Posted by Russell Letson on July 13, 1999 at 08:33:24:
(Mistakenly tried to post this via my e-mailer yesterday:)
Terry wrote, in part:
>But with Vance, you gotta earn your stripes, earn your way in >life and deserve what you get and not merely be born into it.
Whatever Vance's attitudes toward equal opportunity (a phrase I doubt he would ever use without spitting) and the virtues of making one's own way in the world, he does use what might be called the disinheritance motif quite a bit. The first example that comes to mind is *Trullion*, in which one of the issues is who will inherit the old homestead. Of course, Glinnes Hulden winds up having to work (or play) to regain his inheritance, so maybe we're back to a work ethic after all. If I recall correctly, there's a heritage/inheritance theme in *Marune* as well. I suspect there are others as well.
But JV writes out of the romance tradition (going back to Appolonius of Rhodes and Malory rather than Barbara Cartland), and heritage/inheritance is one of the mainstays of that genre--as are journeys to exotic lands, mysterious orphans, willful damsels, and heroes-who-put-things-right. So all this could just be Jack using the materials *he* has inherited from the tradition, rather than some psycho-socio-political parable-making. On the third (and gripping) hand, why *this* subset of motifs from the range of possibilities available to the romancer? Artists chose the materials that interest them, aesthetically, politically, intellectually--or monetarily, for that matter. Figuring which set of appeals is operating in Vance's work at any given moment calls for careful reading and a light hand with the ideology-labeler.