Bakker: Pounded In The Brain By The Great Ordeal Spoilers III

[Darth Richard II]

55 minutes ago, Michael Seswatha Jordan said:

If he wanted it, then it isn't rape, now is it? I guess you didn't read my post,  because I said I don't think Proyas wanted it. 

You need to look up some actual real life stuff about rape and victim blaming, cause, dude, I don't even know where to start.

[PapushiSun]

Regarding the captive in chains, there's no indication of his identity in the books, right? He might be Nau Cayuti but there's nothing in the dreams that confirms that, unless I've missed something.

[Michael Seswatha Jordan]

Dude, what you're accusing me of victim blaming? @Cursed said he thought Proyas might've wanted it, if so, that is consent not rape. Do I think that's the case, that Proyas wanted it? No,  I've stated that twice now. I don't need to look nothing up. 

[Darth Richard II]

No, I'm accusing Cursed of victim blaming, and trying to explain to you why i thought that was all fucked up.

[PapushiSun]

5 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

Quya can be Siqu.

There had to be Quya Siqu, they were the ones who taught the Gnosis to men. Gin'yursis (the Cil Aujas ghost) was a founder of one of the Gnostic schools. IIRC it was the Mangaecca. Gin'yursis was also the ruler of Cil Aujas which made him one of the Tsonoi, Quya, Siqu, and possibly Ishroi all together.

[Michael Seswatha Jordan]

11 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

No, I'm accusing Cursed of victim blaming, and trying to explain to you why i thought that was all fucked up.

Gotcha. Sorry for misunderstanding you. 

[generic]

I think I skipped a thread. Did anyone make something out of the god-Koringhus parallels? The god is described as being broken into warring factions. The same is literally true for him. And then he jumps.

[jurble]

Whoa, that's some a good observation there @generic. I don't think I read that in any thread yet, or if I did, I don't recall. Perhaps, then, The God broke (killed) himself?  But what then to make of the Boatman's song?

[generic]

2 hours ago, Damned with the Wind said:

Whoa, that's some a good observation there @generic. I don't think I read that in any thread yet, or if I did, I don't recall. Perhaps, then, The God broke (killed) himself?  But what then to make of the Boatman's song?

I rather thought that it might point to the resolution rather than the origin. However we have no indication that the Gods strive for the absolute so they shouldn't erase themselves if they watch through the JE. I'm still not sure what the Quirri did. Just accelerated the process?

Another thing I noticed in that context is Serwa's real/unreal distinction. If you use your Dunyain senses to break people down into their components they are unreal. Only once she accepts the failure of her mission does she see Sorweel as real. Similar Koringhus acts that are opposed to the unifying principle (the mission) are described in different terms. He saved his defective son without thinking. Suddenly it is "he" and not a fraction.

Since I'm already here: While it has been overshadowed by by the failure of the WL the next to last Kel scene was also interesting. The voice in his head draws blood, "a reminder how it used to be". Also I thought the identity of Kel and his twin were getting mixed up. Someone should go back and check if the descriptions were consistent. Overall I suspect that there is an external third force involved.

 

Finally I want to state my candidates for why AK returned to the Three seas.

1. The nuke confirms the scale of his ignorance and he decides that he can not bet everything on the Ordeal.
2. He genuinely loves his wife and children.
3. He decided to "burn the fields". For that he has to return to his empire.

 

A combination of 1 and 2 is also possible. That not everyone can be saved is a good thing because it gives him a reason to save the right people.

[WEWLAD]

Esmenet's arc is "disappointing", and she's relatively useless, because her life is a lie. In the same sense that everything Proyas and Koringhus's son, like her, were taught by a Dunyain was a lie.

We weren't taking the info TAE has presented on women literally enough when it comes to Esmenet. Her arc is contradictory (being supposedly feminist, yet riddled with feminine weakness). Why is she empress, but still always failing, breaking down in tears, and clinging to her children? Three books of crying her eyes out and being baby crazy? Were the critics right? Does Bakker have some sort of complex regarding women? Does he need to be locked up?

I think we are still stuck in that scene in TWP where Kellhus scratches the Chronicle clean and tells Esmenet she is equal and only trapped in a lie. Merely disadvantaged by circumstance.

Except that is a lie. Kellhus is a fraud and Esmenet DOES have a lesser soul. Earwa is fatalistic: Esmenet constantly ends up as a fool, a whore, because that is her fate. She's a likeable enough character that, subconsciously or not, we've come to think of her as an equal. A fellow human like us. We want this female character to succeed, but... but... she has a lesser soul. So says the Judging Eye, plain and simple.

If we thought Esmenet's arc had a narrative trajectory of liberation, we were wrong. Because narrative trajectories are Real in Earwa and Bakker has unsubtly been shouting hers at us this entire time. Esmenet's storyline... is about how she really was inferior all along (it's not that she isn't smart, or competent, as we would define it, it's that literally, her place in "the circuit of watcher and watched", like all women, has been ordained to be slavery).

Think of the Judging Eye vs. the White-Luck vs. Unerring Grace (and even vs. the Logos, which is what raised Esmenet to her station). Her stint as empress was never meant to give proof to that scene in the tent where she is "cleansed": it is meant to prove that that was a lie. We had it all backwards.

Just like the Ordeal arc makes a lie of Proyas' prior conditioning, just as the Demua arc gives lie to the logos, Esmenet's arc gives lie to her liberation. Women are not only inferior in moral worth, but inferior in ends in Earwa. The judging eye SEES that women have lesser souls. Fate ENACTS this inferiority (Mommemn in TWLW ends with "fate truly was a whore", after all).

So it all naturally has ended up looking fairly repulsive to our modern eyes. In TGO I think the Momemn arc really gets explicit where Esmenet is concerned right at the end, as she's having her mental breakdown and castigating herself. Once Kellhus appears, remember that she abases herself in front of him and thinks "I let it happen".  And indeed she did. She was fated to. She finally realizes that her emancipation was a lie, and that she really does have a servile yet  treacherous female soul like scripture says. It doesn't even matter that NOBODY controls their own soul, as Koringhus proves.

That whole scene is what Esmenet's arc has been leading up to... since the scene in TWP where she is "freed". I had to read it twice to get it, and then it sort of staggered me (specifically, once I understood what "I let it happen" really means). I find the arc much more compelling now (and much more evil).

Fate unravels the lie Kellhus created for Esmenet. A million Dunyain couldn't permanently engineer a society with gender equality in Earwa, because it would be an objective lie with an objective fate (the fate probably looking somewhat like how Esmenet's career as empress ends). I think there IS a teleological thing with women in the series and maybe TUC will mention it. Across the board, we have: extinct inchoroi and nonmen women, dunyain whale mothers, and the sorry state of Esmenet and three-seas women. This might even be part of the eschaton: women are fated to pass away before men do.

Read Esmenet's last few sections in the final Momemn chapter. It's pretty much all in the text. She's realizing her objective place in the universe and that she's become an obscenity (and this is presumably what will happen to all women in this setting if they try to escape their ordained roles). Recall how TTT ends: she chooses the empress life, over Achamian, despite knowing Kellhus does not love her. Because she doesn't want to be a slave anymore. And this was the wrong decision, that dooms her. Her arc was never meant to be empowering when read literally.

 

[matt b]

10 hours ago, Michael Seswatha Jordan said:

If he wanted it, then it isn't rape, now is it? I guess you didn't read my post,  because I said I don't think Proyas wanted it. 

How could someone know if they truly want something in the presence of a Dunyain? They can't, all they know is what the Dunyain wants them to want. Sex with a Dunyain is not unlike sex between a prison guard and an inmate: it's always rape. The power dynamic is too unbalanced for it to be otherwise. "Yes" has no value when "no" isn't an option.

[Sci-2]

Interesting thoughts WEWLAD...but I think there comes a point where metaphysics can't excuse poor craftsmanship. 

Maybe there's some internal metaphysical logic to explain away the poorly crafted narrative, but that's the kind of thing that works better in a short story than an arc spanning multiple novels.

And the narrative doesn't give us the sense that she's struggling against Fate - if she was using some genius intellect at any point in the second trilogy but always coming up short due to circumstance I'd be more willing to accept that.

[sologdin]

okay, working diligently through scott's the question of ethics, which has required me to look back through nietzsche's genealogy of morals. the latter text is salient regarding the development of the 'ascetic ideal':

Quote

"How is a memory to be made for the man-animal? How is an impression to be so deeply fixed upon this ephemeral understanding, half dense, and half silly, upon this incarnate forgetfulness, that it will be permanently present?" As one may imagine, this primeval problem was not solved by exactly gentle answers and gentle means; perhaps there is nothing more awful and more sinister in the early history of man than his system of mnemonics. "Something is burnt in so as to remain in his memory: only that which never stops hurting remains in his memory." This is an axiom of the oldest (unfortunately also the longest) psychology in the world. It might even be said that wherever solemnity, seriousness, mystery, and gloomy colours are now found in the life of the men and of nations of the world, there is some survival of that horror which was once the universal concomitant of all promises, pledges, and obligations. The past, the past with all its length, depth, and hardness, wafts to us its breath, and bubbles up in us again, when we become "serious." When man thinks it necessary to make for himself a memory, he never accomplishes it without blood, tortures and sacrifice; the most dreadful sacrifices and forfeitures (among them the sacrifice of the first-born), the most loathsome mutilation (for instance, castration), the most cruel rituals of all the religious cults (for all religions are really at bottom systems of cruelty)—all these things originate from that instinct which found in pain its most potent mnemonic.

GE II.iii (trans. h. samuel).  cunuroi in general, yo. kaufmann translates it a bit differently, reading at one point that what hurts is never forgotten, or so.  and as to ishterebinth in particular:

Quote

You can see now what the remedial instinct of life has at least tried to effect, according to my conception, through the ascetic priest, and the purpose for which he had to employ a temporary tyranny of such paradoxical and anomalous ideas as "guilt," "sin," "sinfulness," "corruption," "damnation." What was done was to make the sick harmless up to a certain point, to destroy the incurable by means of themselves, to turn the milder cases severely on to themselves, to give their resentment a backward direction ("man needs but one thing"), and to exploit similarly the bad instincts of all sufferers with a view to self-discipline, self-surveillance, self-mastery. It is obvious that there can be no question at all in the case of a "medication" of this kind, a mere emotional medication, of any real healing of the sick in the physiological sense; it cannot even for a moment be asserted that in this connection the instinct of life has taken healing as its goal and purpose. On the one hand, a kind of congestion and organisation of the sick (the word "Church" is the most popular name for it); on the other, a kind of provisional safeguarding of the comparatively healthy, the more perfect specimens, the cleavage of a rift between healthy and sick—for a long time that was all! and it was much! it was very much!

GE III.xvi.  kaufmann translates 'rift' as 'chasm,' however, which fits better, considering the internal geography.

am accordingly persuaded that the ishterebinth sections at least are nietzschean arguments made manifest in the setting.  nifty.

[SerPaladin]

A good many reviewers here whose opinion I respect. And it seems, though you've all been Bakker fans for quite a long time, that your reviews are largely negative. The reviews on Amazon, mostly positive. I don't read nearly as voraciously as I did 10 years ago (less time stuck on business travel, plus active kids, plus I'm old), so I can't tell if this book should jump to the front of the line.

I've read the preceding books, and have greatly enjoyed the philosophy and world building, along with the "challenge" of the style and the somewhat offensive content. I felt the original trilogy was excellent, and barring certain excellent storylines, TJE and WLW were not as compelling.

Is the Great Ordeal a "go get it now" book, or a "when I get around to it" book.

[Relic]

1 hour ago, SerPaladin said:

Is the Great Ordeal a "go get it now" book, or a "when I get around to it" book.

It was one of the few books i purchased right away in the last 5 years, simply to support Bakker. However....if you aren't burning with desire to read it, and you have to ask the question you just asked, I'd say you should wait. 

[jurble]

47 minutes ago, SerPaladin said:

Is the Great Ordeal a "go get it now" book, or a "when I get around to it" book.

Fer me it was a go get it now book since I'm a fanboy of the series.  All depends on you as a person.

[lokisnow]

@WEWLAD makes ano interesting argument that's supported by non diagetic author commentary, but none of that is in the text, there's nothing in the second series that connects to the shriven scene in TWP, and frankly nothing in anything after that scene within the book or in TTT that develops those ideas out of the shriven scene. Like the whale mothers fan interpretations before Bakker shot them down,  yours is better than what we actually got.

[Kalbear]

I honestly wish that I had waited for TUC.

[sologdin]

but then the concentrated grousing would've given everyone a CVA?

[Sci-2]

On getting the book now or later.

If you're deep into the discussions about the book or you just enjoy pondering the metaphysical and narrative implications, then I'd get it now.

If you're more just wanting to see how the story is resolved and if the No God walks again, you could probably wait.

I guess if you enjoy the mysterious teasing out of how it all fits then get it now, if you're more wanting to read a satisfying book then I suspect it works better as a single book.

I would say the not having the Momemn conclusion we got here would've been better, as my hope against hope is there is a forthcoming explanation for what seemed to be a very cheap turn of events.