From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy@siebel.com>
Subject: RE: (whorl) Roach on Mantis on Wombat on TBOTSS and fanfic
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 16:33:03 

Am I the only one who occasionally wonders if Horn had a brother
named Hardart? I thought so.

---

Okay, Mantis: I think you've made your point with the little table,
i.e., "it's all fiction here, what is it _there_." Which, of course,
relates back to my discusson of "J. Random Bluvian's struggle to
understand the facts of what happened in those early days of the
colony."

Your description of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books & their 
continuations is excellent analogy, as far as it goes; the problem
being that I don't think it adequately covers the situation. 
I would suggest that the idea of "a biography in novel form" would
not occur to J. Random Bluvian (at least a JRB not too far removed
in time from Silk, Horn, and Co.) ... the concept of "the novel"
does not appear to be in their vocabulary. Made-up stories, yes.
But I don't think the distinction between "fact" and "fiction" we
make today, and which is constantly questioned by those pesky pomos, 
is a distinction inherent to our minds or the way we deal with 
texts. Writing a book about a real person or event and making up
the details -- what's odd about that? Nothing; I suspect that the
modern idea of fact in texts is really a product of the Lutheran
revolt; Scriptural inerrancy was a natural and necessary concommitant
of _sola Scriptura_, and has influenced the way we look at "non-
fiction" texts in general (just as most of the techniques of 
modern literary criticism have evolved from Scriptural studies).

Scusi. I'm rambling a bit.

> If you are going to argue that TBOTLS is, within its universe,
> strict BIOGRAPHY as opposed to BIOGRAPHY IN NOVEL FORM 
> (`"biography" is not the same as "fiction"') then by all means,
> make your argument.

I'd far rather argue that there is no evidence that this
distinction exists in (that corner of) the Lupiverse. The
Neither Horn nor his sprats seem to think that there's anything
odd or wrong with filling in the details as best they can; they
don't particularly try to hide the fact that they've done it,
and go to some effort to explain how they've gone about it.
They don't seem to perceive the modernist absolute distinction
between "fact" and "fiction"; rather, they see a continuity
running from "this is true because I was there and saw it,"
to "I spoke to someone who was there," to "I heard about it
from a friend" to "well, this is how it probably went down."

--The Blatt from the Id


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