On narration

As I think of it, Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright has narration, but no narrator. That is, I have a narrating position in mind when I write, one very distinct from me, but I make no attempt to characterise or unify the narration. Here are some notes on my approach.

The idea of the specific, characterised, potentially-unreliable narrator emerged quite recently in European literature and writing without it both steers closer to the poem's inspirations, and seems more fun to me.

But the poem has a narrating position. Every now and then, I even allow little hints at it.

or so their walk went, pace by weary pace,
until above the halls they gladly rose,
full keen their minds to wrench from death’s disgrace,
from bloodied-lips, from hall-shroud’s heart-chill woes
(mere glimpses told, I shudder to unclose).

(Book X)

The parenthetical aside here imitates the kind of stray first-person asides scattered throughout both early epic and developing European romance. CWKB is a written text, but it's primarily to be read aloud, and whoever reads the poem can inhabit this first-person moment for their audience.

In Nightingale of Needles, Wind-Cry cast
about for tool, until his eye alit
on boulder near. Any armours now,
in lesser times, would might to lift a mass so great
full lack—to two or three would fall
the task—but like a shepherd busy who
a fleece in hand up-takes, and bears it off,
and weight but barely feels, so boulder now
did Wind-Cry heft, as if some war-god helped
his arm.

(Book VII)

The simile here of the shepherd comes from Iliad XII, but the temporal gap that enters in the words 'Any armours now, / in lesser times' is my addition: CWKB is a story told a long time after its events.

That matters because I aim to throw a thick shroud of doubt over the possible historicity of all the poem's events, and for that matter its values and attitudes. We hear someone tell us 'the loyal-lettered legend | … / of Kin-Bright the Key-rider| and her cohorts knightly', but we might be getting more insight into the world and values of the time of narration. This echoes (our current knowledge of) the Iliad and Odyssey. (But here's also a difference from Homer: the narration comes from and assumes a society with working literacy in its phrase 'loyal-lettered'. I take that phrase from Gawain and the Green Knight: 'In stori stif and stronge, / With lel letteres loken' (ll. 34–5).)

In some respects, the narration's values differ substantially from those of real-world readers: the narration and its assumed audience find violence less culpable than most readers today do, struggle with modes of social organisation other than coercive monarchy, and stay almost wholly blind to the needs and wants of the mass of normal Taru people in the story's background—at several points I have the narration signal its own failure to comprehend that mass.

I remarked before, when writing about my dislike for plot, on another value which I use the narration to poke at: our annoying but irrepressible tendency to read all stories as moral fables in a sort of prosperity-gospel way, in which those who suffer are therefore condemned and those who succeed are therefore endorsed. The narration, like the Taru, thinks that broadly speaking a people's gods will reward the good and punish the bad, to the extent of their powers, and by staging that idea in the narration I hope to inoculate readers against it (this probably won't work).

I have the narration assume at least some background sense that Kin-Bright's a famous, long-dead hero, and several moments suggest a wider range of stories, unknown to us:

Though several tales of deeds that Kin-Bright wrought
in Rock-bound time, with Qwerthart at her side,
to us by elders’ well-worn tongues come down,
just one, in briefest space, I reach to tell.

(Book V)

Moments like this one suggest that we have met only one within a wider network of tales, some of them perhaps different versions of the whole plot told in CWKB, others telling specific episodic legends about particular figures. I gave this particular moment a slightly defensive framing ('Though…') because the narration is implicitly defending or explaining why we don't hear other lays about Kin-Bright and Qwerthart on the Rock, to an audience who might perhaps know and enjoy some of the other stories.

The assumed presence of stories about other heroes extends beyond just Tar:

Then Heolsterdern from distance launched a charge.
As waif in youth had Heolsterdern the fleet
of black-hulled hunting vessels entered low,
by no belief on-pressed, but rather need:
an orphan in the Fold-ways bread will seek,
and shelter too, from any hand that gives.
In time, to strength she grew, to wit and speed;
on foot she fought at first, on foot excelled,
then rank-wise rulers her to rider raised;
some lays her deeds and loves and dealings lordly tell.

(Book VII)

It is significant that heroes who aren't Taru have their own legend traditions, as far as the narration is concerned. Within the poem, this coheres with the way that I expect it will end; outside the poem, this coheres with the attitude—available, in varying amounts, in many martial epic poets—that views heroes as heroic regardless of what we would today bluntly call their side. Readers often note that although the Iliad is a poem in early Greek, its Trojan heroes receive if anything more sympathy. I think this partly stems from the specific episode within the Trojan War that the Iliad happens to tell, but the effect remains. And one might reasonably say that the Iliad doesn't 'happen' to tell anything: for all we know, Trojan pathos had roles to play in its composition and survival.

You might reasonably ask whether all this thought about positioning and background assumptions doesn't, after all, characterise a narrator. To this thought I answer that everyone from the narration's social context would share the same assumptions, so nothing here creates that dangerous phantasm, the novelistic character.