Dead Mules

[aevogt]

I got a post from one of my Yahoo groups about a mini documentary featureing Harriet and RJ that was posted just this evening.  It's about 15 minutes long and I think was his last interview before his passing.

 

According to some of those interviewed, no wrioting can be considered "Southern Writing" unless it features at least a few dead mules.

 

Much to his apparent chagrin, RJ has never written a dead mule into his work so his own words were, paraphrasing "In the prologue of AMoL, I managed to insert a couple of dead mules".

 

This tells me that, the prologue at least, was completed before he jumped the Great Boa. 

 

I don't own a great many examples of "Southern Literature" but I have a few Faulkner volumes I haven't read since college and once I get a free day or so, I'm going to skim them to see if there are any dead mules therin.

 

I just hope one of those dead mules in the prologue of AMOL turns out to be Bela.

 

[Corbett]

That is some funny stuff. I hope that you are right and this means that the prologe is done and we will see it soon.

[Leopoled Boothe]

I just hope one of those dead mules in the prologue of AMOL turns out to be Bela.

 

 

C'mon now whad could you possibly have against Bela?  Besides Bela is not a mule she is a horse.

[Majsju]

This does by no means necessarily mean the prologue was completed. RJs prologues have quite a few POVs in them, and he only had to write one of them in order to find a home for his ead mules.

[Guest leebarr]

Bela can not be killed off in the last book. Bela is the only animal besides Lan's horse to make it though 11 books. Even Hopper got killed in the begining

[Raeyn]

*points to the news board*  Jason posted the little documentary there too :)

 

And you know - I don't remember a dead mule in anything else RJ wrote.  You'd've thought one would have made its way into the Fallon trilogy, but eh!

[Dbob]

I got a post from one of my Yahoo groups about a mini documentary featureing Harriet and RJ that was posted just this evening.  It's about 15 minutes long and I think was his last interview before his passing.

 

According to some of those interviewed, no wrioting can be considered "Southern Writing" unless it features at least a few dead mules.

 

Much to his apparent chagrin, RJ has never written a dead mule into his work so his own words were, paraphrasing "In the prologue of AMoL, I managed to insert a couple of dead mules".

 

This tells me that, the prologue at least, was completed before he jumped the Great Boa. 

 

I don't own a great many examples of "Southern Literature" but I have a few Faulkner volumes I haven't read since college and once I get a free day or so, I'm going to skim them to see if there are any dead mules therin.

 

I just hope one of those dead mules in the prologue of AMOL turns out to be Bela.

 

 

<i>William Faulkner's "Mule in the Yard" (1950; incorporated as chapter 16 of The Town, 1957) relates the progress of an insurance fraud conducted by a member of the Snopes family and an accomplice named Hait, in which numerous mules are sacrificed for false claims of accidental death: "teams and small droves of his stock would escape from the fenced pasture where he kept them and, tied one to another with sometimes quite new hemp rope (and which item Snopes included in the subsequent claim), would be annihilated by freight trains on the same blind curve which was to be the scene of Hait's exit from this world" (252). Hait's death in this enterprise leads his widow, much later, to shoot a Snopes mule in vengeance (see # 9). </i>

 

[aevogt]

*points to the news board*  Jason posted the little documentary there too :)

 

And you know - I don't remember a dead mule in anything else RJ wrote.  You'd've thought one would have made its way into the Fallon trilogy, but eh!

 

To Jason, I apologise, I meant to type "Posted here just this evening" to draw everyone's attention to it but had a bald moment.

[Jonn]

I just hope one of those dead mules in the prologue of AMOL turns out to be Bela.

 

 

C'mon now whad could you possibly have against Bela?  Besides Bela is not a mule she is a horse.

 

I personally have nothing against Bela. I do wish to murder the Bela category of jokes though...

[aevogt]

I'm with Jonn there.  It's not about Bela per se.  I just want everyone to have to admit that it's just a shaggy little horse and when RJ said RAFO, he was yanking our collective chains.

 

I've never met him, more's the pity, but in every interview I've seen, this one included, he has that glint in his eye that says he has a joke no one else knows.

[Snowy Dawn]

``C'mon now whad could you possibly have against Bela?  Besides Bela is not a mule she is a horse.''

 

And Bela is the only horse that Siuan can safely ride (barely). Siuan is, to me at least, one of the most interesting characters in the WoT. And we last see her, in KoD, having almost fallen off Bela, looking back at Gareth Bryne as he rides off having just escorted her to the Aes Sedai tents in the middle of the rebel camp, with Romanda looking on wondering what is going, unable to see a matter of serious mutual affection right in front of her, and despite the fact that she has just been reading the story of Gaidal Cain and Birgitte Silverbow. [And never mind that she little suspects has actually met the real Birgitte in the person of the foul-mouthed warder of the Daughter-Heir of Andor.]

[Snowy Dawn]

``but in every interview I've seen, this one included, he has that glint in his eye that says he has a joke no one else knows.''

 

And the books, as I just noted above vis-a-vis Romanda, are full of little jokes at the expense of his characters. RJ had a real talent for O'Henry-like twists. One of my favorites is the following passage from the first chapter (``Fanning the Sparks'') of <i>The Fires of Heaven</i>:

 

  ``He would fight no more wars, but it was too late for House Bryne. There had been too many wars, too many battles. He was the last of the blood. No wife, no son, no daughter. The line ended with him. All things had to end; the Wheel of Time turned.''

 

This, mind you, as he is setting of in pursuit of ``Mara Tomanes'', unable to get a pair of intense blue eyes out of his memory. He does not know, nor does the reader at this point, that in few months he will be commanding an army of tens of thousands laying siege to Tar Valon, nor that House Bryne will have an heir after all, whose mother will be the former Amyrlin, Siuan Sanche, and the which heir, one suspects, will grow up in the White Tower, with her father the High Captain of the Tower Guard, having led the same in the Last Battle. I realize that these last bits are speculative, but I think that anyone who has read the series thus far will find them plausible. Egwene will surely make Lord Bryne head of the Tower Guard if the rebels win, which means that he will lead the Tower's forces at TG.

 

How Rand will cope with having five Great Captains, plus Rhuarc and the Chiefs, all together as his military commanders, remains to be seen. (Mat will replace Pedron Niall, of course, as one of the five; but how will they react to having this young man among them who is plainly a more brilliant general than they?) He got along well enough with Davram Bashere, it would seem, in drawing up the plans for the capture of the city of Illian, but I suspect with the other four taken together, there is rather a lot of ego in play. Then again, having seen how good Mat is, Tuon may decide that she wants her husband commanding the Seanchan forces, and make this one of the conditions of a truce. Then again, Mat has, as Robert Frost wrote, ``miles to go and promises to keep'', most particularly the one to go into the land of the Aelfinn and Eelfinn with Thom and Jain Farstrider, to rescue Moiraine.

[aevogt]

Snowy Dawn, good insight into Gareth Bryne.  I'd completely missed that little nugget until you pointed it out.