Synchronicity or shared worlds or something in art

luka

Well-known member
You've got the Arthurian mythos and the larger body of Romance that Don Quixote is riffing on.
 

luka

Well-known member
All the various different stage sets and the stock characters that act upon them.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Wow, lots of responses - lots of good responses in fact - there. Surprised me cos I wasn't sure if I'd made it clear enough what I was asking. Anyway, gonna read through it in more detail and try and respond to bits of it throughout the day.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Film and television especially use this shorthand to avoid exposition. They rely on our prior knowledge and experience.
More and more this has moved to a kind of meta level I think, where not only do they know that we will recognise the location and characters, but sometimes they use it to skip scenes - we know they will have an argument, we know that that guy is dead etc Depending on the film/book whatever and its level of sophistication, they expect you to fill in bigger and (seemingly) less obvious gaps. But surely anything of that nature does depend on acknowledging that however modern or whatever the film is, some bits are - effectively - cliches that you can skip through yourself. Maybe more charitably they are fast forwarding through the obvious bits so they can concentrate on truly new stuff, I dunno.
That's a bit different to what I was talking about in fact but you made me think of it.
 

luka

Well-known member
I think Burroughs does this in his rapid switching of scenes and rotating of characters. He barely even sketches them but we know exactly where we are and who we are with.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Victorian Britain and its fantastic steampunk counterpart. Gas lamps. Horse and carriage. Fog of course. Industry. Jack the Ripper.
I remember reading a sort of speculative essay by Kim Newman the film critic about whether it was possible that Dracula was in fact the person (vampire) responsible for the ripper murders. Did the times match up, was the method of killing plausible etc? I think this kind of thinking that inspired him to write a sort of alternative world Victorian vampire story - although that wasn't at all the plot of what emerged.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
It's funny, you listed a load of things and I recognise them, and yet, to pick an example, the sea say, I've read Melville and I've read Conrad, but what else goes in there? I mean you have Treasure Island I guess, not quite the same, and later you have Master and Commander etc I suppose (though I never read it) but really I feel as though the whole body of work has kinda melted away and is represented by Melville and Conrad and a few others, and a lot of the other stuff becomes just background.... kinda those books are the stars and the others are just the space between them, they have to exist so you can see the others but no-one actually looks at them.
 

luka

Well-known member
I sea what you mean. I guess the other stuff gets erased by time. The boys adventure stories and so on. We still have boys adventure stories of course, but they're about doing time in a columbian prison or being a football hooligan in the '80s rather than about being in the merchant navy
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I mean it's obvious in a way, only the good stuff survives (or the popular etc). There is only room for a few archetypes in each archetype. But yeah merchant navy, as soon as you say that, I picture so many things; steam or sail, salt on the face, shining seas, Caribbean storms, Chinese junks and so on. Of course there are modern takes on this - James Clavell, David Mitchell etc but these are very much in the "inspired by" group. I don't want to say post-modern but probably that's Mitchell at least.
I mean, to be honest I don't really know what a junk or a clipper or whatever is.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Malay deckhands. South sea islanders.
Mulatto able seamen etc in fact I remember one of the Swallows and Amazons books (which I LOVED as a child) called something like Missee Lee an (almost certainly massively racist) story in which they get mixed up with some kind of Chinese pirate lady thing.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Missee Lee is the tenth book of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series of children's books, set in 1930s China. The Swallows and Amazons are on a round-the-world trip with Captain Flint aboard the schooner Wild Cat. After the Wild Cat sinks, they escape in the boats Swallow and Amazon, but are separated in a storm. Both dinghies eventually end up in the lair of the Three Island pirates—Chang, Woo and Lee—where they are held prisoner by the unusual Missee Lee, the leader of the Three Island pirates.
The book, published in 1941, is considered one of the metafictional books in the series, along with Peter Duck and perhaps Great Northern?
Hmm, I wonder what was metafictional about it? I must have missed that when I was seven.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
good thread. was just thinking this was probably a major part of why i loved the sandman so much when i read it as a kid. it was the first thing i'd read that embraced this idea of instantly familiar, archetypal worlds that each contain many stories.

not only do certain shared worlds fade over time, what you might think of as "child" worlds also appear. there are some genres of fiction where you could make a genealogy tree of settings. e.g. tolkien > d&d > mmorpg fantasy.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
peripheral, "riders on the storm" america. serial killers, drifters, motels, strip clubs, christian fundamentalist cults, ufos.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Good post rich. It made me think of robert altman, with what you were saying about the overlapping dialogue and so on. You might enjoy 3 women if you have not already seen it. Everyone sez nashville is his best film but i thought it was crap. Mccabe and mrs miller and the long goodbye also very good. In fact, it strikes me you might very much like the detective in long goodbye, he seems like you.
I've seen Nashville and McCabe and Mrs Miller, not sure about 3 Women.. I will have to double-check.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Detective like me in the Long Goodbye... I really can't remember, is it Elliot Gould? I need to watch again.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
a lot of different ones around japan in the west. edo period japan with samurai and castles, late 20th century bladerunner japan, and most recently the japan of "slice of life" manga: densely packed houses, ramen stands, high school students in uniform, cute cartoon animals, bright colors, and pristine skies. the later being, maybe, a sort of answer to white picket fence stepford america.
 
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