Venator's dialogue about Kenmuir working for a Lunarian "Venture" is interrupted by Venator's thought:
"Venture, Venator, passed through him. What an ironic similarity." (p. 327)
Poul Anderson's characters act, converse and reflect but their reflections are usually designed to summarize background information for the benefit of the reader! Venator's fleeting comparison of "Venture" with "Venator" is a brief exception. Anderson, like nearly every other author of fictional narratives, does not present Joycean "stream of consciousness." To this extent, a text written to tell a story fails to reflect experience. People often speak, and presumably also think, incoherently, for example leaving sentences unfinished. A text written to express a stream of consciousness becomes incomprehensible and has to be interpreted as if it had been written in another language. We do not want to read texts like this all the time but it is worthwhile to reflect on the differences between lives as lived and life as represented in conventional fiction.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And these reflections on Anderson's abilities as a writer is as good a place as any in which to quote the first paragraph of Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull's Preface to their THE LORD OF THE RINGS: A READER'S COMPANION (Houghton Mifflin, 2005, page xi): "THE LORD OF THE RINGS is a masterpiece of storytelling, and needs no assistance to entertain those sensitive to its qualities. Millions of readers have embraced its special blend of fantasy and adventure, its richness of language, its exploration of universal questions of life and death, friendship and love, duty and heroism, perseverance and sacrifice, the lust for war and the desire for peace, for more than fifty years unaided by 'enchiridia' like the present book. One might say, as Tolkien did of the Appendices of his great work, that those who enjoy THE LORD OF THE RINGS as an 'heroic romance' only, without further explanation, will very properly neglect this volume. And yet, like all great works of literature, THE LORD OF THE RINGS repays close scrutiny with deeper understanding and appreciation, and to that end many of its readers may after all welcome assistance to some degree. It is a complicated work, with questions of content, vocabulary, antecedents, and variant texts. And it is unusual in that its setting, characters, and events continued to acquire new facets within the author's imagination as long as he lived."
I was immediately reminded of how much that Hammond and Scull wrote here applies to the works of Poul Anderson. Albeit, in a more diffused way than that of Tolkien, because Anderson, unlike the perfectionist author of LOTR, was able to complete and publish more of his works. Like THE LORD OF THE RINGS, a vast number of the works of Anderson rewards intense scrutiny on many fronts: universal questions or issues, analyses of "...content, vocabulary, antecedents, and variant texts," etc.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
I should have illustrated my comments above with at least one example from the works of Anderson how it pays the reader to give close attention to his texts. Back in August I was rereading the Gregg Press edition of A KNIGHTS OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS and I tried to stay alert to textual anomalies or curiosities. One example I noticed was in Chapter VI, as Flandry was studying a text about the planet Diomedes: "In endless variations around the planet, the same dream is being played." I thought that word "dream" did not truly fit the context, so, since I have copies of he October and December 1974 issues of the science fiction magazine WORLDS OF IF, containing the first publication of KNIGHT, I checked to see what that same text had there. And this is what I found: "In endless variations around the planet, the same drama is being played." Note that, DRAMA was what the magazine text used, not "dream." Since "drama" makes more sense than "dream" in this context, I concluded "dream" was an error, one of those mysterious misprints which seems to slip into every text.
I don't have a copy of Baen Books CAPTAIN SIR DOMINIC FLANDRY, containing some of the stories and novels about Flandry. Does this part of Chapter VI of KNIGHT has either "drama" or "dream"? I consider this a good example of the value and usefulness of paying close attention to Anderson's texts.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Baen Books' SIR DOMINIC FLANDRY: THE LAST KNIGHT OF TERRA has "drama" on p. 427.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Oops! I got the Baen Books' title for this collection wrong! But since the Baem text for A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS also uses "drama" for this part of Chapter VI, that strengthens my conviction "drama" is the correct reading, not "dream."
Baen Books' sAGA OF TECHNIC CIVILIZATION seems to have become the standard edition for Anderson's Technic Civilization stories. But other texts should be consulted in cases of doubt.
Ad astra! Sean
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