Witherwing

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

In the Afterglow thread, Sean referred to

David Jarrett's curious book Witherwing - not what I'd call well-written or well-paced but full of haunting and evocative imagery nonetheless

I love this book. It's kind of hard to say why, although it, along with Amsir and the Iron Thorn, certain parts of The Dying Earth, and a few others really nail a dreamy, post-apocalyptic, elegiac feel. It's completely different from the politicized post-apocalypse survivorship stuff, and relies on its "futurity" essentially to become antiquity. Gene Wofle raised it to a high art form in his Book of the New Sun, which I don't think he's managed to equal since.

But there's something so raw in Witherwing, yet so dreamy. It's hard to describe. The story is great classic stuff: a slightly-mutated young prince quests across the blasted yet partly-recovered wasteland, learning about the different mutants and tribes as he goes. He learns that "wizards" and "witches" are resurrected people from the Old Days, and that his own wing-arm and his blasted family history are the results of such meddling. He develops a fierce hatred of the Game they play among one another, which uses the recovered peoples as pawns and sex-toys, and also a fierce empathy for all things human, no matter how horrific (the "man-fish," brrr). It's all about the typical 1970s post-apocalypse heroic ending, in which the hero gazes out upon the horizon at the end, realizing that he and his people must find their own way now.

There's a weird kind of mythological fiction-writing that became popular in the 1960s and 1970s - John Gardner did it to some extent with Grendel and much more with Jason and Medea. Richard Monaco did it with his series of Arthurian novels. Elizabeth Cook did it, more recently, with Achilles: a Novel. It's different from the approach taken (to choose disparate examples) by Richard Graves and Mary Renault, which are essentially naturalistic. It's more stream-of-consciousness, more about letting the myth enter the reader and then the story often goes on to concern something else entirely. It makes no attempt to be historical at all and was PoMo long before the term was coined; it might quite easily hop into the writing-studio of the author or veer off into the lives of a peasant family nearby the canonical action.

Stylistically, it relies on off-beat imagery. I mean really off-beat - when Parsifal inadvertantly walks in on a knight and a peasant girl having sex in a barn (or somewhere, can't remember), the image from his POV is utterly freaky: some kind of misjointed creature struggling on the ground, no real distinction between clothes and bare flesh, sections with hair on them (e.g. the head) completely unidentifiable as human body parts. When you translate it into the post-apocalyptic, sword-and-sorcery (I use the term loosely) fiction, it works incredibly well but ranks among the most low-level-peripheral disturbing stuff I've ever read. Gene Wolfe does this all the time in the New Sun book, and given the "futurity," it often concerns stuff which is familiar to the modern reader ... but is rendered unfamiliar through the protagonist's perceptions. The most famous example concerns the photo of Armstrong walking on the surface of the moon, which is very carefully described by Severian in first-person, but requires a whole shift-out, lurching experience on the reader's part to process.

Witherwing does all this. The bizarre sequences in which the hero makes love to mutant snake-women, when the wizard who's chosen to exit the Game "plays" in his tower by skidding around on an icy floor in an armchair, when Hrasp's men dance in Kali-like worship to Mother Ice ... and also, the extremely clear and frightening pieces in which the hero (who's rather an effective bad-ass) kills a couple of foes in a spray of blood and snow which marries Kurosawa and Frazetta, or when the stepmother-witch, whose name I'm briefly forgetting, arises from her storage-chamber, carries out a couple of scenes completely nude and hairless, then grows out her head, pubic, and other body hair, and finally offers herself to Witherwing after he's killed Hrasp and is soaked in Hrasp's blood ...

I find that when I give myself up to its pages as a reader, what first appears to be painful first-time-novelist prose transforms into a unique prose medium that communicates extremely effectively. I have always wanted to read the book aloud - my wife often read to one another, and I've found that many books offer a completely different experience when voiced - foremost among them is The Book Ouroboros, but I think Witherwing would qualify.

I have no idea which of the following accounts for the effects of reading I'm describing:

1. Poor writing + nostalgic adolescent appreciation of a book which I read at the right moment (about 14, I think)

2. Good but very unusual writing which requires a particular mind-set, and perhaps a particular cultural moment, to connect with

3. Poor writing with just enough oomph in it to spark some kind of creative process which happens to be something I can do

But I do think the book is worth the effort to put aside all comparison with others - i.e., it's not "another S&S adventure" - and simply absorb with as much imaginative commitment as possible. It doesn't provide anything very new in terms of plain story, but it does deliver the story per se (which is a hell of a lot more than I can say for 99% of the post-apocalyptic SF of the time), and if #2 and #3 above have any validity at all, it'll repay the commitment. Its events and imagery planted themselves in my mind and never left: is literally impossible to forget the duel with Hrasp, the extraordinary impact of the verse Witherwing chooses as his source of strength, the love and friendship of the fisher-people, and Nada's beauty, when she is at her most exhausted and frostbitten.

The verse?

Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with she-wolf's teat.
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.

Does anyone know if this is from an actual poem?

Best,
Ron

[Sean]

Great, great description of this book, Ron.  It's not just the imagery (as I said) that's haunting and elegaic, it's the things that happen.

Someone like Prince Witherwing, with the mutation demonized a little bit further, is the kind of protagonist I would choose to play in Afterglow right now. Hutt I read as an Angel.

I found the writing strangely stop-startish and occasionally clumsy, and the pacing jarring, and I fell asleep trying to finish the book several times. But there was something in it that really stuck, too, and I don't think that was just a product of your youth - I'm not young any more and a lot of the stuff you describe is sticking to me too. So is that good writing or poor? There's also the writing vs. storytelling distinction to consider. But maybe best to say it's writing which manages to evoke and haunt without necessarily providing a good example for Prose Style 101. On the other hand, the fact that there are so many books like this might also suggest that we don't know everything there is to know about prose style yet.

Wolfe has come to annoy me despite his brilliance, but "Seven American Nights" is kind of cool too along the lines we're discussing.

[jrs]

Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat,
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.

"Power" by Ralph Waldo Emerson, also found in his Self-Reliance essay.  

Julie

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Julie,

Makes sense. Self-Reliance is referenced in the novel as well.

Best,
Ron

[DannyK]

Have you read "In the Drift" by Michael Swanwick?  It's sort of post-apocalyptic (set in a world where Three Mile Island melted down catastrophically, and much of the East Coast is a "no-go zone.").

It's definitely worth mining for S&S ideas; two of my favorites are the future New Orleans society, run by the militarized karnival krewes and the brooding evil presence of Three Mile Island itself (clearly an Immanent in S&S terms).

[Sean]

R. K. Elliott's essay "Aesthetic Theory and the Experience of Art" is perhaps useful here.

Elliott distinguishes between the judgments we make of works "from without" (i.e. in terms of their formal properties, surface characteristics, and the like: style, execution, content, rhythm, pacing, etc.) and "from within". Experiencing artworks from within involves experiencing the artwork either as delivering a situation (an imaginative space) or as the expression of one's own emotion (as when the music takes you somewhere other than where you are). Painting often does the former, music often the latter, poetry often both.

Evaluating artworks takes place both on the 'from without' and 'from within' levels, sometimes separately, sometimes in terms of the way they inform each other. In some cases readings of artworks 'from without' and 'from within' need not coincide, and a work that seems sublime in either category may seem banal in the other.

So with all that theoretical baggage in place, I might say this: Witherwing delivers situations so compelling that when you get into the imaginative space of the novel, you kind of can't forget it - it rewards the reader who experiences it from within. Jarrett's vision and the images and events that populate it are powerful and thought-provoking. On the other hand, I felt at least that the quality of the writing was not that high, and 'from without' it, like many (though certainly not all) worthwhile works of fantasy and science fiction, seems to lack certain stylistic graces and types of craftsmanship that also contribute to the overall aesthetic experience. Which means that critics who are particularly obsessed with formal features of artworks, and which don't tend to get past those features to the inner experience of the artwork unless all the i's are dotted and t's are crossed, are never even going to get to experience the work 'from within' at all.

P.S. Most people who bother to think about RPGs tend at least at first to adopt a 'from without', formalist aesthetics for evaluating System, and a 'from within', expressivist aesthetics for evaluating Play. But it's interesting that 'cool mechanic' and 'great session' are in a way such primitive evaluations in the aesthetics of role-playing; the Forge-inspired RPG theorist is perhaps more interested in how the two work together. And justifiably so; but here the Forge theorist starts looking more like the literary connoissuer does with respect to her books, where they're perfectly aware of the joys of both kinds of experience, but want them to work together to support a perhaps more profound kind of overall experience than the artwork which only succeeds on one of the two levels can perhaps provide.

P.P.S. Just in case anyone (maybe Jonathan Walton) who does aesthetics is reading this, no, I don't think Elliott makes out the epistemological case against his opponents, but that vitiates neither his distinction nor his insightful use of it in discussing the works he considers - his discussions of Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle and Bonnard's Nude before a Mirror are themselves worth the trouble of the essay.