Prelude to Revision: Unity of Composition

[caper_est]

Is the tale one thing, or is it many? If it's many, how do they add up to one tale after all, and what does that mean for it?

Some stories are seamless - Terry Pratchett's later Discworld books are mostly like this: they charge right in, and don't stop until they come out the other side. Further along, covering the vast majority of books to some

Comments

[seawasp]

I'd say more that the *tales* in DK conclude, but the story of the *protagonists* is not concluded; there are large pieces of obvious story that have yet to come, but I think each individual tale is complete unto itself.

[caper_est]

Yes, bad phraseology on my part: I meant that they don't collectively conclude, but form a sort of series of beads on a definite arc, of which we equally definitely see only the first part.

If they weren't each complete in themselves, I don't think I could describe them as 'tales' at all - that would make DK more like a unitary novel, of the kind that implicitly expects a series. But it's their very self-completion that made me reach for DK as a good illustration of its kind.

If Schmitz's Telzey Amberdon tales were considered as a 'book' or higher-level tale - which is the form in which I eventually encountered them - I'd take them as a step between DK and Dying Earth: a genuine sequence, without much of a narrative arc at all beyond "stuff happens and has persistent consequences". A statically iterative Star Trek approach, where "stuff happens in one tale but seldom has consequences downstream" is, I suppose, one step beyond in the same direction. H'mmm!

[tamar_lindsay]

The sequence without much narrative arc beyond "stuff happens" is probably a picaresque novel (like Don Quixote, which only ended because the author wanted to prevent further unauthorized sequels and nobody had invented the prequel yet). There were a lot of those-- unending repetitious series with no resolution-- in the 1970s and 1980s.