesture. “A very special kind of myth that creates itself. The best lies about me are the ones I told.”
“They say you never existed,” Chronicler corrected gently.
Kote shrugged nonchalantly, his smile fading an imperceptible amount.
In this case, I’m thinking he’s telling the truth. Strictly speaking, a myth that creates itself is a creation myth. It’s a metaphysic, in a way. And I think he killed the demiurge who killed the demiurge, etc. Again, sun and shade. And, in his case, the abyss and vacuum too.
Need more evidence?
“I’m that too.” Kote turned to polish the counter behind the bar. He shrugged again, not as easily as before. “I’ve killed men and things that were more than men. Every one of them deserved it.”
Other than the draccus, to my knowledge we have yet to see him kill something more than a man. And the draccus was less than a man. And Kvothe didn’t seem to think it deserved it. So we haven’t seen the part of the story where he killed the thing that deserved it that was more than man.
Draugr.
Bur he’s called an Assassin. Because he’s killed the king. But perhaps the king was more than a man as well?
“Some are even saying that there is a new Chandrian. A fresh terror in the night. His hair as red as the blood he spills.”
“The important people know the difference,” Kote said as if he were trying to convince himself, but his voice was weary and despairing, without conviction.
He doesn’t believe himself. Why? Because the Chandrian are the Rhinta and he’s taken the place of the leader who, himself, wasn’t technically Chandrian, but Haliax, God of the sun and shade, substance and abyss. There is no real substantial difference. Alternatively he could have taken the place of Cinder and is now powering the moon movement.
I take this at face value, honestly. Chronicler’s job is to inspect myths and if not deconstruct them, at least get to the reality behind them. Demythologize living myths.
So I’m assuming he’s trying to demythologize the Chandrian in Kvothe, who is one now.
Again this is a book written by the person whose favorite book is The Last Unicorn. So let’s assume for a moment that this book functions similarly: only maybe from the perspective of the harpy? Schmendrik? The Red Bull?
A captive demon?
Chronicler gave a small laugh. “Certainly. For now. But you of all people should realize how thin the line is between the truth and a compelling lie. Between history and an entertaining story.” Chronicler gave his words a minute to sink in. “You know which will win, given time.”
The line’s thin. And Chronicler knows the difference. And so, is he one of them? He knows.
Chronicler took an eager step forward, sensing victory. “Some people say there was a woman—”
“What do they know?” Kote’s voice cut like a saw through bone. “What do they know about what happened?” He spoke so softly that Chronicler had to hold his breath to hear.
“They say she—” Chronicler’s words stuck in his suddenly dry throat as the room grew unnaturally quiet. Kote stood with his back to the room, a stillness in his body and a terrible silence clenched between his teeth. His right hand, tangled in a clean white cloth, made a slow fist. Eight inches away a bottle shattered. The smell of strawberries filled the air alongside the sound of splintering glass.
IN THIS INSTANCE we see exactly why Kvothe finally decides to tell hist story.
As for shattering the bottle, there’s one reader who thinks silence is Kvothe’s Chandrian (or Rhinta) sign.
I’m inclined to believe this. In the case of the strawberry wine, the reader thinks that silence shatters the glass the way that frequency shatters glass. Or that he pulls sound towards him. This is a result of or connected to him shaping / changing his name.
I, personally, think silence is symptomatic but it’s not the actual sign.
I think if I’m right about the Draugr and the lord of Sun and Shade is the same being, then Kvothe’s sign is the abyss. It’s the shadows, silence, and nothingness he casts.
So in the case of silence, it’s a vacuum. Sound can’t travel in a vacuum. I mean the town is literally The Middle of Nowhere.
For the bottle, I think it implodes. This is one of the first things chemistry students get to do: generate a vacuum inside a stable cup and then touch it with a ruler so that it implodes and shards go everywhere. At least that’s the case with Mr. Rippey, our teacher. Best chemistry teacher ever. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t been so depressed and suicidal in Sophomore chemistry: other than poetry and theater and music and certain math classes, I enjoyed chem more than any other subject. Of course, depression probably saved me from a career in big Pharma, so upsides abound.
Anyways, I’ve always appreciated the physics and chem bits in these books.
Here, Chronicler is afraid. Being caught inside a story. And this is what one PhD called “the economy of stories.” The big academic word is “transdiagetic metalepsis” among a text’s dream or story levels. Something like the personification of Personification, the narrativizing of Story per se. If Story stops telling the story, then the story stops. Silence enters. The being of the story is compromised.
James Paxon in the Poetics of Personification calls this three layers: diagetic (narrator level), mimetic (line of action), metadiagetic (the narration about the narration). This is where it gets interesting, for me at least. I hope at this point you’ll indulge me some academies:
“The ostensible transgression of a personification figure into the metadiagetic level, or of a human figure into the diabetic level, would involve, to borrow further from Ginette’s taxonomy, a transdiegetic metalepsis.” Gennet defines a narrative metalepsis as the direct intermingling or collapsing of the elements belonging to two distinct levels of diagnosis. A character who emerges from a book or painting within the narrated universe of a particular novel involves one kind of metalepsis. Another would involve a narrator, like Tristan Shandy, who urges us (presumably outside or “above” the primary line of diegesis) to produce a direct effect on one of his characters — like closing the door to Walter Shandy’s room…. The metaleptical effect becomes a macrometaphor of personification fabulation itself. (77)
Later Paxon says:
“Chaucer’s human characters are dietetically removed from the active and vociferous personification figures who people the primary field… we are faced with a peculiar structural relationship between mute, frozen, and lifeless beings who are makers (epic poets) and active, loquacious lifeless beings who are made (personified verbal utterances). Whether we consider the enshrined writers as ekphrastic elements narratologically quarantined from the personification figures, or as ontologically diminished human consciousnesses in direct physical proximity to enlivened personifications, we readily apprehend the text’s deft and radical ironizing of the problem of literary character differentiation. The makers become the made; the made things gain the power and vitality of human makers.” (85)
“…In The Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer provides another narrator who suffers from artistic and intellectual aridity. The poem begins with a bald paraphrase… this artless paraphrase has prompted critics to see the central theme in the Parliament as a meta poetic self-inquiry carried out by Chaucer into the problems of making poetry. The narrator’s self-doubt about his powers as a poetic maker are amplified by the unusual structural and formal features of the poem.” (86)
The poem has a gate that, depending on the side of the gate, could read as the gate of heaven or hell. Kind of like the door of stone.
Basically because the gate refers to the reading of the text, it’s a verbal artifact within the primary diagesis, making a meta diagesis — a narrative text “within” a narrative text.
Once inside, there are gobs of classical epic, Arthur Romance, and Roman history characters on the wall — the narratological space excluding personification. Making a meta-metadigesis — a story within the story within the story. Chaucer basically separates historical figures who are dead from the author from the personification figures from the objects.
And so Chaucer’s “poem charts a gradual reduction of the prospopoetic powers among the human characters and a runaway increase of it in the personifications.” (88-89)
Sound familiar?
A myth that makes itself?
As Kvothe tells the story, Chronicler is growing silent and Kvothe is stealing his power of narrative, taking back the story: literally creating himself from the mythopoetic powers he has as King of Sun and Shade.
In some ways, this shows the life cycle of language, a name, a myth — from poetry to prose and back again. As George MacDonald said in The Imagination: Its Function and Culture:
“All words, then, belonging to the inner world of the mind, are of the imagination, are originally poetic words. The better, however, any such word is fitted for the needs of humanity, the sooner it loses its poetic aspect by commonness of use. It ceases to be heard as a symbol, and appears only as a sign. Thus thousands of words which were originally poetic words owing their existence to the imagination, lose their vitality, and harden into mummies of prose. Not merely in literature does poetry come first, and prose afterwards, but poetry is the source of all the language that belongs to the inner world, whether it be of passion or of metaphysics, of psychology or of aspiration. No poetry comes by the elevation of prose; but the half of prose comes by the “massing into the common clay” of thousands of winged words, whence, like the lovely shells of by-gone ages, one is occasionally disinterred by some lover of speech, and held up to the light to show the play of colour in its manifold laminations.”
I believe it’s for this very reason that Rothfuss invented a variation on the etymology of “quothe” in Kvothe and originally rejoiced that no instance of the word “Kvothe” existed on Google: he invented a name that has now ossified, that has become Kote the man waiting to die in the inn at the start of The Name of the Wind. Marquez, here, is simply dealing with prose, with the dying of language and imagination. Tolkien — even Coleridge — and especially MacDonald focus on the esemplastic nature of it. Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicle illumines the transition from the latter towards the former.
A theoretical foundation, on the other hand, is something first contemplated: from θεορος, from what we spectate (we touch not), and those speculations — those speculative fictions — become our foundation. When we meet the author in the work, we meet the subject matter of the daily weather of the author’s mind: his fabricated memory of a new experience. This sets us up for actualizing his hypotheses. The poetry of Kvothe leads to the science of Chronicler, the man who has come to vivisect the legend of innkeeper’s Kote’s former life as Kvothe. The secondary faith of Tolkien predicated on the primary faith of Tolkien itself predicates the doubly faithless naturalistic journalism of Marquez. For Being — total Being — cannot be destroyed or created, only donated. First MacDonald:
It is the far-seeing imagination which beholds what might be a form of things, and says to the intellect: “Try whether that may not be the form of these things;” which beholds or invents a harmonious relation of parts and operations, and sends the intellect to find out whether that be not the harmonious relation of them—that is, the law of the phenomenon it contemplates. Nay, the poetic relations themselves in the phenomenon may suggest to the imagination the law that rules its scientific life. Yea, more than this: we dare to claim for the true, childlike, humble imagination, such an inward oneness with the laws of the universe that it possesses in itself an insight into the very nature of things.
…It is the imagination that suggests in what direction to make the new inquiry–which, should it cast no immediate light on the answer sought, can yet hardly fail to be a step towards final discovery. Every experiment has its origin in hypothesis; without the scaffolding of hypothesis, the house of science could never arise. And the construction of any hypothesis whatever is the work of the imagination. The man who cannot invent will never discover. The imagination often gets a glimpse of the law itself long before it is or can be ascertained to be a law.
… Coleridge says that no one but a poet will make any further great discoveries in mathematics; and Bacon says that “wonder,” that faculty of the mind especially attendant on the child-like imagination, “is the seed of knowledge.” The influence of the poetic upon the scientific imagination is, for instance, especially present in the construction of an invisible whole from the hints afforded by a visible part; where the needs of the part, its uselessness, its broken relations, are the only guides to a multiplex harmony, completeness, and end, which is the whole. From a little bone, worn with ages of death, older than the man can think, his scientific imagination dashed with the poetic, calls up the form, size, habits, periods, belonging to an animal never beheld by human eyes, even to the mingling contrasts of scales and wings, of feathers and hair. Through the combined lenses of science and imagination, we look back into ancient times, so dreadful in their incompleteness, that it may well have been the task of seraphic faith, as well as of cherubic imagination, to behold in the wallowing monstrosities of the terror-teeming earth, the prospective, quiet, age-long labour of God preparing the world with all its humble, graceful service for his unborn Man. The imagination of the poet, on the other hand, dashed with the imagination of the man of science, revealed to Goethe the prophecy of the flower in the leaf. No other than an artistic imagination, however, fulfilled of science, could have attained to the discovery of the fact that the leaf is the imperfect flower.
Later in Paxon (108-111):
The hypothesis that perception is independent of and prior to representation is precluded in phenomenological inquiry. Although Husserl set out to demonstrate the distinction between perception (or, as he called it, “retention”) and representation, his phenomenological enterprise revealed — according to Derrida and the whole deconstructive appropriation of phenomenology — that perception itself is structured like a language. “Perception is always already representation” (Norris, Practice, 48). Prosopopeia, even as a perceptual and putatively unconscious, “pre-tropological,” or pre-linguistic phenomenon, is always-already a proposition: everything in the unconscious mind can be described in terms of a mutual system of tropes or figures.) Seeing faces in the clouds constitutes a poetic or textual act even though the experience may seem virtual and unmediated.
Paxon goes on to point to Bussy D’Ambois where George Chapman compares the act of charming a deceptive mask for the creature Sin, a figure, to the primal experience of perceiving faces in clouds or chunks of cartilage that Policy robes in her own cloth and makes into a real systemic monster. So is the face of Sin real or not? It depends.
In The Name of the Wind, we watch this exact spectrum of Paxon’s Greimas Square of Personifcation / Reification ; Dialog / Apostrophe:
…play out in the character of Kvothe. When we meet Kvothe (a name the text tells us means “to know” but sounds like “quothe” as in speech, the word derived from saying and convoking and knowing and writing — all from the resin of trees), he goes by the name Kote — like a coat or perhaps a cote, a shelter for pigeons and small animals. And he’s silent and waiting to die, much like the abstraction at the end of the Divine Comedy, the divine silence.
A Chronicler — a scribe — much like Spenser’s Eumnestes in Queene shows up wanting to get the true record on Kvothe’s life, which has grown to mythic proportions. Both the oral tradition of Kvothe and the manuscripts of Chronicler suffer decay, in various ways, but the economy of story starts with the telling and ends with the writing and eventually decaying until silence resumes and stories begin again.
So Kvothe starts to tell the story of whether or not he really burned down the city of Trebon and whether or not he fought a dragon and the rest. As Kote — the empty coat — tells the story, he begins to come alive. In his room sits a locked box either containing his true name or his death, but he’s surrounded by other elements of personification. Folly, the sword, hangs on the wall for the reification of the folly of a willful pride and the things men do for love (perhaps even a reification of his love, though we can’t be sure until book three comes out).
The personification of to know, to story is Kvothe in the mimetic level of story. The empty coat (or kote, the innkeeper who tends to the “small animals” in that empty columbaria of a town; or, worse, the German imperative for defecate) Kote tells the story with Chronicler on the diegetic level. Their dialog seems to show a true human representation. But you also have mute humans within the level of story that ought to speak, even mute doors, mute texts, inaccessible archives. Fae creatures show up in the diegetic level, but personifications show up as well.
He practices “J.G. Frazer’s quaint terminological division between ‘homeopathic magic’ and ‘contagious magic’” in the story — naming and sympathy. Like Will in Piers Plowman, Kvothe exercises at the very start of the story the narratorial power of naming brand new characters on the spot and that capacity to name shifts with his narrative control, when he’s near death (perhaps Kote is a man “waiting to die” in order to be able to change his own name back to Kvothe, perhaps because he can only tell stories when Kote dies so that Kvothe — the personification and auctophany — may be born, perhaps because he can never die now that he’s made the bargain he’s made on the story level and the story has affected real life). At the center of the personification narrative lies which names the narrator endows on figures, how he endows, when he endows them.
As Will in Plowman delights in the privileged foreknowledge of story events (naming forms his initial problem of narration, he identifies on sight personification figures, he spans diegetic registers), so too does Kote delight in such knowledge and his auctophany personifies that narrative foreknowledge. Yet, just as with Will, Kvothe occasionally forgets his role depending on the characters he meets such as Cthaeh (and vice versa with the Cthaeh — normally an all-timeline-knowing, all-space-knowing demon who can’t see Kvothe’s future) — Thought, Imagination, Anima, Faith, and Spes — every personification Will meets face to face initially, he knows not. In Will’s case, the narratorial epistemology shows a contradiction: at times, Will has omniscience and at others he’s comically obtuse. How does this work?
On the diegetic level of the outer dream, Will has the power to name on sight only those he observes with narrative distance such as in a tableau or iconographic portrait. So too can Kote (the narrator) name Folly, the sword (perhaps a reified version of his love Denna, perhaps an embodiment of the moon, whom he chases, perhaps the incarnation of his very quest for Valaritas) or other personifications that other characters mention. He cannot, and Will cannot, identify personifications he meets for the first time, face-to-face.
On the metadiegetic level of the inner dream, Will holds sway over naming on sight both those met at a distance and those met face to face. In a similar way, Kvothe (the character) gets the names right across the board.
Through narratology proper, foregrounding both #1 and #2 as possibilities for the ideal author, it foregrounds total narratorial omnisciences — extradiegesis. Narrating the story by a narrator exclusively outside. Homodiegetic calls up images of mortal narrator, extradiegetic calls up images of godlike narrator. Indeed, Kote (like Will in the mystical trance state) summons up godlike powers while Kvothe gets hurt. Often.
“This calls up the fourth potential epistemological variation: the world and its entire narrative is a book penned by God according to Hugh of St. Victor. Through the person of Jesus, God the Transcendent father enters his own narrative text.” God transcendent, extradiegetic and even heterodiegetic enters and becomes homodiegetic: even mimetic in infancy. Kote, so far, has not done this. But this would be auctophany. In Will’s case, he has transforming — even Neoplatonic — dreams where he’s “lifted” in to transcendent, metaphysical realms. Dante pulls on this as well. The inner dream, then, penetrates the penetration — moving from Holy Place into Holy of Holies — metamorphizing Will’s knowledge into, to borrow an alchemical process, a sublimated, distilled, and coagulated quality. “His ability to recognize and name all personified characters on the spot reveals that he had penetrated into, or moved up to, a cosmic order that is as ontologically different from the outer dream level of diegetic narrative as the outer dream level is from the level of the mimetic frame, waking reality.”
Therefore Will’s third-person knowledge can be remembered in his first-person narration at times: certainly he sees everyone and everything as “personified essence.” Certainly King, the character in Stephen King’s novels, forgets often. Can Kote’s third-person knowledge be remembered in Kvothe’s first-person narration? We don’t quite know for sure (again, book three of the trilogy does not yet exist so per Augustine, we do not yet have the “organic unity” of the significance of Rothfuss’s entire literary project that makes the pilgrim Kvothe himself metamorphosed into the poet Kote “capable at last of telling the story we have heard”), but we have hints. They both, Will and Kote, enjoy more knowledge on “heterodiegetic” narration and less with “homodiegetic” narration, third person verses first person respectively. The closer Will gets physically to the personification figures, the less he knows. For Kvothe, it’s the opposite as third person is the diegetic level, but the epistemological variation remains. And as Kvothe the character in the story becomes Kote the storyteller in the Waystone Inn (perhaps even a storyteller stuck in a waystone, if the stone door and “waiting to die” offers any indication), a transition happens much like putting a face on a cloud that eventually rains and makes still another face in the pond. In Kvothe’s case, the face is hideous: half-Chandrian, half-psychopathic murderer. So which is it? Was the face there to begin with or did we make it?
García Márquez assumes along with the naturalists that we project faces onto the world, but the truth is the opposite: perception’s structured like language. We see faces because faces exist in the world, always already representation, a pre-tropological, pre-linguistic phenomenon. We see tropes because the world is tropes. We see faces in the cloud because personification is structured into the fabric of being. You can tell people that elephants flew overhead and unless they want to willfully disbelieve, they will say with childlike faith, “What happened next?” What better way, then, to completely change society for the better than to rewrite, revise, and collaborate in reinventing the tropes, figures, and narratives we tell ourselves? It’s no accident that the great scientific breakthroughs of history started not in the lab, but in the myth and legend and science fiction section of the library. Martin says we write it to “find the colors again,” again drawing the connection to dreams.
MOVING ON:
“What can any of them know about her?” — coming from the man whose name means to Know. Remember there are knowers VS shapers or singers VS poets or storytellers VS rumormongers or myths VS demythologizers.
Consider the collective mythos here:
What can any of them know about her?
As demythologizers, not much.
It would take a knower — a singer — like Kvothe to do that.
ALL THAT ASIDE….
“He had to trick a demon to get it. But once it rested in his hand, he was forced to fight an angel to keep it. I believe it, Chronicler found himself thinking. Before it was just a story, but now I can believe it. This is the face of a man who has killed an angel.”
I maintain the demon he tricked is Haliax, god of the sun, to get the moon. But once she was in her hand, he fought her — the moon — to keep her. And killed her like her other suiters.
Or perhaps just Selitos?
“What can they know about any of this?” He made a short, fierce gesture that seemed to take in everything, the broken bottle, the bar, the world.
Emphasis mine. Strong emphasis.
Tat-tat, tat-tat. Liquor from the broken bottle began to patter an irregular rhythm onto the floor. “Ahhhh,” Kote sighed out a long breath. Tat-tat, tat-tat, tat. “Clever. You’d use my own best trick against me. You’d hold my story a hostage.”
I want to point out here that in this place, silence breaks and story re-enters. It is the telling of the story that gives shape to this world. Silence is his sign because if he stops his story, the world stops. Why is that his best trick?
Because Kvothe holds the stories of others hostage against them. He takes their stories and makes them his own. This is what he’s doing to Chronicler: he’s taking his story.
He also held his own story a hostage against himself.
“So you went looking for a myth and found a man,” he said without inflection, without looking up.
Did he?
Or did he go looking for a man and find a myth?
“We got wind of you a while back. Just a whisper of a rumor. I didn’t really expect . . .” Chronicler paused, suddenly awkward. “I thought you would be older.”
“I am,” Kote said. Chronicler looked puzzled, but before he could say anything the innkeeper continued. “What brings you into this worthless little corner of the world?”
How much older?
“No one needs three days,” Chronicler said firmly. “I interviewed Oren Velciter. Oren Velciter, mind you. He’s eighty years old, and done two hundred years’ worth of living. Five hundred, if you count the lies. He sought me out,” Chronicler said with particular emphasis. “He only took two days.”
Perhaps older than 200 years? Perhaps older than 500?
Kote gave Chronicler a look of profound disdain. “What gives you the slightest impression that I would be here when you came back?” he asked incredulously. “For that matter, what makes you think you’re free to simply walk out of here, knowing what you know?”
Chronicler went very still. “Are—” He swallowed and started again. “Are you saying that—”
Kvothe will either kill him or keep him captive forever.
“Then again,” he made a gesture as if to show how useless words were. “You are Kvothe.”
“Yes, I suppose I am,” Kvothe said, and his voice had iron in it.
Iron in his voice.
Because of the Amyr?
Or because of his control of narrative, silence, and speech?
Or because he’s the new Tehlu / Cinder?
Or a Draugr?
Navigate to other chapters:
I’ll put this at the end of each chapter so we can actually navigate the text
- Name of the Wind Analysis — Prologue
- Name of the Wind Analysis — Chapter 1
- Name of the Wind Analysis — Chapter 2
- Name of the Wind Analysis — Chapter 3
- Name of the Wind Analysis — Chapter 4
- Name of the Wind Analysis — Chapter 5
- Name of the Wind Analysis — Chapter 6
- Name of the Wind Analysis — Chapter 7
- Name of the Wind Analysis — Chapter 8
- Name of the Wind Analysis — Chapter 9
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