Subject: What abos? [Was Re: (urth) 5HC: Shadow Children in the Lupiverse?]

From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 21:10:29 +0000

How come you guys are all so convinced the abos exist?  It seems
ambiguous at best.  The alternate theory would be that, inspired
by his father's con and escaping his squalid life, young Victor
Trenchard has developed an elaborate fantasy about the fabulous
abos, which he may even think is true.  John Marsch shows up with
a will to believe and falls for Victor's imaginary friends in a sort
of folie a deux.

Pro-abo:  Many people in the Sainte-Sainte system believe in them.

Reply:  Many people on Earth believe in the yeti, Bigfoot (ObWolfe:
Adorable Woods Woman), the Loch Ness monster, alien abductors, and
fairies (see below).  We seem to like populating the wilderness.
Also, some people--Dr. Hagsmith, at least--don't believe in them.

Pro-abo:  John V. Marsch looks unusual to Number Five.

Reply:  A hint, but I don't find it that convincing.  Maybe he's
just unusual-looking.

Pro-abo:  Mrs. Blount says she's seen them.

Reply:  This is the strongest textual evidence I've found, but as a
child she could have been mistaken or lied to (to justify her
father's shooting thieving human children!), or she could be
remembering wrong.  Or Marsch could conceivably have made up that
part of the conversation.  (The transition is a bit abrupt.)

Is there *any* other textual evidence except from Victor?  Assuming
he's John V. Marsch.

Pro-abo:  Wolfe is usually on the side of credu^H^H^H^H^H belief.

Reply:  Another strong argument, though extra-textual, and there's a
first time for everything.

Anti-abo:  There is no skeletal evidence, although Earthly
explorers went to considerable effort to bring back specimens of
animals (dead or alive) and humans (alive).

Reply:  I'll let the people who believe in them reply.  I will point
out, however, that the (apparently) original Marsch tells us that
the "Good People" were proven to exist, so maybe we're supposed to
believe that a sentient race could populate a region and leave almost
no trace.

Anti-abo:  There's no trace of the abos' language.

Reply:  Did they learn English telepathically?  Did they ever have a
language of their own?

Anti-abo:  You apparently have to believe either 1) Prehistoric
Earth humans had space flight, for which there's a compelling lack
of evidence.

2) Parallel evolution reached the point where humans and abos are
(nearly?) indistinguishable and, in many of your versions, can
interbreed.

3) Humanity originated somewhere other than Earth.  These last two
have a serious conflict with evolutionary thought, as Dan'l pointed
out.

Reply:  Maybe implausible, but all traditional sf assumptions.

--- Tony Ellis <LittleSense at necronomicon.co.uk> wrote:
...

> Personally, I have never felt that Victor had any sort of hidden agenda
> for
> writing 'A Story'. Making him the author always seemed to me to be
> simply a
> framing device, of which Wolfe is inordinately fond. Like Latro's
> scrolls,
> or Cutthroat's recording gadget, or making Horn the author of the Book
> of the Long Sun.
...

How about his motive being enjoying and spreading his fantasy?

> Looking more or less haggard is not, by my definition, shapeshifting.
> Trenchard, who has witnessed this ability firsthand, does not even
> believe
> it is in any way superhuman: "A matter of the voice, you understand, and
> the
> muscles of the face." There's a hint that there may be more to it than
> that
> in the way Victor interjects "Everything!" at this point, and I've
> suggested
> before now that it could be partially telepathic. But it's not the
> transformation of a human being into a "household utensil" as Dr
> Hagsmith puts it.

Again, Victor is eager to provide evidence for the abos' existence.

To sum up: I see more and better evidence against the abos' existence
than for it.

Jerry Friedman

__________________________________________________
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From: Tony Ellis <littlesense at necronomicon.co.uk>
Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2002 09:44:31 +0000

> To sum up: I see more and better evidence against the abos' existence

Pro abo:
Having primed us with the knowledge that abos can't use tools, Wolfe tells
us over and over again that Victor is completely ham-fisted. More than that,
he makes Marsch, the arrogant academic who is looking for abos, tell us this
over and over, without once making the connection. This is typical both of
the way Wolfe encodes true information, and of his penchant for poking fun
at academics.

The account of Rober Culot. And don't forget that the interviews we see are
only the tip of the iceberg of accounts Marsch has gathered.

Marsch himself writes "There was a native race. The stories are too
widespread, to circumstantial, too well documented."  He may be arrogant,
but he's not stupid, and he's put in the legwork.

And finally. If there really aren't any abos, doesn't that make for kind of
a dull story? :-)

--

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From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2002 19:27:07 +0000

--- Tony Ellis <LittleSense at necronomicon.co.uk> wrote:
> the way Wolfe encodes true information, and of his penchant for poking
> fun at academics.

Victor again.  If he fantasizes that he's an abo, you would expect him
to pretend to be ham-fisted, or he may be taking "advantage" of and
even "developing" his natural clumsiness.  I can just see him at five
refusing to hold the pencil the way the other kids did.

> The account of Rober Culot

He remembers that his grandfather claimed to see abos in order to
annoy Robert's father (if I remember right)--not very convincing.
By the way, the surname "Culot" doesn't inspire confidence.

> And don't forget that the interviews we see are

We have no idea what the rest are like.
 
> widespread, to circumstantial, too well documented."  He may be
> arrogant, but he's not stupid, and he's put in the legwork.

Above you made him look pretty stupid.  Anyway, Marsch wants to find
abos, so it's no surprise that he believes he does.  He may be right,
or he may be thinking wishfully.

> And finally. If there really aren't any abos, doesn't that make for kind
> of a dull story? :-)

Maybe, maybe not.  I like _Pale Fire_ a lot, though my reading of it
is that Kinbote and Shade don't exist.  (My suggestions here may have
been influenced a lot by _Pale Fire_.)

Jerry Friedman

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Health - your guide to health and wellness
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From: Tony Ellis <littlesense at necronomicon.co.uk>
Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2002 11:27:07 +0000

>annoy Robert's father (if I remember right)--not very convincing.

Actually, you remember wrong. He remembers his grandfather as "'a most
honest old man. He would not tell lies to anyone, you understand.'" But
perhaps he is delusional, like Victor. Or stupid, like Doctor Marsch. Or
lied to, like Madame Blount. :-)

And that (alongside the what-a-boring-story factor) is the problem I have
with the no-abos theory, which I have certainly considered many times during
my re-readings of 5HC down the years. There is all sorts of evidence in the
novellas indicating that the abos exist, and to say that they don't forces
you to invent an excuse for every last piece of it. If it feels right for
you, fair enough, but to me it just feels like struggling against the
natural current of the story, as opposed to letting it take me where it
wants to go.

--

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From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2002 20:42:04 +0000

> lied to, like Madame Blount. :-)

Or senile.  Or the younger Culot could be lying.  Or just mistaken.

By the way, you were the one who said the real Dr. Marsch was stupid
for not recognizing Victor's clumsiness as a sign that he was an abo.
But Victor wasn't clumsy.  According to Marsch, he was an excellent
camp cook (which must involve using knives, spatulas, etc.), brilliant
with ropes, and capable of pounding tent pegs with a rock.  He just
couldn't write in the normal way or shoot.  Victor's skills with tools
could be a sign that he's not an abo--or that he's half abo.

> natural current of the story, as opposed to letting it take me where it

Precisely my problem with the abos theory.  You have to invent some
really enormous excuses.  This is, after all, a future in which
anthropologists are desperate for new material.  There should be
roomsful of videotapes of the abos' quaint ceremonies.  There should
be treaties.  There should be chiefs or supposed chiefs being briefly
lionized in the capitals of Earth.  There should have been a large
reward for abo remains, so Mrs. Blount's father wouldn't have dreamed
of just leaving them for the wild animals.  These lacks seem much
harder to gloss over than the testimony of a few individuals.

Jerry Friedman

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From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2002 21:21:37 +0000

Jerry observed that:

> Victor wasn't clumsy.  According to Marsch, he was an excellent
> couldn't write in the normal way or shoot.  

Or start a fire.

Actually, here's a weird interpretation of 5HC: Suppose we presume 
that _everyone_, in all three novellas, is actually telling the truth 
-- as he sees it, for his or her own reasons? Sort of a reversal of 
the "unreliable narrator" tactic. Does this create an unworkable set 
of contradictions, or can these all be reasonably attributed to the
differences between their various perspectives?

There's a quote on my old ACE edition from (I think) Ursula K. Le Guin
(btw, has anyone else read the new Earthsea novel? I'm about halfway
through it and I think it's the best thing she's written in many years)
to the effect that 5HC is a fictional dramatization of the uncertainty 
principle.

Okay, so what does that mean? Does she mean it the way a physicist 
would mean it, i.e., that there is an absolute limit to how much you 
can know about something and if you make one aspect of it more certain
you make another aspect less certain? Or is she referring to the all
too common social scientist's misreading of the principle, the idea 
that "[the presence of] the observer affects the outcome/results of the 
experiment?"

I suspect that she actually means the former. Though Le Guin is not a
hard science fiction writer, she has repeatedly (and especially in THE
DISPOSSESSED) shown that she takes the trouble to understand the hard
sciences, even if she chooses to override them (i.e., the way just about 
everyone overrides the hard sciences by allowing FTL communication and/or 
travel); I'm reasonably sure she wouldn't make the error of the latter.

But then what does she mean? My initial thought is that she's saying 
that the more closely you look at any given aspect of 5HC, the more some
other aspect(s) will go out of focus. So you can develop a theory of the
whole book that doesn't get too detailed, or you can develop a theory that
explains any given aspect of it in a completely satisfying way but doesn't
fit with some other aspect(s): in short, no complete theory for
understanding
5HC may be possible.

Does this ring true?

I fear it may.

--

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From: Tony Ellis <littlesense at necronomicon.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 11:47:45 +0000

>Or senile. Or the younger Culot could be lying. Or just mistaken.

None of which is supported by the text. And none of which disproves the
existence of the abos, until you also invent similar extra-textual reasons
why every other piece of evidence is wrong. Robert Culot was senile _and_
Victor is delusional _and_ Doctor Marsch is stupid _and_ Madame Blount was
lied to, and so on and on.

>for not recognizing Victor's clumsiness as a sign that he was an abo.

By the way, I didn't. I said he was arrogant, and that his failing to make
the connection was "typical both of
the way Wolfe encodes true information, and of his penchant for poking fun
at academics." You can be unimaginative without being stupid.

>But Victor wasn't clumsy.

In your post of April 27 you state "If he fantasizes that he's an abo, you
would expect him to pretend to be ham-fisted".

>According to Marsch, he was an excellent
>camp cook (which must involve using knives, spatulas, etc.),

Marsch doesn't tell us what it involves (and I've known more than one
excellent cook who regularly sliced his own fingers with the onions). Wolfe
does, however, make him tell us that "Even so, he burns his fingers pretty
often, I notice."

>brilliant with ropes,

Which we would expect from a people whose reliance on knotting "nets of
rawhide or vegetable fibre" as Number Five puts it, is foreshadowed waaay
back in the early pages of the first novella. And raised several times
subsequently.

>and capable of pounding tent pegs with a rock.

A feat rather less impressive than his ability to use a pen. The
significance of the peg-pounding incident is that it reveals, as Marsch
discovers, that "we had not brought an ax, or any other sort of implement
with which to drive the tent pegs." Odd, that.

>He just couldn't write in the normal way or shoot.

Or cook without regularly burning his fingers.
Or use matches.
Or make flint weapons as well as his crippled father.
Or "even remember the way to twist open the top of a jar."

On the existence of the abos:
>You have to invent some really enormous excuses.

No, you just have to read the text:

>There should be roomsful of videotapes of the abos' quaint
>ceremonies. There should be treaties.

We are told, more than once, of "the destruction of the records of the first
French landing parties by the war."

>There should be chiefs or supposed chiefs being briefly
>of just leaving them for the wild animals.

You seem to be crediting these colonists from a future, overcrowed, and very
distant Earth with a degree of philanthropy and compassion entirely absent
from the picture Wolfe paints -- which is based very obviously on the
treatment of the Australian and Tasmanian aborigines by early Western
settlers.

R.T.: ".but would they be wise to show themselves? Once all this world of
Sainte Anne was theirs. A farmer thinks: "Suppose they are men like me after
all? That Dupont, he is a clever lawyer. What if they engage him, eh?" .What
do you think the farmer does then if he sees an abo on his land, Doctor?
Will he tell anyone? Or will he shoot?"

--

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From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, 01 May 2002 22:20:56 +0000

--- Tony Ellis <LittleSense at necronomicon.co.uk> wrote:
> existence of the abos,

Well, of course not.  I also can't disprove the existence of the 
ahool, a Javanese bat with a nearly twelve-foot wingspan that you
can read about on a few Web sites.  In fact, it could exist.  But
in the absence of stuffed ahools in natural-history museums, or at
least a few photos, I'm not going to believe in them on the
strength of an explorer's saying he saw one and reports that the
local people believe in them.

> until you also invent similar extra-textual reasons
> Victor is delusional _and_ Doctor Marsch is stupid _and_ Madame Blount
> was lied to, and so on and on.

I don't see any "and so on", except the widespread belief in the
abos, which I've already mentioned.  (Though if you're convinced that
the cat is the same being as Victor's girlfriend, that pretty much
settles it, I guess.)

There's an extra-textual *fact* that the kind of testimony Marsch
gets from Mrs. Blount and especially Robert Culot is unreliable.  A
visit to <http://www.cryptozoology.com/> will show you lots of
examples.  The evidence for Sasquatch or UFO abductions is surely
better than the evidence in 5HC for the abos.  Culot's contribution
is hearsay, not admissible in court, of no value for science.  It
probably does have some evidential value in fiction, but we have to
weigh it against other evidence.  See below.

> fun

Sorry.  I didn't say he was stupid either; I said he found what he
expected to find, an error that highly intelligent people have made.

[Big snip--I'll try to address Victor's clumsiness in another post.]

> French landing parties by the war."

I meant the evidence on Earth.  Unless the starcrossers made one-way
trips, they would have brought back videotapes or films, remains, and
whatever else they could get their hands on.  What else did they have
to bring back?

Also, if you accept Mrs. Blount's statement, there was contact with
the abos after the war and no reason for any records of that to be
lost.

> treatment of the Australian and Tasmanian aborigines by early Western

No, I'm crediting them with the same degree of curiosity, interest
in science, and greed that Europeans had at the time of the
colonization of the Americas and Australia.  (I certainly didn't mean
to imply that the treaties would be kept!)

Columbus brought back six Indians on his first voyage, of whom four
died before reaching Spain
<http://www.castellobanfi.com/features/story_3.html>.  There was
at least American Indian (ObWolfe: Squanto) in Britain before the
_Mayflower_ sailed.  I had remarkable difficulty finding similar
information about Australia.  The best I've got is from a strikingly
racist lecture by Thomas Huxley in 1862, that is, 84 years after
the first European settlement.  By that time Huxley could say,
"...in the College of Surgeons there are a number of skulls of
Southern Australians..."
<http://www.maps.jcu.edu.au/hist/stats/hux/huxley6.htm>.  (Earlier
pages at that site contain interesting information on his difficulties
in getting photographs of aborigines.)

We know that anthropology is going strong enough on Earth to pay
for Dr. Marsch's expedition, and we know there are the resources and
interest to come up with _A Field Guide to the Animals of Sainte
Anne_.  I'd expect that if the Annese could be captured or killed,
living individuals or remains would have been brought to Earth.  The
case is even stronger for videotapes, rawhide or vegetable-fiber
nets, and whatever else might have been available.  The absence of
these would be unprecedented and strikes me as strong evidence
against the abos' existence.  The possibility of mistakes or
dishonesty on the part of a few individuals has more than ample
precedent, and so their statements strike me as weaker evidence.
Remember the Loch Ness monster!

Wolfe could easily provide us with certain evidence of the abos if
he wanted to.  Just as an example, when Marsch meets Trenchard, he
could note, "This old faker's face had none of the characteristics of
the Annese skulls in Paris, and his voice didn't resemble the
recordings."  I feel sure that Wolfe wanted the matter to be open
to doubt.

> Will he tell anyone? Or will he shoot?"

R.T. is a con man trying to keep a potential source of money from
getting skeptical.  Furthermore, Mrs. Blount's story (if you believe
her) states that in her case the abos did show themselves, though as
Trenchard suggests they were unwise to do so.  In the same way Dr.
Hagsmith's story of the massacre (if you believe it) has the abos
unable to avoid Earth people.  Is it possible to come up with any
account of the abos (or more than one) in which you decide what to
accept and what to reject, and end up with something that doesn't
contradict itself?

-- 
Jerry Friedman

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From: Robert Borski <rborski at charter.net>
Date: Thu, 02 May 2002 04:26:18 +0000

Jerry F. having opined:

"Wolfe could easily provide us with certain evidence of the abos if he
wanted to. Just as an example, when Marsch meets Trenchard, he could note,
'This old faker's face had none of the characteristics of the Annese skulls
in Paris, and his voice didn't resemble the recordings.' I feel sure that
Wolfe wanted the matter to be open to doubt."

Do interviews count?

In Lawrence Person's interview of Gene Wolfe for Nova Express (Fall/Winter
1998), the following exchange takes place between Person and Wolfe:

LP: Speaking of the New Wave, _The Fifth Head of Cerberus_, especially in
book form, does utilize a lot of New Wave techniques, including non-linear
narrative forms and unreliable narrators. Why did you feel you needed to
tell these interlocked stories in that particular way?

GW: (Snip, snip, snip. Then:) Once I had done the original story, I wanted
to do other related stories so that I could make a book, and the obvious
thing seemed to be to do a prequel and a sequel, which is basically what I
did. So they're nonlinear, if you want to put it like that. Of course, I did
do the rather tricky thing, which I suppose is New Wave, of having one of
the characters in one of the other stories as the purported author of, a,
aggh...I'm sorry, I've lost the titles of my own stories.

LP: "'A Story,' by John V. Marsch."

GW: "'A Story,' by John V. Marsch," yes, which is not actually written by
John V. Marsch, but by the shadowchild who has _replaced_ John V. Marsch.
(Italics Wolfe's)

(Apologies to Editor Person for the copyright violation, but the interview
is otherwide unavailable, the issue having sold out.)

Robert Borski

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From: Jason Ingram <j_ingram at mac.com>
Date: Thu, 02 May 2002 05:21:15 +0000

This sounds like a valuable interview.  It pushes back the 'unreliable 
narrator' question one level: are we to take the term "shadowchild" 
literally, or to view it as a slip where "abo" was intended?

(pedantic aside: style guides vary, and at least one leaves 
capitalization in the case of independent clauses following colons 
optional.)

Sepia

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From: Tony Ellis <littlesense at necronomicon.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 02 May 2002 11:54:54 +0000

Jerry Friedman wrote:
>Unless the starcrossers made one-way
>whatever else they could get their hands on.

We're not told what sort of communication went on between the first settlers
and Earth. But if we're going to indulge in speculation, we can just as
easily speculate that there was none at all, that the French settlers came
to the system with the precise intention of breaking all ties with Earth.
After all, the texts do tell us that:

1. It takes over 20 years, Earth time, for a starcrosser to get to St Anne.
Another 20-plus to get back.
2. Relations between Earth and the French settlers were sufficiently bad for
a full-scale war to erupt.

Neither of which exactly suggests a lively and co-operative exchange. We are
also told that the Annese were a "thinly-scattered" people, who "died off
before they could be thoroughly studied," which doesn't argue for there
being many photo-opportunities in any case.

>for Dr. Marsch's expedition

The successful funding of which rather suggests that sufficient evidence
_did_ get back in the end, does it not?

>the abos after the war and no reason for any records of that to be

If you accept Madame Blount's statement, after the war the abos were (a)
thought of as "animals shaped like people", (b) shot with impunity, and (c)
disposed of after shooting. That's about as far away from making records as
you can get.

--

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From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Date: Thu, 02 May 2002 15:45:54 +0000

> John V. Marsch, but by the shadowchild who has _replaced_ John V. Marsch.

This is an interesting bit of info, but it can't be literally true that
Victor is one of the Shadow Children: he refers to his mother as one of the
Free People (p. 240, Ace pb), whom he regards as distinct from the Shadow
Children, and he obviously looks nothing like the Shadow Children of "A
Story."

In any case, this interview was conducted twenty-six years after the story
was written, so I wouldn't take it as conclusive, no matter how it's
interpreted.

--Adam

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From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 02 May 2002 21:42:51 +0000

> disposed of after shooting. That's about as far away from making records
> as you can get.

Well, thanks to Robert Borski, it's settled now, and you were right.
(Despite the discrepancies Adam Stephanides pointed out, I'd take
Wolfe's remark as showing that there were intelligent beings on 
Sainte Anne when the French landed.)

The above is an interesting issue, though.  Your (a) and (b) are
totally consistent with records--that's how there are stuffed
specimens of animals in museums, of which Sainte Croix has one.
The question is why there aren't abo specimens in the museum.  Maybe
it's because of the point made by Roy Trenchard in the interview
you quoted, which as people have noted echoes something David says:
the people of Sainte-Sainte don't *really* think of the abos as
animals, or at least they're aware that some authority might force
them to stop doing so, so they don't want any evidence of killing
abos.

Jerry Friedman

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