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From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Nicholas=20Gevers?= <vermoulian@yahoo.com> Subject: (urth) Tales Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1999 03:12:17 Reading the fascinating discussion of narrative forms and strategies on the list, two points occur to me: 1) Someone (I think alga) states that "The Tale of the Student and His Son" would not work as a short story in a magazine, but is very effective in its NEW SUN context. This may well be true, but the "Tale" did in fact appear as an independent story, in THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, October 1981. 2) I've speculated previously that THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN IS "The Brown Book" (in addition to all the other things that Sev's narrative can be taken to be). In other words, NEW SUN is an anthology of folk tales, myths, and legends, woven into a narrative which for all its modernist first-person presentation is sufficiently episodic that each set-piece adventure of Sev's still functions as a tale in itself, conforming to some recognizable pattern (rituals of initiation, confronting the ogre, overcoming captivity, whatever). It's been frequently remarked that the five Brown Book tales Wolfe has given us in full each tell Sev's story in some compressed, generally allegorical, form; but I think this logic runs deeper: just as Wolfe's essay "Books in THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN" implies that Sev brings Thecla a copy of THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN in SHADOW, so Sev is in a sense carrying a copy of his own narrative with him throughout his wanderings on Urth. ===== __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Bid and sell for free at http://auctions.yahoo.com *More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/