I Claudius

Russell Wodell · 07 Sep 2006, 00:19 · from 2006-September.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: wrustle at telus.net (Russell Wodell)
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 17:19:38 -0700
Subject: (urth) I Claudius
Message-ID: <000a01c6d213$4eda51a0$a98bd8cf@rw9s6no3t0dhzd>

Graves' Claudius novels seem an obvious inspiration for BOTNS. 

But I wonder if there isn't an intervening source in a Graves rip-off: A.E. van Vogt's fix-up Empire of the Sun (1957). I'm relying on childhood memories here (has anyone read this recently?) but I remember it as chock-full of the surreal pulp imagery that Wolfe loves to rationalize, in this case people fighting with swords and ray-guns in a medieval-seeming setting that included spaceships. The last sentence of Chapter One of Shadow particularly struck me as reminiscent of the van Vogt ("It was in this fashion that I began the long journey by which I have backed into the throne") which recapitulates (againk, as I recall...) the basic Claudius plot of the least likely man becoming Emperor.

In much the same way, the opening sentence of Shadow ("It is possible I aleady had some presentiment of my future") strongly calls to mind both Proust and Dickens, two of Wolfe's culture heroes. Particularly the Dickens of David Copperfield:  "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." How true of Severian!

Russell Wodell
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20060906/f46b701d/attachment.htm

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net