When I first read about Paolini, in what I now realize was part of Knopf's initial marketing of Eragon, he was touted as a boy genius. He wrote Eragon as a teenager. He was home schooled in Montana and had produced what was a sure best-seller; the family had already marketed a self published version that had done quite well. My envy of the hero turned out, I think, to be directly relevant to the content of the book now that I have read it. It is one of the minor themes towards the end of the book, but also, I think, a reflection of the experience of Paolini (at least in my relationship with him), that others are envious of him, and this spills into Eragon's character, who needs to be aware, once he is a bona fide hero, that others will both want things from him, but also be out for his demise, just because he is so competent.
This story of a hero, then, starts out as many such stories do, with the hero being anything but. He is on the edges of a small town at the edges of the poorest district of the vast empire that neither knows nor cares about him. He has skills that set him apart, but they are circumscribed. He returns from the scariest part of the mountains with game to feed his family. Like many other heroes, he is a functional orphan. His mother returned to this small town from a more glamorous life just long enough to give birth and then to leave him with his uncle to raise. His father is unknown. Some reviews (See Adam Gopnik's review here, for instance) have pegged Paolini as cribbing - this sounds like Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter, but it also sounds like Oedipus who was of uncertain parentage, this aspect at least is, I think, a nearly universal fantasy that such heroic characters as ourselves could not have been born of such ordinary stock. Our noble origins, and the trappings that go with it, must have been hidden - perhaps that we might learn humility so that when we do have power we will handle it with grace, which certainly Eragon does, but I am getting ahead of the story.
One of the women that I read books with has noted that when men write their first book, they often include a relationship that the hero has with an idealized woman, one who is unusually concerned with the well-being of the man she is paired with - in an almost maternal fashion. This character is played, in this story, by the dragon herself. Not only is she both his responsibility and his protector, their minds can meld and they have an intimacy that is warm, generative and enviable. They connect in a primordial way that feels, though it is language based, pre-verbal. He merely needs to think "I need you!", and she appears with breathtaking speed from wherever she was and whatever she was doing. And, when he shows interest in another female, she becomes jealous, though he does not press it. She is an idealized mother figure that he can cuddle with at night, and then she becomes ferocious by day to protect her special one.
While I am off on this, I think that there is a good possibility that there is a lot of Paolini in this book. He was home schooled and grew up in remote Montana. His hero, unlike Harry Potter, does not have a cadre of friends - a pack that he hangs with, but instead he meets one mentor after another - OK one guy also turns out to be a chum, but a chum who is much more worldly than he. One of the narrative devices that I found useful in this book is that the story has a relatively straightforward arc in part because of Eragon meeting up with characters in a serial fashion, one after the other rather than all at once. The person who comes on stage gets thoroughly introduced, and then we move onto the next. Also, despite the fact that he is on a quest, this books reads more like Tom Sawyer, where Tom stays in and around his home town, than Huck Finn, where Huck wanders down the Mississippi, with no end in sight (The Iliad vs. the Odyssey might hold true here as well...). Part of this is the circumscribed map at the beginning of the text - we know from the beginning what lands he will encounter - but there is more to it than that. What I mean to be saying is that Eragon never really feels like he is out there - he is always guided by others, in contact with others - at home because home is where the dragon is and home is where his current guide is. It never feels like he has left the known world.
And I think this likely mirrors Paolini's experience, that he has been on an epic quest, but that he has always felt that there have been plenty of psychological resources available to him. I think of the family business being the selling of his book, and before that the editing and publishing of it, and I think of Paolini as Eragon being very well supported by these close, caring adults who teach him the art of writing, just as Eragon is taught by his various mentors the skills he needs to live the life that he does - a life that has been thrust upon him - the dragon chooses him rather than the other way around. And despite being, as so many of our best heroes are, a reluctant hero - one that has to be drawn into the fray rather than one who is itching for a fight (see my real life conversation with a Nicaraguan Hero here), his reluctance - his questioning of his role as a hero, his ambivalence about being the go-to guy (and the ways in which he screws things up when he is in that role so that others must rescue him) makes him an endearing and approachable hero, one who could be me (the reader).
The shifts and changes that we make developmentally between twelve and fifteen are staggering. We are suddenly, at fifteen, looking at driving; which may not be quite as complex and exciting as flying a dragon, but it is as close as most of us are likely to get. We hope we are about to (or have recently) become sexually active, and there is lots of excitement, but also fear and issues of responsibility involved there. We are going to have to start looking at which college we are going to - or whether we will go at all. And whether we go to college or not, we are about to assume a variety of responsibilities that, while they bring with them some measure of autonomy, also carry a great deal of burden as we have to live up to a set of externally imposed obligations. And this just doesn't stop. As reluctant department chair I have run into many obstacles, some of my own making, over the past year that have interfered with my ability to function in the ways that I want to.
So, when Eragon first takes flight as a dragon rider, he is scared. His legs are chafed raw by the dragon's scales, he fears he will fall off, and he is sick to his stomach. Don't we all dream of flying? And, like many things that we dream of, isn't the reality more difficult than the dream? Don't we want to drive, but then fear the responsibility that goes with it? What if I crash? Don't we want to go off to college and then become terribly homesick once we are there? And this book rings true, I think, because Eragon, not unlike Harry Potter, is a reluctant and bumbling hero who is able to come through in a crunch. Don't we all bumble and don't we, more often than not, rise to the occasion - or at least have faith that we will?
And this book is a bit predictable. I find myself getting stuff before Eragon does. I am smarter than the hero. What could be better than that? I think this contributes to my sense that this is a Tom Sawyer rather than a Huck Finn book. I, as the reader, feel in control. I get the sense that reason - a pattern - lies behind all that is going on. I don't feel worried about something random that is coming around the bend. Even when things look very bleak, I trust that someone - Eragon, or someone else - will come through and things will work out. I also trust Eragon's sense of who is trustworthy and who is not - it mirrors my own naive sense that respectful people are to be trusted - and intrusive people are not to be. So when the twins use their magic to break down the barriers in Eragon's mind, I know that they, like the caricature of the old school psychoanalyst telling someone what they are really thinking about (rather than wondering with them what they might also be thinking about), I know from the style of the interaction that they are not to be trusted.
So, I feel perfectly comfortable speculating about the ways that Paolini, a person I have never met, emerges through his writing. But when I start to think about why this book appeals to the reluctant son so much that he wants me to read it - how he identifies with Eragon and the other characters - I am brought up short. I both want to know him better - and feel honored that he asked me to read this book - insisted on it really - but I am concerned about knowing, or thinking that I know him, indirectly by making inferences about what draws him to this book. So we are talking about parts of it. We are wondering about how it is constructed and what it resonates with in us. And we are doing a first pass at visiting colleges on this vacation. And we are talking about what aspects of the college feel like a good fit, and what aspects don't. To try to anticipate, to try to know, to discover, together, who it is that he is in the process of becoming and to try to help him steer himself down a path, with guidance - a path that can feel more like Tom Sawyer's and Eragon's and Paolini's and Luke Skywalker's - a path that feels dangerous, but manageably so; and a path that includes resources that will be available when needed. I'm wondering as I write this whether Huck Finn's path is the path of civil war - of intolerable internal strife and the uncertainty of how that will be resolved. While there may be necessary developmental moments that feel more like civil war than unrest in the face of a dictator - Tom Sawyer's fight against Aunt Polly, something that feels less stressful because we know that we are fighting against evil vs. not knowing what the right answer is - with the corollary that uncertainty feels more psychologically threatening than an external threat.
I am hopeful that he is resonating with the ways in which Eragon feels supported, but also expecting that he, too, feels both exhilarated and burdened by the increasing responsibility that is being thrust upon him. I hope that he, like Eragon, is feeling that he is learning the language that will provide a magical ability to exploit the world around him. I am also hoping, and sensing, that he feels a duty to use that power both for the good of all, but also in ways that are consistent with who he is - that he is working to direct himself in the world with integrity. I hope for all of this, and know that it is much more complicated than even the circumscribed quandaries that Eragon faces, so hope that he will be able to talk about these complications as they inevitably arise, and also know that there will be times when he is, as much as I wish to protect him, like a dragon, from it, that there will be times when he will be mired in uncertainty and internal, seemingly unresolvable strife.
Post Script: I usually return to my blogs once they are posted - I inevitably find typos and thoughtos and try to clean them up. But this post has haunted me in a different way. Every subject that I write on could be thought of in different ways (see a recent post that addresses that here), but not including this alternate view seemed an oversight. To wit:
Dragons are not an area of special interest to me, but their symbolism, which I don't know well, seems highly relevant to this book. In general, Dragons are depicted as the enemy. St. George is traditionally seen as a hero for having slain the dragon (we recently saw a wonderful painting of this in the National Gallery). Much more recently, I was brought up on a book - one that I assume is long out of print (it was very intended for a very Waspy tween audience - which, when I was, I loved it, but since the term tween hadn't been invented and publishing has turned away from Waspy kids books, I assume this to have gotten the heave-ho) - Professor's Diggins Dragons. In this book, the absent minded professor takes some kids to the shore where they fight their own personal demons - one kid is afraid of the dark, one didn't like to clean up her room - and they discover a guy, Mr. Pym (if memory serves), who was afraid of people who would try to take his money. Well Professor Diggins cures each problem (thinking of the school bus they were traveling in as filled with marshmallows and the kid having to eat his way out kept him from being afraid of it being a dark place, having a room to herself cured the slob kid, and having a costume party not only cured Mr. Pym, but convinced him to give money to the University that wanted to fire Professor Diggins for being wacky on condition that the money be used to endow a school of dragon hunting, much to the chagrin of the administration).
The point of all this is - and I think maybe I didn't write from this angle because it would require scholarship that I'm not that interested in engaging in), dragons are generally seen as the enemy. That Eragon is allied with his dragon (and, through identification, so are we) and, further, that the dragon is a source of comfort rather than of terror is noteworthy. I'm not sure what to make of it (another reason not to blog from this perspective), but I do think that being allied with what is foreign and threatening and making it our own is one of the human qualities we possess that helps us develop in new and wonderful ways. For instance, my children are champions of Gay pride and equality. At their age I couldn't have been. Homosexuality was a monster - a dragon - one that was to be slain. My development towards Gay advocacy took a very different arc - one where I had to confront some demons out there. I think they may have been able to keep the demons on the outside and to use Gay pride as an ally - the dragon was their accomplice, not something that they had to confront as an external threat. I think that Harper Lee's book Go Set a Watchman wrestles with these issues in the context of racism.
I'm not sure about all of this, and it may be some time until we can discuss it that would help us be on the same page, but there are very different ways that they experience diversity - on many different dimensions - as an opportunity rather than a threat - or, in my case, a puzzle that I had few tools to utilize in solving at their ages.
To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here. For a subject based index, link here.
To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information. I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...
No comments:
Post a Comment