We experience a perumbration of the Heart’s perfection and place in the World, realized in The Source at series’ end, in the center of Knife, when Todd and Viola are picked up by Wilf (Part IV, Chapter 22, ‘Wilf and the Sea of Things’). Todd the Heart is shattered by this but swears fidelity to Spirit as the curtain closes. Spirit/Viola is shot in the heart, a wound which is almost never fatal in this series but a means to purification and perfection. Only the Heart’s ‘father,’ Ben, is true and there to guide and protect them, if he is almost always invisible.Īt story’s end, they discover that the worldly sanctuary or heaven they have been in search of, the city ‘Haven,’ is like all things in the world, ‘under the Fall(s)’ and subject to the Prince of the World, Satan, the tempter, here represented as the Mayor. Most notably, of course, the Church and the State, embodied by Aaron and the Mayor, do everything possible to force the Heart to become human on their demeaning and diminishing terms and to enslave Spirit to their cause. Knife is their adventure through something of a Pilgrim’s Progress series of vignette’s about The World and its various ways of destroying or waylaying the Heart.
This is a Bildungsroman, of course, a coming of age story and manhood quest, but Todd’s story is mostly about the Heart’s relationship, ‘identification’ really, with Spirit, represented in story by Viola, the girl who appears from the Heavens, out of nowhere, if you will. Every idea he has of himself and his world is shredded until he is left with his core essence or destiny, prima materia, his innocence and love, call it “purity of heart.” We have the Philosophical Orphan, who is an alien in his own community that is forcibly separated from this community and his artificial family in this world. Todd’s experience is everything we should expect in the ‘black stage’ of literary alchemy. Knife of Never Letting Go: Alchemical Nigredo Old hands, however, I’m sure, have already started asking themselves, “If Todd is the Stone/Heart being perfected, are the three books the three alchemical stages of the Philosopher’s Stone?” Indeed, they are. If you’re a newcomer here, that must seem a real stretch. Life is short, art is long let’s get right to the alchemy, then, if you don’t mind.Īs discussed previously, the books’ penchant for Christian and biblical names makes me think ‘Todd’ is meant to be understood as ‘Thaddeus,’ the Aramaic word for ‘Heart,’ the spiritual faculty of the human person, or “breast,’ as in ‘bosom buddy.’ The last name of our hero, ‘Hewitt,’ is a not especially opaque telling of “ hew it,” which translates as “roughly shape or fell the hard object.” Together, I think the Dickensian cryptonym gives us “the stone or wooden heart’s felling” or, better, “the revelation of the heart out of stone.” His story is a postmodern Everyman tale of the spiritual journey to human perfection or apotheosis.
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