In
Brandon Sanderson’s fantasy novella The
Emperor’s Soul, it is possible, through the magical art of Forgery, to
rewrite an object’s history and thus change its manifestation in the present.
Forgery can also be applied to the user’s own history to change his or her
knowledge, skills, and even personality—though this is not only extremely
difficult, but also highly illegal in the empire where the story takes place.
Shortly
before the story’s beginning, Emperor Ashravan was targeted by assassins who
murdered his wife and almost killed him as well; he would have died from a
terrible headwound if not for Forgers who specialized in physiology resetting
the history of his head. This process, however, wiped his memories and
personality. He was left comatose and, in effect, without a soul.
Around
the time of the emperor’s near-assassination, a master Forger and thief named
Shai was arrested and sentenced to death for temporarily altering her soul and
attempting to steal from the palace. Due to her expertise with using Forgery to
alter her own mind, the emperor’s advisors offered to release her in exchange
for her help recreating the emperor’s soul. Such a feat—recreating an entire
human mind from scratch—had never been done before, and Shai was given only one
hundred days to complete the task before the emperor had to be seen in public.
Throughout
the story, there is a recurring theme of identity, originality, and what Walter
Benjamin would call “aura.” Various characters, especially Shai and the emperor’s
old friend Gaotona, ask themselves whether the product of Shai’s labors—were
she to succeed—would in fact be Ashravan. Could Shai accurately recreate an
entire human mind based solely on research and second-hand accounts? Would even
a perfect recreation be Ashravan, or simply a copy of him? No one, least of all
Shai, really believed that an accurate copy was possible. Still, Shai’s
ambition and self-preservation instinct, Gaotona’s love for his lost friend,
and the other advisors’ desire to retain their power kept the endeavor going.
In
the end, not only does Shai recreate a convincing Ashravan, she has studied his
past with such detail that she takes it upon herself to make minor adjustments
to his life course: she encourages him to react to his wife’s death, for
example, by becoming the magnanimous emperor he had once seemed destined to
become. Shai outlines all of this—every detail of her work—in a book which she
provides to Gaotona. Upon reading this book, Gaotona finally reaches a
conclusion to his contemplation of the emperor’s soul:
He found himself weeping.
Not for the future or for the emperor.
These were the tears of a man who saw before himself a masterpiece. True art was more than beauty; it was more than
technique. It was not just imitation.
It was boldness, it was contrast, it was
subtlety. In this book, Gaotona found a rare work to rival that of the greatest
painters, sculptors, and poets of any era.
It was the greatest work of art he had
ever witnessed.
Gaotona, possibly out of love for his old friend, seems to get past his initial question of aura and to take Shai’s recreation of Ashravan as worthy in his own right. He stops concerning himself with whether this Ashravan is the same one he once knew, instead realizing that the new Ashravan is what he always knew his friend could one day become. If the copy, through some virtue of its own, adds to the value of the original’s legacy, then perhaps it can be seen as enhancing, not detracting from, the aura of the original.
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