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From: "Alice Turner" <akt@attglobal.net> Subject: (urth) Narratives Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1999 23:07:16 Daniel, -The Sound and the Fury-, which I read in college, had long ago occured to me as something that might have influenced Wolfe, but only wrt -Fifth Head- (and we have detected other influences there too, rather spectacularly that of Proust [first novella], certainly not a modernist in the same sense). I'm interested, but not convinced, at your bringing it up with NS. Will have to noodle that over. The experimentation with different forms of storytelling is, of course, a huge attraction in the NS series. You bring up "The Boy Called Frog," and I remind you that the principal godfather of that story was Kipling, who told Mowgli's story as "linked tales," not a novel--it too "bounces all over the place" and I remember that, reading it as a child, I was bored and somewhat saddened by the "grown-up" parts. I'll bet all of us love (as much as I do) the recognizable (yet altered) folk-tale origins of the tales told at the Pelerine camp (well, 17's tale doesn't quite fit--well, yes, it does, actually, in its curious way). And the Theseus tale, "The Student and His Son," is a take on the original that could never have worked as a "real" short story in a magazine, but is unforgetable in place. He abandons this altogether in LS, which trades off different narrations in an effective but conventional way (Wm. Gibson does this very well, usually using four different points of view in sequence; Wolfe is not so formal). At the end, we learn that an "author" attempting to give an overview is involved; this technique is quite common to historical novels where the author needs to be in several places at one time. And in SS, so far, we stick with Horn, and are likely to continue to do so unless, as in the Soldier books, someone else has to take over temporarily. So each series is differently told. I miss those interspersed stories, now that I think of them. Though OBW is a terrific tale! -alga *More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/