Re: Nine Stories
Camille Scaysbrook (the_globe@hotmail.com)
Mon, 18 Oct 1999 05:36:58 -0700 (PDT)
Jim wrote:
>But the stories...like most good stories I've read...don't lend
themselves to
>cut and dried analysis very easily. In Laughing Man, for example, the
only
>parallel I saw between the story told on the bus and the narrative action
>itself (what was happening to the storyteller) was emotional -- the
>children's suspense and worry about The Laughing Man was reflective of
the
>storytellers worry about his relationship. The death of the relationship
was
>parallel to the death of the Laughing Man. This story may be a
commentary on
>art itself -- metafiction, of sorts.
Yes, that is exactly what I was hoping to imply. But I like the idea that
you have drawn out of the emotional rather than factual truth running in
parallel in TLM, because I think it's something that rings very true for
all of JDS's fiction. You could even say that towards the end it almost
*has* no factual truth - seven year olds talking like college professors,
weird flashes of insight and foresight ... and yes, it's definitely
metafiction, and anyone who doesn't know what that term means should go
look it up straight away, because I think that we could consider all the
Glass stories, as well as several of the 9 stories, as a very complex
example of metafiction. Never realised what a proto-postmodernist JDS was
til I joined this list. Quentin Tarantino apparently based the structure of
`Pulp Fiction' on the way the Glass stories interwove to make a
multi-faceted whole, if that's not a mathematic proof (:
Camille
verona_beach@hotpop.com
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