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This is a remarkable passage to me.
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He occupies in this passage every subject position of the fairy tale:
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the nurse, the hounds and the king.
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He's the nurse recognizing the beloved child.
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He's the king after her, and the hounds "really" after her.
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At the same time, I think we feel the freshness of
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this prose, and we feel the humor of it, the self-parody.
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So, even though he is counting on us to be seduced by the romantic language,
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that incantatory trance of
,
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there is a certain way in which it's refreshed for us, like when he says,
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"The twenty-five years I have lived since then tapered to a palpitating
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point and vanished."