Conclusion

Abstract

There was in the novels by James Branch Cabell (2014) a hero known under the name Squinting Manuel who used to say: ‘ …my mother, sir, was always very anxious for me to make a figure in the world, and when she lay a-dying I promised her that I would do so, and then she put a geas upon me to do it’. Manuel understood her literally and spent quite a bit of his time moulding figures of mud and trying to breathe life into them through the use of magic. The result was never satisfactory and the last figure the Squinting Manuel crafted was limping and uncomely, making his creator utterly sad and desperate:

this is almost exactly the admirable and significant figure that I desired to make in the world. But, as I now perceive too late, I fashioned the legs of this figure unevenly, and the joy I have in its life is less than the shame that I take from its limping.