From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" 
Subject: RE: (urth) 5HC: Shadow Children in the Lupiverse?
Date: Mon, 6 May 2002 10:25:24 -0700

Josh G. points out that the "brown book" stories...

> ... are not just fiction: they are myth. They express patterns
> of history in easily understood and transmissible terms.

Well, yeah. I guess my point is that they are not _factual_ within
the universe-of-discourse. And, naturally, one of the running 
theories regarding "A Story by 'John V. Marsch'" is that it's a
mythic account of the coming of the settlers, from an Annese
point of view. 

With an ambiguity fairly typical of the book, the story, seen as a 
myth, credits non-human (non-abo) local beings - the Shadow Children 
- with having caused the settlers to find and arrive at Ste-Anne; 
but such myths frequently provide some culturally meaningful 
explanations for events and objects otherwise incomprehensible from 
within the cultural context. We cannot know whether the Shadow 
Children ever actually existed on Ste-Anne; nor, if they did, 
whether they were responsible for the non-discovery of the two worlds
until that time; nor whether this is a 'real' Annese myth of the
invasion, or something "John V. Marsch"/VRT has made up from whole
cloth, or some combination; nor, whatever it is, why he's done it.
This list has by now offered any number of speculations as to why
VRT might have written a mythologized autobiography, transcribed a 
real myth, or created a synthetic myth; each explanation creates
further problems with other aspects of 5HC. 

The Le Guin "uncertainty" analogy is good. I think an even better
analogy might be to Godel ... any reasonably consistent set of 
postulates you come up with regarding 5HC will leave some "unprovable 
truths," i.e., aspects of the book that you can't explain without
invoking further postulates, and ultimately you need to bring in 
postulates inconsistent with ones already in place.

> 'The Story Of The Student And His Son' is (among many other
> things) the story of the Monitor and the Virginia (the Merrimac:
> from the US civil conflict of the 1860's) overlaid upon the story
> of Theseus.

Yes, we discussed this a few weeks ago. I observed that the loser
ruled over a Land of Virgins, i.e., Virginia.


> The one about the wolves and 'Fish and Frog' is (again, among many
> other things) an interplanetary war overlaid on the founding myth
> of Rome.

Not to mention the stories of Mowgli (whose name, Kipling tells us,
means "naked frog") and Moses...


> And in what we are please to call 'our world' the story of
> Alexander gets overlaid upon the story of Gilgamesh.

I'm afraid I'm blanking on this.


--Blattid


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