Quote from: Oreb

Quote from: lockesnow

Sranc, as you can see, are not mentioned.

What's the reason for this discrepancy?

You are right. There is no mention of Sranc in that sentence in my Kindle version too. The first mention of Sranc, however, is on the same page, about the wind moaning like Sranc horns.

Quote from: lockesnow

§P.1 The first thing I noted was the second paragraph.  I wonder if Bakker had read Orson Scott Card’s ‘How to write Science Fiction and Fantasy’, because this paragraph is a textbook example of how Card describes a Speculative world should be introduced to the reader.  It really is impressively masterful, reminiscent of the master herself, Octavia Butler (Card references her opening to Wild Seed in his text). 

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The citadel of Ishuäl succumbed during the height of the Apocalypse.  But no army of inhuman Sranc had scaled its ramparts.

That's very strange, because that's not quite how it reads in my copy (the UK paperback edition). These are the first two sentences of the second paragraph in my copy:

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The citadel of Ishuäl succumbed during the height of the Apocalypse. But no army, human or inhuman, had scaled its ramparts.

Sranc, as you can see, are not mentioned.

What's the reason for this discrepancy?

Quote from: Madness

I could see them removing sorcery because they thought it made men of the world fat and lazy? Obviously, throughout the prologue, we see in Kellhus that they managed some kind of martial prowess over two thousand years of training and breeding.

Like the Bene Gesserit with the Jihad.

Quote from: sologdin

we are accordingly presented with a precession of prefacing that terminates only by virtue of a rhetorical trick of begging the question of the existence of a “soul.”  the precession of prefaces must be amended, then, to:

0 ) the “soul“;
1 ) the epigraph;
2 ) the first part; and
3 ) the entirety of the prologue.

the weirdness that remains is that the prologue as a whole is “separate from” the “the play itself”--simultaneously parcel to and distinguished from the novel that follows. 

Everything in your post was amazing, but I kept thinking you were going to include the Nietzsche quote that precedes all of this.  How does that work in, particularly as Nietzsche is presumably non-diagetic?

good contributions above as to the content.  as i can’t improve upon them, i offer merely some commentary as to form, though marxism may argue also that form is its own peculiar type of content.

RSB's prologue opens with an epigraph, drawn from the in-setting tome of ajencis, The Third Analytic of Men:

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If it is only after that we understand what has come before, then we understand nothing.  Thus we shall define the soul as follows: that which precedes everything.

(I.pro (2003) at 1). 

the prologue continues to narrate “the end of the world” (I.pro at 4), several thousand years prior to the main action that the novel itself purports to describe, as well as to the action of the second part of the prologue.   in skipping ahead two thousand years, the prologue introduces a primary character for the main action of the novel.  this character’s quest, commencing in the second part of the prologue, is itself prefaced by the actors of the first part of the prologue, about whom the text intones “the world forgot them for two thousand years” (I.pro at 4).

the first part of the prologue begins post-epigraph with a gnomic

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One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten.

(I.pro at 1). 

what is to be done with these formal minutiae?

we might begin with some standard definitions, and thereby find the standard reading of prologue, about which harmon & holman's handbook to literature opines:

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An introduction most frequently associated with drama and especially common in England in the plays of the Restoration and the eighteenth century.  In the plays of ancient Greece a speaker announced, before the beginning of the play proper [emphasis added], such salient facts as the audience should know to understand the play itself [emphasis added].

the pertinent principle that is encoded by prologue is therefore that it occurs before the beginning, and is exterior to the play itself, which might only be understood through comprehension of the salient facts.

regarding preface, a related concept (as we shall see further, below), in harmon & holman:

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A statement at the beginning of a book or article--and separate from it [emphasis added]--which states the purpose of the work, makes necessary acknowledgements, and, in general, informs the reader of such facts as the author thinks pertinent.

this, then, gives us to understand that the preface is separate from the text itself, and should deploy the purpose, the necessary acknowledgements, the author’s statement of the pertinent.

to round it out, harmon & holman note that the epigraph in literature is:

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a quotation on the title page of a book, or a motto heading a section of a work.

more to the point, the current wikipedia entry for epigraph holds:

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In literature, an epigraph is a phrase, quotation, or poem that is set at the beginning of a document or component. The epigraph may serve as a preface [emphasis added], as a summary, as a counter-example, or to link the work to a wider literary canon, either to invite comparison or to enlist a conventional context.

the epigraph is itself a preface.  we have, then, a prologue with a epigraphic preface, at the very least.  but, as the prologue is bifurcated, with parts separated by much time and space in-setting, it is fair to state that the first part of the prologue prefaces the second part, just as the epigraph prefaces the entirety of the prologue--and, just as the prologue, separate from the play itself, prefaces the novel proper.

taking these definitions and rationales into account, RSB’s prologue amounts to three separate prefacing maneuvers:

1 ) the epigraph;
2 ) the first part “at the end of the world”; and
3 ) the entirety of the prologue itself.

the first preface works as a moment of willful blindness of inventing an axiom (“the soul precedes everything”) in order to cure the purported cognitive defect of coming to understanding only after the fact, which means “we understand nothing.”  the precession of the soul is supplied as a remedy. 

something therefore precedes everything, all signification--here, the “soul”--which presumably must also precede the epigraph of ajencis, which, as stated, itself precedes the first part of the prologue, which precedes the second part of the prologue, which precedes the novel itself.

we are accordingly presented with a precession of prefacing that terminates only by virtue of a rhetorical trick of begging the question of the existence of a “soul.”  the precession of prefaces must be amended, then, to:

0 ) the “soul“;
1 ) the epigraph;
2 ) the first part; and
3 ) the entirety of the prologue.

the weirdness that remains is that the prologue as a whole is “separate from” the “the play itself”--simultaneously parcel to and distinguished from the novel that follows. 

regarding prefaces, mr. derrida notes, in the ironic no-preface to dissemination, that

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Prefaces, along with forwards, introductions, preludes, preliminaries, preambles, prologues [emphasis added], and prolegomena, have always been written, it seems, in view of their own self-effacement.  Upon reaching the end of the pre- (which presents and precedes [emhasis added], or rather forestalls, the presentative production, and, in order to put before the reader's eyes what is not yet visible, is obliged to speak, predict, and predicate), the route which has been covered must cancel itself out.  But this subtraction leaves a mark of erasure, a remainder which is added to the subsequent text and which cannot be completely summed up within it.  Such an operation thus appears contradictory, and the same is true of the interest one takes in it.

(dissemination (1981) at 9). 

taken this way, however, RSB’s layered prologue manifests expressly its own self-effacement:  the doctrine of the “soul” self-cancels to the extent it is tautological fiat by definition and responsive to a non-problem; the epigraph self-cancels insofar as it proposes a cryptic problem and then supplies an answer, curing its enthymemic dilemma; the first part of the prologue self-cancels as it raises its own forgetting, and self-cancels the forgetting ab initio when it suggests that the forgotten will return to besiege those who are unable to raise walls against it; and the prologue itself as a whole self-cancels when it deploys a “route” for the primary character that

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must of necessity be forgotten or falsified for the main action of the novel to unfold.

the prologue puts “before the reader’s eyes what is not yet visible,” what can be understood only after, the bizarre and incomprehensible setting details that are fundamental to certain strands of post-tolkienian secondary creation.  we might reduce the prologue, to preface, to soul, to precession itself, consistent with the oft-stated determinist principle that “what comes before determines what comes after” (I.pro at 6).  despite the layers of erasure, the cancelling is never complete and must remain incomplete--both because the determinist principle continues in “the play itself,” “separate from“ the prologue, and because the principle of precession exemplified in the layers of the prologue itself embodies the determinist principle. 

the precession of the “soul” is not incidental, but is at root of the primary character’s prior training in the semiotics of face, which allows him to read the “fine musculature of [redshirt's] face,” allowing the reader to see that “whatever moved [redshirt’s] soul moved his expression as well,” granting, through mere reading, an “ability to anticipate [redshirt’s] thoughts, to re-enact the movements of [redshirt’s] soul” (I.pro at 11).

there is therefore no direct access to the “soul,” but only indirectly through the protocols of reading, which, though in general sufficiently problematized when it comes to the discipline of linguistics, is presented here as initially unproblematic with respect to the semiotics of face.  it should be problematic, however, and, if it ultimately is not, then the unproblematic semiotics of face would be the single most fantastic item in a setting filled with fantasy content. 

the face is nevertheless a language, and in the prologue is structured like writing; the preceding soul that is being understood through the face is something of the mysterious signified, the trace of which is marked out and subject to erasure by the signifier of the writing/face.  it is, as in linguistics, an exercise in unsuccessful searching for the origin, the arche, which might only been revealed in its traces, its telling absences, rather than any true manifestation or presence.

i have not addressed the salient facts, the necessary acknowledgements, the pertinent items that prefaces and prologues are supposed to disclose; perhaps those can best be pulled out when we actually get to the play itself, which is separate from the prologue.  only by knowing what comes before the play itself might we understand the play itself, and if we only understand what comes before the play itself after reading the play itself, then we understand nothing.

in this last connection, derrida's preface literally begins with its mind-numbing conclusion:

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This (therefore) will not have been a book.

(dissemination at 3).  as RSB’s prologue begins simultaneously at “the end of the world” as well as at the origin, the “soul,” the absence that stands postulated as the beginning of a chain of causal precession, it might similarly be said to stand for the proposition All good things must come to a beginning.

Quote from: lockesnow

The boy seems to pass the test of the Dunyain, and understand his own self-deception, and the Dunyain celebrate… but are they celebrating Ishual, or celebrating the inclusion of the boy in their ranks—the text seems to celebrate the boy, not the place, “The stranger brought him to the others, and together they celebrated their strange fortune.”   But note how the Dunyain deceive themselves,  They repudiate gods but elevate ‘awareness’ to a godlike status, “awareness most holy.”  From the very beginning are we seeing that the cause of the Dunyain is a vain one?  I’m not sure.

I remember well how the second to last paragraph of this section shocked me on the first reread.  They chiseled away the runes and sorcery, they burnt the books of magic, they discarded all that supernatural about them.  I was not ready for that sort of repudiation, it’s very different from anything else I can think of in fantasy.

Well spotted and I agree, it is /very/ strange for a sect so interested in knowledge to eliminate all references to sorcery. very uncharacterisitc and I hope there will be some explanation about this in future books.

And yeah, awesome way to introduce a new world with almost no infodumping at all.

Quote from: Triskele

ETA:  Are we supposed to keep this thread spoiler free, or can we assume that everyone reading this has made it through WLW by now?

The God has decreed that only virgins may tread these hallowed grounds, their innocence blesses us all; the guilty and the damned profane this place with the spoiling stench of their rot as they revel in the mud and madness of their inner delusions.