What does the pageant of Technic civilization just summarized prove? (If indeed history can be said to prove anything.) First, its rise and fall demonstrates that governments operate under the social equivalent of Darwinian pressure: they must function within their environments or be replaced. Any kind of system that provides its citizens with an acceptable balance of opportunity and security is good. Pragmatic results count for more than political dogma. Initially the League emphasized opportunity and the Commonwealth security but finally neither could give either and so they perished. The best justification for the early Empire was that it spread a military umbrella over 100,000 unique cultural experiments. Once its ability to stimulate and defend its subjects faltered, its days were numbered.
Furthermore, these extant accounts of Technic civilization show history as a record of interlocking ironies arising from individual choices. For instance, if Falkayn had not aided Merseia, it would not have survived to menace the Empire. Yet if he had not also founded Avalon and his descendants not resisted Imperial conquest, no free Avalonian would have been available to save the Empire from a subtle Merseian plot in The Day of Their Return. If Flandry had treated his first two mistresses with greater consideration, he would not have lost his last chance for happiness. If Kathryn had not rebuffed Flandry's advances, neither the Empire nor her own descendants would have long survived. Each irresistible historic trend is actually the net product of separate acts which had not necessarily appeared significant at the time they occurred. Each key event "'is the flower on a plant whose seed went into the ground long before ... and whose roots reach widely, and will send up fresh growths,'" (A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows).
Finally, this temporal drama reminds us that everything in the universe is mortal. All things, institutions as well as persons, are born only to die. The lifespan of a galaxy or an empire is as limited as that of a man. The only proper response, in the face of entropy's inevitable triumph is to struggle as well and bravely as possible. As Flandry said in Hunters of the Sky Cave, "'I don't want to die so fast I can't feel it. I want to see death coming, and make the stupid thing fight for every centimeter of me.'" Existence is a pattern with no universally acknowledged goal or purpose other than to be itself, a doomed but lovely candle in the darkness.
Afterword to The Night Face
by Sandra Miesel
The Night Face is not just a sad story; it is a genuine, dagger-sharp, heart-stabbing tragedy. How was it wrought and of what metal?
Poul Anderson mines his rich stores of knowledge in writing this novel. His scientific training equips him to set up the biochemical problem and design a world to contain it. His outdoors experience lends a wonderful freshness to his nature descriptions. Familiarity with real human cultures past and present gives his imaginary ones their vitality. Furthermore, studying history has inspired Anderson to invent his own, the most successful being his long-running Technic Civilization series to which The Night Face belongs. (This story takes place late in the third millennium A.D., during the reconstruction phase that follows the fall of the Terran Empire.)
But above all, his principal background source is mythology. Myth provides both the substance from which the work is cast and the mold in which it is formed. The most prominent component in this fictional alloy is Celtic tradition. Consider some of the names. The Night Face’s setting is Gwydion, a newly contacted planet named for a figure out of Welsh romance. In the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion, Gwydion is a cryptically divine story-teller, loremaster, magician, and shape-changer. He is the unhappy lover of his moon-goddesslike sister Aranrhod, “The Lady of the Silver Wheel.” The planet Gwydion’s moon is simply called She, perhaps because the proper name was felt to be too sacred for daily use. Its sun is Ynis (“Island”), an oblique reference to islands as locations of the Celtic Happy Otherworld. The Night Face’s hero—the man with a Night Face—is Raven, a soldier from the grim world Lochlann. Lochlann (Llychlyn) was a medieval Welsh name for Norway, ironically known as the home of the White Strangers.
Bale time at the start of Gwydion’s spring when the fiery red Baleflowers bloom recalls the Irish May festival Beltain, a day when sacred fires were lit to insure fertility and good fortune in the coming season. Bale time is a season of giddy madness. Beltain was an exhilarating yet dangerous feast because it was the turning point between the coldness, darkness, and death of winter and the warmth, light, and life of summer. All Celtic peoples shared this fascination with interfaces, whether of time or space or condition. They pondered the eternal clash and the interchange between opposites. The Gwydiona do likewise, celebrating the alternation between Day Faces and Night Faces around the Burning Wheel of Time. “‘The dead go into the Night and the Night becomes the Day, is the Day,’” remarks the heroine.
Of course, not every Gwydiona concept is Celtic. Their absorption in cycles of death and rebirth resembles the teaching of ancient Near Eastern mystery religions or the recurring patterns of destruction and re-creation in Hinduism. Like esoteric Western mystics they believe that God is the summation of all qualities, Good as well as Evil. The prime Gwydiona religious symbol, a gold and black Yang/Yin emblem derived from Taoism, reminds them that the Day and Night forever coexist.
These are only a few of the components Anderson uses in The Night Face. But components are only lifeless materials until the hand of an artist arranges them and infuses them with meaning. Here the author uses myth motifs and dramatic language to tell us that myth is a language—one that can be tragically misunderstood.
The novel’s plot is a-whirl with misinterpretations as the three central characters and the cultures they represent go spinning along in fruitless, uncomprehending pursuit of each other. They are like the three spokes of a triskelion, tips curling in separate directions, destined never to link. “‘We have been making unconscious assumptions about each other,’” says Raven to his rival Tolteca at the novel’s opening. This comment sets the scene for all that follows.
Raven, the younger son of a noble household on feudal Lochlann, has become a mercenary in the hire of his planet’s former subject, democratic Nuevamerica. On Lochlann, a world as bleak and honor-bound as medieval Scandinavia, men still pledge brotherhood by drinking each other’s blood and back their vows with their lives. Namericans unfairly characterize them as “caste-ridden, haughty, ritualistic, and murderous.”
The grimness of his environment and society has made Raven one who “‘lives with the Night Faces all the time.’” Despite this, he remains attuned to all fundamental realities, to flowers as well as knives. Yet, paradoxically, it is the shadow ascendant in his people that relates him to the bright-seeming Gwydiona: “Fair and Foul are near of kin.” The Lochlanna may appear dark and Gwydiona light, but both races experience both Aspects of existence. (And notice that Lochlann and Gwydion speak allied languages which are quite distinct from that of Namerica.)
Tolteca, Raven’s antagonist, is the head of the Namerican expedition to Gwydion. His intelligence is unspectacular, but he is a member of a hereditary intellectual class who calmly enjoys its privileges while proclaiming his anti-aristocratic principles. His appreciation of the arts is a rote response. He listens to recognized classics of Terran music on tape whereas Raven sings and plays folk songs that are still part of a living tradition on his home world. (Raven calls Tolteca a “‘cultureless money-sniffer.’”) Athough inordinately proud of his supposedly tolerant, enlightened attitudes, Tolteca routinely judges others according to his own scale and becomes upset over differences. He cannot feel the titles of social obligation that bind the Lochlanna or even the gentler pressure of custom among the Gwydiona because Namerica is a society of discrete individuals.
Nuevamerica may possibly be a daughter colony of Nuevo Mexico in the old Terran Empire, but if so, it has lost the martial rigor of its founders. Namerica is only superficially Hispanic. Its society is libertarian, mercantile, utilitarian, and thoroughly secular.
‘A Namerican is concerned only wi
th getting his work done, regardless of whether it’s something that really ought to be accomplished, and then with getting his recreation done—both with maximum bustle.’
But the chief flaw in Tolteca—and by extension, of his people—is their naïve ideal of sane and sanitized living. They imagine that every problem can be solved by an appeal to reason. They cannot accept pain and death as inevitable parts of reality. In effect, they try to cling to the Day Faces exclusively. Tolteca foolishly assumes that the Gwydiona have attained his culture’s ideal and can see nothing but brightness in them.
Legend says the Gwydiona are descended from a man with two wives, one dark, one fair. But now the cycle has turned and a Man of the Night and a Man of the Day pursue the same woman. Elfavy, their quarry, is the beauty and serenity of her world incarnate. Nature on Gwydion has loveliness undreamed of on dreary Lochlann nor was it ever ravaged as parts of Namerica were. (As Elfavy’s father says, “‘God wears a different Face in most of the known cosmos.’”) Peaceful, anarchistic Gwydion is a paradise where modest technology serves the arts of good living.
But Elfavy’ very name warns that Gwydion’s perfection is not of this world. (Elfavy herself has echoes of the Elf-Queen whose love is doom to mortals and of Rhiannon, an unlucky supernatural queen-mother in the Mabinogion.) Gwydion is only a beguiling illusion like the Celtic Happy Otherworld it resembles. An Irish description of an enchanted Otherworld island applies equally well to Gwydion:
Unknown is wailing or treachery
in the happy familiar land;
no sound there rough or harsh
only sweet music striking on the ear.
Yet if it seems the antechamber of heaven in its Day phase, during Bale time its Holy Cities are circles of hell. Gwydion oscillates between too careful a harmony and utter discord. Its schizophrenic people are not truly virtuous—they are not sane enough to sin.
These are the persons, races, and principles which collide so disastrously in The Night Face. Their failures to understand each other are symptomatic of interstellar conditions in the post-imperial era when time has driven men apart in language and blood. (See “A Tragedy of Errors,” “The Sharing of Flesh,” and “Starfog.”) Their story is further evidence—as if more were needed—that the universe is under absolutely no obligation to be fair.
When Tolteca, Raven, and Elfavy meet at the bloody climax, they do so cast as Gwydiona myth-figures. Their dooms are sealed by these accidental role assignments. It is safer to live with archetypes rather than in them. When Raven tries to rescue Tolteca from the Gwydiona by proclaiming him the Sunsmith fleeing an enemy in the form of a stag, this identification only makes the mob eager to capture him. Ironically, in the larger context of the story, the Namerican engineer resembles the hunter who pursues the Sun-stag, withering flowers with every step, unable to see past the abyss which the stag leaps. He represents the impotence of reason in the embrace of mystery.
Although the meaning of Raven’s name suggests blackness, woe, and battle-death, the sound of it coincidentally links him to Ragan, the Gwydiona dying savior god entangles in the Sun Wheel. He accepts the fatal part and dies to save others. Only his darkness makes dawn possible. Elfavy rejects her earlier role as the ethereal, comforting Bird Maiden. Instead, she becomes the Mother, hollow with longing for Ragan, impatient to begin mourning his death. But it is a real, not a poetic, death she causes.
Parenthetically, it should be noted that Elfavy is also a Eurydice who lose her Orpheus but is incapable of grieving over him afterwards. The Night Face is an odd variation on the Lost Beloved motif Anderson has so poignantly developed in World Without Stars, “Kyrie,” “Goat Song,” and other works.
For readers, the tragedy of the tale lies in Raven’s sacrificing his life for a man who cannot understand the deed and a woman who cannot remember it. But to Raven, the circumstances of his death make it a kind of triumph. He compensates for wronging Tolteca and at the same time puts his rival under an obligation of honor he can never repay. Nor would he want Elfavy’s life blighted by his memory. His only wish is for her survival and happiness. Raven’s feelings are those of the dead lover in the Unquiet Grave, the song that is the novel’s leitmotiv and the source of its original title, “A Twelvemonth and a Day.”
Finally, from the author’s viewpoint, the soul-piercing tragedy of the Night Face is not a matter of lost love or needless death. Rather, it arises from the very fact of our existence as fallible beings in a mortal universe. The characters’ tragic flaw is simply that they are human.
Raven bears witness to this steely vision. He exposes the Gwydiona dream of godlike perception through ecstasy as false. Man should be content with his human lot, to appreciate life’s joys happily, to meet life’s hardships bravely, to confront the Day and Night Faces in turn, ere he perishes.
Raven confirms that pain is real and separation in death final. Flowers wither, hearts decay. Sorrow cannot be denied (as the Namericans attempt) or explained away (as the Gwydiona do). There is no remedy or rebirth for parted lovers. Life is neither an upward-striving progress as Tolteca thinks nor a renewing cycle of transformations as Elfavy believes. Inexorably, moment by moment, the universe is running down. Time may be called a relativistic dimension or a mythic Burning Wheel but it also the Bridge aflame behind us all.
Flandry's Legacy: The Technic Civilization Saga Page 67
