Ultan, borges

Maru Dubshinki · 02 Feb 2005, 19:30 · from 2005-February.txt.gz

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From: marudubshinki at gmail.com (Maru Dubshinki)
Date: Wed Feb  2 19:30:49 2005
Subject: (urth) Ultan, borges
Message-ID: <f5238c305020219304d87f3e2 at mail.gmail.com>

I know that Ultan, the blind librarian of New sun, is related to
Borges all too clearly, and that his haunting speech is something
Borges himself might well have written, if he dared to write something
so unobfuscatedly autobiographically.  But the style is not Borges,
nor Wolfe's, in my humble opinion.
Recently, re-reading The Picture of Dorian Gray, about half-way
through is a chapter which is a litany of strange, but beautiful
things Gray devoted himself to as an aesthete, and those listings and
comments all strike me inescapably as being of the same vein as Ultan,
though it did not occur to me recently, despite both passages
lingering long in my mind.
Furthermore, I was told that  part of teh reason 'Gray' was a flawed
masterpiece was Wilde's resorts to French 'Symbolistes' games in the
middle of the book. I think it was referring to those chapters which
so impressed me in 'Gray', and by extension of Wolfe's.
Unfortunately, I know nothing of the French Symbolistes, and Internets
searches reveal too little.
Can anyone here trace that passage's essence beyond a Catholic orphan,
a blind Argentinian, and a debauched Englishman?

~Maru
Microsoft delenda est.

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