{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/4139", "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.", "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'" }, "archive": "urth", "thread": { "id": 4139, "subject": "dog-headed ape, 1st vs. 3rd vp", "messages": 2, "voices": 2, "first": "2003-08-01T07:26:34+00:00", "last": "2003-08-01T08:48:02+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "maa32", "address": "maa32 at dana.ucc.nau.edu" }, "date": "2003-08-01T07:26:34+00:00", "subject": "(urth) dog-headed ape, 1st vs. 3rd vp", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I don't know if anyone mentioned this, but I thought it was a weird repetitive \nimage. In the Chapter entitled Carnifex after the duel of flowers in Shadow \nof the torturer, a dog-headed ape shows up and walks up the wall. I never \nmade up my mind about that guy. A masked hierodule/cacogen?\n\nThen, I was reading Long Sun again, because I have neglected it. And lo, in \nthe second chapter of Nightside while Silk looks for sacrifices, we run into \n... \n\"This dog-headed ape, trained to light its master's way with cresset or \nlangern, and (according to a badly lettered placard) to defend him from \nfootpads and assassins\"\n\nWhat do you think? The same creature? Any other places where the dog-headed \nape shows up? Do these two descriptions reveal anything about the creature?\n\nIs Silk doomed to run into many of the same creatures as Severian? Typhon and \nthe sea monster Scylla ... Is the catachrest like the dead bottle creature?\n\nI'd like to shift over to some small viewpoint considerations.\n\n\nBy the way, thanks to Don and Civet for commenting on Wolfe's comments about \nmy story. I appreciate your input! Part of my problem could be that the \ncomplexity of the story in question seemed to demand a third-person viewpoint, \none which I have a hard time finding the right voice for.\n\nI find Wolfe's first person work pretty much flawless ... with male narrators.\nLatro, New Sun, Short Sun, Peace, Fifth Head of Cerberus ... I can't think of \nfiner fiction anywhere. Castleview, There Are Doors, Free Live Free, Devil in \na Forest ... definitely, to me, not quite as fun to re-read over and over.\n\nFor me, I think I prefer 1st person from almost every author, but I am \ninterested in hearing whether this is so for others. \nAnybody else find 1st person fiction more compelling than 3rd in general, or \nis this limited to Wolfe? I think almost every book that Wolfe has written in \nthe 1st person has worked extraordinarily well ... because he knows how to \npresent a narrator that has all the facts but can't put them together ... \nwhereas it is difficult for me to extrapolate too much from a 3rd person \nmanuscript - shouldn't the omniscient \"story teller\" already have put together \nall the cogent facts? There are motives in 1st person, but it is very \ndifficult to find \"motives\" in a work like \"The ziggurat\" - why should we \nthink that the whole thing is a hallucination, when the 3rd person voice of \nhistory presents it as fact? Where is the motivation for the 3rd person voice \nto pander to the mental incapacity of the main character? Long Sun is an \ninteresting case, because we have raw history, but we also have clear \nmotivation, so it operates more like a 1st person manuscript. Anybody else \nhave problems with, say, \"Ziggurat\" or \"The Island of Doctor Death and Other \nStories\" due to an unwillingness to challenge the voice of the uncharacterized \nnarrator?\n\nJust a few banal thoughts.\nMarc Aramini" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Andrew Bollen", "address": "abollen at internode.on.net" }, "date": "2003-08-01T08:48:02+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) dog-headed ape, 1st vs. 3rd vp", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Marc says:" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "I don't know if anyone mentioned this, but I thought it was a weird\nrepetitive\nimage. In the Chapter entitled Carnifex after the duel of flowers in\nShadow\nof the torturer, a dog-headed ape shows up and walks up the wall. I never\nmade up my mind about that guy. A masked hierodule/cacogen?" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Maybe they're just baboons? - \"papio cynocephalus ursinus\". (Cynocephalus =\ndog-headed, of course.)\n\nOn the other hand, I did wonder whether the one in Shadow might have been\nFather Inire, checking out the new guy. Probably a dumb idea.\n\nBut the cynocephalic ape was associated with Hermes/Mercury/Thoth, I\nbelieve - some kind of association with hermetic wisdom; some kind of\npsychopomp figure also. The first could be quite appropriate for Inire; the\nsecond sort of appropriate for Sev's first self- resurrection." } ] } ] }