"Gene Wolfe - Endangered Species" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

The Other Dead Man 377
The Most Beautiful Woman on the World 400
The Tale of the Rose and the Nightingale
(And What Came of It) 415
Silhouette 445



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1
Introduction

AT this point it is traditional to state dogmatically that every
short story must show a beginning, a middle, and an
ending-the lash employed by editors and other critics to
flog writers. And it is true enough that every story should,
although it is not of much use to know it. Authors (and they
are very rare) who commit stories lacking one of the three
necessities always believe the missing element present; and
the truth is that a good story must have much more than
that.

It must have a voice that is not purposelessly changed (as
that of the typical leader in "When I Was Ming the Merci-
less"), at least one character (the madman who composes "My
Book," for example), and at least one event to narrate, though
in a few of these stories you may have to search carefully to
find it. Most important, it must have a reader, which is the
requirement most frequently overlooked. The same critics
who spend hundreds of pages discussing various peculiarities
of the author's supposed nature often devote none to that
much more significant person, the reader for whom he wrote.
I do not say this in jest, merely to entertain you; it is a failure
that disqualifies a great deal of head-scratching and hypoth-
esizing. It amounts to saying that the letter is more important
than its recipient, the signal more important than the chang-
ing image created from it, the bait more important than the
fish. It is, of course, a totalitarian error, born of the classroom;
it springs from the habitual professorial demand that the
assigned material be read and his opinion of it be accepted
without question.

But stories are far older than any classroom. They came
to be at a time when the storyteller knew his (more correctly
her, for the first were almost certainly women) audience thor-
oughly, and was not in the least averse to altering his nar-
ration to fit it. The hearer (every true reader hears the tale
in his mind's ear) is more central than the monstrous beast
slain on the other side of the mountain, or the castle upon
the hill of glass, or the mirror beyond which Gene's sister