Subject: (urth) "Haunted Boardinghouse" & LITTLE, BIG

From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at sirius.com>
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2000 10:11:36 +0000

Patera Nutria wrote:
>>"The Haunted Boardinghouse."  Well, this is related to John Crowley's
>>LITTLE, BIG: if you didn't know that the house-with-no-back [eek!  what are
>>you saying?!] is like the five-faced house in LB, then there is also
>>Crowley's name as one of the 20th century literary giants given in the
>>text.  This story ends exactly like a John Crowley story almost always
>>does.
>
>Great link, but don't forget *The Name of the Rose* as a major player here.
>(labyrinth, library, latin).

I honestly can't see much of a link between "THB" and THE NAME OF THE ROSE.

THE NAME OF THE ROSE and LITTLE, BIG spoilers to follow:

In LITTLE, BIG the house that is central (axial?) to the novel (and its
universe) has five faces.  Each face is in a different architectural style;
there is a strong suggestion throughout the text that each face is linked
to a different season (granted that seasons normally number four to us
modern mortals); we only see three of the faces in the text, through a few
clever tricks that are meant to show us the "seam" of artifice; a fourth
style is mentioned, and the fifth one can be deduced (pregnant with
paradox).

In LB there is a big battle being waged on another plane, or a few planes
at once: this battle draws together odd people from across time and space;
some famous, some unknown.  Part of the draw, for some, is a fervent belief
in =fairyland=, in particular the matter written by Anglo-American fantasy
authors (special emphasis on Victorian writers); fans are =recruited= for
this vast enterprise.  The other plane has many aspects that look like
death, and it is ambiguous; however, there is no ambiguity in the fact that
the hero dies a real death at the threshold so that others may go on.

In LB the hero is led into this situation by a lovely woman who, in the
end, is willing to lie to him in order to get the whole project
completed--it might seem a stretch to compare Daily Alice with Mrs. Seely,
but just think of those sexy old airline commercials, put through a slight
warp: "I'm Death--come fly me!"

The mystery of the hero being confused as to the love-object's identity
(Mrs. Seely and Ms. Death) is important to the betrayal of the hero in LB,
but plays a much larger role in John Crowley's AEGYPT series (which
same-named woman did he dally with in the dark that night: the bright one
or the dark one?).

I trust that all these points have clear relevance to "THB": each face
leads to a different time; the big battle; the recruitment; the love
triangle; the betrayal; the special person who is used to activate and
complete the action, through his own death; etc.

Contrast with THE NAME OF THE ROSE.  "THB" is, to me at least, in no sense
a detective work ala Sherlock Holmes, let alone a negation of detective
fiction; NOTR is both of these.  "THB" is not a send up of academic life,
nor is it much about campus infighting, nor the brutality lurking beneath
the veneer of intellectual pursuits.  The library in "THB" is not a central
key that reveals all, or even very much, or even that it was all just a
joke; the organization of the library is a non-event, rather than an
exciting revelation.  The Latin in "THB" is strictly classical/pagan,
rather NOTR's medieval/theological; the timeframes are wildly different.
The use of Latin in the text is all a part of the recruitment, the
"fiction," if you will, that is the hook that draws the hero from his
mundane world of consentual reality (neo-Victorian) into the world of
consentual dream (ancient Rome as studied by post-Medieval students) where
the hero feels he would rather be, and where the hero's talents will be put
to concrete, immediate use.  In NOTR, "fiction" leads to self-delusion for
the investigators, such that one cannot see the real; one's special talents
are misdirected, wasted. A "Don Quixote-downbeat," if you like.

But maybe I'm misremembering, or misunderstanding the reference points that
are supposed to tie "THB" to NOTR.

=mantis=

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

---

From: Jim Jordan <jbjordan at gnt.net>
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2000 13:38:36 +0000

Mantis,

	Very happy to grant that THB has much more to do with Crowley than Eco.
But it is typical of Wolfe to mix tales, as Mowgli and Romulus in the tales
in TBNS. But maybe everything can be accounted for by Crowley, and the Eco
allusions are only apparent. Still, the Latin....

Patera Nutria