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

Thomas Bitterman tom at bitterman.net
Mon Apr 19 12:57:23 PDT 2010


On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 11:07 AM, John Watkins <john.watkins04 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Maybe the point of the story is narrative desire.  In college, a professor
> asked a class I was in if anyone believed that Trystero was "real" within
> the world of The Crying of Lot 49.  I was one of the ones who did, and when
> asked to explain why, I sort of blurted "Because it's a better story."
>

I thought Trystero was real, too.  It's not even clear what it could mean
for a fictional entity to be thinking about something that wasn't real.  But
this is starting to get real confusing.

If Bax is a con man who made up all the fantastic elements, then the story
> is prosaic, dull, and flat.
>

I don't find it such.  If lying and sorcery are the same thing, then Bax is
truly a powerful sorcerer.  He fooled not just a bunch of fictional
characters, but readers in the real world, too.


> But maybe there's a Chesteronian idea at work as well, which is that
> stories that are *compelling *are more likely to be true--that human
> beings naturally seek to order things into coherent and interesting
> narratives because we think that such narratives best help us to make sense
> of the world.
>

Could you explain this further?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20100419/034c7319/attachment-0004.htm>


More information about the Urth mailing list