The Sixth Conversation Thread

[Clio]

Question 2: what examples do you know of of this, dating from before, say, 1970?

This is really another not-quite example, and how well it fits depends on your definition of 'commentary,' but there are the works of Virgilius Maro Grammaticus.

[alynnidalar]

Sal, do you have any post-1970 examples? There's a lot of books I can think of that do extensive footnotes for humor (Discworld and the Bartimaeus Trilogy immediately come to mind), but I'm not sure if that's the sort of thing you mean, or if you mean something more like The Princess Bride, where the text is claimed to be quotations from and summaries of a (fictional) longer text, with running commentary and criticism.

[elemtilas]

Namárië! Nai hiruvalyë Valimar!

R.I.P. C.J.R.T.

[Salmoneus]

Question 2: what examples do you know of of this, dating from before, say, 1970?

I’d say The Iron Heel by Jack London, published in 1901 or 1904. An althist fiction wherein some historian from the future reads the diary of some woman who was married to what the historian’s society considers a hero with all the attendant commentary, added details, and explanations of how the diary was found and what happened to the people mentioned in it.

Thank you! I was thinking that around that era that sort of thing must have happened, but couldn't think of exact examples...

[Salmoneus]

Sal, do you have any post-1970 examples? There's a lot of books I can think of that do extensive footnotes for humor (Discworld and the Bartimaeus Trilogy immediately come to mind), but I'm not sure if that's the sort of thing you mean, or if you mean something more like The Princess Bride, where the text is claimed to be quotations from and summaries of a (fictional) longer text, with running commentary and criticism.

Well, background: I'm trying to write my review of Pale Fire. The structure, like literally everythign in the book, is claimed to be insanely radical and unprecedented and a landmark in literature, but to me it didn't feel that unusual. But I couldn't think of many other examples of it, particular those from the same or earlier eras (other than Borges).

Pale Fire is structured as a set of scholarly notes on a poem. There's a brief introduction, then a few dozen pages of poem, and then the rest of it is a series of endnotes (which in reality have almost nothing to do with the poem). So there's an internal text (the poem) and an external text (the notes on the poem).

Now, there are many novels with this internal/external structure, but in most of them the external structure is very small (the old "here's a story I heard!" framing story) or else the internal structure is very small (the old "by the way, here's the full text of the song they were singing!" thing). It's relatively unusual to have both of them be substantial.


One later example of this would be Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus, composed of three sections, the first two each being one text and the third being a collage of shorter texts; in the third section, the first two sections are commented upon as texts (though that's not all that happens). The Princess Bride probably would indeed qualify - although it's set up as a traditional "occasional commentary on text" story, the commentary is, as you mention, so extensive that it probably qualifies here, particularly as the framing story is itself very extensive (complete, in later editions, with a further framing story about the new edition). A different sort of approach is Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, in which the main narrative chapters are interspliced with a series of other texts - history and folkore from the world, the diary of another character, and anthropological essays by researchers. The main narrative doesn't directly focus on these texts, but it does mention them. At the other extreme, Lem wrote a series of books that consist entirely of reviews and descriptions of other books that don't actually exist. And another variation is found in Priest's The Affirmation, which consists of two texts, each written by the same character but set in different worlds, each of which claims to document a time in which that character was writing the other text (while trying to instead write the text describing this), so that neither text has certain ontological priority (however, neither text goes into detail about the other text in the way that Pale Fire's commentary section does). A later version, closer to Pale Fire, is Danielewski's House of Leaves, which consists primarily of an academic study of a documentary, excerpts of which appear in transcript, and which is in turn commented on by the narrator of the frame story, who discovers that document. A similarly extreme approach is found in Pavic's A Dictionary of the Khazars, which contains three different, contradictory encyclopaedias, the entries inter-referencing, and a framing story about those texts - the novel itself appears in two different versions.


The idea of novels made up of one or more texts linked together by a commenting frame story was very common in the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly in SF&F (where authors felt they needed a frame story to justify and distances themselves from the obvious 'lies' in their stories). Dracula, for example, is a series of texts compiled by one of the characters in the story (Mina), during the course of the story. But I couldn't think of any where that framing story was actually extensive and important, rather than just an excuse for the main story.

One older predecessor is Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner - the sinner's diary only makes up the second half of the book, with the first half being a lengthy introduction by an anonymous editor, a century later, detailing the actual known facts of the case (the editor returns at the end, and mentions Hogg himself).

[vampireshark]

I guess here's a good place to mention that I'll be moving in a little less than two months: I got a job as a postdoc in the Netherlands! Stuff'll be similar-ish to what I've been doing as a Ph.D. student/postdoc here in Luxembourg, but different enough to be quite a fun and exciting challenge. Plus, this'll be the sixth country I'll be living in, so...

[Salmoneus]

Oh? Which part?

[vampireshark]

Oh? Which part?

Wageningen, which is right next to Arnhem and also not far from Utrecht.

[Lambuzhao]

Namárië! Nai hiruvalyë Valimar!

R.I.P. C.J.R.T.

YES - Madrigal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzwVNxVxe24

I hope he caught that hoary vessel unto the Seventh Age…

[Salmoneus]

Oh? Which part?

Wageningen, which is right next to Arnhem and also not far from Utrecht.

Ah, OK. Not been that way much, although I seem to remember spending some time on the Arnhem ring road system. Utrecht is nice.

[sangi39]

Long lives His Holiness! The difficult decision has been made to say goodbye to the ancient one, one last time.

At the grand old age of 12, he's followed me round for just over a decade, from Bournemouth, to Sheffield, down to Bedforshire and back up to Yorkshire, sometimes fat, sometimes a little thinner, from hand-fed, to chasing down swarms of locusts, back to hand-fed, but always looking down on everyone and everything around him with an air of superiority, which was rightfully deserved.

His tank being empty will be an odd sight, but he's had a good run. I hope he enjoyed it. I know I have.

(credit to my ex-wife, who took this photo of His Holiness on his first day in Sheffield, all the way back in January 2010)

[sangi39]

Unlike when Kyu (the far-too-young leopard gecko) died, I know, deep down, I did the best for His Holiness that I could. 12 years is, as far as I've been able to gather, a pretty long time for a Bearded Dragon. And, as morbid as this might seem to some, hopefully he won't spend a year in the bottom drawer of my freezer.


(When Kyu died, I ended up blaming myself for problems that were... inflicted upon him... before I got him. He was in my freezer for a year before I could bury him)

[qwed117]

I'm sorry

[sangi39]

I'm sorry

Thank you.

I really do think he had a great run. He's seemingly struggled the last couple of years, but it's the last few months that have made me think that he's reached the point of "too much".

I've reached the point of no return, though, and I have to hope that the point at which I have chosen for his life to end really is the best time for his life to end (since I can't exactly ask him). But with him seemingly running on muscle memory (he didn't seem to be eating because he was hungry, more than he was eating because that's the response his jaw made to a specific stimulus), it just seemed like he wasn't really "living" any more. He was just... carrying on. I didn't want that from him. I wanted him to thrive. Not "survive".

[zyma]

I guess here's a good place to mention that I'll be moving in a little less than two months: I got a job as a postdoc in the Netherlands! Stuff'll be similar-ish to what I've been doing as a Ph.D. student/postdoc here in Luxembourg, but different enough to be quite a fun and exciting challenge. Plus, this'll be the sixth country I'll be living in, so...

Congratulations!

---

Long lives His Holiness! The difficult decision has been made to say goodbye to the ancient one, one last time.

At the grand old age of 12, he's followed me round for just over a decade, from Bournemouth, to Sheffield, down to Bedforshire and back up to Yorkshire, sometimes fat, sometimes a little thinner, from hand-fed, to chasing down swarms of locusts, back to hand-fed, but always looking down on everyone and everything around him with an air of superiority, which was rightfully deserved.

His tank being empty will be an odd sight, but he's had a good run. I hope he enjoyed it. I know I have.

(credit to my ex-wife, who took this photo of His Holiness on his first day in Sheffield, all the way back in January 2010)

Spoiler:

Oh no, I'm so sorry.

[Dormouse559]

I really do think he had a great run. He's seemingly struggled the last couple of years, but it's the last few months that have made me think that he's reached the point of "too much".

I've reached the point of no return, though, and I have to hope that the point at which I have chosen for his life to end really is the best time for his life to end (since I can't exactly ask him). But with him seemingly running on muscle memory (he didn't seem to be eating because he was hungry, more than he was eating because that's the response his jaw made to a specific stimulus), it just seemed like he wasn't really "living" any more. He was just... carrying on. I didn't want that from him. I wanted him to thrive. Not "survive".

You're doing the best you can with an extremely difficult decision. That's all anyone can ask for.

[DesEsseintes]

...

I’m terribly sorry to hear about your dragon, sangi.

[Salmoneus]

My sympathies. I honestly think this may be the hardest thing a lot of people will go through. I've had beloved relatives die, and I've had pets put down, and the latter is, for me, far, far more painful. I cared more about the relatives, of course - but that was just what happened, and I couldn't do anything about it. I'm sad. But with pets, having them put down is something you actively do, and feel responsible for, and second-guess. So I'm not just sad but guilty.
Indeed, even when you don't have them put down, you're so completely involved in their welfare that you're likely to second-guess and blame yourself for what you must have done wrong. Whereas other humans - well, most of the time, they look after themselves. If they have the wrong diet and develop heart disease, that's kind of on them, sad though it may be. A pet has the wrong diet, though, and it's on you. So for me, it's a really horrible thing.

[nothing, of course, compared to having a child die, or various other situations where you do feel responsible for another person's death. But most of us, fortunately, will never have to go through that.]

[alynnidalar]

Ah, sangi, that's so hard. I'll add my sympathies to those the others have already expressed (more eloquently). I've enjoyed seeing pictures and hearing about His Holiness over the years!

[sangi39]

My sympathies. I honestly think this may be the hardest thing a lot of people will go through. I've had beloved relatives die, and I've had pets put down, and the latter is, for me, far, far more painful. I cared more about the relatives, of course - but that was just what happened, and I couldn't do anything about it. I'm sad. But with pets, having them put down is something you actively do, and feel responsible for, and second-guess. So I'm not just sad but guilty.
Indeed, even when you don't have them put down, you're so completely involved in their welfare that you're likely to second-guess and blame yourself for what you must have done wrong. Whereas other humans - well, most of the time, they look after themselves. If they have the wrong diet and develop heart disease, that's kind of on them, sad though it may be. A pet has the wrong diet, though, and it's on you. So for me, it's a really horrible thing.

[nothing, of course, compared to having a child die, or various other situations where you do feel responsible for another person's death. But most of us, fortunately, will never have to go through that.]

Yeah, I think you're right. Choosing to have a pet put down is something you actively have to do, so it's almost as if it gives time for the grief to hit earlier and makes the whole process seem so much more... definite. And then, like you said, you have to carry on living knowing that you made that choice on behalf of a being that you were directly involved in and cared for for most of, if not all of, its life. So I guess there's the added guilt of doing something that you would otherwise consider to be "harm" in order to "help" them (I suspect there's at least some moments of "this is murder" involved). And then there's the near-constant worry that it's actually your fault.

I'd wonder to what extent people have these feelings when confronted with euthanasia, in circumstances where they're permitted to take part in the process, especially in the case of a close family member, and then one who you've had to actively care for for some period towards the end.

But, yeah, I've had relatives die (my grandma, who was basically my favourite family member) died almost a decade ago now and that "hurt" less than the four pets that I've had to see of since.