The Big White Book: The World of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time Chapter 2 to End

The One Power:

The workings of circles and population statistics for wilders are better explained here than in the series itself, even compared to the Glossaries.

Writing lessons: even when the mythology and rules are all worked out in your story, you’ve got to decide whether the reader needs to know that level of detail to appreciate the story or action that it relates to. Jordan mostly hit the mark with his explanations of One Power usage, except for Rand’s first use, but I’ll deal with that in The Eye of the World.

The Age of Legends:

The use of semi-mythological names invokes certain images, notably Paaren Disen (Paradise). Jordan made good use of names to invoke certain connotations and associated feelings in readers.

Unlike the One Power, where we are heavily reminded of rules, ter’angreal need no explanation other than ‘it makes toast’ or ‘it spins you upside down’. We’re never specifically told about any rules governing ter’angreal, but because we’re so well versed in the other rules for angreal and channeling, we export that perception to ter’angreal. I suppose there is technically no one in-story who could explain how they work the way they do, but I had never noticed how he gets away with making magic objects with no more explanation than “those snazzy Age of Legends people made it that way”. Convenient. I bet he had 52 pages of notes on ter’angreal construction.

Writing lessons: Make use of reader’s existing perceptions and biases to elicit the reaction you want, or impose some perceptions and biases on them. Make rules, follow rules, explain rules if necessary.

The Fall into Shadow:

Please do yourself a favour and read Jordan’s original short story, The Strike at Shayol Ghul, which has a little less detail, but certainly more flair than this chapter which is mostly comprised of the same information. Jordan somehow creates a tension that doesn’t come through in this chapter’s description of the same events. I’ll look at how he does it under a post dedicated to the short story.

The main question I had was whether the Dark One could be cut off from the main part of the Pattern by creating a wall around the Bore. The Strike at Shayol Ghul answered that question. Read it.

Writing lessons: You could always add more information and detail, but you should be concentrating on how your text will be affecting the reader, not how much background you can provide.

The Forsaken:

How do we know anything about the Dark One at all? The only reliable sources are all Forsaken, no one else has spoken to him. The Dark One could verify any information about the Wheel of Time and Creation, presuming he can observe it from his prison. But would you trust him?

And there’s the problem with Ishamael. He’s got all this insight that you either have to take at face value, or question because he’s untrustworthy. Many of the arguments I’d use at Theoryland were ‘negated’ by the fact that Ishamael had spoken the words I was using as proof, therefore I was wrong. Certainly we’ve seen that Ishamael believes what he’s dishing out, but that still doesn’t satisfy the critics. Sigh.

Ishamael is cheeky though. At a conference discussing the crisis, he tells them who’s behind it all, then says he’s joining forces with this Dark One. That is the kind of sweet detail and characterization I wish had made it into the books.

So, there’s a whole cosmology that everyone believes in, but the only entity who could verify it is the enemy of all existence. And the only reason anyone does believe it is because of the supposed existence of this enemy whom no one knew existed until Ishamael told the world about him. As I say, in-story they take it on faith, but as a reader and theorizer, it bugs me that there’s this disconnect between what is verifiable and what is stated. The Big White Book makes official that neither the Dark One nor Ishamael appear to be lying about the cosmology, but the bias against anything else they say is maintained. That’s what you get for naming your villain Father of Lies.

By my count, Aginor killed more than any other Forsaken, some 54 million people in his experiments. 10,000 per day were collected for 5 years, more than double that for the next five. Some of this exposition would have been nice to know before he made his first on-page appearance. Same for the other Forsaken. I think Jordan once mentioned Sammael as a dud, but we didn’t see him that way. Each of the Forsaken was a potential treasure trove of conflict with Rand, since they had dealt with Lews Therin in the previous Age. Jordan used that in some places, and seems to have purposefully underplayed it in others, preferring to build up the intermediaries than the big baddies.

Writing lessons: You’ll have to work hard to get readers to believe your unreliable viewpoint characters. Which is too bad, because their viewpoints are very useful. Think about which characters you’re building up, and why. Does it serve the story? Are you concentrating on the right characters?

The rest of the Big White Book:

It devolves into details which mostly get shown in-story in much more interesting fashion than here. I’m sure we’ll get some chances to discuss these throughout the reread.

The Big White Book: The World of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time Chapter 1: The Wheel and the Pattern

Before we get to the story, just a short post or two on the World of the Wheel (that name never caught on).

The workings of the World of the Wheel are better explained here than in the series itself. Maybe because this is a book of mostly fact, while in-series explanations are limited by what the character can know, though the Glossaries made up for that a little. Jordan’s in-story solution was to have the most-educated woman on the planet as a supporting character from the beginning: Moiraine. With her noble pedigree and an Aes Sedai education, there is probably no philosophical discussion Moiraine couldn’t hold her ground in. I suspect that a good deal of the Big White Book’s contents would have been spilled in-story by Moiraine or Loial, who appears to have spent 90 years doing nothing but reading. I wish.

I spent many hours debating the nature of the metaphysical aspects with other fans. In-story explanations were vague enough to leave us lots of room to theorize. And even the semi-certainty provided by the Big White Book was undone by the caveat at the beginning.

A few of the standout nuggets that should be considered when theorizing, or that might have saved us some good arguments:

The Wheel:

“The Wheel is Time itself.” The Wheel weaves reality. All of it. Mirror Worlds, tel’aran’rhiod, visions of the future in the rings. All of these are created by the Wheel and allow the Wheel to correct the Pattern should it ever get a little messed up.

What about Forsaken? Are their threads still woven by the Wheel, or has the Dark One’s influence somehow removed the Wheels’ influence to affect them?

Sorry Chosen, you can’t escape the Wheel. “The only known forces outside the Wheel and the pattern are

1.      The Creator, who shaped the Wheel

2.      The One Power that drives it (WHAT? It makes sense, but if I ever thought of it that way, I have forgotten about it)

3.      As well as the plan for the Great Pattern (you wouldn’t want someone in the Pattern able to read the Pattern, unless you wanted them to, which is where prophecies and future visions come in)

4.      And the Dark One.”

I reckon the Wheel is still weaving the Forsaken’s threads, using a Forsaken, and their misguided jealousy or lust to auto-correct the Dark One back into the Bore. Anything in the Pattern must serve the Pattern’s needs, right? And there’s only those four things that are outside the Pattern.

Anyway, having this info laid out in a reference book makes it a little more reliable than in-series philosophical musings by even a highly knowledgeable character. I’ll have to remember next time we theorize some mumbo-jumbo about the seals and the Dark One’s prison.

Reincarnation:

Recalling a particular scene when Rand is considering the implications of reincarnation, I find myself surprised at how blatantly reincarnation is laid out in the very 5^th paragraph of this reference book:

“No ending, even death, is necessarily final within the turning of the Wheel. Reincarnation is a part of the way of the world.”

We spent a lot of time at Theoryland arguing about various means of resurrection, others always keeping an eye towards limiting its use, myself arguing it was fair game and happened all the time. Between examples like *Finns having dead men’s memories, balefired killers, Heroes getting Ripped out of tel’aran’rhiod, Asha’man remembering past lives, and others, it seems clear enough to me that there is more than one way to bring a dead person back to life.

In-story, reincarnation was easy to dismiss since in the beginning there seemed to be nothing proving it was anything more than a catechism characters said in times of worry. We knew characters came back to life in another Age, but it might as well not be true for all the effect it would have had on the story. So was Jordan trying not to let readers think about it too much? If so, he succeeded. Every theory I ever read leaned towards the impossibility of resurrection. Or was he instead hoping to make us take it for granted as characters do? In that case it worked for the mythology surrounding the One Power and the Dark One, but not for the mechanics of reincarnation.

In-story, what proof could a character possibly have for determining the structure of the Wheel, and reincarnation as fact? I submit that these are the only true pieces of knowledge that have survived the Breaking. We can’t prove it’s true, but the Aes Sedai say that the Age of Legends people said it was, so we’ve got to trust them! I guess the characters just accept it as true and go on with their day. Trollocs from the Blight might remind you that you shouldn’t doubt these truths (and in interviews, it’s been said that no one in-story does doubt), I don’t see how southerners maintain this belief. Or maybe the doubters are the Cenn Buies of the world.

Writing lessons: Even when the mythology and rules are all worked out in your story, you’ve got to deliver the info to the reader in a way that is believable in-story, and is complete enough to make them correctly understand (and trust me, Theorylanders can ‘correctly’ understand a dozen different ways!)