Pratchett and Puddleglum, or, Kiddie Lit Saves the World!

Don’t forget—HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!

It’s not so much that Commander Sam Vimes has had greatness thrust upon him; it’s more like greatness has grabbed hold of his ankle to drag him along, kicking and screaming, to save the world.

…..oh, all right, I’m just trying to write like Terry Pratchett, and failing miserably. I’m sure better writers than I have tried and failed…if they were foolish enough to try in the first place.

The inimitable and brilliant Terry Pratchett, O.B.E., who has “occasionally been accused of committing Literature”, is the creator of the fantasy universe of the Discworld. Having your world’s very foundations comprise a gigantic turtle swimming through space, surmounted by a quartet of elephants bearing the spinning turntable of the world on their backs, strikes the western mythological sensibilities as rather amusing; and the denizens of this fictional universe are constructed with a similar offbeatness. Yet Pratchett’s stories, for all the comedy that sparkles across their pages, have a consistent weave of dark and grim themes.

THUD! Is a murder mystery featuring the redoubtable Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. Except the mystery turns out to be more than mere murder….

While no-one knows more about the strange and unsavory streets of Ankh-Morpork than Sam Vimes, the commander is at heart a suburbanite and solid family man. Thereby hangs a frantic and hilarious chase scene—possibly the best ever written for a pre-motorized setting—as Vimes’s men help clear the way for his commute home, lest he be late to his daily appointment with his infant firstborn, Young Sam. The appointment is for the bedtime reading of WHERE’S MY COW?

The heart of every parent in the world cries out in sympathy for Sam as he reads for the hundredth time the plot-challenged picture book with the senseless conclusion. When he dares to make his own editorial adjustments, we know that disaster will ensue….and it does, in the form of Young Sam repeating some rude language in the ears of his mother. Chastened, the elder Sam returns to the word-for-word authorized version of WHERE’S MY COW? for the remainder of the novel….even when, at the climax of THUD!, he finds himself fighting an epic underground battle.

You see, trolls and war and supernatural catastrophe and the like notwithstanding, the appointed hour for WHERE’s MY COW? arrives, and Hell Hath No Fury like Sam prevented from reading to his boy. WHERE’s MY COW?, shouted by memory as the commander hacks his way through an underground battle with the trolls, becomes an integral and mystical element in literally saving the Discworld from catastrophe.

It’s silly, of course. But “God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise”, and there is a profundity to the silliness, because of Sam Vimes’s simple human fatherly devotion.

Vis a vis the importance of foolish things, it is quite interesting to see Pratchett, who guesses he is an atheist arrive, via THUD! and WHERE’S MY COW? , if not at the same place as C.S. Lewis, at least in a nearby neighborhood.

I think of Puddleglum in The Silver Chair, defying the witch’s taunts that his and the children’s talk of Narnia is all a pretty fairy tale made up by babies. Pratchett’s outlook on the universe is indeed akin to Puddleglum’s in that in the Discworld pretty much anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Pratchett reinforces this view with the anthropomorphic language I tried to reproduce at the start of this post. And yet his characters like Vimes do not scruple to set store by such foolish things as a children’s story, and by such seemingly small commitments as reading to one’s children every day. Kiddie Lit saves the World!

P.S. I am not one of those Christian readers who is more interested in what a given writer believes about God than anything else. I find the most interesting thing about Pratchett’s recent experience of what he seems willing to believe may be supernatural is not the mere fact that he had such an experience, but his willingness to discuss it publicly. He seems not to care what other people, atheist, Christian, or other, may think of him as a result of this quite personal disclosure. That bespeaks a certain honesty and humility, reflected in his very amusing stories which in my opinion are indeed Literature of the best, spiritually refreshing sort.

Getting Out of the Way

This article, sans hypertext, first appeared in an issue of Christian Vision in the early 1990s. It was one of a series I did for that publication, a Christian writers’ newsletter from Skysong Press, who still publish the Christian fiction zine Dreams and Visions.

The storyteller mounts the platform and takes up his six-stringed lyre, and with his bold shout the audience falls silent, not daring to move a muscle. "Hwaet!" he cries, "We Gar-dena in geardagum theodcyninga thrym gefrunon...."

The year is 1991, the site of performance Vancouver, British Columbia. But almost from the first words, the audience is no longer there. Benjamin Bagby has magic, and he uses it to open the door into the misty world of sixth century Denmark. For the next hour and a quarter his listeners join the Scyldings and Geats in the famous mead-hall, Heorot, while the hero Beowulf makes good his vow to destroy Grendel, the monstrous descendent of Cain whose jealousy of human happiness has goaded him to a bloodthirsty spree.

I was there. Yes, the entire performance was in Old English; the audience was given a translation of the poem, and in the brief lulls during which the storyteller re-tuned his lyre, you could hear the turning of pages. But even this did not break the spell.

No costumes, no special effects. Just a man with a voice and an instrument. Yes, he had to re-invent storytelling techniques that no longer exist-- techniques that must date back at least to the time when David soothed the demonized King Saul with his harp.

But techniques--the gentle strumming of the lyre to evoke the ocean voyage, or the heightened speech that paints for us Beowulf's heroic character-- these are only the magic runes that unlock the door to the story. Bagby's Beowulf transcends mere performance, for having unlocked the door, he does not stand on the threshold, blocking our view, but strides in confidently, drawing his listeners irresistibly after him.

I am not a performing artist, and don't know exactly how Bagby did this-- how he got himself so much out of the way that we all knew we had come there not to see Benjamin Bagby perform, but to experience Beowulf. I suspect we see few performing artists who are so successful at what they do, because most of them do not want to be actors or singers, they only want to be stars. In short, to enter the magic door needs humility.

The same applies to literary and visual artists. And here I do know a little about how to do it, or at least how not to do it. Don't let a bad sentence stand, for instance, or you'll be blocking the doorway into your story with your own laziness. Don't waste time showing off your flowing prose, if what the story requires is action; then it will be your ego that bars the entry.

It amounts to loving the story you are trying to tell, more than you love being a writer. Like Saint Francis, the artist must want only to be a channel. By all means, develop your technique; no less a genius than Hans Christian Andersen had to return to grammar school at the age of seventeen, to get the basic education without which he would never have had the tools to write the tales that are now more widely translated than any other book in the world except the Bible itself.
But having learned the runes that will unlock the magic door-- having learned how to write description, how to reveal character, how to keep the narrative moving-- don't stand in the doorway admiring your accomplishments. Get out of the way, and let your readers come in.

EDIT addendum, 2008: I've watched the DVD, including the extras, and it's worth every sceatta.

UPDATE: Benjamin Bagby will once more be performing in Vancouver this November 2008