Dreaming, Mag, Able and Art

stilskin · 09 Jan 2005, 13:38 · from 2005-January.txt.gz

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: acronus at yahoo.com (stilskin)
Date: Sun Jan  9 13:38:56 2005
Subject: (urth) Re: Dreaming, Mag, Able and Art
In-Reply-To: <002a01c4f63b$23dd3720$95406596@crunchynut>
Message-ID: <20050109213853.3471.qmail at web20023.mail.yahoo.com>

I think you're onto something about Toug.  Why do you
think he fades from the ms. toward the end?  Is it
simply the return of Able to center stage?


--- Andrew Bollen <abollen at internode.on.net> wrote:

> Further on Dream, Art & Able ... It seems that you
> one way you know you're 
> in Dream is if
> you see the the Valfather's "castle like a star"
> flying through the clouds.
> Toug watches it in Dream (p56), as does Art at the
> start of Knight, on the 
> hillside as he is surely dreaming.
> Elsewhere in Knight, Art dreams he is Able dreaming
> on a hillside (surely 
> the same one) as the
> castle scuds through the clouds, remembering how he
> used to live in a place
> where there were swords and no cars (p133). I think
> all this supports the
> idea of Art & Able having being swapped, by the
> Aelf, via Dream.
> 
> (Though come to think of it, I guess the swap could
> have been engineered by 
> the Overcyn, given the presence of the Valfather's
> castle ...)
> 
> As a bonus, in the Dream chapter in Wizard, there's
> a gratuitous-seeming
> little passage where Art tells Toug that any horse
> ridden by an Aelf  "will
> be one of ours, a horse taken by the Aelf as a man
> or woman may be." Or
> indeed as Able, Art & Toug all have been at one time
> or another.
> 
> Toug is in some ways the most interesting character
> in the series. Art 
> identifies with him to a certain extent. In the
> Dream chapter, he more or 
> less appoints Toug as his prime agent.  I can't
> remember who or where, but 
> one of the characters says that Art sees himself in
> Toug. Toug is a key 
> piece in the game played by various parties in the
> first half of the book to 
> secure Art's services for their own ends; they
> recognize Toug's influence 
> over Art.
> 
> I don't think that Toug and Art have any direct
> physical or psychic 
> relationship with each other, but I do think Art
> sees him as a kindred 
> spirit. More than that, I think Toug is a kind of
> stand-in for the real 
> Able, now in America.
> 
> One of the things that surprised me about Wizard was
> that we hear little 
> about Able. I think we get Toug instead: an
> exceptionally brave peasant kid 
> from the same area as Able, also taken by the Aelf &
> also delivered into a 
> strange and dangerous world ... Toug fights against
> great odds, is wounded, 
> fights on & is further wounded. I think we have to
> assume the same for Able 
> in America; we hear of him in America via Art's
> dreams mainly when he is 
> hospital after fighting hijackers, in an ambulance
> and so on.
> 
> Toug, unlike Art, is not a figure of destiny; no
> god-like beings have 
> moulded him for great tasks and he doesn't have
> "supernatural" powers. I 
> think the same would be true of Able in America, and
> though we don't know 
> the details I feel sure his experiences there
> parallel Toug's.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
> 


=====
http://www.sff.net/people/stilskin


		
__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Yahoo! Mail - Easier than ever with enhanced search. Learn more.
http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250

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