Andrew J. Leggett

ENGL 120, “Why Read?”

Prof. Geiger

Long paper

            It is ironic that the goals we often start out with rarely survive the process of achieving them, but are often revised or thrown out completely along the path towards actually accomplishing them. Our initial, often naïve, intentions take many serious hits once we are faced with the complex realities of moral and human experience. This is a central theme is the work of Australian fantasy author Garth Nix, and one that I will explore in this paper, using four stories from his collection, Across the Wall: A Tale of the Abhorsen and Other Stories. In each of these stories, Nix creates several layers of irony by manipulating the idealistic images usually associated with various archetypes to give them a more complex pscyhological development and explore the ways we view human nature.

            In the first two stories I will examine, Nix does this by taking two female characters from the Arthurian mythos—the Lady of the Lake and Merlin's would-be-lover Nimue—and radically inverting their characters and giving them greater agency beyond the stereotypes of samite-clad water goddess and power-hungry goldigger. In both cases, their downfalls are still inevitable, but rather than being seen, particularly in Nimue's case, as a moral failure, Nix sees them as the only path by which they can gain the experiential knowledge necessary to become fully aware moral beings.

            “Under the Lake” takes this to the greatest extreme—transforming the Lady into a psychopathic monster, who starts out thinking of humans as she does other animals, consuming their lives to extend her own, back when her lake was still the land of Lyonnesse. It is only as these humans begin to offer her the victims she requires in exchange for a sword that will protect them from the invading barbarians, that she starts becoming interested in humans. When she first makes the sword, quenching the sword with the blood of the two hundred maidens she is given to consume, she unintentionally fills the sword with “sorrow and the despair of death”; and when she tries to correct this—then given two hundred youths—by “taking their futures from them without warning, so there was no time for pain, despair, or sadness”, instead infuses their love into the scabbard she weaves from their hair. In the first case, the sword causes a “battle madness, a melancholy that would drive him alone into the midst of the enemy”, and even though the addition of the scabbard is supposed to make the wielder invincible, “it also called to the sword and held it like a lover, refusing to let go…even a hundred lives is not enough against a hundred hundred wounds” (Nix 99 - 100).

Desperate to end the war, both parties offering her an untold number of victims if she will “enforce a peace upon the whole land of Lyonnesse, so that no man could make war upon another”, and from the dreams of these victims she creates the Grail, also unintentionally pouring in “a great part of her power”, which is connected to the foundations of Lyonnesse, causing the land to be submerged at the moment she rises up out of the earth: “I held the Grail aloft, and shouted that it would bring peace to all who drank from it. But even as I spoke, I saw the horizon lift up like a folded cloth, and the blue of the sky was lost in the terrible darkness of the sea” (Nix 101-102). The Lady tries to escape, obviously more overwhelmed by the dreams inside her than any sincere desire for peace, but the Grail, which brings not only peace, but judgement, drags her down, submerging her in the lake and fixing her into a serpent-like form, where she sleeps, coiled around both Grail and Excalibur, until Merlin awakes her, seeking to strike a deal for his Arthur.

In this story Nix uses irony to illustrate, among other things, the theme of justice. Certainly, the Grail is not made so much from blood as the victims’ dreams of justice against the Lady, so it teaches her guilt—a very human trait—as much as making the sword taught her about human sorrow and love. But the Lady is still very inhuman, and understands these first two in a mainly intellectual sense; it is not until she is punished for as many lives as she takes—a thousand years—and depends on the Grail’s mercy to make her suffering bearable, that she understands how experience changes you. Despite this new understanding, she is a fallen beast, wanting only to “sleep without dreaming” (Nix 104).

            This theme of defeat once this knowledge has been relinquished may not seem very hopeful, but the point Nix is trying to illustrate is that without the inherent humanity necessary to utilize this knowledge, this humility can do nothing but deface, just as the unbridled extremes of Excalibur destroy its wielder as much as its enemies. Nix is here showing the irony of an immortal being trying to unnaturally bestow her essentially evil qualities to aid the good of the mortal world—but the contradiction of these inherent qualities keep even the Grail from fulfilling its true purpose, and must remain that “impossible possibility”, like peace itself, always sought and never captured.

            A similar theme manifests with Nimue in “Heart’s Desire”, when she finally gains the power she has been seeking from Merlin. Here the theme of justice is clear in the very equal exchange Nimue must make for this power—namely, sacrificing her ‘heart’s desire’. At the beginning of the story she believes this to be the very power she seeks, a seeming contradiction she puzzles over, wondering what Merlin had given up: “Perhaps there was nothing to lose…A heart’s desire that could come to pass, but did not, was no loss. To see the future was not the same as to live it” (Nix 228). This illustrates the particular irony of this story, which is that once Nimue gains her power, in that moment of exultation, she does not become aware of what she has lost till after it has already been taken from her. This true desire is Merlin himself, with whom she is painted as having a mutual love—as opposed to the original, where it is his power she tricks him out of, as opposed to having her own star to pluck from the heavens. It is important that, as in “Under the Lake”, the outcome is the same: Nimue does have all of Merlin’s wisdom and power, but for Nix, it is the mutal transition from teacher to student, and not a theft; for Nix, it is important that, where power is concerned, that it is gained through the power of choice.

            However, it is also important that one is not always aware of the implications of that choice until it is too late to reverse it. One could easily say that if Nimue had known what she was going to loose, she would have chosen differently. But as the Lady says earlier in “Under the Lake”, “Merlin’s sight does not see behind, only forward” (Nix 97-98), and this is the appropriate reflection of human experience. Merlin knows exactly what is going to happen, but still does nothing to stop himself from being trapped in the black rock, giving up his power as Nimue gains hers. And coming to the point where she now sees what Merlin has been seeing puts Nimue in a comparable position of power, opposed to her original state of naïve vulnerability. Nimue thinks she is choosing to go from one position to the other by searching for power, but it is actually the unavoidable sacrifice she must make—the experience, and not the desire—that actually allows her to accomplish it. This is what changes her focus so that, by the end, she wants to relinquish this power to get Merlin back. But even if this makes her entire quest for agency seem futile, for Nix, it is a positive gain in that she can now see the way the world works, and is thus now capable of a more veritable free-will.

            The theme of vulnerability and sacrifice, as they connect to knowledge and power, can be further explored in “Hansel’s Eyes”, Nix’s urban retelling of the Hansel and Gretel fairytale. Up to a certain point, the main details of the old story remain intact; they are merely updated in ironic ways. For instance, when the father first dumps the siblings off in the woods, they find they way back via a stashed map and compass—so their step-mother whips out some chloroform and has them dumped in the city instead. Further, the gingerbread house Hansel is lured into by the witch is transposed into a videogame store, and instead of wanting to eat Hansel, the witch wants to take his eyes and transplant them onto her own blind self. Obviously Hansel is very vulnerable in his cage, but Nix creates an interesting contrast, as the witch offers to make Gretel her apprentice and give her “power and freedom and dominion over beasts and men” (Nix 244).

Nix obviously views the only way for Gretel to save her brother to be able to gain enough power and knowledge to where she can overcome the witch, though in this case, both siblings are essentially changed from what they were at the beginning. Gretel is changed in the way we have been exploring—her priorities and sense of self shifting along with her experience; but for Hansel, as with Merlin, it is a physical incapacitation that marks him, as the witch manages to take one of his eyes before Gretel can trap her in the meat-freezer. But in this case, they take an eye from the witch’s cat, which is still connected to her when it attacks them at the end, which them gives Hansel some (unstated) powers. For Nix, the transmission of power is not clean, that it is not something separate from the person who wields it. And in the case of Hansel and Gretel, it is something that seems to possess them and turn them from the vulnerable innocents into the formidable threats to their new stepmother.

The change is not always so extreme, as seen in “Three Roses”, a very short story which imitates rather than reinvents an actual myth or fable. The archetype being highlighted in this case is the poor gardener who teaches an important moral lesson to the powerful king. The theme here is, again, seeing things through a different set of eyes, or attempting to understand an elusive concept by gaining the perspective of someone who has experienced it. In the case of this story, this concept is love. A gardener, having lost his wife, plants a rose bush as a way to remember her,

Growing “the most beautiful single rose the world had ever seen” (Nix 297). The king, seeing this rose, claims that “it is too beautiful for anyone but me” and has it uprooted and taken to his palace, where it promptly withers and dies after a year. This scenario replays two more times, each time the gardener claiming that the rose “grew from my love of her” and each time the transplanted rose only lasting a year. It is only at the end, when the king’s personal jardinière asks him why he continues to grow the roses when the king keeps on taking them, and the gardener replies that,

“I grew the first rose because I was afraid I might forget. When it was gone, I knew that I had lost nothing. No one can take the memory of my love… I grow them for the King. He has no memories of his own, no love. And after all, they are only flowers” (Nix 299).

For the gardener, his love is not a concept, but a real thing that is a part of him that, even with his wife dead, continues to live on, far beyond the lifespan of any flower. At first, it might seem like the king is being ridiculous or arrogant, but there is a subtle shift in this short story, from the gardener’s relative silence and the king’s vocal aggressiveness at the beginning. By the end, the king merely stares at the rose silently before turning around—with the obvious implication that he is still taking the rose—and the gardener makes his final explanation; the king cannot articulate that which he has never felt, and the gardener seems to understand this, and takes pity on him, letting the king think he is in control, the one taking something away. The gardener also seems to be implying that the flowers are not only small when compared to love, but that if the king did have a love of his own, he would realize that it wasn’t merely about possession. In this sense, it is the gardener who obviously has experience, but it is the king who has power. The archetype Nix is taking is obviously that the gardener has some intellectual power over the king via his experience, but it is not necessary for the king to know this—it is in fact better that lives in ignorance of the gardener’s power, because it is in fact knowledge that is superior in this case.

If one confuses knowledge with power, as Nimue does, one might become lost in it, as Hansel and Gretel do. Seeing through another set of eyes—that is, changing your perspective through experience—does not mean taking control of those eyes, but letting them create some kind of connection that lets you into a greater awareness of the world. This is the aspect of human nature Nix attempts to illustrate, which many archetypes seem to go contrary to—that focusing on power over others ignores the fact that without power over self, it is necessarily based on the contradiction of needing others without attempting to understand them. At the same time, knowing another does not mean controlling them, but requires a balance of both control and knowledge on both sides. In this dynamic between humans—and more generally, their society—we can see a certain inbalance, which is why almost none of these stories ends happily, as the successful pursuit of this aim against a still vastly unenglightened society means a certain downfall within it. Until this downfall is precipitated on a larger scale within it, one must work as broken people within a matrix still constantly on the verge of a similar (and necessary) collapse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nix, Garth. Across the Wall: A Tale of the Abhorsen and Other Stories. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. 2005.