(urth) The Sorcerer's House Questions (*Major Spoilers*)

[David Stockhoff]

Can we put this together with John's post and call this "the reification of narrative desire"?

Any story is, naturally, true and false at the same time, in exactly that way. Storytellers are hopeful liars. Readers are hopeful consumers of lies. And so on. Sorcerers take it one step further. 

That's fantasy (entertainment).
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Message: 1
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2010 08:14:27 -0700 (PDT)
From: Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) The Sorcerer's House Questions (*Major Spoilers*)
Message-ID: <106850.13854.qm at web37606.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
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I'm with you on this.

I think a big part of it has to do with how the last few chapters start to talk about the nature of what a sorcerer does. Earlier, I mentioned how similar Martha's description of magic words are to Bax's description of lying. A lot of it comes down to controlling context and influencing how people will receive what gets said. (I.e., Bax has no idea what the magic words mean, but he can "sell" them, and that makes him a powerful sorcerer. Even the triannulus seems to come down to interpretation (the pictures are quite abstract, apparently, and Emlyn and Bax see either a fox or a wolf, depending on what they want...and Emlyn even suggests that sometimes it's hard to tell when the spell is finished since it often depends on symbols).

But if being a sorcerer is being a powerful story-teller, so powerful that you can make lies (or at least empty words) have real power, then perhaps it is possible that the story could be both true and false at the same time. And that's an idea I really like.