Digest urth.v030.n088

akt · 15 Apr 2001, 19:36 · from urth-v0030.mbox · original

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: <akt at attglobal.net>
Subject: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v030.n088
Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 19:36:43
Message-ID: <urth-v0030-0305 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0030/0305.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Quoth William Ansley:

> I have just finished listening to a series of taped lectures called
> _The Life and Writings of Geoffrey Chaucer_*. Somewhere in this
> series, the lecturer talks about how Chaucer inserts himself as a
> character, the narrator, in _The Canterbury Tales_. He questions how
> much we should believe the narrator and says, "Chaucer may be the
> first unreliable narrator in English literature." This gave me quite
> a start.
>
> Well, well. Wolfe has an even longer and more distinguished literary
> legacy than I realized.

It is important to distinguish between the unreliable narrator, a
creature of the author, and the unreliable author.  In Chaucer's case,
the lecturer may well be correct. (It's been quite a while since I've
read!) But the fascinating thing, for the few of us who have been
following John Crowley's Aegypt series, is that the *author*, especially
in -Daemonomania-, appears to be unreliable, in a *third-person*
narration. Unreliable does not mean careless--I have been complaining
about carelessness in RttW and I don't want the two
confused--unreliability in a narrator or an author is deliberate. But
different.

-alga

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

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