Critiquing Chapter 2 of the novel
A chapter break, as Bardelys well understands, is not an occasion for the reader to put a book down but rather a ploy by the talesman to keep the reader reading. This can take various forms:
- An unanticipated event that makes the reader want to know ‘what happens now?’
- An unanticipated event that makes the reader want to know ‘why did that happen?’
- A hotly-anticipated event that is about to take place.
- A revelation that makes the reader want to know why.
Here Bardelys shows us (at the end of chapter one) how the pattern in the life of his hero changes; this is unanticipated, and falls under the first category above. It also falls in a sense under the third category, for the reader senses that the Inciting Incident is about to take place: Bardelys has given us the status quo ante in the life of Hans Forester, and now we sense he will experience that event that disturbs the equilibrium of that life, to which he must respond, and which will drive Hans down the road of the Tale.
The walk down the Charcoal Burners Road, and confronting of the Black Forest, is not particularly done. It strikes me as too long for what it is. So it is either graceless, or awkward, or misses the mark in some other way – if I knew precisely how it was lacking, I would tell Bardelys, and presumably he would fix it and he could.
Another challenge Bardelys faces here is common to the ‘narrator-less’ ‘real-time’ talesmanship so common today. When we follow a tale within a character’s experience, how do we skip forward in time? Are we condemned to relate each and every moment of his life? Chapter breaks offer the talesman of such tales a good chance to elide some time. But Bardelys can’t introduce a chapter break here (or at least, he chose not to), so what then?
He chose to put his young hero into a trance-state, and fall into dreaming just after dawn, only to come to awareness at sunset. A whole day slips by Hans, during which he experiences a series of visions of the Black Forest. All these visions, Bardelys assures me, are true, and offer foreshadowing of the experiences Hans will have during the unfolding tale.
The Old Man in the Woods, Bardelys tells me, has a name, a true name, but just as he was preparing this (final?) draft for us to post on this blog, it occurred to him that a old man’s bushy beard is much like the moss that grows on the old maple-trees where Bardelys lives. So he gave the Old Man a common nickname, of ‘Mossbeard.’
The changing of names is a special problem to talesmen. Some talesmen bring in names for their characters at the first conception, and these names strike the talesmen as good and proper and never change. Of course, the name of a person is rather like the title or definition of a thing, especially in these cases, where the ‘person’ has no existence beyond mere words anyway. So the choice of a name is important, and can often guide the conception of the character both for us readers and for the talesmen themselves – a strong name can lead a talesman to give a character a forceful destiny in the course of the unfolding events.
When the talesman is weak-minded, or the name of a character does not quite fit his role, his name may well change, several times, over the long course of composition. And every time the talesman renames a character, he must go over the rest of the tale and edit the scenes in which the character appears. Here the case is even worse than normal, since ‘Mossbeard’ is being added as a third name for the character: he is Mossbeard, and he is the Old Man in the Woods, and he is ‘Walthere’ (for such, Bardelys assures me, is the true name of this creature – that is, unless Bardelys changes his mind yet again).
Hans has his first serious talk with his Father, and we can see that their relationship is difficult and hooded. Neither Hans nor Father can open his heart to the other, and thus no true meeting of hearts takes place: although Hans would like to tell his Father of his fears, and his interest in his Father’s trade, and Father (as we will see later on) wants nothing more than to teach his son his trade. And yet pride comes in between them.
What happens that evening at dinner, however, is altogether unanticipated. For some reason, which Bardelys himself seems unable to explain to me, Hans has an unattractive vision of his own family, in which they appear to him as grotesque creatures. The whole scene becomes so abhorrent to the young man that he passes out – an example of type two of the chapter-breaks.
(Composed on keyboard Sunday 02 November 2008)
