Reply: Item #6846283 from URTH at LISTS.BEST.COM@INET02#
Ron Crown,
I kept meaning to bring up that "touching one's chin" gesture since it is repeated, it seems to be a culture clue, and it seems somewhat familiar--maybe ancient Greek? Yet there's a tricky one to research without even the culture as a given!
Re: hidden/cryptic origins of Cutthroat. If this were a story by
John Crowley, we'd see the androgynous amnesiatic offworlder emerge from the crashed silver sphere craft (THE DEEP); if this were a story by Le Guin we'd see those Evil Others nuke the heroic anthropologist's starship (and buddies!) on page one (ROCANNON'S WORLD).
But Wolfe is very often quite secretive about origins, as we all know and appreciate.
In addition there are multiple layers. For example, take BEOWULF. At the heroic level, it is the story of heroic guy fighting increasingly big monsters. This is the surface level. And yeah, if you want you can pile on all sorts of Christian or pre-Christian stuff for a religious reading--it has been read that way, too. But at another level, beowulf means "bee wolf," which refers to the animal we call "bear"; and at this level of submerged or overwritten animal fable, the dragon's gold is seen to be honey, "going into caves and dying" becomes hibernation during the winter, etc. Which leads to all sorts of ancient bear cult stuff that I personally like a lot, and a level I think that Wolfe taps into overtly in some stories and some passages (corridors of time episodes).
But anyway!
=mantis=