The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander
Monster Portraits by Sofia Samatar
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Emma by Jane Austen
Wise Child by Monica Furlong
The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
Forget the Sleepless Shores by Sonya Taaffe
Emily of New Moon by L.M. Montgomery
Honorable mentions:
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
The entire Earthsea series by Ursula K. Le Guin. My favorite: The Tombs of Atuan
Paris Out of Hand by Karen Elizabeth Gordon
Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales by Greer Gilman
Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke
When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore
Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor
The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne Valente
A Stranger in Oolondria by Sofia Samatar
The Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf
The Museum at Purgatory by Nick Bantock
The City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith
Catherynne Valente’s Under in the Mere
Jim Butcher’s The Aeronaut’s Windlass
Richard Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought
Abraham Eraly’s The Mughal World
Indra Das’s The Devourers
Margo Lanagan’s The Brides of Rollrock Island
Alex Mar’s Witches of America
Catherynne Valente’s The Girl who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home
Oooo boy is there a lot of information in this movie. But each piece of information is simple, straightforward, and always pays off. Plus we have Will and Elizabeth to be baffled and confused so the other characters can tell the audience what everyone else already knows. Most importantly though, the backstory is always used to build suspense.
But I Have Seen a Ship with Black Sails
Mullroy and Murtogg – the comic relief British soldiers – provide the simple setup (or planting :3) for the Black Pearl: It’s an evil, haunted ship crewed by the damned. Boom! One sentence! The conversation doesn’t feel like an info dump because, well, it actually sounds like two old friends arguing, and it makes us curious – is the Pearl actually haunted? How is it haunted? What’s going on here?
When the Pearl shows up in Port Royal, the man in the jail cell next to Jack Sparrow hands out the reminder: The Pearl leaves no survivors. During the battle there are two visual hints that something’s off. A pirate goes down when Will throws an axe into his back, but later the pirate reappears (Will looks confused so we know something’s up). Several pirates find Jack in his cell and when one of them grabs Jack by the throat, his hand turns to bone. Jack even says, “So there is a curse. That’s interesting.” Whaaaaaat? Curiosity peaked. (This is a mini-payoff, btw.)
The mystery of the Pearl is our point of tension for the first half an hour of the movie. But its backstory is also integral to the plot, so it can’t be dragged on too long. Peak interest comes at about the 45 minute mark when Barbossa tells Elizabeth about the curse and the pirate gold.* The mystery of the Pearl is payed off in a satisfying way and will now provide suspense as a point of danger to our heroes. At this point our attention has also been turned to Will’s last name and that becomes our point of tension and suspense.**
*Barbossa mentions that the moonlight shows them for what they really are: namely skeletons. This is set-up visually by the many shots of the moon being covered and exposed by clouds.
**In addition, Jack’s relationship to the Pearl has been woven into the opening. He knows its guns, he knows the crew and calls them mutineers, and he’s the first person to bring up the Pearl in the movie. But! Jack’s backstory has only been mentioned briefly because the opening would be too cluttered with that information and we don’t need it yet. Instead Gibbs explains it about an hour in.
Named for your Father, Eh?
I talked about Will Turner’s arc in my first Pirates post (now lost unfortunately), so here I’ll just cover the beats that emphasize the importance of the name Turner.
When Elizabeth gives her surname as Turner (nicely setup when her maid suggests the pirates are here to kidnap her aka the governor’s daughter), the moment has weight because Barbossa repeats the name to his crew and one of the pirates gives the name ‘Bootstrap.’ Who is Bootstrap?
When Will later asks Jack to help him, Jack only agrees when he learns Will’s name – as Will himself points out later. Again we linger a moment and Jack asks if Will’s named for his father. (This is also when Will explains that he can open the cell with the proper leverage – since Will is later Jack’s leverage this is a bit of a clunky metaphor, but it does manage to come off naturally in the film, so I’ll give it a pass.)
Like the backstory of the Pearl, the mystery of Will’s ancestry isn’t the point of the story, so the important bits are explained at about the 50 minute mark, just 5-10 minutes after it’s first mentioned. But! There’s still tension because we don’t know why Jack wants Turner.
In the next scene we learn Jack wants Will for leverage so that Barbossa will give him the Pearl. This must be convincing because a very dubious Gibbs buys into it. But why does Barbossa want Will? The scene after that Barbossa explains to Elizabeth that they need Turner blood to break their curse – plus the full backstory of how the Pearl and its crew got cursed.
At this point, about an hour in, pretty much all of our questions are answered. The suspense is now no longer based on mystery, but Jack’s constant backstabbing and the danger to Elizabeth and Will.
There are so many through-lines in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. The fact that every single one of them pays off and doesn’t feel contrived is stupid. (Everything from Gibbs’ leather flask being loaded into a canon only for Jack to find it later to Mullroy and Murtogg’s banter about whether Jack is telling the truth, which is reference a magic number of 3 times, to Elizabeth giving her name as Turner, which of course allows for the mistaken identities, but is also used to develop her and Will’s romance when he asks her why she used his name, suggesting that she’s fond of the idea of having his surname *gasp* *pant*.) I’ve talked about the big suspense-building plots – like the Black Pearl’s curse. These are smaller, you know, apple-sized instead of ship-sized
No Additional Shots Nor Powder
Balancing your protagonist’s physical resources and skill against your antagonist’s physical resources and skills is crazy difficult. At the beginning your protagonist should be at a disadvantage so at the end it feels like their victory is hard-won. Often this victory is with a final deus ex machina/power move, like the appearance of a new weapon in Pacific Rim, or by the protagonist learning to hit harder, like in the final fight between Harry Potter and Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows.
Another option is to straight-up give the protagonist less weapons. Often this comes in the form of a few dozen heroes against a million enemies à la most Avengers movies. But once you get past like 50 the number’s are really too big for us to comprehend. This is good for scale, but not for detail and intimacy. When Butch and Sundance face off against an entire army in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid we have a solid sense of the numbers: two men against a few dozen soldiers. As very briefly mentioned in Mikey’s video about Mad Max: Fury Road, this is all the more powerful when the protagonist’s weapons are carefully and clearly presented to the audience so we know exactly what our heroes are working with and can watch them slowly run out of ammo.
In Pirates, after Commodore Norrington catches Jack Sparrow, he, very organically, sorts through Jack’s affects. Norrington comments on the affects and the camera deliberately lingers on each. Jack has one sword, one gun, one bullet, one compass. No additional shots nor powder. The sword of course is an unlimited resource, but almost everyone else is fighting with a gun, so that puts him at a stark disadvantage. (Now you might be asking, aren’t Will and Elizabeth are protagonists? What about them? Well their disadvantage comes mostly from them not being ruthless and chaotic enough. They’re not pirates. But ultimately while Barbossa is everyone’s antagonist, he’s really Jack’s antagonist.)
Even though Jack threatens to use his one bullet multiple times, it’s very clear he doesn’t want to. When he pulls the gun on Will at the end of their first fight, he says, “This bullet was not meant for you.” Will gives us his starry-eyed confused face so that we wonder, Who is it meant for?
From there the gun is never forgotten and has its own merry journey:
Nom, Nom, Delicious Apples
It would have been so easy to muddle through Barbossa’s motivations (that all-important WANT). The screenwriter even could have left the motivation monochromatic across the whole crew: get the gold, feel stuffs again. They even could have left ‘feel stuffs’ as sex/women/wine (vaguely, of course, this is still Disney). It’s not very original, but they’re pirates. That does in fact appear to be the crew’s motivation. They paw at Elizabeth quite a bit and when Barbossa says, “You know the first thing I’m gonna do after the curse is lifted,” everyone chuckles suggestively.
But the screenwriter doesn’t do that. Instead Barbossa has a specific and deeply human desire: all he wants is to eat an apple again. It’s small, sure, but it’s powerful and creates a vulnerable crack in Barbossa’s armor.
When Elizabeth eats dinner with Barbossa, she ravenously devours the banquet, until her offers her a green apple. Unfortunately the camera-work makes it a somewhat sexual moment, but I think Geoffrey Rush means to play it as a very powerful man who is struggling not to look desperate and pathetic by the simple act of watching someone eat while knowing he can’t. Elizabeth refuses the apple and so we get a sort of refusal of his humanity.
Later what Barbossa says that suggestive, “You know the first thing I’m gonna do after the curse is lifted,” he turns to Elizabeth and adds, “eat a whole bushel of apples.” How much more interesting and telling that desire is!
Jack later picks through Barbossa’s apples and we get a quick shot of Barbossa being bitter as Jack blithely, mockingly eats the apples. Jack even offers him one, just to rub salt in the wound.
When Jack finally does shoot Barbossa, Barbossa says, “I feel…” and we see the momentary joy of him being alive and part of the world once more, only for him to realize what he feels is pain and finality as he says, “cold.” As he falls, an apple tumbles from his hand. Now, where did he get that apple? Wasn’t he just holding a gun? Or weren’t his hands empty? WHO CARES IT LOOKS COOL AS ALL GET-OUT AND WORKS ON A SYMBOLIC LEVEL. In other words, he has regained his humanity, only to lose it irrevocably (no, the other movies don’t count, stop it.)
Footnote: the bright-green apples are a great color contrast to the generally blue and red color palette.
The Blood of a Pirate
Blood is a MOTIF, if you will. Or symbolism if you won’t. The blood is both physical and symbolic and is very tied up with the imagery of the medallions and thus the imagery of a curse.
At a symbolic level blood is ancestry, specifically the idea that piracy runs in Will’s veins because of his father Bootstrap. It’s never said this way, but Will initially sees his association to Bootstrap as a curse. Bootstrap is a pirate, the thing that Will hates most. Will is branded and haunted and used because of his blood. Only when he accepts his piratical origins, reveals it to others, and then finally cuts his own hand is he able to accept his blood.
Despite, you know, pirates, the physical blood is very sparing in this movie. Which means it stands out all the more. There are four key moments with blood and they all relate to the curse.
Also just the red blood on the brusque gold medallions, it’s just such a good color.
The Code
Can we just talk about the pirate code for a sec? Just because it’s a weird contrivance that shouldn’t have worked. At a meta-level it’s a set of in-universe rules that allows the screenwriters to get around sticky situations – like why wouldn’t the pirates kill Jack/Elizabeth upon seeing them? And why would Gibbs abandon Jack? Technically this is bad screenwriting, but it works not only because everyone buys into it, but the screenwriter is absolutely not above making fun of how ridiculous the code is.
More importantly though, it ties into Elizabeth and Will’s arc. In the end this is a story about Elizabeth and Will learning to break the rules. So when Elizabeth says to Gibbs and the pirate crew, “You’re pirates. Hang the code and hang the rules. They’re more like guidelines anyway,” it’s really the culmination of her arc. And, you know, she got ‘they’re more like guidelines’ from Barbossa, so it’s an acceptance of piracy at its fullest and most volatile.
Anyway this is all to say, Guys, this is such a good movie. You should go watch it again.
The second episode of Interview with the Vampire, “After the Phantoms of Your Former Self,” asks the question: “Is it okay to kill people?” Louis says no. Lestat says yes.
The question of murder in this show is also a question of food, decadence, and pleasure. The entire episode is framed by food. Daniel, the interviewer, is served countless decedent courses, each beautifully plated and introduced with a nearly incomprehensible litany of fancy terminology. The question, Is it okay to kill people? is, of course, about food as well, since human blood is the main food source of vampires and drinking blood is, or least can be, an act of pleasurable intimacy, loving or violent or both.
The episode asks the question three times. The first time, Louis has just been turned into a vampire and he and Lestat lure home the most middle-American white bread man they can find. He’s a door-to-door salesman. He has a daughter. He’s going to buy her a pony. A great deal of time is dedicated to listening to him drone on about this pony. When Louis kills the man, it is of course a botched job. It’s Louis’ first time after all. Louis struggles to pin him down and Lesat has to give instruction on the basics of drinking blood. The encounter, and our first answer to our question, is a mess. Of course, we should be especially horrified by this victim. He’s innocent. He’s doughy. He has a daughter. But it’s hard to be horrified. It’s hard to feel it. Louis is still floundering, deeply influenced by Lestat’s confidence and too ungainly to make intentional choices about it, even as he is haunted by the killing, philosophically at least. It’s hard as the audience to climb up to the high ground that Louis has reached in the present. The murder is too mundane and Louise is too distracted by other things. At the end of the murder, we don’t linger; Louis is far more concerned about seeing his family, and that’s what’s framed as important.
And as I said, it’s hard to get away from Lestat. For Lestat, this question was settled decades if not centuries ago, and his confidence is hard to resist: Of course it’s okay. It’s beautiful. It’s also necessary. While Louis flails, Lestat gives instructions like he’s telling Louis how to prepare a cutlet. Louis even briefly takes Lestat’s side in the present, asking Daniel if he considers the rabbit before he eats it, if, as an apex predator, it’s ever weighed on his conscious. While Louis violently and bloodily kills a live animal, Daniel responds by taking a bite of his own cooked rabbit.
The second time the episode asks the question seems the most straightforward. During the meal, in the present, one of Louis’ servants, a burly and chiseled white man, a stereotypical Slavic-type, sits next to Louis and holds a pleasant and banal conversation with Daniel while Louis drinks just enough of his blood to be satiated. Louis, as he says, is in perfect control. So here it is. The moral high ground. The vegetarian vampire, as Twilight dubbed it.
It is also, I think, the most uncomfortable moment in the entire episode. Daniel, who has eaten his decedent meal as the servants wrapped the end of the table in saran wrap and brought out a blood bag, who didn’t flinch and continued to eat as Louis devoured a live animal, spurting blood over the table, for the first time Daniel looks queasy. For the first time, he can’t eat. And yet this is the cleanest blood-drinking in the episode. Louis doesn’t even get any blood on his chin.
Of course we might say that no matter how much Louis is in control, it’s still uncomfortable to watch. But I don’t think that’s it. I think Daniel recognizes that there’s something wrong with this moment. The drinking of blood between Louis and Lestat in the first episode is very clearly reminiscent of sex, and while Lestat’s other victims are more characterized by violence, the pleasurable nature still hangs over them; Lestat describes the last kill in the first episode as him ‘overindulging.’ Drinking blood isn’t a perfect allegory for sex – it’s not meant to be and it shouldn’t be read that way. But what Lestat understands and Louis doesn’t is that vampires, even though they’re dead, are inherently sensual beings of pleasure. To be dead, in fact, is to be overwhelmed by your senses, by sights and sounds and smells. To drink blood is to engage in being alive, to revel in the heat and wetness of the human body. I think we’re supposed to see how clinical drinking this Slavic man’s blood is, how detached and removed. Louis does not love this man. He does not connect with this man. This is the philosophical high ground. Of course, as humans ourselves, we have to agree with Louis: It’s not okay to kill people. But this scene makes it hard to feel that, because Louis feels nothing.
The third time the episode asks the questions, back in the past again, Louis is certain. He knows this is wrong, just as it was wrong when he killed the salesman. The death is also far more visceral. The horror and grief that we didn’t get before is present now. But Lestat is also at center stage. This is Lestat’s kill, and Lestat understands pleasure. At the opera, the one place where Lestat is really, truly content, where he revels in the music, the show’s tenor is not up to Lestat’s standards. So he lures the tenor home and humiliates him, making the tenor realize how imperfect his rendition of the opera was. Over the course of the evening, Lestat slowly drains him.
Louis is and is not seduced by this. He connects with the man, experiences the dying man’s final thoughts and visions of home. He describes it lovingly, nostalgically. It is seductive, begging him to join in with Lestat. But it’s also horrifying. The man is humiliated and killed over the course of hours. It’s horrible. Of course it’s horrible. It’s not okay to kill people. But now, as viewers, it’s hard to turn and run back to Louis’ earlier detached meal. Is that really better? To live your whole life going through the motions of pleasure but never really enjoying it?
At the end of the episode, in the present day, a final dessert is served, and Louis joins Daniel in eating it. Daniel, who is perpetually grumpy, is happy for a moment. He reminisces, speaks of how he last ate this after he proposed to his wife, even smiles a little. He enjoys the meal. Louis says the dessert tastes like paste. Louis enjoys nothing. Lestat, killing the tenor, revels. He understands how to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh, and doing so requires him to connect with humans in a way that Louis, by the present, has forgotten how to do.
So, the show asks us, Is it okay to kill people? Of course not! Philosophically, how could you ever agree to that? Even here in the conclusion, as I am about to justify Lestat, I can’t let go of Louis’ moral high ground. But, the show tells us, if Louis is not wrong, he certainly isn’t right either. And if Lestat isn’t right, he’s also not wrong. Lestat understands that the joy of being a vampire is accessing pleasure and communing with the human body. For all that Louis has the moral high ground, for all that he claims to have done so out of a love or at least respect for humans, he has removed himself from them. Louis cannot commune with humans. Louis, as he says, is bored, and his attempts to be strictly moral have put him there.
Brandon Sanderson has three nifty posts on the laws of magic. In the First Law he talks about soft and hard magic. The quick and sloppy version is that hard magic has rules and soft magic does not. E.g. the ring of power is hard magic – wear the ring, turn invisible, attract the Nazgûl. Gandalf’s wizardry is soft magic. It can, like, defeat balrogs and stuff?
Someone once asked me, “Isn’t soft magic just hard magic that hasn’t been explained?” No. No it is not. But it can seem that way and at the time I didn’t have a good answer. And now I have just so many thoughts on this subject.
Sanderson does discuss the tonal difference between hard and soft magic. Namely that soft magic creates a sense of wonder and epic scale, the idea that we are mere mortals living in a grand and incomprehensible world. That’s what Gandalf’s magic feels like, as does much of the magic in Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle and the ritualistic magic in Greer Gilman’s Cloud and Ashes. The tonal difference between hard and soft magic is important and often what dictates the choice of one over the other, but it certainly isn’t everything.
So let’s expand the discussion, yes?
Soft magic is used to explore that which is unknowable.
The world is not composed of inherently explainable or understandable things. I have a certain intensity of loyalty and that loyalty is important to me. I know some people who mirror that intensity in person, but can’t maintain it at a distance. I’ve spent years trying and failing to understand this. It’s not wrong, it’s just far enough beyond my understanding of reality to get it.
Our Hearts Condemn Us, a song by Jozef Van Wissem, evokes very specific feelings for me. I can play it for you (go ahead. It’s a wonderful song). I can describe it: it is dangerous, elsewhere, otherworldly, yellow, distant, and a little painful. I could go into detail about where I first heard it and how I can’t divorce it from the movie Only Lovers Left Alive, but I bet I can’t make you feel exactly what I’m feeling. And if I did, I don’t know how I would know that I had.
In fiction, soft magic can explore everything from death to the limits of language to the complexity of the body.
Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea is about the young wizard Ged, who, in ignorance and arrogance, summons a scary shadow-monster-thing. At the end of the book, Ged chases the shadow past the ends of the earth, where sand and water create a liminal country. So what is that country?
I don’t know, really. It is a beyond, beyond knowledge and experience. It is the feeling of reaching outside our limits and coming to a new understanding. It is like death, but is not death. It’s an exploration of something past our comprehension.
Some other examples: The Veil that Sirius Black collapses into in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. This is also not quite death. It’s elsewhere. It’s unreachable. It’s a deep and terrible loss. In Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars two characters dream each other’s lives, so that while one is awake, the other sleeps. Their lives are interwoven, but disconnected, deeply intimate without understanding how or why or what.
Soft magic is used to create a metaphor.
Metaphor is one of the most common uses of soft magic, and magic in general, in no small part because we expect meaning in our fiction and read fiercely for metaphor. Really, just about every example I drudge up for this post could come back to metaphor.
The shadow that Ged summons in A Wizard of Earthsea is a metaphor. It’s Ged’s own destructive tendencies, his arrogance and self-importance, which is at times so dangerous it causes physical wounds. Le Guin uses soft magic because this is a story about introspection and long, quiet days at sea. It’s about coming to a fuller understanding of our own faults through many journeys and many days. There’s nothing physical or certain about it, but rather a hope that with time we will grow and change.
Certainly, a creature of hard magic could suggest this as well. The shadow might have had clearly delineated powers that Ged had to face. It could have been explained exactly how one summons a shadow like this. In Fonda Lee’s Jade City, Lanshinwan must face his own dangerous arrogance, but he does so in the context of hard magic. Jade City is about naming our destructive, selfish tendencies, giving them shape and clarity, turning them into an enemy we can face head-on with jade and fist. That isn’t Ged’s story. That’s a different story.
As I said, hard magic is imbued with plenty of metaphor: the ring in Lord of the Rings is narcissism and obsession. But some things work better as soft magic. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Dracula is transported overseas in a coffin filled with his native soil. Traveling, especially overseas, is dangerous and when we come to the other side, we’re suddenly outsiders, strangers. Our native soil is safe and familiar, a remind of where we belong. Jewell Gomez uses this idea in The Gilda Stories, with a slant toward hard magic. Vampires line their clothes and walls with their native soil so they can face the sunset and take showers (water in general is dangerous, rather than crossing it specifically). This isn’t explained much, so it’s still soft magic, but it’s used so practically and specifically that it leans toward hard magic. Personally, I don’t think it works as well. The protective nature of our home soil is such a deeply rooted (heh, get it?) and mythic idea, that explaining it pragmatically and outside the metaphor of travel makes it feel a little silly.
Soft magic is used to evoke a mood.
On YouTube, Nerdwriter has a video about the sound of magic in the Harry Potter film series and the mood that invokes. The directors specifically avoid anything futuristic or scifi and, especially later in the series, mix the verbal spell and the sound the wand makes to emphasize how the magic is emerging from the wizard.
In Dictionary of the Khazars, a shepherd enters a city with his flock and spends years trying to get out, only to go deeper into the city. Personally I enjoy the mood best, that of wandering in a strange place, seemingly endlessly. But I acknowledge that there is a long and deep squishy place between mood and metaphor. It could be said that this is a metaphor for being trapped in an unfamiliar place.
For me, an idea is tipped from metaphor to mood when turning it into a metaphor breaks the mood. It’s when something is understood better within the space of an idea, rather than as a single, nailed down idea.
The best example I can think of is basically all of Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s Paris Out of Hand: A Wayward Guide, which is far more surrealism than story. At one point, in passing, the movie Orpheus slips from a film screen and flows down the River Seine, the audience running after it. It’s so prettyyyyy. I can think of a metaphor, but naming it is beside the point and unhelpful. What’s important is that half-caught feeling, that fleeting image, of film-goers with their coats unbuttoned and their skirts rustling, chasing the rippling black-and-white image of Jean Marais.
Finally, soft magic can express a character’s growth and understanding of the world.
This works for both soft magic and hard magic with some flexibility. By going a little beyond how we’ve seen the magic used previously, without breaking our understanding of it, a character can express a deeper understanding of the magic and whatever metaphor that magic stands for.
I’m going to talk about grammar for a second. I apologize. In English, the rules state that past simple is used to talk about completed activities: I killed a dragon. It is dead and I am the best St. George. The end. There is another tense (present perfect simple) which is used to talk about events in the past that may happen again: I have killed a dragon. Perhaps I will go on a quest and kill more dragons. However, because language grows out of people throwing it at each other like rocks, I can use I killed a dragon and I have killed a dragon to mean the same thing. I know I can do this because I’ve been speaking English for just way too long and I understand how to communicate with it, in spite of the rules (to say nothing of slang and my propensity for ‘I is’).
This type of soft magic must be used carefully. It can deus ex machina the hero. In Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find them, the wizards decide to erase the memory of an entire city, including through walls, because they have a gizmo that can erase one person’s memory. This is bad flexibility because it doesn’t fit within the scope of how we understand the magic. It leaves too many questions unanswered and, more importantly, it’s too easy and doesn’t further any characters’ growth.
So let’s return to Earthsea one more time. Ged is searching for the shadow’s name. Standing in the sand and water, Ged realizes that his shadow can have no name but his own. He names it and takes it into himself. How does that fit into the magic system?
At face value, it doesn’t. But let’s explore what we know about Earthsea’s magic. There is some hard magic: wizards can bind people to their will if they use that person’s real name. There’s also soft magic. Magic can be about mending – pots, but also emotional rifts. If it is about mending, it is also about breaking. Naming is about understanding, seeing, knowing.
So there’s nothing in the magic that says by naming this creature, it will become part of Ged. We haven’t seen anything like that before or been told it’s possible. But through the storytelling, the themes, and Ged’s journey, we can see how by naming the shadow, Ged has come to understand that the shadow is none other then himself and his own arrogance. He see what the shadow is and knows how to mend the wrong he has done. He comes to an unknowable place, understands his own destructive capabilities, and names it. By using magic in a way that is new but fits within the metaphor and mood of the story, we see how Ged has grown and changed.
I admit, many of these ideas – mood, metaphor, mystery – overlap. And your interpretation of these books may not be the same as mine. You may read Earthsea and find you know what the liminal country is, but think the shadow is not so easily named. The magic of Earthsea may not be grand and sweeping at all, but simple and everyday. Or, perhaps, you will read A Wizard of Earthsea and understand how the liminal country, the shadow, and the naming have all been chosen to evoke a disquieting but hopeful mood, create the metaphor of personal understanding, and reach toward the unknowable nature of humanity.
For someone else’s take on what soft magic is, how it works, and why it works, I recommend Hello Future Me’s In Defense of Soft Magic.
Hadestown is an up-and-coming Broadway musical based on the concept album by Anaïs Mitchell. It’s about hope, doubt, love, and how Orpheus sucks at keeping his head on straight. Casually set in a post-apocalyptic, climate-screwed world – with a 1930s depression-era blues, train-stations, and hard-times vibe – Hadestown tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice (that’s being the one where Orpheus follows Eurydice into the underworld and wins her back with a song, but then must exit the underworld without looking back to see if she’s following). There’s a lot to say, from the subtle use of an amphitheater for the set, to the amazing use of Hermes as a narrator, to the songs themselves, to Eurydice being given the agency to choose her death, to the use of rattling coins to equate the rattlesnake in the original myth with the train in the musical, to the contrast of Orpheus the dreamer to Eurydice the realist. But I’m going to talk about the soft magic, because the soft magic is what I’m here for.
ALSO: SPOILERS
The Magic System
Some ancestry, my dearies! Orpheus’s parentage is a little squiggy and depends on who you ask. His father may be the god Apollo or Oeagrus, the king of Thrace. Atlas (like, The Atlas) may be involved somewhere in the way-back-when. But his mother is definitely Calliope, the muse of eloquence and epic poetry. His mother is the important bit anyway. Orpheus is a poet, a divine poet, The Poet. So we can assume his magic has to do with poetry, and music since he plays the lyre. Throw in that this is a musical and you better believe this is a music magic system.
At the beginning of the musical, Orpheus tells us he’s writing a song that will bring back spring (spring having high-tailed it for friendlier climates what with Hades and Persephone being on the rocks). But how could a song possibly save spring? NOT THE POINT STOP KILLING THE MOOD. No, but there are emotional reasons that become clear in the climax.
The Trials
THERE ARE THREE BECAUSE OF COURSE THERE ARE.
In the first trial, Orpheus fails. While he’s up in the clouds writing his song, Eurydice is out in the cold trying to get them food and generally keep them alive. She calls out to him, but he’s too lost in his song to hear.
He then must DO something about his love for Eurydice and venture into the underworld. But how will he get past the Fates and all the other nasties? He’ll play his song of course. This is from the original myth, but there’s a twist. Hades is building a wall, to keep the people of Hades safe, to give the people of Hades something to work on, and to keep poverty out (read: to brainwash them). So the trial is less getting past the three-headed dog Cerberus than to get past the wall. So when he sings his song, which is going to bring back spring and move the earth, the earth moves. This is the only time the set (not the floor, that’s a whole other thing) does anything. It moves. It pulls back, breaks apart, and Orpheus gets through.
The third trial is the climax, but I want to break off for a tick to talk about another smidge of small-magic that pops up at this point.
The Walls Have Ears
Eurydice, who is working alongside Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, has begun to forget Orpheus. Here he sings not his song, but “If It’s True.” The workers pick up the song and Eurydice comes to. Why does this work? Because the walls have ears.
You can dismiss this as a really dumb pun if you want, but I can’t emphasize enough how much I love it. The idiom ‘the walls have ears’ may come from the king of Syracuse, who carved out a cave to listen to his political prisoners. So it’s got a pretty literal meaning. The idiom works here at a gut-level because it takes a deeply-rooted idiom and kicks it up to personification. It also works thematically. The people, who have forgotten themselves, are nearly stone themselves, yet they still have ears. The strongest magic in this show is music. If anything can move the stones, it’s Orpheus’s songs.
The Climax
As you would expect, the final trial is when Orpheus sings to Hades to win back Eurydice (now, debateably the final trial is when Orpheus must walk back to the world of the living without looking back to see if Eurydice is following, which, sure. But especially with the way the musical is formatted, that has more to do with the story of Orpheus the dreamer vs. Eurydice the realist rather than the return of spring, so I would say it’s the final trial of a different story-line). In the original myth Orpheus sings a song so beautiful Hades sheds an iron tear and agrees. Pretty straight-forward. Orpheus finishes his song, sings it, woot.
Fortunately I have another twist for you. If you recall, Orpheus promised to bring back spring. His song could just magic spring back, but why settle for that when Hades and Persephone are right there waiting for some character development?
Hermes explains early on that Orpheus has plucked a melody from the earth itself. It’s the melody Hades sang when he first fell in love with Persephone. These days, Hades covets her. He comes to collect her from the world of the living early. But he’s forgotten what it was to love her. When Orpheus begins to sing the melody, Hades starts from his stool, asks where Orpheus got that melody, and near stops the song. Persephone holds him back and Orpheus, who loves Eurydice as much as Hades once loved Persephone, who has literally come through hell to prove his love to Eurydice, keeps singing. Orpheus approaches the end of the song and then trails off. Hades pauses and then finishes the song himself – since it is, after all, his song. Dammit I love it.
Cool prop note: The first time Orpheus sings his melody, a poppy appears in his hand. When Hades finishes the song, a poppy appears in his and spring is returned. New life for the world and his relationship.
In Gaston Baudelaire’s lovely exploration of setting in fiction, The Poetics of Space, he writes, “Words are clamor-filled shells. There’s many a story in the miniature of a single word.” The word, or perhaps we might say image, I took away from the book was vast. The feeling of vast, yellow and wide and a little ominous, became my short story A Yellow Landscape. I thought a lot about imagery in that story. In fiction workshops they’ll tell you to seek out striking images, advice that always baffled me because the examples were so few and far between, subjective as the idea of ‘striking’ is. Nonetheless the advice has stuck with me and I’ve started to gather a little hoard of images, images I can still remember years later, or images that made me stop reading and go oof. I don’t have a definitive answer, a How To Write A Striking Image list, but I have some examples and some reasons I liked them.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
“You would look down on this grove of pines, the fresh tips flared lucent at each rooftop…[to] the two boys lying side by side, the blood already dry on their cheeks…What’s left of November seeps through their jeans, their thin knit sweaters. If you were god, you’d notice that they’re staring up at you. They’re clapping and singing ‘This Little Light of Mine.'”
Briefly Gorgeous is about death, loss, war, and the things that we never had. So when I read this, I knew these boys were dead. I knew they’d been left in the woods to die. They’re covered in blood like soldiers, growing cold like the the November seeping through their jeans, and their lifeless bodies are staring after their souls toward God. And then suddenly, like a reel playing backwards, they’re alive. More than anything, this scene boggled me because it was like a magic trick where Vuong raises the dead. Only for a little though, because one of these characters does die later, like we’re glimpsing into the future. The moment also rings through the whole story because attempting – and failing – to raise the dead is sort of the point.
The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne Valente
“A long, red curl slides out of the black pearl comb in her hair and lands on the table like a spurt of blood.”
Good sentences revolve around their last few words. They lean forward, tense. Even as you speed toward the period, you should wonder, How will the sentence end? Robert McKee talks about it in Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting in The Suspense Sentence section if you want more discussion of the idea. Valente’s sentence ends in a punch, a spurt of blood. It could feel gimmicky. Blood is so obviously striking that it gets overused. But I like it here because everything else pulls back, the language becoming plain and straightforward, and the image itself isn’t overstated. The story pauses, and then moves on. This moment is also a bit of a centerpiece. The Refrigerator Monologues is about women who have been made to suffer in silence, to bear ridicule, indifference, and abuse. It is as though all we see of this woman’s pain is a single spurt of blood, when we know inside she must be hemorrhaging.
Tea Time by Rachel Swirsky
For the full weight of the final line, I feel I must give the whole passage:
“Let us be clear about this:
“When the Queen of Hearts accused the hatter of murdering Time, she was telling the truth.
“Did the hatter kill Time? Yes. Is that the reason why the hatter and the hare are forever caught in this interminable tea time hour? It is.
“But is a soldier in the wrong when he dispatches an enemy of the empire? Is a father guilty when, in protecting his daughter from highwaymen, he resorts to his rifle?
“No. A man should not be excoriated for self-defense.
“Time provoked the hatter. No man can question it.
“Tell the truth—have you not felt the indignities of Time? The way he rushes when you wish to linger with a lover, but dwells stagnantly on the endless sprawl of an agonizing wait? Have you no gray hairs? No twinges? No creaking joints?
Admit it. Time has provoked you, too.”
So this slashfic about the Hatter and the March Hare is one of the most beautiful pieces of fiction I’ve ever read. I could just point you there and and go home. But the line I want to focus on is the very last one: “Admit it. Time has provoked you, too.” Just like in Valente’s sentence, this passage leans forward, tumbling us on to the final sentence. It stops us up short with an abrupt, two-word sentence: “Admit it.” Then we are left with almost a sigh, a soft and comforting ‘too,’ but also an uncomfortable and sharper ‘provoked,’ because: Admit it. Time has provoked you. This passage is not a dramatic twist where you’re shocked at the the end, but there is a soft little twist as it addresses you directly, bringing you in with mundane examples of age and agonizing waits so that you’re left with a final moment of, Oh. Oh, time has provoked me.
A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar
“And the flowers of the courtyard, exhausted with heat, hang on their stalks like handkerchiefs forgotten after a midnight ball.”
I don’t have a lot to say about this. Simply, the first time I read this, the image of the flowers as handkerchiefs, which evoked the emptiness of a hall as the final guests stumble home at dawn, and the exhaustion and glory of decadence, was like a physical sensation in my body. It’s a glorious and wonderful metaphor.
The Habitation of the Blessed by Catherynne Valente
“John stood with the drawn damask clutched in his white hand, and watched a sullen orange sun set on the city of dust, and his beard grew even in that moment, his scalp showed pink through his hair, and his spine became a bent scythe, until he was an old man in my sight, and he wept.”
This is toward the end of the book and John has ruined everything in the way that only white men who think they’re right and you’re wrong can. And yet, in this moment, as he watches his city, the city he loves, the city he’s lost and will never return to, burn to the ground, he becomes frail, and we morn with him. We feel the sharp ache of the scythe bearing him down, all the more poignant for the simply stated ‘and he wept,’ neatly divided from the rest of the sentence by the comma.
Yet the transformation is also horrible. He will not save anyone, not even himself. His body becomes a scythe, an instrument of death and ruin, not only to those around him, but to himself too. The ‘bent’ suggests it might even be a broken scythe, one that can’t properly cut wheat and grains for harvest, but only wreck.
And, analysis aside, the image of the scythe is so perfectly simple and clear and, if I may, striking.
The Search for Delicious by Natalie Babbitt
Let’s end on a pleasant image, one that’s been with me since grade school:
“The most delicious thing of all is a cold leg of chicken eaten in an orchard early in the morning in April when you have a friend to share it with and a brown dog to clean up the scraps. You’ll have to write it all down because every word is important.”
I don’t have a lot to say about this either. The Search for Delicious is a lovely, sweet story and I adore the quiet and yet wonderous nature of Gaylen’s journey. Gaylen is writing a dictionary and polling everyone to find out what the most people agree is delicious. Of course the minstrel’s answer is far too specific to ever be the most agreed on answer. He even says, “You’ll have to write it all down because every word is important.” But of all the examples in the book, from apples to cake to the final answer of water, I can’t help but think, what is more delicious than this?
