Subject: (urth) Malrubius' ghost

From: maa32 <maa32 at dana.ucc.nau.edu>
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 05:16:54 +0000

Just one more thing that I forgot in our recent discussion of whether or not 
Silk could pass for Malrubius in the astral travel scenes of Return to the 
Whorl:

in the comments for The Book of the Short Sun when it was released for the 
SFBC in one volume, Wolfe said a little bit about it, urging readers to accept 
the astral travel and perhaps to discover the secret of "Malrubius' ghost".  I 
obviously threw that catalog away a long time ago, but someone else should 
remember it as well.  I say this is further reason to think that Silk in 
astral form certainly resembles Malrubius, and that the evidence is not 
circumstantial.

Marc Aramini

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From: Chris <rasputin_ at hotmail.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 06:09:35 +0000

Interesting quote, and goes along with something I'd wondered myself.

But looking at it from the flip side, do you think it might be possible 
that, when Severian refers to the ghost of Malrubius, he's actually using a 
sort of euphemism? To be more direct, perhaps it was Silk astral travelling 
again, and since Severian had opted not to explain Silk in the first place 
he filled in a name to substitute in the ghost sequences?

Civet

>astral form certainly resembles Malrubius, and that the evidence is not

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From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <katbarx at hotmail.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 15:58:26 +0000

>he filled in a name to substitute in the ghost sequences?

Nah. Much more likely that Wolfe hadn't invented Silk yet then.

Meaning that Wolfe had something clealry in mind when he created
the ghost of Malrubius, which was NOT the Narrator, or Silk, or
anything to do with the Long and Short Sun books. When dealing
with tBotNS, I think it's appropriate to (mostly) ignore the L/S books
and seek for answers based on what's given there.

Not to say that Wolfe can't retrofit. The business about the gate
is a perfect example: he took something that had no explanation
(and indeed needed none) in the NS, and allowed the events of SS
to intertwine with it so as to provide one. But to take something
that was important in NS, and retcon it to change its meaning,
would be bad art; it would damage NS in the context of the larger
metatext.

Malrubius' ghost is explained by the Hieros as an aquastor generated
by the ship from Sev's memories. I then see four possibilities:

1. This is in fact the case.
2. The Hieros lied to Sev.
3. Sev lied about what the Hieros said.
4. Wolfe commits bad art.

I reject the fourth.

The second and third are possibilities, but I would want to see some
intratextual evidence for either, some reason to think that someone is
lying in this particular case.

And I'll stick with the first pending such evidence.

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From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 16:46:31 +0000

Civet wrote:
>sort of euphemism?

I can go along with this, because I think you are saying that Severian saw
a ghost-like Silk (as shown in BOTSS) and later in TBOTNS saw a ghost which
he reported as being that of Malrubius, while still later this ghost was
made somewhat ambiguous as a machine projection based upon his own thoughts
(basically giving the ghost the form of a wise person Severian had met in
real life, in order to deliver just-in-time wisdom).

Your point being that Severian's "alteration" is merely saying that the
ghost was "Malrubius" rather than the who-knows-where-he's-from Silk.  An
editorial decision on Severian's part to avoid cluttering the manuscript
with a character who would require a whole book (or four or seven) to
himself.

And it is interesting in the way that "Silk as the model for the ghost"
explains the connection between Triskele and the ghost as one of a temporal
association, which was impossible previously because Malrubius died long
before Triskele appeared.  (In BOTNS, Triskele seems to stand for beasts
and Malrubius for wisdom, two entities who never met in life but were
working together as ghosts.)

>To be more direct, perhaps it was Silk astral travelling

"Ghost of Malrubius" already has two "fuzzies" in BOTNS: is it a real
"natural" ghost, or is it a computer generated ghost?  (Or sometimes
one/sometimes the other?)  To this we can add a third fuzzy: That it wasn't
really =based on= Malrubius at all, but on the weird ghostly guy Silk.
This third fuzzy collapses the "real ghost" probability wave to zero,
leaving all the ghostly visitations of "Malrubius" as 100%
computer-generated.

But to say that the ghostly visits in BOTNS are really further,
undocumented astral projections of Silk, rather than a computer-generated
ghost based on Silk, no, this causes too much trouble, I think.

=mantis=

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From: Chris <rasputin_ at hotmail.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 18:57:38 +0000

I agree, in light of the points brought up by several people today, that 
Malrubius' ghost literally being Silk in astral form is too problematic to 
hold on to in that form. Mantis is correct in his guess as to why I thought 
of the idea in the first place. In addition, it was always disconcerting to 
me that the explanation of Malrubius as the ghost was that he was chosen out 
of Severian's memory as a figure of wisdom and possibly a 
pseudo-father-figure, whereas the "real" Malrubius in earlier segments is 
never described with quite enough affection to really justify his having 
this kind of importance to Sev. (My god, what an awful sentence). Master 
Palaemon seems a more sympathetic character, and accounts of Malrubius 
suffer a bit by comparison. So, this always struck a false chord with me but 
at the time I was reading BotNS I was unable to resolve it. These alternate 
explanations appeal to me because they explain what I perceive as an awkward 
point of the text.

On the other hand, I don't know whether this explanation fits with the 
statement of Wolfe's that Marc originally brought up re: Silk's astral 
travel and the mystery of Malrubius' ghost. I wish I had the context of that 
quote, actually.

Civet

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From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 19:36:37 +0000

Civet wrote:
>In addition, it was always disconcerting to

Now hang on, there: the unalterable reason why Malrubius was chosen over
Palaemon is the fact that Malrubius is already dead, in the timeframe, and
a logical candidate for a ghost is needed.  Palaemon is not even a
candidate.

The ghost is to Severian as a fairy godfather is to a hero.

Not to defend the old "Malrubius is the basis of the ghost" line, but
still, there was a certain poignancy in the notion that a person who wasn't
so influential when alive would be a source of wisdom after his death.
That magical thinking wish that unknown ancestors would give us hints about
the silly world around us: the more prosaic understanding about how the
dead communicate to us through their words and actions in the past, whether
we lived through that timeframe and did not perceive their wisdom at the
time, or whether we were born long afterward.

Another thing is this: the closer in one gets toward Severian's core, the
more silent he becomes.  We know next to nothing about Valeria, yet he says
he has written too much!  So in this light it would make perfect sense that
Malrubius was important enough to have little written about him.

=mantis=

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From: Chris <rasputin_ at hotmail.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 21:42:18 +0000

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that Palaemon would have been used in its 
place. I suppose what I'm saying is that one's affection for a "favorite" 
tends to be at the expense of that favorite's peers, and you can be more 
indifferent to the "2nd best teacher" than to a particularly interesting 
stranger. Not stating that as a rule, but it's true often enough and I had 
thought (perhaps incorrectly) that I had picked up some genuine indifference 
on Sev's part toward Malrubius (the living one that is).

The last paragraph is definitely an interesting thought. Although, with 
Valeria, you can somehow see her importance to him through his omissions 
even at the beginning; I did not notice anything similar with Malrubius, but 
that could just be a failure of my reading. But in general, your statement 
about Sev's silence about things close to his core brings some comparisons 
to mind. You have Valeria, who you find out very little about. Then there is 
Thecla, who you hear a good deal about, though Severian seems most 
comfortable speaking of generalities and is very grudging when it comes to 
details. And just to set the opposite end of the scale you have Agia, who 
Sev is very open about nearly from the beginning- does he wax poetic about 
her from his very first description, or is that an error in my memory? You 
could throw Dorcas into the mix as well. Where do each of these people stand 
in relation to his core?

But this is a discussion unto itself.

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From: Lisa Schaffer-Doggett <harlekin at earthlink.net>
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 00:59:34 +0000

> And I'll stick with the first pending such evidence.

Don pops up. (whack him! quick!)

I see no reason to doubt your conclusion since Silk/Malrubius appears 
to Sev before the aquastor.  Besides, if Silk can travel through time 
as well as space (and in an expanding universe wouldn't time travel 
necessarily involve motion?) it is possible that he is Malrubius in 
actuality.  Even if this isn't the case, I see no real contradiction.

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From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 05:18:22 +0000

>Nah. Much more likely that Wolfe hadn't invented Silk yet then.

I agree. Malrubius could not be Silk in actuality. Malrubius may have been
some sort of mentor to Sev, but that's not saying much; Hitler also liked
dogs. Malrubius was a Master in a guild that hurt and maimed and killed
people for a living. Silk was much nearer the opposite end of the moral
spectrum. He could never have done those things to people; it's just not his
nature. Hell, he thought he had sinned when he "killed" a talus, a stupid
_machine_ that was trying to kill him.

-Roy

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From: Lisa Schaffer-Doggett <harlekin at earthlink.net>
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 01:32:53 +0000

> _machine_ that was trying to kill him.

To be honest, I don't particularly like the idea of Silk even 
resembling Malrubius.  That suggestion was more one of those from my 
brain to the keyboard kind of things.  My only real point was that I 
don't think Wolfe intended the aquastor Malrubius to be Silk, 
retrofitted or not, and that Silk's appearance as Malrubius in RttW is 
not at odds with this since it predates the appearance of the aquastor. 
  It doesn't matter really whether the aquastor is the memory of 
Silk/Malrubius or the actual Malrubius.

Regards,
Don

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