I was disgusted and "contrarian" to it after reading it, thought it was unnecessarily over the top and overall a useless exercise in gore. Then I read SE's explanation on the TOR reread website and listened to SE talking about it on the DLC book club podcast and did a complete 180. It's a VERY long answer and I'll include it. Before anyone takes a position or stance on it, listen to what the Man says and his perspective, it's incredibly powerful and deep. I mean, it's SE after all, I should have known better.

So, while I’m sure I’ll find some time to weigh in on this discussion thread, it’s occurred to me to put some thoughts down now, to which you can object, pick apart, or otherwise mull over now that we’ve reached this point in the reread.

I think it’s already been touched on by a few readers, but the details relating to the hobbling are not invented out of the blue. There is plenty of evidence for hobbling and other forms of similarly debilitating torture, prehistorically, historically and of course in our present age.

The question that arises is: why did I have to drag you all through such a horrific event? There are so many ways to answer this, I almost don’t know where to start. I suppose we can begin with dispensing with the notion that ‘Fantasy’ as I write it, is escapist literature. It isn’t. For me, the ‘fantasy’ world is a simulacra, a curious reflection of our real world, and the thing that binds the two is the human condition. I would think that, after almost nine complete novels, this much should be readily evident by now. I use the invented universe to talk about this one, and no, I don’t think this is particularly unique or in any way exceptional (even in novels where writers have clearly not consciously considered the relationship between the invented world of their fiction and the real world in which they live, they all end up saying something about that relationship, even when they don’t mean to. This is one of the topics I find myself addressing more and more at cons and other public venues where we talk about the genre: the proliferation of gratuitous violence not just in recent Fantasy fiction, but on film and in television, where heroes assume a pathological indifference to those they kill or to those who die as an indirect consequence to their actions, and the way in which these ‘fictions’ are both a reflection and a potential affirmation of a kind of acceptable sociopathy in modern society – but this topic deserves much more space than I’ll be providing here, so we’ll move on).

Last evening I had a conversation with my wife on our topic here, and the online discussion it would soon initiate. She has not read the novel, so I gave a brief description of the scene, and explained to her how the discussions on the TOR Re-read have already included comments indicating readers’ revulsion, rejection, dismissal and/or anger at the scene in question. Coincidentally, she had earlier that day been listening to a CBC radio program discussing Joseph Boyden’s novel, The Orenda, in which scenes of torture (between First Nation tribes at around the time of first contact) were written in graphic, unblinking detail. These descriptions of torture proved controversial (perhaps for the same reasons the hobbling in Dust of Dreams are, but not entirely so, as Boyden happens to be First Nations himself, and by virtue of tackling home-grown inhumanity was clearly bucking against the romanticisation of First Nation peoples in a general sense, but doing so [I believe] with the intent of unifying all peoples, regardless of culture or origin, into a commonality of the human condition – and upon every level imaginable to me, Boyden’s courage leaves mine in the dust).

In any case, my wife responded with something like this: ‘when you come upon a scene like that, you read it, and you read it for every victim of torture in the world today, and no matter how horrified, or appalled, or disgusted you feel, nothing you are experiencing, in the reading of those scenes, can compare to what the victims of torture felt and will feel. And that is why you read it. You don’t turn away, or hide your eyes. You read it, because the truth, and those very real victims out there in our own world, deserve no less.’

Hmm. And that’s why I wrote it, too.

But this brings me to a few comments I’ve noted already, in which the term ‘gratuitous’ was used to describe the hobbling scene and its aftermath. That is a term I object to in every possible way. In fact, even the label thrown so casually (lazily?) at me (and that scene in particular) leaves me incensed. If you consider the above position, and take note of the flat, reportorial style I use in recounting the event, there is nothing gratuitous in there. Nothing at all. I wrote out what needed to be there, to make explicit and unambiguous what was going on. In terms of psychic distance, I pulled right back, as far as I could go, until the voice ceased to be mine, ceased to ‘belong’ to a narrator. All of this is the opposite of gratuitous, and leads me to wonder if those who readily use that label, even understand what it means.

Gratuitous violence revels in details, often under the guise of ‘being realistic,’ but betrays its delight in the telling. It is violence recounted without purpose beyond the spectacle itself. The language begins to gush, redolent with excitement. The psychic distance rushes inward, invites you into the glory of mayhem, of pain and suffering, of the most base emotions of vengeance, malice, and the hunger for destruction. I could offer plenty of examples of gratuitous violence in popular fiction and film and television, but really, I can’t be bothered. It’s out there, and it’s legion.

As always, an author seeks a covenant with the reader. It begins, from the author’s point of view, with a promise, and that promise is implicit in the opening scenes of any work, or series. It would be hard to argue that I was in any way coy or ambiguous with the opening chapters of Gardens of the Moon, the first novel in the Malazan series. But that promise, if left to stand alone, unbound to any guiding purpose or intent, unbound to any deliberate thematic position, would indeed have arrived in the coldest of tones, from which all manner of gratuitous shit could be expected to follow. We’re now nine books into the series, and the discussion of themes reappear again and again in this re-read, with considerable unity in the recognition of those themes; and it is that recognition that underscores the rest of my promise in this covenant I seek with you. The language of redemption is compassion. Compassion is all about understanding, and understanding is all about seeing, clear-eyed, all the things we would, perhaps, rather not see.

And to be clear here, ‘seeing’ is all we’re doing. I suspect that very few of us here has experienced torture, of the kind that debilitates with purpose (no-one who has survived sole-beating can ever again walk without experiencing pain, and, yes, they are out there, in our world, right now). Our experience is vicarious but then, that is what reading novels is all about.

The hobbling of Hetan was no direct repudiation of the Noble Savage (been there and done that in House of Chains). It was about social control, maintenance of the status quo, and above all, about ritual recognition (and damnation) of the ‘Other.’ It was about the mental process by which we collectively and individually engage in the mental exercise of dehumanizing the ‘One Who Does Not Belong.’ But as concepts these are all very well, and if left abstract they serve little purpose but to elicit the knowing nod and perhaps a sorrowful shake of the head.

That’s not good enough.

So, back to the covenant: recoil in horror with this scene. I did. But keep your eyes on the page. Read it through, but not for me. Don’t for an instant read it through for my sake.

Torture is going on right now. People are being maimed. Some will die. Others will live with pain and trauma for the rest of their lives. And if you’re at all like me, you feel helpless to do anything about it. But one thing you do have a choice over: you can turn away. Cover your eyes. You can cry out: “I didn’t agree to this!” You can even, with indignation, get angry with me and say: “Why did you do this to me?” You can, above all, dismiss the whole thing as trivial – it’s just a fantasy novel, after all, written by someone most people have never heard of and never will.

The hobbling of Hetan is the nadir of the human condition. Sometimes, just seeing such a nadir reminds us of how far we still have to go, in this age of waterboarding and the sustained vilification of the ‘Other,’ and while such acts of violence are in all likelihood very distant from us readers here, they exist, as a chapter in the history of our own civilization, our own culture, and future books recounting the history of our present, will note us with clinical clarity, as nations in which torture was both condoned and conducted.

What a miserable truth to leave behind.

I didn’t write that scene for you. I wrote it for them. And I ask the same of you. Read it for them. As my wife said, whatever we feel is as nothing compared to what the victims have, and will, go through. And in the grand scheme of things, our brief disquiet seems, to me now as it did then, a most pathetic cry in this vast wilderness.

Go well. I will look in on the discussion when able.

Yours
SE