A quick essay

[kippurbird]

I have been rereading Terry Pratchett’s Nightwatch. In it Samuel Vimes ends up going back in time to when he first joined the Watch and ends up having to mentor himself by accident. There is in the book one part where Vimes goes into one of the watch house’s jail room and finds that it’s been pretty much turned into a torture chamber. He finds people in there that have been hurt so badly that they just aren’t there any more and he puts them out of their misery.

While reading this there is one point where Vimes, contemplating the horror before him, finds and picks up a tooth. I immediately flashed back to Eldest when Eragon is walking amongst the fallen in the battle field and picks idly picks up a tooth and bouncing it around in his hand with his typical blandness.

The differences between the two scenes, though they have a similar action - that of the tooth in the midst of appalling things - their reactions are completely different.

Vimes is actively disturbed at what he finds. He’s fighting back the rage to do things to the few people he’s found in charge.

In a strange kind of dream, he walked across the floor and bent down to pick something that gleamed in the torchlight. It was a tooth.

He stood up again.

A closed wooden door led off on one side of the cellar; on the other, a wider tunnel almost certainly led to the cells. Vimes took a torch out of its holder, handed it to Sam, and pointed along the tunnel -

There were footsteps accompanied by a jingle of keys, heading toward the door, and a light grown brighter underneath it.

The beast tensed...

Vimes dragged the largest club out of the rack and stepped swiftly to the wall beside the door. Someone was coming, someone who knew about this room, someone who called themselves a copper...

He doesn’t bash the guy coming in with the club. The sight of his younger self - Sam- stops him. But still there’s a certain anger that you can see in these words. Vimes lives and breathes being a watchman. It is what he is deep down to the bone and these men have violated this. There’s a certain tenseness in the language and the tooth encapsulates what it is that is wrong here. But he doesn’t play with the tooth. It’s a symbol here, not something to be held and played with.

In Eldest, on the other hand, the tooth is picked up and used much like you would hold a pebble contemplating something. He finds the tooth and no significance is attached to it. It’s just a tooth, much like a pebble would be a pebble in a stream. It’s put there as an action for Eragon to do, but there’s no reason that it has to be a tooth.

He bent and plucked a tooth, a molar, from the dirt. Bouncing it on his palm, he and Saphira slowly made a circuit through the trampled plain. They stopped at its edge when they noticed Jormundur - Ajihad’s second in command in the Varden - hurrying toward them from Tronjheim. When he came near, Jormundur bowed, a gesture Eragon knew he would have never made just days before.

Now honestly, you really could swap out “tooth” with “stone” and there wouldn’t be any difference in the paragraph’s impact. (Also, looking at the sentence I have to wonder why “in the Varden” has to be there. Is Ajihad in charge of other things that require second in commands?) There is no reason that this has to be a tooth. There’s no reason it should be a tooth.

The tooth in Nightwatch is symbolic of what has happened there and what Vimes is going to face. The tooth in Eragon is nothing but an object found in the battlefield but has no significance placed upon it. Which, as a tooth belonging to a human - at least I think it is a human - should at least bring some comment beyond the fact that it is a molar.

Comments

[ceitfianna]

Yeah, its disturbing in a way Paolini probably didn't mean that its actually identified as a molar but nothing else. Vimes would probably think Eragon is rather like Lord Rust or Angua's brother. I love Night Watch, that's one of my favorite Discworld books.

[kippurbird.livejournal.com]

I don't know what Vimes would think of Eragon, but it wouldn't be complimentary. Night Watch is awesome. It really shows how Sam became Sam.

[ceitfianna]

No, it really wouldn't be. I need to reread Night Watch again. Vimes is one of my favorite characters.

[kippurbird.livejournal.com]

I have moved onto Thud.

[fritters.livejournal.com]

Terry Pratchett is such an exceptional writer.

[kippurbird.livejournal.com]

He is! He can take the absurd and make it completely reasonable.

[swankivy.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised he didn't compare the tooth to something gemlike in order to decorate his prose instead of thinking about what he's actually saying. Kinda reminds me of how people can be crying and instead of focusing on their sadness Paolini will describe their tears "like liquid diamonds."

[kippurbird.livejournal.com]

That would indicate that Eragon actually was trying to put some meaning to the tooth. Some emotional investment. Which,as we've learned, doesn't really happen.

And honestly, liquid diamonds? Who thinks like that?

[swankivy.livejournal.com]

I dunno, but it really annoys me. He's always describing how crap looks when we care a lot more about its significance. I just don't understand where he got the idea that we need three or four adjectives describing background objects, like when Roran was sitting on "the iron-hard, sun-bleached, wind-worn shell of an ancient tree trunk."

[kippurbird.livejournal.com]

Not even getting into how Saphira "thought". I mean honestly, if she's going to be thinking like that - annoying as it is - it should be reflected in her speech patterns.

It's like in those movies where they have the character speak in a foreign language for a good half a minute and the translation is "Yes."

[swankivy.livejournal.com]

Exactly. I find that Saphira's thinking was terribly forced . . . it's never reflected in how she communicates to Eragon, like EVER. When I think about how Animorphs did it, with an alien who didn't understand some kinds of concepts (like why humans wear clothes) and kept calling the clothes "artificial skin," he actually SAID that too. Once when he was in human disguise at a dance and a girl wanted to dance with him, his friends were like "she wants your body, haha" and he replied to her, "I would like to shuffle my artificial hooves in time with the music with you. But you cannot have my body." Bwahaha. (There are other problems with the aliens in that series, of course, but hey, they did a lot better than Paolini.)

As for the foreign language thing, I always find it really obnoxious when the foreign characters use their own language mainly for "yes" and "no" and other simple words. Those are the FIRST words we learn in other languages, and it's more likely to be the DIFFICULT words that they end up using their own language for.

[kippurbird.livejournal.com]

Exactly. None of the dragons that we've seen seem to think like that. Not Gladaer or whatever his name was, not Thorn... It's as if he did it like that to make Saphira's POV different, but it's really just a gimmick.

I think the first word I learned in a foreign language was "Agua Susia" and "Shalom", but your point stands.

[swankivy.livejournal.com]

Actually Glaedr had some of the dumb hyphenated crap when Eragon was holding the Eldunarí and spying on his death. It was just as silly. Yes, it's a gimmick. It doesn't really even make sense, especially since the stuff she's noting differently appears to be very human-centric--like, humans might zero in on the elves being different from them because of their freaking ears, but why would Saphira notice something as tiny as that? You'd think she'd be more interested in how they smell or sound different rather than whether their ears have a tiny little difference.

When you're learning a foreign language, you learn the most useful words first. You basically learn yes/no, hello/goodbye, and where's the toilet. And probably how to count. Followed by other polite greetings and responses, a bunch of nouns, and whatever's deemed most vital to your reason for using the language. What I've noticed about writers trying to make foreign people sound foreign is that they insert people saying yes or no in their own language and then continuing in English or whatever. The bilingual people I know don't do this while talking to people they know don't speak the language. I think most of the first foreign words I learned were in Spanish from Sesame Street. I don't remember the focus of learning Hebrew being on word meanings as much as pronunciation, which is weird when I think about it. Great, learn how to say stuff and not know what it means!

[kippurbird.livejournal.com]

Sure, he did it after Paloni decided to have them talk like that. But in Eldest they never did. Or colors. I mean wasn't there a difference in how dragons and humans see colors. I would think a giant predator would be more interested in how you smell than how you look. You can find things in the dark by their smell.

I remember from my linguistics's class the teacher talked about how bilingual people will switch entire phrases and not just single words. I would think harder words would be ones that didn't get translated and not the easy ones like yes or no.

Hebrew is funny. You learn to say the stuff so you can say the prayers, but not necessarily what it means. At least when you're a kid sometimes.

[swankivy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there was no precedent for the dragons understanding the world the way they were claimed to in the whole Brisingr switch-up.

Yes, with bilingual people, usually it will be a turn of phrase that maybe has no English equivalent, or just a particular word they can't think of the English equivalent for, or whatever. When bad writers write bilingual people and pepper it with words from their first language, it's almost always words the authors themselves recognize and could pick out of a foreign sentence. It's really pathetic.

I have a recording of me trying to sing a Chanukah blessing at age five and damned if I knew what a single word of it meant.

[kippurbird.livejournal.com]

Bad Retcon Was Bad.

I know my mom will occasionally turn out a Yiddish phrase or three when she talks. She grew up in a household that used Yiddish as much as it did English and when she first went to school she didn't realize the differences. She's got a great story about how she was visiting a friend's house and they were having chicken for dinner. When they asked her what piece she wanted she said she wanted the "fleglah" which is the wing. They had no idea what she was talking about. And of course I had the same problem. Fleglah was always what we called the chicken wing. Legs, thighs, breast, fleglah.

I only learned what the blessing meant by looking at the English.

[notadoor.livejournal.com]

I'm an ESL teacher, and while it's not hugely common, there have been several occasions where I'll be talking to a student in English and they'll respond with "yes" or "no" in their own language -- not because they don't know the English, but they're concentrating so hard on understanding what's going on that their mouth goes on auto-pilot.

They also have a tendency to say hello/goodbye to me in their own language, because I know the greetings in the most common languages, and they get a really big kick out of an American understanding them.

[swankivy.livejournal.com]

Yep, that makes sense, and I've seen it too, mostly in Japanese and in Spanish. But when writers throw in very basic foreign-language words to spice up foreign people's language and try to force a "voice" on them, it's painful. I hate this especially when it's a group of people who ALL speak the foreign language and yet they are conversing in English and peppering it with the most common words of their native language to remind the reader that they're [whatever foreign origin they are].

[hekateras.livejournal.com]

As my as my gut churns reflexively at the thought of the Discworld and the IC in the same room, figuratively speaking, yes, this.

Pratchett's subtlety of language is another thing I enjoy very much about his books, and one that is exemplified here perfectly. There is nothing so trite and blunt as "Vimes felt really angry" or "Vimes wanted to bash someone over the head". Instead, we see him grab a club, move to the door, are free to draw our conclusions - I love how Pratchett trusts the reader to be smart enough not to need these things spelled out - and we get his mood from the nuances of the word choice, which, through the close narrative distance to the character, becomes descriptory of his mood.

[kippurbird.livejournal.com]

You know Vimes is angry because we're being shown instead of told. We know Vimes' character and what makes him tick. We know that the Unmentionables really piss him off and this, now in their snake nest, is just going to go over the edge. We don't need to be told this.

Like you said, you can draw your own conclusions.