{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/682", "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": 682, "subject": "VRT's Mother - for sure.", "messages": 2, "voices": 2, "first": "1998-05-29T11:57:38+00:00", "last": "1998-05-29T17:35:16+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Tony Ellis", "address": "tony.ellis at futurenet.co.uk" }, "date": "1998-05-29T11:57:38+00:00", "subject": "(urth) VRT's Mother - for sure.", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "I wrote:\nNow have a crack at my theory, Robert. I say that we meet - well, almost\nmeet - VRT's mother. She's the prisoner in the next cell." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Alga wrote:\nFWIW, I too have had this thought, fleetingly." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Robert Borski wrote:\nThis is an interesting theory and one I've never considered before, but I'd\nlike to see something that supports it from text." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "The letter from the authorities at Port-Mimizon states that the prisoner\nis \"an illiterate woman who is a habitual petty thief\". This is on the\npenultimate page of the novel. Why tell us this at all, and why now,\nunless we are meant to read something into it? And one simple reading is\nthat this woman is Annese: with their lack of manual skills they are\ndoomed to a subsistence existence as beggars and thieves. She certainly\nisn't a plant, as Robert suggests, or the letter would have identified\nher as such as it does prisoner #47." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "...If true, it would be\nhighly ironic, but also highly coincidental. " }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Um, this -is- a Gene Wolfe story we are talking about . There are as\nmany coincidences in his books as in a Dickens novel. When are his\ncharacters _not_ bumping into each other in the most unlikely places, or\nturning up just at the right moment, or fishing their own grandmothers\nout of lakes? \n\nHaving said that, a lot of details you regard as so unlikely really\naren't:" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "How is it she's arrested and jailed in a prison that mainly seems to\nconfine political prisoners... " }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Because it's a prison for ordinary criminals too. The first thing #47\nasks VRT is \"are you criminal or political?\"" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "...and is placed with access to her son, a suspected\nspy/murderer?" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Because the authorities have no reason to think that this is VRT's\nmother." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Why would the military government of Sainte Croix even waste\ntime arresting mendicants as opposed to letting them fester in the streets\nor disappearing them?" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Because she's not a mendicant. She's a thief." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Is it even likely she's on Sainte Croix--despite her wishes\nto go there what resources did she have, and wouldn't these same resources,\nif they were personal or sexual, avail her after she arrived?{ I also\nmaintain she'd be the first abo ever to make such a journey.})" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Well, VRT certainly thinks it's possible: \"there seemed to be some\nreason to think, at Roncevaux, that she had come here.\" We don't know\nwhat that reason was, but we know that he was at Roncevaux for a year,\nlong enough to find out plenty. If he thinks it's possible, that should\nbe good enough for us. As for her \"resources\" securing her a comfortable\nexistence when she got to Sainte Croix, why should they, when the best\nshe could manage on Saint Anne was Trenchard? VRT specifically tells us\nhow ill-equipped she was to thrive in human society: \"She knew nothing,\nnothing... She did not think it wrong to steal... if she had eaten she\nwanted nothing.\" [66 pages in, my copy of VRT]\n\nBut here's the real meat of my theory: \n\nI count five different passages in the story where the \"madman\" tapping\nin the next cell is mentioned. One might be regarded as local colour,\nbut five? When the fifth springs the revelation that the prisoner was a\nwoman all along?\n\nAnd two of those five passages tells us something special indeed. Before\nI\nquote them, here's a little background information:\n\n\"...explorers farther south are supposed to have reported signal\ndrumming... by the Annese. ...like all primitives they would presumably\nhave been imitating, with the sound of their blows, their own speech\n- 'talking drums.'\" [page 5 of my VRT].\n\nNow why prime us with that information, I wonder? Could it be connected\nto what we're told much later on?\n\nQuote one:\n\"The prisoner next to me knew I was back, too, and began tapping and\nscraping on the walls in the old way... the sounds are so various I\nthink sometimes he must be be trying to talk with his noises.\" [76 pages\nfurther on]\n\nHmmm.... could our illiterate Annese lady be trying to get in contact?\nAnd if so, and if this was VRT's mother, might not there be one sequence\nof sounds he might just recognise?\n\nQuote two:\n\"I listened to the madman on my left until it almost seemed to me that\namong his idiot scratching and scrapings I could hear my own name.\" [32\npages in]" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Charles Dye", "address": "raster at highfiber.com" }, "date": "1998-05-29T17:35:16+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Re: VRT's Mother - for sure.", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "tony.ellis at futurenet.co.uk (Tony Ellis) writes:" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Quote two:\n\"I listened to the madman on my left until it almost seemed to me that\namong his idiot scratching and scrapings I could hear my own name.\" [32\npages in]" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Wow! Color me convinced! I never, never would have caught this myself ....\n\nraster at highfiber.com" } ] } ] }