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History and Precarity: Glen Cook and the Rise of Picaresque Epic

Dennis Wilson Wise

In one of Glen Cook’s rare interviews, he describes The Instrumentalities of the Night as “a sort of alternate 13th century Europe shaped by counterfactual geography.” He also, intriguingly, dubs Instrumentalities an “experiment with a picaresque ” (qtd. in VanderMeer). Unfortunately, Cook never expands upon this comment, either here or elsewhere, but his experiment is noteworthy and highly unusual. Although picaresque has had a long history since the Spanish sixteenth century, adapted to multiple modes and literary traditions, its relevance for modern epic fantasy seems limited. The gravitas and high seriousness of epic fantasy puts it squarely at odds with the comic picaresque. Generally speaking, picaresque are “episodic, open- ended in which lower-class sustain themselves by means of their cleverness and adaptability…through…predominantly corrupt social milieu” (Bjornson 4). The world is the pícaro’s oyster. At the same time, picaresque fiction also serves a useful vehicle for satirically analyzing social worlds under dissolution. As Jens Elze explains, the picaresque depends upon “wide-spread precarity” (10), and Ulrich Wicks echoes this idea, arguing that the “journey into picaresque is an infinite foray into a world that is forever falling apart, disintegrating” (242). This is why the low social status of pícaros can be freeing rather than limiting. With instability comes opportunity, and so pícaros—no longer hampered by entrenched social barriers—can puncture, often comically, the hypocrisy and bluster of former institutional certainties. Many previous writers of fantasy (though not writers of epic fantasy) have employed the picaresque to good effect: Vance’s Dying Earth series, for instance, or Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories. To this list we might also add Gene Wolfe’s , which achieves several notable picaresque effects. Yet that key term epic in “epic fantasy” is what makes Cook’s experiment in the picaresque so unusual. Fantasy scholar and medievalist Edward James, for one, quoting a definition from Theodore L. Steinberg, sees the epic as a

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that focuses simultaneously on the lives of its characters and on a pivotal moment in the history of a community, whether that community be a nation or a people or the whole of humanity. […] Because the of the epic is so crucial to a whole civilization, it is often viewed as having cosmic significance. Which means that whatever cosmic or divine powers inform the poet’s world may also be included. It also means that the epic must have some sort of grandeur, however vague that term may be; and it also must have a huge scope in order to put the pivotal moment in perspective. (qtd. in James 11)

In epic fantasy, then, the community’s pivotal moment—already weighted by grandeur, huge scope, and cosmic significance—must occur largely in a fantastic secondary world. Yet, at heart, the epic fantasy storyline exceeds the fate of any one person or individual; this is world-saving fiction, quite literally, hence the high seriousness. Usefully, though, James also distinguishes epic fantasy from the medieval romance. Both share many traits except that the latter tends to ramble along in a picaresque, episodic way. In contrast, epic fantasy often resorts to prophecy or other similar strategies in order to achieve “depth, and meaning, and above all epic narrative drive” (14-15)—things all undermined by the picaresque, which ultimately revels in liminality, instability, and upheaval. Overall, we can consider the ideological differences between picaresque fiction and epic fantasy as follows: the former is a literature of precarity, the latter is a literature of totality. Totality, at least as coined by György Lukács in The Theory of the and other writings, consists of a unity between self, society, and world that gives rise to a meaningful, harmonious whole. Within totality, there is found an integration between culture, art, life, social institutions, and individual action—in other words, totality opposes alienation, individual separateness, and reified social relationships. Although Lukács originally devised totality as a structural and historical feature of epic , it applies equally well to modern epic fantasy. The paradigm example, as one might suspect, is Tolkien’s . Despite the absence of explicit references to religion, Tolkien’s Catholic sensibility suffuses the epic structure of his narrative. World-meaning in Middle-earth has a theological guarantee. Later epic fantasists, borrowing Tolkien’s epic structure, therefore re-create Middle-earth’s sense of epic totality. Intriguingly, Farah Mendlesohn touches upon an idea similar to my understanding of totality when discussing portal- . For Mendlesohn, whose disapproval is clear, fantasyland is “constructed, in part, through the instance of a received truth” or, aptly, a revelation. Hence, there can be “only one understanding of the world: an understanding that validates the quest” (7, 13, emphases added). As such, history never becomes a site for contestable or contested interpretations.

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History in portal-, virtually synonymous with epic fantasy since 1977, is therefore always thoroughly monological: a semiotic and ontological given. With all this in mind, epic fantasy (totality) and the picaresque (fragmentation) seem destined for an unhappy marriage—and yet, in Instrumentalities, that marriage works. In fact, I argue that Instrumentalities culminates a career-long attempt by Cook to fracture the totality inherent to epic fantasy. The Black Company books, as my first section shows, complicate epic fantasy’s monological vision of world-meaning by employing literary techniques borrowed from Vietnam War literature. Perspectivism and subjectivity shadow the mythology and history behind Cook’s storyworld with ambiguity. At the same time, several markers of epic totality continue to limit The Black Company’s presentation of precarity on a deeper level. By welding the picaresque to an epic fantasy structure, however, Cook manages—not to destroy epic totality per se—but to empty it of epic meanings. Although Instrumentalities contains many elements traditional to epic fantasy—a ’s destiny; an authoritative wizard-guide; conflicts between sorcerers, soldiers, gods, and kings—the pícaro Piper Hecht in all his disruptive travels fails to salvage any coherence or unity out of the multiplicity. Thus, Cook successfully avoids subordinating historical change to ultimate ends. He imbricates history, untouched by telos or directionality, within randomness and radical flux. On this view, the picaresque epic might seem to support the famous incredulity toward metanarratives expressed by Jean-François Lyotard; despite the similarity, I suggest that it more closely echoes Cook’s grim humanism and low view of human nature. Regardless, this unusual experiment in Instrumentalities manages to articulate an epic storyworld ripe with change, disintegration, and flux—an epic of precarity, in fact, that finally and fully captures a core of Cook’s career: a world and cosmos wherein no metaphysical legitimation can be found for human action.

Experimenting with Epic Fantasy: The Black Company Prior to Instrumentalities, there was The Black Company—Cook’s best-known work of epic fantasy and a major attempt to undermine epic totality. To achieve this, Cook employs a narrative framing device unusual among epic fantasists. He presents his eleven Black Company books, including one trilogy and another complete six-volume series, as the written history—the annals—of the Black Company itself; the story we read is composed by Company annalists telling their tale in the first person. I often imagine Cook’s framing device as a kind of spotlight on a darkened stage—the only things seen are those that the lighting director chooses to focus upon. Or, perhaps more aptly, the Black Company constitutes a tiny bubble of percipience drifting through a vast world-expanse; all grows hazier and vaguer according to its distance from the bubble. In this section, I argue that Cook’s strong (and obvious) structural debts to Tolkien’s

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The Lord of the Rings, while firmly situating his two Black Company series as epic fantasy, also grant them an aura of totality that counteracts any fuller articulation of world fragmentation and historical flux. Yet Cook’s partial success is still highly remarkable. It stems, partly, from an ethos inherited from pulp , a “pragmatic willingness to side with the lesser and more human of two , especially when Good is nowhere to be found or preoccupied with its hierarchies and hypocrisies” (Tompkins 181, emphasis original). Significantly, his success also derives from techniques and attitudes borrowed from Vietnam War literature. Unfortunately, no full academic study has yet been done on this influence, although there exists a general awareness of the relationship (including a Steven Erikson blurb on many of Cook’s book covers). Still, a number of similarities leap out readily. For example, there is Cook’s band-of-brothers theme, plus the muddle and confusion of combat. His general narrative , a “hard-boiled cynicism” that refuses the “usual moralizing tropes of the [fantasy] ” (Kaveney 226), might also fall under this umbrella. Cook also privileges the “common man” perspective, soldiers and grunts alike, which starkly contrasts to the “sorts of wealthy and powerful rulers who regularly figure as heroes in other fantasy novels” (Westfahl 233). Yet Vietnam War literature’s most important legacy is arguably adding subjectivity and perspectivism to war writing, which The Black Company uses to great effect. Epic fantasy rarely employs the first-person narrative voice, as W. A. Senior observes, since it typically lessens the “sense of wonder and distance required” to render a secondary world believable (136). Yet Vietnam War literature often had a journalistic—even memoirist—quality. It emphasizes subjectivity over objectivity, the observer over the observed. It is a literature that bears witness in a highly personal way. Accordingly, even though the Black Company’s main narrative voice, Croaker, a physician and the Company’s official historian, composes his Annals for the sake of posterity, he often highlights his own biases and limitations. No pretensions to pure objectivity infiltrate Croaker’s account. Although a realist, he writes about his brutal soldier- brothers with rose-tinted glasses, for they are “my brethren, my family, and I was taught young not to speak ill of kin” (Chronicles 102). At the same time, Vietnam War literature, in contrast to the literature of the Second World War, rarely engages in geopolitical analysis or deep philosophical rumination. Because the need to bear witness tends to trump all, it avoids “reflection on the history the writers have witnessed. […] They were there, and their primary goal is to make us feel we were there” too (Walzer 96). Likewise, outside the first Black Company trilogy, Croaker rarely engages in self- doubt or personal reflection. For example, late in Soldiers Live, when murderous shadows commit genocide against the Voroshk home world, Croaker feels no guilt despite the Company’s complicity. He acknowledges that although his

journal of the fantastic in the arts History and Precarity · 335 younger self might have felt pangs of conscience, this “time when I examined my soul I found not much more than indifference” (The Return 527). This pragmatic refusal to philosophize or hand-wring accords well with Croaker’s core role. Although historians are supposed to interpret history, Croaker is no historian. As a chronicler of events, an annalist, he merely records. This recording, of course, does not imply objectivity. After all, the subjective criteria by which annalists include or exclude information still colors their writing. Still, as Croaker grows older, he feels a decreasing need to justify either himself or his brethren. At end of day, the Company endures—and that is all. The issue of perspectivism, too, becomes part and parcel of annalists’ subjectivity. A notable feature of Vietnam War literature, at least on the American side, is its tendency to keep the Vietnamese themselves at a distance. Because their culture (including village society and religion) seemed so alien, American texts usually focused on other Americans, mostly combat veterans, and Cook’s annalists share in this myopia. No Company annalist, except for Sleepy, is a native to lands about which they write. In the Books of the South and the Glittering Stone tetralogy, Murgen and Lady hail from the northern continent. Croaker is another cultural outsider, although technically hailing from the northern tip of the southern continent. None know the south continent’s indigenous lands well. Correspondingly, they provide little substantive ethnographic information. Only Sleepy, born in Dejagore, is different. Her annals, the volume Water Sleeps, contains more religious, social, and ethnographic information than all other Black Company books combined. Unlike other annalists, Sleepy seems especially conscious of writing for an who lacks her own cultural background—the result, perhaps, of growing up in a culturally, religiously, and ethnically diverse homeland. Otherwise, when native peoples enter into the Annals, they appear only insofar as they directly affect the Company. This twin billing—perspectivism and heightened subjectivity—drastically impacts the world-building possible within The Black Company. Textually, Cook’s narrative framing device means that readers must acquire secondary- world information entirely from Company annalists, but, except for Sleepy, they have remarkably little interest in conveying this information. The northern and southern continents go unnamed, for instance; readers know little about most cities except their names. Even something as basic as geography—a great concern, one imagines, to soldiers on the march—becomes a thing exceedingly hard to measure. Cook provides no paratextual materials—no maps, no appendices, no historical timeliness or glossaries—to supplement what sparse information his text provides. Hence, there exists no independent means to double-check the veracity of any Company annalist despite their freely admitted biases. Even more importantly, Cook’s annalists can only comment upon what the Black Company directly experiences or observes.

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Everything that occurs off-stage, or beyond the Company’s ken, including world history itself, becomes a site of radical uncertainty—a realm of the unknown, only partially accessible, and fraught with ambiguity. To take just one of many examples, let us examine the carefully obfuscated background history of the Nyueng Bao, an important Company ally in later books. Our primary information comes from Uncle Doj, a sort of warrior- priest, but his various grudging explanations of his people’s past leave Croaker dissatisfied. Thus, he seeks help from Tobo, a half-Nyueng Bao member of the Company, who offers the following non-answer:

“I don’t know [how much Doj lied about our past]. I don’t think he really knows. He did tell me that a lot of what he told Sleepy originally he said just because it sounded believable and like something she wanted to hear.” (Many Deaths 518)

As far as native informants go, then, Uncle Doj is disappointing. He knows less than he pretends, and what he chooses to is less than straightforward—a situation any professional ethnographer grasps all too well. How much, though, should we trust Tobo’s own testimony? Tellingly, neither Croaker nor Lady assume that Tobo spoke “any more of the truth than Doj ever had. Though the boy was not necessarily lying consciously” (519). In other words, despite greater forthrightness, gaps and flaws mar Tobo’s recounting of Nyueng Bao history as much as they do Uncle Doj’s. Like the perfect historian, the perfect native informant does not exist. Subjectivity colors all. Gary Westfahl has suggested that the Black Company offers a meditation on how “writing can shape history, bind present people to past traditions, and influence future actions” (234), but such a comment overlooks the inherent epistemological uncertainties involved in Cook’s framing device. Even the Annals themselves, a nearly sacred text for the Company, are not completely above suspicion. As Murgen notes in his own book, the “oldest Annals have all been recopied time and time again, undergoing translation after translation” (Return 324)—a situation that leaves open the possibility for transcription and translation errors alike. If Cook complicates our access to historical knowledge, however, our access to mythological knowledge pales in comparison. Oftentimes, fictive mythologies pose a powerful legitimizing device for quests in fantasyland; likewise, they comprise a key component for epic totality. Quite deliberately, however, Cook subverts generic expectations here. In Soldiers Live, for example, he presents multiple, mutually incompatible origin stories for Kina, the Black Company’s great goddess-. If we locate the essence or meaning of a thing in how it has originated (for example, think of Bruce Wayne’s murdered parents or Melkor’s disdain for Ilúvatar’s authority), then

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Kina’s conflicting origin stories means that the goddess can never become fully known to us—not completely. Kina’s motivations, her desires, will always on some level remain opaque. This opacity bothers Croaker, certainly, if not his more practical-minded Company brethren. Always the antiquarian, Croaker attempts to ferret out a “true” mythology from Shivetya—but the Plain of Glittering Stone’s resident immortal, alas, has no interest in satisfying Croaker’s curiosity.1 In fact, an immortal like Shivetya could have functioned as a convenient transmission device for ancient truths, but Cook instead prefers to bracket off such certainties. Incomplete world-building, therefore, necessarily helps him fracture the totality that generally pervades epic fantasy storyworlds. Time’s dark mists obscure history and mythology alike. In this regard, the situation of Croaker and his brethren, their inability to discover incontestable or foundational world-truths, mirrors the human situation in the primary world—surely one of Cook’s intentions. There is no prophecy in The Black Company, no destiny, no sacred codices or texts. Characters can never take the meaning of their world for granted; the Company’s bubble of percipience is small indeed. Lives and actions must be built upon precarious conditions. Even if epic certainties existed, they could not be known. A semiotic fissure permanently obtains between storyworld and the individual deed. Still, despite a storyworld laced with lacunae, there nevertheless is a limit on how much uncertainty and ambiguity Cook seems willing to introduce. He fractures epic fantasy totality in The Black Company, but he does not break it. Ultimately, three major narrative tactics stabilize the world-meaning and totality remaining in the books. The first tactic centers around group and individual identities that persist unchanged through time. Croaker’s perspective bookends each major Black Company series: the initial trilogy as well as its following six-volume series (divided by the publisher, not Cook, into The Books of the South and The Books of Glittering Stone). Despite excursions into viewpoints by other annalists, Croaker remains a firm anchor that guides Cook’s readers through an unstable storyworld. Likewise, a communal identity persisting through time maintains the integrity of the Black Company itself—and this holds true despite radical alterations in the Company’s ethnic, religious, and linguistic make-up. After decades on the south continent, Croaker observes, the “culture of the Company has become quite alien. Almost no northern flavor remains. Just a few little quirks, in how things are done, and my own proud legacy, an interest in hygiene that is completely foreign to these climes” (Many Deaths 386). The written Annals, of course, despite the possibility of transcription and translation errors, stabilize that communal identity. The Annals are the Black Company. Although individual brothers come and go, or die, and the Company itself never has any fixed geographic home (legendary Khatovar turns out to be a mirage), the materiality of the Annals anchors Cook’s readers just as firmly as Croaker does himself. journal of the fantastic in the arts 338 · Dennis Wilson Wise

In fact, the contemporary Annals are less unreliable than they might initially seem—Cook’s second marker of epic stability. Cook consistently assures his readers that the physical books being read are accurate, even if Murgen, whose sanity is open to doubt, does write two incompatible accounts of a single sortie out of Dejapore. The Glittering Stone tetralogy, in particular Bleak Seasons, is especially dedicated to historiographic issues. Murgen, for instance, comments freely on the shortcomings of his fellow Annalists. He warns readers that Croaker tends “to fictionalize his secondary viewpoints” and that Lady bases her alternative viewpoint material mainly on secondhand hearsay (Return 87). The method by Murgen, he assures us, is more reliable—he verifies everything by conducting personal interviews with Company brethren. Once he develops his ability to spiritwalk, furthermore, narrative reliability becomes a foregone conclusion. By unmooring his consciousness from his body, Murgen can authenticate nearly anything written in the modern Annals, even if they have happened in the recent past. Nor does Murgen have any qualms about revision. As Sleepy explains in Water Sleeps, Murgen had revised “Lady’s and the Captain’s Annals for accuracy, based on evidence provided by other witnesses, while rendering them into modern Taglian. We have all done that to our predecessors, some, so that every recent volume of the Annals is really an unwilling collaboration” (Return 230). This “unwilling collaboration” goes a long way toward mitigating hesitations created by Cook’s subjectivizing narrative techniques and paratextual forbearance. Excepting only carefully crafted passages like Murgen’s two Dejapore sorties, Cook works to save the reader’s ultimate faith in the text. Although individual Annalists may have blind spots, no one is permitted to become Nick Carraway. We can trust the text—readers are receiving the final corrected proofs. The final marker of epic stability in The Black Company stems from how Cook aligns his narrative climaxes with the defeat of epic fantasy Dark Lords. Kina and the Dominator both represent absolute world-historical forces; their defeats organize—and thereby confer meaning upon—the historical events leading up to them in the text. In a way, The Black Company does, in fact, thematize chance and ephemerality to an extent parallel with the Instrumentalities series. For one example, Murgen muses that the “entire course of history can veer sharply because one man [Croaker in Dreams of Steel] gets dinged by a random arrow during a minor skirmish” (Return 88). Similarly, even momentous events can, in time, lose their significance and be forgotten. A poignant example comes late in the Glittering Stone tetralogy. Croaker recalls the inscrutable menhirs from the first trilogy, and he sadly observes how nobody “cares about the Plain of Fear nowadays” (Return 603). The Black Company books also presage Instrumentalities by depicting history’s major paradigm changes as arising from decisions made by actors blinkered by more immediate concerns. For instance, the Taglians find themselves, almost

journal of the fantastic in the arts History and Precarity · 339 accidentally, under a military dictatorship led by the Black Company because Croaker, the current Captain, knows no better way to hasten the Company’s progress toward legendary Khatovar. By defeating two separate Dark Lords, however, in two separate series, the Black Company infuses their storyworld with epic meaning and totality of a sort. Although history might feel meaningless to people like Croaker, the reader nevertheless grasps the cosmological significance of Kina’s and the Dominator’s downfalls. The defeat of absolute forces wrests a coherence, an ultimate structure, from the accidents and tragedies endured by the Company in all its sorrows. Croaker once makes the harsh observation that One-Eye, a Company sorcerer, had lived a “long but rather pathetic life,” but the godslaying spear he constructs reaches “a level of inspiration seen nowhere else” in his two centuries of existence (Many Deaths 742). Because that spear later kills Kina, the sorcerer redeems his trivial existence. A lifetime of wasted talent is salvaged by one noble creation. Likewise, Kina’s epic defeat salvages the sad, devastatingly lonely fates that befall characters like and Sahra. Without prophecies, destinies, or mythological and historical master narratives, Cook completes his narrative arc—his epic fantasy storyline— through those two vanquished Dark Lords. The world is saved; the existential threat has been removed. History therefore has a direction—a time before and after Kina, a time before and after the Dominator. A single culminating moment forges a meaningful unity between disparate historical events. Totality remains. Despite flux and the apparent randomness of it all, a truly nominalist vision of historical change continues to evade Cook’s grasp. Only by welding epic fantasy to the picaresque, however, will Cook begin to articulate a stronger sense of history in all its non-teleological precarity: history as a mere collection of loosely unconnected events, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

“A Lot of Little Plots Entangled”: The Picaresque Epic Both The Instrumentalities of the Night and The Black Company are sprawling tales that focus on soldiers, sorcerers, gods, and kings in confrontation. They are told in fragmented, sardonic prose styles, and they betray a grim skepticism toward all high ideals and romantic viewpoints. Yet their differences run deep as well. Gone in Instrumentalities is the band-of-brothers theme; gone, too, the unique first-person narrative framing device. It is replaced by standard third-person omniscience, which allows Cook to dip into a hoard of different viewpoints dispersed through a storyworld of staggering geographic scope. If viewed in light of Clute’s fourfold grammar of the complete fantasy story, the series possesses the first three elements—wrongness, thinning, recognition— but not the last, healing or return. Although it includes much typical epic fantasy machinery like a potential Dark Lord (er-Rashal), an authoritative wizard-guide (Cloven Februaren, the Ninth Unknown), and a cosmic threat

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(the Night), the series surprisingly succeeds in draining epic totality of its world-historical significance. In fact, unlike the Black Company finales, there is no cosmic weight, no ultimate telos, that organizes and unifies the chaos of its historic events. A sort of totality does emerge, at least insofar as the storyworld conveys a modest sense of cohesion between individuals, society, and the world, but a curiously empty one: a totality untouched by master narratives or particularly meaningful historic moments. This is the vision of history the Black Company had almost managed to capture: the welter and madness of human striving; grandeur and meaninglessness all in one. At first glance, the picaresque quality of Instrumentalities might be hard to detect. Two hurdles immediately appear: there is nothing noticeably satiric or comic about the books, nor is Piper Hecht a clear pícaro. Although Piper’s Sha-lug background might be considered appropriately lower class, his Praman self-denial distances him from a pícaro’s typical proclivity. Moreover, as a highly disciplined soldier and general, Piper never plays the , servant, , or rogue. Still, besides Cook’s own comment that Instrumentalities is an experiment in a picaresque plot, the is founded on the notion of widespread social disorder, disharmony, and disintegration—features often conveyed, in plot terms, by an endless series of episodic adventures. The worlds of picaresque fiction are always precarious worlds: worlds in upheaval, worlds of chaos. Pícaros generally greet this evaporation of old certainties with dauntlessness and aplomb, and, while “aplomb” is hardly the first adjective that comes to mind when imagining a in Cook, Piper Hecht nevertheless personifies a pícaro’s dauntlessness and fortitude in high degree. With rare flashes of gallows humor often tinted by heavy (another legacy for Cook from Vietnam War literature), Piper Hecht traverses all sectors of a traditional feudal society rapidly falling apart, and this includes the grand ideological collapse of the previous cosmic order. In fact, the initial wrongness in Instrumentalities, this epic fantasy, operates on two broad levels: the cosmological level, marked by the drying Wells of Ihrian, a paradigm case of fantasy “thinning” that defines as the “draining of Magic from the energy pools of creation” (Encyclopedia); and the social level, where feudal society is fracturing under pressure from emergent gunpowder technologies and newly organized professional armies. To take the cosmological level first, not only do the drying Wells of Ihrian weaken the Instrumentalities of the Night, who are semi-corporeal entities—never clearly explained—somewhat akin to phantasms or demigods, but the drying Wells also hasten a catastrophic new Ice Age. Furthermore, in the episode at Esther’s Wood that opens The Tyranny of the Night, Piper accidentally discovers that Instrumentalities, no matter how powerful, can actually be killed by gunpowder weapons. This situation forever changes the basic relationship between humankind and the supernatural. “Gods were beyond challenge,”

journal of the fantastic in the arts History and Precarity · 341 the narrator tells us. “Gods were the source of pain, not its object. That was the supernatural order. That was the Tyranny of the Night” (Working 429). At the same time, human religion itself cracks and shudders too. All the major religions—Chalderean, Praman, Devedian, Dainshaukin—promise their faithful protection against the Night’s tyranny, but gunpowder falcons have rendered that promise obsolete. Human ingenuity, not piety, is the new salvation. Tellingly enough, by the end of the fourth book, a secular authority, the Grail Empire, has entirely eclipsed the Brothen Church in political importance. The Church cannot adapt—but the Empire can. Even Piper himself, a devout Praman, finds this new state of affairs dismaying; his faith wavers after discovering that even God is only a glorified Instrumentality. Worse, he realizes that whole “new realms of warfare [will] open up once men understood that they could butcher one another’s gods” (Lord 422). Social precarity, however, disrupts the lives of Cook’s Instrumentalities characters just as mightily as cosmological precarity. The technological revolution initiated by gunpowder weapons, after Piper Hecht journeys into the West, has a predictable effect on feudal society. Using falcons requires little training and takes the “skill and honor out of combat,” creating an equality between highborn, highly trained armored knights and the “lowest, poorest, mallet-armed churl”; the battle of the Shades, moreover, conclusively proves that “massed machines of destruction” are more effective than sorcery in warfare (Surrender 431).2 Yet the gunpowder revolution is almost less of an upheaval than when Piper begins organizing large-scale professional armies. Old-style feudal warfare had been a haphazard affair, as the narrator tells us; feudal armies scoured the

dregs and leavings of their societies, handed out old and poor quality weapons, added a few hereditary warriors as leaders, then turned the mob loose. Such armies were as dangerous to friend as foe. Either they would indulge in outrageous slaughter or they would break at the first threat of combat. But they were cheap during peacetime. It was not necessary to feed, house, clothe, or train them. And they were never the threat always presented by a standing army. The evanescent loyalties of its frontier armies had been one cause of the breakdown of the Old Brothen Empire. (Tyranny 114)

Such cheap and undisciplined forces are, indeed, as dangerous to friend as to foe. In The Tyranny of the Night, Piper joins a feudal army that—modeled on the historical sack of Béziers in 1209 CE—overreacts to an incident with locals and, without orders, massacres Antieux’s inhabitants. Only Piper and a few other non-participants survive. This unplanned and unnecessary tragedy, though, reverberates throughout the Instrumentalities series, embroiling the

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Connec into a bloody war that will eventually culminate in nothing but slaughter and loss. Yet, following Piper’s recruitment by Divino Bruglioni, he soon begins professionalizing the Patriarchal Forces, selecting officers for competence rather than birth, preferring full-time soldiers to feudal conscripts, and he institutes military training and organizational discipline at all levels. Little thought is given to long-term ramifications, but other professional soldiers take notice. One member of the Brotherhood of War, for instance, marvels at an army that neither disperses “during the winter, planting, or harvest,” nor organizes itself around “leaders who command by right of birth” (Surrender 84). Another officer observes that nothing like Piper’s Patriarchal Forces has existed since the Old Brothen Empire. Since then, westerners have mainly fought “our neighbors, on the smallest scale. And a fear of standing forces, plus contempt for mercenaries, is the standard” (141). And the emphasis Piper places on talent over birth spurs an erosion of traditional and ossified class boundaries. An unprecedented social mobility becomes the norm. Like many pícaros, Piper rises vertically through society, ascending from hired mercenary to ultimately become Lord Arnmigal, Commander of the Righteous for the Grail Empire, but even a grunt like Pinkus Ghort eventually finds promotion to Captain-General. Furthermore, as a consequence of outfitting entire armies with falcons, the industrial demand for resources strains a time-tested agrarian economy. A resource-laden island such as Artecipea—rich in quality saltpeter and sulfur—thus acquires a strategic importance never before witnessed (Surrender 133). The pervasiveness of all these social, economic, and cosmological transformations, this instability at all levels, means that Instrumentalities—even more than The Black Company—thematizes the role played by chance in history. Significantly, a vast proportion of major historical events in Instrumentalities are thoroughly unintended and often completely undesired. This list includes the Antieux massacre; the mental illness of Grail Empress Katrin; the natural death of Sublime V, which ends the bloody Connectan Crusade; Piper’s drifting from commission to commission, depending on who will hire him, which directly leads to the eclipse of Firaldia by the Grail Empire as a driver of world events; the unexpected deaths of three important kings (Peter of Navaya, Jaime of Castauriga, and Regard of Arnhand) in a slipshod and meaningless battle, one of the “most ill-starred and incompetently managed [engagements] of the age despite the presence of the veterans, the trained fighters, and the famous commanders” (Surrender 328); and more. Nothing in Instrumentalities seems to result from long-term planning. Everyone, including Piper, tends to concentrate on more immediate goals and desires. No one person, whether Patriarch or general, sees the whole; everyone is seemingly feeling their way through the dark. Even Piper is someone who reacts to events

journal of the fantastic in the arts History and Precarity · 343 rather than drives them. His personal ambitions are curiously few. Dreams of rule never mar his thoughts, and he drifts from employer to employer, fulfilling their desires rather than his own. The distant future, indeed, seems beyond his ability to contemplate. The Black Company books, of course, had their share of chance, accident, and unforeseen consequences—the Company rarely set goals beyond the immediate job at hand, and its fateful decision to seek Khatovar was no more than a whim of Croaker’s, a desperate attempt to give the Company a goal, any goal, that would prevent its disbanding at the end of The White Rose. As argued in the previous section, though, chance in the Black Company books is not absolute. However random individual events, Cook’s alignment of narrative with the downfall of Dark Lords subordinates randomness to epic meaningfulness. Chance is never quite random; the role it plays in healing or return, in epic totality, always bestows on chance-driven events a retroactive yet weighty meaning. They become parts of a larger whole. Chance and fortune, however, are constitutive features of the picaresque. Thus, constructing Instrumentalities along picaresque lines allows Cook to bypass the apparent teleology at the heart of his epic fantasy structure. As literary scholar Claudio Guillen explains, picaresque fiction is “based on a situation, or rather, a chain of situations” and, far from culminating in a confrontation between what Guillen calls “absolute forces,” such as Kina or the Dominator, the picaresque is always entangled with the relative and the contemporaneous, which leads “to further situations or ‘adventures’” (77). Picaresque plotlines, in other words, never conclude per se—they merely end. They remain continuously open to the future; the future is never divided by an Event, whether a defeated Dark Lord or the Second Coming. This loosely connected “chain of situations” helps Instrumentalities, despite its epic structure, undercut the epic expectations set forth by Cook himself. Indeed, Instrumentalities begins as a portal-quest fantasy—complete with intimations of a single, authoritative, monological world-meaning—and then slides, imperceptibly, into what Farah Mendlesohn calls immersive fantasy, a rhetorical structure “overwhelmingly concerned with the entropy of the world” (61). In The Tyranny of the Night, the portal-quest outlook forms quickly enough. Piper Hecht is ordered from his isolated homeland with the mission (or quest) to disrupt a possible Patriarchal crusade against the Praman lands. Along the way, he meets the sorcerer Cloven Februaren, the Ninth Unknown, who downloads for Piper (and thus the reader) the Night’s true nature, including its newfound fear of gunpowder technology. An apparent destiny is then thrust upon Piper as fantasyland hero: end the Night’s tyranny. Every epic expectation just described, however, falls apart as the story unfolds. Februaren recedes into the background, playing an increasingly minor role. Piper’s sister Heris, another minor character, adopts the Godslayer mantle

journal of the fantastic in the arts 344 · Dennis Wilson Wise for herself—in fact, by the time of Working God’s Mischief, far from slaying Instrumentalities, Piper is nearly an Instrumentality himself, and he forsakes his so-called destiny to the point of ensuring the Night’s survival in exchange for military support. Finally, in the greatest irony of all, far from preventing a Western religious crusade, Piper actually leads such a crusade himself. As Lord Arnmigal, Commander of the Righteous, he conquers the Holy Lands for the Grail Empire. Every major epic fantasy expectation set up by the series, in other words, vanishes into dust. A sort of narrative unity does connect the first Instrumentalities book to the last, despite its loosely connected plot, but this “completed” narrative arc is entirely formal in character, devoid of meaningful content. The series ends with Piper and crew defeating the Dreangerean sorcerer Er-Rashal al-Dhulguarnen, who certainly aspires to Dark Lord status. His various machinations, though, have long since become something of a joke; the series makes several references to how dismally the many schemes of the Rascal (arguably the least intimidating Dark Lord nickname ever) have failed. Although Er-Rashal appears as early as the opening of The Tyranny of the Night, he never succeeds in becoming an “absolute force,” and his defeat comes across as entirely predictable. Indeed, whereas epic fantasy typically escalates dangers—and therefore the import of events—as it approaches the narrative climax, Cook chooses to reverse this trajectory in his picaresque epic. The most eucastrophic moment actually comes in the first book during the Calziran Crusade, when the effectiveness of Piper’s falcons remains uncertain. Afterwards, although the stakes remain high when Piper defeats Kharoulke the Windwalker in Surrender to the Will of the Night, by this time Piper and company have perfected their god-killing methods. Properly execute the method, and you execute the god—no fuss. Cook’s final book is even more workman-like. Thanks to technology and compliant minor Instrumentalities, Lord Arnmigal conquers lands as quickly as he can march to them; likewise, the half-dormant Instrumentality whom er-Rashal attempts to raise, Asher, is several thousand years past its prime. Indeed, political and military tensions have completely disappeared in Working God’s Mischief. What narrative tensions remain are domestic, not world-historical—the relationship between Lord Arnmigal and Empress Helspeth, for example. Notably, these domestic issues are left unresolved by book’s end, maintaining a picaresque openness to the future. The social and cosmological precarity pervading Cook’s storyworld, combined with this picaresque disconnect between episodes, furthermore contributes to a profound disintegration of individual selfhood in Instrumentalities. As we saw in The Black Company, the Company’s communal identity and Croaker’s personal identity were points of stability in the text. They provided readers a consistent anchor despite Cook’s subjectivizing techniques. Not so with Piper Hecht. Like most pícaros, he travels horizontally through space (i.e., the

journal of the fantastic in the arts History and Precarity · 345 geographically vast Instrumentalities storyworld) and vertically through society. Yet the pícaro-figure also resists conventional rhetorical unities of personality, as Mikhail Bakhtin explains; he is never “all of one piece and is not consistent” (408). As such, there are three separate and distinct personal identities that divide Cook’s main for Instrumentalities. Piper first appears to the reader as Else Tage, Captain of the Sha-lug; then he becomes Piper Hecht, Captain-General of the Brothen Church; finally, there is Lord Arnmigal, Commander of the Righteous. (If we count “Gisors,” Piper’s name as a boy before being captured by slavers, a fourth identity emerges.) Besides military competence, however, little unites these three adult identities. Piper, for example, abandons all visible markers of Else’s religion—and even begins to enjoy the taste of pork. Similarly, Lord Arnmigal has a different personality than Piper Hecht. He is more supercilious and controlling, less attentive to the cares of his men—the sort of commander, in fact, that Piper loathed as a junior officer. Indeed, this personality change occurs because Arnmigal is arguably no longer even human; the text continually hints that, thanks to Piper’s long association with the Night, Arnmigal is on the cusp of Ascending, one further rise in rank. Most remarkably, perhaps, all three of Piper’s adult identities each have their own separate families—a material marker of incompatible lives if ever one existed. Piper Hecht never again lays eyes on Else Tage’s Praman wife or children; he instead develops a makeshift nuclear family with Anna Mozilla and their collection of stray children. Yet, in Working God’s Mischief, Piper seems to abandon this family as Lord Arnmigal, who conceives a child—and thus founds a new family—with Empress Helspeth. Unlike Croaker, whose reliable immutability had insulated the Black Company reader from radical Heraclitean flux, the protagonist of Instrumentalities permits the reader no such safety. Everything changes; nothing, and no one, stays the same. Since the ability to develop meaning out of one’s experiences, however, depends on some sense of selfhood persisting through time, Piper’s fragmentation of identity effectively destroys his ability to forge any coherence out of randomness and chance. According to Jens Elze, the episodic adventures in picaresque fiction lead to an episodic sense of self. Only rarely can pícaros “retain their immediate vivid impressions as ideas, let alone to develop complex ideas, with which they can, based on previous impressions, imagine and anticipate similar social situations, without having been concretely exposed to them” (77). In Surrender to the Will of the Night, in one of Cook’s most storyable moments (that is, when fantasy protagonists realize themselves as characters in a story), Piper begins to wonder

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if there was a deeper message. Was it part of a pattern? Was it proof that the world was essentially random? Was his own passage through life part of a divine plan or just a stream of events with no real meaning? He could argue both ways. Were he in an epic it would, for sure, lack a traditional plot, everything connecting to everything else and coming together in the end. His epic consisted of a lot of little plots entangled. (Surrender 309)

No guiding purpose, no architectonic meaning, seems to intrude upon his existence, at least not that Piper sees, but even his faint hopes for a divine plan—a “deeper message”—dim toward the end. Recalling friends and acquaintances from his early days, he sadly ponders an old comrade, Pinkus Ghort, who has

become Captain-General of Patriarchal forces, a post little more than that of head policeman in Brothe, now. Biogna had gone missing. When last seen he had been an undercover agent for Ghort, or Bronte Doneto, or the Church. Or maybe all three. Biogna and Just Plain Joe were close. If Biogna was alive he would contact Joe eventually. […] He did recall that there were other survivors of that first murderous campaign against Antieux, but none who had been with him doing the grunt work. […] Did any of that mean anything anymore? Other than emotionally? Probably not. (Working 93-94)

In one respect, the people in Piper’s memories, their shared events, do certainly matter—they give rise to more events, more new acquaintances. But, unlike the randomness of events in The Black Company, what multiplicity Piper experiences never coalesces into a larger whole. Croaker, at least, had presided over situations of world-historical import: the downfall of absolute forces, the rise of new states of affairs—the only company brother, in fact, to survive all nine Black Company series books. Like Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury, Croaker has seen the first and the last, the beginning and the end. Though he cannot understand totality, not entirely, Croaker has seen it. He bears witness to the whole. Yet none of that applies to the protagonist of Instrumentalities. In a sense, Lord Arnmigal rests on the ashes of Else Tage and Piper Hecht. Previous lives, previous families, are abandoned; forgotten. Beside a technical knowledge of military affairs, there are no continuities in this protagonist’s life, nothing from which philosophical generalizations can be drawn. He bears witness to nothing. The evanescence of the moment disappears into other moments. Even emotions will fade away, like old soldiers, in time. The “good life” cannot be built, nor the architectonic whole grasped, when nothing—including oneself—seems to last through the flux.

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A surprising support for Piper’s despair comes from Brother Candle. As a Maysalean Perfect, a sort of living saint, someone like Brother Candle might easily have articulated a moral center, guiding readers to a totality that eludes less spiritually enlightened characters like Piper. Instead, Brother Candle is a shepherd more perplexed, more confused, more world weary than his flock. His storyline never intersects with Piper’s storyline; he has no power to ameliorate his homeland’s ravishing. His spiritual enlightenment cannot mitigate a single ounce of suffering. Unlike Piper, Brother Candle seems to exist to bear witness to endless human pain, but to whom he bears witness remains a mystery. Once he ponders his country’s feudal succession problems, which have “plagued all the lands, all the time, and caused endless dislocation, confusion, and misery,” but he finds no answer. If one exists, he never expects to see it within his lifetime; every “plan, every scheme, every social experiment broke down as soon as people became involved” (Surrender 331). Although the old feudal structure breaks down, and the Connec collapses into slaughter, no viable alternative arises to replace what has been destroyed. Dissolution, decay, and meaninglessness are the only fruits of this turmoil.3 There is no grand vision of the future to redeem what humanity has endured in the Connec—nothing orchestrates a retroactive meaning out of the endless succession of human crimes and human miseries. At the end of the day, Brother Candle seems to admit, any such redemption is prevented by human nature itself. The end result is epic fantasy totality—or Lukacs’s meaningful unity between the individual, the social, and the cosmological as applied to the epic fantasy storyworld—rendered devoid of positive content: a totality emptied of meaning. There is no telos or ultimate moment that makes any one state of affairs better, or more hopeful, than another. Perhaps the downfall of the Night’s tyranny might seem like meaningful historical progress to some. Yet, if so, Piper abandons that quest when the Night agrees to stop hunting him after Kharoulke’s destruction. Otherwise, there is no cosmic healing or return in Instrumentalities, just Heraclitean flux. Although history still happens, it is a history without direction. In a sense, this emptied totality, plus Brother Candle’s despair over human plans and social experiments, seems to support a specifically postmodern incredulity toward metanarratives. On Jean-François Lyotard’s view, metanarratives are totalizing stories told about history and human action that attempt to legitimize certain knowledge-types and cultural practices over others. Although his critique begins with the grand narrative for modern science, Lyotard also seeks to counteract the conception of totality that the French Marxist and Communist political traditions had derived from Hegel and Lukács. According to Lytoard, totality flattens out and minimizes difference. It is a form of terrorism against all that refuses to be assimilated, and so he proclaims, “Let us wage a war on totality” (82). As such, Lyotard advocates an intellectual realm outside totality where difference can flourish.

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Along similar lines, Cook’s Instrumentalities, as a picaresque epic, can be seen as waging war against the more content-laden totalities envisioned by other epic fantasies—for instance, the Manichean battlegrounds of Good against inspired by Tolkien’s Catholic vision of totality. Still, Cook hardly strikes me as an author much interested in postmodern theory, and perhaps a low humanism better explains the radical nominalism underlying his presentation of historical change and history. Obviously, despite Piper’s abandoned Godslayer quest, the Night’s cataclysmic weakening nevertheless raises humanity’s stature within the cosmic order. A newly anthropocentric universe emerges, and human ingenuity gains new prominence. In a way, the Instrumentalities storyworld, which is a counterfactual Europe, occupies something of a liminal historical moment: post-medieval yet also pre-modern. Precarity affects both religion and feudal society in the series, effectively ending the storyworld’s medieval era, but if we see modernity specifically as the age of metanarratives and grand theory, and including universalist principles like natural rights (a philosophical catalyst for the French and American Revolutions), then Instrumentalities operates in an era just prior to modernity as well. If this is so, then one surprising consequence emerges. Universal principles, arguably, have the potential to produce alienation. The “recognition of universal principles,” as philosopher Leo Strauss has suggested, “forces man to judge the established order […] in light of the natural or rational order; and what is actual here and now is more likely than not to fall short of the universal and unchangeable norm” (13). A better society always therefore exists just over the horizon, and this entails a perpetual dissatisfaction with one’s current society. The self-presence of the contemporaneous is always, partially, dislocated into an as-yet-unrealized future. The now lies on unequal footing with the will be. A different dynamic applies to Instrumentalities, however. In arguably the most memorable achievement of Cook’s picaresque epic fantasy, the series maintains the fullness of the contemporary. Instrumentalities never places any hope in the future, nor does it ever seem to consider placing hope in the past. Things happen; more things follow. For a time they matter—then the mattering stops. Newer things have come to be. As such, Instrumentalities offers humanity a deep at-home-ness within its storyworld. Unmoored from past and future alike, the present is the (empty) totality that the series offers. There are no grand narratives, no ideologies of Progress, no Hegelian or Marxist dialectics; the Day of Judgement and the Second Coming are too. The only thing that never changes is change itself. Thus, humanity always belongs to the world in which it finds itself. Granted, this at-home-ness offers no comfort to any of Cook’s characters. Happiness and contentment never find Piper Hecht or Brother Candle. More depressingly, a sense of hopelessness perhaps arises from this unmooring of the present from past and future. What is the point

journal of the fantastic in the arts History and Precarity · 349 of striving, after all, if a better society—a more perfect state of affairs—can never emerge? Yet there is no quietism in Cook, either, no suicidal despair. On the contrary, Cook seems to suggest, the problem of human nature is that people are always driven to do something; tragically, these doings are usually short-sighted, vainglorious, and marked by cupidity. The saintly inaction of a Brother Candle is extraordinarily rare. Nonetheless, the picaresque epic grants Cook a powerful vehicle for his low humanism—a storyworld caught in radical and permanent flux, a world in fragmentation, endlessly precarious, yet emancipated from classical liberal humanism’s pieties and optimism, and belonging to humanity alone.

Conclusion At first glance, writing a picaresque epic fantasy, as I have suggested, seems like an experiment ripe with self-contradictions. If the picaresque is a literature of precarity, then epic fantasy may be considered a genre of totality. Still, Cook has spent much of his career—while admiring the form—trying to fracture (or empty) the aura of totality that epic fantasy usually sustains. The Black Company books in particular had tried doing so through subjectivist and perspectival techniques borrowed from Vietnam War literature. Yet, partly due to Cook continuing to align his narrative climaxes with the defeats of two absolute forces, the Dark Lords Kina and the Dominator, these techniques had a limited (though still remarkable) success. The Instrumentalities, however, completes one major arc of Cook’s career: the nominalist articulation of a thoroughly anthropocentric epic storyworld untouched by any cosmic or ideological legitimation for human action. Precarity abounds on every level: cosmological, social, and individual. In fact, The Instrumentalities of the Night may be considered an epic of precarity. Larger meanings cannot arise when nothing, on any level, stays stable long enough to serve as a foundation. Totality is therefore emptied. Nothing can be said about history except that in the end, there is nothing to say. The Instrumentalities is a work that mutely bears witness to the flux. About four decades ago, an optimistic fanzine reviewer predicted, “The time is coming when Glen Cook will finally receive the recognition which is his due” (Carrington 16). Although full recognition has still not yet arrived for Cook, perhaps the time has come for a greater appreciation of the daring originality of Cook’s experiments in modern epic fantasy.

Notes 1. Shivetya is willing to converse with Tobo, but, amusingly, the boy has a teenager’s typical interest in researching history.

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2. Much the same lesson is learned from Piper’s later conquest of Shartelle, an allegedly impregnable city that—like its primary-world analogue, Constantinople— falls quickly due to gunpowder artillery. 3. As with most tragedies in Instrumentalities, the bloodshed in the Connect ends rather than concludes. Stability only arrives when all major have been killed or neutralized; and, with feudal primogeniture intact, Cook offers no guarantee that the next generation will be spared the same plagues endured by the current one.

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Holquist, U of Texas P, 1981. Bjornson, Richard. The Picaresque Hero in European Fiction. U of Wisconsin P, 1977. Carrington, Grant. “Cook’s Broth.” Night Voyages, vol. 9, no. 9, Winter/Spring 1983, pp. 14-16. Clute, John, and John Grant, editors. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, Orbit, 1997, http://sf-encyclopedia.uk/fe.php?id=0&nm=introduction_to_the_online_text. Cook, Glen. The Books of the South. 1989-1990. Tor, 2008. —. Chronicles of the Black Company. 1984-1985. Tor, 2007. —. Lord of the Silent Kingdom. Tor, 2007. —. The Many Deaths of the Black Company. 1999-2000. Tor, 2009. —. The Return of the Black Company. 1997. Tor, 2009. —. The Tyranny of the Night. Tor, 2005. —. Surrender to the Will of the Night. Tor, 2010. —. Working God’s Mischief. Tor, 2014. Elze, Jens. Postcolonial Modernity and the : Literatures of Precarity. Springer, 2017. Guillen, Claudio. Literature as System: Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History. Princeton UP, 1971. James, Edward. “Epics in Three Parts.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 29, no. 1, 2018, pp. 7-17. Kaveney, Roz. “Glen Cook.” The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, edited by John Clute and John Grant, Orbit, 1997, http://sf-encyclopedia.uk/fe.php?nm=cook_glen. Accessed 3 Mar. 2019. Lukács, György. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock, MIT Press, 1971. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, U of Minnesota P, 1984. Mendlesohn, Farah. of Fantasy. Wesleyan UP, 2008. Tompkins, Steve. “After Aquilonia, and Having Left Lankhmar…: Sword & Sorcery Since the 1980s.” The Robert E. Howard Reader, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, Borgo Press, pp. 179-204. journal of the fantastic in the arts History and Precarity · 351

Senior, W. A. Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: Variations on the Fantasy Tradition. Kent State UP, 1995. Strauss, Leo. Natural Right and History. U of Chicago P, 1953. VanderMeer, Jeff. “The Instrumentalities of the Night: An Interview with Glen Cook.” SF Site, www.sfsite.com/10a/gc209.htm, 2005. Accessed 9 Feb. 2019. Walzer, Judith B. “Literature and the Vietnam War.” Dissent, vol. 57, no. 3, 2010, pp. 95-102. Westfahl, Gary. “Cook, Glen 1944–.” Writers: and Horror, edited by Richard Bleiler, 2nd ed., vol. 1., Scribner’s, 2003, pp. 233-38. Wicks, Ulrich. “The Nature of Picaresque Narrative: A Modal Approach.” PMLA, vol. 89, no. 2, 1974, pp. 240-49, www.jstor.org/stable/461446. Accessed 22 Jan. 2019.

Abstract This article argues that Glen Cook’s The Instrumentalities of the Night seeks to drain epic fantasy of its characteristic sense of “totality.” Cook accomplishes this by blending the epic fantasy structure with a picaresque plot. The Black Company books had already attempted to fracture totality through their unique first-person narrative framing device, but this experiment, I argue, only partially succeeds. By applying the picaresque, however, a literature of precarity, Cook achieves a vision of history and historical change as fraught with chance, accident, and randomness—a radical Heraclitean flux. While the series captures totality after a fashion, this totality comes emptied of larger epic meaning. In this regard, Instrumentalities bears some striking resemblances to Lyotard’s famous incredulity toward master narratives, but a low humanism better describes Cook’s approach. In the end, Cook’s experimental picaresque epic fantasy articulates an anthropocentric storyworld without metaphysical legitimations for human action.

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