The Guild's Revolutionary

John Watkins · 23 Nov 2009, 15:25 · from 2009-November.txt.gz

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From: john.watkins04 at gmail.com (John Watkins)
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:25:05 -0500
Subject: (urth) The Guild's Revolutionary
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Mark, thanks for sharing that.  Had I ever looked to a copy of the book for
the reference and not found the chapter, I would've assumed Borges had
invented the conceit a an extra, "secret" chapter.  Now I'll never make that
mistake.

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 10:21 AM, Mark Millman <markjmillman at gmail.com>wrote:

> Dear Mr. Wynn,
>
> On Monday 23 November 2009, you wrote:
>
> > I've always thought the Borges=Ultan
> > theory was tenuous. Not impossible,
> > just not much supporting it beyond
> > Utlan's blindness. . . .
>
> There's also the fact that both Ultan and Borges were national
> librarians of their respective countries.
>
> > Okay. While Wolfe might well have been
> > introduced to the monster "Baldanders"
> > by Borges, it comes from the Renais-
> > sance fantasy story "Simplicius Simpli-
> > cissimus".<looks over at it sitting on his
> > shelf right> According to the story, the
> > name means "first one thing and then
> > another" because, like the wizard Talei-
> > san, it is always changing into other
> > things. Although I can think of several
> > reasons why Wolfe might have been at-
> > tracted to a "successive monster", as
> > Borges calls it, I have no idea how this
> > relates to Wolfe's Frankenstein.
>
> I have two different editions of the Simplicissimus, both of which
> lack the sixth book in which, according to Borges, Baldanders appears.
>  What edition do you have, and who prepared it?  I'd like to look for
> a copy of my own.
>
> For those list members who haven't encountered it, the Simplicissimus
> is a sort of German Candide set during the Thirty Years' War.  The
> sixth book, which was added late in the author's life, is, as I
> understand it, considerably more fantastic than the novel's preceding
> books, although there are fantastic episodes earlier, with a
> particularly long one falling in the fifth book.  My guess is that
> modern editors are primarily interested in the work's realistic
> aspects and omit the sixth book as an inferior late addition.  While
> it's not well known in the English-speaking world today (although I
> just found an on-line version at
> http://rbsche.people.wm.edu/teaching/grimmelshausen/ and there are a
> couple of reasonably accurate Wikipedia articles on it and its
> author), many German authorities consider it to be the beginning of
> the modern German novel tradition.
>
> > J.
>
> Best,
>
> Mark Millman
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