by Stefan Ekman
In Lavondyss, the polder is a forest of forking paths. Tallis’s route is not the inevitable, unicursal labyrinth of Steven’s journey. Her years of wandering, lost among the protean mythotopes and through unpredictable hollowings, suggest that the forest path is one of innumerable forks and dead ends. It is, in Doob’s terminology, a multicursal rather than a unicursal labyrinth,84 the kind that Eco refers to as a maze. “In a maze,” he states, “one can make mistakes. […] Some alternatives end at a point where one is obliged to return backwards, whereas others generate new branches, and only one among them leads to the way out.”85 A mythotopic maze is more difficult to negotiate than a spatial maze, because it allows for more than spatial choices. The protean nature of the mythotopes means that backtracking does not return the traveler to an original location, and the forest defenses disorient the travelers. Only slowly are Tallis and her mythago companion drawn inward along the one route that leads not out of the forest but to its center.
The multitude of paths that the forest offers in The Hollowing, on land and through hollowings, within and between the numerous layers of woodland Otherworlds, takes the forest beyond the multicursal maze of Lavondyss. It resembles the type of labyrinth that Eco calls a net: “The main feature of a net is that every point can be connected with every other point.”86 In the forest in The Hollowing, it is implied that every mythotope can be reached from any other mythotope by some route or another. The routes are not necessarily short or obvious, however, and the possibility of losing one’s way is ever present. Eco also claims that “the abstract model of a net has neither a center nor an outside,”87 and whereas Ryhope Wood does have an outside, it is an outside that is impossibly small compared to the inner vastness. Furthermore, unlike the other three books, The Hollowing contains no quest for a Lavondyss at the center of the wood. The heart of the wood and the goal for the quest in this novel is Alex’s hiding-place, located somewhere in the forest net, and any one of several routes leads there. As if the net of paths through the forest were not disorienting enough, this structure is further complicated by the enigmatic and ubiquitous “rootweb” through which Alex can send his consciousness and see things all over the forest, a web underlying the net.
In the cycle’s fourth book, the complex structure of The Hollowing remains, but the journey is one of a small polder within the forest, a polder that creates its own path. When Legion, Kylhuk’s host of mythago heroes, marches through the forest in Gate of Ivory, it does not move consecutively through the mythotopes, nor does it move through the net of hollowings and planes. Instead, it breaks the structural components apart, piecing fractions of time and space together from numerous mythotopes into a new spatiotemporal structure. “Legion moved forward outside what you or I might think of as ordinary space and ordinary time,” Christian explains, musing on the effect this might have on mythagos who would see “when Legion flowed for a few seconds through their space and time” (Gate of Ivory 139). Legion becomes a mythotope in its own right, with its own structure in relation to the rest of the woodlands, just as the latter have a structure dissimilar to that of the outside world. With a reality of its own, maintained and defended by Kylhuk’s warriors and magic users (see, e.g., Gate of Ivory 133), Legion is in fact a polder within the larger polder of Ryhope Wood. This small polder moves through its surrounding sylvan polder like a bubble, but a bubble that makes its own paths through the structure that contains it.
Unlike in Gate of Ivory, the first three books have labyrinthine structures that emphasize how traveling in the mythago wood is to travel literally into the selva oscura, the dark, impenetrable forest where any hope of a straightforward path is lost. Steven, Tallis, and Richard are all at the mercy of their respective labyrinths. In Gate of Ivory, Christian is similarly at the mercy of the forest, but not because of its complex structure. Instead, he is brought into the Legion mythotope. So although his tale is arduously labyrinthine, Christian’s path takes him and his companions straight to the center along a route that suggests nothing of the circuitous inevitability of Mythago Wood. Rather, Kylhuk and Legion become an irresistible force that steadily moves toward its goal. Christian is swept along in their wake—and then sent out again.
In Avilion, a change in perspective results in radically different journeys through the mythotopic landscape. Where the first four books all have some aspect of portal–quest narrative to them, in which the reader discovers the forest together with an outsider in the forest, Avilion is immersive. The protagonists belong in the wood, leaving the readers to figure out the place without a guide. Jack’s visit to Shadoxhurst demonstrates this shift in perspective when, as Paul Kincaid points out in his review of the book, the ordinary is made to seem alien.88 Thus, the spatial complexity of the mythotopical landscape is treated as commonplace, almost banal, and rather than stressing the arduousness of traveling through the forest, the characters’ various paths are emphatically simple: Jack journeys along the Amurngoth trails that cut through the forest mythotopes (e.g., 74 ff.); dreams and supernatural guides lead Yssobel into Avilion; and Guiwenneth joins the Legion as it passes on its march straight through the mythotopic structure.
Rather than emphasizing the arduous journey through the labyrinthine landscape, the text focuses on the liminal regions surrounding Ryhope Wood as a whole as well as those surrounding Avilion at its center. Avilion is not a story about traversing a limitless land in search of its heart. It is a story of entering and leaving, of crossing boundaries: of entering but mainly of leaving Ryhope Wood and of leaving but mainly of entering Avilion.
The interior of the polder becomes both anywhere and anywhen, a place where time is as important as space. Its most striking aspects, to the reader as well as to the characters who venture into the woods, resemble the temporal nature of Lothlórien. As one travels inward, mythotopes keep opening up, mythotopes of ever older myths, and at the center is Lavondyss, the First Forest, the first myth and the forest’s origin at the last Ice Age. The deeper one ventures, “the deeper the time abysses that open before the traveler: because to travel into the Wood is also to travel back in time.”89 Except, of course, in Ryhope Wood, each mythago opens a time abyss, leaving the human outsider teetering on its edge; to travel inward is to descend into that abyss. In Lothlórien, Frodo suddenly finds himself at the bottom of a time abyss, in a corner of the Elder Days. Steven, Christian, and Tallis find themselves journeying, step by step and myth by myth, to reach the oldest myth of all at the center of the forest. Just as space is distended during this journey inward and backward, so is time. The further one moves toward the heartwood, the faster subjective time passes in comparison to time outside—a trek of weeks might correspond to mere days outside (see, e.g., Mythago Wood 53; Hollowing 90; Gate of Ivory 51). Kincaid sees this as part of a nonlinear, “riverine” concept of time that he argues provides a spine for the Ryhope Wood stories as well as for The Merlin Codex, also by Holdstock.90 Time in the mythotopic forest does more than meander through the story, however; just as space in the forest is protean, so is time, which ultimately suggests that even the time that passes in the woodlands is part of the mythotopes. This idea evolves over the novels, and in both Lavondyss and The Hollowing the relative passage of time is of central importance. Wynne-Jones’s daughter, Morthen, rides off to find a place where she can age faster, and the few hours Tallis spends away from her companions correspond to two days for them (Lavondyss 338, 330). In The Hollowing, the time differentials work both ways, keeping Alex and James Keeton virtually unchanged in the forest while years pass outside. Richard’s brief hesitation before going through a hollowing results in a delay of a day and a half for those on the other side (Hollowing 129–30). In Avilion, with its polder-internal perspective, the fluctuating time is taken as much for granted as the shifting space. In an ever-changing environment, only Steven, born outside the forest, senses “the steady passage of time” (Avilion 98). The passage of time in the polder is specific to each mythotope, as mutable as the spat
ial aspects of the forest setting, and always unpredictable.
Ryhope Wood is not just a setting—to visit en route elsewhere or to have an adventure in—it is an engine that drives the stories. Holdstock’s polder is protean and evolving, an anachronism that constantly redefines its own anachronistic properties. It does not seek to protect a specific old time—it offers access to all old times. Regardless of the intentions of the people who manage to venture into the woods, the woods use the people to create the settings and adventures that they meet. In Ryhope Wood, the mythagos and mythotopes created from the protagonists’ minds provide a center for the stories, and the heart of the forest labyrinth is a place that must be reached. The plots are driven by the search for that place, rather than by the actions to be performed there. Places in the forest polder are what they are in myths: the right location for a story to end, not a convenient location for carrying out a particular action.
Time and Time Again: Pratchett’s Djelibeybi91
Djelibeybi is a small but ancient kingdom in the valley of the river Djel. This parody of ancient Egypt is the central setting of Pyramids (The Book of Going Forth), the seventh of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, and is, as Andrew M. Butler puts it in his book on the author, “stuffed full of all the Egyptological details you thought you’d remembered from school.”92 It is a country bound by tradition, where national resources are spent primarily on building pyramids for the dead, religion has a tight grip on both rulers and commoners, and nothing ever seems to change. The novel tells the story of prince Teppic, who returns from his training abroad to accede to the throne only to find himself unable to accept the hidebound traditions and the ubiquitous rituals. Teppic’s rebellion eventually results in the deposing of the undying high priest Dios and the modernization of Djelibeybi.
Although most polders include some conscious opposition to the time outside, that opposition rarely takes center stage to the extent that it does in Djelibeybi. Rather than creating an anachronism understandable mainly in terms of history, as in Lothlórien and Ryhope Wood, Pratchett uses the very nature of time to create the opposition between the polder and the surrounding world, making time an exceptionally important part of the setting. That time is of great concern in Pyramids becomes clear from the beginning of the novel, when the first description of Djelibeybi is devoted to the flaring pyramids, and the destruction of time caused by these flares drives much of the plot. The pyramids’ destructive effect on time is, in the Discworld, a natural phenomenon. “Correctly shaped and oriented, with the proper paracosmic measurements correctly plumbed in” (139), pyramids soak up time during the day and burn it at night in so-called flarelights (plumes of light emitted from the tip of the pyramid, not unlike St. Elmo’s fire). Rather than being invisible and abstract, time is given a concrete, visible form, and its destruction has immediate effects for the polder. Instead of living through constantly new time, people in Djelibeybi “use up past time, over and over again” because all new time is turned into flarelights (203). The pyramids act like batteries, turning temporal potential into light and heat just as electric potential is turned into light and heat in an electric discharge. The potential, in both cases, is nullified. Its similarity to electricity (emphasized by the flarelights’ resemblance to a coronal discharge) strongly suggests that time is some kind of energy potential.
Time is repeatedly described in terms of energy or power in the novel. To Teppic, the kingdom is a place where “nothing actually changes, even if it doesn’t stay the same” (203); without new time, there is no way to bring about change. Thus, time has traits in common with physical energy (or power, which is energy over time); and it is often referred to as—or in terms of—power in the novel. Even metaphorically, time and power have similarities; they are both flows, of events and energy respectively. Indeed, time is largely visualized through a water metaphor associating it with physical quantities such as energy and electric current as well as power: the time flow can have whirlpools (e.g., 108), and the pyramids are described as “dams in the stream of time” that affect the time flow, just as “a hydraulic ram can be induced to pump water against the flow” (139). When time is burned (just as energy can be transformed into different forms) by the pyramids, the time flow ceases, leaving only old time in the kingdom. The handmaiden Ptraci even employs water imagery when she describes the temporal situation in Djelibeybi as “an old pond where no new water comes in,” so that “everyone goes round and round in the same old puddle. All the ptime [sic] you live has been lived already. It must be like other people’s bathwater” (206). The pyramids cause a cessation of the time flow and Djelibeybi is caught in a state in which past and present are conflated, regardless of any attempts to change the kingdom. Having lived through millennia of ever-decreasing change, high priest Dios is, of course, extremely attuned to this temporal conflation, to the point where he even finds the use of the past tense problematic (78)—to him, past and present are the same.
Time is not only a power whose flow can be manipulated, however, it is also one of the four spatiotemporal dimensions. A theoretical discussion on the nature of time is provided by the (inebriated) geometrician Pthagonal, who claims to know why Djelibeybi has disappeared. (This disappearance is discussed later.) He begins by rhetorically asking, “how long did they think they could go on building bigger and bigger pyramids for? I mean, where did they think power comes from?” He then explains how time is “sucked up” and “burned” or “used” up through the flarelights. So far, he indicates that time is a power flow caused by a temporal potential. A few lines further down, though, the geometrician provides an alternative view as he proceeds to tell Teppic that “the power build up” in the Great Pyramid probably moved the dimensions around. “So that length is height and height is breadth and breadth is width and width is […] time. S’nother dimessnon [sic], see? Four of the bastards. Time’s one of them” (203). From Pthagonal’s explanation, it becomes obvious that time in Pyramids is not just one of two seemingly mutually exclusive things; it is a duality: a dimension as well as power. Although Pthagonal’s exposition is somewhat muddled, the Great Pyramid is the most obvious illustration of the dimension–power duality of time. The buildup of time-as-power in the pyramid creates a pressure on reality that eventually shifts the four dimensions (the spatial three plus time-as-dimension) by ninety degrees. This dimensional shift is lent further emphasis by the fact that the pyramid builder’s son, Ptaclusp IIa, does not shift with the rest of the kingdom and is therefore left completely flat, moving along a spatial dimension rather than through time (173–75). To further intertwine aspects of the duality, the Great Pyramid begins to accumulate time before its construction is finished, because sometime in the future, that is, at another point in the time dimension, it will be finished. Because of its size, the finished pyramid has an effect backward in time-as-dimension, causing premature accumulation of time-as-power (108).
The dual nature of time as both power and dimension is linked to quantum mechanics, a set of scientific principles that is repeatedly invoked in exposition and jokes throughout the novel. Time’s paradoxical dual nature echoes a more familiar duality of matter: the seemingly paradoxical, dual nature of subatomic quanta, which exhibit both wave-and particle-like properties. Dios’s ability to know how several mutually exclusive things are all true, an ability that “would make even a quantum mechanic give in” (89), alludes to this particle–wave duality: just as Dios knows that the sun is, simultaneously, a celestial orange, a hole into a fiery realm, the eye of a god, and a small ball of fire, quantum mechanics holds that the smallest building blocks of matter are both waves and particles. In fact, quantum mechanics permeates much of the novel. The first use of the word quantum (clearly alluding to quantum mechanics) can be found already on the first page (7), foreshadowing the idea of parallel universes (belonging to a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics) that is used to explain the existence of the Discworld universe, the “dimensionette” where Teppic
meets the sphinx, and, it is implied, the valley of the Djel itself (219, 233). Most references to quantum mechanics can be found in the discussions of the pyramid builders, especially through their repeated (mis)use of the word quantum (e.g., 91, 94, 136, 278), and an explicit reference is even made to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle—a concept central to quantum mechanics (178n).
The plot of Pyramids turns on this dual nature of time.93 Time must be understood as both power and dimension for the events that lead to the end of the Djelibeybi polder to be clear. The Great Pyramid that Teppic is tricked into having built stores time-as-power because it exists as a four-dimensional object (one of the dimensions being time-as-dimension). The great potential that this buildup causes results in a shift of the four dimensions, time-as-dimension included. That shift, in turn, causes events that ultimately destroy the pyramids and end Dios’s rule. It also brings the polder’s boundaries and maintenance into view.
Unlike Lothlórien and Ryhope Wood, the Djelibeybi polder is not introduced to the reader by its boundaries, even though they are implied by more than just the dimensional shift; instead, Dios’s attempts to maintain the kingdom as an anachronism define much of the story, as do the protagonist’s transgressions of the polder boundaries. A polder requires boundaries that protect it from the hostile reality around it, protection that Djelibeybi initially appears to be without. The clearest sign that the country’s boundaries are more than political constructions is the Great Pyramid’s shifting of the four dimensions. When this happens, Djelibeybi is removed from the Discworld universe. The very fabric of the physical reality changes, but only within the boundaries of the polder. As a footnote explains, “Nature abhors dimensional abnormalities, and seals them neatly away so that they don’t upset people” (204n). The country is sealed away along its political boundaries, demonstrating that the effect is limited to, but includes all of, Djelibeybi. This removal, or sealing away, of the polder also emphasizes its separate pantheon: once the polder is no longer in contact with the rest of the Discworld, the force of the people’s belief is enough to change a number of other natural laws: their gods appear, their mummified ancestors are brought back to life, their ruler is fully responsible for making the sun rise, and so on.