The Book Sill - Terry Pratchett - Snuff

After finishing Pratchett's Snuff, I decided to read Night Watch again. I had the feeling that his writing was seriously degrading. I wanted an element of comparison.

Night Watch mitigated my view. There are indeed signs that Pratchett's writing is changing for what I consider the worse. The sentences are getting longer without gaining complexity: Pratchett now makes much more use of coordination, an unusual evolution for a writer. More importantly, the story is a lot more focused on the central character. In Snuff  Pratchett makes scarce use of the narrator's ubiquity power, resulting in a narrative trapped within Vimes's mind. The secondary characters are far less developed and sometimes border on caricature.

However, as I was re-reading Night Watch, I realised that these tendencies were already present. Focus on the central character seems to define the Sam Vimes novel. The use of coordination helps setting up the narrative into a state of mental confusion caused by irrational events: they are seen by Vimes as a series of facts with no obvious connection. This in turn creates part of the plot's dynamic, which shows a hero forced to take action against a chain of events which outcome is known to him, but which functioning and logic he does not understand. This is not so much the technique of writing which is wrong with Snuff as the content

Tears at the Meerkat

In a lot of us the desire to hurt the weak conflicts with the desire to console and protect. How many times did I lend an ear to my brother winging about life, only to find out in the morrow that he had departed me off another hundred pounds? How many times did I mock or patronize a friend, a colleague or my mother, only to realize a couple of days later what an ignorant snob I had been?

In these conflicts between the desire to hurt and the desire to console, there is often no clear winner. One minute one of them takes the upper-hand ; we then act  with great resolution. The next moment the other one fights back and floods us with shame, scorn, anger. The average human being navigates between antagonists. This is why stories have heroes.

I once had a friend who was a bully.

My bully friend was physically intimidating. He was of a stocky nature, built of a frame far too wide and strong for his legs. He could have been, if not handsome, at least good looking, but he left his family at an early age and took to drinking. By the age of twenty five his face had swollen, his skin was red and dry, he had lost most of his hair and several teeth.

He always had manual jobs, not that he was lacking intellectual skills -he is in fact one of the cleverest persons I have ever met-, but his body demanded it. He needed to lift heavy loads, to hammer rough things into place, to remove and destroy invulnerable objects. This kind of work sets its mark on a man. My friend had big hands, huge shoulders, a strong chest. When he was talking, people were paying attention. I have to say that I never saw him once use this strength to win an argument. His appearances were never more than a way to make himself heard. For the bullying his brains were a much sharper tool.

He was made of one piece. Once or twice in our earlier times I found myself torn in internal conflicts. I tried to confide in him. I was seeking his advice. I soon learned to refrain, for he just laughed at me: "What do you mean? That you don't know what to do or that you regret what you have done?" "Why are you telling me? Are you asking me to help you? To pity you? This is your problem, not mine. You wouldn't like my solution anyway. You wouldn't live with my solution. As for pitying you, give me a fucking break, please. Who do you think you are?"

His ability to insult was the most extraordinary I have ever come across, matched only by his unbending desire to use it. Not insulting someone was causing him an effort which he released by getting regularly and desperately drunk. Drinking alleviated the tensions of civilized conversation -like sex alleviates tensions in a couple. But it was also loosening the little control he had on himself. He was a lot more insulting when drunk, and a lot better at it too.

He relished the drunken state, even though the day after was a nightmare. He had terrible hangovers. When we started drinking together at the age of fifteen, he would get sick beyond belief. He would puke and shit for hours, sometimes days, after a drinking session. He would get ill, feverish, cold, pale, shaking. He would be unable to eat. Sometimes he could not even keep water down. He would not speak to anyone. If you were talking to him he would be unable to reply back. These were the only moments where you could get into an argument with him and win. But he would not forget, oh no. Any bad done to him would never remain unpunished. Not that he was particularly rancorous or afraid to appear vulnerable. He would simply not waste away a perfect opportunity to hurt someone.

As the years went by, he found a parry: to remain unwound and victorious, he had to remain drunk. Or at least, to keep the hangovers few and far in between. In these moments it was essential for him to hide away. He would take a couple of days holidays, or a week. The day before, he would drink himself to stupor. He could do that quite literally. I have seen him pass out in the most unlikely situations: at the table while talking to someone ; at the peak of a party with people dancing and screaming around him ; at a bar falling off his high stool ; once even while standing up and eating. After such a night he would wake up before everybody and vanish. He would not answer his phone, or his emails, or anything. When we met him again, he would never tell us where he had been. Any question on this topic would be greeted with a rebuke. "Somewhere. Not your business. Why do you need to know? Are you jealous? Are you in love?"

He made a lot of people cry. Every time this happened he looked as if he had not intended it. For all his harshness, whenever his insulting jokes and wits would push someone over the edge he would act surprised. When the outraged, humiliated person reacted violently he would simply respond to the violence, enjoy the fight and win. As I mentioned, he was strong. Better, he fought with no restrain. He did not fight for the fun. He did not even fight to win. He fought to crush his opponent. He was not afraid to throw low punches, devastating kicks, use a glass, a chair or a table.

Tears, however, took him aback. He did not know how to react to them. He looked like an awkward child staring at a broken toy. I will always remember the day when he made my girlfriend cry. He was rather found of her, mainly -I think- because she was a silent, quiet person subject to sudden rages. He did not understand that. Rage was foreign to his nature. But violence was not, and the impredictibility of my girlfriend's fits was a source of surprises. In a sense he was finding life too easy, and people increasingly boring. For him she was a small nugget of real excitement found in the everyday mud.

Did that day change something in him? I would not be able to tell, for that day definitely changed something in me. Beforehand I had never questioned the nature of our friendship. I had taken it for granted from the first time we met. But that Thursday I saw Gwen's eyes get bright and fill with water, I watched tears roll down her cheeks, hang for a second at the edge of her jaw, and drop silently onto the table of the Meerkat. At that moment I was drunk, all I could do was laugh to imitate my friend the bully. But as I woke up on the Friday, as the hours passed and I sobered up, I started thinking. That scene was stirring something in me. That was not anger. That was not resentment. But that feeling was not a happy one. It got us all into real trouble.

There will be no manifesto

But there might be a name.

For far too long I tried to fit my experience of the world into tales which were not mine. Tales I had learned to hold for the truth. Then, at the age of twenty-five, I read Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de Linguistique Générale.

"[...] any definition made about a word is doomed" Saussure tells us. "To start from words in order to define things is a bad method" (1)

These lines were a revelation. Because of the nature of language, stories  were not true, stories could not be true. So I understood. Any story was a struggle to make sense of what was in front of the teller. But stories, I also understood, had to do with the very essence of human beings. They were told and written by us: they were made by us. They were not discovered. They were not unveiled. From their inception to their final word, they were brought to existence by whoever was telling them.

This, you might think, is a reality of the basic level. A story is a story is a story. It is not true, obviously it is not true. It is fiction. Yes. But.

To start with, I am a stupid person. I am credulous, slow to understand. I need to dig. I need to break apart. I work my way through the mysteries of life far less, I must say, like a gyrfalcon hunting a snow hare than like a worm hunting a grass root.

But this basic truth tells us more.

Language serves no practical purpose. If men needed a way to exchange warnings, the simple system of noises and body language common to most animals would have been enough. Words add very little to it. Language developed away because (if there is a cause) it was fulfilling a different function ; because it was providing an escape route to our desires and to our fears.

This is my explanation, my own story about language and stories. Stories explain the world. Stories are not true. Combining these two incompatible attributes can have dramatic consequences. Examples abound of people who, pushed by their belief in a story which was obviously not true, started changing the world.

Words may be powerless to account for the world, but they can change it. At least, they can change the world of human beings. I often hear about the importance of being precise when using the language. This refers to the language capability to categorise and describe things. But what is really at work in making stories is another ability: the power of the language to name things. In this movement the dictionary is of little use. A writer must rely on his own mind to call the things he summons on the paper by their appropriate name. Whether this name has been authorized by the dictionary is none of his concern. When telling a story, a writer has no other master than himself.

The urgency to write in English rose in me as I went to see Crosby Beach, north of Liverpool, many weeks ago. As we were walking on the beach, a gale storm burst out. We should have run away. Instead, I found myself obliged to stay at the same place and stand as still as possible while the wind, the sea, the sand, the clouds and the rain combined their efforts to destroy everything else around them. I felt that I had to witness this storm and later recall it, in the language of the people of Crosby. In English then. But this would be my own use of English, in all its awkwardness, all its métissage. That would be my story of the storm, made with words I would pick myself. There is no point in writing otherwise.

And here I am. A man standing on Crosby Beach, in winter, in a gale storm.



(1) Introduction III, par. 2, al. 19 : "C'est pourquoi toute définition faite à propos d'un mot est vaine ; c'est une mauvaise méthode que de partir des mots pour définir les choses."
Saussure never wrote the Cours de Linguistique Générale. He never even authorised it. His researches, he felt, were not complete. He was not ready to publish yet. Only after his death did two of his students gather their notes to build the text which changed the whole field of linguistics, and accidentally laid the ground for structuralism.