A doubt arises over the advisability of a talesman using his own terms
We have now read and criticised Part One of The Magic Key. Before going on to Part Two (which Bardelys tells me is in much rougher shape than Part One, and he’ll be glad of a bit of extra time to start serialising it) I thought it would be a good idea to look back on Part One with a special eye towards two aspects of the tale, the hero’s characterization and the terminology of Faëry.
Stay-at-home or coal-biter?
Bardelys has offered us Hans with aspects of both the stay-at-home and the coal-biter. The difference is two-fold. First, the stay-at-home doesn’t leave his comfy paternal nest for reasons of fear – he’s scared of the big bad World and clings to Mother’s apron-strings. But the coal-biter stays at home mostly out of laziness. The stay-at-home will usually be a ‘good lad’ and do what Mother and Father (if Father is around) tell him. The coal-biter snaps and snarls, talks big, talks tough, is arrogant, and won’t do anything he’s told.
These are the archetypes of the characters, and as you see, they are quite at odds with each other.
Second, the pattern of the typical stay-at-home hero’s story has him leaving home, at last, when the home itself collapses. Father goes bankrupt, the family loses the house, Father dies and Mother is forced off the property, Father and Mother agree that they can’t make ends meet and need to get rid of the kids (think of Hansel and Gretel here). But the coal-biter leaves home because his arrogant behavior has gotten him into trouble locally.
(Since the coal-biter is not well-known as a story pattern, I’ll lay out a modern version: one day, while playing football with the local guys on the high school field, the coal-biter quarrels, as he does with everyone he meets, with the kid playing quarterback on the opposing team. On the next play the coal-biter trips the lineman blocking him, and sacks the quarterback, driving him into the ground so hard he breaks the kid’s neck and kills him. Hauled before the local court on charges, the coal-biter sneers without any repentance, but his father pleads for him, and the judge offers the coal-biter the choice of going to juvenile prison, or enlisting in the army. The coal-biter shrugs and with a contemptuous joke says he’ll take the army because it’s one prison or another. In the army he distinguishes himself for bravery and insane, reckless courage, but is denied the appropriate medals and honors because he is so insubordinate … he goes on to be dishonorably discharged, becomes a mercenary, and ends badly.)
The first that we see of Hans fits the coal-biter in character and behavior. But the next night we see he is afraid of bad dreams, and on the next morning he is afraid of going into the woods. This fits the stay-at-home, not the coal-biter. Finally, he leaves home when his home collapses (literally) and his family is killed. So what starts off as coal-biter ends as stay-at-home, leaving us a bit confused.
It is possible of course to blend the archetypes, which makes Hans a more complex character. But Bardelys has given us what is mainly an archetypal tale, at least in the way he presents it to us. It strikes me as strange, and wrong, to have ‘once upon a time’ lead into a psychological study in realism – the two just don’t fit together.
The Terms of the Tale’s World
I have criticised Bardelys through chapters 7–9 for the lack of Magic, and how the tale seems to have ‘down-shifted’ into a mere adventure tale rather than a tale of the Fantastic. I compared it unfavorably to Professor Tolkien’s The Hobbit in this regard. But I noted, too, that in The Hobbit, Tolkien’s Elves were decidedly unmagical. We regard them as magical simply because, well, they’re elves, aren’t they?
That set me wondering whether Bardelys might not have given these chapters of his a lot more magical feeling, had he named his Charcoal Burners with a traditional name of creatures out of fairyland. What if he had said the wretched poor charcoal burners had been transformed, in the eyes of his young hero, into ‘ghouls’ or ‘demons’ or ‘vampires’ or ‘trolls’? Then every single line that refers to them could be fraught, if not with magic per se, at least with the expectation and anticipation of magic in the minds of us in the audience. ‘They look like Charcoal Burners, but really, they’re demons!’ Hans could tell Farmer Groening, and we might even shiver. But we react quite differently when we hear him say, ‘but really, they’re wicken-things!’ For Bardelys has not yet, at this point in the tale, sufficiently ‘charged’ his invented term of wicken with the same awful supernatural portents.
Thus we see in this instance the advantages for the talesman in using his own terminology for his fantastical creations, and the disadvantages. When we hear or read of ‘ghouls’ or ‘vampires’ or ‘trolls’ we shudder, if we find the terms fresh, but we roll our eyes if we are inveterate readers in the genre, and we think, ‘Oh not the trolls again!’ or we yawn and think, ‘Yeah, I know all about vampires and all their tribes … which kind of vampire is it this time?’ But all the same, we do know that trolls and vampires are not of this Earth. As for ‘wicken’ (or any other newly-coined talesman’s term) we just wonder what the heck it is, and until we get settled into the tale, we have to pause a moment and wonder whether we missed some earlier scene in which the term was set forth and defined.
(Composed on keyboard Monday 10 November 2008)
