Doomed men's manuscripts

Chris · 15 May 2003, 23:08 · from urth-v0305.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: "Chris" <rasputin_ at hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Doomed men's manuscripts
Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 23:08:23 +0000
Message-ID: <urth-v0305-3429 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0305/3429.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

This kind of thing was a staple with Lovecraftian fiction. The device might=20
go way further back than that, but it seems to me that just about every=20
Cthulhu story I've seen consists of a short lead-in by the skeptical editor=20
who finds (or is given) the manuscript, then the manuscript itself often=20
(but not always) ending abruptly, with suitable editor's notes at the end t=
o=20
wrap things up with some comment about how he doesn't believe the story, or=20
the body was never found, etc.

It doesn't seem unreasonable that Wolfe might have been deliberately going=20
for a bit of a Lovecraft atmosphere.

Chris

--
"Indeed it is hard to grasp why it hasn't already given birth... to its=20
hero, that demon who will stage without scruple that horrifying play that=20
reduces the whole age to laughter and to unconsciousness of the fact that i=
t=20
is laughing at itself." -- Soren Kierkegaard


>I've always thought that this was a great ending, even if the idea of the
>hero scratching away at his journal while the Monster climbs the stairs and
>enters the room is patently ludicrous. (If only he had had a dictaphone!)
>But you don't have any doubt that the hero is going to meet An Awful Fate.
>
>There are similarities with the ending of "The Tree is my Hat", but Wolfe,=20
>a
>far more sophisticated artist, says much less, and ends his narrative well
>before his hero actually encounters the fatal thunderstorm.
>
>Incidentally, Hodgson provides a frame story to explain exactly how he and
>his friend discovered the doomed man's manuscript, which he then "edited"
>for publication. Wolfe does a little of this TBotNS, but provides no such
>account for "The Tree is my Hat".
>
>Nigel

_________________________________________________________________
MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE* =20
http://join.msn.com/?page=3Dfeatures/virus


--=20

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