Tales

Nicholas Gevers · 26 Oct 1999, 03:12 · from urth-v0028.mbox · original

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From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Nicholas=20Gevers?= <vermoulian at yahoo.com>
Subject: (urth) Tales
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1999 03:12:17
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0235 at digest.urth.net>
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Reading the fascinating discussion of narrative forms
and strategies on the list, two points occur to me:

1) Someone (I think alga) states that "The Tale of the
Student and His Son" would not work as a short story
in a magazine, but is very effective in its NEW SUN
context. This may well be true, but the "Tale" did in
fact appear as an independent story, in THE MAGAZINE
OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, October 1981.

2) I've speculated previously that THE BOOK OF THE NEW
SUN IS "The Brown Book" (in addition to all the other
things that Sev's narrative can be taken to be). In
other words, NEW SUN is an anthology of folk tales,
myths, and legends, woven into a narrative which for
all its modernist first-person presentation is
sufficiently episodic that each set-piece adventure of
Sev's still functions as a tale in itself, conforming
to some recognizable pattern (rituals of initiation,
confronting the ogre, overcoming captivity, whatever).
It's been frequently remarked that the five Brown Book
tales Wolfe has given us in full each tell Sev's story
in some compressed, generally allegorical, form; but I
think this logic runs deeper: just as Wolfe's essay
"Books in THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN" implies that Sev
brings Thecla a copy of THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN in
SHADOW, so Sev is in a sense carrying a copy of his
own narrative with him throughout his wanderings on
Urth.=20

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

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