The Green Man and the Circus

William H. Ansley · 09 May 1998, 01:02 · from urth-v0010.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: "William H. Ansley" <wansley at warwick.net>
Subject: (urth) The Green Man and the Circus
Date: Sat, 9 May 1998 01:02:17
Message-ID: <urth-v0010-0115 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0010/0115.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Is anyone else reminded of _The Circus of Dr. Lao_ by Charles G. Finney
when reading the passage describing Severian's encounter with the green man
in ch. 3 of _Claw_ (pp. 229-231, Orb ed.)?

I think the echoes are faint and distorted but unmistakable. The green man
combines characteristics of the hound of the hedges and Apollonius of Tyana
in his role as fortune teller. There are many other resonances, as well.
The chapter is even called "The Showman's Tent".

For people that haven't read _Circus_, I highly recommend it, with one
caveat: it contains passages that might not be considered politically
correct by some today. But taking into account it was first printed in
1935, I think the likelihood of anyone taking offense is minor. It is an
unique fantasy and it has had a wide influence in the field.

Finney's writing is lupine at least to the extent that he leaves the reader
with some deliberately unanswered questions and ambiguities.

William Ansley

*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