But I Digress . . .

Since the recaps of Community have improved from egregious to extremely boring, I’m going to make a one-time exception to expand the purview of this blog, because a certain article on the AV Club positively enraged me.  As a Midwestern goatherder child, I’m naturally a huge fan of Lloyd Alexander’s children’s fantasy series the Prydain Chronicles.  In fact, they hold up extremely well.  Oh, Jason Heller, you disagree, do you?

Kids get all kinds of mixed signals from adults.

Oh, right.  This is the AV Club.  How many paragraphs will I have to wade through before we actually start talking about the subject of the article?

If our parents love us, why do they punish us? If learning is good, why does school suck? If we follow their rules, why do we sometimes still get in trouble? The biggest mixed signal, though, has to do with honesty. Growing up, we’re told we should always tell the truth. So how are we supposed to feel when we find out adults have been lying to us? Or keeping secrets? Or simply aren’t who they say they are?

That’s #1!

I was 16 when I found out that my father wasn’t my father. The lie wasn’t a small one. It was an elaborate falsehood that all my close relatives had been in on my entire life. To top it all off, my real father was someone I’d never met, and who’d made many offers of help since I was born, all of which my mother refused. . . .Years of vague evasions and mismatched facts suddenly made sense. The fog of mixed signals I’d been living in for so long began to slip away.

Look, that’s sad.  I sincerely feel sorry for the author.  But is this really the right article for this?  Because not only are we still not to Lloyd Alexander (two paragraphs!), but this section doesn’t even really relate to the first paragraph.  I mean, having the identity of your father hidden from you is not really the same as adults repeating platitudes about the educational value of school, right?

Taran, the hero of Lloyd Alexander’s beloved children’s fantasy series The Chronicles Of Prydain, doesn’t know who his parents are. At least not at first. As with so many stories of its type, Taran is an orphan of simple means whose lineage—and destiny—is gradually revealed to both him and readers. As it turns out, those close to Taran know the truth, or at least strongly suspect it. With the best intentions, Coll and Dallben have kept Taran ignorant of his origins, leaving him to flounder in a cloud of doubt and distrust. They don’t fully lie to him, but they don’t fully tell him the truth: that there’s a strong possibility he’s the heir to the throne of the High King of Prydain. Taran’s childhood isn’t miserable because of this deception, but the bedrock of his existence clearly has cracks in it. Because of that, he’s rarely able to stand on steady ground, feel secure, and truly know himself.

This paragraph is actually quite fascinating.  Not for what it says about the Prydain Chronicles, of course, but it’s quite revealing when it comes to Jason Heller.  Because what Jason has done is to flagrantly misread the novel in order to read himself and his story into it—he’s become Taran, who now longs to know the identity of his parents, which has been concealed from him by his caretakers.

Only problem: Jason’s just objectively wrong.  You just read over these books and wrote an article about them, and you can’t get the most basic facts right?

We’ll take this one at a time. 

One. Coll and Dallben do not lie to Taran, nor do they not even “fully tell the truth.”  Brief refresher course (and it’s been a few years since I’ve re-read the books): Coll and Dallben do not know who Taran’s parents are.  He was found abandoned on the edge of a battlefield.  There is a prophecy that an orphan will become High King of Prydain.  But no one knows, until the very end of the novel, whether or not that orphan is Taran.  There are, after all, a lot of orphans. 

Two.  He is not heir to the throne of the High King of Prydain.  He becomes High King at the end of the novels.  He is not the heir.  His parents are not the king.  Indeed, the knowledge of who his parents are is not “gradually revealed to himself or the readers.”  It’s never revealed.  No one knows who his parents are.  In fact, the work of the books, and particularly of Taran Wanderer, is Taran learning that the identity of his parents—and particularly whether they are royalty or not—is unknowable and unimportant.  And that lesson is confirmed by the absolute unimportance of his lineage at the end of the series. 

So, however sad Jason Heller’s childhood was, this is not a story about him, about a character searching for his real parents.  It’s not remotely a story about how parental figures lie or deceive their kids.  Just because you want to start this article with a personal anecdote doesn’t make it in any way relevant. 

When I was a kid, The Chronicles Of Prydain did more than speak to me—they enchanted me. Part of me wanted to be enchanted by them again, and part of me was. Alexander’s prose and dialogue are crisp and fluid, an effortless mix of exposition and characterization that so many writers, especially in fantasy, strain to perfect. His humor is wry; his sentiment is genuine. His plotting, though, is another matter. In The Book Of Three, the deus ex machina is off the hook. You can practically see Alexander’s heavy authorial hand as he shoves together Taran and his companions in adventure: the valorous High Prince Gwydion; the annoying, furry pseudo-human Gurgi; the peevish, enchantment-wielding Princess Eilonwy; the monarch-turned-bard Fflewddur Fflam; and the crotchety dwarf Doli. 

I don’t know, maybe I’m old fashioned.  But when authors employ easy-to-define terms like “deus ex machina,” I kind of like them to know what those terms actually mean.  And Jason, you clearly have no conception.  Deus ex machina is when an arbitrary device is used to resolve a plot, from the gods that would descend onto the stage to patch things up in Greek drama.  It is not about a widespread “heavy authorial hand.”  There is no deus ex machina in The Book of Three.  I’m sorry, Jason.  Look it up next time.

Also, this critique is just the worst kind of misreading.  Having read the whole series, looking back it may seem kind of arbitrary that the first book works to introduce the reader to all of the major characters.  Only one problem: if you’re actually reading the books fresh, you don’t know these are the major character who are going to crop up for the rest of the series.  You’re just meeting new characters.  Only in retrospective do you see the “heavy authorial hand.”  And if you only see it in retrospect, that’s not bad plotting—it’s good plotting. 

But wait!  The worst is yet to come. 

As the series progresses beyond its first installment, though, Alexander’s string-pulling begins to take on a larger meaning. The Chronicles Of Prydain are about destiny.

If you sum up the meaning of a text in one word, then you’re not doing analysis.  The Chronicles of Prydain is not about destiny.  It’s not about fate.  It’s not about free will.  It’s not about the American Dream.  It’s not about human nature.  It’s not about the exploitation of chickens.  It’s not about the scourge of emerald ash bore.  It’s a novel.  Novels cannot be boiled down to one word.  I know it’s against all the Van Der Werffian philosophy about how whole seasons of Community are about “choice.”    But show me someone who thinks a text can be summed up in a word, and I’ll show you an idiot.

Propelled by various prophetic engines, the series’ young hero has to grapple with what he’s fated to do vs. what he chooses to do. . . . In trying to simplify such a complex issue, though, Alexander hits his readers with the most confusing mixed signal a grownup could give a kid.

I just read a paragraph by someone who tried to “simplify” the “complex” Prydain Chronicles into one word.  The only person here who’s trying to simplify such a complex issue is you.

Alexander’s weakness with female characters comes to a head in the series’ conclusion, The High King. At the end of the book, after the Death-Lord Arawn has been defeated and his henchmen and minions vanquished, the newly crowned High King Taran is faced with a choice: marry Eilonwy and live in the distant, idyllic land known as The Summer Country, or stay in war-torn Prydain to help his people rebuild. He picks the latter, knowing it means he’ll never see Eilonwy again.

Again, reading.  It’s good!  You know, taking in the information written on the page in front of you.  Forget for a moment the judgment on “Alexander’s weakness with female characters,” and just note that the Summer Country is not a “distant, idyllic land.”  It’s a distant, idyllic land where no one ever dies.  You leave that out, but, I don’t know, that seems kind of important.  So that by choosing to stay in Prydain, Taran’s choosing death.  We’ll be coming back to that.

Eilonwy then throws a temper tantrum. Even though she’s one of the most capable characters in the series, she gives up her powers of enchantment to remain with Taran. When her “bauble”—a magic, glowing globe that seems to symbolize her life-force and agency throughout the series—is extinguished forever, it feels cruel rather than liberating. Even worse is the muddled takeaway provided by Dallben, who tells Eilonwy, “Yes [your enchantments are gone], yet you shall always keep the magic and mystery all women share.” Having a female character with as much inherent strength as Eilonwy go out like a piece of furniture is one of Alexander’s most grievous inconsistencies.

Look—that line from the novel is dated and embarrassing, no doubt.  But this interpretation of the ending is just ridiculous.  Is it really so bad that a character is willing to give up something to stay with the person they love?  In the comments to the article, people compared Eilonwy’s choice to giving up a job and follow a love interest to a different city.  Maybe you wouldn’t make that choice, but it doesn’t make the person who relocates a “piece of furniture.”  Eilonwy actively chooses to stay with Taran.

And again, the larger point.  At the end of the novel, the world of magic is passing away, so Eilonwy’s choice to relinquish her powers is not exactly giving away anything.  Maybe that’s a cop out, but again, to remind you, she’s choosing death here.  Kind of a big choice, one that shows “inherent strength,” I think. 

Get ready: here’s the point where I started yelling and restraining my urge to toss around my farming implements.  It’s a big section, but there’s just so much dumb in there.

Even worse is the entire idea of fate. I never picked up on this mixed signal as a kid, but it’s glaring as an adult: Alexander uses the last few pages of The High King to try to reconcile Prydain’s competing ideas of prophecy and free will. He utterly fails. “For the deeds of a man, not the words of a prophecy, are what shape his destiny,” Dallben proclaims at the end of The High King, in essence nullifying the basic force that his [sic] driven Prydain’s characters through the series. Alexander begins speaking of ifs, and of the end of prophecy, where men will once again be masters of their own destiny.

It’s a shame that you were smarter as an eight year old then you are now.  It’s like you’ve read a different series this time.  You know what makes Alexander’s series different, and part of its enduring appeal?  It’s really not interested in prophecy.  Sure, there are some prophecies in a few of the books, but throughout, again and again, Alexander stresses that “destiny” is a combination of outer forces and inner choices.  And at the end of the novel, which is really the best moment of the entire series, Alexander is able to encapsulate these themes brilliantly.  It’s revealed that the supposedly prophetic “Book of Three” is actually a book “of If,” a Borgesian garden of forking paths that captures possibilities, not destinies.  And it’s revealed that the figures of Orddu, Orgoch, and Orwen, who in the previous novels are clearly linked with the Fates of Greek mythology, are in fact different from the Fates.  Humor me.  Since you seem not to have read the books, I’ll quote from them (something that is apparently beyond you, since you quote from the text twice—didn’t you ever take Freshman Comp?)

Here’s a quote from the end of The High King, when Taran is brought a tapestry that he’s seen on Orddu, Orgoch, and Orwen’s loom:

            “It is yours by right, my robin,” answered Orddu.  It does come from our loom, if you insist on strictest detail, but it was really you who wove it.”

            . . .

            “The pattern is of your choosing and always was.”

            “My choosing?” Taran questioned.  “Not yours? Yet I believed . . .”  He stopped and raised his eyes to Orddu.  “Yes,” he said slowly, “once I did believe the world went at your bidding.  I see now it is not so.  The strands of life are not woven by three hags . . . The pattern indeed was mine.  But here . . . here it is unfinished.”

            “Naturally,” said Orddu.  “You must still choose the pattern . . . as long as thread remains to be woven.”

            So, ultimately, Taran comes to a more sophisticated understanding of the interrelation between fate and choice.  Great!  Going beyond simple binaries, learning, growing, all those things AV Club reviewers seem to like.  So what do you think of it, Jason?

It’s a wishy-washy, ass-covering, have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too kind of copout. Maybe it’s the jaded adult in me who, like all of us, has had to sacrifice, compromise, and ruthlessly revise my path through life—that is, when I’ve actually had any control over it at all. As I’ve gotten older, the lofty idea of fate-vs.-free will has given way to nature-vs.-nurture.

I’ll just pause here to point out that the last sentence makes absolutely no sense.  What’s the difference between “fate-vs.-free will” and “nature-vs.-nurture”?  Anyone? 

And from there, it’s just dissolved into something far more ambiguous, messy, and unknowable.

Oh, so you know, something kind of like what’s described in the novel.  A world where choices are hard, and have consequences, and are partly determined by outside forces.  A sophisticated knowledge of the world.  And yet somehow this is a cop-out?  Don’t you understand that what you’re talking about is exactly what is emphasized by the end of The High King?  It’s you who’s stuck in freshman comp binaries about fate vs. free will.  The novel is beyond those binaries. 

For Alexander to wrap up his epic with a handful of conflicting platitudes not only robbed me of my lingering fondness for The High King, it robbed the series’ characters of their triumphs.

I don’t know, seems like you like good conflicting platitudes when you see them, at least judging by this article, amIrite?

What you view as conflicting platitudes seems to me like, I don’t know, complexity.  Seems like Alexander’s idea of the interrelation of fate and choice reminds of a certain other writer, who’s also known for his “conflicting platitudes”:

it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates.  . . .—aye, chance, free will, and necessity—nowise incompatible—all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course—its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.

Who was that writer, again?  Oh yeah, Herman Melville. In a little book called Moby-Dick.

Look, let me explain something to you.  You know what can be helpful when you’re writing a long article like this one?  I don’t know, maybe a little research.  Maybe I’m being old-fashioned again, but I’ll even take WikiPedia.  You know, research can be helpful!  Did you know Lloyd Alexander lived in Paris after WWII?  Did you know he was really into existentialism?  Did you know he even was the first to translate Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre into English—his version will even pop up occasionally in anthologies.  It’s true!  Probably not something that’s worth knowing, that is unless you’re tasked with, say, writing an article about Lloyd Alexander.  Cause maybe that information could be helpful.  Cause kind of seems like the novels express an Existentialist philosophy, now, don’t they?  An affirmation of individual choices, and,particularly, of death as the ultimate guarantor of the centrality of those choices.  That’s why your flagrant glossing over of the fact that Taran (and Eilonwy) chooses death over immortality is so egregious.  Taran chooses death because that provides his life, and his choices, with meaning—even if they may be hemmed in by fate or destiny or whatever—and that’s the philosophy of the novel.  Indeed, that’s the great difference between the Prydain Chronicles and its influences.  Both C.S. Lewis and Tolkien have similar “Summer Countries,” where the good characters go to get rewarded and live eternally at the end of the series.  As such, they’re both books in a Christian framework (explicitly, obviously, when it comes to Lewis), but the Prydain Chronicles ultimately reject that model and emphasize the importance of this mortal world, a world that Taran chooses at the cost of death.  As such, Alexander’s series is the ultimate anti-religious fantasy novel, more than the more overtly anti-Christian  His Dark Materials.  That’s not a copout.  It’s the opposite.  And if you can’t recognize that, maybe you should learn how to understand books before you start writing about them.