Subject: (urth) Gene/Jeannine/#5

From: Robert Borski <rborski at coredcs.com>
Date: Thu, 02 Apr 1998 03:42:41 +0000

[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other works]

Tony Ellis wrote about Fifth Head's narrator:

"Very astute of you  to have spotted this. (Either that, or very 
stupid of me to have missed it.) I suppose if Wolfe is a typical
American-Irish name then it's reinforced slightly by the photograph
of his mother Number Five sees, where he declares her to be of Celtic
origin."

"All the same, I think I would say "can be theorised to be" rather
than "can be determined to be"... We can't be sure his name isn't
Witherspoon. :-) And where are you getting Gene from? The
Gene-geneticist pun is the sort of thing Wolfe loves, of course..."

Tony, et al:

On pg. 22 of the Scribner's edition of FIFTH HEAD, Number Five's aunt tells
him, "Call me Aunt Jeannine." And since later we learn that Aunt Jeannine
is a female variant of Number Five's father (and since Number Five himself
is cloned from the same source), inferentially we may assume Number Five's
name to be the male equivalent of Jeannine or Jean/Gene.

As for the "Wolfe" moiety, besides the library reference, Number Five
remarks that his house is sometimes referred to as Maison du Chien and that
this "may have been a reference to our surname as well." [ibid. pg 14].
Chien meaning dog in French, it's not that big of a stretch to assume
Wolf/e (dogs being evolutionarily the domesticated versions of wolves) is
the name in question.

Robert Borski

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Thu, 02 Apr 1998 13:43:02 +0000

> name to be the male equivalent of Jeannine or Jean/Gene.
                                   
Jeannine = "Gene #9"?

-Rostrum

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From: Charles Dye <raster at highfiber.com>
Date: Fri, 03 Apr 1998 10:53:43 +0000

>Wolf/e (dogs being evolutionarily the domesticated versions of wolves) is

Ah, and I though "Maison du Chien" was just more polyglot punnery like
"Cave Canem" ("Beware of Dog," referring to the statue, but reinterpreted
as "Dog Cave.")  666 Saltimbanque is of course a cat house, among other
things ....

raster at highfiber.com

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From: Jim Jordan <jbjordan at gnt.net>
Date: Fri, 03 Apr 1998 22:28:09 +0000

A coupla notes:

	1. The brother of No. 5 in "5th Head" is indeed a "control," a child of
man and woman. The differences between him and No. 5 are important since,
as the father says, "we don't make progress." The Cerberus line is stuck;
though "someday they'll want us," which I've always taken as an allusion to
a future antichrist, especially given that their home is a WhoreofBabylon
House.

	2. Note how this them is carried through in the third story, as the humans
try to wipe out the shapeshifters, thus eliminating diversity and the kind
of marriage-to-the-other that could make for a dynamic future. VRT is, of
course, a shapeshifter.

	3. On Thecla and the alzabo: It seems to me rather clear that since
everything that comes in contact with Severian is brought back to life,
Thecla comes back to life and live within him. Some of Severian's memories
seem more likely to be Thecla's. I think of his comment after visiting the
whorehouse that he never went there again because it was painful. Men don't
experience pain in their initiation into sex, but women do, of course. I'll
bet that was Thecla's memory.

	Then again, maybe I'm wrong.

Nutria (if that's still who I am)
(Well, I'll always be the Rat to Alga!)