TSH, Lovecraft

David Duffy · 30 Jun 2010, 22:28 · from 2010-June.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: davidD at qimr.edu.au (David Duffy)
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 2010 08:28:52 +1000 (EST)
Subject: (urth) TSH, Lovecraft
In-Reply-To: <9E8185E9-C13E-463D-8D5F-F5E6B0FCD84E at gmail.com>
References: <9E8185E9-C13E-463D-8D5F-F5E6B0FCD84E at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.1007010813370.19840 at orpheus.qimr.edu.au>

On Wed, 30 Jun 2010, Jeff Eoff wrote:

> I just finished The Sorcerer's House for the first time.  I searched 
> through the list archives and read through most of TSH threads I found, 
> but I didn't see any references made to Lovecraft's story "The Dreams In 
> The Witch House" ( 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dreams_in_the_witch_house ).  I was 
> reminded of it near the beginning of THS.  Perhaps it's just a foil or 
> homage by Wolfe, but I find a few parallels.
>

I thought of it even before reading the book, based on descriptions of the 
plot, especially after _An Evil Guest_.  Like so much of Wolfe, I think 
there is some allusion, but it is mixed in with so much other stuff, that 
it doesn't affect the plotline greatly.  Specifically _tDitWH_ is science 
fictional in handling of the dreams, while Wolfe is fantastical, more 
dreamlike.

> The inner dimensions of the witch house are unstable, like the 
> sorcerer's house.

This more reminds me of the use of this trope in _Peace_.  Although the 
Necronomicon does makes an appearance there too.

>
> Twins abound throughout TSH and I figured that Black's house must be a 
> twin to Goldwurm's tower, and that Black must have had a twin himself 
> (as some have suggested already).  Someone also mentioned the middle two 
> chapters having the same name, which suggests a mirror.
>

I was reminded of the _the Incompleat Enchanter_, for some reason.

Cheers, David.

-- 
| David Duffy (MBBS PhD)                                         ,-_|\
| email: davidD at qimr.edu.au  ph: INT+61+7+3362-0217 fax: -0101  /     *
| Epidemiology Unit, Queensland Institute of Medical Research   \_,-._/
| 300 Herston Rd, Brisbane, Queensland 4029, Australia  GPG 4D0B994A v

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