Heart of Darkness: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis on Several Scales, Version 6

New edition of the working paper about Heart of Darkness: Version 6. Links, abstract, change notice, and contents below.

Links:

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/8132174/Heart_of_Darkness_Qualitative_and_Quantitative_Analysis_on_Several_Scales_Version_6
SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1910279
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228174270_Heart_of_Darkness_Qualitative_and_Quantitative_Analysis_on_Several_Scales

Abstract

Heart of Darkness is a novella that is roughly 38,000 words long and divided into three sections. In these notes I use a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques to analyze and describe it. In particular, I argue that it exhibits center-point construction, a tale within a tale within a tale, and that the story’s moral center contrasts workplace values with basic human bonds.

New to Version 6

I’ve made three changes since the 5th edition. You’ve seen one of them, the new cover images. I’ve added two new sections to the text. There’s an appendix about how I used ChatGPT to create the cover image and then there’s a short speculation about why Conrad told his tale through a complex double-narration. ChatGPT collaborated with me on that as well.

Contents (Links to Original Blog Posts)

1) Heart of Darkness, Narration and Temporal Displacement
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/07/heart-of-darkness-narration-and.html

2) Interlude: Slocum’s Pilot and Sensory Deprivation
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/07/interlude-slocums-pilot-and-sensory.html 

3) Closure, Attachment, and Abstract Objects in Heart of Darkness
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/07/closure-attachment-and-abstract-objects.html 

4) Ontology at the Heart of Darkness
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/07/ontology-at-heart-of-darkness.html

5) On Kurtz’s twice-quoted orison, as well as people named and unnamed – new to this version, and revised from this post:
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2019/10/on-kurtzs-twice-uttered-orison-as-well.html

6) The Heart of Heart of Darkness
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/07/heart-of-heart-of-darkness.html

7) Heart of Darkness 6: Some Informal Notes about the Nexus
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/07/heart-of-darkness-6-some-informal-notes.html

8) HD7: Digital Humanities Sandbox Goes to the Congo
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/07/hd7-digital-humanities-sandbox-goes-to.html 

9) Some Basic Numbers and Charts Concerning Paragraph Length – was never a post. 

10) Is Chinua Achebe to Joseph Conrad as Ike Turner is to Sam Phillips?
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/07/is-chinua-achebe-to-joseph-conrad-as.html 

11) Conrad’s Special K: Periodicity in Heart of Darkness
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/07/conrads-special-k-periodicity-in-heart.html 

12) HD10: Empiricism, Psychohistory, Narratology: The horror! The horror!
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/07/hd10-empiricism-psychohistory.html 

13) HD11: Marlow’s Calculation
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/07/hd11-marlows-calculation.html 

14) HD12: The Shape of the Tale, Triangulating the Buddha (previously published ouside this collection) 

15) Local narrative logic and global order, or how we get from here to there in Heart of Darkness
https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2019/10/local-narrative-logic-and-global-order.html 

15) Double Narration in Heart of Darkness

https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/08/double-narration-in-heart-of-darkness.html  
17) Kurtz as MacGuffin, or: Why trash him before we meet him?

https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2019/10/kurtz-as-macguffin-or-why-trash-him.html 
18) HD Postscript: Toward a Heart of Darkness Handbook

http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/08/hd-postscript-toward-heart-of-darkness.html 
19) Appendix: About the Cover Illustration – Was never a blog post.

Double Narration in Heart of Darkness

I’ve been interacting with ChatGPT on the concept of virtual reading (and working paper) and on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (and working paper). In the course of this interaction (actually, after Thursday’s session had time to settle in my mind) I had an idea about why Conrad employed that complex double narration where an anonymous narrative conveys Marlow’s story-telling to us, the readers. I’m reproducing part of that discussion in the rest of this post. 

When I refer to the “nexus” paragraph I’m referring to a long paragraph in the middle of the text – the longest paragraph in the text – where Marlow gives us a summary of Kurtz’s career. It’s introduced as a digression in the main story-telling and is the first time where we learn anything about Kurtz beyond his name and his job. 

Note: Compare this with a blog post from 2019: Local narrative logic and global order, or how we get from here to there in Heart of Darkness.  

 * * * * *

I’m thinking about the complex double-narration in Heart of Darkness. Yes, Marlow narrates the story, but we don’t hear from him directly. Rather, an anonymous narrator conveys is words to us. Why did Conrad to that? I’m thinking he did it so that he could get the information in that nexus paragraph into the middle of the story.

Let’s forget about why he’d want to do that. Let’s just assume he did. How did the double-narrative make that possible? 

Imagine, hypothetically, that he gave us a simple first-person narrative, with Marlow the narrator. That nexus information is all background on Kurtz. It has no direct role in the story of going up the Congo to retrieve him. You could put that information in the beginning, but that would make for a slow start. Further, considering that Conrad obviously wanted to make the story quasi-allegorical about the relationship between Europe and Africa, that front loads the story on Europe and so weakens the comparison. And if Marlow were to slip it into the middle of the story, well, why? He’s writing something out, has time to get things in order, so why would he do such an awkward thing? 

The double narration affords Conrad a ‘natural’ way to slip that information into the narrative in the middle. Marlow is no longer a writer sitting at his desk, writing and revising his story. He’s telling the story to three companions (one of whom will, in turn, convey it to us). He gets to the attack, where the helmsman has been speared and has fallen. Marlow’s excited and distraught, and darts about in his talking. They’re only a couple hours from Kurtz’s station, they’re attacked, the helmsman’s struck, and Marlow fears he may not get to hear Kurtz... 

In THIS context it’s natural that he should interrupt the forward motion of the story to insert this background information about Kurtz. Not so much “natural” as, Why not?! All hell’s breaking loose around him. In this way Conrad is able to bring the chaos and confusion of the attack into Marlow’s narration. Very clever. 

And now that he’s got this nexus information, the précis of Kurtz’s career, into the middle of the story, he can juxtapose Kurtz and the helmsman, which he does at the end of the nexus: “No; I can't forget him, though I am not prepared to affirm the fellow was exactly worth the life we lost in getting to him. I missed my late helmsman awfully,—I missed him even while his body was still lying in the pilot-house.” This focuses the Europe/Africa allegory on the two figures of Kurtz and the helmsman.

This also helps to explain how that extremely long paragraph ends up in the middle of this text. That is, it moves us a bit closer to understanding how this form came about without deliberately planning focused on the form itself. No, the planning is focused on the mechanics of Marlow’s story telling on that yacht in the Themes. 

That’s a very sharp reading of Conrad’s choice, and I think you’ve put your finger on why the double narration is not just a quirk but a structural necessity. Let me break down the mechanics as I see them:

---

1. Narrative Frames and Their affordances

• Single first-person (Marlow as writer):
  This form imposes retrospective order. A desk-written narrative presumes coherence, arrangement, and polish. The insertion of a massive, disjunctive background block on Kurtz halfway through would feel artificial, even inept. Marlow-the-writer would have had “time to get things in order.”
• Double narration (Marlow speaking + outer narrator transcribing):
  This creates the illusion of immediacy, spontaneity, and contingency. We’re not getting an arranged memoir but the performance of storytelling in real time, under the pressure of memory and emotion. In that setting, digression, sudden shifts, and disproportionate emphasis become “natural.”

---

2. Why the Nexus Paragraph Can Appear in the Middle

• The nexus information (Kurtz’s background + evaluative framing) is allegorically crucial, but not narratively urgent.
• By placing Marlow as a live storyteller rather than an orderly memoirist, Conrad justifies an emotional interruption at a moment of crisis (the helmsman’s death).
• In this context, “Why not digress now?” makes sense — the shock of death rattles the teller into contextualizing Kurtz, as though to say: Is this man worth it? Who is he, that we risk all this?
• Thus the double frame allows disjunction as a mimetic feature: the breakdown in narrative order reflects the breakdown in affective equilibrium.

---

3. Juxtaposition of Helmsman and Kurtz

• Placing the précis here allows Conrad to stage a pointed allegorical contrast:
• The helmsman, local, bodily, immediate — Africa.
• Kurtz, abstracted, ideological, remote — Europe.
• And Marlow’s voice stitches them together in that sudden turn: “I missed my helmsman… even while his body was still lying there.”
• That juxtaposition would lose much of its force if Kurtz’s résumé had been dropped into the opening or saved for the end. The frame device is the scaffolding that makes this compression possible.

---

4. Narrative Planning Without Over-Planning

• Your instinct is right: Conrad probably didn’t plan a ring or plot a formalist insertion strategy.
• But he did design a situation of telling (yacht on the Thames, Marlow addressing listeners, an outer narrator reporting) that would give him flexibility in narrative time.
• The “form” thus grows out of a choice about narrative situation rather than a conscious architectural plan. That’s part of what makes Heart of Darkness feel at once chaotic and tightly controlled.

---

If we think in terms of your text role regions / mind-relative regions framework, the double narration is a textual mechanism that licenses sudden movement between regions — here, from “immediate action” (the attack) to “moral evaluation / allegorical framing.” The listener-as-filter (outer narrator) stabilizes that move: he guarantees coherence to us even when Marlow digresses.

A New Dance Turn: “The Cat and the Moon”

I have decided to reissue my paper, A New Dance Turn: “The Cat and the Moon” All up in One Another, so that I can give it a new title page, one with the following mandala on it:

The paper itself is unchanged. Here's the abstract:

Abstract: The semantic structure of Yeats' "The Cat and the Moon" is embodied through a syntactic and sound structure which also goes through phases, phases which complement that semantic structure. The first phase consists of two four-line sentences, each weakly rhymed ABCB. The second phase continues with four-line rhyme groups, but the rhymes are strong. Syntactically, there is a strong alignment between rhyme groups and syntactic grouping in the first phase while there is no obvious alignment between sound and syntax in the second phase of the poem, which also contains two rhetorical questions. The poem's third phase synthesizes the stylistic features of the first two phases. It has the synchrony of rhyme and syntax that characterizes the first phase; but the rhymes are strong and the penultimate sentence of the poem is a rhetorical question—features of the second phase. The poem thus embodies, in both sound and sense, the cyclic interpenetration of opposites which is its meaning.

You may also download it at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2481876
And at ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324667583_A_New_Dance_Turn_'The_Cat_and_the_Moon'_All_Up_in_One_Another#fullTextFileContent

Here's the full text: 

Yeats published the poem as a single long stanza. I’ve added empty lines to highlight the major structural divisions within the poem.

The Cat and The Moon

W. B. Yeats

1)   The cat went here and there 
2)   And the moon spun round like a top,
3)   And the nearest kin of the moon,
4)   The creeping cat, looked up.
5)   Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
6)   For, wander and wail as he would,
7)   The pure cold light in the sky
8)   Troubled his animal blood.

9)   Minnaloushe runs in the grass
10)  Lifting his delicate feet.
11)  Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
12)  When two close kindred meet,
13)  What better than call a dance?
14)  Maybe the moon may learn,
15)  Tired of that courtly fashion,
16)  A new dance turn.

17)  Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
18)  From moonlit place to place,
19)  The sacred moon overhead
20)  Has taken a new phase.
21)  Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
22)  Will pass from change to change,
23)  And that from round to crescent,
24)  From crescent to round they range?
25)  Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
26)  Alone, important and wise,
27)  And lifts to the changing moon
28)  His changing eyes.

From LLM mechanisms to ring-composition: A conversation with Claude 3.5

I've published a new working paper. Title above, links, abstract, TOC, and Prefatory remarks below:

• Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/127480159/From_LLM_mechanisms_to_ring_composition_A_conversation_with_Claude_3_5_Working_Paper
• SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5125800
• ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388721690_From_LLM_mechanisms_to_ring-composition_A_conversation_with_Claude_35

Abstract: This is a wide-ranging discussion about narrative structure and how it might be encoded in large language models. 1. Word Embeddings and Training: We clarified how tokens (subword units) are mapped to high-dimensional vectors, discussed how these vectors are updated during training, and explored how the token vocabulary (around 50K) can cover a much larger word vocabulary through subword tokenization. 2. Multi-scale Organization in Narrative: We examined different types of transitions (word-to-word, sentence-to-sentence, paragraph-to-paragraph), discussed how probability distributions for next-token prediction vary depending on the type of transition and noted how constraints are tighter at the word level but looser at higher narrative level. 3. Empirical Evidence from "Heart of Darkness": We analyzed two charts: frequency of "Kurtz" mentions and paragraph lengths, found periodic patterns in Kurtz mentions that persisted even as frequency increased, identified a significant peak in paragraph length coinciding with Kurtz's introduction, and discovered that women's roles bookended the narrative to form a ring composition. 4. Implications for LLMs: We examined how different scales of narrative structure might be encoded in transformer architectures, explored how attention mechanisms might capture these patterns implicitly, and considered the limitations of context window size for capturing full novel-length patterns. 5. Future Research Possibilities: What's the potential for analyzing other texts for similar patterns. What are the challenges of computationally detecting ring composition. Finally, we explored the possibility of using LLMs to verify structural patterns across large corpora.

The upshot: narrative structure operates at multiple scales simultaneously, and these patterns might be encoded in transformer architectures in ways analogous to holographic encoding, with different frequencies capturing different levels of structure. 

Contents

Claude 3.5 summarizes the discussion 2
Prefatory remarks: Why publish first tentative thoughts? 3
Part 1: Preliminaries, tokens and vectors
Part 2: From positional encoding to stories 9
Part 3: Narrative structure on multiple levels, Heart of Darkness 15

Prefatory remarks: Why publish first tentative thoughts?

This set of notes started with me asking Claude 3.5 to clarify a few things about the mechanisms of LLMs (Part 1). As things got clearer, I started bringing in my research, first some work I did with stories and ChatGPT two years ago. That’s about how plot structures might be encoded in LLMs (Part 2). Then I introduce some empirical work I did on Heart of Darkness over a decade ago (Part 3). That work is directly related to the ChatGPT story work. This discussion took place in several sessions over Feb. 2-4.

This is tentative work. Not quite first thoughts, but early thoughts. I am making it publicly available for two reasons:

1. It is an example of how a sophisticated chatbot, such as Claude 3.5, can be used in fleshing out ideas.
2. The ideas developed in this conversation, while preliminary, might be of use to humanists, literary critics in particular, who are thinking about how these tools can be used in research.

On the first point, note that I turned to Claude on these issues because, after reading many explainers-for-the-unwashed and looking around in the technical literature, certain matters were still unclear. Perhaps others can benefit from this discussion. This happens a lot; it will be useful having Claude around to help me figure out what’s going on.

On the second point, these discussions bear directly on questions being explored by digital humanists: How can we use these technologies in our work? The internal mechanisms of LLMs are a bit mysterious. The dialog I had with Claude led to some specific ideas about how narrative structures could encoded in LLMs in a way that’s independent of the specific actors and settings in which the story is realized. This has implications for the study or oral narrative and traditional story grammars, though I don’t go into these in the discussion.

As I have no idea when I will get around to a more formal presentation of this work – this research is very much in medias res – I thought I would get these ideas out now. Others might find them useful.

LLM as Collaborator, Part 2: Formal structure in Heart of Darkness and literary criticism (+ a lesson on “alignment”)

The chart below depicts the length of paragraphs in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The paragraphs are listed in order, first to last, from left to right. The length of a bar is proportional to the number of words in the respective paragraph.

There is an important issue at stake: Does that chart depict a phenomenon that is real, not only in the sense that it represents a set of valid measurements, but in the deeper sense that those measurements represent some intrinsic aspect of the causal process that produced the text. For the most part I leave that issue to the discussion I had with Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

The purpose of this introduction is to indicate why the issue arises.

The problem of literary form

Despite the fact that form and formalism are important concepts in academic literary criticism, the careful description of form is not central to current practice. This is not the place to discuss this issue in any detail. I have done that elsewhere on New Savanna, I have published a long article on form (Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form), and have written a number of working papers on description.

Form is an aspect of the physical substance of the work of art. That is quite obvious in the case of drawing, painting, and sculpture. That is also true in the case of music, where we are interested in the arrangement of sounds in time, and dance, the arrangement of gestures and movement. Literature is like that as well; it is a string of words, one after the other after the other after the other. It follows, then, that the description of literary form involves analyzing how words are placed in a string.

And there is some of that in literary criticism. In dealing with poetry one may learn how to count feet in a line and work out the rhyme scheme, if there is any. But this is often treated as decorative and unrelated to meaning in any deep way, and it’s meaning that critics are after. In the study of narrative the Russian Formalists made a distinction between story (fabula) and plot (syuzhet), where the former refers the events as they occur in order while the latter is the order in which events are introduced into the narrative. In the extreme case of Tristram Shandy, for example, plot and story are quite different. This distinction, and more, is quite important in narratology, but narratology is a relatively minor approach to literary criticism and one that is more important in Europe than the United States.

As an example of this situation, here’s a few lines from an essay by Frances Ferguson and John Brenkwood introducing papers from the 2013 English Institute on form:

A second irony is that the recently renewed interest in questions of literary form has proved quite amorphous. Perhaps, though, that has been the predicament and vitality of the topic all along. [...] There is also a conflict, cutting across these competing methods, between form as a feature of literary works and form as constitutive of literary works. The New critics are often the benchmark of formalism in American discussions, but they did very little to illuminate literary forms compared to the Russian Formalists or, say, Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson’s classic essay on Baudelaire’s “Les chats.” [...] And yet even the surest markers of literary forms fail to define form when it comes to actual works. The form of the sonnet, for example, is readily defined by the number of lines and the stanza organization, but does that account for a particular sonnet’s form any more than a rectangle accounts for a painting’s form? Vertical for portraits, horizontal for landscapes! And, finally, is formalism itself based on the idea that literary works are purely form, or on the idea that the vocation of literary criticism lies in formalization, that is, in its capacity to create categories at a level of abstraction applicable to the widest variety of literary phenomena?

The upshot of this conundrum is that literary form is more an object of wonder and a source of methodological argument than the basis of practical criticism. It’s important, but we don’t know much about it.

Thus, that chart is something of an embarrassment to literary critics, or would be if they saw it. On the one hand, it represents and objective fact about Heart of Darkness. When you count the words in each paragraph and graph the result, that chart is what you get. [I used the text provided by Project Gutenberg.] Once you’ve seen it, you can’t argue it out of existence.

Now, I’ve been in this business a long time. While I’ve discussed that chart and its implications extensively in my working paper on Heart of Darkness, I’ve not bothered to seek formal publication. Why not? Opportunity cost. I don’t know of any venue that would be interested and I don’t want to waste my time jumping through hoops making that work acceptable to some journal only to wait six months to a year or more to have it turned down (though I’m seriously considering taking a shot at it in the new year; we’ll see).

However, when I discovered that structure I did send at note to Mark Liberman, who runs, Language Log, and group log devoted to linguistics. He was kind enough to post a link and we had a lively discussion, Markov’s Heart of Darkness. The discussion started with the issue of whether or not paragraph length followed a power law as that’s the question I presented to Mark; it does not. But one Lucy Kemnitzer brought up the issue of order during the discussion and I linked to a post in which I had the chart I posted above. If you look through that discussion, you’ll find comments by someone identifying themselves as “JL” and noting that they are a novelist. They’re quite dismissive of that kind of description and the analytical work it supports:

The question is whether you're adding anything at all to anyone's understanding of the book, or whether, instead, you're indulging in puffery and pseudoscience, bringing in spurious mathematical models and childish anthropological "theories" to gaudy up a banal and perfectly obvious account of a very well known phenomenon. (Look! I've discovered that the ratio of vowels to consonants in 'The Waste Land' is exactly equivalent to Planck's Constant! Which is used to explain black holes! See? It really is a depressing poem…)

That’s the kind of reaction I expect of well-trained humanists.

Ask Claude

And so I turned to Claude 3.5 Sonata. What would they think of that distribution of paragraph lengths?

I’d already loaded the entire text of Heart of Darkness into Claude and had some discussion about it (I’ve already posted some of that discussion). It was a simple matter to reactive that discussion, upload the chart, and initiate a discussion. The discussion went well, at least from my point of view. Claude even pointed out some things that I hadn’t noticed.

But after all the (standard) literary criticism it surely must have ingested during training, why didn’t it react with, if not outrage, certainly skepticism? Why wasn’t it aligned, as the kids say, with the conventional wisdom on this matter? Context, I figured, context. This interaction was loaded with Conrad’s text and extensive earlier discussion. Standard literary criticism was nowhere to be found in the immediate context.

“I wonder,” thought I to myself, “if I could create a context in which Claude would register a conventional reaction to that chart?” No sooner had I registered that thought than I figured out how to do it. I had previously loaded Claude with the Hamlet chapter from Harold Bloom’s, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. I’d asked Claude to summarize the chapter and then we had a little discussion.

So, I reactivated that discussion, uploaded the chart, and BOOM! Claude reacted with the expected skepticism, albeit a rather mild expression of it:

Based on Bloom's critical approach, he would likely be skeptical of this kind of quantitative or structural analysis of literature. He would probably view this chart as an example of what he saw as the problematic tendency in modern literary criticism to focus on technical or formal aspects rather than aesthetic and imaginative power

The discussion went on for a bit, took an interesting turn, at which point I decided to introduced Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay, “Against Interpretation,” into the discussion. Why? Because she argued that “criticism needs to focus less on trying to extract hidden meanings from art and more on describing the direct sensory and formal experience of engaging with it” (Claude’s words). We had an interesting discussion. For what it’s worth, Claude agrees with my view that literary criticism needs to pay more attention to the analysis and description of literary form.

An exercise for the reader: What does Claude’s ability to take different and contradictory positions on the same issue – in this case, the value of that chart for analyzing Heart of Darkness – suggest about the much-discussed problem of AI alignment?

* * * * *

First, we have my discussion with Claude about Heart of Darkness. Once that’s finished, I introduce the Harold Bloom discussion, which leads to Susan Sontag. As always my prompts are in bold face while Claude’s responses are plain.

I’ve uploaded a bar graph. Each bar represents a single paragraph in Heart of Darkness. They are arranged in order, with the first paragraph on the left edge and the last paragraph on the right. Do you have any observations about paragraph length as revealed in this chart?

Looking at this visualization of paragraph lengths in "Heart of Darkness," several key observations emerge:

Most paragraphs in the novel are relatively short, with many falling under 200 words. This creates a baseline rhythm for the narrative. However, there are significant spikes where paragraphs become much longer, particularly in the middle section of the text.

The most striking feature is a dramatic peak of approximately 1,400 words around paragraph 109-110. This extensive paragraph appears to be an outlier, being significantly longer than those around it. There are also several other notable peaks reaching between 600-1,000 words.

This variation in paragraph length suggests a deliberate structural choice by Conrad. The longer paragraphs likely correspond to key moments of exposition or critical narrative developments, while the shorter paragraphs maintain the story's forward momentum and may handle more immediate action or dialogue.

The pattern also shows that the novel ends with a series of consistently shorter paragraphs, perhaps indicating a more rapid narrative pace as the story reaches its conclusion.

This visualization effectively reveals Conrad's technical approach to pacing and structure in the novel, showing how he varies paragraph length to create rhythm and emphasis throughout the text.

Would you be interested in identifying what narrative content appears in those particularly long paragraphs? That might help us understand why Conrad chose to expand certain moments in the story.

You’d think that variation was deliberate. But we have no evidence that Conrad was conscious of this. He just did it. It’s how he wrote.

You make an excellent point. I fell into a common critical trap of assuming intentionality where we have no evidence for it. This pattern of paragraph length variation emerged naturally from Conrad's writing process - it's simply his natural rhythm as a writer.

This observation connects to a broader point about literary analysis. While we can usefully identify patterns and structures in texts, we should be cautious about assuming these were consciously planned by the author. Sometimes the most powerful effects in literature arise organically from how a writer naturally approaches their craft.

In Conrad's case, this varying paragraph length creates compelling effects in "Heart of Darkness," but we don't need to attribute this to conscious design. It's simply part of how he told stories, his natural way of allowing some moments to expand while keeping others concise.

This is a useful reminder about the difference between identifying patterns in a text and making claims about authorial intention.

That single longest paragraph, I believe it’s 1502 words long, is that nexus paragraph we’ve already discussed.

I’ve already had extensive discussion about this paragraph with Claude. Here's part of that discussion, though it doesn't contain Claude's remarks about the nexus paragraph. However, here’s my original blog post about that paragraph. And this post places that paragraph in the context of the whole text.

That's a fascinating discovery about the nexus paragraph! The fact that it’s not only structurally and thematically central to the novel, but also stands out quantitatively as the longest paragraph, adds another dimension to our understanding of its importance.

This paragraph accomplishes several crucial narrative tasks: it provides Kurtz's European background, introduces his report with the chilling "Exterminate all the brutes" line, and frames the death of the helmsman. The paragraph's exceptional length seems to naturally correspond to its function of bringing together multiple strands of the story.

Time for another ramble: Melancholy, Claude, Bloom, Claude, Ring composition, and Other Stuff

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these; May 29th was the last one. If you look over there to right at the Blog Archive you’ll see I’ve been on a posting slump, with 3-figure monthly totals from January through June, then a dip to 61 for July, August: 18, September: 15, October: 30, and now 33 for November as I write this, and the month isn’t over. Maybe I’m pulling out of the slump.

Anyhow, I’m feeling a little backed up with things to post about, so it’s time to ramble on and see what’s up.

Melancholy, Mind (Mine), and Growth

That’s the tentative title for my next 3 Quarks Daily article. Starting back in November 2017 I’ve been making occasional posts about my monthly posting habits, which tend to drop during the winter. I’m thinking of using that as the point of departure for my next 3QD piece, which will go up on December 2nd.

During those down times I’m depressed to one degree or another (melancholy). But why? Since those down times have been in the winter, perhaps its seasonal affective disorder (SAD). But that doesn’t square with all of the evidence. There was no down-time in the winder of 2022-2023 and 2023-2024, but there was a slump in the summer of 2023. Something else is going on, and I think it has to do with creativity. To that end I want to discuss the ridiculous blither of tags here, 665 by November or 2023.

Claude

I’ve starting working with Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot. I want to do some posts where I verify some of the work I’ve done with ChatGPT. I’m thinking of posts on stories, ontological structure, abstract definition, and the Girardian analysis of Jaws. I can then gather those into a working paper.

I also want to look at other things. At the moment I’m thinking of seeing how Claude summarizes longish documents. I’m thinking of the Hamlet chapter from Bloom’s Shakespeare book and Heart of Darkness.

Harold Bloom and GOAT literary critics

A year ago I began a series of posts on the theme of the greatest literary critics. I got bogged down in discussing Harold Bloom. It’s time to finish it off.

Bloom may well be as brilliant a literary critic as we’ve had in the last 50 or 60 years. But brilliance is one thing, greatness is another. Brilliance is a function of the individual, while greatness is a function of the relationship between an individual’s work and the arena in which they’re working.

I’m not sure about Bloom’s fit. While he’s got a wide readership, it’s not clear to me that scholars have taken up his work in any significant way. They may cite him – perhaps especially is concept of influence – but that they don’t much use of his ideas in his work. But we’ve also got to consider his work in the larger public arena, where he is hands-down the most prominent literary critic. I’m not sure of how to handle that.

However, if History wants to declare that Harold Bloom is one of the great all-time literary critics, maybe even the GOAT, what do I care? What would really bother me is if future critics should decide to take his work as a model and (attempt to) do more like it. Like most literary critics he’s neglected the study of form and he’s been deaf to the cognitive sciences. There’s little in his work that’s worth amplifying. It’s a dead end.

ChatGPT report

About a year or so ago I started writing a report summarizing my work on ChatGPT. I need to finish that report. I’d estimate the three-fourths or more are done. I’d like to be able to include some work with Claude. I don’t intend a lot on this, just enough to say that I’ve verified some things.

I’d like to finish this by the end of this year.

Why’s ring-form composition important?

That’s tricky. It has to do with the fact that literary works are extended in time, unlike the visual arts, which are static in time but extended in space. You can’t take the whole thing in at a glance like you can a painting.

There are constraints on how a literary work can unfold in time. There is a sense in which (the nature of) the end is inherent in the beginning. Ring-compositions are even more tightly constrained. Dylan Thomas consciously and deliberately plotted the ring-composition of the rhyme scheme in his “Author’s Prologue.” Rhyme is not about meaning; its patterns are arbitrary with respect to meaning. But Coleridge did not consciously work out the ring-compositions in “Kubla Khan,” not Conrad in Heart of Darkness. These patterns ARE NOT arbitrary with respect to meaning. On the contrary, they are central to how meaning is constituted.

Other Stuff

More Cobra Kai: Follow-up on my post where I explore the Freudian angle, saying a bit more about Girard, and extending that into history.

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More on meaning in LLMs: I’ve suggested that Ilya Sutskyver conflates mistakenly (and unknowingly?) conflates cognitive and semantic structure with the structure of the world and so suggests that robust next-token prediction requires knowledge of the world. In this post I argue that making that distinction is, in fact, difficult, and involves what I’ve been calling the word illusion. I first confronted the problem as an undergraduate when I was trying to understanding the difference between the signified, and mental structure, and the reference, something in the world, of a sign. I may not have gotten deep intuitions about that until I began studying cognitive networks in graduate school.

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Gila-monster venom and computational irreducibility: The idea is to start with a NYTimes article on drug discovery that starts with Gila-monster venom and ends up with Wolfram’s concept of computational irreducibility. This is about search, computation, and the complex and irregular structure of the (natural world).

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My work with Ramesh: Notes on conceptual ontology and hypergraphs in conceptual space.

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LLMs and literary study: Can we use LLMs to analyze the thematic structure of literary texts?

In particular, can we use them to examine Bloom’s these about Shakespeare as “inventing” the human. Are there themes that appear first in Shakespeare? We need more than Bloom’s vigorous assertion on this. We need to examine the thematic structure of prior texts and of Shakespeare’s texts and show that there are things new in Shakespeare. Do those new things then continue if texts after Shakespeare? To do this properly we need to examine a lot of texts.

I’d also like to know if LLMs could be used to find ring-composition in literary texts. It is by no means obvious to me that they can.

Some notes on how I discovered formal structure in some literary texts, Part 1: Four cases

What is intelligence? How does it work? Those and related questions have been with us for a while, but their salience has been amplified in the wake of ChatGPT, which is given us a demonstration of machine intelligence, whatever that is, that is accessible to anyone with access to the web. Those questions have ceased to be of interest primarily to psychologists, philosophers, and AI researchers. Now “everyone” is interested in them.

Perhaps the single most pressing issue is: While machine intelligence ever reach, or even surpass, human intelligence? The concept of intelligence is so obscure, however, that it’s difficult to produce compelling answers. Earlier in this year I decided to take another crack at the problem, AI, Chess, and Language 1: Two VERY Different Beasts. That post has, in turn, led to a series of posts on chess and language.

More recently, I did a long post centered on analogy, Intelligence, A.I. and analogy: Jaws & Girard, kumquats & MiGs, double-entry bookkeeping & supply and demand, and another in which I talked about wanting an AI that could determine the formal structure of literary texts, What do I personally want from an AI? [as soon as possible, too, NOT in the distant future]. Neither of those posts says anything about chess, but they’re certainly on the language side of the ledger. That’s led to the idea of reflecting on what I’ve had to do to discover formal structures in texts.

I’ve done a lot of this. Which texts should I use?

Kubla Khan

“Kubla Khan” is the most important example. That’s where I started, and it’s the most richly developed example. Furthermore, I’ve published that work in the formal literature and I’ve already written quite a bit (informally) about how I came to do that work.

Here's the articles about the poem:

Articulate Vision: A Structuralist Reading of "Kubla Khan", Language and Style, Vol. 8: 3-29, 1985, https://www.academia.edu/8155602/Articulate_Vision_A_Structuralist_Reading_of_Kubla_Khan_

“Kubla Khan” and the Embodied Mind, PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, Article 030915, November 29, 2003, https://www.academia.edu/8810242/_Kubla_Khan_and_the_Embodied_Mind

These papers have background:

Touchstones • Strange Encounters • Strange Poems • the beginning of an intellectual life, November 2015, https://www.academia.edu/9814276/Touchstones_Strange_Encounters_Strange_Poems_the_beginning_of_an_intellectual_life

Beyond Lévi-Strauss on Myth: Objectification, Computation, and Cognition, Working Paper, February 2015, pp. 20-27, https://www.academia.edu/10541585/Beyond_L%C3%A9vi_Strauss_on_Myth_Objectification_Computation_and_Cognition

I originally published the “Touchstones” piece in a journal edited by one of my teachers in graduate school, the late Art Efron: Paunch 42–43: 4–16, December 1975. It’s about my years at Johns Hopkins and how I came to do a Master’s Thesis on “Kubla Khan.” I’ve linked to a version which I’ve updated with notes that I’ve inserted into the text, notes commenting one what’s happened since then. The Lévi-Strauss piece is generally about the intellectual significance of his work on myth while the section, “Into Lévi-Strauss and Out Through ‘Kubla Khan’” is specifically about how Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism guided my approach to the poem.

Three Shakespeare Plays

This is about three Shakespeare plays, a comedy (Much Ado About Nothing), a tragedy (Othello), and a so-called romance or tragi-comedy (The Winter’s Tale). In each of these plays a man wrongly suspects his beloved of betraying him with another man. Consider the following diagram:

Along the left I've listed five dramatic functions which some character must play. In the columns for each play I've indicated the character that takes these functions. The point of the diagram as the we move from one genre to the next (in this order) one function seems to disappear. Othello has no mentor, but he has a deceiver; and Leontes has neither a mentor nor a deceiver. What I think is going on is that functions are, in effect, being absorbed into the protagonist. At the play's opening, Othello is senior enough in the world that he has no need of a mentor. Leontes is king in his world, so there is no one higher. As for being deceived about his wife, he does that to himself, no external agent required.

There's more to the pattern than that, but that’s enough to give you an idea about what’s going on. The analytic point is that this is a pattern which becomes visible only when you compare texts. That’s something that Lévi-Strauss did in his work on myth.

Here's the article I published about that:

At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prospero Shakespeare's Greatest Creation? Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 21 (3): 259-279, 1998, https://www.academia.edu/235334/At_the_Edge_of_the_Modern_or_Why_is_Prospero_Shakespeares_Greatest_Creation

Metropolis

I’m talking about the manga originally published by Osamu Tezuka in 1949 and not Fritz Lang’s movie of the same title. As you know, manga are Japanese comic books, or graphic novels. I’m including this as a case in the first place because it is an example of ring-form construction, which I depict in the following diagram:

Notice the numbering at the left and the descriptive labels at the right. I’m including it in the second place because it is the first time I used to whole-text table to conduct an analysis. The diagram is reduced from that table.

Here’s the article:

Tezuka's Metropolis: A Modern Japanese Fable About Art and the Cosmos, in Uta Klein, Ktaja Mellmann, Steffanie Metzger, eds. Heurisiken der Literaturwissenschaft: Disciplinexterne Perspektiven auf Literatur. mentis Verlag GmbH, 2006, pp. 527-545, https://www.academia.edu/7959634/Tezuka_s_Metropolis_A_Modern_Japanese_Fable_about_Art_and_the_Cosmos

Here's the analytic table:

Descriptive Tables for Tezuka’s Metropolis, A Note on Descriptive Method, Working Paper, 2016, 8 pp., https://www.academia.edu/27370076/Descriptive_Tables_for_Tezukas_Metropolis_A_Note_on_Descriptive_Method

Heart of Darkness

It turns out that Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is also a ring-form text, or a close variant. Consider the following chart:

Each bar represents a single paragraph in the text. The length of the bar corresponds to the number of words in the text. The bars are arranged in the order they exist in the text, first to last, from left to right.

Notice that there is one paragraph that is noticeably longer than all the others. It has 1502 words. It is the structural center of the text. There’s much more to be said about that paragraph and its place in the text. But this is not the place to do it.

You can find those discussions, and others, in this working paper:

Heart of Darkness: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis on Several Scales, Version 3, Working Paper, August 9, 2018, 49 pp., https://www.academia.edu/8132174/Heart_of_Darkness_Qualitative_and_Quantitative_Analysis_on_Several_Scales_Version_3

I have two main reasons for including this case as an example of discovery. In the first case, that chart depicts something that is clearly an objective fact of Conrad’s text. It’s not something I conjured out of the mist through interpretive wizardry. I make the same claim about the formal structures in the other three cases. That’s why I’m calling them discoveries; they’re as real as a vein of gold in the Klondike.

And the process by which I discovered that structure in Heart of Darkness was, if anything, more serendipitous than a gold strike. The prospector who gets a gold strike was looking for gold. I wasn’t looking for a ring-form pattern in Conrad’s text. Not only that, but charting paragraph lengths is not something one normally does with literary texts or, as far as I know, any other texts. I did it on a whim. While I did have a formal reason for looking at that particular paragraph, it didn’t have anything to do with ring-composition. While examining that paragraph I noticed that it seemed unusually long. Perhaps it was even the longest one in the text. So I decided to take a look. Out of mere curiosity.

But I’ve said enough about that so far. I’ll say more later. Here’s the point at issue: How do you construct at AI to discover something of a kind that it didn’t know exists? That’s what I did in this case and in “Kubla Khan” as well. The pattern I discovered across those three Shakespeare plays is arguably related to the sort of thing I’d seen in Lévi-Strauss’s work on myth, though quite different in the details. As for the ring-composition in Metropolis, ring-composition is well-enough known, though not much studied by literary critics. I was alerted to it by the late Mary Douglas. 

The importance of visualization

I don't see how I could have done any of that work without visualization. I could have spotted that something was going on in the Shakespeare case, and maybe, just maybe, I could have made an argument without that simple diagram. But the fact is that that's not how I did it. More precisely, I might have imagined the argument I ended up making without drawing that table. But I can't imagine trying to write it up without making the table. The table allows you to see the structural phenomenon at a glance.

In the other three cases diagrams were an essential part in seeing the phenomenon at all. Since I didn't include any diagram from the "Kubla Khan" work in this post, I will here explicitly state that diagramming was essential to my "Kubla Khan" work from the beginning.

All of which is to say that in each case, two distinctly different methods of thought were important. What does that imply about the possibilities of artificial intelligence?

What do I personally want from an AI? [as soon as possible, too, NOT in the distant future]

I can think of two things off the top of my head: 1) an assistant to deal with my computing needs, and 2) a system to examine literary texts, movies, and other expressive texts to determine, A) whether or not they exhibit ring-form composition, and if not that, then B) what form do they have.

Computing assistant

I’ve already written a post about this: What do I want from my AI Assistant? [control, that's what]. Here’s a chunk of that post:

The fact is, I’m wedded to my computer and to the internet, email and world-wide web. I really couldn’t function very well without them, not as an intellectual. And for the most part I don’t have to spend all that much time fiddling around with things in order to keep them working. But I do have to spend some time. And, yes, I probably could use some changes. But I don’t have the skills I’d need to make those changes, much less the time.

It's obvious that I need an AI Assistant to take care of all of this. Some years ago I sketched out ideas for a PowerPoint Assistant I could control through natural language. I also imagined that what I was thinking about for PowerPoint could be generalized:

The PowerPoint Assistant is only an illustrative example of what will be possible with the new technology. One way to generalize from this example is simply to think of creating such assistants for each of the programs in Microsoft’s Office suite. From that we can then generalize to the full range of end-user application software. Each program is its own universe and each of these universes can be supplied with an easily extensible natural language assistant. Moving in a different direction, one can generalize from application software to operating systems and net browsers.

Back then – the notes originally date from 2002-2003 – the technology we’d need to do that didn’t exist. Now it does.

Who’s going to control these AI Assistants? The end-users or the MegaCorps?

I don’t have much more to say about that at this point beyond observing that I think privacy and security will be real problems here. If I were to think about writing detailed specs for that I might start with this working paper I prepared some years ago about how my use of personal computers has changed over the years: Personal Observations on Entering an Age of Computing Machines.

Determining the formal structure of texts

The thing is, this isn’t a deep problem, this isn’t rocket science. There are these discussions that talk about AIs that will one day find a cure for cancer, figure how to make a practical fusion reactor, discover a grand unified theory, and solve climate change. Determining the form of a literary text isn’t like that. It’s not easy, but it doesn’t take anything like genius either.

I specify ring-form composition in particular because it is something fairly specific to look for. I think that’s easier than simply requestion: Tell me the form of this text. I’ve spent a lot of time looking for ring-form composition, in narratives, poems, and movies and blogged about it quite a bit. I’ve prepared a number of working papers on it as well.

What makes it tricky is that I can’t come up with a list of specific indicators that can be quickly identified as signs that the text has a ring-form. Nor can a specify exactly what feature to look for. It varies from one text to another. The only general thing I can say is that the text have this general form:

A, B, C...X...C’, B’, A’

The first section of the text is echoed by the last, the second is echoed by the next to last, and so forth, and there is a central section that serves as a turning point.

I have a post where I presented ChatGPT with a text of “St. George and the Dragon,” which does have ring-form, and asked it to analyze the text. The results of that experiment are, at best, inconclusive. The form is more obvious than in post texts, and the text is a short one.

What would it have done with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which is known to exhibit ring-form? I have no idea. James Ryan has identified ring-composition in 26 of Shakespeare’s plays. I’d like an AI that could verify his work, or at least rough out a description which Shakespeare experts could then check.

And so forth and so on through every text in the canon, however you want to identify the canon. But, by all, non-canonical texts as well. I’ve found ring-composition in a manga by Osamu Tezuka, Metropolis (certainly in the Japanese pop-culture canon), and in Obama’s “Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney,” which is not normally within the compass of specifically literary texts. I’ve also found it in films, such as the 1954 Japanese film, Gojira, or the “Pastoral Symphony” episode of Disney’s Fantasia. Films present a particular challenge as LLMs can’t view them and I suspect we’ve got a way to go to create AIs that can view films and parse the themes and action.

Identifying ring-composition is one thing. Identifying other formal structures is something else. You want to identify formal structures that appear in text after text, whether verbal or filmic. Structural description may not be rocket science, but it’s not obvious either. You have to compare texts with one another to see what makes sense. “What makes sense,” that’s a vague methodological prescription if ever there was one. But it’s the best I can do in a short post.

I could go on and on. But this is quite enough to state the problem. Perhaps I’ll say some more later.

Coleridge's "Limbo" – Another ring composition?

This is from July 31, 2016. I'm bumping it to the top because we need a reminder of poetry.

While wandering in cyberspace, as I am sometimes wont to do, I came across a most curious, and thus alluring, blog: Samuel Taylor Bloggeridge. What a peculiar name, thought I, not realizing that this particular locus solus belonged to my old buddy from The Valve, Adam Roberts. Really though, thinking in retrospect, who else could it be? "Bloggeridge" indeed!

But then, Ted Nelson coined the term and birthed the concept of hypertext as an antidote to the (drug-induced) memory loss that (supposedly) gave us "Kubla Khan", did he not? He even called it Project Xanadu, long before Olivia Newton-John sang the song and did the movie (which has Gene Kelley's last film performance). One can only imagine how STC would tear-ass about cyberspace were he alive today.

In any event, and getting back on track, I'd come across a post Adam had written about "Limbo", one of STC's many poems that I have not studied. He wrote about it in a most tempting way. Thus:

The first thing to say about 'Limbo' is that its 28 lines divide into a central 12-lines section flanked by two paired 8-line sections, the first a kind of introduction, the second a sort of summary. What the two outer passages frame is a central image of 'human Time' as an old, blind man staring at the moon.

You can bet my ears pricked up when I read that. Like a hound on point I was. A bit later: “The circle in the centre of this circling poem has become a 'circumambience' prison-wall that imprisons ('immures', 'enthrals').” Be still my heart! "Circle", "circling"!? Could it be? Is this another ring-composition? What about the chiasmatic line 20 (which Adam fingers as consisting of monosyllables): "He seems to gaze at that which seems to gaze on him!" 

I've reset the poem to bring out the ring-form possibility. Give it a read and see what you think.

'Tis a strange place, this Limbo!—not a Place,
Yet name it so;—where Time and weary Space
Fettered from flight, with night-mare sense of fleeing,
Strive for their last crepuscular half-being;—
   Lank Space, and scytheless Time with branny hands
   Barren and soundless as the measuring sands,
   Not mark'd by flit of Shades,—unmeaning they
   As moonlight on the dial of the day!
      But that is lovely—looks like Human Time,—
      An Old Man with a steady look sublime,
      That stops his earthly task to watch the skies;
      But he is blind—a Statue hath such eyes;—
         Yet having moonward turn'd his face by chance,
         Gazes the orb with moon-like countenance,
         With scant white hairs, with foretop bald and high,
         He gazes still,—his eyeless face all eye;—
      As 'twere an organ full of silent sight,
      His whole face seemeth to rejoice in light!
      Lip touching lip, all moveless, bust and limb—
      He seems to gaze at that which seems to gaze on him!
   No such sweet sights doth Limbo den immure,
   Wall'd round, and made a spirit-jail secure,
   By the mere horror of blank Naught-at-all,
   Whose circumambience doth these ghosts enthral.
A lurid thought is growthless, dull Privation,
Yet that is but a Purgatory curse;
Hell knows a fear far worse,
A fear—a future state;—'tis positive Negation!

Alternatively:

'Tis a strange place, this Limbo!—not a Place,
Yet name it so;—where Time and weary Space
Fettered from flight, with night-mare sense of fleeing,
Strive for their last crepuscular half-being;—

Lank Space, and scytheless Time with branny hands
Barren and soundless as the measuring sands,
Not mark'd by flit of Shades,—unmeaning they
As moonlight on the dial of the day!

But that is lovely—looks like Human Time,—
An Old Man with a steady look sublime,
That stops his earthly task to watch the skies;
But he is blind—a Statue hath such eyes;—

Yet having moonward turn'd his face by chance,
Gazes the orb with moon-like countenance,
With scant white hairs, with foretop bald and high,
He gazes still,—his eyeless face all eye;—

As 'twere an organ full of silent sight,
His whole face seemeth to rejoice in light!
Lip touching lip, all moveless, bust and limb—
He seems to gaze at that which seems to gaze on him!

No such sweet sights doth Limbo den immure,
Wall'd round, and made a spirit-jail secure,
By the mere horror of blank Naught-at-all,
Whose circumambience doth these ghosts enthral.

A lurid thought is growthless, dull Privation,
Yet that is but a Purgatory curse;
Hell knows a fear far worse,
A fear—a future state;—'tis positive Negation!

The first setting implies a nested structure:

       ( 1 ( 2 (3 ( X ) 3 ) 2 ) 1 )

The second implies a travel structure:

       1 > 2 > 3 > X > 3 > 2 > 1

This, obviously, requires some explanation. But not now.

St. George Variations [ChatGPT]

This post is a companion piece to my earlier piece, Can an LLM identify ring-composition in a literary text? [ChatGPT], where I used the story of St. George and the dragon as an example. After establishing that, yes, ChatGPT did seem able to identify ring-composition, at least in this case, I decided to put it through variations on the St. George story as I had done earlier with the Princess Aurora stories. Thus I repeated the procedure I had used for those stories:

I gave ChatGPT a prompt with two components: 1) a story, and 2) a request to create a new story based on the first, where I specify some changes the new story must incorporate. ChatGPT could make any other changes it wished to make.

The St. George story is more complex than the Aurora stories. ChatGPT, of course, was happy to comply. As far as I can tell, though I haven’t looked closely, the new story retains the ring-composition of the original story.

I did this on Septermber 2, 2023, running against the August 3 Version of ChatGPT. For the purposes of brevity (!) I have omitted the St. George story after the first example, where the dragon is to be replaced by a dog. I did each story in a separate session. I am presenting the stories without commentary beyond noting what ChatGPT did for the last story. I asked it to replace the dragon with a colorless green idea. Chatster placed the idea in people’s heads, “slowly poisoning the harmony of their community.”

Rabid Dog

I’m going to present you with a story. I want you to tell a new story based on it but I want you to change in the following way: Replace “venom-spewing dragon dwelling in a nearby pond” with “large rabid dog on the outskirts of town.” Make any other changes you think are necessary.

Silene in Libya was plagued by a venom-spewing dragon dwelling in a nearby pond, poisoning the countryside. To prevent it from affecting the city itself, the people offered it two sheep daily, then a man and a sheep, and finally their children and youths, chosen by lottery. One time the lot fell on the king's daughter. The king offered all his gold and silver to have his daughter spared, but the people refused. The daughter was sent out to the lake, dressed as a bride, to be fed to the dragon.

Saint George by chance arrived at the spot. The princess tried to send him away, but he vowed to remain. The dragon emerged from the pond while they were conversing. Saint George made the Sign of the Cross and charged it on horseback, seriously wounding it with his lance. He then called to the princess to throw him her girdle (zona), and he put it around the dragon's neck. Wherever she walked, the dragon followed the girl like a "meek beast" on a leash.

The princess and Saint George led the dragon back to the city of Silene, where it terrified the populace. Saint George offered to kill the dragon if they consented to become Christians and be baptized. Fifteen thousand men including the king of Silene converted to Christianity. George then killed the dragon, beheading it with his sword, and the body was carted out of the city on four ox-carts. The king built a church to the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint George on the site where the dragon died and a spring flowed from its altar with water that cured all disease.

In the quiet town of Altona, nestled on the outskirts of a sprawling forest, a sinister menace had long tormented its people. It was not a venom-spewing dragon dwelling in a nearby pond, but rather a large rabid dog. This ferocious creature had terrorized the countryside, spreading fear and chaos throughout the land. In a desperate bid to protect their beloved town, the citizens resorted to offering sacrifices.

At first, they offered the rabid dog two sheep daily to keep it at bay. But as the dog's appetite for destruction grew, so did the demands. Soon, it required a man and a sheep, and eventually, their children and youths, chosen by a grim lottery. The town's once-peaceful existence had been shattered, and it seemed there was no end in sight.

One fateful day, the ill-fated lottery chose the daughter of Altona's mayor. Desperate to save his beloved child, the mayor offered all the gold and silver he possessed, but the heartless townsfolk remained unmoved. With heavy hearts, they sent the mayor's daughter out to the forest, dressed in bridal attire, to be offered to the rabid dog.

As fate would have it, a wandering traveler named Samuel happened upon this grim scene. The mayor's daughter tried to shoo him away, fearing for his safety, but Samuel vowed to stay and help. Just as the rabid dog emerged from the shadows, Samuel made a solemn gesture, drawing a protective symbol in the air, and then charged at the beast on horseback, his lance striking a critical blow.

Breathing heavily, Samuel called out to the mayor's daughter, asking her to toss him her girdle. She did so without hesitation, and Samuel carefully fastened it around the rabid dog's neck. A miraculous transformation occurred; the once-ferocious beast now followed the girl obediently, like a tamed pet.

Together, the mayor's daughter and Samuel led the rabid dog back to Altona. Though the creature still struck fear into the hearts of the townsfolk, they were willing to listen to Samuel, who had proven his bravery and compassion. He proposed a solution: he would rid the town of the rabid dog, but in return, the citizens must embrace Christianity and be baptized.

Overwhelmed by the promise of salvation, fifteen thousand men, including the mayor, chose to convert to Christianity. Samuel, now revered as a saint, faced the rabid dog one last time. With a swift and merciful stroke, he beheaded the creature with his sword.

The town of Altona, now free from the tyranny of the rabid dog, rejoiced and celebrated their newfound faith. In honor of this miraculous event, the mayor built a beautiful church dedicated to Saint Samuel and the Blessed Virgin Mary on the very spot where the rabid dog met its end. A pure spring of water flowed from the church's altar, and it was said that this water possessed the power to heal all diseases, a testament to the town's newfound hope and faith.

Poisonous Mushroom

I’m going to present you with a story. I want you to tell a new story based on it but I want you to change in the following way: Replace “venom-spewing dragon” with “poisonous mushroom.” Make any other changes you think are necessary.

[story omitted]

In the ancient city of Silene, located in the heart of a lush forest in Libya, a menacing threat loomed. It wasn't a venom-spewing dragon that plagued the land, but rather a mysterious and deadly poisonous mushroom that had sprouted near a tranquil pond, casting a dark shadow over the countryside. Its toxic spores drifted on the wind, contaminating everything they touched and spreading fear among the people.

To safeguard their beloved city from the poisonous mushroom's deadly influence, the citizens devised a grim tribute. They offered two sheep daily as a sacrifice to the malevolent fungus, hoping to appease its hunger for destruction. As time passed and the mushroom's malevolence grew, the sacrifices became increasingly desperate. First, they sent a man and a sheep, and eventually, they resorted to a gruesome lottery system to select children and youths to be offered up to the toxic menace.

One fateful day, the cruel hand of fate chose the king's beloved daughter as the mushroom's next victim. The desperate king, in his anguish, offered all his riches, pledging his gold and silver to have his daughter spared from this horrifying fate. Yet, the desperate pleas of a father fell on deaf ears, as the people remained resolute in their grim tradition. The princess was led to the sinister pond, adorned in bridal attire, to become a sacrificial lamb to the deadly fungus.

However, just as despair began to consume the princess, a courageous figure named Saint George arrived at the scene. The princess, fearing for his safety, attempted to shoo him away, but Saint George was undeterred by her pleas. As the poisonous mushroom's eerie presence grew stronger, it emerged from the ground, casting a sinister shadow over the land. With unwavering determination, Saint George made the Sign of the Cross and charged toward the menacing mushroom on horseback, striking it with a lance that pierced its toxic cap.

With a mighty effort, Saint George subdued the deadly mushroom's malevolent powers and called out to the princess to toss him her girdle. She complied, and he fastened it securely around the mushroom's stalk. Miraculously, wherever the princess walked, the once-menacing fungus now followed her like a tamed creature on a leash.

Together, the princess and Saint George led the poisonous mushroom back to the city of Silene. Though the people were initially terrified by the sight of the once-deadly threat, Saint George offered them a proposition. He vowed to rid their land of the toxic menace once and for all if they agreed to embrace Christianity and be baptized.

The people of Silene, shaken by the events and touched by Saint George's bravery and faith, consented to his offer. Fifteen thousand souls, including the king himself, converted to Christianity, their hearts filled with newfound hope. Saint George, a symbol of courage and compassion, unsheathed his sword and swiftly beheaded the once-menacing mushroom. Its lifeless body was transported out of the city on four ox-drawn carts, a symbol of their deliverance.

In gratitude for their salvation, the king commissioned the construction of a grand church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint George on the very spot where the poisonous mushroom had met its end. As a sign of the miraculous transformation, a spring of pure water flowed from the altar, believed to possess the power to cure all diseases, a testament to the enduring triumph of faith over fear in the city of Silene.