[lit-ideas] Re: (No References, etc.)

John: Later, from the witch, as she tries to get the others to give her Jack so she can turn him over to the giant's wife. (Jack has killed the giant, her husband).
"The way Grandpa tells it [the story], the seeds sprout immediately and have thirty meters of twigs before the stalk leaves ... the earth. The way I tell it, however, each scape grows so slowly that only generations later may a greatgreatgreatgrandkid named Jack put a leg up on the limb. Aunt Cecile, who is a feminist, puts all the action underground, and thus has Jack climb down roots into the womb of the world. .... At some point we may decide that the telling has betrayed the tale and is no longer properly a version. Is it a version if we adopt the bean's point of view, for instance? If we set the story in Brooklyn and have the plant, like kudzu, consume the entire borough?"
from "The Nature of Narrative" in _Tests of Time_ by William Gass. Knopf, 2002. 
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