Digest from urth@urth.net

David Duffy · 20 May 2002, 00:49 · from urth-v0205.mbox · original

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From: David Duffy <davidD at qimr.edu.au>
Subject: (urth) Re: Digest from  urth at urth.net
Date: Mon, 20 May 2002 10:49:10 +1000 (EST)
Message-ID: <urth-v0205-997 at digest.urth.net>
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>              The point of the pure "story suite" is that the stories
> actually comment on and, in a sense, revise each other -- that the whole
> is not only greater than the sum of the parts, but _different_ from the
> sum of the parts; the parts heterodyne or synergize or whatever this
> year's term is for things working together to produce effects not clearly
> obvious from the two separately.

> The mosaic (as I am understanding the term) is somewhere in between --
> the stories are more separate, like the stories of a "series," but work
> --Blattid

These are all shadings that merely reflect the sophistication of the
writer and timing of how the stories were written.  Take _The Sound and
the Fury_: if the different parts had been written and published
separately, would it stop being a novel?  Alan Garner's _The Stone Book
Quartet_ (recently read) is four stories written one and two years apart
each covering one generation in the life of a family -- each episode
comments on earlier action and reveals motivationsi, and I can see it
just as easily as a novel.  Stories told by multiple tellers from the
same tradition, or a single author trying to imitate such a tradition,
can be contradictory and mutually informative (the four gospels).

| 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

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