Heteronym
New Member
Horace Walpole.
A brilliant politician and witty observer of his time, his achievements include: writing enough letters to fill over 40 volumes of enormous value to historians; causing a personal rift between Rousseau and Hume which involved almost every intellectual of the time (Rousseau’s Dog is a must); building his own Gothic mansion and then inventing the literary genre to go with it.
The kindest thing I can say about The Castle of Otranto is that its imitators – Radcliffe, Beckford, Maturin – made up for its poor quality.
So it was with suspicion that I began Hieroglyphic Tales, a short-story collection which Walpole claimed was even weirder than his novel. Weirder it is, but it’s also infinitely better, funnier, more imaginative and more modern. Walpole says he wrote them in reaction to the novels and history books of his time, which had no imagination. The preface, which claims the stories were written before the creation of the world, sets the tone of this collection in which nonsense, fantasy, paradox and horror abound.
There’s one story that puts a new spin on Scheherazade; one bout a king wanting to marry a princess who doesn’t exist to a man who is dead; one about a girl who inherits a flying elephant; one about a man who eats a foetus by mistake; one about a Chinese emperor who looks for a bride with the same name as her father; and one that mocks the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict.
The stories are straight from the surrealist movement. Three other aspects make Hieroglyphic Tales a very modern book: the mock preface, which has been imitated ad infinitum; the idea of printing a long-lost book; and the fake footnotes, which Borges so aptly used.
A brilliant politician and witty observer of his time, his achievements include: writing enough letters to fill over 40 volumes of enormous value to historians; causing a personal rift between Rousseau and Hume which involved almost every intellectual of the time (Rousseau’s Dog is a must); building his own Gothic mansion and then inventing the literary genre to go with it.
The kindest thing I can say about The Castle of Otranto is that its imitators – Radcliffe, Beckford, Maturin – made up for its poor quality.
So it was with suspicion that I began Hieroglyphic Tales, a short-story collection which Walpole claimed was even weirder than his novel. Weirder it is, but it’s also infinitely better, funnier, more imaginative and more modern. Walpole says he wrote them in reaction to the novels and history books of his time, which had no imagination. The preface, which claims the stories were written before the creation of the world, sets the tone of this collection in which nonsense, fantasy, paradox and horror abound.
There’s one story that puts a new spin on Scheherazade; one bout a king wanting to marry a princess who doesn’t exist to a man who is dead; one about a girl who inherits a flying elephant; one about a man who eats a foetus by mistake; one about a Chinese emperor who looks for a bride with the same name as her father; and one that mocks the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict.
The stories are straight from the surrealist movement. Three other aspects make Hieroglyphic Tales a very modern book: the mock preface, which has been imitated ad infinitum; the idea of printing a long-lost book; and the fake footnotes, which Borges so aptly used.