Dry

The fact that water is essential to life, and that the retention of moisture and close association with water is of particular physical importance to my people, is trivial to my larger thesis about an essential literary trope.

In Saxhleel literature (and by "literature," I mean the totality of fictional artistic verbal expression by or about Argonians, regardless of the language used), aridity and thirst are distancing terms for the "other." Superficially, we tend to regard dryness as a metaphor for either "pain" or "despair." This simple binary analysis follows from the observation that, in literature, water-based imagery like "clear water," "cool rain", and so on, is almost always used metaphorically to refer to positive concepts like "good health," "good fortune," or "success."

In casual conversation, an Argonian who talks about a "river" is almost certainly using the word metaphorically to describe passage through life. So I might say of a deceased friend that the river "bore him peacefully to the sea." Similarly, if someone said, "Ah! Choking rills of sand descend from my spawning pool!", any literate person would know that the person was complaining that they were beset by misfortune.

Given the obvious and somewhat trite poetic linkage between water and life, many literary critics assume that "dryness" must be euphemistic of "death" in Saxhleel literature, but this presumption is simply not borne out by a close examination of the literary tradition. To a careful stylist, a state of "unmoistness" is not "death" per se, but rather, "foreignness" or "that which is uncanny."

In common parlance, non-Saxhleel sentient races are referred to as "drys" or "dry skins." "Dry skin" is actually mildly pejorative, and more sophisticated Saxhleel writers tend to avoid the term by simply referring to "men" or "mer" without the implied insult based on physical appearance. But those writers who avoid using "dry" as a convenient shorthand for other races may still make effective use of dryness to establish a mood of alienation or disjunction.

ARIDITY IN MODERN SAXHLEEL LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION

I have a perfect introductory example of how dryness is used in the novels and plays of Paxhan Dar Uush (better know to her wider readership under her nom-de-plume, "Long Strong-eye.") One can see how aridity is artfully hinted at in the first chapter of her first novel, "The Saltrice Broker," in bracket below.

Briefly, (for those of you whose last memory of the book was when you were required to read it as a schoolchild), "The Saltrice Broker" is a sprawling romance focused primarily on the efforts of its heroine, "Blue-High-Tooth," to emancipate her father from slavery. In the course of her journey from Black Rose to Vivec City, Blue-High-Tooth endangers her own freedom and is forced to lay a clutch of eggs against her will at the behest of a slaver named Orleth. Although the ending is bittersweet, Blue-High-Tooth ultimately triumphs over the obstacles set in her path.

This descriptive passage comes from early in Chapter One:

[She closed her eyes, letting the letter slip from her hand. The ink across the letter's seal had crazed in the heat, obscuring her father's crestmark; the texture of the parchment called to mind the bed of a drought-blasted irrigation canal, with its salt-rimed scabs of shrunken earth and thirsty crevasses.

So far away! How thin the sap scent must have been for him, how faint the breeze upon his cheek. Why else would he have sent her this warrant?]

The passage hints at the geographic separation that had followed on Blue High Tooth's estrangement from her broodmates and adoptive father, but it goes beyond merely expressing physical distance. By referring to "heat-crazed ink," and by correlating the visual appearance of the parchment to the surface of a dry riverbed, the author made it plain not only that the protagonist's father was far away, but that he had written to her from an implicitly alien and hostile land. Without even mentioning the location that the letter had been sent from, the author's reference to a dry irrigation canal has already primed the sophisticated reader to expect that the heroine's father is in Morrowind on business, and that he has met with misadventure, even though neither of those facts are made explicit in the paragraph cited.

For another example of the emotional weight borne by the descriptive use of "dryness," look to the climactic scene from Paxan Dar Uush's most successful and acclaimed novel, "The Eye in the Mask." Set against the backdrop of war and invasion, "The Eye in the Mask" tells the story of a theater troupe whose members are attempting to work their way back to the Imperial City. The last third of the novel is from the perspective of an assimilated Argonian actor who has been suffering from prophetic dreams. In this passage, the actor realizes that his Dunmer colleague and friend has been using the acting troupe to cover for spying activity.

["It's a good house tonight."

He still hadn't answered my question; he was pointedly treating tonight as just another show. He rummaged through the props trunk, looking for his mask and headdress. I snatched the wooden scepter off of his chair.

"Give me that! We're on in five!"

'Last King of the Ayleids' had always been a draw for us, and Fyrthil was brilliant in the part of the great anti-hero. My heart broke as he pleaded with me. His lips were cracked and peeling, his voice hoarse. Was it the skooma, or the drinking that had driven him to this?

"Who are you working for?"

"By the Three, just give me the scepter. Gods! I'm so thirsty."]

Here, the antagonist's discomfort (his thirst and cracked lips) aren't merely descriptive, but are meant to evoke the sense that Fyrthil (who had been portrayed sympathetically as an enlightened and non-bigoted cosmopolitan friend of the protagonist through most of the novel) has fallen away, either reverting to or acquiesing in some sort of cultural alienation. Fyrthil's bigotry and willingness to sell out the lives and welfare of his fellow actors is, in some sense, tied to his failure to suppress his fundamental existential thirst. And his thirst (explicitly for skooma, but implicitly for acceptance) comes from the dryness of the "other," the "foreign" nature within him.